RFID, GPS Technology and Electronic Surveillance

If you think you’re being watched, you’re probably right... The federal government has given state and local governments $300 million in grants to fund an ever-growing array of cameras... It is impossible to quantify exactly how many government-backed surveillance cameras are in the public right of way, but they are in virtually every U.S. state. Two questions posed on the ACLU site ask: "Do we want a society where an innocent individual can’t walk down the street without being considered a potential criminal?" and "Do we want a society where people are comfortable with constant surveillance?" - David Kravets, Report: U.S. Surveillance Society Running Rampant, Wired, January 12, 2009

Arizona Speed Cameras Incite a Mini Revolt

A masked man, a citizens group, a judge and other motorists are behind the fight against photo enforcement.

February 19, 2010

Los Angeles Times - Arizonans drive long distances on their highways, and they like to do it fast.

But since the Grand Canyon State began enforcing speed limits with roadside cameras, motorists are raging against the machines: They have blocked out the lenses with Post-it notes or Silly String. During the Christmas holidays, they covered the cameras with boxes, complete with wrapping paper. One dissenting citizen went after a camera with a pick ax.

Arizona is the only state to implement "photo enforcement," as it's known, on major highways and is one of 12 states and 52 communities, plus the District of Columbia, with speed cameras, according to the nonprofit Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

The cameras, paired with radar devices, photograph vehicles exceeding the speed limit by 11 mph or more. A notice of violation -- carrying a fine of $181.50 -- is then sent to the address of the vehicle's registered owner.

In California, speed cameras are illegal, but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a program to add speed enforcement capabilities to 500 red-light cameras to generate $338 million for the 2010-11 budget. The proposal is unlikely to be a part of the Legislature's upcoming budget recommendations.

State Assembly Budget Committee Chairwoman Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa) has described the proposal as "silly."

"It's using big-brother tactics to balance the state budget," she said. "It's outlandish."

That's certainly been the reaction in Arizona, where the cameras have incited a mini revolt.

Initially, the cameras were thought of as a revenue generator, expected to bring in more than $90 million in the first fiscal year of operation. But from October 2008, when the program began, to October 2009, the cameras generated about $19 million for the state's cash-strapped general fund, according to a report on photo radar released by the Arizona Office of the Auditor General last month.

As of September, only 38% of issued violations were paid, the report said.

This doesn't mean the program lacks defenders. The number of fatal collisions investigated on state highways in 2009 was the lowest in 15 years, a figure that Lt. Jeff King of the Arizona Department of Public Safety attributes to tough drunk driving laws and photo enforcement.

"We believe the cameras should stay up," said King, who is the district commander for the program.

The program was designed to encourage people to pay the fine and not fight their violations: No points are added to an offender's license, and it doesn't affect insurance.

But, critics note, that hasn't stopped people from wanting their day in court. About half of the total violations issued are still pending because people have ignored the tickets or have requested hearings to challenge them, according to the state Department of Public Safety.

The violations put an "inordinate" load on the courts, said Terry Stewart, a court administrator with Maricopa County. People have flocked to request hearings at Phoenix courts, and at one point last year, one court branch had cases set up through 2011.

"You just have irate litigants and irate defendants coming in, just mad at the entire photo enforcement system in general," said Steven Sarkis, a Maricopa County justice of the peace.

The most high-profile protester has been Dave VonTesmar, who has achieved statewide fame through his efforts to fight the tickets with a monkey mask. The 47-year-old flight attendant has allegedly sped past the cameras at least 40 times.

His defense?

There's no way to prove that he was the driver wearing the mask, he says. Lots of people, he adds, drive his car ...

NSA Whistleblower: Wiretaps Were Combined with Credit Card Records of U.S. Citizens

January 23, 2009

Wired - NSA whistleblower Russell Tice was back on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC program Thursday evening to expand on his Wednesday revelations that the National Security Agency spied on individual U.S. journalists, entire U.S. news agencies as well as “tens of thousands” of other Americans.

Tice said on Wednesday that the NSA had vacuumed in all domestic communications of Americans, including, faxes, phone calls and network traffic.

Today Tice said that the spy agency also combined information from phone wiretaps with data that was mined from credit card and other financial records. He said information of tens of thousands of U.S. citizens is now in digital databases warehoused at the NSA.

“This [information] could sit there for ten years and then potentially it marries up with something else and ten years from now they get put on a no-fly list and they, of course, won’t have a clue why,” Tice said.

In most cases, the person would have no discernible link to terrorist organizations that would justify the initial data mining or their inclusion in the database.

“This is garnered from algorithms that have been put together to try to just dream-up scenarios that might be information that is associated with how a terrorist could operate,” Tice said. “And once that information gets to the NSA, and they start to put it through the filters there . . . and they start looking for word-recognition, if someone just talked about the daily news and mentioned something about the Middle East they could easily be brought to the forefront of having that little flag put by their name that says ‘potential terrorist’.”

The revelation that the NSA was involved in data mining isn’t new. The infamous 2004 hospital showdown between then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General James Comey over the legality of a government surveillance program involved the data mining of massive databases, according to a 2007 New York Times article.

But there was always a slight possibility, despite the suspicions of many critics, that the NSA’s data mining involved only people who were legitimately suspected of connections to terrorists overseas, as the Bush Administration staunchly maintained about its domestic phone wiretapping program.

“There’s no spying on Americans,” former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell insisted to the New Yorker last year.

But Tice’s assertions this week contradict these claims.

With regard to the surveillance of journalists, Tice wouldn’t disclose the names of the specific reporters or media outlets he targeted when he worked as an analyst for the NSA but said in the part of the program he covered, “everyone was collected.”

“They sucked in everybody and at some point they may have cherry-picked from what they had, but I wasn’t aware of who got cherry-picked out of the big pot,” he said.

The purpose, he was told, was to eliminate journalists from possible suspicion so that the NSA could focus on those who merited further surveillance. But Tice said on Wednesday that the data on journalists was collected round-the-clock, year-round, suggesting there was never an intent to eliminate anyone from the surveillance.

New York Times reporter James Risen, who co-authored that paper’s 2005 story on the warrantless wiretapping program with colleague Eric Lichtblau, suspects he could have been among those monitored, because Bush Administration officials obtained copies of his phone records, which they showed to a federal grand jury. The grand jury is investigating leaked information that appeared in Risen’s 2006 book State of War about a CIA program, codenamed Operation Merlin, to infiltrate and destabilize Iran’s nuclear program. Risen doesn’t know if his records were obtained by the FBI with a legitimate warrant or through the NSA program that Tice described.

Risen told Olbermann that the NSA program to monitor journalists was likely intended to be used to ferret out and intimidate possible sources “to have a chilling effect on potential whistleblowers in the government to make them realize that there’s a Big Brother out there that will get them if they step out of line.”

Who else might have been among those targeted by the NSA?

Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) said, in a separate interview, that he could very well have been targeted, too.

Rockefeller was speaking to MSNBC host Chris Matthews and gave a cryptic reply when Matthews asked him what he thought about Tice’s spying allegations (see 4:14 in the video below).

“I’m quite prepared to believe it,” Rockefeller said. “I mean, I think they went after anybody they could get. Including me.”

Matthews replied, “They didn’t eavesdrop on you, did they Senator?”

“No,” Rockefeller said shaking his head, “and they sent me no letters.”

If Rockefeller were among those who were spied on, it would be very ironic, since he was instrumental in helping the Bush Administration obtain retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies that are accused of aiding the Administration in its warrantless surveillance program.