Tag: mass surveillance

How to turn off Amazon’s ability to track your movements via dormant network inside Echo and Ring security cameras

Amazon has flipped a switch that automatically enrolled millions of its users in a program that will share Internet bandwidth between neighbors – expanding the company’s ability to track devices. 

Dubbed Amazon Sidewalk, the internet-sharing program links nearby devices via Bluetooth and radio frequencies so they can stay connected to the internet via other Sidewalk-enabled devices even when disconnected from home WiFi networks. 

The program already existed inside Echo and Ring security cameras dating back to 2018 and remained dormant until Tuesday.   

While users do have the option to turn Sidewalk off, it has drawn scrutiny from critics concerned about the amount of data that will pass through devices to and from neighbors connected to it. 

There are also concerns that the program will enable Amazon to track more users outside of their individual homes.  

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Make Way for the Snitch State: The All-Seeing Fourth Branch of Government

“It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.”—Marshall McLuhan, From Cliche To Archetype

We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors.

This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend.

Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

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UK vaccine recipients were secretly surveilled

The UK government tracked millions of people, without their knowledge, using their phones to gain insights into behavioral changes after vaccination, according to a new report. The government somehow insists the data collection was ethical and no privacy laws were broken.

A report by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviors (SPI-B) admitted that government funded researchers tracked one in ten people via their phones in February, without the users’ knowledge or permission.

They used “cell phone mobility data for 10 percent of the British population,” and chose over 4,200 vaccinated individuals. They then focused on the vaccinated group, and tracked it through 40 “CDR [call data records] with corresponding location observation.” The data collected was used for behavioral analysis, looking at “gyration (radius of gyration on vaccination day), time (opening hours) and home (do they go home directly after vaccination).”

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Amazon’s Ring is the ‘largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen’ with one in ten police departments using video from doorbell cameras, warns security expert

Amazon’s Ring doorbell camera ‘is effectively building the largest corporate-owned, civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen,’ it has been claimed.

The stark warning came from Lauren Bridges, a PhD candidate at University of Pennsylvania, who told The Guardian that one in ten police departments around the country have access to video from the civilian cameras after the company partnered with more than 1,800 local law enforcement agencies.

Bridges raises serious concerns that cops are able to request Ring videos from members of the public without a warrant, which she claims is deliberately circumnavigating the Fourth Amendment – the right not to be searched or have items seized without a legal warrant.

Last year alone, law enforcement agencies filed 22,337 individual requests for Ring videos, according to data compiled by Bridges.

A report in the California Law Review claimed that Amazon even assisted and coached law enforcement on how to circumvent legal requirements—such as the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. 

The claims are supported by ‘scripts’, obtained by Vice in 2019 from the Topeka, KS police department, which tell police how to encourage users to share camera footage with police and encourage friends to download the Neighbors app.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, nonprofit organization for ‘defending civil liberties in the digital world,’ has even formed petitions calling on Ring to end its partnerships with law enforcement agencies. 

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Pentagon launches program to surveil military personnel’s social media

The Pentagon is planning on launching a program that would screen military personnel’s social media for “extremist material” — looking to retain a private firm to do the digging in order to circumvent First Amendment protections, according to a report.

Internal Defense Department documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that Bishop Garrison, a senior advisor to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tasked with addressing “extremism” in the armed forces, is currently in the process of designing a social media screening program which will “continuously” monitor for “concerning behaviors.”

In the past, the Pentagon has shied away from surveilling members due to First Amendment protections, as well as other privacy concerns.

This program, according to the outlet, citing a senior Pentagon official, will rely on a private firm in order to avoid being accused of circumventing First Amendment restrictions through government.

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Pentagon collecting Americans’ phone data without warrants and hiding details, senator says

U.S. federal agencies including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have been purchasing access to large databases of phone location data and hiding their motives in what Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) described as “warrantless surveillance” of Americans.

In a Thursday letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Wyden called on Austin to declassify all answers about the Department of Defense’s data collection practices. Wyden noted that of eight questions he raised with the DoD, he received unclassified answers to three questions, while the answers to the five remaining questions were offered in a classified manner.

“In February 2020, media reports revealed that U.S. government agencies are buying location data obtained from apps on Americans’ phones and are doing so without any kind of legal process, sich as a court order,” Wyden wrote. “I have spent the last year investigating the shady, unregulated data brokers that are selling this data and the government agencies that are buying it. My investigation confirmed the warrantless purchase of American’s location data by the Internal Revenue Service, Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).”

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Biden Plans Expansion of Feds’ Army of Snitches in ‘Dollars for Collars’ Program

The Biden administration may soon recruit an army of private snoops to conduct surveillance that would be illegal if done by federal agents. As part of its war on extremism, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may exploit a “legal work-around” to spy on and potentially entrap Americans who are “perpetuating the ‘narratives’ of concern,” CNN reported last week. But federal informant programs routinely degenerate into “dollars for collars” schemes that reward scoundrels for fabricating crimes that destroy the lives of innocent Americans. The DHS plan would “allow the department to circumvent [constitutional and legal] limits” on surveillance of private citizens and groups. Federal agencies are prohibited from targeting individuals solely for First Amendment-protected speech and activities. But federal hirelings would be under no such restraint. Private informants could create false identities that would be problematic if done by federal agents.

DHS will be ramping up a war against an enemy which the feds have never clearly or competently defined. According to a March report by Biden’s office of the Director of National Intelligence, “domestic violent extremists” include individuals who “take overt steps to violently resist or facilitate the overthrow of the U.S. government in support of their belief that the U.S. government is purposely exceeding its Constitutional authority.” Perhaps like setting up a private informant scheme to evade constitutional restrictions on warrantless surveillance?

One DHS official bewailed to CNN: “Domestic violent extremists are really adaptive and innovative. We see them not only moving to encrypted platforms, but obviously couching their language so they don’t trigger any kind of red flag on any platforms.” DHS officials have apparently decided that certain groups of people are guilty regardless of what they say (“couching their language”). The targets are likely to be simply people with a bad attitude towards Washington. That will include gun owners who distrust politicians who vow to seize guns.

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