US Government-funded Android phones come preinstalled with unremovable malware.
Phones were sold to low-income people under the FCC's Lifeline Assistance program.

An Android phone subsidized by the US government for low-income users comes preinstalled with malware that can't be removed without making the device cease to work, researchers reported on Thursday.

The UMX U686CL is provided by Virgin Mobile's Assurance Wireless program. Assurance Wireless is an offshoot of the Lifeline Assistance program, a Federal Communications Commissions plan that makes free or government-subsidized phones service available to millions of low-income families. The program is often referred to as the Obama Phone because it expanded in 2008, when President Barack Obama took office. The UMX U686CL runs Android and is available for $35 to qualifying users.

Researchers at Malwarebytes said on Thursday that the device comes with some nasty surprises. Representatives of Sprint, the owner of Virgin Mobile, meanwhile said it didn't believe the apps were malicious.

The first is heavily obfuscated malware that can install adware and other unwanted apps without the knowledge or permission of the user. Android/Trojan.Dropper.Agent.UMX contains striking similarities to two other trojan droppers. For one, it uses identical text strings and almost identical code. And for another, it contains an encoded string that, when decoded, contains a hidden library named com.android.google.bridge.Liblmp.

Once the library is loaded into memory, it installs software Malwarebytes calls Android/Trojan.HiddenAds. It aggressively displays ads. Malwarebytes researcher Nathan Collier said company users have reported that the hidden library installs a variant of HiddenAds, but the researchers were unable to reproduce that installation, possibly because the library waits some amount of time before doing so.

The malware that installs these programs is hidden in the phone's settings app. That makes it virtually impossible to uninstall, since the phone can't operate properly without it. "Uninstall the Settings app, and you just made yourself a pricey paper weight," Collier wrote.

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Chelsea Manning Says She Is 'Never Backing Down' in Face of US Detention Meant to Break Her

"My long-standing objection to the immoral practice of throwing people in jail without charge or trial, for the sole purpose of forcing them to testify before a secret, government-run investigative panel, remains strong."

Two days after the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer published a letter he sent to the U.S. government urging her release from federal prison, whistleblower Chelsea Manning issued a response welcoming the support and promising to stay resolute in the face of her prolonged detention.

"My long-standing objection to the immoral practice of throwing people in jail without charge or trial, for the sole purpose of forcing them to testify before a secret, government-run investigative panel, remains strong," said Manning.

Manning was imprisoned on March 8, 2019 for refusing to take part in a grand jury investigation on WikiLeaks and the group's founder, Julian Assange. Manning and her supporters have alleged that the real purpose of her testimony would be to set perjury traps that could eventually land the former Army private in prison.

As Common Dreams reported, Melzer's letter expressed the rapporteur's "serious concern at the reported use of coercive measures against Ms. Manning, particularly given the history of her previous conviction and ill-treatment in detention" and requested more information on Manning's detention.

"I recommend that Ms. Manning's current deprivation of liberty be promptly reviewed in light of the United States' international human rights obligations," Melzer wrote. "Should my assessment regarding its purely coercive purpose be accurate, I recommend that Ms. Manning be released without further delay, and that any fines disproportionate to the gravity of any offense she may have committed be cancelled or reimbursed."

Manning's attorney Moira Meltzer-Cohen in a statement said that Melzer's letter made clear that Manning's detention is in violation of international norms and for the sole purpose of torturing the whistleblower.
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Cutting toxic air might prevent millions of people getting depression, research suggests

People living with air pollution have higher rates of depression and suicide, a systematic review of global data has found.

Cutting air pollution around the world to the EU’s legal limit could prevent millions of people becoming depressed, the research suggests. This assumes that exposure to toxic air is causing these cases of depression. Scientists believe this is likely but is difficult to prove beyond doubt.

The particle pollution analysed in the study is produced by burning fossil fuels in vehicles, homes and industry. The researchers said the new evidence further strengthened calls to tackle what the World Health Organization calls the “silent public health emergency” of dirty air.

“We’ve shown that air pollution could be causing substantial harm to our mental health, making the case for cleaning up the air we breathe even more urgent,” said Isobel Braithwaite, at University College London (UCL), who led the research.

Meeting the EU limit could make a big difference, she said. “You could prevent about 15% of depression, assuming there is a causal relationship. It would be a very large impact, because depression is a very common disease and is increasing.” More than 264 million people have depression, according to the WHO.

“We know that the finest particulates from dirty air can reach the brain via both the bloodstream and the nose, and that air pollution has been implicated in increased [brain] inflammation, damage to nerve cells and to changes in stress hormone production, which have been linked to poor mental health,” Braithwaite said.

Joseph Hayes, also at UCL and part of the research team, said: “The evidence is highly suggestive that air pollution itself increases the risk of adverse mental health outcomes.”
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Facebook’s latest transparency report is out.

The social media giant said the number of government demands for user data increased by 16% to 128,617 demands during the first half of this year compared to the second half of last year.

That’s the highest number of government demands it has received in any reporting period since it published its first transparency report in 2013.

The U.S. government led the way with the most number of requests — 50,741 demands for user data resulting in some account or user data given to authorities in 88% of cases. Facebook said two-thirds of all the U.S. government’s requests came with a gag order, preventing the company from telling the user about the request for their data.

But Facebook said it was able to release details of 11 so-called national security letters (NSLs) for the first time after their gag provisions were lifted during the period. National security letters can compel companies to turn over non-content data at the request of the FBI. These letters are not approved by a judge, and often come with a gag order preventing their disclosure. But since the Freedom Act passed in 2015, companies have been allowed to request the lifting of those gag orders.

The report also said the social media giant had detected 67 disruptions of its services in 15 countries, compared to 53 disruptions in nine countries during the second half of last year.

And, the report said Facebook also pulled 11.6 million pieces of content, up from 5.8 million in the same period a year earlier, which Facebook said violated its policies on child nudity and sexual exploitation of children.

The social media giant also included Instagram in its report for the first time, including removing 1.68 million pieces of content during the second and third quarter of the year.
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More Americans engaged in work stoppages last year than since 1986 – and the successful GM strike may encourage other union leaders, experts sayм

The recently ended General Motors strike was part of a surprisingly large recent wave of walkouts, and by many measures, the 49,000 strikers emerged so well from their 40-day showdown with the US auto giant that the results could help inspire more worker militancy and strikes, labor analysts and experts say.

“They did pretty well,” said Kristin Dziczek, vice-president of industry, labor and economics at the Center for Automotive Research, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “They got more money. They got a pathway to regular employment for temporary workers. They defended their healthcare” when GM was seeking to sharply increase the premiums the United Automobile Workers (UAW) members paid.

The GM workers also received an $11,000 signing bonus, and the automaker agreed to essentially end its two-tier wage system by folding the lower tier into the top tier within four years. All those workers, lower-tier and top, will earn $32 an hour at contract’s end – some lower-tier workers now earning less than $20 an hour.

Dziczek added that the UAW failed to win any additional job security measures and failed to achieve one of its primary goals: reopening an assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio. The union did, however, persuade GM to reverse plans to close its Detroit-Hamtramck plant, which had been scheduled to close in January. GM plans to invest $3bn in overhauling that plant.

“They [the UAW] got a pretty hefty contract,” Dziczek said. “I don’t think it will discourage strikes.”

More Americans engaged in work stoppages last year than in any year since 1986 – 485,000 workers participated in strikes or other work stoppages. That surge of collective action continue this year.

In addition to the GM strike – the longest nationwide strike against GM since 1970 – there has been a week-long strike by 30,000 Los Angeles school teachers last January, an 11-day walkout by 31,000 Stop & Shop grocery workers in in New England in April and the ongoing strike by 25,000 educators in Chicago, now in its second week. And last Friday, 3,500 UAW members ended their 12-day strike against six Mack Truck facilities in three states.
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A survey released Monday revealed that 70 percent of U.S. millennials—those between the ages of 23 and 38 in 2019—would support a socialist candidate for president, a result which a number of progressives viewed as an outgrowth of the damage wrought in recent decades by neoliberal capitalism and the ruling corporate order.

Among those slightly younger, voters between the ages of 16 and 22, the sentiment was almost as high with nearly two-thirds of Generation Z saying the same.

The poll was taken by YouGov and paid for by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), which surveyed 2,100 people about their views of capitalism and the U.S. economic system, socialism, and inequality in the United States.

Half of millennials and 51 percent of Generation Z respondents reported negative views of capitalism while the two groups had more favorable views of the term "socialism" than the Generation X, Baby Boomers, and Silent Generation members—people born roughly between 1925 and 1980—who answered the poll.

The survey was released five months after a Gallup poll revealed that 43 percent of Americans embrace some form of socialism.

Some progressives on social media said the difference in opinion regarding the two economic models was no surprise considering the state of capitalism in the United States over the past several decades.

Millions of millennials were in the early years of adulthood when the subprime lending practices used by powerful Wall Street firms contributed to the 2008 economic meltdown and the Great Recession, while about 15 million student loan borrowers between the ages of 25 and 34 owe a total of $497 billion in student debt.

Millennials and Generation Z have also entered adulthood in a time when 53 percent of Americans face medical debt and problems paying medical bills—including people who have health insurance through the for-profit health insurance industry.
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Lawmakers in Australia (like their counterparts in the United Kingdom) are looking for an effective way to limit kids' access to online pornography. Australia's Department of Home Affairs has a possible solution: face-recognition technology.

"Home Affairs is developing a Face Verification Service which matches a person’s photo against images used on one of their evidence of identity documents to help verify their identity," the government agency wrote in a recent regulatory filing. "This could assist in age verification, for example by preventing a minor from using their parent’s driver license to circumvent age verification controls."

Australia's government face-matching system has been years in the making. In 2016, the government announced that (in the words of CNET) "the first phase of its new biometric Face Verification Service (FVS) is up and running, giving a number of government departments and the Australian Federal Police the ability to share and match digital photos of faces."


Initially, the system was fairly limited. It only included photos of people who had applied to become Australian citizens. And use of the database was supposed to be limited to a handful of government agencies with a compelling need for it.

But since then, the government has steadily expanded the system. Photos from other sources were added to the database. And Australia has been trying to develop a more sophisticated Face Identification Service that can identify unknown persons.

And as this latest proposal demonstrates, the government is becoming more comfortable—perhaps even enthusiastic—about the technology being used by the private sector.

"Whilst they are primarily designed to prevent identity crime, Home Affairs would support the increased use of the Document and Face Verification Services across the Australian economy to strengthen age verification processes," the government wrote.

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The surveillance dystopia of our nightmares is not inevitable — and the way we kept it out of concerts and festivals is a lesson for the future.

Imagine showing up at a music festival or concert and being required to stand in front of a device that scans and analyzes your face.

Once your facial features are mapped and stored in a database, a computer algorithm could then decide that you are drunk and should be denied entry, or that you look “suspicious” and should be flagged for additional screening. If you make it through security, facial recognition technology could then be used to track the minute details of your movements once inside.

Face scanning software could be used to police behavior — constantly scanning the crowd for drug use or rule-breaking — or for strictly commercial purposes, like showing you targeted ads, monitoring which artists you came to see, or tracking how many times you go to the bar or the bathroom. Festival organizers could be forced to hand this trove of sensitive biometric data over to law enforcement or immigration authorities, and armed officers could pull people out of the crowd because they have an outstanding warrant or a deportation order. If you’re a person of color, or your gender presentation doesn’t conform to the computer’s stereotypes, you’d be more likely to be falsely flagged by the system.

This surveillance nightmare almost became a reality at US music events. Industry giants like Ticketmaster invested money in companies like Blink Identity, a startup run by ex–defense contractors who helped build the US military’s facial recognition system in Afghanistan. These vendors, and the venture capitalists who backed them, saw the live music industry as a huge potential market for biometric surveillance tech, marketed as a convenient ticketing option to concertgoers.

But now, it seems they’ll be sorely disappointed — and there's a lesson in the story of how we dashed their dystopian profit dreams. A future where we are constantly subjected to corporate and government surveillance is not inevitable, but it’s coming fast unless we act now.

Over the last month, artists and fans waged a grassroots war to stop Orwellian surveillance technology from invading live music events. Today we declare victory. Our campaign pushed more than 40 of the world’s largest music festivals — like Coachella, Bonnaroo, and SXSW — to go on the record and state clearly that they have no plans to use facial recognition technology at their events. Facing backlash, Ticketmaster all but threw Blink Identity under the bus, distancing itself from the surveillance startup it boasted about partnering with just a year ago. This victory is the first major blow to the spread of commercial facial recognition in the United States, and its significance cannot be overstated.

In a few short weeks, using basic grassroots activism tactics like online petitions, social media pressure, and an economic boycott targeting festival sponsors, artists and fans killed the idea of facial recognition at US music festivals. Now we need to do the same for sporting events, transportation, public housing, schools, law enforcement agencies, and all public places. And there’s no time to lose.
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Кіберполіція затримала хакера, який переховувався в Україні від правоохоронних органів США

32-річного іноземця підозрюють у викраденні 6 мільйонів доларів із рахунків американських фінансових установ. Затримання відбулося в одному зі столичних готелів, де він тимчасово проживав.

У рамках міжнародної правової допомоги працівники Департаменту кіберполіції, Департаменту карного розшуку Нацполіції та столичного управління карного розшуку, за процесуального керівництва Генеральної прокуратури України, затримали у Києві іноземця, який розшукувався за вчинення кіберзлочинів.

Розслідування щодо злочинної діяльності іноземця почалося ще у 2010 році співробітниками Федерального бюро розслідувань та Служби розслідування фінансових злочинів (FNTT) США. У 2019 році в Україну надійшов запит про надання міжнародно-правової допомоги щодо розшуку та затримання хакера.

Наразі чоловіка підозрюють у незаконному втручанні в роботу комп’ютерних систем, викраденні та відмиванні грошей в особливо великих розмірах і в шахрайстві.

Поліцейські затримали зловмисника в одному із найдорожчих столичних готелів, де той тимчасово проживав. Вирішується питання щодо видачі затриманого США.

Департамент кіберполіції України
https://www.npu.gov.ua/news/kiberzlochini/kiberpolicziya-zatrimala-xakera-yakij-perexovuvavsya-v-ukrajini-vid-pravooxoronnix-organiv-ssha

While terrorism in the U.S. is relatively rare, over the last decade most politically motivated violence has come at the hands of far-right extremists. Despite that reality, the FBI has devoted disproportionate resources to the surveillance of nonviolent civil society groups and protest movements, particularly on the left, using its mandate to protect national security to target scores of individuals posing no threat but opposing government policies and practices.

Since 2010, the FBI has surveilled black activists and Muslim Americans, Palestinian solidarity and peace activists, Abolish ICE protesters, Occupy Wall Street, environmentalists, Cuba and Iran normalization proponents, and protesters at the Republican National Convention. And that is just the surveillance we know of — as the civil liberties group Defending Rights & Dissent documents in a report published today. The report is a detailed catalog of known FBI First Amendment abuses and political surveillance since 2010, when the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General published the last official review of Bush-era abuses. The incidents the report references, many of which were previously covered by The Intercept, were largely exposed through public records requests by journalists, activists, and civil rights advocates. The FBI relentlessly fought those disclosures, and the documents we have were often so heavily redacted they only revealed the existence of initiatives like a “Race Paper” or an “Iron Fist” operation, both targeting racial justice activists, while giving away little detail about their content.

But the targeting of political dissent is nothing new for the FBI. In fact, one of the bureau’s first campaigns, which began a hundred years ago next month, was an abusive crackdown of politically active immigrants it viewed as disloyal potential terrorists.

On the second anniversary of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, law enforcement agents at the direction of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation — the FBI’s precursor — raided the Russian People’s House in New York City, where immigrants gathered to take classes, and beat and arrested everyone they found there. In the months following, local and federal police across major U.S. cities rounded up thousands of men and women, mostly foreign-born, who they accused of being subversives and Communists. The raids followed politically motivated investigations into immigrant associations, labor organizing groups, and leftist and anarchist circles.

The Palmer Raids, as they came to be known, after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, ushered in an era that tested the nation’s commitment to the civil liberties enshrined in the Constitution. One hundred years later, the FBI continues to target political dissent with a broad mandate, little oversight, and next to no transparency. The FBI continues to routinely conflate dissent with terrorism, and remains particularly fixated on leftist ideologies. Like the old bureau under Palmer, today’s FBI also casts its net around a wide range of civil society and social justice groups as well as racial and religious minorities.

“What is known is that there is a persistent pattern of monitoring civil society activity,” the report concludes, calling for strict oversight and reform of the bureau. “The FBI continuously singles out peace, racial justice, environmental, and economic justice groups for scrutiny. This is consistent with a decades-long pattern of FBI First Amendment abuses and suggests deeply seated political bias.”

After reviewing the report, a spokesperson for the FBI wrote in a statement to The Intercept that every activity the FBI conducts “must uphold the Constitution and be carried out in accordance with federal laws.” The spokesperson added that the bureau’s investigative activities “may not be based solely on the exercise of rights guaranteed by the First Amendment” and that its methods “are subject to multiple layers of oversight.” On its website, the bureau calls the Palmer Raids “certainly not a bright spot for the young Bureau” but adds that they did allow it to “gain valuable experience in terrorism investigations and intelligence work and learn important lessons about the need to protect civil liberties and constitutional rights.”

In fact, FBI violations of civil liberties and constitutional rights continued to be exposed at different points in the bureau’s history — most notably in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and in the post-9/11 years. Yet the bureau’s propensity for the policing of political dissent has remained largely unchallenged, the Defending Rights & Dissent report argues. “In the 100 years since the Palmer Raids,” asks Chip Gibbons, the report’s author, “how much has changed?”
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