posted 04-16-2004 09:55 AM            

***

Car's 'black box' convicts Montreal driver

CBC
Fri, 24 Oct 2003 15:48:25

MONTREAL - Quebec police won a dangerous-driving conviction Friday using evidence from the "black box" in the car, a first in the province.

The black box or event data recorder (EDR), which automatically records a car's speed and other information, showed Eric Gauthier was driving at least 131 km/h when he hit another car in downtown Montreal in April of 2001.

Yacine Zinet, 19, was killed in the crash.

There were no witnesses, but police used the black box in 20-year-old Gauthier's car to determine his speed and build a case against him.

He was convicted of dangerous driving, but cleared of a more serious charge of criminal negligence causing death.

Zinet's sister, Belinda Matthey, was unhappy with the outcome.

"It was possible to see the car, there was no obstruction of any buildings, so it's more than dangerous driving," she said.

But she's glad that the case has established the credibility of black-box evidence.

The EDR was built to determine why a car's air bag activated, but can now be used to reconstruct what happens in the seconds before an accident.

posted 04-23-2004 05:10 PM            

http://www.enterprisenetworksandservers.com/opinionw/art.php/107

posted 04-26-2004 05:02 AM            

NewsMax
April 21, 2004

When our latest issue of Paddler magazine arrived, we were enjoying the usual array of articles about kayaking and canoeing and rafting. And then we spotted this item.

In the scenic but Democrat-governed state of Washington, citizens who just want to park near boat launches now have to give Big Brother their Social Security number and other private information for an electronic database.

The scheme is supposedly part of a federal effort to catch deadbeat dads by denying them everything from driver's licenses and marriage licenses to "recreational licenses," which the bureaucrats in Olympia have decided includes use of boat ramps.

The Legislature says it imposed the burden only because the feds threatened to withhold welfare money if the state did not comply.

The magazine reports that when a paddler named Julie Thomas tried to put in on the Cowlitz River, she had to drive back into a town and let a store clerk enter all sorts of personal info into the database.

"In this day of identity theft, how can they do that for a simple parking permit?" Thomas wondered.

posted 04-26-2004 05:02 AM            

Denver Post
April 13, 2004

A Thornton woman has sued the members of the North Metro Drug Task Force for forcing her to strip down for an outdoor "decontamination" during a fruitless drug raid in April 2002.

Barbara Adriaens was working on homework for an art class in the second-floor bedroom of her condominium when the Northglenn/Thornton SWAT team burst in to execute a search warrant for a suspected methamphetamine lab, according to her lawsuit.

Even though officers found no evidence of a meth lab - only a small amount of methamphetamine - they forced Adriaens to go outside, strip down and wash herself in a kiddie pool, says the suit, which was filed in federal court on Adriaens' behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"The avowed purpose of the decontamination process is to protect others from the potentially hazardous and volatile chemicals that can be present in an operating methamphetamine lab," the suit says.

The kiddie pool, filled with cold water and a cleanser, was only partially enclosed by cloth tarpaulins, Adriaens says in her suit.

"The inside of the enclosure was visible not only to numerous male officers standing in the parking lot but also from the second- floor windows of the other residences in the housing complex," the suit says.

The lawsuit names the cities of Northglenn and Thornton and several individual officers and firefighters as defendants. It also lists an unnamed "private videographer" as a defendant.

The videographer was "an individual working for a private film company" riding along with the task force, according to the suit.

posted 04-26-2004 05:03 AM            

Palm Beach town turns cameras on license tags

Palm Beach Post
April 19, 2004

MANALAPAN - By the end of summer, the license tag of every car entering the multimillion-dollar Point Manalapan neighborhood will be digitally recorded despite midnight darkness or midday glare, even if the driver bolts through the stop sign.

With technology only months old, the seaside bedroom community in Palm Beach County will be one of the state's, if not the nation's, first municipalities to use license-tag recognition technology for more than just writing traffic tickets.

''Big Brother is watching you,'' said Town Commissioner Peter Blum last week after commissioners approved spending up to $60,000 on the system.

''Or, Little Brother, in this case,'' said Commissioner Tom Gerrard, a retired telecommunications executive who is helping guide the town's foray into technological crime-prevention.

Government cameras pointed at citizens are nothing new, but better technology and lower costs are making it more popular.

The town of Palm Beach installed cameras on Worth Avenue two years ago after a rash of smash-and-grab robberies.

posted 04-27-2004 06:46 AM            

Schools Raided By FBI In Pirating Crackdown

By Billy House, Monica Mendoza and Brent Whiting

From: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0421dvraid-ON.html

The Arizona Republic
Apr. 21, 2004 08:37 PM

FBI special agent Susan Herskovits keeps watch Wednesday outside the administrative center for the Deer Valley Unified School District.

Federal agents in Phoenix and elsewhere in the country raided schools and other targets in a national crackdown on pirated music CDs and movies.

Agents poured through data and records at a computer command center for the Deer Valley School District in the northwest Valley and blocked the office from the public. It was among other places in Arizona and "quite a few other states" where sealed search warrants were served, the FBI said.

The raids came on the same day that Justice Department officials in Washington announced the creation of a new Intellectual Property Task Force to step up copyright enforcement.

Some of the stolen copyrighted material being sought in the raids is suspected as having been distributed from overseas sources.

The raids are reflective of a new effort by the Justice Department to treat copyright enforcement as a higher priority, something that motion-picture and music-industry officials have been urging.

FBI agents raided the Deer Valley district's Administration Services Center, just south of Deer Valley High School in Glendale, at 6 a.m. and stayed most of the day. The site houses the district's information services and technology offices, essentially the "brains" of the district's computer system, said Timothy Tait, district spokesman.
No warning

School officials were not warned in advance and even the district's top officials, including Superintendent Virginia McElyea, learned of the search warrant only when computers went down. Classes were not disrupted, but computer use in the district office was limited with no Internet access or e-mail.

"We were very in the dark," Tait said.

FBI spokesman Paul Bresson would not comment on why the federal government was searching a school district's system and he would not identify the other sites in Arizona or elsewhere that were served with warrants. Bresson refused to comment on the raids at Deer Valley facility and elsewhere and would not say how targets were identified, noting the search warrants were under court-ordered seal.

Mum was the word at the Deer Valley site, where an FBI spokeswoman stood by the door and refused to give details.

"We can't talk about what we're looking for or the nature of the case," said Susan Herskovits, FBI spokeswoman.

Officials said a news conference spelling out more details of a nationwide operation could come as early as today in Washington.

In the past year, the recording industry has gone after people, including children, for illegally downloading music from the Internet. Earlier this month, the Recording Industry Association of America subpoenaed the University of Arizona to provide the personal information of four students accused of illegally downloading music from university computers.

Last year, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing on the link between international copyright piracy and organized crime, and the FBI has said that there is strong evidence that organized-crime groups have moved into intellectual-property crime, using the profit to pay for other activities.

On Wednesday in Washington, David Israelite, chairman of the Justice Department's Intellectual Property Task Force, announced the names of people who would serve with him on a new task force, created by Attorney General John Ashcroft. The task force will examine how the Department of Justice handles intellectual-property issues and develop recommendations for future efforts. The group expects to issue a report and recommendations to Ashcroft by the end of the year.

Internet contracts

In Deer Valley, school officials expect to have full access to computers today.

Tait said school officials are not planning any immediate changes to the district's Internet policy.

Every student, employee and volunteer in the Deer Valley school district must sign an Internet contract, which outlines expectations for use of the Internet on school computers. Among the expectations is that the Internet would only be used for educational purposes. Those who violate the contract will be banned from using computers with Internet access. "Some parents, especially of elementary students, don't want their kids accessing the Internet," Tait said.

Each person who uses a school computer must log in with a password, Tait said, which means every user can be tracked.

"It looks like the FBI is looking at actions of individuals within the district as opposed to the operations of the district," Tait said.

Deer Valley has blocked many sites from student use, including those where movies and music can be downloaded.

posted 04-29-2004 10:25 AM            

**

Bio-chip featured at government health showcase

Syringe-injectable device 1 of 20 top innovative health technologies chosen by HHS

World Net Daily
April 29, 2004
Sherrie Gossett

A syringe-injectable microchip implant designed to carry medical records and personal identification information underneath the skin of humans is just one of 20 new technologies chosen by the government to be showcased today and Friday at the Healthier U.S. Summit in Baltimore, Md.

The VeriChip Corporation , maker of the microchip, was invited to participate in Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson's "Technology Showcase" following a selection process whereby government 'e-health' experts nominated, discussed and selected 20 technologies believed to have significant potential to boost preventative health care for the public.

The showcase is part of the national summit designed to advance Thompson's "Steps to a Healthier U.S." initiative launched in 2003.

Medical and government experts will be making presentations focusing on chronic disease prevention and health promotion. Topics covered will include asthma, obesity, diabetes, heart disease and stroke and cancer, as well as lifestyle choices, including nutrition, physical activity and tobacco use.

The Steps initiative is designed to bring policymakers, the health, education and business communities, and the public together to establish model programs and policies that foster healthy behavior changes, encourage healthier lifestyle choices and reduce disparities in health care.

Referring to the VeriChip, HHS representative Mary Jo Deering told WND, "It's the only microchip in the showcase. We wanted a variety of technologies presented and this rounded it out nicely."

Dr. Deering is deputy director for e-health and management in the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The office works with the Office of Public Health and Science, Office of the Secretary, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to strengthen the disease prevention and health promotion priorities of the Department.

"As you know, the president just re-stated his commitment to establishing an electronic health records network and standards, especially emphasizing privacy," Deering told WND, adding, "The HHS funds pilot projects and research into the efficacy and potential of innovative technologies."

Deering said the HHS looks forward to research results showing what applications of the chosen technologies are most effective.

The VeriChip is a radio frequency identification (RFID) implantable microchip containing a unique 10-digit identification number that can be "read" by a handheld scanner or by a subject walking through a portal reader. The identification number can then be relayed to a database containing the individual's personal information, or that information can be stored as data directly on the chip, which is wirelessly writeable. The chip can also be placed in a wristband.

The storing of medical records on the chip would require FDA approval. The company is also marketing the chip to a variety of sectors including homeland security as a form of identification and access control where readers would be installed at all entry and exit doors of a building or residence.

"This unique technology showcase is a great opportunity to open the eyes of people new to e-health, to see how these technologies can serve public health needs, " Deering said.

Scott Silverman, CEO of Applied Digital Solutions (NASDAQ: ADSXD), parent company of the wholly owned VeriChip, commented in a press release: "All of us at VeriChip and ADS are honored that the Department of Health and Human Services has chosen the VeriChip technology to be a part of the Steps to a Healthier U.S. Summit. We believe the healthcare application of VeriChip can greatly assist the patient population which is the focus of this important meeting."

In a 2000 interview with WND, chief scientist behind the chip, Dr. Peter Zhou, indicated he was "very interested" in the possible application of the chip as the universal biometric healthcare identifier for which HHS Secretary Donna Shalala had lobbied.

In an interview with WND, Zhou commented, "Before there may have been resistance, but not anymore. People are used to getting implants. New century, new trend."

Last week VeriChip Corporation also announced that the Italian Ministry of Health has approved a six-month clinical study utilizing the VeriChip healthcare application. The study started Friday at the Instituto Nazionale Lazzaro Spallanzani Hospital in Rome, under the auspices of principal investigator Dr. Giorgio Antonucci. The findings will be presented to the Italian Ministry of Health.

At the time of the publication of this report, VeriChip CTO Dr. Keith Bolton had not responded to WND's request for comment.

Other technologies being featured at the summit emphasize interactive applications that foster proactive and healthy decision-making made in the comfort of one's home. They include:

* A computerized cigarette holder called SmokeSignals, which stores an electronic profile of a smoker's habit and then beeps, flashes and releases a cigarette only when it is time for the user's next smoke, gradually reducing the number of cigarettes they smoke to zero.
* CHESS (Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System), a computer-based interactive health resource designed to educate and equip people facing a difficult health crisis. The designers say CHESS provides information, emotional support, decision-making and health-management tools. It's designed to improve patients' quality of life while reducing demands on physician time and the cost of care.
* The RealAge Test, an interactive test using medically valid metrics that compare biological versus chronological years, based upon each user's individualized results. The test factors in such diverse issues as whether one owns a pet, attends worship services and how many miles one rides by motorcycle each year. The patented health metric results in a detailed personalized plan whereby an individual can achieve a "biological age" lower than their chronological age – or optimum versus average health. Backed by 25,000 medical studies and more than 125 different factors, the test is gaining widespread consumer, medical and scientific acceptance and has been featured in various mainstream media reports.

Speaking with WND from the Baltimore site, Deputy Director Deering concluded: "We're excited about the opportunity to show what this array of applications and technologies can contribute to prevention and chronic disease care."

_______

"The interests behind the Bush Administration, such as the CFR, the Trilateral Commission - founded by Brzezinski for David Rockefeller - and the Bilderberg Group have prepared for and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within the next five years."

posted 05-04-2004 12:05 AM            

Program to implant RFID tags in homeless

April 3, 2004

WASHINGTON (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said Thursday that it was about to begin testing a new technology designed to help more closely monitor and assist the nation's homeless population.

Under the pilot program, which grew out of a series of policy academies held in the last two years, homeless people in participating cities will be implanted with mandatory Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags that social workers and police can use track their movements.

The RFID technology was developed by HHS' Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) in partnership with five states, including California and New York. "This is a rare opportunity to use advanced technology to meet society's dual objectives of better serving our homeless population while making our cities safer," HRSA Administrator Betty James Duke said...

The miniscule RFID tags are no larger than a matchstick and will be implanted subdermally, meaning under the skin. Data from RFID tracking stations mounted on telephone poles will be transmitted to police and social service workers, who will use custom Windows NT software to track movements of the homeless in real time.

In what has become a chronic social problem, people living in shelters and on the streets do not seek adequate medical care and frequently contribute to the rising crime rate in major cities. Supporters of subdermal RFID tracking say the technology will discourage implanted homeless men and women from committing crimes, while making it easier for government workers to provide social services such as delivering food and medicine.

Duke called the RFID tagging pilot program "a high-tech, minimally-intrusive way for the government to lift our citizens away from the twin perils of poverty and crime." Participating cities include New York City, San Francisco, Washington, and Bethlehem, Penn.

Participating states will receive grants of $14 million to $58 million from the federal Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness (PATH) program, which was created under the McKinney Act to fund support services for the homeless. A second phase of the project, scheduled to be completed in early 2005, will wirelessly transmit live information on the locations of homeless people to handheld computers running the Windows CE operating system.

A spokesman for the National Coalition for the Homeless, which estimates that there are between 2.3 million and 3.5 million people experiencing homelessness nationwide, said the pilot program could be easily abused.

"We have expressed our tentative support for the idea to HRSA, but only if it includes privacy safeguards," the spokesman said. "So far it's unclear whether those safeguards will actually be in place by roll-out."

Chris Hoofnagle, deputy director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the mandatory RFID program would be vulnerable to a legal challenge. "It is a glaring violation of the Tenth Amendment, which says that powers not awarded to the government are reserved to the people, and homeless people have just as many Tenth Amendment rights as everyone else," said Hoofnagle, who is speaking about homeless privacy at this month's Computers Freedom and Privacy conference in Berkeley, Calif.

posted 05-06-2004 01:51 PM            

Surveillance Infrastrucure Coming Online Big Time

By Don Harkins

From: http://www.proliberty.com/observer/20040422.htm

As of this writing, I feel like Jim Cary's character in the movie “The Truman Show.” In this film, Carey's life, unknown to himself, was being broadcast live, 24-7, and was available for the word's TV-viewing pleasure. He had no privacy. Though the whole world is not (yet) tuning into “The Harkins Show,” the government is. I am not ascribing an unusual amount of importance to myself: Technological advances are merging and quickly coming online in such a way that we must assume that, at any time, our thoughts, words and actions are being monitored and recorded.

And for what purposes must our most public and private affairs be digitally encoded and the resultant data made available to government agencies and private corporations?

The world of Big Brother and of The Party, futuristically fictionalized in Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984, has been under construction in earnest since the Great Depression. Isolated voices in the wilderness have been sounding the non-fiction surveillance-state alarm since that time.

The Idaho Observer and the handful of other independent presses left in the land of the free have expressed their editorial concern that corporations and government are merging their interests to create seamless cradle-to-grave surveillance of our activities.

Recent advances in cyber technology software are allowing for the massive collection and storage of information that can be networked among public and private databases.

The capacity of software to process, file, store and share information collected with hardware is quickly reaching the point science fiction writers and alarmists have been anticipating for decades.

If you look closely, there are cameras everywhere. Both public and private, cameras can be found strategically positioned to watch most comings and goings of people and their vehicles. Via modem or satelite, all those camera images can be hacked into at any time.

Radio frequency ID chips and Global Positioning System components are becoming stock equipment in many commonly purchased items.

The legislatures of the several states and the District of Columbia are manically trying to keep up with the pace of advancing surveillance capabilities by passing “laws” authorizing government to track and spy on individuals -- even if they are not suspected of criminal activity. Government is giving itself the right to place a camera in every home, a microphone in every room and a tracking chip in every item entered into commerce -- including people. Tiny tracking chips suspended in pharmaceutical preparations can even be delivered into unsuspecting people's bodies through a hypodermic needle.

It appears that the only limitations on government's exponentially-increasing powers of observation are its imagination and our tolerance.

Welcome to our Brave New World. Think about your life and understand that government and industry have merged their interests and you no longer have any right to privacy. Over the next few months Big Brother's omnipresence is going to become inescapable as the marriage between hardware, software and the intent of rightfully paranoid bureaucrats and ruthless business executives are consummated on a national scale.

posted 05-14-2004 03:28 PM            

666

---

Get chipped, then charge without plastic — you are the card
We are becoming 1974. Like, there's this inflation thing. Suddenly, inflation is a huge fear, and we apparently need to break out our Whip Inflation Now buttons from the Gerald Ford days.

USA TODAY

Do you realize who came up with W.I.N. in 1974? Alan Greenspan! And you thought you were stuck in a going-nowhere job.

In 1974, Emerson Lake & Palmer released Welcome Back My Friends to the Show that Never Ends, a tone-deaf song that was resurrected last week on one of the Friends specials.

And in 1974, The Six Million Dollar Man made its debut. Not that anybody has built a bionic person who can run in slow motion to a strange clicking sound. But a number of things have been popping up that begin to meld humans and machines, blurring distinctions between the two.

For instance, there's the important and deeply scientific experiment being conducted among the barely clothed patrons of Baja Beach Club in Barcelona. They're getting electronic credit cards implanted under their skin.

Beautiful club-goers have a problem: If you're going to wear a halter top and micro-skirt, there's not much of anywhere to put a wallet. And who wants to carry a purse when you're there to dance? Luckily, a company called VeriChip this year unveiled a solution based on radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology.

It's a slender glass capsule about as long as a dime is wide. Inside sits a computer chip, which stores a unique code that can identify an individual — sort of an electronic Social Security number. The capsule also holds a tiny antenna, which can radio that code to a receiver many feet away.

At the Baja Beach Club, Tuesdays are VeriChip implantation days. Stop in and a "nurse" — the club's word — uses a syringe to inject a VeriChip capsule under your skin. There don't seem to be any rules about where on the body it has to be placed. If you think this sounds like something you'd never do, then you're not the kind of person who goes to clubs wearing your bestest nose ring.

Once implanted, you become your own credit card. Need to pay for a drink? Wave your implant near a reader, and you're done. VeriChip has dreams of going global with its "human implantable ID technology" — once implanted, you could wave a body part to pay for a burger at Wendy's, a beer at a baseball game, or whatever.

There are a few kinks to be worked out, like the fact that you can't turn the chip off. Privacy groups are going to dog-pile on that one.

Another company is taking the idea of implanted radio-enabled chips to a different level. Cyberkinetics of Foxborough, Mass., calls itself "a leader in the rapidly emerging field of brain computer interfaces." The company makes BrainGate — which, despite the 1974 analogies here, is not a reference to a scandal involving someone's brain.

When implanted in a person's brain, the device can allow that person to control a computer just by thinking. It is essentially a mouse moved by brain waves. Last month, the company got federal approval to implant the chips in five paralyzed people as a test.

While the first uses of BrainGate would be to help the paralyzed, certainly such devices could eventually be implanted in healthy people. The military has visions of pilots flying planes by thought. Imagine what the porn industry — always on tech's cutting edge — could do with hands-free computing.

Another recent development suggests that people might someday be able to see in the dark. Earlier this year, Raytheon announced its Thermal-Eye 2600AS technology. This allows thermal-imaging cameras — the kind that lets people see at night or through smoke — to be small enough to be built into a firefighter's helmet. Instead of a bulky camera, thermal imaging can become almost a part of a firefighter.

The company says the technology can keep getting smaller and better. Someday perhaps it could make regular eyeglasses into night-vision glasses, or even contact lenses. All those promises my mother made about eating carrots might finally come true.

Progress in bionics isn't just about putting electronics into humans. In some cases, it's about putting humanness into electronics. Like when a group of researchers and drama students recently turned on Valerie, who sits behind a desk at Carnegie Mellon University and has the title of "roboceptionist."

Valerie looks like a 21st century scarecrow. Her head is a flat computer screen that projects her animated face and head. The screen sits on top of an industrial mobile robot that is always dressed in real clothes — the kind you'd see on your typical corporate receptionist. She is equipped with a laser scanner that can detect and track people in the room.

All this is driven by a computer programmed by the scientists at CMU's Robotics Institute and — in the most interesting twist — by the school's drama department, which was charged with giving Valerie character.

To ask her a question, you have to type on her keyboard, but she'll answer in a computer-generated voice. If you take a seat in the waiting area, you'll hear Valerie talk on the phone to her friends or her "motherboard" about all her problems, including how she hates to date vacuum cleaners.

It might seem whimsical, but Valerie pushes at the boundary between machines and humans — a step toward the Robot on Lost in Space, the most likable character on the show.

There will be a lot more news about the merging of machines and humans. University labs are doing research. Companies are being started.

posted 05-17-2004 07:47 AM            

quote:

---

In 1974, Emerson Lake & Palmer released Welcome Back My Friends to the Show that Never Ends, a tone-deaf song that was resurrected last week on one of the Friends specials.

---

Excuse me! The album that song is from, "Brain Salad Surgery" was specifically about implants, computer control by a "Pharoah-Like Leader", and that it was NOT a good idea. The premise was that, if left unattended, implants and compters would be controlling people, instead of the other way around.

Maybe the writer of that article should get all the facts straight before passing an idiotic judgement on perhaps one of the most talented bands to ever record.

Maybe he listened to Black Oak Arkansas or Humble Pie back then, who were only interested in their crotches, booze, and groupies.

posted 05-17-2004 09:25 PM            

Even without the benefit of clever transponder chips and optic fibers. Today, in this world, you should fear the air. Millions of dollars fly through it daily, and so does private, proprietary, and intelligent information- Literally!

posted 06-09-2004 06:47 PM            

Captol Hill Blue
By TERESA HAMPTON & DOUG THOMPSON
Jun 7, 2004, 00:34

Customers of the Bank of America branch at 3625 Fairfax Drive in Arlington, Virginia, often wonder about the Arlington police car that is always parked in front of the building in the next block.

They also can't help but notice the two armed guards from the private Cantwell Security Service who patrol the street in front of the building and eye each passerby warily.

“What's going on across the street?” one woman asked while waiting in line to deposit her paycheck last Friday.

“Not sure,” said the man ahead of her in line. “Something to do with the government. The police cars and guards have been there since shortly after 9-11.”

“Oh,” she said. “No matter.”

Actually, if the woman knew what was happening inside the nondescript office building at 3701 Fairfax Drive, she might think it really does matter because the building houses the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's Total Information Awareness Program, the “big brother” program Congress thought it killed.

When the woman in line deposited her paycheck at the Bank of America branch, a record of that deposit showed up immediately in the computer databanks in the office across the street, just as financial, travel and other personal transactions of virtually every American do millions of time every minute.

Despite Congressional action cutting funding, and the resignation of the program's controversial director, retired admiral John Poindexter, DARPA's TIA program is alive and well and prying into the personal business of Americans 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“When Congress cut the funding, the Pentagon – with administration approval – simply moved the program into a ‘black bag' account,” says a security consultant who worked on the DARPA project. “Black bag programs don't require Congressional approval and are exempt from traditional oversight.”

DARPA also hired private contractors to fill many of the roles in the program, which helped evade detection by Congressional auditors. Using a private security firm like Cantwell, instead of the Federal Protective Service, helped keep TIA off the radar screen.

DARPA moved into the Arlington County building shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and established the TIA project under the USA Patriot Act and a number of executive orders from President George W. Bush.

TIA's mission was to build a giant computer database with real time access to bank records, credit card companies, airlines and other travel companies, credit bureaus and other data banks to monitor, in real time, the financial transactions and travel of Americans and foreign citizens with accounts at the institutions.

Under provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the banks and other companies were forced to allow DARPA to access their files, a move normally considered an invasion of privacy.

When news of TIA first surfaced in 2002, along with the appointment of Poindexter, a key-figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, as director, citizens' watchdog groups and some members of Congress took a second look. The uproar that followed led to the resignation of Poindexter, who had lied to Congress during the Iran-Contra investigation, and the elimination of funding for TIA.

But Congress left the door open by supplying DARPA with research funding to develop data mining alternatives to TIA. Instead, the Bush administration instructed the Pentagon to move TIA into the convert area of black bag operations and Congress was cut out of the loop.

Lt. Col. Doug Dyer, a program manager for DARPA, defends TIA as a necessary sacrifice in the war on terrorism.

“Americans must trade some privacy for security,” he says. “Three thousand people died on 9/11. When you consider the potential effect of a terrorist attack against the privacy of an entire population, there has to be some trade-off.”

The trade off means virtually every financial transaction of every American is now recorded and monitored by the federal government. Any bank transaction, all credit card charges plus phone records, credit reports, travel and even health records are captured in real time by the DARPA computers.

“Basically, TIA builds a profile of every American who has a bank account, uses credit cards and has a credit record,” says security expert Allen Banks. “The profile establishes norms based on the person's spending and travel habits. Then the system looks for patterns that break from the norms, such of purchases of materials that are considered likely for terrorist activity, travel to specific areas or a change in spending habits.”

Patterns that fit pre-defined criteria result in an investigative alert and the individual becomes a “person of interest” who is referred to the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security, Banks says.

Such data mining is also called “database profiling” and is prohibited under Fourth Amendment's guarantee against invasion of privacy says Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Steinhardt points out the information is already being used to create “no fly” lists of people who are thought to be a danger but that safeguards are not in place to insure the accuracy of the information.

“Once you get on a ‘no-fly' list, how do you get off it?” Steinhardt asks.

Missouri Congressman William Clay, ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform's Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, and Intergovernmental Relations, worries that DARPA is skirting the law by letting private contractors handle the data mining.

"The agencies involved in data mining are trying to skirt the Privacy Act by claiming that they hold no data," said Clay. Instead, they use private companies to maintain and sift through the data, he said.

"Technically, that gets them out from under the Privacy Act," he said. "Ethically, it does not."

When the Senate voted in 2003 to cut funding for TIA, Senators like Ron Wyden of Oregon thought they had put a stop to the problem.

"This makes it clear that Congress wants to make sure there is no snooping on law-abiding Americans," Wyden said after the vote.

But it didn't. The Bush Administration, already recognized as one of the most secretive Presidencies in modern times, simply put the program under wraps and let it continue.

When Congress voted to cut the funded, the operation at 3701 Fairfax Drive should have shut down and Arlington County should have returned the officers assigned there to normal duty. However, the officers remained in place and additional security was added to the detail.

According to construction records on file in the Arlington County building and zoning office, more than 20 high-speed data lines have been installed at the location in the last 18 months. Microwave data antennas are also installed on the roof.

Pentagon spokesmen refuse to discuss what is happening in the building, citing "national security" as the reason.

When quized about TIA earlier, DARPA officials insist they have safeguards to prevent abuses but the record suggests otherwise.

“Given the military's legacy of privacy abuses, such vague assurances are cold comfort,” says Gene Healy, senior editor of the CATO Institute in Washington.

“During World War I, concerns about German saboteurs led to unrestrained domestic spying by U.S. Army intelligence operatives,” says Healy. “Army spies were given free reign to gather information on potential subversives, and were often empowered to make arrests as special police officers. Occasionally, they carried false identification as employees of public utilities to allow them, as the chief intelligence officer for the Western Department put it, ‘to enter offices or residences of suspects gracefully, and thereby obtain data.'”

In her book Army Surveillance in America, historian Joan M. Jensen noted, “What began as a system to protect the government from enemy agents became a vast surveillance system to watch civilians who violated no law but who objected to wartime policies or to the war itself.”

The Army's recent debacle with treatment of Iraqi prisoners also suggests the American military system lacks either the ability or the restraint to police itself.

“There's a long and troubling history of military surveillance in this country,” Healy adds. “That history suggests that we should loathe allowing the Pentagon access to our personal information.”

While TIA allows the government to snoop on American citizens, experts in the data mining field say it won't help fight terrorism.

"Terrorism is an adaptive problem,” says Herb Edelstein, president of data-mining company Two Crows. “It's pretty unlikely the next terrorist attack will be people hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings.”

Simson Garfinkel, author of Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century, agrees.

“Data mining is good for the purpose of increasing sales and figuring out where to place products in stores,” he says. “This is very different from figuring out if these products are going to be used for terrorist activities.”

Other experts say the chances for mistakes are huge.

“With meaningful pattern recognition, the order of magnitude of errors from inferences is huge, something like ten to the third (power),” says Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce and the chairman of information mapping software company Groxis. “There would be an incalculable expense to monitor a thousand wrong hits for one correct inference.”

DARPA tried to interest Groxis in becoming part of the TIA project but the company declined, saying the project was neither feasible nor ethical. Hawken says he knows people with the National Security Agency who refused to work on TIA because of ethical concerns.

The dangers of TIA have created a coalition of strange bedfellows. The American Civil Liberties Union has teamed up with conservative Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum and even the Heritage Foundation to fight not only TIA but other abuses of Constitutional rights under the USA Patriot Act. Even former member of Congress Bob Barr, a conservative firebrand, has joined the effort.

Yet even with all this attention, TIA still exists and still watches Americans 24/7 from the office building on Fairfax Drive in Arlington. Although employees who work in the building are supposed to keep their presence there a secret, they regularly sport their DARPA id badges around their necks when eating at restaurants near the building. The straps attached to the badges are printed with “DARPA” in large letters.

“Yeah, they're the spooks who work in the building over there,” says Ernie, the counterman at a deli near 3701 Fairfax Drive. “If this is how they keep secrets, I guess we should really be worried.”

posted 06-10-2004 01:58 PM            

"Lt. Col. Doug Dyer, a program manager for DARPA, defends TIA as a necessary sacrifice in the war on terrorism."

“Americans must trade some privacy for security,” he says. “Three thousand people died on 9/11. When you consider the potential effect of a terrorist attack against the privacy of an entire population, there has to be some trade-off.”

IE: Give up your constitutional rights or the CIA TRAINED AND FUNDED BOOGEYMEN are going to get you.

I have ONE word for Lt. Col Dyer.

TREASON

posted 06-11-2004 12:21 PM            

http://www.riverfronttimes.com/issues/2004-06-09/news.html

Egregious E-mail
The Secret Service comes calling after a St. Louisan pens a message wishing bin Laden would eliminate Bush
BY MALCOLM GAY
Malcolm.Gay@riverfronttimes.com
June 9, 2004

Hakim Aziz is seldom hesitant about making radical pronouncements, but when two U.S. Secret Service agents showed up at his doorstep at 10:30 on the night of April 7, he was meek as a lamb. He'd just put his two daughters to bed, and his wife looked on as the two agents asked if they could search the house. Aziz says he didn't have much choice.

"They made it plain to me early on that 'because of this ten-year-old bench warrant [for a DWI] that you didn't take care of, we can just haul you in and make you sit until Perry County comes to get you, which may be never,'" the 42-year-old Aziz recalls the agents saying. "I think they pretty much knew that I was going to do whatever it took to keep from being hauled in that night."

Accompanied by three St. Louis cops, the khaki-clad Secret Service agents sifted through Aziz's files and books. Picking up a copy of Muammar Qadhafi's Third Universal Theory, one of the agents asked Aziz if he admired the Libyan strongman.

"I just couldn't believe they were questioning what I felt," says Aziz. "I was still in shock."

The agents also homed in on a videotaped lecture by Louis Farrakhan and Ahmed Rashid's book Taliban.

"The way they were looking, they honestly expected to find something," remembers Aziz, a self-employed St. Louis accountant who converted to Islam roughly a decade ago. "I couldn't believe that."

The Secret Service did not respond to interview requests for this story, but according to Aziz, the agents said they'd decided to visit him after intercepting a particularly bitter e-mail he'd authored the day before.

"I hate that imbecile Bush so much that I would celebrate if the Honorable Sheik bin Laden succeeded in ridding the earth of his filth," wrote Aziz in an ongoing e-mail debate he'd been having with a neighbor. "Did you honestly think the Iraqi people would welcome the Americans after they finished bombing them and then walked down the street? That is just sheer arrogance to think that you can overthrow the government of a sovereign nation and the people will welcome you with open arms and rose petals."

According to Aziz, the agents told him they'd singled out his e-mail because he'd used the words "Bush" and "bin Laden" in the same sentence. It's a fairly Orwellian explanation, hinting at a bevy of federal computers whose sole task is to scrutinize e-mail word placement.

But according to the American Civil Liberties Union's Christopher Calabrese, federal law enforcement really does have that capability. "It's definitely possible for his e-mail to be intercepted," says Calabrese. "But they would have to be looking ahead of time."

In other words, for Secret Service agents to wiretap Aziz's e-mail account, they had to have been tipped off. And according to Calabrese, there are a variety of surveillance programs that might pluck him from obscurity, most notably the new Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX).

First developed by the Seisint Corporation in Boca Raton, Florida, MATRIX scours multiple databases looking for so-called information fingerprints. By cross-referencing an individual's various "fingerprints," MATRIX can measure the likelihood that a given person is, or could be, a terrorist.

According to documents recently obtained by the ACLU, Seisint compiled a list of 120,000 people identified as "High Terrorist Factors" (HTF). The company then donated the list to several federal law enforcement agencies, among them the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Secret Service. It is difficult to determine what, if anything, was done with this information, though in a 2003 slide show Seisint claimed its list had led to "several arrests within one week" and "scores of other arrests using the HTF."

Nonetheless, MATRIX alone would be incapable of rifling through e-mails looking for the word "Bush" in close proximity to "bin Laden." For that, the Secret Service would need a warrant to install a tracking device on Aziz's Internet service provider. It is impossible to determine whether the Secret Service has taken any such action: Under the Patriot Act, it is illegal for an institution to inform an individual when a terrorism-related warrant has been executed against that individual.

Still, Aziz's ten-year-old bench warrant and far-leftist politics hardly seem so extraordinary as to attract the government's notice. He says he's never been investigated before, and like most people aware of the episode, Aziz is convinced his neighbor tipped the feds to his e-mail diatribe. He and his pro-war neighbor had been e-mailing back and forth for days. The dispute first erupted on the normally genial "Shaw Talk" listserv, an online forum where neighbors discuss all things neighborly. The opponents quickly took to e-mailing each other directly, a sort of online equivalent of taking it outside.

"I was thinking that I was going to use him to go into the conservative camp to start recruiting votes for John Kerry," says Aziz. "That using the 'Honorable' [bin Laden] was more to get under his skin than anything. He just fried my brain and made me so mad that I had to get back underneath his skin the best way I knew how."

Apparently it worked. After receiving Aziz's e-mail, his neighbor threatened to call the cops if Aziz wrote him again. Although Aziz hasn't written his neighbor since the agents paid a visit, he suspects his fellow Shaw neighborhood resident ratted him out.

Regardless of the Secret Service's reason for visiting Aziz, the agents left after an hour without Aziz or any of his files. "The [men were] just doing [their] job," Aziz says of the agents. "They were completely professional the whole time."

posted 07-03-2004 07:27 PM            

How Big Brother Is Watching, Listening and Misusing Information About You

By Teresa Hampton and Doug Thompson

From: http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_4656.shtml

Jun 8, 2004, 08:19

You’re on your way to work in the morning and place a call on your wireless phone. As your call is relayed by the wireless tower, it is also relayed by another series of towers to a microwave antenna on top of Mount Weather between Leesburg and Winchester, Virginia and then beamed to another antenna on top of an office building in Arlington where it is recorded on a computer hard drive.
The computer also records you phone digital serial number, which is used to identify you through your wireless company phone bill that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency already has on record as part of your permanent file.

A series of sophisticated computer programs listens to your phone conversation and looks for “keywords” that suggest suspicious activity. If it picks up those words, an investigative file is opened and sent to the Department of Homeland Security.

Congratulations. Big Brother has just identified you as a potential threat to the security of the United States because you might have used words like “take out” (as in taking someone out when you were in fact talking about ordering takeout for lunch) or “D-Day” (as in deadline for some nefarious activity when you were talking about going to the new World War II Memorial to recognize the 60th anniversary of D-Day).

If you are lucky, an investigator at DHS will look at the entire conversation in context and delete the file. Or he or she may keep the file open even if they realize the use of words was innocent. Or they may decide you are, indeed, a threat and set up more investigation, including a wiretap on your home and office phones, around-the-clock surveillance and much closer looks at your life.

Welcome to America, 2004, where the actions of more than 150 million citizens are monitored 24/7 by the TIA, the Terrorist Information Awareness (originally called Total Information Awareness) program of DARPA, DHS and the Department of Justice.

Although Congress cut off funding for TIA last year, the Bush Administration ordered the program moved into the Pentagon’s “black bag” budget, which is neither authorized nor reviewed by the Hill. DARPA also increased the use of private contractors to get around privacy laws that would restrict activities by federal employees.

Six months of interviews with security consultants, former DARPA employees, privacy experts and contractors who worked on the TIA facility at 3701 Fairfax Drive in Arlington reveal a massive snooping operation that is capable of gathering – in real time – vast amounts of information on the day to day activities of ordinary Americans.

Going on a trip? TIA knows where you are going because your train, plane or hotel reservations are forwarded automatically to the DARPA computers. Driving? Every time you use a credit card to purchase gas, a record of that transaction is sent to TIA which can track your movements across town or across the country.

Use a computerized transmitter to pay tolls? TIA is notified every time that transmitter passes through a toll booth. Likewise, that lunch you paid for with your VISA becomes part of your permanent file, along with your credit report, medical records, driving record and even your TV viewing habits.

Subscribers to the DirecTV satellite TV service should know – but probably don’t – that every pay-per-view movie they order is reported to TIA as is any program they record using a TIVO recording system. If they order an adult film from any of DirecTV’s three SpiceTV channels, that information goes to TIA and is, as a matter of policy, forwarded to the Department of Justice’s special task force on pornography.

“We have a police state far beyond anything George Orwell imagined in his book 1984,” says privacy expert Susan Morrissey. “The everyday lives of virtually every American are under scrutiny 24-hours-a-day by the government.”

Paul Hawken, owner of the data information mining company Groxis, agrees, saying the government is spending more time watching ordinary Americans than chasing terrorists and the bad news is that they aren’t very good at it.

“It’s the Three Stooges go to data mining school,” says Hawken. “Even worse, DARPA is depending on second-rate companies to provide them with the technology, which only increases the chances for errors.”

One such company is Torch Concepts. DARPA provided the company with flight information on five million passengers who flew Jet Blue Airlines in 2002 and 2003. Torch then matched that information with social security numbers, credit and other personal information in the TIA databases to build a prototype passenger profiling system.

Jet Blue executives were livid when they learned how their passenger information, which they must provide the government under the USA Patriot Act, was used and when it was presented at a technology conference with the title: Homeland Security – Airline Passenger Risk Assessment.

Privacy Expert Bill Scannell didn’t buy Jet Blue’s anger.

“JetBlue has assaulted the privacy of 5 million of its customers,” said Scannell. “Anyone who flew should be aware and very scared that there is a dossier on them.”

But information from TIA will be used the DHS as a major part of the proposed CAPSII airline passenger monitoring system. That system, when fully in place, will determine whether or not any American is allowed to get on an airplane for a flight.

JetBlue requested the report be destroyed and the passenger data be purged from the TIA computers but TIA refuses to disclose the status of either the report or the data.

Although exact statistics are classified, security experts say the U.S. Government has paid out millions of dollars in out-of-court settlements to Americans who have been wrongly accused, illegally detained or harassed because of mistakes made by TIA. Those who accept settlements also have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and won’t discuss their cases.

Hawken refused to do business with DARPA, saying TIA was both unethical and illegal.

"We got a lot of e-mails from companies – even conservative ones – saying, ‘Thank you. Finally someone won’t do something for money,’" he adds.

Those who refuse to work with TIA include specialists from the super-secret National Security Agency in Fort Meade, MD. TIA uses NSA’s technology to listen in on wireless phone calls as well as the agency’s list of key words and phrases to identify potential terrorist activity.

“I know NSA employees who have quit rather than cooperate with DARPA,” Hawken says. “NSA’s mandate is to track the activities of foreign enemies of this nation, not Americans.”