Texas Schoolkids Tagged With GPS Tracking Devices
January 22, 2010
Prison Planet
By Paul Joseph Watson
A judge has ordered 22 students at Bryan Highschool in Texas to carry GPS tracking devices in the name of preventing truancy, another example of how schools are now youth internment centers – preparatory camps for brainwashing kids to accept the prison planet.
“Bryan High students who skip school will soon be tracked 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” reports KBTX.
“It’s called the Attendance Improvement Management Program or AIM, and it has been used across Texas and the United States.”
Students who skip class are now forced to attend “truancy court” and be lectured by a judge before being mandated to carry a GPS tracking device.
“Students on the program are tracked with a hand-held GPS device between the time they leave for school in the morning and the time they check in for curfew at night.”
Not only are children being treated as criminals if they skip class, parents too are being targeted if they turn up late to collect their kids. A story we broke back in 2006 highlighted how a junior high school in Indiana threatens parents with police and child protective service involvement if they fail to pick up their child on time after mandatory Friday classes for missed homework.
The school stated that if parents didn’t arrive at the agreed time to pick up their child, “arrangements have been made with the Tell City Police Department to have them housed at the police station.”
The letter then states that intervention by the police will also necessitate involvement of the Perry County Office of Family and Children. In other words – get stuck in a traffic jam and you could get your kids snatched by the state and fed into the pedophile-infested government “care” system.
American public schools are being transformed into prison training camps set up to breed continuous generations of obedient slaves.
Schools across the country are routinely invaded by armed goons conducting “drills” whereby students are shouted at and have guns pointed at them. School lockdowns have also become a routine part of student life as kids are conditioned into thinking that they are constantly in danger and need to be protected at all times by the state.
Having armed men terrorize children is by design and it is intended to normalize the police state and train students to accept it as a routine function of society when they leave school.
Drug raids such as the one conducted in Goose Creek South Carolina, where armed police raided a high school with weapons drawn supposedly in search of drugs, are also routine. Shouting officers aimed guns at students heads as they were ordered face-up against the wall, then into Guantanamo style squats as they were handcuffed and K9 dogs sniffed their backpacks.
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Missouri Police Introduce Retina Scanners to Build Criminal Database
January 21,2010
Columbia Daily Tribune
By Brennan David
A $200,000 COPS — or Community Oriented Policing Services — technology grant will fund license plate and iris scanners for patrol vehicles and the Boone County Jail. The grant is a small chunk of a $1.45 million grant awarded to the Central Missouri Criminal Justice Information System, which will receive a total of $4 million in grants by 2012. The system is made up of seven Mid-Missouri counties that in 2009 began receiving federal grant money through the U.S. Department of Justice to upgrade information technology systems.
David Severson, Osage Beach police chief and system organizer, said upgrading systems will better equip officers to fight crime.
“If a guy was working the road in Osage Beach and he saw a suspicious vehicle, he needs information on that vehicle,” Severson said. “That vehicle could have been involved in a St. Louis murder earlier that day. He needs to have that information while in his car, not later.”
The grant calls for the sheriff’s department and Columbia police to each receive two license plate scanners to attach to patrol vehicles and portable and tethered iris scanners. A permanent iris scanner will be placed at the Boone County Jail so scanning can become part of the booking process, building a database.
“It’s not here to replace fingerprints but to complement it,” said Mike Southard of Sure Scan Technology of Jefferson City.
The iris scan takes a photo of the eye and uses 240 identifiable points of an eye to create a file. The portable device will be used on occasions when identifying a suspect is difficult, Boone County sheriff’s Capt. Chad Martin said, as well as during booking.
Information collected will be stored on a Boone County sheriff’s server and also will be available to law enforcement departments statewide that can access the Missouri Data Exchange. The goal is to get all Missouri counties to create databases to share, Severson said.
In terms of data sharing, the same will apply for the Mobile Plate Hunter 900 Series cameras. The system includes two cameras mounted on a patrol car that automatically scan and process license plate numbers of vehicles parked or driving nearby. A computer instantaneously cross-references the license plate numbers against a database containing license plate numbers of wanted vehicles or suspects linked to those vehicles.
The database is updated at least twice a day by the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, as well as law enforcement agencies that enter the license plate numbers of stolen vehicles or vehicles whose owners have outstanding warrants or are linked to a missing-person case.
A match sounds an alarm in the patrol car that alerts the officer, said Matthew Maxwell of ELSAG North America, the license plate manufacturer. The system can scan more than 3,000 license plates per day and is only limited by an officer’s ability to drive through areas where cars are plentiful.
“This item increases the officer’s safety,” he said. “It keeps both hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.”
The sheriff’s department and Columbia police tested the scanner for a 60-day period in 2009. The sheriff’s department netted six arrests and discovered five vehicles with stolen license plates. Columbia police reported 10 arrests and the recovery of a stolen vehicle.
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60,000 CCTV Cameras Watch People in the UK
December 18, 2009
Mail Online
By James Slack
The number of town hall-controlled Big Brother CCTV cameras has trebled in a decade, it emerged last night.
There are now 60,000 cameras trained on members of the public by council snoopers – one for every 1,000 people in the UK.
The huge increase has cost hundreds of millions of pounds, including at least £170million in Home Office grants – although there are doubts over whether the cameras actually help catch criminals.
Many images are so poor they cannot be used to identify violent thugs, while police have admitted as few as one crime is solved for every 1,000 cameras.
Privacy campaigner Big Brother Watch uncovered the scale of CCTV use by local authorities using Freedom of Information requests.
Director Alex Deane said CCTV was seen as a ‘cheap alternative to policing’ but its ‘ability to deter or solve crimes is sketchy at best’.
‘The quality of footage is frequently too poor to be used in courts, the cameras are often turned off to save money and control rooms are rarely manned 24-hours-a-day,’ he added.
‘We would all feel safer with more police on the beat, there would be fewer crimes and those crimes that do occur would be solved faster.’
The study, entitled Big Brother is Watching, found that 418 local authorities control 59,753 cameras.
Ten years ago similar research found the total was 21,000.
The councils with most cameras are Portsmouth and Nottinghamshire, which each control 1,454, the study showed.
And barely a part of the country has been left untouched by the rise of the surveillance cameras.
Even the remote Outer Hebrides has an astonishing eight CCTV cameras for every resident.
Big Brother Watch said CCTV is designed merely to appease neighbourhoods suffering from anti-social behaviour problems.
The group also warned that, as the number of CCTV cameras increases, so does the potential number of people being watched and the number of council officers watching – with implications for personal privacy and data security.
Cyberhackers Target Corporate Bank Accounts
December 14, 2009
Financial Times
By Joseph Menn
For more than a decade the common currency among cybercriminals has been pilfered credit card numbers, but some underground hackers have learned how to drain money directly from corporate bank accounts.
There has been a big rise in such frauds, raising the stakes in the war between financial institutions and criminals and costing some bank clients half a million dollars – or more.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
Facebook backtracks on privacy – Dec-11
Facebook must be weary of changing the rules – Dec-11
Tech blog – Dec-01
The cyberhackers “are clearly ahead of the defence in terms of antivirus solutions, firewall solutions, etc,” Jeffrey Troy, chief of the FBI’s cybercrime section, told the Financial Times. Online bank thefts in 2009 had seen “a very dramatic increase from past years”.
Law enforcement warnings, recent reports from private security experts and lawsuits are focusing attention on the issue. Some professionals, citing the ongoing boom in virus infections through such social networks as Facebook and Twitter, fear the trends could combine in 2010.
Mr Troy estimated that criminals took about $40m from bank accounts this year, primarily targeting the small and mid-sized businesses that are themselves customers of small and mid-sized banks.
Such banks and their clients were less likely than their biggest competitors to have the highest-grade security procedures.
Targets have fallen victim to “spear phishing” and other tricks. In spear phishing, a misleading e-mail, instant message or social networking communication is aimed at one company or even a single person within that company, frequently a top executive. The message can be tailored convincingly with details of interest to that individual.
As with many generic phishing attacks that go to millions of users, the point is often to get the recipient to click on a link that installs software for surreptitiously logging keystrokes, so that passwords and account numbers can be recorded and transmitted over the internet to the hacker.
Aiming at small groups means that security programs that look for copies of previously reported attacks are less likely to recognise the software.
One of the most prevalent programs for stealing banking passwords, Zeus, can be bought and modified by anyone for about $700, Cisco Systems said in annual security study released this week.
Through both phishing and silent installs via compromised websites, Zeus has landed on some 3.6m machines. Another virus, URLZone, can rewrite online banking statements so that pilfered money does not appear to be missing.
Some businesses have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to thieves employing such tools. While banks typically indemnify consumers for online fraud losses that are spotted quickly, they can take a harder line against corporate clients. Such disputes are coming into the open with the first lawsuits over banking breaches.
This month a Baton Rouge equipment seller called JM Test Systems sued US bank Capital One. The suit says JM Test noticed an unauthorised $45,640 wire transfer to a Moscow bank a day after it went through.
Although the company complained immediately and Capital One pledged to investigate, it allegedly failed to freeze the account and a second fraudulent withdrawal of $51,556 went through six days later. The bank has refunded less than $8,000 of the losses, according to the suit, which accuses Capital One of having unreasonably lax procedures. The bank declined to comment, citing the litigation.
Banks were modifying their systems, said Mr Troy, but they had problems with authenticating account holders.
The same problem exists on the internet – and has been exacerbated with the trend toward shortened web links that deliberately compress – and disguise – the address of websites as they are passed along in e-mails or other messages.
Many social media users placed such trust in material posted by friends and colleagues “that they don’t stop to consider the dangers of clicking on an unidentifiable link”, Cisco found.
Click here for the full report
Criminal Doctors and Researchers Still Allowed by FDA to Work on
November 19, 2009
Natural News
By E. Huff
(NaturalNews) The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released a report indicting the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for allowing health professionals convicted of crimes to perform research for the agency and to supervise patients’ safety during clinical trials.
The FDA is required by law to disqualify from positions within its organization doctors that have been convicted of fraud or other crimes. Yet the GAO is publicizing that it takes an average of four years for criminals to be disbarred from their positions.
In one case, a doctor who was convicted of 53 counts of criminal offense was allowed to remain at the FDA for 11 years before action was taken. The doctor’s offenses included bribing an employee to cover up a patient suicide that occurred during a clinical trial and prescribing drugs without a license.
Another doctor was convicted of defrauding his employer of more than $10 million in clinical research funds. Rather than using the money to conduct the trial, he diverted it to entities owned or controlled by the clinical trial investigators.
One of the more notorious cases is the debarment of Anne Kirkman-Campbell, an Alabama physician who pled guilty to mail fraud in a clinical trial for Sanofi-Aventis SA’s antibiotic, Ketek. Though sentenced to more than four years in prison, it took the FDA nearly five years to actually debar the felon.
According to the report, three doctors who broke FDA regulatory rules or who have been convicted of crimes have yet to be debarred and continue to work for the agency. One of the doctors is involved in fraud that dates back to 2005; the doctor has yet to be debarred.
Falsified clinical trial data
In the majority of cases, doctors are convicted of falsifying clinical trial study data. Everything from submitting data for fictitious study participants to lying about study results has been tolerated by the FDA. The consequences of such deception are ultimately costing people their lives.
Other examples of common misconduct include failing to obtain informed consent from clinical trial participants, failure to properly maintain case histories and records, failure to comply with requirements to obtain initial and continuing approval from an institutional review board, and failure to follow the clinical trial’s research plan.
All such misconduct warrants debarment from the FDA, yet the GAO study has concluded that it takes the FDA an average of four years to remove criminal doctors from its ranks. While required to debar all doctors who violate federal guidelines as well as openly convicted criminals, the FDA habitually drags its feet in dealing with offenders.
One of the biggest problems with the FDA’s debarment policy is a loophole that allows convicted criminals to continue working in another area outside of the one in which they were convicted. For instance, a doctor convicted of drug trial fraud can still work in trials in other areas such as medical devices.
Another major problem is the fact that the FDA holds no actual authority to debar convicted criminals from engaging in medical-device industry activity, a growing segment of the health care industry. A doctor convicted of lying about the purported benefits of a new device to treat asthma, for instance, cannot be debarred under current FDA policy.
Proposed solutions to the problem
Representative Joe Barton of Texas has proposed a bill that would mandate removal of convicted criminals from the FDA within one year of either being found committing fraud or of being formally convicted of committing one.
One year is more than enough time to execute proper removal procedures. Yet the FDA’s track record of handling the crooks in its midst is far from satisfactory and many are demanding some type of reform within the agency.
The GAO has proposed that the FDA be given debarment authority over medical devices in order to curb the transfer from one area of research to another in cases of criminal activity. Regulatory revisions to eliminate any further participation by criminal offenders within the organization is necessary to maintain any sort of organizational integrity.
The foundational problem is that, even with guidelines, the FDA continues to break its own rules and perpetually fails to act in accordance with its mission statement. More rules would potentially do very little to remedy the corruption that continues to plague the agency.
Click here for the full report
More than One in Ten People are in DNA Database
October 28, 2009
Telegraph.co.uk
By Tom Whitehead
Police forces in England and Wales have taken the profiles of 5.5 million people, meaning the proportion of the population on the system has passed a tenth for the first time.
Overall, when profiles taken in Scotland and Northern Ireland are included, almost six million people have now been stored on what is the largest DNA database in the world.
The landmark came as a poll showed eight in 10 people believe a Big Brother state in the UK has eroded freedoms and that the Government cannot be trusted with personal information.
Last week, ministers were forced in to a last minute climb-down over plans to hold on to the DNA of innocent people for 12 years when it dropped plans to include the proposal in an amendment to legislation currently passing through Parliament.
Home Office figures show a total of 5,910,172 profiles are on the national DNA database.
Of those, some 5,532,847 were stored by police forces in England and Wales – the equivalent of more than one in 10 of the population of the two home nations of 54,440,000.
It comes as the row over keeping the profiles of innocents on the database deepens.
The Home Office had proposed a 12 year limit for retaining DNA profiles of those not convicted of offences after a blanket policy to hold on to them indefinitely was ruled unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights.
However, the new policy, contained in an amendment to the Policing and Crime Bill, was dropped last week at the final moment in the face of growing criticism.
A new Bill containing a further set of proposals will now be included in the Queen’s Speech next month.
The move represented an about-turn by the Home Office and campaigners hope it will lead to a significant watering down of the proposals.
Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, demanded that his details be erased after no charges were brought against him following his arrest over Whitehall leaks last year.
It also emerged last week that the number of crimes solved with a DNA match has fallen by a fifth despite more than a million new profiles having been added over the past two years.
James Brokenshire, the shadow home office minister, said: “The Government has been obsessed with growing the DNA database for the sake of it regardless of guilt or innocence.
“Despite being told that their approach is unlawful they have been dragging their feet about doing anything about it. Just how many more DNA profiles of the innocent have to be added before the Government is prepared to act?”
A Home Office spokesman said: “The DNA database is a vital crime fighting tool, identifying 390,000 crimes with DNA matches between April 1998 and September 2008 and providing the police with a lead on the possible identity of the offender. Last year a total of 17,614 crimes, including 83 homicides and 184 rapes, were detected in which a DNA match was available.
“We have now completed a public consultation on proposals to ensure the right people are on the database as well as considering when people should come off. Those proposals were grounded in the research and allowed us to respond to the judgement of the European Court of Human Rights both swiftly and effectively.”
A separate poll for campaign group Big Brother Watch found 79 per cent of the public believe freedoms are being eroded by a Big Brother state while 86 per cent said the Government cannot be trusted to keep personal data safe.
Alex Deane, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “We are the victims of ever more intrusive policies, pushing more and more into the details of our lives.
“The Government doesn’t seem to care that Big Brother Britain has been rejected by the vast majority of people who live here.
“They continue to pursue expensive and invasive surveillance methods that serve only to create criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens.”
Click here for the full report.
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Anorexic is NOT Sexy
Soda Causes Obesity
Stop Being a Victim of Abuse
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Magic Juices
The Government Lies
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Guns Are Not to Blame
September 29, 2009 by JP
Filed under Government
September 29, 2009
Delaware Online
By Bill Stewart
After a terrible tragedy like the murder of Georgetown Police Officer Chad Spicer, gun-control advocates usually come out in force. The gun that Officer Spicer was murdered with was not registered. It wasn’t purchased by a citizen with proof of identity.
Almost every household in South Dakota legally owns at least one gun. In our nation’s capital, gun ownership is illegal. Both populations are about 650,000. Yet Washington’s crime rate is nine times higher than South Dakota’s and its murder rate is 35 times higher. This is in spite of the fact that Washington’s police force is five times the size of South Dakota’s.
Guns don’t equal crime. Criminals equal crime.
Why don’t the anti-gun advocates look at Australia and England, which have banned all guns for the last 20 years? They are now first and second on the violent crime scale, far outranking the United States in those areas. If the anti-gun lobby has its way, soon the U.S. will be the leader in violent crime.
Gun bans simply make the crimes easier, make the law-abiding citizens defenseless prey and give criminals the upper hand.
Government fails to protect us, especially from repeat offenders. In our present environment, to be unarmed is to be helpless. Why should we allow criminals to hurt us or to end our lives?
Gun control would force us into that situation. An armed populace helps to keep the felons away, especially in times of high crimes or terrorism.
Benjamin Franklin said, “If you make yourselves sheep, the wolves will eat you.”
Click here for the full report.
Cameras Keep Track of All Cars Entering Medina
September 16, 2009
The Seattle Times
By Sonia Krishnan
City signs have a unique way of greeting people. In Issaquah, for instance, motorists are told they’re entering “a special place where people care.” For years, Bothell invited people to stay “for a day or a lifetime.”
In Medina, a new sign bears this warning: “You Are Entering a 24 Hour Video Surveillance Area.”
Cameras have recently been installed at intersections to monitor every vehicle coming into the city.
Under the “automatic license plate recognition” project, once a car enters Medina, a camera captures its license-plate number. Within seconds, the number is run through a database.
If a hit comes up for a felony — say, the vehicle was reported stolen or is being driven by a homicide suspect — the information is transmitted instantaneously to police, who can “leap into action,” said Police Chief Jeffrey Chen.
“These cameras provide us with intelligence,” Chen said. “It gets us in front of criminals. I don’t like to be on a level playing field with criminals.”
He declined to give the number and location of all the cameras.
Medina — a city of 3,100 with an average household income of $222,000 — had discussed the idea for years as a way to discourage crime, city officials said.
Last year, there were 11 burglaries, Chen said.
“Some people think [that number of burglaries] is tolerable,” he said. “But even one crime is intolerable.”
All captured information is stored for 60 days — even if nothing negative turns up, he said. That allows police to mine data if a crime occurs later, Chen said.
Doug Honig, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, said such a system smacks of privacy violations.
“Government shouldn’t be keeping records of people’s comings and goings when they haven’t done anything wrong,” he said. “By actions like this, we’re moving closer and closer to a surveillance society.”
Medina City Councilmember Lucius Biglow said crime prevention “outweighs concern over privacy.”
“Privacy is considerably less nowadays than it was, say, 50 years ago,” he said. “I think most of us are pretty well-documented by the federal government … simply because of the Internet and credit cards.”
It’s no secret cameras are everywhere — in stores, streets, parks and intersections where police want to cite drivers for running red lights.
A 2005 city survey showed that nearly a half of Medina’s residents agreed with the camera installation. In 2007, the City Council unanimously approved moving forward. (A cost for the project was not immediately available Tuesday from city officials.)
The city looked to nearby Hunts Point as an example. The peninsula-shaped residential community just north of Medina has been using a video-camera setup to record a continuous loop of car traffic in and out of town for more than three years, town administrator Jack McKenzie said.
The town of about 500 residents hasn’t had a single break-in since the cameras were installed. “I recommend it highly,” McKenzie said.
He said visitors to Hunts Point can’t miss the video equipment: “It’s 12 feet tall and covered with cameras,” he said of the installation, which is located at the traffic circle at the entrance to the community. There are eight cameras in all; pairs of cameras point in four directions.
No residents have ever complained about it, he said.
McKenzie said the town has used it for evidence in a couple of cases. In one case, he said, a woman driving a Mercedes ran into a mailbox pagoda, damaging the mailboxes and her car.
Medina police — who provide Hunts Point with police protection — reviewed the tape and picked out the undamaged Mercedes going into town, and the damaged car later coming out.
Medina City Council members say the cameras aren’t about preserving a gated-community atmosphere.
“We’re not elitist at all,” Councilmember Robert Rudolph said. “There is a mix of people in Medina of all economic strata. What we’re doing here is protecting our citizenry.”
Click here for the full report from the Seattle Times
