The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents. The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.

Microsoft, Google, Apple and other firms have sponsored lecture series in which science fiction writers give talks to employees and then meet privately with developers and research departments. Perhaps nothing better demonstrates the close tie between science fiction and technology today than what is called “design fiction”—imaginative works commissioned by tech companies to model new ideas. Some corporations hire authors to create what-if stories about potentially marketable products. “I really like design fiction or prototyping fiction,” says novelist Cory Doctorow, whose clients have included Disney and Tesco. “There is nothing weird about a company doing this—commissioning a story about people using a technology to decide if the technology is worth following through on. It’s like an architect creating a virtual fly-through of a building.” Doctorow, who worked in the software industry, has seen both sides of the development process. “I’ve been in engineering discussions in which the argument turned on what it would be like to use the product, and fiction can be a way of getting at that experience.”

Les organisations terroristes, notamment, ont malheureusement bien compris l’enjeu de la communication et l’instrument efficace de propagande, d’endoctrinement et d’enrôlement que pouvait constituer cet espace numérique sans frontières.

When it comes to influence, Google has now reached a point where comparing it to other major corporations hardly seems fair. On a grand scale, Google doesn’t even merit mention in conversations about traditional companies. If anything, the latest news about its lobbying efforts reinforces the idea that when we talk about Google, we might as well be talking about Google as a country of its own.

San Francisco's degree of income inequality has also increased, to levels roughly on par with Madagascar. Of the 150 largest regions in the US, the Bay Area ranked 45th for income inequality in 1979. Now we've jumped to No. 14. Across the US, income inequality has risen steadily since 1979, but in about 1999, the Bay Area's rate of increase surpassed the nation's average.

* Google employees donated $1.6 million to President Barack Obama's two White House bids * The company told Daily Mail Online that it has spoken with the Federal Trade Commission about antitrust concerns; it was investigated in 2011 but later let off the hook * In the 2012 election, the company’s search algorithm customized results for Obama but not for Republican Mitt Romney * Google execs who have left to work in the White House include Obama's chief technology officer * Hillary Clinton also poached her new tech chief from Google this week

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is making a big play for Silicon Valley startups and tech innovators that so far have shown little to no interest in working with the Pentagon. To show its seriousness about engaging Silicon Valley, the Defense Department will stand up a permanent office there called “defense innovation unit experimental” — the first time the Pentagon will have a full-time outreach presence in the Valley. It will be staffed by civilian and military officials, including reservists with private-sector experience. Carter also is proposing a pilot program to invest in startup ventures under the CIA’s existing In-Q-Tel technology incubator. According to a senior defense official, the Pentagon will make “small investments” in promising technologies in areas like electronics, software and automation.

President Obama said he would support measures opening backdoors in communications and social media technologies last January. Such measures would force companies like Apple and Google to create holes in their programming that would let the government track suspected criminals or terrorists. “Social media and the Internet is the primary way in which these terrorist organizations are communicating,” Obama said in a Jan. 16 press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron on cybersecurity.

They’re not Terminators, but they sure resemble those iconic killer robots from the big screen. Think C-3PO, not T-1000. That’s the more appropriate pop-culture reference, according to Brian Lattimer, another Virginia Tech researcher working on a bipedal humanoid robot with funding from DARPA. "If I could sit down with Google people, I would want them to make a public pledge to not become involved with autonomous killer robots". DARPA, Boston Dynamics, and Google all declined interviews for this story.

After getting a patent for giving robots personalities last month, Google now wants to unleash an army of Rodney Dangerfield bots on the world. In a patent awarded today, the company outlines a system for “allocating tasks to a plurality of robotic devices The patent suggests that the robots could be controlled by a smartphone—Google’s mobile operating system is called Android, after all—with tasks doled out based on each robot’s ability to complete them. Someone could theoretically control the botswarm from anywhere in the world. As the patent puts it: “The plurality of robotic devices of the system may be configured to receive information from the computing component via the network associated with instructions for performing one or more tasks.”