Tag: surveillance

Categories
Artificial Intelligence Education Reading

Latest Read: Your Face Belongs to Us

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It by Kashmir Hill.

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It by Kashmir Hill

Kashmir holds a masters degrees in journalism from New York University. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The Washington Post. Kashmir is a technology reporter at The New York Times after having worked at Gizmodo Media Group, Fusion, Forbes Magazine, and Above the Law.

Perhaps of the most shocking books in fact that I have read in some time. Kashmir is documenting how a small AI company provided facial recognition to law enforcement, billionaires, and businesses. Yet, it should be no surprise this has eroded privacy as we know it.

Kashmir introduces readers to this chilling story as a skeptic. A tip regarding a mysterious app called Clearview AI held a claim it could with 99% accuracy identify anyone based upon a single photograph of their face. The app indeed provided a person’s online name, social media profiles, friends, family members, and their home address. This was just for starters and in the wrong hands, would be a very powerful surveillance tool.

Clearview AI was a start up run by Australian computer engineer Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor. The company was funded by conservative provocateur Charles C. Johnson and billionaire Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel. In contrast, Google and Facebook chose that this type of tool was too dangerous to release. However, via private investors, Clerview AI would be pitched to thousands of law enforcement agencies around the world.

Continue reading “Latest Read: Your Face Belongs to Us”
Categories
Education Reading

Latest Read: Profit over Privacy

Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet by Matthew Crain.

Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet by Matthew Crain

Matthew holds a PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is an assistant professor of media and communication at Miami University of Ohio and previously taught at Queens College, City University of New York.

The contemporary internet’s de facto business model is one of Surveillance has been the new black. While browser cookies follow us around the web, Web beacons can track and harvest every Google search, every webpage visited, In fact, on a growing number of global websites, beacons know where you click. Yes indeed they know everything about you and are monetizing all of your online activities every day.

In Profit over Privacy, Matthew is delivering a solid historical beginning to the billion dollar surveillance advertising business.

In fact, Facebook posted revenues over $319 billion in 2021 alone. Surprised learning this is below their 2020 revenue? The loss of our privacy is via Facebook, Google, and Amazon. They certainly resell our online activity to data brokers.

Matthew is tracing this surveillance advertising back to the Clinton administration. This includes the launch of the country’s Nation Information Infrastructure and how the long established Information Infrastructure Task Force (IITF) designed a safe approach which did acknowledge the coming online profiling of citizens. The FTC also looked to consumer empowerment. But in America, politics ran amok.

Continue reading “Latest Read: Profit over Privacy”
Categories
Education Reading

Latest Read: No Place to Hide

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald. Glenn is an American journalist, author, and former lawyer with a J.D. from New York University School of Law.

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald

Glenn initially founded a law firm concentrating on First Amendment litigation. He later began writing for Salon and then for The Guardian. He contributed to their 2014 Pulitzer Prize. Glenn was also one of three reporters who won the 2013 George Polk Award.

In 2014, he cofounded The Intercept until his resignation in October 2020. He has since began self-publishing on Substack. Glenn’s book is a focus to the request made by Edward Snowden to contact Glenn in 2013 regarding US surveillance.

So Glenn documents how was initially contacted and actually did not respond thinking the outreach was a fake attempt. Edward only allowed himself to be an anonymous source with evidence of US government spying.

In fact, after Snowden reached out repeatedly through encrypted channels, Glenn did agree to travel to Hong Kong. This turned out to be the digital version of The Pentagon Papers leak by Daniel Ellsberg.

Continue reading “Latest Read: No Place to Hide”
Categories
Education Reading Technology

Latest Read: We See It All

We See It All: Liberty and Justice in an Age of Perpetual Surveillance by Jon Fasman. Jon is a senior reporter at The Economist for 15 years. He holds a Master of Philosophy from Oxford. His writing has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, and The Washington Post.

We See It All: Liberty and Justice in an Age of Perpetual Surveillance

Jon is revealing how current laws and policies are too far behind the times regarding next generation technologies. Ultimately, Jon asks for the public to hold government at the federal, state, and local levels accountable to protect privacy rights and liberty of their citizens.

In fact, this book’s investigation into the legal, political, and moral issues surrounding how law enforcement, including courts utilize surveillance systems confronts the citizen of any country reveals that citizens may live in a free country in the name of safety.

This has certainly escalated rapidly since 9/11. Issues of next generation system already deployed impact privacy and the rights of citizens.

Jon is addressing such topics as moral, legal, and political that are now generating data by advanced tools. For example scanning technologies including facial recognition, license-plate readers are triggering activity by law enforcement.

This certainly book draws similar outcomes to The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, and Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet by Yasha Levine. Law enforcement use of technologies results in higher ticket and arrest data in unique zip codes across major metropolitan areas.

Continue reading “Latest Read: We See It All”
Categories
Education Reading Technology

Latest Read: Permanent Record

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden. Ed’s story moves from his early childhood to his military service post 9/11, to his role implementing technology surveillance for the CIA and NSA.

After sustaining stress fractures in both legs during special forces training he left the military. In fact, Edward then joined the NSA as a contractor in 2006. The following year he was stationed at the CIA office in Geneva Switzerland with diplomatic cover.

Yet, after six years of work within our country’s intelligence communities Edward became a whistleblower by leaking files revealing a global surveillance network was being conducted not only against America’s enemies in the new war on terror, but also against American citizen.

However, his real message is in fact, the most advanced technologies leveraged by the government are used against America’s enemies AND against our fellow citizens. Edward certainly documents how the United States government was able to collect every single phone call, text message, and email from every US Citizen. This results in a new, unprecedented (and certainly mind boggling) mass surveillance across the entire globe.

Continue reading “Latest Read: Permanent Record”