The Seattle Police Department’s drone doesn’t look like much of a threat in person. In fact, it looks like a toy.
In a warehouse where police vehicles are stored, Officer Reuben Omelanchuk on Friday demonstrated how the unmanned aerial vehicle hovers and flies.
“It’s very fun,” said Omelanchuk, who is one of department’s two officers trained to fly the vehicles. “But doing it safely can be stressful at times.”
The 3.5 pound Draganflyer X6 Helicopter Tech cost $41,000 and is operated with a handheld controller and two joysticks. It has cameras that take still pictures, videos and infrared shots that can be viewed live, but it has a battery life of less than 10 minutes. It can’t carry anything that weighs more than 35 ounces.
It also can’t be flown around people or over crowds.
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Pupils are being ‘actively recruited’ by schools to spy on their teachers in the classroom, a union has warned.
They are being used as ‘management tools’ to carry out covert – and even open – surveillance of members of staff, it was claimed.
Chris Keates, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, condemned the practice as a ‘form of abuse’ of children.
She told the union’s annual conference in Birmingham on Saturday that ‘debilitating’ monitoring ‘erodes teachers’ self-esteem and gnaws away at their professional confidence’.
She said: ‘Children and teachers are diminished and abused by the use of pupils as management tools to carry out surveillance on their teachers.
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“Boy, you sure have a lot of apps on your phone.”
“Well, it’s my job.”
“What’s your favorite?”
“Oh, I couldn’t choose. But hey, want to see one to set your skin crawling?”
It was the flush end of a pleasurably hot day — 85 degrees in March — and we were all sipping bitter cocktails out in my friend’s backyard, which was both his smoking room, beer garden, viticetum, opossum parlor and barbecue pit. I was enjoying the warm dusk with a group of six of my best friends, all of whom seemed interested, except for my girlfriend… who immediately grimaced.
“Girls Around Me? Again?” she scolded. “Don’t show them that.”
She turned to our friends, apologetically.
“He’s become obsessed with this app. It’s creepy.”
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Misplacing a cellphone isn’t just a hassle anymore—it’s a security scare. Now that smartphones are packed with all kinds of personal details, losing one could mean giving a complete stranger access to photos, emails and even bank account information.
And if there’s any doubt as to whether strangers will take a peek at all that data, a new study by privacy software company Symantec claims to have the answer: they will. The study (pdf) found that 96 percent of those who found a lost smartphone accessed the device and 89 percent of finders used the phone to open personal-related apps and information.
While some of these actions can be attributed to the finder trying to discover the phone’s original owner, the study found that an attempt to return the mobile device was made only 50 percent of the time.
Symantec came to these conclusions after deliberately “losing” 50 smartphones in five cities: New York City, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco and Ottawa, Canada, the LA Times reports.
The phones were installed with fake applications and GPS tracking devices as well as the ability to transmit data about the phone’s use to a central database.
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Below are the eleven most popular news stories aggregated by PI Newswire in 2011 based on traffic and page views related to privacy, data protection and data breach.
Facebook changes privacy settings for millions of users – facial recognition is enabled
http://bit.ly/vzObAj
Facebook Privacy: 10 Must-Know Security Settings
http://bit.ly/rRiMCj
Are You Being Tracked? 8 Ways Your Privacy Is Being Eroded Online and Off
http://bit.ly/rzUV0y
Russia Considers Improving its Data Protection Law
http://bit.ly/rLYyOX
Dropbox Lied to Users About Data Security, Complaint to FTC Alleges
http://bit.ly/u5hFaG
Infected Laptop Leads to Data Breach at Pentagon Federal Credit Union
http://bit.ly/v3O0Gg
5 Biggest Private Data Breaches Remembered on Data Privacy Day
http://bit.ly/vdIWTq
Protecting Your Privacy During Divorce
http://bit.ly/sX7njG
Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’
http://bit.ly/vziMVK
Background Checks and Constitutional Privacy Rights
http://bit.ly/rDjnEG
Facial Biometrics Pose Privacy Woes
http://bit.ly/pRRn6Q
Private investigator Glenn Mulcaire has revealed the names of the News of the World staff who instructed him to carry out phone hacking, his solicitor has confirmed.
The information was passed in a letter to Steve Coogan’s lawyers in accordance with a court order.
Mulcaire had applied for permission to appeal against the order, which was made in February, but this was denied and he was compelled to pass over the details by Friday.
His solicitor, Sarah Webb, from Payne Hicks Beach, said she could not reveal who the NoW employees were because of “confidentiality issues”.
Schillings, which is representing Coogan, has agreed not to reveal the names yet, to give Payne Hicks Beach a chance to apply for a court order stopping their release.
Mulcaire was ordered to reveal who instructed him to access Coogan’s voicemails, as well as those of celebrities including Max Clifford and Elle Macpherson.
He was jailed for six months in 2007 for intercepting messages left on royal aides’ phones.
A spokeswoman for News International said the firm had no comment.
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The gig: Andrew Bosworth, 29, is the director of engineering at Facebook Inc. and inventor of the social networking site’s News Feed, a feature that broadcasts what your friends are doing on Facebook. He created the Palo Alto company’s engineering boot camp, which helps new recruits get up to speed on Facebook’s computer code and culture. A photographer who takes snapshots of company events, he’s also something of an unofficial Facebook historian.
Lucky encounter: Bosworth met his future boss at Harvard University in 2004. A senior, he was a teaching assistant in an artificial intelligence class. Mark Zuckerberg, a sophomore, was assigned to him. “He didn’t attend my lessons as often as most of my students, but to be fair he was quite literally building Facebook at the time,” Bosworth recalled. “It has worked out well for all of us.” Two years later, Bosworth, who was working at Microsoft Corp. in Seattle, got a call from a recruiter hunting for someone with a background in artificial intelligence. He flew down to Facebook to interview. “I loved using Facebook, but it seemed like it had fulfilled its destiny,” he said. “But when I talked to the team at Facebook, they described a vision of the social Web that had incredible ambition.”
California kid: Bosworth, who goes by the nickname Boz, grew up on a horse ranch and vineyard in the rolling hills of Saratoga in Santa Clara County, where his family has lived since 1891. Bosworth has such a strong attachment to his home state that he has a tattoo of California on his right forearm along with a grizzly bear and golden poppies.
Straight shooter: Bosworth’s other tattoo spells out “veritas,” the Latin word for truth. “I have always just believed in transparency and honesty. That’s a big part of who I am as a person. I wear my heart on my sleeve,” he said.
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A Federal judge has ordered the release of President Richard Nixon’s sealed testimony after historians sued for the right to have access to the documents.
Thirty-six years after the Watergate scandal forced Nixon out of office in disgrace, historians went to court citing the public has a right to see the transcripts of the late President’s testimony before a grand jury.
Apparently U.S. District Judge Royce Lambert agrees for his judgement came down in favor of the release on Friday, despite The White House’s objections.
The historians say Nixon has been dead for 17 years and that it’s time for them to peruse the 297 page classified transcripts for historical reasons. President Obama doesn’t see it that way and feels releasing the secret documents could invade the privacy of those involved who are still alive.
However, the papers would reportedly not be readily available to the public for the government may want to appeal the judge’s decision.
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Italian gun manufacturers will begin putting RFIDs on their weapons starting next year, according to a U.S. gun distributor who sells them. The new technology is set to become standard for inventory and tracking weapons manufactured in Italy. RFID tags can be small tags or chips programmed with identifying information that can be read by a scanner. Gun enthusiasts have raised privacy concerns about the practice, saying that it would make it possible for people to detect who was carrying a weapon and what type it was.
“Recently several Italian gun makers decided to utilize RFID technology to improve manufacturing and provide more accurate inventory control,” according to a press release Thursday from MSK Supply, Inc. a distributor of Italian-owned and manufactured Chiappa Firearms.
In Chiappa guns, the RFID will be hot glued inside the grip area and scannable from two to three inches away. Passive RFID technology like the one planned for use in Chiappa guns is the same type of technology used to prevent theft in retail stores and return lost pets to their owners. One of its early primary uses was to track cattle. These RFIDs will most likely have identifying information about the gun, it’s proofing certification (proofing certification is required by the Italian Government for all firearms made in Italy), and the name of the manufacturer, or a serial number that links back to the preceding information in a database.
The U.S. Government uses RFID in guns to track when diplomatic security personnel check weapons in and out of the armory. However, the technology is not used to track the whereabouts of a weapon purchased by a person in normal commercial transactions.
MSK Supply Inc. says the RFIDs will be used for inventory purposes only. “It’s inventory control for companies, and that’s it,” MSK spokesman Jim Shults told Security Management. Italian proofing inspectors have “to open the box and stamp it, and approve it, and then seal it back in a box so the company can export them all. And through the process, they have to keep track of it. Now they won’t have to open hundreds of boxes by hand prior to packing them in export containers. All this RFID is going to do is say what’s actually in the box” he said.
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Wireless electric medical devices are getting sleeker and smarter, but their security and privacy features are lagging behind.
Security experts showed on Tuesday that an insulin system, consisting of a wireless insulin pump in combination with a glucose monitor — worn by hundreds of thousands of diabetics in the US — is vulnerable to hack attacks. Using off-the-shelf hardware, the user manual and publicly available information, the scientists tapped into information on the system — like insulin dosage and glucose readings. With the PIN access code of the device, they showed that they could also wirelessly control the dosage of insulin.
Though wireless security is a well trodden path when it comes to cellphones and home routers, tackling the issue for a medical device is a whole different ball game.
“Not all [security] solutions will carry over to medical devices,” Anand Raghunathan, one of the lead researchers, told me. “That’s where the innovative thinking needs to be.”
Medical devices are getting smaller and lighter, so that they are easily worn and carried around, and additional security features would put an additional strain on the battery power and size. It’s also possible that they’d cost more. Those are issues device manufacturers will have to grapple with.
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Two lawmakers announced legislation Wednesday that for the first time clearly would mandate the authorities obtain a court warrant to acquire geolocational information of a suspect’s movements, a position clearly at odds with the Obama administration.
The “Geolocational Privacy and Surveillance Act” (.pdf) comes amid a hodgepodge of conflicting court rulings (.pdf) about whether such data — obtained from mobile phones, hidden trackers affixed to vehicles, navigation devices and laptops — should be protected by the Fourth Amendment.
The proposal by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) comes nearly three months after the Obama administration petitioned the Supreme Court to allow the government, without a court warrant, to secretly install GPS devices on suspects’ vehicles to track their every move. The pending petition, if accepted by the justices, arguably would make it the biggest Fourth Amendment case in a decade — one weighing the collision of privacy, technology and the Constitution.
“GPS technology is unquestionably a great tool, not just for Americans on the go and cellular companies offering services, but for law enforcement professionals looking to track suspects and catch criminals,” Wyden said in a statement. “But all tools and tactics require rules and right now, when it comes to geolocation information, the rules aren’t clear.”
Here are a few points of the proposal:
*Requires probable cause and a warrant before acquiring geolocational information.
*Applies to real-time tracking of a suspect’s movements, including data of past movements.
*Forbids private business from sharing customer geolocational data without consent.
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.
The F.B.I. soon plans to issue a new edition of its manual, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, according to an official who has worked on the draft document and several others who have been briefed on its contents. The new rules add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity.
The F.B.I. recently briefed several privacy advocates about the coming changes. Among them, Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that it was unwise to further ease restrictions on agents’ power to use potentially intrusive techniques, especially if they lacked a firm reason to suspect someone of wrongdoing.
“Claiming additional authorities to investigate people only further raises the potential for abuse,” Mr. German said, pointing to complaints about the bureau’s surveillance of domestic political advocacy groups and mosques and to an inspector general’s findings in 2007 that the F.B.I. had frequently misused “national security letters,” which allow agents to obtain information like phone records without a court order.
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