Tag: surveillance

FBI: Jack Smith, Biden DOJ Tracked Phone Calls of GOP Senators, Congressman

Nearly ten Republican senators and a representative had their private communications allegedly tracked by former Special Counsel Jack Smith under the Biden administration, FBI Director Kash Patel revealed Monday.

Files obtained by Fox News show that Smith, in his official capacity at the Department of Justice (DOJ) as he investigated President Donald Trump and the events of January 6, 2021, was allegedly tracking the phone calls of Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham (SC), Marsha Blackburn (TN), Ron Johnson (WI), Josh Hawley (MO), Cynthia Lummis (WY), Bill Hagerty (TN), Dan Sullivan (AK), Tommy Tuberville (AL), and Republican Rep. Mike Kelly (PA).

The alarming document, revealing that Smith and his “Arctic Frost” team had subpoenaed telephone providers for the lawmakers’ records in 2023, was “recently discovered” by Patel, according to Fox News.

Patel confirmed the legitimacy of the findings in an X post, writing, “We recently uncovered proof that phone records of U.S. lawmakers were seized for political purposes.”

“That abuse of power ends now,” the FBI director continued. “Under my leadership, the FBI will deliver truth and accountability, and never again be weaponized against the American people.”

An FBI official told the outlet that Smith and his team, which was opened in the bureau in 2022, were able to see which numbers the politicians contacted, the locations from where the calls originated, and the locations where they were received. 

Officials also explained that the records were investigated pursuant to an oversight request from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), which Patel and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino personally directed in response. 

A source added that the calls were “likely in reference to the vote to certify the 2020 election,” Fox News reported.

Bongino briefed the impacted lawmakers on Monday afternoon and told the publication it is a “disgrace” that he had to reveal those findings. 

“It is a disgrace that I have to stand on Capitol Hill and reveal this — that the FBI was once weaponized to track the private communications of U.S. lawmakers for political purposes,” Bongino said. “That era is over.”

He added, “Under our leadership, the FBI will never again be used as a political weapon against the American people.”

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Australia’s “eSafety” Commissioner Holds 2,600+ Records Tracking Christian Media Outlet

Australia’s online safety regulator is refusing to process a Freedom of Information request that would expose how it has tracked the activity of a prominent Christian media outlet and its leaders, citing excessive workload as the reason for denial.

The office of eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has confirmed it is holding more than 2,600 records connected to The Daily Declaration, its founding body The Canberra Declaration, and three of its editorial figures: Warwick Marsh, Samuel Hartwich, and Kurt Mahlburg.

Despite admitting the existence of these records, the agency says reviewing them would take more than 100 hours and would therefore unreasonably impact its operations.

In a formal response dated 29 September, the regulator explained that it had identified thousands of documents referencing the group and its members. “Processing a request of this size would substantially impact eSafety’s operations,” the notice read.

The documents include media monitoring reports automatically generated whenever The Daily Declaration or its editors have posted online about the regulator or been tagged in relevant conversations.

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Not Only Tulsi: Three Members Of Congress Also Spied On In Quiet Skies Program

Ahead of Tuesday hearings on the subject, the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) obtained documents showing three members of Congress, all Republicans, were followed under the TSA’s just-discontinued Quiet Skies program, which became infamous last summer when whistleblowers revealed bomb-sniffing dogs and Air Marshals were assigned to follow former Hawaii Congresswoman and future National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard.

The members’ names have not yet been publicly released, but they were turned over to the Committee by the Department of Homeland Security, along with “TSA” notes explaining how they ended up on the list. Two of the three members made it onto the list before being elected, but as the Committee notes, “a cursory review would have revealed them to be a member of Congress, or a decorated U.S. veteran or service member.” The list below looks like four entries, but the second and third are the same member.

A wealth of other information — not just about Quiet Skies but other questionable TSA practices — has been produced to the Committee chaired by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. Among the revelations:

  • Documentation showing the TSA approved “enhanced screening” and watchlisting for individuals merely “suspected of traveling to the National Capital Region” in conjunction with January 6th, and who are “believed to pose an elevated risk” but for whom “there is a current lack of specific information relating to unlawful entry into the U.S. Capitol”;

At least 24 people were put into the program for being associated with a group the protested mask mandates, and 12 were placed on a watch list for removing their masks in-flight. The latter act was described in one memo as being “an act of extreme recklessness in carrying out an act that represents a threat to the life of passengers and crew”;

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Age Verification Company Exposes User Data, Reinforcing Privacy Fears Over Digital ID Systems

A company tasked with confirming users’ ages before they access adult content may be compromising their privacy by leaking detailed browsing data, according to a report by the nonprofit AI Forensics.

The group’s investigation highlights serious flaws in how some sites are complying with growing online age-check requirements, raising new concerns about surveillance and data exposure under the guise of protecting children.

France’s law requires that users’ identities remain concealed, not just from adult websites, but from the age verification services themselves.

Known as “double anonymity,” this standard is meant to ensure that those performing the verification process have no knowledge of which websites users are visiting or what content they attempt to access.

But AI Forensics found that AgeGO, one of the verification systems in active use, doesn’t meet those expectations.

Instead, AgeGO’s system reportedly transmits precise details about the user’s activity, including the URL of the video being viewed and the name of the website.

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Google ordered to pay over $425 million in damages for smartphone privacy violations

Tech giant Google has been ordered to pay over $425 million for improperly snooping on the data of smartphone users and invading users’ privacy from 2016-2024.

It’s a violation of public trust,” said attorney & political analyst Madeline Summerville.

The class action lawsuit, initially filed in 2020, accused the company of collecting data from 98 million devices that had turned off a tracking feature in their Google account.

Even though I’ve shutoff all the different apparatuses that would keep Google from monitoring me, they’re still doing it because they were doing it through third party apps,” Summerville said.

The jury found Google spied on users and was in violation of California privacy laws. But Google denied it was improperly accessing devices. A Google spokesperson told Reuters, this decision misunderstands how its products work and it plans to file an appeal. “Our privacy tools give people control over their data, and when they turn off personalization, we honor that choice.”

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Navy SEALs Reportedly Killed North Korean Fishermen and Mutilated Their Bodies To Hide a Failed Mission

You are a fisherman in one of the poorest, most repressed countries in the world. About 20 years ago, your country was suffering from a famine that is still forbidden to discuss frankly. The streets are filled with living reminders of starvation, people whose bodies are marked by childhood malnutrition. Food is precious to you.

So today, as other days, you woke up before dawn with your companions to go diving in the freezing cold ocean, in hopes of putting some mussels on your family’s table. But suddenly, you die. A man you have never met and whose presence you did not know about has shot you with his rifle. His companions stab your lungs so that your body will sink to the bottom of the sea. Your family will likely never know what happened to you.

That is what happened to a group of unnamed North Korean fishermen who accidentally stumbled upon a detachment of U.S. Navy SEALs in 2019, according to a Friday report by The New York Times. The commandos had set out to install a surveillance device to wiretap government communications in North Korea. When they stumbled upon an unexpected group of divers on a boat, the SEALs killed everyone on board and retreated.

The U.S. government concluded that the victims were “civilians diving for shellfish,” sources told the Times. Officials didn’t even know how many, telling the Times that it was “two or three people,” even though the SEALs had searched the boat and disposed of the bodies. The mission wasn’t just an intelligence failure. It was a failure that killed real people through no fault of their own.

The mission was carried out during the first Trump administration. The U.S. government wanted insight into North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his high-stakes nuclear negotiations with President Donald Trump. Matthew Cole, one of the reporters who broke the story, wrote on his Substack that he first caught wind of the story in 2023 from a source who wanted him to know “how the SEALs involved in the mission had avoided any accountability because of how secret the mission was.”

The broader point of the story, according to the Times, was that the U.S. government “often” hides the failures of special operations from policymakers. Seth Harp, author of The Fort Bragg Cartel, roughly estimates that Joint Special Operations Command killed 100,000 people during the Iraq War “surge” from 2007 to 2009. The secrecy around America’s spying-and-assassination complex makes it impossible to know how many of those people were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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NYT: Seal Team 6 Killed Civilians During Mission In North Korea

Today the New York Times revealed U.S. Navy SEALs killed North Korean civilians during a failed covert operation in 2019.

In 2019, U.S. Navy SEALs embarked on a clandestine mission to install a listening device inside North Korea, at a time when then-President Trump was engaged in landmark discussions with Kim Jong Un. 

The operation was reportedly green-lit by Trump.

The mission went awry when the SEALs encountered civilians fishing or diving for shellfish at night. The Americans opened fire, resulting in the deaths of all aboard the fishing vessel.

A subsequent classified Pentagon review deemed the killings justified under the established rules of engagement.  

The disclosure is significant as many have wondered how President Trump got the reclusive and belligerent North Korean leader to be so docile in the public face of the peace negotiations at the time.

There has also been rumors that Trump threatened Kim with assassination via SEAL Team 6.

The origin of those rumors now seems more clear.

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New ‘Sextortion’ Spyware Snaps Webcam Photos Of People Watching Porn

If you’re indulging in adult content online, you might want to slap some electrical tape over your webcam pronto, according to a new report from WIRED. Cybersecurity experts at Proofpoint, a battle-tested firm, just dropped a bombshell detailing a nasty new strain of “infostealer” malware called Stealerium. This open-source digital menace can hijack your webcam to snap photos, snoop on your browser for NSFW keywords, and capture screenshots of anything spicy – all of which could be weaponized for blackmail and extortion schemes that’ll leave victims reeling.

“When it comes to infostealers, they typically are looking for whatever they can grab,” Proofpoint researcher Selena Larson told WIRED, exposing the chilling reality of this cyberthreat. “This adds another layer of privacy invasion and sensitive information that you definitely wouldn’t want in the hands of a particular hacker.”“It’s gross,” Larson fumed. “I hate it.”

WIRED has more:

More hands-on sextortion methods are a common blackmail tactic among cybercriminals, and scam campaigns in which hackers claim to have obtained webcam pics of victims looking at pornography have also plagued inboxes in recent years—including some that even try to bolster their credibility with pictures of the victim’s home pulled from Google Maps. But actual, automated webcam pics of users browsing porn is “pretty much unheard of,” says Proofpoint researcher Kyle Cucci. The only similar known example, he says, was a malware campaign that targeted French speaking users in 2019, discovered by the Slovakian cybersecurity firm ESET.

Larson laid bare the sinister tactics of sextortion spyware, which preys on individuals for profit while flying under the radar. “For a hacker, it’s not like you’re taking down a multimillion-dollar company that is going to make waves and have a lot of follow-on impacts,” she said. “They’re trying to monetize people one at a time. And maybe people who might be ashamed about reporting something like this.”

The malware’s creator, known as witchfindertr, identifies as a “malware analyst” based in London. To top it all off, Stealerium is freely available as an open-source tool on GitHub.

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Microsoft Word To Save New Files to the Cloud by Default

Microsoft is preparing to change how documents are saved in Word for Windows, shifting new file storage to the cloud by default.

Instead of asking users to activate AutoSave or select a cloud location manually, Word will now store all newly created documents directly in OneDrive or another designated cloud service automatically.

Raul Munoz, a product manager on Microsoft’s Office shared services and experiences team, described the change by saying, “We are modernizing the way files are created and stored in Word for Windows. Now you don’t have to worry about saving your documents: Anything new you create will be saved automatically to OneDrive or your preferred cloud destination.”

Currently being rolled out to Microsoft 365 Insiders, this new setup is presented as a way to prevent lost work and provide immediate access to files across mobile platforms and browsers.

However, for anyone working outside Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem, this change introduces additional steps to avoid online storage.

The update also comes with adjustments to how documents are named. Rather than appending sequential numbers to new files, Word will now assign file names based on the date of creation.

Users will have the option to set a preferred default save location or opt out of automatic cloud saves entirely, though doing so requires manual reconfiguration.

Microsoft has been steadily nudging its user base toward cloud reliance. AutoSave already defaults to cloud storage, and persistent prompts in Windows have encouraged, or pressured, users to turn on OneDrive backups.

These reminders have drawn complaints, especially from those who feel Microsoft is eroding straightforward local file access.

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Is your baby, doorbell or security cam spying for China? Florida’s top cop wants to know

Florida’s top law enforcement official has issued a subpoena to Lorex Corp., a top maker of baby monitors, security and doorbell cameras, demanding documents and information about its corporate structure, whether it has any ties to Chinese Communist firms and whether Americans’ data or privacy can be breached. Those documents could provide evidence of illegal activity.

Attorney General James Uthmeier’s office told Just the News he believes Lorex, though North American-based, has imported large swaths of equipment from a Chinese manufacturer banned from the United States over alleged human rights abuses and national security risks.

A spokesperson for Lorex did not immediately respond to a written request for comment sent via email to its corporate public relations account.

Probe into whether products are relabeled from black-listed maker

“Lorex Corporation is importing millions of devices from CCP-controlled Dahua, which has been banned in the United States for human rights abuses and national security risks,” the office said in a statement to Just the News. “AG Uthmeier must discover whether Lorex is selling re-labeled Dahua products which would introduce a range of cybersecurity vulnerabilities that would give the CCP a direct line into the homes and private lives of millions of Floridians.”

Dahua, a Chinese technology company, acquired the Canadian-based Lorex in 2018 but sold it to Taiwan-based Skywatch nearly three years ago after Dahua was blacklisted in the United States.

The Pentagon in 2022 listed Dahua as one of 13 companies doing business with the Chinese military and banned its products in the United States. Earlier, the Commerce Department in 2020 identified Dahua as one of several Chinese firms involved in human rights abuses with alleged slave labor involving Uighur minorities.

In 2023, the Australian government expressed alarm when it found about 1,000 security cameras in its various offices tied to Dahua and another Chinese-tied firm, ordering a sweeping review of all security equipment in its government facilities.

The Florida attorney general’s subpoena was issued Friday, and shortly afterwards, Uthmeier put out a statement on X advising Florida consumers about his actions and possible vulnerabilities in Lorex products they may own.

“What consumers do not know is that data might be shared with the Chinese military,” he said. “Imagine that. Footage of your baby in a crib going to the Chinese government. This is unacceptable. It is a national security issue, and it will not be tolerated.”

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