Intercept, The

The Metadata Trap: The Trump Administration Is Using the Full Power of the US Surveillance State Against Whistleblowers

Government whistleblowers increasingly being charged under laws such as the Espionage Act, but they aren’t spies. While we all live under extensive surveillance, for government employees and contractors — especially those with a security clearance — privacy is virtually nonexistent. When a government worker becomes a whistleblower, the FBI gets access to reams of data describing exactly what happened on government computers and who searched for what in government databases, which helps narrow down the list of suspects.  Government insiders charged under the Espionage Act are not allowed to

Thanks to Facebook, your cellphone company is watching you more closely than ever

Among the mega-corporations that surveil you, your cellphone carrier has always been one of the keenest monitors, in constant contact with the one small device you keep on you at almost every moment.

Prisons Across the US Are Quietly Building Databases of Incarcerated People's Voice Prints

In New York and other states across the country, authorities are acquiring technology to extract and digitize the voices of incarcerated people into unique biometric signatures, known as voice prints. Prison authorities have quietly enrolled hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people’s voice prints into large-scale biometric databases. Computer algorithms then draw on these databases to identify the voices taking part in a call and to search for other calls in which the voices of interest are detected.