Here's a guide on how to make a very low cost GPS tracking device useful for monitoring your own car, your loved ones, or anyone else for that mater so long as you can slip this device into their bag or car.
It was just yesterday that I was explaining why closed circuit tv systems (the the ones they have prominently installed all over London) don't work. Here's an article about a London Graffiti artist who carefully painted a giant message to the authorities that spans three full stories on a building right next to a security camera.
The secretive graffiti artist managed to erect three storeys of scaffolding behind a security fence despite being watched by a CCTV camera.
Then, during darkness and hidden behind a sheet of polythene, he painted this comment on 'Big Brother' society.
Many states have defied REAL ID for privacy (but mostly money) reasons. Now it looks like things are coming to a head with the DHS warning Maine that if they don't implement REAL ID, their identification may no longer be accepted at airports.
If you're not aware of this already, Bush authorized the NSA to spy on Americans without a warrant (which is illegal, duh). He's managed to keep Congress from impeaching him somehow and, emboldened by his victory, he's even pushing to protect giant telecommunications companies like AT&T from the lawsuits that have sprung up against them for participating in the spying.
[Bush] Now the question is, should these lawsuits be allowed to proceed, or should any company that may have helped save American lives be thanked for performing a patriotic service; should those who stepped forward to say we’re going to help defend America have to go to the courthouse to defend themselves, or should the Congress and the President say thank you for doing your patriotic duty? I believe we ought to say thank you.
Well… I guess he has a point. Let me try:
"Thank you Telcos for helping Bush to violate our rights violently and repeatedly for years".
Wait, I don't think I did that right. Let me try again:
"Thank you Telcos for scrambling to cover your butts as much as possible and helping to shield our corrupt leadership from direct responsibility".
Dang. Maybe this time:
"Thank you for treating our privacy and personal rights as so much cow dung to be buried and stepped upon as you see fit".
You know, I don't think I can get the hang of this.
Can and would they use your DNA results against you? Do credit card companies raise your rates according to unrelated things on your credit report? Do insurance companies raise your rates due to traffic tickets that have little to do with telling how good or safe a driver you are?
Like I said, avoiding a record of your DNA is a smart idea.
Vast computer databases give curious employees the ability to look up sensitive information on people with the click of a mouse. The WE Energies database includes credit and banking information, payment histories, Social Security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, and energy usage. In some cases, it even includes income and medical information.
Experts say some companies do little to stop such abuses even though they could lead to identity theft, stalking and other privacy invasions. And companies that uncover violations can keep them quiet because in many cases it is not illegal to snoop, only to use the data for crimes.
But of course, if they didn't store all that unecessary data, this would be far less of an issue.
The funniest part of this is that they're trying to convince their public that it's a good idea to have a national ID card containing even more data.
Said someone from an anti-ID card group:
"It's inevitably good news for our campaign because it proves to people that this government, and indeed any government, cannot be trusted with this amount of information. For 25 million people this is a catastrophe but it is just a small herald of the national ID scheme which would mean a potential catastrophe for 60 million of us."
"DHS is essentially whittling Real ID down to nothing—all in the name of denying Real ID is a failure," said ACLU senior legislative counsel Tim Sparapani. "Real ID is in its death throes, and any signs of life are just last gasps."
In an attempt to remove all doubt that AT&T is a evil-infested, garbage-brained, scum-sucking, low-life, mucus-eating sot of a company, it has been recently discovered that they built a custom algorithm to: "crunch through tens of millions of long distance phone records a night to draw up what AT&T calls "communities of interest" — i.e., calling circles that show who is talking to whom".
Individuals who are believed to have the cryptographic keys necessary for such decryption will face up to 5 years in prison for failing to comply with police or military orders to hand over either the cryptographic keys, or the data in a decrypted form.
That's just peachy. So what happens if you don't know anything about it, but they think you're the guy?
Virtual Shield will capture, monitor, and "fully index" video from the Windy City's surveillance cameras. The software used to run the system will be able to recognize specific license plates, vehicle descriptions, and even patterns of behavior. If someone drops a briefcase on the El platform and it stays unattended for more than a minute, the system could alert the OEMC, which could then dispatch police officers to the scene.
The privacy office concluded that although required privacy analyses were ignored, the Privacy Act was not technically violated because the live data were covered by privacy notices issued earlier for other programs that originally gathered the information.
Which shows that the concept of taking data for one reason, but using for a completely different reason altogether is alive and well. This is the lynch-pin argument that we privacy paranoids have against data mining, store shopper cards, RFID, and any other technology that gathers our information. We know that it can be abused and that's why we try to stop it.
