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

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

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.

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 »

From FireEagle to iPhone apps that use your current location, everyone it seems is racing to get on the geo-aware software bandwagon. So far most geo-aware features have been opt-in and offer reasonable privacy controls (FireEagle is a good example of this), but Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 7 plans to offer developers location tools at the operating system level and the company doesn’t seem to think users care about control or privacy.

Before you freak out at the thought that Redmond will soon be tracking your every move, keep in mind that the new features will be disabled by default. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that if you turn the geo features on, there are very few controls available and, yes, Microsoft could easily track your every move. Now you can freak out.

Windows 7 Will Let Microsoft Track Your Every Move - Webmonkey.

Asda’s plans to introduce webcams to its factories and stores may anger civil liberty campaigners over the perceived advance of a surveillance society. But it may also lead to a few red faces.

Police this month received a video of a former Asda worker licking and stamping on a raw chicken before putting it back on a shelf.

Webcams are only one tool in Asda’s drive for transparency: a new store in Wales will take that objective to its literal conclusion by using glass bricks.
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 »

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display until Sept 09 at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile. Read the rest of this entry »

A collaborative program is helping doctors track and treat the incidence of pneumonia in their patients by scanning NFC-based RFID tags on infants’ bracelets.

via Tracking System Benefits Pakistani Infants, Doctors - RFID Journal.

Police in North Carolina want to build surveillance cameras that would record every car license that passes by and run it through the FBI’s criminal database, alerting authorities in real time if it finds a match.

The system would store license plate numbers for up to a year to provide authorities with historic data should they want to review the data later.

“There is no expectation of privacy to a license plate number,” said John Carey, the police chief in Wilmington, North Carolina, since a license plate is a displayed public record.

Wilmington police have applied for a Department of Homeland Security grant to place the cameras along a local highway as well as at a memorial and bridge. Read the rest of this entry »