Archive for the 'Dictatorship' Category
U.S. Army Tests Fully Autonomous Convoy
January 31st, 2014Via: Wired: U.S. Army convoys will soon be able to roll into even the roughest of unfriendly foreign urban areas and combat zones without the worry of loss of life, thanks to new technology that will make large vehicles fully autonomous. In demonstrations earlier this month at Fort Hood, Texas, the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Research, […]
NSA Targets ‘Leaky Apps Spew Everything’ from Smartphones
January 27th, 2014Via: New York Times: When a smartphone user opens Angry Birds, the popular game application, and starts slinging birds at chortling green pigs, spies could be lurking in the background to snatch data revealing the player’s location, age, sex and other personal information, according to secret British intelligence documents. In their globe-spanning surveillance for terrorism […]
Gallery: Revolution in Kiev
January 26th, 2014Via: LiveJournal: I came to Kiev. I came to see for myself what is happening here.
Dr. Strangelove More of a Documentary Than a Black Comedy
January 24th, 2014Via: The New Yorker: The first casualty of every war is the truth—and the Cold War was no exception to that dictum. Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that […]
Watchdog Report Says NSA Program Is Illegal and Should End
January 23rd, 2014Captain Obvious checking in on Cryptogon this morning. Via: New York Times: An independent federal privacy watchdog has concluded that the National Security Agency’s program to collect bulk phone call records has provided only “minimal” benefits in counterterrorism efforts, is illegal and should be shut down. The findings are laid out in a 238-page report, […]
Army Studying Replacing Thousands of Grunts with Robots
January 21st, 2014Via: Military Times: During remarks at the Army Aviation Symposium in Arlington, Va., on Jan. 15, Cone quietly dropped a bomb. The Army, he said, is considering the feasibility of shrinking the size of the brigade combat team from about 4,000 soldiers to 3,000 over the coming years, and replacing the lost soldiers with robots […]
Files Show Chicago Archdiocese Hid Decades Of Child Sex Abuse
January 21st, 2014Via: CBS: For decades, those at the highest levels of the nation’s third-largest archdiocese moved accused priests from parish to parish while hiding the clerics’ histories from the public. In some cases, abuse by priests happened while there were in seminary school before they were ordained. In other instances, priests were promoted, despite knowledge of […]
Chinese Bootcamps for Internet Addicts
January 21st, 2014Via: news.com.au: CHINA is the first country to label internet addiction a clinical disorder. But instead of shutting the laptop and going for a stroll, in China there are guarded boot camps intended to deprogram hooked teens. … This addiction and social detachment is striking nationwide concern across China, so to stamp it out the […]
Ukraine Tracks Protesters Through Cellphones
January 21st, 2014Via: New York Times: The Ukrainian government used telephone technology to pinpoint the locations of cellphones in use near clashes between riot police officers and protesters early on Tuesday, illustrating that techniques that can be used to target commercial information can serve law enforcement as well. People near the fighting between riot police and protesters […]
Syria: Senior War Crimes Prosecutors Say Photographs and Documents Provide ‘Clear Evidence’ of Systematic Killing of 11,000 Detainees
January 21st, 2014Via: Guardian: Syrian government officials could face war crimes charges in the light of a huge cache of evidence smuggled out of the country showing the “systematic killing” of about 11,000 detainees, according to three eminent international lawyers. The three, former prosecutors at the criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, examined thousands […]
