Tootfinder

Investigation: the US government allowed and even helped US companies sell tech used for China's surveillance across five GOP and Democratic administrations (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/chinese-sur

US government helps Silicon Valley firms sell surveillance technology to China
Even while warning about national security and human rights abuse, the U.S. government across five Republican and Democratic administrations has repeatedly allowed and even actively helped American firms to sell technology to Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, an Associated Press investigation has found. And time after time, despite bipartisan attempts, Congress has turned a blind eye to loopholes that allow China to work around its own rules, such as cloud services, third-p…

Microsoft will no longer allow Israel to use its cloud services to enable its mass surveillance of occupied Palestinians – "the first known case of a US technology company withdrawing services provided to the Israeli military since the beginning of its war on Gaza"

Microsoft has terminated the Israeli military’s access to technology it used to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected millions of Palestinian civilian phone calls made each day in Gaza and the West Bank
https://www.

Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its technology in mass surveillance of Palestinians | Israel | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/25/microsoft-blocks-israels-use-of-its-technology-in-mass-s…

Sources: Microsoft terminated Israel's Unit 8200 access to Azure, after an investigation found the tech was used for mass surveillance in Gaza and West Bank (The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep

Peter Williams, the former general manager at defense contractor L3Harris,
has pleaded guilty to selling surveillance technology to a Russian broker that buys “cyber tools,”
the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed Wednesday. 
“The material, stolen over a three-year period from the U.S. defense contractor where he worked,
was comprised of national-security focused software that included at least eight sensitive and protected cyber-exploit components,”
read the D…

Former L3Harris Trenchant boss pleads guilty to selling zero-day exploits to Russian broker | TechCrunch
Prosecutors confirmed Peter Williams, the former Trenchant boss, sold eight exploits to a Russian buyer. TechCrunch exclusively reported that the Trenchant division was investigating a leak of its hacking tools, after another employee was accused of involvement.

This is a spectacular way to get folks to see the impact of the #surveillance state. Great job #MassiveAttack!
#privacy

Massive Attack Turns Concert Into Facial Recognition Surveillance Experiment
Massive Attack used live facial recognition technology on concertgoers, turning surveillance into provocative art that sparked debate about privacy.

https://apnews.com/article/chinese-surveillance-silicon-valley-uyghurs-tech-xinjiang-8e000601dadb6aea230f18170ed54e88
“Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built …

How Silicon Valley enabled China's digital police state
An AP investigation reveals that U.S. technology companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known. Firms including IBM, Dell, and Cisco sold billions in technology to Chinese police and government agencies, despite repeated warnings that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities. Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a b…

During their latest tour stop, Massive Attack shocked fans by integrating facial recognition into the show itself. Live video feeds captured audience faces, processing them through recognition software and projecting the results as part of the visual experience. https://www.

Massive Attack Turns Concert Into Facial Recognition Surveillance Experiment
Massive Attack used live facial recognition technology on concertgoers, turning surveillance into provocative art that sparked debate about privacy.

ICE amps up its surveillance powers, targeting immigrants and antifa (Eva Dou/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/17/ice-surveillance-immigrants-antifa/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251017/p11#a251017p11

Across China, tens of thousands of people tagged as troublemakers are trapped in a digital cage,
barred from leaving their province and sometimes even their homes
by the world’s largest digital surveillance apparatus.
Most of this technology came from companies in a country that has long claimed to support freedoms worldwide -- the United States.
⚠️ Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state,…

How Silicon Valley enabled China's digital police state
An AP investigation reveals that U.S. technology companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known. Firms including IBM, Dell, and Cisco sold billions in technology to Chinese police and government agencies, despite repeated warnings that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities. Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a b…

So, apparently Peter Thiel, who is obsessed with the antichrist, had never pondered how to respond if someone notices that he's behaving like one, or at least enabling one. Not exactly my idea of resilient thinker.
“You’re an investor in AI,” Douthat says. “You’re deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare and so on. And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and us…

It Kind of Seems Like Peter Thiel Is Losing It
He's spent the past month delivering four high-octane lectures in San Francisco's downtown waterfront on the antichrist.

The UK has ramped up the use of facial recognition, AI, and internet regulation to address crime and other issues, stoking concerns of surveillance overreach (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/t…

Has Britain Gone Too Far With Its Digital Controls?
British authorities have ramped up the use of facial recognition, artificial intelligence and internet regulation to address crime and other issues, stoking concerns of surveillance overreach.

License plate reader company Flock launches new product that detects human voices https://therecord.media/flock-surveillance-technology-gunshot-voice-detection

TinyFish, which develops AI-powered web agents that automate complex online tasks like dynamic price surveillance, raised a $47M Series A led by ICONIQ Capital (Krystal Hu/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/ai-agent-startup…

CattleSense - A Multisensory Approach to Optimize Cattle Well-Being
Srijesh Pillai, M. I. Jawid Nazir
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12617 https://arxiv.org/pd…

CattleSense - A Multisensory Approach to Optimize Cattle Well-Being
CattleSense is an innovative application of Internet of Things (IoT) technology for the comprehensive monitoring and management of cattle well-being. This research paper outlines the design and implementation of a sophisticated system using a Raspberry Pi Module 4B, RFID Card Reader, Electret Arduino Microphone Module, DHT11 Sensor, Arduino UNO, Neo-6M GPS Sensor, and Heartbeat Sensor. The system aims to provide real-time surveillance of the environment in which Cows are present and individual …

Millisecond-Response Tracking and Gazing System for UAVs: A Domestic Solution Based on "Phytium Cambricon"
Yuchen Zhu, Longxiang Yin, Kai Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04043

Millisecond-Response Tracking and Gazing System for UAVs: A Domestic Solution Based on "Phytium + Cambricon"
In the frontier research and application of current video surveillance technology, traditional camera systems exhibit significant limitations of response delay exceeding 200 ms in dynamic scenarios due to the insufficient deep feature extraction capability of automatic recognition algorithms and the efficiency bottleneck of computing architectures, failing to meet the real-time requirements in complex scenes. To address this issue, this study proposes a heterogeneous computing architecture base…

Full-Dimensional Beamforming for Multi-User MIMO-OFDM ISAC for Low-Altitude UAV with Zero Sensing Resource Allocation
Zhiwen Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06428 https://

Full-Dimensional Beamforming for Multi-User MIMO-OFDM ISAC for Low-Altitude UAV with Zero Sensing Resource Allocation
Low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to play an important role for low-altitude economy with a wide range of applications like precise agriculture, aerial delivery and surveillance. Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a key technology to enable the large-scale deployment and routine usage of UAVs by providing both communication and sensing services efficiently. For UAV ISAC systems, as UAV often acts as both a communication user equipment (UE) and a sensing targe…

VisAug: Facilitating Speech-Rich Web Video Navigation and Engagement with Auto-Generated Visual Augmentations
Baoquan Zhao, Xiaofan Ma, Qianshi Pang, Ruomei Wang, Fan Zhou, Shujin Lin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03410

VisAug: Facilitating Speech-Rich Web Video Navigation and Engagement with Auto-Generated Visual Augmentations
The widespread adoption of digital technology has ushered in a new era of digital transformation across all aspects of our lives. Online learning, social, and work activities, such as distance education, videoconferencing, interviews, and talks, have led to a dramatic increase in speech-rich video content. In contrast to other video types, such as surveillance footage, which typically contain abundant visual cues, speech-rich videos convey most of their meaningful information through the audio …