Eideard

Daniel Gárate’s career came crashing to earth a few weeks ago. That’s when the Los Angeles Police Department warned local real estate agents not to hire photographers like Mr. Gárate, who was helping sell luxury property by using a drone to shoot sumptuous aerial movies. Flying drones for commercial purposes, the police said, violated federal aviation rules.

His career will soon get back on track. A new federal law, signed by the president on Tuesday, compels the Federal Aviation Administration to allow drones to be used for all sorts of commercial endeavors — from selling real estate and dusting crops, to monitoring oil spills and wildlife, even shooting Hollywood films. Local police and emergency services will also be freer to send up their own drones.

But while businesses, and drone manufacturers especially, are celebrating the opening of the skies to these unmanned aerial vehicles, the law raises new worries about how much detail the drones will capture about lives down below — and what will be done with that information. Safety concerns like midair collisions and property damage on the ground are also an issue…

“As privacy law stands today, you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy while out in public, nor almost anywhere visible from a public vantage,” said Ryan Calo, director of privacy and robotics at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University…

Drone proponents say the privacy concerns are overblown. Randy McDaniel, chief deputy of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department in Conroe, Tex., near Houston, whose agency bought a drone to use for various law enforcement operations, dismissed worries about surveillance, saying everyone everywhere can be photographed with cellphone cameras anyway. “We don’t spy on people,” he said. “We worry about criminal elements.”

Who determines who is an “criminal element”? You got it. Sheriff Randy McDaniel.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups are calling for new protections against what the A.C.L.U. has said could be “routine aerial surveillance of American life…”

“We see a huge potential market,” said Ben Gielow of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a drone maker trade group.

Anyone else see a huge potential for Uncle Sugar to watch over every waking moment of our lives spent outdoors?

The FBI plans to step up the monitoring of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and has asked for help building an app to constantly monitor the sites.

Earlier this month the FBI quietly published a request for information looking for companies that might help it build a new social network monitoring system looking at “publicly available” information. Contractors have until 10 February to suggest solutions.

US enforcement agencies have increasingly been using social networks to track crime. Recently over 40 members of two feuding New York gangs were indicted in connection with a series of shootings and killings in Brooklyn after they boasted about their crimes on Twitter…

But the increasing monitoring of social networks has also alarmed privacy advocates. Last year, Twitter disclosed that the justice department had subpoenaed it to get personal records of Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a former WikiLeaks aide.

Lillie Coney, associate director of EPIC, a Washington-based privacy group, called the FBI request “ridiculous.”

“Get a warrant,” she said. “You don’t know half the people you communicate with on Twitter. They are going to launch investigations and start looking at all sorts of people that they have no right to be investigating. There is no accountability, no transparency and no oversight.”

The RFI calls on companies to develop a “secure, light weight web application” for the FBI’s strategic information and operations center. “The application must have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents and emerging threats.”

The product must allow the FBI to keep hold of cached information as well as real time data, and allow that information to be linked to specific locations and easily shared…

The FBI did not return calls for comment.

I haven’t any beef with the premise of government recording, analyzing public data. In and of itself, that can be productive and useful. The concern is as old as the FBI. That is, what will they do with the information?

Geeks continue to admonish newbies to realize that everything they say online is out there for the world to see. There is no privacy on public parts of the Web. I would add another reminder to my fellow Americans. Since the first time I stood up publicly and opposed racist law and practice — in a demonstration 50 miles from the White House in 1960 — I have had a file on my activities in the FBI. That’s a fact of life for anyone in this land who dissents. It’s a badge of honor.

“The direct number to the CEO of AT&T is in the top righthand drawer of your desk”

A U.S. appeals panel on Thursday upheld the constitutionality of a federal law that grants immunity to telecommunications companies that assist the U.S. government in conducting surveillance of American citizens. However, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also revived a separate lawsuit against the government over its surveillance activities.

Several lawsuits filed in the wake of revelations about warrantless wiretapping alleged that telecom companies provided authorities with direct access to nearly all communications passing through their domestic facilities. Besides the government itself, defendants included AT&T, Sprint Nextel and Verizon.

In 2008, Congress granted telecoms immunity for cooperating with the government’s intelligence-gathering activities. A district judge in San Francisco upheld the law as constitutional, and dismissed the claims against the companies.

In a ruling on Thursday, a unanimous three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit agreed…

Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a leading plaintiff in both cases, said they had not yet decided whether to appeal the telecom ruling…

Cohn said it has been nearly six years since warrantless wiretapping was revealed. “I think the American people deserve a little faster justice than that,” she said.

Some of us – foolish as it has turned out to be – expected that the Obama Administration would come down on the side of Liberty for All and the rest of that good stuff and reverse the crap spying and censorship brought upon this land by the Bush/Cheney cabal.

Wrong.

The next time children in some elementary schools in Texas try to sneak extra french fries onto their tray in the cafeteria line, the eye in the sky will be watching them.

Using a $2 million grant from the Department of Agriculture, the schools in San Antonio are installing sophisticated cameras in the cafeteria line and trash area that read food bar codes embedded in the food trays.

“We’re going to snap a picture of the food tray at the cashier and we will know what has been served,” said Dr. Roberto Trevino…”When the child goes back to the disposal window, we’re going to measure the leftover.”

The goal of the program is to cut down on childhood obesity by providing parents and school nutrition specialists with information on what types of food elementary students are eating…

“We will be able to determine whether current programs that are aimed at preventing obesity work, and whether they are really changing students’ behavior,” Trevino said…

The technology will identify the food, capture the nutrient levels and measure the food that children eat, according to Dr. Roger Echon of the center, who designed the program…

He said the program can break down the data into total monounsaturated fatty acids, soluble dietary fiber, and more than 100 other specific measures.

Trevino said the children will not be photographed, and only children who have the permission of their parents or guardians will be allowed to participate.

He said that if the effort is successful in San Antonio, the plan is to implement similar programs in elementary schools nationwide.

Even though the food police have permission, even though their goal is admirable – the Big Brother aspect is troubling. Especially with Texas’ history of morality police.

If it works at cafeteria checkouts and trash cans, where’s the next place, the next reason for spying on the little angels, eh?

Saudi Arabia has taken an Israeli bird into custody on suspicion of espionage after it was found to be wearing a transmitter and leg bracelet with the words “Tel Aviv University,” the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv reports.

Ha’aretz, another Israeli newspaper, says the wounded bird is part of a long-term Israeli research project into bird migration patterns, but residents told Saudi Arabia’s Al-Weeam newspaper that the incident seems to be a “Zionist plot.”

Iran’s Tabnak news agency, according to Ha’aretz, reported that “spy personnel number of X63 [the I.D. number on the leg bracelet] leaves no doubt that other birds are going to be sent by the Zionist regime for espionage against Saudi Arabia and other countries.”

Give me a fracking break! One group of theocratic nutballs being extra-paranoid over the activities of a tiny rational portion – of another group of theocratic nutballs.

Japan’s Defense Ministry says it will investigate the use of high-flying surveillance drones to monitor activity in China and North Korea.

The ministry said it would send senior Self-Defense Forces officers to the United States to study how it uses and maintains the technologically advanced Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.

Does no one tire of the pretense and hypocrisy of a Japanese “Self-Defense Force”?

Drones are widely used by the United States and Britain in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and Germany was reportedly considering their use…

The drones can stay aloft about 30 hours before refueling. The cost is about $3.2 million each, not including monitoring equipment…

Sometimes I think Japanese politicians are engaged in competition with the Brits to be our 51st state. Slavish imitation of Cold War policies remains stuck into the minds of militarist nutballs.

Japan’s military is adopting modern policies about as quickly as Japan’s banking and financial barons. Which means – not at all.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab training in Yemen
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

US intelligence failed to collect, analyze, and share key information that could have helped stop the failed Christmas Day bomber before he boarded a US-bound airliner.

Nearly a decade after the September 11, 2001 strikes led lawmakers to enact the most sweeping reorganization of the US spy community in a half-century, human and technical flaws abounded in the bombing plot, a Senate report said.

In an unclassified 12-page summary [.pdf] of its investigation into the attack, the US Senate Intelligence Committee said “systemic failures” enabled accused plotter Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, to get as far as he did…

The panel laid much of the blame on the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), created by the US Congress as the lead agency to organize and share intelligence about suspected extremists across the intelligence community.

“Specifically, the NCTC was not organized adequately to fulfill its missions,” according to the summary, which noted that no single agency considered itself responsible for identifying and tracking all terror threats. “In addition, technology across the IC (intelligence community) is not adequate to provide search enhancing tools for analysts, which contributed to the failure of the IC to identify Abdulmutallab as a potential threat…”

The committee, which launched its investigation on December 31, noted failures to revoke Abdulmutallab’s visa, place him on the “no-fly list,” connect and correlate different pieces of information, as well as the CIA’s failure to share information about suspicions he was plotting an attack…

Previous probes revealed that US analysts knew Abdulmutallab was an extremist and that Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was plotting an attack, but did not connect the information.

Someday, the administrative functions of intelligence agencies just may be coordinated by professional standards instead of professional politicians. Killer Klowns who have made the career choice to be re-elected by any means necessary aren’t especially useful at much – least of all protecting a nation from gangsters.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether the gangsters are trafficking religion, drugs or derivative, we’re still the targets, we still get screwed.

A federal class action claims a suburban school district has been spying on students and families through the “indiscriminant use of and ability to remotely activate the webcams incorporated into each laptop issued to students,” without the knowledge or consent of students or parents. The plaintiffs say they learned that Big Brother was in their home when an assistant principal told their son that the school district knew he “was engaged in improper behavior in his home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor plaintiff’s personal laptop issued by the school district.”

The families say the Lower Merion School District issued Webcam-equipped personal laptop computers to each of its approximately 1,800 high school students: in Harriton High School in Rosemont, and Lower Merion High School in Ardmore. The schools issued the computers as part of a “one-to-one” laptop computer initiative lauded by Superintendent Christopher McGinley as an effort that “enhances opportunities for ongoing collaboration, and ensures that all students have 24/7 access to school based resources and the ability to seamlessly work on projects and research at school and at home.”

But the parents and students say that, without their knowledge, the access went both ways. Nowhere in any “written documentation accompanying the laptop,” or in any “documentation appearing on any Web site or handed out to students or parents concerning the use of the laptop,” was any reference made “to the fact that the school district has the ability to remotely activate the embedded webcam at any time the school district wished to intercept images from that webcam of anyone or anything appearing in front of the camera,” the complaint states…

The school district in fact has the ability to remotely activate the webcam contained in a student’s personal laptop computer issued by the school district at any time it chose and to view and capture whatever images were in front of the webcam, all without the knowledge, permission or authorization of any persons then and there using the laptop computer.

Defendants include the Lower Merion School District [info@lmsd.org], the Board of Directors [capitalcomments@lmsd.org] of the Lower Merion School District, and Superintendent McGinley [mcginleyc@lmsd.org].

What a flock of bureaucratic creeps! It’s damning enough of our social and political culture that the Bill of Rights probably wouldn’t get through Congress, today. But, you would think that preservation of your boring little sinecure, some cardboard closet for administrative ditto machines, would suggest liberty and privacy are overriding concerns when considering a policy as abhorrent as this?

Thanks, Cinaedh

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Intelligence activities across the U.S. government and military cost a total of $75 billion a year, the nation’s top intelligence official has disclosed, revealing publicly for the first time an overall number long shrouded in secrecy.

The disclosure by Dennis Blair, President Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence, put a spotlight on the sharp growth in intelligence spending as well as on the huge and long obscured role of military intelligence programs, which, based on previous disclosures, would account for roughly $25 billion to $30 billion of the $75 billion total.

In comparison, when total intelligence spending was accidentally published in a congressional document in 1994, it totaled about $26 billion, including $10 billion for military intelligence programs, according to Steven Aftergood, an expert on intelligence spending with the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy.

Blair cited the $75 billion figure in releasing a four-year strategic blueprint for the sprawling, 200,000-person intelligence community…

The $75 billion figure incorporated spending by the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies, referred to collectively as the national intelligence program (NIP), as well as amounts spent by the Pentagon on so-called military intelligence program (MIP) activities in support of troops in the field in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, officials said.

Aftergood said there was “no good reason” to keep information about those military programs secret.

“Its disclosure does not reveal any sensitive sources, methods or operations,” he said, adding that Blair’s disclosure “suggests that a more rational approach to intelligence secrecy may be around the corner. And it’s about time.”

Pay attention!

I know folks who have been battling the Capitol bureaucrats for this info for a half-century.

Police in London said Friday they are investigating an allegation of torture involving a British intelligence officer.

The Metropolitan Police said it was asked by the attorney general to investigate the case. The British Secret Intelligence Service — also known as MI6 — referred the case to the attorney general, the police said…

Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Friday that the British government “wholeheartedly” condemns torture.

“We will not condone it,” he wrote in a letter responding to Hague. “Neither will we ever ask others to do it on our behalf. This is not mere rhetoric but a principled stance consistent with our unequivocal commitment to human rights. We are fortunate to have the best security and intelligence services and armed forces in the world. We are all safer because of the work they do with integrity and bravery.”

Police released no other details about the new case they are investigating…

Golly. I guess we don’t have to worry about this happening in the USA.