Privacy Matters

The federal government flooded Tampa with $50 million for weapons, high-tech CCTV cameras and other police and surveillance costs associated with this week's Republican National Convention.

We don’t know much about what the NSA is doing. What we do know – and what we suspect -  is featured in today’s New York Times. 

Yesterday I wrote a quick blog about the data-mining and electronic systems management firm NTREPID, which produced a strange document purporting to show the network of power connecting "anarchists" in the United States. The most powerful image associated with that product was the following, which purports to lay out the connections between supposedly "anarchist" activists and organizations, including PBS, Citizen Radio and Occupy Oakland. 

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The combatants are hardly evenly matched. A man armed with nothing but the paper weapon of international law stares down the firing range at the most formidable military machine the world has ever known. 

Yesterday the independent surveillance researcher Asher Wolf tweeted an astonishing link to a private intelligence corporation's website containing a document entitled: "Tartan Influence Model: Anarchist Groups." The document was published  by a corporation called Tartan Metrics, a division of the information security, cyberwar and surveillance company NTREPID -- a company that

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In 2008, a Reston, VA based corporation called Oceans' Edge, Inc. applied for a patent. On March, 2012 the company's application for an advanced mobile snooping technology suite was approved.

Image: The ISIS camera configuration set-up at Logan airport in Boston, MA. Image courtesy the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Note: This post has been updated with images of the ISIS system taken from the patent application posted here.