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Comment by andreyf | Hacker News Reader

RT is, as usual, full of shit. TrapWire is no secret, but a public product, available to any company who wants to pay for it (see www.trapwire.com).

"more accurate than modern facial recognition technology"

"recorded digitally on the spot"

"encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence"

"the corporation's ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented"

It sounds a bit ominous, but what does any of that even mean? The security video cameras have encrypted feeds into a central server, which does facial recognition? Sounds nice, but I'd be surprised if it works well enough to be useful (esp. if someone is wearing sunglasses), but not nearly as alarmed as the tone of the RT article encourages. Sounds more like fantasy technology and wasted tax money than anything else.

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> RT is, as usual, full of shit.

"As usual" really? They are not an objective news source, for sure, but they are decent. They often provide a good counter point on any US based and so called "free" media news sources.

> TrapWire is no secret,

Not "secret" as in classified. Secret as in your average person on the street probably doesn't know about, unless they of course read the "full of shit RT" source instead of relying say on Fox News.

> Sounds nice, but I'd be surprised if it works

Alright so if we found out that China was using the technology would you be saying the same "they have it, but no worries, it is probably not usable, so we shouldn't worry about criticizing China for it"

> "As usual" really? They are not an objective news source, for sure, but they are decent. They often provide a good counter point on any US based and so called "free" media news sources.

I don't read them much, but was pretty disappointed with their coverage of CISPA linked on reddit a couple of months ago. It was very sparse on facts, and very heavy editorialized, full of fear mongering and propaganda. Same thing here.

Wouldn't it be something as simple as a continuous recording, uploaded to NSA/gov servers where they would then run basic facial recognition, tag each face, index them and compare them for matches in the database. Then you could track where an individual has been over time.

The product may be publicly available, but the difference here is that the government is secretly installing cameras in every major public location, and building a growing database of every individual's face and movements. No individual company could do that. The government can.

the government is secretly installing cameras in every major public location, and building a growing database of every individual's face and movements

Is there any proof of this actually happening? I mean not "there's a system that does video surveillance, so they must be spying on everybody", but actual proof that there exists the database that includes every individual's face and movements and that police is installing cameras in every major public location to maintain this database (as opposed to, you know, legitimate purposes of securing major public locations).

The high profile ex-NSA whistleblowers in the press right now are making plenty of statements about these new systems.

I don't recall anything about video surveillance specifically, but what they are concerned about is the database of dossiers on everyone that includes all of the multimedia information available. They have internet traffic, email, cell information (movements) but I don't know what else is collected.

Maybe someone who's done more reading on the subject can pipe up.

Any links to these whistleblowers that tell about dossiers on everyone including internet traffic and movements?

http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-whistleblower-says-the-go...

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/exclusive_national_sec...

Isn't internet traffic a non secret now after the warrantless spying program fiasco that whistleblower Diane Roark allegedly leaked? And if you have cell phone information you have movement information, I haven't heard anything specifically about movement other than that.

The first link has a lot of things but I think main content is distilled here: http://publicintelligence.net/binney-nsa-declaration/ Where Binney says that NSA has capability to intercept electronic communications and he suspects it is doing so without privacy guards. He however does not say anything about existence of personal dossiers on every US citizen. He also makes some estimates of new (not yet existing) NSA data storage capacity, and deduces this amount of storage may only be needed if NSA plans to capture and store all traffic without filtering. However, this system does not actually exist as of yet, and his estimates are based on "some reports" and are hard to verify. While of course extreme suspicion may be prudent in every case where a lot of taxpayer dollars is spent on building new surveillance infrastructure by an agency that has had proven its disregard for privacy, it alone does not prove current existence of the program as described above.

The second link describes the program which was explicitly made to exclude US citizens, but after 9/11 they used also data on US citizens provided by telecoms, such as AT&T - namely billing data (i.e. who talked to whom). I see no mention on them having access to location data or internet traffic, or them doing it for every US citizen. Binney was understandably outraged about warrantless surveillance on US citizens and had quit, however he neither proves not implies there's a systematic program of the extent mentioned above (i.e. personal dossier on communications, location, etc. of every person in US), unless I have missed something there.

That may be true .. but why has http://www.trapwire.com/management.html been taken offline?

Cache available here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0pAfaMR...

Did you read the emails WL posted? At least one of the mirrors linked to in the article is up. I read through them all (there's about 8 of them). It seems TripWire has some kind of RSS feed viewer, and most of the emails are about how StratFor can get relevant articles into that RSS feed equivalent so that they can in turn sell ad space to big contractors like Lockheed Martin.

The emails are incredibly mundane, nothing even hinting at super secret conspiracy stuff in them at all.

My feeling is there are usually far more mundane reasons for trying to break/bury a story, corruption and conflicting interests still hold weight even if the main narrative isn't worthy of a sci-fi plot.

Yeah, RT alone is not a reputable source. They thrive on unfounded conspiracy theories and often times report outright falsehoods. During the Libyan revolution, they would claim whole cities were under Gaddafi control when they was clear video and multiple members of international media proving otherwise.

It was and still is an info war, both sides acting accordingly.

Lybian revolution had plenty of staged content that was fed to "international media" who happily gulped it down. Rebel troops taking on cities in fucking flip-flops? Sure, why not. Kind of unclear who did the actually fighting, but that's not really important, is it.

various "news" sources are also quite adept at turning the cameras off when the larger agenda warrants it

Why is it so hard to believe that they would be wearing flip-flops? Under-equipped fighters is nothing new. Here's a photo of a barefoot Khmer Rouge fighter with an RPG, at the fall of Phnom Penh.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mYN-WF164gg/T40tDKWNLDI/AAAAAAAAas...

Have you never seen the picture of the guy with an assault rifle, wearing gardening gloves, a life vest, and sneakers?

http://borderland-beat-forum.924382.n3.nabble.com/file/n4027...

When George Washington led 12,000 men into winter camp at Valley Forge, 2/3 had no shoes. In December. In Pennsylvania.

At least Libya was probably warm enough for flip-flops.

If you unconditionally believe video, which so obviously can be misleading, then you might as well believe RT too. The international media, which can too often means Western media, is equally suspect at times. All sides play the information war games.

Nope. But I do believe my family and friends living in Libya. I also believe family friends there.

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