Street litterbugs caught on film

People who drop litter in a London borough are being filmed by a council team and face £80 on-the-spot fines. The BBC reports.

quotemarksright.jpgHackney Council has employed 11 environmental enforcement officers, each who has a mobile phone with a video camera to record offenders.quotesmarksleft.jpg

Fines will also be issued to those who do not clean up after their dogs.

via picturephoning.com: Camphone snapshots nab criminals.

Mainstream reporters helped spread VeriChip “lies,” Spychips author says

(Katherine Albrecht, the world’s most influential opponent to the use of RFID tags for tracking humans, is driving another nail into VeriChip, and its MSM dupes, for promoting subcutaneous chipping. Photo: Anne Hellmond)

from Mark:

I always tell my journalism students that objectivity should not come at the expense of the truth.

Still, many reporters appear to take the corporate suits at their word, despite compelling evidence from grassroots technology opponents (link, excerpt, below).

A simple denial from VeriChip, for example, seemed enough to balance the scales for reporters at Time Magazine, Business Week, and RFID Journal, after Albrecht told an AP reporter about animal studies strongly suggestive of a chip-cancer link.

Industry and government are fairly adept at damage control. After I wrote a Wired story about Homeland Security human tracking scheme in early 2005, the agency enlisted a computer rag hack in an attempt to discredit my original piece.

VeriChip similarly reached out to Time magazine to soften the blow of the surprising findings of cancer in animals bearing microchip implants, which Albrecht brought to light.

Albrecht believes the VeriChip might be a precursor to the Mark of the Beast described in the Book of Revelation.

Verichip Cancer Report
VeriChip’s media efforts have done little to salvage the company’s public image or its financial performance, both of which plummeted after research linking the implantable microchip to cancer was first widely revealed by the Associated Press in September 2007. The same company that once predicted revenues in the “billions” earned just $3,000 from its microchip implant operations in the first quarter of 2008, as patients shun the device that many are now calling the “cancer chip.”

Investors have also distanced themselves from the failing company, with VeriChip’s stock plummeting from a high of $10.62 last year to just over $2.00 today.

The government can also call dibs on your personal data at any time. (See the excerpt from Google Health’s privacy policy, below.) The fed’s interests in your data, of course, are potentially limitless: Did you get your vaccinations? Are you on psychiatric meds? The CDC, DHS, NIH, the Attorney General’s Office… they all want to know.

Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is participating in the service. So, I tried pairing my BIDMC records with a Google Health account. But my data did not seem to transfer over.

I deleted my Google Health account after this failed experiment. I will eat my hat if the data have truly been deleted from Google’s databases.

Any possible benefits to consumers from Google Health clearly outweigh the privacy risks at this point.

And I am left wondering whether this might prove Google’s “first flop.” — mb

Google Privacy Center – Privacy Policy
e have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request, (b) enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations thereof, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, or (d) protect against imminent harm to the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public as required or permitted by law.

They were supposed to fight crime–the ubiquitous cameras, which in London appear to be on every lamppost and crossing signal. But the billions the police have spent creating an all-seeing eye are proving worthless.

The police are building a database of CCTV images, however (see excerpt, below), which might have been their plan in the first place.

CCTV boom has failed to slash crime, say police | UK news | The Guardian
A new database of images which is expected to use technology developed by the sports advertising industry to track and identify offenders.

· Putting images of suspects in muggings, rape and robbery cases out on the internet from next month.

· Building a national CCTV database, incorporating pictures of convicted offenders as well as unidentified suspects. The plans for this have been drawn up, but are on hold while the technology required to carry out automated searches is refined.

Scientists in authoritarian-ruled Singapore say they’ve developed a DNA identification assay-on-a-chip that also preps a drop of blood for sampling. This means any one of us might be just a pinprick away from being instantly Identified as a threat. (The watch, below, is one possible form-factor for the DNA tester.)

From the Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology:

…a rapid test for genetic diagnosis that combines the preparation of biological samples with a polymerase chain reaction PCR on one chip. As they report in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the “laboratory device” for all steps in this system is a single drop containing magnetic nanoparticles, which is moved across the chip by a magnetic field.

The chip, called Monza, has a read range 40 percent greater than most currently used to track people and consumer goods

In other words, Monza chips can be read at distances beyond forty feet, conceivably making it easier for spies with handheld readers to hide around corners, or distances up to a quarter of a block away from their targets.

Low-cost RFIDs are called passive, because they draw power from the “read” signal from a reader device.

Impinj says the chips, which overcome water, metal and other RF-disrupting materials, are suitable for tagging individual store items. That will turn a can of Coke, a pack of smokes, into a tracking device.

RFID Journal – - RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) Technology News & Features
March 27, 2008—With an eye toward supporting the tagging of products at the item level and at the point of manufacture, RFID chipmaker Impinj unveiled today a new version of its Monza chip made for passive UHF, EPC Gen 2 tags. Called the Monza 3, the chip is significantly more sensitive to radio frequency signals than leading Gen 2 chips from other manufacturers, as well as the currently available Monza 2 chip, which Impinj released in 2006, says Impinj president and CEO Bill Colleran, adding that this increase in sensitivity should translate into better-performing RFID tags.

media monarchy: pentagon to test invisible gas on crystal city, virginia
“The Pentagon is scheduled to release an odorless, invisible, and yes, harmless, gases into the city Thursday to test how quickly they spread through buildings, officials said.”

“The test is part of the military’s national security preparation for the capital area,” reports The Examiner.

Wal-Mart, Kmart and other big box retailers, and the U.S. Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, plan to attach RFID tags to everything person and product on the planet. The real and virtual worlds will be joined by the tags. RFID proponents call this mix “the internet of things.”

The OECD last month made its case for applying its own privacy and security standards, in a paper that relies largely on pro-RFID news in the mainstream media. Click here for the PDF.

clipped from www.rfidjournal.com Rethinking Privacy Radio-based technologies change the way we gather, access and protect data. All told, these radio-based technologies allow us to bring together the physical world and the cyberworld. By the year 2015, one forecast predicts, as many as one trillion sensors will be deployed.

Google says its new, ground-level street views (reportedly taken from atop dusty old vans cruising city streets) will be a boon for tourism and local businesses in major cities.

But Google’s point-by-point photos, shaped into navigable 3D panoramas for internet consumption, also cover residential neighborhoods.

The company tells AFP (clip and excerpt, below) it is only taking its photos from public property, which is splitting hairs.

Photographing people in public places is legal in the United States, the AFP story points out. But photographing non-newsworthy people in their homes and private spaces, and in embarrassing moments, crosses a line.

clipped from rawstory.com “What Google does is not illegal, but irresponsible,” said Rebecca Jeschke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a US non-profit group dedicated to defending Internet freedom and privacy.”Google Street View technology has been an intrusion of privacy to many people captured in their pictures. They could have waited until they developed technology that would allow them to obscure peoples’ faces.”

My buddy Tom, a diabetic, went for a blood draw recently… The nurses had a heck of a time finding a vein. The reason: he was as dry as a prune.

An MIT spinout has a new device that detects whether you’re over-or-under hydrated. It could help healthcare workers make quicker diagnoses…

Hemetrics Development Corporation’s device is called the HydrAlert, and is expected to cost $800 a pop.

Riff: Medgadget