Tag: mass surveillance

The Postal Service is running a ‘covert operations program’ that monitors Americans’ social media posts

The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service has been quietly running a program that tracks and collects Americans’ social media posts, including those about planned protests, according to a document obtained by Yahoo News.

The details of the surveillance effort, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, have not previously been made public. The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.

“Analysts with the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) monitored significant activity regarding planned protests occurring internationally and domestically on March 20, 2021,” says the March 16 government bulletin, marked as “law enforcement sensitive” and distributed through the Department of Homeland Security’s fusion centers. “Locations and times have been identified for these protests, which are being distributed online across multiple social media platforms, to include right-wing leaning Parler and Telegram accounts.”

A number of groups were expected to gather in cities around the globe on March 20 as part of a World Wide Rally for Freedom and Democracy, to protest everything from lockdown measures to 5G. “Parler users have commented about their intent to use the rallies to engage in violence. Image 3 on the right is a screenshot from Parler indicating two users discussing the event as an opportunity to engage in a ‘fight’ and to ‘do serious damage,’” says the bulletin.

“No intelligence is available to suggest the legitimacy of these threats,” it adds.

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“Smart” homes are just modern-day surveillance systems that spy on you and share all your audio and video with police and the FBI

Many in today’s society have been brainwashed into believing that “smart” devices exist to make our lives easier and more convenient. The ugly truth, however, is that Nest thermostats, Alexa speakers, Apple watches and other always-listening, always-watching electronics were actually designed for the purpose of enslaving you under constant surveillance.

People who live in “smart” homes can now be monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week without the need for a warrant or probable cause, thanks to this clever little “smart” scheme. And in the United States where privacy laws are pitifully weak, there is almost nothing anyone can do about it other than to try to avoid “smart” devices whenever possible.

The problem is that even if you do not personally own anything “smart,” chances are someone you know does. When you visit a friend or a family member, for instance, “smart” devices throughout their homes will watch and listen to you without your consent.

In many cases, consumer spy devices like the “Amazon Echo” relay the data they capture back to the mother ship, typically for the purpose of selling it to third parties. In some cases, however, “smart” devices relay people’s private information to police departments and even the FBI, which could end up using it to falsely incriminate certain targets.

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CIA Secretly Owned World’s Top Maker of Encryption Devices – Reports

The US and West German intelligence agencies clandestinely owned the world’s leading manufacturer of encryption devices, Swiss-based Crypto AG, enjoying throughout the Cold War direct access to closely guarded secrets of more than 120 countries, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

“It was the intelligence coup of the century,” the newspaper quoted a CIA report as saying. “Foreign governments were paying good money to the US and West Germany for the privilege of having their most secret communications read by at least two (and possibly as many as five or six) foreign countries.”

For decades, since World War II and well into the 21st century, Crypto was selling sophisticated equipment for coded correspondence to state clients all over the world, among them Iran, India and Pakistan, countries of Latin America and the Vatican, the report said.

According to the publication, from 1970 the CIA and the National Security Agency together with their German partners controlled nearly every aspect of the company’s operations, including “hiring decisions, designing its technology, sabotaging its algorithms and directing its sales targets.”

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Find Out If Google Is Tracking You With New FloC System

Google is ramping up its monopoly on tracking users with a new system called FloC, or Federated Learning of Cohorts”.  It is currently in test mode with some Chrome users, and you can quickly find out if you are being “FloCed” by going to EFF’s AmIFloced.org site.

Google is running a Chrome “origin trial” to test out an experimental new tracking feature called Federated Learning of Cohorts (aka “FLoC”). According to Google, the trial currently affects 0.5% of users in selected regions, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United States. This page will try to detect whether you’ve been made a guinea pig in Google’s ad-tech experiment.

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Smartphones share our data every four and a half minutes, says study

Android handsets and iPhones share data with their respective companies on average every 4½ minutes, with data being sent back even when idle in a pocket or handbag, according to a new academic study.

The Trinity College Dublin research has raised fresh privacy concerns about smartphones, with the research claiming there was little difference between Apple and Google when it came to collecting certain data.

The study, which was published by Prof Doug Leith at Trinity’s Connect Centre, claimed iPhones offered no greater privacy than Google devices.

However, the study noted that Google handsets collected “a notably larger volume of handset data than Apple” with 1MB of data being sent from idle Google Pixel handsets every 12 hours, compared with 52KB sent from the iPhone.

Among the data potentially sent back by the handsets were the insertion of a SIM and handset details such as the hardware serial number, IMEI, Wifi MAC address and the phone number.

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Journalist Can’t Sue Rod Rosenstein for Alleged Illegal Spying on Her Family During Obama Admin Because of Qualified Immunity

Television journalist Sharyl Attkisson and her family sued former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein for illegally spying on them in violation of the Fourth Amendment and federal law during the Obama administration. A federal court dismissed the lawsuit earlier this week by finding that Rosenstein is entitled to qualified immunity.

The controversy has taken numerous paths through the legal system since the Attkissons claimed they discovered that the government had hacked into their computers and cellphones in 2014—first filing a lawsuit against former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, former U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe, and numerous “John Doe” agents with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) based on alleged violations of the First and Fourth Amendments.

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