Tag: police state

Saudis Use Orwellian App to Identify Dissidents, Imprisoning Some for Decades

Saudi Arabians are using a mobile app sold by both Apple and Google to snitch on their fellow citizens for dissenting against government authorities. As a result, activists and others are going to prison for more than 30 years in some cases, Business Insider reported on Friday.

On August 16, Saudi national Salma el-Shabab, a PhD student at Leeds University, was sentenced to 34 years in prison for tweets “in support of activists and members of the kingdom’s political opposition in exile,” the report said. Though the posts were made while she was in the UK, el-Shabab was nonetheless reported through the “Kollona Amn” app and immediately arrested upon returning home. 

“Every day we wake up to hear news, somebody has been arrested, or somebody has been taken,” Real, a Saudi women’s-rights activist using an alias, told Insider.

Kollona Amn – which roughly translates to “We Are All Security” in Arabic – was launched by the Saudi Interior Ministry in 2017, but the last few years have seen a “dramatic” surge in court cases referencing the app, according to legal-rights activists.

The app “encourages everyday citizens to play the role of police and become active participants in their own repression. Putting the state’s eyes everywhere also creates a pervasive sense of uncertainty – there is always a potential informant in the room or following your social media accounts,” said Noura Aljizawi, a researcher at Citizen Lab, which focuses on threats to free speech online.

The Orwellian nature of the app is such that users often report on people “defensively,” fearing they could face punishment themselves for merely overhearing speech deemed offensive to the regime. In some cases, the app has also been used for “blackmail” and to “settle scores,” Insider noted.

Keep reading

5 Psychological Experiments That Explain The Modern World

The world is a confusing place. People do things that don’t make any sense, think things that aren’t supported by facts, endure things they do not need to endure, and viciously attack those who try to bring these things to their attention.

If you’ve ever wondered why, you’ve come to the right place.

Any casual reader of the alternate media landscape will eventually come up with a reference to Stanley Milgram, or Philip Zimbardo, the “Asch Experiment” or maybe all three.

“Cognitive Dissonance”, “Diffusion of Responsibility”, and “learned helplessness” are phrases that regularly do the rounds, but where do they come from and what they mean?

Well, here are the important psycho-social experiments that teach us about the way people think, but more than that they actually explain how our modern world works, and just how we got into this mess.

Keep reading

Prosecutor for State’s Child Protection Division Arrested on Multiple Charges for Preying on Children

For 12 years, before he retired without notice in 2020, Gary Lee Bell was the assistant attorney general from the Utah Attorney General’s Office where he worked in the Child Protection Division, prosecuting individuals who harmed children. His years of service are now being called into question, however, as he was arrested this month for that very act.

Bell was arrested on August 24th by Utah County sheriff’s deputies and charged with six counts of sexual exploitation of a minor. According to police, the investigation into Bell was launched on May 22, 2022, after they received a tip about child sex abuse material being uploaded to social media.

According to the tip, submitted to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Bell was distributing images and videos on an unnamed social media app of children under the age of 10 being sexually abused.

Keep reading

New ATF Document Reveals Gun Owners Who Own ‘Pistol Braces’ Could Be Forced To Register

Readers know the Biden administration has weaponized the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) to wage war on law-abiding gun owners and manufacturers.

AmmoLand News reported the latest move by the ATF could force law-abiding gun owners who own pistol braces to register them with the federal government. 

The plan (or request) for a registry of pistol braces was buried within a document about a budget justification from the ATF to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Here’s what the document says:

“Due to the upcoming Amnesty Registration of Pistol Brace weapons, photos of the weapon being registered will be required to prove the weapon does utilize a pistol brace in its configuration and would qualify for an amnesty registration.”

“Our ATF inside sources have told AmmoLand News that the ATF was planning for an amnesty period where gun owners would be able to register their braced pistols as short-barreled rifles (SBR) and that it is expected they will receive a free tax stamp,” AmmoLand’s John Crump said. 

Keep reading

82-Year-Old Grandma Hand-Filed Taxes for Years – 1 Small Mistake Has the IRS Demanding $2.1M

The Internal Revenue Service is going after an 82-year-old woman for an outrageous $2.1 million in “penalties” because she didn’t use the right form to file her taxes.

The grandmother from the Boston area had spent decades going to her local library and diligently filling out her IRS forms by hand and sending them in. But eventually she made a serious error, though it was one she had no way of knowing that she was making, according to Reason Magazine.

After Monica Toth’s family left Germany in the 1930s to escape Hitler’s fascist empire, they landed in Argentina, where Monica was born in 1940. By age 22, she had moved to the U.S. to start a family. Ultimately, in the 80s she became a naturalized American citizen.

In 1999, Toth’s father left her $4.2 million in a Swiss Bank account. Not being a tax accountant or tax preparer, Monica was not aware of the arcane rule that Americans who own bank accounts in foreign countries must file an annual one-page form known as the Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts report (FBAR). This form basically alerts the federal government to the existence of the bank account and lists the assets therein, the New York Post reported.

Toth had no clue that this form even existed and so, she spent years neglecting to file the form.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading