Free Republic

Today, the New Civil Liberties Alliance launched a Complaint against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) challenging the agency’s unconstitutional “Consolidated Audit Trail.” The CAT is the largest government-mandated mass collection of personal financial data in American history. Without any statutory authority, SEC is forcing brokers, exchanges, clearing agencies and alternative trading systems to capture and send detailed information on every investor’s trades in U.S. markets to a centralized database, which SEC and private regulators can access forever. NCLA is asking the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to stop this unlawful, unprecedented seizure and mass surveillance...

Why would a COVID lab run by a shady Chinese company be operating in Reedly, CA in the central San Joaquin Valley? The lab, which was supposed to be an empty building, was discovered by Reedly city code enforcement officers when they saw a garden hose attached to the building and investigated.

The email account of the U.S. ambassador to China was hacked by Chinese hackers on a mission to attack several American and global targets in recent weeks, including another account at the State Department, according to reports.China-based hackers breached the email account of US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns as part of a recent targeted intelligence-gathering campaign, three US officials familiar with the matter told CNN.The hackers also accessed the email account of Daniel Kritenbrink, the assistant secretary of State for East Asia, who recently traveled with Secretary of State Antony Blinken to China, the people said.The State Department did...

One year ago, New York City fired over 1,430 city employees who refused to take the COVID vaccine. Several of those workers filed a class action lawsuit against the City. During that lawsuit, the teachers’ attorney introduced a sword deposition stating that, when teachers refused the vaccination, the city flagged them as “problems” and handed their fingerprints over to both the FBI and the New York criminal justice system. Michael Kane, the named plaintiff in Kane v. DeBlasio, has written a post revealing how New York City tried to criminalize teachers who refused to comply with the demand that they...

A report published at the end of May by NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, notes that the official statistics bureau of Norway will soon track most grocery store purchases made in the Scandinavian country, a development that should serve as a warning to Americans about the growing trend in Western nations to expand surveillance and tracking of everyday citizens. In an article titled “Statistics Norway demands to know exactly what Norwegians buy in the grocery store,” reporter Martin Gundersen wrote that Statistics Norway has “ordered the grocery chains NorgesGruppen, Coop, Bunnpris and Rema 1000 to share all their receipt data...

Statistics Norway wants to receive several million daily receipts from food stores, signalling a new era in state data collection. Privacy advocates and the supermarkets themselves are unhappy. People living in Norway are used to big government. But the latest news coming out of Oslo is a surprising new step down the road of data collection that not everyone is happy with. Statistics Norway (SSB) is the state-owned entity responsible for collecting, producing and communicating statistics related to the economy, population and society at national, regional and local levels. Because everything about an individual living in Norway is linked to...

From The Verge: The video was made in late 2016 by Nick Foster, the head of design at X (formerly Google X) and a co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory. The video, shared internally within Google, imagines a future of total data collection, where Google helps nudge users into alignment with their goals, custom-prints personalized devices to collect more data, and even guides the behavior of entire populations to solve global problems like poverty and disease.

One of the attorneys representing the anonymous “whistleblowers” accusing President Donald Trump of conspiring with foreign leaders to interfere in the next U.S. presidential election used to report directly to former director of national intelligence James Clapper. Charles McCullough, an attorney now representing the whistleblowers with Andrew Bakaj, a former staffer for Sens. Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton, was previously the inspector general of the intelligence community (ICIG) at the height of the Clinton email scandal. Now a partner at the Compass Rose Legal Group, McCullough’s professional biography on the law firm’s website notes that he reported directly to Clapper...

Imagine a future where America’s biggest rival--the Chinese Communist Party--holds much of your personal information and data, including your faceprint, voiceprint, and even your DNA. This could soon become a reality. For some of us, it likely is already. Recent news has demonstrated that the Biden Administration along with European countries are concerned about an increasingly aggressive communist China. But much of the focus on China has been on topics such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Uighurs, an oppressed minority population inside China. These are not easy problems to solve, nor do they affect most Americans. Much more concerning...

The Amsterdam-based Market Information Research Foundation (SOMI) sued the video-sharing platform TikTok on behalf of 64,000 Dutch parents, seeking 1.4 billion euros (about $1.7 billion) for allegedly collecting data from millions of children. Meanwhile, TikTok has updated its privacy policy in the United States with regard to collecting personal data such as facial and voice recognition. According to Dutch media, on June 2, SOMI filed the lawsuit in a court in Amsterdam against the Chinese social media app for violating the European Union’s data protection law. The organization claims that TikTok is collecting the data of children without proper permission,...

China has made anal COVID-19 swabs mandatory for all foreign travelers arriving in the country, a report said Wednesday. The government has claimed that such tests provides a higher degree of accuracy than other screening methods for the virus, the Times UK reported... Li Tongzeng, a respiratory disease medic, said that the anal swabs are better because virus traces stay longer in fecal samples than they do in the nose or throat, state media reported... “Some Japanese reported to our embassy in China that they received anal swab tests, which caused a great psychological pain,” Katsunobu Kato, Japan’s chief cabinet...

I love my digital devices, but people keep telling me to worry more about my privacy. "Encrypt your emails!" "Drop Google and use search engines like DuckDuckGo that don't track us!" I probably should. But I don't. I'm lazy, and I like that web companies know me and show me things I'm interested in. I like that they display "restaurants near me." "You do not understand the way that that system is being used against you," says whistleblower Edward Snowden in my new video. Snowden is in exile in Russia because he revealed how the NSA spied on us and...

COVID-19 is so new and information is changing so rapidly that it is difficult to separate fact from fiction and truth from partial truth. Like everyone else, I'm just trying to make sense of the evolving information. Many of us have been monitoring the daily reports measuring the number of deaths relative to the number of cases. We've been treated to crash courses in lay epidemiology via daily press briefings and voluminous articles. We understand that the administration and state governments have been trying to "flatten the curve" of the coronavirus by slowing its spread. The main purpose, as has...

Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos. Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security. His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it...

On Twitter, people shared screenshots of how their photos were tagged. "To be fair, 'one person, beard' is pretty much a spot-on description of me," Zack Whittaker, an editor at TechCrunch, wrote. Facebook automatically scans all photos on the social network with facial- and image-recognition software powered by AI to detect who or what is being pictured. At times, it appeared the AI incorrectly tagged the photo, as in the case of the Fortune reporter Danielle Abril's where the photo description read: "5 people, including Danielle Abril, people smiling, people standing, hoes and indoor." Hopefully there was a gardening tool...

When the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted the online accounts of legally targeted foreigners over a four-year period it also collected the conversations of nine times as many ordinary Internet users, both Americans and non-Americans, according to a probe by The Washington Post. Nearly half of those surveillance files contained names, email addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents, the Post reported in a story posted on its website Saturday night. […] At the same time, the intercepted messages contained material of considerable intelligence value, the Post reported, such as information about...

A coalition of child and consumer advocacy groups on Wednesday accused Facebook of illegally collecting data on children with its new Messenger Kids app. In a complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and other organizations argued that the service’s disclosures about its privacy practices are overly vague, allowing Facebook to share children’s data with third parties. The groups allege that Messenger Kids is in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) because it doesn’t ensure that the adult giving a child permission to use the app is actually the...

It's 21 years old, but interesting to see what was being proposed to the government as a way of collecting massive amounts of data and automatically processing it. This was before nav units in cars were common, and portable interaction was normal. Another earlier video, our first home production, describes more nitty-gritty data collection by topic in various languages, with people able to correct and adjust confidence in the collected data. PLUM is referenced in the video above.PLUM - Probabilistic Language Understanding ModelAnd the government has now had two decades to refine their massive data collection techniques.

In an Internet of Things future, everything from your toothbrush to your car could be collecting data on you -- about your personal habits as well as the way your business works. But with 50 billion objects set to come online by 2020, who will really own that goldmine of information? Data gathered by IoT sensors and systems can pass through any number of hands -- those of the end-user that creates it, or of the company whose hardware collects it, even the software business the processes it, and the app maker that shares it, and all of them may...

More and more people are having the disturbing experience of seeing their doctors spend more time pecking at a computer keyboard than examining them. The doctors are entering data into their patients’ electronic health records (EHRs) in compliance with federal rules introduced a few years ago. EHRs drive doctors crazy. Their own experience tells them that electronic recordkeeping interferes with care, by taking time away from patients. In a survey conducted by the Deloitte consulting group, three of four doctors said EHRs are not worth the cost. The influential RAND Corporation, which had long endorsed EHRs, reported in 2013 that...