Weird, Unusual & Interesting - Spy News Clickbait

Venice, Italy - The city’s leaders are acquiring the cellphone data of unwitting tourists and using hundreds of surveillance cameras to monitor visitors and prevent crowding. Next summer, they plan to install long-debated gates at key entry points; visitors coming only for the day will have to book ahead and pay a fee to enter. If too many people want to come, some will be turned away. more

Banksy's Spy Booth Brick + NFT Auction Crashes Servers with Overwhelmingly Heavy Web Traffic more

Australia - An ABC News drone took the brunt of the bite force when a saltwater crocodile leapt up and plucked it from mid-air while filming in Darwin. video

Top 9 Surveillance Videos of the Week video  

How Jamie Spears Spied on Britney Spears Through iCloud - A security firm spied on Britney Spears through her iCloud account. Here's how to figure out if someone is doing that to you, and how to stop it. more & more & more & bugsweep

ShadowDragon: Inside the Social Media Surveillance Software That Can Watch Your Every Move - The tool is the product of a growing industry whose work is usually kept from the public and utilized by police. more & more

Florida - New Law – Corporate Espionage (HB 1523): Sponsored by Republican Rep. Mike Beltran, the new law creates the crime of “trafficking in trade secrets” and enhances criminal penalties under certain circumstances. If the trafficking of trade secrets benefits a foreign government or company, the offense is now a first-degree felony. more

Florida - Surveillance Drone Assists in Search for Brian Laundrie more 

Security researchers think Amazon's Astro bot isn't safe. more

Grain of Sand Sky Spies

A new microchip roughly the size of a grain of sand that has the potential to glide across great distances is being touted as a breakthrough for aerial surveillance.

Key points: 

• The devices are about the size of a grain of sand and can transmit wirelessly
• Remote sensing technology was originally developed for warfare
• The researchers hope the technology can be used to help monitor disease spread

Collaborating scientists from institutions including Northwestern University in the United States and Soongsil University in Korea have created what they believe are the world's smallest ever "human-made flying structures", which can be fitted with microchips and sensors and have the capacity to transmit data remotely.

The microchips can be dropped from the sky and potentially used to monitor environmental impacts and the spread of disease.The researchers, who published their findings today in the journal Nature. more

FutureWatch: Laser Through a Keyhole Can Expose Everything in a Room (somewhat)

If you're worried about privacy, it might be time to cover up your front door's peephole.

Being able to see inside a closed room was a skill once reserved for super heroes. But researchers at the Stanford Computational Imaging Lab have expanded on a technique called non-line-of-sight imaging so that just a single point of laser light entering a room can be used to see what physical objects might be inside...

It’s an incredibly clever technique, and one day it could be a very useful technology for devices like autonomous cars that would potentially be able to spot potential hazards hidden around corners long before they’re visible to passengers in a vehicle, improving safety and obstacle avoidance...

The research could one day provide a way for police or the military to assess the risks of entering a room before actually breaking down the door and storming their way inside, using nothing but a small crack in the wall or a gap around a window or doorway.  more

CCTV Company Pays Remote Workers to Yell at Armed Robbers

Clerks at 7-Eleven and other convenience stores are being constantly monitored by a voice of god that can intervene from thousands of miles away.

In a short CCTV video, a clerk at a small convenience store can be seen taking a bottle of coffee from a cooler and drinking it. When he returns to the cash register, an unseen person's voice emits from a speaker on the ceiling and interrogates him about whether he scanned and paid for the item.

In another video, a cashier is standing behind the counter talking to someone just out of frame. There’s a 'ding' sound, and the voice from above questions the cashier about who the other man is—he’s there to give the cashier a ride at the end of his shift—then orders the man to stand on the other side of the counter.

The videos are just a few examples that Washington-based Live Eye Surveillance uses to demonstrate its flagship product: a surveillance camera system that keeps constant watch over shops and lets a remote human operator intervene whenever they see something they deem suspicious.  

For enough money—$399 per month according to one sales email Motherboard viewed—a person in Karnal, India will watch the video feed from your business 24/7. The monitors “act as a virtual supervisor for the sites, in terms of assuring the safety of the employees located overseas and requesting them to complete assigned tasks,” according to a job posting on the company's website. more

Tin Foil Hat Alert: Tiny, Wireless, Injectable Chips Use Ultrasound to Monitor

Columbia Engineers develop the smallest single-chip system that is a complete functioning electronic circuit; implantable chips... that can be injected into the body with a hypodermic needle to monitor medical conditions.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering report that they have built what they say is the world's smallest single-chip system, consuming a total volume of less than 0.1 mm³. The system is as small as a dust mite and visible only under a microscope. In order to achieve this, the team used ultrasound to both power and communicate with the device wirelessly. The study was published online May 7 in Science Advances.

“We wanted to see how far we could push the limits on how small a functioning chip we could make,” said the study’s leader Ken Shepard, Lau Family professor of electrical engineering and professor of biomedical engineering. “This is a new idea of ‘chip as system’—this is a chip that alone, with nothing else, is a complete functioning electronic system. This should be revolutionary for developing wireless, miniaturized implantable medical devices that can sense different things, be used in clinical applications, and eventually approved for human use.” more

The Very Long Arm of the Law

UK - A Royal Navy submarine and a bugged Scottish farmhouse were used to try to catch the killers of Stephen Lawrence, it has emerged.

The elaborate surveillance operation was set up in 1999 in an attempt to gather evidence from five men accused of the teenager’s murder, as they enjoyed a two-week break after giving a high-profile TV interview...

But the Daily Mail yesterday revealed how, before they arrived, police had planted hidden microphones in the house, in the Perthshire village of Forteviot. The submarine, which took up position off Dundee, sent the signal back to London...

The Met rigged up the whole venue with hidden listening devices even placing them in golf buggies the suspects rode on in the quaint village of Forteviot.

They relayed their signal to a helicopter circling nearby which passed it onto the sub which in turn fired it down to detectives in Scotland Yard.

Even the friendly minibus driver who showed them the sights during their 15-day Highlands stay was an undercover police officer, reports the Mail.

One source said: “It was pure James Bond. It was run like a big anti-terror operation. The team had every piece of kit you had ever heard of.” more  more

Apple Airtags - You're It

A new report today says that AirTag stalking is “frighteningly easy” thanks to a number of weaknesses in Apple’s privacy protections...

...three days is a very long time to be tracked without your knowledge if you are an Android user. Additionally, for a stranger stalker, they would be able to track you to your home address or another location you frequently visit, before you are alerted – in other words, after the damage is done...

...An AirTag starts a three-day countdown clock on its alarm as soon as it’s out of the range of the iPhone it’s paired with. Since many victims live with their abusers, the alert countdown could be reset each night when the owner of the AirTag comes back into its range...

...There’s an option in the Find My app to turn off all of these “item safety alerts” — and adjusting it doesn’t require entering your PIN or password. People in abusive situations don’t always have total control over their phones...

...The only protection for Android users is the audible alert after three days, and it’s already been shown that the speaker can be disabled... more

Too Smart for Their Own Good, Smart TVs

A recent revelation regarding privacy violations by Skyworth TV has rattled smart TV users in China...the app that does the job is called Gozen Data, which is pre-installed on the TV’s Android system and which would scan the devices, sending back data from hostname, Mac, ip addresses, network delay times, and even nearby WiFi SSID names to a database called gz-data.com.

The website traces back to Dozen, a big data company. At time of this article’s publication, the official website of Gozen has gone into repair, but other open resources show that this company has long established partnerships with not only Skyworth, but also a series of smart TV manufacturers as well, including Sanyo, TCL, Toshiba and Philips. The firm collects data by implanting system development kits in the system layer, and is able to draw a massive amount of information... more

Animal Surveillance Tech - Bird Buddy

You want a Bird Buddy? It’s a smart bird feeder that notifies you via an app when a feathered friend has approached the vicinity.

The in-built camera turns on, records and takes pictures of the wee thing as it pecks away at the bird seed. And you can get your kicks as you watch it and take pictures on your phone.

The team behind the Bird Buddy says it captures their photos and organizes them in a “beautiful collection that is easy to view and share." more

Note: This is a crowd-funded project.
$7,132,542 USD by 30,767 backers
$5,092,995 USD by 22,921 backers on Jan 14, 2021 with another platform

PI Alert: Samsung is Crippling Your Latest Surveillance Trick

Samsung has announced that customers will soon be able to scan for unknown Galaxy SmartTags trackers using Samsung’s SmartThings Find service. The feature, called Unknown Tag Search, will be coming to the SmartThings app starting next week. 

Users will be able to scan the nearby area for any SmartTags that don’t belong to them but that are moving along with them. This feature could be a big win for safety, providing an easy way to make sure that nobody’s tracking you with a tiny SmartTag that they slipped in your backpack, purse, coat pocket, etc. It’s a nice feature if you’re concerned about the privacy or security implications of Tile-like tracking devices. more

Iowa Passes New Electronic Surveillance Law

IA - New penalties for those found guilty of trespassing to set up electronic surveillance equipment on someone else's property to secretly capture images or video have passed in the House.  

Iowa legislators have been trying to enhance trespassing laws for nearly a decade in response to undercover operations in large-scale livestock operations. Republican Representative Jarad (JAIR-ud) Klein of Keota says the bill addresses somebody that has ill intentions and wants access to somewhere where they don't have a reason to be. 

Critics say the bill could be used to shield those who are mistreating animals or it could prevent reporting of unsafe working conditions in Iowa meatpacking plants. more

Cars Know Your Location. A Spy Firm Wants to Sell It to the Military

• 15 billion car locations.
• Nearly any country on Earth.
‘The Ulysses Group’ is pitching a powerful surveillance technology to the U.S. government.

A surveillance contractor that has previously sold services to the U.S. military is advertising a product that it says can locate the real-time locations of specific cars in nearly any country on Earth. It says it does this by using data collected and sent by the cars and their components themselves, according to a document obtained by Motherboard.

"Ulysses can provide our clients with the ability to remotely geolocate vehicles in nearly every country except for North Korea and Cuba on a near real time basis," the document, written by contractor The Ulysses Group, reads. "Currently, we can access over 15 billion vehicle locations around the world every month," the document adds. more

Placed in my Grain of Salt file until I can verify.

There Are Spying Eyes Everywhere...

 ...and Now They Share a Brain.

Security cameras. License plate readers. Smartphone trackers. Drones. We’re being watched 24/7. What happens when all those data streams fuse into one?

...it’s a mistake to focus our dread on each of these tools individually. In many places across the world, they’re all inputs for a system that, with each new plug-in, reaches a little closer to omniscience.

That idea—of an ever-expanding, all-knowing surveillance platform—used to be a technologist’s fantasy, like the hoverbike or the jetpack. To understand how this particular hoverbike will finally be built, I began by calling up the people who designed the prototype. more

Legislation Proposed in NY to Protect Owners from Eavesdropping Devices

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is proposing ground-breaking legislation that would require companies that make “smart” devices like smart phones and televisions that can record, retain and transmit recordings to clearly display those capabilities to consumers.

The Democrat says the legislation is intended to make sure people know their smartphones, smart speakers and smart TVs that are connected to the internet can record what their owners are doing so they can manage their settings accordingly. 

The Governor says everyone has heard stories about smart devices connected to the internet recording people without their knowledge. Cuomo says people should be better informed about those capabilities and not have to search for that information hidden in fine print.

The Governor’s announcement did not go into detail on how that information would be displayed and what penalties could be levied against companies that failed to clearly disclose recording capabilities. more

German Laptop Retailer Fined €10.4m for Video-Monitoring Employees

Data protection authority LfD Niedersachsen has fined Germany-based IT products supplier Notebooksbilliger.de AG €10.4 million ($12.6 million) for video monitoring its employees without any legal basis, ZD Net reported. 

The video surveillance system was active at all times and recordings were saved for as many as 60 days in the company's database, breaching employees’ privacy rights under the 2018 General Data Protection Regulation. more

Snitch Culture Redux, or The Hong Kong So Long

Police in Hong Kong have launched a hotline where residents can report breaches of the national security law imposed by Beijing earlier this year.

The law criminalizes secession, subversion and collusion with foreign forces. It has silenced many protesters since it came into force.

Hong Kong residents can send images, audio and video files to the hotline.

Rights groups say they are concerned the service could be used to target those with opposing political views. more

 It is worth remembering that "Citizen Snitch Surveillance" is a tactic of cultures that eventually fail. 

About one in 100 East Germans was an informer for communist East Germany's secret police in 1989, according to a new study. Political ideology was their main motivation, both in East and West Germany.

The Stasi kept detailed files on thousands of East Germans

Around 189,000 people were informers the secret police of the GDR's communist regime, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 -- that's according to Thuringia's state office for researching East Germany's Stasi... more

 

See the movie...

Phones, Cameras, Cardkeys - What Will Track You Next?

Thanks to a new system developed at EPFL, building owners can detect the number of occupants and track their movement using sensors installed on floor slabs. This novel approach could be particularly useful for enhancing safety in retirement homes or managing buildings' energy use more efficiently...

Scientists at ENAC's Applied Computing and Mechanics Laboratory (IMAC), headed by Professor Ian Smith, have developed an alternative approach.  

"By installing sensors in a building's floor slabs, we can measure the vibrations created by footsteps. That lets us calculate the number of people in the building as well as where they are located and their trajectory," says Slah Drira, the IMAC Ph.D. student who completed his thesis on this topic.

To each his own gait...

"The signals our sensors record can vary considerably depending on the person's anatomy, walking speed, shoe type, health and mood," says Drira.

His method uses advanced algorithms—or more specifically, support vector machines—to classify the signals recorded by the sensors. Some interpretation strategies were inspired by the convolutional neural networks often employed in pixel-based image recognition, and can identify the footstep characteristics of specific occupants. more

Covid 19 Affects MI5's Spies Street Surveillance Tactics

The pandemic has changed the way millions of people work -- and even spies aren't exempt.

Near-empty streets caused by fewer people traveling into city centers can make it difficult for Britain's spies to track suspects, the new head of MI5, the UK's domestic security service, has said.

Ken McCallum told journalists Wednesday that his agents have adjusted the way they work as a result of the coronavirus crisis, after crowds thinned in public spaces. more

Bugged Turtle Eggs – Good Surveillance Tech

The Wire Inspired a Fake Turtle Egg That Spies on Poachers 

Scientists 3D-printed sea turtle eggs and stuffed transmitters inside. When poachers pulled them out of nests, the devices tracked their every move.

In the HBO series The Wire, Baltimore cops Herc and Carver devise an unorthodox way to listen in on a drug dealer named Frog, right on the street: They shove a tiny, $1,250 microphone into a tennis ball, which they then place in a gutter. 

Listening in from a building across the street, they watch as Frog picks up the ball and absentmindedly tosses it between his hands, sending thuds and an electric screech into Herc’s headphones. Quickly over it, Frog chucks the ball over their building. Carver rushes after it, only to watch a semi truck crush their very expensive tennis ball.

The Baltimore PD’s failure, though, may still be biologists’ gain. Drawing both from the imaginary surveillance tennis ball and a story arc from Breaking Bad, in which the Drug Enforcement Agency uses GPS to track methylamine barrels, real life researchers have developed the InvestEGGator: a fake sea turtle egg filled with a transmitter in place of an embryo, a clever new way to track where poachers are selling the real deal. more

China Looks To Build Espionage Hub In Iran Under 25-Year Deal

The next phase of the 25-year deal between China and Iran will focus on a large-scale roll-out of electronic espionage and warfare capabilities focused around the port of Chabahar and extending for a nearly 5,000 kilometer (3,000 mile) radius, and the concomitant build-out of mass surveillance and monitoring of the Iranian population, in line with the standard operating procedure across China, senior sources close to the Iranian government told OilPrice.com last week. 

Both of these elements dovetail into Beijing’s strategic vision for Iran as a fully-functioning client state of China by the end of the 25-year period.

By that time, Iran will be an irreplaceable geographical and geopolitical foundation stone in Beijing’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ project, as well as providing a large pool of young, well-educated, relatively cheap labor for Chinese industry. 

The mass surveillance, monitoring, and control systems to cover Iran’s population is to begin its full roll-out as from the second week of November...

“The plan is for nearly 10 million extra CCTV [closed-circuit television] cameras to be placed in Iran’s seven most populous cities, to begin with, plus another five million or so pinhole surveillance cameras to be placed at the same time in another 21 cities, with all of these being directly linked in to China’s main state surveillance and monitoring systems,” said an Iran source. “This will enable the full integration of Iran into the next generation of China’s algorithmic surveillance system that allows for the targeting of behavior down to the level of the individual by combining these inputs with already-stored local, national, and regional records on each citizen, together with their virtual data footprints,” he said. more