Tag: surveillance

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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Mystery Shrouds Destruction Of US Spy Satellite

A mysterious breakup of a decades-old American spy satellite has sent debris hurtling through low-Earth orbit, with the U.S. Space Force now tracking the fragments for potential threats to other spacecraft, according to Space-Track.

The satellite, known as USA 32, came apart on September 13 at approximately 5:13 p.m. ET, according to U.S. Space Forces-Space. Officials have not publicly determined what caused the nearly 40-year-old spacecraft to suddenly fragment.

“All tracked debris are being incorporated into routine conjunction assessment screenings to support spaceflight safety,” U.S. Space Forces-Space said in a notice. “No immediate threats have been identified; further analysis is ongoing.”

USA 32 had been circling Earth since the final years of the Cold War.

The National Reconnaissance Office satellite blasted into space aboard a Titan II rocket on September 5, 1988. Public records identify the spacecraft as an electronic and signals intelligence satellite designed to collect information from orbit.

USA 32 has also been identified as FARRAH III, part of a secretive family of American intelligence satellites whose name was inspired by actress Farrah Fawcett.

The satellite was traveling in an orbit roughly 480 miles above Earth when it broke apart. Officials have yet to disclose how many fragments were produced.

That uncertainty matters because debris traveling at orbital speeds can pose a hazard to functioning satellites even when the individual pieces are relatively small. Space Force tracking systems routinely monitor objects around Earth and screen their trajectories for possible collisions.

Exactly what happened to USA 32 remains a mystery.

A collision with an untracked object is one possible explanation for an unexpected satellite breakup. Aging spacecraft can also fragment because of failures involving batteries, pressurized tanks or other components. There is currently no public evidence establishing any of those scenarios as the cause of USA 32’s demise.

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Border Agents Are Randomly Seizing Phones of US Citizens Who Support Palestine

Florida lawyer Jalal Shehadeh is convinced that the warrantless seizure of his cell phone by federal agents at the Newark International Airport after he returned from Palestine this September was not random.

Shehadeh, a Miami-based attorney and Palestinian rights advocate, was held for several hours for a secondary inspection and had his phone seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) after he refused to allow federal agents to search it.

“It’s just a wildly invasive thing to do to somebody with no individualized justifiable basis to do it,” Shehadeh told Truthout.

He suspects federal authorities targeted him for his activism. The lawyer is involved in a legal complaint against a federal judge in Florida over the judge’s anti-Palestinian statements.

Shehadeh is one of several Palestinian rights advocates who have been detained and had their personal devices searched by CBP while returning to the U.S. from international travel since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023.

Other similar cases include Amir Makled, a lawyer from the Detroit area who was representing University of Michigan students involved in pro-Palestine activism, journalist Max Blumenthal, and Osama Abu Irshaid, the executive director of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).

Jenin Younes, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which filed a legal motion earlier this week demanding the return of Shehadeh’s phone, said CBP appears to be escalating phone searches against opponents of President Donald Trump’s agenda.

“Common sense tells us that they are targeting people who have pro-Palestine views,” Younes told Truthout.

She stressed that the searches are illegal. The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects “persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Younes said the “border exception” that allows searches to ensure that no illegal items are brought into the country should not apply to phones.

Younes, a civil liberties attorney, said the authors of the Constitution would have certainly opposed giving the government blanket authority to search people’s phones without cause.

“Law enforcement can search shipping vessels coming into the Boston harbor to make sure that they don’t have contraband. That’s a totally different thing from searching the contents of people’s smartphones,” she said. “I don’t think the framers would have thought that you could read the papers of somebody coming into the country in their suitcase, and likewise, a smartphone, which has so much more personal information.”

The case of Shehadeh and other Palestinian rights supporters targeted for searches at the border has reignited the debate over the application of constitutional protections at ports of entry.

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Florida Deputy Charged After Using Flock License Plate Reader System to Search Woman 300 Times, Another Deputy Arrested After Looking Up 17-Year-Old Girl in Police Database

The misuse of Flock Safety camera systems continues to grow.

On Wednesday, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri announced the arrests of two deputies accused of improperly accessing law enforcement databases, including an automated license plate reader system that uses Flock cameras.

According to Gualtieri, Deputy Karl Gwynn, 57, ran 381 searches on a 35-year-old woman he had arrested years earlier because he reportedly wanted a relationship with her.

Of the 381 searches, 300 queries were made through the Flock ALPR system.

The second deputy arrested was 33-year-old Travis Stanton who allegedly used the police databases to gather information on a 17-year-old girl he was reportedly “romantically interested in.”

Per WTSP:

Two Pinellas County sheriff’s deputies have resigned and face criminal charges after investigators said they improperly accessed sensitive law enforcement databases, including the Flock camera system.

Sheriff Bob Gualtieri announced the arrests Wednesday, describing two unrelated cases involving a former deputy’s interest in a 17-year-old girl and another deputy’s repeated searches of a woman’s information across multiple databases.

The first case involves former Deputy Travis Stanton, 33, who resigned on Sept. 25 after the sheriff’s office began investigating his conduct involving a 17-year-old girl who had filed a complaint with the agency. Gualtieri said Stanton used several databases to gather information about the girl and her vehicle, including running her license plate through Florida’s vehicle registration system using a computer in his patrol car.

In an unrelated case, Deputy Carl Gwynn, 57, allegedly queried a 35-year-old woman’s information 381 times.

Sheriff Gualtieri said Gwynn had arrested the woman years earlier and wanted a relationship with her. Unlike the Stanton case, Gwynn’s alleged misconduct directly involved the sheriff’s office automated license plate reader system (ALPR), commonly associated with Flock Safety cameras.

Gwynn has since resigned and was arrested on four counts of unlawfully accessing secure systems with his bond being set at $25,000.

Stanton was charged with unlawfully accessing secure systems and his bond was set at $10,000.

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