If you’re an employee under the heel of a giant corporation you should probably be terrified by the vision of the future of connected gadgets that Microsoft just revealed at its Build developer conference here in Seattle.
Two demos from today’s keynote stood out, both for being entertaining and for revealing a potentially frightening future for anyone working for a big employer with the will to micro-monitor its employees.
The first featured cameras watching employees on a construction worksite. The cameras are tied into the cloud, where artificial intelligence monitors everything in real time, noting identities of employees as well as identifying almost every single piece of equipment on the worksite.
That is undoubtedly cool, especially as the AI can instantly notice when someone is on the worksite that shouldn’t be, or identify when someone is using dangerous equipment in an ill-advised fashion.
It is also, you know, terrifying. Microsoft’s demo purposely focused on a construction worksite, where accidents are too common, and a smart AI overseer sort of makes sense. Spotting OSHA violations or trespassers quickly and then relaying that information to an employer via mobile notifications could genuinely save limbs and lives.
But my brain immediately started conjuring a scenario that was much more oppressive—One where these cameras were in some open office where people come to work in skirts or button downs from Dillard’s. Not a place where security or safety is a primary concern, but instead, a place where employers obsessively monitor employees in some misguided attempt to maximize profit by chewing up and spitting out the fleshy cogs in their machine.
With a surveillance system like this you couldn’t invite your friend to stop by for lunch because your boss would know, a notification instantly appearing on their phone. There’d be no long lunches or grabbing extra office supplies from the closet. Take a too [long] smoke break or have a bout of indigestion that leaves you on the toilet longer than usual? The AI would be able to notice so quickly that your boss could meet you in the hallway with a bottle of Pepto Bismol.
The little bit of autonomy many employees still have in the office would be eradicated if this system were moved away from construction worksites and into more traditional offices.
This further illustrated by the other big demo of Build’s Day 1 Keynote. It focused on Cortana, and how it could now be everywhere, instead of just lashed to your laptop or phone. The demo shows a woman chatting with a Cortana-powered Invoke speaker in a set intended to represent her home. Then it reminded her she had a meeting, so she hopped in the car, where it promptly told her traffic was going to make her late and notified her workplace, then slotted her into a meeting already in progress.
This sounds wildly cool and convenient, but there was one thing Microsoft left unsaid. This woman was logged into her home and car with her workplace ID, which means potentially her employers could now have access to data from her home and car life. If work-life balance is of any concern to you, the fact that your home speaker system might one day tell you to hurry up and get to the office because you’re late and you’re chronically late should be alarming.
These demos illustrate the trade-offs inherent in a world in which we use more and more connected gadgets. You have to give up some of your privacy in order to reap the benefits of a network of devices tuned to you and your whims. But the realities of these trade-offs start to feel worse with Microsoft because despite its array of consumer products, like the Surface Pro and Microsoft 10 Home, Microsoft is in the business of working with businesses. Those are its primary clients, and it’s very much who Microsoft spent the majority of today’s keynote speaking to. You are not the business model, your company is. Asking consumers to give their data to a big faceless corporation like Google so it can sell ads is one thing—but asking them to also give all that data to the people who sign their checks is another.
Supposedly a reporter named Michael Hastings was killed when the car he was driving was taken over and put under someone else's control. He apparently had found out something he wasn't supposed to know.
one way transparency .....how is that at all a good thing?
"they" say, if you aren't doing anything wrong, then why be disturbed by constant surveillance ?
however, this works and has to work both ways,
yet this is not what is observed at all.
the average being is like an extra on a vast reality show set with more and more details of their activities being recorded,
but the ones doing the observing and the legislating are under no such scrutiny.....
so who has something to hide then?
those who seek to be immune from scrutiny such as those doing the scrutinizing.....
certainly not a bunch to be trusted.
Supposedly a reporter named Michael Hastings was killed when the car he was driving was taken over and put under someone else's control. He apparently had found out something he wasn't supposed to know.
Connections Between Michael Hastings, Edward Snowden And Barrett Brown — The War With The Security State
By Christian Stork
Global Research, August 08, 2013
WhoWhatWhy 7 August 2013
At the time of his death in a mysterious one-car crash and explosion, journalist Michael Hastings was researching a story that threatened to expose powerful entities and government-connected figures. That story intersected with the work of two controversial government critics — the hacker Barrett Brown and the on-the-run surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Any probe into Hastings’s untimely death needs to take into account this complex but essential background.
But First, the Raw Facts
A little over 12 hours before his car was incinerated on an LA straightaway on June 18, 2013, Hastings sent out a short email headed, “FBI Investigation, re: NSA.” In it, he said that the FBI had been interviewing his “close friends and associates,” and advised the recipients — including colleagues at the websiteBuzzfeed — “[It] may be wise to immediately request legal counsel before any conversations or interviews about our news-gathering practices or related journalism issues.” He added, “I’m onto a big story, and need to go off the radat [sic] for a bit.”
From: Michael Hastings
Date: Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 12:56 PM
Subject: FBI Investigation, re: NSA
To: [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED]
Hey [5 REDACTED WORDS] the Feds are interviewing my “close friends and associates.” Perhaps if the authorities arrive “Buzzfeed GQ”, er HQ, may be wise to immediately request legal counsel before any conversations or interviews about our news-gathering practices or related journalism issues.
Also: I’m onto a big story, and need to go off the radar for a bit.
All the best, and hope to see you all soon.
Michael
The next day, Hastings went “off the radar” permanently.
Here is a video that shows a lateral view of Hastings’s speeding car just before it crashed. (It shows at about 0.07.)
Following publication of the email by KTLA, the FBI quickly denied that the Bureau was ever investigating Hastings.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation and ProjectPM — the research wiki that Brown was involved with — are in the process of filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to learn if indeed Hastings was the subject of an FBI probe.
The FBI denial notwithstanding, a number of clues indicate that the proximity of Hastings to Brown and the work of ProjectPM may have been what spawned the purported investigation in the first place.
Deep Background
When the FBI raided the Dallas home of journalist Barrett Brown in March 2012, the travails of the Vanity Fair and Guardian contributor didn’t get much ink — that is, until Michael Hastings published an exclusive on the Brown raid on Buzzfeed.
The story included a copy of the search warrant that revealed why the government was so interested in Brown: Along with colleagues at the research wiki he started, ProjectPM (PPM), Brown was looking into a legion of shadowy cybersecurity firms whose work for the government raised all sorts of questions about privacy and the rule of law.
Since Hastings was familiar with the government contractors listed in the search warrant, he was also potentially culpable in whatever “crimes” the feds believed Brown and PPM were guilty of. Is this why he was being investigated in the days before his fatal crash on June 18, 2013? By then, Hastings had established a reputation as a fearless muckraker, whose stories often stripped the haloes from the powerful and well-connected:
– The besmirched “runaway” Special Forces general Stanley McChrystal, whose career Hastings had dispatched in a 2010 article forRolling Stone
– The saintly General “King” David Petraeus—former commander of Central Command (CENTCOM), International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) in Afghanistan, and head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
– Daniel Saunders—a former assistant US attorney for the Central District of California
– Former Secretary of State and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, with whose staff Michael had many pointed exchanges regarding State’s Benghazi spin.
“To Maintain and Cultivate an Enemies List”
In his profile on the blogging consortium True/Slant, Hastings confided that his “secret ambition” was “to maintain and cultivate an enemies list.” Such ironic distancing was Hastings’s way of making palatable an inherently cynical view of the world. He knew that power corrupted, and to effect change it was necessary to point out the Emperor’s glaringly naked flesh.
In this manner, he was much like his blogging colleague at True/Slant, Barrett Brown. So much so, in fact, that the latter approached Hastings to work on a project that would change the way the public viewed the murky world of intelligence contracting in the post-9/11 era.
For those unfamiliar with Brown’s tale,WhoWhatWhy has been chroniclinghis trials since February 2013. He is currently in federal custody in Ft. Worth, Texas, facing over a hundred years behind bars for researching 70,000 hacked emails obtained from the cybersecurity firm HBGary Federal and its parent company HBGary. At no point is the government alleging he was involved in the hack itself. His putative “crime” is doing what investigative reporters are supposed to do: digging for the truth about breaches of the public trust.
To do this, Brown pioneered a collaborative wiki where researchers and journalists could sift through these emails and create an encyclopedia from the information contained within. This was known as ProjectPM (PPM).
In 2009, Brown invited Hastings to join forces on PPM, but Hastings’s interest was tempered by other commitments. When the two spoke next, Hastings told Brown he was working on something big.
“Not One of Us”
Hastings was referring to his impending 2010 article, “The Runaway General,” for Rolling Stone, in which he quoted several high-ranking military officials from within Gen. McChrystal’s inner circle disparaging their civilian command. The article caused a stir in official Washington, and eventually led to McChrystal being relieved of duty by President Obama.
Amid the fallout from this journalistic coup, an interesting narrative began forming in certain sectors of the press: “Michael Hastings is not one of us.” Hastings had broken one of the rules governing Washington’s hermetic circle of “access journalism” by quoting his subjects without their express permission. Elsewhere, most working reporters would call this, well, journalism.
Brown was quick to defend Hastings, penning an article for Vanity Fair titled, “Why The Hacks Hate Michael Hastings.” Later, the two blurbed each other’s books, further cementing their professional relationship.
One thing they shared was a deep discontent with the mainstream media. Indeed, Brown says, they were “obsessed with coming up with ways to change the dynamic.”
The busy Hastings never fully immersed himself in the work of PPM. “[Hastings] was an outlet for us to pass things to,” says Alan Ross, better known on PPM’s Internet relay chat (IRC) as Morpeth. “His relationship was one of talking to Barrett in my experience, rather than direct involvement in PPM.” He was “more of an associate than a member.”
“Get ready for your mind to be blown.”
For Hastings, Brown was clearly a confidential source—the type that flourishes best when kept in the dark and away from other reporters. Yet on January 24, 2013, Hastings tweeted that he was finally beginning to work on the Brown story, telling his interlocutors to “get ready for your mind to be blown.”
Kevin Gallagher, the administrator of Brown’s legal defense fund atFreeBarrettBrown.org, said Brown and Hastings hadn’t been able to talk securely in eight or nine months, but that after a few months of back and forth with Brown’s lawyers Hastings finally planned on interviewing him in custody in June.
After whistleblower Snowden’s bombshell revelations of dragnet surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA), Hastings wrote an article on June 7 that referenced Brown for the first time since April 2012. Titled “Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans,” it lambasted supposedly liberal Democrats for their Bush-like surveillance fixation and their unrelenting war on those who seek to expose the operations of the surveillance state:
“Transparency supporters, whistleblowers, and investigative reporters, especially those writers who have aggressively pursued the connections between the corporate defense industry and federal and local authorities involved in domestic surveillance, have been viciously attacked by the Obama administration and its allies in the FBI and DOJ.
[snip]
Barrett Brown, another investigative journalist who has written for Vanity Fair, among others [sic] publications, exposed the connections between the private contracting firm HB Gary (a government contracting firm that, incidentally, proposed a plan to spy on and ruin the reputation of the Guardian’s [Glenn] Greenwald) and who is currently sitting in a Texas prison on trumped up FBI charges regarding his legitimate reportorial inquiry into the political collective known sometimes as Anonymous.”
The article ended with “Perhaps more information will soon be forthcoming.”
The fact that he planned to interview Brown was corroborated by documentarian Vivien Weisman, who told WhoWhatWhy that she spoke to Hastings about it at a Los Angeles book signing for “Dirty Wars” in May 2013. And the editor of Buzzfeed reportedly confirmed that Hastings was in the midst of working on the Brown expose at the time of his death.
Knowing this prompts the question: what angle of the PPM research was Hastings about to tackle?
The evidence seems to point to another shadowy project revealed in the cache of hacked emails that PPM was sifting through: Romas/COIN.
Your Data Is Mine
Gallagher, who was briefed on the last discussion Hastings had with Brown before the planned interview, says, “Hastings had specifically asked about Romas/COIN.”
Romas/COIN was the name given to a program through which the U.S had been conducting “a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world,” according to emailshacked from the cybersecurity firm HBGary Federal. Evidently, this program allows the intelligence community to “monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once.”
Over the course of a year, Aaron Barr, CEO of HBGary Federal, sought out various companies to form a consortium that could wrest control of Romas/COIN from the current contract holder, Northrop Grumman. Eventually the consortium included no less than 12 different firms — ranging from niche software companies to behemoths like Google, Apple, and even Disney.
From the emails, it’s clear that “mobile phone software and applications constitute a major component of the program,” concludes the entry in ProjectPM. Periodic references to “semantic analysis,” “Latent Semantic Indexing,” and “specialized linguistics” indicate that the government agency overseeing the contract was clearly interested in automated dissection of spoken or written communication. This is the hallmark of NSA surveillance.
Is it possible that this consortium planned on developing mobile phone software and applications with bugs that would allow the US government to hack into targets’ phones and give it access to all of the communications within?
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Originally posted by Gale Frierson
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