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Ed Webb

Border Patrol, Israel's Elbit Put Reservation Under Surveillance - 0 views

theintercept.com/...trol-israel-elbit-surveillance

surveillance US USA Mexico Israel Palestine israelpalestine border borders policing

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Aug 19 - Cached
  • The vehicle is parked where U.S. Customs and Border Protection will soon construct a 160-foot surveillance tower capable of continuously monitoring every person and vehicle within a radius of up to 7.5 miles. The tower will be outfitted with high-definition cameras with night vision, thermal sensors, and ground-sweeping radar, all of which will feed real-time data to Border Patrol agents at a central operating station in Ajo, Arizona. The system will store an archive with the ability to rewind and track individuals’ movements across time — an ability known as “wide-area persistent surveillance.” CBP plans 10 of these towers across the Tohono O’odham reservation, which spans an area roughly the size of Connecticut. Two will be located near residential areas, including Rivas’s neighborhood, which is home to about 50 people. To build them, CBP has entered a $26 million contract with the U.S. division of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest military company.
  • U.S. borderlands have become laboratories for new systems of enforcement and control
  • these same systems often end up targeting other marginalized populations as well as political dissidents
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • the spread of persistent surveillance technologies is particularly worrisome because they remove any limit on how much information police can gather on a person’s movements. “The border is the natural place for the government to start using them, since there is much more public support to deploy these sorts of intrusive technologies there,”
  • the company’s ultimate goal is to build a “layer” of electronic surveillance equipment across the entire perimeter of the U.S. “Over time, we’ll expand not only to the northern border, but to the ports and harbors across the country,”
  • In addition to fixed and mobile surveillance towers, other technology that CBP has acquired and deployed includes blimps outfitted with high-powered ground and air radar, sensors buried underground, and facial recognition software at ports of entry. CBP’s drone fleet has been described as the largest of any U.S. agency outside the Department of Defense
  • Nellie Jo David, a Tohono O’odham tribal member who is writing her dissertation on border security issues at the University of Arizona, says many younger people who have been forced by economic circumstances to work in nearby cities are returning home less and less, because they want to avoid the constant surveillance and harassment. “It’s especially taken a toll on our younger generations.”
  • Border militarism has been spreading worldwide owing to neoliberal economic policies, wars, and the onset of the climate crisis, all of which have contributed to the uprooting of increasingly large numbers of people, notes Reece Jones
  • In the U.S., leading companies with border security contracts include long-established contractors such as Lockheed Martin in addition to recent upstarts such as Anduril Industries, founded by tech mogul Palmer Luckey to feed the growing market for artificial intelligence and surveillance sensors — primarily in the borderlands. Elbit Systems has frequently touted a major advantage over these competitors: the fact that its products are “field-proven” on Palestinians
  • Verlon Jose, then-tribal vice chair, said that many nation members calculated that the towers would help dissuade the federal government from building a border wall across their lands. The Tohono O’odham are “only as sovereign as the federal government allows us to be,”
  • Leading Democrats have argued for the development of an ever-more sophisticated border surveillance state as an alternative to Trump’s border wall. “The positive, shall we say, almost technological wall that can be built is what we should be doing,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in January. But for those crossing the border, the development of this surveillance apparatus has already taken a heavy toll. In January, a study published by researchers from the University of Arizona and Earlham College found that border surveillance towers have prompted migrants to cross along more rugged and circuitous pathways, leading to greater numbers of deaths from dehydration, exhaustion, and exposure.
  • “Walls are not only a question of blocking people from moving, but they are also serving as borders or frontiers between where you enter the surveillance state,” she said. “The idea is that at the very moment you step near the border, Elbit will catch you. Something similar happens in Palestine.”
  • CBP is by far the largest law enforcement entity in the U.S., with 61,400 employees and a 2018 budget of $16.3 billion — more than the militaries of Iran, Mexico, Israel, and Pakistan. The Border Patrol has jurisdiction 100 miles inland from U.S. borders, making roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population theoretically subject to its operations, including the entirety of the Tohono O’odham reservation
  • Between 2013 and 2016, for example, roughly 40 percent of Border Patrol seizures at immigration enforcement checkpoints involved 1 ounce or less of marijuana confiscated from U.S. citizens.
  • the agency uses its sprawling surveillance apparatus for purposes other than border enforcement
  • documents obtained via public records requests suggest that CBP drone flights included surveillance of Dakota Access pipeline protests
  • CBP’s repurposing of the surveillance tower and drones to surveil dissidents hints at other possible abuses. “It’s a reminder that technologies that are sold for one purpose, such as protecting the border or stopping terrorists — or whatever the original justification may happen to be — so often get repurposed for other reasons, such as targeting protesters.”
  • The impacts of the U.S. border on Tohono O’odham people date to the mid-19th century. The tribal nation’s traditional land extended 175 miles into Mexico before being severed by the 1853 Gadsden Purchase, a U.S. acquisition of land from the Mexican government. As many as 2,500 of the tribe’s more than 30,000 members still live on the Mexican side. Tohono O’odham people used to travel between the United States and Mexico fairly easily on roads without checkpoints to visit family, perform ceremonies, or obtain health care. But that was before the Border Patrol arrived en masse in the mid-2000s, turning the reservation into something akin to a military occupation zone. Residents say agents have administered beatings, used pepper spray, pulled people out of vehicles, shot two Tohono O’odham men under suspicious circumstances, and entered people’s homes without warrants. “It is apartheid here,” Ofelia Rivas says. “We have to carry our papers everywhere. And everyone here has experienced the Border Patrol’s abuse in some way.”
  • Tohono O’odham people have developed common cause with other communities struggling against colonization and border walls. David is among numerous activists from the U.S. and Mexican borderlands who joined a delegation to the West Bank in 2017, convened by Stop the Wall, to build relationships and learn about the impacts of Elbit’s surveillance systems. “I don’t feel safe with them taking over my community, especially if you look at what’s going on in Palestine — they’re bringing the same thing right over here to this land,” she says. “The U.S. government is going to be able to surveil basically anybody on the nation.”
Ed Webb

Glenn Greenwald: How America's Surveillance State Breeds Conformity and Fear | Civil Li... - 0 views

www.alternet.org/...ate_breeds_conformity_and_fear

surveillance US USA analysis opinion PATRIOT internet privacy anonymity

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • The Surveillance State hovers over any attacks that meaningfully challenge state-appropriated power. It doesn’t just hover over it. It impedes it, it deters it and kills it.  That’s its intent. It does that by design.
  • the realization quickly emerged that, allowing government officials to eavesdrop on other people, on citizens, without constraints or oversight, to do so in the dark, is a power that gives so much authority and leverage to those in power that it is virtually impossible for human beings to resist abusing that power.  That’s how potent of a power it is.
  • If a dictator takes over the United States, the NSA could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.
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  • Now it’s virtually a religious obligation to talk about the National Security State and its close cousin, the Surveillance State, with nothing short of veneration.
  • The NSA, beginning 2001, was secretly ordered to spy domestically on the communications of American citizens. It has escalated in all sorts of lawless, and now lawful ways, such that it is now an enormous part of what that agency does. Even more significantly, the technology that it has developed is now shared by a whole variety of agencies, including the FBI
  • Now, the Patriot Act is completely uncontroversial. It gets renewed without any notice every three years with zero reforms, no matter which party is in control.
  • hey are two, as I said, established Democrats warning that the Democratic control of the Executive branch is massively abusing this already incredibly broad Patriot Act. And one of the things they are trying to do is extract some basic information from the NSA about what it is they’re doing in terms of the surveillance on the American people.  Because even though they are on the Intelligence Committee, they say they don’t even know the most basic information about what the NSA does including even how many Americans have had their e-mails read or had their telephone calls intercepted by the NSA.
  • "We can’t tell you how many millions of Americans are having their e-mails read by us, and their telephone calls listened in by us, because for us to tell you that would violate the privacy of American citizens."
  • An article in Popular Mechanics in 2004 reported on a study of American surveillance and this is what it said: “There are an estimated 30 million surveillance cameras now deployed in the United States shooting 4 billion hours of footage a week. Americans are being watched. All of us, almost everywhere.” There is a study in 2006 that estimated that that number would quadruple to 100 million cameras -- surveillance cameras -- in the United States within five years largely because of the bonanza of post-9/11 surveilling. 
  • it’s not just the government that is engaged in surveillance, but just as menacingly, corporations, private corporations, engage in huge amounts of surveillance on us. They give us cell phones that track every moment of where we are physically, and then provide that to law enforcement agencies without so much as a search warrant.  Obviously, credit card and banking transactions are reported, and tell anyone who wants to know everything we do. We talk about the scandal of the Bush eavesdropping program that was not really a government eavesdropping program, so much as it was a private industry eavesdropping program. It was done with the direct and full cooperation of AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and the other telecom giants. In fact, when you talk about the American Surveillance State, what you’re really talking about is no longer public government agencies. What you’re talking about is a full-scale merger between the federal government and industry. That is what the Surveillance State is
  • The principle being that there can be no human interaction, especially no human communication, not just for international between foreign nations but by America citizens on American soils that is beyond the reach of the U.S. government.
  • at exactly the same time that the government has been massively expanding its ability to know everything that we’re doing it has simultaneously erected a wall of secrecy around it that prevents us from knowing anything that they’re doing
  • government now operates with complete secrecy, and we have none
  • it makes people believe that they’re free even though they’ve been subtly convinced that there are things that they shouldn’t do that they might want to do
  • what has happened in the last three to four years is a radical change in the war on terror. The war on terror has now been imported into United States policy. It is now directed at American citizens on American soil. So rather than simply sending drones to foreign soil to assassinate foreign nationals, we are now sending drones to target and kill American citizens without charges or trial. Rather than indefinitely detaining foreign nationals like Guantanamo, Congress last year enacted, and President Obama signed, the National Defense Authorization Act that permits the detention -- without trial, indefinitely -- of American citizens on U.S. soil.
  • this is what the Surveillance State is designed to do.  It’s justified, in the name of terrorism, of course that’s the packaging in which it’s wrapped, that’s been used extremely, and in all sorts of ways, since 9/11 for domestic application. And that’s being, that’s happening even more. It’s happening in terms of the Occupy movement and the infiltration that federal officials were able to accomplish using Patriot Act authorities. It’s happened with pro-Palestinian activists in the United States and all other dissident groups that have themselves [dealt with] with surveillance and law enforcement used by what was originally the war on terror powers.
  • if the government is able to know what we speak about and know who we’re talking to, know what it is that we’re planning, it makes any kind of activism extremely difficult. Because secrecy and privacy are prerequisites to effective actions.
  • we are training our young citizens to live in a culture where the expect they are always being watched. And we want them to be chilled, we want them to be deterred, we want them not to ever challenge orthodoxy or to explore limits where engaging creativity in any kind. This type of surveillance, by design, breeds conformism.  That’s its purpose. that’s what makes surveillance so pernicious.
  • f you go and speak to communities of American Muslims is you find an incredibly pervasive climate of fear.
  • This climate of fear creates limits around the behavior in which they’re willing to engage in very damaging ways
  • governments, when they want to give themselves abusive and radical powers, typically first target people who they think their citizens won’t care very much about, because they’ll think they’re not affected by it
  • the psychological effects on East German people endure until today. The way in which they have been trained for decades to understand that there are limits to their life, even once you remove the limits, they’ve been trained that those are not things they need to transgress.
  • Rosa Luxembourg said, “He who does not move does not notice his chains.”
  • You can acculturate people to believing that tyranny is freedom, that their limits are actually emancipations and freedom, that is what this Surveillance State does, by training people  to accept their own conformity that they are actually free, that they no longer even realize the ways in which they’re being limited.
  • important means of subverting this one-way mirror that I’ve described is forcible, radical transparency. It’s one of the reasons I support, so enthusiastically and unqualafiably, groups like Anonymous and WikiLeaks. I want holes to be blown in the wall of secrecy.
  • There are things like the Tor project and other groups that enable people to use the internet without any detection from government authorities. That has the effect of preventing regimes that actually bar their citizens from using the Internet from doing so since you can no longer trace the origins of the Internet user. But it also protects people who live in countries like ours where the government is trying to constantly monitor what we do by sending our communications through multiple proxies around the world that can’t be invaded. There’s really a war taking place: an arms race where the government and these groups are attempting to stay one tactical step ahead of the other. In terms of ability to shield internet communications from the government and the government’s ability to invade them and participating in this war in ways that are supportive of the “good side” are really critical as is veiling yourself from the technology that exists, to make what you do as tight as possible.
Ed Webb

Clear backpacks, monitored emails: life for US students under constant surveillance | E... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ce-us-schools-safety-shootings

surveillance US USA edtech education privacy

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Dec 19 - Cached
  • This level of surveillance is “not too over-the-top”, Ingrid said, and she feels her classmates are generally “accepting” of it.
  • One leading student privacy expert estimated that as many as a third of America’s roughly 15,000 school districts may already be using technology that monitors students’ emails and documents for phrases that might flag suicidal thoughts, plans for a school shooting, or a range of other offenses.
  • When Dapier talks with other teen librarians about the issue of school surveillance, “we’re very alarmed,” he said. “It sort of trains the next generation that [surveillance] is normal, that it’s not an issue. What is the next generation’s Mark Zuckerberg going to think is normal?
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  • Some parents said they were alarmed and frightened by schools’ new monitoring technologies. Others said they were conflicted, seeing some benefits to schools watching over what kids are doing online, but uncertain if their schools were striking the right balance with privacy concerns. Many said they were not even sure what kind of surveillance technology their schools might be using, and that the permission slips they had signed when their kids brought home school devices had told them almost nothing
  • “They’re so unclear that I’ve just decided to cut off the research completely, to not do any of it.”
  • As of 2018, at least 60 American school districts had also spent more than $1m on separate monitoring technology to track what their students were saying on public social media accounts, an amount that spiked sharply in the wake of the 2018 Parkland school shooting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive advocacy group that compiled and analyzed school contracts with a subset of surveillance companies.
  • “They are all mandatory, and the accounts have been created before we’ve even been consulted,” he said. Parents are given almost no information about how their children’s data is being used, or the business models of the companies involved. Any time his kids complete school work through a digital platform, they are generating huge amounts of very personal, and potentially very valuable, data. The platforms know what time his kids do their homework, and whether it’s done early or at the last minute. They know what kinds of mistakes his kids make on math problems.
  • Felix, now 12, said he is frustrated that the school “doesn’t really [educate] students on what is OK and what is not OK. They don’t make it clear when they are tracking you, or not, or what platforms they track you on. “They don’t really give you a list of things not to do,” he said. “Once you’re in trouble, they act like you knew.”
  • “It’s the school as panopticon, and the sweeping searchlight beams into homes, now, and to me, that’s just disastrous to intellectual risk-taking and creativity.”
  • Many parents also said that they wanted more transparency and more parental control over surveillance. A few years ago, Ben, a tech professional from Maryland, got a call from his son’s principal to set up an urgent meeting. His son, then about nine or 10-years old, had opened up a school Google document and typed “I want to kill myself.” It was not until he and his son were in a serious meeting with school officials that Ben found out what happened: his son had typed the words on purpose, curious about what would happen. “The smile on his face gave away that he was testing boundaries, and not considering harming himself,” Ben said. (He asked that his last name and his son’s school district not be published, to preserve his son’s privacy.) The incident was resolved easily, he said, in part because Ben’s family already had close relationships with the school administrators.
  • there is still no independent evaluation of whether this kind of surveillance technology actually works to reduce violence and suicide.
  • Certain groups of students could easily be targeted by the monitoring more intensely than others, she said. Would Muslim students face additional surveillance? What about black students? Her daughter, who is 11, loves hip-hop music. “Maybe some of that language could be misconstrued, by the wrong ears or the wrong eyes, as potentially violent or threatening,” she said.
  • The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy was founded in 2014, in the wake of parental outrage over the attempt to create a standardized national database that would track hundreds of data points about public school students, from their names and social security numbers to their attendance, academic performance, and disciplinary and behavior records, and share the data with education tech companies. The effort, which had been funded by the Gates Foundation, collapsed in 2014 after fierce opposition from parents and privacy activists.
  • “More and more parents are organizing against the onslaught of ed tech and the loss of privacy that it entails. But at the same time, there’s so much money and power and political influence behind these groups,”
  • some privacy experts – and students – said they are concerned that surveillance at school might actually be undermining students’ wellbeing
  • “I do think the constant screen surveillance has affected our anxiety levels and our levels of depression.” “It’s over-guarding kids,” she said. “You need to let them make mistakes, you know? That’s kind of how we learn.”
Ed Webb

Iran Says Face Recognition Will ID Women Breaking Hijab Laws | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...l-id-women-breaking-hijab-laws

surveillance Iran technology authoritarianism women protests veiling

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • After Iranian lawmakers suggested last year that face recognition should be used to police hijab law, the head of an Iranian government agency that enforces morality law said in a September interview that the technology would be used “to identify inappropriate and unusual movements,” including “failure to observe hijab laws.” Individuals could be identified by checking faces against a national identity database to levy fines and make arrests, he said.
  • Iran’s government has monitored social media to identify opponents of the regime for years, Grothe says, but if government claims about the use of face recognition are true, it’s the first instance she knows of a government using the technology to enforce gender-related dress law.
  • Mahsa Alimardani, who researches freedom of expression in Iran at the University of Oxford, has recently heard reports of women in Iran receiving citations in the mail for hijab law violations despite not having had an interaction with a law enforcement officer. Iran’s government has spent years building a digital surveillance apparatus, Alimardani says. The country’s national identity database, built in 2015, includes biometric data like face scans and is used for national ID cards and to identify people considered dissidents by authorities.
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  • Decades ago, Iranian law required women to take off headscarves in line with modernization plans, with police sometimes forcing women to do so. But hijab wearing became compulsory in 1979 when the country became a theocracy.
  • Shajarizadeh and others monitoring the ongoing outcry have noticed that some people involved in the protests are confronted by police days after an alleged incident—including women cited for not wearing a hijab. “Many people haven't been arrested in the streets,” she says. “They were arrested at their homes one or two days later.”
  • Some face recognition in use in Iran today comes from Chinese camera and artificial intelligence company Tiandy. Its dealings in Iran were featured in a December 2021 report from IPVM, a company that tracks the surveillance and security industry.
  • US Department of Commerce placed sanctions on Tiandy, citing its role in the repression of Uyghur Muslims in China and the provision of technology originating in the US to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The company previously used components from Intel, but the US chipmaker told NBC last month that it had ceased working with the Chinese company.
  • When Steven Feldstein, a former US State Department surveillance expert, surveyed 179 countries between 2012 and 2020, he found that 77 now use some form of AI-driven surveillance. Face recognition is used in 61 countries, more than any other form of digital surveillance technology, he says.
Ed Webb

Surveillance does not make us safe | openDemocracy - 1 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...eillance-does-not-make-us-safe

surveillance UK

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Surveillance is about power– rarely safety or security
  • The possession of great powers by the state should prompt a principled determination to ensure that the permissible exercise of such powers is strictly defined, regulated and monitored so as to guarantee that any intrusion into liberty and privacy of the individual is fully justified by an obviously superior community interest.
  • Emily Bowie on 29 Sep 10
     
    I agree that Surveillance can be used for safety and security reasons. I mean we can't deny that video's of robberies and such haven't come in handy for catching the bad guys. However, I also agree that it has a lot to do with power. It's so easy to take surveillance too far and impede on others' privacys. It's scary... Emily
Ed Webb

The Imagination Age: Surveillance Satire: A Cat Dumps a Woman in the Trash - 5 views

www.theimaginationage.net/...satire-cat-dumps-woman-in.html

surveillance satire funny

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Aug 10 - No Cached
  • Emily Bowie on 03 Oct 10
     
    Well. That was hilarious and very random. I was really confused until I found the video it was making fun of. I think that what the UK woman did was disgusting but I'm not sure how I feel about this video in concerns with surveillance. I think that surveillance can be taken too far, but the camera the owners had installed was to keep their car from being stolen or broken into. Which seems to me like a fair reason to install a camera. So I'm not sure.
Ed Webb

Surveillant Society - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...surveillant-society

surveillance sousveillance

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The assumption that one is not being recorded in any real way, a standard in civilization for more or less all of history, is being overturned.
  • CEOs have become slaves to the PR department in a bizarre inversion of internal corporate checks and balances
  • “Your word against mine” can be a serious and drawn-out dispute, subject to all kinds of subjective judgments, loyalties, rights, and arguments; “Your word against my high-definition video” gives citizens and the vulnerable a bit more leverage.
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  • The issue of ownership is being muddied by the same process that has upended media industries – the transition of recordable data from physical to virtual property, infinitely copyable but still subject to many of the necessities of more traditionally-held items. Who owns what, who is legally bound to act in which way, which licenses supercede others? A team of lawyers and scholars might spend months putting together a cohesive argument for any number of possibilities. What chance does an end user have to figure out whether or not they have the right to print, distribute, delete, and so on?
  • if you show everything, you’re likely to show something you should have hidden, and if you hide everything, everyone will assume you did so for a reason
  • Hoaxes, fakes, set-ups, staged scenarios, creative editing, post-production, photoshopping, and every other tool of the trade, all show something other than the raw, original product. I’m not familiar with forensic digital media evaluation tools in use today, but I get the feeling that if they’re not inadequate now, they will be so in a few years.
  • our responsibilities as a society to use these new tools judiciously and responsibly
  • increasingly, the answers to these questions are tending towards the “record first” mentality
  • The logical next step, after assuming one is being recorded at all times when in public (potentially true) is ensuring one is being recorded at all times when in public. Theoretically, you won’t act any differently, since you’re already operating under that assumption.
  • how long before it’s considered negligent to have not recorded an accident or criminal act?
  • You have no privacy in public, haven’t had any for a long time, and what little you have you tend to give away. But the sword is double-edged; shouldn’t we benefit from that as well as suffer? A surveillance society is watched. A surveillant society is watching.
Ed Webb

Project Vigilant and the government/corporate destruction of privacy - Glenn Greenwald ... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

surveillance privacy internet USA US politics wikileaks espionage intelligence

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Aug 10 - Cached
  • it's the re-packaging and transfer of this data to the U.S. Government -- combined with the ability to link it not only to your online identity (IP address), but also your offline identity (name) -- that has made this industry particularly pernicious.  There are serious obstacles that impede the Government's ability to create these electronic dossiers themselves.  It requires both huge resources and expertise.  Various statutes enacted in the mid-1970s -- such as the Privacy Act of 1974 -- impose transparency requirements and other forms of accountability on programs whereby the Government collects data on citizens.  And the fact that much of the data about you ends up in the hands of private corporations can create further obstacles, because the tools which the Government has to compel private companies to turn over this information is limited (the fact that the FBI is sometimes unable to obtain your "transactional" Internet data without a court order -- i.e., whom you email, who emails you, what Google searches you enter, and what websites you visit --is what has caused the Obama administration to demand that Congress amend the Patriot Act to vest them with the power to obtain all of that with no judicial supervision). But the emergence of a private market that sells this data to the Government (or, in the case of Project Vigilance, is funded in order to hand it over voluntarily) has eliminated those obstacles.
  • a wide array of government agencies have created countless programs to encourage and formally train various private workers (such as cable installers, utilities workers and others who enter people's homes) to act as government informants and report any "suspicious" activity; see one example here.  Meanwhile, TIA has been replicated, and even surpassed, as a result of private industries' willingness to do the snooping work on American citizens which the Government cannot do.
  • this arrangement provides the best of all worlds for the Government and the worst for citizens: The use of private-sector data aggregators allows the government to insulate surveillance and information-handling practices from privacy laws or public scrutiny. That is sometimes an important motivation in outsourced surveillance.  Private companies are free not only from complying with the Privacy Act, but from other checks and balances, such as the Freedom of Information Act.  They are also insulated from oversight by Congress and are not subject to civil-service laws designed to ensure that government policymakers are not influenced by partisan politics. . . .
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  • There is a long and unfortunate history of cooperation between government security agencies and powerful corporations to deprive individuals of their privacy and other civil liberties, and any program that institutionalizes close, secretive ties between such organizations raises serious questions about the scope of its activities, now and in the future.
  • Many people are indifferent to the disappearance of privacy -- even with regard to government officials -- because they don't perceive any real value to it.  The ways in which the loss of privacy destroys a society are somewhat abstract and difficult to articulate, though very real.  A society in which people know they are constantly being monitored is one that breeds conformism and submission, and which squashes innovation, deviation, and real dissent. 
  • that's what a Surveillance State does:  it breeds fear of doing anything out of the ordinary by creating a class of meek citizens who know they are being constantly watched.
  • The loss of privacy is entirely one-way.  Government and corporate authorities have destroyed most vestiges of privacy for you, while ensuring that they have more and more for themselves.  The extent to which you're monitored grows in direct proportion to the secrecy with which they operate.  Sir Francis Bacon's now platitudinous observation that "knowledge itself is power" is as true as ever.  That's why this severe and always-growing imbalance is so dangerous, even to those who are otherwise content to have themselves subjected to constant monitoring.
Ed Webb

From Helmand to Merseyside: Unmanned drones and the militarisation of UK policing | ope... - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...nes-enter-uk-domestic-policing

surveillance policing intelligence UK Britain privacy drones military

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • the intensifying cross-overs between the use of drones to deploy lethal force in the war zones of Asia and the Middle East, and their introduction within western airspace, need to be stressed. The European Defence Agency, for example, a body funded by the UK and other European governments,  is lobbying hard to support the widespread diffusion of drones within UK and EU policing and security as a  means to bolster the existing strengths of European security corporations like BAE systems, EADS and Thales within  booming global markets for armed and military drones. The global market for drones is by far the most dynamic sector in the global airline industry. The current annual market of $2.7 billion is predicted to reach $8.3 billion by 2020 and $55 billion is likely to be spent on drones in the next decade. A specific concern of the EU is that European defense and security corporations are failing to stake claims within booming global drone markets whilst US and Israeli companies clean up.
  • what scholars of surveillance term ‘function-creep’ is likely to be a key feature of drone deployments
  •  it is startling that the main concern so far in public policy debates about the introduction of military-standard surveillance drones into routine police practice in Western countries has surrounded the (very real) dangers of collision with other aircraft.
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  • the widespread introduction of almost silent, pilotless drones with military-standard imaging equipment raises major new questions about the way in which the UK as a ‘surveillance society’. Is the civilian deployment of such drones a justified and proportionate response to civilian policing needs or a thinly-veiled attempt by security corporations to build new and highly profitable markets? Once deployed, what ethical and regulatory guidelines need to be in place to govern drone deployment and the ‘targeting’ of drone sensors? Above all, are transparent regulatory systems in place to prevent law enforcement agencies from abusing radical extensions in their powers to vertically and covertly spy on all aspects of civilian life 24 hours a day?
Ed Webb

How ethical is it for advertisers to target your mood? | Emily Bell | Opinion | The Gua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...dvertisers-to-target-your-mood

media surveillance advertising dystopias

shared by Ed Webb on 05 May 19 - No Cached
  • The effectiveness of psychographic targeting is one bet being made by an increasing number of media companies when it comes to interrupting your viewing experience with advertising messages.
  • “Across the board, articles that were in top emotional categories, such as love, sadness and fear, performed significantly better than articles that were not.”
  • ESPN and USA Today are also using psychographic rather than demographic targeting to sell to advertisers, including in ESPN’s case, the decision to not show you advertising at all if your team is losing.
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  • Media companies using this technology claim it is now possible for the “mood” of the reader or viewer to be tracked in real time and the content of the advertising to be changed accordingly
  • ads targeted at readers based on their predicted moods rather than their previous behaviour improved the click-through rate by 40%.
  • Given that the average click through rate (the number of times anyone actually clicks on an ad) is about 0.4%, this number (in gross terms) is probably less impressive than it sounds.
  • Cambridge Analytica, the company that misused Facebook data and, according to its own claims, helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, used psychographic segmentation.
  • For many years “contextual” ads served by not very intelligent algorithms were the bane of digital editors’ lives. Improvements in machine learning should help eradicate the horrible business of showing insurance advertising to readers in the middle of an article about a devastating fire.
  • The words “brand safety” are increasingly used by publishers when demonstrating products such as Project Feels. It is a way publishers can compete on micro-targeting with platforms such as Facebook and YouTube by pointing out that their targeting will not land you next to a conspiracy theory video about the dangers of chemtrails.
  • the exploitation of psychographics is not limited to the responsible and transparent scientists at the NYT. While publishers were showing these shiny new tools to advertisers, Amazon was advertising for a managing editor for its surveillance doorbell, Ring, which contacts your device when someone is at your door. An editor for a doorbell, how is that going to work? In all kinds of perplexing ways according to the ad. It’s “an exciting new opportunity within Ring to manage a team of news editors who deliver breaking crime news alerts to our neighbours. This position is best suited for a candidate with experience and passion for journalism, crime reporting, and people management.” So if instead of thinking about crime articles inspiring fear and advertising doorbells in the middle of them, what if you took the fear that the surveillance-device-cum-doorbell inspires and layered a crime reporting newsroom on top of it to make sure the fear is properly engaging?
  • The media has arguably already played an outsized role in making sure that people are irrationally scared, and now that practice is being strapped to the considerably more powerful engine of an Amazon product.
  • This will not be the last surveillance-based newsroom we see. Almost any product that produces large data feeds can also produce its own “news”. Imagine the Fitbit newsroom or the managing editor for traffic reports from dashboard cams – anything that has a live data feed emanating from it, in the age of the Internet of Things, can produce news.
Ed Webb

Obama and the Age of Surveillance | Indypendent Reader - 0 views

indyreader.org/...obama-and-age-surveillance

US USA politics NSA surveillance privacy internet

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • “Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter.'”
  • To be fair, the US government has given significant contributions to the research and development of free speech and anonymity technologies, such as the Tor Project.[26] Technologies created and fostered by the US government have been invaluable in the fight for freedom all around the globe. After all, it was the US military that created the precursor to the internet, called ARPANET. But without the ability to be accountable for its own crimes, and to protect the rights of those in opposition to its own policies, the US continues its greatest tradition of hypocrisy. The Obama administration lifts up the struggles of those fighting its enemies with one hand, while attacking those who speak up about injustices of US-sponsored regimes with the other. All the while, it is slowly and secretly building up its omni-present police state at home.
Ed Webb

Review: Google Chrome has become surveillance software. It's time to switch. - Silicon ... - 0 views

www.siliconvalley.com/...ce-software-its-time-to-switch

surveillance internet

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • There are ways to defang Chrome, which is much more complicated than just using “Incognito Mode.” But it’s much easier to switch to a browser not owned by an advertising company.
Ed Webb

Pluralistic: 14 Nov 2021 - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow - 0 views

pluralistic.net/...still-the-product

surveillance technology USA US privacy analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • The capture of the regulatory state by capitalism is why companies spy on you: spying only makes money if all costs (breaches, loss of agency, etc) can be externalized onto society, and if companies can manufacture consent by cramming an "I agree" button down your throat. In other words, they spy on you because they can get away with it, because the state permits them. We don't have a federal privacy law with a private right of action, we don't have statutory limits on terms of service. Even where you do have some rights, we let companies take them away with "binding arbitration" waivers that confiscate your right to sue them and join class actions
  • Vizio is a surveillance company that incidentally manufactures TVs. A Vizio TV nonconsensually spies on you and shows you ads, and it does so despite the fact that you're paying for it. Vizio's latest financials show that the company makes more money from spying on you than it does from selling TVs.
  • our justice system treats corporate crime as a feature, not a bug, and allows firms to use the proceeds from their misbehavior to buy their way out of accountability.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • There's nothing inevitable about an ad market that requires surveillance. Contextual advertising – advertising based on the content of articles, rather than data on the readers – is far more profitable for publishers than behavioral ads.
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