On January 23, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that law enforcement authorities do not generally have a right to affix a GPS tracking device to a suspect’s car without first obtaining a valid warrant. This case, United States v. Jones, is being referred to as one of the most important Fourth Amendment tests in a decade. However, the court’s decision only begins to address how the privacy rights of citizens will be protected in our technological world.

There are many more ways today to perform surveillance without physically trespassing on private property, a point recognized by Justice Samuel Alito in a concurrence joined by three other justices. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in another concurring opinion, “the Fourth Amendment is not concerned only with trespassory intrusions on property.”

Justice Alito said the court should address how expectations of privacy affect whether warrants are required for remote surveillance using electronic methods that do not require the police to install equipment, such as GPS tracking of mobile telephones.

In his opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: 

“It is important to be clear about what occurred in this case: The Government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information. We have no doubt that such a physical intrusion would have been considered a ‘search’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted.”

Let’s consider our mobile phones. Mobile phone service providers log the list of cell sites to which our cell phones connect throughout the day. Mobile apps gather data on the usage patterns of our wireless devices and often track device location to the accuracy of a specific residence or office building, undermining the oft-cited claim that the data gathered is not “personal.” Much of this data is collected and then sold with our consent, in accordance with privacy policies that few of us read before accepting, to a complex ecosystem of mobile application providers and advertisers.

When we walk into a store, restaurant, office building, or sit in a taxi, images of us are recorded and date-stamped.

In the past, it would have been impractical to archive all of this information, but this is no longer the case. Retail hard drive costs are over one million times cheaper today than they were two decades ago. About $50 worth of storage can hold the information identifying the location of each of one million people to 4.5-meter accuracy at five-minute intervals, 24 hours a day for a full year.

What about data collected from video surveillance cameras or license plate cameras? It is becoming less expensive to archive data from video surveillance cameras. License plate cameras record our automobile trips. In addition, I wrote a story yesterday about the new “intellistreets” street lamps soon to be installed on Chicago streets and other cities. These “street lamps” can monitor conversations and take pictures among many other capabilities.

The days when being tracked is the exception rather than the rule are coming to an end. Inevitably, we are building an infrastructure that enables location surveillance decisions to be made retroactively, reducing the need to determine in advance who should be surveilled.

In the future, the issue of before-the-fact location-tracking warrants will be largely irrelevant. All of the necessary data will be collected automatically. The important privacy questions will instead concern the protections that apply to that data: Who can see it and under what circumstances?

In our post-911 world, most would agree that the government needs the ability to access archived information about the movements of a person credibly believed to be planning, for example, a terrorist attack. But what about juveniles suspected of petty crimes? What types of location data should be available to parents engaged in a child custody battle? Or former business partners embroiled in a legal dispute?

The Supreme Court has not yet addressed these questions but inevitably it will. The answers/decisions, far more than the ruling in United States v. Jones, will help define the meaning of privacy in 21st-century America.

Source: yimg

New street lights called “Intellistreets” are coming to Chicago. These are not your average street lights. These lights also double as surveillance monitors. They can play music, direct traffic, monitor conversations, take pictures, and send emergency signals. The lights include “Homeland Security” applications and are being installed in a few cities, including Chicago, Pittsburgh and Detroit, with the aid of government funding. The first concept installation of the system was launched in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

Some say these lights should be called, “Spying Street Lights.”

The system detects movement and can identify whether the movement is a car, person or animal. If too much movement is detected, the police are notified.

As you can imagine, some view this as an invasion of privacy, “creepy” and the feeling that Big Brother is watching. Others see the system as a way to keep their neighborhoods safer. One example is that some believe such a system could have prevented a deadly shooting that took place in the Uptown area of Charlotte, NC, last May. The shooting is believed to have been gang related.

The Deputy of Charlotte, North Carolina Homeland Security chief was quoted as saying, “If the City installed street lights with surveillance abilities…you would never know.”

The founder of the system, Ron Harwood, said he came up with the idea after 911 and Hurricane Katrina. He is the president of the company that manufactures these lights – Illuminating Concepts. In an interview with Fox News, Harwood said that if speakers are installed in the poles, authorities could speak to people to tell them what to do if there is an emergency. He also said that access to pictures/images would not be available to just anyone. He said that a police officer, city official or city employee would have to “ask” to retrieve an image from a pole and that image would be in the form of a “picture.” It was after Harwood’s development that he began discussions with Homeland Security.

It seems to me that law enforcement or investigators would need more than a picture if they were trying to analyze a crime – who did what and when, etc. It would seem you would need active surveillance to determine what took place during a crime. When people don’t feel they are being told everything, they aren’t going to trust the system. If the system is capable of surveillance and monitoring conversations, why would one believe that only a picture would be released to authorities?

Using street lights as surveillance tools has already been advanced by several European countries. In 2007, leaked documents out of the UK Home Office revealed that British authorities were working on proposals to fit lamp posts with CCTV cameras that would X-ray scan passers-by and “undress them” in order to “trap terror suspects.”

Dutch police also announced last year that they are developing a mobile scanner that will “see through people’s clothing and look for concealed weapons.”

So-called ‘talking surveillance cameras’ that use a speaker system similar to the Intellistreets model are already being used in UK cities like Middlesborough to bark orders and reprimand people for dropping litter and other minor offenses.

According to reports, one of the most common phrases used to shame people into obeying instructions is to broadcast the message, “We are watching you.”

At $3,000 a piece, Intellistreets luminaries have the potential of lowering energy costs by adjusting brightness to match the appropriate atmosphere and location. Additionally, the company says it has an endless number of entertainment options and can serve as a public address system of sorts and offer advertisements up to passersby. That’s right — it records video, counts heads and spews propaganda! When you put it that way, it’s no wonder that Harwood is in cahoots with Homeland Security.

The transformation of street lights into surveillance tools for Homeland Security purposes will only serve to heighten concerns that the United States is fast on the way to becoming a high-tech police state, with TSA agents being empowered to oversee that control grid, most recently with the announcement that TSA screeners would be manning highway checkpoints, a further indication that security measures we currently see in airports are rapidly spilling out onto the streets.

According to the Illuminating Concepts Website, the Intellistreets system comprises of a wireless digital infrastructure that allows street lights to be controlled remotely by means of a ubiquitous wi-fi link and a miniature computer housed inside each street light, allowing for “security, energy management, data harvesting, and digital media.”

After the first installments took place in Michigan, a backlash began to hit Intellistreets and the company removed a YouTube video that offered an eerie insight into the surveillance capabilities. The video was also quick to once again note the Homeland Security features which have the potential to link up to government agencies. Infowars responded by asking, “If Intellistreets is such a cutting-edge concept that presents an array of wonderful benefits, as the promo video claims, then why remove it from You Tube?”  “Now that the company has tried to hide the video, it will only generate more suspicion about the true purpose behind Intellistreets and the level of involvement on behalf of Homeland Security,” read a blog post on the site.

Sources: Fox News, nowtheendbegins.com, forbiddenknowledgetv.com, rt.com, infowars.com

An unidentified and uninvited woman was caught on a security camera entering a church in Des Moines, Washington as a couple was rehearsing for their wedding.

The camera caught the woman reaching into the “bride to be’s” purse. She stole family heirlooms and the groom’s wedding ring.

The bride, Mrs. Parker, spoke with MSNBC. The bride seemed to take the incident in stride and said the couple hopes the thief gets the help she needs.

I hope the security camera assists in catching this thief so she can get the help she needs and the Parkers can reclaim their stolen items.

View the video@ msnbc

The Washington Post is reporting that police in D.C. are beefing up their areas covered by license plate cameras. More than 250 cameras in D.C. and its suburbs are constantly hard at work, grabbing license plate numbers and sticking them into databases. The police aren’t exactly doing this quietly, but it’s being done with “virtually no public debate.”

The highest concentration of these plate readers in the entire nation exists in D.C. (one reader per square mile), so that means that District police are building the biggest location database based on license plates in the whole country.

First, these are apparently different types of cameras than the cameras cities have been affixing near stoplights and other places to catch people running red lights or speeding – the “here’s a ticket 2 weeks later in the mail” cameras.

These plate readers cost about $20,000 each and can snatch images of numbers and letters on cars traveling nearly 150 mph and across four lanes of traffic. These plate readers in D.C. take 1,800 images per minute, every one of which is stored in a database.

Basically, these plate readers have made it possible for police to track everyone’s movements as they move across the city.

These plate readers and the subsequent database of image captures has tipped the privacy concerns of some – notably the American Civil Liberties Union. One of their main concerns is naturally the privacy implications.

In the District, laws are in place that limit the amount of time that surveillance camera footage can be kept.  The images must be dumped after 10 days, unless there is an actual investigatory reason to keep them. But right now, there is nothing keeping data from the plate readers from being stored for years.

The ACLU says that this database is storing the location data of innocent people. The plate readers are casting an all-inclusive net, grabbing license plate numbers indiscriminately.

This technology is rapidly approaching the point where it could be used to reconstruct the entire movements of any individual vehicle. As this story notes (see link below), and I have written in previous blog stories, in the context of GPS tracking the level of intrusion on private life is something that the police should not be able to engage in without a warrant.

Obviously, the plate readers are a valuable tool for the police and there are an abundance of situations where one could imagine the searchable database of plate captures to be extremely useful.  But are those plate readers building up a database that’s just a little too full of innocent people’s location information for your liking?

Send us your comments.

Read full story@ webpronews