The Boarder Wall is Only Part of Your Personal Safety Equation...

THE TRUMP WALL IS ONLY PART OF YOUR PERSONAL SAFETY EQUATION car-home-wall While your elected representatives are posturing and promoting themselves for the 2020 election cycle, you might ask what are they doing to keep you safe and secure at home, in the car, and in public? Yes, the democrats and the republicans are fighting over border protection schemes to keep illegal aliens out of the country – a necessary measure to keep Americans safe from terrorists, drug dealers, and those who are rapidly consuming our local, state, and federal resources and disadvantaging Americans in the areas of housing, employment, medical care, education, and social safety nets. But, what of the internal threats posed by the big technology companies that are capturing and selling your information under the guise of providing targeted information that you want or need? Using unilateral “terms of service” or “privacy agreements” which allow them to invade your computers, your home, your vehicle, and anywhere else licensed software resides? It appears that law enforcement authorities are now surreptitiously capturing and voice-printing incarcerated inmates – and possibly doing the same thing to innocent, law-abiding citizens on the other end of the conversation. With today’s sophisticated voice recognition software, how soon will it be before data streams, possibly involving client-attorney privilege, are captured and used in a criminal prosecution? PRISONS ACROSS THE U.S. ARE QUIETLY BUILDING DATABASES OF INCARCERATED PEOPLE’S VOICE PRINTS In New York and other states across the country, authorities are acquiring technology to extract and digitize the voices of incarcerated people into unique biometric signatures, known as voice prints. Prison authorities have quietly enrolled hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people’s voice prints into large-scale biometric databases. Computer algorithms then draw on these databases to identify the voices taking part in a call and to search for other calls in which the voices of interest are detected. Some programs, like New York’s, even analyze the voices of call recipients outside prisons to track which outsiders speak to multiple prisoners regularly. [OCS: I wonder if those products contain software licenses that permit the vendor to access that information in the guise of improving the customer user experience or the accuracy of their returned search results – and then allowing third-parties to access that information with or without a search warrant. We would also be naive to believe that those former law enforcement officials who work for the big technology companies do not do favors for their former colleagues off the books.] Corrections officials representing the states of Texas, Florida, and Arkansas, along with Arizona’s Yavapai and Pinal counties; Alachua County, Florida; and Travis County, Texas, also confirmed that they are actively using voice recognition technology today. And a review of contracting documents identified other jurisdictions that have acquired similar voice-print capture capabilities: Connecticut and Georgia state corrections officials have signed contracts for the technology (Connecticut did not respond to repeated interview requests; Georgia declined to answer questions on the matter). Authorities and prison technology companies say this mass biometric surveillance supports prison security and fraud prevention efforts. But civil liberties advocates argue that the biometric buildup has been neither transparent nor consensual. Some jurisdictions, for example, limit incarcerated people’s phone access if they refuse to enroll in the voice recognition system, while others enroll incarcerated people without their knowledge. Once the data exists, they note, it could potentially be used by other agencies, without any say from the public. [OCS: It is a truism that the inmates often do run the prison, colluding with guards to impose extrajudicial punishment for real or imagined offenses or slights. How is it that in a tightly controlled environment, we keep seeing phones, drugs, and other contraband appear with great regularity. To believe that prison officials are not benefiting from politically-arranged special interest vendor deals and actual bribes is to believe in the tooth-fairy. As we have seen, The Obamacons shared classified unmasking information with a number of agencies without controls to protect key sources and information from leaking to unauthorized persons; and in many cases, the media.] It’s particularly alarming, they add, that the technology’s use in prisons can ensnare people beyond their walls. “Why am I giving up my rights because I’m receiving a call from somebody who has been convicted of a crime?” asks Jerome Greco, a digital forensics attorney at New York’s Legal Aid Society. Greco argues that the mining of outside parties’ voice prints should require a warrant. “If you have a family member convicted of a crime, yet you haven’t been, why are you now having your information being used for government investigations?” Truth-be-told, you cannot trust the big technology companies to tell the truth about the capabilities of their products or the use to which they are put. I can remember when General Motor’s OnStar vehicle safety and protection people told consumers that their system was incapable of spying on a car’s occupants. Until the capability and its use was revealed in a court case. Want to see how bad the problem may be, read “Cartapping: How Feds Have Spied On Connected Cars For 15 Years” at Forbes? How about that fancy doorbell with the embedded camera? “The doorbells have eyes: The privacy battle brewing over home security cameras -- Police want to register — and even subsidize — private security cameras.” Your “smart” television? “Shocking: Smart TV Manufacturer Vizio Spies On Customers Using Advanced Big Data Analytics.” Your DNA? “Woman uses DNA test, finds sperm donor — and pays a ‘devastating’ price.” Even the DNA, voluntarily given by your relatives, can be used to connect you to a crime scene. And, it is being increasingly common for law enforcement officials to interrogate cell phone towers in the location of a criminal act to identify and locate potential witnesses. How long before this capability is used in a high-profile case by the bad guys? Check out what a private investigation firm is offering clients -- “Locating Lost or Unresponsive Witnesses and Clients” Even worse… It appears that major technology companies are prepared to engage in political censorship – mostly biased towards progressive socialist democrats and against conservatives. “Financial Blacklisting: NewsGuard Advises Advertisers to Avoid Pro-Trump Media” or “Microsoft is trying to fight fake news with its Edge mobile browser.” I seriously question any company’s efforts to determine “fake news” because “fake news” is specifically crafted to look like “real news” and, in many instances, the truth is in the interpretation – over which reasonable men and women can agree or disagree. Bottom line… It is time to demand that our elected officials earn their pay by creating legislation that protects “we the people” and not their special interests who fund their campaigns. We must bring our analog laws into the digital age. For individuals, you may want to consider supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) who is fighting to preserve and protect the constitutional rights of individuals in this digital age. We are so screwed. -- steve