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Surveillance

Camera System Feeds Information To Police On Drivers Nationwide

The United States public has been treated to round after round of revelations disclosing that our actions — public and private, digital and physical, criminalized and legal — are tracked and surveilled in a bevy of ways. New realms of egregious privacy violations and excesses continue to be regularly broached by corporations and police. One of the most concerning contemporary cases is that of the AI-enabled security camera start-up Flock Safety, which, by surveilling enormous expanses of public terrain and facilitating the tracking of innocent individuals, is both testing the limits of warrantless dragnet surveillance and indulging in extremes of vacuous start-up hype and negligent absurdity.

Legal Groups Sue Administration Over Use Of Israeli Spyware

Civil rights attorneys are suing the Trump administration to force the release of records detailing whether federal immigration agencies are using sophisticated Israeli spyware to track, monitor, and target immigrants and activists across the country. The lawsuit, filed on Oct. 30 in federal court by Just Futures Law and the Center for Constitutional Rights, demands that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) comply with Freedom of Information Act requests related to their contracts with tech companies Cellebrite and Paragon Solutions. Both companies have been linked to government surveillance of journalists, human rights defenders, and protesters around the world. 

AI-Powered Drones Used In Gaza Now Surveil US Cities

AI-powered quadcopter drones used by Israel in its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza are now being used to surveil US citizens, from protestors to spring breakers, in all major US cities, according to a report from the journalist project ¡Do Not Panic! published on 3 November. Hundreds of drones manufactured by the US company Skydio were delivered to Israel after the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023 for use in the strip. Now, they are flying daily above all major US cities, including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, Cleveland, and Jacksonville, while automatically uploading millions of images to an evidence database.

Daily Tips To Protect Your Privacy And Security

Trying to take control of your online privacy can feel like a full-time job. But if you break it up into small tasks and take on one project at a time it makes the process of protecting your privacy much easier. This month we’re going to do just that. For the month of October, we’ll update this post with new tips every weekday that show various ways you can opt yourself out of the ways tech giants surveil you. Online privacy isn’t dead. But the tech giants make it a pain in the butt to achieve. With these incremental tweaks to the services we use, we can throw sand in the gears of the surveillance machine and opt out of the ways tech companies attempt to optimize us into advertisement and content viewing machines.

Interview With Katya Schwenk On AI Surveillance Pricing

ou go to buy a ticket for a flight; you think the price is the price, but, in fact, the airline is using lots of available information about you to present the highest price they think you will pay. Yes, airlines have always tweaked prices based on status or frequency of flying, but this is different. This is companies using information you didn’t share with them, determining what they, openly among themselves, call your “pain point,” the maximum you will spend before you say, “OK, I just won’t see my mother this year.” Some insist this is just the market at work, but what can we do if we decide it’s actually an instance of using technology to do something because it can, without adequate consideration of whether it should?

Mass Opposition To Flock Surveillance Grows In Denver

Hundreds packed a conference room in Denver, Colorado on the evening of Wednesday, October 22, after the city’s Mayor Mike Johnston renewed a contract with surveillance company Flock without a public process or City Council vote, according to activists. Just weeks after Denver’s City Council unanimously voted down a two-year, USD 666,000 extension with Flock in May, Johnston’s office approved a shorter-term deal worth USD 498,500, which is narrowly under the USD 500,000 threshold that would have triggered council oversight. “Instead of joining us here at this town hall tonight, the mayor announced this morning that he is again unilaterally extending the city’s contract with Flock,” Katie Leonard, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, told the crowd.

By Enabling Police Surveillance, Elected Officials Fuel Trump’s Agenda

In a remarkable series of avoidable mistakes, elected officials in Illinois have demonstrated to the rest of the country the impossibility of meaningful regulation of police use of surveillance technology. In May of this year, 404 Media published evidence that Illinois automated license plate reader data was being accessed on behalf of federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as directly by law enforcement agencies across the country, including in Texas, who used the information for immigration enforcement and to monitor people seeking abortions.

Microsoft Revokes Cloud Services From Israel’s Unit 8200

Microsoft has terminated the Israeli army’s access to technology it was using to store vast troves of intelligence on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza, the tech giant informed Israel’s Defense Ministry in a letter late last week, according to the Guardian. The decision followed an exposé last month by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian revealing how Unit 8200, the Israeli army’s elite cyber warfare agency, was housing intercepted recordings of millions of mobile phone calls by Palestinians on Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, creating one of the world’s most intrusive collections of surveillance data over a single population group. According to the joint investigation, this data has been used over the past two years to plan lethal airstrikes in Gaza, as well as to arrest Palestinians in the West Bank.

True, Or Fake News? ‘90% Of Nicaraguans Feel Spied Upon’

The “spied upon” headline from El Pais is unequivocal. The story, in the newspaper’s English-language edition, says that Nicaraguans live in “a climate of permanent surveillance” in which they distrust even their neighbors. Further, apparently harmless community meetings are really “a mechanism of social control” where they “feel watched.” El Pais sources a survey carried out “independently” by an organization called Hagamos Democracia (“Let’s Make Democracy”), based in Costa Rica. Its president, Jesús Tefel, says that people can’t “express opinions openly for fear of being betrayed.” El Pais’s conclusion is that Nicaraguans live under “constant surveillance and repression.”

Global Sumud Flotilla Advances Towards Tunisia Under ‘Harassment’ Of Surveillance Drones

The Global Sumud Flotilla is advancing towards Gaza and is already sailing towards Tunisia, divided into two large groups. Both expeditions will meet in Tunisia at the end of the week, when they will be joined by another twenty boats in what the organizers consider to be the “largest humanitarian mission in solidarity with Palestine.” Technical problems and bad weather have significantly delayed the flotilla’s schedule, which set sail on August 31 from Barcelona and has so far only been able to cover a handful of nautical miles. Harsh sea conditions forced several boats to be repaired, and after a particularly violent storm on Monday, September 1, the expedition was divided between the ports of Mahón (Menorca) and Barcelona.

How Pro-Palestine Youth Are Responding To Online Censorship

When Israel initiated plans to evict Palestinians from their homes in occupied East Jerusalem to make way for illegal settlers, millions of young people around the world got involved in a high-profile social media campaign to raise awareness.  Using the hashtag #SaveSheikhJarrah, more than 40 million people joined in, forming part of a wave of online organising that set the stage for a new era of pro-Palestine digital activism. That trend continued as Israel launched its ongoing genocide in Gaza in October 2023 with activists dedicating their instagram feeds and TikTok reels to spreading awareness of Israeli atrocities. But mounting censorship on social media, digital fatigue and a hunger for deeper forms of engagement, are forcing organisers to shift gears and adopt new modes of activism.

Microsoft Launches Formal Review Into Gaza Surveillance Claims

Microsoft announced on 15 August that it has opened an independent review into the reported use of its Azure cloud technology by the Israeli military's Unit 8200, following detailed investigations published by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call. The company updated a blog post originally published in May, saying it does not always have visibility into how clients deploy its software once installed on private servers and devices. “Microsoft appreciates that The Guardian’s recent report raises additional and precise allegations that merit a full and urgent review,” the company said. It pledged to release its findings once the review, led by Covington & Burling LLP, is complete.

Microsoft Helping Israel Spy On Millions Of Palestinians Since 2021

Israel has been using a Microsoft cloud platform to store massive amounts of data and intelligence on Palestinians in both the occupied West Bank and Gaza, according to a new investigation carried out by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian.  The investigation reveals that Microsoft’s chief executive met in 2021 with the commander of Israel’s notorious Unit 8200 – the military intelligence unit involved in the pager terror attacks against Lebanon and other covert operations across the region.  Unit 8200 chief Yossi Sariel convinced Microsoft’s Satya Nadella to grant Israeli military intelligence access to a “customized and segregated area” inside the Azure cloud platform, according to The Guardian.

Obama Colluded With The Surveillance State Against Trump

“It probably helps him a lot, the immunity ruling. But it doesn’t help the people around him at all. It probably helps him a lot. He’s done criminal acts, no question about it but he has immunity and it probably helps him a lot. He owes me big. Obama owes me big.” - Donald Trump on his treason accusations against Barack Obama Because immigrants around the country are being snatched off the streets and detained by masked ICE agents without any due process, and because the United States remains committed to aiding Israel’s genocidal grip on Gaza, it isn’t easy to write the words, “Donald Trump was right.”

Colorado Activists Fight To Disable Cameras Aiding Arrests

Denver-based activists are seeking to shut off Flock ALPR (Automated License Plate Recognition) cameras in their city after reports indicate that the footage collected is being used for ICE arrests and to infringe on abortion rights. Flock ALPR cameras take photos of the license plates of passing cars, and are used by law enforcement throughout the country to track down vehicles. According to data reviewed by 404 Media, although Flock does not have a direct contract with ICE, the agency obtains data from Flock cameras through requests made to local law enforcement.
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