Tag: mass surveillance

USPS spied on ‘MAGA’ protesters, right-wing groups, gun rights activists, documents show

The U.S Postal Service spied on ‘MAGA’ protesters, gun rights activists and other right-wing groups between late 2020 and early 2021, according to records obtained by The Washington Times. ‘MAGA’ is former President Donald Trump’s slogan meaning “Make America Great Again.”

Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, obtained heavily redacted files detailing the USPS’ surveillance activities from September 2020 to April 2021, which included a secret effort to surveil social media known as the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP).

The USPS monitored the activities of gun rights activists, protesters planning to demonstrate against police in Louisville, Kentucky after the shooting of Breonna Taylor, and right-wing groups traveling to Washington, D.C. after the 2020 election. 

Eddington said the documents demonstrate the USPS’ surveillance capabilities.

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Senator Wyden: US military bought mass monitoring tool that includes email and browsing data

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has revealed that the US Naval Investigative Service (NCIS) has a contract for “Augury” – a mass monitoring tool that reportedly covers 93% of the world’s internet traffic and provides access to petabytes of current and historical data.

Wyden made the revelation in a recent letter that urged officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Defense (DOD), and Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate their department’s “warrantless purchase and use of records revealing the websites Americans have accessed online.”

The Senator wrote that public contracting records show that NCIS has a contract for Augury and that these records show that Augury provides access to network data “from over 550 collection points worldwide.” Wyden added that these records show Augury “is updated with at least 100 billion new records each day” and “confirm that Augury provides access to email data…and data about web browser activity.”

Not only does Wyden’s letter highlight this Augury contract but it also reveals that Wyden’s department was recently contacted by a whistleblower who had filed formal complaints “regarding the warrantless purchase and use of netflow data by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS).” This whistleblower told Wyden’s department that NCIS is “purchasing access to data, which includes netflow records and some ‘communications content” from Team Cymru – a data broker that offers access to Augury.

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Facebook spied on private messages of Americans who questioned 2020 election

Facebook has been spying on the private messages and data of American users and reporting them to the FBI if they express anti-government or anti-authority sentiments — or question the 2020 election — according to sources within the Department of Justice.

Under the FBI collaboration operation, somebody at Facebook red-flagged these supposedly subversive private messages over the past 19 months and transmitted them in redacted form to the domestic terrorism operational unit at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, without a subpoena.

“It was done outside the legal process and without probable cause,” alleged one of the sources, who spoke on condition of ­anonymity.

“Facebook provides the FBI with private conversations which are protected by the First Amendment without any subpoena.”

These private messages then have been farmed out as “leads” to FBI field offices around the country, which subsequently requested subpoenas from the partner US Attorney’s Office in their district to officially obtain the private conversations that Facebook already had shown them.

But when the targeted Facebook users were investigated by agents in a local FBI field office, sometimes using covert surveillance techniques, nothing criminal or violent turned up.

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An Opaque Web of Credit Reports Is Tracking Everything You Do

Liam Downey remembers the first time he heard about ChexSystems. It was December 2021, not long after he moved to Mancos, Colorado, a tiny mountain hamlet with a population under 1,500.

The only bank in town had just barred the 52-year-old flight paramedic from opening an account because his so-called ChexSystems score was too low. The teller gave him the contact information of the agency but not much else. He walked out of the bank perplexed.

ChexSystems, as Downey would soon find out, is a national consumer reporting agency — abbreviated CRA — that specializes in gathering data on how Americans use checks and bank accounts. It distills this information into a score similar to a credit score. Some 80% of banks rely on such information to screen people who want to open new accounts.

On a scale of 100 to 899, Downey’s ChexSystems score was 553. As far as the sole bank in Mancos was concerned, those three digits — regardless of his 15-year-long relationship with his current out-of-state bank — meant he was too risky to take on as a customer.

“I think this is complete nonsense,” Downey says of the reporting system. “People don’t even recognize it exists. It’s not easy to interpret, it’s not easy to change, and it’s completely arbitrary.”

Critics of ChexSystems note the agency generally tracks only negative information like account closures and overdrafts, essentially making it a bank-account rap sheet. The company is just one of a large — and largely unknown — sum of CRAs that actively monitors the financial and nonfinancial behavior of more than 200 million Americans, including many children.

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A Guided Tour of How Cops Can Browse Your Location Data

In Part 1 of our series on Fog Data Science, we saw how when you give some apps permission to view your location, it can end up being packaged and sold to numerous other companies. Fog Data Science is one of those companies, and it has created a sleek search engine called Fog Reveal that allows cops to browse through that location data as if they were Google Maps results.

In this article, we’ll be taking a deep dive into Fog Reveal’s features. Although accounts for Reveal are typically only available to police departments, we were able to analyze the app’s public-facing code to get a better understanding of how it works, how it’s used, and what it looks like when cops get warrantless access to your location data.

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US government finally unseals long-hidden rulings on mass surveillance

The US government has finally released previously classified rulings from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which have revealed how the secretive court interprets the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a law that allows mass surveillance of foreigners.

FISC was created by Congress in 1978 to act as a warrant court that approved the surveillance of individual foreign targets. However, after 9/11, the court’s role expanded and it started approving mass surveillance programs, some of which illegally collected data of foreigners and US citizens.

In 2015, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, which required the government to make public all significant rulings by the FISC. However, the executive branch argued that the USA Freedom Act did not apply to FISC rulings issued before the passing of the law in 2015.

Due to this lack of transparency, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued under the Freedom of Information Act to force the government to disclose all significant FISC rulings. The lawsuit resulted in the government releasing more than 70 FISC rulings that were previously kept secret.

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Google triggers criminal probe after dad takes photos of his toddler, naked, for doctor

Google triggered a criminal investigation and locked a man out of his accounts after flagging photos he sent to his son’s pediatrician as potential child pornography, according to the New York Times.

The tech company initially flagged the images when they were automatically uploaded to Google servers from the father’s phone, according to the NYT. After a nearly year-long investigation of everything in his Google account, including search history, location history, messages and photos, police determined he hadn’t committed a crime.

The father, referred to only as Mark by the NYT, had taken photos of his young son, naked, at the request of a doctor over concerns about his infected penis, according to the NYT. Google quickly locked him out of his account after scanning the photos, and he lost emails, contacts and personal photos and had to get a new phone number after losing access to his Google Fi account.

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Meta can track users’ credit card, internet history on other websites, researcher claims

An ex-Google employee claims his research shows Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is “rewriting” other websites so that it can better track users’ data.

The researcher, Felix Krause, claims Meta can “inject” tracking code into other websites whenever those websites are opened by Facebook or Instagram’s in-app web browser, as opposed to standalone web browsers like Google Chrome and Safari.

The Instagram app injects their tracking code into every website shown, including when clicking on ads, enabling them [to] monitor all user interactions, like every button and link tapped, text selections, screenshots, as well as any form inputs, like passwords, addresses and credit card numbers,” Krause warns in a tweet.

Krause also claims Meta injects this tracking code “without the user’s consent, nor the website operator’s permission.”

Why is this a big deal? Instagram & Facebook actively work around the new App Tracking Transparency System which was designed to prevent exactly this kind of abuse, to keep tracking users outside their ecosystem,” Krause claims in a follow-up tweet.

The ex-Google engineer apparently discovered the code injection while developing a tool to detect extra commands added to websites by web browsers. For most browsers and apps, the tool doesn’t detect any lines of code injection, but for Facebook and Instagram, Krause claims the tool found up to 18 added lines of code.

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Amazon plots to turn surveillance network into reality TV series

Comedian Wanda Sykes will host a new show, called “Ring Nation,” that will feature videos captured by Amazon Ring cameras, according to a report on Deadline. Amazon-owned MGM Television and Big Fish Entertainment will produce the show.

The show will feature funny and viral content captured by Ring cameras, like “neighbors saving neighbors, marriage proposals, military reunions and silly animals.”

Such videos can be entertaining and often go viral. However, they pull people’s attention from the mass surveillance Ring cameras conduct. Videos from Ring cameras have been used in investigations by law enforcement in the US and abroad, even pulling video from people’s doorbell cameras without a warrant.

By cultivating fears about crime in the suburbs and partnering with police departments, Amazon has aggressively rolled out Ring home surveillance cameras.

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Amazon’s Ring Camera Penetrates 18% Of Homes To Create Massive Surveillance Network

If you walk through your local neighborhood—providing you live in a reasonably large town or city—you’ll be caught on camera. Government CCTV cameras may record your stroll, but it is increasingly likely that you’ll also be captured by one of your neighbors’ security cameras or doorbells. It’s even more likely that the camera will be made by Ring, the doorbell and security camera firm owned by Amazon.

Since Amazon splashed out more than a billion dollars for the company in 2018, Ring’s security products have exploded in popularity. Ring has simultaneously drawn controversy for making deals (and sharing data) with thousands of police departments, helping expand and normalize suburban surveillance, and falling to a string of hacks. While the cameras can provide homeowners with reassurance that their property is secure, critics say the systems also run the risk of reinforcing racism and racial profiling and eroding people’s privacy.

Videos shared from security cameras and internet-connected doorbells have also become common on platforms like Facebook and TikTok, raking in millions of views. “Ring impacts everybody’s privacy,” says Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Most immediately, it impacts the people who walk down the streets every day, where the cameras are pointing out.”

While Ring is far from the only maker of smart doorbells and cameras—Google’s Nest line is another popular option—its connections to law enforcement have drawn the most criticism, as when it recently handed over data without warrants. So, what exactly does Ring collect and know about you?

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