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Federal Agents Tapped Cellphones of Portland Protesters

HeadlineSep 23, 2020

The Nation magazine is reporting federal officials with the Justice Department and Homeland Security have intercepted the phone communications of protesters in Portland. The Nation reports the surveillance involved cellphone cloning, where the government steals a phone’s unique identifiers and copies them to another device in order to intercept the communications received by the original device. Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley has called for a full investigation. He wrote on Twitter, “The Trump admin has treated the people of Portland like enemy combatants. These tactics—like cell phone cloning to spy on protestors—are unacceptable in America.”

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