Tag: surveillance

Colombia is conducting widescale illegal surveillance

Want to know why it’s important to have checks on mass surveillance programs? Colombia should serve as a good example. Privacy International reports that the country not only collects bulk internet and phone data on a grand scale, but violates the law in the process — it’s supposed to require judicial approval for any surveillance, but regularly ignores that oversight. Colombian agencies have also relied on controversial tools like IMSI catchers (which scoop up nearby cellphone data) and Hacking Team’s spyware, and they’ve sought to expand their powers rather than rein things in. It’s no secret that Colombia has a history of surveillance, fueled in no small part by its decades-long battles with rebels and drug cartels. And unfortunately, the pressure to keep an eye on communications isn’t likely to drop anytime soon. A Venezuelan immigrant crackdown has forced many Colombia-born residents back to their homeland, increasing tensions between the two countries. It may take a long while before the political climate is truly conducive to surveillance reform. [Image credit: AP Photo/Fernando Vergara] Filed under: Cellphones , Wireless , Internet Comments Via: The Verge Source: Privacy International Tags: colombia, hackingteam, imsicatcher, internet, privacy, security, spying, spyware, surveillance

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Colombia is conducting widescale illegal surveillance

New Privacy Concerns About US Program That Can Track Snail Mail

Lashdots writes: A lawyers’ group has called for greater oversight of a government program that gives state and federal law enforcement officials access to metadata from private communications for criminal investigations and national security purposes. But it’s not digital: this warrantless surveillance is conducted on regular mail. “The mail cover has been in use, in some form, since the 1800s, ” Chief Postal Inspector Guy J. Cottrell told Congress in November. The program targets a range of criminal activity including fraud, pornography, and terrorism, but, he said, “today, the most common use of this tool is related to investigations to rid the mail of illegal drugs and illegal drug proceeds.” Recent revelations that the U.S. Postal Service photographs the front and back of all mail sent through the U.S., ostensibly for sorting purposes, has, Fast Company reports, brought new scrutiny—and new legal responses—to this obscure program. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Privacy Concerns About US Program That Can Track Snail Mail

Breakthrough In Face Recognition Software

An anonymous reader writes: Face recognition software underwent a revolution in 2001 with the creation of the Viola-Jones algorithm. Now, the field looks set to dramatically improve once again: computer scientists from Stanford and Yahoo Labs have published a new, simple approach that can find faces turned at an angle and those that are partially blocked by something else. The researchers “capitalize on the advances made in recent years on a type of machine learning known as a deep convolutional neural network. The idea is to train a many-layered neural network using a vast database of annotated examples, in this case pictures of faces from many angles. To that end, Farfade and co created a database of 200, 000 images that included faces at various angles and orientations and a further 20 million images without faces. They then trained their neural net in batches of 128 images over 50, 000 iterations. … What’s more, their algorithm is significantly better at spotting faces when upside down, something other approaches haven’t perfected.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Breakthrough In Face Recognition Software

Feds Are Spying on Millions of Cars With License Plate Readers

We’ve known for a long time that federal authorities have a lot of license plate readers at their disposal, some of which they surely use for nefarious purposes. However, new details have emerged that show exactly how nefarious those purposes are. Does secretly spying on millions of Americans and seizing property sound nefarious enough to care? Read more…

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Feds Are Spying on Millions of Cars With License Plate Readers

Police Nation-Wide Use Wall-Penetrating Radars To Peer Into Homes

mi writes At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside. The device the Marshals Service and others are using, known as the Range-R, looks like a sophisticated stud-finder. Its display shows whether it has detected movement on the other side of a wall and, if so, how far away it is — but it does not show a picture of what’s happening inside. The Range-R’s maker, L-3 Communications, estimates it has sold about 200 devices to 50 law enforcement agencies at a cost of about $6, 000 each. Other radar devices have far more advanced capabilities, including three-dimensional displays of where people are located inside a building, according to marketing materials from their manufacturers. One is capable of being mounted on a drone. And the Justice Department has funded research to develop systems that can map the interiors of buildings and locate the people within them. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Police Nation-Wide Use Wall-Penetrating Radars To Peer Into Homes

Hackers Can Read Your Texts Thanks to Huge Security Flaw

The global telecom network Signal System 7 helps phone carriers across the world, including AT&T and Verizon, route calls and texts . It’s also apparently perforated with security holes that lets hackers and spies listen to your calls and read your texts. It’s so bad the ACLU’s chief technologist told me that people worried about being snooped should just not use their cell phone to make calls. Privacy: Remember that? Read more…

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Hackers Can Read Your Texts Thanks to Huge Security Flaw

Apple and Samsung Already Working On A9 Processor

itwbennett writes According to a report in Korean IT Times, Samsung Electronics has begun production of the A9 processor, the next generation ARM-based CPU for iPhone and iPad. Korea IT Times says Samsung has production lines capable of FinFET process production (a cutting-edge design for semiconductors that many other manufacturers, including AMD, IBM and TSMC, are adopting) in Austin, Texas and Giheung, Korea, but production is only taking place in Austin. Samsung invested $3.9 billion in that plant specifically to make chips for Apple. So now Apple can say its CPU is “Made in America.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple and Samsung Already Working On A9 Processor

Linux 3.18 Released, Lockup Bug Still Present

jones_supa writes As anticipated, Linus Torvalds officially released Linux 3.18. The new version is now out there, though that nasty lockup issue has still yet to be resolved. Dave Jones is nearing the end of bisecting the issue, but since it also affects Linux 3.17 and not too many people seem to get hit by the lockups, Linus Torvalds decided to go ahead and do the 3.18 release on schedule. Linus was also concerned that dragging out the 3.18 release would then complicate the Linux 3.19 merge window due to the holidays later this month. Now the Linux 3.19 kernel merge window is open for two weeks of exciting changes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux 3.18 Released, Lockup Bug Still Present