Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations
February 26th, 2014Via: The Intercept: Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To […]
Electronics Retailer Checks Customers’ Names Against U.S. Watch List
February 25th, 2014Via: EEV Blog: If your name happens to be fairly common like mine, then you may end up having your orders flagged and put on hold by Element 14, at least here in Australia. Because, well, their system sucks arse, and it seems like they are licking the arse of the United States government to […]
At Newark Airport, the Lights Are On, and They’re Watching You
February 23rd, 2014Via: New York Times: Visitors to Terminal B at Newark Liberty International Airport may notice the bright, clean lighting that now blankets the cavernous interior, courtesy of 171 recently installed LED fixtures. But they probably will not realize that the light fixtures are the backbone of a system that is watching them. Using an array […]
“Or, maybe nothing, and this is all a coincidence.”
February 22nd, 2014Via: Daring Fireball: According to slide 6 in the leaked PowerPoint deck on NSA’s PRISM program, Apple was “added” in October 2012. These three facts prove nothing; it’s purely circumstantial. But the shoe fits. Sure would be interesting to know who added that spurious line of code to the file. Conspiratorially, one could suppose the […]
Reporter Claims Computer Self Deleted Text While He Tried to Write Book About Snowden
February 22nd, 2014My first question would be: Was the system really offline? Was he using a computer with a wi-fi network adapter (pretty much any laptop made in the last decade)? If yes, then it’s probably safe to assume that he wasn’t actually offline. Whatever rootkit was running on the system could simply turn on the wi-fi […]
Google’s Project Tango: Indoor 3D Mapping and Tracking
February 20th, 2014Because tracking you outside is so 1990s. It’s not enough for the Legion of Doom to be able to track your every move outside. It now wants to map your indoor world, in 3D, and where you are in it. NSA/NGA will love this. Coincidence: Tango: Tango (U.S.) NATO phonetic alphabet for the letter “T” […]
Inside DuckDuckGo, Google’s Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
February 20th, 2014Via: Fast Company: “Every year, we’ve grown 200-500%,” Weinberg says. “The numbers keep getting bigger.” As of early February, DuckDuckGo was seeing more than 4 million search queries per day. One year ago, that number had just barely broken 1 million. Surprisingly, the sudden success didn’t send the site crashing down. Nor did it change […]
“Smart Cities”
February 20th, 2014Via: Fast Company: Tech giant Cisco thinks there’s something to all this talk of ”smart cities”–and that connecting roads or license plate readers to the Internet is going to be big business. In the latest installment of their ongoing expansion into the Internet of Things, Cisco recently announced an agreement with Swiss security firm AGT […]
Chicago: Predictive Policing Experiments
February 20th, 2014Via: The Verge: When the Chicago Police Department sent one of its commanders to Robert McDaniel’s home last summer, the 22-year-old high school dropout was surprised. Though he lived in a neighborhood well-known for bloodshed on its streets, he hadn’t committed a crime or interacted with a police officer recently. And he didn’t have a […]
NSA Will Expand Surveillance—Because of Lawsuits
February 20th, 2014Via: The Hill: The federal government may actually expand the controversial surveillance program that collects Americans’ phone records in a bid to preserve evidence for the multiple lawsuits filed against the National Security Agency, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The decision comes despite President Obama’s instruction in a speech on American surveillance practices last […]
