Research into techniques of facial biometrics, carried out by scientists at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), has come up with a system that is able to recognize the facial “DNA” of every individual by determining his/her most noteworthy facial traits, with a of 95% rate of precision.

Recognition techniques based on facial features, known as facial biometrics, is usually based on the search for those traits which make one face different from another. The research carried out by this team, in contrast, approaches the issue from a slightly different point of view. “The difference between our work and the majority of the others that are found in this field is the idea of individualized models.”, explains one of the study’s authors, mathematician David Delgado Gomez from the UC3M Statistics Department. “Our objective”, he continued, “is to create a model for each person which highlights the most distinguishing features of each face, as a sort of facial “DNI”.

The researchers had this idea when they were imagining the situation of a crowded room where someone comes in asking for one of them. “Our way to describe a person is through some traits that the others don’t have, such as the tall woman with blue eyes, or the bald guy with a beard. We try to apply this idea to our algorithm.”, remarked Professor Delgado, who has been carrying out this research with Federico Sukno, Kaushik Pavani and Alejandro Frangi from the CISTIB Group of Universidad Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona, and Bjarne Ersboll and Jens Fagertun from the mathematical modelling group of Technical University of Denmark, which has recently published an article entitled “Similarity-based Fisherfaces”, with some of their research results appearing in the scientific journal Pattern Recognition Letters.

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James Slack - 28th October 2009

A Big Brother landmark has been passed with ten per cent of the population now stored on the Government’s DNA database.

In total, there are now an astonishing 5,532,847 individual profiles logged on the giant computer system - out of a population of 54million in England and Wales.

Around one million of those included on the system have never been convicted of any crime.

It will fuel the public backlash against the march towards a surveillance state, with polling released today showing eight out of ten voters are now fed-up with the increased use of surveillance powers.

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Noah Shachtman - October 19, 2009

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

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Mark Lerner - 25 September 2009

The Big Question - should government control the people or should the people control government?

Orwell’s prediction of a future big brother government came true. Whether acknowledged or not, Americans now live in a surveillance society.

Most of that American public falls into one of the categories the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) calls “potential threats;” environmentalists, animal lovers, anti-war protestors, pro-lifers, evangelical Christians, observant Jews, Constitutionalists, returning veterans, and third party candidate supporters are all “potential domestic terrorists.”

Just how far is the American public willing to let the government go in order to assure public safety? Do the people want the police on every block, all emails read by the government, phone calls overheard, or every financial transaction monitored? Do the people want sensors placed in cities that detect how much an individual perspires, in order to assess and monitor supposed guilt?

How about computer software programs that decide whether or not the way people walk or dress presents a threat to the government? In Britain citizens are captured on surveillance cameras an average of 300 times a day; does the American public want to be subjected to this level of scrutiny?

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The European Union is spending millions of pounds developing “Orwellian” technologies designed to scour the internet and CCTV images for “abnormal behaviour”.

Ian Johnston - 19 Sep 2009

A five-year research programme, called Project Indect, aims to develop computer programmes which act as “agents” to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers.

Its main objectives include the “automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence”.

Project Indect, which received nearly £10 million in funding from the European Union, involves the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and computer scientists at York University, in addition to colleagues in nine other European countries.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of human rights group Liberty, described the introduction of such mass surveillance techniques as a “sinister step” for any country, adding that it was “positively chilling” on a European scale.

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Surveillance is a gradual and incessant creep, the House of Lords warns. Unchecked, we march towards a mark where every detail about an individual is recorded and pored over by both the state and private sectors.

By then, though, it will be no use asking who is watching us – because everyone will be.

The Age | Aug 30, 2009

THE all-seeing eye was once seen as a divine force, surrounded by dazzling rays of light from on high. Its eyelid heavy but gaze unwavering, the eye was the protective stare of a supreme being watching over us from above.

Now, though, it simply watches, often from the shadows. Peering down from security cameras as we walk the city streets, buy bread at the corner store, fill the car with petrol, or catch a taxi or tram. Tracking us through our mobile phone or when driving through a tollway to Melbourne Airport, which last year trialled “virtual strip search” security scanners. Someone’s watching while we’re surfing online, sending an email, or updating our Facebook profile to paranoid. Melbourne once held pretensions of being the city that never sleeps. Now, at least, it is the city that never shuts its eyes.

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William N. Grigg - July 27, 2009

Salt Lake City’s Deseret News, as part of its continuing campaign against rationality, recently published a house editorial condemning civilian ownership of firearms.

Bobbing in the puddle of pathos created by the editorial staff’s lachrymosity can be found this lump of congealed hypocrisy: “[T]ough guys don’t pack firearms. Fearful guys do — people who see everyone around them as a threat and think the worst of faces they don’t recognize. Guns don’t showcase strength, they showcase weakness.”

There is the beginning of an important point here, but it’s one the people responsible for that editorial, in their ideologically induced foolishness, are too thick to recognize: If they are serious in their assessment that carrying firearms (particularly handguns) is symptomatic of socially dangerous insecurity on the part of those who carry them, then disarmament should begin with those most frequently found in public possession of those weapons — that is, the police.

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Cryptogon - June 22nd, 2009

What has happened is that bloggers have blown the support columns out from underneath traditional media and the people who run the show don’t like that.

The fact that some of us are able to survive by maintaining blogs must have come as an incredible shock to fat bastards in boardrooms across the land. That we are not “regulated” is unthinkable in the Soviet hive mind that governs the political economy of the United States.

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Joseph Cannon - June 20, 2009

After I wrote this diatribe against social networking tools, I decided to put matters to the test. More at less at random, I picked out the MySpace page of a young woman I’ve never met, who lives in another state. The goal: Find out everything I could about her, using the info on that page plus Google and some elementary-my-dear-Watson deduction. Every technique I used was quite legal.

Within about half an hour, I had this girl’s entire life. I had her real name, her many photos, her place of work, her life history, her parents, her family, her home address, a picture of her front porch (by way of Google Maps Street View), her favorite drink, her schooling, her religious views, her tastes in the arts, her ambitions, her complete itinerary for that day — and of course (since all of America’s daughters nowadays feel compelled to present like mandrills), her measurements, kinks and fellatio depth. But I didn’t get her telephone number, so don’t ask for it.

For half a century, people have fretted about governmental theft of our privacy. That may no longer be a worry. Why should Uncle Sam steal something we’re willing to give away?

Full story

Ezra Levant - April 28, 2009

In 1965 and 1966, the Canadian Jewish Congress helped organize the fledgling Canadian Nazi Party. That sounds crazy, but it’s true, and I wrote about it in Shakedown, my new book about Canada’s human rights commissions.

In a letter to the editor in the Citizen last week, the CJC’s current co-president, Rabbi Reuven Bulka, called my book’s description of the CJC’s role “fiction.” He said all the CJC did for the Nazis was buy them a bottle of rum.

It’s true that the CJC did buy drinks for Nazis in the 1960s. That’s pretty strange in itself, and I’d like to hear more of Rabbi Bulka’s thoughts on spending Jewish charitable donations that way. But the CJC did a lot more than that: they hired an ex-cop named John Garrity to go to work for the Canadian Nazi Party.

Full story (via Save The Males)

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See: Power Play : Friday, June 12 : Philippe Dufresne, CHRC and Ezra Levant, author of ‘Shakedown’

A new report by the CHRC delivered to parliament recommended improving on the Canada Human Rights Act to create a statutory definition of hate as it pertains to the Internet.

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Jennifer Lynch tries to bully CTV into cancelling my appearance on the news

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Opening Statement

I don’t answer to the state

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The European Union is stepping up efforts to build an enhanced pan-European system of security and surveillance which critics have described as “dangerously authoritarian”.

Bruno Waterfield - 10 Jun 2009

Civil liberties groups say the proposals would create an EU ID card register, internet surveillance systems, satellite surveillance, automated exit-entry border systems operated by machines reading biometrics and risk profiling systems.

Europe’s justice ministers will hold talks on the “domestic security policy” and surveillance network proposals, known in Brussels circles as the “Stockholm programme”, on July 15 with the aim of finishing work on the EU’s first ever internal security policy by the end of 2009.

Full story

F. William Engdahl - June 3, 2009

The French Government is developing secret plans to impose mandatory vaccination of the entire French population, allegedly against possible Swine Flu disease according to reports leaked in a French newspaper. The plan is without precedent and even defies recommended public health advice. Pharmaceutical giants benefit from the move, as the Swine Flu increases the trend towards the militarization of public health and use of needless population panic to advance the agenda.

According to a report in the May 30 edition of the French newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche, the Sarkozy government has authorized spending of an estimated €1 billion to buy vaccines allegedly to combat or protect against H1N1 Swine Flu virus. The only problem is that to date neither the WHO nor the US Government’s Center for Diseases Control (CDC) have succeeded to isolate, photograph with an electron microscope and chemically classify the H1N1 Influenza A virus. There is no scientifically published evidence that French virologists have done so either. To mandate drugs for a putative disease that has not even been characterized is dubious to say the least.

Even more bizarre is the admission by the US Government’s Food & Drug Administration, an agency responsible for health and safety of its citizens, that the ‘test’ is approved for premature release to test for H1N1 is not even a proven test. More to the point, there is no forensic evidence in any of the deaths reported to date that has been presented that proves scientifically that any single death being attributed to H1N1 Swine Flu virus was indeed caused by such a virus. European epidemiologists believe the deaths reported to date are ‘coincidental’ or what are called opportunistic infections.

Full story

Antifascist - May 26, 2009

A quintessential hallmark of an authoritarian regime, particularly one that operates within highly-militarized, though nominally democratic states such as ours, is the maintenance of a system of internal control; a seamless panopticon where dissent is equated with criminality and the rule of law derided as a luxury ill-afforded “during a time of war.”

In this context, the deployment of new offensive technologies which can wreck havoc on human populations deemed expendable by the state, are always couched in a defensive rhetoric by militarist aggressors and their apologists.

While the al-Qaeda brand may no longer elicit a compelling response in terms of mobilizing the population for new imperial adventures, novel threats–and panics–are required to marshal public support for the upward transfer of wealth into the corporate trough. Today, “cyber terror” functions as the “new Osama.”

And with Congress poised to pass the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, an Orwellian bill that would give the president the power to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any “critical” information network “in the interest of national security” of course, the spaces left for the free flow of information–and meaningful dissent–slowly contract.

Full story

Manipulation, propaganda, imagery & PR wizardry

by Andrew Hughes

After 8 years of the Bush-Cheney nightmare during which we saw the wanton destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, the cynical negation of centuries of Law designed to protect the most basic human rights and a foreign policy worthy of Genghis Khan, there came along the “Great Black Hope” in the persona of Barack Obama. The collective world consciousness turned uncritically to what was presented as a new era for peace, change and trust in Government.

Never before had one witnessed such an accomplished use of manipulation, propaganda, imagery and public relations wizardry to sell the public a man who was to take the baton from Bush and run with it in the race to destroy the economy, the rights of the people and help birth a nation totally controlled by those who have always lurked in the shadows of power. “Change” was promised and was delivered in the form of a deepening of the already Dystopic nightmare.

Promises were broken with no apology, the same creative legalese that infested the Bush administration, in the form of John Yoo and Alberto Gonzalez, was again used to deny justice to the inmates of Guantanamo, It was used to justify more torture, more destruction of the Constitution and more illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens.

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by Mrs Jane Birkby

I see echoes of Germany in the 1920/30s in our country today. The powerful multi-national corporations and banks hold sway, the public are dissatisfied with their Parliament, which has been run badly by the ineffective three in one main parties, who handed over most of it’s legislative power to the EU.

The situation is ripe for someone to gain complete power and control, using the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, and the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre, in conjunction with the terrorist legislation, to sweep away our democratic bodies, take power away from the people, and tyrannise the country using the surveillance apparatus already in operation.

We have brutal police units not afraid to harm to public, and another foreign military police unit (Ugendfor) waiting in Vincenza, Italy to ‘help’ our police in cases of civil unrest.

Full story