The story is that the US doesn’t want backdoors on iPhones because everyone in the government is using iPhones, and if they put backdoors in them, the Russians and the Chinese – and anyone else who wants them – will have access.

The NSA has some kind of way to hack iPhones, which they presumably get from Israeli companies that develop this software (that was in WikiLeaks), but what the UK is asking for – just an open door that will allow them to spy on all the phones at the same time – is something different and much more extreme.

RT:

The UK government has issued a “technical capability notice” to Apple, compelling the tech giant to create a backdoor to its encrypted iCloud service, the Washington Post reported on Friday. The move would enable UK law enforcement and security agencies to access encrypted data stored by Apple users worldwide, according to the newspaper.

The UK’s Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), referred to by critics as the “Snoopers’ Charter,” grants authorities the power to mandate that tech companies permit access to users’ data for investigative purposes. It also makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has made such a demand. The recent notice requires Apple to provide a means for decrypting user data. It is currently protected by end-to-end encryption, ensuring that only users can access their information.

Creating such backdoors could weaken overall security and set a dangerous precedent, according to Daniel Castro, vice-president of the US-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. In a statement on Friday, he has described the UK’s move as an “unjustified over-reach that threatens the security and privacy of individuals and businesses around the world.”

…

UK security officials argue that encryption can hinder efforts to combat crime and terrorism. “Maintaining proportionate, lawful access to such communications in the face of ever-more prevalent encryption is sometimes our only means of detecting and understanding these threats,” Ken McCallum, head of the UK’s domestic intelligence agency MI5, stated last October. He believes that “privacy and exceptional lawful access can coexist if absolutist positions are avoided.”

Well, if the UK hadn’t flooded their country with immigrants, they wouldn’t have a terrorism problem.

This whole “we have to take everyone’s freedom away because all these immigrants we brought in are violent criminals who want to kill us all” is something you could only argue in a modern democracy country, where the social order is controlled by the media.

In a normal country, that argument would leave people with their jaws hanging open, and then they would riot and overthrow the government.

I have every confidence that Apple will stay on the right side of history and resist government demands to add surveillance backdoors to iOS. Any backdoor built for one government will ultimately be demanded by all, and will be exploited by hackers and nation state adversaries. https://t.co/fHqitHSLbB

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) February 7, 2025

The grave danger here is that governments, eager to expand their surveillance of citizens, will offer Apple a corrupt bargain: Support their secret government spying demands, and your monopoly will get a free pass on antitrust and regulatory enforcement.

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) February 7, 2025

How much personal data are social media and streaming platforms collecting and selling about you?
@tomcostellonbc digs into an eye-opening FTC report. pic.twitter.com/WHLaamXq0U

— NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (@NBCNightlyNews) September 19, 2024

Wow, I didn’t know this.

The Guardian:

Social media and online video companies are collecting huge troves of your personal information on and off their websites or apps and sharing it with a wide range of third-party entities, a new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) staff report on nine tech companies confirms.

The FTC report published on Thursday looked at the data-gathering practices of Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Discord, Reddit, Amazon, Snap, TikTok and Twitter/X between January 2019 and 31 December 2020. The majority of the companies’ business models incentivized tracking how people engaged with their platforms, collecting their personal data and using it to determine what content and ads users see on their feeds, the report states.

The FTC’s findings validate years of reporting on the depth and breadth of these companies’ tracking practices and call out the tech firms for “vast surveillance of users”. The agency is recommending Congress pass federal privacy regulations based on what it has documented. In particular, the agency is urging lawmakers to recognize that the business models of many of these companies do little to incentivize effective self-regulation or protection of user data.

…

Notably, the report highlights how consumers have little control over how these companies use and share their personal details. Most companies collected or inferred demographic information about users such as age, gender and language. Some collected information about household income, education and parental and marital status. But even when this type of personal information was not explicitly collected, some companies could analyze user behavior on the platform to deduce the details of their personal lives without their knowledge. For instance, some companies’ user interest categories included “baby, kids and maternity”, which would reveal parental status, or “newlyweds” and “divorce support”, which would reveal marital status. This information was then used by some companies to tailor what content people saw to increase engagement on their platforms. In some cases, that demographic information was shared with third-party entities to help target them with more relevant advertisements.

…

Several firms say it’s impossible to even compile a full list of who they share your data with. When the companies were asked to enumerate which advertisers, data brokers or other entities they shared consumer data with, none of these nine firms provided the FTC with a full inventory.

Who would have thought?

🚨🇪🇺EU TO PHASE OUT PHYSICAL PASSPORT STAMPS WITH NEW DIGITAL ENTRY SYSTEM

Starting November 10, the European Union will replace physical passport stamps with a digital Entry/Exit System for non-EU visitors.

The new system will use high-tech scanners to digitally register… pic.twitter.com/SoZlt9hPfx

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) September 6, 2024

This whole biometric ID system was first talked about as a way to deal with migrants, and people were like “yeah, but you could at any time just stop allowing these people in the country though?”

Then it really picked up steam during the coronavirus hoax, where they said they were going to stop virus people from moving around with viruses using biometrics. That also made no sense (even if you believed in the hoax), but it really pushed the plan forward. If you recall, the government could just do whatever during that virus hoax.

Now they’re planning to really fuck you bad with a total control grid, exactly like the one they claim exists in China (which does not actually even exist in China).

The Guardian:

The full implementation of an EU entry-exit system introducing fingerprinting and facial recognition checks at ports and airports is expected to be delayed again amid fears over congestion and long queues.

Ylva Johansson, the EU’s home affairs commissioner, said recently that the new entry-exit system (EES) would be introduced on 10 November with a contingency of delaying it one week to 17 November.

Johansson had given member states until 5 September to provide the required declaration on their state of readiness.

It is understood three countries, France, Germany and the Netherlands, have written to her to say they will not be ready. They raised concerns about the lack of testing of the system in the field, raising new questions about the target launch date, according to multiple sources.

…

The EES is being introduced at all entry ports and airports within the Schengen area so also impacts airports across the continent, particularly Schipol, Charles de Gaulle and Frankfurt – three of Europe’s biggest transport hubs – while Germany is also concerned about Cologne and Munich.

Passengers will have their fingerprints or photo of their face taken the first time they arrive in the EU after the introduction of the EES, with electronic verification of biometric data thereafter.

The problem with face ID is that all black people look the same. That’s not a joke, go look it up.

You would think with the advances in AI, the software would be able to recognize blacks – surely, they don’t all literally look exactly alike? – but, no. Even with these new powerful LLM AIs, they still can’t make it work on blacks.

In China, an alert just goes off – WARNING WARNING BLACK FACE BLACK FACE RED ALERT.

I’m just joking. They don’t really go Defcon 3 for every black. But yeah, China’s face ID system does just acknowledge that all black people look the same, and I’m sure some people using it go on high alert when a black passes through.

Again, the scope of China’s biometric system is nowhere near what they claim in Western media in the first place. That’s another kind of blood libel against Chinese people, pushed by the West, which claims it is somehow “more free” than China, when anyone can just go to China and check that claim for themselves, realizing it is false about 10 minutes after arriving in the country.

Black people are the biggest criminals and the people you actually do need to check. But the EU probably wants to use this system to punish people who post supposedly offensive memes on the internet, so they don’t even care it doesn’t work on the blacks.

🇬🇧EU BORDER CHECKS THREATEN BRITAIN’S CHRISTMAS FOOD SUPPLY

New EU Entry/Exit System (EES) checks, starting November 10, may disrupt Britain’s food supply chain and create long delays at Dover.

The system requires fingerprint and facial recognition for non-EU passengers,… pic.twitter.com/NhHoZmBcW5

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) September 13, 2024

Related: Utopia Closer Than Ever After NYC Puts Gun-Detecting Tech at Busy Subway Station

I didn’t realize Mayor Eric Adams loved tech so much.

Here I am learning that he’s a tech-lover, and I didn’t even know that.

New York Post:

Central Park frolickers could soon find themselves under Big Brother surveillance from NYPD drones flying above them, as the iconic green space struggles with a whopping crime increase.

Tech-loving Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday floated the notion and also using nebulous other “new technology” to deal with a worrisome surge in sex crimes, assaults and robberies in Central Park — including an incident involving three teenage muggers targeting a trio of park-goers that very morning.

“I think with such a vast large area, we could do a better job in using drones to police the area from the sky,” Hizzoner said during his weekly news conference with reporters.

The NYPD, pressed for more details by The Post, forwarded previous testimony from a deputy commissioner on Capitol Hill in which the higher-up said the department would be testing drones to respond to ShotSpotter gun-detection alerts.

“The Department anticipates drones to be operational at the Central Park Precinct in the coming weeks,” an e-mail from a rep said.

Okay, well.

Okay.

Are the drones going to drop hand-grenades, like in the Ukraine videos we all watch on Telegram?

Because if not, I don’t see what good these drones are going to do.

They are going to record the crimes?

The crimes are already recorded.

What good is video of a crime?

It’s not like the police are going to rush in as soon as they see a live drone feed of a crime. If anything they are going to be like “let’s keep our distance from that, we don’t want to end up like Derek Chauvin.”

But even if the cops were not scared to death to arrest blacks, here’s the thing: after people commit a crime, they run away. So unless the police are right near by, the video does not help at all, and if they’re right near by, they don’t need the video anyway.

This seems like a more of an excuse to do a dystopian, Half-Life type thing, where we just have drones flying everywhere watching people all the time.

Remember the drones in Half-Life 2, kids?

Kids these days.

The don’t even remember Half-Life 2.

They would know about Half-Life 3, if it were to ever be released, but Eric Adams will stop crime in New York before that happens.

NOW: NYPD Gun Detectors UNVEILED at Fulton Street Subway Station in NYC

Video by Peter H Desk@freedomnews.tv to license pic.twitter.com/CM5fnZKn3I

— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) July 26, 2024

It would be better if everyone was legally allowed to bring their guns on the subway, no?

I mean, whites are a lot better aim than blacks.

It’s already a ridiculous mess, at this point, just openly allowing shootouts on the subway would make everyone feel a lot safer.

You would probably have people coming up from Texas to ride around on the subway all day just waiting for some black or Venezuelan to draw his gun.

New York Post:

Mayor Eric Adams’ controversial plan to install gun-detecting tech in the Big Apple’s beleaguered transit system was booted up Friday in lower Manhattan.

The weapons scanner pilot program from company Evolv, which was unveiled by the tech-loving mayor in March, went live in the Fulton Street station at around 4 p.m., ahead of the evening commute.

A Post reporter observed passengers forking over their handbags and backpacks to police for inspection before they passed through the electronic detector, where there was a sea of additional officers waiting on the other side. Once cleared, they walked back and retrieved their items.

One police officer wearing rubber gloves was seen thoroughly searching one straphanger’s black backpack, carefully going through each pocket.

Commuters who spoke to The Post welcomed the scanners — as long as they are accurate and don’t hold up the hurried commuters.

When the program is implemented only random people — every five people or so — will be selected to go through the detector, Adams told reporters at a press conference Friday evening.

He described the new weapons technology surveillance pilot, which uses electromagnetic technology, as “groundbreaking” — noting scanners will be placed at “select” stations throughout the city “over the next month.”

This hardly seems like a long-term solution to the problem of escalating violence.

It seems to me that this is a social problem, and not a problem of access to guns.

No?

Dennis Winn

Don’t you own your property up to a certain number of feet in the air?

I’m sure there must be some rule. Obviously you can’t shoot down a plane, but a drone has to be within your property’s headroom.

Are the drones even from Walmart?

They’re probably fednigger drones and they just blamed Walmart.

New York Post:

A Florida man was arrested after he shot a Walmart drone with a 9mm handgun as it flew over his house — causing thousands of dollars in damage — because he thought it was “watching him.”

The suspect — Dennis Winn, 72, of Clermont, Florida — allegedly admitted to police June 26 that he took a potshot at the drone, which a two-man crew was operating over his Lake County home, the Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post.

A Walmart representative said the flights were part of a local campaign that featured mock deliveries to attract business and interest in the area, which is about 25 miles west of Orlando, according to FOX 35 Orlando.

But as the crew piloted the craft back towards the ground, one of the reps heard a gunshot.

…

Cops arrested him and charged him with shooting at an aircraft, criminal mischief damage over $1,000 and firing a gun in public.

This is an outrage.

That’s three cop cars.

Don’t you pigs have some NIGGERS to deal with?

Seriously though, I do wonder how high your property extends into the air. The rules are probably different in different countries. (What’s weird is condos, where you literally own a square box in the sky.)

I would look it up but I’m crunched for time. I’ve got to install all my shit on my new computer.

By the way – send lawyers, guns, and money.

This was not cheap.

Elvis Dunderhoff contributed to this article. 

America lost something important today, and hardly anyone heard. The headlines of state-aligned media screech and crow about the nefarious designs of your fellow citizens and the necessity of foreign wars without end, but find few words for a crime against the Constitution. https://t.co/VvgVQcq2NE

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 20, 2024

🧵 2/4

My 1st amendment included my bipartisan 4th Amendment is Not for Sale Act (already passed by the House). It would have ended the government’s practice of buying its way around the Bill of Rights by purchasing Americans’ personal data.

Defeated 31-61

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) April 20, 2024

Yet again the Senate was asked to consider the question: can liberty be exchanged for security? And sadly the majority of Senators said yes it can.

Final FISA reauthorization passed once again.

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) April 20, 2024

Democracy is just a rat cage.

It’s like that Smashing Pumpkins song.

Reuters:

The U.S. Senate voted late on Friday night to approve the reauthorization of a controversial surveillance program, narrowly missing the midnight expiration of the program, and the White House said President Joe Biden would swiftly sign it.

The reauthorization secures what supporters call a key element of U.S. foreign intelligence gathering.

“Democrats and Republicans came together and did the right thing for our country safety,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said.

Yeah, Chuck Schumer, the baby-killing Jew, is just very concerned about the safety of Americans.

If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge I want to sell you. In Baltimore.

FISA has attracted criticism from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, who argue it violates Americans’ constitutional right to privacy. The bill was blocked three times in the past five months by House Republicans bucking their party, before passing last week by a 273-147 vote when its duration was shortened from five years to two years.

…

Although the right to privacy is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, foreign nationals’ data gathered by the program often includes communications with Americans, and can be mined by domestic law enforcement bodies such as the FBI without a warrant.

This mention of the “foreign national” is stupid, because it’s anyone who has talked to a foreign national, or anyone who has talked to anyone who has talked to a foreign national. They just open up your email or your apps, and read everything. It’s actually a limitless domestic spying program, to collect all private communications, which goes almost as far as the “secret” and “illegal” NSA programs.

Here are the 60 Senators who—bolstered by a lie about a phony deadline—decided to vote away our Fourth Amendment rights late on a Friday night when no one was paying attention. pic.twitter.com/yUB6vUCh0m

— Amy Peikoff (@AmyPeikoff) April 20, 2024

.@SpeakerJohnson was incredibly wrong to vote w/ Dems against the 4th amend. when he killed the FISA warrant requirement and wrong to give in to the Dems spending demands. As I see it now, I’m not so sure there’s a difference between him being in charge and Dems being in charge. pic.twitter.com/NoyRhUrvRM

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) April 14, 2024

This stuff is all happening because of 911, supposedly.

lol.

Reuters:

Reformers had hoped that the debate over the reauthorization of a key U.S. domestic surveillance law would lead to new safeguards protecting Americans’ data.

But the bill now headed to the Senate instead expands the scope of the country’s domestic surveillance program, allowing police organizations including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to access to a far broader swathe of sensitive data on their fellow citizens than before.

Missing from the proposed legislation is any need for a warrant. A vote to require officials to seek judicial authorization before exploiting the data failed on a vote of 212 to 212 in the House of Representatives on Friday.

“It’s obviously pretty disappointing to have lost on a tie vote,” said Kia Hamadanchy, a senior policy counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU is one of scores of non-governmental organizations that have been lobbying to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which allows law enforcement to mine the massive trove of data collected by American spies.

…

The White House did not immediately return a message seeking comment on its lobbying. In a call with reporters on Tuesday, a White House official defended Section 702 as aimed squarely at foreigners. And a Department of Justice official defended the broader scope of the surveillance bill, saying it was an effort to adapt surveillance legislation “to the current communication technology landscape.”

That adaptation would allow U.S. spies to draw data not just from any U.S. “electronic communications service provider” – generally understood to be internet service providers and phone companies – but “any service provider” with “access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications.”

The distributed nature of the internet means that could be virtually anyone, as the Information Technology Industry Council, a lobbying group, argued in a blog post.

“The language in the amendment vastly expands the U.S. government’s warrantless surveillance capabilities, damaging the competitiveness of U.S. technology companies large and small,” the group said, urging senators to reverse the change.

People don’t care.

They don’t care about anything.

People’s private lives are such a disaster, the only thing they can get energized about are these horrific scenes of children being annihilated in Gaza.

Please SIGN THIS PETITION to intensify the spotlight on Edward Snowden’s case and exert pressure on the Biden administration to pardon him.

SIGN NOW ➡️ https://t.co/u0v5wv0yYU

Snowden, who has been in exile for more than a decade, performed a critical public service by… pic.twitter.com/rjNhgHj8rc

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) April 1, 2024

Kennedy would be the best candidate for president if he would take a harder line against Israel.

I agree with most of what he says, but despite supposedly being a classic leftist, he will not condemn the sickening blood-drinking Jews.

We should free Snowden and Assange, and we should make statues to them. But we should do that only after we nuke Israel.

New York Post:

Independent presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has re-upped his commitment to pardon US accused spy and anti-surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden if elected.

The Kennedy scion rolled out a petition Monday calling for the pardon of Snowden — while hailing the now-Russian resident for exposing highly classified domestic government surveillance operations.

“Edward Snowden is an American hero,” Kennedy, 70, said in a video. “Instead of jailing Snowden, I’m going to build a statue to him and maybe to [WikiLeaks] Julian Assange somewhere near the Washington Press Club or perhaps outside the CIA headquarters in Langley as a civics lesson to the Republic.

“Snowden, who has been in exile for more than a decade, performed a critical public service by revealing that our government had been spying on millions of law-abiding American citizens, in violation of numerous laws and our fundamental right to privacy,” Kennedy said.

“The America I love doesn’t punish whistleblowers. Truth-tellers who champion free speech and try to return America to its democratic and humanitarian ideals should be revered, not prosecuted,” the candidate said.

…

Snowden, 40, funneled a tranche of highly confidential documents to the Guardian, the Washington Post and several other outlets in 2013, shedding light on a litany of surveillance programs by the NSA as well as Allied organizations.

The information dump featured the rampant collection of people’s metadata — information about when and to whom a phone call or electronic message was sent.

Kennedy is also pro-Bitcoin.

There’s only one person running for president who is pro-crypto.

Join me in fighting for transactional freedom and making the U.S. the most crypto-friendly country in the world.

DONATE NOW ➡️ https://t.co/HSIpsHnufA#KennedyShanahan24 pic.twitter.com/lNIBCX75bp

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) April 2, 2024

It’s safe to say he’s better than Trump. Trump doesn’t have any positions that interest me anymore. He talks about immigration, but that ship has already sank. Unless he wants to round up tens of millions of people and put them in concentration camps, then whatever he’s saying about immigration is basically irrelevant.

Also, Kennedy says the same stuff as Trump about open borders.

Elvis Dunderhoff contributed to this article. 

🚨BREAKING: Historic privacy settlement in which Google agrees to delete browsing data collected in Incognito Mode and more. Quotes:

➡️”Google with this Settlement agrees to rewrite its disclosures to inform users that “Google” collects private browsing data, including by… pic.twitter.com/CXkA4Z40uZ

— Luiza Jarovsky (@LuizaJarovsky) April 1, 2024

Why do people not just use Brave?

How are people still using Chrome, knowing that it is recording everything they do?

The Guardian:

Google agreed to destroy billions of records to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly tracked the internet use of people who thought they were browsing privately in its Chrome browser’s incognito mode.

Users alleged that Google’s analytics, cookies and apps let the Alphabet unit improperly track people who set Google’s Chrome browser to “incognito” mode and other browsers to “private” browsing mode.

They said this turned Google into an “unaccountable trove of information” by letting it learn about their friends, favorite foods, hobbies, shopping habits and the “most intimate and potentially embarrassing things” they hunt for online.

Yeah, people use “incognito mode” to look at porn.

This ends up being a massive blackmail database.

Basically, everyone is looking at some kind of weird porn, but they’re all embarrassed about it, for obvious reasons.

Terms of the settlement were filed on Monday in the Oakland, California, federal court, and require approval by US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. The class action began in 2020, covering millions of Google users who used private browsing since 1 June 2016.

Under the settlement, Google will update disclosures about what it collects in “private” browsing, a process it has already begun. It will also let incognito users block third-party cookies for five years.

“The result is that Google will collect less data from users’ private browsing sessions, and that Google will make less money from the data,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote.

Google’s entire business model is spying on people and selling the data to advertisers and the government.

People should not be involved with this company.

wow. super interesting data point on impact to Google’s revenues from 3rd party cookie blocking (aka privacy)… connecting dots.

Left: Google’s redacted estimate of impact on blocking 3rd party tracking cookies in Chrome’s private mode (aka Incognito).

Right: unsealed today. pic.twitter.com/B1SBG2PlJg

— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) April 1, 2024