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Spies Are More Common, and Boring, Than You Think

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Spies Are More Common, and Boring, Than You Think

How many spies are there anyway? Many Americans were surprised in 2018 by allegations that a Russian woman, Mariia Butina, had infiltrated the National Rifle Association and was having sex with well-placed men, in the hopes of receiving information for Russia. Politico has reported that Russia and China are significantly stepping up their spying operations in Silicon Valley, to extract useful tech knowledge.

I think Americans underestimate the extent of spying in their midst. Because we do not know the number of operating spies, that’s a hard hypothesis to test, but there are a number of reasons to find it plausible.

Amazon’s Ring Planned Neighborhood “Watch Lists” Built on Facial Recognition

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Amazon’s Ring Planned Neighborhood “Watch Lists” Built on Facial Recognition

Ring, Amazon’s crimefighting surveillance camera division, has crafted plans to use facial recognition software and its ever-expanding network of home security cameras to create AI-enabled neighborhood “watch lists,” according to internal documents reviewed by The Intercept.

The planning materials envision a seamless system whereby a Ring owner would be automatically alerted when an individual deemed “suspicious” was captured in their camera’s frame, something described as a “suspicious activity prompt.”

It’s unclear who would have access to these neighborhood watch lists, if implemented, or how exactly they would be compiled, but the documents refer repeatedly to law enforcement, and Ring has forged partnerships with police departments throughout the U.S., raising the possibility that the lists could be used to aid local authorities. The documents indicate that the lists would be available in Ring’s Neighbors app, through which Ring camera owners discuss potential porch and garage security threats with others nearby.

It Seemed Like a Popular Chat App. It’s Secretly a Spy Tool. – The New York Times

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It Seemed Like a Popular Chat App. It’s Secretly a Spy Tool. – The New York Times

It is billed as an easy and secure way to chat by video or text message with friends and family, even in a country that has restricted popular messaging services like WhatsApp and Skype.

But the service, ToTok, is actually a spying tool, according to American officials familiar with a classified intelligence assessment and a New York Times investigation into the app and its developers. It is used by the government of the United Arab Emirates to try to track every conversation, movement, relationship, appointment, sound and image of those who install it on their phones.

ToTok, introduced only months ago, was downloaded millions of times from the Apple and Google app stores by users throughout the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. While the majority of its users are in the Emirates, ToTok surged to become one of the most downloaded social apps in the United States last week, according to app rankings and App Annie, a research firm.

Opinion | How to Track President Trump – The New York Times

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Opinion | How to Track President Trump – The New York Times

f you own a mobile phone, its every move is logged and tracked by dozens of companies. No one is beyond the reach of this constant digital surveillance. Not even the president of the United States.

The Times Privacy Project obtained a dataset with more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million people in this country. It was a random sample from 2016 and 2017, but it took only minutes — with assistance from publicly available information — for us to deanonymize location data and track the whereabouts of President Trump.