Surveillance State

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IMF: Credit Scores Should be Based on Browsing History

Andrew Orr · · 1 Comment

As if reality couldn’t be more dystopian, researchers for the International Monetary Fund proposed that credit scores should include data from peoples’ browsing, search, and purchase history.

Citing soft-data points like “the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases” that could be incorporated into evaluating a borrower, the researchers believe that when a lender has a more intimate relationship with the potential client’s history, they might be more willing to cut them some slack.

What an insane, stupid idea. Too poor to afford a Mac? Sorry! Your credit score won’t be rising above 600.

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Worried if You Were Infected by Pegasus? This Tool Can Help

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

This week, a strain of malware known as Pegasus from NSO Group has been making headlines. It’s used by governments to target journalists, activists, and other people deemed dissidents. But there is a tool that could detect it.

MVT will let you take an entire iPhone backup (or a full system dump if you jailbreak your phone) and feed in for any indicators of compromise (IOCs) known to be used by NSO to deliver Pegasus, such as domain names used in NSO’s infrastructure that might be sent by text message or email.

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Court Finds NSA Collects Innocent Americans’ Data Anyway

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) found that the NSA doesn’t follow the law and collections the data of innocent Americans. This is according to a recently declassified document [PDF] from November 2020.

From where we sit, it seems clear that the FISC continues to suffer from a massive case of national security constitutional-itis. That is the affliction (not really, we made it up) where ordinarily careful judges sworn to defend the Constitution effectively ignore the flagrant Fourth Amendment violations that occur when the NSA, FBI, (and to a lesser extent, the CIA, and NCTC) misuse the justification of national security to spy on Americans en mass.

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US Court Rules NSA Mass Surveillance Program Illegal

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Seven years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed the agency’s mass surveillance of Americans, a U.S. appeals court has deemed it illegal.

The ruling will not affect the convictions of Moalin and his fellow defendants; the court ruled the illegal surveillance did not taint the evidence introduced at their trial. Nevertheless, watchdog groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped bring the case to appeal, welcomed the judges’ verdict on the NSA’s spy program.

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Secret Service Purchased ‘Location X’ Product to Track Phones

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A Secret Service document reveals the purchase of “Location X” a product that uses location data harvested from apps. The product is from a company called Babel Street. If that name sounds familiar it’s because two employees left the company to form “Anomaly Six” another location tracking company.

“The purpose of this modification is to add 1 licenses [sic] to CLIN 0003 and incorporate the Master Subscription Agreement and Locate X Addendum as attached,” the contract document reads. Motherboard obtained the document through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

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Electronic Frontier Foundation Unveils ‘Atlas of Surveillance’

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

The EFF unveiled the Atlas of Surveillance today. It’s a database of surveillance tech used by law enforcement across the country. Anyone can use it to see what spying technology their state’s LE uses. You can download datasets, too.

We specifically focused on the most pervasive technologies, including drones, body-worn cameras, face recognition, cell-site simulators, automated license plate readers, predictive policing, camera registries, and gunshot detection. Although we have amassed more than 5,000 datapoints in 3,000 jurisdictions, our research only reveals the tip of the iceberg and underlines the need for journalists and members of the public to continue demanding transparency from criminal justice agencies.

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The FBI is Collecting Your Data Through its ‘FitTest’ App

Andrew Orr · · 2 Comments

The FBI has been promoting its fitness app called FitTest to help people exercise at home. It’s also collecting your data.

…an FBI spokesperson reiterated the app’s privacy statement, adding that “the app does not gather or save any personal information other than what you select for your profile.”

But the app’s privacy statement makes room for some tracking: When FitTest accesses pages from the official FBI website, it says, “fbi.gov’s privacy policy applies.” The fbi.gov privacy policy states that “individuals using this computer system are subject to having all of their activities monitored and recorded.”

I can’t wait for the FBIPhone and FBIMessage apps.

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U.S. Government Wants to Track Coronavirus Spread With Location Data

Andrew Orr · · 6 Comments

The U.S. government is in talks with Facebook, Google, and others to use location data to track the spread of the coronavirus.

Public-health experts are interested in the possibility that private-sector companies could compile the data in anonymous, aggregated form, which they could then use to map the spread of the infection, according to three people familiar with the effort, who requested anonymity because the project is in its early stages.

On the surface, it’s for good intentions (They always seem good on the surface). But we know that in certain situations, data can be de-anonymized. Some questions: How will they use this data? How effective would this be? Will the government keep the database afterward? My initial thought is that I have no problem with medical experts and scientists doing this. But I have no faith in this current administration, or faith in companies like Facebook and Google. What if they created an app to collect this data? That way it’s optional. And please password–protect the server.

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Utah is Now a Surveillance State Thanks to This Company

Andrew Orr · · 1 Comment

A surveillance company called Banjo has partnered with Utah state authorities to enable a dystopian panopticon.

The lofty goal of Banjo’s system is to alert law enforcement of crimes as they happen. It claims it does this while somehow stripping all personal data from the system, allowing it to help cops without putting anyone’s privacy at risk. As with other algorithmic crime systems, there is little public oversight or information about how, exactly, the system determines what is worth alerting cops to.