Even Bugs Will Be Bugged Exploring the next frontier

Even when mark zuckerberg posted a picture of himself on Facebook in June, a sharp-eyed observer spotted a piece of tape covering his laptop’s camera. The irony didn’t go unnoticed: A man whose $350 billion company relies on users feeding it intimate details about their lives is worried about his own privacy. But Zuckerberg is smart to take precautions.

Even those of us who don’t control large corporations have reason to worry about surveillance, both licit and illicit. Here’s how governments, terrorists, corporations, identity thieves, spammers, and personal enemies could observe us in the future, and how we might respond.

1 | Cameras Will Be Invisible

Many of the cameras that can be pointed at us today are easy to spot. But researchers are developing recording devices that can hide in plain sight, some by mimicking animals. A company called AeroVironment has produced a drone that looks and flies like a hummingbird. Engineers at Carnegie Mellon, Nasa, and elsewhere have designed “snakebots” that can maneuver in tight spaces and could be adapted for surveillance. Robotic bugs are in development, too, and engineers at UC Berkeley and in Singapore are developing cyborg beetles—real insects that can be remote-controlled via implanted electrodes and that might someday pack cameras.

If even an insect is too obvious, Kristofer Pister, an engineer at Berkeley, and David Blaauw, an engineer at the University of Michigan, are developing “smart dust” and “micro motes,” respectively: tiny computers mere millimeters wide that can be equipped with cameras and other sensors. One can (or can’t, as it were) see where this is going.

2 | Your Past Will Be Omnipresent

Imagine this: You walk into a car showroom and before you say anything, the dealer knows your name, employment status, car-buying history, and credit rating. Such a future isn’t far off, says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist at the ACLU.

Already, data brokers such as Acxiom and LexisNexis compile reams of information on all of us. Clients can purchase a dossier on your criminal, consumer, and marital past. Soghoian thinks it’s only a matter of time before data brokers begin drawing from online-dating profiles and social-media posts as well.

Right now, clients have to log in and search for people by name or buy lists of people with certain traits. But as facial-recognition technology becomes more widespread, Soghoian says, any device with a camera and the right software could automatically pull up your information. Eventually, someone might be able to point a phone at you (or look at you through smart contact lenses) and see a bubble over your head marking you as unemployed or recently divorced. We’ll no longer be able to separate our personae—our work selves from our weekend selves. Instead our histories will come bundled as a pop-up on strangers’ screens.

3 | We’ll Let Spies In

This January, a spate of news articles reported that a search engine called Shodan allows online voyeurs to browse password-unprotected baby monitors and watch strangers’ children sleeping in their cribs. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise: Unsecured webcams of all sorts are findable through various search engines, including Google. Still, the news was a reminder of how easy it is to spy on people through the gadgets in their homes—a problem that’s likely to grow as more devices are connected to the internet.

With the advent of the Internet of Things, appliances and gadgets will monitor many aspects of our lives, from what we eat to what we flush. Devices we talk to will record and upload our conversations, as Amazon’s Echo already does. Even toys will make us vulnerable. Kids say the darndest things, and the talking Hello Barbie doll sends those things wirelessly to a third-party server, where they are analyzed by speech-recognition software and shared with vendors.

Even our thoughts could become hackable. The technology company Retinad can use the sensors on virtual-reality headsets to track users’ engagement. Future devices might integrate EEG electrodes to measure brain waves. In August, Berkeley engineers announced that they had produced “neural dust,” implantable electrodes just a millimeter wide that can record brain activity for scientific or medical purposes.

Then again, you don’t need brain implants to have your mind read. “Google knows more about me than my wife does,” says Bruce Schneier, a computer-security expert at IBM. “No one ever lies to a search engine. It’s not a neural implant, but it’s freakishly close.”

4 | Machines Will Decide Our Fates

https://archive.is/BB1lZ

Even Bugs Will Be Bugged Exploring the next frontier

Even when mark zuckerberg posted a picture of himself on Facebook in June, a sharp-eyed observer spotted a piece of tape covering his laptop’s camera. The irony didn’t go unnoticed: A man whose $350 billion company relies on users feeding it intimate details about their lives is worried about his own privacy. But Zuckerberg is smart to take precautions.

Even those of us who don’t control large corporations have reason to worry about surveillance, both licit and illicit. Here’s how governments, terrorists, corporations, identity thieves, spammers, and personal enemies could observe us in the future, and how we might respond.

1 | Cameras Will Be Invisible

Many of the cameras that can be pointed at us today are easy to spot. But researchers are developing recording devices that can hide in plain sight, some by mimicking animals. A company called AeroVironment has produced a drone that looks and flies like a hummingbird. Engineers at Carnegie Mellon, Nasa, and elsewhere have designed “snakebots” that can maneuver in tight spaces and could be adapted for surveillance. Robotic bugs are in development, too, and engineers at UC Berkeley and in Singapore are developing cyborg beetles—real insects that can be remote-controlled via implanted electrodes and that might someday pack cameras.

If even an insect is too obvious, Kristofer Pister, an engineer at Berkeley, and David Blaauw, an engineer at the University of Michigan, are developing “smart dust” and “micro motes,” respectively: tiny computers mere millimeters wide that can be equipped with cameras and other sensors. One can (or can’t, as it were) see where this is going.

2 | Your Past Will Be Omnipresent

Imagine this: You walk into a car showroom and before you say anything, the dealer knows your name, employment status, car-buying history, and credit rating. Such a future isn’t far off, says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist at the ACLU.

Already, data brokers such as Acxiom and LexisNexis compile reams of information on all of us. Clients can purchase a dossier on your criminal, consumer, and marital past. Soghoian thinks it’s only a matter of time before data brokers begin drawing from online-dating profiles and social-media posts as well.

Right now, clients have to log in and search for people by name or buy lists of people with certain traits. But as facial-recognition technology becomes more widespread, Soghoian says, any device with a camera and the right software could automatically pull up your information. Eventually, someone might be able to point a phone at you (or look at you through smart contact lenses) and see a bubble over your head marking you as unemployed or recently divorced. We’ll no longer be able to separate our personae—our work selves from our weekend selves. Instead our histories will come bundled as a pop-up on strangers’ screens.

3 | We’ll Let Spies In

This January, a spate of news articles reported that a search engine called Shodan allows online voyeurs to browse password-unprotected baby monitors and watch strangers’ children sleeping in their cribs. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise: Unsecured webcams of all sorts are findable through various search engines, including Google. Still, the news was a reminder of how easy it is to spy on people through the gadgets in their homes—a problem that’s likely to grow as more devices are connected to the internet.

With the advent of the Internet of Things, appliances and gadgets will monitor many aspects of our lives, from what we eat to what we flush. Devices we talk to will record and upload our conversations, as Amazon’s Echo already does. Even toys will make us vulnerable. Kids say the darndest things, and the talking Hello Barbie doll sends those things wirelessly to a third-party server, where they are analyzed by speech-recognition software and shared with vendors.

Even our thoughts could become hackable. The technology company Retinad can use the sensors on virtual-reality headsets to track users’ engagement. Future devices might integrate EEG electrodes to measure brain waves. In August, Berkeley engineers announced that they had produced “neural dust,” implantable electrodes just a millimeter wide that can record brain activity for scientific or medical purposes.

Then again, you don’t need brain implants to have your mind read. “Google knows more about me than my wife does,” says Bruce Schneier, a computer-security expert at IBM. “No one ever lies to a search engine. It’s not a neural implant, but it’s freakishly close.”

4 | Machines Will Decide Our Fates

https://archive.is/BB1lZ

Media knives out for Catherine Herridge — for reporting Obamagate straight

By Jonathan S. Tobin

https://nypost.com/2020/05/19/media-knives-out-for-catherine-herridge-for-reporting-obamagate-straight/

Journalists are pack animals. That’s especially true in Washington. Despite the hunger for scoops, when it comes to the substance of stories, few have the guts to go against the ideological groupthink that prevails in our nation’s capital.

That’s what makes CBS’ Catherine Herridge so exceptional. In an era when too many network journalists slant their reporting to serve establishment opinion, Herridge sticks to the facts. Her dogged determination to get to the bottom of stories has made her an invaluable source on the national security beat.

Her sterling quality and integrity have also put a target on her back. When it came to the “collusion” hoax, she dared to let the truth guide her. Likewise with her reporting into government misconduct in the prosecution of President Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Most of her colleagues reveled in collusion falsehoods — and ignored FBI wrongdoing. She did the opposite.

But there’s always a price to be paid for ­refusing to conform. If you expose documents that further discredit the already exploded myth that Trump colluded with Russia, you are going to lose friends in Washington. If you show that there was a concerted attempt to spy on his campaign and to leak information designed to paralyze his administration, you aren’t going to be popular with journalists who were part of this effort.

So it’s hardly surprising that Herridge — a star reporter at Fox News from 1996 until last year before moving to CBS — has been subjected to abuse by Joe Biden’s campaign mouthpiece and backstabbed by her colleagues in recent days.

Jealousy, and her association with ratings champion Fox, no doubt motivated her mainstream colleagues to blackball her when she came under attack. This even though her tenure at Fox was marked by admirable objectivity.

After Herridge beat other reporters to the news that Biden’s name was on the list of ex-officials who had asked to “unmask” Flynn, Biden flack Andrew Bates called her a “partisan, right-wing hack.” A scurrilous story appeared in The Daily Beast, in which various CBS journalists speaking anonymously voiced their disgust with her for not sharing their partisan prejudices.

That’s what happens when you play it straight rather than distort the news to serve anti-Trump talking points.

The Biden campaign’s attacks on Herridge, and the sniping at her from colleagues, also illustrated the appalling hypocrisy of most of the Washington press corps.

Whenever Trump talks back to relentlessly hostile reporters at news briefings, they ­denounce him for supposedly trying to ­destroy press freedom.

Some of his tweets on the subject, calling hostile journos “enemies of the people,” have been over the top. But the same can be said for the collective pearl-clutching on the part of his targets. Though they pose as victims, they have spent the last 3½ years breathlessly pushing stories about Russia collusion that don’t withstand scrutiny. In the Flynn case, they (the media) have been the persecutors, which makes their collective shrug now all the more appalling — and telling.

While their colleagues have feted the objects of Trump’s ire as First Amendment martyrs, few have spoken up in defense of Herridge. That was also generally the case when President Barack Obama routinely bashed Fox for reporting or commentary that contradicted his talking points.

Most mainstream outlets have tilted liberal for decades, of course. But today’s media bias is something else. Many supposedly straight-news reporters now openly see themselves as part of a project to delegitimize the Trump administration — and to humiliate its supporters. They are proud of this. They don’t even bother to hide it on Twitter.

The news business is paying a price for this ideological zeal. If much of the country doesn’t believe what the media tell them, it’s not because of Trumpian manipulation. It’s because Americans can see with their own eyes what happens when someone like Herridge steps outside the lines.

There is intimidation of the press in our time. But Trump isn’t the one who metes it out. It’s establishment reporters and editors who punish their own for questioning liberal orthodoxies — or following the facts to the unpopular conclusions.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org. Twitter at: @JonathanS_Tobin