Tag: Surveillance
Finally, the NYPD unit responsible for the department’s widespread spying on Muslim communities has been disbanded. The Demographics Unit sent infiltrators into student groups, surveilled mosques, and collected data on the daily comings and goings of Muslim people in the city and New Jersey. According to an NYPD chief’s testimony in 2012, it generated no […]
From the artist/writer who founded the “New Aesthetic,” James Bridle’s project #Rorschcam taps into the CCTV cameras mounted all around the city. You can now watch the Department of Transportation’s live feeds, from the construction on 9th Avenue and 49th Street to the midday traffic droll of Columbus Circle at Central Park, from as close to a block from our office to as far […]
Space Replay, a project by British design students Francessco Tacchini, Julinka Ebhardt and Will Yates-Johnson, is listening to your every word. Taking the form of a menacing black sphere, it floats around aimlessly, recording everything it hears. Later, it plays those sounds back, echoing the human activity it just witnessed. As otherworldly as Space Replay feels, it’s mechanics […]
Ron Paul is putting his money where his civil-liberties-minded mouth is. The Libertarian stalwart started a petition to give Edward Snowden clemency for leaking classified information about the NSA’s massive surveillance operation. Snowden’s year of asylum in Russia ends this July, and Paul says he hopes his petition will show the U.S. government that “Mr. Snowden […]
Nothing to Hide, an HTML5 game released yesterday to commemorate The Day We Fight Back, flips the usual surveillance paradigm on its head. In its George Saunders-ian universe, spying is so normalized that the state will kill you off stepping outside the range of a surveillance camera even for a second. As a teenage runaway, you’re […]
In the surveillance video above, we see a pedestrian walking down Coney Island Avenue in Sheepshead Bay, minding his own business, when two snow plows drive by. The first passes without incident, but moments later, the second sends a tidal wave of snow and slush barreling toward the sidewalk, sweeping up our hero and knocking […]
Well, this is terrifying, if inevitable: the NYPD is testing Google Glass to see whether cops could use the wearable technology while on patrol. “We signed up, got a few pairs of the Google glasses, and we’re trying them out, seeing if they have any value in investigations, mostly for patrol purposes,” a police official […]
A new report from the think tank New America Foundation claims NSA surveillance isn’t nearly as effective at stopping terrorism as the feds would have you believe. The study, titled “Do NSA’s Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorism?” Of the 225 counterterrorism cases researchers studied, only 7.5 were investigated under evidence obtained by the NSA. The […]
Remember those billboards that popped up around town last week, ostensibly advertising things like the NSA and internet regulation? We knew the ads were part of a teaser campaign, and now, BitTorrent, Inc. is taking responsibility. That’s a lot more interesting than I was expecting. The company unmasked itself today by altering the ads to […]
Artist and composer Ben Grosser created a new Google Chrome extension that, when enabled, automatically adds a passage of additional algorithmically generated text to your emails containing many of the keywords known to trigger the National Security Agency‘s email surveillance systems. This extension, in theory, works as a trap to not only force these systems to […]
