The Wegman’s Supermarket Chain Is Probably Using Facial Recognition
The New York City Wegman’s is collecting biometric information about customers.
Entries Tagged "surveillance"
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Flock Exposes Its AI-Enabled Surveillance Cameras
404 Media has the story:
Unlike many of Flock’s cameras, which are designed to capture license plates as people drive by, Flock’s Condor cameras are pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras designed to record and track people, not vehicles. Condor cameras can be set to automatically zoom in on people’s faces as they walk through a parking lot, down a public street, or play on a playground, or they can be controlled manually, according to marketing material on Flock’s website. We watched Condor cameras zoom in on a woman walking her dog on a bike path in suburban Atlanta; a camera followed a man walking through a Macy’s parking lot in Bakersfield; surveil children swinging on a swingset at a playground; and film high-res video of people sitting at a stoplight in traffic. In one case, we were able to watch a man rollerblade down Brookhaven, Georgia’s Peachtree Creek Greenway bike path. The Flock camera zoomed in on him and tracked him as he rolled past. Minutes later, he showed up on another exposed camera livestream further down the bike path. The camera’s resolution was good enough that we were able to see that, when he stopped beneath one of the cameras, he was watching rollerblading videos on his phone.
Urban VPN Proxy Surreptitiously Intercepts AI Chats
This is pretty scary:
Urban VPN Proxy targets conversations across ten AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok (xAI), Meta AI.
For each platform, the extension includes a dedicated “executor” script designed to intercept and capture conversations. The harvesting is enabled by default through hardcoded flags in the extension’s configuration.
There is no user-facing toggle to disable this. The only way to stop the data collection is to uninstall the extension entirely.
[…]
The data collection operates independently of the VPN functionality. Whether the VPN is connected or not, the harvesting runs continuously in the background.
[…]
What gets captured:
- Every prompt you send to the AI
Every response you receive- Conversation identifiers and timestamps
- Session metadata
- The specific AI platform and model used
BoingBoing post.
Chinese Surveillance and AI
New report: “The Party’s AI: How China’s New AI Systems are Reshaping Human Rights.” From a summary article:
China is already the world’s largest exporter of AI powered surveillance technology; new surveillance technologies and platforms developed in China are also not likely to simply stay there. By exposing the full scope of China’s AI driven control apparatus, this report presents clear, evidence based insights for policymakers, civil society, the media and technology companies seeking to counter the rise of AI enabled repression and human rights violations, and China’s growing efforts to project that repression beyond its borders.
The report focuses on four areas where the CCP has expanded its use of advanced AI systems most rapidly between 2023 and 2025: multimodal censorship of politically sensitive images; AI’s integration into the criminal justice pipeline; the industrialisation of online information control; and the use of AI enabled platforms by Chinese companies operating abroad. Examined together, those cases show how new AI capabilities are being embedded across domains that strengthen the CCP’s ability to shape information, behaviour and economic outcomes at home and overseas.
Because China’s AI ecosystem is evolving rapidly and unevenly across sectors, we have focused on domains where significant changes took place between 2023 and 2025, where new evidence became available, or where human rights risks accelerated. Those areas do not represent the full range of AI applications in China but are the most revealing of how the CCP is integrating AI technologies into its political control apparatus.
News article.
New Anonymous Phone Service
A new anonymous phone service allows you to sign up with just a zip code.
Huawei and Chinese Surveillance
This quote is from House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company.
Long before anyone had heard of Ren Zhengfei or Huawei, Wan Runnan had been China’s star entrepreneur in the 1980s, with his company, the Stone Group, touted as “China’s IBM.” Wan had believed that economic change could lead to political change. He had thrown his support behind the pro-democracy protesters in 1989. As a result, he had to flee to France, with an arrest warrant hanging over his head. He was never able to return home. Now, decades later and in failing health in Paris, Wan recalled something that had happened one day in the late 1980s, when he was still living in Beijing.
Local officials had invited him to dinner.
This was unusual. He was usually the one to invite officials to dine, so as to curry favor with the show of hospitality. Over the meal, the officials told Wan that the Ministry of State Security was going to send agents to work undercover at his company in positions dealing with international relations. The officials cast the move to embed these minders as an act of protection for Wan and the company’s other executives, a security measure that would keep them from stumbling into unseen risks in their dealings with foreigners. “You have a lot of international business, which raises security issues for you. There are situations that you don’t understand,” Wan recalled the officials telling him. “They said, ‘We are sending some people over. You can just treat them like regular employees.’”
Wan said he knew that around this time, state intelligence also contacted other tech companies in Beijing with the same request. He couldn’t say what the situation was for Huawei, which was still a little startup far to the south in Shenzhen, not yet on anyone’s radar. But Wan said he didn’t believe that Huawei would have been able to escape similar demands. “That is a certainty,” he said.
“Telecommunications is an industry that has to do with keeping control of a nation’s lifeline…and actually in any system of communications, there’s a back-end platform that could be used for eavesdropping.”
It was a rare moment of an executive lifting the cone of silence surrounding the MSS’s relationship with China’s high-tech industry. It was rare, in fact, in any country. Around the world, such spying operations rank among governments’ closest-held secrets. When Edward Snowden had exposed the NSA’s operations abroad, he’d ended up in exile in Russia. Wan, too, might have risked arrest had he still been living in China.
First Wap: A Surveillance Computer You’ve Never Heard Of
Mother Jones has a long article on surveillance arms manufacturers, their wares, and how they avoid export control laws:
Operating from their base in Jakarta, where permissive export laws have allowed their surveillance business to flourish, First Wap’s European founders and executives have quietly built a phone-tracking empire, with a footprint extending from the Vatican to the Middle East to Silicon Valley.
It calls its proprietary system Altamides, which it describes in promotional materials as “a unified platform to covertly locate the whereabouts of single or multiple suspects in real-time, to detect movement patterns, and to detect whether suspects are in close vicinity with each other.”
Altamides leaves no trace on the phones it targets, unlike spyware such as Pegasus. Nor does it require a target to click on a malicious link or show any of the telltale signs (such as overheating or a short battery life) of remote monitoring.
Its secret is shrewd use of the antiquated telecom language Signaling System No. 7, known as SS7, that phone carriers use to route calls and text messages. Any entity with SS7 access can send queries requesting information about which cell tower a phone subscriber is nearest to, an essential first step to sending a text message or making a call to that subscriber. But First Wap’s technology uses SS7 to zero in on phone numbers and trace the location of their users.
Much more in this Lighthouse Reports analysis.
The Trump Administration’s Increased Use of Social Media Surveillance
This chilling paragraph is in a comprehensive Brookings report about the use of tech to deport people from the US:
The administration has also adapted its methods of social media surveillance. Though agencies like the State Department have gathered millions of handles and monitored political discussions online, the Trump administration has been more explicit in who it’s targeting. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a new, zero-tolerance “Catch and Revoke” strategy, which uses AI to monitor the public speech of foreign nationals and revoke visas of those who “abuse [the country’s] hospitality.” In a March press conference, Rubio remarked that at least 300 visas, primarily student and visitor visas, had been revoked on the grounds that visitors are engaging in activity contrary to national interest. A State Department cable also announced a new requirement for student visa applicants to set their social media accounts to public—reflecting stricter vetting practices aimed at identifying individuals who “bear hostile attitudes toward our citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles,” among other criteria.
Flok License Plate Surveillance
The company Flok is surveilling us as we drive:
A retired veteran named Lee Schmidt wanted to know how often Norfolk, Virginia’s 176 Flock Safety automated license-plate-reader cameras were tracking him. The answer, according to a U.S. District Court lawsuit filed in September, was more than four times a day, or 526 times from mid-February to early July. No, there’s no warrant out for Schmidt’s arrest, nor is there a warrant for Schmidt’s co-plaintiff, Crystal Arrington, whom the system tagged 849 times in roughly the same period.
You might think this sounds like it violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects American citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures without probable cause. Well, so does the American Civil Liberties Union. Norfolk, Virginia Judge Jamilah LeCruise also agrees, and in 2024 she ruled that plate-reader data obtained without a search warrant couldn’t be used against a defendant in a robbery case.
Details About Chinese Surveillance and Propaganda Companies
Details from leaked documents:
While people often look at China’s Great Firewall as a single, all-powerful government system unique to China, the actual process of developing and maintaining it works the same way as surveillance technology in the West. Geedge collaborates with academic institutions on research and development, adapts its business strategy to fit different clients’ needs, and even repurposes leftover infrastructure from its competitors.
[…]
The parallels with the West are hard to miss. A number of American surveillance and propaganda firms also started as academic projects before they were spun out into startups and grew by chasing government contracts. The difference is that in China, these companies operate with far less transparency. Their work comes to light only when a trove of documents slips onto the internet.
[…]
It is tempting to think of the Great Firewall or Chinese propaganda as the outcome of a top-down master plan that only the Chinese Communist Party could pull off. But these leaks suggest a more complicated reality. Censorship and propaganda efforts must be marketed, financed, and maintained. They are shaped by the logic of corporate quarterly financial targets and competitive bids as much as by ideology—except the customers are governments, and the products can control or shape entire societies.
More information about one of the two leaks.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.