Interesting how laws that do not directly address privacy can still be of concern to privacy advocates.
https://www.bespacific.com/how-a-digital-abortion-footprint-could-lead-to-criminal-charges/
How a Digital Abortion Footprint Could Lead to Criminal Charges
TIME: “Getting away with breaking the law in the digital age is tricky. Almost everything one does—whether it’s making a Google search for “how to clean up a crime scene,” purchasing suspicious items on Amazon, or merely having been in the proximity of a crime scene with a cell phone that had its location services turned on—can be discovered via court-issued warrant and lead to charges and convictions. If Roe v. Wade is overturned—as a draft of a Supreme Court opinion signaled it might be— soon having or helping procure an abortion could become a crime in some states. And that means individuals’ personal internet data could be collected and used against them if they seek or facilitate a pregnancy termination. “Your geolocation data, apps for contraception, web searches, phone records—all of it is open season for generating data to weaponize the personal information of women across the country,” Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and longtime proponent of digital privacy reform, tells TIME. In states that not only outlaw but criminalize abortion—a move that Louisiana is considering adopting after a final decision from the Supreme Court —a pregnant woman’s digital search of abortion-inducing medication, online purchase of pregnancy tests, or email request for financial support to a pro-abortion resource group could be deployed against her in criminal proceedings. In states that criminalize assisting in abortions, data revealing frequent trips to a reproductive health clinic could also be used. “Everything we do is traceable,” says Bennett Capers, a visiting criminal law professor at Yale University and full professor at Fordham’s law school. “Once getting an abortion is illegal, then attempting to get an abortion is also illegal.” In recent years, several Democratic lawmakers have introduced legislation to bring America’s digital privacy laws into the 21st century and enshrine safeguards against the unfettered collection of individuals’ personal data by governments and companies for criminal surveillance and corporate profit. Now, Wyden and his colleagues are pushing with renewed urgency to get those bills passed, hoping the leak of the draft opinion spurs Congress to action with the Supreme Court’s final decision anticipated to come down in the next two months. “A lot of privacy rules are from the Dark Ages,” Wyden says. “The SCOTUS prospects certainly drive home the real world consequences of the law not keeping up with the time.”…
Your face on Post Office walls throughout America?
U.S. cities are backing off banning facial recognition as crime rises
Facial recognition is making a comeback in the United States as bans to thwart the technology and curb racial bias in policing come under threat amid a surge in crime and increased lobbying from developers.
Virginia in July will eliminate its prohibition on local police use of facial recognition a year after approving it, and California and the city of New Orleans as soon as this month could be next to hit the undo button.
… Efforts to get bans in place are meeting resistance in jurisdictions big and small from New York and Colorado to West Lafayette, Indiana. Even Vermont, the last state left with a near-100% ban against police facial-recognition use, chipped away at its law last year to allow for investigating child sex crimes.
Not all bangs are gunshots? Imagine that.
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/news/shotspotters-deafening-impact/
ShotSpotter’s deafening impact
Before last March, you might not have heard of ShotSpotter. That month, news of 13-year-old Adam Toledo’s killing by a police officer in Little Village rang through Chicago just as resoundingly as the alleged noise of gunshots that brought cops to his location in the first place.
Almost as soon as the news of Toledo’s death broke, activists began raising questions about the private gunshot-detection system that summoned police to the scene. That summer, the activists’ voices grew even louder when it became public that the city had quietly extended its $33 million, three-year contract with ShotSpotter by another two years, through August 2023.
ShotSpotter markets its technology as a “proactive” tool that hears gunshots and gets police to potential crime scenes faster than 911 calls.
But sound is a tricky thing. It travels, echoes, and reverberates, and can be muffled, distorted, or unclear. How can ShotSpotter sensors tell the difference between a gunshot or firework? They apparently can’t—at least not as accurately as the company has publicly asserted. And there is little evidence to suggest that the Chicago police (CPD) or ShotSpotter test the devices to see how they register different loud noises once deployed.
ShotSpotter’s primary purpose is to hear gunshots, but according to a report published by the city’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) last August, only 9.1 percent of alerts generated between January 1, 2020, and May 31, 2021, actually resulted in police finding evidence of a gun crime. And a 2011 study commissioned by the company found that trucks, motorcycles, helicopters, fireworks, construction, trash pickup, and church bells, among other sounds, have all triggered false positive alerts, mistaking these sounds for gunshots.
Clearly true?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/12/why-mark-cuban-predicts-ai-will-dominate-the-future-workplace.html
Mark Cuban predicts AI will dominate the future workplace: To be successful, ‘you’re going to have to understand it’
… “There’s two types of companies: those who are great at AI and everybody else,” Cuban said. “And you don’t necessarily have to be great at AI to start a company, but at some point, you’re going to have to understand it. It’s just like the early days of PCs. You didn’t have to be good at PCs, but it helped. Then networks, then the internet, then mobile.”
In Ye Olden Days (when I was working as an Analyst) Open Source always seemed to come after our other sources. Perhaps the Internet changed that?
Spy agencies look to standardize use of open source intelligence
Intelligence agencies are starting to coalesce around a set of common standards and data for using open source intelligence, but challenges remain in boosting the use of OSINT throughout the intelligence community.
Patrice Tibbs, chief of community open source at the CIA, said open source has “proven itself over and over,” especially given current events like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. OSINT is generally defined as unclassified information, often publicly available, like data gleaned from social media feeds.
… “I think more and more of our customers and personnel realize the value of open source,” he said. “They also get it first, frankly, in many cases. It’s very immediate. . . . It wasn’t possible 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, for information to be that widespread, immediately available to anyone who has a mobile device, or computer at their desk. So I think a lot of our customers, and our all source analysts and other collectors are getting much more comfortable with relying on open source early and often.”
(Related)
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/13/cyberspace_is_first_theatre_of_war/
'Peacetime in cyberspace is a chaotic environment' says senior US advisor
The internet is now the first battleground of any new war – before the shooting starts
Cyber war has become an emerged aspect of broader armed conflicts, commencing before the first shot is fired, cybersecurity expert Kenneth Geers told the audience at the Black Hat Asia conference on Friday.
… Geers said the Russia-Ukraine war demonstrates how electronic and kinetic conflicts interact. Ahead of the Ukraine invasion, Russia severed network cables, commandeered satellites, whitewashed Wikipedia, and targeted military ops via mobile phone geolocations.
Geers highlighted that Russia's DDoS attack on the Ukraine began 10 days before its soldiers invaded on February 24. A day before the official war began, Russian cybersecurity operations began to execute wiper attacks, targeting Ukrainian systems and deleting its data.
That same day, February 23, the "psyops" began. These psychological operations included misinformation in the form text messages sent to Ukrainian soldiers that they should surrender, messages to citizens about non-functioning ATMs creating bank panic, and even deepfakes of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky surrendering.
No comments:
Post a Comment