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Cameras are everywhere.

Do you have a cell phone? Unless it’s an old antiquated flip phone, there’s a camera. Public parks, roadways, the parking garage at your favorite shopping center, police officers wearing body cameras, school…they are everywhere.

There was a time when Americans viewed the presence of security cameras in a private business as a creepy Orwellian intrusion into their private lives. They didn’t want to be recorded and watched as they did their shopping or when they went into the bank to cash their paychecks. Those days came and went and Americans accepted and adapted those cameras.

Then along came public surveillance cameras and traffic light cameras. And, once again people felt their lives were being infringed upon. Not only were private businesses still conducting the surveillance, but the government was now watching too. This left many people feeling as though their privacy rights had been taken away from them.

All that changed when 9/11 happened. Suddenly Americans couldn’t be stopped from stuffing their concerns over privacy as far down the toilet bowl as they could.

Two decades later the “Privacy Train” has left the station.

Everywhere we go, there are cameras. Whether it be a camera in a retail store, at a stoplight, inside a hospital, inside an Uber car, inside a restaurant, possibly even inside your own home. Oh, and let’s not forget the doorbell cameras. like the ones surveilling the entire neighborhood without their consent. If you have a smartphone, it’s tracking everywhere you go and that data is being used to compile incredibly detailed information about you.

Cameras are everywhere…including in our own hands. While the images being posted on social media may just be static images, they are still pictures of someone who may not even know that image was posted.

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

Police And Fusion Centers Use Wi-Fiber Technology To Secretly Monitor Americans: Part 1

October 5, 2020

Police And Fusion Centers Use Wi-Fiber Technology To Secretly Monitor Americans: Part 1

A four year old video from Wi-Fiber Technology does not even come close to telling the whole story of how law enforcement and Fusion Centers can use this product to secretly monitor Americans.
At approximately the 1 minute mark of the above video, Wi-Fiber offers a glimpse into how government agencies use their product to “improve public safety and emergency response in real-time.”

A look at Wi-Fiber’s website reveals next to nothing about how their “Self-Forming, Modular, Autonomous, Real-Time, Turn-Key” (S.M.A.R.T.) product is used. Which opens up a ton of questions.

Readers are left guessing as to how and why law enforcement would want to use S.M.A.R.T. until you start to read between the lines.

You see, S.M.A.R.T. is really just an acronym for smart cities and everything it entails. Wi-Fiber uses Smart Mesh, Edge Computing, Inter-Operability, Visualization, Cloud and G.A.R.I.2. The G.A.R.I.2 PowerPoint Presentation reveals exactly why police are so excited to purchase Wi-Fiber.

All of these smart city devices are designed to do two things, be accessible by one platform and provide intelligence in real-time. As Canton, Ohio Police Chief Jack Angelo said, “the more and more we dug into it, we saw that it was going to be probably more of a cost-effective solution.”

A recent Columbus-Dispatch article was a little more revealing.

“Wi-Fiber technology has proven more useful to police than the ShotSpotter system it replaced, “We get a lot more out of cameras and license plate reading than we do out of the shot detection,“ Chief Angelo said.”

How are police departments getting more intelligence out of Wi-Fiber than license plate readers and ShotSpotter? Because Wi-Fiber allows law enforcement to use CCTV cameras in ways they could only dream about years ago.

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

Operation Legend is Bringing Surveillance Tech to Cities

September 13, 2020

OPERATION LEGEND IS BRINGING SURVEILLANCE TECH TO CITIES

Using federal grants, cities are contracting with companies that hack smartphones and detect gunshots.

IN AUGUST, 40 federal agents arrived in Memphis. Some were already on the ground by the time U.S. Attorney Michael Dunavant announced the onset of Operation Legend and the city became, along with St. Louis, the seventh to be targeted by the Justice Department’s heavy-handed initiative to reduce violent crime. Many of the agents are on temporary assignment, working in collaboration with police; nearly half will relocate by November. But they will leave behind a city flush with grant money for local police — and heightened surveillance capabilities.

In Memphis, organizers have long battled police surveillance. The fight came to a head in 2017, when a lawsuit against the city of Memphis revealed years of close surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists and union organizers. “We knew we were being watched and monitored and surveilled,” said Hunter Demster, an activist who was tracked on social media by MPD. The suit was successful, and in 2018, a federal judge ordered an independent monitor to oversee policing in the city. Now, activists there say that Operation Legend is a serious blow.

Operation Legend and its December precursor, Operation Relentless Pursuit, are both funding surveillance technology in cities across the country. Through Operation Legend, Memphis and four other cities received grants for gunshot detection technology, which lines cities with sensors to detect gunfire, despite longstanding concerns about its efficacy. Other more opaque grants from the Justice Department, like a $1.4 million grant to Shelby County, which surrounds Memphis, in April and a $1 million grant in July to the city of Cleveland, are to be used in part for “technological solutions” or “support” for investigations.

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

Inside One Of Big Brother’s ‘Location Harvesting’ Contractors, Which Tracks ‘Hundreds Of Millions’ Of Phones

August 9, 2020

Inside One Of Big Brother’s ‘Location Harvesting’ Contractors, Which Tracks ‘Hundreds Of Millions’ Of Phones

A Virginia-based software company founded by two US military veterans with backgrounds in intelligence has been tracking hundreds of millions of mobile phones across the world, according to documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

The company, Anomaly Six LLC, draws location data from over 500 apps – partly through their proprietary software development kit (SDK) which they’ve paid to embed directly in some of the apps, while the company gets location data from partner providers. The SDK allows the company to obtain a user’s location if they have allowed the apps in question to access the phone’s GPS coordinates.

App publishers often allow third-party companies, for a fee, to insert SDKs into their apps. The SDK maker then sells the consumer data harvested from the app, and the app publisher gets a chunk of revenue. But consumers have no way to know whether SDKs are embedded in apps; most privacy policies don’t disclose that information. Anomaly Six says it embeds its own SDK in some apps, and in other cases gets location data from other partners. –Wall Street Journal

Anomaly Six holds contracts with several branches of the US Government – although they told the Journal that they ‘restrict the sale of US mobile phone movement data to nongovernmental, private sector clients,’ according to the report. Private sector clients – typically marketing companies or others in the advertising space – buy and sell geolocation data, sometimes ‘reselling it to government agencies or contractors‘ according to the report.

And as the Journal notes, in the case of Anomaly Six, “the direct collection of such data by a business closely linked to US national security agencies is unusual.“

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

London Is The Third Most-Surveilled City In The World

July 25, 2020

London Is The Third Most-Surveilled City In The World

According to a study by research website Comparitech, most of the world’s most surveilled cities are located in China.

The country has been making headlines for its intense use of surveillance technology and, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, is featured heavily throughout the whole ranking that looked at the 150 most populous cities worldwide, excluding those for which insufficient data was available.

The Chinese city of Taiyuan, located in the Shanxi province roughly 300 miles Southwest of Beijing, tops the list with 120 public CCTV cameras per 1,000 inhabitants.

Infographic: The Most Surveilled Cities in the World | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

The highest-ranked non-Chinese city is London, also notorious for its strict surveillance of public spaces, with 67 cameras per 1,000 people, with Los Angeles the highest-ranked U.S. city in the ranking with 6 cameras per 1,000 inhabitants.

CCTV technology is controversial in many places around the world, with proponents touting its benefits for fighting crime and opponents cautious about surveillance’s potential to be used as a tool of public control and to violate privacy rights.

The makers of the survey said that they found little correlation between lower crime rates or a heightened feeling of security and surveillance in the cities surveyed.

Government Can Already Track You Without Apps

July 1, 2020

Government Can Already Track You Without Apps

People have no idea that the government can already track your movement and can determine if you are a protestor or not. A company named Mobilewalla released a report titled, “George Floyd Protester Demographics: Insights Across 4 Major US Cities.” It produced 60 pie charts detailing what percent of protesters in these demonstrations were male or female, young adult (18–34); middle-aged (35-54), or older (55+); and “African-American,” “Caucasian/Others,” “Hispanic,” or “Asian-American.” This data is available now and can provide a questionable practice constitutionally.

You better get a burner phone and leave the smartphone home if you are getting near any protest, for you can be determined to be part of it.

Mass-Tracking COVI-PASS Immunity Passports Slated to Roll Out in 15 Countries

June 29, 2020

FOURTH REICH?

Mass-Tracking COVI-PASS Immunity Passports Slated to Roll Out in 15 Countries

COVI-PASS will determine whether you can go to a restaurant, if you need a medical test, or are due for a talking-to by authorities in a post-COVID world. Consent is voluntary, but enforcement will be compulsory.

Through the magic of Internet meme culture, most Millennials will be familiar with the famous opening scene of the 1942 film, “Casablanca,” where two policemen stop a civilian in the “old Moorish section” of Nazi-occupied French Morocco and ask him for his “papers.” The subject is taken away at once after failing to produce the required documents. The cinematic exchange has been used ever since as a popular reference to the ever-encroaching hand of the state, which is now on the verge of attaining a level of control over people’s movements that puts the crude Nazi methods to shame.

A British cybersecurity company, in partnership with several tech firms, is rolling out the COVI-PASS in 15 countries across the world; a “digital health passport” that will contain your COVID-19 test history and other “relevant health information.” According to the company website, the passport’s objective is “to safely return to work” and resume “social interactions” by providing authorities with “up-to-date and authenticated health information.”

These objectives mirror those that Bill Gates has been promoting since the start of the COVID-19 lockdown. In an essay written by Gates in April, the software geek-cum-philanthropist lays out his support for the draconian measures taken in response to the virus and, like an old-timey mob boss, suggests the solutions to this deliberately imposed problem.

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

LEE CAMP: While Pandemic Destroys So Many Lives, The Surveillance State Celebrates

May 6, 2020

LEE CAMP: While Pandemic Destroys So Many Lives, The Surveillance State Celebrates

If they’re able to track “violators” who follow within a flying spit particle of someone else, then it stands to reason they could choose to track pretty much any other type of behavior.

If we don’t fight back against the secretive surveillance state growing steadily around us, your wife/husband may find out you love a Cinnabon more than you love her/him. And that might be just the beginning of it.

While many of us remain quarantined — inexorably welded to our home/apartment/RV in an abandoned Walmart parking lot — the surveillance state is actually stretching its legs, brought out for a run by our friendly neighborhood oligarchs like a young golden retriever let off its leash on a nice day. Unfortunately, in this case what it’s retrieving is all of our information, movements, thoughts and desires.

Right now violations of American’s privacy rights do not hold many people’s attention. We’re too busy adapting to a new, confusing, and anxiety-filled form of existence. (Last week I myself finally saw my dentist, my therapist and my prostitute all via Zoom calls. Unfortunately, I had performance anxiety – but that was with the therapist [flaccid super-ego].)

More Americans have now been killed by Covid-19 than were killed during the Vietnam War. (I mean Americans killed in Vietnam of course. “Others” killed have never much mattered to us.) As the virus death toll rises, various governments around the world have discussed using smart city technology to trace where infected people go and who they come in contact with. At first that sounds great. What kind of psychopath doesn’t want to end this pandemic? But it turns out there’s one problem with allowing the moneyed rulers to track every man, woman, and child. That problem — stop me if you guessed it — is that they’re tracking every man, woman, and child.

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

Data Privacy Advocates Alarmed By NHS’s New ‘Contact-Tracing’ App

May 2, 2020

Data Privacy Advocates Alarmed By NHS’s New ‘Contact-Tracing’ App

As both countries prepare to start unwinding the strict nationwide lockdowns imposed more than 6 weeks ago, the UK and France are collaborating on a new ‘voluntary’ surveillance app purportedly designed to help with ‘contact tracing’ for coronavirus patients.

The Evening Standard reports ministers from both countries have been “liaising” on the development of the new technology, which is expected to be ready within two or three weeks.

But why are the two allies collaborating on building their own ‘surveillance’ app instead of adopting a model proposed by Apple or Google? Well, apparently, British officials felt Apple’s treatment of user privacy was “too cautious”.

The app will use bluetooth to collect data from the phones of everybody one passes; should one of them test positive, a user will be notified.

A consultant to the French government said: “Apple appeared to be much more cautious about protecting client data and privacy than the French or British authorities.”
The smartphone app will track and trace any possibly affected persons near the user. Some have feared its use of Bluetooth could divulge confidential information about people’s locations.

To be sure, Matthew Gould, head of the unit at the NHS that’s in charge of developing the app, has said the location-tracking feature – pretty much the only reason to use the app – would be “opt-in”.

Matthew Gould, head of the NHS unit developing the app, has said the location aspect of the system would be “an opt in” and not compulsory.
“If you want to protect the NHS and stop it being overwhelmed while at the same time want to get the economy moving, the app is going to be part of the essential strategy,” he told the Commons science and technology committee.

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

“Don’t Trace Me, Bro” — Just Say No to Contact Tracing

May 1, 2020

“Don’t Trace Me, Bro” — Just Say No to Contact Tracing

Contact Tracing? Really? That’s the next big government program to push for total surveillance over our lives. Now the real fallout from the Coronapocalypse comes to light.

The very people who created a fake pandemic out of faulty statistics, media fear-pimping and the rankest of propaganda are now pushing the total surveillance state to protect us (them?) from the next crisis.

James Corbett from the Corbett Report just published an excellent video discussing ‘contact tracing’ as promulgated by (who else?) the Clinton Global Initiative to create an army of new Brown Shirts to assist our wise and benevolent leaders in managing us like livestock.

James is urging us not to use their Orwellian term, and I agree with him. But the best way to do that is to make fun of it and them.

I propose just looking at them and saying, “Don’t Trace Me, Bro.”

As always when they want to herd us towards a terrible idea they first have to come up with a harmless sounding euphemism for it. Either that or just call it a war that we’re going to fight and win together, you know, for kids!

But this was always the plan with this virus. We can speculate as to why this has been done, why it was directed from the commanding heights of our society but, in the end, that speculation is irrelevant.

This is happening, it’s here and they are now working to square the circle. The goal is to finish off the last vestiges of anonymity and individuality started with the destruction of financial privacy during the Clinton Adminstration, which was wrapped in the classic government phrases “Know Your Customer” and “Anti-Money Laundering”

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

“Scarier Than Contracting The Virus” – Pandemic-Tracking Tech Raises Fears Of Global Surveillance State

April 16, 2020

“Scarier Than Contracting The Virus” – Pandemic-Tracking Tech Raises Fears Of Global Surveillance State

The world is sleepwalking into a surveillance state, under cover of the virus pandemic.

For the last several months, governments on both East and West hemispheres have been quickly imposing new digital surveillance measures to track and monitor citizens in quarantine. Governments have told their citizens that digital surveillance is being used to combat the virus and is temporary.

Citizens of the world must remember the freedoms they had in a pre-corona world will likely not all exist in a post-corona world. The “new normal” is a global surveillance state that would make President Xi Jinping blush.

The emergence of digital surveillance to combat the virus originated in China, then spread to South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, all governments in these respected countries used cellphone location data to identify if people were abiding by the public health orders to stay-at-home.

In Europe and the US, similar digital surveillance measures have been used, but have been implemented at a much slower rate because of more stringent regulation.

France admitted last week that it was working on a “StopCovid” app that would march the country, and even maybe the bloc, towards an Orwellian society.

In the US, government agencies have been pulling data from mobile apps to monitor social distancing in states, counties, cities, and or even right down to the neighborhoods.

We mentioned last month that a company called Unacast, launched a mobile app called “Social Distancing Scoreboard,” which tracks the GPS location of smartphones and grades geographical regions, such as a town, county, and or even a state, on how well residents in those areas are abiding by the government-enforced social distancing rules. The app creates an index, ranked from A to F, for whether people are staying home or not.

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

Global Pandemic Response Handing Governments Sweeping Powers They May Never Relinquish

March 27, 2020

Global Pandemic Response Handing Governments Sweeping Powers They May Never Relinquish

While the response to the coronavirus pandemic have ranged from mocking the disease (such has Brazil’s Bolsonaro) to physically sealing people inside of apartment buildings in China, governments are deploying an array of legislative and technical measures to track and control citizens during the outbreak which has killed over 21,000 in roughly three months.

As the situation deteriorates, many fear that the current efforts to control the virus will have dire consequences for individual freedoms long after the danger of COVID-19 has passed, according to Bloomberg‘s Ian Marlow – who notes “In desperate times like these, leaders on all levels are going to extraordinary lengths to do whatever possible to contain the virus.”

Like the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., the coronavirus pandemic is a crisis of such magnitude that it threatens to change the world in which we live, with ramifications for how leaders govern. Governments are locking down cities with the help of the army, mapping population flows via smartphones and jailing or sequestering quarantine breakers using banks of CCTV and facial recognition cameras backed by artificial intelligence.
The restrictions are unprecedented in peacetime and made possible only by rapid advances in technology. And while citizens across the globe may be willing to sacrifice civil liberties temporarily, history shows that emergency powers can be hard to relinquish. –Bloomberg

“A primary concern is that if the public gives governments new surveillance powers to contain Covid-19, then governments will keep these powers after the public health crisis ends,” says Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation based in San Francisco. “Nearly two decades after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government still uses many of the surveillance technologies it developed in the immediate wake.“

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

Leaked Reports Show EU Police Are Planning a Pan-European Network of Facial Recognition Databases

February 24, 2020

LEAKED REPORTS SHOW EU POLICE ARE PLANNING A PAN-EUROPEAN NETWORK OF FACIAL RECOGNITION DATABASES

A POLICE INVESTIGATOR in Spain is trying to solve a crime, but she only has an image of a suspect’s face, caught by a nearby security camera. European police have long had access to fingerprint and DNA databases throughout the 27 countries of the European Union and, in certain cases, the United States. But soon, that investigator may be able to also search a network of police face databases spanning the whole of Europe and the U.S.

According to leaked internal European Union documents, the EU could soon be creating a network of national police facial recognition databases. A report drawn up by the national police forces of 10 EU member states, led by Austria, calls for the introduction of EU legislation to introduce and interconnect such databases in every member state. The report, which The Intercept obtained from a European official who is concerned about the network’s development, was circulated among EU and national officials in November 2019. If previous data-sharing arrangements are a guide, the new facial recognition network will likely be connected to similar databases in the U.S., creating what privacy researchers are calling a massive transatlantic consolidation of biometric data.

The report was produced as part of discussions on expanding the Prüm system, an EU-wide initiative connecting DNA, fingerprint, and vehicle registration databases for mutual searching. A similar system exists between the U.S. and any country that is part of the Visa Waiver Program, which includes the majority of EU countries; bilateral agreements allow U.S. and European agencies to access one another’s fingerprint and DNA databases.“This is concerning on a national level and on a European level, especially as some EU countries veer towards more authoritarian governments.”

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

Adapting to a Fast-Forward World

February 24, 2020

Adapting to a Fast-Forward World

The world is going through a period of accelerating change, as four secular developments illustrate. Firms and governments must make timely adjustments, not only to their business models and operational approaches, but also to both their tactical and strategic mindsets.

LONDON – Firms and governments must increasingly internalize the possibility – indeed, I would argue, the overwhelming probability – of an acceleration of four secular developments that influence what business and political leaders do and how they do it. Decision-makers should think of these trends as waves, which, especially if they occur simultaneously, could feel like a tsunami for those who fail to adapt their thinking and practices in a timely manner.

The first and most important trend is climate change, which has evolved from a relatively distant concern, on which there is ample time to take remedial action, to an imminent and increasingly urgent threat.

The mobilization of various concerned segments of society, owing partly to unusual climatic disruptions in recent years, has greatly increased the pressure on companies to act now. BP’s recent announcement that it intends to achieve “net-zero” carbon emissions by 2050 – a notable promise by an energy company that operates in several highly challenging settings – is the latest example of business responding to such calls. It is only a matter of time until this pressure also prompts governments to take further steps, not only to encourage green activities, but also to tax and regulate those that cause pollution.

Second, privacy concerns have grown alongside technical innovations involving artificial intelligence and big data.

Society is increasingly recognizing that recent technological advances allow not only for more efficient compilation of huge amounts of personal data, but also for using this information to monitor and alter behaviors.

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

40 Privacy Groups Warn That Facial Recognition is Threatening Democracy

February 3, 2020

40 Privacy Groups Warn That Facial Recognition is Threatening Democracy

We must take action and guard what little privacy remains before it’s too late.

(TMU) — On Monday, forty organizations signed a letter calling on an independent government watchdog to recommend a ban on U.S. government use of facial recognition technology.

The l etter was drafted by the digital privacy advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and signed by organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Color of Change, Fight for the Future, Popular Resistance, and the Consumer Federation of America. The letter calls on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) to “recommend to the President and the Secretary of Homeland Security the suspension of facial recognition systems, pending further review.“

The PCLOB was originally created in 2004, as an independent agency that advises the administration on privacy issues. “The Congress specifically found that new surveillance powers ‘calls for an enhanced system of checks and balances to protect the precious liberties that are vital to our way of life and to ensure that the Government uses its powers for the purposes for which the powers were given’,” the letter states.

The organizations challenge the PCLOB to “examine the more significant public concerns about the use of facial recognition in public spaces.” They also call on the board to address concerns that facial recognition software can be used by “authoritarian governments to control minority populations and limit dissent could spread quickly to democratic societies.“

The letter from EPIC mentions a recent New York Times investigation of a facial recognition service used by more than 600 law enforcement agencies across the country. As the Mind Unleashed recently reported, Manhattan-based Clearview AI is collecting data from unsuspecting social media users and the Chicago Police Department (CPD) is using the controversial facial recognition tool to pinpoint the identity of unknown suspects.

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

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