Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
South Wales Police Facial Recognition System Generated 92% False Positives at Soccer Match
May 7th, 2018Via: Engadget: Ask critics of police face recognition why they’re so skeptical and they’ll likely cite unreliability as one factor. What if the technology flags an innocent person? Unfortunately, that caution appears to have been warranted to some degree. South Wales Police are facing a backlash after they released data showing that their face recognition […]
Chinese Firms Use ‘Mind-Reading’ Devices to Monitor Workers’ Emotions
April 30th, 2018As I’ve always said (recent example) re: EEG data and these sorts of claims: I doubt it works at all, but the fact that they’re trying is disturbing enough. Via: Sydney Morning Herald: Workers in China are being hooked up with brain-reading devices that feed information about their moods to their employers, raising fears about […]
Dark Journalist X-Series: Pine Gap
April 28th, 2018Dark Journalist is slowly and carefully weaving many strange threads together with his outstanding X-Series. I usually post this sort of material on the Cryptogon Backchannel, but I’m posting this to the main page because Pine Gap is a standard Cryptogon topic, in terms of the surveillance and communications aspects of the facility that we’re […]
Amazon Designing Some Sort of Home Robot
April 23rd, 2018Via: Bloomberg: Ten years ago, Amazon introduced the Kindle and established the appeal of reading on a digital device. Four years ago, Jeff Bezos and company rolled out the Echo, prompting millions of people to start talking to a computer. Now Amazon.com Inc. is working on another big bet: robots for the home. The retail […]
Bill Gates Backs Space Based Video Surveillance System for Entire Planet
April 20th, 2018Via: TechCrunch: A new space imaging startup called EarthNow aims to provide not just pictures of the planet on demand, but real-time video anywhere a client desires. Its ambition is matched only by its pedigree: Bill Gates, Intellectual Ventures, Airbus, SoftBank and OneWeb founder Greg Wyler are all backing the play. Its promise is a […]
Palantir Using War on Terror Tools to Track American Citizens
April 19th, 2018Via: Bloomberg: The LAPD uses Palantir’s Gotham product for Operation Laser, a program to identify and deter people likely to commit crimes. Information from rap sheets, parole reports, police interviews, and other sources is fed into the system to generate a list of people the department defines as chronic offenders, says Craig Uchida, whose consulting […]
These Ex-Spies Are Harvesting Facebook Photos For A Massive Facial Recognition Database
April 17th, 2018Via: Fortune: When Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica revelations, he tried to describe the difference between “surveillance and what we do.” “The difference is extremely clear,” a nervous-looking Zuckerberg said. “On Facebook, you have control over your information… the information we […]
Facebook Donated to 46 of 55 Members on Committee That Will Question Zuckerberg
April 10th, 2018Via: USA Today: Members of the House and Senate committees that will question Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about user privacy protection next week are also some of the biggest recipients of campaign contributions from Facebook employees directly and the political action committee funded by employees. The congressional panel that got the most Facebook contributions is […]
Do You Trust This Computer?
April 7th, 2018Via: doyoutrustthiscomputer.org: Do You Trust This Computer? from Busy Child on Vimeo.
The Assassination Complex
April 4th, 2018Via: The Intercept: The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret slides that provides a window into the inner workings of the U.S. military’s kill/capture operations at a key time in the evolution of the drone wars — between 2011 and 2013. The documents, which also outline the internal views of special operations forces on […]
