U.S. falls behind in spy program name game

Screen Shot 2015-01-28 at 10.41.22 PMIn a piece on Motherboard, Matthew Braga writes of Canadian electronic surveillance program that tracks downloads on file sharing sites. Government snooping is a hot button topic, of course. But the best part of the piece is that some folks in the government spy business have a great knack for cooking up names. The file sharing surveillance program is called Levitation. There’s a similar British program called Mutant Broth. Another is called Atomic Banjo. There’s even one that sounds like an 80’s pop star: EonBlue.

The only American program mentioned in the article is called Rampart. A little stodgy next to the likes of Mutant Broth and EonBlue, don’t you think? The NSA has got to get real with its name game.

 

Drone wars (in court)

DroneImage

Via eschipul / Flickr.

The drone wars are just beginning. As this article on the Motherboard site details, the ability of cheap drones to conduct surveillance on citizens or their property increases with each year. And it’s not just governments and security services that are using drones, private citizens can buy quadrotor surveillance drones off the shelf right now. Some observers think this will lead to a great deal of wrangling in court as the legal issues of private surveillance and privacy get worked out.