Home » Posts tagged 'mass surveillance' (Page 10)

Tag Archives: mass surveillance

Totalitarian – Of or being a form of government in which the political authority exercises absolute control over all aspects of life and opposition is outlawed; a practitioner or supporter of such a government.

– American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd Ed.

We have almost reached the point where the country can be referred to as “totalitarian” in accordance with the definition provided. Incrementally, it creeps forward: the “soft” tyranny. Curing, refining itself, and hardening, there will be a point of no return that is reached…a point where it has metastasized until it is both all encompassing and ubiquitous.

The problem is twofold: the incremental spread as mentioned, and the complacency and inability of people to recognize it for what it is. Someone posted a comment recently with a paragraph from Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” where the author regretfully lamented the complacency displayed by the Russians as the country turned Communist overnight. His regret was that the citizenry could have stopped it with hatchets and pitchforks at that point if they had acted and been of one accord. I have recommended it as a “must read,” and strongly advise you to consider it as a “window” to what is happening in the U.S.

Two articles surfaced this week that are astonishing: they show the surveillance and data-collection “culture” that is being inflicted upon us, dulling our already stultified public into vapidity and inaction by desensitization. This latter term: the outrage of yesterday becomes the “accepted” and commonplace of today, and even further/worse tomorrow. Paradigm shift.

First, one written by Betsy Mikel entitled “Walmart just made an announcement that may make you never want to shop there again,” published on 10/9/18 by Inc. Here is an excerpt:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Idemia: The Corporation Building Spy Grid in China, National ID in India Also Creates Drivers Licenses in the U.S.

August 23, 2018

Idemia: The Corporation Building Spy Grid in China, National ID in India Also Creates Drivers Licenses in the U.S.

Company that helps manufacture U.S. citizens drivers licenses brags of “building and managing databases of entire populations” across the globe.

Big Tech has gathered unprecedented amounts of personal data from millions of people. At the same time, a system of total surveillance has been constructed: Facial recognition, biometric scanning, cell phone surveillance and more have amassed a huge amount of information.

We see the stories about the growing surveillance state, but we don’t hear about the gigantic multinational corporation that is helping to build the physical infrastructure supporting it.

Idemia (formerly Morpho), is a billion dollar multinational corporation. It is responsible for building a significant portion of the world’s biometric surveillance and security systems, operating in about 70 countries. Some American clients of the company include the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and the FBI.

The company website says that Morpho has been “…building and managing databases of entire populations…” for many years.

From the company site:

Morpho has been building and managing databases of entire populations for governments, law enforcement agencies and other government bodies around the world, whether for national ID, health cards, bank cards or even driver license programs.

In the United States, Idemia is involved in the making of state issued drivers licenses in 42 states.

The company is now pushing digital license trials in the U.S. Delaware and Iowa are among five states involved in the trials this year. With the mobile license, law enforcement will be able to wirelessly “ping” a drivers smartphone for their license. The move is part of a wider trend toward cashless payment.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

5 Articles Show How TPTB “Fix” You As Staked Goats

August 18, 2018

5 Articles Show How TPTB “Fix” You As Staked Goats

Five recent articles exemplify the ever-increasing surveillance by TPTB (The Powers That Be) to “fix” you and I…in the manner of goats staked out to lure in the lion. In this case, the lion is a ravening wolf, performing his own staking in the guise of a sheep. The articles will be listed in chronological order. Ironically, the level of alarm should increase with that order, as well.

The reason I’m writing about this is that it is important to cite the things that generally do not receive the greatest amount of interest by the public overall. Some of them are obscure and do not really “jump” out at you until you examine them and see them not merely as they are presented…but the underlying significance to it all. Then it materializes into a puzzle piece. When the pieces are matched with others in the jigsaw picture? To paraphrase O’Brien in Orwell’s “1984,” you will then see the true portrait of the world they are creating.

24 July 2018 “What is 5G and what will it mean for you?” by Matthew Wall. This explains the 5G system that will be emplaced by many nations by 2020, according to the article. Here are some excerpted passages, compressed together to save time:

“What is 5G exactly? It’s the next-fifth generation of mobile Internet connectivity promising much faster data download and upload speeds, wider coverage, and more stable connections. What will it enable us to do? “Whatever we do now with our smartphones we’ll be able to do faster and better,” says Ian Fogg from OpenSignal, a mobile data analytics company. “Think of smart glasses featuring augmented reality, mobile virtual reality, much higher quality video, the Internet of things making cities smarter.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Google Is Constantly Tracking, Even If You Turn Off Device ‘Location History’

August 14, 2018

Google Is Constantly Tracking, Even If You Turn Off Device ‘Location History’

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Google is actually tracking you even when you switch your device settings to Location History “off”.

As journalist Mark Ames comments in response to a new Associated Press story exposing Google’s ability to track people at all times even when they explicitly tell Google not to via iPhone and Android settings, “The Pentagon invented the internet to be the perfect global surveillance/counterinsurgency machine. Surveillance is baked into the internet’s DNA.”

In but the latest in a continuing saga of big tech tracking and surveillance stories which should serve to convince us all we are living in the beginning phases of a Minority Report style tracking and pansophical “pre-crime” system, it’s now confirmed that the world’s most powerful tech company and search tool will always find a way to keep your location data.

The Associated Press sought the help of Princeton researchers to prove that while Google is clear and upfront about giving App users the ability to turn off or “pause” Location History on their devices, there are other hidden means through which it retains the data.

According to the AP report:

Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you’ve been. Google’s support page on the subject states: “You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.”

That isn’t true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking.

For example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open its Maps app. Automatic daily weather updates on Android phones pinpoint roughly where you are.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A New Broadband Network is Pitching Surveillance Enhancements to Cops Across the Country

July 31, 2018

A Chicago police officer speaks on his radio at the scene where three people were shot, one fatally, in the 2500 block of West Lithuanian Plaza Court on Friday, July 28, 2017, in the Marquette Park neighborhood of Chicago, Ill. An 18-year-old man was shot in the head and pronounced dead at Advocate Christ Medical Center. A 34-year-old man and a 33-year-old woman were wounded. (Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune/TNS via Getty Images)

Photo: Erin Hooley

A NEW BROADBAND NETWORK IS PITCHING SURVEILLANCE ENHANCEMENTS TO COPS ACROSS THE COUNTRY

THE LATEST TECHNOLOGIES promise cops the ability to whip out a smartphone, take a snapshot of a passerby, and instantly learn if that person is in an immigration or gang database.

A federal broadband program, designed after 9/11 to improve first responder communication during emergencies, will enhance this sort of capability and integrate it into an internet “super highway” built specifically for police and public safety. The program, called FirstNet, is already expanding the surveillance options available to law enforcement agencies across the country.

According to publicly available documents, as well as interviews with program participants, stakeholders, and government researchers, FirstNet will help agencies like U.S. Customs and Border Protection communicate with local police, deliver more information to officers’ hands, accelerate the nascent law enforcement app industry, and provide public safety agencies with new privileges and powers over AT&T’s commercial broadband network.

The program will also hasten these agencies’ migration from public radio frequencies to encrypted broadband networks, potentially eliminating one resource that local newsrooms and citizens have historically relied upon to monitor police and first responders.

FirstNet is a public-private partnership that creates a dedicated lane for public safety agencies within AT&T’s existing broadband network. As of January, all U.S. states had opted in to FirstNet, meaning that they agreed not to build their own competing broadband lanes for law enforcement and public safety. Then, in March, AT&T announced that FirstNet’s core — the infrastructure that isolates police traffic from the commercial network — had become operational at last.

“It’s like having a super highway that only public safety can use,” the company wrote in a press release.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Living in a World Bereft of Privacy

July 31, 2018

Living in a World Bereft of Privacy

As Edward Snowden confirmed beyond doubt, we live in a world where our most intimate moments can be seen by would-be extortioners and, more alarmingly, by our governments, says Annie Machon.

A few days ago I first received a menacing email from someone calling herself Susana Peritz. She told me “she” had hacked my email, planted malware on my computer, and had then filmed me getting my jollies while watching “interesting” porn online. Her email had caught my attention because it mentioned in the subject line a very old password, attached to a very old email address I had not used for over a decade. The malware must have been planted on a defunct computer.

Putting aside the fact that I am far more concerned about GCHQ or the NSA hacking my computer (as should we all be), this did rather amuse me.

Apparently, I must pay this “Susana” $1000 via Bitcoin or, shock, have my alleged pleasures shared with my acquaintances. And just last night I received another courteous request for cash from someone calling themselves Jillie Abdulrazak, but the price has now been inflated to $3000.

Why am I not concerned? Well, I can safely say – hand on heart – that I have never watched online porn. But this got me thinking about how or why I could have been singled out for this mark of a blackmailer’s esteem, and that brings me on to some rather dark thoughts.

It is perfectly possible that a rare, unguarded moment of long-distance online love might have been captured (but by whom?). That would probably be over a decade ago and would certainly have been using the old email account which was attached to the particular password at the time.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Big Brother Surveillance Begins: Cuomo Unveils Facial Scanning At New York Toll Plazas

July 21, 2018

Big Brother Surveillance Begins: Cuomo Unveils Facial Scanning At New York Toll Plazas

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo revealed on Friday that facial recognition cameras installed at bridge and tunnel toll plazas across New York City are scanning every driver’s face and feeding them into a massive database designed to catch suspected criminals.

“When it reads that license plate, it reads it for scofflaws . . . [but] the toll is almost the least significant contribution that this electronic equipment can actually perform,” Cuomo said at a press conference outside the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

“We are now moving to facial-recognition technology, which takes it to a whole new level, where it can see the face of the person in the car and run that technology against databases… Because many times a person will turn their head when they see a security camera, so they are now experimenting with technology that just identifies a person by their ear, believe it or not,” he continued.

The technology is currently in use at the RFK/Triborough Bridge, and was switched on at the Queens Midtown and Brooklyn-Battery tunnels on Friday, according to the Governor’s office.

It will also eventually come to at least two of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s six other spans — the Throgs Neck and Whitestone bridges — and down the road will be added at all area airports, Cuomo’s office confirmed.

A request for proposals from contractors previously published by the online news outlet Vocativ says the tech is slated for all seven of the city’s toll bridges in addition to the two tunnels. –NY Post

The Governor’s office wouldn’t say when forthcoming cameras will be activated, which databases will be used to compare photos, or who will have access to the data, however Cuomo said that license plates which are already scanned at the plazas are currently checked “for warrants, suspected felons, parole violators, terrorist suspects.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Silicon Valley Will Not Save You from the Surveillance State

July 8, 2018

Silicon Valley Will Not Save You from the Surveillance State

There was something quite odd about the very welcome news that some Google employees were objecting to a military contract, namely all the other Google military contracts. My sense of the oddness of this was heightened by reading Yasha Levine’s new book, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet.

I invited Levine on my radio show (it will air in the coming weeks) and asked him what he thought was motivating the revolt over at Google. Were they objecting to a particular kind of weapon, in the manner that some people rather bizarrely object to drones only if they are automated but not if a human pushes the murder button? Were they actually clueless about their own company?

Levine’s answer requires investigation but certainly makes an interesting hypothesis. He said that all during the Obama years, the tech press and community aired no concerns whatsoever about militarism, whereas since the arrival of Trump such talk is to be heard and read. Levine maintains that Google employees do not object to militarism, they object to Trumpian militarism.

I had hoped for and wrongly predicted this phenomenon in the general public the moment Trump gained the throne. Is it possible that it’s finally begun, but begun in Silicon Valley?

Levine’s book describes Google and other internet corporations as major military and spy contractors from the beginning. Google partnered with Lockheed Martin on parts of the war on Iraq and is a major partner of the military, the CIA, the NSA, etc. Surveillance Valley goes back to the post-WWII origins of today’s military madness. Military experiments as preparation for war, “field tested” in Vietnam, and supported by President Kennedy as appropriately hi-tech and modern, were actually war and developed into one of the worst wars ever seen. Vietnam was mass-surveilled — or the attempt was made and foiled with bags of urine and other low-tech tricks.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

First of Its Kind University Study Proves Without a Doubt that Your Phone is Spying On You

July 8, 2018

First of Its Kind University Study Proves Without a Doubt that Your Phone is Spying On You

For years, conspiracy theories about smart phones listening to users without their permission to show them advertisements have abounded. While some researchers have shown this could happen, a first of its kind study just found something far more insidious. Academics at Northeastern University have just proven that your phone is recording your screen—as in taking video—and uploading it to third parties.

For the last year, Elleen Pan, Jingjing Ren, Martina Lindorfer, Christo Wilson, and David Choffnes ran an experiment involving more than 17,000 of the most popular Android apps using ten different phones. Their findings were alarming, to say the least.

As Gizmodo points out, during the study, the researchers started to see that screenshots and video recordings of what people were doing in apps were being sent to third-party domains. For example, when one of the phones used an app from GoPuff, a delivery start-up for people who have sudden cravings for junk food, the interaction with the app was recorded and sent to a domain affiliated with Appsee, a mobile analytics company. The video included a screen where you could enter personal information—in this case, their zip code.

GoPuff did not disclose in its terms of use that its app was recording users screens and uploading this data to a third party. What’s more, when they were contacted by the researchers GoPuff merely added a disclosure to their policy acknowledging that “ApSee” might receive users PII.

The fact that these apps can record your screen without you knowing and use this data is chilling. It illustrates how easy it would be for a malicious actor to be able to look at your private messages, personal information, passwords, photos, and videos.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Amazon’s Fusion With the State Shows Neoliberalism’s Drift to Neo-Fascism

July 4, 2018

Amazon’s Fusion With the State Shows Neoliberalism’s Drift to Neo-Fascism

In our next installments, we will continue exploring the rise of Surveillance Capitalism and the implications of Amazon-fueled spying technology, both in the workplace and in U.S. city streets.

“Capitalism is a system that seeks to transgress all boundaries in its production and sale of commodities, commodifying everything in existence, which today, in the age of monopoly-finance capital and surveillance capitalism, means intruding into every aspect of existence,” John Bellamy Foster told MPN.

SEATTLE – This year may go down in history as a turning-point when the world finally woke up to the dark side of the ubiquitous presence of popular Silicon Valley companies in our daily lives. One can only hope so, at least.

From Amazon to Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and PayPal – among others – revelations poured out confirming the ongoing abuse of user data by monopolistic corporations, as well as their growing role as vendors of surveillance technology to the U.S. police state, military, and migrant detention agencies.

In March, the lid was blown off of the violation of user data on Facebook, with Cambridge Analytica mining user information for the purpose of providing millions of detailed “psychological profiles” to the Trump campaign, among others. Scarcely two weeks later, the Google campus was in an uproar over the development of its “Project Maven,” which was building an AI-fueled platform to vastly upgrade the automatic targeting abilities of the U.S. military’s global drone fleet. Faced with public outrage and internal dissent, the companypulled out of bidding to renew its Pentagon contract, which ends next year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Police State Takes A Giant Leap Towards Pre-Crime

June 27, 2018

The Police State Takes A Giant Leap Towards Pre-Crime

If you think we still have privacy rights or a 4th Amendment you are living in the past. Technology has moved past our individual rights and technology is now determining what day and time a crime will be committed in your neighborhood and produce a list of suspects that need to “questioned” prior to a crime being committed. Technological profiling.

Wearing a head cover that’s new to you? Well, it could mean you’re about to commit a crime. Show up in an area for the first time? Well, why are you there and what are you doing? Sounds like criminal activity to me.

You’re guilty for being human and simply living your life according to your beliefs. The police state will not allow you to be, nor it will it allow you to explore new areas, dress differently and if you do, you will categorized, profiled and a note added to your file for future reference.

Technology has been transforming every aspect of society, including revolutionary new capabilities for police departments from tattoo-recognition technology to the growing use of drones. The June edition of Wired magazine explores this topic. Wired editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson joins “CBS This Morning: Saturday” to discuss the kind of devices officers are using and why they are prompting concerns about racial profiling and privacy. Source – CBS This Morning

I always knew tattoo’s were a bad idea for me and now I know why. My guess is the technology is currently, or will be soon enough, that will be able to determine the ink type, profile of the ink in the tattoo and be able to pin-point where the tattoo was created.

Nicholas Thompson, while not exactly gleeful over the situation, he is not expressing a level of concern this situation warrants. What is being described is straight out of the movie Minority Report and George Orwell’s 1984.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Wiretap Rooms

June 26, 2018

THE WIRETAP ROOMS

The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities

THE SECRETS ARE hidden behind fortified walls in cities across the United States, inside towering, windowless skyscrapers and fortress-like concrete structures that were built to withstand earthquakes and even nuclear attack. Thousands of people pass by the buildings each day and rarely give them a second glance, because their function is not publicly known. They are an integral part of one of the world’s largest telecommunications networks – and they are also linked to a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program.

Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. In each of these cities, The Intercept has identified an AT&T facility containing networking equipment that transports large quantities of internet traffic across the United States and the world. A body of evidence – including classified NSA documents, public records, and interviews with several former AT&T employees – indicates that the buildings are central to an NSA spying initiative that has for years monitored billions of emails, phone calls, and online chats passing across U.S. territory.

The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.” It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it “has access to information that transits the nation,” but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Government Eyes Are Watching You: We Are All Prisoners of the Surveillance State

June 20, 2018

Government Eyes Are Watching You: We Are All Prisoners of the Surveillance State

“We’re run by the Pentagon, we’re run by Madison Avenue, we’re run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don’t revolt we’ll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche…. As long as we go out and buy stuff, we’re at their mercy… We all live in a little Village. Your Village may be different from other people’s Villages, but we are all prisoners.”— Patrick McGoohan

First broadcast in America 50 years ago, The Prisoner—a dystopian television series described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the freedom of the individual, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of humankind to meekly accept their lot in life as a prisoner in a prison of their own making.

Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner (17 episodes in all) centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned and interrogated in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly tranquil retirement community known only as the Village. The Village is an idyllic setting with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.

While luxurious and resort-like, the Village is a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise: its inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, their movements are tracked by surveillance drones, and they are stripped of their individuality and identified only by numbers.

The series’ protagonist, played by Patrick McGoohan, is Number Six.

Number Two, the Village administrator, acts as an agent for the unseen and all-powerful Number One, whose identity is not revealed until the final episode.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

US Intelligence Developing Better Storage To HOARD YOUR DATA Based On Human DNA

June 14, 2018

US Intelligence Developing Better Storage To HOARD YOUR DATA Based On Human DNA

Since the United States insists on spying its own people and saving massive amounts of personal data, the government is running out of storage space. So now, they are developing a new and improved data storage system based on human DNA.

It’s obvious the spying isn’t going to stop, and the US is no longer making it a secret that they want every scrap of data available on you stored. The Molecular Information Storage program, run by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), is recruiting scientists to help develop a system for storing huge amounts of data on “sequence-controlled polymer,” molecules with a similar makeup and structure to DNA.

According to RT, US intelligence services struggle to store the trove of data collected during their snooping operations, so a team of researchers is developing the radical new storage technology. The issue for the government of how to store data is one the world’s intelligence services intend to solve for the overbearing governments of the planet. Costly data centers take up huge amounts of land, which is unsustainable given the increasing amount of data generated by each person on a daily basis.

Some data centers are currently being housed in urban locations. The Lakeside Technology Center in Chicago is the largest data storage facility in the US. It spans a whopping 1.1 million square feet, which is equivalent to an entire city block. The site is actually at the location of the former printing press for the Yellow Pages, but the center was transformed in 1999 and now holds more than 50 generators whirring around the clock. The Chicago facility is only matched by the NSA’s $1.5 billion Bumblehive data center in Bluffdale, Utah, which is just over 1 million square feet.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: mass surveillance

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts