A Predator drone with the NASA insignia has flown solo in US commercial airspace. The first flight of its kind comes amid concerns that unmanned government aircraft operations will become the new normal in the United States.

The remotely piloted MQ-9 Predator B Ikhana aircraft successfully flew over California on Tuesday, according to NASA. It was the first time it had completed a flight in commercial airspace without a chase plane.

NASA has hailed the move as bringing the US “one step closer to normalizing unmanned aircraft operations used by commercial and private pilots,” with the agency stating that such a practice could prove beneficial from everything to monitoring forest fires to conducting search and rescue operations. 

However, what NASA’s Integrated Aviation Systems Program Director Ed Waggoner calls a “major milestone” is seen as a worrying trend by some who fear that the normalization of unmanned drones buzzing across the sky is a slippery slope – particularly if such drones become armed.

The debate surrounding US drones isn't new, but continues to intensify with every so-called “milestone” that's reached. One of those came in March 2017, when US President Donald Trump gave the CIA power to order drone strikes without Pentagon approval. Physician Tomasz Pierscionek summed up the thoughts of many in an op-ed for RT, writing that “a future where a globalized battlefield becomes the norm and individuals deemed a threat to the US, or any other power with the means, can be eliminated without due process or trial is a dark one indeed.” 

Then there's the topic of spying on US citizens, should Predator drones become omnipresent in American skies. The Pentagon itself admitted in 2016 to using drones to spy on Americans, a practice that could increase to a whole new level if a fleet of sophisticated surveillance aircraft is put to work. Perhaps even more worrying is that the Defense Department determined that such missions were completely legal and hadn't violated any laws.

Outcry over such a possibility isn't just focused at the national level in the US, however. One of those instances occurred back in 2014, when the Los Angeles Police Department was gifted two quadcopter drones as a gift from the Seattle Police Department. It wasn't long before a group calling itself “Stop LAPD Spying Coalition” launched an initiative against the police force. 

“We reject all forms of police oppression and any policy that make us all suspects in the eyes of the state. Our vision is the dismantling of government-sanctioned spying and intelligence gathering, in all its multiple forms,” the group's website reads.

While the issue remains a point of contention domestically, Washington's reach spans far outside the United States. US spy drones and planes flew close to Russia’s Crimea over 100 times in 2017, a high-ranking regional army official announced in October. 

So, while many hail the progress of NASA as a major step forward, the question remains whether the technology will be used for good or as a dangerous method to keep everyone – Americans and others – behaving exactly the way Washington wants them to.

https://www.rt.com/usa/429615-nasa-predator-drone-flight/

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A former employee of a company that works closely with the Pentagon has filed a lawsuit claiming he was terminated from his job after reporting that the firm had transported a drone rigged with explosives on a commercial flight.

Mark Anderson, who headed up security efforts for California-based AeroVironment’s government programs, says that he was fired after reporting to the Defense Department that his firm had transported an explosive-laden drone in a carry-on bag. The Delta Airlines flight from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles had 230 passengers on board, the lawsuit states.

AeroVironment is heavily reliant upon US government contracts. According to the company’s most recent annual report, 55 percent of AeroVironment’s business comes from contractor or subcontractor work for government agencies, with 37 percent of its revenue coming from the Defense Department.

After reporting the incident in May 2015 to the Pentagon, Anderson claims that he was censured, stripped of various responsibilities and ultimately terminated without severance. Anderson’s lawsuit claims that the company’s CEO pressured employees to mislead the government about ongoing security violations and mishandling of top-secret information. Anderson also claims that company lawyers “made an effort to threaten him” and that he was fired in retaliation for his whistleblowing activities.

A spokesperson for AeroVironment told Bloomberg News in an email that the company “believes the complaint contains baseless legal claims that are without merit,” emphasizing the firm’s “commitment to conducting its business with the highest standards of ethics, safety and integrity.”

According Aurelius Value, which specializes in researching publicly traded companies suspected of deceiving investors, 56 senior employees and executives have left AeroVironment since the inception of the alleged drone-bomb cover-up.

Allegations of wrongful termination aside, Anderson’s lawsuit also raises serious security questions. A Delta spokesman contacted by Bloomberg made no immediate comment.

Thousands of Google employees have signed an open letter urging the tech giant not to work on a US government surveillance engine which could use artificial intelligence to improve the targeting of drone strikes.

"We believe that Google should not be in the business of war. Therefore we ask that Project Maven be cancelled and that Google draft, publicize, and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology," reads the letter which was published by the New York Times on Tuesday.

It goes on to describe Project Maven as a "customized AI (artificial intelligence) surveillance engine that uses 'wide area motion imagery' data captured by US government drones to detect vehicles and other objects, track their motions and provide results to the Department of Defense."

It states that although Google Board of Directors member Diane Greene previously told staff that the technology would not be used to operate or fly drones or to launch weapons, it could still be used to assist in such tasks.

The letter also cites the "growing fears of biased and weaponized AI," while stating that Google is "already struggling to keep the public's trust."

"This contract puts Google’s reputation at risk and stands in direct opposition to our core values. Building this technology to assist the US government in military surveillance – and potentially lethal outcomes – is not acceptable," it says.

Marine Corps Col. Drew Cukor, who is part of the US government team working on Project Maven, said it "focuses on computer vision – an aspect of machine learning and deep learning – that autonomously extracts objects of interest from moving or still imagery." He added that the only way to develop an AI system to fit the needs of the government is to have "commercial partners" working alongside Pentagon officials.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal put Facebook through the wringer in recent weeks, losing the company $100 billion in stock value and prompting a global debate on internet privacy.

The social media giant was forced to apologize and overhaul its privacy and data sharing practices, but it still remains in the media spotlight and in the crosshairs of the Federal Trade Commission, which says it may be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fines.

But amid all the furor, one monolithic entity has continued to harvest data from billions of people worldwide. The data gathered includes a precise log of your every move and every internet search you’ve ever made, every email you’ve ever sent, your workout routine, your favourite food, and every photo you’ve ever taken. And you have allowed it to happen to yourself, for the sake of better service and more relevant advertising.

Google is a ‘Big Brother’ with capabilities beyond George Orwell’s wildest nightmares. These capabilities are all the more chilling after Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., cut its famous “don’t be evil” line from its code of conduct in 2015.

Everything you’ve ever searched for on any of your devices is recorded and stored by Google. It’s done to better predict your future searches and speed up and streamline your browsing. You can clear your search history, but it only works for that particular device. Google still keeps a record of everything. Click here to see everything you’ve ever searched on a Google device.

The same goes for every app and extension you use. If it’s connected to Google, your data is stored. That means that your Facebook messages are not only farmed out to companies like Cambridge Analytica, Google also has them from the Facebook app you use.

YouTube, which is a Google subsidiary, also stores a history of every video you watch. It will know if you’ve listened to Linkin Park’s ‘In the End’ 3,569 times, or watched hours of flat-earth conspiracy theory videos.

Likewise, any file you’ve ever stored on Google Drive, any Google Calendar event you’ve attended, any photo you’ve stored on Google Photos, and every email you’ve ever sent are all stored. You can access a copy of all of this data by requesting a link from Google here.

extension you use. If it’s connected to Google, your data is stored. That means that your Facebook messages are not only farmed out to companies like Cambridge Analytica, Google also has them from the Facebook app you use.

YouTube, which is a Google subsidiary, also stores a history of every video you watch. It will know if you’ve listened to Linkin Park’s ‘In the End’ 3,569 times, or watched hours of flat-earth conspiracy theory videos.

Likewise, any file you’ve ever stored on Google Drive, any Google Calendar event you’ve attended, any photo you’ve stored on Google Photos, and every email you’ve ever sent are all stored. You can access a copy of all of this data by requesting a link from Google here.

Read more

‘There will be serious consequences’: Facebook could be fined millions for violating consent deal

Perhaps what hits home the hardest, though, is that Google keeps track of where you are and how you got there, at all times. If you have a smartphone, there’s a good chance it runs the Android operating system, considering Android phones account for 82 percent of the global market share. That’s over 2 billion monthly active users.

And, unless you’ve disabled this feature, clicking here will show you a list of every journey you’ve ever made with your phone, including an estimate of how you traveled there. If you’re back and forth between work and home at the same time every day, Google knows this is your commute. That heavy traffic warning Google maps gives you on your drive home; Google knows there’s a traffic jam because it knows that every Android phone in every car is moving slower than they usually do at that time of day.

Google doesn’t do this behind your back. On a desktop, Google Chrome allows sites to access your computer’s camera and microphone by default. On a smartphone, agreeing to an app’s terms of service allows the app to do nearly anything, from accessing your phone’s camera and location, to recording your calls and log your messages. The Facebook app, for example, requires 44 such permissions.

It is possible to opt out of most of Google’s tracking – including search history, location timeline and targeted advertising – but it takes a bit of rooting around in settings menus, and you have to know about the option first. And of course, Google says it’s not associating the data with you, as a person – instead, it’s linked to your “advertising ID,” and never shared unless you want it to be. Or unless a government requests that Google hands it over – which US government agencies alone have done almost 17,000 times in just the first half of 2017, with over 80 percent of requests fulfilled, at least to some extent

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