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Two years after sparking a provincial probe, Tyee finds practice has grown.

TransLink compass card — If you register a Compass card or pay for TransLink rides with a credit card, the police can get personal information like your name, phone number, email address and trip history without a warrant or telling you.

What happened after The Tyee exposed that TransLink increasingly was handing over data about its riders to police without informing customers or requiring any warrants?

That was in August 2017.

A follow-up Tyee investigation finds police tracking of TransLink riders has since intensified.

And a probe by B.C.’s Information and Privacy Commissioner triggered by The Tyee’s report quietly wrapped up four months ago without telling the public or resulting in any new safeguards.

The fact the data sharing continues without any moves to protect riders’ privacy or ability to know is “tremendously disappointing,” said Micheal Vonn, policy director for the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association.

But TransLink emphasized that the province’s investigation concluded the transit authority broke no laws by secretly sharing customers’ information with police.

TransLink’s data can reveal to police, without the rider’s knowledge, their name, email address, phone number and every trip taken with a Compass card or fare purchased from a kiosk with a credit or debit card.

In July 2017, TransLink responded to a Tyee freedom of information request saying it had received 132 police requests for such information, granting 82. The number of times law enforcers sought and received such information had risen since 2016. In the whole of that year, police had made 147 requests and were granted 111.

In 2015, The Tyee learned, TransLink fielded only 16 such requests, granting 10.

Five Reasons to Care about RCMP Monitoring Your Social Media

April 11, 2019

Five Reasons to Care about RCMP Monitoring Your Social Media

Surveillance is going ahead without oversight or accountability, for one.

Governments have taken no effective steps to protect citizens from round-the-clock, random surveillance in the internet age. Photo: Shutterstock.

You should care, even be scared, by The Tyee’s reports on the RCMP’s “Operation Wide Awake,” a secretive and unsupervised social media monitoring operation.

We’re already deep into a new era. Police — and businesses and other organizations — have the ability to track citizens in ways unimagined even a decade ago. Social media, the internet, cellphones, algorithms and analytics have given the state extraordinary power to monitor what you think and predict what you might think or do.

And governments have taken no effective steps to protect citizens from round-the-clock, random surveillance in the internet age. They have quietly surrendered our rights.

The Tyee’s Bryan Carney revealed the RCMP’s Operation Wide Awake, its expansion, and the lack of oversight to protect Canadians’ rights.

The RCMP, Carney reported, had launched a sweeping project to monitor Canadians’ internet use, especially social media. At first, the goal was to help investigators solve crimes. Then the police decided to expand the monitoring to try and assess whether people might commit crimes.

Basic privacy considerations around the expanded program have not been completed.

Why should that scare you?

First, this is a whole new kind of surveillance. Even a decade ago, police had few options for tracking citizens. They could intercept mail or tap a phone line, if the court approved a warrant. Officers could interview neighbours or infiltrate groups they thought might be a threat.

But between legal safeguards and the practical challenges, mass monitoring was impossible.

Operation Wide Awake shows how much that has changed. The RCMP bought social media monitoring technology from Salesforce via Carahsoft, a big U.S. corporation supplying governments with technology.

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

Are we sleepwalking into an AI police state?

March 28, 2019

Are we sleepwalking into an AI police state?

Predictive analytics enabling law enforcement to identify “high-risk” areas has highlighted ethical and legal quandaries

Science fiction has long speculated on the danger of a dystopian future and machines powered by artificial intelligence (AI). But with the advent of big data, we no longer need to speculate: the future has arrived. By the end of March, West Midlands Police is due to finish a prototype for the National Data Analytics Solution (NDAS), an AI system designed to predict the risk of where crime will be committed and by whom. NDAS could eventually be rolled out by every police force in the UK.

Ultimately, we need to be able to choose as a society how we use these technologies and what kind of society we really want to be

Fourteen police forces around the UK have used or planned to use such tools. But a report published in February by human rights group Liberty warns that far from being objective, police crime-mapping software reinforces pre-existing biases about who commits crime.

Current mapping tools use past crime data to identify so-called high-risk areas, leading to more intensive patrolling. Yet these areas are often already subject to disproportionate over-policing. By relying on data from police practices, according to Liberty’s advocacy director Corey Stoughton, these tools might simply “entrench discrimination against black and minority-ethnic people”.

Police mapping tools turning citizens into suspects

Ben Hayes, a data protection and ethics adviser to the European Union, United Nations and other international organisations, warns that the increased use of such mapping tools is increasingly turning ordinary citizens into suspects.

“People can be categorised as vulnerable, at risk, threatening, deserving or undeserving,” says Dr Hayes, noting that this tends to target those already marginalised. “Services such as border control, policing and social welfare are all subject to inherent bias. Machine-learning doesn’t eliminate those biases, it amplifies and reinforces them.”

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

Social Media, Universal Basic Income, and Cashless Society: How China’s Social Credit System Is Coming To America

March 17, 2019

Social Media, Universal Basic Income, and Cashless Society: How China’s Social Credit System Is Coming To America

Some well-informed Americans may be aware of China’s horrifying “Social Credit System” that was recently unveiled as a method of eradicating any dissent in the totalitarian state. Essentially freezing out anyone who does not conform to the state’s version of the ideal citizen, the SCS is perhaps the most frightening control system being rolled out today. That is, until you consider what is coming next.

Unbeknownst to most people, there appears to be a real attempt to create a system in which all citizens are rationed their “wages” digitally each month in place of a paycheck, including the ability to gain or lose money. This system would see any form of dissent resulting in the cut off of those credits and the ability to work, eat, or even exist in society. It would not only be the end of dissent but of any semblance of real individuality.

Here’s how the Social Credit System operates in China.

First, however, for those who are unaware of the Social Credit System as it operates in China, we should briefly describe just what has taken place there. The Social Credit System in China isn’t merely a punishment for criticizing the state as is the case in most totalitarian regimes, the SCS can bring the hammer down for even the slightest infraction such as smoking in a non-smoking zone.

One summary of the SCS can be found in Business Insider’s article by Alexandra Ma entitled “China has started ranking citizens with a creepy ‘social credit’ system — here’s what you can do wrong, and the embarrassing, demeaning ways they can punish you,” where Ma writes,

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

NSA Abandons Part Of Mass Surveillance Program Exposed By Snowden

March 5, 2019

NSA Abandons Part Of Mass Surveillance Program Exposed By Snowden

The National Security Agency (NSA) has reportedly abandoned part of their infamous surveillance apparatus exposed by former contractor Edward Snowden, and used for the mass collection of Americans’ communications records; including phone logs, metadata and text messages.

The New York Times noted that House minority leader national security adviser Luke Murry told The Lawfare Podcast that the NSA “hasn’t actually been using it for the past six months,” and that he’s “not certain that the [Trump] administration will want to start that back up” (despite collecting 530 million US phone records in 2017)

Keep in mind, the NYT report isn’t claiming the NSA has abandoned other programs such as XKeyscore – which the agency uses to search and analyze global internet data. When asked by German broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk “What could you do if you would use XKeyscore?” Edward Snowden replied:

You could read anyone’s email in the world, anybody you’ve got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you’re tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It’s a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA’s information.
… You can tag individuals … Let’s say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a form somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what’s called a fingerprint, which is network activity unique to you, which means anywhere you go in the world, anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, your identity. –Edward Snowden

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

The Insane Surveillance of your iPhone that Exposes You To Massive Risks

February 14, 2019

The Insane Surveillance of your iPhone that Exposes You To Massive Risks

There is a new and very serious data scandal rising up with iPhones that Apple is being asked to shutdown. There are a number of major companies who are now secretly recording your every move on their iPhone apps without your permission or even your knowledge. They are actually recording every keystroke you make. The list of companies are Abercrombie & Fitch, Air Canada, Expedia, Hollister, Hotels.COM, and Singapore Airlines to mention a few.

According to an investigation by App Analyst, they checked apps created by Glassbox by reviewing their listed customers to see exactly what data was leaving their iPhones and going back to the companies. According to TechCrunch, none of the apps that were checked bothered to tell the client that they were recording their screens or that they were sending the information back to each company. This type of surveillance to see what you might be interested in buying next is EXTREMELYdangerous. This is going way too far and we really do need laws to prohibit this type of data collection. They are capturing everything including your banking details.

What is becoming painfully obvious is you SHOULD NOT use your phone for financial transactions — PERIOD!!!!! Additionally, get a cheap laptop and use that for any financial transactions with NO OTHER apps for movies, travel, or anything. Segregate your financial transactions from the rest of your activities.

2019: The Three Trends That Matter

February 11, 2019

2019: The Three Trends That Matter

Look no further than Brexit in Britain, the yellow vests in France and the Deplorables in the U.S. for manifestations of a broken social contract and decaying social order.

Among the many trends currently in play, Gordon Long and I discuss three that will matter as 2019 progresses: 2019 Themes (56 minutes)

1. Final stages of the debt supercycle

2. Decay of the social order/social contract

3. Social controls: Surveillance capitalism, China’s Social Credit system, social globalization

The basic idea of the debt supercycle is simple: resolving every crisis of over-leveraged speculative excess, evaporation of collateral and over-indebtedness by radically increasing debt eventually leads to an implosion of the entire credit-based financial system.

The final stages of the current debt supercycle are manifesting all sorts of interesting cross-currents: de-dollarization and the unprecedented expansion of debt in China to name just two.

De-dollarization describes the efforts of many nations to reduce their dependence on U.S. dollars for trade and reserves. Since the USD remains the largest reserve currency in both trade and reserves, this trend threatens to reorder the entire global financial system, with potentially disruptive consequences not just to the USD but to a variety of institutions and norms.

China’s total systemic debt has soared from $7 trillion in 2008 to $40 trillion in 2018. This is of course only a rough estimate, as China’s enormous Shadow Banking System is famously opaque, as are many of its institutional and corporate balance sheets.

China has embraced the narrative of “growing our way out of stagnation by quintupling debt,” but the banquet of consequences of this speculative orgy is finally being served: China’s dramatic slowdown in 2018 is just the appetizer course of the banquet of consequences.

This excerpt of a recent (and immediately censored) talk given by a Chinese economist illuminates the result of debt-fueled mal-investment and speculation on a grand scale:

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

DRAGONFLY: Google Employees Publicly Rebel Against Building a Dystopian New Search Engine

December 12, 2018

DRAGONFLY: Google Employees Publicly Rebel Against Building a Dystopian New Search Engine

More than 1,400 Google staff, many journalists, and human rights organizations are calling on Google to halt its controversial project called Dragonfly.

What is Project Dragonfly?

Dragonfly is a search engine specially built for China. It would unleash more censorship on a mass scale by selectively blocking certain search terms, apparently at the behest of China’s government. Human rights groups are blasting the company for aiding and abetting China’s mass surveillance and rights violations which could result in potential imprisonment.

It turns out Google’s employees had been unwittingly working on this project for a while until 2017 without knowing its intended purpose. News of this highly secret program finally leaked and no one is letting it get swept under the rug.

Thankfully, since the news leaked out, no amount of time has caused advocates and free speech lovers to forget this scandal. Those in the know are using the hashtag #DropDragonfly.

How would the Dragonfly search engine in China Work?

The search engine would censure terms like “human rights” and “religion.” Hundreds of Google employees have called this out as obvious freedom of speech violations.

BBC reported in August:

The search app would “blacklist sensitive queries”, The Intercept says, identifying and filtering websites currently blocked by China’s so-called Great Firewall.

According to documents it had seen, a search via the app would result in a list with banned websites removed and a disclaimer saying that “some results may have been removed due to statutory requirements”.

It said the BBC News website and Wikipedia would be among those blocked.

Employees of Google are horrified.

“We are Google employees and we join Amnesty International in calling on Google to cancel project Dragonfly…”

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

The Conflicting Forces of Modernism: Kafka and Kierkegaard

December 10, 2018

The Conflicting Forces of Modernism: Kafka and Kierkegaard

We seem to be heading into a confrontation between the two forces of Modernism: the primacy of the individual versus the increasing technological and economic might of the central state.

In Kafka’s Nightmare Emerges: China’s “Social Credit Score” (May 7, 2018), I wrote about Kafka’s vision of a bureaucratic nightmare emerging in China’s “Social Credit Score.”

The idea here is the central state sets up a vast, pervasive surveillance system to monitor all its citizens, and assigns a social score to each citizen based on his/her compliance with regulations and social norms as defined by the state.

In Kafka’s nightmarish novels, an opaque, impenetrable and impersonalized bureaucracy controls the social and economic structures of everyday life.

China’s system is based on a social score, but one’s social score has enormous economic consequences: the citizen with a low score can be denied rights to travel, his/her children can be denied access to educational opportunities and so on.

As I noted, there doesn’t appear to be a legal process for challenging one’s low social score, or much transparency on the various violations and weighting of violations that go into calculating each individual’s score.

I’ve often written about the difference between force and power: as per Edward Luttwak, force (coercion) is costly and clumsy, while power works via persuasion, grudging or otherwise.

China is attempting to create a system that is extremely coercive (a low score generates severe punishments) but also seeks to internalize the social scoring system: no authority figure is required to force individuals to comply; each individual internalizes the rules and modifies their own behavior accordingly.

This aligns with China’s historic reliance on internalized social norms to control its vast populace. Even in the Song Dynasty (960 AD to 1279 AD), the central state relied on the internalized social norms of Confucian values to “order society” with minimal coercion.

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

Is China Really More “Dystopian” Than The UK?

December 6, 2018

Is China Really More “Dystopian” Than The UK?

RT reported that the UK’s so-called “National Data Analytics Solution” will see an algorithm process whichever of 30 separate data points have been recorded about a person in local and national police databases in order to predict which members of the population are most likely to commit a crime or be victimized by one, after which the state will dispatch local health and social workers to offer “counseling” to them in an attempt to prevent the computer’s envisioned scenario from transpiring. This program is being likened to the 2002 film “Minority Report” and carries with it a vibe of China’s controversial “social credit” system, albeit without any “rewards” being offered for law-abiding behavior. In fact, one can actually make the claim that instead of the UK copying China to a degree, it was actually China that learned from the UK seeing as how the island nation’s mass surveillance system used to be far ahead of the communist nation’s one.

The problem with “pre-crime” technology, however, is that it straddles the fine line between security and liberty in what is supposed to be a “democracy”, therefore making it uncomfortably out of place in the UK while being much more natural to implement in centrally controlled societies like China’s. While the European country insincerely pretends to be a “democracy” in the Western sense of how this system is commonly assumed to function, the East Asian one makes no such pretenses and is proud of having a different organizational model, which should be doubly disturbing for any British citizen because it means that their “democratically elected government” is actually less forthcoming about its nationwide surveillance strategy than comparatively more centralized China’s is. No value judgement is being made about either country’s governing system, but the purpose of this comparison is to point out the surprising similarities between the two that are usually lost on most observers.

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

More Surveillance State Moves: The U.S. Will Lose Liberty Before (And If) It’s Restored

December 3, 2018

More Surveillance State Moves: The U.S. Will Lose Liberty Before (And If) It’s Restored

In previous articles, I outlined the three methods the globalists are most likely to use (in order of preference) to finish off the U.S. and usher in their Globalist-Corporatist-Oligarchic world government. They are as such:

A lethal bio-engineered virus
An Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) “Event” – defined as either an attack by a foreign entity (such as North Korea, China, or Russia), or a “domestic self-infliction” subsequently blamed on one or more of the listed former.
A nuclear war

For skeptics and rabid naysayers who attacked previous articles regarding the threat posed by North Korea outlined over the past several years, information from the U.S. Air Force was posted the other day that may make you want to “reanalyze” your stance. As I mentioned before, I’m just the messenger: the information has been gathered over the years by men such as Pry and Graham who headed the former Committee to brief Congress on the EMP Threat against the United States.

That same Committee was de-funded (in this administration), and rendered defunct. According to the Air Force 2018 report, the mothballing of the Committee was premature. The Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard wrote an article released 11/30/2018 entitled, “Military warns EMP attack could wipe out America, democracy, world order.” Here’s an excerpt:

“In an extraordinary and sobering report meant to educate the nation on a growing threat, a new military study warns that an electromagnetic pulse weapon attack such as those developed by North Korea, Russia, and Iran could essentially challenge the United States and displace millions.

“Based on the totality of available data,” said the report from the Air Force’s Air University and provided to Secrets, “an electromagnetic spectrum attack may be a threat to the United States, democracy, and the world order.”

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

China Is Helping Governments of the World Build Their Own Surveillance State

November 18, 2018

China Is Helping Governments of the World Build Their Own Surveillance State

Everywhere we look the influence of the Chinese government and their totalitarian surveillance methods can be seen.

Go ahead and search “China surveillance” (Pro-tip: Use DuckDuckGo or an alternative search engine!) and watch how many articles pop up regarding the growing digital dystopia being finalized across the People’s Republic of China. Titles like, Smart ID cards and facial recognition: How China spreads surveillance tech around the world and China’s new surveillance state, everyone will be watched, reviewed and rated really warm the heart and fill the head with a vision of a society where no thought is private, criticism of the State is illegal, and your social behaviors affect your place in life.

This is the current state of much of China. And it’s coming to a neighborhood near you.

Case in point, Reuters recently reported that Chinese telecom giant ZTE Corp is developing a “Smart Card” for Venezuela to help track citizens every move. The Venezuelan government sent a group to China to learn how to build their own surveillance state. Reuters reports:

‘What we saw in China changed everything,’ said the member of the Venezuelan delegation, technical advisor Anthony Daquin. His initial amazement, he said, gradually turned to fear that such a system could lead to abuses of privacy by Venezuela’s government. ‘They were looking to have citizen control.’

The following year, when he raised concerns with Venezuelan officials, Daquin told Reuters, he was detained, beaten and extorted by intelligence agents. They knocked several teeth out with a handgun and accused him of treasonous behavior, Daquin said, prompting him to flee the country. Government spokespeople had no comment on Daquin’s account.

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

The Implicit Desperation of China’s “Social Credit” System

November 14, 2018

The Implicit Desperation of China’s “Social Credit” System

Other governments are keenly interested in following China’s lead.

I’ve been pondering the excellent 1964 history of the Southern Song Dynasty’s capital of Hangzhou, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276 by Jacques Gernet, in light of the Chinese government’s unprecedented “Social Credit Score” system, which I addressed in Kafka’s Nightmare Emerges: China’s “Social Credit Score”.

The scope of this surveillance is so broad and pervasive that it borders on science fiction: a recent Western visitor noted that train passengers hear an automated warning on certain lines, in Mandarin and English, that their compliance with regulations will be observed and may be punished via a poor social score.

Taking the train in China is like stepping into an episode of ‘Black Mirror’ (via GFB)

Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams (NYT)

China has turned Xinjiang into a police state like no other (The Economist)

In the Song Dynasty, arguably China’s high water mark in many ways (before the Mongol conquest changed China’s trajectory), social control required very little force. The power of social control rested in the cultural hierarchy of Confucian values: one obeyed the family’s patriarch, one’s local rulers and ultimately, the Emperor.

Author Edward Luttwak made the distinction between force and power in his fascinating book The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century CE to the Third: power is persuading people to cooperate, force is making them obey.

Power is people choosing of their own accord to comply, for reasons they find sound and that serves their self-interest; there is little need for the application of force.

Power is highly leveraged; a relatively small police/military and judiciary is all that’s needed. Force, in contrast, doesn’t scale: it’s enormously costly in capital and labor to monitor an entire populace and impose control and obedience.

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

National facial recognition database to use loyalty rewards to identify American shoppers

November 14, 2018

National facial recognition database to use loyalty rewards to identify American shoppers

image credit: Zenus Biometrics

For years, I have been warning people about facial recognition in retail stores, but this story might convince you to avoid retail stores altogether.

A recent article in Biometric Update. com (BU) reveals that retail stores have a master plan to convince Americans to accept facial biometrics.

BU interviewed four facial biometric company CEO’s and what they revealed is frightening.

The article starts off innocuously enough by telling us that U.S. retail biometrics is used primarily in loss-prevention but things quickly take a turn for the worse.

BU’s interview with FaceFirst CEO Peter Tripp is especially disconcerting, as he reveals how retailers plan to use a “facial recognition opt-in environment.”

“There is another step though that exists which has more to do with consumer loyalty, and consumer experience, that is not quite as expensive an endeavor, and I think there are lots of folks looking at ways of doing that in a friendly opt-in environment, where privacy is not the cornerstone issue, Tripp said.”

If any of this sounds familiar its because they are doing the exact same thing with digital drivers licenses.

Biometric companies are trying to convince Americans to accept digital drivers license by tying them to loyalty rewards programs. Last year the Lincoln Motor Company installed “complimentary” TSA PreCheck biometric scanners in all their new vehicles so customers can get through airport and sport stadium check-in lines quicker.

Corporate-run national biometric database

According to a recent ZDNet article a new partnership between SureID a biometric fingerprinting company and Robbie.AI a facial recognition company “could create a national biometric database.”

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

Facebook’s New Troll-Crushing “War Room” Confirms Surveillance By Corporation Is The New America

October 22, 2018

Facebook’s New Troll-Crushing “War Room” Confirms Surveillance By Corporation Is The New America

Facebook on Wednesday briefed journalists on its latest attempt to stop fake news during the election season, offering an exclusive tour of a windowless conference room at its California headquarters, packed with millennials monitoring Facebook user behavior trends around the clock, said The Verge.

This is Facebook’s first ever “war room,” designed to bring leaders from 20 teams, representing 20,000 global employees working on safety and security, in one room to lead a crusade against conservatives misinformation on the platform as political campaigning shifts into hyperdrive in the final weeks leading up to November’s US midterm elections. The team includes threat intelligence, data science engineering, research, legal, operations, policy, communications, and representatives from Facebook and Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Instagram.

“We know when it comes to an election, every moment counts,” said Samidh Chakrabarti, head of civic engagement at Facebook, who oversees operations in the war room.

“So if there are late-breaking issues we see on the platform, we need to be able to detect and respond to them in real time, as quickly as possible.”

This public demonstration of Facebook’s internal efforts comes after a series of security breaches and user hacks, dating back to the 2016 presidential elections. Since the announcement of the Cambridge Analytics privacy scandal in March, Facebook shares have plunged -14.5% It seems the war room is nothing more than a public relations stunt, which the company is desperately trying to regain control of the narrative and avoid more negative headlines.

The war room is staffed with millennials from 4 am until midnight, and starting on Oct. 22, social media workers will be monitoring trends 24/7 leading up to the elections. Leaders from 20 teams will be present in the room. Workers will use machine learning and artificial intelligence programs to monitor the platform for trends, hate speech, sophisticated trolls, fake news, and of course, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian interference.

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

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