Clearview AI is reportedly set to cancel client accounts that are not associated with law enforcement or other government entities, as scrutiny grows over abuses of the facial recognition AI app. Read the rest
“We believe that the Blacks and the Jews are taking over America, and it’s our job to take America back for the White race,” Patton testified at trial, describing his beliefs while carrying out the crime — beliefs he said he no longer held.
Banjo CEO Damien Patton has admitted to being a Neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth. But until today, the extent of his activity had not yet been reported, in part because of multiple spellings of his name used over the years. Read the rest
📷 Pepper Construction is using Startup SmartVid.io to analyze worksite images for Oracle Industries Innovation Lab in Deerfield, Illinois.
Existing security cameras at retail stores and workplaces are being equipped with articifial intelligence to enforce measures intendded to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, Reuters reports, based on interviews with 16 different machine vision software firms and a number of businesses that are now their clients. Read the rest
Tracking entire populations now with electronic surveillance, facial recognition, and biosecurity sensors to combat the coronavirus pandemic will inevitably mean even more invasive forms of government spying later, privacy advocates warn. Read the rest
BuzzFeed News reporters have seen leaked Clearview AI documents that show the company is “working with more than 2,200 law enforcement agencies, companies, and individuals around the world,” including Best Buy, Walmart, Macy's, ICE, DOJ, and the FBI, plus “a sovereign wealth fund in the United Arab Emirates.” Read the rest
“Russia has sent intelligence agents to Ireland to map the precise location of the fibre-optic, ocean-bed cables that connect Europe to America,” Ireland's security agency suspects, according to this report in The Times of London.
“This has raised concerns that Russian agents are checking the cables for weak points, with a view to tapping or even damaging them in the future.”
Irish security officials believe Russia may be targeting Ireland as a regional base for military intelligence operations because the country's counterintelligence abilities are limited, and Moscow presumably views Ireland as a vulnerable spot.
Additionally, various tech giants that have placed their offices in Dublin to evade U.S. taxes might be juicy targets for Vladimir Putin's corporate espionage programs.
Excerpt:
Ireland is the landing point for undersea cables which carry internet traffic between America, Britain and Europe. The cables enable millions of people to communicate and allow financial transactions to take place seamlessly.
Garda and military sources believe the agents were sent by the GRU, the military intelligence branch of the Russian armed forces which was blamed for the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer.
Read more: Russian agents plunge to new ocean depths in Ireland to crack transatlantic cables
[thetimes.co.uk] Read the rest
An unsecured facial recognition database that contained info on thousands of children from 20 schools in China, half of which are located in historically ethnic Tibetan areas, has been found online. Read the rest
In Israel on Thursday, a court ordered closed-door hearings in the legal bid by Amnesty International to stop the global export of NSO Group surveillance software, which Amnesty and other human rights groups say is sold to autocratic regimes around the world to spy on journalists and dissidents, and target them more efficiently for imprisonment and assassination.
We've written a lot previously about NSO Group here on Boing Boing.. Read the rest
“Among the eight or so examples initially provided to Reddit are a handful of disturbingly clear images showing a sleeping baby, a security camera's view of an enclosed porch, and a man seemingly asleep in a chair.” Read the rest
The increasingly popular social media application TikTok has a concerning relationship with the Chinese state. That link became ever the more concerning today, when reports began circulating of a brand new partnership between the company that owns TikTok, ByteDance, and the government of China. Read the rest
Today, a federal judge sentenced former CIA officer Jerry Lee to 19 years in prison. He was convicted of gathering United States defense information and other sensitive information, and handing it over to agents for the government of China. Read the rest
Documents on an unprotected, network-connected drive owned by an employee of Nokia shed light on the inner workings of Russia's networked surveillance system known as SORM (Russian: COPM). Read the rest
