Pages with tag Big Brother

Amazon employees demand stopping face-recognition contract with federal government Among the Amazon Web Services is Rekognition, a facial recognition system running on Amazon's cloud. Anyone can sign up with the service, to have video analyzed to identify people or objects. Turns out the federal government is using this service for various tasks including deportation and detention programs run by ICE, the Immigration Control force. A group of Amazon employees have written to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos demanding that Amazon not do as IBM did during the 1940's when IBM's systems were used by Nazi Germany to help round up the Jews.
Big Brother touched Juniper Networks - backdoor allowed anyone to eavesdrop on communications It's known the U.S. Government spy agencies have demanded "cooperation" from computer and networking equipment vendors in ensuring spy agencies can unlawfully tap into communications traffic. The effect is that anybody learning the secret keys used by government spies to wiretap communications can also listen in on communications.
British Home Secretary makes chillingly authoritarian response to 'terror' attack Last week an angry man of Islamic descent (but born in Great Britain) rented a car, drove through a crowd on Westminster Bridge, killing several people, before killing a Police officer guarding Westminster Palace, after which he was shot and killed by other police officers. The killer may have been ISIS-connected (ISIS claims responsibility). In response British Home Secretary Amber Rudd named several online sites as hotbeds of online terrorism communication and radicalization. Her list included blogging platform Wordpress.com of all things. Her chilling message is there should be no secret places to hide.
Democrat party 'smart wall' proposal to expand surveillance technology and possibly end government shutdown We've just started the second month of Trump's government shutdown rooted in his unwarranted demand for a border wall to increase border security. The Democratic party has recently offered a different border security solution, rather than build a wall to build a 'smart wall' that would use technology and drones and stuff. While it's appealing to turn to more technology, this solution means the government will be funding and developing ever-more-powerful surveillance technology.
Facebook has built a surveillance state where the inmates WANT to be in the prison

Facebook may need to come under government regulation. Facebook's COO claimed in a TV interview that the company has an advertising-driven model just like Radio and Television, both of whom are regulated by Governments. She also said that what Facebook is selling is access to people, but that's not for sale, which causes a big "HUH"? Any owner/operator of a Facebook page knows that over the last year or so Facebook has diminished the organic growth potential of Facebook Page postings. Such postings previously showed up organically in the newsfeed of folks following the pages, today that doesn't happen organically (very much). Instead, Page owner/operators are constantly barraged with please to spend money on advertising, in other words Facebook begs page owners to buy access to Facebook's users.

Facial recognition technology used to solve cases like Capitol Gazette newspaper shooting in Annapolis

The immediate reaction on Thursday to the Capitol Gazette newspaper shooting was that the climate of violence encouraged by Pres. Trump, all the vindictive aimed at newspapers by Trump, has resulted in some lunatic acting out the grievances inflamed by Trump's rhetoric. In other words, some Patriot believing the Capitol Gazette to be a hub of Liberal nonsense could have decided to shoot the place up. Supposedly the shooter, to mess up law enforcement efforts, had damaged his fingerprints, and did not carry identification, making us think maybe this was some kind of terror attack. At the end of the day, "Facial Recognition Technology" was used to identify the shooter as a person with a long-standing personal grievance against the staff of that newspaper, because of reporting by that newspaper about that person.

In other words, there is no nefarious dark scheme here. While it is true that Pres. Trump, and others in his administration, are inflaming the public against journalists with eery similarity to the Nazi Germany playbook, this particular case is a straight-up personal grievance. And, we have proof that while we should be concerned about big brother implications of facial recognition technology, in some cases like this one the technology is higly useful.

Google employees demand AI rules to preclude use as weapons

Google's culture of open free-flowing discussion could be ending in the wake of an uproar over Google's partnership with the US Dept. of Defense, called Project Maven, on AI software to analyze drone footage. Since Google's participation in Project Maven was publicly revealed in March, a raging debate with Google has swirled around whether the company famous for its "Do No Evil" slogan should be involved with making weapons. Googlers even sent an open letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai starting with the declaration "We believe that Google should not be in the business of war." That letter flatly called for Google's participation in Project Maven to be canceled.

On June 27, 2018, it is learned that Google has instituted new rules for internal discussion and workplace conduct within the company.

In China, facial recognition technology is used to create a Big Brother tracking system

Modern technology is gifting society with many wonders, including democratization by giving more creative power to individuals. In some countries the Internet is not allowed to be used for democratization, but for authoritarian control. One particular area is facial recognition technology which is how social media networks like Facebook can automatically tag your pictures with your friends. That same technology can be aimed at a crowd, and used to implement real-time tracking of where folks walk throughout a city. Supposedly the benefit is catching wrong-doers, but in every movie about ubiquitous monitoring the government doesn't use the information for the benefit of all, but to squash freedom.

NSA supposedly cancels bulk collection of phone call records Since the Terrorism Scare of 2001-2006ish the NSA has been collecting telephone records of every phone call made in the USA. The theory was to find the needle-in-the-haystack the NSA first needed the haystack, and that by having records of all phone calls the NSA could build a map of all associations and therefore find The Terrorists. The program became widely known with the Edward Snowden revelations, and was 'shut down' with a 2015 law, The Freedom Act. That act preserved parts of the program, and is due to expire at the end of the year unless the Trump Administration or Congress acts.
The man who spies on spy satellites, watching big brother watching us Several governments have spy satellites in orbit tracking us, so why not focus our cameras on the spy satellites? Citizens can spy on the governments who spy on citizens. Modern technology makes it possible to track how they are tracking us. And it is an exercise in freedom to determine just how it is we are being tracked by the government.
UN/EU eyes Blockchain technology to stop Moldovanian child sex trafficking

The UN and EU are proposing a solution to child sex trafficking based on Moldova, one of Europe's poorest countries. According to a Reuters report, many children born in Moldova do not have official identity documents, making them attractive for sex trafficking because they're outside the normal system where governments track the existence of its citizens. The proposal is to implement a system using Blockchain to give these children "paperless documents" containing immutable biometric identification information.

While Bitcoin itself may become irrelevant - i.e. it might be banned for legal use, and therefore its use would be limited to the shadowy underworld - the Blockchain technology it's built on is of wide-spread interest. The key features are using strong encryption to implement a ledger of data that is strongly protected by that encryption. It seems possible to use this for human identification -- if a set of data can be identified that automagically computes a security key that indexes into the blockchain, ...etc...

US Postal Service introduces Informed Delivery, a Big-Brotherly preview of incoming postal mail

Today the US Postal Service sent me an email inviting me to sign up with Informed Delivery. The pitch is that the USPS Mobile App will be upgraded to have access to Informed Delivery which is described as "a new, free feature that gives you the ability to see a digital preview of your incoming mail." Conveniently the Postal Service will send out grey-scale scans of the exterior of all pieces of mail arriving at the mailbox, and those scans can be viewed with the Mobile App or can be sent to ones e-mail inbox.

I'm not sure what the value is to me for this service. The big worry is that obviously it means the Postal Service is scanning the outside of every envelope, and what the heck are they doing with those scans? Who else is receiving those scans? The NSA? The FBI? Who?

Wikileaks reveals CIA iPhone penetration team: hacking the iPhone A new batch of 8,761 files was released on Tuesday by WikiLeaks that alleges that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has a dedicated iOS exploit team —and lacks the ability to keep the attack vectors under lock and key. They either bought or developed in-house a large pile of iPhone hacking tools. They were collected by the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), a group of over 5000 members, and have been used to directly target over 10,000 people. However, the tools have escaped the CIA and are now circulating among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner. It is one of those people who released the information to Wikileaks.