Video: Sacrificing Freedoms
Showing posts with label Security. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Security. Show all posts
Friday, April 19, 2013
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Cops to Use Facial Recognition iPhone
CRIMEARE U.S. COPS PREPARING WIDESPREAD USE OF FACIAL RECOGNITION IPHONE?
Starting as early as September, cops across the country may be using a new iphone-based device to identify people based on a picture of their face, iris scan, or a fingerprint reader, raising concerns about how the data will be gathered, stored, and used.
The device in question is called the MORIS, which stands for Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System. Made by BI2 Technologies of Plymouth, Mass, it runs on the iphone platform. The company states that it has contracts with 40 government agencies to deliver 1,000 devices this fall.
Unlike other currently used biometric technologies, the MORIS does not require a separate digital camera or upload time, and automatically scans known databases for criminal warrants and other relevant history. The Wall Street Journal gives specifics on how this new device works:
“To scan a person’s iris, police officers can hold the special iris-scanning camera on device, called MORIS, about 5 to 6 inches away from an individual’s irises. After snapping a high resolution photo, the MORIS system analyzes 235 unique features in each iris and uses an algorithm to match that person with their identity if they are in the database.”
“For the facial recognition, an officer takes a photo of a person at a distance of about 2 feet to 5 feet. Based on technologies from Animetrics Inc., the system analyzes about 130 distinguishing points on the face, such as the distance between a person’s eye and nose. It then scans the database for likely matches.”
As for the usage of the devices, the law does not appear settled on whether police need consent to take a person’s photo. Generally speaking, the law does not prohibit taking photos of people in a public place. But taking and storing photos for law enforcement purposes- particularly if the subject is in custody- could trigger a different standard of rules. The law becomes even more vague on issues such as whether an iris scan constitutes a search.
Below is a video presentation for the Brockton Police Department showing facial recognition and iris scanning technologies that have been demoed and will soon be in use by various law enforcement units in Massachusetts. The presenters show the devices, discuss the database, and describe the features designed to help law enforcement officers.
Video: Mass. Police Get Facial Recognition App For iPhones
US Troops overseas have used a variety of biometric tools for years to vet allies and identify insurgents and terrorists. But the MORIS is poised to become the first widespread, mobile usage of such technology here in the US by local and federal law enforcement.
Law enforcement analysts believe the device could prevent the wrong inmates from obtaining prison release, to identify accident victims and keep track of the homeless. While there are many privacy and civil liberties concerns associated with law enforcement’s widespread use of facial recognition devices, the landscape of biometrics is already rapidly changing with programs such as Facebook Facial Recognition:
Video: Facebook Expands Facial Recognition for Photo Tagging, Triggering Privacy Concerns
Source: the Blaze
There Is No First Amendment Without the Second Amendment!
“ He who gives up their freedom for security, generally gets or deserves either!!” …Benjamin Franklin
Monday, May 16, 2011
Most Watched City in the World…
Which one… Chicago; the home of our President and now run by Rahm Emanuel whose coronation, ah swearing in, is today, May 16th, 2011… 1984 has arrived in Chicago and if we don’t stand up NOW… coming to your city next!
In what has been dubbed Operation Virtual Shield, thousands of public and privately owned security cameras have been put in place in Chicago and linked together, creating a capsule of surveillance over the entire city, more extensive than anywhere else in the United States. Chicago holds the record for number of surveillance cameras, estimated at up to 10,000. The network is said to have cost $60 million. Officials say it is worth the price, but privacy concerns are at a peak.
Video: May 16, 2011 !!!1984!!! YOU NEED TO KNOW!!!
Your rights and freedoms are being consciously and deliberately stripped away. This is NOT about public safety!
It is about power and control by a self appointed few.
Red Squad Back Big Brother cameras zoom in on Chicago
http://www.youtube.com/user/RussiaToday#p/u/8/drdYYrzgnP4
RussiaToday | May 15, 2011 | 4,134 view
Benjamin Franklin, “He who gives up his liberty for security ends up with neither!!”
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
~~ Asra Q. Nomani: I'm a Muslim. Please profile me ~~
In the wake of yet another Muslim terror plot, we can't ignore the threat profile any longer—or the solution. Asra Q. Nomani argues the case for religious and racial profiling.
For all those holiday travelers negotiating the Transportation Security Administration’s new cop-a-feel strategy, there is a difficult solution we need to consider: racial and religious profiling.
Passenger Angela Johnson talks to reporters about security and Thanksgiving holiday travel at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, Georgia on Nov. 24, 2010. (Photo: Chris Rank / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
As an American Muslim, I’ve come to recognize, sadly, that there is one common denominator defining those who’ve got their eyes trained on U.S. targets: MANY of them are Muslim—like the Somali-born teenager arrested Friday night for a reported plot to detonate a car bomb at a packed Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in downtown Portland, Oregon.
We have to talk about the taboo topic of profiling because terrorism experts are increasingly recognizing that religious ideology makes terrorist organizations and terrorists more likely to commit heinous crimes against civilians, such as blowing an airliner out of the sky. Certainly, it’s not an easy or comfortable conversation but it’s one, I believe, we must have.
This past week, as part of a debate series sponsored by the New York-based group Intelligence Squared, I argued that U.S. airports should use racial and religious profiling. (Taking the opposite stand was a “debating team” that included the former director of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff; Columbia University scholar of Pakistan, Hassan Abbas; and Debra Burlingame, a former flight attendant whose brother was a pilot of one of the planes hijacked on 9/11.)
I realize that in recent years, profiling has become a dirty word, synonymous with prejudice, racism, and bigotry. But while I believe our risk assessment should not end with religion, race and ethnicity, I believe that it should include these important elements, as part of a “triage” strategy that my debate partner, former CIA case officer Robert Baer, says airports and airliners already do.
Profiling doesn’t have to be about discrimination, persecution, or harassment. As my debating partner, conservative columnist Deroy Murdock put it: “We are not arguing that the TSA should send anyone named Mohammad to be waterboarded somewhere between the first-class lounge and the Pizza Hut.”
In an online posting of the Intelligence Squared video, a Muslim viewer called me an “Uncle Tom.”
And more Americans, it seems, are willing to choose racial and religious profiling as one part of keeping our skies safe. At the beginning of the debate, 37 percent of the audience was for religious and racial profiling, while 33 percent were against and 30 percent were undecided. By the end of the debate, 49 percent of the audience was for religious and racial profiling, 40 percent were against and the rest were undecided, meaning that that the motion carried. Of course, this “victory” in a scholarly debate doesn’t mean that the motion would necessarily win any broader popularity contests.
In the debate, I said, “Profile me. Profile my family,” because, in my eyes, we in the Muslim community have failed to police ourselves. In an online posting of the Intelligence Squared video, a Muslim viewer called me an “Uncle Tom.”
But to me, profiling isn’t about identity politics but about threat assessment.
According to a terrorism database at the University of Maryland, which documents 60 attacks against airlines and airports between 1970 and 2007, the last year available, suspects in attacks during the 1970s were tied to the Jewish Defense League, the Black Panthers, the Black September, the National Front for the Liberation of Cuba, Jewish Armed Resistance and the Croatian Freedom Fighters, along with a few other groups.
In each of these groups’ names was a religious or ethnic dimension. For that time, those were the identities that we needed to assess. Today, the threat has changed, and it is primarily coming from Muslims who embrace al Qaeda’s radical brand of Islam.
Data in reports released over the past several months from New York University’s Center for Security and the Law; the Congressional Research Service, and the Rand Corporation reveal that over the past decade not only are many defendants in terrorism cases Muslim, but they trace their national or ethnic identity back to specific countries.
According to the Rand study “Would-Be Warriors,” the national origins or ethnicities most defendants came from was Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Jordan and Egypt, with a handful from the Muslim areas of the Balkans.
To be sure, according to New York University’s Center for Security and the Law “Terrorist Trial Report Card,” an analysis of terrorism cases prosecuted between 2001 and 2009 reveals that identifying race and ethnicity doesn’t mean stereotyping according to country. Among the hundreds of defendants in the study, most held U.S. citizenship. Still, many of the Americans were ethnically connected to Pakistan, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt.
The track record of Muslim plots against airliners and airports is clear, starting with the 1989 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. After the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, Ramzi Yousef schemed with his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a Muslim of Pakistani Baluchi ethnicity, to blow up 12 jetliners traveling from Asia to the U.S., intending to kill as many as 4,000 people. The plan fell apart in 1995 after a chemical fire caught the attention of police in the Philippines, but a test run had already killed one passenger seated near a nitroglycerin bomb on a Philippine Airlines Flight.
Three years later, Osama bin Laden threatened to bring down U.S. and Israeli aircrafts through the International Islamic Front for Fighting Against the Jews and Crusaders, warning the attacks would be “pitiless and violent” and announcing that “the war has begun.”
“Our response to the barbaric bombardment against Muslims of Afghanistan and Sudan will be ruthless and violent,” he said in a statement. “All the Islamic world has mobilized to strike a prominent American or Israeli strategic objective, to blow up their airplanes and to seize them.” A declassified CIA memo written in December 1998 warned: “Bin Ladin preparing to hijack U.S. aircraft.”
In 1999, we had a “Millennium bomber,” targeting Los Angeles International Airport. And, in a case that became very personal to me, on Dec. 24, 1999, a group of Pakistani Muslim militants hijacked an Indian Airlines jet from Kathmandu, Nepal, diverting it to Kandahar, Afghanistan, killing one newlywed passenger. In exchange for the passengers, India released Muslim militants, including a Pakistan-British Muslim militant named Omar Sheikh. Sheikh went on to mastermind the 2002 kidnapping of my friend, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whom Khalid Sheikh Mohammed later confessed to killing.
After the Kathmandu hijacking, we had the 9/11 attacks. And since then, we’ve had the “Torrance Plotters,” the “JFK Airport Plotters,” the Glasgow, Scotland, bombers, and the “Transatlantic bombers,” all targeting airlines and airports. More recently, there was the attempt by the “underwear bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who last Christmas attempted to blow up explosives in his underwear—a foiled attack that brought the pat-downs of today. In addition to the Portland plot, most recently, we had the package bomb attempt out of Yemen last month.
Victor Asal, a political science professor at State University of New York at Albany, and Karl Rethemeyer, a professor of public administration and policy at SUNY at Albany, have studied 395 terrorist organizations in operation between 1998 and 2005, and Asal concludes, “What makes terrorist organizations more lethal is religious ideology. When you combine religion and ethno-nationalism, you get a dangerous combination.”
Asal, the son of a Tunisian father, says there hasn’t been enough research done for him to take a stand on racial and religious profiling, but favors “behavioral profiling,” which assesses risky behavior like buying one-way tickets with cash and flying without checked baggage.
As attorney R. Spencer MacDonald put it in an article in the Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law, we can have “rational profiling.”
I know this is an issue of great distress to many people. But I believe that we cannot bury our heads in the sand anymore. We have to choose pragmatism over political correctness, and allow U.S. airports and airlines to do religious and racial profiling.
Asra Q. Nomani is the author of Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam. She is co-director of the Pearl Project, an investigation into the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Her activism for women's rights at her mosque in W.V. is the subject of a PBS documentary, The Mosque in Morgantown. She recently published a monograph, Milestones for a Spiritual Jihad: Toward an Islam of Grace. asra@asranomani.com
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We really must begin asking ourselves… exactly who is it that favors and gains from TSA agents groping passengers, full body scanners that give off radiation, and the loss of passenger dignity as well as another huge affront to freedom and the Constitution? The information is out: one expert after another says the scanners radiation is harmful, these methods do not work, George Soros as well as Former Secretary of DHS, Micheal Chertoff and more than a few others!! (Lobbyists for the scanner company include Susan Carr, a former senior legislative aide to Rep. David Price (D-N.C.) who is coincidentally chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee); and even Hillary Clinton said she would not go through pat downs. And that is always the kicker anyway… our elite government gang doesn’t go through any of this even if they do fly commercial.
How America Stands Up Against this Invasion of Privacy Could Change Our Entire World! - And so far we aren’t doing the world or ourselves a favor! But what they have done has helped and would work if we were stronger: Did TSA Cave on Scanners for Thanksgiving Rush?
Forget Body Scans and Pat Downs – Let’s Get Busy Profiling!! It is What Works!
T&A… err TSA Monster Link List
The Solution to the TSA Scanner Dilemma - rational profiling like Israel uses, dogs like Europe uses and a discreet full-body scanner. The manufacturer, Iscon Imaging, awaits TSA approval of its Model 1000D. It uses thermal infrared energy to generate images of clothed passengers… to be used randomly or if deemed necessary.
“Those who give up their freedom for security neither get nor deserver either!”… Benjamin Franklin
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Security Theater Now Playing at Your Airport
As hands are wrung in the aftermath of the near-tragedy on a Northwest Airlines flight approaching Detroit, a conversation from London’s Heathrow airport in 1986 comes to mind.
Nizar al-Hindawi and Ann-Marie Murphy.
It consisted of an El Al security agent quizzing one Ann-Marie Doreen Murphy, a 32-year-old recent arrival in London from Sallynoggin, Ireland. While working as a chambermaid at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane Murphy met Nizar al-Hindawi, a far-leftist Palestinian who impregnated her. After instructing her to “get rid of the thing,” he abruptly changed his tune and insisted on immediate marriage in “the Holy Land.” He also insisted on their traveling separately.
Murphy, later described by the prosecutor as a “simple, unsophisticated Irish lass and a Catholic,” accepted unquestioningly Hindawi’s arrangements for her to fly to Israel on El Al on April 17. She also accepted a wheeled suitcase with a false bottom containing nearly 2 kilograms of Semtex, a powerful plastic explosive, and she agreed to be coached by him to answer questions posed by airport security.
Murphy successfully passed through the standard Heathrow security inspection and reached the gate with her bag, where an El Al agent questioned her. As reconstructed by Neil C. Livingstone and David Halevy in Washingtonianmagazine, he started by asking whether she had packed her bags herself. She replied in the negative. Then:
“What is the purpose of your trip to Israel?” Recalling Hindawi’s instructions, Murphy answered, “For a vacation.”
“Are you married, Miss Murphy?” “No.”
“Traveling alone?” “Yes.”
“Is this your first trip abroad?” “Yes.”
“Do you have relatives in Israel?” “No.”
“Are you going to meet someone in Israel?” “No.
“Has your vacation been planned for a long time?” “No.”
“Where will you stay while you’re in Israel?” “The Tel Aviv Hilton.”
“How much money do you have with you?” “Fifty pounds.” The Hilton at that time costing at least £70 a night, he asked:
“Do you have a credit card?” “Oh, yes,” she replied, showing him an i.d. for cashing checks.
That did it, and the agent sent her bag for additional inspection, where the bombing apparatus was discovered.
Had El Al followed the usual Western security procedures, 375 lives would surely have been lost somewhere over Austria. The bombing plot came to light, in other words, through a non-technical intervention, relying on conversation, perception, common sense, and (yes) profiling. The agent focused on the passenger, not the weaponry. Israeli counterterrorism takes passengers’ identities into account; accordingly, Arabs endure an especially tough inspection. “In Israel, security comes first,” David Harris of the American Jewish Committee explains.
Obvious as this sounds, overconfidence, political correctness, and legal liability render such an approach impossible anywhere else in the West. In the United States, for example, one month after 9/11, the Department of Transportation issued guidelines forbidding its personnel from generalizing “about the propensity of members of any racial, ethnic, religious, or national origin group to engage in unlawful activity.” (Wear a hijab, I semi-jokingly advise women wanting to avoid secondary screening at airport security.)
Worse yet, consider the panicky Mickey-Mouse, and embarrassing steps the U.S.Transportation Security Administration implemented hours after the Detroit bombing attempt: no crew announcements “concerning flight path or position over cities or landmarks,” and disabling all passenger communications services. During a flight’s final hour, passengers may not stand up, access carry-on baggage, nor “have any blankets, pillows, or personal belongings on the lap.”
Some crews went yet further, keeping cabin lights on throughout the night while turning off the in-flight entertainment, prohibiting all electronic devices, and, during the final hour, requiring passengers to keep hands visible and neither eat nor drink. Things got so bad, the Associated Press reports, “A demand by one attendant that no one could read anything … elicited gasps of disbelief and howls of laughter.”
Widely criticized for these Clouseau-like measures, TSA eventually decided to add “enhanced screening” for travelers passing through or originating from fourteen “countries of interest” – as though one’s choice of departure airport indicates a propensity for suicide bombing.
The TSA engages in “security theater” – bumbling pretend-steps that treat all passengers equally rather than risk offending anyone by focusing, say, on religion. The alternative approach is Israelification, defined by Toronto’s Star newspaper as “a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death.”
Which do we want – theatrics or safety?
By Daniel Pipes – FrontPageMag.com
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Thought For The Day - 10.04.08
“The Greatest Fear Is Fear Itself!” …President
(Nothing Gets Our Attention Like Fear says Gavin de Becker, Security Expert & Author of ‘The Gift of Fear’ & ‘Fear Less’. He also says that what Americans should fear the most is the ‘cure’, the rights we have given up so freely since 9/11, the invasive precautions we now accept in the name of security and the daily local news broadcast that keeps us in a state of fear!!)
Biden Secret Service Codename: 'Assassination Insurance'
While Gov. Sarah Palin is being grilled on her position on mark-to-market accounting rules, the press can't bother to ask Joe Biden if he could give us a ballpark estimate on when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president -- or maybe take a stab at guessing the decade when televisions were first available to the public.
Being interviewed by Katie Couric on the "CBS Evening News," Biden said: "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened."
For those of you who aren't hard-core history buffs, Biden not only named the wrong president during the 1929 stock market crash, he also claimed a president who wasn't president during the stock market crash went on TV before Americans had TVs.
Other than that, the statement holds up pretty well. At least Biden managed to avoid mentioning any "clean" Negroes he had met.
Couric was nearly moved to tears by the brilliance of Biden's brain-damaged remark. She was especially intrigued by Biden's claim that FDR had said the new iPhone was the bomb!
Here is Couric's full response to Biden's bizarre outburst about FDR (a) being president and (b) going on TV in 1929: "Relating to the fears of the average American is one of Biden's strong suits." ...Yet she is the one looking down on Sarah Palin; scrunching up her face in looks of bewilderment.
But when our beauteous Sarah said that John McCain was a better leader on the economy than Barack Obama, Couric relentlessly badgered her for evidence. "Why do you say that?" Couric demanded. "Why are they waiting for John McCain and not Barack Obama? ... Can you give us any more examples of his leading the charge for more oversight?"
The beauteous Sarah had cited McCain's prescient warnings about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But Couric, the crackerjack journalist who didn't know FDR wasn't president in 1929, demanded more examples from Palin.
We are currently in the middle of a massive financial crisis brought on by Fannie Mae. McCain was right on Fannie Mae; Obama was wrong. That's not enough?
Not for the affable Eva Braun of evening TV! "I'm just going to ask you one more time," Couric snipped, "not to belabor the point. Specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation?"
This would be like responding to someone who predicted the 9/11 attacks by saying: OK, you got one thing right. Not to belabor the point, but what else?
Obama was not merely wrong on Fannie Mae: He is owned by Fannie Mae.
Somehow Obama managed to become the second biggest all-time recipient of Fannie Mae political money after only three years in the Senate. The biggest beneficiary, Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, had a 30-year head start on receiving loot from Fannie Mae -- the government-backed institution behind our current crisis.
How does the Democratic ticket stack up on other major issues facing the nation, say, gas prices?
Shockingly, Sen. Joe Biden was one of only five senators to vote against the first Alaskan pipeline bill in 1973. This is like having been a Nazi sympathizer during World War II. If Sarah Palin does nothing else, she has got to tie that idiotic pipeline vote around Biden's neck.
The Senate passed the 1973 Alaskan pipeline bill by an overwhelming 80-5 vote. Only five senators voted against the pipeline on final passage. Sen. Biden is the only one who is still in the Senate -- the other four having been confined to mental institutions long ago.
The stakes were clear: This was in the midst of the first Arab oil embargo. Liberal Democrats, such as senators Robert Byrd, Mike Mansfield, Frank Church and Hubert Humphrey, all voted for the pipeline.
But Biden cast one of only five votes against the pipeline that has produced more than 15 billion barrels of oil, supplied nearly 20 percent of this nation's oil, created tens of thousands of jobs, added hundreds of billions of dollars to the U.S. economy and reduced money transfers to the nation's enemies by about the same amount.
The only argument against the pipeline was that it would harm the caribou, an argument that was both trivial and wrong. The caribou population near the pipeline increased from 5,000 in the 1970s to 32,000 by 2002.
It would have been bad enough to vote against the pipeline bill even if it had hurt the caribou. A sane person would still say: Our enemies have us in a vice grip. Sorry, caribou, you've got to take one for the team. But when the pipeline goes through and the caribou population sextuples in the next 20 years, you really look like a moron.
We couldn't possibly expect Couric to ask Biden about a vote that is the equivalent of voting against the invention of the wheel. But couldn't she have come up with just one follow-up question for Biden on FDR's magnificent handling of the 1929 stock market crash?
Or here's a question the public is dying to know: "If Obama wanted a historically delusional vice president, why not Lyndon LaRouche?" At least LaRouche didn't vote against the Alaskan pipeline.
The media also keeps telling us that Obama is ahead in the polls by as much as 9 percentage points, because of his ‘handling’ of the present economic crisis… Handling??? He is nowhere around!! And as we all know, statistics and polls can be interpreted and spun by anyone who wants to and needs to… The fact is that only one poll, that interviewed Democrats to Republicans 2 to 1, shows Obama ahead of McCain by more than 3 percentage points… while others show them from 3 percentage points apart to being in a dead heat, even with all the media spin for Obama and with McCain being off the campaign trail and doing his job in Washington.
By Ann Coulter for NewsMax
“McCain wants to ‘put his country first’. The best way is simple: Get aggressive and win the election!” …Larry Elder, who says McCain needs to take off the gloves!
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