John Cox

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Tagged surveillance · everything

Medium

Want to see something crazy? Open this link on your phone with WiFi turned off.

US telecommunications companies grant third-party services like Danal and Payfone direct access to sensitive customer data—including home addresses, phone numbers, and real-time cell tower location data—through enterprise APIs ostensibly designed for fraud detection. These services can look up this information using only a mobile phone's IP address, with minimal consent requirements and likely inadequate oversight, enabling potential tracking or de-anonymization of nearly any American cell phone user without meaningful safeguards or warrant requirements. The article demonstrates working demos of these capabilities and notes that major carriers' opt-out mechanisms appear ineffective at preventing such access.

Permalink privacysecuritymobileinvestigation

apple.news

www.wired.com

Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They’re the Bad Guys

Palantir employees are increasingly breaking with the company's culture of internal debate to openly question leadership over its deepening ties to Trump-era immigration enforcement and military operations, including ICE deportation work, alleged Maven surveillance involvement in a deadly Iranian strike, and CEO Alex Karp's public rhetoric on AI and voters. WIRED documents a year of escalating internal Slack revolts, deleted message logs, contentious AMAs with privacy staff, and a fascism-tinged company "manifesto" that together suggest a genuine identity crisis at a firm founded partly to prevent post-9/11 civil-liberties abuses. Worth keeping as a granular, sourced account of how a secretive, non-disparagement-bound workforce is nonetheless cracking under Karp's unapologetic embrace of controversy.

Permalink technologyaiprivacypolitics

www.nytimes.com

Opinion | How Life as a Trucker Devolved Into a Dystopian Nightmare

Long-haul truckers endure extreme surveillance, declining real wages since the 1970s, and dangerous working conditions—forced to work excessive hours because they're paid by the mile rather than hourly—which creates the endemic exhaustion that safety systems are deployed to manage. Deregulation in the 1970s destroyed the unionized trucking industry, triggering a 91 percent turnover rate as workers flee wages and conditions that have become progressively worse. The vaccine mandate that sparked the Canadian trucker protest resonated precisely because truckers already experience such total control over their labor and bodies that this additional government mandate became the breaking point for an industry that has been "a keg of dynamite waiting to explode for 39 years."

Permalink technologyaicanadaunited states

www.inverse.com

15 Years Ago, a Visionary Director Made a Shocking Dystopian Sci-Fi Movie That Was Ahead of Its Time

Alex Rivera's 2008 science fiction film *Sleep Dealer* imagines a dystopian near-future where a sealed U.S.-Mexico border no longer stops American exploitation of Mexican labor—instead, workers have nodes implanted in their bodies to remotely control robots performing jobs in the U.S. while their physical bodies remain in Mexico, drained of energy in networked factories. The film follows Memo, a young man who journeys to Tijuana after a drone strike kills his father, only to discover that even this technological form of cross-border employment offers no escape from dehumanization and the hollow promise of the American Dream. Rivera uses practical effects and modest cinematography to explore how systems of oppression manipulate even marginalized people into enforcing them, while ultimately suggesting that connection to the land and solidarity against common enemies might offer resistance to this new world order.

Permalink mexicolaborsci-fidystopia

www.fodors.com

Is There Anything You Can Do About Hidden Cameras at Your Airbnb?

CNN's investigation found that Airbnb receives tens of thousands of reports about hidden cameras in listings but has done little to address the problem, partly because the company owns no properties and thus faces minimal legal accountability. Although Airbnb banned indoor cameras globally in March 2024, the company quickly settles lawsuits with victims under non-disclosure agreements, rarely involves law enforcement, and provides no transparency about how it enforces the policy. Guests are left to conduct their own searches for cameras upon arrival, with no foolproof method available to ensure their privacy.

Permalink technologysafetyprivacytravel

collider.com

This Surveillance Thriller Series Will Make You Question Everything

This Collider piece makes the case for watching the BBC conspiracy thriller The Capture, streaming on Peacock, which follows detective Rachel Carey through two seasons uncovering a surveillance conspiracy involving "Corrections"—manipulated CCTV and deepfake footage used to frame a soldier and later to sabotage a British politician. The writer argues the show's strength lies in its performances (Holliday Grainger, Callum Turner, Ron Perlman) and its unpreachy but pointed exploration of how deepfake and facial-recognition technology can distort reality and justice, making it feel unsettlingly plausible rather than sci-fi. It's essentially a recommendation piece framing the series as timely viewing given real-world AI and deepfake anxieties.

Permalink thrilleraitvtv features

www.nytimes.com

303 See Other

The U.S. Postal Service operates two surveillance programs—the century-old "mail covers" system and the more recent Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program—that collectively monitor the exterior information of virtually all mail processed in the country, creating a comprehensive map of Americans' communications without requiring judicial warrants. Law enforcement agencies request mail covers tens of thousands of times annually for criminal and counterterrorism investigations, citing their effectiveness in solving crimes, but critics argue the programs are easily abused and amount to the same invasive surveillance as the NSA's electronic monitoring, yet Congress has not revisited the issue since brief hearings in 1976. A Buffalo bookstore owner and former environmental activist discovered he was under postal surveillance and has now sued the government, exemplifying concerns that the system enables tracking of political dissidents without proper oversight.

Permalink privacysecuritynewssurveillance

the Guardian

tracking my girlfriend via her cell phone

This article demonstrates how easily anyone with brief physical access to a mobile phone can install location-tracking software that works invisibly—the phone shows no alerts or traces of the tracking, yet the tracker can pinpoint the device's location within 150 yards and monitor movements continuously. The author, a journalist, installed such tracking on his girlfriend's phone (with her permission "in principle") by simply registering her phone on a commercial GSM tracking website, paying £5, and deleting the warning text messages that appeared on her phone. The piece serves as a warning that mobile phone companies could monetize location data through these services, and anyone—not just authorities—might already be secretly tracking you if they've had five minutes alone with your phone.

Permalink technologyprivacysecurityinternet