Tootfinder

This is a spectacular way to get folks to see the impact of the #surveillance state. Great job #MassiveAttack!
#privacy

Massive Attack Turns Concert Into Facial Recognition Surveillance Experiment
Massive Attack used live facial recognition technology on concertgoers, turning surveillance into provocative art that sparked debate about privacy.

Inside First Wap, a European-led phone tracking company in Indonesia that has exploited the SS7 telecom protocol to target politicians, journalists, and others (Mother Jones)
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/

The surveillance empire that tracked world leaders, a Vatican enemy, and maybe you
Inside the hidden world of First Wap, whose untraceable tech has targeted politicians, journalists, celebrities, and activists around the globe.

During their latest tour stop, Massive Attack shocked fans by integrating facial recognition into the show itself. Live video feeds captured audience faces, processing them through recognition software and projecting the results as part of the visual experience. https://www.

Massive Attack Turns Concert Into Facial Recognition Surveillance Experiment
Massive Attack used live facial recognition technology on concertgoers, turning surveillance into provocative art that sparked debate about privacy.

Unions sue Trump over surveillance and allege First Amendment breach (Julianna Bragg/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/16/trump-surveillance-first-amendment-union-lawsuit
http://www.memeorandum.com/251016/p155#a251016p155

A Case for Urgency


“Gradually, then suddenly.” – Ernest Hemingway

We live in a rapidly developing dictatorship here in the US. We do not know exactly the details on how this will evolve, but we know that surveillance is always core to creating and sustaining a dictatorship. Surveillance provides the dictator with the foundation for suppressing and intimidating any opposition.


Privacy in our communications reduces the effectiveness of surveillance. Not everything we say…

Swiss government looks to undercut privacy tech, stoking fears of mass surveillance
The Swiss government could soon require service providers with more than 5,000 users to collect government-issued identification, retain subscriber data for six months and, in many cases, disable encryption.
🇨🇭 https://

Swiss government looks to undercut privacy tech, stoking fears of mass surveillance
Swiss-based providers of secure email, VPNs and other digital services say a pending government proposal would be catastrophic to their ability to protect the privacy of users.

They move to ... Germany (partly)
https://social.heise.de/@heiseonlineenglish/115040366123200972

Yeah, I knew some lovely people who worked at Twitter too. And did you know they once had unfettered API access and anyone could create their own client? Some of us loved that so much we built things that helped legitimise them as an open platform. And then one day they just switched that off.
Legitimacy is gold to venture-capital-funded startups. They need people with it to convince everyday folks that this latest iteration of the same old rug pull is different. Until they’ve grown s…

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr)
Attached: 1 image I can't wait to use Bluesky, but I will not be joining Bluesky. As much as I trust and respect the Bluesky executives and board members I am acquainted with, I believe the service itself is insufficiently enshittification-resistant to trust: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: h…

A DHS Data Hub Exposed Sensitive Intel to Thousands of Unauthorized Users
https://www.wired.com/story/a-dhs-data-hub-exposed-sensitive-intel-to-thousands-of-unauthorized-users/

A DHS Data Hub Exposed Sensitive Intel to Thousands of Unauthorized Users
A misconfigured platform used by the Department of Homeland Security left national security information—including some related to the surveillance of Americans—accessible to thousands of people.

Smash-and-grab thieves in Seattle made off with an estimated $2m in diamonds, luxury watches, gold and other items in a daring midday jewelry store robbery that took just about 90 seconds, police said on Friday.
Video from the west Seattle store’s surveillance cameras shows four masked suspects shattering the locked glass front door with hammers and then ransacking six display cases on Thursday.
One display held about $750,000 worth in Rolex watches, police said in a statement, and…

I would have thought that someone like Epstein didn't set up a Yahoo Mail account to coordinate illegal activities, but would have paid someone to set up his own email server.
That's a stark reminder to all the people saying "just setup your own Mastodon server" or similar things about personal digital autonomy.

Jeffrey Epstein’s Yahoo Inbox Revealed
Plus: ICE deploys secretive phone surveillance tech, officials warn of Chinese surveillance tools in US highway infrastructure, and more.

Deformed #SkyPenis over #Memphis

Lightweight CNNs for Embedded SAR Ship Target Detection and Classification
Fabian Kresse, Georgios Pilikos, Mario Azcueta, Nicolas Floury
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10712 https:…

Lightweight CNNs for Embedded SAR Ship Target Detection and Classification
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data enables large-scale surveillance of maritime vessels. However, near-real-time monitoring is currently constrained by the need to downlink all raw data, perform image focusing, and subsequently analyze it on the ground. On-board processing to generate higher-level products could reduce the data volume that needs to be downlinked, alleviating bandwidth constraints and minimizing latency. However, traditional image focusing and processing algorithms face challen…

The Surveillance Empire That Tracked World Leaders, a Vatican Enemy, and Maybe You (Mother Jones)
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/firstwap-altamides-phone-tracking-surveillance-secrets-assad-erik-prince-jared-leto-anne-wojcicki/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251014/p157#a251014p157

City Features V 🌆
城市特征 V 🌆
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Feds Used Local Cop's Password to Do Immigration Surveillance With Flock Cameras https://www.404media.co/feds-used-local-cops-password-to-do-immigration-surveillance-with-flock-cameras/

Switzerland proposes regulations forcing service providers to collect user IDs and disable encryption, threatening its status as a haven for privacy tech firms (Suzanne Smalley/The Record)
https://therecord.media/switzerland-digital-privacy-law-proton-priv…

Swiss government looks to undercut privacy tech, stoking fears of mass surveillance
Switzerland-based providers of secure email, VPNs and other digital services say a pending government proposal would be catastrophic to their ability to protect the privacy of users.

Examining Solidarity Against AI-Enabled Surveillance at the Intersection of Workplace and Carceral Realities
Morgan McErlean, Cella M. Sum, Sukrit Venkatagiri, Sarah Fox
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06537

Examining Solidarity Against AI-Enabled Surveillance at the Intersection of Workplace and Carceral Realities
As panoptical, AI-driven surveillance becomes a norm, everyone is impacted. In a reality where all people fall victim to these technologies, establishing links and solidarity is essential to fighting back. Two groups facing rising and targeted surveillance are workers and individuals impacted by the carceral system. Through preliminary data collection from a worker-surveillance lens, our findings reveal several cases of these surveillance infrastructures intersecting. Continuation of our work w…

ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team.
#USpol

ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team
Documents show that ICE plans to hire dozens of contractors to scan X, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms to target people for deportation.

Ça commence Š être le fun habiter proche des frontières
/not
https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/2025-08-08/surveillance-a-la-frontiere-canado-americaine/je-ne-me-sens-plus-en-securi…

Combining Textual and Spectral Features for Robust Classification of Pilot Communications
Abdullah All Tanvir, Chenyu Huang, Moe Alahmad, Chuyang Yang, Xin Zhong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09752

Combining Textual and Spectral Features for Robust Classification of Pilot Communications
Accurate estimation of aircraft operations, such as takeoffs and landings, is critical for effective airport management, yet remains challenging, especially at non-towered facilities lacking dedicated surveillance infrastructure. This paper presents a novel dual pipeline machine learning framework that classifies pilot radio communications using both textual and spectral features. Audio data collected from a non-towered U.S. airport was annotated by certified pilots with operational intent labe…

An Empirical Inquiry into Surveillance Capitalism: Web Tracking
Nils Bonfils
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07454 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07454

An Empirical Inquiry into Surveillance Capitalism: Web Tracking
The modern web is increasingly characterized by the pervasiveness of Surveillance Capitalism. This investigation employs an empirical approach to examine this phenomenon through the web tracking practices of major tech companies -- specifically Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) -- and their relation to financial performance indicators. Using longitudinal data from WhoTracks.Me spanning from 2017 to 2025 and publicly accessible SEC filings, this paper analyzes patterns and t…

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/09/pakistan-mass-surveillance-and-censorship-machine-is-fueled-by-chinese-european-emirati-and-north-american-companies/

Pakistan: Mass surveillance and censorship machine is fueled by Chinese, European, Emirati and North American companies
Pakistan’s unlawful mass surveillance and censorship expansion is powered by a nexus of companies based in Germany, France, United Arab Emirates (UAE), China, Canada, and the United States, Amnesty International said today in a new report “Shadows of Control”. The year-long investigation was carried out in collaboration with Paper Trail Media, DER STANDARD, Follow the […]

Isn't this great from a surveillance perspective...? 😆
#wifi

Wi-Fi Signal Tracks Heartbeat Without Wearables
Can Wi-Fi signals really track your heartbeat? Dive into the world of Pulse-Fi and find out how it works without wearables.

Across China, tens of thousands of people tagged as troublemakers are trapped in a digital cage,
barred from leaving their province and sometimes even their homes
by the world’s largest digital surveillance apparatus.
Most of this technology came from companies in a country that has long claimed to support freedoms worldwide -- the United States.
⚠️ Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state,…

How Silicon Valley enabled China's digital police state
An AP investigation reveals that U.S. technology companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known. Firms including IBM, Dell, and Cisco sold billions in technology to Chinese police and government agencies, despite repeated warnings that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities. Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a b…

The "kill cloud" at work.
https://www.972mag.com/microsoft-8200-intelligence-surveillance-cloud-azure/

Vision-driven River Following of UAV via Safe Reinforcement Learning using Semantic Dynamics Model
Zihan Wang, Nina Mahmoudian
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09971 https://

Vision-driven River Following of UAV via Safe Reinforcement Learning using Semantic Dynamics Model
Vision-driven autonomous river following by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is critical for applications such as rescue, surveillance, and environmental monitoring, particularly in dense riverine environments where GPS signals are unreliable. We formalize river following as a coverage control problem in which the reward function is submodular, yielding diminishing returns as more unique river segments are visited, thereby framing the task as a Submodular Markov Decision Process. First, we introduce Ma…

Here is some useful and wise advice for living in the 21st-century surveillance-state epoch: https://aphyr.com/posts/395-geoblocking-multiple-localities-with-nginx

Man-in-the-Middle Proof-of-Concept via Krontiris' Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman Over COSE (EDHOC) in C
Daniel Hennig, Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10574 https…

Man-in-the-Middle Proof-of-Concept via Krontiris' Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman Over COSE (EDHOC) in C
This report presents some technical details on the authentication process of a lightweight key exchange protocol, paying attention on how Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks could undermine its security, e.g., under the scope of lawful interception and its risk to facilitate mass surveillance. We focus only on some technical aspects associated to the attack scenario. Perspectives for future work are also discussed. Other specific aspects of the work, mainly focusing on the security implications of…

This is the perfect expression of a theme that never shows up in mass media:
Police are running out of legitimate work and are willing to invent new work solely to keep their jobs.
Crime rates have dropped precipitously over the past few decades, with some spikes around the financial crisis and pandemic. In a sane society, we would have also been reducing police budgets and headcounts
(See also: #Freikorps

Vessel Detection and Localization Using Distributed Acoustic Sensing in Submarine Optical Fiber Cables
Erick Eduardo Ramirez-Torres, Javier Macias-Guarasa, Daniel Pizarro-Perez, Javier Tejedor, Sira Elena Palazuelos-Cagigas, Pedro J. Vidal-Moreno, Sonia Martin-Lopez, Miguel Gonzalez-Herraez, Roel Vanthillo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11614

Vessel Detection and Localization Using Distributed Acoustic Sensing in Submarine Optical Fiber Cables
Submarine cables play a critical role in global internet connectivity, energy transmission, and communication but remain vulnerable to accidental damage and sabotage. Recent incidents in the Baltic Sea highlighted the need for enhanced monitoring to protect this vital infrastructure. Traditional vessel detection methods, such as synthetic aperture radar, video surveillance, and multispectral satellite imagery, face limitations in real-time processing, adverse weather conditions, and coverage ra…

Investigation finds Russian surveillance, sabotage ship near European undersea cables, FT reports: https://benborges.xyz/2025/09/27/investigation-finds-russian-surveillance-sabotage.html

Swiss government looks to undercut privacy tech, stoking fears of mass surveillance https://therecord.media/switzerland-digital-privacy-law-proton-privacy-surveillance

It's Saturday morning, and that means it's time for Metacurity's round-up of the best infosec-related long reads of the week, available to our free and paid subscribers.
This week's selection covers
--Myanmar's junta benefits from cyberscams,
--Cyberscams could be behind the Thai-Cambodia conflict,
--Africans are tricked into cyberscam compounds,
--How China's propaganda and surveillance work,
--Vibe coding is risky,
--Ross Ul…

Best infosec-related long reads for the week of 9/6/25
Myanmar's junta benefits from cyberscams, Cyberscams could be behind the Thai-Cambodia conflict, Africans are tricked into cyberscam compounds, How China's propaganda and surveillance work, Vibe coding is risky, Ross Ulbricht is very lucky, Don't steal the phone of a hacker's girlfriend

"Popeyes Chicken, covert surveillance and alleged rotting meat"
People DO NOT eat at fast food establishments, They will kill you for a dime.
#fastfood = die sooner

Bistability and Noise-Induced Evasion in Tumor-Immune Dynamics with Antigen Accumulation and Immune Escape
Mengfan Tan, Shaoqing Chen, Chunjin Wei, Da Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11048

Bistability and Noise-Induced Evasion in Tumor-Immune Dynamics with Antigen Accumulation and Immune Escape
Tumor-immune interactions are shaped by both antigenic heterogeneity and stochastic perturbations in the tumor microenvironment, yet the mathematical mechanisms underlying immune phase transitions remain poorly understood. We propose a four-compartment dynamical model that incorporates antigen accumulation and immune escape mutations. Bifurcation analysis reveals bistability between immune surveillance and immune escape states, providing a mechanistic explanation for heterogeneous immune outcom…

it’s annoying that web devs are no longer able to analyse their web server access logs
instead they install javascript spyware, hand over all their user data to surveillance direct marketing firms, slap a cookie consent banner on it, and pretend this is ok

One might think that Microsoft's storage of the actual contents (not just the meta-data) all phone calls from Gaza and the West Bank might violate both US and EU privacy laws.
The US might ignore this, but I suspect the EU could use the GDPR to levy very large, punitive fines on Microsoft.
"‘A million calls an hour’: Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians"

Microsoft will no longer allow Israel to use its cloud services to enable its mass surveillance of occupied Palestinians – "the first known case of a US technology company withdrawing services provided to the Israeli military since the beginning of its war on Gaza"

screaming into the void is bad opsec now. they put surveillance cameras in it.

New documents and court records obtained by EFF show that
Texas deputies queried Flock Safety's surveillance data 💥in an abortion investigation,
contradicting the narrative promoted by the company and the Johnson County Sheriff that she was
“being searched for as a missing person,” and that“it was about her safety.” 
The new information shows that deputies had initiated a "death investigation" of a "non-viable fetus," logged evidence of a woman’…

Flock Safety and Texas Sheriff Claimed License Plate Search Was for a Missing Person. It Was an Abortion Investigation.
New documents and court records obtained by EFF show that Texas deputies queried Flock Safety's surveillance data in an abortion investigation, contradicting the narrative promoted by the company and the Johnson County Sheriff that she was “being searched for as a missing person,” and that “it was about her safety.” The new information shows that deputies had initiated a "death investigation" of a "non-viable fetus," collected evidence of a woman’s self-managed abortion, and consulted…

Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance
[…] From passports to colonial passbooks, from welfare cards to border regimes, the apparatus of identification has always been tied to domination. Digital ID is simply the latest iteration of this long history, but with a scale and sophistication that makes its dangers even more profound. […]
👷

Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance - Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement
The world is entering an era where identity is no longer a matter of personal relationships, lived experience, or even paperwork. Increasingly, it is reduced...

"It was a comment he couldn't take back, even though he deleted the words and never sent the email. School administrators saw it within an hour because of a monitoring software installed on school laptops."
I've had challenging kids and have dealt with school systems that don't give a fuck about protecting kids. They just hide behind the rules once they've decide you're a bad kid. I really feel for this guy. HE DIDN'T EVEN SEND THE EMAIL?!? Just p…

US federal contracting records suggest US ICE is planning to hire ~30 contractors to monitor social media content, seeking leads for enforcement operations (Dell Cameron/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/ice-social-media-surveillance-24-7-contract/

ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team
Documents show that ICE plans to hire dozens of contractors to scan X, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms to target people for deportation.

https://apnews.com/article/chinese-surveillance-silicon-valley-uyghurs-tech-xinjiang-8e000601dadb6aea230f18170ed54e88
“Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built …

How Silicon Valley enabled China's digital police state
An AP investigation reveals that U.S. technology companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known. Firms including IBM, Dell, and Cisco sold billions in technology to Chinese police and government agencies, despite repeated warnings that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities. Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a b…

ICE, Secret Service, Navy All Had Access to Flock's Nationwide Network of Cameras https://www.404media.co/ice-secret-service-navy-all-had-access-to-flocks-nationwide-network-of-cameras/

Israel used Microsoft's Dutch data centre for mass surveillance - DutchNews.nl
https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/09/israel-used-microsofts-dutch-data-centre-for-mass-surveillance/

The EU is pushing to scan ALL private messages, even encrypted ones, endangering privacy, security, and fundamental freedoms across 450 million people.
This is mass surveillance disguised as child protection, and it breaks encryption, risks false accusations, and threatens democracy worldwide.
Learn more & act NOW: https://fightchatcontrol…

Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its technology in mass surveillance of Palestinians | Israel | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/25/microsoft-blocks-israels-use-of-its-technology-in-mass-s…

One day prosecutors will use AI enhancement on surveillance images (if this happened already).
https://www.theverge.com/news/776793/charlie-kirk-fbi-person-of-interest-photos-shooter

Internet detectives are misusing AI to find Charlie Kirk’s alleged shooter
The FBI shared two blurry photos of a person of interest in the shooting of Charlie Kirk, and people are misusing AI to make the images seem clearer.

AI Eyes on the Road: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Traffic Surveillance
Ziming Wang, Shiwei Yang, Rebecca Currano, Morten Fjeld, David Sirkin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06480 h…

AI Eyes on the Road: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Traffic Surveillance
AI-powered road surveillance systems are increasingly proposed to monitor infractions such as speeding, phone use, and jaywalking. While these systems promise to enhance safety by discouraging dangerous behaviors, they also raise concerns about privacy, fairness, and potential misuse of personal data. Yet empirical research on how people perceive AI-enhanced monitoring of public spaces remains limited. We conducted an online survey ($N=720$) using a 3$\times$3 factorial design to examine percep…

MAESTRO: Multi-modal Adaptive Ensemble for Spectro-Temporal Robust Optimization
Hong Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08578 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08578

MAESTRO: Multi-modal Adaptive Ensemble for Spectro-Temporal Robust Optimization
Timely and robust influenza incidence forecasting is critical for public health decision-making. To address this, we present MAESTRO, a Multi-modal Adaptive Ensemble for Spectro-Temporal Robust Optimization. MAESTRO achieves robustness by adaptively fusing multi-modal inputs-including surveillance, web search trends, and meteorological data-and leveraging a comprehensive spectro-temporal architecture. The model first decomposes time series into seasonal and trend components. These are then proc…

Having just finished a 1-year consulting contract myself, my own list of restrictions for future jobs/consulting is very similar:
- will not work on adtech/surveillance/weapons
- will not knowingly make world worse and/or abet genocides
- will not be forced to use vibe coding (or will explain cost implications)
- prefer to work in the open
- prefer remote only
- flexible with time zones (last role was for a company in LA, -9h)

Joey de Villa 🪗 (@AccordionGuy@mastodon.cloud)
Attached: 1 image As long as we’re in the “September Surge” (that trend where there’s a noticeable uptick in job vacancies and hiring around September and October, when companies ramp up for year-end and the upcoming year), you might as well also ask “What DON’T I want in a new job?” https://www.globalnerdy.com/2025/09/06/what-dont-you-want-in-your-next-job/

Podemos's maximalist posture is preventing Spain enacting an arms embargo on Israel. Other parties (Sumar, ERC) agree it's inadequate but say they can then work to strengthen it, e.g. with surveillance at ports.
Un embargo de armas como respuesta a un genocidio

Un embargo de armas como respuesta a un genocidio
El decreto del embargo de armas a Israel recibirá el apoyo de los socios del Gobierno, pero Podemos se niega en el pleno a garantizar su aprobación por considerarlo falso e insuficiente. Álvarez de Toledo utiliza hechos desacreditados sobre el ataque de Hamás en 2023 para atacar al Gobierno

‘A million calls an hour’: Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians
Revealed: The Israeli military undertook an ambitious project to store a giant trove of Palestinians’ phone calls on Microsoft’s servers in Europe.
https://www.…

🕵🏽 ‘Revolutionary surveillance’: 90% of Nicaraguans feel spied upon
https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-09-08/revolutionary-surveillance-90-of-nicaraguans-feel-spied-upon.html

‘Revolutionary surveillance’: 90% of Nicaraguans feel spied upon
The Sandinista regime resorts to police, paramilitaries and neighborhood committees to quell dissent. A survey reveals the extent of social control

#Drumpf era #CDC has stopped monitoring for several factors it once tracked for foodborne illness outbreaks. As of July 1, a critical surveillance program is ordered to only monitori for two pathogens instead of the previous eight.
Currently only two

The CDC quietly scaled back a surveillance program for foodborne illnesses
A federal-state partnership that monitors for foodborne illnesses quietly scaled back its operations nearly two months ago

https://tuta.com/fr/blog/switzerland-surveillance-plan

La Suisse prévoit une surveillance pire que celle des États-Unis | Tuta
La révision de la loi suisse sur la surveillance (VÜPF) viserait directement les fournisseurs de VPN et de services de messagerie et de chat cryptés basés en Suisse.

Clear Roads, Clear Vision: Advancements in Multi-Weather Restoration for Smart Transportation
Vijay M. Galshetwar, Praful Hambarde, Prashant W. Patil, Akshay Dudhane, Sachin Chaudhary, Santosh Kumar Vipparathi, Subrahmanyam Murala
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09228

Clear Roads, Clear Vision: Advancements in Multi-Weather Restoration for Smart Transportation
Adverse weather conditions such as haze, rain, and snow significantly degrade the quality of images and videos, posing serious challenges to intelligent transportation systems (ITS) that rely on visual input. These degradations affect critical applications including autonomous driving, traffic monitoring, and surveillance. This survey presents a comprehensive review of image and video restoration techniques developed to mitigate weather-induced visual impairments. We categorize existing approac…

#Facebook is very very bad. https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/how-facebook-t…

Public records show AWS is aggressively promoting AI surveillance tech to law enforcement agencies, partnering with companies such as Flock Safety and ZeroEyes (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewste

Inside Amazon’s Aggressive Push To Get Cops Using AI Surveillance
Inside Amazon’s Aggressive Push To Get Cops Using AI

ICE plans to hire dozens of contractors to scan X, Facebook, TikTok, and other social media platforms
to target people for deportation.
https://www.wired.com/story/ice-social-media-surveillance-24-7-contract/

ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team
Documents show that ICE plans to hire dozens of contractors to scan X, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms to target people for deportation.

in a bad field of SF electeds, Matt Dorsey stands out as uniquely terrible. he's up for re-election next year: we should throw him out. #sfpol
https://mastodon.social/@eff/1153176660541…

Microsoft has terminated the Israeli military’s access to technology it used to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected millions of Palestinian civilian phone calls made each day in Gaza and the West Bank
https://www.

Black People Knew This Would Happen (Alain Stephens/The Intercept)
https://theintercept.com/2025/10/08/chicago-ice-blitz-black-surveillance-state-violence/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251009/p2#a251009p2

Investigation: IBM, Dell, Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia, and other US tech companies helped design and build China's vast digital surveillance state (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/chinese-surve…

The cybersecurity news machine is cranking away at top speed, so don't miss today's Metacurity for the critical infosec developments you should know, including
--US indicts ransomware dev, offers $10 million reward, and puts him on most-wanted list,
--US tech giants enable human rights abuse in China,
--BlackDB.cc operator pleads guilty,
--Microsoft issues 80 Patch Tuesday fixes,
--Pakistan has built sweeping surveillance system,
--Apple targets spy…

US indicts ransomware dev, offers $10 million reward, puts him on most-wanted list
US tech giants enable human rights abuse in China, BlackDB.cc operator pleads guilty, Microsoft issues 80 Patch Tuesday fixes, Pakistan has built sweeping surveillance system, Apple targets spyware with Memory Integrity Enforcement, Korean telco KT on hot seat for 278 mobile fraud cases, much more

Fascism is once again rising across the world, creeping in through surveillance capitalism, mass data harvesting, chat control laws, UK-style age verification, and endless new tools of digital censorship presented as safety.
Freedoms vanish piece by piece through biometric borders, predictive policing, restrictions on protest, voter suppression, book bans, and the relentless spread of authoritarian policies disguised as order. What seemed impossible a decade ago is now routine.
T…

Lumana, which integrates vision-language models and agentic AI into its video surveillance system, raised a $40M Series A led by Wing Venture Capital (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2025/07/29/lumana-gets-40m-build-intel…

Lumana gets $40M to build more intelligent video surveillance systems - SiliconANGLE
Lumana gets $40M to build more intelligent video surveillance systems - SiliconANGLE

AI Warfare in Gaza: Targeted Killings, Automated Surveillance (Khalil Dewan)
https://www.juancole.com/2025/07/targeted-automated-surveillance.html

You don't want to miss today's extra-packed Metacurity for the most critical infosec developments you should know today, including
--Microsoft enabled Israeli spy agency's mass surveillance of Palestinians' mobile calls,
--Cisco's registered web users disclosed in a likely Salesforce breach-related vishing attack,
--Google confirms customer theft in Salesforce breach-related incident,
--Broadcom chip flaw exposes millions of Dell laptops to attack, …

Microsoft enabled Israeli spy agency's mass surveillance of Palestinians' mobile calls
Cisco's registered web users disclosed in a likely Salesforce breach-related vishing attack, Google confirms customer theft in Salesforce breach-related incident, Broadcom chip flaw exposes millions of Dell laptops to attack, MSFT's Project Ire can ID malware with AI, much more

New Machine Learning Approaches for Intrusion Detection in ADS-B
Mika\"ela Ngambo\'e, Jean-Simon Marrocco, Jean-Yves Ouattara, Jos\'e M. Fernandez, Gabriela Nicolescu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08333

New Machine Learning Approaches for Intrusion Detection in ADS-B
With the growing reliance on the vulnerable Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) protocol in air traffic management (ATM), ensuring security is critical. This study investigates emerging machine learning models and training strategies to improve AI-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) for ADS-B. Focusing on ground-based ATM systems, we evaluate two deep learning IDS implementations: one using a transformer encoder and the other an extended Long Short-Term Memory (xLSTM) network…

Made me smile (gift link): https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/business/china-chongqing-protest.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jE8.LOI-.nxBWn_BPfxeP&smid=url-share

A Hidden Camera Protest Turned the Tables on China’s Surveillance State
Before fleeing China, an activist in Chongqing staged an elaborate one-man demonstration against the Communist Party that doubled as performance art.

Cops Used 83K Cameras to Track an Abortion Patient--on Her Abuser's Tip (Jessica Valenti/Abortion, Every Day)
https://jessica.substack.com/p/texas-abortion-surveillance-plate-reader
http://www.memeorandum.com/251007/p103#a251007p103

This is just sensationally bad: Microsoft struck a deal with the Israeli secret intelligence arm Unit 8200 that allowed it to build a powerful new mass surveillance tool that collects and stores recordings of millions of mobile phone calls made each day by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
‘A million calls an hour’: Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians

VRAE: Vertical Residual Autoencoder for License Plate Denoising and Deblurring
Cuong Nguyen, Dung T. Tran, Hong Nguyen, Xuan-Vu Phan, Nam-Phong Nguyen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08392

VRAE: Vertical Residual Autoencoder for License Plate Denoising and Deblurring
In real-world traffic surveillance, vehicle images captured under adverse weather, poor lighting, or high-speed motion often suffer from severe noise and blur. Such degradations significantly reduce the accuracy of license plate recognition systems, especially when the plate occupies only a small region within the full vehicle image. Restoring these degraded images a fast realtime manner is thus a crucial pre-processing step to enhance recognition performance. In this work, we propose a Vertica…

Germany's seems close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private communications in the EU. Please do not let this happen...
#chatcontrol #EU

Sources: Microsoft terminated Israel's Unit 8200 access to Azure, after an investigation found the tech was used for mass surveillance in Gaza and West Bank (The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep

Sparse BEV Fusion with Self-View Consistency for Multi-View Detection and Tracking
Keisuke Toida, Taigo Sakai, Naoki Kato, Kazutoyo Yokota, Takeshi Nakamura, Kazuhiro Hotta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08421

Sparse BEV Fusion with Self-View Consistency for Multi-View Detection and Tracking
Multi-View Multi-Object Tracking (MVMOT) is essential for applications such as surveillance, autonomous driving, and sports analytics. However, maintaining consistent object identities across multiple cameras remains challenging due to viewpoint changes, lighting variations, and occlusions, which often lead to tracking errors.Recent methods project features from multiple cameras into a unified Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) space to improve robustness against occlusion. However, this projection introduc…

Security researchers say they have caught a surveillance company in the Middle East exploiting a new attack capable of tricking phone operators into disclosing a cell subscriber’s location
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/18/a-su

A surveillance vendor was caught exploiting a new SS7 attack to track people's phone locations | TechCrunch
The new SS7 bypass-attack tricks phone operators into disclosing a cell subscriber's location, in some cases down to a few hundred meters.

Wyden asks White House to scrutinize UK surveillance laws https://therecord.media/wyden-asks-white-house-scrutinize-uk-surveillance-laws-apple

Fijn..... 🙄
"The system was built to sit on Microsoft’s servers behind enhanced layers of security developed by the company’s engineers with Unit 8200’s instructions. The leaked Microsoft files suggest that a large proportion of the unit’s sensitive data may now be sitting in the company’s datacentres in the Netherlands and Ireland."

GTA-Crime: A Synthetic Dataset and Generation Framework for Fatal Violence Detection with Adversarial Snippet-Level Domain Adaptation
Seongho Kim, Sejong Ryu, Hyoukjun You, Je Hyeong Hong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08232

GTA-Crime: A Synthetic Dataset and Generation Framework for Fatal Violence Detection with Adversarial Snippet-Level Domain Adaptation
Recent advancements in video anomaly detection (VAD) have enabled identification of various criminal activities in surveillance videos, but detecting fatal incidents such as shootings and stabbings remains difficult due to their rarity and ethical issues in data collection. Recognizing this limitation, we introduce GTA-Crime, a fatal video anomaly dataset and generation framework using Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA5). Our dataset contains fatal situations such as shootings and stabbings, captured fro…

It's been about three weeks, but Metacurity's digest of the best long-form (and longish) infosec-related pieces we couldn't properly fit into our daily news crush is back!
This issue's selection covers
--Russian cybersecurity companies are tools for global expansion,
--Merrick Garland's fears of a judicial system cyberattack came true,
--Flock has plans for ubiquitous surveillance to stop crime,
--Misinformation from adversaries now runs ram…

Best infosec-related long reads for the week of 8/16/25, 8/23/25, and 8/30/25
Russian cybersecurity companies are tools for global expansion, Merrick Garland's fears of a judicial system cyberattack came true, Flock has plans for ubiquitous surveillance to stop crime, Misinformation from adversaries now runs rampant with no US pushback, AI can't capture personality, more

From high above Eastern Europe, NATO's airborne surveillance crews
operating the alliance's E-3 Sentry planes
have tracked Russia's evolving air war since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In the early days, aircrews watched Russian warplanes fly bombing runs toward the front lines.
Now, aircraft are rarely crossing into Ukrainian airspace, having largely been replaced by standoff missile strikes and drone attacks
as both sides rely m…

How NATO surveillance jet saw Russian air war against Ukraine change
As the front lines froze, and air defenses got better, Russia and Ukraine pivoted away from close bombing runs to standoff attacks.

Wyden secures data privacy deal to shield Oregonians from out-of-state abortion, immigration surveillance (Tim Gordon/KGW-TV)
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/state/wyden-secures-data-privacy-deal-shield-oregonians-out-of-state-abortion-immigration-surveillance/283-aa03cae2-4dc1-427a-8159-086bdf267118
http://www.memeorandum.com/250726/p19#a250726p19

A profile of Flock Safety, which operates 80K AI surveillance cameras across the US and hit a $7.5B valuation in March 2025, as it expands into US-made drones (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewste

AI Startup Flock Thinks It Can Eliminate All Crime In America
With more than 80,000 AI-powered cameras across the U.S., Flock Safety has become one of cops’ go-to surveillance tools. Now CEO Garrett Langley has both police tech giant Axon and Chinese drone maker DJI in his sights on the way to his goal: Preventing all crime in the U.S.

How Surveillance Firms Use ‘Democracy’ As a Cover for Serving ICE and Trump https://www.404media.co/how-surveillance-firms-use-democracy-as-a-cover-for-serving-ice-and-trump/

A Classification-Aware Super-Resolution Framework for Ship Targets in SAR Imagery
Ch Muhammad Awais, Marco Reggiannini, Davide Moroni, Oktay Karakus
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06407

A Classification-Aware Super-Resolution Framework for Ship Targets in SAR Imagery
High-resolution imagery plays a critical role in improving the performance of visual recognition tasks such as classification, detection, and segmentation. In many domains, including remote sensing and surveillance, low-resolution images can limit the accuracy of automated analysis. To address this, super-resolution (SR) techniques have been widely adopted to attempt to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution inputs. Related traditional approaches focus solely on enhancing image …

Technologies that promise to track, manage, and supervise workers,
increasingly using artificial intelligence,
are entrenched in the developing world, according to a new report by Coworker.org,
a labor rights nonprofit based in New York. 
Audits of more than 150 startups and regional companies based in Kenya, Nigeria, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and India showed
workplace surveillance is expanding in scale and sophistication, the researchers said.
While lar…

VC money is fueling a global boom in worker surveillance tech
A funding surge has given rise to technologies to track, analyze and manage workers — often in countries with little regulation.

Amnesty: Pakistan is spying on millions via phone tapping and a Chinese-built internet firewall, in one of the broadest surveillance programs outside China (Ariba Shahid/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific

Schools are next for Flock Safety’s automatic license place reader cameras https://therecord.media/flock-safety-raptor-technologies-schools-surveillance

Leaked docs: Chinese network-monitoring provider Geedge Networks has sold Great Firewall-style censorship systems to at least four countries, including Pakistan (Zeyi Yang/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/geedge-networks-mass-censorship-leak/

Massive Leak Shows How a Chinese Company Is Exporting the Great Firewall to the World
Geedge Networks, a company with ties to the founder of China’s mass censorship infrastructure, is selling its censorship and surveillance systems to at least four other countries in Asia and Africa.

Your regular reminder that marginal income & capital gains tax rates are too low
-- and this poses an existential threat to 🇺🇸 democracy
https://bsky.app/profile/robertscotthorton.bsky.social/post/3lzu3j77n622p

Scott Horton (@robertscotthorton.bsky.social)
Larry Ellison envisions a surveillance state in which techbros rule. '“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” Ellison said in an hour-long Q&A during Oracle’s Financial Analyst Meeting last week.' https://fortune.com/2024/09/17/oracle-larry-ellison-surveillance-state-police-ai/

"The website, called Fight Chat Control, was set up by Joachim, a 30-year-old software engineer living in Aalborg, Denmark. He made it after learning of a new attempt to approve a European Union proposal to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM) — a bill seen by privacy activists as breaking encryption and leading to mass surveillance."
One-man spam campaign ravages EU ‘chat control’ bill

One-man spam campaign ravages EU ‘chat control’ bill
A software developer from Denmark is having an outsized influence on a hotly debated law to break open encrypted apps.

Leaked spreadsheets, Slack messages, and files linked to an alleged group of North Korean IT scammers show how they track potential jobs and record earnings (Matt Burgess/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/leaked-data-reveals-the-workaday-lives…

Leak Reveals the Workaday Lives of North Korean IT Scammers
Spreadsheets, Slack messages, and files linked to an alleged group of North Korean IT workers expose their meticulous job-planning and targeting—and the constant surveillance they're under.

Investigation: Israel's Unit 8200 built a system to collect millions of mobile phone calls made daily in Gaza and the West Bank using Microsoft's Azure platform (The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microso…

Don't leave for the weekend without checking out today's Metacurity for the most critical infosec developments you should know, including
--CISA orders agencies to fix Cisco firewall zero day flaws by noon today,
--Microsoft terminates Israeli military access to surveillance system,
--Senate report documents DOGE's marauding ways,
--Dutch cops bust two teens for wi-fi sniffing,
--Hackers stole pics and info on 8,000 nursery school kids,
--Edge d…

CISA orders agencies to fix Cisco firewall zero day flaws by noon today
Microsoft terminates Israeli military access to surveillance system, Senate report documents DOGE's marauding ways, Dutch cops bust two teens for wi-fi sniffing, Hackers stole pics and info on 8,000 nursery school kids, Edge device-focused threat group RedNovember is aligned with China, much more

Intel has partnerships with multiple Chinese surveillance companies sanctioned by the US for enabling human rights abuses, including Uniview and Hikvision (Emily Baker-White/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-wh

Intel Worked With Chinese Firms Sanctioned For Enabling Human Rights Abuses
As the U.S. government takes a 10% stake in Intel, Forbes has learned the tech company partnered with sanctioned Chinese surveillance firms Uniview, Hikvision and Cloudwalk.

Public records show C3 AI's Project Sherlock, company's flagship contract to speed up policing in San Mateo County, has struggled with usability issues and more (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewste

Billionaire Tom Siebel's C3 AI Was Supposed To Speed Up Policing. It’s Not Going Well.
San Mateo County pumped $12 million into a grand AI surveillance system that was supposed to level up its police work. Three years later, it still hasn’t seen the benefits.