U.S.-China Surveillance

A journalism professor in Oregon, exchanging emails with a friend in Sudan, begins to wonder if he needs to “watch” what he is writing:
As I wrote him back, expressing my relief and my on-going concern for his safety, I also wanted to tell him about my concern for my own country and about my opposition [...]

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 [...]

The Bill of Rights Defense Committee has produced an excellent instructional video on the growing use and abuse of national security letters (NSLs) by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Its available in two parts on Youtube and embedded below.
When a private firm does not comply with a friendly request from the FBI for information [...]

A student at Beijing University is suing Microsoft for violating his privacy. In the case, which is to be heard at the First Intermediate People’s Court of Beijing, student Lu Feng argues that Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) tool is akin to spyware, echoing similar claims in an ongoing case, Brian Johnson v Microsoft, being [...]