Tag: technology

Giving up biometrics at US airports soon won’t be optional, transport security chief says

The chief of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) David Pekoske said that the agency is considering biometric technology to reduce traveler processing times and reduce the number of screening officers. He made the comments at the South by Southwest conference, which focused on aviation security.

Pekoske noted that the TSA’s role is maintaining security and the transportation system and staying ahead of threats. For those reasons, it is “critically important that this system has as little friction as it possibly can, while we provide for safety and security.”

The TSA has been relying on biometric technology in the identification verification process. According to the agency, the newest technology it has been using is over 99% effective and does not have problems identifying darker-skinned people like the old technology.

“We’re upgrading our camera systems all the time, upgrading our lighting systems,” Pekoske said. “[We’re] upgrading our algorithms, so that we are using the very most advanced algorithms and technology we possibly can.”

Pekoske said that the agency will ensure it remains transparent with the public about the data that is taken, what it is used for, and for how long it will be stored. For now, he said that travelers can opt out of processes they are not comfortable with.

According to The Dallas Morning News, giving up biometric data for travel will eventually not be optional.

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The toxic world of GM crops

The biotech industry promised genetically engineered foods would reduce pesticide use, increase the nutritional content of food, boost farmers’ profits and feed the world by increasing yields.

In reality, GM crops have turned glyphosate into one of the most widely and recklessly used herbicides in history and monoculture has led to a loss of biodiversity.

GM crops have also failed to live up to expected increases in crop yields and, nutritionally, GMOs primarily provide cheap, unhealthy ingredients for ultra-processed ready meals, pre-packaged foods and fast-food restaurants.

More than 40,000 people in the US have filed lawsuits alleging exposure to Roundup is the cause of their cancer. Once a rare cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma is now the seventh most common cancer in US men and women.

The agricultural biotech industry continues to advance with a new suite of genetic engineering technologies known as gene editing, which includes techniques such as CRISPR as well as synthetic biology and gene drives.

Promises, promises, promises. The toxic world of genetically modified organisms (“GMOs”) and industrial agriculture is built on false promises. For nearly 30 years we have been listening to the propaganda of big biotech companies like Monsanto/Bayer, Syngenta, DuPont/Pioneer, BASF and others about how genetic engineering will transform farming and food production.

We’ve heard how it will reduce the environmental impact of farming by lowering pesticide use. We’ve been promised that it will increase the nutritional content of food. We’ve been told how it will boost farmers’ profits by increasing yields, and that those increased yields will help “feed the world.”

As the problem of man-made climate change has moved to the top of the global agenda, new promises have emerged about how GMOs will fight climate change and how genetic engineering will make plants more resilient to drought and flooding. The huckster promises keep on coming, but what has the biotech industry actually delivered over nearly three decades?

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Secretive “Wearable Camera” Startup With Ex-Apple Execs Secures $100 Million, Partners With OpenAI

WSJ reports that a new investment round of $100 million has been secured by a secretive startup called Humane Inc., founded by ex-Apple executives, along with a partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Although the startup’s device is shrouded in mystery, it seems to be developing a wearable camera powered by artificial intelligence.

“This Series C round presented an opportunity to raise money through equity, and to bring on board great VCs and strategic partners who would like to participate in equity as the company grows,” founder Chaudhri Bongiorno told TechCrunch in an email interview.

“At Humane, we’re building a first-of-its-kind device and services platform — we’re growing fast, and we’ve been focused on innovation, research and development,” he said. 

According to The Verge, the startup is developing a wearable camera device that would allow the user to have access to AI technology at all times. It sounds like this is ChatGPT on steroids…

A leaked investor pitch deck from 2021 revealed by tech blog Daring Fireball describes the device as a camera that “captures moments you didn’t think to capture” or “moments you want to recall.”

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The Covid Era could not have been deployed without technology

We have a new kind of overlord. This overlord appeals not to excellence. Rather his fitness to rule purportedly derives from his ability to render the entire planet as “standing-reserve” for a universal project. Everything just standing there, waiting, so it may be called upon at any time.  

In 2020, masks, tests, people, arms, needles, hospital beds, lives and deaths themselves became “standing-reserve” – on standby and ready to be put on order, available on demand. Even health came to mean supply.  All this could not have happened if it weren’t for technology.

Technology in the modern sense is not neutral at all. Our technology is a great challenging of nature and man is the ultimate “standing-reserve” in the battle of ideology. What emerges from this technology is humanity made inhuman by the cult of technology.

“Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.” – Martin Heidegger

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‘Geofence’ Warrants Threaten Every Phone User’s Privacy

The last time your phone asked you to allow this or that app access to your location data, you may have had some trepidation about how much Apple or Google know about you. You may have worried about what might come of that, or read about China’s use of the data to track anti-lockdown protesters. What you probably didn’t realize is Google has already searched your data on behalf of the federal government to see if you were involved with January 6th.

But last month, the federal district court in DC issued an opinion in the case of  one of the many defendants who stands accused of sacking the Capitol in the wake of the 2020 election.

And with it, Judge Rudolph Contreras became the first federal district judge to approve a “Geofence” warrant, endorsing a recent police innovation: searching the cell phone history of every American to check who happened to be in the area of some potential crime.

The “Geofence” in this context refers to cell phone location data collected by Google from users of its Android operating system, as well as iPhone users who use apps such as Google Maps. Location tracking can be turned off, but most users allow it for the convenience of getting directions, tracking their daily jog, or finding the nearest Chipotle. The Government’s warrant demanded location history for every Google account holder within a range of longitude and latitude roughly corresponding to the Capitol building on the afternoon of January 6, 2021, along with similar data from that morning and evening (to filter out Hill staff and security guards).

It’s not clear this information was even needed: This defendant was apprehended within the building that day, carrying knives and pepper spray, and features on various security cameras — his whereabouts are not in question. Many of his coreligionists were considerate enough to live stream their antics themselves. While tracking down every participant in what was dubbed the Beer Belly Putsch is impractical, prosecutors have not lacked for defendants, or for evidence against them. But the government nonetheless decided to resort to a level of mass surveillance without precedent in history or criminal law. This is only the second federal district judge to rule on such a warrant, and the first, in the Eastern District of Virginia, found it “invalid for lack of particularized probable cause” (though that judge declined to suppress the evidence on the basis of other Fourth Amendment loopholes created by the Supreme Court).

That particular requirement comes from the Fourth Amendment itself, which calls for every warrant to “particularly describ[e] the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” This means that, for instance, the warrant issued last year for former President Trump’s Florida residence did not simply say “search the house,” but detailed specific rooms to be searched for specific things (boxes of documents). The cops can’t — or at least are not supposed to — dump out your underwear drawer based on a tip that you’re hiding cocaine in your basement.

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Biden’s Executive Order Nightmare: Government Will Track Every Dime You Spend

When I was a sparring partner for professional boxers many, many years ago, I was taught to be wary of the jab. It is a tactic used to distract an opponent while setting him up for a devastating power punch that takes him down for the count.

Biden is throwing jabs.

The power punch is a little noticed Executive Order with the innocuous number 14067 and its title, “Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets.”

In a 21st Century world where cryptocurrency and cybercrime are now embedded threats to our collective financial security, this Executive Order would seem to address these issues. That is the jab.

In fact, this order includes language that allows the Federal Reserve System to “explore” the possibility of introducing digital currency into the United States. This means that your cash becomes so much colored paper. That would not be the only catastrophic impact on our society and the nation’s economy. 

Under this new digital currency, any transfer of funds to family, friends, charities, or clients would be able to be tracked by the nation’s central bank that issued this virtual money. Big Brother will be in your wallet every hour or every day. 

You will not be able to buy a stick of gum without a Federal Reserve computer knowing where, when, and to whom you just put down a buck.

Like any jab, its starts with a feint.

“At this stage, the Fed is just introducing the subject into the public debate and is weighing the options,” according to Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University economics professor who was interviewed by the Associated Press in an Aug. 24 story.

Apologists for the White House insist that the Executive Order does not implement digital currency or give Washington the power to control it.

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The US military plans to use deep fakes and take over appliances for propaganda

Can you create cutting edge “deep fake” videos, spy on people using household appliances, and make massive data dragnets? If so, the Pentagon wants to hear from you so it can amp up its manipulation efforts. 

US Special Operations Command (US SOCOM) has issued proposal requests for a whole host of dodgy services, according to new documents obtained by The Intercept. 

Specifically, the Pentagon is looking for “next generation capability to ‘takeover’ Internet of Things (IoT) devices in order to collect data and information from local populaces to enable a breakdown of what messaging might be popular and accepted through sifting of data once received.” 

For what purpose? “This would enable MISO [Military Information Support Operations] to craft and promote messages that may be more readily received by the local populace in relevant peer/near peer environments,” according to the document.  

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Some Claiming Turkey Earthquakes Were Man-made

As the death toll from the recent earthquakes that decimated parts of Turkey and Syria on February 6 continues to rise — now exceeding 50,000 — skeptics of the mainstream narrative, such as Romanian Senator Diana Iovanovici Șoșoacă, have claimed that globalist powers such as the United States triggered the recent series of quakes and tremors to penalize Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for not aligning with globalist interests.

In a statement to Romania’s upper house, Șoșoacă, also one of Romania’s key skeptics of the official Covid-19 narrative, posited:

For three years we have been experiencing a real campaign of mass killing worldwide, either through alleged pandemics and the imminent need to inject untested vaccines that kill people, or through wars that reduce the world’s population, but rearranges international politics, realigns power poles and alters borders. We have lived to witness the production of earthquakes on command, which is actually an attack on Turkey by the greatest of the world who totally disliked being set up by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the President of Turkey.

Moreover, his position of neutrality and mediator in the Ukrainian-Russian war deeply disturbed them, especially since Turkey is the second great power from a military point of view within NATO. His position to block Sweden’s accession to NATO, his speech in Davos, as well as the gesture of leaving in the middle of the press conference, defying [World Economic Forum head Klaus] Schwab, did not remain without an echo in the cold world of leaders the world. But, no one thought that people would have to die, so many people, and in such a terrible way. And it’s just a warning, because it wasn’t the most populated area of Turkey.

150 aftershocks of a devastating earthquake, the second larger than the first, without the existence of an epicenter, the area being artificially stimulated, geological weapons having existed for a very long time, being used so far without causing too many casualties, probably for experiments. Now, it has been put into practice.

If we look carefully at the map of Turkey, we will see that it is furrowed by gas and oil pipelines, this being actually one of the goals: their destruction. But, 10 seconds before the occurrence of the so-called earthquake, the Turks closed these pipelines. In addition, 24 hours before the earthquake, 10 countries withdrew their ambassadors from Turkey. 5 days before its occurrence, the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a travel warning for Romanian citizens in Turkey, although there was no danger, as did other countries. By killing people, they served their interests. The maps shown on all the television channels show that there was no epicenter, but a line with thousands of earthquakes. The Turkish secret services are investigating a possible “criminal intervention,” (read an involvement of another state in triggering the first earthquake), what followed later being a chain reaction after the destabilization of the tectonic plates in the region.

Not surprisingly, mainstream media outlets did not report Șoșoacă’s speech, reiterating that earthquakes are natural events, particularly in countries with major fault lines, such as Turkey. Several mainstream “fact-checkers” at places such as USA Today and India Herald have also dismissed claims that globalists used technology to cause the deadly quakes.

“Nobody has the ability to intentionally create a large earthquake with any degree of certainty,” said Rachel Abercrombie, a seismologist at Boston University cited by USA Today. “Various human activities — such as building large water reservoirs and fracking and waste-water injection related to hydrocarbon extraction and geothermal energy projects — can induce earthquakes, but never as large as this.”

Similarly, USA Today quoted Jonathan Stewart, an environmental engineering professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, who claimed that induced earthquakes do not reach magnitudes above the mid-5 range, whereas the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria were much stronger.

Nonetheless, technologies that can trigger earthquakes do exist, with their origins traceable to the late 19th century, when experiments staged by Nikola Tesla at his New York laboratory undermined a building’s stability and threatened to bring it down. Based on this fact, some (such as Șoșoacă) have claimed that if the recent earthquakes were man-made, the party likely responsible for them would be the HAARP facility in Alaska.

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Face Biometrics Getting Deeper into Policing, Sparking Concerns

Those worried about the use of facial recognition by law enforcement have warned about how the technology could become entrenched in bureaucracies, growing in use and getting harder to question from outside governments.

A trio of recent reports, from Germany, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom seem to bear that out.

In Germany, a civil rights activist, Matthias Monroy, writing in his own blog, says a facial recognition system used to identify unknown people has grown “dramatically” from 2021 to 2022.

The database reportedly belongs to Germany’s federal police. According to Monroy, it was searched about 7,700 in 2022, compared to 6,100 times in 2021.

About 2,800 people were identified using the police’s algorithm last year, compared to 1,300 in 2021.

The advocate says that the Federal Ministry offered the information after being asked by a party in parliament. He also said that, according to the ministry, the same data has not been received from German states.

The images are gathered from CCTV cameras and from phones used by police to record the faces of suspects of crimes. Asylum seekers are in the same database.

Reportedly, the number of facial images in the police database grew by about 1.5 million last year compared to the previous year primarily because only 400,000 images were deleted.

If German police are starting to hold on to photos longer, they might be in good company.

Trade publication ComputerWeekly is reporting that some in the UK feel the government is adopting a biometrics “culture of retention.”

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Futuristic “biocomputers” Using Human Brain Cells Could Soon Be A Reality

Futuristic “biocomputers” using the power of human brain cells could soon become a reality — revolutionizing digital technology, a new study explains. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University say the half-human-half-machine devices have the potential to push past current technological limits by using brain organoids taken from tiny human skin samples.

The team of scientists has been experimenting with brain tissue the size of a pen dot, containing neurons and other functions with the ability to learn and memorize. Professor Thomas Hartung, who leads the work, says this “biological hardware” could soon assist with valuable research on how the human brain works and provide a way of alleviating energy consumption demands in supercomputers.

The study team also hopes organoid intelligence could additionally revolutionize drug testing research for neurodevelopmental disorders and neurodegeneration. Though computers can do calculations with numbers and data far quicker than humans, the brain is much better at making complex logical decisions, such as identifying one animal from another.

“The brain is still unmatched by modern computers,” Hartung says in a media release. “Frontier, the latest supercomputer in Kentucky, is a $600 million, 6,800-square-feet installation. Only in June of last year, it exceeded for the first time the computational capacity of a single human brain — but using a million times more energy.”

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