Free Republic

So we are just finding out about this now? According to an FBI whistleblower, former Directed James Comey inserted two female agents inside the Trump campaign in 2016. The Washington Times reported that the female agents were directed to act as “honeypots” and travel with Trump and his staff. This was an “off-the-books” operation and was separate from Comey and Obama’s Crossfire Hurricane operation that that targeted Trump based on false Russian collusion lies. For years now we have not seen ANY high-level whistleblowers from the FBI during the debunked Crossfire Hurricane investigation of President Trump. The entire FBI and...

Although the legacy media has buried the story, it turns out that over the last several years the Federal Bureau of Investigation has resurrected a hated and unconstitutional spying program once directed by the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. His program, called the COINTELPRO program, targeted Americans who committed no crime, but simply sought to express their political views. Former President Richard Nixon directed Hoover to aggressively infiltrate and disrupt many political movements in the late ‘60’s and ‘70’s. This included the Vietnam War activists, the Rev. Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders. They even spied on...

Your long-held suspicions are confirmed, according to a report: Your phone really is listening to you. A marketing firm whose clients include Facebook and Google has privately admitted that it listens to users’ smartphone microphones and then places ads based on the information that is picked up, according to 404 Media. Cox Media Group, the television and radio news conglomerate, admitted in a pitch deck to investors that its “Active Listening” software uses artificial intelligence to “capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversations,” according to the report. “Advertisers can pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market...

Find out if you're accidentally sharing your location with Google, Apple apps and services blog.google, support.apple.com When mobile apps first hit the scene, many were designed to make our phones more useful. This included new tools for productivity, as well as apps for entertainment. Many of today’s apps, though, are packed with sneaky permission requests and hidden trackers. These tactics are legal because app developers (and the companies behind them) have to give you a choice to opt in or out of these tracking permissions. Unfortunately, not everyone knows how to do that … or the developers make it really...

If you think you’re disgusted with our military and political “leaders,” you aren’t nearly disgusted enough. It turns out the Chinese balloon overflight of some of our most sensitive military installations was only the tip of what appears to be a planet-sized iceberg: For several nights, military personnel had reported a mysterious breach of restricted airspace over a stretch of land that has one of the largest concentrations of national-security facilities in the U.S. The show usually starts 45 minutes to an hour after sunset, another senior leader told [USAF General Mark] Kelly. The first drone arrived shortly. Kelly, a...

In December 2023, for 17 continuous days, a fleet of drones appeared at night over Langley Air Force Base (AFB), Virginia and other facilities in the greater Virginia Beach area. This was reported at the time, but the story was fleeting. Two other events occurred in the area that are relevant to the story. In February 2023, a pair of F-22s from Langley shot down the Chinese spy balloon as it exited the United States over South Carolina into the Atlantic Ocean. In January 2024, a Chinese graduate student at the University of Minnesota, was arrested for flying a drone...

...For several nights, military personnel had reported a mysterious breach of restricted airspace over a stretch of land that has one of the largest concentrations of national-security facilities in the U.S. The first drone arrived shortly. Kelly, a career fighter pilot, estimated it was roughly 20 feet long and flying at more than 100 miles an hour, at an altitude of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 feet. Other drones followed, one by one, sounding in the distance like a parade of lawn mowers. The drones headed south, across Chesapeake Bay, toward Norfolk, Va., and over an area that includes the home...

By year-end, Americans will be required to hand over data on their small businesses to the federal government’s law enforcement database... The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) is an aggressive domestic program to federally register millions of unsuspecting small business owners under the guise of an “anti-money laundering initiative.” By the end of this year, Americans will be required to hand over their small businesses’ private data — such as owners’ names and home addresses — to the federal government’s law enforcement database, operated by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), housed under the Department of the Treasury. Such small businesses...

The Biden Administration is pushing banks to report every $600 transaction, whether a deposit or withdrawal, from every business or personal account. The Democrats want everything, and no matter how much they collect, they will always spend more. TAXES are really no longer even necessary along with borrowing. They never pay off the debt anyhow, and it would be immensely more efficient for the government to just print the money they need and end both borrowing and taxation. Over 70% of the national debt is due to interest and wars. It does not go to expand the economy or help...

The Department of Justice announced 17 new charges against Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange on Thursday, including a virtually unprecedented move to charge him with publishing classified material — a move that could pose challenges to First Amendment protections. In a superseding indictment, a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, has accused Assange of breaking the law by inducing Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning to send him classified documents — and then publishing material that included the names of confidential sources who provided information to American diplomats. The 17 counts were tacked on to a single count accusing Assange of conspiring with Manning...

Ah, the wind in your hair, the open road ahead, and not a care in the world… except all the trackers, cameras, microphones, and sensors capturing your every move. Ugh. Modern cars are a privacy nightmare. Car makers have been bragging about their cars being “computers on wheels" for years to promote their advanced features. However, the conversation about what driving a computer means for its occupants' privacy hasn’t really caught up. While we worried that our doorbells and watches that connect to the internet might be spying on us, car brands quietly entered the data business by turning their...

A month ago, news broke that, up in Canada, Justin Trudeau’s government is fining the Amish community $300,000 ($222,660 American dollars). Their crime? They didn’t download the government’s COVID app. The twist, of course, is that the Amish don’t have smartphones. They eschew all modern technology. This story has made almost no headlines, but it’s important because it’s a preview of coming attractions if Kamala becomes president. This is what leftists do. Acting for your own good, they destroy you. As anyone who has watched either Witness or Weird Al Yankovich’s brilliant Amish Paradise knows, the Amish lifestyle does not...

Donald Trump says a federal case needs to be brought against Kamala Harris after it was revealed Iran sent sensitive materials to her campaign about her rival... ...on Wednesday, the FBI claimed the cyber-terrorists sent unsolicited emails containing stolen information from the Trump campaign to people connected to the Democratic president in an effort to interfere. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, is now questioning why the Biden or Harris campaign did not turn over this information or report it to authorities... There's no evidence that any of the recipients of the hacked information responded, officials said, and...

If it were up to Larry Ellison, the exorbitantly rich cofounder of software outfit Oracle, all of us will soon be smiling for the camera — constantly. Not for a cheery photograph, but to appease our super-invasive, if not totally omnipresent, algorithmic overseers. As Business Insider reports, the tech centibillionaire glibly predicts that the wonders of AI will bring about a new paradigm of supercharged surveillance, guaranteeing that the proles — excuse us, "citizens" — all behave and stay in line. "We're going to have supervision," Ellison said this week at an Oracle financial analysts meeting, per BI. "Every police...

Governments are pushing the public to switch to smart vehicles to reduce fossil fuel consumption, but there is also a second motive – surveillance. This September, Ford filed a new patent to eavesdrop on riders. They plan to share this information with third-parties to personalize the advertisements riders hear. Ford will also take the driver’s destination into consideration to determine location-specific advertisements and suggestions. The technology will factor in the weather, traffic, and all external sensors to fine tune when and what to market to passengers. Advertisements are perhaps the least ominous use of voice data based on the plans...

As an old congressional investigator, some things really bother me. Dishonesty at the Justice Department is one. Attorney General Merrick Garland is a disgrace – and danger. He opposes textual interpretations of the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. He resents individual rights, and how they limit government power to suppress rights – which is why they were framed. Now, he disavows another core principle, called “separation of powers.” To be clear, separating powers among those who make our laws, administer them, and interpret them is ancient. It is not a MAGA idea. It goes back to the French...

Tesla CEO compared incoming Recall feature to an episode of Black MirrorNew Recall feature will be coming to Copilot+ PCs from JuneIt takes screenshots of everything you do on-screenSnapshots are analysed by AI on-device so they can be searchedElon Musk has announced plans to disable the feature on his PCPrivacy campaigners have also flagged concernsUK privacy watchdog has launched an investigation into RecallElon Musk has criticised a controversial new AI feature coming to Windows 11 devices this summer. Known as Recall, it takes screenshots of everything on-screen so you can scroll back in time and resume work on anything from...

Millions of people have long suspected it, but now a leak suggests that out phones really are listening to us. An apparent pitch deck from one of Facebook's marketing partners appears to detail how the firm eavesdrops on users' conversations to create targeted ads. In a slideshow, Cox Media Group (CMG) claims that its 'Active-Listening' software uses AI to collect and analyze 'real-time intent data' by listening to what you say through your phone, laptop or home assistant microphone. 'Advertisers can pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers,' the deck states. The pitch deck goes on to...

“This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet and magazine. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and X.” (Required for republishing) Everything is bigger in Texas—including state police contracts for surveillance tech. In June, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) signed an acquisition plan for a 5-year, nearly $5.3 million contract for a controversial surveillance tool called Tangles from tech firm PenLink, according to records obtained by the Texas Observer through a public information request. The deal is nearly twice as large as the company’s $2.7 million two-year...

New FBI information about corruption in a Clinton-approved uranium deal with Russia raises questions about Clinton’s actions after the FBI broke up a deep-cover Russian spy ring in 2010. For a decade, the FBI ran an operation called Ghost Stories to monitor and rip apart a deep-cover Russian agent network. Ghost Stories tracked a ring Russian spies who lived between Boston and Washington, D.C., under false identities. It was one of the FBI’s most elaborate and successful counterintelligence operations in history.