NYSee Radar

Tag: surveillance

  • CBP Tapped Into the Online Advertising Ecosystem To Track Peoples’ Movements

    Joseph Cox · 404 Media

    An internal DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows for the first time CBP used location data sourced from the online advertising industry to track phone locations. ICE has bought access to similar tools.

    · · ·

    DHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) later found both CBP and ICE did not limit themselves to non-operational use. The OIG found that CBP, ICE, and the Secret Service all illegally used the smartphone location data, and found a CBP official used the data to track coworkers with no investigative purpose. CBP and ICE went on to repeatedly purchase access to location data.

  • ‘It beggars belief’: MoD sources warn Palantir’s role at heart of government is threat to UK’s security

    Charlie Young & Carole Cadwalladr · The Nerve

    “When you have that mosaic built from UK sovereign defence, health, roads, power networks, power stations, and our major industrial bases, you have a detailed understanding of virtually every aspect of the sovereign United Kingdom. For an adversary, or even a nation with whom we have a special relationship, that picture is worth more than all the fine art on Earth.” 

  • Inside the plan to kill Ali Khamenei

    Inside the plan to kill Ali Khamenei

    FT · Mehul Srivastava · James Shotter · Neri Zilber · Steff Chávez

    This is mostly an article about the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but I was drawn to the intelligence operation, namely the construction of “patterns of life” through hacked traffic cameras.

    Nearly all the traffic cameras in Tehran had been hacked for years, their images encrypted and transmitted to servers in Tel Aviv and southern Israel, according to two people familiar with the matter.

    One camera had an angle that proved particularly useful, said one of the people, allowing them to determine where the men liked to park their personal cars and providing a window into the workings of a mundane part of the closely guarded compound.

    Complex algorithms added details to dossiers on members of these security guards that included their addresses, hours of duty, routes they took to work and, most importantly, who they were usually assigned to protect and transport — building what intelligence officers call a “pattern of life”.

  • Hackers Expose Age-Verification Software Powering Surveillance Web

    L0la L33tz · The Rage

    Three hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open internet.

    In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting – and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies.

    …

    Persona Identity, Inc. is a Peter Thiel-backed venture

    …

    The software performs 269 distinct verification checks and scours the internet and government sources for potential matches, such as by matching your face to politically exposed persons (PEPs), and generating risk and similarity scores for each individual. IP addresses, browser fingerprints, device fingerprints, government ID numbers, phone numbers, names, faces, and even selfie backgrounds are analyzed and retained for up to three years.

    …

    The program, according to the researchers, performs product analytics and user behavior tracking on a government identity-verification platform, provides real-time user monitoring — every click, every page load — on a FedRAMP platform processing PII and biometrics, and includes financial identity-verification capabilities on the government platform.

  • NYPD: Internet Attribution Management Infrastructure

    NYPD · NYC.gov

    The NYPD disclosure from February 4th:

    The NYPD uses internet attribution management infrastructure, including Ntrepid, to manage digital footprints and allow its personnel to safely, securely, and covertly conduct investigations and detect possible criminal activity on the internet.

    . . .

    The information that is ultimately accessible to NYPD personnel utilizing this equipment is limited to publicly available information or the information that is viewable as a result of the privacy settings, privacy practices, and access limitations of an internet environment (e.g., chatrooms, social media profiles, messaging applications)

  • Mamdani faces first showdown with NYPD – will he risk alienating police?

    Eric Berger · The Guardian

    On 4 February, the NYPD disclosed that it used “internet attribution management infrastructure” from the technology company Ntrepid to “allow its personnel to safely, securely and covertly conduct investigations and detect possible criminal activity on the internet”. In other words, to create the sort of “sock puppet” online identities that Mamdani had once sought to prevent.

    . . .

    Owen, of Stop, also argues that the police could use such a tool to target Black and Latino residents. He pointed to the NYPD’s previous disclosure that if someone “makes a comment such as ‘Happy Birthday’ on the Facebook page of a gang member”, they could be considered a “known associate” and added to its criminal database, according to an inspector general report.

  • EFFecting Change: Get the Flock Out of Our City

    EFF · EFFecting Change Livestream Series

    Join our panel to explore what’s happening as Flock contracts face growing resistance across the U.S. We’ll break down the legal implications of the data these systems collect, examine campaigns that have successfully stopped Flock deployments, and discuss the real-world consequences for people’s privacy and freedom.

    Livestream
    February 19, 2026 – 12:00pm to 1:00pm PST

  • New ZeroDayRAT Mobile Spyware Enables Real-Time Surveillance and Data Theft

    Ravie Lakshmanan · The Hacker News

    advertised on Telegram as a way to grab sensitive data and facilitate real-time surveillance on Android and iOS devices

    The fact that it’s being marketed on Telegram is hinting at a trend toward spyware commodification. No bueno.

  • With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet

    With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet

    Jason Koebler · 404 Media

    Ring had always, explicitly been intended to assist law enforcement. In a series of investigations we did back at VICE (mostly written by Caroline Haskins, who is still covering surveillance at WIRED), we uncovered thousands of pages of documents, emails, and chats via public records requests and leaks that highlighted Ring’s surveillance ambitions. The company threw parties for police, employees wore “FUCK CRIME” shirts to internal parties, and helped police facilitate the retrieval of footage from its customers’ cameras if they initially refused to cooperate.

    . . .

    With Ring’s recent partnership with Flock, which will further facilitate the sharing of video footage with police, and its new Search Party feature, the message is clear: Ring is still, again, and always will be in the business of leveraging its network of luxury surveillance consumers as a law enforcement tool.

    404Media.co screenshot. Article title, "With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet". Subtitle, "Ring's 'Search Party' is dystopian surveillance accelerationism." Meta, "Jason Koebler · Feb 10, 2026 at 10:05 AM " Picture below shows surveillance camera image and a recognized object, a dog with a green rectangle around it and the label, "Milo Match."

  • Local police aid ICE by tapping school cameras amid Trump’s immigration crackdown

    Local police aid ICE by tapping school cameras amid Trump’s immigration crackdown

    Mark Keierleber of the 74 · The Guardian

    Flock of Vultures – Flock of Terror

    Police departments nationwide also routinely tapped into the eight Flock cameras installed at the 30,000-student Alvin independent school district south of Houston. Over a one-month period from December 2025 through early January, more than 3,100 police agencies conducted more than 733,000 searches on the district’s cameras, the 74’s analysis of public records revealed. Of those, immigration-related reasons were cited 620 times by 30 law enforcement agencies including ones in Florida, Georgia, Indiana and Tennessee.
    . . .
    Federal agents “were working directly” with a Carrollton police officer who had access to the Flock cameras “and they asked him to run it and they did”, Hitchcock said. If federal agents ask his office to help them with an immigration case, Hitchcock said, “we will assist them – no questions asked.”