Archive for the 'Outsourced' Category
Atlas, The Next Generation
February 24th, 2016Via: Boston Dynamics (aka Google, aka Alphabet Inc): A new version of Atlas, designed to operate outdoors and inside buildings. It is specialized for mobile manipulation. It is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated. It uses sensors in its body and legs to balance and LIDAR and stereo sensors in its head to avoid obstacles, assess […]
“No Cost” License Plate Readers Are Turning Texas Police into Mobile Debt Collectors and Data Miners
February 1st, 2016Via: Electronic Frontier Foundation: Vigilant Solutions, one of the country’s largest brokers of vehicle surveillance technology, is offering a hell of a deal to law enforcement agencies in Texas: a whole suite of automated license plate reader (ALPR) equipment and access to the company’s massive databases and analytical tools—and it won’t cost the agency a […]
“The Pentagon Has No Clue How Many Weapons It Has Lost to ISIS”
January 25th, 2016Lost. *wink* None of this is by design. Oh no. Shit happens. They forgot to mention the stacks of cash: 2011: $6.7 Billion In Cash Missing in Iraq Via: Mother Jones: For more than a decade, the United States has supplied huge quantities of weapons and military hardware to the Iraqi government—and a large chunk […]
Delhi: The Sleep Mafia
January 18th, 2016Via: New York Times: When midnight approaches in Old Delhi and a thick, freezing fog settles over the city, the quilt-wallah Farukh Khan sits on his corner, watching the market for his services come to life. They shuffle up one by one, men desperate for sleep. The bicycle rickshaw pullers, peeling one of his 20-rupee, […]
Wal-Mart Hires Lockheed Martin for “Intelligence Gathering” on Union Organizers
December 19th, 2015Via: Bloomberg: OUR Walmart, a group of employees backed and funded by a union, was asking for more full-time jobs with higher wages and predictable schedules. Officially they called themselves the Organization United for Respect at Walmart. Walmart publicly dismissed OUR Walmart as the insignificant creation of the United Food and Commercial Workers International (UFCW) […]
The High-Stakes Race to Rid the World of Human Drivers
December 14th, 2015Via: The Atlantic: The race to bring driverless cars to the masses is only just beginning, but already it is a fight for the ages. The competition is fierce, secretive, and elite. It pits Apple against Google against Tesla against Uber: all titans of Silicon Valley, in many ways as enigmatic as they are revered. […]
ISIS Armed with U.S. Weapons
December 9th, 2015Via: CNN: A new report from a prominent human rights group has found that ISIS has built a substantial arsenal, including U.S.-made weapons obtained from the Iraqi army and Syrian opposition groups. Amnesty International’s 44-page report, released late Monday, found that much of ISIS’ equipment and munitions comes from stockpiles captured from the U.S.-allied Iraqi […]
Homeland Security: “An Entirely New Phase”
December 6th, 2015The whole ISIS mess originates with U.S. activities in Iraq (which, even the mainstream hive mind admits had nothing to do with 9/11), and now, “We have moved to an entirely new phase in the global terrorist threat.” Via: Reuters: U.S. officials, faced with an evolving threat of deadly attacks by homegrown extremists, are rethinking […]
Pentagon Task Force: We Want Villas and Flat-Screen TVs in Afghanistan
December 3rd, 2015Via: ProPublica: The requirements were clear: Villas with no less than queen beds, flat-screen TVs of no less than 27 inches, meals of at least three stars, and round-the-clock bodyguards. Sounds more like a celebrity rider than a description of Afghanistan accommodations for U.S. government employees. But that’s what the Pentagon’s Task Force for Business […]
Air Force Hires Civilian Drone Pilots for Combat Patrols
November 27th, 2015Via: Los Angeles Times: The Air Force has hired civilian defense contractors to fly MQ-9 Reaper drones to help track suspected militants and other targets in global hot spots, a previously undisclosed expansion in the privatization of once-exclusively military functions. For the first time, civilian pilots and crews now operate what the Air Force calls […]
