So this surveillance technology started in the military to track insurgents, expanded to law enforcement and government to track suspects and the general public, and is now expanding to corporations to monitor customers. This pattern makes it seem like the cat is out of the bag, and that pervasive expansion and abuse of this technology is all but inevitable. Let's extrapolate a bit and start thinking about what socie…
All Activities Monitored
21–30 of 41 posts
Re: All Activities Monitored
#22So this surveillance technology started in the military to track insurgents, expanded to law enforcement and government to track suspects and the general public, and is now expanding to corporations to monitor customers. This pattern makes it seem like the cat is out of the bag, and that pervasive expansion and abuse of this technology is all but inevitable. Let's extrapolate a bit and start thinking about what socie…
Extrapolate a bit more. Imagine a Maps app that allows you to see individual people and forward predict their interactions with the world with half second resolution, conditioned on the personalized stimuli you feed them through their electronic devices.
Re: All Activities Monitored
#23So this surveillance technology started in the military to track insurgents, expanded to law enforcement and government to track suspects and the general public, and is now expanding to corporations to monitor customers. This pattern makes it seem like the cat is out of the bag, and that pervasive expansion and abuse of this technology is all but inevitable. Let's extrapolate a bit and start thinking about what socie…
Re: All Activities Monitored
#24"It's 10 PM. Do you know where your Congressman is?"
At some point, everyone is monitored, once the playing field is leveled to include people in high-profile positions also being monitored, I think there will be at lease some revolt from a legal perspective.
Re: All Activities Monitored
#25So this surveillance technology started in the military to track insurgents, expanded to law enforcement and government to track suspects and the general public, and is now expanding to corporations to monitor customers. This pattern makes it seem like the cat is out of the bag, and that pervasive expansion and abuse of this technology is all but inevitable. Let's extrapolate a bit and start thinking about what socie…
In other words the Apocalypse, literally meaning TEOTAWKI (the end of the world as WE know it) by finally removing the veil from reality.
Re: All Activities Monitored
#26Re: All Activities Monitored
#27For some perspective on this level of surveillance (and what it's like when the technology extends to the consumer level) check out this 21 year old book by David Brin, "The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom". (Preferably get it from your local library, if you still have one, or a small independent bookseller.)
Re: All Activities Monitored
#28This is utterly terrifying. What can we ordinary people do to protect ourselves from this stuff?
Anyone want to build a drone-seeking high-powered-laser-pointer turret to dazzle them?
Re: All Activities Monitored
#29Seems parts are a bit misleading and exaggerating capabilities. E.g. >> Images from the cameras are in turn fed to computer programs that allow analysts to track suspects, and even to rewind to look back over their paths, like watching TiVo. I'm pretty sure that really just means that they digitized footage and the analysts did the actual tracking manually but it reads as having good image recognition back in 2006.
I do not know the specifics of the software used in the Gorgon Stare program, but SRI started work on automated image surveillance under DARPA contract in 1982 with ImagCalc. The system was later expanded to video and continued development until two years ago:
http://www.ai.sri.com/software/freedius
I am not sure what year they added automated video tracking. At the 2007 International Lisp Conference Christopher Connolly and/or Lynn Quam (can't remember) showed a demo of FREEDIUS that, among other things, had automated track analysis on aerial and CCTV surveillance footage; by that time the problem was long solved, and they were working on automated event detection.
Same year (2007) the same SRI group also published this paper, "Recovering Social Networks From Massive Track Datasets":
http://www.ai.sri.com/pubs/files/1552.pdf
The "massive track datasets" were automatically derived from surveillance motion sensors, of course.
Automated surveillance capabilities were very far along by 2006.
The really interesting thing is that FREEDIUS is publicly available under the Mozilla Public License:
https://github.com/SRI-CSL/f3d
Drone away!
Re: All Activities Monitored
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like something many wealthy people will opt out of by living in communities that are organized around an interest in avoiding it/disallowing it. I’m imagining planned communities that have much higher privacy standards even in their public spaces like shops and parks.
Are you thinking a technological solution to the wide net surveillance or policy?