The spy agency has relied more on facial-recognition technology in the past four years as a result of new software that can process the flood of digital communications such as emails, text messages and even video conferences, according to the documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
They say it is only used for images sent/received from outside the U.S.A.
Yeah, right.
It’s becoming quite amusing how as time goes bymore and more of those “crazy tinfoil hat” guys are being proven right. I will not be surprised when the next headline reads “NSA can tap into cell phone cameras at any time” and all of those guys putting tape over their cameras go ‘ha’
All Police Departments have access to facial recognition which link into the home states Drivers license data base, Arrest, Release and Probation data. The Facial Rec programs are very easy to use and any Internet posted or security camera captured image can be used to compare against the data base.
You know there are several entities that can and do access your camera and microphone already?
I keep the camera covered with a piece of medical tape and I unplug my battery at night. I’m not really too worried about PERSEC anymore as I’ve pretty much resigned to a life of boring normality. But still the idea just weirds me out.
Pretty much this from the way things have been going:
Not really, but it’s a little disheartening to hear all the power brokers auctioning off privacy by pushing fear. You can argue that “privacy is not a right” all you want, but it’s still an intangible thing that holds great value to many people. People like Rep. Peter King have based their entire careers on stealing privacy from Americans, and justifying this by saying it hurts no one. Personally, I want a key to Pete’s house and written authorization to enter any time I choose. I’ll agree to touch nothing and not interact in any way. I’ll just stand quietly and observe him and his family. Since I’m not taking anything tangible from him, nor impeding him in any way, he should be OK with that, right?
It’s easy to get all the FR data you need. People are way to eager to post pics of themselves online. FB even runs FR programs. This should not be a surprise. Even my wife deleted her FB account. Every wireless communication world wide is recorded.
That anyone believes this technology won’t be abused by an over reaching government still amazes me.
If they can, they will. Governments aren’t known for exercising restraint or stopping and saying “Is this right what we are doing?” They just do it. If they are caught they defend their actions, if they can’t defend their actions they form a Congressional investigative team to “look into it.”
If Snowden didn’t dime them out, it would be business as usual at the NSA. And quite frankly, it’s still business as usual at the NSA.
We are currently living under a surveillance state, next stop . . . police state.
“It’s really a turnkey situation where it can be turned quickly and become a totalitarian state pretty quickly. The capacity to do that is being set up. If we get the wrong person in office or in government they could make that happen quickly.”
– William Binney former NSA Technical Director/40 Veteran of the NSA
“The only way to have perfect security is to have a perfect surveillance state. That’s George Orwell, that’s 1984 . . . that’s what the world would look like".
– Thomas Drake former NSA Senior Official and Information Privacy Advocate
This! Only right-wing tinfoil hat, racist, militia types want liberty and privacy!
You don’t want to be…ONE OF THEM, now do you?
It’s funny how they like to marginalize anyone who would be against incessant government snooping.
My issue with programs like these, is that, imagine that they stay in place, and they will, and someone magnitudes worse than Obama ascends to the Presidency.
Tell me that shit won’t be abused?
Tell me we won’t be kicking ourselves for not crying foul sooner…
This kind of bullshit has been going on for a long time; since PROMIS, and CARNIVORE, and ECHELON. People prior to Edward Snowden were ringing Freedom’s bell well over a decade before this became “news”, the problem is that, we as a society preferred to ignore the ringing.
we have already entered the police state hahaahah
sad to laugh but I think some of that has crept in already from IRS targeting to releasing of certain prisoners to the massive amount of check points we hear about and the abuse of some of those at those check points and just the plain militarization of our police to even the dept of educations police force etc…
U.S. revives group to fight homegrown extremists: officials
By Julia Edwards
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is re-establishing a law enforcement group to fight those it designates as domestic terrorists, with an announcement expected on Tuesday, Department of Justice officials said.
Following hate-motivated shootings such as the one at a Jewish Community Center in Kansas City, Missouri in April, federal prosecutors have pressed the need to coordinate intelligence of such criminals on a national level, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The group will coordinate cases that involve Americans who may be spurred to violence for political or prejudicial reasons.
It will include representatives of the FBI, the National Security Division of the Justice Department and the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee, which includes representatives of federal prosecutors.
Then Attorney General Janet Reno first established such a task force following the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, but it was dismantled after the Sept. 11, 2001 hijacked-plane attacks as the agencies turned their attention toward threats from abroad.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder signed a memorandum last month reconstituting the group and will announce the details on Tuesday, one official said.
Events like the April 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon, in which the attackers appeared to be influenced by extremist groups abroad, would not fall under the committee’s jurisdiction.
And I’m sure it’s purely coincidence that the two “domestic terrorists acts” used as justification to reform Reno/Holder Team America were well known by the Feds one being a ****ing informant with a new identity under WITSEC.
Well I suppose if they are, perhaps they’ll see this and maybe not look so often anymore.
Hope that shows up really big on their screen while they’re eating dinner and watching this.
James Robert Jones, convicted of murder in 1974, escaped from Leavenworth in 1977, arrested in March of this year in Miami thanks to facial recognition software. The future is NOW.
I was reading the old late 90s “SpyCounterspy” website stuff recently. Whether or not that writer was nonsense isn’t the discussion. A few years ago the stuff he was talking about would have sounded extremely tinfoily. Fast forward to 2014 and he was absolutely nailing it.
Facial recognition is a huge growth industry by not just governments but retailers. They want to track you as move about the store and they can target you for advertising. It also helps the store track how people shop for better product placement.
Just creating an example but say you go to BestBuy and spend a few minutes looking at an item but put it down and leave without buying anything. With loyalty cards or credit card purchases or some other way they tagged you in their database. Then you go online and look for the same item or similar items. You could get ads from BestBuy for the item you we’re looking at or similar items. They already do this with cookies and tracking peoples viewing habits. Now they’re bringing the same thing if you look at certain items in brick and mortar stores.
Cell phones are tracking devices and are another way to see who’s in their store, and there are quite a few large marketing databases out there that have information on just about all of us. There was a story where Target knew a girl was pregnant before she did. All of this is down to a science. There’s a reason Google and Facebook are multi billion dollar companies. 90% of Google’s latest quarterly profits were from advertising.
As far as governments go all this will be done under the guise of fighting crime and terrorism which is one thing but all this tech is going in a big net which we’re all getting caught up in. They might not have a reason to get in your life today but they may in a year, five years, or 20 years from now. Then they just pull you up in their system and can have years of travel habits, pictures you posted 15 years ago, who you’ve called in the last decade, your email contacts, where you spend money at…basically your entire life is at someone’s fingertips which can all then be used against you. Information can be shaped to portray you in a certain way.
This has consequences for us as gun owners. It’s not just a murderer who escaped from prison or people on the no fly list or in some counter terrorism database. Just wait until you buy too many guns or you posted something online while heated or a gun ban is passed in your state and you’re already identified as someone who owns now banned guns. Information is power and this big net the gov has created might seem like it doesn’t apply to you now but it very may well one day. We don’t know what’s in store for us 10 years or 20 years from now. Look at the IRS situation and if their cameras pick you up at a Tea Party rally or gun rights rally that could be used against you. They learned from this situation to be more under the radar next time. They aren’t going to stop. They made a mistake that will be harder to prove next time. The IRS was behind the technology curve in networking personal connections between people out and identifying activities. They won’t be next time since they got bit by that this time.
