Tag: privacy

‘Beyond belief’: Trans athlete records students inside locker room, now all hell breaks loose

Virginia Republicans Gov. Glenn Youngkin and state Attorney General Jason Miyares launched an investigation into Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) Tuesday after several male students expressed discomfort with a female student using the boys’ locker room.

The district reportedly opened a Title IX investigation into the three boys attending Stone Bridge High School, questioning whether they perpetrated sexual harassment by complaining about the girl’s presence, according to ABC7 News.

The girl, who had allegedly used the boys locker room several times before, also purportedly filmed “the reaction of male students” during the incident, per to the AG’s press release.

“It’s deeply concerning to read reports of yet another incident in Loudoun County schools where members of the opposite sex are violating the privacy of students in locker rooms,” Youngkin said.

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Woke Virginia school district unleashes wrath on boys ‘who complained about trans kids in changing rooms’

A woke Virginia school district is investigating three boys after they questioned why a trans student was filming them in the male locker room, according to their parents. 

Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) has opened a Title IX probe into the pupils at Stone Bridge High after they said the arrangement made them feel uncomfortable. 

Title IX investigations involve allegations of sex-based discrimination, including sexual harassment, sexual assault, domestic violence, and other violations. 

A father of one of the students said the trans pupil, a biological female who identifies as male, used a mobile phone to record his son and others in the locker room after a gym class in March. 

‘I believe that is an invasion of their privacy,’ he told ABC7. ‘We’re concerned’. 

He said his son is being investigated for ‘questioning why there was a female in the men’s locker room’.

‘Other boys were also uncomfortable with it,’ he added. ‘There were other boys asking the same question. They (LCPS) created a very uncomfortable situation. 

‘They’re young, they’re 15 years old. They’re expressing their opinions, and now they’re being targeted for expressing those opinions.

‘I don’t think my son should be punished for expressing his First Amendment right and being able to ask questions.’

‘I have a daughter that’s in high school as well, and if there was a male in there videotaping her in the locker room, I would have issues,’ he added. 

‘If it’s my son and there’s a female in the locker room videotaping, I have issues. Even if it was somebody of the same sex, I believe that this is an invasion of their privacy.’ 

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Mozilla’s Google Dependence Threatens Firefox’s Survival

Despite its mission to challenge Big Tech dominance, Mozilla now finds itself tethered to one of its largest rivals in a paradox that could threaten the very survival of its flagship browser, Firefox.

As the Justice Department pushes forward with remedies aimed at curbing Google’s monopoly over online search, Mozilla’s financial dependence on the search giant is surfacing as a glaring vulnerability, one that the organization admits could become existential.

Mozilla’s Chief Financial Officer, Eric Muhlheim, testified in court on Friday, describing the potential fallout of the DOJ’s proposals as dire. “It’s very frightening,” he said if Google were barred from paying to remain the default search provider in Firefox.

That payment, ironically, forms the lifeblood of a browser that was created to stand as a counterweight to corporate control of the internet. Firefox generates roughly 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue, and Muhlheim confirmed that about 85 percent of that comes from its agreement with Google; an arrangement that funds both Mozilla’s for-profit arm and, by extension, the nonprofit foundation behind it.

While the court has already determined that Google’s use of default search engine contracts amounts to illegal monopolistic behavior, Mozilla’s testimony underscores the tangled consequences of dismantling those deals. Mozilla, positioned as a David to Google’s Goliath in the browser wars, depends on the very dominance the DOJ seeks to unwind.

Muhlheim didn’t mince words about what severing the deal could mean. The immediate loss of that income would require sweeping cutbacks. He spoke of a “downward spiral” in which reduced funding for product development would degrade Firefox, prompt user attrition, and potentially “put Firefox out of business.” The ripple effects, he warned, would hit Mozilla’s other initiatives—such as its work on ethical AI and open web standards.

The contradiction is hard to miss: Firefox, hailed by digital rights advocates as a rare independent in a browser market increasingly shaped by Apple’s WebKit and Google’s Chromium, is only able to survive because of a search contract with Google. Its own browser engine, Gecko, was developed precisely to prevent a single corporation—then Microsoft—from dictating how the internet worked. Now, two decades later, Mozilla’s survival hinges on the largesse of another tech behemoth.

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Gun Owners Group Calls for Inquiry into Firearms Industry’s Secret Sharing of Customer Data

A coalition of firearm owners is pressing federal regulators to investigate whether the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, covertly exploited consumer data for political purposes, despite publicly promoting itself as a defender of privacy.

In a formal appeal submitted to three federal agencies, Gun Owners for Safety is demanding accountability over a long-running data-sharing operation first exposed by a ProPublica report.

That investigation revealed that for years, the NSSF quietly received personal details from gun buyers, collected by manufacturers, without informing those individuals that their information would be funneled into a political targeting effort.

The group’s letter, sent to the FBI, Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), described the practice as “underhanded” and deceptive.

Malcolm Smith, a longtime gun owner and member of the group, underscored the nonpartisan stakes of the issue. “Gun owners’ privacy is not a partisan or ideological issue,” he wrote. “No matter the industry, exploiting customers’ private data like their underwear size and children’s ages in a secret scheme is reprehensible and cannot be permitted.”

Gun Owners for Safety, backed by the gun violence prevention group Giffords, operates across nine states and is composed of firearm owners who support tighter safeguards around gun ownership, including safety measures and enhanced background checks. The organization was launched in 2019 under the leadership of former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, a gun violence survivor.

Regulatory responses to the complaint have been minimal so far. The ATF confirmed receipt of the letter but offered no additional comment. The FBI, FTC, and NSSF remained silent when approached by ProPublica for statements.

Though the NSSF is less widely known than the National Rifle Association, its influence spans the firearms business ecosystem, representing manufacturers, shooting ranges, ammunition retailers, and industry publishers.

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Digital ID is a danger to us all

Few things stir the imagination of conspiracy theorists like the prospect of a government-backed digital-identity scheme. The obsessive advocacy of digital ID by Tony Blair of all people is just more grist to their mill. But there are perfectly rational reasons to be wary of the British state’s digital-ID scheme. For one thing, it will make us less safe.

As I recently reported in the Telegraph, I was contacted by a senior civil servant working on One Login, the UK’s digital-identity project. Announced in 2021 and developed by the Government Digital Service (GDS), One Login has absorbed over £300million in public funds so far. It is ultimately designed to help citizens access hundreds of government services and, in the shape of the gov.uk wallet, retain digital documents including an individual’s driving licence. It currently processes the sensitive personal and biometric data for three million citizens, but that number is expected to rise as the service expands.

What the senior civil servant told me was disturbing. He arrived on the project in 2022 to set up an information-assurance team, which performs a function similar to that of an auditor, assessing risk. At One Login, he found a chaotic and insecure work culture. The system was being accessed by users with ‘do anything’ system-administrator privileges thousands of times a month. Many of these users did not have the recommended security-clearance level required to work with the sensitive personal data of millions of citizens. Moreover, the GDS did not mandate locked-down workstations for staff working from home, or for the hundreds of contractors developing the system – a legacy of the GDS’s ‘geeks in jeans’ culture once eulogised by commentators. The civil servant also discovered that part of the system was being developed in Romania, a nation named by Oxford University researchers as one of the world’s ‘key cyber-crime hotspots’.

It would only take one developer with the right administrator privileges to create havoc on the system, perhaps developing ‘back doors’ into One Login that no one would even be aware of.

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Google’s Updated Local Services Ads Terms Spark Privacy Fears, Threaten Confidentiality in Medical and Legal Sectors

Google has once again raised considerable privacy and surveillance concerns – including affecting sensitive sectors like the medical industry – this time with its updated Terms of Service for Local Services Ads (LSA).

The LSA scheme is designed to give local business leads, like calls and emails, directly from local customers who search for their services on Google.

But an email sent to participating advertisers last week informed them that failure to accept the terms by June 5 will mean their ads will no longer appear either in the giant’s Search or Maps.

The new rights over advertiser assets benefit not only Google but also the company’s affiliates, and what they now can do is access all content in an LSA profile (including calls from potential customers) in order to use, modify, and display it across Google products and services.

This by no means exhaustive list of content includes business photos, entity name, location, phone number, category, site, and hours.

Google is also claiming the right to select, modify, display, and use content such as photos, provider bios, service descriptions, pricing information, and discounts.

That content is derived from phone calls and messages with end users routed through Google, and URLS identified and shared in the LSA account.

Ad agencies can be the ones to consent to the terms on behalf of advertisers, and in that case, the new rules apply to both. However, it is at this time not clear whether agency manager accounts can make this decision without letting the clients know how their data will be handled starting June 5.

When applied to advertisers representing legal and medical firms, Google having the right to record phone calls and messages means they would be unable to continue to use LSA without breaking confidentiality.

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“Stop The Digital Control Grid…”

Catherine Austin Fitts (CAF), publisher of “The Solari Report,” is back to update us about the “Fast-Approaching Digital Control Grid.”  (CAF) told us last time here on USAW, “There is no bigger ongoing battle for lovers of freedom than the battle taking place over the freedom killing idea of digital ID.”  

But it’s more that just ID, it’s an entire control grid that is being quietly built that is like a frog being put into pot and the water being brought to a boil.  

CAF explains, “You know our goal at Solari is each person has a free and inspired life.  So, we have been working for several years to stop financial transaction control.“

”  If you get the ability to track each person and control their transactions, so if they don’t do what you say, they can turn off your money.  That is game over for the Constitution and for human liberty.  If you look at how the control grid is coming together, there are many different pieces.  There is digital ID, all digital currency or transaction system to a social credit system to the management to certain kinds of data and back-up energy.  There are many different pieces.  We look at the pieces, and we look at them as one-off things such as, oh, I don’t mind having a ‘Real ID’ because I can see why they might want a federal ID, or a passport or whatever.  Each one of these things looks nonthreatening and even convenient, but when they snap together, they are in a control grid, and it’s completely something else.  When Trump was elected, I was shocked to see, almost immediately, the President announce the Stargate AI initiative with the mRNA vaccines, which to me is the internet of bodies.”

CAF put together a long list of Trump Administration actions that are speeding up what looks like a control grid.  It’s called “The Fast-Approaching Digital Control Grid.”  It lists things such as crypto friendly currency actions, private Central Bank Digital Currency, shrinking banking sector, DOGE, undisclosed Epstein files and many more red flag items that could be used to allow crime to continue and build a digital prison for “We the People.”  While the Trump Administration brings change at a record pace, not a single thing has been done to find out about the “$21 Trillion Missing Money” that has been well documented by CAF and Michigan State Professor Dr. Mark Skidmore.  The money has been stolen from America, and the silence about this is deafening.  CAF says,

“We know there has been tremendous fraud in the financials of the US government.  We know that has happened.  If you look at all the things that you or I would do to figure out what had happened, where the money went and how do we get it back, that’s not what they are doing. . . . If you look at how we would do a successful operation to reengineer government and identify the real fraud and stop it, I don’t see any indication that they are doing that.  I do see some selected efforts that are probably sincere. . . . They are shutting things down lots of us would like to see shut down. . . . We know how to stop the death and disabilities that come from the Covid 19 vax injection, but you go the CDC website, and they are still recommending the Covid injections.”

The massive crime going on with government accounting makes it necessary for the control grid.  CAF explains, “What happened in the last Trump Administration is they adopted FASAB 56.  FASAB 56 basically said they could take the books of the US government dark.“

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NIH To Build Massive Health Data Platform Linking Health Records, Genomic Profiles, and Smartwatch Data for Medical Research

The National Institutes of Health is quietly assembling a vast digital mosaic of Americans’ private medical histories, pulling sensitive data from both government-run health systems and commercial sources to support autism research tied to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s latest project. The new scheme involves a sweeping plan to integrate diverse streams of health data into a single platform, raising significant concerns about privacy, oversight, and long-term use.

According to NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the data aggregation includes pharmacy transactions, insurance claims, clinical test results, and even personal metrics collected from wearable tech such as fitness trackers and smartwatches.

Health information from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Indian Health Service is also being funneled in, creating a massive, centralized repository with a wide lens on the US population.

As Bhattacharya told agency advisers on Monday, the objective is to eliminate the fragmentation that currently limits access to existing health data sets. He said the new system would cut down on redundancies and make it easier for researchers to conduct large-scale analysis.

“The idea of the platform is that the existing data resources are often fragmented and difficult to obtain. The NIH itself will often pay multiple times for the same data resource. Even data resources that are within the federal government are difficult to obtain,” he said.

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DHL to suspend global shipments of over $1,000 to US consumers

DHL Express, a division of Germany’s Deutsche Post, said it would suspend global business-to-consumer shipments worth over US$800 (S$1,000) to individuals in the United States from April 21, as US customs regulatory changes have lengthened clearance.

The notice on the company website was not dated, but its metadata showed it was compiled on April 19.

DHL blamed the halt on new US customs rules that require formal entry processing on all shipments worth over US$800. The minimum had been US$2,500 until a change on April 5.

DHL said business-to-business shipments would not be suspended but could face delays.

Shipments under US$800 to either businesses or consumers were not affected by the changes.

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Digital ID Dangers: Whistleblower Alleges Massive Security Failures in UK’s GOV.UK One Login Digital ID System

UK’s digital ID scheme, GOV.UK One Login, allegedly contains a host of serious vulnerabilities affecting security and data protection, that are “built in” and present in the system since its launch.

These claims come from a whistleblower, a security expert who worked for the Government Digital Service (GDS, a part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology). The most grave consequences stemming from the flaws – that the whistleblower first pointed out through proper channels in 2022, only to be ignored – would include data breaches.

Another threat from more than half a million system vulnerabilities that they said were identified is identity theft. At this time, some three million people in the UK use the system to access 50 government services.

The security expert, whose identity has not been revealed in reports about the brewing scandal, asserted that thousands of vulnerabilities identified were rated as either critical or high.

The whistleblower’s account of the events suggests the authorities went for a slapdash approach to setting up the digital ID infrastructure, not only from the technical but also from the policy point of view.

“Basic” governance and risk management were not in place, according to the source, while the £330 ($436.70) million in funding arrived thanks to the business case that featured “misleading claims” regarding the quality of the scheme’s security.

And when the decision was made to outsource development to Romania, it came without GDS CEO’s approval, and without consultation with the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC).

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