Tag Archives: security

9 Reasons Why You Could Be a Terrorist

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James Wesley, Rawles has been in law enforcement for the past 18 years. He recently wrote a blog on SurvivalBlog expressing his concern with law enforcement teachings, specifically in regards to potential domestic terrorism.

Wesley points out the change of law enforcement training sponsors.
Before they were supported by the “local community” but now Big Brother ( represented here by the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Transportation Security Agency) dominates the training sessions and is concerned with profiling potential terrorists.

According to Wesley this list contains traits and characteristics that Big Brother believes make you a potential terrorist:

  1. Holding Second Amendment-oriented views. (NRA or gun club membership, holding a CCW permit)
  2. Reading survivalist literature. (fictional books such as “Patriots” and “One Second After” are mentioned by name)
  3. Being self-sufficient (stockpiling food, ammo, hand tools, medical supplies)
  4. Fearing economic collapse (buying gold and barter items)
  5. Holding religious views concerning the book of Revelation (apocalypse, anti-Christ)
  6. Expressing fears of Big Brother or big government (Oops)
  7. Being homeschooled
  8. Declaring Constitutional rights and civil liberties
  9. Believing in a New World Order conspiracy

Wesley observes how easy it can be to target someone as a potential terrorist. Here he remembers a lecture that uses a plumber as an example:

The officers were told how to use his employment as a plumber as further evidence of terrorism.  The suspect’s employment would be described as an elaborate scheme to justify possessing pipes and chemicals so as to have bomb making materials readily available

To drive the point home Wesley puts it in laymen’s turns:

It is easy to frame anyone for possessing bomb making materials (or other crimes) if the officer knows what items to list in the report and how to link these items to terrorism.

Wesley goes on to provide multiple ways to calm polices’ phobia of anything without a badge. But after reading this article, meant to enlighten us on how to avoid an ignorant fascist militant dictatorship, my fear of Big Brother’s constant oppressive presence has only been reinforced.

Via: Survival Blog

RFID phones will soon work as credit cards at many checkout counters

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Look for the NFC (Near Field Communication) logo on your next phone and, perhaps, everywhere else. (Photo: Courtesy of the NFC Forum)

Thanks to an agreement announced today between the NFC (Near Field Communication), credit card, and Smart Card industries:

With this new liaison, EMVCo will share relevant technical information with the NFC Forum that will enable the certification of properly-provisioned NFC devices for use in the following scenarios:

* to make POS payments (in Card Emulation mode) wherever such payments can be made with EMVCo contactless card products;

* to act as POS devices (in Reader/Writer mode) within the EMVCo contactless payment infrastructure.

This kind of all-in-one action through a single device should raise concerns from privacy watchdogs.

via NFC Forum : NFC Forum Forges Collaborative Links with EMVCo, GSM Association and Smart Card Alliance.

Swann Security CES theft: Too "good" to be true?

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I smell a setup, but I know Swann Security will deny that “Willy Wu” (who is this guy?) wasn’t paid to “rob” its CES booth earlier this month.

One thief was either not paying close attention to the booth he decided to target or he was just very confident. What the thief didn't realize was his whole act was caught on camera at the booth he had stolen from.

via Thief Steals from the Wrong Booth at CES – Las Vegas Now.

Stranger things have happened. As I mentioned earlier this month, on this blog, a major Japanese consumer electronics maker approached me with an offer to be their corporate spy at the show.

Coke's face-match trickery makes suckers of Facebookers

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Barr. DavidAll06/Flickr CC

I sure hate what Bob Barr put us through, back when he was leading the effort to impeach Bill Clinton.

But the man makes perfect sense when he’s talking about the privacy threats posed by intrusive, government spy technologies.

Here, Barr reveals the problem with the ungodly mashup of facial recognition software and social media, in Coca Cola “Facial Profiler” campaign:

Coca Cola is a multi-national corporation which means it operates in conjunction with and under the watchful eye of our and other national governments around the globe. Posting a picture on Coke’s website or Facebook may on the surface appear to be a harmless act; but giving a multinational corporation access to a digitized photo of one’s self contributes to the building of a globally accessible database that can be used for facial-recognition cameras and systems. The privacy implications associated with having potentially hundreds of millions of digital pictures from people throughout the world in a database or databases is astounding.

via Facial profiling and Coke Zero game | The Barr Code.

The CIA-backed technology that searches your face for signs of “bad intents” already exists, of course.

Poppa Baard. Photo: Chris Taggart

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This bit reminds me, by the way, of my own observation last October that Bob Barr looks like a Baard.

Tiny planes to snoop inside homes

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Photo: John Brian Silverio. Flickr/CC

Photo: John Brian Silverio. Flickr/CC

Another wacky one, courtesy of DARPA:

The Defense Sciences Office (DSO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is seeking approaches to allow a small (Nano Air Vehicle to Micro Air Vehicle scale) air vehicle to be Teleoperated and Hover In Place (TeleHIP) in GPS denied environments. It is anticipated that the flight environment for this capability will be primarily in buildings or similarly sized enclosures. The development of a small unmanned aircraft system (UAS) capable of such missions would add a new capability to urban intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and provide increased situational awareness for warfighters.

via Defense Sciences Office.

"Unforgeable" ID cards hacked in minutes

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Classic:

New ID cards are supposed to be ‘unforgeable’ – but it took our expert 12 minutes to clone one, and programme it with false data

Adam Laurie is no ordinary hacker. In the world of computing, he is considered a genius – a man whose talents are used by government departments and blue-chip companies to guard against terrorists and cyber-criminals.

via New ‘unforgeable’ ID cards cloned and reprogrammed in 12 minutes « Aftermath News.

Now it's barcodes that can be read at a distance

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_46116184_-3Radio frequency identification tags are not fully catching on, thanks to objections from Alan Watt, Katherine Albrecht, and others who have been hammering away for years at RFID’s threats to privacy and civil liberties.

For global corporations and the US Department of Homeland Security, who remain eager to track individuals, that means it’s time to shift their efforts back to barcodes.

MIT scientists last week said they’ve overcome the barcode’s strongest privacy protections–its close read range, and fussy need to be scanned, line-of-sight. Now, using the camera in a mobile phone, a spy, or hacker, will be able to scan the barcode label on any object, or person, at an angle, and up to 60 feet away.

The MIT scientists are working with grants from Nokia, Samsung, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation–named for its founder, the ruthless auto industry chief that one reporter counts among “Hitler’s carmakers.” Sloan is also a creator–through his strategy of  “planned obsolescence”–of our modern, consumerist culture.

The new barcode labels, called bokodes, can be made “tiny, and imperceptible“–each is about three millimeters in diameter.

Here’s an excerpt from the BBC:

“For traditional barcodes you need to be a foot away from it at most,” said Dr Mohan.

The team has shown its barcodes can be read from a distance of up to 4m (12ft), although they should theoretically work up to 20m (60ft).

“One way of thinking about it is a long-distance barcode.”

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Barcode replacement shown off.

Boston: Price of cheap wireless may be less privacy and security

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Photo: CC/Niall Kennedy

Photo: CC/Niall Kennedy

Universal Hub relays the news that Boston’s languishing municipal Wi-Fi project–that is, its government-run wireless internet service–has been reinvented as an ad-hoc, mesh network:

The effort initially focused on traditional wireless access points (like the ones you can see on lightpoles all over Brookline), but organizers realized that would prove impossibly expensive and so are now using a “mesh” approach, in which each subscriber’s computer is essentially equipped to act as an access point through a cheapo router. The result: Free WiFi in parts of the Fenway.

via Universal Hub | All Boston, all the time.

This is not likely to be good news for individual privacy and security.

First, consider the following:

  • Muni Wi-Fi projects in other cities have been marred by conflicts of interest and mismanagement
  • Users in other cities are already being charged for what they were told was going to be “free” access
  • Boston is among the cities planning to piggyback police and other government communications onto its muni Wi-Fi network. (This “dual use” for the network has the potential to bring Homeland Security dollars into the city’s coffers.)

Now, for the “ad-hoc” piece:

  • Some of the equipment Boston will be using was developed with money from sources with direct ties to the intelligence community.
  • Ad-hoc networks were not created with privacy and security in-mind. Rather, the technology was first deployed in vineyards and parking lots.
  • Ad-hoc wireless networks are more prone to unreliable connections and speeds–which means the folks on Mission Hill, and in Boston’s other poor neighborhoods, will be getting less service for their money.
  • Cheap wireless equipment might also be more vulnerable to backdoor attacks.

Synchronicities strike the rails

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Here’s one for Loren Coleman (The Copycat Effect) and the synchromystics. I’ve noticed several reports of collisions in the heavy and light-rail industries since May 28–and one intense, and fictitious scene, in Caprica, which appeared online earlier this year, in promos for the new series.

The Disney Monorail crash killed a 21-year old man who was raised in Disney’s planned community, Celebration.

Picture 1 Photo: WFTV-9

Washington, DC, Metro train collision. AP photoNewton, Mass. Green Line derailment. AP Photo

Photos (clockwise from top left): Early scene from the Caprica pilot; Washington, DC, Metro crash; Green Line crash, Newton, Mass., May 28; the Disney Monorail crash.

WASHINGTON – At least two people are dead and nine people are injured after a Metro Red Line train derailed and collided with another Metro train, officials say.

The six-car train derailed and then collided with another train between the Takoma Park and Fort Totten stations around 5 p.m. Monday, trapping several passengers.

via 2 dead after Metro train derailment, collision – wtop.com.

You can't trust Google Earth's prying eyes

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Image: From Google Earth. CC/Mark Baard

Interesting examples here (link, excerpt from blog, below), of Google Earth images tweaked to protect government installations, mostly.

Those caught in the nude must fend for themselves, however.

Thanks to widespread coverage, many people are now familiar with the idea that “sensitive” areas of our planet are being hidden from view in the images that online mapping services display.

It’s also commonly understood that the images are usually altered by the company who originally took them (rather than Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, or any other buyer), allowing them to remain in line with their local laws and regulations.

Such areas include military installations, government buildings, and airports – but the point is usually simply to prevent people from viewing the exact details of the site, rather than attempting to deny their very existence.

Last year we saw some imagery in the Netherlands had been altered in a more dramatic way – drawing the ridicule of the Photoshop Disasters blog in the process – which in turn led to even wider recognition of the attempted cover up.

via The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Airport – Google Sightseeing.