According to the Daily News, the Republican Campaign Committee had a private detective attach a GPS device to an opponent’s car to track his comings and goings.
The state police say it was probably legal. Which is good news for stalkers who can now claim they were just engaged in negative research of a potential political opponent.
New York Daily News, Sept 6, 2014
How do I know the article is good? Because MrMild sent me an excerpt. Should you read the article? Only if you want to give up some privacy to do so.
“[T]o detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution . . . Truthy uses a sophisticated combination of text and data mining, social network analysis, and complex networks models . . .”
And, yes, the project really is named “Truthy.”
When you’re talking, things in the same room vibrate from the sound waves. Film the vibrating object — e.g., a bag of chips — run it through some software and Bingo! you can turn it back into speech.
Both the police and your neighborhood peeping tom will love this.
[Scientists reconstruct speech through soundproof glass by watching a bag of potato chips http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/4/5968243/mit-turns-recorded-vibrations-back-into-speech-and-music via DuckDuckGo for Android]
Security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski has revealed that personal data including text messages, contact lists and photos can be extracted from iPhones by Apple Inc employees, through previously unpublicized techniques. Now that Zdziarski has let the cat out of the bag, Apple has admitted that he’s right.
The Bitemaster was surfing around the Web when he came across this article from 2010:
Ukrainian Carding King ‘Maksik’ Was Lured to Arrest | Threat Level | WIRED.
In short, Maksym Yastremskiy, a Ukrainian who is alleged to have sold millions of dollars worth of stolen credit and debit card information, was caught following a “sneak-and-peek” search of his laptop while he was traveling through Dubai.
Fans of BITEME well know that we don’t like government — or Google, for that matter — snooping through people’s stuff. But how the hell do we catch the big time thieves without some serious privacy invasion?
On another note, the article notes that 143 million credit and debit card records were stolen in 2009. With numbers that high, how will the credit card companies survive? Perhaps by getting us to switch to debit cards, which have less protection against loss or fraud.
What’s the opposite of privacy? Publicity? Unprivacy?
Leicestershire Police are now using NEC’s NeoFace face recognition software, in the hope that it will be able to compare images from CCTV and police body cameras against the 90,000 photos in the Leicestershire Police database.
Manual searches could take hours but NeoFace can do the search in seconds.
The same tech is already in use in the US, where the Chicago Police Department recently used it to sort through 4.5 million booking photos to help convict an armed robber.
UK police begin trialling the world’s fastest face recognition tech.
Today, we bring you a tiny bit of cheer in the generally depressing privacy landscape.
“The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that police generally can’t search the contents of a cellphone seized during an arrest, unless they get a warrant.
“Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the unanimous decision (PDF) finding that such warrantless cellphone searches violate the Fourth Amendment. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote a separate opinion concurring in the judgment.”
SCOTUS rules against warrantless cellphone searches in ‘sweeping endorsement of digital privacy’.
Good news, kiddies! Not only are bell bottoms fashionable again, but COINTELPRO is back, too.
This time it’s called the Minerva Initiative and it’s being run by the Department of Defense. They’re using university academics to learn how to manipulate civilian activists, neutralize protesters, and subvert perceived troublemakers.
But there is a silver lining to this thing: we’ll be able to use the techniques developed by the Minerva Initiative to put the tea party out of business.
Defense Dept. studying protesters to prepare for ‘mass civil breakdown’.
See also the Report from Iron Mountain
On April 16, the Federal Housing Finance Agency and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau posted a notice in the Federal Register, detailing a policy shift regarding the kinds of data that would be included in the expansion of the National Mortgage Database.
The proposed expansion would allow the FHFA and the CFPB to see more information than most people can remember about themselves, including your name, current and past addresses, your telephone numbers, your date of birth, race/ethnicity, gender, the languages spoken in your home, your religion, your Social Security number, education records, military status/records, and employment history. Additionally, it would include every detail of your financial history stretching back to 1998, including balances owed, payment history, how much you paid for your house, your debt-to-income ratio and a gaggle of other data points.
Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee issued a letter proclaiming the expansion, “an unwarranted intrusion into the private lives of ordinary Americans.”
Good for them.
A New Government Database Would Know Almost Everything About You – ABC News.