“Surveillance Society”

Liberal media is trying to protect the FBI from hard questions about illegal surveillance

Besides addressing the crisis at the southern border, there is no more urgent matter for the new Republican House majority to direct its attention to than the conversion of the federal government into a progressive cudgel against civil rights. And there is nothing less surprising than the media-Democrat complex’s determination to strangle the probe in its cradle.

In the left’s playbook, everything is either about race or Donald Trump — if not both. So as night follows day, with House Republicans poised to establish a much needed Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Democrats and their press accomplices are framing the panel as an adjunct of the 2024 Trump presidential campaign.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Surveillance Society", FBI

Facial recognition mistake leads to wrong man being arrested and thrown in jail for SIX days

Louisiana authorities’ use of facial recognition technology led to the mistaken arrest of a Georgia man on a fugitive warrant, an attorney said in a case that renews attention to racial disparities in the use of the digital tool.

Randall Reid, 28, was jailed on November 25 in DeKalb County, Georgia, after authorities misidentified him as a purse theft in Jefferson Parish and Baton Rouge.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Surveillance Society"

‘Dystopian’ new spy technology should terrify you

Frightening new technology in the hands of government intelligence agencies has the ability to commandeer any smart camera and even “alter feeds” to manipulate both its audio and visuals — including past recordings, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

The Big Brother-like software — used by the nation’s intelligence agency Mossad — has been brokered since 2018 to global states by a former Israeli defense force cyber chief’s company, Toka.

But only recently has the true power of this superior hacking tool been revealed.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Surveillance Society"

Government-Run On-Line Extremism

Evidence suggests certain governments have operated fake far-right social media accounts, raising the prominence of ‘extremism’ in the public consciousness in ways that can justify limiting freedom of speech.

Fake far-right social media accounts have apparently been promoted by several western governments.

According to Breitbart, citing an investigation by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung… 

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Surveillance Society"

How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate

The platform suppressed true information from doctors and public-health experts that was at odds with U.S. government policy.

I had always thought a primary job of the press was to be skeptical of power—especially the power of the government. But during the Covid-19 pandemic, I and so many others found that the legacy media had shown itself to largely operate as a messaging platform for our public health institutions. Those institutions operated in near total lockstep, in part by purging internal dissidents and discrediting outside experts.

Twitter became an essential alternative. It was a place where those with public health expertise and perspectives at odds with official policy could air their views—and where curious citizens could find such information. This often included other countries’ responses to Covid that differed dramatically from our own.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Big Tech Oligopoly", "China eats weird animals disease", "Criminalizing Dissent", "extremists", "Surveillance Society", Twitter

Massive Police-Led Iris Scan Collection in China Raises Concerns of State Control and Repression: Canadian Study

A new study from the University of Toronto reveals a massive police-led iris scan collection campaign conducted in China’s western province of Qinghai, which researchers said could be used for increased state control and repression of ethnic and religious minorities and critics of the communist regime.

The study, published by U of T’s The Citizen Lab on Dec. 14, looked at nearly 190 publicly available sources, including the official social media accounts of the Chinese regime or public security bureau and local news reports. Among these sources, 53 contained figures showing that between March 2019 and July 2022, Chinese police may have collected between roughly 1,250,000 and 1,450,000 iris scans, representing between one-fifth (21.1 percent) and a quarter (25.6 percent) of Qinghai’s total population of 5.9 million.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"China - Communist Slave State", "Surveillance Society"

Spooks infiltrate Silicon Valley: Facebook is riddled with ex-CIA agents – including President’s briefer who now runs ‘harmful content’ team – so many ex-FBI work at Twitter they have Slack channel and Google is rife with ex-CIA

Former US government intelligence agents are now working across Silicon Valley in senior roles dedicated to censoring ‘misinformation’, DailyMail.com can disclose.

A large number of ex-officers from the FBI, CIA, NSC, and State Department have taken positions at Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

The revelation comes amid fears the FBI operated control over Twitter censorship and the Hunter Biden laptop story.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Surveillance Society"

Social credits, digital passports and other coming totalitarian evils

Psychologist, author and social commentator Jordan Peterson, the guy the left loves to hate, said on Sky News Australia that it won’t be long before the fears over COVID-19 are exploited to bring about a mass social credit system involving digital passports and government controls on the people.

He’s quite right.

The masses, amid COVID-19 fears, have shown as frogs in boiling pots of water.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Surveillance Society"

FBI Gives Dismissive Reply to Twitter Files Revelations of FBI-Twitter Censorship

Part Six of the Twitter Files was released by journalist Matt Taibbi on Twitter Dec. 16, revealing just how closely the platform worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to censor Americans prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform. “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” Taibbi tweeted.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Surveillance Society", FBI, Twitter

Chinese security firm advertises ethnicity recognition technology while facing UK ban

A Chinese security camera company has been advertising ethnicity recognition features to British and other European customers, even while it faces a ban on UK operations over allegations of involvement in ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang.

In a brochure published on its website, Hikvision (Canadian site) advertised a range of features that it said it could provide in collaboration with the UK startup FaiceTech.

These included using facial recognition for retail security, border control, and anti-money laundering checks for retail banking.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"China - Communist Slave State", "Surveillance Society"

If the secret police had a file on you, why wouldn’t you want to see it? Ask the Germans spied on by the Stasi

When East Germany collapsed, millions of the Stasi’s victims choose to remain in ignorance about their oppressors. Is it sometimes better to forget the past than to investigate it?

In East Germany, during the communist period, people would sometimes join a queue on the basis that if others were waiting, there must be something worth having at the end of it. Siegfried Wittenburg, whose images accompany this article, photographed this waiting-for-I-know-not-what in his home town of Rostock. It was safer to take photos than to criticise the regime in words, but only just.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Surveillance Society"

The Administrative State Can Put a Bug in Your Phone

A COVID contact tracing app brazenly violates Americans’ right to privacy.

In the age of cell phones and the internet, consumers often face a simple choice: convenience or privacy? Do we let Big Tech have access to our private communications and free email accounts because it’s so easy? Once you’ve said yes — and who among us has not? — it’s not a stretch to think that Big Data already has almost all your information, so why get picky at the next juncture?

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Surveillance Society", Big Brother, Big Data

RCMP monitored hostility from anti-vaccine movement against Trudeau since election

OTTAWA — The RCMP worried that after arriving in Ottawa, participants in the “Freedom Convoy” would try to pinpoint Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s location, documents suggest — just as demonstrators had tried to do during last year’s election campaign.

The concerns are outlined in assessments by the national police force’s intelligence personnel that were tabled as part of evidence presented at a public inquiry probing the Trudeau government’s use of the Emergencies Act in response to last winter’s protests.

The weeks-long demonstrations, which blockaded downtown Ottawa and several border crossings, were driven by opposition to COVID-19 restrictions such as mask and vaccine requirements. Many participants voiced their opposition to the federal government in general and Trudeau himself.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Criminalizing Dissent", "Surveillance Society", Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government, RCMP