Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
U.S. Terrorist Database Growing at Rapid Rate
July 19th, 2014Via: AP: The U.S. government is rapidly expanding the number of names it accepts for inclusion on its terrorist watch list, with more than 1.5 million added in the last five years, according to numbers divulged by the government in a civil lawsuit. About 99 percent of the names submitted are accepted, leading to criticism […]
German NSA Committee May Turn to Typewriters
July 15th, 2014Via: Ars Technica: Patrick Sensburg, chairman of the German parliament’s National Security Agency investigative committee, now says he’s considering expanding the use of manual typewriters to carry out his group’s work. In an appearance (German language) Monday morning on German public television, Sensburg said that the committee is taking its operational security very seriously. “In […]
GCHQ Has Developed Covert Tools to Seed the Internet with False Information
July 15th, 2014The headline is a huge understatement. Go through the document for a laundry list of stuff they’re up to. Via: First Look: The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web […]
Binney: “The NSA lies about what it stores.”
July 13th, 2014Via: Guardian: William Binney is one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA. He was a leading code-breaker against the Soviet Union during the Cold War but resigned soon after September 11, disgusted by Washington’s move towards mass surveillance. On 5 July he spoke at a conference in London organised by the […]
Hospitals Are Mining Patients’ Credit Card Data to Predict Who Will Get Sick
July 4th, 2014Via: Bloomberg: Imagine getting a call from your doctor if you let your gym membership lapse, make a habit of buying candy bars at the checkout counter, or begin shopping at plus-size clothing stores. For patients of Carolinas HealthCare System, which operates the largest group of medical centers in North and South Carolina, such a […]
NSA Targets Tor Administrators and People Searching for Privacy Tools
July 3rd, 2014More: NSA Targets the Privacy-Conscious Via: ndr.de: The investigation discloses the following: Two servers in Germany – in Berlin and Nuremberg – are under surveillance by the NSA. Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the person […]
The Military Is Already Using Facebook to Track Your Mood
July 2nd, 2014Via: Defense One: Critics have targeted a recent study on how emotions spread on the popular social network site Facebook, complaining that some 600,000 Facebook users did not know that they were taking part in an experiment. Somewhat more disturbing, the researchers deliberately manipulated users’ feelings to measure an effect called emotional contagion. Though Cornell […]
Google: Better Than 50% Chance That Loon Becomes a Reality
June 30th, 2014They also have drones: Google Buys Drone Maker Titan Aerospace. Via: Wired: Cassidy has always contended that by providing the Internet to unserved areas, his project could help make those dreams achievable. A year after the project’s public launch, he’s confident that Internet service enabled by high-altitude balloons is more than a possibility. “We’ve definitely […]
Facebook’s Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment
June 28th, 2014Via: The Atlantic: Facebook’s News Feed—the main list of status updates, messages, and photos you see when you open Facebook on your computer or phone—is not a perfect mirror of the world. But few users expect that Facebook would change their News Feed in order to manipulate their emotional state. We now know that’s exactly […]
Predictive Policing
June 25th, 2014Via: Guardian: The algorithm at play is performing what’s commonly referred to as predictive policing. Using years – and sometimes decades – worth of crime reports, the algorithm analyses the data to identify areas with high probabilities for certain types of crime, placing little red boxes on maps of the city that are streamed into […]
