fuNctioN cReeP

Smart Bullets

2012-05-26T04:45:00.000-07:00

(ieee)
A team of engineers at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, is completing a testable prototype of the world’s first laser-guided bullet. Like a “mini-me” of smart bombs, this patented technology has some of the same computerized control and guidance features found on proven Gulf War weaponry, such as the Paveway series of laser-guided bombs.  

An infrared laser illuminates a target, which the bullet’s optical sensors follow. An onboard tracking chip calculates the course corrections, carried out by four actuator-controlled fins on the bullet’s body. The end result, says Larry Shipers, manager of system technologies at Sandia, is a bullet that could improve its shooter’s marksmanship by 98 percent, at distances between 1 and 2 kilometers.  

Shipers says the technology has already cleared a hurdle that experts had said couldn’t be overcome: the survival of the battery and chip, despite their being fired out of a .50-caliber rifle. Launch tests found that the munition’s innards did indeed stand up to the crushing 120 000 g-force acceleration and 344.7 megapascals (50 000 pounds per square inch) of pressure as the bullet comes hurtling out of the barrel. The next step is to find a commercial partner that can turn the ideas now being bench-tested into a field-ready bullet.  

“We believe we can get to a full-up prototype using primarily existing technology,” says Shipers. 
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Students Will Be Tracked With RFID Chips

2012-05-25T19:02:00.001-07:00

(mysanantonio)
Northside Independent School District plans to track students next year on two of its campuses using technology implanted in their student identification cards in a trial that could eventually include all 112 of its schools and all of its nearly 100,000 students.

District officials said the Radio Frequency Identification System (RFID) tags would improve safety by allowing them to locate students — and count them more accurately at the beginning of the school day to help offset cuts in state funding, which is partly based on attendance.

Northside, the largest school district in Bexar County, plans to modify the ID cards next year for all students attending John Jay High School, Anson Jones Middle School and all special education students who ride district buses. That will add up to about 6,290 students.

The school board unanimously approved the program late Tuesday but, in a rarity for Northside trustees, they hotly debated it first, with some questioning it on privacy grounds.

State officials and national school safety experts said the technology was introduced in the past decade but has not been widely adopted. Northside's deputy superintendent of administration, Brian Woods, who will take over as superintendent in July, defended the use of RFID chips at Tuesday's meeting, comparing it to security cameras. He stressed that the program is only a pilot and not permanent.

“We want to harness the power of (the) technology to make schools safer, know where our students are all the time in a school, and increase revenues,” district spokesman Pascual Gonzalez said. “Parents expect that we always know where their children are, and this technology will help us do that.”

Chip readers on campuses and on school buses can detect a student's location but can't track them once they leave school property. Only authorized administrative officials will have access to the information, Gonzalez said.

“This way we can see if a student is at the nurse's office or elsewhere on campus, when they normally are counted for attendance in first period,” he said...
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Biometrics to Track Problem Drinkers

2012-05-25T16:40:00.001-07:00

(thirdfactor)
Australia’s Northern Territory Department of Justice has installed biometric readers in 14 police watch houses to understand how often problem drinkers habitually get taken into custody, reports IT News.

The department contracted with Unisys to design and install its Integrated Justice Identification Module, which has been rolled out in stages since last July. Police officers use the system to capture fingerprints and photographs of repeat offenders.

The system stores the data and helps police identify when offenders have prior incidences of drunken misconduct that could land them on the Territory’s banned drinking registry...
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Watchdogs Ring Alarm on Biometric Info

2012-05-25T16:35:00.002-07:00

(courthousenews)
The government's growing database of DNA and other identifying information is raising concerns from privacy and immigration advocates who want greater accountability about law enforcement's collection of biometric data, according to a new report.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Immigration Policy Center on Wednesday released their 23-page report, "From Fingerprints to DNA: Biometric Data Collection in U.S. Immigrant Communities."

The report, written by Electronic Frontier staff attorney Jennifer Lynch, raises concerns about the growing government database of biometric data collected from immigrants and other groups.

Homeland Security takes 300,000 fingerprints from noncitizens who cross the border every day, and regularly collects fingerprints and other data from people who are applying for immigration benefits, the report says.

Besides fingerprints, biometrics are typically collected through DNA samples, fingerprints, iris scans, and photographs.

State and local law enforcement also collect this information, and the FBI has started working with several states to collect face-recognition-ready photos of suspects who have been arrested and booked, the report says.

"Once these federal biometrics systems are fully deployed, and once each of their approximately 100+ million records also includes photographs, it may become trivially easy to find and track people within the United States," the report states.

The groups are also concerned that collection tools "are getting smaller, more advanced, and less obtrusive, increasing their use for non-invasive though known, as well as unobtrusive, collection purposes."

"Increasingly, devices are portable, transmit data wirelessly, and are designed to allow collection, verification, and identification 'in the field,'" the report says.

Problems with biometrics collection are not limited to government agencies, the groups say, pointing to Facebook's face-recognition service that allows users to find friends online.

"It is likely the government will try to find a way to take advantage of Facebook's face recognition service for each of these purposes soon," according to the report...
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Biometric Fail: Irises Change As We Age

2012-05-25T16:28:00.002-07:00

(nature)
Identifying people by scanning the irises of their eyes may not be as reliable as some governments and the public might think. That’s according to new research suggesting that irises, rather than being stable over a lifetime, are susceptible to ageing effects that steadily change their appearance over time.

With iris recognition now being used at border control in countries such as the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, this has huge implications, says Kevin Bowyer, a professor of computer science at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. At the very least, it could cause delays if people have to be scanned again. At worst, it implies that people might increasingly be able to evade detection when moving between countries.

Bowyer and his colleague Samuel Fenker, also at Notre Dame, used state-of-the-art, commercial iris-matching software to measure differences in the software's performance when comparing more than 20,000 different images of 644 irises, taken between 2008 and 2011. The authors compared the quality of a match between two images of the same iris that were recorded roughly a month apart, to pairs of images taken one, two or three years apart. They found that the rate at which the system failed to match two images of the same iris — known as the false non-match rate — increased by 153% over the three years...
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Kenyans Divided Over Surveillance Camera Plans

2012-05-25T04:17:00.003-07:00

(voanews)
Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga says the country has received funding from China to install surveillance cameras in an effort to fight terrorism in Kenyan cities. East Africa Correspondent Gabe Joselow spoke to the citizens of Nairobi to hear their views on the matter.

Odinga told Kenya's parliament Wednesday the government will soon be installing the closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras across the country, starting with the capital Nairobi.

"We are going to start the installation almost immediately," said Odinga. "And this is going to spread to other cities, Mombasa is next, then Kisumu, and other cities, Mr. Speaker."

He said Kenya received a $100-million grant from China for the project, and that the goal is to stop terrorism and improve security.

On the streets of Nairobi, Kenyan citizens had mixed reactions about the project...
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‘Barcode Everyone at Birth’

2012-05-24T18:22:00.001-07:00

(bbc)
Science fiction writer Elizabeth Moon argues that everyone should be given a barcode at birth.

“If I were empress of the Universe I would insist on every individual having a unique ID permanently attached - a barcode if you will; an implanted chip to provide an easy, fast inexpensive way to identify individuals.

It would be imprinted on everyone at birth. Point the scanner at someone and there it is.

Having such a unique barcode would have many advantages. In war soldiers could easily differentiate legitimate targets in a population from non combatants.

This could prevent mistakes in identity, mistakes that result in the deaths of innocent bystanders. Weapons systems would record the code of the use, identifying how fired which shot and leading to more accountability in the field.

Anonymity would be impossible as would mistaken identity making it easier to place responsibility accurately, not only in war but also in non-combat situations far from the war.”
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The Cons of a Biometric Cashless Society

2012-05-24T02:52:00.001-07:00

(moneycrashers)
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to predict how a cashless financial system would work on a large scale. Consumers may expose themselves to unnecessary inconvenience and complications, which are more likely in the early stages of any new technology.

1. Hackers
Google swears that the Google Wallet system is more secure than cash and credit cards, but it did recently have to do a temporary shutdown of a feature that allows users to load prepaid card information onto smartphones for spending. The reason for the shutdown was due to a security vulnerability that was exposed by a Zvelo Labs researcher at a technology convention.

To demonstrate, the researcher showed how easy it is to use software to crack someone’s PIN and access their virtual wallet once you have their phone in your possession. This means that if you want the convenience of Google Wallet, you’d better not lose your phone. Forget about questioning the security of the network Google Wallet is using – the phones themselves don’t appear to have reliable encryption capabilities.

This is only one example. Unfortunately, it is likely that there are other would-be thieves who are working on similar hacks in anticipation of a cashless, cardless future.

2. Failure Rates
Another potential problem is the failure rate of biometric ID systems. These systems may be convenient, but they are far from perfect. In fact, if you research “failure rate of biometric data systems” via a search engine or academic database, you will find some disheartening information.

For example, according to a test by the National Physical Laboratory’s Centre for Mathematics and Scientific Computing in the UK, the failure to enroll rate of the fingerprint biometric system is 1%. This means some people might not even be able to enroll in a biometric system using their fingerprints. Glitches such as this cast a doubt on whether biometrics are as reliable as their sales and marketing pitches make them out to be.

To many, 1% seems like a small number and not worth worrying about. However, let’s imagine that there are 100 million people wanting to use a biometric system to safeguard their digital wallets. If the failure to enroll rate is 1%, 1 million people would not be able to even use the system – that’s pretty significant...
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Sock Puppet War: US Military Using Fake Online Personas

2012-05-23T19:09:00.000-07:00

(infowars)
The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an “online persona management service” that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.

The project has been likened by web experts to China’s attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.

The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as “sock puppets” – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same...
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Cops Want to Use Armed Drones Against American Citizens

2012-05-23T18:32:00.002-07:00

(infowars)
First we were bombarded with the news that 30,000 drones would be spying on us domestically and within weeks the agenda has already moved on to arming the drones with non-lethal weapons.

CBS DC reports that the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Texas “is considering using rubber bullets and tear gas on its drone.”

“It’s simply not appropriate to use any of force, lethal or non-lethal, on a drone,” responded Catherine Crump, staff attorney for the ACLU.

As we reported last year, although the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office initially claimed the drone would be used for surveillance only, the ShadowHawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicle had previously been used against suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and East Africa, and has the ability to tase suspects from above as well as carrying 12-gauge shotguns and grenade launchers.

This is a frightening new advance in the government’s war on the American people and a shocking indication of how the apparatus of the war on terror has been focused internally.
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FBI Quietly Forms Massive Internet Surveillance Network

2012-05-23T03:52:00.001-07:00

(cnet)
The FBI has recently formed a secretive surveillance unit with an ambitious goal: to invent technology that will let police more readily eavesdrop on Internet and wireless communications.

The establishment of the Quantico, Va.-based unit, which is also staffed by agents from the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency, is a response to technological developments that FBI officials believe outpace law enforcement's ability to listen in on private communications.

While the FBI has been tight-lipped about the creation of its Domestic Communications Assistance Center, or DCAC -- it declined to respond to requests made two days ago about who's running it, for instance -- CNET has pieced together information about its operations through interviews and a review of internal government documents.

DCAC's mandate is broad, covering everything from trying to intercept and decode Skype conversations to building custom wiretap hardware or analyzing the gigabytes of data that a wireless provider or social network might turn over in response to a court order. It's also designed to serve as a kind of surveillance help desk for state, local, and other federal police...
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Clubbers Boycott Bars With Facial Recognition App

2012-05-23T03:46:00.000-07:00

(todayonline)
Clubbers in San Francisco are staying away from bars using a new app that scans faces of patrons and reveal their age and genders.

The app, SceneTap, provides real-time updates on the crowd-size, average age and male-to-female mix ratio to users so they can decide if it is to their liking.

The app's relies on biometrics to identify genders and age, said The Herald Sun. A camera at the door takes the patron's picture and the software will map features to a grid. By measuring distances between features such as eyes, nose, and ears, then matching the results with a database of averages, it can guess the patron's age and gender.

App makers say they do not identify individuals or save personal information and, so, do not infringe on patron's privacy rights.

However civil rights experts say facial recognition technology has advanced to the point that having your picture taken potentially offers the same information as giving someone your fingerprints.

Computer programs can break down high resolution images with detail to identify distinctive features on individual faces. Those patterns, not so much the image themselves, can expose individuals to people who do not even know them. In theory, the program could match the photo to identifiable online images such as those found on Facebook, said a staff attorney with free-rights advocate Electronic Frontier Foundation Lee Tien.
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Is the Internet Hurting Children?

2012-05-22T02:06:00.000-07:00

(cnn)
Amid the buzz over the Facebook IPO, the ever-evolving theories about how Twitter is reshaping our communications and speculation about where the next social media-enabled protest or revolution will occur, there is an important question we've largely ignored. What are the real effects of all this on the huge segment of the population most affected by social media themselves: our children and our teens?

The explosive growth of social media, smartphones and digital devices is transforming our kids' lives, in school and at home. Research tells us that even the youngest of our children are migrating online, using tablets and smartphones, downloading apps. Consumer Reports reported last year that more than 7.5 million American kids under the age of 13 have joined Facebook, which technically requires users to be 13 years old to open an account. No one has any idea of what all of this media and technology use will mean for our kids as they grow up.

By the time they're 2 years old, more than 90% of all American children have an online history. At 5, more than 50% regularly interact with a computer or tablet device, and by 7 or 8, many kids regularly play video games. Teenagers text an average of 3,400 times a month. The fact is, by middle school, our kids today are spending more time with media than with their parents or teachers, and the challenges are vast: from the millions of young people who regret by high school what they've already posted about themselves online to the widely documented rise in cyberbullying to the hypersexualization of female characters in video games.

These challenges also include traditional media and the phenomenon of "ratings creep" in the movies that our kids consume. Movies today -- even G-rated ones -- contain significantly more sex and violence, on average, than movies with the same rating 10 or 20 years ago.

The impact of heavy media and technology use on kids' social, emotional and cognitive development is only beginning to be studied, and the emergent results are serious. While the research is still in its early stages, it suggests that the Internet may actually be changing how our brains work. Too much hypertext and multimedia content has been linked in some kids to limited attention span, lower comprehension, poor focus, greater risk for depression and diminished long-term memory.

Our new world of digital immersion and multitasking has affected virtually everything from our thought processes and work habits to our capacity for linear thinking and how we feel about ourselves, our friends and even strangers. And it has all happened virtually overnight...
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Facial Detection Startup Changes Privacy Policy After Friday Launch

2012-05-21T00:43:00.001-07:00

(arstechnica)
As the Oakland A’s were set to take on the Giants in the adjacent baseball stadium, few in the Polo Grounds bar seemed aware that another event was taking place—the launch party of the controversial social geo-location app, SceneTap.

The Chicago-based startup debuted in the city by the Bay Friday evening after it caused a bit of a stir locally during the week. This is despite the fact that SceneTap has operated previously in several other cities around the country largely without a hitch. Several San Francisco bars that originally agreed to partner with SceneTap said that they have pulled out, largely due to negative media attention and potential privacy concerns.

The app, using facial detection and video cameras, plots bar activity on a Google Map, with pushpins revealing data like: “Crowd: >70% full | Women: 52% | Men: 48%.”

SceneTap representatives have stressed to multiple media outlets (including Ars) that the company is not storing images. The only stored data are historical trends of male and female ratios and estimates of customer ages. The company says that once it has accumulated such data over time, it will make it available to bars as an analytical tool to evaluate bar traffic.

However, CEO Cole Harper spoke with two reporters from Ars at the launch (Cyrus Farivar and Matt Braga). Ars pointed out that not storing images was not the same as agreeing not to retain any of the facial data, and that’s what many privacy advocates were concerned about. Harper said he would consider making a change to the company’s privacy policy.

By the following day, Saturday, Ars received an e-mail alerting us to this modification: “No facial mapping metrics, measurements, or other data used to predict demographics are stored...”
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Hotel Key Cards to be Replaced With Biometrics

2012-05-20T23:18:00.001-07:00

(hoteliermiddleeast)
CADD Emirates has announced it is to start to replace its key card systems with new biometric scanners, which will scan guests’ fingerprints.

The new system will be ready to be rolled out within around two months, said Jimmy Joseph, business manager for hospitality in MENA and India for CADD Emirates.

Joseph said: “Hotels want something different to stand out, and this will be perfect. We are just finishing testing the new technology – we already have the systems in place, this will just be an update of the technology.”

He said that the system will be able to remember guest preferences from hotel-to-hotel in locations across the globe, with information saved against their fingerprints.

“The new technology probably won’t be used hotel-wide, but it will mainly be used for exclusive club members,” he added.
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Korean Surveillance School Trains Citizen Snoops

2012-05-20T02:05:00.001-07:00

(voanews)
Law-breakers in South Korea beware. Citizens trained to videotape illegal activity are on the loose and making extra income by selling the tapes to the police.

Ji Soo-hyun leads a double life. Three-months ago, the housewife began a career catching lawbreakers red handed. Ji, 54, says her specialty is going undercover at private tutoring schools.

"I pretend that I am going to enroll my kids in the school. I ask the faculty about extra services. There are a lot of illegal activities in these schools, like staying open too late and charging additional fees. These are the types of things I record," Ji noted.

When Ji is on her mission, she uses a small, concealed camera to record video.

A cameraman is among the students of the Seoul paparazzi school - the same place that taught Ji how to secretly film illegal activity.

Academy director Moon Seong-ok also helps students find buyers for their secret footage.

"The students want to make money. I contact them with police agencies, local governments, health agencies and education authorities who pay them," Moon explained.

Moon claims citizen paparazzi can earn between $20 and $30,000 a year. But some observers say the government should not be paying neighbors to spy on neighbors.

"When it comes to citizen paparazzi, the government is outsourcing responsibility to civilians and everyone knows it is a big problem. However, people don't really see it as an important issue," said Chun Sang-chin, a sociologist at Seoul's Sogang University.

Chun says that is because people worry that if they complain, it will seem like they have something to hide...
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The Death of Civil Society

2012-05-20T01:58:00.002-07:00

(theage)
Total surveillance is just another nail in the coffin of civil society.

TWO years ago, the London Olympic Committee to smiles all round, unveiled the 2012 Games official mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville - cartoonish aliens, each with one eye in the middle of the head.

The committee couldn't have been more chuffed, but pride turned to dismay once the public had a chance to react, pointing out en masse that the duo did indeed symbolise London, but only because the creature resembled the city's most ubiquitous presence, the street CCTV, the beige, rectangular cameras bolted to every street corner, every wall.

The committee had got it right, of course. For most Londoners, the Olympics will be experienced as little more than a series of security crackdowns and prohibitions - on assembly, on free movement, even on public transport use. Advertisement: Story continues below

The enormous security presence will include licensing of foreign security agencies to deploy operatives and force during the Games fortnight, the promulgation of a host of new laws banning protests anywhere near the stadiums and, most recently, the attempt to introduce legislation to allow GCHQ - the real British spy agency, hidden behind the more visible MI5 and MI6 - to monitor the sender, receiver, date and time of all phonecalls and emails made in Britain, without a warrant.

Supporters of this measure insisted that it was essential for the Olympics. Yet even though protest has now delayed the introduction of the measures until well after the Games, incredibly, they are still going ahead. The crackdown rolls on automatically.

Nor is the process confined to Britain. In the US, a new comprehensive security bill, the NDAA Act, authorises a whole new range of powers beyond the Patriot Act, including the imprisonment without trial of US citizens. There's random drug-testing of civil servants (Florida), making it illegal to debate whether Armenia suffered a genocide (France), a two-month jail term for some offensive remarks on Twitter (Britain), and on and on.

These initiatives have become so many, self-generating and interconnected that anyone wanting to oppose them has to recognise that some stage of resisting them is over, lost. Something has gone, and it is worth trying to work out what it was and what has replaced it.

What has departed is usually known as liberal society, but it goes deeper than the principles of one political ideology. What has gone is what one might call ''citizen-society'', a society based on a set of beliefs about public life - that speech should be free unless it contains direct menace, for example. But it also involved a host of more particular practices. That of reciprocal recognition, for example - that if a police officer can see you as you go about your law-abiding life, you should be able to see her/him, rather than being spied on. For nearly 200 years in the West, we have in general been on a trajectory towards a more comprehensive citizen-society. Why has it started to reverse with such energy?

The short answer is what for any other matter would be called a long answer - the long answer would take the whole newspaper.

Left and liberal movements in the modern era made it impossible for the state to clamp down for long. But these faltered in the 1970s, and a new type of liberalism, so-called neoliberalism, took over, in which liberty resided in the exchange of goods rather than ideas. Citizens became consumers.

Society became the market. Collective dissent atomised and was treated as criminal, and the most cost-effective solution was to apply technologies of surveillance and control. Sections of the left contributed the idea of behavioural reshaping, from ''offensive speech'' to ''nudge'' theory, dealing a further blow to social citizenship.

Then came 9/11, and it became possible to connect social control to national defence. Real terrorist threats mingled with wildly exaggerated ones.

Total surveillance was offered not merely as the means but the symbol of social wellbeing. An event such as the Olympics becomes little more than a ritual of security and population management, with sport as a pretext. Believing, with Mrs Thatcher, that there is ''no such thing'' as society, we have nowhere to go but technology.

Wenlock, the cute CCTV mascot, becomes a mordant symbol of love, as stern a guarantor of safety as was, in time past, a trade union banner or a crucifix...
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Facebook Hit With $15B Class Action Lawsuit

2012-05-19T00:32:00.002-07:00

(pcworld)
A class action lawsuit has been filed against Facebook seeking $15 billion in damages, or $10,000 per member, for violating the privacy of its members, according to the complaint.

The action filed in federal district court in California combines 21 cases filed across the United States and alleges the social network violated its members' privacy rights by tracking them even after they logged out of their Facebook accounts.

Facebook's Andrew Noyes, manager of public policy communications told PCWorld in a short statement: "We believe this complaint is without merit and we will fight it vigorously."

The lawsuit was filed as Facebook launched an Initial Public Offering (IPO) of stock expected to raise some $16 billion for the company, which has a market capitalization of some $100 billion.

“This is not just a damages action, but a groundbreaking digital-privacy rights case that could have wide and significant legal and business implications," Bloomberg news was told in an email statement by one of the attorneys in the case, David Straite, a partner with the U.S. branch of Stewarts Law. Stewarts is the largest litigator in the United Kindgom and just opened offices in the United States last month.

According to the lawsuit, Facebook violated the U.S. Wiretap Act by tracking its members movement on the Web through "like" buttons embedded on millions of web pages throughout the Internet.

The law bars “interception and disclosure of wire, oral or electronic communications" and provides fines of $100 a day, up to $10,000, for every day the law is violated. If the maximum fine were imposed on Facebook members could receive $10,000 - which is highly unlikely...
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UK Surveillance Program Will Expose Private Lives

2012-05-19T00:28:00.001-07:00

(foxnews)
British officials have given their word: "We won't read your emails."

But experts say the government's proposed new surveillance program will gather so much data that spooks won't have to read your messages to guess what you're up to.

The U.K. Home Office stresses it won't be reading the content of every Britons' communications, saying the data it seeks "is NOT the content of any communication." It is, however, looking for information about who's sending the message and to whom, where it's sent from and other details, including a message's length and its format.

The proposal, unveiled last week as part of the government's annual legislative program, is just a draft bill, so it could be modified or scrapped. But if passed in its current form, it would put a huge amount of personal data at the government's disposal, which it could use to deduce a startling amount about Britons' private lives — from sleep patterns to driving habits or even infidelity.

"We're really entering a whole new phase of analysis based on the data that we can collect," said Gerald Kane, an information systems expert at Boston College. "There is quite a lot you can learn."

The ocean of information is hard to fathom. Britons generate 4 billion hours of voice calls and 130 billion text messages annually, according to industry figures. In 2008, the BBC put the annual number of U.K.-linked emails at around 1 trillion.

Then there are instant messaging services run by companies such as BlackBerry, Internet telephone services such as Skype, chat rooms, and in-game services like those used by World of Warcraft.

Communications service providers, who would log all that back-and-forth, believe the government's program would force them to process petabytes (1 quadrillion bytes) of information every day. It's a mind-boggling amount of data, on the scale of every book, movie and piece of music ever released.

So even without opening emails, how much can British spooks learn about who's sending them?
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Surveillance State Mascot For The 2012 Olympics

2012-05-18T00:48:00.002-07:00

(forbes)
Olympic mascots are often controversial. Usually this is because they are weird blobby cartoon characters with goofy names that seem to have been dreamed up by creators who mainlined Mountain Dew Code Red while watching 24 straight hours of Pokemon. The official mascot for the 2012 Olympics, set in London, has that going for it but is also controversial for an entirely different reason. London, the premiere panoptic city was one of the first to blanket itself with CCTV cameras; its heavy security and surveillance cordon is nicknamed the Ring of Steel. London decided to make its surveillance yen a dominant feature of its otherwise goofy mascots. “Wenlock” and “Mandeville” both have a huge single eye made out of a camera lens so that they can “record everything.”
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Supreme Court to Rule on Tasering Pregnant Women

2012-05-17T02:09:00.000-07:00

(theroot)
Next week the U.S. Supreme Court will be meeting to decide whether to hear an appeal from three Seattle police officers on the future of "a useful pain technique," commonly known as the use of a Taser.

You may recall the case of Malaika Brooks, a woman in the third trimester of her pregnancy, who had Seattle police use a stun gun on her while she was driving her 11-year-old son to school. Brooks was stopped for a moving violation and agreed to accept a ticket but refused to sign it, thinking that it would be an admission of guilt.

Failure to sign a ticket for a moving violation is a crime in Washington, so the police officers placed Brooks under arrest. Brooks refused to get out of the car, telling police officers that she was pregnant and had to use the restroom. Because Brooks posed no immediate threat, the officers actually had time to discuss how to handle the situation.

These three geniuses came up with the idea of applying a Taser to Brooks' leg, arm and finally her neck, at which point she collapsed.

Brooks, who was convicted of refusing to sign the ticket, sued the officers whose use of the stun gun left her with intense pain and permanent scars. The officers won a split decision in October in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The majority believed that the officers used excessive force but could not be sued because the law was unclear at the time of the incident.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski said that Brooks had been "defiant" and "deaf to reason," which caused the incident to occur, and that the officers deserved praise and commendations for their actions. Although the officers won the case, the court informed them that "some future use of Tasers would cross a constitutional line and amount to excessive force." The officers appealed the case to the Supreme Court to "clear their names" and preserve their right to "a useful pain technique."

So these police officers, who basically got away with using a Taser on a pregnant woman, now want the Supreme Court to tell them they were right after a circuit court already has? I don't know about you, but I would feel pretty ashamed and embarrassed if I had used a stun gun on a seven-months-pregnant woman over a refusal to sign a ticket.

Instead of hiding their heads in shame, they want to push this case to the Supreme Court, even after the city of Seattle has said there is no reason for the appeal and accepted liablility for injuries incurred during the Brooks incident. So who is being "defiant" and "deaf to reason"?
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Surveillance State Saps Freedom

2012-05-16T22:13:00.000-07:00

(baltimoresun)
The surveillance state expands. The Patriot Act allows our phones to be wiretapped. Our email and Internet transactions leave a trail for some to follow. The police can access our GPS location data through our smartphones without a warrant. Retailers record our purchasing habits with painstaking detail. Apparently, Target studies those purchases to determine when customers are pregnant — in the second trimester, no less — for specialized marketing purposes.

And now, there will be surveillance drones. Congress recently passed a bill ("The FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012") that opens the gates to widespread use of surveillance drones on U.S. soil. They will be used for law enforcement and border protection but also commercially — for real estate, entertainment and journalism, for example. One prominent drone showcased on the Web is a hummingbird drone. As the name suggests, it's tiny, quick and highly mobile. A popular video shows the hummingbird drone entering a building and flying down a corridor, transmitting everything it sees. It's chilling to imagine the possibilities — and the future.

The political problem with all this surveillance is obvious if we'd care to admit it. Authorities have so much more access to the details of our lives, information which, in the wrong hands, could do real harm. The only thing protecting us is the character of those in power who collect all this information — and swear they will do nothing objectionable with it.

Regarding the new National Defense Authorization Act, which sanctions the president's power to detain indefinitely or even assassinate U.S. citizens suspected of involvement in terrorist organizations, President Barack Obama tried to allay fears by saying that this administration will use discretion and judgment in exercising this power. What about subsequent administrations? The Founding Fathers were highly concerned to design a government impervious to corruption by character flaws of individual officeholders. The "war on terror" has steadily rendered us vulnerable to just that.

Perhaps most remarkable about the growing surveillance state is how we are largely unperturbed by it. Indeed, we jump headlong into the new technologies that allow us to be watched. The ACLU cries like a voice in the wilderness about civil rights threats, but we're too busy shopping online, sharing intimate personal details on Facebook, Tweeting our most mundane revelations...
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Indefinite Detention Struck Down by Judge

2012-05-16T19:14:00.002-07:00

(politico)
A judge on Wednesday struck down a portion of a law giving the government wide powers to regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists, saying it left journalists, scholars and political activists facing the prospect of indefinite detention for exercising First Amendment rights.

U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest in Manhattan said in a written ruling that a single page of the law has a “chilling impact on First Amendment rights.” She cited testimony by journalists that they feared their association with certain individuals overseas could result in their arrest because a provision of the law subjects to indefinite detention anyone who “substantially” or “directly” provides “support” to forces such as Al Qaeda or the Taliban. She said the wording was too vague and encouraged Congress to change it.

“An individual could run the risk of substantially supporting or directly supporting an associated force without even being aware that he or she was doing so,” the judge said.

She said the law also gave the government authority to move against individuals who engage in political speech with views that “may be extreme and unpopular as measured against views of an average individual.

“That, however, is precisely what the First Amendment protects,” Forrest wrote.

She called the fears of journalists in particular real and reasonable, citing testimony at a March hearing by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Christopher Hedges, who has interviewed Al Qaeda members, conversed with members of the Taliban during speaking engagements overseas and reported on 17 groups named on a list prepared by the State Department of known terrorist organizations. He testified that the law has led him to consider altering speeches where members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban might be present.

Hedges called Forrest’s ruling “a tremendous step forward for the restoration of due process and the rule of law.”

He said: “Ever since the law has come out, and because the law is so amorphous, the problem is you’re not sure what you can say, what you can do and what context you can have.”

Hedges was among seven individuals and one organization that challenged the law with a January lawsuit. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was signed into law in December, allowing for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism. Wednesday’s ruling does not affect another part of the law that enables the United States to indefinitely detain members of terrorist organizations, and the judge said the government has other legal authority it can use to detain those who support terrorists.

A message left Wednesday with a spokeswoman for government lawyers was not immediately returned.

Bruce Afran, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, called the ruling a “great victory for free speech.”

“She’s held that the government cannot subject people to indefinite imprisonment for engaging in speech, journalism or advocacy, regardless of how unpopular those ideas might be to some people,” he said.
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Drones Over Chicago

2012-05-16T15:08:00.001-07:00

Don't Let FBI Use CALEA to Track Americans!

2012-05-16T00:52:00.001-07:00

(chron)
UmeNow announced today that it wants the U.S. Senate to hold public hearings so the FBI can explain to the American public why CALEA should be amended to force social networks and other Internet-based companies to build side doors for the FBI to track people's private communication.

CNET has reported that the FBI is asking Internet-based companies not to oppose a proposal to require firms like Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google to build in backdoors for government surveillance. Currently, CALEA only applies to telecommunications providers, not Web companies. The Federal Communications Commission extended CALEA in 2004 to apply to broadband networks. If CALEA is amended per FBI request, it would require social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail to alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.

"The FBI has an obligation to honor and uphold our constitution. Law-enforcement by surveillance and tracking is technologically easy to do. Therein lies the great danger. Where does it stop? Should we track people inside their homes too with cameras and microphones? Undoubtedly many secrets reside behind residential closed doors," stated Evelyn Castillo-Bach, founder and CEO of UmeNow, a private social network that has banned all tracking.

The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) passed in 1994 mandated that phone companies install remote wiretapping ports so federal agents could monitor court-ordered wiretaps from their offices without attaching alligator clips to phone lines. A year after the CALEA passed, the FBI disclosed plans to require the phone companies to build into their infrastructure the capacity to simultaneously wiretap one percent of all phone calls in all major U.S. cities.

Philip Zimmerman, the creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), has stated, " It's hard to see how the government could even employ enough judges to sign enough wiretap orders to wiretap one percent of all our phone calls, much less hire enough federal agents to sit and listen to all that traffic in real time. The only plausible way of processing that amount of traffic is a massive Orwellian application of automated voice recognition technology to sift through it all, searching for interesting keywords or searching for a particular speaker's voice.... This plan sparked such outrage that it was defeated in Congress. But the mere fact that the FBI even asked for these broad powers is revealing of their agenda..."
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