At Least 7 of the 9/11 Hijackers are Still Alive

National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

Outline of the 9/11 Plot

The muscle hijackers 'picked by bin Ladin':

• Satam al Suqami
• Wail and Waleed al Shehri (two brothers) Alive
• Abdul Aziz al Omari Alive
• Fayez Banihammad (from the UAE)
• Ahmed al Ghamdi
• Hamza al Ghamdi
• Mohand al Shehri Alive
• Saeed al Ghamdi Alive
• Ahmad al Haznawi
• Ahmed al Nami Alive
• Majed Moqed
• Salem al Hazmi (the brother of Nawaf al Hazmi)

How can the 9/11 Commission be taken seriously when they refer to 9/11 'hijackers' who are still alive?

Some of the suspects apparently used the stolen identities of at least five Saudis who worked in the airline industry as pilots, mechanics, and flight attendants — people who would have had increased access in airports, a Saudi government official told the Sun-Sentinel.

American Airlines Flight 11

• Aircraft: Boeing 767-223ER
• Fuel Capacity: 24,000 gallons
• Seating Capacity: 181
  • Passengers: 81 (including hijackers)
  • Flight Attendants: 9
  • Pilots: 2

Alleged Hijackers:

• Satam M.A. Al Suqami
• Waleed M. Alshehri - Alive
• Wail M. Alshehri - Alive
• Mohamed Atta - Alive?
• Abdul Aziz al Omari - Alive

Full details:
Scheduled flight: Boston - Los Angeles
Flight departed: 07:59 a.m.
Crashed into WTC 1: 08:46 a.m.

United Airlines Flight 175

• Aircraft: Boeing 767-222
• Fuel Capacity: 24,000 gallons
• Seating Capacity: 181
  • Passengers: 56 (including hijackers)
  • Flight Attendants: 7
  • Pilots: 2

Alleged Hijackers:

• Marwan Al-Shehhi
• Fayez Rashid Ahmed Hassan Al Qadi Banihammad
• Ahmed Alghamdi
• Hamza Alghamdi
• Mohand al Shehri - Alive

Full details:
Scheduled flight: Boston - Los Angeles
Flight departed: 08:14 a.m.
Crashed into WTC2: 09:03 a.m.

American Airlines Flight 77

• Aircraft: Boeing 757-223
• Fuel Capacity: 11,000 gallons
• Seating Capacity: 200
  • Passengers: 58 (including hijackers)
  • Flight Attendants: 4
  • Pilots: 2

Alleged Hijackers:

• Khalid Almihdhar - Alive?
• Majed Moqed
• Salem al Hazmi - Alive
• Nawaf Alhazmi
• Hani Hanjour

Full details:
Scheduled flight: Washington to Los Angeles
Flight departed: 08:20 a.m.
Crashed into the Pentagon: 09:38 a.m.

United Airlines Flight 93

• Aircraft: Boeing 757-222
• Fuel Capacity: 11,000 gallons
• Seating Capacity: 200
  • Passengers: 38 (including hijackers)
  • Flight Attendants: 5
  • Pilots: 2

Alleged Hijackers:

• Saeed al Ghamdi - Alive
• Ahmed Ibrahim A. Al Haznawi
• Ahmed al Nami - Alive
• Ziad Samir Jarrah

Full details:
Scheduled flight: Newark to San Francisco
Flight departed: 8:42 a.m. (delayed 41 mins)
Crashed in Pennsylvania: 10:06 a.m.

Hijackers

• AMERICAN AIRLINES Flight 11: Crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center
• UNITED AIRLINES Flight 175: Crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center
• AMERICAN AIRLINES Flight 77: Crashed into the Pentagon
• UNITED AIRLINES Flight 93: Crashed in rural Pennsylvania

9/11 Airport Surveillance Video Discrepancies

The BBC reported a transcript of a phone call made by Flight Attendant Madeline Amy Sweeney to Boston air traffic controls in which she gave the seat numbers occupied by the hijackers, and these seat numbers did not correspond with those of the men claimed by the FBI to be responsible for the hijacking.

CNN reported that the men who hijacked the aircraft used phony IDs containing the names of real people living in Arab nations in the Middle East.

Even the FBI says there is no evidence to link the above men to the 9/11 hijackings.

So, one fact is apparent. If those who hijacked the 9/11 airplanes were using stolen identities, then we don't know who they were or who they worked for. We can't. It's impossible.

A Saudi embassy official said it was difficult to know for certain whether the hijackers used bogus names. "You cannot throw a stone in Saudi Arabia without hitting an Al Ghamdi," he said, referring to the alleged last name of three of the hijackers. [Chicago Tribune]

Now, people who are intending to commit suicide normally don't worry about whether anyone knows their real name, and it is here that some other odd aspects of this case take on a new meaning.

We are told that the group that planned and carried out the hijackings and subsequent attack on the World Trade Towers were highly trained (possibly by the CIA) experts, with knowledge of how to steal identities and forge fake IDs.

Yet at the same time, we are being told that these same hijackers spent the night before the attack getting drunk in bars, making noise, screaming insults at the "infidels", and doing everything they could to attract attention to themselves. They used the credit cards issued in their stolen names, allowed their driver's licenses with the stolen names to be photocopied, and used public library computers to send emails back and forth using their stolen names signed to unencrypted messages about their plans to steal aircraft and crash them into buildings, then decorated their apartments with absurdly obvious props such as a crop dusting manual to the point where the whole affair reads like a low-budget "B" detective movie from the 1930s.

In short, these men did everything they could to make sure everyone knew who they were, or more to the point, who they were pretending to be.

Because the IDs used by the hijackers were phony, we cannot know who they really were or who they really worked for. But what is apparent is that those who planned the hijackings and the 9/11 attacks went out of their way to leave plenty of clues pointing to citizens of Middle Eastern Arab nations.

Many of the investigators believe that some of the initial clues that were uncovered about the terrorists' identities and preparations, such as flight manuals, were meant to be found. A former high-level intelligence official told me, "Whatever trail was left was left deliberately—for the F.B.I. to chase." [The New Yorker]

Conclusion

We don't know who planned the 9/11 attacks. But we do know who they wanted us to think they were. We do know who they intended America to blame for the attacks.

See also:

• Nine Hijackers Drew Scrutiny on Sept. 11, Officials Say
• Tracking All Hijackers
• 9/11 - An Inside Job?
• What Really Happened

SUPPRESSED DETAILS OF CRIMINAL INSIDER TRADING LEAD DIRECTLY INTO THE CIA's HIGHEST RANKS

CIA EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR "BUZZY" KRONGARD MANAGED FIRM THAT HANDLED "PUT" OPTIONS ON UAL

by Michael C. Ruppert

[© COPYRIGHT, 2001, Michael C. Ruppert and FTW Publications, www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. - May be reprinted or distributed for non-profit purposes only.]

FTW, October 9, 2001

Although uniformly ignored by the mainstream U.S. media, there is abundant and clear evidence that a number of transactions in financial markets indicated specific (criminal) foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the case of at least one of these trades -- which has left a $2.5 million prize unclaimed -- the firm used to place the "put options" on United Airlines stock was, until 1998, managed by the man who is now in the number three Executive Director position at the Central Intelligence Agency. Until 1997 A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard had been Chairman of the investment bank A.B. Brown. A.B. Brown was acquired by Banker's Trust in 1997. Krongard then became, as part of the merger, Vice Chairman of Banker's Trust-AB Brown, one of 20 major U.S. banks named by Senator Carl Levin this year as being connected to money laundering. Krongard's last position at Banker's Trust (BT) was to oversee "private client relations." In this capacity he had direct hands-on relations with some of the wealthiest people in the world in a kind of specialized banking operation that has been identified by the U.S. Senate and other investigators as being closely connected to the laundering of drug money.

Krongard (re?) joined the CIA in 1998 as counsel to CIA Director George Tenet. He was promoted to CIA Executive Director by President Bush in March of this year. BT was acquired by Deutsche Bank in 1999. The combined firm is the single largest bank in Europe. And, as we shall see, Deutsche Bank played several key roles in events connected to the September 11 attacks.

THE SCOPE OF KNOWN INSIDER TRADING

Before looking further into these relationships it is necessary to look at the insider trading information that is being ignored by Reuters, The New York Times and other mass media. It is well documented that the CIA has long monitored such trades - in real time - as potential warnings of terrorist attacks and other economic moves contrary to U.S. interests. Previous stories in FTW have specifically highlighted the use of Promis software to monitor such trades.

It is necessary to understand only two key financial terms to understand the significance of these trades, "selling short" and "put options".

• "Selling Short" is the borrowing of stock, selling it at current market prices, but not being required to actually produce the stock for some time. If the stock falls precipitously after the short contract is entered, the seller can then fulfill the contract by buying the stock after the price has fallen and complete the contract at the pre-crash price. These contracts often have a window of as long as four months.
• "Put Options," are contracts giving the buyer the option to sell stocks at a later date. Purchased at nominal prices of, for example, $1.00 per share, they are sold in blocks of 100 shares. If exercised, they give the holder the option of selling selected stocks at a future date at a price set when the contract is issued. Thus, for an investment of $10,000 it might be possible to tie up 10,000 shares of United or American Airlines at $100 per share, and the seller of the option is then obligated to buy them if the option is executed. If the stock has fallen to $50 when the contract matures, the holder of the option can purchase the shares for $50 and immediately sell them for $100 - regardless of where the market then stands. A call option is the reverse of a put option, which is, in effect, a derivatives bet that the stock price will go up.

A September 21 story by the Israeli Herzliyya International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism, entitled "Black Tuesday: The World's Largest Insider Trading Scam?" documented the following trades connected to the September 11 attacks:

• Between September 6 and 7, the Chicago Board Options Exchange saw purchases of 4,744 put options on United Airlines, but only 396 call options. Assuming that 4,000 of the options were bought by people with advance knowledge of the imminent attacks, these "insiders" would have profited by almost $5 million.
• On September 10, 4,516 put options on American Airlines were bought on the Chicago exchange, compared to only 748 calls. Again, there was no news at that point to justify this imbalance; Again, assuming that 4,000 of these options trades represent "insiders," they would represent a gain of about $4 million.
• [The levels of put options purchased above were more than six times higher than normal.]
• No similar trading in other airlines occurred on the Chicago exchange in the days immediately preceding Black Tuesday.
• Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., which occupied 22 floors of the World Trade Center, saw 2,157 of its October $45 put options bought in the three trading days before Black Tuesday; this compares to an average of 27 contracts per day before September 6. Morgan Stanley's share price fell from $48.90 to $42.50 in the aftermath of the attacks. Assuming that 2,000 of these options contracts were bought based upon knowledge of the approaching attacks, their purchasers could have profited by at least $1.2 million.
• Merrill Lynch & Co., with headquarters near the Twin Towers, saw 12,215 October $45 put options bought in the four trading days before the attacks; the previous average volume in those shares had been 252 contracts per day [a 1200% increase!]. When trading resumed, Merrill's shares fell from $46.88 to $41.50; assuming that 11,000 option contracts were bought by "insiders," their profit would have been about $5.5 million.
• European regulators are examining trades in Germany's Munich Re, Switzerland's Swiss Re, and AXA of France, all major reinsurers with exposure to the Black Tuesday disaster. [FTW Note: AXA also owns more than 25% of American Airlines stock making the attacks a "double whammy" for them.]

On September 29, 2001 - in a vital story that has gone unnoticed by the major media - the San Francisco Chronicle reported, "Investors have yet to collect more than $2.5 million in profits they made trading options in the stock of United Airlines before the Sept. 11, terrorist attacks, according to a source familiar with the trades and market data.

"The uncollected money raises suspicions that the investors - whose identities and nationalities have not been made public - had advance knowledge of the strikes." They don't dare show up now. The suspension of trading for four days after the attacks made it impossible to cash-out quickly and claim the prize before investigators started looking.

"October series options for UAL Corp. were purchased in highly unusual volumes three trading days before the terrorist attacks for a total outlay of $2,070; investors bought the option contracts, each representing 100 shares, for 90 cents each. [This represents 230,000 shares]. Those options are now selling at more than $12 each. There are still 2,313 so-called "put" options outstanding [valued at $2.77 million and representing 231,300 shares] according to the Options Clearinghouse Corp."

"The source familiar with the United trades identified Deutsche Bank Alex Brown, the American investment banking arm of German giant Deutsche Bank, as the investment bank used to purchase at least some of these options." This was the operation managed by Krongard until as recently as 1998.

As reported in other news stories, Deutsche Bank was also the hub of insider trading activity connected to Munich Re. just before the attacks.

CIA, THE BANKS AND THE BROKERS

Understanding the interrelationships between CIA and the banking and brokerage world is critical to grasping the already frightening implications of the above revelations. Let's look at the history of CIA, Wall Street and the big banks by looking at some of the key players in CIA's history.

• Clark Clifford - The National Security Act of 1947 was written by Clark Clifford, a Democratic Party powerhouse, former Secretary of Defense, and one-time advisor to President Harry Truman. In the 1980s, as Chairman of First American Bancshares, Clifford was instrumental in getting the corrupt CIA drug bank BCCI a license to operate on American shores. His profession: Wall Street lawyer and banker.
• John Foster and Allen Dulles - These two brothers "designed" the CIA for Clifford. Both were active in intelligence operations during WW II. Allen Dulles was OSS station chief in Berne, Switzerland, where he met frequently with Nazi leaders and looked after U.S. investments in Germany. John Foster went on to become Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower and Allen went on to serve as CIA Director under Eisenhower and was later fired by JFK. Their professions: partners in the most powerful - to this day - Wall Street law firm of Sullivan, Cromwell.
• Bill Casey - Ronald Reagan's CIA Director and OSS veteran who served as chief wrangler during the Iran-Contra years was, under President Richard Nixon, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. His profession: Wall Street lawyer and stockbroker.
• David Doherty - The current Vice President of the New York Stock Exchange for enforcement is the retired General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency.
• George Herbert Walker Bush - President from 1989 to January 1993, also served as CIA Director for 13 months from 1976-7. He is now a paid consultant to the Carlyle Group, the 11th largest defense contractor in the nation, which also shares joint investments with the bin Laden family.
• A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard - The current Executive Director of the Central Intelligence Agency is the former Chairman of the investment bank A.B. Brown and former Vice Chairman of Banker's Trust.
• John Deutch - This retired CIA Director from the Clinton Administration currently sits on the board at Citigroup, the nation's second largest bank, which has been repeatedly and overtly involved in the documented laundering of drug money. This includes Citigroup's 2001 purchase of a Mexican bank known to launder drug money, Banamex.
• Nora Slatkin - This retired CIA Executive Director also sits on Citibank's board.
• Maurice "Hank" Greenburg - The CEO of AIG insurance, manager of the third largest capital investment pool in the world, was floated as a possible CIA Director in 1995. FTW exposed Greenberg's and AIG's long connection to CIA drug trafficking and covert operations in a two-part series that was interrupted just prior to the attacks of September 11. AIG's stock has bounced back remarkably well since the attacks. To read that story, please go to http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ciadrugs/part_2.html.

One wonders how much damning evidence is necessary to respond to what is now irrefutable proof that CIA knew about the attacks and did not stop them. Whatever our government is doing, whatever the CIA is doing, it is clearly NOT in the interests of the American people, especially those who died on September 11.

In June 2001, Cooper would make a prediction that would earn him the legacy as the man who predicted the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Cooper pulled on historical threads of tragic events and tied them to what he saw as the government and media colluding to make a boogeyman out of Osama bin Laden. Cooper predicted an awful event would soon occur in the United States and that the country’s leaders would blame it on bin Laden.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the day his prophecy was realized, Cooper stayed on air for 10 hours. According to audio archived on the Cooper tribute website, BeholdAMessenger, in the initial hours after the attack, Cooper theorized the towers of the World Trade Center came down by controlled demolition.

“Categorically unconstitutional” – that is how the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled about the use of geofence warrants.

The part of the Constitution that this type of warrant, that enables dragnet-style mass surveillance, violates is the Fourth Amendment, the court found.

This amendment is meant to protect citizens from unreasonable searches or seizures – but, said the court of appeals, what geofence warrants do is allow for the opposite: “General, exploratory rummaging.”

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

Geofencing works by essentially treating everyone who happens to be in a geographic area during a given time as a suspect, until established otherwise.

And, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights group, an outspoken critic that often gets involved in legal cases to argue against this method of investigation, welcomed the court’s decision, noting that people should not have to fear having their phone with them in public because that could turn them into a criminal suspect.

The Circuit Court’s stance on geofence warrants came as it deliberated the United States v. Smith case, revolving around the police in Mississippi in 2018 resorting to obtaining this type of warrant to investigate an armed robbery and assault that took place in a post office.

Google, which is who law enforcement turns to with these warrants most of the time, obliged, turning over data from the phones to the police, who then managed to produce two suspects, later defendants.

But – even though it decided not to suppress the evidence, because it found the police were acting “in good faith” while geofencing was still a new phenomenon – the Fifth Circuit Court doesn’t think the warrants are inherently lawful, i.e., in compliance with the Constitution.

One problem cited by the judges is that police access to sensitive location data collected during the process of geofencing is “highly invasive” since it can reveal a lot about a person, including their associations, and, also lets the police “‘follow’ them into private spaces,” EFF explained the court’s decision.

Another is that the warrants never specify that they apply to a particular person, as law enforcement “have no idea who they are looking for, or whether the search will even turn up a result.”

You might still think about Eric Schmidt as a “(big) tech guy” and businessman, but his passion for (geo)politics was always evident, even while he served as Google’s CEO.

These days, Schmidt is the chair of the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), a think tank that would like to position itself as a reference point to a military alliance, NATO, and get it to “monitor disinformation in real-time.”

SCSP’s ambition is no less than to help craft new national security strategies, always with an eye on the alleged attempts to increase disinformation (here AI is to blame) – but also ways to combat that, and here, SCSP says (the US) must strengthen its “AI competitiveness.”

The goal is to “win” what’s referred to as the techno-economic competition by 2030 – there’s that deadline, favored by many a controversial globalist initiative.

Here, the group would like NATO and its members to fight against what is described as AI disinformation, that new chapter in information warfare.

Schmidt’s think tank doesn’t like what’s seen as the current reactive approach and the tired old debunking. That means there must be an “active” one – and the replacement for debunking would logically be some form of the dystopian concept of “prebunking.”

(SCSP mentions both as desirable methods in a late 2022 report, but this time shies away from using the latter term.)

SCSP wants various actors to carry out real-time surveillance of “disinformation” by means of spending money on tools fed with publicly available online data (aka, the cynically named “open source” data).

In other words, real-time mass-scale internet data scraping. Such tools already exist and are used by law enforcement, causing various levels of controversy.

Next comes prebunking, even if the latest batch of SCSP recommendations stops short of calling it that.

But what would you call it?

“NATO should provide its own positive narrative to get out ahead of disinformation, and highlight failures of authoritarian regimes, especially on their own digital platforms.”

And to make this work, SCSP wants NATO to co-opt various governments and companies, as well as NGOs. Inside the alliance, a “disinformation unit” should be formed.

Last but not least, the think tank says – “Foster healthy skepticism.”

Perhaps starting with SCSP’s own roles, goals, and affiliations.

The Biden administration is working to expedite widespread adoption of digital IDs, including driver’s licenses, a draft executive order indicates.

Digital IDs are a contentious concept primarily because of the concentration of – eventually – the entirety of people’s sensitive private information in centralized databases controlled by the government, and on people’s phones, “client-side.”

That in turn brings up the issues of technical security, but also privacy, and the potential for dystopian-style mass surveillance.

Proponents, on the other hand, like to focus on the “convenience” that such a shift from physical to digital personal documents is promised to bring.

In the US, some states have started this process via digital driver’s licenses, and the executive order is urging (“strongly encouraging”) both federal and state authorities to accelerate this, as well as other types of digital ID.

Where this policy seems to be converging to is coming up, at long last, with a functional way to carry out online identity verification. Namely, digital ID would be combined with biometric data obtained through facial recognition, and other forms of biometrics harvesting.

Centralization of data – opponents say to better control it, even if that makes it less secure – is a key component of these schemes, and so the Biden executive order speaks about making it obligatory for federal agencies to join “a single government-run identity system, Login.gov,” reports say.

It is also noted that Biden initially mentioned such an executive order was coming during his 2022 State of the Union speech, but the wording reportedly became a cause of contention.

Now, that seems to have been resolved, and the only question for the administration is when Biden should sign the order, the same sources who saw the text, report.

At the same time, as states are launching their own (partial) digital ID programs, an increasing number are looking for ways to introduce online age verification and are enacting laws to this effect.

A federal-level digital ID scheme would help in these efforts to solve the “problem” of online anonymity – and in the process forever change the internet as we know it.

In Brazil, a significant upheaval in digital privacy and access to information is unfolding, as a notable number of reputable VPN services—including NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark, and VyprVPN—have vanished from the local iOS App Store. This move is widely believed to comply with Brazilian authorities’ directives, reflecting a concerning trend towards online censorship.

This development is particularly alarming in light of the recent decision X made to shutdown its operations in the country. X terminated its operations after a protracted legal confrontation with Brazilian officials, who had accused the platform of insufficient efforts to combat disinformation, specifically its failure to block accounts spreading false information and hate speech. Despite the shutdown, X’s app is still accessible in Brazil.

The closure of X’s offices and the removal of VPNs from the App Store have spurred a significant shift toward VPN usage among Brazilians, seeking to bypass increasing online restrictions. Proton VPN reported a staggering 580% surge in new registrations recently, highlighting the growing reliance on VPNs to maintain internet freedom.

Nevertheless, acquiring these tools has become challenging. Attempts to install these apps from the iOS App Store are met with no option to download, indicating a blockade rather than a mere removal.

The current scenario underscores the critical importance of VPN services in safeguarding internet freedom in Brazil. As digital platforms face governmental pressures and the landscape of internet accessibility continues to evolve, the role of VPNs as tools for ensuring unrestricted access to information becomes ever more vital.

California is one of the US states that have introduced digital license plates, amid opposition from a number of rights advocates.

Now, there is a legislative effort to have GPS location tracking embedded in these, to all intents and purposes, devices attached to the car.

Sponsored by Democrat Assemblywoman Lori Wilson, Bill 3138 is currently making its way through the state’s legislature. It refers to “License plates and registration cards: alternative devices,” and the bill has another sponsor – Reviver.

The company was founded by Neville Boston, formerly of the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), and promotes itself as the first digital license plates platform. It has made its way to both this proposal, and the law the current draft builds on – AB 984 (also sponsored by Wilson) – which was signed into law two years ago.

The problem with Reviver is that it has already had a security breach that allowed hackers to track those using the company’s digital plates in real-time. It doesn’t help, either, that the company is effectively a monopoly – the only one, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notes, “that currently has state authorization to sell digital plates in California.”

Meanwhile, the key problem with AB 3138, warns EFF, is that it “directly undoes the deal from 2022 and explicitly calls for location tracking in digital license plates for passenger cars.”

The deal in question refers to the way AB 984 eventually managed to become law, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom: a provision that would have allowed for location tracking of private vehicles was removed at the time.

But clearly, that was just a temporary move to pacify opponents, and now Wilson – and Reviver – are back to “complete” the original effort.

EFF is urging the legislature not to approve AB 2138 and is choosing to highlight those scenarios where such GPS tracking would be detrimental to those who are ostensibly among the voters or sympathizers of Wilson and her party.

Thus, the digital rights group speaks about those seeking abortion traveling (and being tracked, unawares) from state to state, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) using the tech, etc.

However, it’s difficult to see how adding another way for the authorities to track vehicles in real-time is not potentially detrimental to any person, as a form of invasive mass surveillance.

Free speech group the Foundation for Individual Rights (FIRE) has gone to court in a bid to block Texas state age verification law, Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act (SCOPE Act, HB 18).

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

This largely Republican-backed law will take effect on September 1, starting when online platforms will be under obligation to register and verify the age of all users.

This will apply if “more than a third” of content on the platforms is considered “harmful” or “obscene.”

But FIRE believes this is a form of pressure to make sure sites collect biometric and ID data from adults in Texas as they access what is lawful (to them) content.

Hence the case, Students Engaged in Advancing Texas v. Paxton, where FIRE is suing state Attorney General Ken Paxton on behalf of four plaintiffs that the group says would have their rights threatened by the SCOPE Act – unless the US District Court for the Western District of Texas issues declaratory and injunctive relief.

In other words, FIRE wants the judges to stop the enforcement of the law, which the filing brands as unconstitutional.

Said FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere: “In a misguided attempt to make the internet ‘safe’, Texas’ law treats adults like children. But even minors have First Amendment rights. Whether they’re 16 or 65, this law infringes on the rights of all Texans.”

This is by no means a sole voice expressing disagreement with the idea that more, and more invasive online censorship and surveillance will result in better protection of children.

Senator Rand Paul has penned an opinion piece where he goes after the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which has raised privacy, censorship, and digital ID concerns among civil rights activists.

According to Paul, what motivated those behind the legislation to come up with it is not questionable, but the actual bill falls short to the point where it “promises to be a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences.”

The senator notes that those pushing the bill insist the goal is not to regulate content, but he believes online platforms would face unprecedented demands regarding mental health harms, like anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.

However, Paul believes – “imposing a duty of care on internet platforms associated with mental health can only lead to one outcome: the stifling of First Amendment–protected speech” while at the same time empowering “speech police” to “silence important and diverse discussions that are essential to a free society.”

Paul speaks in favor of making sure those protections continue to apply and suggests coming up with “clear” rules for platforms, allowing them to comply with the law.

But KOSA, according to him, “fails to do that in almost every respect.”

The senator sees it as (yet another) bill that is too vague for (legal) comfort, so much so that “many of its key provisions are completely undefined.”

Although a lower court had dismissed the case, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has decided that Google will have to go to trial after all, for allegedly secretly collecting data from Chrome users, regardless of whether they chose to sync information from the browser with their Google account.

The class action lawsuit, Calhoun v. Google LLC., accuses the tech giant of using the browser, by far the most dominant in its market, to collect browsing history, IP addresses, unique browser identifiers, and persistent cookie identifiers – all without consent.

The case was initially filed in 2020 and then dismissed in December 2022, but now the appellate court – in a ruling signed by Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. – said that the decision failed to take into account, looking into Google’s disclosures, i.e., the privacy policy agreement, “whether a reasonable user reading them would think that he or she was consenting to the data collection.”

The plaintiffs are certain this was in fact happening without explicit permission, and consider the way Chrome was set up to work in this context is “intentional and unlawful.”

Google on the other hand defended its actions when the case was originally filed by saying that explicit permission happened when users accepted its privacy policy. The lower court judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, accepted this argument to dismiss the case, saying Google’s disclosure about the data collection was “adequate,” and therefore had the users’ consent.

According to Judge Smith, despite its general policy, Google was pushing Chrome “by suggesting that certain information would not be sent to Google unless a user turned on sync.”

Interestingly enough, Google is removing the sync option from all versions of Chrome – after iOS, this will now be the case on desktops and Android as well. All it will take is to sign into the Google account on Chrome to link the data from the browser to the account – although signing in is not mandatory, at least for now.

A Google spokesman who commented on the decision of the court of appeals – which sent the case back to a lower court – confirmed that the change “is not related to the litigation.”

As for the litigation – “We disagree with this ruling and are confident the facts of the case are on our side. Chrome Sync helps people use Chrome seamlessly across their different devices and has clear privacy controls,” claims Jose Castaneda.

The push to develop digital ID and expand its use in the US is receiving a boost as the country’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is launching a new project.

NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has teamed up with 15 large financial and state institutions, as well as tech companies, to research and develop a way of integrating Mobile Driver’s License (mDL) into financial services. But according to NIST, this is just the start and the initial focus of the program.

The agreement represents an effort to tie in yet more areas of people’s lives in their digital ID (“customer identification program requirements” is how NIST’s announcement describes the focus of this particular initiative). These schemes are often criticized by rights advocates for their potential to be used as mass surveillance tools.

Now NIST’s initiative brings together this institution and the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA), California Department of Motor Vehicles, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – Science and Technology Directorate, New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Microsoft.

Among the other participants are companies specializing in digital ID IDEMIA, MATTR Limited, iLabs, SpruceID, and the OpenID Foundation (plus US Bank, and Block Inc.)

They were chosen after submitting a response regarding their capabilities via the Federal Register, and have now received collaborative research and development agreements, known as CRADA.

Those who are now in will work within the project’s three phases, dubbed, Define, Assemble, and Build. The first will set the scope of work along with industry participants, the second should produce teams with members from the industry, government, and academia, while the “Build” phase is to focus on “creating practical modules and prototypes to address cybersecurity challenges.”

They will now collaborate with NCCoE to speed up the adoption of digital ID standards, a press release said, as well as best practices by developing “reference architectures, representative workflows, and implementation guides to address real-world cybersecurity, privacy, and usability challenges faced by the adoption of mDL in the financial sector.”

NIST’s NCCoE itself is set up as a hub dealing with cybersecurity and often works with government, industry, and academia on developing precisely this type of standards.

The call to respond to the mobile driver’s license project collaboration was first issued a year ago, in late August 2023.

The District Court for the Eastern District of New York has ruled that the US government must reverse course on its policy of warrantless searches of US (and foreign) nationals’ electronic devices as they enter the country.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

This is not the only court decision on this issue, while this particular outcome, requiring that border agents obtain court-issued orders before performing such searches, concerns the district that is the court’s seat – therefore also a major port of entry, JFK International Airport.

It was precisely at this airport that an event unfolded which set in motion a legal case. In 2022, US citizen Kurbonali Sultanov was coerced (he was told he “had no choice”) into surrendering his phone’s passport to border officers.

Sultanov later became a defendant in a criminal case but argued that evidence from the phone should not be admitted because the device was accessed in violation of the Fourth Amendment (which protects Americans against unreasonable and warrantless searches).

Of course, all these envisaged protections refer to US citizens, and even there prove to be sketchy in many instances. Foreign travelers (even though entering the country legally) are effectively left without any protections regarding their privacy.

Sultanov’s argument was supported in an amicus brief filed the following year by the Knight First Amendment Institute and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, who said that the First Amendment is violated as well when law enforcement gains access to phones without a warrant since it invalidates constitutional protections of speech, freedom of the press, religion, and association.

The New York Eastern District Court’s decision is by and large based precisely on that amicus brief. One of the arguments from it is that journalists entering the US are often forced to hand over their devices.

The court agreed that “letting border agents freely rifle through journalists’ work product and communications whenever they cross the border would pose an intolerable risk to press freedom,” said Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press attorney Grayson Clary in a press statement.

Meanwhile, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said they were reviewing this ruling – and would not comment on what the agency said are “pending criminal cases.”