Tag: surveillance

How Police Can Illegally Wiretap Your Phone

How do you know if a government of law enforcement agency has hacked your personal device? The truth of the matter is: most of the time you don’t.

One of the most common methods used by police to spy on the public, is by using an expensive piece of technology called a “Stingray,” manufactured by Harris Corporation in Florida. This special high-tech black box pretends to be a mobile phone/cell tower, allow police to divert your phone signal to their black box, rather than the nearly cellular tower. Moments after connecting their device to you phone, police can then gather a huge amount of information.

In addition to Stingray which clocks in at a cool $148,000, they also make advanced surveillance products like KingFish and Crossbow.

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CHICAGO POLICE COMPILING DOSSIERS ON PEOPLE WHO SPEAK AT POLICE BOARD MEETINGS

Why would the Chicago Police Department be running background checks on people who sign up to speak at public meetings of the city’s police disciplinary panel?

That is what many people want to know after a public records request conducted by the Chicago Tribune revealed that since January 2018, CPD has collected information on at least 60 people in advance of their speaking at the weekly meetings—a practice that police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi confirmed has been going on since at least 2013.

From the Tribune:

“The checks appear to be extensive, with police searching at least one internal department database to determine if speakers have arrest or prison records, warrants outstanding for their arrest, investigative alerts issued for them by the department and even if they’re registered sex offenders or missing persons. Police also searched comments that speakers had previously made on YouTube or on their Facebook and Twitter accounts, among other internet sites, the documents show.

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University COVID App Mandates Are The Wrong Call

As students, parents, and schools prepare the new school year, universities are considering ways to make returning to campus safer. Some are considering and even mandating that students install COVID-related technology on their personal devices, but this is the wrong call. Exposure notification apps, quarantine enforcement programs, and similar new technologies are untested and unproven, and mandating them risks exacerbating existing inequalities in access to technology and education. Schools must remove any such mandates from student agreements or commitments, and further should pledge not to mandate installation of any technology.

Even worse, many schools—including Indiana University, UMass Amherst, and University of New Hampshire—are requiring students to make a general blanket commitment to installing an  unspecified tracking app of the university’s choosing in the future. This gives students no opportunity to assess or engage with the privacy practices or other characteristics of this technology. This is important because not all COVID exposure notification and contact tracing apps, for example, are the same. For instance, Utah’s Healthy Together app until recently collected not only Bluetooth proximity data but also GPS location data, an unnecessary privacy intrusion that was later rolled back. Google and Apple’s framework for exposure notification based on Bluetooth is more privacy-protective than a GPS-based solution, but the decision to install it or any other app must still be in the hands of the individuals affected.

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12 Videos Prove Police Use Drones To Ticket And Surveil The Public

Here is a nice compilation of the high-tech police state in action. One can only imagine when this gets combined with facial recognition, health databases, social distancing, contact tracing and all the rest – oh, wait, they’re already doing some of that in these videos.

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