Big Kevin, Is He Watching Your Children?

By Darryl Mason

So this is why prime minister Kevin Rudd wanted to get a laptop in front of every school student in Australia :

....the laptops issued to high-school students....have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families.

Don't panic. Yet. This story is about an extremely creepy laptops-for-students program in Philadelphia.

But do the the tens of thousands of laptops being distributed to Australian schools have webcams as standard? And can they be remotely activated?

Students probably already know the lenses can be blinded temporarily, without damage, by taping a small piece of paper over that digital eye.

Just in case.



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Federal Police Chief Authorises Use Of Surveillance Aircraft That Doesn't Officially Exist To Find Lost Government Minister

By Darryl Mason

The Australian Federal Police have stopped denying one of their aerial surveillance vehicles was used in the search and rescue of missing Victorian government minister Tim Holding, but only after "The AFP went so far as to say they did not own any aircraft."

The Age runs a photo of a (manned) GA Airvan, as an unnamed source claims such a plane was/is used by the AFP in operations over Australia :

The Age has been told that the equipment that produced a thermal image of Mr Holding was a US-made Star Sapphire Forward Looking Infra-red Radar system capable of finding a human body from well over two kilometres away.

The system can be used to track criminal fugitives, terrorists or missing people through darkness or cloud in forests or at sea at a considerable distance.

So a source tells The Age the spy plane is a GA Airvan....but "sources" tell the Herald Sun the spy plane :

...could be a Cessna 208 Grand Caravan or a Britten Norman Defender, which had been heavily modified to conduct covert operations at high altitude.

No Australian mainstream media appears to be entertaining the idea that the spy plane could be, and more than likely is, a UAV. Not yet anyway.

Incredibly, The Australian backs the AFP respin :

The Australian Federal Police -- which was linked to the plane in some news reports yesterday, but actually has no aircraft -- deflected inquiries back to Victoria Police, while the Defence Force said none of its aircraft was involved in the search.

And that's after the Herald Sun reported :

AFP chief Mick Keelty, on his second last day in the job, offered the use of the plane to search for Mr Holding.

Victoria Police mentioned the plane on its website when it announced a campsite used by Mr Holding was seen on Monday night by a plane using sophisticated night vision equipment.

"Police located minister Tim Holding just after 10am this morning after an AFP plane located a possible camp site overnight," the statement said.

The statement was later amended to remove all mention of the AFP.

Shhh, it never happened. That occasional buzzing noise you might hear over your city at 3am is probably just some angry wasps. The Australian Federal Police do not have spy planes, even if the AFP chief authorised the loan of a spy plane to find a Victorian government minister lost in the wilderness.

Melbourne radio ranter Derryn Hinch thinks the rescued Tim Holding is "an arrogant, self-centred turd" and weighs in on the spy plane controversy :

Why all the secrecy about the Australian Federal Police spy plane with its secret heat-seeking, and night surveillance equipment?

Premier Brumby boasted at first it was used. And Victoria Police put out a press release referring to an ‘AFP planer’ and then tried to withdraw it and the Federal Police flatly denied they had any such planes. Which is a lie.

So, the high tech plane was successfully used to pinpoint Holding’s location. Was such a plane offered in New South Wales when that British tourist was missing for 13 days? No.

At least the AFP spy plane controversy distracts a little from the rising chorus that Holding's rescue was treated as something very, very special indeed by the Victorian Labor government. The deployment of a previously unknown Australian Federal Police surveillance aircraft being just the start of "special treatment". There is a nasty 'us vs them' belief spreading fast, along the lines of "Look what they do for one of their own! They'd leave us poor fuckers out there to die of exposure!"

This attitude is fusing with suspicion that Tim Holding staged his own disappearance for publicity reasons, best exampled by a pungent little punnet of conspiracy theories found on the most paranoid and conspiracy-laden mainstream media blog in Australia :

"Call me a cynic but his political career needed a boost and he thought that this sort of publicity was one way of doing it."

"Tim Holding is a publicity hound and all round media bitch. This incident has done wonders for his profile."

The next time anyone goes missing in the bush, in the desert or on a snow-slashed ridge, we can expect the deployment of (formerly top secret) spy planes, from the Australian Defence Force and/or the Australian Federal Police, to help find them. And within 72 hours, just as was done for Tim Holding.

Can't we?

Maybe.

Obviously pizza-scoffing, infuriatingly dim, British backpackers will be left to fend for themselves.

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Federal Police Tell Media To Shut Up About Their Secret Spy Plane

Do the Australian Federal Police have unmanned aerial surveillance planes that they're not yet ready to admit to owning?

After the Australian Federal Police issued a press release explaining, or boasting, that an 'AFP plane' found a missing Victorian government minister in remote wilderness, under heavy cloud cover - he was using a flashlight inside his emergency tent - they quickly changed their minds, removed all references to aerial vehicles they officially do not own or operate in the press release and contacted Australian media to demand they not report what their own media department had told reporters barely an hour before.

Why?

The Herald Sun digs deeper :

In a statement released this afternoon, the AFP said they "provided aerial support" to Victoria Police with their search operation and "routinely lease aircraft to support operational activity across the country".

"This capability has been utilised previously in a search capacity," the statement read.

The spy plane revelation - posted on the Victoria Police media website yesterday - was a breach of national security.

Whoops.

The last word from the Australian Federal Police on this issue :

"No further comment will be made in relation to the deployment of any operational assets of the AFP."

How soon before the Australian Federal Police get UAVs not just equipped with extremely sensitive heat-sensing/thermal imaging capability, but also weapons?

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to assume that UAV makers have already pitched their vehicles, and given demos, to the Australian Federal Police. Along with Israel, Australian companies have had enormous success selling UAVs to both armies and police forces across the world.

The question is how many did the AFP buy? And were those purchases part of a black (off the books) budget?

The Australian Federal Police recently took part in 'urban operations' training during Operation Talisman Saber war games held in Queensland. As part of the military exercises, unmanned aerial vehicles from the 20 Surveillance and Target Acquisition Regiment were also used, according to the Defence Department's own website.

Play Nice, Your Comment May Be Archived For Later Use Against You

By Darryl Mason


The Daily Telegraph's Tim Blair warns his readers :

Prepare to be watched...

He should also be telling his regular commenters to prepare to have their comments, all their comments, archived and data-mined at a later date by persons unknown. And not just the comments they leave now, but all the comments they have ever left at a Tim Blair blog.

It seems he's only just discovered that government agencies, including ASIO, monitor Australian blogs, and in particular, the posted comments.

Tim Blair won't tell his readers that the widespread trials and use of such online monitoring technology, and key word recognition programs, became reality during the lead-up to the Iraq War.

The surveillance of Australian blogs is not exactly a new thing. Whatever prime minister Kevin Rudd allows such programs to become, they began in the Howard era.

Blair should tell his readers that he's known for years that all comments at his blog were being monitored, and archived, by government agencies, right through the last four years of the Howard era.

Blair also failed to inform his readers that some of their more violent, or violently insane comments, might come back to haunt them one day, might in fact be used against them, to prosecute or persecute them. That they were written under aliases may make no difference at all in a courtroom.

Rupert Murdoch has already shown that privacy is all but a fiction at MySpace, and his worldwide media empire, presumably also including Tim Blair's blog at the Daily Telegraph, have something of an open agreement with local government agencies to offer what help they legally can to track down someone who has posted threats of violence against politicians, or public figures, at any of Murdoch's online media. Those loudly wishing to kill movie stars and necklace green activists also get red-flagged. Such comments might not make it online, but they are not forgotten, nor do they disappear.

Prolific commenters at blogs, say on a story about Islamic terrorism or why "something must be done" about Rudd, are routinely monitored and followed online by any number of government intelligence agencies and private agencies. They're not just looking for "terrorists" anymore, now they're looking for "extremists".

In March, 2004, Tim Blair enthusiastically promoted ASIO's recruiting of online spies, not perhaps understanding that some of those who signed up would probably be monitoring his own site for threats of violence or "hate speech" a few years later.

The joke is that Blair ever believed such monitoring of online comments would stop at sniffing out possible Islamic terrorists, and not go after those who want Islam banned, or get publicly furious about tens of thousands of Muslims immigrating to Australia.

There's a New Terrorism, of which many millions may already be likely suspects, because the War On Terror was never meant to only stop at nabbing the suicidally jihad-crazed, it was always about introducing laws and widespread surveillance to go after "extremists" (as then President Bush began calling terrorists in 2007).

If you think the definition of "terrorist" is loose in government legislation, try to find examples of behaviour that define you as an "extremist". The word "extremist" has come into common usage by world leaders because "terrorist" was almost too specific.

Depending on where you are in the world, "Extremist"covers religion-crazed church burners and airline bombers, American libertarians and Ron Paul supporters, anti-abortion activists and animal liberationists, anarchists and anti-globalisationists, drug-dealing bikers and Afghanistan-based beheaders, anti-cannabis prohibition marchers and gun-rights patriots.

Unspecified thought crimes will get you flagged, watched and followed across the internet.

Everyone is a potential suspect when the prosecution of thought crimes becomes a policing and crime prevention reality.

As is our reality now.

Nobody Knows How Many Surveillance Cameras There Really Are In Sydney

Now storage of digital video is becoming less of a problem, and far less expensive, just where will all the surveillance footage from today end up in five or ten years time? What will video data-miners and image analysis software one day be able to learn from footage of you, as you go about your business tomorrow?

We are city under a blanket of surveillance cameras and CCTV :

Even the experts are unsure how many (cameras) are in place.

"It is very hard to get numbers,'' Dr Don Weatherburn from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research said.

At the heart of Sydney's extensive surveillance network is theso-called Situation and Emergency Control Room.

It is located in a room reached through a through a maze of corridors, security doors and an inconspicuous office kitchen and it resembles a scene from a science fiction movie.

....up to six operators watched Sydney's streets via 16 screens displaying footage from up to 2200 cameras.

The surveillance Holy Grail is, of course, to have all the CCTV, from police, councils, motorways, red light cameras, train and bus cameras, 7-11s, shopping malls, all accessible from a central database. It won't be far away, as police and councils now already share surveillance footage.

There is no escape :

People sometimes tried to run from the cameras (and the police), security operations manager Alex Kennedy said.

"But they're pretty puffed before they get out of our camera range,'' he said.

"And tricking operators by running into a bar and out the back door into an alley in Chinatown would not get them very far either.

"The camera is already waiting for them there.''

Surveillance cameras do stop some crime :

The studies included in his review showed CCTV had a modest but significant effect on crime prevention with most effect in reducing vehicle crimes in car parks.

However, evaluations of CCTV in city and town centres showed mixed results. Dr Weatherburn said there hadn't been significant investigation of their effectiveness.

People are still getting their heads kicked in waiting for a taxi in the city at2am, but now there is footage for the evening news to show.

There is only minor evidence, at best, that putting people under total surveillance stops them committing crimes. State and federal governments love camera surveillance because they believe it allows them to employ less police and commit less resources in general to crime fighting.

Yes, we do have less police on the streets, but look at all the cameras we have watching you getting assaulted!

Soon it will be even cheaper and easier than ever before for all surveillance footage of people committing no crimes at all to be archived, forever. There will be a market for all that old footage. It will be digitally archived, and eventually sold on to companies who will use body/gait/face-matching technology to identify and lock in on individuals through millions of hours of archived footage, and data-mine it all.

Perhaps somewhere in the future, someone may be willing to spend a few grand to find out where you were and what you were doing on January 17, 2009, or April 29, 2011. Perhaps they may want to see all the vid of you commuting on those days, buying lunch, drinking with friends, where you drove, how you spent your time away from the office, or in the office itself.

People forced to have surveillance cameras installed in their homes for 24 hour monitoring purposes will soon happen so often it will become a non-news event.

Is a life lived under surveillance, of being aware of always being on camera, being constantly watched, really living at all? If you are not breaking the law, don't you have the right to not be under surveillance?

If you live and work in Sydney, privacy is a myth.

The surveillance camera's mortal enemy is the humble Post-It note :

"We'll Use Your Teenage Moments Of Racist Stupidity Against You, Later"

The intention to stop racism may be solid, but it's still downright creepy that someone is saving some 14 year old's idiotic party photos where he's giving Hitler salutes, on social networking sites, and is intending to make sure a usually brief moment of teenage stupidity will haunt them,
forever :

Mat Henderson-Hau (of anti-racism group Fight dem back!) has decided to use the proliferation of racist groups on Facebook and MySpace to his advantage, mining the sites for valuable information on the far-right such as photographs and the connections between individuals and groups across national borders.

He said Fight dem back! stored this data until it became useful.

"For example, Johnny X may have pics on his Facebook or MySpace of him doing a Heil Hitler salute in his boots and braces," Henderson-Hau said.

"Johnny X might one day wind up pitching for a government contract for his plumbing business. That is when those pictures would be sent to the relevant authorities."

Every comment you make to a blog discussion, every photo you post on Facebook, every video clip you upload to YouTube, every e-mail, every text message, every purchase you make online, every search entry, every website you visit, is being recorded, logged, stored somewhere, by government, private and individual surveillance agencies and data miners. And you have no idea how someone may use it against you, years or even decades from now.

You can't turn 28 and find an old box of teenage photos that embarrass the shit out of you, of a you long gone in the past, where confused youthful rage and hate usually dies, and then burn them, make them disappear.

If you post them online, they will never cease to exist.

The Eye On The Pole Catches All

If you can't drive fast through city traffic, then what the hell is the point of being a cop?

Nearly four police officers a day were booked for breaking traffic laws including speeding while at work last year without any evidence they were responding to an emergency.

That's 1433 speeding fines issued to cops, by cops. Well, not real cops. The camera ones. Nobody escapes :

Of the fines issued to police most - 1325 - were issued by fixed speed cameras, including school zone cameras.

Most of those cops are probably feeling just as annoyed as the more half a million drivers in NSW, alone, who payed a few hundred extra dollars, each, for driving faster than constantly changing speed limits were supposed to inform them to drive :

The cameras doubled their fines revenue last financial year as they picked up a total of 677,839 drivers across NSW in the same period.

The lash of this story is you should be outraged at cops who speed, not that more than half a million people were fined because cameras that replace police determined they were speeding.

Speed camera lenses do not like Post-It notes.

Fingerprint ID Scans Forced On School Children

Parents Called "Idiots" For Refusing Biometric Data Collection Of Their Children

Why not just take DNA swabs of the students instead? Then the schools can have their students biometrically profiled to find out what their potential future levels of aggression, illness and classroom misbehaviour may be. Pre-emptive expulsions!

From news.com.au :

A Sydney high school has been accused of intimidating students into having their fingerprints scanned for a new attendance monitoring system, and branding parents who object as "idiots".

Parents of students at Ku-ring-gai High School in Sydney's north say their children have been bullied into taking part in a trial of the scheme introduced this week.

According to a principal's note sent home with students last Friday, parents were permitted to opt out by sending an "exemption" letter to the school.

Parents told The Australian yesterday their children were told their fingers would be scanned anyway, and data later deleted, only if there were still objections.

Alison Page said her daughter in Year 10 and other students who carried exemption letters were told "their parents were idiots for not agreeing". She said they were asked again if they would have the scans. "They were told to go home and tell their parents they were worrying about nothing," she added.

Ms Page said her other daughter in Year 12 was among students required to provide finger scans without notice after an English exam on Tuesday. Her daughter had an exemption letter but had not been allowed to take it into the room.

"They were not allowed to leave the room until it was done," she said. "They were told it could be deleted later if they didn't want it done."

Parent Chris Gurman said his daughter Alex was also told she could not leave the exam room until her fingerprint was taken.

"My daughter was the only one who refused," Mr Gurman said. "She's read 1984. When she refused to co-operate, a teacher let her out of the room."

Alex Gurman, 17, said they were told: "'If any of your stupid parents have any worries about this we will talk about it later.' I felt like crying, I felt like I was being forced to do something I didn't want to do, it was very confronting."

NSW Education Minister John Della Bosca said a small number of schools had introduced fingerprint scanning with the support of parents, adding it was not a government nor department initiative.

So who's paying for the fingerprint scanners? The schools? Did the schools hold fund-raising chocolate drives? Or were the scanners 'donated'?

It starts with fingerprint scanners. Once every school has brought a few scanners they will be found to be inneffective. Or not effective enough at collecting biometric data. DNA collection and state/national biometric databases of school students will then be introduced.

Neither the NSW Labor Government, or its education department, has made any formal announcement about the rolling out of biometric data collection programs for school children.

Presumably they were waiting to see how loud or outraged the reaction from parents would be when they found out it was already going on.

So far, the reaction has been fairly subdued.

The school children may as well get used to it. Within a decade, having your implanted ID chip, or biometric data, scanned every time you enter a school, train station, shopping mall or night club will be standard, every day stuff.

Unless you refuse ID chips and allowing your biometric data to be collected and datamined, of course. Then you will become a non-person and be refused access to just about everywhere.

'Australians Now Support Big Brother Society'

Will 2008 Herald The Rise Of 'The Unplugged'?

Why did Australians fall so easily and with so little dissent into the clutches of a surveillance society?

We used to cherish our privacy and gag at the thought that our every movement outside the home could be captured on video and stored away somewhere. Or that our personal details, our opinions, our beliefs and our favourite food choices could be databased and monitored for the rest of our lives.

Many of are still repulsed at even the idea of every Australian being issued with a centrally controlled and fully databased ID card. But it's already here, even if it is spread across your driver's lisence, supermarket loyalty cards, credit cards, e-mail records and search engine queries. All those records will be centralized soon enough, if they aren't already. If you're working, or on social security, you've already been issued with a unique numerical ID - it's called your tax file number.

Echelon is yet another of those once absurd conspiracy theories that has turned out to be an everyday fact. Every phone call, every e-mail, every fax, every text message, every web page you visit can surveilled if you are deemed to be "of interest", or if you are associated with people "of interest", even if those friends or family members haven't committed a crime, yet.

Speak, type or text the right 'key word' and a record of your communication will be stored within Echelon. Three years or two decades from now, your teenage years joke text message about terrorism or 'bombing' may come back to haunt you.

And why did you buy so many tubs of pool chlorine during the second half of 2008? Your store loyalty cards are compiling details of your shopping habits that will be analysed and evaluated, in years to come, in ways that even the techheads at Coles and Franklins haven't yet considered.

Did you even stop to think about how all that personal information about yourself that you so freely typed into MySpace questionnaires and quizzes and into Facebook profiles will be used? Do you even know that all that info will never disappear, and that those personal details are already being traded and circulated and analysed and used to build profiles of you, your emotions and your thought patterns?

And if you think that using fake names or profiles on MySpace or Facebook will keep you safely anonymous, think again. That little bout of Googling your own name a few months ago IDed you to your computer's IP address.

Big Brother isn't just watching you. He's already inside your head and saving back-ups of your thoughts, your dreams, your passions and desires.

Perhaps the next great trend amongst Australians will not to become more 'wired' but to become one of 'The Unplugged' - lose the cell phone, burn the Blackberry, delete the MySpace and Facebook profiles, shred the loyalty cards and credit cards, hang up on anyone who rings your home and starts asking questions for a 'survey' and only use internet browsers that allow you to wipe your personal information and browsing records every time you end a session online.

Why make it any easier for them to know so much about you? They already know enough.

From the Sydney Morning Herald :

Increasingly Australians are being bar-coded and scoped. Their whereabouts are checked, along with the company they keep. How they make money, how they spend it - all is monitored in the name of progress, profit and private and national security.

Australians had been sceptical about the surveillance industry and associated identity checks. But the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001, and subsequent terrorist outrages changed much of that. And while law enforcement agencies' activities have expanded considerably to fit new laws and demands, other surveillance industries and programs have enthusiastically jumped on the "new world order" band wagon and grown exponentially.

Data-matching and data-mining allow information generated by people doing ordinary things - such as using automatic teller machines, paying with credit cards, using shopping loyalty cards or smartcards, writing cheques, renting cars or videos, sending or receiving emails or surfing the internet - to be collected and collated, often without the subject's consent or knowledge.

Once people carefully husbanded their identities, and that privacy was respected. For years the only piece of paper people were happy to carry was a driver's licence.

In 1987 Bob Hawke's government pulled a double dissolution in an attempt to get its proposed Australia Card legislation through the Senate. The ID check for Australian citizens and resident foreigners arose partly out of the ease with which drug runners wandered in and out of the country but voters remained unconvinced.

As a consequence Australians were lumbered with a tax file number, a sort of watered down version of the American Social Security number that, together with the Medicare card, targets small fish by permitting greater scrutiny of the link between welfare and tax.

For the hundreds of thousands who came to Australia as immigrants, the absence of ID checks symbolised the new freedoms they had embraced.

Authoritarian regimes were skewered as Big Brother in George Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949. The two words were synonymous with one-party states and dictatorships for years. However, just as globalisation, the internet and money markets made Australians surrender to a brave new world where surveillance was king, the sense of incipient threat that Orwell's words symbolised was drained away with the 1999 arrival of the reality television franchise that eventually saw totalitarianism give way to "turkey-slapping".

The proliferation of online transactions and a trend towards a cashless society means thieves no longer need to steal a wallet when they can steal an identity.

Billions are being spent to counter identity theft. Research into "gait DNA" enables a computer to make identifications by matching a person's facial image to gait, height and weight. Also being investigated are body odour measurement and ear geometry.

Traditionally Australians have been wary of such "Big Brother" developments but opinion polls show that - like Americans and the English - Australians now tend to support more rather than less surveillance.

But for how much longer?

Could you live your life as one of The Unplugged?