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Israel accused of planting mysterious spy devices near the White House

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Daniel Lippman
Politico
(September 12, 2019)

The U.S. government concluded within the past two years that Israel was most likely behind the placement of cellphone surveillance devices that were found near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington, according to three former senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.

But unlike most other occasions when flagrant incidents of foreign spying have been discovered on American soil, the Trump administration did not rebuke the Israeli government, and there were no consequences for Israel’s behavior, one of the former officials said.

The miniature surveillance devices, colloquially known as “StingRays,” mimic regular cell towers to fool cellphones into giving them their locations and identity information. Formally called international mobile subscriber identity-catchers or IMSI-catchers, they also can capture the contents of calls and data use.

The devices were likely intended to spy on President Donald Trump, one of the former officials said, as well as his top aides and closest associates — though it’s not clear whether the Israeli efforts were successful.

Trump is reputed to be lax in observing White House security protocols. POLITICO reported in May 2018 that the president often used an insufficiently secured cellphone to communicate with friends and confidants. The New York Times subsequently reported in October 2018 that “Chinese spies are often listening” to Trump’s cellphone calls, prompting the president to slam the story as “so incorrect I do not have time here to correct it.” (A former official said Trump has had his cellphone hardened against intrusion.)

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Amazon’s Ring Is a Perfect Storm of Privacy Threats

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Matthew Guariglia
Electronic Frontier Foundation
(August 21, 2019)

Doors across the United States are now fitted with Amazon’s Ring, a combination doorbell-security camera that records and transmits video straight to users’ phones, to Amazon’s cloud—and often to the local police department. By sending photos and alerts every time the camera detects motion or someone rings the doorbell, the app can create an illusion of a household under siege. It turns what seems like a perfectly safe neighborhood into a source of anxiety and fear. This raises the question: do you really need Ring, or have Amazon and the police misled you into thinking that you do?

Recent reports show that Ring has partnered with police departments across the country to hawk this new surveillance system—going so far as to draft press statements and social media posts for police to promote Ring cameras. This creates a vicious cycle in which police promote the adoption of Ring, Ring terrifies people into thinking their homes are in danger, and then Amazon sells more cameras.

Map of Ring partnerships with police compiled by Shreyas Gandlur. See full screen. 

How Ring Surveils and Frightens Residents

Even though government statistics show that crime in the United States has been steadily decreasing for decades, people’s perception of crime and danger in their communities often conflict with the data. Vendors prey on these fears by creating products that inflame our greatest anxieties about crime.

Ring works by sending notifications to a person’s phone every time the doorbell rings or motion near the door is detected. With every update, Ring turns the delivery person or census-taker innocently standing on at the door into a potential criminal.

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Documents

An FBI Field Report on the Radical “Resistance”

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American Left Linked to Islamic State

Editor’s Note: This Federal Bureau of Investigation Field Report was produced in 2017 and originally appeared in the appendices of Edward Klein’s All Out War: The Plot to Destroy Trump (Regnery Publishing, 2017).

CONFIDENTIAL
Report to the Office of Director FBI And Field Offices

Confidential

Office of Director and Field Offices Informational Report
Delivered July 11, 2017

Summary

Task force covered G-20 meeting in Hamburg studied intel from local authorities, Interpol and other assets, determined that as assumed U.S. based anarchist/radical groups had traveled to Germany and took part in the violence. There is also evidence of meetings between these individuals and associates of ISIS. There is clearly overwhelming evidence that there are growing ties between U.S. radials and the Islamic State as well as several offshoots and splinter group affiliates.

There is an urgent need to closely surveil the identified individuals.

Continue reading An FBI Field Report on the Radical “Resistance” →

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Videos

Ford v. Kavanaugh: CIA False Dialectic? (Video)

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George Webb

The SCOTUS Senate Hearings are not about which witness is telling the truth, argues George Webb, but rather a classic “divide and conquer” CIA ploy to distract public opinion from the issue of illegal government spying (which Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh vigorously defends) and against Trump’s “Red Wave” in the run up to the 2018 Midterm Election.

H/t Prof. Darrell Hamamoto

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Sandy Hook Promise Rolls Out Nationwide School Surveillance Program

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Multimillion Dollar Charity Aligned with US Secret Service

By James F. Tracy

Sandy Hook Promise, the multi-million dollar 501(c)3 predicated on the Sandy Hook Massacre event, is actively partnering with school districts throughout the United States to institute a nationwide, extralegal intelligence-gathering system targeting students at taxpayer-funded public schools.

The trade-marked “‘Know the Signs’ prevention programs” feature the “Say Something Anonymous Reporting System,” which encourages minor students and school staff whose institutions have partnered with Sandy Hook Promise (SHP) to divulge observational information directly to an SHP-operated “crisis center” on peers they suspect of being future “active shooters,” or who may otherwise be perceived as “at-risk of hurting themselves and others.”

SHP’s other trade-marked “violence prevention programs” include “Say Something,” “Start With Hello,” “Signs of Suicide,” and “Safety Assessment & Intervention.”

The Broward County School Board in South Florida, led by the former chief administrative officer of Chicago Public Schools Robert W. Runcie, has already signed a three year contract with SHP to implement the Say Something Reporting System across one of the largest school districts in the state.

Continue reading Sandy Hook Promise Rolls Out Nationwide School Surveillance Program →

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The CIA and the Media

The CIA and the Media: Historical Fact #57

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Editor’s Note: In August 2015 MHB published, “The CIA and the Media: 50 Historical Facts The World Needs to Know.” The present series seeks to augment this initial article with several dozen additional facts and observations on the relationship between the US intelligence community, the mass media, and public opinion.

Image Credit: Reuters

Following his successful 1998 campaign to be elected Minnesota’s 38th governor former professional wrestler, media personality and Mayor of Brooklyn Park Minnesota Jesse Ventura explains how he was interrogated at length by over twenty CIA agents seeking to assess the ins and outs of his populist political platform.

“The first inkling that certain people inside the federal government were out to keep an eye on me came not long after I took office,” Ventura recalls.

I was “asked” to attend a meeting in the basement of the Capitol building at a time when the State Legislature was not in session. I was informed that the Central Intelligence Agency was conducting a training exercise that they hoped I’d be willing to participate in … I was placed in the middle of a big circle of chairs, and they all sat there staring at me with notebooks on their laps … They all focused on how we campaigned, how we achieved what we did, and did I think we truly could win when we went into the campaign. Basically, how had the independent wrestler candidate pulled this off?”

Jesse Ventura and Dick Russell, American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies and More Dirty Lies the Government Tells Us, New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2010, xi, xii.

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Guest Posts

“Want To Freak Yourself Out?” Here Is All The Personal Data That Facebook/Google Collect

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 By Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
03/27/2018

The Cambridge Analytica scandal was never really about Cambridge Analytica.

As we’ve pointed out, neither Facebook nor Cambridge Analytica have been accused of doing anything explicitly illegal (though one could be forgiven for believing they had, based on the number of lawsuits and official investigations that have been announced).

Instead, the backlash to these revelations – which has been justifiably focused on Facebook – is so severe because the public has been forced to confront for the first time something that many had previously written off as an immutable certainty: That Facebook, Google and the rest of the tech behemoths store reams of personal data, essentially logging everything we do.

Continue reading “Want To Freak Yourself Out?” Here Is All The Personal Data That Facebook/Google Collect →

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