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4.04.16: The Navy's Acoustic Warfare, Anti-Surveillance Camouflage, & Erasing Your Metadata

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Bombs on bats and dolphin mine sweepers.  First, we learn about the Navy’s long-running acoustic warfare program...mimicking mammals for weaponry.

Plus, we know where your cat lives. An artist uses all those adorable cat photos on the internet to pinpoint your location.

And, want to make sure your face isn’t recognized on surveillance cameras? All it takes is a little make-up and creativity. Today we’re looking at the digital footprints we leave all over the internet.

Listen to the full show. 

The Navy's Deadly Obsession With Whales

Joshua Horwitz is co-founder and publisher of Living Planet Books. His latest book is called War of the Whales and in it he reveals the unknown back story of the Navy’s acoustic warfare program – and the challenges to those practices in court. You can read an excerpt from the book on Outside Magazine.

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The Navy's Deadly Obsession With Whales

The World's Loneliest Whale

The complexities of replicating cetacean sonar have confounded humans for decades, but what happens when the species itself can’t replicate it? We’ll get the story of the world’s loneliest whale. Producers Craig Shank and George Drake Jr. brought us the story. 

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The World's Loneliest Whale

Anti-Surveillance Camouflage

The Atlantic editor Robinson Meyer tried out CV Dazzle, a proposed method for camouflaging individual faces from surveillance technology,  and found that while it might conceal you from cameras, it brings more attention to you from other humans. He wrote about the experience in the article “Anti-Surveillance Camouflage for Your Face.”

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Anti-Surveillance Camouflage

I Know Where Your Cat Lives

Everyone who has been on the internet has seen a picture of a cat. Or a GIF, or a video. It turns out those darlings of the internet can act as a Trojan Horse, capable of leaking personal information to the public.  Owen Mundy is an artist, designer, and programmer who investigates public space and its relationship to data. He is also an Assistant Professor of Art at Florida State University and his latest project is called“I Know Where Your Cat Lives.”

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I Know Where Your Cat Lives

How To Erase Metadata

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the metadata that’s attached to each of your photos is probably worth a few thousand more. You can remove this data, but do you really need to? We asked Sara Plourde, our Digital Producer and Designer at NHPR. She’s also a photographer, which makes her our resident expert on EXIF metadata.

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How To Erase Metadata

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