Drakegoodman scanned this 1917-ish photo of Soviet planespotters in exotic headgear; according to a commenter, the binox are focused at infinity “so that when you found the source of the sound by turning your head, you could see the aircraft creating that sound.”
I think the foot-wide-apart lenses will also make for headachingly good 3D viewing.
The guy at the right really is trying not to laugh, no?
Egor Egorov visited the Stasi Museum and took a lot of fine pictures for us. Almost quaint, nowadays. How analog.
Amazing stuff, real-time. Try zooming in to your location, then slowly zoom out… http://www.flightradar24.com/51.45,7.02/7
Man, that is hard to beat for hardcore spookpunk. It shows so much contempt for Jobs and his hippie-freedom rubbish that there’s something endearing about it. I wonder how old this NSA technician is, and what he reads on his off hours.
via Bruce Sterling
The Naval Ocean Surveillance System (NOSS), also called White Cloud and PARCAE, refers to one or several systems of SIGINT satellites
At an altitude of 1100km the satellites travel around the world as a group, an organization of three. They can track all military ships at sea. The formation: one satellite leads, two follow.
A key to the world’s data?! Apparently the idea is to show that the program can splice the ‘full take’ of the captured networks into its relevant components. Like a glass prism splits white light into rainbow colors. Here’s an interpretation from the Guardian.
Q: Is it possible to put security in place to protect against state surveillance?
A: “You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place.”
He is deeply worried about being spied on. He lines the door of his hotel room with pillows to prevent eavesdropping. He puts a large red hood over his head and laptop when entering his passwords to prevent any hidden cameras from detecting them.
Though that may sound like paranoia to some, Snowden has good reason for such fears. He worked in the US intelligence world for almost a decade. He knows that the biggest and most secretive surveillance organisation in America, the NSA, along with the most powerful government on the planet, is looking for him.
…, and as a result, “I got hardened.”
A basic tool for free speech: learn how to use email encryption. Mac and Windows versions are here; the mothership is for Linux. It couldn’t be easier, the end-user versions come with great instructions.
Send me something good! Here’s my public key for sievers [at] khm [dot] de (actually those tools above will find it for you automatically).
http://khm.de/~sievers/D457B050.asc
P.S. the iphone screenshot shows you it has no means to decrypt the message, which is probably just as well
“…our inability to describe and understand technological infrastructure reduces our critical reach, leaving us both disempowered and, quite often, vulnerable.”
James Bridle
“Again it comes back to infrastructure and how our inability to describe and understand reduces our critical reach, leaving us both disempowered and, quite often, vulnerable.
Opacity is an important word here too, as is the term ‘black box’. Most of our engineered communications infrastructure is not just extraordinarily abstract for people to come to grips with but is actively kept hidden. There are some valid reasons, of course, for keeping infrastructure hidden but the fact is it out of sight is being increasingly exploited in and out of supposedly democratic contexts, largely by surveillance initiatives we were never told about.
Engendering a healthy paranoia here, along with making work that ruptures the featureless skin of these black boxes – providing points of entry – is important to me currently. Infrastructure must not be a ghost. Nor should we have only mythic imagination at our disposal in attempts to describe it. ‘The Cloud’ is a good example of a dangerous simplification at work, akin to a children’s book. Such convenient reductions will be expensive in time as some corporations and governments continue to both engineer – and take advantage of – ignorance.”