You have something personal to discuss with a friend. You arrange to meet for a coffee and a chat in a public restaurant. It’s noisy, and you have a good heart to heart in the belief that nobody else can hear what you’re saying. Or you leave a message on an answer phone or via a phone app and think that it’s just between yourself and the recipient.
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In the 1970s and ’80s, when undercover agents recorded conversations with mobsters and corrupt politicians, they wore a bulky tape recorder strapped around their waists–that sometimes weighed as much as 10 pounds–and wires, connected to a microphone, taped to their chests. Needless to say, they were nervous about being caught!
In the April 8th edition of the New York Times, Wendy Ruderman quotes retired FBI agent Robert K. Wittman as saying, "When you pulled them off, all the hair came off our chest. There used to be a lot of recordings that ended with ‘Aaahhhhh,’ when you ripped the wires off. It was almost like getting a body wax."
Today that has all changed: Recording equipment has been miniaturized.
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It’s shocking enough to see a rat scurrying across your kitchen floor, but what if that "rat" was REALLY a remote-controlled spy? And even better, what if it wasn’t a robot disguised as a rat, but a REAL rodent, being operated from a distance by remote control?
At a laboratory at the State University of New York, researchers are working on creating just that. Rats have an excellent sense of smell, so cyborg rats could be trained to detect the scent of land mines. This wouldn’t even be a danger to the rats, since they are too lightweight to detonate them.
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Spying has changed in the internet age–Now we leave a record of what we’re doing and what we’re interested in every time we click on a website, post on a social network or purchase something online. Homeland Security and police are tracking this information, and so are AD AGENCIES.
In the December 13th edition of the Financial Times, Emily Steel writes: "A new generation of executives, armed with millions of terabytes of data, are taking over today’s advertising world. They are schooled in creating sophisticated automated systems for buying and selling ads, searching for patterns in the data to tell stories and tapping algorithms to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing." Their goal is to target personalized ads to the right person at the right time. read more