Archive for the ‘Surveillance’ Category
“THOUSANDS of the worst families in England are to be put in “sin bins” in a bid to change their bad behaviour, Ed Balls announced yesterday. The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes. They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.
Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction. Around 2,000 families have gone through these Family Intervention Projects so far. But ministers want to target 20,000 more in the next two years, with each costing between £5,000 and £20,000 – a potential total bill of £400million. Ministers hope the move will reduce the number of youngsters who get drawn into crime because of their chaotic family lives, as portrayed in Channel 4 comedy drama Shameless. Sin bin projects operate in half of council areas already but Mr Balls wants every local authority to fund them…”
source: express.co.uk
“Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano traveled to New York to deliver a speech to the boss today. She told the Council on Foreign Relations there will be no departure from the Bush administration in regard to homeland security. It will be the same agenda with a few minor changes — for instance, the color-coded threat advisory will be chucked.
‘Napolitano sang the praises of counter-terrorism intelligence being shared between federal, state and local agencies through arrangements known as fusion centers,’ writes Frank James for NPR. Napolitano said she plans ‘to make them a top priority for this department to support them, build them, improve them and work with them.’
Translation: the feds will continue the full-steam ahead effort to federalize state and local law enforcement, an effort that began in earnest under Bill Clinton and picked up critical momentum during the reign of George W. Bush. ‘Napolitano sounded just like her predecessors Ridge and Michael Chertoff,’ James continues. ‘And she talked about educating the populace about how to be the eyes and ears of counter-terrorism and also how to respond to the aftermath of man-made or natural disasters,’ or for that matter government contrived false flag operations. Napolitano told the internationalist cabal in New York that the American people suffer from ‘complacency’ and this is a ‘threat in the United States.’ In order to combat complacency, the government has to do more to ‘educate’ the public on the threat posed by terrorists and other miscreants. In other words, Napolitano admitted the incessant warnings of impending doom — from dirty bombs in major cities to bad guys taking out nuclear plants — have not worked…”
source: infowars.com
“The city of Miami and several commercial partners plan to rollout a “smart grid” citywide electrical infrastructure by the year 2011. This rollout was
announced on the heels of news that foreign agents have infiltrated our existing electrical infrastructure and that recent penetration tests have uncovered numerous vulnerabilities in the proposed technologies. Simultaneously, the National Institute for Standards in Technology (“NIST”) has recently released a roadmap for producing smart grid standards. In this whitepaper, I will discuss the flaws with the current guidelines and map them to the criticisms of similar regulatory mandates, including the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (“PCI DSS”), that rely heavily on organizations policing themselves…
As of the writing of this white paper, NIST has released a draft framework for review that includes some of the proposed standards. While there are several security standards listed in the framework, NIST appears to be making the same mistakes of previous regulatory mandate governing bodies. For example, the PCI DSS standards have been criticized for not requiring a high-level of security in environments that process cardholder data. Specifically, one of the major criticisms is the “self policing” aspect of these standards. The credit card companies (American Express, Discover
Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide, and Visa Inc.) are responsible for ensuring that relevant companies are compliant with the standards. If a company is deemed non-compliant, then the credit card companies issue what they consider to be the appropriate punishment…”
source: blackhat.com
“The EU is about to enter talks with the US on giving it access to banking data in its fight against terrorism. German politicians from across the political spectrum are up in arms, and members of the European Parliament say they will try to scupper any deal that violates data privacy.
US anti-terror officials want to be able to continue examining Europeans’ financial transactions, and it appears likely that the European Union is going to comply.
On Monday, foreign ministers of European Union member states gave their approval for the European Commission and Sweden, which currently holds the six-month rotating EU presidency, to negotiate an agreement with Washington that would allow it to scrutinize European citizens’ banking data. However, there is a growing wave of criticism from across the political spectrum in Germany and from the European Parliament…”
source: spiegel.de
“Local authorities are still illegally spying on individuals despite curbs imposed on their covert activities, the senior official charged with scrutinising their activities said today.
The disclosure appears in the latest annual report by Sir Christopher Rose, the chief surveillance commissioner. He said it was ‘of significant concern’ that councils were conducting covert surveillance of individuals for purposes now banned under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, Ripa.
Local councils were authorised to conduct nearly 5,000 ‘directed surveillance’ missions in the year to the end of March, he revealed. Almost 5,000 were also carried out by other public authorities, including Whitehall departments.
‘Directed surveillance’ is defined as ‘covert surveillance of individuals while in a public place for the purposes of a specific investigation’. Such surveillance can be used only for the ‘protection or detection of crime or of preventing disorder’…”
via guardian.co.uk