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NEW AI STREET SURVEILLANCE FINGERS YOU AND EVERYONE YOU MEET. The company is called Vintra and their motto is “Know what the cameras know.”
A new surveillance product leverages AI to analyze video footage and make startling connections that provide a creepily invasive and detailed interaction map of people on public streets.
Not only does the system identify users by matching them to say a photo provided by an authority such as a police or government agency, or private company or employer.
The ACLU recently called attention to an especially troubling aspect of the technology, which detects connections to any other persons that came into contact or were near a given individual in a given time frame. That capability allows the system to build association maps that provide a comprehensive picture of potential relationships.
According to Vintra:
“[Using the system], You can really start building out a network. You may have one guy, that showed up a few times, that you’re interested in—you can start looking at windows of time around him to see who else is there at the same time, and build out the networks of those people.”
In a video demonstration highlighting the capabilities of Vintra’s surveillance technology, a firm executive examined a month’s worth of video footage acquired by roughly 10 fixed cameras, as well as body cameras, in a San Jose transportation hub.
The Vintra exec provided the system an image of a male subject, and an AI algorithm quickly produced 23 snapshots of the person from the center’s cameras. The footage in which he appeared was presented in snapshots that could be clicked on to play the relevant footage.
Even more disturbing, on inputting a time frame—say, ten minutes—and pressing a “find associates” button, an algorithmic search can sniff out virtually potential contacts of the subject, seen in the video footage.
The Vintra technology can analyze the nature and quality of the “contacts.”
For example, in the company’s demonstration video, the technology could report that 150 of the persons identified in proximity with the subject person during the given time-frame appeared on camera just once, while three others appeared twice.
The technology could also ascertain that one individual had 14 “co-appearances” with the main subject person. It could be readily presumed that the two individuals had some kind of relationship.
And of course, snapshots of virtually every instance of them appearing together could be clicked for a video review.
According to Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst for the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, Vintra’s technology represents an example of a rapidly advancing potential surveillance nightmare:
“Face recognition and other analytic techniques appear to have brought social network analysis to video surveillance. And who knows what purposes such mining could be used for.”
The Truckers Convoy protest in Ottawa, COVID lockdown protests around the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, and the election fraud protest in Washington D.C. in January 2021, have shown the extent to which supposedly free democracies have already shown a willingness and ability to crush organizing and conduct of peaceful protests advocating for the most basic rights of election integrity and medical freedom.
There’s little doubt that governments will be only too willing to add technology of the kind companies like Vintra are developing, to further control and crush opposition to their power and designs.
AND THE LATEST U.S. INTELLIGENCE “EMPLOYEE OF MONTH” IS…YOU. Professional spies are so yesterday. Yes, U.S. Intelligence agencies have a vast hook into educational institutions throughout the U.S., cultivating and enticing enlistments into the intelligence fields.
But the most exciting area of spy enlistment is in the area of average, largely unwitting citizens.
Intelligence agencies, in close working collaboration with tech companies, are progressively rolling out technology that not only tracks people, but turns them into surveillance nodes and assets in a fast metastasizing surveillance net that can be leveraged to know about people, what they do, their associations, and indeed, their entire life footprint, in real-time.
Several recent technologies provide examples of how the surveillance net is evolving almost from day to day. Those include:
- Phone based contract tracing apps
- Driverless Car technology
- Embedded microchips in objects including clothing and consumer items like coffee containers, etc.
- Microchipping of medications people ingest
Contact tracing apps and other medical surveillance is rapidly becoming standard in the U.S. and other countries, according to Aaron Kheriaty, Director of the Bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Writing on substack, Kheriaty noted that contact tracking applications have multiplied, with at least 120 distinct apps being used in 71 different states, and 60 additional digital contact-tracing techniques being utilized in 38 other nations.
Driverless Car technology utilizes video cameras that capture everything that happens around the cars. The cameras and video reportedly are used by companies to enhance the safety and operability of these vehicles.
Examples like GM’s Cruise and Alphabet’s Waymo, conceal the fact that the film captured by these vehicles may be accessible by the authorities, according to a recent article by reclaimthenet.org.
The outlet noted that the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) has already utilized video from autonomous cars for investigations, according to a document acquired by Motherboard via a freedom of information request.
Clothes, as strange as that might sound, might soon be another vector of surveillance net, opening new treasure troves of data to authorities.
A company called EON (working together with Microsoft) was recently profiled in a Medium.com article for microchipping its lines of apparel.
Microchip clothing tags would use Near Field Communication (NFC), which is now available on all Android devices, when in close proximity.
A Circular ID tag can be scanned and information for that particular product recorded over the life cycle of the garment.
Data is transferred to Microsoft through the Internet of Things (IoT), sorted by Microsoft’s Cognitive Services, and stored in Microsoft’s Azure Cloud.
According to Medium, the technology opens open a myriad of tracking possibilities:
“But what about scanning with NFC or RFID? When you walk through airport security, will your clothes be scanned? Or do you go to a restaurant or a business that has an RFID reader? Will this information be saved in the data file?”
Eon claims the microchipping allows consumers to be better informed and able to verify the sourcing for materials and ethical production of their products.
But of course all that could simply be attested by the company, on penalty of fines and sanctions for deceptive practices, should they be lying.
No, it seems clear the technology is an inroad for tracking their products and the people utilizing them. Information that might be gathered could be exploited in various ways, including:
- where and when you purchased the garment
- Tagging your clothes on blogger photos to assist with identification, despite visual masking of things like hats, facemasks, headscarves and sunglasses, etc.
- Knowing how many times (and by whom) an item has been leased and/or resold, establishing a trail of relationships as well as a chain of custody, with possible tax or other implications
- When you donate clothing, a stylist may look up all of the items in your wardrobe and suggest outfit combinations for you.
So the clothes on your back may now join smartphones and other devices, appliances and vehicles as the tools that help make citizens nodes of the U.S. intelligence network.
And add medicine to that mix as well, at least if “visionaries” like Pfizer CEO and former veterinarian Albert Bourla realize their visions. Speaking recently at a World Economic Forum event, Bourla pitched microchips in medical pills that could report back to insurance companies on things like when they were taken. (See “BOURLA DOES DAVOS, SELLS MICROCHIPS IN PILLS,” 24 May 2022)
From Saturating Higher Ed, to Saturating Every Household
In 2017, the book Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America’s Universities, detailed the disturbing extent to which higher ed has become allied with and beholden to American intelligence money, influence and objectives.
It’s becoming hard to find a university that doesn’t have some connection, via Cyber Security, Law Enforcement, AI Technology and other course fields and Majors.
And if one were to suppose that religious-affiliated schools would be a bastion of independence from government intelligence seeding and influence, that presumption would be very wrong. Religious affiliated colleges have been just as prone to succumb to the money and funding incentives dangled by U.S. intelligence to build programs and departments that become pipelines.
But the “everything connected” vision of metaverse, augmented reality and IoT objects is quickly changing the paradigm of how intelligence agencies are surveilling and gathering information.
In short, it looks more and more like the future isn’t so much about a cadre of specialist spies on the ground, but a growing, pervasive web of objects and even our own activities, providing troves of information about us and everything and everyone around us, via connectivity we take for granted, and are mostly unaware of.
Unless of course, authorities have reason to present that information in granular detail, should an infraction of unwanted dissident behavior, protest or defiance necesitate it.
The Trends Journal covered and predicted the growing surveillance concerns surrounding IoT in “SMART CITIES WILL BE DIGITAL PRISONS” (30 Mar 2021) and “CANCELED IN THE METAVERSE” (16 Nov 2021).