Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
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 […]
Real Headline: “Get Ready for Freeways That Ban Human Drivers”
September 22nd, 2016Sure, they lead with the safety argument, but what you’re going to wind up with is something like this: Didn’t pay taxes? “Driving disabled. Would you like to pay overdue taxes, penalties, fees and interest now?” Didn’t pay parking fine? “Driving disabled. Would you like to pay your fine now?” Children not vaccinated? “Limited destinations. […]
German Spies ‘Systematically Violating Constitution’
September 5th, 2016Via: thelocal.de: The BND, Germany’s version of the CIA, has been accused of massive breaches of the constitution in a leaked report by the government’s representative for data protection. “The BND [Bundesnachrichtendienst] systematically lifted and used personal data without a legal basis to do so,” wrote Federal Data Protection Commissioner Andrea Voßhoff in a report […]
Chicago: “Array of Things”
August 29th, 2016Via: USA Today: The Windy City has begun installing what sounds and looks a whole lot like a Fitbit that can measure the vitals of a bustling metropolis. Chicago, which partnered on the project with researchers at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory and several corporations, last week installed the first two of […]
