Mediaboss Marketing

The National Security Agency can gather the data of US citizens without a warrant - as long as it gathers this data by mistake, a court has ruled. However, this suits the agency just fine, whistleblower William Binney told RT.

The NSA is permitted to gather data on US citizens abroad, or foreign connected Americans at home. The dragnet surveillance operation necessary to gather this information also sucks up data on millions of Americans with no foreign contacts, a process critics say is unconstitutional.

On Wednesday, the 2nd Court of Appeals in New York declared this incidental collection of information permissible. The NSA has maintained that it is incapable of separating properly and improperly gathered data, but former NSA Technical Director William Binney told RT that this is simply untrue.

Theyve been lying to the courts all along, Binney said. Theyve had the capability to sort that stuff out. Its just that they dont want to.

This gives them power over everyone, the ability to look into political opponents like they did with President Trump, he continued.

While the court ruling gives the NSA free rein to suck up data on Americans phone and internet communications, it did not authorize the US other intelligence and law enforcement agencies to dig through this data. However, according to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court ruling issued last year, the FBI accessed this data trove some 3.1 million times in 2017.

Its agents did so without proper warrants, and on persons unrelated to ongoing criminal cases, as explicitly forbidden by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In at least one case, the FBI illegally accessed the data of a suspect before seeking a warrant to spy on them legally.

Wednesdays court ruling concerned Agron Hasbajrami, a US permanent resident who was arrested en route to Turkey in 2011. The government claimed that Hasbajrami was travelling to Pakistan to join a terrorist organization. Hasbajrami claims that the government illegally accessed NSA data to build its case against him.

The court did not issue a ruling on this data access, instead punting the decision back down to a lower court to examine the Fourth Amendment implications.

Hasbajramis case is rare, in that he was informed that the evidence against him was collected by the NSA. Defendants are usually kept in the dark when clandestine agencies do the investigating.

The CIA, the FBI, the DEA and other law enforcement people have access to that data to search for common crime within the United States, Binney said. And they use it against US citizens in criminal courts without telling anyone in the court, or anyone else in the court, lawyers included.

So theyre fundamentally violating the rights of thousands of US citizens every year...without any oversight whatsoever.

The existence of the NSAs mass surveillance program was revealed in 2013 by former agency contractor Edward Snowden. Though the agency has reportedly ended its phone spying program, the espionage charges against Snowden remain in place, and Snowden himself remains in Moscow, where he has been granted asylum.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

Follow this link:
NSA has been lying to the courts all along, says whistleblower, as judges give warrantless surveillance the thumbs-up - RT

Edward Snowden won't see any of the proceeds from his new memoir instead, the US government is entitled to seize the profits, a federal judge ruled Dec. 17, 2019.

Snowden's memoir, "Permanent Record," describes his work as a contractor for the National Security Administration and his 2013 decision to leak government secrets, including the fact that the NSA was secretly collecting citizens' phone records. Snowden has lived in Moscow since 2013, where he has been granted asylum.

The US sued Snowden on the day his memoir was published in September, alleging that he violated contracts with the NSA by writing about his work there without pre-clearance.

Judge Liam O'Grady made a summary judgement in favor of the US government on Dec. 17, 2019, rejecting requests from Snowden's lawyers to move the case forward into the discovery stage. O'Grady ruled that Snowden violated his contracts, both with the publication of the memoir and through other public speaking engagements in which he discussed his work for the NSA.

"Snowden admits that the speeches themselves purport to discuss intelligence-related activities," O'Grady wrote in his decision, adding that Snowden "breached the CIA and NSA Secrecy agreements."

In recent years, Snowden has maintained his criticisms of US surveillance while also turning his attention to big tech companies. In November, he decried the practice of aggregating personal data, arguing that Facebook, Google, and Amazon "are engaged in abuse."

This article originally appeared on Business Insider. Follow @BusinessInsider on Twitter.

Related Articles Around the Web

Read the original post:
Government can seize all profits from Edward Snowden's book - We Are The Mighty

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a computer system which learns from the experiences it encounters. It can adjust on its own to new inputs, allowing it to perform tasks in a way that is similar to what a human would do. How we have defined AI over the years has changed, as have the tasks weve had these machines complete.

As a term, artificial intelligence was defined in 1956. With increasing levels of data being processed, improved storage capabilities, and the development of advanced algorithms, AI can now mimic human reasoning. AI personal assistants, like Siri or Alexa, have been around for military purposes since 2003.

With these artificial intelligence pros and cons, it is important to think of this technology as a decision support system. It is not the type of AI from science-fiction stories which attempts to rule the world by dominating the human race.

1. Artificial intelligence completes routine tasks with ease.Many of the tasks that we complete every day are repetitive. That repetition helps us to get into a routine and positive work flow. It also takes up a lot of our time. With AI, the repetitive tasks can be automated, finely tuning the equipment to work for extended time periods to complete the work. That allows human workers to focus on the more creative elements of their job responsibilities.

2. Artificial intelligence can work indefinitely.Human workers are typically good for 8-10 hours of production every day. Artificial intelligence can continue operating for an indefinite time period. As long as there is a power resource available to it, and the equipment is properly cared for, AI machines do not experience the same dips in productivity that human workers experience when they get tired at the end of the day.

3. Artificial intelligence makes fewer errors.AI is important within certain fields and industries where accuracy or precision is the top priority. When there are no margins for error, these machines are able to breakdown complicated math constructs into practical actions faster, and with more accuracy, when compared to human workers.

4. Artificial intelligence helps us to explore.There are many places in our universe where it would be unsafe, if not impossible, for humans to see. AI makes it possible for us to learn more about these places, which furthers our species knowledge database. We can explore the deepest parts of the ocean because of AI. We can journey to inhospitable planets because of AI. We can even find new resources to consume because of this technology.

5. Artificial intelligence can be used by anyone.There are multiple ways that the average person can embrace the benefits of AI every day. With smart homes powered by AI, thermostat and energy regulation helps to cut the monthly utility bill. Augmented reality allows consumers to picture items in their own home without purchasing them first. When it is correctly applied, our perception of reality is enhanced, which creates a positive personal experience.

6. Artificial intelligence makes us become more productive.AI creates a new standard for productivity. It will also make each one of us more productive as well. If you are texting someone or using word processing software to write a report and a misspelled word is automatically corrected, then youve just experienced a time benefit because of AI. An artificial intelligence can sift through petabytes of information, which is something the human brain is just not designed to do.

7. Artificial intelligence could make us healthier.Every industry benefits from the presence and use of AI. We can use AI to establish healthier eating habits or to get more exercise. It can be used to diagnose certain diseases or recommends a treatment plan for something already diagnosed. In the future, AI might even assist physicians who are conducting a surgical procedure.

8. Artificial intelligence extends the human experience.With an AI helping each of us, we have the power to do more, be more, and explore more than ever before. In some ways, this evolutionary process could be our destiny. Some believe that computers and humanity are not separate, but instead a single, cognitive unit that already works together for the betterment of all. Through AI, people who are blind can now see. Those who are deaf can now hear. We become better because we have a greater capacity to do thins.

1. Artificial intelligence comes with a steep price tag.A new artificial intelligence is costly to build. Although the price is coming down, individual developments can still be as high as $300,000 for a basic AI. For small businesses operating on tight margins or low initial capital, it may be difficult to find the cash necessary to take advantage of the benefits which AI can bring. For larger companies, the cost of AI may be much higher, depending upon the scope of the project.

2. Artificial intelligence will reduce employment opportunities.There will be jobs gained because of AI. There will also be jobs lost because of it. Any job which features repetitive tasks as part of its duties is at-risk of being replaced by an artificial intelligence in the future. In 2017, Gartner predicted that 500,000 net jobs would be created because of AI. On the other end of the spectrum, up to 900,000 jobs could be lost because of it. Those figures are for jobs only within the United States.

3. Artificial intelligence will be tasked with its own decisions.One of the greatest threats we face with AI is its decision-making mechanism. An AI is only as intelligent and insightful as the individuals responsible for its initial programming. That means there could be a certain bias found within is mechanisms when it is time to make an important decision. In 2014, an active shooter situation caused people to call Uber to escape the area. Instead of recognizing the dangerous situation, the algorithm Uber used saw a spike in demand, so it decided to increase prices.

4. Artificial intelligence lacks creativity.We can program robots to perform creative tasks. Where we stall out in the evolution of AI is creating an intelligence which can be originally creative on its own. Our current AI matches the creativity of its creator. Because there is a lack of creativity, there tends to be a lack of empathy as well. That means the decision of an AI is based on what the best possible analytical solution happens to be, which may not always be the correct decision to make.

5. Artificial intelligence can lack improvement.An artificial intelligence may be able to change how it reacts in certain situations, much like a child stops touching a hot stove after being burned by it. What it does not do is alter its perceptions, responses, or reactions when there is a changing environment. There is an inability to distinguish specific bits of information observed beyond the data generated by that direct observation.

6. Artificial intelligence can be inaccurate.Machine translations have become an important tool in our quest to communicate with one another universally. The only problem with these translations is that they must be reviewed by humans because the words, not the intent of the words, is what machines translate. Without a review by a trained human translator, the information received from a machine translation may be inaccurate or insensitive, creating more problems instead of fewer with our overall communication.

7. Artificial intelligence changes the power structure of societies.Because AI offers the potential to change industries and the way we live in numerous ways, societies experience a power shift when it becomes the dominant force. Those who can create or control this technology are the ones who will be able to steer society toward their personal vision of how people should be. It also removes the humanity out of certain decisions, like the idea of having autonomous AI responsible for warfare without humans actually initiating the act of violence.

8. Artificial intelligence treats humanity as a commodity.When we look at the possible outcomes of AI on todays world, the debate is often about how many people benefit compared to how many people will not. The danger here is that people are treated as a commodity. Businesses are already doing this, looking at the commodity of automation through AI as a better investment than the commodity of human workers. If we begin to perceive ourselves as a commodity only, then AI will too, and the outcome of that decision could be unpredictable.

These artificial intelligence pros and cons show us that our world can benefit from its presence in a variety of ways. There are also many potential dangers which come with this technology. Jobs may be created, but jobs will be lost. Lives could be saved, but lives could also be lost. That is why the technologies behind AI must be made available to everyone. If only a few hold the power of AI, then the world could become a very different place in a short period of time.

More here:

16 Artificial Intelligence Pros and Cons Vittana.org

This is a list of all Artificial Intelligence ETFs traded in the USA which are currently tagged by ETF Database. Please note that the list may not contain newly issued ETFs. If youre looking for a more simplified way to browse and compare ETFs, you may want to visit our ETFdb Categories, which categorize every ETF in a single best fit category.

This page includes historical return information for all Artificial Intelligence ETFs listed on U.S. exchanges that are currently tracked by ETF Database.

The table below includes fund flow data for all U.S. listed Artificial Intelligence ETFs. Total fund flow is the capital inflow into an ETF minus the capital outflow from the ETF for a particular time period.

Fund Flows in millions of U.S. Dollars.

The following table includes expense data and other descriptive information for all Artificial Intelligence ETFs listed on U.S. exchanges that are currently tracked by ETF Database. In addition to expense ratio and issuer information, this table displays platforms that offer commission-free trading for certain ETFs.

Clicking on any of the links in the table below will provide additional descriptive and quantitative information on Artificial Intelligence ETFs.

The following table includes ESG Scores and other descriptive information for all Artificial Intelligence ETFs listed on U.S. exchanges that are currently tracked by ETF Database. Easily browse and evaluate ETFs by visiting our Responsible Investing themes section and find ETFs that map to various environmental, social and governance themes.

This page includes historical dividend information for all Artificial Intelligence listed on U.S. exchanges that are currently tracked by ETF Database. Note that certain ETFs may not make dividend payments, and as such some of the information below may not be meaningful.

The table below includes basic holdings data for all U.S. listed Artificial Intelligence ETFs that are currently tagged by ETF Database. The table below includes the number of holdings for each ETF and the percentage of assets that the top ten assets make up, if applicable. For more detailed holdings information for any ETF, click on the link in the right column.

The following table includes certain tax information for all Artificial Intelligence ETFs listed on U.S. exchanges that are currently tracked by ETF Database, including applicable short-term and long-term capital gains rates and the tax form on which gains or losses in each ETF will be reported.

This page contains certain technical information for all Artificial Intelligence ETFs that are listed on U.S. exchanges and tracked by ETF Database. Note that the table below only includes limited technical indicators; click on the View link in the far right column for each ETF to see an expanded display of the products technicals.

This page provides links to various analyses for all Artificial Intelligence ETFs that are listed on U.S. exchanges and tracked by ETF Database. The links in the table below will guide you to various analytical resources for the relevant ETF, including an X-ray of holdings, official fund fact sheet, or objective analyst report.

This page provides ETFdb Ratings for all Artificial Intelligence ETFs that are listed on U.S. exchanges and tracked by ETF Database. The ETFdb Ratings are transparent, quant-based evaluations of ETFs relative to other products in the same ETFdb.com Category. As such, it should be noted that this page may include ETFs from multiple ETFdb.com Categories.

See the article here:

Top 45 Artificial Intelligence ETFs - ETFdb.com

AI jobs are on the upswing, as are the capabilities of AI systems. The speed of deployments has also increased exponentially. It's now possible to train an image-processing algorithm in about a minute -- something that took hours just a couple of years ago.

These are among the key metrics of AI tracked in the latest release of theAI Index, an annual data update from Stanford University'sHuman-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institutepublished in partnership with McKinsey Global Institute. The index tracks AI growth across a range of metrics, from papers published to patents granted to employment numbers.

Here are some key measures extracted from the 290-page index:

AI conference attendance: One important metric is conference attendance, for starters. That's way up. Attendance at AI conferences continues to increase significantly. In 2019, the largest, NeurIPS, expects 13,500 attendees, up 41% over 2018 and over 800% relative to 2012. Even conferences such as AAAI and CVPR are seeing annual attendance growth around 30%.

AI jobs: Another key metric is the amount of AI-related jobs opening up. This is also on the upswing, the index shows. Looking at Indeed postings between 2015 and October 2019, the share of AI jobs in the US increased five-fold since 2010, with the fraction of total jobs rising from 0.26% of total jobs posted to 1.32% in October 2019. While this is still a small fraction of total jobs, it's worth mentioning that these are only technology-related positions working directly in AI development, and there are likely an increasingly large share of jobs being enhanced or re-ordered by AI.

Among AI technology positions, the leading category being job postings mentioning "machine learning" (58% of AI jobs), followed by artificial intelligence (24%), deep learning (9%), and natural language processing (8%). Deep learning is the fastest growing job category, growing 12-fold between 2015 and 2018. Artificial Intelligence grew by five-fold, machine learning grew by five-fold, machine learning by four-fold, and natural language processing two-fold.

Compute capacity: Moore's Law has gone into hyperdrive, the AI Index shows, with substantial progress in ramping up the computing capacity required to run AI, the index shows. Prior to 2012, AI results closely tracked Moore's Law, with compute doubling every two years. Post-2012, compute has been doubling every 3.4 months -- a mind-boggling net increase of 300,000x. By contrast, the typical two-year doubling period that characterized Moore's law previously would only yield a 7x increase, the index's authors point out.

Training time: The among of time it takes to train AI algorithms has accelerated dramatically -- it now can happen in almost 1/180th of the time it took just two years ago to train a large image classification system on a cloud infrastructure. Two years ago, it took three hours to train such a system, but by July 2019, that time shrunk to 88 seconds.

Commercial machine translation: One indicator of where AI hits the ground running is machine translation -- for example, English to Chinese. The number of commercially available systems with pre-trained models and public APIs has grown rapidly, the index notes, from eight in 2017 to over 24 in 2019. Increasingly, machine-translation systems provide a full range of customization options: pre-trained generic models, automatic domain adaptation to build models and better engines with their own data, and custom terminology support."

Computer vision: Another benchmark is accuracy of image recognition. The index tracked reporting through ImageNet, a public dataset of more than 14 million images created to address the issue of scarcity of training data in the field of computer vision. In the latest reporting, the accuracy of image recognition by systems has reached about 85%, up from about 62% in 2013.

Natural language processing: AI systems keep getting smarter, to the point they are surpassing low-level human responsiveness through natural language processing. As a result, there are also stronger standards for benchmarking AI implementations. GLUE, the General Language Understanding Evaluation benchmark, was only released in May 2018, intended to measure AI performance for text-processing capabilities. The threshold for submitted systems crossing non-expert human performance was crossed in June, 2019, the index notes. In fact, the performance of AI systems has been so dramatic that industry leaders had to release a higher-level benchmark, SuperGLUE, "so they could test performance after some systems surpassed human performance on GLUE."

More:

Artificial intelligence jobs on the rise, along with everything else AI - ZDNet