Its' 1984 All Over Again

This has got to be the most F.U. use of technology since the up skirt camera.  What am I twitchin about now? Well you know that piece of tech attached to the Microsoft 360 called the Kinect?  Well it seems that Microsoft can use the Kinect for nefarious purposes (NO!)  Oh yes!  It seems in a newly uncovered  patent, Microsoft has developed tech that allows Microsoft to use these cameras attached to your TV to gather information (Oh hell, who am I kidding they are spying, jesus I am even lying to myself now) And why is Microsoft so damn interested in what's going on in front of the set?  Would you believe that this new tech allows Microsoft to get this....count how many people are say watching a movie and should you say have too many people watching, they can shut down the player, tv whatever, you name it.  

Check it out in this Boing Boing article:

• Basically, when you buy or rent something like a movie, you’ll only be granted a “license” for a certain number of people to watch it. If Kinect detects more people in the room than you had a licence for, it can stop the movie, and even charge you extra. So if Microsoft has its way, you won’t just be renting movies any more. You’ll have to decide how many people are watching, and no doubt pay more. And if one extra person turns up to your movie night? Click....

Check out the patent here

And here is the original story at Kotaku

Hexagon Finally Declassified

Wow, when Xnewsman drops a bombshell he drops a big one! Now I, as a general rule, don't often post about cold war politics or the skunkwurkz that went on during that period...but when I started reading a post from the Canadian Business page written by Helen O'Neill for the Associated Press that X sent me, I was transported as well as transfixed...how bout that for conflicting emotions! lol.

The article tells about a gathering of technical personnel, engineers, scientists, draftsmen and inventors, that worked for Perkin-Elmer Corp., an optical design company in Danbury Connecticut. These highly skilled men worked on an ultra top secret project called Hexagon KH-9 during the cold war era from the mic 60s to the late 80s designing cameras for spy satellites. The technicians were sworn to secrecy so stringent that none of their family members knew what they were working on and only those with extremely high government clearance had any idea what so ever.

The specs alone are stunning considering that the system was envisioned in the 60s and was 60 feet long, 30,000 pounds in weight and had to handle film transport speeds of 200 feet per second!  Putting something this size into Earth orbit even today is no mean feat.

Hexagon remained classified for 45 years which meant that many of the people who worked on the project took the secret of their involvement to their grave, the rest are only now speaking about what has to be one of the most fascinating projects to come out of the cold war.

Check out the article here  for a top notch read.  I really thought I was reading the opening pages of a spy novel - this was written so well.

And the WIKI article here
Truly facinating!

Android Smartphones - Full on Spy Equipment

In today's hyper-paranoid society what we really don't need is the information that someone is spying on us with our own equipment, but thanks to a couple of Microsoft interns, that is exactly what just might happen!

A new, creepily Android application called TagSense, takes information from smartphone sensors to tag photographs with the identities of who's in them. You need do nothing what so ever!

TagSense uses Android phones' built-in accelerometers, light sensors, GPS, the phones' microphones all to determine who the people are in the picture, where they are, what the weather conditions are like, what they are doing and talking about and all this info is tagged to the picture. What makes TagSense even creepier is TagSense is that it is designed to tap into information stored on other, smartphones. The application will be able to interact with data stored on adjacent phones to complete the tagged info in the photo on your phone and remember all without any input from you.

It gets worse. Read the complete article here at Fast Company

shirt is the spycam shirt from Think Geek

Guess who is coming to "Chuck"

Are you a fan of the tongue in cheek spy series Chuck? If so then you know that the cast has been pretty deep from time to time. Adam Baldwin has been a regular since the onset, Scott Bakula has had some walkons as Chuck's dad, but we have never been privy to just exactly who was Chucks mom. Well in the upcoming season, that blank will be filled in with none other than Linda Hamilton!

According to Mark Wilson over at the About SF blog:

• Hamilton will play Mary Bartowski, the long-time missing mother of Chuck and Ellie, joining the series as a recurring guest.

Look for this and other surprises when the series returns September 20th.

spies in the skies

Any fan of Little Brother or Mallcity is going to love this nasty little trick. Shaun Saunders sends in this pic from Newsweek that shows a blimp over this year's Indy 500. Now most people don't give these things a second glance, but maybe they should. This is where it gets nasty...At first glance it appeared to be an advertising blimp for a legit charity but the real truth is revealed once what was inside was brought to light. Here is what the Newsweek article had to say:

• Hidden inside the 55-foot-long white balloon was a powerful surveillance camera adapted from the technology Raytheon provides the U.S. military. Essentially an unmanned drone, the blimp transmitted detailed images to the race's security officers and to Indiana police.

The whole idea is Raytheon was doing a proof of concept test and is now marketing the tech to large municipalities, police departments and sporting venues to spy on yep, you guessed it.

Read the full article

New Surveillance System Will Identify Suspicious People

Well if you find societies like those in 1984 or Brave New World unlikely and consider MallCity to be a fantasy, comes tech that makes them just that much more possible.

In an age when Bulletin boards are becoming smart and some systems can send audio information straight into your head and track you as you move is the incarnation that reminds one of Doctorow's 'Little Brother' or 'Scroogled' comes a surveillance system that ties them all together.

From Newswise: Engineers here are developing a computerized surveillance system that, when completed, will attempt to recognize whether a person on the street is acting suspiciously or appears to be lost. The ultimate goal is a networked system of “smart” video cameras that will let surveillance officers observe a wide area quickly and efficiently. Computers will carry much of the workload.

And you know you should be a wee bit suspicious when the very next statement from the researchers developing the tech is: The research isn't meant to gather specific information about individuals.

I ask you, when the very people that develop this ability are having thought like invasion of privacy and eroding of personal freedoms....just how much of Pandora's box has been opened.

I might be jumping to conclusions here and seeing evil when there isn't any, but I ask you to read the article and see what you think.

<- newswise ->

Thanks to Ron Huber for the article

US Army toyed with telepathic ray gun

Shaun Saunders finds some chilling research done by the Department of Defense in New Scientist. It seems amongst some declassified documents detailing the US Army report on the biological effects of non-lethal weapons reveals plans for "ray gun" devices, which would cause artificial fevers or beam voices into people's heads. The report titled "Bioeffects Of Selected Nonlethal Weapons" which detail five different "maturing non-lethal technologies" using microwaves, lasers and sound. One bizzare device detailed a microwave gun to "beam" words directly into people's ears, have been tested. It is claimed that the so-called "Frey Effect" – using close-range microwaves to produce audible sounds in a person's ears produced documented results.

As a psychologist, Shaun had these comments

This technology is described in my forthcoming Mallcity sequel 'Return To Mallcity'...it is insidious, unethical, and has profound implications. For example, as a psychologist, how would a clinician seeing a client complaining of or referring to hearing voices in their head distinguish between schizophrenia, for eg, or external, covert influence such as described in this link? I think that most would naturally opt for the former, and relegate any claims of persecution by authorities or covert agencies to another box labelled 'paranoia'... Also, I would tend to think that such technology has most likely been around for some time (and would be an excellent means for descrediting someone, like a dissident, for example....)

Comcast Wants to spy on you oh yes they do...

Shaun said "MallCity infopanels, need I say more?" and you ask what he is talking about.....well check this out and then tell us we have been paranoid!

Comcast is experimenting with camera technology. More specifically, it trying out technology that turns cable boxes into camera-equipped devices that would utilize body-form-recognition as a means to provide custom-tailored service, and, of course, custom tailored advertising. The boxes would be able to tell who is in the room based on the shape of their body, thus tailoring programming to fit their specific desires and security settings. Facial recognition is not in the works as of yet.

Here is the rest of the story...

FBI aims for world's largest biometrics database

Dave T. sends in this tidbit. Shaun Saunders has been warning about this from day one with MallCity and look at Cory Doctorow's Scroogled, both tell tales of one government entity or another amassing personal data to the extreme. Check this out:

The Washington Post reports that: The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion project to build the world's largest computer database of biometrics to give the government more ways to identify people at home and abroad. The agency expects to award a 10-year contract to expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. The system, called Next Generation Identification, will collect the biometric information. This will be added to the digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns, the FBI already has amassed in its system.

(editor note: I plan on reading Cory's story Scroogled on this week's program. That will be #85)

Odd things in the sky! photos from Dave

These are some of the devices that Dave mentioned in this weeks show (#80) Very odd looking well.....satellites? They are not aircraft but are they satellites? If you haven't listened to this week's interview with Dave, take a listen....I haven't got a clue what these things are.

Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs.

I have been hearing a lot about this from a great deal of people. Here is the Washington Post article online that Shaun Saunders found. We know the tech is there...saying that it is not, well is just hiding your head....what bothers me is that it's being deployed.... Has the pendelum swung that far back people? Is this the 21st century version of the sixties? Lots of unpopular wars, losts of protests, lots of government agencies spying, lots more interesting in causing fear and trouble..... Remember what Buffalo Springfield said.... "there's something happening here.... what it is ain't exactly clear..."

Here is the article

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

"I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' "

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.

Others think they are, well, dragonflies -- an ancient order of insects that even biologists concede look about as robotic as a living creature can look.

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.

The robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate the crannies of collapsed buildings to find survivors.

The technical challenges of creating robotic insects are daunting, and most experts doubt that fully working models exist yet.

Big Brother is watching us all

Shaun A. Saunders writes....."Infopanels just around the next corner, somewhere in the 'Mallcity 14' zone:"

BBC News online's Humphrey Hawksley reports:
The US and UK governments are developing increasingly sophisticated gadgets to keep individuals under their surveillance. When it comes to technology, the US is determined to stay ahead of the game. At Maryland University just outside Washington DC, where Professor Challapa and his team are inventing the next generation of citizen surveillance. They are writing a program called Gait DNA. Their goal is to invent a system whereby a facial image can be matched to your gait, your height, your weight and other elements, so a computer will be able to identify instantly who you are. "As you walk through a crowd, we'll be able to track you," said Professor Challapa. "These are all things that don't need the cooperation of the individual." Since 9/11, some of the best scientific minds in the defence industry have switched their concentration from tracking nuclear missiles to tracking individuals such as suicide bombers. BBC's Hawksley
next travels to the Pentagon in Washington DC.
Click here for the complete story

Robotic Fleas Spring into Action

A robotic flea has been developed that is capable of jumping nearly 30 times its height, rubber band power. These tiny rubber band powered micro-robots could serve as ultra-small sensors. Swarms of such robots could eventually be used to create networks of distributed sensors for detecting chemicals or for military-surveillance purposes. Early tests show that the solar-powered autonomous "flea-bots" can store enough energy to make a 7-millimeter robot jump 200 millimeters high. This flea-like ballistic jumping would enable these sensors to be mobile, overcoming distances and obstacles that would normally be a major problem for micrometer-sized bots.

Son of TIA Will Mine Asian Data

Nearly four years after Congress pulled the plug on what critics assailed as an Orwellian scheme to spy on private citizens, Singapore is set to launch an even more ambitious incarnation of the Pentagon's controversial Total Information Awareness program -- an effort to collect and mine data across all government agencies in the hopes of pinpointing threats to national security. The system -- dubbed Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning, or RAHS -- was rolled out early this week. Retired U.S. Adm. John Poindexter, the architect of the original Pentagon program, traveled to Singapore to deliver a speech at the unveiling. In 2003, plans for Total Information Awareness, or TIA, sparked outrage among privacy advocates. Poindexter, President Reagan's national security adviser and a key figure in the '80s Iran-Contra scandal, was in charge of the office. Facing an avalanche of bad publicity, Poindexter resigned in August 2003. Congress pulled funding for the program, and TIA and related programs were either terminated or moved to other agencies.

submitted by Shaun A. Saunders

American Express to install spy chips in their credit cards

Credit card provider American Express has applied for a patent related to RFID devices.

That patent application, titled "Method and System for Facilitating a Shopping Experience," describes a Minority Report (or MallCity 14) style blueprint for monitoring consumers through RFID-enabled objects, like the American Express Blue Card.

According to the patent, RFID readers called "consumer trackers" would be placed in store shelving to pick up "consumer identification signals" emitted by RFID-embedded objects carried by shoppers. These would be used to identify people, track their movements, and observe their behavior.

In response to concerns expressed by consumer protection groups like CASPIAN, American Express also promised that it would make a chip-free version of its credit card available to concerned consumers who ask for it.

submitted by Shaun A. Saunders

Cyborg Pigeons Invade China??!!

From the Wired Blog

The People's Daily Online reports that scientists in China have successfully used brain implants in pigeons to control the birds' movement. Scientists with the Robot Engineering Technology Research Center of east China's Shandong University of Science and Technology say they implanted micro electrodes in the brain of a pigeon so they can command it to fly right or left or up or down. The implants stimulated different areas of the pigeon's brain according to signals sent by the scientists via computer, and forced the bird to comply with their commands. But don't hold your breath waiting for animal spies to roam the world anytime soon. One of the most infamous would-be animal espionage projects, dubbed Acoustic Kitty, dates back to the 1960s, when the CIA wired a furry feline to eavesdrop. On its trial run, the cat was run over by a car.