Cyborg Spy Beetles are no longer a thing of the future. UC Berkeley (funded by DARPA) has created cyborg beetles guided wirelessly via laptop. These spy beetles were created with the intent of bugging actual conversations, literally acting as the "fly on the wall". [more inside]
posted by scrutiny on Oct 27, 2009 - 56 comments

A group of respected British children's authors and illustrators will stop visiting schools from the start of the next academic year, in protest at a new government scheme that requires them to register on a database in case they pose a danger to children.

"In essence, I'm being asked to pay £64 to prove that I am not a paedophile."
posted by orthogonality on Jul 15, 2009 - 139 comments

1984: The masterpiece that killed George Orwell
posted by Artw on May 9, 2009 - 79 comments

BigBrotherFilter: Estimates place the number of CCTV cameras in the UK at 4.2 million, but how can these images all possibly be watched? Researches in Turkey have an answer: an eye-gaze tracking system placed on the CCTV operators themselves which can "then automatically produces a summary of the CCTV video sequences they have missed during their shift". [more inside]
posted by tybeet on Apr 15, 2009 - 32 comments

Become a Virtual Texas Deputy! (via)
posted by cjorgensen on Feb 23, 2009 - 50 comments

Zombies don't run, says Simon Pegg. Well ours do, says Charlie Brooker, director of Deadset. (also some stuff about the election and skeletor and stuff)
posted by Artw on Nov 9, 2008 - 84 comments

Not only will SAFEE ensure 9/11 never happens again, but it will also catch unruly passengers.
posted by gman on May 30, 2008 - 28 comments

Google Health launched today.. [more inside]
posted by pearlybob on May 19, 2008 - 79 comments

Shepard Fairey's cover art for Penguin releases of 1984 & Animal Farm.
posted by jonson on Apr 13, 2008 - 29 comments

The Anonymity Experiment. Is it possible to hide in plain sight? Privacy-minded people have long warned of a world in which an individual’s every action leaves a trace, in which corporations and governments can peer at will into your life with a few keystrokes on a computer. Now one of the people in charge of information-gathering for the U.S. government says, essentially, that such a world has arrived.
posted by amyms on Feb 16, 2008 - 44 comments

Over the past couple of years, Facebook has become increasingly popular, until it seemed like everyone and their grandma was joining up. A new feature, called Facebook Beacon, lets corporations join the fray. Might this be cause for concern? [more inside]
posted by Reggie Digest on Nov 19, 2007 - 49 comments

Surveillance Society Clock. "It's six minutes before midnight as a surveillance society draws near within the United States." [Via Danger Room.]
posted by homunculus on Sep 18, 2007 - 37 comments

So you're in the Big Brother house in Australia. Your dad died last Wednesday. His funeral was on Monday. But his dying wish was that you shouldn't be told that until you're evicted. So when will you be evicted? Since you're not up for eviction this week, it'll be at least a fortnight. A letter from Emma's brother.
posted by reklaw on May 25, 2007 - 79 comments

"Web History helps deliver more personalized search results based on what you've searched for on Google and which sites you've visited." Google unveils Web History, a new feature to help you "view and manage your web activity." You can also get an idea of what sites you visit frequently, broken down by time of day, and search across the full text of pages you've visited. "If you remember seeing something online, you'll be able to find it faster and from any computer with Web History. " What could possibly go wrong?
posted by jbickers on Apr 25, 2007 - 26 comments

George Orwell, Big Brother is watching your house. With CCTV. Perhaps the Surveillance Camera Players could put on a performance there. It looks like Britain really is becoming a surveillance society. [Via Digg.]
posted by homunculus on Apr 2, 2007 - 44 comments

AT&T and Verizon obey FBI emergency requests, even if they're of dubious legality, and they get paid for it. But AT&T can't be sued, they say, because that would endanger national security.
posted by homunculus on Mar 20, 2007 - 42 comments

Big Brother State. Nice animation about life in a surveillance society. [Via BB.]
posted by homunculus on Mar 10, 2007 - 49 comments

For Your Eyes Only? Allegations that the government is reading your e-mails, with the help of AT&T. The latest episode of NOW did a good piece on the NSA's domestic surveillance program (previously discussed here.) It can be viewed on their website. Meanwhile, Canadian human rights attorney Maureen Webb has written a new book on the scope of government surveillance, and found that the use of sophisticated methods to search for terrorists is not identifying the right suspects.
posted by homunculus on Feb 21, 2007 - 72 comments

AT&T Ducks Accountability. Lawsuits, Questions Follow NSA Surveillance Approval.
posted by homunculus on Jan 21, 2007 - 14 comments

The UKs Celebrity Big Brother provokes a diplomatic incident after bullying and alleged racism in the Big Brother house. At the center of the furor are Shilpa Shetty, massive bollywood film star, and Jade Goody, a previous Big Brother content famous for being a previous big brother contestant and her odd views on geography. Both Jade and Shetty are now up for eviction, with the formerly popular Jade being widely expected to be evicted. She could face trouble on the outside, where already an anti-bullying charity she represents has dropped her. Meanwhile Shetty has become favorite to win.
posted by Artw on Jan 17, 2007 - 136 comments

Psiphon facilitates circumvention of national firewalls.
posted by Optamystic on Nov 29, 2006 - 15 comments

Fingerprinting school kids for lunch. Several schools in California will require students to scan their fingerprints before getting their school lunch to help speed up cafeteria lines. Don't worry about it, it's already being done in Georgia while Florida has a similar system which also lets parents check to see what their kids bought for lunch. Arizona doesn't do fingerprints, it just has the kids enter a number for their meals. New Jersey has Iris Scanning.

Hopefully all of this information was gained through parental consent.
posted by Brandon Blatcher on Nov 5, 2006 - 38 comments

Drugs at music festivals are nothing new. Sometimes this results in comically bad journalism and sometimes the results are not so funny. At the Wakarusa Music Festival this past year police used new, creepy tools pursue drug dealers on the Festival grounds in an attempt to seperate the drugs from the music.
posted by aburd on Sep 16, 2006 - 28 comments

You are being followed.
posted by panoptican on Jul 25, 2006 - 53 comments

Before I was even aware that such a plan existed, the FAA has put the brakes on a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office plan to purchase a fleet of 20 camera-equipped unmanned spy drone planes (only $30,000 apiece) to fly over my city and monitor civilian behavior round the clock. Sadly, the plan is not permanently kiboshed, but merely on hold until authorization can be obtained.
posted by jonson on Jun 22, 2006 - 39 comments

Surveillance Nation. Cameras, Cameras everywhere. Welcome to the United Kingdom.

"The UK would appear to have around 4.2m cameras in operation," says Professor Clive Norris, of Sheffield University's centre for criminological research. "That's more than anywhere else in the world, with the possible exception of China. It's one for every 14 citizens."

While you're here, admire the ANPR system, that will record every journey by private car, anywhere in the country and keep the information for five years. It will be switched on this summer. Not everyone is happy.
posted by grahamwell on Jun 20, 2006 - 65 comments

Bush administration signals intent to invoke the obscure state secrets privilege in order to stop the EFF lawsuit against AT&T, (previously discussed here) for providing the NSA direct access all 312 terabytes of its customers' telephone and internet traffic since 2001, (including those Good Vibrations charges you racked up). In a nutshell, according to legal experts, invoking the privilege kills the judicial process dead: the courthouse doors are closed, and there's nothing but grownup stuff to see here; move along, kids.
posted by squirrel on May 2, 2006 - 51 comments

NewsFilter: I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?
posted by I Love Tacos on Feb 18, 2006 - 154 comments

Shut yo' mouth! The US government, will soon spider the entire web analyzing all pages -- including your blog -- for evidence of "terrorism". It greatly extends prior government watching of the web for "terrorists" like the ACLU. But not for political speech, of course. Never that.
So shut your mouth and shut down your blog if you don't want to end up on a list of people to be "neutralized" -- like Mario Savio, hounded for ten years despite never breaking a law.
posted by orthogonality on Feb 9, 2006 - 111 comments

National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) Sometimes, its the unheralded steps, that take you most quickly to your destination. On October 7, 2005, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and their associated domains announced the first release of the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) Version 0.1. NIEM "establishes a single standard XML foundation for exchanging information between DHS, DOJ, and supporting domains, such as Justice, Emergency Management, and Intelligence." The release of this specification, and the development of the systems that utilize it may actually be the cataylst for more 'progress' in information mining on the individual than most other, well publicized efforts. NIEM Mission: "To assist in developing a unified strategy, partnerships, and technical implementations for national information sharing — laying the foundation for local, state, tribal, and federal interoperability by joining together communities of interest." When you say it like that, it sounds sort of cool!
posted by sfts2 on Jan 12, 2006 - 19 comments

In the early 1990s Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC coined the term ubiquitous computing or "ubicomp" to describe the way he thought computing ought to look in the post-PC era: computers would be invisible, "in the woodwork everywhere around us." Ubicomp has been discussed here a few times before (in fact a MeFite went on to write a book about it)...but with a flood of manufacturers racing to offer up their versions of the so-called digital home, is Weiser's vision moving closer to reality?
posted by Shanachie on Jan 11, 2006 - 23 comments

George Galloway is in the Celebrity Big Brother house. My jaw dropped when I read it. He's a prominent member of the Respect Coalition, an antiwar figure and a frequent target of corruption claims. He claims his strategy is to reach a new audience of young people and to offer the public a "chance to show a large and different audience what I'm really like". There's already a debate about the war on the official show message boards.
posted by By The Grace of God on Jan 6, 2006 - 73 comments

$110 gets you last 100 calls made by any cellphone. Apparently it is legal.
posted by riffola on Nov 29, 2005 - 26 comments

Mologogo Track any Java/GPS enabled phone through a convienent Google Maps based interface with mologogo.
posted by phrontist on Oct 30, 2005 - 10 comments

What you watch Tucked deep inside a massive bill designed to track sex offenders and prevent children from being victimized by sex crimes is language that could put many Hollywood movies in the same category as hardcore, X-rated films. The provision added to the Children's Safety Act of 2005 would require any film, TV show or digital image that contains a sex scene to come under the same government filing requirements that adult films must meet.
posted by halekon on Oct 12, 2005 - 41 comments

"The number of secret court-authorized wiretaps across the country surged by 19 percent last year, according to court records which also showed that not a single application was denied."
posted by knave on Apr 29, 2005 - 20 comments

Canadian Couple Offers Drug Dog for Hire (Reuters link)
A couple bought a dog trained to sniff drugs for $20,000 and now they will hire it out to sniff around your kid's stuff to see if they've been doing drugs within the last 30 days for a mere $20 a sniff (they also have a sliding scale for businesses that need them).
Where to draw the line between concern and obsession for keeping one's children safe? Some sites are keeping tabs on the infringement of children's rights including privacy. Which begs the question, Do Children Have a Right to Privacy?
posted by fenriq on Feb 4, 2005 - 46 comments

Who is watching Big Brother? Last week, the Australian Privacy Foundation held its annual Big Brother Awards, with biometric passports winning the prestigious "Orwell" for the most invasive technology (other countries' Big Brother Awards here). Not long before, Privacy International and the Electronic Privacy Information Center released their 7th Annual Survey on the state of privacy in sixty countries, claiming that threats to personal privacy have reached a level that is dangerous to fundamental human rights. Are we edging closer to Room 101?
posted by UbuRoivas on Nov 29, 2004 - 6 comments

Eastasia plans attacks on Eurasia "Efforts each of you make to be vigilant – such as reporting suspicious items or activities to authorities – do make a difference. Every citizen using their common sense and eyes and ears can support our national effort to stop the terrorists. Thank you for your continued resolve in the face of the ongoing threat of terrorism. We must continue to work together – to ensure that the freedom we just celebrated continues as the hallmark of this great nation." Are you scared yet?
posted by skechada on Jul 8, 2004 - 57 comments

Unreasonable Search and Seizure? Boston's MBTA to begin randomly searching passenger bags and packages next month on subway and commuter trains. Last month they started playing frequent Big Brother-type announcements as part of their See Something? Say Something(pdf) - Transit Watch program. I'm either reminded of "Loose Lips, Sink Ships" or Starship Troopers' "Do you want to know more?".
posted by FreezBoy on Jun 8, 2004 - 28 comments

Watching Justice -- a new blog keeping an eye on the Dept. of Justice, drawing on the research and insight of a vast list of organizations, from the ABA to the Violence Policy Center, and brought to us by Soros' Open Society Institute.
posted by amberglow on Apr 18, 2004 - 5 comments

The DOJ wants to tap your IMs, your email, your VOIP calls, and your Web browsing -- and they want you to pay for it. The Justice Department is seeking to expand its ability to monitor online traffic by forcing broadband providers to make their services "wiretap-friendly," and a petition filed with the FCC this week says you will foot the bill. Get ready for CALEA 2.0. "As a means of espionage, writs of assistance and general warrants are but puny instruments of tyranny and oppression when compared with wire tapping," the prescient Justice Brandeis observed in 1928.
posted by digaman on Mar 13, 2004 - 15 comments

Students for an Orwellian Society. Also: The complete Newspeak dictionary and American Newspeak. I love Big Brother!
posted by jdroth on Feb 4, 2004 - 8 comments

Big Brother Really Exists, And He's Not Who You Think He Is. While most of those in the privacy realm have been focusing on keeping the government from spying on its citizens, the government has made an end-run: Letting the private sector do it for them. ChoicePoint, an Atlanta-based spinoff from credit agency Equifax, now has more than 200 terrabytes of data on us, and as previously noted, they're not always very good at it. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
posted by darren on Dec 10, 2003 - 25 comments

The State of Britain today. Mass surveillance of it's citizenry. ID cards. Making criminals of teenagers who snog (!) And a bill to rival the USA Patriot Act removing property & human rights at a minister's whim. With men being imprisoned in UK jails for over almost 2 years, without charge or trial (ala Guantanamo) it looks like the partnership between Bush and Blair is a little more than simple expediency.
posted by Blue Stone on Dec 1, 2003 - 26 comments

Southeast Airlines has plans to install digital video cameras throughout the cabins of its planes to record the faces and activities of its passengers at all times. Furthermore, the charter airline will store the digitized video for up to 10 years. And it may use face recognition software to match faces to names and personal records.
posted by Irontom on Jul 18, 2003 - 17 comments

The Future is Now. "It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face… was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime…"
posted by the fire you left me on Jul 9, 2003 - 15 comments

Nominate the world's stupidest security procedure. UK-based watchdog group, Privacy International, is accepting nominations until March 15th from the general public about the most annoying and invasive security measures with the lowest effectiveness in protecting individual safety. What would you nominate?
posted by jonp72 on Mar 6, 2003 - 19 comments

A Google boondoggle? Does Google deserve your nomination for Big Brother of the Year? Nine points from the previously mentioned folks at Google Watch. (via the Disinformation Newsletter)
posted by boost ventilator on Feb 18, 2003 - 27 comments

KEEP BIG BROTHER'S HANDS OFF THE INTERNET Ashcroft as Senator! That was then. This is now. Does it still apply?
posted by Postroad on Nov 25, 2002 - 16 comments