Facebook can now instantly identify your face out of its half a billion users worldwide.  Facebook is using this technology for its new “Tag Suggestions” feature.  The idea is that facial recognition technology will speed up the process of tagging friends and family in photos that have been posted on Facebook.

That sounds harmless enough, but the problem is that facial recognition technology has been automatically enabled for millions upon millions of Facebook users but they were never even told that the new technology would be automatically enabled on their accounts.

The following excerpt is from the blog post where Facebook officially announced this change…..

Because photos are such an important part of Facebook, we want to be sure you know exactly how tag suggestions work: When you or a friend upload new photos, we use face recognition software—similar to that found in many photo editing tools—to match your new photos to other photos you’re tagged in. We group similar photos together and, whenever possible, suggest the name of the friend in the photos.

So exactly how does this new technology function?

A recent Computerworld article explained exactly how this is going to work….

Facebook noted that starting in just a few weeks, its system will scan all photos posted to Facebook and will offer up the names of the people who appear in the frame. All of Facebook’s users are automatically being added to the database.

The facial recognition feature is automatically turned on. Users who don’t want the service must go in and manually opt out of it

So if anyone has ever posted a picture of you to Facebook, the company can now instantly identify you through the use of facial recognition technology.

That sounds a little creepy, doesn’t it?

Sadly, Facebook doesn’t seem to have much regard for our privacy these days.  Senior technology consultant Graham Cluley had the following to say about this recent change….

“Yet again, it feels like Facebook is eroding the online privacy of its users by stealth”

So what if you don’t want facial recognition technology enabled for your Facebook account?

Well, you have to manually go in and disable it.

The following video explains exactly how to opt out of the new “facial recognition” technology on Facebook….

But let’s not dump all of the blame on Facebook here.  The truth is that Google’s Picasa and Apple’s iPhoto also use facial recognition technology.

These kinds of “Big Brother” technologies are spreading and are becoming a part of the very fabric of the world in which we live.

Every single day a few more shreds of our privacy are stripped away.

Sometimes it is the government that is doing it.  Other times it is corporations that are doing it.

Either way, we are becoming more exposed all the time.

Increasingly, nearly everything that we do is being watched, tracked, traced, monitored, surveilled or controlled in some way.

For much more on how our world is slowly but surely being transformed into a “control grid”, I encourage you to check out some of the previous articles I have done on this topic….

1) “18 Signs That Life In U.S. Public Schools Is Now Essentially Equivalent To Life In U.S. Prisons”

2) “32 Signs That The Entire World Is Being Transformed Into A Futuristic Big Brother Prison Grid”

3) “Cell Phone Surveillance: Some Cell Phones Record Your Location Hundreds Of Times A Day”

4) “10 Examples That Should Convince Anyone That We No Longer Live In The Land Of The Free And The Home Of The Brave”

If we do not stand up for privacy now, eventually we will have none left.

If we continue on the road that we are currently on, a day will come when everything we buy, everything we sell and everywhere we go will be very tightly tracked and controlled.

At some point we may have very few decisions left that are truly are own.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to end up living in some bizarre, futuristic version of George Orwell’s “1984″.

The facial recognition technology being used by Facebook is not going to change the world, but it is another small step towards a world where none of us have any privacy left.

Called the Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2011 (PDF), the bill would create a “universal legal obligation” for companies to honor users’ opt-out requests on the Internet and mobile devices, and would give the Federal Trade Commission the power to take action against companies that don’t comply.

“Recent reports of privacy invasions have made it imperative that we do more to put consumers in the driver’s seat when it comes to their personal information,” Rockefeller said in a statement. “I believe consumers have a right to decide whether their information can be collected and used online. This bill offers a simple, straightforward way for people to stop companies from tracking their movements online.”

According to the bill, the FTC would be tasked with coming up with standards for companies to implement within a year of the bill being signed into law. After a user makes a request to stop being tracked, the companies in question would only be able to continue collecting certain information on customers if it’s absolutely necessary in order for the site or service to function. That information must still be anonymized or destroyed after its usefulness expires, and the user must still give explicit consent for the information to be used that way.

Companies that violate the guidelines will have to answer to the FTC and state attorneys general—these groups will be able to pursue violators with civil penalties, and the FTC would be able to take it a step further by pursuing them under the FTC Act. The FTC would even be able to go after nonprofits for Do Not Track violations, despite those groups being generally exempt under the FTC Act.

Positive reaction from privacy groups

Privacy groups seem impressed with the bill, pointing out that the FTC has a good deal of flexibility in tailoring a persistent opt-out mechanism. “This legislation would give Americans the right and the right tools to browse the Internet without their every click being tracked,” Consumer Protection director Susan Grant said on a call to discuss the bill after it was introduced. Chris Calabrese from the ACLU agreed, describing the bill as “a crucial civil liberties protection for the twenty-first century.” Privacy Rights Clearinghouse founder Beth Givens said she was “very pleased” that Rockefeller introduced the bill, describing it as an “important step in the right direction.”

The reaction from these groups is markedly different than their reaction to the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011 introduced by Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ) last month. There are a number of differences between the two bills—the Kerry and McCain bill does not have any provisions for a Do Not Track mechanism, and gives the Commerce Department more power than privacy advocates are comfortable with.

“It is important to note that the Commerce Department—as it should—primarily seeks to promote the interests of business. It is not, nor should it be expected to be, the primary protector of consumers’ interests,” Consumer Watchdog, the Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Action, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and Privacy Times wrote in a letter following the introduction of Kerry and McCain’s bill. “Commerce, therefore, must not have the lead role in online privacy.”

Of course, the final details for how companies are supposed to comply with the guidelines of Rockefeller’s bill have yet to be hammered out, but the privacy groups seemed optimistic that the FTC could handle the burden. After all, the FTC itself has been pushing for a Do Not Track mechanism online since 2010, and the Obama administration has voiced its support for some kind of “consumer privacy bill of rights.” Also, three of the four major browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari) either already support or will soon support Do Not Track opt-out headers originally developed by Mozilla, giving the FTC an easier launching point.

“This is a moment whose time has come,” said Consumer Watchdog’s Jamie Court.

Richard Fisher, head of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, explains what it’s all about:

The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we’re getting together to discuss.

The National Academy of Sciences framed the problem two years ago in a landmark report entitled “Severe Space Weather Events—Societal and Economic Impacts.” It noted how people of the 21st-century rely on high-tech systems for the basics of daily life. Smart power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications can all be knocked out by intense solar activity. A century-class solar storm, the Academy warned, could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina.

Much of the damage can be mitigated if managers know a storm is coming. Putting satellites in ‘safe mode’ and disconnecting transformers can protect these assets from damaging electrical surges. Preventative action, however, requires accurate forecasting—a job that has been assigned to NOAA.

“Space weather forecasting is still in its infancy, but we’re making rapid progress,” says Thomas Bogdan, director of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado.

Bogdan sees the collaboration between NASA and NOAA as key. “NASA’s fleet of heliophysics research spacecraft provides us with up-to-the-minute information about what’s happening on the sun. They are an important complement to our own GOES and POES satellites, which focus more on the near-Earth environment.”

Among dozens of NASA spacecraft, he notes three of special significance: STEREO, SDO and ACE.

STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) is a pair of spacecraft stationed on opposite sides of the sun with a combined view of 90% of the stellar surface. In the past, active sunspots could hide out on the sun’s farside, invisible from Earth, and then suddenly emerge over the limb spitting flares and CMEs. STEREO makes such surprise attacks impossible.

SDO (the Solar Dynamics Observatory) is the newest addition to NASA’s fleet. Just launched in February, it is able to photograph solar active regions with unprecedented spectral, temporal and spatial resolution. Researchers can now study eruptions in exquisite detail, raising hopes that they will learn how flares work and how to predict them. SDO also monitors the sun’s extreme UV output, which controls the response of Earth’s atmosphere to solar variability.

Bogdan’s favorite NASA satellite, however, is an old one: the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) launched in 1997. “Where would we be without it?” he wonders. ACE is a solar wind monitor. It sits upstream between the sun and Earth, detecting solar wind gusts, billion-ton CMEs, and radiation storms as much as 30 minutes before they hit our planet.

“ACE is our best early warning system,” says Bogdan. “It allows us to notify utility and satellite operators when a storm is about to hit.”

NASA spacecraft were not originally intended for operational forecasting—”but it turns out that our data have practical economic and civil uses,” notes Fisher. “This is a good example of space science supporting modern society.”

2010 marks the 4th year in a row that policymakers, researchers, legislators and reporters have gathered in Washington DC to share ideas about space weather. This year, forum organizers plan to sharpen the focus on critical infrastructure protection. The ultimate goal is to improve the nation’s ability to prepare, mitigate, and respond to potentially devastating space weather events.

“I believe we’re on the threshold of a new era in which space weather can be as influential in our daily lives as ordinary terrestrial weather.” Fisher concludes. “We take this very seriously indeed.”

For more information about the meeting, please visit the Space Weather Enterprise Forum home page at http://www.nswp.gov/swef/swef_2010.html.

Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY) and John Cornyn (R-TX) joined forces and announced a new bill that would require an ID at the point of sale. Phone companies would need to keep this information on file in order to help police track “terrorists, drug lords and gang members,” along with the occasional hedge fund manager.

“In 2009,” said the Schumer/Cornyn announcement, “[prepaid cell phones] were even used by hedge fund managers and Wall Street executives implicated in the largest insider trading bust in US history. In court papers, federal prosecutors detailed how traders from the Galleon Group hedge fund communicated with other executives through prepaid phones in order to try to evade potential wiretaps. In one instance, one suspect is described as having chewed the Subscriber Identity Module, or SIM card, until it snapped in half in order to destroy possible evidence.”

“We caught a break in catching the Times Square terrorist, but usually a prepaid cell phone is a dead end for law enforcement. There’s no reason why it should still be this easy for terror plotters to cover their tracks,” said Schumer.

Prepaid phones can be bought over the counter in many different stores, from big-box retailers to gas stations, and many can be activated without credit checks or ID.

Some countries have already forbidden this sort of anonymous use. The Canadian government funded a study on this question back in 2006. A team from Simon Fraser University looked at 24 OECD countries and found that nine of them require mobile operators to collect registration data for prepaid phone users.

“In all cases, the rationale for a prepaid registration requirement was to improve efficiency of law enforcement and national security activities,” said the report.

US states have followed suit; similar laws have been introduced in Texas, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Georgia and South Carolina, according to Schumer and Cornyn. But “in light of the increased reliance of terrorists on the devices,” the senators said, “it was time for a federal response.”

The explosive devices are made of pentaerythritol tetranitrate—also known as PETN—one of the most powerful explosives in existence. The surgeons performing the operations—reportedly trained in the United Kingdom—place the PETN devices inside bags, just like the ones used to hold the silicone gel inside breast implants. PETN is difficult to detonate, however, even while it’s more sensitive to shock and friction than TNT. It has an explosive energy of 5.810 kilojoules per gram, which means that an explosive cup C—with just a few grams of PETN inside—would be able to open a large hole in an airplane’s fuselage, effectively causing a crash.

Allegedly, MI5—who picked up the information from Middle East terrorist chatter following the failed crotchbomber attempt—has also pointed out that some men terrorist are getting PETN-based devices into their buttocks, using the same surgical procedure.

It sounds scary. It is scary. When they are inside clothing or bags, you can easily detect PETN using scanners or chemical test swabs. But the report says that these bombs would be almost impossible to detect when they are inside a body… unless you install human body scanners at airports.

And that’s when things get oddly convenient for some companies, pushing hard for the installation of not-so-effective airport body scanners. Just in the middle of the debate, which has rights and privacy watchers up in arms, here’s a report that says that the only way to stop these highly dangerous naughty bits are body scanners.

I don’t doubt that MI5′s intentions are good this time—even while they weren’t good at all back in the ramping up of misinformation before the Iraq invasion—but there’s something here that smells a bit fishy. [The Sun via Fox News and Wikipedia]

The proposal by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York) and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina) comes as the states are grappling to produce another national identification card at the behest of the Department of Homeland Security. Virtually none of the states are in compliance with this Real ID program — adopted in 2005 — requiring state motor vehicle bureaus to obtain and internally scan and store personal information like Social Security cards and birth certificates for a national database.

Now comes a bid for a second card.

Homeland Security officials pointed to the Sept. 11 hijackers’ ability to get driver’s licenses in Virginia using false information as justification for the proposed $24 billion Real ID program. Schumer and Graham point to illegal immigration as cause for their plan.

“We would require all U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who want jobs to obtain a high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security card. Each card’s unique biometric identifier would be stored only on the card; no government database would house everyone’s information,” they said. “The cards would not contain any private information, medical information or tracking devices. The card would be a high-tech version of the Social Security card that citizens already have.”

Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, suggests the plan would undoubtedly lead to a national database. He added that “there is no practical way of making a national identity document fraud-proof.”

What’s more, Richard Esguerra, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s in-house activist, notes that a national ID card likely would expand from its stated purpose.

“Because of the ID card’s proposed universality, it will likely be requested and required by airlines, insurance agencies, health care providers, mortgage lenders, credit card companies, and so forth,” he said.

And this so-called mission creep is no fantasy.

A recent and clear example of this is the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act. The 2007 law requires states to have statutes demanding sex-offender registration for those convicted of the non-sex-related offenses.

Graham and Schumer said they have discussed the immigration plan with President Barack Obama, but that apparently is as far it has gone. Regarding Real ID, beginning Jan. 1 the law was supposed to have blocked anybody from boarding a plane using their driver’s license as ID if their resident state did not comport with the Real ID program.

But the Department of Homeland Security extended the deadline for another year.

Last month RU-Center, Russia’s largest domain name registrar and web-hosting provider, was forced to shut down the domain of Torrents.ru, the country’s biggest torrent site with around 4 million users.

The grounds for the seizure was a breach of Article 146 of the Criminal Code – “Illegal use of objects of copyright or related rights, as well as acquisition, storage, transportation of counterfeit copies of works or phonograms for sale, committed on a large scale”.

Torrents.ru was quickly restored with a new domain, RUtracker, but this fight back has only spurred the authorities on to take even more aggressive action.

“The police will take action to stop the operation of file-sharing sites like torrents.ru and will fight with their creators,” said Economic Security deputy chief Lt. Gen. Victor Vasilyev from Moscow’s Ministry of Internal Affairs. “Our task is to stop those sites’ owners activities,” he told a press conference.

The existence of file-sharing networks is causing considerable damage to copyright holders, said Vasilyev, although he admitted that thus far the police campaign against them has returned limited success.

Vasilyev noted that many sites (including RUTracker) are registered outside the .RU domain which makes them more difficult to deal with. “But even if they are registered in the Russian Federation it is often really hard to establish the identity of the owner and make them liable,” he added.

Dreamtorrent Corp spokesperson (the creator of torrents.ru) Alexander Volkov believes that the police fight should work against the exchange of pirate material, not BitTorrent trackers. Volkov said this would avoid the risk of limiting users’ ability to share information which could constitute an encroachment on civil rights.

“If we are talking about limiting pirated materials, then authorities already do what they can,” Volkov added.

Nevertheless, it seems the police are already looking at this problem from two directions. Citing developments in Europe, the authorities believe that going after sites and holding users of those sites responsible for their actions is the way forward.

Nikolay Nazimok, head of Moscow police’s Economic Crime Department, says that since users of file-sharing networks like BitTorrent not only download but upload too, they effectively become part of a distribution network for counterfeit goods.

“The problem of file-sharing networks is becoming very acute,” Nazimok told a press conference yesterday. “They are a dangerous web that form a network of networks. By downloading movies from the resource, you become distributors of these products to other users,” he added.

Nazimok has proposed that illegal file-sharers should be treated in the same way as criminal counterfeiters.

The achievement could replace decades-old methods of generating electricity, such as combustion engines and turbines, the researchers say.

In the future, coated carbon nanotubes crafted from individual atoms could power everything from cell phones to hybrid-electric vehicles. The team envisions such nanotube-based power being available to consumers in the next five years.

Carbon nanotubes are thin sheets of carbon rolled up into teensy tubes each with a diameter about 30,000 times smaller than a strand of hair.

When carbon — one of the most abundant elements on Earth — is rolled up into tubes, it exhibits some extraordinary properties such as high heat conduction, which the team exploited in the new study.

A carbon firecracker

The researchers coated the nanotubes with a fuel, such as gasoline or ethanol, and applied heat to one end. The result: The fuel reacts and produces more heat, which ignites more fuel to create even more heat.

The process creates “a wave that travels like dominoes falling in a line [down the length of the nanotube],” said study team member Michael Strano, a chemical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The resulting heat wave, it turns out, also creates a wave of electrons moving in one direction — aka electricity.

“The thermal wave squeezes electrons out of the nanotubes like a tube of toothpaste,” Strano explained.

The devices built in the MIT lab produced 10 times more power than a lithium-ion battery of equivalent mass.

“What’s intriguing about these waves is that we haven’t really done any engineering to make them efficient yet and already they’re ten times [more powerful than] a lithium-ion battery,” Strano told TechNewsDaily. “We may be able to make very very small power sources out of them.”

Cell phone battery replacement

The fuel-coated nanotubes could replace batteries for cell phones and other devices. Strano imagines a device with a button that you would push to create heat from friction, triggering the electricity-generating reaction inside the microscopic tubes.

These power devices could be made 10 times smaller than today’s cell-phone batteries but still hold the same amount of power. Furthermore, unlike today’s batteries, the carbon nanotube variety would not contain any toxic metals.

With some tweaking, the carbon nanotubes could even power a car, Strano said. But instead of coating the carbon cylinders with fuel, a liquid fuel could be stored in the car’s gas tank and get injected onto the carbon nanotube battery when needed.

Strano said he was confident his team’s discovery could be translated into commercial batteries within a few years.

“We have a lot of engineering challenges that we have to overcome in order to make this a commercial device,” Strano said, “but nothing is as difficult as the initial discovery.”

Strano and his colleagues detail their discovery in the March 7 issue of the journal Nature Materials

© 2010 TechNewsDaily

Anticipating hordes of black-masked, Starbucks-smashing anarchists, the Pittsburgh police and the Secret Service coordinated nearly 4,000 law enforcement officers, outfitting them with the latest in riot-dispersal technology. Crowds marching on the summit were met with pepper spray, stun grenades, and—for the first time on US soil—acoustic cannons that blast painful sounds as far as 1,000 feet. But the protesters had their own crowd-control methods, and that’s what had brought the state troopers to the CareFree Inn.

What they found when they broke down the door were a couple of middle-aged housemates from Queens, New York. Elliott Madison sat at a desk with a laptop and a cell phone. A police scanner lay nearby. Michael Wallschlaeger was at the minifridge grabbing some hummus when the police rushed in. According to the criminal complaint filed against them, the two men had been “communicating with various protestors, and protest groups…[via] internet based communications, more commonly known as ‘Twitter’. The observed ‘Twitter’ communications were noted to be relevant to the direction of the movement of the Protestors…in order to avoid apprehension…”

Madison and Wallschlaeger were part of Tin Can Comms Collective, a “collection of communication rebels” made up of several individuals in various locations across Pittsburgh. Madison’s job was to verify information being sent in and then relay that to legal observers, street medics, and other organizers who could in turn tweet the information to the masses in the streets.

The raid occurred just as the protests were starting, but even as Madison and Wallschlaeger were arrested, the information flowed from the other tweeters without a blip. “A comms facility was raided, but we are still fully operational please continue to submit reports” stated one subsequent tweet.

The real-time updates were available to anyone who followed the feed, allowing protesters to see the theater of operations and add information to the picture. It was as if the demonstrators had gotten their own helicopter. Tin Can Comms sent out messages such as “SWAT teams rolling down 5th Ave towards Schenley” and “40 cops, w/ bus, headed towards friendship park.” The police knew they were being outflanked, but could do little against a decentralized foe: “SCANNER JUST SAID: BE ADVISED WE’RE BEING MONITORED BY ANARCHISTS THROUGH SCANNER,” noted one Tin Can tweet.

Madison and Wallschlaeger were charged with “criminal use of a communication facility,” “possessing instruments of crime,” and “hindering apprehension”—two felony counts and one misdemeanor.

With his long ponytail and goatee, Madison looks younger than his 42 years. A full-time social worker and self-proclaimed anarchist, he has long played support roles in protest movements, most often as a legal observer or a communications coordinator. He has no criminal record, but nevertheless had to post $30,000 in bail. Wallschlaeger, a 46-year-old host of a radio show called “This Week in Radical History,” had to post $5,000.

Madison calls the arrest an attempt to “stifle dissent” and says his actions were “perfectly legal.” His lawyer, Martin Stolar, calls them “absolutely protected speech.” Madison also points out the irony that last June the State Department asked Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance so as not to interrupt Iranian protesters tweeting from the barricades.

Tehran and Pittsburgh were not the first time social networking and mass texts were used to support a large-scale protest: At the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, thousands of protesters were organized by a mass-messaging program called TXTmob (pdf). This proved the new tools’ usefulness to both activists and police, and they adjusted their strategies accordingly. TXTmob is even credited as one of the programs that inspired Twitter’s inventors.

In Pittsburgh, the protesters’ Twitter stream continued through the end of the G20 summit, with noticeable results. By the time the tear gas cleared, only around 190 arrests had been made, far fewer than at previous protests in Seattle and New York. The media soon forgot about the story—but for the two arrestees, an ordeal that Madison describes as “Kafkaesque” was only beginning.

At around six in the morning a week after Madison and Wallschlaeger posted bail, a dozen NYPD officers and FBI agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) broke down the front and back doors of Madison’s home in Queens. Guns drawn, they smashed in bedroom doors, and Madison, Wallschlaeger, their housemates, and a guest were left handcuffed on a couch. With helicopters circling overhead, agents searched the house for 16 hours. “I asked to see the search warrant,” says Madison, “and they basically said, ‘Fuck you, you’ll see it when we give it to you.’”

Court records show the FBI seized hundreds of items, including computers, hard drives, cameras, a World War I-era gas mask, “anarchy books,” even an antique needlepoint of Lenin made by Madison’s wife’s grandmother. Several issues of Steampunk Magazine, where Madison writes under the pen name Professor Calamity, were also seized, as was a guide on poisons (which he says he uses in the writing of mystery novels), a Mao Tse-tung refrigerator magnet, and several Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs. A poster in the living room of anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin was left alone; “I guess they didn’t know who he was,” says Madison. At one point a hazmat team in full protective gear was brought in to investigate a jar of kombucha tea fermenting in the basement. Madison claims a JTTF agent shook his head and said, “You guys are just a bunch of hippies!”

The raid seemed to have an aimless quality. Madison was handed a ticket for a packet of fireworks, and an agent who put his hand into a suspected bag of marijuana discovered, painfully, that it was dried stinging nettles, used in homeopathy. “It was almost as if they thought, ‘If we take enough stuff, we’ll find something to charge them with,’” Madison says. When he was finally shown the cover sheet to the search warrant, it provided for the seizure of any items “designed or intended as a means of violating the federal rioting laws.”

The federal anti-riot statute—18 USC §2101—makes it a felony to engage in interstate travel to “organize, promote, encourage, participate in, or carry on a riot.” The statute is almost never invoked, but was used to indict the Chicago 7 for their organizing activities during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. That case was ultimately appealed and thrown out on other grounds, so the constitutionality of the anti-riot statute has never been challenged in the Supreme Court. Critics have long contended that it is vague, overbroad, and designed to suppress protest activity and free expression. Applied in the current context, “it starts to criminalize dissent, to conflate terrorism with demonstrations, and that’s a very, very dangerous notion,” says lawyer Stolar. “Essentially it’s prosecution for a thought crime.”

The fallout from the G20 protests has gotten curiouser and curiouser. In an unexpected move, the Pittsburgh charges against Madison and Wallschlaeger were summarily dismissed. A spokesman for the Allegheny County district attorney said that the defendants’ actions “may have been related to more expansive activities” and “that until further investigative activities by law enforcement agencies can be completed, it would be more prudent to have the current charges withdrawn.” Whatever the JTTF was up to, in other words, would remain secret, along with the sealed warrant that the Pennsylvania state troopers had used.

At around the same time, during an October hearing on the Queens raid, a prosecutor revealed that a federal grand jury had been convened to investigate protest activities. The affidavits containing the allegations that convinced a judge to approve the search of Madison’s house also remain sealed.

Federal and grand juries are conducted in utter secrecy and have enormous power. The old joke is that they can “indict a ham sandwich,” but if they turn up nothing, they can disappear with no public disclosure. Stolar doesn’t know of anyone who has been summoned, but given the course of events, “I would say they’re looking to go after what they consider to be hardcore demonstrators,” he says. “I have very little faith in government anyway,” says Madison, “but this is something I would have expected more under the Bush regime.” A spokesman for the US attorney for the Eastern District of New York declined to comment on the investigation.

Madison and his housemates are trying to get on with their lives, not knowing when, or if, the other shoe will drop. “Nothing could ever happen and we’ll never know why,” says Madison, sitting in the living room of his Queens home, the broken lock on the front door still unrepaired. “We’re anarchists,” he adds, “but that’s not illegal, and it’s actually a good thing. We’re not ashamed of it. Part of the thing with the government is to make you feel not only afraid but also ashamed. That’s just not going to work with me.”

Lower Merion School District officials would not comment on the accusation, but angry students have already responded by putting tape on their laptop cameras and microphones.

Sophomore Tom Halperin described students as “pretty disgusted,” and noted that his class recently read “1984,” the George Orwell classic that coined the term “Big Brother.”

“This is just bogus,” said Halperin, 15, of Wynnewood, as he left Harriton High School on Thursday with his taped-up computer. “I just think it’s really despicable that they have the ability to just watch me all the time.”

The school district can activate the webcams without students’ knowledge or permission, the suit said. Plaintiffs Michael and Holly Robbins suspect the cameras captured students and family members as they undressed and in other embarrassing situations, according to the suit.

Such actions would amount to potentially illegal electronic wiretapping, said Witold J. Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which is not involved in the case.

“School officials cannot, any more than police, enter into the home either electronically or physically without an invitation or a warrant,” Walczak said.

The school district could not immediately confirm whether it has the ability to activate the webcams remotely, a spokesman said.

“We can categorically state that we are and have always been committed to protecting the privacy of our students,” said the spokesman, Doug Young.

The affluent district prides itself on its technology initiatives, which include giving Apple laptops to each of the approximately 2,300 students at its two high schools.

“It is no accident that we arrived ahead of the curve; in Lower Merion, our responsibility is to lead,” Superintendent Christopher W. McGinley wrote on the district Web site. McGinley did not immediately return messages left Thursday by The Associated Press.

The Robbinses said they learned of the alleged webcam images when Lindy Matsko, an assistant principal at Harriton High School, told their son Blake that school officials thought he had engaged in improper behavior at home. The behavior was not specified in the suit.

“(Matsko) cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor plaintiff’s personal laptop issued by the school district,” the suit states. The behavior was not specified in the suit, which did not make clear whether the family had seen any photographs captured by school officials.

Matsko later confirmed to Michael Robbins that the school had the ability to activate the webcams remotely, according to the suit, which was filed Tuesday and which seeks class-action status.

The Robbinses declined to speak with an Associated Press reporter at their home Thursday. Their lawyer, Mark S. Haltzman, did not return messages.

The U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the privacy of the home when it ruled in 2001 that police could not, without a warrant, use thermal imaging equipment outside a home to see if heat lamps were being used inside to grow marijuana. Technology or no, Supreme Court precedents draw “a firm line at the entrance to the house,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, quoting an earlier case.

“This isn’t just them spying on the kids, this is them intruding on the parents’ home. Who knows what they are seeing?” Walczak said. “The courts for 80 years have said there’s no greater sanctuary than a person’s own home.”

The lawsuit’s allegations raise new concerns about school-issued laptops, said an Electronic Freedom Foundation lawyer.

“I’ve never heard of anything this egregious,” said Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney at the San Francisco-based group. “Nobody would have imagined that schools would peer into students private homes and even bedrooms without any kind of justification.

Students like Halperin say they mostly keep their computers in their bedrooms — and rarely turn them off.

“School ends at the end of the school property, so they shouldn’t really be in our business at home,” Halperin said.

The campaign was launched by the anti-Scientology group Anonymous in response to plans to implement a mandatory and wide-ranging internet filter modeled on that of the Communist Chinese government.

This is not the first time the group has attacked government websites, having launched a similar stunt last September.

“The main government website, www.australia.gov.au, and parliament’s www.aph.gov.au were both affected along with the sites for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy,” reports AFP.

“No one messes with our access to perfectly legal (or illegal) content for any reason,” said a statement released by the group.

The Australian government attacked the campaign as “not a legitimate form of political statement.”

Despite the Australian government promising that the Internet filter would only be used to block access to child pornography and other illegal websites, the watchdog group Electronic Frontiers Australia warned that the law will also allow the government to block any website it desires under vague definitions.

In March 2009, the Wikileaks website published a leaked secret list of sites slated to be blocked by Australia’s state-sponsored parental filter.

The list revealed that blacklisted sites included “online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.”

The filter will even block web-based games deemed unsuitable for anyone over the age of fifteen, according to the Australian government.

Calls to mandate Internet users to obtain licenses, in other words government permission, before they can post to the web have grown in recent weeks, with top Microsoft executive Craig Mundie insisting at the recent Davos Economic Forum that the Internet should be policed.

Within days, Time Magazine enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon to back Mundie’s proposal, as authorities push for a system even more stifling than in Communist China, where only people who have been approved by the authorities would be allowed to express free speech.

ISPs across the world, including in supposed democratic countries like the UK, the US and New Zealand, have periodically blocked access to Alex Jones’ websites without justification and only restored access after a barrage of complaints.

As we have highlighted before, although the merits of hacking as a form of protest can be debated, what seems certain to happen is that governments will launch a false flag cyber attack which will cause a major catastrophe that can then be blamed on the free Internet, acting as a pretext to tighten the screws on plans for centralized regulation and censorship which are already in place.

Source: Prison Planet

CNET has a great article up tracing out the history of the FBI’s call for data logs. From the article:

As far back as a 2006 speech, Mueller had called for data retention on the part of Internet providers, and emphasized the point two years later when explicitly asking Congress to enact a law making it mandatory. But it had not been clear before that the FBI was asking companies to begin to keep logs of what Web sites are visited, which few if any currently do.

One has to wonder how all of that information is going to be useful. If you’re trying to parse everything that an ISP’s customer has done over the course of two years, you’re going to end up in the territory of Excel spreadsheets that bring even the mightiest CPUs to a crawl.

Another concern is whether or not such a law for logging data explicitly for the purpose of federal investigation in some way violates the Constitution. For example, American citizens are entitled to an expectation of privacy. In my opinion, this if you’re just visiting a website in your home that doesn’t have any social features, this activity should be considered private. If, on the other hand, you’re on a site interacting with users, then you’re being less private.

Personally, any proposals for data logging set off my internal Orwellian sensors. The FBI argument will be that more data will allow for better policing of criminal activity, but that’s also the problem: all of the user data collected would be more or less for the purpose of prosecuting people. And the last thing we need in the US is more ways to put people in jail

source: The Next Web

The Obama administration got on board with an $8 billion infusion, and more cash is likely en route from Congress. It’s enough for Florida and Texas to dust off some previously abandoned plans and for urban clusters in the Northeast and Midwest to pursue some long-overdue upgrades. The nation’s test bed will almost certainly be California, which already has voter-approved funding and planning under way.

But getting up to speed requires more than just seed money. For trains to beat planes and automobiles, the hardware needs to really fly. Officials are pushing to deploy state-of-the-art rail rockets. Next stop: the future.

Read More: Wired Magazine

(Tech Crunch) After our earlier post on the Nexus One, there was a lot of debate surrounding how much the thing would cost. It appears that this information is out there now. According to some leaked documents sent to Gizmodo, the Nexus One will be $529.99 unlocked and $179.99 if you sign up for a two-year T-Mobile contract (which runs $79.99 a month). This information is not 100% confirmed, but it seems in line with earlier reports and common sense.

So what does this mean? Well, at first glance, it’s pretty standard, really. For example, you can buy an iPhone without having to sign up for a contract, but it will cost you $599 or $699 depending on the storage size of the device. With a contract, those models run $199 and $299, respectively. The difference is that those phones, and many of the others you can buy without a contract, are still carrier-locked. That means that even if you buy them without a monthly contract, you will eventually have to sign-up for some kind of plan through that carrier, if you plan to use that device. That is, unless you plan to manually unlock it, something which in most cases voids the warranty — if it works at all.

But Google is supposedly selling this $530 Nexus One completely unlocked. That means that you can use it with any carrier — provided that carrier is running a compatible GSM network, which the Nexus One is built to run on. In the U.S., that basically means the device will be able to run on T-Mobile or AT&T. Though given earlier leaked specs, it would seem that if you do run it on AT&T, it may only work with EDGE data, and not the faster 3G variety. In other words, the thing still is rather locked down. In order to use it to its full potential in the U.S., you’ll likely want to be using it with T-Mobile anyway. But that’s not so bad since T-Mobile offers pay-as-you go SIM cards, though they are not a great deal.

Still, the fact remains that this in an important moment in the mobile industry in the U.S. While unlocked phones are common abroad, they’re almost unheard of here where the carriers rule with an iron fist. The iPhone was able to break this domination somewhat, but they’re still only tied to one carrier (AT&T). Google directly selling an unlocked phone, even if it’s limited, is a big step in the right direction. As we noted earlier, the next step for them is to sell an unlocked device that is compatible with both GSM and CDMA networks, then things will really start to get interesting. And even if they don’t do that, in the next couple of years, the next generation LTE networks will come into play, and those promise a more unified mobile experience from a hardware perspective.

So yes, while it’s true that Google is unlikely to be selling a $530 phone in droves, its existence means something. It points to a future where the carriers don’t dominate the mobile scene with their ridiculous contracts and lock-in policies. And that’s a good thing.

via: Tech Crunch

Officers will activate the cameras, about the size of a Bluetooth device and attached by a headband above the ear, every time they respond or make contact with a person. At the end of the officer’s shift, the recording will be downloaded to a central server.

Chief Rob Davis said the devices, to be tested by 18 patrol officers, are a technological advance comparable to the advent of police cars, two-way radios and the 911 emergency system.

San Jose is the first major U.S. city to try out the devices, known as AXON.

The cost of the trial is being shouldered by maker Taser International of Scottsdale, Ariz. But if the trial leads to full-fledged use, equipping the entire 1,400-officer department will be expensive. At $1,700 per kit and a $99 per officer monthly fee, the system could cost $2,888 per officer in the first year, or $4 million.

Davis said he expected the price would decrease, and he hoped that the department would be able to find grants to defray the cost.

The kit includes a camera, a control piece and a computer that can hang from the belt. In the pilot project, officers have been directed to switch on the camera as they are about to contact a civilian. The cameras, equipped with an audio recorder, align with the officer’s vision, and can be later switched to standby mode.

Afterward, the officer can switch the camera to a “buffer” mode, where it still records limited segments of video, and a nonrecord mode. The officer may review the tape at any time, but it may not be erased. At the end of the shift, the device’s memory is downloaded onto a central server.

Davis said commanders will randomly review the tapes, to evaluate the system and to gather information that could help assess police policies and procedures.

Officers, he said, welcomed the devices.

“I used it this morning in making an arrest,” said officer William Doane, one of the AXON test pilots. “It verified what I saw.” In the two days of testing, he generally remembered to turn on the AXON before incidents, but sometimes forgot to turn it off afterward, he said. Overall, he said, “It’s a good system.”

The devices could provide evidence of crimes, timely information about suspects, help with police training and be a resource in investigations of complaints against police and deterrence of public misbehavior, Davis said. Critics, however, are interested in how the cameras might prevent police from overstepping bounds.

Over several months, groups representing Latinos, Asians and African-Americans have criticized San Jose police for too easily resorting to force. Per capita, San Jose police make more arrests for resisting arrest than does any other major California city, according to a Mercury News investigation.

Criticism spiked after police fatally shot a mentally ill man, Daniel Pham, in May and after a cell phone video showed officers apparently beating Phuong Ho, a San Jose State University student from Vietnam.

A detailed review by the Mercury News showed that San Jose police have repeatedly used force in incidents that began as seemingly benign situations. In response, Davis has formed a panel to review the department’s use of force.

In 2008, police received 117 use-of-force complaints, but said none of the complaints was justified.

Jayadev said he was concerned about who would have access to AXON tapes. Given the department’s reluctance to release evidence, such as 911 tapes, he said he fears the camera tapes might prove to be a tool for police but be denied to residents facing criminal charges or criticizing police conduct.

Davis said that the department will balance privacy concerns in making the camera footage available to the public.

Jayadev also pointed out that the trial of AXON mirrors the introduction of Tasers in 2004, soon after police killed a knife-wielding woman in her kitchen.

When Davis became one of the first big city chiefs to arm all his officers with Tasers, the idea was to save lives and reduce violent contacts.

“Of course, they didn’t,” Jayadev said. “We can’t solve our problems with a new piece of gadgetry.”

Although officers are already bearing vests, weapons and radios, most of them welcome adding a camera to record their actions, Davis said. In addition, he said, “We’re making it so it has cachet.”

A leading critic of the department welcomed the cameras as a tool to provide useful evidence, but dismissed their significance as a solution to rocky police-community relations.

“The AXON project is unfortunately a positive thing right now because the level of distrust is so high,” said Raj Jayadev, director of the community organization Silicon Valley De-Bug. “But it doesn’t address the more fundamental problem: What stereotypes police may carry when they see people of color on the street and make assumptions about character.”

The HP webcam referenced in the complaint is said to be equipped with face-tracking software that designed to follow the movements of the user. In a video uploaded to YouTube titled “HP computers are racist,” two users describe having experienced troubles with the facial recognition feature, saying the camera failed to work when a darker-skinned face appeared in the camera’s frame.

HP has issued a statement in response to the criticism and YouTube video:

Some of you may have seen or heard of a YouTube video in which the facial-tracking software didn’t work for a customer. We thank Desi, and the people who have seen and commented on his video, for bringing this subject to our attention.

We are working with our partners to learn more. The technology we use is built on standard algorithms that measure the difference in intensity of contrast between the eyes and the upper cheek and nose. We believe that the camera might have difficulty “seeing” contrast in conditions where there is insufficient foreground lighting.

The appointed hour — Friday, from 12 noon to 1 p.m. PST — came and went and AT&T’s (T) wireless had not been brought to its knees, despite the best efforts of thousands of Apple (AAPL) iPhone users.

“As far as I can tell, there’s been no impact at all,” wrote Dan Lyons in The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs at 12:19 p.m. “My iPhone is working just the same as ever. ”

It was Lyons, writing as Fake Steve Jobs, who on Monday had encouraged iPhone owners to overwhelm AT&T’s network by turning on a data-intensive app and running it for an hour. Operation Chokehold, as he dubbed it, was intended as a protest against AT&T’s threatened imposition of data usage fees.

By Wednesday, after the FCC’s chief of homeland security issued a stern warning, Lyons began to have second thoughts. But by then the protest had taken on a life of its own. See here.

Although there were scattered reports of slowdowns Friday on Operation Chokehold’s official Facebook page, AT&T’s 3G network seemed to be holding up just fine.

In Brooklyn, where we were monitoring the network’s performance, upload and download speeds actually increased during the hour. See the chart below the fold.

CNN Money

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

To Read more about Operation Chokehold visit Here.

Ted Estarija says he was expecting his bill to be higher this month after adding his son to his plan, but wasn’t expecting a bill of $21,917 in data usage charges.

The Hayward man says his Verizon Wireless bill soared after his son apparently downloaded about 1.4 million kilobytes of data last month.

His plan didn’t cover data usage, so he was charged by the megaby
Estarija says after the first media reports, Verizon said they would credit his account for the entire amount.

He has also suspended his son’s account.

A spokeswoman for Verizon says the company investigates cases with exceptionally large bills.

Mercury News

The service, which gives Web users a driver’s perspective of hundreds of cities around the world, has raised the ire of residents who say the images are an invasion of their privacy. Now residents in California’s Humboldt County are complaining that the drivers who are hired to collect the images are disregarding private property signs and driving up private roads.

In an episode reported recently by the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, a Street View driver cruised past two “no trespassing” signs to collect images of a residence that is 1,200 feet from the public road.

“It isn’t just a privacy issue; it is a trespassing issue, with their own photos as evidence,” resident Betty Webb told the newspaper. “They really went off the track to get to our address.”

Webb’s experience apparently is not an isolated incident: the newspaper used digital maps provided by the county of Sonoma and found Google had photographed along more than 100 private roads.

Google told the newspaper that, while it has the right to photograph from private roads, it tries to avoid it.

“Our policy is to not drive on private land,” spokesman Larry Yu said, adding that the company hires local drivers who are given specific routes to follow. Yu retracted that statement when the newspaper told him of a driver who said he was simply told to just drive around the county and collect images.

Google’s claims to be legally allowed to photograph on private roads stems from its assertion that privacy no longer exists in this age of satellite and aerial imagery.

“Today’s satellite-image technology means that…complete privacy does not exist,” Google said in its response to a complaint filed in April by a Pittsburgh couple that sued Google when photographs of their home appeared on the site.

Indeed, Google appears adamant that its right to photograph streets trumps individuals’ right to privacy. Internet pioneer and Google evangelist Vint Cerf told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in May that “nothing you do ever goes away and nothing you do ever escapes notice.” Then, in what the newspaper described as an “intentionally flippant moment,” Cerf added, “There isn’t any privacy, get over it.”

Cerf may have been channeling former Sun Microsystems’ CEO Scott McNealy, who said, “You have no privacy. Get over it” in 1999. Either way, Cerf explained himself on Google Blogoscoped: “It was intended to be partly in jest and partly irony…I was trying to suggest that we really have entered a period when things are a lot less private. Think of the ease with which photos and videos can be taken, digitized, shipped around on the Internet, posted on YouTube or its equivalent.”

This is not the first time Google has been caught on private streets. In January, a private Minnesota community near St. Paul, unhappy that images of its streets and homes appeared on the site, demanded Google remove the images, which the company did.

Not long after the feature launched in May 2007, privacy advocates criticized Google for displaying photographs that included people’s faces and car license plates. In May, the company announced that it had begun testing face-blurring technology for the service.

CNET News

A robotic hand has been successfully connected to an amputee, allowing him to feel sensations in the artificial limb and control it with his thoughts, a group of European scientists said Wednesday.