11/ Help starve the ADINT dragnet. Do this now:
iPhone: ⚙️Settings➡️Privacy & Security➡️ Tracking
Turn off "Allow Apps to Request to Track"
Android: ⚙️Settings➡️Privacy ➡️ Ads ➡️Delete Advertising ID
It's only a beginning, but you don't owe any of these companies a drop of your data.
💥Orbán’s intelligence agencies have been secretly using Webloc — a mass surveillance tool that tracks hundreds of millions of people via smartphone advertising data — making Hungary the first confirmed EU country to deploy it, in likely violation of GDPR.
“Mossad’s intel indicated that […] with the impetus of the spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion an intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the IR opposition to overthrow the regime.”
Who was the intended audience of PRISONBREAK and other ops? Iranians, or Americans?
3/ But: once the genie is out of the bottle, its sword will cut both ways. Netanyahu having to prove to be alive and not AI-generated, relative to our @citizenlab.ca report PRISONBREAK, is a case in point.
2/ Sowing distrust in the information ecosystem is the point. If anything can be forged or manufactured, everything is - at least if we decide to believe (or just surrender) without verifying. And verifying is hard, time-consuming, and plain exhausting.
1/ I spoke with The New York Times for their new story on the “liar’s dividend” in times of war — the ability not to trick audiences with AI-generated content, but to dismiss real one as AI-generated.
That might be an extra question to ask - though I still don’t see it as justifying the choices made here.
5/ Meta has led the way in industry reporting on IOs for the past decade. Let 2026 not be the year that’s put to rest, or neutered for political reasons.
4/ China, Russia, Iran. Sure, we know, they run IOs all the time. But aren’t countries that are not US adversaries doing it too, with equally harmful consequences? Our JUICYJAM and PRISONBREAK reports at @citizenlab.ca at least stand to prove otherwise.
3/ Why is “CIB” now almost an afterthought at the bottom of the report? Did the influence operations threat and harm landscape fundamentally change? I beg to differ.
2/ Why “First Half 2026” now when it used to be quarterly and even more frequent before that? What next?
1/ I have a huge amount of respect for my former colleagues investigators at Meta who did the hard and smart work behind this new Adversarial Threat Report. And I find what’s in it really important and interesting.
But I have questions for the company.
More spyware fallout in Italy 🇮🇹 following WhatsApp & Apple notifications & @citizenlab.ca investigations
Prosecutors' team confirms journalist @fcancellato.bsky.social's phone hacked with Paragon spyware
@lorenzofb.bsky.social with details; stay tuned for more
techcrunch.com/2026/03/05/i...
Trump has invoked Iran’s past attempts to influence US elections as a justification for war. But his administration has decimated CISA and stopped the FBI from investigating foreign election interference, writes Paul M. Barrett. Is Trump building a case to intervene in future elections?
“Look what we found after having wiped out our Trust & Safety guardrails, the teams deploying them, and all connections with civil society!”
Note: all accounts we reported on (#JUICYJAM, #PRISONBREAK, even older #HKLEAKS stuff) are still visible on the platform — some also very active to this day.
Several years from now, a thoughtful scholar will write a book called “Trump’s Willing Executioners” about how a nation of 340 million descended into abject depravity.
If only regular people would read this and realize “Well, maybe he’s not really in it for my best interest.”
An ICE detainee in Arizona has died of a TOOTH INFECTION after it went untreated for weeks, a local official says. He was a Haitian asylum seeker imprisoned in Florence, Arizona. @emilybregel.bsky.social reports.
tucson.com/news/local/b...
7/ The bottom line: in the midst of the fog of war, nothing is certain. Be skeptical of everything you see. Verify where you can.
Legitimate opinions are just that. Their exploitation for political gain are made at the expense of those advancing them, and of the whole information ecosystem. Us.
6/ …it doesn’t have to be *completely* different. In fact, it closely resembles what @haaretzcom.bsky.social had flagged (at the same time as our report) as being a coordinated, state-sponsored campaign towards regime change in Iran, and the installation of Pahlavi as the new leader.
5/ This is different from what we @citizenlab called PRISONBREAK back in October. That one was a hyper focused, tactical network wearing their inauthenticity on their sleeve.
But…
4/ The creation date for several of the accounts is also telling. Very often, they were registered over the past ~2 months.
3/ I could probably spend the whole day listing accounts like these - posting the hashtags in question in large volumes.
2/ A significant number of accounts pushing the usual pro-Pahlavi hashtags, plus some new ones, look like this. “Account based in [name country]”.
See that “shield” icon to the right? That’s X telling us not to trust the location as the user is on a VPN.
1/ NEW: There’s currently a heavy push over X in support of (1) the ongoing attacks on Iran (2) Reza Pahlavi. It’s hard to quickly quantify this wave, but anecdotal evidence shows that the main support hashtags - as well as by the *real* people promoting them - are also pushed inorganically.
It is just a half sentence, but I still find it strangely infuriating that Trump is using the argument that Iran could threaten 'our good allies in Europe' as part of the reasoning for this war he started.
NEW – “Not Safe for Politics: Cellebrite Used on Kenyan Activist and Politician Boniface Mwangi”
New research shows that Kenyan authorities used Cellebrite’s forensic extraction tools to access activist Boniface Mwangi’s phone.
Read: citizenlab.ca/research/cel...
“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns”.
Every now and then we should pause and wonder: was the internet supposed to be this? Do I really need *this* internet in my life?
