http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=56173 LAW OF THE LAND Teen facing felony for taping cop State's wiretapping ban prohibits recording officer's voice Posted: June 14, 2007 1:00 a.m. Eastern An 18-year-old from Pennsylvania is facing a felony charge after he was caught videotaping a police officer handing out a traffic ticket on a public street. "I didn't think I could get in trouble for that," Brian D. Kelly told The Patriot-News. Apparently, neither did a long list of members of the public, who have erupted on the newspaper's comment page. "This is the most asinine thing I have EVER heard. Citizens have the right, and indeed, often the DUTY to film police officers performing their job," wrote ZippoPA. "I will donate right now to a fund to defend this person." "Don't police videotape you from their car without consent? I think they should be required to obtain consent for dashboard cameras," added TheSabre "In the era of Rodney King and such we should have the right to video them, after all they video us … with the dashcam," suggested cd3. "I'm seriously beginning to question the stability and wisdom of our area police," wrote Liberty1776. "The idea of this man being prosecuted is frightening. Regardless of his attitude during the incident, there are many police who are irrational and abuse the power of their badge. … Sometimes Americans should be afraid of their government." Prosecutors declined to respond to WND requests for a comment about the situation that developed in Carlisle. Kelly said making movies is a hobby, and he was just recording another interesting event. But authorities say he's facing a felony wiretapping count, and up to seven years in prison, after his camera and film were seized by police on May 24. He spent the next 26 hours in the Cumberland County prison until his mother raised security for his $2,500 bail on her house. The law technically bans the intentional recording of any oral conversation without permission. A preliminary hearing has been scheduled for July, before Judge Jessica Brewbaker. "Obviously, ignorance of the law is no defense," District Attorney David Freed told the newspaper. "But often these cases come down to questions of intent." Reports show Kelly was riding in a pickup that was stopped for alleged traffic violations. Kelly's camera was in his lap, running, and he aimed it at the officer. Police said they ordered him to turn it off and confiscated it, filing the felony after checking with a prosecutor. "He said, 'Young man, turn off your ... camera,'" Kelly said. "I turned it off and handed it to him. ... Six or seven more cops pulled up, and they arrested me." Carlisle Police Chief Stephen Margeson suggested a guilty plea to a lesser charge might be appropriate. "I don't believe there was any underlying criminal intent here," he said. Prosecutors said state law does allow police to record civilians, but not the other way around. "Welcome to the police state," added deadload on the newspaper comment page. "I would think the only reason the cops don't want to be taped is so that they won't be caught doing something wrong."
Speaking of tapes and police, it's kind of a reverse play on something that happened here not long ago. The president of a local black college was pulled over for a traffic violation. The pres. repeated over and over "don't you know who I am!" to the officer that pulled him over. The officer was very polite as he carried out his business, but afterwards the black college president went straight to the media claiming discrimination, that the officer was very abusive and rude and all sorts of nonsense. So the local politicians, NAACP, ACLU, etc. etc. were roasting the police dept. and the officer. The officer was even suspended. Finally, someone leaked a copy of the tape to the press. After the truth was shown over and over on TV everything changed. For whatever reason the tape was never officially released by the police dept., and since it was leaked they changed their policy and SOP in regards to the way that tapes are handled, processed, and stored so they they won't have any more leaks. It is odd how politics work, how a police dept. was going to let their office take the heat and not stand up for the truth. When the leaked copy of the tape helped their dept., they made sure it wouldn't happen again. Either they made sure, or politicians above the "blue line" did.
Typically cynical tango view: Big dogs don't want to be caught on tape getting preferential treatment...
But they sure are thankful when some citizen gets a blueboy getting his arse whupped on tape. I think I've seen several of those over the last couple years.
Point, Click ... Eavesdrop: How the FBI Wiretap Net Operates By Ryan Singel 08.29.07 | 2:00 AM The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act. The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected. It's a "comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems," says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert. DCSNet is a suite of software that collects, sifts and stores phone numbers, phone calls and text messages. The system directly connects FBI wiretapping outposts around the country to a far-reaching private communications network. Many of the details of the system and its full capabilities were redacted from the documents acquired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but they show that DCSNet includes at least three collection components, each running on Windows-based computers. The $10 million DCS-3000 client, also known as Red Hook, handles pen-registers and trap-and-traces, a type of surveillance that collects signaling information -- primarily the numbers dialed from a telephone -- but no communications content. (Pen registers record outgoing calls; trap-and-traces record incoming calls.) DCS-6000, known as Digital Storm, captures and collects the content of phone calls and text messages for full wiretap orders. A third, classified system, called DCS-5000, is used for wiretaps targeting spies or terrorists. What DCSNet Can Do Together, the surveillance systems let FBI agents play back recordings even as they are being captured (like TiVo), create master wiretap files, send digital recordings to translators, track the rough location of targets in real time using cell-tower information, and even stream intercepts outward to mobile surveillance vans. FBI wiretapping rooms in field offices and undercover locations around the country are connected through a private, encrypted backbone that is separated from the internet. Sprint runs it on the government's behalf. The network allows an FBI agent in New York, for example, to remotely set up a wiretap on a cell phone based in Sacramento, California, and immediately learn the phone's location, then begin receiving conversations, text messages and voicemail pass codes in New York. With a few keystrokes, the agent can route the recordings to language specialists for translation. The numbers dialed are automatically sent to FBI analysts trained to interpret phone-call patterns, and are transferred nightly, by external storage devices, to the bureau's Telephone Application Database, where they're subjected to a type of data mining called link analysis. FBI endpoints on DCSNet have swelled over the years, from 20 "central monitoring plants" at the program's inception, to 57 in 2005, according to undated pages in the released documents. By 2002, those endpoints connected to more than 350 switches. Today, most carriers maintain their own central hub, called a "mediation switch," that's networked to all the individual switches owned by that carrier, according to the FBI. The FBI's DCS software links to those mediation switches over the internet, likely using an encrypted VPN. Some carriers run the mediation switch themselves, while others pay companies like VeriSign to handle the whole wiretapping process for them. http://www.wired.com/politics/securi...007/08/wiretap
[UK] Your phone calls are no longer private http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article....&in_page_id=34 (Oct01, 07) Details of every phone call made in Britain will be available to the police and the Government from today. A law is now in force requiring telephone companies to keep information about landline and mobile communications for up to a year. The time and length of the call and the name and address of the phone's owner will be recorded under the legislation, brought in as part of the Government's anti-terrorism measures. Phone masts will be used to pinpoint the location of the mobile caller and this will also remain on record. However, content will not be recorded. Applications to view the information are made to a senior police officer. Among the 652 bodies entitled to apply are the police, the Gaming Board and the Food Standards Agency. Civil liberties groups such as Liberty say the law gives too many organisations access to the information. A Liberty spokesman said: 'A recent poll suggests 75 per cent believe we live in a surveillance society. It's time the authorities did something to win back our trust.' A Home Office spokesman said the law followed a directive from the EU. 'Imposing requirements on phone service providers to retain data is part of the difficult balance between protecting people from terrorism and serious crime, and respecting people's human rights,' he added.
Targeting travelers October 1, 2007 http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opi...,3100094.story Once again, federal assurances that anti-terrorism surveillance tactics respect the limits of individual privacy rights have been proved worthless. Listen in. Here's Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff last December defending a program that collects and saves for up to 15 years information about the travel habits of innocent Americans: "What we are doing is a sensible, totally constitutional and privacy right-respecting effort to make sure that we don't inconvenience the rights of most travelers, so that we can focus more sensibly and in a more risk-managed fashion on those people that do potentially pose a threat." Turns out what he meant was that Customs and Border Protection officials are making long-lasting electronic notes of such personal details as traveling companions and reading material, credit card and telephone records, itineraries, hotel and rental car information and a preference for king or double beds. One civil liberties activist who requested his records and then turned them over to The Washington Post discovered that his file included the notation that he once carried a book on marijuana titled Drugs and Your Rights, which homeland security folks apparently decided cast the shadow of criminal intent. This is the great danger of such unregulated surveillance of innocent individuals. Observations are made by all-too-human, and perhaps not well trained, border officials and based on their presumptions and prejudices. The information is stored for up to 15 years, DHS officials said, because terrorists have often proved in the past to have no criminal records that might be a tip-off, so these vaguer details about what they read and with whom they associate could someday prove useful. Like the discredited FBI of decades ago, this program is targeting potential threats among travelers on the basis of hunches, bias and gossip. And once the information is recorded, it's widely available to law enforcement and other agencies. From wiretaps, to spy satellites, to surveillance cameras in the public square, Americans have lost an enormous amount of privacy since Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Chertoff and his colleagues would do well to remember that the Department of Homeland Security has a two-part mission: "preserving freedoms and protecting America." Soon, there may be nothing left to preserve and a country too damaged to protect.
Do You Write Like a Terrorist You might think your anonymous online rants are oh-so-clever. But they'll give you away, too. A federally-funded artificial intelligence lab is figuring out how to track people over the Internet, based on how they write. The University of Arizona's ultra-ambitious "Dark Web" project "aims to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web," the National Science Foundation notes. And that analysis, according to the Arizona Star, includes a program which "identif[ies] and track individual authors by their writing styles." That component, called Writeprint, helps combat the Web's anonymity by studying thousands of lingual, structural and semantic features in online postings. With 95 percent certainty, it can attribute multiple postings to a single author. From there, Dark Web has the ability to track a single person over time as his views become radicalized. The project analyzes which types of individuals might be more susceptible to recruitment by extremist groups, and which messages or rhetoric are more effective in radicalizing people.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comhttp://survivalmonkey.com/forum/ />[/FONT][/SIZE] [SIZE=3][FONT=<o] <font face=" /> http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/09/do-you-write-li.html
Mebe dey can trak mah ritin stile. Goot luk. They track those who might be susceptible to extremist groups. This is my extremist group!!
