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Tag: surveillance
MIT, Donald Trump

MIT Report Exposes Trump Campaign App As Deceptive ’Surveillance’ Tool

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

About 800,000 people have downloaded the Trump 2020 campaign's app. According to a study by the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, better known as MIT, users are handing over a massive amount of personal information – and an astonishing amount of access – to the Trump campaign.

MIT, which investigated both the Trump campaign app and the Biden campaign app, says the Trump campaign app is a "voter surveillance tool" with "extraordinary power."

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White Billionaire Secretly Funds Surveillance Program Aimed at Baltimore’s Mostly Black Population

White Billionaire Secretly Funds Surveillance Program Aimed at Baltimore’s Mostly Black Population

Published with permission from AlterNet

Hedge funder uses private foundation to fund personal police project, circumventing democratic oversight.

Over the past few years, billionaires have unilaterally shut down a popular newsite, pushed common core on the Department of Education and steered candidates to a hardline position on Israel. Now one Texas-based billionaire (who began amassing his fortune at Enron) has singlehandedly spearheaded a massive spying program—secret until now—in a city 1500 miles away from where he lives.

John Arnold used his foundation to funnel $120,000 for an aerial surveillance program into a police charity, the Baltimore Community Foundation, which covered the costs for the department. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, which broke the story earlier this week, the program was not revealed to Baltimore citizens, and because it was funded by monies outside the normal channels of oversight, it did not need typical approval from elected city officials.

The surveillance program, implemented by Persistent Surveillance System’s Ross McNutt, involved a near-total visual surveillance of the population using a combination of on-the-ground cameras and cameras attached to a permanently rolling fleet of Cessna planes. The effort began last year when John Arnold heard a piece on the public radio program RadioLab featuring the technology, which was originally used in Iraq during the surge.

The Laura and John Arnold Foundation told McNutt if he could find a city that would allow the company to fly for several months, they would donate the money to keep the plane in the air. McNutt had met the lieutenant in charge of Baltimore’s ground-based camera system on the trade-show circuit, and they had become friendly. “We settled in on Baltimore because it was ready, it was willing, and it was just post-Freddie Gray,” McNutt says. The Arnolds’ foundation donated the money to the Baltimore Community Foundation.

It’s unclear how Baltimore could be “ready and willing” when the public wasn’t informed. What McNutt appears to mean is that the Baltimore Police Department was ready and would not seek public discussion.

While initial reports did not explore the racial component, it cannot be ignored. McNutt’s “post-Freddie Gray” remark carries with it racial implications, namely that the monitoring tool might be used to control protests or unrest in addition to preventing crime. Arnold, who is white, is using his tremendous power and wealth to treat a predominately black city as a guinea pig in his crime prevention trial raises questions of undue influence and the circumvention of normal, local democratic processes. The democratically elected body that would normally need to approve such a measure, the Baltimore Board of Estimates, is currently 60 percent African American. The foundation that served as the conduit between Arnold and the department is not sanctioned by voters and according to its spokesperson didn’t even “know what the money was for.” If true, this would rest the oversight of the program entirely on the shoulders of the hedge fund billionaire who was paying for it and the Baltimore Police Department that managed it.

No doubt anticipating bad press, the Baltimore Sun ran a glowing puff piece on the Arnolds Friday, showcasing the charitable work they do in Maryland. John Arnold is also a major backer of charter schools, a movement heavily favored by the hedge fund industry. He has also spent a considerable amount of time and money pushing so-called pension reform, a long-term project also supported by many in the hedge fund industry.

With the expansion of police body cameras and surveillance in general, the ways in which monitoring can also help prevent police violence are at the center of this controversy. Power asymmetry can affect what cameras record and prioritize, and typically works in favor of those who control the technology.

“This whole city is under a siege of cameras,” Baltimore resident Ralph Pritchett told Bloomberg Businessweek in its report. “In fact, they observed Freddie Gray himself the morning of his arrest on those cameras, before they picked him up. They could have watched that van, too, but no—they missed that one. I thought the cameras were supposed to protect us. But I’m thinking they’re there to just contradict anything that might be used against the city of Baltimore. Do they use them for justice? Evidently not.”

h/t Bloomberg Businessweek

Photo via Flickr/Jonathan McIntosh

Donald Trump And Others Want To ‘Investigate’ Black Lives Matter — Why?

Donald Trump And Others Want To ‘Investigate’ Black Lives Matter — Why?

Black Lives Matter is a civil rights movement, and the way conservative leaders are going after it eerily recalls how government went after the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

When asked by Bill O’Reilly on Monday if Black Lives Matter (BLM) “will be singled out as a provocateur in this terrible situation?” if Donald Trump is elected president, the Republican nominee replied that he’s seen protesters “essentially calling death to the police,” and “we’re going to have to look into that.”

“We are going to have to, perhaps, talk with the Attorney General about it or do something, but, at a minimum, we’re going to have to be watching because that’s really bad stuff and it’s happened more than once,” Trump said after O’Reilly reminded him of Americans’ freedom of assembly and free speech.

Trump then said he’s “probably the least racist person there is,” and that he’s “doing very well with the African American community.”

In reality, he’s polling at six percent with African Americans, according to one recent poll.

A day later, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick voiced his support for an investigation into Black Lives Matter (BLM). “If you are walking down the street saying ‘What do we want, we want to kill cops now,’ the president has to speak out against that, and the president needs to stop inviting people to the White House who say they want to kill cops,” Patrick said on CNN.

This wouldn’t be the first time government officials “investigate” a civil rights movement in order to suppress its message. By now, it is no secret that the FBI kept Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists under constant surveillance during the 1960s. They began this surveillance in 1955 using King’s possible ties with communism as an excuse.

After his August 1963 iconic “I Have A Dream” speech, the FBI intensified their pursuit of King in fear of his movement’s momentum. In one of tens of thousands of FBI memos from the time, King is called the “most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” The FBI then scheduled a meeting to “explore how best to carry on our investigation [of King] to produce the desired results without embarrassment to the Bureau,” and neutralize King as “an effective Negro leader.”

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had filed a request a month before the speech to the Attorney General to tap the phones of King and his associates and bug their homes and offices. Attorney General Robert Kennedy approved this request in September.

In 1967, the FBI created a counter-intelligence program against ‘‘Black Nationalist–Hate Groups,’’ to look into the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and civil rights leaders. Hoover described the goal of this program as an endeavor “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.”

A Senate Committee during the 1970’s to look into the FBI’s domestic intelligence operations determined that “Rather than trying to discredit the alleged Communists it believed were attempting to influence Dr. King, the Bureau adopted the curious tactic of trying to discredit the supposed target of Communist Party interest—Dr. King himself.”

 

Photo: AFP Photo/Mladen Antonov

Is Pokémon Go The Next Big Brother?

Is Pokémon Go The Next Big Brother?

If you own a smartphone, there’s a decent chance you are one of the world’s nearly 18 million Pokémon Go players. Launched last Thursday, Pokémon Go is a GPS-synchronized augmented reality game that places the classic, colorful Nintendo creatures in the real world — or at least, against the live backdrop provided by your phone’s front-facing camera. Users are encouraged to “catch ‘em all.” But is there a chance the game is catching something of theirs as well?

Minnesota Senator Al Franken certainly seems to think so. Earlier this week he sent a public letter to Niantic, the company that developed Pokémon Go, requesting a full report on how they use players’ personal information. His letter stated that the app could threaten the right to privacy, as the game’s privacy policy states that user information “can be shared with The Pokémon Company and ‘third-party service providers.” Franken also described how Niantic treats this personal information as a “business asset,” that could be revealed or transferred to other companies that buy out or merge with Niantic. The Minnesota Senator asked for a response by August 12. Niantic has yet to answer.

Even before Senator Franken’s letter, however, some Pokémon Go users expressed concern about how Niantic required “full access” to their personal Google accounts in order to play the game: Theoretically, this means that Niantic had the ability to read and send emails from a personal Gmail account, but also to records calendar entries, directions, and notes. Earlier this week, Niantic issued an update and clarified that they only use the most basic account information to run the app.

On the other hand, even the most basic information is a valuable commodity for third-party companies. On iOS gaming news site Touch Arcade, an anonymous mobile game producer explained how apps so effectively dig up and sell user information — key facts like gender, age, location, and even interests.

“Every time you play a free to play game, you just build this giant online database of who you are, who your friends are and what you like and don’t like. This data is sold, bought and traded between large companies I have worked for,” the producer wrote. Even more alarming is that his experiences date back a few years, before huge mobile games like Angry Birds burst onto the mobile gaming scene. Data-mining techniques have only become more sophisticated since then.

Still, this doesn’t doesn’t necessarily mean Niantic is selling your personal information. Despite being free to play, Pokémon Go has a number of in-game purchases — small payments that can be made to quickly upgrade Pokémon and acquire rare items. This “freemium” model has proven to be quite lucrative, but Pokémon Go has taken it to the next level. For example, Think Gaming estimated the daily revenue for hit game Candy Crush Saga at $442,296. Business Insider reported Pokémon Go’s revenue might be as high as $2.3 million per day. Remarkably, these figures aren’t even coming from a large consumer base. Most people avoid in-game purchases, meaning that the bulk of the funds are from a very small number of players. In fact, mobile marking company Swrve found that over 60 percent of mobile game revenue comes from just 0.13 percent of users.

Pokémon Go has become a highly lucrative property in the short week it’s been available to download. Nintendo’s stock has soared by over 25 percent since the game’s release. At the peak of this spike, market analysts valued the game at a whopping $7 billion. Niantic CEO John Hanke has announced that they plan to open up Pokémon Go to digital advertising.

Of course, these developments don’t guarantee Pokémon Go any long-term financial success — the game has all the markings of a brief, furious fad. But for now, it’s the juggernaut of the gaming world. It has so much going for it that it doesn’t seem to need to depend on selling user information — though it certainly is collecting quite a bit about each and every player, even after Niantic’s update. Where exactly all that data ends up, however, remains a mystery.

So go forth and catch as many (or few) pokémon as you like. Just be aware of how much you reveal to companies like Niantic — if the game is free, you’re the one being bought and sold.