The US-led "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance said on Tuesday that tech firms must allow law enforcement agencies access to encrypted material, warning that failing to do so puts people at risk.
The application for the patent was filed by the e-commerce giant in 2015 and granted on June 4.
Microsoft concluded it would lead to innocent women and minorities being disproportionately held for questioning because the artificial intelligence has been trained on mostly white and male pictures.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has come up with a concept iPhone case that can help prevent the government from finding your location.
Germany once again requires telcos and ISPs to make user data available to law enforcement, after a previous law and the EU directive on which it was based were declared unconstitutional.
Canon is experimenting with new CCTV tools that allow cameras to follow you everywhere you go -- or make them blind to your presence
Two French ISPs have asked France's highest court to overturn a secret government decree defining how French security services can scoop up foreign Internet traffic. They claim the decree is unconstitutional.
"What about the tech world today keeps you up at night?" was the question. RSA encryption algorithm co-inventor Leonard Adelman, "Father of the Internet" Vint Cerf and cryptography innovator Manuel Blum all shared their biggest fears.
Facing a real business threat from the fallout from the NSA's intelligence gathering, tech sector luminaries are expanding their presence in Washington as they lobby for surveillance reforms.
At the recent ASIS show in Las Vegas, among booths where vendors hocked everything from locks to tasers to bomb-sniffing dogs was a booth for a vendor selling Graffiti Cam. The portable, covert surveillance camera detects "graffiti-related motion," snaps pictures and e-mails them to the police as it sends text messages to their cell phones that say, essentially, "Hey, get down here." All the while, it collects TV-quality video on a tamper-resistant, encrypted memory card.
At only US$5,000 per camera, Graffiti Cam seems like a home run. It arrives at a time when public surveillance has gained tacit, creeping acceptance and when graffiti has become a $12 billion migraine for cities and towns--a kind of aerosol spam that they desperately want to scotch because it's bad for business. Social scientists call this the broken windows theory: Vandalism leads people to sense a place is unsafe and broken down, so they leave, which in turn makes the place actually become unsafe and broken down. Reality follows perception.