Police departments across the country could soon have access to facial recognition technology in the Breathalyzer tests they give and the body cameras they wear.
The post Public to Be Scanned in Real Time as Police Body Cameras May Soon Get Facial Recognition appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
(FORTUNE) When Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica revelations, he tried to describe the difference between “surveillance and what we do.” “The difference is extremely clear,” a nervous-looking Zuckerberg said. “On Facebook, you have control over your information… the information we collect you can choose to have us not collect.”
But not a single member of the committee pushed the billionaire CEO about surveillance companies who exploit the data on Facebook for profit. Forbes has uncovered one case that might shock them: over the last five years a secretive surveillance company founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer has been quietly building a massive facial recognition database consisting of faces acquired from the giant social network, YouTube and countless other websites. Privacy activists are suitably alarmed.
That database forms the core of a facial recognition service called Face-Int, now owned by Israeli vendor Verint after it snapped up the product’s creator, little-known surveillance company Terrogence, in 2017. Both Verint and Terrogence have long been vendors for the U.S. government, providing bleeding-edge spy tech to the NSA, the U.
The post These Ex-Spies are Harvesting Facebook Photos for a Massive Facial Recognition Database appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department recently announced they have adopted a massive biometric system in an effort to fight crime.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has made public a partnership with NEC Corporation of America (NEC) which will allow the department to utilize NEC’s award-winning facial recognition program. According to a press release, the Sheriff’s Department originally made the switch on January 7, but the announcement has only now been made public. The arrangement grants the Sheriff’s Department access to NEC’s Integra ID 5 Multimodal Identification Biometric Solution (MBIS). The MBIS will be managed by the Los Angeles County Regional Identification System (LACRIS) Unit.
The new system will handle criminal identification needs for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, the County of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Police Department, and 45 additional police departments in L.A. County.
According to the press release,
LACRIS integrates 164 remote LiveScan systems and 76 digital latent workstations into MBIS. LACRIS’ use of NEC’s Integra ID 5 MBIS is one of the largest criminal biometric identification implementations in the world, interfacing to numerous state and federal databases, including California Department of Justice and the FBI’s Next Generation Identification system.
NEC’s system supports fingerprint, palm print, face and iris biometrics. In addition, their “Services Oriented Architecture (SOA)” is apparently capable of gathering data on an individual’s voice pattern. The press release touts the success of the Integra ID 5 MBIS, claiming that the NEC system has uncovered 107 hits related to unsolved cases. These cases could potentially be solved thanks to NEC’s cutting-edge facial recognition software, the company writes.
The topic of facial recognition technology has increasingly been in the news (unless you are watching television). In early February Activist Post reported on news that the Trump administration is preparing to install a biometric wall along the southern and northern borders of the United States where all people entering and exiting the country will have their faces scanned. Most recently it was revealed that facial recognition tech has been used at Madison Square Garden during sports events. In that article Allen Ganz, a director of critical infrastructure at NEC, told The New York Times that his company’s system could “estimate anonymously the age and gender of people coming into the stadium.” Ganz declined to tell the Times which arenas are currently using NEC’s technology.
Another interesting aspect of this story deals with the headquarters of NEC. The corporation is based in Irving, Texas, near Dallas and Fort Worth. Apparently NEC has also convinced the Irving Police Department to test out their facial recognition technology, specifically a program known as NeoFace Reveal. According to NEC’s website, “NeoFace Reveal software delivers reliable face recognition by capturing, enhancing, organizing and matching video and graphic images to specific individuals, including images of poor resolution and with partial positioning.” The program has been named the most accurate facial recognition program on the market by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The program specializes in taking “poor quality and highly compressed surveillance videos and images” that were previously thought unusable and making them functional for an investigation. Sgt. Jason Mullins, a supervisor with the Irving Police Department’s Crime Information Center, even bragged that the program “was still able to make a match” despite images appearing blurry or pixelated.
The FBI is currently facing lawsuits that are attempting to force transparency regarding their Next Generation Identification System which contains the faces of almost half of all Americans. Will NEC and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department also fight against transparency when it comes to their new facial recognition toy?
Via Activist Post
The post Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department launches massive facial recognition program appeared first on Intellihub.
(The Real Agenda News) SÃO PAULO – Facial recognition technology comes loaded with comfort, yes, promises of greater security, okay. But it also comes loaded with a major, yet often ignored inconvenience: Violation of Privacy.
In parallel, the expansion of an entire security industry revolves around it and slowly but surely society turns into the Orwellian nightmare of a place of controlled citizens.
Derived from artificial intelligence, facial recognition took its first steps in the mid-sixties.
Those early attempts to use a computer to recognize a human face have led to a technology that has reached an amazing level of maturity.
Proof of this is the iPhone X, which enshrines something that a few years ago belonged to the domain of science fiction: unlock a phone with the image of our face.
“When you find a technology like this in a consumer device like the telephone,” says Enrique Dans, professor of Innovation at IE Business School, “it means that with it you can do everything”.
In China, a country that has set itself the goal of becoming a leader in artificial intelligence research and applications in 2030, one can now scan the face with the Xiaohua Qianbao mobile application and ask for a loan from the virtual bank operated by Xiaohua; go to a Kentucky Fried Chicken in the city of Hangzhou and pay with a smile -Smile to Pay is the latest system developed by the online payment application Alipay, and control student class attendance at Nanking University of Communications.
There, the technology of facial recognition advances firmly of the hand of Face ++, a Chinese start-up that at the end of October defeated Facebook, Google, and Microsoft in tests of recognition of face images in the International Conference of Vision by Computer celebrated in Italy.
That same month the company raised 460 million dollars in a round of financing.
But the expansion of the phenomenon is not limited to that territory. Toronto stores use it to detect thieves. Facebook has been using it for a long time to tag the person who appears in the photo.
In fact, in 2015 it already announced that he could identify someone with an 83% success without showing his face; body type, hairstyle or posture are sufficient elements.
The new challenge for researchers is now to get the identification of people wearing dark glasses, veil, mask, balaclava: at the University of Basel, Switzerland, Professor Bernhard Egger works on a system that creates a 3D face pattern form of the uncovered areas of the face.
Thus, the facial recognition market moves more than 3,300 billion in the world and could reach 7,7 billion in 2022, according to the consultancy MarketsandMarkets.
Banks, airlines, telephony, computer manufacturers, all open up to this new form of biometric identification that supposes a leap forward in front of the fingerprint and the iris.
Tace is not the same as the fingerprint. When we go to renew a bank card, we agree to give this biometric data to the authorities. But our face can be captured by whoever wants without our consent. With any camera on the street, anywhere.
This technology consists of two basic modalities, as explained in a telephone conversation from Michigan by the great expert Anil K. Jain, professor of computer engineering and director of the biometric research group at the University of Michigan.
The face detection or authentication, in which the system compares two images: the one we have stored in the phone -in the case of the iPhone- and a 3D model that is created from the face that is presented in front of the screen, and the face search, in which an image is crossed with those stored in a database to see that they match -to identify strangers-.
“In this second it is much easier to make mistakes,” explains Jain. “You need powerful computers and ample databases with millions of faces.”
It is this second modality that has triggered the debate on privacy and freedoms.
Its combination with the growing self-exposure in social networks is ending the era of anonymity.
The best example is offered by the FindFace application, which last year unleashed a storm in Russia: one pulls out the phone and takes a picture of the passenger traveling in the metro in front; the algorithm of the application crosses the image with those existing in the social network Vkontakte, which has more than 400 million profiles; with an efficiency of 70%, and lets people know who that person is.
The British newspaper The Guardian reported that the Australian Attorney General has been in talks with telephone operators and banks for the private use of its facial verification service in 2018.
Data protection experts are worried about the use that companies can make of their clients’ faces.
An investigation by The Washington Post revealed in November that Apple was sharing face information with some applications; and that made a change, as a result of journalistic research, requiring an app to inform users of the privacy policy.
Facebook, Google and Snapchat, on the other hand, are three of the companies that have already been sued in Illinois for the capture and storage of users’ images without their consent.
Can we trust that the companies of the new digital economy will not market our faces?
“The problem is that there is a total lack of transparency,” says Kelly Gates, a professor at the University of California San Diego and author of Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance.
“The police, like the Army, is experimenting, but we do not know what they are doing.”
This researcher, who now studies the techniques of forensic video analysis, assures that there is a proliferation of videos and data coming from drones, street cameras and stores whose analysis is outsourced to private companies:
“Scientists say that it is a technology with which many mistakes are made. There is no science that supports it and, even so, it continues to be used. “
Everything is because it does not happen as in that dystopia signed by Terry Gilliam, Brazil, a 1985 film in which a mistake of data leads to the arrest of Mr. Buttle when the target was Mr. Tuttle.
“You are pursuing a perfect security that is never going to be achieved. To think that, in contexts of violence, all this is the great solution is like buying more air conditioners to solve the problems posed by climate change “.
In the end, the question is in which hands falls the use of this technology and the handling of our data.
Countries with problems of human rights and freedoms have a tremendous instrument for persecution of dissidents.
Does anyone imagine this technology in the hands of a far-right government in Europe? Or in a country ruled by radical Islamists?
We cite these cases because it is clear that in western countries governments are already using it to illegally spy on people everyday.
The post Facial Recognition: Convenience vs Privacy appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
Sometime this year, Facebook plans to unveil a new facial recognition technology across the site which uses artificial intelligence to scan uploaded photos to analyze and recognize faces based on images previously uploaded to the site. But this is nothing more than a surveillance technique.
According to Natural News, this sneaky surveillance technique will link users to the people they meet in real life all while tracking their whereabouts and social circle even further. And the real kicker? Facebook will roll out this AI deep state mass surveillance under the guise of “protecting your privacy.”
Facebook will roll the controversial plan out all in the name of “protecting your privacy.” Facebook promises to alert users when someone uploads a photo of them to Facebook. This feature supposedly helps users “detect when others might be attempting to use your image as their profile picture.” This feature is just a façade to invade user privacy, as Facebook gets permission to analyze your photos and track your connections and whereabouts. – Natural News
But there is a way to mostly opt out. By default, users will already be giving Facebook permission to use the facial recognition AI if their tag suggestions setting is currently “on.” In order to opt out, the user must switch the tag suggestions setting to “none.”
But even more horrifying, is the fact that we should have known that this was coming. Two and a half years ago, ARS-Technica said that Facebook will eventually be able to recognize you – even when you are facing away.
Facebook researchers have unveiled new research that allows for faces to be more easily recognized based on other contextual information, such as hair style, clothing, and body shape.
The research, which was published on arXiv.org in January 2015, was presented at a conference in Boston earlier this month and first reported by New Scientist on Monday.
According to the researchers, the system, dubbed Pose Invariant PErson Recognition (PIPER), is accurate 83 percent of the time—far higher than the current state-of-the-art, which primarily requires clear, full frontal photos to work well. –ARS Technica
But even though a user didn’t give permission to have their face analyzed, the picture could theoretically be analyzed anyway because it contains the face of someone who had given Facebook permission to analyze their pixels. There’s no way Facebook can ensure users that their photos won’t be analyzed. In the end, there really will be no consent or privacy with this AI facial recognition rollout.
There is no such thing as privacy when using Facebook; or any social media or chat app. All the data that’s shared openly by Facebook users (including pictures, connections, interests, comments, likes, and personal information) is readily compiled and analyzed by algorithms to map out and predict who you are, where you go, what you’ll buy, and much more.
Most Facebook users naively share information rather liberally, only to have their life turned over to surveillance systems, marketing algorithms, and artificial intelligence which is capable of analyzing the pixels in your photos, micromanaging your life interests and dislikes, and tracking your every move.
(INTELLIHUB) — As biometric databases grow in travel hubs worldwide airlines are pushing for the installation of new facial recognition software which allows passengers to board flights by merely scanning their face.
However, such technology will likely be deployed to every street corner in the future which will ultimately allow authorities to track the whereabouts and habits of every living person and pet in major cities.
The technology is being sold in the name of ‘security’ and ‘convenience’ which travelers will most likely eat up but such technology may also act as a duel-edged sword. Keep in mind, the TSA knows that biometric databases can also be targeted by criminals to extort travelers biometric data but the question is: what will security officials do to stop it.
Shepard Ambellas is an opinion journalist, analyst, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Intellihub News & Politics (Intellihub.com). Shepard is also known for producing Shade: The Motion Picture (2013) and appearing on Travel Channel’s America Declassified (2013). Shepard is a regular contributor to Infowars. Read more from Shep’s World. Follow Shep on Facebook. Subscribe to Shep’s YouTube channel.The post Airlines to scan your face as boarding pass becomes obsolete appeared first on Intellihub.
Both Congress and the Department of Homeland Security have never justified the biometric scanners at airports that could cost Americans $1 billion in 2018.
A woman in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing has been offered a second refund after faulty facial recognition software on two iPhone X handsets allowed her colleague to unlock them.
As The South China Morning Post reports, the woman, identified only by her surname Yan, told the Jiangsu Broadcasting Corporation that despite activating and configuring each phone’s facial recognition software, her work colleague was able to get into both devices on every attempt.
Yan said the first time it happened, she called the Apple hotline, but the staff would not believe her.
Shen then went with her colleague to the nearest Apple store, where her colleague used facial recognition on the phone to demonstrate the issue to staff, according to the report.
The store said the camera might be faulty and gave Yan a refund. But the new iPhone X that she bought also had the same problem, prompting the shop to offer another refund, the report said.
No details were given about whether the woman decided to purchase a third iPhone X.
Apple did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
So the question is... does the iPhone X (or its operating system) think all young Chinese women look the same? ... and therefore, is it racist?
Shares of Alibaba fell on Thursday morning, despite an exciting news story involving the Chinese e-commerce juggernaut, which is rushing to shake up the way people buy cars in China. Alibaba seems to be taking a page from Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods, with the continued push into physical retail. The plan outlined by Alibaba, is to open two giant car vending machines in early 2018, shaped like a futuristic tubular building with a giant cat’s head on top.
Having monopolized the online world, Alibaba continues to push offline with investments in Chinese bricks and mortar retailers.
Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang said back in November, “physical stores serve an indispensable role during the consumer journey, and should be enhanced through data-driven technology and personalized services in the digital economy.”
“By fully integrating online and physical channels together with our partners, we look forward to delivering an original and delightful shopping experience to Chinese consumers,” he added.
So how does this vending machine work?
The smartphone user must open Alibaba’s Taobao app to scan a car. The app will then process the picture and let the user pick a color and other basic options.
Next, the app will require the user to take a selfie to confirm their identity. Once confirmed, the app will arrange for a test-drive at a car vending machine.
To retrieve the car, the customer will gain access through a facial recognition device at the staffless vending machine. According to the company, a “super member” does not need to leave a deposit to retrieve a vehicle.
Once the identity is confirmed, the multi-floor vending machine will rotate cars like a ferris wheel until the car is found. The test-drive is limited to three days, after which Alibaba can arrange for the sale or the user can choose a different model. Alibaba members are limited to five test-drives per month, where Alibaba is relying on its financial services arm to vet members before borrowing.
Alibaba said it will open two locations starting in January 2018 (Shanghai and Nanjing), and it plans to open “dozens” more across China later in the year. The vending machine concept blended with car buying, is an attempt by the company to streamline the buying process to as quick as opening a can of soda.
“Our thinking behind the Car Vending Machine is focused on helping users solve certain problems they face in the car-buying process. To do that, we are building a physical, experiential store that offers staffless car pickup through facial-recognition, three-day ‘deep’ test-drives, and a one-stop-shop that displays [cars from] all mainstream brands at once,” said Huan Lu, marketing director of Tmall’s automotive division.
Arizona citizens are now in a government database that uses facial recognition technology to track them simply for getting a driver’s license. This allows federal and local law enforcement to use the “perpetual lineup” of suspects not accused of a crime to see if someone is wanted for a crime, Arizona Capitol Times reported.
The state says that the program is to prevent identity theft and fraud. Here’s how it works according to Arizona Capitol Times.
After someone at the Motor Vehicle Division takes your photo, your face is scanned by a system based on a proprietary algorithm that analyzes facial features. The system compares your face against the 19 million photos in the state’s driver’s license database to look for similarities. If an image is similar enough, the system will flag it for further review.
The program is an effort that is part of a nationwide initiative called the REAL ID Act that was created by Congress in 2005 as a response to the September 11th terror attacks. The system allows the state to comply with the federal act, which increased standards for identification documents. Although the REAL ID Act does not explicitly call for facial recognition, it does maintain that states need to take measures to reduce fraud.
The Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) already has publicly boasted about the success with more than 100 cases it has taken to court for fraud using the technology, which has been in place since early 2015.
But the use of the system to prevent identity theft isn’t what people are worried about; the problem is the lack of oversight in government programs that allows anyone with access to look into the database. As such, state-run facial recognition databases are dangerous and can lead down a slippery slope to allow other operations the technology wasn’t intended for.
The other key issue is the fact that residents in Arizona aren’t even being told that this is going on – coupled with the lack of oversight and disclosure, it becomes a nightmare for privacy rights advocates.
“If you don’t know that a system is in place, you actually don’t have the choice of consenting to it or not,” said Clare Garvie who authored the “perpetual line-up” study.
Jim Dempsey, the executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, also had some reservations about the lack of disclosure currently in effect.
Informed consent, through giving notice to people that their faces will be matched up against millions of others when they apply for a license, is a basic tenet of privacy, Jim Dempsey, the executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, said.
Even if notice is given, it’s unlikely that people would opt out of getting a license because facial recognition technology is used because people will decide driving a car and having a legal ID outweigh the risks, Dempsey said.
“It’s an important element. The lack of it is an issue, but it’s one that should be corrected and would be easy to correct,” he said.
Both the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have voiced their concerns about state facial recognition databases and how this could be tied into the push by the federal government to use these databases in airports and border checkpointscreating a dystopian Orwellian surveillance state.
“DMV photo databases are probably the most comprehensive databases in existence,” which means they’re “very, very powerful” tools for potential surveillance, something the ACLU worries could be a “next step,” Jay Stanley a senior policy analyst at ACLU said.
One of the main pitfalls of such a system is not only the lack of oversight on the program by any government watchdog, but the fact that there are no laws to justify the collections, or a court between law enforcement and access to millions of people’s identities.
The only requirement for those that search is that it must involve people suspected of committing a crime or “who law enforcement may suspect is about to commit a crime.” People could also be involved in activities that are threats to public safety, sought as part of a criminal investigation or “intelligence-gathering effort.”
Such extremely broad terms for using this technology is extremely worrying and has a high potential for abuse.
“There should at the very least be a court involved before law enforcement can access millions of unwitting people’s identities,” EFF staff attorney, Adam Schwartz, said.
“It’s really hard to function in a car-based society without a driver’s license, and people shouldn’t be subjected to an invasive technology when they decide to follow the law and get a legal document that allows them to drive,” he added. “It’s a misuse of data to collect data, in this case images, for one thing and use them for other purposes.”
Schwartz added that
in many states, including Arizona, agencies have started using facial recognition technology outside of any formal approval from the public and its representatives, state lawmakers.”
“Before government starts using powerful technology to surveil the public, there ought to be a more open and transparent process where the public controls whether or not this is picked up.
The post Arizona Citizens Tracked In Facial Recognition Database In First Step For REAL ID Implementation appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
The Surveillance State has slowed down its rate of growth since the President took office, however, it has not halted that growth. Instead, it lies festering below the veneer of daily events, inexorably growing its tentacles and extending their reach.
Akin to an infestation of weeds, the roots are deep within the fabric of our communications networks: telephones, CCTV (Closed-Circuit Television) cameras, the Internet…all are thoroughly permeated.
Gizmodo released an article entitled “US Homeland Security Wants Facial Recognition to Identify People in Moving Cars,” on 11/2/17 by Matt Novak. Here is an excerpt from that article:
The proposed program would allow Homeland Security to maintain a database of everyone who leaves and enters the US that would now include photos taken by spying robot-cameras at every border crossing.
Not only does DHS want this new facial recognition program to work without anyone having to exit their vehicle, the agency wants it to work even if the travelers are wearing things like sunglasses and hats. DHS also wants it to work without cars having to stop.
Seems they really want our information for their database. There is something more. One of the readers on the article’s website who uses the handle “Artiofab” posted this comment that is important, as he lives on the Texas border with Mexico:
“11/02/17 12:31pm Hi everybody I live near the US-MX border so I’m happy to give informed opinions on this topic, since I know that a lot of the audience at Gizmodo dot com apparently lives closer to the US-CA border.
Near the US-MX border along major US highways there are these interior checkpoints. If you’re traveling “into” the US (e.g., if you’re in New Mexico and you’re driving north) you stop your car, a USBP agent asks if you’re all US citizens, you say yes, they let you keep going.
(I have no personal anecdote about what happens if you don’t say yes. I have some secondhand anecdote about what happens if you are transporting a small amount of substances that the US considers illegal. But that’s tangential…) If you’re traveling “towards” Mexico, you don’t have to stop. Instead you drive past one of these.
Yes, those are cameras and lights that take images of your car as you drive past them. What does the USBP do with the images? Great question! I don’t know the answer. But I imagine that they might really like some facial recognition software to do some biometric data-gathering on anyone passing past those cameras.”
This is interesting. Illegal aliens (yes, the Mexicans and foreigners who cross the border illegally are aliens: foreigners entering the United States illegally) are crossing our borders every day. These measures are not to keep the illegal aliens out.
These measures are to keep the subjects (taxpaying American citizen-slaves) in.
Why else would they be requiring the use of a passport starting next year on domestic flights? This is the internal passport system of the former Soviet Union, materializing before our eyes. They will not need the “Mark of the Beast” implanted or bar-coded…they have the cellular telephones.
The taxpayer slave-serfs carry these around…willingly, of their own free will…to transmit their every activity and location every four seconds…events that are all recorded for future use in whatever capacity the rulers see fit.
China has been the “testing ground” ever since free trade with them was initiated along with NAFTA (George H.W. Bush created this: Clinton just signed it into law). There is another revelatory article about the increase in surveillance technology in China. Entitled “This is What a 21st Century Police State Really Looks Like,” by Megha Rajagopalan for Buzz Feed News, released 10/17/17.
Here is an excerpt from that important article:
For millions of people in China’s remote far west, this dystopian future is already here. China, which has already deployed the world’s most sophisticated internet censorship system, is building a surveillance state in Xinjiang, a four-hour flight from Beijing, that uses both the newest technology and human policing to keep tabs on every aspect of citizens’ daily lives.
The region is home to a Muslim ethnic minority called the Uighurs, who China has blamed for forming separatist groups and fueling terrorism. Since this spring, thousands of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities have disappeared into so-called political education centers, apparently for offenses from using Western social media apps to studying abroad in Muslim countries, according to relatives of those detained.
The reason the article is important is that Miss Rajagopalan was in the area for two months, accumulating firsthand interviews, reports, and photos. Here’s the big news. The Chinese have devices that allow them to scan cell phones and laptops from a distance at any time. They have biometric facial scanners they employ when stopping individuals on the street. The photos are a must-see: it shows an almost cowed populace infringed upon in every area of life.
That is the type of life coming to the United States, and soon.
In an article by the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Who Wants to Supply China’s Surveillance State? The West,” by Dan Strumpf on 11/1/17. This excerpt reveals the meaning of the article’s title:
Companies from across the globe packed one of the world’s biggest surveillance trade shows to demonstrate the latest gizmos and algorithms powering the high-tech revolution in the industry, of which China is on the vanguard. Tools being hawked included facial-recognition cameras, iris scanners, software that can read a subject’s mood and cameras that can scan license plates in the dark. The surveillance-equipment market in China was valued at $6.4 billion last year, according to IHS Markit .
China is a big buyer of surveillance technology as Beijing steps up its efforts to better monitor its 1.4 billion people. That is providing a boon for equipment makers, who are looking to export their gear abroad. But it has also sparked concern from rights activists about how the authoritarian government is using the souped-up “Big Brother” technology.
China is the testing ground for the eventual use of this surveillance technology in the United States. An article posted on 11/6/17 shows us just how far the police state has come along toward completion. “Texas National Guard Using Cellphone Spy Tech on Surveillance Planes,” is the article’s title, by Michael Thalen of Info Wars. The Texas National Guard is using technology to mimic cell phone towers and capture locations of thousands at a time. Here is part of the article:
The devices, purchased with drug-asset forfeiture money from Maryland-based Digital Receiver Technology Inc. (DRT), are designed to locate cellphones within a certain range by emulating a cell tower. The specific model obtained by the Texas National Guard, known as the DRT 1301C, is even capable of intercepting and recording phone calls in real-time. A leaked U.S. government catalogue of cellphone surveillance devices obtained by The Intercept in 2015 also notes the ability of the DRT 1301C, nicknamed the “dirt box,” to “locate up to 10,000 targets and can process multiple analog and digital wireless devices all at the same time.”
There is a large question as to whether a National Guard Unit is allowed to take on the role of a police force. That question has already been covered under legislation and executive orders passed under the Color of Law that basically has thrown the rulebook out the window. Posse Comitatus has been supplanted by the Warner Defense Act of 2006, and the NDAA’s and accompanying Executive Orders under Obama have all but federalized both Active Duty military forces and National Guard troops in the never-ending “War on Terror.”
As can be seen with these articles, the U.S. government has a new President and a new “pitch,” but many things are not changing, or if so…it is for the worse. The increasing surveillance is tightening of the noose around the necks of the American citizens.
The surveillance state is growing more powerful and thanks to legislation, is becoming more invulnerable to challenges to its supremacy. Soon its inexorable march will be irreversible. Totalitarian control will be in place, and most of the citizens are either unaware of such, or they do not care that it is so.
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
Another shooting, another day in America.
Or so it seems.
With alarming regularity, the nation is being subjected to a spate of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s fragile ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.
Take this latest mass shooting that took place at a small church in a small Texas town.
The lone gunman—a former member of the Air Force—was dressed all in black, wearing body armor, a tactical vest and a mask, and firing an assault rifle.
Devin Patrick Kelley, the 26-year-old gunman, was described as a “regular guy” by those who knew him.
This “regular” guy’s shooting rampage left at least 26 people.
President Trump and the Governor of Texas have chalked the shooting up to mental illness.
That may well be the case here.
Still, there’s something to be said for the fact that this shooting bore many of the same marks of other recent attacks: the gunman appeared out of the blue without triggering any alarms, he was dressed like a soldier or militarized police officer, he was armed with military-style weapons and clearly trained in the art of killing, and the attacker died before any insight could be gained into his motives.
As usual, we’re left with more questions than answers and a whole lot more fear and anxiety.
That sense of unease is growing.
How do you keep a nation safe when not even seemingly “safe places” like churches and rock concerts and shopping malls are immune from violence?
The government’s answer, as always, will lead us further down the road we’ve travelled since 9/11 towards totalitarianism and away from freedom.
Those who want safety at all costs will clamor for more gun control measures (if not at an outright ban on weapons for non-military, non-police personnel), widespread mental health screening of the general population and greater scrutiny of military veterans, more threat assessments and behavioral sensing warnings, more CCTV cameras with facial recognition capabilities, more “See Something, Say Something” programs aimed at turning Americans into snitches and spies, more metal detectors and whole-body imaging devices at soft targets, more roaming squads of militarized police empowered to do random bag searches, more fusion centers to centralize and disseminate information to law enforcement agencies, and more surveillance of what Americans say and do, where they go, what they buy and how they spend their time.
All of these measures play into the government’s hands.
As we have learned the hard way, the phantom promise of safety in exchange for restricted or regulated liberty is a false, misguided doctrine that has no basis in the truth.
Still, why do these things happening?
Clearly, America is in the midst of a national nervous breakdown.
Things are falling apart, and the inmates in the asylum are starting to turn on each other.
This breakdown - triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment), a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing corruption, the government’s alienation from its populace, and an economy that has much of the population struggling to get by - is manifesting itself in madness, mayhem and an utter disregard for the very principles and liberties that have kept us out of the clutches of totalitarianism for so long.
When things start to fall apart or implode, as they seem to be doing lately, I have to wonder who stands to benefit from it. In most cases, it’s the government that stands to benefit by amassing greater powers at the citizenry’s expense.
See, we’re like lab mice, conditioned to respond appropriately to certain stimuli.
Right now, we’re being conditioned to be reactionaries capable of little more than watching and worrying. Indeed, we are fast becoming a nation of bad news junkies, addicted to the steady and predictable drip-drip-drip of news—be it sensational, devastating, demoralizing, disastrous, or just titillating—that keeps us plastered to our screen devices for the next round of breaking news.
So much is happening on a daily basis that the average American understandably has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,” manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork and keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from reality.
We are suffering from “the crisis of the now.”
All the while, the government continues to amass more power and authority over the citizenry.
This is how the corporate elite controls a population, either inadvertently or intentionally, and advances their agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.
Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Zone, imagined just such a world in which the powers-that-be carry out a social experiment to see how long it would take before the members of a small American neighborhood, frightened by a sudden loss of electric power and caught up in fears of the unknown, will transform into an irrational mob and turn on each other.
It doesn’t take long at all.
So you see, Devin Patrick Kelley may have pulled the trigger that resulted in the mayhem in that small Texas church, but something else is driving the madness.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’re caught in a vicious cycle right now between terror and fear and distraction and hate and partisan politics and an inescapable longing for a time when life was simpler and people were kinder and the government was less of a monster.
Our prolonged exposure to the American police state is not helping.
As always, the solution to most problems must start locally, in our homes, in our neighborhoods, and in our communities. We’ve got to refrain from the toxic us vs. them rhetoric that is consuming the nation. We’ve got to work harder to build bridges, instead of burning them to the ground. We’ve got to learn to stop bottling up dissent and disagreeable ideas and learn how to agree to disagree. We’ve got to de-militarize our police and lower the levels of violence here and abroad, whether it’s violence we export to other countries, violence we glorify in entertainment, or violence we revel in when it’s leveled at our so-called enemies, politically or otherwise.
Unless we can learn to live together as brothers and sisters and fellow citizens, we will perish as tools and prisoners of the American police state.
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
On Tuesday, Apple revealed their newest phone. The new line was anticipated by Apple users and is another cult favorite. But many are rightly skeptical of the “FaceID” feature.
FaceID, is a tool that would use facial recognition to identify individuals and unlock their phones for use. Unsurprisingly, this has generated some major anxiety about mass spying and privacy concerns. Retailers already have a desire for facial recognition technology. They want to monitor consumers, and without legally binding terms and Apple could use FaceID to track consumer patterns at its stores or develop and sell data to others.
That seems minor on the surface, but the ramifications could be enormous.
It’s also highly possible that police would be able to more easily unlock phones without consent by simply holding an individual’s phone up to his or her face, violating the rights of the person to privacy.
But FaceID should create fear about another form of government surveillance too. And this one is a rights violation of every person on earth: mass scans to identify individuals based on face profiles. Law enforcement is rapidly increasing their use of facial recognition; one in two American adults are already enrolled in a law enforcement facial recognition network, and at least one in four police departments has the capability to run face recognition searches. This could make Apple the target for a new mass surveillance order.
While Facebook has a powerful facial recognition system, it doesn’t maintain the operating systems that control the cameras on phones, tablets, and laptops that stare at us every day.
Apple’s new system completely changes that. For the first time, a company will have a facial recognition system with millions of profiles, and the hardware to scan and identify faces throughout the world.
According to Wired, this is a system already ripe for government abuse. The government could issue an order to Apple with a set of targets and instructions to scan iPhones, iPads, and Macs to search for specific targets based on FaceID, and then Apple would provide the government with those targets’ location based on the GPS data of devices’ that receive a match. Apple has a good record of fighting for user privacy, but there’s only so much the company could do if its objections to an order are turned down by the courts. And the government is already looking into how this could benefit them, but are hiding behind the guise of “privacy.” On Wednesday Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota) released a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, asking how the company will handle the technology’s security and privacy implications.
But this type of sleazy “Big Brother” activity by the government is not new.
Over the last decade the government has increasingly embraced this type of mass scan method. Edward Snowden’s disclosures revealed the existence of Upstream, a program under FISA Section 702 (set to expire in just a few months). With Upstream, the NSA scans all internet communications going into and out of the United States for surveillance targets’ emails, as well as IP addresses and what the agency has called cybersignatures. And last year Reuters revealed that Yahoo, in compliance with a government order, built custom software to scan hundreds of millions of email accounts for content that contained a digital signature used by surveillance targets. –Wired
Mass facial recognition scans are unconstitutional and a gross violation of human privacy rights. But that has yet to stop the overreaching government from its pursuit of an even more effective method of their goal of dystopian mass surveillance.
On Tuesday, Apple revealed their newest phone. The new line was anticipated by Apple users and is another cult favorite. But many are rightly skeptical of the “FaceID” feature.
FaceID, is a tool that would use facial recognition to identify individuals and unlock their phones for use. Unsurprisingly, this has generated some major anxiety about mass spying and privacy concerns. Retailers already have a desire for facial recognition technology. They want to monitor consumers, and without legally binding terms and Apple could use FaceID to track consumer patterns at its stores or develop and sell data to others.
That seems minor on the surface, but the ramifications could be enormous. It’s also highly possible that police would be able to more easily unlock phones without consent by simply holding an individual’s phone up to his or her face, violating the rights of the person to privacy.
But FaceID should create fear about another form of government surveillance too. And this one is a rights violation of every person on earth: mass scans to identify individuals based on face profiles. Law enforcement is rapidly increasing their use of facial recognition; one in two American adults are already enrolled in a law enforcement facial recognition network, and at least one in four police departments has the capability to run face recognition searches. This could make Apple the target for a new mass surveillance order.
While Facebook has a powerful facial recognition system, it doesn’t maintain the operating systems that control the cameras on phones, tablets, and laptops that stare at us every day. Apple’s new system completely changes that. For the first time, a company will have a facial recognition system with millions of profiles, and the hardware to scan and identify faces throughout the world.
According to Wired, this is a system already ripe for government abuse. The government could issue an order to Apple with a set of targets and instructions to scan iPhones, iPads, and Macs to search for specific targets based on FaceID, and then Apple would provide the government with those targets’ location based on the GPS data of devices’ that receive a match. Apple has a good record of fighting for user privacy, but there’s only so much the company could do if its objections to an order are turned down by the courts. And the government is already looking into how this could benefit them, but are hiding behind the guise of “privacy.” On Wednesday Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota) released a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, asking how the company will handle the technology’s security and privacy implications.
But this type of sleazy “Big Brother” activity by the government is not new.
Over the last decade the government has increasingly embraced this type of mass scan method. Edward Snowden’s disclosures revealed the existence of Upstream, a program under FISA Section 702 (set to expire in just a few months). With Upstream, the NSA scans all internet communications going into and out of the United States for surveillance targets’ emails, as well as IP addresses and what the agency has called cybersignatures. And last year Reuters revealed that Yahoo, in compliance with a government order, built custom software to scan hundreds of millions of email accounts for content that contained a digital signature used by surveillance targets. –Wired
Mass facial recognition scans are unconstitutional and a gross violation of human privacy rights. But that has yet to stop the overreaching government from its pursuit of an even more effective method of their goal of dystopian mass surveillance.
Please Spread The Word And Share This Post
Author: Mac Slavo
Views: Read by 222 people
Date: September 14th, 2017
Website: www.SHTFplan.com
Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.
Update: This seemed to sum things up in Cupertino perfectly - Steve Wozniak is wandering around. He said he is excited to see the new iPhone features, especially the facial recognition. He likes the feature a lot on his Samsung phone.
1001ET BLACKBERRY ENTERPRISE UPDATED TO AAPL IOS 11 MOBILE OPER SYSTEM
The stock ran up excitedly into the event...
1007ET APPLE TURNS POSITIVE AS PRODUCT EVENT BEGINS
1019ET Apple Watch - *FOSSIL SHARES DIP AS APPLE CLAIMS TOP POSITION IN WATCHES
* * *
As we detailed earlier, anticipation is sky high as CEO Tim Cook prepares to unveil Apple"s latest iPhones (and "one more things") from The Steve Jobs Theater at the new Apple "spaceship" Campus.
As CNET reports, for the past eight months, we"ve watched a parade of flagship phone launches, from power players like Samsung with the Galaxy S8 to scrappy players like Motorola with its family of Moto phones. Premium phones with not-so-premium prices like the OnePlus 5 have also competed for our attention.
Meanwhile, rumors about the next iPhone kept trickling out thanks to leakers and established publications alike.
Apple is set to cut through all the noise with the official unveiling of at least one new iPhone (and maybe more), as well as the rumored release of updates to the Apple Watch and Apple TV. There"s also a chance we get more details on the forthcoming HomePod smart speaker.
Watch live here (if you"re on a Mac with Safari).
Live Feed (via CNET):
What are we expecting...
A weekend leak of some unreleased iOS 11 code may have spoiled all the surprises Apple had in store for tech fiends at tomorrow’s big iPhone event, with John Gruber of Daring Fireball calling the leaker “the least-popular person in Cupertino.”
There is expected to be three new phones. Two will at least be modest upgrades to the iPhone 7, getting beefier chips and the like.
The phone people really care about -- in imagination, if not necessarily spending plans (yet) -- is the 10th anniversary version of the phone.
While Apple was typically quiet about its plans, by now the world has a pretty good sense of the feature set.
The phone is expected to be Apple’s first with an organic light-emitting diode, OLED, display, which will be larger at 5.8 inches, and sharper, than the previous LCD displays.
Hold on to your hats: Apple ditched the home button in the phone, which is expected to now be unlocked through facial-recognition technology.
The phone is also expected to offer wireless charging and 3D sensors that enhance the performance of coming augmented-reality apps.
What will the stock do?
UBS technology analyst Steven Milunovich says there’s a distinct pattern in how Apple’s stock price reacts to these product launches.
“Based on the last five iPhone announcements, the stock has a reasonably consistent pattern: down in the two weeks preceding the event; up/down 1-2% the day of the event; up between the event and launch (phone availability about two weeks later); weak in the two weeks post launch; and then up going into earnings,” he wrote in a note out Tuesday morning.
“We think there is somewhat greater near-term downside risk this time though we expect the stock to outperform over the next 6-12 months.”
Here"s how the stock has moved before, during, and after previous iPhone announcements, relative to the S&P 500:
Apple Inc. had hoped that its iPhone eight might demolish the company’s sales records in China as the country’s burgeoning middle class embraced the phone, thanks in part to its name: Eight is considered a lucky number in Chinese culture, signifying wealth and fortune.
Unfortunately for the world’s most valuable company, this calculus isn’t playing out as well as its massive marketing operation had hoped for one simple reason: The price of the phone is simply too high for most members of the company"s target demographic.
However, Apple investors reacted positively to news Monday that the company"s iPhone 8 would be priced at $1,000 a unit. AAPL was up nearly 2% in early trade.
Two versions of the iPhone 8, along with a third premium model known as the iPhone X, will be officially unveiled at its product launch in Cupertino tomorrow. Details on price points of the new devices and their availability dates are still unknown, though even the cheapest of the latest top-of-the-line model is expected to cost about $1,000.
Unfortunately, the bulls could be a little short-sighted, especially considering that signs of slowing sales in some of Apple’s key growth markets have weighed on its share price in the past.
To wit, Reuters reporters spoke to regular Chinese citizens about the new iPhone – specifically, whether they intended to buy one. For Apple, their response was discouraging.
Here’s Reuters:
“Chinese shoppers, however, are already counting the cost, with the latest model tipped to have a price tag upward of $1,000 - roughly double the average Chinese monthly salary.
…
“I’ll wait for a drop in price, it’s too expensive,” said Angie Chen, 23, a project manager in Nanjing and iPhone 6 owner.
Chen said she might even wait for the new phone’s successor, when prices will fall. “It’s a nice number to hear, but there’s no rush.”
As Reuters points out, Greater China, which (according to Apple’s definition) includes Taiwan and Hong Kong, accounted for roughly 18 percent of iPhone sales in the quarter ended in July, making it the company’s third-largest market after the US and Europe. Meanwhile, the iPhone’s share of China’s smartphone shipments fell to 9% between January and June, down from 14% in 2015, according to data from Counterpoint Research.
Compounding the problem for the company is the fact that some analysts expect China to be a key driver of sales growth. Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty told Bloomberg that she is watching for especially strong growth in China after the upgradeable, 2-year old iPhone base grew 56% this year, meaning more consumers are choosing to buy successive iPhone models.
Yet sales in China are down 10 percent from a year earlier, extending a nearly three-year series of declines. That contrasts with growth in all other regions. And although the Chinese currency has risen sharply against the dollar in 2017, a dramatic reversal of those gains could be imminent after Chinese authorities eliminated a requirement that sales desks set aside 20% of their revenues from sales of FX derivatives. The policy was intended to make it too costly to short the yuan, helping the PBOC fend of speculators as it sought to slow the currency’s depreciation against the dollar last year. But now, the central bank has ostensible switched off the “no” in the “no vacancy” sign at the yuan short-seller’s motel. And predictably, the yuan saw its largest drop in eight months overnight as the bears piled back in.
All of this means the phone will be more expensive for consumers, further suppressing sales as Chinese consumers stick with popular domestic brands like Xiaomi. But even with the company’s shares trading near all-time highs, despite reports of production problems that could limit supplies of the new models, whether or not another slowdown in China will actually impact the company’s shares remains to be seen.
* * *
In a preview of tomorrow"s product launch, several Apple analysts told Bloomberg what they felt would be the biggest reveals during CEO Tim Cook"s highly anticipated presentation. In terms of new features, while investors will certainly pay close attention to the iPhone"s hardware, the change that has the most significance with long-term implications is the addition of 3D-sensing capabilities that enable augmented reality applications, Gene Munster said.
While AR applications will be backward compatible to the 2015 iPhone 6S, the addition of designated 3D and computer vision hardware on the premium iPhone would be a “big step toward putting AR in the hands of everyday users” and a big step toward the “next generation of computing - beyond the smartphone," according to Munster via Bloomberg.
Performance of facial recognition on the OLED iPhone will be widely scrutinized, as the device probably won’t have a fingerprint sensor for login and Apple Pay usage, according to KeyBanc analyst Andy Hargreaves.
According to RBC analyst Amit Daryananianother, recent surveys suggest “sizable pent up demand” and excitement around the iPhone launch. With more of the hundreds of millions of iPhone users around the world expected to upgrade their devices this year, Daryananianother said the company could experience a "sales supercycle."
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official.”
- Herman Schwartz, The Nation
Our freedoms - especially the Fourth Amendment - are being choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, shoot, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
Such is life in America today that Americans are being made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are - our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.) - in order to clear the nearly insurmountable hurdle that increasingly defines life in the United States: we are now guilty until proven innocent.
Forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans are being forced to accept that we have no control over our bodies, our lives and our property, especially when it comes to interactions with the government.
Consider, for example, what happened to Utah nurse Alex Wubbels after a police detective demanded to take blood from a badly injured, unconscious patient without a warrant.
Wubbels refused, citing hospital policy that requires police to either have a warrant or permission from the patient in order to draw blood. The detective had neither. Irate, the detective threatened to have Wubbels arrested if she didn’t comply. Backed up by her supervisors, Wubbels respectfully stood her ground only to be roughly grabbed, shoved out of the hospital, handcuffed and forced into an unmarked car while hospital police looked on and failed to intervene (take a look at the police body camera footage, which has gone viral, and see for yourself).
Michael Chorosky didn’t have an advocate like Wubbels to stand guard over his Fourth Amendment rights. Chorosky was surrounded by police, strapped to a gurney and then had his blood forcibly drawn after refusing to submit to a breathalyzer test. “What country is this? What country is this?” cried Chorosky during the forced blood draw.
What country is this indeed?
Unfortunately, forced blood draws are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the indignities and abuses being heaped on Americans in the so-called name of “national security.”
Forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies and forced roadside strip searches are also becoming par for the course in an age in which police are taught to have no respect for the citizenry’s bodily integrity whether or not a person has done anything wrong.
For example, 21-year-old Charnesia Corley was allegedly being pulled over by Texas police in 2015 for “rolling” through a stop sign. Claiming they smelled marijuana, police handcuffed Corley, forced her to strip off her pants, threw her to the ground, forced her legs apart and then probed her vagina. The cavity search lasted 11 minutes. This practice is referred to as “rape by cop.”
David Eckert was forced to undergo an anal cavity search, three enemas, and a colonoscopy after allegedly failing to yield to a stop sign at a Wal-Mart parking lot. Cops justified the searches on the grounds that they suspected Eckert was carrying drugs because his “posture [was] erect” and “he kept his legs together.” No drugs were found.
During a routine traffic stop, Leila Tarantino was subjected to two roadside strip searches in plain view of passing traffic, while her two children—ages 1 and 4—waited inside her car. During the second strip search, presumably in an effort to ferret out drugs, a female officer “forcibly removed” a tampon from Tarantino. No contraband or anything illegal was found.
Thirty-eight-year-old Angel Dobbs and her 24-year-old niece, Ashley, were pulled over by a Texas state trooper on July 13, 2012, allegedly for flicking cigarette butts out of the car window. Insisting that he smelled marijuana, the trooper proceeded to interrogate them and search the car. Despite the fact that both women denied smoking or possessing any marijuana, the police officer then called in a female trooper, who carried out a roadside cavity search, sticking her fingers into the older woman’s anus and vagina, then performing the same procedure on the younger woman, wearing the same pair of gloves. No marijuana was found.
Meanwhile, four Milwaukee police officers were charged with carrying out rectal searches of suspects on the street and in police district stations over the course of several years. One of the officers was accused of conducting searches of men’s anal and scrotal areas, often inserting his fingers into their rectums and leaving some of his victims with bleeding rectums.
It’s gotten so bad that you don’t even have to be suspected of possessing drugs to be subjected to a strip search.
Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Florence v. Burlison, any person who is arrested and processed at a jail house, regardless of the severity of his or her offense (i.e., they can be guilty of nothing more than a minor traffic offense), can be subjected to a strip search by police or jail officials without reasonable suspicion that the arrestee is carrying a weapon or contraband.
As technology advances, police searches are becoming more invasive on a cellular level, as well, with passive alcohol sensors, DNA collection roadblocks, iris scans and facial recognition software—to name just a few methods—used to assault our bodily integrity.
America’s founders could scarcely have imagined a world in which we needed protection against widespread government breaches of our privacy, including on a cellular level.
Yet that’s exactly what we so desperately need.
Unfortunately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the indignities being heaped upon us by the architects and agents of the American police state—whether or not we’ve done anything wrong—are just a foretaste of what is to come.
