Interesting
The software can be used by pilots to superimpose information onto pilots’ screens as they circle above areas, which include one San Bernardino mosque after the shooting last year.
Read more
Category: surveillance – Page 37
U.S. Plans $6 Billion Investment in Space Situational Awareness
Hosted by the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society, the International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium 2015 (IGARSS 2015) will be held from Sunday July 26th through Friday July 31th, 2015 at the Convention Center in Milan, Italy. This is the same town of the EXPO 2015 exhibition, whose topic is “Feeding the planet: energy for life”.
We’ve suspected it all along—that Skynet, the massive program that brings about world destruction in the Terminator movies, was just a fictionalization of a real program in the hands of the US government. And now it’s confirmed—at least in name.
As The Intercept reports today, the NSA does have a program called Skynet. But unlike the autonomous, self-aware computerized defense system in Terminator that goes rogue and launches a nuclear attack that destroys most of humanity, this one is a surveillance program that uses phone metadata to track the location and call activities of suspected terrorists. A journalist for Al Jazeera reportedly became one of its targets after he was placed on a terrorist watch list. Read more
The Most Wanted Man in the World
Posted in government, hacking, privacy, security, surveillance
The message arrives on my “clean machine,” a MacBook Air loaded only with a sophisticated encryption package. “Change in plans,” my contact says. “Be in the lobby of the Hotel ______ by 1 pm. Bring a book and wait for ES to find you.”
ES is Edward Snowden, the most wanted man in the world. For almost nine months, I have been trying to set up an interview with him—traveling to Berlin, Rio de Janeiro twice, and New York multiple times to talk with the handful of his confidants who can arrange a meeting. Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government’s domestic surveillance programs? In May I received an email from his lawyer, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, confirming that Snowden would meet me in Moscow and let me hang out and chat with him for what turned out to be three solid days over several weeks. It is the most time that any journalist has been allowed to spend with him since he arrived in Russia in June 2013. But the finer details of the rendezvous remain shrouded in mystery. I landed in Moscow without knowing precisely where or when Snowden and I would actually meet. Now, at last, the details are set.
— The Washington Post
Surveillance companies are marketing systems to governments worldwide that are capable of pulling location data out of global cellular networks, even if you are traveling in another country. These systems are designed so that neither cellphone users nor their carriers detect the tracking. That could allow government officials to potentially sidestep court review or other systems designed to protect the rights of people targeted for surveillance.
Could the FBI See Your Selfies?
Posted in surveillance
By Tom Risen — US News
The FBI is preparing to launch a facial recognition database this summer that includes photos of people without criminal records- and a court case in New York may expand the ability of the government to request data from Facebook to help.
The bureau’s database, called the Next Generation Identification system, or NGI, builds upon the government’s fingerprint database and is slated to be operational this summer, according to the FBI. This database will contain photos of anybody who sends images as part of an application for a job that requires fingerprinting or a background check – even if that person has no criminal record – according to research by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy advocacy organization. The FBI is slated to have 52 million face images by 2015, according to the EFF.
An innovative Australian digital radar built with a series of modified rugby goalposts is attracting worldwide attention the ABC reports.
A consortium led by La Trobe University in Melbourne developed the Tiger-3 digital radar, which is 10 times more sensitive than any other research radar. Lead researcher Professor John Devlin said the radar would be used to study space weather, which has an impact on navigation and surveillance systems for shipping and aircraft, as well as for GPS systems. “It measures the ionospheric reflections from a distance out to about 5,000 kilometres,” he said.
Researchers measure the data to study space weather, like recent solar flares, which can potentially knock out power, satellites, navigation and surveillance systems for shipping, aircraft and GPS.
The recent solar flares just grazed the Earth, but Dr Custovic said flares had the potential to knock out transformers, potentially shutting off power for weeks.
Radars were first developed during World War II, but engineer Dr Eddie Custovic said technology had come a long way since then. “The innovation is largely in new software technology that is used to analyse data and signal processing,” he said. La Trobe University Engineering and Space Physics staff have been working on digital radars since the 1990s, and the Tiger-3 took a team three years to build.
Digital radars still work on waves, using frequencies of 8–20 MHz in the High Frequency band, but the electronics and signal processing are now entirely digital, meaning the radar is less susceptible to instrumentation noise. Most radars are still analogue or hybrid, and the digital one offers greater sensitivity, longer range and a much wider field of view, which means researchers are able to detect objects and structures that were not previously visible.
Julia Angwin — Nation of Change
A new, extremely persistent type of online tracking is shadowing visitors to thousands of top websites, from WhiteHouse.gov to YouPorn.com.
First documented in a forthcoming paper by researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium, this type of tracking, called canvas fingerprinting, works by instructing the visitor’s Web browser to draw a hidden image. Because each computer draws the image slightly differently, the images can be used to assign each user’s device a number that uniquely identifies it.