Tag: surveillance

Musk’s SpaceX is building spy satellite network for US intelligence agency, sources say

SpaceX is building a network of hundreds of spy satellites under a classified contract with a U.S. intelligence agency, five sources familiar with the program said, demonstrating deepening ties between billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s space company and national security agencies.

The network is being built by SpaceX’s Starshield business unit under a $1.8 billion contract signed in 2021 with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an intelligence agency that manages spy satellites, the sources said.

The plans show the extent of SpaceX’s involvement in U.S. intelligence and military projects and illustrate a deeper Pentagon investment into vast, low-Earth orbiting satellite systems aimed at supporting ground forces.

If successful, the sources said the program would significantly advance the ability of the U.S. government and military to quickly spot potential targets almost anywhere on the globe.

The contract signals growing trust by the intelligence establishment of a company whose owner has clashed with the Biden administration and sparked controversy, opens new tab over the use of Starlink satellite connectivity in the Ukraine war, the sources said.

The Wall Street Journal reported, opens new tab in February the existence of a $1.8 billion classified Starshield contract with an unknown intelligence agency without detailing the purposes of the program.

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How to Figure Out What Your Car Knows About You (and Opt Out of Sharing When You Can)

Cars collect a lot of our personal data, and car companies disclose a lot of that data to third parties. It’s often unclear what’s being collected, and what’s being shared and with whom. A recent New York Times article highlighted how data is shared by G.M. with insurance companies, sometimes without clear knowledge from the driver. If you’re curious about what your car knows about you, you might be able to find out. In some cases, you may even be able to opt out of some of that sharing of data.

Why Your Car Collects and Shares Data

A car (and its app, if you installed one on your phone) can collect all sorts of data in the background with and without you realizing it. This in turn may be shared for a wide variety of purposes, including advertising and risk-assessment for insurance companies. The list of data collected is long and dependent on the car’s make, model, and trim.  But if you look through any car maker’s privacy policy, you’ll see some trends:

  • Diagnostics data, sometimes referred to as “vehicle health data,” may be used internally for quality assurance, research, recall tracking, service issues, and similar unsurprising car-related purposes. This type of data may also be shared with dealers or repair companies for service.
  • Location information may be collected for emergency services, mapping, and to catalog other environmental information about where a car is operated. Some cars may give you access to the vehicle’s location in the app.
  • Some usage data may be shared or used internally for advertising. Your daily driving or car maintenance habits, alongside location data, is a valuable asset to the targeted advertising ecosystem. 
  • All of this data could be shared with law enforcement.
  • Information about your driving habits, sometimes referred to as “Driving data” or “Driver behavior information,” may be shared with insurance companies and used to alter your premiums.  This can range from odometer readings to braking and acceleration statistics and even data about what time of day you drive.. 

Surprise insurance sharing is the thrust of The New York Times article, and certainly not the only problem with car data. We’ve written previously about how insurance companies offer discounts for customers who opt into a usage-based insurance program. Every state except California currently allows the use of telematics data for insurance rating, but privacy protections for this data vary widely across states.

When you sign up directly through an insurer, these opt-in insurance programs have a pretty clear tradeoff and sign up processes, and they’ll likely send you a physical device that you plug into your car’s OBD port that then collects and transmits data back to the insurer.

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Your car is secretly spying on you and driving your insurance rates through the roof: report

Drivers of cars manufactured by General Motors, Honda and other popular brands say that their insurance rates went up after the companies sent data about their driving behavior to issuers without their knowledge.

Kenn Dahl, 65, is a Seattle-area businessman who told The New York Times that his car insurance costs soared by 21% in 2022 after GM’s OnStar Smart Driver computerized system installed in his Chevy Bolt collected information about the particulars of his driving habits.

Dahl said that his insurance agent told him the price increase was based on data collected by LexisNexis, which compiled a report tracking each and every time he and his wife drove their Chevy Bolt over a six-month period.

According to Dahl, the 258-page report contained information about the start and end times of his trips, distance driven and other data detailing possible instances of speeding, hard braking and sharp accelerations.

The report contained information about one particular trip in June which lasted 18 minutes and spanned 7.33 miles

During that same trip, the LexisNexis report recorded two instances of rapid acceleration and two incidents of hard braking.

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The Chinese company at the center of Biden’s crane concerns denies it’s a threat to U.S. national security

Chinese shipping cranes are fast becoming the latest item to get caught up in Washington and Beijing’s fractious relationship. U.S. officials have been talking about the security threat posed by Chinese-made cranes at U.S. ports for months. Then, last month, the U.S. announced an initiative to bolster cybersecurity at the country’s ports.

Now, the company at the heart of the controversy—China’s Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries, also known as ZPMC—is denying that it poses a security threat. ZPMC said it “strictly adheres to laws and regulations of relevant countries and regions,” in a statement released on Sunday.

ZPMC accounts for over 70% of the global market in shipping cranes. There are over 200 Chinese-made cranes at U.S. ports, accounting for “nearly 80%” of the total, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

These cranes help move goods through maritime ports. The cranes can often be controlled remotely, which U.S. officials fear could be an avenue for hackers to disrupt the economy. A recent congressional probe claimed to find over a dozen cellular modems on cranes that could be remotely accessed, the Wall Street Journal reports.

ZPMC, in Sunday’s statement, said that recent reports “can easily mislead the public without sufficient factual review.”

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Suspicious tech found in Chinese-made cargo cranes, fueling spying worries: Congress probe

An investigation by the US Congress into Chinese-built cargo cranes has found suspicious technology that could potentially be used to disrupt or spy on American commercial activities, according to a report.

The House Homeland Security Committee said that it has discovered cellular modems that were installed in cranes and which can be remotely accessed by hostile powers, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The committee’s discovery has fueled concerns in the Biden administration that cranes built by a Chinese firm, Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries (ZPMC), could potentially be used to spy on US ports.

More than 12 cellular modems were found in Chinese-made cranes that were relied upon in several US ports, according to the Journal.

While some of the modems were used for operational functions such as monitoring and tracking maintenance remotely, others were installed despite the fact that the ports in which they were being used hadn’t requested them.

China “is looking for every opportunity to collect valuable intelligence and position themselves to exploit vulnerabilities by systematically burrowing into America’s critical infrastructure, including in the maritime sector,” Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, said.

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Emotion-Tracking – AI on the job: Workers Fear Being Watched – and Misunderstood.

We have heard the warnings from Yuval Noah Harari, that if we don’t figure out how to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) human brains will be hacked soon,” a statement that arguably speaks to humanity’s worst fears about AI. This may be especially so, when hearing from Schwab’s advisor Harari that to “hack a human being is to get to know that person better than they know themselves,” which can enable those who own the technology to increasingly manipulate us.

We may believe this extreme threat to our privacy will occur some time in the future, but, the hacking Harari is describing is more proverbial than literal, and has already been occuring in environments like Facebook and YouTube where we are led to view content that the algorithms have deemed to be of interest to us. It now would appear that many have gradually become desensitised to it the “hacking” and manipulation allowing it to increase without too much protest.

But how would you feel if your workplace was tracking how you feel? asks Nazanin Andalibi who is Assistant Professor of Information at the University of Michigan. and in the article below dissuses emotion AI which is already being used in the workplace.

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DOD developing ‘Gremlin’ capability to help personnel collect real-time UAP data

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office is producing and refining a new deployable surveillance capability — the Gremlin System — to enable personnel to capture real-time data and more rapidly respond to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) incidents as they occur, the acting chief of the office told DefenseScoop during a press briefing Wednesday.

Tim Phillips, AARO’s acting director on assignment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, shared the first public details about these in-the-works, sensor-equipped Gremlin “kits” during the Wednesday briefing, which was more broadly focused on the office’s release of the congressionally required “Volume I Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP.” That report is attached below.

“We’re working with some of the government labs, such as the Department of Energy labs, and we have a great partner with Georgia Tech. And what we’re doing is developing a deployable, configurable sensor suite that we can put in Pelican cases. We’re going to be able to pull it to the field to do a long-term [collection]. Since the UAP target — that signature is not clearly defined — we really have to do hyperspectral surveillance to try to capture these incidents,” explained Phillips, who stepped into the AARO lead role when its inaugural director Sean Kirkpatrick departed last year.

The AARO team began developing the sensors and associated capabilities for Gremlin in October. 

The team is currently experimenting with Gremlin at “a very large range in Texas,” where officials have been testing the system against known drone-type targets, and some unknown targets as well, Phillips noted.

“It’s picking up a lot of bats and birds. We’re learning a lot about solar flaring. We’re really starting to understand what’s in orbit around our planet and how we can eliminate those as anomalous objects,” he said. 

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Republicans Probe GoFundMe and Eventbrite Over Government Transaction Surveillance

The US House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government appears to be trying to dig deeper into the meaning of the subject matter it has been convened to explore.

Specifically – how some private financial entities, egged on by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) – a federal, US Department of Treasury agency – allegedly went on to essentially surveil clearly political terms like “Trump” and “MAGA” on platforms such as Eventbrite and GoFundMe.

The latter company’s purpose is self-evident – it’s a crowdsourcer – whereas Eventbrite is in a similar business, with a stress on event management and ticketing.

And that’s apparently how deep – and wide – government influence on digital platforms/companies went in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 events in Washington DC.

Now the House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan wants to know what exactly was happening in these “spaces” at that time.

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Unregulated, Exploitative, and on the Rise: Vera Institute’s Report on Electronic Monitoring

Incarceration rates in the United States have long been among the highest in the world, and in response to the systemic flaws and biases unveiled by the renewed scrutiny of the criminal legal system, many advocates have championed new policies aimed at reducing sentences and improving conditions in prisons. Some have touted the use of electronic monitoring (EM) as an alternative fix to ensure that people whose cases have yet to be adjudicated are not physically detained. Unsurprisingly, those most often making these claims are the for-profit firms offering EM technology and the governmental agencies they contract with, and there is little data to back them up. In a new report, the Vera Institute of Justice provides the most detailed data yet showing that these claims don’t match reality, and outlines a number of issues with how EM is administered across the country.

Another Private Sector Wild West

According to interviews and an analysis of policies across hundreds of jurisdictions, the Vera Institute found that the use of EM was an unregulated patchwork across counties, states, and the federal government. As private firms market new products, the level of testing and quality assurance has failed to keep up with the drive to get contracts with local and state law enforcement agencies. Relying on technology produced by such a disordered industry can lead to reincarceration due to faulty equipment, significantly increased surveillance on those being monitored and their household, and onerous requirements for people under EM than when dealing with probation or parole officers.

Even the question of jurisdictional authority is a mess. The Vera Institute explains that agencies frequently rely on private firms that further subcontract out the hardware or software, and individuals in rural areas can create profitable businesses for themselves that only serve as a middleman between the criminal justice system and the hardware and software vendors. The Vera Institute suggests that this can lead to corruption, including the extortion by these small subcontractors of people held on EM, often with no oversight or public sector transparency. That presents a problem to the data collection, public records requests, and other investigative work that policymakers, advocates, and journalists rely on to find the truth and inform policy.

Further, the costs of EM are frequently passed on to the people forced to use it, sometimes regardless of if they have the means to pay, whether the EM is an obstacle to their employment, or whether they are under monitoring pre-trial (where presumption of innocence should apply) or post-sentencing (after a guilty verdict). And these costs don’t necessarily buy them greater “liberty,” as many forms of hardware or app-based software increased around-the-clock surveillance at the hands of private firms, once again with little to no oversight or ability to access data through public records requests.

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Jeffrey Epstein Had Secret ‘Panopticon’ Recording Room To Monitor ‘Guests’: Lawsuit

In late 2019, Jeffrey Epstein victim Maria Farmer alleged that the deceased pedophile had a “media room” on the first floor where high-profile johns were allegedly recorded having sex with women and children.

“So if you’re facing the house, there’s a window on the right that’s barred – that’s the room, the ‘media room’ is what he called it,” Farmer said. “And so there was a door that looked like an invisible door with all this limestone and everything and you push it and you go in and I saw all the cameras.”

Maria said: “What it was – was like old televisions basically, like stacked.“

“They were monitors inside this cabinet and there were men sitting here and I looked on the cameras and I saw toilet, toilet, bed, bed, toilet, bed.

“And I was like I’m never going to use the restroom here and I am never going to sleep here.” –The Sun

In 2020 a former jewel thief who says he had group sex with Ghislaine Maxwell but ‘drew the line at under-age girls’ claims he was forced to watch pedo videos involving ‘two high-profile US politicians’ and ‘two high society figures having a threesome with an under-age girl.’

The jewel thief, who goes by the name William Steel, claims that in the mid-1990s he met Epstein in the “upstairs room at a very high-end diamond dealer, the kind of place where only a few people are allowed in at a time.”

“I was there doing what I do. I was meeting my fence.

“I saw Jeff with a young girl who looked only about 13 or 14 and he had his hand in the back of her shorts.

“That’s what first got my attention.

“She was so young and he was much older. That’s when I knew that he was dirty.

“I had about 200,000 dollars worth of jewellery that I was getting rid of and later I struck up a conversation with him.

“He later said the girl he was with was his niece but I called bulls**t on that, telling him I saw what he was doing with her. –The Sun

Now, two women who have filed a recent lawsuit in Manhattan federal court are claiming the same. According to the Washington Times, the plaintiffs – Danielle Bensky and Jane Doe 3, say Epstein employed a sophisticated system involving constant CCTV surveillance within his New York mansion.

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