Tag: surveillance

Hamilton resident wins legal battle with city over security cameras

For the past two years, Rebel News has chronicled the plight of Dan Myles. The Hamilton resident’s house has no fewer than 10 video cameras recording the comings and goings of people in the neighbourhood. Alas, some of those people are nefarious characters indeed.

Of note, the Hamilton Police Service has no problem with Dan’s videography. In fact, the cops are thankful. The police have solved crimes over the years thanks to Dan’s video evidence – including homicide cases.

But for some reason, the City of Hamilton doesn’t like those cameras. Which is bizarre, because should you choose to visit Hamilton City Hall, several industrial-grade 360-degree surveillance cameras abound. But never mind…

And so it was that some two years ago Hamilton Bylaw ordered Dan to take down his cameras. Dan refused.

Yet, why is the city so concerned, especially when it is enduring its worst crime wave in history?

Apparently, it’s all about “privacy.” The cameras record the sidewalks and the streets as well as the front yardage of some properties. But with the exception of one neighbour (the person who complained to bylaw), homeowners in the neighbourhood have no problem with the video surveillance.

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Georgia Mayor Secretly Puts GPS Tracker on Police Chief’s Truck, ENTIRE Police Force Quits in Response

The mayor of the small town of Milner, Georgia, Craig Timmons, has admitted he secretly placed a GPS tracker on Police Chief Lamar Bunn’s city vehicle and set up a camera on private property aimed at City Hall after becoming concerned about work hours and timesheets.

The disclosure outraged the department, prompting Bunn and all five full-time officers to quit, with most of the reserve officers following, and City Manager Tausha Grose also stepping down.

Their resignations took effect on Wednesday, leaving the Lamar County Sheriff’s Office to cover law enforcement for the small town.

The city council later censured the mayor for not using proper channels and methods for his concerns. Members said Timmons should have first brought the issues to them as required by the city charter.

Timmons confirmed his actions to WSB-TV reporter Mark Winne, saying he bought the tracker with his own money and installed a camera at a car wash pointed at City Hall with the property owner’s approval.

Investigative reporter Mark Winne asked the mayor outright, “Did you place a tracking device on the police vehicle driven by the Milner police chief?”

“Yes sir, I did,” Timmons said.

Winne followed up, “Did you put a video camera out back of car wash pointed at the building where his office was?”

“Yes, City Hall, yes sir, and with approval from the property owner,” Timmons said.

The mayor said that his signature appears on the chief’s timesheets and that he believed there were problems with hours, stating, “The mayor’s position is not just shaking hands and kissing babies.”

Bunn told the council the tracker was placed without his knowledge or that of the council or city administrator and called it a violation of his rights.

Officers’ resignation letters cited a lack of trust, concerns about the mayor’s judgment and decision-making, and ethical issues.

Captain Craig Walton specifically called for an independent investigation into the mayor’s conduct.

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Hackers Dump Records on Over 41,000 DHS Employees, Including Undercover ICE Agents

A group calling itself the “Department of Peace” has released a massive trove of records on more than 41,000 Department of Homeland Security employees and contractors, including names, cellphone numbers, email addresses, office locations, membership in internal groups tied to undercover operations, wiretap programs, and surveillance tools.

The transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets published the archive under the name “Icepick” on Wednesday after receiving the material from the “Department of Peace,” which claims it obtained the data from DHS’s Okta single sign-on login system.

The records were last updated on August 19, 2026, and cover DHS headquarters along with agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

WIRED, which reviewed the data dump, reported that the leak maps out organizational structure, reporting lines, facility locations, and permission groups for sensitive programs.

The report noted, “The Trump administration has prosecuted protesters for posting information about individual ICE officers and warned others for doing so. In June, 15 Minnesota residents were charged under laws related to stalking and threats of violence, which prosecutors linked to their participation in ICE-opposition activities. More than 100 HSI agents, including undercover operatives, took part in an operation that included widespread surveillance and infiltration of group chats.”

The BBC reports:

Most of the agents included, more than 21,000 of them, work for CBP, according to the data. Nearly 6,600 work for ICE.

Other records show agents with Homeland Security Investigations, the Federal Protective Service and even people working for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The leaked information also included dozens of previously unknown operation names, the agents that led and worked on those operations, and some of the technology they used in their work, including tech provided by Cellbrite and Palantir.

The hackers left a note with the files stating, “They have our information, so it’s only fair that we have theirs.”

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Citizen Lab Exposes Israeli Spyware Infecting Phones Through Ordinary Ads

Israeli mercenary spyware reached potentially hundreds of millions of devices worldwide through ordinary online advertisements that required no user interaction to deliver their payload, according to research by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. [1]

The findings published Thursday, Oct. 15, said the incident is likely to be the first confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered through targeted ads [2]. The ads, loaded with the Candiru spyware, were placed by Israeli firm Discover-Tech.

What The Citizen Lab Investigation Found

During a four-month period examined by researchers, Discover-Tech ads appeared on almost 200,000 unique websites and Android and iOS applications across dozens of countries. [1] The Citizen Lab said the advertising supply chain effectively functions as a mass-profiling and infection system capable of reaching enormous populations with no user action whatsoever.

Scope Extended to Sensitive Networks, Researchers Say

According to The Citizen Lab, Discover-Tech ad impressions were also found in North Atlantic Treaty Organization and United Nations networks, the European Parliament, the European Commission and more than a dozen national governments. Ads also appeared within media organizations in eight countries, including Australia, Mexico and across Europe. The pattern suggests that the advertising infrastructure used in the campaign reached deeply into government, military and journalistic environments where surveillance would be most valuable.

Platform Access and Prior Blacklisting

Candiru’s rebrand to Integrity Labs followed a 2025 acquisition by the U.S. private equity firm Integrity Partners, which is not subject to U.S. sanctions. This corporate restructuring allowed the spyware operation to continue under a new identity while its prior entity remained on the blacklist.

Following the findings by the two research groups, Google, IAB Europe, Beeswax and other platforms disconnected Discover-Tech’s access to the digital advertising market. In November 2021, Candiru was also used to target Middle East Eye and other websites, according to the security firm ESET, in an attack that targeted links to the Middle East with a strong focus on Yemen and the surrounding conflict.

Researcher Comments and Context

“The way online advertising works today is a systemic security threat,” Wolfie Cristl, a senior researcher at The Citizen Lab, told Reuters. The reports describe an advertising model in which commercial ad platforms can be repurposed for tracking, reconnaissance and the automated delivery of malicious exploits without any interaction from the user.

The findings add to a growing pattern of documented abuses of commercial spyware. In September 2026, suspected spyware attacks targeted the phones of at least three Turkish ministers, with Apple sending notifications warning that the devices may have been compromised [3].

In December 2025, a joint investigation by media outlets in Greece, Israel and Switzerland revealed that Predator spyware from the Intellexa Consortium, led by a former senior Israeli intelligence official, continued to be used against targets in multiple countries despite U.S. sanctions [4]. These cases point to a broader ecosystem in which commercial spyware vendors operate across borders, adapt to sanctions and find new delivery channels.

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Dirty Jack Smith Had a Spreadsheet on Americans and Their Address Who Bought a Trump Hat Between 2021-2025

On Wednesday we learned that former Special Counsel Jack Smith collected information on 639,000 Republican voters and donors during his sprawling Arctic Frost investigation, according to documents released by Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley.

The information collected included the donors’ physical home addresses, credit card information, occupations and donation amount.

Later today we learned Jack Smith’s illegal spying investigation included Trump supporters who bought MAGA hats!

If you bought a red MAGA hat you likely ended up on Jack Smith’s spreadsheet along with your address.

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FBI Arrests OpenAI Engineer Over a Hidden Listening Device

OpenAI builds technology that answers complicated questions. Yet federal investigators say one of its engineers tried to get answers by secretly listening to executives. The alleged equipment was a recording device plugged into a television inside a restricted conference room in San Francisco.

For a company developing some of America’s most valuable technology, that’s a chilling failure.

From the DOJ:

“According to the complaint unsealed today, Abdulrahman Alfozan allegedly concealed a covert recording device inside his employer’s executive conference room to secretly capture sensitive communications about the company’s super intelligence technology,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “Protecting American SI innovation is essential to safeguarding our nation’s economic strength and national security, and the FBI views that mission as one of our highest counterintelligence priorities. Thank you to Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and our law enforcement partners for their support — and we will continue working closely with our partners across the U.S. government and private sector to keep American businesses and citizens safe and to ensure our country maintains its competitive edge.”

The FBI arrested Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national, on October 9. Prosecutors unsealed a criminal complaint Tuesday charging him with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. He had worked at OpenAI since July 2025. The company has since fired him, and federal investigators are examining his alleged activities.

OpenAI personnel discovered the device on September 30, connected to a USB port behind a television. Someone had concealed it in toilet paper, and its stored contents were encrypted. Investigators believe someone installed it around September 28. The room regularly hosted discussions of proprietary research, future products, business arrangements, government contacts, and technical progress OpenAI hadn’t disclosed publicly.

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Canadian YouTuber builds ‘Flock-like’ camera to exclusively track police vehicles, gets a visit from police — officers visit his home to express privacy concerns

A YouTuber has received an unexpected visit from the police over an automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) camera he built to specifically track police cars, using the same technology law enforcement has infamously used to track ordinary citizens. In a video posted to his channel on October 7, Anthony Sistilli says two police officers showed up at his doorstep on September 20th to ask questions about the device, asking what his intentions were with the project.

Sistilli, a Canadian software engineer and YouTuber, pointed out the irony of the officers’ concerns, explaining that they mirror the privacy concerns of ordinary citizens who are growing increasingly weary of the recent spike in blanket surveillance brought about by a mass installation of ALPR cameras. Flock Safety, a U.S. public safety technology company, recently scaled its centralized national surveillance network to over 120,000 cameras operating across 49 states, according to the company, capturing billions of vehicle scans every month.

The development sparked widespread public backlash, with critics arguing that Flock has quietly built a massive government surveillance dragnet without a public vote or federal oversight, since any police department on the network can search across state lines. Security researchers later discovered the network included 335,701 Flock cameras and created a “Flock Surveillance Map,” exposing their locations.

Similar ALPR camera surveillance networks exist in Canada, where Sistilli resides, prompting him to build his own device, but this time, encoded to exclusively track police cars. He detailed the build in several TikTok videos, describing it as “a personal Flock surveillance camera to Flock the Flockers.” He then posted a video of himself using the device in real life. The video brought Peel Regional Police, the local law enforcement serving Sistilli’s city, Brampton, Ontario, to his doorstep two weeks later.

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Researchers Develop AI ‘Mind-Reading’ Tool That Reconstructs What Your Eyes See

A cutting-edge new artificial intelligence (AI) tool can reconstruct images from a person’s vision simply by analyzing brain scans.

The technology recreates a person’s visual field with startling accuracy and can also predict brain activity by analyzing what a person is looking at in real time.

Professor Michal Irani of the Weizmann Institute of Science developed the “mind-reading” AI model Brain-IT, which interprets functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of participants’ brain activity as they view a series of images.

Irani and her team – which includes Roman Beliy, Amit Zalcher, Jonathan Kogman, and Navve Wasserman from Weizmann’s Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department – released their research on Sept. 14.

While the current study used fixed images, Irani’s lab plans to test these so-called mind-reading methods on participants’ hearing and, eventually, on video.

“What remains especially challenging is decoding video – for example, during dreaming,” Irani said in a statement.

“Dozens of images change every second, while an fMRI scan takes about two seconds. If we overcome all these obstacles, it’s possible that in the future we may even be able to read dreams.”

The study reviewed fMRI scans of eight participants who had viewed thousands of images across 30 to 40 scanning sessions. Participants viewed around 40 images over roughly 10-minute sessions as researchers scanned their brains six times. This created roughly 73,000 image-fMRI pairs for the AI model to analyze.

Irani said other models can translate brain activity into images with “impressive reconstructions,” but that they often make basic composition and color errors.

“The new model we developed outperforms them in reconstructing both the content of the image and its details,” she said.

“What’s more, while every other model requires dozens of hours of brain scans to learn to ‘read’ a new person, our model needs only one hour,” she said.

Scientists have been working on similar technology for years. A paper published in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences in 2017 discussed the possibility of reaching “brain-based mind reading” with neuroimaging techniques.

The paper described how these techniques could be used for lie detection to assess defendants, prisoners, and prospective jurors in court cases to improve the legal system. However, it also notes that brain-based mind reading could have potentially unethical coercive uses.

Improvements in the signal data produced by fMRI machines and in how humans analyze that data in recent years have made this technology possible, according to Kenneth Norman, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Princeton University.

In a discussion with the American Psychological Association in 2022, Norman said the technology could help people with depression or anxiety.

Therapists could use neurofeedback to make participants aware that their thinking has drifted toward negative thought loops and then give them direction to try to control those mental patterns, he said.

Some neuroscientists have heralded the capabilities of Brain-IT’s AI model, highlighting how it could therapeutically help people suffering from neurological conditions. But others have raised concerns about how the technology could be abused to coercively extract information from a person’s mind.

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Newly-Released Documents Reveal Biden’s FBI Tracked Melania and Barron Trump’s Travel

Newly-released documents revealed Biden’s FBI tracked Melania Trump and Barron Trump’s travel.

The probe, dubbed “Plasmic Echo,” was later led by disgraced Special Counsel Jack Smith during the classified documents investigation.

Fox News reported:

The Biden-era FBI tracked First Lady Melania Trump and Barron Trump’s travel, while surveilling President Trump’s future Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ phone, as officials worked the classified documents investigation reaching deep into Trump’s inner circle, newly declassified records show.

Documents released Monday by the White House detail “Plasmic Echo,” the probe later led by special counsel Jack Smith into whether Trump improperly retained classified documents after leaving office.

The declassified documents show agents tracked the First Lady and First Son’s travel while planning the Mar-a-Lago search, then monitored Susie Wiles’ calls involving defense lawyers, campaign advisers and journalists.

The surveillance collected call details rather than conversation contents, according to the documents.

“Jack Smith’s surveillance operation was a disgraceful abuse of government power. Spying on political opponents is weaponization of law enforcement, plain and simple,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis told Fox News Digital. “Those responsible must be held accountable.”

Earlier Monday it was reported that Jack Smith’s team secretly monitored the phone activity of Susie Wiles while she was running President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign,

The investigation swept up Susie Wiles’ contacts with at least 21 Trump-affiliated defense lawyers, campaign staff, political advisers, and at least five journalists. Most names are redacted. Two are not: current FBI Director Kash Patel, and Just the News founder John Solomon.

Earlier this year, The Gateway Pundit reported that Biden’s FBI secretly obtained the phone records of Kash Patel and Susie Wiles in 2022 and 2023, while both were private citizens, and buried the files in “prohibited” case folders designed to hide them from ordinary searches. Patel called it “outrageous and deeply alarming.”

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Sen. Bill Hagerty Asks Tennessee to DISBAR Jack Smith Over Secret Subpoena for Republican Senators’ Phone Records

Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) has asked the Tennessee bar to strip former Special Counsel Jack Smith of his law license, accusing the Biden-era prosecutor of hiding critical facts from a federal judge so he could secretly seize the call logs of sitting U.S. senators, including Hagerty’s own.

On September 30, 2026, one day after Smith testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Hagerty sent a four-page formal complaint to R. Culver Schmid, chairman of the Board of Professional Responsibility of the Supreme Court of Tennessee.

Smith’s Tennessee bar number is 034063. Hagerty is demanding the harshest penalty on the books: disbarment.

“I filed a bar complaint against Jack Smith this morning,” Hagerty wrote on X. “He’s a blatantly partisan actor and his prosecutorial misconduct damaged our constitutional order. He should never be able to practice law again.” He closed with a warning: “Next up, @Verizon.”

According to the complaint, Smith, while serving as special counsel in the Biden Justice Department, sent a grand jury subpoena to Verizon for non-content telephone records of sitting senators. Those logs show who called whom, the date, and how long the call lasted. They do not include the words spoken. The records, Hagerty says, “pertained to our duties as legislators.”

Attached to that subpoena was a secret nondisclosure order signed by D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg. The order barred Verizon from telling anyone, senators included, that the government had come for the data.

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