The banking password may be about to expire — forever. Some of the nation’s largest banks, acknowledging that traditional passwords are either too cumbersome or no longer secure, are increasingly using fingerprints, facial scans and other types of biometrics to safeguard accounts. Millions of customers at Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo routinely…
Category: Communications
Surveillance State: The F.B.I.’s Growing Surveillance Gap
There are more homegrown jihadists than the feds can actually watch. And not everyone likes what the FBI is doing instead. A day after Omar Mateen killed 49 and wounded 53 in an Orlando nightclub, purportedly under the banner of the Islamic State or other terrorist groups, the FBI announced that it had repeatedly scrutinized…
Surveillance State: The Olympics are Turning Rio into a Police State
The air is electric in Rio right now, and not just because of the surveillance cameras scattered all around the city Rio’s hundreds of surveillance cameras are easy to view on the 85 square meter display in the panopticon-style Center for Integrated Command and Control or the equally huge screen in the Operations Center…
Surveillance State: Hackers Have Found a Pulsating New Way to Spy on You on Your Phone and FitBit
Hackers may be pickin’ up good vibrations from your phone. All the better to surveil you with, my dear. Researchers at the Electrical and Computer Engineering school of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign discovered that the vibration motor in your devices can operate like a microphone, according to the researchers’ paper. That means, if…
Military Intelligence History: The Battle of Midway, The Complete Intelligence Story
The Battle of Midway in June of 1942 was one of the most important naval battles in world history and a turning point in the Second World War. Between June 4 and 7, aircraft from aircraft carriers Enterprise, Yorktown, and Hornet of the U.S. Navy’s Task Forces 16 and 17 ambushed and sank the Imperial…
Surveillance State: Warrantless Cell Tracking Now Legal
One more thing to check off in that very short list of “Reasonable Expectations of Privacy”. Whats Next I wonder? -SF A split federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that police do not need a search warrant before obtaining cell tower location data that can trace the long-term movements of a suspect’s mobile phone, while conceding…
Surveillance State: The FBI’s Secret Biometric Database
FBI wants to keep secret who’s stored in its massive biometric database The FBI said it would retain the data to “aid in establishing patterns of activity” to help discover new criminals when they arise. The FBI is proposing keeping information that it stores as part of a massive biometric database private — even to…
Surveillance State: Everything We Know About How the FBI Hacks People
RECENT HEADLINES WARN that the government now has greater authority to hack your computers, in and outside the US. Changes to federal criminal court procedures known as Rule 41 are to blame; they vastly expand how and whom the FBI can legally hack. But just like the NSA’s hacking operations, FBI hacking isn’t new. In…
Book Review: Playing to the Edge, American Intelligence in the Age of Terror
by Michael V. Hayden Penguin, 448 pp When Michael Hayden was a young air force officer in the 1980s, the military stationed him as an intelligence attaché in Bulgaria. There, the man who would rise to the top of the American intelligence community in the post–September 11 era lived under constant surveillance: he and his…
The Surveillance State: Twitter and Data Mining
Twitter has barred Dataminr, a service that analyzes tweets from across the globe to inform users about news events, from providing its information to US intelligence agencies, according to the Wall Street Journal. The social network has not confirmed that it cut the agencies off from the service, which claims to have informed clients about the…