Category Archives: george floyd

Amnesty sues NYPD, seeking details about facial recognition technology and arrest data

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Two watchdog groups sued the New York Police Department over the agency’s refusal to disclose public records about its acquisition of facial recognition technology and other surveillance tools. The lawsuit, filed by Amnesty International and Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, could force the NYPD to hand over records that will shed light on the depth of its surveillance capabilities. “It’s so outrageous that when New Yorkers came out to protest police abuse they were just met with more of the same,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of S.T.O.P. “We have no idea how often they were using this technology to track New Yorkers who were exercising their First Amendment rights.” Amnesty International last September filed a request seeking public records about the procurement, functionality and general use of facial recognition technology, drones and other surveillance technologies by the NYPD before and during Black Lives Matters protests. The NYPD denied the […]

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The FBI’s digital security guide for local police actually has good OPSEC advice

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An FBI cybersecurity guide instructs local police officers on how to avoid surveillance and harassment online amid ongoing protests against police brutality throughout the U.S. The Federal Bureau of Investigation instructions include a range of advisories for smaller police agencies, ranging from ways to avoid harassment on Facebook to the best ways to remove personal information from publicly available databases. The 354-page document, titled “Digital Exhaust Opt Out Guide,” was released publicly in June as part of the BlueLeaks data dump, a trove of law enforcement materials made public by transparency activists calling themselves Distributed Denial of Secrets. Federal authorities have distributed the guidelines to local police fusion centers — the state-operated hubs where federal, state, local and other law enforcement agencies share threat information and training tools — amid protests over the death of George Floyd and other unarmed Black Americans at the hands of police. A number of […]

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‘Distributed Denial of Secrets’ publishes ‘Blue Leaks,’ a trove of law enforcement records

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An anonymous hacktivist group says it’s published a trove of sensitive law enforcement data that originated with hundreds of police departments in an apparent effort to expose police abuses amid ongoing demonstrations through the U.S. The “Distributed Denial of Secrets” group marked Juneteenth, the June 19 holiday marking the end of slavery in the U.S., by publishing a searchable database containing 269 GB of data apparently stolen from more than 200 law enforcement agencies. The database, which the group has named “Blue Leaks,” appears to contain police training materials, police safety guidelines and protest containment strategies. The files also may contain names, email addresses, phone numbers and a large number of text and video files, according to a June 20 alert from the National Fusion Center Association obtained by security journalist Brian Krebs. The association reported that the data surfaced following an apparent breach at Netsential, a Houston-based web development […]

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Facebook removed white nationalist accounts encouraging guns at anti-racist protests

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Facebook removed multiple account networks connected with white nationalist hate groups that encouraged members to bring guns to anti-racism demonstrations throughout the United States. The social media company said Friday it removed sites affiliated with the Proud Boys and American Guard, which have been designated as extremist hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, respectively. Facebook removed roughly 30 accounts and 30 Instagram accounts belonging to the Proud Boys, which has appeared at white supremacist rallies like the Charlottesville demonstration in 2017. They also removed approximately 80 accounts and roughly 50 Instagram accounts from American Guard, who have advocated violence against immigrant and refugee communities. Both groups previously had been banned from Facebook, according to Brian Fishman, the company’s director of counterrorism and dangerous organizations. Facebook staff that had been monitoring both networks in an attempt to map their connections accelerated the account removals as […]

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Who’s DDoSing Anti-Racism Groups?

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In the days after George Floyd’s death, the websites of several black-rights groups have seen huge DDoS attacks.
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Facebook announces it will flag state media posts, eventually decline ad dollars

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Facebook says it soon will begin labeling posts from state-controlled media outlets, an update praised by some disinformation researchers that comes after other social media firms have taken more aggressive steps to root out incendiary posts. Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, announced Thursday that the company will include notes on pages of media organizations that are “wholly or partially under the editorial control” of a government, as well as the outlets’ Ad Library Page and the Page Transparency section. Facebook also will apply labels to advertisements from state-controlled media outlets, a process that will not begin until U.S. election season accelerates. “State-controlled media outlets rarely advertise in the U.S.,” Gleicher wrote in a blog post explaining the update. “Nevertheless, later this summer we will begin blocking ads from these outlets in the U.S. out of an abundance of caution to provide an extra layer of protection against various […]

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Signal wants to protect protesters’ privacy with new face-blurring feature

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Protesters worried about government or corporate surveillance will soon have a new tool to protect themselves. Signal, the popular encrypted messaging app, will release a feature that enables users to blur faces in photos they share, Signal Foundation co-founder Moxie Marlinspike said Wednesday. The feature will be built into forthcoming versions of Signal for Android and iOS to automatically detect faces and obscure them. For faces that aren’t detected, the user can manually blur the image before sending, Marlinspike said. The announcement comes as U.S. authorities have increased their efforts to monitor protests following the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man. The U.S. Department of Justice has given the Drug Enforcement Administration new authority to “conduct covert surveillance” of some protesters, according to a memo obtained by BuzzFeed News. (Exact details of the surveillance remains unclear.) More than 10,000 people have been arrested in protests against systemic racism since Floyd’s killing on May […]

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Denial of service attacks against advocacy groups skyrocket

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Distributed denial-of-service attacks against advocacy organizations increased by 1,120% since a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck, sparking demonstrations throughout the U.S. In figures published Tuesday, the internet security firm Cloudflare said it blocked more than 135 billion malicious web requests against advocacy sites, compared to less than 30 million blocked requests against U.S. government websites, such as police and military organizations. The company did not disclose which websites were affected, specifically. “As we’ve often seen in the past, real world protest and violence is usually accompanied by attacks on the internet. This past week has been no exception,” Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince and chief technology officer John Graham-Cumming said in a blog post. DDoS attacks occur when anonymous web users flood a site with fabricate traffic in an attempt to knock it offline, thus silencing its web presence until the site recovers. Web […]

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This matters more: How cyber pros are confronting racism in their own ranks, and beyond

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The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last week prompted Leroy Terrelonge to do something he had never done: vividly recall all of his experiences with racism since youth. “I was surprised by how incidents that I had buried deep suddenly surged back to my memory and hurt all over again,” said Terrelonge, 34, a black cyber-risk analyst at Moody’s. “I imagined how they could have taken a wrong turn under certain circumstances and I, too, could be dead.” Terrelonge is one of millions of black Americans experiencing Floyd’s death in visceral ways. He’s also one of many cybersecurity professionals searching for the right balance between work and advancing social justice. The daily grind of reverse-engineering malware feels trivial when police are teargassing peaceful protesters, neighborhoods are in flames and opportunists unaffiliated with black social-justice causes are violently exploiting the unrest. “Information security is not often a matter of life or death, even for those […]

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