General Atomics is working hard to put a close cousin of its Reaper anti-terrorism drone in the hands of local law enforcement.
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Category: law enforcement – Page 18
A sting operation run by the Government Accountability Office revealed a number of loopholes that bad actors could use to buy excess military arms and equipment through the 1033 program.
When you realize you’ve somehow sold $1.2 million worth of controlled military equipment to a law enforcement agency that doesn’t exist, you’re likely to jumpstart efforts to reform that program.
That’s what happened when the Defense Logistics Agency learned that a sting operation run by the Government Accountability Office had exploited vulnerabilities in the Pentagon’s 1033 program, which sells local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies excess military equipment.
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WASHINGTON — Approximately a dozen police, fire and emergency agencies surrounding Washington, D.C. are using drones to capture criminal suspects and fight fires, but the unmanned aircraft systems also are sparking privacy concerns and legislation.
At least 347 state and local police, sheriff, fire and emergency units in the United States have acquired drones, according to an April report by Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College.
“More and more departments in the public safety space, particularly in law enforcement, are acquiring drones for a range of operations,” says Dan Gettinger, co-director of the research group.
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Artificial intelligence is already helping determine your future – whether it’s your Netflix viewing preferences, your suitability for a mortgage or your compatibility with a prospective employer. But can we agree, at least for now, that having an AI determine your guilt or innocence in a court of law is a step too far?
Worryingly, it seems this may already be happening. When American Chief Justice John Roberts recently attended an event, he was asked whether he could forsee a day “when smart machines, driven with artificial intelligences, will assist with courtroom fact finding or, more controversially even, judicial decision making”. He responded: “It’s a day that’s here and it’s putting a significant strain on how the judiciary goes about doing things”.
Roberts might have been referring to the recent case of Eric Loomis, who was sentenced to six years in prison at least in part by the recommendation of a private company’s secret proprietary software. Loomis, who has a criminal history and was sentenced for having fled the police in a stolen car, now asserts that his right to due process was violated as neither he nor his representatives were able to scrutinise or challenge the algorithm behind the recommendation.
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Decentralization of technology and ever cheaper electronics and materials will also bring more risks. Not to mention the serious risks of terrorism.
Here is a less harmful example of what decentralized tech can do.
Using computers they’d built out of discarded electronics and hidden in a closet ceiling, two inmates in an Ohio prison hacked the facility’s network, downloaded porn, and applied for credit cards with stolen information, according to a report released Tuesday (April 11) by Ohio’s inspector general’s office.
The computers were discovered in 2015 after the IT department at the Marion Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison, noticed that a computer on the network had exceeded its daily usage limit. Alerts indicated that the computer had attempted to hack through the network’s controls, but was unsuccessful.
A new well written but not very favorable write-up on #transhumanism. Despite this, more and more publications are tackling describing the movement and its science. My work is featured a bit.
On the eve of the 20th century, an obscure Russian man who had refused to publish any of his works began to finalize his ideas about resurrecting the dead and living forever. A friend of Leo Tolstoy’s, this enigmatic Russian, whose name was Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, had grand ideas about not only how to reanimate the dead but about the ethics of doing so, as well as about the moral and religious consequences of living outside of Death’s shadow. He was animated by a utopian desire: to unite all of humanity and to create a biblical paradise on Earth, where we would live on, spurred on by love. He was an immortalist: one who desired to conquer death through scientific means.
Despite the religious zeal of his notions—which a number of later Christian philosophers unsurprisingly deemed blasphemy—Fyodorov’s ideas were underpinned by a faith in something material: the ability of humans to redevelop and redefine themselves through science, eventually becoming so powerfully modified that they would defeat death itself. Unfortunately for him, Fyodorov—who had worked as a librarian, then later in the archives of Ministry of Foreign Affairs—did not live to see his project enacted, as he died in 1903.
Fyodorov may be classified as an early transhumanist. Transhumanism is, broadly, a set of ideas about how to technologically refine and redesign humans, such that we will eventually be able to escape death itself. This desire to live forever is strongly tied to human history and art; indeed, what may be the earliest of all epics, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, portrays a character who seeks a sacred plant in the black depths of the sea that will grant him immortality. Today, however, immortality is the stuff of religions and transhumanism, and how these two are different is not always clear to outsiders.
Everyone knows prevention is better than a cure, and that’s as true for law enforcement as it is for medicine. But there’s little evidence that a growing trend towards “predictive policing” is the answer, and it could even bake in racial bias.
Police departments faced with tight budgets are increasingly turning to machine learning-enabled software that can sift through crime data to help predict where crimes are likely to occur and who might commit them.
Using statistics in law enforcement is nothing new. A statistical system for tracking crime called Compstat was pioneered in New York in 1994 and quickly became popular elsewhere. Since then, crime has fallen 75 percent in New York, which has been credited by some to the technology. But while Compstat simply helped identify historical hotspots, “predictive policing” uses intelligent algorithms to forecast tomorrow’s hotspots and offenders.
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Glad I wasn’t on TOR for a while.
Visitors to more than 10,000 Tor-based websites were met with an alarming announcement this morning: “Hello, Freedom Hosting II, you have been hacked.” A group affiliating itself with Anonymous had compromised servers at Freedom Hosting II, a popular service for hosting websites accessible only through Tor. Roughly six hours after the initial announcement, all the sites hosted by the service are still offline.
In the message, the group offers to sell the compromised data back to Freedom Hosting II in exchange for 0.1 bitcoin, or just over $100, although it is unclear whether the offer is in earnest.
The hackers also claim child pornography made up more than half the data stored on the servers. It’s impossible to verify that claim without seeing the data itself, but it’s consistent with what we know about previous dark-web hosting companies. The original Freedom Hosting was compromised by law enforcement in 2013, resulting in a number of child pornography prosecutions. At the time, the service hosted as many as half of the websites accessible only through Tor, commonly referred to as the Dark Web.
And, the laws are slowly try to catch up to tech.
SANTA FE, N.M. (Jan. 27, 2017) – A bill introduced in the New Mexico Senate would limit the warrantless use of surveillance drones. The legislation would not only establish important privacy protections at the state level, it would also help thwart the federal surveillance state.
Sen. Gerald Ortiz y Pino (D-Albuquerque) introduced Senate Bill 167 (SB167) on Jan. 19. Titled The Freedom from Unwanted Surveillance Act, the legislation would prohibit federal, state and local law enforcement from using a drone with the intent to gather evidence on private property without a warrant in most cases.
The proposed law would allow for the warrantless drone surveillance when exigent circumstances exist.
Luv the map; however, missing a lot of info. Namely, many decades and contributors. QC officially recorded to start in 1960 with Stephen Wiesner discovery of a cryptographic tool. And, even modern day QC such as a QC Net has been in existence since late 90s with Los Alamos.
Still nice colored map for a limited view of 2014, 2015, and current. However, I don’t see the ORNL, Oxford, U. of Sydney, China, USC, MIT, etc. breakthroughs most importantly the scalable Quantum, syn. diamonds contribution to enable stable QC and QC Net.
From law enforcement to criminals, governments to insurgents, and activists to Facebook dabblers, many people have come to rely on encryption to protect their digital information and keep their communications secure. But the current forms of encryption could be obsolete the moment anyone succeeds in building a quantum computer. A what! Read on about the brave new world awaiting us.