Tag: mass surveillance

Customs And Border Protection Bought Half A Million Dollars Worth Of Location Data

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) just got its hands on a whole bunch of location data. The news service Motherboard (Vice’s technology segment) uncovered a procurement order for $476,000 paid to the company Venntel Software last month. Venntel specializes in location data mining, compiling and selling GPS data gathered on users from various phone apps.

Sources who work with Venntel gave Motherboard more insight into the type of data the government now has its hands on.

Venntel’s technology only gives anonymized data, meaning it does not identify specific people or phone numbers. It gives only a randomized identification number. BUT there is an easy way to identify the owners of the phone.

The technology allows the CBP to draw a perimeter around a geographical area, and obtain the location data for any phones in that area. In this way, CBP could draw a circle around one particular home, acquire the data from it, and surmise that the few devices in that home belong to the homeowners.

What this means:

This allows Customs and Border Protection to ignore laws that require them to obtain a warrant before surveilling particular subjects. They simply purchase the data, instead of having to show probable cause that a crime has been committed.

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Court rules NSA phone snooping illegal — after 7-year delay

The National Security Agency program that swept up details on billions of Americans’ phone calls was illegal and possibly unconstitutional, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

However, the unanimous three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said the role the so-called telephone metadata program played in a criminal terror-fundraising case against four Somali immigrants was so minor that it did not undermine their convictions.

The long-awaited decision is a victory for prosecutors, but some language in the court’s opinion could be viewed as a rebuke of sorts to officials who defended the snooping by pointing to the case involving Basaaly Moalin and three other men found guilty by a San Diego jury in 2013 on charges of fundraising for Al-Shabaab.

Judge Marsha Berzon’s opinion, which contains a half-dozen references to the role of former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden in disclosing the NSA metadata program, concludes that the “bulk collection” of such data violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The call-tracking effort began without court authorization under President George W. Bush following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A similar program was approved by the secretive FISA Court beginning in 2006 and renewed numerous times, but the 9th Circuit panel said those rulings were legally flawed.

The appeals court stopped just short of saying that the snooping was definitely unconstitutional, but rejected the Justice Department’s arguments that collecting the metadata did not amount to a search under a 40-year-old legal precedent because customers voluntarily share such info with telephone providers.

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WATCH AS NEW WIFI METHOD SEES THROUGH WALLS AND IDENTIFIES PEOPLE FROM VIDEO FOOTAGE

Several years ago, I wrote an article titled “How WiFi Will Be Used to Erase Civil Liberties.”  At that time, announcements in the UK and in New York City demonstrated that governments had been working with private corporations to blanket entire cities with WiFi connectivity.

Now that 5G is rolling out to far wider audiences, WiFi has only become more pervasive and, with it, the surveillance capabilities of this technology.

Methods that can use WiFi to see people hidden behind walls have been in development for some time, as reported by Mac Slavo from SHTFPlan many years ago:

Researchers at MIT have come up with a way to use WiFi signals to see behind walls, and map a room in 3-D. By reflecting the signal, it can also locate the movements of people or objects in the room. The Daily Mail reports:

Using a wireless transmitter fitted behind a wall, computer scientists have developed a device that can map a nearby room in 3D while scanning for human bodies.

Using the signals that bounce and reflect off these people, the device creates an accurate silhouette and can even use this silhouette to identify who that person is.

The device is called RF Capture and it was developed by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). 

Today, researchers claim to have a new method for taking this one step further: once a person is located, they can then be properly identified by matching any available video footage of that individual. Apparently, our unique gait and movement gives us away. Naturally, this is a huge win for law enforcement which has a larger database than ever of public video footage from its ubiquitous camera surveillance.

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