12 June 2013 – For the past three years the Financial Times has been running a series on … for lack of a better term … “data”.  Articles have appeared in its “Connected Business” section (6 editions a year), it’s “Cybersecurity” section (twice a year) and in its regular weekday and weekend editions.  Subjects have included EU data protection, the corporate competition to accumulate information about consumers, concerns about government surveillance (yes, before PRISM), unregulated companies that obtain information by scouring social networks and/or purchase histories and public records, the use and power of algorithms to determine/predict consumer behavior, etc., etc. We have included many references in our posts over the years.

Tomorrow’s regular edition of the FT has a corker of a story.  Despite all the growing concerns about government surveillance, the corporate competition to accumulate information about consumers is fierce, pushing down the market price for intimate personal details to fractions of a cent. As the FT has reported in previous articles, the surveillance of consumers has developed into a multibillion-dollar industry conducted by largely unregulated companies that … Read more

By: Gregory P. Bufithis, Esq.  (CEO) and Eric De Grasse (Chief Technology Officer).  

10 June 2013 – Wow. So George Orwell and Philip K. Dick were right: “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type” (quoting Glenn Greenwald, the blogger who revealed the existence of PRISM as leaked to him by Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old former C.I.A. computer technician). Although what immediately came to mind was the 1998 movie “Enemy of the State” which had Gene Hackman playing a disillusioned National Security Agency (NSA) analyst who says “the agency has been in bed with the telecommunications industry for decades, and they can suck a salt grain off a beach.” As the MIT Technology Review said at the time, that movie was more documentary than fiction.  While the visual tracking abilities of the government were way overblown in the film, the RF tracking abilities were vastly underestimated, as were the relationships among and between members of the military-industrial complex. As Dwight Eisenhower said in his famous military-industrial complex speech our public policy “could itself become the captive of … Read more