The NSA is building an enormous spy center, probably the biggest ever, in Bluffdale Utah. When construction is completed in 2013, the heavily fortified $2 billion facility will encompass 1 million square feet, including four 25,000-square-foot areas to house endless rows of high-powered servers. The center will be fed data collected by the agency’s eavesdropping satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret monitoring rooms in telecom facilities throughout the US. The incredible processing power of this facility will be used to scan e-mails, phone calls, text [...]

New technologies are making the work of CIA Director David Petraeus a whole lot easier. According to him, the advent of wireless and web-connected devices has caused citizens to bug their own home, effectively allowing the spy agency to collect a wealth of information with great ease. If that wasn’t enough, people now readily share the most (in)significant details of their lives through Facebook, which now displays all of this information in a very convenient time-line. Another concept that is brushed upon in this article [...]

Japanese researchers have developed a gun that can silence people in mid-sentence. The Speech-Jamming gun can effectively jam the words of speakers who are over 100 feet away simply by pointing its visor at them. While countless jokes can be made about that gun (i.e. “I could use that on my wife” or “It was specifically designed for Kanye West”), the real purpose of it are not as funny. The gun is indeed being promoted as something useful to “mediate debates” or to “facilitate the [...]

Already used by the US Army in war-zones such as Afghanistan, unmanned drones are about to be used by police departments, border patrols and even power companies. These remote-controlled planes can be equipped with high powered cameras, heat sensors and even weapons (they have been used to kill “terrorists” in the Middle-East) to track, monitor and potentially wreck havoc on groups or specific individuals. Although not yet used in the US their use on domestic soil is pretty much an inevitability. For example, the ShadowHawk, [...]

The very anticipated operating system Windows 8 will have a feature that was never found on PC’s before: A kill switch that can remotely delete software and edit code without the user’s permission. Although Microsoft claims the switch would only be used for software that is downloaded from its app store, no official policies clearly define the actual purpose of the kill switch. In other words, nothing is truly considered “illegal” and that includes issues regarding spying, censorship and free speech. Although the kill switch [...]

The dystopian nightmare described in George Orwell’s novel 1984 took place in London, UK. This very city is today one of the most heavily monitored places in the world, using a record number of cameras and the most advanced surveillance technology to keep track of its citizens. Reuters now reports that the CCTV system of London has now the ability to tag specific people, track them across the entire system and even run a “search” on them for previous footage. The report basically praises the [...]

The company named Illuminating Concepts (can’t make that up), backed by the Department of Homeland Security, has launched its new product called Intellistreets. It is street lights equipped with a speaker system, motion sensors, video cameras, mics and other crap nobody wants. Remotely controlled using Wi-Fi technology, these street lights have some interesting advantages such as energy saving and whatnot. It however doesn’t take much of an imagination to grasp to frightening police-state, oppressive potential of these lights. I mean they can film you, record [...]

When they say “perception is reality”, they are wrong.