Category Archives: Technology

If You’re Close to the Scene of a Crime, Police Can Demand Google Hand Over Your Data, by Aaron Kesel

Posted on March 13, 2020 | 1 comment

Now proximity to a crime gives the police “probable cause” to obtain your data from Google. From Aaron Kesel at themindunleashed.com:

Google reverse location search warrants have privacy and civil liberties advocates concerned.

Crime Google Data

(TMU) — The Gainesville Police Department suspected an innocent man was involved in a burglary so naturally they requested that Google give them all of his location data.

Google’s legal investigations support team wrote to Zachary McCoy telling him that local police were demanding information related to his Google account. Google replied and said it would release the data unless McCoy went to court and tried to block the request, NBC reported.

The man then searched his case number on the Gainesville Police Department website where he found a one-page report on the burglary of an elderly woman’s home ten months earlier on March 29, 2009. Unfortunately for McCoy, the crime occurred less than a mile from the home that he shared with his two roommates.

Caleb Kenyon, McCoy’s lawyer, said he was subject of a “geofence warrant.” A geofence warrant is essentially a virtual dragnet over crime scenes where police request to sweep up Google location data drawn from users’ GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular connections from everyone who is near a crime scene.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Privacy, Surveillance, Technology

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“Intelligence Coup Of The Century”: CIA Ran Global Spy Op Using Well-Known Swiss Encryption Company, by Tyler Durden

Posted on March 8, 2020 | Leave a comment

What better way to infiltrate a government’s computer systems than by selling them their encryption software. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

In a new bombshell report, The Washington Post reveals a massive covert operation which was ‘hidden in plain sight’ that seems straight out of Confessions of an Economic Hitman — it’s yet more ‘conspiracy theory’ of the past now definitively proven conspiracy fact.

For the past decades, the CIA owned and operated a front company based in Switzerland for the purpose of spying on secret government communications across the globe, whether they were allies or adversaries. This according to newly unearthed 280-pages of an internal CIA history of the operation obtained by the Post along with Swiss public broadcaster SRF and German broadcaster ZDF.

Crypto AG, a Switzerland-based communications encryption firm, was secretly purchased by the CIA and West German intelligence services in 1971. The company not only made millions by selling encryption equipment to over 120 countries into the 21st century, but used the very same equipment to infiltrate each host country’s communications in a ‘Trojan Horse’ style operation.

Crypto is headquareted in Steinhausen, Switzerland. Image source: Reuters.

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Posted in Business, Governments, Intelligence, Privacy, Surveillance, Technology

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The New Cold War With Russia Is All America’s Fault, by Scott Horton

Posted on March 3, 2020 | 1 comment

Scott Horton marshals an impressive case that the US is responsible for the new cold war with Russia. From Horton at antiwar.com:

The following is the text of a speech Scott gave to the King County, Washington Libertarian Party, February 29, 2020.

According to Rep. Jason Crow, Russian President “Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy.”

But that’s not true. There’s no real reason to believe that Putin means us any harm at all. The new Cold War with Russia is all America’s fault.

See, at the end of the last Cold War the American foreign policy community, led by the neoconservatives, adopted a doctrine of global dominance. This was as Charles Krauthammer put it in 1990, the U.S.’s “Unipolar Moment” and opportunity to remake the world our way and keep it that way. They call it leadership, hegemony, preeminence, predominance or even Full Spectrum Dominance. No really, it’s all for their own good though. Keeping the peace; protecting the sea lanes; enforcing the global rules-based liberal international order.

Dick Cheney’s Defense Department’s post-Iraq War I, “Defense Planning Guidance” from 1992 defined the doctrine for the new decade and into the new millennium: The U.S. must remain the single dominant power on the planet, and must maintain enough military power to prevent any possible strategic rivals, such as Germany, Japan, Russia or China, from even considering an attempt to challenge U.S. power.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, Technology, War

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5G and the China Epidemic, by Jon Rappoport

Posted on March 2, 2020 | 1 comment

This would be a much better article if the author sourced via footnotes his many claims. However, he raises some interesting possibilities if those claims are taken at face value. From Jon Rappoport at lewrockwell.com:

When a momentous event occurs, people weigh in. One person says, ‘X is the cause.’ Another says, ‘No, Y is the cause.’ Is it possible that X and Y are both causing the event? Of course. But people have a tendency to aim for one and only one explanation. This is a psychological factor that has nothing to do with the truth. If a person is starving and also going without water, is there only one reason for his illness? Both causes together are creating a dire situation. In the current “epidemic,” the combination of deadly air pollution in Chinese cities, and the rollout of 5G technology, could both be operating with horrific effect.

Here is a typical standard definition of 5G, from the industry: “5G is the 5th generation mobile network. It will take a much larger role than previous generations. 5G will elevate the mobile network to not only interconnect people, but also interconnect and control machines, objects, and devices. It will deliver new levels of performance and efficiency that will empower new user experiences and connect new industries.” (Qualcom.com)

Several petitions have circulated, with the aim of stopping 5G deployment altogether. From principia-scientific.org, here is an excerpt from one petition, which is claimed to have 26,000 scientists as signatories:

“We the undersigned scientists, doctors, environmental organizations and citizens from (__) countries, urgently call for a halt to the deployment of the 5G (fifth generation) wireless network, including 5G from space satellites. 5G will massively increase exposure to radio frequency (RF) radiation on top of the 2G, 3G and 4G networks for telecommunications already in place. RF radiation has been proven harmful for humans and the environment. The deployment of 5G constitutes an experiment on humanity and the environment that is defined as a crime under international law.”

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Posted in Business, Governments, Medicine, Propaganda, Science, Technology

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GOOGLE’s Creepy Line, by MG

Posted on February 29, 2020 | 1 comment

Google delves deeper and deeper into the dark arts. It truly is “sinister.” From MG at theburningplatform.com:

The Creepy Line is a particularly sinister term used in an unguarded remark by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2010. In hindsight, what is most disturbing about the comment is how casually he explained Google’s policy regarding invading the privacy of its customers and clients.

“Google policy on a lot of these things,” Schmidt says about 45 seconds into the introduction, “is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” Time pointer needed.

The Creepy Line is an 80-minute documentary available through several options available at the link below.  For now, it is available for free at Amazon Prime, but I’m not sure how long it will be offered there considering many current concerns regarding censorship of anti-establishment themes on various social media platforms.  This film offers a very frank look at the number one source of news in our country: Facebook and Google.

https://www.thecreepyline.com/

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Government, Privacy, Surveillance, Technology

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Unicorns & Non-Unicorns Hung Out to Dry: As SoftBank Licks its Wounds, Startup Funding Fizzles, Shutdowns & Layoffs Spread, by Wolf Richter

Posted on February 25, 2020 | 1 comment

Wolf Richter surveys the weird, weird world of Silicon Valley finance. From Richter at wolfstreet.com:

The out-of-money moment is here. The party is over. But it sure was fund, so to speak, while it lasted.

It’s now a near daily litany: Startups, once assured to be fed endless cash to burn, are laying off people or are shutting down entirely as funding for them dries up, and as exits for investors get tough after the recent IPO fiascos, including Casper, Lyft, and Uber, and the messily scuttled IPO of WeWorkthat has pulled the rug out from under SoftBank.

San Francisco startup Starsky Robotics, which tried to develop autonomous-with-remote-human-control-trucking technology, and which had raised over $20 million in four rounds, has laid off the majority of its engineers and office staff after investors backed out of a funding round late last year. A potential buyer with deep pockets has not yet emerged either, senior VP Paul Schlegel, whose last day was January 31, told FreightWaves.

But it’s not the autonomous-driving industry overall that appears to be cutting back: According to Schlegel, 85% of the laid-off engineers have been hired by Google’s Waymo, GM’s Cruise, TuSimple (which has raised nearly $300 million, including from UPS), and others. It’s just that this company ran out of funds and investors refused to throw more money at it.

Then there are the cutbacks and layoffs among startups in the consumer DNA testing space, which has gotten tangled up in all kinds of privacy scandals, and now a drop in demand, but which received billions of dollars in funding over the years.

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Posted in banking, Business, Financial markets, Investing, Money, Technology

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The Bogus Big Brother-Big Tech Brawl Over Backdoors, by Bill Blunden

Posted on February 24, 2020 | Leave a comment

Don’t be fooled by Big Tech’s rhetoric about protecting your electronic devices from government snoops. From Bill Blunden at theamericanconservative.com:

The law can already get into your phone anytime. But Apple needs you to think it isn’t helping them.

By L By Aaban /Shutterstock

In the wake of this year’s Munich Security Conference, members of the European Union are pushing back against warnings by the United Statesabout networking gear sold by Chinese telecom giant Huawei. American officials have alleged that Huawei can covertly access its equipment through backdoors designed for law enforcement, and voiced concerns about the risk associated with installing hardware that could give the Chinese government the ability to remotely monitor or even disable other nation’s networks.

The insistence of countries like Britain and Germany on integrating technology from a police state directly into their digital infrastructure is definitely curious. But it’s not like supply chain subversion hasn’t already transpired on an industrial scale. For example, we know now, thanks to a recent Washington Post report, that during the early days of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency succeeded in secretly compromising encryption technology used by over 120 different countries. For years, American spies were tapping lines and pilfering secrets from all over the globe.

Back to 2020. American officials are sounding alarms about Huawei having backdoors, though that hasn’t stopped them from supporting U.S. law enforcement getting their own access to everyone’s data whenever they want. But theirs is a “noble” cause: high ranking members of the political establishment are warning that they won’t be able to protect us against terrorists, drug cartels, and child pornographers unless Silicon Valley allows in American security services.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Governments, Intelligence, Investigations, Law, Privacy, Propaganda, Surveillance, Technology

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