The unwarranted surveillance policies that get enshrined into law and all the illegal snooping by the gov seems to trace to anti-terror legislation and anti-terror backroom initiatives. I have to wonder, is this all attributed to Israel? If the US and other Israel allies had quit supporting Israel during their oppression of Palestinians, would there be a notable terror threat that could then be the cause for action (for unwarranted snooping) under the anti-terror façade? Would bankers had been converted into police had it not been for Israel’s oppression of Palestine?

Is this why we will lose cash in the future?

Have any privacy orgs calculated how many terror incidents stem from a consequence of supporting Israel? This could even count the white supremacist nutters who attack mosques in retaliation.

What would be a more effective anti-terror policy?:

• Snoop on everyone in every possible way. Wiretaps, forced banking, making bankers into cops, video surveillance everywhere with

All links for this story are shit -- Cloudflare or paywalls. So I linked the archive and will dump the text below. Note the difference between my title and the original. I think mine is more accurate. The AG seems to view feature phones as a tool for criminals. But also says having no phone is suspect as well, so the original title is also correct.

Georgia AG claims not having a phone makes you a criminal

That’s dangerous for constitutional rights
SAMANTHA HAMILTON
FEBRUARY 12, 2024 6:52 PM

The ubiquity of smartphones is causing some to pine for simpler times, when we didn’t have the entire history of humankind’s knowledge at our fingertips on devices that tracked our every move. There’s a growing trend, particularly among young people, to use non-smartphones, or “basic phones.” The reasons range from aesthetic to financial to concern for mental health. But according to Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, having a basic phone, or a phone with no data on it, or no

Image Transcription:

WHAT WILL A CASHLESS SOCIETY MEAN?

THE PROS

CONVENIENCE — THERE WILL NO LONGER BE ANY NEED TO CARRY CASH AROUND

THE CONS

EVERY TRANSACTION YOU MAKE WILL BE TRACKED YOUR SPENDING HABITS CAN BE LINKED TO YOUR CARBON FOOTPRINT

YOU WILL ONLY BE PERMITTED TO SPEND ON THINGS THE GOVERNMENT APPROVES OF. THINGS THAT ARE DEEMED TO BE LUXURIES — MEAT, FUEL, TRAVEL — CAN BE RESTRICTED

YOUR MONEY CAN BE PROGRAMMED WITH AN EXPIRY DATE — IF YOU DON’T SPEND IT BY A CERTAIN DATE, YOU'LL LOSE IT

THERE WILL BE NO ‘BLACK’ ECONOMY. IT WILL NOT BE POSSIBLE TO AVOID TAX, BUT THEN YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO GIVE POCKET MONEY TO CHILDREN OR GRANDCHILDREN AND NEITHER WILL YOU BE ABLE TO BORROW OR LEND MONEY TO FRIENDS WITHOUT THAT BEING TAXED BY THE GOVERNMENT

PARKING AND SPEEDING FINES WILL BE TAKEN AT SOURCE, WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF CHALLENGE AND POSSIBLY EVEN WITHOUT YOUR KNOWLEDGE

IF YOU PROTEST THE ACTIONS OF THE GOVERNMENT, YOUR MONEY CAN BE SWITCHED OFF.

cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/2667522

Apparently some company I do business with shared my data with another corp without me knowing, then that corp who I did not know had my data was breached.

WTF?

Then the breached corp who could not competently secure the data in the first place offers victims a gratis credit monitoring services (read: offers to let yet another dodgy corp also have people’s sensitive info thus creating yet another breach point). Then the service they hired as a “benefit” to victims outsources to another corp and breach point: Cloudflare.

WTF?

So to be clear, the biggest privacy abuser on the web is being used to MitM a sensitive channel between a breach victim and a credit monitoring service who uses a configuration that blocks tor (thus neglecting data minimization and forcing data breach victims to reveal even more sensitive info to two more corporate actors, one of whom has proven to be untrustworthy with privat

Are there any privacy implications of enabling it?

The link is Cloudflare-free, popup-free and reachable to Tor users.

(edit) Some interesting factors--

from the article:

For a period of over 2 years, Uber transferred those data to Uber's headquarters in the US, without using transfer tools. Because of this, the protection of personal data was not sufficient. The Court of Justice of the EU invalidated the EU-US Privacy Shield in 2020.

Yes but strangely & sadly the US benefits from an adequacy decision, which IIRC happened after 2020. This means the US is officially construed as having privacy protections on par with Europe. As perverse as that sounds, no doubt Uber’s lawyers will argue that point.

The Dutch DPA started the investigation on Uber after more than 170 French drivers complained to the French human rights interest group the Ligue des droits de l’Homme (LDH), which subs

“Categorically unconstitutional” – that is how the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled about the use of geofence warrants.

The part of the Constitution that this type of warrant, that enables dragnet-style mass surveillance, violates is the Fourth Amendment, the court found.

This amendment is meant to protect citizens from unreasonable searches or seizures – but, said the court of appeals, what geofence warrants do is allow for the opposite: “General, exploratory rummaging.”

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

Geofencing works by essentially treating everyone who happens to be in a geographic area during a given time as a suspect, until established otherwise.

And, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights group, an outspoken critic that often gets involved in legal cases to argue against this method of investigation, welcomed the court’s decision, notin

The Biden administration is working to expedite widespread adoption of digital IDs, including driver’s licenses, a draft executive order indicates.

Digital IDs are a contentious concept primarily because of the concentration of – eventually – the entirety of people’s sensitive private information in centralized databases controlled by the government, and on people’s phones, “client-side.”

That in turn brings up the issues of technical security, but also privacy, and the potential for dystopian-style mass surveillance.

Proponents, on the other hand, like to focus on the “convenience” that such a shift from physical to digital personal documents is promised to bring.

In the US, some states have started this process via digital driver’s licenses, and the executive order is urging (“strongly encouraging”) both federal and state authorities to accelerate this, as well as other types of digital ID.

Where this policy seems to be converging to is coming up, at long last, with a functional

In Brazil, a significant upheaval in digital privacy and access to information is unfolding, as a notable number of reputable VPN services—including NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark, and VyprVPN—have vanished from the local iOS App Store. This move is widely believed to comply with Brazilian authorities’ directives, reflecting a concerning trend towards online censorship.

This development is particularly alarming in light of the recent decision X made to shutdown its operations in the country. X terminated its operations after a protracted legal confrontation with Brazilian officials, who had accused the platform of insufficient efforts to combat disinformation, specifically its failure to block accounts spreading false information and hate speech. Despite the shutdown, X’s app is still accessible in Brazil.

![](https://links.hackliberty.o

California is one of the US states that have introduced digital license plates, amid opposition from a number of rights advocates.

Now, there is a legislative effort to have GPS location tracking embedded in these, to all intents and purposes, devices attached to the car.

Sponsored by Democrat Assemblywoman Lori Wilson, Bill 3138 is currently making its way through the state’s legislature. It refers to “License plates and registration cards: alternative devices,” and the bill has another sponsor – Reviver.

The company was founded by Neville Boston, formerly of the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), and promotes itself as the first digital license plates platform. It has made its way to both this proposal, and the law the current draft builds on – AB 984 (also sponsored by Wilson) – which was signed into law two years ago.

The problem with Reviver is that it has already had a security breach that allowed hackers to track those using the company’s digital plates in real-time. It doe

Free speech group the Foundation for Individual Rights (FIRE) has gone to court in a bid to block Texas state age verification law, Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act (SCOPE Act, HB 18).

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

This largely Republican-backed law will take effect on September 1, starting when online platforms will be under obligation to register and verify the age of all users.

This will apply if “more than a third” of content on the platforms is considered “harmful” or “obscene.”

But FIRE believes this is a form of pressure to make sure sites collect biometric and ID data from adults in Texas as they access what is lawful (to them) content.

Hence the case, Students Engaged in Advancing Texas v. Paxton, where FIRE is suing state Attorney General Ken Paxton on behalf of four plaintiffs that the group says would

Although a lower court had dismissed the case, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has decided that Google will have to go to trial after all, for allegedly secretly collecting data from Chrome users, regardless of whether they chose to sync information from the browser with their Google account.

The class action lawsuit, Calhoun v. Google LLC., accuses the tech giant of using the browser, by far the most dominant in its market, to collect browsing history, IP addresses, unique browser identifiers, and persistent cookie identifiers – all without consent.

The case was initially filed in 2020 and then dismissed in December 2022, but now the appellate court – in a ruling signed by Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. – said that the decision failed to take into account, looking into Google’s disclosures, i.e., the privacy policy agreement, “whether a reasonable user reading

The push to develop digital ID and expand its use in the US is receiving a boost as the country’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is launching a new project.

NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has teamed up with 15 large financial and state institutions, as well as tech companies, to research and develop a way of integrating Mobile Driver’s License (mDL) into financial services. But according to NIST, this is just the start and the initial focus of the program.

The agreement represents an effort to tie in yet more areas of people’s lives in their digital ID (“customer identification program requirements” is how NIST’s announcement describes the focus of this particular initiative). These schemes are often criticized by rights advocates for their potential to be used as mass surv

This email provider gives onion email addresses:

pflujznptk5lmuf6xwadfqy6nffykdvahfbljh7liljailjbxrgvhfid.onion

Take care when creating the username to pull down the domain list and choose the onion domain. That address you get can then be used to receive messages. Unlike other onion email providers, this is possibly the only provider who offers addresses with no clearnet variations. So if a recipient figures out the clearnet domain it apparently cannot be used to reach you. This forces Google and MS out of the loop.

It’s narrowly useful for some situations where you are forced to provide an email address against your will (which is increasingly a problem with European governments). Though of course there are situations where it will not work, such as if it’s a part of a procedure that requires confirmation codes.

Warning: be wary of the fact that this ESP’s clearnet site is on Cloudflare. Just don’t use the clearnet site and keep CF out of the loop.

https://github.com/umutcamliyurt/FaradayTester

I have lots of whistles to blow. Things where if I expose them then the report itself will be instantly attributable to me by insiders who can correlate details. That’s often worth the risks if the corporate baddy who can ID the whistle blower is in a GDPR region (they have to keep it to themselves.. cannot doxx in the EU, Brazil, or California, IIUC).

But risk heightens when many such reports are attributable under the same handle. Defensive corps can learn more about their adversary (me) through reports against other shitty corps due to the aggregation under one handle.

So each report should really be under a unique one-time-use handle (or no handle at all). Lemmy nodes have made it increasingly painful to create burner accounts (CAPTCHA, interviews, fussy email domain criteria, waiting for approval followed by denial). It’s understandable that unpaid charitable admins need to resist abusers.

Couldn’t this be solved by allowing anonymous posts? The anonymous post would be untrus