Security News This Week: The Biggest US Surveillance Program You Didn’t Know About

DO YOU KNOW where tonight’s pork chop dinner came from? You might not like the answer.

This week, we revealed the first-ever footage recorded in a US meatpacking plant of a CO2 “stunning chamber” used in the butchering of pigs. The footage was captured at a facility in California by an activist with the group Direct Action Everywhere using infrared pinhole spy cameras that are smaller than a coin. The goal of the covert surveillance mission was to prove that this supposedly “painless” form of killing is illegal and inhumane.

In less upsetting news, Apple has worked hard to brand itself as the privacy-friendly giant of Big Tech—and in many ways, that’s true. But that doesn’t mean it won’t collect your data for advertising purposes if given the opportunity. We combed through some 70,000 words of Apple’s various policies to figure out exactly what it’s collecting about you—and how to keep it under control.

Speaking of online ads, new research this week from Human Security uncovered a massive ad-fraud scheme dubbed Vastflux. The operation used weaknesses in the advertising ecosystem to target some 1,700 apps and 11 million phones, resulting in around 12 billion requests for ads each day at Vastflux’s peak. The fraud has since been largely shut down, but those behind it have yet to be named.

Fraud aside, it’s increasingly lucky to be able to get online at all. Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare this week published its first annual report into the state of online connectivity disruptions around the world and found a startling uptick. From outages in North Carolina caused by an attack on the power grid to Iran’s authoritarian internet shutdowns meant to stifle anti-government protests, 2022 is looking like the first year in a new era of online blackouts.

We also dove into the lingering threat of online echo chambers, which continue to have an outsize impact on US politics, and explored the ongoing mess at T-Mobile, which this week revealed yet another major data breach that the company says impacted some 37 million customers.

But that’s not all. Each week we dive into the stories we weren’t able to cover in-depth ourselves. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.