Free Republic

Reports that the Venezuelan intelligence agency is targeting and spying on the Venezuelan Jewish community as well as on Venezuelan companies and organizations with ties to Israel is deeply troubling, asserted the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). “We are deeply troubled by a recent news report alleging that the Venezuelan Intelligence Service (SEBIN) is spying on the Venezuelan Jewish community,” said ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman. “Venezuela under the regime of Hugo Chavez has a history of harassing the Jewish community in that country,” he said. “It is chilling to read reports that the SEBIN received instructions to carry out clandestine...

A bipartisan House bill introduced this week, HR 8250, would require operating system providers to verify the age of every user who sets up an account or uses an operating system, shifting age-checking obligations away from individual apps and onto platform owners such as mobile and computer operating system companies.The Parents Decide Act was introduced by Rep. Josh Gottheimer and Rep. Elise Stefanik.“With each passing day, the Internet is becoming more and more treacherous for our kids,” Gottheimer said. “We’re not just talking about social media anymore — we’re talking about artificial intelligence and platforms that are shaping how our...

A Russian spy ship parked in international waters off Kauai for several days has delayed a Missile Defense Agency missile test, officials said. U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor said in a statement that it “is aware of the Russian vessel operating in international waters in the vicinity of Hawaii, and will continue to track it through the duration of its time here. Through maritime patrol aircraft, surface ships and joint capabilities, we can closely monitor all vessels in the Indo-Pacific area of operations.” It was not immediately clear if the Russian vessel is broadcasting an automatic identification system, or...

A law that became the subject of scrutiny following surveillance on 2016 Trump campaign aide Carter Page is up for renewal with an April 20 deadline, and the debate is creating unusual battle lines. The debate centers on whether reforms should be made to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702, or if there should be a “clean” extension of the law. FISA allows for the federal government to gather foreign intelligence, but some critics have warned that it opens the door for Americans to be spied on in the process. President Donald Trump is asking for a “clean...

nti-liberty/gun cracktivists find themselves stuck on recycling old, failed narratives because there is really nothing new in the distortions and lies they tell in trying to obliterate the Second Amendment. Among those failed narratives is microstamping, a nonsensical measure about which I last wrote in Microstamping And Zombies, 2024 in June of 2024 at my home blog. Microstamping is laser engraving a unique, identifying code on the tips of firing pins which will “stamp” that code—letters, numbers, etc—on the primers of fired cases. Some microstamping schemes also demand a second stamp elsewhere on a fired case. California has always been...

Recently, a researcher working for the large AI company Anthropic was sitting in a park near its San Francisco headquarters, enjoying a lunchtime sandwich. Scrolling on his phone, he suddenly received an email that must have instantly ruined his appetite. It was from a new AI model the company was testing: a program that was meant to have no access to the internet, let alone be able to send emails. Chillingly, the AI informed the researcher that it had successfully broken its way out of its digital 'sandbox' – a supposedly secure enclosure used to test potentially dangerous software without...

Mexico now requires all cell phone users to register with CURP and photo ID by June 2026. Learn how expats can comply, registration deadlines, and what happens if you don't register. If you have a Mexican cell phone number, you need to pay attention. Starting January 9, 2026, Mexico now requires all cell phone lines to be linked to official identification. This new mandate affects an estimated 137 million mobile lines across the country—and that includes the phones of American and Canadian expats living in Mexico. If you fail to register your line by the deadline, your cell phone service...

A new law requires new cars to include some rear seating, so to speak, for Big Brother. According to reports such as this one in Blaze Media, the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act requires that: “Car manufacturers will need to comply with new AI tracking technology requirements by the end of the year. The add-ons will place cameras pointed directly at the driver's face to monitor eye movements, among other bodily functions.” The bill is ostensibly intended to "ensure the prevention of alcohol-impaired driving fatalities” via advanced prevention technology that "must be standard equipment in all new passenger motor...

The Authentication LayerWhy Digital ID Is the Hill to Die OnA friend and I got into it recently. He’s smart, freedom-minded, and totally gets the danger of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). Expiring money, programmable control, carbon budgets - he sees most of the expanding tyranny clearly. And yet he dismisses Digital ID as a distraction. When I try to make the case that digital ID is the gateway to the gulag in the metaverse, he demands I name ONE thing Digital ID gives the government that they can’t already do.My answer: it enables CBDC.Of course, governments have already encroached...

Your next car purchase comes with an unwelcome passenger: a federal mandate requiring surveillance technology that monitors your every blink, glance, and head nod. Thanks to Section 24220 of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, NHTSA must finalize rules forcing all new passenger vehicles to include “advanced impaired driving prevention technology”—essentially turning your dashboard into a judgment-free zone that’s anything but judgment-free. The Technology That’s Watching Infrared cameras and sensors create a constant biometric assessment of driver alertness and sobriety. The tech involves infrared cameras mounted on steering columns or A-pillars, tracking eye movement, pupil dilation, and drowsiness patterns....

Attack infrastructure attributed to 'several Iran-nexus threat actors'Multiple Iranian hacking crews have been targeting internet-connected surveillance cameras across Israel and other Middle Eastern countries since the war started on February 28, according to Check Point security researchers. The Tel Aviv-based security shop has tracked "hundreds" of attempts to exploit a handful of bugs in IP cameras made by two manufacturers, Hikvision and Dahua, according to Sergey Shykevich, threat intelligence group manager at Check Point Research, in a conversation with El Reg. The countries targeted in these digital intrusion attempts - Israel, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE, Cyprus, and Lebanon...

Iran built the most comprehensive civilian surveillance network in the Middle East. Cameras on every street. Facial recognition at universities. License plate readers that automatically fined women for removing their hijab in their own cars. A mobile app called Nazer that let citizens report uncovered women. Drones at beaches. The infrastructure that killed Mahsa Amini in September 2022 and crushed the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising that followed. Israel hacked nearly all of it.

EU Europe is increasingly abandoning a civilized approach to dissenting opinions. The raid on the Paris offices of Elon Musk’s company X appears to be just the tip of the iceberg. Today, those who resist are being attacked on multiple levels, while those who submit are largely spared. It is time to increase pressure on Brussels. Elon Musk’s communications platform X has become caught between systemic fronts. On one side stands the American understanding of free speech, which has experienced a political revival under Donald Trump’s new presidency. On the other, an increasingly repressive EU control regime is eroding the...

A 30-second ad from Ring stood out among Sunday’s glut of Super Bowl commercials shilling myriad forms of artificial intelligence, serving as a frightening reminder of how ubiquitous surveillance cameras have become amid our diminishing privacy. After all, if the “Search Party” function built into the doorbell camera’s app can be used to find a lost dog, as Sunday night’s ad emphasized, there’s little to stop it from being used to track people. The doorbell camera’s feature is especially worrisome now as the government encroaches on our civil liberties. Pointing out the potential of the Amazon-owned Ring being used to...

This piece is premised on the book American Stasi, available free at AmericanStasi.com, and at all major booksellers. The book attempts to show that the nations of the West have all deployed East German Stasi-like ground surveillance in their communities, to monitor all the citizens, and make sure none can ever rise high enough in government to see the rampant fraud and abuse. The surveillance is most notable through its vehicular units, which follow established procedures, and which you can even see on Google Streetview, as they perform surveillance on the Google car as it moves through communities. Here we...

January 21, 2022 With inflation at a record high, millions of its citizens fleeing the country, and a political opposition recognized by most Western democracies as the legitimate government of Venezuela, the regime of Nicolás Maduro seemed to be on the brink of collapse in 2019. But Maduro regime survived, thanks to a number of factors — among them the external support it received from malign state actors such as Russia and China. Moscow and Beijing never wavered in their political support of the Venezuelan regime, or of Maduro himself, including by refusing to recognize the constitutionally mandated interim presidency...

A retired San Francisco schoolteacher is accusing the city of running a “Big Brother” surveillance dragnet that illegally tracks everyday drivers. Michael Moore, a retired public school teacher, filed a federal class-action lawsuit Monday alleging sweeping Fourth Amendment violations. Moore says the city’s Flock license-plate reader system unlawfully monitors his movements as he drives to stores, his sons’ schools and family gatherings — all without a warrant or probable cause. San Francisco has installed roughly 450 to nearly 500 Flock cameras along major roadways, making it “functionally impossible” to drive anywhere in the city without having your license plate photographed,...

Gary D. Barnett warns that humanity is being taken over through digitisation, digital ID, algorithmic confinement and technocratic incarceration, which will lead to the end of freedom and property. The transformation of mankind involves the intentional fusing of human and machine through neuroscientific nanoscale brain-computer interfacing, with methods including “vaccines,” geoengineering, mRNA platforms and precision medicine. The only solution to stop this technological transhuman invasion, he writes, is through education, exposure and mass non-compliance. (snip) I do not know how many more times I will have to bring up the subject of the AI takeover; digitisation, digital ID, algorithmic confinement...

Over a decade ago, Google showed off a pair of smart spectacles called Google Glass, sparking a major ethical debate over wearables being used to covertly film people without their permission. At the time, the outrage was enshrined by the derogatory neologism “glasshole,” meaning a Google Glass wearer who was accused of having little regard for the privacy of those around them. A seeming eternity later, Meta has attempted to revive the idea with its Ray-Ban Meta glasses. While it’s arguably a significant technological leap over Google’s early forays, the debate has seemingly remained the same. Case in point, as...

Hours before the sun rose on Dallas police Chief Daniel Comeaux’s first day on the job, an elderly man in a wheelchair was shot dead near Fair Park. Two days later, the new chief stood among a cluster of officers outside the suspected gunman’s home in west Oak Cliff. He was impressed by one tool the investigators had used to arrive there: the network of license plate-reading cameras scattered across the city. “I was like, ‘Alright,’” Comeaux recalled saying, referencing the April case months later in an episode of Bridging the Divide, the Assist the Officer Foundation’s podcast, “‘explain this...