The latest Wikileaks data-dump reveals that the government now has the ability to grab video from far-flung surveillance cameras located in stores, casinos and other businesses around the country. It uses sophisticated facial recognition software to identify people of interest captured by the ubiquitous cameras numbering in the millions.
The software, Trapwire, is a significant breakthrough for the surveillance state. It was uncovered by security researcher Justin Ferguson. He delved into the massive pile of emails hacked from Stratfor – regarded as a shadow CIA – on Christmas of 2011. In response to Ferguson’s discovery and the Trapwire revelation, Wikileaks was recently hit with a large scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
“Trapwire would make something like disclosure of UFO contact or imminent failure of a major U.S. bank fairly boring news by comparison,” writes David Seaman.
“Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence,” RT reported last week. “It’s part of a program called TrapWire and it’s the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America’s intelligence community. The employee roster at Arbaxas reads like a who’s who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and the corporation’s ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented.”
TrapWire: The Truth Behind The Hype
New emails released by WikiLeaks indicate that TrapWire, a defense contractor owned and operated by ex-CIA operatives, plays a key and troubling role in coordinating government and corporate surveillance. Many activists have gotten carried away, however, vastly overstating the scope of TrapWire. More on storify.com