Pokemon Go is sweeping the nation and the world. Anecdotes and human interest stories abound. Like somebody who has been chasing some rare thing they can only see on their phone for hours, the public has Pokemania fatigue.
On February 24, Vice's Motherboard tech blog announced that it had discovered the FBI hacking the Tor online privacy network with a generous amount of assistance from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Motherboard's research into this attack and the resultant court cases spans six thorough articles on this topic going back to November 2015. Despite their respectable efforts, there are stones yet unturned, as the case is a metaphorical rock garden of discovery. A few more stones will be flipped below and turned into dots that connect.
The Iraq and Afganistan wars produced multiple ways to watch an occupied civilian population. One of the more notable, a blimp bearing the Kestrel camera system, has already been adapted by Google to provide 4G cellular connectivity in the third world. Closer to home, law enforcement has found that there is more than one way that a Kestrel flies. Meet Miami Valley's own Persistant Surveillance Systems (PSS).
There is a hidden problem in warfare when it comes to information. You can actually have too much of it. It is an extension of the “can't see the forest thru the trees.” cliché. Having too much information can lead one to overlook which bit of information is important, or when a bit becomes important. That happened to Edward Snowden last night on twitter, literally right in front of me, and I could do nothing but hit [prt sc] and ponder the gravity of it.
Sometimes I have difficulty writing headlines that don't reference livestock excrement so directly as to invalidate a story. That difficulty increases when it involves any statement made by the head of a police or espionage agency. Spies are liars. This is what they are paid for. Deception is the center of the profession of espionage and the FBI is a spy agency that occasionally dabbles in law enforcement.
Google has been generating a lot of press as of late with their efforts to provide connectivity to the rural third world. Both their drone based project, which will compete with Facebook's, and their balloon based Project Loon, leverage technology to provide connectivity from via high-altitude, long endurance platforms. Both have deep privacy implications and Project Loon's original DNA and connections have roots in America's endless counterinsurgency struggle in the Middle East.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation(EFF) has launched a lawsuit against the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency(DEA) in federal district court in California, after the DEA was revealed to have been spying on Americans since 1992. The suit, filed last week on behalf of Human Rights Watch, claims the safety and privacy of its workers and activists abroad were violated when the program illegally collected records of the organization’s telephone calls to foreign countries.
Shocking revelations by the London based Bureau of Investigative Journalism raise questions about how much power has been given over to private military contractors who, according to an examination of over 8 million documents, collect, process and analyze much of the intelligence that leads to military drone strikes – muddying the distinction between the national chain of command and corporate contractor mercenaries, when life or death targeting choices are weighe
A Washington Post article on May 5 stated that that the FBI had conducted secret surveillance flights over Baltimore during the recent protests against the police murder of Freddie Gray. Ars Technica also covered the story and covered aviation enthusiasts efforts to track the aircraft's flight patterns, registration and speculated some on their capabilities. The revealed result was the outer edge of a secret air force that rivals size of those belonging to small European nations.
