Technofascism blog

Remember, this is all according to the DoD planning document:

The goal is to achieve transparent flight operations in the NAS. (national airspace).

There are various systems, both on and off board, and policy changes being explored to allow incremental access to the civil airspace system.

via Reuters.

The U.S. government will have unmanned surveillance aircraft monitoring the whole southwest border with Mexico from September 1, as it ramps up border security in this election year, a top official said on Monday.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said U.S. Customs and Border Protection would begin flying a Predator B drone out of Corpus Christi, Texas, on Wednesday, extending the reach of the agency’s unmanned surveillance aircraft across the length of the nearly 2,000 mile border with Mexico.

“With the deployment of the Predator in Texas, we will now be able to cover the southwest border from the El Centro sector in California all the way to the Gulf of Mexico in Texas, providing critical aerial surveillance assistance to personnel on the ground,” Napolitano said during a conference call.

via San Jose Mercury News.

California officials are outfitting preschoolers in Contra Costa County with tracking devices they say will save staff time and money.The system was introduced Tuesday. When at the school, students will wear a jersey that has a small radio frequency tag. The tag will send signals to sensors that help track children’s whereabouts, attendance and even whether they’ve eaten or not.

School officials say it will free up teachers and administrators who previously had to note on paper files when a child was absent or had eaten.

Sung Kim of the county’s employment and human services department said the system could save thousands of hours of staff time and pay for itself within a year.

It cost $50,000 and was paid by a federal grant.

Jesse Schell’s point-based Orwellian nightmare world is getting closer everyday. Check-in apps are now automatically tracking users locations and giving them tasks.  The tasks are currently voluntary and game-like; eventually, they will become mandatory and work-like.  For the first time in history, machines are tracking and assigning tasks to the general public.  Welcome to TechnoFascism!

via CNN.com.

Seth Priebatsch was at a burrito joint in Boston recently when a message popped up on his smartphone from an app called SCVNGR.

If he opened the foil on the burrito ever so carefully and turned the wrapper into a piece of origami art — and if he uploaded a picture of his creation to the app, the note said, then he would earn points toward a free burrito.

Priebatsch thought: That might be fun.

“I made a really weak origami crane, because I’m no origami artist myself,” he said, but “it got me closer to unlocking a free burrito, which was cool.”

SCVNGR, which Priebatsch helped create, is one of the latest apps to build on top of the idea of a “check-in,” that emerging term some tech-savvy people use to describe the act of using a GPS-enabled smartphone to share their whereabouts with friends.

Increasingly, app developers are using existing location-based social networks — such as Foursquare, Gowalla and, most recently, Facebook Places — to create games, challenges, city guides and dating services.

It seems the “check-in” was just the beginning.

SCVNGR, for example, announced its integration with Facebook Places on Friday. That means people can use that free Android and iPhone app to complete challenges similar to Priebatsch’s origami experiment and share that information easily with friends on Facebook. People on SCVNGR (pronounced “scavenger”) also will be able to see the locations of their friends who use Facebook Places.

Users also can go onto the app and create their own challenges if they’ve earned enough points, Priebatsch said.

‘Check-in fatigue’

Other location-based apps seek to make the act of checking in easier.

Tim Sears said he developed the Future Checkin iPhone app, for example, to help people combat a phenomenon he calls “check-in fatigue.”

The app automatically checks users in through the Foursquare network when they go within a 300-meter radius of one of their favorite locations.

That’s a big help if you’re the kind of person who checks in all the time and gets sick of pulling your phone out of your pocket constantly to do so, he said. And it also may help cut down on the social awkwardness of checking in if you’re with friends who would rather you talk to them than stare at a phone.

“If I’m at my house and I know I’m going to be at P.F. Chang’s later to grab Chinese food, I could search for that place [on the app], hit ‘add to favorites’ and it has it on my favorites list at that point,” Sears said, “so when I get with in 300 meters of P.F. Chang’s it will automatically check me in and send me a notification message.”

Geoloqi

An open-source group called geoloqi is trying to take that idea of an automated check-in radius even further.

The volunteer group of app developers, which is based in Portland, Oregon, is working on a website and app that will help trigger events if and when a person walks up to certain pre-set locations.

For example, you would be able to set the app to text you your shopping list when you went within a certain distance of your favorite grocery store.

Or, if you didn’t show up to work by 9 a.m., you could set the app automatically to e-mail your boss saying that you’re late, said Aaron Parecki, geoloqi’s founder.

“We’re calling these geonotes,” he said, “and these are location-based notes so you can leave yourself a note that is tied to a location and pops up when you’re there.”

The site and the app should be up and running in about a month, he said. Geoloqi won’t be a social network, exactly, but it could be integrated into Foursquare, Gowalla or other location-based networks, he said. The group has one new project up — it’s a Seattle, Washington-based website that can send you a text message, in real time, when a 911 call is placed within a certain radius of you.

Check-in guides

Other add-ons act more like guides to a city.

Foursquare has developed a number of innovative partnerships with corporations that want to advertise through the network, said Marshall Kirkpatrick, the lead writer at the tech blog ReadWriteWeb.

The Independent Film Channel, for example, launched a challenge for its viewers to review theaters, coffee shops and restaurants that exemplify the IFC brand, he said. The company picked its favorites, and people who follow IFC on Foursquare get notifications and reviews if they’re nearby.

Bravo, another TV channel, also has a similar integration with Foursquare. The channel’s pseudo stars, such as Lynne Curtin from “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” submit reviews of their favorite spots on the app.

Yelp, the restaurant and venue review site, also has added check-ins and is expected to integrate soon with Facebook Places. On the wackier side of things, an Android app called Pee*Free collected information from Foursquare users about public toilets to get you a rated guide to free, public commodes near you.

Finally, a website called Where Do You Go takes a person’s Foursquare check-ins and plots them on a heat map — giving you a good idea of which neighborhoods in your city you visit most often and which others you may want to explore.

Location games

Other developers are interested in turning the real world into a game.

Some are using check-ins to do so, although most of these appear to be in the earliest stages, said Brian Crecente, editor-in-chief at the gaming blog Kotaku.

A few games build on top of the Foursquare network. One, called Mayor War, encourages users of that app “to fight each other with virtual weapons in real locations.”

“Use eggs, wedgies, wet wellies and many more weapons to fight your friends and fellow mayors on Foursquare venues,” a description of that app says.

Another, called Mob Zombies, uses location as part of a zombie fighting game.

Shopkick

Other check-in-based apps try to save people money.

A app called shopkick, for example, is trying to combine some gamelike features with real-world shopping deals.

When you sign into the app, you’re shown a list of nearby retail stores. Some of those stores offer you deals if you check in from their location; others may give you a discount or points if you just walk in; and still others require you to complete some sort of challenge — like taking a photo of merchandise — before earning points.

Points in shopkick can be redeemed for gift cards and other prizes.

The app only works in certain cities for now, including New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, California, and Chicago, Illinois, according to the app’s website.

Further innovation

These apps may only be the beginning.

For developers to build on top of existing check-in apps, the owners of those apps must open their code for developers to tinker with.

Foursquare did this in November 2009, but others have only opened up recently or may do so in the near future. Gowalla, one of Foursquare’s direct competitors, opened its code up for developers this month.

Facebook Places announced it would let a group of select partners, including Foursquare, tinker with its code.

Facebook said it will open up its check-in code to everyone to write on top of in “coming months.”

That will give developers a chance to put new check-in-based apps out to Facebook’s 500 million users around the globe.

This doesn’t ensure the success of check-in-based apps, said Kirkpatrick, from ReadWriteWeb, but he said he hopes it will give this idea a boost.

via Yahoo! News.

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre – and scary – rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants – with no need for a search warrant.

It is a dangerous decision – one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.

This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle’s underside.

After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA’s actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)

In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno’s privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the “curtilage,” a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government’s intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.

The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno’s driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month’s decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people’s. The court’s ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. “There’s been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there’s one kind of diversity that doesn’t exist,” he wrote. “No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter.” The judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of “cultural elitism.”

The court went on to make a second terrible decision about privacy: that once a GPS device has been planted, the government is free to use it to track people without getting a warrant. There is a major battle under way in the federal and state courts over this issue, and the stakes are high. After all, if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police state – with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi.

Fortunately, other courts are coming to a different conclusion from the Ninth Circuit’s – including the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That court ruled, also this month, that tracking for an extended period of time with GPS is an invasion of privacy that requires a warrant. The issue is likely to end up in the Supreme Court.

In these highly partisan times, GPS monitoring is a subject that has both conservatives and liberals worried. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s pro-privacy ruling was unanimous – decided by judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Plenty of liberals have objected to this kind of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge Kozinski who has done so most passionately. “1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last,” he lamented in his dissent. And invoking Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia where privacy is essentially nonexistent, he warned: “Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we’re living in Oceania.”

via cbs3.com.

Teenagers are becoming addicted to texting, according to a new study. In fact experts are saying being hooked on texting can be like being addicted to drugs.

Walking, sitting, it doesn’t matter where it happens, teenagers seem to need to text. Statistics show 80 percent of all 15 to 18-year-olds own a cell phone. And the rate of texting has sky rocketed 600 percent in three years. The average teen sends 3,000 texts a month

via The Associated Press.

Members of the 24 Hour Fitness chain no longer need to worry about forgetting their membership cards and IDs when they go to the gym: All they need to bring are their fingers.

The San Ramon-based company is now using fingerprint scanners at its 60 San Francisco Bay area locations to verify members’ identities. It also has started offering so-called “Cardless Check-In” this month at some gyms in other states.

To enter the gym, 24 Hour Fitness members need to punch in a 10-digit code and have an index finger scanned by a device that compares the fingerprint to one on file.

via Forbes.

As the privacy controversy around full-body security scans begins to simmer, it’s worth noting that courthouses and airport security checkpoints aren’t the only places where backscatter x-ray vision is being deployed. The same technology, capable of seeing through clothes and walls, has also been rolling out on U.S. streets.

American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. While the biggest buyer of AS&E’s machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S.

“This product is now the largest selling cargo and vehicle inspection system ever,” says Reiss.

Law enforcement agencies in Washington D.C. have begun to use technology that they say can predict when crimes will be committed and who will commit them, before they actually happen.

The Minority Report like pre-crime software has been developed by Richard Berk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Previous incarnations of the software, already being used in Baltimore and Philadelphia were limited to predictions of murders by and among parolees and offenders on probation.

via Pre-Crime Technology To Be Used In Washington D.C..

via ABC News.

New crime prediction software being rolled out in the nation’s capital should reduce not only the murder rate, but the rate of many other crimes as well.

Developed by Richard Berk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the software is already used in Baltimore and Philadelphia to predict which individuals on probation or parole are most likely to murder and to be murdered.

In his latest version, the one being implemented in D.C., Berk goes even further, identifying the individuals most likely to commit crimes other than murder.

If the software proves successful, it could influence sentencing recommendations and bail amounts.

Seeking more money and even more control in the guise of greater efficiency, a Connecticut public school system is seeking to participate in a “research” program that involves tracking students with RFID chips.  The “research” would be funded by easy money from a $100,000 NSF grant. Your tax dollars at work.

via Acorn-online

New Canaan Public Schools have been invited to participate in a technology experiment — one that would involve potentially placing radio frequency strips on student or staff ID cards or on school items such as laptops to enhance security and increase efficiencies.