Nsa on Locodigital

Person of Interest: how the show predicted mass surveillance

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0300

In 2011, a TV series portrayed a secret AI called "the Machine" that analyzed cameras, phone calls, emails, and cellphone metadata from every American — in real time — to predict crimes and terrorist threats. The government knew. Nobody else did. In June 2013, Edward Snowden released documents proving that the NSA had been doing exactly that through the PRISM program. Fiction had a two-year head start.

What is Person of Interest

Person of Interest was created by Jonathan Nolan (Christopher Nolan's brother, co-writer of The Dark Knight and Interstellar) and aired on CBS from 2011 to 2016 — five seasons, 103 episodes. The premise: Harold Finch (Michael Emerson), an eccentric billionaire and computing genius, built "the Machine" for the U.S. government as a post-9/11 counterterrorism tool. The Machine watches everyone. Finch kept a backdoor: the "numbers" — ordinary people the AI flags as involved in imminent crimes, but whose stories are deemed "irrelevant" by national security. He recruits a former CIA operative, John Reese (Jim Caviezel), to intervene.

WannaCry: how an NSA exploit infected 200,000 PCs in 2017

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 10:00:00 -0300

On the morning of Friday 12 May 2017, hospital screens across the British NHS started showing the same red message: your files have been encrypted, send US$300 in bitcoin. Surgeries were cancelled, patients were redirected to other units, staff went back to pen and paper. Hours later, Telefónica in Madrid was telling employees over the internal PA system to shut their machines down immediately. In Brazil, the INSS and Itamaraty took systems offline as a precaution.

Edward Snowden: the NSA leak that redefined privacy

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 05:00:00 -0300

On 21 June 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, the man who thirty years later would put a government's mass surveillance on front pages around the world was born. Edward Snowden turns 43 today, and the leak that carries his name is still the obligatory reference whenever the subject is government surveillance, encryption and privacy on the internet.

From IT analyst to NSA contractor

Snowden was neither a hacker nor a secret agent in the classic sense. He passed briefly through the US Army, worked as a technical assistant at the CIA from 2006 and, in 2009, became a Dell contractor providing systems administration services to the NSA (National Security Agency) itself. In March 2013, on his own initiative, he requested a transfer to Booz Allen Hamilton, another of the agency's contractors, at a facility in Hawaii — precisely, as he later told the South China Morning Post, in order to gain access to more classified documents before leaking them.