Bugging Equipment

A search of several Mexican lawmakers’ offices turned up recording equipment, leading legislators to believe they have been spied on for years, a congressman said Wednesday.

Congressman Armando Rios said security personnel found microphones and other devices that seemed to have been installed years ago.

“Some of the equipment has newer technology, but other devices are from a long time ago, which leads us to believe they were installed years ago,” said Rios, a member of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD.

Offices of key committees and of several lawmakers from different political parties were bugged.

Congress president Guadalupe Acosta, also of the PRD, has filed a complaint with federal prosecutors, who have opened an investigation.

Acosta wouldn’t identify the lawmakers who were being spied on or who he thinks was behind the espionage. Rios blamed the government of President Felipe Calderon, who belongs to the conservative National Action Party, or PAN. Interior Secretary Alejandro Poire denied Rios’ accusations and said the government has done nothing illegal.

Mexico’s main intelligence agency allegedly spied on the government’s political opponents during the 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

After PAN candidate Vicente Fox won the 2000 presidential election, he announced that the agency, the Center for National Security and Investigation, would no longer spy on political opponents. However, in 2008, under Calderon, the agency hired a private company to monitor the activities of legislators.

Legislators complained they were being spied on but the government said it was simply collecting public information.

Several secretly recorded telephone conversations of government officials or politicians have been made public in Mexico in the last few years.

In 2006, the former governor of Puebla state, Mario Marin, was implicated in a revenge plot against a journalist after Mexican news media released a recorded telephone conversation. In it, he allegedly speaks with a businessman about punishing Lydia Cacho, who had written a book that accuses one of their acquaintances of being a child molester.

In 2010, a radio station broadcast a telephone conversation between then federal lawmaker Cesar Godoy and alleged drug trafficker Servando Gomez, known as “La Tuta.” In it, Godoy and Gomez express support for each other and discuss bribing a reporter.

Shortly after the recording was released, Godoy, who is now a fugitive, was charged with aiding drug trafficking and money laundering.

Sources: blogspot.com, philstar.com

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

Have you ever wondered what a virus sounds like? Or what noise a bacterium makes when it moves between hosts? If the answer is yes, you may soon get your chance to find out, thanks to the development of the world’s tiniest ear. The “nano-ear,” a microscopic particle of gold trapped by a laser beam, can detect sound a million times fainter than the threshold for human hearing.

Looking at this from a completely scientific perspective, this is exciting news. But with the advent of new technology, sometimes there are downsides – like when the technology gets into the wrong hands.

It’s still at the experimental stage, but this could lead to far more sensitive surveillance microphones in the future. The required laser beam could be carried by a difficult-to-detect optical fiber strand to the sensor.  Combined with DSP and advanced acoustic signal processing algorithms, this could represent a major security threat.

We already know that listening and viewing devices can be planted in homes and offices or people can carry audio listening devices on their clothing, etc. However, all of this requires a bit of work or being within a reasonable range of proximity to your target. Even then, the listening/recording quality may not be perfect. Can you imagine what a scary world this would be if people’s ears could be devised to be listening devices – not to mention with superb hearing capability? This sounds like some espionage Sci-Fi movie to me.

The concept of the nano-ear began with a 1986 invention known as optical tweezers. The tweezers use a laser beam focused to a point with a lens to grab hold of tiny particles and move them around. They’ve become a standard tool in molecular biology and nanotechnology, helping researchers inject DNA into cells and even manipulate it once inside. Optical tweezers can also be used to measure minuscule forces acting on microscopic particles; once you’ve grabbed hold of your particle with the laser beam, instead of moving it yourself, you simply use a microscope or other suitable monitoring apparatus to watch whether it moves of its own accord. That’s where the nano-ear comes in.

Sound waves travel as a forward and backward displacement of the particles of the medium they pass through. So to detect sound, you need to measure this back-and-forth motion.

As well as having unprecedented sensitivity, their nano-ear could also calculate the direction the sound had come from. They suggest three-dimensional arrays of nano-ears working together could be used to listen in on cells or microorganisms such as bacteria and viruses, all of which emit very faint acoustic vibrations as they move and respire.

Biophysicist Lene Oddershede of the Optical Tweezer Laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen is impressed and suspects the paper will inspire others in the field to look for sound waves when studying microorganisms. “It’s a really interesting idea, and we could easily do that, but we have never made any attempt to do so,” she says. “I would say this paper’s very inspiring in that sense.” She cautions, however, that the experimental setup will need to be significantly refined to improve its ability to separate sound waves from random molecular movement before the suggested acoustic microscope can become a reality. But she is optimistic: “I do believe they can relatively quickly improve the equipment.”

Read story@ sciencemag

Listening Device Disguised as a Fob

It would come as no surprise that most politicians would prefer to run unopposed for election. This is a story of a political nobody who says he secretly recorded for the FBI an incumbent state senator offering him a state job and cash to drop out of the race.

The candidacy of Little Village community activist Raul Montes Jr. would seem to pose no danger to the election hopes of state Sen. Steve Landek, who also is the mayor of Bridgeview. Montes, 36, has never held political office, has raised no campaign donations and, judging by his one-man effort to circulate nominating petitions, has no network of volunteers behind him.

Yet Landek has waged a full-bore legal campaign to challenge Montes’ nominating petitions and remove him from the ballot.

Montes says that Landek followed up that effort last week by inviting him to a skybox at Toyota Park, owned by the village of Bridgeview, where he says Landek used a carrot-and-stick approach to try to back him out of the race — alternately threatening to dirty him up in the petition challenge while also offering financial inducements.

Neither tactic is considered all that unusual in the cutthroat business of petition gathering and petition challenges overseen by a small cadre of election lawyers who make it their specialty to keep candidates on or off the ballot. It’s a world where incumbents almost always have the upper hand.

However, in this case, Montes brought in the FBI to secretly record his conversation with Landek. According to Montes, he said Landek promised him a job working on his campaign and later with his Senate staff if he agreed to withdraw from the race. Landek isn’t commenting, but his lawyer, election law specialist Burt Odelson, said Landek understood his legal bounds and offered Montes nothing improper.

Montes says, that he had brought along an FBI eavesdropping device, disguised as a fob on his key ring, to record what turned out to be their 2½-hour conversation. He said he met two female FBI agents before the meeting with Landek, then followed them to a residential neighborhood near the stadium where they put the recording device on his keychain.

Landek is an important suburban political power. So why would Landek, who can expect to have the entire Democratic establishment behind him, be intent on eliminating a rival who by all appearances stacks up as a non-contender?

Although Landek currently represents the 11th Senate District, legislative redistricting has pushed him into the 12th District, where Montes is his only would-be opponent. For one, if you have an opponent, there’s always a possibility, however remote, that you could lose. Also, when you have an opponent, you are put in a position to mount a campaign. Campaigns require time, energy, and most importantly, money.

Montes said Landek remarked on the cost of running a campaign several times during their talk to explain why it was worth his while to strike a deal.

Redistricting also creates uncertainty for incumbents. While Landek has only been in office a year, now he’s faced with running on new turf where Montes is bound to get some traction because of his Hispanic heritage.

As you would expect, the FBI is not confirming or denying any involvement with Montes. It is unknown as to what the outcome will be if the FBI did indeed set him up with an eavesdropping device for this meeting. I guess we will have to wait and see what transpires on this one.

This would be at least the second time Landek found himself on the receiving end of an FBI wiretap. The Sun-Times reported in 2006 that Landek was secretly recorded by a businessman who said he was being harassed to sell a real estate parcel that Bridgeview needed to build Toyota Park for use by the Chicago Fire.

Some information for this story was obtained @ suntimes