Big Brother
New WiFi and RFID Technology Used to Track Inmates
Added: 8/9/07. Source: Broadband Wireless Exchange Magazine
"Alanco Technologies, Inc. announced the first U.S.A. installation of its new WiFi compatible RFID inmate tracking technology at the Marion County Juvenile Detention Center in Indianapolis, Indiana."
This new system "provides for seamless incorporation of other wireless communication devices, such as handheld monitoring units for corrections officers. The new system also features a patented, rapid on/off inmate wrist transmitter in an industry-first rechargeable battery configuration."
Savi Announces First Participants in its Standardized RFID E-Seal Licensing Program
Added: 8/9/07. Source: CNN Money
"Savi Technology, a Lockheed Martin company and provider of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)-based total asset management solutions, today announced the first six companies that have agreed to license Savi's intellectual property [in their] electronic cargo seals (e-Seals). This is to get into compliance with the U.S. SAFE Port Act of 2006 that calls for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (USDHS) to define the voluntary use of container security devices in accordance with international standards.
The companies listed, and their hometowns (if known), are: Axcess International Inc.; Evigia Systems, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Envotech Co., Ltd., Malaysia; Identec Solutions, Lustenau, Austria; KPC in Seoul, South Korea; and SAVR Communications, Inc., in Irving, Texas.
Fingerprint payments taking off despite security concerns
Added: 10/19/05. Source: SecurityFocus
This week, Pay By Touch Solutions, a San Francisco-based firm whose system allows customers to pay at participating grocery stores with the press of a finger, announced that investors have pledged $130 million to fund the company's expansion plans. And, rival BioPay has already enrolled more than 2 million people into its service for cashing payroll checks and paying at the supermarket checkout. The primary reason consumers sign up is for convenience and merchants stand to save a significant amount in processing fees if their customers pay using fingerprints linked to their bank accounts--up to 75 percent over straight credit card fees.
Both companies require customers to physically enroll and link their fingerprint and customer ID number to one or more financial accounts. Social Security numbers are not used. Neither system uses the actual fingerprint to identify the user, but creates a template of the fingerprint. "Convenience almost always wins out, even over security," said Donita Prakash, vice president of marketing for Herndon, Virginia-based BioPay.
However, at least one of BioPay's practices has raised eyebrows among security and privacy experts. While Pay By Touch executives say the company does not keep the original image of the fingerprints used by the customer to enroll, BioPay does, storing two fingerprints images from each of its 2 million customers encrypted in an offline database. Privacy experts worry that the existence of a database of fingerprints would also be a lure to law enforcement.
When asked what the company's reaction would be to a subpoena from law enforcement to check its database for a certain fingerprint: "It hasn't happened yet, and I don't want to speculate," Prakash said.
The Crime of "Unauthorized Reproduction" - New law will require marriage as a legal condition of motherhood
Added: 10/14/05. Source: Booman Tribune draft legislation: State of Indiana (pdf file).
Republican lawmakers are drafting new legislation that will make marriage a requirement for motherhood in the state of Indiana, including specific criminal penalties for unmarried women who do become pregnant "by means other than sexual intercourse."
According to a draft of the recommended change in state law, every woman in Indiana seeking to become a mother through assisted reproduction therapy such as in vitro fertilization, sperm donation, and egg donation, must first file for a "petition for parentage" in their local county probate court.
Only women who are married will be considered for the "gestational certificate" that must be presented to any doctor who facilitates the pregnancy. Further, the "gestational certificate" will only be given to married couples that successfully complete the same screening process currently required by law of adoptive parents.
The change in Indiana law to require marriage as a condition for motherhood and criminalizing "unauthorized reproduction" was introduced at a summer meeting of the Indiana General Assembly's Health Finance Commission on September 29 and a final version of the bill will come up for a vote at the next meeting at the end of this month.
"We did want to address the issue of whether or not the law should allow single people to be parents. Studies have shown that a child raised by both parents - a mother and a father - do better. So, we do want to have laws that protect the children," she explained.
When asked specifically if she believes marriage should be a requirement for motherhood, and if that is part of the bill's intention, Sen. Miller responded, "Yes. Yes, I do."
Secrecy Power Sinks Patent Case
Added: 9/23/05. Source: Wired News.
In a little-noticed opinion this month, a federal appeals court ruled against the Crater Coupler patent holders and upheld a sweeping interpretation of the controversial "state secrets privilege" -- an executive power handed down from the English throne under common law that lets the government effectively kill civil lawsuits deemed a threat to national security, even if the state is not a party to the suit.
The ruling is notable as a rare appellate interpretation of the state secrets privilege as it applies to patent holders. As such, it is a potentially worrying development for inventors -- particularly those developing weapons, surveillance and anti-terror technologies for government contractors -- who may find infringement claims dismissed without a hearing under the auspices of national security. It also offers a fascinating, if limited, view into the machinery of official secrecy at a time when the privilege is being exercised as never before. "It's the most powerful privilege the government has," says William Weaver, senior adviser to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. "It's the nuclear option. It never fails."
French says he and his partners -- Charles Monty and Steven Van Keiren -- got the first inkling of a national security application for the Crater Coupler a decade ago. While shopping the new design around to "a whole mess of quick-disconnect companies," the trio received an intriguing inquiry from Lucent Technologies, the reincarnation of the legendary Bell Labs research center, and at that time still part of AT&T. Lucent wanted to evaluate the Crater Coupler for use as a fiber-optic "wetmate" -- an airtight connector for two fiber-optic cables designed to operate underwater. It was part of a contract with a U.S. government agency that, the company said, would have to remain unnamed. "It was a secret black job, they couldn't divulge what it was for," says French. "Who it was for, the Navy or the CIA, or who knows, they never said."
The inventors agreed to help Lucent try to adapt the Crater Coupler to the company's needs, with the expectation that Lucent would license the group's patent if it all worked out. After about a year of development and testing, Lucent had good news for the inventors: The device passed all the tests, shaming a competing, clunky design that French says resembled an old thermos. But when the inventors got on the phone with Lucent's lawyers to discuss license terms, the company dropped a bomb. "Almost the first thing they said was, 'Well, we don't have to do anything, because this is under some sort of provision for military secret stuff where we don't have to pay anything,'" says French.
The list of cases in which the state secrets privilege has been invoked seems a pantheon of injustice. The privilege was upheld in 1982 to prevent former Vietnam War protestors from learning more about an illegal CIA and NSA electronic surveillance effort that targeted them during the 1970s. In 1991, it was used to stop a lawsuit by a banker who'd unwittingly been roped into an illegal CIA money-laundering operation, and who claimed the agency had ruined his career when he tried to get out. In 1998, workers at the Nevada airbase known colloquially as Area 51 were blocked from learning what chemicals they'd been exposed to during illegal burning of toxic waste by base administrators. In 2004, the Bush administration resorted to the privilege to silence former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who said she was fired from the bureau after reporting security breaches and misconduct in the agency's translation program. And in perhaps the most disturbing case, this year the Justice Department asserted the privilege to kill a lawsuit by Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who, in 2002, was picked up by U.S. officials as a suspected terrorist while changing planes at JFK, and promptly shipped off to Syria for a year of imprisonment and torture.
NSA granted Net location-tracking patent
Added: 9/23/05. Source: CNet News.com.
The National Security Agency has obtained a patent on a method of figuring out an Internet user's geographic location. Patent 6,947,978, granted Tuesday, describes a way to discover someone's physical location by comparing it to a "map" of Internet addresses with known locations.
The patent description talks only generally about the technology's potential uses. It says the geographic location of Internet users could be used to "measure the effectiveness of advertising across geographic regions" or flag a password that "could be noted or disabled if not used from or near the appropriate location." Other applications of the geo-location patent, invented by Stephen Huffman and Michael Reifer of Maryland, could relate to the NSA's signals intelligence mission--which is, bluntly put, spying on the communications of non-U.S. citizens.
"If someone's engaged in a dialogue or frequenting a 'bad' Web site, the NSA might want to know where they are," said Mike Liebhold, a senior researcher at the Institute for the Future who has studied geo-location technology. The technique isn't foolproof. People using a dial-up connection can't be traced beyond their Internet service provider--which could be in an different area of the country--and it doesn't account for proxy services like Anonymizer.
Digital Envoy holds a patent on geo-location, and Quova, a privately held firm in Mountain View, Calif., holds three more, one shared with Microsoft. "It's honestly not clear that there's anything special or technically advanced about what they're describing," Quova Vice President Gary Jackson said, referring to the NSA's patent. "I'd have to have our technical guys read it, but I don't think it impacts us in any way."
Are private firms helping Big Brother too much?
Added: 9/17/05. Source: MS-NBC.
Federal law enforcement agencies are quietly recruiting private industry and private citizens as de facto agents in the war on terror, creating unofficial government policy to enlist companies and citizens in the building of massive databases aimed at monitoring people in the United States.
The Surveillance-Industrial Complex written by Jay Stanley for the ACLU is warning that this puts civil liberties in great peril with very little anti-terrorism payoff. "Things that sounded like paranoid fantasies and science fiction last month, the next month is reality," he says.
Chris Hoofnagle of the Electronic Privacy Information Center recently wrote a law review article called "Big Brother's Little Helper," which explores much the same theme as the ACLU's report. The databases being compiled by companies like ChoicePoint, and sold to the government — no court order required — offer "one-stop mind-boggling power," his article says.
Even some law enforcement agents concede that data mining, and enlisting private industry in the war on terror, can lead to abuses. Stanley adds, "If the government is judging individuals and interfering with freedoms based on those judgements, there needs to be due process. There needs to be a way for people on no fly lists to get cleared, lest they end up in a Kafkaesque nightmare."
US Can Confine Citizens Without Charges, Court Rules
Added: 9/13/05. Source: Washington Post.
A federal appeals court yesterday backed the president's power to indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil without any criminal charges, holding that such authority is vital during wartime to protect the nation from terrorist attacks. This case has ignited a fierce battle over the balance between civil liberties and the government's power to fight terrorism.
Federal prosecutors asserted that Bush not only had the authority to detain Padilla but also that such power is essential to preventing terrorist strikes. The ruling limits the president's power to detain Padilla to the duration of hostilities against al Qaeda, but the Bush administration has said that war could go on indefinitely.
Opponents have warned that if not constrained by the courts, Padilla's detention could lead to the military being allowed to hold anyone who, for example, checks out what the government considers the wrong kind of reading materials from the library.
Toyota Computer Makes You Watch the Road
Added: 9/13/05. Source: Personal Tech Pipeline.
New safety technology developed by Toyota "will keep the driver's eyes on the road." Flashing lights and a beeping noise alert drivers if their eyes begin to wander. If that doesn't work, the "brakes kick in." A camera near the steering wheel detects whether the driver is looking straight ahead. For now, the system will be only be introduced in Lexus luxury models sold in Japan.
ID Revolution - prepare to meet the new you
Added: 9/13/05. Source: New Scientist requires paid subscription
"Our digital identity is becoming more important than our physical identity. Soon, biometrics will transform what it takes to prove who you are." The days of using your signature to identify yourself have been replaced. In the midst of this Identity Revolution, people need passports, drivers licenses, credit cards, login names and passwords before they establish their credentials.
This site plans to investigate the questions: "Will your digital identity become the pass key to a future without fraud, providing instant access to services, and improved security? Or will it lead to an Orwellian nightmare of permanent surveillance, curtailed civil liberties and an underclass of identity have-nots?"
Smiling on British passports now forbidden
Added: 9/13/05. Source: News24.com
As reported by the London Guardian, new scanners are now in place which focus on biometrical recognition. British passport photographs are now required to display "a neutral expression with your mouth closed." The US already uses similar technology, following similar rules.
Biometric data recorded "on passports and identity cards" is considered an effective new tool in the fight against terrorism, fraud and organised crime. Not everyone is in support. Even if technology improves, the "passports and ID cards will, paradoxically, reveal less of our identity than before."
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