Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
Iris Scanner Identifies a Person 40 Feet Away
April 18th, 2015Via: Discovery: The CMU team recently posted a video successfully testing the system in a typical traffic stop scenario. Using the long-range iris scanner, the system was able to identify the driver of a vehicle by capturing an image of the eye via the side-view mirror.
Facebook Claims ‘A Bug’ Made it Track Nonusers
April 11th, 2015Mmm hmm. Via: The Hill: Facebook researchers have found “a bug” that caused it to track people, even if they had never visited its website, the social media giant acknowledged this week. The bug caused the company to place cookies — a common way to track people’s browsing habits on the Web — on “some” […]
Baltimore Police Used Stingray Systems to Track Cellphones in Thousands of Cases
April 9th, 2015Via: Baltimore Sun: The Baltimore Police Department has used an invasive and controversial cellphone tracking device thousands of times in recent years while following instructions from the FBI to withhold information about it from prosecutors and judges, a detective revealed in court testimony Wednesday. The testimony shows for the first time how frequently city police […]
Human Rights Watch Sues DEA Over Bulk Collection of Americans’ Telephone Records
April 8th, 2015Via: EFF: Human Rights Watch, a nonpartisan organization that fights human rights abuses across the globe, filed suit against the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration late Tuesday for illegally collecting records of its telephone calls to certain foreign countries as part of yet another government bulk surveillance program. The group is represented by the Electronic Frontier […]
Australia Outlaws Warrant Canaries
March 27th, 2015Via: BoingBoing: The exceptionally broad new surveillance bill lets the government do nearly unlimited warrantless mass surveillance, even of lawyer-client privileged communications, and bans warrant canaries, making it an offense to “disclose information about the existence or non-existence” of a warrant to spy on journalists.
Apple Patent Envisions Tracking People in Real Time
March 25th, 2015.gov has probably been doing it for years, so why not? Via: cnet: Apple’s current Find My Friends feature could one day expand into more of a Track My Friends feature. Granted to Apple on Tuesday by the US Patent and Trademark Office, a patent called “Sharing location information among devices” describes a process that […]
U.S. Customs Quietly Launches Facial Recognition Experiment at DC Airport
March 20th, 2015Via: Vice: The next time you come back from overseas and flash your American passport at Washington, DC’s Dulles airport, customs officers might take a picture of you and use facial recognition technology to figure out if you really are who you say you are. On March 11, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) quietly […]
Google’s New Facial Recognition System
March 19th, 2015Via: Fortune: New advances in facial recognition are a step forward for an artificial intelligence technique called deep learning. “I never forget a face,” some people like to boast. It’s a claim that looks quainter by the day as artificial intelligence research continues to advance. Some computers, it turns out, never forget 260 million faces. […]
Hertz Puts Cameras In Its Rental Cars, Says It Has No Plans To Use Them
March 16th, 2015Via: Fusion: Hertz has offered the NeverLost navigational device for years, but it only added the built-in camera feature (which includes audio and video) to its latest version of the device — NeverLost 6 — in mid-2014. “Approximately a quarter of our vehicles across the country have a NeverLost unit and slightly more than half […]
U.S. Post Offices Have Installed Hidden Spy Cameras to Film Customers
March 16th, 2015Via: Gizmodo: While the U.S. Postal Inspection Service is typically tasked with looking into mailbox vandalism and mail fraud, an investigation in Denver reveals that they’re also installing hidden cameras at post offices and spying on Americans. This postal surveillance program sounds shady as hell. FOX31 Denver found one camera disguised as a utility box […]
