A scenario that could happen based on what already has. On December 4, 2017, at a little before nine in the morning, an executive at Goldman Sachs was swiping through the day’s market report in the backseat of a hired SUV heading south on the West Side Highway when his car suddenly swerved to the…
Category: Cyber-Skills
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…
Modern Crime: Will Cyber-Assassinations Soon Be A Reality?
As we hurtle forward into the digital, connected future, ever more objects are becoming targets for hackers and malicious software. Where once hacks only affected computers, they now bring down everything from cars to power grids and thermostats to secretive nuclear enrichment programs. So how long until a hack doesn’t just cause a nuisance or…
Modern Crime: Inside a Russian Hacker Ring
A man with intense eyes crouches over a laptop in a darkened room, his face and hands hidden by a black ski mask and gloves. The scene is lit only by the computer screen’s eerie glow. Exaggerated portraits of malicious hackers just like this keep popping up in movies and TV, despite the best efforts…
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…
Surveillance State: DIVA Software Designed to Spot Suspicous Behavior BEFORE it Happens
The program is called Deep Intermodal Video Analytics—or DIVA—and it seeks to locate shooters and terrorists before they strike. The intelligence community is working on amping up people-recognition power to spot, in live videos, shooters and potential terrorists before they have a chance to attack. Part of the problem with current video surveillance techniques is the difficulty…
Technology: Sci-Fi Classics That Accurately Predicted the Future
With all this talk lately of “Minority Report” type technology in Bio-Metrics and other Security apparatus, I thought it would be interesting to look at other sci-fi movies that nailed it as far as actual current or “coming soon” technology. -SF Did you know a kid’s cartoon predicted 3D-printed food in 1962? Or that…
Surveillance State: Push To Expand FBI Surveillance Authority Threatens U.S. Email Privacy Bill
Not sure if you guys have been paying attention to the clowns in the Senate lately, in typical backdoor fashion (kind of like the secret night time session where they passed CISA 74 to 21) they are attempting to pass legislation that if it goes through, Online Privacy will truly be an afterthought in the…
Future Warfare: 21st Century DIY Insurgency
It started innocuously enough. The prime minister-for-life never missed the annual “Liberation Day” parade. With the drums and platoons thundering, nobody noticed as the quadcopter, barely larger than a sparrow, floated down toward the dais, its faint whirr drowned out by the industrial machinery rolling by in formation. It was at once a child’s birthday…
Surveillance State: Smart Policing
Power Loves the Dark Police Nationwide Are Secretly Exploiting Intrusive Technologies With the Feds’ Complicity By Matthew Harwood and Jay Stanley Can’t you see the writing on the touchscreen? A techno-utopia is upon us. We’ve gone from smartphones at the turn of the twenty-first century to smart fridges and smart cars. The revolutionary changes to…