Tag: mass surveillance

Taliban weighs using U.S. mass surveillance plan, met with China’s Huawei

The Taliban are creating a large-scale camera surveillance network for Afghan cities that could involve repurposing a plan crafted by the Americans before their 2021 pullout, an interior ministry spokesman told Reuters, as authorities seek to supplement thousands of cameras already across the capital, Kabul.

The Taliban administration — which has publicly said it is focused on restoring security and clamping down on Islamic State, which has claimed many major attacks in Afghan cities — has also consulted with Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei about potential cooperation, the spokesman said.

Preventing attacks by international militant groups – including prominent organisations such as Islamic State – is at the heart of the interaction between the Taliban and many foreign nations, including the U.S. and China, according to readouts from those meetings. But some analysts question the cash-strapped regime’s ability to fund the program, and rights groups have expressed concern that any resources will be used to crackdown on protesters.

Details of how the Taliban intend to expand and manage mass surveillance, including obtaining the U.S. plan, have not been previously reported.

The mass camera rollout, which will involve a focus on “important points” in Kabul and elsewhere, is part of a new security strategy that will take four years to be fully implemented, Ministry of Interior spokesman Abdul Mateen Qani told Reuters.

“At the present we are working on a Kabul security map, which is (being completed) by security experts and (is taking) lots of time,” he said. “We already have two maps, one which was made by U.S.A for the previous government and second by Turkey.”

He did not detail when the Turkish plan was made.

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Department of Defense Signs Contract With Social Media Monitoring Company

Fresh revelations regarding a $2.5 million contractual agreement between the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) at Fort George G. Meade and social media scrutinizer Dataminr have emerged. These claims, unveiled by a US government notice, imply a new era of digital monitoring rests on the horizon, increasingly unsettling in its reinforcement of sweeping surveillance, and potentially having implications on free speech and privacy protection.

Fort Meade, also known as the steering wheel of the US Government’s paramount signals intelligence organization, the National Security Agency, has seemingly struck a discreet deal to expand its espionage services.

DISA, commodiously located at Fort Meade, is now purported to have voluminous exposure to public posts from assorted social media platforms, including X, formerly Twitter.

Dataminr is a company specializing in AI-driven real-time information discovery and is known for detecting, classifying, and determining the significance of public information in real time. It’s plausible that government entities, including the Department of Defense, may leverage services like Dataminr to monitor social media and other public data sources to maintain situational awareness and respond to emerging events or threats more rapidly.

When privacy buffs and free speech advocates look at governmental use of tools like Dataminr, it’s met with a hefty dose of suspicion, and rightfully so. The potential implications for personal freedom, civil rights, and the pillars of democracy are considerable. There’s this looming worry about the government, potentially with too loose a leash, exploiting these tools to spy on lawful activities and on people living their everyday lives with no criminal intentions.

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U.S. Government Monitoring Pregnant Moms’ Social Media Posts

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) premier law enforcement agency monitors expecting parents’ online posts about their pregnancy and reproductive health issues, according to internal emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the online privacy activist group, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

The U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE), the DHS agency that conducts criminal investigations and enforces U.S. immigration laws, is one of a handful of government agencies that use a software tracking tool called SocialNet.

SocialNet pulls citizens’ online data from a host of websites, including BabyCenter, a reference and pregnancy tracking site where new and expecting parents can post information about their health and pregnancy experiences.

Eva Galperin — cybersecurity director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a leading nonprofit defending civil liberties in the digital world — said the revelation is “concerning.”

“When people post about their pregnancies to BabyCenter, they’re usually doing it without the expectation that ICE or the local police are checking up on the status of their pregnancy,” Galperin told The Defender.

“ICE could potentially be reading information about your reproductive health and about your pregnancy or your children,” she said, adding that this is particularly concerning due to the current political climate surrounding pregnancy and abortion.

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The UK Government Knows How Extreme The Online Safety Bill Is

The U.K.’s Online Safety Bill (OSB) has passed a critical final stage in the House of Lords, and envisions a potentially vast scheme to surveil internet users.

The bill would empower the U.K. government, in certain situations, to demand that online platforms use government-approved software to search through all users’ photos, files, and messages, scanning for illegal content. Online services that don’t comply can be subject to extreme penalties, including criminal penalties.

Such a backdoor scanning system can and will be exploited by bad actors. It will also produce false positives, leading to false accusations of child abuse that will have to be resolved. That’s why the OSB is incompatible with end-to-end encryption—and human rights. EFF has strongly opposed this bill from the start.

Now, with the bill on the verge of becoming U.K. law, the U.K. government has sheepishly acknowledged that it may not be able to make use of some aspects of this law. During a final debate over the bill, a representative of the government said that orders to scan user files “can be issued only where technically feasible,” as determined by Ofcom, the U.K.’s telecom regulatory agency. He also said any such order must be compatible with U.K. and European human rights law.

That’s a notable step back, since previously the same representative, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, said in a letter to the House of Lords that the technology that would magically make invasive scanning co-exist with end-to-end encryption already existed. “We have seen companies develop such solutions for platforms with end-to-end encryption before,” wrote Lord Parkinson in that letter.

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U.K. Government Finally Admits It Can’t Scan for Child Porn Without Violating Everybody’s Privacy

The U.K. government finally acknowledges that a component of the Online Safety Bill that would force tech companies to scan data and messages for child porn images can’t be implemented without violating the privacy rights of all internet users and undermining the data encryption tools that keep our information safe.

And so the government is backing down—for now—on what’s been called the “spy clause.” Using the justification of fighting the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), part of the Online Safety Bill would have required online platforms to create “backdoors” that the British government could use to scan messages between social media users. The law also would’ve allowed the government to punish platforms or sites that implement end-to-end encryption and prevent the government from accessing messages and data.

While British officials have insisted that this intrusive surveillance power would be used only to track down CSAM, tech and privacy experts have warned repeatedly that there’s no way to implement a surveillance system that could be used only for this particular purpose. Encryption backdoors allow criminals and oppressive governments to snoop on people for dangerous and predatory purposes. Firms like Signal and WhatsApp threatened to pull their services from the U.K. entirely if this bill component moved forward.

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U.S. SPY AGENCY DREAMS OF SURVEILLANCE UNDERWEAR IT’S CALLING “SMART EPANTS”

THE FUTURE OF wearable technology, beyond now-standard accessories like smartwatches and fitness tracking rings, is ePANTS, according to the intelligence community. 

The federal government has shelled out at least $22 million in an effort to develop “smart” clothing that spies on the wearer and its surroundings. Similar to previous moonshot projects funded by military and intelligence agencies, the inspiration may have come from science fiction and superpowers, but the basic applications are on brand for the government: surveillance and data collection.

Billed as the “largest single investment to develop Active Smart Textiles,” the SMART ePANTS — Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems — program aims to develop clothing capable of recording audio, video, and geolocation data, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced in an August 22 press release. Garments slated for production include shirts, pants, socks, and underwear, all of which are intended to be washable.

The project is being undertaken by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the intelligence community’s secretive counterpart to the military’s better-known Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. IARPA’s website says it “invests federal funding into high-risk, high reward projects to address challenges facing the intelligence community.” Its tolerance for risk has led to both impressive achievements, like a Nobel Prize awarded to physicist David Wineland for his research on quantum computing funded by IARPA, as well as costly failures.

“A lot of the IARPA and DARPA programs are like throwing spaghetti against the refrigerator,” Annie Jacobsen, author of a book about DARPA, “The Pentagon’s Brain,” told The Intercept. “It may or may not stick.”

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We the Targeted: How the Government Weaponizes Surveillance to Silence Its Critics

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman

Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare.

The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is a country where nothing ever really changes, and everyone lives in fear.

Race wars are still being stoked by both the Right and the Left; the military-industrial complex is still waging profit-driven wars at taxpayer expense; the oligarchy is still calling the shots in the seats of government power; and the government is still weaponizing surveillance in order to muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.

This last point is particularly disturbing.

Starting in the 1950s, the government relied on COINTELPRO, its domestic intelligence program, to neutralize domestic political dissidents. Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, John Lennon, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, and hundreds more.

In more recent decades, the powers-that-be have expanded their reach to target anyone who opposes the police state, regardless of their political leanings.

Advances in technology have enabled the government to deploy a veritable arsenal of surveillance weapons in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived threats to the government’s power.

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NSA ORDERS EMPLOYEES TO SPY ON THE WORLD “WITH DIGNITY AND RESPECT”

THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY, the shadowy hub for the United States’ electronic and cyber spying, has instructed its employees that foreign targets of its intelligence gathering “should be treated with dignity and respect,” according to a new policy directive. The directive, released this summer as internal guidance, is for the NSA’s vaunted signals intelligence, or SIGINT, division, which is responsible for covert surveillance and data collection worldwide.

“In recognition that SIGINT activities must take into account that all persons should be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their nationality or wherever they might reside,” says the previously unreported directive, which was issued by NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone. 

Civil liberties experts say the PR-friendly directive is an attempt to mollify European partners and American critics amid a simmering congressional debate over whether to reauthorize the NSA’s broad surveillance authorities. Experts also pointed to the absurdity that the NSA, an intelligence agency that specializes in electronic eavesdropping including the interception of text messages and emails, could do so respectfully.

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DHS Uses Social Media Surveillance Tools To Detect Peoples’ Emotions

More and more reports are coming out detailing US government agencies’ desire to expand and “refine” their surveillance operations by including detection of sentiment and emotion, by using “AI”-powered software.

One of them is Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and which, according to internal documents obtained through freedom of information act (FOIA) requests, hired a third party in order to scan online posts for “risk terms and phrases.”

The company that provides this tool, Fivecast, does so in multiple languages. Fivecast also sells surveillance of video and image material through what it calls AI-enabled object recognition.

The company’s marketing itself as being able to scrape data for these purposes not only from large platforms such as Facebook and Reddit, but also 4chan, 8kun, and Gab.

It apparently doesn’t stop there, because there is also anti-trafficking and anti-propaganda capability baked in there somewhere, at least according to what are said to be leaked statements made by one employee.

404 Media reports about all these findings stemming mostly from a number of FOIA documents it has had access to, adding that CBP responded to the outlet’s queries by stating that data used in the process is “open source” (meaning, publicly available online).

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FBI Made ‘Inappropriate Use’ of Foreign Surveillance Program To Spy on Americans

A White House advisory board has recommended that Congress place new restrictions on the FBI’s access to a foreign surveillance tool to prevent the bureau from using it to spy on Americans’ electronic communications.

That surveillance program—authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—was intended to track foreign spies and potential terrorists but has predictably morphed into a way for law enforcement agencies to get a warrantless peek at Americans’ phone records, emails, and other electronic communications. In the report published Monday, the White House’s Intelligence Advisory Board said the FBI’s use of the databases created by Section 702 should be limited to investigations dealing with foreign intelligence—the same standard that is used at the other intelligence agencies with access to that data.

“FBI’s use of Section 702 should be limited to foreign intelligence purposes only and FBI personnel should receive additional training on what foreign intelligence entails,” the report recommends. The report says the FBI has made “inappropriate use of Section 702 authorities, specifically U.S. person queries.”

While the full scope of Section 702 data collection remains unknown, there’s no doubt about the FBI’s aggressive use of the database. In 2021, for example, the FBI ran more than 3.3 million queries through the Section 702 database, according to a government transparency report. Separately, a 2021 report from the secret federal court responsible for adjudicating FISA-related matters documented 40 instances in which the FBI accessed surveillance data as part of investigations into a host of purely domestic crimes, including health care fraud and public corruption.

The FBI imposed new internal restrictions on the use of Section 702 surveillance last year, but the new White House report says those changes are “insufficient to ensure compliance and earn the public’s trust.”

Indeed, the public (and Congress) ought to be wary of the FBI’s promises to police itself—and of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s (FISC) ability to hold the bureau accountable. As Reason‘s Scott Shackford detailed in 2021, the FBI had promised the FISC in the wake of the Carter Page scandal that it would change procedures to stop snooping on Americans. The FISA court rubber-stamped those changes.

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