RT @samim: Artificial Stupidity — Patenting Intelligence: It already upset some technocrats, nice!

Peter Warren Singer Strategist & Senior Fellow

Horrific torture and unfathomable experiments perpetrated by the USA/CIA are finally coming to light. While seemingly disconnected, they mosaic into a terrible picture for terrible times by terrible people -- a self-fulfilling agenda of "exceptional" decisions by covert agencies, the military and pathological politicians. We will not be asked permission. It goes beyond brinkmanship. As stated in the above video, the CIA "would do the same again today." Maybe worse. Undoubtedly worse.

RT @trevortimm: Who has creepier facial recognition technology: Facebook, Google, random advertisers on the street, or the FBI?

I have heard the term “rape” used as slang to imply that someone was going to put forth great effort to defeat or accomplish a task. I first think of the nickname in this context. By nicknaming a drone “Sky Raper,” operators—who are actors of the State—own the use of rape for domination and to defeat a target, while simultaneously participating in the normalization of rape as a larger systemic issue. The drone that takes this name is literally a weapon of war, operated by US persons in the War on Terror.

During World War II, Nazi doctors had unfettered access to human beings they could use in medical experiments in any way they chose. In one way, these experiments were just another form of mass torture and murder so our moral judgement of them is clear. But they also pose an uncomfortable moral challenge: what if some of the medical experiments yielded scientifically sound data that could be put to good use? Would it be justifiable to use that knowledge?

“At a base minimum, people should be able to walk down a public street without fear that companies they’ve never heard of are tracking their every movement — and identifying them by name — using facial recognition technology,” the privacy advocates wrote in a joint statement. “Unfortunately, we have been unable to obtain agreement even with that basic, specific premise.”

A new cybersecurity elite moves between government and private practice, taking state secrets with them. To confront the surveillance state, we also have to confront the cyberintelligence ruling class and expose it for what it really is: a joint venture of government officials and private-sector opportunists with massive power and zero accountability.

.. a number of major political writers have reviled the film, including New Yorker writer Jane Mayer and Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, while Senators Dianne Feinstein, John McCain and Carl Levin wrote a letter of complaint to the film’s distributor, Sony Pictures, calling the movie “grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information” that led to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The division between political writers, politicians and critics only got more pronounced as the CIA’s acting director, Michael Morell, published an unusual disavowal of the film. When it comes to torture, Morell wrote, “the film takes significant artistic license, while portraying itself as being historically accurate.”

The secret history of the fight over the CIA’s controversial interrogation methods, widely criticized as torture.