The government's obsession with your face

The Week June 18, 2018

The government is obsessed with your face. Do not be flattered. This is more of a creepy stalker fixation.

From the federal Department of Homeland Security down to local police departments, governmental use of biometric facial recognition software has gained a startling amount of traction in recent years. And these agencies are getting help from big business, to boot.

For example, DHS is reportedly developing a massive new biometric and biographic database with extensive data on citizens and foreigners alike. The Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) database will reportedly include at least seven biometric identifiers, including face and voice data, tattoos, DNA, scars, and other "physical descriptors" on as many as 500 million people. The agency has been remarkably hush-hush on how HART will be utilized — but the possibilities are frightening.

DHS expects to launch the new database next fiscal year, according to internal documents. By the following year, they anticipate having iris and facial matching capabilities, and by fiscal year 2021, the database is expected to be functioning in its full capacity. This massive and intrusive initiative will grant a whole host of federal, state, and local agencies access to intimate details about hundreds of millions of Americans and foreigners.

Social media companies have built up a massive censorship apparatus capable of seamlessly monitoring, tracking, and blocking millions of pieces of content.

WSWS 18 January 2018

Behind the backs of the US and world populations, social media companies have built up a massive censorship apparatus staffed by an army of “content reviewers” capable of seamlessly monitoring, tracking, and blocking millions of pieces of content.

Armed with increasingly powerful artificial intelligence systems, these technology companies are free to remove and block the communications of their users at the behest of the government, in a seamless alliance between Silicon Valley and the major US spy agencies.

Facebook began testing new tools to carry out its "censorship plan" with the convenient name of "tackling fake news"

Guilherme Schneider
One of the tools being tested will enable users to inform Facebook if certain news stories are using “misleading language”. Some users posted images of a Facebook survey asking them the following question: “To what extent do you think that this link’s title withholds key details of the story?”.

It is still unclear what kind of actions will be carried out after this additional user data is collected, but it is likely that some sort of a database, containing the list of “misleading” news websites, will be generated.

In a not so distant past, content curators from Facebook confirmed that they received direct orders from the company to decrease the relevance or even hide from the newsfeed stories and content with conservative language. While this happened in the US, similar stories have been reported in Brazil, the United Kingdom around the time of the Brexit, and in other countries.

Recently, there were other reports that Facebook developed a special software for the Chinese market, that would enable “third parties” to authorize the contents before posting it to the users’ timelines. The initiative would aim to lift the current ban of the social network in the country.

The main difference between this new software and the current content restrictions in some countries is that instead of reacting to a government request to hide some specific content, Facebook would be giving the option to some parties to censor and take down content before it is even posted on the network.

It is true that when you create a profile on Facebook or any other social network, you have to accept their terms and conditions in exchange of the “non-paid” use of their platforms. Most of these terms and conditions allow the social networks to analyze the information you are publishing and reading for several proposes, including targeted advertisements and many others, but is it ethical to take advantage of this information in order to define what content you should or should not see?

Since Snowden’s NSA information leak we know that we can be monitored at any given time by government agencies. The realization of this fact, however, didn’t stop us from using the same networks, nor did it prompt the closure of the NSA or other agencies involved in the perpetual recording and storage of our data.

But now we are entering a whole new level in which companies and governments will attempt to define what is right and wrong for us to see, read and talk about. What’s even more bizarre is that the CEO of Facebook could potentially run for office, while retaining control over one of the most popular social networks in the world, with the capability of retrieving and accessing anyone’s data without any sort of legal process or request.

This Orwellian trend is truly scary and we should really start questioning ourselves about the extent to which we are willing to continue handing out personal data and information to these networks.    The Duran

AT&T Is Spying on Americans for Profit and doing NSA-style work for law enforcement—without a warrant

Kenneth Lipp10.25.16 1:13 AM ET

On Nov. 11, 2013, Victorville, California, sheriff’s deputies and a coroner responded to a motorcyclist’s report of human remains outside of town.

They identified the partially bleached skull of a child, and later discovered the remains of the McStay family who had been missing for the past three years. Joseph, 40, his wife Summer, 43, Gianni, 4, and Joseph Jr., 3, had been bludgeoned to death and buried in shallow graves in the desert.

Investigators long suspected Charles Merritt in the family’s disappearance, interviewing him days after they went missing. Merritt was McStay’s business partner and the last person known to see him alive. Merritt had also borrowed $30,000 from McStay to cover a gambling debt, a mutual business partner told police. None of it was enough to make an arrest.

Even after the gravesite was discovered and McStay’s DNA was found inside Merritt’s vehicle, police were far from pinning the quadruple homicide on him.

Until they turned to Project Hemisphere.

Hemisphere is a secretive program run by AT&T that searches trillions of call records and analyzes cellular data to determine where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why.

“Merritt was in a position to access the cellular telephone tower northeast of the McStay family gravesite on February 6th, 2010, two days after the family disappeared,” an affidavit for his girlfriend’s call records reports Hemisphere finding (PDF). Merritt was arrested almost a year to the date after the McStay family’s remains were discovered, and is awaiting trial for the murders.

In 2013, Hemisphere was revealed by The New York Times and described only within a Powerpoint presentation made by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The Times described it as a “partnership” between AT&T and the U.S. government; the Justice Department said it was an essential, and prudently deployed, counter-narcotics tool.

However, AT&T’s own documentation—reported here by The Daily Beast for the first time—shows Hemisphere was used far beyond the war on drugs to include everything from investigations of homicide to Medicaid fraud.

Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public.

These new revelations come as the company seeks to acquire Time Warner in the face of vocal opposition saying the deal would be bad for consumers. Donald Trump told supporters over the weekend he would kill the acquisition if he’s elected president; Hillary Clinton has urged regulators to scrutinize the deal.

While telecommunications companies are legally obligated to hand over records, AT&T appears to have gone much further to make the enterprise profitable, according to ACLU technology policy analyst Christopher Soghoian.

“Companies have to give this data to law enforcement upon request, if they have it. AT&T doesn’t have to data-mine its database to help police come up with new numbers to investigate,” Soghoian said.

AT&T has a unique power to extract information from its metadata because it retains so much of it. The company owns more than three-quarters of U.S. landline switches, and the second largest share of the nation’s wireless infrastructure and cellphone towers, behind Verizon. AT&T retains its cell tower data going back to July 2008, longer than other providers. Verizon holds records for a year and Sprint for 18 months, according to a 2011 retention schedule obtained by The Daily Beast.         Read More

Silicon Valley appears open to helping US spy agencies after terrorism summit

Obama administration acknowledges ‘complicated first amendment issues’ after top counter-terrorism officials traveled to California to woo technology executives from companies including Apple, Facebook and Twitter

Technology giants appeared to be open to helping the US government combat Islamic State during an extraordinary closed-door summit on Friday that brought together America’s most senior counter-terrorism officials with some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful executives.

The remarkable rendezvous between Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and others and a delegation from the White House revealed a willingness on the part of tech firms to work with the government, and indicated that the Obama administration appears to have concluded it can’t combat terrorists online on its own.

Top officials – including National Security Agency director Michael Rogers, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and FBI director James Comey – appeared to want to know how they could launch a social media campaign to discredit Isis, a person familiar with the conversation said.

A briefing document sent to tech executives Friday morning in advance of the meeting and shared with the Guardian laid out a wish list from the government delegation, which included America’s most senior spy, director of national intelligence James Clapper.

“We are interested in exploring all options with you for how to deal with the growing threat of terrorists and other malicious actors using technology, including encrypted technology,” the briefing document said. “Are there technologies that could make it harder for terrorists to use the internet to mobilize, facilitate, and operationalize?”

Despite recent fights over civil liberties, encryption, and surveillance, tech executives appeared receptive to this message, according to sources familiar with conversations at the meeting.

This meeting confirmed that we are united in our goal to keep terrorists and terror-promoting material off the Internet.

Facebook spokeswoman

“I was pleasantly surprised by the tone of the conversation,” said one attendee, Matthew Prince, chief executive of CloudFlare, a San Francisco-based security and network company. Christopher Young, head of Intel’s security group, who was also in the room, added it was “a good discussion today”.

In Washington earlier, White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters “many of these technology companies that are participating in the meeting today are run by patriotic Americans” and would want to cooperate.

Earnest acknowledged there are “obviously a lot of complicated first amendment issues and other things” but added: “you know, our sense here is that there’s some common ground that we should be able to find”.

One area of discussion was over how a system used by Facebook to deal with users at risk of suicide could serve as a model for identifying terrorist sympathizers.

The social network’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, walked government officials through how Facebook currently enables users to flag people who appear to be posting suicidal thoughts, a person familiar with the conversation said. The government officials in the room wondered if such a system could be used to flag terrorist content or detect a user who appears to be radicalizing, added the person, declining to be quoted on the record.

“This meeting confirmed that we are united in our goal to keep terrorists and terror-promoting material off the Internet,” a Facebook spokeswoman said. “Facebook does not tolerate terrorists or terror propaganda.”

It wasn’t all agreement. At another point, Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook told the government it needs to state publicly that it supports strong encryption. Over the past year, Apple has faced repeated attacks from the FBI for selling products that, officials say, criminals could use to communicate in secret.

Other technology companies present included LinkedIn, DropBox, YouTube, Yahoo and PayPal.

This was not the first time such a senior delegation has traveled to Silicon Valley, but the attempt by America’s leading counter-terrorism officials to court tech executives was an unusual sight.

Flanked by Secret Service agents, secretary of homeland security Jeh Johnson and McDonough smiled as they popped out for a Starbucks run about 20 minutes before the scheduled 11am start of a meeting in San Jose, California.

The top Obama administration officials walked past a Mexican restaurant; a sign on an office window describes the region as “the world’s innovation incubator”. Moments later, Johnson was seen shaking hands with Drew Houston, founder and CEO of Dropbox.

No tech executive would want to be seen supporting terrorism online, but the government’s ask is trickier than it may seem.

Ideally, the Obama administration wants technology companies to be able to find terrorists on social media and chat apps for them, current and former US officials said. This would involve piecing together communications networks and message content to map terrorist cells. The government’s assumption, these people said, is that technology firms are doing much of this anyway for business purposes.

However, since Edward Snowden leaked western government secrets to the Guardian and other outlets in 2013, Silicon Valley has become increasingly cautious about seeming too cozy with Washington’s three-letter agencies.

Government requests also raise legal issues. Under current US law, tech firms only are supposed to share user content with authorities if faced with a court order for a specific user or there is a credible, immediate threat of harm.

“It’s a very fine line to get that information,” said Andre McGregor, a former FBI terrorism investigator and now director of security at Tanium Inc, a Silicon Valley security company. “You’re essentially trying to take what is in someone’s head and determine whether or not there’s going to be some violent physical reaction associated with it.”

Companies provide some voluntary assistance now – such as when it removed a Facebook page last month linked to the shootings in San Bernardino – but it’s unclear how much further they would go.

The government also appears conscious of the risks. In the briefing document sent to tech executives before the meeting it asked if any terrorist content flagging system “were clearly independent from government involvement, would that increase its viability”.

They also face competing demands from different US officials. Public-facing politicians – such as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the respective Democratic and Republican presidential frontrunners – have called on technology companies to effectively kick terrorists off the internet. That’s impossible, the companies respond.

Others, such as those inside the FBI and NSA, sometimes want American firms to keep terrorist accounts up – and keep authorities in the loop.

“It’s a no-brainer to keep Isis using US products,” said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union and a privacy advocate. Soghoian countered however that it’s up to the government to find terrorists online and it would be impractical to ask companies to do it.

Referring to the armies of overseas contractors tech companies use to police social media he said, “are you going to entrust that decision to someone getting paid $2 an hour in the Philippines?”

After the meeting wrapped up, the nation’s top spies demonstrated their skills of evasion. Attendees slipped out various side doors. Others exited the building. None were available to comment.     The Guardian

Microsoft Windows 10 is spying on you

 

Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 10, is loved by Windows users. This being the fact, there has always been speculations about Windows 10 being not as good as it seems. Why? Because of speculations that Microsoft must be spying on Windows 10 users and collecting data through Windows 10 devices.

Ever since the OS has been out, Microsoft gives away figures every other day to prove how much people love Windows 10. When the figures were all about installation of Windows 10 on devices (on desktops, laptops, Xbox One or Lumia phones), things were fine. But what if I tell you Microsoft is tracking your activities and collecting personal data as well? Giving out latest details to prove how successful their OS is, Microsoft has indirectly confirmed the spying.

Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft, recently said, “One of the ways we measure our progress with Windows 10 is looking at how people are using Windows. Recently we reached another milestone – people have spent over 11 billion hours on Windows 10 in December alone, spending more time on Windows than ever before.” Without realizing that he is confirming speculations that can go against Windows 10 and its devices, he further said, “Here are a few fun facts on what people have been doing on Windows 10” Let us have a look at the FUN FACTS, so that we know if there really is fun for us in store:

1. In the month of December 2015, 44.5 billion minutes and more were reportedly spent in Microsoft Edge.
2. Cortana was asked over 2.5 billion questions since the launch.
3. Xbox One: Over 6.6 million hours of games were streamed.
4. In the Windows 10 Photo App, over 82 billion photos were viewed.
5. In 2015, gamers played PC games on Windows 10 devices for over 4 billion hours.

So, Microsoft is not only keeping itself updated about the installation of Windows 10 on different devices, but is also tracking every single activity of its users. Asking Cortana a question? Microsoft tracks it. Playing a game? Microsoft tracks it, too. Is this the dirty side of the free Windows 10 upgrade that everyone talks about? Is this all? Or with time, will more shocking stats and news be put forth?       Morningnewsusa