Tag: smartphones

Rand Paul: Time to ban feds from tracking Americans through their cellphone location data

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a fierce protector of freedom and privacy, says it is time to ban federal agencies from being able to track Americans’ behavior by buying their cell phone location data from commercial vendors.

“When the government is trying to snoop on your behavior, it’s wrong, and there should be laws against it,” Paul told the “Just the News, Not Noise” television show in an exclusive interview aired Wednesday night.

Paul’s comments came after newly released government documents revealed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tracked Americans’ compliance with pandemic lockdowns by buying and monitoring their cellphone geospatial data from commercial vendors.

Such data is collected on each American from apps they use on their smart phones and sold by third-party brokers unless a user explicitly opts out of such collection for each app. Increasingly, law enforcement and other government agencies have been acquiring the data for official work, though the CDC was the first publicly disclosed use to track private Americans’ health behavior.

The data also was bought and used by the election integrity group True the Vote to identify people suspected of illegally collecting ballots in the 2020 Georgia election, a revelation that has prompted a formal investigation by the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.

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CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard. The documents also show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly, it intended to use it for more general CDC purposes.

Location data is information on a device’s location sourced from the phone, which can then show where a person lives, works, and where they went. The sort of data the CDC bought was aggregated—meaning it was designed to follow trends that emerge from the movements of groups of people—but researchers have repeatedly raised concerns with how location data can be deanonymized and used to track specific people.

The documents reveal the expansive plan the CDC had last year to use location data from a highly controversial data broker. SafeGraph, the company the CDC paid $420,000 for access to one year of data to, includes Peter Thiel and the former head of Saudi intelligence among its investors. Google banned the company from the Play Store in June. 

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Mental health and worship apps are found to be some of the most privacy invasive

Apps that deal with some of the most sensitive and personal data, such as that concerning a user’s mental health or religious activities, are said to rank among the worst privacy offenders.

This is the conclusion of a study conducted by the Mozilla Foundation, which singled out mental health and prayer apps as being prone to track and collect data revealing a person’s state of mind, feelings, and thoughts, and then “share” that for-profit via targeted advertising.

Mozilla’s team looked into 32 apps from this category, putting a “privacy not included” label on 29, and publishing the findings in a guide of the same name. 25 of these apps didn’t pass the foundations’ minimum security standards around password quality and handling of security updates.

PTSD Coach, developed by the US The Department of Veterans Affairs, has “strong privacy policies and security practices,” while chatbot Wysa “seems to value users’ privacy.” And the Catholic prayer app Hallow was the only one to “respond in a timely manner” to Mozilla’s emails.

Besides these technical issues, the apps singled out in the report are also said to target “vulnerable users with personalized advertisements” and track and share biometric data.

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Americans warned: Police now authorized to track you via cell phone

Police across America now can track citizens through their cell phones – without a warrant – despite the Fourth Amendment’s ban on warrantless searches, according to a team of civil-rights lawyers at the Rutherford Institute.

That’s the result of the U.S. Supreme Court deciding not to intervene in a lower court decision that authorized exactly that.

The institute had filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case Hammond v. U.S. that challenged the tracking of people through their cell phones as unconstitutional.

That tracking can tell police a person’s location with great precision, “whether that person is at home, at the library, a political event, a doctor’s office, etc.,” the organization reported.

“Americans are being swept up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals. Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute.

“Added to that, police are tracking people’s movements by way of license plate toll readers; scouring social media posts; triangulating data from cellphone towers and WiFi signals; layering facial recognition software on top of that; and then cross-referencing footage with public social media posts, all in an effort to identify, track and eventually round us up. This is what it means to live in a suspect society,” he said.

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AMERICAN PHONE-TRACKING FIRM DEMO’D SURVEILLANCE POWERS BY SPYING ON CIA AND NSA

IN THE MONTHS leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, two obscure American startups met to discuss a potential surveillance partnership that would merge the ability to track the movements of billions of people via their phones with a constant stream of data purchased directly from Twitter. According to Brendon Clark of Anomaly Six — or “A6” — the combination of its cellphone location-tracking technology with the social media surveillance provided by Zignal Labs would permit the U.S. government to effortlessly spy on Russian forces as they amassed along the Ukrainian border, or similarly track Chinese nuclear submarines. To prove that the technology worked, Clark pointed A6’s powers inward, spying on the National Security Agency and CIA, using their own cellphones against them.

Virginia-based Anomaly Six was founded in 2018 by two ex-military intelligence officers and maintains a public presence that is scant to the point of mysterious, its website disclosing nothing about what the firm actually does. But there’s a good chance that A6 knows an immense amount about you. The company is one of many that purchases vast reams of location data, tracking hundreds of millions of people around the world by exploiting a poorly understood fact: Countless common smartphone apps are constantly harvesting your location and relaying it to advertisers, typically without your knowledge or informed consent, relying on disclosures buried in the legalese of the sprawling terms of service that the companies involved count on you never reading. Once your location is beamed to an advertiser, there is currently no law in the United States prohibiting the further sale and resale of that information to firms like Anomaly Six, which are free to sell it to their private sector and governmental clientele. For anyone interested in tracking the daily lives of others, the digital advertising industry is taking care of the grunt work day in and day out — all a third party need do is buy access.

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Biden administration admits to giving free cellphones to illegals

On Wednesday, the Biden administration revealed that illegal immigrants entering the United States are handed smartphones when they arrive.

Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked Jen Psaki about the attempt during today’s news briefing.

“Our team in Texas is saying that you guys are starting to give smartphones to border crossers, hoping that they’ll use the phones to check-in or – uh – to be tracked. Which part of that is supposed to ‘deter’ people from crossing illegally into the states?” asked Doocy.

Well,” replied Psaki, “I think you of all people – since you’ve asked me a range of questions on this topic over time – would recognize that we need to take steps to ensure that we know where individuals are and we can track – we can check in with them.”

Psaki went on to describe the three types of technology that the administration is using to track illegal immigrants: “Telephonic is one of them, which uses a participant’s voice to create a biometric voiceprint during the enrollment process. And when the participant has a check-in call, their voice is compared to the voiceprint.”

“SmartLink, which is another option, enables participant monitoring via smartphone or tablet using facial-matching technology to establish identity.”

“And Global Positioning System monitoring is of a participant’s location and movement history, using satellite technology through an ankle bracelet.  This is all part of our effort, as individuals come into the United States and individuals who are entering who will proceed to immigration proceedings, to monitor and track where they are.”

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Barack Obama Backs Internet Controls to Grapple with the ‘Demand for Crazy’

Government regulation and control over the internet can defeat a “demand for crazy” through the spread of incorrect messages, former President Barack Obama said Wednesday.

Obama, 60, spoke with Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg at an event hosted by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and the magazine.

“I do think that there is a demand for crazy on the internet that we have to grapple with,” Obama said, before adding a mix of regulation and industry standards are needed to address the issue.

Obama lamented how misinformation plays out across the U.S., accusing those who say President Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election as guilty of falling for conspiracy theories.

He called out “a systematic effort to either promote false information, to suppress true information, for the purpose of political gain, financial gain, enhancing power, suppressing others, targeting those you don’t like.”

The former president blamed smartphones for accelerating “an erosion of accountability norms and standards in political life” from 2010 onwards.

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Creepy Bill Gates Threw Millions at New Technology of Under-Skin Nanoparticle QR Code, to be Scanned by Smartphones

Last year it was revealed that Pentagon scientists working in a secretive united created a microchip to be inserted underneath the skin, that can detect Covid-19 before the body exhibits symptoms.

60 Minutes interviewed retired Colonel Matt Hepburn, an army infectious disease physician, who spent years with the secretive defense advanced research projects agency or DARPA, working on technology he hopes will ensure COVID-19 is the last pandemic.

“Dr. Hepburn showed us a few current projects, some sound like they’re from an episode of “Star Trek.” Consider a ship like the USS Theodore Roosevelt — hobbled last year when 1,271 crew members tested positive for the coronavirus. What if everyone on board had their health monitored with this subdermal implant, now in late-stage testing. It’s not some dreaded government microchip to track your every move, but a tissue-like gel engineered to continuously test your blood,” 60 Minutes host Bill Whitaker said.

Dr. Hepburn told 60 Minutes that the microchip is like a “check engine light.”

The segment aired on “60 Minutes.”

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Postal Inspectors Have Used iPhone Hacking Tools Hundreds of Times

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) owns sophisticated hacking tools that can breach iPhones, and has used them hundreds of times over the last several years, according to USPIS records.

Law enforcement’s use of hacking tools such as Cellebrite and GrayKey has attracted considerable attention in recent years, particularly following reports that the FBI used the Israeli-based Cellebrite to help access the iPhone belonging to San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook—though there has since been reporting to the contrary. More recently, records obtained by Vice Motherboard last year revealed how police departments use GrayKey.

The use of such tools by the USPIS, the law enforcement arm of the Postal Service, is disclosed in its 2019 and 2020 annual reports, but has gone largely unpublicized until now. The Epoch Times has also reviewed an internal Postal Service letter, which shows that one technician in the USPIS digital evidence unit used GrayKey to crack more than 150 iOS devices—iOS being the mobile operating system for the iPhone.

Altogether, the records suggest that the USPIS has cracked hundreds of iPhones—generally thought to be one of the most secure commercial phones on the market—as well as other devices.

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Police Caught Stealing Money from Innocent People To Secretly Buy Tech to Spy on Citizens’ Cellphones

The Boston Police department has been robbing citizens of their cash — many of whom were never accused of a crime — to buy surveillance technology off the books, to spy on citizens.

As their report points out, an August investigation by WBUR and ProPublica found that even if no criminal charges are brought, law enforcement almost always keeps the money and has few limitations on how it’s spent. Some departments benefit from both state and federal civil asset forfeiture. The police chiefs in Massachusetts have discretion over the money, and the public has virtually no way of knowing how the funds are used.

Boston cops have stolen so much money that they are secretly buying more expensive gear to seemingly get better at stealing money. According to the report:

[I]n 2019 the Boston Police Department bought the device known as a cell site simulator — and tapped a hidden pot of money that kept the purchase out of the public eye.

A WBUR investigation with ProPublica found elected officials and the public were largely kept in the dark when Boston police spent $627,000 on this equipment by dipping into money seized in connection with alleged crimes.

Because this spy equipment was bought with funds stolen from citizens, not even the Boston city council knew police had it.

Boston city councilors interviewed by WBUR said they weren’t aware that the police had bought a cell site simulator. Councilor Ricardo Arroyo, who represents Mattapan, Hyde Park and Roslindale, said, “I couldn’t even tell you, and I don’t think anybody on the council can necessarily tell you … how these individual purchases are made.”

Only because ProPublica obtained the documents, does anyone know the department is using stingray devices to spy on citizens. So much for transparency.

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