Researchers at the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center are developing a pocket-sized aerial surveillance device for Soldiers and small units operating in challenging ground environments.
The Cargo Pocket Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance program, or CP-ISR, seeks to develop a mobile Soldier sensor to increase the situational awareness of dismounted Soldiers by providing real-time video surveillance of threat areas within their immediate operational environment.
While larger systems have been used to provide over-the-hill ISR capabilities on the battlefield for almost a decade, none of those delivers it directly to the squad level, where Soldiers need the ability to see around the corner or into the next room during combat missions. (more)
The functional difference between a diffuse wall and a mirror is well understood: one scatters back into all directions, and the other one preserves the directionality of reflected light.
The temporal structure of the light, however, is left intact by both: assuming simple surface reflection, photons that arrive first are reflected first. In this paper, we exploit this insight to recover objects outside the line of sight from second-order diffuse reflections, effectively turning walls into mirrors. (more)
UK - A man who hid his phone in a toilet with the intention of filming his colleagues has been cleared of three charges of voyeurism – after magistrates accepted he has an extreme phobia of diarrhea and vomit.
A psychologist was called in to explain how Thomas Clark's actions were not as perverse as was being claimed by prosecutors.
The 28-year-old, from Barry Close in Tilgate, told a court he was petrified someone using the unisex toilet at his workplace before him might have suffered a bout of diarrhea or been sick.
Between November 1, 2012, and June 5, 2013, Mr Clark's phone was found on three occasions hidden in the toilet, by women he worked with at an office in Southgate.
On one occasion it was found in a bin, on another in a newspaper and on the third occasion in an Argos catalog. (more)
Yo, Barry... check it out.
New Jersey's Supreme Court is proposing an exception to the law that keeps conversations between a husband and wife private...
The state's highest court sided with the appeals court that marital communication does not lose its privacy just because it's heard by wiretap. But the justices proposed that the Legislature create a crime-fraud exception when spouses are jointly involved in criminal activity. (more)
A former Ford engineer is being probed by the FBI after listening devices were found in meeting rooms at company offices.
Ford issued a statement saying that it "initiated an investigation of a now-former employee and requested the assistance of the FBI."
It also adds that Ford's offices were not searched by the agency. "Ford voluntarily provided the information and items requested in the search warrant. We continue to work in cooperation with the FBI on this joint investigation. As this is an ongoing investigation, we are not able to provide additional details." (more)
(Sharon) Leach admitted hiding the devices under tables to help her transcribe meetings, her lawyer said...
The devices were installed before meetings but could not be easily
removed, her lawyer said. The audio devices were left in the conference
rooms and unintentionally recorded other meetings.
In all, Leach gave Ford security eight Sansa recording devices, her
lawyer said. Those are the same devices listed on the FBI’s search
warrant on July 11. (more)
A renowned four-floor Old Town nightclub has been put up for sale after its parent companies plunged into administration.
Dozens of jobs are at risk while the future of Espionage – based inside India Buildings in Victoria Street – is thrashed out. (more)
Ever posted a picture of your cat online?
Unless your privacy settings avoid making APIs publicly available on sites like Flickr, Twitpic, Instagram or the like, there's a cat stalker who knows where your liddl' puddin' lives, and he's totally pwned your pussy by geolocating it.
Mundy, a data analyst, artist, and Associate Professor in the Department of Art at Florida State University, has been working on the data visualization project, which is called I Know Where Your Cat Lives.
It's a data experiment that takes advantage of a furry monolith: some 15 million images currently tagged with the word "cat" on public image hosting sites, with more being uploaded at a rate of thousands more per day.
Mundy isn't even particularly a cat person. He could just have easily called the project "I know where your kid sleeps". Creepy? Oh yeah - much worse than kitty-stalking creepy. That is, of course, the point of the project... (more) (The Map)
Tip: Go tighten up your privacy settings. Better yet, turn off geo-location when taking photos. Ultimate better, stop posting.
This is how bad things are getting...
"The NSA made me slather my face in make-up... I had slathered the paint on my face in order to hide from computers. The patterns in which I applied the paint were important: To the pixel-calculating machinations of facial recognition algorithms, they transformed my face into a mess of unremarkable pixels. In the computer’s vision, my face caused a momentary burst of confusion. That’s why the patterns are called computer vision dazzle (or CV dazzle). When it works, CV dazzle keeps facial-recognition algorithms from seeing a face...
...more unexpected was what CV dazzle taught me about the physical world. It reminded me of another tech experiment I’d undertaken:
My phone’s Reminders app can tie a message to a specific place, it triggers an alert tone every time a user comes within 500 feet. I’d tried tying these reminders to a different kind of location—the 176 embassies and diplomatic missions in Washington, D.C. Whenever I got within a couple hundred feet of one, my phone sent me a little ping: “Iceland.” “Thailand.” “Equitorial New Guinea.”...
...here is the essence of CV dazzle’s strangeness: The very thing that makes you invisible to computers makes you glaringly obvious to other humans." (more) (official site cvdazzle.com)
Blank Reg would have loved this.
Turkey’s political system appeared to be sinking deeper into crisis on Tuesday, as nearly 70 police officers, some of them senior, were arrested for illegally wiretapping the telephones of senior government figures, including the Prime Minster and the intelligence chief. At least 67 members of the country’s police force were arrested in raids that took place on Tuesday all over Turkey, while warrants have reportedly been issued for over 100 people.
Many of the arrestees were seen being taken away in handcuffs by security personnel, including two former heads of Istanbul police’s counter-terrorism unit. Hadi Salihoglu, Istanbul’s chief prosecutor, said in a written statement issued on Tuesday that the suspects were part of a criminal conspiracy that had wiretapped phones belonging to Turkeys’ Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as well as Hakan Fidan, director of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization, known as MİT.
Thousands of other phone lines had also been wiretapped, he added, belonging to journalists and government administrators, including judges and military officials. (more)
A South Park man is being held without bail after investigators say he murdered his mother and stepfather and then disposed of their bodies near the Duwamish River.
Longtime friends of Parenteau say the father of two had become increasingly more paranoid... "He thought they put something in his arm and were bugging his phone. He thought he was Jesus." (more)
Moral: The fear of privacy invasion is serious and deeply felt. When someone mentions it, take it seriously. It doesn't matter if it is real or imagined. It is real to them. Don't ignore the anguish. Try to help.
A "rogue" gynecologist who used tiny cameras to secretly record videos and photos of his patients has forced one of the world's top medical centers to pay $190 million to 8,000 women and girls.
Dr. Nikita Levy was fired after 25 years with the Johns Hopkins Health System in Baltimore in February 2013 after a female co-worker spotted the pen-like camera he wore around his neck and alerted authorities.
Levy committed suicide days later, as a federal investigation led to roughly 1,200 videos and 140 images stored on computers in his home... His suicide — by wrapping his head in a plastic bag with a hose connected to a helium tank — frustrated everyone who wanted to know his motives and see him face justice. (more)
According to a security researcher, undocumented services in iOS allow Apple -- and law enforcement -- to access the contents of any iOS device, including encrypted ones.
Forensic researcher Jonathan Zdziarski has outlined details of how a number of undocumented services in iOS are purportedly used to collect personal data by law enforcement and government agencies, according to ZDNet.
The services, which sport names like "lockdownd," "pcapd" and "mobile.file_relay," are allegedly used to bypass lock screens and collect data from iOS devices, and are accessible by USB and WiFi. (Zdziarski adds "maybe cellular" to that list as well.)
Zdziarski presented his findings at the HOPE/X (Hackers On Planet Earth) conference in New York, where he noted that while Apple has worked hard to make iOS secure against "typical attackers," the company has also ensured that it can "access data on end user devices on behalf of law enforcement. "The end result is that iOS has been made "more secure from everybody except Apple and the government." (more)
"...we got Snowden!"
Russian President Vladimir Putin is denying media reports that he will reopen a Soviet-era base in Cuba used to spy on the United States.
Putin said Thursday there are no plans to resume operations at the Lourdes signals intelligence facility near Havana, after Russian media first reported a day earlier that the two countries provisionally agreed to the deal last week. (more)
Russia is trying to reopen a Cold War-era spy base in Cuba.
During Russian President Vladimir Putin’s trip to Cuba earlier this month, Putin and Cuban officials reportedly reached a provisional agreement to reopen the signals intelligence facility in Lourdes, Cuba, south of Havana...
The Lourdes base was first opened in 1964 and was used to intercept communications in the U.S. and throughout the Western Hemisphere. Some estimate that as much as 50 percent of the radio-intercepted intelligence that the Soviet Union collected on the U.S. during the Cold War came from Lourdes. Putin closed the facility back in 2001, citing it as a “goodwill gesture” toward the U.S., which had long expressed concerns about the Russian spy station. However, many analysts believed the real reason behind the decision was the $200 million-a-year rent that Moscow was reportedly paying to Cuba to maintain the base.
According to The Guardian, “the Lourdes facility was the Soviet Union’s largest foreign base, a mere 155 miles from the U.S. coast. It employed up to 3,000 military and intelligence personnel to intercept a wide array of American telephone and radio communications.” (more)
mCouple is something you can download on your Android and iOS devices to keep track of your partners.
So if someone thinks their significant other is cheating on them or if they’re anxious about who their partner is talking to and where he/she is going... (You get the idea.) It works in a two-way fashion, so both the partners need to have it installed on their devices in order to take advantage of it...
...its key concept is that all the history from you device will be accessible on your partner’s device. This means, any call or message you get during your day will be accessible on your partner’s connected smartphone without any bounds.
The same applies for contact entries made by you as well. ...its GPS tracking attribute makes it possible to track every move your partner makes. Facebook hasn’t been kept out of mCouple’s purview as well, with partners having been given the option of viewing all the Facebook chats of their significant others. (more)
FutureWatch: An in-app purchase offer for the Instant Alibi upgrade feature :)
