Nowhere To Hide As Minority Report-Style Facial Recognition Technology Spreads Across America

Dees Illustration

Michael Snyder

What is our society going to look like when our faces are being tracked literally everywhere that we go?  As part of the FBI's new Next Generation Identification System, a facial recognition database known as the Interstate Photo System will have collected 52 million of our faces by the end of 2015.  But that is only a small part of the story.  According to Edward Snowden, the NSA has been using advanced facial recognition technology for years.

In addition, as you will see below, advertising companies are starting to use Minority Report-style face scanners in their billboards and many large corporations see facial recognition technology as a tool that they can use to serve their customers better.  Someday soon it may become virtually impossible to go out in public in a major U.S. city without having your face recorded.  Is that the kind of society that we want?

How Wearable Smart Tech Will Control Your Life

Aaron Dykes and Melissa Melton

Privacy? What’s that?

IF you take your cues from propaganda outlets like TIME, wearable technology is what’s next in our lives and in a big way. Simply carrying around a cellphone — which is really a complicated mini-computer in and of itself — won’t be fashionable or sensible for much longer.

As the likes of futurist Ray Kurzweil and others have long been predicting, wearable wrist-watch and eyeglass style wi-fi units (and eventually implantables) will be the new mediary between “Us” and “The Net.” From lulling us to sleep to waking us up, monitoring everything we are datawise including our heartbeats, calorie intake, hydration level and other vital stats to coaching our exercise to becoming an ever-mindful business secretary and digital wallet, these wearables will do more (and thus, invade our very existence) than SMART phones ever could…

17 Fake Cell Phone Towers Discovered Across U.S.

Chris Carrington

Now why would someone want to erect fake cell phone towers across the United States? Who would have the money and the manpower to do so? Who owns them? Who is using them to track your calls?

These are just a few of the questions Les Goldsmith, Chief Executive of the security company ESD America, wants answered.

Talking to Popular Science magazine Mr Goldsmith said:

Newly Revealed NSA Program ICREACH Extends the NSA's Reach Even Further

Nadia Kayyali
Electronic Frontier Foundation 

Turns out, the DEA and FBI may know what medical conditions you have, whether you are having an affair, where you were last night, and more—all without any knowing that you have ever broken a law.

That’s because the DEA and FBI, as part of over 1000 analysts at 23 U.S. intelligence agencies, have the ability to peer over the NSA’s shoulder and see much of the NSA’s metadata with ICREACH.

Metadata is transactional data about communications, such as numbers dialed, email addresses sent to, and duration of phone calls, and it can be incredibly revealing. ICREACH, exposed by a release of Snowden documents in The Intercept, is a system that enables sharing of metadata by “provid[ing] analysts with the ability to perform a one-stop search of information from a wide variety of separate databases.” It’s the latest in a string of documents that demonstrate how little the intelligence community distinguishes between counter-terrorism and ordinary crime—and just how close to home surveillance may really be.

New Social Media Surveillance Program Violates Privacy to Keep You Safe

Joe Wright  

The latest press release from Virginia Tech University, posted in full below, uses a familiar sales pitch which asserts that the only way to keep the public safe is through pervasive surveillance.

Even amid the public outrage and pushback in the wake of the Snowden revelations, the establishment continues to push forward with justifications about why it is in our best interest to be under their constant watch.

Now, as Ebola has taken center stage as the latest threat to humanity, "ChatterGrabber" is being rolled out - a "machine-learning algorithm" that will theoretically help detect public health risks based on harvested communications. However, it goes far beyond the most extreme cases, and researchers are not hiding its wider applications. The press release is a must-read for its rare honesty, but here is the crux of the program:

ChatterGrabber has also been used to monitor tickborne diseases, such as Lyme disease, public sentiment involving vaccines, and gun violence and terrorism, serving as an early warning system for public health officials through suspicious tweets or conversations. (emphasis added)

Read on, it only gets worse:

Spy Tech "Stress Camera" Scans Crowds For Suicide Bombers

Kevin Samson

In addition to the myriad ways we are being spied on by surveillance cameras, biometrics and in the digital world, scientists also seek to uncover our internal workings in order to predict behavior. One way this traditionally has been done in law enforcement is through an examination of stress levels, whether it be from trained observation or newly created hi-tech mechanisms.

Shopper Tracking Device Embedded in Store Mannequins

Iconeme

John Galt

The search for predictive behavior technology to target shopping habits has been a contentious one in the United States. Several years ago a notice appeared at Promenade Temecula in California, and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va. which advised shoppers that their cell phone signal would be used to track them as they move from store to store. Despite privacy assurances, that test-run produced enough outrage to force the UK maker of the technology, Path Intelligence, as well as mall management to halt the surveillance. Senator Charles Schumer was embroiled in the debate and subsequently put forth a Code of Conduct "to promote consumer privacy and responsible data use for retail location analytics." It's been described as a step in the right direction, while other lawmakers still see major privacy gaps.

Nevertheless, a new shopper tracking system is being rolled out in the UK which will be embedded into store mannequins. Meanwhile, some of the earlier pushback in the U.S. seems to be fading on news that the government appears to be encouraging strong regulations, potentially opening the door for such systems to be used in the United States. 

Australian Proposal Would Require Suspicionless Domestic Spying by ISPs

Nadia Kayyali and Jeremy Malcolm
Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Australian government announced new anti-terrorism measures this week, in response to the alleged involvement of Australian citizens with extremist groups in countries including Syria and Iraq. Quietly omitted from the briefing at which those changes were announced, but separately leaked to the press this week, were the government's plans to introduce mandatory data retention requirements for Australian Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

These changes are causing an outcry from privacy advocates and political parties alike. And they should.

New Spy Tech Can Recover Voice Imprints From Physical Objects

Activist Post

Thanks to a new eavesdropping technology developed by MIT, speech can now be recovered from any physical object simply from the sound wave imprint left by an individual.

Even more impressive is that researchers could detect speech from an object photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof glass, as well as analyze video recordings and extract the data from objects in a room even when the people targeted were off camera.

You can see the full demonstration of how this "visual microphone" technology works, and how it combines with other similar discoveries, in three videos posted below.

In our era of ever-increasing crazy spy tech, this discovery could open up a whole new array of surveillance applications.

New Tracking Tech Designed to Thwart the Next Edward Snowden

image source

Jason Erickson

Whether one calls the revelations of Edward Snowden legitimate whistleblowing or treason, the technology to potentially thwart future security breaches has been rolled out in an unlikely place: Estonia.

After a wave of cyber attacks in 2007, Estonia began focusing on data integrity and is now leading the world toward big data governance. Simultaneously, Estonia is laying claim as the first country to implement a national digital identity system, proving that all forms of tracking are being taken seriously:

More Evidence for the Chilling Effects of NSA Surveillance

Cindy Cohn
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Human Rights Watch and the ACLU today published a terrific report documenting the chilling effect on journalists and lawyers from the NSA's surveillance programs entitled: "With Liberty to Monitor All: How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism, Law and American Democracy." The report, which is chock full of evidence about the very real harms caused by the NSA's surveillance programs, is the result of interviews of 92 lawyers and journalists, plus several senior government officials.

This report adds to the growing body of evidence that the NSA's surveillance programs are causing real harm. It also links these harms to key parts of both U.S. constitutional and international law, including the right to counsel, the right of access to information, the right of association and the free press. It is a welcome addition to the PEN report detailing the effects on authors, called Chilling Effects: How NSA Surveillance Drives US Writers to Self-Censor and the declarations of 22 of EFF's clients in our First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA case.

Police State Britain

image source

Stephen Lendman

Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) operates like NSA. They work cooperatively. They're out-of-control rogue agencies. 

They spy on their own populations. They do it globally. They conduct espionage. They collect enormous amounts of personal information. They do it illegally. 

Obama wages war on freedom. He targets whistleblowers and investigative journalists exposing government wrongdoing. So does Britain. It equates doing so with terrorism.

London's Guardian is threatened. Its offices were raided. Hard drive stored information was destroyed. Its editor, Alan Rusbridger, was warned. Cease and desist or else.

Government Says Secret Court Opinion on Law Underlying PRISM Program Needs to Stay Secret

Mark Rumold and David Sobel

EFF

In a rare public filing in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the Justice Department urged continued secrecy for a 2011 FISC opinion finding government surveillance to be unconstitutional. Significantly, the activities at issue were carried out under the controversial legal authority that underlies the National Security Agency’s recently-revealed PRISM program.

EFF filed a suit under the Freedom of Information Act in August 2012, seeking disclosure of the FISC ruling. Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall revealed the existence of the opinion, which found that collection activities under FISA Section 702 "circumvented the spirit of the law” and violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. But, at the time, the Senators were not permitted to discuss the details publicly. Section 702 has taken on new importance this week, as it appears to form the basis for the extensive PRISM surveillance program reported recently in the Guardian and the Washington Post. 

Report states tech giants worked with government surveillance program, companies deny role in PRISM

Madison Ruppert

The New York Times reports that the Internet giants involved in the secret PRISM surveillance program agreed to cooperate with the government. The same companies have issued denials which some argue are actually cleverly worded attempts to obscure their involvement.

All of this comes in response to the reports exposing the NSA’s massive surveillance program known as PRISM which gives them access to the servers of some of the largest Internet companies which was quickly defended by Obama. The information about PRISM was released shortly after it was revealed that Verizon was secretly ordered to hand over all the records of U.S. phone calls in their system.

This slide shows when each company joined the PRISM program
image credit: documents obtained by The Guardian

Now the New York Times reports that in some cases the companies actually changed their computer systems to make it more efficient and secure for the government to conduct surveillance.

Unconstitutional US Data-Mining

Stephen Lendman

On June 5, London's Guardian reported part of it. "NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily," it headlined.

On June 6, a follow-up article headlined "NSA taps in to systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and others, secret files reveal." 

The Washington Post followed with its own report. It said the NSA and FBI "are tapping directly into the central servers of nine US Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to trace a person’s movements and contacts over time."

Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple, and other online companies willingly cooperate with lawless government spying.

Doing so, in part, reflects old news. Institutional spying on Americans is longstanding. Previous articles discussed it. More on the Guardian articles below.

Passwords to Surveillance

image source

Catherine J. Frompovich

Finally, some members of the U.S. Congress are waking up to what’s been going on right under their noses. Members of Congress are initiating oversight proceedings—why so late?—and the Senate Intelligence Committee is planning an investigation of the National Security Agency (NSA)[1] regarding the collection of individuals’ personal phone data.

Doesn’t that sound like something that would have taken place in the former Soviet Union or definitely in Nazi Germany, that is, if old Adolph would have had current technology? Instead of making Germany’s Jewish citizens wear their traditional six-pointed-star—actually interlocking triangles depicting “as above, so below”—Hitler would have targeted their every conversation, just like what’s going on now in the United States of America. Who would believe that really is going on in the USA?

Congress is to blame, in this writer’s opinion, because it has gone along with all the changes to the 2001 Patriot Act and certainly is not bridling all those Presidential Executive Orders (PEOs) citizens don’t know about—or care about—until they take effect. Please study all Mr. Obama’s PEOs.

Warning: Take a calming sedative before reading. Mr. Obama has issued over 150 PEOs since his very first PEO (#13489) dealing with Presidential Records secrecy the day after he was first inaugurated in 2009 to his most recent PEO Authorizing the Implementation of Certain Sanctions… issued June 3, 2013. In essence, what PEOs do is legally establish one-man-authoritarian-rule! A dictatorship, if and when a sitting president wants to invoke his ‘special’ privileges that he gave himself by issuing PEOs, while voters, the Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court can’t do a damn thing about it. Did you know that?

Obama: “Nobody is listening to your phone calls.” But What About Your Dishwasher?

Daniel Taylor

In response to “revelations” that the National Security Agency is collecting vast amounts of information from Verizon customers, Obama told the press that “Nobody is listening to your phone calls.”



Whew. We can all take a deep breath of relief now. Obama says no one is watching. Or are they?

Obama defends massive surveillance program as former Justice Department prosecutor files lawsuit

image credit:
rob.rudloff/Flickr

Madison Ruppert

President Barack Obama has come out today in defense of the massive surveillance program run by the National Security Agency (NSA) involving both direct access to the servers of Internet giantsand ordering Verizon to hand over the records of all phone calls in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Larry Klayman, a former Department of Justice prosecutor and founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch, has filed a lawsuit over the seizure of Verizon phone records against Verizon, Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, the Justice Department, NSA Director Keith Alexander, the NSA itself and Roger Vinson, the federal judge who signed and issued the order.

Klayman, himself a user of Verizon, filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, citing violations of the 1st, 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution.

“Here, there is no doubt that this massive illegal seizure had to be authorized and approved at the highest levels of the executive branch, which necessarily leads to the president, attorney general and the director of the NSA,” Klayman said in a statement.

Lindsey Graham on Verizon: If We're Not Talking to Terrorists "We Don't Have Anything to Worry About"

Daisy Luther

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) must have studied his Police State Handbook before giving an interview regarding the Verizon scandal. The U.S. government was granted unlimited authority to obtain the records of all telephone calls in the Verizon system if at least one of the parties was in the US.

All of the classic manipulative language was present to justify the invasion of privacy when Graham discussed the matter with Fox News and expressed his personal delight at being surveilled.

I think we should be concerned about terrorists trying to infiltrate our country and attack us and trying to coordinate activities from overseas within inside the country… 

…I’m a Verizon customer. I don’t mind Verizon turning over records to the government if the government’s going to make sure that they try to match up a known terrorist phone with somebody in the United States. I don’t think you’re talking to terrorists. I know you’re not. I know I’m not. So, we don’t have anything to worry about.

Government Surveillance Of American Citizens Goes Far Beyond What You Are Being Told

Anthony Freda Art

Michael Snyder

Every single day, the U.S. government gathers and stores more than a billion phone calls, emails, text messages, photographs and Internet searches.  Just about every form of electronic communication that you can possibly imagine is being harvested.  In fact, it has been reported that NSA personnel gather 2.1 million gigabytes of data every hour.  This is being done even though it is a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution. Sadly, most Americans do not even know what the Fourth Amendment actually says.

For those that do not know, the Fourth Amendment says the following: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Unfortunately, our leaders have totally abandoned the Constitution.  They seem to believe that they have the right to look through our electronic communications any time they want and that we should not complain about it.  As you will see below, workers at the NSA have even eavesdropped on very intimate conversations between soldiers serving in Iraq and their female loved ones back home.  What kind of sick person would do such a thing?  Sadly, the truth is that we have allowed ourselves to become a “Big Brother society”, and we are an utter disgrace to the millions of brave men and women who have died to defend our freedoms.