Plus: US Tech Companies Enabled Mass Detention In China |
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In May this year, in a town 40 miles south of Washington D.C., a woman was looking through some items left on the curb by their neighbor for the trash collectors, on the off chance there was something valuable. Alongside an assortment of household goods and personal belongings, the dumpster diver found some other items of note: manila folders marked “confidential.”
The neighbor, according to a search warrant reviewed by Forbes, was an outgoing inventory management specialist at the Quantico, Virginia, headquarters of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). The discarded documents included over 240 pages of classified information.
It’s unclear just what secret NCIS information was in the files. NCIS investigates major crimes involving the Navy and Marines, from child exploitation to narcotics trafficking to espionage. Three of the documents were marked both secret and “NOFORN,” the latter indicating that the information should never be released to foreign nationals without permission of the originator. All documents marked secret should only be visible to people with the correct clearances.
The NCIS worker in this case has not been charged. Forbes is choosing not to publish their name. The Department of Justice said it couldn’t comment on whether or not there was an ongoing investigation. The former NCIS employee told investigators they were in the process of moving, but had no explanation as to why classified files were the trash. The employee was one of many federal government staffers who’d taken up Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency offer to resign back in January and February, and keep receiving wages up to September.
As evidenced by this latest investigation, driving large numbers of people out of the federal workforce comes with the risk of exposing highly sensitive information. It also shows how all different kinds of people—not just outgoing presidents like Biden or Trump—are liable to take home classified files and risk divulging state secrets.
Got a tip on surveillance or cybercrime? Get me on Signal at +1 929-512-7964. |
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 | | CREDIT: AP Photo/Ng Han Guan |
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A blockbuster investigation from AP, based on tens of thousands of pages of documents and over 100 interviews, details how tech giants like IBM, Cisco and Dell helped build the infrastructure enabling mass surveillance and repression in China.
While all the companies say they had fully complied with all laws, sanctions and U.S. export controls, the AP discovered a glut of snooping initiatives carried out on Chinese people, especially those from minority groups.
Per the report, “American surveillance technologies allowed a brutal mass detention campaign in the far west region of Xinjiang—targeting, tracking and grading virtually the entire native Uyghur population to forcibly assimilate and subdue them.” |
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Airlines Reporting Corporation, a data broker owned by some of the world’s biggest airlines–including American Airlines, United and Delta–has sold as many as 5 billion travel records to government agencies, including ICE and the FBI. This essentially created a system of mass, warrantless surveillance, 404 Media reports.
ICE is preparing for an imminent “agent hiring surge” and has ordered all manner of surveillance tech and weapons with which to arm the new recruits. That includes a number of AI-powered drones from Silicon Valley manufacturer Skydio.
Cryptocurrency wallets with around $1.5 billion worth of digital currency may belong to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, according to an Elliptic analysis of a report from the National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing of Israel. “However, it is not possible to verify whether all of these transactions are directly linked to the IRGC since some of the addresses may be controlled by cryptocurrency services and could be part of wallet infrastructure used to facilitate transactions for many customers,” Elliptic clarified. Still, the findings suggest Iran is trying to obtain a significant amount of crypto.
Apple has upped its security game in its new iPhones. The tech giant has built in a feature called Memory Integrity Enforcement, which is designed to stop attacks targeting memory corruption bugs, often exploited by spyware developers and phone forensic tools used by law enforcement, TechCrunch reports. |
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| Remedio, founded by ex-teen hacker and Israeli intelligence officer Tal Kollender, has announced its first funding round at $65 million. Not that the company is new. Formerly called Gytpol, Remedio has been going for six years and has been profitable most of that time, Kollender tells Forbes. |
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| Like other major AI chatbot providers of late, Anthropic has been forced to remove user chats with Claude that were accessible over Google, Forbes found. The company was supposed to have blocked crawlers from Google harvesting Claude chats, but hundreds of conversations were found with some simple searches. |
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