Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

Court Challenges to NSA Surveillance: 2017 in Review One of the government’s most powerful surveillance tools is scheduled to sunset in less than three weeks, and, for months, EFF has fought multiple legislative attempts to either extend or expand the NSA’s spying powers—warning the public, Representatives, and Senators about circling bills that threaten Americans’ privacy. But the frenetic, deadline-pressure environment on Capitol Hill betrays the slow, years-long progress that EFF has made elsewhere: the courts. 2017 was a year for slow, procedural breakthroughs. Here is an update on the lawsuits that EFF and other organizations have against broad NSA surveillance powers. Jewel v. NSA EFF began 2017 with significant leverage in our signature lawsuit against NSA surveillance, Jewel v. NSA . The year prior, U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White in Oakland, California, ordered the U.S. government to comply with EFF’s “discovery” requests—which are inquiries for evidence when l...

Beating Back the Rise of Law Enforcement’s Digital Surveillance of Protestors: 2017 in Review In 2017, we’ve seen a dramatic rise in the number of high-profile cases where law enforcement has deployed digital surveillance techniques against political activists. From the arrest and prosecution of hundreds of January 20, 2017 Inauguration Day (J20) protestors to the systematic targeting, surveilling and infiltration of Water Protectors  in Standing Rock, North Dakota, and the Black Lives Matter Movement over social media, law enforcement and private security firms have taken advantage of the wealth of information available online to thwart activists’ credibility and efficacy.  While government surveillance and investigation of opposition groups may not be anything new , the tools and methods for conducting such surveillance and the sheer scope of information that can be captured about these groups is staggering. The magnitude of information now available in the digital ag...

Part 1 of this 4-part series introduced ways in which increasing digitization might improve plant operations. Here we examine how IIoT can improve the productivity of reactive, preventive, predictive and proactive maintenance.  Reactive maintenance, in which things aren’t fixed until they break, is probably the most widely applied maintenance strategy. According to ARC, this is especially true for non-critical assets in which the overall impact of failure is minimal. While reactive maintenance does not add costs in the short term, it can potentially contribute to higher lifetime costs, including the cost of diagnosing, fixing, testing, etc., as well as the cost of downtime during the operation. IIoT, however, can improve reactive maintenance by enabling a more efficient, more informed response. Some estimates show that field operators spend only 2.5 hours of a 10-hour shift on work that adds value to the business, while the rest is taken by looking for information — probably tra...