Tag: surveillance

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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Biden Looking at Expanding Internet Surveillance After Discord Leaks

The Biden administration appears poised to increase internet surveillance in response to the leaked Pentagon documents that appear to have been posted on the messaging platform Discord.

NBC News reported on Wednesday that the administration was looking at expanding how it monitors social media sites and chat rooms.

The report cited an unnamed senior administration official and a congressional official who said the administration wants to “expand the universe” of social media sites that US law enforcement and intelligence agencies monitor.

According to the congressional source, the report said the “intelligence community is now grappling with how it can scrub platforms like Discord in search of relevant material to avoid a similar leak in the future.”

According to The Washington Post, the top-secret documents were posted on a private Discord server that a member later posted on public servers in March. The documents have been circulating on the internet since then and were discovered by The New York Times last week.

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FBI Sent Undercover Agents to Church Services to Investigate ‘Domestic Extremism’

On Monday, Jim Jordan subpoenaed FBI Director Christopher Wray for documents related to the FBI’s handling of a domestic violent extremism investigation against Catholic Americans.

Jordan, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said that the FBI used at least one undercover agent to produce their analysis and that FBI agents engaged in outreach programs to Catholic parishes. This included clergy as well as church leadership.

Jordan’s letter reports that the FBI document sought to categorize Catholic Americans based on theological distinctions, as an attempt to label certain kinds of Catholic Americans as domestic terrorists.

“We have repeatedly sought information from the FBI relating to a January 23, 2023 document… After receiving no response, we reiterated our outstanding requests in a subsequent letter dated March 20, 2023. On March 23, 2023, we received a substandard and partial response consisting of only 18 pages — many with significant redactions of ‘personally identifiable information’ or ‘specific non-public information about [FBI] investigations, sources, and methods’ that prevents the Committee from fully assessing the content and context of the documents and obtaining information requested from the Bureau,” wrote Jordan in the letter to Wray.

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US Is Spying On Zelensky: Here’s What’s Known So Far From The Leaked Intelligence Files

The highly classified Pentagon documents which were leaked online in recent weeks, but which began being confirmed and reported as authentic by The New York Times and others only in the past few days, contain some embarrassing revelations. This has sent DOJ and US intelligence officials scrambling to discover the source of the leaks.

CNN is confirming Monday based on one of the documents which appeared online that the US has been spying on Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky – a disclosure which has caused officials in Kiev to be “deeply frustrated”.

“One document reveals that the US has been spying on Zelensky,” CNN reports. “That is unsurprising, said the source close to Zelensky, but Ukrainian officials are deeply frustrated about the leak.”

The US intelligence document suggests that American officials have been worried about possible Zelensky decision-making to strike deep into Russian territory, which would escalate the war and potentially bring Russian and NATO into direct clashes:

The US intelligence report, which is sourced to signals intelligence, says that Zelensky in late February “suggested striking Russian deployment locations in Russia’s Rostov Oblast” using unmanned aerial vehicles, since Ukraine does not have long-range weapons capable of reaching that far.

An additional possibility is that the US intelligence community might be monitoring the Ukrainian presidency’s office as part of efforts to oversee and account for how the tens of billions in aid sent to Kiev is being utilized. 

The Washington Post details that “many of the documents seem to have been prepared over the winter for Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other senior military officials, but they were available to other U.S. personnel and contract employees with the requisite security clearances.”

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New Medical Codes for COVID-19 Vaccination Status Used to Track People, CDC Confirms

Medical codes introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic to show when people are unvaccinated or undervaccinated for COVID-19 are being used to track people, the top U.S. public health agency has confirmed.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made the confirmation in emails that The Epoch Times obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The CDC had said in documents and public statements that the goal of the new codes, in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) system, was “to track people who are not immunized or only partially immunized.”

The CDC now says it does not have access to the data, but that health care systems do.

“The ICD codes were implemented in April 2022, however the CDC does not have any data on the codes and does not track this information,” CDC officials said in the emails.

“The codes were created to enable healthcare providers to track within their practices,” the officials added.

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8 ways your phone is tracking you that you can stop now

You understand that your phone knows where you’re located.

This is how GPS works, how Find My Friends sees your location, and why you get local ads on Facebook and Google.

Like other data on your phone, that location data is a hot commodity for internet marketers in today’s digital economy.

Targeted advertising is one of the biggest enterprises on the web.

Companies are eager to serve you ads for products you’re likely to buy, and that data helps them hit their mark.

Some companies have even made this their primary business model. Tap or click here to see one shocking way Facebook tracks your data.

Thankfully, you don’t have to stand for this kind of data collection if you’re uncomfortable with it.

These tactics are legal because the companies behind them give you a choice to opt in or out, but not everyone knows how to change the settings.

We’ll show you how to stop your phone from tracking you.

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The FBI Used an Undercover Cop With Pink Hair to Spy on Activists and Manufacture Crimes

THE YOUNG WOMAN with long pink hair claimed to be from Washington state. One day during the summer of 2020, she walked into the Chinook Center, a community space for left-wing activists in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and offered to volunteer.

“She dressed in a way that was sort of noticeable,” said Samantha Christiansen, a co-founder of the Chinook Center. But no one among the activists found that unusual or alarming; everyone has their own style. They accepted her into the community.

The pink-haired woman said her name was Chelsie. She also dropped regular hints about her chosen profession.

“She implied over the course of getting to know her that she was a sex worker,” said Jon Christiansen, Samantha’s husband and another co-founder of the Chinook Center.

“I think somebody else had told me that, and I just was like, ‘Oh, OK. That makes sense,’” said Autum Carter-Wallace, an activist in Colorado Springs. “I never questioned it.”

But Chelsie’s identity was as fake as her long pink hair. The young woman, whose real name is April Rogers, is a detective at the Colorado Springs Police Department. The FBI enlisted her to infiltrate and spy on racial justice groups during the summer of 2020.

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Lowes introduces surveillance robots that monitor license plates, mobile devices, to detect repeat offenders

Home improvement products retailer Lowe’s has started using security robots manufactured by Knightscope in four stores in Philadelphia.

The robots, K5’s – first launched in 2015 – are supposed to help the retailer collect evidence in case of criminal prosecutions, and act like “security guards.”

Even though the K5 can detect persons, has 16 microphones, and Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR), as well as sonar sensors, along with four 360-degree high definition wide angle cameras, it does not have facial recognition software baked into it.

(But Knightscope offers that feature – “seeing” a person, and knowing who it is – in the K1 Tower and KA Hemisphere models.)

K5’s other features include a security button on the back that people can press to summon help, what seems like limited communication letting users send customized messages through it and, as it patrols parking lots, the robot can emit a sound.

By using the robots to identify license plates and mobile devices, Lowe’s is able to cross-reference that data with an existing database of previous “offenders.”

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Giving up biometrics at US airports soon won’t be optional, transport security chief says

The chief of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) David Pekoske said that the agency is considering biometric technology to reduce traveler processing times and reduce the number of screening officers. He made the comments at the South by Southwest conference, which focused on aviation security.

Pekoske noted that the TSA’s role is maintaining security and the transportation system and staying ahead of threats. For those reasons, it is “critically important that this system has as little friction as it possibly can, while we provide for safety and security.”

The TSA has been relying on biometric technology in the identification verification process. According to the agency, the newest technology it has been using is over 99% effective and does not have problems identifying darker-skinned people like the old technology.

“We’re upgrading our camera systems all the time, upgrading our lighting systems,” Pekoske said. “[We’re] upgrading our algorithms, so that we are using the very most advanced algorithms and technology we possibly can.”

Pekoske said that the agency will ensure it remains transparent with the public about the data that is taken, what it is used for, and for how long it will be stored. For now, he said that travelers can opt out of processes they are not comfortable with.

According to The Dallas Morning News, giving up biometric data for travel will eventually not be optional.

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