Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
Portrait of a Drone Killer: ‘I Have a Duty, and I Execute My Duty’
July 31st, 2012Via: Lew Rockwell Blog: One wonders if drone pilot Col. D. Scott Brenton listens to Louis Armstrong in the suburban Air National Guard Base in Syracuse from which he murders people 7,000 miles away. “I see mothers with children, I see fathers with children, I see fathers with mothers, I see kids playing soccer,” Brenton […]
JCPenney to Eliminate Check-Out Clerks
July 22nd, 2012Via: CBS: But the store is getting a makeover – specialized boutiques within the store like a denim bar – and more. The CEO of JCPenney is the former retail chief of Apple, and he wants to shake things up to restore the company to profitability. But one of his ideas – replacing clerks with […]
IARPA Contracting for Quiet Surveillance Drone
July 19th, 2012Via: Aviation Week: Now small firm D-Star Engineering has received what appears to be the first contract (for $4.8 million) awarded under the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (IARPA) Great Horned Owl (GHO) program to develop a new class of quiet small unmanned aircraft. … Sound is the number one signature that gives away the […]
Pentagon, CIA Sued for Lethal Drone Attacks on U.S. Citizens
July 18th, 2012Via: Wired: Survivors of three Americans killed by targeted drone attacks in Yemen last year sued top-ranking members of the United States government, alleging Wednesday they illegally killed the three, including a 16-year-old boy, in violation of international human rights law and the U.S. Constitution. “The government has killed three Americans. It should account for […]
Google Settles with U.S. Government on Privacy Violations
July 12th, 2012Where does $22.5 million show up on Google’s list of expenses? Hmm… In other words, for Google and other companies: Do more of this. The penalty for getting caught is trivial. Via: New York Times: Google and the Federal Trade Commission are near a $22.5 million settlement agreement related to charges that Google bypassed privacy […]
Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts
July 12th, 2012Via: The Chronicle of Higher Education: In a small, anonymous office in the Trump Tower, 28 floors above Wall Street, a man sits in front of a computer screen sifting through satellite images of a foreign desert. The images depict a vast, sandy emptiness, marked every so often by dunes and hills. He is searching […]
14 Incredibly Creepy Surveillance Technologies
July 10th, 2012Via: Blacklisted News: Most of us don’t think much about it, but the truth is that people are being watched, tracked and monitored more today than at any other time in human history. The explosive growth of technology in recent years has given governments, spy agencies and big corporations monitoring tools that the despots and […]
Air Force Trains Drone Pilots by Tracking Civilian Cars in U.S.
July 8th, 2012Via: New York Times: Today many of the pilots at Holloman never get off the ground. The base has been converted into the U.S. Air Force’s primary training center for drone operators, where pilots spend their days in sand-colored trailers near a runway from which their planes take off without them. Inside each trailer, a […]
Swarms of Maple Seed Drones
July 6th, 2012Via: Talking Points Memo: Imagine a cheap, tiny, hovering aerial drone capable of being launched with the flick of a person’s wrist and able to provide manipulable 360-degree surveillance views. It’s real, it’s inspired by maple seeds, and the company behind it, Lockheed Martin, envisions a future in which swarms of the new drones can […]
Drone Makers Urge U.S. to Let Them Sell More Overseas
July 2nd, 2012Via: Los Angeles Times: Despite concerns about U.S.-made drones ending up in enemy hands, American military contractors are lobbying the government to loosen export restrictions and open up foreign markets to the unmanned aircraft that have reshaped modern warfare. Companies such as Northrop Grumman Corp.and other arms makers are eager to tap a growing foreign […]
