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Remember that scene in that dreadful movie The Phantom Menace where Anakin’s mother explains that slaves have tracking devices implanted to prevent them escaping?
An American company has developed such technology, and they have more then just slaves in mind.
The process is oh so easy:
Once implanted just under the skin, via a quick, simple and painless outpatient procedure (much like getting a shot), the VeriChip can be scanned when necessary with a proprietary VeriChip scanner. A small amount of radio frequency energy passes from the scanner energizing the dormant VeriChip, which then emits a radio frequency signal transmitting the individual’s unique personal verification (VeriChip ID) number. The VeriChip Subscriber Number then provides instant access to the Global VeriChip Subscriber (GVS) Registry – through secure, password-protected web access to subscriber-supplied information. This data is maintained by state-of-the-art GVS Registry operations centers in Riverside, California and Owings, Maryland.
And the implications are oh so scary….
How the Soviets would have loved this kind of technological capability:
A US requirement for visitors to be fingerprinted and photographed is being expanded to include citizens from America’s closest allies.
The move will affect visitors from 27 countries – including the UK, Japan and Australia – whose nationals are able to visit the US without a visa.
Though even if the technology had been available to the Soviets they would not have been to afford it. But Western democracies can afford it so these fingerprint-reading machines will be coming soon not just to an airport near you but, in due course, a bank, a supermarket, a sports stadium and just about everywhere else.
I was so impressed with all those books written in the 1990’s that confidently predicted that the new age of digital technology would empower the individual and neuter the state. The implementation is having exactly the reverse affect.
Here is a new hack that has been making the rounds of the computer security community. It seems bluetooth lays many very common mobile phones wide open to one or more attacks. On at least one Nokia (the very one I have in fact), someone walking past you on the street can lift your entire address book and calendar even if your Bluetooth setting is HIDDEN. There are other sorts of possible abuse as well: read the article.
No, I did not get caught out. I spend too much time in bad company to trust any system which hasn’t been source-code audited by people I trust. Since mobile phones are all based on proprietary code, I have always taken the precaution of only enabling such features (on mobiles or other systems) during time of use.
For those of you who religiously follow slashdot, this is probably not news. Most of our readers are not engineers so this may be news to them.
If you have bluetooth, turn the bloody thing OFF!!!!
Did you know your twenty dollar bills have RFID tags in them? That is what these people think… and they have the burned bills to prove it.
A year or so ago I suggested microwaving as a way to de-louse items with RFID tags in them. From the state of the bills in the picture, I think we will need a gentler method of disinfection.
It is apparent to me that the chips are just soaking up too much energy from the rather high intensity inside an oven. It doesn’t really take all that much to waste a chip so a much milder power source is called for. Suggestions and experimental results are welcome.
All you need is some engineering creativity and money to burn.
What does this sound like to you?
[From UK Times]
DOZENS of speed cameras are to be replaced with electronic signs that display a frowning face when a driver is speeding but do not result in fines or penalty points.
The devices are to be placed where police can no longer justify having a speed camera because there is no recent history of crashes.
Police hope that the speed indicator devices (SIDs) will defuse some of the anger generated by the huge increase in camera fines. Last year an estimated two million drivers caught on camera were fined £60 and given three penalty points.
The new devices use radar to detect the speed of an oncoming vehicle, and flash it up on a screen. If the driver is within the limit, the screen changes to a smiling face.
At just 1mph over the limit, the face will frown.
Because it sounds to me like the Home Office are starting to back down.
At this rate it will take about another year for the ‘frowny faces’ to be replaced by an All-Weather Traffic Co-Ordination Officer whose job it will be to stand on the verge of a dual carriageway and shout “fascist, fascist” as the cars whizz by.
While channel hopping in the early hours of this morning through the unwatched digital end of the British TV spectrum (no doubt that is a technologically impossible thing to do literally but I’m sure you understand), I encountered the beginnings of or an advertisement for (I switched off and am only now remembering it) one of those Kilroy-Silk type programmes in which a sleek self-important talk-leader wanders around among various people desperate to be on television talking about something too interesting and lowbrow to be of interest to the kind of people who watch analogue TV with a number like 1 or 2, such as what it is like to sleep with your nephew or why you want your grandmother to stop getting any more tattoos. This sleek Kilroy-man was called Walsh, I think. (Yes.) And, this time the subject was going to be … and here I confess to forgetting the technical term which the unwatched TV industry has coined for this phenomenon … but it was video/digital/TV cameras for looking up girls’ skirts in public places. Apparently some unfortunate girl had become the victim of one of these freelance soft porn Spielbergs and video of her bottom and underwear was even now circulating on the internet.
I don’t know exactly how the cameras are organised. Perhaps they are placed in the shoes of the filmer. Perhaps they are operated from the basements of sleazy restaurants. A particular unfortunate girl had become more unfortunate in that she had sued her voyeur-tormentors in an American court, and the court had found that although disgusting, the behaviour of the electro-digital-voyeurs was not illegal. So now the unfortunate girl was taking her case to a higher court: unwatched television.
And that was when I switched off, which I now regret. It was the most memorable and interesting thing I saw on the telly yesterday, but I only realised this today.
As I say, I don’t know how the argument then proceeded, although I do know that they had managed to entice or fake up some sleazoids willing to argue in favour of the rights of people to make movies by pointing cheap cameras up girl’s skirts. So presumably there was an argument.
What might I have said if I had found myself in the middle of such an argument? I have no idea, but here are some guesses. → Continue reading: Invisible cameras in the pavement? What is to be done?
Over on White Rose I have put up some remarks by Josie Appleton of Spiked On-Line regarding ID Cards. To which all I can add is… yeah!
And while you are at it, you might like to check out Trevor Mendham’s worthy anti-ID cards campaign on iCan.
…from an Internet café in Japan to be exact. Michael Jennings is en route to Australia and stopped off at Narita International Airport long enough to blog about some very odd demands made of him before he was allowed to use the Internet.
Check out the article on White Rose.
Speed cameras don’t reduce casualties – they are just for revenue generation
– Northumbria Police’s Acting Chief Inspector, Paul Gilroy
I really cannot add much to that.
The GATSO killers must be starting to give the state a serious headache.
From the UK Times:
THE police have come up with a new way to catch irate motorists who vandalise speed cameras: set up other cameras to film them in the act.
And then other cameras to film those cameras and still more cameras to film those cameras and……
A closed-circuit television system would be installed beside the speed traps under plans being considered to curb a spate of attacks in which 700 cameras have been burnt, pulled down or had their lenses spray painted.
Of course this means that the closed-circuit security cameras will become targets as well. It seems that the campaign of the GATSO killers is moving beyond the sporadic outbursts of pique and onto a low-grade insurrection.
The great gift of cash (fiat currencies included) is the anonymity it affords the bearer. Nobody but the bearer knows just how much cash he has. Nobody knows how much may have been earned, paid, spent, saved or transported.
But that is all about to change:
Dogs trained to sniff the ink on bank notes are being used for the first time on trains to detect criminals carrying large amounts of illicit cash.
The “currency dogs” have already been used successfully by Customs and Excise at ports and airports, where they have detected more than £800,000 in mainly drugs cash, and are now being targeted at mainline train routes into London.
So the dogs will miraculously detect ‘criminals’. Is this Trial by Canine? Do the sniffer dogs have to prove their case on a mere balance of probabilities or is proof beyond all reasonable doubt required? Will there be Defence Dogs standing by to rebut the charges?
And how is anyone supposed to know that the cash is ‘illicit’? Unless, of course, all cash is presumed to be illicit. Given its hitherto undetectable properties I can think of why certain institutions would insist on precisely that assumption:
However, those caught with such volumes of cash, even if not criminal, are likely to be investigated by tax authorities. Customs sources said they will only seize cash in cases of £10,000 or more.
It is the logical last piece of the jigsaw. What with the Money Laundering Laws and the War on Tax Havens, I reckon that the lockdown is pretty near to completion.
After reading Natalie Solent’s article, posted both here and on White Rose called A law-abiding person has nothing to hide?, reader Matt Judson wrote in with a cautionary tale of his own as a case in point.
Check out his close encounter with the reality of CCTV over on White Rose.
CCTV is not your friend.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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