Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
MTV Real World Casting Call for Occupy Wall Street Protestors
October 20th, 2011An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will. —Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind So, Obombya, the Goldman Sachs’ shill, and MTV are now behind this Occupy Wall Street situation. [Update: Mikhail Gorbachev: Protests leading to […]
Egypt’s Top ‘Facebook Revolutionary’ Now Advising Occupy Wall Street
October 19th, 2011Via: Wired: One of the key activists behind Egypt’s “Facebook Revolution” is now giving advice to a new group of protesters: the Occupy Wall Street movement. The protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park — and their offshoots around the country — often cite the mass demonstrations earlier this year in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as their […]
‘The Pentagon hopes to sniff out who has fallen prey to dangerous ideas’
October 18th, 2011Via: Wired: Mark Twain once tried to distinguish between the storyteller’s art and tales that a machine could generate. He observed that stringing “incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities,” was the province of the American storyteller. A machine might imitate simple formulas […]
Facebook Accused of Violating U.S. Wiretap Law
October 17th, 2011I know. You get it re: Facebook already. Ok, one more: Why Facebook Is After Your Kids. Via: Register: A Mississippi woman has accused Facebook of violating federal wiretap statutes by tracking her internet browsing history even when she wasn’t logged onto the social networking site. In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in federal court […]
U.S. Government Refuses FOIA Request to Turn Over ‘Secret’ Interpretation of Patriot Act
October 17th, 2011Via: TechDirt: We’ve been covering for a while now how Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have been very concerned over the secret interpretation the feds have of one piece of the PATRIOT Act. They’ve been trying to pressure the government into publicly explaining how they interpret the law, because they believe that it directly […]
Verizon Wireless Now Handing Over Your Web, Location and App Data to Advertisers by Default
October 17th, 2011Via: PC Magazine: For the last month, Verizon Wireless has been notifying customers through email of a major change to its default privacy setting: it will begin collecting your Web browsing history, cell phone location and app usage, for third-party marketing purposes. You can opt out of such surveillance, although Verizon has promised not to […]
Meet the Guy Who Snitched on Occupy Wall Street to the FBI and NYPD
October 16th, 2011My guess is that we would all be taken aback if we could know the complete list of agencies working that thing. Via: Gawker: The Occupy Wall Street protests have been going on for a month. And it seems the FBI and NYPD have had help tracking protesters’ moves thanks to a conservative computer security […]
Government Cameras In Your Car?
October 14th, 2011Via: MSNBC: Imagine that you couldn’t drive on major highways without agreeing to put a camera in your car — one that could film either the occupants or the vehicle’s surroundings and transmit the images back to a central office for inspection. You don’t have to read George Orwell to conjure up such an ominous […]
Path Intelligence: Tracking People Via Their Mobile Phones as They Meander Around Malls
October 14th, 2011Via: news.com.au: SHOPPING centres will monitor customers’ mobile phones to track how often they visit, which stores they like and how long they stay. The technology, brought to Australia by a UK-based company, has prompted a call for privacy or telephone intercept regulators to investigate. One unnamed Queensland shopping centre is next month due to […]
Facebook Reportedly Can Track Web Browsing Without Cookies
October 13th, 2011This is related to browser uniqueness. See How Unique – and Trackable – Is Your Browser? and Network Device Fingerprinting for the background on how this works. Again, Facebook widgets must be blocked from loading by default, unless, of course, you’re ok with this nonsense. Ghostery is the easiest solution. AdBlock+ and NoScript will also […]
