As crowds gather to watch the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, there will be giant eyes-in-the-sky watching them back. The white orbs floating hundreds of feet above four venues are balloons mounted with 13 high-resolution cameras. Each orb can cover an area of up to 25 square miles, giving their operators the ability to stream video in real-time, zoom in on specific pedestrians, and rewind through eight hours of recorded footage.
Logos Technologies, the company that builds the balloons, calls them “wide area persistent surveillance systems” due to their ability to continuously capture what happens in a city.
Initially created for military operations, the Olympics are the first time these aerial systems have been used at a sporting event. But they are only one of many technologies in the advanced arsenal Rio has acquired in order to host this mega-event.
Source: fusion.net
It’d Be Crazy Easy for Brazil to Block the Web Right Now:
AS THE OLYMPICS unfold in Brazil this week, the digital rights group Access Now started a petition to make sure the government there doesn’t turn off the Internet.
But that’s not a thing Brazil could do, right? And even if it were possible, it wouldn’t, right?
Wrong. It could shut down the entire Internet, or just block certain sites, as it has done repeatedly.
Source: Wired
Communication access advocates worried about Brazil blocking internet access:
Brazil has gone to extreme measures to monitor the Olympics, employing the use of its Simera surveillance system, which uses a series of cameras attached to balloons to monitor events across the Rio metro.
“We can’t predict the likelihood of it happening, only that the conditions are especially ripe for a shutdown: widespread protests, new surveillance tech, and the recent shutdown of WhatsApp in a criminal investigation for the third time,” an Access Now employee told the Daily Dot, citing the most recent case of the encrypted messaging app being suspended in Brazil.
Tell Brazilian authorities to #KeepItOn by signing our petition here.
Source: dailydot.com
Right now, more than 30,000 journalists are traveling to Brazil to cover the Rio Olympics. This comes as a new report (in Portuguese) reveals that the telecom authority, ANATEL, is allowing the Brazilian military to shut down the internet during the course of the games. The permit grants the Brazilian Armed Forces – which are in charge of security during the Olympics – the ability to use equipment that, in addition to “jamming” illegal drones and potentially thwarting terrorist attacks, could shut off all or parts of mobile internet.
Tell Brazilian authorities to keep the internet on during the Olympic Games!
Source: act.accessnow.org
Traveling to Brazil for the 2016 Rio Olympics? Take five minutes to protect your digital security – tips here.
Source: accessnow.org