Privacy

Source: Flex Your Rights

In any given police visit to your home, with a few notable exceptions, the below rules will help protect your civil rights and improve your chances of leaving safely—so you don't have to be a legal expert to do the right thing.

1) Keep Your Private Items Out of View
This is common sense: Always keep any private items that you don't want others to see out of sight. Legally speaking, police do not need a search warrant in order to confiscate any illegal items that are in plain view. Bear in mind that, without a search warrant, police cannot enter you home under any circumstances. Still, if they see something suspicious in the proximity of your house, they could arrive with a warrant quickly and unexpectedly.

2) Do Not Let Them Enter
Exit the house and close the door behind you before greeting the officer. Regardless of what the officer says, there is no reason they need to be allowed into your home. Permitting an officer to enter your home is the equivalent of waiving your Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Without a warrant, police officers absolutely cannot enter your home without your permission or an emergency circumstance that could justify their entry.

3) Be Courteous & Non-Confrontational
If a police officer contacts you at your home, remain calm. Ask the Officer "How can I help you?" While you may not be pleased to have the police at your door, it is best to treat them as you would any other unexpected visitor. You have nothing to gain -- and everything to lose – by allowing hostilities to emerge.

Even if the officers are being belligerent it's always in your best interest to remain calm, courteous and non-confrontational.

Source: Wired

Federal agents at the border do not need any reason to search through travelers' laptops, cell phones or digital cameras for evidence of crimes, a federal appeals court ruled Monday, extending the government's power to look through belongings like suitcases at the border to electronics.

The unanimous three-judge decision reverses a lower court finding that digital devices were "an extension of our own memory" and thus too personal to allow the government to search them without cause. Instead, the earlier ruling said, Customs agents would need some reasonable and articulable suspicion a crime had occurred in order to search a traveler's laptop.

On appeal, the government argued that was too high a standard, infringing upon its right to keep the country safe and enforce laws. Civil rights groups, joined by business traveler groups, weighed in, defending the lower court ruling.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the government, finding that the so-called border exception to the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches applied not just to suitcases and papers, but also to electronics.

Source: Yahoo Tech

A series of events at international airport security checkpoints -- and not just the all-gadgets-out-of-bags issue that Ben reported last week -- are troubling privacy and civil liberties advocates.

In the last few months, travelers have found their cell phones and laptops seized by officials, at least temporarily. In at least one case, an engineer was asked to turn on the PC, enter his password, and allow agents to copy a record of all the web sites he had visited on the machine. The laptop was then taken away from him altogether.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Asian Law Caucus filed a lawsuit last week to demand that the government disclose border search policies regarding electronic devices. At least two dozen incidents have now been logged, 15 of which involved officers searching records of cell phone calls, files on laptops, and even the contents of MP3 players. Almost all involve "travelers of Muslim, Middle Eastern or South Asian background, many of whom... are concerned they were singled out because of racial or religious profiling."

Source: BoingBoing

The easiest way to kill an RFID, and be sure that it is dead, is to throw it in the microwave for 5 seconds. Doing this will literally melt the chip and antenna making it impossible for the chip to ever be read again. Unfortunately this method has a certain fire risk associated with it. Killing an RFID chip this way will also leave visible evidence that it has been tampered with, making it an unsuitable method for killing the RFID tag in passports. Doing this to a credit card will probably also screw with the magnetic strip on the back making it un-swipeable.

The second, slightly more convert and less damaging, way to kill an RFID tag is by piercing the chip with a knife or other sharp object. This can only be done if you know exactly where the chip is located within the tag. This method also leaves visible evidence of intentional damage done to the chip, so it is unsuitable for passports.

The third method is cutting the antenna very close to the chip. By doing this the chip will have no way of receiving electricity, or transmitting its signal back to the reader. This technique also leaves minimal signs of damage, so it would probably not be a good idea to use this on a passport.

The last (and most covert) method for destroying a RFID tag is to hit it with a hammer. Just pick up any ordinary hammer and give the chip a few swift hard whacks. This will destroy the chip, and leave no evidence that the tag has been tampered with. This method is suitable for destroying the tags in passports, because there will be no proof that you intentionally destroyed the chip.

Source: BBC

Biometric technology uses computerised methods to identify a person by their unique physical or behavioural characteristics.

Developments and uses have increased with demand to match concerns over international, business and personal security.

Biometrics is more personal than a passport photo or Pin, using traits such as fingerprints, face or eye "maps" as key identifying features.

Uses range from building access and laptop security to identity cards and passports.

However, there are concerns about the storing of biometric data and its possible misuse.

Continued

Source: BBC

Tens of thousands of children are being fingerprinted in school - often without the consent of their parents, a human rights group has complained.

Prints are taken for a library lending system which the makers say makes lending more efficient and less vulnerable to abuse.

But the pressure group Privacy International says the practice is illegal and breaches the human right to privacy.

 

Regarding the 7/7/2005 terrorist attacks in London, let us look at the facts, and what we were told, and compare them. Then, using Ockham’s Razor and common-sense, let us see what conclusions are to be drawn, so we can all understand what most likely really did happen that day.

Source: Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Source: Wired

The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops' online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.

Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.

The new rules (.pdf) obtained by Wired News require a commander be consulted before every blog update.

"This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging," said retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, editor of The Blog of War anthology. "No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has -- it's most honest voice out of the war zone. And it's being silenced."

Army Regulation 530--1: Operations Security (OPSEC) (.pdf) restricts more than just blogs, however. Previous editions of the rules asked Army personnel to "consult with their immediate supervisor" before posting a document "that might contain sensitive and/or critical information in a public forum." The new version, in contrast, requires "an OPSEC review prior to publishing" anything -- from "web log (blog) postings" to comments on internet message boards, from resumes to letters home.

Failure to do so, the document adds, could result in a court-martial, or "administrative, disciplinary, contractual, or criminal action."

Source: NZ Herald

Facebook has 20 million users worldwide, is worth billions of dollars and, if internet sources are to be believed, was started by the CIA.

The social networking phenomenon started as a way of American college students to keep in touch. It is rapidly catching up with MySpace, and has left others like Bebo in its wake.

But there is a dark side to the success story that's been spreading across the blogosphere. A complex but riveting Big Brother- type conspiracy theory which links Facebook to the CIA and the US Department of Defence.

The CIA is, though, using a Facebook group to recruit staff for its very sexy sounding National Clandestine Service.

Checking out the job ads does require a Facebook login, so if you haven't joined the site - or are worried that CIA spooks will start following you home from work - check them out on the agency's own site.

The story starts once Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had launched, after the dorm room drama that's led to the current court case.

Facebook's first round of venture capital funding ($US500,000) came from former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome 'The Diversity Myth', he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC.

The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".