BBC – A £235m government database containing the records of England’s 11 million children has been switched off. ContactPoint was established in the wake of the Victoria Climbie child abuse case to aid child protection. The report into her death highlighted the need to improve the exchange of information between different agencies working with vulnerable children. The government argued the system was disproportionate to the problem, so is looking at developing other solutions. Read Article
ABC – The US government will have unmanned surveillance aircraft monitoring the whole border with Mexico from September 1, as it ramps up border security. Homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano said US Customs and Border Protection would begin flying a Predator B drone out of Corpus Christi, Texas, on Wednesday. That will extend the reach of the the agency’s unmanned surveillance aircraft across the length of the nearly 3,200 km border with Mexico. Read Article
Mercury News – Cupertino students could add electronic “tracking devices” to the list of items they carry in their backpacks this fall. The Cupertino Public Safety Commission wants to test a new program that uses a tracking device to count how many students walk and bike to school in the notoriously congested tri-school area near Bubb and McClellan roads. The commission is working on the logistics of bringing the Boltage program to Lincoln Elementary and Kennedy Middle schools this fall. The goal is to get more cars off the road. The Boltage system uses a machine called the Zap, a solar-powered radio frequency identification reader. Students who walk and bike in the program get an RFID tag that attaches to their backpack, and the Zap reads their unique number when they go past it at the school. Read Article
Public Intelligence – Purpose. This Concept of Operations (CONOP) documents concepts and procedures for the use of biometric technologies to support identity superiority, protection and management in the entire USCENTCOM AOR. This CONOP focuses on the biometrics process and key systemic enablers. This CONOP contains UNCLASSIFIED and CLASSIFIED 100 annexes. The body of the CONOP is UNCLASSIFIED however, Annex E, “HUMINT Biometrics Management”, is CLASSIFIED SECRET//NOFORN. Read Article
Register – Residents in Cleveland, Ohio, will have to ensure their recycling is out on time or face a $100 fine for failing to do their bit. RFID tags will be fitted to the recycling bins provide by the city council, and counted by passing rubbish-collection vans. Any residents whose recycling bin isn’t on the curb over a couple of weeks will get a visit from the rubbish inspector, and face a $100 fine if it turns out they’ve been discarding recyclable goods. Read Article
On Saturday 28 August, the editor of www.OpenYourEyesNews.com, James Fairbairn, made a guest appearance on ABC720 Radio in Perth, Western Australia to discuss with host, James Lush, some of the key news events of recent days.
Check out our latest interview on our new Podcast channel and please subscribe to keep up to date with future episodes of OpenYourEyesNews
Time – Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements. That is the bizarre – and scary – rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants – with no need for a search warrant. (See a TIME photoessay on Cannabis Culture.) It is a dangerous decision – one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. Read Article
Daily Mail -A software company is developing revolutionary software which provides the ability to identify people from photographs posted on the internet. Face.com has produced technology that can identify individuals on social networking sites and online galleries by comparing their image against a known picture of them. It means detailed profiles of individuals can be built up purely from online photographs and critics have said it could lead to exploitation by employers. Read Article
Telegraph – Spain has became the latest country to take on internet search giant Google over alleged privacy violations made during mapping for its “Street View” feature. A Madrid judge has ordered a Google representative to appear in court in October as part of an investigation into whether the company committed a “computer crime” while taking shots of the city streets in Spain. The service launched in more than 30 countries provides internet users with street-level views of public buildings and private residences. Read Article
Economist Times – The worsening domestic security situation in the country has foreign defence contractors like Boeing, BAE Systems and EADS, rubbing their hands in anticipation. Stung by the glaring deficiencies in the country’s internal security apparatus, the government has announced plans of spending about $10 billion, over the next five to six years and completely overhaul and modernise the internal security arrangements. The vendors have already identified a gamut of opportunities in the space, ranging from cyber-security networks to precision munitions and urban-specific armoured transportation, all essential elements that are either depleted or missing from the country’s weapons arsenal. Read Article
Reuters – Health officials on Friday approved a new, longer-lasting “morning-after” pill to prevent pregnancy after unprotected sex. The prescription drug, called ella, is made by French company HRA Pharma and will be sold in the United States by Watson Pharmaceuticals. It is the first emergency contraceptive approved since a five-year battle under the Bush administration ended with limited over-the-counter sales and age checks by pharmacists for a rival pill. Read article
Washington Times – If the eyes are the window to the soul, then facial-recognition technology might be regarded as the soul’s window cleaner — at least by state officials nationwide who are increasingly using it to catch identity thieves and other fraudsters trying to get driver’s licenses. New York this year became one of more than 30 states to deploy the controversial technology at its Department of Motor Vehicles. Gov. David A. Paterson will brief reporters Tuesday on hundreds of cases the state is prosecuting as a result — including at least one that officials will tout as a major criminal apprehension. Read Article
Wired – Watch out, humans, the U.S. military has released an all-seeing, unmanned helicopter into the wild, according to Aviation Week. The Boeing A160T Hummingbird was photographed in Belize, where it was test flying a tree-penetrating Darpa radar called FORESTER. Locals were given a heads-up thanks to a press release from the U.S. Embassy. There’s no sign of the document on the website, but local reports say that the the Belize government invited the U.S. to test the Hummingbird in a mountain range 25 miles from the Guatemalan border. A few dozen military personnel – both Belizean and American – are involved in the testing, which will last until September. Read Article
Washington Post – A federal appeals court ruled for the first time Friday that police cannot use a Global Positioning System device to track a person’s movements for an extended time without a warrant, clearing the way for the Supreme Court to decide the privacy impact of the new surveillance technology in products such as cellphones and vehicle-navigation systems. Read Article
Telegraph – Fewer people have been killed and injured on roads following a decision by a local council to switch off its speed cameras. Accident data shows that in the first nine months after the devices were scrapped in Swindon, there were 315 road casualties in the area as a whole, compared with 327 in the same period the previous year. In total there were two fatalities – compared with four in the same period previously – and 44 serious injuries, down from 48. Read Article
Forbes – A semi-secret government contractor that calls itself Project Vigilant surfaced at the Defcon security conference Sunday with a series of revelations: that it monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers, hands much of that information to federal agencies, and encouraged one of its “volunteers,” researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about the alleged source of a controversial video of civilian deaths in Iraq leaked to whistle-blower site Wikileaks in April. Read Article
Register – RFID tags can be read at a surprising range, a researcher has found. When he’s not listening in to GSM phone calls, Chris Paget has been busy seeing at what distance an RFID tag can be read, managing a respectable 217 feet. Paget also reckons the US military could read an EPC Gen2 tag from 80 miles off, though the connection would likely time out before any data was retrieved. Which is a shame as his calculations put the theoretical maximum read range at 317 miles, if you’ve got a big enough dish. Read Article
Telegraph – Advertising billboards similar to those seen in the film Minority Report, which can recognise passers-by, target them with customised adverts and even use their names, are being developed by computer engineers. Researchers at IBM have revealed they are working on technology which will lead to consumers being shown tailor made adverts that reflect their personal interests. Read Article
On Saturday 10th July, the editor of www.OpenYourEyesNews.com, James Fairbairn, made another guest appearance on 720 ABC Radio in Perth, Western Australia to discuss with host, James Lush, some of the key news events of recent weeks. The interview covered the following:
- Oceanic plastic pollution
- New technology that allows Big Brother to listen to your conversations, and for Apple to know your exact whereabouts
- Some of the similarities between the US economy now and 1932
Check out our latest interview on our new Podcast channel and please subscribe to keep up to date with future episodes of OpenYourEyesNews
Telegraph – Two police forces have begun trialling the sophisticated programme, which has echoes of the Tom Cruise film Minority Report, where psychics are used to stop criminals before they commit a crime. The system, known as Crush (Criminal Reduction Utilising Statistical History) evaluates crime records, intelligence briefings, offender profiles and even weather reports, to identify potential flashpoints where a crime is most likely to occur. Read Article
Wall Street Journal – Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to roll out sophisticated electronic ID tags to track individual pairs of jeans and underwear, the first step in a system that advocates say better controls inventory but some critics say raises privacy concerns. Read Article
CNN – The United States has spent more than $1 trillion on wars since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, a recently released Congressional report says. Adjusting for inflation, the outlays for conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere around the world make the “war on terrorism” second only to World War II. Read Article
LA Times – As it rapidly expands its drone program over Afghanistan, the U.S. military is turning to the technology that powers NFL broadcasts, ESPN and TV news to catalog a flood of information coming from the cameras of its fleet of unmanned aircraft. U.S. military archives hold 24 million minutes of video collected by Predators and other remotely piloted aircraft that have become an essential tool for commanders. Read Article
AP – The government calls it “sealed management.” China’s capital has started gating and locking some of its lower-income neighborhoods overnight, with police or security checking identification papers around the clock, in a throwback to an older style of control. It’s Beijing’s latest effort to reduce rising crime often blamed on the millions of rural Chinese migrating to cities for work. The capital’s Communist Party secretary wants the approach promoted citywide. But some state media and experts say the move not only looks bad but imposes another layer of control on the already stigmatized, vulnerable migrants. Read article
Daily Mail – British citizens face being subjected to chilling new EU ‘Big Brother’ surveillance and investigation powers. Bureaucrats want foreign officials to be able to travel to the UK and immediately assume the powers of our own police. They would be able to order undercover-spying missions, demand DNA and even pursue people for ‘crimes’ which are not recognised in UK law – such as criminal defamation. Read Article
