A face recognition system will scan faces and match them to biometric chips on passports. Photograph: Image Source/Getty
Airline passengers are to be screened with facial recognition technology rather than checks by passport officers, in an attempt to improve security and ease congestion, the Guardian can reveal.
From summer, unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers' faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their biometric passports.
Border security officials believe the machines can do a better job than humans of screening passports and preventing identity fraud. The pilot project will be open to UK and EU citizens holding new biometric passports.
But there is concern that passengers will react badly to being rejected by an automated gate. To ensure no one on a police watch list is incorrectly let through, the technology will err on the side of caution and is likely to generate a small number of "false negatives" - innocent passengers rejected because the machines cannot match their appearance to the records.
In 1993, the dawn of the Internet age, the liberating anonymity of the online world was captured in a well-known New Yorker cartoon. One dog, sitting at a computer, tells another: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Fifteen years later, that anonymity is gone.
It’s not paranoia: they really are spying on you.
Technology companies have long used “cookies,” little bits of tracking software slipped onto your computer, and other means, to record the Web sites you visit, the ads you click on, even the words you enter in search engines — information that some hold onto forever. They’re not telling you they’re doing it, and they’re not asking permission. Internet service providers are now getting into the act. Because they control your connection, they can keep track of everything you do online, and there have been reports that I.S.P.’s may have started to sell the information they collect.
Miami police could soon be the first in the United States to use cutting-edge, spy-in-the-sky technology to beef up their fight against crime.
A small pilotless drone manufactured by Honeywell International, capable of hovering and "staring" using electro-optic or infrared sensors, is expected to make its debut soon in the skies over the Florida Everglades.
If use of the drone wins Federal Aviation Administration approval after tests, the Miami-Dade Police Department will start flying the 14-pound (6.3 kg) drone over urban areas with an eye toward full-fledged employment in crime fighting.
This is something that was covered in our Message Boards a while back. It is a youtube clip discussing how America, Canada, and Mexico are planning to 'merge' into 1 controlled area - simply dubbed 'The North American Union'.
Thanks go out to Louis Fourie via Email for pointing this out.
A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.
Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.
Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.
The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.
The Department of Homeland security is forging ahead and finalizing plans to use a network of spy satellites for domestic surveillance despite the fact that the Congressional committee supposedly overseeing the program has had no update on it for over three months.
A report in today's Wall Street Journal suggests that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is in the process of finalizing a charter for the program this week, regardless of the fact that it is supposed to be suspended.
The DHS had declared that the program was "on hold" after its existence was made public in August, prompting an outcry amongst civil libertarians and lawmakers.
Demands to justify the congressional legality of the satellites, which were originally mandated for foreign surveillance, followed the revelation that a new department branch called the National Applications Office would oversee the program and be responsible for providing images from the satellites to non military law enforcement agencies.
Critics have called for cuts to DHS funding, stressing that the program is in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus act, which prevents the use of military for domestic law enforcement. It also violates the fourth amendment as the satellites are capable of seeing through the walls of people's homes.
"Civil liberties - such as the rights to liberty and assembly and freedom of speech - are ancient rights enshrined in common law as well as modern rights enshrined in international human rights legislation. But if they are not to be eroded by the political class whose desire is always to acquire greater power then people need to remain vigilant. In the 60s, the cultural direction suggested that any attempt by the government to increase its power over the people would automatically be challenged. Many ordinary people decided they were no longer going to bend the knee automatically to the government."
Nearly two-thirds of Americans think it is possible that some federal officials had specific warnings of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, but chose to ignore those warnings, according to a Scripps Howard News Service/Ohio University poll.
A national survey of 811 adult residents of the United States conducted by Scripps and Ohio University found that more than a third believe in a broad smorgasbord of conspiracy theories including the attacks, international plots to rig oil prices, the plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the government's knowledge of intelligent life from other worlds.
The high percentage is a manifestation, some say, of an American public that increasingly distrusts the federal government.
"You wouldn't have gotten these numbers a year or two after the attacks themselves," said University of Florida law professor Mark Fenster. "You've got an increasingly disaffected public that is unhappy with the administration."
Children are to be tracked in school via radio chips sewn into their uniforms.
The manufacturer is marketing the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) surveillance system nationwide, following a trial with 19 pupils at Hungerhill School in Doncaster this year.
The chip is embroidered into school uniforms using conductive 'smart threads'. A teacher can then scan these to view the pupil's identity, photo, whether they misbehaved in lessons and their school attendence record.
Hungerhill headteacher Graham Wakeling said the pilot was "not intrusive to the pupil in the slightest" because tracking would not go beyond the school's gates.
However, the chip has drawn criticism from civil liberties groups. David Clouter, from LeaveThemKidsAlone, a campaign group, was appalled by the idea.
"To put this in a school badge is complete and utter surveillance of the children. Tagging is what we do to criminals we let out of prison early," he said.
Stanton Friedman, a physicist who once worked for such giants as Westinghouse and General Electric, has devoted much of his adult life to ferreting out clues in the UFO controversy.
Pitching his case before more than 600 campus audiences, Friedman concludes that alien aircraft have been around for decades and that governments have tried to keep an airtight lid on them.
He has five reasons for a massive and sustained cover-up that he labels “the cosmic Watergate.”
1. Government agents want to figure out how crashed aircraft work.
2. No one wants any enemy governments to know what has been discovered.
3. If some trusted public figures, say the queen of England and the pope, disclosed UFOs, society would be shaken up, and earthlings would begin thinking of themselves as such, rather than as citizens of individual nations.
4. The fourth problem is the fundamentalist Christian perspective that aliens are “the work of the Devil,” quoting 700 Club founder Pat Robertson and the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. The two said earth contains the only intelligence life in the universe, he said.
5. A public confirmation would lead to economic chaos, and lastly, secrecy is a way of life in government.
This morning, you left the house tagged with a tracking device that the government can use to find out where you have been and where you are going.
I'm talking, of course, about your cell phone. Mobile phones communicate continuously with cellular towers in order to receive calls, sending out a signal registering its existence and identity with the provider's nearest towers. The provider stores this cell-site data, which can be triangulated to determine the customer's physical location.
While most courts considering the issue have held that police need "probable cause" to track your movements, a new decision (.pdf) last week out of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts holds that law enforcement need show only "relevance to an ongoing investigation" to get a historical record of your past movement (something like the Jeffy trail in The Family Circus cartoon).
Why are courts treating past and prospective tracking so differently, and should they?
The problem starts with a basic congressional assumption that real-time information in transit is more private than stored information -- a bias that is enshrined in various laws that protect wire and electronic communications. Congress has imposed stronger limits on how real-time information is accessed and used.
Presidential power is spiraling out of control, making George W. Bush the most powerful American leader since at least WWII, according to a new analysis.
But the current president, now entangled in a controversy over his recent decision to assert Executive Privilege, can’t take full credit for the power grab, the researchers argue. A number of factors have converged over the past 60 years to turn the American presidency into a position of incredible influence that has a negative effect on American politics and which won't change just because someone else takes charge of the White House.
In their new book "Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced" (W. W. Norton, 2007), Johns Hopkins University political scientists Benjamin Ginsberg and Matthew Crenson trace the history of the presidency since the middle of last century, uncovering a series of murder mystery-like motives, means and opportunities that have shaped the executive branch into the most powerful institution on the globe.
Ginsberg and Crenson are not the only researchers to spot the radical change.
“The presidency has grown in size and in power throughout the 20th century,” agreed Christopher S. Kelley, a political scientist at Miami University in Ohio.
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, Special to LiveScience
We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough – irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent – for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now.
In the past year, Al Gore’s so-called “documentary” film was shown in cinemas worldwide, Britain’s – more or less Tony Blair’s – Stern report was published, the fourth report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was put together and the Group of Eight summit announced ambitions to do something about the weather. Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond. The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced.
The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda”. I feel the same way, because global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established” truth, although a lot of people – including top-class scientists – see the issue of climate change entirely differently. They protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities.
As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.
THE NHS is spending more than £1million a month on mind-altering drugs designed to help to calm hyperactive children.
Doctors now write almost 7,500 prescriptions a week for Ritalin tablets, known as “chill pills”.
They cost about £200 a year per child and are likely to cost taxpayers a total of £12.48million this year, figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act have revealed.
The revelation comes as new figures show that Ritalin or similar drugs are being linked to at least 11 deaths in Britain.
It's not uncommon here also in the U.S School systems to have nearly 30+% and some schools said to have as high as 40+% of the kids on ritilin or some form of mind altering drug.
Schools are to get the go-ahead to fingerprint pupils as young as five, in new measures to be approved by the Government.
Ministers will issue guidance telling schools they have the right to collect biometric data and install fingerprint scanners. But the decision has angered opposition MPs who say collecting fingerprints from children will be a gift to identity thieves.
The guidance will say that personal data, including fingerprints and eyeball scans, can be collected from pupils and used to monitor attendance, so long as schools consult parents first and do not share the data with outside bodies.
Schools will be able to place fingerprint scanners at the entrances to classrooms, the school gates and even in cafeterias. Fingerprint and eyeball scans would make it easy for schools to track children during the day, and tell if they are playing truant, or even what they have eaten for lunch.
TONY Blair wants to hand the European Union radical new powers in his last act as Prime Minister, it emerged today.
The Prime Minister has welcomed controversial plans to bring back the troubled EU constitution by the back door - totally bypassing the need for public referendums on sweeping new powers for Brussels.
German chancellor Angela Merkel has suggested ditching the name "constitution" from the title and instead calling it an "amending treatyÓ - to avoid having to seek the approval of voters.
French and Dutch voters rejected the original plan - which would hand Brussels the power to represent individual countries at the UN and change national laws - two years ago.
Even George Orwell would be shocked. He described the sinister machinations of a totalitarian police state in his novel, 1984, and laid bare the danger of eroding our basic civil liberties, including the right to freedom of speech and the right to privacy.
Although he famously coined the phrase 'Big Brother is watching you', even Orwell cannot have foreseen just how prescient those words would prove to be.
Today, in Tony Blair's Britain - which I naively voted into power ten years ago - we have witnessed a breath-taking erosion of civil liberties.
The truth is we are fast becoming an Orwellian state, our every movement watched, our behaviour monitored, and our freedoms curtailed.
Between May 1997 and August 2006, New Labour created 3,023 new criminal offences - taking in everything from a law against Polish potatoes (the Polish Potatoes Order 2004) to one which made the creation of a nuclear explosion in Britain officially illegal.
Then there has been the incredible number of CCTV cameras - a total of 4.2 million, more than in the rest of Europe put together.
Cover Ups 
The Department of Homeland security is forging ahead and finalizing plans to use a network of spy satellites for domestic surveillance despite the fact that the Congressional committee supposedly overseeing the program has had no update on it for over three months. 
