CBS — Surveillance aircraft used by the U.S. military overseas could soon be coming to the skies above Los Angeles County. KNX 1070?s Charles Feldman reports the Federal Aviation Administration is making it easier for local law enforcement agencies to fly unmanned drones. The FAA has streamlined the process that would allow agencies to fly smaller, unarmed versions of the drones that hunt down terrorists in places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. Read Article
The Week – Soon, Congress will begin drafting legislation reauthorizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which serves as the legal framework for domestic espionage against external threats. And while FISA doesn’t affect spy activities overseas, the attention it generates will shift scrutiny to the National Security Agency and its growing and astonishing capabilities. Read Article
Forbes – If the world’s largest surveillance agency has a working relationship with the world’s largest Internet firm, that’s no one’s business but theirs, according to an appeals court in the DC Circuit. In the ruling issued Friday, (PDF here ) the court decided that the National Security Agency doesn’t need to either confirm or deny its relationship with Google in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, ruling that a FOIA exemption covers any documents whose exposure might hinder the NSA’s national security mission. Read Article
BBC – The Ministry of Defence has confirmed a sonic device will be deployed in London during the Olympics. The American-made Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) can be used to send verbal warnings over a long distance or emit a beam of pain-inducing tones. The equipment was spotted fixed to a landing craft on the Thames at Westminster this week. Read Article
Business Insider – DARPA is at it again. This time, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has announced plans to create nanochips for monitoring troops health on the battlefield. Kate Knibbs at Mobiledia reports the sensors are targeted at preventing illness and disease, the two causes of most troops medical evacuations. What seems like a simple way of cutting costs and increasing efficiency has some people concerned that this is the first step in a “computer chips for all” scenario. Bob Unruh at WND reports one of those opponents, Katherine Albrecht, co-author of Spychips says “It’s never going to happen that the government at gunpoint says, ‘You’re going to have a tracking chip. It’s always in incremental steps. If you can put a microchip in someone that doesn’t track them … everybody looks and says, ‘Come on, it’ll be interesting seeing where we go.’” Read Article
NY Times – Legal and technology researchers estimate that it would take about a month for Internet users to read the privacy policies of all the Web sites they visit in a year. So in the interest of time, here is the deal: You know that dream where you suddenly realize you’re stark naked? You’re living it whenever you open your browser. There are no secrets online. That emotional e-mail you sent to your ex, the illness you searched for in a fit of hypochondria, those hours spent watching kitten videos (you can take that as a euphemism if the kitten fits) — can all be gathered to create a defining profile of you. Read article
WSJ – Skype was told a year and a half ago about a security flaw that allows for the location tracking of customers, but left it unfixed, the security researchers who first discovered the vulnerability told CIO Journal. The flaw, which allows hackers to secretly track IP addresses, should be of interest to CIOs. Skype, which is now owned by Microsoft, said last year about 37% of its 663 million community members use the “Skype product platform occasionally or often for business-related purposes.” r Read article
WIRED – Upstart Virginia aerospace firm Mav6 is offering to install guided missiles on the massive robotic spy blimp it’s building for the Air Force. The idea would only be slightly terrifying, if the massive airship were headed to Afghanistan, as originally planned. But Mav6 and its CEO, a respected retired Air Force general, are also promoting the giant airship for homeland security missions over U.S. soil. In that way, today’s war blimp could become tomorrow’s all-seeing, lethal Big Brother. Read Article
CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and that the bureau is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory. READ ARTICLE
The Guardian – The Google engineer behind the collection of wireless data by Street View cars told at least two colleagues – including a senior manager – about the controversial plans before it was released, a US regulator has found. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said in a report that the Google engineer told colleagues in 2007 that his Street View programme could collect private information including emails and text messages. Read article
Mail Online – Millions of credit and debit card users could be ‘robbed by radiowave’ because of new contactless technology being brought in by banks. Almost 20million shoppers are now able to buy goods by simply waving their card in front of a reader at the tills, even if it is still in a wallet or a purse. Read article
BRG – The United States House of Representatives has voted to pass the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), talk of which has swept the Internet over the past few weeks. The House vote was moved up to Thursday night, and CISPA passed as 248 members of Congress voted for the bill and 168 voted against. The bill is sponsored by Representatives Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Maryland), and it now faces further modifications in the Senate if it is to avoid being vetoed by the White House. President Barack Obama has indicated that he intends to veto the bill if it makes it to his desk, noting that as it is written now, the legislation would allow “broad sharing of information with governmental entities without establishing requirements for both industry and the government to minimize and protect personally identifiable information.” The American Civil Liberties Union issued a statement following the vote. “Cybersecurity does not have to mean abdication of Americans’ online privacy,” said ACLU legislative counsel Michelle Richardson. “As we’ve seen repeatedly, once the government gets expansive national security authorities, there’s no going back. We encourage the Senate to let this horrible bill fade into obscurity.” Read Article
Daily Mail – There are at least 63 active drone sites around the U.S, federal authorities have been forced to reveal following a landmark Freedom of Information lawsuit. The unmanned planes – some of which may have been designed to kill terror suspects – are being launched from locations in 20 states. Most of the active drones are deployed from military installations, enforcement agencies and border patrol teams, according to the Federal Aviation Authority. Read Article
Technology Review – Location services company Navizon has a new system, called Navizon I.T.S., that could allow tracking of visitors in malls, museums, offices, factories, secured areas and just about any other indoor space. It could be used to examine patterns of foot traffic in retail spaces, assure that a museum is empty of visitors at closing time, or even to pinpoint the location of any individual registered with the system. But let’s set all that aside for a minute while we freak out about the privacy implications. Most of us leave Wi-Fi on by default, in part because our phones chastise us when we don’t. (Triangulation by Wi-Fi hotspots is important for making location services more accurate.) But you probably didn’t realize that, using proprietary new “nodes” from Navizon, any device with an active Wi-Fi radio can be seen by a system like Navizon’s. To demonstrate the technology, here’s Navizon CEO and founder Cyril Houri hunting for one of his colleagues at a trade show using a kind of first person shooter-esque radar. Read Article
The Independent – The former head of GCHQ Sir David Omand called for greater surveillance of Facebook and Twitter today, reigniting the debate on how much the state should be allowed to snoop on individuals. Launching what he described as the first serious study into how the police and security services can use social media as a form of intelligence, Sir David said it was time they catch up with the explosion in the medium and develop expertise in understanding its particular language and culture. The #Intelligence report, produced by the influential think tank Demos, comes just weeks after the government was forced to retreat on plans for legislation to allow the police and intelligence services to monitor the online activity of every person in Britain after cross-party uproar. Read Article
The Guardian – Ministers are planning a shakeup of the law on the use of confidential personal data to make it far easier for government and public-sector organisations to share confidential information supplied by the public. Proposals to be published next month by the Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, are expected to include fast-track procedures for ministers to license the sharing of data in areas where it is currently prohibited, subject to privacy safeguards. The development will raise fears among civil liberty and privacy campaigners that sensitive personal information supplied by citizens to a doctor, social worker or police officer for one purpose could be used arbitrarily, without the consent or knowledge of the citizen, by another agency of the state for a different purpose. The proposals are similar to “database state” legislation abandoned by the last Labour government in 2009 in the face of fierce opposition. That legislation was intended to reverse the basic data protection principle that sensitive personal information provided to one government agency should not normally be provided to another agency for a different purpose without explicit consent. Despite the coalition government’s pre-election promises to roll back the database state, the growth of internal Whitehall databases has quietly continued apace in the last two years. Read Article
“Big brother is watching you”, reads the posters from Orwell’s “1984”. The idea of an omnipresent figure representing the oppressive control over individuals now seems to apply mainly to governments, but can be used to describe any authoritarian entity. The practical application of Big Brother watching you today are seen in surveillance cameras, wiretaps, tracking of communications, digital facial recognition and more. With new legislation brought in under the banner of the war against terror, now more than ever, Big Brother really is watching you. Read ourBig Brother archive of 990 articles CLICK HERE
Borneo Post – Singapore has begun installing police surveillance cameras that will eventually cover all 10,000 public-housing blocks across the island, officials confirmed yesterday. The move immediately drew mixed reactions in a city-state already famous for being one of the world’s safest societies but now undergoing political transition as citizens demand greater freedom from government control. “Welcome to Big Brother!” popular local satirist Mr Brown wrote on Twitter, referring to a fictional character in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty Four about a totalitarian state where each citizen is watched by a camera.Installations have begun at 300 blocks and by 2016 the cameras will be operational on the ground floors of all 10,000 government-built apartment blocks where over 80 per cent of the population live. Entry and exit points of public car parks will also be covered. Read Article
The Atlantic – Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson, reading through Section 31406 of the “Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act” (MAP-21) bill that’s currently making its way through Congress, made a nice catch: The bill calls for “Mandatory Event Data Recorders” to be installed in new vehicles starting in the year 2015. Yes. If the bill becomes law, cars manufactured in the U.S. will have black boxes — similar to the recording devices that are standard inclusions on aircraft. There are some obvious benefits to making trip reporting a standard feature of automobiles — not just the same benefits, basically, that make them standard features on planes, but also (assuming it’s an option) the personal consumer benefits that come from understanding, in detail, how you use your car. Even more obvious, however, are the drawbacks that will come with the recording devices. For one thing, they’ll make GPS tracking in cars not an anomaly, but an assumption. They’ll be an implicit, omnipresent threat to personal privacy. They’ll take the thing that has been Americans’ prototypical symbol of freedom and individuality — the car — and render it just another piece of trackable infrastructure. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Ministers will announce on Monday new moves to allow dogs to be traced back to their owners, who will then be held accountable for the animals’ behaviour. Ministers are under growing pressure to act because of concern about dangerous dogs – especially bull terriers — being used as weapons and status symbols. The Government has already missed its own deadline for new rules on dogs. Groups including the RSPCA have called for compulsory microchipping to create a clear link between all dogs and their owners. Read Article
Wall Street Journal – With little public attention, dozens of universities and law-enforcement agencies have been given approval by federal aviation regulators to use unmanned aircraft known as drones, according to documents obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests by an advocacy group. The more than 50 institutions that received approvals to operate remotely piloted aircraft are more varied than many outsiders and privacy experts previously knew. They include not only agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security but also smaller ones such as the police departments in North Little Rock, Ark., and Ogden, Utah, as well the University of North Dakota and Nicholls State University in Louisiana. Read Article
DW – European parliamentarians have approved a controversial data-sharing deal with the US. Proponents argue that it will make travel more safe, but critics say it violates the rights of EU citizens. The European Parliament has approved a controversial agreement that will give US authorities access to data on passengers flying from European Union destinations to the United States. Read Article
RT – London’s Metropolitan Police have developed a phone app, allowing people to identify criminals in their neighborhood at the flick of a switch. Police hope the new app will greatly increase arrests in the UK capital. The new program, named Facewatch ID, which can be downloaded on to Blackberries, iPhones and Android devices, shows users photos of wanted individuals in the area. Read Article
IT World – The Wall Street Journal recently published an article on how IT departments are coping these days with the biggest threat to data security — namely, employees in the IT department. That the “enemy within” is the biggest threat to an enterprise is nothing new, but buried in the article was something that struck me as, well, Orwellian. The WSJ reports that some organizations “are even using new technology to look at the language of their IT staff’s emails to determine whether their behavior or mind-set has changed.” Read Article
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