“Surveillance Society”
Vaccination Passports: The Cornerstone of a Totalitarian State Ushering China’s Social Credit System into America.
Vaccination passports, like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want everyone to be forced to carry, are profoundly un-American.
This data-driven authoritarianism, if it comes to pass, will wash away what remains of the rule of law and the Constitution, and annihilate the American way of life.
The U.S. Intelligence Community, Flouting Laws, is Increasingly Involving Itself in Domestic Politics
A report declassified last Wednesday by the Department of Homeland Security is raising serious concerns about the possibly illegal involvement by the intelligence community in U.S. domestic political affairs.
Entitled “Domestic Violent Extremism Poses Heightened Threat in 2021,” the March 1 Report from the Director of National Intelligence states that it was prepared “in consultation with the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security—and was drafted by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with contributions from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).”
Ikea France on trial for snooping on staff and customers
The French subsidiary of Ikea will go on trial on Monday over allegations that it snooped on employees and customers by using private detectives and police officers.
Ikea France will be tried as a corporate entity alongside several of its former executives.
Prosecutors say Ikea France set up a “spying system” across its operations.
The 15 people in the dock include top executives such as former CEO Stefan Vanoverbeke, and former store managers.
Your Face Is Not Your Own
When a secretive start-up scraped the internet to build a facial-recognition tool, it tested a legal and ethical limit — and blew the future of privacy in America wide open.
In May 2019, an agent at the Department of Homeland Security received a trove of unsettling images. Found by Yahoo in a Syrian user’s account, the photos seemed to document the sexual abuse of a young girl. One showed a man with his head reclined on a pillow, gazing directly at the camera. The man appeared to be white, with brown hair and a goatee, but it was hard to really make him out; the photo was grainy, the angle a bit oblique. The agent sent the man’s face to child-crime investigators around the country in the hope that someone might recognize him.
When an investigator in New York saw the request, she ran the face through an unusual new facial-recognition app she had just started using, called Clearview AI. The team behind it had scraped the public web — social media, employment sites, YouTube, Venmo — to create a database with three billion images of people, along with links to the webpages from which the photos had come. This dwarfed the databases of other such products for law enforcement, which drew only on official photography like mug shots, driver’s licenses and passport pictures; with Clearview, it was effortless to go from a face to a Facebook account.
Four hidden ways Big Tech platforms suck up your data
Big Tech companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon collect personal user data from many different sources to create “secret identities” of people in order to understand users’ personality traits, predict purchasing behavior, and ultimately sell these profiles to advertisers and sometimes the government.
Most often, users don’t even realize that their data is being collected and exploited by tech companies. Besides advertisers, millions of people’s personal user data has also been sold to U.S. federal agencies for border control purposes as well as to the military for counterterrorism purposes.
Greenwald: If Left Can Create Narrative The Country Is Always Under Threat, They Can Expand Mass Surveillance
Glenn Greenwald warned the left is desperate to contain the “mythology” of what happened on the day of the Capitol Riot in order to preserve the Capitol Wall and have Congress create laws expanding surveillance.
How Democracy Dies: Big Tech Becomes Big Brother
“Digital giants have been playing an increasingly significant role in wider society… how well does this monopolism correlate with the public interest?,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said on January 27, 2021.
“Where is the distinction between successful global businesses, sought-after services and big data consolidation on the one hand, and the efforts to rule society[…] by substituting legitimate democratic institutions, by restricting the natural right for people to decide how to live and what view to express freely on the other hand?”
Was Mr. Putin defending democracy? Hardly. What apparently worries him is that the Big Tech might gain the power to control society at the expense of his government. What must be a nightmare for him — as for many Americans — is that the Tech giants were able to censor news favorable to Trump and then censor Trump himself. How could the U.S. do this to the president of a great and free country?
China’s ‘Sharp Eyes’ Program Aims to Surveil 100% of Public Space
The program turns neighbors into agents of the surveillance state
Ontario seeking public input on “not spooky surveillance state shit at all” digital ID program – OK. Fuck Off.
The Ontario government says it is looking for the public’s input on a possible digital ID program that would allow for people to prove who they are online much easier.
The hope is that the program will be introduced by the end of 2021.
The program will allow for people to “securely and conveniently prove their identity online,” according to the Ford government. It will also help people to be able to access things online rather than have to travel to do things in-person, the government said, such as a small business applying for a license or a parent looking for information on their child’s immunization records.
Clearview AI broke Canadian privacy laws with facial recognition tool, watchdogs say
OTTAWA — A new watchdog report says Canadian use of U.S. firm Clearview AI’s facial-recognition technology violated federal and provincial laws governing personal information.
In a report today with three provincial counterparts, federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien says the New York-based company’s scraping of billions of images of people from across the internet represented mass surveillance and was a clear violation of Canadians’ privacy rights.
A victory? That Genie is out of the bottle, we are all the “usual suspects” now.
Secretive CSIS technology that could reveal ‘lifestyle choices’ needs a warrant, says court
Canada’s spy agency needs a warrant when using a secretive type of technology that could help them “learn about an individual’s private activities and personal choices” as part of its foreign intelligence gathering mandate, according to a recent Federal Court decision.
Details of what exactly that technology is and how it’s used were redacted in the June 2020 court ruling, which was posted online today.
The Federal Court’s findings would only say it concerns technology that allows the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to collect certain information from mobile devices.
Given Canada’s ruling class trends toward promotion of virtually any perversion you care to name I expect heterosexual monogamy and church attendance will be revealed as scandalous behaviors meriting state surveillance.
Intelligence Analysts Use U.S. Smartphone Location Data Without Warrants, Memo Says
WASHINGTON — A military arm of the intelligence community buys commercially available databases containing location data from smartphone apps and searches it for Americans’ past movements without a warrant, according to an unclassified memo obtained by The New York Times.
Defense Intelligence Agency analysts have searched for the movements of Americans within a commercial database in five investigations over the past two and a half years, agency officials disclosed in a memo they wrote for Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon.
Ex-ADT employee admits hacking into 200-plus live cameras, spying on naked women and couples having sex
A former ADT employee admitted Thursday that he hacked into the video feeds of more than 200 Texas customers to spy on naked women and couples having sex inside their homes.
Telesforo Aviles, 35, logged into customers’ accounts more than 9,600 times over a four-year period “in order to view their footage for sexual gratification,” he admitted in federal court.
“This defendant, entrusted with safeguarding customers’ homes, instead intruded on their most intimate moments,” Acting U.S. Attorney Prerak Shah said in a statement.
One thing is certain. Our government would never stoop to such low measures!
High Decibel Social Distancing ‘Dog Collars’ for Factory Workers Deployed
A Swedish manufacturer in France has been accused of treating their employees like dogs after the company asked its workers to wear a social distancing device that emits a high decibel sound if employees are too close to each other.
Hacked home cams used to livestream police raids in swatting attacks
Hackers have livestreamed police raids on innocent households after hijacking their victims’ smart home devices and making a hoax call to the authorities, the FBI has warned.
It said offenders had even spoken to responding officers via the hacked kit.
It marks the latest escalation of a crime known as “swatting”, in which offenders fool armed police or other emergency responders to go to a target’s residence.
The FBI said there were “deadly” risks.