S. Smith

Cities across the country are replacing older public lighting with newfangled LED light bulbs. Sold as efficient, cost-saving, and “eco-friendly”, it turns out they’re perfect for covert surveillance. From City Lab’s latest article, ‘LED Streetlight Raise New Opportunities for Surveillance’:

“But as more communities adopt government-funded, eco-friendly LED lights as an environmental measure, some worry that the eyes on these bulbs may be a bit too literal. As they illuminate the streets, they could be watching—and recording—what happens below with attached cameras, microphones, and other devices.The biggest appeal of LEDs is their efficiency and cost-saving potential: They aren’t designed specifically to surveil. But the bulbs’ complex wiring and strategic positioning make recording devices an easy addition. When LEDs started brightening the halls of Newark Liberty International Airport in 2014, and malls across the countrysoon after, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and community members were unsettled to discover that hidden inside some of them were cameras. Others, microphones.

“I think rather than call them smart bulbs in smart cities I’d call them surveillance bulbs in surveillance cities,” said Chad Marlow, advocacy and policy council for the ACLU. “That’s more accurate.””“Smart city” is the new buzzphrase among city councils across the country intent on bringing their cities “into the twentieth century”. But their equation of “progressive” with “internet-connected everything” is creating a scenario where Surveillance State hyperbole becomes impossible. The “smart city” ideal would entail total, ubiquitous, 24/7 surveillance of every activity within the entire jurisdiction, for “efficiency” purposes and to make everyone’s lives easier. But imagine a Google city, or Microsoft township. Every conceivable surveillance toy would be operational within the city, and these cities would become playgrounds for the tech giants, the Pentagon, and the myriad corporations churning out spy goodies at a break-neck pace. And you know the push behind fast-tracking these surveillance cities, behind the PR campaign that came up with the propagandistic “smart city” catchphrase are the very companies and government agencies that will stand to make a fortune off the boondoggle. Buyer beware.

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Meddling in the affairs of other nations is pretty much the modus operandi of U.S. foreign policy

Posted on March 8, 2018 by S. Smith

Hypocrisy has reached new frontiers in the official outrage over possible interference by Russia of the U.S. Presidential election, given that US foreign policy is solely concerned with attempting to control the outcomes of foreign elections and foreign conflicts.

On the subject, see Daniel Lazare’s piece, “The National Endowment for (meddling in) Democracy”:

“But meddling in other countries has been a favorite Washington pastime ever since William McKinley vowed to “Christianize” the Philippines in 1899, despite the fact that most Filipinos were already Catholic. Today, an alphabet soup of U.S. agencies engage in political interference virtually around the clock, everyone from USAID to the VOA, RFE/RL to the DHS—respectively the U.S. Agency for International Development, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Department of Homeland Security. The last maintains some 2,000 U.S. employees in 70 countries to ensure that no one even thinks of doing anything bad to anyone over here.

Then there is the National Endowment for Democracy, a $180-million-a-year government-funded outfit that is a byword for American intrusiveness. The NED is an example of what might be called “speckism,” the tendency to go on about the speck in your neighbor’s eye without ever considering the plank in your own (see Matthew 7 for further details). Prohibited by law from interfering in domestic politics, the endowment devotes endless energy to the democratic shortcomings of other countries, especially when they threaten American interests. In 1984, the year after it was founded, it channeled secret funds to a military-backed presidential candidate in Panama, gave $575,000 to a right-wing French student group, and delivered nearly half a million dollars to right-wing opponents of Costa Rican president Oscar Arias—because Arias had refused to go along with our anti-communist policy in Central America.”

03/08/18 Morning News & Commentary

Posted on March 8, 2018 by S. Smith

WSWS: Google admits collaboration with illegal US drone murder program

EFF: Geek Squad’s relationship with FBI is cozier than we thought

WND: Experts warn Congress that tech world won’t protect privacy by itself

Reason: Trooper stops driver twice within 3 hours, gropes her for no apparent reason

Another from Reason: America’s war on pain pills is killing addicts and leaving patients in agony

The Federalist: Trump administration sues California over three laws designed to frustrate immigration enforcement

Techdirt: Police union boss attacks DA for daring to speak to police recruits about deadly force

Motherboard: ‘Deep Voice’ software can clone anyone’s voice with just 3.7 seconds of audio

Ars Technica: It just got much easier to wage record-breaking DDoSes

Buzzfeed: US gov’t has plans to nuke incoming asteroids

Oil Price: 44 things you didn’t know about oil

03/08/18 Overnight News & Commentary

Posted on March 8, 2018March 7, 2018 by S. Smith

WIRED: The leaked NSA spy tool that hacked the world

Ars Technica: FBI again calls for magical solution to break into encrypted phones

Reuters: Florida sheriff’s office could be sued over deputy’s inaction: experts

ABC News: Drone tech: What happens when good technology falls into the wrong hands?

Mises: Why libertarians should shrug off memo mania

Washington Examiner: Don’t give the IRS personal information it doesn’t need

Forbes: The faces behind China’s omniscient video surveillance technology Ed: They look very proud of themselves

Activist Post: How China’s social credit score will shape the “perfect” citizen

Consortium News: Record-high Afghanistan opium crop signals violent year for U.S. forces

Washington Post: Pentagon kicks off a winner-take-all among tech companies for multi-billion dollar cloud-computing contract

TimesHigherEd: Academics who cooperate with intelligence agencies face moral dillema

National Review: How an Obama-era precedent may doom California’s effort to make itself a “sanctuary state”

FEE: James Damore and the ‘fascist’ slur

Reason: Free yourself from the soft tyranny of nutrition studies

The Verge: NASA’s Juno spacecraft finds deep winds and patterned cyclones on Jupiter

03/07/18 Morning News/Commentary

Posted on March 7, 2018 by S. Smith

The Intercept: Leaked files show how the NSA tracks other countries’ hackers

Gizmodo: Self-declared ‘Health Ranger’ Mike Adams has apparently been booted from YouTube Ed: Tech giants are ramping up censorship.

More on tech giants’ discrimination of viewpoints opposed to their own from National Review: Viewpoint discrimination with algorithms

Bloomberg: America is giving away the $30 billion medical marijuana industry

Vox: America’s opioid crisis has become an “epidemic of epidemics”

The American Conservative: The ridiculous arguments for supporting the war on Yemen

Vanity Fair: Trump entertains economic suicide to tick off “globalists”

WND: ‘Free speech issue of our time’: Tech giants trigger conservative revolt

Motherboard: Experts to US Army: Beware of swarm drones

Activist Post: Police are creating a national surveillance network using COMTEC, Project Green Light, and more

The Lens: Should Big Brother get to watch you buy booze in New Orleans? City Council slated to vote tomorrow

KMOV: St. Louis police deploy new surveillance tool to “fight crime”

The American Conservative: American Stalinism, then and now

The Federalist: Law students labeling Christina Hoff Summers a ‘Fascist’ is what’s wrong with our campuses

The Conversation: The Cold War’s toxic legacy: Costly, dangerous cleanups at atomic bomb production sites

03/07/18 Overnight News/Commentary

Posted on March 7, 2018March 6, 2018 by S. Smith

BoingBoing: Geek Squad’s secret spying on behalf of the FBI went on for a decade and involved constant, ongoing collaboration

The Intercept: New Orleans surveillance program gives powerful tools to a police department with a history of racism and abuse

Bloomberg: Pentagon drone program is using Google AI

More in-depth from Daily Mail: Google is working with Pentagon to equip military drones with people-tracking AI in secret “Project Maven” deal, report claims

CNN Money: Facebook robots may one day follow you around at home

ACLU: Facial recognition: A powerful tool for authoritarian surveillance

Techdirt: CIA still arguing its official leaks to journalists shouldn’t be subject to FOIA requests

The American Conservative: The new Surveillance State and the old perjury trap: “Incidental collection” is the claimed inadvertent or accidental monitoring of Americans’ communications under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. Incidental collection exists alongside court-approved warranted surveillance authorized on a specific individual. But for incidental collection, no probable causeis needed, no warrant is needed, and no court or judge is involved. It just gets vacuumed up.

While exactly how many Americans have their communications monitored this way is unknown, we know these Republican Trump supporters and staffers were caught up in surveillance authorized by a Democratic administration (no evidence of incidental surveillance of the Clinton campaign exists). Election-time claims that the Obama administration wasn’t “wiretapping” Trump were disingenuous. They in fact gathered an unprecedented level of inside information. How was it used?

BoingBoing: Six immortal superweapons the Democrats made for the President, which Trump now gets to wield: Through the Obama years and even into the Trump administration, Democrats have voted a range of powers for the president that gives him almost unlimited authority, out of a combination of the foolish conviction that no one untrustworthy would inherit Obama’s tools, and cowardice about voting against mass surveillance and being criticized by war on terror hawks.

Six of these superweapons are frankly terrifying: the power to start a war without Congressional authorization (Authorization for Use of Military Force); the power to enter into trade deals without Congressional authorization (fast-tracking); the power to lock anyone up without charge (National Defense Authorization Act); the power to assassinate Americans (AUMF — again); total control over the US election infrastructure (Obama DHS directive).

Raw Story: High-ranking GOP congressmen call for special prosecutor to look into surveillance of Carter Page Ed: This story is getting old.

Sonoma State Star: ‘Google Clips’ could be new form of surveillance

TIME: Britain says it will hit back if Russia was behind ex-spy’s sudden illness

CNET: Brace for ‘quantum supremacy’ with Google’s Bristlecone chip

Reason: The 2010’s have been a banner decade for unintended consequences of the Drug War

High Times: The UK bans medical cannabis domestically, yet remains the biggest exporter of it in the world