Category: surveillance

Iran’s coronavirus ‘diagnosis’ app looks more like a surveillance tool

[ad_1] AC19’s developer, Sarzamin Housmand (formerly Smart Land Solutions), is also known for developing government clones of Telegram that weren’t as secure as the real thing and were geared more toward enabling surveillance. While it’s not clear exactly what the Iranian government is doing with the data, it’s eager to brag about the scale. ICT […]

Recommended Reading: The AI surveillance company watching Utah

[ad_1] This small company is turning Utah into a surveillance panopticonJason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, and Joseph CoxMotherboard If you think Clearview’s AI-powered facial recognition is a major problem, buckle up. An artificial intelligence company called Banjo has agreement with Utah that gives it real-time access to traffic cameras, CCTV/public safety cameras, 911 systems and other […]

Banjo AI surveillance is already monitoring traffic cams across Utah

[ad_1] Banjo relies on info scraped from social media, satellite imaging data and the real-time info from law enforcement. Banjo claims its “Live Time Intelligence” AI can identify crimes — everything from kidnappings to shootings and “opioid events” — as they happen. Banjo presents many of the same concerns that similar companies have encountered. One […]

NYT: $100 million US phone surveillance program produced two unique leads

[ad_1] After 2015, the USA Freedom Act replaced NSA mass surveillance of American’s call metadata that had been enacted under the Patriot Act and Section 215. While it didn’t go so far as to completely reform the system as groups like the EFF and ACLU hoped, it changed things by having phone companies collect the […]

Why Clearview AI is a threat to us all

[ad_1] Clearview AI was founded in 2017 by Richard Schwartz and now-CEO Hoan Ton-That. The company counts Peter Thiel and AngelList founder Naval Ravikant among its investors. Clearview’s technology is actually quite simple: Its facial recognition algorithm compares the image of a person’s face from security camera footage to an existing database of potential matches. […]

US claims Huawei can secretly access carrier backdoors

[ad_1] Huawei is unique in having this kind of access and doesn’t tell national security agencies, one unnamed official said. The US apparently didn’t start sharing these claims until late 2019, having changed its mind after previously insisting that it didn’t need to provide tangible evidence. It partly declassified some of those assertions, but those […]

ACLU rejects Clearview AI’s facial recognition accuracy claims

[ad_1] For one, Clearview was searching nearly 3 billion public photos that included the politicians whose faces were part of the test, not arrest photos like the ACLU used. It didn’t account for what would happen if someone wasn’t in the database. Would it generate false positives, and would there be any bias in those […]

Interior Department permanently grounds Chinese-made drones

[ad_1] Interior Secretary David Bernhanrd told the Wall Street Journal he believed the department would be “very able” to complete its objectives “without sacrifice,” although he also hoped domestic drone makers would replace Chinese equipment at some point. It’s not certain that the fears are justified, however. DJI, which makes many of the Interior Department’s […]

I am my own spy: A personal surveillance story

[ad_1] That was my first experience with internet-connected cameras, but it wouldn’t be my last. Over the years, I acquired other cameras: an Amazon CloudCam to keep an eye on our cat and the Nest Hello video doorbell as it was a more sensible upgrade over my jerry-rigged Dropcam (plus I could use it to […]

Messaging app ToTok is reportedly a spying tool for the UAE

[ad_1] There appear to have been attempts to cover up ToTok’s roots. It’s officially developed by Breej Holding, but that’s believed to be a front for DarkMatter, a cyberintelligence company run by UAE intelligence officials and former operatives from the NSA and Israeli military intelligence. The software is also linked to Pax AI, a data […]