An article this week in The New York TimesPolice Use Surveillance Tool to Scan Social Media about Chicago company Geofeedia’s use of text, photos and videos from social media outlets such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to aid in law enforcement sparks controversy about law enforcement vs. civil liberties.
The use of location technology to solve crimes is nothing new. The use of social media content in a specific location is relatively new, and a potent resource for law enforcement.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing, or is it, like all new technologies, fraught with the potential for misuse as well as for the common good? It is sort of like the case of the hammer: you can use it to build a house, or to hit someone over the head with it.
We have covered Geofeedia quite extensively in GISCafe news, for use in retail, public safety, disaster response and law enforcement etc. Additional uses for Geofeedia services remain to be seen, but it may be extremely helpful for averting violence at certain events.
Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure acquired GISquadrat GmbH of Vienna, Austria. The acquisition is aimed at enhancing Hexagon’s geospatial, cloud and mobile solutions for governments and utility providers in Europe as well as bringing in more than 300 customers and thousands of users into the Hexagon fold.
The GoPro Karma quadcopter, a new micro UAS compatible with GoPro’s Hero4 Black+Silver, Hero5 Session and Hero5 Black camera offerings, is set to be released in October.
The GRACE Project for the Upper Peninsula (GRACE for UP) of Keweenaw County, Michigan is an amazing project-model for GIS-based education, with high school students using Esri GIS on two related real-world community projects in celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the National Parks Celebration.
The computer can show you how one senator has co-sponsored more bills of a Senate Majority Leader than any other senator over a period of years. It can also show you who has the best record of getting bills out of committee – information that took years in the making to obtain ten years ago. Today, with a dashboard platform called Quorum Analytics, a startup developed a year ago by two then-Harvard undergraduates, Alex Wirth and Jonathan Marks, customers can have this information at their fingertips for far less time and money.
About two weeks ago, Esri launched a collection of web maps that display NOAA forecast streamflow data for the continental U.S. NOAA’s recently released National Water Model. Data from the Model combined with the National Hydrography Dataset and fed by NOAA’s National Weather Service data, forecasts the flow of water along the 2.7 million stream segments in the continental U.S. in ArcGIS Online.
Network attacks of all kinds are on the rise, and it is imperative that organizations deploy a proactive, defense-in-depth strategy that addresses all layers of the network.
LGS Innovations recognizes the importance of network-level software integrity as a component of the larger network security ecosystem. With a dedication to the evolution of enterprise support born from extensive experience deploying secure, mission-critical switching solutions, LGS Innovations offers CodeGuardian™: a solution that hardens network devices at both the software source code and binary executable levels to enhance overall network security.
Through a partnership with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE), worldwide enterprise communications organization, the LGS CodeGuardian solution has been applied to ALE’s OmniSwitch family of products, to harden these network devices at both the software source code and binary executable levels within. David Lau, software engineer manager, Product, Solutions and Applications, said the company has a long heritage with Bell Labs. They recently purchased Axios, a traditional networking group.
Patrick T. Biltgen, Ph.D., Technical Director for Analytics, Vencore, Inc., talked with GISCafe Voice about their offerings. Vencore is a provider of information solutions, engineering and analytics for the U.S. Government with more than 40 years of experience working in the defense, civilian and intelligence communities. This summer Vencore, a company that spun off from Lockheed Martin about four years ago, was awarded a prime contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to deliver research in the area of enhanced cyber defense by developing a fully air-gapped detection system based on analysis of involuntary analog emissions. The four-year contract has a total ceiling value of $8.3M and will be performed as part of DARPA’s Leveraging the Analog Domain for Security (LADS) program.
GISCafe Voice: How are you able to decipher which information is potentially significant and which is not?
Open sources and social media provide a wealth of information, but each source must be vetted carefully. We have developed a structured method for evaluating the quality and reliability of open sources based on their social network, past reporting, credentials, and other factors. We also have highly trained, contextually aware analysts with years of experience studying conflict around the world. Many of our analysts have spent time overseas and are fluent in multiple languages.
This holistic perspective allows us to weigh and judge information instead of accepting open source data at face value. (more…)
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