Posts Tagged communication

The Tech Tyranny Is Upon Us

From Glenn Greenwald:

No authoritarians believe they are authoritarians. No matter how repressive are the measures they support — censorship, monopoly power, no-fly lists for American citizens without due process — they tell themselves that those they are silencing and attacking are so evil, are terrorists, that anything done against them is noble and benevolent, not despotic and repressive. That is how American liberals currently think, as they fortify the control of Silicon Valley monopolies over our political lives, exemplified by the overnight destruction of a new and popular competitor.

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YouTube Continues Crackdown On Gun Channels

From Bearing Arms:

So, YouTube appears to have informally implemented a new, unspoken policy (i.e., I could not find this in the content guidelines) whereby it will demonetize videos which aren’t shot in a “controlled environment” such as a “shooting range.”

This raises a lot of questions, not the least of which is:
How does YouTube determine what usage is improper? Is there someone at YouTube with proper training on safe gun handling who will implement these policies?*
How will they know when someone is in a “controlled environment” or not, and who has the authority to reach that conclusion?
Is a shooting range, in fact, safer and more “controlled” than the creator’s private property such that this policy needs to be implemented, to begin with?
WHAT IS A MODIFIED WEAPON?
Who do you think you are?
What gives you right?

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Defense Distributed CEO Discusses Future

From Reason:

For Paloma Heindorff, who took over as head of the company last year after stints as director of development and vice president of operations, these innovations are an important part of keeping the powerful in check. “We’ve got to be developing technologies in the independent sector to be able to counterbalance the enormous control that the government has and the enormous access to information that corporations have,” she says.

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YouTube Bans Defense Distributed Press Conference

From The Washington Examiner:

The video in question, which has already been reposted by other accounts on YouTube, shows a press conference Wilson gave for a collection of reporters from major media outlets including the Associated Press, New York Times, Houston Chronicle, and others. The 46-minute video features Wilson explaining his reaction to a recent ruling by a federal judge forcing the State Department to abandon its settlement with Wilson, which would have allowed him to publish certain gun files, including his design for a gun made mostly from 3D-printed components, pending further legal action. After explaining that he would begin to sell the files online and sharing them over email or other secured means of transmission in response to the judge’s assertion that doing so would likely be legal, Wilson then took questions from the press for about 40 minutes.

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BitTorrent Creates More Secure Chat Program

From BitTorrent:

First, a few words on Chat’s origins. Here at BitTorrent, we value privacy. With the news this year reminding us all of the susceptibility of the communications platforms we rely on to snooping, we found ourselves wanting something new, something secure, something private. We ultimately realized that we were uniquely qualified to build this platform.

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Ham Radios – James Yeager

James Yeager talks about his Ham Radios

http://youtu.be/j3Az58kYd58

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Tactical Hand Signals

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New Military GPS

From Defense Industry Daily:

The DAGR system provides a Precise Positioning System, using a hand-held, dual-frequency, lightweight receiver of less than one pound that incorporates the next generation, tamper-resistant Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) “SAASM” (Selective Availability Anti-Spoofing Module) security module.

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Oppose HR 3523, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Congress is considering legislation that would give companies a free pass to monitor and collect communications, including huge amounts of personal data like your text messages and emails, and share that data with the government and anyone else. All a company has to do is claim its privacy violations were for “cybersecurity purposes.” Tell Congress that they can’t use vaguely-defined “cybersecurity threats” as a shortcut to bypassing the law.

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Marines Test New Long Range Radios

From Wired’s Danger Room:

The Harris radios Marines carry in Afghanistan, hooked up to the military’s Joint Tactical Radio System, have a range of under 100 miles. Not bad for when you’re patrolling Anbar or Helmand provinces.

Enter the Distributed Tactical Communications System, a brainchild of the futurists and contrarians at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. The DTCS, as it’s known, would more than double the reach of the Marines’ connectivity, allowing them to communicate from 250 nautical miles, via satellite. And that’s for starters: The Lab says the system has a 30 percent success rate in tests of 700 miles.

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EFF Demands Answers About Secret Surveillance Law Memo

From: EFF

EFF Demands Answers About Secret Surveillance Law Memo

EFF has filed a Freedom of Information Act suit against the Department of Justice (DOJ), demanding the release of a secret legal memo used to justify FBI access to Americans’ telephone records without any legal process or oversight. This suit stems from a report released last year by the DOJ’s own Inspector General that revealed how the FBI had come up with a new legal argument to justify secret, unchecked access to private telephone records. According to the report, the DOJ’s Office of the Legal Counsel had issued a legal opinion agreeing with the FBI’s theory. EFF’s lawsuit is seeking that legal opinion, which is a crucial piece of the puzzle in understanding the government’s efforts to expand and overreach their surveillance powers.

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SOCOM Wants Android Devices

SOCOM wants to use Google’s Android devices instead of developing a proprietary system:

From Danger Room:

SOCOM calls it the Tactical Situational Awareness Application Suite, or TactSA, and it has to work in low-connectivity areas — the middle-of-nowhere places you’d expect to send the military’s most elite troops. It’s got to be peer-to-peer, encrypted “at the application level” and able to recover from “network outages and substantial packet loss.”

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The Great Radio Spectrum Famine

Mobile broadband is consuming the available radio spectrum. Serving up more won’t be easy.

Read the full article here…

http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/the-great-radio-spectrum-famine/1

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How to Respond to Terrorism Threats and Warnings

How to Respond to Terrorism Threats and Warnings is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

By Scott Stewart

In this week’s Geopolitical Weekly, George Friedman wrote that recent warnings by the U.S. government of possible terrorist attacks in Europe illustrate the fact that jihadist terrorism is a threat the world will have to live with for the foreseeable future. Certainly, every effort should be made to disrupt terrorist groups and independent cells, or lone wolves, and to prevent attacks. In practical terms, however, it is impossible to destroy the phenomenon of terrorism. At this very moment, jihadists in various parts of the world are seeking ways to carry out attacks against targets in the United States and Europe and, inevitably, some of these plots will succeed. George also noted that, all too often, governments raise the alert level regarding a potential terrorist attack without giving the public any actionable intelligence, which leaves people without any sense of what to do about the threat.

The world is a dangerous place, and violence and threats of violence have always been a part of the human condition. Hadrian’s Wall was built for a reason, and there is a reason we all have to take our shoes off at the airport today. While there is danger in the world, that does not mean people have to hide under their beds and wait for something tragic to happen. Nor should people count on the government to save them from every potential threat. Even very effective military, counterterrorism, law enforcement and homeland security efforts (and their synthesis — no small challenge itself) cannot succeed in eliminating the threat because the universe of potential actors is simply too large and dispersed. There are, however, common-sense security measures that people should take regardless of the threat level. Read the rest of this entry »

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Atlantic Signal Tactical Headsets

Atlantic Signal Custom Tactical Headset Systems, Options & Accessories

Atlantic SignalAtlantic Signal and its predecessor, New Eagle, have been in the business of designing and manufacturing tactical communications for L.E. and Military Operators worldwide since 1989. www.atlanticsignal.com

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