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Surprise! The FBI has been involved in warrantless surveillance! But that's not particularly surprising; we've known that for a while now (even in some pundits like to pretend as if it's absolutely unprecedented when the FBI occasionally stops monitoring Muslims, Black rights, and environmental activists and turns their attention to money laundering networks surrounding right-wing politicians). — Read the rest
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | kontekbrothers)
The US Supreme Court yesterday denied a petition to review a case involving the National Security Agency's surveillance of Internet traffic, leaving in place a lower-court ruling that invoked "state secrets privilege" to dismiss the lawsuit.
The NSA surveillance was challenged by the Wikimedia Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. The Supreme Court's denial of Wikimedia's petition for review (formally known as "certoriari") was confirmed in a long list of decisions released yesterday.
"As a final development in our case, Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA, the United States Supreme Court denied our petition asking for a review of the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance of Internet communications and activities. This denial represents a big hit to both privacy and freedom of expression," the Wikimedia Foundation said yesterday.
Enlarge (credit: Andrea Nissotti / EyeEm)
On Saturday afternoon, US jets intercepted the Chinese surveillance balloon as it was leaving the continental US. Live footage of the event shows contrails of aircraft approaching the balloon, followed by a puff of smoke that may indicate the explosion of some ordnance near the balloon's envelope—a reporter is heard saying "they just shot it" in the video embedded below. The envelope clearly loses structural integrity shortly afterwards as it plunges towards the ocean. Reportedly, the events took place near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Here's video of it being shot down near Myrtle Beach via Katie Herrmann #ChineseSpyBalloon pic.twitter.com/KmT9rL2bR7
— Brad Panovich (@wxbrad) February 4, 2023
Shortly afterwards, the US Department of Defense (DOD) released a statement attributed to its Secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, that confirmed the interception was performed by US fighter jets on the order of President Biden. The DOD identifies the hardware as a "high altitude surveillance balloon," and says that the President authorized shooting it down as early as Wednesday. The military, however, determined that this could not be done without posing a risk to US citizens, either due to debris from the balloon itself, or from the ordnance used to destroy it.
As a result, the military waited until the balloon was far enough offshore to no longer pose a risk to land, but close enough that it would fall within US territorial waters, ensuring that the country would be the first to recover any hardware that survived the plunge into the sea. Secretary Austin also thanked Canada for its assistance in tracking and intercepting the balloon through the countries' cooperative North American defense organization, NORAD.
Telegram, the messaging app created by Saint Petersburg native Pavel Durov, is said to be private and secure. So why does the Russian government seem to be able to read anything people share on it? At Wired, Darren Loucaides investigates.
Russians needed to consider the possibility that Telegram, the supposedly antiauthoritarian app cofounded by the mercurial Saint Petersburg native Pavel Durov, was now complying with the Kremlin’s legal requests.
Over the past year, numerous dissidents across Russia have found their Telegram accounts seemingly monitored or compromised. Hundreds have had their Telegram activity wielded against them in criminal cases. Perhaps most disturbingly, some activists have found their “secret chats”—Telegram’s purportedly ironclad, end-to-end encrypted feature—behaving strangely, in ways that suggest an unwelcome third party might be eavesdropping.
When Telegram emerged as one of the last remaining oases of information and discussion for Russians, it also became a kind of funnel for Kremlin agents. Agora’s Seleznev believes that Telegram’s API allows investigators to monitor public groups at a large scale and then zero in on potential suspects, who can subsequently be pursued into private channels by undercover agents—or perhaps via a court order to Telegram.
Each day, 50,000 people enter Disney’s theme parks, along with their phones, purchases, locations, and photos. What happens to the data?
The post Data Free Disney appeared first on Public Books.
Enlarge / A bathroom on an Airbus A321neo. (credit: Getty | Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto)
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is considering blending sewage sampling from airplanes into its wastewater surveillance system, which has proven useful for monitoring the spread and prevalence of a variety of pathogens, particularly SARS-CoV-2.
Amid the pandemic, the CDC launched wastewater testing programs across the nation, trying to get ahead of SARS-CoV-2 surges. Viral particles are often shed in fecal matter and can be an early indication of an infection. The fecal focus has proven useful for sniffing out community-wide transmission trends and disease spread for not only COVID-19 but also other recent outbreaks as well, namely polio and mpox (formerly monkeypox). Adding surveillance from airplanes and airports could flush out yet more information about infectious disease spread, such as global travel patterns and the debut of novel viral variants.
A study published last week in PLOS Global Public Health found such sewage surveillance in UK airport terminals and airplanes was effective at tracking SARS-CoV-2 among international travelers. Overall, the surveillance data suggested that it is a "useful tool for monitoring the global transfer rate of human pathogens and other disease-causing agents across international borders and should form part of wider international efforts to monitor and contain the spread of future disease outbreaks," the authors, led by Kata Farkas of Bangor University, concluded.
Over the weekend I launched Ring Log, which is simultaneously a critique of surveillance culture and a parody of machine vision in suburbia. In the interactive artist statement I call Ring Log an experiment in speculative surveillance.
“Speculative” in this context means what if?
What if Amazon’s Ring doorbell cams began integrating AI-powered object detection in order to identify, catalog, and report what the cameras “see” as they passively await for friends, neighbors, and strangers alike to visit your home? This is the question Ring Log asks. And, given the season (I write this on October 29, 2019), what would the cameras see and report on Halloween, when many of the figures that appear on your front stoop defy categorization?
I dive into the technical details and my inspirations in the artist statement, so no need to repeat myself here. I will add that I was very much inspired by an old Twilight Zone episode, even including several Easter Eggs to that effect. I was also inspired by the ridiculous posts I see on NextDoor, where paranoid neighbors routinely share Ring videos of “suspicious” visitors to their houses. Finally, I’m in debt to Everest Pipkin, whose work “What if Jupiter had turned into a Star” provided some of the underlying JavaScript effects for Ring Log. Everest’s work, like my own, appears with a permissive copyright license that allows for the reuse and modification of the code. Wouldn’t it be awesome if creative coders borrowed from Jupiter and Ring Log and made their own adaptations of these works, similar to what happened with Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge?
(Yeah, that’s a hint about what my students will be doing in my Electronic Literature course next semester!)
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