Tag: surveillance

‘Arctic Frost’ Scandal: Biden FBI Wiretapped Trump Adviser Susie Wiles During Privileged Attorney Call, Then Hid Evidence in “Prohibited” Files

During a high-stakes hearing of the Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) dropped a series of nuclear revelations regarding the “Arctic Frost” investigation, a sweeping, clandestine operation by the Biden-era DOJ and FBI designed to spy on the political opposition.

The Gateway Pundit has been hammering this story since February, when we reported that Biden’s FBI secretly snatched the phone records of Kash Patel and Susie Wiles in 2022 and 2023 as part of deranged Special Counsel Jack Smith’s sham classified-documents probe into papers lawfully stored at Mar-a-Lago.

Joe Biden’s FBI wiretapped a privileged attorney-client call involving top Trump adviser Susie Wiles, without the consent of either party, and then attempted to bury the evidence.

Axios reporter Marc Caputo reports that the lawyer, who has not been publicly identified, denied the accusation that he approved the FBI recording.

The revelations were confirmed during the hearing titled “Arctic Frost: A Modern Watergate,” held by the Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights.

Witnesses included:

  • Will Chamberlain (Article III Project)
  • Margot Cleveland (The Federalist)
  • Christopher O’Leary (former FBI agent)

What they described was nothing short of chilling.

Cruz walked Cleveland through the scope of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation, and the numbers alone are staggering:

  • Nearly 200 subpoenas issued
  • Over 400 Republican individuals and organizations targeted
  • Some targets had no connection to January 6
  • Others didn’t even exist at the time

Cruz asked about subpoenaing toll records of members of Congress. Cleveland confirmed it raises massive Speech and Debate Clause problems. When Jack Smith tried to force AT&T to cough up Ted Cruz’s own records, AT&T flat-out refused, saying it violated the Constitution. Smith backed down like a coward and never even tried to enforce it in court.

Cleveland made it crystal clear, Smith knew well what he was doing was illegal.

Keep reading

Hong Kong Police Can Now Demand Phone or Computer Passwords of Suspects Under National Security Law

Your passwords are no longer safe in Hong Kong.

Ever since Hong Kong returned from British rule to China in 1997, the island has devolved towards the totalitarian ways of mainland China.

In 2020, the National Security Law (NSL) imposed by Beijing crystallized this new reality.

The NSL criminalizes acts of ‘secession, subversion, terrorism, collusion with foreign forces, treason, espionage, sabotage, and external interference’.

With penalties up to life imprisonment, it even allows some cases to be tried on the mainland, and it grants police ‘broad surveillance and detention powers’.

Needless to say, this has curtailed political dissent, free speech, and pro-democracy activities in Hong Kong.

And now, it arises that Hong Kong police can demand phone or computer passwords from suspects under the NSL.

BBC reported:

“Those who refuse could face up to a year in jail and a fine of up to HK$100,000 ($12,700; £9,600), and individuals who provide ‘false or misleading information’ could face up to three years in jail.

It comes as part of new amendments to a bylaw under the NSL that the government gazetted on Monday.”

Keep reading

Jury Clears Afroman of Defamation for Mocking Cops Who Raided His House

An Ohio jury on Wednesday found the rapper Afroman not liable for defaming the sheriff’s deputies who raided his house nearly four years ago.

The verdict is a free speech victory for Joseph Foreman, a.k.a. Afroman, best known for his 2000 hit “Because I Got High.” Over the course of a three-day civil trial that captured social media attention, Afroman, who appeared in court dressed in an American flag-print suit, insisted that he had a First Amendment right to make fun of the deputies who kicked down his door and pawed through his belongings. Afroman released several music videos about the incident using surveillance footage of the raid.

“I got freedom of speech. After they run around my house with guns and kick down my door, I got the right to kick a can in my back yard, use my freedom of speech, and turn my bad times into a good time, yes I do,” Afroman told jurors on Tuesday. “And I think I’m a sport for doing so, because I don’t go to their house, kick down their doors [and] then try to play the victim and sue them.”

The sheriff’s deputies, meanwhile, were reduced in court to watching full-length music videos of Afroman mocking them and testifying about how the rapper had called them “dipshits” and made claims to sleeping with their wives.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio, which filed an amicus brief in support of Afroman, applauded the verdict.

“We’re very pleased with this outcome, and we think the jury got it right. Robust protection for free speech requires leaving room for speakers to give their opinions in strong, florid, or figurative terms without fear of criminal or civil consequences,” says David Carey, deputy legal director of the ACLU of Ohio. “All the more so with speech involving criticism of government officials and their actions. Juries exercising common sense and considering the full context and actual meaning of a speaker’s words are a critical part of that system.”

Adams County, Ohio, sheriff’s deputies executed a search warrant on Afroman’s house in 2022. According to a search warrant, Afroman was suspected of drug possession, drug trafficking, and kidnapping. The deputies were searching for evidence of outlandish claims from a confidential informant that the house contained a basement dungeon. 

Body camera footage of the raid showed the deputies—after the initial excitement of busting down the front door—ambling through Afroman’s house, rifling through his clothes and CDs, and trying to find false walls and secret rooms. But the hourslong search turned up no evidence to corroborate the claim of a basement dungeon. Part of the problem may have been that, as Afroman’s record label told Vice, the house did not have a basement.

Afroman was never charged with a crime.

Keep reading

Tucker Carlson Says CIA Has Been Reading His Texts and is Preparing a Criminal Referral Against Him for Alleged FARA Violation – “You Should Know What the Stakes Are”

Tucker Carlson alleged in a video statement on Saturday that the Central Intelligence Agency has been spying on him and is preparing a criminal referral against him for alleged violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).

Under the law, it is a crime to act on behalf of a foreign principal without proper registration.

Carlson has come under fire recently for his criticisms of Israel and the war in Iran, even prompting Trump to disavow him. Following the initial Operation Epic Fury strikes in Iran on February 28, Tucker responded, calling the war “absolutely disgusting and evil.”

Trump responded to Tucker, saying he “has lost his way” and is “not MAGA.”

Many of Tucker’s other critics on the right, including Fox News host Mark Levin, have attempted to claim that Tucker is paid by Qatar to broadcast his opinions on Middle East conflicts. Most notably, failed presidential candidate Ted Cruz has ramped up his attacks on Tucker, recently smearing him as an antisemite and “the single most dangerous demagogue in this country.”

Carlson said he was “talking to people in Iran before the war,” and the CIA read his text messages to prepare a criminal referral to the Department of Justice, but that he’s “not too worried about an actual criminal case.”

“One, I’m not an agent of a foreign power. Unlike a lot of people, commenting on US politics and global affairs, I have only one loyalty, and that’s the United States and have never acted against it. Its interests are the only interests I care about because I’m from here and I have a lot of kids, so that’s not a concern. I’ve also never taken money from anybody. Don’t need it, don’t want it, and that’s provable,” he said.

“And moreover, it’s my job to talk to everybody all the time and try and figure out what’s happening around the world. That’s literally what I do for a living. And I’m not going to stop doing that, nor should I, I don’t think. I’m also an American. I can talk to anybody. I have no secrets to divulge. So, legally, I think the case is ludicrous, and I doubt it will even become a case.”

He says, “there are some people who are mad at me for my views about Israel,” and they may be filing a criminal referral to justify a warrant or as part of a humiliation and intimidation campaign, the existence of which may be leaked to the media in the near future.

“None of this, in my judgment, as of right now, is a huge threat to me. So, I’m not making this video to complain about it or whine or ask you to send me money because I’m under attack. I’m saying it because it’s true, and you should know what your own government is doing, and you should know what the stakes are, and you should know that a lot of what happens in this country that affects outcomes happens behind the scenes. Some of it is legal; some of it is not, including what I’m describing now, but it has an effect,” Tucker added, comparing the apparent investigation to the Russiagate scandal.

Keep reading

Deep State Dirt: FBI Ran Secret Surveillance on Kash Patel, Tried to Cover Their Tracks

Journalist John Solomon said newly uncovered information suggests the FBI maintained hidden investigative files targeting individuals close to President Donald Trump during the tenure of former FBI Director Christopher Wray, raising concerns about potential civil liberties violations.

Solomon made the remarks during a discussion with commentator Benny Johnson, where the two examined reports that certain politically sensitive investigations were placed into restricted systems rather than the FBI’s standard case management database.

Johnson opened the conversation by questioning reports that FBI Director Kash Patel did not initially have access to the records.

“Line in the lead here, John, that is the most alarming to me is that Kash Patel doesn’t have access to these files, or that they have been scattered to the wind,” Johnson said.

Solomon responded by explaining how certain investigations were handled differently from normal FBI cases.

“So in these politically sensitive investigations where we now know they were targeting people close to the president, lawyers, like people around the president, were lawyers advising him, advisors, movie makers, journalists,” Solomon said.

Keep reading

TikTok Says Privacy Makes Users Less Safe

Over the past five years, the largest social platforms settled on a clear position about private messaging. Lock it down. Facebook turned on end-to-end encryption. Instagram and Messenger did the same. X joined the club. Yes, metadata is still an issue and the protocols used matter; but, generally speaking, the move was toward more privacy of actual messages.

TikTok looked at that trend and made a different choice. Then it scheduled a briefing in London with the BBC to explain the reasoning.

The explanation was safety.

In the UK, TikTok belongs to ByteDance, a Chinese technology company that operates under Beijing’s jurisdiction. China maintains strict limits on end-to-end encryption inside its borders. TikTok, after its own review of the issue, reached the same policy outcome for its messaging system.

Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at Surrey University, raised that point directly. The company’s “Chinese influence might be behind the decision,” he said, adding that end-to-end encryption is “largely banned in China.”

TikTok declined to engage with that suggestion, of course. The remark hung in the air. However, it’s worth adding that the US operation of TikTok has made no indication that it is moving towards private messaging standards either.

End-to-end encryption is simple in theory. Only the people in a conversation can read the messages. The platform running the service cannot access the content. Governments cannot request it. Engineers inside the company cannot view it.

TikTok’s system operates in a different way. Messages on the platform remain readable to the company. Employees can access them under defined circumstances. Law enforcement agencies can request them through legal channels.

TikTok argues that readable messages allow the company to identify harmful activity.

The debate turns on a basic technical fact. “We can read your messages to catch predators,” and “we can read your messages” describe the same system.

Keep reading

They Track Every Dollar You Move. They Ignored $378 Million of Epstein’s.

Try to wire $15,000 to a foreign bank account sometime.

You’ll be asked to fill out compliance forms explaining the purpose of the transfer. Your bank’s compliance department will review the transaction. A Currency Transaction Report will be filed with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. And depending on the bank, you may receive a follow-up phone call asking you to further justify why you’re moving your own money.

Try to open a bank account overseas and it gets even more fun. Under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, every foreign bank on Earth is required to report American account holders to the Internal Revenue Service. The paperwork burden is so heavy that thousands of foreign banks have simply stopped accepting American clients altogether.

Deposit $10,000 in cash and the government automatically files a report. Split it into two deposits of $5,000 to avoid that report and you’ve committed a federal crime called “structuring” — punishable by up to five years in prison.

This is the financial surveillance infrastructure that every American lives under. It was built over decades, starting with the Bank Secrecy Act in 1970 and expanded massively by the Patriot Act after 9/11. We are told it exists to catch money laundering, drug trafficking, terrorism financing, and financial crimes.

Yet over twelve years, Jeffrey Epstein moved $378 million across 270 wire transfers without a single flag.

Bank of New York Mellon — one of the oldest and largest financial institutions in America — processed every one of them. At least 18 were round-dollar $1 million wires in 2007 alone — textbook structuring.

The bank’s own compliance review could not identify a legitimate business purpose for any of the 270 transactions. And no Suspicious Activity Report was filed until 2019 — only after Epstein had been arrested on federal sex trafficking charges.

More than a decade passed between when the transactions occurred and when regulators were notified.

This wasn’t an isolated case, either. Both JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank settled lawsuits related to their Epstein banking relationships. The pattern was identical: process the money, ignore the red flags, settle quietly later.

But while the banks were asleep, another arm of the government was not.

Keep reading

Hacked Tehran Traffic Cameras Fed Israeli Intelligence Before Strike On Khamenei 

Years before the air strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Israeli intelligence had been quietly mapping the daily rhythms of Tehran. According to reporting by the Financial Times (paywalled), nearly all of the Iranian capital’s traffic cameras had been hacked years earlier, their footage encrypted and transmitted to Israeli servers. One camera angle near Pasteur Street, close to Khamenei’s compound, allowed analysts to observe the routines of bodyguards and drivers: where they parked, when they arrived and whom they escorted. That data was fed into complex algorithms that built what intelligence officials call a “pattern of life,” detailed profiles including addresses, work schedules and, crucially, which senior officials were being protected and transported. The surveillance stream was one of hundreds feeding Israel’s intelligence system, which combines signals interception from Unit 8200, human assets recruited by the Mossad and large-scale data analysis by military intelligence.

When US and Israeli intelligence determined that Khamenei would attend a Saturday morning meeting at his compound, the opportunity was judged unusually favorable. Two people familiar with the operation told the FT that US intelligence provided confirmation from a human source that the meeting was proceeding as planned, a level of certainty required for a target of such magnitude. Israeli aircraft, reportedly airborne for hours, fired as many as 30 precision munitions. The strike was carried out in daylight, which the Israeli military said created tactical surprise despite heightened Iranian alertness. The Financial Times reports that the assassination was a political decision as much as a technological feat. Even during last year’s 12-day war, when Israeli strikes killed more than a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists and senior military officials and disabled air defences through cyber operations and drones, Israel did not attempt to kill Khamenei.

The capability to do so, however, had been built over decades. Former Mossad official Sima Shine told the FT that Israel’s strategic focus on Iran dates back to a 2001 directive from then-prime minister Ariel Sharon instructing intelligence chief Meir Dagan to make the Islamic Republic the priority target. What distinguishes the latest operation, according to the FT, is the scale of automation. Target tracking that once required painstaking visual confirmation has increasingly been handled by algorithm-driven systems parsing billions of data points. One person familiar with the process described it as an “assembly line with a single product: targets.”

Keep reading

‘My own employees … had downloaded software on my phone’: Kristi Noem claims Elon Musk helped expose spyware inside DHS

Though the Department of Homeland Security has achieved some success in deporting illegal aliens, it has always been met with resistance — both on the street and in the department itself.

In an interview with podcaster Patrick Bet-David this week, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem revealed the depth of some of the problems her department has been facing and the people who have helped her fight the alleged corruption.

“You wouldn’t even believe what I’ve found since I’ve been in this department,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said on the “PBD Podcast” this week.

“I just found the other day a whole room on this campus that was a secret SCIF — secure facility — that had files nobody knew existed. So we just happened to have an employee walk by a door and wonder what it was and started asking questions. We went in there. There was individuals working there that had secret files that nobody knew about on some of these most controversial topics.”

Keep reading

Dems Silent After New Revelations About Jack Smith’s Spying Ops On Political Enemies

The people who cheered on Jack Smith’s corrupt investigations into Donald Trump and his allies are suddenly silent after a bombshell report detailing the Biden FBI’s politically-charged spying ops.

Reuters this week reported the Democrat-led FBI subpoenaed records of phone calls made by current FBI Director Kash Patel and Susie Wiles, Trump’s campaign manager who now serves as his White House chief of Staff, in 2022 and 2023 when they were private citizens. Two anonymous FBI officials told the publication that the agency “recorded a phone call between Wiles and her attorney” in 2023. 

Patel told Reuters that the clandestine, taxpayer-funded operation “extended into Wiles’ time as Trump’s co-campaign manager.” 

Special Counsel Jack’s Smith’s “indiscriminate” election case against Trump, as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has described it, was drenched in partisan politics and constitutional transgressions, not the least of which is that Smith acted without without lawful authority. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon ruled in July 2024 that Smith’s appointment was unlawful. 

Smith, appointed in 2022 by Democrat hatchet man, Attorney General Merrick Garland, was charged with investigating Trump on allegations that the president schemed to “overturn” the results of the rigged 2020 election in which Democrat Joe Biden claimed victory. The antecedent of that probe was “Arctic Frost,” the Biden FBI’s vendetta investigation targeting Republicans in Trump’s orbit, The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland has reported.

Patel called the latest revelations of the agency’s wider spying operations “outrageous and deeply alarming.” He told Reuters in a statement that previous FBI leadership used “flimsy pretexts” and buried the process in “prohibited case files designed to evade all oversight.” 

Keep reading