Tag: Region US

U.S. spied on UN Secretary General

The U.S. allegedly eavesdropped on private conversations between United Nations Secretary General António Guterres and other U.N. officials, according to documents obtained by the Washington Post. The classified documents highlight conversations that Guterres had with top U.N. officials and world leaders, including one about how he was angry that he was not allowed to visit the Tigray region of Ethiopia,…

UK, US sanction art dealer with suspected ties to Hezbollah

  LONDON (AP) — A diamond and art dealer was sanctioned Tuesday by the U.K. and U.S. governments for allegedly funding Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group. The U.K. Treasury said it froze Nazem Ahmad’s assets in the U.K. because he financed the Iranian-backed Shiite militant organization that has been designated an international terrorist group. Under the sanctions, no one in the…

DOJ: Two Arrested for Operating Illegal Overseas Police Station of the Chinese Government

Defendants Are New York City Residents Who Allegedly Operated the Police Station in Lower Manhattan and Destroyed Evidence When Confronted by the FBI A complaint was unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, charging two defendants in connection with opening and operating an illegal overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan, New York, for a provincial branch of…

Parler’s New Owner Shuts Down Site: ‘No Reasonable Person Believes Twitter For Conservatives Is A Viable Business Model’

  Ah, remember Parler? They were the first of the “alternative” social media companies targeting the Trumpist crowd, in which I pointed out that their whole “we don’t moderate” schtick wasn’t going to work. The company speed ran the content moderation learning curve faster than most. But even from the beginning, the Trumpists who joined admitted it was just no…

National Guardsman Arrested For Leaking Top Secret Ukraine War Documents On Discord

So, we’re just handing out top secret security clearance to everyone, I guess. It was clear from the documents posted to Discord (before spreading everywhere), the person behind them would soon be located.

The folded security briefings were obviously smuggled out of secure rooms in someone’s pocket and then photographed carelessly, in one case on top of a hunting magazine. I mean, that narrows it down to people who still buy stuff printed on physical media, a number that shrinks exponentially by the day.

On top of that, the entry level for the leaked info — much of it related to the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia — was Discord, which no one has considered to be the equivalent of Signal or any other secure site for the dissemination of sensitive material.

Fox Hit With Court Sanctions For Withholding Information In Dominion Libel Lawsuit

It doesn’t look like Fox News is going to get away with badmouthing Dominion Voting Systems for weeks following Donald Trump’s unsurprising loss in the 2020 election. Evidence already handed over to Dominion in its libel lawsuit shows many Fox News executives — as well as anchors and commentators — were aware the claims were false but chose to give…

Abusive Governments (And The Criminals They Employ) Are Going To LOVE The UN’s Cybercrime Treaty

Various treaties and multi-national proposals to combat cybercrime have been around for years. I’m not exaggerating. These have been floating around for more than a decade. (Do you want to feel old? This cybercrime treaty proposal would be old enough to legally obtain a social media account in the United States if it were still viable.)

The UN has been pushing its own version. But its idea of “crime” seems off-base, especially when it’s dealing with a conglomerate of countries with varying free speech protections. The “Cybercrime Treaty” proposed by the UN focuses on things many would consider ugly, distasteful, abhorrent, or even enraging. But it’s not things most people consider to be the sort of “crimes” a unified world front should be addressing — not when there’s plenty of financially or personally damaging cybercrime being performed on the regular.

Turkey tightens restrictions on Russian aircraft

Some of Turkey’s largest airport ground handler firms stopped providing services to western-made aircraft owned by Russian airlines earlier this month, multiple sources told Middle East Eye.  The sources, who are within the aviation industry and are familiar with the issue, said Havas, Turkey’s largest ground service provider, as well as Turkish Ground Services (TGS), stopped serving the US-made Boeing and European Airbus aircraft…

US sanctions Turkey, UAE-based entities it accuses of aiding Russian war effort

The US on Wednesday slapped sanctions on several entities based in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates which it said had violated US export controls and helped Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. The firms were included in a new list of sanctions rolled out by the US Treasury Department against more than 120 targets across over 20 countries and jurisdictions….

AI Firm Clearview AI Scrapes 30 Billion Social Media Photos, Hands Them to Law Enforcement

One of the most notorious privacy-breaching tech companies in operation, Clearview AI, has, according to its CEO, scraped 30 billion social media photos, packaged and curated them, and passed them along to the surveillance state authorities to do with what they will (in the dark, with no oversight, naturally, as the Founders warned such authorities would if left unchecked). Clearview’s…

Canada faces questions over alleged Chinese interference

When Member of Parliament Kenny Chiu was contacted by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) ahead of Canada’s federal election in 2021, he was puzzled. He had never expected to be part of a CSIS investigation, let alone one that required an in-person talk at the height of Canada’s COVID-19 pandemic. “At that time, everything had moved online, so it was…

French Court Smacks Remote Learning Software Company For Pervasive Surveillance Of Students In Their Own Homes

In a preliminary victory in the continuing fight against privacy-invasive software that “watches” students taking tests remotely, a French administrative court outside Paris suspended a university’s use of the e-proctoring platform TestWe, which monitors students through facial recognition and algorithmic analysis.

TestWe software, much like Proctorio, Examsoft, and other proctoring apps we’ve called out for intrusive monitoring of exam takers, constantly tracks students’ eye movements and their surroundings using video and sound analysis. The court in Montreuil, France, ruled that such “permanent surveillance of bodies and sounds” is unreasonable and excessive for the purpose preventing cheating.

Indiana poised to add to US state privacy law patchwork

There’s growing evidence that passing a comprehensive privacy law at the state level is a multiyear endeavor. There are anomalies among existing laws on the books, but most legislatures take two years or more to pass a bill.

Indiana is the latest example of how the process plays out, as it’s on the verge of adding to the pile of comprehensive state privacy laws. The Indiana House took a unanimous 98-0 vote to grant final passage to Senate Bill 5 on consumer data protection a year after the bill stalled in the same chamber.

The Indiana Senate, which already voted 49-0 to approve SB 5 on 9 Feb., will vote on concurrence, a perceived formality before the bill heads to Gov. Eric Holcomb, R-Ind., for a final signature. Holcomb has seven days upon transmission to act on the bill, with a definitive veto the only way it will not become a law.

Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to stay out of prison

Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes has been rebuffed in her attempt to stay out of federal prison while she appeals her conviction for the fraud she committed while overseeing a blood-testing scam.

Almost six in 10 U.S. adults living paycheck-to-paycheck: survey

Almost 6 in 10 U.S. adults in a new poll report they’re living paycheck-to-paycheck amid an economic landscape fraught with inflation and recession fears.

A CNBC-Momentive survey on financial confidence found that 58 percent of Americans say they’re living paycheck-to-paycheck, and that 70 percent said they feel stressed about their personal finances.

Nearly 80 percent of respondents making less than $50,000 and 74 percent making between $50,000 and $99,999 said they’re stressed about their finances. And even among those making $100,000 or more, 57 percent still said they’re stressed.

Nearly 80 percent of respondents making less than $50,000 say they’re living paycheck-to-paycheck, compared to just 32 percent of those making $100,000 or more.

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