A Military Contractor Is Flying Spy Balloons High Over the Midwest

The United States military is now testing high-altitude surveillance balloons across the Midwest, according to documents a military contractor filed with the Federal Communications Commission. The news was first reported by The Guardian.

The filing states the intent of military contractor Sierra Nevada Corporation is to ‘provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotics trafficking and homeland security threats.” The Guardian reported these have been launched and tested across South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Illinois.

IBM secretly used New York’s CCTV cameras to train its surveillance software

New technology is making surveillance cameras more powerful than ever. Such systems are often developed away from the public eye, as detailed in a new report showing how IBM worked with the NYPD to create software that could search CCTV footage for individuals based on their skin tone. Features like searching for individuals based on age, gender, and skin tone IBM’s software was reportedly developed and tested on surveillance cameras run through the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative (pictured).

MIT Device Uses WiFi to ‘See’ Through Walls and Track Your Movements

Anyone who has ever been intrigued by ads for x-ray specs in the back of a comic book will appreciate the latest work out of MIT, which advances technology to “see” through walls. Using WiFi, a team at Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is now able to “see” a person on the other side of a wall and precisely track their movements, even if it’s something as subtle as giving a high five, according to new research to be presented at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition next week. Katabi told me that previous versions of the technology developed by her team were table to give you the position of the person and kind of their vague, blob-like outline, but not precise movements.

Barcelona is leading the fightback against smart city surveillance

“Now we have a big contract with Vodafone, and every month Vodafone has to give machine readable data to city hall. Before, that didn’t happen. They just took all the data and used it for their own benefit”

In 2015 Ada Colau, an activist with no experience in government, became mayor of Barcelona. She called for a democratic revolution, and for the last two years city hall, working with civic-minded coders and cryptographers, has been designing the technological tools to make it happen. Their efforts have centred on two things.

Potential Spy Devices Which Track Cellphones Found in D.C., Md., Va.

The News4 I-Team found dozens of the potential spy devices while driving around Washington, D.C., Maryland and Northern Virginia. The technology can be as small as a suitcase, placed anywhere at any time, and it’s used to track cell phones and intercept calls. The News4 I-Team found dozens of potential spy devices while driving around Washington, D.C., Maryland and Northern Virginia.

Baltimore Police Can’t Explain Why Their All-Seeing Spy Planes Were Kept Secret

Police officials in Baltimore are trying to deflect controversy over an aerial mass-surveillance program exposed earlier this week, in which a private company quietly keeps watch over a 32-mile radius of the city by flying planes overhead for as many as 10 hours a day. Smith justified the program by alluding to two cases from the 1980s, in which the Supreme Court ruled that police don’t need a warrant to observe a suspect from above using helicopters. But those cases notably involved surveillance of a single person, not half an entire city of 621,000 people.

China forces spyware onto Muslim’s Android phones, complete with security holes

JingWang (“clean internet” in Chinese) doesn’t just block access to specific websites. It also searches your Android phone for “illegal” images, audio recordings, and videos, and can upload them to an external server – alongside identifying details of your phone such as its IMEI number, model, phone number, and manufacturer.

Source: bitdefender.com

Under a millimeter wide and powered by light, tiny cameras could hide anywhere

As if there weren’t already cameras enough in this world, researchers created a new type that is both microscopic and self-powered, making it possible to embed just about anywhere and have it work perpetually. It’s undoubtedly cool technology, but it’s probably also going to cause a spike in tinfoil sales.

Source: techcrunch.com

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Lost $6 Billion the Day After Cambridge Analytica’s Data Misuse Was Revealed

The Facebook’s co-founder and CEO lost $6.06 billion in stock value, according to CNBC, when reports that Cambridge Analytica, a firm hired by Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, improperly used the social network’s user data.

Source: fortune.com

Schools Are Spending Millions on High-Tech Surveillance of Kids

Advanced surveillance technologies once reserved for international airports and high-security prisons are coming to schools across America. From New York to Arkansas, schools are spending millions to outfit their campuses with some of the most advanced surveillance technology available: face recognition to deter predators, object recognition to detect weapons, and license plate tracking to deter criminals. Privacy experts are still debating the usefulness of these tools, whom they should be used on, and whom they should not, but school officials are embracing them as a way to save lives in times of crisis.

China eyes ‘black tech’ to boost security as parliament meets

At a highway check point on the outskirts of Beijing, local police are this week testing out a new security tool: smart glasses that can pick up facial features and car registration plates, and match them in real-time with a database of suspects.

Source: reuters.com