Glenn Greenwald warned the left is desperate to contain the “mythology” of what happened on the day of the Capitol Riot in order to preserve the Capitol Wall and have Congress create laws expanding surveillance.
“Surveillance Society”
How Democracy Dies: Big Tech Becomes Big Brother
“Digital giants have been playing an increasingly significant role in wider society… how well does this monopolism correlate with the public interest?,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said on January 27, 2021.
“Where is the distinction between successful global businesses, sought-after services and big data consolidation on the one hand, and the efforts to rule society[…] by substituting legitimate democratic institutions, by restricting the natural right for people to decide how to live and what view to express freely on the other hand?”
Was Mr. Putin defending democracy? Hardly. What apparently worries him is that the Big Tech might gain the power to control society at the expense of his government. What must be a nightmare for him — as for many Americans — is that the Tech giants were able to censor news favorable to Trump and then censor Trump himself. How could the U.S. do this to the president of a great and free country?
China’s ‘Sharp Eyes’ Program Aims to Surveil 100% of Public Space
The program turns neighbors into agents of the surveillance state
Ontario seeking public input on “not spooky surveillance state shit at all” digital ID program – OK. Fuck Off.
The Ontario government says it is looking for the public’s input on a possible digital ID program that would allow for people to prove who they are online much easier.
The hope is that the program will be introduced by the end of 2021.
The program will allow for people to “securely and conveniently prove their identity online,” according to the Ford government. It will also help people to be able to access things online rather than have to travel to do things in-person, the government said, such as a small business applying for a license or a parent looking for information on their child’s immunization records.
Clearview AI broke Canadian privacy laws with facial recognition tool, watchdogs say
OTTAWA — A new watchdog report says Canadian use of U.S. firm Clearview AI’s facial-recognition technology violated federal and provincial laws governing personal information.
In a report today with three provincial counterparts, federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien says the New York-based company’s scraping of billions of images of people from across the internet represented mass surveillance and was a clear violation of Canadians’ privacy rights.
A victory? That Genie is out of the bottle, we are all the “usual suspects” now.
Secretive CSIS technology that could reveal ‘lifestyle choices’ needs a warrant, says court
Canada’s spy agency needs a warrant when using a secretive type of technology that could help them “learn about an individual’s private activities and personal choices” as part of its foreign intelligence gathering mandate, according to a recent Federal Court decision.
Details of what exactly that technology is and how it’s used were redacted in the June 2020 court ruling, which was posted online today.
The Federal Court’s findings would only say it concerns technology that allows the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to collect certain information from mobile devices.
Given Canada’s ruling class trends toward promotion of virtually any perversion you care to name I expect heterosexual monogamy and church attendance will be revealed as scandalous behaviors meriting state surveillance.
Intelligence Analysts Use U.S. Smartphone Location Data Without Warrants, Memo Says
WASHINGTON — A military arm of the intelligence community buys commercially available databases containing location data from smartphone apps and searches it for Americans’ past movements without a warrant, according to an unclassified memo obtained by The New York Times.
Defense Intelligence Agency analysts have searched for the movements of Americans within a commercial database in five investigations over the past two and a half years, agency officials disclosed in a memo they wrote for Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon.
Ex-ADT employee admits hacking into 200-plus live cameras, spying on naked women and couples having sex
A former ADT employee admitted Thursday that he hacked into the video feeds of more than 200 Texas customers to spy on naked women and couples having sex inside their homes.
Telesforo Aviles, 35, logged into customers’ accounts more than 9,600 times over a four-year period “in order to view their footage for sexual gratification,” he admitted in federal court.
“This defendant, entrusted with safeguarding customers’ homes, instead intruded on their most intimate moments,” Acting U.S. Attorney Prerak Shah said in a statement.
One thing is certain. Our government would never stoop to such low measures!
High Decibel Social Distancing ‘Dog Collars’ for Factory Workers Deployed
A Swedish manufacturer in France has been accused of treating their employees like dogs after the company asked its workers to wear a social distancing device that emits a high decibel sound if employees are too close to each other.
Hacked home cams used to livestream police raids in swatting attacks
Hackers have livestreamed police raids on innocent households after hijacking their victims’ smart home devices and making a hoax call to the authorities, the FBI has warned.
It said offenders had even spoken to responding officers via the hacked kit.
It marks the latest escalation of a crime known as “swatting”, in which offenders fool armed police or other emergency responders to go to a target’s residence.
The FBI said there were “deadly” risks.
Test-Monitoring Software Is an Invasion of Privacy
You might remember reading these words in high school or university:
“The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.”
Did Americans Come to Love Big Brother?
Millions of Americans may come to resemble Winston Smith, the defeated hero of Nineteen Eighty-Four, who at last accepts the calm.
In less than a month, there will likely be no more President Trump for the media to obsess over. No more false stories about him overfeeding koi fish or headlines screeching that Trump told Americans to inject bleach to combat COVID-19. No more Trump-fixated media worries over how to best accentuate bad news and downplay good.
The Era of Biotechnology, Mass Surveillance, and Government Control
The world is arguably experiencing the first biowar in history. This is not to say that any country deliberately manufactured covid or released bioweapons, but as recent reporting from the New York Times shows, the Chinese government tried to exploit it politically, perhaps calculating that a pandemic would hurt more complex economies than simpler ones. A great power competition has crossed over into the biology of the planet.
New Satellite Has “Superman’s X-Ray Vision” To See Through Buildings
A new satellite from Capella Space is capable of taking high-resolution images anywhere in the world, even through the walls of buildings, according to Futurism.
What makes the Capella-2 satellite nothing short of magnificent is its onboard sensor, called the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), which can snap a picture in night or day, rain or shine.
h/t Mauser
Your Search History Will Determine Your Financial Credit Score In Future, Says IMF
A new white paper by the IMF calls for linking your search history to your financial credit score, which would in effect lower your score if you visit websites marked harmful by their fact-checkers.
In a new blog post for the International Monetary Fund, four researchers presented their findings from a working paper that examines the current relationship between finance and tech as well as its potential future.
Americans Said No to Coronavirus Contact Tracing Spy Apps
But will they be able to stay off the “national server” if the Democrats take over?
When the NHS, Britain’s socialized medicine system, debuted its contact tracing app, six million eagerly rushed to download it. After a few days, 10 million had downloaded and installed the app, and after a month, around 40% of smartphone users had put a monitoring device on their phones that would trace their social interactions and could tell them to isolate at any moment.