- Imagine this.
-
- You're walking down your street to get a Slurpee at the
Neighborhood 711. Let's say your wearing a Red Baseballcap, a white tshirt,
and blue jeans.
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- Hmmm..... Why is this person wearing Red, White, and
Blue? Is this some sort of Terrorist Code?
-
- Let's say a Cop sees you and makes the decision that
you are a "person of interest". Now, let's imagine the police
officer walks up to you and asks you what your name is.
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- What happens if you don't tell him? Well, we know what
will happen - you go to jail- that's what the Supreme Court has ruled,
and God Forbid you try and stick up for your rights as an American Citizen.
That's called "Resisting Arrest".
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- Now, imagine, once you give the police officer your name,
he types it into his palm pilot.
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- The next thing you know everything about you pops up
in the palm of his hand. Everything you've searched on the internet, every
instant message you've ever sent, every email, every website you have visited,
every purchase you made on your credit cards, every item you purchased
at Walmart and beyond (RFID Tracking), your credit report, your medical
records, parking tickets, citations, college transcript, highschool and
elementary school records, tax records, every place you have travelled
(GPS Tracking), and possibly even a database of your Vital Signs and Brain
Wave thought Pattern Records (Verichip).
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- Think this can't happen to you?
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- Think Again:
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- Welcome to the Matrix. All I can say is you can lead
SHEEPLE to water, but you can't make the SHEEPLE Drink the "Kool Aid".
Wake up America - You are Borg.
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- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/25/tech/main626140.shtml
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-
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- Cop On The Beat A Walking Database
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- (AP) A police officer stops you on the street, then taps
something into a device in the palm of his hand.
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- The next minute, he knows who your relatives are, who
lives in your house, who your neighbors are, the kind of car you drive
or boat you own, whether you've been sued and various other tidbits about
your life.
-
- Science fiction? Hardly.
-
- A growing number of police departments now have instant
access via handheld wireless devices to vast commercial databases that
contain details on just about anyone officers encounter on the beat.
-
- In a time of terrorism worries, the information could
theoretically save lives, or produce clues that an eagle-eyed cop could
use to solve a case.
-
- But placing a commercial database full of personal details
at an officer's fingertips also raises troubling questions for electronic
privacy activists.
-
- "If the police went around keeping files on who
you lived with and who your roommates were, I think people would be outraged,"
said Jay Stanley, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union, "And
yet in this case, they're not doing it, but they're plugging into a company
that is able to do it easily."
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- In recent years, police departments have been testing
different handheld wireless devices. Typically, they've used the devices
to gain access to law enforcement databases meant only for police that,
for example, alert them when someone is wanted for arrest.
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- At the same time, many police departments have been using
desktop computers to search commercial databases to help them learn more
detailed information about people they are investigating. These databases
can hold billions of public records from a variety of sources. Thousands
of law enforcement bodies now use them; five states have linked their own
records with a huge commercial database in a federally funded program known
as Matrix.
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- Now, in a convergence of the two trends, police are beginning
to access the commercial databases using handheld wireless devices.
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- LocatePLUS Holdings Corp., a Beverly, Mass.-based company
that says it maintains more than 6 billion records and has data on 98 percent
of the U.S. population, announced this week that it would provide Blackberry
wireless devices to state police at Logan International Airport. Two of
the planes hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001, took off from Logan.
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- The officers can use the Blackberrys to access the LocatePlus
database wherever and whenever they want, though the records don't include
state and federal criminal justice databases or terrorist watch lists.
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- Such empowerment gains even more heft with Monday's ruling
by a sharply divided Supreme Court that people who refuse to give their
names to police can be arrested, even if they've done nothing wrong.
-
- Justice John Paul Stevens, one of the dissenters, expressed
concern that, with simply a name, officers could quickly tap into databases
and learn a "broad array of information about the person."
-
- Indeed, that's already happening.
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- LocatePlus now has more than 50 law enforcement agency
customers that use wireless handhelds to access its database, said chief
executive Jon Latorella.
-
- Latorella said the company's database takes information
from such sources as registries of motor vehicles, credit bureaus, property
tax departments, telephone directories -- even unlisted numbers -- and
courts to create computerized dossiers on people on demand.
-
- ChoicePoint Inc., based in Alpharetta, Ga., also offers
police wireless access to its vast databases, but so far has a smaller
number of clients, said James E. Lee, the company's chief marketing officer.
-
- Massachusetts State Police Lt. Thomas Coffey, who works
at Logan, said he felt the LocatePLUS service would be useful.
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- "We're in the information business, obtaining information
about individuals or groups. It's an intelligence-gathering tool. It just
allows us to do our job better," he said.
-
- Privacy activists argue, however, that information collected
for one purpose shouldn't be used for others. They call for federal standards
on the access and use of data as well as mechanisms to prevent abuse.
-
- The ACLU's Stanley said the need for standards is even
more urgent as cops on the street get wireless access to databases, and
could make snap judgments based on incorrect data.
-
- Harlin McEwen, a former police chief who chairs the technology
committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said private
database searching via handhelds is getting a lot of interest from police
chiefs.
-
- But he also cautioned that police should be wary about
relying on information from databases not controlled and maintained by
the government.
-
- "It may be a tool for me. It may be a tip. But I'd
better not rely on its accuracy without doing further investigation,"
McEwen said.
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- Privacy activists agree on the accuracy issue, and have
broader concerns.
-
- "These new services ... literally alter the balance
of power between the individual and the state," giving the government
more power, said Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic
Privacy Information Center in Washington. "The private sector has
become Big Brother's little helper."
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