If war in Ukraine and Russia’s ongoing atrocities that have not provided enough fodder to perish, this week provided a new dose of domestic crisis: A draft Court decision Leaked Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, overturning a ruling that has been the cornerstone of reproductive rights for nearly five decades. And this crisis will play out in the digital as well as the physical and legal spheres.
WIRED’s Lily Hay Newman responded to the news with a guide to protect your privacy if you’re looking to have an abortion in a near-future world where Roe was in fact debunked. While right-wing experts demanded Supreme Court prosecution, meanwhile, we analyzed the laws regarding the leak of unclassified government information as draft court rulings and found that there are no clear rules for criminalizing that kind of information sharing. And law professor Amy Gajda guided us through History of leaks of the Supreme Courtspanning hundreds of years.
As Russia’s war in Ukraine continued, we looked at how Small, consumer-grade drones are providing a defensive tool for Ukrainians which they are exploiting like no other war in history. And further abroad in India, a war is brewing between VPN companies and the Indian government, which is ask them to hand over the user’s data. Meanwhile, the country’s new “super app”, Tata Neu, has raises concerns about user privacy.
And much more than that. As we do weekly, we have compiled all the news that we do not break or cover in depth. Click on the title to read the full story. And it’s safe out there.
If RoeNo precedent goes out to protect abortion seekers across the US, the question of who can digitally survey abortion seekers and abortion providers — and how to avoid it. that scrutiny — will become the most pressing civil liberties fight ever. This week, Motherboard’s Joseph Cox opened the door to that battle with a series of stories about data brokers offering to sell location data including visits by individuals to abortion clinics. and the Office of Planned Parenthood, a severe form of capitalism surveillance with immediate human consequences. Anti-abortion groups have used abortion clinic data to target ads at women inside clinics, and the same data could soon be used to identify women seeking abortions. out of state violates local law.
Cox pointed out two companies, SafeGraph and Placer.ai, both sell location data of people who seem to visit abortion clinics. Placer.ai has gone far beyond offering “heat map” of where visitors visit the abortion clinic live with anyone who creates a free account on its website. Cox’s report had quick results: SafeGraph, banned from the Google Play store in June, responded to Motherboard’s story by pledge to stop selling abortion-related location data. One of its investors, Are Traasdahl, said that he sell his shares in the company and raise money for Planned Parenthood.
Your move, Placer.ai.
While we’re shaming the companies that leak or sell their users’ location data, Grindr has long represented a uniquely dangerous combination: a company that scours vulnerable users risk and then they fail to protect their privacy. This week, The Wall Street Journal revealed that Grindr users’ location data was sold for many years — starting in 2017 until at least two years ago — through an ad network, which has the ability to display motion, work location and home address of millions of gay men. Disclosure after years of data abuse Grindr and disregard for privacy and security, such as allowing anyone identify users using triangle techniqueand even turn a blind eye as a person lives have been ruined by fake Grindr accounts.
In 2022, a Russian military occupation will mean more than just material devastation from shelling, unspeakable war crimes and the mass deportation of Ukrainian civilians to the interior. of Russia. In the Russian-occupied Kherson region of southern Ukraine, that now means Ukrainians have been disconnected from the global internet and rerouted through the tightly controlled “Runet”, surveying and Russian censorship. The move, confirmed Monday by internet monitoring firm Netblocks, represents a huge step forward for “splinternet“The concept of repressive regimes increasingly severing the internet in their regions in order to gain more control over their populations. Currently, Russia appears to be experimenting with expanding internet repression against the victims of its gratuitous military conquests in an effort to better control and influence digital information in Russia. there.
Last month, New Yorkers announced an in-depth investigation into how Israel’s NSO Corporation’s highly sophisticated smartphone spyware was used to targeted at members of Spain’s Catalan independence movement. Now, the Spanish government may be tasting its own medicine: Both Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and the country’s Defense Minister, Margarita Robles, say their phones were also hacked with Pegasus in May and June 2021. Spain’s criminal court is investigating the hack, which was revealed by security researchers at Citizen Lab. While the Spanish government claims that the attack must have been carried out by a foreign perpetrator, Pegasus targets in Catalan have long been pointed out — at least targeting themselves — in China. Spain’s National Intelligence Center.
The US Treasury Department announced Friday that it is issuing sanctions against Blender.io, a “mixing” service used to conceal the origin and destination of cryptocurrencies. Mixers, including Bitcoin Fog and Helix, have been criminally prosecuted by the US Department of Justice for helping to conceal the criminal origins of cryptocurrencies. But the Blender.io sanctions represent the first time the Treasury Department has taken measures to boycott the mixers financially, making it a crime for any American to do business with the service. In this case, Blender allegedly helped launder $20.5 million in $620 million worth of crypto. North Korean hacker Lazarus allegedly stole from crypto company Ronin Networks March. That hack alone shows that North Korean thieves topped the estimated $400 million in crypto — much of it in Ethereum — that they stole last year.
