Federal court: 4th Amendment standard does not always apply to mobile phone location data
By Stephen C. Webster Law enforcement can still be required to obtain a search warrant for access to citizens’ mobile phone location data, but police need not uphold the traditional Fourth Amendment standard of “probable cause” in the process of such an investigation, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. While...
North Carolina governor suspends gun rights
Paul Valone [Raleigh] Yesterday, North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue signed Executive Order No. 62, declaring a State of Emergency in advance of Hurricane Earle. In doing so, Perdue suspended the right of state residents to use or carry firearms outside their premises. At issue is N.C. General Statute 14-288.7, which prohibits...
Technology Tracks Schoolbus Kids
In a bid to set parents’ nerves at ease, a southwest suburban school district has become one of the first in the state to begin tracking students riding buses to and from school each day with Global Positioning System and Radio Frequenty Identification technology. Palos Heights School District 128 had previously...
Homeland Security head praises city’s security cameras
BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Thursday ranked Chicago’s Big Brother network of well over 10,000 public and private surveillance cameras as one of the nation’s most extensive and integrated — and Mayor Daley wants to make it even bigger. “Expansion of cameras...
FDA: Obamacare’s Calorie-Count Mandate Now In Effect—But Not Enforcable
By Chris Neefus (CNSNews.com) - A mandate buried in the health-care bill President Barack Obama signed in March is now confounding not only the vending-machine operators who are supposed to follow it but also the federal regulators who are supposed to enforce it. The Food and Drug Administration has ruled that the provisions...
The Government’s New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS
By ADAM COHEN Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable...
ACLU Report: Spying on Free Speech Nearly At Cold War Level
By Ms. Smith The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released numerous reports of increased government spying on American citizens. Once upon an unhappy time, U.S. law enforcement agencies, from the FBI to local police, had a history of political spying during the Cold War. The ACLU said that the old political spying tendencies...
New Canaan Considers Tracking Devices for Students
In the tony town of New Canaan, students might someday get tracking tags along with their textbooks. No decisions have yet been made, but school officials plan to look into the possibility of adding radio frequency tags to student or staff ID cards, or place them on school property, like laptops, the New Canaan Advertiser...
High-tech carts will tell on Cleveland residents who don’t recycle … and they face $100 fine | cleveland.com
Mark Gillispie, The Plain Dealer CLEVELAND, Ohio — It would be a stretch to say that Big Brother will hang out in Clevelanders’ trash cans, but the city plans to sort through curbside trash to make sure residents are recycling — and fine them $100 if they don’t. The move is part of a high-tech collection...
FBI: North Carolina Crime Lab Buried Blood Evidence in Hundreds of Criminal Cases
By JESSICA HOPPER Greg Taylor was wrongfully convicted of killing a prostitute in 1991 in North Carolina. Taylor proclaimed his innocence, but the evidence against him seemed insurmountable: blood from the victim found on his SUV. The catch is that there was never any blood in the car. Taylor was convicted after crime lab technicians...
Surge in Britons exported for trial
By Andrew Gilligan The number of people in Britain seized under the controversial “no-evidence-needed” European Arrest Warrant rose by more than 50 per cent last year, figures obtained by The Sunday Telegraph show. In total 1,032 people – almost three a day – were detained and extradited by British police...
Software Predicts Criminal Behavior
By ERIC BLAND New crime prediction software being rolled out in the nation’s capital should reduce not only the murder rate, but the rate of many other crimes as well. Developed by Richard Berk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the software is already used in Baltimore and Philadelphia to predict which...
US Homeland Security to Expand ‘Secure Communities’ Nationwide
By Joshua Philipp The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to broaden its Secure Communities program nationwide by 2013, according to a DHS release. Administered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the largest investigative agency within DHS, Secure Communities aims to identify and possibly remove illegal...
Report–Obama demands access to Internet records without court review
Anthony G. Martin ‘Big Brother is watching you.’ Yet another move toward a totalitarian government has secretly occurred that bears ominous signals for personal freedom. Barack Obama is demanding access to the Internet records of average citizens, in secret, and without court review. The Center for Research on...
Mayor asks FBI to investigate alleged excessive force
Jace Larson Deborah Sherman DENVER – Mayor John Hickenlooper has asked the FBI to review the case of alleged excessive force by Denver Police that was the subject of a year-and-half 9Wants to Know investigation. “The video is very disturbing, and when viewed in isolation it does not reflect well on the officers...
NYPD Examining Subway Footage to Help Solve Crimes
Surveillance video from subway stations are getting closer scrutiny recently, as transit police increase efforts to identify and arrest armed robbers and other criminals, a published report said today. The NYPD asked transit police to pull footage from surveillance cameras some 2000 times last year — ten times more often than...
Feds admit storing checkpoint body scan images | Privacy Inc. – CNET News
by Declan McCullagh For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they’re viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded.” Now it turns out...
Computer hackers look to take over power plants
WASHINGTON — U.S. officials say computer hackers are targeting power plants and other critical infrastructure around the world in bold new efforts to seize control of operations. For the first time, cyber experts have discovered a malicious computer code that was specifically created to take over systems that control the inner...
DHS Announces New Communitarian Law Enforcement Initiatives
Source: DHS Press Release Expands “If You See Something, Say Something” Campaign to the Washington, D.C., area Washington, D.C. – Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano today announced a series of initiatives to support state and local law enforcement and community groups across the country...
F.B.I. Challenges Wikipedia Over Use of Its Seal
By JOHN SCHWARTZ The Federal Bureau of Investigation has taken on everyone from Al Capone to John Dillinger to the Unabomber. Its latest adversary: Wikipedia. The bureau wrote a letter in July to the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia, demanding that it take down an image of the F.B.I. seal accompanying...
