Orwell, digital prisons and the double-edged sword of surveillance

[AdamG]

IN THE DECADE after the 9/11 attacks, the New York City Police Department moved to put millions of New Yorkers under constant watch. Warning of terrorism threats, the department created a plan to carpet Manhattan’s downtown streets with thousands of cameras and had, by 2008, centralized its video surveillance operations to a single command center. Two years later, the NYPD announced that the command center, known as the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center, had integrated cutting-edge video analytics software into select cameras across the city.

Now, thanks to confidential corporate documents and interviews with many of the technologists involved in developing the software, The Intercept and the Investigative Fund have learned that IBM began developing this object identification technology using secret access to NYPD camera footage. With access to images of thousands of unknowing New Yorkers offered up by NYPD officials, as early as 2012, IBM was creating new search features that allow other police departments to search camera footage for images of people by hair color, facial hair, and skin tone.

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/06/...n-tone-search/

[AdamG]

"Do No Evil" Google aiding and abetting Beijing's censorship.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/21/goog...aboolainternal

[AdamG]

How Google’s China project undermines its claims to political neutrality
The Verge

A leaked internal presentation about censorship frames the issue correctly — but the company’s work in China contradicts it

https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/11/...e-speech-china

[AdamG]

Tim Cook: Personal data collection is being 'weaponized against us with military efficiency'

Apple and its CEO have long touted personal privacy, distancing themselves from recent, growing scandals among tech companies — but the comments from Cook are some of the strongest to date.
CEO Tim Cook said the business of selling ads against personal data has become a "data industrial complex" and stopped just short of naming tech giants like Facebook and Google in his criticisms.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/24/appl...vacy-laws.html

[AdamG]

BEIJING (AFP) -
From virtual reality police training programmes to gun-toting drones and iris scanners, a public security expo in China showed the range of increasingly high-tech tools available to the country's police.

The exhibition, which ran Tuesday to Friday in Beijing, emphasised surveillance and monitoring technology just as the Communist government's domestic security spending has skyrocketed.

Facial-recognition screens analysing candid shots of conference attendees were scattered around the exhibition hall, while other vendors packed their booths with security cameras

https://www.france24.com/en/20181026...curity-gadgets

[AdamG]

Chinese authorities have begun deploying a new surveillance tool: "gait recognition" software that uses people's body shapes and how they walk to identify them, even when their faces are hidden from cameras.

Already used by police on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai, "gait recognition" is part of a push across China to develop artificial-intelligence and data-driven surveillance that is raising concern about how far the technology will go.

Huang Yongzhen, the CEO of Watrix, said that its system can identify people from up to 50 meters (165 feet) away, even with their back turned or face covered. This can fill a gap in facial recognition, which needs close-up, high-resolution images of a person's face to work.

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wi...-walk-58988215

[AdamG]

Facial recognition software is already prevalent in a lot of mainstream technology products. You may even use a few of them, like Facebook photo tagging, Snapchat or Instagram face filters, or the iPhone’s Face ID, which uses facial recognition to unlock the phone.

Future uses of the technology may not be so harmless.

Microsoft President Brad Smith laid out a frightening scenario in which facial recognition technology, if left unchecked, could totally change the way we live and what privacy people are able to retain, if any.

“It potentially means every time you walk into a store, a retailer knows when you were in there last, what good you picked out, what you purchased,” he said at Web Summit, a tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday. “I think even that frankly pales in comparison to what it could do to relationships between individuals and the state.”

Smith went on to describe what sounds like a total doomsday scenario for facial recognition technology, a scenario on par with the idea that automation will replace all jobs, or Elon Musk’s projected AI apocalypse.

https://www.recode.net/2018/11/7/180...air-web-summit