Spying and Surveillance
The Seventh Circuit just handed down a landmark opinion, ruling 3-0 that the Fourth Amendment protects energy-consumption data collected by smart meters. The court recognized that data from these devices reveals intimate details about what’s going on inside the home that would otherwise be unavailable to the government without a physical search. The court held that residents have a reasonable expectation of privacy in this data and that the government’s access of it constitutes a “search.”
It is of the first order of importance to remember this: “the system cannot be fixed by the system.”
Here are 8 things that are undermining your freedom that you need to know about (but probably don’t) by Gary Z McGee (The Mind Unleashed).
Now, DARPA have created yet another technology with an immense potential for abuse: small robots that could be deployed by the government in a time of disaster.
Hearing about all of this Russian hacking, Trump, and politics, in general, these days seems to be like eating the same type of food every night, you literally get sick of it. This begs the question, should we even pay attention to it? Of course, we should, the political realm and the corporate stranglehold over it (and above that sit the financial elite) are taking advantage of us because WE are the ones that allow this entire charade to continue.
The CEO of a company that makes facial recognition software has publicly stated that his company will not sell to law enforcement or governments.
“The most important surveillance story you will see for years just went online, revealing how AT&T became the internet’s biggest enemy, secretly collaborating against its customers and partners to destroy your privacy,” said Edward Snowden. “Fortress-like” AT&T buildings located in eight major American cities have played a central role in a massive National Security Agency (NSA) spying program “that has for years monitored billions of emails, phone calls, and online chats passing across U.S. territory.”
The documents themselves are quite bizarre and, honestly, despite reports dismissing them, it is worth remembering that this is exactly what the CIA was working on for years during MKULTRA. That program was supposed to have been shut down after the Church Hearings and other congressional hearings exposed all of the CIA’s clandestine activities at the time many that violated human rights including experimentation on patients and the American population without their knowledge.
Police in the US city of Boston unjustly spied on thousands of social media posts and specifically targeted Muslims and African Americans claims the ACLU
The CLOUD Act will also allow the U.S. to enter into agreements that allow the transfer of private data from domestic servers to investigators in other countries on a case-by-case basis, further globalizing the ever-encroaching surveillance state. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has strongly opposed the legislation, listed several consequences of the bill, which it called “far-reaching” and “privacy-upending”:
New leaks from Edward Snowden, has just released documentation showing that the NSA worked ‘urgently’ to target bitcoin users.
The CLOUD Act – a piece of legislation which may erode privacy protections around the globe – was passed by the Senate recently.
AnyVision claims their facial recognition technology can detect, track and recognize any person of interest with more than 99% accuracy. Their video also claims they can identify marathon runners in real-time.
Boston Police effectively broke the law by illegally surveilling social media users for years to conduct online surveillance in 2014, 2015, and 2016, without telling the city council
The Verge reported Friday, U.S. will now be privy to a capacious database of license plates — data reaped by private corporations in the course of standard operations by automated license-plate readers.
