Security News
"There are over 6,000 systems and 80,000 cameras in operation across 183 LAs!" So exclaimed the UK's outgoing Surveillance Camera Commissioner as he detailed just how many council CCTV cameras there are across the nation. In a public plea asking councils to take compliance with surveillance laws seriously, Tony Porter lifted the lid on the scale and depth of CCTV camera deployment across Great Britain.
India's Securities and Exchange Board appears to have sent a circular to stock exchanges that calls for market participants to upgrade information security as bad actors seek to take advantage of the financial services industry's move to working from home. SEBI appears not to have made its document public, but India's National Stock Exchange - the nation's largest - plus the Bombay Stock Exchange and Multi Commodity Exchange of India all late last week published the same 14-point security guidelines that say SEBI has called for market participants to implement a security baseline on the computers their staff use when working from home.
The tactics associated with surveillance capitalism - the commodification of personal data for profit as mastered by companies like Google and Facebook - have followed the same path. The race between competing political campaigns to out-collect, out-analyze and out-leverage voter data has raised concerns about the damaging effects it has on privacy and democratic participation, but also about the fact that all of this data, if seized by adversarial nation-states, opens up opportunities for affecting an election and sowing electoral chaos.
A U.S. federal appeals court ruled that the controversial National Security Agency mass surveillance program exposed in 2013 was illegal - and may have even been unconstitutional. The call comes seven years after former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden outed the mass surveillance program, which enabled snooping in on millions of American's phone calls, in a bombshell leak that drew widespread worries about privacy.
Toshiba announces the expansion of the Toshiba S300 Surveillance Hard Disk Drive series. This includes a new S300 series using shingled magnetic recording technology for small and medium-sized businesses and the renaming of the conventional magnetic recording technology surveillance drives to the S300 Pro series for professional and public sector use.
Cory Doctorow has writtten an extended rebuttal of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. He summarized the argument on Twitter. Shorter summary: it's not the surveillance part,...
Hexagon AB, a global leader in sensor, software and autonomous solutions, announced the acquisition of TACTICAWARE, a provider of LiDAR-based 3D surveillance software used to monitor and protect critical infrastructure and buildings - from powerplants and airports to commercial and residential buildings and more. TACTICAWARE's flagship solution, Accur8vision, is a volumetric detection security system offering 3D surveillance.
Legal told The Register that the laws "Cut away some of the powers which up until today can be used to obtain communications data". In other words, as section 12(5)(a)(i) puts it, any surveillance power granted to the public sector under any law other than the Snoopers' Charter itself or the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 now can't be exercised unless your telco or Royal Mail can be persuaded to hand over access to your communications.
Video cameras can be used in a variety of situations beyond simple surveillance, says research firm IDC. The demand for video surveillance cameras is expected to jump over the next few years, according to new data released by IDC on Tuesday. Differing somewhat from traditional security and closed-circuit television cameras, video surveillance cameras typically work in conjunction with security systems and are often internet-connected so people can monitor the feed from anywhere.
For seven years, a Chinese threat actor has targeted the Uyghur ethnic minority with several malware families, including newly identified Android surveillance tools, mobile security firm Lookout reports. Malicious attacks focusing on Uyghurs are not new, with several of them publicly detailed over the years, targeting users of Windows PCs, Macs, and mobile devices.