We’d Better Talk About This Surveillance State

Wonder who's watching me now, the IRS?!

Images from Nancy Guthrie’s Nest cam, posted by Kash Patel

The US surveillance of its citizens sure has expanded exponentially under this regime, and it’s not just your face or license plate out in public places any more. It seems all of our devices are watching us whether we ask them to or not, and potentially ratting our activities out to the government, which has been using legally questionable “administrative warrants” to secretly monitor who-knows-how-many people.

Last night, after 10 days of no leads whatsoever, FBI Director Kash Patel posted footage from the Google Nest camera of what seems to be the kidnapper of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of reporter Savannah, from her home in Pima County, Arizona, on the night she was abducted. Footage that Patel says he got from “residual data located in backend systems” of Guthrie’s cameras.

He’s a residual back end. Too bad Patel and friends purged about 1,500 FBI agents last year, they might have helped.

Of course no one with a soul could object to the FBI doing everything in its power to locate that poor woman. But it is curious how the FBI could obtain that footage, as Guthrie did not have a Nest subscription. Said Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos on February 3: “The cameras we’re working with, they’re not on a cloud, so the data has to go through a server, has to take some time to get to the company that has that and get them warrants and services.”

And it turns out, even without a subscription, Nest still backs up to the Google cloud, and the backups stay on Google’s servers unless/until they’re overwritten.

So reminder, cameras you might not think are watching you may come with leakier back ends than you think! And if you’ve got cheating loins, or are an immigrant, or have been traitorously protesting or voicing any objections to the regime, you might want to change up your OpSec accordingly.

These fuckers in the regime may be dumb and incompetent, but they’ve also got high-tech help, and have been wilding out with DHS’s legally dubious administrative warrants and subpoenas. As in, ones signed off on by themselves, secretly, with no probable cause necessary, no notification to the target so they have the chance to challenge the subpoena, and no legal recourse for targets if DHS breaks the law, other than maybe a civil suit after the fact, if one has the time and money for that kind of thing.

And what a motherlode of data Google has on most people in the US, especially with the full suite of web browsing, Gmail, maps, messaging and home listening devices like Assistant and Google Home … it’s every breath you take, every move you make, every cake you bake, every O you fake!

Google’s motto used to be “Don’t Be Evil,” but then in 2018 they dropped that because they thought it would help them sell search advertising better. Portentous!

And now it seems Google is freely giving everyone’s information to DHS. No wonder DHS needed so much help from Peter Thiel and Palantir to build massive databases!

Stories of hair-raising abuses already abound, with an intensifying focus on citizens. In Minneapolis, since Bovino and a thousand-something agents out of 3,000 have departed, and Border Czar Tom Homan arrived to help “turn down the temperature,” he is not even pretending the siege has anything to do with immigrants any more, the target has now become uppity protestors who won’t stop saying mean things to agents.

The Intercept reported that over the past month in Minnesota, despite the “drawdown,” DHS has “disappeared” nearly three times more citizen observers than immigrants: 66 immigrants were deported, but 158 people arrested for “interfering with federal law enforcement,” for doing First Amendment things like following agents in their cars and filming. Homan is proud of this, even openly calling on locals to “end the resistance,” and whining some more that citizens being hostile to the ICE agents is why there’s been so much bloodshed. Stop making us shoot you!!

Further proof it’s all bullshit, the vast majority of detained citizen observers were released after hours in detention with no charges. But all of the detainees have their personal and biometric data entered into DHS’s database for enhanced monitoring.

History moment:

In most cases, people arrested for interfering with ICE are taken to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, a seven-story edifice that is part of Fort Snelling, the historic site of a government-run concentration camp during the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862.

And DHS has been secret-snooping like crazy. Student journalist Amandla Thomas-Johnson was alarmed to find that DHS obtained his digital information from Google and Meta, “including usernames, addresses, itemized list of services, including any IP masking services, telephone or instrument numbers, subscriber numbers or identities, and credit card and bank account numbers,” without his ever being notified, much less given the chance to challenge any subpoenas.

And there’s the story of “Jon,” a 67-year-old retiree in the Philadelphia suburbs. Poor guy read a story in the Washington Post about an Afghan refugee who had supported the US in Afghanistan, but the government was trying to deport him back to Afghanistan where he would surely be killed.

Jon emailed Joseph Dernbach, the lead prosecutor in the case, quite politely:

Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life. Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.

Then,

In five minutes, Jon said, he finished the note, signed his first and last name, pressed send and hoped his plea would make a difference.

Five hours and one minute later, Jon was watching TV with his wife when an email popped up in his inbox. He noticed it on his phone.

“Google,” the message read, “has received legal process from a Law Enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google Account.”

Listed below was the type of legal process: “subpoena.” And below that, the authority: “Department of Homeland Security.”

That’s how it began. Soon would come a knock at the door by men with badges and, for Jon, the relentless feeling of being surveilled in a country where he never imagined he would be.

Jon never saw any copy of a subpoena to Google.

Lawless harassment is not just the little people:

In March, Homeland Security issued two administrative subpoenas to Columbia University for information on a student it sought to deport after she took part in pro-Palestinian protests. In July, the agency demanded broad employment records from Harvard University with what the school’s attorneys described as “unprecedented administrative subpoenas.” In September, Homeland Security used one to try to identify Instagram users who posted about ICE raids in Los Angeles. Last month, the agency used another to demand detailed personal information about some 7,000 workers in a Minnesota health system whose staff had protested Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s intrusion into one of its hospitals.

What can one do to stay safe as a mouthy Trump hater? Not a whole lot, probably, because it’s the US government here. Even if you’re a Washington Post reporter or Letitia James, seemingly doing everything right and practicing good OpSec, if the regime wants to harass you, they will put Ed Martin in front of your house peeping in your windows if they must.

At least the government has so much data on all of us that they can’t track every single person who vocally hates them, so they can only make examples of the critics who annoy them the very most to instill fear in others, China or Stalin-style? The more people who resist, the harder it is to track us all. Sorry, that’s the best we can do trying to find a silver lining in this Google cloud.

But stay woke!

[The Intercept / Washington Post gift link]

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