Tag: Surveillance
In theme with Russia’s war on anonymity and “extremism” on the internet, the country’s interior ministry is recruiting hackers to decrypt identities of Tor users. The ministry is offering 3.9 million rubles (about $110,000) to anyone who can crack the encryption service, BBC reports, which is a lot better than their previous contest where you get a free refrigerator for giving birth on June […]
If you post photos of your cat on social media, the internet probably knows exactly where your cat lives. And, unless your cat has its own place, that’s probably where you live too. Florida State University professor Owen Mundy was trying to tell you this when he created I Know Where Your Cat Lives — an interactive map […]
In a recent in-depth interview with the Guardian, former security contractor Edward Snowden has stated that documents completely irrelevant to the NSA’s work — like nude photos, discovered during routine surveillance — were regularly passed around the office. Though we’ve become somewhat jaded to ongoing revelations of the NSA’s abuses of power and personal violations, Snowden’s new comments […]
The city has just announced a two-year, $1.5 million pilot program of the ShotSpotter’s gunshot detection systems, which will be installed on rooftops across the city. Within ten seconds, the sensors can triangulate the source of a gunshot sound within 2 feet, provided it wasn’t a false alert, like a firework. ShotSpotter offers: The purpose of the […]
Software engineer and artist David Huerta has made a mixtape that is encrypted against NSA surveillance, for the express purpose of sending it to the NSA. This snarky subversion is inspired by the “cypherpunks” of the 90’s, whose open sourcing of encryption software allowed regular people access to government-level privacy enforcement. “I work outside the […]
A piece of code used by the NSA to label online “extremists” has been uncovered for the first time. The German public television network ARD reported that the popular encryption service Tor, which is based in Germany, was one of the entities that had become a target for the NSA’s labeling as part of their […]
Facebook has has a pretty shitty week in the media. Last week, we found out that they’d conducted an “emotional contagion” study in 2012 on almost 700,000 users without their knowledge. Advocates of privacy and informed consent raged, but defenders pointed out that Facebook’s User Agreement contains a sentence that warns users they can use your information […]
Last week, the New Scientist published an “emotional contagion study” conducted by researchers employed by Facebook, which proved that people can be influenced by the emotions of others online, just like “in real life.” The study’s unsettling methodology caught our attention: The experiment’s subjects were nearly 700,000 regular Facebook users whose feeds were manipulated to contain more […]
After several high profile cases in which defendants were arrested based on information found on their cell phones, the Supreme Court has ruled that police officers must obtain a warrant in order to search the mobile devices. Justice John Roberts said in his ruling: Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience. With all […]
“Open Informant” is an app created by Superflux that searches your phone using real NSA trigger keywords and then displays those communications on a wearable badge. The NSA, GCHQ and other government security services secretly collect and scan our personal information and correspondence for trigger words; from the overtly malevolent: ‘anthrax’, ‘assassination’ and ‘bomb’ to the seemingly benign: ‘pork’, […]
