Tag: mass surveillance

South Africa considers requiring citizens to turn over biometric data to own a phone

Governments of several nations around the world have considered using biometric data during SIM card registrations as a “fraud deterrent.” The proposals have always faced pushback for being a clear challenge to privacy.

Biometric data or identifiers include scans of a fingerprint, palm, retina, or the entire face of the user. South Africa has become the latest nation to consider SIM laws that make this data a mobile phone registration requirement.

Identity and other thieves can still hack phones with current security measures. Biometric data makes it more difficult because a criminal would need biometric proof that they own a phone and have the right to unlock it.

Acquiring body scans illegally is a difficult process. Governments hope that the extensive time and financial effort required to copy or mimic the biometrics of a specific person might deter criminals from hacking phones.

They also hope it might deter criminals from using their own phones for criminal activities since biometrics data creates a solid link between them and their phones that investigators can trace from a phone used in a crime back to the owner.

The telephone regulator for South Africa believes that all SIM card records should have biometric identifiers. For now, the data would only be used for basic authentication of ownership and monitoring of SIM swaps.

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Signed as Law: Utah Expands Limits on Drone Surveillance

On Monday, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a bill into law expanding state limits on government drone surveillance. The legislation will not only establish important privacy protections at the state level; it will also help thwart the federal surveillance state.

Rep. Ryan Wilcox (R) introduced House Bill 259 (HB259) on Jan. 28. In 2014, Utah passed a law requiring police to get a warrant before conducting drone surveillance in most situations. HB259 clarifies that the law applies “to any imaging surveillance device, as defined in Section 77-23d-102 when used in conjunction with an unmanned aircraft system.” This includes “radar, sonar, infrared, or other remote sensing or detection technology.”

In effect, the enactment of HB259 clarifies that this type of technology cannot be used in conjunction with a drone without a warrant.

The Senate passed HB259 by a 23-0 vote. The House approved the measure by a vote of 70-0. With Gov. Cox’s signature, the law goes into effect May 4.

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Eric Adams considering using drones to fight NYC crime, sources say

Mayor Eric Adams is mulling a mini-army of drones to fight surging crime in the Big Apple — possibly deploying the high-flying robocops from rooftops as watchful guardians of Gotham, sources told The Post.

Tel Aviv-based Blue White Robotics and Easy Aerial of Brooklyn were two drone manufacturers featured earlier this month at an event to launch a NYC-Israel Chamber of Commerce.

Adams attended the gathering in the Williamsburg Hotel, and sources said the mayor was so impressed with the joint presentation that he suggested his chief technology officer Matthew Fraser and the firms’ honchos begin talks about the city potentially buying drones and expanding the NYPD’s use of them.

“Eric is a big booster of drones and how they can be used to streamline government function, but obviously whatever he would try to roll out would be constrained” under existing laws limiting drone use, said a source familiar with the mayor’s thinking.

The drone makers – whose clients include the US Department of Defense, Air Force and Customs and Border Protection – say they’ve dubbed the plan the “Soteria Project,” derived from a Greek word meaning “deliverance from a crisis.”

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The Kids Online Safety Act Is a Heavy-Handed Plan to Force Platforms to Spy on Young People

Putting children under surveillance and limiting their access to information doesn’t make them safer—in fact, research suggests just the opposite. Unfortunately those tactics are the ones endorsed by the Kids Online Safety Act of 2022 (KOSA), introduced by Sens. Blumenthal and Blackburn. The bill deserves credit for attempting to improve online data privacy for young people, and for attempting to update 1998’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA). But its plan to require surveillance and censorship of anyone under sixteen would greatly endanger the rights, and safety, of young people online.

KOSA would require the following:

  • A new legal duty for platforms to prevent certain harms: KOSA outlines a wide collection of content that platforms can be sued for if young people encounter it, including “promotion of self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and other matters that pose a risk to physical and mental health of a minor.”
  • Compel platforms to provide data to researchers
  • An elaborate age-verification system, likely run by a third-party provider
  • Parental controls, turned on and set to their highest settings, to block or filter a wide array of content

There are numerous concerns with this plan. The parental controls would in effect require a vast number of online platforms to create systems for parents to spy on—and control—the conversations young people are able to have online, and require those systems be turned on by default. It would also likely result in further tracking of all users.

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CIA BUSTED Doing The UNTHINKABLE To US CITIZENS … on US Soil!

Big Brother is watching you. He gets your emails, your texts, your phone records, and who knows what else they have. If you don’t think the FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ aren’t the most corrupt government agencies of all time I want some of what you are smoking. In June of 2013, it was revealed that the NSA was collecting information from hundreds of millions of US citizens.

Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (N.M.)  said:

(The CIA)  “has secretly conducted its own bulk program” and “has done so entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes with FISA collection.”

“This basic fact has been kept from the public and from Congress. Until the [Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board] report was delivered last month, the nature and full extent of the CIA’s collection was withheld even from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.”

“[W]hat these documents demonstrate is that many of the same concerns that Americans have about their privacy and civil liberties also apply to how the CIA collects and handles information under executive order and outside the FISA law. In particular, these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans, the same issue that has generated bipartisan concern in the FISA context.”

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IARPA Project Aims to Identify People from Drones by More Than Just Their Face

The intelligence community’s key research arm recently moved to develop biometric software systems that can identify people’s entire bodies from long ranges in challenging conditions.  

Through this newly unveiled multi-year research effort—called the Biometric Recognition & Identification at Altitude and Range or BRIAR program—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity is working with teams from multiple companies and universities to pave the way for next-level recognition technology.

“There’s such a diversity of technical challenges that are trying to be addressed. This is tackling a problem that’s important for the government and for national security—but I think is underrepresented in the academic research because it’s not a topic focus area,” IARPA Program Manager Dr. Lars Ericson told Nextgov on Wednesday. “You need to have government involvement to stimulate the data, and the research, and the evaluations in this topic area. So, I think that there’s a lot of potential for broad benefits to biometrics and computer vision, while also driving towards this very important government mission capability.”

Ericson’s background is in physics, as well as biometrics applications and technologies. He oversees IARPA’s biometrics portfolio of research efforts.

As one of the latest programs to kick off, BRIAR’s ultimate aim, according to a broad agency announcement released last year to underpin this work, is to “deliver an end-to-end [whole-body] biometric system capable of accurate and reliable verification, recognition and identification of persons from elevated platforms and at distances out to 1,000 meters, across a range of challenging capture conditions.”

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Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the Military Origins of the Internet

As the digital revolution was underway in the mid-nineties, research departments at the CIA and NSA were developing programs to predict the usefulness of the world wide web as a tool for capturing what they dubbed “birds of a feather” formations. That’s when flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in rhythmical patterns.

They were particularly interested in how these principles would influence the way that people would eventually move together on the burgeoning internet: Would groups and communities move together in the same way as ‘birds of a feather, so that they could be tracked in an organised way? And if their movements could be indexed and recorded, could they be identified later by their digital fingerprints?

To answer these questions, the CIA and NSA established a series of initiatives called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) to directly fund tech entrepreneurs through an inter-university disbursement program. Naming their first unclassified briefing for computer scientists ‘birds of a feather,’ which took place in San Jose in the spring of 1995.

Amongst the first grants provided by the MDDS program to capture the ‘birds of a feather’ theory towards building a massive digital library and indexing system – using the internet as its backbone – were dispersed to two Stanford University PHD’s, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who were making significant headways in the development of web-page ranking technology that would track user movements online.

Those disbursements, together with $4.5 million in grants from a multi-agency consortium including NASA and DARPA, became the seed funding that was used to establish Google.

Eventually MDDS was integrated into DARPA’s global eavesdropping and data-mining activities that would attempt total information awareness over US citizens. Few understand the extent to which Silicon Valley is the alter-ego of Pentagon-land, even fewer realise the impact this has had on the social sphere.   But the story does not begin with Google, nor the military origins of the internet, it goes back much further in time, to the dawn of counterinsurgency and PSYOPs during the second world war.

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