“Many people are uncomfortable with the march of the surveillance state – but a Manchester band has used it to their advantage.

Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets. With an estimated 13 million CCTV cameras in Britain, suitable locations were not hard to come by.

They set up their equipment, drum kit and all, in eighty locations around Manchester – including on a bus – and proceeded to play to the cameras. Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organisations involved and asked for the footage under the Freedom of Information Act.”

(via The Telegraph)

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“I’m in the university town of Wageningen, about to have the least private lunch of my life, and a Dutchman is playing tricks with my mind. “Would you like coffee?” he says, all cryptically. “No, water will be fine,” I reply, because I’m not going to be manipulated. A bottle of water turns up with four beakers, all black but different shapes. The Dutchman is smirking, barely able to contain his excitement as he waits for my next move.

If I choose the tall one, it probably means I have issues with the size of my penis. If I choose the short, stubby one, it probably means the same. I choose the one closest to me. The Dutchman nods to himself. “What does all that mean?” I ask. “Well, you were on edge because I was smirking,” says the Dutchman, smirking at the fact that smirking was part of his test.

“And you were uncomfortable because all the beakers are black, which is the colour we associate with death. The different shapes should have no real significance they hold the same amount of water but subconsciously, you were making false assumptions about one holding more than the other. It was interesting.” At least it had nothing to do with my penis. Welcome to the Restaurant of the Future, a multi-million-pound experiment that could, and probably will, change the way we eat.”

(via Mind Control 101)

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“A pilot project in social networking, which involves wirelessly monitoring people in a closed environment, will commence in March, 2008 at the University of Washington’s computer science building. The RFID Ecosystem project will provide long-term, in-depth research of user-centered RFID systems in relation to fields such as society and technology. Volunteers will wear electronic tags on their clothing and belongings, enabling RFID readers to monitor their whereabouts. One of the main questions this research faces is whether or not the utility aspect of this monitoring system outweighs the participants’ potential loss of privacy, and how can this loss of privacy be minimized?”

(via The Future of Things)

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“A revised version of legislation intended to protect the privacy of individuals using RFID tags with “unique personal identifier numbers” passed the Washington State House of Representatives on Wednesday. House Bill (HB) 1031—intended to limit collection of personal information from an RFID tag without the tag holder’s knowledge or consent—passed with 69 to 27 votes. The bill is now headed for the State Senate and, if approved, to the office of Governor Christine Gregoire.

[…] The revised bill would make it a Class C felony to intentionally read the data encoded to an RFID tag in possession of a person without that individual’s knowledge and consent, for the purpose of fraud, identity theft or some other illegal or unapproved purpose—a process known as “skimming.” With this bill, skimming refers to capturing personal data about a tag’s holder, such as the details on a loyalty card, driver’s license or other identity card. It does not refer to capturing data from EPC RFID tags attached to products that do not hold the consumer’s data. Class C felony in Washington State has a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. If the bill is signed into law, it would be the first legislation on the state level to make skimming a felony, says Morris.”

(via RFID Journal)

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“Once a tagged item is associated with a particular individual, personally identifiable information can be obtained and then aggregated to develop a profile.” ~ U.S. Government Accountability Office report on RFID technology

A future full of traceable microchips is much closer than many would like to think. Already microchips are being found in computer printers, car tires, personal care products, clothing, library books and “contactless” payment cards. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, experts say.

[…] The Washington Post reports that this technology is already well developed and enables objects and people to be tagged and tracked wirelessly. Newer and potentially invasive uses are being patented, perfected and deployed daily to unsuspecting consumers. While the technology obviously presents a risk to privacy, many believe that these microchips are the way of the future. Like it or not, these potential tracking devices will soon be imbedded everywhere imaginable. Microchips with antennas will be hidden in virtually everything you buy, wear, drive and read, allowing retailers and law enforcement to track consumers wherever they go.”

(via The Daily Galaxy)

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“Senior British police officials are talking to the FBI about an international database to hunt for major criminals and terrorists. The US-initiated programme, “Server in the Sky”, would take cooperation between the police forces way beyond the current faxing of fingerprints across the Atlantic. Allies in the “war against terror” - the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand - have formed a working group, the International Information Consortium, to plan their strategy. Biometric measurements, irises or palm prints as well as fingerprints, and other personal information are likely to be exchanged across the network. One section will feature the world’s most wanted suspects. The database could hold details of millions of criminals and suspects.

The FBI is keen for the police forces of American allies to sign up to improve international security. The Home Office yesterday confirmed it was aware of Server in the Sky, as did the Metropolitan police. The plan will make groups anxious to safeguard personal privacy question how much access to UK databases is granted to foreign law enforcement agencies. There will also be concern over security, particularly after embarrassing data losses within the UK, and accuracy: in one case, an arrest for a terror offence by US investigators used what turned out to be misidentified fingerprint matches.”

(via The Guardian)

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And what about the wrongly accused? Putting all the “Big Brother”, conspiracy theories aside for a moment; they’ve discovered that implanting the VeriChip causes serious side effects. We don’t have any idea to what will come with long term use. So the act of implanting this in prisoners, is criminal in itself.

“Ministers are planning to implant “machine-readable” microchips under the skin of thousands of offenders as part of an expansion of the electronic tagging scheme that would create more space in British jails. Amid concerns about the security of existing tagging systems and prison overcrowding, the Ministry of Justice is investigating the use of satellite and radio-wave technology to monitor criminals. But, instead of being contained in bracelets worn around the ankle, the tiny chips would be surgically inserted under the skin of offenders in the community, to help enforce home curfews. The radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, as long as two grains of rice, are able to carry scanable personal information about individuals, including their identities, address and offending record.

The tags, labelled “spychips” by privacy campaigners, are already used around the world to keep track of dogs, cats, cattle and airport luggage, but there is no record of the technology being used to monitor offenders in the community. The chips are also being considered as a method of helping to keep order within prisons. A senior Ministry of Justice official last night confirmed that the department hoped to go even further, by extending the geographical range of the internal chips through a link-up with satellite-tracking similar to the system used to trace stolen vehicles. “All the options are on the table, and this is one we would like to pursue,” the source added.”

(via The Independent)

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The three judges who heard the arguments in October in the appeal of his decision seemed persuaded that a computer is just a container and deserves no special protection from searches at the border. The same information in hard-copy form, their questions suggested, would doubtless be subject to search.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., took that position in a 2005 decision. It upheld the conviction of John W. Ickes Jr., who crossed the Canadian border with a computer containing child pornography. A customs agent’s suspicions were raised, the court’s decision said, “after discovering a video camera containing a tape of a tennis match which focused excessively on a young ball boy.”

It is true that the government should have great leeway in searching physical objects at the border. But the law requires a little more — a “reasonable suspicion” — when the search is especially invasive, as when the human body is involved.

Searching a computer, said Jennifer M. Chacón, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, “is fairly intrusive.” Like searches of the body, she said, such “an invasive search should require reasonable suspicion.”

Full Story: New York Times.

(via The Agitator).

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Travelers at Sea-Tac and dozens of other major airports across America are being scrutinized by teams of TSA behavior-detection officers specially trained to discern the subtlest suspicious behaviors.

[…]

TSA officials will not reveal specific behaviors identified by the program–called SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Technique)–that are considered indicators of possible terrorist intent.

But a central task is to recognize microfacial expressions–a flash of feelings that in a fraction of a second reflects emotions such as fear, anger, surprise or contempt, said Carl Maccario, who helped start the program for TSA.

“In the SPOT program, we have a conversation with (passengers) and we ask them about their trip,” said Maccario from his office in Boston. “When someone lies or tries to be deceptive, … there are behavior cues that show it. … A brief flash of fear.”

Let me quote from George Orwell’s, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Part 1, Chapter 5):

He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

via America’s heroes at Daily Kos à la Making Light

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Klint already posted the surveillance state surveys. With the U.K. and the U.S. sadly sagging on the bottom of the list of Western nations, and the top three leading with only barely-adequate privacy laws, the Western world is in a bad way. Interestingly, Eastern European states are doing much better over the years. Perhaps it’s a cyclical thing, where we’ve taken for granted the freedoms afforded to us in the past. We’re not letting them slip away and those that had to fight for theirs more recently, such as Ukraine, are pushing their governments into responsible formats.

I’ve been meaning to post these others, but have been busy till now:

Dreams: Night School
A hundred years after Freud, one man may have figured out why we dream. You’ll never think the same way about nightmares again.
via Psychology Today

Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach
When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.
via the Washington Post

American book publishers lobbying to get rid of libraries
Of all the dangerous and dot-complex problems that American publishers face in the near future — economic downturns, competition for leisure time, piracy — perhaps the most explosive one could be libraries. Publishers and librarians are squaring off for a battle royal over the way electronic books and journals are lent out from libraries and over what constitutes fair use of written material.
Grossly oversimplified: Publishers want to charge people to read material; librarians want to give it away.
via the Washington Post

Map of Surveillance Societies Around the World
As you can see, even with Canada topping the list personal freedoms, we’re still only barely in the middle of the list of where we could be. And our Harper Government is only sucking at the teste of Bush, so we’ll slowly be adopting more crap soon. But if this is what it takes to wake people up again, so be it. People are lazy, stupid animals. Sadly.
via Richard Florida and the Creative Class Exchange

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This year’s report from Privacy International is pretty grim. Only one country, Greece, received an “adequate” rating. No country was better than “adequate.” Only one country, Slovenia, improved over last year - all others stayed the same or dropped. The United States dropped from the “systemic surveillance society” category to the “endemic surveillance society” category. Canada dropped far, from a rating higher than Greece to below “adequate.”

Full Story: Privacy International.

(via Wendy McElroy).

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This is downright creepy:

“A just-published Microsoft patent application for Monitoring Group Activities describes how a company or the government can determine if employees are not meeting their project deadlines through the use of detection components comprised of ‘one or more physiological or environmental sensors to detect at least one of heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement, facial movements, facial expressions, and blood pressure.’ Yikes.”

(via Techdirt)

(patent application for Monitoring Group Activities)

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“On Court TV:

This vérité action series follows Tiger Team ­ a group of elite professionals hired to infiltrate major business and corporate interests with the objective of exposing weaknesses in the world’s most sophisticated security systems, defeating criminals at their own game. Tiger Team is comprised of Security Audit Specialists Chris Nickerson, Luke McOmie and Ryan Jones who employ a variety of covert techniques ­ electronic, psychological and tactical — as they take on a new assignment in each episode.”

(via Schneier on Security)

(link to “Tiger Team” on Court TV Red)

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“In 2003, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signed a document called the Information Operation Roadmap which outlined, among other things, the Pentagon’s desire to dominate the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

From the Information Operation Roadmap:

“We Must Improve Network and Electro-Magnetic Attack Capability. To prevail in an information-centric fight, it is increasingly important that our forces dominate the electromagnetic spectrum with attack capabilities.” [emphasis mine] - 6

“Cover the full range of EW [Electronic Warfare] missions and capabilities, including navigation warfare, offensive counterspace, control of adversary radio frequency systems that provide location and identification of friend and foe, etc.” - 61

“Provide a future EW capability sufficient to provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, denying, degrading, disrupting, or destroying the full spectrum of globally emerging communication systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependant on the electromagnetic spectrum.” [emphasis mine] - 61

“DPG [Defense Planning Guidance] 04 tasked USD(AT&L) [Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics], in coordination with the CJCS [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and Services, to develop recommendations to transform and extend EW capabilities, … to detect, locate and attack the full spectrum of globally emerging telecommunications equipment, situation awareness sensors and weapons engagement technologies operating within the electromagnetic spectrum.” [emphasis mine] - 59″

(via Global Research)

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“Telecommunications giant AT&T expanded its portfolio of RFID offerings last week with a managed service for schools. The solution comprises AT&T’s cellular network, RFID asset tracking and a global positioning system (GPS) technology, and can be packaged in a variety of applications. These include helping schools track and manage their fleets of buses, track bus-riding students, automate attendance procedures and lunch payments, and track mobile computers and other assets within the school.

Created for educational institutions (kindergarten through grade 12), the service includes designing, deploying and managing the solutions. Depending on the school system’s needs, AT&T will help determine the most appropriate technologies, such as active WiFi-based tags for tracking equipment, or ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tags incorporated into student and faculty badges for automated attendance procedures, or for ensuring students safely get on and off buses.”

(via RFID Journal)

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“Animal world has provided mankind with locomotion over millennia. For example we have used horses and elephants for locomotion in wars and conducting commerce. Birds have been used for sending covert messages, and to detect gases in coal mines, a life-saving technique for coal miners. More recently, olfactory training of bees has been used to locate mines and weapons of mass destruction. The HI-MEMS program is aimed to develop technology that provides more control over insect locomotion, just as saddles and horseshoes are needed for horse locomotion control.

The HI-MEMS program is aimed at developing tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces by placing micro-mechanical systems inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis.”

(via DARPA)

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Great. Now we have to deal with movies being made from surveillance videos?

“Look, which has already won major kudos on the film festival circuit and will be in theaters this Friday, is sure to be a thought provoking and controversial film. It purports to be made entirely out of surveillance footage shot without the knowledge of the people involved.”

(via Alternet)

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Here we go…Write your Congressmen, people…

“A new intelligence institution to be inaugurated soon by the Bush administration will allow government spying agencies to conduct broad surveillance and reconnaissance inside the United States for the first time. Under a proposal being reviewed by Congress, a National Applications Office (NAO) will be established to coordinate how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and domestic law enforcement and rescue agencies use imagery and communications intelligence picked up by U.S. spy satellites. If the plan goes forward, the NAO will create the legal mechanism for an unprecedented degree of domestic intelligence gathering that would make the U.S. one of the world’s most closely monitored nations. Until now, domestic use of electronic intelligence from spy satellites was limited to scientific agencies with no responsibility for national security or law enforcement.”

(via CorpWatch)

(Congress.org)

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New project from rhizome.org

Torrent Raiders is a dynamic network visualization realized through the idioms and aesthetics of arcade-style video games. Driven in real-time by the activity of bit torrent swarms, Torrent Raiders takes place on the ad-hoc networks created by bit torrent users. Torrent Raiders playfully addresses issues of domestic surveillance and intellectual property by putting players in the role of a mercenary copyright enforcer, encouraging them to capture evidence against peers on torrents in order to collect bounties. Players assist in the distributed surveillance of these torrent swarms, sending information to a central server where it will be used to drive further visualizations of this information. As a dynamic visualization exploring privacy, piracy and surveillance, Torrent Raiders challenges Internet users, content pirates and government spooks to examine their allegiances and mistrust their computer connections.

Download from torrentraiders.com.

(Thanks Wes).

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“In 2004, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved a radiofrequency identification (RFID) device that is implanted under the skin of the upper arm of patients and that stores the patient’s medical identifier. A debate in this week’s PLoS Medicine discusses the pros and cons of patients getting fitted with such an RFID chip. When a scanner is passed over the RFID device, the identifier is displayed on the screen of an RFID reader. An authorized health professional can then use the identifier to access the patient’s clinical information, which is stored in a separate, secure database.

In the PLoS Medicine debate, Mark Levine, Chair of the Council of Ethical and Judicial Affairs at the American Medical Association (Chicago, IL, USA), argues that such devices have the potential “to make significant advances in the effectiveness, efficiency, and safety of medical care by improving patient identification, promoting patient safety, and expediting access to patients’ medical records.” Yet, as with all new technologies, he says, “their adoption must be tempered by attention to potential unintended consequences.” Ethical concerns regarding the use of RFID devices arise, he says, from issues pertaining to informed consent, the privacy and accessibility of stored information, and the purposes for which the transmitted data will be used. Because of the risks of unintended consequences, the implantation of RFID devices “merits a healthy dose of skepticism,” argue Ben Adida (Children’s Hospital Informatics Program, Boston, MA, USA) and colleagues. If such devices become widely deployed, say Adida and colleagues, they may provide an incentive for both well and ill-intentioned parties to set up readers for these “license plates for people.” A store owner, for example, might set up a reader to track frequent customers, linking the unique identifier to the customer record upon first purchase. Law enforcement might leverage RFID as a means of ubiquitous surveillance. At the very least, say the authors, the informed consent process must “transparently convey the significant societal side effects of RFID devices.”

via PLoS Journal

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As I went through airport security, these ideas went through my mind:

“We’ve opened up a new front on the war on terror. It’s an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it’s a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested — even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.”

The War on the Unexpected

via Schneier on Security

(see also More “War on the Unexpected”)

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Surveillance cameras rolling inside our local schools is nothing new, but what’s taking place inside Demarest’s public schools is truly cutting edge: a live feed from more than two dozen cameras with a direct connection to the police.

It’s an expensive, but effective tool that could be a sign of the times with an increase in school shootings over the years.

The system, which cost about $28,000, can even track movement in a crowded room.

WTF? “expensive, but effective”? Is this an editorial piece? And what increase in school shootings? Last I heard school shootings have been dropping since before Columbine.

Full Story: WCBSTV.

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Not that this is a surprise to anyone. Just a confirmation of the obvious. So all you Rads and various outsiders out there, take note! Soon they’ll be RFID-ing the used tissues in your garbage, thrown out after a raucous night of lovemaking. And don’t forget to pay for your groceries and gas by using your fingerprint. It’s fast, convenient and ’secure’! …sheesh.

via The Register

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So now that the Veri-Chip has been found to have side-effects, why not tag and track people before they’re born? The fact that “usually, two employees manually check the names to prevent a mistake from being made”, isn’t very comforting knowing how fallible we human beings are. Add the fact that RFID tags can be easily hacked, and you have quite a messed-up sci-fi scenario. Big Brother is watching you and your reproductive system.

” Overlake Reproductive Health located in Bellevue, Wash., has become the first reproductive-medicine center in the United States to deploy an RFID-based system for tracking human eggs, sperm and embryos. This system should help ensure that no identity mistakes are made during collection, storage and fertilization.”

RFID Journal

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The future of U.S. anti-terrorism technology could lie near the end of a Moscow subway line in a circular dungeon-like room with a single door and no windows. Here, at the Psychotechnology Research Institute, human subjects submit to experiments aimed at manipulating their subconscious minds.

Elena Rusalkina, the silver-haired woman who runs the institute, gestured to the center of the claustrophobic room, where what looked like a dentist’s chair sits in front of a glowing computer monitor. “We’ve had volunteers, a lot of them,” she said, the thick concrete walls muffling the noise from the college campus outside. “We worked out a program with (a psychiatric facility) to study criminals. There’s no way to falsify the results. There’s no subjectivism.”

Full Story: Wired.

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