Since 2016, Sacramento County officials have been accessing license plate reader data to track welfare recipients suspected of fraud, the Sacramento Bee reported over the weekend.
The TSA admitted to surveilling about 5,000 citizens this year as part of its secretive “Quiet Skies” program, which places travelers on TSA watch lists even if they aren’t suspected of a crime, the Boston Globe reports. In a meeting with members of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee last week…
Less than a week after a damaging report exposed substantial flaws in facial recognition technology marketed to law enforcement by Amazon, five Democratic lawmakers are calling for an investigation into the commercial and government use, and potential abuse, of the technology.
Surveillance drones are headed indoors.
Days after the ACLU released a damning report on Amazon’s face recognition product Rekognition, Amazon’s general manager of AI, Dr. Matt Wood, countered its findings in a blog post. The ACLU used Rekognition to scan the faces of all 535 members of Congress, finding the software mistook 28 of them for suspected…
Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, Brad Smith, called for federal regulation of face recognition in a new blog post on Friday. Half of all adults already have their face in a federal database, and vendors are supplying face recognition technology to schools, airports, and baseball stadiums. Federal…
MLB and Clear announced a partnership on Thursday that will soon let baseball fans enter stadiums using fingerprints, and eventually, just their face, instead of tickets.
The Police Foundation doesn’t want the police to call drones “drones.” Because of the public’s association with “military-style weapons like the Predator,” the organization’s 311 page report reads, the term “drone” is “a major obstacle to law enforcement’s ability to convince the public” that police drone programs…
Contrary to earlier reports, Orlando police confirmed Monday they will renew a contract with Amazon to pilot its controversial face recognition software, Rekognition—a move that is sure to reignite concerns of privacy and civil liberties advocates who have pushed back against law enforcement’s use of the technology.
The UK government’s Home Office released a report this week announcing plans for a forthcoming centralized biometric database of its citizens, compiling DNA, fingerprint, face, and possibly even voice data for law enforcement to access and share, according to the Telegraph. In addition to helping local police solve…
In 2017, the NSA had a banner year of spying on Americans, managing to collect three times the number of call records than it did in the previous year. Now, it says there were some “technical irregularities” that resulted in it sucking up data the agency is not allowed to have. Its troubling solution is just to delete…
Face recognition will be used to harm citizens if given to governments or police, writes Brian Brackeen, CEO of the face recognition and AI startup Kairos, in an op-ed published by TechCrunch today. Last week, news broke that bodycam maker Axon requested a partnership with Kairos to explore face recognition. Brackeen…
Body camera manufacturer Axon requested a contract for face recognition software from an artificial intelligence startup, the Wall Street Journal reports, which stands to further fears from privacy advocates about the state of surveillance in America.
Where do you go to tell a secret? Probably depends on the secret. What you’d feel comfortable murmuring to a friend in a private meeting is likely not what you’d say loudly to a coworker while your boss is in earshot. Online, we not only communicate, we calculate—based on who we’re speaking to, or what platform we’re…
Apoidea, welcome to the resistance.
Researchers at Purdue University have found a new way to get surveillance cameras to “talk” to the people they see. The system is called PHADE, which stands for “private human addressing,” and it enables cameras to send messages to people’s devices when they’ve entered a specific area without collecting their personal…
The Australian government is ending its plans for a national biometric database meant to help police departments track suspects and other persons of interest, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission announced Friday. Surveillance and security company NEC was awarded the contract in 2016, but after a…
The Chinese government, in its ongoing pursuit to create the dystopian police state dreamed up in many a science fiction tale, is reportedly readying a new vehicle identification system that will be capable of monitoring the movement of citizens.
Beginning in August, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will begin piloting a new face recognition system at the Mexican border. Using a series of cameras, the CBP plans to use face recognition to remotely check the identifies of both drivers and passengers.
This weekend, news broke in the New York Times that Facebook’s habit of giving extensive user data to third parties extended to “at least 60 device makers” who were granted access to private Facebook APIs over the past decade. The social media giant has been trying to quash the story by insisting developers were only…
