Concepts

What happens to everyone around a target?

44AI analysisDocumented

An idea drawn from this archive’s research and journal, either the author’s own speculation or generated by AI, and labelled as such.

Surveillance aimed at one person is rarely confined to one person, and in at least one widely deployed technology the indiscriminacy is the design. A cell-site simulator, commonly called a Stingray, works by impersonating a mobile network tower. Phones in range cannot tell the difference, so they connect and identify themselves. That includes the phone the operator is looking for and every other phone nearby — neighbours, passers-by, people in adjacent flats, anyone in a hospital or a place of worship within the radius. The bystander collection is not an error; it is how the device locates the target at all. What surrounded that capability is documented too. The FBI required local police departments to sign non-disclosure agreements as a condition of acquiring the equipment, and the American Civil Liberties Union obtained and published them. Departments concealed the technology's use from defence lawyers and from judges, and in some cases prosecutors dropped charges rather than disclose in open court how a defendant had been found. The Pasco County programme shows the same shape without any exotic equipment: the people repeatedly visited were not only those on the list but the households around them — parents, siblings, grandparents cited for uncut grass and missing house numbers because someone under that roof had been designated. Whether or not a given system is aimed at one person, the record shows the burden of it lands on everyone within reach.

  • A cell-site simulator impersonates a network tower; every phone in range connects and identifies itself, not only the target's
  • Bystander collection is intrinsic to how the device locates a target, not an incidental fault
  • The FBI required non-disclosure agreements from local departments acquiring the equipment; the ACLU obtained and published them
  • Use was concealed from defence counsel and courts, and charges were dropped in some cases rather than disclose the method
  • Pasco County: households around a listed person — parents, siblings, grandparents — were repeatedly visited and cited

Open questions

  • This describes capability and documented practice. It does not establish that any particular person was ever incidentally collected.
  • Policy has changed in places since the non-disclosure agreements were published, and this concept does not track current practice in any given jurisdiction.
  • Nothing here establishes coordination between the technologies described, or that any of them was directed at any individual.

References

The ACLU is cited for documents it obtained and published. The Pasco material is drawn from the linked concept and its own sources.

Not independently verified

This concept reports documented capability and published practice. It establishes no surveillance of any individual, and no current practice by any named agency.

Topics: Harassment · Technology · Surveillance & memory access · Law enforcement & government

Keep reading

06Author's observationPattern

The Diving Ecosystem

A hypothetical system, suggested to be a military deployment, that supports telepathic communication. Its suggested purpose is to give an invading force full transparency over all communication within enemy territory. That transparency would cover more than speech: through the Diving process, with or without a computer, it would reach the memories of people inside that territory. This concept is the author's speculation. It describes a hypothetical system and does not assert that the system exists. Every statement recorded in the journal is an external communication; read this concept under the Critical Disclaimer. Do not reward their presence: the author's caution In the author's experience, the system is generally used to provoke people and draw them out of their homes. When it began, in 2023, the voices presented themselves as the spirit world. Once the author researched neuroscience and realised they were human beings, he ended every relationship with any so-called invisible friend, anyone communicating on the system. The author's view is that it is vital not to reward their illegitimate presence. Rewarding it erodes the constitutional rights of everyone around you, and your own most of all, and it puts your life at risk. Their refusal to share contact details through any public, accountable channel is a serious red flag. For anyone experiencing this kind of communicatio

SpeculationTechnologySurveillance & memory accessRead →
29Author's observationDocumented

Are people made into intelligence assets without knowing it?

Intelligence tradecraft has always separated a witting source from an unwitting one. A person can supply information without knowing who receives it, or that anyone does. What changed is scale, and it required nobody's cooperation. American law enforcement agencies buy location data that phones emit continuously. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's investigation into Fog Data Science documented a company selling local police searchable access to billions of location signals harvested from ordinary apps, at prices small departments could afford. Babel Street's Locate X offered comparable capability, and EPIC obtained records of Customs and Border Protection's use of it. The mechanism is commercial: brokers buy from the advertising ecosystem and agencies buy from brokers. No warrant is involved because no compulsion is involved. The result is a population of unwitting sources. A person carrying a phone generates a record of where they went, who they were near and for how long, and that record is purchasable. They were never approached, never recruited, and are never harassed — because harassment would defeat the purpose. The value of an unwitting asset lies precisely in their not knowing. What this does not describe is access to perception. No documented capability reads a person's eyesight, and the mechanism above does not require one. What people already emit is sufficient.

TechnologySurveillance & memory accessLaw enforcement & governmentRead →
30Author's observationDocumented

Does being watched change what people let themselves think?

Amnesty International's 2023 report Automated Apartheid documented facial-recognition systems, Red Wolf and Blue Wolf among them, used to control Palestinian movement in the occupied territories, with residents describing repeated identification at checkpoints as a condition of ordinary life. Palestinians interviewed described the effect in consistent and non-technical terms: there was no space left in which to think privately. That effect is measurable, and it has been measured in the United States. Jonathon Penney, writing in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal in 2016, examined Wikipedia traffic to privacy-sensitive articles before and after June 2013, when the NSA and PRISM disclosures became public. He found a statistically significant immediate decline, with evidence that it persisted. People stopped looking things up. Nobody instructed them to. The migration of such tools is documented too. Julian Go, in the American Journal of Sociology, traces how instruments and doctrines developed for imperial control returned to domestic American policing; cell-site simulators reached local departments from military origins by the same route. The pattern is old enough to carry a name in the literature. So the question worth asking is not whether America has some particular system. It is narrower and answerable: given that capabilities move from conflict territory to domestic policin

TechnologySurveillance & memory accessLaw enforcement & governmentRead →
40AI analysisDocumented

What are children subject to?

In November 2020 the Tampa Bay Times published Targeted, an investigation into the Pasco County Sheriff's Office in Florida. The office had built a list of roughly 420 schoolchildren it considered likely future criminals. The children were not told. Their parents were not told. The school superintendent said he had not known the data was being used this way. The list was assembled from sixteen categories drawn from school records and state child-welfare data, and the categories are the part worth reading twice. A child could be flagged for grades of D or below, for three or more absences in a quarter, for discipline referrals — and for adverse childhood experiences, meaning abuse, witnessing violence, or having a parent incarcerated. A child who had been abused was thereby made more likely to appear on a police list of probable future offenders. The district's early-warning system covered more than thirty thousand middle and high school students, and the district paid the Sheriff's Office $2.3 million a year for thirty-two school resource officers. What happened next is the part worth recording, because it is the rarest outcome in this entire archive: someone was held to account. Four Pasco residents — Darlene Deegan, Dalanea Taylor, Tammy Heilman and Robert A. Jones III — sued in federal court in 2021, represented by the Institute for Justice. The pattern they described was no

Proposed solutionsHarassmentSurveillance & memory accessRead →
43AI analysisDocumented

How protected is your medical information?

Less than most people assume, and the gap is structural rather than criminal. HIPAA protects a setting, not a category of information. It binds health plans, clearinghouses and providers who bill electronically. It does not bind most of the places health information is now generated. That distinction is not academic. When the Federal Trade Commission acted against GoodRx in February 2023, it could not use HIPAA at all — it used the Health Breach Notification Rule, and part of its complaint was that GoodRx had falsely suggested to consumers that it complied with HIPAA. What GoodRx had actually done was compile lists of users who bought particular medications and upload their email addresses, phone numbers and mobile advertising identifiers to Facebook, Google, Criteo, Branch and Twilio, so those users could be advertised to on the basis of their prescriptions and health conditions. The penalty was $1.5 million. The FTC brought a comparable action against BetterHelp over mental-health questionnaire data shared with advertisers. Scale is the other half. In 2024 a ransomware attack on Change Healthcare, a UnitedHealth subsidiary that processes a large share of American medical claims, exposed the data of roughly 190 million people — the largest health-data breach in United States history, and not a break-in at a doctor's office but a failure at a clearing house most patients had ne

TechnologySurveillance & memory accessLaw enforcement & governmentRead →