• TSA considering "identity-based" screening

    TSA does not call it “profiling,” but “identity-based screening”; the department is asking for public comments on the proposed system; “Physical screening will likely never go away completely, but the idea of adding identity-based security makes good sense and it’s an idea we’re actively exploring,” the department says

  • Israeli military intelligence to monitor groups critical of Israel

    Israel believes that at least some of the organizations criticizing its policies pursue a broader agenda: the delegitimization of Israel; in response, Israel’s Military Intelligence several months ago created a unit within its research division, dedicated to monitoring left-wing groups; the new MI unit will monitor Western groups involved in boycotting Israel, divesting from it, or imposing sanctions on it; the unit will also collect information about groups that attempt to bring war crime or other charges against high-ranking Israeli officials, and examine possible links between such organizations and terror groups

  • Beijing to track individual movement through cell phones

    Beijing could soon track the daily movements of seventeen million residents by tapping into their cell phones; authorities have proposed a program designed to help ease traffic congestion by providing up to the minute data on an individual’s movements; critics say that this is an attempt by authorities to prevent large crowds from forming; the proposed plan comes as Chinese officials have grown increasingly worried about domestic unrest in light of the mass protests sweeping across the Middle East; Chinese police forces turned out in full force after anonymous calls for mass protests were posted online; the government has also placed more than eighty activists under house arrest while others have gone missing

  • Officials say unified government-wide databases with shared access is the future

    Federal agencies are looking to reduce the “stove piping” of information by using a “person-centric view” to open proprietary databases that store information within a particular agencies to allow state, local, and federal agencies to access it and share information; these databases depend on developing common identification and access systems where employees would use a single credential to access information; the Department of Justice and the FBI have rolled out programs that embrace this philosophy; N-DEx is a database that collects criminal case files, past histories, and other pertinent information and makes it available to investigators at all levels

  • Free program to detect suspicious vehicles unveiled

    Funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and administered by the TSA, the First Observer program encourages parking lot operators to watch for oddities such as improperly parked cars, civilians conducting surveillance, and strange odors such as diesel from gasoline vehicles

  • Twelve research teams to develop persistent-stare, visual-intelligence systems

    The U.S. military anticipates a significant increase in the role of unmanned systems in support of future operations, including jobs like persistent stare; by performing persistent stare, camera-equipped unmanned ground vehicles would take scouts out of harm’s way; these machines’ truly transformative feature will be visual intelligence, enabling these platforms to detect operationally significant activity and report on that activity so warfighters can focus on important events in a timely manner

  • U.S. terror watch list streamlined, updated instantaneously

    Now a single tip about a terror link will be enough for inclusion in the watch list for U.S. security officials, who have also evolved a quicker system to share the database of potential terrorists among screening agencies; a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said that officials have now “effectively in a broad stroke lowered the bar for inclusion” in the list; the new criteria have led to only modest growth in the list, which stands at 440,000 people, about 5 percent more than last year; also, instead of sending data once a night to the Terrorist Screening Center’s watch list, which can take hours, the new system should be able to update the watch list almost instantly as names are entered

  • PatriotApp allows citizens to alert feds

    A new iPhone app — the PatriotApp — allows people to report criminal or suspicious activity to several federal agencies, including the FBI, EPA, CDC, and GAO, the office responsible for investigating public funds; it also includes RSS feeds for the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and the Department of Homeland Security’s threat level, and allows people to report workplace harassment and discrimination

  • Canada introduces legislation to fight crime in today's high-tech world

    The Canadian government has reintroduced two bills that would provide law enforcement and national security agencies with up-to-date tools to fight crimes such as gang- and terrorism-related offences and child sexual exploitation; the proposed legislation would provide law enforcement agencies with new, specialized investigative powers to help them take action against Internet child sexual exploitation, disrupt on-line organized crime activity and prevent terrorism

  • U.K. examines surveillance plan's £2 billion price tag

    The U.K. coalition government has revived the sweeping digital surveillance program which had been abandoned by the previous Labor government — but the government said it is looking closely at the price tag, estimated at £2 billion, and that new figures will be released in November; industry sources had all along maintained that the original £2 billion estimate was unrealistically low; the government’s move means that they were correct, or that the scheme is being scaled back

  • U.K. revives sweeping digital surveillance scheme

    The U.K. government has revived a sweeping surveillance scheme killed by its Labor predecessor last December; the scheme will require that every e-mail, phone call, and Web site visit be recorded and stored, allowing the security and police authorities to track every phone call, e-mail, text message, and Web site visit made by the public if they argue it is needed to tackle crime or terrorism; the information will include who is contacting whom, when, and where — and which Web sites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages

  • DARPA awards additional $11 million for video search technology

    As a result of advancements in intelligence gathering technologies (think UAVs), the U.S. military and intelligence community have been accumulating video archives over the past decade which make YouTube look puny; it is not only the number of pictures, but their quality: mere HD movies and TV are small and tightly compressed compared to the high resolution, full-motion imagery which pours in like an avalanche from every Predator or Reaper drone — and dozens of these surveillance drones are airborne above southwest Asia every minute of every day; DARPA is looking for an effective, automated video search technology

  • Indian government: Google, Skype will follow BlackBerry in being forced to open networks

    The Indian government, in a meeting last month with representatives of network operators and Internet service providers, said that after RIM was forced to open BlackBerry-based communication to government eavesdropping, Google and Skype would be asked to do the same — or face bans on some of their services in India; It is unlikely that the Indian government is interested in Google’s search business, but about twenty million Indians are active on Google’s social networking service, Orkut, which encourages them to communicate with each other over Google Talk

  • Conflict between governments' need to know and secure comms intensifies

    The tensions between the desire of government authorities to use every tool available to them to detect and prevent crime — and acts of terrorism, on the one hand, and technologies which offer privacy to businesses and individuals, on the other hand, is not new; the skirmishes between BlackBerry — and, soon, Google and Skype — and the governments of India, Saudi Arabia, and UAE are but the latest round in this decades-old conflict

  • Deep judicial disagreements over increased police use of GPS surveillance

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on 6 August overturned a drug-trafficking conviction because the police, without a warrant, placed a GPS tracking device on the suspect’s car; the decision contradicted decisions in three similar GPS-related cases by appellate panels in Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco; there are fierce judicial disagreements on the issue: Judge Douglas Ginsburg, who oppose GPS surveillance without a warrant, writes that “Prolonged surveillance reveals types of information not revealed by short-term surveillance, such as what a person does repeatedly, what he does not do, and what he does ensemble;” Judge Richard Posner, who says warrants are not necessary for GPS surveillance, says that the Fourth Amendment “cannot sensibly be read to mean that police shall be no more efficient in the 21st century than they were in the 18th”; Chief Judge Alex Kozinski characterized the GPS tracking as “creepy and un-American” and contended its capabilities handed “the government the power to track the movements of every one of us, every day of our lives”