The subheadline of a Wall Street Journal article on cell phone security vulnerabilities presents the subject of my post.
The passcode that unlocks your phone can give thieves access to your money and data; “it’s like a treasure box”
The article then laid out the problem:
Florida has a law (HB5, Reducing Fetal and Infant Mortality Act) banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Florida’s Governor DeSantis (R) has characterized the law as
protect[ing] babies in the womb who have beating hearts, who can move, who can taste, who can see, and who can feel pain.
Planned Parenthood and the ACLU have sued, claiming that the ban violates the Florida Constitution. The Florida Constitution, Art I, Sect 23, grants a right of privacy to every natural person. The only part of the Florida Constitution that directly addresses abortion is Art X, Sect 22, which authorizes the State’s legislature to enact laws requiring notification of a minor’s parent or guardian prior to termination of the minor’s pregnancy.
The Senate’s Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (as are all Senate and House committees in this Congress so dominated) passed out of committee a plan to impose a national digital ID system for US citizens—the better for Government tracking of its subjects.
Supporters claim that such national IDs could be
the key to unlocking access to financial services, various government benefits and educational opportunities, as well as a number of other critical services.
A number of credit card companies, on the demand of the Federal government as washed through the International Standards Organization, are going to start explicitly listing gun sales by lawful gun stores to individual average Americans. Among those credit card companies are Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx.
The Federal government now is going to track us average Americans and build a database of who among us has a firearm.
For what purpose?
…gun control advocates who argue that a separate category for gun store sales will help track suspicious quantities of firearm sales that could potentially lead to a mass shooting.
Another one from New York. It seems that US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s Stand for America PAC, a 501(c)(4) organization with a legally protected list of donors has had that list released by the NY AG’s Charities Bureau to Politico, which then proceeded to publish that list.
The Charities Bureau is an arm of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ (the same one who “consulted” with then-FBI Director James Comey to suppress any hint of investigation of Hillary Clinton’s classified email handling ‘way back in 2016) Attorney General office.
A techy article about the wonders of location apps in our smartphones—if “properly shared”—in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal caught my eye. The author’s piece centered on the alleged benefits of automatically sharing your personal location data with a selected audience (usually family members) and the app providers’ directions for how to achieve “proper sharing,” supposedly limiting the location sharing to that selected audience.
The author missed the larger problem, though: the intrinsic lack of security on those apps, especially given the historical disdain for personal information security on the part of some of those providers.
This time, it’s the California’s Attorney General, the Progressive-Democrat Rob Bonta, who released the personally identifiable information of thousands of California’s firearm owners and concealed carry permit holders.
In the name of transparency, he claims. Oh, and that much transparency was an accident, he claims.
The information “accidentally” released includes
the person’s full name, race, home address, date of birth, and date their permit was issued. The data also shows the type of permit issued, indicating if the permit holder is a member of law enforcement or a judge.
Amazon is bragging about a new capability it’s developed for its Alexa service. It’s bad enough that Amazon can eavesdrop on private, often highly personal, conversations through its Alexa device.
Now the device can mimic voices—including those of deceased persons—and Amazon says, with a straight face, that this is so cool.
On the other hand, so much for voice recognition as part of a two- (or more) factor authentication regime.
And, here’s another forger’s tool brought to market.
I suppose this might be an improvement in certain circles….
It turns out this isn’t limited to cookies through browsers and overt tracking software.
There’s another software package that businesses use to track their users activities. Log4j
is used on computer servers to keep records of users’ activities so they can be reviewed later by security or software development teams.
Businesses are secretly tracking our activities as we interact with them digitally, not just quietly through cookies and tracking tools. Maybe not only those teams, either. It wouldn’t surprise me if marketing teams were using our data, and if other teams were putting together packages of our data to peddle to other companies.
Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA), of FOXLA, known also for his reporting from our border along the Rio Grande Valley, had this Twitter thread concerning the close ties the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has with the People’s Republic of China, especially as concerns Americans’ DNA records. I’ve reproduced the thread below, absent the tweeting headers for easier reading.
One other thing: the Los County County Supervisor at the end of the thread that Melugin tried to contact, Hilda Solis, is the same Hilda Solis (D) who sat in ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) Secretary of Labor chair and did so much damage during his first term.