Mind Wars: How the military wants to control our brains

The routine revelations of military atrocities in Afghanistan might lead one to question whether ethicists can be any different from priests blessing the troops before they go into battle.

Mind Wars by Jonathan D Moreno – review

guardian.co.uk | Jun 1, 2012

by Steven Rose

Science long ago struck its Faustian bargain with the military. From Archimedes and Leonardo to the physicists of the Manhattan project, Vietnam’s electronic battlefield and the computer-controlled drones over Afghanistan, the lineage is well known. Now it is the turn of the neurosciences to be recruited into the asymmetric wars of the 21st century.

The new brain sciences offer methods to enhance the fighting capabilities of one’s own troops (war-fighters, in today’s military jargon) and to degrade those of the enemy. The technologies range from the biochemical to the electro-magnetic. They promise novel methods of surveillance and intelligence gathering – not just in traditional war zones abroad but also in controlling an unruly citizenry at home. A line once drawn between the military and the police is being redrawn as wars abroad return in the form of urban terrorism and riot to haunt the heartlands of the old imperial powers.

Many of these developments are veiled in secrecy. A rare insight into their development came in October 2002, when a group of Chechen rebels invaded the Nord Ost theatre in Moscow, taking the 850 theatre-goers hostage. Two days later, in an abortive rescue attempt, Russian special forces pumped an opioid gas, fentanyl, into the theatre’s ventilation system before storming it. The gas, supposedly non-lethal, killed at least 129 of the hostages; all the Chechens were shot.

What is closed elsewhere, however, is far more open in the US, where the military is happy to reveal much about its thinking. A central player is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which for decades has funded military research projects straddling the borderline between practicability and science fiction. Darpa’s activities have been followed for much of this period by Jonathan Moreno, bioethicist and historian, who has been in the privileged insider/outsider position that gives him both access and freedom to comment. His new book, Mind Wars, updates his earlier accounts of the military’s wars on the mind to bring us chilling news of Darpa’s latest projects. To these, he is an excellent and authoritative guide. However, he is cautious and less than surefooted about the politics, as when he describes Bertrand Russell as a socialist – a label that would have appalled and astonished the late earl in equal measure.

So what’s on offer? One priority is to enhance the efficiency of one’s own troops. US pilots flying bombing missions over Iraq and Afghanistan have already used Modafinil to keep them alert on long flights and Ritalin to enhance attention. Asked to suggest military priorities for brain research, the US National Research Council pressed for the development of improved cognitive enhancers to add to the existing drugs. Might it be possible to enhance intelligence by tapping directly into the brain? Smart soldiers for the age of smart weaponry? How about a helmet incorporating a hairnet of electrodes to read off the brain’s electrical activity? Or a brain-computer interface to “analyse intelligence information, improve motivation and accelerate learning”, as well as a warfighter’s ability to “detect and identify threats rapidly and at a distance”? Similar interfaces might enable soldiers brain-damaged or paralysed after a roadside bomb explosion to recover some function, coupling the brain’s electrical activity to the movement of a prosthetic limb. One Darpa project seeks to restore memory loss in brain-injured soldiers by bypassing the damaged brain regions via computer inputs. And for those traumatised by the horrors of war, the military is exploring “forgetting” drugs to erase painful memories. As is so often the case the spur of war advances medicine, and such brain prostheses and drugs are likely to become available for civilians too.

As for the enemy, although lethal chemicals are already banned under international conventions, the non- or, more accurately, the less-lethals, such as fentanyl, inhabit a grey area waiting to be exploited. During the 1960s the US military hit on a drug they claimed would disorientate and confuse an enemy. Codenamed BZ, it worked a bit like LSD, and a film was produced that showed troops exposed to the substance collapsing in laughter, throwing their rifles down and ignoring military orders. Unfortunately army chiefs seem to have been too cautious to employ it.

Today a whole new generation beckons, euphemistically named calmatives to the outside world (and to the insiders spoken of as “on the floor” or “off the rocker”). To avoid any suggestion that they contravene international conventions, the funding has come from the civil budget as the “calmatives” are claimed to be intended for crowd and riot control. International agreements only cover the use of chemicals in war, not for police use.

In an unusual burst of openness, the British Home Office announced in April that it was expanding its “non-lethal” armoury to include guns firing pellets that cause intense burning sensations – already routinely and sometimes lethally used by the Israeli military against Palestinian demonstrators as part of its “active denial strategy”.

Also under research are various forms of electromagnetic radiation. Could an enemy be disoriented by a microwave beam? Could thoughts and intentions be read at a distance? As Moreno comments, many US citizens already believe that their brains are being read or manipulated by the surveillance state – and judging by my email inbox, a fair number on this side of the Atlantic share the suspicion. For decades Darpa has been interested in microwave radiation devices that could disorient and pacify opponents, or, even better, read their intentions and modify their thoughts.

Communication between nerve cells in the brain is electrochemical, and where there is an electric current, there is a magnetic field at right angles to it. Interfere with the magnetic field and the brain signals are disrupted. At the current stage of the technology, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) requires the magnets to be placed directly around a person’s head and focused on specific brain regions. In clinical trials such stimulation has been used to treat depression, OCD and Parkinson’s disease. But could such devices read minds and predict intentions?

Moreno investigates the companies that claim to use brain imaging techniques to do so. “Brain fingerprinting” records the brain’s electrical activity to decide whether a person has “terrorist thoughts” or has visited “a terrorist training camp”; NolieMRI offers a sophisticated lie detection system. Most neuroscientists regard such prospectuses as snake oil, and Moreno shares this scepticism, even if Darpa doesn’t.

He ends his book with a plea for “a new role for neuroethics” which he hopes might be shared by military and the neurotechnology industry alike, and praises Darpa’s willingness to bring ethicists into its discussions. The routine revelations of military atrocities in Afghanistan might lead one to question whether ethicists can be any different from priests blessing the troops before they go into battle.

Google knew from the start that camera-car software could capture personal data of millions

independent.co.uk | May 27, 2012

by Kevin Rawlinson

Google knew that software installed in its camera cars could capture and store the online data of millions of people, including emails, text messages and images, when it sent them out to photograph Britain’s streets, according to US authorities investigating the company.

Correspondence handed over to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) suggest that the team managing the project was told of their software’s capability and were even advised to seek legal advice.

The company has always maintained that it had no idea of the capabilities of the Street View cars nor any intention to sweep up the huge amounts of data from unsecured WiFi networks it did for more than two years.

As recently as last week, the its executive chairman Eric Schmidt told a Google-organised conference in Hertfordshire that the scandal was unintentional and that Google blew the whistle on itself when it realised.

But these revelations throw that position into doubt and will lend weight to the calls for British authorities to look more closely at the matter.

The Information Commissioner’s Office, which previously ruled that it was a mistake, said this weekend that it intended to review the evidence.

The emails show a developer, who was not named in the FCC report, working on software called gstumbler.

The British engineer, who is pleading the fifth amendment in order to avoid incriminating himself, wrote to Google colleagues in 2007: “We are logging user traffic along with sufficient data to precisely triangulate their position at a given time, along with information about what they were doing.”

He also wrote that the data could be “analysed offline for use in other initiatives”.

Google insists that it never used the data. The company posted an admission in May 2010 on its own blog and referred the evidence to data protection authorities across the world.

It is still under investigation in some countries and was ordered to delete the data collected in Ireland. It was cleared of breaching US law but the FCC said Google had impeded its investigation and fined $25,000 (£15,300).

Robert Halfon, the Tory MP who has campaigned to highlight the data breach, called the evidence “quite astonishing”. “Google has so far been let off lightly in this country because this unacceptable breach has never been properly investigated,” he told the Sunday Times.

A Google spokesman said: “We have always been clear that the leaders of this project did not want or intend to use this payload data. Indeed Google never used it in any of our products or services.

“Both the Department of Justice and the FCC have looked into this closely–including reviewing the internal correspondence–and both found no violation of law.”

Google spies deliberately stole personal information in drive-by data harvasting but executives ‘covered it up’ for years

Work of Street View cars to be examined over allegations Google used them to download personal details

Emails, texts, photos and documents taken from wi-fi networks as cars photographed British roads

Daily Mail | May 2012

Sinister truth about Google spies: Web giant deliberately stole information but executives ‘covered it up’ for years

By Jack Doyle and Daniel Bates

Google is facing an inquiry into claims that it deliberately harvested information from millions of UK home computers.

The Information Commissioner data protection watchdog is expected to examine the work of the internet giant’s Street View cars.

They downloaded emails, text messages, photographs and documents from wi-fi networks as they photographed virtually every British road.

It is two years since Google first admitted stealing fragments of personal data, but claimed it was a ‘mistake’.

Now the full scale of its activities has emerged amid accusations of a cover-up after US regulators found a senior manager was warned as early as 2007 that the information was being captured as its cars trawled the country but did nothing.

Around one in four home networks in the UK is thought to be unsecured – lacking password protection – allowing personal data to be collected. Technology websites and bloggers have suggested that Google harvested the information simply because it was able to do so and would later work out a way to use it to make money.

The slow reaction of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to deal with the data theft is in direct contrast to the vigorous efforts of watchdogs in Germany, France and even the Czech Republic.

The fact that the Government was at the same time courting executives at Google opens up uncomfortable questions about its relationship with the company.

Last month a report by the US media regulator the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) revealed that the Google programmer who wrote the Street View software repeatedly warned that it collected personal data, and called for a legal and privacy review.

Yesterday he was named as Marius Milner, 41, a British software engineer from Hove, East Sussex, who now lives in California. He has pleaded the fifth amendment against self-incrimination and refused to answer investigators’ questions.

Yesterday at the family home, his stepmother said: ‘He has always had a love of computers, even from an early age I think. He is a brilliant mind.

‘He got a degree from Trinity College, Cambridge. My husband is an elderly man. He is nearly 90 and he is rather distressed by this. We really don’t want to say any more.’

The report by the FCC attacked Google for inadequate oversight of Street View, and claimed it was planning to use the data collected for other internal projects.

A spokesman for the Information Commissioner’s Office said it would examine what Google knew at the time and whether it breached the Data Protection Act.

But critics said the ICO was doing ‘too little, too late’, and pointed to its earlier report into Street View which concluded that any collection of personal data was ‘inadvertent’.

As Britain’s privacy watchdog was accused of being lily-livered in its handling of Google, regulators in the US and continental Europe confronted it head on.

In Germany Google was forced to stop filming for Street View owing to privacy concerns by Hamburg prosecutors, who opened a criminal investigation.

In France Google was fined £87,000 by the privacy regulator CNIL, the largest it had ever handed out.

In the Czech Republic Street View was banned in September 2010 after negotiations between Google and the authorities over privacy concerns failed.

A Tory MP said he would raise the issue of Google’s information gathering when Parliament reconvenes.

Robert Halfon said: ‘The FCC report seems to indicate that there is far more to it than an innocent mistake. Clearly what happened is unacceptable.

‘Google created the privatised surveillance society by hoovering up our emails and wifi data. Google has some serious questions to answer.’

Concern about links between the internet giant and the Government have emerged in recent weeks, with the Daily Mail revealing that Tory ministers have met Google executives an average of once every month since the General Election.

This week Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt will face the Leveson Inquiry to face questions about his links to another multi-national company, News International.

His special adviser Adam Smith was forced to quit after text messages were published by the inquiry showing his closeness to a News International lobbyist. Mr Hunt has also faced repeated calls to quit.

Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch said: ‘It appears Google deliberately and without remorse spied on people’s wi-fi networks and has now been caught trying to cover it up.

‘The continued thirst of big-data companies for personal information is a serious threat to privacy and all too often consumers find themselves without redress when their rights are compromised.’

A spokesman for the Information Commissioner said: ‘We are currently studying the FCC report to consider what further action, if any, needs to be taken.

Google provided our office with a formal undertaking in November 2010 about their future conduct, following their failure in relation to the collection of wi-fi data by their Street View cars.

‘This included a provision for the ICO to audit Google’s privacy practices. The audit was published in August 2011 and we will be following up on it later this year, to ensure our recommendations have been put in place.’

Google spokesman Anthony House said: ‘We have always been clear that the leaders of this project did not want or intend to use this payload data. Indeed Google never used it in any of our products or services.

‘Both the Department of Justice and the FCC have looked into this closely – including reviewing the internal correspondence – and both found no violation of law.’

Army ‘Pre-Crime’ Division wants to monitor computer activity

At SAIC, which is testing a behavior analytics system, Beard likened behavioral modeling to the Pre-Crime unit from the science fiction movie “Minority Report.” Instead of using psychics to stop crimes before they occur, the software would be programmed to detect behavior that has preceded malicious acts in the past.

armytimes.com | May 5, 2012

By Joe Gould

In the wake of the biggest dump of classified information in the history of the Army, the brass is searching for ways to watch what every soldier is doing on his or her Army computer.

The Army wants to look at keystrokes, downloads and Web searches on computers that soldiers use.

Maj. Gen. Steven Smith, chief of the Army Cyber Directorate, said the software was one of his chief priorities, joking that it would take the place of a lower-tech solution: “A guy with a large bat behind every user as they go to search the Internet.”

“Now we’ve been in the news — I don’t know if you’ve seen it — with a little insider threat issue,” Smith continued.

Smith did not mention Pfc. Bradley Manning by name. However, the effort comes in the wake of the former intelligence analyst’s alleged leak of hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documents to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks in 2009 and 2010. Manning faces a military trial on 22 counts, including aiding the enemy.

According to Smith, the Army will soon shop for software pre-programmed to detect a user’s abnormal behavior and record it, catching malicious insiders in the act. Though it is unclear how broadly the Army plans to adopt the program, the Army has more than 900,000 users on its computers.

Smith explained how it might work.

“So I’m on the South American desk, doing intelligence work and all of a sudden I start going around to China, let’s say,” Smith said. “That might be an anomaly, it might be justified, but I would sure like to know that and let someone make a decision, almost at the speed of thought.”

The scenario echoes the allegations against Manning: As an intelligence analyst charged with researching the Shiite threat to Iraqi elections, Manning raided classified networks for State Department cables, Afghanistan and Iraq war logs and video from a helicopter attack, according to courtroom testimony.

Software of the type Smith describes is at various stages of development in the public and private sectors. Such software could spy on virtually any activity on a desktop depending on its programming, to detect when a soldier searches outside of his or her job description, downloads massive amounts of data from a shared hard drive or moves the data onto a removable drive.

The program could respond by recording the activity, alerting an administrator, shutting down the user’s access, or by feeding the person “dummy data” to watch what they do next, said Charles Beard, a cybersecurity executive with the defense firm SAIC’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance group.

“It’s a giant game of cat and mouse with some of these actors,” Beard said.

What’s exciting, Smith said, is the possibility of detecting problems as they happen, on what cybersecurity experts call “zero day,” as opposed to after the fact.

“We don’t want to be forensics experts. We want to catch it at the perimeter,” Smith said. “We want to catch this before it has a chance to be exploited.”
A governmentwide effort

The Army’s efforts dovetail with a broader federal government initiative. President Obama signed an executive order last October that established an Insider Threat Task Force to develop a governmentwide program to deter, detect and mitigate insider threats.

Among other responsibilities, it would create policies for safeguarding classified information and networks, and for auditing and monitoring users.

In January, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget issued a memo directing government agencies that deal with classified information to ensure they adhere to security rules enacted after the WikiLeaks debacle.

Beyond technical solutions, the document asks agencies to create their own “insider threat program” to monitor employees for “behavioral changes” suggesting they might leak sensitive information.

The interagency Insider Threat Task Force is aiming to complete work on the new standards by October. These standards may address training and employee awareness protocols, said John Swift III, senior policy adviser to a task force now working on the draft policy.

Deanna Caputo, lead behavioral psychologist for Mitre Corp., said both technical solutions and monitoring of human behaviors are needed for a successful detection and prevention program.

“To think that we can tackle the problem simply by technical solutions is a mistake,” Caputo said.

A “culture of reporting” is essential, she said. “We need to up the ante and expect a little bit more from our people” to report abnormal behaviors among their co-workers. However, “there is a fine line with that [reporting]. People need to trust they are in a safe environment to do their job.”

Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute has compiled 700 insider threat case studies, and come up with two broad profiles of insiders who steal intellectual property in business settings.

One is an “entitled independent” disgruntled with his job who typically exfiltrates his work a month before leaving. The other is an “ambitious leader” who steals information on entire systems and product lines, sometimes to take to a foreign country, such as China.

According to Patrick Reidy, who leads the FBI’s insider threat program, such users may be conducting authorized activities for malicious ends, and their actions would not register on intrusion detection or anti-virus systems.

“People look at computers and networks but not people and data,” he said. “The insider threat is all about people.”

Reidy, Swift and Caputo discussed the effort at a defense industry convention in Washington, D.C., on April 4.

The ‘Pre-Crime’ division

Private industry and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are among the entities that have technological solutions in various stages of progress.

Raytheon’s SureView software captures any security breach or policy violation it’s programmed to find and can “replay the event like a DVR,” for a local administrator or others to view, according to the company’s website. The software’s trigger is programmable and can be set to any behavior considered suspicious or not.

Working with Raytheon, a group of cadets from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point last year conducted a simulation of an insider attack at a forward operating base. Cadets looked at how to fine-tune the way SureView detects potential threats and eliminate false positives for innocuous behavior, said West Point computer science professor Col. Greg Conti.

“It was very powerful, very flexible and allowed you to monitor with very fine resolution activities on the desktop, and the real trick becomes how you detect anomalous behavior,” Conti said. “Predictive models are kind of the holy grail. When you see that no one else has done something but bad guys, you can start being predictive.”

At SAIC, which is testing a behavior analytics system, Beard likened behavioral modeling to the Pre-Crime unit from the science fiction movie “Minority Report.” Instead of using psychics to stop crimes before they occur, the software would be programmed to detect behavior that has preceded malicious acts in the past.

In real life, researchers are examining the behavior of malicious insiders to see what actions they took before they acted out. That in turn would be used to teach the software what behavior to flag.

“We may want to administer policies that say, ‘Gee, gosh, why do you really want to download 300 [megabytes] of stuff or a gig of data in a single session?’ ” Beard said. “We look for the antecedents of behavior that would suggest based on past history that bad things are going to take place.”

That could be visiting restricted websites, requesting access to information outside of one’s job description or asking for large amounts of storage media — or likely some combination of the above. Individually, the actions may not seem problematic, but combined and in the context of human intelligence, they could raise alarms.

“We start taking those things and recombining them to say, ‘What is going on in the environment?’ ” Beard said. “Any one of those things independently can be totally innocuous and innocent, but when you put them together — plus their job, plus their access, plus the things they are working on — you may be looking at it as a counterintel kind of thing.”

Drawbacks and challenges

Cybersecurity expert Michael Tanji, an Army veteran who has spent nearly 20 years in the U.S. intelligence community, said he sees potential drawbacks and unanswered policy questions. He asked how the Army would implement such technology without unintentionally stifling cross-disciplinary collaboration among soldiers.

Knowing they are being monitored, personnel might avoid enterprising or creative behavior for fear it would be flagged by monitoring software, he said.

Tanji also predicted the technology would come at a considerable financial cost, both to warehouse the data collected by the software and to pay the added staff needed to monitor the reports it generates.

“A brigade-sized element that uses computers on a regular basis would probably need a company-sized element just to keep up with the data that comes in,” he said.

Reidy, the FBI official, said such concerns were valid. Because software may report benign behavior as malicious and vice versa, he cautioned against using technical solutions alone to solve insider threats.

“After a major incident, and no offense to any vendors, but the charlatanism always goes up,” he said. “It’s absolutely amazing how many phone calls I get from people who say they have solved the WikiLeaks problem or solved this or that problem. Everybody’s got to eat, but it’s simply not true.”

Finding bad behavior amid the vast sea of keystrokes, downloads and Web browsing on military computers is no easy task, DARPA acknowledges.

A DARPA solicitation for Suspected Malicious Insider Threat Elimination, or SMITE, announces it is attempting to recognize “moving targets” — telltale patterns of behavior amid “enormous amounts of noise (observational data of no immediate relevance).”

The program, based in behavioral science, would have to distinguish anomalous behavior from normal behavior, and deceptive and malicious behavior from anomalous behavior, the solicitation reads.

A solicitation for another program — Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales, or ADAMS — uses accused Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan to frame the problem. It asks how to sift for anomalies through millions of data points — the emails and text messages on Fort Hood, for instance — using a unique algorithm, to rank threats and learn based on user feedback.

The program is trying to look beyond computers to spot the point when a good soldier turns, whether that means homicidal or suicidal or ready to dump stolen data.

“When we look through the evidence after the fact, we often find a trail — sometimes even an ‘obvious’ one,” the solicitation states. “The question is, can we pick up the trail before the fact, giving us time to intervene and prevent an incident? Why is that so hard?”

US Military Eager To ‘Microchip’ Troops

U.S. military developing spychips for soldiers

WND | May 6, 2012

by Bob Unruh

The U.S. military wants to plant nanosensors in soldiers to monitor health on future battlefields and immediately respond to needs, but a privacy expert warns the step is just one more down the road to computer chips for all.

“It’s never going to happen that the government at gunpoint says, ‘You’re going to have a tracking chip,’” said Katherine Albrecht, who with Liz McIntyre authored “Spychips,” a book that warns of the threat to privacy posed by Radio Frequency Identification.

“It’s always in incremental steps. If you can put a microchip in someone that doesn’t track them … everybody looks and says, ‘Come on,’” she said. “It’ll be interesting seeing where we go.”

According to a report at Mobiledia, the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has confirmed plans to create nanosensors to monitor the health of soldiers on battlefields.

The devices also would report data to doctors. But privacy analysts have expressed concern that the implants could be used not just to monitor health but to keep track of and possibly control people.

DARPA describes the technology on which it is working as “a truly disruptive innovation,” which would diagnose, monitor vital states and “even deliver medicine into the bloodstream.”

According to LiveScience.com, “Solving the problem of sickness could have a huge impact on the number of soldiers ready to fight, because far more have historically died due to illness rather than combat.”

The report suggested that for special forces, “the practical realization of implantable nanosensors capable of monitoring multiple indicators of physiological state could be a truly disruptive innovation.”

Already being researched is the concept of nanosensors diagnosing disease.

DARPA expects to launch a second effort focused on treatment later this year.

Albrecht said the move is another step in the trip down the road of having every person implanted with a chip that might very well monitor health but also other areas of life.

Microchipping, she said, already is “par for the course” for pets in many parts of the nation, and that acceptance will make it easier to require it for people.

She said it was expected that captive audiences, such as prisoners and troops, would be the first subjected to the requirement, which would make it easier for the general populace to accept it as well.

“It’s interesting,” she said. “I’m stunned how this younger generation is OK. They don’t see the problem. … ‘Why wouldn’t everyone want to be tracked?’”

But she said Americans will have to decide to say no to incremental advances, or by the time officials finally roll out the idea of chips for all, whether they want them or not, it will be too late to decide.

“The analogy that I draw is [that of a train], and if I’m in California and I do not want to wind up in New City, every stop brings me closer,” she said. “At some point I have to get off the train.”

Albrecht also has helped develop and launch a new project called StartPage, which now is handling some 2 million search requests per day.

The benefit of the page is its privacy. The site explains that every time a person uses a typical search program such as Google, “your search data is recorded.”

“Then they store that information in a giant database,” she explains.

As a result, corporate America and the government have access to “a shocking amount of personal information about you, such as your interests, family circumstances, political leanings, medical conditions and more

WND reported previously that owners of pets have reported cancer in their animals after microchipping. The report documented how a dog developed a highly aggressive cancer right at the point where a chip was embedded.

Albrecht told the story of another dog, a 5-year-old Yorkshire terrier named Scotty that was diagnosed with cancer in Memphis, Tenn. Scotty developed a tumor between his shoulder blades, in the same location where the microchip had been implanted. The tumor the size of a small balloon – described as malignant lymphoma – was removed. Scotty’s microchip was embedded inside the tumor.

Verichip, a major manufacturer of the microchip implants, touts the technology’s capability to identify a lost pet and enable its return home, while dismissing potential health risks.

“Over the last 15 years,” stated the VeriChip website, “millions of dogs and cats have safely received an implantable microchip with limited or no reports of adverse health reactions from this life-saving product, which was recently endorsed by the USDA. These chips are a well-accepted and well-respected means of global identification for pets in the veterinary community.”

WND also reported there were warnings about a radio chip plan that would allow identification of individuals by government agents simply by walking through an assembly.

The proposal, which was supported by Janet Napolitano, the chief of the Department of Homeland Security, would embed radio chips in driver’s licenses, or “enhanced driver’s licenses.”

“Enhanced driver’s licenses give confidence that the person holding the card is the person who is supposed to be holding the card, and it’s less elaborate than REAL ID,” Napolitano said in a Washington Times report.

REAL ID was a plan for a federal identification system standardized across the nation that so alarmed governors many states have adopted formal plans to oppose it. However, a privacy advocate today told WND that the EDLs are many times worse.

WND also previously has reported on such chips when hospitals used them to identify newborns, a company desired to embed immigrants with the electronic devices, a government health event showcased them and when Wal-Mart used microchips to track customers.

Former GCHQ head calls for greater surveillance of Facebook and Twitter

independent.co.uk | Apr 24, 2012

by Terri Judd

The former head of GCHQ Sir David Omand called for greater surveillance of Facebook and Twitter today, reigniting the debate on how much the state should be allowed to snoop on individuals.

Launching what he described as the first serious study into how the police and security services can use social media as a form of intelligence, Sir David said it was time they catch up with the explosion in the medium and develop expertise in understanding its particular language and culture.

The #Intelligence report, produced by the influential think tank Demos, comes just weeks after the government was forced to retreat on plans for legislation to allow the police and intelligence services to monitor the online activity of every person in Britain after cross-party uproar.

Yesterday Nick Pickles, Director of the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch said “It is perfectly legitimate for the authorities to be able to use new technology to monitor a suspect, but the Home Office’s plans involve indiscriminate surveillance of every person using the internet and no amount of legal tinkering will make that any more acceptable.”

Track criminals via social media, says ex-GCHQ head

“The (Demos) report is absolutely right to say that we need a far more open discussion about what data should be monitored and the legal framework underpinning the collection of data,” he added.

Acknowledging that there were major concerns about a “digital big brother”, Sir David said there nevertheless needed to be monitoring of a medium that was increasingly used by criminals and terrorists: “We need to start by having a public debate then to establish a set of principles by which such activity can be regulated.”

In particular, he said, the police were found wanting during last summer’s riots: “They didn’t have the capacity to look at these social media sites and, when they did look, they were swamped.”

In a series of recommendations to the government, Sir David – the Cabinet Office’s former Security and Intelligence co-ordinator – said out-dated legislation needed to be reformed to ensure an ethical and legal framework for such intelligence gathering, which was clear and transparent.

The report recommends that social media should be divided into two categories, the first being open source information which public bodies could monitor to improve services while not identifying individuals without permission.

On the more contentious category of monitoring private social media, Sir David said it needed to be properly authorised – including the need for warrants when it was considered “genuine intrusion” -  only used as a last resort when there was substantial cause and with regard to “collateral damage” to any innocent people who might have been in contact with a suspect.

Calling for greater clarity from the government on how it intends to proceed, the report’s recommendations include an inter-departmental review of legislation, including the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, as well as a single centre of excellence across the police adept at analysing information.

iBrain can ‘read your mind’, upload it to computers

yahoo.com | Apr 9, 2012

By Eric Pfeiffer

 

Dr. Philip Low wearing the "iBrain" (Misha Gravenor/TechnologyReview.com)

A team of California scientists have developed the world’s first portable brain scanner, and it may soon be able to “read a person’s mind,” playing a major role in facilitating medical breakthroughs.

“This is very exciting for us because it allows us to have a window into the brain. We’re building technology that will allow humanity to have access to the human brain for the first time,” said the project’s leader, Phillip Low.

KGTV reports that the device, created by San Diego-based NeuroVigil, and dubbed the iBrain, fits over a person’s head and measures unique neurological patterns connected to specific thought processes.

Low says the goal is to eventually have a large enough database of these brainwaves that a computer could essentially read a person’s thoughts out loud. One person who has already tried out the iBrain is famed physicist Dr. Stephen Hawking.

“We’d like to find a way to bypass his body, pretty much hack his brain,” said Low. This past summer, Low traveled to Cambridge, England, where he met with Hawking, who was asked to think “very hard” about completing various tasks while wearing the device.

NeuroVigil says the device could be used at home by individuals and worn during sleep. It comes equipped with a USB port for transferring the recorded data to a local computer.

Beyond so-called mind reading, the device has potential medical applications, such as enlisting the iBrain to help doctors prescribe the correct levels of medication based on a person’s brainwave responses.

“This is the first step to personalized medicine,” Low said.

Police and MI5 get power to watch you on the web

independent.co.uk | Apr 2, 2012

by Martin Hickman Author Biography , Oliver Wright

Police and intelligence officers are to be handed the power to monitor people’s messages online in what has been described as an “attack on the privacy” of vast numbers of Britons.

The Home Secretary, Theresa May, intends to introduce legislation in next month’s Queen’s Speech which would allow law-enforcement agencies to check on citizens using Facebook, Twitter, online gaming forums and the video-chat service Skype.

Regional police forces, MI5 and GCHQ, the Government’s eavesdropping centre, would be given the right to know who speaks to whom “on demand” and in “real time”.

Home Office officials said the new law would keep crime-fighting abreast of developments in instant communications – and that a warrant would still be required to view the content of messages.

But civil liberties groups expressed grave concern at the move. Nick Pickles, director of the Big Brother Watch campaign group, described it as “an unprecedented step that will see Britain adopt the same kind of surveillance as in China and Iran. “This is an absolute attack on privacy online and it is far from clear this will actually improve public safety, while adding significant costs to internet businesses,” he said. David Davis, the former Conservative shadow Home Secretary, said the state was unnecessarily extending its power to “snoop” on its citizens.

“It is not focusing on terrorists or on criminals,” the MP said. “It is absolutely everybody. Historically, governments have been kept out of our private lives. They don’t need this law to protect us. This is an unnecessary extension of the ability of the state to snoop on ordinary innocent people in vast numbers.”

The former Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith abandoned plans to store information about every phone call, email and internet visit – labelled the “Big Brother database” – in 2009 after encountering strong opposition.

Ms May is confident of enacting the new law because it has the backing of the Liberal Democrats, normally strong supporters of civil liberties. Senior Liberal Democrat backbenchers are believed to have been briefed by their ministers on the move and are not expected to rebel in any parliamentary vote. A senior adviser to Nick Clegg said he had been persuaded of the merits of extending the police and security service powers but insisted they would be “carefully looking at the detail”. “The law is not keeping pace with the technology and our national security is being eroded on a daily basis,” the adviser said.

Confirming the legislation would be introduced “as soon as parliamentary time allows”, the Home Office said: “We need to take action to maintain the continued availability of communications data as technology changes. Communications data includes time, duration and dialling numbers of a phone call or an email address. It does not include the content of any phone call or email and it is not the intention of Government to make changes to the existing legal basis for the interception of communications.”

According to The Sunday Times, which broke the story, the Internet Service Provider’s Association, which represents communications firms, was unhappy with the proposal when it was briefed by the Government last month. A senior industry official told the paper: “The network operators are going to be asked to put probes in the network and they are upset about the idea… it’s expensive, it’s intrusive to your customers, it’s difficult to see it’s going to work and it’s going to be a nightmare to run legally.”

Google and BT declined to comment. A spokesman for Microsoft told The Independent: “We comply with legislation in all the countries in which we operate. This is a proposal and we have not had the opportunity to review it in depth.”

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats had resisted greater surveillance powers when in opposition. “This is more ambitious than anything that has been done before,” she told Sky News’s Dermot Murnaghan. “The Coalition bound itself together in the language of civil liberties. Do they still mean it?”

SECURITY THEN AND NOW

June 2009: “Today we are in danger of living in a control state. Every month over 1,000 surveillance operations are carried out. The tentacles of the state can even rifle through your bins for juicy information.” David Cameron

April 2012: “It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public.” Home Office spokesman

Supreme Court OKs strip searches for even minor offenses

The Supreme Court rejected the claim of Albert Florence, right, with his attorney Susan Chana Lask, that a strip search violated his constitutional rights. (Mel Evans / Associated Press / April 2, 2012)

latimes.com | Apr 2, 2012

By David Savage

Washington—The Supreme Court refused Monday to limit strip searches of new jail inmates, even those arrested for minor traffic offenses.

Dividing 5-4 along ideological lines, the high court said jail guards needed the full authority to closely search everyone who is entering a jail in order to maintain safety and security.

It would be “unworkable,” said Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, to make an exception for persons who are arrested for minor offenses. County jails often must process hundreds of new inmates a day, he said.

“Experience shows that people arrested for minor offense have tried to smuggle prohibited items into jail,” Kennedy said. And officials cannot take such a risk, he added.

The decision is a defeat for civil liberties groups and a New Jersey man who was strip-searched twice after he was stopped on a highway and taken to jail over an unpaid fine.

Albert Florence was held for six days and finally released when he showed the fine had already been paid before he was arrested. He then sued county jail officials for violating his privacy and subjecting him to a humiliating strip search.

A judge ruled in his favor, but he lost before the U.S. Court of Appeals. In delivering his opinion, Kennedy said violent criminals sometimes are arrested for minor traffic offenses.

He cited the example of Timothy McVeigh,the man who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. He was stopped and taken to jail for a traffic violation. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined with Kennedy.

In dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said it was unreasonable to subject possibly innocent persons to humiliating searches, particularly when they are not suspected of a serious crime.

“In my view, such a search of an individual arrested for a minor offense that does not involve drugs or violence is an unreasonable search forbidden by the 4th Amendment,” he wrote. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan agreed.

The case was Florence vs. Board of Chosen Freeholders of Burlington County.

Eye-Tracking Computers Will Read Your Thoughts

And when they do, the privacy debate will become even more important.

slate.com | Mar 27, 2012

By John Villasenor

In the future, will we be served online ads based on the thoughts reflected in our eye movements? Photograph by ThinkStock.

Consider, for a moment, the following list: Republican. Abortion. Democrat. Future. Afghanistan. Health care. Same-sex marriage.

There is an enormous amount of information reflected in the way you just read that list. Did your eyes pause for a fraction of a second on certain words? Did your pupils dilate, ever so slightly, at any point while you were reading the list? For some words did your eyes blink at a different rate? Did you backtrack to reread any words, and if so, which ones, when, and for how long?

Eye-tracking, which uses images from one or more cameras to capture changes in the movements and structure of our eyes, can measure all of these things with pinpoint accuracy. There are many benevolent applications for eye-tracking, most notably in providing disabled people with a way to interact with objects on a screen. But recent advances are taking the technology into the mainstream, with the biggest initial applications likely to be in user interfaces and gaming. Apple, for example, has filed a patent application for a three-dimensional, eye-tracking user interface, and European company Sensye aims to have its eye-tracking software built into smartphones next year. As eye-tracking becomes increasingly deployed in laptops, tablets, and smartphones in the coming years, it will open a new front in the fractious digital privacy debate.

Today, eye-tracking isn’t quite ready for mass-market adoption. The computations required tax even the advanced computer chips found in many current-generation consumer devices. In addition, not all of these devices have “front-facing” cameras that can capture images of a user’s eyes. But these obstacles are vanishing as mobile phones and other devices become increasingly powerful. While today’s laptops and tablets might have trouble performing eye-tracking computations, those of 2015 will be able to do so with ease. And, they will almost all have front-facing cameras.

Once the technology for eye-tracking is in place, it will glean information conveying not only what we read online, but also how we read it. Did our eyes linger for a few seconds on an advertisement that, in the end, we decided not to click on? How do our eyes move as they take in the contents of a page? Are there certain words, phrases, or topics that we appear to prefer or avoid? In the future, will we be served online ads based not only on what we’ve shopped for, but also on the thoughts reflected in our eye movements?

This information will be collected, analyzed and resold to hundreds of companies—advertisers, data analytics providers, and others—across the digital ecosystem in what the industry calls the “mobile marketing value chain.” In theory, they will be anonymous, “nonpersonal” data. But in practice, the anonymity will be easy to penetrate. For example, eye-tracking data collected from tablets and smartphones will be tied to a “unique device identifier” associated with one specific device. These data will also be correlated to accurate location-tracking information, often to the precision of a specific home or commercial building.

If we have learned anything from the steady drumbeat of revelations about data collected without our consent—think Carrier IQ in November, Android in December, and Google, Twitter, Apple, and Android last month—it is that these stories tend to follow a predictable pattern: After a few days of headlines, calls for congressional or FTC investigations, and damage-control statements from company representatives, attention shifts elsewhere. For each data collection leak that gets identified and plugged, there are probably dozens more waiting to be discovered. It is an environment in which asking forgiveness, not permission, has proven to be a highly successful business strategy.

The overwhelming majority of the time, no one will be interested in putting all of this information together. But if someone does want to identify us by name, study our eye movements, and try to gauge what we, as individuals, were thinking as we viewed digital content, all of the necessary data will be readily available.

We also have to recognize the law-enforcement and security applications for eye-tracking. Researchers in the United States and the United Kingdom have mapped the correlation between blink rates, pupil dilation, and deception. The Department of Homeland Security has been developing a “pre-crime” program aimed at identifying criminals before they act. The DHS program, known as Future Attribute Screening Technology, is designed to analyze images acquired at airport security checkpoints to measure eye movement, position, and gaze (as well as heart rate, respiration, and facial expression) to identify behavior deemed suspicious.

Of course, it’s tempting to think that there’s a very low-tech solution to unwanted eye-tracking performed by our personal electronics devices: put a piece of masking tape over the camera. For today’s devices, that would do the trick. But that may not be an option in the future. As evidenced by an Apple patent application, future display screens could include thousands of tiny imaging sensors built into the screen itself.

Today, when we read something online, our thoughts are still our own. We should enjoy it while it lasts.