More Info Leaks About The CBP's Counter-Terrorism Division's Targeting Of Journalists

from the rules?-we-don't-need-no-stinkin'-rules dept

For a few years now, information has come to light showing Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has been engaged in the sort of activity that's gotten other federal law enforcement agencies in trouble in the past: the targeting of journalists.

To be clear, no law enforcement agency -- federal or otherwise -- should target a journalist unless the journalist is suspected of criminal activity. Journalists' sources may be suspected of criminal activity from time to time, but that does not justify the direct targeting of journalists to identify their sources. The First Amendment -- as interpreted in multiple court decisions -- protects journalists and their sources. Federal agencies should know better and yet they far too frequently ignore these protections to hunt down leakers and whistleblowers.

The CBP has been at this for a while now. In 2019, leaked documents showed CBP had created a watchlist related to the immigrant caravan approaching the US border -- one that contained plenty of journalists, activists, and immigration lawyers. Shortly thereafter, it became apparent the rights-violating watchlisting was a multinational effort, with the Mexican government pitching in to keep an eye on these individuals on its side of the border.

An DHS Inspector General's investigation followed. It found plenty of targeting of journalists but decided that since the CBP never engaged in retaliatory activities against press members, there was no wrongdoing... for the most part. No harm, even if there was clearly a foul.

Another Inspector General's report -- one that hasn't been publicly released in unredacted form -- shows even more CBP targeting of journalists, something the agency apparently considered to be a normal part of its day-to-day counterterrorist operations.

A special Customs and Border Protection unit used sensitive government databases intended to track terrorists to investigate as many as 20 U.S.-based journalists, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporter, according to a federal watchdog.

Yahoo News, which published an extensive report on the investigation, also found that the unit, the Counter Network Division, queried records of congressional staffers and perhaps members of Congress.

This Inspector General report has uncovered even more targeting of journalists and others the CBP should be steering clear of. But instead of steering clear, the CBP embraced its access of multiple databases to investigate journalists not suspected of any wrongdoing. Pattern and practice, as the civil rights lawsuits say.

Jeffrey Rambo, an agent who acknowledged running checks on journalists in 2017, told federal investigators the practice is routine.

"When a name comes across your desk you run it through every system you have access to, that's just status quo, that's what everyone does," Rambo was quoted by Yahoo News as saying.

Yahoo's extensive report contains much more information about the CBP and this agent's inappropriate use of the agency's multiple tools for tracking and investigating people.

[Jeffrey Rambo] worked at a secretive Customs and Border Protection division. The division, which still operates today, had few rules and routinely used the country’s most sensitive databases to obtain the travel records and financial and personal information of journalists, government officials, congressional members and their staff, NGO workers and others.

Lots of journalists, lots of abuse of the CBP's power. Zero accountability.

As many as 20 journalists were investigated as part of the division’s work, which eventually led to referrals for criminal prosecution against Rambo, his boss and a co-worker. None were charged, however.

Rambo refers to this as "vetting," although it's not clear what the vetting was supposed to accomplish, other than allowing him (and others) to compile large amounts of information about the people listed above. Agents pulled email addresses, photos from passport applications, and phone numbers. Names were run against multiple databases, including government terrorist watchlists. What did the CBP put in place to ensure these systems weren't abused by agents? Nothing, according to Rambo.

"There is no specific guidance on how to vet someone,” Rambo later told investigators. “In terms of policy and procedure, to be 100 percent frank there, there's no policy and procedure on vetting.”

Critics are calling it abuse. Rambo says abuse or not, it's standard operating procedure. There's nothing alerting agents this might be the wrong thing to do, even though it would seem apparent that targeting journalists, members of Congress, and activists might be unconstitutional and certainly isn't publicly acceptable.

And the CBP doesn't appear to believe there's anything wrong with this either. Its statement to Yahoo says things about "strict governance" and "best practices," claiming this is all part of its valuable national security work. It claims it has done nothing wrong.

“CBP does not investigate individuals without a legitimate and legal basis to do so,” the spokesperson added. “These investigations support CBP’s mission to protect our communities.”

Protect which community? The public at large? Or does it serve to protect the border control community from critical journalists and nosy Congressional reps? It might be little more difficult for the CBP to justify this sort of "vetting." This is no longer Trump's CBP -- one headed by a Commander-in-Chief who was openly hostile to both immigrants and journalists. That's not to say the Biden's CBP is completely distinguishable from Trump's CBP, but there appears to be more support from the Executive Branch when it comes to protecting the rights of journalists.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 4th amendment, cbp, journalists, surveillance

An Unplanned, Ad-Hoc Collaboration Reveals The On-The-Ground Truth About China's Internment Camps For Uyghurs

from the name-that-surveillance-camera dept

The US, UK and Australia have all announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. The reason given for the move is because of human rights abuses in China, particularly in the turkic-speaking region of Xinjiang. Techdirt has been writing about the Chinese authorities' use of technology to censor and carry out surveillance on the local Uyghur population, among others, for some years. One of the most controversial aspects of China's policy in the region is the use of huge detention camps. According to the authorities there, these camps are for educational and vocational training. Human rights organizations call them internment camps; some governments speak of "genocide" against the Uyghurs.

Given the highly sensitive nature of the topic, it is naturally hard to ascertain what is really happening in these camps. One solution is to use satellite imagery to peek inside China's tightly-controlled borders. Perhaps the best-researched investigation using this technique appeared on BuzzFeed News last year. The main article, and the four follow-ups, revealed the hitherto unknown scale of the internment camps, but were necessarily limited by their use of an extreme physical viewpoint -- the view from space.

A Chinese travel blogger going by the name of Guanguan decided to investigate on the ground some of the camps located by BuzzFeed News, by driving to them. The remarkable 20-minute video summary of his travels provides unique views of the camps, which complement the satellite imagery used by BuzzFeed News. Specifically, they show in some detail side-views of the camps. This allows Guanguan to make reasonable guesses about which camps are indeed for education and training of some kind, and which ones are likely to be high-security internment camps.

The video is well-worth watching in its entirely, since it provides probably our best glimpse yet of the reality of China's internment camps for Uyghurs and others (wisely, Guanguan seems to be out of China now). In fact, the quality of the video images is such that IPVM, which specializes in covering the world of video surveillance, was able to recognize several of the security cameras used at the internment camps. There are a few cameras from the Chinese company Dahua Technology, but the majority identified come from Hikvision. This, Techdirt readers will recall, is the company whose director of cybersecurity and privacy said that IoT devices with backdoors "can't be used to spy on companies, individuals, or nations." IPVM reported that Hikvision "declined to comment" on these latest findings. Its article noted that the visual evidence of Hikvision cameras being used in multiple internment camps, the result of an interesting unplanned, ad-hoc collaboration between Western journalists and a Chinese video blogger, is likely to make things even worse for a company already blacklisted by the US government.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: china, guanguan, internment camps, surveillance, uyghurs
Companies: hikvision

Disrupting Spycraft: Always-On Surveillance Is Prompting Massive Changes In Covert Operations

from the move-fast-and-break-your-own-stuff dept

The spies are back to complaining that the always-on digital world and the omnipresence of surveillance devices (both public and private) is making it difficult to do spy stuff.

Last January, sources were telling Yahoo that it's no longer enough to carry around a few fake documents to get past customs and engage in spycraft -- not when the cover identities are bereft of the digital detritus generated by simply existing in a connected world. And it's difficult to move about unobserved when every street light, business, and front porch has a camera attached to it, monitoring activity 24/7/365.

The report also noted that online access to a large variety of information also made it more difficult to engage in covert activities. Russian counterintelligence agents were apparently able to sniff out CIA agents working in US embassies by looking for things like prior postings in certain countries, pay bumps for hazardous work, or mismatches in salary for employees with similar titles. Some of this investigative work could be achieved by utilizing open source information gleaned from government sites and professional-oriented platforms like LinkedIn. Data from the massive Office of Personnel Management hack likely filled in the rest of the details.

It isn't all losses, though. The same surveillance apparati that made it difficult for covert operatives to maintain cover also made it easier for them to track their targets. But the overall tone of the report was that undercover work needed to undergo an extensive overhaul or it would be rendered almost entirely useless.

It's been almost two years since that report was released. Since then, surveillance tech has become even more ubiquitous, with governments and private citizens alike installing more cameras and monitoring other people's movements and activities more frequently.

The complaints from agencies utilizing covert surveillance haven't changed, though. What used to be extremely difficult is now almost impossible, according to this report from the Wall Street Journal. (alt. link here)

Operatives widely suspected of working for Israel’s Mossad spy service planned a stealthy operation to kill a Palestinian militant living in Dubai. The 2010 plan was a success except for the stealth part—closed-circuit cameras followed the team’s every move, even capturing them before and after they put on disguises.

In 2017, a suspected U.S. intelligence officer held a supposedly clandestine meeting with the half brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, days before the latter was assassinated. That encounter also became public knowledge, thanks to a hotel’s security camera footage.

Last December , it was Russia’s turn. Bellingcat, the investigative website, used phone and travel data to track three operatives from Moscow’s FSB intelligence service it said shadowed and then attempted to kill Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny. Bellingcat named the three. And published their photographs.

The CIA has its own issues, as the new director (William Burns) admitted during his February confirmation hearing. He said the CIA's bread-and-butter covert work was "much more difficult" to perform but expressed confidence the agency would find some way to work around these millions of inconveniences.

If packing a bag with a handful of aliases and their corresponding paperwork no longer works in a world where every cover story needs to be backed by a fleshed-out online existence, the solution might be to do away with the fakery. Instead of adopting personas as needed, agents will be expected to exist as someone else -- something that requires far more dedication and commitment than playing a small part for a few months or years to gather intelligence.

Crossing international borders under an assumed name is rapidly becoming yesteryear’s tradecraft, because of biometrics like facial recognition and iris scans, several former officials said.

“It’s more difficult for intelligence officers to masquerade under alias,” said a retired Western intelligence officer who estimated he had nine false identities during his career, and credit cards for each.

More spying will be done in “true name,” meaning the spy won’t pose as someone else, but “live their cover” as a businessperson, academic or other professional with no obvious connection to the U.S. government.

There will be no more coming in from the cold. Always-on surveillance is leading to always-on spycraft. Another alternative -- one already in use -- is the use of teams to perform covert work, with one handling the actual legwork while the rest of the team steers the operative clear of surveillance cameras in the area.

Something approaching schadenfreude comes from reading reports like these, where the early adopters and pioneers of surveillance tech are now realizing there's too much surveillance tech standing between them and their work. Pervasive surveillance has made citizens around the world aware lives can no longer be lived largely unobserved. A wealth of personal data only clicks away makes anonymity almost impossible.

And there's a layer of irony on top of the schadenfreude: the same governments that felt they needed thousands or millions of cameras to keep an eye on their citizens are finding out that massive surveillance systems are capable of exposing their own secrets to their adversaries. There's no rolling it back, either. The difficulty level of covert human intelligence operations is only going to keep increasing.

Filed Under: always on, cia, spycraft, surveillance

Apple Notifies More Victims Of NSO Malware Hacking Attempts

from the [extremely-1960s-Batman-splash]-THWART!!! dept

Apple's announcement that it was suing Israeli malware purveyor NSO Group for targeting iPhone users was coupled with another, equally dismaying (I mean, for NSO…) announcement: it would be informing targets of malware anytime it detected a suspected intrusion.

Actually, this may be more of a concern for NSO's customers. After all, they're still paying the same licensing fees even if their targets are being warned of hacking attempts. It can't make them happy and -- since it appears many of NSO's customers like to target non-terrorists and non-criminals -- there's really nothing they can do about it. Local entities may be sworn to secrecy with court orders (if those are even obtained) but there's nothing preventing Apple from alerting users that malware might be present on their phones.

Given the long list of seemingly inappropriate targets for NSO's Pegasus spyware -- which includes journalists, activists, dissidents, government critics, political figures, religious leaders, lawyers, ex-wives, etc. -- Apple's policy is the Right Thing To Do. NSO's customers agree to use the spyware to target terrorists and dangerous criminals. They clearly don't do that. If NSO won't stop them (and it won't [until very recently]), this is one way to mitigate the damage.

And so the disclosures have flowed. A Polish prosecutor who dared to offend the ruling party in that country was one of the first notified by Apple's new program. Since then, the floodgates have opened, potentially ruining the surveillance plans of several governments. Here's Carly Page for TechCrunch, rolling out the details on Apple's unwelcome mat.

Apple has sent threat notification alerts to victims of state-sponsored hackers in Thailand, El Salvador and Uganda, just hours after filing a lawsuit against Israeli spyware maker NSO Group.

At least six Thai activists and researchers who have been critical of the government have received the notification, according to Reuters, including Prajak Kongkirati, a political scientist at Bangkok’s Thammasat University, researcher Sarinee Achananuntakul and Thai activist Yingcheep Atchanont of the legal monitoring group iLaw. Citizen Lab, which tracks illegal hacking and surveillance, identified in 2018 a Pegasus spyware operator active within Thailand.

Also on the list: the president of the Democratic party in Uganda (the same nation where US State Dept. employees were targeted) and a dozen employees of El Salvador newspaper, El Faro, which has long been a critic of that country's government.

None of the people listed are legitimate targets for this powerful spyware. NSO has claimed for years its exploits only target the worst of the worst. And for roughly the same number of years, investigations and leaks have shown governments are using the spyware to target critics and political opponents who only pose a threat to their power, rather than public safety or national security.

Fortunately, there's another entity watching these people's backs. Prior to Apple's notification program, it took in-depth research by entities like Canada's Citizen Lab to discover the source of hacking and properly attribute it to NSO malware. Apple presumably can make these determinations much faster, heading off future interception and eavesdropping.

If NSO doesn't like it, it can suck it. It chose to sell to governments with long histories of targeting critics and violating human rights. Its customers can likewise suck it. They've given themselves an infinite amount of leash and NSO's exploits have let them take full advantage of this. Even a minimal amount of thwarting of nefarious doings is welcome in a world where the powerful go unpunished and unchecked far too often.

Filed Under: hacking, malware, pegasus, surveillance
Companies: apple, nso group

Verizon Once Again Expands Its Snoopvertising Ambitions

from the opt-in-to-adventure dept

Back in 2008, Verizon proclaimed that we didn't need additional consumer privacy protections (or opt in requirements, or net neutrality rules) because consumers would keep the company honest. "The extensive oversight provided by literally hundreds of thousands of sophisticated online users would help ensure effective enforcement of good practices and protect consumers," Verizon said at the time.

Six years later and Verizon found itself at the heart of a massive privacy scandal after it began covertly injecting unique user-tracking headers into wireless data packets. The technology allowed Verizon to track users all over the internet, and the company neither bothered to inform users it would happen, or gave users any way to opt out. It took security researchers two years before security researchers even realized what Verizon was doing. Verizon ultimately received a $1.35 million fine from the FCC (a tiny portion of what Verizon made off the program), but still uses the same tech (albeit with functioning opt-out) today.

A few years later and it's not clear Verizon has actually learned all that much. The company last week began expanding its data collection and monetization once again, this time via a new "Verizon Custom Experience" the company says will help it "personalize our communications with you, give you more relevant product and service recommendations, and develop plans, services and offers that are more appealing to you." In reality that means Verizon is expanding the collection of data on the websites you visit, the people you communicate with, and the apps you use.

Of course Verizon isn't asking user permission before enrolling them in this new exciting "experience," and while the company claims it emailed users to inform them they were being opted in, many customers (including myself) never received any such notification. So while users can opt out through a fairly simply opt-out process, most users aren't going to know they're enrolled in the first place. And Verizon being Verizon (where most of its apps and services are shoddy copies of better products), nobody really wants any of this stuff in the first place:

"Nothing I’ve read about the program would make me even consider staying in, especially since Verizon is sneakily signing people up without asking. In an example of how the program could benefit you, Verizon says it could present music listeners with a “Verizon offer that includes music content” or give you a “choice related to a concert in our Verizon Up reward program.” The company then tries to persuade you with “personalized content and marketing” when opting into Custom Experience Plus."

Of course Verizon has been caught up in more privacy scandals than I can remember, from its collection of user metadata to its role as one of the NSA's most trusted allies in domestic surveillance. And when Verizon gets too greedy, which it does a lot, it generally sees a wrist slap with a fine that's always a tiny, tiny fraction of the money made from the dodgy behavior. And the only demand placed on it is usually that it be transparent about whatever dodgy behavior it's doing, while providing working opt out tools.

So not only does Verizon never really face any meaningful accountability when it goes too far, any feckless regulatory enforcement that does happen generally puts the onus on the consumer to not only pay attention to what Verizon's doing, but to also take the time to understand it then opt out. Verizon being Verizon, it's going to always be financially incentivized to make that as convoluted and cumbersome as possible, assuming the opt out system works at all (telecom, like Facebook, has a nasty habit of re-enrolling users who've opted out of such programs).

Filed Under: advertising, custom experience, opt-out, privacy, super cookie, surveillance, telcos
Companies: verizon

NSO Spyware Used To Snoop On US State Department Employees Stationed In Uganda

from the just-another-day-at-work-for-NSO-Group dept

Israeli exploit seller NSO Group has long past reached the limits of its non-denials and deflection attempts. There's only bad news on the horizon for the tech company, which would be a lot less disheartening for the company if it hadn't been preceded by months of bad news.

Already considered morally suspect due to its decision to sell powerful phone hacking tools to human rights violators, NSO has since proven to be pretty much amoral. Investigations uncovering abuse of its spyware to hack phones of journalists and activists began to surface three years ago before a leaked database of alleged spyware targets was given to investigators and journalists. Since then, NSO has waged a losing battle with a seemingly endless onslaught of revelations that put its hacking tools in the hands of bad actors and its powerful spyware (Pegasus) in the phones of journalists, activists, lawyers, diplomats, politicians, and religious leaders.

NSO was sued by WhatsApp and Facebook in 2019 for using the messaging app to send malware to targets. It was sued by Apple just a couple of weeks ago for targeting iPhone users. It is facing investigations in a handful of countries, including its home base. It has been blacklisted by the US Commerce Department and its list of governments it can sell to has been drastically trimmed by the Israeli government, from 102 to 37.

The question now is: does NSO Group even feel it when news breaks about additional misuse of its spyware? Or does it just prompt an exasperated "what now?!" from its execs as it tries to figure out how to remain viable in the future? Whatever the case is, this latest revelation isn't going to get its Commerce Department blacklisting lifted any time soon.

iPhones of at least nine U.S. State Department employees were hacked by an unknown assailant using sophisticated spyware developed by the Israel-based NSO Group, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The hacks, which took place in the last several months, hit U.S. officials either based in Uganda or focused on matters concerning the East African country, two of the sources said.

The intrusions, first reported here, represent the widest known hacks of U.S. officials through NSO technology.

The Reuters report says the source of the hacking hasn't been identified. But one can assume it was entities opposed to whatever aims the US State Department hopes to achieve in Uganda, which apparently includes simply trying to meet with opposition leaders. People don't spy on people whose aims are allied with theirs. And attribution has limited worth. Entities willing to abuse spyware to hack the phones of political opponents -- especially those operating under diplomatic immunity -- aren't really going to care if their wrongdoing is exposed.

And NSO only has to care now because it has spent years claiming it does everything it can to prevent misuse of its powerful malware -- only to have that assertion exposed as a lie with six months of uninterrupted news releases showing its hacking tools have been misused multiple times by multiple entities. Accompanying this steady drip of news reports has been zero evidence of NSO's asserted oversight or willingness to terminate contracts with entities who've abused its malware.

NSO's response to this report is no different than its response to several others: it will do something about this now that it has made international headlines.

"If our investigation shall show these actions indeed happened with NSO's tools, such customer will be terminated permanently and legal actions will take place..."

That's meaningless. NSO claims it has no visibility into its customers' actions and, if this is true, it has no way of investigating these claims. It's all just noise, something almost less substantial than a "no comment." The State Department's response means more: it simply pointed to NSO's blacklisting by the federal government. And that's pretty much all that needs to be said by witnesses and victims of these hacking attempts. NSO is running out of bridges to burn. There will always be a market for easily abused malware. But it's becoming much more difficult to keep these abuses secret and that's what has harmed NSO the most.

Filed Under: malware, pegasus, spyware, state department, surveillance
Companies: nso group

Chinese Government Is Building A Surveillance System That Will Target, Track Foreign Journalists, Students

from the if-you-can't-beat-'em,-maybe-it's-time-to-start-physically-beating-t dept

The Chinese government is truly, undeniably, utterly evil. Anyone saying otherwise has something to sell (most likely to the Chinese people or their government). Private companies and public entities alike have kowtowed and capitulated rather than face the ferocity of the easily angered government and/or risk losing access to a marketplace containing a few billion people.

China has embraced its own version of capitalism to create the leverage it now wields against those who offend it, no matter where else in the world they might be located. It sees even more opportunity in ultra-lucrative Hong Kong and has taken direct control of the region. It refuses to acknowledge Taiwan's existence as a separate country and demands apologies from world leaders and professional athletes when they make the "mistake" of acknowledging yet another lucrative region China wishes to directly control.

It has rolled out multiple layers of oppression to keep its citizens in line, starting with pervasive widespread surveillance that ties into "citizen scores" that limit opportunities for those the government believes aren't patriotic enough. It is engaged in the erasure of its Uighur Muslim population, utilizing concentration camps, disappearances, brutality, and a war of attrition designed to eliminate these "unwanteds" completely in the coming years.

Is China irredeemable? I guess it all depends on what you think of redemption. The underlying basis of Christianity is that no one is completely irredeemable (even if far too many Christians seem to believe certain people are). Our penal system, in a much more half-hearted way, conflates punishment with rehabilitation, as if the best way to turn your life around is to see it destroyed. China isn't a Christian nation, so that ends that part of the speculation. And China most likely believes people can be punished into contrition, which will "redeem" them while allowing the state to remain intact. Can China ever be anything than increasingly worse versions of itself?

Sanctions and public condemnation haven't had any effect. The Chinese government isn't too big to fail. Nothing ever is. Just ask the former USSR (which, unfortunately, is resembling its old self more and more every day.) But it is too big to care what anyone else thinks. The first step towards redemption is realizing you need to be redeemed. Will China ever reach that starting point?

It seems unlikely. The government likes things the way they are. And its vision for the future is the elimination of any roadblocks to complete power. But it still struggles to control the narrative, despite constantly finding new ways to limit the spread of information it doesn't approve of and its rewriting of even very recent history to excise anything that might suggest the state is immoral, fallible, or dangerous to the citizens it oversees.

Which brings us to this, which isn't the worst thing China has done. Instead, it's just another example of the Chinese government tossing aside concerns about its public image. Press freedoms are practically nonexistent in China. And now the government is planning to actively target journalists who refuse to play by its rules.

Security officials in one of China's largest provinces have commissioned a surveillance system they say they want to use to track journalists and international students among other "suspicious people", documents reviewed by Reuters showed.

A July 29 tender document published on the Henan provincial government’s procurement website - reported in the media for the first time - details plans for a system that can compile individual files on such persons of interest coming to Henan using 3,000 facial recognition cameras that connect to various national and regional databases.

The surveillance apparatus is already in place. The county has millions of surveillance cameras everywhere. All these cameras need are a certain form of "smarts" -- one that lets the government identify and track undesirables. The government has already asked Chinese tech companies to give it AI capable of seeking out Uighur Muslims. Now, it wants a system that can see past facemasks and eyewear to positively identify journalists and foreigners it wants to keep track of. And it wants the system to be responsive and fast, capable of performing searches of recorded footage for images matching uploaded images or biometric attributes.

It's going to throw a lot of money and personnel at this "problem," grading targets on a scale that will easily indicate how much the Chinese government wants journalists or international students deported, disappeared, silenced, or otherwise punished.

The system will be operated by at least 2,000 officials and policemen, and specifies that journalists will be divided into three categories: red, yellow, green, in decreasing order of risk, according to the tender.

Different police forces covering all of Henan, whose 99 million inhabitants makes it China's third-largest province by population, will be connected to the platform in order to spring into action in the event of a warning being set off, the tender explains.

Warnings will be set off if a journalist while in Henan registers into a hotel, buys a ticket, or crosses the provincial border, according to the tender.

"Suspicious persons must be tailed and controlled, dynamic research analyses and risk assessments made, and the journalists dealt with according to their category," the tender reads.

All of this will be perfectly legal when it finally goes into use. The Chinese government has spent the last several years rewriting and expanding its national security laws to justify actions it takes against critics, activists, journalists, and dissidents. It has thrown "fake news" into the mix to grease the wheels for direct targeting of press outlets.

And it's not just for locals. The Chinese government was unhappy with foreign news coverage of flooding in the country earlier this year and engaged in harassment of reporters covering the disaster. Not coincidentally at all, the proposal paper also lists "foreign journalists" as targets of this surveillance, which suggests the government wants to be able to eject members of the press from other countries the moment their reporting starts contradicting the government's narrative.

This is ugly and it's right out there in the open. The tender documents were perhaps never meant to be seen by outsiders, but the details show the government is seeking ways to destroy everything but the party line. No one really needs any more evidence the Chinese government is evil. But somehow, entities that should want to have nothing to do with it play by its rules and apologize publicly when they break them. Maybe China can't be stopped. But the deference shown to it with alarming frequency certainly needs to.

Filed Under: china, journalists, students, surveillance

After Months Of Troubling News, Israel's Government Finally Limits Who NSO Group Can Sell To

from the tough-to-stay-solvent-using-a-'scorch-your-own-earth'-policy dept

Well, it's been yet another hilarious couple of days for Israel's NSO Group. I mean, not so much for NSO, which is currently sitting at the center of a raging dumpster fire of its own creation. But just because NSO isn't laughing doesn't mean it's not funny.

For years, it sold spyware to whoever wanted it. Those customers used the powerful phone exploits to target journalists, activists, dissidents, and high-ranking government officials.

Some of this had already been exposed by security researchers like Canada's Citizen Lab before the bombshell dropped: a list of 50,000 alleged NSO malware targets. NSO denied having anything to do with the list, but report after report tied its spyware to abuse by government agencies and quasi-political leaders like kings and princes in the United Arab Emirates, one who used the malware to hack the phone of his ex-wife and her lawyer.

France's President, Emmanuel Macron, was one of those on the target list obtained by journalists. This prompted the President (and other French government officials) to acquire new phones. Because of this, the French government has decided it won't be requiring the services of NSO in the future.

At the exact same time, MIT Technology Review has learned, French government officials were in the final stages of contract negotiations to purchase Pegasus hacking tools from NSO. The French were on the verge of buying the tool—in the type of deal that is typically worth millions of dollars—despite years of allegations that it was regularly being used to surveil and harass dissidents, journalists, and human rights activists worldwide.

But sources familiar with the deal say that the process fell apart after the accusations that French politicians potentially were among those targeted, and negotiations were broken off just a few days before the sale was set to take place. After publication, France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied it was in the process of purchasing NSO Group tools.

That takes one customer off the list for NSO. The Israeli government -- after years of ignoring NSO's sales to human rights violators -- has further limited the company's market base, removing nearly two-thirds of the countries on its approved purchasers list.

The Defense Ministry has dramatically scaled back the number of countries to which Israeli companies can sell cyber technologies amid global fallout over Israeli spyware firm NSO Group, according to a report Thursday.

The updated November list consists of 37 countries, down from 102, according to the Calcalist business news daily.

Countries with questionable human rights records, including Israel’s new allies Morocco and the UAE, have been removed, the report said.

Much like everything related to the fallout from the NSO target list obtained in July, this could have been prevented if NSO had decided not to sell to governments known to routinely violate human rights or -- if it just couldn't help itself -- its government had forbidden sales of powerful malware to these countries.

Having fewer customers isn't going to help NSO climb back out of the hole it dug for itself. This trimming of its potential user base follows blacklisting by the US Commerce Department -- something that had an almost-immediate effect on the company's credit rating.

According to Bloomberg, Moody’s dropped NSO’s credit rating by two levels, asserting that the company’s risk of defaulting on its debts had increased and noting that the company has been losing money since 2020.

Not that NSO was in great financial shape to begin with. This was the second downgrade by Moody's, the first of which came a month before the July release of the alleged NSO spyware target list.

Moody’s said in June that it downgraded the company’s rating from B2 to B3, adding that its outlook remains negative. The report said most of the debt is supposed to be repaid in March 2025.

NSO has been offering up nonsensical and contradictory defenses of its actions for several months. Now, it's just flailing. It now wants people to believe its current woes are the end result of an anti-Israel conspiracy.

In a letter, [NSO] argued that the U.S. blacklisting arose from "an orchestrated campaign by anti-Israel organizations" that would result in hundreds of employees losing their job, according to Israeli news site Walla.

That's a ridiculous assertion. NSO would be toxic no matter where it was located. And it has had years to head off this sort of worldwide reckoning but chose to reap the profits, rather than control use of its powerful phone hacking tools. Investigations attributing phone hacks of journalists and human rights activists to NSO malware have been public knowledge for a few years now, and the company's response (until now) has been to do nothing.

By waiting this long to finally start addressing these allegations, NSO has limited its options to making nonsensical defensive statements and, presumably, starting to figure out how much its office furniture might go for at auction.

The same can be said for the Israeli government, which has been aware of these troubling allegations about NSO for just as long, but instead chose to urge on sales to human rights abusers, rather than discourage NSO from pursuing business relationships with governments that were always going to end up abusing the powerful malware. Due to this close relationship, NSO's problems are also Israel's problems, which is likely why even the Israeli government is trying to distance itself from the country's most toxic asset.

Filed Under: israel, malware, pegasus, spyware, surveillance
Companies: nso group

Helicopter Footage Obtained By The ACLU Shows Pervasive Surveillance Of Peaceful Anti-Police Violence Protests

from the because-of-course-it-does dept

Thanks to a trove of public records, the ACLU can provide some insight on how the California Highway Patrol engaged in surveillance of anti-police brutality protests. While one would expect police helicopters to fly over protests to keep an eye out for any illegal activity, it appears the officers manning the surveillance cameras were more interested in trying to identify protesters who weren't breaking any laws.

Some lowlights of the aerial footage can be seen in this video produced by the ACLU:

Here's how the ACLU describes what it observed in the recordings liberated from from the CHP:

In Sacramento, CHP closely zooms in on a protester as they sit alone on a fountain next to a Black Lives Matter poster. An hour later, when people peacefully assemble in front of the fountain to hear an organizer speak, CHP continues to hover and record, zooming in closely on people’s faces and signs.  

In Placerville, CHP captures detailed footage of several dozen protesters peacefully assembled in front of the El Dorado County courthouse. The video captures an organizer thanking and hugging participants as they hold up signs. CHP also recorded a Riverside County courthouse protest described as a “vigil... so quiet that the loudest sound was helicopters overhead.” In the CHP recordings, police cameras zoom in on faces and linger over people speaking at vigils, handing out water, making signs, participating in die-ins, and even dancing.

This is the Press-Enterprise's recounting of the peaceful protest in Riverside not-so-quietly observed by CHP helicopters:

The demonstration ended peacefully in the mid-afternoon, after protesters took a symbolic nine-minute knee in front of the Riverside Historic Courthouse. The vigil was so quiet that the loudest sound was helicopters overhead.

Then they returned to the park and dispersed, with some demonstrators cleaning up the streets as they went.

There were no arrests. “Very peaceful. No issues reported,” Riverside Police spokesman Officer Ryan Railsback said.

But despite there being no signs of criminal activity, the helicopters continued to circle the protest while camera operators zoomed in on faces for reasons that went undocumented in the reports obtained by the ACLU. That lack of information implies the apparent attempts to photograph or identify protesters fell outside the stated purpose of the surveillance and was deliberately left out of CHP reports.

That's not the only troubling aspect of the CHP surveillance footage. It also appears the CHP took particular interest in anti-police protests, allowing other large protests to go unobserved by its eyes in the sky.

We asked CHP whether it had any surveillance footage of other protests last year, including those related to the COVID-19 pandemic and associated shelter-in-place orders. But in hour after hour of footage provided by CHP, what we saw were protests against police violence, not protests of pandemic policy.

There are several reasons a law enforcement agency might find anti-police brutality protests more "worthy" of extended surveillance than other protests over other issues. Very few of those reasons are excusable. At best, it would be safe to assume that anti-police protests are more volatile because they historically have been. But when no criminal activity is observed, the CHP should maintain its distance. When it's clear it's a peaceful protest, the CHP has no business targeting individual protesters.

The rest of the reasons suck. The CHP targeted the protests because the protests targeted law enforcement. A majority of protesters in these protests (as compared to COVID-related protests) were persons of color. The eyes in the sky weren't so much about keeping the peace as reminding protesters law enforcement is omnipresent and its eyes can be pretty much anywhere at all times. Circling over peaceful protests with police helicopters is a form of intimidation. Destroying a nine-minute silent tribute to a black man killed by a white cop with whirling rotors and engine noise is a feature, not a bug, of this form of surveillance.

This implicit ugliness will, of course, be denied by law enforcement officials. Just like they've denied all sorts of evidence of biased policing pretty much since the inception of their respective law enforcement agencies. But everyone can see it's still there. The footage obtained here says what police officials are unwilling to confront: that cops go after minorities whenever possible and still feel very comfortable singling them out for whatever form of surveillance they happen to have on hand.

Filed Under: blm, california, chp, helicopter, protests, surveillance

NSO Made Millions Selling Phone Hacking Tools To The Princes And Kings Of The United Arab Emirates

from the handing-more-power-to-the-unassailably-powerful dept

NSO Group can't get a break. Too bad. It really doesn't deserve one. The inability of the Israeli exploit purveyor to escape this endlessly negative news cycle is entirely its own fault. And each passing day seems to uncover something new and nasty about the tech company, which has built its business by seemingly selling to whoever wants to buy, no matter how morally repugnant.

The company's malware has been deployed by a variety of repeat human rights offenders to target journalists, critics, dissidents, religious leaders, opposition parties, and the occasional heads of state of their allies. To its own critics, NSO has issued contradictions: it is not responsible for how its customers use its products and that it does everything it can to prevent misuse of its products. The contradiction is baked in: NSO says it pulls access for misuse while claiming it has no "visibility" into its customers' activities.

It also says it does not sell its powerful malware to private entities. But the fine line between public and private entities is never finer than in the United Arab Emirates, where the allied rulers of the area are also private citizens -- kings and princes with access to a whole lot of wealth and a whole lot of power.

A prince can claim to be a government official and still behave like a private citizen. Take Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum of Dubai. He's the king of Dubai. He's also in the middle of an extremely messy, somewhat public divorce from Princess Haya bint al-Hussein. His access to NSO's most popular phone exploit (Pegasus) allowed him to hack phones belonging to his ex, along with phones belonging to her legal reps.

But he's not the only UAE figurehead with NSO contracts. Israeli news agency Haaretz reports NSO has sold to other kings and princes who control parts of UAE: men who have plenty of private business that could benefit from a bit of phone hackery using tools obtained under the auspices of Official Government Business.

The Israeli cyber firm NSO sold its Pegasus mobile-phone hacking software to two different leaders of the United Arab Emirates – Abu Dhabi ruler Mohammed Bin Zayed and Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid al-Makhtoum.

TheMarker has learned that the price each of these clients paid in dollars is a seven- to eight-figure number.

It's not that UAE doesn't have national security and law enforcement agencies that would make better homes for phone hacking tools. (I mean comparatively…) The UAE has a federal police force and a joint national security agency that's supposed to handle the sorts of things (serious crime, terrorist activity) NSO swears up and down its customers are using its exploits to combat.

So, why sell the princes and kings, who have few obligations to the people they rule over… you know, since they're rulers rather than elected officials? Apparently, the answer is because they have millions to spend on phone hacking tools and a company willing to exchange goods and services for money while pretending to hold its nose, cover its eyes and ears, and act all defensive when people ask the why in the almighty fuck are they selling exploits to the United Arab Emirates, much less its literal ruling class?

NSO says publicly (and a lot more frequently in recent months) that it takes a hard line on the abuse of its products to violate human rights. But it says that after years of selling to rulers with long histories of extremely severe human rights violations. Both things can't be true. And a cursory Google search would give NSO all the due diligence it needs to refuse to sell to rulers (and government agencies) located in places like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. (Not to mention others with the same cavalier attitude towards life and liberty.)

Recent revelations are forcing NSO to put its money where its mouth is. With every new report of violations and use by human rights violators, the company is now obligated to yank access and cancel contracts. I cannot imagine how uncomfortable it will be for the company to approach rulers who preside over areas where executions and disappearances of critics are commonplace. But suck it up, NSO. The best way to avoid having to tell brutal rulers their business is no longer welcome is to never welcome it in the first place.

Worse, the country NSO calls home may be partly to blame.

In some cases, including the sale of two systems to two separate rulers in the UAE, the Pegasus system was only sold following heavy pressure from the Israeli government, as part of the diplomatic warming between Israel and the UAE. Yet the system’s irregular use embarrassed NSO and caused the third bout of bad publicity the company has sustained since being blacklisted by the U.S. last week.

So, if the Israeli government feels any complicity in the current state of NSO affairs, it probably should send a couple of diplomats along to ensure the revocation of hacking power by NSO not only actually happens, but happens without part of the NSO sales force being disappeared for having the audacity to tell these half-patriarchy/half-oligarchy rulers to take their business elsewhere.

Filed Under: dubai, israel, malware, pegasus, spyware, surveillance, uae
Companies: nso group