Technology Impacts

It sounds like something from a sci-fi film, but one in four Germans would be happy to have a microchip implanted in their body if they derived concrete benefits from it, a poll Monday showed.

The survey, by German IT industry lobby group BITKOM, was intended to show how the division between real life and the virtual world is increasingly coming down, one of the main themes of the CeBIT trade fair that kicks off Tuesday.

In all, 23 percent of around 1,000 respondents in the survey said they would be prepared to have a chip inserted under their skin “for certain benefits.”
http://rawstory.com/2010/03/germans-microchip-skin-poll/

Every police force in England and Wales will be equipped with mobile fingerprint scanners to check the identity of suspects in the street.

Up to 3,000 devices, the size of a mobile phone, will enable officers on patrol to cross-reference prints with national records.

Senior officers claimed the scheme would speed up criminal inquiries, bring more people to justice and save thousands of hours of police time.

But fears have arisen the technology could contribute to the so-called “surveillance state” and encourage random searches.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-to-be-equipped-with-mobile-fingerprint-scanners-1916123.html

London - Monitored by millions of cameras and spied on by a secretive domestic intelligence network, Britons could be forgiven for feeling up in arms over the latest threat to their privacy: Intelligent garbage bins that can monitor how much they throw out.

Although the technology is already nearly a decade old, a U.K. privacy rights group says the number of local authorities fitting their trash bins with sensors of some kind has risen dramatically in the past year - affecting at least 2.6 million British households.

Big Brother Watch says the practice could lead to Britons being charged for how much they throw out - and effectively allow the government to go through their garbage.

“Placing microchips in bins capable of monitoring the content of weight of household refuse produces yet another piece of data for the state on an individual’s private life it has no right to have,” the group said in a report published Friday.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-eu-britain-waste-watchers,0,3791290.story

A Chinese woman managed to enter Japan illegally by having plastic surgery to alter her fingerprints, thus fooling immigration controls, police claim.

Lin Rong, 27, had previously been deported from Japan for overstaying her visa. She was only discovered when she was arrested on separate charges.

Tokyo police said she had paid $15,000 (£9,000) to have the surgery in China.

via BBC News - ‘Fake fingerprint’ Chinese woman fools Japan controls.

There was growing speculation [or distraction from the main issue of Global Warming fraud?] on Sunday that hackers working for the Russian secret service were responsible for the theft of controversial emails in the ‘Climategate’ scandal.

Thousands of emails, from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were first published on a small server in the city of Tomsk in Siberia.

So-called ‘patriot hackers’ from Tomsk have been used in the past by the Russian secret service, the FSB, to attack websites disliked by the Kremlin, such as the “denial of service” campaign launched against the Kavkaz-Tsentr website, over its reports about the war in Chechnya, in 2002.

via Climategate: was Russian secret service behind email hacking plot? - Telegraph.

Cyber war has moved from fiction to fact, says a report.

Compiled by security firm McAfee, it bases its conclusion on analysis of recent net-based attacks.

Analysis of the motives of the actors behind many attacks carried out via the internet showed that many were mounted with a explicitly political aim.

It said that many nations were now arming to defend themselves in a cyber war and readying forces to conduct their own attacks.

While definitions of what constitutes cyber war are not shared, it was clear that many nations were preparing for a future in which conflict was partly conducted via the net. Read the rest of this entry »

Citizen spies will be given the chance to win up to £1,000 by watching CCTV cameras on the internet and reporting people they suspect of committing crimes.

The new scheme, called Internet Eyes, involves web users scouring CCTV cameras installed in shops, businesses and town centres across Britain looking for offenders.

The cameras’ owners will be charged a fee for putting live footage from their cameras online, while members of the public who help catch criminals can win cash prizes.

The project will be trialled in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warks, next month, but the consortium behind the idea hopes that it will eventually attract a global audience of viewers monitoring Britain’s 4.2 million security cameras.

However, it has already provoked criticism from civil liberties campaigners, who claim that it will create a “snoopers paradise” and erode people’s privacy. Read the rest of this entry »

The days of being able to walk through airport security checkpoints while wearing shoes and a jacket could return if an experimental program proves successful, some Department of Homeland Security officials say.

Project officials hope various sensors, such as this one that tracks eye movement, can help security screeners.

The Homeland Security-funded project is Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST. Instead of focusing on whether you have hidden explosives or whether you’re carrying a weapon, sensors and cameras located at security checkpoints would measure the natural signals coming from your body — your heart rate, breathing, eye movement, body temperature and fidgeting.

Those physiological signs, measured together, will indicate whether you might have the desire or intent to do harm, project manager Robert Burns said.

“There’s been a large field of research that ties your physical reactions to your mental state, your emotional state. We’re looking for those signals that your body gives off naturally,” Burns said. Read the rest of this entry »

As part of a major research project, scientists are currently working on a closed-circuit television (CCTV) system that could be able to predict suspicious behavior usually associated with crime in bus travelers. The cameras would relay information back to a control room, where operators would be able to watch suspicious characters, and then intervene even before an attack happens. If emergency-response units cannot get to the bus on time to prevent the harmful actions, then they will be just in time to catch the perpetrators, the creators of the new system believe. According to scientists at the Queens University Belfast – who are in charge of developing the system, and the software associated with it –, the CCTV cameras could lead to a significant curbing in the rate of public-transportation attacks, to which many innocent travelers fall victim, the BBC News reports. Although the new system is still in its theoretical stage, the scientists say they could have it ready for implementation within five years. By that time, every person that boards a bus could be profiled when they climb the stairs. The work is being conducted at the QUB’s newly founded Center for Secure Information Technologies.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Home Office is to spend over £500,000 this year on a marketing campaign for the identity card which features cartoon fingerprints

A departmental spokesperson told GC News that it is planning a public information campaign to alert businesses on the need to prepare for the introduction of the card, which will initially be made available on a voluntary basis.

It will be focused primarily on the north-west of England, reflecting plans to make the card available to residents of Greater Manchester later this year, with some nationwide marketing.

The campaign, one advert for which features a cartoon fingerprint unveiling the identity card to an admiring audience of other fingerprints, is expected to cost £544,000 between September and December.

“This will help businesses with ‘know your employee’ and ‘know your customer’ checks,” the spokesperson said. “The National Identity Card may be presented to businesses across the country any time after launch, as proof of identity. Businesses need to ensure that their staff are ready to recognise the National Identity Card, and know how to check the security features.” Read the rest of this entry »