MassPrivateIFacebook is considering incorporating most of its 1 billion-plus members’ profile photos into its growing facial recognition database, expanding the scope of the social network’s controversial technology.
The possible move, which Facebook revealed in an update to its data use policy on Thursday, is intended to improve the performance of its “Tag Suggest” feature. The feature uses facial recognition technology to speed up the process of labeling or “tagging” friends and acquaintances who appear in photos posted on the network.
Facebook, Google and other companies have insisted that they have never participated in any program giving the government direct access to their computer servers and that they only provide information in response to specific requests, after careful review and as required by law.
Try not to laugh at the following statements:
Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan said that adding members’ public profile photos would give users better control over their personal information, by making it easier to identify posted photos in which they appear.
“Our goal is to facilitate tagging so that people know when there are photos of them on our service,” Egan said.
She stressed that Facebook users uncomfortable with facial recognition technology will still be able to “opt out” of the Tag Suggest feature altogether, in which case the person’s public profile photo would not be included in the facial recognition database.
“Can I say that we will never use facial recognition technology for any other purposes? Absolutely not,” Egan said. But, she noted, “if we decided to use it in different ways we will continue to provide people transparency about that and we will continue to provide control.”
Microsoft and Google to sue over US surveillance requests:
Microsoft and Google are to sue the US government to win the right to reveal more information about official requests for user data. The companies announced the lawsuit on Friday, escalating a legal battle over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), the mechanism used by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other US government agencies to gather data about foreign internet users.
Microsoft’s general counsel, Brad Smith, made the announcement in a corporate blog post which complained of the government’s “continued unwillingness” to let it publish information about Fisa requests.
Each company filed a suit in June arguing that they should be allowed to state the details under the first amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, and in the process defend corporate reputations battered by Edward Snowden‘s revelations. Critics accused the companies of collaborating in the snooping.
“On six occasions in recent weeks we agreed with the department of justice to extend the government’s deadline to reply to these lawsuits. We hoped that these discussions would lead to an agreement acceptable to all,” Smith wrote.
The negotiations failed, he wrote, so Google and Microsoft were going to court. He did not specify when, or to which court.
“With the failure of our recent negotiations, we will move forward with litigation in the hope that the courts will uphold our right to speak more freely. And with a growing discussion on Capitol Hill, we hope Congress will continue to press for the right of technology companies to disclose relevant information in an appropriate way.”
The companies denied the NSA had “direct access” to their systems but said they were legally unable to disclose how many times they have been asked to provide information on users.
Fisa requests are granted by a special court that sits in secret and can grant the NSA permission to collect data stored by any company about a named person. In 2012, the court granted 1,856 requests and turned none down.
“We believe we have a clear right under the US constitution to share more information with the public,” said Smith’s post. “The purpose of our litigation is to uphold this right so that we can disclose additional data.”
He welcomed a government announcement earlier this week that it would begin publishing the total number of national security requests for customer data for the past 12 months.
“But the public deserves and the constitution guarantees more than this first step. For example, we believe it is vital to publish information that clearly shows the number of national security demands for user content, such as the text of an email.”
http://www.theguardian.com/law/2013/aug/31/microsoft-google-sue-us-fisa
The United States spying budget is an unbelievable $52.6 billion dollars:
U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top-secret budget.
The $52.6 billion “Black Budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.
The summary provides a detailed look at how the U.S. intelligence community has been reconfigured by the massive infusion of resources that followed the 2001 attacks. The United States has spent more than $500 billion on intelligence during that period, an outlay that U.S. officials say has succeeded in its main objective: preventing another catastrophic terrorist attack in the United States.
The result is an espionage empire with resources and a reach beyond those of any adversary, sustained even now by spending that rivals or exceeds the levels at the height of the Cold War.
The summary describes cutting-edge technologies, agent recruiting and ongoing operations. The Post is withholding some information after consultation with U.S. officials who expressed concerns about the risk to intelligence sources and methods. Sensitive details are so pervasive in the documents that The Post is publishing only summary tables and charts online.
“The United States has made a considerable investment in the Intelligence Community since the terror attacks of 9/11, a time which includes wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction technology, and asymmetric threats in such areas as cyber-warfare,” Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. wrote in response to inquiries from The Post.
“Our budgets are classified as they could provide insight for foreign intelligence services to discern our top national priorities, capabilities and sources and methods that allow us to obtain information to counter threats,” he said.
Among the notable revelations in the budget summary:
●Spending by the CIA has surged past that of every other spy agency, with $14.7 billion in requested funding for 2013. The figure vastly exceeds outside estimates and is nearly 50 percent above that of the National Security Agency, which conducts eavesdropping operations and has long been considered the behemoth of the community.
●The CIA and the NSA have begun aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as “offensive cyber operations.”
●Long before Snowden’s leaks, the U.S. intelligence community worried about “anomalous behavior” by employees and contractors with access to classified material. The NSA planned to ward off a “potential insider compromise of sensitive information” by re-investigating at least 4,000 people this year who hold high-level security clearances.
●In words, deeds and dollars, intelligence agencies remain fixed on terrorism as the gravest threat to national security, which is listed first among five “mission objectives.” Counterterrorism programs employ one in four members of the intelligence workforce and account for one-third of the intelligence program’s spending.
The surge in resources for the CIA funded secret prisons, a controversial interrogation program, the deployment of lethal drones and a huge expansion of its counterterrorism center. The agency was transformed from a spy service struggling to emerge from the Cold War into a paramilitary force.
The CIA has devoted billions of dollars to recruiting and training a new generation of case officers, with the workforce growing from about 17,000 a decade ago to 21,575 this year.
The agency’s budget allocates $2.3 billion for human intelligence operations and $2.5 billion to cover the cost of supporting the security, logistics and other needs of those missions around the world. A relatively small amount of that total, $68.6 million, was earmarked for creating and maintaining “cover,” the false identities employed by operatives overseas.
War on terrorism’s price tag is $17.82 billion for 2011-2012:
The government on Thursday informed the Senate that the country’s economy suffered an estimated loss of $17.82 billion due to the war on terror during 2011-12.
The finance division provided details of the estimates to the upper house of the parliament on a query posed by Senator Abdul Haseeb Khan. The finance ministry further stated that these estimated losses, which occurred due to the war on terror during 2011-12, are being finalized by the authorities concerned.
The house was informed that approximately $30.4 billion in aid have been received by Pakistan from the US in connection with the war on terror during the last decade.
The finance ministry also informed the house that $647 million in foreign aid had been received from different countries for flood relief activities, and rehabilitation of flood affectees since 2010.
Minister of State for Privatisation Khurram Dastagir Khan said that the government also acquired $857 million in foreign loans for flood relief activities from 2010 to 2013.
He said the amount received under aid and loan heads was disbursed among provinces. The finance ministry also informed the house that the Pakistan government had obtained foreign loans during fiscal year 2008-09 to 2012-13 worth $14.55 billion and the amount paid back by the government during the period in question was $10.62 billion.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/597248/senate-told-war-on-terrorisms-price-tag-17-82b/
U.S. government spending on big data to grow exponentially:
Biometrics Research Group, Inc. has observed that national security and military applications are driving a large proportion of “Big Data” research spending.
Big Data is a term used to describe large and complex data sets that can provide insightful conclusions when analyzed and visualized in a meaningful way. Conventional database tools do not have capabilities to manage large volumes of unstructured data. The U.S. Government is therefore investing in programs to develop new tools and technologies to manage highly complex data. The basic components of Big Data include hardware, software, services and storage.
Biometrics Research Group estimates that federal agencies spent approximately $5 billion on Big Data resources in the 2012 fiscal year. We estimate that annual spending will grow to $6 billion in 2014 and then to $8 billion by 2017 at a compound annual growth rate of 10 percent. Our industry analysis projects that most of this spending will be directed through the military apparatus of the U.S. government in the near to midterm. Currently, federal agencies are pursuing over 150 Big Data projects involving procurements, grants or related activities.
Big Data research is being mainly driven by the military establishment, with over 30 projects led by the U.S. Department of Defense. Specifically, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA) is leading nine major projects focused on algorithmic improvement, espionage and surveillance. Some DARPA Big Data projects are also attempting to make improvements to natural speech recognition and video and image retrieval systems.
DARPA’s Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales (ADAMS) program addresses the problem of anomaly detection and characterization in massive data sets. In this context, anomalies in data are intended to cue collection of additional, actionable information in a wide variety of real-world contexts. The initial ADAMS application domain is insider threat detection, in which anomalous actions by an individual are detected against a background of routine network activity.
The Cyber-Insider Threat (CINDER) program seeks to develop novel approaches to detect activities consistent with cyber espionage in military computer networks. As a means to expose hidden operations, CINDER will apply various models of adversary missions to “normal” activity on internal networks. CINDER also aims to increase the accuracy, rate and speed with which cyber threats are detected.
The Insight program addresses key shortfalls in current intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems. Automation and integrated human-machine reasoning enable operators to analyze greater numbers of potential threats ahead of time-sensitive situations. The Insight program aims to develop a resource management system to automatically identify threat networks and irregular warfare operations through the analysis of information from imaging and non-imaging sensors and other sources.
DARPA’s Machine Reading program seeks to realize artificial intelligence applications by developing learning systems that process natural text and insert the resulting semantic representation into a knowledge base rather than relying on expensive and time-consuming current processes for knowledge representation that require expert and associated-knowledge engineers to hand craft information.
The Mind’s Eye program seeks to develop a capability for “visual intelligence” in machines. Whereas traditional study of machine vision has made progress in recognizing a wide range of objects and their properties—the nouns in the description of a scene—Mind’s Eye seeks to add the perceptual and cognitive underpinnings needed for recognizing and reasoning about the verbs in those scenes. Together, these technologies could enable a more complete visual narrative.
The Mission-oriented Resilient Clouds program aims to address security challenges inherent in cloud computing by developing technologies to detect, diagnose and respond to attacks, effectively building a “community health system” for the cloud. The program also aims to develop technologies to enable cloud applications and infrastructure to continue functioning while under attack. The loss of individual hosts and tasks within the cloud ensemble would be allowable as long as overall mission effectiveness was preserved.
The Programming Computation on Encrypted Data (PROCEED) research effort seeks to overcome a major challenge for information security in cloud-computing environments by developing practical methods and associated modern programming languages for computation on data that remains encrypted the entire time it is in use. Giving users the ability to manipulate encrypted data without first decrypting it would make interception by an adversary more difficult.
The Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) program aims to develop a system to provide military imagery analysts with the capability to exploit the vast amount of overhead video content being collected. If successful, VIRAT will enable analysts to establish alerts for activities and events of interest as they occur. VIRAT also seeks to develop tools that would enable analysts to rapidly retrieve, with high precision and recall, video content from extremely large video libraries.
The XDATA program seeks to develop computational techniques and software tools for analyzing large volumes of semi-structured and unstructured data. Central challenges to be addressed include scalable algorithms for processing imperfect data in distributed data stores and effective human-computer interaction tools that are rapidly customizable to facilitate visual reasoning for diverse missions. The program envisions open source software toolkits for flexible software development that enable processing of large volumes of data for use in targeted defense applications.
In addition, the National Security Agency (NSA) has unveiled “Vigilant Net”, which is effectively a competition to foster and test cyber defense situational awareness at scale. The project will explore the feasibility of conducting an online contest for developing data visualizations in the defense of massive computer networks, beginning with the identification of best practices in the design and execution of such an event. The U.S. intelligence community has identified a set of coordination, outreach and program activities to collaborate with a wide variety of partners throughout the U.S. Government, academia and industry, combining cybersecurity and Big Data and making its perspective accessible to the unclassified science community.
Previous editorial commentary on BiometricUpdate.com has also indicated that “big” government is already exploiting Big Data in the areas of surveillance for criminal and anti-terror investigations.
BiometricUpdate.com reporting has also found that U.S. Government is also increasingly developing “predictive pattern-matching” techniques to determine suspicious patterns of behavior by actively collecting and collating metadata from the Internet, cellular phone networks and other publicly-accessible sources.
While the aforementioned programs are just a sample of some of the new, experimental Big Data research and development that has been undertaken, a recent survey of 150 IT executives in the U.S. Government, sponsored by EMC, found that 70 percent of respondents believe that within five years, Big Data will be critical to all government operations.
http://www.biometricupdate.com/201308/u-s-government-spending-on-big-data-to-grow-exponentially
The NSA is paying communications companies to let them spy on communications networks
The National Security Agency is paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to U.S. companies for clandestine access to their communications networks, filtering vast traffic flows for foreign targets in a process that also sweeps in large volumes of American telephone calls, e-mails and instant messages.
The bulk of the spending, detailed in a multi-volume intelligence budget obtained by The Washington Post, goes to participants in a Corporate Partner Access Project for major U.S. telecommunications providers. The documents open an important window into surveillance operations on U.S. territory that have been the subject of debate since they were revealed by The Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper in June.
New details of the corporate-partner project, which falls under the NSA’s Special Source Operations, confirm that the agency taps into “high volume circuit and packet-switched networks,” according to the spending blueprint for fiscal 2013. The program was expected to cost $278 million in the current fiscal year, down nearly one-third from its peak of $394 million in 2011.
Voluntary cooperation from the “backbone” providers of global communications dates to the 1970s under the cover name BLARNEY, according to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. These relationships long predate the PRISM program disclosed in June, under which American technology companies hand over customer data after receiving orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The budget documents do not list individual companies, although they do break down spending among several NSA programs, listed by their code names.
In briefing slides, the NSA described BLARNEY and three other corporate projects — OAKSTAR, FAIRVIEW and STORMBREW — under the heading of “passive” or “upstream” collection. They capture data as they move across fiber-optic cables and the gateways that direct global communications traffic.
The documents offer a rare view of a secret surveillance economy in which government officials set financial terms for programs capable of peering into the lives of almost anyone who uses a phone, computer or other device connected to the Internet.
Although the companies are required to comply with lawful surveillance orders, privacy advocates say the multimillion-dollar payments could create a profit motive to offer more than the required assistance.
“It turns surveillance into a revenue stream, and that’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. “The fact that the government is paying money to telephone companies to turn over information that they are compelled to turn over is very troubling.”
Former telecommunications executive Paul Kouroupas, a security officer who worked at Global Crossing for 12 years, said that some companies welcome the revenue and enter into contracts in which the government makes higher payments than otherwise available to firms receiving reimbursement for complying with surveillance orders.
These contractual payments, he said, could cover the cost of buying and installing new equipment, along with a reasonable profit. These voluntary agreements simplify the government’s access to surveillance, he said.
“It certainly lubricates the surveillance infrastructure,” Kouroupas said. He declined to say whether Global Crossing, which operated a fiber-optic network spanning several continents and was bought by Level 3 Communications in 2011, had such a contract.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-paying-us-companies-for-access-to-communications-networks/2013/08/29/5641a4b6-10c2-11e3-bdf6-e4fc677d94a1_story.html
CNN caught staging news segments on Syria with actors:
The primary “witness” that the mainstream media is using as a source in Syria has been caught staging fake news segments. Recent video evidence proves that “Syria Danny”, the supposed activist who has been begging for military intervention on CNN, is really just a paid actor and a liar.
While Assad is definitely a tyrant like any head of state, a US invasion of the country is a worst case scenario for the people living there.
By pointing out that the mainstream media is orchestrating their entire coverage of this incident, we are not denying that there is a tremendous amount of death and violence in Syria right now.
However, we are showing that the mainstream media version of events is scripted and staged propaganda.
The following video shows him contradicting himself while off air, and even asking crew members to “get the gunfire sounds ready” for his video conference with Anderson Cooper on CNN.
http://intellihub.com/2013/08/29/cnn-correspondent-syria-exposed-actor-caught-multiple-lies/
image source blacklistednews.com
http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2013/08/big-brothers-reach-extends-far-beyond.html