Argus Panoptes is the name of a giant of Greek mythology who had a hundred eyes and who was said to be “all-seeing”. What an appropriate name for DARPA’s latest wide area monitoring system, described as the “next generation of surveillance”. When mounted on a drone, ARGUS (which stands for Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging [...]
The new generation of HDTV’s and cable receivers sold to the public contain features that are not very publicized by tech companies: Cameras, mics and sensors that have the ability of recording everything that is happening in the living room. Not unlike the telescreens in George Orwell’s novel 1984, TV’s will soon be able [...]
A few months ago, the proposal of an anti-piracy bill by the name of SOPA caused a great deal of controversy and protest due to the fact that it allowed the snooping of web users while opening the door to the censorship of the internet. The proposal of this law caused companies and internet giants [...]
On April 2nd, the US Supreme Court ruled that jails do not violate privacy rights by routinely strip-searching everyone, even those arrested on minor traffic offences. This decision is part of a disturbing trend in US law enforcement practices: The addition of a sexual humiliation component to them – a component that was found in [...]
We’ve seen in the past months a variety of laws aiming to monitor and censor the internet. The UK (aka Oceania to George Orwell readers) is taking a step further by proposing laws allowing the monitoring of emails, phone calls, text messages and even visited websites in real time. These laws are not a long-term [...]
Schools in northern Brazil are now embedding their uniforms with locator chips that allow the tracking and monitoring of their students. Advertised as a “way of informing parents in case their children skip school”, the widespread use of these devices and the information they can potentially gather is rather unsettling. There no “off function” on [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
