-DARPA building search engine for video surveillance footage.

ars technica:

The government agency that birthed the Internet is developing a sophisticated search engine for video, and when complete will allow intelligence analysts to sift through live footage from spy drones, as well as thousands of hours worth of archived recordings, in order to spot a variety of selected events or behaviors. In the past month, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced nearly $20 million in total contracts for private firms to begin developing the system, which is slated to take until at least 2011 to complete.

According to a prospectus written in March but released only this month, the Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) will enable intel analysts to “rapidly find video content of interest from archives and provide alerts to the analyst of events of interest during live operations,” taking both conventional video and footage from infrared scanners as input. The VIRAT project is an effort to cope with a growing data glut that has taxed intelligence resources because of the need to have trained human personnel perform time- and labor-intensive review of recorded video.

Diagram of the VIRAT system concept

The DARPA overview emphasizes that VIRAT will not be designed with “face recognition, gait recognition, human identification, or any form of biometrics” in mind. Rather, the system will search for classes of activities or events. A suggested partial list in the prospectus includes digging, loitering, exploding, shooting, smoking, following, shaking hand, excahnging objects, crawling under a car, breaking a window, and evading a checkpoint. As new sample clips are fed into the system, it will need to recognize the signature features of new classes of search terms.

How VIRAT would work in action

VIRAT will be rolled out in three phases, each assigned to a different contractor in order to prevent conflicts of interest. The first phase, design of an initial prototype, will be handled by New York–based Kitware, Inc., which The Washington Post reports is heading a consortium of 9 companies and universities that will work on the $6.7 million project. (Correction: The Post initially misidentified the consortium as comprising 19 members.) Later phases will refine and optimize the search algorithm, then demonstrate its capabilities on real-world data. Massachussets-based BAE Systems National Security Solutions  and Lockheed Martin were also awarded VIRAT contracts, presumably for these later phases, totalling $7.2 million and $5.5 million respectively.

By the end of the final phase of development, according to DARPA’s plan, VIRAT will process at least 58 megapixels per second, with an accuracy rate of 95 percent.

-The Orwellosphere: Anglo-American Drive to ‘Total Security State’ Rolls On.

Empire Burlesque (snippet):

“technology to wipe out truth is now available. not everybody can afford it but it’s available. when the cost comes down look out!” – Bob Dylan, “World Gone Wrong”

“toleration of the unacceptable leads to the last round-up.” – Dylan, ibid.

In the whirlwind of anxiety and confusion surrounding the global economic meltdown, one thing is certain: governments will use the crisis to augment their own power.

This may occur directly, as with the Bush-Paulson bailout plan, which gives the Treasury Secretary virtually unlimited and unsupervised power to give billions of taxpayer dollars to his cronies on Wall Street, while also allowing him to override the few restrictions left on the machinations of raw greed in the financial markets. (Yes, of course, all of this will change completely after Barack Obama is elected: instead of Hank Paulson and George Bush doling out bailout pork to their Wall Street pals, a brand-new Treasury chief and Obama will be doling out bailout pork to their Wall Street pals.)

But the economic freak-out will also be employed as a distraction, with governments using it to enact measures hugger-mugger while public attention is obsessively focused elsewhere. A prime — and chilling — example of this can be found in a new law slouching its way through the legislative process in Britain, where it is likely to emerge in the stark light of day next year. And it is a very rough beast indeed; the measure will, as Jenni Russell puts it in the Guardian

[create a] centralised database that will track, in real time, every call we make, every website we visit, and every text and email we send. That information will then be stored and analysed – perhaps for decades. It will mean the end of privacy as we know it.

Or rather, what’s left of privacy as we used to know it. And Americans should not take comfort in the fact that this truly Orwellian law is being prepared across the sea. Britain has long been a bellwether for repressive measures in the United States, blazing a path on detention without charges, omnipresent camera surveillance, “strenuous interrogation,” and other liberty-stripping “counterterrorism” measures, many of them honed in the glory days of the dirty war with the IRA. [For more on how British dirty war tactics cross-pollinated American black ops in Iraq, see "Ulster on the Euphrates."]

Full article.

-Cops test license-plate cameras that store, trace data.

The Portland Tribune:

Portland police are testing a high-tech camera system that rivals anything in a science fiction movie.

It can reach back in time and track your movements across the city — and even produce photos of your previous locations.

But — while some are raising Big Brother civil liberties questions about the concept — the police promise they will only use it to solve crimes, like finding stolen cars or locating wanted criminals.

The system features a series of cameras that mount on patrol cars that automatically read and photograph the license plates of all passing vehicles — including those parked along the sides of the streets. Plates of stolen and suspect-linked vehicles trigger an alarm, allowing the officers to immediately locate them.

The camera also is hooked into a computer that records the exact time and location where each plate was photographed, allowing the police to later map its previous locations around town.

“It’s not magic, but it’s pretty cool,” said Portland Police Southeast Precinct officer Terry Colbert, who has been sharing the Dodge Charger patrol car used in the test.

The test car only has been equipped with the system for a few weeks. But Colbert already has recovered seven stolen cars it identified.

Colbert believes the “data-mining” ability of the system has the potential to be even more important to the police, however.

FULL ARTICLE

-Report: Data Mining For Terrorists Doesn’t Work.

c|net:

The most extensive government report to date on whether terrorists can be identified through data mining has yielded an important conclusion: It doesn’t really work.

A National Research Council report, years in the making and scheduled to be released Tuesday, concludes that automated identification of terrorists through data mining or any other mechanism “is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts.” Inevitable false positives will result in “ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses” being incorrectly flagged as suspects.

The whopping 352-page report, called “Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists,” amounts to at least a partial repudiation of the Defense Department’s controversial data-mining program called Total Information Awareness, which was limited by Congress in 2003.

Read Full Article Here

-DNA Could Reveal Your Surname.

Science Daily (snippet):

Scientists at the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester – where the revolutionary technique of genetic fingerprinting was invented by Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys — are developing techniques which may one day allow police to work out someone’s surname from the DNA alone.

-Firefox to track your location.

PCPro:

Mozilla Labs has unveiled a new Add-on that allows Firefox to pinpoint your location based on Wi-Fi signals. The feature, called Geode, is a prototype for the location-tracking technology that will be built into the forthcoming Firefox 3.1.

Geode is designed to work with websites that rely on knowing your location, such as mapping and geotagging services.

A demo application called Food Finder highlights restaurants and caf�s in the immediate vicinity on a Google Map.

Existing web services such as Pownce (which lets you send location-tagged photos and messages to friends) and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle (which updates your blog and other web services with your current location) will also work with Geode.

Privacy concerns

The prospect of Firefox having the ability to track your location raises obvious privacy fears. Mozilla insists users will remain in complete control.

“With Geode, when a website requests your location a notification bar will ask how much information you want to give that site: your exact location, your neighbourhood, your city, or nothing at all,” the Mozilla Labs blog. claims.

Geode uses Skyhook’s Loki technology to determine your location from local Wi-Fi hotspots, with Mozilla claiming the technology can map your location to within 10-20 metres in less than a second. That obviously hinges on Loki knowing the co-ordinates of a hotspot in your area: in our brief test this morning in Sussex, it was unable to determine our location.

Mozilla says it plans to refine the technology before the launch of Firefox 3.1. “Geode and the Geolocation Services in Firefox 3.1 will use the same W3C API for Geolocation, meaning that the same Javascript code will work in both,” the blog claims.

“The still-in-developement Firefox 3.1 version will allow the user to choose a geolocation service provider, which can either be a peripheral device like a GPS, or a web-based service provider like we’ve used in Geode.”

Firefox users can download the Geode Add-on here.

-Cell phone “Real Space See-through Mobile” sensor technology.

This looks like something that would interest DARPA and their push for see-thru-wall technology. But I’m going to wait for more info before thinking to deeply into these claims.

Article.

-Darpa Launches Secret ‘Gandalf’ Project.

Danger Room:

Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out research wing, is launching a new, classified effort to find enemies by the phone they use. It’s called Gandalf.

Announced yesterday by Darpa, the SECRET/NOFORN program’s goal is to employ “set of handheld devices” to track down a particular “signal emitter of interest,” using “radio frequency geolocation.”

The “specific goals and performance objectives… for the Gandalf system are classified,” Darpa says. But former Royal Navy officer Lew Page, who unearthed the project, explains what he believes the R&D agency has in mind:

It would appear that a group of undercover operatives… dispersed near a target (perhaps a specific cell or satellite phone) might carry portable gadgets, presumably networked. The netted devices would be able to pick out the phone, radio or whatever they were after and track it.

This sort of thing is already done by surveillance aircraft and/or drones; the new wrinkle is being able to do it using handheld devices. So Project Gandalf [is] presumably intended for situations where the spy planes and drones can’t be used – perhaps where the local government is unaware of the operation.

A classified meeting to discuss Gandalf is being held in northern Virginia at the end of October.

-DHS works on physiological screening of John Q. Public.

Heraldnet:
September 22, 2008

They must be having a heck of a sci-fi good time over there at the Homeland Security Department’s research division.

On Thursday, the department showed off an early version of “physiological screeners” being designed to spot terrorists, USA Today reported. They are called “Future Attribute Screening Technology” (FAST) scans. The idea: People walk by a set of cameras, which would “read them,” looking for signs of anxiety, which will identify the bad guys.

The body polygraph is part of a five-year project in which the department is trying to devise ways to thwart terrorism. Another part is the Transportation Security Administration’s program — Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT). Their screeners have been trained in “behavior detection” — they pull people out of line in airports based on their “suspicious behavior.” By April, more than 100,000 people had been questioned, and fewer than 700 arrested. No would-be terrorists have been arrested.

The FAST scans, if they ever become reality, will be similarly intrusive and just as ineffective.

Homeland Security researchers are currently conducting experiments to determine what physiological reactions a person experiences when they mean to do others harm. Such characteristics would then be used as a comparative measure when Jane Doe walks past the cameras and lights them up with her anxiety. (What physiological reactions are experienced by a terrorist who means to do harm, but is not anxious because he is joyful about carrying out his mission? That would be a tough experiment to carry out.)

Does it not make more sense to focus on identifying weapons than trying to spot behavioral clues that may or may not mean anything?

How much money are we spending on such “research?”

There aren’t many monetary figures to be found on the Homeland Security Web site. But they do have a list of other projects, the descriptions of which are so impenetrable, there must be some way to use them for actual protection.

For example: The Violent Intent Modeling and Simulation Project. Overview: The project develops intelligence analysis frameworks, including extraction of terrorist intention signatures, systematic estimation of future terrorist behavior based on social and behavioral sciences, and modeling and simulations of future terrorist behavior influences. It identifies leading edge social science modeling and simulation technologies and advances social science modeling and data fusion capabilities in such areas as hybrids of neural nets, structural equations, genetic algorithms, social networks, etc.

Gotta love that “etc.” at the end. Oh, yes, genetic algorithms and the systemic estimation of blah blah blah.

If only we could wear jargon like armor.

-Nowhere To Hide: Killer drones that can see through walls.

Slate:

For the last couple of days, in the Human Nature blog, I’ve been looking into a breakthrough cryptically reported in Iraq and Afghanistan: the ability of U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles to identify and track human targets “even when they are inside buildings.” Several recently reported technologies might account for it, but Slate reader fozzy suggests looking for the answer in a military research field called STTW, usually translated as “sense-through-the-wall.” Has this ability been extended to a distance that allows it to be used by aerial drones?

Fozzy cites a March 2008 Army technical report on the latest progress in STTW radar methods. (Warning: Most of the documents I’m linking to here are PDFs, and some take a long time to open.) With a few more clicks, I pulled up an April 2008 report from the same research team. Both reports focus on “detecting and identifying humans enclosed in building structures.” “Through-the-wall sensing is currently a topic of great interest to defense agencies both in the U.S. and abroad,” says the April report. “The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has been active in all these fields of investigation, approaching these issues both through hardware design and radar measurements and through computer simulation of various STTW scenarios.”

STTW has been around for a while. A 2006 report from the National Defense University mentions a DARPA system that can “detect the presence of personnel within rooms (stated to be successful through 12 inches of concrete),” as well as a commercially developed system with a “30-foot standoff capability.” The next step, to protect U.S. personnel, is to put the technology on “unattended” mobile devices. Since the initial context is urban warfare, the pioneering client is the Army, and the introductory platform is unmanned ground vehicles. But the goal is to increase “standoff distance” and spread the technology to other platforms.

Meanwhile, up in the air, drone designers have been struggling with a similar problem: seeing through “darkness, bad weather, and tree canopies.” The crucial contribution drones have made in Iraq—providing instant, on-demand customized video to ground forces—doesn’t work where the drones’ cameras can’t see. So American engineers are developing radar that penetrates outdoor obstacles.

What seems to be happening is that these two projects—STTW and UAVs—are converging. In other words, unmanned vehicles that can see through walls. In some planning documents, the merger is explicit. A 2006 “Operational Needs Statement” from the military’s Joint Urban Operations Office calls for a “STTW sensor mountable on both manned and unmanned vehicles,” including “UAV platforms.” A Navy bulletin calls for the same thing.

Conceptually, the merger serves every tactical objective. It increases standoff distance and mobility. It makes aerial drones useful in bad weather and urban settings. It also integrates them into a more ambitious plan: to see the enemy through every wall, not just one. A 2005 DARPA report, for example, proposes to “image through multiple walls and even penetrate whole buildings using distributed sensors on or around buildings,” with UAVs assisting ground forces. A 2007 Army Research Lab study explores the ability of ground sensors, working with UAVs, to capture “images from different angles,” thereby providing “intelligence on the configuration, content, and human presence inside enclosed areas (buildings).”

Three years ago, according to a defense contractor, the goal was to extend STTW capability to “distances in excess of 100 m,” which would start to bring UAVs into the game. Boeing was in discussions to put STTW radar into a UAV. The Army was seeking “a suitable lightweight and compact imaging sensor to be hosted by the Camcopter-small UAV, capable of lifting 65 lbs of payload.” The requirement for true aerial mobility was to make the system “lightweight (less than 30 lbs) and portable (less than 4 cubic feet).”

That sounds a lot like the mystery devices now being placed aboard drones in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the Los Angeles Times describes them, “The devices are roughly the size of an automobile battery, but are heavy enough that outfitted Predators in some cases carry only one Hellfire missile instead of two.” The effect of these devices, according to a former U.S. military official interviewed by the Times, is that insurgents, even indoors, “are living with a red dot on their head.”

Cool, huh? Except that if their walls are now transparent, so are yours. As fozzy astutely asks: “What happens when the government ‘brings this technology home‘?” And do you think our government is the only one merging STTW with UAVs? Heck, even the Canadians are well into it. “We will put the UWB radar on mobile platforms such as robots or unmanned airborne vehicle,” says a 2002 report from Defence R&D Canada. “We are confident that a through-the-roof surveillance capability could be implemented using UWB radars installed on helicopters or small UAV.”

Congratulations. The good news is, we might win in Iraq and Afghanistan after all. The bad news is, now we all have red dots on our heads.

*Mobile Google Android to condition people to embrace constant GPS tracking

Ignorance Is Futile:

The fact is that virtually every modern cell phone has GPS tracking technologies built-in. Odds are that the masses in general have very little concept of this. This being the case, then it’s a good thing the Federal government ‘has’ Google ‘working in their interests’ in that before most people even have clear understanding that their movements being tracked, they may become acclimated to the embracing and desire of such. But this Google Android isn’t even meant for merely just cell phones, it’s meant for virtually any and all palm-sized mobile devices (even MP3 players), set-top boxes for TV’s, and vehicles.

The 20 applets being reviewed here are actually awards given to participants in their “Android Developer Challenge“, on which they had $3,750,000 up for grabs in a contest. So one might argue that these weren’t even written by Google, however, their Location APIs’ were central developer plugins, and these are the applets Google picked when it was over.

Many of these applets have inherent built-in capabilities to enable governments and stalkers to track their prey’s moves. Even if someone can manage to ensure that their location isn’t being broadcast it’s possible for predators or estranged ex-lovers to hide them in a persons vehicle without their knowing it. This is already an issue with certain cell phones. A show I seen recently showed how a crazed ex-husband managed to hide a GPS enabled cel phone deep inside the stalkee’s dashboard only to be found after she asked police to rip her car apart knowing there had to be some form of tracking device embedded in her car after he consistently popped up not just un her rearview mirror, but also in her path as if to make it all look coinciedental.

Elsewhere, I recall seeing articles about women who have been murdered after being tracked with their cellphones. The technology much more understood by the public in large where it’s more out ion the open by the cell phone company’s in a society that has aquiessed into a total Orwellian Big Brother control grid nightmare.

A final item of consideration, before unrolling the Google applet list, is technology dependency. I ask all you cell phones users out there how many phone numbers can you list from memory in case you got stranded someplace and your phone was dead? For most people that I have asked over the past couple years, maybe one or 2. This new ‘everyone has GPS’ precident reminds me of a good friend of mine. He uses a stand-alone GPS unit for driving for work. I’ve caught him using the voice guidance system while driving to menial well-known locations. It’s sets a precident of computers doing all of our thinking for us, which I would argue may lower IQ in different cases. Another potential dillema is always fretting about where I am precisely (one Google applet has you checking your location while cooking dinner)  may be but another all-day daily distraction from clear thought.

$275,000 Award Winners:

cab4me:

This applet helps you “get you a cab anywhere and any time”. It shows you your location on the map and what appears to be a cab company base terminal, a moving cab or both. Wouldn’t that be a convenient service? So convenient that “cab4me enables you to easily call a cab to any location worldwide. You do not need to know the number of the local cab company. You do not need to enter or even know the address you want to be picked up at.”

I can also see where cab companies would encourage people to use them because it’d would be insane for people to order a cab with their phone to then ditch without paying when near the target neighborhood.

Locale:

Changes your phone settings based on your location. “For example, your At Work situation might notice when your location condition is 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, and triggers your ringer volume setting to vibrate. Locale is an innovative way to simplify your life.”

Ecorio:

Geared towards CO2-concerned environmentalist in that it “allows the user to accurately calculate their travel carbon footprint.”

“After Installation, Ecorio runs in the background on your phone, keeping track of your movements and tallying up the trips that you take each day.”

Life360:

Encourages you to “track your family on the map”, or your friends & neighbors, for various reasons such as for “help” and “safety”.

Softrace:

Applet for runners and bicyclists to enhance their outdoor experience.

TuneWiki:

A sort of quazi social networking app with several gimmicks to get you to use it. The feature of our concern is that tells you what music others have played based on your GPS location.

Wertago:

Is almost explicitly geared towards younger people in general as it’s a party & nightlife locator. It shows your location on the map and where other things around you are happening.

PicSay:

Hijacks your devices camera and names the files based on your location.

The other 2:

From the Top 10, there’s also 2 other nifty shopping apps that it’s not clear whether or not they show your location, but it’s likely at least one of them does explicitly. The basic principle of each is price comparisons, and it’s out in the open that Google would like to know what people look at in order ‘to serve better ads’.

$100,000 Award Winners:

BreadCrumbz:

“BreadCrumbz uses the phone’s camera and GPS to take geo-tagged pictures of your route. BreadCrumbz incorporates Android’s location APIs and Compass sensor to track your progress as you navigate. Android’s Maps API is used to overlay route information on top of a map.”

Cooking Capsules:

This one encourages you to check up on your location during cooking: “Android’s Location awareness is used to find your nearest markets and friends.”

Maverick:

“Maverick empowers users to instantly exchange text, location and multimedia content in the form of audio clips, photos and scribbles…” And so on. Also a feature for bloggers to blog their current location.

Pebblebox:

“Pebblebox allows the user to publish and discover local events, theater schedules, housing, restaurants, tourism guide, etc. It is also a social platform in neighborhoods. Users can read and write geo-blogs, share experiences, and make new friends.”

PhoneBook 2.0:

“Ideally suited for teenagers willing to share their mood and location, it also helps business people to keep their contacts secure and up-to-date.”

Piggyback:

“Piggyback is a revolutionary real-time carpooling application for mobile phones that helps you save time and money while reducing your carbon footprint.”

Pocket Journey:

“Pocket Journey is the mobile application for delivery of, and the marketplace for, high quality, location-specific multimedia.”

The final 3:

The last 3 applets in Google’s listing don’t appear to be tracking conditioners.

———

So that’s 15 of 20 that are for sure tracking related, 2 that might be and 3 that don’t appear to be.




-A Face-Finding Search Engine

Note: Google is has already been working on this for over 2 years. Their version also includes object recognition.

Technology Review (images not included):

Today there are more low-quality video cameras–surveillance and traffic cameras, cell-phone cameras and webcams–than ever before. But modern search engines can’t identify objects very reliably in clear, static pictures, much less in grainy YouTube clips. A new software approach from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University could make it easier to identify a person’s face in a low-resolution video. The researchers say that the software could be used to identify criminals or missing persons, or it could be integrated into next-generation video search engines.

Today’s face-recognition systems actually work quite well, says Pablo Hennings-Yeomans, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon who developed the system–when, that is, researchers can control the lighting, angle of the face, and type of camera used. “The new science of face recognition is dealing with unconstrained environments,” he says. “Our work, in particular, focuses on the problem of resolution.”

In order for a face-recognition system to identify a person, explains Hennings-Yeomans, it must first be trained on a database of faces. For each face, the system uses a so-called feature-extraction algorithm to discern patterns in the arrangement of image pixels; as it’s trained, it learns to associate some of those patterns with physical traits: eyes that slant down, for instance, or a prominent chin.

The problem, says Hennings-Yeomans, is that existing face-recognition systems can identify faces only in pictures with the same resolution as those with which the systems were trained. This gives researchers two choices if they want to identify low-resolution pictures: they can either train their systems using low-resolution images, which yields poor results in the long run, or they can add pixels, or resolution, to the images to be identified.

The latter approach, which is achieved by using so-called super-resolution algorithms, is common, but its results are mixed, says Hennings-Yeomans. A super-resolution algorithm makes assumptions about the shape of objects in an image and uses them to sharpen object boundaries. While the results may look impressive to the human eye, they don’t accord well with the types of patterns that face-recognition systems are trained to look for. “Super-resolution will give you an interpolated image that looks better,” says Hennings-Yeomans, “but it will have distortions like noise or artificial [features].”

Read page 2.

-Photo Ticket Cameras to Track Drivers Nationwide + How To Block Them

Survivalist News:

Vendors plan to add spy technology to existing red light camera and speed camera installations.

Private companies in the US are hoping to use red light cameras and speed cameras as the basis for a nationwide surveillance network similar to one that will be active next year in the UK. Redflex and American Traffic Solutions (ATS), the top two photo enforcement providers in the US, are quietly shopping new motorist tracking options to prospective state and local government clients. Redflex explained the company’s latest developments in an August 7 meeting with Homestead, Florida officials.

“We are moving into areas such as homeland security on a national level and on a local level,” Redflex regional director Cherif Elsadek said. “Optical character recognition is our next roll out which will be coming out in a few months — probably about five months or so.”

The technology would be integrated with the Australian company’s existing red light camera and speed camera systems. It allows officials to keep full video records of passing motorists and their passengers, limited only by available hard drive space and the types of cameras installed. To gain public acceptance, the surveillance program is being initially sold as an aid for police looking to solve Amber Alert cases and locate stolen cars.

PhantomPlate has developed a series of products that make your licenses plate invisible to traffic cameras and photo radar speed traps. PhantomPlate distorts your tag making it unreadable from above and the side. The plate can still be read from directly on so the policeman coming up behind you will be no wiser. If you value your privacy and don’t want to be tracked Survivalist News highly recommends the Phantom Plate Photoshield Cover. Don’t let them track you!!!

*Obama’s VP Joe Biden promised mandatory microchip implant Supreme Court ruling

http://www.youtube.com/IgnoranceIsntBliss

The full paragraph Biden used:

BIDEN: And we’ll be faced with equally consequential decisions in the 21st century.

Can a microscopic tag be implanted in a person’s body to track his every movement? There’s actual discussion about that.

You will rule on that — mark my words — before your tenure is over.

Can brain scans be used to determine whether a person’s inclined toward criminality or violent behavior?

You will rule on that.

The important thing is that This wasn’t an actual question (it was more of a lecture), and now Chief Justice Roberts didn’t answer the ‘question’. Listen carefully. Biden promised that would happen.

FBI prepares vast database of biometrics

$1 billion project to include images of irises and faces
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22366208/

CLARKSBURG, W. Va. – The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world’s largest computer database of peoples’ physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.

Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.

“Bigger. Faster. Better. That’s the bottom line,” said Thomas E. Bush III, assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which operates the database from its headquarters in the Appalachian foothills.

The increasing use of biometrics for identification is raising questions about the ability of Americans to avoid unwanted scrutiny. It is drawing criticism from those who worry that people’s bodies will become de facto national identification cards. Critics say that such government initiatives should not proceed without proof that the technology really can pick a criminal out of a crowd.

Increasing use
The use of biometric data is increasing throughout the government. For the past two years, the Defense Department has been storing in a database images of fingerprints, irises and faces of more than 1.5 million Iraqi and Afghan detainees, Iraqi citizens and foreigners who need access to U.S. military bases. The Pentagon also collects DNA samples from some Iraqi detainees, which are stored separately.

The Department of Homeland Security has been using iris scans at some airports to verify the identity of travelers who have passed background checks and who want to move through lines quickly. The department is also looking to apply iris- and face-recognition techniques to other programs. The DHS already has a database of millions of sets of fingerprints, which includes records collected from U.S. and foreign travelers stopped at borders for criminal violations, from U.S. citizens adopting children overseas, and from visa applicants abroad. There could be multiple records of one person’s prints.

“It’s going to be an essential component of tracking,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s enabling the Always On Surveillance Society.”

If successful, the system planned by the FBI, called Next Generation Identification, will collect a wide variety of biometric information in one place for identification and forensic purposes.

In an underground facility the size of two football fields, a request reaches an FBI server every second from somewhere in the United States or Canada, comparing a set of digital fingerprints against the FBI’s database of 55 million sets of electronic fingerprints. A possible match is made — or ruled out–as many as 100,000 times a day.

Fast fingerprint checks
Soon, the server at CJIS headquarters will also compare palm prints and, eventually, iris images and face-shape data such as the shape of an earlobe. If all goes as planned, a police officer making a traffic stop or a border agent at an airport could run a 10-fingerprint check on a suspect and within seconds know if the person is on a database of the most wanted criminals and terrorists. An analyst could take palm prints lifted from a crime scene and run them against the expanded database. Intelligence agents could exchange biometric information worldwide.

More than 55 percent of the search requests now are made for background checks on civilians in sensitive positions in the federal government, and jobs that involve children and the elderly, Bush said. Currently those prints are destroyed or returned when the checks are completed. But the FBI is planning a “rap-back” service, under which employers could ask the FBI to keep employees’ fingerprints in the database, subject to state privacy laws, so that if that employees are ever arrested or charged with a crime, the employers would be notified.

Advocates say bringing together information from a wide variety of sources and making it available to multiple agencies increases the chances to catch criminals. The Pentagon has already matched several Iraqi suspects against the FBI’s criminal fingerprint database. The FBI intends to make both criminal and civilian data available to authorized users, officials said. There are 900,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officers who can query the fingerprint database today, they said.

The FBI’s biometric database, which includes criminal history records, communicates with the Terrorist Screening Center’s database of suspects and the National Crime Information Center database, which is the FBI’s master criminal database of felons, fugitives and terrorism suspects.

The FBI is building its system according to standards shared by Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

At the West Virginia University Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR), 45 minutes north of the FBI’s biometric facility in Clarksburg, researchers are working on capturing images of people’s irises at distances of up to 15 feet, and of faces from as far away as 200 yards. Soon, those researchers will do biometric research for the FBI.

Covert iris- and face-image capture is several years away, but it is of great interest to government agencies.

Think of a Navy ship approaching a foreign vessel, said Bojan Cukic, CITeR’s co-director. “It would help to know before you go on board whether the people on that ship that you can image from a distance, whether they are foreign warfighters, and run them against a database of known or suspected terrorists,” he said.

Reliability questioned
Skeptics say that such projects are proceeding before there is evidence that they reliably match suspects against a huge database.

In the world’s first large-scale, scientific study on how well face recognition works in a crowd, the German government this year found that the technology, while promising, was not yet effective enough to allow its use by police. The study was conducted from October 2006 through January at a train station in Mainz, Germany, which draws 23,000 passengers daily. The study found that the technology was able to match travelers’ faces against a database of volunteers more than 60 percent of the time during the day, when the lighting was best. But the rate fell to 10 to 20 percent at night.

To achieve those rates, the German police agency said it would tolerate a false positive rate of 0.1 percent, or the erroneous identification of 23 people a day. In real life, those 23 people would be subjected to further screening measures, the report said.

Accuracy improves as techniques are combined, said Kimberly Del Greco, the FBI’s biometric services section chief. The Next Generation database is intended to “fuse” fingerprint, face, iris and palm matching capabilities by 2013, she said.

To safeguard privacy, audit trails are kept on everyone who has access to a record in the fingerprint database, Del Greco said. People may request copies of their records, and the FBI audits all agencies that have access to the database every three years, she said.

“We have very stringent laws that control who can go in there and to secure the data,” Bush said.

Privacy concerns
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the ability to share data across systems is problematic. “You’re giving the federal government access to an extraordinary amount of information linked to biometric identifiers that is becoming increasingly inaccurate,” he said.

In 2004, the Electronic Privacy Information Center objected to the FBI’s exemption of the National Crime Information Center database from the Privacy Act requirement that records be accurate. The group noted that the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2001 found that information in the system was “not fully reliable” and that files “may be incomplete or inaccurate.” FBI officials justified that exemption by claiming that in law enforcement data collection, “it is impossible to determine in advance what information is accurate, relevant, timely and complete.”

Privacy advocates worry about the ability of people to correct false information. “Unlike say, a credit card number, biometric data is forever,” said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley technology forecaster. He said he feared that the FBI, whose computer technology record has been marred by expensive failures, could not guarantee the data’s security. “If someone steals and spoofs your iris image, you can’t just get a new eyeball,” Saffo said.

In the future, said CITeR director Lawrence A. Hornak, devices will be able to “recognize us and adapt to us.”

“The long-term goal,” Hornak said, is “ubiquitous use” of biometrics. A traveler may walk down an airport corridor and allow his face and iris images to be captured without ever stepping up to a kiosk and looking into a camera, he said.

“That’s the key,” he said. “You’ve chosen it. You have chosen to say, ‘Yeah, I want this place to recognize me.’ “

Culture of surveillance may contribute to delusional condition

Source: IHT

Psychosis in the 21st century looks something like this: You think your every move is being filmed for a reality television show starring you, and that everyone in your life is an actor.

Or you think you are under intense surveillance by an army of spies, whom you refer to as the “www people,” as in the World Wide Web, and they wiretap your furniture and appliances.

Or else you refuse to drink water because you fear that another cup drawn from your faucet will, once and for all, deplete the world’s water supply.

Those thoughts are from three case studies of what psychiatrists interested in the intersection of mental illness, culture and society are calling, respectively, Truman Show delusion, Internet delusion and climate change delusion; all of them a window, through madness, into the modern world.

If you have delusions of grandeur in this century, you are probably not Napoleon, but you may be Bill Gates.

The Truman Show delusion, or Truman Syndrome, has drawn attention in recent months, in the United States and Britain, as psychiatrists in both countries describe a small but growing number of psychotic patients who describe their lives as mirroring that of the main character in the 1998 film “The Truman Show.”

Played by Jim Carrey, Truman Burbank leads a mundane existence in the suburbs, starting from the time he was in the womb, while being filmed for a documentary television show that he cannot escape.

Everyone is in on it, including his wife, and no one will believe Truman when he discovers clues that his life is being chronicled all the time by cameras.

With Internet delusion, patients typically incorporate the Internet into paranoid thoughts, including a fear that the Web is somehow monitoring or controlling their lives, or being used to transmit photographs or other personal information.

The delusions are fueling a chicken-and-egg debate in psychiatry: Are these merely modern examples of classic paranoia fed by the cultural landscape, or is there something about media like reality television and the Internet that can push people over the sanity line?

“Most likely these people would be delusional anyway,” said Dr. Joel Gold, a psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York, who said he saw five patients at the hospital from 2002 to 2004 with Truman Show delusion. Gold and his brother, Dr. Ian Gold, the Canada research chair in philosophy and psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, came up with the term “Truman Show delusion.”

“But the more radical view is that this pushes some people over the threshold; the environment tips them over the edge,” said Joel Gold, who is a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at New York University. “And if culture can make people crazy, then we need to look at it.”

One way of looking at the delusions and hallucinations of the mentally ill is that they represent extreme cases of what the general population, or the merely neurotic, are worried about. Schizophrenics and other paranoid patients can take common fears – like identity theft because of information transmitted on the Internet, or the loss of privacy because of the prevalence of security cameras to fight crime – and magnify them, psychiatrists say.

“There is the old saying that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there’s not somebody after you,” said Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University.

The prevailing view in psychiatry is that a delusion is just a delusion, psychosis is psychosis, and the scenery is incidental. Fear, a sense of persecution and grandiosity are static features of delusional thinking, many psychiatrists say.

During World War II, for example, psychotics might have believed a neighbor was a Nazi. During the Cold War, they might have thought the KGB or CIA was following them. In a post-Sept. 11 world, the persecutor might be Al Qaeda or the Department of Homeland Security.

“Cultural influences don’t tell us anything fundamental about delusion,” said Vaughan Bell, a psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College in London, who has studied Internet delusion.

“We can look at the influence of television, computer games, rock ‘n’ roll, but these things don’t tell us about new forms of being mentally ill,” said Bell, who said he had also treated patients who believed they were part of a reality television show.

British psychiatrists, writing in this month’s edition of the British Journal of Psychiatry about the phenomenon, called it the Truman syndrome and said they had seen a growing number of patients claiming to be the stars of a filmed reality show.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines a delusion, considered still to be little understood in psychiatry, as, essentially, a false belief that is not grounded in reality and that is held with absolute conviction despite proof to the contrary. The manual lists a caveat that a belief is not delusional if it is something widely accepted by other members of a person’s culture or subculture – for example, religious faith. But some psychiatrists say the exception is too vague.

Some experts studying conditions like Truman Show delusion and other culture-bound delusions, which are specific to a time or place, are questioning the premise that culture is only incidental to psychosis, even as a growing body of evidence has pointed to brain abnormalities and other biological causes for illnesses like schizophrenia.

Psychiatrists have studied delusions like turabosis, which is the belief that one is covered in sand, and which has been documented in Saudi Arabia but would be unlikely to occur in, say, North Dakota. Another study found a delusion occurring only in rural West Bengal, India, in which women and men bitten by dogs believe they have become pregnant with puppies.

Joel Gold, who is writing a book about Truman Show delusion with his brother, said that three of the five patients he saw with the condition specifically mentioned the film. He said what distinguishes this delusion from most others is that it involves the patient’s entire world, and everything real is unreal.

Psychiatrists say that other movies whose characters are living in an unreal world or being watched by malevolent forces, including “The Matrix,” “Edtv” and even the film based on George Orwell’s “1984,” have come up in conversations with psychotic patients. But the premise of “The Truman Show” (”What if you were watched every moment of your life?” according to a promotional blurb) is strikingly similar to what patients describe as their own experiences.

Reinforcing their beliefs is the fact that in the movie, Truman is right about being watched and recorded at all times. Every other character is part of the conspiracy.

Since the Golds first presented their findings in 2006, they have learned of about 40 cases of people who say they are experiencing the delusion or have in the past. Sometimes patients contact them directly.

Recently, Joel Gold received an e-mail message from a woman who told him, “It’s my show.”

ACLU Weighs In On Attempt to Expand Law Enforcement Intelligence Systems

Washington, DC – In response to a proposed rule change by the Justice Department that would greatly expand law enforcement intelligence gathering in the United States, the American Civil Liberties Union submitted comments today strongly urging the department to reject it. The rule would amend 28 Code of Federal Regulations Part 23 to weaken restrictions on state and local police to collect, retain, and disseminate intelligence on Americans. The ACLU is strenuously objecting to the proposed amendment citing Fourth Amendment and privacy concerns.

“This is the Bush administration’s final push to create a de facto secret police force,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “Turning our local and state law enforcement officers into domestic intelligence collectors is a recipe for disaster.  Not only will police officers be looking for suspicion where there is none, they will be distracted from the business of protecting our communities from real threats. We strongly urge the Justice Department to reject any methods that would imperil the privacy rights of innocent Americans.”

The proposed changes would ease restrictions regarding when state and local law enforcement can collect personal information, and all but remove limitations on when and with whom they can share this intelligence. One proposed amendment would double the amount of time police agencies can keep information without reviewing it for accuracy. Another would allow police to target organizations as well as individuals, which will likely lead to blacklists that smear innocent people and limit Americans’ free association rights.  Most troubling, the proposed rule seems to suggest that this “update” to the regulation is necessary because current information sharing initiatives, such as the Information Sharing Environment, the Joint Terrorism Task Forces and intelligence fusion centers may not clearly comply with the current regulation. Indeed, the ACLU noted that the potential abuse of police intelligence activities has already been borne out with numerous stories of police infiltration of advocacy organizations, including the recent case of Maryland law enforcement spying on anti-death penalty and peace groups.

“If the federal government announced tomorrow that it was creating a new domestic intelligence agency of more than 800,000 operatives reporting on even the most mundane everyday activities, Americans would be outraged,” said Michael German, ACLU National Security Policy Counsel and former FBI Agent. “This proposed rule change is the final step in creating an America we no longer recognize – an America where everyone is a suspect. Combined with the breadth of intelligence overhaul we’ve seen in the last seven years, the proposed changes to the law could sound the death knell for Americans’ expectation of privacy. The combination of ambivalent rules and lack of oversight will almost definitely result in misuse and abuse.”

ACLU’s comments to the Justice Department:  http://www.aclu.org/safefree/36595leg20080829.html

Electronic binoculars from Northrop Grumman team to detect threats through brain activity

Dandelion Salad

Military & Aerospace Electronics
23 Aug. 2008

LINTHICUM, Md., 23 Aug. 2008. Everyone who has ever watched the Star Wars films from George Lucas has probably at one moment wished they had Jedi abilities such as mind control or what Lucas called Jedi reflexes – knowing something will happen a second before it does.

A team led by Northrop Grumman’s Electronic Systems Sector is looking to bring a similar threat detection capability to warfighters as part of an advanced research contract to develop a panoramic day/night optical system that will utilize human brain activity to detect, analyze, and alert foot-soldiers to possible threats.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in Arlington, Va., awarded the contract, which is for the first phase of the Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System program, or CT2WS.

DARPA officials say the CT2WS will function as an intelligent neuro-optical system, using the stimuli sensed by brain activity to detect targets at long-range over a wide field of view.

[...]

Electronic binoculars from Northrop Grumman team to detect threats through brain activity – Military & Aerospace Electronics.

h/t: CLG

Anxious Governments React to Google Earth

Secrecy News:

The easy availability of high-resolution imagery of much of the Earth’s surface through Google Earth has presented a significant challenge to longstanding secrecy and national security policies, and has produced several distinct types of reactions from concerned governments, according to a recent report (pdf) from the DNI Open Source Center (OSC).

“As the initial shock wore off, five main responses to the ‘Google threat’ emerged from nations around the world: negotiations with Google, banning Google products, developing a similar product, taking evasive measures, and nonchalance,” the OSC report said.

The report documents these responses with citations to published news sources. It also notes several incidents in which terrorists or irregular military forces reportedly used Google Earth to plan or conduct attacks.

The OSC report has not been approved for public release, but a copy was obtained by Secrecy News. See “The Google Controversy — Two Years Later,” Open Source Center, 30 July 2008.

Further background on the impact of commercial satellite imagery may be found in “Can You Spot the Chinese Nuclear Sub?” by Sharon Weinberger, Discover, August 2008.

Due to government restrictions, lawsuits or other arrangements with Google, quite a few locations have been excluded from detailed coverage in Google Earth. Many of these were identified in “Blurred Out: 51 Things You Aren’t Allowed to See on Google Maps,” IT Security, July 15, 2008.

Both articles were cited by the OSC in its new report.

First Space Espionage GPS Satellite Launched

Space War
RIA Novosti
by Andrei Kislyakov
RIA Novosti political commentator
Moscow (RIA Novosti) Aug 21, 2008

Replacements are expected to take place soon in the “space spy community”. Yet another American GPS (Global Positioning System) Navstar satellite will be launched into the low earth orbit in autumn.

It might seem an ordinary event, had it not been for this satellite being equipped with a platform for intelligence equipment. A purely navigational GPS has turned into an advanced intelligence system, appropriate for a variety of special tasks.

Military experts expect the world’s major powers to spend as much as $30.6 billion for intelligence satellite programs in the next decade. By that time, around one hundred military satellites of various types will be orbiting earth.

Intelligence satellite constellations, including imagery intelligence (optic and electronic, and radar intelligence), electronic surveillance, military communications, and space navigation satellites are packed with the following capabilities:

- early warning of a nuclear missile attack;

- timely detection of preparations for and start of hostilities,

- sustained communication and combat control in the interest of the state leadership, strategic nuclear forces, and other branches and services;

- navigational, hydro-meteorological support, cartographic survey support, time and frequency support for the armed forces.

The U.S. possesses the most powerful space intelligence network, having launched over 500 satellites by now. The Key Hole imagery intelligence satellites, also codenamed Big Bird, are the heart of the U.S. space intelligence system.

The first of the series, the KH-9, was deployed in 1971. Now these “birds”, weighing up to 15 tons, provide coverage of nearly all the Earth’s surface. One of these satellites was given a special assignment in 2001 to track down Bin Laden in Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, the further operation of “Big Birds” is at risk. The Misty program, launched by Boeing and Lockheed Martin and aimed at the creation of advanced imagery intelligence satellites, has already consumed $7.6 billion with no significant results.

In late winter last year, a U.S. Navy cruiser fired a missile and shot down the malfunctioning satellite USA-193, which, military experts believe, could be the latest KH-14. In September 2007, a transitional model of Key Hole, the KH-12-4, which was a prototype of the KH-13 series, fell to earth in Peru.

In Russia, the fate of the intelligence satellite program is inseparable from the fate of the national space program. There was a great decline between the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. By 2005, only one Russian electronic reconnaissance satellite was in orbit, compared to 12 American satellites, surveying Russia’s territory.

Currently Russia has almost nothing to match the Big Bird. In November 2006 and August 2007, optical reconnaissance satellites ceased operation.

Still, there’s no need to panic.

In late July this year, a Persona optical reconnaissance satellite was placed into orbit. It is a modern intelligence space vehicle, able to transmit images via a radio channel. Russia’s Defense Ministry plans to launch two Persona satellites a year, starting with 2009.

Moreover, in late January, Vladimir Popovkin, who was in charge of Russia’s Space Force at that time, said a new domestic-made satellite will be launched next year to retransmit signals from Russian intelligence space vehicles to ground centers.

It will have a lifetime of 12 years, while the satellites currently in service operate a maximum of three years.