Happy New Year! It's 1984 ...in 2019

Students at more than 10 schools in Guizhou Province, one of China’s poorest provinces, and the neighboring Guangxi region are now required to wear “intelligent uniforms,” which are embedded with electronic chips that track their movements.

The uniforms allow school officials, teachers, and parents to keep track of the exact times that students leave or enter the school, Lin Zongwu, principal of the No. 11 School of Renhuai in Guizhou Province, told the state-run newspaper Global Times on Dec. 20.

If students skip school without permission, an alarm will be triggered.

If students try to game the system by swapping uniforms, an alarm also will sound, as facial-recognition equipment stationed at the school entrance can match a student’s face with the chip embedded in the uniform. more

FutureWatch: Chips embedded in the students.

German Football Club Caught Spying with a Drone

‘We didn‘t do anything illegal!‘
Spy games: German club admit to spying on rivals using drones

German football was stunned at the news that Werder Bremen one of the biggest clubs in the Bundesliga spied on training sessions of rivals Hoffenheim by using drones piloted by club officials...

And remarkably, Werder Bremen has issued a statement taking responsibility for the incident, admitting it was they who arranged for the drone to conduct surveillance of Hoffenheim‘s training session.

An official statement was released, explaining that the drone was piloted by a member of club staff, while the club‘s general manager Frank Bauman made a formal apology and took full responsibility for the incident. more

Spy Book Collection for Kids

Can an undercover nerd become a superstar agent? Ben Ripley sure hopes so—and his life may depend on it!

When Ben Ripley is recruited to the CIA’s Academy of Espionage, it’s a dream come true. But as soon as he gets on campus, Ben finds out that Spy School is way more deadly than debonair. And given his total lack of coordination and failure to grasp even the most basic spying skills, Ben begins to wonder what he’s doing here in the first place.



Luckily, through a series of hilarious misadventures, Ben realizes he could actually become a halfway decent spy…if he can survive all the attempts being made on his life! more

FutureWatch: Spy Technology of the Future

An Exciting Future for Spy Technology

1. Real-Time Facial Surveillance That Doesn't Require Clear, Unobstructed Images
2. Tools That Detect Activity Based on a Phone's Characteristics
3. Increased Uses for Artificial Intelligence
4. Technology to Detect Suspicious Body Language



Although it's not possible to know exactly how espionage experts will depend on the things on this list and others, it's evident that technology will help spies achieve their missions. It may also allow them to diversify their responsibilities as tech takes care of past tasks. more

Being Your Own Bodyguard, by Richard Roth (Kindle)

Click to enlarge.

Foreword by The Honorable Carlos C. Campbell

Rich Roth condenses over four decades of experience as a member of the United States Secret Service, and as a private security consultant and bodyguard.

His business portfolio includes cyber security, executive protection, aircraft and airport vulnerability, threat assessment and mitigation, training, perimeter detection and CCTV systems design and crisis management.

From the plazas of Paris, to dodging the guns in the Gaza strip, to the cafes in Caracas, Roth slips out of the shadows of surveillance to inform readers about how they can protect themselves through situational awareness, adaptation, and employ techniques and tactics for survival and mitigation.

Being Your Own Bodyguard deals with physical layouts and boundaries, psychological characteristics, and physiognomic [facial expressions] clues in assessing threats. Rich draws heavily on his experience with the USSS that includes over one hundred protection assignments. more

Security Director Alert - Well Produced Information Security Awareness Videos for Employees

Foreign intelligence entities, which may include foreign governments, corporations, and their proxies, are actively targeting information, assets, and technologies that are vital to both U.S. national security and our global competitiveness. 

Increasingly, U.S. companies are in the cross-hairs of these foreign intelligence entities, which are breaching private computer networks, pilfering American business secrets and innovation, and carrying out other illicit activities.

The National Counterintelligence and Security Center is dedicated to raising awareness among government employees and private industry about these foreign intelligence threats, the risks they pose, and the defensive measures necessary for individuals and organizations to safeguard that which has been entrusted to their protection.

The following products will enable personnel to better understand these threats and provide guidance and tips for protecting the sensitive information, assets, technologies, and networks to which employees have access. It will also serve to help them protect their personal, confidential information that may be used by others to gain their trust. more

Videos:
Social Media Deception Trailer
Social Media Deception
Social Media Deception Full Video
Social Engineering
Spear Phishing (30 second trailer)
Spear Phishing 2017
Spear Phishing Full Video
Travel Awareness
Human Targeting
Supply Chain Risk Management
Economic Espionage  (True story.)

Infographic - Check Your Phone for Spies

There is a lot which can be done to check your phone for spyware. 
Everything from following instructions in a book to a full forensic inspection.

In the meantime, you can start with this...

You can find a slightly larger version here.

Yet another Spy Museum Opens

The KGB Spy Museum (in New York City) features the largest collection of USSR KGB espionage artifacts.

The KGB, an initialism for КГБ Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti translated in English as Committee for State Security, was the main security agency for the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, KGB always wanted to compete with the CIA in all possible ways.

Interactive spy museum presents to visitors that era special technique: spy cameras, KGB concealment devices, secret recorders, crypto and cipher machines, spy radios, secure telephones...

The museum exhibition, much of which is only now being made public, presents a never-before-seen collection of items covering the activities of prominent KGB agents and revealing the strategies and methods that underlay many of history’s top secret espionage operations. more

"Alexa, what’s my neighbor doing?"

Alexa, what’s my neighbor doing? ‘Human error’ allows user to eavesdrop on stranger’s life.

A German Amazon customer was able to access hours of audio files from a stranger‘s Alexa device that included recordings of him in the shower thanks to a “mistake” by one of Amazon‘s human employees.

Amazon sent the customer a link that included 1,700 recordings of another man and his female companion when he asked to play back the recordings from his own Alexa voice assistant.

He reported the anomaly to Amazon, but the company did not immediately reply, except to delete the files. By then, he had already downloaded them. After weeks of no response from Amazon, the customer notified German trade c‘t, worried the company would just cover up the incident otherwise.

Using the information contained in the recordings, which included their first and last name, the name of their partner, where they lived – even audio of the person in the shower – c‘t was able to locate and the victim, who was... more

Yup, like I said two years ago. ~Kevin

Happy Birthday World's First Spy Musuem

The Spy Museum in Tampere, Finland opened to the public in the summer of 1998. It was the world's first spy museum dedicated exclusively to espionage. This year, the Spy Museum celebrated its 20th anniversary. 

Two years later, in 2000, a sister museum, the International Spy Museum, opened its doors in Washington, D.C.  more

The Case of the Eavesdropping Boyfirend - Settled

"Wonderful fun. Hundreds of practical uses."

A New York City accountant agreed to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission more than a half-million dollars to settle insider trading charges related to the merger of Alaska Airlines and Virgin America. Peter Cho was accused of listening in on his investment banker wife’s* phone calls to glean sensitive information, allowing him to earn over $250K through a series of perfectly timed investments. more   * At the time his fiancée.

The Surprising Spy Story Behind Lafayette Radio

by Rich Post KB8TAD 

Lafayette's three owners
Sometimes when you look closely at a company, a surprise pops up. Such was the case with Lafayette. The change in corporate names in 1939-40 and the separate catalogs in 1942 as well as the sudden and permanent disappearance of Lafayette from Atlanta and Chicago in 1951 triggered the question of why. Was there a rift among partners?

Searching on the names of the three owners as stated in the Federal Trade Commission action against Wholesale Radio in 1935 turned up nothing until... A search on the correctly-spelled names of Samuel J. Novick and Max H. Krantzberg came up with Krantzberg as the Executive Vice President of Lafayette with stock holdings just a bit less than President and Chairman Abraham Pletman in a Securities and Exchange Commission report in 1961. Each owned roughly a third of the outstanding shares...

The communist connection
Novick was not actually the author of "A Plan for America at Peace" but his company sponsored and paid for the publication. He had immigrated to the US from Czarist Russia in 1914 at age 17. One of his early jobs in the US was radio telegrapher. He became an excellent business man. He was also an avowed communist who allegedly paid the bills for radio commentators from the American Communist Party on the Blue radio network. He supported a variety of organizations later deemed to be underground communist groups according to FBI reports. Some labor unions at the time were also controlled by communists allegedly including the one that had honored him. Of course, in free speech America, this was allowed.

Spies and Lies
However, it was after the FBI uncovered a Russian spy that Samuel Novick came to their attention.

Arthur Adams was a high-ranking undercover GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) operative under the code named "Achilles" and was assigned along with others in the NKVD (forerunner of the Russian KGB) to obtain US corporate and military technology secrets.

In 1937 Novick had written a letter to the US Immigration and Naturalization Service vouching that Adams was a highly skilled radio engineer who had worked for him for 10 years at Wholesale Radio as its Canadian representative and was needed in the US. It was a lie.  more

Extra Credit: Explore old Lafayette catalogues here, and later ones here. Old issues of Monitoring Times may be obtained here.

This Month in... Bots Gone Wild

Sneaky parrot uses Amazon Alexa to shop while owner is away. more

GPS signals across far northern Norway and Finland failed. Civilian airplanes were forced to navigate manually, and ordinary citizens could no longer trust their smartphones. more

Virgin Australia is under investigation after two engines on one of its aircraft "flamed out" during descent and had to be manually re-ignited before the aircraft hit the tarmac. more

Drone shatters passenger jet’s nosecone and radar during landing. more

Uber manager in March: “We shouldn’t be hitting things every 15,000 miles.” "They told me incidents like that happen all of the time," whistleblower wrote. more

New Zealand courts banned naming Grace Millane’s accused killer. Google just emailed it out. more

She'd just had a stillborn child. Tech companies wouldn't let her forget it. A woman pleads with tech companies like Facebook and Twitter to stop serving her ads to intensify her grief. more

Microsoft is sending users who search for Office 2019 download links via its Bing search engine to a website that teaches them the basics about pirating the company's Office suite. more

Delivery robot bursts into flames at UC Berkeley. more

Rudy Giuliani Says Twitter Sabotaged His Tweet (not true) more
Mystery Drone Still on the Loose at Gatwick Airport, But Flights Resume Anyway more

Thousands of people trusted Blind, an app-based "anonymous social network," as a safe way to reveal malfeasance, wrongdoing and improper conduct at their companies. But Blind left one of its database servers exposed without a password, making it possible for anyone who knew where to look to access each user's account information and identify would-be whistleblowers. more

...and a cautionary tale.

FutureWatch: 2019 - Stricter Privacy Regulation (we hope)

After decades of complacency, the regulatory tide is finally turning against the unchecked personal data collection that powers the ad-revenue machines at Google, Facebook, and other big tech firms. 

In Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an unprecedented leap forward in privacy regulation, with strict rules and harsh penalties designed to limit personal data collection.

Though the US has been slower to act, there is a growing demand for an Internet Dodd-Frank, a sweeping federal legislation designed to protect the privacy of US citizens.

The recently passed California Protection Act (AB 375) is one potential, though imperfect, template for a federal consumer privacy law. This new law affords California residents new privacy rights that entitle them more insight into, and more control over, the personal data companies collect on them...

Google already commented that they "...look forward to improvements to address the many unintended consequences of the law," which could easily translate to prioritizing the protection of the practices that have allowed these companies to make billions at the expense of consumer privacy. more

Government Spying... Outsourced

New Zealand - The State Services Commission delivered a damning report into the use of companies like Thompson and Clark (Investigations Limited) to carry out surveillance on protestors, activists and other members of the public, as well as inappropriately close relationship between investigators and some public servants.

https://amzn.to/2SaAd8i

The Commissioner described the way some agencies allowed some New Zealanders to be targeted by investigators as an affront to democracy.

The report has already claimed its first casualty.

Ross Butler quit as chair of the government insurance agency Southern Response last night before his meeting with the Greater Christchurch Regeneration Minister Megan Woods.

The insurer broke its code of conduct, and possibly the law, when it used security firm Thompson and Clark to secretly record meetings of earthquake victims. more & more