Drones are an inevitable part of our future. Whether they're used for good or evil is up for debate. With that idea in mind, Setup, a media lab in the Netherlands, created the Cuddly Drones program to teach kids about drone engineering and surveillance concerns.
In the documentary film "Citizenfour" by Laura Poitras, it’s revealed that Edward Snowden’s longtime girlfriend Lindsay Mills also left the United States and joined Snowden in Russia. Cheekily, Vogue suggests a trio of outfits for Mills, to match both the climate and the need for discretion that comes with proximity to the source of a major intelligence leak.
“When I first heard the news, I was doing cartwheels,” says Cindy Southworth, a technology expert at the National Network to End Domestic Violence. “But my official statement is ‘Yippee! One down and 400 to go.’ There’s a long list of really vile products right behind StealthGenie that need to be investigated and taken down too.”
Powered by a pusher propeller, covered in pixel camouflage, and furnished with stadium-seating for its two crew members, the Advanced High Performance Reconnaissance and Surveillance Aircraft (AHRLAC) looks like an alternate history version of a World War I fighter. The result of a collaboration between South Africa's Aerosud aviation firm and the Paramount Group, the AHRLAC is designed as a cheap alternative to the big name in military surveillance right now: drones.
The Boston Calling Music Festival in May 2013 had a great lineup: Fun., Dirty Projectors, and Of Monsters and Men, to name a few. The event also included ten cameras that recorded over 50 hours of video surveillance footage on the thousands of concert goers at Boston's City Hall Plaza. An investigative series by the Boston area free weekly DigBoston recently unearthed this surveillance, which was done on behalf of the city.
On Sunday, German newspaper Der Spiegel published a story about the National Security Agency's “Tailored Access Operations” unit, based in San Antonio, Texas. The NSA, whose mandate concerns intercepting electronic communications, is usually associated with high-tech espionage. Buried in the article, however, is an altogether lower-tech revelation: the NSA’s TAO unit has swiped computers in transit. Says Der Spiegel: “If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops."
