Canada May Soon Require Facial Recognition, Biometric Data for Air Travel via @nationalfile https://t.co/0tzWCWOb5H
— lou ferreira (@astroloupicus) May 22, 2022
Should law enforcement be able to test them?
Article republished from Undark Magazine
Biometrics
Amazon’s creepy facial recognition doorbell won’t just be looking at your front porch. It will surveil the WHOLE NEIGHBORHOOD and store the data in the Cloud.
Source: Amazon’s Creepy Facial Recognition Doorbell – The Organic Prepper
http://www.theorganicprepper.com
Amazon’s creepy facial recognition doorbell won’t just be looking at your front porch. It will surveil the WHOLE NEIGHBORHOOD and store the data in the Cloud.
Source: Amazon’s Creepy Facial Recognition Doorbell – The Organic Prepper
http://www.theorganicprepper.com
By Meadow Clark
At first glance of Amazon’s new patent application, one would be tempted to think it no more than a built-in “smart” security system.
But no, this facial recognition surveillance doorbell does a lot more than record would-be thieves.
Ding! Dong! Prepare to be downright disturbed.
According to a new report, the patent application, made available in late November, would pair facial surveillance such as Rekognition, the product that Amazon is aggressively marketing to law enforcement, with Ring – a doorbell camera company that Amazon acquired in 2018.
CNN writes, “Amazon’s application says the process leads to safer, more connected neighborhoods, as well as better informed homeowners and law enforcement.”
Yeah, that’s one way of putting it. Here’s another:
Amazon is dreaming of a dangerous future, with its technology at the center of a massive decentralized surveillance network, running real-time facial recognition on members of the public using cameras installed in people’s doorbells. –Jacob Snow, ACLU
Wow. Do you feel safer yet?
This tech isn’t really there to protect your house or neighborhood.
It’s going to record all who walk by and gather composite images and recordings that can be stored in a cloud and accessed by law enforcement to help surveil and catch suspects.
One of the main problems – besides the obvious privacy violations and smashing the 4th amendment to smithereens – is that facial recognition has been abysmal so far. That means if a database determines you are a suspect because you bear a striking resemblance, then the police could show up and detain you before you even drop off the potato salad to your next potluck.
Snow writes:
While the details are sketchy, the application describes a system that the police can use to match the faces of people walking by a doorbell camera with a photo database of persons they deem “suspicious.” Likewise, homeowners can also add photos of “suspicious” people into the system and then the doorbell’s facial recognition program will scan anyone passing their home. In either case, if a match occurs, the person’s face can be automatically sent to law enforcement, and the police could arrive in minutes.
It would be far too easy to get yourself on a “list” with this technology
The application describes creating a database of suspicious persons. Unwanted visitors would be added to the list when a homeowner tags them as not authorized. Other people could be added to the database because they are a convicted felon or registered sex offender, according to the application. Residents may also alert neighbors of a suspicious person’s presence.But some people, such as a mail courier, could be placed on an authorized persons list. Postal service logos could be used to help identify them.
Putting people on a naughty list? Wait, doesn’t that all sound eerily similar to the social credit system rolled out in China?
“The patent describes the neighborhood surveillance system as an opt-in service,” CNN adds.
But really, it is not possible to opt out of broad brushstroke surveillance. How can I opt out of my neighbor (and Amazon, and the government) storing everything about me in the Cloud? What if my neighbor hates that my tree branch hangs over their fence? Will I go on their suspicious persons list?
Remember when Amazon just sold books?
“As a former patent litigator, I’ve spent a lot of time reading patents. It’s rare for patent applications to lay out, in such nightmarish detail, the world a company wants to bring about,” writes Jacob Snow in a recent ACLU report on the newest invasive technology by the company that only 10 years ago just sold…books.
Photo: Amazon
Is Justice blind or prejudiced?
“These systems threaten to further entangle people with law enforcement, ripping families apart and increasing the likelihood of racially biased police violence,” Snow claims.
He adds, “this technology puts activists and protesters in danger when exercising their First Amendment rights.”
Tests from the ACLU showed that facial recognition doesn’t correctly identify people and this leaves the door wide open to let A.I. do the justice. That means innocent people could be filling up the privatized prison system.
The ACLU tested the software, and…
The ACLU tested the Rekognition software and proved that it incorrectly identified members of Congress as common criminals. Yes, the irony would be giggle-inducing in a John Oliver segment, but not so much for the innocent person serving life in prison.
This glaring inaccuracy prompted Amazon shareholders to urge the company to stop selling this tech to law enforcement. The recent patent application serves as a flippant disregard for that plea.
“The application also undercuts Amazon’s own purported defense of its face surveillance product. The company has told the public that biometrics should only be used by law enforcement as an aid, not a replacement, to human judgment. But Amazon’s patent application is pushing the technology toward automation, removing human judgment from the identification process, and instead potentially relying on data, like arrest photos, that itself is a record of racially discriminatory policing,” says Snow.
The ACLU notes that facial recognition is even less accurate for darker skinned people and that this technology paves the way for harassment and wrongful action against the formerly incarcerated. But for activists, too.
Here is a figure of the doorbell and the surveillance scope. Check out the rest of the patent application HERE:
Diagram from Amazon’s patent application
That’s Not All, Folks!
Snow warns that the patent makes it painfully clear that this surveillance tech will not be limited to doorbells or homes.
Any complementary audio or visual device – Cough! Echo! Cough! – can be set up for biometric scanning.
Amazon is expecting to target a bevy of other biometrics such as:
- fingerprints
- skin-texture analysis
- DNA, palm-vein analysis
- hand geometry
- iris recognition
- odor/scent recognition
In addition, the surveillance tech could even include recognition based on behavioral characteristics, like:
- typing rhythm
- gait
- voice recognition
Imagine a doorbell – or in-home device – that can do all that.
Do we even know each other as well as Amazon will know us?
For Snow…“It confirms that Amazon wants to enable the tracking of everyone, everywhere, all the time. And it’s apparently happy to deliver that data to the government.”
We always knew the government had boundary issues but this is just TMI – too much intimacy.
A lot of people are comfy and cozy with the idea that they are being watched all the time, like the people lining up to be scanned at the airport to save two seconds of their time.
For me, being watched under a microscope by my government makes every nerve of my being burn with the fire of a thousand hells with the added dread that there is not one minute of reprieve, nor any identity of my own except to be an eyeballed object of the all mighty, omnipresent State.
But, hey, that’s just me…
You can’t escape this recognition tech
If you go to someone’s house, you’ll be on the digital record.
Imagine if a neighborhood was set up with these doorbell cameras. Simply walking up to a friend’s house could result in your face, your fingerprint, or your voice being flagged as “suspicious” and delivered to a government database without your knowledge or consent. With Amazon selling the devices, operating the servers, and pushing the technology on law enforcement, the company is building all the pieces of a surveillance network, reaching from the government all the way to our front doors.
Like I said before when I wrote about biometrics at the Atlanta International airport: it’s nearly impossible to avoid facial recognition technology today.
Yet, we do still have control over how we spend our money, our voice, and with whom we spend our time. It’s not much control in the grand scheme of things but if we rise up and fight this, our great grandchildren will honor us.
That is, if they will even understand the concept of privacy by the time they get here…
What do you think of all this?
It seems like every day I stumble across a new piece of creepy tech that someone wants to add to our every day lives under the guise of “convenience” and “safety.” How will you avoid getting caught in the net? Are you creeped out by this stuff?
Fingerprints are the oldest and most widely used biometric marker. Artifacts unearthed from ancient Babylon, China, and Persia show that fingerprints were often used on clay tablets and seals for business transactions and official documents. The loops, whorls, and arches that emerge from the “friction ridges” that form on a fetus’s developing fingers become unique to each person, and it’s no surprise that fingerprint identification has also been the gold standard in law enforcement and forensics since about the early 1900s. More recently, fingerprint verification technology has become almost ubiquitous in our daily lives as an access key for everything from smartphones and computers to bank accounts, offices, and even health records.
For all its utility, however, the image of this distinctive, swirling pattern has been the most information that you could extract from a fingerprint—though that’s starting to change. A raft of sensitive new fingerprint-analysis techniques is proving to be a potentially powerful, and in some cases worrying, new avenue for extracting intimate personal information—including what drugs a person has used.
That’s right: The new techniques can determine, from a single fingerprint, not whether you have handled these drugs, but whether you have taken them.
The new methods use biometrics to analyze biochemical traces in sweat found along the ridges of a fingerprint. And those trace chemicals can quickly reveal whether you have ingested cocaine, opiates, marijuana, or other drugs. One novel, noninvasive forensic technique developed by researchers at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom can detect cocaine and opiate use from a fingerprint in as little as 30 seconds. The team collected 160 fingerprint samples from 16 individuals at a drug-treatment center who had used cocaine within the past 24 hours—confirmed by saliva testing—along with 80 samples from non-users. The assay—which was so sensitive that it could still detect trace amounts of cocaine after subjects washed their hands with soap—correctly identified 99 percent of the users, and gave false positive results for just 2.5 percent of the nonusers, according to a paper published in Clinical Chemistry.
The researchers say they hope to expand the range of controlled substances that can be detected, which could include methamphetamines, amphetamines, and marijuana. The test can be modified to detect therapeutic drugs prescribed by physicians too.
Needless to say, the technology has titillated law-enforcement and corrections officials, and it may have useful applications for professionals working in drug treatment, elder-care centers, and other inpatient and outpatient facilities. For all of its heady new potential, however, the emergence of technologies like these has some observers feeling a bit uncomfortable about how, where, and to whom they are likely to be applied. More pointedly, the ability to glean detailed information about a person from a mere fingerprint—Do they smoke cigarettes? Use marijuana? Enjoy fatty foods? Drink alcohol?—raises a number of potentially knotty questions of privacy and consent. And even within the criminal-justice system, some stakeholders worry that the emergence of these new fingerprint technologies could undermine what are already tenuous human rights.
“Oftentimes police will deploy these technologies without any consultation with the public,” said Camilla Graham Wood, a legal officer at Privacy International, a London-based organization that advocates for greater human rights around emerging technologies. Some law-enforcement agencies in the United Kingdom are already experimenting with field devices that can extract biometric data from fingerprints. “They’re relying on older, outdated laws that came into being long before these technologies were even considered,” Wood said. “So, it is unclear what legal basis they are relying upon.”
Wood said the police implementation of the fingerprint-based drug detection is an example of “technology for technology’s sake.”
“The bottom line is that police and law enforcement are excited about this new technology,” she told me. “They want to use it but don’t question, ‘Is it necessary?’ or, ‘How should it be done in a proportionate manner?’ These technologies have become very useful and convenient for the police. But that doesn’t make it acceptable or normal.”
Full article:
Source link
(Natural News) In a happy marriage of old Captcha and new biometric techniques, researchers have devised a new verification methodology called Real-Time Captcha. It presents real-time puzzles that will throw artificial intelligence for a loop and protect the accounts of human users, reported a ScienceDaily article.
Real-Time Captcha is a logical evolution of current biometric techniques based on facial photos or video feeds of the user. It’s designed to foil machine learning and image generation software that have adapted to now-standard security systems.
Like current image-video biometric systems, Real-Time Captcha asks users to look into the camera of their mobile device. The new addition is a Captcha that appears on the screen with a random question that a human can answer much faster than an artificial intelligence could.
Mobile devices and online services have changed up their passwords for biometric techniques that verify the log-in attempt by looking at the user’s biological features. One such example is the iPhone X, which has facial recognition software. Other devices and systems require brief video segments of the user.
However, cyber-attackers can still spoof or steal these, said Professor Wenke Lee of Georgia Tech. “If the attacker knows that authentication is based on recognizing a face, they can use an algorithm to synthesize a fake image to impersonate the real user,” Lee warned. (Related: Bitcoin wallet devices found to be surprisingly vulnerable to hacking.)
The struggle for cyber-security
Real-Time Captcha was designed to address these vulnerabilities. It is the brainchild of cyber-security specialists from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and developed for the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The researchers looked into image spoofing software to find out how cyber-attackers bypass current security. They then designed a system that requires hackers to break a Captcha in addition to generating convincing video.
The widely-used and well-known Captcha stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” It keeps bots outside websites by leveraging a human’s superior ability to see patterns in images.
“We are making the challenge harder by sending users unpredictable requests and limiting the response time to rule out machine interaction,” said Erkam Uzun, a graduate research assistant at Georgia Tech.
Real-Time Captcha debuted at the Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) Symposium 2018 in San Diego, California.
Old and new tech
Log-in requests must pass the following tests imposed by Real-Time Captcha:
- spot the challenge question in the Captcha
- answer the question within a time limit
- match the pre-recorded image and voice of the legitimate user
According to the Georgia Tech team, challenges will include easy math problems and scrambled letters that a human can recognize and answer while a machine is still trying to make sense of the Captcha.
They tested their new hybrid captcha-biometric system on 30 human and machine participants. The researchers found out that humans could comply with the Captcha question in just a second or less.
Machines, in contrast, required anywhere from six to 10 seconds to decode the challenge and generate an appropriate faked audio and video. “This allows us to determine quickly if the response is from a machine or a human,” explained Uzun.
He and his fellow researchers assure that Real-Time Captcha will not be a major drain on bandwidth. The Captcha images are small in comparison to the audio and video that are required by existing biometric systems.
The Georgia Tech group is looking to improve their newly-developed system. They’ve identified challenges such as background noise disrupting speech recognition software and the need for a secure connection between the device and the authenticating server.
Keep track of cyber-security developments at CyberWar.News.
Sources include:
Source: Aaron Kesel @ Activist Post
December 30, 2017
Russia is to start a biometric database for financial services starting next summer, the Central Bank of Russia said in a statement.
The system, although not mandatory, will extend access to banking by letting customers open accounts without having to visit a banking branch. This is all in an effort to “digitize” financial services. The regulator noted that data would only be stored with a person’s consent.
However, what the biometric database will include is worrying to say the least.
The biometric database will incorporate images of faces, voice samples and, eventually, irises and fingerprints.
With constant hacks against corporations including credit agency Equifax here in the U.S., which was threatened in September to pay in Bitcoin or else, putting all of someone’s physical identification in one place is a nightmarish scenario. Especially with the rise of using biometric data (fingerprints and facial recognition) to unlock cell phones.
Imagine someone hacks your bank biometric information – they now have your full identity and are free to access your phone and other services that use your fingerprint and face as if they were you. This enables blackmailing with access to all your private information, text, and pictures.
The biometric effort is being backed by Russian state-owned Rostelecom, and Sberbank PJSC who has been selected to run the database, Bloomberg reported.
Last month, PJSC acquired a 25% stake in a company called VisionLabs as a first step toward building a biometric platform to identify people through face, voice and retina recognition technologies.
Rostelecom’s board chairman is Sergei Ivanov, a former KGB agent who was President Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff until last year and is currently among those sanctioned by the U.S. for Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.
The law will take effect six months after it’s passed. The database could also be expanded for use by microfinance organizations and government services, the central bank added.
Russia isn’t the only country planning to implement a biometric database. China has also turned its nation into George Orwell’s nightmare.
China’s Ministry of Public Security, which oversees the database, has amassed biometric information for more than 40 million people it was reported in 2015. The Communist country has the world’s biggest database of DNA information according to a report published by Human Rights Watch (HRW) just this year. For comparison, in the US, the FBI’s national DNA index has 12.7 million offender profiles.
“Mass DNA collection by the powerful Chinese police absent effective privacy protections or an independent judicial system is a perfect storm for abuses,” Sophie Richardson, China director at HRW said. “China is moving its Orwellian system to the genetic level.”
A follow-up report published earlier this month by the human rights watchdog group revealed that there was even a program which has gathered biometric data—including fingerprints, iris scans, blood-type, and DNA—on millions of residents in six regions in Xinjiang in 2017 under the guise of a free public health program providing physical examinations.
That’s not all. According to the organization, the Chinese government is even collecting “voice pattern” samples of individuals to establish a national voice biometric database.
The group stated authorities are collaborating with iFlytek, a Chinese company that produces 80 percent of all speech recognition technology in the country, to develop a pilot surveillance system that can automatically identify targeted voices in phone conversations.
“The Chinese government has been collecting the voice patterns of tens of thousands of people with little transparency about the program or laws regulating who can be targeted or how that information is going to be used,” said Sophie Richardson, China director. “Authorities can easily misuse that data in a country with a long history of unchecked surveillance and retaliation against critics.”
Here in the U.S. the DHS is planning a biometric facial recognition database for border checkpoints and to create the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) to store 500 million people, including many US citizens’ identities within its system.
HART will no doubt link into the FBI’s NGI (Next Generation Identification System.) The FBI uses the system for a number of criminal cases a few are listed below.
As detailed on the FBI’s website:
- The Interstate Photo System contains 23 million front-facing photographs that can be used to identify suspects without human intervention.
- The Repository for Individuals of Special Concern (RISC) allows agents in the field to rapidly identify detainees and criminal suspects by searching a repository of Wanted Persons, Sex Offenders Registry Subjects, Known or appropriately Suspected Terrorists, and other persons of special interest.
- The Latents and National Palm Print System is an updated database of finger and palm prints that can be searched on a nationwide basis.
- The Rap Back Service notifies agencies of the activity of individuals after “the initial processing and retention of criminal or civil transactions.” The service can “notify agencies of subsequent activity for individuals enrolled in the service. Including a more timely process of confirming the suitability of those individuals placed in positions of trust and notification to users of criminal activity for those individuals placed on probation or parole.”
- Iris Recognition is “poised to offer law enforcement a new tool to quickly and accurately determine identity.”
Facebook has long used facial recognition software to identify its users that upload photographs and offers facial recognition as a method of verifying a user is who they say they are.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is currently working with allied organizations to oppose mandatory national ID cards and biometric databases. According to EFF’s website, there is an expanding list of countries that have introduced biometric ID databases including Argentina, Belgium, Colombia, Germany, Italy, Peru, and Spain.
That list will soon include Russia, the U.S., and other countries within the European Union. Privacy will cease to exist if we let it and will be a thing of the past. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Last month, PJSC acquired a 25% stake in a company called VisionLabs as a first step toward building a biometric platform to identify people through face, voice and retina recognition technologies.
Rostelecom’s board chairman is Sergei Ivanov, a former KGB agent who was President Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff until last year and is currently among those sanctioned by the U.S. for Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.
The law will take effect six months after it’s passed. The database could also be expanded for use by microfinance organizations and government services, the central bank added.
Russia isn’t the only country planning to implement a biometric database. China has also turned its nation into George Orwell’s nightmare.
China’s Ministry of Public Security, which oversees the database, has amassed biometric information for more than 40 million people it was reported in 2015. The Communist country has the world’s biggest database of DNA information according to a report published by Human Rights Watch (HRW) just this year. For comparison, in the US, the FBI’s national DNA index has 12.7 million offender profiles.
“Mass DNA collection by the powerful Chinese police absent effective privacy protections or an independent judicial system is a perfect storm for abuses,” Sophie Richardson, China director at HRW said. “China is moving its Orwellian system to the genetic level.”
A follow-up report published earlier this month by the human rights watchdog group revealed that there was even a program which has gathered biometric data—including fingerprints, iris scans, blood-type, and DNA—on millions of residents in six regions in Xinjiang in 2017 under the guise of a free public health program providing physical examinations.
That’s not all. According to the organization, the Chinese government is even collecting “voice pattern” samples of individuals to establish a national voice biometric database.
The group stated authorities are collaborating with iFlytek, a Chinese company that produces 80 percent of all speech recognition technology in the country, to develop a pilot surveillance system that can automatically identify targeted voices in phone conversations.
“The Chinese government has been collecting the voice patterns of tens of thousands of people with little transparency about the program or laws regulating who can be targeted or how that information is going to be used,” said Sophie Richardson, China director. “Authorities can easily misuse that data in a country with a long history of unchecked surveillance and retaliation against critics.”
Here in the U.S. the DHS is planning a biometric facial recognition database for border checkpoints and to create the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) to store 500 million people, including many US citizens’ identities within its system.
HART will no doubt link into the FBI’s NGI (Next Generation Identification System.) The FBI uses the system for a number of criminal cases a few are listed below.
As detailed on the FBI’s website:
- The Interstate Photo System contains 23 million front-facing photographs that can be used to identify suspects without human intervention.
- The Repository for Individuals of Special Concern (RISC) allows agents in the field to rapidly identify detainees and criminal suspects by searching a repository of Wanted Persons, Sex Offenders Registry Subjects, Known or appropriately Suspected Terrorists, and other persons of special interest.
- The Latents and National Palm Print System is an updated database of finger and palm prints that can be searched on a nationwide basis.
- The Rap Back Service notifies agencies of the activity of individuals after “the initial processing and retention of criminal or civil transactions.” The service can “notify agencies of subsequent activity for individuals enrolled in the service. Including a more timely process of confirming the suitability of those individuals placed in positions of trust and notification to users of criminal activity for those individuals placed on probation or parole.”
- Iris Recognition is “poised to offer law enforcement a new tool to quickly and accurately determine identity.”
Facebook has long used facial recognition software to identify its users that upload photographs and offers facial recognition as a method of verifying a user is who they say they are.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is currently working with allied organizations to oppose mandatory national ID cards and biometric databases. According to EFF’s website, there is an expanding list of countries that have introduced biometric ID databases including Argentina, Belgium, Colombia, Germany, Italy, Peru, and Spain.
That list will soon include Russia, the U.S., and other countries within the European Union. Privacy will cease to exist if we let it and will be a thing of the past. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Aaron Kesel writes for Activist Post. Support us at Patreon. Follow us on Facebook,Twitter, Steemit, and BitChute. Ready for solutions? Subscribe to our premium newsletter Counter Markets.
“Such is life in America today that Americans are being made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are – our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics – in order to clear the nearly insurmountable hurdle that increasingly defines life in the United States: we are now guilty until proven innocent.”
“…the indignities being heaped upon us by the architects and agents of the American police state—whether or not we’ve done anything wrong—are just a foretaste of what is to come.”
Source: What Country Is This? Forced Blood Draws, Cavity Searches, And Colonoscopies | Zero Hedge
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
by Tyler Durden
Sep 7, 2017
“The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official.”
– Herman Schwartz, The Nation
Our freedoms – especially the Fourth Amendment – are being choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, shoot, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
Such is life in America today that Americans are being made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are – our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.) – in order to clear the nearly insurmountable hurdle that increasingly defines life in the United States: we are now guilty until proven innocent.
Forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans are being forced to accept that we have no control over our bodies, our lives and our property, especially when it comes to interactions with the government.
Consider, for example, what happened to Utah nurse Alex Wubbels after a police detective demanded to take blood from a badly injured, unconscious patient without a warrant.
Wubbels refused, citing hospital policy that requires police to either have a warrant or permission from the patient in order to draw blood. The detective had neither. Irate, the detective threatened to have Wubbels arrested if she didn’t comply. Backed up by her supervisors, Wubbels respectfully stood her ground only to be roughly grabbed, shoved out of the hospital, handcuffed and forced into an unmarked car while hospital police looked on and failed to intervene (take a look at the police body camera footage, which has gone viral, and see for yourself).
Michael Chorosky didn’t have an advocate like Wubbels to stand guard over his Fourth Amendment rights. Chorosky was surrounded by police, strapped to a gurney and then had his blood forcibly drawn after refusing to submit to a breathalyzer test. “What country is this? What country is this?” cried Chorosky during the forced blood draw.
Unfortunately, forced blood draws are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the indignities and abuses being heaped on Americans in the so-called name of “national security.”
Forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies and forced roadside strip searches are also becoming par for the course in an age in which police are taught to have no respect for the citizenry’s bodily integrity whether or not a person has done anything wrong.
For example, 21-year-old Charnesia Corley was allegedly being pulled over by Texas police in 2015 for “rolling” through a stop sign. Claiming they smelled marijuana, police handcuffed Corley, forced her to strip off her pants, threw her to the ground, forced her legs apart and then probed her vagina. The cavity search lasted 11 minutes. This practice is referred to as “rape by cop.”
David Eckert was forced to undergo an anal cavity search, three enemas, and a colonoscopy after allegedly failing to yield to a stop sign at a Wal-Mart parking lot. Cops justified the searches on the grounds that they suspected Eckert was carrying drugs because his “posture [was] erect” and “he kept his legs together.” No drugs were found.
During a routine traffic stop, Leila Tarantino was subjected to two roadside strip searches in plain view of passing traffic, while her two children—ages 1 and 4—waited inside her car. During the second strip search, presumably in an effort to ferret out drugs, a female officer “forcibly removed” a tampon from Tarantino. No contraband or anything illegal was found.
Thirty-eight-year-old Angel Dobbs and her 24-year-old niece, Ashley, were pulled over by a Texas state trooper on July 13, 2012, allegedly for flicking cigarette butts out of the car window. Insisting that he smelled marijuana, the trooper proceeded to interrogate them and search the car. Despite the fact that both women denied smoking or possessing any marijuana, the police officer then called in a female trooper, who carried out a roadside cavity search, sticking her fingers into the older woman’s anus and vagina, then performing the same procedure on the younger woman, wearing the same pair of gloves. No marijuana was found.
Meanwhile, four Milwaukee police officers were charged with carrying out rectal searches of suspects on the street and in police district stations over the course of several years. One of the officers was accused of conducting searches of men’s anal and scrotal areas, often inserting his fingers into their rectums and leaving some of his victims with bleeding rectums.
It’s gotten so bad that you don’t even have to be suspected of possessing drugs to be subjected to a strip search.
Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Florence v. Burlison, any person who is arrested and processed at a jail house, regardless of the severity of his or her offense (i.e., they can be guilty of nothing more than a minor traffic offense), can be subjected to a strip search by police or jail officials without reasonable suspicion that the arrestee is carrying a weapon or contraband.
As technology advances, police searches are becoming more invasive on a cellular level, as well, with passive alcohol sensors, DNA collection roadblocks, iris scans and facial recognition software—to name just a few methods—used to assault our bodily integrity.
America’s founders could scarcely have imagined a world in which we needed protection against widespread government breaches of our privacy, including on a cellular level.
Yet that’s exactly what we so desperately need.
Unfortunately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the indignities being heaped upon us by the architects and agents of the American police state—whether or not we’ve done anything wrong—are just a foretaste of what is to come.
31 Jan 2017
READ THE REPORT HERE: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=21603
The biometric ID grid is closing in as country after country implements biometric passports, biometric id databases and, yes, biometric payment systems. If you’re interested in contributing to this open source investigation and leaving info about your country, please read the report on CorbettReport.com:
Source: All Israelis Will Have to Join Biometric Database From Next Year, Minister Says
http://www.blacklistednews.com
Source: haaretz
July 8, 2016
During the third quarter of 2015 there was a sharp drop in the number of people signing up. Only one quarter of people taking out new documents in that period opted for biometric ones. The Population Authority released data showing that between last November and May there was a rise in these numbers, with 31 percent opting for biometric documentation.
The rate of people choosing biometric documents goes up with age, except for people who are 80 years old or older. There are gender differences, with somewhat more men who signed up during the pilot phase. Twenty-four percent of people who signed on never returned to pick them up. From August, these documents will be mailed to people for whom they were issued.
The pilot phase began in July 2013 and was supposed to end after two years. However, it was extended twice. Former Interior Minister Silvan Shalom assumed his post a month and a half before the end of the pilot, and requested more time to study the issue. The Knesset approved his request and extended the pilot by nine months, ending in March of this year.
Read More…
Source: The FBI’s secret biometrics database they don’t want you to see — RT America
RT America
May 22, 2016
© FBI / Wikipedia
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) wants to prevent information about its creepy biometric database, which contains fingerprint, face, iris, and voice scans of millions of Americans, from getting out to the public.
The Department of Justice has come up with a proposal to exempt the biometric database from public disclosure. It states that the Next Generation Identification System (NGI) should not be subject to the Privacy Act, which requires federal agencies to give people access to records that have been collected concerning them, “allowing them to verify and correct them if needed.”
The proposal states that allowing individuals to view their own records, or even an account of those records, could compromise criminal investigations or “national security efforts,” potentially reveal a “sensitive investigative technique,” or provide information that could help a subject “avoid detection or apprehension.”
The database contains biometric information on people who have provided fingerprints to employers, or for licenses and background checks, as well as on convicted criminals and those that have been suspected of wrongdoing even for a short period of time, according to Underground Reporter.
The proposal argues that the FBI should be able to retain the data it has collected on individuals even if they are later found to have done nothing illegal, as the information “may acquire new significance when new details are brought to light.”
The FBI claims the retained data could also be used for “establishing patterns of activity and providing criminal lead.”
In addition, the FBI’s proposal calls for an exemption to a clause which requires agencies to maintain records proving that their determinations regarding individuals in their data base are fair and legally justified, arguing that it is “impossible to know in advance what information is accurate, relevant, timely and complete.”
The proposal is open for comment until June 6.
Facial recognition is being used outside the realms of law enforcement as well. For example, a nightclub in Sydney uses the technology to identify clubbers previously deemed unruly to prevent them from getting in again.
Facebook has long used facial recognition software to identify people in uploaded photographs and offers facial recognition as a method of verifying a user’s identity.
There are now even facial recognition apps that can identify strangers on the street. While this may be great news for stalkers, it is less so for those not inclined to reveal their identity to random passersby.
Meanwhile, there are companies making products that can confuse or fool facial recognition software. A Japanese company has invented a “privacy visor” that will “scramble digital facial recognition software,” Biometric Update reports.
Specially made clothes and camouflage make up can turn a face “into a mess of unremarkable pixels” in order to throw the technology off.
Inside the NGI, in the words of the FBI
The information stored on the FBI’s Next Generation Identification System, the biometrics database it is trying to keep under wraps, gives federal agents access to a number of identification systems.
Here’s a rundown on the tools on offer to law enforcement, as detailed on the FBI’s website:
- The Interstate Photo System contains 23 million front-facing photographs that can be used to identify suspects without human intervention.
- The Repository for Individuals of Special Concern (RISC) allows agents in the field to rapidly identify detainees and criminal suspects by searching a repository of Wanted Persons, Sex Offenders Registry Subjects, Known or appropriately Suspected Terrorists, and other persons of special interest.
- The Latents and National Palm Print System is an updated database of finger and palm prints that can be searched on a nationwide basis.
- The Rap Back Service notifies agencies of the activity of individuals after “the initial processing and retention of criminal or civil transactions.” The service can “notify agencies of subsequent activity for individuals enrolled in the service. Including a more timely process of confirming suitability of those individuals placed in positions of trust and notification to users of criminal activity for those individuals placed on probation or parole.”
- Iris Recognition is “poised to offer law enforcement a new tool to quickly and accurately determine identity.”
Pic added by Tales. Wiki
Source: Fingerprints to be Tested as ‘Currency’
SM Gibson
April 8, 2016
Over the course of the upcoming summer months, the Japanese government will begin testing a new authentication system that will allow foreign tourists entering the Pacific nation to verify their identities using only the user’s fingerprint.
Travelers will register their fingerprints and provide an array of personal data about themselves — including credit card information — at airports upon arrival on the islands.
Once signed up, participants will be allowed to make purchases and conduct tax-exempt transactions by simply pressing two fingers gently against a device, which will be installed at various retail outlets. The technology will also allow foreign tourists to avoid previously mandatory requirements that they produce a passport while checking into ryokans (inns) or hotels. Instead, travelers will only need to produce their fingers.
With the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games only four years away, the Japanese government believes the system could alleviate travelers’ anxiety by eliminating their need to carry cash or credit cards at the event. If the test proves successful, the system will gradually be implemented throughout Japan by the 2020 games.
The initial rollout will include 300 different establishments that are popular with tourists, including souvenir stores, restaurants, and hotels.
A similar system has already been operational at Huis Ten Bosch theme park in Nagasaki, where visitors can make fingerprint-only payments at about 30 restaurants and shops.
“The system has been well received by customers, including those with children, since it saves them the trouble of taking their wallets out,” according to a theme park spokesperson.
Aeon Bank, based in Tokyo, plans to release an ATM as early as this month based on a similar model that will do away with the need for ATM cards.
Tales from the Conspiratum 
