The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads.
Despite the pervasiveness of law enforcement surveillance of digital communication, the FBI still has a difficult time monitoring Gmail, Google Voice, and Dropbox in real time. But that may change soon, because the bureau says it has made gaining more powers to wiretap all forms of Internet conversation and cloud storage a “top priority” this year
Google’s big principled stance against surveillance is honorable — or it would be, if the company wasn’t so deeply involved in the very thing that it claims to be against.
what few people realize is that Google has also been using its wares to enhance and enrich the surveillance operations of the biggest and most powerful intelligence and DoD agencies in the world: NSA, FBI, CIA, DEA and NGA — the whole alphabet soup.
Right now the most significant consequence has been the knowledge that has fueled the debate. A lot of what we have read from these NSA documents isn't surprising, but the details make them real in a way that speculation doesn't.
ISIS communicates using human beings—not the Internet or phones, networks the U.S. intelligence apparatus can surveil with relative ease. Human couriers, in contrast, move quietly, quickly, and blend into the local population, rendering them effectively invisible.
To allow government agents to sift through the masses of records on ICREACH, engineers designed a simple “Google-like” search interface. This enabled analysts to run searches against particular “selectors” associated with a person of interest—such as an email address or phone number—and receive a page of results displaying, for instance, a list of phone calls made and received by a suspect over a month-long period.The myth that metadata is just a bunch of numbers and is not as revealing as actual communications content was exploded long ago—this is a trove of incredibly sensitive information.”
Cyborg Unplug is a wireless anti-surveillance system for the home and workplace. 'Plug to Unplug', it detects and kicks devices known to pose a risk to personal privacy from your local wireless network, breaking uploads and streams.
Moving Walls 22 / Watching You, Watching Me explores the intersection between photography and surveillance. Employing a dynamic range of approaches—from documentary to conceptual practice, from appropriation to street art—these 10 artists provide a satellite-to-street view of the ways in which surveillance culture blurs the boundaries between the private and public realm.
Surveillance art — or as one academic has called it, artveillance — fits into a creative continuum that stretches back to at least the 1930s, when the introduction of “miniature” cameras, such as the Leica, made it relatively easy for photographers to secretly take pictures. Walker Evans led the way with undercover pictures taken on the New York City subway with a Leica hidden behind his coat.
Pentagon officials are worried that the US military is losing its edge compared to competitors like China, and are willing to explore almost anything to stay on top—including creating watered-down versions of the Terminator. Taken together, the “scientific revolutions” catalogued by the NDU report—if militarized—would grant the Department of Defense (DoD) “disruptive new capabilities” of a virtually totalitarian quality. Pentagon-funded research on data-mining feeds directly into fine-tuning the algorithms used by the US intelligence community to identify not just ‘terror suspects’, but also targets for the CIA’s drone-strike kill lists.It is far from clear that the Pentagon’s Skynet-esque vision of future warfare will actually reach fruition. That the aspiration is being pursued so fervently in the name of ‘national security,’ in the age of austerity no less, certainly raises questions about whether the most powerful military in the world is not so much losing its edge, as it is losing the plot.
Hal Varian, chief economist for Google: “By 2025, the current debate about privacy will seem quaint and old-fashioned. The benefits of cloud-based, personal, digital assistants will be so overwhelming that putting restrictions on these services will be out of the question. Of course, there will be people who choose not to use such services, but they will be a small minority. Everyone will expect to be tracked and monitored, since the advantages, in terms of convenience, safety, and services, will be so great.”
Le projet Google Nest se décompose en quatre sous-projets : Google TRUST (google confiance), Google HUG (google embrassade), Google BEE (Google Abeille) et Google BYE (Google au revoir).
Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet— “Google has ramped up its sales force in the Washington area in the past year to adapt its technology products to the needs of the military, civilian agencies and the intelligence community,”
Call it guilt by metadata...
The information about where those calls and emails went, however - to a New York Times journalist - was enough to convince a jury to send Sterling to prison for up to 80 years.
Pentagon officials are worried that the US military is losing its edge compared to competitors like China, and are willing to explore almost anything to stay on top—including creating watered-down versions of the Terminator.
Humans are natural storytellers, and the world of stories is much more tidy, predictable, and coherent than reality. Millions of people behave strangely enough to attract the FBI’s notice, and almost all of them are harmless.
The most significant thing about ARPANET is that it permits the instant connection of computers of different types, ranging from the huge ILLIAC IV to the commercial-class models produced by IBM and others. Complex switching techniques allowing these computers to “talk to each other” are considered a major technological break-through. The question that goes on haunting civil libertarians is whether ARPANET can be used for domestic intelligence by being hooked into CIA, FBI, military intelligence, White House, or other computer systems.
Après l’effervescence et le débat qu’ont généré les révélations d’Edward Snowden relatives à la surveillance massive des télécommunications, le « soufflé » est quelque peu retombé. Or l’Assemblée Parlementaire du Conseil de l’Europe, en publiant un rapport édifiant et extrêmement critique ainsi qu’une série de recommandations adressées aux Etats membres, entend remettre au goût du jour l’encadrement et le contrôle des mesures de surveillance. La réflexion succédant à la réaction, le rapport rappelle la gravité de la situation et insiste sur la nécessité d’amender un cadre juridique manifestement inadapté, afin d’instaurer un encadrement strict et un véritable contrôle des mesures de surveillance.