Blog Heap o'Links
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Big Brother

Displaying 31 - 46 of 46
Wired • Tue 2012 Mar 20, 1:58pm

Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.... secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors.... Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
[h/t The Blaze]

TV
Daily Mail (UK) • Tue 2012 Mar 20, 1:27pm

Agency director says it will 'transform' surveillance

  • Devices connected to internet leak information
  • CIA director says these gadgets will 'transform clandestine tradecraft'
  • Spies could watch thousands via supercomputers
  • People 'bug' their own homes with web-connected devices

[h/t War News Update]

The Blaze • Thu 2012 Mar 15, 5:02pm

One company served with an NSL earlier this year is pushing back on this request for silence. Wired reports that it wants to tell its customers that their information has been requested by the government and give them the opportunity to take it to court, should they wish. This “minor defiance,” Wired states, has caused the government to file a request that the company, which remains unnamed, be forced to remain quiet because speaking out “may endanger the national security of the United States.”
Wired has more on a case that it believes “shed a little light” on NSLs post-9/11 when they were reformed to not require a court order and come with forced gag orders on companies

Fox News • Wed 2011 Dec 28, 9:24pm

A new technology called ShotSpotter enables law enforcement officials to precisely and instantaneously locate shooters, and it has been quietly rolling out across America. From Long Island, N.Y., to San Francisco, Calif., more than 60 cities in the U.S. have been leveraging ShotSpotter to make their streets safer.

Moonbattery • Wed 2011 Dec 28, 9:23pm

Smart meters should come in handy when the EPA inflicts its self-granted mandate to force every aspect of our lives to comply with obscure bureaucratic conceptions of “sustainability.” [Video]

Bartlesville Radio • Wed 2011 Dec 28, 9:02pm

The Bartlesville Municipal Authority heard a presentation by Water Utilities Director Mike Hall about a proposed automated meter reading project.

wired.com • Sat 2011 Jul 30, 6:41pm

Iarpa, the intelligence community's way-out research shop, wants to know where you took that vacation picture over the Fourth of July. It wants to know where you took that snapshot with your friends when you were at that New Year's Eve party. Oh yeah, and if you happen to be a terrorist and you took a photo with some of your buddies while prepping for a raid, the agency definitely wants to know where you took that picture — and it's looking for ideas to help figure it out. In an announcement for its new "Finder" program, the agency says that it is looking for ways to geolocate (a fancy word for "locate" that implies having coordinates for a place) images by extracting data from the images themselves and using this to make guesses about where they were taken. ... And you better believe that it's not just spooks who want to know where images were taken. Google, Facebook, Apple and all the other internet and social media giants are probably looking to do the same thing so that they can better understand where their users are and what they are doing there. So before long your Facebook or Google+ account will be automatically tagging who is in your pictures and where they were taken… …and spooks might be, too.

boingboing.net • Sat 2011 Jul 30, 3:08pm

Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee voted 19-10 for H.R. 1981, a data-retention bill that will require your ISP to spy on everything you do online and save records of it for 12 months. California Rep Zoe Lofgren, one of the Democrats who opposed the bill, called it a "data bank of every digital act by every American" that would "let us find out where every single American visited Web sites."

bostonherald.com • Fri 2011 Jul 22, 4:29pm

Civil libertarians are raising the alarm over the state's plans to create a Big Brother database that could map drivers' whereabouts with police cruiser-mounted scanners that capture thousands of license plates per hour — storing that information indefinitely where local cops, staties, feds and prosecutors could access it as they choose.

news.cnet.com • Wed 2011 Jul 13, 4:03pm

Law enforcement representatives are planning to endorse a proposed federal law that would require Internet service providers to store logs about their customers for 18 months, CNET has learned. The National Sheriffs' Association will say it "strongly supports" mandatory data retention during Tuesday's U.S. House of Representatives hearing on the topic.

nytimes.com • Wed 2009 Jun 17, 4:13pm

The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged...

business.theatlantic.com • Tue 2009 May 19, 7:51pm

Googlein the process of developing a code that synthesizes employee surveys, promotions and pay to estimate which employees are most likely to quit the company.

kvia.com • Thu 2009 Apr 23, 10:03pm

As emergency crews tended to the driver, police Sgt. Raul Ramirez told the ABC-7 crew from across the barrier to leave. Several people and half a dozen cars were also stopped on the eastbound shoulder. Darren continued to try to get information from the men in fatigues when the situation began to escalate. The sergeant jumped the barrier and told Darren to get in the truck (an ABC-7 news unit) and leave, then held Darren with his hands behind his back to the side of the truck belonging to a witness that was parked on the shoulder. "I'm not doing anything," Darren said repeatedly. Darren and Ric were handcuffed, read their Miranda rights and taken to the Westside Regional Command Center. They were released within a few minutes. The entire incident lasted about an hour.

azcentral.com • Mon 2009 Apr 6, 3:12pm

Police officers accused of drunken driving. A female officer's alleged promiscuity and infidelity. A commander whose critics labeled his son a child molester. Jeff Pataky said he uses negative complaints and anonymous tips to fuel his blogging crusade against Phoenix police. A headline on his Web site suggests rewards would be provided for "dirt" on police indiscretions. ... said he believes his online criticism of the department - along with past criticisms of police investigations - led officers to serve a search warrant at his home last week. [Y'think?]

breitbart.com • Wed 2009 Apr 1, 10:41pm

The U.S. Border Patrol is erecting 16 more video surveillance towers in Michigan and New York as part of its plans to use technology to help secure parts of the United States' 4,000-mile northern border with Canada. The government awarded the $20 million project to Boeing Co., the same company responsible for the so-called virtual fence along the U.S.-Mexico border that has come under criticism for faulty technology. [Oh, it doesn't work? We'll spend more. (Democrat-think)]

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