Tag Archives: NSA

realizethelies 6:02 pm on August 24, 2022
Tags: Amazon, , , NSA, Ring Doorbell camera   

Ring Cameras Amassing Info On Users…And Their Neighbors

About 18% of Americans now own a video doorbell. That means a significant and growing slice of American neighborhoods are under a form of intermittent surveillance. If the surveillance video and associated data were the exclusive property of individual homeowners, it might not be of much concern. 

However, that’s not the case. For example, Ring, the company behind the top-selling brand, maintains a vast database on its users and their cameras. Ring is an Amazon subsidiary, thanks to the tech giant’s 2018 purchase of the company for over $1 billion.

Ring says it doesn’t sell its customers data, but sometimes it gives it away for free — to the police. In the first half of 2022 alone, Ring fielded more than 3,500 requests from law enforcement agencies. 

Ring keeps plenty of info that you’d expect them to have. According to Wired magazine:

“Ring gets your name, phone number, email and postal address, and any other information you provide to it—such as payment information or your social media handles if you link your Ring account to Facebook, for instance. The company also gets information about your Wi-Fi network and its signal strength, and it knows what you ‘ve named your camera “

Maybe you’ve opted against buying a Ring doorbell out of privacy concerns. That’s fine, but don’t forget that your neighbor’s Ring camera may be watching you — or even listening to you. Tests have found Ring cameras can record audio from 20 feet away.

If you’re strolling by a Ring-equipped house and talking to someone, you and your conversation could be in Ring’s database. The same is true if you’re on your own property and you’re close enough to a neighbor’s camera and microphone.

This isn’t just a question of whether you trust Amazon and Ring not to misuse your video, audio and associated data. There’s always the chance that your info could be hacked by common criminals — or the ones who work for the government.

Speaking of the latter, earlier this year, Amazon was awarded a $10 billion renewal of a secret NSA contract.

Via :Zerohedge

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realizethelies 5:37 pm on August 24, 2022
Tags: , , , Illegal Spying, NSA, Senate intelligence comitee, Warantless surveillance   

Declassified :CIA collecting data on American citizens, No accountability As usual.

The Central Intelligence Agency has been collecting American’s private data without any oversight or even the minimal legal safeguards that apply to the NSA and FBI, an unconstitutional affront to our civil liberties.

According to a declassified report released by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), the CIA’s surveillance program is reminiscent of the mass surveillance programs conducted by the NSA, though the details released thus far paint a disturbing picture of potential wide-scale violations of people’s privacy.

The CIA program has apparently been conducted outside the statutory reforms and oversight of the intelligence community instituted after revelations by Edward Snowden in 2013. The newly declassified CIA data collection program is carried out in conjunction with Executive Order 12333 and is therefore subject to even less oversight than the woefully under-supervised NSA surveillance programs subject to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The agency said the programs involved “counterterrorism intelligence-related activities” that operated under Executive Order 12333. It also announced that portions of reports on the programs were being declassified.

As per senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico,members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The agency has conducted its own “bulk program” and “has done so outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection.”

The report which was heavily redacted, did not indicate how long, exactly, the surveillance had unfolded, how widespread it had been, or what sort of information was collected and from whom. 

From that letter and a PCLOB “Staff Recommendations” document, we know that the CIA collects a vast amount of data, often on U.S. persons, without any clear guidelines about data retention and without substantial oversight of analysts querying information about U.S. citizens. The program seems to exist outside the jurisdiction of either courts or Congress–given that even the Senate Intelligence Committee was left in the dark about this program.

In their letter, Wyden and Heinrich inquire as to the nature of the CIA’s relationship to its “sources,” perhaps a reference to whether the CIA might be getting some of its data from the same place as the NSA—through secretive agreements with private companies. In 2013, it was reported that the CIA paid $10 million a year in order to gain access to AT&T’s call data. 

While the CIA is largely prohibited by law from “engaging in domestic spying,” which makes the revelations troubling. As the Wall Street Journal reports, at times intelligence agencies have found ways to circumvent these prohibitions, noting that “some U.S. intelligence programs collect broad streams of internet or telephone data in a way that can scoop up information on Americans.

The nature of the surveillance isn’t fully clear. Yet the language in the redacted letter suggests the program involves nontraditional surveillance, noting data collection is done in “bulk” and uses “backdoor searches of Americans. This implies the spy agency may be “vacuuming up” vast amounts of information “to spy on Americans” and storing it indefinitely.

Via MSN & Zerohedge

realizethelies 12:36 pm on January 25, 2015
Tags: , NSA, ,   

Welcome to the Matrix: Enslaved by Technology and the Internet of Things

NetID

“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.'” ― Philip K. Dick

If ever Americans sell their birthright, it will be for the promise of expediency and comfort delivered by way of blazingly fast Internet, cell phone signals that never drop a call, thermostats that keep us at the perfect temperature without our having to raise a finger, and entertainment that can be simultaneously streamed to our TVs, tablets, and cell phones.Likewise, if ever we find ourselves in bondage, we will have only ourselves to blame for having forged the chains through our own lassitude, laziness, and abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos that render us wholly irrelevant.

Indeed, while most of us are consumed with our selfies and trying to keep up with what our so-called friends are posting on Facebook, the megacorporation Google has been busily partnering with the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon, and other governmental agencies to develop a new “human” species, so to speak.
In other words, Google—a neural network that approximates a global brain—is fusing with the human mind in a phenomenon that is called “singularity,” and they’ve hired transhumanist scientist Ray Kurzweil to do just that. Google will know the answer to your question before you have asked it, Kurzweil said. “It will have read every email you will ever have written, every document, every idle thought you’ve ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better than your intimate partner does. Better, perhaps, than even yourself.”

But here’s the catch: the NSA and all other government agencies will also know you better than yourself. As William Binney, one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA said, “The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control.”

We’re fast approaching Philip K. Dick’s vision of the future as depicted in the film Minority Report. There, police agencies apprehend criminals before they can commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things, in which internet-connected “things” will monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free.

In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have — and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in — will be connected and talking to each other.”By 2018, it is estimated there will be 112 million wearable devices such as smartwatches, keeping users connected it real time to their phones, emails, text messages, and the Internet. By 2020, there will be 152 million cars connected to the Internet and 100 million Internet-connected bulbs and lamps. By 2022, there will be 1.1 billion smart meters installed in homes, reporting real-time usage to utility companies and other interested parties.

Between driverless cars that completely lacking a steering wheel, accelerator, or brake pedal, and smart pills embedded with computer chips, sensors, cameras, and robots, we are poised to outpace the imaginations of science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. It’s not just our homes that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government and our very bodies that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.

Unfortunately, in our race to the future, we have failed to consider what such dependence on technology might mean for our humanity, not to mention our freedoms.
Ingestible or implantable chips are a good example of how unprepared we are, morally and otherwise, to navigate this uncharted terrain. Hailed as revolutionary for their ability to access, analyze and manipulate your body from the inside.Sure, the technology could save lives, but is that all we need to know? Have we done our due diligence in asking all the questions that need to be asked before unleashing such awesome technology on an unsuspecting populace?

Read More Here

realizethelies 12:22 pm on January 25, 2015
Tags: , Cyber Weapons, NSA   

NSA Cyber War Will Use Internet of Things as Weapons Platform; Your Home is the Battlefield

NSAcyberwar

New documents recently revealed by Edward Snowden demonstrete that the NSA is getting ready for future digital wars as the agency postures itself in an aggressive manner towards the world.
“The Five Eyes Alliance,” a cooperation between United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, is working hard to develop these weapons of Cyber Warfare.

So called “D” weapons, as reported by Der Spiegel, will paralyze computer networks and infrastructure that they monitor. Water supplies, factories, airports, as well as the flow of money are all potential targets.
The Der Spiegel report does not mention the wider issue of the expanding network of everyday objects and appliances that are connected to the Internet. According to CIA chief David Petraeus the Internet of Things will have a monumental impact on “clandestine tradecraft.” Richard Adhikari writes for Tech News World that the Internet of Things is “…ripe for exploitation by the NSA.

Consumer appliances are now becoming activated and “smart.” RFID chips and wireless Internet connections enable devices like televisions, refrigerators, printers, and computers to communicate with each other and generally make life easier for us. This comes at a price, however. Your privacy is eliminated.

The NSA’s Cyber Weapons program will undoubtedly exploit these devices, which include household appliances, and, frighteningly, medical devices that can be hacked.If the developers of these Internet-connected devices don’t willingly work with the NSA to place back-doors in the technology, the agency is hard at work trying to find and exploit them.

Think the idea of your appliances spying on you is crazy? According to Samsung’s new privacy policy, their smart TV can monitor your conversation. The policy states, “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.”

Original Story Here

realizethelies 3:25 pm on February 8, 2013
Tags: , NSA,   

A Single Intelligence Network for a New World Order

Total_Information_Awareness

While budgets are being slashed by governments around the world, national intelligence agencies are not only flush with money but they are increasingly networking their resources against the “threat”. What is the threat?

It is whatever national leaders and their governments deem it to be. One day it is «Al Qaeda», the next day it is Iran, then North Korea, then global narco-terrorists, and so on and so on…

Just as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is becoming a global military past without a distinct enemy, the Central Intelligence Agency, Britain’s MI-6, and other intelligence agencies are increasingly pooling their intelligence and networking their information-sharing networks.

To what purpose would such citadels of secrecy wish to cooperate? The answer is simple. In a world of the tiny minority «haves» and the super-majority «have nots», the intelligence agencies, like national armed forces, believe there is safety in numbers.

In a conflict between the minority super-wealthy and the rest of society, intelligence agencies are increasingly protecting the interests of corporations and not countries. Intelligence agencies, therefore, have decided to become a global «Panopticon» where no one can hide and no secrets are held.

For many years, attempts to create a worldwide database of personal data, beginning with basic criminal information, were forestalled by the fact that the chief promoter of such a combined on-line repository of information, the United States, lacked a government department akin to other nations’ Interior Ministries. Now The Homeland Security Department, National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, and Federal Bureau of Investigation now represent a massive governmental data gathering behemoth that is building on traditional and new relationships with foreign intelligence and national security agencies to build a network of shared databases. However, the network is a one-way street.

Currently, the National Security Agency is building the Utah Data Center on a National Guard base in Bluffdale, Utah a massive data storage center that is the size of 17 football fields. The center will contain stored communications records as well as transactional data, including financial, travel, and medical information, on perhaps billions of people around the world. The center is designed to store a yottabyte of data – equivalent to 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

The data will range from that derived from relatively open sources to «deep data». Deep data is that which is obtained through sophisticated computer espionage programs. This computerized Panopticon not only knows every detail about living individuals but an immense amount of information about their deceased ancestors. That is the sort of information craved by despotic leaders.

Original Article Here

realizethelies 11:05 am on December 31, 2012
Tags: , , , NSA, William binney   

Americans Are The Most Spied On People In World History

The US surveillance regime has more data on the average American than the Stasi ever did on East Germans.Indeed, the American government has more information on the average American than Stalin had on Russians, Hitler had on German citizens, or any other government has ever had on its people.

The American government is collecting and storing virtually every phone call, purchases, email, text message, internet searches, social media communications, health information, employment history, travel and student records, and virtually all other information of every American.

Some also claim that the government is also using facial recognition software and surveillance cameras to track where everyone is going. Moreover, cell towers track where your phone is at any moment, and the major cell carriers, including Verizon and AT&T, responded to at least 1.3 million law enforcement requests for cell phone locations and other data in 2011. (And – given that your smartphone routinely sends your location information back to Apple or Google – it would be child’s play for the government to track your location that way.) Your iPhone, or other brand of smartphone is spying on virtually everything you do.

As the(former) top spy chief at the U.S. National Security Agency explained this week, the American government is collecting some 100 billion 1,000-character emails per day, and 20 trillion communications of all types per year. He says that the government has collected all of the communications of congressional leaders, generals and everyone else in the U.S. for the last 10 years.

As the top spy chief (William Binney) at the U.S. National Security Agency explained, the American government is collecting some 100 billion 1,000-character emails per day, and 20 trillion communications of all types per year.[Binney] says that if anyone gets on the government’s “enemies list”, then the stored information will be used to target them. Specifically, he notes that if the government decides it doesn’t like someone, it analyzes all of the data it has collected on that person and his or her associates over the last 10 years to build a case against him. The spying isn’t being done to keep us safe … but to crush dissent and to smear people who uncover unflattering things about the government … and to help the too big to fail businesses compete against smaller businesses.

Disinfo Story Here

Original Article

realizethelies 10:46 am on December 31, 2012
Tags: , , NSA, warrantless wiretapping   

Senate Approves Warrantless Electronic Spy Powers

The Senate on Friday reauthorized for five years broad electronic eavesdropping powers that legalized and expanded the President George W. Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.

The FISA Amendments Act, (.pdf) which was expiring Monday at midnight, allows the government to electronically eavesdrop on Americans’ phone calls and e-mails without a probable-cause warrant so long as one of the parties to the communication is believed outside the United States. The communications may be intercepted “to acquire foreign intelligence information.”

The American Civil Liberties Union immediately blasted the vote.

“The Bush administration’s program of warrantless wiretapping, once considered a radical threat to the Fourth Amendment, has become institutionalized for another five years,” said Michelle Richardson, the ACLU’s legislative counsel.

The legislation does not require the government to identify the target or facility to be monitored. It can begin surveillance a week before making the request, and the surveillance can continue during the appeals process if, in a rare case, the secret FISA court rejects the surveillance application. The court’s rulings are not public.

Original Article Here

realizethelies 9:28 am on September 11, 2012
Tags: NSA, , Stellar Wind   

Stellar Wind: The Secret NSA Domestic Spying Program; Whistleblower Tells All

As the anniversary of 9/11 approaches, instead of listening to mainstream media and government propaganda about what happened that day, and how all of the police state measures that have followed have made us more free, we should continue to uncover the lies of what really happened.

Now that the entire police state apparatus has obviously turned inward, as admitted in numerous government announcements and reports that are putting everyday Americans on terror watch lists, whistleblowers are stepping forward to reveal just how extensive and ongoing the surveillance has been. Instead of being heralded for their patriotism, these whistleblowers are being persecuted by the U.S. government. However, key insiders such as Sibel Edmonds, Susan Lindauer, and Thomas Drake have prevailed to reveal a startling amount of information that should concern any American who values civil liberties.

Former top NSA mathematician and code breaker, William Binney, has gone on record to publicly reveal the scope of a top-secret surveillance program that has directly targeted everyday Americans following 9/11. He is sounding an alarm about the massive scope of this project that engages in 24/7 warrantless wiretapping of the American population.

Surveillance and data collection of the U.S. population has been in the making for some time, perhaps best known through programs like ECHELON, but to have a 32-year, top-level veteran of the NSA reveal in the video below the domestic component of a program code named Stellar Wind, and his concerns that we are heading down the road to totalitarianism if not brought under control, should be a wake-up call to those who still believe that we are immune from the treatment that has been dished out across the rest of the planet.

Activist post Article Here