Big Brother
Daily Mail Online
Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:12 EST
© Jamie Wiseman
The cameras are used to look for anti-social behaviour
CCTV cameras are being fitted inside family homes by council 'snoopers' to spy on neighbours in the street outside, it was revealed today.
The £1,000 security cameras have been placed inside properties but are trained on the streets to gather evidence of anti-social behaviour.
Each device is linked to a laptop computer and accessible online by police and council officials 24 hours a day.
But the trial inside two homes by Croydon council in south London has sparked new fears about invasion of privacy and Britain's 'surveillance society'.
Hans Vogel
iraq-war.ru
Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:38 EST
The world is becoming unsafer by the day. Before the end of November, half a billion new terrorists will be added to the list kept by the US government.
On November 30, one day before the Lisbon Treaty is scheduled to take effect, the ministers of justice of the EU's 27 member states will sign yet another security agreement with the US. It is supposed to be an essential weapon in the global "War on Terror" the US claims to be fighting.
Under the new agreement, the US government will get access to all the banking data of all Europeans. This means that from December 2009, every single financial transaction done by every single European banking customer will come under the scrutiny of the US authorities. Henceforth, whenever the US government suspects a European "citizen" of supporting terrorism, it can request all his or her banking data, including all bank statements as well as any and all personal data connected with the account.
No doubt, many people will fail to see much harm in this, because "they have nothing to hide." But such an attitude is based on the assumption the US is governed by benign, rational individuals, controlled by an elaborate system of checks and balances.
Geoffrey Alderman
The Guardian
Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:28 EST
The London Safety Camera Partnership is dominated by bureaucrats, has no constitution and holds meetings in secret
On Wednesday the London assembly member Victoria Borwick will, on my behalf, put a series of questions to the mayor, Boris Johnson, relating to the present plight of the London Safety Camera Partnership, a road safety initiative designed to reduce speeding and the number of vehicles running red lights in the capital.
The LSCP is a curious entity. It has no written constitution. Why not? The LSCP has not met since January. Why not? We are told that the LSCP is now in financial crisis, and may be "mothballed". Would this matter?
There are now 38 SCPs, covering most police force areas. Until April 2007, local SCPs received a proportion of the income from fines generated by traffic-enforcement cameras, but the well-founded suspicion that the cameras were being used primarily for revenue-raising purposes led the government to abandon this method of funding. Nowadays all local authorities with a responsibility for road safety receive an annual road safety grant not related to the number of penalty notices issued.
John Oates
The Register
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:23 EST
Cardiff Airport is joining Manchester in using facial recognition technology to automate passport checks for inbound passengers.
Anyone over 18 with a biometric passport issued since 2006 can choose to have their face scanned, matched to the picture held on a chip on their passport and, assuming there's a match, be allowed in.
Doesn't this sound marvellous? Except the gates in Manchester were throwing up so many false results that staff effectively turned them off. Previously matches had to be 80 per cent the same - this was quickly changed to 30 per cent.
This means the machines are unable to distinguish between the faces of Winona Ryder and Osama bin Laden. Even more worryingly, the adjusted gates failed to distinguish between renownded pseudo-Scot Mel Gibson and actual Scot Gordon Brown.
Adam Murdock, M.D.
Campaign for Liberty
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:40 EST
Will it make you an enemy of the state?
As I have written about in a previous article entitled "
Stop the Swine Whine," the public health establishment has used the current swine flu hysteria to try to impose mandatory vaccination laws under the guise of a health crisis. Fortunately, these proposed laws, with the exception of New York's short-lived mandatory health care worker vaccination mandate, have yet to come to fruition. In the case of New York some courageous doctors and nurses filed suit against the dictatorial law and were successful in getting the state government to back down.
While the constitutional crisis that this represented has been temporarily averted, a dangerous precedent has been set. It may be that in the coming months and years that these same government officials will not so easily relent. It may be as soon as the next flu season or the passage of the Obamacare health bill that our medical rights are lost forever.
Kable
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:26 EST
The Home Office's scheme to monitor all electronic communications remains within the Home Office's financial plans, despite the government postponing the relevant legislation
The Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP) is planned for completion in 2016, having started in April 2006, according to a written parliamentary answer from Home Office minister Phil Woolas.
A bill to establish the scheme, which would require communications service providers to greatly increase the data they hold on customers for the benefit of the police and security agencies, has been dropped by the government from this week's Queen's Speech.
However, the information from Woolas shows the Home Office does not anticipate that this will delay the IMP, with 2016 as both the original and the current planned date for completion.
Stephen Lendman
OpEdNews
Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:48 EST
During his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama promised to "Support the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet."
Perhaps not given a worse record than his fiercest critics feared, worse than George Bush, across the board on both domestic and foreign policies, including:
-- failing to deliver promised change;
-- being the standard bearer for the corrupted political/business elite;
-- governing like a crime boss in league with Wall Street;
-- disdaining democratic rights, freedoms, and the rule of law;
-- betraying working Americans;
-- proposing social services cuts instead of increasing them when they're most needed;
-- denying budget-strapped states vitally needed aid;
-- ignoring growing poverty, hunger, homelessness and despair;
-- expanding militarism, imperial wars, and state-sponsored terrorism;
-- violating human rights and civil liberties; and
-- providing open-ended banker bailouts, an array of pro-business measures, and the greatest ever amounts of military spending at a time America has no enemies.
Karl Vick
Washington Post
Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:31 EST
© Washington Independent
Famed to readers as the birthplace of John Steinbeck and in supermarket produce circles as the "Salad Bowl of the World," the city of Salinas carries darker renown in the netherworld of California's prisons. Instant respect is accorded any inmate tattooed with the words "Salad Bowl" or "Salis" -- gang shorthand for a city now defined most of all by ferocious eruptions of violence.
In the space of 11 days this year, seven people were murdered in Salinas. Each killing, like the record 25 homicides the previous year, spilled from the gang warfare that this summer pushed the homicide rate in the city of 140,000 to three times that of Los Angeles. Residents retreated indoors at night, and Mayor Dennis Donohue affirmed his decision to seek help from an unlikely source: the U.S. military.
Dave Lindorff
The Public Record
Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:28 EST
© White House photographer Pete Souza
In an unprecedented town hall in Shanghai, the President takes questions on the most pivotal issues in U.S.-China relations directly from students and via the internet.
President Obama, in his visit to China, held a "town meeting" with Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the value of freedom of information, saying that he is a "supporter of non-censorship" and that open access to information was a "source of strength."
And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Talk about censorship! But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian style control over information.
Let's just take the issue of depleted uranium weapons, over 1000 tons of which have been expended in the US invasion of Iraq, most of it in populated areas where millions remain exposed to the radioactive dust of the burned material. There is almost no reporting on this topic in the US media. The Pentagon has for years lied about and hidden the effects of this deadly substance, used in shells, bombs and bullets because of its unique ability to penetrate hard steel armor and concrete bunker walls.
Don Dahler
New York Times
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:22 EST
© CBS
Residents who live at 1510 Lexington Avenue, New York City's first non-smoking apartment building, aren't even allowed to light up on the sidewalks outside the development.
Smoking has been banned in restaurants, bars, taxis, office buildings, but what if you were told you couldn't even smoke your own home? That's just the case in Manhattan where "No Smoking" signs are going up in numerous apartment buildings.
For the 1 million New York City residents who smoke, doing so in their own home has been an unwritten privilege. The problem with smoking in an apartment, however, is you can't keep that smoke from going into other parts of the building. In fact, a recent study by the New York City Department of Health says 57 percent of non-smokers have had substantial exposure to cigarette smoke.
So some apartment buildings are now banning smoking for new tenants. Existing tenants who smoke will be allowed to continue to puff away.
That's not the case with the new East Harlem building at 1510 Lexington Avenue, which will be the city's first completely non-smoking residence, where tenants won't even be allowed to walk outside and light up in the immediate perimeter of the building. Even the construction workers can't light up.
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