From the point of view of civil libertarians, the Obama administration has been an exercise in frustration, with every hopeful sign followed by failures to live up to its own promises.

The ACLU has just issued a report (pdf), titled “Establishing a New Normal: National Security, Civil Liberties, and Human Rights Under the Obama Administration,” which focuses on this pattern of inconsistency.

“The administration has displayed a decidedly mixed record,” explains ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romaro, “resulting, on a range of issues, in the very real danger that the Obama administration will institutionalize some of the most troublesome policies of the previous administration — in essence, creating a troubling ‘new normal.’”

As summarized in a press release announcing the report, “President Obama has made great strides in some areas, such as his auspicious first steps to categorically prohibit torture, outlaw the CIA’s use of secret overseas detention sites and release the Bush administration’s torture memos, but he has failed to eliminate some of the worst policies put in place by President Bush, such as military commissions and indefinite detention. He has also expanded the Bush administration’s ‘targeted killing’ program.”

The report is divided into seven sections covering transparency, torture and accountability, detention, targeted killing, military commissions, speech and surveillance, and watch lists. The most striking areas of the report, however, are those which focus not on torture or secret prisons but on less-publicized recent actions by the Obama administration.

Full article here

I have often spoken about the excessive size of government, and most recently how waste and inefficiency needs to be eliminated from our military budget. Our foreign policy is not only bankrupting us, but actively creating and antagonizing enemies of the United States, and compromising our national security. Spending more and adding more programs and initiatives does not improve things for us; it makes them much much worse. This applies to more than just the military budget.

Recently the Washington Post ran an extensive report by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the bloated intelligence community. They found that an estimated 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearances. Just what are all these people up to? By my calculation this is about 11,000 intelligence workers per al Qaeda member in Afghanistan. This also begs the question — if close to 1 million people are authorized to know top secrets, how closely guarded are these secrets?

They also found that since the September 11 attacks, some 17 million square feet of building space has been built or is being built to accommodate the 250 percent expansion of intelligence organizations. Intelligence work is now done by some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private contracting companies in about 10,000 locations in the United States.

The former Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, has asserted that US intelligence now has the authority to target American citizens for assassination without charge or trial. How many of these resources are being devoted to spying on American citizens for nefarious reasons at home rather than targeting foreign enemies abroad?

It has been pointed out how much information we had about the impending attacks on 9/11, but because of layers upon layers of bureaucratic inefficiencies, our intelligence community was unable to act meaningfully on that information. Obviously we needed drastic change. But it was pretty clear that we did not need more bureaucracy, more confusion, more expenditures and more government.

It is even claimed by some leaders that the intelligence community has grown this way by design; that it is advantageous to have more than one set of eyes looking at the same information. With this logic, is there any number of intelligence employees at which we achieve diminishing returns? Can there ever be too many cooks in the kitchen, in their view?

Are there any problems at all that the government wouldn’t attempt to solve by throwing more money at them? Even now, the government is trying to solve our economic problems related to too much government spending and debt, with more government spending and debt.

The problem with our intelligence community before 9/11 was not an inability to collect information. Therefore, the post-September 11 build-up of the surveillance state does nothing to enhance safety. Instead what Americans have gotten in return for the billions of tax dollars spent on security is a surveillance state that reads our e-mails, wiretaps us without warrants, and strip searches grandmothers at airports. This is yet another instance in which Americans would be safer, richer and freer if our government would simply look to the Constitution and respect the boundaries it has set.

The democrats are not a left leaning party, they are not liberal in any meaningful way rather they are the current face of the one party state that supports the corporate bankster take over of government and the economy.

The current financial reforms prove this as no matter how much Obama may claim they will prevent another repeat of the financial meltdown they won’t do anything of the sort and it will only be a matter of time until another bubble bursts and the government is expected to clean up the mess. Instead of doing something drastic such as re-introduce Glass Stegal and other post depression laws they have instead given even more power to the one group of people who are probably more responsible for the current mess e.g the Federal Reserve.

The current reform act has done nothing to prevent the huge casino banks from making high risky investments and relying on the taxpayer to bail them out when they go wrong. Instead this acts proves the amount of power that the banksters have over government policy as they taken a large chunk of the bailout money given to them and used it to lobby, bribe and buy off politicians to prevent any meaningful reform from occurring. If the Democrats were a true left leaning party they would have stuck up for the man on the street instead of Wall Street. Their recent actions prove where their real allegiances lie.

If the Democrats were a true left leaning liberal party they would be against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and definitely against the expansion of the never ending war on terror into Iran, Yemen and Pakistan. Instead they kowtow to Israeli pressure groups and the neo-con factions pushing for more war as if it was some kind of economic stimulus rather than one of the primary causes behind the collapse of the American dollar.

Instead of trying to reverse the massive amount of damage the last Republican war party has done to world peace, Americas image abroad and to the rule of law they have instead followed previous policies as well as expanding them. A true liberal party would have stopped these wars of aggression and instead used the trillions of dollars spent blowing up Afghani wedding parties and school buses to help the economy at home.

At home in America they have proved that they are controlled by financial and corporate interests by watering down any truly progressive bills such as the health care reform. Instead of going for a public option, a cheap affordable insurance plan that everyone could get covered by they opted for fudges and unconstitutional insurance mandates. When it came to propaganda about death panels and abortions on demand the Democrats buckled and gave in to fear and in fact it was the lack of votes on their side of the aisle that prevented their original plans from being implemented.

On civil liberties they have proved their non liberal credentials by following George Bush’s attack on the constitution and by extending the high tech surveillance state that is now a common feature of most western democracies. Using the war on terror as an excuse for anything and everything they have kept the Patriot Act, continued mass unwarranted wire tapping, renditions of prisoners to overseas prisoners where they can be tortured and extended the definition of “terrorist” to include many domestic protesters.

Instead of standing up for liberal beliefs in personal freedom and a small state they have instead extended the size of government beyond any comprehension and the size of the national debt is such that it is very likely to never be paid off unless a massive devaluation of the dollar takes place.

As Maher says in the video, a true liberal party would have legalised marijuana, and ended the other war that will never be won e.g the war on drugs. Instead of rolling back the police state apparatus that has sprung up they have allowed it to continue growing at a very fast pace.

This is a police force that sees nothing wrong with Tasering old grannies lying in their beds, or to shoot people in the back on train station platforms, or to storm into ones house and kill family pets who bark to loud. This is a police force that is crying out for a big firm hand to be squeezed around it to prevent abuse and in which cops who abuse their power by Tasering, assaulting and killing are punished in the same manner as any other citizen of the country would be. In fact I would go so far as to say that Police officers should be forced to upkeep even higher standards of professional conduct than anyone else and no leniency should be given to officers who choose to abuse their power by mistreating the public.

No matter what some on the right may say about Democrats being liberals, socialists and commies the truth of the matter is that the majority of Democrat house members don’t seem to have any liberal views at all.

The old left right paradigm has long disappeared and the only choice for voters in the 2 party political system is between a center right party e.g the democrats and a far right religious fundamentalist neo-con war mongering party. If you are anti war, anti corporate take over, pro civil rights and pro constitution which party are you supposed to vote for?

Bill Maher nails the current state of American politics.

Remote control in high-tech warfare has begun to extend to robots involved in surveillance, troop supply and even the firing of powerful weapons.

By Sherwood Ross

The Pentagon is rapidly improving its ability to fight wars with robots. This capability is “bringing about the most profound transformation of warfare since the advent of the atom bomb,” says Scientific American, and raises “a host of ethical and legal issues.”

“Robots are pouring onto battlefields as if a new species of mechanotronic alien had just landed on our planet,” the publication says in an editorial on their development in its July issue.  “The prospect of androids that hunt down and kill on their own accord (shades of Terminator) should give us all pause. An automatic pilot that makes its own calls about whom to shoot violates the ‘human’ part of international humanitarian law, the one that recognizes that some weapons are so abhorrent that they just should be eliminated.”

Since 2003, 7,000 unmanned aircraft and 12,000 ground vehicles have entered the U.S. military inventory, “entrusted with missions that range from seeking out snipers to bombing the hideouts of al-Qaeda higher-ups in Pakistan,” writes P.W. Singer in an accompanying article titled “War of The Machines.”

Singer, who directs the 21^st Century Defense Initiative at The Brookings Institution, in Washington, D.C., a non-profit research think tank, says robots include:

# Lockheed Martin’s High-Altitude Airship, an unmanned blimp that carries a radar the length of a football field and can fly at nearly 19,800 meters for over a month at a time.

# Contractor QinetiQ North America’s MAARS robot, resembling a tank that is armed with a machine gun and grenade launcher that does sentry and sniper duty.

# The miniature surveillance “bot” from contractor AeroVironment that “mimics a hummingbird in size and its ability to hover over a target” and which flaps its wings frenetically as its cameras observe a scene.

# The Counter-Rocket Artillery and Mortar, or C-RAM, which resembles Star Wars robot R2-D2 and is armed with a machine gun that can shoot down incoming missiles and is used to protect the Green Zone in Baghdad.

# The TALON ground robot that can defuse bombs and peeks over obstacles to hunt for enemies.

# The ChemBot, conceived by the University of Chicago and contractor iRobot, of Bedford, Mass., and which is “a bloblike machine that shifts shape, such that it is able to squeeze through a hole in the wall.”

# The Predator drone that can track 12 targets at once and which has been used in combat since 1995. This unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) from General Atomics is armed with two lethal Hellfire missiles that have killed as many as 40 al-Qaeda leaders but which, by some estimates, have killed as many as 1,000 civilians across Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Author Singer writes that robots are machines built to operate in a “sense-think-act” paradigm. Information from their sensors is relayed to computer processors or artificial intelligence software that decide whether to activate their mechanical “effectors.”

“The global Positioning Satellite system, video-game-like remote controls and a host of other technologies have made robots both useful and usable on the battlefield during the past decade,” Singer writes. “The increased ability to observe, pinpoint and then attack targets in hostile settings without having to expose the human operator to danger became a priority after the 9/11 attacks…,” he writes.

What’s more, Singer intimates that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. “The inexorable growth in computing power means that today’s recently enlisted soldiers may end their careers witnessing robots powered by computers literally a billion times more capable than those currently available,” he writes.

In an editorial titled “Terminate the Terminators,” Scientific American warns, “Some might call a ban on autonomous robots naïve or complain that it would tie the hands of soldiers faced with irregular warfare. But although robots have clear tactical advantages, they carry a heavy strategic price.”

“The laws of war are an act not of charity but of self-interest,” the editorial continues. “The U.S. would be weakened, not strengthened, if chemical and biological weapons were widespread, and the same is true of robots. They are a cheap way to offset conventional military, and other nations and groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon are already deploying them…We can never put the genie back into the bottle, but putting a hold on further development of this technology could limit the damage.”

While this is perfectly true, the sentiment of the Editors is unlikely garner much support inside the Pentagon, which now dominates the planet military from 1,000 bases in the U.S. and 800 more overseas and has the financial wherewithal to manufacture countless robots, which Hezbollah does not.

The prospect of waging wars on battlefields ll,000 kilometers distant by remote control from computer terminals near Las Vegas, Nev., without exposing its own personnel to harm may seem like a dream come true to the Pentagon—but because of its persistent aggressiveness much of the rest of humanity may see it as a nightmare. As the Scientific American article points out, as a result of the deadly Predator strikes, a leading Pakistan newspaper has already branded the U.S. a “principal hate figure.” That is, of course, precisely how the “Empire,” with its Imperial Walkers and robot soldiers, was perceived by the “human” rebels in the 1977 movie “Star Wars.” Need I say more?

                                                              #

(Sherwood Ross is an American public relations consultant “for good causes.” He has contributed to many national magazines and formerly worked for major dailies and wire services. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com)

View the original article at Veterans Today

NY gov signs law removing information from stop-frisk database; NYC mayor, top cop decry move

Gov. David Paterson signed legislation Friday that eliminates a database of thousands of people stopped and frisked by New York City police without facing charges, calling the practice “not a policy for a democracy.”

Paterson signed the law over vehement objections of New York City’s mayor and police commissioner, who said the city was losing a key crime-fighting tool.

But the governor said the policy that targets criminals won’t be affected by eliminating a database of people who were stopped, then released.

“This law does not in any way tamper with our stop-and-frisk policies,” Paterson said. “What it does is it disallows the use of personal data of innocent people who have not done anything wrong. … That is not a policy for a democracy.”

Critics have said information from such stops, mainly of blacks and Latinos who are innocent, can lead to future police suspicion and surveillance. Police say the database helped to solve crimes, including anti-gay and anti-Hispanic bias attacks.

“Albany has robbed us of a great crime-fighting tool, one that saved lives,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in a statement. “Without it, there will be, inevitably, killers and other criminals who won’t be captured as quickly, or perhaps ever.”

Paterson said he had met with Kelly and spoken to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but had not been persuaded that the database protects the city from crime.

“Civil justice, and I think common sense, would suggest that those who are questioned and not even accused of crimes be protected from any further stigma or suspicion,” Paterson said.

He signed the bill at a press conference with the bill’s sponsors and supporters including the city’s public advocate, Bill de Blasio.

“Today’s reform of the stop and frisk database reaffirms a basic value of this country. The government cannot keep tabs on people who have done nothing wrong,” de Blasio said.

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, praised Paterson for signing the legislation.

“Innocent people stopped by the police for doing nothing more than going to school, work or the subway should not become permanent criminal suspects,” said Lieberman. “By signing this bill, the Paterson administration has put itself on the right side of history and leaves an important legacy in support of civil rights, civil liberties and common sense.”

In his sponsor’s memo, Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, D-Brooklyn, said that in 2009, the New York Police Department stopped 574,304 people, nearly 90 percent of them people of color, and nine out of 10 were released without any further legal action. Data show 2.5 million stops since 2005.

Sen. Eric Adams, a Brooklyn Democrat and former NYPD captain who sponsored the bill, said Friday the bill would protect innocent people from being targeted by police, especially minorities.

“Our fear is not to have our sons (be) victims of aggressive criminal behavior, but we also don’t want our children to be victims of aggressive police behavior,” Adams said.

The automated database, believed to be the only one in the country, grew out of a law requiring police to keep details such as age and race on anyone they stop, and it was envisioned as a way to safeguard civil rights.

The law, enacted in 2001, required the police department to turn information over to lawmakers every quarter. It was aimed at uncovering whether police were disproportionately stopping black and Hispanic men. But police also indefinitely hold on to addresses and names of people stopped — information not required by the law.

The bill, which takes effect immediately, would not prohibit police from entering into an electronic database generic identifiers, such as gender, race and location of the stop.

View the original article

Terror attacks, natural disasters and a surveillance security crackdown

Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
Friday, Jul 16th, 2010

In our leading article today we provide an overview of the nightmare future envisaged by a recent Rockefeller Foundation study which describes a global dictatorship tightly controlled by the world’s elite and super rich.

The Rockefeller blueprint for a new world order entitled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” predicts four future narratives.

One narrative in particular, “Hack Attack” outlines a scenario in which Technology is demonized as a criminal weapon prevalent in a world where civilization has all but collapsed.

“Devastating shocks like September 11, the Southeast Asian tsunami of 2004, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake had certainly primed the world for sudden disasters. But no one was prepared for a world in which large-scale catastrophes would occur with such breathtaking frequency.” the report states.

“The years 2010 to 2020 were dubbed the “doom decade” for good reason: the 2012 Olympic bombing, which killed 13,000, was followed closely by an earthquake in Indonesia killing 40,000, a tsunami that almost wiped out Nicaragua, and the onset of the West China Famine, caused by a once-in-a-millennium drought linked to climate change.” it continues.

The study envisages nation states all over the world literally losing control of their public finances and the ability to retain order and stability with “violence and crime more rampant”. It also envisions global coordination and interconnectedness between nations breaking down altogether to be replaced by proxy wars and low level conflict.

“By 2030, the distinction between “developed” and “developing” nations no longer seemed particularly descriptive or relevant.” the report states.

The only ones able to prosper in such an environment (surprise surprise) are the global elite and the super wealthy:

“The global have/have-not gap grew wider than ever. The very rich still had the financial means to protect themselves; gated communities sprung up from New York to Lagos, providing safe havens surrounded by slums. In 2025, it was de rigueur to build not a house but a high-walled fortress, guarded by armed personnel.” the report states.

As a backdrop to this chaos, the study attacks advanced technology, in particular the internet, depicting it as a tool for criminals and terrorists:

“Technology hackers were also hard at work. Internet scams and pyramid schemes plagued inboxes. Meanwhile, more sophisticated hackers attempted to take down corporations, government systems, and banks via phishing scams and database information heists, and their many successes generated billions of dollars in losses.” the study prophesies.

“The internet is overrun with spam and security threats and becomes strongly associated with illicit activity — especially on “dark webs” where no government can monitor, identify, or restrict activities.” the report states elsewhere.

Of course, the solution to fight such envisioned evils is to implement a highly sophisticated surveillance security system:

“Identity-verification technologies become a staple of daily life, with some hitches — a database of retina recordings stolen by hackers in 2017 is used to create numerous false identities still “at large” in the mid-2020s.”

“The positive effects of the mobile and internet revolutions were tempered by their increasing fragility as scamming and viruses proliferated, preventing these networks from achieving the reliability required to become the backbone of developing economies — or a source of trustworthy information for anybody.” the study outlines.

The message here is clear, the internet revolutionized global communication and enhanced the spread of knowledge, yet it is in its current form uncontrollable, and as such constitutes a great danger to the only ones who can continue to prosper in this nightmare new world order; the global elite.

While communication technology is demonized, other so called advances, such as genetically modified crops are lauded as progressive, despite being mired in controversy in today’s world. The study envisages the by now decimated poorer classes actually benefiting from “backyard and garage activities” including the mass production of GMO foods.

However, the report draws the line on such technological advances when it comes to the production of cheaper medicines and vaccinations, which it intimates will be deadly if allowed to be mass produced outside of elite control.

This study is not a work of dystopian fiction. It has not been written for entertainment value. This is what the Rockefeller Foundation and the elite Global Business Network envisage unfolding in the new world order. This study is deadly serious, and those involved with it’s funding and publication are not playing games.

Furthermore, the scenarios outlined in the report are not simply falling into place naturally, they are being actively implemented. Economic collapse and authoritarian social control are being fomented in front of our eyes by design.

The self correcting free market has been strangled and snuffed out by a combination of government intervention and offshore bankster looting of the planet’s wealth. As this situation continues to worsen, without meaningful corrective action, it is not difficult to imagine the social unrest we are already witnessing becoming global in its scope.

The report compliments these conditions with propaganda and fearmongering over climate change and natural disasters, as well as huge terror attacks.

It takes the overriding agenda of elite social engineers and places it into a not too distant future as a way of normalizing the prospects it outlines. As the report notes in it’s introduction, the scenarios outlined “allow us to imagine, and then to rehearse, different strategies for how to be more prepared for the future — or more ambitiously, how to help shape better futures ourselves.”

Read the report in full below:

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, July 9, 2010

Since the scum public can’t be trusted to control themselves after drinking a glass of wine, the state government of Pennsylvania has begun trials for a system that could eventually be rolled out in grocery stores across the region, where consumers are forced to scan their ID, perform a breathalyzer test, and stare into a surveillance camera before a government employee approves their purchase.

“A customer chooses a wine on a touch-screen display, swipes an ID, blows into an alcohol sensor (no contact with the machine is required) and looks into a surveillance camera. A state employee in Harrisburg remotely approves the sale after verifying the buyer isn’t drunk and matches the photo ID,” reports the Associated Press.

The zombie public, completely unaware of how having to prove that they are a good citizen before obtaining government permission to buy something has no place in a free country and is a slippery slope to draconian measures of control over the individual, expressed their approval at this new level of serfdom.

“This is just convenient one-stop shopping,” said Darby Golec, 28, of Enola. “It’ll be nice to have it all in one area.”

Others called the system “Big Brother” and pointed out that it creates a dangerous imbalance between the state and the citizen.

“The process is cumbersome and assumes the worst in Pennsylvania’s wine consumers — that we are a bunch of conniving underage drunks,” said Keith Wallace, president and founder of The Wine School of Philadelphia.

For decades, those who feared the “mark of the beast” were derided as Christian nutjobs when they warned of a system being introduced that would mandate people to prove they were a loyal citizen before being allowed to purchase anything. Citing the Book of Revelation 13:17-18, the following passage has often been brought up in the context of government moves to regulate how people make purchases.

“And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”

While for the moment, the ID necessary to make a purchase in Pennsylvania remains a drivers license, in five or ten years it could well be the implantable microchip. Indeed, as we highlighted several years ago now, trendy nightclubs in places like Barcelona require patrons wishing to access the VIP area of the club to receive a Verichip implant which is also used to keep a database of their drinks purchases.

Similarly, in 2004, Mexico’s attorney general and 160 of his office staff were implanted with tracker chips to control access to to secure areas of their headquarters.

When Alex Jones interviewed Baja Beach Club owner Conrad Chase, he related a story of how Verichip CEO Dr. Keith Bolton had told him that the Verichip was destined to become the global implantable identity system.

“The objective of this technology is to bring an ID system to a global level that will destroy the need to carry ID documents and credit cards,” Chase said during a 2002 conference.

In 2008, we learned that the Bilderberg Group, the quasi-secret organization of global power brokers that meets annually to plot the course of world affairs, had called for humans to be microchipped en masse in the name of weeding out “terrorists”.

Investigative journalist Jim Tucker’s source told him that Bilderberg discussed introducing the system under the pretext of fighting terrorism whereby the “good guys” would be allowed to travel freely from airports so long as their microchip could be scanned and the information stored in a database.

Similarly, before his death Hollywood director and documentary filmmaker Aaron Russo told Alex Jones that Nick Rockefeller had who personally told him that the elite’s ultimate goal was to create a microchipped population.

During one conversation, Rockefeller asked Russo if he was interested in joining the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) but Russo rejected the invitation, saying he had no interest in “enslaving the people” to which Rockefeller coldly questioned why he cared about the “serfs.”

“I used to say to him what’s the point of all this,” said Russo, “you have all the money in the world you need, you have all the power you need, what’s the point, what’s the end goal?” to which Rockefeller replied (paraphrasing), “The end goal is to get everybody chipped, to control the whole society, to have the bankers and the elite people control the world.”

So presumably those who refuse to take the “mark” or the microchip will eventually be ostracized from society and be forced to live on the fringes of existence.

But for the rest of the general public, transfixed by the behavior of Lindsay Lohan and LeBron James as their freedoms crash and burn around them, the “convenience” of scanning their ID chip for every conceivable purpose will represent just another facet of their meaningless, prozac-hazed, slavish lives.

The federal government is launching an expansive program dubbed “Perfect Citizen” to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants, according to people familiar with the program.

The surveillance by the National Security Agency, the government’s chief eavesdropping agency, would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack, though it wouldn’t persistently monitor the whole system, these people said.

Defense contractor Raytheon Corp. recently won a classified contract for the initial phase of the surveillance effort valued at up to $100 million, said a person familiar with the project.

An NSA spokeswoman said the agency had no information to provide on the program. A Raytheon spokesman declined to comment.

Some industry and government officials familiar with the program see Perfect Citizen as an intrusion by the NSA into domestic affairs, while others say it is an important program to combat an emerging security threat that only the NSA is equipped to provide.

“The overall purpose of the [program] is our Government…feel[s] that they need to insure the Public Sector is doing all they can to secure Infrastructure critical to our National Security,” said one internal Raytheon email, the text of which was seen by The Wall Street Journal. “Perfect Citizen is Big Brother.”

Full article here

Unsuspecting motorists were stung for more than £8million in fines last year by a fleet of ‘drive-by spy cars’.

The 187,993 victims of the CCTV-equipped Smart cars included parents stopping momentarily to drop off children by the school gates.

Civil liberties campaigners described the cars as ‘a very dangerous escalation in Britain’s surveillance society’.

Big Brother Watch revealed there are currently 54 CCTV Smart cars patrolling 31 local council areas.

The cars include a mast, which is up to 15ft in length, with a periscope-mounted camera attached at the top.

Councils park the vehicles at known ‘hot-spots’ and junctions to monitor traffic.

Full article here

Privacy rights advocates and civil liberties campaigners in Europe are raising the alarm about a new surveillance system that monitors conversations in public.

The surveillance system, dubbed Sigard, has been installed in Dutch city centers, government offices and prisons, and a recent test-run of the technology in Coventry, England, has British civil rights experts worried that the right to privacy will disappear in efforts to fight street crime.

The system’s manufacturer, Sound Intelligence, says it works by detecting aggression in speech patterns.

“Ninety percent of all incidents involving physical aggression are preceded by verbal aggression,” the Sound Intelligence Web site says. “The ability to spot verbal aggression before it turns into a violent outbreak delivers valuable time to security personnel and enables speedy intervention.”

According to the UK’s Sunday Telegraph, the city of Coventry recently finished a six-month test run of the system, which involved the installation of seven microphones around a crime-prone nightlife district. A spokesperson for the city said the system is “no longer in use.”

The Herald in Scotland reported last month that the system has also been tested in London, Glasgow, Birmingham and Manchester.

“In Hackney in London, the system detected up to six crimes a night, including fights and guns being fired,” the paper reported.

Sigard’s use is more widespread in the Netherlands, where the system’s manufacturer is located. According to the Sound Intelligence Web site, the system has been installed in Amsterdam’s train station, as well as police headquarters, and has also been installed inside a number of prisons and the city centers of Dordrecht and Groningen.

Sound Intelligence says that the technology focuses principally on tone of voice, and is not designed to listen to the content of conversations. But opponents say the technology is open to abuse.

“There can be no justification for giving councils or the police the capability to listen in on private conversations,” Dylan Sharpe of the UK’s Big Brother Watch told the Sunday Telegraph. “There is enormous potential for abuse, or a misheard word, causing unnecessary harm with this sort of intrusive and overbearing surveillance.”

In a sarcastic editorial, the Herald argued that crime could be eliminated altogether if the government were to install Sigard technology in all homes and offices.

Let’s install surveillance cameras and microphones in every room of every new home that is built. Make it a condition of planning consent. … It won’t just leave terrorists with no place to hide, it’ll expose criminals wherever they’re holed up or plotting. Isn’t this the logical extension of what is already happening, of what we’re allowing with barely a squeak of protest?

The police could be at the door, handcuffs at the ready, before a drunken man can punch his wife or say “domestic violence”. … Cameras in the home would eradicate child abuse. Burglary, too, would be obliterated since the thief would know the police had a ringside seat. Think of the benefits. Peace would reign in every household, the crime rate would plummet and prisons would no longer be overcrowded.