As if conspiracy theorists didn’t have enough to worry about, Northwestern University engineers have just developed a flying microchip. As reported in the Sep. 23 issue of Nature, the airborne microchip is carried from place to place by the wind, behaving very much like a maple tree leaf as it
Democrats’ plan to have banks report all transactions over a certain amount to the Internal Revenue Service is mired in practical and privacy concerns, Republicans and some tax groups contend. President Joe Biden initially planned for banks to report all account inflows and outflows of over $600 to the IRS to help
The U.S. government is reportedly secretly issuing warrants for Google to provide user data on anyone typing in certain search terms, raising fears that innocent online users could get caught up in serious crime investigations at a greater frequency than previously thought. In an attempt to track down criminals, federal
You might not imagine that the U.S. intelligence community would have much stake in local protests over monuments and statues. You’d be wrong. A document provided to Lawfare on July 19 from the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) describes personnel as “collecting and reporting
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pushing forward with an amendment that would let the FBI collect records on Americans’ web-browsing and search histories without a warrant this week. McConnell proposed the amendment as part of the renewal of the 2001 Patriot Act, The Daily Beast first reported. The Senate
Apple and Google grew into global forces by creating wildly popular devices and applications. Their products became iconic for their elegant, user-friendly designs, and for their ability to handle heaps of data. Now those companies, who have often gone head-to-head in the past,are trying to apply that technical sensibility and
The revelation that the CIA (and German Intelligence) was in secret control of the Swiss cryptography firm Crypto AG highlights the hypocrisy of US ‘security concerns‘ over the advance of Huawei and other firms. The very wise old saying that if you point one finger at someone there are three
The CIA secretly owned a company that sold rigged encryption systems to other countries, allowing the agency to spy on more than 100 nations over several decades while generating millions in profit. The agency’s relationship with the company, Crypto AG, was detailed by the Washington Post in an investigation published
Ring doorbells are providing customer data to companies such as Facebook and Google, an investigation suggests. The Electronic Frontier Foundation found the Ring app was “packed” with third-party tracking, sending out customers’ personally identifiable information. Five companies were receiving a range of information, including names, IP addresses and mobile networks,
At first it seems like a quirky, what-are-the-chances-of-that headline: “China rewards fishers who netted foreign spy devices.” But behind that headline in Chinese state media, there is a different – and more intriguing – story. Firstly, this wasn’t two or three fishermen receiving awards. It was 11 – one woman,
