NSA Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images 136
Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes "The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents. The spy agency's reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency's ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed."
1984+100=2084 (Score:4, Interesting)
I think George Orwell's classic 1984 needs an update... Any bids from the rest of you /. reading cellar dwelling SciFi nerds on what 2084 will be like? Will our kids and grandkids have micro drones hovering about them, recording their every utterance and their every move and reporting it to private corporations and/or christian conservative ayatollahs in Washington? Will people be walking around with masks to avoid the omnipresent surveillance society? Will masks even be legal? In the UK hey've already entertained the idea of banning hooded garments because they enable you to hide your face from CCTV.
Reciprocal approach (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not start spying on the spies and publish every single move and action they make. Follow the spies by spying on them and publish the results. Not only celebrities are public goods, the spies who collect information should be must be as transparent as they live on and deal in public goods. What is good for the goose...
Hey, just like Facebook (Score:5, Interesting)
It's funny how little difference there is between what Facebook's servers are doing and the NSA's. I wonder who has more info on you.
Re:edit (Score:2, Interesting)
Sadly no. A terrifyingly stupid EO was signed that made it so that the wikileaks info was still classified. So that every single person with a clearance that ran across it on the web had to report it as a security violation. Yes, the national security adviser is that stupid.