A Chinese spy balloon in the US is the latest in a long history of governments spying on each other from the sky. Aerial surveillance dates back to the French Revolution to UFO rumors to the Cuban Missile Crisis.It’s gone from hot air balloons to CIA gadgets to sophisticated live-streaming drones. Last month, the US...
Tag: surveillance
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MuckRock’s Guide to Getting Your Own FBI File
A self-request falls under the Privacy Act and not the Freedom of Information Act. It requires a special Department of Justice form stating, under penalty of perjury, that you are who you say you are.The request should state clearly that you are requesting all documents with your name and any aliases in them. It...
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Pegasus Project: What Has Happened Since the Revelations About Israeli Spyware
The biggest cyber surveillance scandal since the Snowden revelations, the conclusions of the investigation published in July 2021 were promptly confirmed by forensic analyses conducted by French and Belgian authorities. Protests erupted in several countries and a number of investigations were opened by various international authorities, including by the European Parliament, which in May 2022...
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Private Intelligence Is Changing the Way Spy Services Work
From Sipher Brief In place of the government monopoly on espionage technology, today there is a boisterous bazaar of information and data vendors. These companies sell a wide variety of social media intelligence tools, earth observation capabilities, large-scale information storage and processing, mobile phone location data, global HUMINT platforms, and sophisticated telemetry intelligence capabilities. This...
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How to Protect Yourself From NSO Spyware
The U.S. government has advice for journalists and activists: Watch out for spyware. The National Counterintelligence and Security Center doesn’t mention NSO, the Israeli company whose Pegasus spyware has been implicated in policies of surveillance and repression around the world. But the warning described Pegasus’ powers exactly. Companies and individuals have been selling commercial surveillance...