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Walking in downtown Seattle? Your smartphone may be tracked by a police mesh network.
The Seattle police department has a proven track record of being less than forthcoming when they institute surveillance measures. They installed 30 cameras in the port district for 'security' without owning up to it or saying how they are used. Most recently, they've installed a mesh wireless network downtown. Each box contains for wireless ( Read more... ) -
Homeland Security seizes and shuts down a CANADIAN gambling site
The site violated Maryland law even though the money transfers took place in/through non-USAian countries. The Feds filed suite in Maryland and indicted the owners, and got Verisign in California to shut down the domain ( Read more... ) -
Drive-through backscatter x-ray scanners, coming soon to a checkpoint near you
Three are already in service, one in California and two in New Mexico. Well, north of El Paso, TX, which is close enough. And which I'll have to drive through whenever I go to El Paso, unless I take 150 mile detour through Las Cruces ( Read more... ) -
SOPA vote to get it out of committee delayed
This is good. They've heard from ??AA "experts" who want to legislate technical changes to the internet, yet they didn't allow any witnesses who were technical experts on how the internet is engineered and how these changes would damage the internet ( Read more... ) -
DHS gets three new Predator drones. And they don't want them.
I love it! "DHS is already struggling to operate their seven existing drones. Officials acknowledge that they are short on pilots and maintenance - right now, they can only pay to fly the drones five days a week. So now DHS is in a mad scramble trying to figure out how they can successfully incorporate three more vehicles into the roster."DHS insider says "body bombs" are a good thing
I'm not entirely clear why they think this. There's a huge number of problems involved in the concept of surgically-implanting a bomb inside a person: surgeon skill, infection issues, toxicity of explosives, how to detonate, the dampening effect of water mass on explosives, etc. So from the top, the difficulties of doing this in a third-world ( Read more... )Senate hold kills Protect IP act!
The act would have given the governmentMPAA/RIAA power to order American ISPs to block DNS resolution of sites that are infringing content, mainly torrent trackers and download sites. Currently the government has the power to order the Department of Homeland Security to seize the domain names of sites that offend the governmentMPAA/RIAA, which is ( Read more... )The Department of Homeland Security asked Mozilla to remove a Firefox add-in
I can't say it any better than the Wired article puts it:
The Department of Homeland Security has requested that Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser, remove an add-on that allows web surfers to access websites whose domain names were seized by the government for copyright infringement, Mozilla’s lawyer said Thursday ( Read more... )Possibly the next chapter in TSA security theater: shoe scanners
Design proposals are being accepted for devices that would scan your shoes while you wear them. Remember the fluoroscopes in shoe stores in years gone by? Lots of shoe store employees got cancer.
When is DHS/TSA going to figure out that a device/protocol that addresses Threat X is invariably worthless against Threat Y? dhs, tsa, security theater