Coming Soon: Ubiquitous Long-Term Surveillance From Big Brother 191
alphadogg writes "As the price of digital storage drops and the technology to tap electronic communication improves, authoritarian governments will soon be able to perform retroactive surveillance on anyone within their borders, according to a Brookings Institute report. These regimes will store every phone call, instant message, email, social media interaction, text message, movements of people and vehicles and public surveillance video and mine it at their leisure, according to 'Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Government,' written by John Villaseno, a senior fellow at Brookings and a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA."
Authoritarian? or any Western country as well? (Score:5, Informative)
Funny that article writer wrote "authoritarian". This applies to almost any country - with USA being the prime example (CarrierIQ^3), or ubiquitous cameras in UK.
If people think their governments do not spy on them just as in "authoritarian" regimes, they are so wrong...
Re:Accountability (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Accountability (Score:5, Informative)
Possible, merely theoretical solutions that have no basis in what would happen:
* Confiscate Cameras: http://www.infowars.com/cops-confiscate-cameras-at-ohio-congressmans-town-hall/ [infowars.com]
* Delete data: http://www.pixiq.com/article/chicago-police-delete-journalism-professors-video-footage [pixiq.com]
* Destroy phone/camera: http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2011/06/miami_police_destroy_cell_phon.php [scienceblogs.com]
* Use of a live streaming/storage to avoid confiscation/destruction? There's tech for that:
** http://inventorspot.com/articles/spy_technology_how_disable_a_cell_phone_15035 [inventorspot.com]
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_jammer [wikipedia.org]
* Wiretapping laws: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/05/1954216/Leave-a-Message-Go-To-Jail?from=twitter [slashdot.org]
* Camera blocking devices:
** http://www.gizmag.com/norte-photoblocker-club-beer-cooler/20820/ [gizmag.com]
** Unable to find it, but I'm sure I remember Kipkay having a video showing how to make glasses that would blind any camera sensitive to infrared.
Some of this, such as the wiretapping cellphone case, has been overturned. I believe. This is just off the top of my head. I'm sure there is more for real cynics with time to list.
Re:A race between utopia and oblivion (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/ [ibmandtheholocaust.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust [wikipedia.org]
"IBM and the Holocaust is a book by investigative journalist Edwin Black which details the business dealings of the American-based multinational corporation International Business Machines (IBM) and its German and other European subsidiaries with the government of Adolf Hitler during the 1930s and the years of World War II. In the book, Black outlines the way in which IBM's technology helped facilitate Nazi genocide against the Jewish people through generation and tabulation of punch cards based upon national census data."
How they curtailed bombing in Baghdad (Score:4, Informative)
I read someplace that this is kind of how they curtailed the car/roadside bombings in Iraq that were so common there.
They put up enough drones to cover the city with video; when a bomb went off, they basically rewound time and followed the car that blew up back to where it came from, which often was a bomb factory or other insurgent facility.