If you live in Oakland, California, then prepare to be watched, followed, and tracked. Big time. State Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday he is sending hundreds of high-tech surveillance cameras to be installed across the city and surrounding freeways to battle rising crime.
Read More: Breitbart
Forget Big Brother. A stranger in a coffee shop can watch you and learn virtually everything about you, where you’ve been and even predict your movements “with greater ease and precision than ever before,” experts say.
All the user would need is a photo and advanced artificial intelligence technology that already exists, said Kevin Baragona, a founder of DeepAI.org.
“There are services online that can use a photo of you, and I can find everything. Every instance of your face on the internet, every place you’ve been and use that for stalker-type purposes,” Baragona told Fox News Digital.
Read More: Fox News
The company is utilizing emerging technology that uses artificial intelligence software for surveillance cameras to detect potential problems. Actuate doesn’t actually install any new devices, instead, the company connects cameras online in an encrypted way and then runs its algorithms that are programmed to search for problems.
Read More: Fox5
The FBI used National Security Letters — a form of surveillance that privacy watchdogs call “frightening and invasive” — to surreptitiously seek information on Google users, the web giant has just revealed.
Google’s disclosure is “an unprecedented win for transparency,” privacy experts said Wednesday. But it’s just one small step forward. “Serious concerns and questions remain about the use of NSLs,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Dan Auerbach and Eva Galperin wrote. For one thing, the agency issued 16,511 National Security Letters in 2011, the last year for which data was available. But Google was gagged from saying just how many letters it received — leaving key questions unanswered. “The terrorists apparently would win if Google told you the exact number of times the Federal Bureau of Investigation invoked a secret process to extract data about the media giant’s customers,” Wired’s David Kravets wrote. He described the FBIs use of NSLs as a way of “secretly spying” on Googles customers.National Security Letters are a means for the FBI to obtain information on people from telecommunications companies, authorized by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act ECPA and expanded under the Patriot Act.
It lets the agency seek information on a subscriber to a wire or electronic communications service, although not things like the content of their emails or search queries, Google said.And thanks to secrecy constraints built into NSLs, companies that receive them usually aren’t even allowed to acknowledge the request for information. Citing such extreme secrecy, privacy experts have decried the use of these letters in the past.“Of all the dangerous government surveillance powers that were expanded by the USA PATRIOT Act, the National Security Letter NSL power … is one of the most frightening and invasive,” the EFF wrote. “These letters … allow the FBI to secretly demand data about ordinary American citizens private communications and Internet activity without any meaningful oversight or prior judicial review.”
Thanks to negotiations with the government, Google finally opened the smallest chink in the armor, allowing the search giant to reveal the fact that it had received these requests for data, as well as some general information about them.
“Visit our page on user data requests in the U.S. and you’ll see, in broad strokes, how many NSLs for user data Google receives, as well as the number of accounts in question,” Richard Salgado, Google’s legal director of law enforcement and information security, wrote in a Tuesday blog post.A new table posted to Google’s Transparency Report site outlines the details; it tabulates how many requests for information the company has received over each of the past four years: some undisclosed number between 0 and 999.
With those NSLs, the FBI sought information on somewhere between 1,000 and 1,999 users/accounts.“People don’t always use our services for good, and it’s important that law enforcement be able to investigate illegal activity,” Salgado wrote.
No other technology company presently disclose such basic information about government requests, experts noted.
more at FBI secretly spying on Google users, company reveals | Fox News.
The Return Of Cable Boxes That Spy On You
from the wave-to-the-camera dept
Remember the outcry last year when a Comcast exec mentioned in passing the idea of a set-top box that would have a built in camera to monitor who and how many people were actually watching the TV? The outcry over that forced Comcast to say that it wasn’t really going to do that, but Broadband Reports points out that the technology behind such a plan is still moving forward — and apparently cable companies are, indeed, interested in it. The idea is that it can show personalized ads and better target content. It’s worth noting that the company behind the system, Prime Sense, seems to be trying to position it for less “scary” apps, such as being able to do “virtual touch” interfaces, so users could interact with menus on the screen without a remote (features found in some video games these days). Still, unless the end user is given total control over what info is recorded and where it’s being sent, this technology seems like a non-starter.
for more: The Return Of Cable Boxes That Spy On You | Techdirt.
Federally funded high tech surveillance cameras are being installed in Detroit, Chicago and Pittsburgh. These street lights will not only provide light, but will act as Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars.com said, ” ‘Intellistreets’ is “big brother” on steroids. George Orwell himself, would probably have considered the concept too far-fetched, to even appear in his classic book ‘1984’. But folks, this is what’s happening in America today.”