Tag: technology

Digital Authoritarianism: AI Surveillance Signals the Death of Privacy

“There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. One of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. We must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.” ― Philip K. Dick

Nothing is private.

We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.

While the political Left and Right continue to make abortion the face of the debate over the right to privacy in America, the government and its corporate partners, aided by rapidly advancing technology, are reshaping the world into one in which there is no privacy at all.

Nothing that was once private is protected.

We have not even begun to register the fallout from the tsunami bearing down upon us in the form of AI (artificial intelligence) surveillance, and yet it is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable.

AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.

Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer.

Governments and corporations alike have heedlessly adopted AI surveillance technologies without any care or concern for their long-term impact on the rights of the citizenry.

As a special report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warns, “A growing number of states are deploying advanced AI surveillance tools to monitor, track, and surveil citizens to accomplish a range of policy objectives—some lawful, others that violate human rights, and many of which fall into a murky middle ground.”

Indeed, with every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

Cue the rise of digital authoritarianism.

Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”

The seeds of digital authoritarianism were planted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, with the passage of the USA Patriot Act. A massive 342-page wish list of expanded powers for the FBI and CIA, the Patriot Act justified broader domestic surveillance, the logic being that if government agents knew more about each American, they could distinguish the terrorists from law-abiding citizens.

It sounded the death knell for the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, especially the Fourth Amendment, and normalized the government’s mass surveillance powers.

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DARPA To Create New Technology Powerful Enough To See Through Concrete Walls

U.S. Military officials announced Friday a new program of teams from various sectors plan to create a subatomic particle compact source powerful enough to see through thick concrete walls, underground tunnels, and chambers hundreds of meters below the Earth’s surface.

In a press release, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) said the personnel would make deeply penetrating terrestrial muons, subatomic particles about 200 times heavier than electrons. Such particles could create energy beams up to hundreds of giga-electronvolts to scan or characterize materials for scientific discovery and national security.

Mark Wrobel, the program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, said the ever-advancing high-peak-power laser technology could produce terrestrial muons that “can travel easily through dozens to hundreds of meters of water, solid rock, or soil’ if the energy was high enough.

“MuS2 will lay the groundwork needed to examine the feasibility of developing compact and transportable muon sources,” Wrobel said.

Although officials called the process of harnessing the primary sources used to create such muons for advanced surveillance “tedious and not very practical,” they have proven themselves effective. In the late 1960s, scientists used muons to examine about 20 percent of the interior chambers within the walls of great pyramids in Egypt. To this day, scientists still are using are using cosmic radiation to see inside the pyramids.

The Defense Department and other federal agencies have used advanced sources to generate subatomic particles that enabled officials to scan cargo containers with dangerous materials or test an aircraft for internal defects. Still not strong enough, however, to “map the core of a volcano from the outside, or peer deep underground to locate chambers and tunnels.”

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Scientists Hijack Fruit Fly Brains to Remote Control Their Wings

Are we one step closer to remote controlling human brains?

According to a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature Materials, we just might. A team of researchers at Rice University have officially been able to hack into the brains of fruit flies and successfully command them to make a specific movement — with just a click of a wireless remote control.

The team — an assemblage of experts in genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and electrical engineering — first created genetically modified flies bred to express a specific heat-sensitive ion channel which, when activated, caused the insects to spread their wings.

They then injected the gene-hacked buggos’ brains with a heat trigger: magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles, which quickly heat up in the presence of a magnetic charge.

Then, by switching on a magnetic field, the scientists were able to warm those iron oxide nanoparticles — and in turn, those heat-sensitive, wing-specific ions.

In other words, the study showed that within half a second of a human clicking a button, the bugs would spread their wings. It’s a crude hack, but an intriguing proof of concept for altered animals controlled by technology.

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The Semiconductor Industry Is Coming for Your Wallet — As Usual, Congress Is Complicit

Of all the problems in the world right now, the chip shortage probably isn’t the chief concern for most people, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a serious issue. The auto and tech sectors have faced unprecedented delays and rising prices in recent months. Some used cars are even selling for more than their new counterparts because of the delays, a sure sign that production has slowed dramatically.

To address this, Congress is contemplating bipartisan legislation known as the Chips Act, which would provide $52 billion in grants and $24 billion in tax credits to the US semiconductor industry. Thanks to a last-minute bipartisan amendment, the bill will also put tens of billions of dollars toward various federal agencies, bringing the total price tag to $250 billion.

Because why not…

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Why Facebook May Have Your Medical Records

By now, most people are aware that if they “like” a certain page on Facebook, it gives the social media giant information about them.

“Like” a page about a particular disease, for instance, and marketers may begin to target you with related products and services.

Facebook may be collecting sensitive health data in far more insidious ways as well, however, including tracking you when you’re on hospital websites and even when you’re in a personal, password-protected health information portal like MyChart.

It does this via pixels, which may be installed without your knowledge on websites you visit. They can collect information about you as you browse the web, even if you don’t have a Facebook account.

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Engineers Have Created ‘Small-Scale’ Soft Robots That Can Crawl Around a Stomach and Deliver Drug ‘Cargo’

In a new study published in Science Advances a team of engineers at The Chinese University of Hong Kong outlines how it has created small-scale soft robots capable of multimodal locomotion, drug cargo delivery, and the ability to tolerate exposure to acid. A prime use case for the small-scale robots—which are tens of millimeters across depending on their shape—is, according to the engineers, “for biomedical applications that involve operation in the stomach such as gastric ulcer treatment.” As a proof-of-concept for the study, the researchers even had one of the small, soft robots roll around in an ex vivo pig’s stomach and apply a “therapy patch.”

In their study the engineers describe how their small-scale robots utilize a “modular soft magnetic architecture” with individual parts of the robots containing magnetic microparticles that each have their own prescribed magnetization profiles—that is, they each respond to their own type of magnetic field depending on the directionality of the field.

These “modular magnetization units” are embedded into a “network of adhesive sticker layers” in order to form the soft robots, which are capable of taking on either 2D or 3D shapes. “Functional” modules consisting of different materials, and having different shapes—e.g., particles, papers, films, foams, and electronic components—can then be “seamlessly integrated” into the small-scale robots.

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Over 1,600 of the Brightest Scientific Minds in Technology Have Signed a Letter Calling Both Crypto and Blockchain a Sham

The letter is a punch in the gut to the Wall Street underwriters who have brought billions of dollars of crypto related companies to the public markets, most of which have now collapsed in price. It makes the billionaire venture capitalists who have invested billions in crypto startups look like fools. And it renders the big-name celebrities who have promoted this garbage in TV commercials look like the shills that they are.

The letter was sent to key members of Congress and to the Chairs of the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees. It is signed by more than 1,600 computer scientists, software engineers and technologists from around the world. There are 45 signatories who currently work at Google; 19 who work at Microsoft; 11 employed at Apple. (Those three companies currently have a collective market capitalization of more than $5.75 trillion; they can afford to hire the best and the brightest.) There are signatories that are Ph.Ds from the most prestigious universities in the world, including the University of Oxford and MIT. And all 1,600 have signed a letter that says this about crypto and blockchain:

“We strongly disagree with the narrative—peddled by those with a financial stake in the crypto-asset industry—that these technologies represent a positive financial innovation and are in any way suited to solving the financial problems facing ordinary Americans…

“As software engineers and technologists with deep expertise in our fields, we dispute the claims made in recent years about the novelty and potential of blockchain technology. Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal or data privacy mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design. Financial technologies that serve the public must always have mechanisms for fraud mitigation and allow a human-in-the-loop to reverse transactions; blockchain permits neither.”

The letter links to an article from Bruce Schneier, a Security Technologist who teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School. The article appeared at Wired on February 6, 2019 under the headline: “There’s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology.” The article makes the following salient points:

“What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure.

“When that trust turns out to be misplaced, there is no recourse. If your bitcoin exchange gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If your bitcoin wallet gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If you forget your login credentials, you lose all of your money. If there’s a bug in the code of your smart contract, you lose all of your money. If someone successfully hacks the blockchain security, you lose all of your money. In many ways, trusting technology is harder than trusting people. Would you rather trust a human legal system or the details of some computer code you don’t have the expertise to audit?”

Losing your money is mostly what has been going on this year in crypto. In addition to crypto itself being a dubious “investment,” the Federal Trade Commission reported in June that “since the start of 2021, more than 46,000 people have reported losing over $1 billion in crypto to scams. That’s about one out of every four dollars reportedly lost to fraud during that period.” (For more on the perils of crypto investing, see our report on how customers on the Coinbase crypto exchange are being victimized.)

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FDA-Approved Brain Computer Interface Company “Synchron” Implants First Brain Device in US Patient

New York-based Synchron, the startup behind an FDA ‘breakthrough neuroprosthesis device,’ successfully implanted its first brain device in a patient in the US earlier this month, Bloomberg first reported.

According to the news outlet, a doctor at Mount Sinai West Medical Center in New York inserted a “1.5-inch-long implant consisting of wires and electrodes into a blood vessel in the brain of an ALS patient” on July 6.

In August 2020, Synchron becomes the first brain-computer interface (BCI) company to receive the FDA’s approval to conduct an investigational device exemption (IDE) clinical trial of a permanently implanted device.

NIH awarded Synchron $10 million to begin a US trial of a brain implant that allows users to manage digital apps using only their thoughts, as reported by Fierce Biotech.

“Our neuroprosthetics are designed to help people get their lives back by restoring lost functions,” Synchron wrote on its website.

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The quantum internet has taken a major step forward

The development of a so-called quantum internet may have just seen a significant breakthrough, experts have declared. 

Research from a team Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada published in the scientific journal Nature(opens in new tab) provides proof of principle that T centers, a specific luminescent defect in silicon, can provide a ‘photonic link’ between qubits (quantum computing’s counterpart to the binary digit or bit of classical computing).

As successfully harnessing quantum technology would benefit from communications technology that enables these qubits to link together at scale, this could be a huge step forward.

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