Apple Joins With Big Brother

[_bcspace]

Police forces around the world have had the problem that when their officers get a bit carried away and start pepper spraying tied captives there is someone on hand filming the event on their mobile phones.

While six police lay into prone grannies on the floor with long batons, the pictures can be on the net in seconds, meaning supervisors have to answer embarrassing questions.

But they may not need to fear scrutiny much longer - Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, whenever they like.

All the coppers have to do is decide that a public gathering or venue is deemed "sensitive", and needs to be "protected from externalities" and Apple will switch off all its gear.

The police can then get on with the very difficult task of kettling protesters without having to worry about a few beating anyone to death.

Apple insists that the affected sites are mostly cinemas, theatres, concert grounds and similar locations, but it does admit that it could be used in "covert police or government operations which may require complete 'blackout' conditions".

According to RT it could also be used to prevent whistleblowers like Edward Snowden from taking pictures and broadcasting them on the interent.

Apple said that the wireless transmission of sensitive information to a remote source is one example of a threat to security.

But it said that this sensitive information could be anything from classified government information to questions or answers to an examination administered in an academic setting.

Apple patented the means to transmit an encoded signal to all wireless devices, commanding them to disable recording functions.

The policies would be activated by GPS, and wi-fi or mobile base-stations, which would ring-fence ("geofence") around a building or a "sensitive area" to prevent phone cameras from taking pictures or recording video.

Odd that the company made famous by its 1984 Big Brother video can't really see what it is doing. Perhaps its own secretive culture and an overzealous security treatment of its staff have fostered sympathy for Big Brother after all.

http://news.techeye.net/security/apple-patents-tech-to-let-cops-switch-off-iphone-video-camera-and-wi-fi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA

After all, Big Brother is the ultimate goal of liberalism so it's no surprise that an icon of liberal culture would get around to doing this; using and hiding behind the instruments of freedom in order to ultimately destroy it.

[_moksha]

What is XKeyscore? Well, we'll let the NSA tell you: XKeyscore is their "widest reaching" system for developing intelligence from the Internet. XKeyscore gives NSA analysts the ability to search through the entire database of your information, without any authorization whatsoever. This means they don't require a warrant, court clearance, or any signature from anyone above their pay grade.

All an NSA analyst must do is complete a simple on-screen form, and just mere seconds later your online history appears before their eyes. The NSA claims that XKeyscore covers "nearly everything a typical user does on the Internet."

Snowden's right-hand site, The Guardian, reached out to the NSA for statement regarding XKeyscore, to which the government spy agency replied:

XKeyscore is used as a part of NSA's lawful foreign signals intelligence collection system. Allegations of widespread, unchecked analyst access to NSA collection data are simply not true. Access to XKeyscore, as well as all of NSA's analytic tools, is limited to only those personnel who require access for their assigned tasks. In addition, there are multiple technical, manual and supervisory checks and balances within the system to prevent deliberate misuse from occurring. Every search by an NSA analyst is fully auditable, to ensure that they are proper and within the law. These types of programs allow us to collect the information that enables us to perform our missions successfully -- to defend the nation and to protect U.S. and allied troops abroad.

Read more at http://www.tweaktown.com/news/32091/snowden-reveals-another-nsa-spy-program-xkeyscore/index.html#uDBFhReeqEf3oxd6.99

Once this technology becomes established at the NSA Bluffdale, Utah headquarters, Merlyn Young or Oswald Tanner from the Turley J. Hinton Institute could easily track national subversives like Doctor Scratch, Polygamy Porter or Subgenius. Is this likely to happen? Need you ask?

[_Gadianton]

Welcome to the cloud, the digital road to serfdom.

[_cinepro]

So this only effects Apple devices? If so, this is a great day for Android!

[_krose]

*sigh*

And I quote:

Oh noes, Apple has patented Big Brother!

Facebook is blowing up with re-posts of several halfassed link-bait articles claiming that Apple has patented the ability to make your phone be unable to take pictures of cops.

I know it's too much work to double-click the patent number, select "Search", and actually read it, so here's the patent:

8,254,902: Apparatus and methods for enforcement of policies upon a wireless device.

It's a patent on making the behavior of a device reactive to its environment, like forcing "silent mode" in a theatre or forcing "airplane mode" in a plane. Like all patents, it's written in an inverted cascade of clauses of the form, "And if you don't buy that, then also this. And if you don't buy that, then also this."

The part the link-baiters are freaking out about is a single sentence in the middle of the "background" part that says:

- Covert police or government operations may require complete "blackout" conditions.

The context that nobody is quoting is that the surrounding paragraph makes it clear that they're talking about screen brightness.

Because someone else already has the patent on turning off cameras in "sensitive areas".

If you want to be angry about this, what you should be angry about is that patents on this crap were granted at all, not because of the creep of big brother but because it's damned obvious behavior to implement and it is not an invention at all. The granting of patents like this makes the world objectively, measurably worse.