Google ordered to disclose data passed to US spies

The top court in South Korea questioned the supremacy of US laws over citizens' privacy

South Korea's Supreme Court has ordered Google to disclose any personal data it has collected on South Korean citizens and shared with third parties, including US intelligence agencies. The decision is binding, even as the case against the tech giant continues in a lower court.

Thursday’s ruling came after several South Korean plaintiffs sued Google and its local branch, Google Korea, seeking to force the company to reveal whether it had gathered or shared their data. They alleged that personal information was passed to the US National Security Agency (NSA) through its ‘PRISM’ program, which collects a massive amount of data from the internet, including private communications, as well as from service providers directly.

While South Korean law mandates that internet service providers must respond to customer inquiries related to their own personal data and whether it has been shared with third parties, an appeals court previously ruled that Google had the right to reject such requests so long as the decision was in line with US law.

However, the Supreme Court partially overturned that ruling, finding that Google must disclose the relevant information upon request regardless of American law, though it nonetheless returned the case to a lower court to continue litigation.

“Comprehensive consideration should be given to whether the need to respect foreign laws is significantly superior to the need to protect personal information,” the court said in a statement.

The top court also ruled that even if personal data was transferred to a foreign intelligence service for legitimate reasons, companies still must disclose that fact after the person in question is no longer under investigation.

In a statement, Google Korea said it would review Thursday’s decision “carefully,” and claimed that user privacy was a priority for the company.

The PRISM program was first revealed to the public in 2013, after NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked a massive trove of classified documents showing, among other things, the extent of domestic mass surveillance in the United States. According to the leaked material, PRISM was once “the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports” after it was launched in 2007 under President George W. Bush. The program has come under fire by privacy advocates for its sweeping scope, with Snowden deeming it “dangerous” and accusing the NSA of “nakedly, aggressively criminal acts.”

https://www.rt.com/news/574708-google-data-nsa-south-korea/

Man Disguised as Woman Tossed from Chess Tournament After Fooling Officials

A man pretending to be a devout Muslim woman wearing a full niqab was tossed out of a chess tournament in Nairobi, Kenya, after succeeding in making it to the last round.

The man entered the Kenya Open Chess Championship in Nairobi under the name Millicent Awuor and played through the early stages, beating one woman after another, according to an Australian news outlet.

The prize for winning the women’s tournament was a hefty $42,000, a payday that attracted 450 players from 22 African federations. So, a lot was on the line at the event.

During the matches, the player tore through his female opponents without saying a single word. But officials eventually got suspicious when he succeeded in beating former national champion Gloria Jumba and Ugandan top player Ampaira Shakira.

The tournament staff was reported as being averse to challenging the player for fear of finding out he was a woman which would have set them up for accusations of religious discrimination. But, after taking him behind closed doors, he admitted he was a male college student just hoping to win the big cash prize.

This is only the latest strange incident in the world of chess after last year’s cheating scandal at the Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis, Missouri, where 19-year-old American Hans Niemann beat chess champ Magnus Carlsen, 31, from Norway.

Niemann — one of the lowest-rated players in the tournament — was accused of cheating and faced the outlandish claim that he was using an electronic chess move generator hidden somewhere on his person that was wirelessly linked to an anal massage device secreted just where such a device might be placed. Accusers claimed that the anal device would buzz in some sequence to tell Niemann what moves to make, though the player’s detractors did not exactly reveal just how that could work.

Whether he did or did not cheat, Niemann filed a $100 million defamation lawsuit over the claims he used a sex toy to cheat.

But despite his protestations, though, Neimann has since had to suffer the indignity of having his rear-end scanned when he enters tournaments.

https://www.breitbart.com/sports/2023/04/13/man-disguised-woman-tossed-from-chess-tournament-after-fooling-officials/

‘Soros-Backed’ Texas DA Accused of Evidence Tampering, Witness Retaliation in Army Sgt. Self-Defense Murder Case

Lawyers for Army Sergeant Daniel Perry accused Travis County District Attorney José Garza of tampering and retaliation against a detective witness. They say the district attorney prevented the detective from presenting evidence to the grand jury supporting Perry’s self-defense claim in the alleged murder of a protester in Austin. The accusation resurfaced on Thursday in a letter from the defense attorneys to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently asked the board to consider a recommendation for a pardon.

Defense attorneys F. Clinton Broden and Doug O’Connell sent a letter to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to present evidence in support of the governor’s requested pardon recommendation. Governor Abbott made the request on April 8 following the conviction by a Travis County jury of murder in the Daniel Perry self-defense trial, Breitbart Texas reported. The letter from the defense team (attached below) reveals exculpatory evidence that was not allowed to be presented to the jury by the trial judge.

The letter resurfaces a previously made accusation that Travis County DA Garza tampered with evidence prepared by the lead investigator during the time leading up to the grand jury hearing. A motion requesting an evidentiary hearing regarding the initial allegation was denied by the trial judge. The judge denied the evidentiary hearing request but did not rule on the merits of the allegations, Fox 7 reported.

“As the Board will no doubt learn, the lead detective in this case was forbidden by the Travis County District Attorney from mentioning a great deal of exculpatory evidence to the grand jury which considered the case in the first instance,” the attorneys wrote. While acknowledging the DA is not required to present exculpatory evidence to the grand jury, the defense team added, “there is a very clear legal distinction between choosing not to present exculpatory information to a grand jury and tampering with the testimony of a grand jury witness by shaping that witness’s testimony as to what that witness is allowed to say under fear of reprisals.”

“In fact, when the decorated detective later explained in an affidavit that he believed the Travis County District Attorney tampered with his grand jury testimony, the District Attorney did retaliate by putting the detective on a Brady list which ultimately caused him to resign after almost 30 years of exemplary service at the Austin Police Department,” the attorneys continued.

A Brady list is compiled by prosecutors or police departments and contains a list of law enforcement officers who “have sustained incidents of untruthfulness, criminal convictions, candor issues, or some other type of issue placing their credibility into question,” according to a presentation published by the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

“Being placed on a Brady list is the kiss of death to a homicide detective’s career,” Breitbart Texas legal analyst Lana Shadwick said. “The detective can no longer serve as a homicide detective because they would not be able to testify in court about the evidence they gathered during the investigation.”

In August 2021, Detective Fugitt filed an affidavit (attached below) detailing the allegations against District Attorney Garza. In that sworn affidavit, Fugitt stated:

I firmly believe the District Attorney’s. Office, acting under the authority of Jose P. Garza, tampered with me as a witness. Often witness tampering is subtle. In this case, there were foreseeable consequences if I did not comply and tailor my grand jury presentation as directed and failure to do so would adversely affect my working relationship with the District Attorney’s Office for the foreseeable future. I was afforded no choice but to comply with the directives that were issued to me by Jose Garza through his assistants.

I am familiar with the crime of witness tampering as set out in the Texas Penal Code and under the circumstances believe myself to be a victim of such tampering.

During the trial which concluded on April 7, Detective Fugitt testified as a witness for the defense.

https://www.breitbart.com/border/2023/04/13/soros-backed-texas-da-accused-of-evidence-tampering-witness-retaliation-in-army-sgt-self-defense-murder-case/

UK Government May Have Overestimated Trans Population Due to Foreign Migrants

Britain’s government may have massively overestimated the number of trans individuals, and residents with a poor grasp of the English language trying to answer a convoluted question on gender identity may be to blame.

The UK’s 2021 census has likely massively overestimated the number of transgender individuals living in England and Wales as a result of the large migrant population in both countries, experts have now said.

According to the Office of National Statistics, 262,000 in both countries claimed in the census that they were transgender, roughly equivalent to 0.5 per cent of the total population.

However, according to a report by The Telegraph, experts now believe that such a figure is inaccurate, with many suspecting that foreign migrants with bad English answering the census claimed to be transgender by mistake.

By compiling the census data, scientists have found that those with a migrant background, as well as those with poor English, were far more likely to claim to be transgender, with the 10 per cent of adults in the country for whom English is not their first language making up nearly one-third of all transgender individuals in the country.

The data — as is — also claims that areas with large migrant populations are disproportionately transgender, and that one in 67 Muslims are also trans, a figure deemed to be unbelievable by experts in a literal sense.

Such massive confusion on the part of the non-native English speakers in the country has been reportedly blamed on how the census asked the public whether they were transgender or not.

Instead of simply asking the answerer whether or not they were trans, the document posed the question: “is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?”, a definition of non-transgender individuals said to have been dreamt up by LGBT+ NGO Stonewall.

While the question may be easy to parse for those who speak English as a first language, and particularly for those who have been regularly exposed to lengthy discussions steeped in modern trans politics language in the mainstream media, the wording has clearly foxed some outside of that group linguistically and culturally.

“The ONS were so focussed on how trans people would respond to that question and if it would hurt people’s feelings and I think, as a result, they didn’t think about the vast majority of people and those who don’t share the same language,” University of Oxford Sociology professor Michael Biggs remarked regarding the government’s apparent gaffe.

“Professional, managerial-class people have had the training on gender language and gender identity,” he added. “But a lot of people working on building sites or cleaning hospitals, for example, those are the people that I think are confused and if ONS had asked: ‘Are you trans?’ It would have been simpler, but the way they have formed the question, you are directed to the wrong answer or at least it’s generated confusion.”

“The question they used is Stonewall’s definition of cisgender and it shows just how influential Stonewall is,” he went on to say.

Such a revelation that it is highly likely there are far fewer trans individuals in England and Wales than previously thought will make it even harder for the government to justify its pro-transgenderism policies.

Despite constantly promising to stem the influence of the ideology when speaking to its voter base, the UK’s ruling Conservative Party has been extremely friendly to transgenderism in practice. The Conservatives boast of having the first openly transgender MP in the House of Commons.

Authorities have also previously expressed the desire to make so-called “conversion therapy” for transgender individuals illegal, a move that many fear will render it illegal for certain medical officials to treat people with medical gender dysphoria.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2023/04/14/uk-government-may-have-overestimated-trans-population-due-to-foreign-migrants/

International research suggests masks better at causing 'long COVID' than stopping virus

"Mask-induced exhaustion-syndrome" resembles long COVID symptoms, Swiss peer-reviewed study finds. London hospital that made surgical masks optional after NHS ended mandate sees no change in infection rate.

Government-backed assumptions about the safety and effectiveness of high-quality mask-wearing against COVID-19 are facing scrutiny from new international research that shines a harsh light on the feds' continued faith in face coverings.

Surgical and N95-grade masks might induce symptoms misidentified as biologically elusive "long COVID," according to a "systematic review" in the peer-reviewed Swiss journal Frontiers in Public Health. It echoes a recent study of Norwegian adolescents and young adults on long COVID's connection to "loneliness" and physical inactivity — conditions exacerbated by pandemic interventions.

A U.K. government metareview found no real-world evidence that N95s and equivalent masks protect those at highest risk of severe COVID, while a U.K. hospital study found "no discernible difference" from surgical masks in "reducing hospital-acquired SARS-CoV-2 infections."

They join a metareview of several dozen randomized controlled trials, updated in January, that found surgical and N95-grade masks made "little to no difference" on either influenza-like or COVID-like illness or "laboratory-confirmed" infections. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky dismissed the study's validity because of its reliance on RCTs.

New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci apparently spooked Cochrane, the British-based research collaborative that publishes the ongoing 17-year study, into publicly undercutting the authors' interpretation of the findings, though Cochrane has since contradicted her claim that it made a "correction."

Coauthor and University of Oxford epidemiologist Tom Jefferson also demanded the Times examine the "personal agenda" of Tufekci, a sociologist who reversed herself on masks between February and March 2020, and her attempted "subversion of the scientific process" and "personal attack" on him.

The Times didn't answer Just the News queries.

German, Austrian, Polish and Indian researchers in the Frontiers study found "mask-induced exhaustion-syndrome" and "down-stream physio-metabolic disfunctions [sic]" resulting from wearing surgical and N95 masks, which can have "long-term clinical consequences," especially for children, pregnant women, elderly and ill people.

Starting with more than 2,000 German- and English-language studies, they culled the research to 54 publications for synthesis and 37 for meta-analysis. Only 14 were RCTs, which the researchers said have trouble measuring "causes with a long latency period."

They found "significant effects" from surgical masks and especially N95s: decreased "peripheral oxygen saturation" and volume of gas inhaled or exhaled per minute, "simultaneous" with increased blood-CO2 concentration, heart rate, systolic blood pressure, skin temperature and humidity.

Citing a Journal of Infectious Diseases long-COVID study by University of Michigan researchers, the Frontiers researchers found nearly 40% of those symptoms "overlap" with mask-related complaints and symptoms. "It is possible that some symptoms attributed to long-COVID-19 are predominantly mask-related," they wrote, calling for further research.

The median mask-wearing duration was 18 minutes, ranging from 6 minutes to 6 hours depending on the study. While a "short application of the mask seems to be less harmful, longer and long-term use may cause shift [sic] toward the pathophysiological direction with clinical consequences even without exceeding physiological thresholds," the researchers said.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/international-research-suggests-masks-better-causing-long-covid