Tag: surveillance

Disturbing ‘Columbine’ Inspired Plot Uncovered in Student’s Manifesto at Chippewa Falls School District — Targets Included Christians, Jocks, and Preppy Girls — School District Silent for Over Three Months

A disturbing plot inspired by the infamous Columbine High School massacre, which resulted in 13 deaths and 20 others being injured before turning their guns on themselves and committing suicide, was uncovered at Chippewa Middle School.

An exclusive report, obtained by Steven Crowder’s Louder with Crowder’s MugClub Undercover unit, which previously disclosed the manifesto of Nashville school transgender shooter Audrey Hale, reveals that the school district did not disclose information for more than three months regarding a student’s manifesto that described a “terrorist” threat against their peers.”

The threat targeted specific groups, including Christians, “jocks,” and “preppy” girls.

The discovery was made possible through the vigilance of school administration and the utilization of the “Aristotle alert system,” a digital monitoring tool designed to flag concerning content typed into school Chromebooks.

The investigation began at approximately 12:30 PM when Officer Downey was alerted by Dean of Students, Corey Hahn, about multiple Aristotle alerts linked to a single user’s account. These alerts were triggered by searches for content ranging from the Columbine High School massacre to instructions on manufacturing explosives.

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New Documents Provide More Insights on Moderna’s Online Speech Monitoring Efforts

Controversies originating from those who gained the most from the pandemic – most visibly, Big Pharma – refuses to go away.

One of the leading (and among the earliest) producers of Covid vaccines was US-based Moderna. We know for sure that the vaccine worked for Moderna – turning it from the verge of collapse into a $100 billion company, Defender reports.

But in large part due to the unusual speed with which vaccines were put through trials and then to market, many people – from regular citizens to public figures to medical professionals and scientists – felt skepticism about their efficacy and safety.

Expressing that openly, though, tended to get those people canceled or at least monitored and/or censored, and now new documents reveal Moderna’s role. Among them were journalists Alex Berenson, Stanford Health Policy professor Jay Bhattacharya, and actor Russell Brand.

In one instance, they “flagged a Russell Brand video in which he raised concerns about former British health official Jonathan Van-Tam, who was instrumental in COVID-19 policymaking and then took a high-level job at Moderna,” writes Defender.

Despite the billions in revenues raked in by Big Pharma, this obviously wasn’t enough, especially once the Covid panic started to subside and vaccine sales stalled.

And so Moderna sought out online media surveillance partners, and found one in the Public Goods Projects non-profit (otherwise receiving funds from Big Pharma), which was then useful in getting Covid vaccine skeptics silenced or censored on Twitter – Moderna and its partner, of course, called this combating “medical information.”

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Supreme Court Declines To Hear X’s Challenge to FBI Surveillance Gag Orders

The social network formerly known as Twitter has been undergoing more than just “superficial” branding transformations as of late, going from a reliable ally of state-driven censorship, to a platform that became the first major one to try to shed light on the mechanisms and practices of deep censorship.

The Twitter Files disclose more than just a private company exercising the right to be wrong in suppressing users’ free speech: they also implicated the US federal government with damning proof of serious transgressions, such as (explicitly unconstitutional) state collusion in censorship.

However, the US Supreme Court has now refused to consider X’s request to be able to publish some relevant numbers.

The original filing dates all the way back to 2014, in the wake of the revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, that sent shock waves both among citizens and politicians.

But those behind the company/platform, now called X, seem well-aware that this story by no means ended with some government concessions (regarding disclosure) made after the Snowden revelations, or with the Twitter Files.

And so, possibly as a defense tactic going forward, X tried to be granted the right to reveal the number of times federal law enforcement “gets in touch” to get information, framed as pertaining to national security.

The Supreme Court decision came after X appealed when a lower instance court said that the FBI had every right to constrain X in sharing the information about the “national security investigations requests” number with the public.

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Atlas of Surveillance…

Law enforcement surveillance isn’t always secret. These technologies can be discovered in news articles and government meeting agendas, in company press releases and social media posts. It just hasn’t been aggregated before.

That’s the starting point for the Atlas of Surveillance, a collaborative effort between the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the University of Nevada, Reno Reynolds School of Journalism. Through a combination of crowdsourcing and data journalism, we are creating the largest-ever repository of information on which law enforcement agencies are using what surveillance technologies. The aim is to generate a resource for journalists, academics, and, most importantly, members of the public to check what’s been purchased locally and how technologies are spreading across the country.

We specifically focused on the most pervasive technologies, including drones, body-worn cameras, face recognition, cell-site simulators, automated license plate readers, predictive policing, camera registries, and gunshot detection. Although we have amassed more than 12,100 datapoints in 5,500-plus jurisdictions, our research only reveals the tip of the iceberg and underlines the need for journalists and members of the public to continue demanding transparency from criminal justice agencies.

Visit it HERE

PRISONS ACROSS THE U.S. ARE QUIETLY BUILDING DATABASES OF INCARCERATED PEOPLE’S VOICE PRINTS

Roughly six months ago at New York’s Sing Sing prison, John Dukes says he was brought out with cellmates to meet a corrections counselor. He recalls her giving him a paper with some phrases, and offering him a strange choice: He could go up to the phone and utter the phrases that an automated voice would ask him to read, or he could choose not to and lose his phone access altogether.

Dukes did not know why he was being asked to make this decision, but he felt troubled as he heard other men ahead of him speaking into the phone and repeating certain phrases from the sheets the counselors had given them.

“I was contemplating, ‘Should I do it? I don’t want my voice to be on this machine,’” he recalls. “But I still had to contact my family, even though I only had a few months left.”

So, when it was his turn, he walked up to the phone, picked up the receiver, and followed a series of automated instructions. “It said, ‘Say this phrase, blah, blah, blah,’ and if you didn’t say it clearly, they would say, ‘Say this phrase again,’ like ‘Cat’ or ‘I’m a citizen of the United States of America.’” Dukes said he repeated such phrases for a minute or two. The voice then told him the process was complete.

“Here’s another part of myself that I had to give away again in this prison system,” he remembers thinking as he walked back to the cell.

Dukes, who was released in October, says he was never told about what that procedure was meant to do. But contracting documents for New York’s new prison phone system, obtained by The Appeal in partnership with The Intercept, and follow-up interviews with prison authorities, indicate that Dukes was right to be suspicious: His audio sample was being “enrolled” into a new voice surveillance system.

In New York and other states across the country, authorities are acquiring technology to extract and digitize the voices of incarcerated people into unique biometric signatures, known as voice prints. Prison authorities have quietly enrolled hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people’s voice prints into large-scale biometric databases. Computer algorithms then draw on these databases to identify the voices taking part in a call, and to search for other calls where the voices of interest are detected. Some programs, like New York’s, even analyze the voices of call recipients outside prisons to track which outsiders speak to multiple prisoners regularly.

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The Navy Bought “Global” Surveillance Data Through Adtech Company Owned by Military Contractor

A section of the Navy bought access to a tool that gave the Pentagon “global” surveillance data via an adtech company that is owned by a U.S. military contractor, according to a Navy contract obtained by 404 Media. Beyond its global scale, the document does not explicitly say what specific sort of data was included in the sale. But previous reporting from the Wall Street Journal has shown that the marketing agency and government contractor responsible are part of a supply chain of location data harvested from devices, funneled through the advertising industry, onto contractors, which then ends with U.S. government clients.

The news provides one of the clearest examples yet of how the online advertising industry is not just fertile ground for surveillance, with myriad companies harvesting sensitive data from peoples’ phones and computers and selling that information ultimately to law enforcement, but also one that is actively being exploited by military agencies.

Specifically, the document points to a product called “the Sierra Nevada nContext Vanir software tool.” The contract covers a number of different areas, including support and training, both remotely and at the contractor’s facility; two months of access to the tool for “evaluation and assessment;” and “intelligence and analytical support.” The Navy paid $174,941.37 for access to the data, according to the contract.

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INVISIBILITY COAT’ THAT HIDES HUMANS FROM AI SECURITY CAMERAS DEVELOPED BY CHINESE STUDENTS

At first glance, it may look like an ordinary, run-of-the-mill camouflage coat. However, what a group of Chinese graduate students have actually developed is a cost-effective “invisibility coat” capable of concealing the human body from AI-monitored security cameras, both day and night.

At the forgivable price of just $70 USD, the high-tech jacket, which has been dubbed the “InvisDefense coat,” was crafted by a team of four graduate students from Wuhan University in China. The real-life sci-fi coat secured the top prize at the inaugural “Huawei Cup,” a cybersecurity innovation contest sponsored by the Chinese tech giant Huawei. 

Professor Wang Zheng from the School of Computer Science oversaw the team, comprising doctoral student Wei Hui from the School of Computer Science, along with postgraduates Li Zhubo and Dai Shuyv from the School of Cyber Science and Engineering, and postgraduate Jian Zehua from the Economics and Management School.

The InvisDefense invisibility cloak involves a kind of camouflage pattern designed by a new algorithm, which challenges the efficacy of this commonly used method of AI pedestrian detection. “In layman’s terms, it means cameras can detect you but cannot determine that you are human,” according to a statement released by Wuhan University (WHU).

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US Navy FINALLY recovers spy plane stuck in Hawaii bay two weeks after it overshot Marine base runway and ‘destroyed’ endangered ocean coral – as crews find a dead sea turtle at recovery site

The US Navy has finally recovered a spy plane that crashed into the sea after overshooting a runway in Hawaii two weeks ago. 

But the extraction has cost an estimated $1.5million and, as a sea turtle is found dead onsite, experts warn the plane has damaged the endangered ocean coral. 

The US Navy P-8A plane missed its mark while attempting to land at a US Marines base, located ten miles from Honolulu, on November 20. 

For two weeks it sat floating in Kaneohe Bay – home to coral reefs and a range of marine life, from sharks to octopus and fish.

Its wheels lodged in the coral bed and Navy contractors had to design a complex inflatable and rope system to float it to the surface and remove it from the water. 

Officials said the removal operation took 13 hours starting around 6.30am Saturday.

‘Our team went through a detailed planning process to develop the best course of action to get the P-8 out of the bay as quickly and as safely as possible,’ Rear Adm. Kevin P. Lenox, the salvage operation’s on-scene commander, said.

‘At times, it took us an hour to move the aircraft five feet.’

The Navy estimated the total cost of the operation will be $1.5million as they focus on preserving the aircraft so it can return to service once removed.

But the cost to marine life has been high too, and on Thursday, a ‘deceased sea turtle’ was found ‘floating between’ two of the Navy barriers around the plane.

‘This one is unfortunate. DLNR observers this morning found a deceased sea turtle floating in between two of our barriers,’ Lenox said. 

‘I have no information on the cause of death on that particular sea turtle. DLNR did report a sick sea turtle struggling in the vicinity yesterday, we suspect that may be related. 

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Washington State Republican Party Files Formal Ethics Complaint Against WA Secretary of State Hobbs for Using Public Funds to Surveil and Censor Political Opposition

Today the Washington State Republican Party (WSRP) filed a formal ethics complaint with the Washington State Ethics Board against Secretary of State Steve Hobbs. A big thank you to WSRP Chairman Jim Walsh for initiating the complaint and attorney K. Garl Long, Long Law office, for writing and filing the complaint.

After the complaint was filed the WSRP issued a press release here.

Full Complaint, Exhibits, and Footnotes here:

Summary of Complaint: Secretary of State Hobbs (“Secretary Hobbs”) is using public funds to pay an offshore artificial intelligence company to surveil voters. Speech objectionable to Secretary Hobbs is “fact-checked,” reported as a “threat,” and suppressed. It is unethical and illegal to use public funds to aid Secretary Hobbs and/or his political party in suppressing opposition views. Such government censorship is a spreading cancer in our society.1

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The untimely death of a witness and defendant in govt. spying on me

An historic victory of sorts was had in my case, Attkisson v. DOJ, in the government spying on me, when I received a clerk’s default against one of the defendants: a seedy character named Ryan Dark White. It is the first known such default in a case of the government spying on a journalist.

White had admitted to being part of one of the government surveillance operations against me. He provided us some details, some of which we were able to verify, and then disappeared and refused to respond shortly after we named him as a defendant in the lawsuit.

White said the rogue group he worked with under then-US Attorney Rod Rosenstein spied on “hundreds” of US citizens. I just happened to have sources who helped me prove it, in part by unearthing unique government IP addresses in my computer used as part of the surveillance. White said the group included then-Secret Service agent, Shaun Bridges, who was later convicted and sent to prison in a separate government corruption case.

With the government refusing to hold its own agents accountable, the Dept. of Justice has fought my lawsuit every step of the way, and provided private attorneys to defend Bridges– funded by your tax money, of course.

I learned throughout the years that the courts don’t necessarily care that we have forensic proof of the government intrusions. I once thought that such irrefutable evidence sealed the deal. Case closed. Instead, they require that you, in advance of a trial and discovery, point to who, specifically, knew what and when, and provide evidence of that. Assuming the guilty parties aren’t going to tell on themselves and turn over damning documents, the only real way to get the information the court requires is through the process of “discovery.” But the only way to get discovery is to first obtain the information the court wants. But the only way to get it is through discovery. It’s a senseless loop.

The Dept. of Justice is fighting discovery, instead of cooperating. One could ask why they would spend tax money and all these years fighting… if their agents were innocent? If they would simply provide the necessary documents, we’d see that we’re barking up the wrong tree– if that were the case.

With the government withholding documents, interviews, and information that we need; and the court requiring us to have it in order to proceed, it puts us in a tough place.

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