New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani may have an ambitious policy agenda, but overhauling the self-governing and deeply dysfunctional behemoth that is the New York City Police Department is not on the list. Mamdani surprised supporters by asking current Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch to stay on after his inauguration early next year. Tisch, a technocrat heir to a vast real estate fortune, clashes with Mamdani on several fronts, including policy (she believes New York State’s bail reforms caused rising crime) and the geopolitics that inevitably make their way into New York City’s streets. (Tisch’s family are key figures in the Israel lobby; Mamdani is vociferously pro-Palestinian.) One area where Mamdani is guaranteed to clash with Tisch is on the NYPD’s massive technical surveillance apparatus and intelligence-gathering methods, which have metastasized since 9/11 to levels that rival the capabilities of a midsize country. More than one observer has characterized the NYPD as operating more like a US intelligence agency—at one point, the department’s Intelligence Division was run by a CIA veteran, and at least one CIA analyst was embedded at NYPD—than a police department. While Mamdani’s public safety proposals center on the creation of a $1 billion Department of Community Safety that will handle non-emergency 911 calls in place of armed cops, some of his other stated positions conflict directly with Tisch’s own positions and background with the NYPD, where she got her start in the department’s controversial intelligence division during the height of its “mosque-raking” mass surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers. Experts say the stakes in the current moment are far higher with regard to surveillance, largely due to the federal government’s nationwide immigration blitz using surveillance data gathered by police departments to track down and arrest targeted people. Andrew Guthrie Ferguson of George Washington University Law School studies the use of high-tech surveillance by law enforcement and is the author of The Rise of Big Data Policing. He has studied the NYPD’s sweeping buildout of networked CCTV, gunshot detectors, license plate readers, and video analytics since 9/11. The current wave of federal immigration raids, he says, have made clear how local police data such as fingerprints and license plate scans can be weaponized by an authoritarian administration and makes the current moment ripe for a reckoning on police surveillance. “In a horrible way, the sense of how technologies can be weaponized against people has expanded,” Ferguson tells WIRED. “When the government expanded its targeting, it also expands the conversation beyond the poor Black communities that were initially targeted by things like CCTV networks and predictive policing.” Mamdani’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. The NYPD’s turn toward mass surveillance was begun in earnest by Commissioner Raymond Kelly during the immediate aftermath of September 11, buoyed by hundreds of millions of dollars in federal anti-terrorism grants. However, Ferguson says Kelly’s rival, former commissioner William Bratton, was a key architect behind the NYPD’s reliance on “big data,” by implementing the CompStat data analysis system to map and electronically collate crime data during the mid-1990s and again during his return to New York City in 2014 under Mayor Bill de Blasio. Bratton was also a mentor to Jessica Tisch and has spoken admiringly of her since leaving the NYPD. Tisch was a main architect of the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System, an enormous, $3 billion, Microsoft-based surveillance network of tens of thousands of private and public surveillance cameras, license plate readers, gunshot detectors, social media feeds, biometric data, cryptocurrency analysis, location data, bodyworn and dashcam livestreams, and other technology that blankets the five boroughs’ 468-square-mile territory. Patterned off London’s 1990s CCTV surveillance network, the “ring of steel” was initially developed under Kelly as an anti-terrorism surveillance system for Lower and Midtown Manhattan before being rebranded as the DAS and marketed to other police departments as a potential for-profit tool. Several dozen of the 17,000 cameras in New York City public housing developments were also linked through backdoor methods by the Eric Adams administration last summer with thousands more in the pipeline, according to NY Focus. Though the DAS has been operational for more than a decade and survived prior challenges over data retention and privacy violations from civil society organizations like the New York Civil Liberties Union, it remains controversial. In late October, a Brooklyn couple filed a civil suit along with Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), a local privacy watchdog, against the DAS, alleging violations of New York State’s constitutional right to privacy by the NYPD’s persistent mass surveillance and data retention. NYPD officers, the suit claims, can “automatically track an individual across the city using computer vision software, which follows a person from one camera to the next based on descriptors as simple as the color of a piece of clothing.” The technology, they allege, “transforms every patrol officer into a mobile intelligence unit, capable of conducting warrantless surveillance at will.” “It’s a really open question about whether he’ll push policies that’ll dismantle the infrastructure of mass religious and racial profiling and the pseudoscience of surveillance as safety, and focus on evidence based alternatives, or he’ll be too afraid of the NY Post,” says Albert Fox Cahn, the founder in residence of STOP. Referring to Tisch as the “mother of the DAS,” Fox Cahn questioned why Mamdani would choose to retain a police commissioner with a record on privacy and criminal justice that runs contrary to the mayor-elect. For instance, Mamdani has vowed to get rid of the NYPD’s controversial gang database—an elimination Tisch strongly opposes. “This raises a fundamental question: When mayors are so terrified of firing police commissioners who are inconsistent with their own agenda, do we really have democratic oversight of policing?” Fox Cahn says. “Are they overseeing police in name only, and if not, what does that say about the state of democracy in America? Forget Trump; this is on the local level.” Municipal oversight of the NYPD’s massive surveillance arsenal is indeed lacking. Even though New York City passed a relatively mild oversight law for the NYPD’s surveillance gear in 2020 that required the agency to disclose the purchase and deployment of new surveillance technologies, the department refused to comply. As a result, there is still no public accounting for the contracts, use policies, and deployments of many of the NYPD’s most invasive tools, including drones and robot dogs. Elizabeth Joh, a law professor at the UC Davis School of Law who has long studied police intelligence and surveillance practices, says that Mamdani’s progressive ideals are on a collision course with the NYPD’s operational model, which is founded on pervasive surveillance of the city. “What does it mean to be the mayor of a big American city, where the police have absolutely embraced techno-solutionism as policing, as the dominant attitude toward policing?” Joh says. One potential inflection point for NYC could be future immigration sweeps like those in Los Angeles and Chicago, where police are making use of data collected by local cops and biometric software to hunt down undocumented people. “Immigration enforcement will almost certainly be a flash point: The use of technology in that context is alarming people, and I’m not surprised feds are using live facial recognition,” Joh says. A New York Department of Investigation report last year lambasted Mayor Eric Adams and police officials for buying and deploying several new tools, including a semiautonomous robotic dog; an entirely useless Knightscope “security” robot; the StarChase GPS system, which allows officers to fire a tracking projectile designed to stick to a car; smartphone fingerprinting technology; and an augmented-reality program police officers can download on their phones. In August, the Legal Aid Society urged the city Department of Investigation to scrutinize the NYPD’s use of facial recognition technology after The City reported that the NYPD used an FDNY account with Clearview AI to identify a pro-Palestine protester at Columbia University. The NYPD also maintains a facial recognition database that includes photographs of juveniles, according to 2019 reporting by The New York Times. Three bills are currently in front of New York’s city council to ostensibly strengthen its visibility into the NYPD’s surveillance arsenal (including a requirement to draft formal facial recognition use and audit policies). However, the City Council has far less power to scrutinize and set policy for the police department’s spying capabilities than many other cities that passed legislative reforms in the 2010s thanks to intense lobbying by the NYPD against a stronger bill. Beyond creating a Department of Community Safety, Mamdani’s other rare point of policy clarity on public safety concerns the department’s repressive approach to protests and the role of its controversial intelligence division in conducting mass surveillance on Muslim New Yorkers. The Demographics Unit, created under former commissioner Ray Kelly by a CIA officer loaned to the NYPD in the mid-2000s, went about mapping Muslim and Middle Eastern communities in the city’s five boroughs. Meanwhile, undercover officers were sent to infiltrate religious congregations and student groups as far afield as Connecticut and New Jersey. Although the Demographics Unit has been disbanded, and the department’s “mosque-raking” operations led to a legal settlement, activists and legal workers say the department’s surveillance in Middle Eastern and South Asian communities is still prevalent. Notably, Tisch’s family is best known around New York City for its philanthropy, with the family name adorning concert halls, museum wings, and university departments. The family is also known for donating heavily to Israeli causes (Jerusalem's Tisch Biblical Zoo, for example), with Jessica’s father playing key roles in the US Israel lobby and donating heavily to both pro-Trump Republican congressional candidates and GOP political action committees. Her extended family threw at least $900,000 into supporting Andrew Cuomo’s failed NYC mayoral bid—including her mother, former New York state regent Merryl Tisch. Jessica Tisch got her start at the NYPD in the Kelly-era Intelligence Bureau building dossiers on Muslim extremism. In January, she gave the opening remarks at a training on “combatting antisemitism” that labeled participants in Students for Justice in Palestine as “campus extremists” and claimed that SJP was responsible for a 300 percent increase in antisemitism at American colleges and universities. At the training, keffiyehs and watermelons were branded as “antisemitic symbols” that “incite hatred, violence, or discrimination against Jewish individuals or communities.” The NYPD’s violent repression of pro-Palestinian protests, documented extensively by The Nation, will almost certainly be an issue for Mamdani. Senior NYPD officials have attended trainings and events held by far-right Zionist organizations, and the agency is still fighting court-ordered restrictions on protest policing imposed as part of a settlement for its behavior during the 2020 George Floyd demonstrations. Another open question is the NYPD’s ongoing use of the New York City Police Foundation as a conduit for controversial surveillance technology and the underwriting of its overseas detectives program by foreign governments. The foundation still foots the $1,204,126 bill for the NYPD Intelligence Bureau’s “international liaison” program that posts detectives overseas to 11 countries, including Israel, Spain, France, Australia, and Singapore. That cost rose significantly from $948,261 in 2023. In the past, corporations that did business with the NYPD also contributed money to the foundation, raising questions about quid pro quos and the use of the police “booster” nonprofit as a way to circumvent public procurement procedures, particularly for surveillance equipment. The United Arab Emirates also paid $1 million to the NYC Police Foundation, according to 2012 tax records, which was the same amount that covered the entire overseas detectives program that year, according to a report by The Intercept. An NYPD detective has been posted to Abu Dhabi since 2009. The Police Foundation also serves as a key nexus for the local business community’s influence over the NYPD. Two members of Tisch’s family sit on the NYCPF’s Board, according to the nonprofit’s latest tax filings. Per reporting by veteran police scribe Leonard Levitt, one of Tisch’s relatives convinced then-commissioner Ray Kelly to give her a posting in the NYPD in the late 2000s, leading to her hiring. Kelly denied Levitt’s reporting in a 2015 interview with Bloomberg. Tisch did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in late 2024, Tisch said that a “friend” made the key connection with Kelly and steered her to the intel division job. The Police Foundation is also involved in the NYPD’s rapid expansion of its drone unit under Mayor Eric Adams. In 2024, the foundation spent $230,750 to buy drones for the NYPD’s transit command. At the time, the department’s drone expansion was overseen by Kaz Daughtry, a controversial police official and Adams ally who faces accusations of heavy drone surveillance by pro-Palestine activists and residents of Brooklyn neighborhoods subjected to blanket drone patrols during Labor Day cookouts in 2023. Although Mamdani’s mayoral campaign was defined by his relentless emphasis on affordability, the looming battles with the Trump administration over immigration enforcement and the breakneck buildout of the NYPD’s already formidable surveillance arsenal under Adams means he will be forced to reckon with the police department’s spying programs. ​​”Mass surveillance endangers all values at the heart of our democracy, and I do hope that our next mayor is willing to be a spokesperson for this cause,” says STOP’s Fox Cahn. “You can’t be a sanctuary city and a surveillance state—you can’t promise to protect undocumented neighbors and provide a data pipeline to ICE.”

Someone recently managed to get on a Microsoft Teams call with representatives from phone hacking company Cellebrite, and then leaked a screenshot of the company’s capabilities against many Google Pixel phones, according to a forum post about the leak and 404 Media’s review of the material. The leak follows others obtained and verified by 404 Media over the last 18 months. Those leaks impacted both Cellebrite and its competitor Grayshift, now owned by Magnet Forensics. Both companies constantly hunt for techniques to unlock phones law enforcement have physical access to. “You can Teams meeting with them. They tell everything. Still cannot extract esim on Pixel. Ask anything,” a user called rogueFed wrote on the GrapheneOS forum on Wednesday, speaking about what they learned about Cellebrite capabilities. GrapheneOS is a security- and privacy-focused Android-based operating system. rogueFed then posted two screenshots of the Microsoft Teams call. The first was a Cellebrite Support Matrix, which lays out whether the company’s tech can, or can’t, unlock certain phones and under what conditions. The second screenshot was of a Cellebrite employee. 💡 Do you know anything else about phone unlocking technology? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co. According to another of rogueFed’s posts, the meeting took place in October. The meeting appears to have been a sales call. The employee is a “pre sales expert,” according to a profile available online. The Support Matrix is focused on modern Google Pixel devices, including the Pixel 9 series. The screenshot does not include details on the Pixel 10, which is Google’s latest device. It discusses Cellebrite’s capabilities regarding ‘before first unlock’, or BFU, when a piece of phone unlocking tech tries to open a device before someone has typed in the phone’s passcode for the first time since being turned on. It also shows Cellebrite’s capabilities against after first unlock, or AFU, devices. Screenshot via GrapheneOS forum. The Support Matrix also shows Cellebrite’s capabilities against Pixel devices running GrapheneOS, with some differences between phones running that operating system and stock Android. Cellebrite does support, for example, Pixel 9 devices BFU. Meanwhile the screenshot indicates Cellebrite cannot unlock Pixel 9 devices running GrapheneOS BFU. In a statement, Victor Cooper, senior director of corporate communications and content strategy at Cellebrite, told 404 Media “We do not disclose or publicize the specific capabilities of our technology. This practice is central to our security strategy, as revealing such details could provide potential criminals or malicious actors with an unintended advantage.” Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. GrapheneOS is a long running project which makes sizable security changes to an Android device. “GrapheneOS is focused on substance rather than branding and marketing. It doesn't take the typical approach of piling on a bunch of insecure features depending on the adversaries not knowing about them and regressing actual privacy/security. It's a very technical project building privacy and security into the OS rather than including assorted unhelpful frills or bundling subjective third party apps choices,” the project’s website reads. As well as being used by the privacy and security conscious, criminals also turn to GrapheneOS. After the FBI secretly ran its own backdoored encrypted phone company for criminals, some drug traffickers and the people who sell technology to the underworld shifted to using GrapheneOS devices with Signal installed, according to interviews with phone sellers. In their forum post, rogueFed wrote that the “meeting focused specific on GrapheneOS bypass capability.” They added “very fresh info more coming.”

Deleting or overwriting the title and content on ml seems to propagate *sometimes*, but not always. Don't hit, I really like the idea of the Fediverse and Lemmy in particular--I guess I already sort of knew that things worked this way, but, well, I'd be lying if I didn't say this spooked me a bit. EDIT: I'm usually pretty good about not rageposting or whatever, so there's not a whole lot of stuff I want to expunge from the record, but there are some tech support type questions that I've asked in the past that now seem to me unbelievably and embarrassingly dumb that I'm not sure I want to have out there! ~~EDIT EDIT: I'd also be lying if I didn't say my eyes were wandering a bit towards raddle.me at this point...~~ EDIT EDIT EDIT: (sorry, feeling kinda punchy over here after too much early-morning ☕️) This reminds me of something from back in the pre-Snowden days, when everything was still mostly htttp and while websurfing I had Wireshark open and saw "http://www.nytimes.com/lifestyle/how-to-get-the-most-enjoyment-from-watching-clown-porn.html" flashing past.  Seriously tho, this is back when I, along with just about everyone else I knew, would say things like "well, yeah, you know, Google, Facebook, the internet, etc., everything's out there in the open, but what can you do?" And then there's the feeling you get when you actually *see* identifiable stuff like this going out across the wires and you're like "...*oh*..." 🙁 Not unlike the time when my boss asked me if I liked to listen to Rush: Me: I haven't really listened to that much of their stuff, although I really like *Power Windows*. My boss: No, I meant Rush Limbaugh. Me: ...*oh*... 🙁

I can understand why governments would push for something like this after 9/11, though it of course goes without saying that this is a totally unacceptable violation of someone's basic rights. It also goes without saying that governments always want more control over their citizens, but what exactly are they so worried might happen, right now, in 2025 or the near future?

FWIW: >The servers hosting Thundermail will initially be located in Germany *with more countries to follow in the future.*

Saw this by way of https://filen.io/hub/help-us-fight-chat-control-our-privacy-and-security-are-under-threat-again/. Not shillin', just sayin'.

Basically what it says in the title. Too many sites make you jump through all these hoops to have your account deleted, and sometimes even then don't do it. I know about justdeleteme, but unfortunately that doesn't cover a lot of things. Threatening legal action with my state's attorney general—in one case, anyway—didn't work. Maybe the EU will pass some legislation that will carry over to the US . . . Anyway, don't mind me, just griping. EDIT: Sort of like the "unsubscribe" button you get at the bottom of some emails. Did they have to pass a law to get that enacted?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/30717996 > Amazon and PayPal being out of the running of course. FWIW, I think Mullvad uses Stripe . . . 🤔

While I'm waiting for the Linux desktop client for Proton Drive . . . does anyone have any experience with Filen? https://alternativeto.net/software/filen/about/ https://tosdr.org/en/service/6820

Asking because USPS's frequently doesn't work.

SearXNG does, I think...any others? Looking around for other engines that aren't US-based, though I guess DDG is still considered acceptable for LibreWolf's default engine. Bangs are incredibly useful!

Joan Westenberg mentioned this in her "[Trump-proof tech stack](https://www.joanwestenberg.com/american-tech-is-compromised-heres-my-replacement-stack-2/)" post; anyone have any experience with this? It says it's [open source](https://github.com/cozy), self-hostable, and based in France. Unfortunate Andy Yen comments aside, a big plus is that [cozy](https://cozy.io/en/) actually has a Linux desktop client (!), unlike Proton.

Had never heard of this before today. Anyone tried it? **EDIT:** "[Being a fork of Mozilla Thunderbird, the software collects some data about the user, less than the original Mozilla Thunderbird, as outlined in Thunderbird's privacy statement. No data is submitted to Betterbird, some data may be submitted to Mozilla. No telemetry and no crash reports are submitted, however, add-on updates and blocklists are downloaded from Mozilla sites. Betterbird offers a product Start Page which processes access data as described above](https://www.betterbird.eu/legal/index.html)."

They have several apps on F-Droid, which is usually a good sign . . . **EDIT:** But try to sign up and they want your name, address, and phone number. Forget it!

Because it's kind of hard! Even if I follow their instructions. Maybe I'm just dumb . . . 🙁

Tor is off the table for me because it's so slow. If you can point to some test sites or documentation that supports your choice, please include!

How come?

Especially for the less tech-savvy among us?

It would be nice if I could get SMS 2FA-type notifcations on my desktop without having to use my phone. I probably wouldn't use Signal with it, since Beeper's own page seems to suggest that sending Signal messages with it would be less secure! And, I guess, SMS isn't secure to begin with . . . If I download and install Element, and then look at the SMS bridges available on Matrix's website, the recommended bridge instructions sends me over to Beeper, since I don't have my own server. Old and confused here . . .