Minority Report is set in 2054, but Palantir is putting pre-crime into operation now. Peter Thiel’s CIA-backed, data-mining firm honed its ‘crime predicting’ techniques against insurgents in Iraq. The same methods are now being sold to police departments. Palantir watches everything you do and predicts what you will do next in order to stop it. As of 2013, its client list included the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Centre for Disease Control, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point and the IRS. Up to 50% of its business is with the public sector. In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm, was an early investor. ...

Ms. Yang, center at front, with her soldiers, circa 1956. Credit Yang family Olive Yang was born to royalty in British colonial Burma, but rejected that life to become a cross-dressing warlord whose C.I.A.-supplied army established opium trade routes across the Golden Triangle. By the time of her death, last week at 90, she had led hundreds of men, endured prison and torture, generated gossip for her relationship with a film actress and, finally, helped forge a truce between ethnic rebels and the government. ...

The 21 suspected government users of RCS by Hacking Team Hacking Team, also known as HT S.r.l., is a Milan-based company that describes itself as the “first to propose an offensive solution for cyber investigations". Their flagship Remote Control System (RCS)1 product, billed “the hacking suite for governmental interception,” is a suite of remote monitoring implants (i.e., spyware) sold exclusively to government agencies worldwide. ...

Daily surveillance of the general public conducted by the search engine, along with Facebook, is far more insidious than anything our spooks get up to. “Surveillance”, as the security expert Bruce Schneier has observed, is the business model of the internet and that is true of both the public and private sectors. – Guardian - June 18, 2017

Report: How thousands of companies monitor, analyze, and influence the lives of billions. Who are the main players in today’s digital tracking? What can they infer from our purchases, phone calls, web searches, and Facebook likes? How do online platforms, tech companies, and data brokers collect, trade, and make use of personal data? In recent years, a wide range of companies has started to monitor, track and follow people in virtually every aspect of their lives. The behaviors, movements, social relationships, interests, weaknesses and most private moments of billions are now constantly recorded, evaluated and analyzed in real-time. The exploitation of personal information has become a multi-billion industry. Yet only the tip of the iceberg of today’s pervasive digital tracking is visible; much of it occurs in the background and remains opaque to most of us. ...

All wars are won or lost due to either side’s ability to secure supply lines, logistics, transportation, provisions, military hardware, and communications. And the ability to pay for all of them. Just as any business which can’t finance its plans goes belly up so, too, does any army. Now, imagine an army with the ability to decentralise all of these elements. This army is actually technologically and economically backward. This doesn’t sound threatening until you realise that: ...

Our mobile phones can reveal a lot about ourselves: where we live and work; who our family, friends and acquaintances are; how (and even what) we communicate with them; and our personal habits. The research that we and our colleagues are doing identifies and explores a significant threat that most people miss: More than 70 percent of smartphone apps are reporting personal data to third-party tracking companies like Google Analytics, the Facebook Graph API or Crashlytics. ...

C’te blague… Lu dans un email émanant de la direction du Lycée des gamins: Le déroulé de la journée bla bla… Le vocabulaire jargon propre à l’Éducation Nationale ayant une légère tendance à agacer le TeamVieux l’adepte du Bled/Bescherelle que je suis, Yours Truly est donc allé voir ce qu’écrit l’Académie Française à ce propos: Il arrive souvent, en français, que d’un même verbe on tire un nom dérivé en -ment et un participe passé substantivé. L’un désigne une action et l’autre le résultat de cette action ou la personne qui a, selon les cas, bénéficié de cette action ou l’a subie. On distingue donc l’affranchissement de l’affranchi, l’abrutissement de l’abruti (sauf au LFKL visiblement), l’abrègement de l’abrégé. Mais cette double dérivation n’est en rien systématique et il arrive qu’un terme unique désigne à la fois l’action et le résultat comme, parmi tant d’autres, le terme déroulement. ...

The CIA is planting web beacons inside Microsoft Word documents to track whistleblowers, journalists and informants, according to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks released details on what it said is a Central Intelligence Agency document tracking program called Scribbles, part of the agency’s effort to keep tabs on documents leaked to whistleblowers and journalists. Scribbles allegedly embeds a web beacon-style tag into watermarks located on Microsoft Word documents that can report document analytics back to the CIA. ...