Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
Feds Walk Into A Building, Demand Everyone’s Fingerprints To Open Phones
October 18th, 2016Via: Forbes: In what’s believed to be an unprecedented attempt to bypass the security of Apple iPhones, or any smartphone that uses fingerprints to unlock, California’s top cops asked to enter a residence and force anyone inside to use their biometric information to open their mobile devices. FORBES found a court filing, dated May 9 2016, in which the Department of Justice sought […]
Half of American Adults Already In Facial Recognition Network
October 18th, 2016Via: Vocativ: Half of all American adults are already in some sort of facial recognition network accessible to law enforcement, according to a comprehensive new study. Conducted over a year and relying in part on Freedom of Information and public record requests to 106 law enforcement agencies, the study, conducted by Georgetown Law’s Center on […]
U.S. Based VPN Tries to Get Me to Promote Their Service
October 7th, 2016As I’ve told you guys on here forever, all a VPN does is shift your Internet activity from one place to another. Instead of the logs being held by X, they’re held by Y. It’s not magic. You’re not anonymous online. Since I can’t know what any VPN service is doing on the backend, I’ll […]
National Guard, State Police Descend on 81-Year-Old’s Property to Seize Single Pot Plant
October 6th, 2016Via: Daily Hampshire Gazette: All that remains of the solitary marijuana plant an 81-year-old grandmother had been growing behind her South Amherst home is a stump and a ragged hole in the ground. Margaret Holcomb said she was growing the plant as medicine, a way to ease arthritis and glaucoma and help her sleep at […]
FBI Arrests NSA Contractor
October 5th, 2016Via: The Atlantic: The FBI arrested a National Security Agency contractor in late August for stealing classified material from the intelligence organization, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday. Federal prosecutors have charged Harold Thomas Martin III, 51, of Glen Burnie, Maryland, with theft of government property and unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials. Martin […]
Not OK, Google
October 5th, 2016Via: Tech Crunch: At its hardware launch event in San Francisco yesterday, Alphabet showed the sweeping breadth of its ambition to own consumers’ personal data, as computing continues to accelerate away from static desktops and screens, coalescing into a cloud of connected devices with the potential to generate far more data — and data of […]
Homeland Security Tracks License Plates At Gun Shows
October 5th, 2016Via: ZeroHedge: Newly discovered emails from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), reveal efforts of the federal government to track American citizens who visit gun shows across the country. The discovery came via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the Wall Street Journal that revealed internal emails from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement […]
Yahoo Secretly Scanned Customer Emails for U.S. Intelligence
October 4th, 2016Via: Reuters: Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter. The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest […]
Not The Onion: ‘A Robot Baby Intended to Make Lonely People More Happy’
October 3rd, 2016Via: Independent: Toyota has created a tiny robot baby that it hopes can make lonely people more happy. The company’s Kirobo Mini is meant to help provide a companion. It looks like a baby – and could even serve that purpose for people in Japan, where it will be sold and where falling birth rates […]
AI Legion of Doom: Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Form AI Partnership
September 28th, 2016Via: Tech Crunch: The world’s largest technology companies hold the keys to some of the largest databases on our planet. Much like goods and coins before it, data is becoming an important currency for the modern world. The data’s value is rooted in its applications to artificial intelligence. Whichever company owns the data, effectively owns […]
