#warrantless access

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google’s new phones can’t stop phoning home

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

One of the most brazen lies of Big Tech is that people like commercial surveillance, a fact you can verify for yourself by simply observing how many people end up using products that spy on them. If they didn't like spying, they wouldn't opt into being spied on.

This lie has spread to the law enforcement and national security agencies, who treasure Big Tech's surveillance as an off-the-books trove of warrantless data that no court would ever permit them to gather on their own. Back in 2017, I found myself at SXSW, debating an FBI agent who was defending the Bureau's gigantic facial recognition database, which, he claimed, contained the faces of virtually every American:

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/mar/11/sxsw-facial-recognition-biometrics-surveillance-panel

The agent insisted that the FBI had acquired all those faces through legitimate means, by accessing public sources of people's faces. In other words, we'd all opted in to FBI facial recognition surveillance. "Sure," I said, "to opt out, just don't have a face."

This pathology is endemic to neoliberal thinking, which insists that all our political matters can be reduced to economic ones, specifically, the kind of economic questions that can be mathematically modeled and empirically tested. It would be great if all our thorniest problems could be solved like mathematical equations.

Unfortunately, there are key elements of these systems that can't be reliably quantified and turned into mathematical operators, especially power. The fact that someone did something tells you nothing about whether they chose to do so – to understand whether someone was coerced or made a free choice, you have to consider the power relationships involved.

Conservatives hate this idea. They want to live in a neat world of "revealed preferences," where the fact that you're working in a job where you're regularly exposed to carcinogens, or that you've stayed with a spouse who beats the shit out of you, or that you're homeless, or that you're addicted to Oxy, is a matter of choice. Monopolies exist because we all love the monopolist's product best, not because they've got monopoly power. Jobs that pay starvation wages exist because people want to work full time for so little money that they need food-stamps just to survive. Intervening in any of these situations is "woke paternalism," where the government thinks it knows better than you and intervenes to take away your right to consume unsafe products, get maimed at work, or have your jaw broken by your husband.

Which is why neoliberals insist that politics should be reduced to economics, and that economics should be carried out as if power didn't exist:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/05/farrago/#jeffty-is-five

Nowhere is this stupid trick more visible than in the surveillance fight. For example, Google claims that it tracks your location because you asked it to, by using Google products that make use of your location without clicking an opt out button.

In reality, Google has the power to simply ignore your preferences about location tracking. In 2021, the Arizona Attorney General's privacy case against Google yielded a bunch of internal memos, including memos from Google's senior product manager for location services Jen Chai complaining that she had turned off location tracking in three places and was still being tracked:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#goog

Multiple googlers complained about this: they'd gone through dozens of preference screens, hunting for "don't track my location" checkboxes, and still they found that they were being tracked. These were people who worked under Chai on the location services team. If the head of that team, and her subordinates, couldn't figure out how to opt out of location tracking, what chance did you have?

Despite all this, I've found myself continuing to use stock Google Pixel phones running stock Google Android. There were three reasons for this:

First and most importantly: security. While I worry about Google tracking me, I am as worried (or more) about foreign governments, random hackers, and dedicated attackers gaining access to my phone. Google's appetite for my personal data knows no bounds, but at least the company is serious about patching defects in the Pixel line.

Second: coercion. There are a lot of apps that I need to run – to pay for parking, say, or to access my credit union or control my rooftop solar – that either won't run on jailbroken Android phones or require constant tweaking to keep running.

Finally: time. I already have the equivalent of three full time jobs and struggle every day to complete my essential tasks, including managing complex health issues and being there for my family. The time I take out of my schedule to actively manage a de-Googled Android would come at the expense of either my professional or personal life.

And despite Google's enshittificatory impulses, the Pixels are reliably high-quality, robust phones that get the hell out of the way and let me do my job. The Pixels are Google's flagship electronic products, and the company acts like it.

Until now.

A new report from Cybernews reveals just how much data the next generation Pixel 9 phones collect and transmit to Google, without any user intervention, and in defiance of the owner's express preferences to the contrary:

https://cybernews.com/security/google-pixel-9-phone-beams-data-and-awaits-commands/

The Pixel 9 phones home every 15 minutes, even when it's not in use, sharing "location, email address, phone number, network status, and other telemetry." Additionally, every 40 minutes, the new Pixels transmit "firmware version, whether connected to WiFi or using mobile data, the SIM card Carrier, and the user’s email address." Even further, even if you've never opened Google Photos, the phone contacts Google Photos’ Face Grouping API at regular intervals. Another process periodically contacts Google's Voice Search servers, even if you never use Voice Search, transmitting "the number of times the device was restarted, the time elapsed since powering on, and a list of apps installed on the device, including the sideloaded ones."

All of this is without any consent. Or rather, without any consent beyond the "revealed preference" of just buying a phone from Google ("to opt out, don't have a face").

What's more, the Cybernews report probably undercounts the amount of passive surveillance the Pixel 9 undertakes. To monitor their testbench phone, Cybernews had to root it and install Magisk, a monitoring tool. In order to do that, they had to disable the AI features that Google touts as the centerpiece of Pixel 9. AI is, of course, notoriously data-hungry and privacy invasive, and all the above represents the data collection the Pixel 9 undertakes without any of its AI nonsense.

It just gets worse. The Pixel 9 also routinely connects to a "CloudDPC" server run by Google. Normally, this is a server that an enterprise customer would connect its employees' devices to, allowing the company to push updates to employees' phones without any action on their part. But Google has designed the Pixel 9 so that privately owned phones do the same thing with Google, allowing for zero-click, no-notification software changes on devices that you own.

This is the kind of measure that works well, but fails badly. It assumes that the risk of Pixel owners failing to download a patch outweighs the risk of a Google insider pushing out a malicious update. Why would Google do that? Well, perhaps a rogue employee wants to spy on his ex-girlfriend:

https://www.wired.com/2010/09/google-spy/

Or maybe a Google executive wins an internal power struggle and decrees that Google's products should be made shittier so you need to take more steps to solve your problems, which generates more chances to serve ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Or maybe Google capitulates to an authoritarian government who orders them to install a malicious update to facilitate a campaign of oppressive spying and control:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

Indeed, merely by installing a feature that can be abused this way, Google encourages bad actors to abuse it. It's a lot harder for a government or an asshole executive to demand a malicious downgrade of a Google product if users have to accept that downgrade before it takes effect. By removing that choice, Google has greased the skids for malicious downgrades, from both internal and external sources.

Google will insist that these anti-features – both the spying and the permissionless updating – are essential, that it's literally impossible to imagine building a phone that doesn't do these things. This is one of Big Tech's stupidest gambits. It's the same ruse that Zuck deploys when he says that it's impossible to chat with a friend or plan a potluck dinner without letting Facebook spy on you. It's Tim Cook's insistence that there's no way to have a safe, easy to use, secure computing environment without giving Apple a veto over what software you can run and who can fix your device – and that this veto must come with a 30% rake from every dollar you spend on your phone.

The thing is, we know it's possible to separate these things, because they used to be separate. Facebook used to sell itself as the privacy-forward alternative to Myspace, where they would never spy on you (not coincidentally, this is also the best period in Facebook's history, from a user perspective):

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

And we know it's possible to make a Pixel that doesn't do all this nonsense because Google makes other Pixel phones that don't do all this nonsense, like the Pixel 8 that's in my pocket as I type these words.

This doesn't stop Big Tech from gaslighting* us and insisting that demanding a Pixel that doesn't phone home four times an hour is like demanding water that isn't wet.

*pronounced "jass-lighting"

Even before I read this report, I was thinking about what I would do when I broke my current phone (I'm a klutz and I travel a lot, so my gadgets break pretty frequently). Google's latest OS updates have already crammed a bunch of AI bullshit into my Pixel 8 (and Google puts the "invoke AI bullshit" button in the spot where the "do something useful" button used to be, meaning I accidentally pull up the AI bullshit screen several times/day).

Assuming no catastrophic phone disasters, I've got a little while before my next phone, but I reckon when it's time to upgrade, I'll be switching to a phone from the @calyxinstitute@mastodon.social. Calyx is an incredible, privacy-focused nonprofit whose founder, Nicholas Merrill, was the first person to successfully resist one of the Patriot Act's "sneek-and-peek" warrants, spending 11 years defending his users' privacy from secret – and, ultimately, unconstitutional – surveillance:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/depth-judge-illstons-remarkable-order-striking-down-nsl-statute

Merrill and Calyx have tapped into various obscure corners of US wireless spectrum licenses that require major carriers to give ultra-cheap access to nonprofits, allowing them to offer unlimited, surveillance-free, Net Neutrality respecting wireless data packages:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/22/i-have-found-a-secret-tunnel-that-runs-underneath-the-phone-companies-and-emerges-in-paradise/

I've been a very happy Calyx user in years gone by, but ultimately, I slipped into the default of using stock Pixel handsets with Google's Fi service.

But even as I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with the direction of Google's Android and Pixel programs, I've grown increasingly impressed with Calyx's offerings. The company has graduated from selling mobile hotspots with unlimited data SIMs to selling jailbroken, de-Googled Pixel phones that have all the hardware reliability of a Pixel, coupled with an alternative app suite and your choice of a Calyx SIM and/or a Calyx hotspot:

https://calyxinstitute.org/

Every time I see what Calyx is up to, I think, dammit, it's really time to de-Google my phone. With the Pixel 9 descending to new depths of enshittification, that decision just got a lot easier. When my current phone croaks, I'll be talking to Calyx.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/08/water-thats-not-wet/#pixelated

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[sapphicscholar]

Hey so remember how I posted yesterday about how it’s not a great idea to be condescending to people assuming the worst about the surveillance state and the role of the internet and tech companies in upholding and enforcing it? Well anyway, here’s an important thread on the House’s Section 702 “reform” bill, scheduled for a floor vote ASAP (as early as Dec. 12), which would be one of the largest expansions of surveillance within the US (accessible text below the images along with links to the linked articles)

Tweet thread from Elizabeth Goitein:

RED ALERT: Buried in the House intelligence committee’s Section 702 “reform” bill, which is schedule for a floor vote as soon as tomorrow, is the biggest expansion of surveillance inside the United States since the Patriot Act. 1/11

Through a seemingly innocuous change to the definition of “electronic service communications provider,” the bill vastly expands the universe of U.S. businesses that can be conscripted to aid the government in conducting surveillance. 2/11

Under current law, the government can compel companies that have direct access to communications, such as phone, email, and text messaging service providers, to assist in Section 702 surveillance by turning over the communications of Section 702 targets. 3/11

Under Section 504 of the House intelligence committee’s bill, any entity that has access to *equipment* on which communications may be transmitted or stored, such as an ordinary router, is fair game. What does that mean in practice? It’s simple… 4/11

Hotels, libraries, coffee shops, and other places that offer wifi to their customers could be forced to serve as surrogate spies. They could be required to configure their systems to ensure that they can provide the government access to entire streams of communications. 5/11

Even a repair person who comes to fix the wifi in your home would meet the revised definition: that person is an “employee” of a “service provider” who has “access” to “equipment” (your router) on which communications are transmitted. 6/11

The bill’s sponsors deny that Section 504 is intended to sweep so broadly. What *is* the provision intended to do, and how is the government planning to use it? Sorry, that’s classified. 7/11

At the end of the day, though, the government’s claimed intent matters little. What matters is what the provision, on its face, actually allows—because as we all know by now, the government will interpret and apply the law as broadly as it can get away with. 8/11

This isn’t a minor or theoretical concern. One of the FISA Court amici posted a blog to warn Americans about this provision. I can’t overstate how unusual it is for FISA Court amici to take to the airwaves in this manner. We’d be foolish to ignore it. https://www.zwillgen.com/law-enforcement/fisa-reform-bill-702-surveillance/ 9/11

If you don't want to have to worry that the NSA is tapping into communications at the hotel where you're staying, tell your House representative to vote NO on the House intelligence bill this week. More on the many flaws with that bill here: https://t.co/i9PEXmg5r6 10/11

Instead, they should vote for the Protect Liberty & End Warrantless Surveillance Act, a bill passed by the House Judiciary Committee on a 35-2 vote that would reauthorize Sec. 702 with strong reforms to protect Americans’ privacy and civil liberties. https://t.co/CN7ZepGSUu 11/11

[mariacallous]

Last month, US president Joe Biden signed a surveillance bill enhancing the National Security Agency’s power to compel US businesses to wiretap communications going in and out of the country. The changes to the law have left legal experts largely in the dark as to the true limits of this new authority, chiefly when it comes to the types of companies that could be affected. The American Civil Liberties Union and organizations like it say the bill has rendered the statutory language governing the limits of a powerful wiretap tool overly vague, potentially subjecting large swaths of corporate America to warrantless and secretive surveillance practices.

In April, Congress rushed to extend the US intelligence system’s “crown jewel,” Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The spy program allows the NSA to wiretap calls and messages between Americans and foreigners abroad—so long as the foreigner is the individual being “targeted” and the intercept serves a significant “foreign intelligence” purpose. Since 2008, the program has been limited to a subset of businesses that the law calls “electronic communications service providers,” or ECSPs—corporations such as Microsoft and Google, which provide email services, and phone companies like Sprint and AT&T.

In recent years, the government has worked quietly to redefine what it means to be an ECSP in an attempt to extend the NSA’s reach, first unilaterally and now with Congress’ backing. The issue remains that the bill Biden signed last month contains murky language that attempts to redefine the scope of a critical surveillance program. In response, a coalition of digital rights organizations, including the Brennan Center for Justice to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is pressing the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, and the nation’s top spy, Avril Haines, to declassify details about a relevant court case that could, they say, shed much-needed light on the situation.

In a letter to the top officials, more than 20 such organizations say they believe the new definition of an ECSP adopted by Congress might “permit the NSA to compel almost any US business to assist” the agency, noting that all companies today provide some sort of “service” and have access to equipment on which “communications” are stored.

“Deliberately writing overbroad surveillance authorities and trusting that future administrations will decide not to exploit them is a recipe for abuse,” the letter says. “And it is entirely unnecessary, as the administration can—and should—declassify the fact that the provision is intended to reach data centers.”

The Justice Department confirmed receipt of the letter on Tuesday but referred WIRED to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which has primary purview over declassification decisions. The ODNI has not responded to a request for comment.

It is widely believed—and has been reported—that data centers are the intended target of this textual change. Matt Olsen, the assistant US attorney general for national security, appeared on an April 17 episode of the Lawfare podcast to say that, while unable to confirm or deny any specifics, data centers today store a significant amount of communications data and are an “example” of why the government viewed the change as necessary.

A DOJ spokesperson pointed WIRED to an April 18 letter by Garland that claims the new ECSP definition is “narrowly tailored.” The letter includes written reflections on the provision by the assistant attorney general, Carlos Uriarte, who writes that the “fix” is meant to address a “critical intelligence gap” resulting from changes in technology over the past 15 years. According to Uriarte, the DOJ has committed to applying the new definition internally “to cover the type of service provider at issue” before the court.

Ostensibly this means the government is promising to limit future surveillance directives to data centers (in addition to the companies traditionally defined as ECSPs).

The surveillance court that oversees FISA and the appeals court that reviews its decisions sided two years ago with an unidentified company that fought back after being served an NSA order. Both courts ruled that it did not, in fact, appear to meet the criteria for being considered an ECSP, as only part of its function was storing communications data. Finding the government’s interpretation of the statute overly broad, the court reminded the government that only Congress has the “competence and constitutional authority” to rewrite the law.

Digital rights groups argue that declassifying additional information about this FISA case may help the public understand which types of businesses are actually subject to NSA directives. Practically speaking, they say, that information is no longer a secret anyway. “Declassifying this information would cause little if any national security harm,” the letter says. “The New York Times has already revealed that the relevant FISC case addressed data centers for cloud computing.”

In the aftermath of the FISA court’s ruling, the NSA and other spy agencies began lobbying the House and Senate intelligence committees to aid the administration in redefining what it means to be an ECSP. Members of both committees have subsequently portrayed the court’s ruling as a “directive” that Congress needs to expand the NSA’s reach. In a floor speech last month, Mark Warner, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, “So what happened was, the FISA Court said to Congress: You guys need to close this loophole; you need to close this and change this definition.”

But in fact what the court asserted was that the government had exceeded its authority and that it was Congress’ job, not the Justice Department’s, to revise the law. “Any unintended gap in coverage revealed by our interpretation is, of course, open to reconsideration by the branches of government whose competence and constitutional authority extend to statutory revision,” the court said.

This would culminate in new language being proposed that quickly alarmed legal experts, including top civil liberties attorneys who’ve appeared before the secret court in the past. The surveillance fears quickly spread to Silicon Valley. The Information Technology Industry Council, one of the tech industry's top lobbying arms, warned that companies like Facebook and IBM were interpreting the bill as having “vastly expanded the US government’s warrantless surveillance capabilities.”

This expansion, the firm added, would also hinder the “competitiveness of US technology companies” and arguably imperil the “continued global free flow of data between the US and its allies.” Customers internationally, it argued, would likely begin taking their business elsewhere should the US government turn data centers into surveillance watering holes.

Concerns about the new ECSP definition have been circulating since December. While largely dismissing them, members of the House and Senate intelligence committees made a few adjustments in February, exempting a handful of business types. This came in response to popular concerns that Starbucks employees and hotel IT staff might be secretly conscripted by the NSA. FISA experts such as Marc Zwillinger—a private attorney who has appeared twice before the FISA Court of Review—noted in response to those adjustments that Congress’ rush to exempt a handful of businesses only served to demonstrate that the text was inherently too broad.

Intelligence committee members kept the pressure on lawmakers to reauthorize the Section 702 program with the sought-after language, going as far as to suggest that another 9/11-style attack might occur if they failed. The power of the committees was on full display, as while neither actually have primary jurisdiction over FISA, a majority of the Section 702 bill that passed was authored by intelligence committee staff.

Even while supporting the new framework and dismissing the intensity of civil society’s concerns, Warner did eventually step forward to acknowledge the new ECSF definition needed additional tweaking. First, on the Senate floor in April, he said that Garland shared his “view” that the language “could have been drafted better.” Later, in response to questions from reporters, he added: “I’m absolutely committed to getting that fixed.”

That appears unlikely to happen soon. According to The Record, Warner indicated that the best time to update the language again would be in the “next intelligence bill,” presumably referring to legislation this fall broadly reauthorizing the intelligence community’s work.

In the meantime, however, more than half of Congress is running for election, and the next US president will have greater surveillance powers than any other before. No one can say for sure who that president will be or how they’ll make use of that authority.

[v3ng3anc3-qu33n]

PSA about the U.S.A.!! TW!!

I live in America, and right now, we have a convicted felon, rapist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, etc. man as president, Trump. The 2025 plan is unbelievable and strips us of basic human rights and plans to do horrid things. Please send support to those you know and love! Create your own activism groups! Stand up for what you believe in, not what a rich white man sitting high and mighty does! You have your own fucking brain use it! Do your own research not believe what others say! If you support his actions get the fuck off my page no hate is tolerated here and he hates many and his followers are not welcome here I will not stop commenters harassing you I will not help you. I will not take this lying down. I have already posted on my other socials about this, and I'm posting it here now. He does not care for us. To him, we are drones to work for him until we die. According to the Vanity Fair, Trump has 34 felony counts, 1 conviction, 2 cases pending, 2 impeachment, 6 bankruptcies, and he now has 4 more years. The president is meant to serve us, not have us serve him. You are supporting a man who threw a pissbaby tantrum when he lost in 2020 and sent his followers to start a riot in the capitol. Then according to the American Civil Liberties Union, Project 2025 plans many horrid things such as severely limiting abortion access, mass deportations, abusing warrantless surveillance, using violence against protester and even journalists, limiting voting access, censoring classroom discussions of real world issues, taking back trans rights, etc. This should not be a debate it should be common sense. Believe me, I understand the world is not black and white it is shades of gray, but even in a world of gray, Trump is a scourge on the world, and this does not only affect America. He wishes to be a tyrant. The fact that I am in my teens and seem to be better educated than most adults is a problem if you have a problem with ANYTHING I have said I don't give a fuck and honestly you deserve to suffer and that's coming from a girl who never wished harm on others. A girl who now realises that some people deserve to suffer and a girl who has been ruined by this world. A girl who fears for her best friends. For her anorexic friend. For her depressed friend. For her autistic friend. For her transgender friend. For her self harmong friend. For her black friend. For her Hispanic friend. For her Latino friend. For her suicidal friend. For her family already struggling. For herself. For everyone. For all their rights. For all of them. Please donate to all possible sources! I am on birth control due to period cramps that would leave me randomly having to sit on the floor and being unable to move leaving me laying in bed or on the floor for multiple days as i have a very long period and heavy flow and also am given severe migraines I unfortunately cannot stock up in advance as it is a prescription and especially due to my history of suicidal thoughts we can't gather my meds in advance however please use this to help others you know and support them in these hard times!! There are many people who need extra money in these hard times to ensure their safety, please provide aide!

[darkmaga-returns]

Whoa! If you give a policeman your phone for any reason, and you have a biometric ID turned on (facial recognition or fingerprint), you will expose all the data on your phone: pictures, passwords, financial information, chat streams, email, mapping data, etc. Don’t let that happen! Immediately turn off all biometric ID features on your phone and use a password instead. If your phone has an anti-theft feature to block repeating guessing of your password, turn it on! The same logic applies to tablets and laptops.

⁃ Patrick Wood, TN Editor.

Without a warrant and specific proof of incriminating evidence, police should never be allowed past your phone’s lock screen.

Growing police power has gravely distorted interactions between cops and citizens. Officers arrive with not just a gun and body armor but with wide-ranging legal immunities and both the privilege and training to lie to you during questioning.

Now they want to force you to unlock your phone. [Don’t ever do this! – ed.]

The amount of personal data we keep on our smartphones is almost immeasurable, a reality the Supreme Court recognized in 2014 when it ruled that police must comply with the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement to search your device. But your phone has a simpler safeguard: a password that, under the Fifth Amendment, you shouldn’t have to reveal unless the government overcomes your right against self-incrimination.

It’s a right with deep roots, dating back to fourth-century Christian thinker St. John Chrysostom, who argued that no one should be required to confess their sins in public because it would discourage people from confessing at all.

By the 17th century, English common law had begun to develop these ideas into a right not to be interrogated under oath. The right achieved major recognition after the infamous Star Chamber sentenced prominent natural rights thinker John Lilburne to approximately 500 lashes for refusing to testify against himself. Lilburne remained a significant English philosopher and politician for decades while the Star Chamber was abolished just four years later.

Lilburne’s case was so influential that colonial America enshrined the privilege against self-incrimination in nine state constitutions before it even became part of the Bill of Rights. Today, police act as if smartphones and digital technology invalidate those protections. They don’t.

It doesn’t matter if you haven’t broken the law or you think you have nothing to hide. What matters is whether police believe—rightly or wrongly—that you have done something illegal or that you have something to hide. Police are incentivized not to protect rights but to arrest people allegedly (or actually) breaking laws.

Without a warrant and specific proof of incriminating evidence, police should never be allowed past your phone’s lock screen.

Unfortunately, your Fourth Amendment right against warrantless searches and seizures is insufficient to stop police from scouring the trove of personal data on your phone for information unrelated to their investigation. Police can seize your device before they get a warrant and if they have the passcode nothing stops them from performing an off-the-record search—even if they might be later prevented from introducing that information in court.

Once police get warrants to perform specific searches—which courts regularly grant—they often retain smartphones far longer than needed to execute the narrow bounds of the warrant. They may try to introduce the evidence they “coincidentally” discovered, even if it falls outside the warrant’s scope.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Clay Bennett, The Chattanooga Times

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 17, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 18, 2024

Texas attorney general Ken Paxton responded this evening to the federal government’s demand that state troops give U.S. Border Patrol agents access to Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, the site where three migrants died last week as they tried to cross the Rio Grande. 

Aarón Torres and Joseph Morton of The Dallas Morning News reported that Paxton’s letter acknowledged that by law the federal government’s Border Patrol officers are allowed  “warrantless access to land within 25 miles of the border, but only ‘for the purpose of patrolling the border to prevent the illegal entry of aliens into the United States.’” Paxton claimed that this law doesn’t apply because the current administration’s policies—the law, after all, is written by Congress—are not intended to stop undocumented immigration. “There is not even a pretense that you are trying to prevent the illegal entry of aliens,” he wrote. 

Torres and Morton note that, in fact, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported more than 142,000 migrants in 2023 and that Paxton presented no evidence for his claims.

Two weeks ago, House Homeland Security Committee chair Mark Green (R-TN) demanded that Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas testify as part of the House’s impeachment proceedings against him. As Rebecca Beitsch points out in The Hill, testimony from a cabinet secretary is usually arranged several weeks or even months in advance, and Mayorkas said he could not make the date because he will be discussing immigration with a delegation from Mexico at that time but he asked to arrange another time. Mayorkas has testified before the House panel twice in the past year and before Congress 27 times since he took office.

In a letter obtained by Punchbowl News, Green wrote: “Since you continue to decline to come in person, I invite you to submit written testimony for the January 18th hearing record, so that our Committee Members may hear from you directly.” 

This evening, an inadvertently circulated internal Republican memo obtained by Rebecca Beitsch of The Hill shows that Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee likely have switched their demand for live testimony to a demand for written answers because they have already committed to impeachment on a tight timeline and cannot wait for the live hearing to be rescheduled. 

Green had previously suggested on the Fox News Channel that an impeachment document had already been written even though there had been no impeachment hearings. The memo appears to corroborate that suggestion, saying: “We have scheduled the markup for impeachment articles at 10:00 AM ET on Wednesday, January 31, 2024.” 

Republicans argue that Mayorkas lied to Congress because he said the government has operational control over the border. They dispute this characterization because the Secure Fence Act defines operational control as one in which not a single person or object enters the country improperly. This perfect standard has never been met, and yet they apparently decided to impeach over it before even holding hearings.  

Republicans are clearly hoping to use the issue of immigration against President Joe Biden and the Democrats in the upcoming election. After insisting in November that immigration was in such a crisis that there could be no more aid to Ukraine, Israel, or Taiwan without it, Republicans in December rejected the idea of new legislation and said Biden must handle the issue himself. Then, in early January, 64 Republicans traveled to the border to demonstrate the importance of the issue.

But now that the Senate appears to have hammered out a bipartisan immigration reform measure, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said this morning: “It’s a complex issue. I don’t think now is the time for comprehensive immigration reform, because we know how complicated that is.” After a meeting at the White House today with President Biden, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, and committee heads, Johnson still refused to put the proposed deal up for a vote in the House.

In today’s meeting, Biden emphasized the danger of leaving Ukraine’s defense unfunded. “He was clear,” the White House said, “Congress’s continued failure to act endangers the United States’ national security, the NATO Alliance, and the rest of the free world.” 

Johnson is caught between U.S. national security and Trump. On the Fox News Channel tonight, Laura Ingraham told Johnson she had just gotten off a phone call with Trump and Trump had told her that he was against the immigration deal and had urged Johnson to oppose it. “He…was extremely adamant about it,” she said. Johnson agreed and said that he and Trump had been “talking about this pretty frequently.”   

Trump needs the issue of immigration to whip up his base for the 2024 election.

Today the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, chaired by James Comer (R-KY) held a hearing titled “The Biden Administration’s Regulatory and Policymaking Efforts to Undermine U.S. Immigration Law.” The administration has asked for additional funding for border patrol officers, immigration courts, and so on, but Comer said in his opening statement that the problem is not a lack of resources but rather an unwillingness to enforce the law. 

Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) replied: “You know we have failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform up here for decades.” He noted that one of his colleagues had provided statistics showing that President Barack Obama deported more people in each term than Trump did, so “if the border wasn’t a problem until President Biden was elected, then how are we deporting all of these people in administrations before Trump was elected? It’s because this situation has been going on for decades. So stop lying to the American people that none of this happened until President Biden was elected.”

Comer has also used the House Oversight Committee to spread the idea that President Biden is corrupt, but while he has made many allegations on right-wing media channels, the committee has not, in fact, turned up any evidence linking the president to illegal activity. Instead, the investigations there appear to be a continuation of the technique Republicans have used since  the 1990s to insinuate that a Democrat has engaged in wrongdoing simply by holding investigations. 

Trump employed this technique effectively in 2016 in his constant refrain that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, had illegally deleted emails, and less effectively in 2019 when he tried to strong-arm Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into Hunter Biden. It was central to the plan of convincing state legislatures that they could recast their 2020 electoral votes: lawyer Jeffrey Clark wanted to tell them (falsely) that there were voting irregularities that the Department of Justice was investigating.

But this technique has backfired so far in this Congress. After a year of hearing that Biden is corrupt, MAGA Republicans have expected to see him impeached. But Democrats have come to hearings exceedingly well prepared and have pushed back on MAGA talking points, turning the tables on the Republicans so thoroughly that Comer recently was forced to back down, saying, “My job was never to impeach.” 

Creating a false reality to trick voters is central to undermining democracy, and it is no secret that autocratic states like Russia, Iran, and China are spreading disinformation in the U.S. But I have always wondered what would happen when the American people finally pushed back against suggestions and innuendo and instead demanded actual evidence and policies designed to address problems, as they did before American politics turned into entertainment.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[alphaman99]

Tenth Amendment Center

A bill prefiled in the Florida Senate would ban warrantless location tracking and the use of stingray devices to sweep up electronic communications in most situations. The proposed law would not only protect privacy in Florida, but it would also hinder one aspect of the federal surveillance state.

Sen. Jeff Brandes (R-St. Petersburg) introduced Senate Bill 916 (S916) on November 15th. The legislation would help block the use of cell-site simulators, known as “stingrays.” These devices essentially spoof cell phone towers, tricking any device within range into connecting to the stingray instead of the tower, allowing law enforcement to sweep up communications content, as well as locate and track the person in possession of a specific phone or other electronic device.

S916 would require police to get a search warrant based on probable cause before acquiring real-time or historical GPS location data, and before using any type of mobile tracking device in most situations. Police already must get a warrant before intercepting cell phone communication content. Adding location tracking to the warrant requirement would effectively end warrantless stingray use in Florida. The legislation would also require police to get a warrant before accessing stored location data from a service provider. Under current law, police can access stored data with a court order.

[nando161mando]

"LAPD Is Using Israeli Surveillance Software That Can Track Your Phone and Social Media [...] outsources much of their surveillance work to AI and machine learning, gives police warrantless [=constitution circumventing] access to your personal information [...through corporation...] by former IDF special operatives Omri Timianker, Shay Attias, and former Mossad official Udi Levy. The company is part of the controversial billion-dollar surveillance industry in Israel, where the technology is often tested on Palestinians before being implemented elsewhere in the world."

[theknightlywolfe]

I would like to bring up something I don't think people are talking about much here: Biometrics.

Fingerprint for getting into your phone, eyescan to unlock safety deposit boxes, gain access to secure sites, etc.

If studios can scan you, how detailed can that scan get? 3D printers are getting faster and faster and working in a wider variety of materials than they could just five years ago.

Do you really want to work as an extra in the hopes of becoming a star just to find out the studio sold their high res 3D digital scan of you to some company that then resold it to the dark web? Or the cops? Right now police in some states can force you to unlock your phone without a warrant but some require a warrant. The protections against warrantless search of your digital devices might become moot if the police can simply buy your biometrics from somebody else.

Actors on Strike

I don't think a lot of people have given much consideration to the issues that people have with their images being scanned and then used later in AI without further permission or compensation.

Consider that anyone anywhere in any film at any time could be reused without notice in the most disturbing porn imaginable. Do you honestly think these images won't be licensed and sublicensed and used to train AI engines? And because you signed a contract, that would be legal?

Think about how you'd feel if you were an extra on some film set, you made $100, and the next thing you know a studio sells a set of image contracts the way people sell kitbashing image packs.

Because that's what's coming.

If companies can license creator's works and figure out ways not to pay them, and the works can end up completely bastardized in ways the original creator would never predict or want, imagine what these studios are going to do to your face and body.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

We should ban TikTok('s surveillance)

With the RESTRICT Act, Congress is proposing to continue Trump’s war on Tiktok, enacting a US ban on the Chinese-owned service. How will they do this? Congress isn’t clear. In practice, banning stuff on the internet is hard, especially if you don’t have a national firewall:

https://doctorow.medium.com/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography-33aa668dc602

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/30/tik-tok-tow/#good-politics-for-electoral-victories

My guess is that they’re thinking of ordering the mobile duopoly of Google and Apple to nuke the Tiktok app from their app stores. That’s how they do it in China, after all: when China wanted to ban VPNs and other privacy tools, they just ordered Apple to remove them from the App Store, and Apple rolled over:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/11/foreseeable-consequences/#airdropped

That’s the completely foreseeable consequence of arrogating the power to decide which software every mobile user on earth is entitled to use — as Google and Apple have done. Once you put that gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, you damn betcha that some strong-man backed by a powerful state is going to come along and shoot it by Act III.

The same goes for commercial surveillance: once you collect massive, nonconsensual dossiers on every technology user alive, you don’t get to act surprised when cops and spies show up and order your company to serve as deputies for a massive, off-the-books warrantless surveillance project.

Hell, a cynic might even say that commercial surveillance companies are betting on this. The surveillance public-private partnership is a vicious cycle: corporations let cops and spies plunder our data; then the cops and spies lobby against privacy laws that would prevent these corporations from spying on us:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/25/nationalize-moderna/#hun-sen

Which makes the RESTRICT Act an especially foolish project. If the Chinese state wants to procure data on Americans, it need not convince us to install Tiktok. It can simply plunk down a credit card with any of the many unregulated data-brokers who feed the American tech giants the dossiers that the NSA and local cops rely on.

Every American tech giant is at least as bad for privacy as Tiktok is — yes, even Apple. Sure, Apple lets its users block Facebook spying with a single tap — but even if you opt out of “tracking,” Apple still secretly gathers exactly the same kinds of data as Facebook, and uses it to power its own ad product:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

There is no such thing as a privacy-respecting tech giant. Long before Apple plastered our cities with lying billboards proclaiming its reverence for privacy, Microsoft positioned itself as the non-spying alternative to Google, which would be great, except Microsoft spies on hundreds of millions of people and sells the data:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

Tech’s surveillance addiction means that Tiktok’s own alternative to the RESTRICT Act is also unbelievably stupid. The company has proposed to put itself under Oracle’s supervision, letting Oracle host its data and audit its code. You know, Oracle, the company that built the Great Firewall of China 1.0:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/selling-china-surveillance

We should not trust Tiktok any more than we trust Apple, Facebook, Google or Microsoft. Tiktok lied about whether it was sending data to China before:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-tapes-us-user-data-china-bytedance-access

And even if it keeps its promise not to send user data to China, that promise is meaningless — it can still send the vectors and models it creates with that data to China — these being far more useful for things like disinformation campaigns and population-scale inferences than the mere logs from your Tiktok sessions.

There are so many potentially harmful ways to process commercial surveillance data that trying to enumerate all the things that a corporation is allowed to do with the data it extracts from us is a fool’s errand. Instead, we should ban companies from spying on us, whether they are Chinese or American.

Corporations are remorseless, paperclip-maximizing colony organisms that perceive us as inconvenient gut-flora, and they lack any executive function (as do their “executives”), and they cannot self-regulate. To keep corporations from harming us, we must make it illegal for them to enact harm, and punish them when they break the law:

https://doctorow.medium.com/small-government-fd5870a9462e

After all, the problem with Tiktok isn’t the delightful videos or the fact that it’s teaching a generation of children to be expert sound- and video-editors. The problem with Tiktok is that it spies on us. Just like the problem with Facebook isn’t that it lets us communicate with our friends, and the problem with Google isn’t that it operates a search engine.

Now, these companies will tell you that the two can’t be separated, that a bearded prophet came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning, “Larry, Sergey, thou shalt stop rotating thine logfiles and, lo, thou wilt data-mine them for actionable market intelligence.” But it’s nonsense. Google ran for years without surveillance. Facebook billed itself as the privacy-forward alternative to Myspace and promised never to spy on us:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

The inevitabilist narrative that says that corporations must violate our rights in order to make the products we love is unadulterated Mr Gotcha nonsense: “Yet you participate in society. Curious. I am very intelligent”:

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Of course, corporations push this narrative all the time, which is why American Big Tech has been quietly supporting a ban on Tiktok, which (coincidentally) has managed to gain a foothold in the otherwise impregnable, decaying, enshittified oligarchy that US companies have created.

They have conspicuously failed to call for any kind of working solution, like a federal privacy law that would ban commercial surveillance, and extend a “private right of action,” so people could sue tech giants and data-brokers who violated the law, without having to convince a regulator, DA or Attorney General to bestir themselves:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy

Instead, the tech giants have the incredible gall to characterize themselves as the defenders of our privacy — at least, so long as the Chinese government is the adversary, and so long as its privacy violations come via an app, and not buy handing a credit card to the data-brokers that are the soil bacteria that keeps Big Tech’s ecosystem circulating. In the upside-down land of Big Tech lobbying, privacy is a benefit of monopoly — not something we have to smash monopolies to attain:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

Not everyone in Congress is onboard with the RESTRICT Act. AOC has come out for a federal privacy law that applies to all companies, rather than a ban on an app that tens of millions of young Americans love:

https://www.businessinsider.com/aoc-first-tiktok-congress-ban-without-being-clued-in-2023-3

You know who agrees with AOC? Rand Paul. Yes, that absolute piece of shit. Paul told his caucusmates in the GOP that banning an app that millions of young American voters love is bad electoral politics. This fact is so obvious that even Rand fucking Paul can understand it:

https://gizmodo.com/rand-paul-opposes-tiktok-ban-warns-republicans-1850278167

Paul is absolutely right to call a Tiktok ban a “national strategy to permanently lose elections for a generation.” The Democrats should listen to him, because the GOP won’t. As between the two parties, the GOP is far more in thrall to the Chamber of Commerce and the rest of the business lobby. They are never going to back a policy that’s as good for the people and as bad for big business as a federal privacy law.

The Democrats have the opportunity to position themselves as “the party that wants to keep Tiktok but force it to stop being creepy, along with all the other tech companies,” while the GOP positions itself as “the party of angry technophobes who want to make sure that any fun you have is closely monitored by Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pinchai and Tim Cook and their pale imitations of the things you love about Tiktok.”

That’s not just good electoral politics — it’s good policy. Young voters aren’t going to turn out to the polls for performative Cold War 2.0 nonsense, but they will be pissed as hell at whoever takes away their Tiktok.

And if you do care about Cold War 2.0, then you should be banning surveillance, not Tiktok; the Chinese government has plenty of US dollars at its disposal to spend in America’s freewheeling, unregulated data markets — as do criminals, petty and organized, and every other nation-state adversary of the USA.

The RESTRICT Act is a garbage law straight out of the Clinton era, a kind of King Canute decree that goes so far as to potentially prohibit the use of VPNs to circumvent its provisions. America doesn’t need a Great Firewall to keep itself safe from tech spying — it needs a privacy law.

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here’s how you can: I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A modified vintage editorial cartoon. Uncle Sam peeks out over a 'frowning battlement' whose cannon-slots are filled with telescopes from which peer the red glaring eyes of HAL 9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Topping the battlements in a row are Uncle Sam and three business-suited figures with dollar-sign-bags for heads. The three dollar-bag men have corporate logos on their breasts: Facebook, Google, Apple. Standing on the strand below the battlements, peering up, is a forlorn figure with a Tiktok logo for a head. The fortress wall bears the words 'RESTRICT Act.']

[plethoraworldatlas]

With the U.S. Senate poised to vote later this week on legislation to reauthorize a heavily abused warrantless surveillance authority, privacy advocates are ramping up pressure on lawmakers to remove a provision that would force a wide range of businesses and individuals to take part in government spying operations.

Dubbed the "Make Everyone a Spy" provision by one advocacy group, the language was tucked into a House-passed bill that would extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows U.S. agencies to spy on non-citizens located outside of the country without a warrant. Americans' communications have frequently been collected under the spying authority.

The provision that has sparked grave warnings from privacy advocates was spearheaded by the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), and the panel's ranking member, Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.).

While supporters of the provision, including the Biden White House, claim the proposed change to existing law is narrow, civil liberties defenders say it's anything but.

Currently, U.S. agencies can use Section 702 authority to collect the data of non-citizens abroad from electronic communications service providers such as Google, Verizon, and AT&T without a warrant.

The Turner-Himes amendment would significantly expand who could be ordered to cooperate with government surveillance efforts, broadening Section 702 language to encompass "any other service provider who has access to equipment that is being or may be used" to transmit or store electronic communications.

That change, privacy advocates say, would mean grocery stores, laundromats, gyms, barber shops, and other businesses would potentially be conscripted to serve as government spies.

[libraryogre]

I wanna know how they knew about their high energy use. Like, are they checking meters? Do they have warrantless access to utility bills?

And "an odor of cannabis"? It's fucking California.

If you saw me agreeing with being annoyed about wasted helium in a fictional context and were like "I bet she has some more helium based anger in her life" good news LAPD fucked up a raid on a medical facility they thought was a pot farm and flat out ruined thousands of gallons of the stuff.

[mariacallous]

Some of the United States’ largest civil liberties groups are urging Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer not to pursue a short-term extension of the Section 702 surveillance program slated to sunset on December 31.

The more than 20 groups—Demand Progress, the Brennan Center for Justice, American Civil Liberties Union, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice among them—oppose plans that would allow the program to continue temporarily by amending “must-pass” legislation, such as the bill needed now to avert a government shutdown by Friday, or the National Defense Authorization Act, annual legislation set to dictate $886 billion in national security spending across the Pentagon and US Department of Energy in 2024.

“In its current form, [Section 702] is dangerous to our liberties and our democracy, and it should not be renewed for any length of time without robust debate, an opportunity for amendment, and—ultimately—far-reaching reforms,” a letter from the groups to Schumer says. It adds that any attempt to prolong the program by rushed amendment “would demonstrate blatant disregard for the civil liberties and civil rights of the American people.”

The letter, which was first reported by Bloomberg Law, cited reporting by WIRED and CQ Roll Call. Schumer did not respond to a request for comment.

As WIRED has previously reported, surveillance under the 702 program may technically continue for another six months, regardless of whether Congress reauthorizes it by the end of December. The program was last certified by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April 2023 for a full year. “Transition procedures” codified in the statute permit surveillance orders to “continue in effect” until they expire.

The 702 program is controversial for its collection of communications of “US persons.” The program legally targets roughly a quarter million foreigners each year, gathering the content of their text messages, emails, and phone calls, but collaterally intercepts an unknown but presumably large amount of American communications as well. This interception takes place with the compelled cooperation of US telecommunications companies that handle internet traffic at stages along global networks.

The program includes procedures for intercepting, storing, and querying the information in ways that are designed to “minimize” the odds of Americans’ rights being violated, but the rules are also subject to various exemptions. A top criticism of the 702 program is that it permits the Federal Bureau of Investigation to access the calls and emails of US citizens without a warrant and without evidence they’ve committed a crime.

The 702 program was last reauthorized in 2018 following a similarly contentious debate. The program currently permits the National Security Agency to target foreigners under an array of circumstances related to counterterrorism, espionage, and nuclear proliferation, though is also prominently used today to investigate and combat cybercrime and drug trafficking.

On November 7, a bipartisan, bicameral coalition of US lawmakers introduced a comprehensive privacy bill called the Government Surveillance Reform Act, led in part by veteran Senate Intelligence Committee member Ron Wyden. Among other provisions aimed at restricting warrantless surveillance and the collection of location data by police, the bill would impose several reforms of the 702 program, ensuring the FBI obtained a warrant before querying the database using “US Person” identifiers.

The GSRA is widely supported by the civil liberties groups whose letter advises Schumer against a short-term extension of Section 702.

“I plan to vote against any continuing resolution that extends FISA Section 702 without meaningful reforms," Wyden tells WIRED. "Massive surveillance programs that violate Americans’ privacy should not be rushed through without reform or review. Congress must have a real debate about reforming warrantless government surveillance of Americans. Therefore, the administration and congressional leaders should listen to the overwhelming bipartisan coalition that supports adopting commonsense protections for Americans’ privacy and extending key national security authorities at the same time.”

[brianbrianbrain]

IDs are of the slides of this Instagram post by peoplescitycouncil and seastersjones.

ID. Screenshot of this article by Joey Scot on November 27, 2023 for Knock LA.

Title: LAPD Is Using Israeli Surveillance Software That Can Track Your Phone and Social Media.

Deck: The software, built by Cobwebs Technologies, uses AI to track, surveil, and create profiles of people based on online and phone data.

The article is categorized as news and tagged with LAPD and surveillance. End ID.

ID. Screenshot of this article by Jules Roscoe on November 29, 2023 for Motherboard: Tech by VICE.

Title: The LAPD is Using Controversial Mass Surveillance Tracking Software.

Deck: Cobwebs Technologies' WebLoc software allows police to track individuals using geolocation signals displayed on a map interface. End ID.

ID. Screenshot of a slide from an Instagram post by Al Jazeera, with logo in top left corner. The dark background is of the seals of the LAPD and ICE, with the circles side by side and half of each in frame.

Black text with yellow highlighting: Police in Los Angeles are using Israeli surveillance software to identify and track people.

White text with some yellow underlining: Begin underline Cobwebs Technologies end underline produces AI-powered tools that let police access personal info without a warrant, using their phone and social media activity.

Its tech has been bought by U.S. agencies like begin underline ICE and the IRS. end underline. End ID.

ID. Screenshot of text from the Knock LA article: LAPD has bolstered its online surveillance operations by adding another piece of technology to its roster. LAPD’s newest surveillance partner, Cobwebs Technologies, gathers data from your phone and social media activity and turns it into intelligence. The Israeli company’s surveillance software, which outsources much of their surveillance work to AI and machine learning, gives police warrantless access to your personal information. 

Cobwebs Technologies was founded in 2015 by former IDF special operatives Omri Timianker, Shay Attias, and former Mossad official Udi Levy. The company is part of the controversial billion-dollar surveillance industry in Israel, where the technology is. End ID.

ID. Screenshot of text from the Knock LA article: official Udi Levy. The company is part of the controversial billion-dollar surveillance industry in Israel, where the technology is often tested on Palestinians before being implemented elsewhere in the world. During a 2014 trip to Israel, LAPD’s top brass saw firsthand how Israel used drones, social media surveillance software, and automatic license plate readers. Within five years of the trip, the department would be using all three. This year, Cobwebs was acquired by private equity firm Spire Capital, which owns the surveillance companies GeoTime and PenLink. The company currently has several contracts with local and federal agencies including the Texas Department of Public Safety (who use it to track migrants), the IRS. End ID.

ID. Screenshot of text from the Knock LA article: LAPD purchased the nearly $200,000-per-year subscription to the technology in 2022 with the help of a $600,000 DHS grant that focuses on terrorism prevention in urban areas. Part of the purchase was a suite of over 50 digital tools, including surveillance and investigative software built by other companies. In the grant proposal for the technology,  LAPD said it would make it easier to share intelligence with federal police agencies. 

Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, banned accounts used by Cobwebs and labeled it a surveillance-for-hire company. In a 2021 report, Meta found that Cobwebs was being used to target activists, opposition. End ID.

ID. Screenshot of this article by Rachel Levinson-Waldman and Mary Pat Dwyer on November 17, 2021 for the Brennan Center for Justice.

Title: LAPD Documents Show What One Social Media Surveillance Firm Promises Police

The article is categorized as analysis. Above the headline is a rectangular image of a black and white police sedan "driving" along a black ground, outlined in yellow and with its center shared with a semicircular grid overlaying blue map. Image credit: Brennan Center for Justice/epantha/werbeantrieb/Anatasiia Konko/Getty. Below the headline are logos of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn that link to share the article. End ID.

ID. Screenshot of text from the Knock LA article: LAPD’s largest bulk purchase of surveillance technology happened right before the passage of the department’s Acquisition and Annual Reporting of Certain Information Systems and Technologies policy. The bulk purchase of $600,000 worth of surveillance and investigative technology included payment to Cobwebs Technologies. LAPD passed the policy on August 17, 2022, and promoted it to ensure the public is informed about the technology it uses. 

The department’s policy requires an application be filled out before acquiring new surveillance technology. That application must be submitted and discussed publicly at the Board of Police Commissioners meeting. The report outlines. End ID.

ID. Screenshot of text from the Knock LA article: While LAPD remains enamored with the capabilities of today’s surveillance software, its policies have not kept up with the speed of advancements in technology. For example, the department lacks a policy on accessing and tracking people’s phone data through a third party and/or data brokers. It also lacks a policy about using technology that uses AI or machine learning, including whether the algorithms in the software it uses are aligned with the department’s biased policing policies. 

LAPD defends using Cobwebs, saying the information it gathers is open-source and publicly available. But Cobwebs is not available for use by the general public, nor does the general public have access to the. End ID.

ID. Screenshot of text from the Knock LA article: LAPD defends using Cobwebs, saying the information it gathers is open-source and publicly available. But Cobwebs is not available for use by the general public, nor does the general public have access to the breadth of information gathered by Cobwebs. 

Dave Maass with EFF pushes back against LAPD’s claim:

“LAPD likes to play games and claims that if it’s public, there is no public interest in protecting it from police spying. … LAPD should learn from history and recognize that this kind of surveillance is damaging to everyone.” End ID.

for people in the u.s., y'all better not be talking shit about the surveillance state in other countries without also talking shit about the one in the u.s.

though I would like to say, I took a look at Cobwebs's website, and it's really not clear if they're using AI at all or if it's just as a buzzword. even their reports and white papers that might shed further light are behind information paywalls – which is to say, hell no am I handing my data on a silver platter to this murderous company just to get my hands on that information. I can live with not knowing exactly if Cobwebs is really AI. AI or not, it is still part of the surveillance state. nonetheless, it would be nice if journalists didn't fearmonger about AI without clarity. is anyone up to sacrificing their information to try and figure this out?

and even the white papers being behind information paywalls – this is really the least open-source thing ever, okay. what are you even open to. if you're not open to the general public you are literally not open-source. IDK what these mfs on (it's the fricking money and murder, but still, you get my point). what really gets me is that they also have a certification from GDPR??? like okay i mean i already knew GDPR was bullshit, but they're really not even trying to hide it.

EFF thanks for holding it down though. big tech is part of the surveillance state too, okay. don't be idolizing tech execs, because to them you literally are not even human.

[darkmaga-returns]

By Matthew Guariglia

EFF has joined with 23 other organizations including the ACLU, Restore the Fourth, the Brennan Center for Justice, Access Now, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation to demand that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) furnish the public with an estimate of exactly how many U.S. persons’ communications have been hoovered up, and are now sitting on a government server for law enforcement to unconstitutionally sift through at their leisure.

This letter was motivated by the fact that representatives of the National Security Agency (NSA) have promised in the past to provide the public with an estimate of how many U.S. persons—that is, people on U.S. soil—have had their communications “incidentally” collected through the surveillance authority Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. 

As the letter states, “ODNI and NSA cannot expect public trust to be unconditional. If ODNI and NSA continue to renege on pledges to members of Congress, and to withhold information that lawmakers, civil society, academia, and the press have persistently sought over the course of thirteen years, that public trust will be fatally undermined.”

Section 702 allows the government to conduct surveillance of foreigners abroad from inside the United States. It operates, in part, through the cooperation of large and small telecommunications service providers which hand over the digital data and communications they oversee. While Section 702 prohibits the NSA from intentionally targeting Americans with this mass surveillance, these agencies routinely acquire a huge amount of innocent Americans' communications “incidentally” because, as it turns out, people in the United States communicate with people overseas all the time. This means that the U.S. government ends up with a massive pool consisting of the U.S.-side of conversations as well as communications from all over the globe. Domestic law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), can then conduct backdoor warrantless searches of these “incidentally collected”