Tag: Surveillance
In a press conference Monday, Mayor Bloomberg said that in the wake of the Boston bombings, our interpretation of the Constitution should change in order to allow for increased surveillance and security. “The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry,” he said. “But we live in a complex world where you’re going […]
Secretbook is a Google Chrome extension created by twenty-one year old Oxford Univesity student Owen-Campbell Moore as a way to send messages without that pesky ongoing survieilience that Facebook has become so widely known for. The messages, hidden in JPEG images, may only be accessed via a user created password shared between the creator and […]
The NYPD has created a new facial recognition unit, which specializes in identifying subjects using photographs, according to a DNAinfo report. Established late last year, the eight-officer unit uses software to scan for faces in Facebook, Instagram, and surveillance camera images, then match them against the mugshots of known criminals. Thankfully, a facial match doesn’t […]
At 11:45 Monday morning, a friend of ANIMAL art editor Marina Galperina sent her a GChat message saying that he’d seen a drone flying over East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “Maybe 10 foot wingspan. Probably 200 ft in the air. Not high, though it wasn’t armed with missiles or a visible camera,” Rhett Jones wrote. “I thought […]
Riot, a recently-revealed surveillance software package from security firm Raytheon, allows anyone to collect your personal information across all social networks, then analyze it to deduce some frighteningly personal facts about you: where you like to hang out, who your closest friends are, what you look like–that sort of thing. The Guardian obtained footage from 2010 of […]
That illustration above is law student Asher J. Kohn’s concept of what a fully operational drone-proof city might look like. Rather than building barriers to keep people out and deter weapon strikes like traditional defenses, Kohn’s concept–called Shura City–includes several technologies that obscure people and their movements in order to make them untraceable by UAVs. […]
In the near future, this tiny pet drone helicopter could hover over your shoulder and monitor everything you do for just 50 bucks. Always Innovating, the company behind the MeCam, isn’t planning on mass producing, but believes a larger company could license the technology and sell the device at bargain prices. Coupled with Twitter’s new […]
So you’re out shopping for clothes and you notice that one of the store’s facial recognition-equipped mannequins appears to be spying on you. The Stealth Wear hoodie you just bought will protect you against drones, but is powerless against these bots. What do you do? You pick up a pair of Japanese professor Isao Echizen’s “Privacy […]
When 4chan exposed flaws in certain TRENDnet security systems that allowed hackers to snoop on private camera feeds last year, the whole process felt too wonky to be exploited by your average IRL citizen–unless your neighbor was a /b/tard or redditor, he probably wouldn’t be spying on you. A year later, TRENDnet has issued a […]
In an effort to curb New York’s out-of-control prescription drug market, Ray Kelly and the NYPD are considering a radical new plan: embedding “bait bottles” with GPS tracking devices, then hiding them among regular stock at pharmacies. If a pill thief lifts the bait bottle, the thinking goes, cops will be able to track it […]
