Tag: surveillance

Biden’s Justice Dept. spied on journalists’ Apple and Google accounts: Project Veritas

The journalistic whistleblower organization, Project Veritas, announced Wednesday that Apple and Google have come forward to provide documents showing that President Biden’s Justice Department issued nine secret subpoenas to the companies to access multiple Project Veritas journalists’ private information.

The subpoenas and warrants were reportedly even extended to the journalist’s security detail.

In a video, published by Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, the documents purport to show that the Justice Department “compelled Apple and Google not to disclose that they were providing the individual’s private data to the government,” according to Project Veritas.

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DHS Official Defends Monitoring Trucker Protests, Linking Terrorism To Misinfo

Recent Department of Homeland Security (DHS) decisions to monitor trucker protests and link domestic terrorism to misinformation have prompted backlash from some conservatives and civil libertarians, but DHS Counterterrorism Coordinator John Cohen defended his department’s actions at a Feb. 15 online event.

The DHS’s Feb. 7 bulletin warned of a heightened terrorism threat because of “false and misleading narratives,” misinformation, and “conspiracy theories.”

“The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors,” the bulletin said.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) reportedly accused the DHS of “policing” speech in a Feb. 15 letter, while Center to Advance Security in America (CASA) is probing the department over its methodology for crafting the bulletin, according to the Washington Times.

Cohen defended the bulletin at the Feb. 15 online event, hosted by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. He said the DHS now has “hard analysis” linking violence to narratives about government’s response to COVID-19, the 2020 election, immigration, and race.

“We have tied those narratives specifically to the overwhelming majority of domestic violent extremism incidents,” he said.

“These narratives have, in fact, inspired violence.”

According to Cohen, the threats of information are coming from all directions.

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Democrats Framed And Spied On Trump While He Was President

Enemies of Donald Trump surveilled the internet traffic at Trump Tower, at his New York City apartment building, and later at the executive office of the president of the United States, then fed disinformation about that traffic to intelligence agencies hoping to frame Trump as a Russia-connected stooge.

A tangential filing on Friday in the criminal case against former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann revealed these new details uncovered by Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation. The revelation came in the middle of a 13-page motion Durham’s prosecutors filed in the criminal case against Sussmann. The special counsel’s office charged Sussmann in September 2021, in a one-count indictment of lying to James Baker during a meeting Sussmann had with the then-FBI general counsel in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election.

During Sussmann’s September 19, 2016 meeting with Baker, Sussmann allegedly provided the FBI general counsel information that purported to show the existence of a secret communication channel between the Trump organization and the Russian Alfa Bank. The indictment charged that Sussmann told Baker during that meeting that he was not working on behalf of any client, when, according to the indictment, Sussmann was actually acting on behalf of “a U.S. technology industry executive at a U.S. Internet company”—later identified as Rodney Joffe—and “the Hillary Clinton Presidential Campaign.”

While the special counsel’s indictment of the Clinton campaign lawyer was, by itself, huge news, the details Durham sprinkled throughout the 27 pages of the talking indictment suggest even more bombshells are to come. Those allegations suggested “a scandal much deeper than merely Sussmann’s role in a second Russian hoax — a scandal that entangles the Clinton campaign, multiple internet companies, two federally-funded university researchers, and a complicit media.”

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Ottawa Police announce digital surveillance of Freedom Convoy protesters, supporters, and donors

The Ottawa Police Service has announced a new operation where it is partnering with federal intelligence agencies to create “enhanced intelligence operations and investigations” that will target individuals who are taking part in and supporting the Canadian Truckers Freedom Convoy.

The Ottawa police said that it’s partnering with the US’s FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to investigate “online threats.”

Ottawa police the “enhanced investigation” will start with focusing on those who were involved in organizing the protest convoy and will use surveillance to “identify and target protestors who are funding/supporting/enabling unlawful and harmful activity by protesters.”

The police also said they are focusing on gathering “financial, digital, vehicle registration, driver identification, insurance status, and other related evidence that will be used in criminal prosecutions.”

Ottawa Police have also said they’re working with police agencies across Ontario, the RCMP, and Sûreté du Québec.

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Capitol Police examines backgrounds, social media feeds of some who meet with lawmakers

After the Jan. 6 insurrection, the Capitol Police’s intelligence unit quietly started scrutinizing the backgrounds of people who meet with lawmakers, according to three people familiar with the matter.

POLITICO also viewed written communications describing the new approach, part of a host of changes that the department implemented after the Capitol attack. Examining the social media feeds of people who aren’t suspected of crimes, however, is a controversial move for law enforcement and intelligence officials given the civil liberties concerns it raises.

Among those who have been subject to new Capitol Police scrutiny are Hill staffers, the three people said. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) said in an interview that he is unaware of any members who know about the “very, very bad” practice.

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Amazon patents show new level of surveillance

Amazon has registered 17 new patents for biometric technology intended to help its doorbell cameras identify “suspicious” people by scent, skin texture, fingerprints, eyes, voice, and gait.

The tech giant has been developing its doorbell security camera system since 2018, when Amazon acquired the firm named Ring and, with it, the original technology. According to media reports, Jeff Bezos’ company is now preparing to enable the devices to identify “suspicious” people with the help of biometric technology, based on skin texture, gait, finger, voice, retina, iris, and even odor.

On top of that, if Amazon’s new patents are anything to go by, all Ring doorbell cameras in a given neighborhood would be interconnected, sharing data with each other and creating a composite image of “suspicious” individuals.

One of the patents for what is described in the media as a “neighborhood alert mode” would allow users in one household to send photos and videos of someone they deem ‘suspicious’ to their neighbors’ Ring cameras so that they, too, start recording and can assemble a “series of ‘storyboard’ images for activity taking place across the fields of view of multiple cameras.”

Aside from the possible future interconnectivity among the Ring devices themselves, Amazon’s doorbell cameras, as it stands now, already exchange information with 1,963 police and 383 fire departments across the US, according to Business Insider. Authorities do not even need a warrant to access Ring footage.

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Maxwell Case: Surveilled And Silenced

The trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, former partner of Jeffrey Epstein, looks like it is being set up to fail. Prosecutors rested their case after nine days in which victims seemed barely prepared for cross-examination and co-conspirators were notable by their absence.

Even this threadbare reckoning was too much information for Twitter, which banned a popular account reporting daily from Manhattan Federal Court. The new Twitter CEO has previously said the company is not bound by the First Amendment, and blocked posts that were drawing 500,000 views.

The touchy revelation seems to have been that hard drives removed from Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse in 2019 already had FBI tags on them, suggesting they’d previously been seized and returned to the predator.

The state-corporatist media, like the federal prosecutors, have ignored the clear implication of surveillance and even blackmail. The court case is limited to six counts relating to sex trafficking and Maxwell’s alleged involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teen women.

Not only does it seem U.S. agencies may have been complicit in compromising individuals — Twitter tries to stop us from knowing. Kudos to The Free Press Report for its daily summary of the trial.

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Epstein’s Zorro Ranch Had Computer Rooms the ‘Size of Houses’ to Spy on Guests Including Prince Andrew, Victim Claims

An alleged victim of the late billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein is speaking out this week to claim that his infamous Zorro Ranch had three computer rooms “the size of houses” to spy on famous guests like Prince Andrew.

Former Epstein employee Maria Farmer told The Sun that Epstein had footage of Andre’s alleged seven-day stay at his 33,339 square foot desert estate in New Mexico in 2000.

Architect plans for the home reveal a huge underground floor, around 8,000 sq ft in size, including exercise, massage, and jacuzzi rooms, later transformed into a pool area. It also includes three unusually large “mechanical rooms” on this lower floor, and Farmer claimed these were the computer rooms.

“All of Epstein’s residences had these mechanical rooms and tunnel systems. I know this because Epstein told me,” she alleged.

“These rooms were enormous – bigger than houses. I have no idea why anyone needs so many computers in one room. There were pinhole cameras to record everything on every estate. The cameras were ubiquitous. You couldn’t see them unless they were pointed out to you.”

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The Future Of Work At Home: Mandatory AI Camera Surveillance

Colombia-based call center workers who provide outsourced customer service to some of the nation’s largest companies are being pressured to sign a contract that lets their employer install cameras in their homes to monitor work performance, an NBC News investigation has found.

Six workers based in Colombia for Teleperformance, one of the world’s largest call center companies, which counts Apple, Amazon and Uber among its clients, said that they are concerned about the new contract, first issued in March. The contract allows monitoring by AI-powered cameras in workers’ homes, voice analytics and storage of data collected from the worker’s family members, including minors. Teleperformance employs more than 380,000 workers globally, including 39,000 workers in Colombia.

“The contract allows constant monitoring of what we are doing, but also our family,” said a Bogota-based worker on the Apple account who was not authorized to speak to the news media. “I think it’s really bad. We don’t work in an office. I work in my bedroom. I don’t want to have a camera in my bedroom.”

The worker said that she signed the contract, a copy of which NBC News has reviewed, because she feared losing her job. She said that she was told by her supervisor that she would be moved off the Apple account if she refused to sign the document. She said the additional surveillance technology has not yet been installed.

The concerns of the workers, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, highlight a pandemic-related trend that has alarmed privacy and labor experts: As many workers have shifted to performing their duties at home, some companies are pushing for increasing levels of digital monitoring of their staff in an effort to recreate the oversight of the office at home.

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Microsoft exec: Targeting of Americans’ records ‘routine’

 Federal law enforcement agencies secretly seek the data of Microsoft customers thousands of times a year, according to congressional testimony Wednesday by a senior executive at the technology company.

Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for customer security and trust, told members of the House Judiciary Committee that federal law enforcement in recent years has been presenting the company with between 2,400 to 3,500 secrecy orders a year, or about seven to 10 a day.

“Most shocking is just how routine secrecy orders have become when law enforcement targets an American’s email, text messages or other sensitive data stored in the cloud,” said Burt, describing the widespread clandestine surveillance as a major shift from historical norms.

The relationship between law enforcement and Big Tech has attracted fresh scrutiny in recent weeks with the revelation that Trump-era Justice Department prosecutors obtained as part of leak investigations phone records belonging not only to journalists but also to members of Congress and their staffers. Microsoft, for instance, was among the companies that turned over records under a court order, and because of a gag order, had to then wait more than two years before disclosing it.

Since then, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, called for an end to the overuse of secret gag orders, arguing in a Washington Post opinion piece that “prosecutors too often are exploiting technology to abuse our fundamental freedoms.” Attorney General Merrick Garland, meanwhile, has said the Justice Department will abandon its practice of seizing reporter records and will formalize that stance soon.

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