Remember when the US and Australian police surreptitiously owned and operated the encrypted cell phone app ANOM? They arrested 800 people in 2021 based on that operation. New documents received by Motherboard show that over 100 of those phones were shipped to users in the US, far more than previously believed. What’s most interesting to … Read More “Using Foreign Nationals to Bypass US Surveillance Restrictions” »
Category: surveillance
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This development suprises no one who has been paying attention: Researchers now believe AirTags, which are equipped with Bluetooth technology, could be revealing a more widespread problem of tech-enabled tracking. They emit a digital signal that can be detected by devices running Apple’s mobile operating system. Those devices then report where an AirTag has last … Read More “Apple AirTags Are Being Used to Track People and Cars” »
Vice has a detailed article about how the FBI gets data from cell phone providers like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, based on a leaked (I think) 2019 139-page presentation. Powered by WPeMatico
It’s not actually banned in the EU yet — the legislative process is much more complicated than that — but it’s a step: a total ban on biometric mass surveillance. To respect “privacy and human dignity,” MEPs said that EU lawmakers should pass a permanent ban on the automated recognition of individuals in public spaces, … Read More “The European Parliament Voted to Ban Remote Biometric Surveillance” »
Vice has an article about how data brokers sell access to the Internet backbone. This is netflow data. It’s useful for cybersecurity forensics, but can also be used for things like tracing VPN activity. At a high level, netflow data creates a picture of traffic flow and volume across a network. It can show which … Read More “Surveillance of the Internet Backbone” »
In this post, I’ll collect links on Apple’s iPhone backdoor for scanning CSAM images. Previous links are here and here. Apple says that hash collisions in its CSAM detection system were expected, and not a concern. I’m not convinced that this secondary system was originally part of the design, since it wasn’t discussed in the … Read More “More on Apple’s iPhone Backdoor” »
Apple’s announcement that it’s going to start scanning photos for child abuse material is a big deal. (Here are five news stories.) I have been following the details, and discussing it in several different email lists. I don’t have time right now to delve into the details, but wanted to post something. EFF writes: There … Read More “Apple Adds a Backdoor to iMesssage and iCloud Storage” »
Forbes has the story: Paragon’s product will also likely get spyware critics and surveillance experts alike rubbernecking: It claims to give police the power to remotely break into encrypted instant messaging communications, whether that’s WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger or Gmail, the industry sources said. One other spyware industry executive said it also promises to get … Read More “Paragon: Yet Another Cyberweapons Arms Manufacturer” »
This is important: Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill was general secretary of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), effectively the highest-ranking priest in the US who is not a bishop, before records of Grindr usage obtained from data brokers was correlated with his apartment, place of work, vacation home, family members’ addresses, and more. […] The … Read More “De-anonymization Story” »
A Catholic priest was outed through commercially available surveillance data. Vice has a good analysis: The news starkly demonstrates not only the inherent power of location data, but how the chance to wield that power has trickled down from corporations and intelligence agencies to essentially any sort of disgruntled, unscrupulous, or dangerous individual. A growing … Read More “Commercial Location Data Used to Out Priest” »