The inside story of the teenager whose “swatting” calls sent armed police racing into hundreds of schools nationwide—and the private detective who tracked him down.
In just 20 minutes this morning, an automated license-plate-recognition (ALPR) system in Nashville, Tennessee, captured photographs and detailed information from nearly 1,000 vehicles as they passed by. Among them: eight black Jeep Wranglers, six Honda Accords, an ambulance, and a yellow Ford Fiesta with a vanity plate.
This trove of real-time vehicle data, collected by one of Motorola’s ALPR systems, is meant to be accessible by law enforcement. However, a flaw discovered by a security researcher has exposed live video feeds and detailed records of passing vehicles, revealing the staggering scale of surveillance enabled by this widespread technology.
More than 150 Motorola ALPR cameras have exposed their video feeds and leaking data in recent months, according to security researcher Matt Brown, who first publicized the issues in a series of YouTube videos after buying an ALPR camera on eBay and reverse engineering it.
Misconfigured license-plate-recognition systems reveal the livestreams of individual cameras and the wealth of data they collect about every vehicle that passes by them.
A network of Facebook pages has been advertising “fuel filters” that are actually meant to be used as silencers, which are heavily regulated by US law. Even US military officials are concerned.
Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, was apprehended on Monday after visiting a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
The FTC is targeting data brokers that monitored people’s movements during protests and around US military installations. But signs suggest the Trump administration will be far more lenient.
More than 3 billion phone coordinates collected by a US data broker expose the detailed movements of US military and intelligence workers in Germany—and the Pentagon is powerless to stop it.
