Everywhere one looks in America, these days, one finds cameras trained on him/her recording our every move…. go here The Silent Majority: America’s Emasculation.
facial recognition
The Eye of Sauron: Something New Under the Sun | Fred Reed
The pieces come together. Within the last week I have read:
1) New software, associated with Google, will recognize customers in stores so as to offer them discounts; having your photos uploaded to allow this service will (for now) be voluntary.
2) A new surveillance system in New York will store footage from cameras in, for example, the subway, so that when an unattended package is discovered, the police can look back in time to see who left it.
3) TSA is perfecting a laser that will allow detection on travelers of trace amounts of drugs, explosives, and doubtless a wide variety of other things.
4) The government is moving toward mandating black boxes on cars to record information thought to be useful in ascribing blame in crashes.
5) Various police departments are beginning to use “drone” aircraft to monitor the population.
These are recent pieces of the coming world. They have not yet all been completely deployed and linked. Some are voluntary, for the moment. Others are in development. All are coming. Continue reading
Cubic Sets the Trap: Acquiring Abraxas and Trapwire was Evil Genius | John Stanton
“Cubic is the world’s leading provider of automated payment and fare collection systems and services for the transportation industry.” Cubic’s purchase of Abraxas in 2010 for $124 million (US) in cash made sense looking at where the $1.2 billion dollar Cubic Company does business. A large chunk of that money comes from its Defense Systems and Mission Support Operations segments (where Abraxas is apparently operating). Roughly $415 million comes from its Transportation division.
Cubic’s acquisition of Abraxas and its magic bag full of electronic tracking/snooping tools was made two years prior to the 2012 Olympic Games in London.In 2011. The transit authority there had recently installed video cameras on all of its 191 buses. Continue reading
TMI Nation | Reason Magazine
via TMI Nation – Reason Magazine.
…But what may be most unnerving about the Web is not how it empowers malicious smear merchants but how it standardizes chronic self-disclosure through mechanisms as innocuous as Facebook “likes,” and how it allows content aggregators to amass the tiny truths we disclose about ourselves in ways we can neither predict nor control. Imagine car insurers monitoring your tweetstream to see how often you use Foursquare to check-in at bars at least 30 miles from your apartment. Imagine dating sites assigning you a narcissism quotient based on how often you review hair salons and Pilates instructors on Yelp.com.
As indiscreetly as we live now, it is possible that in 2013 we may look back to 2011 as a golden era of privacy. Flickr, Facebook, and other social media sites today are filled with millions of photos that could prove embarrassing in certain contexts, but for the most part the people in those photos remain unidentified. That’s changing fast. “When combined with facial recognition and the power of Google to find obscure information, the possibility of damage to reputation is obvious,” Fertik writes. “Anyone photographed (accidentally or intentionally) near an adult bookstore could be identified by name and made subject to ridicule by his peers…
The Grey Enigma 