Thought Police

From the BBC:

A new road camera that counts car occupants by detecting blood and water content on skin is being tested. How does it work? … Using police officers is very costly and accuracy is only 55-60%, due to visibility issues partly from tinted windows or differing skin tones, he says. And CCTV cameras can mistake a dog for an individual or miss a small person entirely. “We wanted to be able to spot humans, as opposed to inflatable dolls and mannequins. We thought ‘What is humanness?’ “We couldn’t go on skin pigment, but infra-red rays see all skin in the same colour.”  Blood and water is one of the things that determines we are human, he says, so he developed a system that detects human skin. [Read More]

From the BBC:

Pakistan’s attempts to block access to YouTube have been blamed for a near global blackout of the site on Sunday.  Google, the owner of YouTube, blamed the outage on “erroneous internet protocols”, sourced in Pakistan BBC News has learned that the nearly two-hour long blackout was almost certainly connected to Pakistan Telecom and internet service provider PCCW. The country ordered ISPs to block the video-sharing website because of content deemed offensive to Islam. [Read More]

From The Associated Press:

A landlord snooped on tenants to find out information about their finances. A woman repeatedly accessed her ex-boyfriend’s account after a difficult breakup. Another obtained her child’s father’s address so she could serve him court papers. All worked for Wisconsin’s largest utility, where employees routinely accessed confidential information about acquaintances, local celebrities and others from its massive customer database. [Read More]

From CNET News:

A recent incident in which a Finnish free speech activist was censored by his government highlights the dangers of secret blacklists of supposedly illegal Web sites. The spat started when programmer Matti Nikki began to research which Web sites were secretly blocked by Finnish Internet providers based on a list compiled by the government. Although the secret blacklist was supposed to be reserved for overseas child pornography, Nikki discovered that, at least in his view, the majority of Web sites blocked were perfectly legal. And what happened when Nikki published his findings on its Lapsiporno.info site? You guessed it: Embarrassed government officials put his expose on their blacklist as well. [Read More]

Congress requires all federal agencies to report on their data mining activities. The Federation of American Scientists has posted the report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The report details some of the research being conducted by the newly formed Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) which is responsible for technology for the intelligence community in the way that DARPA does for defense.

Some of the Data Mining research areas at IARPA include -

• Knowledge Discovery and Dissemination: seeking ways to coordinate access to and exploiting data from multiple sources across disparate intelligence agencies
• Tangram project: a terrorism threat surveillance and warning system
• Video Analysis and Content Extraction (VACE): ways to accelerate the tedious task of reviewing video content for potential intelligence value
• Proactive Intelligence Project (Paint):studies the dynamics of complex intelligence targets for nefarious activities
• Project Reynard: studying the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games and their implications for the Intelligence Community.

Read the full report at: http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/datamining.pdf

From Fox News:

Google News quietly reinstated Tuesday the articles of a news service that routinely exposes U.N. corruption, a day after FOXNews.com ran a story about the Internet giant’s decision to remove Inner City Press from its search engine. [Read More]

WikiLeaks.org appears to be drawing censorship attempts on a number of different fronts including a DDoS attack, a fire which took out the main servers hosting the site in Sweden, and a restraining order on the domain name ‘WikiLeaks.org’ issued in the United States for Cayman Island Bank Julius Baer.

There are still plenty of cover names you can use however -

http://wikileaks.cx/wiki/Wikileaks:Cover_Names

From WikiNews:

“The order was entirely written by Cayman Island’s Bank Julius Baer lawyers and was accepted by judge White without amendment, or representations by Wikileaks or amicus. The case is over several Wikileaks articles, public commentary and documents dating prior to 2003. The documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion. The bank alleges the documents were disclosed to Wikileaks by offshore banking whistleblower and former Vice President the Cayman Island’s operation, Rudolf Elmer.

From The LA Times:

The CIA set up a network of front companies in Europe and elsewhere after the Sept. 11 attacks as part of a constellation of “black stations” for a new generation of spies, according to current and former agency officials. But after spending hundreds of millions of dollars setting up as many as 12 of the companies, the agency shut down all but two after concluding they were ill-conceived and poorly positioned for gathering intelligence on the CIA’s principal targets: terrorist groups and unconventional weapons proliferation networks. [Read More]

From CNET News:

Visitors to Europe will face biometric screening and automated security checks under proposals for a shake-up of EU border controls. Under plans to strengthen checks at European borders laid out by the European Commission, international travelers would also have their stay logged and monitored by an electronic system, which could become operational by 2015. [Read More]

From The Washington Post:

President Bush, acting on the advice of his national security advisers, has decided to attempt to shoot down a malfunctioning spy satellite that is expected to crash to Earth early next month, a spokesman for the National Security Council said today. [Read More]

From The San Fransisco Chronicle:

A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit Wednesday that accused a San Jose flight-planning company of helping the CIA transport prisoners to overseas dungeons for interrogation and torture, agreeing with the Bush administration that the case risks exposure of state secrets. [Read More]

Freom The Toronto Star:

OTTAWA–The RCMP is improperly holding “tens of thousands” of secret records containing sensitive information about Canadians, the country’s privacy watchdog has found. Jennifer Stoddart issued a special report to Parliament yesterday to flag “disturbing” problems with two databases the RCMP uses to track information on criminal intelligence and national security. [Read More]

From The Washington Post:

The FBI yesterday announced the award of a $1 billion, 10-year contract to Lockheed Martin to develop what is expected to be the world’s largest crime-fighting computer database of biometric information, including fingerprints, palm prints, iris patterns and face images. [Read More]

From the ACLU Blog:

Today was a sad day indeed. Today we watched dozens of senators, including many Democrats, capitulate to a lawless, weakened, lame duck President by passing a dangerous and unconstitutional FISA bill that allows warrantless government eavesdropping on Americans. [Read More]

From the BBC:

Campaigners are calling for a ban on a device that emits a high-pitched sound to disperse groups of teenagers, saying it is not a fair way to treat them. There are estimated to be 3,500 of the devices, known as the Mosquito, in use in England, many at shopping centres. Their sound causes discomfort to young ears – but their frequency is above the normal hearing range of people over 25. [Read More]