Archive
Fans to be Willingly RFID-Chipped at Lollapalooza Concerts
Hundreds of thousands of young and old alternative music fans lined up to willingly be tracked with RFID micro-chips at Lollapalooza in Chi-town in Chicago Friday.
The “non-removable wristbands” were provided by organizers for attendees to gain entrance to Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago’s Grant Park, that began Friday August 2nd, according to LibertyFight.com’s Martin Hill, whose article appeared on the Daily Paul website.
For years, innocent targeted individuals (TIs) have seemingly outlandishly complained of being involuntarily covertly micro-chipped, not just by small chips left in personal belongings, but also via “non-removable” injection.
“Hitachi holds the record for the smallest RFID chip, at 0.05mm × 0.05mm,” according to Wikipedia.
Some of those TIs have provided medical evidence of injected RFID chips to courts, such as Read more…
U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans
A slide from a presentation about a secretive information-sharing program run by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Operations Division (SOD)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of Read more…
FBI pressures Internet providers to install surveillance software
CNET has learned the FBI has developed custom “port reader” software to intercept Internet metadata in real time. And, in some cases, it wants to force Internet providers to use the software.
FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C.
(Credit: Getty Images)
The U.S. government is quietly pressuring telecommunications providers to install eavesdropping technology deep inside companies’ internal networks to facilitate surveillance efforts.
FBI officials have been sparring with carriers, a process that has on occasion included threats of contempt of court, in a bid to deploy government-provided software capable of intercepting and analyzing entire communications streams. The FBI’s legal position during these discussions is that the software’s real-time interception of metadata is authorized under the Patriot Act.
Attempts by the FBI to install what it internally refers to as “port reader” software, which have not been previously disclosed, were Read more…
10 Ways That The Iron Grip Of The Big Brother Prison Grid Is Tightening On All Of Our Lives
Do you ever feel trapped in an invisible control grid that is slowly but surely closing in all around you? Do you ever feel like virtually everything that you do is being watched, tracked, monitored and recorded? If so, unfortunately it is not just your imagination. Our society is rapidly being transformed into a Big Brother prison grid by a government that is seemingly obsessed with knowing everything that we do. They want a record of all of our phone calls, all of our Internet activity and all of our financial transactions. They even want our DNA. They put chips in our passports, they are starting to scan the eyes of our children in our schools, and they have declared our border areas to be “Constitution-free zones” where they can do just about anything to us that they want. The Bill of Rights has already been eroded so badly that many would argue that it is already dead. The assault against our most basic freedoms and liberties never seems to end. The following are 10 ways that Read more…
XKeyscore: The NSA program that collects ‘nearly everything’ that you do on the internet
If you were shocked by the NSA’s Prism program, hold onto your hat: The NSA also operates another system, called XKeyscore, which gives the US intelligence community (and probably most of the US’s Western allies) full access to your email, IMs, browsing history, and social media activity. To view almost everything that you do online, an NSA analyst simply has to enter your email or IP address into XKeyscore. No formal authorization or warrant is required; the analyst just has to type in a “justification” and press Enter. To provide such functionality, the NSA collects, in its own words, “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet.” Perhaps most importantly, though, it appears that HTTPS and SSL might not protect your communications from Read more…Google: FBI watching you on internet
WASHINGTON: Google says the FBI is monitoring the Web for potential terrorist activity. But it can’t say how extensive the surveillance is.
As part of the Google Transparency Report, the Internet giant this week released data on so-called National Security Letters — official requests for data under the Patriot Act passed after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
But Google said it was only allowed to provide broad ranges of numbers: in the years from 2009 to 2012, for example, it received between zero and 999 requests. The requests affected between 1,000 and 1,999 accounts, except in 2010 when the range was 2,000 to 2,999 accounts, Google said.
“You’ll notice that we’re reporting numerical ranges rather than exact numbers. This is to address concerns raised Read more…
Next Up for Big Brother: Recording and Transcribing Public Conversations
Matt Lease, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, is working on ways to literally record all human conversations no matter where they take place. But his research is being funded by the Department of Defense, raising the question of how such a technology might be used in the hands of the government.
Lease’s plan is to utilize crowdsourcing, voice recognition software and everyday devices like smartphones to gather human speech, whether in a business meeting or on the street, and store it somewhere so people could access what they said anytime.
He told Wired’s Danger Room that he saw the work as both a “need and opportunity to really make conversational speech more accessible, more part of our permanent record instead of being so ephemeral, and really trying to imagine what this world would look like if we really could capture all these conversations and make use of them effectively going forward.”
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) liked Lease’s idea so much it gave him a $300,000 grant to support his efforts.
If successful, this new system could raise “some thorny legal and social questions about privacy,” wrote Robert Beckhusen at Wired.
One example cited by Lease involves “respecting the privacy rights of multiple people involved,” and how to gain permission of everyone talking before capturing and storing a conversation. In the hands of spy agencies, this is not expected to be an issue.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
DHS Granted Right To Seize Any Electronic Devices Within 100 Miles Of A U.S. Border
As decreed by the Orwellianly-named DHS office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Wired reports:
The Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights watchdog of has concluded that travelers along the nation’s borders may have their electronics seized and the contents of those devices examined for any reason whatsoever — all in the name of national security.
“We conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful,” the two-page memo said.
The President George W. Bush administration first announced the suspicionless, electronics search rules in 2008. The Obama administration followed up with virtually the same rules a year later.
According to legal precedent, the Fourth Amendment — freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures — does not apply along the border. The government contends the Fourth-Amendment-Free Zone stretches 100 miles inland from the nation’s actual border.
Facing up to the law: increasing surveillance raises privacy concerns
I spy the use of facial recognition systems by law enforcement agencies is becoming more widespread. Illustration: Sam Bennett
ABOUT 15,000 people have had images of their faces captured on an Australian Federal Police database in its first year of operation, igniting fears that the rise of facial recognition systems will lead to CCTV cameras being installed on every street corner.
The database includes pictures of alleged criminals who may not know their images are on file.
The AFP say facial recognition may eventually be considered as credible as fingerprints, but images on their database are not being shared with state police forces. Sharing images on a national database could be possible by 2015.
The president of Australian Councils for Civil Liberties, Terry O’Gorman, said it was troubling that technologies such as facial and number plate recognition had become so widespread and there appeared to be no independent monitoring of the impacts on privacy.
The justification for widespread CCTV has also been questioned, with a report by police in London, the most spied-upon city in the world, showing that only one crime was solved per 1000 cameras.
An AFP forensic and data centres biometrics co-ordinator, Simon Walsh, said international agencies were Read more…
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](https://i0.wp.com/www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/gold/t24_au_en_usoz_2.gif)
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](https://i0.wp.com/www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/silver/t24_ag_en_usoz_2.gif)
crisisboom
CRISISBOOM 
You must be logged in to post a comment.