Tag: surveillance

How new social media checks would change travel to US

The US is seeking to significantly expand its 

vetting of social media accounts for people who want to enter the country.

In 2019, during President Donald Trump’s first term, the US imposed a requirement that visa applicants disclose their social media accounts. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) now aims to apply a similar requirement to another group: travellers from countries such as the UK, Japan and Australia whose citizens can enter the US without a visa.

The Trump administration argues that the rule change is necessary to ensure travellers entering the country “do not bear hostile attitudes” to the US and its citizens. Civil-liberties groups warn that the approach marks a sweeping expansion of federal surveillance over routine travel. Here’s what to know.

What exactly is the US proposing?

The US is proposing that foreign visitors from countries whose citizens can travel to the US without a visa, but must still apply online for advance authorisation, provide their social media history from the last five years. 

DHS did not respond to a query about what information applicants from visa-waiver countries would need to supply for the social media screening. (Visa applicants are required to list all social media identifiers they have used in the past five years.)

Applicants would also be required to supply, when “feasible,” a broad set of additional personal information: telephone numbers used in the last five years; e-mail addresses used in the last ten years; IP addresses and metadata from electronically submitted photos; family members’ names, residences, places and dates of birth, and phone numbers used in the last five years; and personal biometrics – fingerprints, DNA samples, iris scans, and facial images. The proposal does not clarify how biometric information would be collected. 

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Texas AG sues five major TV companies for allegedly spying on state residents

exas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton filed lawsuits Monday against five major television companies for allegedly spying on state residents by secretly recording what they watch in their own homes.

The lawsuits include two China-based television companies, Hisense and TCL Technology Group Corporation, which Paxton claimed pose serious concerns about consumer data harvesting. 

The three American companies are Sony, Samsung and LG. 

“Companies, especially those connected to the Chinese Communist Party, have no business illegally recording Americans’ devices inside their own homes,” Paxton said. “This conduct is invasive, deceptive, and unlawful. The fundamental right to privacy will be protected in Texas because owning a television does not mean surrendering your personal information to Big Tech or foreign adversaries.”

Paxton’s office said the companies have been illegally collecting personal information from users through Automated Content Recognition technology, which captures “screenshots of a user’s television display every 500 milliseconds, monitor viewing activity in real time, and transmit that information back to the company without the user’s knowledge or consent.”

The companies then sell the information to ad agencies so targeted advertisements can be shared on different platforms.

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Palantir Quietly Lands In Education Department Through Foreign Funding Portal

Palantir is expanding its reach into the Education Department, where the data analytics and software giant is helping develop the agency’s new portal for universities across the country to report foreign donations.

The quiet move marks the technology company’s latest expansion into federal government work, particularly in data management services.

An Education Department spokesperson confirmed Palantir was involved as a subcontractor for its revamped foreign funding portal, which is set to be rolled out early next month.

The agency announced the portal project this week, but did not name the vendors behind it. The portal will serve as a central place for schools to disclose to the department any foreign-source gifts and contracts worth $250,000 or more, the agency said.

Palantir is a subcontractor to Monkton, a northern Virginia-based computer and network security company, the spokesperson told FedScoop. According to federal spending records, the Education Department awarded a contract to Monkton in September that obligated $9.8 million for the design, development, and deployment of a “Section 117 Information Sharing Environment Capable of Providing Greater Transparency.” Palantir, however, is not publicly listed as a subcontractor on the project.

Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires schools to disclose foreign gifts and contracts over $250,000.

The contract with Monkton could cost the agency up to $61.8 million, more than six times the cost of the modernization project for the ed.gov website, which was allocated $10 million in 2022.

Speculation over the portal began after the agency’s Office of the Chief Information Officer registered a new federal domain, foreignfundinghighered.gov, which was discovered by a bot tracking new government domains.

When FedScoop visited the link shortly before 10:30 a.m. ET on Thursday, the website showed a blocked network alert, which read, “The network connection you are using is not in your enrollment’s ingress allowlist. Please contact your enrollment administrator or Palantir representative.”

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Smith Prosecutors Admitted They Risked Lawsuits To Illegally Grab Senators’ Private Records

In a move that has raised eyebrows among conservatives, special counsel Jack Smith and his team have been revealed to have pursued the phone records of Republican congress members, despite being cautioned about the potential for “litigation risk,” according to internal emails.

As reported by Western Journal, the emails, which were made public on Tuesday by Senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, expose the deliberations of prosecutors as they decided which congress members to target with subpoenas. These actions were part of the “Arctic Frost” investigation, which later evolved into Smith’s 2020 election case against then-President Donald Trump.

John Keller, the former head of the Justice Department Public Integrity Section, had warned the prosecutors in a May 2023 email, stating, “As you are aware, there is some litigation risk regarding whether compelled disclosure of toll records of a Member’s legislative calls violates the Speech or Debate Clause in the D.C. Circuit.” Despite this caution, Keller gave the green light for the subpoenas.

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Lindsey Graham Falls Prey to the Surveillance Monster He Championed

Some people find religion after a brush with mortality. Lindsey Graham found the Fourth Amendment after a brush with Jack Smith.

The senator from South Carolina has spent the past two decades helping build the modern surveillance state, and now he’s furious that it turned its cold electronic eye on him.

Federal prosecutors secretly subpoenaed his phone records without his knowledge as part of Special Counsel Smith’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s alleged role in the events of January 6.

Graham says it’s an outrage, a scandal. He’s demanding the impeachment of the federal judge who approved it and threatening to sue someone, though he hasn’t worked out who, for “tens of millions of dollars.”

It’s the kind of melodrama that comes easily to a man who’s never been shy about using the power of the state when it suits him.

This story started last month when FBI Director Kash Patel revealed that phone records of eight Republican senators, including Graham’s, were pulled as part of Smith’s “Arctic Frost” probe.

The data covered January 4 to 7, 2021, and came with gag orders preventing telecom companies from telling the targets they were under the microscope.

“They spied on my phone records as a senator and a private citizen,” Graham complained on Fox News. “I’m sick of it.”

He’s not wrong to be angry. But there’s something deeply comic about Graham discovering his inner civil libertarian only after the dragnet landed on his number.

Graham has been one of the most reliable defenders of the surveillance architecture that is now bothering him.

In 2001, as a House member, he voted for the Patriot Act, the law that kicked open the door for mass data collection. When Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was collecting Americans’ phone records by the millions, Graham didn’t seem alarmed.

“I’m a Verizon customer. It doesn’t bother me one bit for the NSA to have my phone number,” he famously said. “I’m glad the NSA is trying to find out what the terrorists are up to overseas and in our country.”

He later voted to codify those surveillance powers into Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008 and backed every major reauthorization since.

For most of his career, Graham treated Section 702 like a sacred text.

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Pennsylvania School District Using AI-Enabled Wi-Fi To Search Students For Firearms

A Pennsylvania school district is using artificial intelligence to keep guns off its campuses. But civil liberties advocates have warned that the technology could lead to mass surveillance and violation of constitutional rights.

The Chartiers Valley School District in Allegheny County has implemented AI that harnesses the district’s Wi-Fi signals to determine whether people are carrying weapons as they enter the schools.

The technology, called Wi-AI, was developed by CurvePoint of Pittsburgh. CurvePoint grew out of AI research at Carnegie Mellon University.

According to the company, Wi-AI uses “spatial intelligence” to find weapons such as guns before they enter a school.

The AI system analyzes a space and detects where potential weapons are located by interpreting “how Wi-Fi signals reflect off people and objects.”

Once a possible weapon is found, security personnel, school administrators, or others can go to the location to determine whether there is actually a threat.

It is now in use at Chartiers Valley School District high school, middle school, and primary school campuses. CurvePoint CEO Skip Smith said that in a recent test, the system found a pistol hidden in a backpack. He said the technology has a 95 percent success rate, failing only 4 percent of its searches.

Smith said the Wi-AI does not carry the same privacy concerns of other security systems because it does not rely on facial recognition or biometric data.

“We don’t know it’s you,“ Smith told The Epoch Times. ”We have no biometric information about you. Our system just sees a big bag of salt water.”

Darren Mariano, president of the Chartiers Valley Board of School Directors, said the district is excited to be the first in the country to adopt the technology.

“The safety of our students and staff is always our top priority,” he said in a statement. “We’re thrilled to be the first district in the nation to implement this groundbreaking technology.”

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Google Sued For Allegedly Using Gemini AI Tool To Track Users’ Private Communications

Google LLC is accused in a civil lawsuit of using its artificial intelligence program Gemini to collect data on users’ private communications in Gmail as well as Google’s instant messaging and video conference programs.

Until around Oct. 10, the Gemini AI assistant required the user to deliberately opt into its feature. After that date, the feature was allegedly “secretly” turned on by Google for all its users’ Gmail, Chat, and Meet accounts by default, enabling AI to track its users’ private data in those platforms “without the users’ knowledge or consent,” according to the complaint filed Nov. 11 in federal court in San Jose.

The class action lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that Google is violating the California Invasion of Privacy Act, a 1967 law that prohibits surreptitious wiretapping and recording of confidential communications without the consent of all parties involved.

Although Google provides a way for users to turn off the feature, it requires users to look for it in the privacy settings to deactivate it, despite never having agreed to it in the first place, the complaint said.

The AI feature is categorized in “Google Workspace smart features” in Google settings. Once turned on, it means the user consents to the program using “Workspace content and activity” across Workspace or in other Google products.

When the feature is turned on, Gemini can “scan, read, and analyze every email (and email attachment), message, and conversation on those services,” according to the complaint.

Technology writer Ruben Circelli wrote in a PCMag article that Gemini is “downright creepy” in diving deep into his personal history, analyzing 16 years’ worth of emails after he signed up for a more advanced pro feature.

In a series of tests by Circelli, Gemini told him one of his character flaws and even knew who his first crush was in elementary school.

“This invasion of privacy wasn’t just disconcerting, though; it was unexpected,” Circelli wrote.

“Google didn’t explain what this integration would do before I signed up for its AI Pro plan, nor did it give me a way to opt out at the start.”

The Epoch Times reached out to Google for comment, but did not receive an immediate response.

“We do not use your Workspace data to train or improve the underlying generative AI and large language models that power Gemini, Search, and other systems outside of Workspace without permission,” the company has stated.

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House Will Vote on Repealing Funding Provision Allowing Senators to Sue Over Phone Searches

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced on Nov. 12 that the House will soon vote on legislation to repeal a provision of a deal to end the shutdown that allows senators to sue if the government illegally obtains their electronic records.

The provision in question creates a civil right of action to sue the U.S. government if a senator’s digital data, generated in the course of their official duties, is illegally accessed by the Executive Branch. Senators could recover a minimum of $500,000 per violation.

Congress passed the measure on Wednesday as part of a legislative package to reopen the government.

“House Republicans are introducing standalone legislation to repeal this provision that was included by the Senate in the government funding bill. We are putting this legislation on the fast track suspension calendar in the House for next week,” Johnson wrote on social media.

The provision was inserted into the government funding bill at the behest of several Republican senators whose phone data was accessed by the Department of Justice under the Biden administration during Special Counsel Jack Smith’s “Arctic Frost” probe and criminal investigation of President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The senators whose data was accessed include Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.).

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Open Table is spying on you — and ratting out your bad habits like being late, canceling to restaurants

What happens at the dining table no longer stays at the dining table.

If the city’s servers suddenly always seem to know your go-to drink order, or how you always order extra croutons on your salad – you’re not going crazy.

Reservation platform OpenTable is spying on its users and compiling personal information on guests to share with restaurants, both good and bad, from wine preferences to whether they cancel a same-day reservation.

This allows eateries to highlight things to your preference, save preferred seating or — if your AI notes reveal poor etiquette — cancel your reservation altogether, sources tell The Post. 

“It’s not just spending habits or if they like Coca-Cola or bottled water. Now, we’re getting a taste of what a diner’s behavior at a restaurant is like: If they’re a late canceler, if they leave reviews a lot,” Shawn Hunter, a general manager for Sojourn Social on the Upper East Side told The Post of the feature he first noticed two weeks ago.

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Dem-run city hires inspectors to snoop in residents’ garbage cans to make sure they’re recycling properly

Residents in a California city can expect to see trash inspectors lifting their garbage cans in the early morning hours as the city continues to crack down on recycling. 

Officials are sending teams of Compliance Officers or ‘lid lifters’ to walk through neighborhoods before trash collection and monitor whether residents are properly sorting their trash and recycling. 

The initiative in San Diego was launched following the passage of a law in the California State Senate (SB 1383), which established a new organic waste recycling program. 

The city will not issue citations to those who violate the recycling rules, but instead will place an ‘oops’ tag on the bin, notifying the owner that they made a mistake. 

Some bins may have a ‘do not collect’ sticker on them, which requires homeowners to sift through their trash and call the city for a new pickup.  

The lid lifters won’t be sifting through garbage cans and are only tasked with inspecting what they can see after looking inside the bins. 

City Waste Reduction Program Manager Alexander Galasso told local ABC affiliate, KGTV: ‘Waste doesn’t end when you come to the trash can.’

‘There is a life after waste and we want to make sure that these are sorted correctly, because not only does it impact our staff and trucks, but it impacts what goes into our landfill.’

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