The Independent – Two IT workers at a suburban Philadelphia school district that secretly activated webcams on students’ school-issued laptops are on paid leave amid an FBI wiretap investigation. Lower Merion School District officials insist the move is not meant to suggest wrongdoing by the veteran employees. They have said the webcams were only activated to find missing laptops, and not for any rogue purpose. Read Article
SOCIAL WORKERS have placed the five-year-old daughter of a professional couple on the child protection register for “emotional abuse” after the mother told the girl she was delivered by caesarean. Other allegations against the mother include cuddling her daughter for too long when dropping her off at nursery. The intervention by Birmingham social services prompted the mother, Shahnaz Malik, to go into hiding with her daughter, Amaani, for two months, fearing the girl would be taken away. Read Article
Ed. – Is this the sort of world we want for ourselves or our children? This is why it is important to stand up against this sort of ‘big brother’ attitude by various levels of Government. And Internet filters/secret blacklists (not on E-mail) – however well-intentioned.
Daily Mail – Heads will be forced to list children as young as five on school ‘hate registers’ over everyday playground insults. Even minor incidents must be recorded as examples of serious bullying and details kept on a database until the pupil leaves secondary school. Read article
Daily Telegraph – At least 2.6million households now have microchips in their bins which can be used to weigh the amount of waste used. Information collected by the microchips, which electronically measure the weight of rubbish in bins, is meant to be used to educate households about cutting waste. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – The Tories are planning to tackle one of the heaviest burdens on business by scrapping the existing PAYE (”pay-as-you-earn”) scheme in the most radical shake up of the tax system since the Second World War. Read Article
Ed – However though the opposition Conservatives are selling it as a way to reduce the red tape burden on small businesses (classic Problem, Reaction, Solution), in reality if the Tax Office has an electronic trojan in your bank account it will move on from deducting from your salary to taking a cut of your eBay sales and tracking all British financial transactions.
Daily Mail – A prototype camera phone application that enables the user to find names and numbers of complete strangers has been labelled a ’stalker’s dream’. The application, called Recognizr, has been developed to find personal information through facial recognition software.The user simply has to take a picture of a person and hit the ‘Recognize’ button Read Article
Ed – The technology of the state however is already many, many times more powerful than this consumer application
News.Com.Au – IT SOUNDS like something from a sci-fi film, but one in four Germans would be happy to have a microchip implanted in their body if they derived concrete benefits from it. The survey, conducted by German IT industry lobby group BITKOM, was intended to show how the division between real life and the virtual world is increasingly coming down. In all, 23 per cent of around 1000 respondents in the survey said they would be prepared to have a chip inserted under their skin “for certain benefits”. Around one in six (16 per cent) said they would wear an implant to allow emergency services to rescue them more quickly in the event of a fire or accident. Read Article
Ed – A perfect example of Problem, Reaction, Solution at work. 10 years ago no-one in their right mind would want a chip insterted so that the state can follow their every move from the cradle to the grave. However insert a ‘problem’ such as “what if you have an accident” and alll of a sudden the sheeple queue up willingly.
The Times – A pregnant British woman has fled to Spain with her parents to prevent her unborn baby being taken into care by social services, despite an offer by the child’s grandparents to foster her. Megan Coote, 21, is one of two British women who have escaped to Spain after threats by Suffolk social services to remove their babies. The infants were born last week two days apart and are now neighbours. Read Article
Ed. – “Other countries are much less interventionist and our system is generally much better,” The point is being missed in a rather large way here: Intervention can become intrusiveness when people set themselves up to judge others. Surely better to work WITH the parents, providing ongoing education and support i.e. frequent visits. These lasting measures are monetarily expensive? – yes, but in terms of society, belonging and love being engendered instead of the fear that they are currently experiencing, the choice is simple.
AP — President Barack Obama has signed a one-year extension of several provisions in the nation’s main counterterrorism law, the Patriot Act. Provisions in the measure would have expired on Sunday without Obama’s signature Saturday. The act, which was adopted in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, expands the government’s ability to monitor Americans in the name of national security.Three sections of the Patriot Act that stay in force will:
-Authorize court-approved roving wiretaps that permit surveillance on multiple phones.
-Allow court-approved seizure of records and property in anti-terrorism operations.
-Permit surveillance against a so-called lone wolf, a non-U.S. citizen engaged in terrorism who may not be part of a recognized terrorist group. Read Article
CNN – A majority of Americans think the federal government poses a threat to rights of Americans, according to a new national poll. Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal government’s become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Forty-four percent of those polled disagree. Read article
Washington Post – The mother of a 13-year-old Montgomery County middle school student is demanding an apology from a teacher who had school police escort the youngster from a classroom for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance. The unidentified student was mocked by other children in her class and has been too traumatized to return to [her school] in Germantown, according to Ajmel Quereshi, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland who is representing the family. Read Article
Ed. – This comment was actually used in the WP to attract attention to this article: “Freedom to choose — or choose not — to display your expressions of reverence to the symbols that represent your form of government is generally seen as a pillar of DEMOCRACY. FORCED expression of reverence to the symbols that represent your form of government is what you call a DICTATORSHIP.” jeffatgzg, 7:42 A.M. » Mother wants apology over Pledge of Allegiance|Weigh in.
Gather – Under pressure from small farmers and organic consumers, the US Department of Agriculture announced on February 5, 2010, that it is suspending its controversial National Animal Identification System (NAIS) and offering a new approach to tracking animal disease and food contamination. This is a major victory for the Organic Consumers Association, our allies, and organic farmers and ranchers, who have complained that the USDA’s goal of tagging every farm animal in country wouldn’t do anything to prevent disease, would be unnecessary and expensive for small and organic farmers, and couldn’t be enforced without violations of privacy and religion. Read Article
Ed – The trialling of RFID chips in animals is ongoing. You are next.
BBC – An off-licence owner in Bridlington has started using fingerprint technology to deter underage drinkers and smokers. Rod Parker installed a scanner at his Bossy Boots shop in Queensgate just over a week ago. The equipment reads a customer’s thumb or fingerprint and checks it against ID previously supplied by the customer. Read Article
Ed – A glimpse into another aspect of the threatened Big Brother world?
Daily Telegraph – Workers judged to be lonely and to have a chaotic home life could be barred from working with vulnerable people, even though there is no evidence that they pose a risk, according to guidelines from the Government’s new vetting agency. Decisions about staff will be taken by officials who have never met them, based on details passed on by their employers. Read article
Ed. – That puts a lot of power in the hands of the employers. Not difficult to exploit. The question is: “WHO SAYS?” What gives an official, or even a possibly ‘jaded’ employer OR a forensic pathologist(?) the right to judge the worth of another human being? – which is essentially what they are doing. And this would seem to be in the abscence of any supporting statistics about the risk of harm to the vulnerable population.
AP — The FBI is investigating a Pennsylvania school district accused of secretly activating webcams inside students’ homes, a law enforcement official with knowledge of the case told The Associated Press on Friday. The FBI will explore whether Lower Merion School District officials broke any federal wiretap or computer-intrusion laws, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Days after a student filed suit over the practice, Lower Merion officials acknowledged Friday that they remotely activated webcams 42 times in the past 14 months, but only to find missing student laptops. They insist they never did so to spy on students, as the student’s family claimed in the federal lawsuit. Read Article
Courthouse News Service – A federal class action claims a suburban school district has been spying on students and families through the “indiscriminant use of and ability to remotely activate the webcams incorporated into each laptop issued to students,” without the knowledge or consent of students or parents. The named plaintiffs say they learned that Big Brother was in their home when an assistant principal told their son that the school district knew he “was engaged in improper behavior in his home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor plaintiff’s personal laptop issued by the school district.” The families say the Lower Merion School District issued Webcam-equipped personal laptop computers to each of its approximately 1,800 high school students: in Harriton High School in Rosemont, and Lower Merion High School in Ardmore. The schools issued the computers as part of a “one-to-one” laptop computer initiative lauded by Superintendent Christopher McGinley as an effort that “enhances opportunities for ongoing collaboration, and ensures that all students have 24/7 access to school based resources and the ability to seamlessly work on projects and research at school and at home.”But the parents and students say that, without their knowledge, the access went both ways. Read Article
New York Times – When Google introduced Buzz — its answer to Facebook and Twitter — it hoped to get the service off to a fast start. New users of Buzz, which was added to Gmail on Tuesday, found themselves with a ready-made network of friends automatically selected by the company based on the people that each user communicated with most frequently through Google’s e-mail and chat services. But what Google viewed as an obvious shortcut stirred up a beehive of angry critics. Many users bristled at what they considered an invasion of privacy, and they faulted the company for failing to ask permission before sharing a person’s Buzz contacts with a broad audience. For the last three days, Google has faced a firestorm of criticism on blogs and Web sites, and it has already been forced to alter some features of the service. Read Article
“Far from victory in the Cold War, the superpower nuclear arms race and the corresponding militarization of the American economy gave us ramshackle cities, broken bridges, failing schools, entrenched poverty, impeded life expectancy, and a menacing and secretive national security state.”
- Richard Rhodes
Wired – Police forces all over the UK will soon be able to draw on unmanned aircraft from a national fleet, according to Home Office plans. Last month it was revealed that modified military aircraft drones will carry out surveillance on everyone from protesters and antisocial motorists to fly-tippers, and will be in place in time for the 2012 Olympics. Surveillance is only the start, however. Military drones quickly moved from reconnaissance to strike, and if the British police follow suit, their drones could be armed — but with non-lethal weapons rather than Hellfire missiles. Read Article
Ed – Not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell ever imagined police drone aircraft that can not only conduct surveillance of protesters, but also zap them into submission with non-lethal weapons.
CNET – Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbers known as the “Scarecrow Bandits” that had robbed more than 20 Texas banks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves. Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court to consider the topic will hear oral arguments (PDF) in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless devices. Read Article
The Guardian – Metropolitan police assistant commissioner John Yates has been reprimanded by the culture select committee for what it claims was a failure to give more detailed evidence to MPs over the scale of hacking into private phone messages by former News International employees. The chairman of the culture committee, John Whittingdale, has written to Yates to deliver the reprimand. Yates has angrily replied it had never been his intention to mislead the committee and he is most concerned that the committee believed that to be the case. The Guardian revealed last week that a freedom of information request had disclosed that the police found News International had pin codes, which are used for accessing voicemail messages, belonging to 91 people. The phones had been accessed by the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who worked for the News of the World and the paper’s royal correspondent, Clive Goodman. Read Article
ABC – Trucking giant Lindsay Fox is passionate about road safety.That is why he is unapologetic for rolling out new GPS satellite technology which keeps close tabs on his employees at Linfox. The black box tracking device was shown off to dozens of transport ministers and officials from Australia and APEC nations at Mr Fox’s Australian Automotive Research Centre near Wensleydale in country Victoria. “You can watch the truck moving along and watch the speed that it’s doing,” Mr Fox said. Read Article
Ed – Technology that government’s around the world are looking very actively at, usually under the auspices of congestion charging, and will soon be fitted in every car as a result. There are civil liberties implications. Be aware.
The Guardian – Privacy campaigners expressed shock last night after it emerged that large amounts of confidential personal information held about British citizens on a giant computer network spanning the European Union could be accessed by more than 500,000 terminals. The figure was revealed in a Council of the European Union document examining proposals to establish a new agency, based in France, that would manage much of the 27 EU member states’ shared data. But the sheer number of access points to the Schengen Information System (SIS) – which holds information regarding immigration status, arrest warrants, entries on the police national computer and a multitude of personal details – has triggered concerns about the security of the data. Read Article
CNET – The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years, a requirement that law enforcement believes could help it in investigations of child pornography and other serious crimes. FBI Director Robert Mueller supports storing Internet users’ “origin and destination information,” a bureau attorney said at a federal task force meeting on Thursday. Read Article
The Local – The European Court of Justice has told Sweden that it must implement a 2006 measure requiring telecom operators to store information about their customers’ phone calls and emails.The European Union directive, known as the Data Retention Directive, was approved by Brussels in March 2006, but Sweden has yet to implement the measure more than three years after its passage. The Swedish government conceded to the court that it had not fulfilled its obligations and assured the court that the EU directive 2006/24 can be expected to pass into Swedish law on April 1st 2010. But hours after the verdict was made public, Justice Minister Beatrice Ask told news agency TT that the government would not be preparing a legislative proposal on the issue prior to this autumn’s general election. Read Article
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