The Surveillance State - A New Era

TRANCOSO wrote:

Micjer wrote:Like walmart is where the terrorist are going to meet!!!!

Well, not anymore...

Haha!




Meeting will be at Masonic Hall Mon 8 p.m.

Transportation
Metro to start random bag searches

By: Kytja Weir 12/16/10

Metro plans to begin random searches of its riders' bags in the coming days, the transit agency said Thursday, revisiting a plan first announced two years ago.

Metro Police Chief Michael Taborn said the coordinated effort with the Transportation Security Administration was not in response to a specific threat but was part of a continuing effort to keep the system safe from explosives. Boston, New York and New Jersey transit officials do similar searches, according to the agency.

Metro officials would not specify when the first searches will begin, how long they will last, which locations will be targeted or how many riders' bags will be searched. The agency planned to start alerting riders with pamphlets and station announcements on Thursday afternoon.

But riders immediately started to sound off against the plan.
How the searches will work
¥ Searches will occur in stations and transit areas before riders pay to enter, not on trains or buses. In areas with checkpoints, riders will see several officers, a sign announcing the search and a table.
¥ Officers will use randomized counting of riders carrying bags to choose who to screen.
¥ An officer will run a swab over the bag, then run it through a portable ionization device for finding explosives called a Sabre 4000, which is about the size of bread box. Bags will not be opened for the initial scan.
¥ Explosive-sniffing K-9 units will follow up on any positive scans from the equipment. The dogs are not trained to sniff for illegal drugs, Metro Transit Police Chief Michael Taborn said.
¥ Riders may choose not to have their bags searched but will not be allowed to enter the stations or buses with the items.

David Alpert, who serves on the agency's Riders' Advisory Council and writes the Greater Greater Washington blog, called it "security theater" that wastes money without stopping terrorists. He said such resources could be better spent having more officers and dogs patrol the system.

"Riders are already frustrated with Metro right now," Alpert said. "Doing something that's just going to frustrate riders is absolutely the wrong approach."

Metro announced two years ago that it would conduct searches but never did any after riders and their advocates complained.

Metro officials would not say what prompted them to revisit the policy now, denying that the recent arrests of two men on separate allegations of threatening the subway system had anything to do with the timing.

"It's an added a layer of protection we can add at this time," Taborn said. "It's another tool in our toolbox."

The officers will try to "minimize inconvenience to riders," General Manager Richard Sarles said, with brief inspections of randomly selected riders.

This time, though, the bags will be searched for hazardous materials using ionization technology and explosive-sniffing K-9 units. The earlier proposal involved officers opening riders' bags and looking inside them. But bags will be not be opened unless they are deemed to need further inspection. Furthermore, Metro officials said, the equipment and dogs are looking for explosives and will not be looking for guns or drugs.

"It won't cost us anything," Taborn said, saying that the agency already has officers, dogs and equipment through homeland security grants. He did acknowledge printing costs for the pamphlets but could not pin down a cost.

Taborn said the screenings would not take more than about a minute and a half. "We don't want to create a bottleneck. We don't want to eliminate the mass in mass transit."

kweir@washingtonexaminer.com


Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/local/dc/2010/12/metro-start-random-bag-searches#ixzz18ka70Wu3

Love Always
mudra

iPhone snitch network launched

Jason Douglass
Infowars.com
December 13, 2010

http://www.infowars.com/iphone-snitch-network-launched/

A new iPhone App with the misleading name ‘PatriotApp’ attempts to draw on the power of the patriot movement, turning smartphone users into a gigantic snitch network.

You might think an app with such a patriotic name might have useful functions like a pocket constitution or quotes from our forefathers. But contrary to the services one might expect, this app allows users to report any ‘suspicious’ behavior directly linking them with top government agencies.
Much like the new DHS program ‘If you see something, say something’ this app is meant to turn average citizens into a network of spies feeding information back to the federal government.

Citizen Concepts, a company formed by insiders from DHS, defines the use of such an app on their homepage:

Citizen Concepts announces the launch of PatriotAppTM, the world’s first iPhone application that empowers citizens to assist government agencies in creating safer, cleaner, and more efficient communities via social networking and mobile technology. This app was founded on the belief that citizens can provide the most sophisticated and broad network of eyes and ears necessary to prevent terrorism, crime, environmental negligence, or other malicious behavior.

Simply download, report (including pictures) and submit information to relevant government agencies, employers, or publish incident data to social network tools.

Key Features:
Integrated into Federal Agencies points of contacts
FBI
EPA
GAO
CDC
Custom integration with user employers
Fully integrated with Social Media (Facebook, Twitter)
Multiple menus and data fields
View FBI Most Wanted
Simple graphical user interface



Uses:
Enable citizens to record and communicate:
National Security, Suspicious activities, Crime
Government Waste
Environmental Crime or possible violations
White collar crime
Workplace harassment, discrimination, or other violations
Public Health concerns
PatriotApp encourages active citizen participation in the War on Terror and in protecting their families and surrounding communities.

Love Always
mudra

RULES
By Jim Kirwan
12-22-10

Sounds very official doesn't it. It sounds like 'order' and reeks of Authority, but it is also at the core of killing 'freedoms' wherever they exist. I thought about calling this a Q & A, because I used to think this fight was about asking Questions and the need for transparency, for actual-responsibility and truth. But I overlooked this five-letter word that has 'ruled' over almost everything that has been done since people began to record whatever they might be thinking about - and in almost every case the ending of freedoms have been the result.

Yesterday the FCC decided that the freedom available on the net just had to have some 'RULES' because 'everything must have rules.' That would have been fine, if what they had suggested had been very little, very specific, and very limited. But they won't be. Government could fck up a steel ball, and frequently does. In this case it wants rules' so that it can introduce charges, fees, penalties, fines and above all special-privileges for the same people that want to own the world. There will be contracts, fine print, and lawyers, lawyers, lawyers: That is not Freedom-and this must be rejected! The FCC is "concerned" about the theft of copyright privileges. (1)

If that were true they would SHUT DOWN FACEBOOK in a flash; because FACEBOOK steals copywritten material as a matter of course: It's actually a key component in their business-plan, and the government has not done anything about it. I'm just pissed because a project I spent over thirty years on and one hell of a lot of money, was stolen because someone other than me chose to put most of it up on FACEBOOK ­ and since none of our intrepid legal eagles will challenge the mighty FACEBOOK in court; my two meager copyrights on that work mean absolutely nothing at all because FACEBOOK now owns everything about it. Of course I'm just one of millions which this has already happened to which is why it matters. But: It takes a lot of money to file charges-which is another reason that the rich rule the world.

So, in the case of FACEBOOK; stealing other-people's copywritten material is just part of doing business; (the RULES again) and because FACEBOOK is part of the inner-workings of USI, no crime has been committed. I wonder: Will the new RULES apply to FACEBOOK as well? Of course not ­ because FACEBOOK is still intrinsic to the government's side of things, or at least they have been since this slovenly site that caters to banality 'began.' FACEBOOK doesn't give a damn about 'people, or privacy or ownership unless it's theirs.' Ordinary people? To FACEBOOK, they're just road-kill on the way to making even more money.

What the new ruling will do in the real world is that it will utterly destroy on-line small businesses that cannot compete with AT&T, Microsoft, or any of the other Behemoths-of-Business that will now own the net, outright, from inside USI. I'm using AT&T here because they have seen to it, that they have at least one lobbyist for every member of congress; and they are only one of those that bought this new 'RULE' that has yet to be fleshed-out for the rest of us. That's why three out of five men, on a government committee decided that there must be RULES ­ because freedom cannot be allowed to exist in the USI, unless of course it comes directly from them; to whomever they shall exempt from 'The Rules.'

When I began thinking about RULES I remembered things that I had forgotten about all those years ago, long before I got entangled with this Tar-Baby of Public-Criminality. I've worked for myself for most of my existence, so I've had a lot of time to think about things that most don't have the time to consider.

RULES are something that fearful people need to assure themselves that what they are doing is "correct." But they can also be deadly and lead directly to false-interpretations when they take no account of the wider issues which 'these same rules' often frustrate. For instance many times a day now you hear the phrase: "I'm just doing my job." This is usually invoked without the corollary ­ "And what exactly is your job?" If you are a cop or a manager, or some form of an official; this statement can very quickly become a slippery slope. For anyone with life & death hanging from their hips, "just doing my job" might well involve killing people; often the wrong people. How can that be rationalized, when the "mistake" has turned out to equal the death of someone that did not need to die?

For managers and corporate executives, postal workers and day laborers the terms which 'the rules' lay down can be very different, depending on why the rules were created in the first place. In healthcare for instance there are prohibitions against things that when seen as stand-alone issues are often seen as threats to the overall health of the public. But when looked at in terms of the actual life-situations which such 'potential threats to health' have to be balanced against, such as, what the current situation is in the rest of your life: Smoking and drinking are examples.

If you work for a criminal corporation and most of them now are criminally structured, the stress levels of frustration & anger can frequently go off-the-charts. This fact is the reason for behavior patterns before and after work, where people try and protect themselves from 'losing it" on the job. The corporations and the health-insurers maintain that smoking drives up the costs of their health insurance: and lowers the productivity of their workforce. Interestingly these harsh rules do not apply to the executives in whose offices one can find a full bar, and an assortment of powders and pills, that they can use whenever they feel the need. Yet many corporations now demand that workers who smoke must stop altogether: "you cannot smoke at work, at home or anytime, if you do, you will be fired!"

NOTE: both smoking and drinking are legal. Cigarettes and alcohol can be openly purchased if you are over 21, yet the use of these items, when they are used in moderation, has been regulated beyond the scope of any reality. The reasons for "regulations" in this case involves not just the substance itself but the taxes, fines and fees which each of these 'products' brings in to the government as a way to "permit" anyone to have the appearance of the same rights as everyone else-provided these less-than-stellar individuals are willing to pay more for what they freely chose to use, to obtain some degree of respite from the corporate nightmare which this nation now is.

Government is not there to "Allow" us the things that we are responsible for in the end. Ironically when it comes to those other things like providing police protection, from both the criminals and the government-too often today they will not respond! That leaves the citizen to be responsible for their own real protection in life and death matters: And that ladies and gentlemen is what the Second Amendment is for!

Several things are missing from this government's zero-tolerance policies. First neither the company nor the health-insurer is willing to pay the employee to change their way of life. Second the corporation wants total control over their employees 24-7, 365 days in the year: Yet the company is only willing to pay employees for a very small fraction of all those hours which they are demanding total-control over. And perhaps most important is the fact that the real-reason for the poor health of employees could be the extremely toxic work-related-environments of corporate life itself? This is something that no health-insurer will ever cover in a potential patient-even though this is the common denominator that can easily be responsible for some of the habits, as a survival mechanism, against the outrage they experience daily ­ "on the job." In this case "just doing your job" could easily contribute vastly to killing you! This is too often what 'RULES' are all about.

In history 'RULES' have fared no better. During the Victorian Age, which this country is still trying to live in; everything that might have yielded any small pleasure to a working human being was OUTLAWED. In practice however the publicly-scorned 'pleasures' began to soar which in the end made a mockery of those straight-laced, uptight freaks of nature that tried to force their ideas of a "good life" onto every other person on the planet. Yet today even after 'prohibition' FAILED utterly, Amerikans still cling to the idea that everything that people do must be regulated or 'ruled-on' by the rest of society. This public-paranoia comes from a terror of "doing the wrong thing." It also comes from their very real fear of the naked human body, which is beautiful, all by itself.

Clothing was designed to cover-up the actual shape of us, it's why men so love their suits and ties ­ because they are afraid to let others see who they really are. It would help immensely if this country actually held more than one political-opinion. But officially this country has no no-political-oppostion party anywhere in sight, and holding only one opinion is as dangerous as eating the same meal every day for the rest of your life - because not taking advantage of real choices will also kill you in the end.

What most people have never realized is that from the moment we are born into this world, we are being coerced into conforming to whatever the norm is; within that particular place where we were born. But if 'conformity' is the only thing that matters then no questions can ever be asked, of anyone about anything - and if that had been the only thing that happened we'd all still be living in caves. Talented people, and every one of us is born with hundreds of talents, tend to have most of that kicked out of them by the time they reach seven years of age - simply because those talents threaten their norms.

'Governments govern best who govern least,' someone else said. But it's oh so true. Every government that I can remember going back to Truman always said that government was too big, or as Ronnie put it "We have to get government off our backs." Yet in practice the government has gotten bigger and bigger and BIGGER until today it has become a totally unmanageable monster. And as for the DEBT which government creates and then we get to pick up the tab for: This practice of DEBT-DRIVEN-RULE came from none other than Ronald Reagan; he who spoke so often of that "shining city on the hill." Without bothering to mention that his "vision" necessitated the total elimination of the middle-class and of all our rights as well as the end of the Constitutional form of government - but everyone so loved Ronnie that they never even glanced at what he was really doing when he took us from the world's greatest CREDITOR nation to the Worlds' leading DEBTOR nation in just eight years!

What Bush & Obamanation have done is to take us completely out of the Universe in terms of money figures that exceed the entire money supply currently in existence today. No one can pay back the Quadrillions that the corporations and the NWO have laid upon our backs: The answer to that problem is just to give it back to them! These DEBTS are theirs, not ours. They will have to go bankrupt and all that funny-money will just disappear ­ and we will have freed ourselves from this monetary Tar-Baby one more time!

If people lived authentic lives then there would be no fear of everything that the world "might" do to you - because to be free is the natural state of all of life itself: When you are free you can very easily understand the need to balance your freedoms with those of other people and the world. Every other 'animal' save man at least understands the need to protect its own life. It's automatic in the freedom of living your life - that when threatened with death or imprisonment life tends to fight or flee: unless you're a brain-dead Amerikan who actually tries to negotiate their way out of every real danger.

Being controlled by a company, a religion, or a government is not the answer to anything; because that is the direct opposite of what it means to actually be alive. Humans are the only animals to have developed a rule-book; and it has killed every society in the end; because each and every time these excessive RULES have always been used and abused to the benefit of only the owners and to the detriment of those that made them wealthy.

The old United States killed itself with regulations long before we began to see even the shadow of either the New World Order or USI. That was also by design. Look at today's fashions (for women) that are derived from torture and domination, dark fantasies of sexual transgressions and excess, meant to lure the gullible into the thoughts of sexual submission and self-degradation in the name of lust alone. Look at computer games, look anywhere; whether it's film or magazines, or what's left of the rudder - less newspapers that have shrunk themselves into nothing more than Tabloid gossip - while the world is about to go up in flames.

All of this comes to us by design from the Zionistas of Israel and from the sewers beneath the White House, the 'city' of London and the Vatican; just to name the most obvious. In each and every case their very first sleepers and counter-insurgents have always USED the RULES to restrain the society before they begin to murder it outright: IF Amerika sits still for this prior-restraint of a born-free-internet: then it is over people; because you will have capitulated to your worst fears about the insecurity of yourselves ­ on every level.

There's one other curiosity that few have even wondered about; but it is of major importance here. Why do men, especially corporate men, all politicians, and anyone that "wants to be taken seriously" still wear neckties? The reason is simple. It signifies their agreement to be RULED by the owners of this society. So the next time you see an Obama, in whatever form he is assuming today ­ he is a changeling afterall just ask yourself: Who is this jerk subservient to; because he sure as hell is not serving me or this country. The answer is that he is serving the same master that now wants to bring RULES to the internet - even though that will mean the end of all the real possibilities that the web has brought to the wider-world, to small business on the net, and it will lead to total domination by the same criminals that have taken over everything else already.

Of course I have to mention that these new rules will also put an end to people like me, something that some will do doubt cheer for. But there are others as well: Others that whether you know it or not, you will definitely miss because your life will be the poorer for the lack of your ability to read or listen to them every day. Not to mention that there will be NO MORE actual NEWS FROM OVERSEAS ­ so your life will be confined to a thoroughly CONTROLLED 'lifeboat Amerika' and even the thought of that is unthinkable!

kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net

1) FCC Approves Controversial Net Neutrality Regulations
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/fcc-controversial-net-neutrality-rules/

BACKGROUND: Ending Freedom on the Internet
http://www.kirwanesque.com/politics/articles/2010/art148.htm

SOURCE: http://www.rense.com/general92/rules.htm

Britain's Police State: London arrests based on CCTV identification. - Britain adopts Chinese model of policing protest?
by Nathan Allonby
21-12-2010

CCTV has led to large scale arrests, following the recent student protests in London, over increased tuition fees. A total of over 180 people have been arrested, with the majority identified by CCTV.

The current arrests very much represent a landmark - we are now equipped for the Chinese approach to public order, in almost a complete reversal previous British policing.

The power of the new system is based on the ability to track down individuals at leisure. However, this ability could be used as easily to track anyone, in “political policing” of lawful democratic activity.

More than 180 people have been arrested by police investigating rioting during the series of protests against rising student tuition fees.

Senior officers said the vast majority of the 182 suspects were aged between 17 and 25 and have never been involved in violence or criminal acts before.

Detective Chief Superintendent Matt Horne, who is leading the inquiry, said he expects the figure to grow considerably as 80 officers comb through video footage.

Speaking at New Scotland Yard… he said the inquiry could take months to complete. … "What struck me is the number of people arrested who did not go that day with necessarily any intention of committing any violent action."
(Evening Standard, London)

Police had been criticised for their handling of the protests, particularly the tactic of “kettling“, where large groups - hundreds - of demonstrators were confined for several hours and not allowed to leave until late at night. It was argued that this tactic actually caused violence, and punished many who had done nothing wrong. Similar criticisms were made when this tactic was used at the G20 protests in London last year.

Here is the contrast: - previously, almost all the arrests would have taken place at the scene, to remove trouble-makers from the fray, to de-escalate the situation, not afterwards, to “settle scores“. Now, everything has changed.

The combination of these two new tactics - containment and surveillance - has parallels with handling of large disturbances by Chinese authorities: - rather than attempt to make arrests at the scene, the police merely contain the disturbance to limit any damage; CCTV photography is used to identify individuals within the crowd, who are then arrested later, at their homes.

The use of CCTV in China, to identify protestors, dates from at least 1989 : -
[Box 3:] "Neutral" Technology at Tiananmen Square

Following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the Chinese authorities tortured and interrogated thousands of people in an attempt to identify the demonstration’s organizers. But even if the students and workers had resisted the terrors of the secret police, the hapless demonstrators stood little chance of anonymity. Stationed throughout Tiananmen Square is a network of UK manufactured surveillance cameras, designed to monitor traffic flows and regulate congestion. These cameras recorded everything that transpired in the months leading up to the tanks rolling into the square.

In the days that followed, these images were repeatedly broadcast over Chinese state television. Virtually all the transgressors were identified in this way. Siemens Plessey, which manufactured and exported the cameras, and the World Bank, who paid for their installation, claim they never had any idea that their "technologically neutral" equipment would be used in this way. However, in 1995 the World Bank authorized the funds to set up the same traffic flow system in Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region. Lhasa is not, as yet, known for having problems with traffic congestion; besides, the area in which the traffic flow system is in operation is solely for pedestrians. (56)

Is it valid to make a comparison between Britain and China? After all, the people arrested in Britain allegedly were involved in violent disorder and British government is not going to torture them.

On the other hand, the model of policing has sharply diverged from traditional “policing by consent”, with scenes such as police horse-charging protestors and dragging a disabled man from his wheelchair. Something has to have gone wrong when police arrest, not determined trouble-makers but, large numbers of young people who “have never been involved in violence or criminal acts before” and “who did not go… with… any intention of committing any violent action”.

The techniques of surveillance and identification employed here could just as easily be used to identify lawful political activists, leaving a quiet meeting. There is the manpower to do this - by comparison with the current 80-man search, Britain already has a permanent police unit of 100 staff, looking full-time for “extremists“. Extremism is a term also applied to peaceful, lawful protest.

In the near future, identification is likely to be much faster and less labour-intensive, due to new CCTV technology, scheduled for implementation. Not just in Britain - New York plans soon to overtake London in CCTV technology.

There are very strong European dimensions to these events - the European wave of austerity programmes and protests, the European sponsorship of new surveillance technology and what may be an emergent European style of policing political dissent, with an EU manual on policing public order. We can see common tactics in policing, for example, kettling - penning-up large numbers of demonstrators - which was used at London was also seen at the Copenhagen Climate Summit, December 2009.

Identification
How have British police identified these 182 suspects in London - people mostly without a photo on file?

One way has been to post photographs on the news, as the Chinese did in 1989, but it appears the majority were identified by other means, because the number of photos released has been small compared with the number of arrests.

A second method the police announced was by searching websites and forums, “where activists might boast about their actions”.

It has not been disclosed how police have conducted this search, so this will inevitably be the subject of speculation. In theory, police could able to search social websites for photos matching suspects, using new facial recognition and semantic search technology. Facial recognition has made huge progress recently, largely overcoming problems with size of databases. Semantic search makes it possible to search on criteria other than text, for example, to search by image characteristics. The UK National CCTV Strategy discusses how the CCTV network may be used in conjunction with other databases to allow data-matching/mining and profiling; the same techniques can be applied to any database.

Facebook has recently added facial recognition to its features, to allow users to tag names to photos. Privacy on the Facebook scheme is opt-out, rather than opt-in, hence it is possible many people may be unaware of their participation in this new functionality. Other people may be completely unaware that there may be photos of them on the web, posted by others (e.g. group photos with friends) and tagged with their name. Although Facebook claim their tool is not suitable for site-wide trawling, the intelligence agencies have put significant resources into data-mining social network sites.

However, the most powerful tool to identify people is by tracking their movements, to a point where they can be identified, for example, by getting in a car (which can be identified by vehicle registration) or by getting on public transport (potentially to be identified by a travel pass). So that any camera can identify a vehicle, Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) facility is being added to town centre CCTV systems, not just traffic cameras, as part of the National CCTV Strategy (see p40). On public transport, the National CCTV Strategy, sought to integrate “Transport system cameras to travel cards“(p40), so that travellers identities could be established as they passed through barriers. Police tracking of travel cards is an established reality - in 2008, police obtained over 3000 individuals’ travel records from Oyster Card, Transport for London’s smart-card. OysterCard has been so successful, it is now being rolled out across the entire UK, for all public transport, as the integrated ticketing scheme.

Technology to track individuals from camera to camera, through a city’s CCTV network, has been available for over a decade and has been deployed widely. More recently, technology now allows police to track suspects by their clothing. This allows police to re-acquire suspects, if they are lost between camera sightings.

...Once the item to search for is selected - a Nike T-shirt worn during a shop robbery, for instance - the computer analyses it, pixel by pixel.

It then scans for matches in the police database and footage from other CCTV cameras in the area, and provides a list of search results to help identify and locate the suspect.

"We say to the machine, 'there's a Coke logo, go and find it'," says David McIntosh, of Omniperception. "The technology is like a bloodhound. You give it a smell and it will go off looking for it."

For example a camera might only have a clear of shot this fictional Nike-clad suspect from 150 yards away. Feed this image into the system, and it will recognise the outfit filmed from other angles and distances, even if partially obscured.

The best results are gleaned from giving the computer an image of a suspect, rather than feeding it "clean" brand logos.

Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, of the new London-based unit [Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) ] ... says the system could help track a suspect's movement before and after an offence. This may throw up footage of their face without hat or hood, or even where they live.
(How can CCTV spot suspects by clothing logos? BBC, 7 May 2008)

The power of his technology is its ability to trawl through vast amounts of data, generated by extensive camera networks, or to piece-together fragmented information, which may have been assembled from numerous sources. This is important considering that the majority of the 500,000 CCTV cameras in London are not yet networked, and police have to search laboriously through recordings - for example, private CCTV systems in shops and cameras on buses. (However, it is likely that many of these cameras may become networked within the decade). It is easy to see that without machine-searching, it would be impractical to access and organise this huge amount of data.

Number of cameras, ease of access
Many quoted numbers of CCTV cameras in Britain can be misleading. Yes, there are a lot of cameras, but in London, only few of tens of thousands of these can be accessed easily by police, which would make the rest relatively useless for routine political surveillance. Those cameras that have live-networked access vary in ease of data-retrieval. Despite this, the London CCTV network provides formidable coverage, particularly on trains and the London Underground.

There had been a sustained programme to upgrade the system, under the National CCTV Strategy. This appeared to be threatened by the pledges of the new government, elected this year, but now, it seems likely that the recent disturbances will guarantee the upgrade goes ahead. The London Olympics in 2012 are also expected to prompt major upgrades of police and surveillance systems.

Although there is an official estimate of 500,000 CCTV cameras accessible by police in London, the vast majority of these can only be accessed by requesting recordings.

In 2007, there were 10,524 local authority CCTV cameras in 32 London boroughs - but the figure today may be significantly greater - these are all networked live-feed public cameras. Additionally, there are currently 12,000 cameras on the London Underground network, plus Transport for London has 900 traffic cameras, to which the police also have networked live access.

These are still large numbers - about four times the number used by NYPD and transit.

At the present time, cameras on London buses are not networked live - however, there are “60,000 recordable CCTV cameras operating on the 8,000 London buses”, and the police make “650 requests every month for images”. Several other British cities, do have live-feed CCTV on buses, which can be accessed not only by central commend but also by mobile officers, on hand-held viewers. This seems likely to come to London by 2012.

Images obtained from private cameras are important. Police announced that photographs of suspects have been obtained from the private CCTV systems of shops along the route of the march. There is a voluntary registration scheme for privately-owned CCTV systems, so that the police may obtain recordings when required. As part of new proposals for regulation of CCTV, this registration is expected to become compulsory. As part of the controversial “Internet Eyes” monitoring scheme, many shops are beginning to link their CCTV systems to the internet. It is easy to see how this could evolve into live-access to the authorities.

At present, the London CCTV network still suffers from a heritage of piecemeal construction, ... In London, video from cameras is transmitted via a system comprised of several separate networks and storage points based on London's police districts and borough maps. Although CCTV pictures are also stored in London for 30 days, they are harder to retrieve on an urgent basis because of the decentralized design of the storage and transmission system, making it more time-consuming and logistically awkward to screen and assemble video chronologies in cases where trails cross network boundaries.
(Mark Hosenball, Newsweek, 13 May 2010)

London also had to shut-down some cameras, to enforce standardised digital formats.

The CCTV network in London is still evolving and still very piecemeal - the price of being a pioneer. This is why it has taken as many as 80 officers to track down 180 suspects. It won’t be nearly so difficult in future. We can be fairly certain that, by the Olympics in 2012, the network will be much more streamlined and automated. There has been a sustained programme to create this, as part of the National CCTV Strategy. Reportedly, under an initiative called 3Ci (Command, Control, Communication and Information) access and control has now been consolidated centrally. It is believed that now, any of London’s networked CCTV cameras can be accessed and “driven” from any one of three “Special Operations Centres”. Several similar regional CCTV centres have now become operational throughout the UK.

Other cities, like New York, are intending to learn from London and will soon install up-to-date, efficient systems, free of the London system‘s limitations.

Is this about crime?
In numerous studies, CCTV has been found to have a very low effect in reducing crime.

CCTV represents a radical departure from the approach of traditional policing. The methodology of observation and recording is that of the secret policeman, not that used in tackling real crime. Perhaps that’s why CCTV has had so little impact on crime, yet has been so effective at arresting demonstrators.

According to this report: the London CCTV system is mainly useful for reconstructing crimes or incidents after they happen—rather than preventing them—people familiar with British security measures say that the camera system is gradually being used more extensively for intelligence-gathering and surveillance by undercover agencies like Special Branch, the political policing arm of Scotland Yard, and MI5, Britain's clandestine domestic intelligence service…
(Mark Hosenball, Newsweek)

If CCTV does not deter crime, does it help solve crime, and catch criminals? In London, CCTV does not seem to have helped much, finding the perpetrators of real crime, such as robbery and violence.

Only one crime is solved a year for every 1,000 CCTV cameras, police admitted …

Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said: '£500million has been spent by the Government on cameras. Despite this, in 2008 less than 1,000 crimes were solved using CCTV …'

He said that of the 269 robberies reported in one month only eight were solved with the help of CCTV footage. …

Detectives are thought to be reluctant to scour hours of recorded footage 'because it's hard work'.
(CCTV helps solve just ONE crime per 1,000 as officers fail to use film as evidence. Matthew Hickley, Daily Mail 25th August 2009)

In parallel with this new-found investment in technology, policing in Britain has been moving away towards something more remote and detached. Town-centre police stations, where the public could go to report a crime, a lost dog or whatever, have been closing down, to relocate out-of-town, to large “patrol bases” in business parks, which are closed to the public. It sounds like beat-policemen, community contacts and the human touch are seen as a thing of the past.

Where next?
The big problem with CCTV has always been a shortage of people, to watch the cameras, or to sift through recordings. All this is set to change with radical artificial intelligence (AI) systems currently under development by the European Union (EU). Now, machines will be able to watch the cameras, spot crime or aberrant behaviour, alert officers to the scene, track (and identify) the suspect, and collect the relevant video clips into a file, together with any other relevant information from other feeds.

HERMES, INDECT and ADABTS are AI suites aiming for deployment in 2012-3. They will be capable of analysing multiple different types of data-streams, identifying events and assembling a file with a commentary.

According to the EU website, the HERMES system will be capable of recognising events such as robberies or violence, and can “not only detect events in real time as they are filmed by surveillance cameras but also describe them semantically and react to them intelligently. It operates at three levels: tracking the movement of people and objects; monitoring the behaviour of people; and, in the case of high-resolution footage taken at close quarters, detecting changes in facial expression.”

HERMES is also designed to automatically search for and correlate other data, from other sources, such as multiple alternative camera positions or other identification systems.

ADABTS is intended to recognise "suspicious behaviour" so [this] can be automatically detected using CCTV and other surveillance methods. The system would analyse the pitch of people's voices, the way their bodies move and track individuals within crowds.
(How the EU is Watching You, Open Europe, 2009 (p24))

ADABTS is being developed by a consortium including arms company BAe Systems and the Swedish Defence Research Agency.

INDECT is aimed at surveillance in a different sphere - it will enable,
“continuous and automatic monitoring of public resources such as: web sites, discussion forums, usenet groups, file servers, p2p [peer-to-peer] networks as well as individual computer systems, building an internet-based intelligence gathering system, both active and passive [with the aim of] automatic … recognition of abnormal behaviour or violence"

Tom Burghardt described INDECT as a system for “profiling internet dissent” INDECT had emerged from strategies in Europe and the CIA to data-mine information about political opposition, from social networks and related sources.

What these official descriptions above do not mention is that, to do their job, these systems have to lead to the automatic machine-identification of individuals. It is not hard to see how the ability to track individuals and access “multi-media data streams” will make this possible. It is also easy to see how the ability to identify individuals combined with the ability to assemble data in organised files, with notes, could construct personal dossiers on the movements and contacts of any individual. This would be a gift for the surveillance and control of legitimate political activity.

In 2007, a European Union working group presented a proposal called the ”Digital Tsunami“, to track and record the lives of every individual. This was described by Tony Bunyan of Statewatch: "Every object the individual uses, every transaction they make and almost everywhere they go will create a detailed digital record. This will generate a wealth of information for public security organisations", leading to behaviour being predicted and assessed by "machines" (their term) which will issue orders to officers on the spot. The proposal presages the mass gathering of personal data on travel, bank details, mobile phone locations, health records, internet usage, criminal records however minor, fingerprints and digital pictures that can be data-mined and applied to different scenario – boarding a plane, behaviour on the Tube or taking part in a protest.
(‘The surveillance society is an EU-wide issue’, Tony Bunyan, 28 May 2009, The Guardian)

Officially, this proposal was never adopted as policy. In practice, every measure within it has been adopted, under the new name “Digital Agenda“. Worryingly, this dovetails with a new, authoritarian approach in the “Stockholm Programme” on security, justice and home affairs.

CCTV becomes much more powerful in this role when combined with complimentary tracking technologies, such as the RFID chips (Radio-Frequency Identification), which have been inserted into ID cards around the world. Bank cards too increasingly incorporate RFID. In several European countries, bank cards have taken on the function of ID cards - called eID (or “electronic signatures“), issued in collaboration with the national population register, via “commercial certification authorities“, they are recognised for accessing public services. As mobile phones are becoming used for payment, these too are being registered within the same system. This international eID registration system has come about to enable electronic payment, and has been organised by a UN agency, UNCITRAL. This has become another branch of a global population register.

Technologies exist to locate and identify the position of all RFID tags within the view of a CCTV camera. Integration is becoming simpler and more affordable, with commercial solutions available.

Since opening in 2007, all passengers at Heathrow, Terminal 5 have been tracked and managed by a combination of RFID and facial recognition CCTV. The system was developed by the European Union as “The INtelligent Airport” project (TINA). Normally at airports, domestic and international passengers would be carefully segregated, for security, but at Terminal 5 they are allowed to mix in one departure lounge, controlled by ubiquitous surveillance. Effectively, passengers are tracked by RFID and facial recognition CCTV is used to verify, to a high degree of accuracy, that the subject is the authorised holder. The system can also identify anyone not carrying an RFID pass, and recognise a pass dropped on the floor. The system can also recognise the RFID in passengers’ passports, which are the same as RFID in national ID cards, both standardised by the ICAO. This surveillance system is trusted to provide the same level of security as physical segregation. Facial recognition is now a proven, mature technology.

The European Union is investing heavily in promoting RFID and a system for tracking RFID, called the Internet of Things (IoT). Every tagged object will have its own webpage, with the web-address being its RFID serial number. Every time an RFID tag is scanned, the webpage will be updated with the time and location. Designed to track goods in the supply chain, corporations realised that this could also track customers after purchase, to produce marketing information. This scanning and logging will become frequent and pervasive, as RFID scanners replace anti-theft portals at shop entrances, and all will be networked into the Internet of Things.

It is easy to see how the Internet of Things could potentially dovetail with intelligent CCTV and AI systems to enable ubiquitous surveillance.

Conclusion
The real threat comes not from CCTV but from its application to identifying citizens, then tracking and recording their lives. This phase of CCTV is only just beginning, but will be heavily upon us, very soon.

We can get a glimpse of this in China, as described by Naomi Klein: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras … Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.
(China's All-Seeing Eye Naomi Klein, May 14th, 2008, Rolling Stone)

Authors such as Naomi Klein and Greg Walton have pointed out the role of the West in supplying this surveillance technology to China. Our governments have shown no moral scruples and far too much interest in this convenient field-trial of repression.

If we can’t trust the morality or ethics of our governments, can we really trust them with the enormous power they are assembling?

(For more information on surveillance cameras visit the No CCTV website at www.no-cctv.org.uk )

Nathan Allonby is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

SOURCE: http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22478

William Pawelec interview by Steven Greer .

"Mr William Pawelec gave this interview with Dr. Greer prior to the 2001 National Press Club disclosure event . He asked that it not be released until after his death .
Mr William Pawelec passed away on May 22 , 2007 and we received permission to release it in December 2010 "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yytSNQ2ogD4&feature=player_embedded


The bottom line is that billion of chips used for tracking people have been produced decades ago and are in use ....
A lot of info in this interview that matches what we already know and even the possibility that A.I. is alive and well ....

Thanks Trancoso . I am still not confident with embedding video . Cheers

Invisible Truths
By Jim Kirwan
12-23-10

In my world everything is personal. But in the world of Amerrika-today it seems that almost nothing is ever taken personally. There are many reasons for this spirit-crushing fact; but the bottom line is that if you continue to fail to take what is going on 'personally' then all of this will end with the surrender of this place without any resistance whatsoever.

Where I came from I learned that in this life you get pushed-around for just as long, as you don't learn how to push back. I also learned very early on that no one else can ever promise you an absolute-guarantee of anything: Especially not something as nebulous as being perfectly-protected from every possible threat. That phrase is especially true of weapons-addicted governments that care not about the very people they are suppose to be "protecting."

The reason that this government chose "terror and terrorism" as their next big target in a world that had just successfully ended the Cold War was that those nebulous terms cannot actually ever be clearly defined-hence anything and everything must always be done to protect you from "it," or "them." (1)

This was the reason that the world did not did get that Peace-Dividend that we were promised, if the Cold War ever ended. But it did END, and all we got was a brand new boogey-man that doesn't even have a country, a military or even any clearly defined goals; all the better to threaten the public with, and virtually impossible to deny because "every person both here and abroad is a potential terrorist." Except of course for the people that created the terror in the first place who are the same people that have put themselves in-charge of catching the "real-terrorists." Cute huh!

Here's another little foot-note that very few have bothered to track. About the same time as most Amerrikans were leaning how to duck-&-cover, in absolute terror of the atom bombs that were supposed to be coming-to-America in the 50's: There was another move afoot to segregate the population, to mitigate integration and to divide the country into the haves and the have-nots. It was innocuously called "The Burbs." Because living in the Burbs does not involve daily interaction between "neighbors, as a rule; in fact quite the opposite is true.

You can live next to others for years and have very little contact, because the car is King and conversations can be suspect. Travel back to the hated cities is necessary "for work" but between the hundreds of hours wasted in commuting and the distances that everyone must traverse between work and home, or home and recreation etc.: So much valuable time is wasted that very few even notice how much of their lives have been stolen just to live in the Burbs; so that when they finally get somewhere they aren't interested in what others are doing and the nearly invisible walls succeed in doing what the police-state could never do-which is to isolate communities and individuals from each other, and from society as well. The plan was to "sell" this idea to people as "the good life" and people actually paid to isolate themselves from their former communities, thus making it far easier to sell the public on anything as massively-scary as "TERRORISM."

The Burbanites have their guns and their Barbeque pits, their back-yard gardens and of course a car for every adult-member of the household: But they also have a lot of stuff to support and almost no time to enjoy any of it. Those still in the filthy and moldering cities can at least enjoy their diversions because they are usually close-by, or maybe just a cab-ride away. Inner-city dwellers have no need of cars (they can rent when necessary) because for most things there is public transportation or you can just walk to where you want to go. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars saved-immediately. Of course there are trade-offs, lots of them, wherever you chose to live. But this was a masterstroke of the police-state before they even had their coming-out party back in 2001.

The kinds of "TERROR" that the Burbanites fear most are heightened because of what they "have" as well as just how far away they might well be from any congested areas. The selling point for buying out-there was in fact all that distance from the evil cities, fresh air, good schools, the best of everything it was said: But now we see that the air has been poisoned, the water contaminated, and the even the soil is becoming dead or hostile to growing anything that is eatable. Also because the money moved to the Burbs; crime followed where the money went.

Years after the dream-home was purchased the owners woke one day to discover that paradise was NOT what it was cracked up to be. Crime had followed them home, even into the gated communities; and "life" was actually very stilted and very much sub-compartmentalized-down to and including regulations and Home-Owners-Associations that are now virtual self-appointed police-states of their own; so much for escaping the evils of city-life. But hey! You've got your piece of the good-life; right? How would I know about any of this? Because I was one of the first home-designers of these colonies that were devoted to the Generation-of-the-Self. I watched while buyers demanded that book shelves give way to more floor-to-ceiling glass, and libraries were dropped to make room for family rooms that were usually never used for families because the members were almost always scattered to other places (of necessity).

Lots of changes in the way people in the 50's and 60's lived; and how that was converted into the sterility of the 70's and the 80's where the nature of the "developments" began to more and more resemble the prison-complexes of the future, rather than the neighborhoods in the cities they had fled from. Look around at where you live-how secure do you really think you are in those distant Burbs with a land value that is worth far less today than what you have left to pay on the mortgage-and do you really believe that was just an accident?

No, that practice goes hand in glove with all those massive corporations that have a tendency to fire people just before they reach retirement-to avoid paying them for what they paid into. That happened across the country while I was in the military; and it left behind a whole lot of disillusioned people. At the same time this was mirrored in the military that was dumping their thirty-year 'lifers' (left-over's from WWII) just to keep from paying them for their services. This little corporate game has been going on since Corporations acquired the same status as human beings, but without any of the responsibilities that you and I are responsible for.

The end result of all this tinkering with the invisible mechanics of society was to assist in the weakening of the whole country. The conversion of people from a people-based society to a consumer-focused-herd of mindless morons that seem to spend their lives racing from one acquisition to the next; while never even having the time to play with whatever was last-years "must-have" possession.

This worked wonderfully well for the Corporations and the Police-state dreamers; but it was a disaster for the society that needed to have diverse people and lots of diverse interests living close together and working with each other instead of competing with everyone else on the planet-including their next-door neighbors. Think about it ­ because all of this was part of the spider's web that you now find yourself almost totally imprisoned in! These programs did not have specific names but if they had chosen to call it anything it should been named: Divide & Conquer!

I would suggest that the next time you find yourself threatened by some gorillas in rent-a-cop Kevlar, with no visible badge, name or number: That you begin to push back. These creatures are not supermen or superwomen they're just people underneath all that garbage that makes them feel like Robocops. They need to answer our questions before they do anything else. Something like this might help to get you started.

"Your Papers please! Who are you and why have you stopped me? I'm a citizen and I have a right to be here. Your papers and your authorizing credentials ­ now!" Here's what one woman did when she refused to be treated like meat-because she had legitimate reasons to refuse TSA's primitive methods. (2)

Instead of whipping out a cell-phone whenever you find yourself witnessing one of their illegal stops and seizures of other people; Why not grab a few others that are also watching and begin to gather-round the confrontation. Keep the cameras rolling but do something to end that illegal stop and search because the people doing the search have no idea what they are looking for; they're just there to intimidate a random person or persons. The last thing in the world that cops want to see now is a crowd that outnumbers them: A crowd that demands that they justify THEIR presence on the scene. A crowd that is writing down license places, taking photographs and calling others to join-in?

Many may find this idea discomforting, but know this: Every single thing that is being done to us today by the Police-State is VERY PERSONAL because it is about Life & Death, and that's just about as personal as it ever gets, especially in this country that is totally afraid of even our own shadows.

These creatures, whether it's at TSA or whenever VIPER comes to call are all acting outside the laws of this country, Their Superior's and Department heads are WAR Criminals already, and worse; so if you do not resist in some way then what they will continue to do to everyone of us will only increase in its severity until there will no longer be any freedom of movement left, anywhere within this country.

Don't you realize that when they molest you or your children at the airport or at the checkpoints that are coming; that that is a criminal act? Their reason for doing this is based on a "bomber" that had a firecracker in his shorts-a firecracker that did not even destroy the shorts; the FBI has shown them to the world, and then mandated that everyone must have their private parts searched by hand or by a full body scanner ­ to detect evidence of a bomb!

Do you know how completely STUPID this idea is or how UNLIKELY it is that anyone would ever have enough of anything in their underwear to actually blow up an airliner?

On the other hand if the same amount of money (that was used to buy the scanners from the former head of Homeland Security) was used to investigate the FBI-to find out just how it was that so many traitors managed to get into this government and into the key offices of government at every level of the last two administrations ­ that information is critical and necessary to solving the mystery of how this nation became compromised and is now totally subservient to Zionist Israel. This is a million times more important than this bullshit that Holder continues to spout, on "the existence" of supposed terrorists.

It was the FBI's JOB to find and block the appointments of people whose first loyalty was not to theUSA. They failed, just like they FAILED; before, on, and after 911 to prevent anything from continuing to kill people for an hour and forty-five minutes.

The FBI is not our friend or savior: The FBI is part of this grand plan to shut down American life as we have known it and they need to be investigated thoroughly; along with their leader; the traitor Eric Holder, that is the current Attorney General who has consistently FAILED to do anything about the massive criminalities or the war
Crimes that this government has continued committing since 911.

When Eric is finished with finding and firing those responsible for this actual security lapse; then he can "talk about the terror threat" that he and his boss have been pushing as if it was important. Until then Eric Holder needs to just "DO HIS JOB" and leave the retelling of fairy tales to others. (1)

kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net

1) Attorney General's Blunt Warning on Terror Attacks
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/attorney-general-eric-holders-blunt-warning-terror-attacks/story?id=124
44727&tqkw=&tqshow=GMA&tqkw=&tqshow=GMA&tqkw=&tqshow=GMA

2) Woman arrested at ABIA after refusing enhanced pat down
http://www.kvue.com/news/local/Woman-arrested-at-ABIA-after-refusing-enhanced-pat-down-112354199.html

SOURCE: http://www.rense.com/general92/defsc.htm

Well if the net goes down its back to books and snail mail if we're lucky. In our case it would be whale male.

TRANCOSO wrote:William Pawelec Interview

EXCELLENT!

Big Brother USA: Monitoring America
by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin
28-12-2010

Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.

Other democracies - Britain and Israel, to name two - are well acquainted with such domestic security measures. But for the United States, the sum of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny.

This localized intelligence apparatus is part of a larger Top Secret America created since the attacks. In July, The Washington Post described an alternative geography of the United States, one that has grown so large, unwieldy and secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or how many programs exist within it.

Today's story, along with related material on The Post's Web site, examines how Top Secret America plays out at the local level. It describes a web of 4,058 federal, state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions. At least 935 of these organizations have been created since the 2001 attacks or became involved in counterterrorism for the first time after 9/11.

(Search our database for your state to find a detailed profile of counterterrorism efforts in your community. http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22529 )

The months-long investigation, based on nearly 100 interviews and 1,000 documents, found that:
* Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.

* The FBI is building a database with the names and certain personal information, such as employment history, of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents whom a local police officer or a fellow citizen believed to be acting suspiciously. It is accessible to an increasing number of local law enforcement and military criminal investigators, increasing concerns that it could somehow end up in the public domain.

* Seeking to learn more about Islam and terrorism, some law enforcement agencies have hired as trainers self-described experts whose extremist views on Islam and terrorism are considered inaccurate and counterproductive by the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies.

* The Department of Homeland Security sends its state and local partners intelligence reports with little meaningful guidance, and state reports have sometimes inappropriately reported on lawful meetings.

Counterterrorism on Main Street In cities across Tennessee and across the nation local agencies are using sophisticated equipment and techniques to keep an eye out for terrorist threats - and to watch Americans in the process.Launch Gallery » The need to identify U.S.-born or naturalized citizens who are planning violent attacks is more urgent than ever, U.S. intelligence officials say. This month's FBI sting operation involving a Baltimore construction worker whoallegedly planned to bomb a Maryland military recruiting station is the latest example. It followed a similar arrest of a Somali-born naturalized U.S. citizen allegedly seeking to detonate a bomb near a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore. There have been nearly two dozen other cases just this year.

"The old view that 'if we fight the terrorists abroad, we won't have to fight them here' is just that - the old view," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told police and firefighters recently.

The Obama administration heralds this local approach as a much-needed evolution in the way the country confronts terrorism.

Top Secret America is a project two years in the making that describes the huge security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Today’s story is about those efforts at the local level, including law enforcement and homeland security agencies in every state and thousands of communities. View previous stories,explore relationships between government organizations and the types of work being done, and view top-secret geography on aninteractive map. However, just as at the federal level, the effectiveness of these programs, as well as their cost, is difficult to determine. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, does not know how much money it spends each year on what are known as state fusion centers, which bring together and analyze information from various agencies within a state.

The total cost of the localized system is also hard to gauge. The DHS has given $31 billion in grants since 2003 to state and local governments for homeland security and to improve their ability to find and protect against terrorists, including $3.8 billion in 2010. At least four other federal departments also contribute to local efforts. But the bulk of the spending every year comes from state and local budgets that are too disparately recorded to aggregate into an overall total.

The Post findings paint a picture of a country at a crossroads, where long-standing privacy principles are under challenge by these new efforts to keep the nation safe.

The public face of this pivotal effort is Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona, which years ago built one of the strongest state intelligence organizations outside of New York to try to stop illegal immigration and drug importation.

Napolitano has taken her 'See Something, Say Something' campaign far beyond the traffic signs that ask drivers coming into the nation's capital for 'Terror Tips' and to 'Report Suspicious Activity'.

She recently enlisted the help of Wal-Mart, Amtrak, major sports leagues, hotel chains and metro riders. In her speeches, she compares the undertaking to the Cold War fight against communists.

"This represents a shift for our country," she told New York City police officers and firefighters on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary this fall. "In a sense, this harkens back to when we drew on the tradition of civil defense and preparedness that predated today's concerns."

Source: http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22529

Killer Robots Are Here…Really
Posted by John J. Xenakis Dec 28th 2010

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.081ed8ef951580bf2ea69716935b211d.921&show_article=1

In 2005, the Department of Defense announced the Future Combat System program.

(See “Army’s ‘Future Combat System’ calls for autonomous robot soldiers by 2014.”)

The plan was that a network of intelligent battlefield robots, including aircraft, ground vehicles, and units that look like toy trucks, would replace the duties of ordinary soldiers, and would have the ability to kill. However, at least initially, the robots would not be making autonomous decisions to kill, and humans would have to approve any killing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMkV8E2re9U&feature=player_embedded


Other countries took up the concept. The above is the scariest video you’ve ever seen. It’s a 2007 promotional video for heavily armed robot sentries being considered by the South Koreans to guard the North Korean border. The robot would have the ability to detect intruders, give verbal warnings, interpret voiced responses, and fire if necessary.

The project was canceled in 2008, after a a year-long pilot showed that the robots were “unfit for combat,” according to Global Security. However, Stars and Stripes reports that a new generation of the robots are now being tested along the North Korean border.

In 2009, development of DoD’s Future Combat Systems was terminated because it was substantially over budget and wasn’t showing results. Some of the individual components, including unattended ground sensors, were spun off and are still under development.

This is the way artificial intelligence has gone since its inception. In the 1950s, it was promised that computer algorithms would be developed that would make a computer the world chess champion within ten years. By 1970, computer chess could only play as well as a mediocre human player.

It’s only in the last few years that IBM’s Deep Blue computer could credibly claim to be world champion. Is that because IBM’s scientists finally developed those clever algorithms that were promised in the 1950s? Hardly. In fact, IBM’s winning computers used pretty much exactly the same algorithms (the so-called Minimax Algorithm) that was used in the 1960s.

The only major change from the 1960s is that today’s computers are much faster and more powerful. A 1960s computer could look ahead only three chess moves; today’s computers can look ahead almost ten moves in the same amount of time.

Love Always
mudra

Breaking GSM With a $15 Phone … Plus Smarts
By John Borland Email Author
December 28, 2010 |

Whatever assurances have been given about the security of GSM cellphone calls, forget about them now.

Speaking at the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) Congress here Tuesday, a pair of researchers demonstrated a start-to-finish means of eavesdropping on encrypted GSM cellphone calls and text messages, using only four sub-$15 telephones as network “sniffers,” a laptop computer and a variety of open source software.

While such capabilities have long been available to law enforcement with the resources to buy a powerful network-sniffing device for more than $50,000 (remember The Wire?), the pieced-together hack takes advantage of security flaws and shortcuts in the GSM network operators’ technology and operations to put the power within the reach of almost any motivated tech-savvy programmer.

“GSM is insecure, the more so as more is known about GSM,” said Security Research Labs researcher Karsten Nohl. “It’s pretty much like computers on the net in the 1990s, when people didn’t understand security well.”

Several of the individual pieces of this GSM hack have been displayed before. The ability to decrypt GSM’s 64-bit A5/1 encryption was demonstrated last year at this same event, for instance. However, network operators then responded that the difficulty of finding a specific phone, and of picking the correct encrypted radio signal out of the air, made the theoretical decryption danger minimal at best.

Naturally this sounded like a challenge.

Working the audience through each step of the process, Nohl and OsmocomBB project programmer Sylvain Munaut demonstrated how the way in which GSM networks exchange subscriber location data, in order to correctly route phone calls and SMSs, allows anyone to determine a subscriber’s current location with a simple internet query, to the level of city or general rural area.

Once a phone is narrowed down to a specific city, a potential attacker can drive through the area, sending the target phone “silent” or “broken” SMS messages that do not show up on the phone. By sniffing to each bay station’s traffic, listening for the delivery of the message and the response of the target phone at the correct time, the location of the target phone can be more precisely identified.

To create a network sniffer, the researchers replaced the firmware of a simple Motorola GSM phone with their own alternative, which allowed them to retain the raw data received from the cell network, and examine more of the cellphone network space than a single phone ordinarily monitors. Upgrading the USB connection allowed this information to be sent in real time to a computer.

By sniffing the network while sending a target phone an SMS, they were able to determine precisely which random network ID number belonged to the target. This gave them the ability to identify which of the myriad streams of information they wanted to record from the network.

All that was left was decrypting the information. Not a trivial problem, but made possible by the way operator networks exchange system information with their phones.

As part of this background communication, GSM networks send out strings of identifying information, as well as essentially empty “Are you there?” messages. Empty space in these messages is filled with buffer bytes. Although a new GSM standard was put in place several years ago to turn these buffers into random bytes, they in fact remain largely identical today, under a much older standard.

This allows the researchers to predict with a high degree of probability the plain-text content of these encrypted system messages. This, combined with a two-terabyte table of precomputed encryption keys (a so-called rainbow table), allows a cracking program to discover the secret key to the session’s encryption in about 20 seconds.

This is particularly useful, the researchers said, because many if not most GSM operators reuse these session keys for several successive communications, allowing a key extracted from a test SMS to be used again to record the next telephone call.

“There is one key used for communication between the operators and the SIM card that is very well protected, because that protects their monetary interest,” Nohl said. “The other key is less well protected, because it only protects your private data.”

The researchers demonstrated this process, using their software to sniff the headers being used by a phone, extract and crack a session-encryption key, and then use this to decrypt and record a live GSM call between two phones in no more than a few minutes.

Much of this vulnerability could be addressed relatively easily, Nohl said. Operators could make sure that their network routing information was not so simply available through the internet. They could implement the randomization of padding bytes in the system information exchange, making the encryption harder to break. They could certainly avoid recycling encryption keys between successive calls and SMSs.

Nor is it enough to imagine that modern phones, using 3G networks, are shielded from these problems. Many operators reserve much of their 3G bandwidth for internet traffic, while shunting voice and SMS off to the older GSM network.

Nohl elicited a laugh from the audience of hackers when he called the reprogrammed network-sniffing phones “GSM debugging devices.” But he was serious, he said.

“This is all a 20-year-old infrastructure, with lots of private data and not a lot of security,” he said. “We want you to help phones go through the same kind of evolutionary steps that computers did in the 1990s.”

SOURCE: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/breaking-gsm-with-a-15-phone-plus-smarts/

Breaking GSM With a $15 Phone … Plus Smarts LoL

The thing is in the UK anyway with all of these ridiculous "security" and surveillance measures, the hysteria, the their massive costs, their invasiveness, their omnipresence, the whole industry, the fact that the uber echelons are not looking for a lot of the real terrorists like themselves, the bankers and 9/11 domestic dudes and MI6 jerks who knocked off Dr. David Kelly, their utter waste of human ingenuity, is something I read in an expat UK weekly recently. (The Telegraph) They also happen to not work. I found the article online here-

Anti-terrorism convictions fall 90% in four years

Terror convictions plummet - 7:00AM GMT 26 Nov 2010
The number of people convicted under counter terror laws has plummeted by 90 per cent in just four years raising fresh questions over their effectiveness.

Terror charges for suspects have also fallen by almost 80 per cent over the same period, Home Office figures show.

The decline will further fuel concerns that the raft of counterterror measures brought in by the last Government were unnecessary and a knee-jerk reaction to events.

It emerged last month that not a single person stopped and searched under anti-terror laws last year was then arrested for suspected terror offences despite police using the power more than 100,000 times.

A total of 12 suspects were charged under counter terror laws in 2009/10 compared with 54 in 2006/07.

Of those, only five were prosecuted and three convicted, compared with 47 prosecutions and 32 convictions in 2006/07.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8160214/Terror-convictions-plummet.html

I think by now Bran that many of us realize the whole terror movement was just a means to step up the Globalist One World agenda of massive surveillance on human kind in general and prepare them for invasive manipulation by the dark forces that control government. We are the cattle unless we choose to dissent en masse as there are far more of us then them.

Carol wrote:I think by now Bran that many of us realize the whole terror movement was just a means to step up the Globalist One World agenda of massive surveillance on human kind in general and prepare them for invasive manipulation by the dark forces that control government. We are the cattle unless we choose to dissent en masse as there are far more of us then them.

That's why TPTB are in such a hurry to complete the last stage of their 'Control' legislation.

There is a little blip in their plan.
But I can't tell you until next week.

Internet very large-scale spying machine
According to Cryptome co-founder John Young the "Internet (is) a very large-scale spying machine." Cryptome.org was publishing classified and secret documents long before WikiLeaks made headlines. Cryptome co-founder John Young told RT such sites are allowed to stay online so that spy services might keep an eye on their visitors.

“In terms of their being able to see everything that we are doing, we know that we cannot keep any secrets about our site and we tell our readers, ‘You should not expect us to protect you, because we are being watched and every other site is being watched, just like WikiLeaks is being watched,’” he said. “There’s no secrecy on the Internet – that’s the lesson we’ve learned and we are now trying to spread that.”

“They [the security services] use our site to see what’s going on and that’s something that we’ve learned about sites like ours. They are left in place in order to watch who comes there and see what kind of information we’ve put up,” John Young added. “The reason we haven’t been shut down is that we are useful to them to see what kind of attention is paid to this material. We think they actually feed us material to put up as they are feeding information to WikiLeaks and many other sites that operate the same way.”

(Visit the link for the full news article + video interview with John Young)

www.rt.com/news/cryptome-classified-secret-wikileaks/

I've always assumed that anything that is on the net can be viewed by someone else. With that in mind, one's life is an open book.

Almost Everything Is A Crime In America Now: 14 Of The Most Ridiculous Things That Americans Are Being Arrested For
12-28-2010

Doesn’t it seem like almost everything is becoming a crime in America now? Americans are being arrested and charged with crimes for doing things like leaving dog poop on the ground, opening up Christmas presents early, not recycling properly, farting in class and having brown lawns. But is it healthy for our society for the police to be involved in such silly things? Every single day the United States inches closer to becoming a totalitarian society.

While there are some that would welcome this shift, the truth is that throughout history the societies that have experienced the greatest economic prosperity have all had at least a certain level of freedom. Business thrives when people feel free to live and work. When a government tightens the grip too much many people just start shutting down. Just look at places like North Korea. Even though the rest of the world is sending them huge amounts of food starvation is still quite common in that totalitarian regime.

That is why it is so disturbing that it seems like almost everything has become a crime in America now. As we continue to criminalize relatively normal behavior our slide toward becoming a totalitarian state will only accelerate.

We are throwing anyone and everyone in prison these days. It is getting absolutely ridiculous. Today, the United States leads the world in the number of prisoners and in the percentage of the population in prison. The United States has 5% of the world’s population, but approximately 25% of the world’s incarcerated population.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, as of the end of 2009 a total of 7,225,800 people were either on probation, in prison or on parole in America.

That is a sign of a very, very sick society. Either we have a massive crime problem or the “control grid” that our leaders have erected for us is wildly out of control.

Or both.

But how in the world are we supposed to have a healthy economy if our entire nation is being turned into one gigantic prison?

Sadly, it is not just hardcore criminals that are being rounded up and abused by authorities these days. The following are 14 of the most ridiculous things that Americans are being arrested for….

read on: http://blacklistednews.com/Almost-Everything-Is-A-Crime-In-America-Now%3A-14-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Things-That-Americans-Are-Being-Arrested-For/12071/0/0/0/Y/M.html

Love from me
mudra

WikiLeaks Disclosures Increase Net Control Efforts - Concern at governments' moves to control web

WikiLeaks' seemingly unstoppable stream of disclosures has intensified efforts by governments to exert more control over information and the complex technology underpinning its availability on the internet. From the UN to the self-governing body overseeing web addresses, countries are working to assert more authority, with some success.

The developments concern technologists who view the internet as the ultimate democratic, ungovernable force. While China and other authoritarian regimes have long imposed more information controls than western governments, they are finding new support from the US and others enraged by the posting of classified diplomatic cables and unrelated hacking attacks.

"This momentum toward securitisation is helping legitimise and pave the way for greater government involvement in cyberspace," the founders of OpenNet Initiative, a research body, wrote recently in a journal affiliated with the US National Endowment for Democracy.

The motivations and approaches taken by countries vary, and not all would extend across borders. But even in international forums that have historically taken a hands-off approach to internet governance, some states have gained significant ground in the past few weeks.

US politicians publicly railed against companies that provided a variety of services to WikiLeaks, which has not been accused of violating any laws. Some of the companies, including those processing donations and one in charge of steering web surfers to the whistleblower group's flagship site, dropped the outfit as a client.

Obama administration officials say they did not put pressure on such companies to cut ties with WikiLeaks, but the administration's high-profile deliberations about legal action against the group and Julian Assange, its founder, sent a message of its own.

Such rhetoric and responses have alarmed advocates of internet openness, although they are also concerned by Anonymous, the amorphous vigilante group, which orchestrated a series of crude hacking attacks on companies that disowned WikiLeaks.

The Internet Society, home to a central standards-setting body called the Internet Engineering Task Force, wrote that "free expression should not be restricted by governmental or private controls over computer hardware or software, telecommunications infrastructure, or other essential components of the internet".

Official US complaints helped to delay the ex-pected debut of many more web address endings such as .com and .net, known as top-level domains. The Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers, the non-profit organisation that oversees the domain name process, had been expected to approve a plan allowing the sale of names ending in .hotel, .vacation and variants. Big companies were concerned they would have to register scores of new websites to protect their brands from squatters. They complained to the US commerce department, which wrote a public letter to Icann. Icann backed down, saying it would meet a committee made up of more than 100 countries to hear their views.

Last week, a UN body pressed ahead with plans to convene a governmental group to advise it on how to restructure the Internet Governance Forum, a UN panel that has not had any power to set rules for the internet.

The UN action has drawn fire from Icann and Vint Cerf, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG - news) 's chief internet evangelist. "This structure that seems to have been settled upon really takes away the participatory strength of the non-government stakeholders. If they move to the mode that is proposed, that's the first step in trying to create a governance organisation that takes actions - and while I can understand the appeal, especially for some governments, I don't think it bodes well," Mr Cerf said.

Western governments, meanwhile, have learnt from the WikiLeaks episode just how difficult it can be to contain a website. Even when sites are closed, others can spring up to take their place.

Additional reporting: Daniel Dombey in Washington

SOURCE: http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/Concern-governments-moves-ftimes-2121610292.html?x=0

Careful what you put on face book also. Personally I don't use it.