Tag: BIG BROTHER

On July 23rd, the British Children's Secretary, Ed Balls, announced a plan to spend a potential £400 million (over $675 million) on the installation of closed circuit cameras (CCTVs) in the homes of 20,000 "problem families" -- which include homes with truant children, alcohol abuse, or reports of malnutrition -- according to the Daily Express. The program would put the families under ...

When Amazon.com went into Kindle devices across the country to delete unauthorized copies of 'Animal Farm' and '1984' by George Orwell, the irony was certainly not lost on users. A Big Brother move, no doubt, especially because no one was informed of the invasion of privacy -- and customers thought the reclaimed content had been legally purchased. Amazon did issue refunds, but the blogosphere ...

When the New York Times revealed in December of 2005 that the U.S. government was eavesdropping on citizens' telephone and e-mail conversations without warrants, a retired AT&T technician named Mark Klein knew he had physical evidence showing how the feds had been stealing information from AT&T's network. Strangely, though, nobody gave him the time of day. According to Klein, even the ...

Okay, Switched readers, here's a great debate. Lancaster, Pennsylvania is known as the home of Hershey's corporate, the town where Peeps was invented (not made -- that's Bethlehem), and the American city with the highest amount of surveillance per capita. Lancasterians have been subjected to a community-wide program that installs closed-circuit cameras on nearly every street, hosting more outdoor ...

It's something we never really appreciated when waltzing into class way back when, but the ability to show up at your leisure without having to "clock in" and "clock out" was awesome. If you agree, you'll probably want to shred that application for City of Ely Community College in the UK, which has become one of the first UK schools to trial a new facial recognition technology from Aurora. ...

It was less than a year ago that closed circuit television (CCTV) security cameras in the UK were given the ability to hear. Now, in some places, those cameras are getting a major upgrade in the form of an artificial intelligence program that law enforcement officials hope will eventually be able to identify and locate specific sounds. The current generation of software is sophisticated enough for ...

Everyday this Big Brother stuff gets scarier and scarier. Pretty soon the only place you'll be safe is in your own home, in your bed room, under the blanket. We posted before about experts declaring that by 2057 there will be roughly one million sensors and recorders for every U.K. resident. It looks like London is wasting no time rushing towards that goal. We're well aware of the security ...

All your Big Brother nightmares are about to come true, thanks to an $800,000 award from the Nation Science Foundation. The money is funding computer and behavioral scientists at the University of Buffalo to work on a tracking system that will allow authorities to score an individuals likeliness to commit a terrorist act. Sound creepy? Well, it gets even better. The system works by monitoring ...

BBC corespondent Humphrey Hawksley recently got up-close and personal with Big Brother, or rather the people developing the next generation of surveillance technology. Hawksley's first visit was with a team of researchers at Maryland University. They've developed a technology that can pick individuals out of a crowd based on the way they walk. His second visit was with the Defense Advanced ...