Free Republic

A George Washington University pilot program 'used locational data tracked by Wi-Fi access points' to map student and employee movements on campus. The university failed to inform the students and staff about the now-ended program. The George Washington University's president publicly apologized Friday for a fall 2021 surveillance pilot program that tracked students' and employees' locations on campus without their consent. "I write to inform you of a data analytics pilot program that took place on the university campus during the Fall 2021 semester, and to apologize on behalf of the university for the failure to inform you in advance...

As all eyes were trained on the aggressive police sweep of the Ottawa trucker convoy this week, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s administration was quietly moving to implement a sweeping expansion of surveillance power at the federal level. The Trudeau government’s financial war against the truckers has been covered at length. But one underreported aspect of this broader assault on Canadian civil liberties is the effort to bring crowdfunding and payment service providers — two of the most prominent routes for financial transactions on the Internet — under the permanent control of a centralized government authority. In a February 14...

Canadian banks will receive the names of people involved in “Freedom Convoy” protests that have descended on the nation’s capital, a first step in a promised financial crackdown on demonstrators being instituted by the far-left government of Justin Trudeau. Bloomberg reports the Canadian Bankers Association confirmed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has alerted banks to a list of names and made it available. The institutions are reportedly still seeking clarity from law enforcement on how to handle the alleged protesters’ accounts, according to people familiar with the matter. But Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said some accounts have already been...

Big tech companies are doing the bidding of the U.S. government in actions that mirror China’s social credit system, and Americans must recognize what’s happening and take action, according to Kara Frederick, a former Facebook intel analyst and a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Kara Frederick, a Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology Policy, in Washington on Feb. 11, 2022 Frederick recently authored a Heritage Foundation report titled, “Combating Big Tech’s Totalitarianism: A Road Map,” which details how Big Tech has wielded its power to censor Americans. The report proposes a range of actions Americans...

Trudeau’s state broadcaster is doxxing Trudeau’s political opponents. They’re teeing them up for financial punishments. This is not journalism, anymore than Der Sturmer or Pravda was journalism.

The Central Intelligence Agency has been collecting American’s private data without any oversight or even the minimal legal safeguards that apply to the NSA and FBI, an unconstitutional affront to our civil liberties. According to a declassified report released last week by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), the CIA’s surveillance program is reminiscent of the mass surveillance programs conducted by the NSA, though the details released thus far paint a disturbing picture of potential wide-scale violations of people’s privacy. To start, the CIA program has apparently been conducted outside the statutory reforms and oversight of the intelligence...

Earlier this year, researchers at Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky witnessed a cyberespionage campaign targeting Microsoft Windows PCs at government and telecom entities in China and Pakistan. They began in June 2020 and continued through to April 2021. What piqued the researchers’ interest was the hacking software used by the digital spies, whom Kaspersky had dubbed Bitter APT, a pseudonym for an unspecified government agency. Aspects of the code looked like some the Moscow antivirus provider had previously seen and attributed to a company it gave the cryptonym “Moses.” Moses, said Kaspersky, was a mysterious provider of hacking tech known as...

The new tool would analyze stylistic differences in sentences to determine authorship, which researchers claim could combat disinformation. If you’ve spent any time online you’re well aware the internet is infested with bots and shit stirrers of all stripes pretending to be people they aren’t. Though bot proliferation, in particular, is difficult to measure, a 2020 report from cyber security firm Imperva found over a quarter, (37.2%) of all internet users weren’t human. That’s a lot. Mix that with everyone else operating under aliases and you start to realize that much of the modern internet, to some degree, is fake....

The U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) are under fire after the USCP inspector general opened an investigation into allegations that the department illegally entered the offices of GOP members of Congress, interviewed GOP staffers, and took photos of documents that were protected under congressional rules. In a Twitter thread, Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) alleged that his office was one of several GOP offices that had been illegally entered and searched by the USCP. “The Capitol Police Intelligence Division investigated my office illegally and one of my staffers caught them in the act,” Nehls opened the thread.

U.S. Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger said Tuesday that an officer conducted a security check of a Capitol Hill office that was left open, rejecting a GOP congressman’s claim that police were involved in an illegal probe last November. In a Twitter thread Tuesday, Rep. Troy E. Nehls (R-Tex.) claimed without evidence that “The @CapitolPolice Intelligence Division investigated my office illegally and one of my staffers caught them in the act.” Nehls accused Capitol Police leadership after one of the officers entered his office in the Longworth House Office Building with no prior notice Nov. 20, 2021, ahead of the...

Israel used the NSO Group’s software as a tool of diplomacy. The F.B.I. wanted it for domestic surveillance. Then everything soured. Here are highlights of a New York Times Magazine investigation. It is widely regarded as the world’s most potent spyware, capable of reliably cracking the encrypted communications of iPhone and Android smartphones. The software, Pegasus, made by an Israeli company, NSO Group, has been able to track terrorists and drug cartels. It has also been used against human rights activists, journalists and dissidents. Now, an investigation published Friday by The New York Times Magazine has found that Israel, which...

@RepTroyNehls Joins Tucker Carlson Tonight To Discuss Members Of Capitol Police Spying On Members Of Congress @SheriffTNehls: "They're weaponizing these federal law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies." Tucker: "I hope you get every one one of these cretins fired." Segment...

People don’t want outsiders reading their private messages —not their physical mail, not their texts, not their DMs, nothing. It’s a clear and obvious point, but one place it doesn’t seem to have reached is the U.S. Senate. A group of lawmakers led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have re-introduced the EARN IT Act, an incredibly unpopular bill from 2020 that was dropped in the face of overwhelming opposition. Let’s be clear: the new EARN IT Act would pave the way for a massive new surveillance system, run by private companies, that would roll back...

As you sit down to watch the Winter Olympics in Beijing this week, remember that the Chinese government is watching too. Under the pervasive surveillance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), entire populations cannot take a single free step. Uyghur Muslims are facing genocide in modern-day concentration camps. Hong Kong pro-democracy protestors and newspaper editors are being silenced and thrown in jail. The people of Tibet are victims to a cultural genocide as the CCP destroys their Buddhist temples and sacred cultural sites. Even well-known celebrities like Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai are forcibly disappeared after accusing party officials of...

Telling a website to stick its cookies someplace else might not be enough to keep it from tracking you across the web—there are other identifiers that can help narrow down who you are and what you're doing as you travel the silicon superhighway. These techniques rely on tracking the exact configuration of hardware you're running inside your PC, though researchers suggest this form of hardware tracking could be done with even greater accuracy through something known as GPU fingerprinting.Outlined in a research paper [PDF warning] from co-first authors Tomer Laor of Ben-Gurion University and Naif Mehanna from University Lille, CNRS,...

WASHINGTON _ Millions of Americans will soon have to scan their faces to access their Internal Revenue Service tax accounts, one of the government's biggest expansions yet of facial recognition software into people's everyday lives.Taxpayers will still be able to file their returns the old-fashioned way. But by this summer, anyone wanting to access their records - including details about child tax credits, payment plans or tax transcripts - on the IRS website will be required to record a video of their face with their computer or smartphone and send it to the private contractor ID.me to confirm their identity.About...

A plurality of Democrats said governments should “fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines” (48%), and support forcing unvaccinated American citizens “to use a smart phone app or wearable device that tracks unvaccinated people to ensure that they are quarantined or socially distancing from others.”

It is widely regarded as the world’s most potent spyware, capable of reliably cracking the encrypted communications of iPhone and Android smartphones. The yearlong investigation, by Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti, also reports that the FBI bought and tested NSO software for years with plans to use it for domestic surveillance until the agency finally decided last year not to deploy the tools. The Times found that sales of Pegasus played a critical role in securing the support of Arab nations in Israel’s campaign against Iran and negotiating the Abraham Accords, the 2020 diplomatic agreements, signed at a Trump White...

School issuing compliance warnings to anyone caught violating restrictions and reported to the authorities by fellow students.. Some students at Yale are warning that the litany of restrictions and rules, and the system the university has implemented to report anyone seen to be breaking them, has transformed the campus into a “surveillance state” policed by Stasi-like students who are annoyed at others violating the ever changing decrees. The Washington Free Beacon reports that complaints are being registered anonymously against anyone not wearing a mask, or indulging in “handshakes, hugs, and high-fives.” In one example cited in the report, one student...

Capitol Police examines backgrounds, social media feeds of some who meet with lawmakers The little-known new practice by the department’s intelligence analysts, instituted since the Jan. 6 attack, is highly controversial given the civil liberties concerns it raises. After the Jan. 6 insurrection, the Capitol Police’s intelligence unit quietly started scrutinizing the backgrounds of people who meet with lawmakers, according to three people familiar with the matter.... ..... Major changes in the Capitol Police intelligence unit started in fall of 2020, when the department brought on former Department of Homeland Security official Julie Farnam to help run its intelligence unit......