‘A leading COVID testing company in the UK is under investigation over its plans to sell swabs containing customers’ DNA.
According to The Telegraph, “Cignpost Diagnostics, a government-approved supplier trading as Express Test, said it will analyse samples to sell the information to third parties, company documents have revealed.”
‘Raider may be an adorable black Lab, but her uncanny hunt instinct made her the perfect K-9 sniffer dog.
The cute pup went viral on TikTok after her fun-loving owner and work partner, Officer Ritchey, of the Alpharetta Police Department, started recording their adventures together.
Officer Ritchey first met Raider on a small farm, where he would intentionally toss a tennis ball into thick, tall grass for her to fetch. Raider wouldn’t come out of that grass without the ball—no matter how long it took.’
The following is part of an email from Australia’s THE SPECTATOR.
‘The irony of debating voluntary assisted dying in the age of Covid
This week the NSW parliament will start considering a bill to legalise medically-assisted death at the instigation of the person dying.
Morning Double Shot has discontinued daily editorials, so you’re spared from getting the editor’s tortured views on this fraught moral issue.
Instead, reflect on the irony of such legislation being enacted, now in NSW and recently in Queensland, while the Covid-19 pandemic continues to rage.
For coming up to two years, our federation has been ripped apart, our society gutted, and our economy filleted, to prevent deaths from a virus whose pact with the Grim Reaper mostly is confined to harvesting the souls of the elderly and people with other health risk factors who could easily have been taken by old age, or other natural causes, rather than Covid-19.
Yet, at the same time, majorities in our parliaments are determined to make medically-assisted dying for people in extremis lawful.
Our political representatives both fear and embrace death in making laws profoundly affecting our social fabric. Verily, it’s a strange world we now live in.’
Even the Left leaning THE CONVERSATION carried an article concerning the new law here in Australia, that seems to me, takes away even more of our freedoms and privacy. All this is occurring under a supposed CONSERVATIVE Federal government! Is this law truly meant to catch REAL criminals or is it to actually meant to spy on those citizens that may not swallow all the Kool Aid handed out by government? Personally, laws such as this only provides more reasons why many do not trust the government! With that said ‘A new law gives Australian police unprecedented powers for online surveillance, data interception and altering data. These powers, outlined in the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill, raise concerns over potential misuse, privacy and security.
The bill updates the Surveillance Devices Act 2004 and Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979. In essence, it allows law-enforcement agencies or authorities (such as the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission) to modify, add, copy or delete data when investigating serious online crimes.
What’s more, legal hacking by law enforcement may make it easier for criminal hackers to illegally access computer systems via the same vulnerabilities used by the government.
What’s in the law?
The bill introduces three new powers for law-enforcement agencies:
“data disruption warrants” allow authorities to “disrupt data” by copying, deleting or modifying data as they see fit
“network activity warrants” permit the collection of intelligence from devices or networks that are used, or likely to be used, by subject of the warrant
“account takeover warrants” let agencies take control of an online account (such as a social media account) to gather information for an investigation.
There is also an “emergency authorisation” procedure that allows these activities without a warrant under certain circumstances.
However, the new bill gives agencies unprecedented interception or “hacking” powers. It also allows “assistance orders”, which could require selected individuals to assist government hacking or face up to ten years in prison.
Why do police argue this bill is required?
According to the Department of Home Affairs, more and more criminal activity makes use of the “dark web” and “anonymising technologies”. Previous powers are not enough to keep up with these new technologies.
In our view, specific and targeted access to users’ information and activities may be needed to identify possible criminals or terrorists. In some cases, law enforcement agencies may need to modify, delete, copy or add content of users to prevent things like the distribution of child exploitation material. Lawful interception is key to protecting public and national security in the fight of global community against cybercrimes.
How does lawful data interception work?
“Lawful interception” is a network technology that allows electronic surveillance of communications, as authorised by judicial or administrative order. There are standards (which means regulations and rules) for telecommunication and internet service providers to achieve this, such as those recommended by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute.
Law-enforcement agencies may require service providers to hand over copies of communications data, decrypted data, or intercepted data without notifying users. Service providers may also have to make available analytical tools such as graphs or charts of target behaviours.
What are the privacy concerns?
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and others have also raised privacy concerns. The bill may impact third parties who are not suspected in the investigation of criminal activities. In particular, the bill can authorise access to third party computers, communication and data.
The Human Rights Law Centre argues the proposed broad powers can potentially compel any individual with relevant knowledge of the targeted computer or network to conduct hacking activities. In some cases this may clash with an individual’s right to freedom from self-incrimination.
Enabling law enforcement agencies to modify potential evidence in a criminal proceeding is also a major issue of concern. The detection and prevention of inappropriate data disruption will be a key issue.
The implementation of the new warrants needs to be in line with Privacy Act 1988 which was introduced to promote and protect the privacy of individuals and to regulate Australian government agencies and organisations. Where some agencies may have exemption against the Privacy Act, it is important to balance between public safety and privacy impacts.
What are the security issues and impacts?
The Identify and Disrupt Bill is a part of an extensive set of Australian digital surveillance laws, including the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018 (TOLA), and the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act 2015 (the Mandatory Metadata Retention Scheme).
Under the Identify and Disrupt Bill, access can be gained to encrypted data which could be copied, deleted, modified, and analysed even before its relevance can be determined. This significantly compromises users’ privacy and digital rights.
Modern encryption can be very hard to crack, so hackers often exploit other vulnerabilities in a system to gain access to unencrypted data. Governments too are reportedly using these vulnerabilities for their own lawful hacking.
Specifically, they depend on “zero-day exploits”, which use software vulnerabilities that are unknown to software vendors or developers, to hack into a system. These vulnerabilities could be exploited for months or even years before they are patched.
A conflict of interest may arise if law enforcement agencies are using zero-day exploits for lawful hacking. To protect citizens, we would expect these agencies to report or disclose any software vulnerabilities they discover to the software manufacturers so the weakness can be patched.
However, they may instead choose not to report them and use the vulnerabilities for their own hacking. This puts users at risk, as any third party, including criminal organisations, could exploit these so-called zero day vulnerabilities.
It’s not an abstract concern. In 2016, the CIA’s secret stash of hacking tools itself was stolen and published, highlighting the risk of these activities. The Chinese government has claimed the CIA was hacking targets in China for more than a decade using these and similar tools.
Government use of hacking tools may result in worse cyber security overall. The warrant powers given to Australian law enforcement agencies may protect public safety and national interests, but they may also provide powerful means for adversaries to access government data.
This includes the data and online accounts of targeted individuals like state officials, which may significantly impact national security. This possibility needs to be considered in light of the passing of the new bill.
Believe it or not ‘A school in the UK has reported its chaplain to an anti-terrorism unit after Christian students were told they were allowed to disagree with LGBT ideology.
Here’s more of the same story. This ‘...school secretly reported its chaplain to the anti-terrorism Prevent programme after he delivered a sermon defending the right of pupils to question its introduction of new LGBT policies.
The Reverend Dr Bernard Randall told pupils at independent Trent College near Nottingham that they were allowed to disagree with the measures, particularly if they felt they ran contrary to Church of England principles.
‘The Biden administration is considering using private firms to track the online activity of American citizens in order to get around the Fourth Amendmentand other laws that protect Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures and surveillance. The report says that the Biden administration wants to monitor “extremist chatter by Americans online” but can’t do so without a warrant, and thinks private firms can get around the legal restrictions.
If the police in this story were all white then it must be racist!
‘Four MS-13 gang members are accused of killing a woman and placing her body in a car in Queens, New York.
According to WLNY-TV, officers with the New York Police Department “saw the four suspects carry a large object out of a building on Foam Place and place it in the trunk of a car before driving away” just before 2 a.m. on Wednesday.
Officers discovered the body of 31-year-old Nazareth Claure in the trunk after following the suspects’ vehicle and conducting a traffic stop near the Nassau Expressway in Far Rockaway.
The body was wrapped in a blanket, confirming the officers’ suspicions from earlier that night, the report said.
“Police say one of the suspects, who was also the victim’s boyfriend, strangled her,” WCBS-TV reported.
If anyone SHOULD celebrate FREE SPEECH it would be a law school; Right?! Well, not so fast!
‘SAN DIEGO, Calif., April 13, 2021 — Almost a month after launching a preliminary investigation into law professor Tom Smith’s online comments criticizing the Chinese government, the University of San Diego School of Law is doubling down on its violation of Smith’s expressive rights. In defiance of free speech advocacy efforts by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education andothers, the law school has now passed the investigation to the university for an official review.
“We have an oppressive institution cracking down on dissent by investigating a professor for criticizing an oppressive government cracking down on dissent,” said Sabrina Conza, FIRE program analyst. “USD’s unconscionable treatment of Smith is a delight for fans of irony and censorship alike.”
On March 10, Smith posted an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal op-ed on his personal blog, along with his own commentary: “If you believe that the coronavirus did not escape from the lab in Wuhan, you have to at least consider that you are an idiot who is swallowing whole a lot [sic] of Chinese cock swaddle.”
After the post prompted cries of racism from student groups, the university opened an investigation into Smith’s reference to “Chinese cock swaddle.” In response to the criticism, Smith updated the post to clarify that he was referring to the Chinese government, not to Chinese people generally.
FIRE defended Smith’s freedom of expression in March with a letter to the university. The university’s general counsel responded, offering only that USD was “reviewing the matter and expeditiously will take action as appropriate.” FIRE sent a second letter on April 1 expressing its disappointment with the tepid response and reminding the university that investigations alone are enough to create an impermissible chilling effect on campus.
“It’s easy to say that you have the right to free speech, but there’s a climate where there’s so much that you risk by exercising that right,” Smith told FIRE. “And it ends up really diminishing academic freedom.”
FIRE received no response to its second letter, but Smith let FIRE know on April 6 that rather than backing down, the university launched an official “review.”
“Against the objections of free speech advocates and all common sense, and in defiance of its own promises to protect extramural expression, USD continues to obsess over Smith’s comments,” said Conza. “The school must immediately end its review so that all faculty can feel free to express themselves and engage in open dialogue.”
In his inaugural address as president, USD President James Harris said the university can set an example in higher education by playing a “central role as a bastion of free speech and open dialogue in a free and democratic society.”
