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No opt-out rule for airport body scanners
Generic outline: a screen displays an image of a man walking through the scanner.Civil libertarians are worried by proposed legislation meaning passengers will not be able to opt out of undergoing full body scans at Australian airports.
The Federal Government will introduce legislation this week so the technology can be rolled out in all of Australia’s international airports.
The move follows a trial in Sydney and Melbourne.
Except for travellers with serious medical conditions, all passengers will have to go through the scanners if asked by airport staff.
Civil Liberties Australia director Tim Vines says the scanners will amount to an unnecessary digital strip search of citizens who want to travel.
He says passengers should be allowed to request a pat-down.
“In the European Union, where they do allow these types of scanners, they have issued a directive that says governments must Read more…
Virtual Reality Contact Lenses Could Be Available by 2014
Contact lenses that help enhance normal vision with megapixel 3D panoramic images are being designed by scientists using military funding.
For those who do not want to rely on contact lenses, future versions could involve lenses directly implanted within the eye, researchers added.
Over the decades, the video displays that everyone from fighter pilots to the general public use have grown increasingly complex. One possibility for advanced displays is a virtual reality (VR) system that replaces our view of the real world with computer-generated vistas. Another idea consists of augmented reality (AR) displays that overlay computer-generated images over real-world environments. However, these often require bulky apparatus such as oversized helmets.
“Unless the display industry can deliver transparent, high-performance and Read more…
U.S. Government & Military To Get Secret-Worthy Android Phones
The amount of stuff we trust to fly in and out of our smartphones is astounding. Just look at what happened when a couple of reporters got access to an unwitting (and rather unlucky) Apple employee’s iMessages alone — within days, they learned more about him than most people know about their closest friends.
Now, imagine all the stuff that could fly in and out of a government official’s phone, or that of a highly-ranked member of the military. Forget saucy texts and booty pictures — we’re talking about state secrets, here.
Looking to keep their secrets underwraps while on the go, the U.S government is working on a build of Android custom-tailored to meet their security requirements.
Word of the project comes from CNN, who notes that U.S. officials/soldiers aren’t currently allowed to send any classified data over their smartphones. If they need to transmit anything that might Read more…
Why Are Economists Allergic To Gold?
As the old saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Some 32 years ago, Ronald Reagan ran for U.S. President, in part, on a promise to appoint a “gold commission” to study the issue of whether and how the United States should return to some variation of the gold standard.
The nation had just come through a couple of tough decades during which, at times, it seemed as if the whole fabric of American society was being ripped apart. Devastating inflation and a lagging economy only made worse the social and emotional turmoil created by changing mores and standards surrounding civil rights, gender roles and military intervention. President Richard Nixon’s shocking act of severing the U.S. dollar’s ties to gold had failed to bring economic prosperity to the nation, and the Republican Party was feeling a bit of buyers’ remorse. The idea of a return to a gold-based monetary system gained steam.
A recent New York Times article describes the pre-election environment:
The United Nations Wants To Crash The World Economy In Order To Save The Environment
The United Nations says that the earth is in great danger and that the way you and I are living is the problem. In a shocking new report entitled, “Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing” the UN declares that the entire way that we currently approach economics needs to be changed. Instead of focusing on things like “economic growth”, the UN is encouraging nations all over the world to start basing measurements of economic success on the goal of achieving “sustainable development”. But there is a huge problem with that. The UN says that what we are doing right now is “unsustainable” by definition, and the major industrialized nations of the western world are the biggest culprits. According to the UN, since we are the ones that create the most carbon emissions and the most pollution, we are the ones that should make the biggest sacrifices. In addition, since we have the most money, we should also be willing to finance the transition of the developing world to a “sustainable development” economy as well. As you will see detailed in the rest of this article, the United Nations basically wants to crash the world economy in order to save the environment. Considering the fact that the U.S. and Europe are in the midst of a horrible economic crisis and are Read more…
Darpa Implants Could Track Your Stress Level 24/7
Photo: U.S. Air Force
Plenty of geeks are already obsessed with self-tracking, from monitoring sleep rhythms to graphing caffeine intake versus productivity. Now, the Department of Defense’s far-out research agency is after the ultimate kind of Quantified Self: Soldiers with implanted body sensors that keep intimate tabs on their health, around the clock.
In a new call for research, Darpa is asking for proposals to devise prototype implantable biosensors. Once inserted under a soldier’s skin, Darpa wants the sensors to provide real-time, accurate measurements of “DoD-relevant biomarkers” including stress hormones, like cortisol, and compounds that signal inflammation, like histamine.
Implantable sensors are only the latest of several Pentagon-backed ventures to track a soldier’s health. Darpa’s already looked into tracking “nutritional biomarkers” to evaluate troops’ diets. And as part of the agency’s “Peak Soldier Performance” program, Darpa studied how one’s genes impact physical ability, and tried to manipulate cellular mitochondria to boost the body’s energy levels.
Sensors alone won’t make troops stronger, smarter or more resilient. But they’d probably offer the kind of information that could. For one thing, the sensors would provide military docs an array of reliable info about the health of every single soldier. Plus, they’d tell leaders how a soldier’s body stood up to Read more…
Digital Privacy and the Fifth Amendment
The Internet has vastly changed society. It’s one of those things that we can’t imagine living without, and we can’t imagine how we got by without the Internet just a few decades ago. However, something that changes society as drastically as the Internet has also alters legal boundaries, laws, and interpretations. The 5th Amendment, which protects American citizens’ right to due process and against self-incrimination, among other things, is no exception.
A federal judge in Colorado recently ruled that your computer is not granted those protections under the 5th Amendment. Even encrypted data that’s stored on your computer or an external hard drive would be subject to investigation, and giving up that information is equivalent to complying with a search warrant. The question of the 5th Amendment, privacy, and the law has always been a muddy one. How much digital privacy do people actually have? Is handing over our digital information, such as Read more…
US No-Fly List of Terror Suspect Doubles in 1 Year
WASHINGTON — Even as the Obama administration says it’s close to defeating al-Qaida, the size of the government’s secret list of suspected terrorists who are banned from flying to or within the United States has more than doubled in the past year, The Associated Press has learned.
The no-fly list jumped from about 10,000 known or suspected terrorists one year ago to about 21,000, according to government figures provided to the AP. Most people on the list are from other countries; about 500 are Americans.
The flood of new names began after the failed Christmas 2009 bombing of a Detroit-bound jetliner. The government lowered the standard for putting people on the list, and then scoured its files for anyone who qualified. The government will not disclose who is on its list or why someone might have been placed on it.
The surge in the size of the no-fly list comes even as the U.S. has killed many senior members of al-Qaida. That’s because the government believes the Read more…
Have Chinese Had Enough?
Chinese leaders have always identified international politics with struggle – the struggle for sovereignty, status and prosperity. In recent years, offering lucrative business opportunities to other countries and investing in scores of official dialogues allowed Beijing to claim a course of peaceful development. And many countries gave it the benefit of the doubt, at least for a while.But China now faces growing resistance as even some Chinese begin to question how peaceful the country’s rise can really be. Either way, the Year of the Dragon looks set to be a strategic watershed for Chinese diplomacy.
Centrality invariably means trouble in geopolitics, and certainly for China. I remember strolling underneath the weeping willows of Beijing’s Ritan Park with a retired ambassador who neatly summed up the problem China faces: “If we do well, our neighbors see that as a threat. If we are in trouble, that is perceived as a threat as well. We are a challenge just by being here.”
It’s this diplomatic claustrophobia that explains why Chinese leaders have been so eager to Read more…
Earth twin discovered 22 light-years away
The Kepler mission initiated to find habitable Earth-like planets near our own has turned up another candidate for places we might visit in the future: GJ 667Cc. This planet has an orbital period of about 28 days regularly and has a mass that’s at least 4.5 larger than Earth. This planet is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the surface, and it sits aside two or three additional planets that may well be similar enough to also be Earth candidates. This newest discovery was made by astronomers from UC Santa Cruz Steven Vogt and Eugenio Rivera, lead by Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution for Science.
The host star in this system is called GJ 667C and is an M-class dwarf star. Two more stars sit in the Read more…
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