Free Republic

Mark Ruffalo is an American actor who spends his free time spewing antisemitic rhetoric and dangerous anti-Israel propaganda to his nearly 30 million social media followers. Ruffalo regularly aligns himself with antisemitic positions and fans the flames of Jew-hatred masked as pro-Palestinian activism.In 2018, Ruffalo tweeted his outrage over CNN’s firing of antisemite Marc Lamont Hill. Hill was caught inciting violence against Israel and the Jewish people by reciting rhetoric that called for the dissolution of the Jewish people and the only Jewish nation. Ruffalo stated Hill was advocating for Palestinian rights, when in reality Hill openly called for the...

The stuff uncovered in the Twitter whistleblower report is much crazier than anything in the "Twitter files" but it's much less politically/tribally salient so it got no attention. Going to do a thread on some of the craziest things, in no particular order. Twitter didn't monitor employee computers at all, it was not uncommon for employees to install spyware on work devices. Twitter does not have separate development, test, staging, and production environments. At least 5,000 employees had privileged access to production systems...

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) is facing a class action lawsuit for allegedly working with Google to install “spyware” onto the Android devices of a million state residents without their knowledge during the COVID-19 pandemic.Plaintiffs Robert Wright and Johnny Kula were among 1 million Massachusetts residents who had the state’s “COVID Exposure Settings: US-MA” app auto-installed without their consent, according to the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), the nonpartisan civil rights group that filed the lawsuit (pdf) on Tuesday.The app, once automatically installed, didn’t appear on the device’s home screen as newly-installed apps typically do. Instead, it was...

TheTruthSpy app has been downloaded to thousands of smartphones in America without the owner of the device knowing.. The Android app markets itself as a way for customers to monitor their spouses communications on the device.. A new report from TechCrunch reveals the app is also collecting and storing personal information from devices.. This includes 1.2 million text messages and 4.42 million call logs, along with 278,861 location data points from Americans over the course of six weeks.. ... Thousands of Americans have fallen victim to stalkware planted on their smartphones by someone they know - and an Android app...

Conservative MP Martin Shields is ringing the alarm bells after it was revealed that the RCMP and Trudeau’s other intelligence agencies are using spyware to spy on elected officials. ... Shields said that the Ethics Committee has been meeting over the last two days to discuss the recent revelation that the RCMP uses spyware to monitor Canadians — even elected Members of Parliament — through their devices. “What is spyware? Spyware is a technology that’s recently been developed in the last few years; even Canadian companies are developing it. It allows someone who’s using spyware to be able to turn...

Several observers have pointed out the terrible optics and even worse legal and cultural implications of the FBI’s raids earlier this month on three undercover journalists’ homes. Since the reporters’ organization, Project Veritas, is a political opponent of the American regime, the raids echo government behavior in unfree countries such as Russia, China, and Turkey.Yet there’s another, less remarked, aspect to this story. It’s the raids’ effect of protecting a longtime, top-tier deep state information operations partner, The New York Times.Project Veritas is a threat to The New York Times, not only in some of its undercover reporting about Times...

Peter Schweizer’s new book Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win tells the story of how Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) husband Richard Blum was part owner of a Chinese firm that allegedly sold computers with spyware chips to the U.S. military. The military has never been able to calculate how much sensitive data these computers allowed China to steal. A hefty chapter of Red-Handed is devoted to tracking Feinstein’s long and expensive relationship with Communist China. In a total coincidence that could not possibly have been related in any way to Feinstein’s friendship with the tyrants of Beijing,...

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...

In a statement to the Guardian, the Us intelligence agency says it bought a license from NSO Group for 'product testing and evaluation only' and not 'operational use' The FBI confirmed on Wednesday that it had purchased Pegasus spyware from Israel's NSO Group, but denied ever using it during an operation. In a statement to the Guardian, the FBI said it purchased the powerful cellphone hacking software in order to "stay abreast of emerging technologies and tradecraft." The US security agency said it bought a "limited license" to use Pegasus for "product testing and evaluation only," and said "there was...

Apple released an emergency software update Monday after it discovered a vulnerability that would allow hackers to infect iPhones, iPads, Apple computers and watches without a user even clicking a malicious link. The spyware detected could open up an Apple device to data theft and eavesdropping. The flaw was detected by researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, who noticed spyware from the world’s most infamous hacker-for-hire firm, NSO Group, had infected the iPhone of a Saudi activist. It was the first time a so-called “zero-click” exploit had been caught and analyzed, said the researchers, who found the malicious...

... first week of remote work, David and his team were introduced to a digital surveillance platform called Sneek. Every minute or so, the program would capture a live photo of David and his workmates via their company laptop webcams. The ever-changing headshots were splayed across the wall of a digital conference waiting room that everyone on the team could see. Clicking on a colleague’s face would unilaterally pull them into a video call. If you were lucky enough to catch someone goofing off or picking their nose, you could forward the offending image to a team chat via Sneek’s...

Microsoft is announcing that Windows 11 will be released on October 5th. The new operating system will be available as a free upgrade for eligible Windows 10 PCs, or on new hardware that ships with Windows 11 pre-loaded.The free upgrade to Windows 11 will start rolling out on October 5th, but like many Windows upgrades in the past, it will be available in phases. New eligible devices will be offered the upgrade first, and then Windows 11 will become available for more in-market devices in the weeks and months following October 5th.“Following the tremendous learnings from Windows 10, we want...

Female journalists and activists say they had their private photos shared on social media by governments seeking to intimidate and silence them. Ghada Oueiss, a Lebanese broadcast journalist at Al-Jazeera, was eating dinner at home with her husband last June when she received a message from a colleague telling her to check Twitter. Oueiss opened up the account and was horrified: A private photo taken when she was wearing a bikini in a jacuzzi was being circulated by a network of accounts, accompanied by false claims that the photos were taken at her boss’s house. Over the next few days...

The text delivered last month to the iPhone 11 of Claude Mangin, the French wife of a political activist jailed in Morocco, made no sound. It produced no image. It offered no warning of any kind as an iMessage from somebody she didn’t know delivered malware directly onto her phone — and past Apple’s security systems. Once inside, the spyware, produced by Israel’s NSO Group and licensed to one of its government clients, went to work, according to a forensic examination of her device by Amnesty International’s Security Lab. It found that between October and June, her phone was hacked...

The hitmen came for Cecilio Pineda Birto as he swung in a hammock at a carwash, waiting for his pickup to be cleaned. The 38-year-old freelance reporter was shot dead ... A few hours earlier, Pineda had in a broadcast on Facebook Live accused state police and local politicians of colluding with a violent local capo known as El Tequilero. In previous weeks, Pineda had received a string of anonymous death threats. At about the same time, his mobile phone number was selected as a possible target for surveillance by a Mexican client of the spyware company NSO Group. A...

It is the name for perhaps the most powerful piece of spyware ever developed – certainly by a private company. Once it has wormed its way on to your phone, without you noticing, it can turn it into a 24-hour surveillance device. It can copy messages you send or receive, harvest your photos and record your calls. It might secretly film you through your phone’s camera, or activate the microphone to record your conversations. It can potentially pinpoint where you are, where you’ve been, and who you’ve met. Pegasus is the hacking software – or spyware – that is developed,...

President Joe Biden has signed an executive order revoking former President Trump’s ban on Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat. The Verge reports that President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday that revokes former President Trump’s ban on the Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat. Biden will instead be instructing the commerce secretary to investigate apps with ties to foreign adversaries that may pose a risk to American data privacy or national security.

Like other modern cars and trucks, the Genesis GV80 that Woods was driving when he crashed was equipped with an electronic data recorder... Vehicles in the Genesis line — Hyundai’s luxury brand — for example, also feature artificial intelligence software that keeps a watchful eye, sending alerts if it detects the driver is distracted or closes his or her eyes while driving. ...Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department executed a search warrant this week to retrieve the data contained on the SUV’s computers. Information on how fast Woods was going, whether he ever hit the brakes, and other clues could be...

We’re hearing Gestapo thrown around a lot lately. It’s almost as though the legions of easily-propagandized ignorants wore out the constant mis-use of Nazi, Fascist and Hitler. Most of the Gestapo iterations of this are complete nonsense. Most. Not all. The Chinese Communist government’s police state apparatus is the modern day equivalent of the Gestapo. A report leaked to the Washington Post shows that the Chinese Communist government has tested, and is presumably using, AI facial recognition software developed by Huawei to identify the Muslim ethnic minority of Uighurs and alert police — read, Gestapo. The Post story reports: “The...

The text-messaging system, called v-safe, is intended to provide early indications about possible adverse reactions from the vaccines. Using the messaging program, people who have received the shots can report symptoms and other health effects, such as missed work. Their responses could prompt phone calls from a team of safety professionals. The CDC said in a statement that the smartphone-based tool was developed to allow “people to report how they are feeling after covid-19 vaccination to CDC in almost real time." The voluntary system is in addition to existing safety monitoring programs, the agency said. “Reports to v-safe indicating a...