serisec

Category: surveillance

  • Chilling Effects

    Chilling Effects Younger Americans have soured on the second Donald Trump presidency, but they are not protesting it. Despite an unpopular Iran war and an even more unpopular Trump administration, college campus protests nationwide have gone silent. And at many schools, student activism is virtually nonexistent. This silence comes in the wake of a relentless…

  • Identifying People Using Wi-Fi Routers

    Identifying People Using Wi-Fi Routers Not identifying people based on their use of Wi-Fi routers, but identifying people using Wi-Fi signals. This is accomplished through what is known as WiFi sensing, or the use of WiFi signals to infer information about a physical environment. When radio signals like WiFi travel through a space, they interact…

  • Smashing Security podcast #465: This developer wanted to cheat at Roblox. It cost millions

    Smashing Security podcast #465: This developer wanted to cheat at Roblox. It cost millions A developer at an AI startup wanted to cheat at Roblox. They downloaded a dodgy script on their work laptop. That one decision triggered a cascade of failures that ended with a $2 million data breach affecting hundreds of thousands of…

  • ICE Uses Graphite Spyware

    ICE Uses Graphite Spyware ICE has admitted that it uses spyware from the Israeli company Graphite. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Mexican Surveillance Company

    Mexican Surveillance Company Grupo Seguritech is a Mexican surveillance company that is expanding into the US. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Company that Secretly Records and Publishes Zoom Meetings

    Company that Secretly Records and Publishes Zoom Meetings WebinarTV searches the internet for public Zoom invites, joins the meetings, secretly records them, and publishes (alternate link) the recordings. It doesn’t use the Zoom record feature, so Zoom can’t do anything about it. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Sen. Wyden Warns of Another Section 702 Abuse

    Sen. Wyden Warns of Another Section 702 Abuse Sen. Ron Wyden is warning us of an abuse of Section 702: Wyden took to the Senate floor to deliver a lengthy speech, ostensibly about the since approved (with support of many Democrats) nomination of Joshua Rudd to lead the NSA. Wyden was protesting that nomination, but…

  • $10,000 bounty offered if you can hack Ring cameras to stop them sharing your data with Amazon

    $10,000 bounty offered if you can hack Ring cameras to stop them sharing your data with Amazon Amid a privacy backlash, a US $10,000 reward has been offered for anyone who can find a way to run Ring doorbell cameras locally, cutting off the flow of video data to Amazon’s servers. Read more in my…

  • Ring Cancels Its Partnership with Flock

    Ring Cancels Its Partnership with Flock It’s a demonstration of how toxic the surveillance-tech company Flock has become when Amazon’s Ring cancels the partnership between the two companies. As Hamilton Nolan advises, remove your Ring doorbell. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • 3D Printer Surveillance

    3D Printer Surveillance New York is contemplating a bill that adds surveillance to 3D printers: New York’s 2026­2027 executive budget bill (S.9005 / A.10005) includes language that should alarm every maker, educator, and small manufacturer in the state. Buried in Part C is a provision requiring all 3D printers sold or delivered in New York…

  • Ireland Proposes Giving Police New Digital Surveillance Powers

    Ireland Proposes Giving Police New Digital Surveillance Powers This is coming: The Irish government is planning to bolster its police’s ability to intercept communications, including encrypted messages, and provide a legal basis for spyware use. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • AI-Powered Surveillance in Schools

    AI-Powered Surveillance in Schools It all sounds pretty dystopian: Inside a white stucco building in Southern California, video cameras compare faces of passersby against a facial recognition database. Behavioral analysis AI reviews the footage for signs of violent behavior. Behind a bathroom door, a smoke detector-shaped device captures audio, listening for sounds of distress. Outside,…

  • The Wegman’s Supermarket Chain Is Probably Using Facial Recognition

    The Wegman’s Supermarket Chain Is Probably Using Facial Recognition The New York City Wegman’s is collecting biometric information about customers. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Flock Exposes Its AI-Enabled Surveillance Cameras

    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…

  • Urban VPN Proxy Surreptitiously Intercepts AI Chats

    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…

  • Chinese Surveillance and AI

    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…

  • New Anonymous Phone Service

    New Anonymous Phone Service A new anonymous phone service allows you to sign up with just a zip code. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Huawei and Chinese Surveillance

    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…

  • First Wap: A Surveillance Computer You’ve Never Heard Of

    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…

  • The Trump Administration’s Increased Use of Social Media Surveillance

    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…

  • Flok License Plate Surveillance

    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…

  • Smashing Security podcast #438: When your mouse turns snitch, and hackers grow a conscience

    Smashing Security podcast #438: When your mouse turns snitch, and hackers grow a conscience Your computer’s mouse might not be as innocent as it looks – and one ransomware crew has a crisis of conscience that nobody saw coming. We talk about how something as ordinary as a web page could turn your mouse into…

  • Details About Chinese Surveillance and Propaganda Companies

    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,…

  • Automatic License Plate Readers Are Coming to Schools

    Automatic License Plate Readers Are Coming to Schools Fears around children is opening up a new market for automatic license place readers. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Surveilling Your Children with AirTags

    Surveilling Your Children with AirTags Skechers is making a line of kid’s shoes with a hidden compartment for an AirTag. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Tradecraft in the Information Age

    Tradecraft in the Information Age Long article on the difficulty (impossibility?) of human spying in the age of ubiquitous digital surveillance. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Surveillance Used by a Drug Cartel

    Surveillance Used by a Drug Cartel Once you build a surveillance system, you can’t control who will use it: A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI official’s phone records and use Mexico City’s surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency’s informants in 2018, according to a…

  • What LLMs Know About Their Users

    What LLMs Know About Their Users Simon Willison talks about ChatGPT’s new memory dossier feature. In his explanation, he illustrates how much the LLM—and the company—knows about its users. It’s a big quote, but I want you to read it all. Here’s a prompt you can use to give you a solid idea of what’s…

  • Surveillance in the US

    Surveillance in the US Good article from 404 Media on the cozy surveillance relationship between local Oregon police and ICE: In the email thread, crime analysts from several local police departments and the FBI introduced themselves to each other and made lists of surveillance tools and tactics they have access to and felt comfortable using,…

  • Self-Driving Car Video Footage

    Self-Driving Car Video Footage Two articles crossed my path recently. First, a discussion of all the video Waymo has from outside its cars: in this case related to the LA protests. Second, a discussion of all the video Tesla has from inside its cars. Lots of things are collecting lots of video of lots of…

  • Paragon Spyware Used to Spy on European Journalists

    Paragon Spyware Used to Spy on European Journalists Paragon is an Israeli spyware company, increasingly in the news (now that NSO Group seems to be waning). “Graphite” is the name of its product. Citizen Lab caught it spying on multiple European journalists with a zero-click iOS exploit: On April 29, 2025, a select group of…

  • Surveillance Via Smart Toothbrush

    Surveillance Via Smart Toothbrush The only links are from The Daily Mail and The Mirror, but a marital affair was discovered because the cheater was recorded using his smart toothbrush at home when he was supposed to be at work. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • US as a Surveillance State

    US as a Surveillance State Two essays were just published on DOGE’s data collection and aggregation, and how it ends with a modern surveillance state. It’s good to see this finally being talked about. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • DIRNSA Fired

    DIRNSA Fired In “Secrets and Lies” (2000), I wrote: It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state. It’s something a bunch of us were saying at the time, in reference to the vast NSA’s surveillance capabilities. I have been thinking of that quote a lot as I read…

  • Smashing Security podcast #409: Peeping perverts and FBI phone calls

    Smashing Security podcast #409: Peeping perverts and FBI phone calls In episode 409 of the “Smashing Security” podcast, we uncover the curious case of the Chinese cyber-attack on Littleton’s Electric Light Company, and a California landlord’s hidden camera scandal. Find out about this, and more, in the latest edition of the “Smashing Security” podcast by…

  • RIP Mark Klein

    RIP Mark Klein 2006 AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein has died. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Rayhunter: Device to Detect Cellular Surveillance

    Rayhunter: Device to Detect Cellular Surveillance The EFF has created an open-source hardware tool to detect IMSI catchers: fake cell phone towers that are used for mass surveillance of an area. It runs on a $20 mobile hotspot. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Atlas of Surveillance

    Atlas of Surveillance The EFF has released its Atlas of Surveillance, which documents police surveillance technology across the US. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce schneier

  • Smashing Security podcast #400: Hacker games, AI travel surveillance, and 25 years of IoT

    Smashing Security podcast #400: Hacker games, AI travel surveillance, and 25 years of IoT The video game Path of Exile 2 suffers a security breach, we explore the issues of using predictive algorithms in travel surveillance systems, and the very worst IoT devices are put on show in Las Vegas. Oh, and has Elon Musk…

  • Secret Service Tracking People’s Locations without Warrant

    Secret Service Tracking People’s Locations without Warrant This feels important: The Secret Service has used a technology called Locate X which uses location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on phones. Because users agreed to an opaque terms of service page, the Secret Service believes it doesn’t need a warrant. Bruce Schneier Go to bruce…

  • The Scale of Geoblocking by Nation

    The Scale of Geoblocking by Nation Interesting analysis: We introduce and explore a little-known threat to digital equality and freedom­websites geoblocking users in response to political risks from sanctions. U.S. policy prioritizes internet freedom and access to information in repressive regimes. Clarifying distinctions between free and paid websites, allowing trunk cables to repressive states, enforcing…