Saturday, July 19, 2014: 5:00 pm (Manning): Government and private entities are working to shred privacy and warehouse personal, relationship, and communications data. Once unimaginable surveillance technologies are being perfected and implemented. The most intimate details of lives are routinely and unthinkingly surrendered to data-gatherers. Is it still possible to be an anonymous whistleblower? Is it still possible to be anonymous at all? Your physical location and activities for the past ten years are known and have been logged. If you attend a church or synagogue or mosque or a demonstration or visit an abortion clinic or a "known criminal activity location" or meet with a "targeted person" or a disliked political activist, it is routinely recorded. Your finances, sexual orientation, religion, politics, habits, hobbies, and information on your friends and family are gathered, indexed, and analyzed. Facial recognition, camera analytics, license plate readers, and advances in biometrics allow you to be de-anonymized and remotely surveilled 24/7/365 by machines. Forensic linguistics, browser and machine fingerprinting, and backdoors substantially eliminate the possibility of anonymous Internet activity. Thanks to "The Internet of Things," your thermostat and electric meter report when you arrive home and your garbage can reports when you throw out evidence to be collected by the few remaining human agents. "Predictive profiling" even knows what you will do and where you will go in the future, so the data collection bots can be waiting for you. Data collection now begins at birth. And no data gathered will ever be thrown away. And none of the data gathered belongs to you or will be under your control ever again. An internationally-known private investigator and longtime HOPE speaker, Steve Rambam will describe in frightening detail how the last shreds of everyone's anonymity are being ripped away. Real world examples will be used. Surprises can be expected.

(Three hours!)

Steve Rambam