At War Blog: Battlefield Update: The Fight for Isolated Government Outposts in Northern Syria
As world leaders and commentators of every stripe have debated President Obama’s “red line,” there have been significant developments on the ground.
battlefield
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development
government
president obama
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Will Harper's oil tanker safety convince BC to approve pipeline
The Harper government is under fire for its environmental policy, pulling out of Kyoto and for putting resource development and the economy ahead of the environment. Yesterday the government rolled out steps to improve oil tanker surveillance and safety.
development
environment
government
harper
kyoto
policy
surveillance
Raytheon's Riot Program Mines Social Network Data For Intelligence Agencies
Shipud writes "Raytheon> has secretly developed software capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future behavior by mining data from social networking websites according to The Guardian. An 'extreme-scale analytics' system created by Raytheon, the world's fifth largest defense contractor, can gather vast amounts of information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. Raytheon says it has not sold the software – named Riot, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology – to any clients. But the company has acknowledged the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analyzing 'trillions of entities' from cyberspace. The power of Riot to harness popular websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into controversial techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time ...
agency
development
entity
facebook
foursquare
government
guardian
harness
information
intelligence
movement
privacy
raytheon
security
shipud
surveillance
technology
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twitter
Found more than 1 month ago on channel
Slashdot
UK Government Faces Lawsuit Over Surveillance Exports
judgecorp writes "The UK government has been threatened with legal action, over its failure to block exports of espionage technology to oppressive regimes. British firms have sold covert surveillance equipment to the former Egyptian regime, as well as to Iran and Syria in recent months, and pressure group Privacy International has sent a letter asking for a change of policy and an update of export restrictions — backed by a threat that it will take the government to court if there is no response."
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british
egyptian
equipment
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iran
policy
privacy
restrictions
surveillance
syria
technology
Found more than 1 month ago on channel
Slashdot
Selling Software That Kills
The government of Syria uses made-in-California technology from BlueCoat Systems to censor the Internet and spy on its pro-democracy activists (who are regularly arrested and tortured, not to mention slaughtered wholesale.) McAfee and Nokia Siemens have done the same in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Amesys of France and FinFisher of the UK aided brutal dictators in Egypt and Libya. Sweden's Teliasonera allegedly took up the same cudgel in Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Kazakhstan. Meanwhile, back in the USSA, Bain Capital recently bought a Chinese video-surveillance company reportedly "used to intimidate and monitor political and religious dissidents," and Cisco "has marketed its routers to China specifically as a tool of repression." You can't help but be impressed by how globalized the oppression-technology industry has become. So what privacy/surveillance story caused an eruption of outrage this week? Yes, you guessed it: SceneTap, a startup that uses facial-recognition ...
activists
american
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azerbaijan
bahrain
bain
belarus
bluecoat
china
chinese
cisco
democracy
egypt
eruption
finfisher
france
georgia
government
internet
kazakhstan
kuwait
libya
made-in-california
mcafee
mention
nokia siemens
privacy
repression
saudi arabia
scenetap
surveillance
sweden
syria
tajikistan
technology
teliasonera
ussa
uzbekistan
yes