Utah Lawyer Charged with Voyeurism...

...after employees find video of bathroom camera...

A lawyer in Vernal has been charged with stalking and voyeurism after

claims he installed a camera in a bathroom in his law office... Investigators in Uintah County first responded to a report from Judd’s employees who said they discovered printed pornography photos and a memory cards in a folder in office personnel files, according to court documents. Documents state an employee viewed the files on one of the SD cards and found a video of Judd placing a camera inside an employee bathroom ceiling vent.

There were also recordings of women employed by Judd using the bathroom. When the recordings were recovered, employees examined the vent in the video but found the camera had been removed, according to documents...

The same employee said that one duty she performed at work was to order items for Judd on an Amazon account they both had access to. “The account history showed that several small spy cameras had been ordered beginning February 2021, and continuing through that year,” documents state. more

Intense Competition Leads to Attempted Corporate Espionage

via Lexology - from the Troutman Papper law firm.

Side Note: Troutman Pepper has formed a Corporate Espionage Response Team to help clients combat the increasing incidence of corporate espionage.

Arthur AI, a New York-based AI company, received a request for a Zoom demonstration of its technology from a startup called OneOneThree. The head of technology at OneOneThree, Yan Fung, expressed interest in purchasing Arthur AI’s technology. But there were some immediate red flags.

First, prior to the Zoom meeting, Arthur AI employees recognized that OneOneThree had no website. The Timesarticle says that Fung told Arthur AI at the time that OneOneThree was in “stealth mode,” which is why it had no website. Then, when Arthur AI asked Fung to sign a nondisclosure agreement (NDA), he reportedly asked Arthur AI to “hold off on the NDA,” and Arthur AI agreed.

Despite these issues, a Zoom meeting was arranged to demo the technology. Fung said Karina Patel, OneOneThree’s “main engineer,” would dial in to the meeting. However, during the Zoom meeting, an attendee logged in under the name of Aparna Dhinakaran, which an Arthur AI employee immediately recognized as a founder of Arize AI, a rival startup. When recognized, the attendee quickly logged off. Arthur AI later deduced that Fung was, in fact, an employee of Arize AI named Dat Ngo, and OneOneThree was an inactive company of his.

After the call concluded, one of Arthur AI’s employees messaged Ngo via LinkedIn direct messaging. Ngo responded by trying to recruit the Arthur AI employee, according to the Times article. more

Lessons Learned:

• Require NDAs Every Time.
• Perform Proper Due Diligence and Act Consistently With Your Findings. 
• Only Use Secure Communication Channels and Restrict Recording.
• Train Employees on Spotting and Responding to Potential Threats.
• Conduct a Prompt and Careful Investigation Into Suspected Activity.

Apple AirTag: Police Official Accused of Stalking

CA - A high-ranking Los Angeles Police Department official has been demoted and is facing the possibility of termination after being accused of stalking a fellow officer with whom he was romantically involved...

The female officer who accused Labrada of stalking contacted Ontario police after she discovered an AirTag — a small tracking device that can be attached to personal items — among her possessions, according to two sources familiar with the case.

A group of officers from a since-disbanded San Fernando Valley gang unit is under investigation for, among other misconduct, allegedly using the devices to track suspects without court authorization...

Ontario police had been investigating the stalking allegations, but the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office said Wednesday it did not have enough evidence to pursue charges against Labrada. more

Malaysian Police Investigate Spycam Found in Newlywed Couple’s Airbnb

Malaysian police investigate after spycam found in newlywed Chinese couple’s Airbnb room...

The device was installed inside a wall power socket in a room of a lodging establishment in Sabah
The case came to light after the tourists shared their ordeal on Chinese social media

Malaysian police are looking for those responsible for placing a hidden camera within a wall power socket in a room of a lodging establishment in Sabah state where a newlywed Chinese couple had stayed in earlier this month...

A probe had been conducted at the said premises, he said, adding they have seized the spycam in question. more

Girl Spycam'ed in Aircraft Bathroom - Flight Attendant Suspected

The FBI is investigating after a hidden camera was allegedly found in a bathroom onboard an American Airlines flight.

Massachusets state police said that a "potential criminal act" happened onboard an American Airlines flight that landed at Boston Logan International Airport from Charlotte, N.C. on Sept. 2, but told WSOC that the incident involved a "juvenile, a flight attendant, and a cell phone."

State officials said since the incident happened in midair, the potential crime falls under federal jurisdiction.

Fox affiliate Boston 25 spoke with a passenger on the plane, who said that he saw a teenage girl attempt to use the first-class section bathroom and was stopped by a male flight attendant. "When she was about to go the bathroom he stopped her and said, ‘Hey hold on just a second, we’re about to start collecting trash so I am going to wash my hands,'" the passenger recalled. After the flight attendant left the bathroom, the girl then used the restroom. more

Spycam Awareness training.

U.S. Blacklists 2 Firms - Built Meta, iOS and Android Spyware

The Commerce Department blacklisted two European cyber firms that build spyware software, the Commerce Department announced Tuesday, including technology hawked by both firms that was used to surveil Meta users and reportedly at least one Meta employee.

The software exploited vulnerabilities in Android and iOS software and deployed hundreds of spoof Meta accounts to surveil activists, politicians and journalists around the world.

The firms — Intellexa and Cytrox — were described jointly as traffickers of “exploits used to gain access to information systems, threatening the privacy and security of individuals and organizations worldwide” in a Bureau of Industry and Security press release. more

Alert: Not All Documents Labeled Confidential Actually Are

A Harris County Texas District Court jury found a telecom company acted in bad faith by filing a $23 million trade secret misappropriation lawsuit against a rival where the underlying technology was found to not actually be a trade secret...

As Texas courts have noted, and Liquid Networx cited in its motion for directed verdict, affixing a confidentiality label to a document does not necessarily make the information within a trade secret. See Providence Title Co. v. Truly Title, Inc., 547 F. Supp 3d 585, 609 (E.D. Tex. 2021) (“[B]usiness information is not necessarily a trade secret simply because it is confidential.”)...

It is important to always consider the nature of the document, how it was created, what value comes from keeping it confidential, what efforts are made to keep it from third parties, and what safeguards are used when it is disseminated to third parties, in analyzing trade secrets. more

Note: TSCM information security surveys are used by savvy businesses to show serious trade secret protection efforts. 

Crocs Sues Rival Joybees Over Stolen Trade Secrets...

...by former manager...

Footwear makers Crocs and rival Joybees have filed competing claims against each other in a U.S. court, as the companies clash over corporate trade secrets, intellectual property and competition in the foam clog market.

The new complaint accuses McCarvel, who was a midlevel manager at Crocs, of stealing several thousand documents containing Crocs’s highly confidential and proprietary business information, as well as the contents of an entire Crocs email account...

The complaint accuses McCarvel of using the stolen documents to build Crocs' rival shoe company, Joybees. more

Lawsuit: West Virginia Police - Spying Using Hidden Cameras on Women & Minors

West Virginia State Police have been accused of planting hidden cameras to spy on women, from active law enforcement officers to recruits training at the academy, some of whom were minors.

Two of the active West Virginia law enforcement officers involved in the civil suit, Brenda Lesnett and Megan Talkington, spoke with CNN...

Lesnett and Talkington are two of around 70 women suing the department after an anonymous letter addressed to the state’s top lawmakers with the allegations was made public in February. Among the allegations of misconduct, which are said to have taken place over a 10-year period, are a hidden camera system set up in the women’s locker room and showers at the West Virginia Police Academy. Some of the possible victims are minors who took part in a junior program. Lesnett and Talkington said there could be “hundreds, if not thousands” of total victims. more

Protect yourself. Learn how you can detect spycams.

North Carolina House Speaker Installs Spy Cameras

Rep. Tim Moore (R-Cleveland) allegedly used his political influence to bed former Apex Town Councilman Scott Lassiter’s wife, Jamie Liles Lassiter, over the course of their three-year extramarital relationship, according to a lawsuit filed June 18.

After Lassiter, 36, confronted the Republican legislator about the infidelity, Moore allegedly hired an unidentified goon to install a camera on the Lassiters’ Raleigh property earlier this month in an effort to keep the tryst under wraps.

“Defendant Tim Moore and Defendant John Doe willfully and wantonly interfered with [Lassiter’s] property rights and right to privacy by entering upon [Lassiter’s] property in the middle of the night and installing equipment intended to surreptitiously record [Lassiter’s] private actions in his own home,” the lawsuit states.

Lassiter claims to have found the camera inside his flowerbed in the early hours of June 1, on what would have been his and Jamie’s 10th wedding anniversary. more

Man Arrested for Spying on Woman with Drone

RI - The Cranston Police Department announced a convicted sex offender was arrested for spying on a woman through her bathroom window with a drone...

Officials said the woman victim...was preparing to use the shower when she heard a buzzing noise from outside. The woman went to her back yard thinking the sound had something to do with her pool when she noticed a drone hovering outside her bathroom window. When the victim approached the drone, she said it moved quickly in an attempt to get away from her when it crashed into a tree and hit the ground...the victim disabled the drone in her pool and called 911 shortly after. more

77 Industrial Espionage Arrests

South Korean police have arrested 77 people involved in 35 cases of suspected industrial espionage discovered during a recent nationwide investigation, Yonhap news agency reported on Sunday.

Most cases only involved domestic companies, although eight were related to the leak of technology secrets to China or other countries, Yonhap quoted the National Police Agency as saying...

The number of international cases was double that of a similar probe conducted one year ago, Yonhap said, citing police data. more

Blackmail with Email, or The Employer's Lawyer Destroyer

Last month, Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith, one of the nation’s largest law firms, was rocked by the announcement that two top partners were starting their own boutique practice and taking as many as 140 colleagues with them.

The shock inside Lewis Brisbois’ downtown Los Angeles headquarters soon gave way to anger... over the weekend, Lewis Brisbois struck back.

In an extraordinary move, its management team directed the release of scores of emails in which Barber and Ranen used vile terms for women, Black people, Armenians, Persians, and gay men and traded in offensive stereotypes of Jews and Asians. In one fell swoop, the venerable firm managed to torpedo its new rival, destroy the defecting partners’ careers and send the legal establishment reeling. more

-----

“Say it with flowers,

Say it with mink,

But never, ever say it with ink."

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Business Espionage: The Employee Competitor… and what to do about it

Police Lt. Sentenced - Illegally Videotaping Women

MA - Belchertown Police Lt. Michael Beaupre, a former officer charged with illegally recording multiple women without their consent, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years of probation on Tuesday in Eastern Hampshire District Court, according to Worcester County District Attorney Joseph Early.

Beaupre, 38, pleaded guilty to eight counts of photographing an unsuspecting nude person, the district attorney’s office said, and was sentenced to two years of probation.

The officer also admitted in court to sufficient facts on 11 counts of unlawful wiretapping, the office said. A judge continued those counts for two years without a finding, and those probation sentences will run concurrently.

Beaupre used multiple concealed recording devices to secretly video record women as they undressed in his home between January 2017 through January 2022, the office stated. A woman who’d found some of the videos had reported them to law enforcement. more

Protect yourself and loved ones. 

Learn how to discover covert spy cameras.

Ring to pay $5.8M - Staff & Contractors - Snooping on Videos

Ring, the Amazon-owned maker of video surveillance devices, will pay $5.8 million over claims brought by the Federal Trade Commission that Ring employees and contractors had broad and unrestricted access to customers’ videos for years.

The settlement was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Wednesday. The FTC confirmed the settlement a short time later. News of the settlement was first reported by Reuters.

The FTC said that Ring employees and contractors were able to view, download, and transfer customers’ sensitive video data for their own purposes as a result of “dangerously over-broad access and lax attitude toward privacy and security.”

According to the FTC’s complaint, Ring gave “every employee — as well as hundreds of Ukraine-based third-party contractors — full access to every customer video, regardless of whether the employee or contractor actually needed that access to perform his or her job function.” The FTC also said that Ring staff and contractors “could also readily download any customer’s videos and then view, share, or disclose those videos at will.”

The FTC alleged on at least two occasions Ring employees improperly accessed the private Ring videos of women. In one of the cases, the FTC said the employee’s spying went on for months, undetected by Ring. more

Hugh Grant Accuses The Sun Used 'Bugging' to Obtain Private Information

The Sun newspaper used "burglaries to order" and "breaking and entering" to obtain private information through "bugging, landline tapping and phone hacking", Hugh Grant has claimed in court.

The 62-year-old actor made the allegations in a witness statement read out as part of his lawsuit against News Group Newspapers (NGN) - the publisher of The Sun and the now-defunct News Of The World.

The British star attended the final day of a hearing at London's High Court where NGN is bringing a bid to have claims by him and Prince Harry thrown out. more

The Chatbot-Centric Wiretapping Lawsuit Against Old Navy

Court Refuses to Toss Out Chatbot-Centric Wiretapping Lawsuit Against Old Navy

Old Navy cannot escape a lawsuit accusing it of running afoul of the California Invasion of Privacy Act (“CIPA”) by way of its use of a sophisticated chatbot feature on its e-commerce site. Despite Old Navy’s bid to get the case that Miguel Licea lodged against it in August 2022 dismissed in its entirety, Judge Sunshine Sykes of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California sided with the plaintiff, in part, finding that his CIPA Section 632.7 claim against Old Navy for eavesdropping can move ahead. more

Australia urges U.S. to Drop Espionage Case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

Australia - A cross-party group of Australian politicians has called on the United States to drop an espionage case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and allow the Australian citizen to return home.

In an open letter to U.S. Attorney-General Merrick Garland, 48 members of Parliament and the Senate, including 13 from the ruling Labor Party, said the case against Mr. Assange would “set a dangerous precedent for all global citizens, journalists, publishers, media organizations and the freedom of the press.” more 

Doctor Slipped Cleaner into Spouse’s Tea - He Installed Cameras

...now she’s charged.

A Mission Viejo dermatologist is accused of using liquid cleaner to try to poison her husband. Suspicious about the taste of his tea, he installed cameras at home. 

Growing suspicious, Chen secretly installed cameras around his Irvine home where, according to the restraining order request, he captured video of Yu pouring liquid drain cleaner into his cup when he left it unattended... 

According to prosecutors, video showed Yu pouring the chemical into the tea on July 11, 18 and 25. more

A New Wave of Lawsuits - Wiretapping Litigation for Website Analytics

2022 saw a new wave of class action lawsuits targeting companies that use technology to track consumers’ interfaces on their websites...

Plaintiffs often ground their claims in the electronic interception provisions of federal and state wiretapping laws. Under the Federal Wiretap Act of 1968, a person is prohibited from “intentionally intercept[ing] … any … electronic communication.” 18 U.S.C. § 2511(1)(a) (2022). The FWA and many state statutes define “interception” as “acquiring the contents of that electronic communication.” Id. § 2510(4). “Content” is defined as “any information concerning the substance, purport[] or meaning of that communication.” Id. § 2510(8). 

Under the FWA, a court may require a defendant to pay $10,000 per violation. Id. § 2520(c)(2). Fines under similar state laws range from $1,000 to $50,000 per violation, depending on the state. more