Tag: surveillance

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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Alleged Russian ‘Spy’ Whale Reappears Off Sweden’s Coast

A harness-wearing Beluga whale discovered in Norway’s far northern region of Finnmark in 2019 has reappeared off Sweden’s coast. It’s believed the Russian military trained the whale. 

Sebastian Strand, a marine biologist with the OneWhale organization, a group that tracks the beluga whale named “Hvaldimir,” said he was recently spotted in Hunnebostrand, off Sweden’s southwestern coast. 

“We don’t know why he has sped up so fast right now,” especially since he is moving “very quickly away from his natural environment,” Strand told AFP News. 

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Disturbing Testimony Reveals FBI Collected License Plate Numbers of Parents Attending School Board Meetings

During Thursday’s hearing by the House Judiciary Select Committee on the weaponization of the federal government, FBI whistleblower Stephen Friend testified that he was ordered to write down the license plate numbers of parents who attended school board meetings.

Friend — a 12-year veteran of the bureau — was suspended after he refused to take part in a SWAT-style raid on a January 6 suspect who was facing misdemeanor charges last summer. “I have an oath to uphold the Constitution,” Mr. Friend, a 12-year veteran of the bureau, told his supervisors when he declined to participate in the raid on August 24, 2022. “I have a moral objection and want to be considered a conscientious objector.”

On Thursday, U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) questioned the FBI whistleblowers on the bureau’s “terrorism symbol guide.”

The agents told Gaetz that voicing support for the second amendment, the Betsy Ross flag and writing “2A” were all among the FBI’s designated domestic terrorism symbols. Gaetz then turned his attention to Friend and asked about school board meetings.

Friend told the panel that the FBI directed him to record license plate numbers from vehicles belonging to parents opposed to leftist agendas at school board meetings. The suspended agent was one of those parents himself, having attended a number of local school board meetings to voice curriculum concerns.

“After I attended privately my colleagues teased me that [the FBI] were probably going to start investigating me,” Friend said.

In addition, Friend revealed that he was pulled from cases involving child predators in order to investigate parents at school board meetings.

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Smartphones With Popular Qualcomm Chip Secretly Share Private Information With US Chip-Maker

During our security research we found that smart phones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm. This data is sent without user consent, unencrypted, and even when using a Google-free Android distribution. This is possible because of proprietary Qualcomm software which provides hardware support also sends the data. Affected smart phones are Sony Xperia XA2 and likely the Fairphone and many more Android phones which use popular Qualcomm chips.

The smartphone is a device we entrust with practically all of our secrets. After all, this is the most ubiquitous device we carry with us 24 hours per day. Both Apple and Android with their App Store and Google Play Store are spying on its paying customers. As a private alternative some tech-savy people install a Google-free version of Android on their ordinary smartphone. As an example we analyzed such setup with a Sony Xperia XA2 and found that this may not protect sufficiently because proprietary vendor software, different from the (open source) operating system, sends private information to the chip maker Qualcomm. This finding also applies to other smartphone with a Qualcomm chip such as the Fairphone.

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Neighborhood Watch Out: Cops Are Incorporating Private Cameras Into Their Real-Time Surveillance Networks

Police have their sights set on every surveillance camera in every business, on every porch, in all the cities and counties of the country. Grocery store trips, walks down the street, and otherwise minding your own business when outside your home could soon come under the ever-present eye of the government. In a quiet but rapid expansion of law enforcement surveillance, U.S. cities are buying and promoting products from Georgia-based company Fusus in order to access on-demand, live video from public and private camera networks.

The company sells police a cloud-based platform for creating real-time crime centers and a streamlined way for officers to interface with their various surveillance streams, including predictive policing, gunshot detection, license plate readers, and drones. For the public, Fusus also sells hardware that can be added to private cameras and convert privately-owned video into instantly-accessible parts of the police surveillance network. In Atlanta, Memphis, Orlando, and dozens of other locations, police officers have been asking the public to buy into a Fusus-fueled surveillance system, at times sounding like eager pitchmen trying to convince people and businesses to trade away privacy for a false sense of security.

The model expands police access to personal information collected by private cameras that would otherwise require warrants and community conversation. Because these cameras are privately owned, police can enjoy their use without having to create and follow records retention and deletion policies.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been collecting and reviewing documents about cities’ uses of Fusus, which counts nearly 150 jurisdictions as customers. You can access these records on DocumentCloud. EFF also shared these documents with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which published its report today.

Police surveillance threatens constitutionally protected activities. It gives police the ability to surreptitiously spy on and track people of no real or alleged criminal concern. It creates caches of sensitive, personal information that can be retained indefinitely. Fusus is compounding these issues by expanding police access to surveillance cameras and integrating the cameras with a number of other surveillance services. This increases the ways police are able to record, track, and marginalize communities.

Deciding whether to expand police video surveillance to every corner of our lives should never happen without strong community conversation, transparency, and real respect for procurement rules and the public’s liberty. Yet cities’ responses to public records requests reveal a lack of clear guidance on when live access can be utilized, with very few locations able to provide policies regarding appropriate and specific police use of the system.

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Pentagon Docs Allegedly Leaked by Jack Teixeira Reveal at Least 4 Additional Chinese Spy Balloons

Classified documents allegedly leaked by Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira reveal that US intelligence officials were aware of as many as four other Chinese spy balloons apart from the one that floated across the country earlier this year.

One of the previously undisclosed balloons flew over a US carrier strike group in the Pacific, according to the Washington Post.

Another Chinese craft, code-named Bulger-21 by US officials, circumnavigated the Earth from December 2021 until May 2022, according to top-secret documents reviewed by the news outlet.

A third balloon named Accardo-21 is mentioned in the documents and a fourth is referenced to have crashed in the South China Sea, the Washington Post reports, noting that it is unclear if Bulger-21 and Accardo-21 were the same balloons that crashed and flew over the carrier strike group.

The documents also show that the balloon that crossed over the continental US in January and February before being shot down off the coast of South Carolina was code-named Killeen-23.

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