Tag Archives | Spying

Verizon Files Patent For Cable Box That Watches You As You Watch Television

By on December 11, 2012 in News 22

Another reason not to own a TV, via Yahoo! News:

A Verizon patent idea envisions spying on TV viewers for the sake of serving up related ads. For instance, a couple snuggling in front of the TV could end up getting bombarded by commercials for romantic vacations, flowers or even birth control. The system could also detect a person’s mood or identify objects such as pets, soft drink cans or a bag of chips in a person’s hand, and room decorations or furniture.

Such a patent idea would turn TV set-top boxes into spy boxes with sensors for both seeing and hearing the activity in front of the TV. Many TV viewers already own such set-top boxes to access pay-per-view services, digital video recordings and Internet streaming.

The patent filing even suggests the tracking system communicating with whatever smartphone or tablet a TV viewer might happen to have in his or her hands.

… Read the rest

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Toy Surveillance Glasses For Kids

By on December 2, 2012 in News 16

Play objects often mimic the realities of the adult world. The hot gift for for sale this holiday season is children’s SpyNet Glasses, which allow the child to steathily record video of everyone around them and upload the footage. The line of toys also includes a mock taser:

The SpyNet HQ glasses provide stealthy video recording, disguised as sunglasses! Get all the intel, in plain sight! Records up to 20 minutes of video – upload to your computer and SpyNetHQ.com!

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NYPD Has Spied On Muslim Residents For Years, Hasn’t Generated A Single Terrorism Lead

By on November 2, 2012 in News 17

The Mercury News on the frustrating lack of insidious plots by the city’s residents:

In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department’s secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday.

[The NYPD had] help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames. Police hoped the Demographics Unit would serve as an early warning system for terrorism.

But in a June 28 deposition as part of a longstanding federal civil rights case, Assistant Chief Thomas Galati said none of the conversations the officers overheard ever led to a case. “Related to Demographics,” Galati testified that information that has come in “has not commenced an investigation.”

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Rebranding Propaganda, Normalizing Torture, Third Party Censorship

By on October 28, 2012 in News 1

On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin talks about the Third Party Debates that aired live on RT, and talks to Georgetown Professor, Chris Chambers about the total media blackout that keeps alternative voices and third party candidates in the dark. Abby then looks at the NYPD’s continued surveillance of Muslim communities and foiled FBI sting operations, and Obama’s rebranding of the Bush administration’s counter-terrorism policies with an interview with Media Roots Journalist, Robbie Martin.

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Storing Millions Of People’s Voices In A Voice-Recognition Database

By on September 21, 2012 in News 17

Slate on software, already being sold to governments and corporations, making it possible to store and identify the unique sound of everyone’s speech. The obvious question is, can it be thwarted by pitch shifting or other modification?

Intercepting thousands of phone calls is easy for government agencies. But quickly analyzing the calls and identifying the callers can prove a difficult task. Now one company believes it has solved the problem—with a countrywide biometric database designed to store millions of people’s “voice-prints.”

Russia’s Speech Technology Center, which operates under the name SpeechPro in the United States, has invented what it calls “VoiceGrid Nation,” a system that uses advanced algorithms to match identities to voices. The idea is that it enables authorities to build up a huge database containing up to several million voices—of known criminals, persons of interest, or people on a watch list.

Alexey Khitrov, SpeechPro’s president, told me the company is working with a number of agencies in the United States at a state and federal level.

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America’s Cold War Spy Tunnel For Tapping Berlin Phone Calls Discovered After 50 Years

By on August 23, 2012 in News 1

Spy vs. spy strangeness, via Bloomberg:

A section of an ingenious tunnel built by U.S. and British spies to intercept Russian phone conversations in Cold War Berlin has been found after 56 years in a forest 150 kilometers from the German capital.

The 450-meter-long tunnel, built in 1955, led from Rudow in West Berlin to Alt-Glienicke in Soviet-occupied East Berlin. By tapping into the enemy’s underground cables, Allied intelligence agents recorded 440,000 phone calls, gaining a clearer picture of Red Army maneuvers in eastern Germany.

Codenamed “Stopwatch” by the British and “Gold” by the Americans, it was funded by the U.S. at a cost of $6.7 million (then a vast sum) and operated jointly by the CIA and the British SIS.

The tunnel operated for 11 months and 11 days, intercepting some of the Red Army’s most secret communications, including those between Moscow and the military headquarters in East Berlin.

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Anti-Obama Journalist Claims Drones Are Following Him

By on July 8, 2012 in News 10

This may be paranoid fantasies, but it’s bound to actually happen sooner or later. Via Russia Today:

Journalist Joseph Farah says the aircraft he saw hover above his rural Northern Virginia home recently was a government surveillance drone, and he believes the unwelcome visit was just a step in the Obama administration’s war against liberty.

“I’m taking my dog for a walk and guess what I see right over the tree line right above my head is a drone,” Farah, the editor of World Net Daily, tells radio host Alex Jones this week.

“I don’t live in the city, I don’t live in a populated area, I live in one of the most rural places you could possibly live in Northern Virginia and there could only be one thing that this drone was spying on and that would be me, that would be my property because there’s just nothing else around except woods and deer,” he adds.

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FBI’s New Secretive Surveillance Unit Can Spy on Skype and Wireless Communications

By on May 24, 2012 in News 0

Reports Declan McCullagh on cNet News:

The FBI has recently formed a secretive surveillance unit with an ambitious goal: to invent technology that will let police more readily eavesdrop on Internet and wireless communications.

The establishment of the Quantico, VA-based unit, which is also staffed by agents from the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency, is a response to technological developments that FBI officials believe outpace law enforcement’s ability to listen in on private communications.

While the FBI has been tight-lipped about the creation of its Domestic Communications Assistance Center, or DCAC — it declined to respond to requests made two days ago about who’s running it, for instance — CNET has pieced together information about its operations through interviews and a review of internal government documents.

DCAC’s mandate is broad, covering everything from trying to intercept and decode Skype conversations to building custom wiretap hardware or analyzing the gigabytes of data that a wireless provider or social network might turn over in response to a court order…

Read More: cNet News… Read the rest

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Bomber in Plot on U.S. Airliner Said to Be a Double Agent

By on May 8, 2012 in News 8

Flag of Al-Qaeda in Iraq

Fantastic spy novel stuff, but for real (apparently) per this report in the New York Times:

The would-be suicide bomber dispatched by the Yemen branch of Al Qaeda last month to blow up a United States-bound airliner was actually a double agent who infiltrated the terrorist group and volunteered for the suicide mission, American and foreign officials said Tuesday.

In an extraordinary intelligence coup, the agent left Yemen, traveling by way of the United Arab Emirates, and delivered both the innovative bomb designed for his air attack and critical information on the group’s leaders to the C.I.A., Saudi and other foreign intelligence agencies.

After spending weeks at the center of the terrorist network’s most dangerous affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the agent provided critical information that permitted the C.I.A. to direct the drone strike on Sunday that killed Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso, the group’s external operations director and a suspect in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000.

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