Tag: surveillance

New York Bodega Owners to City: Drop Dead!

It’s been more than 50 years since the New York Daily News reported that President Gerald Ford would veto any bailout for the city’s endless red ink with the headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Ford never said exactly that, of course, but the headline created such a backlash that Ford backed down a few months later, putting his signature on $2.3 billion worth of emergency loans. That’s about $14.3 billion in 2026 money — a very nice little bailout, indeed.

Today, New York City bodega owners know that nobody will bail them out when the city’s Commie-Islamist Mayor Zohran Mamdani puts them out of business, which is why they just silently told him to drop dead.

Or at least that’s the impression I got from a Monday morning New York Post exclusive detailing the showdown between Gracie Mansion and local retailers threatened by Mamdani’s campaign promise to build and operate city-run grocery stores.

“Business owners gripe that city officials are only now seeking their input — and seemingly as an afterthought — after sparking alarms in April with a surprise plan to build a public grocery store in East Harlem at La Marqueta,” the Post reported. “That store will cost a whopping $30 million to build – and threatens the livelihood of more than a dozen existing stores nearby.”

All of that is to be expected. The city can throw Other People’s Money at its socialist stores until it runs out, while typical grocers operate on razor-thin 2% profit margins. Considering the services they provide and the complexity of their operations, the real crime is how little money they make.

But I digress, as I usually do.

What I love about this story — and what makes it so newsworthy — is the sheer gall of the Mamdani administration. 

“We met with bodega owners so they could help us plan and ensure that we take into account their challenges and their role as a part of the food ecosystem,” Julie Su, deputy mayor for “economic justice,” told the Post in a statement. But what really happened was that bodega owners reported to City Hall last week at Su’s invitation for a roundtable discussion, “only to get barraged with ‘intrusive’ questions about their businesses,” according to the Post’s source.

The questionnaire bodega owners were expected to fill out included questions like, “What items are sold the most at your stores?” and “Where is your profit margin the greatest?” 

The correct answer to questions like those is, “Get stuffed.” The polite answer is, “Try running a bodega and figure it out for yourself, or get stuffed.”

Instead, an anonymous bodega owner who spoke to the Post said, “They wanted us to share proprietary information with them but they don’t answer our questions and that’s why there is distrust.”

“Tell us how to run you out of business with your hard-won institutional knowledge and your tax dollars” is pretty much the height of gall, I thought. But then I read the part where Su told the Post, “One of the questions we wanted to understand is whether there are key products bodegas sell and rely on that we should not sell. That’s how serious we are about not undercutting them.”

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Meta pauses an AI training program that tracks employees’ keystrokes after an internal leak

Meta is pausing an internal AI training program after sensitive data was accessible across the entire company, according to screenshots obtained by Business Insider.

A screenshot showed that the leak exposed employees’ private conversations, performance data, and transcriptions. The incident was classified as a SEV 2 on a scale of 0 to 5, with 0 being the most severe.

A Meta spokesperson confirmed the incident and said the company is investigating.

“We have carefully designed this program with privacy safeguards, and while we have no indication at this time that any data was improperly accessed by Meta employees, we’re pausing it while we investigate,” the spokesperson said.

In April, Meta announced the AI training program, called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), which was intended to improve the company’s AI models by using its staff’s keystrokes and mouse movements as training data. The program, which is mandatory for most staff, sparked a backlash from employees who felt uncomfortable with their data being recorded, Business Insider previously reported.

This leak is causing frustration within Meta, according to screenshots seen by Business Insider, with employees critical that data wasn’t locked down from the start.

“I am incensed,” one employee wrote on Monday about the recent leak in an internal group, according to a screenshot obtained by Business Insider.

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Missouri AG Catherine Hanaway Launches Lawsuit Against Baby Monitors and Home Cameras Company ‘Lorex’ Over Concealed CCP and Chinese Military Ties

Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway is taking aim at a major surveillance technology company over what she says are hidden ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese military.

Hanaway announced legal action against Lorex, a popular manufacturer of baby monitors, home security cameras, and surveillance systems sold by major American retailers including Costco, Best Buy, and Amazon.

“Families and retailers like Costco, Best Buy, and Amazon are being lied to,” Hanaway wrote. “Lorex, a leading manufacturer of baby monitors and home cameras, is concealing material ties to the CCP and Chinese military. We’re taking them to court.”

The company’s products have maintained deep ties to Dahua, its former owner and ongoing supplier of critical components, even after Dahua was designated a Chinese Military Company that poses a direct threat to U.S. national security. Researchers found Lorex firmware routing straight back to Dahua servers, giving the Chinese Communist Party potential real-time access to the most intimate moments inside American homes.

These are the cameras watching babies breathe in their cribs. Recording children’s voices. Capturing family life in bedrooms and living rooms across Missouri and the country. Sold at Costco, Best Buy, Amazon, Staples, Menards, Micro Center, Office Depot, and directly through Lorex’s own site.

“The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world,” Attorney General Hanaway said in a statement. “Missouri will not allow the CCP to put its hand on our cradles. Parents place these cameras over cribs and in bedrooms to protect their children, not to invite a foreign adversary into their homes.”

“Lorex tells families its video cameras are ‘private by design’ while concealing ties to a Chinese military company,” she continued. “These cameras watch our babies breathe, capture our children’s voices, and record families’ most intimate moments. When companies won’t tell the truth about their connection to hostile foreign governments, my office will step in to protect families.”

The lawsuit, brought under Missouri’s Merchandising Practices Act, seeks up to $1,000 in restitution for every Missouri consumer who purchased a Lorex camera in the last five years, plus more than $1.8 million in damages and a court order barring the company from continuing its deceptive practices.

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A Nation of Suspects

Some of the recent legal challenges to the use of surveillance by the Department of Homeland Security upon Americans have resulted in the revelation of truly terrifying behavior by the government, in direct defiance of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. We now know that the federal government spies on innocent Americans without suspicion and without warrants.

The spying seems to fall into several categories. The National Security Agency, which is in the Department of Defense, employs about 60,000 domestic spies. These are the folks who want us to believe that they go through the trouble of making applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for warrants to spy on foreigners.

Actually, from time to time they do go to this court, but their travels there — where judges are frisked upon entering and leaving the courthouse by the NSA agents who appear before them — serve as fig leaves for their massive warrantless spying on Americans. The FISA Court is unconstitutional because it issues warrants based on probable cause of communicating with a foreign person, rather than on probable cause of crime as the Fourth Amendment requires.

The courts have ruled consistently since the 1960s that spying — surveillance, as the feds call it — is a search, and the capture of data from a surveillance is a seizure.

The Fourth Amendment protects all persons in America — not just Americans — from warrantless searches and seizures of their “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” There are some well-recognized exceptions to this constitutional baseline, such as evidence that will quickly vanish or be seriously degraded, but those exceptions do not apply here as the NSA captures in real time all keystrokes on all digital devices and all fiber optic data transmitted into, out of and within the United States.

The judges of the FISA Court surely know that the Department of Justice lawyers and NSA agents who appear before them are going through a charade, and the court has been made a part of it. The charade is the pretense that all spying is done pursuant to the warrants that FISA Court judges issue. Former NSA agents have revealed publicly that this is hardly the case.

Nevertheless, the lowered standard from probable cause of crime to probable cause of communicating to a foreign person was crafted by Congress — in another of its many moments heedless of the Constitution. After a few years of this, the FISA Court began to issue warrants for spying on the Americans who communicate with foreigners, out to the sixth degree. A sixth grader can do the math, as this leads to hundreds of millions of Americans whose communications are captured.

A second category of spying is employed by the DHS. The DHS — now a 250,000-person strong federal police department nowhere countenanced by the Constitution — has sophisticated software that can read fingerprints at 15 feet and irises at 15 inches. So, if you wave goodbye or good riddance to an ICE agent, and he holds up his mobile phone, and you are in the federal system for any benign reason, he has captured your bank, health, legal and commercial records on the spot. If he talks to you in your car and is within 15 inches of your face, he can capture the same data.

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WHAT? China Demands Foreign Intelligence Services Stop Using ‘Spy Turtles’ To Scan Its Waters

The assets from the animal kingdom.

After India complained of the Mumbai ‘Chinese spy pigeon’ and the Ukrainians warned of the ‘Russian spy beluga whale’, the allegations of utilizing animals for information gathering see a new chapter.

China has warned against foreign governments using sensor-fitted fish and turtles to spy on its waters.

The Telegraph reported:

“In a post on social media, Beijing’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) claimed that ‘foreign intelligence services are continuously collecting and stealing sensitive marine data’.

Among the different types of espionage equipment allegedly in use, the agency claimed that fish and turtles had been fitted with sensors and were found to be collecting data such as ‘water temperature, salinity and ocean currents’, which were then transmitted via satellite in real time.”

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Under Pressure, Michigan Makes It Easier to Opt Out of Vaccine Tracking

Michigan health freedom and privacy advocates scored a win this month when the state’s health department stopped using a vaccine information handout that failed to explain to parents how they can opt out of the state’s vaccine tracking program, and didn’t include an opt-out form.

It’s the latest development in health freedom and privacy advocates’ efforts to get the state health department to stop adding a thick layer of bureaucratic red tape — which isn’t even required under state law — that makes it difficult for families to opt out of vaccines and vaccination tracking.

“While this is definitely a win, there is still a long way to go,” said journalist and Michigan resident Jeremy R. Hammond, who has a 13-year-old unvaccinated son.

Until now, the Michigan Department of Health & Human Services (MDHHS) largely avoided telling parents what the tracking system is and how they can opt out of it, Hammond said.

This matters because the state’s vaccination tracking system, Michigan Care Improvement Registry (MCIR), causes “pressure and coercion” for families who prefer not to vaccinate, according to Dr. Remington Nevin, medical director for the St. Clair County Health Department in rural eastern Michigan.

Dubbed “Michigan’s ‘RFK Jr.’” by Bridge Michigan, Nevin is an epidemiologist with multiple degrees from Johns Hopkins University. He is also a former U.S. Army major and preventive medicine officer.

Nevin spoke with The Defender about why it’s crucial for parents to be able to opt out of MCIR — and how he submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that likely led the state health department to stop using the old form and start making it easier for parents to opt out.

State health department violated Michigan law

The MCIR system sends reminders to medical staff to encourage them to keep their pediatric patients up to date with the American Academy of Pediatrics or the American Academy of Family Physicians childhood vaccine schedule.

When a child visits a clinic, front desk staff and nurses may tell parents their child is due for a particular vaccine, even though “the parent and the child’s physician may have decided together through shared clinical decision-making to not give that shot until later on in the child’s life,” Nevin said.

Michigan law requires the state health department to give parents a form — before vaccinating a child — notifying parents that they can object to having their child automatically enrolled in MCIR.

But for years, MDHHS failed to give parents any such form.

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Angry Pentagon Sources Leak Report Of Israel’s ‘Unhinged’ Spying On US Officials

It’s no secret that Israeli spying and surveillance is pervasive, and it is often even directed at its most powerful ally and backer, the United States. But the phenomenon has escalated of late, outraging Washington intelligence officials.

Behind the scenes of this alliance which mainstream media and pundits typically project as essentially untouchable, deep-seated friction is boiling over. In an unprecedented move, the Pentagon has officially elevated Israel’s counterintelligence threat level to its highest possible category, driven by surging internal alarm that this primary Mideast regional ally is aggressively ramping up espionage operations targeting senior US officials – even Trump’s own top Iran negotiator.

The intelligence warning, freshly reported this weekend by NBC News and The New York Times, highlights a profound rift within the national security apparatus as tensions mount between the Trump administration and Israel over the ongoing joint war on Iran.

The revelation’s timing is interesting, given it comes after Axios reported at the start of this month that on a phone call President Trump ‘steamrolled’ Prime Minister Netanyahu. Trump is said to have been “pissed” and at one point yelled and berated Netanyahu, saying “What the fuck are you doing?”

And now, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is broadcasting an internal alert raising Israel’s specific threat designation to “critical”. According to details revealed in a Sunday NBC report:

The designation stems from concerns within the Pentagon that Israel is making a particular effort to surveil top U.S. officials to get information on the Trump administration’s internal deliberations and decision-making on the conflicts in the Middle East, the officials said.

The DIA assessment includes a seven-page document and features a chart, according to one of the current U.S. officials. The document says the assessment of Israel is that its ability to conduct human espionage and technical collection is at a “critical level,” according to the official.

And parallel to this, a report by the NY Times lists out names that are very high level within the Trump administration. Israel has allegedly focused its electronic and human efforts to eavesdrop on the following officials (likely among others):

  • Steve Witkoff, Trump’s premier regional negotiator.
  • Elbridge A. Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official.
  • Michael P. DiMino IV, one of Colby’s primary deputies.

The Israeli embassy in Washingtons has slammed the reports as ‘completely false’: “This entire story is false and sourced to someone who doesn’t have any knowledge of what’s going on,” it said in a statement.

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House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan Warns British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood To Stop Backdoor Spying on US Citizens

Not a friendly move by the Brits.

In the context of a grave crisis in the ‘special relationship’ between the US and the UK, a top House representative is warning the British government against ‘using sensitive backdoor technology’ to spy on Americans.

Yesterday (5), Donald J. Trump’s ally, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, wrote to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood alerting her about a ‘lack of security cooperation’.

Jordan warned that Britain ‘may be using encryption to gain access to US citizens’ private data’.

The Telegraph reported:

“[Jordan] pointed to the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act 2016, which allows the government to issue secret orders known as ‘technical capability notices’.”

As the leader of the House judiciary committee, Jordan has led investigations into the activities of the FBI and US spy agencies – and now he is targeting the United Kingdom.

“The UK may be building ‘backdoors into their encrypted services’, he wrote to Ms. Mahmood.

US companies would be prohibited from informing anyone about these backdoors without the express permission of the Home Secretary.”

Jordan told Sir Christian Turner, the ambassador to the UK, that a US company who wanted to discuss a ‘technical capability notice’ with members of Congress, something that would require Mahmood’s permission.

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Congress Has A New Intelligence Bureau and It’s Spying On Americans Critical Of AI

As rage about artificial intelligence and the data centers powering it grows, Congress is taking notice — not with any legislation or law, but by spying on public opposition.

A newly created intelligence agency of the Congress (yes, it has its own now) is warning that legislators are in danger from an angry public. The U.S. Capitol Police Intelligence Services Bureau, created after January 6 and in parallel to the 18-member Executive Branch intelligence community, laid out the warning in an internal intelligence report produced in April.

“ISB has prepared this Intelligence Note to provide the US Capitol Police and law enforcement personnel with information related to recent threats and attacks likely linked to grievances concerning data centers,” the report says.

There’s only one problem: the report admits that there is no evidence of any actual threat to Congress.

“The US Capitol Police is not investigating any data center-motivated threats to Members of Congress,” the report says.

Nonetheless, it goes on to warn that artificial intelligence “related policies introduced on the Hill and in local communities are likely to continue drawing opposition, increasing potential concerns for public officials.”

The Congressional intelligence office that authored the report was formed in the aftermath of January 6th and justified to bring the congressional police force “in line” with federal intelligence agencies and thereby gain more access to the massive existing intelligence community. The “intelligence note” was also distributed to police organizations and state-level fusion centers across the country.

“We now have a world class intelligence operation,” then-Chief of the U.S. Capitol Police Thomas Manger said last May. “We are significant players in the intelligence community in the Washington, D.C., region and, frankly, all over the country … Whereas before, we were basically just — we were consumers of information. The FBI would give us intelligence, other agencies would give us intelligence. Now we are gathering our own.”

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Aww Look At The Cute Dancing Robot Police State Surveillance Dog…

Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dogs are being deployed at designated World Cup venues in the US to perform perimeter security inspections, prompting concerns over the advance of surveillance tech.

The company has stated that the machines “will be used to assist security personnel with investigating things like suspicious packages or other potentially hazardous materials.”

These four-legged fiends are set to roam, and even dance (oh how cute) around AT&T Stadium in Dallas and other FIFA sites ahead of the 2026 tournament, sending live feeds back to human teams with their 360-degree cameras, thermal sensors, acoustic pickups, and AI anomaly detection.

“The robots do not have facial recognition capabilities,” a Boston Dynamics spokesperson told WFAA, insisting they spot unauthorized people in restricted zones without utilising facial scans for now, after a viral TikTok video made the claim.

Hyundai, the South Korean owner of Boston Dynamics and major FIFA sponsor, added the bots “will support on-site security operations, helping contribute to a safer tournament environment.”

But peel back the puppy-like head tilts and choreographed spins and you see the real rollout: tireless mechanical sentries normalizing constant surveillance on American soil. They look fun today at the soccer spectacle expecting half a million visitors. Tomorrow the same platforms patrol streets, malls, and events nationwide, always watching, always recording.

This isn’t some isolated gimmick. It’s fast becoming commonplace in cities such as Atlanta, where robot security dogs prowl apartment complexes and parking lots issuing verbal commands to citizens.

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