Anonymous, candid reviews made Glassdoor a powerful place to research potential employers. A policy shift requiring users to privately verify their real names is raising privacy concerns.

Using Glassdoor, the site famous for candid employee reviews that break through corporate facades, is less anonymous than it used to be.

In July last year, the company added new social features integrated from Fishbowl, an app for work-related discussions acquired in 2021. Glassdoor has also changed its sign-up process to ask people to disclose their full name, job title, and employer; historically, it had required email addresses, but not names. In tests by WIRED, returning users who didn’t previously provide a full name are prompted to enter one by an impossible-to-dismiss pop-up that says, “Entering your real name is required to verify your profile but other users won't see your name unless you choose to share it.”

Reviews of employers posted to Glassdoor remain anonymous, and people can post in its new discussion channels with only their work titles or employer visible, but the company’s policy of collecting and verifying real names has triggered concern among some users and privacy experts.

Alarm about those changes recently spread on social media, where several people described logging in to old Glassdoor accounts and allegedly finding their names had been added, they say, without their consent. WIRED reviewed emails in which one user was told by a Glassdor support representative that they would not be able to remove their name, and would have to delete their account if they wanted it gone. Glassdoor did not provide comment on these scenarios. When this reporter attempted to delete or change her name from a Glassdoor profile, the site instead provided a link to contact the help center to make changes.

Glassdoor’s help pages say it has to verify identities and employment information to “ensure that our users can engage in authentic, candid conversations with other professionals, coworkers, and company leaders in a safe space.” Having verified identity info on file could also make it more seamless for people to respond to the job ads listed on the platform. But trying to maintain that accuracy comes with a cost.

“You can’t both be verified and anonymous,” says Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a pro-privacy organization. “You can’t both be a social network and a confidential reporting space. You can do one of those well, or you can do both of them badly.”

The concerns over Glassdoor’s evolving policies on real names show how confusion can arise when a platform that many people visit only infrequently shifts its business model. Amanda Livingood, Glassdoor’s VP of corporate communications, provided a statement saying that integrating Fishbowl with Glassdoor created a broader set of services that user information is now shared across—a different model to that many people with older Glassdoor accounts signed up for. Fishbowl’s old terms of service state that people who signed up for accounts may have been required to add their names.

“When a user provides information, either during the sign-up process or by uploading a résumé, that information will automatically cross-populate between all Glassdoor services, including our community app Fishbowl,” Livingood says. “When using Glassdoor and Fishbowl, there is always the option to remain anonymous. Users can choose to be fully anonymous or reveal elements of their identity, like company name or job title, while using our community service.” Company help pages say real names and email addresses are used only for “verification purposes _only_.”

Glassdoor has a history of working to keep its users’ identities private, but there are concerns about these identity changes. “Glassdoor has been second to none in defending their user’s First Amendment rights,” says Aaron Mackey, a senior staff attorney with the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation. He represented a Glassdoor user in a case initiated in 2019 when their former employer, cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, attempted to unmask the authors of reviews, alleging that former workers had violated severance agreements with their posts. (The parties settled and the subpoena was withdrawn in 2020).

The current terms, Mackey says, are a big shift. “This is concerning, if the way in which they’re operating their business now creates potential for people to be identified, separate from whether or not they’re sued.”

Glassdoor won name recognition by marketing itself as a place focused on protecting anonymity, but companies with smaller workforces have always had good odds at guessing who wrote a particular review. That might be even easier if managers can also see social channels on Glassdoor where people are posting with their real names, indicating which workers have accounts on the site. People unaccustomed to thinking about their online footprint could inadvertently leave big clues, for example, by posting anonymously and then less covertly at the same time.

Glassdoor’s terms cite the risk. “You acknowledge that Glassdoor cannot guarantee your anonymity,” as a company or department’s size, the content posted, and the user’s location may allow employers’ to infer who left a review, the document says. “You should understand this risk before submitting Content to the services.”

**Social Pivot**

Glassdoor’s acquisition of Fishbowl in 2021 united two platforms that lured users by hosting relatively unfiltered discussions of work, a place to pick up the kind of gossip more often shared in person. Together they had offered a counterweight to LinkedIn, which relies on people using their full identities and often results in rose-tinted, overly congratulatory, and sometimes downright cringey posts about work.

Glassdoor is owned by Recruit Holdings, which also owns Indeed. Indeed and Glassdoor profit from advertising open jobs. Some 55 million people visit Glassdoor every month, according to the company. Verifying profiles could help prevent trolls from posting fake information about companies and misleading those seeking an insider’s view—all of which erode trust with other users.

Changing policies on names and verification can erode trust, too. If Glassdoor isn’t so anonymous, it may change how some of those users engage. The recent social media discussion inspired some people to try and delete their accounts.

Tracking the evolution of Glassdoor’s terms of service shows how its commitments to users changed as it began to add new social features. The company consolidated its terms with Fishbowl between December 2022 and January 2023, months before the company announced the new discussion channels on Glassdoor.

Some of the changes to the terms added information about how users are verified, as well as how they can be anonymous across services. Glassdoor’s terms of use state that the company may use information obtained from third parties to update profiles, along with personal data provided on résumés or elsewhere on its services. It may also attempt to verify employment history.

Glassdoor’s approach is very different from that of Blind, a younger, competing forum where people discuss work. It requires an email to sign up, and a work email to access certain features, but says that it does not store email addresses, and that activity on the site cannot be linked back to a person’s email. Blind does not require real names to use its services, but employers could potentially know an employee signed up by seeing they received a verification code at a company email address.

Glassdoor calls its community aspects a “verified network,” requiring people to confirm their identity, including name, job title, industry, company, and active email address or social network to gain access to all of the Glassdoor services. (It also recommends handing over both work and personal email addresses, as well as a phone number.) On a page updated in December, Glassdoor says it uses a “proprietary verification process” to validate accounts, along with confirming emails or an active profile from another social network.

The company’s help pages also say, “We don’t allow anyone, including employers, to access the identity of anonymous posts.”

But Glassdoor’s pages add a caveat: “Considering the reality of our digital age, we're unable to fully confirm our users' identities, the truthfulness of their contributions, or their employment status.”

Glassdoor Wants to Know Your Real Name

Plus: The operator of a dark-web cryptocurrency “mixing” service is found guilty, and a US senator reveals that popular safes contain secret backdoors.

How do you know the internet has a deepfake porn problem? Just look at copyright takedown requests. WIRED found this week that Google is receiving thousands of Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaints for deepfake nudes, most of which are published by just a handful of websites. Experts say the deluge of DMCA takedown requests is evidence that Google should delist the offending sites from search. In Texas, meanwhile, a federal court upheld the state’s age-verification requirements for porn sites, which could lead to even more lawsuits.

In a win for privacy advocates, Airbnb announced on Monday that it will ban the use of indoor security cameras at short-term rental properties around the world. The ban extends to outdoor areas where there is a “greater expectation of privacy,” such as saunas or outdoor showers. The company has long banned the use of hidden cameras and required hosts to tell guests where it has security cameras installed. Hosts who violate the security cam ban could have their properties removed from Airbnb.

Cryptocurrency firm Binance’s troubles have gone from bad to downright scary. Two of the company's executives—Tigran Gambaryan, a former financial crimes investigator for the IRS, and UK-based government affairs specialist Nadeem Anjarwalla, have been held for weeks by Nigeria’s government amid its broader crackdown on cryptocurrency. Neither man has been charged with any crime, and their families are asking the US and UK governments for help securing their release.

In case you’re wondering: No, the US government isn’t hiding evidence of aliens, according to a new Pentagon report. But it sure seems to be hiding _something_, raising more questions about what’s out there if that thing isn’t UFOs. Elsewhere in the world of government secrets, the US House Intelligence Committee chair recently held a closed-door meeting in which he urged lawmakers to block privacy reforms to a major US surveillance program by citing how it could be used to surveil US-based protesters, further raising civil liberties concerns. Congress’ efforts to renew that program, known as Section 702, remain ongoing.

Donald Trump this week earned enough delegates in the 2024 Republican primary to officially win the party’s nomination. If Trump does win another term in the White House, experts fear he could use a slate of “emergency powers” to carry out an authoritarian agenda—and there’s little the other branches of government could do to stop him.

Finally, reporters at _Der Spiegel_, Recorder, _The_ _Washington Post_, and WIRED collaborated on an investigation into a global network of violent predators who use major platforms like Discord, Telegram, and even Roblox to target children and extort them into committing horrific acts of abuse—or worse.

And that’s not all. Each week, we round up the security news we didn’t cover in-depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe out there.

Insurance companies have long offered discounts to drivers who'll carry GPS devices or download smartphone apps that track their driving habits. But when wary drivers refuse, insurers find other ways of monitoring their driving. Data brokers like LexisNexus are buying people's car data directly from manufacturers, such as General Motors, which are making a killing by selling it off. This data is then used to create “risk” scores for individual drivers, which insurance providers use to set premiums. The businesses claim the data-sharing is consensual, but most drivers have no idea what's happening. Drivers whose risk scores are shared with insurance providers often see their monthly insurance payments skyrocket.

**The Bitcoin Fog Case Ends in a Guilty Verdict**

The operator of a darknet cryptocurrency “mixing” service called Bitcoin Fog faces a maximum of 20 years in prison after his conviction this week by a federal jury in Washington, DC. Roman Sterlingov, 35, ran Bitcoin Fog between 2011 and 2021, moving roughly $400 million worth of currency, much of which, prosecutors say, was tied to narcotics, identity theft, and cybercrime. Sterlingov had denied founding Bitcoin Fog in interviews with WIRED; however, the US Justice Department countered that claim in court with blockchain analysis and a trial of financial paperwork.

**Popular Safes Contain Secret Backdoors**

Two commercial safe makers have been called out for installing backdoors in their safes, according to a letter by Ron Wyden, a US senator from Oregon. The reset codes are one reason the Department of Defense has banned the safes from being used inside the US government. Knowledge of the codes, which Wyden says leaves consumers vulnerable to criminals and spies, was made public through a letter he wrote to the National Counterintelligence and Security Center. In it, he asks the agency to issue an alert, warning Americans about the risks posed by the safes.

Automakers Are Telling Your Insurance Company How You Really Drive

For months, US lawmakers have examined every side of a historic surveillance debate. With the introduction of the SAFE Act, all that’s left to do now is vote.

A bill introduced by senators Dick Durbin and Mike Lee to reauthorize the Section 702 surveillance program is the fifth introduced in the US Congress this winter. The authority is threatening to expire in a month, disrupting a global wiretapping program said to inform a third of articles in the President’s Daily Briefing—a morning “tour d’horizon” of US spies’ top concerns.

But the stakes aren't exactly so clear. With or without Congress, the Biden administration is seeking court approval to extend the 702 program into 2025. From the moment US representative Mike Johnson assumed the House speakership, he’s been unable to orchestrate a vote on the program. Outgunned most recently by Mike Turner, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Johnson was forced to kill a vote after a month of negotiations.

This, even though Congress can essentially agree on one thing if nothing else: that the 702 program is vital to the national defense and that it can’t be allowed to expire. Johnson has, once again, vowed to hold a vote on the matter, this time after Easter. And historically, this is where things have begun to fall apart.

The biggest hurdle to reauthorizing the program is a dispute between lawmakers over whether the government should get search warrants before looking up Americans using 702, a massive wiretap database full of millions of email, voice, and text conversations intercepted by spies.

The Durbin-Lee bill contains tweaks designed, its authors say, to meet the Biden administration halfway. While all the legislation up to this point has wrestled over the title of “reform bill,” Durbin’s has set its sights on an idea far more defensible: The Security and Freedom Enhancement (SAFE) Act, he says, is a “bill of compromise.”

Unlike other reform bills, the SAFE Act would _not_ require the FBI to obtain a warrant to find out if the 702 database contains an American’s communications. Only if the search produces results would investigators need a warrant, and only if they wanted to read what the messages say.

Without going to court, investigators could learn whether the communications they’re after exist, whether the person they’re looking at communicated with any foreigners under US surveillance, and when exactly those conversations took place. As it’s generally trivial for law enforcement to obtain these kinds of records anyway, this is a compromise that doesn’t serve up a major loss for lawmakers on the side of reform.

The tweak will add to the difficulty the FBI is having convincing lawmakers that warrants will hinder investigations or destroy the program altogether. “This narrow warrant requirement is carefully crafted to ensure that it is feasible to implement,” Durbin says, “and sufficiently flexible to accommodate legitimate security needs.”

“There is little doubt that Section 702 is a valuable national security tool,” adds Durbin, but the program sweeps up “massive amounts of Americans’ communications.”

“Even after implementing compliance measures, the FBI still conducted more than 200,000 warrantless searches of Americans’ communications in just one year—more than 500 warrantless searches per day,” he says.

The SAFE Act contains the same menu of emergency exceptions that members of the House Judiciary Committee offered up in previously introduced legislation. The exceptions would allow the FBI to ignore the warrant requirements during emergencies, such as people faced with imminent harm or death. The bureau can search the database at will using “known threat signatures” linked to cybercrimes as well, a carve-out designed to help the FBI dodge legal red tape while mitigating harm from malicious software.

While the possibility looms that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) will approve the Biden administration’s request, extending the 702 program into 2025 on its own, it's an outcome that all sides seem eager to avoid—improvising a way to prolong a hotly debated surveillance program being a bad look for nearly everyone involved.

One of the program’s core tenets, according to a “fact sheet” distributed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) this year, reflects the bargain it strikes between the government and the public: US spies are to receive an “invaluable source of intelligence on foreigners located outside the US.” Americans get in return “robust civil liberties and privacy safeguards, overseen by all three branches of government.”

If Congress had meant, in 2018, to reauthorize the 702 program for seven years rather than six, its members wouldn’t have found out last week. Allowing the program to carry on without a mandate from Congress—with nothing but a green light from a secret court—is a legacy of dysfunction that most members aren’t eager to carry, and one that the intelligence community may also come to resent, as people start to question the integrity of its oversight.

“Although the legislation does not include every reform we have called for, it is a thoughtful compromise that would meaningfully restore privacy in the United States,” says Sean Vitka, policy director at Demand Progress, a digital rights nonprofit.

“An overwhelming number of Americans from across the political spectrum want Congress to seize this once-in-a-generation moment and get this done.”

Sinking Section 702 Wiretap Program Offered One Last Lifeboat

Every US president has the ability to invoke “emergency powers” that could give an authoritarian leader the ability to censor the internet, restrict travel, and more.

Donald Trump appears to dream of being an American authoritarian should he return to office. The former US president, who on Tuesday secured enough delegates to win the 2024 Republican nomination, plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and house scores of them in large camps. He wants to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military in cities across the nation to quell civil unrest. He wants to prosecute his political opponents. There’s an organized and well-funded effort to replace career civil servants in the federal government with Trump loyalists who will do his bidding and help him consolidate power.

What’s also concerning to legal experts, though, are the special powers that would be available to him that have been available to all recent presidents but have not typically been used. Should Trump decide to go full authoritarian, he could utilize what are called “emergency powers” to shut down the internet in certain areas, censor the internet, freeze people’s bank accounts, restrict transportation, and more.

Utilizing laws like the National Emergencies Act, the Communications Act of 1934, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), he would be able to wield power in ways this country has never seen. Furthermore, America’s vast surveillance state, which has regularly been abused, could theoretically be abused even further to surveil his perceived political enemies.

“There really aren’t emergency powers relating to surveillance, and that’s because the non-emergency powers are so powerful and give such broad authority to the executive branch. They just don’t need emergency powers for that purpose,” says Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program at the New York University School of Law.

Goitein says she worries most about what a president could do with the emergency powers available to them, though, when she considers whether a president might decide to behave like an authoritarian. She says the laws surrounding these powers offer few opportunities for another branch of government to stop a president from doing as they please.

“Emergency powers are meant to give presidents extraordinary authorities for use in extraordinary circumstances. Because they provide these very potent authorities, it is critical that they have checks and balances built into them and safeguards against abuse,” Goitein says. “The problem with our current emergency powers system—and that system comprises a lot of different laws—is that it really lacks those checks and balances.”

Under the National Emergencies Act, for example, the president simply has to declare a national emergency of some kind to activate powers that are contained in more than 130 different provisions of law. What constitutes an actual emergency is not defined by these laws, so Trump could come up with any number of reasons for declaring one, and he couldn’t easily be stopped from abusing this power.

“There's a provision of the Communications Act of 1934 that allows the president to shut down or take over communications facilities in a national emergency. There is a provision that allows the president to exert pretty much unspecified controls over domestic transportation, which could be read extremely broadly,” Goitein says. “There’s IEEPA, which allows the president to freeze the assets of and block financial transactions with anyone, including an American, if the president finds it necessary to address an unusual or extraordinary threat that is emanating at least partly from overseas.”

Goitein says that if someone is targeted using IEEPA, they wouldn’t be allowed to even rent an apartment, buy groceries, or have a job in the US. She says Congress needs to reform these laws before a president decides to abuse them.

You can imagine Trump deciding he wants to shut down the internet, use the military as a police force, and utilize the government’s surveillance powers if a large anti-Trump protest were to occur in one or more cities around the country. This would resemble the tactics authoritarians have used to quash popular resistance in less democratic countries around the globe.

Though the Insurrection Act is not technically an emergency power, because no emergency has to be declared for it to be used, Goitein says she’s deeply concerned about how that law could be utilized.

“It clearly falls into the category of extraordinary powers that are meant for extraordinary circumstances,” Goitein says. “The Insurrection Act gives the president incredibly broad discretion to use federal armed forces as a domestic police force.”

Chris Edelson, an assistant professor of government at the American University, tells WIRED that he worries what Trump might do regardless of what is lawfully allowed.

“I think he will do what he can get away with, and he will make use of whatever tools are available, which could include statutory provisions like the National Emergencies Act, or it could just include acting by fiat. He could just say, ‘I’ll order the government to do whatever I want,’” Edelson says.

If the US Supreme Court were to rule that Trump has overstepped what he’s allowed to do, Edelson says he’s not confident Trump would obey such a decision. This harkens back to something that happened in 1832 when President Andrew Jackson said of the Supreme Court decision in _Worcester v. Georgia_, “\[Chief Justice\] John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” The Supreme Court can put out a decision, but it’s not guaranteed that a president will listen. The executive branch has been operating under norms, and Trump likes to break norms.

“Trump is a bully at heart. He might try to ignore a court ruling,” Edelson says. “He’ll do whatever he thinks he can get away with, including ignoring a judicial decision.”

Regardless of who’s president, Goitein and Delson both say that Congress needs to reform the laws that allow presidents to wield such great power. If they’re not abused by Trump, they could be abused by another president in the future. It’s best not to leave a powerful weapon available to someone who may one day be tempted to use it, and Trump has historically tested what a president can get away with.

The ‘Emergency Powers’ Risk of a Second Trump Presidency

A global network of violent predators is hiding in plain sight, targeting children on major platforms, grooming them, and extorting them to commit horrific acts of abuse.

There Are Dark Corners of the Internet. Then There's 764

The US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit has vacated an injunction against an age-verification requirement to view internet porn in Texas.

Texas can enforce a law requiring age-verification systems on porn websites, the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled Thursday. The appeals court vacated an injunction against the law's age-verification requirement but said that Texas cannot enforce a provision requiring porn websites to "display health warnings about the effects of the consumption of pornography."

In a 2-1 decision, judges ruled that "the age-verification requirement is rationally related to the government's legitimate interest in preventing minors' access to pornography. Therefore, the age-verification requirement does not violate the First Amendment."

The Texas law was challenged by the owners of Pornhub and other adult websites and an adult-industry lobby group called the Free Speech Coalition. "We disagree strenuously with the analysis of the Court majority," the Free Speech Coalition said. "As the dissenting opinion by Judge \[Patrick\] Higginbotham makes clear, this ruling violates decades of precedent from the Supreme Court."

A US District Court judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the law in August 2023, finding that "Plaintiffs have shown that their First Amendment rights will likely be violated if the statute takes effect, and that they will suffer irreparable harm absent an injunction."

But a few weeks later, the 5th Circuit issued a temporary stay that allowed the law to take effect in September 2023. The new ruling issued last week was on the merits of the preliminary injunction.

**Court Cites Magazine Precedent**

The 5th Circuit, generally regarded as one of the most conservative appeals courts, found that the Texas porn-site law should be reviewed on the "rational-basis" standard and not under strict scrutiny. The court panel majority pointed to _Ginsberg v. New York_, a 1968 Supreme Court ruling about the sale of "girlie" magazines to a 16-year-old at a lunch counter. The Supreme Court in that case upheld a New York criminal obscenity statute that prohibited the knowing sale of obscene materials to minors.

The same principle applies to the internet, the 5th Circuit majority found. "Because it is never obvious whether an Internet user is an adult or a child, any attempt to identify the user will implicate adults in some way... To suggest protecting children would be so difficult is inconsistent with _Ginsberg_, where rational basis review was sufficient _even though_ adults would presumably have to identify themselves to buy girlie magazines," the ruling said.

As Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman wrote, the 5th Circuit "panel majority claims the 56-year-old _Ginsberg_ opinion, which dealt with offline retailers, governs the Conlaw \[constitutional law\] analysis of the Texas law instead of the squarely on-point 1997 _Reno v. ACLU_ and 2004 _Ashcroft v. ACLU_ opinions, both of which dealt with the Internet."

In his dissent, Judge Higginbotham said the majority's attempts to distinguish _Ginsberg_ from later rulings "are unconvincing." Although "_Ginsberg_ remains good law and indubitably recognizes the government's power to protect children from age-inappropriate materials," the Supreme Court "has unswervingly applied strict scrutiny to content-based regulations that limit adults' access to protected speech," he wrote.

The Texas law "limits access to materials that may be denied to minors but remain constitutionally protected speech for adults," Higginbotham wrote. "It follows that the law must face strict scrutiny review because it limits adults' access to protected speech using a content-based distinction—whether that speech is harmful to minors."

**Section 230 Analysis Flawed, Professor Says**

The 5th Circuit panel majority found that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does not preempt the Texas law. Goldman called the decision "another entry in the Fifth Circuit's increasingly unstable Section 230 jurisprudence."

Goldman said that judges seem to be saying "that the age authentication mandate only regulates the services' conduct, and thus it doesn't impose liability for third-party content... However, fundamentally, the statute imposes liability for services for publishing third-party content to underage viewers, and Section 230 clearly should apply to that aspect."

Porn Sites Need Age-Verification Systems in Texas, Court Rules

A closed-door presentation for House lawmakers late last year portrayed American anti-war protesters as having possible ties to Hamas in an effort to kill privacy reforms to a major US spy program.

At a private meeting about the reauthorization of a major United States surveillance program late last year, the Republican chairman of the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) presented an image of Americans protesting the war in Gaza while implying possible ties between the protesters and Hamas, an allegation that was used to illustrate why surveillance reforms may prove detrimental to national security, WIRED has learned. Sources who attended the meeting say it alarmed Republicans who are pursuing new limits on the US government's power to warrantlessly access the communications of US citizens.

In December, as many as 200 Republican staffers gathered behind closed doors to hear a presentation by House Intelligence chair Mike Turner, one of several such meetings that day aimed at shoring up support for a US surveillance program known as Section 702.

House lawmakers were expected to cast votes the following day to determine which of two rival bills would become law. While both aimed to reauthorize the 702 program, they shared little else in common. The first bill was backed by Turner and Jim Himes—HPSCI's leading Democrat—and had the support of the US intelligence community. The second, a bill chock full of privacy reforms, had been introduced by the House Judiciary Committee and was opposed by the Biden White House.

While Turner addressed the Republican staffers, representatives from the intelligence community conducted their own briefing with Democrats on Capitol Hill. Both meetings were designed to dissuade House members from supporting the privacy reforms offered under the Judiciary bill—chiefly among them, an amendment that would force the FBI to obtain warrants before accessing the communications of Americans collected under the 702 program—phone calls, emails, and text messages intercepted by US spies in the process of eavesdropping on foreigners overseas.

The briefing conducted by Turner at roughly 2 pm EST on December 11 carried on for more than an hour. Roughly 15 minutes into the presentation, two slides were introduced referencing American protesters. The implication, sources present for the briefing tell WIRED, was that the demonstrators were suspected of having ties to Hamas, which the US government classifies as a terrorist organization.

A spokesperson for the House Intelligence Committee said in an email on Friday that the protesters depicted in the slide had “responded to what appears to be a Hamas solicitation.”

A WIRED review of the slides shown by Turner casts doubt on that claim. Notably, while the two slides were portrayed as being related to a single protest in November outside Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer's Brooklyn residence, WIRED has since learned that the slides reference two separate events that occurred nearly a month apart.

What’s more, the allegation that the protesters were following Hamas' lead is based on a post on X that contains false information about who organized one of these two events.

Three Republican staffers who attended Turner’s briefing that day tell WIRED the images immediately set off alarms. Section 702 authorizes the government to surveil foreigners located physically overseas, they said, but not Americans or individuals on US soil. Even while Turner spoke, a few staffers began privately debating whether what Turner described was a lawful use of the program.

While eavesdropping on foreigners is permitted, doing so for the explicit purpose of gaining access to an American’s communications—a practice commonly referred to as “reverse targeting”—is strictly forbidden.

"At the outset of the presentation, he's running through slides, making his case for why 702 reauthorization is needed,” a senior Republican aide tells WIRED. “Then he throws up that photo. The framing was: ‘Here are protesters outside of Chuck Schumer's house. We need to be able to use 702 to query these people.’”

Another aide in attendance said: "The sentiment was that \[Turner\] wanted to know if these people were talking to Hamas. That's how I interpreted why he brought up those slides."

Jeff Naft, the HPSCI spokesperson, says the purpose of the slides was to illustrate that, even if the protesters did have ties to Hamas, they would “not be subject to surveillance” under the 702 program. “702 is not used to target protesters," he says. “702 is used on foreign terrorist organizations, like Hamas. Chairman Turner’s presentation was a distinction exercise to explain the difference between a US person and Hamas.”

WIRED's sources, who are not authorized to discuss closed-door briefings and requested anonymity to do so, describe this as a conflation of two separate issues—a tactic, they say, that has become commonplace in the debate over the program’s future. “Yes, it’s true, you cannot ‘target’ protesters under 702,” one aide, a legislative director for a Republican lawmaker, says. “But that doesn’t mean the FBI doesn't still have the power to access those emails or listen to their calls if it wants.”

Under the 702 program—authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—the term “target” refers to foreign individuals whose communications are primarily sought after by US spies. But a person needn't be a “target” (or a foreigner, for that matter) for the US government to intercept their calls or emails. Nor does a person need to be a “target” for the FBI to access and review those conversations, a practice that privacy advocates have come to call a “backdoor search.”

The government’s claim that 702 is not used to _target_ protesters may be misleading to those not steeped in the program’s specifics. Between 2020 and early 2021, the FBI conducted “tens of thousands” of queries related to “civil unrest” in the United States. Even had those queries been lawful, the FBI would never have referred to those Americans as “targets.” For people whose communications are being accessed, it’s a distinction without much of a difference.

A Biden administration official tells WIRED that it was made clear at the briefing that individuals “can never be queried due to the fact that they participated in a protest.” Any suggestion to the contrary, they said, is inaccurate. “US person queries of lawfully collected 702 data are based on information such as contact with a foreign terrorist, since such queries must be reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information,” the official says.

The bar for justifying a query, though, is far below “contact with a terrorist,” according to Elizabeth Goitein, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law. “The law’s definition of ‘foreign intelligence’ is extremely broad and sweeps far beyond matters relating to terrorism or espionage,” she says.

A query for an American's communications may be allowed, for instance, if it's deemed necessary for “purposes of security," Goitein says, noting that the term “security” isn't defined. The information sought by the government can merely be necessary to understand the “conduct of foreign affairs,” something that the Center for Strategic & International Studies says may apply to “almost any activity.”

Last year, the FISA court approved three definitions of foreign intelligence information, adds Goitein. One of them is simply information related to “foreign governments and related entities.”

James Czerniawski, a senior policy analyst at Americans for Prosperity, a libertarian think tank, says the idea that US protesters could be queried under 702 without a warrant, simply based on accusations of harboring overseas ties, represents “an affront to Americans' privacy.”

"It manifests why trust has eroded in the very institutions meant to protect us, and it represents a material threat to the millions of Americans who will undoubtedly soon join protests,” Czerniawski says, “no matter what happens in November.”

Beyond what the slides represented to Turner’s audience at the time, they are more controversial now for reasons that weren't quite apparent during that December 11 briefing.

The first of Turner's slides includes a photograph of anti-war activists sitting cross-legged at an intersection in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, arms interlocked. The second slide features a tweet by Matthew Foldi, a conservative staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon. It also relates to a protest outside of Schumer’s home. The implication of Foldi’s tweet, sources say, was that the protesters in both cases had gotten their marching orders overseas from an organization Foldi referred to as a “Hamas front group.”

Regardless of whether Turner and his staff bought into the claim, there are several issues with this portrayal, and HPSCI had no evidence on hand to support the allegation—not to staff members in December and not last week when questioned by WIRED about the veracity of the claim.

The first of the two slides, showing protesters sitting in the street, can be traced back to a demonstration on October 13, organized by the US nonprofit Jewish Voice for Peace. Thousands of Americans had attended protests across New York City that day.

According to a local news report, several rabbis as well as descendants of Holocaust survivors were among the 57 people arrested for blocking traffic near Schumer’s home. New York State Assembly members Zohran Mamdani and Marcela Mitaynes were also present and were issued citations for acts of civil disobedience. Statements gathered from journalists at the scene show the demonstration was being closely monitored by the FBI’s New York field office. But aside from a few “scuffles” with counter-protesters earlier in the day, there are no reports of the protests turning violent.

Sean Vitka, a policy director at the civil-liberties-focused nonprofit Demand Progress, says Congress enacted FISA specifically to stop the FBI from spying on protesters. "Spying on protesters is ice in the heart of democracy—and if someone trolling the ‘other side’s’ protest on Twitter is cause to spy on those protesters, we have an enormous problem,” he says.

The second slide in Turner’s presentation featured the tweet by Foldi, which likewise references a march on Schumer’s home. That protest, however, took place nearly a month after the first. HPSCI's claim that Hamas may have incited the demonstration appears solely based on this remark by Foldi, who claims the protesters were responding to a call issued by a pro-Palestinian group known as Samidoun.

However, that wasn't the case.

The only evidence of the Palestinian group’s involvement is that the protest was included on a calendar maintained by Samidoun on its website. The calendar currently lists more than 5,000 protests that have taken place around the world, from Australia and England to Finland, Nigeria, Iceland, and Japan. The same site bears a disclaimer that notes the list includes protests not organized by Samidoun, and visitors are encouraged to submit details about events being organized in their respective countries.

Foldi went on to portray Samidoun as having been “banned from Germany and booted from numerous payment processors over suspicions of acting as a Hamas front group.”

A German branch of Samidoun was dissolved in November, but not as a result of evidence it had ties to Hamas. Rather, the group, formed to protest the imprisonment of Palestinians, was accused of spreading “anti-Jewish conspiracy theories,” an allegation that the organizers vehemently deny, while noting their ranks boast many Jewish members.

For obvious reasons, Germany has some of the strictest antisemitism laws in the world, enabling Berlin to issue blanket bans against protests aimed at raising awareness of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Such bans would be unlawful in the United States under its constitution.

Branches of Samidoun have also faced bans by payment processors overseas. This also happens frequently in the United States. The bar for being banned by a payment processor is notably far below having terrorism ties.

Payment processors last year severed ties with a French branch of the group, known as Collectif Palestine Vaincra, a result of the French government attempting to dissolve the organization under allegations it was “anti-Jewish.” This attempt was blocked by a French court in May, however, after it rules the Macron government's allegations of “antisemitism” against the group were “unfounded.”

Neither Foldi nor Samidoun immediately responded to requests for comment.

That the chairman of a US intelligence committee chose such questionable examples during a presentation aimed at garnering support for a US surveillance authority gave many Republican staffers pause.

None of the House sources who spoke to WIRED work for lawmakers that could be credibly accused of showing anything but support for the Israeli government. Yet all agreed the issue of domestic surveillance transcends political ideology—one of the purest examples of the “pendulum politics” that define America’s two-party system.

“What we know for sure is this,” a Republican aide says, “However the government decides to treat left-wing protesters today, that’s how we should expect protesters in our party to be treated under future administrations.”

A House Democratic staffer—half-jokingly referencing the Cold War doctrine of “mutually assured annihilation”—says that they agreed “wholeheartedly” with the sentiment. “Our fates are aligned,” they say. “That's the best defense we have.”

“Political protest is literally how America was founded. It’s in our DNA,” says Jason Pye, senior policy analyst at the nonprofit FreedomWorks. “Whether you agree with these protesters or not is irrelevant.”

US Lawmaker Cited NYC Protests in a Defense of Warrantless Spying

Tigran Gambaryan, a former crypto-focused US federal agent, and a second Binance executive, Nadeem Anjarwalla, have been held in Abuja without passports for two weeks.

In his years as a US federal agent, Tigran Gambaryan helped to lead landmark investigations that took down cryptocurrency thieves and money launderers, dark-web drug dealers, and even crypto-funded child exploitation networks. Now, in his post-government role at the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, he has become the target himself of a very different sort of federal crypto crackdown: For the past two weeks, he and another Binance executive have been detained against their will by Nigerian officials.

Since February 26, Gambaryan, who now leads Binance's criminal investigations team, and Nadeem Anjarwalla, Binance's Kenya-based regional manager for Africa, have been stripped of their passports and held in confinement at a government property in the Nigerian capital of Abuja. Neither has been informed of any criminal charge against them, according to their families. Instead, the two men appear to have been swept up in Nigeria's broad actions to ban cryptocurrency exchanges amid a drastic devaluation of the country's national currency, according to the _Financial Times__,_ which was first to report the two executives' detention without identifying them.

“There’s no definite answer for anything: how’s he’s doing, what’s going to happen to him, when he’s coming back,” says Gambaryan’s wife, Yuki Gambaryan. “And not knowing that is killing me.”

Gambaryan, a US citizen, and Anjarwalla, a dual citizen of the UK and Kenya, arrived in Abuja on February 25, their families say, following the Nigerian government’s invitation to address its ongoing dispute with Binance. They met with Nigerian officials the next day, intending to speak to the government about its order to the country’s telecoms to block access to Binance and other cryptocurrency exchanges, which regulators blamed for devaluing its official currency, the naira, and for enabling “illicit flows” of funds.

Shortly after Gambaryan and Anjarwalla’s first meeting with the Nigerian government, however, Gambaryan and Anjarwalla were taken to their hotels, told to pack their things, and moved into a “guesthouse” run by Nigeria’s National Security Agency, according to their families. Officials seized their passports and have since held the two men at the house against their will for two weeks and counting.

Gambaryan has been visited by a US State Department official and Anjarwalla by a representative of the UK foreign office, their families say, but Nigerian government guards have also remained present in those meetings, preventing them from speaking privately.

When WIRED reached out to Binance, a spokesperson declined to comment on what the men or the company itself has been accused of or what demands the Nigerian government may have made for their release. “While it is inappropriate for us to comment on the substance of the claims at this time, we can say that we are working collaboratively with Nigerian authorities to bring Nadeem and Tigran back home safely to their families,” a Binance spokesperson tells WIRED. “They are professionals with the highest integrity and we will provide them all the support we can. We trust there will be a swift resolution to this matter.”

At one point last week, the two men were transferred to a local hospital after Anjarwalla fell ill. His exact symptoms were unclear but possibly indicated malaria, according to his wife. He has since recovered, however, and the two men were returned to the Nigerian government house, where they've been held since.

For Gambaryan in particular, becoming an apparent pawn in a dispute between Binance and an aggrieved government marks an ironic twist. Gambaryan's high-profile recruitment to lead Binance's investigations team in 2021 was widely regarded as an effort to clean up the exchange's flows of dirty money, better comply with regulations, and more closely cooperate with law enforcement. In late November of last year, Binance agreed to a plea deal with American prosecutors in which it would pay a record $4.3 billion settlement for alleged money laundering and submit to intense ongoing scrutiny from US regulators.

Prior to taking the Binance position, Gambaryan had become well known in the law enforcement world for his record of pioneering high-impact cryptocurrency cases as an agent in the US Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigations (IRS-CI) division. From 2014 to 2017 alone, for instance, Gambaryan led the investigation into two corrupt federal agents who stole cryptocurrency from the Silk Road dark-web drug market and sold law enforcement intel to its creator, worked to track down 650,000 bitcoins stolen from the Mt. Gox exchange, helped develop a crypto tracing technique to find the server running the massive AlphaBay crime market, and had a hand in the takedown of the Welcome to Video crypto-based child sexual abuse materials network.

In his years at IRS-CI, Gambaryan was a “top-notch agent” of “the highest integrity,” according to Will Frentzen, a former prosecutor who worked closely with Gambaryan. “The cases he was involved in are a who’s who of the biggest crypto cases of that time,” says Frentzen. “He was innovative in investigating things in ways that very few people in the country had figured out, and incredibly selfless in terms of who got credit. I don’t think anyone had a bigger impact on these types of investigations.”

Gambaryan’s wife, Yuki, points to that track record to argue that her husband has earned the support of the US government, which she says now needs to help negotiate his freedom. “He’s done so much good for this country throughout his career,” she says. “I believe it’s his turn to get the same amount of support from his country.” She says she’s not aware of what exactly the State Department or the US embassy in Abuja has done so far to extricate him.

Anjarwalla, an Oxford- and Stanford-educated government affairs specialist for Binance, joined the crypto company a year ago. His wife, Elahe Anjarwalla, writes in a statement that he’s a “middle management employee of Binance with no decision-making authority.” She adds that Anjarwalla, a Muslim, is being held during Ramadan; that their infant son had his first tooth appear in the past two weeks; and that their baby will reach his first birthday next week. “Nadeem is a loving husband and father. He is my best friend,” she says. “All I want is for Nadeem to be allowed to come back home to us.”

The two men have had access to a television and a balcony, but Gambaryan has described the experience in detention to his wife as “Groundhog Day,” says Yuki Gambaryan. “I can tell he’s trying to stay positive, but it’s getting to him. He’s getting impatient, he’s feeling hopeless.”

For Gambaryan’s wife herself, the anxiety and uncertainty has made the past two weeks the “hardest days of her life,” she says. She has yet to tell their two young children.

“Sometimes it feels like I’ll never see him again,” says Yuki Gambaryan. “I’m just begging them to let him go.”

Binance’s Top Crypto Crime Investigator Is Being Detained in Nigeria

The Pentagon says it’s not hiding aliens, but it stops notably short of saying what it is hiding. Here are the key questions that remain unanswered—some answers could be weirder than UFOs.

But what, then, were those programs? Herein lies the most intriguing—and potentially ground-breaking—question that the Pentagon study leaves us wondering: What exactly are the secret compartmentalized programs that the whistleblowers and government witnesses _misidentified_ as being related to UAP technology? What, exactly, are the Pentagon, intelligence community, or defense contractors working on that, from a concentric circle or two away inside the shadowy world of SAPs, looks and sounds like reverse-engineering out-of-this-world technology or even studying so-called “non-human biologics”?

There are at least four clear possibilities.

Secret Tech From Foreign Nations

First, what exotic technological possibilities have been recovered from unknown _terrestrial_ sources? For example, if the government is working on reverse-engineering technologies, those technologies are likely from advanced adversary nation-states like China, Russia, and Iran, and perhaps even quasi-allies like Israel that may be more limited in their technology-sharing with the US. What have other countries mastered that we haven’t?

A Question of ‘Peculiar Characteristics’

Second, what technologies has the US mastered that the public doesn’t know about? One of the common threads of UFO sightings across decades have been secret military aircraft and spacecraft in development or not yet publicly acknowledged. For example, the CIA estimated that the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s accounted for as much as half of reported UFO sightings. And the AARO report spends a half-dozen pages documenting how confusion over subsequent generations of secret US government aircraft appear to have also contributed to the great intergalactic game of telephone of UFO programs inside the government, including modern Predator, Reaper, and Global Hawk drones. AARO investigated one claim where a witness reported hearing a former US military service member had touched an extraterrestrial spacecraft, but when they tracked down the service member, he said that the conversation was likely a garbled version of the time he touched an F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter at a secret facility.

There are surely other secret craft still in testing and development now, including the B-21 stealth bomber, which had its first test flight in November and is now in testing at Edwards Air Force Base in California, as well as others we don’t know about. The government can still surprise us with unknown craft—like the until-then-unknown modified stealthy helicopter left behind on the Pakistan raid to kill Osama bin Laden. And some of these still-classified efforts are likely causing UFO confusion too: AARO untangled one witness’s claim of spotting a UAP with “peculiar characteristics” at a specific time and place and were able to determine, “at the time the interviewee said he observed the event, the DOD was conducting tests of a platform protected by a SAP. The seemingly strange characteristics reported by the interviewee match closely with the platform’s characteristics, which was being tested at a military facility in the time frame the interviewee was there.” So what was that craft—and what were its “peculiar characteristics?”

Relatedly, the US military has a classified spaceship, the X-37B, that has regularly orbited around the Earth since its first mission in 2010—it just blasted off on its seventh and most recent mission in December—and its previous, sixth, mission lasted a record-breaking 908 days in orbit. The Pentagon has said remarkably little about what it does up there for years at a time. What secret space-related or aviation-related programs is the government running that outsiders confuse as alien spacecraft?

A Material Matter

The third likely area of tech development that might appear to outsiders to be UFO-related is more speculative basic research and development: What propulsion systems or material-science breakthroughs are defense contractors at work on right now that could transform our collective future? Again, AARO found such confusion taking place: After one witness reported hearing that “aliens” had observed one secret government test, AARO traced the allegation back to find “the conversation likely referenced a test and evaluation unit that had a nickname with ‘alien’ connotations at the specific installation mentioned. The nature of the test described by the interviewee closely matched the description of a specific materials test conveyed to AARO investigators.” So what materials were being tested there?

There are some puzzling materials-science breadcrumbs wrapped throughout the AARO report. It found one instance where “a private sector organization claimed to have in its possession material from an extraterrestrial craft recovered from a crash at an unknown location from the 1940s or 1950s. The organization claimed that the material had the potential to act as a THz frequency waveguide, and therefore, could exhibit ‘anti-gravity’ and ‘mass reduction’ properties under the appropriate conditions.” Ultimately, though, the new report concluded, “AARO and a leading science laboratory concluded that the material is a metallic alloy, terrestrial in nature, and possibly of USAF \[US Air Force\] origin, based on its materials characterization.”

A Knowledge Limit

Fourth and lastly is the category of the truly weird: Scientists at the forefront of physics point out that we should be humble about how little of the universe we truly understand; as Harvard astronomy chair Avi Loeb explains, effectively all that we’ve learned about relativity and quantum physics has unfolded in the span of a single human lifespan, and astounding new discoveries continue to amaze scientists. Just last summer, scientists announced they’d detected for the first time gravitational waves criss-crossing the universe that rippled through space-time, and astrophysicists continue to suspect that the universe is far weirder than we think. (Italian astrophysicist Carlo Rovelli last year posited the existence of “white holes” that would be related to black holes, which, he pointed out, were still a mystery just 25 years ago when he was starting his career.)

Answers here could be almost unfathomably weird—think parallel dimensions or the ability to travel at a fraction of the speed of light. And one of the most intriguing questions left by the UAP “game of telephone” is whether there are truly astounding advances in physics that government scientists, defense contractors, or research laboratories or centers could be feeling around that could also appear from the outside to be UFO-related.

The 4 Big Questions the Pentagon’s New UFO Report Fails to Answer

Starting at the end of April, Airbnb will no longer allow hosts to have security cameras inside their rental properties, citing a commitment to prioritizing guest privacy.

Airbnb will soon ban hosts from watching their guests with indoor security cameras, as the company is reversing course on its surveillance policies.

As of April 30, hosts around the world must remove indoor cameras and disclose other outdoor monitoring tech to guests before they book. Airbnb previously allowed hosts to install security cameras in common areas of a home, like hallways and living rooms. But it also required hosts to disclose them, make them clearly visible, and keep the cameras out of places like sleeping areas and bathrooms.

Still, the cameras have been an issue. Guests have reported encountering hidden cameras in their short-term rentals. For hosts, the cameras can be a way to discourage guests from throwing large parties or to stop the gatherings before they become too disruptive. It’s a big enough concern that several companies have started making noise monitoring tech, billing themselves as solutions to protect short-term rentals.

But guests see them as an invasion of privacy—a watching eye intruding on their vacation.

“We're really grateful that Airbnb listened to those of us pushing back and calling for them to actually put safety and privacy first,” says Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a pro-privacy organization.

In its announcement, Airbnb said that the majority of its listings do not mention a security camera, so the rule change may not affect most listings. Vrbo, another short-term rental platform, already banned the use of visual and audio surveillance inside of properties.

Airbnb says it will investigate reported violations of the rule, and may penalize violators by removing their listings or accounts. But this policy may struggle to address the camera problem at large, as the company has already required hosts to disclose the indoor cameras, and guests have sometimes reported hidden and undisclosed cameras.

The new rules also require hosts to disclose to guests whether they are using noise decibel monitors or outdoor cameras before guests book. Both are used by some hosts to monitor properties for parties, which have continued to bring noise, damage, and danger even after Airbnb instituted a party ban and employed new anti-party tech to try to prevent revelers from booking on its site. Airbnb will also prohibit hosts from using outdoor cameras to monitor indoor spaces, and bars them from “certain outdoor areas where there’s a greater expectation of privacy,” such as outdoor showers and saunas, it says.

“This just emphasizes the fact that surveillance always gives a huge amount of power to whoever controls the camera system,” says Fox Cahn. “When it's used in a property you're renting, whether it's a landlord or an Airbnb, it's ripe for abuse.”

Source

Wired