Privacy | Does Google Chuckle When It Reads Your Email?

Do you get any of your bills delivered by email? Do you realize that your email provider can read those bills? Google routinely reads the content of your emails.  This is how they are able to place targeted advertising on your Gmail account.

Rather than being ashamed for peaking into your personal business, Google is now offering a service to complement this invasion of privacy. They are offering an app that will keep track of the bills that you have delivered via email and will let you know which of them are coming due. I suspect that there are a lot of people who will find the convenience appealing. There are also a lot of people (including me) who find it creepy.

Surveillance | DHS to get $249 Million for Biometric Database

The U. S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee has agreed to fund the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM) for 2015. And it is a rather large commitment at nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. Although it is small compared to the 47 billion dollars that DHS is going to get for 2015.

A World Neither Brave Nor New

When Shakespeare coined the phrase 'brave new world' he was being sarcastic. His character, Miranda, referred to what she thought were wonderful things in this manner because she just didn't know any better. And when Aldous Huxley used the words for the title of his famous novel it was with the same sense of irony and sarcasm.

Attached is an article from the Gulf Daily News with the title 'A Brave New World'. In it the author lauds a world of biometric national IDs, biometric databases, checkpoints and 'your papers please'. I can only assume that the author of this article, like Shakespeare's Miranda, just doesn't know any better. And that is how it will be when the beast of Revelation arises for his time on Earth. He will come with signs and miracles, his mortal wound will be healed and he will claim to be God. And people will worship him. And they will think it is a brave new world.

The Politics of Technology " The Internet of Things" and Shadow Government

Great Britain and the rest of Europe are embracing digital technology in a big way. Prime Minister David Cameron says that it is his intention to make Great Britain the most digital nation in the G8. He is doing this by promoting the internet of things.  The internet of things is the term used for the connection of common devices, such as refrigerators and air conditioners, to the internet for the purpose of communication.

He and the Prime Minister of Germany were recently at the CeBIT conference Where Mr. Cameron spoke. He believes that the internet of things is transformative technology. It is transformative in the amount of surveillance and control that it will give the government and quasi-governmental agencies over the lives of individuals. One of the major goals is to be able to control air conditioning and heating thermostats. This is promoted as an energy savings. Actually, it is merely a method for the utility to control their peak usage and thereby reduce their infrastructure costs and increase profits.

Robocop Meets Minority Report

A company called Knightscope has produced a prototype crime fighting robot that it is calling K5 Autonomous Data Machine. It is a robot on wheels that looks a little like R2D2 from Star Wars. But it is functionally more reminiscent of the movie Minority Report. It has crime prediction software as well as cutting edge surveillance hardware and software. The K5 has or will have a license plate reader, facial recognition, biohazard sniffers and LIDAR mapping for positional awareness.

Naturally the thought of these robots wandering around public areas keeping tabs on innocent civilians has raised privacy concerns. Knightscope answers these with the same old excuses we have come to expect. It is their opinion that the loss of privacy that is produced by constant surveillance is more than offset by the warm safe feeling of your every movement being watched and judged by a robot.  The CEO of Knightscope, William Santana Li says "What puts people on edge is not necessarily privacy. What puts people on edge is being shot at." Knightscope is not arming K5 - at least not yet.

Big Brother ''threatens democracy'': Internet founder

The growing surveillance and censorship of the Internet "threatens the future of democracy", the inventor of the world wide web said on Friday. Tim Berners-Lee was speaking at the launch of his World Wide Web Foundation''s second annual index measuring the Internet''s contribution to social, economic and political development and human rights.

"One of the most encouraging findings of this year''s Web Index is how the web and social media are increasingly spurring people to organise, take action and try to expose wrongdoing in every region of the world," said Berners-Lee.

In 80 percent of the 81 countries surveyed, the Internet and social media played a role in public mobilisation in the last year, the foundation said. "But some governments are threatened by this, and a growing tide of surveillance and censorship now threatens the future of democracy," Berners-Lee said.

-brecoder

The FBI has been working on rolling out their Next Generation Identification (NGI) for several years now. The first phase went online in 2008.  It will be fully functional next year, although it will most likely be in a constant state of upgrade.  It has cost about $1.2 billion at this point. naturally, there are privacy concerns with a database that large.

Below is a very informative article at Biometric Update. It describes the six increments of the NGI. The article is written from a biometrics-can-solve-all-the -world's-problems point of view. So to get a more balance perspective you can read the Electronic Freedom Foundations article on NGI here - 

https://www.eff.org/foia/fbis-next-generation-identification-biometrics-database

And you can read the information from the Electronic Privacy Information Center here - 

http://epic.org/foia/fbi/ngi/

Could a program tracking identities of 1.3 billion Indians be the secret to ending poverty?

It could be and then some...

Could a semi-Orwellian program to collect biometric data for 1.3 billion Indians become a key tool to pulling people out of extreme poverty and integrating them into the global economy? The world’s largest democracy is betting it will, and that it could offer important benefits in poorer countries around the world.

In this case, Big Brother has a name. It is Nandan Nilekani, Indian technology entrepreneur, founder of outsourcing company Infosys, and now chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India - an agency that is collecting fingerprints and iris scans of all Indian residents and assigning them a unique ID number in a massive database on the cloud.

http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/24/could-a-program-tracking-identities-of-1-3-billion-indians-be-the-secret-to-ending-poverty/

Going Global | Homeland Security top officer to work on UN’s new global Internet rules

The second-in-command at the US Department of Homeland Security is stepping down as deputy secretary in order to sign-on for a role with the United Nations. But as Jane Holl Lute changes venues, will she change the world’s Internet as well?

Lute confirmed to Reuters this week that she will offer the DHS her official resignation in the coming days and will exit the third-largest agency in the federal government to join the ranks of the UN. There, she says an interview published on Tuesday, she will pursue a role in international Internet affairs.

But as Lute leaves the DHS and takes up a job with a more global reach, she could be bringing with her an ideology about the Internet that doesn’t sit well with some: during her tenure in the Obama administration, Lute touted the president’s attempts to strengthening information sharing between the federal government and the private sector.