surveillance Archives

the largest surveillance device at a sporting event

June 11, 2026 by usatoday24

He World Cup 2026 which begins tonight will be the largest soccer tournament in history: 48 teams will face each other in 104 matches, distributed in 16 venues in the United States, Canada and Mexico, and more than five million fans in the stands. It’s also going to be one of the most watched sporting events of all time. This is the security apparatus that is going to be deployed in the stadiums. A world cup under the magnifying glass. The event is held in a terrorist risk contextfueled by the conflict between the US and Iran. Of the more than 100 games, 78 are going to be held in eleven American cities, which places considerable strain on security resources at all points in the chain, from travel to the stadium itself. They count in Wired that the Trump administration may use this event to deploy an invasive surveillance system without appropriate safeguards. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), has issued a travel warning to attendees to the world cup, in which they specifically warn about “repression of freedom of expression and protest and increased surveillance.” Drones. Both drones and, above all, anti-drone systems will play a key role in the security of events. Stadiums will be no-fly zones, but there are other gathering places that may be targets for drone attacks. The company Fortem Technologies has once again been chosen (already participated in Qatar in 2022) to deploy its kinetic anti-drone technology at US headquarters. Contracts have also been signed with Sentrycs, which will contribute its non-disruptive anti-drone technologyand Axon, which will deploy a full stack of drones and counter-drones in Dallas. Facial recognition. It will be another of the great security systems used during the event, something that already happened during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where more than 15,000 cameras monitored the stadiums. In this edition, the stadiums of Boston, Miami and Atlanta, making up the facial recognition powered by AI to gain access to the premises and make payments, and there will also be facial recognition on Kansas City buses. Robot dogs. In addition to facial recognition in the stadiums themselves, Boston Dynamics robot dogs equipped with cameras will be deployed capable of detecting faces. These robots will be seen at the venues in Dallas, Texas and at the New Jersey stadium, where the final will be held, which has been classified as a “national special security event.” In Mexico, at the Monterrey stadium, they also plan reinforce security with four robot dogs. Command platforms. Lenovo is the official technology partner of FIFA and has announced that will be in charge of managing the command center in which they will monitor the movements of the crowd and manage the devices that each worker will carry. On the other hand, Booz Allen Hamilton will provide his Sit(x) platform of situational information in real time. What if it’s not temporary? In statements to WiredElectronic Frontier Foundation security analyst Matthew Guariglia warns of the risk of this technology being used “to restrict people’s civil liberties and the fact that surveillance infrastructure is precisely that: infrastructure.” That is to say, there is concern that all these supposedly temporary measures will end up being permanent. Additionally, there is concern that ICE performs during the games against the migrant population. The agency’s director has confirmed that ICE will be a key part of the security of the events, but They have not made clear what their role will be. The militarization of sport. As we said, in the previous edition of the World Cup in Qatar there was an enormous security deployment, but also took advantage of this context to reinforce its national security strategy, outsourcing part of that security to allied powers and using the tournament as a test bed for new military and police capabilities. They say in Wired that there is not much information about the companies behind many of the World Cup security contracts, but they are expected to end up in the hands of military industry companies such as Palantir, Anduril and Lockheed Martin. Organizations such as Privacy International fear that these events will be used to normalize mass surveillance tools. Image | Xataka with Gemini In Xataka | Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle: “Citizens will behave because we are recording and documenting everything that happens”

emotional surveillance by AI

May 7, 2026 by usatoday24

Companies have been monitoring their employees for a long time. First was the signing. Then the logging of keystrokes and mouse activity. And now a new generation of emotional monitoring software Analyze if the expression on your face while you work is positive enough. Is called “emotion AI” or affective computing. And it’s no longer science fiction. Why is it important. Time control and of activity on screen They were the first battles between companies and workers in the digital era and in the stage of remote work that triggered the pandemic. This is the nextand it goes much deeper: it is no longer about measuring how much you work, but rather quantifying how you feel while you do it. The context. Tools like MorphCast, HireVue or Slack integration called Aware They have been perfecting this type of analysis for years. Some scan video conferences in real time to detect levels of attention, emotion or positivity. Others process chat transcripts to infer the collective mood of a team. There are those that analyze the tone of voice of customer service agents call by call. MetLife, Burger King and McDonald’s They already use them or have at least tried them. The global market of emotion AI It has reached 3 billion dollars and forecasts suggest that it will triple before 2030. Yes, but. The scientific premise on which this entire industry is based has a problem: it is debatable. A good part of these systems are built on the theory of basic emotions of psychologist Paul Ekman, who postulates six universal emotions recognizable in the face of any person. This theory has been questioned by the academic community for some time. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett defend that facial gestures do not have an intrinsic emotional meaning, but rather a relational one. They depend on the context, the culture, the physiology of each person. Someone who frowns because they are concentrating may be labeled as angry. An employee who expresses sadness when talking to a patient may receive a penalty for lack of warmth. The LLM and visual recognition systems replicate the biases of the data with which they are trained: a 2018 study found that an emotional recognition AI consistently rated black NBA players as angrier than their white teammates, even when they smiled. Between the lines. There is a clear market logic behind all this. Writer Cory Doctorow theorized it: the most extractive technologies reach the most vulnerable workers first, become normalized, and then move up. Truck drivers first, police officers call center later… and office workers, now. The EU banned emotion AI in the workplace in your AI Lawexcept for medical or security purposes. It was the exception, not the rule. In the United States, The legislation gives employers a very wide margin to monitor virtually anything a worker does on company time, property or devices. And now what. The companies that sell these tools argue that humans are biased too, that a boss’s subjective impressions are just as fallible as an algorithm. It’s a good argument, but something changes when emotional monitoring is automated: it’s no longer a boss who senses that you’re low on Monday. It is a system that analyzes 100% of your interactions and records everything. In Xataka | The real impact of AI on the labor market in Spain already has its first figures: it is not good news Featured image | Xataka

“Citizen surveillance and autonomous weapons deserved more deliberation” OpenAI robotics director resigns

March 8, 2026 by usatoday24

A week ago we were just saying that “A dead king, a king“: Anthropic passage to pure ostracism after being considered a “risk to the supply chain” of the United States practically overlapped with the announcement of the US Defense Administration agreement with OpenAI in record time. Behind the scenes: the reasons for the no from the company led by Dario Amodei and the unknown of the terms of that agreement that installs ChatGPT on the Pentagon computers. A few days later, Caitlin Kalinowski says goodbye at his position at OpenAI, citing the military use of artificial intelligence as the reason. The resignation. Caitlin Kalinowski, head of the OpenAI robotics team since November 2024, announced her departure from the company a few hours ago in publications from X and from LinkedIn. He makes it clear that his decision is about principles and not people and expresses respect for Sam Altman and the team. In his brief statement there are two lines that, in his opinion, the company did not think about enough internally: The surveillance of American citizens without judicial supervision. Autonomous weapons capable of firing without human supervision. Tap to go to the post Context. The resignation occurs in the midst of Anthropic’s departure from the Pentagon (the transition will last six months), the entry of OpenAI and in the midst of a debate about how far AI companies should go in their collaboration with the US military establishment: Anthropic stood before the Pentagon drawing strict lines on domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. OpenAI reached an agreement with the Department of Defense to deploy its models on a classified government network in a move that has been interpreted as opportunistic. According to the company led by Altman, the agreement excludes domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons, but the damage to its reputation had already been done: thousands of people uninstalled ChatGPT by way of cancellation. Why it is important. The goodbye of Caitlin Kalinowski is the first public and nominative resignation from a senior position at OpenAI motivated by ethical disagreements over the military use of AI explicitly. And this sets a precedent in the industry insofar as it exposes the internal fracture in the most influential company in the sector, placing OpenAI in a delicate situation before those who use its tools, its staff and also before society. And finally, it makes more clear than ever the need to legislate on artificial intelligence and its civil and military uses. Maybe Europe is behind in the AI battlebut a long time ago he set about the arduous task of establish a regulatory framework. Which Kalinowski does not say. In the comments of her post on Kalinowski does not say it clearly, but when an agreement of this magnitude has already been signed and its CEO makes it publicthere is no room for much maneuver from within: resigning with a public statement like yours is one of the few pressure maneuvers left to exert. Consequences. For OpenAI, the pressure is growing and it faces more departures and more cancellations if it does not clearly show what its red lines are in a credible and verifiable way: the militarization of AI is something we are experiencing in real time. For the AI industry, it is more fuel on the fire of the self-regulation debate. And Anthropic gains reputation, although in the short term it has lost an important agreement and its new status may put its existence in check. In Xataka | The US has decided to shoot itself in the foot and destroy one of the best AI companies in the country In Xataka | Sam Altman says he’s terrified of a world where AI companies believe themselves to be more powerful than the government. It’s just what you’re building Cover | Caitlin Kalinowski

Facebook loads ‘Likes’ and comments on external websites. The surveillance tool par excellence is no longer necessary

November 11, 2025 by usatoday24

Meta announced this week that Starting in February 2026, the “like” and “comment” buttons will be removed of Facebook on external websites. The official explanation is so polite it almost hurts: its use “has naturally declined with the evolution of the digital landscape.” But that phrase hides two implicit admissions: The first is known: we barely leave the platforms anymore. The second, more subtle, is devastating: Meta no longer needs to follow us to know us. Let’s think about what that button really was. like external. It was not an innocent social accessory. It was distributed surveillance: Every time you gave like to an article about vintage guitars in a lost blog, Facebook took note: this guy likes guitar playing. Every comment on a recipe website, every interaction outside your garden, fed your profile. Meta built the perfect panopticon: millions of websites working for free as sensors, reporting your interests, your obsessions, your clicks. And in exchange, those websites received crumbs of viral traffic that It stopped coming a long time ago. But today, almost in 2026, that spy system is obsolete. Why track yourself on the Internet when you spend three hours a day on Instagram? Why deduce your tastes when Instagram knows which videos make you stay to watch them until the end, and which videos you send away after two seconds? AI has made extensive surveillance unnecessary. Now it is enough to observe you in its territory. It is more efficient, more precise and cheaper. He like external was Big Brother. AI is a confessor that listens to you voluntarily, interprets and codifies your tastes (the declared and the inferred) and with that it has more than enough to know who you really are, above who you say you are on social networks. And there is something else. These buttons not only gave data to Meta: they also gave certain power to external websites. An item with 50,000 likes Facebook had authority, reach, and negotiating capacity. It was validation. Small media could go viral, specialized blogs found audiences, there were cracks to slip through. Meta is closing those cracks. And not out of malice, but out of business logic: why fertilize a foreign ecosystem when you can focus all your attention—and all your money—on your own land? The “natural evolution of the digital landscape” that Meta mentions is real. Only it has not happened in a vacuum or in a foreign way: they were the ones who designed it, they were the ones who executed it and they are the ones who now certify it. First they locked us in there. Now they know us so well that they no longer need to look at what we do outside their domains. The button like He dies because he has already won everything he could win. And there is nothing left to watch beyond the walls. In Xataka | The new Ray-Bans from Meta will allow you to cross a line: seem present while you are completely absent Featured image | Mariia Shalabaieva

Behind police surveillance technologies there is a very lucrative business. A business that Amazon wants to conquer

October 3, 2025 by usatoday24

Artificial intelligence technologies have broken in such a way that, today they can be given endless uses. According to A FORBES investigationAmazon would be deploying an aggressive commercial strategy to position themselves in the market of the Police surveillance technologya segment valued at 11,000 million dollars, according to the medium. The company would not only be offering its own artificial surveillance and intelligence tools, but also act as an intermediary for a complete ecosystem of companies that operate on their cloud infrastructure AWS. What is happening. Electronic Correos obtained by Forbes through requests from public records reveal That the Amazon police and school security team, led, according to the media, by a former Washington state police officer, is actively contacting police departments throughout the US west coast. According to the investigation, the company would be promoting from weapons detection technologies to IA to massive surveillance analysis software, through tools to write automatically police reports. A whole Surveillance Catalog. According to They report From the middle, among the technologies that Amazon has been offering, there are registration monitoring systems of FLOCK Safety, Zeroyes weapons detection software, applications for real -time surveillance centers of companies such as C3 AI, or Veritone technology capable of identifying and tracking individuals in recordings of security cameras and social networks. Leo Technologies tools also appear that monitor and transcribe calls from practically “real -time” prisoners for AI analysis. The method of sale. As They assure From Forbes, emails show a particularly insistent commercial style. In one of them, a Amazon manager writes to the department of the San Diego County Sheriff on Lucidus Tech (company now owned by Flock). “It is one of the most amazing tools that I have seen for the forces of the order (…) I think that your prison intelligence group would lose your head,” you could read in the investigation. In another message to King County Police Chiefs, in Washington, it promotes a meeting to “talk about strategy on how to introduce Zeroeyes in your schools.” The research shows how Amazon even offered help to request public grants to finance these technologies. The concerns. Activists advocating privacy, such as Jay Stanley, of ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), express Your concern. “It is discouraging to see one of the largest and most powerful companies promoting authoritarian surveillance technology in this way,” he told Forbes. Amazon has had a long history of setbacks in terms of violating the privacy of users. From your employees listening and transcribing Echo device recordings to improve Alexa a The accusations towards Ring for not applying basic protections that enabled hackeos in their systems. Both cases recognized by the company itself. Amazon’s response. The company defend which is simply providing its public sector customers “tools to protect the rights of citizens and comply with applicable laws.” On subsidies, Amazon points out that it is not unusual to “educate” customers about the aid available for them. And now what. As assures The media, Amazon Web Services plans to attend the Conference of the International Police Chiefs Association in Denver in October, the most important police event of the year in the United States, where AI is the main theme. The lounge is a whole offer of surveillance technology, technology that is executed on Amazon servers. Cover image | Michał Jakubowski In Xataka | Amazon new do not compete against Google Home. Compete against indifference

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