Tag: surveillance

Now They Can Actually Use WiFi “To See People Through Walls”

If you truly wanted complete and total privacy, you would need to give up nearly all of the technology that you are currently using.  I wish that wasn’t true, but this is the reality of the world in which we now live.

The “Big Brother surveillance grid” is constantly growing and evolving all around us, and those who are using it to watch, monitor, track, influence and control us have an insatiable appetite for more data.  They are constantly pushing the envelope, and most people don’t seem to care.  But if we don’t stand up for our rights now, eventually we will find ourselves living in a society where there is absolutely no privacy at all.

In fact, many would argue that we are already there.

Recently, I was horrified to learn that researchers have been working on a way to use WiFi to look through the walls of our homes to see what we are doing.  The following is a brief excerpt from a Vice article entitled “Scientists Are Getting Eerily Good at Using WiFi to ‘See’ People Through Walls in Detail”…

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed a method for detecting the three dimensional shape and movements of human bodies in a room, using only WiFi routers.

To do this, they used DensePose, a system for mapping all of the pixels on the surface of a human body in a photo. DensePose was developed by London-based researchers and Facebook’s AI researchers. From there, according to their recently-uploaded preprint paper published on arXiv, they developed a deep neural network that maps WiFi signals’ phase and amplitude sent and received by routers to coordinates on human bodies.

As we have seen with so many other highly intrusive surveillance technologies, those that have developed this method are touting the benefits that it could have…

The researchers ague that their Wi-Fi approach to imaging humans in households could be applied to home healthcare, where patients may not want to be monitored with a camera in places like the bathroom or with other sensors and tracking devices.

No matter how old I get, I don’t ever want anyone using any technology to monitor me while I am taking a dump.

If that makes me old-fashioned, so be it.

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Elon Musk’s Twitter Goes Dark on Government Data Grabs

TWITTER BOSS ELON Musk has railed against what he sees as U.S. government attempts to “censor” the social media company. 

“As (outgoing) Chair of House Intelligence, did you approve hidden state censorship in direct violation of the Constitution of the United States @RepAdamSchiff?” he asked one congressman in a tweet last December.

Musk has also promised, over and over again, to build a more transparent Twitter — one that makes it clear when a government agency requests a user’s data, or asks to take an account offline. “Transparency is the key to trust,” he tweeted around the same time. 

For a decade, Twitter published rundowns twice a year of all of those government requests. But under Musk, that appears to have ended. 

Despite Musk’s rhetoric about government bullying of social media, his company hasn’t published one of the formerly regular transparency reports detailing what governments are demanding from Twitter — and whether the company is bending to them.

It’s a development that’s horrified privacy advocates and former Twitter employees alike.

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Local Farmer Sounds the Alarm: Why Did East Palestine Launch ‘MyID’ Emergency Service to Surveil Biometrics 1 Week Before Ohio Train Derailment?

A man who lives nine miles away from where the Norfolk Southern train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in eastern Ohio reached out to The Gateway Pundit to sound the alarm on the bizarre coincidences that continue to pile up surrounding the incident.

Bob Moore, a 70-year-old farmer and longtime resident of East Palestine, initially ignored local news reports urging residents to sign up for “MyID” to receive a new biometric tracking device that provides first responders updates about an individual’s health conditions amid an emergency or “major disaster.”

But the suspicious timing of the government’s distribution of this health-monitoring digital ID, exactly a week before the disaster, warrants answers, Moore told TGP in an exclusive interview.

“It was exactly a week before the derailment happened,” Moore said. “The people were asked to go to the local fire department in downtown East Palestine to get that MyID.

“They began monitoring your physical activity, your heart rate, your respiration, anything you might be exposed to. I see this as the kind of censor you would put on an astronaut or on an athlete that you wanted to track to see how he’d react to stress or being winded, or in this instance chemical exposure. It’s a monitoring device.”

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Discover To Begin Tracking Purchases At Gun Retailers Starting In April

One month ago, credit-card provider Discover Financial Services, issuer of the eponymous credit card, stunned markets when it unveiled in its latest forecast that it expects its 2023 charge off rate to more than double from the 2022 average, hitting a multi-year high and hinting that the US consumer was about to hit a brick wall

Last week, Discover decided to cement that not only would its charge off rate soar but it was about to lose millions of customers after it told Reuters that it would effectively oversee (i.e., spy on) its clients by allowing its network to track purchases at gun retailers come April, making it the first among its peers to publicly give a date for moving ahead with the initiative, which is aimed at helping authorities probe gun-related crimes.

Discover’s announcement came after the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which decides on the classification of merchant categories used by payment cards, approved in September the launch of a dedicated code for gun retailers.

Proponents of the move, almost exclusively Democratic politicians and gun control activists, say it will allow financial institutions to better assist authorities in investigating crimes involving gun violence in the United States. While the codes will not show specific items purchased, some Republican politicians have spoken out against the move, arguing it could violate the privacy of U.S. citizens lawfully buying guns.

Discover said it will include the new code in its next policy and product update to merchants and payment partners in April.

“We remain focused on continuing to protect and support lawful purchases on our network while protecting the privacy of cardholders,” Discover said in its statement to Reuters.

Curiously, a Discover spokesperson said following the publication of the story that other payment network companies had already decided to implement the new code in April, and that Discover was following their lead. While the Discover spokesperson declined to name those peers, it means that any legal purchase of guns now triggers a whole array of red lights and ringing bells across the government which has taken its crusade against legal gun ownership and purchases to unprecedented levels in recent years, even as gun-related crime in such democrat-controlled cities as Chicago and Baltimore hits record highs every year.

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US Officials Now Say Chinese “Spy Balloon” Flew Over The US Accidentally

The Washington Post has a weird new article out citing multiple anonymous US officials saying that the Chinese “spy balloon” we’ve been hearing about for the last two weeks was never intended for a surveillance mission over North America at all.

The article is titled “U.S. tracked China spy balloon from launch on Hainan Island along unusual path,” and throughout it alternates between the objective journalistic terms “suspected spy balloon” and “suspected Chinese surveillance balloon” and the US government’s terms “spy balloon” and “airborne surveillance device”. There is at this time no publicly available evidence that the balloon which was famously shot down on February 4th was in fact an instrument of Chinese espionage; the Chinese government has said that the balloon was a civilian meteorological airship that got blown off course, and the Pentagon’s own assessment is that a Chinese spy balloon would not “create significant value added over and above what the PRC is likely able to collect through things like satellites in Low Earth Orbit.”

What makes the article so weird is that it actually contains claims which substantiate Beijing’s assertion that this was in fact a balloon that got blown off course, yet it keeps repeating the unevidenced claim that it was a “spy balloon”.

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Balloons, UFOs, fighter jets, oh my! What’s really going on in the skies above America…

In case you’re living under a rock and hadn’t heard, there was another “UFO” shot down over the Great Lakes this weekend.

According to reports, the US military had been monitoring Lake Michigan earlier in the day, and even closed the airspace for a short while before giving the “all clear” and reopening.

And just as Americans breathed a collective sigh of relief and returned to their Super Bowl snacks, word came down that fighter jets had shot down yet another “UFO” over Lake Huron, near the Canadian border, after the object ventured too close to a sensitive military site.

And if that wasn’t enough fuel for the already-raging media “UFO” bonfire, things heated up even more after General Glen VanHerck, commander of U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) announced that he wasn’t ruling out “aliens.”

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What’s Known So Far About The “Cylindrical & Silverish Gray” Object Downed Over Alaska

Recovery efforts utilizing military planes and helicopters in the far northeast arctic region of Alaska continue, where on Friday an unidentified object was shot down by F-22 jets.

Still, little definitive is known, including who owns the object or where it came from; however, in media and US official reports the ‘high-altitude’ object is increasingly being referenced as a another balloon.

Biden called the operation a “success” – and yet didn’t engage reporters’ questions directly when asked about follow-up details. 

What has become clear is that Biden gave the order to shoot it down before knowing who owned it or where it came from, or whether it was state-owned or perhaps owned by a corporation. And of course the question remains: was this another Chinese spy balloon? Or was it a weather research balloon just downed over Alaska?

According to details from White House and Pentagon briefings on Friday, including descriptions from senior officials, here’s what’s known at this point:

  • It flew at 40,000 feet
  • Deemed a safety threat to civilian aircraft
  • Unknown origin or ownership 
  • Cylindrical and silverish gray
  • Roughly the size of a car
  • Smaller than the Chinese ‘spy’ balloon shot down last Satursday
  • Object not maneuverable or propelled 
  • Shot down by US F-22 with sidewinder missile

In the meantime the media is only hyping the rampant online speculation into overdrive…

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First Balloons, Now Space Lasers: Chinese Satellite Blasts Green Lights Over Hawaii

Chinese spy balloons aren’t the only strange thing flying over U.S. airspace as of late.

Numerous green laser lights were spotted over Hawaii on Jan. 28, initially believed to be from a NASA satellite that monitors the thickness of ice sheets on earth. However, the claim was retracted on Feb. 6, and responsibility was instead attributed to a Chinese atmospheric monitoring satellite.

The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan published a photo of the lasers on Jan. 28 saying they were “thought to be from a remote-sensing altimeter satellite ICESAT-2/43613,” the NASA satellite. Then, on Feb. 6, NAOJ released an updated report and said it was unlikely to have come from the NASA satellite due to the trajectory of the lasers.

NASA scientist Dr. Alvaro Ivanoff determined via a simulation that the culprit was likely China’s Daqi-1/AEMS satellite, according to Science Alert.

Daqi-1 monitors the earth’s atmospheric environment and can project lasers from its Aerosol and Carbon Dioxide Detection Lidar (ACDL), according to The Science Times.

NASA’s IceSAT-2 functions similarly and fired 10,000 lasers per second to measure changes on the earth’s surface, according to The Science Times.

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Nothing About the Chinese Balloon Saga Makes Sense

Nothing about the “Chinese spy balloon” story makes sense—but that hasn’t stopped U.S. officials from using it to stoke anti-China sentiment and cancel an attempt to ease diplomatic relations.

The basics: A Chinese balloon started drifting into U.S. territory about 10 days ago. It first entered Alaskan airspace, then drifted over Canada, then made its way back into U.S. airspace, appearing over Montana on February 1. By Saturday, when U.S. forces shot down the balloon, it was floating over the shores of South Carolina.

What the Chinese say: It was “a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes”—a weather balloon, essentially—that veered off course due to westerly winds and “limited self-steering capability.”

What Americans are saying: It’s a spy balloon! It’s an act of open hostility! U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken called it “a violation of our sovereignty” and “a violation of international law.” House China Select Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) declared the balloon “a threat to American sovereignty” and “a threat to the Midwest.” Mitt Romney used it as an opportunity to call for banning TikTok.

The fallout: Blinken was supposed to visit Beijing this past weekend, on a trip designed to help keep relations cordial and keep lines of communication open between the countries. He was even scheduled to meet with Chinese president Xi Jinping. But Blinken canceled the trip last week, as the Chinese balloon loomed large (literally and figuratively) over America.

Not only did the balloon nix a diplomatic visit, it’s inflaming tensions—and paranoia—here in the States. The balloon is “more fodder for China hawks in Washington, for sure,” NPR correspondent Michele Kelemen said on Saturday. Kelemen described the incident as sounding like a story out of the Cold War, which was “exactly what [Blinken’s] trip was supposed to prevent.”

The absurdity: The balloon in question is absolutely massive, with “an undercarriage roughly the size of three buses,” as The New York Times put it. This would be an absolutely bonkers way to spy on the United States—especially since the images it picks up are reportedly no better than those it can obtain through satellites. One defense official said, as summarized The Washington Post, that the images a balloon like this could obtain “wouldn’t offer much in the way of surveillance that China couldn’t collect through spy satellites.”

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How Did Biden Admin Retroactively ‘Discover’ Chinese Balloons in the U.S During the Trump Years?

The Biden administration has been trying to plug a gigantic hole in their story about Chinese spy balloons flying over U.S. territory during the Trump administration with no one in the government aware of it.

Initially, the Biden administration sought to deflect attention from their failure to shoot down the balloon by noting that Chinese spy balloons transited U.S. territory three times during the Trump years. But when several Trump administration officials hotly denied that charge, Biden administration officials changed their story. They claimed that the balloons were only over U.S. territory briefly — skirting Hawaii and flying over part of Florida — unlike this latest spy balloon, which traversed the entire width of the country. They also claimed that the balloons weren’t detected.

But how do we know this if the balloons weren’t detected and national leaders weren’t informed of their presence?

The American military had a “domain awareness gap,” according to Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command.

“Every day as a NORAD commander, it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America. I will tell you that we did not detect those threats,” VanHerck said. “And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out, but I don’t want to go into further detail.”

What’s a “domain awareness gap”? General VanHerck didn’t define the term, but Breaking Defense offered a partial explanation.

When VanHerck speaks of a “domain gap,” he’s referring to the U.S. Northern Command not having “the correct mix of sensor capabilities.”

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