RTFA: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howabou…

The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets.

With an estimated 13 million CCTV cameras in Britain, suitable locations were not hard to come by.

They set up their equipment, drum kit and all, in eighty locations around Manchester - including on a bus - and proceeded to play to the cameras.

This is a great way to externalize the cost of production.

RTFA: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/344868_airport…

Travelers at Sea-Tac and dozens of other major airports across America are being scrutinized by teams of TSA behavior-detection officers specially trained to discern the subtlest suspicious behaviors.
TSA officials will not reveal specific behaviors identified by the program — called SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Technique) — that are considered indicators of possible terrorist intent.
But a central task is to recognize microfacial expressions — a flash of feelings that in a fraction of a second reflects emotions such as fear, anger, surprise or contempt, said Carl Maccario, who helped start the program for TSA.
“In the SPOT program, we have a conversation with (passengers) and we ask them about their trip,” said Maccario from his office in Boston. “When someone lies or tries to be deceptive, … there are behavior cues that show it. … A brief flash of fear.”
Such people are referred for secondary screening, which can include a pat-down search and an X-ray exam. The microfacial expressions, he said, are the same across many cultures.
Since January 2006, behavior-detection officers have referred about 70,000 people for secondary screening, Maccario said. Of those, about 600 to 700 were arrested on a variety of charges, including possession of drugs, weapons violations and outstanding warrants.

It’s when they pull treachery DIRECTLY from Orwell’s 1984 that YOU must ask yourself if this is justified by ANY law, or by ANY shred of evidence that the program works. I submit, as evidence from the article above, that the program has a 1% effectiveness rate.

I will do the math for you: that is 99% false positives. Folks, this is dangerously scary!

RTFA: http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?…

The 2007 International Privacy Ranking

A few countries stand out.

Yep - straight from the internet tube: the Senate will pick this one up in January.

To quote Harry Reid, “in Nevada we don’t like wiretaps… we’re very private people, and I think that’s where America is.” He continued, “Because we believe this retroactive immunity needs to be studied very closely, it doesn’t mean we’re any less patriotic than anyone else.”

Dodd wrapped it up by quoting Frank Church, who chaired the initial FISA discussions: “Domestic surveillance activities threaten to undermine our democratic society… Personal privacy is protected because it is essential to our liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Current as of 1638PST. They’re working late in DC, tonight!

RTFA: http://www.eff.org/cases/att/attachments/master-co…

68. Since on or about February 1, 2001, BellSouth has disclosed and/or divulged the “call-detail records” of all or substantially all of their customers, including Plaintiffs, to the NSA, in violation of federal law, as more particularly set forth below.

69. BellSouth has, since on or about February 1, 2001, been disclosing to the NSA “individually identifiable customer proprietary network information” belonging to all or substantially all of their customers, including Plaintiffs, in violation of federal law, as more particularly set forth below.

Today, on the US Senate floor, a bill is being discussed that may or may not include a provision that grants retroactive amnesty to telecommunications companies that participated in the NSA’s domestic surveillance of telephones in the US. Bush has said that he will veto any bill that doesn’t include amnesty.

The excerpt above was taken from the complaint filed specifically against BellSouth, from the Factual Allegations section. These simple facts will mean everything, because if they are accepted as fact, it indicates that there is evidence this domestic surveillance program began seven months before September 11, 2001.

George W. Bush was sworn into office on January 20, 2001. This lawsuit would establish that, within two weeks of swearing to uphold the US Constitution, Bush had authorized the establishment of this surveillance program.

Today, the US Senate will decide whether or not this lawsuit, and others like it, should be thrown out of court.

RTFA: http://www.stopthespying.org/

The president is unconstitutionally wiretapping the telephone and Internet communications of millions of ordinary Americans.
Companies like AT&T want immunity for their illegal collaboration with the President’s program.

And Congress might let them get away with it.

Stop the Spying Now!

This one is pretty basic. Your conversations have been recorded. Yes - that’s what this fuss is about. You thought you had a constitution to protect you, but now you feel like an idiot.

RTFA: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070905/wr_nm/fossett_tech_dc

British billionaire Richard
Branson said on Wednesday he was hoping to trace Steve Fossett
through a satellite mapping service offered by Internet data
provider Google as the search for the missing U.S. adventurer
resumed.

Branson told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. he was worried
that Fossett, who disappeared over the Nevada desert after
taking off in a small plane late on Monday, had not activated
the aircraft’s emergency tracking beacon.

Wild - one of the world’s best pilots disappears on a routine flight. Will Big Brother save him?

RTFA: http://www.cnet.com/8301-13739_1-9769645-46.html

Comcast is perfectly within its right to filter the Internet traffic that flows over its network. What it is not entitled to do is to impersonate its customers and other users, in order to make that filtering happen. Dropping packets is perfectly OK, while falsifying sender information in packet headers is not.

Comcast lowers its bandwidth bills by spoofing TCP RST packets. The net effect is that if their customers run normal TCP/IP stacks, the customer’s computer will think the remote host has disconnected. Right now, they use this on Bittorrent traffic, but the same technique is used in China to perform per-keyword HTTP-over-TCP filtering, too. One solution, presented in this paper, is to hack your TCP/IP stack to ignore, or at least be smarter, about spoofed TCP RST packets.