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The secretive federal court that approved the surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page on Tuesday accused FBI agents of creating a misleading impression about their basis for requesting a warrant and ordered the bureau to overhaul its process. In a blistering order, a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) accused the bureau of providing false information and withholding materials that would have undercut its four surveillance applications. "The FBI's handling of the Carter Page applications, as portrayed in the OIG report, was antithetical to the heightened duty of candor described above," Rosemary Collyer, presiding judge with...

Fanatics can justify any action, and House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff this week demonstrated where that mindset leads. In his rush to paint Donald Trump as a lawbreaker, Mr. Schiff has himself trampled law and responsibility. That’s the bottom line in Mr. Schiff’s stunning decision to subpoena the phone records of Rudy Giuliani and others. Mr. Schiff divulged the phone logs this week in his Ukraine report, thereby revealing details about the communications of Trump attorneys Jay Sekulow and Mr. Giuliani, ranking Intelligence Committee member Devin Nunes, reporter John Solomon and others. The media is treating this as a victory,...

CNN has updated its report that President Trump continues to use his personal cell phone to make calls, despite repeated concerns expressed by his staff that such phone calls leave the president vulnerable to surveillance by foreign governments.  In a tweet on Saturday, President Trump called upon "Fake News" CNN to retract the story that he describes as "totally false information and reporting." Trump also tweeted that he hasn't "had a personal cell phone for years" and only uses "government approved and issued phones."  Fake News @CNN is reporting that I am “still using personal cell phone for calls despite...

An overview of modern surveillance technology including the antennas done. Presentation by wireless expert Kent Britain, WA5VJB

World-first technology to catch drivers using phones illegally is being introduced in NSW ahead of the rest of the country. Here are the mobile phone fines in each state. Drivers using a mobile phone illegally have a greater chance of getting caught from today, as NSW becomes the first place in the world to introduce mobile phone detection cameras – and other Australian states are poised to follow. A mix of 10 fixed and portable mobile phone detection cameras will be installed in NSW from today (1 December 2019); another 35 are planned over the next four years. During a...

Search giant is amassing health records from Ascension facilities in 21 states; patients not yet informed Google is engaged with one of the country’s largest health-care systems to collect and crunch the detailed personal health information of millions of Americans across 21 states.The initiative, code-named “Project Nightingale,” appears to be the largest in a series of efforts by Silicon Valley giants to gain access to personal health data and establish a toehold in the massive health-care industry. Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are also aggressively pushing into health care, though they haven’t yet struck deals of this scope.Google began the effort in secret last year with...

Washington (CNN)An FBI official is under criminal investigation after allegedly altering a document related to 2016 surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser, several people briefed on the matter told CNN.

Uber plans to record audio during rides in the United States as part of a new security feature, in its latest push to protect riders and drivers amid rising safety concerns. The feature, which is first to be piloted in some Latin American cities next month, allows users to opt in to activate an audio recording on any trip or all trips, according to internal communications viewed by The Washington Post and confirmed by Uber. In markets where it’s available, users would probably be given a blanket warning that trips are subject to recording — and that the feature will...

Police officers who download videos captured by homeowners’ Ring doorbell cameras can keep them forever and share them with whomever they’d like without providing evidence of a crime, the Amazon-owned firm told a lawmaker this month. More than 600 police forces across the country have entered into partnerships with the camera giant, allowing them to quickly request and download video recorded by Ring’s motion-detecting, Internet-connected cameras inside and around Americans’ homes. The company says that the videos can be a critical tool in helping law enforcement investigate crimes such as trespassing, burglary and package theft, and that homeowners are free...

The helicopter flying at the Second Amendment rally at the Capitol in D.C., was there to surveil the crowd with aerial photography. At the 2019 rally for the Second Amendment on the west lawn of the Capitol, in Washington, D.C. about 2,000 freedom activists were listening to speakers orate about the necessity of restoring the Second Amendment. Most attendees noticed a helicopter orbit around the capitol a couple of times, starting around 2:30, as I recall. Several people thought it might be President Trump having a look at the crowd. I did not think so. The helicopter was too small...

To go to a zoo and see the gorillas in socialist China, you've got some pre-conditions to fulfill first. You now have to give them a print of your face. And if you're a passholder, you'd better give it or else, because No Refunds.That's what's prompted some pushback from a guy in Hangzhou, who's launched what's a probably hopeless lawsuit to protest the Orwellian practice, which falls into the same sort of doings that come with China's social credit system.  According to the Wall Street Journal: BEIJING—A Chinese law professor has raised a rare legal challenge over how facial-recognition technology is deployed in a...

When Christian Chase wants to take a bathroom break at his high school, he can't just raise his hand. Instead, the 17-year-old senior makes a special request on his school-issued Chromebook computer. A teacher approves it pending any red flags in the system, such as another student he should avoid out in the hall at the same time, then logs him back in on his return. If he were out of class for more than a set amount of time, the application would summon an administrator to check on him. Heritage High School in Loudoun County, Virginia, introduced the software,...

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the USA PATRIOT Act - a textbook example of how the United States federal government expands its power. The American public largely accepts the USA PATRIOT Act as a part of civic life as immutable, perhaps even more so than the Bill of Rights. However, this act – passed in the dead of night, with little to no oversight, in a panic after the biggest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor – is not only novel, it is also fundamentally opposed to virtually every principle on which the United States of America was founded....

HUGE! FBI Employees Conducted 3.1 Million Questionable and Illicit Searches, Including Searches on US Citizens in 2017-2018 According to a new declassified ruling FBI employees abused NSA mass surveillance data in 2017 and 2018. In 2017 FBI employees conducted over 3.1 million searches from the NSA database including searching activities of US citizens.Under current FBI rules surveillance data can only be searched if there is reasonable suspicion of crimes having taken place or clear risks to national security. But FBI employees and even contractors were searching the database to see what information they could find on U.S. citizens.The bureau is...

According to a new declassified ruling from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), FBI personnel systematically abused National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance data in both 2017 and 2018. The 138-page ruling, which dates back to October 2018, was only unsealed 12 months later in October 2019. It offers a rare look at how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been abusing the constitutional privacy rights of U.S. citizens with alarming regularity. The court ruling is also a stinging rebuke to the FBI’s overreach of its ability to search surveillance intelligence databases. Key elements of the FISA court...

Last week House Democrats called in fired US Ambassador Marie Yovanovich to testify in their sham impeachment proceedings. Ambassador Yovanovich is a noted Trump-hater who blocked Ukrainian officials from traveling to the United States to hand over evidence of Obama misconduct during the 2016 election to President Trump. Yovanovich was US ambassador to Ukraine during the 2016 election when the Ukrainian government was colluding with the DNC and Hillary Campaign to undermine the US presidential election. Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenkoko told journalists in March that Yovanovitch gave him a “do not prosecute” list during their first meeting. The president...

FBI personnel improperly searched an expansive foreign surveillance database for tens of thousands of phone numbers and/or email addresses that included those of Americans—in violation of rules put in place to protect Americans’ constitutional rights, according to a court ruling. “The FBI procedures, as implemented, have involved a large number of unjustified queries conducted to retrieve information about U.S. persons,” said James Boasberg, judge on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in an Oct. 18, 2018 ruling (pdf) that was released with redactions on Tuesday. The database aggregates data collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act...

DNI Declassifies FISA Judge James Boasberg 2018 Ruling – FBI Conducted “Tens of Thousands” of Unauthorized NSA Database Queries… Posted on October 8, 2019 by sundance There is a lot to unpack in a decision today by the Director of National Intelligence to declassify (with redactions) a 2018 FISA court ruling about ongoing unauthorized database search queries by FBI agents/”contractors” in the period covering 2017/2018.BACKGROUND: In April 2017 the DNI released a FISA report written by Presiding Judge Rosemary Collery that showed massive abuse, via unauthorized searches of the NSA database, in the period of November 2015 through May 2016. Judge Collyer’s report specifically identified search query increases...

* China's National Reform and Development Commission has completed its initial assessments, which will be used to label firms excellent, good, fair or poor. * Foreign firms fear they will be targeted in the event of a trade dispute or to give domestic firms a commercial advantage. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ China is moving forward rapidly its plans for a controversial social credit rating system that will include 33 million companies, raising fears of reprisals among foreign firms as Beijing seeks to extend its control over the business environment in the country. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) is pushing ahead with...

There exists in China a “Social Credit” system, which is used to decide an individual's status as regards the state. This system works much like a traditional credit score does in the way of permitting you credit to make purchases. Each individual is granted an original score of 1000, and loses points for each social “offense.” Social score decides what you can do and even what you can be punished for. First implementation began in 2014 and it is expected to be fully functional by 2020. “Social Credit” information shall be used, among other things, to check who will be...