If the war in Ukraine and the still-unfolding atrocities in Russia didn’t offer enough fodder to turn the tables, this week provided a fresh dose of domestic crisis: An expired draft of a Supreme Court decision that would have been overturned Roe v. Wadeoverturning a decision that has served as a cornerstone of reproductive rights for nearly five decades. And this crisis will play out in the digital realm as well as the physical and legal.
WIRED’s Lily Hay Newman responded to the news with a guide to protecting your privacy if you’re seeking an abortion in a near-future world where Rowe actually canceled. Meanwhile, while right-wing pundits demand Supreme Court prosecutions of leaked information, we analyzed the laws surrounding the leaking of unclassified government information as a draft ruling and found that there is no clear statute criminalizing this type of information sharing. And law professor Amy Gaida walked us through the history of Supreme Court leaks that goes back hundreds of years.
As Russia’s war in Ukraine continues, we’ve looked at how small, consumer-grade drones offer Ukrainians a defensive tool that they’re exploiting like no other war in history. And further, a battle is shaping up in India between VPN firms and the Indian government, which is demanding they hand over users’ data. Meanwhile, the country’s new ‘super app’, Tata Neu, has raised concerns about user privacy.
And there’s more. As we do every week, we’ve rounded up all the news we haven’t uncovered or covered in depth. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
If RoweAs precedent ceases to protect abortion-seekers in the United States, the question of who can digitally monitor abortion-seekers and abortion providers—and how to avoid that surveillance—will become a civil liberties battle of the utmost urgency . This week, Motherboard’s Joseph Cox fired the opening salvo in that battle with a series of stories about data brokers offering to sell location data that includes individuals’ visits to abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood offices, an impressive form of capitalism for observation with immediate human implications. Anti-abortion protest groups have already used data from abortion clinics to target ads to women at the clinics, and the same data could soon be used to identify women seeking out-of-state abortions in violation of local laws.
Cox pointed to two companies, SafeGraph and Placer.ai, both of which sell location data on those who apparently visit abortion clinics. Placer.ai has gone so far as to offer “heat maps” of where abortion clinic visitors live to anyone who creates a free account on its site. Cox’s report had quick results: SafeGraph, which was banned from the Google Play store in June, responded to Motherboard’s story by pledging to stop selling abortion-related location data. One of the investors, Are Traasdahl, says he is selling his stake in the company and donating the money to Planned Parenthood. Placer.ai also said it has now removed Planned Parenthood locations from both the paid and free versions.
Updated 9/5 with a response from Placer.ai.
While we shame companies that leak or sell their users’ location data, Grindr has long represented a uniquely dangerous combination: a company that woos at-risk users and then flatly fails to protect their privacy. this week The Wall Street Journal revealed that Grindr users’ location data had been sold for years – since 2017. until at least two years ago – through ad networks, potentially revealing the movements, jobs and home addresses of millions of gay men. The revelation follows years of Grindr data abuses and disregard for privacy and security, such as allowing anyone to identify users with a triangulation technique and even turning a blind eye when one person’s life was ruined by fake Grindr accounts.
In 2022 Russian military occupation does not simply mean physical devastation from shelling, unspeakable war crimes, and mass deportations of Ukrainian civilians into Russia’s interior. In the Russian-occupied Kherson region of southern Ukraine, this now means that Ukrainians are cut off from the global internet and rerouted through Russia’s tightly controlled, monitored and censored Runet. The move, confirmed Monday by Internet monitoring firm Netblocks, represents a grim advance of the “split web” idea for repressive regimes that increasingly cut off their own regional share of the Internet to exert greater control over their populations. Russia now appears to be experimenting with extending its internet crackdown to the victims of its unprovoked military conquests in an effort to better control and influence digital information there as well.
last month, The New Yorker published an in-depth investigation into how Israeli hacking firm NSO Group’s highly sophisticated smartphone spyware, known as Pegasus, was used to target members of the Catalan independence movement in Spain. Now Spain’s government can try its own medicine: both Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and the country’s Defense Minister Margarita Robles said their phones were also hacked with Pegasus in May and June 2021. A Spanish criminal court is investigating the hack uncovered by security researchers at Citizen Lab. While the Spanish government claims the hack must have been carried out by a foreign perpetrator, Pegasus’ Catalan targets have long pointed the finger — at least for their own targeting — at Spain’s National Intelligence Center.
The U.S. Treasury Department announced on Friday that it is imposing sanctions on Blender.io, a “blending” service that is used to disguise the origins and destinations of cryptocurrency. Mixers including Bitcoin Fog and Helix are being prosecuted by the US Department of Justice for helping to obscure the criminal origins of the cryptocurrency. But the sanctions against Blender.io represent the first time the Treasury Department has taken steps to financially ostracize a blender, making it a crime for any American to transact with the service. In that case, Blender is accused of helping launder $20.5 million of $620 million worth of cryptocurrency that North Korea’s Lazarus hackers stole from cryptocurrency firm Ronin Networks in March. This hack alone suggests that North Korean thieves have already surpassed the estimated $400 million in cryptocurrency — mostly the Ethereum currency — that they stole last year.
