Surveillance State

  By Molly Wood Marketplace Tech (5/22/18) Phone carriers collect a minute-by-minute record of everywhere you go. If you use GPS on your phone, that may be obvious. But carriers are also selling that information to companies that don’t do much to keep it secure. One of those companies, Securus Technologies, was hacked this month. Securus gets its information from a company called LocationSmart. On Friday, security researcher Brian Krebs reported a bug on LocationSmart’s website that would make it possible to track any phone on the four major carriers using only a phone number. Krebs spoke with Marketplace Tech…

Gestapo: the secret police force of the German Nazi state, notorious for its terrorism, brutality, etc. Collins Dictionary ***** White House Seeking Private Funding For Totally “Off The Books” Secret Spy Group Answerable Only To Trump & CIA Head (Editor’s Note: Like a well-oiled Mafia operation, every autocratic regime depends upon private “off-the-books” intelligence and thuggish enforcement forces to track and eliminate any kind of resistance to authoritarian rule. In Nazi Germany it was the Gestapo. Similar private enforcement units can be found working for authoritarian thugs like Donald Trump around the planet. The stories below should be of concern to every American citizen because,…

    By Trévon Austin World Socialist Web Site (9/30/17) The US Department of Justice has issued warrants demanding that Facebook turn over private account information on three individuals described by their attorneys as “anti-administration activists” who “are generally very critical of [the Trump] administration’s policies.” The private account information on thousands of Facebook users could be funneled to the government as a result of the warrants. Facebook received the warrants in February, but was until recently under a gag order barring it from making the warrants known to the targeted individuals or the public. The social media giant has…

TheCommonerCall.org   By Olivia Solon The Guardian (3/13/17) AUSTIN, TX – As artificial intelligence becomes more powerful, people need to make sure it’s not used by authoritarian regimes to centralize power and target certain populations, Microsoft Research’s Kate Crawford warned on Sunday. In her SXSW session, titled Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fascism, Crawford, who studies the social impact of machine learning and large-scale data systems, explained ways that automated systems and their encoded biases can be misused, particularly when they fall into the wrong hands. “Just as we are seeing a step function increase in the spread…