[awakened53]

EU Rules On Data Collection Don’t Apply To Police State

The European Parliament has voted to give Europol wide powers to collect and process data on individuals, including people not suspected of any crime, in a move that significantly widens the power of the European police agency.
MEPs voted on 4 May to widen the mandate of Europol to collect personal data from tech companies, including telecoms and internet suppliers and social media firms, and to collect and analyse data from countries outside the European Union (EU).
The proposals also give Europol the go-ahead to develop algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of making automated decisions and developing predictive policing models.
The Parliament’s draft regulation effectively overturns an order by the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) in January 2020 that required Europol to delete swathes of personal data it had collected and processed unlawfully.
MEPs voted by 480 in favour of a significant expansion of Europol’s role, with 142 against and 20 abstentions, in a move that will extend Europol’s use of big data and artificial intelligence in criminal investigations.
The proposed regulation introduces measures to protect the privacy of individuals, including the appointment of a fundamental rights officer at Europol and independent oversight by the EDPS.
A ‘massive, unchecked expansion’ of powers
But the move has been criticised by civil society groups, and some MEPs, which claim that it amounts to a “massive, unchecked expansion” of Europol’s powers and could represent a first step on the road to creating a European version of GCHQ or the US National Security Agency.


Read More: EU Rules On Data Collection Don’t Apply To Police State

[awakened53]

“Privacy” Search Engine DuckDuckGo Smoked Over Hidden Tracking Agreement With Microsoft

DuckDuckGo, the search engine which claims to offer “real privacy” because it doesn’t track searches or store users’ history, has come under fire after a security researcher discovered that the mobile DuckDuckGo browser app contains a third-party tracker from Microsoft.
Researcher Zach Edwards found that while Google and Facebook’s trackers are blocked, trackers related to bing.com and linkedin.com were also being allowed through.

But you won't find any public articles from DuckDuckGo explaining *why* they are not blocking Microsoft-owned 3rd party data flows on websites *not* owned by Microsoft, like on Facebook's Workplace[.]com domain sending data to Bing & Linkedin in the DDG "private" browser. pic.twitter.com/ATS4J7aBhE
— ℨ??? ??????? (@thezedwards) May 23, 2022

Read more: “Privacy” Search Engine DuckDuckGo Smoked Over Hidden Tracking Agreement With Microsoft

[awakened53]

Remote Learning Apps: Children’s Data Shared At ‘Dizzying Scale’

Millions of children had their online behaviors and personal information tracked by the apps and websites they used for school during the pandemic, according to an international investigation that raises concerns about the impact remote learning had on children’s privacy online.
The educational tools were recommended by school districts and offered interactive math and reading lessons to children as young as prekindergarten. But many of them also collected students’ information and shared it with marketers and data brokers, who could then build data profiles used to target the children with ads that follow them around the Web.
Those findings come from the most comprehensive study to date on the technology that children and parents relied on for nearly two years as basic education shifted from schools to homes.
Researchers with the advocacy group Human Rights Watch analyzed 164 educational apps and websites used in 49 countries, and they shared their findings with The Washington Post and 12 other news organizations around the world. The consortium, EdTech Exposed, was coordinated by the investigative nonprofit the Signals Network and conducted further reporting and technical review.
What the researchers found was alarming: nearly 90 percent of the educational tools were designed to send the information they collected to ad-technology companies, which could use it to estimate students’ interests and predict what they might want to buy.
Researchers found that the tools sent information to nearly 200 ad-tech companies, but that few of the programs disclosed to parents how the companies would use it. Some apps hinted at the monitoring in technical terms in their privacy policies, the researchers said, while many others made no mention at all.
The websites, the researchers said, shared users’ data with online ad giants including Facebook and Google. They also requested access to students’ cameras, contacts or locations, even when it seemed unnecessary to their schoolwork. Some recorded students’ keystrokes, even before they hit “submit.”
The “dizzying scale” of the tracking, the researchers said, showed how the financial incentives of the data economy had exposed even the youngest Internet users to “inescapable” privacy risks — even as the companies benefited from a major revenue stream.
Read More: Remote Learning Apps: Children’s Data Shared At ‘Dizzying Scale’

[awakened53]

UK signs deal to share police biometric database with US border guards

The UK has signed up to a US plan for sharing police-held biometric data about citizens with US border officials.
According to a member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE), the body met “informally” with representatives of the US Department of Homeland Security this week to discuss the plans.
They come under the auspices of the Enhanced Border Security Partnership (EBSP), which is designed to increase the US Department Of Homeland Security’s ability to detect threats through biometric information sharing. Israel signed up to the arrangement in March.
LIBE committee member and Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer said that during the meeting last week, the committee discovered that the UK – and three EU member states, though their identities were not revealed – had already signed up to reintroduce US visa requirements which grant access to police biometric databases.

Read more: UK signs deal to share police biometric database with US border guards

[awakened53]

Surveillance State Watch: British Police Deploy Live Facial and License Plate Recognition

The surveillance state continues to expand with British police conducting live facial and license plate recognition operations in busy public spaces hoping to catch criminals accused of “violent and other serious crime.” However, the net effect of these operations serves to intimidate and condition the public into the acceptance of non-stop surveillance. This intrusion of privacy cannot be accepted under the guise of trying to catch violent criminals, as police and other authorities are notorious for collecting biometric data from the innocent as well.
Biometric Update has more on the story:
British police operating in London and the northwest of England recently used live facial recognition (LFR), operator initiated facial recognition and automatic number plate recognition (ANPR or license plate recognition, LPR, in North America). The operations, a week apart, resulted in three arrests in London via LFR (despite four matches) and algorithm testing and eight arrests in the northwest where the emphasis was on identifying vehicles.
London live facial recognition
On 7 July, London’s Metropolitan Police Service (the Met) set up their live facial recognition unit at Oxford Circus in the borough of Westminster for the fourth time. The spot is busy with pedestrians all day given its location in a principle shopping area and having one of the busiest underground stations.
According to the Met’s reporting, the aim once again was “Targeting violent and other serious crime, including violence, gun and knife crime, child sexual exploitation and helping protect the vulnerable” and “Locating those wanted by the courts and subject to an outstanding warrant for their arrest.”
With a smaller watchlist than the last outing (28 January 2022), 6,699 compared to 9,756, four true alerts were generated from just four alerts, a significant improvement on previous operations. The police made three engagements with the four people detected, leading to three arrests.
Computer Weekly reports that the Met told them that the live facial recognition operators and engagement officers were unable to locate the fourth biometrically matched individual in the crowd.
Read More: Surveillance State Watch: British Police Deploy Live Facial and License Plate Recognition

[awakened53]

NYU School of Law Warns Digital ID “Paving a Digital Road to Hell”

New York University’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice has issued a chilling warning about the potential dangers to human rights posed by the push for digital identity.
In mid-June, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, a “hub for human rights study” at New York University (NYU) School of Law, issued a 100-page report detailing the growing dangers of a reliance on digital identity around the world. The report, titled Paving a Digital Road to Hell?, examines the role of the World Bank and other international networks which have been promoting the use if digital ID in recent years.
 

TODAY, our Digital Welfare State & Human Rights Project launches a new report entitled: Paving a Digital Road to Hell? A Primer on the Role of the World Bank and Global Networks in Promoting Digital ID. pic.twitter.com/nvXcK81hCO
— Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (@humanrightsnyu) June 17, 2022

The report notes that the World Bank has been “energetically promoting biometric and other digital ID systems that are increasingly linked to large-scale human rights violations, especially in the Global South.” The researchers warn that digital identity schemes “promoted in the name of development and inclusion, might be achieving neither”. Despite ostensible good intentions on the part of some promoting these systems, they “may well be paving a digital road to hell.”
“Governments around the world have been investing heavily in digital identification systems, often with biometric components (digital ID). The rapid proliferation of such systems is driven by a new development consensus, packaged and promoted by key global actors like the World Bank, but also by governments, foundations, vendors and consulting firms.“
The report states that many of the digital identity schemes are taking inspiration from the Aadhaar system in India. This specific digital ID model has prioritized digital ID as an “economic identity”, according to the report. “The goal of such systems is primarily to establish ‘uniqueness’ of individuals, commonly with the help of biometric technologies,” the release states. This in turn allows for bringing in impoverished people from the “informal” or “counter-economy” to the formal economy. This also has the effect of “unlocking” their behavioral data that can then be used by governments and other parties.
The report also notes that the Executive Chairman of the influential ID4Africa, a platform where African governments and major companies in the digital ID market meet, noted at the 2022 Annual Meeting in June that digital ID is no longer about identity alone but, “enables and interacts with authentication platforms, payments systems, digital signatures, data sharing, KYC systems, consent management and sectoral delivery platforms.”


Read More: NYU School of Law Warns Digital ID 

[awakened53]

Amazon’s Ring Camera Penetrates 18% Of Homes To Create Massive Surveillance Network

If you walk through your local neighborhood—providing you live in a reasonably large town or city—you’ll be caught on camera. Government CCTV cameras may record your stroll, but it is increasingly likely that you’ll also be captured by one of your neighbors’ security cameras or doorbells. It’s even more likely that the camera will be made by Ring, the doorbell and security camera firm owned by Amazon.
Since Amazon splashed out more than a billion dollars for the company in 2018, Ring’s security products have exploded in popularity. Ring has simultaneously drawn controversy for making deals (and sharing data) with thousands of police departments, helping expand and normalize suburban surveillance, and falling to a string of hacks. While the cameras can provide homeowners with reassurance that their property is secure, critics say the systems also run the risk of reinforcing racism and racial profiling and eroding people’s privacy.
Videos shared from security cameras and internet-connected doorbells have also become common on platforms like Facebook and TikTok, raking in millions of views. “Ring impacts everybody’s privacy,” says Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Most immediately, it impacts the people who walk down the streets every day, where the cameras are pointing out.”
While Ring is far from the only maker of smart doorbells and cameras—Google’s Nest line is another popular option—its connections to law enforcement have drawn the most criticism, as when it recently handed over data without warrants. So, what exactly does Ring collect and know about you?

Read More: Amazon’s Ring Camera Penetrates 18% Of Homes To Create Massive Surveillance Network

[awakened53]

Cult’s World Economic Forum Suggests There Are ‘Rational’ Reasons to Microchip Your Child (‘Rational’ = We want you to do that)

The latest highly controversial technology/policy that the World Economic Forum (WEF) has set out to normalize is the idea of implanting tracking chips into humans.
It wasn’t that long ago that those speculating on a future where this is happening would get dismissed as conspiracy theorists, but now the world elites’ most vocal outlet is predicting that chip implants will eventually become just a commodity.
And the WEF makes a case that implanting chips into children could be viewed by parents as a “solid, rational” move. All of this crops up in a blog post on the organization’s website dedicated to the future of augmented reality (AR), and what is referred to as “an augmented society.”
Like in many of WEF’s other takes on the future of various types of technology, the emphasis is put on inserting the “right,” i.e., its own “vision” in the direction these should be developing, with the inevitable mention of undefined society stakeholders who will hold the key to the ethics issue of it all.
Read more: Cult’s World Economic Forum Suggests There Are ‘Rational’ Reasons to Microchip Your Child (‘Rational’ = We want you to do that)

[awakened53]

Major Web Browsers Drop Mysterious Authentication Company After Ties To US Military Contractor Exposed

This week several major web browsers quickly severed ties with a mysterious software company used to certify the security of websites, three weeks after the Washington Post exposed its connections to a US military contractor, the Post reports.
TrustCor Systems provided “certificates” to browsers to Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge, which vouched for the legitimacy of said websites.
“Certificate Authorities have highly trusted roles in the internet ecosystem and it is unacceptable for a CA to be closely tied, through ownership and operation, to a company engaged in the distribution of malware,” said Mozilla’s Kathleen Wilson in an email to browser security experts. “Trustcor’s responses via their Vice President of CA operations further substantiates the factual basis for Mozilla’s concerns.”

Read more: Major Web Browsers Drop Mysterious Authentication Company After Ties To US Military Contractor Exposed

[awakened53]

Don’t Trust the Government with Your Privacy, Property or Your Freedoms

How do you trust a government that continuously sidesteps the Constitution and undermines our rights? You can’t.
When you consider all the ways “we the people” are being bullied, beaten, bamboozled, targeted, tracked, repressed, robbed, impoverished, imprisoned and killed by the government, one can only conclude that you shouldn’t trust the government with your privacy, your property, your life, or your freedoms.
Consider for yourself.
Don’t trust the government with your privacy, digital or otherwise. In the two decades since 9/11, the military-security industrial complex has operated under a permanent state of emergency that, in turn, has given rise to a digital prison that grows more confining and inescapable by the day. Wall-to wall surveillance, monitored by AI software and fed to a growing network of fusion centers, render the twin concepts of privacy and anonymity almost void. By conspiring with corporations, the Department of Homeland Security “fueled a massive influx of money into surveillance and policing in our cities, under a banner of emergency response and counterterrorism.” For instance, all across the country, police are installing Flock Safety license plate readers as part of a public-private partnership program between police and the surveillance industry. These cameras, which upload data in real time to fusion crime centers, signal a turning point in the transition from a police state to a police-driven surveillance state.
Don’t trust the government with your property. In yet another effort to legitimize warrantless searches, police are employing “hit-and-hold” tactics in which police enter a home, carry out an initial sweep of the property, handcuff the occupants, then wait for official search warrants to be secured and applied retroactively. In the meantime, police have managed to bypass the Fourth Amendment. The rationale, to prevent possible destruction of evidence, is the same one used to deadly effect with no-knock raids. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have allegedly been associated with some criminal scheme.
Don’t trust the government with your finances. The U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are being forced to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity. The national debt is $31.3 trillion and growing, and we’re paying more than $300 billion in interest every year on that public debt, yet there seems to be no end in sight when it comes to the government’s fiscal insanity. According to Forbes, Congress has raised, extended or revised the definition of the debt limit 78 times since 1960 in order to allow the government to essentially fund its existence with a credit card.
Don’t trust the government with your health. For all intents and purposes, “we the people” have become lab rats in the government’s secret experiments, which include MKULTRA and the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. Indeed, you don’t have to dig very deep or go very back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins. Unfortunately, the public has become so easily distracted by the political spectacle out of Washington, DC, that they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the U.S. government, which has meted out untold horrors against humans and animals alike.
Don’t trust the government with your life: At a time when growing numbers of unarmed people have been shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety, even the most benign encounters with police can have fatal consequences. The number of Americans killed by police continues to grow, with the majority of those killed as a result of police encounters having been suspected of a non-violent offense or no crime at all, or during a traffic violation. According a report by Mapping Police Violence, police killed more people in 2022 than any other year within the past decade. In 98% of those killings, police were not charged with a crime.
Don’t trust the government with your freedoms. For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people. Freedom no longer means what it once did. This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.” On paper, we may be technically free, but in reality, we are only as free as a government official may allow.
Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.
Remember the purpose of a good government is to protect the lives and liberties of its people.
Unfortunately, what we have been saddled with is, in almost every regard, the exact opposite of an institution dedicated to protecting the lives and liberties of its people.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” should have learned early on that a government that repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn can’t be trusted.