Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department launches massive facial recognition program

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 According to a press release, the Sheriff’s Department originally made the switch on January 7, but the announcement has only now been made public.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

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Featured Image: Cambodia, P.I. Network/Flickr

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Qualcomm Files Lawsuit Seeking To Ban Sale And Manufacture Of iPhones In China

Apple experienced a sudden air pocket dip (which was promptly bought) after a Bloomberg report that Qualcomm has filed lawsuits in China seeking to "ban the sale and manufacture of iPhones in the country," a move which is the chipmaker’s biggest shot at Apple so far in a bitter legal fight between the two companies.

San Diego-based Qualcomm filed the suits in a Beijing intellectual property court claiming patent infringement and seeking injunctive relief, according to Christine Trimble, a company spokeswoman, and hopes to inflict pain on Apple in the world’s largest market for smartphones, cutting off production in a country where most iPhones are made.  Greater China accounted for 22.5% of Apple’s $215.6 billion sales in fiscal 2016.

"Apple employs technologies invented by Qualcomm without paying for them," Trimble said.

The two companies have lobbed legal shots and lawsuits at each other for years, and are currently months into a legal dispute that centers on Qualcomm’s technology licensing business. While Qualcomm gets the majority of its sales from making phone chips, it pulls in most of its profit from charging fees for patents that cover the fundamentals of all modern phone systems. The suits come at a sensitive time for Apple, which just introduced iPhone 8 and X models which aim at "reasserting leadership in a market that’s steeped in competition from fast-growing Chinese makers."

Suppliers and assemblers in China are rushing to churn out as many new iPhones as possible ahead of the key holiday season, so any disruptions would likely be costly. As reported yesterday, the iPhone X is already suffering major problems involving its facial recognition technology, which if unresolved could lead to product launch delays.

Some more details from Bloomberg on the latest litigation:

The legal battle started earlier this year when Apple filed an antitrust suit against Qualcomm arguing that the chipmaker’s licensing practices are unfair, and that it abused its position as the biggest supplier of chips in phones. Qualcomm charges a percentage of the price of each handset regardless of whether it includes a chip from the company, and Apple issick of paying those fees.

Qualcomm has countered with a patent suit and argued that Cupertino, California-based Apple encouraged regulators from South Korea to the U.S. to take action against it based on false testimony. Earlier this week, Qualcomm was fined a record NT$23.4 billion ($773 million) by Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission, a ruling the company is appealing. Qualcomm is also asking U.S. authoriti

While on the surface the latest legal salvo may sound serious, the market"s reaction - to this as well as to everything else - has been largely negligible, as BTFD algos rushedin to quickly fill the gap created by triggerhappy sellers.

Apple's New "FaceID" Could Be A Powerful Mass Spying Tool

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.

Watch Live: Apple Unveils Latest iPhone From Spaceship Campus

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

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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:

Retired Green Beret Fears The Final Government Objective: Enslave Or Kill Us All

Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces) via SHTFplan.com,

In the world situation, we are all aware of the “hot spots,” such as North Korea, Syria, and Ukraine that could escalate into a full-blown regional war and then expand even further, either on their own or with “assistance” from governments and oligarchs alike.  We also have seen a rekindling of the tensions that existed during the first Cold War and the shaping of a new Cold War with Russia.  Meanwhile, with all foreign policy in shambles and diplomatic ties in a limbo-vacuum, the U.S. government has adjusted its pace domestically.  The President was sworn in with a tide of almost “messianic” fervor; however, 6 months has elapsed with little change evident and many of his reforms stopped dead in the water for the time being.

Domestically the U.S. government was instituting and initiating “reforms” at a running pace under Obama.  The reforms were actually removals of more and more of our liberties.  This pace has slowed down, but has not ceased.  Read the article Senate Bill: Travelers Must Register Cash and Digital Amounts Over $10K or Face 10 Years in Prison and Full Asset Seizure.  Labeled Senate Bill 1241, this nefarious totalitarian measure also contains provisions for wiretapping anyone suspected of “drug trafficking or money laundering” to fit the bill for asset seizure and further torment by the government.

They want to know everything you have, everything you’re doing, everywhere you’re going, and track you in real time with your happy cellular telephone.

We may appear to digress, now, but this next item is chillingly interrelated to the information previously mentioned.  Another article by a neuroscientist, a Miss Shelly Fan.  The government has been working on technologies such as this one for some time.  Here is the first step, in Miss Fan’s article Forget Police Sketches: Researchers Perfectly Reconstruct Faces by Reading Brainwaves.

There you have it, straight out of George Orwell’s “1984,” where Winston Smith was confronted and tortured by O’Brien.  The latter informed Smith there were two problems for the State (Oceania) to overcome: How to kill off hundreds of millions in an instant, and how to know exactly what a human being is thinking.  Well, here we are.  If they can pattern facial recognition technology to create sketches of people from the human mind, how long will it be before they can take your thoughts and formulate words or other images…even place them on a screen and store them for later use.  Will such a thing hold up in a court?  Probably not.  Nowadays, they don’t need probable cause to snag you…only “reasonable suspicion,” and they can doggedly pursue you across the ends of the earth.

Each week or even more often, we are seeing more technological advances, along with more Draconian, totalitarian edicts termed “legislation.”  Here we see the enemy of the people in the form of a tyrannical state that has abused its powers and privileges afforded it by the Constitution and the vote of the people.  Here we see an almost bankrupted government, running on the fumes of Fiat currency and the treaties made in the birthing of the vampiric Petrodollar…a medium created with the Saudis that (as evidenced by Qatar) they may very well be the ones to plunge the stake through the heart of the vampire.  Here we see the last stages of a Republic’s collapse into totalitarianism.

The almost omnipresent police state…the federalization local and state police departments and Sheriff’s departments, the fusion centers, the data collection facility in Utah, the steadily-hatching CCTV “chickadees” popping up on every corner, in every gas station, public building, and convenience store.  It is a well-known fact that before an empire slips completely into tyranny, it enslaves, torments, brutalizes, and kills its citizens.  Foreigners come and go, illegally and with a passport, carte blanche: Americans are the ones subjected to the scrutiny when they travel.  An empire can’t have its subjects…taxpaying, system-supporting subjects…going “off” the reservation, now, can they?

If there is a war, I have stated (and stand by the assertion) in previous articles that the war will be initiated with an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) attack.  Stefan Stanford penned a brilliant article entitled, This ‘Game Changer’ Could Lead to 270 Million Dead Americans and Foreshadows a Massive False Flag on the Horizon.  Stefan’s belief is that an EMP may be too severe for TPTB to recover from without losing a great deal of their assets.  He expostulates an excellent theory that it will be a controlled cyberattack that accomplishes exactly what the EMP attack would, minus the recovery time.

He also mentioned the show “Revolution” that had a couple of seasons and then was discontinued abruptly and for no reason when the ratings were good…a show that had a cyberattack that brought down the whole shooting match as its theme.  Readers also undoubtedly recall the “Jericho” series that lasted only 2 seasons that had nuclear devices exploded in 23 American cities to collapse the country and usher in a new era of chaos and “warlord” type engagements between factions claiming to be “the” legitimate government. Stefan and I are in complete agreement with the fact that these cancellations are way too obvious when you consider the predictive programming policies carried out by the U.S. government and Hollywood, the puppet-lackey of the State.  The scenarios are too feasible to be discounted. 

In the meantime, the public plods through the day, dulled to the everyday events that lead us closer to the corral, and eventually into the cages.  We need to focus upon these changes as they are made and keep abreast of what is happening.  Such measures are neither “cheap,” nor are they instituted by our wonderful Congressional members for no reason.  It would be a lack of reason to discount such actions as anything other than plans for the future…their plans to rule it, as well as their plans to “deal” with us.