"He hopes his experience can help others where they’re unexpectedly denied entry at an expensive event based on data about them that has been collected by the company.
“It’s something that we all have to be aware of. We’re [being] surveilled at all times, and it’s always framed as a safety thing, when rarely is that the case.
It’s more of a deterrent and a fear tactic to try to keep people in line.”
MEET RAYHUNTER: A New Open Source Tool from EFF to Detect Cellular Spying
Rayhunter is a new open source tool we’ve created that runs off an affordable mobile hotspot that we hope empowers everyone, regardless of technical skill, to help search out CSS around the world
#CSS (Stingrays or IMSI catchers) are devices that masquerade as legitimate cell-phone towers, tricking phones into connecting to the device rather than a tower
#surveillance #Spying #Privacy #Protest
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-open-source-tool-eff-detect-cellular-spying
I drove 300 miles in rural #Virginia , then asked police to send me their public #surveillance footage of my car. Here's what I learned. - Cardinal News
Anyone might wonder how often they are caught on police cameras that operate 24/7. I spent a day driving, and over a month trying to get the answer.
#flock #privacy #foia
I drove 300 miles, then asked police to send me surveillance footage of my car.
Kim Jong Un Shows Off North Korea’s Nuclear Attack Warning Craft https://www.byteseu.com/871234/ #AEW&C #aircraft #Inspection #KimJongUn #NorthKorea #Nuclear #Russia #surveillance #warning
EFF launches Rayhunter — a $20 open-source tool that helps detect cell-site simulators (aka Stingrays) used for surveillance. Big win for privacy! 
#Privacy #Surveillance #OpenSource #security #cloud #infosec #cybersecurity
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-open-source-tool-eff-detect-cellular-spying
"While CBP said it only searched about 47,000 devices of the 420 million people who crossed the US border in 2024, experts the Guardian spoke to say border enforcement has been unpredictable under the Trump administration, so figuring out whether you’re at risk of a device search is not as straightforward as it once was. French officials said a French scientist was recently turned away at an airport in Texas because immigration officers found texts that were critical of Trump on his phone.
“The super-conservative perspective is to assume they are completely unhinged and that even the most benign reasons for travel are going to subject non-citizens to these device searches,” said Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit digital rights group.
If you’re a US citizen, you must be admitted into the country. That said, some jurisdictions allow CBP to work with the FBI or local police to advance domestic investigations, so there are still some risks of your devices being searched for domestic reasons.
There are steps you can take to make it harder for CBP officers to access your device and the data on it. So what should you do to protect the data on your phone from being searched? The main thing is to prepare ahead of heading to the airport. Here is what you should be thinking about:"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/26/phone-search-privacy-us-border-immigration
There once was a government bold
Spying on refugees, the story's told
Using spyware on the sly
To keep an eye on those who defy
Their actions, immoral and cold
#GuardianLimerick #Italy #Europe #WhatsApp #Hacking #Surveillance #Espionage #Refugees
There once was a tale quite grim,
Of spyware approved on a whim,
Italian government spies,
On NGOs, a surprise,
Invasion of privacy on a limb.
#GuardianLimerick #Italy #Europe #WhatsApp #Hacking #Surveillance #Espionage #Refugees
In Italy, spyware they did approve,
On refugees and MPs they would snoop,
A violation of rights,
Causing such fright,
Invasion of privacy - a loop.
#GuardianLimerick #Italy #Europe #WhatsApp #Hacking #Surveillance #Espionage #Refugees
Wary of US surveillance? Try these European alternatives to Big Tech | Proton
https://proton.me/blog/european-tech-alternatives
#vieprivée #donnéespersonnelles #surveillance
There's a tale of espionage told,
Spyware on refugees, so bold,
Italian MPs were told,
The government's role, they unfold,
A story of secrets that unfold.
#GuardianLimerick #Italy #Europe #WhatsApp #Hacking #Surveillance #Espionage #Refugees
What to do if Trump Invokes the Insurrection Act on April 20th.
https://medium.com/@aletheisthenes/if-the-shit-actually-hits-the-fan-b491462c6057
“TRUMP KILLED PUBLIC WAR RESEARCH. STARGATE WILL MAKE IT SECRET—AND FAR MORE DANGEROUS”
by Kit Klarenberg in Mint Press News
“Days after a #Pentagon spokesperson celebrated the work of Elon Musk’s DOGE, the Minerva Initiative—an influential research program—was killed without fanfare. No mainstream outlet covered it. But the reasons behind its demise reveal the next frontier of American war planning: #AI, #surveillance, and full-spectrum #social #control”
https://www.mintpressnews.com/trump-killed-minerva-stargate-make-secret-more-dangerous/289313/
"[A] team of researchers recently set out to determine just how much companies like Amazon, Apple and Google are using the data gathered through their voice assistants to profile us –– track and monitor our behavior –– across the internet.
(...)
The study focused on the behaviors of the three biggest voice assistant platforms: Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant. What researchers found was that how concerned you should be about your smart assistant profiling you varies greatly depending on which device you use.
But in order to figure this out, they had to essentially trick voice assistants into profiling them.
They downloaded publicly available information that Google compiles on every user based on their searches, like gender, age range, relationship status and income bracket. Using those labels, they were able to design questions that could easily convince the platforms that they were, for example, married, had children or were a homeowner not a renter.
The researchers then recorded themselves asking these questions and replayed the audio to voice assistants over and over again. Over the course of 20 months, they conducted 1,171 experiments involving nearly 25,000 queries.
(...)
What they ended up finding was that Alexa exhibits the most straightforward kind of profiling behavior: It’s all based on your interest in products.
(...)
However, with Siri and Google Assistant, things are more complicated.
After reaching out to Apple to get their data, the company insisted “they had no data on us,” Choffnes says, “which means we couldn’t even test anything or prove any hypothesis about whether there was any profiling happening.”
(...)
Meanwhile, Google Assistant was the strangest of the bunch. The researchers found that it was clearly profiling its users but often incorrectly."
https://news.northeastern.edu/2025/03/17/voice-assistant-profiling-research/
"Since the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card-holding pro-Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate student, many have asked which legal residents the Trump administration will target next. Trump promised that the 30-year-old Columbia graduate and Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent would be the first of many such arrests to come.
In early March, Axios reported that the administration was using AI to scan tens of thousands of social media accounts, targeting student visa holders believed to show “pro-Hamas” support. The endeavor, run by the State Department as well as the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, will be used to revoke student visas, officials said.
Whether or not the “Catch and Revoke” system reported by Axios was behind ICE’s deportation efforts, DHS has been well positioned to use AI surveillance of social media in targeting “foreign threats” for years.
“The previous administrations built the runway that can be used by the Trump administration and more authoritarian regimes to crack down on the civil rights of communities in the U.S.,” wrote Citlaly Mora Hernandez, a spokesperson for a racial and immigration justice advocacy group fighting against tech surveillance, Just Futures Law."
https://documentedny.com/2025/03/25/dhs-ice-ai-social-cbp-media-khalil-surveillance/
There once was a government sly,
Approved spyware without batting an eye,
On refugees and MPs,
Causing quite a big fuss,
In Italy, where privacy went awry.
#GuardianLimerick #Italy #Europe #WhatsApp #Hacking #Surveillance #Espionage #Refugees
There once was a government so sly
Using spyware, they gave a sly try
On refugees, NGOs
MPs heard the expose
Italian scandal, oh my, oh my
#GuardianLimerick #Italy #Europe #WhatsApp #Hacking #Surveillance #Espionage #Refugees
