So Ford has apparently filed a patent for an automated police car, giving privacy and civil liberties advocates something entirely new to oppose.

“The patent, first spotted by Motor1, describes an autonomous police vehicle that would be able to detect infractions performed by another vehicle, either on its own or in conjunction with surveillance cameras and/or road-side sensors.

The AI-powered police car could then remotely issue citations or pursue the vehicle. Or (and this is where it gets really creepy), “the method may further involve the processor remotely executing one or more actions with respect to the first vehicle,” according to the patent.

In other words, the autonomous police car could wirelessly connect to the original car to communicate with the passenger, verify identity, and issue a citation.

In fact, Ford’s patent filing describes a machine learning algorithm that would be able to determine whether or not a vehicle breaking the law warrants a warning as opposed to a citation, and relay that decision to the driver.”

I suppose that with the rise of the driverless car, this situation would be inevitable.  Now the specter of a driverless police car cruising around, analyzing its surroundings by means of a “machine learning algorithm”, and making its own decisions.

At what point in time will Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics need to be rolled out?

  Bloomberg: Pentagon wins as Trump readies $716 billion budget request

TruthOut: How the Pentagon enlisted Trump to continue its perpetual “War on Terror”

Techdirt: New York police union sues NYPD to block public release of body camera footage

The Intercept: The NSA deletes “honesty” and “openness” from core values

Reason:  The NSA gets honest about its lack of honesty

Sputnik: Ex-FBI agent: NSA unlikely to be punished for illegal data destruction

Science Daily: Superconducting synapses may be missing piece for ‘artificial brains’

The New Yorker: The Google Arts and Culture app and the rise of the ‘coded gaze’

AS an example of the effect that persistent, total government surveillance has on an individual, look to what likely drove Ernest Hemingway to commit suicide: continuous surveillance by government agents. 

The FBI monitored Hemingway continuously from the 1940s until his suicide in 1961, ostensibly based on his ties to Cuba.  There’s a story of a distraught Hemingway sitting in a restaurant with his wife.  When she asked what was wrong, he responded with, “Those two FBI agents at the bar, that’s what’s wrong.”

This happens to journalists all the time.  Low-level harassment, the purpose being nothing more than breaking the spirit of the target.

Barrett Brown is a more recent example of the psychological effect that the harassment of journalists by armed government agents has.

And there’s the strange death of journalist Michael Hastings, whose car inexplicably accelerated before crashing in a ball of fire.

Wikileaks later released CIA documents revealing that smart cars can be remotely hacked, and that doing so would be a wonderful way to off someone they deemed needed it.

“Beware then, that when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster, and when you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you.” -Nietzche

In response to a reader email, yes, I read these links.  And as to why I don’t post them Instapundit-style but rather in globs of ten or so, well, it’s because I use the research that I do as well.  It’s easier to scroll back through the blog to find stories when they’re bunched up in one post, as opposed to scattered to the digital winds.  The aim of this site is to be a resource for those who are serious about ending total surveillance, restoring a civilized level of privacy protections for citizens of this country.  When the construction of the Surveillance State here is complete, we will have nowhere to hide from our government.

This has grave implications for our ability to engage in dissent and protest against the crimes of our governments.  What’s more, it will have dire implications for journalism.  Journalists will be tracked and surveiled at a far higher rate than the rest of us.  Passive, pervasive harassment of journalists has the ability to stifle the search for truth, information all of us depend on for an accurate view of what our government is up to.

Governments of the world murdered 252 million unarmed civilians during the twentieth century, not because they suddenly became more cruel, but because they have the means.  Advances in technology and industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century gave humankind the ability to wage war on a global scale. So we did.  It gave governments the means also to mass murder their own citizens.  So they did.

To say it can’t happen again is the height of naivete. The chief lesson of history is that governments murder and enslave.  That is not hyperbole, it is fact.  The Surveillance State will empower governments to do far more.  Do I think that mass murder is on the horizon any time soon?  I don’t.  What I believe this surveillance infrastructure will be used for is incremental enslavement, the boxing in of citizens, who aren’t aware of the prison being built around them until they try to escape.  It will by then be too late.  This is why privacy should be enshrined into law on an equal plane with that of free speech.  Our data is ours, our lives are our own.

I also post fun science-y stories.

Well hello there, Skynet: Gizmodo: The US intelligence community apparently wants someone to build them a brain

Activist Post: Oklahoma’s exemplary AMI Smart Meters Removal and Consumer Protection Bill: A model for other states to follow

Slate: Americans wanted more privacy protections.  Congress gave them fewer.

Prospect: The new surveillance capitalism

Architectural Digest: This brand new drone is tiny and basically unbreakable

Mises Institute: 2018 looks to be another good year for weapons manufacturers

Reason: Man incarcerated for 6 years without trial because he demanded a speedy trial

The Intercept: Blowback: How US drones, coups, and invasions just create more violence

High Times: Detroit has more opioid overdose deaths than murders Ed: Give the people marijuana and psychedelics, spread them far and wide.  It will end this crisis.

WIRED: Why no gadget can prove how stoned you are

Science: Muon’s magnetism could open door to new physics

Washington Examiner: Leading FISA critics in Congress split along party lines on ‘release the memo’ push

The Federalist: What to expect from the House intel memo on surveillance abuse

Fox News: Rep. Issa says Americans have a right to see FISA abuse memo

The Hill: As walls close in on the FBI, the bureau lashes out at its antagonists

Washington Post: How to fight mass surveillance even though Congress just reauthorized it

Economic Times: EU court rejects Facebook class action suit by privacy activist

National Review: The digital Emperor of China’s Surveillance State

Charles Koch Institute: Veterans, civilians don’t believe military intervention makes us safer

LA Times: Why going to 7-11 has become a political act

American Conservative: The moral case against Trump’s import tariffs

RealClearPolicy: Bayer-Monsanto merger would devastate farmers, raise food prices

National Review: YouTube’s new father figure

 ZMEScience: Psychedelic mushrooms boost love for nature and dislike for authoritarianism, study finds

Slightly dated, but important: Science Alert: Magic mushrooms do the opposite of antidepressants, but that may be why they work

SingularityHub: How fast is AI progressing? Stanford’s new report card on artificial intelligence

Washington Examiner: Senate Intelligence Committee denied access to memo detailing alleged surveillance abuses

Foreign Policy Journal: Spy court finds surveillance operating outside the law

Washington Times: How a conspiracy of silence assaults privacy

Reason: Militarized police events are now routine

Mashable: Apple raises privacy concerns with medical records on Apple watch

Jacobin: Dark money at the Pentagon

The Guardian: Does AI need an off switch?

Science: Physicists planning to build laser so powerful it could rip apart empty space

Quanta: Era of quantum computing is here..and isn’t

Since its inception, the free and open internet has completely devastated the Gatekeepers of information.

Before the development and rapid evolution of the world wide web, the information we received about the state of the world, our leaders and their activities, were taken at face value.  There was no way to verify the facts, weight alternative opinions or that of the rest of the consumers of the news.  Whatever was given, either by radio, television, or newspaper, was taken.  There was no alternative.

Fast forward to the present.  A seemingly endless array of news and opinion sites pepper the web, giving the reader virtually unlimited choices on what to read.  Anyone can start a blog for free.  Freedom of the press has come to mean something revolutionary, a revolution greater than that inaugurated by Gutenberg.  And with the news now comes another glory of the internet era: the comments section.  Here is where the reader can eviscerate Establishment shills, and endlessly debate fellow readers.  No where in the history of civilization has this been possible.  It becomes almost impossible to overstate the revolution that the internet embodies.

The internet finally wrested control of information away from the Establishment and placed it into the hands of the deplorables. Not Trump’s deplorables, but rather what the Elites surely refer to everyone of us as, the taxpayers, those with normal jobs and normal lives, those without political leverage or hidden power, those who make the world that they control, turn.  They have never forgiven us for our use of the internet, and the short work it has made of their designs for our world.  And they’ve worked night and day to find ways of taking the internet away from us.  Of course, just shutting it down would be to overt.  They know that for their plan to be effective, it must be indirect to the point of invisibility.  Whether it be herding us into what Matt Drudge dubbed ‘internet ghettos’, such as Facebook and Twitter, where content can be controlled, the plan must not appear as a plan at all.

And now we have Julian Assange recently warning us of the greatest threat to open discourse online, that of the use of artificial intelligence as a tool of internet censorship. From his Twitter he wrote on January 17th:

A nexus point is being reached, with total surveillance removing our ability to hide from our governments, and artificial intelligence silently reclaiming control over the flow of information online merging, with propaganda immaculately embedded within the flow.

The most perfect prison is one that we don’t realize is there at all.

Good god. Apparently the ‘Erin Brockovich’ carcinogen is still floating around in the water we drink and clean ourselves with, threatening our health and that of those around us.

The cancer-causing industrial chemical, hexavalent chromium, is a popular industrial compound, now finding a second life in our groundwater and our bodies.  According to the interactive map, Cleveland and Oklahoma counties have some of the highest concentrations of the chemical in their public water supplies.  Moral of the story: drink Fiji?

h/t Catarina

Media Post: Supreme Court to hear arguments in Microsoft email privacy case in February

What have I been saying? The Verge: Artificial intelligence is going to supercharge surveillance

Washington Examiner: This email privacy bill is wildly popular.  So why won’t it pass?

Washington Times: FBI text messages lost because of ‘misconfiguration issues’ that perplex security experts

Fox News: FBI’s ‘missing’ five months of text messages is worse than Watergate

Committee to Protect Journalists: How US vote to extend NSA program could expose journalists to surveillance

The Hill: After ‘foreign surveillance law’, Congress must demand answers from intelligence community

Bitcoin.com: Is privacy possible in the digital era?

Planet Biometrics: Voiceprints raise surveillance fears

Motherboard: Meet the activist developer who helps journalists protect data and sources

District Sentinel: Pentagon allowed to keep Congress in the dark over Afghan human rights abuses

U-Today: A new kind of propulsion system that doesn’t need a propellant.