Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
Monero Less Untraceable Than It Seems
March 29th, 2018Via: Wired: Monero is designed to mix up any given Monero “coin” with other payments, so that anyone scouring Monero’s blockchain can’t link it to any particular identity or previous transaction from the same source. But in a recent paper, a team of researchers from a broad collection of institutions—including Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, Boston University, […]
By 2019 Every New Ford Will Have 4G LTE Connectivity for Over-The-Air Updates
March 18th, 2018Tesla has been doing this for years, and it’s very disturbing. Of course, the justification is that changes can be made to the car to fix things over the air, without the customer having to bring the car in for servicing. I get all of that. But many people don’t realize that the vehicles are […]
China to Bar People with Bad ‘Social Credit’ from Planes, Trains
March 16th, 2018Via: Reuters: China said it will begin applying its so-called social credit system to flights and trains and stop people who have committed misdeeds from taking such transport for up to a year. People who would be put on the restricted lists included those found to have committed acts like spreading false information about terrorism […]
TSA Laptop and Phone Searches on Domestic Flights
March 12th, 2018Via: Guardian: There are a growing number of reports of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) searching the electronic devices of passengers on domestic flights in the US, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has sued the federal agency for records. The ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed a lawsuit against the TSA […]
Palantir Wins $876 Million U.S. Army Contract
March 11th, 2018Via: Bloomberg: Billionaire investor Peter Thiel got a fresh victory in Washington. His data-mining startup, Palantir Technologies Inc., won a much-contested contract to provide software to the U.S. Army. Palantir will work with Raytheon Co. to replace the troubled Distributed Common Ground System now in effect. They beat out seven other proposals for a decade-long, […]
FBI Used Geek Squad Technicians as Informants
March 8th, 2018Via: EFF: After the prosecution of a California doctor revealed the FBI’s ties to a Best Buy Geek Squad computer repair facility in Kentucky, new documents released to EFF show that the relationship goes back years. The records also confirm that the FBI has paid Geek Squad employees as informants. EFF filed a Freedom of […]
Tor Is a Foreign Policy Weapon of the U.S. Government
March 2nd, 2018Via: Yasha Levine: For years, the Tor Project — along with other U.S. government crypto tools like Signal — has been seen in almost religious terms by the privacy community as the only way to protect people from government spying online. The Electronic Frontier Foundation held up Tor as the digital equivalent of the First […]
The Disturbing Acceptance of Google’s New ‘Smart’ Camera
March 1st, 2018Via: The Week: In the reviews that rolled out recently for Google’s new Clips smart camera, there were the rote things that you’d expect in all tech reviews: what was good, what was bad, and, inevitably, whether or not you should buy it. There was, however, a key idea conspicuously absent: whether or not the […]
Palantir Has Secretly Been Using New Orleans to Test Its Predictive Policing Technology
February 28th, 2018Via: The Verge: The program began in 2012 as a partnership between New Orleans Police and Palantir Technologies, a data-mining firm founded with seed money from the CIA’s venture capital firm. According to interviews and documents obtained by The Verge, the initiative was essentially a predictive policing program, similar to the “heat list” in Chicago […]
Apple Confirms It Uses Google’s Cloud for iCloud
February 26th, 2018Via: CNBC: A file that Apple updated on its website last month provides the first acknowledgment that it’s relying on Google’s public cloud for data storage for its iCloud services. The disclosure is fresh evidence that Google’s cloud has been picking up usage as it looks to catch up with Amazon and Microsoft in the […]
