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Category: Surveillance

  • The confronting reality of pervasive surveillance laws

    When discussing the topic of government electronic surveillance, I often reflect on the time during a significant AFP Counter Terrorism investigation that we had cause to install a hidden camera in the bedroom of a terrorism suspect. The surveillance device was crucial for the evidence it obtained, and ultimately assisted in bringing serious terrorism charges…

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  • John Miller ‘Chose to Lie About Something That’s Well-Documented’ – CounterSpin interview with Sumayyah Waheed on CNN’s John Miller

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Muslim Advocates’ Sumayyah Waheed about CNN‘s John Miller for the September 16, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220916Waheed.mp3

     

    Janine Jackson: In March of this year, John Miller—then deputy commissioner of intelligence and counter-terrorism for the New York Police Department—told a New York City Council meeting that “there is no evidence” that the NYPD surveilled Muslim communities in the wake of September 11, 2001—”based,” he said, “on every objective study that’s been done.”

    NPR: NYPD Shuts Down Controversial Unit That Spied On Muslims

    NPR (4/15/14)

    At that point, media had extensively documented the unconstitutional discrimination of the NYPD’s so-called “Demographics Unit,” including installing police cameras outside mosques, and reporting store owners who had visible Qurans or religious calendars. And the NYPD had agreed to disband the unit in the face of multiple federal lawsuits.

    In September, CNN hired John Miller as “chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst,” part of changes attached to CNN‘s absorption by Warner Brothers Discovery, whose most powerful shareholder is libertarian billionaire John Malone, who has stated that he would like CNN to feature more “actual journalism,” citing, as an example, Fox News.

    Forget what it portends for CNN. The Miller hire is a message to Muslim communities about who it’s OK to harm under official sanction, and how eagerly some will strive to deny and erase that harm and its ongoing effects.

    We’re joined now by Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy council at Muslim Advocates. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Sumayyah Waheed.

    Sumayyah Waheed: Thank you so much for having me.

    John Miller

    CNN‘s John Miller

    JJ: I want to read just a little bit more context for the statement that John Miller made to New York City Council member Shahana Hanif, when she asked for transparency and an official apology for the NYPD surveillance and harassment of Muslims.

    Just before he said there’s no evidence, Miller said:

    Perception allowed to linger long enough becomes reality. I know from my own conversation with Muslim members of the community, and Muslim community leaders, that there are people…who will believe forever…[that] there were spies in their mosques who were trying to entrap people.

    It seems important to acknowledge that this isn’t just lying. This is gaslighting, right?

    SW: Yeah. And it’s lying under oath. He was providing testimony under oath to the City Council.

    It’s important to note he had choices in terms of how to respond to this, the request for an apology. He could have flatly refused it. He could have defended the NYPD’s program. I wouldn’t agree with that, either, but he could have done that.

    Instead, he chose to lie about something that’s well-documented. And as you said, specifically something that harms a marginalized community, the Muslims in the New York area, whose harms that they suffered from this massive surveillance echo through today.

    Pulitzer Prizes: Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eileen Sullivan and Chris Hawley of the Associated Press

    Pulitzer Prizes (2012)

    And this was not that long ago. This program started in the aftermath of 9/11, so about 20-plus years ago, and then the AP reported on it in, I think, 2012. They won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on it.

    And they reported with a treasure trove of documents, internal documents from the NYPD, some of which our organization utilized in our lawsuit against the NYPD for their spying. And a federal appeals court explicitly said that our client’s allegations were plausible, that the NYPD ran a surveillance program with a facially discriminatory classification.

    So he chose to lie about something that’s well-documented. He chose to basically spit in the face of Muslim communities who were harmed by this program. And he has basically been rewarded for it, by being hired by a major news outlet with a position that, I don’t even know how much he’s going to be compensated, but he’s now got a national platform to further spread lies.

    JJ: It’s incredible, and I just want to draw you out on one piece, which is that folks, even critically thinking folks, will have heard, yes, this was a program that happened, but it was ended, despite what Miller, in his brain, which we don’t want to explore, believes. The program ended, and so therefore maybe things are better.

    Could I just ask you a little bit about the harms from something like this surveillance program, which is—cameras outside of mosques, interrogating people in stores, you know? The harms don’t disappear when the program is officially ended.

    Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and Its Impact on American Muslims

    CLEAR et al. (2013)

    SW: Not at all. So first of all, just from our lawsuit—and our lawsuit was specifically for New Jersey Muslims who were affected by this, and there were other lawsuits for the New York Muslims, and there were Muslims outside of the New York and New Jersey area who were affected by this. But just from our lawsuit, we knew that the NYPD spied on at least 20 mosques, 14 restaurants, 11 retail stores, two grade schools and two Muslim student associations in New Jersey.

    So every aspect of Muslims’ lives was being surveilled, and the community finding out about this pervasive surveillance, that’s not something that you can just dismiss. The community basically was traumatized by this.

    And the result—there’s a Mapping Muslims report that actually goes into all the effects, some of the impacts on the Muslim community from this notorious program of surveillance. And they found that Muslims suppressed themselves, in terms of their religious expression, their speech and political associations.

    It sowed suspicion within the community, because people found out, you know, the person sitting next to me at the mosque was an informant. How can I go to the mosque and trust everyone there? Maybe I won’t go.

    Of course, it severed trust with law enforcement, and then contributed to a pervasive fear and unwillingness to publicly engage.

    So that you can’t just flip a switch on. If the NYPD actually wanted to address those harms, that would be a really long road to repair.

    And by having John Miller in his position, and not actually censuring him or firing him for those comments, the NYPD signaled the opposite, right, that they’re going to back somebody who doesn’t care to address the harms of the department.

    And then, of course, now he’s being further validated by a national news media company.

    FAIR: To Defeat Transparency, NYPD Turns to Journalist-Turned-Cop-Turned-Journalist-Turned-Cop

    FAIR.org (6/21/17)

    JJ: And Miller does Big Lie—a term, by the way, that is now reportedly forbidden at CNN with reference to Trump’s stolen election.

    But in 2017, as Josmar Trujillo wrote for FAIR.org, Miller was on a local radio station, WNYM, saying that

    activists have in their mind this idea that police departments and cities like New York run massive surveillance programs, targeting innocent civilians for no reason. Now, that’s nutty. I mean, why would we do that? How could we do that? And how would it make sense?

    Again, this is beyond misinformation to disinformation. And it’s very clear that this is his jam, you know? And so CNN has to want him for that, and not despite that. It just, it’s breaking my brain.

    SW: Yes, because news networks should be helping us sort fact from fiction, not further destroying the line. Otherwise they’re nothing better than propaganda machines.

    And this is not just propaganda. This is specifically erasing the experiences of marginalized people —and to elevate law enforcement above any criticism, much less actually holding it accountable to ordinary people.

    And we know that law enforcement has a pattern of systemically depriving communities that are already marginalized: Black communities, Latinx communities, poor communities, Muslims, disabled communities. I mean, the list goes on.

    So, basically, CNN is signaling that this is where they’re putting their weight.

    JJ: Yeah. And you know, at that point, Josmar Trujillo was writing about how the NYC City Council was calling on the police department to be transparent about surveillance operations. That was something called the POST Act, and the police and the right-wing media came in shrieking, like this is going to be a “roadmap for terrorists” to how to attack us.

    But the point is, that hysteria pulled the goalpost to the right. So now transparency—what surveillance operations are you doing—becomes the weirdest thing that you can call for. And ending that discriminatory surveillance and harassment is pushed off the page and off the table.

    And I just wonder what your thoughts are about media and journalism, and what they could do to help, or could stop doing that hurts.

    Muslim Advocates' Sumayyah Waheed

    Sumayyah Waheed: “News networks are supposed to help us sort fact from fiction, not further destroy the line.”

    SW: Right. I think that, again, going back to my point that news networks are supposed to help us sort fact from fiction, not further destroy the line, and specifically with the powerful actors, whether they’re police departments or elected officials, to utilize that truth-telling, the investigatory process, to hold those actors accountable.

    Because that should be the role of the news, is finding the information that might not be obvious, accessing the records that should be public, because we live in a free and open society, supposedly, and enabling people to take that information and hold their elected or public officials accountable.

    So simply ceding ground because there’s a loud, screaming, radical voice out there is definitely not the answer. And to further reiterate, you know, the AP, by reporting on this, won the Pulitzer Prize. So it’s not like there’s no reward for it besides, you know, a free and well-engaged society. We should be rewarding truth-telling and proper investigations by journalists.

    But you know, this is a rightward shift at CNN under the new chairman, and it comes after the firing of Brian Stelter and John Harwood for criticizing Trump and Republicans who engage in election denials.

    So the story is already being told by these moves, right? So it’s just really alarming and disturbing for anyone who values truth, who values our democracy—and particularly for the marginalized communities, who know that this type of gaslighting, this type of elevating law enforcement above any kind of reproach is going to continue to harm us.

    JJ: And I wish I didn’t have to note that nothing about that program made anybody safer.

    SW: Yes.

    JJ: Because what we’re going to hear is, “OK, yeah, we’re harming some people’s civil liberties, but it’s all about safety.”

    And so I wish we didn’t have to say it, but the thing is that that harm didn’t make anybody safer.

    FAIR: ACTION ALERT: Crime Claims of CNN’s New Police Expert Don’t Hold Up to Facts

    FAIR.org (9/14/22)

    SW: Right, the entire massive surveillance apparatus did not lead to one investigatory lead.

    And I’ll also point out: the federal appeals court that ruled for our clients also cited the Japanese internment as a bad example of being overly deferential to the executive branch, which law enforcement is part of, and not wanting to repeat that shameful history.

    So one step towards repeating history is denying it. Another step is forgetting it. But active denial just accelerates that process. So it’s very unsettling, and CNN should really just reverse course, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen, so it’s pretty discouraging.

    JJ: Well, we’re going to encourage listeners to encourage that to happen.

    We’ve been speaking with Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy council at Muslim Advocates. You can find their work online at MuslimAdvocates.org. Thank you so much, Sumayyah Waheed, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    SW: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

     

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  • They Know Everything

    Enter the Matrix: the New World Order Global Surveillance Documentary

    The post They Know Everything first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Monitoring Prisoners

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  • Stumbling Surveillance: The end of the COVIDSafe App

    It took a few years of tolerable incompetence, caused fears about security, and was meant to be the great surveillance salvation to reassure us all.  Instead, Australia’s COVIDSafe App only identified two positive cases of infection during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and failed, in every sense of the term, to work.

    Launched in April 2020, this AU$21 million platform was heralded as a great tool for pandemic surveillance.  It was one of many such digital responses used by countries to combat viral transmission.  China adopted the Alipay Health Code app, which shares location data with police authorities.  Users receive various codes denoting status: red for those needing to spend two weeks in isolation; yellow for those needing to self-quarantine; and green for those able to move about freely.  India has Aarogya Setu; England and Wales, the NHS COVID-19 app.

    As Privacy International observes, the spread of these apps, some voluntarily applied, others not, had a range of consequences.  Data might be generated without the user’s involvement.  Data might also be lifted from the relevant device.  Some apps might store data locally or convey it to servers.  “And they can leak data to analytics firms and social media platforms.”

    COVIDSafe relied on Bluetooth signals transmitted at intervals to nearby users, with those testing positive would trigger a process by which state and territory authorities could request access to the phone to identify other potential infections.  The close contacts would have to be within 1.5 metres of each other for at least 15 minutes.  In principle, this was meant to lead to improved contact tracing, more effective isolation protocols and enable more restrictive measures to be eased.

    From the start, the project seemed plagued.  There were questions about the exposure window and how viable it was, notably in the face of more infectious variants.  There were concerns that user data in the national data store could become accessible to the US government, given the awarding of the data-storage contract to Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud subsidiary of Amazon.  By the end of April 2020, 3 million Australians had downloaded the app.  In total, there were 7.9 million downloads.  The measure of success for the program, in other words, became one of downloading an app rather than its supposed effectiveness.

    Users were assured that little needed to be done for the app to successfully operate.  “Your phone does not need to be unlocked for the app to work,” Minister for Government Services Stuart Robert claimed in an unconvincing statement.  Users were also encouraged to “have the app running in the background when they are coming into contact with others.”  This betrayed a lack of technological savvy habitual among cabinet ministers.

    In the view of the Minister for Social Services Anne Ruston, the app was part of an effort to empower Australians “to proactively limit the spread of the coronavirus and protect the community.”  Having such a mechanism in place would “help protect the lives and health of the Australian community to make sure that we are in a position to quickly respond and be able to trace people if they have come into contact with somebody who has the virus.”

    But the government’s own assessments revealed that the app only worked effectively on locked iPhones about a quarter of the time, if that.  As of late April 2020, documents from the Digital Transformation Agency found that the app’s qualities in communicating between two locked iPhones was “poor”.  The same finding was made for encounters between locked Android to iOS services and active Android to locked iOS devices.

    The rating for unlocked or active iPhone-to-iPhone encounters was, by way of contrast, “excellent”, logging in a success rate of 80-100 per cent.  But the latter rate was fairly meaningless, given that iPhone users are, for reasons of privacy, encouraged to maintain a default lock setting.

    With COVIDSafe’s effectiveness coming into question, the strategy of the Morrison government moved from the silver bullet to the general plan.  The digital tool was to be but one element in the overall battle against the pandemic, complementing, in Ruston’s words, “the existing manual process by which we currently trace and track people.”  It could be likened to, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison did with trivialising ease, donning sunscreen before heading out the door.

    A subsequent government report into the app, released on July 29th, 2021, chose to avoid some of the more glaring problems in the enterprise.  Even then, the authors had to concede that COVIDSafe was “rarely” resorted to by public health officials “except to confirm cases identified through manual processes.”  This, the reasoning went, was due to low rates of community transmission and formidable manual contact tracing.  The app’s failure, in other words, was a sign of the country’s success.

    A less than flattering counter report by software developers Richard Nelson, Jim Mussared and Geoffrey Huntley, along with cryptographer Vanessa Teague, noted a lack of “deep discussion of changes made throughout the app’s development which heavily impacted efficacy, and fails to disclose key information such as the number of active users of the application.”

    This stood in sharp contrast to the peer-reviewed study, published in Nature, which considered the epidemiological impact of the NHS COVID-19 app developed in the UK.  In that case the National Health Service abandoned initial connection methods based on Bluetooth, implementing, instead, Apple and Google’s Exposure Notification Framework.

    As the critical multi-authored study of COVIDSafe concludes, “Almost all of the serious security bugs, privacy issues, and bugs affecting efficacy that were present could have all been avoided by using the Exposure Notification Framework, keeping public perception  high.”

    A few spluttering apologias can be found in defence of the app.  One effort can be found in that dullest of fora, The Conversation.  That contribution, sterilised and pasteurised, tries to be optimistic about a profligate, failed exercise.  “One of the goals of COVIDSafe was to automate the manual work, to help the efforts of contact tracers at scale.  This goal was achieved, although the value and effectiveness are questionable, as we discuss below.”

    Then comes the following, which suggests a lamentable ignorance of the implications of surveillance.  “Getting so many Australians to download new and contested technology is an unparalleled achievement.  While the number of downloads doesn’t tell us how many people were actively using the app, it shows some success in getting people to at least download and engage with it.”

    This relish for technological utopia can only take us so far before disgust sets in.  The issue for such believers is not how good the effort was, but the fact that it was tried by the unsuspecting.  And not only that, “COVIDSafe struck a balance between being aesthetic and relatively easy to use.”

    In future, those in the business of dolling out such health initiatives should think more carefully.  These systems may be intended to keep public trust afloat but can have quite the opposite effect.  Ultimately, the proof of COVIDSafe’s great demise can be found in the number of individuals who consented to having their data added to the National COVIDSafe Data Store for reasons of contact tracing.  While there were 7.9 million registrations of the app between April 2020 and May 2022, fewer than 800 gave consent to that measure.  As Australia’s current health minister, Mark Butler, opined, the entire endeavour was a monumental waste.

    The post Stumbling Surveillance: The end of the COVIDSafe App first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Giving up Your Right to Privacy

    Edward Snowden Gives “ALERT! Your Smartphone Is Always Spying On You.”

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  • Coalition used private contractor to collect intelligence on Nauru asylum seekers

    Exclusive: asylum seekers in the offshore detention centre who had contact with Australian journalists, lawyers and advocates were closely watched, documents reveal

    The Australian government used private security contractors to collect intelligence on asylum seekers on Nauru, singling out those who were speaking to journalists, lawyers and refugee advocates, internal documents from 2016 reveal.

    Intelligence officers working for Wilson Security compiled fortnightly reports about asylum seekers “of interest”, including individuals flagged as having “links with [Australian] media”, “contact with lawyers in Australia” or “contacts with Australian advocates”.

    Continue reading…

  • AI Surveillance Signals the Death of Privacy

    There are no private lives…. This a most important aspect of modern life…. That one of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. That we must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.

    ― Philip K. Dick, “The Last Interview”

    Nothing is private.

    We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.

    While the political Left and Right continue to make abortion the face of the debate over the right to privacy in America, the government and its corporate partners, aided by rapidly advancing technology, are reshaping the world into one in which there is no privacy at all.

    Nothing that was once private is protected.

    We have not even begun to register the fallout from the tsunami bearing down upon us in the form of AI (artificial intelligence) surveillance, and yet it is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable.

    AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.

    Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer.

    Governments and corporations alike have heedlessly adopted AI surveillance technologies without any care or concern for their long-term impact on the rights of the citizenry.

    As a special report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warns, “A growing number of states are deploying advanced AI surveillance tools to monitor, track, and surveil citizens to accomplish a range of policy objectives—some lawful, others that violate human rights, and many of which fall into a murky middle ground.”

    Indeed, with every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

    Cue the rise of digital authoritarianism.

    Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”

    The seeds of digital authoritarianism were planted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, with the passage of the USA Patriot Act. A massive 342-page wish list of expanded powers for the FBI and CIA, the Patriot Act justified broader domestic surveillance, the logic being that if government agents knew more about each American, they could distinguish the terrorists from law-abiding citizens.

    It sounded the death knell for the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, especially the Fourth Amendment, and normalized the government’s mass surveillance powers.

    Writing for the New York Times, Jeffrey Rosen observed that “before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”

    Who could have predicted that 50 years after George Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel 1984, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big Brother.

    Yet that is exactly what has come to pass.

    After 9/11, Rosen found that “people were happy to give up privacy without experiencing a corresponding increase in security. More concerned about feeling safe than actually being safe, they demanded the construction of vast technological architectures of surveillance even though the most empirical studies suggested that the proliferation of surveillance cameras had ‘no effect on violent crime’ or terrorism.”

    In the decades following 9/11, a massive security-industrial complex arose that was fixated on militarization, surveillance, and repression.

    Surveillance is the key.

    We’re being watched everywhere we go. Speed cameras. Red light cameras. Police body cameras. Cameras on public transportation. Cameras in stores. Cameras on public utility poles. Cameras in cars. Cameras in hospitals and schools. Cameras in airports.

    We’re being recorded at least 50 times a day.

    It’s estimated that there are upwards of 85 million surveillance cameras in the U.S. alone, second only to China.

    On any given day, the average American going about his daily business is monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

    Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

    Yet it’s not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked.

    We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our biometrics—our faces, irises, voices, genetics, microbiomes, scent, gait, heartbeat, breathing, behaviors—runs them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique “identifiers,” and then offers them up to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses.

    As one AI surveillance advocate proclaimed, “Surveillance is no longer only a watchful eye, but a predictive one as well.” For instance, Emotion AI, an emerging technology that is gaining in popularity, uses facial recognition technology “to analyze expressions based on a person’s faceprint to detect their internal emotions or feelings, motivations and attitudes.” China claims its AI surveillance can already read facial expressions and brain waves in order to determine the extent to which members of the public are grateful, obedient and willing to comply with the Communist Party.

    This is the slippery slope that leads to the thought police.

    The technology is already being used “by border guards to detect threats at border checkpoints, as an aid for detection and diagnosis of patients for mood disorders, to monitor classrooms for boredom or disruption, and to monitor human behavior during video calls.”

    For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government: the surveillance state.

    This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.

    The government’s “technotyranny” surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it’s hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins.

    The short answer: they have become one and the same entity. The police state has passed the baton to the surveillance state, which has shifted into high gear with the help of artificial intelligence technologies. The COVID-19 pandemic helped to further centralize digital power in the hands of the government at the expense of the citizenry’s privacy rights.

    “From cameras that identify the faces of passersby to algorithms that keep tabs on public sentiment online, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools are opening new frontiers in state surveillance around the world.” So begins the Carnegie Endowment’s report on AI surveillance note. “Law enforcement, national security, criminal justice, and border management organizations in every region are relying on these technologies—which use statistical pattern recognition, machine learning, and big data analytics—to monitor citizens.”

    In the hands of tyrants and benevolent dictators alike, AI surveillance is the ultimate means of repression and control, especially through the use of smart city/safe city platforms, facial recognition systems, and predictive policing. These technologies are also being used by violent extremist groups, as well as sex, child, drug, and arms traffickers for their own nefarious purposes.

    China, the role model for our dystopian future, has been a major force in deploying AI surveillance on its own citizens, especially by way of its social credit systems, which it employs to identify, track and segregate its “good” citizens from the “bad.”

    Social media credit scores assigned to Chinese individuals and businesses categorize them on whether or not they are worthy of being part of society. A real-name system—which requires people to use government-issued ID cards to buy mobile sims, obtain social media accounts, take a train, board a plane, or even buy groceries—coupled with social media credit scores ensures that those blacklisted as “unworthy” are banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train. Among the activities that can get you labeled unworthy are taking reserved seats on trains or causing trouble in hospitals.

    In much the same way that Chinese products have infiltrated almost every market worldwide and altered consumer dynamics, China is now exporting its “authoritarian tech” to governments worldwide ostensibly in an effort to spread its brand of totalitarianism worldwide. In fact, both China and the United States have led the way in supplying the rest of the world with AI surveillance, sometimes at a subsidized rate.

    This is how totalitarianism conquers the world.

    While countries with authoritarian regimes have been eager to adopt AI surveillance, as the Carnegie Endowment’s research makes clear, liberal democracies are also “aggressively using AI tools to police borders, apprehend potential criminals, monitor citizens for bad behavior, and pull out suspected terrorists from crowds.”

    Moreover, it’s easy to see how the China model for internet control has been integrated into the American police state’s efforts to flush out so-called anti-government, domestic extremists.

    According to journalist Adrian Shahbaz’s in-depth report, there are nine elements to the Chinese model of digital authoritarianism when it comes to censoring speech and targeting activists: 1) dissidents suffer from persistent cyber attacks and phishing; 2) social media, websites, and messaging apps are blocked; 3) posts that criticize government officials are removed; 4) mobile and internet access are revoked as punishment for activism; 5) paid commentators drown out government criticism; 6) new laws tighten regulations on online media; 7) citizens’ behavior monitored via AI and surveillance tools; 9) individuals regularly arrested for posts critical of the government; and 9) online activists are made to disappear.

    You don’t even have to be a critic of the government to get snared in the web of digital censorship and AI surveillance.

    The danger posed by the surveillance state applies equally to all of us: lawbreaker and law-abider alike.

    When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

    As Orwell wrote in 1984, “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

    In an age of too many laws, too many prisons, too many government spies, and too many corporations eager to make a fast buck at the expense of the American taxpayer, we are all guilty of some transgression or other.

    No one is spared.

    As Elise Thomas writes for Wired: “New surveillance tech means you’ll never be anonymous again.”

    It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whomever we wanted, buy whatever we wanted, think whatever we wanted, go wherever we wanted, feel whatever we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants, sold to government agencies, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

    Tread cautiously: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, 1984 has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day AI surveillance state.

    Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights when power, AI technology and militaristic governance converge, it won’t be long before Philip K. Dick’s rules for survival become our governing reality: “If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities.”

    The post AI Surveillance Signals the Death of Privacy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Nothing to Hide

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  • Twenty Years Later, It Is Still Time to Dismantle the War on Terror

    Three days after the twin towers fell, then-President George W. Bush called for Americans to “unite.” What followed was the decades-long United States military-led campaign — the “war on terror” — which has resulted in the death of over 2 million Muslims; the expansion of a network of over 800 global U.S. military bases; and the creation of codified Islamophobia, the violence of which knows no bounds. The rhetoric framing and otherizing of Muslims as people inherently prone to terrorism has been embedded in the design of post-9/11 policies “overtly and covertly, domestic and external,” Maha Hilal recounts in her new book, Innocent Until Proven Muslim.

    From the get-go, the Bush administration swiftly deployed a version of public morality upholding dichotomous ideological values between the West and Islam — painting any response by the U.S. as “acceptable and even necessary.” As reported in the book, the five dimensions of the war on terror are: militarism and warfare, draconian immigration policy, surveillance, federal terrorism prosecutions, and detention and torture.

    The root of the war on terror — institutionalized Islamophobia laced with white supremacy — has allowed the U.S. government to carry out state-sanctioned violence without an ounce of accountability. Two decades later, Muslims abroad and in the U.S. are facing the repercussions of a plethora of xenophobic programs like the National Security Entry-Exit Registration system, the use of Guantánamo Bay prison to house and torture Muslim men, and surveillance initiatives like Countering Violent Extremism. Muslims in the U.S. are forced to reconcile with their identities, whether they’re making a trip to the mosque for Jummah prayer or calling out the U.S. government for the destruction of their homelands.

    Innocent Until Proven Muslim is an accumulation of Hilal’s ongoing research and efforts to organize to dismantle the war on terror by highlighting the most devastating impacts of U.S. empire. Analyzing everything from the panoptic violence of surveillance to the ongoing violations of fundamental rights, Hilal envisions a world in which Muslims no longer live under a cloud of suspicion.

    Three Presidents Built, Maintained and Expanded the War on Terror

    The U.S.’s narrow framing of moral culpability under the guise of national security has persisted under three successive presidencies, broadening the scope of state violence at every turn. Hilal describes the extent to which Muslim lives have been dehumanized.

    Consider the pattern of performative accountability: Americans were shocked when photos from the Abu Ghraib scandal emerged, documenting extensive torture of Muslim prisoners who were punched, slapped, kicked, doused with hot water, forced into stress positions for hours, threatened with dogs, etc. In response, former President Bush stated, “The prison does not represent the America that I know,” evading any critique of the government while intentionally disregarding the livelihood of the Iraqis who were tortured.

    Hilal writes, “The extent to which this has been allowed is a testament to the power of narrative to create real-world systems and the resilience that same narrative power displays to evade responsibility for the human cost of the systems it supports.”

    During Barack Obama’s administration, a U.S. soldier massacred 16 villagers in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The immediate administrative focus, as Obama put it, was the “sacrifices that our men and women have made in Afghanistan” — sacrifices for whom? These examples illustrate how both Bush and Obama were experts at erasing the victimization of Muslims to justify the war on terror by any means. An entire infrastructure of systematic Islamophobia was designed in the early days after 9/11, and these attitudes toward counterterrorism have since been codified in law and policy. The true reach of the war on terror is difficult to imagine.

    Openly glorifying in brutality, former President Donald Trump has expressed pride in state violence carried out during his presidency and laid the groundwork to leverage support for extreme policies like the Muslim ban. In 2015, Trump said the U.S. needs to “watch and study the mosques.” Four days later, he indicated that he would “certainly implement” a database to track Muslims in the U.S. Two days after that, he falsely claimed that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims cheered in New Jersey when the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11.

    Trump’s efforts to further perpetuate harmful tropes about Muslims make their deaths seem unimportant. Hilal reminds us that, in turn, “The dominant narrative becomes more difficult to dislodge from the imagination of a public who accepts this political landscape as matter of course.”

    The Government Is Spying on Muslims

    Innocent Until Proven Muslim is not limited to describing the pattern of physical abuse against Muslim bodies. Woven together with Hilal’s critical analysis of the human cost of post-9/11 wars are countless examples of sinister surveillance methods used to racially and religiously profile whole communities. Take for example, the creation of The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, which required immigrant men from Muslim-majority countries over the age of 16 to register with the government. Although this program ended in 2011, 80,000 men were subject to intensive interrogations and not a single one was charged with a crime.

    Considering the superficial construction of the war on terror, Hilal reminds us that the government was able to “establish a differential system of justice,” paving the way for the normalization of entrapment, informants and so-called “fishing expeditions” — used to create conditions that lead to an actionable offense. The Holy Land Five case is perhaps one of the most prominent examples of arbitrary domestic trial cases.

    A charitable organization created to support displaced Palestinians across the Middle East, the Holy Land Five were accused of diverting donations to Hamas. Although no direct connection between them was found, all five men were sentenced to 15 to 65 years in prison, and many American Muslims are still grappling with the criminalization of Muslim charities.

    During the Obama administration, the authority of the U.S. government to surveil its citizens was expanded both in intent and practice — Hilal explains how these programs “disrupted community bonds” and “the confidence that stems from a reasonable expectation of freedom.” Mere months before the government launched the Countering Violent Extremism Program, Obama declared in his state of the union address that, “Muslims Americans are part of our American family.” A quick look at what this program entailed, however, was the pairing of vulnerable Muslim youth — disproportionately Black — with police officers who were trained to pathologize mental health issues. The psychological impact on Muslim Americans since 9/11 is insurmountable.

    To answer the question, “is the war on terror over?” Hilal closes with 11 interviews that feature Muslims from a variety of different backgrounds. The unmistakable message in these conversations is that collective liberation means justice for all and in that, abolishing oppressive institutions that continue to otherize Muslims. In the words of Zahra, a Somali chaplain whom Hilal quotes in the book:

    Islam has always been a theology and political tool that liberates people, even when they’re caged, even when they’re enslaved, even when they’re imprisoned. Even when our bodies are caged, even when we are under apartheid and in the borders of Gaza, or in the prisons in Philadelphia, or in the cages at Gitmo, Islam allows us to survive the unsurvivable. And that inherently makes you a threat to an empire whose only function has been to dominate, oppress, pillage, and kill.

    For many Muslims, it is difficult not to internalize and absorb anti-Muslim rhetoric in a climate that seeks to normalize it. Islamophobia in the U.S is baked into laws, institutions and policies. From being treated as a suspect community when going through airport security to global militarism that continues to yield unrestricted violence in countless Muslim-majority countries — imagining a better future requires rising up together. Zahra, along with the ten other interviewees, speak of the importance of unifying to dismantle anti-Muslim bigotry. Although individual Muslim communities face different degrees of state-sanctioned violence, collective liberation would ultimately free us all.

    The war on terror is and always will be rooted in racism. Although Trump was able to expand its executive reach, the pathway was paved by both Bush and Obama. What has differed across administrations is not the gravity of violence or the human toll, but the preference for one form of violence over another. It was Bush who created a xenophobic immigration system with the creation of ICE, it was Obama who earned his place in history as “deporter in chief,” and it was Trump who reigned terror with a series of executive orders banning Muslims from entering the country. There’s no singular definition of justice for Muslims in the U.S and abroad, but perhaps demanding accountability from the war criminals who’ve once occupied the oval office is a start.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Here’s Why Arab Americans Like Me Are Supporting Efforts to Defund the Police

    Both Republicans and Democratic leaders have been pushing increasingly hyped-up narratives to persuade us that crime is exploding, and calling for increased policing and police funding. This is standard Republican rhetoric across the board, and Democratic mayors like Lori Lightfoot of Chicago and Eric Adams of Chicago have been parroting a similar message. Even Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia who has received widespread support from progressives, announced Thursday that she is in favor of raising police pay.

    In recent weeks, we’ve also been repeatedly told that bail reform has caused crime to skyrocket. But according to the American Civil Liberties Union, this is a “false narrative.”

    Yes, homicide is up since 2020, but it is very possible that the increase is tied to the expansion of neoliberalism and the dislocations caused by the pandemic rather than the “fall guy” of minimal bail reform. It is imperative to reject this alarmist rhetoric, which obscures the racist, classist, sexist, and homophobic realities of police violence in the United States.

    Even communities we may perceive to be one step removed from the harms of police-perpetrated violence can be targeted by it, and should speak out against so-called “tough–on–crime” approaches.

    As an Arab American who has witnessed the chilling effect of surveillance on my community, three factors have inspired me to stand with the movement to defund the police.

    First — as organizations like Chicago’s Arab American Action Network and San Francisco’s Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), the Abolishing the War on Terror movement, the Arabs for Black Lives Collective, and the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights exemplify — Arab Americans have a responsibility to stand with Black (including Black Arab), migrant and Indigenous social movements challenging oppressive policing systems.

    Middle-class Arab immigrant communities should especially be engaged in these matters, as some of us have benefited from anti-Blackness, the theft of Native land, and the exploitation of working-class migrants — perhaps not as directly as white people, but by virtue of living on stolen Indigenous land, or because our families have gained economic privileges related to anti-Black systemic racism.

    We should be challenging the privileges we do hold in relation to oppressive systems. The forms of state violence Arab and Black communities face are not the same, but solidarity is both our responsibility and a means to acknowledging accountability to those upon whose backs this country was built and continues to operate.

    Second, the racist structures targeting Arab and Muslim migrant communities — including airport profiling and government surveillance — are part of the U.S.’s increasingly broad systems of policing and incarceration. Therefore, we should be in coalition with communities striving to end systems of policing.

    U.S. policing systems are broad and work through many forms of containment and punishment, such as racist neighborhood policing, as well as surveillance like police use of gang databases and terrorist databases. Both rely on racial profiling, which civil rights groups assert is unconstitutional because the practice infringes on privacy rights.

    Furthermore, the “war on terror” normalizes the militarization of the police while the military and police are increasingly pushed to share strategies, technologies and trainings to intensify repression of social justice movements and poor communities.

    This is evident in military surplus equipment and gear going to police, including armored vehicles and high-powered rifles. After the police-perpetrated killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, police in combat gear made communities look like war zones. There is no evidence that this reduces crime, but the practice raises profound concerns about what we want public safety to look like and whether we are being primed to accept a more militaristic and authoritarian future. (When President Donald Trump renewed a military surplus program reformed by the Barack Obama administration and spoke with amusement about police not roughing people up too much, this sent a clear signal to police and endangered communities of color.)

    Across the country, communities have been expressing concerns about how cops target people who they perceive to be Muslim, including Arab Americans who may or may not be Muslim, in Islamophobic rhetoric and actions. The well-known New York Police Department spying campaign, confirmed in 2011, entailed wholesale surveillance of Arabs and Muslims in the New York City area — from “terrorism” investigations of mosques to attempts to infiltrate the board of directors at the Arab American Association of New York.

    Recent examples include two Michigan lawsuits, one involving officers who forced a Muslim woman to remove her hijab and another, where officers held three Arab Muslim men for nearly three days without charges. The men had called the police for help. Caught on a police body camera, the cops said, “the Muslims lie a lot” and tried to arrest them by fabricating information about them, according to the lawsuit.

    In May 2022, Chicago’s Arab American Action Network (AAAN) released a report demanding the abolition of “Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR).” They evidence how the Department of Homeland Security’s “If You See Something Say Something” campaign encourages police officers and “the entire population to report…seeing something that they find suspicious.” They found these reports focus on suspicions “about people who are or are assumed to be Arab, Muslim, or from the Middle East” for benign activities termed “suspicious” and “promote information sharing that can enable multiple law enforcement and intelligence agencies to conduct their own follow-up investigations.” Overall, the AAAN explains, they have the effect of repressing dissent and surveilling and criminalizing Arabs and Muslims while reinforcing white supremacy.

    In this sense, scholars and activists working with Chicago’s working-class Arab immigrant communities have helped expand how we define policing and the communities we refer to as those targeted by policing.

    Along similar lines, across the U.S., the “Countering Violent Extremism” program seeks to enlist Muslim leaders as active participants in spying on their own communities, destroying trust and dividing and undermining those very communities.

    “The U.S. empire’s surveillance, counterterrorism and counterinsurgency have been imported from the global war into policing practices domestically and have always had an import/export approach to their carceral strategies,” said University of Illinois Chicago doctoral candidate Sangeetha Ravichandran. This creates a dangerous reality for communities of color, who are subjected to a violent, high-tech, white supremacist policing culture in need of abolition.

    For many Arab Americans, mistrust in the police is not new. In 1993, Arab Americans filed damage claims against Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego police for sharing confidential information with the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League after hundreds of Arab Americans were notified that their names were included in files sent to them. After 9/11, FBI agents collaborated with police to gather intelligence about Arab Americans.

    The third reason why we should support defunding the police is made clear by the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy’s report on the Status of Racial Justice for Arab Americans, which found that, although Arab Americans are targeted by police in different ways and to different degrees than Black and other communities of color, they are direct targets nonetheless. It is not only terrorism-related surveillance that entails harmful racial profiling practices impacting Arab and Muslim migrant communities, but the direct violence of police — rather than just the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

    We found that some Arab Americans face police officers that cite their experience fighting in the so-called war on terror to justify threatening Arab immigrants. One research participant recalled a police officer making racist assumptions about the interviewee’s Muslim faith and said the cop intimidated him by referencing the war on terror. An officer saying, “I was crushing skulls in Iraq,” is intimidating to a Muslim and conveys more than a hint of violent intent.

    Another interviewee called the police to protect them against hate speech. Rather than defend him against slurs like “camel jockey,” the cop defended the perpetrator by saying, “You have to understand, he is a veteran.”

    In the context of Arab American life, radicalized veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with supercharged racist views who interact with Muslims and Arabs as police cannot be viewed as a “few bad apples.” The entire policing system promotes racism and Islamophobia.

    As a result of such disturbing interactions — including a cop jokingly asking an Arab woman if she was hiding a bomb under her hijab — many Arab Americans have lost faith in the police.

    In San Francisco, the Arab Resource and Organizing Center report, “Build the Block, Alternatives to Policing,” explains that day-to-day interactions with law enforcement among youth in schools coupled with the infiltration of organizations “necessitate a deeper understanding of surveillance, policing, sentencing and imprisonment… We need ways to respond to harm and fear that do not make us rely on law enforcement or on the criminalization of other communities.”

    We need to ways to develop internal capacity to respond, defend, and build power in places that are most vulnerable. The work we did together has laid the groundwork for AROC to move in that direction with clarity and alignment with our values and principles.

    Their report reminds us of how Arab Americans have been drawn into U.S. systems of policing. One Arab family has a parent that was a political prisoner in Palestine. They also had the FBI visit their home in the Bay Area and witnessed their son incarcerated through the same system that criminalizes young Black and Brown men and their activist daughter and her friends living with the ongoing fear of surveillance.

    As more and more Arab Americans lose trust in the cops, Arab American social movements are expanding the basis of our solidarity with Black liberation movements. For decades, U.S. police departments’ collaboration with Israeli settler-colonial occupation forces has helped foster Arab American (and specifically Palestinian diasporic) resistance to policing, igniting Palestinian solidarity with Black struggle. Today, long-standing ties between Arab and Black liberation struggles remind us that it is time to depart from outdated activist frameworks that reduce “ Arab and Muslim struggle” to Palestine and the war on terror on the one hand, and “Black struggle” to defunding the police on the other. Police violence harms working class Arab migrants and refugees right here in the U.S. First and foremost though, it is crucial to affirm and resist the disproportionate impact of police violence on Black communities. At the same time, organizing from the standpoint that the struggle to free Palestine, abolish the war on terror, and abolish the police are conjoined, or more broadly, that policing is a foundational strategy of the U.S. nation-state to further its many agendas — from the prison-industrial complex, to settler–colonialism, the control of borders, and war — can go a long way in freeing more and more people.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Nigeria, Oh, Nigeria, Cry for me, Nigeria!

    So, good friend, Madu, who I met decades ago, at UT-El Paso. He was coming through buildings where part-time English faculty had offices. That big smile, that large voice, and an open hand. He was working the used/discount book gig: going to colleges to get books from faculty and bookstores that might have been extra copies from the respective publishers called review copies.

    So, part-time faculty like myself, in the 1980s, would order tons of these reviewer’s copies of grammar, lit, and survey collections. Then fellows like Madu might come by with hard cold cash to buy them up.

    The old days when students could find alternative prices (lower) than what college bookstores would charge. Madu has that service.

    We talked, and his Nigerian love, his Nigerian spirit, the fact he was in Houston, with a wife and three children, all of that, made the chats open and real. I had just had a baby girl, so we talked about her.

    Then politics, Africa, my own activism around Central America, the US-Mexico border, the environment, twin plants, militarization of campuses and the border, and my own work trying to unionize part-time exploited faculty.

    Global politics. Nigeria, Africa, Diasporas, evil US-backed dictators, colonialism, post-colonialism, the trauma, the long-term biopiracy of Africa, the theft of resources, and alas, imagine, 30 years later, almost, and African countries are in the grips of AFRICOM, the US vassals, the exploiters, the mining, ag, and oil thieves. Until, 2022, many are becoming failed states, famines, the entire world of data mining, Zuckerberg encircling the continent with his Metaverse, and on and on. The story of United Fruit Company, Coca Cola, Monsanto, Big Pharma, Hearts and Minds USA special forces, and proxy wars and Nationa ENdowmenr for Democracy/CIA fomenting hell.

    Oh, this devil USA:

    Phoenix Express 2021, the AFRICOM-sponsored military exercise involving 13 countries in the Mediterranean Sea region, concluded last week. While its stated aim was to combat “irregular migration” and trafficking, the U.S. record in the region indicates more nefarious interests. “AFRICOM military’s exercise: The art of creating new pretexts for propagating U.S. interests” (source)

    Go to MR Online, and then put in AFRICOM. Or, AFRICOM and Nigeria, or pick your country. Mark my words: Everything, I say EVERYTHING, tied to the USA and UK and EU when involving African nations now, well, pure evil:

    This is recent, as in Oct. 2021:

    Please join us for the launch of the international month of action by attending a webinar on October 1st, titled “AFRICOM at 13: Building the Popular Movement for Demilitarization and Anti-Imperialism in Africa.” Speakers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, and the African diaspora will discuss AFRICOM and what we can do to expel imperialist forces from the continent. Following the webinar, events will take place throughout October organized by various organizations on the African continent, in the U.S., and around the world to demand an end to the U.S. and western invasion and occupation of Africa.

    BAP makes the following demands in the U.S. Out of Africa!: Shut Down AFRICOM campaign:

    • The complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Africa,
    • The demilitarization of the African continent,
    • The closure of U.S. bases throughout the world, and
    • That the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) oppose U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and conduct hearings on AFRICOM’s impact on the African continent, with the full participation of members of U.S. and African civil society.

    Written by Tunde Osazua, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace’s Africa Team and the coordinator of the U.S. Out of Africa Network.

    So, I was on Madu’s radio show, and he has run for Senate in Nigeria, and he wants to run for president. However, as he clearly states: “You have to have millions of dollars and militias to buy the votes.”

    This is his organization:

    Here’s a statement from Madu:

    Not rising up by Nigerians from within Nigeria and around the world beyond ethnic, regional, religious and partisan political boundaries to save Nigeria from the hands of her mostly visionless, ignorant, insensitive, inhumane, squandermanic and most painfully, corrupt and morally bankrupt drivers of government at all levels whose actions have significantly weakened her sovereignty and territorial integrity, and made her peoples so poor and vulnerable , is a sin against God and a grave infraction against humanity for which history and unborn generations of Nigerians will judge us all harshly if we fail today to act unconditionally to save the country from an imminent collapse.

    ….Smart Madu Ajaja

    This is a serious and long-term project, the decolonizing of the world, including all those countries’ economies, the land, the people, the cultures and the individuals:

    This Special Issue aims to explore the complex and contested relationship between trauma studies and postcolonial criticism, focusing on the ongoing project to create a decolonized trauma theory that attends to and accounts for the suffering of minority groups and non-Western cultures, broadly defined as cultures beyond Western Europe and North America. The issue builds on the insights of, inter alia, Stef Craps’s book, Postcolonial Witnessing, and responds to his challenge to interrogate and move beyond a Eurocentric trauma paradigm. Authors were invited to submit papers on the theorization and representation of any aspect of postcolonial, non-Western and/or minority cultural trauma with a focus predominately, but not exclusively, on literature. (Source= Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism … 200+ pages!)

    I talked with Madu on his radio show, and below, the show. I do cover a lot of philosophical territory, and alas, this is about Madu and his love of his country and how quickly the country of his birth has spiraled into a country of selling people as slaves, kidnapping people for organs, murder, rape, theft.

    So under the cover of counterterrorism, AFRICOM is beefing up Nigeria’s military to ensure the free flow of oil to the West, and using the country as a proxy against China’s influence on the continent. And that is the issue, too, that Madu is not happy with — his country being exploited by anyone, including China. I explained to him that the USA has the military bases, the guns, and China has the contracts, the builders. In fact, Madu is spiritually exasperated at how his own countrymen turn against their own countrymen, and how there is a overlay of trauma and laziness and desperation and inflicted PTSD, including the post-colonial trauma referenced above.

    USA is like a storm of ticks, locusts, mosquitos, viruses, as the syphilitic notions of Neocon and Neoliberal anti-diplomacy hits country after country like disease. A plague.

    The greatest threat looming over our planet, the hegemonistic pretentions of the American Empire, are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger, and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads.

    –Hugo Chavez

    The United States Military is arguably the largest force of ecological devastation the world has ever known.

    –Xoài Pham

    Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfill it or betray it.

    –Frantz Fanon (source)

    William Blum wrote about the illegality of the USA’s direct and indirect bombing and invasions.

    Here, a bit of an update:

    The Death Toll of U.S. Imperialism Since World War 2

    A critical disclaimer: Figures relating to the death toll of U.S. Imperialism are often grossly underestimated due to the U.S. government’s lack of transparency and often purposeful coverup and miscounts of death tolls. In some cases, this can lead to ranges of figures that include millions of human lives–as in the figure for Indonesia below with estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people. We have tried to provide the upward ranges in these cases since we suspect the upward ranges to be more accurate if not still significantly underestimated. These figures were obtained from multiple sources including but not limited to indigenous scholar Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology as well as Countercurrents’ article Deaths in Other Nations Since WWII Due to U.S. Interventions (please note that use of Countercurrents’ statistics isn’t an endorsement of the site’s politics).

    • Afghanistan: at least 176,000 people
    • Bosnia: 20,000 to 30,000 people
    • Bosnia and Krajina: 250,000 people
    • Cambodia: 2-3 million people
    • Chad: 40,000 people and as many as 200,000 tortured
    • Chile: 10,000 people (the U.S. sponsored Pinochet coup in Chile)
    • Colombia: 60,000 people
    • Congo: 10 million people (Belgian imperialism supported by U.S. corporations and the U.S. sponsored assassination of Patrice Lumumba)
    • Croatia: 15,000 people
    • Cuba: 1,800 people
    • Dominican Republic: at least 3,000 people
    • East Timor: 200,000 people
    • El Salvador: More than 75,000 people (U.S. support of the Salvadoran oligarchy and death squads)
    • Greece: More than 50,000 people
    • Grenada: 277 people
    • Guatemala: 140,000 to 200,000 people killed or forcefully disappeared (U.S. support of the Guatemalan junta)
    • Haiti: 100,000 people
    • Honduras: hundreds of people (CIA supported Battalion kidnapped, tortured and killed at least 316 people)
    • Indonesia: Estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people
    • Iran: 262,000 people
    • Iraq: 2.4 million people in Iraq war, 576, 000 Iraqi children by U.S. sanctions, and over 100,000 people in Gulf War
    • Japan: 2.6-3.1 million people
    • Korea: 5 million people
    • Kosovo: 500 to 5,000
    • Laos: 50,000 people
    • Libya: at least 2500 people
    • Nicaragua: at least 30,000 people (U.S. backed Contras’ destabilization of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua)
    • Operation Condor: at least 10,000 people (By governments of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. U.S. govt/CIA coordinated training on torture, technical support, and supplied military aid to the Juntas)
    • Pakistan: at least 1.5 million people
    • Palestine: estimated more than 200,000 people killed by military but this does not include death from blockade/siege/settler violence
    • Panama: between 500 and 4000 people
    • Philippines: over 100,000 people executed or disappeared
    • Puerto Rico: 4,645-8,000 people
    • Somalia: at least 2,000 people
    • Sudan: 2 million people
    • Syria: at least 350,000 people
    • Vietnam: 3 million people
    • Yemen: over 377,000 people
    • Yugoslavia: 107,000 people (Source: The Mapping Project is a multi-generational collective of activists and organizers in the Boston area who are deeply engaged in Palestine solidarity / BDS work. For over a year, we’ve been tracing Greater Boston’s networks of support for the colonization of Palestine–and how these networks participate in other forms of oppression, from policing to U.S. imperialism to medical apartheid and privatization.)

    Madu and most activist Nigerians know these facts. Big global facts. The vices the United States of America has put the world in. The dirty Empire. The global cop. And, so, Nigerians in the USA number around two million, with a few hundred thousand. Now, of course, off camera, I repeated to Madu that most Americans, oh, 90 percent of the 355 million currently residing (most illegally) here do not care about Black, Africans, Chinese, and again one American is worth a million Nigerians. It is a juggling act, being part of the Diapora, and Madu is a nurse, and he like I said ran for Senate, and lost, and he has been inspired by some youth, but again, youth are being colonized by the ticks of data. Read below the YouTube window.

    So, Alison McDowell at Wrench in the Gears, and then Silicon Icarus and others are talking about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the next colonialization of Africa. Coltan and gold may be like gold to the Wall Streeters and Transnationalists, and water and food and good land may be like platinum to the same group of thieves, but data is worth its gigbytes/terrabytes in emeralds. “French Imperialism vs. Crypto Colonialism: The Central African Republic Experiment” and “Blockchain Technology & Coercive Surveillance of the Global South” both by Sebs Solomon

    So, Madu, and great honorable youth in Nigeria who want to have a free, open, clean, sustainable, cultural-centric, food security, self-imposing, country of healthy bodies, minds and ecosystems, I am sorry to report the devils wear skinny jeans, and many come to the USA from India with work permits to work and live in Seattle/Redmond to work for Microsoft/Google/Facebook and all the other devils helping put these systems in place:

    At the same time, SingularityNET partnered with UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education (IBE) to establish a new curriculum for children and teens, with an emphasis on emerging technology to prepare the youth for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. According to UNICEF:

    There will never be enough money allocated in the budget, qualified teachers, or places in schools for the population we have; therefore, emerging technologies like Virtual Reality allow us to leapfrog these problems and offer the hope of more affordable, scalable and better quality education.

    It is striking to read that UNICEF doesn’t believe there will ever be enough money to help all of the children in the world receive a traditional, classroom, education; therefore, it’s better to invest and scale Virtual Reality education — a rather pessimistic take from the “children’s fund” arm of the UN. UNICEF Innovation Fund, has virtual reality education programs in Chile, India, Nigeria, and Ghana. In Ghana, they noted there are “challenges to accessing the necessary teaching and learning resources for students to receive quality education; which is compounded by the lack of necessary and up-to-date education materials, huge class sizes and the lack of necessary infrastructural facilities.” (source)

    How many more battlefields shall honorable people like Madu enter into with no money, no militias and the kings of capital weilding more powerful digital bombs than hydrogen bombs?

    For a rabbit hole or warren, go to: Silicon Icarus and see Alison McDowell’s work on the following: Alison McDowell. Or over at her blog: Wrench in the Gears. She’s expending lifetime hours looking into this evil web of Davos, WEF, the billionaires’ club, the taking over of humanity through transhumanism, blockchain, Singularity, and all the other topics the mainstream and leftstream media and blogs just won’t tackle.

    • Blockchain
    • Gamification
    • Genomics
    • Impact Finance
    • Smart Cities
    • Biosecurity State

    This is what the Fourth Industrialization devils want for all children on earth (minus their kids and their sychophants’ kids). Soylent Green be damned!

    The post Nigeria, Oh, Nigeria, Cry for me, Nigeria! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Surveillance Tech Is Wrongly Accusing Disabled Students of Cheating on Tests

    From juggling immense debt to contending with the global pandemic, being a modern college student is undeniably stressful. To make matters worse, there is a growing narrative that cheating in higher education is running rampant. This narrative has widened the divide between faculty and students, inspired stricter policies and created additional challenges for today’s students.

    While cheating is never excusable, it should be addressed and punished appropriately and proportionately when it occurs. Unfortunately, due to the belief that cheating is becoming more widespread, many faculty members and administrators at colleges across the country are adopting a draconian approach to police the issue.

    For example, the University of Alabama has broadly defined students using unauthorized materials, study aids or computer-related information that have not been approved by the instructor, as cheating. Depending on the professor, this can include useful online study resources like Google, YouTube and Quizlet, and the repercussions for using such tools include suspensions. The vague wording of their academic misconduct policies creates an impossible standard where students are discouraged from using online resources to help them study, even when they need additional help to achieve academic success.

    The University of Alabama is not alone. While academic institutions have had honor codes for decades, during the pandemic, when colleges shifted away from physical classrooms and toward virtual learning and online test-taking, fears surrounding increased academic dishonesty in online education grew, and academic institutions began implementing stricter policies.

    However, as James Orr, a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity told NPR, “Just because there’s an increase in reports of academic misconduct doesn’t mean that there’s more cheating occurring. In the online environment, I think that faculty across the country are more vigilant in looking for academic misconduct.”

    Unfortunately, this hasn’t stopped colleges across the country from enacting harsher policies. These policies fail to recognize that third-party materials, study aids and online study resources are used and relied upon by millions of students, particularly non-traditional students, who have limited time and resources. After graduation, employers value resourceful employees who know how to find and use outside resources when necessary. Yet, this new wave of heavy-handed policies inhibits the use of supplemental study aids and forces students to choose between falling behind or risking severe consequences.

    Higher education should aim to create an optimal environment for learning, and pitting faculty and students against one another while limiting the resources students can use is detrimental to all. So, it begs the question, why are clashes surrounding cheating becoming so pervasive, and who is benefitting from them?

    One industry that has benefited immensely is the global online exam proctoring market. This sector, which was valued at approximately $355 million in 2019, is expected to be worth nearly $1.2 billion by 2027. This growth, in some part, must be attributed to increased demand caused by growing fervor over student cheating.

    It’s not surprising that these proctoring companies benefit from the public, especially faculty members, believing that cheating is widespread. After all, the bigger this issue appears, the greater the need for these proctoring companies’ often invasive services. These services range from programs that capture student desktop screens and chat logs to artificial intelligence technologies that detect and analyze keywords spoken by students in real time.

    These programs rarely leave room for nuance, and some students found these services went so far as to discriminate against them: Proctoring tools unfairly require test takers to have a reliable computer, fast internet and quiet testing space. Underprivileged students who lack access to these resources are put in a difficult situation because the software can’t grant accommodations for their unique circumstances.

    And this is not the only way these proctoring services discriminate and worsen the experience of already disenfranchised students. Students at Miami University in Ohio found that their school’s service, Proctorio, would often accuse students with ADHD of cheating. Proctorio, which is designed to track a student’s gaze and flag students who look away from their screens as suspicious, flagged students with ADHD symptoms as potential cheaters.

    Not only that, the facial recognition technology used by many proctoring services registers a preference for lighter skin, which sometimes forces students with darker skin to “shine a light on their faces to be seen,” according to Shea Swauger, a librarian and doctoral student at the University of Colorado. This is one of the many reasons why students at that university started a petition to ban the use of these proctoring services.

    But due to the cheating narrative becoming ubiquitous among faculty, proctoring services also gained in popularity, often to the detriment of the very students the universities are supposed to be educating.

    College students already face numerous challenges. They should not have to face a hostile learning environment, fear repercussions for using available tools or be forced to use invasive proctoring services that have been found to be discriminatory.

    Higher education works best when faculty and students share mutual respect and trust. To return to a place of respect and trust, academic institutions need to take a step back, reassess the current environment and remember that students should indeed be their number one priority.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Senators Urge FTC to Protect Abortion Clinic Patients’ Data From Being Sold

    Sixteen Senators have sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking the agency to protect abortion clinic patients’ data from being sold after revelations that at least two companies had been doing so.

    In the letter, first reported by Refinery29, the lawmakers asked FTC Chair Lina Khan to detail what the agency is doing to prevent data firms from putting abortion seekers at risk with their location data.

    “In light of reports that the Supreme Court is set to overrule Roe vs. Wade, we are concerned about the privacy of women making decisions that should be between them, their families, and their doctors as they have for nearly five decades,” the lawmakers wrote, using the term “women” instead of more accurate language that includes trans men and nonbinary people. “Banning and criminalizing abortion in parts of our country could create added risks to those seeking family planning services in states where abortions remain legal.”

    Recent reporting has found that two data firms, SafeGraph and Placer.ai, are sellling abortion clinic patients’ location data, including where patients live, how long they stayed at the clinic and where they may have gone before and after the visit.

    Motherboard found that they were able to access such data using simple searches on the companies’ websites, meaning that the data is easily accessible by anti-abortion hate groups, who have used such data before to target abortion seekers. The publication was able to buy data from SafeGraph showing locations of people who had visited over 600 Planned Parenthood clinics for only $160 — mere pennies for anti-abortion groups with millions of dollars in funding, some of which comes from conservative benefactors like the Koch family.

    With laws like Texas’s abortion ban, which essentially authorizes citizens to become bounty hunters, and with 26 states poised to ban abortion if Roe is overturned, the data could be used to harangue abortion seekers and providers, or even people who visit a clinic like Planned Parenthood that provides abortions along with other reproductive health services.

    Anti-abortion vigilantes have waged attacks on abortion clinics for years, and clinics are bracing themselves for a rise in violence and harassment if the Roe overturn is officially issued.

    Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) led the letter effort, with signatures from prominent progressives like Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

    “As reproductive rights are under attack across the country, we must do everything possible to protect the safety and privacy of women accessing the healthcare they need,” Klobuchar told Refinery29 in a statement. “Personal decisions such as those about contraceptives or abortion should remain between a woman and her doctor, not some data company that is willing to share location tracking information to the highest bidder.”

    The lawmakers asked the FTC if it is making moves to allow people to remove their data if it is being sold online and if the agency is planning on taking more general moves to “mitigate harms posed by mobile phone apps that are developed to collect and sell location data.”

    Indeed, outside of data specifically related to abortions, hate groups are using data to target marginalized groups. Motherboard reported last year that the people behind the Catholic Substack newsletter The Pillar used location data tied to LGBTQ dating app Grindr in order to track and identify a priest who was using its services, which ultimately led to his resignation.

    The FTC has announced measures it will be taking to protect data, especially that of children, from being sold online, but has yet to speak about abortion-related data.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pregnant People May Be Under Intensified Tech Surveillance in Post-“Roe” US

    Imagine, several months from now, a pregnant woman in Texas traveling to New York to obtain an abortion. When she’s about to fly back, a friend phones to warn her there’s an arrest warrant waiting for her, because police in her home state used a “keyword warrant” to monitor everyone in their area who’d searched a particular term online — say, “abortion clinics in New York” — and then obtained a “geofence warrant” to track her to a Planned Parenthood facility in Manhattan. The woman becomes part of a population the U.S. hasn’t seen in recent history: an internally-displaced person, unable to travel home under threat of arrest and prosecution.

    Or imagine a woman in the Deep South, who in her last weeks of pregnancy, delivers a stillborn fetus at home, and, when she’s taken to the hospital, encounters a nurse who suspects she’d tried to end the pregnancy herself and calls the police. When prosecutors take on the case, they obtain not just her medical records — evidence of the outcome — but her online search history as well: what they cast as evidence of “intent.” Thanks to information handed over by internet providers — that the woman once searched for information about abortion medication and miscarriages — she is charged with second-degree murder, and faces 20 years to life in prison if convicted.

    That latter scenario already happened, several years ago in Mississippi. The former, says civil rights attorney Albert Fox Cahn, is not just a potential threat but an imminent reality if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade in the coming weeks, as forecast in Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft majority opinion earlier this month.

    On Tuesday morning, Cahn’s organization, the nonprofit privacy organization Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), released a new report, “The Handmaid’s Trail: Abortion Surveillance After Roe,” laying out in blunt terms how digital and other surveillance technologies could be employed if the coming SCOTUS ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health makes abortion immediately illegal in numerous states.

    “[R]epealing a half century of reproductive rights won’t transport Americans back to 1973,” Cahn and his co-author on the report, Eleni Manis, write. Rather, “it will take us to a far darker future, one where antiquated abortion laws are enforced with cutting edge technology.” What they envision is that the computers and smartphones of anyone who’s pregnant and seeking an abortion — or who suffers a miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy or stillbirth — could be turned into repositories of evidence for police, prosecutors and even individual bounty-hunters hoping to collect a cash reward for proving someone has had an illegal abortion.

    For years, pregnant patients have been subjected to a wide array of surveillance through both routine and novel means by government, corporate and private entities. Pregnant patients at hospitals face “suspicionless” drug testing when they go for prenatal checkups while patients of clinics that offer abortion services may encounter anti-abortion activists who photograph them and license plates. These days, they also face the prospect of anti-abortion geofencing: when activists pair cell phone location data with commercial advertising databanks to text them anti-abortion messages while they’re sitting in abortion clinic waiting rooms. If they seek out or stumble upon one of the anti-abortion pseudo-clinics known as crisis pregnancy centers, in person or online, chances are anything they say could be added to the massive databases some CPC networks maintain.

    Outside of such medical (or “medical”) settings, commercial retailers and big tech companies have already fine-tuned their predictive capabilities so well that they can figure out an internet user is pregnant before they’ve even told their family. And while the goal of that sophisticated technology is financial — to target expectant parents just when they’re about to start spending a lot of money — Cahn and Manis warn that “such commercial lists now will become evidence for those individuals whose pregnancies don’t come to term.”

    There’s already precedent for that. As civil rights attorney Cynthia Conti-Cook wrote in a 2020 article in the University of Baltimore Law Review, “Digital evidence fills a gap for prosecutors keen on prosecuting women for their pregnancy outcomes. When medical theories fail to explain why some outcomes happen, prosecutors can now sift through an accused person’s most personal thoughts, feelings, movements and medically-related purchases during their pregnancy, even if there is little evidence supporting the conclusion that their conduct caused the pregnancy to end.”

    But the re-criminalization of abortion, say Cahn and Manis, will lead to even wider use of digital technologies to prosecute both abortion seekers and those who help them.

    Some of the technology is familiar: obtaining people’s search histories, shopping records, emails, chats or texts to prove they were discussing or seeking information about abortion, or even just that they were pregnant. “When purchasers pay with a credit card, an online account, or with an in-store loyalty card,” the report notes, “everyday purchases — medication, pregnancy tests, prenatal vitamins, menstrual products — can become circumstantial evidence.”

    Others are less well-known. Law enforcement can use “keyword warrants” that would “cast digital dragnets, identifying large numbers of potential abortion seekers” by requiring technology companies to turn over information about anyone in a geographic area who has searched online for particular terms. They can also obtain “geofence warrants” that require those same companies to give information about all people who were in a particular place at a particular time. Both types of warrants have already been used in other contexts.

    “Geofence warrants were first introduced in 2018 and since then have expanded so dramatically that they are now the majority of all warrants that Google receives in the U.S.,” said Cahn. A 2021 advocacy campaign by a coalition of civil rights groups, including S.T.O.P., compelled Google to release information that shows that this type of inquiry accounted for more than 10,000 warrants the company responded to in 2020.

    To date, keyword warrants are less common, but Cahn says they were used in one case where police demanded that Google identify everyone who had searched for a particular address, using that information as part of their investigation.

    Broadly speaking, these types of warrants, as well as technology like facial recognition software, says Cahn, have been justified as a necessity for addressing threats like terrorism. But their application has not been neutral. “We’ve found that facial recognition was used more to target Black Lives Matter protesters than to target those responsible for the insurrection on Jan. 6,” said Cahn. “There’s profound discrimination in how these tools are deployed.”

    What’s more, Cahn said, geofence warrants simply aren’t effective for most police work — they’re good at casting “broad digital dragnets” but bad at identifying whether someone actually is a likely suspect. However, he said, they could easily prove to be a “terrifying tool” that enable “authoritarian efforts to target health care, to target protest, to target houses of worship. It’s very easy to see the potential for abuse.”

    In light of that threat, S.T.O.P.’s report calls for a number of measures to address these issues, primarily in “rights-protective” states unlikely to outlaw abortion. Some states offer limited protections already. Massachusetts, for instance, bans geofencing near abortion clinics, but is the only state in the country to have done so. Illinois prohibits the sharing of some biometric data, although data related to abortion is not yet included in its provisions.

    But more, the report holds, is needed. First, from companies like Google or Apple, which may voice public support for abortion rights but nonetheless could be key to undermining those rights through their information collection and warehousing practices.

    “If a company doesn’t have individualized locations in a database that can be searched by a geofence, one can get all the warrants they want and you’re not going to give over any data,” said Cahn. “It’s a design choice whether Google wants to put their users at risk of this type of search.”

    Likewise, he said, states must act. “This is already happening. We already see electronic surveillance being used to target pregnant people. The only question is how quickly anti-abortion policing ramps up to these search tactics.”

    Two first-in-the-nation bills are currently under consideration in New York that could offer substantially more protection. One would ban both geofence and keyword warrants as well as prohibiting law enforcement from buying geolocation data from commercial companies. A second would prohibit police from creating fake social media accounts that allow them to pose as friends or medical providers in order to trick people seeking abortions into identifying or incriminating themselves.

    Law enforcement agencies must also reassess their participation in inter-agency information sharing agreements, Cahn said. Current data sharing agreements require local police to share information with their counterparts in other states, which could easily enable the tracking and prosecution of abortion seekers from red states who travel to other parts of the country to get an abortion.

    Such agreements have always caused tension, Cahn said, “because it’s meant that so-called immigration sanctuary jurisdictions are actually giving information to ICE in some cases. But now, if you’re part of an inter-agency information sharing agreement, and you are honestly a pro-choice jurisdiction, you can’t in good faith remain when you know the people receiving that data are going to use it to arrest pregnant people.”

    For years, Cahn said, civil rights groups have fought the use of surveillance technologies like geofence warrants, arguing that certain types of information should be off-limits as policing tools. For just as long, he said, many lawmakers have been “comfortable enabling these types of abuses when different communities were being targeted.”

    “Now we know the targets will include pregnant people,” he said, and “we’ll see people who once felt very far removed from the threat of mass surveillance being intimately targeted.”

    “It is very much that incremental expansion of government authority,” he said. “We ignore it and we ignore it. And then suddenly, we and our families and those dearest to us are in the crosshairs.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • New Surveillance Transparency Report Documents An Urgent Need For Change

    The U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) has released its Annual Statistical Transparency Report disclosing the use of national security surveillance laws for the year 2021—and to no one’s surprise it documents the wide-ranging overreach of intelligence agencies and the continued misuse of surveillance authorities to spy on millions of Americans. Specifically, the report chronicles how Section 702, an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), that authorizes the U.S. government to engage in mass surveillance of foreign targets’ communications, is still being abused by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to spy on Americans without a warrant.

    Specifically, the report reveals that between December 2020 and November 2021, the FBI queried the data of potentially more than 3,000,000 “U.S. persons” without a warrant.

    The post New Surveillance Transparency Report Documents An Urgent Need For Change appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Warren Calls Out Tech Firms for Selling Abortion Clinic Patients’ Location Data

    Fourteen Senate Democrats sent a letter to tech firms Wednesday demanding answers to reports about the collection and sale of location data of people who have visited abortion clinics.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) led the lawmakers in writing letters to the two firms, expressing concerns about the data as Roe v. Wade faces being overturned by the Supreme Court. If Roe is struck down, over half of states are likely to ban abortion by automatic trigger laws or new legislation.

    “Especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, your company’s sale of such data — to virtually anyone with a credit card — poses serious dangers for all women seeking access to abortion services,” read the letter addressed to SafeGraph, using “women” as shorthand for abortion seekers, who also include trans and nonbinary people.

    The letter was signed by Democratic lawmakers such as Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Cory Booker (D-New Jersey).

    Earlier this month, Motherboard reported that data firm SafeGraph is selling information about the whereabouts of people who have visited abortion clinics such as Planned Parenthood, including their movement after the visit and how long they stay at the clinic. The publication also found that Placer.ai offered data for sale showing the approximate location of where Planned Parenthood clinic visitors live; it removed the listing for such data after reporters contacted the company for comment.

    Anti-abortion groups have been harassing, attacking and murdering abortion clinic employees, escorts and patients for years. With abortion rights under threat, clinics are prepared for more vicious attacks, especially as far right Republicans seek to place bounties on people involved in reproductive care.

    Such hate groups have already used location data in order to show patients anti-abortion messaging on their phones while they are sitting in Planned Parenthood clinics. Other data, like search engine history for abortion pills, can be tied to personal information like Google accounts. The data also provides access to information on a person’s finances and political views, and emails they send and receive. In a post-Roe world, even data from period tracker apps could be weaponized by anti-abortionists to prosecute someone whose data suggests they may have gotten an abortion.

    Access to the type of data offered by SafeGraph and Placer.ai only puts patients and providers at even more risk, the lawmakers said. “It is difficult to overstate the dangers of SafeGraph’s unsavory business practices,” they wrote.

    SafeGraph has defended its sales of the data, saying that it’s “anonymized,” but the lawmakers said that that defense demonstrates a misunderstanding of the root of the problem.

    “[A]s experts have repeatedly warned, it can be ‘trivially easy’ to link someone’s location data with their real-world identities, especially when datasets are limited to only ‘four or five’ devices in a location,” the lawmakers said. “SafeGraph’s sale of this data presents an ongoing threat to women who have sought abortions and who may seek them in the future.”

    The letters’ signatories asked the companies to provide details about the type of data that it sells about abortion clinic visitors and to pledge to stop selling such data altogether. The letters are part of Democrats’ attempts to protect abortion rights and abortion seekers ahead of the likely end of Roe.

    “Democrats need to use every tool possible to defend Americans’ right to an abortion and protect women’s health,” Warren said in a statement. “With an extremist Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe, I’m calling out data-broker companies for their disturbing practices of selling and transferring the personal information of women visiting abortion clinics, including their cell-phone location data.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden’s Border “Wall” Could Involve Robotic Dogs, Autonomous Surveillance

    First, it was the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) vehicles speeding along on the road in front of our campsite. Then it was the Border Patrol’s all-terrain vehicles moving swiftly on a ridge above us. I was about 10 miles north of the border with Mexico, near Peña Blanca Lake in southern Arizona, camping with my six-year-old son and some other families. Like fire trucks racing to a blaze, the Border Patrol mobilization around me was growing so large I could only imagine an emergency situation developing.

    I started climbing to get a better look and soon found myself alone on a golden hill dotted with alligator junipers and mesquite. Brilliant vermilion flycatchers fluttered between the branches. The road, though, was Border Patrol all the way. Atop the hill opposite mine stood a surveillance tower. Since it loomed over our campsite, I’d been looking at it all weekend. It felt strangely like part of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s panopticon — in other words, I wasn’t sure whether I was being watched or not. But I suspected I was.

    After all, that tower’s cameras could see for seven miles at night and its ground-sweeping radar operated in a 13-mile radius, a capability, one Border Patrol officer told me in 2019, worth “100 agents.” In the term of the trade, the technology was a “force multiplier.” I had first seen that tower freshly built in 2015 after CBP awarded a hefty contract to the Israeli company Elbit Systems. In other words, on top of that hill, I wasn’t just watching some unknown event developing; I was also in the middle of the border-industrial complex.

    During Donald Trump’s years in office, the media focused largely on the former president’s fixation with the giant border wall he was trying to have built, a xenophobic symbol so filled with racism that it was far easier to find people offended by it than towers like this one. From where I stood, the closest stretch of border wall was 10 miles to the south in Nogales, a structure made of 20-foot-high steel bollards and covered with coiled razor wire. (That stretch of wall, in fact, had been built long before Trump took office.)

    What I was now witnessing, however, could be called Biden’s wall. I’m speaking about a modern, high-tech border barrier of a different sort, an increasingly autonomous surveillance apparatus fueled by “public-private partnerships.” The technology for this “virtual wall” had been in the works for years, but the Biden administration has focused on it as if it were a humane alternative to Trump’s project.

    In reality, for the Border Patrol, the “border-wall system,” as it’s called, is equal parts barrier, technology, and personnel. While the Biden administration has ditched the racist justifications that went with it, its officials continue to zealously promote the building of a border-wall system that’s increasingly profitable and ever more like something out of a science-fiction movie.

    As March ended, one week before my camping trip, I saw it up close and personal at the annual Border Security Expo in San Antonio, Texas.

    “Robots That Feel the World”

    The golden chrome robotic dog trotted right up to me on the blue carpet at the convention center hall. At my feet, it looked up as if it were a real dog expecting me to lean over and pet it. According to the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, this “dog” will someday patrol our southern border. Its vendor was undoubtedly trying to be cute when he made the dog move its butt back and forth as if wagging its tail (in reality, two thin, black antennae). Behind the vendor was a large sign with the company’s name in giant letters: Ghost Robotics. Below that was “Robots That Feel the World,” a company slogan right out of the dystopian imagination.

    According to its organizers, this was the most well-attended Border Security Expo in its 15-year history. About 200 companies crowded the hall, trying to lure officials from CBP, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, border sheriffs’ departments, and international border forces into buying their technologies, sensors, robots, detectors, and guns. As I stood staring at that surreal dog, behind me the company Teledyne Flir was showing off its video surveillance system: a giant retractable mast sitting in the bed of a black pickup truck. On the side of the truck were the words “Any Threat. Anywhere.”

    Another company, Saxon Aerospace (its slogan: “Actionable Intelligence, Anytime, Anywhere”), had a slick, white, medium-sized drone on display. One vendor assured me that the drone market had simply exploded in recent years. “Do you know why?” I asked. His reply: “It’s like when a dog eats blood and gets carnivorous.”

    Elsewhere, the red Verizon Frontline mobile command-and-control truck looked like it could keep perfect company with any Border Patrol all-terrain vehicle unit; while Dell, the Texas-based computer firm, displayed its own frontline mobile vehicle, promising that “whether you’re providing critical citizen services, innovating for the next generation, or securing the nation, we bring the right technology… and far-reaching vision to help guide your journey.”

    And don’t forget 3M, which has moved well beyond its most famous product, Scotch tape, to provide “rugged and reliable equipment across DoD [Department of Defense], DoJ [Department of Justice], DHS [Department of Homeland Security], and U.S. state and local agencies.” Top defense contractors like Airbus (with a shiny black helicopter on display in the center of the expo hall) were also present, along with top border contractors like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Elbit Systems.

    Just the day before the expo opened, the Biden administration put out its fiscal year 2023 budget, which proposed $97.3 billion for the DHS, that agency’s largest in its two-decade history. The Customs and Border Protection part of that, $17.5 billion, would similarly be the most money that agency has ever received, nearly $1.5 billion more than last year. Although Immigration and Customs Enforcement received just a marginal increase, it will still get $8.5 billion. Combine just those two and that $26 billion would be the highest sum ever dedicated to border and immigration enforcement, significantly more than the $20 billion that the Trump administration started out with in 2017. As DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas put it, such a budget will help secure our “values.” (And in an ironic sense, at least, how true that is!)

    “Notably,” Mayorkas added, “the budget makes smart investments in technology to keep our borders secure and includes funding that will allow us to process asylum claims more efficiently as we build a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system.”

    What Mayorkas didn’t mention was that his border plans involve ever more contracts doled out to private industry. That’s been the case since 9/11 when money began to pour into border and immigration enforcement, especially after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. With ever-growing budgets, the process of privatizing the oversight of our southern border increased significantly during the administration of President George W. Bush. (The first Border Security Expo was, tellingly enough, in 2005.) The process, however, soared in the Obama era. During the first four years of his presidency, 60,405 contracts (including a massive $766 million to weapons-maker Lockheed Martin) were issued to the tune of $15 billion. From 2013 to 2016, another 81,500 contracts were issued for a total of $13.2 billion.

    In other words, despite his wall, it’s a misconception to think that Donald Trump stood alone in his urge to crack down on migration at the border. It’s true, however, that his administration did up the ante by issuing 87,293 border-protection contracts totaling $20.9 billion. For Biden, the tally so far is 10,612 contracts for $8 billion. If he keeps up that pace, he could rack up nearly $24 billion in contracts by the end of his first term, which would leave Trump’s numbers and those of every other recent president in the dust.

    If so, the contracts of the Trump and Biden administrations would total nearly $45 billion, slightly surpassing the $44.3 billion spent on border and immigration enforcement from 1980 to 2002. In the media, border and immigration issues are normally framed in terms of a partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans. While there is certainly some truth to that, there are a surprising number of ways in which both parties have reached a kind of grim border consensus.

    As Maryland Democratic Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger, a member of the House appropriations committee, said ever so beamingly on a screen at that Expo conference, “I have literally put my money where my mouth is, championing funding for fencing, additional Border Patrol agents, and state-of-the-art surveillance equipment.” And as Clint McDonald, a member of the Border Sheriff’s Association, said at its opening panel, the border is “not a red issue, it’s not a blue issue. It’s a red, white, and blue issue.”

    When I asked the Ghost Robotics vendor if his robo-dog had a name, he replied that his daughter “likes to call it Tank.” He then added, “We let our customers name them as they get them.” While we were chatting, a prospective customer asked, “What about weapons mountable?” (That is, could buyers weaponize that dog?) The vendor immediately assured him that they were already working with other companies to make that happen.

    Later, when I asked Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz about the surveillance dogs, he downplayed their significance, stressing the media hype around them, and saying that no robo-dogs were yet deployed anywhere on the border. Nonetheless, it was hard not to wander that hall and think, This, much more than a wall, could be our border future. In fact, if the “big, beautiful” wall was the emblem of Donald Trump’s border policy, then for the Biden moment, think robo-dogs.

    Border Security Is Not a “Pipe Dream”

    The night before I stood on that hill in Arizona, I had heard people passing through the campsite where my son and I were sleeping in a tent. Their footsteps were soft and I felt no fear, no danger. That people were coming through should hardly have been a surprise. Enforcement at our southern border has been designed to push such border-crossing migrants into just the sort of desert lands we were camping in, often under the cover of night.

    The remains of at least 8,000 people have been found in those landscapes since the mid-1990s and many more undoubtedly died since thousands of families continue to search for lost loved ones who disappeared in the borderlands. Those soft footsteps I heard could have been from asylum seekers fleeing violence in their lands or facing the disaster of accelerating climate change — wilted crops and flooded fields — or economic dispossession in countries where foreign corporations and local oligarchies rule the day. Or all of that combined.

    For years, I’ve been talking to migrants who crossed isolated and hazardous parts of the Arizona desert to bypass the walls and guns of the Border Patrol.

    I thought of them when, on the last day of that Border Security Expo, I watched Palmer Luckey, the CEO of Anduril, a new border surveillance company, step up to the podium to introduce a panel on “The Digital Transformation of the Border.” The 20-something Luckey, already worth $700 million, had floppy brown hair and wore a Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and flip-flops. He told the audience of border industry and Homeland Security officials that he was wearing shades because of recent laser surgery, not an urge to look cool.

    He did look cool, though, as if he were at the beach. And he does represent the next generation of border tech. Since 2020, his company has received nearly $100 million in contracts from Customs and Border Protection.

    His introduction to the panel, which sounded to me more like a pitch for financing, offered a glimpse of how the border-industrial complex now works. It was like listening to a rehearsal for the lobbying appearances he and his company would undoubtedly make in Congress for the 2023 budget. In 2021, Anduril spent $930,000 lobbying on issues that mattered to its executives. It also gifted political candidates with nearly $2 million in campaign contributions.

    Luckey’s message was: fund me and you’ll create a “durable industrial base,” while ensuring that border security will not be a “pipe dream.” Indeed, in his vision, the new border-surveillance infrastructure he represents will instead be an autonomous “pipeline,” delivering endlessly actionable information and intelligence directly to the cell phones of Border Patrol agents.

    I was thinking about his pitch again as I stood atop that hill watching the border apparatus quickly mobilize. I was, in fact, looking at yet another Border Patrol vehicle driving by when I suddenly heard a mechanical buzzing overhead that made me think a drone might be nearby. At our southern border, the CBP not only operates the sizeable Predator Bs (once used in U.S. military and CIA operations abroad), but small and medium-sized drones.

    I could see nothing in the sky, but something was certainly happening. It was as if I were at the Expo again, but now it was real life. I was, in fact, in the middle of the very surveillance-infrastructure pipeline Luckey had described, where towers talk to each other, signal to drones, to the all-terrain vehicle unit, and to roving Border Patrol cars.

    Then the buzzing sound abruptly stopped as a CBP helicopter lifted into the air, its loud propellers roaring.

    The Real Crisis

    After that dramatic helicopter exit, I wondered if there was indeed a border emergency and finally decided to get in my car and see what I could find out, leaving my son with our friends. As I rounded a corner, I came across Border Patrol agents and vehicles at the side of the road with a large group of people who, I assumed, were migrants. About four individuals had already been put in the back of a green-striped Border Patrol pickup truck, handcuffed and arrested. They had the tired look I knew so well of people who had walked an entire night in an unknown, hazardous landscape, had failed, and were now about to be deported. The agents of the ATV detail were lounging around in their green jumpsuits as their quads idled, as if this were all in a day’s (or night’s) work, which indeed it was.

    I remembered then hearing those footsteps as my son slept soundly and thought: The border is not in crisis. That’s impossible. The border’s inanimate. It’s the people walking through the desert — the ones who crept past us and those in the back of that truck or soon to be put in other trucks like it, arrested so far from home — who are actually in crisis. And it’s a crisis almost beyond the ability of anyone who hasn’t been displaced to imagine. Otherwise, why would they be here in the first place?

    The ongoing border-crisis story is another example of what Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once would have called an “upside down” world, so twisted in its telling that the victim becomes the victimizer and the oppressor, the oppressed. If only there were a way we could turn that story — and how so many in this country think about it — right-side up.

    As I was mulling all of that over, I suddenly noticed the omnipresent “eye” of the Elbit Systems tower “staring” at me again. Its superpower cameras were catching the whole scene. Perhaps its radar had detected this group to begin with. After all, the company’s website says, “From the darkest of nights to the thickest of brush, our border solutions help predict, detect, identify, and classify items of interest.” Not people, mind you, but the handcuffed “items of interest” in the back of that truck.

    As I watched the scene unfold, I remembered a moment at that Expo when a man from the Rio Grande Valley asked a panel of Department of Homeland Security officials a rare and pointed question. Gesturing toward the hall where all the companies were hawking their wares, he wondered why, if there was so much money to be made in border security, “would you even want a solution?”

    The long uncomfortable silence that followed told me all I needed to know about the real border crisis in this country.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Spain: PSOE struggling to supress stench of ‘Catalangate’

    The scandal of electronic eavesdropping on 65 leaders of the Catalan independence movement by Spain’s National Intelligence Centre shows signs of becoming a long-running soap opera. Dick Nichols reports.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Spain: Will ‘Catalangate’ bring down the PSOE-UP government?

    A New Yorker investigation has exposed that from 2018‒20, at least 65 leading figures in the Catalan government and independence movement had their mobile phones bugged, reports Dick Nichols.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • ‘You Have to Laugh at the Ways Agencies Will Evade Giving You Information’

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed EFF’s Dave Maass about transparency and journalism for the April 22, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220401Maass.mp3

     

    The Foilies 2022

    (image: EFF)

    Janine Jackson: A functioning democracy relies on an informed citizenry. But what you read in a high school textbook, and what you see when you look up from it, are different things. Importantly, transparency—a free flow of information—should be the norm. But it isn’t. That makes even more important the role of journalists who dig out critical information the public needs to hear, whether we know it or not: information we need to challenge the powerful. And it reminds us of the need to protect that role and that ability.

    Our next guest is all about transparency and public knowledge. Dave Maass is director of investigations at Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the prime mover behind the Foilies, a project out of EFF and MuckRock news involving tongue-in-cheek awards given to government agencies and others that thwart the public’s right to access information. He joins us now by phone from Reno, Nevada. Welcome to CounterSpin, Dave Maass.

    Dave Maass: Oh, glad to be here.

    JJ: Some folks, and especially CounterSpin listeners, may know about Sunshine Week, the yearly effort by news organizations to promote and to celebrate open government and access to information. The Foilies are connected to Sunshine Week in a way that’s funny, but kind of “laugh instead of cry” funny, because it’s about everything that matters in our lives and our relationship to power.

    DM: Exactly. I think if you work in a space where you’re filing public records requests, and you’re filing Freedom of Information requests, you have a certain personality where you love the gratification of receiving records, but you also take a little bit of—I mean, you have to laugh at the various ways that government agencies will try to evade giving you that information. And the Foilies are our annual way to provide some solace, through a little bit of humor, to those who file requests, but also to make sure that the people who are using these tricks don’t get away with it, that they are publicly in the light during Sunshine Week.

    JJ: Absolutely, which is what sunshine is all about. So it’s about conveying absurdity at the same time as you’re highlighting these real issues.

    So what, then, for 2021, what are some recent awardees that represent the problems you’re talking about? I know, for example, that Trump and the toilet stuffed with documents was a little too “fish in the barrel” for you. Maybe that’s—maybe that metaphor’s more complicated than I realized. But in other words, you’ve done Trump, and we get that. What are some of the other things that you’re trying to lift up?

    A photo of the only copy of Wu-Tang Clan's Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, revealed through a Freedom of Information request

    A photo of the only copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, revealed through a Freedom of Information request (BuzzFeed, 1/5/22)

    DM: We’ve tried to make sure that we have a range of awards that go to local agencies and national agencies and things that are in the news, as well as things that are kind of pop culture–related. One that, from the very beginning, we knew was going to make it into the Foilies this year was the Wu-Tang Clan–related FOIA request filed by BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold. Now, if folks remember, there was a particular pharma bro whose name I can’t really pronounce, it’s gonna be a little embarrassing, but I think his name is Martin Shkreli.

    JJ: Close enough.

    DM: Before he was convicted of federal crimes, he successfully bid to win this Wu-Tang Clan one-of-a-kind, super-amazing album that there would only be one copy. And then he was convicted, and the US Marshals seized it. And in went some FOIA requests to find out more information about this secret Wu-Tang album that was eventually sold by the US Marshals, and the US Marshals refused to release how much money they got for this new Wu-Tang album. And they redacted a bunch of photos, so that we couldn’t see the pictures that they took in order to try to sell this on the open market. So immediately, whenever you can get Wu-Tang Clan in—the Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nothing to F with, unless the F stands for FOIA.

    JJ: Right. I can see why that would grab people, which it totally—it’s absurd. And I, at the same time, and as I know you do, know that some folks would hear that and be like, that’s rich versus rich, and I’ve got nothing to do with that. So let’s take a look at some of the other things. A street-level surveillance taking a picture of your face, and there’s all kinds of stuff that, you don’t need to be Wu-Tang, you don’t need to be Martin Shkreli, it still involves you.

    DM: Right. So the one that I think is probably the most offensive of the year went to a company—now, we often get these out to government agencies, but then sometimes we give these to companies that really tried to chill the public’s access to information.

    So, specifically, the company that we called out is called Clearview AI. This is a facial recognition company that has scraped the internet for photos that you have published online in order to create a database that law enforcement can use to identify you.

    We know that face recognition is racially biased and makes mistakes, can pull people into the criminal justice system. This Clearview system is more offensive than others because it grabs the images that we put on the internet to share with one another to communicate with ourselves, and it uses those against us.

    Now, the only reason that we know Clearview AI exists is because a couple of researchers, named Freddy Martinez and Beryl Lipton, filed public records requests around the country related to it. And Freddy Martinez, specifically, works for an organization called Open the Government, and he also is involved with a local organization called Lucy Parsons Labs in Chicago. And he had found out about Clearview and started filing tons of requests.

    NYT: The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It

    New York Times (1/18/20)

    They pass this information on to the New York Times. It became a huge story. You’re seeing attorney generals take action on it. You’re seeing lawsuits over it. You’re seeing them being fined, both in the US and abroad. Huge controversy.

    And so what does Clearview decide to do? It decides to go after Freddy Martinez. So, he had never been involved in a lawsuit with Clearview AI, but Clearview used one of the other lawsuits it’s involved in to file subpoenas to try to get all of the information that Freddy Martinez had gathered, all the journalists he’d spoken with, all the communications with journalists and nonprofit organizations, in a very clear attempt to chill Freddy Martinez’s right to get access to information, and to retaliate against him.

    Now, after public outcry, Clearview withdrew those subpoenas, withdrew those legal requests. But nevertheless, you just know that they, a big company, were trying to bully an everyday researcher.

    JJ: Absolutely. And, you know, you’re describing a critical relationship, which is that open-government advocates, whistleblowers, can pitch, but they do rely on journalists to catch. Folks reveal information at great effort, sometimes at peril, and I can only imagine how disappointing it is to then see journalists dismiss that information, or not run with it, in the way that is so important, and that is so necessary in terms of getting the information out to the public.

    And I just wanted to ask you, with regard to that, I know that as scholar in residence at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, you work on something called the Atlas of Surveillance, and you’re very interested in that street-level surveillance that we’re talking about.

    I saw you cited in connection with that project a couple years back, and you said, “If our goal is to keep neck and neck with the growth of the surveillance state, we’d lose”; you can’t keep up with it. The opacity is such that it’s difficult for investigators to keep on track of things like surveillance. And so I just wanted to ask you, what do you see as the goal, not just of that project, but of the project of the Foilies, and projects that are aimed at exposing the barriers that governments put up to transparency? What do you see as the hope of this kind of work?

    Dave Maass

    Dave Maass: “We have to take the victories that are there. And we have to at least try to inform people about what’s going on.”

    DM: We are kind of engaged in what the military would call asymmetrical warfare, where we are part of a small group of nonprofits and advocates up against a huge tech industry, a whole military policing complex, that just dwarfs us in funding and dwarfs us in resources. But nevertheless, by using things at our disposal, particularly transparency, we are able to have such an outsized impact.

    And maybe we’re not able to always result in something that changes everything nationwide. And honestly, with Congress as it is, that, to me, is not even a huge option. To get Congress to pass anything on anything is kind of a lofty notion these days.

    But we are able to have these victories in places like San Francisco and Boston. You’re able to get laws passed, you’re able to get new measures in place, that maybe don’t outlaw certain surveillance technologies, but at least gets some controls in place, or at least put the transparency measures in place that allow us to come back and say, “No, look, the police are abusing this technology, we need to stop it.” And we’ve seen it with face recognition: We started to get a lot of traction with governments moving back on it.

    It is hard to keep up. But I just don’t think giving up the fight is worthwhile. We have to take the victories that are there. And we have to at least try to inform people about what’s going on. And in the process, we’re going to root out corruption, we’re going to find companies like Clearview that are going to get sued for millions and millions and millions of dollars, and are going to have contracts revoked. So I’m still optimistic, even if I’m also pessimistic, if you get what I mean.

    JJ: I understand completely.

    We’ve been speaking with Dave Maass; he’s director of investigations at Electronic Frontier Foundation. You can find their work, including around the Foilies, online at EFF.org. Dave Maass, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    DM: Thank you.

     

    The post ‘You Have to Laugh at the Ways Agencies Will Evade Giving You Information’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Norway’s NGOs furious about Telenor’s data ending up in the hands of Myanmar’s junta

    Former Minister of Trade and Industry Monica Mæland visiting Myanmar in 2014. Photo: Trond Viken, Ministry of Trade and Industry

    On 25 March, Telenor announced that the telecom giant had transferred the operational activities of Telenor Myanmar to M1 Group. [see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/10/26/norways-telenor-in-myanmar-should-do-more-than-pull-out-it-should-not-hand-sensitive-data-to-the-regime/] In a release following the announcement, the Norwegian Forum for Development and Environment (ForUM) condemns the sale, and Kathrine Sund-Henriksen, ForUM’s general manager calls it a dark day for Telenor and for Norway as a human rights nation.

    ForUM is a network of 50 Norwegian organizations within the development, environment, peace, and human rights with a vision of a democratic and peaceful world based on fair distribution, solidarity, human rights, and sustainability. ForUM writes that together with transferring the operational activities of Telenor Myanmar to M1 Group, Telenor also sells sensitive personal data of 18 million former Telenor customers, and there is an imminent danger that this information will soon be in the hands of the country’s brutal military dictatorship. ForUM is furious at the news that the sale has been completed.

    “Ever since the sale was announced last summer, we have worked to prevent it because there is a big risk that the military junta will have access to sensitive personal information and use it to persecute, torture, and kill regime critics. Incredibly, Telenor is going through with a sale that has been criticized by human rights experts, civil society, Myanmar’s government in exile, and even their own employees in the country,” says Kathrine Sund-Henriksen.

    Telenor has admitted that since October last year they have known that the junta uses the M1 Group as an intermediary and that the data will soon end up in the hands of Shwe Byain Phy Group, a local conglomerate with close ties to the junta. Kathrine Sund-Henriksen believes it is only a matter of time before the sale has tragic consequences for human rights activists in the country.

    “When metadata is transferred, the junta will be able to know who a user has called, how long the call has lasted, and where the call was made. All of this can be used to expose activist groups operating in secret for the junta. According to the UN, the junta has killed more than 1,600 people and more than 12,000 have been arrested since last year’s coup. Those numbers will continue to increase, and Telenor has given the junta all the information they need to expose human rights defenders,” Kathrine Sund-Henriksen says.

    https://www.forumfor.no/nyheter/2022/forum-for-utvikling-og-miljo-fordommer-salget-av-telenor-myanmar

    Norway’s ForUM condemns the sale of Telenor Myanmar

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Universities must act to prevent espionage and foreign interference, but national laws still threaten academic freedom

    ANALYSIS: By Sarah Kendall, The University of Queensland

    This week, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security released its much anticipated report on national security threats affecting the higher education and research sector.

    The 171-page report found the sector is a target for foreign powers using “the full set of tools” against Australia, which can undermine our sovereignty and threaten academic freedom.

    It made 27 recommendations to “harden the operating environment to deny adversaries the ability to engage in the national security risks in the sector”.

    The committee’s recommendations, when correctly implemented, will go a long way towards combating the threat of espionage and foreign interference. But they are not enough to protect academic freedom.

    This is because the laws that make espionage and foreign interference a crime could capture legitimate research endeavours.

    National security risks to higher education and research
    The joint committee found there are several national security threats to the higher education and research sector. Most significant are foreign interference against students and staff, espionage and data theft.

    This includes theft via talent recruitment programmes where Australian academics working on sensitive technologies are recruited to work at foreign institutions.

    These threats have been occurring through cyber attacks and human means, including actors working in Australia covertly on behalf of a foreign government.

    Foreign adversaries may target information on research that can be commercialised or used for national gain purposes.

    The kind of information targeted is not limited to military or defence, but includes valuable technologies or information in any domain such as as agriculture, medicine, energy and manufacturing.

    What did the committee recommend?
    The committee stated that “awareness, acknowledgement and genuine proactive measures” are the next steps academic institutions must take to degrade the corrosive effects of these national security risks.

    Of its 27 recommendations, the committee made four “headline” recommendations. These include:

    1. A university-wide campaign of active transparency about the national security risks (overseen by the University Foreign Interference Taskforce)
    2. adherence to the taskforce guidelines by universities. These include having frameworks for managing national security risks and implementing a cybersecurity strategy
    3. introducing training on national security issues for staff and students
    4. guidance for universities on how to implement penalties for foreign interference activities on campus.

    Other recommendations include creation of a mechanism to allow students to anonymously report instances of foreign interference on campus and diversification of the international student population.

    What about academic freedom?
    Espionage makes it a crime to deal with information on behalf of, or to communicate to, a foreign principal (such as a foreign government or a person acting on their behalf). The person may also need to intend to prejudice, or be reckless in prejudicing, Australia’s national security.

    In the context of the espionage and foreign interference offences, “national security” means defence of Australia.

    It also means Australia’s international relations with other countries. “Prejudice” means something more than mere embarrassment.

    So, an academic might intend to prejudice Australia’s national security where they engage in a research project that results in criticism of Australian military or intelligence policies or practices; or catalogues Australian government misconduct in its dealings with other countries.

    Because “foreign principals” are part of the larger global audience, publication of these research results could be an espionage offence.

    The academic may even have committed an offence when teaching students about this research in class (because Australia has a large proportion of international students, some of whom may be acting on behalf of foreign actors), communicating with colleagues working overseas (because foreign public universities could be “foreign principals”), or simply engaging in preliminary research (because it is an offence to do things to prepare for espionage).

    Research
    Even communicating about research with overseas colleagues could fall foul of espionage and foreign interference laws. Image: The Conversation/Shutterstock

    Foreign interference makes it a crime to engage in covert or deceptive conduct on behalf of a foreign principal where the person intends to (or is reckless as to whether they will) influence a political or governmental process, or prejudice Australia’s national security.

    The covert or deceptive nature of the conduct could be in relation to any part of the person’s conduct.

    So, an academic working for a foreign public university (a “foreign principal”, even if the country is one of our allies) may inadvertently commit the crime of foreign interference where they run a research project that involves anonymous survey responses to collect information to advocate for Australian electoral law reform.

    The anonymous nature of the survey may be sufficient for the academic’s conduct to be “covert”.

    Because it is a crime to prepare for foreign interference, the academic may also have committed an offence by simply taking any steps towards publication of the research results (including preliminary research or writing a first draft).

    The kind of research criminalised by the espionage and foreign interference offences may be important public interest research. It may also produce knowledge and ideas that are necessary for the exchange of information which underpins our liberal democracy.

    Criminalising this conduct risks undermining academic freedom and eroding core democratic principles.

    So, how can we protect academic freedom?
    In addition to implementing the recommendations in the report, we must reform our national security crimes to protect academic freedom in Australia. While the committee acknowledged the adequacy of these crimes to mitigate the national security threats against the research sector, it did not consider the overreach of these laws.

    Legitimate research endeavours could be better protected if a “national interest” defence to a charge of espionage or foreign interference were introduced. This would be similar to “public interest” defences and protect conduct done in the national interest.

    “National interest” should be flexible enough so various liberal democratic values — including academic freedom, press freedom, government accountability, and protection of human rights — can be considered alongside national security.

    In the absence of a federal bill of rights, such a defence would go a long way towards ensuring legitimate research is protected and academic freedom in Australia is upheld.The Conversation

    Sarah Kendall is a PhD candidate in law, The University of Queensland. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Project Nimbus: How Amazon and Google and Amazon made billions from Israel’s occupation

    A US$1.2 billion contract between Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Israeli government provides cloud services for the Israeli apartheid state to spy on Palestinians, reports Ramzy Baroud.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • The Billion Dollar Deal that Made Google and Amazon Partners in the Israeli Occupation of Palestine

    “We are anonymous because we fear retaliation.” This text was part of a letter signed by 500 Google employees last October, in which they decried their company’s direct support for the Israeli government and military.

    In their letter, the signatories protested a $1.2 billion contract between Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Israeli government which provides cloud services for the Israeli military and government that “allows for further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land”.

    This is called Project Nimbus. The project was announced in 2018 and went into effect in May 2021, in the first week of the Israeli war on besieged Gaza, which killed over 250 Palestinians and wounded many more.

    The Google employees were not only disturbed by the fact that, by entering into this agreement with Israel, their company became directly involved in the Israeli occupation of Palestine, but were equally outraged by the “disturbing pattern of militarization” that saw similar contracts between Google – Amazon, Microsoft and other tech giants – with the US military, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other policing agencies.

    In an article published in The Nation newspaper in June, three respected US academics have revealed the financial component of Amazon’s decision to get involved in such an immoral business, arguing that such military-linked contracts have “become a major source of profit for Amazon.” It is estimated, according to the article, that AWS alone was responsible for 63 percent of Amazon’s profits in 2020.

    The maxim ‘people before profit’ cannot be any more appropriate than in the Palestinian context, and neither Google nor Amazon can claim ignorance. The Israeli occupation of Palestine has been in place for decades, and numerous United Nations resolutions have condemned Israel for its occupation, colonial expansion and violence against Palestinians. If all of that was not enough to wane the enthusiasm of Google and Amazon to engage in projects that specifically aimed at protecting Israel’s ‘national security’ – read: continued occupation of Palestine – a damning report by Israel’s largest human rights group, B’tselem should have served as that wake up call.

    B’tselem declared Israel an apartheid state in January 2021. The international rights group, Human Rights Watch (HRW) followed suit in April, also denouncing the Israeli apartheid state. That was only a few weeks before Project Nimbus was declared. It was as if Google and Amazon were purposely declaring their support of apartheid. The fact that the project was signed during the Israeli war on Gaza speaks volumes about the two tech giants’ complete disregards of international law, human rights and the very freedom of the Palestinian people.

    It gets worse. On March 15, hundreds of Google workers signed a petition protesting the firing of one of their colleagues, Ariel Koren, who was active in generating the October letter in protest of Project Nimbus. Koren was the product marketing manager at Google for Education, and has worked for the company for six years. However, she was the kind of employee who was not welcomed by the likes of Google, as the company is now directly involved with various military and security projects.

    “For me, as a Jewish employee of Google, I feel a deep sense of intense moral responsibility,” she said in a statement last October. “When you work in a company, you have the right to be accountable and responsible for the way that your labor is actually being used,” she added.

    Google quickly retaliated to that seemingly outrageous statement. The following month, her manager “presented her with an ultimatum: move to Brazil or lose her position.” Eventually, she was driven out of the company.

    Koren was not the first Google – or Amazon – employee to be fired for standing up for a good cause, nor would, sadly, be the last. In this age of militarism, surveillance, unwarranted facial recognition and censorship, speaking one’s mind and daring to fight for human rights and other basic freedoms is no longer an option.

    Amazon’s warehouses can be as bad, or even worse, than a typical sweatshop. Last March, and after a brief denial, Amazon apologized for forcing its workers to pee in water bottles – and worse – so that their managers may fulfill their required quotas. The apology followed direct evidence provided by the investigative journalism website, The Intercept. However, the company which stands accused of numerous violations of worker rights – including its engagement in ‘union busting’ – is not expected to reverse course any time soon, especially when so much profits are at stake.

    But profits generated from market monopoly, mistreatment of workers or other misconducts are different from profits generated from contributing directly to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Though human rights violations should be shunned everywhere, regardless of their contexts, Israel’s war on the Palestinian people, now with the direct help of such companies, remains one of the gravest injustices that continues to scar the consciousness of humankind. No amount of Google justification or Amazon rationalization can change the fact that they are facilitating Israeli war crimes in Palestine.

    To be more precise, according to The Nation, the Google-Amazon cloud service will help Israel expand its illegal Jewish settlements by “supporting data for the Israel Land Authority (ILA), the government agency that manages and allocates state land.” These settlements, which are repeatedly condemned by the international community, are built on Palestinian land and are directly linked to the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

    According to the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, Project Nimbus is the “most lucrative tender issued by Israel in recent years.” The Project, which has ignited a “secretive war” involving top Israeli army generals – all vying for a share in the profit – has also whetted the appetite of many other international tech companies, all wanting to be part of Israel’s technology drive, with the ultimate aim of keeping Palestinians entrapped, occupied and oppressed.

    This is precisely why the Palestinian boycott movement is absolutely critical as it targets these international companies, which are migrating to Israel in search for profits. Israel, on the contrary, should be boycotted, not enabled, sanctioned and not rewarded. While profit generation is understandably the main goal of companies like Google and Amazon, this goal can be achieved without necessarily requiring the subjugation of a whole people, who are currently the victims of the world’s last remaining apartheid regime.

    The post The Billion Dollar Deal that Made Google and Amazon Partners in the Israeli Occupation of Palestine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US deploys 3 surveillance ships in South China Sea

    China has accused the U.S. of intensifying spying activities in the disputed South China Sea after the U.S. Navy deployed three of its ocean surveillance vessels in the region.

    An aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, also entered the South China Sea on Friday, ahead of the large-scale Philippines-U.S. joint military exercise Balikatan 22.

    Data provided by the ship-tracking website MarineTraffic show the ocean survey ship USNS Bowditch is currently operating in Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), 60 nautical miles east of Danang and about 90 nautical miles south of China’s Hainan Island.

    At the same time, another ocean surveillance vessel, the USNS Effective, is in waters northwest of the Philippines, 250 nautical miles from Scarborough Shoal, which China calls Huangyan Island.

    The third ocean surveillance ship, USNS Loyal, is in the sea east of Taiwan.

    China’s state-run Global Times said they are “spy ships” that carry out reconnaissance in support of anti-submarine warfare against China. They have been in the area since March 17, it said.

    “The U.S. Navy has frequently sent spy vessels near China in recent years, but it is unusual to see so many of them present at the same time,” Global Times said.

    Amid the raging war in Ukraine, the deployment of the ships may serve as an indication of the U.S. commitment in the Indo-Pacific.

    A file photo showing ocean surveillance ship USNS Effective sitting in dry dock at Yokosuka, Japan, Sept. 13, 2007. The ship is currently deployed to the South China Sea. Credit: U.S. Navy
    A file photo showing ocean surveillance ship USNS Effective sitting in dry dock at Yokosuka, Japan, Sept. 13, 2007. The ship is currently deployed to the South China Sea. Credit: U.S. Navy
    ‘Spy ships’

    The USNS Bowditch is a Pathfinder-class survey ship that has often been deployed in the South China Sea. The USNS Effective and USNS Loyal are both Victorious-class ocean surveillance ships.

    The ships measure water conditions and deploy underwater drones that take very detailed measurements of water temperature, salinity, the acoustic environment and the water’s chemical make-up. They also conduct very detailed surveys of the ocean bottom. 

    “The ships’ data can be used to detect submarines and identify ships’ noises, so from China’s perspective they are spy ships,” said Carl Schuster, a retired U.S. Navy captain and former director of operations at the U.S. Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.

    “China’s survey ships do similar operations so in many ways, China’s description of the American ships provides an insight into how China uses its survey ships,” he said.

    MarineTraffic also shows that a Chinese survey vessel has just been deployed.

    China’s homegrown third-generation, spacecraft-tracking ship Yuanwang-5 is currently in waters east of Taiwan, some 255 nautical miles from the island.

    It’s unclear where the ship, described by the Chinese military as “a backbone in China’s maritime tracking and measuring network,” is heading.

    China has four Yuanwang-class tracking ships in active operation, including Yuanwang-5 which entered service in 2007.

    Some security analysts, like Paul Buchanan at the Auckland, New Zealand-based 36th Parallel Assessments risk consultancy, say the Yuanwang-class ships are “dual-platform spy ships.”

    Buchanan has previously been quoted by the NZ Herald as saying the ships are used for intelligence collection and tracking satellites. He said 60 to 70 per cent of their work is looking for other people’s signals and 30 per cent is the satellite work. Buchanan also said the U.S. and China use their signals collection ships partly to track rival submarines.

    In another development, the American expeditionary mobile base USS Miguel Keith entered the South China Sea on March 21, the Beijing-based South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI), a think tank, said.

    This is the first time the USS Miguel Keith entered the South China Sea since its deployment to the West Pacific in October 2021, the SCSPI said.

    The 90,000-ton ship that can serve as a strategic platform and command center is the second-biggest ship type in the U.S. Navy after aircraft carriers.

    It is unclear if the USS Miguel Keith will join the Balikatan 22 joint exercise between the U.S. and Philippine armies taking place from March 28 to April 8 across the Luzon Strait.

    With over 5,000 U.S. military personnel and 3,800 Filipino soldiers, the U.S. Embassy in Manila said that Balikatan 22 will be “one of the largest-ever iterations of the Philippine-led annual exercise” which this year coincides with the 75th anniversary of U.S.-Philippine security cooperation.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Home Office illegally seized phones of 2,000 asylum seekers, court rules

    Secret, blanket policy to take mobiles and extract data from them judged unlawful on several fronts

    The Home Office operated an unlawful, secret, blanket policy to seize almost 2,000 mobile phones from asylum seekers arriving in the UK on small boats and then downloaded data from these phones, the high court has ruled.

    The court found that the policy was unlawful on multiple fronts and breached the asylum seekers’ human rights. The judges ruled that there was no parliamentary authority for seizures and data extractions and that the legal power that Home Office officials thought they could use was the wrong one.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Western Media Took Gold in Evidence-Free Allegations of Chinese Olympic Spying

     

    WaPo: ‘China will be China’: Why journalists are taking burner phones to the Beijing Olympics

    The Washington Post‘s headline (1/20/22) seems to sum up why Western journalists saw no need to factcheck claims of Chinese cyberespionage at the Beijing Olympics.

    A persistent trope in Western media coverage of China is the claim that Chinese technology is inherently compromised and used as a nefarious tool by Beijing to spy on unwitting foreigners. However, when one actually looks for evidence behind these claims or innuendos, one often finds unsubstantiated speculation.

    Before the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics began, there was a spate of reports alleging that China could be spying on visiting athletes and journalists. The reports had a sinister tone, implying to Western audiences that China was trying to collect private information for malicious purposes:

    • Quartz (1/20/22): “Beijing Winter Olympics Athletes Have Every Reason to Worry About Their Cybersecurity”
    • BBC (1/18/22): “Winter Olympics: Athletes Advised to Use Burner Phones in Beijing”
    • New York Times (1/18/22): “Security Flaws Seen in China’s Mandatory Olympics App for Athletes”
    • CNN (2/1/22): “FBI Urges Olympic Athletes to Leave Personal Phones at Home Ahead of Beijing Games”
    • Daily Mail (1/31/22): “Over 1,000 Athletes and Coaches Are Using ‘Burner’ Phones at the Winter Olympics Because the Chinese State Has ‘Crazy, Scary’ Spying Tech that Monitors Calls, Reads Texts, Tracks Movements and Can Spot ‘Illegal’ Words in Private Conversations”
    • Washington Post (1/20/22): “‘China Will Be China’: Why Journalists Are Taking Burner Phones to the Beijing Olympics”

    Creating an anaconda

    Yahoo!: China is watching: Olympians go to great lengths to avoid stolen data at 2022 Games

    Yahoo! Sports (2/5/22) closed its article on cyberespionage at the Olympics with an analyst who compared China to an anaconda: “It doesn’t need to bite you. It doesn’t need to spit venom at you. But your behavior will change simply because you know that it exists.”

    Yahoo! Sports (2/5/22) reported on a tech advisory the US Olympic Committee distributed to sports federations that discouraged athletes from bringing their personal smartphones to Beijing. “There should be no expectation of data security or privacy while operating in China,” the advisory warned, a message echoed by other Western national Olympics committees. Yahoo! cited numerous Western officials and cybersecurity experts who claimed that broader fears of Chinese cyberespionage are “absolutely rational,” setting the stage for what Yahoo! called the “Paranoia Olympics.”

    Yahoo! cited a number of Western cybersecurity experts raising concerns for Olympic athletes:

    Their worries stem from a variety of sources, from an alleged technical flaw in an app that all Olympics participants must download to broader anti-China hysteria; from Twitter threads claiming to prove that “all Olympian audio is being collected, analyzed and saved on Chinese servers,” to genuine fears about the Chinese government’s ability and willingness to steal sensitive information and use it.

    Yahoo!’s report cited supposed China experts’ explanation for how the Chinese government doesn’t even need to conduct cyberespionage to deter athletes from causing disturbances:

    It’s a version of what Sinologist Perry Link once termed “The Anaconda in the Chandelier.” It’s a metaphor “used to describe how the Chinese government controls dissent and speech,” explained Neil Thomas, a China analyst at the Eurasia Group. “It basically sits there as a huge anaconda in the chandelier of a room…. It doesn’t need to do anything, this anaconda. It just needs to be there. It doesn’t need to bite you. It doesn’t need to spit venom at you. But your behavior will change simply because you know that it exists.”

    This raises the question: If China merely convincing athletes that it might conduct cyberespionage on them is sufficient to control their behavior, and prevent them from bringing up topics that “might trigger the Chinese government,” then wouldn’t unsubstantiated Western media allegations of a Chinese surveillance program on foreign delegations serve the same function as the supposed Chinese anaconda–regardless of whether such a program exists?

    Citizen Lab’s findings

    DW: DW exclusive: Cybersecurity flaws leave Olympians at risk with Beijing 2022 app

    Deutsche Welle (1/18/22) set the tone for coverage of Citizen Lab’s report on the Beijing Olympics app.

    Is there evidence of a Chinese surveillance program on foreign delegations? Many Western media reports (e.g., BBC, 1/18/22; CBC, 1/18/22; New York Times, 1/18/22) on China’s supposed cyberespionage efforts against foreign delegations to the Olympics can be sourced back to a report by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity research center best known for identifying government-authorized spyware on phones belonging to human rights activists and journalists, which was first reported by German state media outlet Deutsche Welle (1/18/22).

    DW reported on some of Citizen Lab’s findings, noting that athletes, coaches, reporters and sports officials, as well as local staff, were required to put “personal information” like passport data and flight information, as well as sensitive medical information related to possible Covid-19 symptoms, onto either the My 2022 app used for the Beijing Olympics or the Olympics’ website:

    The app’s SSL certificates—which are supposed to ensure that data traffic is only exchanged between trustworthy devices and servers—are not validated, meaning that the app has a serious encryption vulnerability. As a result, the app could be deceived into connecting with a malicious host, allowing information to be intercepted, or even malicious data to be sent back to the app.

    Citizen Lab researcher Jeffrey Knockel says he found the vulnerability not only regarding health data, but also with other important services in the app. This includes the app service that processes all file attachments as well as transmitted voice audio…. The expert says he also discovered that for some services, data traffic in the app is not encrypted at all. This means that the metadata of the app’s own chat service can easily be read by hackers.

    It also found that the app had an inactivated “censorship keyword list,” a “reporting function that allows users to report other users if they consider a chat message to be dangerous or dubious.” One option that could have been chosen (had the function been turned on) was “‘politically sensitive content,’ a phrase that is typically used in China to describe censored topics.”

    DW reported that Citizen Lab confidentially reported these findings to the Beijing Organizing Committee on December 3, 2021.  Citizen Lab’s cybersecurity experts, the news article said, conducted an audit on January 17 that found that “no changes were made to address the concerns raised over security vulnerabilities and the list of ‘illegal words.’”

    ‘A simpler explanation’

    Citizen Lab screenshots of the My2022 app

    Citizen Lab (1/18/22) found that the My 2022 app’s “widespread lack of security is less likely to be the result of a vast government conspiracy but rather the result of a simpler explanation such as differing priorities for software developers in China.”

    However, when one actually reads the full Citizen Lab report (1/18/22) that DW and other Western media outlets selectively cited, one quickly discovers that this reporting contained significant omissions that made My 2022’s alleged vulnerabilities seem more malicious and deliberate than they were described in the original report.

    For example, Citizen Lab’s report claims that while it’s “reasonable to ask whether the encryption in this app was intentionally sabotaged for surveillance purposes or whether the defect was born of developer negligence,” it also argues that “the case for the Chinese government sabotaging My 2022’s encryption is problematic” for several reasons:

    For instance, the most sensitive information being handled by this app is submitted in health customs forms, but this information is already being directly submitted to the government, and thus there would be little instrumental rationality in the government intercepting their own data, as weaknesses in the encryption of the transmission of this information would only aid other parties. While it is possible that weakness in the encryption of health customs information was collateral damage from the intentional weakening of the encryption of other types of data that the Chinese government would have an interest in intercepting, our prior work suggests that insufficient protection of user data is endemic to the Chinese app ecosystem. While some work has ascribed intentionality to poor software security discovered in Chinese apps, we believe that such a widespread lack of security is less likely to be the result of a vast government conspiracy but rather the result of a simpler explanation, such as differing priorities for software developers in China.

    In other words, Citizen Lab offered plausible reasons for why My 2022’s developers left alleged security vulnerabilities to enhance functionality that have nothing to do with a malicious Chinese government conspiracy to spy on foreign delegations. Citizen Lab also pointed out that the most sensitive information about athletes would already be directly submitted to the Chinese government for Covid containment purposes, so there would be little point in using My 2022 for espionage purposes.

    Ultimately, Citizen Lab concluded:

    While we found glaring and easily discoverable security issues with the way that My 2022 performs encryption, we have also observed similar issues in Chinese-developed Zoom, as well as the most popular Chinese Web browsers. My 2022’s functionality to report other users for “politically sensitive” expression is common in other Chinese apps, and, while we found bundled a list of censorship keyword terms capable of stifling political expression, such lists are near ubiquitous in Chinese chat apps, live streaming apps, mobile games and even open source software. In light of previous work analyzing popular Chinese apps, our findings concerning MY2022 are, while concerning, not surprising.

    Citizen Lab’s arguments and conclusions undermine the conspiratorial tone in Western media coverage, which might be why they were omitted, with the opposite impression conveyed through cherry-picked quotes. Outlets like the CBC (1/18/22), Quartz (1/20/22) and the Washington Post (1/20/22) focused on Citizen Lab’s “worst case scenarios” of all internet traffic potentially being intercepted, warning people to “pack burner digital devices” to evade the “‘devastating flaw’ that could expose users’ medical and passport information.”

    Aside from a few exceptions like the Associated Press (1/18/22), which correctly noted there “was no evidence that the easily discoverable security flaws in the MY2022 app were placed intentionally by the Chinese government,” the Chinese state media outlet CGTN (1/28/22) offered more nuanced reporting, citing the major thrust of Citizen Lab’s conclusions that were omitted from most Western media accounts, where they would have contradicted the lurid narrative.

    ‘Two software patches ago’

    There is one apparent error in Citizen Lab’s report. The group calls My 2022 “an app required to be installed by all attendees to the 2022 Olympic Games,” a claim repeated in Western media reports on My 2022’s alleged vulnerabilities. The link provided leads to a report by Fortune (12/7/22) that states attendees are “mandated to download a health app called ‘My 2022’ to input personal information and health records,” with no source provided to substantiate this claim.

    But the International Olympics Committee (IOC) has directly refuted this claim, noting that it is not mandatory for attendees to download the app, and that the app’s settings can be configured to disable access to “‘files and media, calendar, camera, contacts,’ as well as a user’s location, their phone and their phone’s microphone.” The IOC has also noted that the app has been validated by Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store, in addition to passing two independent assessments by cybersecurity testing organizations that found “no critical vulnerabilities.”

    NBC: Experts warn Olympics participants: China doesn't need an app to spy

    NBC (2/8/22) debunked the My 2022 scare stories–but still warned Olympians to be afraid.

    Later, in early February, Citizen Lab (NBC, 2/8/22) noted its concerns about My 2022 were addressed “several weeks and two software patches ago,” after the developers reached out after the initial paper was published and sought advice on how to fix the identified problems. All of this indicates that there is no basis for the claim My 2022 was used by the Chinese government to spy on foreign delegations.

    However, NBC argued that “focusing on that single smartphone app is a red herring” in “the context of China’s larger appetite for the personal data of people around the world.” It provided no evidence of China’s alleged appetite for the personal data of people outside its borders, instead relying on resurgent Yellow Peril hysteria in Western countries to suggest that it must be true.

    Another claim about My 2022 that has gone viral on social media, spread by popular podcast host Joe Rogan and Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, is the allegation that the app constantly records audio on users’ phones. This was debunked by numerous experts, like Will Strafach, the creator of an iPhone app that blocks location trackers, who looked at My 2022’s code and found that there was nothing beyond an overt translation function that could activate the phone’s microphone.

    More evidence-free espionage claims

    Business Insider: Everything you need to know about Huawei, the Chinese tech giant accused of spying that the US just banned from doing business in America

    Business Insider (3/16/19): “The US has upped its fight in the last year against Huawei, which it suspects of spying for the Chinese government and posing a great risk to US national security.”

    The evidence-free allegations promoted by Western media about supposed Chinese cyberespionage at the Olympics fit into a larger pattern of claims that Chinese technology is inherently compromised and engineered to serve as spyware by the Chinese government.

    Numerous headlines alleged that Huawei, a Chinese multinational tech corporation that created the world’s first 5G smartphone, was conducting espionage on behalf of the Chinese government:

    • Forbes (2/26/19): “Huawei Security Scandal: Everything You Need to Know”
    • Fox (2/13/20): “US Accuses Huawei of Spying on Mobile Phone Users”
    • NBC (2/14/20): “US Officials: Using Huawei Tech Opens Door to Chinese Spying, Censorship”
    • Business Insider (3/16/19): “Everything You Need to Know About Huawei, the Chinese Tech Giant Accused of Spying That the US Just Banned From Doing Business in America”

    Huawei had been cleared of accusations of espionage as early as October 2012, after the White House ordered an 18-month review of security risks by suppliers to US telecommunications companies. The inquiry found no evidence that the company was an espionage asset, although predictable concerns about nebulous “security vulnerabilities” were raised (Reuters, 10/17/12).

    In more recent years, Australian officials led the way in getting Western governments like the US to ban Huawei’s technology on national security grounds, after conducting simulations on the offensive espionage potential of 5G technology (Sydney Morning Herald, 5/22/19). However, when one reads past sensationalist headlines and looks for evidence that Huawei is conducting espionage on behalf of the Chinese government, one comes up dry.

    For instance, the Wall Street Journal’s report headlined “US Officials Say Huawei Can Covertly Access Telecom Networks” (2/12/20) cited anonymous US officials claiming that Huawei “can covertly access mobile-phone networks around the world through ‘backdoors’ designed for use by law enforcement.” When one reads further down, however, the Journal admitted that the officials “didn’t provide details of where they believe Huawei is able to do so,” and that they “declined to say” whether the US has observed Huawei taking advantage of these supposed backdoors.

    This is consistent with the US government’s assumption that it doesn’t need to show proof of malicious activity by Huawei; it’s a Chinese company, and therefore could be ordered to install backdoors or share data with the Chinese government, despite denials by both Huawei and the Chinese government of those allegations (Wall Street Journal, 1/23/19). In the absence of evidence, the US government has relied on asking foreign governments to shun Huawei’s technology based on speculative “what if” scenarios (Axios, 1/30/20).

    Critics of baseless US government accusations have argued that it wouldn’t make sense for China to jeopardize their own business interests by spying through Huawei’s technology, because the US and other Western countries are China’s best customers, aside from its domestic market, and it would be catastrophic if espionage were ever discovered (ZDNet, 5/20/19). This might be why Huawei has stated they are willing to sign “no spy” agreements to reassure suspicious governments that there are no backdoors in their technology (BBC, 5/19/19).

    But one doesn’t need to take Huawei or the Chinese government’s word for it, as other Western governments have confirmed there is no evidence for the US government’s allegations. The British National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) reported that they haven’t seen any evidence of malicious activity by Huawei, contradicting evidence-free US government allegations (Reuters, 2/20/19).

    Although German spy chief Bruno Kahl claimed that Huawei “can’t be fully trusted,” he didn’t cite any evidence of malicious activity by Huawei, and the head of Germany’s IT watchdog (Federal Office for Information Security), Arne Schönbohm, stated they had “no evidence” of Huawei conducting espionage (The Local, 12/16/18). France’s cybersecurity chief, Guillaume Poupard, the head of the national cybersecurity agency ANSSI, stated that “there is no Huawei smoking gun as of today in Europe” (South China Morning Post, 1/31/20).

    ‘Is TikTok Spying on You?’

    CBS: How TikTok could be used for disinformation and espionage

    Because of TikTok, a Heritage Foundation analyst told CBS (11/15/20), if China “were to try and source a human-intelligence asset, well, they know the exact type of legend or profile that they need to have.”

    Other speculative headlines about Chinese cyberespionage revolved around the popular social media app TikTok:

    • Washington Post (7/13/20): “Is it Time to Delete TikTok? A Guide to the Rumors and the Real Privacy Risks.”
    • Forbes (7/25/20): “Is TikTok Spying on You For China?”
    • Bloomberg (5/13/21): “A Push-Up Contest on TikTok Exposed a Great Cyberespionage Threat”
    • CBS (11/15/20): “How TikTok Could Be Used for Disinformation and Espionage”

    Although these headlines suggest that the Chinese government is using the video sharing platform to spy on users, when one actually reads these reports, it becomes apparent that there is no evidence that TikTok takes more data from users than other social media apps like Facebook, or that it shares that data with the Chinese government.

    CBS (11/15/20) cited numerous claims from experts they contacted about how China could potentially  share data with the Chinese government or “push disinformation” through the “For You” page on the app that recommends videos–though it doesn’t mention a single instance where TikTok actually did such those things. Forbes (7/25/20) admitted that despite “all the talk, there is no solid proof that TikTok sends any data to China, there is no solid proof that any information is pulled from users’ devices over and above the prying data grabs typical of all social media platforms.” Although Bloomberg (5/13/21) stated that claims of cyberespionage are difficult to verify, it acknowledged there’s “no publicly available evidence that TikTok has passed American data to Chinese officials.” The Washington Post (7/13/20) concluded that “TikTok doesn’t appear to grab any more personal information than Facebook,” and there is “scant evidence that TikTok is sharing our data with China.”

    Critics of the insinuations used by US government officials to try to ban TikTok on national security grounds have argued that “TikTok is not fundamentally different from other social media platforms,” as DW editor Fabian Schmidt (8/8/20) put it. It is of “no importance in the end who runs the platforms where people choose to put themselves on stage,” Schmidt argued, since the users themselves are “primarily responsible for protecting their own data on social media.”

    However, people need not take TikTok’s word that it is not spying on behalf of the Chinese government, as groups from Citizen Lab to the CIA have concluded that there’s no evidence that Beijing has intercepted data or used the app to access users’ devices (South China Morning Post, 3/23/21; New York Times, 8/7/20).

    These accusations of Chinese hardware and software conducting espionage on foreigners on behalf of the Chinese government are ironic, since there is more evidence of the US government spying on Huawei, and using Huawei’s technology to spy on others, than there is of Huawei spying for the Chinese government. And Washington has been caught inserting secret backdoors on US hardware and embedding software on mobile apps to spy on and keep track of people’s movements, while the NSA spies on Americans and people abroad operating on a “collect it all” ethos (Der Spiegel, 12/29/13; Wall Street Journal, 8/7/20).

    Motives to sully Chinese tech

    Breakthrough News: Why They’re Telling You to Fear China All of a Sudden

    Breakthrough News (10/28/20): “China hysteria has become a weapon of mass distraction for the US political establishment.”

    Journalist Vijay Prashad (Breakthrough News, 10/28/20) has pointed out that the US information war on China has intensified in recent years, as China’s technology industry has either become a peer competitor to or surpassed the US in certain sectors. Huawei once surpassed Apple as the second-largest smartphone maker in 2018, and TikTok is one of the most popular social media apps in the US.

    Similar Yellow Peril propaganda campaigns were waged by the US against Japan in the 1980s, with familiar tropes of alleged unfair trading practices when Americans were anxious regarding Japan’s rising economy as a peer competitor, noting their dominance in exporting technology like cars, computers and semiconductors. Japan’s economy is widely believed to have been sabotaged by the 1985 Plaza Accord Tokyo was pressured to sign by the US.

    Despite racist insinuations that China isn’t capable of innovating and claims that its success stems primarily from stealing intellectual property from the US, China is now in the lead regarding 5G (and potentially 6G mobile technology) and artificial intelligence, and has had a lead over the US in global patent filings since 2019. China’s status as a competitor to the US and emerging leader in the tech industry has even led US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo to say that the US and Europe should work together to “slow down China’s rate of innovation” (CNBC, 9/28/21).

    But whereas other East Asian countries like South Korea and Japan are politically subordinate to the US, in addition to having much smaller economies, China is politically independent of the US, and has already surpassed the US’s GDP when measured in purchasing power parity terms. Western corporate media thus have less incentives to vilify those countries compared to China, since they will not be independent countries capable of rivaling the US anytime soon.

    It is admittedly possible that the Chinese government is lying about not trying to conduct cyberespionage on foreign delegations at the Olympics, or spying on people through Huawei’s technology and social media platforms like TikTok. But Western media insistence on potential cyberespionage hazards are accusations without evidence. The US’s hybrid war on China includes diplomatically isolating it in world events like the Olympics, and unsubstantiated allegations of nebulous security vulnerabilities can be used to smear and sabotage China’s increasingly competitive tech industry as well.

    The post Western Media Took Gold in Evidence-Free Allegations of Chinese Olympic Spying appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Investigation Shows Police Are Still Secretly Surveilling Minnesota Activists

    Police form a line as demonstrators gather on April 11, 2021, in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota.

    A new investigation reveals that federal and local law enforcement agencies have been surveilling journalists and activists involved in the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd for over a year under a secretive program known as Operation Safety Net (OSN), despite claiming to have shut the operation down last April.

    Officials announced OSN in February 2021, a month before the trial for former Minneapolis police officer and murderer Derek Chauvin began. Law enforcement officials claimed that the goal of the program was to ensure that the public was able to exercise its right to free speech while making sure that things like business buildings weren’t harmed in the process.

    The program has gathered a vast amount of information on activists and journalists, including pictures and documentation of their locations during the protests — moves that are antithetical to the program’s supposed goal of protecting free speech. In April 2021, when Chauvin’s verdict was handed down, OSN stopped posting on social media and officials told the public that the program was stopping after it had received criticism from civil rights advocacy groups and lawmakers like Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota).

    But reporters have found that, at least as of February, officials were still surveilling and gathering data on activists and journalists — including people who are not suspected of committing a crime — under an operation deemed OSN 2.0.

    The program involved nine agencies in Minnesota, 120 officers from out of state and at least 3,000 National Guard soldiers, Tate Ryan-Mosley and Sam Richards detailed in the MIT Technology Review. Federal agencies took part, with at least six FBI agents having aided with the program and the Department of Homeland Security offering its support.

    Customs and Border Protection also helped surveil protesters and the media, lending helicopters to Minneapolis police to monitor the protests at their peak, flying high to avoid detection.

    At the time, police were detaining journalists and uploading information about their location, photographs of their bodies and faces, and press passes into a surveillance tool called Intrepid Reponse. The program provides law enforcement with the geolocations of targets and colleagues, and can act as a sort of database for officials looking to control protesters.

    That information was presumably entered into a watch list of protesters and journalists, which MIT Technology Review obtained. The list, compiled by the Criminal Intelligence Division of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, included photos and identifying information of people arrested by the Minnesota State Patrol.

    Ryan-Mosley and Richards reviewed thousands of documents and conducted dozens of interviews. “Taken together, they reveal how advanced surveillance techniques and technologies employed by the state, sometimes in an extra-legal fashion, have changed the nature of protest in the United States, effectively bringing an end to Americans’ ability to exercise their First Amendment rights anonymously in public spaces,” they wrote.

    Officials claim that the operation isn’t ongoing and that OSN 2.0 doesn’t exist. But the reporters found presentations, emails and intelligence that clearly referred to the operation as OSN 2.0.

    OSN was originally meant to have four phases. The first phase was for planning, the second for protests during jury selection for Chauvin’s trial, and the third for during the closing arguments and verdict. But law enforcement ended up starting phase three a week before closing arguments, and began using the planned “full deployment of law enforcement and the national guard” during this time. Officers used tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray, and more.

    Further, when officials announced that OSN was in phase four in April 2021, which was meant to wind the program down, the program seemed to be still ongoing. The investigation found that the program still appears to be surveilling protests in reaction to police killing 22-year-old Amir Locke after executing a no-knock warrant last month.

    “The events in Minnesota have ushered in a new era of protest policing,” Ryan-Mosley and Richards wrote. “Protests that were intended to call attention to the injustices committed by police effectively served as an opportunity for those police forces to consolidate power, bolster their inventories, solidify relationships with federal forces, and update their technology and training to achieve a far more powerful, interconnected surveillance apparatus.”

    While the findings of this investigation are chilling, it lines up with anecdotal and data-driven evidence that police and the government are averse to allowing left-wing protesters to demonstrate and exercise their First Amendment rights. For instance, research has shown that police are 3.5 times more likely to use force against left-wing protesters than against right-wing protesters. Meanwhile, lawmakers across the country have introduced and passed bills limiting protesters’ rights in reaction to 2020’s uprisings.

    In response to the investigation, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) criticized lawmakers who have been calling for increased funding for law enforcement. “Shout out to everyone working to explode funding for surveillance programs like these across the country under the guise of ‘fund the police’ when in fact police budgets are already at some of their highest levels in US history across the country,” she said on Thursday. “No facts, just vibes.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.