Posts Tagged surveillance

The Case For Banning Surveillance Ads

From The Electronic Freedom Foundation:

The behavioral advertising industry claims that it can deliver more value to everyone through this surveillance: advertisers get to target exactly who they want to reach; publishers get paid top dollar for setting up exactly the right user with exactly the right ad, and the user wins because they are only ever shown highly relevant ads that are tailored to their interests.

And as to the claim that users “like ads, so long as they are relevant,” the evidence is very strong that this isn’t true and never was. Ad-blocking is the most successful consumer boycott in human history. When Apple gave iPhone users a one-click opt-out to block all surveillance ads, 96 percent of users clicked the button (presumably, the other four percent were confused, or they work for ad-tech companies).

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Bank CEO That Pushed Credit Card Gun Code Wants To Report On Citizens’ “Suspicious” Activity

From Ammoland:

“‘Detection scenarios’ are in the works that, if triggered, would prompt banks to file a Suspicious Activity Report to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network,” the story elaborates, citing Amalgamated Bank Chief Executive Officer Priscilla Sims Brown.

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Oppose the Surveillance of the EARN IT Act

From EFF:

While Apple’s plan would have put the privacy and security of its users at risk, the EARN IT Act compromises security and free speech for everyone. The bill would create serious legal risk for business that hosts content—messages, photos stored in the cloud, online backups—and, potentially, even cloud-hosting sites like those using Amazon Web Services, unless they use government-approved scanning tools. 

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Former FBI Head Says Conservatives Are The Same As Islamists

From The Federalist:

McCabe likened conservatives to members of the Islamic Caliphate: “I can tell you from my perspective of spending a lot of time focused on the radicalization of international terrorists and Islamic extremist and extremists of all stripes… is that this group shares many of the same characteristics of those groups that we’ve seen radicalized along entirely different ideological lines,” he said.

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Why Didn’t Trump Pardon Snowden and Assange?

From Glenn Greenwald:

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How The ATF Collects Data On You And How To Avoid It

From En Bloc Press:

The best way to avoid triggering these multiple handgun sales reports is simply to not buy two handguns at once, or to wait more than 5 consecutive business days between your purchases. You could also just buy one handgun at one FFL dealer and then another handgun at a separate FFL dealer.

There is no federal law which limits how many firearms an individual can buy at a time. As a legal gun owner, you’re not breaking the law by taking measures to avoid being reported to the ATF, provided of course that you aren’t actually involved in the unlawful trafficking of firearms.

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FBI Won’t Acknowledge Stingray Surveillance Tech

From MSN:

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union are fighting to uncover more about the FBI’s role in helping local police acquire powerful cellphone surveillance devices known widely as “stingrays.” The true scope of their use against Americans has, by design, remained a closely guarded secret for more than a decade. This is thanks to secrecy requirements devised by the federal government, which police departments and prosecutors have followed to an extreme.

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Colorado Court Rules Against 3 Month Long Surveillance

From Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Last week, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled, in a case called People v. Tafoya, that three months of warrantless continuous video surveillance outside a home by the police violated the Fourth Amendment. We, along with the ACLU and the ACLU of Colorado, filed an amicus brief in the case.

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Deep State Intelligence

From Chronicles Magazine:

It should be stressed that the American intelligence “community” is a scary misnomer, bearing in mind that we are talking of a gigantic apparat which is literally capable of surveilling every spoken and written word everywhere.

Tucker Carlson accused the FBI in his evening program on Fox News—three weeks before he accused the NSA of reading his emails—of setting up and fanning the disturbances on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6. There have been several dozen participants in those events—whom the state-controlled narrative insistently calls rioters or even insurrectionists—who have been shielded from any legal consequences, who have been spared criminal proceedings which are applied with gusto to others. This would be in accordance with the years-long practice of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to incite crimes and felonies, to encourage individuals to plot criminal acts, in order to arrest them—and then to claim credit for having prevented those acts….

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Pushing Back Against Surveillance Tech

From Electronic Frontier Foundation:

At work, employee-monitoring “bossware” puts workers’ privacy and security at risk with invasive time-tracking and “productivity” features that go far beyond what is necessary and proportionate to manage a workforce. At school, programs like remote proctoring and social media monitoring follow students home and into other parts of their online lives. And at home, stalkerware, parental monitoring “kidware” apps, home monitoring systems, and other consumer tech monitor and control intimate partners, household members, and even neighbors. In all of these settings, subjects and victims often do not know they are being surveilled, or are coerced into it by bosses, administrators, partners, or others with power over them.

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The Corporate Surveillance State

From The Guardian:

Imagine a government with the power to spy on any critic, reporter or activist. A state with the capacity to extort or silence by tracking not just a person’s movements but her conversations, contacts, photos, notes, emails … the entire content of one’s digital life.
This may sound like something from dystopian fiction, but such targeted surveillance is a grim reality of the digital age. It is increasingly a tool of repressive governments to stifle debate, criticism and journalism. Over and over, researchers and journalists have been uncovering evidence of governments, with the help of private companies, inserting malware through surreptitious means into the smartphones, laptops and other devices belonging to people they are seeking to suppress: people who play essential roles in democratic life, facilitating the public’s right to information.

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Mobile Customer Locations Easily Accessible

From Motherboard:

Motherboard’s investigation shows just how exposed mobile networks and the data they generate are, leaving them open to surveillance by ordinary citizens, stalkers, and criminals, and comes as media and policy makers are paying more attention than ever to how location and other sensitive data is collected and sold. The investigation also shows that a wide variety of companies can access cell phone location data, and that the information trickles down from cell phone providers to a wide array of smaller players, who don’t necessarily have the correct safeguards in place to protect that data.

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Australia Wants Backdoors In Software

From Signal:

One of the myriad ways that the “Assistance and Access” bill is particularly terrible lies in its potential to isolate Australians from the services that they depend on and use every day. Over time, users may find that a growing number of apps no longer behave as expected. New apps might never launch in Australia at all.

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Border Patrol Wants Your Twitter, Facebook Accounts

From The Register:

Under new proposals, each traveler filling out an I-94 travel form or applying for an Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) visa will be asked for “information associated with your online presence/social media identifier.”

In other words, you’ll be asked to hand over your Twitter and Instagram handles, Facebook and LinkedIn URLs, and so on, so you can be watched.

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