Category Archives: Surveillance

US Agencies’ Planned Expansion of Facial Recognition, by Julia Conley

Posted on September 7, 2021 | Leave a comment

The US government doesn’t believe there’s enough facial recognition surveillance. From Julia Conley at consortiumnews.com:

(EFF Photos, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Digital rights advocates reacted harshly last month to an internal U.S. government report detailing how 10 federal agencies have plans to greatly expand their reliance on facial recognition in the years ahead.

The Government Accountability Office surveyed federal agencies and found that 10 have specific plans to increase their use of the technology by 2023 — surveilling people for numerous reasons including to identify criminal suspects, track government employees’ level of alertness, and match faces of people on government property with names on watch lists.

The report (pdf) was released as lawmakers face pressure to pass legislation to limit the use of facial recognition technology by the government and law enforcement agencies.

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rand Paul (D-KY) introduced the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act in April to prevent agencies from using “illegitimately obtained” biometric data, such as photos from the software company Clearview AI. The company has scraped billions of photos from social media platforms without approval and is currently used by hundreds of police departments across the United States.

The bill has not received a vote in either chamber of Congress yet.

The plans described in the GAO report, tweeted law professor Andrew Ferguson, author of “The Rise of Big Data Policing,” are “what happens when Congress fails to act.”

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Intelligence, Politics, Surveillance, Technology, Tyranny, Uncategorized

Tagged

The All-Seeing “i”: Apple Just Declared War on Your Privacy, by Edward Snowden

Posted on August 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

Apple is taking a big step towards become an agent of governments’ totalitarian surveillance. From Edward Snowden at edwardsnowden.substack.com:

By now you’ve probably heard that Apple plans to push a new and uniquely intrusive surveillance system out to many of the more than one billion iPhones it has sold, which all run the behemoth’s proprietary, take-it-or-leave-it software. This new offensive is tentatively slated to begin with the launch of iOS 15⁠—almost certainly in mid-September⁠—with the devices of its US user-base designated as the initial targets. We’re told that other countries will be spared, but not for long.

You might have noticed that I haven’t mentioned which problem it is that Apple is purporting to solve. Why? Because it doesn’t matter.

Having read thousands upon thousands of remarks on this growing scandal, it has become clear to me that many understand it doesn’t matter, but few if any have been willing to actually say it. Speaking candidly, if that’s still allowed, that’s the way it always goes when someone of institutional significance launches a campaign to defend an indefensible intrusion into our private spaces. They make a mad dash to the supposed high ground, from which they speak in low, solemn tones about their moral mission before fervently invoking the dread spectre of the Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse, warning that only a dubious amulet—or suspicious software update—can save us from the most threatening members of our species.

Suddenly, everybody with a principled objection is forced to preface their concern with apologetic throat-clearing and the establishment of bonafides: I lost a friend when the towers came down, however… As a parent, I understand this is a real problem, but…

As a parent, I’m here to tell you that sometimes it doesn’t matter why the man in the handsome suit is doing something. What matters are the consequences.

Apple’s new system, regardless of how anyone tries to justify it, will permanently redefine what belongs to you, and what belongs to them.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Governments, Morality, Politics, Privacy, Propaganda, Surveillance, Technology

Tagged ,

T Is for Tyranny: How Freedom Dies from A to Z, by John Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on August 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here’s a depressing A to Z list of the freedoms we’ve lost and the power the government has arrogated to itself. From John Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.”— French philosopher Etienne de La Boétie

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to be a convenient, traumatic, devastating distraction.

The American people, the permanent underclass in America, have allowed themselves to be so distracted and divided that they have failed to notice the building blocks of tyranny being laid down right under their noses by the architects of the Deep State.

Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton: they have all been complicit in carrying out the Deep State’s agenda.

Frankly, it really doesn’t matter who occupies the White House, because it is a profit-driven, unelected bureaucracy—call it whatever you will: the Deep State, the Controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the corporate elite, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—that is actually calling the shots

Our losses are mounting with every passing day, part of a calculated siege intended to ensure our defeat at the hands of a totalitarian regime.

Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, media, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more are casualties in the government’s war on the American people.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Governments, History, Law, Morality, Politics, Privacy, Surveillance

Tagged ,

How the New Mileage Tax Will Get Your Old Car Off the Road, by Eric Peters

Posted on August 9, 2021 | 1 comment

The assholes have dreamed up all sorts of ways of getting you to do things without making it look like they’re forcing you to do them (think vaccines). From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

Joe Biden and the Republicans – without whom Joe Biden could not have done it – may have just outlawed cars that can’t be tracked without actually outlawing them, per se. Instead, they will be regulated away – the new trick in government’s dirty bag thereof.

It might have caused a ruckus to propose a law outlawing older vehicle without Onboard Diagnostic (OBD II) electronic data collection ports, GPS transponders or some other, similar means by which a vehicle can be externally tracked – using the pretext of keeping track of its mileage that way, so as to tax its owner that way. This being bad enough all by itself, being invasive enough all by itself. Instead of paying gas taxes anonymously at the pump whenever you fill up – possibly with cash – the federal government will tax you automatically and electronically by the mile, wherever you drive.

Which will also give the government – and the insurance mafia, which is also effectively the government, just ex officio but endowed with governmental power to make you do things or else – the power to monitor how you drive, since the same OBD data port/GPS that will be used to keep track of mileage can also keep track of how fast you drive as well as where and when you drive.

Everything about your drive will, in other words, be known unto them.

That is one of the many treasures hidden within the just-passed – by enabling Republicans, who provided the necessary support for the Democrats who confected it – “Infrastructure” bill. Which only has about 20 percent to do with building new roads and bridges or fixing the ones that exist and 80 percent to do with funding various projects that almost no one wishes to fund voluntarily, as by paying for them willingly. Things like Amtrack and related forms of government-controlled herd transit. Also “green” things such as electric car charging stands and of course electric cars, themselves that cost plenty of green – all of it to be extorted from the public that would otherwise never freely pay the cost of it.

Continue reading→

1 Comment

Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Government, Law, Politics, Propaganda, Surveillance, Technology, Tyranny

Tagged ,

“This Is About Control, Not Children”: Eric Weinstein Calls Out Apple’s Virtuous Pedo-Hunter Act, by Tyler Durden

Posted on August 9, 2021 | 1 comment

Apple has become an instrument of Deep State surveillance. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Last week, Apple announced that they would begin analyzing images on its devices before they’re uploaded to the cloud in order to identify child pornography and report it to the authorities, sending privacy advocates through the roof.

Apple defended the decision – claiming there’s a ‘1 in 1 trillion chance of false positives.’

“Instead of scanning images in the cloud, the system performs on-device matching using a database of known CSAM image hashes provided by NCMEC (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children) and other child safety organizations. Apple further transforms this database into an unreadable set of hashes that is securely stored on users’ devices,” the company said in an announcement.

Privacy advocates have pointed out the obvious slippery slope of allowing big tech to infiltrate our personal lives under the guise of fighting [evil thing], and the next thing you know Apple is hunting dissidents for human rights abusers, reporting who owns what guns, or people taking ‘suspicious’ routes that deviate from their normal pattern. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes:

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again now: it’s impossible to build a client-side scanning system that can only be used for sexually explicit images sent or received by children. As a consequence, even a well-intentioned effort to build such a system will break key promises of the messenger’s encryption itself and open the door to broader abuses.

All it would take to widen the narrow backdoor that Apple is building is an expansion of the machine learning parameters to look for additional types of content, or a tweak of the configuration flags to scan, not just children’s, but anyone’s accounts. That’s not a slippery slope; that’s a fully built system just waiting for external pressure to make the slightest change. -EFF

They’re hypocrites anyway

Continue reading→

1 Comment

Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Law, Media, Politics, Privacy, Propaganda, Surveillance, Technology, Tyranny

Tagged ,

What Would Our Economy Look Like in the Shadow of Vaccine Passports? by Brandon Smith

Posted on August 9, 2021 | 1 comment

Has anybody really thought out what a vaccine passport requirement would do to business and the economy? From Brandon Smith at alt-market.us:

This article was written by Brandon Smith and originally published at Birch Gold Group

Yes, it’s an official concern now. The mainstream media and the Biden Administration have gone from suggesting that Covid vaccinations would “not be mandated” to saying they “should be mandated.” This means several very uncomfortable consequences are on the way for our economy and the nation as a whole. Remember, the federal government already decided it’s legal for companies to require coronavirus vaccines. The most obvious next step: A mandatory “vaccine passport” certifying its holder has gotten the recommended injections.

The assertion by the establishment is that life would simply go back to normal as long as you comply and get your shots like a good citizen. But from what I have seen even some people who have taken the vaccines voluntarily do not want a passport system in place, and for good reason. Should a mandatory vaccine passport system be implemented, life will never be normal again.

Vaccine passports are not a panacea

First we have to take into account the fact that there will never be a 100% vaccination rate in the U.S.; not even close. With a number of states at or below a 50% vaccination rate, there is a question of practicality regarding vaccine passports. Such a program would mean that around half the country could be put in the position of hearing they have no right to employment or possibly even general interaction in trade because they won’t take the experimental jab.

The real concern with a vaccine passport has nothing to do with coronavirus, or herd immunity, or saving lives. It’s a tool of control. Like the Soviet Union’s communist party membership card, it’s an official document that demonstrates compliance to authority. It’s a tool to divide the U.S. population.

If this autocratic diktat was directed at a tiny minority of people within the population, it might work at frightening them into accepting the vaccinations; to go along to get along. But, with hundreds of millions of people saying “no way,” history tells us the more pressure applied the more rebellion is inspired.

Second, we have to consider what the immediate economic and financial effects will be in light of this conflict. For example, look at the amount of relocation and migration that has happened in the U.S. in the past year alone. Many millions of people have escaped from predominantly blue states based on political and social factors; and the covid mandates and lockdowns are a big part of what inspired most people to leave.

As has been well documented, blue states are much slower in recovering economically when compared to red states with less restrictions. Not only that, but money moves with people. This is a hard reality. Conservative states are seeing ample cash inflows from tourism and mass migration while blue states are bleeding tax revenues. In light of this revelation, red states are going to ask themselves this question:

“Why would we commit economic suicide like the blue states by following their example? Wouldn’t vaccine passports be the equivalent of blue state covid mandates times a hundred?”

Continue reading→

1 Comment

Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Economy, Governments, Insurrection, Labor, Politics, Propaganda, Surveillance, Tyranny

Tagged

Freedom in the Coming Time of Madness, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on August 5, 2021 | 1 comment

Liberty that can be taken away anytime the government says there is a crisis isn’t liberty. From Andrew Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

Sadly, we are approaching a time in America during which our elected public officials will assault the liberties we have hired them to protect. Whatever the cause, the government will soon blame its failures to contain a virus on a small portion of the population and then impose restrictions on the inalienable rights of all of us.

We cannot permit this to happen again.

During the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln thought it expedient to silence those in the northern states who challenged his wartime decisions by incarcerating them in military prisons, he was rebuked afterward by a unanimous Supreme Court. The essence of the rebuke was that no matter the state of difficulties — whether war or pestilence — the Constitution protects our natural rights, and its provisions are to be upheld when they pinch as well as when they comfort, in good times and in bad.

Whether COVID-19 is coming back or not, our central planners have panicked. We do not have a free market in the U.S. in the delivery of health care; rather, we have thousands of pages of statutes, regulations and controls at the federal, state and local levels.

Those controls were revealed as manifestly deficient the last time around. The feds were so protective of their control of health care — an area of governance that the Supreme Court has ruled is nowhere delegated to them in the Constitution and, but for their power to tax those who defy them, is nonexistent — that they insisted that only the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta could be trusted to test for the virus.

Continue reading→

1 Comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Law, Military, Politics, Propaganda, Surveillance, War

Tagged , , ,

The Insecurity Industry, by Edward Snowden

Posted on July 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

Your phone is watching you, hearing you, retransmitting your data, and recording your movements. What a great technology, huh? From Edward Snowden at edwardsnowden.substack.com:

 
 

1.

The first thing I do when I get a new phone is take it apart. I don’t do this to satisfy a tinkerer’s urge, or out of political principle, but simply because it is unsafe to operate. Fixing the hardware, which is to say surgically removing the two or three tiny microphones hidden inside, is only the first step of an arduous process, and yet even after days of these DIY security improvements, my smartphone will remain the most dangerous item I possess.

The microphones inside my actual phone, prepped for surgery


Prior to this week’s Pegasus Project, a global reporting effort by major newspapers to expose the fatal consequences of the NSO Group—the new private-sector face of an out-of-control Insecurity Industry—most smartphone manufacturers along with much of the world press collectively rolled their eyes at me whenever I publicly identified a fresh-out-of-the-box iPhone as a potentially lethal threat.

Despite years of reporting that implicated the NSO Group’s for-profit hacking of phones in the deaths and detentions of journalists and human rights defenders; despite years of reporting that smartphone operating systems were riddled with catastrophic security flaws (a circumstance aggravated by their code having been written in aging programming languages that have long been regarded as unsafe); and despite years of reporting that even when everything works as intended, the mobile ecosystem is a dystopian hellscape of end-user monitoring and outright end-user manipulation, it is still hard for many people to accept that something that feels good may not in fact be good. Over the last eight years I’ve often felt like someone trying to convince their one friend who refuses to grow up to quit smoking and cut back on the booze—meanwhile, the magazine ads still say “Nine of Ten Doctors Smoke iPhones!” and “Unsecured Mobile Browsing is Refreshing!”

In my infinite optimism, however, I can’t help but regard the arrival of the Pegasus Project as a turning-point—a well-researched, exhaustively-sourced, and frankly crazy-making story about a “winged” “Trojan Horse” infection named “Pegasus” that basically turns the phone in your pocket into an all-powerful tracking device that can be turned on or off, remotely, unbeknownst to you, the pocket’s owner.   

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Government, Intelligence, Law, Politics, Propaganda, Surveillance

Tagged , , ,

Watching The Watchmen, by Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison

Posted on July 25, 2021 | Leave a comment

The FBI induces people to conspire to commit crimes and then arrests them for conspiracy to commit crimes, covering itself in glory and targeting politically disfavored groups. It appears it did so in the now infamous Gretchen Whitmer assassination plot. From Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison at buzzfeednews.com:

The Michigan kidnapping case is a major test for the Biden administration’s commitment to fighting domestic terrorism — and a crucible for the fierce ideological divisions pulling the country apart.

In the inky darkness of a late summer night last September, three cars filled with armed men began circling Birch Lake in northern Michigan, looking for ways to approach Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s three-bedroom vacation cottage, subdue her — using a stun gun if necessary — and drag her away.

One vehicle stopped to check out a boat launch while a second searched in vain for the right house in the thick woods ringing the lake. The third car ran countersurveillance, using night vision goggles to look out for cops and handheld radios to communicate with the others.

Earlier, they had scoped out a bridge over the Elk River, just a few miles away, scrambling down under the span to figure out where plastic explosives would need to be placed to blow it sky-high. That would slow police response, giving the men time to escape with the governor — who had infuriated them by imposing COVID lockdowns, among other outrages — and either take her to Lake Michigan, where they could abandon her on a boat, or whisk her to Wisconsin, where she would be tried as a “tyrant.”

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Government, Insurrection, Intelligence, Politics, Surveillance

Tagged , , ,

Meet Jigsaw: Google’s Intelligence Agency, by Privacy To Go

Posted on July 24, 2021 | Leave a comment

Google is an arm of the US government. From Privacy To Go at off-guardian.com:

t’s no secret that Google regularly collaborates with intelligence agencies. They are a known NSA subcontractor. They launched Google Earth using a CIA spy satellite network.

Their executive suite’s revolving door with DARPA is well known.

In the wake of the January 6th Capitol event, the FBI used Google location data to pwn attendants with nothing more than a valid Gmail address and smartphone login:

The police were then able to obtain an Instagram registration email, which turned out to be a Gmail address. With that in hand, investigators ordered Google to provide any location data they had on that Gmail user, which the tech giant duly provided after it identified a linked smartphone.

A stark reminder that carrying a tracking device with a Google login, even with the SIM card removed, can mean the difference between freedom and an orange jumpsuit in the Great Reset era.

But Google also operates its own internal intelligence agency – complete with foreign regime-change operations that are now being applied domestically.

And they’ve been doing so without repercussion for over a decade.

From Google Ideas to Google Regime Change

In 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt created Google Ideas. In typical Silicon Valley newspeak, Ideas was marketed as a “think/do tank to research issues at the intersection of technology and geopolitics.”

Astute readers know this “think/do” formula well – entities like the Council on Foreign Relations or World Economic Forum draft policy papers (think) and three-letter agencies carry them out (do).

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Government, Intelligence, Media, Politics, Privacy, Propaganda, Surveillance, Technology

Tagged , ,