VIDEO: D.C. police knock man in wheelchair to the ground!

http://www.chicagonewsreport.com/2011/05/video-dc-police-knock-man-in-wheelchair.html

Washington D.C. — Two officers, identified as Washington D.C. cops, were caught on camera slamming a wheelchair bound man to the ground.

The video entitled “DC police abuse homeless man in wheelchair”, was uploaded to Youtube on May 19, 2011, by someone using the screen name ChrisWhite313.

At the beginning of the footage, two cops can be seen wrestling with a man riding what appears to be a motorized wheelchair, and instructing him to “get on the ground”. Which is a little difficult to do if you can’t walk.

Then the officers throw the seemingly disabled man onto the concrete, causing his head to bleed. A person at the scene said the alleged suspect’s head was “bust wide open”.

When a bystander asked one of the arresting officers why the man was being taken into custody, the cop said the injured man “assaulted a police officer”. Angry eyewitnesses openly disagreed with the officer’s version of what happened and told him that his reasons for arresting the man “weren’t true”.

A woman in the background can be heard saying the bleeding suspect lives on the block where the incident occurred.

TSA Backs Down from Prom Night Grope

http://www.infowars.com/tsa-backs-down-from-prom-night-grope/

Last week it was announced that TSA goons would conduct a grope-down of students during prom night at a Santa Fe high school. The TSA promised to move from airports into the New Mexico high school after two girls said security personnel groped them and a federal judge ruled the TSA should conduct pat-downs at dances or graduations.

The judge’s ruling indicates the federal government and the TSA believe they should be conducting searches. The TSA has moved from airports to train and bus stations. TSA boss Napolitano has said she envisions the agency ultimately groping citizens at malls and hotels.

Teen Arrested For Asking Cop About Unwarranted Raids

Robert Wanek
You Tube
May 16, 2011

Officer Dustin Hill falsely arrested 17-year-old filmmaker Robert Wanek. Hill used the legal system as a weapon to retaliate against the Wanek for filming him. Hill would be the most honest cop in Philadelphia, where the pigs routinely rob, torture, frame, and otherwise victimize the taxpaying citizens who pay their salaries. Yes, Hill was wrong, but his offenses were minor by comparison!

NsaneSk8er007

1. Officer Dustin Hill is a former SEMCA Narcotics agent downgraded to a K-9 Unit officer
2. Police Report Indicates I was arrested for standing within FIVE feet of Hill, when I am clearly 15 feet away.
3. Police Report states that ” He said he was filming a story for MAKEACHANGE.ORG and I could tell he was becoming more upset” I was never even remotely upset.
4. It is 100% legal to Film any officer in Public in the state of North Dakota
5. He engaged me, I was not bothering him I was on a public street.
6. I was not interfering with anything, officers should be proud to be seen doing their work in the community, not something to hide.
7. Law enforcement states they were ‘unable to pull up the surveillance footage’
8. I was in violation of ZERO laws.
9. I did not serve as a threat to the officer
10. Dustins Sergeant interviewed me without reading me any miranda rights, while I remained cuffed behind my back in a room monitored by 2 officers Like I was a serious threat to the department. I had been patted down.

1984 movie

George Orwell’s novel of a totalitarian future society in which a man whose daily work is rewriting history tries to rebel by falling in love.

Red-light camera complaints continue in Brevard

http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20110509/NEWS01/105090320/Red-light-camera-complaints-continue-Brevard

A statewide ban on red-light cameras died in the Legislature, but the issue of whether the cameras are legal remains very much alive across Florida — and now, in Brevard County Circuit Court.

While a complete repeal of the red-light statute failed to pass, the full Legislature approved Friday, as part of the state’s transportation budget, what amounts to a moratorium on new red-light cameras. An amendment proposed by Rep. Richard Corcoran, a New Port Richey Republican, says the Department of Transportation must conduct a study to determine if an intersection has a disproportionate number of crashes. Without that, no new enforcement cameras can be installed by the state, counties or cities. The amendment also prohibits issuing infractions for right-on-red turns.

But in local court, as well as at protests countywide during the past month, complaints abound.

On April 12, attorney Stephen Koons of Melbourne filed a complaint against the city of Cocoa Beach for plaintiff Mary Lombardo, an 82-year-old Cocoa Beach resident who received a red-light violation ticket in September 2010 and paid the $158 fine. Koons, 63, who last year received a ticket for a violation at A1A and the entrance to Fischer Park, chose to take his case to court in early April. The judge dismissed the case, Koons said, “because the city could not overcome my hearsay objections to the process and granted my motion for involuntary dismissal.”

Koons calls the red-light cameras “nothing more than a ‘traffic trap’ much like the speed traps we witnessed back in the late ’60s and ’70s.”

The case filed for Lombardo seeks to get the city to stop the program and “a refund of all revenue collected by the city because of the red-light program,” he said.

The testimony of an officer who was not present when the picture was taken — by a camera owned by a vendor in Phoenix — doesn’t pass muster with Koons.

“The whole system doesn’t comply with the Florida evidence code relating to hearsay. You get this notice in the mail from a company in Phoenix,” he said. “Then they send the reviewing police officer to these traffic infraction hearings. It’s completely hearsay. They’re not records custodians. They don’t have any personal knowledge of the situation, other than what they’re being told by a company in Phoenix.”

Officials for Cocoa Beach were not available for comment Friday. The city has four red-light cameras in three locations. The only other Brevard city with red-light cameras is Palm Bay, which has five of the devices.

Koons also said that his investigation of the timing of the yellow light at the spot where he allegedly ran the light showed it does not always meet national or Florida Department of Transportation standards for the transition from green to red.

Lombardo, a Cocoa Beach resident, said she was turning left onto State Road 520 from North Atlantic Avenue when her violation allegedly occurred. The light was neither red nor yellow when she began the turn, she said.

“I paid the fine because I thought somebody would probably come after me,” she said. “But what bothers me, too, is people in Phoenix taking money for something happening here in Florida. I feel it was an extremely unfair ticket. I’ll be 83 in June. I don’t run red lights. I have no objection to testifying in court because I think it was wrong.”

Contact Kennerly at 321-409-1423 or bkennerly@floridatoday.com.

 

Korean police raid Google offices over location tracking

On the heels of a recent controversy involving the alleged tracking of sensitive user location data on Apple’s iPhone and Google Android, the South Korean police raided Google’s Seoul offices Tuesday on suspicions that the company had collected personal data without consent.

Reuters reports that South Korean police have initiated a probe into Google’s AdMob advertising arm, resulting in Tuesday’s police visit to the company’s offices.

“We suspect AdMob collected personal location information without consent or approval from the Korean Communication Commission,” a South Korean police official said.

A Google spokesman confirmed that the police visit to the company’s offices had indeed occurred and promised the company’s cooperation with the investigation.

As it has grown, Google has faced increased scrutiny over its privacy policies, including several privacy investigations in South Korea and the U.S. After evidenced surfaced suggesting that Google had collected private data with its fleet of “Street View” cars, investigations were opened. Last month, South Korea’s top Internet portals lodged a complaint with anti-trust regulators alleging unfair competition from Google in the mobile Internet search market, according to the report.

Late last month, the Mountain View, Calif., search giant, along with Apple, was called to testify at a U.S. Senate hearing on May 10.

Several weeks ago, security researchers claimed that Apple had been storing an unencrypted log of user’s locations. South Korean officials promptly indicated that they were investigating the alleged practice.

Apple broke its silence last week with a statement reassuring users that it was not tracking the location of iPhones. Instead, Apple identified the log in question as a “crowd-sourced database” of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers meant to help the iPhone more rapidly and accurately calculate its location.

The iPhone’s “crowd-sourced database” | Source: O’Reilly Radar

According to Apple, iOS bugs resulted in data being stored longer than necessary and updates to the database even when Location Services are disabled. A fix to the bug is expected in an upcoming release of iOS 4.3.3, which will reportedly come in the next two weeks.

In a rare interview, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs acknowledged that more could be done to inform consumers about new technology and declined to comment on Google’s privacy policy.

“As new technology comes into the society, there is a period of adjustment and education,” Jobs said. “We haven’t, as an industry, done a very good job educating people, I think, as to some of the more subtle things going on here. As such, (people) jumped to a lot of wrong conclusions in the past week.”

Feds mine Facebook for info

http://www.stltoday.com/news/national/govt-and-politics/article_bbd23382-6ecf-11e0-aeef-001a4bcf6878.html

DETROIT — Federal investigators in Detroit have taken the rare step of obtaining search warrants that give them access to Facebook accounts of suspected criminals.

The warrants let investigators view photographs, email addresses, cell phone numbers, lists of friends who might double as partners in crime, and see GPS locations that could help disprove alibis.

There have been a few dozen search warrants for Facebook accounts nationwide since May 2009, including three approved recently by a federal magistrate judge in Detroit, according to a Detroit News analysis of publicly available federal court records.

The trend raises privacy and evidentiary concerns in a rapidly evolving digital age and illustrates the potential law-enforcement value of social media, experts said.

Locally, Facebook accounts have been seized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and FBI to investigate more than a dozen gang members and accused bank robber Anthony Wilson of Detroit.

“To be honest with you, it bothers me,” said Wilson, 25, who was indicted Tuesday on bank robbery charges after the FBI compared Facebook photos with images taken from a bank surveillance video. “Facebook could have let me know what was going on. Instead, I got my door kicked down, and all of a sudden I’m in handcuffs.”

Federal investigators defend the practice. “With technology today, we would be crazy not to look at every avenue,” said Special Agent Donald Dawkins, spokesman with the ATF in Detroit.

The FBI suspected Wilson was behind a string of bank robberies across Metro Detroit that netted more than $6,300. Special Agent Juan Herrera said an informant told the FBI about Wilson’s Facebook account. It was registered under the name “Anthony Mrshowoff Wilson.”

In several photos on Facebook, Wilson was wearing a blue baseball hat and blue hooded sweatshirt, both featuring a Polo emblem. That’s the same outfit the FBI said the suspect wore when he stole $390 from a Bank of America Branch in Grosse Pointe Woods on Nov. 26, according to federal court records.

His Facebook photos also included one in which Wilson wore a red Philadelphia Phillies baseball hat, which the FBI said Wilson donned while robbing $1,363 from a PNC Bank branch in St. Clair Shores on Dec. 21, according to court records.

On Jan. 26, U.S. Magistrate Judge Virginia Morgan gave approval for the FBI to seize information from Wilson’s Facebook account. The warrant was executed within four hours.

Facebook gave the FBI Wilson’s contact information, including birth date, cell phone number, friends, incoming and outgoing messages, and photos.

Wilson was charged in a criminal complaint Feb. 7 and indicted Tuesday on five bank robbery charges. He is free on a $10,000 unsecured bond.

“I’m innocent until proven guilty,” Wilson told The Detroit News. “They’re basically going off my clothes. Ralph Lauren is a popular clothing line.”

He’s since updated his Facebook photo. Wilson swapped the blue Polo hat and blue Polo sweatshirt for white ones featuring the iconic Polo horse.

Despite the search warrants, his Facebook information page was still public Thursday.

Technology challenging

Morgan, the federal magistrate judge, also approved two search warrant requests from the ATF late last year and in February to search the accounts of at least 16 people suspected of belonging to a Detroit area gang. The affidavit justifying the search remains sealed in federal court.

Even with the access, investigators are having a hard time keeping up with high-tech crooks. In February, an FBI official testified before a House subcommittee about the difficulty accessing electronic communications on social media sites and email even with court approval.

“The FBI and other government agencies are facing a potentially widening gap between our legal authority to intercept electronic communications pursuant to court order and our practical ability to actually intercept those communications,” FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni testified.

Monitoring real-time Web-based conversations is particularly difficult, she said.

The FBI uses the term “Going Dark” to label the gap between having the authority to access electronic communications and the Internet service providers’ capability to gather the information. “This gap poses a growing threat to public safety,” Caproni testified.

Concerns over privacy

Information gleaned from the Internet raises constitutional and evidentiary issues that must be considered, including privacy and the right against unreasonable searches and seizures, said Chief U.S. District Judge Gerald E. Rosen, who also is an evidence professor at Wayne State University. Evidence obtained from the Internet and social media sites also raises issues about whether the information can be authenticated, he said.

“The Internet is the next frontier for the development of Fourth Amendment law,” Rosen said, referring to the amendment protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures.

A Facebook spokesman said the company receives a “significant volume of third-party data requests” that are reviewed individually for “legal sufficiency.”

“We do not comment publicly on data requests, even when we disclose the request to the user. We have this policy to respect privacy and avoid the risk that even acknowledging the existence of a request could wrongly harm the reputation of an individual,” said Andrew Noyes, Facebook manager of public policy communications. “We never turn over ’content’ records in response to U.S. legal process unless that process is a search warrant reviewed by a judge. We are required to regularly push back against overbroad requests for user records, but in most cases we are able to convince the party issuing legal process to withdraw the overbroad request, but if they do not, we fight the matter in court (and have a history of success in those cases.)”

Spokeswomen for the U.S. Attorney’s Office and FBI declined to discuss techniques used by investigators.

It is unclear exactly how many search warrants have been executed for Facebook accounts. But requests – in Maryland , New York , North Carolina , Virginia , California , Pennsylvania , Montana and Alabama – come amid a backlash from users who complained too much of their personal information was being disclosed .

The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation , a digital civil liberties organization based in San Francisco, launched a campaign recently to encourage Facebook and others to disclose when and how often law-enforcement agencies request user account information.

Your iPhone Is Tracking Your Location History

http://mashable.com/2011/04/20/iphone-location-history/

Two security researchers have discovered that Apple’s iPhone keeps track of a user’s location and saves that information to a file that is stored both on the device and on a user’s computer when they sync or back it up in iTunes. The researchers, Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan, discovered the hidden file while collaborating on a potential data visualization project. “At first we weren’t sure how much data was there, but after we dug further and visualised the extracted data, it became clear that there was a scary amount of detail on our movements,” Warden told The Guardian.

You can watch Allan and Warden’s discussion about the data and how it can be surfaced in this video:

—– What Does the Data Say —–

The data, which is stored as a log in a file called “consolidation.db,” contains longitude and latitude coordinates along with a timestamp. Right now, it appears that Apple has been recording this information since iOS 4.0 was released last June. Allan and Warden think that this information is determined by cell-tower triangulation. Although it isn’t always exact, it can give a very detailed overview of where an individual (or their phone) has traveled over a period of time.

—— Visualizing the Data ——

Beyond simply revealing that this data is available and, with a little work, accessible, Warden and Allan created a web app that can create a visualization of a user’s location information from an iPhone or 3G iPad. Warden and Allan are not the first two data scientists to uncover this data store. However, they have created the most layperson accessible proof of concept that can showcase how this data could potentially be used.

 ——- What Does this Mean ——–

As Warden and Allan make clear, right now, there is no evidence that the data ever leaves the user’s custody or that it is transmitted to anyone else. In other words, for someone to access this information, they need physical access to your phone or your computer with data backups, along with the wherewithal to actually use it. The bigger question is: why does this data exist in the first place? Moreover, why is this data not encrypted within a backup? Sure, users can choose to encrypt their iPhone backups, but this is the type of file that strikes us as being encryption-worthy from the start. Realistically speaking, the likelihood that this data could be used for evil is miniscule. We would be far more troubled if this information was accessible to other apps or was sent to Apple. Having said that, its very existence raises questions that Apple should be forced to address.

Obama moves forward with Internet ID plan

Declan McCullagh
CNET
April 17, 2011

The Obama administration said today that it’s moving ahead with a plan for broad adoption of Internet IDs despite concerns about identity centralization, and hopes to fund pilot projects next year.

At an event hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C., administration officials downplayed privacy and civil liberties concerns about their proposal, which they said would be led by the private sector and not be required for Americans who use the Internet.

There’s “no reliable way to verify identity online” at the moment, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said, citing the rising tide of security threats including malware and identity theft that have grown increasingly prevalent over the last few years. “Passwords just won’t cut it here.”

A 55-page document (PDF) released by the White House today adds a few more details to the proposal, which still remains mostly hazy and inchoate.

It offers examples of what the White House views as an “identity ecosystem,” including obtaining a digital ID from an Internet service provider that could be used to view your personal health information, or obtaining an ID linked to your cell phone that would let you log into IRS.gov to view payments and file taxes. The idea is to have multiple identity providers that are part of the same system.

Administration officials plan to convene a series of workshops between June and September of this year that would bring together companies and advocacy groups and move closer to an actual specification for what’s being called the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, or NSTIC.

Left unsaid was that the series of workshops, which will be open to the public, will give the proposal’s backers a chance to downplay concerns that it could become the virtual equivalent of a national ID card.

During his speech, Locke lashed out at the “conspiracy theory set” who have criticized the proposal. A column in NetworkWorld.com, for instance, called NSTIC a “great example of rampant, over-reaching, ignorant, and ill-conceived political foolishness.”

“A top-down strategy for online identity is unlikely to work,” Jim Harper, director of information studies at the Cato Institute, said today. “People will not participate in a government-corporate identity project that deviates from their demand for control of identity information, which is an essential part of privacy protection, autonomy, and liberty.”

The Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration created a YouTube video (above) to reassure Americans that “there is no central database tracking your actions.” An FAQ repeats the message. It’s enlisted allies to spread the message, including the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Leslie Harris, who wrote in a post on commerce.gov that NSTIC is “not a national ID,” but instead represents “a call for leadership and innovation from private companies.”

One intriguing feature of today’s description of NSTIC released by the White House is that it appears to build on a joint Microsoft-IBM project called Attribute-Based Credentials. (See CNET’s previous coverage.)

The idea is to use encryption technology to let people disclose less about themselves–ideally, the minimum necessary to complete a transaction. The NSTIC document gives the example of someone filling a medical prescription online: “The pharmacy is not told (his) birth date or the reason for the prescription. The technology also filters information so that the attribute providers—the authoritative sources of the age and prescription information—do not know what pharmacy (is being used).” 

The idea of using encryption technology to protect privacy in this way isn’t exactly new. The legendary cryptographer David Chaum, the father of digital cash who’s now building secure electronic voting systems, developed some of these ideas in the late 1980s. Dutch cryptographer Stefan Brands more fully developed the concept of limited disclosure digital certificates; Microsoft bought his company in 2008, and released the U-Prove specification last year along with a promise not to file patent lawsuits over its use.

On the other hand, it would be more convenient for law enforcement (not to mention intelligence agencies) if a more traditional, centralized system were used.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat who also spoke today at the Chamber event, seemed to veer a bit off-message–and instead of touting anonymity, she stressed the importance of aiding law enforcement.

Protecting civil liberties is important, Mikulski said. “But the first civil liberty is to be able to have a job, lead a life, and be able to buy what you want in the way we now buy it, which is through credit cards.”

“We’re going to support the FBI,” said Mikulski, who heads the Senate subcommittee that oversees the FBI’s funding. “We’re going to support the growth of the FBI.”

The Obama administration’s record on digital identification and authentication is mixed.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, President Obama told CNET that “I do not support the Real ID program.” But after being elected, Obama has not called for its repeal and his administration said last month that it’s working “very closely with the states to assist with implementation.”

Another cautionary note comes from a previous public-private partnership that also sought to improve identity-related authentication. The largest company participating in the TSA’s registered traveler identification program, Verified Identity Pass’ CLEAR, shut down in 2009. Its assets were sold to the highest bidder.

Another concern: Although the White House is describing the NSTIC plan as “voluntary,” federal agencies could begin to require it for IRS e-filing, applying for Social Security or veterans’ benefits, renewing passports online, requesting federal licenses (including ham radio and pilot’s licenses), and so on. Then obtaining one of these ID would become all but mandatory for most Americans.

“For end-users, online identification has become increasingly cumbersome and complex,” says Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “But it remains unclear whether the White House proposal will solve this problem or create new problems. There is the real risk that consolidated identity schemes will lead to ‘hyper’ identity theft.”

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20054342-281.html#ixzz1JsuaKdj7

Chilling Effect: TSA security looks at people who complain about … TSA security.

CNN
April 14, 2011

COMMENT: It seems quite “arrogant” that TSA would assume the authority to grope passengers, ignore the 4th Amendment and castigate those warning that body scanners pose radiation risks or that terrorism is a hoax for social control. Arrogance is government usurpation of undue powers, not ordinary people expressing common sense opposition to TSA practices.

Washington (CNN) — Don’t like the way airport screeners are doing their job? You might not want to complain too much while standing in line.

Arrogant complaining about airport security is one indicator Transportation Security Administration officers consider when looking for possible criminals and terrorists, CNN has learned exclusively. And, when combined with other behavioral indicators, it could result in a traveler facing additional scrutiny.

CNN has obtained a list of roughly 70 “behavioral indicators” that TSA behavior detection officers use to identify potentially “high risk” passengers at the nation’s airports.

Many of the indicators, as characterized in open government reports, are behaviors and appearances that may be indicative of stress, fear or deception. None of them, as the TSA has long said, refer to or suggest race, religion or ethnicity.

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