This article was featured in our weekly newsletter, the Liberator Online. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here.

Political theater is rarely entertaining but Senator Rand Paul stole the show when he forced an early curtain call on senators pushing a phony whistleblower resolution. Paul introduced a bill that retroactively protects Edward Snowden and applies the Sixth Amendment to the president.

On October 30, Senate Democrats showed that they will support or reject legislation based on a single factor of whether or not it helps impeach President Donald Trump, even if its a symbolic gesture.

Thats why Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii were so perturbed when Paul blocked their move to reach unanimous consent to pass a resolution that purports to honor the contributions of whistleblowers.

Not one of these people who fake outrage over this whistleblower and President Trump and the impeachment, not one of them will stand up for Edward Snowden, Paul stated. They would still put him in jail for life if they could.

In response, Hirono didnt dare name Snowden but instead called Pauls bill laughable because it restored the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution to the president, who under current rules is being prevented from facing his accuser, an ex-CIA agent who worked for Vice President Joe Biden on Ukraine.

This whistleblowers name, Eric Ciaramella, is known widely in Washington, D.C., and has been printed in RealClearInvestigations, but he is both closely guarded and highly praised by many in power who hypocritically turned their backs on Snowden or even favored the death penalty in his case.

Paul educated a reporter from The Hill on the legality of naming the whistleblower last week. The whistleblower is also a key witness to the alleged corruption of Biden, and his son Hunter, who received $50,000 a month from a Ukrainian energy firm under investigation by a Ukrainian prosecutor who Biden had removed in a quid pro quo arrangement.

Its always a good time to remind the U.S. government and the American people of the injustice done to Snowden, the greatest whistleblower of our time, who revealed illegal mass surveillance conducted on virtually all Americans.

Tired and debunked shameful smears against Snowden erupted on Twitter after Paul invoked his name. Snowden isnt a true whistleblower, they claim because he didnt go through proper channels.

Forget that Snowdens peers other whistleblowers charged under the Espionage Act, like Thomas Drake, did go through proper channels and were still denied an opportunity to present their case to a jury. Snowden, as a government contractor, didnt have access to even the same protections that people like Chelsea Manning or Daniel Hale had.

Pauls brilliant move left the Democrats openly choosing style over substance. The Trump-Ukraine whistleblower, a Democrat himself, is held up as a hero while Snowden is left exiled from the country he served with honor, all because the political show must go on.

Read the original:
Rand Paul Exposes 'Fake Outrage' Over Trump Whistleblower With Bill to Protect Snowden - The Liberator Online

Cornelia Parker is softly spoken and bird-like; an artist who peppers her conversation with nervous little laughs. Yet her work is all about blowing things up.

Over her career, the Turner prize-shortlisted English artist, who was appointed an Order of the British Empire in 2010, has made a name treating objects with what she terms cartoon violence. Silver cutlery has been crushed with a steamroller. A garden shed has been blown to smithereens. Wedding rings have been stretched. And stretched. And stretched.

I did a series of work with things meeting their end like a cartoon death: throwing silver objects off the White Cliffs of Dover or steamrolling stuff or putting money on the railway track, says Parker. When we meet, despite the heat, she is dressed in black tights and a monochrome fleece topped off with her trademark page-boy bob. These were all cliches. I like cliches. They are a monumental thing [My practice asks]: why are they so universally loved?

Now Parker, 63, is hosting her first major survey in the southern hemisphere. Cornelia Parker, showing at Sydneys Museum of Contemporary Art, features over 40 artworks ranging from smaller pieces on paper to her epic, soul-stirring large-scale installations.

Art is just political. Full stop. Whether it's party-political is another matter

Most famous of these is 1991s Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View. Parker enlisted the British army to detonate a purpose-built shed, stuffed with donations from friends (soft toys, gardening tools) and items found in charity stores. The blackened, broken parts were then suspended from the ceiling, as if at the moment of eruption. Casting shadows on to the walls, Cold Dark Matter looks like a giant chandelier poised gorgeously between destruction and creation.

But if Parker talks about the violence within her work with a Wham! Bam! Pow! joviality (it was quite satisfying, she says of the explosion), those works also contain an eerie sense of turmoil and deep unsettlement.

The blowing up was part of trying to disrupt something that was cosy and suburban, like the garden shed. Blowing it up was just causing havoc in a place that was really quite benign and quite peaceful. She shrugs. It was pre-September 11, so it seemed like a childlike thing to do.

And yet: We had IRA bombs going off in London and you couldnt turn on the news without there being yet another explosion. The knowledge gives Cold Dark Matter a grim twist.

Sculpture, for Parker, is a nexus of change, rather than a place to build something substantial and solid. She finds herself drawn to leaves on trees, blades of grass in the field they are made up of lots of small things that are mobile. Those are the things I really quite enjoy rather than having big static lumps of stone, which might be a more traditional way of sculpture. I like things being ephemeral.

Her early 2000s work Subconscious of a Monument is, like Cold Dark Matter, about freezing a transitory moment in time and space. Engineers, tasked with preventing the Leaning Tower of Pisa from collapsing, eventually found a workable method: the extraction of soil from underneath the monument.

They were desperate to save it but they took 10 years to find the right technique, says Parker, who was dating an Italian architect at the time (she is now married to American-born artist Jeff McMillan, with whom she has a daughter). Intrigued, she asked if she could use the excavated clay, hanging each chunk from the ceiling by an individual wire. A lot of my work is about gravity for me to suspend the clods of earth lain in the dark for over a thousand years, its like the turning of the earth, she says.

In 2015, Parker turned her attention to another world attraction: Magna Carta (An Embroidery) is a tapestry of the charter of rights Wikipedia page as it stood on the cusp of its 800th anniversary. The twist? Many of the 4,000-plus words in the 13-metre long tapestry were embroidered by men and women with opposing political views, values or life experiences: Julian Assange and Edward Snowden contributed, as did the American ambassador to the UK and convicted murderers in state prisons. Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger embroidered the words political contemporary relevance, spilling, as he pricked his finger, some of his own blood.

I wanted to have good and evil, it to be left and right, says Parker. To have the American ambassador alongside Edward Snowden all on the same bit of fabric. I wanted to turn an embroidery into something a bit more pithy, a bit more edgy.

Today, as a staunch remainer, Parker is keen to talk about something else altogether: the impending general election in her home country. She is looking on with wry humour, scepticism (Jeremy Corbyn is ineffectual and vain; Boris Johnson a racist, sexist and quite Machiavellian), as well as relief that, unlike in 2017, she is no longer the UKs official election artist.

Art is just political. Full stop. Whether its party-political is another matter, she says. I keep thinking: If you want to say something just open your mouth and say it. I really feel particular about things like climate change and Brexit Id rather just be verbal about it than make work about it.

At heart, Parkers art speaks to the human condition above day-to-day squabbles. She has long been fascinated with The Golden Bough, anthropologist Sir James George Frazers seminal book on mythology. Ancient religions had to kill something off every time they wanted something to be regenerated. For every death you get a resurrection, she says. Thats what happens when I suspend [my work]. It is very like a morgue; [but] in the air they are reanimated.

Cornelia Parker is showing at Sydneys Museum of Contemporary Art until 16 February 2020

Continue reading here:
Steamrollers, explosions, and 'cartoon violence': the artistic eruptions of Cornelia Parker - The Guardian

A woman uses an ATM with facial recognition technology during the presentation of the new service by CaixaBank in Barcelona on February 14, 2019. LLUIS GENE/AFP via Getty Images

So, I just got the new iPhone 11 Pro. I have to say, I pretty much love the facial recognition unlock feature. And no, Apple is not paying me to say that. Prior, I was a facial recognition skeptic. But now, I can unlock my phone with my face! I love it, but Im also slightly scared at the possibilities of what other people could do if they get access to my face without my knowledge. Better keep my face to myself.

It was only a matter of time before we heard about the financial services industry adopting innovative biometrics technology for access management of private information. In other words: Banks are using facial recognition.

SEE ALSO: What on Earth Is a Data Scientist? The Buzzwords Inventor Spills All

Sounds practical. Sounds scary. Sounds both practical and scary. Ive seen the John Woo movie, Face/Off,and Im well aware of how this could all go horribly wrong.

The financial sector understands the constant need for new and ever-improving security measures better than most industries, because of the implicit risk of being a bank, Shaun Moore, co-founder and CEO of Trueface,told Observer. There are people trying to hack, rob or defraud this industry every single day.

Moores company is working with some of the top global banks to infuse facial recognition into existing security and access management infrastructure.

We are seeing the financial services sector test face recognition as a part of multi-factor authentication for ATM withdrawals, mobile banking enrollment and mobile account access and transactions, said Moore. By implementing face recognition as the key step in multi-factor authentication, banks are able to mitigate their exposure to risk and fraud, saving themselves millions of dollars in the process.

Good point. Dont we all like saving millions of dollars in the process? I know I do.

What we can expect from our sci-fi financial transactions in the next five to 10 years is a federated identity across the digital and physical banking worldwhere your face will be the key to accessing your banking information, transacting and securing your account. The aim is to reduce fraud and lead to more secure financial data. Mexico has already adopted a biometric security mandate, which Moore sees as a trend that will be spread first to South America and eventually to the U.S.

Whether you are withdrawing money from an ATM or you enter a banks physical branch, our goal is to provide an extremely frictionless, personalized experience with a focus on security, he said.

Moore sees the adoption of facial recognition repositioning the financial sector as a leader in service and security. The tech nuts-and-bolts on how this works?Trueface has developed a suite of SDKs (software development kits) and a dockerized container solution that harness the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to transform your camera data into actionable intelligence, Moore explained. Computer vision will be used for automated account registration, recognizing VIPs to enhance service at brick and mortar locations, recognize known criminals in branches and alerting authorities, access control for vaults and even employee timekeeping.

The whole VIP banking system does raise some flags about secret consumer scores,which allow companies to sell and profit from our data. As Edward Snowden said, there is no good reason for companies to hold onto our dataexcept when they see value and profit from it.

But according to Moore, We provide the solutions to run on our client infrastructure so that no data ever leaves the clients site/servers, ensuring performance but also data privacy and security.

Still, the city of San Francisco has banned facial recognition technology used by local law enforcement agencies. One slight problem is that facial recognition has trouble identifying people of color.

So, how is that being combatted with financial security?

The city, which was not using face recognition to begin with, created a legal process for using face recognition, not an outright ban, said Moore. This is something that we are in favor of. The bias discussed around face recognition has to do with the underlying data the algorithms are trained with. If the data is disproportionate, then the results will also be skewed in one direction. The industry as a whole recognizes this and has been actively working towards mitigating data bias risk.

Moore said the problem with facial recognition bias is shrinking and will cease to exist in the very near future.

The impact of this hurdle plays more of a role when it comes to recognizing one person out of many; thousands or millions, he stated. Typically with account authentication, the database we scan is few or one-to-one making this a non-issue.

The skeptics of facial recognition, Moore finds, are largely siloed in a surveillance use, not access control. Still, there are other possible failures and downsides with facial recognition and security.

The biggest concern is the ability to spoof or falsify identity when enrolling in an account remotely, said Moore. The solution to this problem is to ensure liveness and/or to pair biometrics with other forms of verification.

Plus, with artificial intelligence as part of the facial recognition formula, there is the classic quote from Elon Muskthat we need to fear AI more than nukes. Is the same fear justified for AI use in the banking sector?

AI is still in its infancy, but what I believe Elon is referring to here is that once something is created, its hard to reverse progress if we dont like the results, Moore said. The computing power required to reach this type of AI-driven world is still a decade or more away, so it is more important that we recognize the potential risks and re-adjust our path accordingly.

Moores takeaway is face recognition is a tool that can be used to significantly improve security and efficiency. In the meantime, Im going to be locking and unlocking my new iPhone with my faceuntil its time for my next banking expedition.

Read the original:
How AI and Facial Recognition Are Impacting the Future of Banking - Observer

The guy whos been visioning about stringent data protections strikes again.

Edward Snowden, a popular whistleblower who worked for both NSA and CIA, and responsible for leaking classified information of the American governments mass surveillance program on global citizens in 2013. Hes contribution along with The Guardian and other news reporters surprised everyone in the world and made them realise of data thefts.

Though in exile, hes been in constant contact with the world via Twitter and periodical TV shows (video conferencing securely). And today, he has appeared in the opening ceremony of Web Summit 2019 in Lisbon, Portugal.

In his speech addressing to 20,000 attendees, he termed the big technology companies are running on a data-hungry business models where they abuse the users collected data. All these big corporations, naming Facebook, Google and Amazon, are amassing personal data of millions, or even billions of people that are easily accessible by governments. This makes all those people vulnerable, he opined.

These people are engaged in abuse, particularly when you look at Google and Amazon, Facebook and their business model. And yet every bit of it, they argue, is legal. Whether were talking about Facebook or the NSA, we have legalized the abuse of the person. he said.

While Europes General Data Protection Rights (GDPR) is considered to be an optimal law protecting users data,Snowden isnt even happy about that. He starts with claiming theres a fault in its title itself. He criticized the laws focus on just protecting the gathered data but being okay on spy!

He called GDPR as just a Paper Tiger. Further, he said, It gives us false assurances. The problem is not data protection. It is data collection. GDPR assumes the data was all collected properly in the first place. It is as if it is okay to spy on everyone, as long as the data never leaks. When it does, it is not data being exploited. It is people.

Unlike penalising when theres a data leak, he believes that all such companies has to be penalised every year until their change their methodology.

See the rest here:
Edward Snowden Calls GDPR a Paper Tiger. Accuses of Just Making The Spying Legal. - TechDator

Today the Labour Party was the victim of a large and sophisticated cyber attack. It shouldnt come as a surprise, however. After the hack of the US Democratic National Committee in 2016, security experts warned it was only a matter time before a UK political party was targeted.

Hacker politics is nothing new to parties though. In fact, they often use it to their advantage, leveraging dark data and social media manipulation techniques. Yet our entire system of political regulation is still stuck in the20thCentury and unprepared for the current threat from foreign state or private criminal hacking.

The Electoral Commission devotes almost all of its resources to the problems faced by electoral systems in an analogue world. Todays breach has exposed how urgently the independent body needs to develop its e-regulations to control how political parties remain digitally secure, and how they can use data responsibly and fairly.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

In the absence of any specific requirements for data security within political parties, organisations are left to muddle through. The situation is murky enough that just last week the Information Commissionerwroteto all major political parties reminding them they are not above data protection law (the assumption being that perhaps they believed they were).

Currently held by the SNP with a majority of 2

Getty

Currently held by Labour with a majority of 20

Getty

Currently held by the SNP with a majority of 21

Getty

Currently held by independent, formerly Labour, MP Ian Austin with a majority of 22

LivingInMediocrity

Currently held by Labour with a majority of 30

Derek Harper

Currently held by the Conservatives with a majority of 31

Rob Candish

Currently held by the Conservatives with a majority of 45

Robin Webster

Currently held by Labour with a majority of 48

Jaggery

Currently held by the SNP with a majority of 60

Alec MacKinnon

Currently held by the SNP with a majority of 75

Christine Johnstone

Currently held by the SNP with a majority of 2

Getty

Currently held by Labour with a majority of 20

Getty

Currently held by the SNP with a majority of 21

Getty

Currently held by independent, formerly Labour, MP Ian Austin with a majority of 22

LivingInMediocrity

Currently held by Labour with a majority of 30

Derek Harper

Currently held by the Conservatives with a majority of 31

Rob Candish

Currently held by the Conservatives with a majority of 45

Robin Webster

Currently held by Labour with a majority of 48

Jaggery

Currently held by the SNP with a majority of 60

Alec MacKinnon

Currently held by the SNP with a majority of 75

Christine Johnstone

Worryingly, the Labour Party websitesprivacy policy, under How we protect your information, makes no mention of any technical cybersecurity measures. It does not even specify whether the party uses a certified data centre.

It appears that this Labour breach (a DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service) was not a highly sophisticated form of cyber attack. These weapons which, if ever successful, could seriously disrupt or even swing an election can be easily sourced by anyone on the dark web. There is a de facto right to bear digital arms and no one is taking it seriously.

There is every chance, however, that a foreign government was directly or indirectly behind this attack. Russia is best-known for having a high level hacking capability that is directed from within the Kremlin, but China, Iran, and even North Korea are known to have hacker special forces within their military and intelligence apparatus.

A state actor could have outsourced this to attempt to cover their tracks, or perhaps even deliberately used a relatively low-tech method to make it look like it was a small hacktivist group rather than a foreign government.

The only thing we can say with certainty is that our democracy is vulnerable. This is not a particular criticism of the Labour Party, or even all political parties. Recent successful cyberattacks have targeted large companies, and the fact that this hack is believed to have been successfully defended against suggests that Labour had at least some measures in place.

Political parties must be held to a higher standard than other organisations, however. I know small businesses with more robust security measures than the political parties who make up our parliament, with all the consequences for national security that come with that.

More broadly, the threat is even bigger. Political parties have access to a huge amount of personal data. The Labour Party, for example, has detailed data on half a million members. But like any major party, they will also have a data operation that seeks to profile every British voter.

This big data makes political parties more effective, but also makes them more attractive targets for cyber attackers. Any hacker looking for a huge data haul in an organisation that is perhaps bureaucratic or out-dated in its security measures would quickly find him or herself setting their sights on British political parties.

Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events

No-one knows how exactly this data has been collected, because there are almost no rules about this: laws likeGDPRare, as Edward Snowden recently claimed, a paper tiger, focussing on data protection, not data collection. This means that there is likely a much larger data haul within political parties than many of us realise.

It is time for the Electoral Commission to take this seriously. Fraudulent postal ballots might corrupt a single constituency, but a successful hack can destroy our entire democracy. Some may say it is just a matter of time.

JamalAhmedis aFellow of Information Privacyand founder ofKazient Privacy Experts

Continued here:
Almost anyone could have cyber-hacked the Labour Party and now our democracy is under threat - The Independent

Hola! Today we did a serious analysis of Edward Snowdens Twitter activity. So lets do it. These are the main things: as of 2019-11-12, Edward Snowden (@Snowden) has 4171034 Twitter followers, is following 1 people, has tweeted 4424 times, has liked 301 tweets, has uploaded 372 photos and videos and has been on Twitter since December 2014.

Going from top to bottom, their latest tweet, at the time of writing, has 56 replies, 179 retweets and 1,346 likes, their second latest tweet has 6 replies, 108 reweets and 275 likes, their third latest tweet has 31 replies, 119 retweets and 1,026 likes, their fourth latest tweet has 3 replies, 80 retweets and 344 likes and their fifth latest tweet has 2 replies, 73 retweets and 196 likes. (We could keep going, but we think you get the idea )

MOST POPULAR:

Going through Edward Snowdens last couple-dozen tweets (including retweets), the one we consider the most popular, having let to a very nice 161 direct replies at the time of writing, is this:

That looks to have caused quite a bit of discussion, having also had 2642 retweets and 5810 likes.

LEAST POPULAR:

Now what about Edward Snowdens least popular tweet as of late (again, including retweets)? We have concluded that its this one:

That only had 2 direct replies, 73 retweets and 196 likes.

THE VERDICT:

We did a huge amount of of research into Edward Snowdens Twitter activity, looking through what people are saying in response to them, their likes/retweet numbers compared to the past, the amount of positive/negative responses and so on. We wont drone on and on about the numbers, so our verdict is this: we believe the online sentiment for Edward Snowden on Twitter right now is good, and most people like them.

Thats it for now. Thanks for coming, and write a comment if you disagree with me. However, we wont publish anything overly rude.

Continue reading here:
The Community Reacts To Edward Snowden On Twitter (2019-11-12) - Global Real News

By Philip Guelpa 12 November 2019

New York Congressman Peter King announced that he would not seek re-election to the House of Representatives next year. As the longest-serving Republican in New Yorks congressional delegation, his departure adds to a growing number of long-time Republican legislators who are abandoning the party in the run-up to the 2020 election, where they would share the ballot with President Donald Trump.

King represents an upscale district that extends along the south shore of Long Island, with a median household income of $90,614, making it 21st out of 435 districts in the United States. He has held the seat for 28 years, starting out on the right wing of the Republican Party and ending up, without changing his own positions, characterized as a moderate, because of the drastic shift to the right by the Republican Party and bourgeois politics as a whole.

While the 75-year-old King couched his departure in personal terms, it is clear that his retirement is at least in part a response to the defeat of the Republicans last year, and the likelihood that the Republicans will remain in the minority in 2020. The Republican losses in 2018 placed King in the minority and stripped him of most of his political influence in the House.

King's own margin of victory fell from 24 points in 2016 to 6 points in 2018, and 2020 was looking even closer. His likely opponent in next years election is Jackie Gordon, an African-American councilwoman in Babylon, Long Island, who is a 29-year veteran of the US military.

Gordons campaign website is typical of those candidates the WSWS profiled in the 2018 campaign as the CIA Democrats, veterans of the military-intelligence apparatus who highlighted their national-security credentials as the focus of their campaigns, in keeping with the Democrats effort to divert all popular opposition to Trump behind the CIA-instigated anti-Russia campaign.

Her campaign website declares: Over her 29-year career in the Armed Forces, Jackie served our country overseas as a platoon leader in Germany during Operation Desert Storm, as an operations officer at Guantanamo Bay during the Global War on Terror, as a battle captain in Baghdad during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and as Commander of the 310th Military Police Battalion in Afghanistan in 2012. She retired from the Army Reserve with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in 2014.

King himself has the closest connections to the military-intelligence apparatus. He served two different terms as chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, and is particularly vociferous in his defense of domestic spying. But his political position has been undermined by the shift, over the past two elections, by upper-middle-class suburban voters like those in his district towards the Democrats.

The New York Times praises King for his ability to reach across party lines to enact bipartisan legislation. While considered a moderate among current Republicans, Kings political positions are far to the right. He has long been especially vicious on immigration. He was a co-sponsor of the 2005 Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act. The bill, which was passed by the House but not by the Senate, would have, among other things, supported the building of a wall along parts of the Mexican border, a decade before this issue was made infamous by Donald Trump. In 2006, King vehemently opposed the so-called guest worker program proposed by the Bush administration. Its not the kind of issue you can compromise on. Either youre giving amnesty to people who are here illegally, or you arent, railed King.

Regarding unaccompanied minors crossing the Mexican border, King called last year for secret police-style in-depth vetting not only of unaccompanied minors, but of their host familiesoften distant relatives of the youth, their only connection in the US. A disproportionate number of the MS-13 members are unaccompanied minors, King said, echoing the demagogic accusations made by Trump.

The Republican has also been outspoken in attacking democratic rights, free speech and freedom of the press. He supports the frame-up and persecution of Julian Assange. In 2017, when the State Department announced new charges against Assange, alleging that he had conspired with Edward Snowden to disclose NSA spying, King stated, in an interview with CNN, Im glad that the Justice Department has found a way to go after Assange. Hes gotten a free ride for too long. King had earlier said of Snowden, I think Edward Snowden is a defector and a traitor. According to King, there were no abuses by the NSA. He called for the prosecution of journalists, including Glenn Greenwald, who published material leaked by Snowden.

Kings departure reflects a growing political trend. Over the past several months, two dozen congressional Republicans have announced their retirements, far more than the number of Democrats doing the same. In some cases, as with Francis Rooney in Florida, the congressman publicly vacillated on the question of impeachment, and within a day or too had announced his retirement.

King sits on the House Intelligence Committee and has been at the Trump impeachment inquiry hearings. In his retirement statement, King said that he would vote against the Trump impeachment and would support him in the next election. However, his close ties with the military-intelligence apparatus, which is the major institutional force motivating the drive against Trump, could bring that into question.

Read more from the original source:
Another leading House Republican decides to retire - World Socialist Web Site

Whats up. Today we did a serious analysis of Edward Snowdens Twitter activity. Lets jump right into it. First, the simple stuff: as of 2019-11-11, Edward Snowden (@Snowden) has 4169083 Twitter followers, is following 1 people, has tweeted 4405 times, has liked 284 tweets, has uploaded 365 photos and videos and has been on Twitter since December 2014.

Going from top to bottom, their latest tweet, at the time of writing, has 7 replies, 91 retweets and 267 likes, their second latest tweet has 4 replies, 77 reweets and 200 likes, their third latest tweet has 7 replies, 128 retweets and 225 likes, their fourth latest tweet has 236 replies, 5,107 retweets and 8,733 likes and their fifth latest tweet has 109 replies, 1,186 retweets and 5,666 likes. That gives you an idea of how much activity they usually get.

MOST POPULAR:

Going through Edward Snowdens last couple-dozen tweets (and retweets), the one we consider the most popular, having incited a very nice 8696 direct replies at the time of writing, is this:

That looks to have caused quite a ruckus, having also had 13995 retweets and 81792 likes.

LEAST POPULAR:

And what about Edward Snowdens least popular tweet in the recent past (including any retweets)? We reckon its this one:

That only had 4 direct replies, 77 retweets and 200 likes.

THE VERDICT:

We did a huge amount of of research into Edward Snowdens Twitter activity, looking through what people were saying in response to them, their likes/retweet numbers compared to the past, the amount of positive/negative responses and more. We wont bore you with the details, so our conclusion is this: we say the online sentiment for Edward Snowden on Twitter right now is just OK.

Thats it for now. Thanks for reading, and leave a comment if you disagree or agree with me. Just dont write anything too mean.

See original here:
Edward Snowden Is Doing Great On Twitter (2019-11-11) - Global Real News

Rapid technological advances in data collection and analysis are transforming the way spy agencies work, potentially putting civil liberties at risk, an Israeli intelligence expert has warned the Canadian security community.

The organizations responsible for keeping people safe must ensure privacy and basic rights are not compromised in the process or they risk losing public faith, Shay Hershkovitz said in a presentation to the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies.

Spycraft is being revolutionized by the growing number of smart devices, almost-unlimited data storage and the advent of artificial intelligence, Hershkovitz told the association's recent annual conference in Ottawa.

"Transparency will be key here, and legislators will have to limit the use of these technologies," he said.

"If intelligence agencies will not ask these questions and will not lead the public debate, they will be dragged into it kicking and screaming, and everyone will suffer and lose."

Hershkovitz, a senior research fellow and former intelligence officer in Israel, attended the conference at the Canadian War Museum, though a sudden illness meant the gathering of security officials and academics saw a pre-recorded, multimedia presentation of his ideas about the future of one of the world's oldest professions.

"If we really want to learn what intelligence will look like, we must look outside the national-security establishment that is, we should explore not only what governments are doing but, more important, what is happening in the private sector and in academia," he said.

By next year, some 50 billion devices will be connected to the internet, growing to 100 billion devices by 2025, said Hershkovitz, head of research at the XPRIZE Foundation, a non-profit organization in California that manages public competitions intended to encourage beneficial technologies.

"The inevitable conclusion is that in the near future, in about five years from now, information will be spewing from every street, every car, every house and even from the sky," he said.

The price of data storage, meanwhile, is falling steadily. The cost of storing one gigabyte of data in 1980 was about half a million dollars, but just two cents today, he said.

At the same time, the flood of data will only speed up the development of artificial intelligence, Hershkovitz predicted.

Intelligence agencies have traditionally made decisions to collect information about specific people and groups, taking away resources that could have been used to monitor other targets, he said. Now they can collect and sort information on a massive scale and decide later what information already in hand is most relevant.

Agencies will have to decide what information to store, and for how long, and analysts will need to work side-by-side with computers to sift the huge amounts of data, Hershkovitz added.

Revelations in recent years by former U.S. spy contractor Edward Snowden about widespread surveillance of communications created public awareness about the privacy risks of digital technologies and society's increasing reliance on them.

Newly enacted security legislation recognizes the burgeoning role of big data, requiring the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to seek a judge's permission to keep datasets that primarily contain personal information about Canadians.

During a conference panel discussion, engineer and lawyer Samuel Witherspoon emphasized the continuing need for humans to help make sense of such information.

Key decisions, possibly involving life or death, can't simply be left to algorithms, said Witherspoon, co-founder of IMRSV Data Labs Inc., which is teaching computers to read, hear and see. "I think that's an incredibly problematic approach."

The intelligence community will have to grapple with the necessary restraints as storing vast amounts of data becomes even less expensive in coming years, said Benoit Hamelin, who has worked as a developer, researcher and manager at startup companies involved in cyberdefence and threat detection.

"Of course there are ethical implications," he said. "We have to set out an ethical framework."

Originally posted here:
New data-crunching technologies used by spy agencies could threaten civil liberties, analyst warns - CBC.ca

Key Point:China is the world's leader in stealing and reverse-engineering other countries products.

Photos of the J-20 provide an up close and personal look at the fuselage of the new interceptor. But the photos also appear to show a sensor system that looks awfully similar to the Lockheed Martin Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS) on the front of the F-35 Lighting II.

Theres a reason for this: In 2007, Lockheed Martin dealt with something of acyber Oceans 11when Chinese hackersstoletechnical documents related to the development of the F-35. The details on the hack, eventually revealed in documents leaked by Edward Snowden, are just one example ofChinese attemptsto steal foreign aviation technology; as recently as 2017, Chinese hackerswent after Australian F-35defense contractors, nabbing even more info on the cutting-edge fighter.

Although the two electro-optical systems pictured above are not identical, they share quite a few similarities in shape and placement: compared to the Eurofighter or Su-57s electro-optical systems and Infrared Tracking Systems (IRTS), respectively, which are also mounted on top of the fuselage, the differences between the Lockheed Martin and J-20s Systems are relatively minor. The systems positioning under the nose of the aircraft also reinforces that the J-20 is probably designed for both long-range strike missions against ground targets and interceptor duties. However, the J-20 EOTS appears to be less capable than the F-35 equivalent, judging by the size and layout of the J-20 EOTS enclosure.

Much about the J-20 is shrouded in secrecy, but the plane is most likely powered by the same two AL-31F engines which are used in the Su-27, a Russian fighter that is capable of a top speed of Mach 2.3. Butthe J-20 could also be flying withindigenous (but less reliable) WS-10B engines, due to a lack of Russian engines or as a stopgap until the more powerful WS-15 jet engines are ready for operational use. And while parts of the design of the J-20 appear to resemble the F-22 and its stealthy curves, these similarities could be skin deep as the angularity on the jet inlets and wings remain quite different, and the J-20 lacks all-aspect stealth. Recently the Indian Air Forceclaimed they could trackthe J-20 using the Su-30MKIs electronically scanned Phazotron Zhuk-AE radar.

Although the J-20 has been pushed into service, recentproblems with the J-15carrier-based fighter suggest that the Chinese answer to the F-22 isnt quite ready for prime-time despite propaganda fromChinese-owned media outletsthat portray the J-20 as a fully-armed and operational battle station. That certainly sounds familiar

This first appeared in Task and Purpose here.

Image: Reuters.

Excerpt from:
China's J-20 Stealth Fighter Surely Has F-35 'DNA' - The National Interest Online