The government is spying on us through our computers, phones, cars, buses, streetlights, at airports and on the street, via mobile scanners and drones, through …
Surveillance / Government Spying
The government is spying on us through our computers, phones, cars, buses, streetlights, at airports and on the street, via mobile scanners and drones, through our smart meters, and in many other ways. Even now – after all of the revelations by Edward Snowden, Bill Binney, and other whistleblowers – spying apologists say that the reports are “exaggerated” or “overblown”, and that the government only spies on potential bad guys. In reality, the government is spying on everyone’s digital and old-fashioned communications. For example, the government is photographing the outside information on every piece of snail mail. The government is spying on you through your phone … and may even remotely turn on your camera and microphone when your phone is off.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg oversaw plans to consolidate the social network’s power and control competitors by treating its users’ data as a bargaining chip, while publicly proclaiming to be protecting that data, according to about 4,000 pages of leaked company documents largely spanning 2011 to 2015 and obtained by NBC News. The documents, which include emails, webchats, presentations, spreadsheets and meeting summaries, show how Zuckerberg, along ...
Amazon customers have complained that their privacy has been violated after it emerged that the company employs hundreds of people to listen to recordings of them speaking to their Alexa devices. The company can listen to audio from all Echo devices, including the millions of UK households which use Alexa. Employees in Romania, India, Costa Rica and the US are given recordings of some people speaking to their Alexa ...
Chinese authorities are now taking steps in rural areas of China to intensify the ongoing crackdown on Christian gatherings often known as house churches. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is reportedly resorting to offering monetary rewards to anyone who spies on a neighbor or even family member and reports a group of believers to authorities. In documents obtained by Bitter Winter magazine, monetary incentives are spelled ...
Google reportedly failed to disclose a “secret” microphone featured on its home security product, Nest Secure. According to Business Insider, Google announced this month “users would now be able to use Google Assistant” on Nest Secure devices. However, “users didn’t know a microphone even existed on their Nest Secure devices to begin with.” Google apologized for failing to disclose the “secret” microphone on Tuesday (Feb 19), ...
Soon after the social media “purge” of independent media sites and pages this past October, a top neoconservative insider — Jamie Fly — was caught stating that the mass deletion of anti-establishment and anti-war pages on Facebook and Twitter was “just the beginning” of a concerted effort by the U.S. government and powerful corporations to silence online dissent within the United States and beyond. While a few, relatively ...
In China, there is now reportedly a bounty for the arrest of Christians–part of the widespread and intensifying crackdown on the church in China. The religious liberty magazine Bitter Winter is reporting that police stations in the major port city of Dalian (a population of 6.6 million) in northeast China are being evaluated based on the number of Christians they arrest. A police officer from Dalian, ...
In an attempt to hold Facebook accountable for the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal, the U.K. Parliament has seized a cache of internal Facebook documents from an American software executive visiting the country for business. The Guardian reports that the U.K. Parliament has used their legal powers to obtain a number of internal Facebook documents as it attempts to hold the social media giant accountable for ...
Newly declassified documents reveal the CIA—which is supposed to be strictly limited in the types of surveillance and other secret operations it conducts on U.S. soil—routinely monitors U.S. government computer systems. That information is contained in two formerly secret letters of “congressional notification” written in 2014 by the Intelligence Community inspector general at the time, Charles McCullough. In the letters, McCullough reveals the CIA secretly intercepted ...
"For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it,” Tim Berners-Lee told Vanity Fair last month. "I was devastated" he said while going through a litany of harmful and dangerous developments of the past three decades of the web. That's why "the Father of the World Wide Web" has launched a start-up that ...
On Monday (Sept 17, 2018) the Freedom of the Press Foundation released Department of Justice documents detailing the procedure for monitoring journalists using the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The documents were recently obtained via Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Freedom of the Press Foundation and Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. The documents reveal that the DOJ is not required to satisfy ...
