From Sipher Brief In place of the government monopoly on espionage technology, today there is a boisterous bazaar of information and data vendors. These companies sell a wide variety of social media intelligence tools, earth observation capabilities, large-scale information storage and processing, mobile phone location data, global HUMINT platforms, and sophisticated telemetry intelligence capabilities. This...
Tag: surveillance
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How to Protect Yourself From NSO Spyware
The U.S. government has advice for journalists and activists: Watch out for spyware. The National Counterintelligence and Security Center doesn’t mention NSO, the Israeli company whose Pegasus spyware has been implicated in policies of surveillance and repression around the world. But the warning described Pegasus’ powers exactly. Companies and individuals have been selling commercial surveillance...
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Suspicionless Surveillance: Suppressing Communities of Color and Political Dissent After 9/11
The expansive post-9/11 notion of “homeland security” – manifested most concretely in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – underpins suspicionless surveillance. DHS itself, “as part of its regular operations, conducts invasive physical searches of millions of Americans and their belongings each week without any predicate.” These programs, according to the...
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Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, Many Chose to Cooperate
In his TK News Substack newsletter, Matt Taibbi compares the relationship between U.S. news organizations and the intelligence community in 2014 and today. Fast forward seven years. Julian Assange is behind bars, and may die there. Snowden is in exile in Russia. Brennan, Clapper, and Hayden have been rehabilitated and are all paid contributors...
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China’s Top Spy is a Working Class Hero
SpyTalk on China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS in Chinese) Since its founding in 1983, the MSS has had a preeminent role in China’s vast machinery of domestic repression. But Chen appears set to turn its foreign spying arm into an increasingly effective presence in America and elsewhere during the 2020s, says Nicholas Eftimades, one...