Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
Google Collecting Complete Health Histories on Millions of Americans
November 11th, 2019Unbelievable. Via: Wall Street Journal: Google is engaged with one of the U.S.’s largest health-care systems on a project to collect and crunch the detailed personal-health information of millions of people across 21 states. The initiative, code-named “Project Nightingale,” appears to be the biggest effort yet by a Silicon Valley giant to gain a toehold […]
Inside Amazon’s Plan for Alexa to Run Your Entire Life
November 11th, 2019Comedy Gold on Cryptogon this morning. Via: MIT Technology Review: The creator of the famous voice assistant dreams of a world where Alexa is everywhere, anticipating your every need. … The crux of the plan is for the voice assistant to move from passive to proactive interactions. Rather than wait for and respond to requests, […]
Chinese Surveillance Goods Illegally Sold to U.S. Military
November 8th, 2019Via: AP: A Long Island firm sold tens of millions of dollars in Chinese-made surveillance and other sensitive security equipment to customers, including the U.S. military to use on aircraft carriers, by falsely claiming the goods were manufactured in America, federal prosecutors said Thursday. The fraud that prosecutors allege by Aventura Technologies Inc. raised “a […]
Google Wants More Pentagon Work
November 7th, 2019Via: DefenseOne: The company’s senior vice president for global affairs said Tuesday that the search giant has Pentagon contracts to work on cybersecurity, business automation, and deepfake detection — and is looking for more. “It’s been frustrating,” said Google’s Kent Walker, referring to rising public perceptions that the company is opposed to doing national security […]
This Is How the U.S. Military’s Massive Facial Recognition System Works
November 7th, 2019Via: OneZero: Over the last 15 years, the United States military has developed a new addition to its arsenal. The weapon is deployed around the world, largely invisible, and grows more powerful by the day. That weapon is a vast database, packed with millions of images of faces, irises, fingerprints, and DNA data — a […]
Google Given Green Light for Toronto Smart City
November 2nd, 2019Via: BBC: Sidewalk Labs’s plans to create a smart city in a disused area of Toronto can proceed but on a much smaller scale than it had wanted. Any data the Google-affiliate collects there must be treated as a public asset. Waterfront Toronto, the group charged with overseeing development of the area, voted unanimously for […]
The Fantasy of Opting Out
November 1st, 2019Via: The MIT Press Reader: Consider a day in the life of a fairly ordinary person in a large city in a stable, democratically governed country. She is not in prison or institutionalized, nor is she a dissident or an enemy of the state, yet she lives in a condition of permanent and total surveillance […]
Military Algorithm Can Predict Illness 48 Hours Before Symptoms Show
October 25th, 2019Via: Nextgov: U.S. service members are strong but they’re still people, and people get sick sometimes. But when one gets sick at the last minute, that can have serious repercussions on their unit’s ability to execute critical missions. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, or DTRA, is trying to get ahead of this problem by developing […]
SpaceX Plans to Start Offering Starlink Broadband Services in 2020
October 24th, 2019Global Lightning. Hmm. Via: Space News: Shotwell said many of the Starlink features are being tested by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory under a program called Global Lightning. SpaceX in December 2018 received a $28 million contract to test over the next three years different ways in which the military might use Starlink broadband […]
“We the People” Have Become “We the Police State”
October 23rd, 2019Via: The Rutherford Institute: We are fast becoming slaves in thrall to a faceless, nameless, bureaucratic totalitarian government machine that relentlessly erodes our freedoms through countless laws, statutes, and prohibitions. Book: Battlefield America: The War On The American People by John W. Whitehead
