Tag: transparent_society

Tracking all radios

A cluster sweeps a band of territory 2000km wide so, circling the planet every 90 minutes or so, it can revisit many areas several times a day. Moreover, unlike spy satellites fitted with optical cameras, rf satellites can see through clouds. Their receivers are not sensitive enough to detect standard mobile phones. But they can pick up satellite phones, walkie-talkies and all manner of radar. And, while vessels can and do illicitly disable their ais, switching off their communications gear and the radar they use for navigation and collision-avoidance is another matter entirely. “Even pirates don’t turn those things off”. Horizon also plans to compile a library of unique radar-pulse “fingerprints” of the world’s vessels, for the tiny differences in componentry that exist even between examples of the same make and model of equipment mean that signals can often be linked to a specific device. It will thus be able to determine not merely that a vessel of some sort is in a certain place, but which vessel it is, and where else it has been.

Dust size cameras

The pill-sized cameras in today’s mobile phones may seem miraculously tiny, given that a decade ago the smallest cameras available for retail sale were the size of a pack of cards. Ali Hajimiri of the California Institute of Technology will make far smaller cameras. His team plan to replace them with truly minuscule devices that spurn every aspect of current photographic technology. Not only do Dr Hajimiri’s cameras have no moving parts, they also lack lenses and mirrors—in other words, they have no conventional optics. That does away with the focal depth required by today’s cameras, enabling the new devices to be flat.

Phone video clears man

nice how automatic video upload cleared this man from police thugs.

The 10-second video doesn’t show much, just a quick shot of 1 Toronto police officer, then a second, who then reaches up to slap away the phone camera. But the brief video recording captured the crucial part of Abdi Sheik-Qasim’s exchange with Toronto police Consts. Piara Dhaliwal and Akin Gul — enough for an Ontario judge to rule Sheik-Qasim had been assaulted by Toronto police, not the other way around.

Volunteering citizens

The next steps towards the transparent society.

it will be good for society if the powers of surveillance are shared with the citizenry, enabling the public to watch the watchers. this continues the trend promoted by Adam Smith, John Locke, the US Constitutionalists and the western enlightenment, who held that any elite should experience constraints upon its power. And there is no power-equalizer greater than knowledge.

The end of spycraft

that, and spring break ain’t the same anymore with everyone scared of being face tagged, eh? it’s called the transparent society and it is nearly here.

Busy spy crossroads such as Dubai, Jordan, India and many E.U. points of entry are employing iris scanners to link eyeballs irrevocably to a particular name. Likewise, the increasing use of biometric passports, which are embedded with microchips containing a person’s face, sex, fingerprints, date and place of birth, and other personal data, are increasingly replacing the old paper ones. For a clandestine field operative, flying under a false name could be a one-way ticket to a headquarters desk, since they’re irrevocably chained to whatever name and passport they used.

opsec is really dead:

the Kremlin was quickly able to identify new CIA officers in the US Embassy in Moscow — likely based on the differences in pay between diplomats, details on past service in “hardship” posts, speedy promotions and other digital clues,. Those clues could have come from access to the OPM data