I was so amazed the author can connect Ai Weiwei with the WildCat robot, an image of Obama's calling from a camp, and a kid in a car using Disney product.
How this can connect together?!
If you want to talk about surveillance or privacy, won't NSA's Snowden be a more famous and impacting example?
Ai Weiwei lives under total surveillance. Google is producing technology for the military. Obama has to use a tent in his hotel room to block surveillance. The disney wristband tracks your movements and spending.
Surprisingly the NSA is barely mentioned at all. The author is primarily concerned with how technology is enabling surveillance, not the organizations currently using it.
[0] http://www.darpa.mil/our_work/dso/programs/maximum_mobility_...
Google is not a defense contractor. As frequently beaten as a dead horse on HN, Google sells ads, not weapons.
DARPA funds lots of projects that eventually get inherited by the private sector. SIRI funding at SRI was provided by DARPA, does that make Apple a defense contractor?
Guilt by association usually produces bad analysis.
>One of the technologies the NSA uses for this feat is made by Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (‘PittPatt’), now owned by Google. We underestimate how much a company like Google is already part of the military industrial complex. I therefore can’t resist showing a new piece of Google technology: the military robot ‘WildCat’ made by Boston Dynamics which was bought by Google in December 2013.
> How this can connect together?!