license plate recognition

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pages: 397 words: 110,222

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. The Rise of Surveillance Tech by Cyrus Farivar

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, call centre, citizen journalism, cloud computing, computer age, connected car, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, information security, John Markoff, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lock screen, Lyft, national security letter, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech worker, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, you are the product, Zimmermann PGP

“Woman’s Life Saved”: “Woman’s Life Saved Using Vigilant Solutions’ License Plate Recognition (LPR) Data,” Officer Press Release, 2013. Available at: http://www.officer.com/​press_release/​10939925/​womans-life-saved-using-vigilant-solutions-license-plate-recognition-lpr-data. Another proclaims: “Survey: License Plate Recognition Is a Valuable, Well-Regulated Technology,” Officer Press Release, 2013. Available at: http://www.officer.com/​press_release/​11079856/​survey-license-plate-recognition-is-a-valuable-well-regulated-technology. One notable example came: “SB-893 Automated License Plate Recognition Systems: Use of Data,” Bill Status, California Legislative Information, 2017.

Its website and press releases herald numerous “success stories” with quotes from law enforcement agencies nationwide. (Access to Vigilant’s database, known as LEARN-NVLS, requires that officers agree to a non-disparagement clause contained within the company’s terms of service.) “Woman’s Life Saved using Vigilant Solutions’ License Plate Recognition (LPR) Data,” one success story touts. Another proclaims: “Survey: License Plate Recognition Is a Valuable, Well-Regulated Technology,” citing a poll of hundreds of law enforcement officers. As a private company, Vigilant Solutions does not disclose financial data, but in 2013, a company official told the San Francisco Business Times that its “products and services are used by more than 2,000 government agencies with 30,000-plus officers, including about two dozen agencies in the Bay Area.”

These are essentially specialized: “3M™ Mobile ALPR Camera P634” 3M, 2017. Available at: http://www.3m.com/​3M/​en_US/​company-us/​all-3m-products/​~/​3M-Mobile-ALPR-Camera-P634?N=5002385+8709322+8709393+3292106901&rt=rud. The three largest vendors of LPR: “3M Completes Sale of Tolling and Automated License/Number Plate Recognition Business,” 3M Press Release, June 30, 2017. Available at: http://investors.3m.com/​news/​press-release-details/​2017/​3M-Completes-Sale-of-Tolling-and-Automated-LicenseNumber-Plate-Recognition-Business/​default.aspx. These companies routinely encourage: “Find Out How to File for Law Enforcement Grants and Funding,” Elsag, 2017.


pages: 316 words: 90,165

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves by Hiawatha Bray

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, digital map, don't be evil, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Edward Snowden, Firefox, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, license plate recognition, lone genius, openstreetmap, polynesian navigation, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Thales of Miletus, trade route, turn-by-turn navigation, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Zipcar

,” Wired.com, November 3, 2011, www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/feds-fake-cell-phone-tower/. 15. Cynthia Lum and Linda M. Merola, “Emerging Surveillance Technologies: Privacy and the Case of License Plate Recognition (LPR) Technology,” Judicature (November–December 2012): 119. 16. Jon Campbell, “License-Plate Recognition Has Its Eyes on You,” San Diego CityBeat, February 20, 2013, www.sdcitybeat.com/sandiego/article-11511-license-plate-recognition-has-its-eyes-on-you.html. 17. “Report: RFID Market to Surpass $26B in 2022,” Security Sales and Integration, July 19, 2012, www.securitysales.com/channel/vertical-markets/news/2012/07/19/report-rfid-market-to-surpass-26b-in-2022.aspx.

Police forces throughout the United States track millions of vehicles with help from digital systems that record the license plates of passing cars. If you are a driver, your vehicle has probably been tracked this way. A 2009 study found that 37 percent of police agencies of more than one hundred officers were using license-plate recognition systems, and another one-third of departments were planning to get it.15 In an LPR system, police mount cameras along major roads, at intersections, or even on roving squad cars. These cameras give a clear view of the license plates on passing vehicles. The large bold letters and numbers are easily readable by a computer.

See Keyhole Markup Language Kobia, David, 182 Korean Air Lines Flight 007, 105–106 Krasner, Norm, 115 Lamarr, Hedy, 124 Land, Edwin, 156 Lapita people, 3 Latitude, 4, 6, 7–8, 12, 50, 86, 87, 92, 106, 113, 119, 127, 170–171, 173, 228 Laussedat, Aimé, 147 Law, 146, 147, 160 Law enforcement, 113–114, 140, 216, 217, 226, 227 Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, 166 Leghorn, Richard, 154–156 Lewis, David, 3 Lewis, Meriwether, 17 License-plate recognition (LPR) systems, 218 Lighted airway system, 33, 34 Lindbergh, Charles, 104–105 Location Privacy Protection Act, 226–227 Lockheed Martin, 167 Loki, 133–134 Longitude, 7–8, 12, 13, 14, 86, 87, 92, 106, 113, 119, 127, 170–171, 173, 228 Logsdon, Tom, 106–107 LORAN, 96–97 Magnavox, 86 Magnetic compasses, 8–13, 20, 26, 48, 50–51, 59, 60, 61, 106 Magnetism, 8–13, 20–21 Mail system, 32–34 Mapping compasses and, 11–13 GPS and, 119 history of, 2–7 hot-spot, 130–134 radio technology and, 29–30 triangulation and, 16–17 wave, 3–4 Wi-Fi, 136, 137–144, 170 world map and, 17–18 See also Internet mapping MapQuest, 175, 176, 179, 187–188 Marconi, Guglielmo, 22–23, 24–25, 45 Marcus, Michael, 124–125 Marine Corps, US, 184 Marketing, 202–205 Markey, Edward, 216 Maskelyne, Nevil, 16 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 40, 61, 67, 68, 69, 71, 212 Maximus Planudes, 7 Maxwell, James CLerk, 21 Mayflower, 1, 2, 18 McClure, Frank, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83 McDonnell, Stephen, 144 Meier, Patrick, 181–182, 183 Melvin, Curtis, 170 Mercator, Gerhard, 10, 11–12 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 124 Microsoft, 175, 179, 187 Midway, 79 Miguelez, Andrew, 200–201 Million Map, 17–18 MIT.


pages: 305 words: 93,091

The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data by Kevin Mitnick, Mikko Hypponen, Robert Vamosi

4chan, big-box store, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, connected car, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Earth, incognito mode, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, Tesla Model S, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Sure, I could walk into Walmart and pay cash for a burner phone and one hundred minutes of airtime. Who would know? Well, lots of people would. First, how did I get to Walmart? Did I take an Uber car? Did I take a taxi? These records can all be subpoenaed. I could drive my own car, but law enforcement uses automatic license plate recognition technology (ALPR) in large public parking lots to look for missing and stolen vehicles as well as people on whom there are outstanding warrants. The ALPR records can be subpoenaed. Even if I walked to Walmart, once I entered the store my face would be visible on several security cameras within the store itself, and that video can be subpoenaed.

These license-plate photographs are also used to nab red-light runners at problematic intersections. And increasingly, police are using a similar strategy as they drive by parking lots and residential driveways. Police departments passively track your car’s movements every day with automated license plate recognition (ALPR) technology. They can photograph your car’s license plate and store that data, sometimes for years, depending on the police department’s policy. ALPR cameras scan and read every plate they pass, whether the car is registered to a criminal or not. Ostensibly ALPR technology is used primarily to locate stolen cars, wanted criminals, and assist with AMBER Alerts.

The system is further linked to a Department of Justice database that keeps track of the license plates of stolen cars and vehicles associated with crimes. As an officer drives, the ALPR technology can scan up to sixty plates per second. If a scanned plate matches a plate in the DOJ database, the officer receives an alert both visually and audibly. The Wall Street Journal first reported on license plate recognition technology in 2012.13 At issue for those who oppose or question ALPR technology is not the system itself but rather how long the data is kept and why some law enforcement agencies will not release it, even to the owner of the car being tracked. It’s a disturbing tool that the police can use to figure out where you’ve been.


pages: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Data breaches don’t take account of nuance; the devastation of their personal and social lives will be unmitigated by whether a couple was going through a rough patch or whether somebody was just looking with no intention to actually commit infidelity. It’s not just the things we say or do but also the information that is collected about us that makes up our identity and reputation now. On a typical day as you drive home, cameras mounted on top of police cars and road signs are using automated license-plate recognition technology to make a database of virtually all of your car’s movements. Surveillance cameras on buildings and at traffic stops are constantly snapping pictures and recording video of you everywhere you go. As you pull into your driveway, your home automation system makes a record of exactly when you arrived; to deliver the perfect temperature, your Nest thermostat tracks your movements across the house.


pages: 307 words: 87,373

The Last Job: The Bad Grandpas and the Hatton Garden Heist by Dan Bilefsky

Boris Johnson, Crossrail, Etonian, gentrification, global supply chain, license plate recognition, urban sprawl, young professional

Just about a week after the burglary had first been discovered, the network of surveillance footage finally led them to the tool shop in Edmonton, where CCTV cameras had filmed the distinctive car parked outside, while Collins and Jones bought a new replacement pump to help them complete the job. They were homing in. Automatic license plate recognition cameras, which photograph license plates and are installed all over London to help police fight crime, had also photographed the Mercedes. Armed with a positive identification on the car and the data on its movements, Day was then able to identify the car’s owner: a portly career criminal called Kenny Collins, whom the Firm referred to as “a wombat-thick old cunt.”


pages: 265 words: 69,310

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Individual traffic police officers can and do have a pattern of disproportionately stopping black drivers,72 while traffic cameras with automatic license plate recording act irrespective of the race of the driver. So in this way, a change of technology can cut down on specific incidents of racist behavior. Yet we should be careful about drawing general conclusions about the overall effect of any new technology: as criminologist Clive Norris has shown, license plate recognition has now become a way of tracking known individuals as they move around, and it is no surprise who is tracked more and who is tracked less.73 The underlying problem remains: there is still racism in the system, but it is now manifested in different ways. Data acquisition shifts the place where racism happens from the street to the database query.


pages: 444 words: 84,486

Radicalized by Cory Doctorow

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, G4S, high net worth, information asymmetry, Kim Stanley Robinson, license plate recognition, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, old-boy network, public intellectual, satellite internet, six sigma, Social Justice Warrior, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit

On the other hand, making a new tag wasn’t exactly rocket surgery: #AfraidShouldBeYes, #YShldBFrd. Of course, the Fuckriffers didn’t care, they got all the #YouShouldBeAfraid talk they needed on their private boards. BlueCross BlueShield of Minneapolis broke ground on a new building in an industrial park at the end of its own gated cul-de-sac, with high guard towers, automated license plate recognition systems in a one-mile radius, panic rooms on every floor, and a large staff of 24/7 armed guards. Their shareholder disclosures costed this out and amortized the capital over five years, explaining how the running costs would be covered by a combination of a “security surcharge” on all premiums and a tiny per-share dividend hit.


Succeeding With AI: How to Make AI Work for Your Business by Veljko Krunic

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, anti-pattern, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, correlation coefficient, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, Gini coefficient, high net worth, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, minimum viable product, natural language processing, recommendation engine, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, strong AI, tail risk, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, web application, zero-sum game

NOTE To be on the safe side, you decide to assume that the number of overstays would collapse. Instead of using 300/year, you assume there would be at least 51 overstays/year. You’re hedged by the city if there are 50 or fewer overstays, so 51 overstays/year is the worst-case scenario for you. Figure 6.4 shows the simple ML pipeline you’ll use. Photo from the camera License plate recognition Parking rules Issue citation, if parking rules are violated (remote system) Figure 6.4 A simple ML pipeline for the automated parking meter that takes a picture of the license plate, checks if parking is legal, and issues a citation if not. The examples in this chapter use this pipeline for the analysis.


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Retrieved from https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2018/09/these-police-drones-are-watching-you/ One vendor of drones has bragged about a 518 percent growth in use by U.S. agencies: Dronefly. (n.d.). Police drone infographic. Retrieved June 16, 2020, from https://www.dronefly.com/police-drone-infographic There are automatic licence plate readers: Howe, R. J. (October 2009). “Privacy impact assessment: Automatic license plate recognition (ALPR).” Royal Canadian Mounted Police (obtained through access to information request by Rob Wipond). Retrieved from https://robwipond.com/ref/RCMP%20ALPR%20PIA.pdf; Parsons, C. (2017, June 13). Who’s watching where you’re driving? Retrieved from https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/blog/20170613 Palantir technology “allows ICE agents to access a vast ‘ecosystem’ of data”: Biddle, S., & Devereaux, R. (2019, May 2).


pages: 432 words: 124,635

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Cities intent on building more variety, freedom, sharing, and sustainability in mobility have no choice but to confront the privilege of private cars. Demand, Supply, and Surprise Some brave cities have tinkered with the economics of demand. In 2003 the London mayor Ken Livingstone adopted the world’s most geographically extensive congestion charge on vehicles entering the heart of the city on weekdays.* The system uses automatic license plate recognition cameras to identify and charge most private vehicles entering the city core, with exemptions for emergency vehicles, taxis, and residents. The fee started at a hefty £5 but has since been bumped to £10. After three years, the charge had reduced traffic in the core by a quarter and was pulling in £122 million a year.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Other powerful systems that are currently being built can also be easily reconfigured to suit more predictive demands. Consider the New York Police Department’s latest innovation—the so-called Domain Awareness System—which syncs the city’s 3,000 closed-circuit camera feeds with arrest records, 911 calls, license plate recognition technology, and radiation detectors. It can monitor a situation in real time and draw on a lot of data to understand what’s happening. The leap from here to predicting what might happen is not so great. If PredPol’s “prediction” sounds familiar, that’s because its methods were inspired by those of prominent Internet companies.


Inside British Intelligence by Gordon Thomas

active measures, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, country house hotel, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, job satisfaction, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, lateral thinking, license plate recognition, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, operational security, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

No other nation, except China, equaled such surveillance. Sufficient film to encircle the equator was downloaded daily and analyzed, and “appropriate” images were stored for future use. A Home Office spokesman said, “The question of what is appropriate is decided on a national security basis.” A surveillance network was devoted to automatic license plate recognition: Its cameras tracked vehicles used by suspected terrorists or criminals and had the capability to handle fifty million plate readouts in a day in any weather conditions and transmit them to one of the scores of optical software recognition stations positioned across Britain. From snapshot to target recognition took seconds.


pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

the repossession business: Shawn Musgrave (5 Mar 2014), “A vast hidden surveillance network runs across America, powered by the repo industry,” BetaBoston/Boston Globe, http://betaboston.com/news/2014/03/05/a-vast-hidden-surveillance-network-runs-across-america-powered-by-the-repo-industry. Shawn Musgrave (5 Mar 2014), “Massive license plate location database just like Instagram, Digital Recognition Network insists,” BetaBoston/Boston Globe, http://betaboston.com/news/2014/03/05/massive-license-plate-location-database-just-like-instagram-digital-recognition-network-insists. 2.5 billion records: Vigilant Video (23 Feb 2009), “Site specific preparation sheet for LEARN V.4.0 server installation,” https://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/texas/alprpra_portharthurPD_portarthurtx%20%287%29.pdf.

With enough cameras in a city, police officers will be able to follow cars and people around without ever leaving their desks. This is mass surveillance, impossible without computers, networks, and automation. It’s not “follow that car”; it’s “follow every car.” Police could always tail a suspect, but with an urban mesh of cameras, license plate scanners, and facial recognition software, they can tail everyone—suspect or not. Similarly, putting a device called a pen register on a suspect’s land line to record the phone numbers he calls used to be both time-consuming and expensive. But now that the FBI can demand that data from the phone companies’ databases, it can acquire that information about everybody in the US.

Microsoft does the same thing to people passing within ten miles of some of its stores; it works with the company NinthDecimal. Sense Networks uses location data to create individual profiles. CORRELATING DIFFERENT DATA SETS Vigilant Solutions is one of the companies that collect license plate data from cameras. It has plans to augment this system with other algorithms for automobile identification, systems of facial recognition, and information from other databases. The result would be a much more powerful surveillance platform than a simple database of license plate scans, no matter how extensive, could ever be. News stories about mass surveillance are generally framed in terms of data collection, but miss the story about data correlation: the linking of identities across different data sets to draw inferences from the combined data.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Previously, such high-tech gear would only have resided in a spy agency or with the FBI, but now, given the exponential drop in pricing of these technologies, even a neighborhood mom can spy on her kids or potentially cheating spouse. In the world of big data, we can even leak our physical location without a bugged mobile phone or GPS tracker hidden in our car. A new technology, known as an automatic license plate reader (ALPR), allows both governments and individuals to use video cameras and optical character recognition to record the locations of cars as they pass from one camera point to another, revealing the real-time movement of any vehicle throughout a city or country with great detail. From Minnesota to New Jersey, and from Ankara to Sydney, hundreds of millions of individual license plate records have been stored.

Army, news archive, Mar. 7, 2012, www.​army.​mil. 46 The longitude and latitude: Ibid. 47 Not only can we be tracked: The product can now be found at http://​www.​trackingkey.​com. 48 From Minnesota to New Jersey: For an excellent review of the social and privacy implications of automatic license plate readers, see the American Civil Liberties Union report You Are Being Tracked: How License Plate Readers Are Being Used to Record Americans’ Movements. 49 Private companies such as Digital Recognition Network: Julia Angwin and Jennifer Valentino-Devries, “New Tracking Frontier: Your License Plates,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 29, 2012. 50 He then used the data: Ibid. 51 In 2009: Kate Crawford, “San Francisco Woman Pulled Out of Car at Gunpoint Because of License Plate Reader Error,” ACLU (blog), May 15, 2014. 52 To date, Euclid has: Quentin Hardy, “Technology Turns to Tracking People Offline,” Bits (blog), New York Times, March 7, 2013; Gene Marks, “Why the Home Depot Breach Is Worse Than You Think,” Forbes, Sept. 22, 2014. 53 The cloud is here to stay: Frederic Lardinois, “Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Its Cloud Computing Services and Storage, Introduces Sustained-Use Discounts,” TechCrunch, March 25, 2014. 54 All the major cloud service providers: Keir Thomas, “Microsoft Cloud Data Breach Heralds Things to Come,” PCWorld, Dec. 23, 2010; Ed Bott, “Dropbox Gets Hacked … Again,” ZDNet, Aug. 1, 2012. 55 In late 2014, hundreds: Daisuke Wakabayashi and Danny Yadron, “Apple Denies iCloud Breach,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 2, 2014. 56 As a result, the plans: Jaikumar Vijayan, “Classified Data on President’s Helicopter Leaked via P2P, Found on Iranian Computer,” Computerworld, March 2, 2009. 57 In fact, there are more than a hundred: Threat Working Group of the CSIS Commission on Cybersecurity, “Threats Posed by the Internet.” 58 Every single day, the NSA: Dana Priest and William M.


Practical Python and OpenCV by Adrian Rosebrock

computer vision, license plate recognition, Mars Rover


pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

While Xinjiang remains ground zero for the Chinese surveillance state, the technologies tested and perfected there are rapidly spreading across the country. Police departments often combine facial recognition systems with other technologies such as mobile phone scanners, which capture a unique identification code for every phone that passes through the vicinity, car license plate readers and fingerprint recognition technology to weave an Orwellian tapestry that is becoming increasing integrated over time. Algorithms can often, for example, match phone identification codes with faces, creating a comprehensive tracking and identification system for individuals. Such systems are installed in neighborhoods or at the entrances of specific buildings known to be associated with higher crime levels.


pages: 292 words: 94,660

pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra


When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity by Anthony Berglas, William Black, Samantha Thalind, Max Scratchmann, Michelle Estes

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, AI winter, air gap, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, call centre, cognitive bias, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, create, read, update, delete, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, DeepMind, disinformation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, factory automation, feminist movement, finite state, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general-purpose programming language, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, job automation, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, patent troll, patient HM, pattern recognition, phenotype, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Thomas Malthus, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zero day

In the past horrific crimes against children and adults could be very difficult to solve. Today, if a serious crime is committed, such as the disappearance of a child, the police quickly query mobile phone towers to produce a list of everyone that was in the vicinity at the time. License plate readers and facial recognition technology can already monitor the movements of cars and people. Voice recognition systems will soon be able to analyze million of hours of phone and other conversations. A major drive for this surveillance is to prevent terrorist attacks, which kill a few people every few years in western countries.


Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Computer and communications technologies outside the military sphere are applied with great effectiveness by public and private police agencies. One example that I saw with my own eyes is suggestive of the range of goodies available to police forces: at a laboratory outside Tokyo, I saw a video camera on a freeway zero in on the license plate of a speeder, use shape-recognition software to decode the license number, and transmit it to police computers, where a warrant search could be conducted. No human in the loop-- the camera and computer determine that a crime has been committed and instantly identify the suspect. Just as grassroots citizens' networks have been interconnecting into a planetary Net, police information networks have been evolving as well.


pages: 444 words: 117,770

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day


pages: 159 words: 42,401

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

What would prevent them from making a similar request involving an Amazon Echo or any other smart device with a microphone or sensors? The spread of networked devices — the so-called internet of things — could someday give police easy access to the most private parts of our lives. Law enforcement already has a formidable array of surveillance technologies, ranging from license plate readers to the cell site simulators nicknamed “stingrays” that mimic mobile phone towers to facial recognition and access to credit card transactions — an area of data that is mushrooming as some areas of the country move towards a cashless economy. Meanwhile, Amazon has quietly been licensing its own facial recognition software, called Rekognition, to law enforcement agencies.


pages: 588 words: 131,025

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

If you are willing to give up privacy altogether, the mobile app Placed gives you coupons for providing information on what store you’re in. As you get out on the city streets and public places, there’s now an unprecedented array of sensors, CCTVs, and vast wireless networks that are set up to detect your motion, sense your car, read your license plate, and capture key biometric information such as facial recognition. Then there are all the low-cost satellites from above so that “all of the Earth will be held to a mirror, in near real time, at an increasing granularity of visual infrared and other kinds of data.”33b Wow, are we ever being watched. Not just being watched but also identified.


pages: 558 words: 164,627

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boston Dynamics, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, GPS: selective availability, Herman Kahn, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, license plate recognition, Livingstone, I presume, low earth orbit, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, place-making, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

The system of systems being built by DARPA was long term, and had ambitious, well-funded goals. The ultimate objective for Combat Zones That See was to be able to track millions of people and cars as they moved through urban centers, not just in Iraq but in other urban areas that potentially posed a threat. Cars would be tracked by their license plates. Human faces would be tracked through facial recognition software. The supercomputers at the heart of the system would process all this information, using “intelligent computer algorithms [to] determine what is normal and what is not,” just as the Total Information Awareness office proposed. Combat Zones That See was similar to TIA’s needle-in-a-haystack hunt.


pages: 304 words: 80,143

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

“More Data and Surveillance Are Transforming Justice Systems,” The Economist,, June 2, 2018, https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2018-05-02/justice. 3. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), 282–290. 4. Surveillance-Video, product catalog, https://www.surveillance-video.com/license-plate-cameras/ (accessed June 27, 2019). 5. Will Oremus, “Forget Security Cameras. Stores Are Using Face Recognition to See If You’re a Shoplifter,” Slate, November 24, 2015, http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/11/24/stores_are_using_face_recognition_to_catch_shoplifters.html (accessed June 27, 2019). 6. JenerationTech, “How Facial Recognition Will Impact the Shopping Industry,” Kairos, November 22, 2016, https://www.kairos.com/blog/how-facial-recognition-will-impact-the-shopping-industry (accessed June 27, 2019). 7.


pages: 350 words: 98,077

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, ImageNet competition, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, ought to be enough for anybody, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, the long tail, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers

As Google’s Blaise Agüera y Arcas remarked, “It’s been a sort of gold rush—attacking one problem after another with the same set of techniques.”13 Using ConvNets trained with deep learning, image search engines offered by Google, Microsoft, and others were able to vastly improve their “find similar images” feature. Google offered a photo-storage system that would tag your photos by describing the objects they contained, and Google’s Street View service could recognize and blur out street addresses and license plates in its images. A proliferation of mobile apps enabled smartphones to perform object and face recognition in real time. Facebook labeled your uploaded photos with names of your friends and registered a patent on classifying the emotions behind facial expressions in uploaded photos; Twitter developed a filter that could screen tweets for pornographic images; and several photo- and video-sharing sites started applying tools to detect imagery associated with terrorist groups.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day


pages: 527 words: 147,690

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce


pages: 889 words: 433,897


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The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

(The site was rarely updated with new information, and it became entangled in a larger lawsuit lodged under the U.S. Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act.77 The site remains accessible.) An associated venture solicits the public to take pictures of women arriving at clinics, including the cars in which they arrive (and corresponding license plates), and posts the pictures in order to deter people from nearing clinics.78 With image recognition technology mash-ups, photos taken as people enter clinics or participate in protests can be instantly cross-referenced with their names. One can easily pair this type of data with Google Maps to provide fine-grained satellite imagery of the homes and neighborhoods of these individuals, similar to the “subversive books” maps created by computer consultant and tin-kerer Tom Owad, tracking wish lists on Amazon.79 This intrusion can reach places that the governments of liberal democracies refuse to go.


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar