Privacy

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

"I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' "

Voices of Resistance from Occupied London | There is nothing comparable at all in the U.S. to the apparatus of surveillance that exists in London. Even CCTV cameras are only recently becoming an issue in the U.S. Total surveillance of down town areas of American cities is something I wrote about in the early nineties but only applied to tiny areas, a few acres in down town Los Angeles for example. If Giuliani does become president we will get closer to the idea of having total surveillance and control in the city centre but London is at least one if not two generations ahead of the United States.

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.

Arizona became the third state last week to volunteer for a Homeland Security Department program in which it will develop a hybrid identification card that combines a state driver’s license with a U.S. border-crossing card.

DHS and state officials announced an agreement to partner in development of the “enhanced” driver’s license that is expected to meet the department’s Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative requirements as well as align with future driver’s license requirements of the Real ID Act, DHS said in a news release.

“Arizona’s new driver’s license is poised to be one of the nation’s first to comply with Real ID requirements,” the news release said.

The FBI bit off some controversy in 2000 when it acknowledged it was using a custom packet sniffer called Carnivore to effect court-authorized surveillance of internet traffic.

Some network operators were uncomfortable with g-men barging in their colo to hang a black box off their network, while civil libertarians chaffed at the bureau's legally adventuresome use of some of Carnivore's features with perfunctory court notice instead of a  full-blown wiretap order.

The feds responded by giving the tool a less-ominous moniker, DCS-1000, and getting the law changed. They later put the tool out to pasture in  favor of commercial solutions.