Welcome to Orwell's 1984 - The Firearms Forum

Shizamus · 05-21-2003, 01:12 AM

Walk this way....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/s...694090,00.html

Snoop this way....
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/13..._snoops+.shtml

REALITY IS SCOFFED AT, ILLUSION IS KING.

Smokin Guns · 05-21-2003, 08:38 PM

shizamus, reckon ya cud sometimes just Copy-n-Paste, some of us is on painful..dial-up...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Watch your step! The Pentagon is developing a radar-based device that can identify people by the way they walk, for use in a new antiterrorist surveillance system.

Operating on the theory that an individual's walk is as unique as a signature, the Pentagon has financed a research project at the Georgia Institute of Technology that has been 80 to 95 percent successful in identifying people.

If the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, orders a prototype, the individual ``gait signatures'' of people could become part of the data to be linked together in a vast surveillance system the Pentagon agency calls Total Information Awareness.

That system already has raised privacy alarms on both ends of the political spectrum, and Congress in February barred its use against American citizens without further congressional review.

Nevertheless, government documents reviewed by The Associated Press show that scores of major defense contractors and prominent universities applied last year for the first research contracts to design and build the surveillance and analysis system.

DARPA is the federal agency that helped develop the Internet as a research tool for universities and government contractors. Its newest project is massive by any measure.

In its advice to contractors, DARPA declared, ``The amounts of data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes.''

One petabyte would dwarf most existing databases; it's roughly equal to 50 times the Library of Congress, which holds more than 18 million books.

Conceived and managed by retired Adm. John Poindexter, the TIA surveillance system is based on his theory that ``terrorists must engage in certain transactions to coordinate and conduct attacks against Americans, and these transactions form patterns that may be detectable.''

DARPA said the goal is to draw conclusions and predictions about terrorists from databases that record such transactions as passport applications, visas, work permits, driver's licenses, car rentals, airline ticket purchases, arrests or reports of suspicious activities.

Other databases DARPA wants to access include financial, education, medical and housing records and biometric identification databases based on fingerprints, irises, facial shapes and gait.

TIA is an effort to design breakthrough software ``for treating these databases as a virtual, centralized grand database'' capable of being quickly mined by counterintelligence officers even though the data will be held in many places, many languages and many formats, DARPA documents say.

One goal is to provide ``focused warnings within an hour after a triggering event occurs,'' the documents say.

Poindexter's plan would integrate some projects DARPA has been working on for several years, including research headed by Gene Greneker at Georgia Tech.

At a cost of less than $1 million over the past three years, he has been aiming a 1-foot-square radar dish at 100 test volunteers to record how they walk. Elsewhere at Georgia Tech, DARPA is funding other researchers to use video cameras and computers to try to develop distinctive gait signatures.

``One of the nice things about radar is we see through bad weather, darkness, even a heavy robe shrouding the legs, and video cameras can't,'' Greneker said in an interview. ``At 600 feet we can do quite well.''

And the target doesn't have to be doing a Michael Jackson moonwalk to be distinctive because the radar detects small frequency shifts in the reflected signal off legs, arms and the torso as they move in a combination of different speeds and directions.

``There's a signature that's somewhat unique to the individual,'' Greneker said. ``We've demonstrated proof of this concept.''

The researchers are anticipating ways the system might be fooled.

``A woman switching from flats to high heels probably wouldn't change her signature significantly,'' Greneker said. ``But if she switched to combat boots, that might have a difference.''

The system could be used by embassy security officers to conclude that a shadowy figure observed a few hundred feet away at night or in heavy clothing on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday was the same person and should be investigated further to see if he was casing the building for an attack, Greneker said.

At a restricted facility, the technology could warn security officers that an approaching person was probably not an employee by comparing his gait with those on file. ``And we now know how to detect people who are carrying heavy packages, which could include a 25-pound bomb in a backpack,'' Greneker said.

Greneker hasn't gotten caught up in the privacy debate. ``We are research and development people. We think about what's possible, not what the government will do with it. That's somebody else's job. And this isn't a weapons system.''

DARPA contracting records made available through a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group, show Poindexter agreed to fund 26 research projects and rejected 154 others through last Dec. 4. Other DARPA contract award data were released under FOIA to the Center for Public Integrity, an ethics advocacy group.

One of the largest was a contract for up to $27 million to Veridian Systems Division of Arlington, Va., to design software to allow ``intelligence analysts and decision makers to jointly participate in the development of a full range of contingencies.''

Shizamus · 05-21-2003, 11:18 PM

Building a nation of snoops

By Carl Takei, 5/14/2003

''WATCHING AMERICA with Pride, not Prejudice.'' This is the Orwellian motto of the New Jersey-based Community Anti-Terrorism Training Institute, or CAT Eyes, an antiterrorist citizen informant program being adopted by local police departments throughout the East Coast and parts of the Midwest. Mike Licata, a high school teacher and retired Air Force officer, created the CAT Eyes program in cooperation with ex-military SWAT officer Jason McClendon and businessman Tony Elghossain.

In a recent telephone interview, Licata said he wants to use CAT Eyes to create what he calls ''a modern civil defense network,'' converting neighborhood watch groups into antiterrorist informant cells. These groups, constantly watching for signs of terrorist activity in their neighborhoods and workplaces, would report suspicious activities directly to the FBI. Said Licata: ''I envision 100 million Americans looking for indicators of terrorism and promptly reporting it to a central database where it would get analyzed.''

According to Licata, city and town police departments in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Ohio have adopted the program, as well as the Washington, D.C., Park Police, and scattered cities in Florida, Nevada, and California. University police departments, including at MIT, are also adopting the program.

Licata singles out the Boston police for praise, noting that they have assigned 20 community service officers to conduct citizen trainings. He will, no doubt, use his increasing local successes to leverage bids for state and federal funds. Licata says he is trying to develop a statewide program with the Virginia governor's office and is currently drafting funding proposals to the Department of Justice and to President Bush's CitizenCorps program.

Licata has few qualms about the prospect of CAT Eyes-trained citizens spying on their neighbors. ''If I felt that my neighbor of 10 years was doing fund-raising for a group, I'd turn 'em in,'' says Licata. After all, he says, the FBI will ''just investigate them -- and if you're wrong, you're wrong. And if you're right, that's a big thing!''

Licata does emphasize that racial profiling is wrong, and his training materials disavow racism. Terrorism, he says, ''has nothing to do with race or religion. Timothy McVeigh was an Irish-American and he blew up the federal building in Oklahoma.''

However, such assurances give cold comfort. Citizen informers, after all, are not subject to the same public accountability as police officers. If a citizen informer unfairly targets certain races or ethnic groups, there is no way to keep track of it and no way to punish the errant informer. Licata himself admits, ''If someone goes the wrong way, there's nothing I can do about that.''

Moreover, with or without racial profiling, CAT Eyes could severely curtail our expectations of privacy. If Licata comes even close to his stated goal of 100 million informers, CAT Eyes would dwarf the citizen informer programs of the most repressive totalitarian states, making them appear amateurish by comparison.

Even communist East Germany, a tightly controlled society with more informants per capita than either Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany, was not as ambitious about citizen surveillance as CAT Eyes. In its heyday, the East German secret police, or Stasi, is generally believed to have had about 2 million informers, or about one-eighth of the East German population.

CAT Eyes wants to train more than one in three Americans to be FBI informers. As the number of such informers rises, participants in even the smallest of dinner parties and water cooler gossip sessions could reasonably fear that expressing controversial opinions or admitting to ''suspicious'' associations would attract the attention of the FBI.

This comes at a time when cherished American rights to privacy are already under assault. Last year the FBI obtained warrants for 1,228 secret antiterrorism searches and wiretaps, a 30 percent increase over 2001. In April, the CIA requested congressional authority to conduct its own searches and wiretaps of US residents independent of the FBI. (Though congressional Democrats successfully scuttled the proposal this time around, it is likely to resurface soon.) Meanwhile, Justice Department lawyers are quietly drafting proposals to further expand the FBI's authority to use secret wiretaps and conduct searches with little or no judicial oversight.

A country that encourages neighbors to spy on neighbors is a not just a sick society but a weak one. Cooperation and solidarity will never flourish in an America suffused by the paranoia and mutual suspicion inevitably generated by an informer culture -- yet those are exactly the assets we need if we are to confront the terrorist threat with our national values intact.

THERE IS A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND !

pickenup · 05-22-2003, 12:55 AM

I carry a gun out to my car, to go to the range or a match,
someone sees me and calls the jack booted thugs.
I disappear from the face of the planet.

I feel so much safer now.

whitefeather · 05-22-2003, 11:12 AM

LOL we live in a freak'n bubble. We might as well have computer chips implanted in us so they can track us everywhere we go (oops don't want to give them any ideas)

What happen to the good old days of Seal Team 6 when we went out and blew up terrorists with a single unit.

whitefeather · 05-22-2003, 11:39 AM

LOL i just remembered a show I watched where the military(gov.) was watching over a controled community (I guess feeding them information...that they were terrorists)...seeing how long it would take for them to turn on them...in the end the neighborhood burned them in their house.

SPOOKY

Shizamus · 05-22-2003, 12:55 PM

You mentioned computor chip...
Go to FIRE FOR EFFECT Forum

Line up to be bar coded post

Evilahole · 05-22-2003, 06:03 PM

A radar device that can tell who we are by the way we walk?
At least I have a good reason to get faced from now on.
Get good and drunk and stumble around a lot...that'll throw a monkey wrench in their system.

1952Sniper · 05-23-2003, 08:34 AM

Quote:

LOL i just remembered a show I watched where the military(gov.) was watching over a controled community (I guess feeding them information...that they were terrorists)...seeing how long it would take for them to turn on them...in the end the neighborhood burned them in their house.

I saw that one too. It was the new Twilight Zone, or some show like that. The whole time I was thinking that it seems pretty typical of how most people act nowadays. I was especially disappointed in how the show made gun owners look like crazed fools who want to rush out and shoot someone.

05-21-2003, 01:12 AM	#1
Shizamus Senior Member Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Vermont Posts: 891	Welcome to Orwell's 1984 Walk this way.... http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/s...694090,00.html Snoop this way.... http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/13..._snoops+.shtml REALITY IS SCOFFED AT, ILLUSION IS KING. -->

05-21-2003, 08:38 PM	#2
Smokin Guns Advanced Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: "Gun Culture Members Clubhouse"... Posts: 4,463	Law'd a'mercy!... shizamus, reckon ya cud sometimes just Copy-n-Paste, some of us is on painful..dial-up... WASHINGTON (AP) - Watch your step! The Pentagon is developing a radar-based device that can identify people by the way they walk, for use in a new antiterrorist surveillance system. Operating on the theory that an individual's walk is as unique as a signature, the Pentagon has financed a research project at the Georgia Institute of Technology that has been 80 to 95 percent successful in identifying people. If the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, orders a prototype, the individual ``gait signatures'' of people could become part of the data to be linked together in a vast surveillance system the Pentagon agency calls Total Information Awareness. That system already has raised privacy alarms on both ends of the political spectrum, and Congress in February barred its use against American citizens without further congressional review. Nevertheless, government documents reviewed by The Associated Press show that scores of major defense contractors and prominent universities applied last year for the first research contracts to design and build the surveillance and analysis system. DARPA is the federal agency that helped develop the Internet as a research tool for universities and government contractors. Its newest project is massive by any measure. In its advice to contractors, DARPA declared, ``The amounts of data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes.'' One petabyte would dwarf most existing databases; it's roughly equal to 50 times the Library of Congress, which holds more than 18 million books. Conceived and managed by retired Adm. John Poindexter, the TIA surveillance system is based on his theory that ``terrorists must engage in certain transactions to coordinate and conduct attacks against Americans, and these transactions form patterns that may be detectable.'' DARPA said the goal is to draw conclusions and predictions about terrorists from databases that record such transactions as passport applications, visas, work permits, driver's licenses, car rentals, airline ticket purchases, arrests or reports of suspicious activities. Other databases DARPA wants to access include financial, education, medical and housing records and biometric identification databases based on fingerprints, irises, facial shapes and gait. TIA is an effort to design breakthrough software ``for treating these databases as a virtual, centralized grand database'' capable of being quickly mined by counterintelligence officers even though the data will be held in many places, many languages and many formats, DARPA documents say. One goal is to provide ``focused warnings within an hour after a triggering event occurs,'' the documents say. Poindexter's plan would integrate some projects DARPA has been working on for several years, including research headed by Gene Greneker at Georgia Tech. At a cost of less than $1 million over the past three years, he has been aiming a 1-foot-square radar dish at 100 test volunteers to record how they walk. Elsewhere at Georgia Tech, DARPA is funding other researchers to use video cameras and computers to try to develop distinctive gait signatures. ``One of the nice things about radar is we see through bad weather, darkness, even a heavy robe shrouding the legs, and video cameras can't,'' Greneker said in an interview. ``At 600 feet we can do quite well.'' And the target doesn't have to be doing a Michael Jackson moonwalk to be distinctive because the radar detects small frequency shifts in the reflected signal off legs, arms and the torso as they move in a combination of different speeds and directions. ``There's a signature that's somewhat unique to the individual,'' Greneker said. ``We've demonstrated proof of this concept.'' The researchers are anticipating ways the system might be fooled. ``A woman switching from flats to high heels probably wouldn't change her signature significantly,'' Greneker said. ``But if she switched to combat boots, that might have a difference.'' The system could be used by embassy security officers to conclude that a shadowy figure observed a few hundred feet away at night or in heavy clothing on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday was the same person and should be investigated further to see if he was casing the building for an attack, Greneker said. At a restricted facility, the technology could warn security officers that an approaching person was probably not an employee by comparing his gait with those on file. ``And we now know how to detect people who are carrying heavy packages, which could include a 25-pound bomb in a backpack,'' Greneker said. Greneker hasn't gotten caught up in the privacy debate. ``We are research and development people. We think about what's possible, not what the government will do with it. That's somebody else's job. And this isn't a weapons system.'' DARPA contracting records made available through a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group, show Poindexter agreed to fund 26 research projects and rejected 154 others through last Dec. 4. Other DARPA contract award data were released under FOIA to the Center for Public Integrity, an ethics advocacy group. One of the largest was a contract for up to $27 million to Veridian Systems Division of Arlington, Va., to design software to allow ``intelligence analysts and decision makers to jointly participate in the development of a full range of contingencies.'' __________________

05-21-2003, 11:18 PM	#3
Shizamus Senior Member Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Vermont Posts: 891	SNOOP THIS WAY.... Building a nation of snoops By Carl Takei, 5/14/2003 ''WATCHING AMERICA with Pride, not Prejudice.'' This is the Orwellian motto of the New Jersey-based Community Anti-Terrorism Training Institute, or CAT Eyes, an antiterrorist citizen informant program being adopted by local police departments throughout the East Coast and parts of the Midwest. Mike Licata, a high school teacher and retired Air Force officer, created the CAT Eyes program in cooperation with ex-military SWAT officer Jason McClendon and businessman Tony Elghossain. In a recent telephone interview, Licata said he wants to use CAT Eyes to create what he calls ''a modern civil defense network,'' converting neighborhood watch groups into antiterrorist informant cells. These groups, constantly watching for signs of terrorist activity in their neighborhoods and workplaces, would report suspicious activities directly to the FBI. Said Licata: ''I envision 100 million Americans looking for indicators of terrorism and promptly reporting it to a central database where it would get analyzed.'' According to Licata, city and town police departments in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Ohio have adopted the program, as well as the Washington, D.C., Park Police, and scattered cities in Florida, Nevada, and California. University police departments, including at MIT, are also adopting the program. Licata singles out the Boston police for praise, noting that they have assigned 20 community service officers to conduct citizen trainings. He will, no doubt, use his increasing local successes to leverage bids for state and federal funds. Licata says he is trying to develop a statewide program with the Virginia governor's office and is currently drafting funding proposals to the Department of Justice and to President Bush's CitizenCorps program. Licata has few qualms about the prospect of CAT Eyes-trained citizens spying on their neighbors. ''If I felt that my neighbor of 10 years was doing fund-raising for a group, I'd turn 'em in,'' says Licata. After all, he says, the FBI will ''just investigate them -- and if you're wrong, you're wrong. And if you're right, that's a big thing!'' Licata does emphasize that racial profiling is wrong, and his training materials disavow racism. Terrorism, he says, ''has nothing to do with race or religion. Timothy McVeigh was an Irish-American and he blew up the federal building in Oklahoma.'' However, such assurances give cold comfort. Citizen informers, after all, are not subject to the same public accountability as police officers. If a citizen informer unfairly targets certain races or ethnic groups, there is no way to keep track of it and no way to punish the errant informer. Licata himself admits, ''If someone goes the wrong way, there's nothing I can do about that.'' Moreover, with or without racial profiling, CAT Eyes could severely curtail our expectations of privacy. If Licata comes even close to his stated goal of 100 million informers, CAT Eyes would dwarf the citizen informer programs of the most repressive totalitarian states, making them appear amateurish by comparison. Even communist East Germany, a tightly controlled society with more informants per capita than either Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany, was not as ambitious about citizen surveillance as CAT Eyes. In its heyday, the East German secret police, or Stasi, is generally believed to have had about 2 million informers, or about one-eighth of the East German population. CAT Eyes wants to train more than one in three Americans to be FBI informers. As the number of such informers rises, participants in even the smallest of dinner parties and water cooler gossip sessions could reasonably fear that expressing controversial opinions or admitting to ''suspicious'' associations would attract the attention of the FBI. This comes at a time when cherished American rights to privacy are already under assault. Last year the FBI obtained warrants for 1,228 secret antiterrorism searches and wiretaps, a 30 percent increase over 2001. In April, the CIA requested congressional authority to conduct its own searches and wiretaps of US residents independent of the FBI. (Though congressional Democrats successfully scuttled the proposal this time around, it is likely to resurface soon.) Meanwhile, Justice Department lawyers are quietly drafting proposals to further expand the FBI's authority to use secret wiretaps and conduct searches with little or no judicial oversight. A country that encourages neighbors to spy on neighbors is a not just a sick society but a weak one. Cooperation and solidarity will never flourish in an America suffused by the paranoia and mutual suspicion inevitably generated by an informer culture -- yet those are exactly the assets we need if we are to confront the terrorist threat with our national values intact. THERE IS A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND !

05-22-2003, 12:55 AM	#4
pickenup Advanced Senior Member Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Colorado Rocky Mountains Posts: 6,837	I carry a gun out to my car, to go to the range or a match, someone sees me and calls the jack booted thugs. I disappear from the face of the planet. I feel so much safer now. __________________ The gene pool needs chlorine

05-22-2003, 11:12 AM	#5
whitefeather Member Join Date: May 2003 Posts: 42	LOL we live in a freak'n bubble. We might as well have computer chips implanted in us so they can track us everywhere we go (oops don't want to give them any ideas) What happen to the good old days of Seal Team 6 when we went out and blew up terrorists with a single unit.

05-22-2003, 11:39 AM	#6
whitefeather Member Join Date: May 2003 Posts: 42	LOL i just remembered a show I watched where the military(gov.) was watching over a controled community (I guess feeding them information...that they were terrorists)...seeing how long it would take for them to turn on them...in the end the neighborhood burned them in their house. SPOOKY

05-22-2003, 12:55 PM	#7
Shizamus Senior Member Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Vermont Posts: 891	You mentioned computor chip... Go to FIRE FOR EFFECT Forum Line up to be bar coded post

05-22-2003, 06:03 PM	#8
Evilahole V.I.P. Member Join Date: Mar 2003 Posts: 348	A radar device that can tell who we are by the way we walk? At least I have a good reason to get faced from now on. Get good and drunk and stumble around a lot...that'll throw a monkey wrench in their system.