Tuesday, April 30th, 2019 (
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Still trust the government to not abuse their surveillance power? Read this story about a federal agent who used the Department of Homeland Security's database to stalk his ex-girlfriend and her family. When we paraniod types tell you that massive government systems can be turned against us easily, remember that though we may be loud, obnoxious, and a little nuts at times, that doesn't mean we're wrong.
Tags:
Big Brother,
DHS
Wednesday, May 1st, 2019 (
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In what has become the norm and not the exception, an expensive Department of Defense project has been shown to be a complete failure wasting millions of dollars and all of our time. What makes this story interesting is it was due in no small part to the efforts of the Government Accountability office that this project was scrapped. They discovered that the program was using live data on American citizens instead of dummy data and that none of the required privacy protections had been put in place. Go figure.
Most frightening is this line:
The privacy office concluded that although required privacy analyses were ignored, the Privacy Act was not technically violated because the live data were covered by privacy notices issued earlier for other programs that originally gathered the information.
Which demonstrates the danger of taking data for one reason, but using for a completely different reason altogether.
Tags:
Accountability,
Big Brother,
Data Mining,
DHS
Thursday, July 19th, 2007 (
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In the UK,
they're allowing the police to use the toll camera network to track vehicles. The cameras are used to enforce a toll and have software that analyzes license plates to match them with the car's owner.
But they will only be able to use the data for national security purposes and not to fight ordinary crime, the Home Office stressed.
Yeah right. Just like the
FBI and national security letters.
JTAG ERROR: No slashdot_ht index defined
Tags:
Big Brother,
UK
Thursday, July 19th, 2007 (
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This is actually pretty clever. This kid was making bomb threats to his school and was doing a pretty good job at hiding his tracks until
the FBI got involved.
By sending a small program to his Myspace page, they somehow managed to infect his home PC with a monitoring program that collected evidence of his crime:
...if the Bureau could get the CIPAV installed on the user's machine, it would be able to collect the machine's IP address, MAC address, list of running programs, operating system, Internet browser used, language used, the registered computer name, the currently logged-in username, and more. All of this information would be relayed over the Internet back to an FBI computer in Virginia.
That sounds just like
Windows Vista.
Tags:
Big Brother,
Windows
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 (
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Under the guise of security, the Iraqi people are being cataloged into a US database. First, I want to make it clear that I do not necessarily oppose this move in that it's possible that it will be used properly to target terrorist while leaving innocent people alone. As with all the various privacy concerns here, though, the problem is in what
else they plan to do with the data. And let's face it, the US governement has a sad, sick, history of abusing our data and privacy.
JTAG ERROR: No privacyorg_ht index defined
Tags:
Big Brother
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 (
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It's well known that body language is very difficult to control and often gives away your true thoughts and feelings for those capable of looking for the signs. Now a
German company is trying to make software that understands those slight signals in order to produce superior quality ads.
"With this type of technology there are always going to be significant questions," Ngo said. "People should have the right to say 'no' as well."
In the case of the IIS technology, the software doesn't identify individual people and then store the information for later. Instead, it compiles information and offers it as statistics, Küblbeck said.
"We do not store any patterns and try to re-identify the person," he added.
And with all such technologies, they must be banned or strictly controlled to prevent them from being turned against us at the flip of a switch.
Tags:
Big Brother
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 (
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The TSA is
failing more tests:
In one test, TSA inspectors hid the components of a fake bomb in carry-on luggage that also contained a bottle of water. The screeners at Albany International confiscated the water bottle but missed the bomb.
To which the TSA replied that the tests are unnaturally difficult and whine that it paints an "innacurate" picture of their work force. To which I wonder if the terrorists will not be so sneaky and mean as the TSA auditors. Perhaps they won't use
every dirty trick. They wouldn't want the TSA to look bad after all.
Last October, the Star-Ledger newspaper of Newark, citing unnamed federal security officials, reported screeners at Newark Liberty International Airport flunked 20 of 22 tests, including failing to detect bombs and guns in luggage at checkpoints.
The TSA responded to the report by launching an internal investigation in which federal employees were interrogated about whether they had leaked the results, the newspaper said.
That sounds like a perfect Bush-era response.
"These statistics are horrible!"
"Yeah, what should we do to fix them?"
"Fix them!? We should cover them up!"
Too bad the TSA doesn't get Nation Security as an excuse.
(Thanks to
The Consumerist for the link)
Tags:
Big Brother,
George Bush
Saturday, March 16th, 2019 (
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Apparently, the DHS has only charged 12 cases of terrorism out of 814,000 cases it's brought.
TRAC reported more than 85 percent of the charges involved more common immigration violations such as not having a valid immigrant visa, overstaying a student visa or entering the United States without an inspection.
Tags:
Accountability,
Big Brother,
DHS
Friday, March 15th, 2019 (
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It's getting worse over there.
Assistant chief constable Simon Byrne said: "People clamour for the feeling of safety which cameras give.
Yes, but that's only because you tell them that cameras make them safer. How do you prevent them from becoming abused? What if a new law suddenly turns all those cameras on normal people. Things could go from ok to nightmare in a single day because of the infrastructure of social control that they're building.
I like this quote from Slashdot:
Is there any evidence to suggest that this increasingly Orwellian society is actually any safer?"
Tags:
Big Brother,
Drones,
UK
Thursday, March 14th, 2019 (
No comments yet)
So they don't have cameras watching the TSA employees as they check the luggage? It's no wonder abuses like this keep happening.
Don't check valuables! You have to assume that anything worth more than 5 bucks that you check is going to be stolen. It's not pretty, but it's the world we live in.
This is unacceptable. When there's a string of employee thefts and in particular done by security personnel, there's no justification for ignoring the problem.
Tags:
Big Brother,
Theft,
TSA
