Spies are everywhere these days (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show) and their new tools–Smartphone cameras connected to social media networks–give them more power than ever. The OLD spies–in places like the Soviet Union and East Germany–would have envied the technology the average person has at his fingertips today.
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Engineers who work for giant telecommunications companies or small start-ups are inventing products that can send messages–from a diaper that lets parents know their baby needs changing, to slippers that can tell when your grandmother might be about to fall down and break her hip. Finnish engineer Jari Arkko connected his house to a wireless network so he can get updates on his computer or cell phone when the front door opens, the laundry is dry or his toast pops up. It took him only 20 minutes to connect his toaster to Facebook.
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We’ve reported on tracking chips inside your clothes and inside Canadian money (not to mention cell phones!), but now IBM, the company that built the early computers that were used by the Nazis (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show) to identify and track Jews and eventually send them to extermination camps, has now developed a radio frequency identification chip so tiny that it can be introduced into food.read more
Congress just passed the extension of the Patriot Act with hardly a murmur and it was signed into law on May 27. Now Senator Ron Wyden (D Oregon) says that what the public has been led to believe the act allows and how the government secretly interprets it are two different things. The reason is that the government’s interpretations of the act are classified, so there is no way to know how it is being used–or abused–by the FBI, the CIA and other enforcement and investigative agencies.
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