Tag: surveillance

TEXAS STATE POLICE PURCHASED ISRAELI PHONE-TRACKING SOFTWARE FOR “BORDER EMERGENCY”

THE TEXAS DEPARTMENT of Public Safety purchased access to powerful software capable of locating and following people through their phones as part of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s “border security disaster” efforts, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept.

In 2021, Abbott proclaimed that the “surge of individuals unlawfully crossing the Texas-Mexico border posed an ongoing and imminent threat of disaster” to the state and its residents. Among other effects, the disaster declaration opened a spigot of government money to a variety of private firms ostensibly paid to help patrol and blockade the state’s border with Mexico.

One of the private companies that got in on the cash disbursements was Cobwebs Technologies, a little-known Israeli surveillance contractor. Cobwebs’s marquee product, the surveillance platform Tangles, offers its users a bounty of different tools for tracking people as they navigate both the internet and the real world, synthesizing social media posts, app activity, facial recognition, and phone tracking.

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Japanese Police Test AI-Equipped Cameras To Protect VIPs

Japanese police will begin testing security cameras equipped with AI-based technology to protect high-profile public figures, Nikkei reports.

AI-equipped cameras can have functions such as “behavior detection,” which analyzes a person’s movements, and “facial recognition,” which identifies a person. The agency will consider only the technology’s ability to detect behavior.

In behavior detection, the system learns to detect unusual movements, such as repeatedly looking around, by observing the patterns of suspicious individuals. Detecting suspicious behavior in crowds can be difficult to do with the human eye, and the system could make security forces better able to eliminate security risks.

The camera system can also spot guns and other suspicious items, as well as intrusion into unauthorized areas, which will be tested as part of the trial – along with the accuracy of detection in testing process.

The announcement comes as the country mourned the anniversary of the fatal shooting of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Saturday.

The National Police Academy will explore the use of the technology before deciding on a wider deployment.

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Judge Reveals the FBI Illegally Spied on a U.S. Senator, FBI Gives Astonishing Response

I’d say “Another day, another example of the FBI being completely out of control,” but these stories happen multiple times a day at this point so I guess it’s time to change the saying to “Another hour, another example of the FBI being completely out of control.”

According to a recently released court opinion, FBI officials illegally accessed a foreign intelligence database to search for information on a U.S. Senator, a state senator, and a state-level judge.

According to the opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, an analyst with the FBI conducted four searches of the intelligence database using the last names of a U.S. Senator and state senator in June of 2022 — both of whom were not named in the filing.

The analyst “had information that a specific foreign intelligence service was targeting” both legislators, but a review of the search by the Justice Department’s National Security Division determined that the search still didn’t meet the proper standards because they weren’t sufficiently tailored.

In a separate instance last October, an FBI specialist ran a search of the 702 database using the social security number of a state judge who “had complained to FBI about alleged civil rights violations perpetrated by a municipal chief of police,” the filing says, that also didn’t meet sufficient standards.

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“I Hope That We Succeed,” Man Suing Massachusetts Health Department For Silently Installing Covid Tracking App On His Phone Speaks Out

A plaintiff in a lawsuit against government “spyware” has shed more light on the situation. In a potentially far-reaching legal dispute, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health is being accused of covertly partnering with tech behemoth Google to clandestinely install COVID-tracing software onto as many as a million unsuspecting smartphone users. This was the claim being presented in a class-action lawsuit filed by the Washington-based New Civil Liberties Alliance.

The legal challenge alleges an explicit violation of both US and Massachusetts constitutional law. It targets not just the perceived breach of privacy but also the audacity of the health department’s actions. “Such brazen disregard for civil liberties violates both the United States and Massachusetts Constitutions, and it must stop now,” the suit asserts.

The case, filed in 2021, was raised on behalf of Massachusetts native Robert Wright and Johnny Kula from New Hampshire, who commutes daily into Massachusetts. The duo vehemently objects to the installation of the COVID-tracing app on their phones sans their explicit consent. Kula, in particular, alleged that his attempt to delete the app proved futile as it surreptitiously resurfaced on his device.

“I hope that we succeed, and this sets a precedent, and that, in the future, no government even considers tracking Americans’ movements 24/7 without their knowledge or consent,” Wright said in a recent statement.

Originally conceived amidst the COVID pandemic’s height, Apple and Google jointly developed a contact tracing system. This system used a smartphone’s Bluetooth capabilities to alert users of potential proximity to an infected individual. An alert from an infected person’s phone could prompt nearby app users to take a COVID test.

The lawsuit asserts that the state’s health department colluded with Google to create a version to be forcefully installed on all Android phones, unbeknownst to the owners.

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Lawmakers Push For Investigation Into Secret “Problem Codes” Database Kept on Unvaccinated Teachers

A group of nine Congressional representatives from New York have taken a united front, urging the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) to conduct a full investigation regarding secret “problem codes” databases, alongside fingerprints, that were kept on teachers who opted not to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. The representatives have penned a letter to the NYC DOE Chancellor, David Banks, expressing their concerns.

The gravity of the issue is rooted in the NYC DOE’s utilization of the same “problem codes” database — ordinarily assigned to individuals accused of severe offenses like child abuse, rape, or assault—for educators who were put on unpaid leave due to their refusal to get vaccinated against COVID-19, as per an internal email in 2022. The comparison of unvaccinated educators with individuals implicated in heinous crimes has created a maelstrom of concerns.

Mary Holland, former president of the Children’s Health Defense (CHD), an organization actively advocating for a bipartisan congressional investigation since March, was emphatic about the lack of transparency. She stated that the city’s “unwillingness to be transparent about how and when these codes are used and under what circumstances requires a thorough and complete investigation.”

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This Anti-Tracking Tool Checks If You’re Being Followed

MATT EDMONDSON, A federal agent with the Department of Homeland Security for the last 21 years, got a call for help last year. A friend working in another part of government—he won’t say which one—was worried that someone might have been tailing them when they were meeting a confidential informant who had links to a terrorist organization. If they were being followed, their source’s cover may have been blown. “It was literally a matter of life and death,” Edmondson says.

“If you’re trying to tell whether you’re being followed, there are surveillance detection routes,” Edmondson says. If you’re driving, you can change lanes on a freeway, perform a U-turn, or change your route. Each can help determine whether a car is following you. But it didn’t feel like enough, Edmondson says. “He had those skills, but he was just looking for an electronic supplement,” Edmondson explains. “He was worried about the safety of the confidential informant.”

After not finding any existing tools that could help, Edmondson, a hacker and digital forensics expert, decided to build his own anti-tracking tool. The Raspberry Pi-powered system, which can be carried around or sit in a car, scans for nearby devices and alerts you if the same phone is detected multiple times within the past 20 minutes. In theory it can alert you if a car is tailing you. Edmondson built the system using parts that cost around $200 in total, and will present the research project at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas this week. He’s also open-sourced its underlying code.

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Coming to a Rooftop Near You: A UFO-Spotting Spycam

An ex-spook made an incredible claim about aliens last week. David Charles Grusch, a former official with the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, told The Debrief that the feds possess what the publication described as “intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.”

But there’s a catch: There’s no actual evidence to back up Grusch’s claim. No evidence that the government is sitting on a bunch of derelict alien spacecraft. And no evidence aliens even exist, for that matter. Worse for Fox Mulder-style true believers, no one’s even looking for extraterrestrials near Earth—at least not with any real scientific rigor.

That last caveat is about to change. Harvard physicist Avi Loeb and his alien-hunting startup, the Galileo Project, is building what they hope will be a global network of skyward-pointing sensors whose purpose is to scan, look, and listen for UFOs—or, to borrow the in-vogue and official U.S. government term, Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAP).

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Your Tax Dollars at Work: Military Monitors Social Media for Mean Posts About Generals

The U.S. Army’s Protective Services Battalion (PSB), the Department of Defense’s equivalent of the Secret Service, now monitors social media to see if anyone has posted negative comments about the country’s highest-ranking officers.

Per a report by the Intercept, the PSB’s remit includes protecting officers from “embarrassment,” in addition to more pressing threats like kidnapping and assassination.

An Army procurement document from 2022 obtained by the Intercept reveals that the PSB now monitors social media for “negative sentiment” about the officers under its protection, as well as for “direct, indirect, and veiled” threats.

“This is an ongoing PSIFO/PIB” — Protective Services Field Office/Protective Intelligence Branch — “requirement to provide global protective services for senior Department of Defense (DoD) officials, adequate security in order to mitigate online threats (direct, indirect, and veiled), the identification of fraudulent accounts and positive or negative sentiment relating specifically to our senior high-risk personnel.”

Per the report, the Army intends not just to monitor platforms for “negative sentiment,” but also to pinpoint the location of posters.

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Las Vegas police set up cameras at house where family called 911 to report aliens

Las Vegas Metro police set up cameras in the yard of the family who called 911 to report an alien sighting, the department confirmed to the 8 News Now Investigators.

On April 30 around 11:50 p.m., a Las Vegas Metro police officer’s body camera video recorded as something streaked low across the sky. Several people across eastern California, Nevada and Utah reported seeing the flash, according to the American Meteor Society.

About 40 minutes later, a young man called 911, saying he and his family saw something fall from the sky and that there were two moving things in his northwest valley backyard.

“There’s like an 8-foot person beside it and another one is inside us and it has big eyes and it’s looking at us — and it’s still there,” the caller told a dispatcher around 12:30 a.m. on May 1. “They’re like 8 foot, 9 feet, 10 foot. They look like aliens to us. Big eyes. They have big eyes. Like, I can’t explain it, and big mouth. They’re shiny eyes and they’re human. They’re 100% not human.”

The Metro police call log the 8 News Now Investigators obtained shows several other family members confirmed the sighting to police. The dispatcher sent two officers to the home to investigate. The 8 News Now Investigators obtained body camera video from both officers.

“I’m so nervous right now,” one officer said as he is preparing to drive to the house. “I have butterflies bro — saw a shooting star and now these people say there’s aliens in their backyard.”

In the days after the report, at least one officer interviewed neighbors, who said they too felt something “land” in the area, sources told the 8 News Now Investigators.

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An Anti-Porn App Put Him in Jail and His Family Under Surveillance

ON A WEDNESDAY morning in May, Hannah got a call from her lawyer—there was a warrant out for her husband’s arrest. Her thoughts went straight to her kids. They were going to come home from school and their father would be gone. “It burned me,” Hannah says, her voice breaking. “He hasn’t done anything to get his bond revoked, and they couldn’t prove he had.”

Hannah’s husband is now awaiting trial in jail, in part because of an anti-pornography app called Covenant Eyes. The company explicitly says the app is not meant for use in criminal proceedings, but the probation department in Indiana’s Monroe County has been using it for the past month to surveil not only Hannah’s husband but also the devices of everyone in their family. To protect their privacy, WIRED is not disclosing their surname or the names of individual family members. Hannah agreed to use her nickname.

Prosecutors in Monroe County this spring charged Hannah’s husband with possession of child sexual abuse material—a serious crime that she says he did not commit and to which he pleaded not guilty. Given the nature of the charges, the court ordered that he not have access to any electronic devices as a condition of his pretrial release from jail. To ensure he complied with those terms, the probation department installed Covenant Eyes on Hannah’s phone, as well as those of her two children and her mother-in-law. 

In near real time, probation officers are being fed screenshots of everything Hannah’s family views on their devices. From images of YouTube videos watched by her 14-year-old daughter to online underwear purchases made by her 80-year-old mother-in-law, the family’s entire digital life is scrutinized by county authorities. “I’m afraid to even communicate with our lawyer,” Hannah says. “If I mention anything about our case, I’m worried they are going to see it and use it against us.”

Covenant Eyes is part of a multimillion-dollar market of “accountability” apps sold to churches and parents as a tool to police online activity. For a monthly fee, the app monitors every single thing a user does on their devices, then sends the data it collects, including screenshots, to an “ally” or “accountability partner,” who can review the user’s online activities.

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