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A highly sophisticated surveillance system called TrapWire has been revealed

Published August 10, 2012 10:45PM (EDT)

Busy keeping track of Olympians’ names and faces? Well, it seems a scarily sophisticated surveillance system called TrapWire has been keeping tabs on us. Created by former CIA operatives at Abraxas, a company based in northern Virginia, the system continually collects data from designated points in U.S. cities and major landmarks, before digitally recording and encrypting it and sending it off to a top-secret database. As RT reports, TrapWire is “more accurate than modern facial recognition technology.”

The unsettling reveal occurred this week, as emails pertaining to TrapWire began surfacing online. WikiLeaks was set to publish some of the most sensitive messages – that is until AntiLeaks hackers barraged the site. As Ben Doernberg wrote on Storify, TrapWire appears to be an anti-terrorist move on behalf of law enforcement agencies, an effort to “connect the dots,” between apparently unrelated data.


By Salon Staff

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Cia Privacy Trapwire Wikileaks