John Z Black
Brunswick, ME • (207) 245-1010 • contact@johnzblack.com
The Invisible Spy in Your Pocket: Why Carrier Privacy Just Failed
Think your phone is secure because it's in your pocket? Citizen Lab caught 'Phantom Operators' tracking users globally through cell signaling gaps that no app can fix.
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Researchers Turned a Fiber Optic Cable Into a Listening Device. Your RF Scanner Won't Find It.
New research from NDSS 2026 demonstrates that standard fiber optic cables can reconstruct conversations in adjacent rooms using off-the-shelf commercial equipment. No network access. No credentials. No software. And it bypasses both RF scanners and ultrasonic jammers, the two most common counter-surveillance tools.
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The Week the Clock Ran Out
Defenders got squeezed this week. AI sped up vuln discovery, OT attacks stayed active, and trusted update channels turned into incident response events.
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The Week the Clock Ran Out
Defenders got squeezed this week. AI sped up vuln discovery, OT attacks stayed active, and trusted update channels turned into incident response events.
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Your Ad Data Is a Federal Surveillance Tool. Meet Webloc.
Webloc ingests mobile ad data from 500 million devices and makes it searchable for ICE, the military, and local police. No warrant needed. You probably said yes to it when you tapped Allow on some app.
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ICE Is Using Paragon Spyware on American Soil. Congress Wants to Know Who They're Watching.
House Democrats demand answers on ICE's use of Paragon's Graphite spyware, raising questions about domestic surveillance and oversight.
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FBI Says China Hacked Its Surveillance Systems, Triggers 'Major Incident' Classification
The FBI classified a suspected Chinese intrusion into law enforcement surveillance infrastructure as a FISMA major incident, forcing Congressional notification within days.
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Two Active Campaigns Are Using WhatsApp as the Front Door
A VBS-based Windows hijack and an Italian spyware operation are both running through WhatsApp right now. Your chat app is a threat vector.
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Your VPN Might Be Getting You Watched by the NSA Instead of Protected
Six US lawmakers want to know if VPN use can strip Americans of Fourth Amendment protections by making their traffic look foreign to intelligence agencies. Nobody has officially said it isn't happening.
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The FBI Is Buying Your Location Data. No Warrant Required.
FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed the FBI purchases bulk location data from commercial brokers with no warrant. The agency had previously said it stopped. It didn't.
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Proton Mail Helped the FBI Identify an Anonymous Protestor. Here's What That Actually Means.
Proton Mail's encryption worked fine -- it was metadata that gave the anonymous Stop Cop City protestor away, and most users still don't understand the difference.
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Privacy Is Now a $475 Million Business, and That's Kind of a Scandal
Cape raised $100M to protect phones from Stingrays and SS7 attacks; Cloaked raised $375M to hide your identity from data brokers -- together they're a $475 million indictment of the infrastructure that was supposed to protect you.
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Meta's AI Glasses Are a Privacy Disaster — And Now There's an App to Detect Them
Bruce Schneier called Meta's AI glasses 'a privacy disaster.' A developer built an Android app to detect them nearby. Together, they're the first signs of a consumer counter-response to ambient AI surveillance.
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CBP Was Tracking Your Phone With Ad Data -- And When Their Own Privacy Officers Said Stop, They Were Fired
CBP bought commercial ad data to track Americans' phones without warrants. When internal privacy officers pushed back on related illegal conduct, they got canned.
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The FBI's Warrant-Free Surveillance Just Hit a New High -- Right as Congress Finally Moves to Stop It
The FBI searched Americans' private communications without a warrant 7,413 times last year, up 34%. A bipartisan bill just landed to require warrants going forward.
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After the 'Worst Telecom Hack in History,' Washington Is Already Moving On
Salt Typhoon was called the most significant cyberattack on US telecom infrastructure ever. Policy reform momentum is stalling. Congress is more interested in restricting FBI surveillance than fixing the infrastructure that got hacked.
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When 'No' Means Nothing: Privacy Erosion from DHS Surveillance to Duolingo Tracking
DHS fired the privacy officers who questioned surveillance orders. Duolingo keeps sending your data to ByteDance after you opt out. Your 'no' doesn't work when nobody's enforcing it.
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