Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
U.S. Searches of Phones, Laptops at Airports Rising
May 1st, 2019Via: AP: U.S. government searches of travelers’ cellphones and laptops at airports and border crossings nearly quadrupled since 2015 and were being done for reasons beyond customs and immigration enforcement, according to papers filed Tuesday in a federal lawsuit that claims scouring the electronic devices without a warrant is unconstitutional. The government has vigorously defended […]
FCC Approves SpaceX’s Plans to Fly Internet-Beaming Satellites in Lower Orbit
April 30th, 2019In case you’re not being hit with enough EM smog already… Via: The Verge: The Federal Communications Commission has approved SpaceX’s request to fly a large swath of its future internet-beaming satellites at a lower orbit than originally planned. The approval was a major regulatory hurdle the company needed to clear in order to start […]
Censorship – The First Action of a Criminal Government
April 29th, 2019Via: The Crow House: Research Credit: LoneWolf
Retailers Are Tracking Where You Shop – and Where You Sleep
April 27th, 2019Via: Bloomberg: Retailers are following the trail of electronic bread crumbs left by millions of customers. And it’s helping them at a time when the industry is suffering. They’re buying mobile-phone data that can track where and for how long people shop, eat, see movies — and where they go before and after. It allows […]
Walmart Experiments with AI to Monitor Stores in Real Time
April 25th, 2019Enable face recognition so the system can tempt Bubba with three cents off his next bag of Doritos with alerts on his phone as he’s standing in front of the chips. Via: AP: Inside one of Walmart’s busiest Neighborhood Market grocery stores, high resolution cameras suspended from the ceiling point to a table of bananas. […]
Amazon’s Alexa Reviewers Can Access Customers’ Home Addresses
April 24th, 2019Via: Bloomberg: An Amazon.com Inc. team auditing Alexa users’ commands has access to location data and can, in some cases, easily find a customer’s home address, according to five employees familiar with the program. The team, spread across three continents, transcribes, annotates and analyzes a portion of the voice recordings picked up by Alexa. The […]
DHS Plan for Face Scanning at Airports Sparks Alarm
April 24th, 2019Via: The Hill: Lawmakers and civil liberties advocates are calling on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to halt plans to begin using facial recognition technology on nearly all departing air passengers within the next four years. The agency’s plan has reignited the fight over the sensitive technology. Critics say facial recognition technology is not […]
U.S. Government Spent Over $500m on Fake Al-Qaeda Propaganda Videos that Tracked Location of Viewers
April 22nd, 2019My guess is that even I would be shocked if we knew the extent of America’s ongoing PSYOP with regard to media. Via: Independent: A former contractor for a UK-based public relations firm says that the Pentagon paid more than half a billion dollars for the production and dissemination of fake Al-Qaeda videos that portrayed […]
We’re All Being Judged By a Secret ‘Trustworthiness’ Score
April 15th, 2019Via: Slashdot: Nearly everything we buy, how we buy, and where we’re buying from is secretly fed into AI-powered verification services that help companies guard against credit-card and other forms of fraud, according to the Wall Street Journal. More than 16,000 signals are analyzed by a service called Sift, which generates a “Sift score” ranging […]
2 million Kiwis Have Police Alert on Their Names
April 15th, 2019Via: New Zealand Herald: Nearly two million people appear in a New Zealand police intelligence system with an alert against their name, inquiries by the Otago Daily Times have revealed. Those in the database are generally flagged without their knowledge, and a leading security analyst says the broad sweep of the system raises privacy concerns. […]
