Free Republic

Fielding hundreds of angry calls a day. Thousands of people leaving irate voicemails. One caller threatening to shoot up GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger's Washington, DC office. These are just some of the things Kinzinger's congressional staffers have had to deal with in recent months as a result of his participation in the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. Maura Gillespie, Kinzinger's deputy chief of staff, told Insider that since the congressman started working on the January 6 committee, his office has had to contact US Capitol Police several times to report threats against the congressman. The phone calls...

The White House on Wednesday defended the idea of giving smartphones to illegal border crossers, to help them stay in touch with ICE officials. White House press secretary Jen Psaki appeared indignant after Fox News reporter Peter Doocy questioned her about the program, detailed recently in their reporting. “I think you, of all people, since you’ve asked me a range of questions on this topic over time, would recognize that we need to take steps to ensure that we know where individuals are and we can track, and we can check in with then,” she replied. Psaki said the phones...

“You will own nothing, and you will be happy.” The mantra of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution for the globalist elites at the World Economic Forum has always been a challenging concept for most Americans to fully grasp. Our nation was built on the precepts of freedom, capitalism, and property ownership, so when the WEF’s mantra creeps into a conversation it is often met by scowls and consternation. Well, not everyone balks. Some fall in line like good little lemmings. Neo-Marxists in America adopted the WEF’s slogan faster than the Che Guevara t-shirts they used to love. Those were replaced...

President Biden phoned the parents of Trevor Reed, a former U.S. Marine detained in Russia, on Tuesday to “reiterate his commitment to doing everything he can to bring their son home,” according to a White House official. The phone call came after the family had unsuccessfully sought a meeting with Biden during his trip to Fort Worth, Texas, on Tuesday for an event focused on veterans health care. “After his event in Fort Worth, the President called Joey and Paula Reed to reiterate his commitment to doing everything he can to bring their son home, to staying in close touch...

Mobile Attacker’s Mindset Series – Part II Evaluating how attackers operate when there are no rules leads to discoveries of advanced detection and response mechanisms. ZecOps is proudly researching scenarios of attacks and sharing the information publicly for the benefit of all the mobile defenders out there. iOs persistence is presumed to be the hardest bug to find. The attack surface is somewhat limited and constantly analyzed by Apple’s security teams. Creativity is a key element of the hacker’s mindset. Persistence can be hard if the attackers play by the rules. As you may have guessed it already – attackers...

Canada’s federal government admitted to secretly surveilling its population’s movements during the COVID-19 lockdown by tracking 33 million phones.The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) clandestinely tracked the devices to assess “the public’s responsiveness during lockdown measures,” the agency acknowledged last week, according to Blacklock’s Reporter, which first reported the disclosure.Canada’s entire population totals 38 million, according to Statistics Canada.“Evidence is coming in from many sources, from countries around the world, that what was seen as a huge surveillance surge — post 9/11 — is now completely upstaged by pandemic surveillance,” David Lyon, author of “Pandemic Surveillance” and the former...

Lithuania’s defence ministry recommended that consumers avoid buying Chinese mobile phones and advised people to throw away the ones they have now after a government report found the devices had built-in censorship capabilities. Flagship phones sold in Europe by China’s smartphone giant Xiaomi Corp have a built-in ability to detect and censor terms such as “Free Tibet”, “Long live Taiwan independence” or “democracy movement”, Lithuania’s state-run cybersecurity body said on Tuesday (Sept 21). The capability in Xiaomi’s Mi 10T 5G phone software had been turned off for the “European Union region”, but can be turned on remotely at any time,...

VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) — Lithuanian cybersecurity experts are urging the country’s government agencies to abandon the use of Chinese-made smartphones after an investigation identified security vulnerabilities and censorship concerns with certain devices. Lithuania’s National Cyber Security Center said it found four major cybersecurity risks for devices made by Huawei and Xiaomi, including two relating to pre-installed apps and one involving personal data leakage, and warned against using these two brands. There’s also the risk of possible restrictions on freedom of expression with Xiaomi phones, which contain a content-filtering feature for 449 keywords or groups of keywords in Chinese characters. The...

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...

Care to take a 360-degree look at what appear to be Samsung's latest foldable phones, smartwatches and earbuds? Well-known Twitter tipster Evan Blass is happy to oblige. Blass, whose Twitter handle is @evleaks, served up some delicious animated GIFs for Samsung fans Friday night, along with the simple note "#GalaxyUnpacked 11 August 2021." That would suggest, of course, that Samsung plans to tout the featured gadgets at an Unpacked event next month. The event would follow Unpacked shindigs that went down in April, March and January. The snarfable GIFs posted by Blass appear to show the rumored Galaxy Z Fold...

Massachusetts state officials recently announced the launch of the “voluntary” MassNotify app, which monitors the spread of COVID-19 in the state. The only problem is the app appears to be installing itself on residents’ and their kids’ smartphones, unbeknownst to users, and without their consent. The news creates a disturbing new dimension to privacy laws and even private property concerns as hundreds of users have reported their Android phones have had the app surreptitiously installed, without their prior knowledge. “Thank you MA/Google for silently installing #MassNotify on my phone without consent. But I have a request: Can you also silently...

Although the insecure algorithms are still implemented in modern mobile phones, the researchers do not expect them to pose a significant threat to users. Credit: RUB, Marquard ================================================================================== The encryption algorithm GEA-1 was implemented in mobile phones in the 1990s to encrypt data connections. Since then, it has been kept secret. Now, a research team from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), together with colleagues from France and Norway, has analyzed the algorithm and has come to the following conclusion: GEA-1 is so easy to break that it must be a deliberately weak encryption that was built in as a backdoor. Although the...

Walmart will give 740,000 employees free Samsung smartphones by the end of the year so they can use a new app to manage schedules, the company announced Thursday. Employees will only be able to use work features on the new Me@Walmart while on the clock, the company said. "The idea of this app started as a way to manage associates' schedules and has grown into our single in-store app for U.S. associates, saving them time and helping them be more efficient," the company said. Earlier this year, Walmart announced pay increases for nearly a third of its U.S. workforce of...

The schemes of Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler are predictable. As we said three months ago, Robert Mueller would not be allowed to testify without a handler. Small group participant Aaron Zebly will now join Mueller for his testimony. This has always been the plan, but strategically announced today. Remember, Mueller’s team is working closely with Nadler’s team; they are part of the same purpose. They are all part of the same network. The impeachment objective is a group effort from inside government & outside (Lawfare). These are not separate groups. The pre-planning was why Chairman Nadler hired...

In May 2016, a student enrolled in a high-school in Shelbyville, Texas, consented to having his phone searched by one of the district’s school resource officers. Looking for evidence of a romantic relationship between the student and a teacher, the officer plugged the phone into a Cellebrite UFED to recover deleted messages from the phone. According to the arrest affidavit, investigators discovered the student and teacher frequently messaged each other, “I love you.” Two days later, the teacher was booked into the county jail for sexual assault of a child. The Cellebrite used to gather evidence in that case was...

Ad giant sued after mobile allowances eaten by hidden transfers Google on Thursday was sued for allegedly stealing Android users' cellular data allowances though unapproved, undisclosed transmissions to the web giant's servers. "Google’s misappropriation of Plaintiffs’ cellular data allowances through passive transfers occurs in the background, does not result from Plaintiffs’ direct engagement with Google’s apps and properties on their devices, and happens without Plaintiffs’ consent." The device, stationary, with all apps closed, transferred data to Google about 16 times an hour, or about 389 times in 24 hours. Assuming even half of that data is outgoing, Google would receive...

An official who worked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation wrote in a recently released email that he or she was in possession of an iPhone belonging to Lisa Page three days after the former FBI lawyer’s last day on the job and at a time when the device was thought to have been lost. The special counsel’s office (SCO) and the Justice Department previously claimed to have no documents to show who handled Page’s iPhone after she turned it in on July 14, 2017, or who improperly wiped it two weeks later, before it could be checked for...

In the U.S., at least three of every four people now own a smartphone. And one estimate suggests that Americans touch their mobile devices more than 2,600 times a day on average. But what do all those pings and buzzes, scrolls and swipes actually add up to?.. Initial data from a $300-million study by the National Institutes of Health, for example, now provides evidence that a child's brain may indeed develop differently with heavy use of digital devices. Those of us whose brains matured before the first iPhone came to market in 2007 may also be vulnerable to mental changes....

On Saturday, President Trump reacted to news that Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team wiped their phones clean before turning the devices over to investigators. Recently released documents suggest the Muller team engaged in massive evidence destruction while under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General. At least 15 phones used by Mueller's team of investigators were 'accidentally' wiped clean, the new documents reveal. A key tactic used by the Mueller team to destroy the evidence was to place the phones on airplane mode, lock them, and then claim not to remember the password. "Phone was...

NEWS: At least 27 phones used by the Mueller team were wiped before they could be checked for records. Some phones just wiped themselves, in other cases there was mass password amnesia that required resets. Andrew Weismann wiped two of his three Special Counsel's Office phones. He wiped one by accident. He wiped the other by entering the wrong password too many times. Has anyone ever wiped their phone by accident? Asking for a friend. UPDATE: Counting the phones which were "reassigned," the Special Counsel's Office wiped 31 phones before they could be checked for records. A phone belonging to...