The government is spying on us through our computers, phones, cars, buses, streetlights, at airports and on the street, via mobile scanners and drones, through …
Surveillance / Government Spying
The government is spying on us through our computers, phones, cars, buses, streetlights, at airports and on the street, via mobile scanners and drones, through our smart meters, and in many other ways. Even now – after all of the revelations by Edward Snowden, Bill Binney, and other whistleblowers – spying apologists say that the reports are “exaggerated” or “overblown”, and that the government only spies on potential bad guys. In reality, the government is spying on everyone’s digital and old-fashioned communications. For example, the government is photographing the outside information on every piece of snail mail. The government is spying on you through your phone … and may even remotely turn on your camera and microphone when your phone is off.
Roughly a year ago, Google offered health-data company Cerner Corp. an unusually rich proposal. Cerner was interviewing Silicon Valley giants to pick a storage provider for 250 million health records, one of the largest collections of U.S. patient data. Google dispatched former chief executive Eric Schmidt to personally pitch Cerner over several phone calls and offered around $250 million in discounts and incentives, people familiar with the matter say ...
Since just before Christmas, armies of unidentified drones have been appearing each night in the skies above Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas. The drones are approximately 6 feet wide and they have red and white lights, but nobody knows where they are from or who owns them. This is a story that is now receiving national attention, and the FBI, the FAA and the U.S. Air Force ...
In an exclusive report Friday that outraged human rights advocates worldwide, The Guardian revealed that Canadian police wanted snipers on standby for a January 2019 crackdown on Indigenous land defenders who were blocking construction of a natural gas pipeline through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. The Guardian reported on official records—documents as well as audio and video content—reviewed by the newspaper related to the police “invasion” that led ...
Every year, a lack of vaccination leads to about 1.5 million preventable deaths, primarily in developing nations. One factor that makes vaccination campaigns in those nations more difficult is that there is little infrastructure for storing medical records, so there’s often no easy way to determine who needs a particular vaccine. MIT researchers have now developed a novel way to record a patient’s vaccination history: storing ...
China has stepped up its internet censorship by demanding its citizens pass a facial-recognition test to be able to use web services. People who want to have the internet installed at home or on their phones must have their faces scanned by the Chinese authority to prove their identities, according to a new regulation. The rule, which will take effect on December 1, is said to ...
The watch towers, double-locked doors and video surveillance in the Chinese camps are there “to prevent escapes.” Uighurs and other minorities held inside are scored on how well they speak the dominant Mandarin language and follow strict rules on everything down to bathing and using the toilet, scores that determine if they can leave. “Manner education” is mandatory, but “vocational skills improvement” is offered only after ...
A massive four-terabyte trove of sensitive personal data belonging to over a billion profiles has been found on an unsecured Google Cloud server - its owner still a mystery - in one of the largest single-source data leaks ever. The mountain of data, including phone numbers, email addresses, and social media profiles, was sitting unprotected on an anonymous server hosted on the Google Cloud when security ...
Google is facing a federal investigation after a report that revealed the tech giant was working on a project to collect health data on millions of Americans. Google partnered with Ascension, the second-largest health care system in the U.S., in an effort to create software using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to analyze patient information and give people recommendations to improve their health as part of a not-so-secret project titled ...
Google has agreed to purchase fitness watchmaker Fitbit for about $2.1 billion, the activity-tracking company announced in a Friday press release. Both companies have received backlash for their data-collection practices — Google for its massive scale of data collection and Fitbit for collecting specific individual health-related data. “Fitbit will come under Google’s privacy policy. Similar to our other products, including Fit, we will be transparent about the data we collect and ...
Police and government agencies are becoming increasingly reliant on facial recognition software to hunt for suspects, despite the fact that this technology is notorious for falsely identifying innocent people as criminals. In one of the most recent cases, Amazon’s facial recognition technology falsely identified 27 different professional athletes as criminals. While it may be true that professional football players have been known to get in trouble ...
