Showing posts with label SciTech. Show all posts
FBI sued over secretive facial recognition program
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| Reuters / Michael Caronna |
Soon the FBI will be done building a database containing the photographs, fingerprints and other biometric data for millions of Americans, but the agency has been far from forthcoming with the details. A new lawsuit filed this week aims to change that.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit digital rights group based out of California, sued the United States Department of Justice this week for failing to comply with multiple Freedom of Information Act requests filed last year by the EFF.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation received no fewer than three FOIA requests from the EFF last year for details about its state-of-the-art Next Generation Identification program, or NGI, a system that will store personally-identifiable data for millions of Americans and foreign nationals to act as what the FBI has called a "bigger, faster and better" version of what law enforcement already uses. But while the bureau has indeed already been using fingerprint information to track down potential terrorists and troublemakers for years, the EFF’s main concern revolves around what sort of space-age face recognition abilities NGI will be able to employ.
The FBI previously acknowledged that NGI will “house multimodal biometrics records like palm prints and iris scans” in one master system, as well as facial imaging information and intelligence about scars, marks and tattoos. Eventually, the agency said, it hopes to incorporate technology to track down people using only their voice. For now, though, the EFF is interested in what the facial recognition infrastructure will be able to do, and is demanding the FBI fesses up.
“NGI will change almost everything about how the FBI treats photograph submissions,” the complaint filed this week reads. Citing government documents, the EFF says that the system will allow “the increased capacity to retain photographic images, additional opportunities for agencies to submit photographic images and additional search capabilities, including automated searches.”
“The proposed new system would also allow law enforcement ‘to collect and retain other images (such as those obtained from crime scene security cameras’ and from family and friends) and would allow submission of ‘civil photographs along with civil fingerprint submissions that were collected for noncriminal purposes,’” the EFF continues.
When all is said and done, the FBI will be able to use NGI to scan millions of entries in a single database to find someone based off of a single photograph, and the EFF fears that could send things down a slippery slope.
“Governmental use of face recognition — and the potential for misuse — raises many privacy concerns,” the EFF says in the lawsuit.
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| AFP Photo / Mandel Ngan |
Using statements already made by the FBI about the program, the EFF presents an argument about why they should be worried that’s hard to counter.
“The FBI has also stated in a public presentation given at a national biometrics conference that it wants to use its facial recognition system to 'identify unknown persons of interest from images' and 'identify subjects in public datasets,'” the complaint continues. “In the same presentation, the FBI included a graphic image that implied the Bureau wanted to use facial recognition to be able to track people from one political rally to another.”
Another digital watchdog group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, previously alleged that NGI system could be integrated with other surveillance technology in order to enable “real-time image-matching of live feeds from CCTV surveillance cameras.”
Obtaining information about how the FBI will manage and operate this information has been a priority for the EFF for over a year now, and the failure to comply with those FOIA requests has finally prompted the organization to ask a court to intervene.
"NGI will result in a massive expansion of government data collection for both criminal and noncriminal purposes," EFF Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch said in a statement this week. "Biometrics programs present critical threats to civil liberties and privacy. Face-recognition technology is among the most alarming new developments, because Americans cannot easily take precautions against the covert, remote and mass capture of their images."
The EFF is asking the court to enforce the FOIA requests sent last June and July, which could compel the FBI to disclose information about the face-recognition program and any plans to merge civilian and criminal records in a single database. They are also asking for the total number of face-recognition capable records currently in the database and an assessment of what number the agency expects to have when it rolls out the program in 2014.
"Before the federal government decides to expand its surveillance powers, there needs to be a public debate," Lynch said. "But there can be no public debate until the details of the program are presented to the public."
In a July 18, 2012 assessment, the FBI reported that the program was “on scope, on schedule, on cost and 60 percent deployed.” The program is being put together by contractors Lockheed Martin, who are expected to rake in $1 billion from the government by the time the NGI system is finally up and running.
The FBI previously admitted that they found 7,380 records that were "potentially responsive” to one of the EFF’s request, but has yet to deliver actual information pursuant to any of the three FOIA submissions filed, prompting the nonprofit to allege the FBI is “dragging its feet."
"FBI has not explained to the public how NGI or IAFIS's system design would ensure that civil submissions are not 'tainted' by criminal submissions or explained why it is necessary to combine the two types of data," the EFF wrote in the complaint.
St. Louis police chief wants drones to monitor city
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| St. Louis Police Capt. Sam Dotson (Image from slmpd.org) |
A Missouri police chief has asked the Federal Aviation Administration for his very own surveillance drone, which he would use to conduct police chases and monitor the city for criminals.
“To help keep officers safe, to help keep the community safe. For monitoring public spaces – things like the upcoming Fair St. Louis [and] baseball games – for terrorists, suspicious activity,” St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson told KSDK.
The police chief does not like to use the word ‘drone’, so in his request to the FAA, he asked for permission to use an ‘unmanned surveillance vehicle’, he told KTVI. Dotson believes the surveillance vehicles would help police capture fleeing criminals and ultimately reduce crime in St. Louis.
“Criminals believe, and with some truth, that if they flee from police officers, officers will not pursue and they will ultimately elude capture,” Dotson wrote in hisMarch 25letter to the FAA. “If we are serious about crime reduction strategies, we must look to new technologies which help keep officers and the public safe and apprehend criminals.”
Dotson says purchasing drones, at the price of $80,000-$300,000 a piece, is a more cost-effective solution than purchasing helicopters, which cost about $2-$2.5 million. Some surveillance drones can even cost less than $10,000, Dotson told Fox2 News. The newest generation of surveillance drones can be as small as a coffee cup and do not carry any weapons.
If approved to employ a drone, Doston said he would seek out donations and grants to buy the unmanned surveillance vehicle.
News of Dotson’s intentions has concerned privacy advocates, who are already complaining about the FBI’s use of drones for domestic surveillance. Jeffrey Mittman, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Eastern Missouri, told the St Louis Post-Dispatch that the police chief is taking surveillance too far.
“This is a significant expansion of government surveillance,” he said. “Our laws have not kept up with our privacy rights. Our Fourth Amendment privacy rights aren’t safe from unreasonable search and seizure when you’re looking at drones."
The St. Louis Police Department is not the first to request drones for domestic surveillance purposes. The Electronic Frontier Foundation last year discovered that dozens of police agencies had submitted FAA applications, requesting permission for drone usage. The FAA has only granted permission to about a half-dozen of these police departments, most of which are in rural areas and thus unable to interfere with airports, the St. Louis-Post Dispatch reports.
The FAA does not allow the use of drones for commercial purposes, and requires the vehicles to fly below 400 feet.
All-seeing IRIS: New-gen NASA telescope poised to solve Sun mystery
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| The fully integrated spacecraft and science instrument for NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission is seen in a clean room at the Lockheed Martin Space Systems Sunnyvale, California facility in this undated NASA handout photo released June 20, 2013.(Reuters / Jim Dowdall) |
NASA is launching IRIS, a revolutionary telescope that could finally explain a phenomenon that has been puzzling physicists for decades: why the Sun’s atmosphere is hotter than its surface. It may also give a clue about how other stars spread their heat.
IRIS, short for Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph – a 7-foot ultraviolet telescope that cost over $100 million – will be launched not from the ground, but from a high altitude. A specially modified plane will take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, before reaching a height of about 13,000 meters and dropping the Pegasus XL rocket – used on tens of missions since 1994 - which will propel the payload into the atmosphere at an estimated 2:27 GMT on Friday morning.
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| Final preparations after launch was delayed by a day (Photo from nasa.gov) |
Once in the atmosphere, four identical cameras will try to rapidly capture light changes in the chromosphere – the 2,000 km deep area between the sun’s surface and outer atmosphere – which will then be processed into 3-D heat movement maps by super-computers on the ground.
At any one point they will focus in detail on just 1 percent of the Sun’s surface – rather than the entire body, as have most existing observation telescopes.
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| The telescope itself (Photo from nasa.gov) |
“IRIS will show the solar chromosphere in more detail than has ever been observed before,” declared Adrian Daw, deputy project scientist. “My opinion is that we are bound to see something we didn’t expect to see.”
The prime question is – what is the physical process by which the surface of the sun is about 5,700 degrees Celsius, while the corona, the outer layer of the atmosphere, which stretches over millions of miles, is more than 1,000,000 million degrees Celsius (and can heat up to ten times that).
“Usually, the closer you get to a heat source, such as a fire, the hotter it gets, but the solar atmosphere doesn’t do that. The solar atmosphere gets hotter as it gets further away from the Sun, and scientists don’t yet have enough information to distinguish between various theories on why this happens,” said NASA in a pre-mission statement.
"What we want to discover is what the basic physical processes are that transfer energy and material from the surface of the sun out to the outer atmosphere, to the corona," said IRIS principal investigator Alan Title, a physicist at Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in California.
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| The surface of the sun (Photo from nasa.gov) |
There are two current theories explaining what has been termed the Coronal Heating Problem. One proposes that special sorts of waves travel from the hot core of the sun to the corona, where they dissipate, leaving heat. Another shows magnetic fields in the sun creating electric currents in the corona, which then violently “re-connect” lashing back onto the sun and releasing huge quantities of energy into the outer atmosphere.
“We don’t know whether any of these are right or whether we need new concepts. It’s the observations from IRIS that are going to be able to determine that,” said Eric Priest, a solar physicist at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland.
The area under the lens is also the source of the ‘space weather’ our planetary system experiences. Solar flares and solar winds, which can have a wide variety of effects from damaging satellite equipment to causing blackouts on Earth (in fact an energy outage forced the IRIS launch to be postponed by a day), either originate in the chromosphere and the bottom of the corona, or are much affected by the little-known processes going on there.
Any discoveries will also help scientists understand how other very hot bodies in the universe behave.
“If we understand these structures properly on the Sun,” said Priest “we will predict how they scale in other structures in the universe.”
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Snowden admits taking Booz Allen job to collect data on NSA surveillance
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| The Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp office (Reuters / Kevin Lamarque) |
Edward Snowden signed on to work with intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton only to obtain information about the United States’ surveillance programs, the NSA leaker told the South China Morning Post.
The paper, one of only three outlets to have acknowledged contact with Snowden along with The Guardian and the Washington Post, wrote on Monday that he admitted to taking the job just to collect intelligence.
“My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked,” he told the Post. “That is why I accepted that position about three months ago.” According to the paper, Snowden was asked specifically if he went to the contractor to gather evidence of surveillance, to which he replied, “Correct on Booz.”
The Post said the interview was conducted on June 12. Snowden reportedly left Hong Kong late last week and was believed to be in Moscow as of Sunday. An indictment against him was unsealed in the US days earlier and American officials are seeking his extradition back to the States.
“I’m not going to get into specifics, but it is our understanding that he is still in Russia,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said during a briefing with reporters on Monday. "We have asked the Russians to look at all the options and expel Snowden to the US.”
Snowden, 30, has been charged with the unlawful disclosure of classified intelligence and is wanted in the US for a myriad of counts that could bring him decades in prison if convicted. During Monday’s presser, Carney said the decision on the part of Hong Kong to release Snowden “was a deliberate choice by the government to release a fugitive despite a valid arrest warrant.”In the latest Post article, Snowden defended his actions and the method he went about selecting documents to send to The Guardian.
“I did not release them earlier because I don’t want to simply dump huge amounts of documents without regard to their content,” he told the paper. “I have to screen everything before releasing it to journalists.”
Snowden also hinted at the likelihood of more leaks to come:“If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country to make their own assessment, independent of my bias, as to whether or not the knowledge of US network operations against their people should be published,” he said.
Snowden took a job making six-figures at Booz Allen earlier this year rounding off a career that formerly found him working for the Central Intelligence Agency and Dell computers. Last week, Reuters reported that hiring screeners at Booz Allen found possible discrepancies in the resume Snowden submitted when he first sought work, but ultimately the contractors decided to bring him on board anyway.
Pelosi booed for defending NSA wiretapping
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| U.S. House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (AFP Photo / Alex Wong) |
“He did violate the law in terms of releasing those documents,” Pelosi told attendees of the annual Netroots National conference of liberal Internet activists. “We have to have a balance between security and privacy.” She also said it was unfair to compare the president’s office to President George W. Bush’s “fourth term”, and argued that Obama’s administration increased oversight of the NSA by giving the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) courts a role in approving the agency’s programs. “People on the far right are saying oh, this is the fourth term of President Bush,” Pelosi said. “Absolutely, positively not so.” Pelosi’s comments provoked the crowd, prompting conference attendees to boo and interrupt the lawmaker they previously looked up to. Security guards escorted one activist out of the conference room because he stood up and questioned Pelosi too loudly.
“It’s not a balance. It’s not constitutional!” shouted 57-year-old Marc Perkel from Gilroy, Calif., before being escorted out. “No secret laws!” Several other activists walked out in support of the man, angry at the California Democrat’s remarks. Others shouted comments in support of Perkel, and expressed their opposition to the NSA surveillance program, with some calling the US a police state.
“Leave him alone! Secrets and lies! No secret courts! Protect the First Amendment,” the audience members shouted, according to the San Jose Mercury News. “You suck!” one man yelled at Pelosi. Conference moderator Zerlina Maxwell tried to calm the crowd, telling the activists that they should submit questions via Twitter rather than yelling them out, but Pelosi said she welcomed the shouted questions. After being booed and interrupted, the House Minority Leader continued to discuss the NSA scandal, noting that the problem is the outsourcing of government programs to contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton, which is where Snowden worked. Outside the hall, Perkel told the San Jose Mercury News that he believes Pelosi has good intentions, but simply does not fully understand the NSA's data collection programs. The lawmaker received positive reactions on many of the other issues she discussed, including gay and lesbian workplace rights and bringing more women into positions of power. But regarding the NSA, the liberal activists were largely disappointed in their leader. “We’re listening our progressive leaders who are supposed to be on our side of the team saying it’s OK for us to get targeted for online surveillance,” Jana Thrift of Eugene, Ore., told the San Jose Mercury News. “It’s crazy. I don’t know who Nancy Pelosi really is.”
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Google’s chief engineer: People will soon upload their entire brains to computers
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| Ray Kurzweil (AFP Photo / Gabriel Bouys) |
There are around 377 million results on Google.com for the query “Can I live forever?” Ask that question to company’s top engineer, though, and you’re likely to hear an answer that’s much more concise. Simply put, Google’s Ray Kurzweil says immortality is only a few years away. Digital immortality, at least. Kurzweil, 64, was only brought on to Google late last year, but that hasn’t stopped him from making headlines already. During a conference in New York City last week, the company’s director of engineering said that the growth of biotechnology is so quickly paced that that he predicts our lives will be drastically different in just a few decades. According to Kurzweil, humans will soon be able to upload their entire brains onto computers. After then, other advancements won’t be too far behind. “The life expectancy was 20, 1,000 years ago,” Kurzweil said over the weekend at the Global Future 2045 World Congress in New York City, CNBC's Cadie Thompson reported. “We doubled it in 200 years. This will go into high gear within 10 and 20 years from now, probably less than 15, we will be reaching that tipping point where we add more time than has gone by because of scientific progress.” "Somewhere between 10 and 20 years, there is going to be tremendous transformation of health and medicine," he said. In his 2005 book “The Singularity Is Near,” Kurzweil predicted that ongoing achievements in biotechnology would mean that by the middle of the century, “humans will develop the means to instantly create new portions of ourselves, either biological or nonbiologicial,” so that people can have “a biological body at one time and not at another, then have it again, then change it.” He also said there will soon be “software-based humans” who will “live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including holographically projected bodies, foglet-projected bodies and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms.”
Those nanobot swarms might still be a bit away, but given the vast capabilities already achieved since the publication of his book, Kurzweil said in New York last week that more and more of the human body will soon be synced up to computers, both for backing up our thoughts and to help stay in good health. "There's already fantastic therapies to overcome heart disease, cancer and every other neurological disease based on this idea of reprogramming the software," Kurzweil at the conference. "These are all examples of treating biology as software. ...These technologies will be a 1,000 times more powerful than they were a decade ago. ...These will be 1,000 times more powerful by the end of the decade. And a million times more powerful in 20 years." In “The Singularity Is Near,” Kurzweil acknowledged that Moore’s Law of Computer suggests that the power of computer doubles, on average, every two years. At that rate, he wrote, “We're going to become increasingly non-biological to the point where the non-biological part dominates and the biological part is not important anymore.” “Based on conservative estimates of the amount of computation you need to functionally simulate a human brain, we'll be able to expand the scope of our intelligence a billion-fold,” The Daily Mail quoted Kurzweil. Kurzweil joined Google in December 2012 and is a 1999 winner of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. In the 1970s, Kurzweil was responsible for creating the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer.
