Surveillance Technology

  • First Amendment Freedoms
  • Military Industrial Complex
  • Private Intelligence & Security
  • The Mercenaries; 
  • Surveillance Technology
    • Broidy violated Israeli-military developed NSO Group “Pegasus” spyware rules by brokering its first sale to the country of Mexico using Markston Capital Group; remote cellphone Surveillance–2010 by Israeli former military intelligence of Unit 8200;  Niv Carmi, Omri Lavie, and Shalev Hulio;  Jamal Khashoggi; Jeff Bezos hack, attacks on journalists, the Whats App hack & more; 2012 Mexico deal for $20 million; 2015 Panama deal. Elliott Broidy brokered the first NSO deal, bribing NY State officials with $1 million to receive a $250 million investment into Broidy’s private equity firm, Markstone Capital Partners, who sold NSO software to Mexico. Calcalist’s Udi Oren sued his lifelong friend Eran Reshef and his business partner Matan Caspy  in August 2015 in a Tel Aviv court as Oren was owed $872,000 for his part in the Pegasus deal. Witnesses: NSO co-founder and CEO Shalev Hulio and Eric Banoun, Israeli vice president of sales and business development of the cyber and intelligence business NICE Systems Ltd.; 2011 partnered in Circles Technologies and sold NSO’s technology. “According to the released documents, it was Reshef and Caspy who recruited Broidy to assist in the deal. Each of them owns 20% of Rayzone Group Ltd., a global seller and distributor of intelligence and cyber technologies. In his testimony, Caspy said he spent a few years in California, among other things selling technological products in South America. That was when he had first met and worked with Broidy, whom he described as a wealthy businessman with ample business activity and connections in South and Central America. For a while, he had also been employed at one of Broidy’s companies, Broidy Capital Management, as vice president of business development.” CalCalistech
    • Palantir- Peter Thiel, Facebook VC Investor & Board
    • Clearview AI Facial Recognition: Mr. Ton-That & Scalzo, aide to Rudy Giuliani; Backed by Peter Thiel
  • Big Data
  • Trump Campaign 
  • Trump Inauguration 2017– Broidy was Vice-Chair
  • Republican Party
    • 2017 RNC Finance Committee:
      • Elliott Broidy- RNC Finance Committee 2009 Bribery of NY State officials to conceal Israeli NSO Group “Pegasus”  spyware sold to Mexico; Tried to get the DOJ to drop the case against Jho Low in the 1MDB Malaysian sovereign wealth fund theft and also to get Mar-a Lago member Guo Wengui extradited to China at Low and a Chinese government official’s request.

Palantir Knows Everything About You Peter Thiel’s data-mining company is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens. The scary thing? Palantir is desperate for new customers. Bloomberg By Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman, and Jordan Robertson April 19, 2018

Clearview AI-Facial Recognition with “3 billion photographs scraped from social media and video streaming sites”Intelligencer    David Scalzo, CEO.  Financially Backed by Peter Thiel ($200,000 in 2017) & Kirenaga Partners, founder David Scalzo; Founder Richard Schwartz was an aide to Rudy Giuliani when he was Mayor of New York City. Schwartz met Mr. Ton-That (creator of failed “Trump hair” photo app & 2009 Google “phishing scam” on ViddyHo using tinyurls New York Times) at the Manhattan Institute, conservative think tank.

The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It The New York Times By Kashmir Hill A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images — and “might lead to a dystopian future or something,” a backer says. “The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants….Another engineer was hired to perfect a facial recognition algorithm that was derived from academic papers. The result: a system that uses what Mr. Ton-That described as a “state-of-the-art neural net” to convert all the images into mathematical formulas, or vectors, based on facial geometry — like how far apart a person’s eyes are. Clearview created a vast directory that clustered all the photos with similar vectors into “neighborhoods.”… One of the odder pitches, in late 2017, was to Paul Nehlen — an anti-Semite and self-described “pro-white” Republican running for Congress in Wisconsin — to use “unconventional databases” for “extreme opposition research,” according to a document provided to Mr. Nehlen and later posted online. Mr. Ton-That said the company never actually offered such services. The company soon changed its name to Clearview AI and began marketing to law enforcement. That was when the company got its first round of funding from outside investors: Mr. Thiel and Kirenaga Partners. Among other things, Mr. Thiel was famous for secretly financing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit that bankrupted the popular website Gawker. Both Mr. Thiel and Mr. Ton-That had been the subject of negative articles by Gawker….In February, the Indiana State Police started experimenting with Clearview. They solved a case within 20 minutes of using the app….The Indiana State Police became Clearview’s first paying customer, according to the company…Clearview deployed current and former Republican officials to approach police forces, offering free trials and annual licenses for as little as $2,000…The company’s main contact for customers was Jessica Medeiros Garrison, who managed Luther Strange’s Republican campaign for Alabama attorney general. Brandon Fricke, an N.F.L. agent engaged to the Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren, said in a financial disclosure report during a congressional campaign in California that he was a “growth consultant” for the company.

Amazon Pushes ICE to Buy Its Face Recognition Surveillance Tech The Daily Beast Jake Laperruque,Andrea Peterson October 23, 2018  Amazon employees are up in arms about possible collaborations with law enforcement. That has not stopped Amazon reps from pitching ICE on its face-scanning tech.

Feds would be banned from using facial recognition under new bill And it’d make it harder for local police to use it, too The Verge By Makena Kelly

ACLU of Michigan Complaint re Use of Facial Recognition. June 24, 2020 to the Chief Investigator re. the Detroit Police Department about father Robert Williams’ false arrest on January 9, 2020.

Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act of 2020, June 25, 2020- introduced by Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA)- Federal agencies, state, and local police departments would be banned from using facial recognition and prohibits its use until another law is made that allows it.

Boston Bans Use Of Facial Recognition Technology. It’s The 2nd-Largest City To Do So WBUR News June 24, 2020. Ally Jarmanning

Why We Should Ban Facial Recognition Technology Intelligencer By

 

The Dodgy Framework and the Middlemen: how NSO Sold its First Pegasus License CalCalistech Tomer Ganon and Hagar Ravet. February 24, 2020 A legal dispute regarding brokerage fees sheds light on the way the malware was first sold to a foreign country. American businessman Elliott Broidy, currently under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for possible violations of lobbying laws, was originally tapped as one of the architects of the deal despite admitting to illegal gifts worth $1 million shortly before.