Cloakers

As with just about everything else reported on here, it will likely come to be because, good honest people have nothing to fear.

It would be far nicer if the focus was only the positive, getting plus points for community involvement, never committing a violent crime, being employed in recent years…

How long before having too few friends on Facebook singles you out as a credit risk?

More than three dozen local governments across China are beginning to compile digital records of social and financial behavior to rate creditworthiness. A person can incur black marks for infractions such as fare cheating, jaywalking and violating family-planning rules. The effort echoes the dang’an, a system of dossiers the Communist party keeps on urban workers’ behavior.

In time, Beijing expects to draw on bigger, combined data pools, including a person’s internet activity, according to interviews with some architects of the system and a review of government documents. Algorithms would use a range of data to calculate a citizen’s rating, which would then be used to determine all manner of activities, such as who gets loans, or faster treatment at government offices or access to luxury hotels.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Judge Kendra Ausby ruled last week that the police should not have used a stingray to track Andrews without a search warrant, and she said prosecutors could not use any of the evidence found at the time of his arrest.

Baltimore police used a stingray to locate Kerron Andrews after he was charged with attempted murder in 2014. Prosecutors did not reveal that surveillance until a year later, and a judge ruled that using the phone tracker was an unconstitutional search. Some states require officers to get a search warrant, in part because the technology is so invasive. The Justice Department is considering whether to impose a similar rule on its agents.

While no clear decision has been made on Stingray technology, the USA Today article makes it clear that police are careful not to disclose the are using it. In other words, they want to get away with it for as long as they can.