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Surveillance

NYC Police Plan To Use Drones To Surveil Labor Day Parties

September 2, 2023 Zane McNeill, Truthout. , , , ,
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is planning to use surveillance drones to patrol large gatherings, including private parties and barbecues, this Labor Day weekend. “If a caller states there’s a large crowd, a large party in a backyard, we’re going to be utilizing our assets to go up and go check on the party,” Kaz Daughtry, the assistant NYPD Commissioner, said at a press conference. Civil liberties groups and privacy advocates have said that such drone use may violate existing laws that regulate police surveillance in the city. One such law is the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, which requires that the NYPD disclose its surveillance tactics at least 90 days prior to implementation.

Helicopter Footage From Mass Arrest Reveals State Trooper Surveillance

August 17, 2023 Niko Georgiades, Unicorn Riot. , , , , ,
Minneapolis, MN – High-tech surveillance video and audio communication from a Minnesota State Patrol helicopter, obtained and first published by Unicorn Riot, reveals some of the planning and tactics behind the largest mass arrest in recent Minnesota history. On Nov. 4, 2020, a multi-agency law enforcement operation kettled and arrested at least 646 people during a post-election-day protest calling for then-President Donald Trump to not ‘steal the vote.’ In an exclusive release, viewers are taken inside Minnesota State Patrol’s Bell 407 helicopter, N119SP, to see and hear the operations of authorities as around 700 peaceful protesters marched onto Interstate 94 in Minneapolis.

The ‘Disinformation Industry’ Lands In Court

July 16, 2023 Patrick Lawrence, Scheer Post. , , , , , ,
What kind of a week was last week in the theater of war wherein battles rage over illegal censorship, illegal attacks on freedom of speech, illegal government infringements on our constitutional rights, and, amid it all, the complicity of our most powerful media in these illegalities? For a brief while it looked as though it was a very fine week. On July 4, an excellent day for this, a district court in Louisiana ruled that the White House and a long list of other federal agencies are barred from all contacts with social media companies if the intent is to intimidate or otherwise coerce Twitter, Google, Facebook, and other such platforms into deleting, suppressing, or in any way obscuring content protected as free speech, to paraphrase a key passage in the ruling.

Microsoft, IBM, Cisco And Dell Enable Surveillance And Control In Palestine

June 24, 2023 Jessica Buxbaum, MintPress News. , , , , , , ,
In September, Israel installed an AI-powered gun at a military checkpoint in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. Now, that same technology has been deployed at the entrance of the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. Across occupied East Jerusalem, you can find surveillance cameras strategically placed on street corners. And throughout the West Bank, Palestinians’ encounters with Israeli soldiers often include not only violence but face-scanning apps designed to capture their personal data. Technology has become integral to our modern lives, but for Palestinians, Big Tech has also become another way Israel enacts control.

The Google Employee Who Helped Edward Snowden In Hong Kong

June 18, 2023 Johana Bhuiyan, The Guardian. , , , , ,
Early on the morning of 10 June 2013, Hong Kong time, the journalist Glenn Greenwald and film-maker Laura Poitras published on the Guardian site a video revealing the identity of the NSA whistleblower behind one of the most damning leaks in modern history. It began: “My name is Ed Snowden.” William Fitzgerald, then a 27-year-old policy employee at Google, knew he wanted to help. But he didn’t yet know how. Snowden was arguably the most wanted man in the world. The confidential documents he shared with Greenwald, Poitras and the Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill detailed a sweeping US government surveillance program that was global in reach and involved some of the world’s best known tech companies.

EU Advances AI Rules Restricting Facial Recognition

June 15, 2023 Julia Conley, Common Dreams. , , , ,
Digital rights groups on Wednesday applauded lawmakers across the European Union after they passed a draft law that would strictly regulate the use of artificial intelligence including facial recognition technology and chatbots, potentially setting a new standard for protecting the public from the misuse of AI—but noted that some provisions could exclude vulnerable people. The European Parliament passed a major legislative hurdle as it voted in favor of the draft rules in the Artificial Intelligence Act, with 499 lawmakers supporting the provisions, 28 opposing, and 93 abstaining from voting.

Leaks Reveal FBI Helps Ukraine Censor Twitter Users

June 11, 2023 Aaron Maté, The Grayzone. , , ,
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has aided a Ukrainian intelligence effort to censor social media users and obtain their personal information, leaked emails reveal. In March 2022, an FBI Special Agent sent Twitter a list of accounts on behalf of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Ukraine’s main intelligence agency. The accounts, the FBI wrote, “are suspected by the SBU in spreading fear and disinformation.” In an attached memo, the SBU asked Twitter to remove the accounts and hand over their user data. The Ukrainian government’s FBI-enabled targets extend to members of the media. The SBU list that the FBI provided to Twitter included my name and Twitter profile.

Cops Incorporate Private Cameras Into Their Surveillance Networks

May 16, 2023 Beryl Lipton, Electronic Frontier Foundation. , , , ,
Police have their sights set on every surveillance camera in every business, on every porch, in all the cities and counties of the country. Grocery store trips, walks down the street, and otherwise minding your own business when outside your home could soon come under the ever-present eye of the government. In a quiet but rapid expansion of law enforcement surveillance, U.S. cities are buying and promoting products from Georgia-based company Fusus in order to access on-demand, live video from public and private camera networks. The company sells police a cloud-based platform for creating real-time crime centers and a streamlined way for officers to interface with their various surveillance streams, including predictive policing, gunshot detection, license plate readers, and drones.

UN Expresses Concerns Over Reports Of US Spying On Its Top Officials

April 20, 2023 People's Dispatch. , , ,
The United Nations officially expressed concern over recent reports of the US government spying on its top officials, including Secretary General António Guterres, and attempting to interfere in their work. The statement came from UN Secretary General’s official spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric on Tuesday, April 18. Dujarric said that the “UN officially expressed to the host country its concern regarding recent reports that the communications of the secretary general and other senior UN officials have been the subject of surveillance and interference by the US government.” He also asserted that the said US actions violate its obligations to the UN Charter and the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the UN.

Prevent: Health Workers Resist UK’s ‘Counter Terrorism’ Strategy

March 12, 2023 Tanupriya Singh, People's Dispatch. , , ,
In the two decades since the UK government unveiled its ‘counter terrorism’ strategy ‘Prevent’, campaigners and human rights organizations have consistently documented its impact on racialized and otherwise marginalized communities, and the ways in which public services—including healthcare—have been weaponized in this process. A part of the government’s broader counter-terrorism strategy called CONTEST, Prevent’s stated objective is to “prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.” First implemented in the aftermath of the 2005 London bombings, Prevent was amended in 2011 to deal with “all forms of terrorism and with non-violent extremism.”

US Shoots Down High-Altitude Balloon And Whips Up Anti-China Paranoia

February 6, 2023 People's Dispatch. , , ,
On Monday, February 6, China lodged a formal protest with the United States over the latter’s decision to shoot down a balloon last week. In a statement, China’s Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Xie Feng held the US accountable for setting back progress made in attempts to stabilize relations between the two nations. The Chinese statement also came in the wake of US government officials and politicians whipping up anti-Chinese paranoia. A US fighter plane downed the high-altitude unmanned balloon originating from China, within US airspace, with much publicity and spectacle on Saturday, February 4. The US deployed an F-22 fighter jet to shoot an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile at the balloon just over the coast of North Carolina on the US east coast, with the US set to collect the debris from its territorial waters. Xie said that the “indiscriminate use of military force” against the balloon, which China maintains is a “civilian unmanned airship,” had “seriously violated the spirit of international law and international conventions.”

Assange Visitors Renew Request For CIA To ‘Purge And Destroy’ Files On Them

January 31, 2023 Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. , , ,
Attorneys and journalists, who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange while he was living under political asylum in the Ecuador embassy, amended their lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for allegedly spying on them. The complaint [PDF] filed in the Southern District of New York now even more explicitly seeks an injunction against the CIA to prevent the agency “from utilizing in any way, or revealing to any third party, the content of materials seized” from the plaintiffs, who are all US citizens. It also asks the court to order the CIA to “purge and destroy all such materials from their files.” In the initial lawsuit that was filed in August 2022, the CIA, along with former CIA director Mike Pompeo, UC Global, and UC Global director David Morales, were sued for their alleged role in violating the privacy of attorneys Margaret Ratner Kunstler and Deborah Hrbek and journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass.

AZ Attorney General Created An Illegal Surveillance Program

January 28, 2023 Fikayo Walter-Johnson and Nathan Freed Wessler, American Civil Liberties Union. , , ,
Phoenix, Arizona - Last year, Sen. Ron Wyden raised alarms about one of the largest government surveillance programs in recent memory. Sen. Wyden revealed that the Arizona attorney general’s office, in collaboration with the Phoenix Field Office of the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations, had engaged in the indiscriminate collection of money transfer records for transactions exceeding $500 sent to or from Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas, as well as to or from Mexico. Any time anyone in the U.S. used companies like Western Union or MoneyGram to send or receive money to or from one of these states or Mexico — whether to send a remittance home, or help a relative with an emergency expense, or pay a bill — a record of their transaction was deposited into a database controlled by the Arizona attorney general and shared with other law enforcement agencies.

GOP Has Not Created A New Church Committee

January 18, 2023 John Kiriakou, Consortium News. , , ,
House Republicans last week announced that they would quickly create a special committee that they referred to as the Church Committee II.  Formally, they named it the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.  The subcommittee was created on a straight party-line vote:  All 221 Republicans voted in favor while all 211 Democrats were opposed. It will be chaired by far-right Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, the former wrestling coach at Ohio State University whom six former wrestlers accused of doing nothing to help them, despite the fact that he knew they were being molested by the team doctor.  Jordan is also the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee; in one of life’s ironies, despite graduating from an obscure law school in central Ohio, he never bothered to take the bar exam.

Number Of Immigrants Under Punitive Surveillance Quadrupled Under Biden

December 6, 2022 Setareh Ghandehari, Truthout. , , ,
Over the past two years, despite President Joe Biden’s campaign promises to bring fairness to the immigration system, the current administration has quadrupled the number of people enrolled in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) so-called “alternatives to detention” (ATD) surveillance program, and has doubled the number of people held in immigration jails. There is no acceptable justification for this rapidly growing surveillance dragnet. As advocates working toward the abolition of immigration detention, we are outraged that the Biden administration is increasingly turning immigrants’ homes and communities into an extension of prison cells. Our vision must extend beyond abolishing immigration jails themselves, as they are only one part of a larger racist, exclusionary system that targets and harms our communities.
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