Oakland cops: Mind if we search your house for guns? Inside Bay Area A six-month pilot program where Oakland police officers would knock on doors and ask permission to search homes for guns got the green light from the City Council's public safety committee Tuesday night. It goes to the full council Tuesday, when the council will meet at 6 p.m. at City Hall, 1 Frank Ogawa Plaza. The consent-to-search program, as it is called, is based closely on a similar effort launched in St. Louis in 1994 and on ongoing programs in Boston and Washington, D.C. The idea is simple: To ask parents for permission to search their homes for weapons their children may be hiding. Under the program, officers would request permission to search homes for guns. Guns would be taken away, but officers would not pursue prosecution unless the weapon was tied to a crime.       Bush links cybersecurity program to NSA Raw Story Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff has dropped the bomb. At a speech to hundreds of security professionals Wednesday, Chertoff declared that the federal government has created a cyber security "Mahattan Project," referencing the 1941-1946 project led by the Army Corps of Engineers to develop American's first atomic bomb. According to Wired's Ryan Singel, Chertoff gave few details of what the government actually plans to do.       Chinese Paramilitary Cops Police Americans InfoWars Steve Watson A 30 man squad of crack trained Chinese paramilitary cops will today march through the streets of San Francisco, policing the one and only US stop on the Olympic torch relay, and tackling any American protesters who get in their way. The news follows revelations that the London and Paris Olympic torch relay stops were policed by an elite "Flame Protection Unit", hand picked from special police units of the People’s Armed Police, China’s internal security force. The so called "Flame attendants" are usually responsible for fighting unrest and maintaining internal stability in China. Tens of thousands of the "Wujing," as the People’s Armed Police are called in Chinese, recently took part in crackdowns against demonstrators in Tibet and neighboring regions. YouTube Video         Top Professor: Autonomous Killer Robots In The Field Infowars A top robotics expert has issued a stark warning that the world may be sleepwalking into a potentially lethal technocracy and has called for safeguards to be put into place now, in order to counter such a scenario unfolding within the next ten years. Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield, spoke on the Alex Jones show of his fears that an international robot arms race has already begun and that the development and deployment of autonomous robots, machines that essentially make their own decisions, signals a shift towards a dangerous new phase of the technological age. "We don't have to get too futuristic because the robots are already here, and are armed, especially the flying ones." Professor Sharkey commented. "The Predators and the Reapers now, you must know about the Reapers that are carrying fourteen Hellfire missiles."     PJB: Katrina Nation Buchanan.org When Woodrow Wilson went to Congress to ask for a declaration of war in 1917, the U.S. Army was ranked 17th in the world, behind Portugal. On Armistice Day, 19 months later, there were 2 million doughboys in France, where they had helped to break the back of Gen. Ludendorff’s theretofore invincible army in its final offensive, and 2 million more in the United States ready to march on Berlin. No other nation could have done that. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, FDR demanded that a disarmed America "build 50,000 planes" — a seemingly impossible number, but one America met and exceeded. Starting from scratch in 1941, the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos designed, built, tested and detonated three atomic bombs by August 1945 to end the war. After Sputnik humiliated America, Wernher Von Braun and the boys at Redstone Arsenal had a satellite up in three months. In 1961, JFK declared we were going to the moon and would be there before the decade was out. Cynics scoffed. This writer was at Canaveral to watch Apollo 11 lift off in the summer of 1969. Whatever became of that can-do nation?       Caught on tape: More officers accused of beating inmate WTSP-TV Tampa 10 Former teacher Paul King says he used to be one of those people who said lock ‘em up throw away the key. However King has changed his mind since being arrested on public intoxication last July. A video shows deputies pushed him against a glass wall as he was being frisked, threw him to the ground for no apparent reason, held his neck back more than 2 minutes as he was being put into a restraint chair, put a hood over his face and then appeared to try to hide the action from cameras by moving paperwork to cover his head. King says it’s something like out of Guantanamo. King says when he was out of camera view, two deputies took him out of the restraining chair and says they both started kneeing him up against a bench or a wall, as he was pleading please, please, please. But it didn’t stop there. King says they made him say you’re a f***ing p***y. And he says they were hurting him so he said " I’m a f***ing p****y and the deputies all laughed         The Latest Fad in Government Thievery Lew Rockwell The local media in Balimore have run quite a few stories recently about dozens of citizens who are willing to go to court over fake parking tickets. This is when you return to your car parked on a city street with a half hour or more still on the meter, and a "time expired" ticket already on your windshield. The cops say they're "looking into it." (Yeah, as soon as they're finished looking into all those cop-taser incidents). But there can never be enough money for government, whose motto is: You've got it, and we want it. The latest racket is for the tax collectors (oops! I mean, "police officers") to write tickets without even getting up out of their swivel chairs at the station. They simply write tickets to randomly-chosen license plates, as this woman, who left Baltimore more than ten years ago, recently discovered. She was not even a resident of the state of Maryland any longer, and her car was no longer registered in the state, when she got a $23 ticket in 1997 which, with fines and interest, is now up to $1100. She's being hounded by a collection agency employed by the city government, which has advised her to travel from Florida to contest the eleven-year-old ticket in court.         EFF sues Justice Department over Google privacy hire News.com The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice seeking information about communications between a former top privacy official and Google, which eventually hired the official. At the time Jane Horvath was named as the Justice Department's chief privacy and civil-liberties officer in February 2006, Google was challenging a subpoena by the department for Web searches. A federal judge granted part of a Justice Department request for Google search data allowing Google to share information about random URLs but said users' search queries were off-limits. Horvath, quoted in an article afterward, was critical of the initial subpoena, saying she had privacy concerns with it, the EFF says. In the fall of 2007, Horvath was named as Google's senior privacy counsel. The EFF asked the Justice Department for information about communications between Horvath and Google by filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, but the Justice Department has not responded, according to the EFF. "Google has an unprecedented ability to collect and retain very personal information about millions of Americans, and the DOJ and other law enforcement agencies have developed a huge appetite for that information," EFF Senior Counsel David Sobel wrote in a statement Tuesday about the foundation's lawsuit against the government agency (PDF). "We want to know what discussions DOJ's top privacy lawyer had with Google before leaving her government position to join the company." Sobel explained that the nonprofit would probably have filed the lawsuit even if Google had never hired Horvath. Click on linked headline for complete report

Domestic Access to Spy Imagery Expands Associated Press A plan to use U.S. spy satellites for domestic security and law-enforcement missions is moving forward after being delayed for months because of privacy and civil liberties concerns. The charter and legal framework for an office within the Homeland Security Department that would use overhead and mapping imagery from existing satellites is in the final stage of completion, according to a department official who requested anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly about it. The future of this program is likely to come up Wednesday when Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff goes to Capitol Hill to talk about his department's spending plan. Last fall, senior Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee asked the department to put the program on hold until there was a clear legal framework of how the program would operate. This request came during an ongoing debate over the rules governing eavesdropping on phone calls and e-mails of suspected terrorists inside the United States. The new plan explicitly states that existing laws which prevent the government from spying on citizens would remain in effect, the official said. Under no circumstances, for instance, would the program be used to intercept verbal and written conversations. The department currently is waiting for federal executive agencies to sign off on the program — called the National Applications Office — and will share the details with lawmakers soon.       Amtrak riders to see more cops, face random bag searches soon NY Daily News Cops with automatic weapons and bomb-sniffing dogs will patrol Amtrak trains and randomly search carry-on bags in a dramatic tightening of security to be announced today. Although some riders were unhappy with the idea of guns on the trains, most welcomed the new security plan. "I think it's good," said Yvette Davis, 23, an assistant shoe store manager from the Bronx, while waiting for a train in Penn Station. "You can never be too protective, especially with some of these crazy people." "I think it's great," said Manhattan software salesman Dan Hurley, 39. "I've often wondered why there is so little security on trains. They could do as much damage as a plane." April Holder, 30, from Manhattan, said only, "Just don't make us late. New Yorkers hate being late." Amtrak officials insist the security ramp-up won't make anyone late.       Handcuffed man 'tasered to shut him up' The News, Australia POLICE are investigating claims an officer tasered a handcuffed man three times in the Cleveland watchhouse last year to "shut him up".Three other complaints about police using the 50,000-volt stun guns inappropriately had been referred to the service's internal investigation unit, police said. Ethical Standards Command investigators dismissed one complaint against an officer who pulled out a Taser but did not fire it, according to a police spokeswoman. Two matters are still under investigation and the other is subject to court proceedings, she said. Police Minister Judy Spence last month controversially announced a statewide rollout of Tasers to all frontline police despite being barely halfway through a 12-month trial.

Blackwater Training US Police Rense   The mercenary firm Blackwater USA is well known for the controversy involving its “shoot first, ask no questions” policy in Iraq. It is also known that Louisiana’s Department of Homeland Security contracted with Blackwater to provide public law enforcement services in New Orleans following hurricane Katrina. Blackwater is also planning to establish regional training centers in Potrero, California and Mount Carroll, Illinois, billed as Blackwater West and Blackwater North, respectively. These training centers, in addition to Blackwater’s Lodge and Training Center in Moyock, North Carolina — Blackwater East — and a possible fourth rumored to be slated for the Pacific Northwest — Blackwater Northwest — may result in the establishment of a network of Blackwater-trained police, sheriffs, and other police units around the country. Given Blackwater’s dismal record on human rights and brutality, this spells trouble for civilian control of police and paramilitary forces in the United States, from major metropolitan areas to small rural towns. On October 14, the Washington Post ran a story, which included photographs from Blackwater’s Moyock training center. However, what was most intriguing was a photograph of a police and military patch board at Blackwater’s headquarters that indicated the police agencies that have sent their officers to Moyock for training.       Vigilant Shield: JFCOM, NORAD to drill martial law during TOPOFF4 TruthNews  “North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command along with U.S. Pacific Command, the Department of Homeland Security as well as local, state and other federal responders will exercise their response abilities against a variety of potential threats during Exercise Vigilant Shield ‘08, a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff-designated, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM)-sponsored, and U.S. Joint Forces Command[JFCOM]-supported Department of Defense exercise for homeland defense and defense support of civil authorities missions. VS-08 will be conducted concurrent with Top Officials 4 (TOPOFF 4), the nation’s premier exercise of terrorism preparedness sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, and several other linked exercises as part of the National Level Exercise 1-08. These linked exercises will take place October 15-20 and are being conducted throughout the United States and in conjunction with several partner nations including Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, as well as the Territory of Guam. VS-08 and National Level Exercise 1-08 will provide local, state, tribal, interagency, Department of Defense, and non-governmental organizations and agencies involved in homeland security and homeland defense the opportunity to participate in a full range of exercise scenarios that will better prepare participants to prevent and respond to national crises. The participating organizations will conduct a multi-layered, civilian-led response to a national crisis.       Deputies compete in arrest contests LA Times  Southeast L.A. competitions were meant to boost morale, official says. Baca calls them a well-meaning but ill-conceived idea. Participating in sports such as football, weightlifting and boxing has long been part of the culture within the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. But deputies have recently been playing some new games -- on-duty enforcement competitions that have police watchers across the country crying foul. One recent competition, described in an internal Sheriff's Department e-mail obtained by The Times, was called "Operation Any Booking." The object was to arrest as many people as possible within a specific 24-hour period.       CIA still operates ‘black sites’ overseas Raw Story The secret CIA overseas detention program first exposed by the Washington Post remains active, according to a senior US counterterrorism official who went on the record in Thursday’s New York Times. Little attention has been paid to the revelation, aside from a Reuters story late Thursday. The Central Intelligence Agency, through a spokesman, refused to comment on the report. “We do not comment on this question as a matter of course,” CIA spokesman George Little told reporters. “The agency’s terrorist detention and interrogation program has been conducted lawfully, with great care and close review.” On Friday, at a hastily called Oval Office meeting with reporters, President Bush said, “This government does not torture people.” “When we find somebody who may have information regarding a potential attack on America, you bet we’re going to detain them, and you bet we’re going to question them,” he added. “The American people expect us to find out information, actionable intelligence so we can help protect them. That’s our job.”       FBI Puts Antiwar Protesters on Criminal Database; Canada Uses It To Ban Protesters From Entry Oped News Two well-respected US peace activists, CODEPINK and Global Exchange cofounder Medea Benjamin and retired Colonel and diplomat Ann Wright, were denied entry into Canada On October third. The two women were headed to Toronto to discuss peace and security issues at the invitation of the Toronto Stop the War Coalition. At the Buffalo-Niagara Falls Bridge they were detained, questioned and denied entry. "In my case, the border guard pulled up a file showing that I had been arrested at the US Mission to the UN where, on International Women's Day, a group of us had tried to deliver a peace petition signed by 152,000 women around the world," says Benjamin. "For this, the Canadians labeled me a criminal and refused to allow me in the country." "The FBI's placing of peace activists on an international criminal database is blatant political intimidation of US citizens opposed to Bush administration policies," says Colonel Wright, who was also Deputy US Ambassador in four countries. "The Canadian government should certainly not accept this FBI database as the criteria for entering the country." Both Wright and Benjamin plan to request their files from the FBI through the Freedom of Information Act and demand that arrests for peaceful, non-violent actions be expunged from international records. "It's outrageous that Canada is turning away peacemakers protesting a war that does not have the support of either US or Canadian citizens," says Benjamin.       Turse, The Mean Streets of the Homeland Security State-let Tom Dispatch   Sometime during the demonstrations against the Republican National Convention, which renominated George W. Bush in August 2004, I went on a media protest march down the Valley of the Imperial Media, Sixth Avenue, in the Big Apple. I had certainly been on enough marches in my life, but I was amazed. Back in the Vietnam era, when the police photographed peaceful demonstrators, they tended to do it surreptitiously and out of uniform. Here, police in uniform with video cameras were proudly out in the open shooting what looked like continuous footage of us all. And that was the least of it. We demonstrators were surrounded by a veritable army of police, on horseback, on motorbike, on foot. As I wrote at the time: "The 'march,' which you might want to imagine as a serpentine creature heading south on New York's Sixth Avenue, had actually been chopped into a series of one-block long segments by the New York Police Department. Each small segment was penned on its sides by moveable wooden barricades and on either end by the wheel-to-wheel bikes of a seemingly endless supply of mounted policemen backed up by all manner of police vehicles… To 'march,' that is, actually meant to step from pen to pen, hemmed in everywhere, your protest at the mercy of the timing, tactics, and desires of the police."       Almost all CCTV systems are illegal, says expert The Register (UK) As many as 95 per cent of CCTV systems in the UK are operating illegally, according to a CCTV expert. The revelation comes as new legislation is about to take effect in Scotland which could render even more systems illegal. Companies whose premises have CCTV systems in operation must alert the Information Commissioner that they are gathering personal information about the people they are recording. They must also put up signs to warn the public that recording is taking place. A new law will come into force in Scotland on 1 November requiring those operating systems on a contract to have a separate licence. The law, which is already in effect in England and Wales, does not apply to operators working directly for the company whose premises are being surveyed.

Big Brother is keeping tabs on satnav motorists InfoWars A secret 'Big Brother' operation is allowing officials to pinpoint the exact location of thousands of vehicles with satellite navigation systems. The controversial scheme is built into the small print of a contract between the Department for Transport and the satnav company Trafficmaster. Currently the 'spy in the sky' system is limited to some 50,000 drivers who have Trafficmaster's Smartnav system. However, the system could provide the blueprint to monitor the location, speed and journey details of millions of drivers in years to come. Such a system might be used to manage a system of road pricing, where motorists are charged according to which roads they use and the time of day. It might also be used to identify speeding drivers. It could also be used by everyone from the police to the taxman .       ID cards 'fundamentally flawed' says face recognition expert Daily Mail Plans for identity cards are "fundamentally flawed" because people are so bad at comparing mug shots to living people, a scientist has warned. Face recognition expert Dr Rob Jenkins said computers found it just as hard to accurately match photographs of strangers to real people. In tests, volunteers asked to identify faces from a photograph usually fail a third of the time, he said. "These limitations have profound implications for today's surveillance society," Dr Jenkins, a psychologist at Glasgow University, said. "With more than four million CCTV cameras operating in the UK, photo identity cards in the pipeline and national security at the top of the political agency, it has never been more important to understand these limitations."       ‘Alien’ Races Into RFID Runner Tracking RFID Update   RFID products and services provider Alien Technology has announced that its tags and readers will by deployed by Sweden's Racetimer, which organizes and times large running and racing events. Specifically, Racetimer will use UHF Gen2 tags from Alien at the Blodomloppet race, Scandinavia's second largest cross-country race which includes more than 40,000 runners. Racetimer is touting key benefits of UHF over the historically common LF-based RFID. In particular, UHF can be read accurately at much higher distances, sometimes up to 20 meters. That allows runners to be reliably registered at key points during the race, including the finish line itself, where runners no longer have to wait in line for their tags to be scanned by race organizers. This alone can save several minutes per runner, which, in a race with thousands of runners, is significant. The UHF tags are also cheaper and disposable, so runners aren't required to return them to organizers at the conclusion of a race. "Collecting the tags after the race completion can be a time-consuming and inefficient distraction for race organizers and runners alike," Stephen Crocker, Alien's director of sales and channels for EMEA/India, was quoted in the announcement. He added that there might be sentimental benefit as well, in that a runner's tag could serve as a memento of the race. In total, Racetimer calculates that using Alien's RFID versus older LF or even bar code solutions will save it 20 percent in costs and up to 5 man hours per race. Alien's work with Racetimer is indicative of a few trends at the company. First is its continuing diversification away from a strict focus on the compliance and supply chain markets. (See Alien Looks to Channel, Non-Mandate RFID Adoption for more.) Second is the company's strategy of cultivating relationships with value-added resellers and solutions providers that develop custom applications for niche markets. And third is its work with local companies in foreign markets, which widens the company's channel and its global footprint. The Racetimer announcement is the fourth in which a non-US company deployed a solution in its local market based on Alien's technology (the others: work-in-process in Portugal and Italy, and vehicle tracking in Turkey).       RFID implants & cancer Xinhua (China) Wireless identification tags planted beneath the skin may cause cancer, U.S. media reports Monday cited medical studies as cautioning. The RFID (radio-frequency identification) chips, first implanted in pets, are small radio devices encoded with information about the animal and are meant to get them home safely if lost. The chips can be read with a remote sensor device. Those chips are now being implanted in some people, especially Alzheimer's patients, and encoded with their medical records. Some 2,000 people worldwide have had them fitted, and the companies which make them hope to see them installed in millions of patients for medical monitoring.     McDonald's Pilots RFID Self-Ordering System in Korea RFID Update       US doles out millions for street cameras Boston Globe The Department of Homeland Security is funneling millions of dollars to local governments nationwide for purchasing high-tech video camera networks, accelerating the rise of a "surveillance society" in which the sense of freedom that stems from being anonymous in public will be lost, privacy rights advocates warn. Since 2003, the department has handed out some $23 billion in federal grants to local governments for equipment and training to help combat terrorism. Most of the money paid for emergency drills and upgrades to basic items, from radios to fences. But the department also has doled out millions on surveillance cameras, transforming city streets and parks into places under constant observation. The department will not say how much of its taxpayer-funded grants have gone to cameras. But a Globe search of local newspapers and congressional press releases shows that a large number of new surveillance systems, costing at least tens and probably hundreds of millions of dollars, are being simultaneously installed around the country as part of homeland security grants. In the last month, cities that have moved forward on plans for surveillance networks financed by the Homeland Security Department include St. Paul, which got a $1.2 million grant for 60 cameras for downtown; Madison, Wis., which is buying a 32-camera network with a $388,000 grant; and Pittsburgh, which is adding 83 cameras to its downtown with a $2.58 million grant. Small towns are also getting their share of the federal money for surveillance to thwart crime and terrorism.       Homeland Security To Covertly Scan Behavior InfoWars The United States Department of Homeland Security is to install a host of new technology to covertly scan the behaviour and emotions of American citizens in an effort to prevent terrorism according to an upcoming article in the New Scientist. Scientists and engineers have been asked to devise ways of analysing people's behaviour and physiology from afar, in the hope they may reveal clues about their mental state and even their future intentions, reports the London Guardian . A program named Project Hostile Intent (PHI) is aiming by 2010 to develop technology that can scan the bodily functions of citizens without them knowing and uncover any possible hostile intent or deception.