Tag: surveillance

More on the Secret Binder That Could Expose Officials in Russia Collusion Hoax

I reported earlier about the bombshell report that blew apart the “official” account of the start of the Russia collusion hoax and explained that it was started by the Obama CIA. 

The report – written by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag – details how the Obama administration CIA allegedly and improperly called on foreign allies from the “Five Eyes Nations” (the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) to surveil 26 Trump aides as “targets for collection and misinformation.” The journalists got this information from sources close to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) investigation.

That’s big news. Shellenberger told Fox News that it was both illegal and election interference. 

Some of the information on this is in a binder, Shellenberger said. There has been a rumor about the binder and speculation that Mar-a-Lago was raided because of information that former President Donald Trump may have had on Crossfire Hurricane. 

Shellenberger is now talking about his and fellow journalist’s new report that gives more information about the secret binder. 

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In Lawsuit Against Spying On Assange Visitors, CIA Will Invoke ‘State Secrets Privilege’

The CIA plans to invoke the “state secrets privilege” to block a lawsuit against the agency for allegedly spying on Americans, who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange while he was living under political asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy.

In December, United States Judge John Koeltl dismissed multiple claims brought by four American attorneys and journalists against the CIA. But Koeltl also determined that the Americans had grounds to sue the CIA for violating their “reasonable expectation of privacy” under the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

The Americans alleged that the CIA and CIA Director Mike Pompeo directed UC Global, a Spanish security company, to carry out a spying operation against Assange. The security company copied the contents of their electronic devices and provided the data to the CIA.

On February 8, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jean-David Barnea notified the court [PDF] that the CIA would assert the state secrets privilege.

“After the court’s recent decision on the government’s motion to dismiss, the sole remaining claim in this case is the plaintiff’s allegation that, at the CIA’s request, the Spanish defendants illegally downloaded the contents of the plaintiffs’ electronic devices when they visited Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London and transmitted these materials to the CIA.”

The government continued, “Any factual inquiry into these allegations—whether they are true or not—would implicate classified information, as it would require the CIA to reveal what intelligence-gathering activities it did or did not engage in, among other things.”

“Because the CIA cannot publicly reveal the very facts over which it is seeking authorization to assert the state secrets privilege,” the government indicated that it would not respond to the Americans’ discovery requests or any allegations in the complaint. 

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Treasury Department’s Janet Yellen Dodges Questions on Financial Surveillance of “MAGA,” “Trump”

A wave of backlash for the Biden administration has been triggered following a probe into a surveillance mission by the Treasury Department targeting Americans. Republicans have been seeking answers about the initiative, which involved surveilling bank records of Americans for “extremist” activities post-January 6.

Recent reports revealed a controversial directive from the Treasury Department regarding the monitoring of financial transactions. Under this directive, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) asked financial institutions to investigate their clients’ transaction data for terms such as “MAGA” and “Trump.” This sparked an outcry from Republicans who questioned the government’s monitoring strategies.

This comes following a revelation of the specific sectors and demographic being targeted — Trump supporters, patrons of outdoor stores like Cabela’s, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Bass Pro Shops, and individuals who bought religious texts. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen encountered numerous questions about these retrieval requests during her appearances on Capitol Hill this week.

However, these intense inquiries were deflected by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who responded that the matter was under investigation and that she didn’t have extensive knowledge about the situation.

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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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