Tag: surveillance

The FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Program Has a New Target: Animal Rights Activists

On a chilly, early morning in January 2019, a group of animal rights activists descended upon a poultry farm in central Texas. Donning plastic gloves, medical masks, hazmat suits, and T-shirts emblazoned with “Meat the Victims,” they slipped through the unlocked door of a massive, windowless barn. 

Inside, they found 27,000 chicks densely packed across the floor, like “just a sea of yellow,” recalled Sarah Weldon, one of the activists. “There were a lot of chicks that were already deceased, in various stages of decomposition,” she said. “Some were so deformed you couldn’t even tell they used to be baby chicks, just fluffs of feathers.”

Activists with Meat the Victims, a decentralized, global movement to abolish animal exploitation, later uploaded gruesome photos of injured and dead chicks to social media platforms. This is how, Weldon suspects, the police identified her and issued a warrant for her arrest, along with 14 other activists. She was charged with criminal trespassing, a Class B misdemeanor, and quickly turned herself into jail.

The local police weren’t the only ones paying attention. An FBI agent in Texas had been secretly monitoring the demonstration. His focus? Weapons of mass destruction. 

The FBI has been collaborating with the meat industry to gather information on animal rights activism, including Meat the Victims, under its directive to counter weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, according to agency records recently obtained by the nonprofit Animal Partisan through Freedom of Information Act litigation. The records also show that the bureau has explored charging activists who break into factory farms under federal criminal statutes that carry a possible sentence of up to life in prison — including for the “attempted use” of WMD — while urging meat producers to report encounters with activists to its WMD program.

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Pokémon Go Player Data Being Used to Train AI & Construct ‘Large Geospatial Model’

Millions of users’ location and imaging data is being compiled to construct a global virtual model of the real world, ostensibly to build new augmented reality experiences, the company behind the popular mobile game Pokémon Go has revealed.

In a blog update Tuesday, Niantic explained they’ve been enlisting Pokémon Go players to participate in efforts to construct a Large Geospatial Model (LGM), which the company says “could guide users through the world, answer questions, provide personalized recommendations, help with navigation, and enhance real-world interactions.”

The company says the LGM constructs a comprehensive AI world model by leveraging its Visual Positioning System (VPS), which was “built from user scans, taken from different perspectives and at various times of day, at many times during the years, and with positioning information attached, creating a highly detailed understanding of the world. This data is unique because it is taken from a pedestrian perspective and includes places inaccessible to cars.”

“The LGM will enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces, but also to interact with them in new ways, forming a critical component of AR glasses and fields beyond, including robotics, content creation and autonomous systems,” Niantic said. “As we move from phones to wearable technology linked to the real world, spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system.”

“Over the past five years, Niantic has focused on building our Visual Positioning System, which uses a single image from a phone to determine its position and orientation using a 3D map built from people scanning interesting locations in our games and Scaniverse,” the company wrote.

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Ohio child welfare agency secretly tracking sexual orientation and transgender identity of children

An Ohio child welfare agency has made a database tracking the sexual orientation, transgender identity and pronouns of children who communicated with the agency.

The Cuyahoga County Division of Children and Family Services (DCFS) developed a supposed “confidential spreadsheet” that monitored the sexual orientations and transgender identities of children.

The report, which describes a document acquired by the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF), spotlights the extent to which some government agencies entrusted with the protection of children have been captured by trans activists.

The document features entries dated from March 2018 to August 2024 and the spreadsheet was part of the agency’s “Safe Identification” program, which teaches social services personnel how to gather information about the sexuality and gender identity of children.

The DCNF discovered that the Cuyahoga County DCFS was one of four social service agencies in the United States “chosen to research, develop and evaluate transgender ideology-based child welfare interventions that suggest parents and caregivers who do not affirm a child’s sexual orientation or gender confusion are unsafe and may need to have their children removed from their home.”

Members of President Joe Biden’s administration called the Cuyahoga County group “trailblazers” and wished to nationalize their model.

The Cuyahoga County DCFS team influenced the recently completed Biden order, which requires child welfare systems to approve and support gender confusion. Staff members described the confidential spreadsheet as their means of “assisting” children acquire gender treatments. They also shared that some of the children they tracked were as young as five years old.

They tracked if children were “transgender or gender diverse,” naming them as pansexual, bisexual, gay, lesbian, straight or “questioning” their sexual orientation.

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FBI Whistleblower Alleges Plan to Deploy Plainclothes FBI Agents to Maricopa County Polling Stations to Monitor Trump Voters — FBI Responds

A bombshell report from a whistleblower has set off alarms among Arizona’s voters and political leaders, as new revelations have surfaced about an alleged plan by the FBI to deploy plainclothes agents to polling stations in Maricopa County.

According to a whistleblower who attended a recent security briefing, the FBI’s primary objective with this operation is to monitor Trump voters during the upcoming election—a disturbing indication of federal interference aimed at intimidating those who dare to support the 45th president.

Representative Alexander Kolodin (R-AZ) was quick to act, sending a forceful letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, warning that such actions would not be tolerated.

In the letter, Kolodin made it clear that the House is prepared to take immediate action against any attempts by federal agents to intimidate or censor voters in Arizona.

“I sincerely hope that this disturbing allegation is false. Rest assured, however, that if your agents are here for any other purpose than ensuring that every lawful voter is able to cast a ballot, the House is prepared to take immediate action to secure all Arizonans the equal protection of the laws,” Kolodin wrote.

The letter expresses deep concern over the alleged deployment of FBI agents in Maricopa County polling stations, with the intent to monitor and intimidate Trump voters specifically.

The whistleblower claims that the agents were tasked with making sure Trump voters “don’t get out of line,” a vague but menacing directive that could lead to widespread voter suppression.

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A Licence for Everything: British Government Creates Mandatory Chicken Register

“Do you keep chickens in your back garden? Register them now or break the law”, Britons are warned by state media as new rules pulling back yard flocks into industrial bureaucracy that takes force today.

As difficult as it is to believe a Western government would use a flu-like virus to crack down on freedoms, the British government is nevertheless at it, and from today anyone harbouring unlicensed chickens on their property will be breaking the law.

People who have chickens in their garden and don’t comply with the mandatory register, the purpose of which is to allow “more effective surveillance”, risks “being fined or even imprisoned”.

Announced in the Spring, the rule change removes the old exemption for back yard flocks and smallholdings, which meant anyone keeping less than 50 birds — including chickens and ducks — would not need to note the government and could continue the ages-old practice of raising their own food unmolested.

But government concern over avian flu, even despite as the state broadcaster the BBC notes “a lack of recent reported cases in captive birds”, has pushed it to reduce the notifiable number of birds down to one.

The deadline to register with the Animal Plant Health Agency in England and Wales is October 1st, and December 1st in Scotland, and chicken keepers had been encouraged to get signed up early. As explained by the NFU, “Bird keepers will need to provide information, including their contact details, the location where birds are kept and details of the birds (species, number and what they are kept for).”

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iPhone Now Collects Your Mental Health Data

True Story: The Health app built into iPhones is now collecting as much personal information on the mental health of each and every one of us as they can get a hold of.

Yet, a search on Google and Brave yielded no results on the dangers of sharing such information over the phone or the internet. Seriously, no single MSM has done an article on why such data sharing might be a bad idea?

To start, in sharing such data, you aren’t just sharing your information; iPhone knows exactly who your family members are. In many cases, those phones are connected via family plans.

iPhone mental health assessments not only ask questions about your mental health but can also infer the mental health status of family members, as demonstrated by the image publicly shared by phone on the benefits of a phone mental health assessment.

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School Monitoring Software Sacrifices Student Privacy for Unproven Promises of Safety

Imagine your search terms, key-strokes, private chats and photographs are being monitored every time they are sent. Millions of students across the country don’t have to imagine this deep surveillance of their most private communications: it’s a reality that comes with their school districts’ decision to install AI-powered monitoring software such as Gaggle and GoGuardian on students’ school-issued machines and accounts. As we demonstrated with our own Red Flag Machine, however, this software flags and blocks websites for spurious reasons and often disproportionately targets disadvantaged, minority and LGBTQ youth.

The companies making the software claim it’s all done for the sake of student safety: preventing self-harm, suicide, violence, and drug and alcohol abuse. While a noble goal, given that suicide is the second highest cause of death among American youth 10-14 years old, no comprehensive or independent studies have shown an increase in student safety linked to the usage of this software. Quite to the contrary: a recent comprehensive RAND research study shows that such AI monitoring software may cause more harm than good.

That study also found that how to respond to alerts is left to the discretion of the school districts themselves. Due to a lack of resources to deal with mental health, schools often refer these alerts to law enforcement officers who are not trained and ill-equipped to deal with youth mental crises. When police respond to youth who are having such episodes, the resulting encounters can lead to disastrous results. So why are schools still using the software–when a congressional investigation found a need for “federal action to protect students’ civil rights, safety, and privacy”? Why are they trading in their students’ privacy for a dubious-at-best marketing claim of safety?

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Now, the Feds Are Spying on Congress

“Those who have sown the wind shall reap the whirlwind.”
— Hosea 8:7

The federal antipathy to compliance with the Constitution is well known and well documented. Presidents have declared war in contravention of the constitutional command that only Congress may do so. Congress itself has enacted legislation in areas that the drafters of the Constitution reserved to the states — and it has done so using some of the more absurd linguistic contortions thinkable.

In one infamous case where the feds sought to regulate the amount of wheat a farmer grew — all of which his wife ground into flour from which she made baked goods that were all consumed by their family — the feds claimed that his wheat field constituted interstate commerce because by eating his own product instead of selling, he and others similarly situated commercially increased the demand for wheat, and the water that this Ohio farmer used emanated in Pennsylvania and thus the wheat was part of a continuous interstate movement and so was congressionally regulable. The late Justice Antonin Scalia called these arguments, which the court accepted, “hogwash.”

There are many of these. As deep into our pocketbooks as is the Federal Reserve, which is the economically disastrous and liberty-crushing central planner of the U.S. economy, and as invasive of personal freedom as is the Patriot Act, which permits one FBI agent to authorize another to search for private data in the custody of a third party, the Supreme Court has never ruled on the constitutionality of either.

Now, one of these chickens is coming home to roost. Here is the backstory.

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U.S. To Track Moving Air And Ground Targets Via Space By 2030, But Aircraft Will Still Play A Part

The U.S. Space Force second-in-command has provided updates on plans for the service’s introduction of space-based ground moving-target indicator and air moving-target indicator (GMTI/AMTI) capabilities. Also discussed was the U.S. military’s need for a layered surveillance network, including to deal with the expanding breadth of enemy ‘kill webs,’ something which TWZ has discussed in the depth in the past.

Speaking today at the annual Defense News Conference in Arlington, Virginia, Gen. Michael A. Guetlein, the Vice Chief of Space Operations, U.S. Space Force (USSF), said that the first parts of a satellite-based GMTI/AMTI capability should start coming online in “probably the early 2030s.”

Importantly, however, Gen. Guetlein said that he expects the U.S. military’s future surveillance network to involve multiple assets, both in the atmosphere and in space. “I see it always being a layered set of capabilities to increase survivability, first and foremost,” he said.

While a layered surveillance network — one including space-based assets, alongside crewed aircraft, drones, and potentially other platforms — has been discussed for some time now, it was only last month that the design baseline for Space Force’s new satellite system was certified, meaning that it can now progress into the formal development phase.

In the past there have also been repeated suggestions that space-based surveillance assets would increasingly take over from the aircraft that have traditionally undertaken surveillance of targets on the ground, at sea, and in the air. In particular, satellite-based surveillance assets offer the advantages of greater persistence and — at least in the past — enhanced survivability. It is also worth noting that the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is reportedly acquiring a constellation of hundreds of intelligence-gathering satellites from SpaceX, with a specific focus on tracking targets down below in support of ground operations. Its relationship to the USSF program is unclear, but there is certainly some crossover regarding capabilities.

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Backyard Privacy in the Age of Drones

Police departments and law enforcement agencies are increasingly collecting personal information using drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles. In addition to high-resolution photographic and video cameras, police drones may be equipped with myriad spying payloads, such as live-video transmitters, thermal imaging, heat sensors, mapping technology, automated license plate readers, cell site simulators, cell phone signal interceptors and other technologies. Captured data can later be scrutinized with backend software tools like license plate readers and face recognition technology. There have even been proposals for law enforcement to attach lethal and less-lethal weapons to drones and robots. 

Over the past decade or so, police drone use has dramatically expanded. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Atlas of Surveillance lists more than 1500 law enforcement agencies across the US that have been reported to employ drones. The result is that backyards, which are part of the constitutionally protected curtilage of a home, are frequently being captured, either intentionally or incidentally. In grappling with the legal implications of this phenomenon, we are confronted by a pair of U.S. Supreme Court cases from the 1980s:California v. Ciraolo and Florida v. Riley. There, the Supreme Court ruled that warrantless aerial surveillance conducted by law enforcement in low-flying manned aircrafts did not violate the Fourth Amendment because there was no reasonable expectation of privacy from what was visible from the sky. Although there are fundamental differences between surveillance by manned aircrafts and drones, some courts have extended the analysis to situations involving drones, shutting the door to federal constitution challenges.

Yet, Americans, legislators, and even judges, have long voiced serious worries with the threat of rampant and unchecked aerial surveillance. A couple of years ago, the Fourth Circuit found in Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department that a mass aerial surveillance program (using manned aircrafts) covering most of the city violated the Fourth Amendment. The exponential surge in police drone use has only heightened the privacy concerns underpinning that and similar decisions. Unlike the manned aircrafts in Ciraolo and Riley, drones can silently and unobtrusively gather an immense amount of data at only a tiny fraction of the cost of traditional aircrafts. Additionally, drones are smaller and easier to operate and can get into spaces—such as under eaves or between buildings—that planes and helicopters can never enter. And the noise created by manned airplanes and helicopters effectively functions as notice to those who are being watched, whereas drones can easily record information surreptitiously.

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