“Surveillance Society”

The release last week of a partially declassified letter that Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM) wrote last April to the director of national intelligence and director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recalls a prominent issue of a few years ago—national security agencies conducting broad collection of data that could cover activities of Americans and be considered an affront to their privacy. Wyden and Heinrich’s heavily redacted letter requests information on an otherwise unspecified “bulk program” of collection by the CIA. The more prominent issue from a few years ago centered on collection of telephone usage data by the National Security Agency (NSA), the primary organization responsible for collecting signals intelligence in support of U.S. national security.

RCMP Hires US Artificial Intelligence Firm to Spy on Web Users

The RCMP awarded a new social media monitoring contract Sept. 2 to a U.S. company that uses artificial intelligence to track what’s said on the web. Virginia-based Babel Street says its software can instantly translate between 200 languages and filter social media content by geographic areas and by sentiments expressed. Using artificial intelligence, it also analyzes relationships between content and senders, according to the company.

Careful what you say in the comments. No calls to violence.

On Monday, the IRS stated that it would be transitioning away from using third-party facial recognition services provided by ID.me, ending a period of intense scrutiny for the newly prominent vendor. But inside the company, workers and executives have been dealing with a very different set of challenges.

In June 2019, three Israeli computer engineers arrived at a New Jersey building used by the F.B.I. They unpacked dozens of computer servers, arranging them on tall racks in an isolated room. As they set up the equipment, the engineers made a series of calls to their bosses in Herzliya, a Tel Aviv suburb, at the headquarters for NSO Group, the world’s most notorious maker of spyware. Then, with their equipment in place, they began testing.

The F.B.I. had bought a version of Pegasus, NSO’s premier spying tool. For nearly a decade, the Israeli firm had been selling its surveillance software on a subscription basis to law-enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world, promising that it could do what no one else — not a private company, not even a state intelligence service — could do: consistently and reliably crack the encrypted communications of any iPhone or Android smartphone.