#privacy

Records released to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other requesters under the Freedom of Information Act show the US Postal Service's internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) monitored social media posts about protests in 2020 and 2021, with little record of oversight or legal justification, EFF says. Bulletins covered events across the political spectrum, including a planned "Million MAGA March," a Virginia gun-rights rally and counter-protest, a Save the Post Office protest and protests outside then-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's home.

EFF sued in 2021 after Yahoo News revealed the program. The agency says it renamed the program and stopped issuing bulletins, but EFF notes the records don't say the monitoring stopped. Emails about the program were kept on an external hard drive that, officials said, someone dropped, making it unreadable; the originals had already been deleted under the retention schedule. Few documents on internal safeguards were released.

A group calling itself the Department of Peace says it took personnel records from the Department of Homeland Security's login system and handed them to the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), which published them on Wednesday, October 28, as "Icepick." According to WIRED and NPR, the data covers more than 41,000 employees and contractors: names, work email addresses, phone numbers and office locations, plus supervisors and the internal permission groups each person belongs to.

WIRED counts more than 21,000 records from Customs and Border Protection and about 10,000 from ICE, including staff in groups that court filings tie to certified undercover operations and wiretap programs. DDoSecrets says the data came from DHS's Okta system; Okta told WIRED it has no evidence its systems were compromised. DHS said it was "aware of a potential breach" and working to protect employees.

The release's backers call it an accountability tool; a Recorded Future analyst told WIRED it could help adversaries target staff. By Thursday, Bluesky was blocking links to the dataset and a searchable site was offline after a takedown notice filed for DHS, TechCrunch reports.

A security researcher who posts on X as log4j says he got root access to his 2025 Samsung TV after noticing oddly specific ads, then live-posted what he found in its Tizen software. According to Tom's Hardware and Decrypt, a policy file lists functions such as an always-on microphone, automatic content recognition (identifying what is on screen), location, network mapping, a targeted-ads service and user profiling, and he describes on-device AI models that categorize audio and screenshots. He says TVs without a microphone look for one on connected soundbars or Bluetooth devices.

The claims are his own and not independently confirmed. A Hugging Face engineer who tested an already-rooted Tizen TV saw the microphone open for five seconds and then stop; an X community note points out that Samsung advertises some sound-listening features, such as pet and baby alerts. Experts told Decrypt that this kind of collection is usually written into privacy policies and that AI-assisted reverse engineering will surface more of it. The researcher also says OpenAI banned his account for "cyber abuse," which he disputes.

A New Mexico district court judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in civil penalties, CNBC reports, in a case stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In September a Santa Fe jury found the company liable for misleading state residents about how it collects and protects user data, finding more than 43 million violations of the state's Unfair Practices Act, each carrying a penalty of up to $5,000.

According to the filing, the state was awarded $219.5 billion, reduced to $25 billion. Judge Francis Mathew wrote that the number and duration of willful violations, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership and the "intentional and systematic nature" of the misstatements supported the maximum per-violation penalty. Interest accrues at 15% a year until the fine is paid.

Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the order shows such violations "carry real consequences." Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the company is confident it will prevail on appeal and that the ruling "makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico."

Researchers at security firm Claroc say they found 6,800 links that users of Meta's Muse AI agent had created to share conversations, and that opening a few hundred turned up material clearly not meant to be public, Ars Technica reports. Examples include a candidate's notes for a confidential call with a frontier AI lab, a company's internal revenue review, a small-business loan application and a staff vacation calendar.

The cause, Ars says, is that Muse puts the conversation title in the link's subdomain on a single Meta domain. When a recipient opens the link, the name passes through DNS and can end up in commercial passive-DNS databases that anyone can search. Claroc calls these "GhostShares." "It took one query," the researchers wrote.

Claroc's CTO says he reported the issue through Meta's bug bounty on October 8. Meta told Ars it has paused the sharing feature while it reviews the report and considers changes to how links can be discovered.

Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt as protesters gathered outside, Flock CEO Garrett Langley argued that if society wants criminals held accountable, "we shouldn't pause progress," and compared the trade-offs to driverless cars. TechCrunch reports he deflected questions about the backlash that has cost Flock contracts and led to layoffs.

Langley also said Flock's gunshot-detection microphones detect "just gunshots." Flock's website says the audio product can also detect street takeovers, severe crashes, fireworks and sideshows, and when the feature launched the company said it would listen for "screaming" before changing that to "sounds of human distress" and later pulling distress detection.

Major banks warned that the rapid rollout of AI shopping agents is creating fraud, scam and privacy risks faster than consumer safeguards are developing.

Concerns include how agents handle financial data, whether they can be manipulated toward insecure payment methods and who is responsible when an automated transaction goes wrong.

Why it matters

Once agents can spend money, security failures become materially different from a bad chatbot answer. Identity, authorization, transaction confirmation and dispute resolution become core parts of the agent security model.