U.S.-China Surveillance

A recent blog post by Hal Roberts at the The Berkman Center for Internet & Society raises concerns about popular anonymizing and censorship circumvention services DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix selling their individual user data to third parties. In the post, Roberts infers from a curiously-worded FAQ entry at Edoors.com that these three partner services [...]

An interesting post in the Financial Times today talks about a new online surveillance trend in China, led by the Beijing-based company TRS Information Technology, that shifts from searching for politically sensitive keywords to “advanced text mining solutions enabling censors to monitor and forecast public opinion.” The article appears to takes a negative view [...]

Just in time for the Olympics, the Guardian is reporting a development in how the Tor network diffuses that appears, at least temporarily, to obviate any established methods of web censorship. The Tor network was developed by the US Naval Research laboratory to anonymize (but not necessarily encrypt) Internet traffic. The Chinese government has been [...]

CNN journalist John Vause today is reporting a meeting with Chinese hackers in Zhoushan city who say they have hacked into sensitive computer systems all over the world, including the Pentagon. Although the hackers claim to have been paid by the Chinese government, they could just as easily have been acting independently. Below are some [...]

When China launches the Summer 2008 Olympics, IBM will be there providing real-time surveillance services for public spaces, using its new Smart Surveillance System (S3). S3 can provide real-time alerts via a standard web browser when particular patterns appear in the stream of visual data. Vice President for security and privacy services at IBM, Julie [...]

I’ve added a new feature to this blog, a real-time feed of surveillance-related news items and other documents as I find them. There is a link to it on the navigation bar to the left. Comments welcome.

Just quick, a point I wanted to make about the issue of AI and surveillance cameras that came up in my last post when I critiqued a piece on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) Newshour about “China’s new high-tech surveillance system.” I wrote that face recognition algorithms are not sophisticated enough to note if “individual X” [...]

There has been so much US-focused surveillance news of late, I decided I needed to balance it with a China-related post. What follows is a five-minute clip from an August 11 newscast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Newsworld’s anchor interviews tech consultant Jesse Hirsh about China’s plans to expand its surveillance infrastructure with AI-powered [...]

The Silicon Valley-based startup, Pudding Media, launched the beta version of a new internet phone service today, called The Pudding. The Pudding is similar to Skype, except there is no charge for calling regular phones anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. To generate revenue, the company uses voice recognition software to monitor the content of [...]

The Baltimore Sun reported yesterday on the NSA’s highly classified “Cyber Initiative” to monitor traffic on the Internet within the U.S.. The program will be run by the Department of Homeland Security.
Since the existence of its warrantless domestic eavesdropping program was revealed in 2005, the NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have been mired [...]