Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
NSA Contractor Indicted Over Mammoth Theft of Classified Data
February 8th, 2017Via: Reuters: A former National Security Agency contractor was indicted on Wednesday by a federal grand jury on charges he willfully retained national defense information, in what U.S. officials have said may have been the largest heist of classified government information in history. The indictment alleges that Harold Thomas Martin, 52, spent up to 20 […]
Cellphone Spy Tools Have Flooded Local Police Departments
February 8th, 2017Via: CityLab: Major cities throughout the U.S. have spent millions on mobile surveillance tools—but there are still few rules about what happens to the information they capture.
The FBI’s Secret Rules
January 31st, 2017Via: The Intercept: For example, the bureau’s agents can decide that a campus organization is not “legitimate” and therefore not entitled to robust protections for free speech; dig for derogatory information on potential informants without any basis for believing they are implicated in unlawful activity; use a person’s immigration status to pressure them to collaborate […]
DragonflEye Project Wants to Turn Insects Into Cyborg Drones
January 26th, 2017Via: IEEE: As hard as we’re trying, it’s going to be a very long time before we’re able to build a robotic insect that’s anywhere near as capable or versatile as a real one. So for now, we rely on a cybernetics approach to get real insects to do our bidding instead. Over the past […]
This Company Has Built a Profile on Every American Adult
January 24th, 2017Via: Bloomberg: Every move you make. Every click you take. Every game you play. Every place you stay. They’ll be watching you. Forget telephoto lenses and fake mustaches: The most important tools for America’s 35,000 private investigators are database subscription services. For more than a decade, professional snoops have been able to search troves of […]
Facial Recognition to Replace Passports in Security Overhaul at Australian Airports
January 23rd, 2017Via: Guardian: A radical overhaul of security at Australia’s international airports is the first step towards the government’s goal of automating 90% of air traveller processing by 2020. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection will start moving towards a “contactless” system for arrivals this year, Fairfax reported on Sunday – the most ambitious stage […]
A New Era of Mass Surveillance is Emerging Across Europe
January 22nd, 2017Via: Just Security: In recent months, and in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks across Europe, Germany, France and the United Kingdom — Europe’s biggest superpowers — have passed laws granting their surveillance agencies virtually unfettered power to conduct bulk interception of communications across Europe and beyond, with limited to no effective oversight […]
Tesla’s Second Generation Autopilot Could Reduce Crash Rate by 90%, Says CEO Elon Musk
January 21st, 2017Whatever you think about autonomous drive technologies, my point with posting these stories is not to be a cheerleader one way or another. I just want to be sure everyone knows that this stuff is real and it is coming. Millions of drivers will lose their jobs, and these are not minimum wage, burger flipping […]
Air Force Tests IBM’s Brain-Inspired Chip as an Aerial Tank Spotter
January 17th, 2017Nope, there aren’t any SkyNet jokes in the article. Via: MIT Technology Review: Satellites, aircraft, and growing numbers of drones—the U.S. Air Force has a lot of electronic eyes in the sky. Now it’s exploring whether brain-inspired computer chips could give those systems the smarts to do things like automatically identify vehicles such as tanks […]
Obama Expands Surveillance Powers on His Way Out
January 13th, 2017Via: Electronic Frontier Foundation: With mere days left before President-elect Donald Trump takes the White House, President Barack Obama’s administration just finalized rules to make it easier for the nation’s intelligence agencies to share unfiltered information about innocent people. New rules issued by the Obama administration under Executive Order 12333 will let the NSA—which collects […]
