More cities plan extensive surveillance networks to monitor vehicles going in and out of town

If you visit Kings Point, big brother will be watching. The affluent community is hoping to prevent crime by going high-tech — by setting up a sophisticated network to screen every vehicle that goes in or out of town.

Kings Point is one of the wealthiest villages on the North Shore, and residents want to keep it that way with the latest security. “I think it’s great,” one resident told CBS 2’s John Slattery. To protect its 3.3 square miles, Kings Point plans to install 44 cameras and license plate readers at each of the 19 points of entry. The devices will take pictures of every vehicle and license plate and compare them to data bases. “It will alert us to suspended registrations, felonies, stolen cars, order of protection, sex offenders, things like that,” Kings Point Police Commissioner Jack Miller said. WCBS 880 Long Island Bureau Chief Mike Xirinachs: It May Become The Most Extensive Municipal Surveillance System In The United States.

A week and a half ago, CBS 2 reported on a Kings Point woman being followed into her garage and robbed of her diamond ring by two guys who haven’t been caught. “If they came into the village again with those cameras up, they would pass three of our locations with cameras,” Miller said. In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, the NYPD put in its so called “Ring of Steel” camera system in lower Manhattan, modeled after the one in London. Kings Point residents Slattery spoke with said they support the plan. “It doesn’t bother me. I have nothing to hide,” Nancy Roth said. “I think it’s an absolutely wonderful idea and they should,” Nahal Zelouf added. “There’s cameras on almost every intersection now. It’s the harsh reality of today’s world,” another resident said.

Privacy advocates call the cameras “overreaching.” The New York Civil Liberties Union said it may not be illegal, but there are privacy concerns. “Giving up our liberty and our privacy in the name of security doesn’t always make us safer,” the NYCLU’s Samantha Fredrickson said. Like the police, resident Barbara Stein, used a recent rash of home burglaries in the village to defend the surveillance. “I mean if it’s caught on video, you know, they’ll have a better chance of apprehending whoever is doing this,”

Stein tells WCBS 880 Long Island Bureau Chief Mike Xirinachs. Aaron Freedburg said you have to balance people’s security and their right to privacy. “[It's a good balance] as long as you’re respectful to the extent possible of people’s privacy and the things that enhanced security, especially in this day and age, I tend to be in favor of,” Freedburg told 1010 WINS reporter John Montone. There’s no way of knowing whether the project will reduce crime. It may just send it off to other towns that are less secure.

source: http://www.prophecynewswatch.com/2011/May02/0271.html

Your face on Facebook 'your own worst enemy'

Using publicly available data, it is now possible to identify strangers and gain their personal information – even their Social Security numbers – by using facial recognition software and social media profiles, according to a new study to be presented tomorrow at the Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas. Professor Alessandro Acquisti from Carnegie Mellon University and his research team studied the implications of the combining, or "mash-up," of three technologies: face recognition, cloud computing (an Internet technology) and social networks. The team studied the possibility of using publicly available Internet data and commercially available facial recognition software to reveal more information about a person than was intended. In work that was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research office, the team noted that Google has acquired Neven Visions, Riya and PittPatt and deployed face recognition into Picasa. Further, "Apple has acquired Polar Rose, and deployed face recognition into iPhoto. Facebook has licensed Face.com to enable automated tagging. So far, however, these end-user Web 2.0 applications are limited in scope: They are constrained by, and within, the boundaries of the service in which they are deployed.

Our focus, however, was on examining whether the convergence of publicly available Web 2.0 data, cheap cloud computing, data mining, and off-the-shelf face recognition is bringing us closer to a world where anyone may run face recognition on anyone else, online and offline – and then infer additional, sensitive data about the target subject, starting merely from one anonymous piece of information about her: the face." Acquisti noted that last year, more than 2.5 billion photos were uploaded by Facebook users per month. These users also use their real names, addresses, birthdates and other contact information as part of their profiles on social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google-Plus and others, and in many cases the information is visible to the entire world.

 Now using a new commonly used Internet technology called "cloud computing," it is possible to easily run millions of facial comparisons in a matter of seconds. In the Carnegie Mellon study, 93 student volunteers had their pictures taken using a webcam attached to a laptop. The pictures then were uploaded to the Internet and compared with a database of 261,262 publicly available photos downloaded from Carnegie Mellon students' Facebook profiles. Using facial recognition software from a company called Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, "PittPatt," Acquisti's team successfully identified more than 30 percent of the students by their pictures alone. Acquisti said the study "suggests that the identity of about one-third of subjects walking by the campus building may be inferred in a few seconds combining social-network data, cloud computing and an inexpensive webcam." He called it the "democratization of surveillance." Then, using a technique he developed in a 2009 study and data gathered from the Facebook profiles of the subjects he identified, the research team could correctly predict the first five digits of the person's Social Security number 27 percent of the time after just four attempts. He utilized the fact that in 1987 the Social Security Administration started assigning Social Security numbers in a way that inadvertently made them easier to predict, based on the person's birth date. (Acquisti also noted in his study that the last four numbers of the SSN are also predicable, but a larger sample size would be needed.)

With Facebook's and Google-Plus's (Google's new social media software) total membership of almost 800 million users, these sites have essentially become an online identity-verification database. "It's certainly not science fiction anymore," said Peter N. Belhumeur, professor of computer science at Columbia University. Since these same tools are available to anyone, the results of the study may foreshadow a future in which there is no privacy. With the mass deployment of security cameras, smart phones and other data imaging devices, anyone could be identified almost anywhere. Not only could individuals be identified by friends and neighbors, but by government agencies as well. Anyone with a smartphone and Internet connection will be able to establish who someone is, where they live, how much they earn, a credit score and whether they've ever gotten a ticket. All that from a person's face. "A person's face is the veritable link between her offline and online identities," said Acquisti. "When we share tagged photos of ourselves online, it becomes possible for others to link our face to our names in situations where we would normally expect anonymity." Acquisti believes that his study is about much more than facial recognition. "Our study is less about face recognition and more about privacy concerns raised by the convergence of various technologies. There is no obvious answer and solution to the privacy concerns raised by widely available face recognition and identified (or identifiable) facial images," he said. "Google's Eric Schmidt observed that, in the future, young individuals may be entitled to change their names to disown youthful improprieties. It is much harder, however, to change someone's face. Other than adapting to a world where every stranger in the street could predict quite accurately sensitive information about you (such as your SSN, but also your credit score, or sexual orientation), we need to think about policy solutions that can balance the benefits and risks of peer-based face recognition," he continued. "Self-regulation, or an opt-in mechanism, is not going to work, since the results we presented are based on publicly available information," he said. The technology and online investigative services may make government initiatives, such as the "Real ID" program, obsolete. Through the combination of social media, the Internet and smart devices, de facto, unregulated "Real ID" infrastructure already may exist.

source: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=329441 

While You Were Sleeping, They Abolished the Fourth Amendment

Oh boy, we have laws and precedents regarding property and home invasion in Australia. There is an implied right of access to your front door only, which can be rescinded by the owner by way of signage or verbal instruction to an unwanted party, including police. Yes, that's right, INCLUDING POLICE.

This is well founded and tested in Australian law, but it seems the same right has been shot down in the good old USA...

Dear Americans, open your arms to the police state...

Steve B
=====

Two recent Supreme Court cases have served to virtually abolish the Fourth Amendment in the United States of America, with citizens no longer being “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

In a precedent described by dissenting justices as “breathtaking” and “unnecessarily broad,” the Indiana Supreme Court ruled last week in a 3-2 vote that doing anything to resist police busting down your door and conducting an illegal search is now a criminal act.
“[We] hold that the right to reasonably resist an unlawful police entry into a home is no longer recognized under Indiana law,” the court ruled in the case of Richard L. Barnes v. Indiana.
Dissenting Justices Brent E. Dickson and Robert D. Rucker made it clear that the ruling represented a total rejection of rights enshrined in the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution.
“In my view, the wholesale abrogation of the historic right of a person to reasonably resist unlawful police entry into his dwelling is unwarranted and unnecessarily broad,” Dickson wrote.
“In my view it is breathtaking that the majority deems it appropriate or even necessary to erode this constitutional protection based on a rationale addressing much different policy considerations,” added Rucker. “There is simply no reason to abrogate the common law right of a citizen to resist the unlawful police entry into his or her home.”
The ruling was made under the justification that resisting a police officer had the potential to escalate and cause violence against the officer, meaning that the God-like status bestowed upon police officers now trumps both the 220-year-old Fourth Amendment and the 796-year-old Magna Carta on which it is based.
In a separate case, on Monday the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that the police can now also bust down a door and enter your property without a warrant if they smell marijuana or hear sounds that are suggestive of destruction of evidence. The case revolved around the warrantless search of an apartment in Kentucky, Lexington.
“Where, as here, the police did not create the exigency by engaging or threatening to engage in conduct that violates No prescription cialis the Fourth Amendment, warrantless entry to prevent the destruction of evidence is reasonable and thus allowed,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the majority.
Of course, the fact that police officers have been known to habitually lie in order to justify illegally entering a property and violating the Fourth Amendment (which is apparently now null and void anyway), was not considered.
These two cases merely scratch the surface of America’s descent into an authoritarian tyranny, which has noticeably deepened over the last few weeks. Describing the United States as a “police state” is no longer a glib or alarmist use of rhetoric, because by every measurable tenet and in every context, the rights guaranteed in the Constitution are now being completely ignored by government or simply abolished altogether.
The fact that Supreme Courts are now attacking the very Constitution they are supposed to uphold is proof that America has been hijacked by rogue criminal elements who are busy dismantling everything that once made the country a beacon of liberty for the world.
The debate is officially over. America has now entered the annuls of history as an authoritarian police state on a par with Soviet Russia, and as that virus spreads throughout all levels of society it will ultimately lead the United States to the same fate – the only question remaining is how messy the collapse will be, how many people will be incarcerated, and how many people the government will murder in the process.
Article written by Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
May 17, 2011
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.