New submitter HillNKnowlton22 writes: U.S. federal agencies have been using a 35-year-old American surveillance law to secretly track WhatsApp users with no explanation as to why and without knowing whom they are targeting. In Ohio, a just-unsealed government surveillance application reveals that in November 2021, DEA investigators demanded the Facebook-owned messaging company track seven users based in China and Macau. The application reveals the DEA didn’t know the identities of any of the targets, but told WhatsApp to monitor the IP addresses and numbers with which the targeted users were communicating, as well as when and how they were using the app. Such surveillance is done using a technology known as a pen register and under the 1986 Pen Register Act, and doesn’t seek any message content, which WhatsApp couldn’t provide anyway, as it is end-to-end encrypted.

As Forbes previously reported, over at least the last two years, law enforcement in the U.S. has repeatedly ordered WhatsApp and other tech companies to install these pen registers without showing any probable cause. As in those previous cases, the government order to trace Chinese users came with the statement that the Justice Department only needed to provide three “elements” to justify tracking of WhatsApp users. They include: the identity of the attorney or the law enforcement officer making the application; the identity of the agency making the application; and a certification from the applicant that “the information likely to be obtained is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation being conducted by that agency.” “Other than the three elements described above, federal law does not require that an application for an order authorizing the installation and use of a pen register and a trap and trace device specify any facts,” the government wrote in the latest application.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – WhatsApp Ordered To Help US Agents Spy On Chinese Phones

Over the past 450 million years, life on Earth has been devastated by at least five mass extinctions, which are typically defined as catastrophes that wipe out more than 75 percent of species in a short amount of time. Many scientists have proposed that we are entering a Sixth Mass Extinction, this time driven by human activity, though debates still rage over the validity and consequences of this claim. From a report: Now, a team led by Robert Cowie, research professor at the University of Hawaii’s Pacific Biosciences Research Center, argues that “the Sixth Mass Extinction has begun on land and in freshwater seems increasingly likely,” according to a recent article published in Biological Reviews. “We consider that the Sixth Mass Extinction has probably started and present arguments to counter those who would deny this,” said the team, which also included biologists Philippe Bouchet and Benoît Fontaine of the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, France, in the article.

“Denying it is simply flying in the face of the mountain of data that is rapidly accumulating, and there is no longer room for skepticism, wondering whether it really is happening,” added the authors. Cowie and his colleagues refer to a multitude of studies cataloging the extinction of species across clades, but the article is primarily built around their research into mollusks, an invertebrate family that includes snails, clams, and slugs. This focus counteracts the disproportionate attention that vertebrates, such as birds and mammals, receive in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, among other conservation efforts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Scientists Warn that Sixth Mass Extinction Has ‘Probably Started’