Privacy & Surveillance

How the U.S. and its Spy Allies Scan the World for Hackable Servers
"The spy agencies behind the Five Eyes snooping alliance are actively scanning networks across the connected world for vulnerabilities. Their tool is called Hacienda and its task is to find any unprotected "holes" left in server firewalls, such that spies can penetrate those servers and, potentially, take control. This was revealed in a paper published yesterday in Heise Online by researchers and journalists based in Germany."

Beantown's Big Brother: How Boston Police Used Facial Recognition Technology to Spy on Thousands of Music Festival Attendees
"...One of the reasons for a less physically imposing police presence may have been that the city was in the process of testing a pilot program for a massive facial recognition surveillance system on everyone at the concerts in both May and September. Using software provided by IBM that utilized existing security cameras throughout the area, the city tracked the thousands of attendees at the concert and in the vicinity, and filtered their appearance into data points which could then be cross-checked against certain identifying characteristics. And then... Well, what happens next is what makes this sort of thing so potentially troubling."

No comments: