Technology Impacts

Somebody’s fibbing in the case of a Pennsylvania school that using Webcams in loaned laptops, and now the FBI may have to sort out the truth.

CNN reports that federal authorities are investigating the case of 15-year-old Blake Robbins v. the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania, a class action lawsuit uncovered by BoingBoing last week. The FBI hasn’t confirmed the investigation; CNN’s report comes from an anonymous police official, who says the feds will look into whether federal wiretap or computer intrusion laws were violated.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/022210-school-spycam-case-raises-fbi.html

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

Google is now “personalizing” results even when users have not logged into its web-dominating search site. And SEO types aren’t too happy about it.

Personalization is a euphemism for a Google-controlled practice that involves tweaking your search results according to your past web history. Mountain View was already doing this with users who had signed in to a Google account so they could use non-search services like Gmail and Google Calendar. But now it’s targeting results for all users - whether they’re logged in or not.

Webmasters fume as Google profiles signed-out searchers • The Register.

The European Commission’s study into feasibility of fitting black box recorders to cars to record 20 types of data in case of accidents looks set to recommend the devices are fitted to all European cars.

Project Veronica, which began in 2003 and cost £2.4m, has dismissed privacy concerns because the boxes only record data in the event of an accident. The boxes will be triggered by sudden deceleration and will only record movement in the 30 seconds prior to an accident, and a few seconds afterwards.

via Europe plots black boxes for cars • The Register.

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 »

The Department of Homeland Security has pushed hard for the past few years to make sure it retains the right to search your laptop at the border with no real limitations. It is, indeed, (as defenders of this policy always like to point out) established law that the border is not in the country, so Constitutional 4th Amendment rights do not apply. That still doesn’t make it right. I, like many others, would not have a problem with searches due to probable cause. Nor do we have any real problem with searches of physical luggage at the border. But a blank slate, seems like a bit much — for a few reasons. First, the purpose of a border search is to see what you’re bringing into the country. But, when it comes to digital data, no one’s bringing it across the border to get it into the country. You could just send it over any number of internet protocols to get it into the country without using a laptop. So, the very rationale doesn’t make sense. Second, when people travel, they specifically pick and choose what physical goods to put into their luggage. With a computer, the situation is the opposite. You automatically bring everything (including, potentially access to remote drives). Read the rest of this entry »

The Daily Telegraph has a disturbing report about an alleged compulsory plan to insert RFID microchip transponders in all dogs in the UK, and Yet Another National Database of human names, addresses and telephone numbers, which will not solve the underlying problems, and which will pose a Privacy and Security risk to millions of innocent people.

All dogs to be microchipped with owner’s details to ‘help track pets’

All dogs in Britain will be fitted with microchips which contain their owner’s details, under cross party plans designed to track family pets.

By Andrew Hough
Published: 7:00AM BST 28 Sep 2009

Owners will be forced to install the microchip containing a barcode that can store their pet’s name, breed, age and health along with their own address and phone number.

barcode ? Surely not ! How exactly do you read one of those opticaly, when it is implanted under the skin and fur ?

Presumably the author means an implantable RFID transponder chip

This sort of glass encapsulated RFID transponder chip implant, designed for animal tagging, uses a low frequency of around 125KHz, with a reading range of about a metre. High or microwave frequency, faster data rate, longer range RFIDchips etc. are of no use for implants, as those radio frequencies are strongly absorbed by living tissue.

The barcode’s details would then be stored on a national database which local councils could access in a bid to easily identify an owner’s pet.

What is the justification for this being a national database ? Read the rest of this entry »