On July 23, in a keynote address at the International Conference on Cyber Security at Fordham University, US Attorney General William Barr took up a banner that the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation have been waving for over a decade: the call for what former FBI director James Comey had referred to as a "golden key."

The pernicious growth of the surveillance state continues with the imminent rollout of live facial recognition cameras across Britain. That is why this week I signed a statement, alongside a cross-party group of MPs, experts and civil liberties campaigners, calling for a halt to facial recognition trials to give parliament the chance to debate it properly. There is a point at which crime-fighting measures cease to challenge the guilty and become a threat to the innocent. That point has come with unfettered facial recognition.

AdaptiveMobile Security have uncovered a new and previously undetected vulnerability and associated exploits, called Simjacker. This vulnerability is currently being actively exploited by a specific private company that works with governments to monitor inpiduals.

PAUL WALLICH usually walks his small son to the bus stop a stone’s throw from their Vermont home. But he can use a robot too: a football-sized drone, hovering several metres off the ground, follows a beacon stashed in the little boy’s school bag. A smartphone strapped to the device beams back video.

Our personal tech columnist asked security researchers what they could find out about him from just his cellphone number. Quite a lot, it turns out.

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users’ phone numbers were exposed in an open online database, the company confirmed Wednesday, in the latest example of Facebook’s past privacy lapses coming back to haunt its users.

Chinese authorities have begun deploying a new surveillance tool: “gait recognition” software that uses people’s body shapes and how they walk to identify them, even when their faces are hidden from cameras.