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
• Amazon's new Chinese thermal spycam vendor was blacklisted by U.S. over allegations it helped China detain and monitor Uighurs and other Muslim minorities 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
VIDEO: RTÉ News.
Singapore's Public Utilities Board is deploying a robot to encourage people wandering the outdoor parks of the densely populated Asian metropolis to social distance, and "stay safe, stay home". 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
In Russia, two human rights groups say Vladimir Putin's government has vastly expanded surveillance to enforce the nation's coronavirus lockdown, using facial recognition technology and collection of personal data. The groups say regulation is required to ensure that surveillance measures are both temporary and proportionate. Read the rest
Want to avoid being seen by person-recognizing camera systems? Wear a shirt printed with a complex, confusing image that looks like a mangled JPG of a crowd scene.
The bright adversarial pattern, which a human viewer can darn-near see from space, renders the wearer invisible to the software looking at him. ... Code does not "think" in terms of facial features, the way a human does, but it does look for and classify features in its own way. To foil it, the "cloaks" need to interfere with most or all of those priors. Simply obscuring some of them is not enough. Facial recognition systems used in China, for example, have been trained to identify people who are wearing medical masks while trying to prevent the spread of COVID-19 or other illnesses.
And of course, to make the task even more challenging, different object detection frameworks all use different mechanisms to detect people, Goldstein explained. "We have different cloaks that are designed for different kinds of detectors, and they transfer across detectors, and so a cloak designed for one detector might also work on another detector," he said.
See also Adversarial Fashion. 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
“Before Clearview Became a Police Tool, It Was a Secret Plaything of the Rich.” That's the title of the New York Times piece, and that's the horrifying reality of how artificial intelligence and facial recognition are already being used in ways that violate your expectations of privacy in the world. 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
Clearview, the shady facial-recognition firm with links to law-enforcement and alt-right internet trolls, reports that its entire client list has been stolen.
In the notification, which The Daily Beast reviewed, the startup Clearview AI disclosed to its customers that an intruder “gained unauthorized access” to its list of customers, to the number of user accounts those customers had set up, and to the number of searches its customers have conducted. The notification said the company’s servers were not breached and that there was “no compromise of Clearview’s systems or network.” The company also said it fixed the vulnerability and that the intruder did not obtain any law-enforcement agencies’ search histories.
Not a good look for any security company--especially one that prides itself on scraping private information from Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the web, irrespective of whether they're permitted to, and repackaging it for government and the police to identify and track individuals through surveillance. Read the rest
One of the strangest contradictory sensations of the Trump era is the man's relationship towards and with the various U.S. intelligence agencies. In many cases, Trump's broad criticisms about the unaccountable and seemingly limitless scope of intelligence gathering are valid. Or would be, anyway, if the man actually cared about those issues for any reason beyond his larger tantrum over the way those agencies have undermined his ego. Or if he wasn't simultaneously trying to use that same wide jurisdiction to target his own political enemies.
In other words, Trump's not necessarily wrong about the potential abuses of secret and/or warrantless surveillance (or "wiretapping" as he puts it). But he's only mad about those things because they can be used to threaten him and his friends, instead of reinforcing his hunches. Otherwise, illegal spying and invasions of privacy are totally fine with him—as long as they target the right people.
There are moments, then, where it becomes a case of "My enemy's enemy is my friend" — except that "friend" is also an enemy of sorts, which further complicates the whole mess. Case in point: this recent Just Security post by Douglas London, a former CIA operative. In it, London talks about the way that the CIA's priorities have been forced to shift from general intelligence gathering to just kind of soothing Trump's ego, and retroactively justifying all of the man's random baseless instincts:
Read the restThe revealing and most disconcerting aspect of this episode was not that Pompeo presumed the worst from his workforce before getting the full story, nor his vicious dressing down of a dedicated senior official and decorated officer.
“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
