5: How to Protect Yourself from Creepy, Phone Snooping Spyware
Off-the-shelf spyware is often marketed towards jealous lovers to spy on their spouse.
On Wednesday, Motherboard showed how powerful off-the-shelf, $170 spyware really is. For a day, I used a piece of software on my phone to surreptitiously collect GPS location data, intercept phone calls, and silently steal photos.
Although a hacker can only infect a phone if they have physical access to the device, the threat from this type of malware is very real. It is heavily used by, and marketed towards, jealous lovers to spy on their spouses. For around two decades, people have used spyware for this purpose, with many cases ending up in violence or even murder.
What can potential victims of this type of surveillance do to check if they’re being monitored? What are some of the best practices to keep in mind to make installing the malware harder? And what can those who are certainly being spied on do?
Vice News
4: Mapping hate: The rise of hate groups in the US
There has been a rise in the number of hate groups operating in the United States for a second year in a row, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) monitoring group.
In a recent report , the SPLC found that the total number of hate groups in the US in 2016 grew to 917 from 892 a year earlier.
Since 1999, the total number of hate groups in the US has more than doubled.
There are now more anti-Muslim , anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, white nationalist, neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate and black separatist organisations.
But the number of Ku Klux Klan (KKK) chapters, racist skinhead groups and anti-government militias and political groupings has declined, according to the report.
The sharpest increase was among anti-Muslim groups, which grew from 37 to 101 during that period – a 197 percent increase in just one year.
FBI statistics show that hate crimes targeting Muslims had already grown by 67 percent between 2014 and 2015.
The SPLC defines anti-Muslim groups as those that harbour “extreme hostility” towards Muslims, who are “depicted as irrational, intolerant and violent, and their faith is frequently depicted as sanctioning paedophilia, coupled with intolerance for homosexuals and women”.
In 2010, the SPLC knew of only five anti-Muslim groups.
“Beginning in 2010, anti-Muslim legislation increased and opposition to the development of an Islamic centre in lower Manhattan made headlines,” the SPLC notes.
The SPLC’s newly published hate map comes at the same time as a sharp rise in “bias incidents” – instances of hate crimes or harassment and intimidation – following the election of far-right President Donald Trump.
In the first three months following Trump’s election, the group recorded 1,372 bias incidents. Of that total, more than 25 percent were motivated by anti-immigrant sentiments.
Aljazeera
3: “Kids Will Be Harmed by This”: Trump Admin Rolls Back Protections for Transgender Students
The Trump administration has rescinded key protections for transgender students in public schools. The move reverses President Obama’s landmark decision last May to order public schools to let transgender students use the bathrooms matching their chosen gender identity. The Obama administration had threatened to withhold funding for schools that did not comply. According to press accounts, there was a split in the Trump administration over the issue between Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. The New York Times reports Devos initially resisted signing off and told Trump that she was uncomfortable because of the potential harm that rescinding the protections could cause transgender students. At a meeting on Tuesday in the White House, the president sided with Sessions and pushed DeVos to drop her opposition, which she did. We speak to Chase Strangio, staff attorney with the ACLU’s LGBT & AIDS Project.
Democracy Now
2: Pope Francis: better to be an atheist than a hypocritical Catholic
Pope Francis has delivered another criticism of some members of his own church , suggesting it was better to be an atheist than one of many Catholics who he said lead a hypocritical double life.
In improvised comments in the sermon of his private morning mass in his residence, he said: “It is a scandal to say one thing and do another. That is a double life.
“There are those who say, ‘I am very Catholic, I always go to mass, I belong to this and that association’,” the head of the 1.2 billion-member Roman Catholic church said, according to a Vatican Radio transcript.
He said some of these people should also say “‘my life is not Christian, I don’t pay my employees proper salaries, I exploit people, I do dirty business, I launder money, [I lead] a double life’.”The Guardian
1: DONALD TRUMP PLANS TO BYPASS THE COURTS TO DEPORT AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE
ON TUESDAY, THE Department of Homeland Security released a pair of memos laying out how the agency intends to implement President Donald Trump’s executive orders on domestic immigration enforcement. In addition to calling for a massive increase in the number of immigration agents and the deputizing of local and state law enforcement across the country — described in the documents as a “force multiplier”— the memos dramatically expand the range of people who can be deported without seeing a judge.
“I see now what the plan is,” Greg Siskind, a Tennessee-based immigration attorney and a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) board of governors, told The Intercept. “Their plan is basically to have everybody thrown out of the country without ever going to court.” Additional immigration attorneys and legal experts who spoke to The Intercept shared Siskind’s concerns, describing various elements of the DHS directives and the executive orders they reflect as “horrifying,” “stunning,” and “inhumane.”
“This is the broadest, most widespread change I have seen in doing this work for more than two decades,” Lee Gelernt, a veteran immigration attorney and deputy director of the ACLU’s national Immigrants’ Rights Project, told The Intercept. “After 9/11 we saw some extreme policies, but they were largely confined to particular areas around the relationship between immigration and national security. Here what we’re seeing are those types of policies but also much broader policies just dealing with immigration generally.”
“I expected bad based on Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric,” added David Leopold, a Cleveland-based immigration attorney and past president of the AILA. “Then when I read the executive order, I expected really bad … but I’m absolutely shocked at the mean-spiritedness of this.”
The Intercept
