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NSA Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images
Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes "The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents. The spy agency's reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency's ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed."
Great, now someone can finally put together a comprehensive porn database! Also, first :)
Oddly enough, they often do.
As opposed to what you see in movies most "terrorist" aren't some kind of drones that only lives for one thing.
Many times they are just what your military would be like if they didn't have resources and what your soldiers would be like if they didn't have any options.
....you put online stays online. Forever!!
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I think George Orwell's classic 1984 needs an update... Any bids from the rest of you /. reading cellar dwelling SciFi nerds on what 2084 will be like? Will our kids and grandkids have micro drones hovering about them, recording their every utterance and their every move and reporting it to private corporations and/or christian conservative ayatollahs in Washington? Will people be walking around with masks to avoid the omnipresent surveillance society? Will masks even be legal? In the UK hey've already entertained the idea of banning hooded garments because they enable you to hide your face from CCTV.
Martyrdom video
Just remember, they're only doing what the rest of the world does! Because they're all bastards.
Why not start spying on the spies and publish every single move and action they make. Follow the spies by spying on them and publish the results. Not only celebrities are public goods, the spies who collect information should be must be as transparent as they live on and deal in public goods. What is good for the goose...
Anyone has one? It would be a nice project to put together a database with information and images on all who work there.
Human nature being what it is.... If you don't want someone else to see it, don't send it. Everybody always lies. Everybody always spies.
NSA Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images
The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts
Intercepted communications aren't "the web."
emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences
Apart from social media (largely), none of those things are "the web."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
This is a top News for Nerds story?
It's funny how little difference there is between what Facebook's servers are doing and the NSA's. I wonder who has more info on you.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
cont.d: I know crypto won't fix everything. But mass surveillance will be fixed by it.
Social networks with public key cryptography will fix the facial recognition issues at least there.
Most of the stuff the mass surveillance programs are getting isn't encrypted and is put up by users. Restricting that information to parties not concerned through crypto will effectively put all these programs in the dark.
Honestly it is kind of what you would expect that kind of organisation to be doing..
Just remember, they're only doing what the rest of the world does! Because they're all bastards.
Well, in this case they're following the lead of the British GCHQ, so in some sense they are doing what the rest of the world does.
But since GCHQ is a bought and paid for subsidary of the NSA...
Watch this Heartland Institute video
If you don't want someone else to see it, don't send it.
Pray tell, how do I get someone to not post pictures of me?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I thought they were collecting feces. I waited a full 30 minutes in the bathroom before I realized my error.
But since GCHQ is a bought and paid for subsidary of the NSA.
Learn some history mate.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Should read, " ... according to formerly top-secret documents."
By not being in them to begin with, doofus.
How's your Mars trip coming along you retard?
Why? Did your Skylark throw a rod?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Yahoo: http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
With one exception, targeting women and children. Now, you might say, but they do kill women and children. I would have to say you are probably right, they have. The difference is, that as a nation, the United States does not condone the killing of women and children, therefore our military and the people who sign up for our military are not there to kill women and children, that is not why they exist.
GCHQ, NSA, and their equivalent agencies in Australia, Canada and NZ are all members of the "five eyes" spying group also known as ECHELON. Any time a law might restrict one from spying on citizens of their own country, they just have another member spy for them and hand over the info.
Collecting too much porn.
Your an idgit. If you have soshul, your going to have survAloance. Duonut!
Last time I checked, NSA was our copy of GCHQ. We were so impressed with what they did in WW2, we decided we needed some of that....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
What an ugly world some have turned this beautiful place into. Is there a ship leaving for another possibly peaceful planet? A world without all the governments, spies and terrorists would be nice.
What an idiotic statement. I am a veteran of the US Air Force who did two tours in Afghanistan. One time I personally helped fire a rocket at a truck of "suspected insurgents" (read: some guys we just targeted because we were pissed off at getting mortared every day) with a Javelin missile, blowing it to pieces....sending half the flaming wreckage rolling down into a nearby orchard, killing an old man. His granddaughter was not so lucky; she lost an arm and an eye. You should have heard the whooping and cheering when we saw that big ass explosion. It was really cool! The only other person I met who seemed to show any doubt about what we'd done was the young (20-22 year old) combat medic who had to patch her up.
War is hell. Get a clue, you fucking useful idiot.
The flip side of posting the most innocuous details of your life online for all to see. What did you THINK would happen?
Why do you think that contradicts his statement? Take a look at how much funding GCHQ receives from the NSA - it's a significant amount of their total budget and has led to some concerns that they act more in the interests of the US than UK.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...but the killing of men though, that's just jim-dandy.
History?
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/01/nsa-paid-gchq-spying-edward-snowden
The real history is that the UK found it didn't have the resources to fund Bletchley Park without American help and by the end of the war most of the work was being done in the US:
By December 1943, 120 machines were installed. For the remainder of the war, the US took care of breaking the majority of German Naval Enigma traffic and in particular the messages of the dreaded German U-Boats.
http://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/bombe/
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Every politician who is a threat to the system, when they get the power to do something they suddenly flip. Why is that??
Sure, in some cases when they hear the arguments they change their minds; but it seems that it is extremely easy to make any politician to flip sides and behave. It is naive to just assume that it is always a result of lying politicians and whatever other stereotypes you are more comfortable with than questioning whether the system is so corrupt that it has working control over politicians who threaten the soft spots.
Hoover used the FBI to blackmail; the CIA has done it as well; political parties use it on their members to some degree as well. I'm confident we have psychological profiles of our leaders and not just all the foreign ones; I bet that info gets abused as well.
Automation and technology isn't going to bring us new powers of "persuasion"; it's going to make old ones more effective and widespread. The NSA doesn't need to do this, they can just get facebook to give them access to their system and maybe throw a tax break their way to add some features... if they are not already doing this now.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Where are the filthy, filthy shills who screamed over and over again, in every forum, that the Xbox One was an 'innocent' device, and anyone who said otherwise was a tin-foil hat wearing 'nutter'.
Bill "I made inBloom in partnership with Rupert Murdoch" Gates dedicates his life to advancing the police state, and thinking of new ways to enhance the full surveillance programs of the NSA. Gates personally forced Microsoft to spend may tens of billions of dollars buying every available company that might have technology useful for the Kinect 2 NSA sensor block that was originally a COMPULSORY internet connected peripheral of EVERY Xbox One.
The original plans for the console meant ZERO gaming or other use could occur unless there was a permanent internet connection directly connecting to the data continuously streaming from the cameras and microphones of the Kinect2. Even when a massive backlash forced Microsoft to remove the always-on internet connection requirement, the Kinect2 NSA sensor block was functioning at 100%, even when the console was in stand-by power-mode.
Kinect2 was designed to be the ultimate, remotely programmable spy platform, but it had a default mode active on EVERY console. This mode takes facial recognition quality images of the faces of EVERY person who enters the room (even in the dark- even if you think the console is 'sleeping') and uploads these images to NSA servers hidden in Microsoft's cloud.
Despite the best efforts of people like the owners of Slashdot (who provide infinite moderation points to paid shills of the NSA and other governmental organisations), ordinary people rejected the obscenity of the Xbox One to such an extent (opting for the vastly superior- and cheaper- gaming platform, Sony's PS4) that Microsoft has now agreed to provide a Kinect-free version of the Xbox One.
Bill Gates gave you:
-Common Core (the best psychological methods used to dumb-down Middle America)
-inBloom (the universal database that monitors the lives of every American child in every detail). inBloom has now been transferred to the NSA full surveillance programs, and relies on covertly tapping into various online databases to extract the information on each child. As an overt program, the brainchild of Rupert "Fox News" Murdoch and Bill Gates came under too much public scrutiny.
-NSA in-home spying via the Xbox One Kinect
Gates' family has a long history in American Eugenics- the same movement that gave Hitler and the Nazis all that pseudo-science (yes, Adolf Hitler personally thanked the US eugenic movement for their assistance providing Germany with their theories on 'racial purity'). Gates tours the world, giving speeches on how the Human Race must be 'culled' (no more than two billion sheeple required to serve the needs of the 'elites').
Gates wants every ordinary American to be tracked in every aspect of their lives 100% of the time. In this goal he is joined by most of the other 'technology' leaders, including those behind Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Oracle, and IBM (the original partner of the Nazi movement). In the 50s, this concept had a famous phrase "no place to hide". In the 50s, the sheeple were told it was the 'corporations' and 'advertisers' who were pursuing this agenda for commercial reasons, but even then, darker forces pulled the strings in the background.
The ONLY thing that can save Humanity from such an unthinkable abuse is the incorporation of fundamental principles of privacy into the written and unwritten Constitutional protections of Human societies. Like how slavery was fundamentally abolished. The US constitution needs new amendments specifically prohibiting all forms of Full Surveillance, describing such actions as morally and legally repugnant. The RIGHT TO PRIVACY against the machinations of the paid servants of the State is an essential Human Right.
and that's why you signed up, right? oh wait that's why you signed up for the second tour.
At least you are not an AC.
I don't like taking the bait but... +4 really? all the mod points probably came from U.S. citizens too, that's a shame.
Naive? I understand, but apparently you can't read, I did not say we don't or never kill women and children. I think the only thing I really did there was use the word "probably" which FTFY, "I would have to say you are right, they have."
... So at some point the capabilities that the NSA now has, may be available to the average citizen. Then it will be time to lift the rocks under which the watchers live, and report publicly on their every move. Payback's a bitch.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
They suggested that any public be able to access public camera feeds. That is the spy targets spy on the spyers. The writing was n the wall then with video prices dropping, you could install thousands of cameras everywhere. Many businesses and police do so.
People would have to be incredibly naive to assume the worlds government intelligence agencies and commercial intelligence are not collected and analyzing any data they can.
Yeah, because the drone strikes etc don't have any sort of 'collateral damage' at all. For that matter, remember the "collateral murder" helicopter video?
But anybody within a certain age limit and fairly generous radius of a drone target is considered to be collaborating with the target... so they're not considered civilian casualties. If you don't like the statistics, change the parameters... (but lots of innocents still get killed).
The man who buys the meat is brother to the butcher. You sign up for an organization that kills fairly indiscriminately; you accept responsibility for the deaths.
Film at 11.
Years after the 9/11 attack, I talked with a young National Guard soldier whose patrol was the New York City subway system. He told me how he was trained, if need be, to shoot to kill a baby in a stroller. As he told me this, I remember how his eyes had an eerie, haunted look.
The NSA is the world's largest collection of amateur porn
There is no expectation of privacy in public. Someone can take your picture to their heart's content and there is nothing you can do about it. If that someone is the government, so what?
Yes, that's what drones are for... To do the dirty work from miles away rather than look into the eyes of a 16 year old US citizen abroad as he is in the back yard cooking on the grill. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/07/grandfather-of-american-teen-killed-in-drone-strike-demands-answers/
Or maybe you forgot a lot of our soldiers who saw active combat in Iraq were just children of 18 or 19 years old. Not old enough to be trusted to drink responsibly, but old enough to die in armed combat in the middle of the dessert half a world away from their friends and family. Children as fodder in a sensless war. Oh, but they weren't our targets, they were just our tools.
is that facebook wants every bit of info about me in order to shill me products, mot to retroactively incriminate me if i were ever to become a threat. Facebook also doesn't care about what you fap to, but it's been proven that the NSA does--want to guess why?
They're worried that at the next incident they'll get blamed and then dismantled because they failed to prevent it. The solution-- throw even more technology and data collection at the problem-- technology and enough data can fix anything, don't you know?. And then when they get called up to testify before Congress why they weren't able to prevent it, it won't be because they didn't collect the right data. Of course, it'll be because they had so much data they couldn't make useful sense of it, but that's another story (technology can fix that too, can't it?).
Time to fill up your facebook profile photos with thousands of bogus images.
"But we KNEW they had colluded with google, microsoft and facebook to spy on us!" "But we KNEW the NSA was intercepting shipments of cisco routers to compromise them!" "But we KNEW they're hiring an army of paid trolls to pollute forums!"
/. get way more comments than most other topics--is that indicative of "old news"? Think about that next time you say this BS.
NSA-related posts on
Honestly, let it die.
The NSA are doing there job. You'd all very quickly turn the blame if there was another 9/11 attack.
Yet, people are more than happy to give Facebook their life photos?
Wake up to the real world.
No. They aren't. Because they're an arm of the federal government, and all search and seizure by the federal government is formally and unequivocally limited to very specific procedures, which the NSA are not following, by the 4th amendment to the US constitution.
What they are doing is fundamentally illegal, as defined by the very highest law in the land, the very one that authorizes our government to even exist.
Was it your impression that we all live in a banana republic where the government can do anything it wants? Anything congress wants, it gets? That's not how it's supposed to work. When it does work that way, it is broken.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
War is like that. No point in pointing it out as being not typical or being particularly hard on the military about it. People die in war; this has been proven throughout the ages. Non military personnel get in the way all the time. Call it accidental or call it Darwin. It just is. Accept it.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
By not being in them to begin with, doofus.
Okay. So how do I get people to stop posting pictures that I've been photoshopped into.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Only a moron would find it surprising that government agencies aren't looking at them.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Amazingly enough, Slashdot does not allow users to delete their accounts.
Worse, it does not even allow users to change their nicknames.
So, if you're concerned about Web analytics or analogous technologies
connecting your Slashdot postings to postings made with stylistic language,
zip codes, other inferred demographics, or even nicknames similar to those
of your Slashdot postings, you're shit out of luck. And speaking as one who
works in the field, such connections and inferences are far from mere
paranoia. Analytics and inferential knowledgebase-driven tracking is what
drives NSA data mining, many types of clicktracking, and magically targeted
Netflix & Amazon messages, and these methodologies are still barely out of
their infancy -- data collected today is likely to yield far more
information when mined 5 or 10 years from now, when increased data-storage
and processing capabilities eliminate some of the scalability constraints of
current technology. DNA computing, anyone?.
Still unconvinced? As recently as last March
(http://yro-beta.slashdot.org/story/13/03/11/218221/facebook-knows-if-youre-
gay-use-drugs-or-are-a-republican), Slashdot itself reported that
researchers, using only Facebook metadata (not postings), could generally
predict a user's sexual orientation, political party, IQ, likelihood to use
drugs, and other personal characteristics. Hence, prudence dictates that
online users should ALWAYS delete unnecessary traces. And older Slashdot
postings, which may be far more revealing than a Facebook "like," should
certainly be high on the list of deletion candidates -- even if you always
post as an AC.
Amazingly, Slashdot refuses to provide basic posting-deletion functionality.
It refuses to allow even half-assed attempts to hide one's identify by
changing a nick. And it won't acknowledge email requests to explain these
policies. When I sent a message to Slashdot last month asking for
clarification or assistance with deleting my account or past postings, I
received a form letter apologizing for "Slashdot's inability to reply to
every question about its new beta system."
Jeez, can't we even get kissed when we get fucked?
So what can a helpless Slashdot user do? Well, to start, I'll be continuing
to submit this message as a story proposal until I get some kind of reaction
from a Slashdot decision-maker who thinks I'm raising a valid issue. In the
interim, I STRONGLY urge anybody thinking of opening a Slashdot account, or
of posting other than anonymously, to think again. Search on Google (or
better, on the Patent Office Web site) for terms like "web analytics,"
"inferential statistics," "knowledgebase," "big data," "natural-language
prcoessing," or even just "cybersecurity." Or page through a copy of the
already-outdated, but still relevant, book "Dragnet Nation." And remember
that, once you open that Slashdot account, once you post that Slashdot
message, there's no redo.
Shame on you, Slashdot! I could understand seeing these kinds of policies on
a Duck Dynasty fan-club forum, but you guys are supposed to have a clue.
I think I spending too much time on slasdot...
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Hundreds of thousands, huh? And you call the grandparent poster naïve?!?
If you think that the US military condones your actions, try giving that statement to a JAG. Then you will figure out who the idiot is.