Michael Tennant - 14 March 2011

Americans concerned about exposure to potentially dangerous levels of radiation from the Transportation Security Administration’s full-body scanners just got another reason to worry: USA Today reports that on March 11 the TSA announced “that it would retest every full-body X-ray scanner that emits ionizing radiation — 247 machines at 38 airports — after maintenance records on some of the devices showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected.” The TSA, of course, insists that all the machines are safe and that the records indicating the high radiation levels are the result of recordkeeping errors by technicians. TSA spokesman Nicholas Kimball told USA Today that, for example, “the testing procedure calls for the technician to take 10 separate scans” for radiation levels, “add them up and then divide by 10 to take an average. They didn’t divide by 10.” In addition, says the paper, “even the highest readings listed on some of the records — the numbers that the TSA says were mistakes — appear to be many times less than what the agency says a person absorbs through one day of natural background radiation.”

The agency posted reports from 127 X-ray devices, including some used to scan checked luggage, on its website. “Of the reports posted, about a third showed some sort of error,” Kimball told USA Today. Even more alarmingly, of the reports from 40 backscatter (i.e., full-body) scanners, 19 had errors, including six that were described as “considerable.”

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Darlene Storm - March 3, 2011

Having previously looked at how biometric recognition is more than a fictional spy-thriller, we didn’t look at biometric technology used in the past which seems like something out of the future. These are some of those past biometrics, followed by a few new biometric recognition technologies being proposed for everything from securing your smartphone, replacing the ID in your wallet, and even required testing to prove paternity.

From WikiLeaks diplomat cables, we discovered that the State Department is more interested in collecting biometric data than was previously disclosed. A cable supposedly from Hillary Clinton told certain embassies in Africa to collect more biographical information like fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and iris scans for U.S. Intelligence. Besides asking for "detailed biometric information," the government asked for "e-mail listings; internet and intranet ‘handles’, internet e-mail addresses, web site identification-URLs; credit card account numbers; frequent flyer account numbers; work schedules, and other relevant biographical information." Other diplomatic cables asked other countries to pick up their spying effort by collecting biometric DNA identification as well as health, biographic, and assessment information on leaders.

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Nicholas West - February 27, 2011

A new level of invasive screening is scheduled for airports this summer: a portable DNA scanner to conduct on-site, real-time genetic testing.

This technology is being implemented under the cover of combating human trafficking, illegal immigration, and finding missing persons, but Richard Seldon of NetBio, creator of the scanners, clearly states that “DNA information has the potential to become part of the fabric of day-to-day life.” In an interview with Katie Drummond who broke this story for The Daily, Seldon envisions additional applications in emergency rooms, food safety tests, and law enforcement.

DNA collection is actually nothing new, as the Pentagon has admitted that it currently has a DNA database with 80,000 suspected foreign terrorists on it, and growing daily. However, this collection apparatus has been secretly in place for Americans as well. Lawsuits are pending from families who uncovered a secret program to collect DNA from babies and store it in a military database. However, that was a secret that had to be uncovered. The fact that DNA screening is being rolled out openly marks a new level of blatant tyranny in America.

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GLENN GREENWALD - August 9th, 2010

It is unsurprising that the 9/11 attack fostered a massive expansion of America’s already sprawling Surveillance State. But what is surprising, or at least far less understandable, is that this growth shows no signs of abating even as we approach almost a full decade of emotional and temporal distance from that event. The spate of knee-jerk legislative expansions in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 trauma — the USA-PATRIOT Act — has actually been exceeded by the expansions of the last several years — first secretly and lawlessly by the Bush administration, and then legislatively and out in the open once Democrats took over control of the Congress in 2006. Simply put, there is no surveillance power too intrusive or unaccountable for our political class provided the word “terrorism” is invoked to “justify” those powers.

The More-Surveillance-Is-Always-Better Mindset

Illustrating this More-Surveillance-is-Always-Better mindset is what happened after The New York Times revealed in December, 2005 that the Bush administration had ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without the warrants required by law and without any external oversight at all. Despite the fact that the 30-year-old FISA law made every such act of warrantless eavesdropping a felony, “punishable by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both,” and despite the fact that all three federal judges who ruled on the program’s legality concluded that it was illegal, there was no accountability of any kind. The opposite is true: the telecom corporations which enabled and participated in this lawbreaking were immunized by a 2008 law supported by Barack Obama and enacted by the Democratic Congress. And that same Congress twice legalized the bulk of the warrantless eavesdropping powers which The New York Times had exposed: first with the 2007 Protect America Act, and then with the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which, for good measure, even added new warrantless surveillance authorities.

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Neil Kramer - June 08, 2010

Since the end of World War II, the United Kingdom has steadily and perceptibly regressed into a psychotic quagmire of officialdom. This has been implemented according to an explicit strategy to remove the personal privacy, self empowerment and spiritual alignment from the people of Britain. The current subjects of the German Dynastic elites known as The House Of Saxe-Coburg And Gotha (renamed The Windsors in 1917 for public relations reasons), are seeing a rapid regression to the in-your-face serfdom that was previously believed to have been consigned to the dark days of the 17th century. Or so it would seem.

Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian fantasy film ‘Brazil’ satirized the debilitating apparatus of bureaucracy and how it completely dehumanizes the free thinking individual whilst being firmly supported by a zombified populous who absorb and repeat its disempowering memes without question. If you’re not familiar with Britain’s particularly exasperating brand of totalitarianism, watch Brazil (The Directors Cut) for a crash course in pen-pushing authoritarian squalor. The film vividly illustrates Gilliam’s own frustrations on a personal creative level (regarding the increasingly corporatized movie industry), whilst succeeding in portraying the cold-blooded machinations of an oppressive regime that has finally thrown off the tiresome camouflage of democracy.

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Antifascist - Mar 14, 2010

A truism perhaps, but before resorting to brute force and open repression to halt the “barbarians at the gates,” that would be us, the masters of declining empires (and the chattering classes who polish their boots) regale us with tales of “democracy on the march,” “hope” and other banalities before the mailed fist comes crashing down.

Putting it another way, as the late, great Situationist malcontent, Guy Debord did decades ago in his relentless call for revolt, The Society of the Spectacle:

“The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender ‘lonely crowds.’ With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions.”

And when those “presuppositions” reproduce ever-more wretched clichés promulgated by true believers or rank opportunists, take your pick, market “democracy,” the “freedom to choose” (the length of one’s chains), or even quaint notions of national “sovereignty” (a sure fire way to get, and keep, the masses at each others’ throats!) we’re left with a fraud, a gigantic swindle, a “postmodern” refinement of tried and true methods that would do Orwell proud!

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Liz Hull - 12th February 2010

It has been nicknamed the flying saucepan and looks an unlikely weapon in the war against crime.

But yesterday it emerged that a suspected car thief had become the first person to be arrested in Britain thanks to the help of this miniature remote-controlled helicopter.

The Air Robot or drone was deployed by Merseyside police after officers lost the alleged offender who had escaped on foot in thick fog.

Using the device’s on-board camera and thermal-imaging technology, the operator was able to pick up the suspect through his body heat and direct foot patrols to his location.
It led officers to a 16-year-old youth, who was hiding in bushes alongside the Leeds-Liverpool canal, in Litherland, Merseyside.

The drone, which measures 3ft between the tips of its four carbon fibre rotor blades, uses unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology originally designed for military reconnaissance.

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Christopher Soghoian - Dec. 1, 2009

Executive Summary

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.

The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint’s Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.

It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies’ extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics — since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004.

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When George Orwell wrote 1984, he probably never imagined that society would actually become that oppressive. Yet in some nations of the world it has. In fact, in nations such as the U.K., “Big Brother” controls have now been implemented that are so bizarre that Orwell could not have possibly envisioned them during the time in which he lived. The truth is that the U.K. has become a society run by elitist control freaks. The most intimate and personal details of the lives of millions of people in the U.K. are tightly monitored and controlled by a ruthless technocracy that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago. The following are 20 signs that the U.K. has now become the most oppressive Big Brother society on earth…..

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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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