Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
“You Are Not Anonymous On Tor”
September 17th, 2020Via: The Hacker Factor Blog: Last February, my Tor onion service came under a huge Tor-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. I spent days analyzing the attack, developing mitigation options, and defending my server. (The Tor service that I run for the Internet Archive was down for a few hours, but I managed to keep it […]
Robot Can Detect if People Are Wearing Masks
September 15th, 2020Via: Fox 5 NY: A human-like robot called Pepper can now detect whether people are wearing a mask to help stop the spread of COVID-19. Pepper uses cameras to scan the faces of up to 5 people in a group, simultaneously, in order to check if they are wearing a mask. During the interaction, Pepper […]
NSA Chief Who Oversaw Sweeping Domestic Phone Surveillance Joins Amazon Board As Director
September 9th, 2020Via: ZeroHedge: Just days after Amazon published a scathing letter slamming President Trump for not allowing the American multinational tech company to get the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, which instead was awarded to Microsoft, Amazon’s board has just appointed former NSA head and retired general of the US Army Keith B. […]
Amazon Wants Alexa to Move Into Your Apartment Before You Do
September 9th, 2020Via: Vice: On Thursday, Amazon announced a new program called Alexa for Residential that would make it cheaper for apartment complexes to integrate Alexa and Amazon devices into their rental units. This should come as no surprise, especially considering that the pandemic has allowed Amazon to grow even more entrenched in our daily lives. Before […]
Dozens More Mystery Drone Incursions Over U.S. Nuclear Power Plants Revealed
September 8th, 2020Via: Forbes: I recently described how a swarm of drones flew in a restricted area at Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant on two successive nights last September. A new cache of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) reveals how 24 nuclear sites suffered at least 57 drone incursions from 2015 to 2019 […]
U.S. Government Asks Mitre Corp to Build Creepy Surveillance Technologies
September 7th, 2020Via: Forbes: Among the government’s wilder Mitre orders: a prototype tool that can hack into smartwatches, fitness trackers and home thermometers for the purposes of homeland security; software to collect human fingerprints from social media websites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for the FBI; support in building what the FBI calls the biggest database of […]
Florida: Pasco County Sheriff Terrorizes Citizens
September 3rd, 2020Via: Tampa Bay Times: Deputies gave the mother of one teenage target a $2,500 fine because she had five chickens in her backyard. They arrested another target’s father after peering through a window in his house and noticing a 17-year-old friend of his son smoking a cigarette inside. As they make checks, deputies feed information […]
Mass Surveillance Program Exposed by Snowden Was Illegal
September 3rd, 2020Via: Reuters: Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful – and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth. In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, […]
Police Across Canada Are Using Predictive Policing Algorithms
September 1st, 2020Via: Vice: Police across Canada are increasingly using controversial algorithms to predict where crimes could occur, who might go missing, and to help them determine where they should patrol, despite fundamental human rights concerns, a new report has found. To Surveil and Predict: A Human Rights Analysis of Algorithmic Policing in Canada is the result […]
California: Tell Your Senators That Ill-Conceived “Immunity Passports” Won’t Help Us
August 26th, 2020The crazy is coming very fast now. Via: Electronic Frontier Foundation: Californians should not be forced to present their smartphones to enter public places. But that’s exactly what A.B. 2004 would do, by directing the state to set up a blockchain-based system for “immunity passports”: a verified health credential that shows the results of someone’s […]
