Loss of Privacy

Project Indect is the culmination of five years of research aimed at developing computer programs that can monitor information from every corner of the internet, including what was once thought very private.  Not only can it process information from websites and forums, but from p2p programs, file servers and individual computers.  Project Indect’s objective is to detect threats as well as abnormal behavior and violence.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of human rights group Liberty, described the introduction of such mass surveillance techniques as a “sinister step” for any country, adding that it was “positively chilling” on a European scale.

Stephen Booth, an Open Europe analyst who has helped compile a dossier on the European justice agenda, said these developments and projects such as Indect sounded “Orwellian” and raised serious questions about individual liberty.

“This is all pretty scary stuff in my book. These projects would involve a huge invasion of privacy and citizens need to ask themselves whether the EU should be spending their taxes on them,” he said.

“The EU lacks sufficient checks and balances and there is no evidence that anyone has ever asked ‘is this actually in the best interests of our citizens?’”

Of course it’s not in the best interests of the citizens.  It’s in the best interest of those who stand to profit and gain from the information collected.

Miss Chakrabarti said: “Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society.

But, it’s okay if we do it “in the name of the children” or to protect the citizens from some, as yet unknown, bad guy.

According to the official website for Project Indect, which began this year, its main objectives include “to develop a platform for the registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information and automatic detection of threats and recognition of abnormal behaviour or violence”.

It talks of the “construction of agents assigned to continuous and automatic monitoring of public resources such as: web sites, discussion forums, usenet groups, file servers, p2p [peer-to-peer] networks as well as individual computer systems, building an internet-based intelligence gathering system, both active and passive”.

In plain English, this means, “We are going to watch every single thing you do, put it in a database somewhere, and use it against you at the first opportune moment.”

Idaho police were not happy that so many people were refusing breathalyzer tests when stopped for drunk driving.  It’s not against the law to refuse, so they came up with a new idea.  The forceful drawing of blood is perfectly legal and the Idaho police are enforcing this practice.

Officers can’t hold down a suspect and force them to breath into a tube, she noted, but they can forcefully take blood — a practice that’s been upheld by Idaho’s Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court.

The nation’s highest court ruled in 1966 that police could have blood tests forcibly done on a drunk driving suspect without a warrant, as long as the draw was based on a reasonable suspicion that a suspect was intoxicated, that it was done after an arrest and carried out in a medically approved manner.

The practice of cops drawing blood, implemented first in 1995 in Arizona, has also raised concerns about safety and the credibility of the evidence.

“I would imagine that a lot of people would be wary of having their blood drawn by an officer on the hood of their police vehicle,” said Steve Oberman, chair of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ DUI Committee.

Really?  Ya think?

The officer phlebotomists are generally trained under the same program as their state’s hospital or clinical phlebotomists, but they do it under a highly compressed schedule, and some of the curriculum is cut.
Uhm, yay for shortcuts?

…they are trained on the elbow crease, the forearm and the back of the hand. If none are accessible, they’ll take the suspect to the hospital for testing.

Drunk or not, I’m going to fight this, which means the police won’t be able to do their work or they’ll stab me so bad I’ll need to go to the hospital.  Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to have police officers take blood at the scene?

Once they’re back on patrol, they will draw blood of any suspected drunk driver who refuses a breath test. They’ll use force if they need to, such as getting help from another officer to pin down a suspect and potentially strap them down, Watson said.

So, you’ve got a potentially drunk person who is, naturally, going to freak out when they are pinned down and no one thinks anything could possibly go wrong here?

Though most legal experts agree blood tests measure blood alcohol more accurately than breath tests, Oberman said the tests can be fraught with problems, too.

Vials can be mixed up, preservative levels in the tubes used to collect the blood can be off, or the blood can be stored improperly, causing it to ferment and boosting the alcohol content.

There is so much wrong here all you can do is shake your head at the stupidity of government officials that think this program is going to work.

“What we found was that the refusal rates of chemical testing lowered significantly since this program began,” Haywood said. “Arizona we had about a 20 percent refusal rate in 1995, and today we see about an 8 to 9 percent refusal rate.”

People scared shitless probably have nothing to do with this drop in refusal rates.  Most probably don’t know their rights and are so scared that they just comply with the police for fear of worse reprisals.

Just because you are suspected of being drunk doesn’t mean that you should be subjected to such procedures.  I don’t care what the Supreme Court said, the states are misinterpreting it and stretching the law to fit what they want.  The side of the road is not a safe or sterile environment to perform such a test.  Despite basic training, a police officer is not a trained medical personnel and I will not allow someone who is not properly trained to jab me with anything sharp.

The police pass their training after 75 successful blood draws.  I have blood drawn at the hospital and, even then, the properly trained nurses can’t always find a vein and don’t always get it right.  How is a cop going to do better than a nurse with years of training?

Breathalyzers aren’t always accurate.  No one wants a cop drawing their blood.  Your choice?  Don’t ever go to Idaho.

You’re a cop in Polk County, Florida and you’re raiding a home during a drug bust.  Do you A) look for drugs in the house, or B) play Wii bowling.  If you answered A, you can’t be on the Polk County police force.

While some detectives hauled out evidence such as flat screen televisions and shotguns, others threw strikes, gutter balls and worked on picking up spares.

A Polk County sheriff’s detective cataloging evidence repeatedly put down her work and picked up a Wii remote to bowl. When she hit two strikes in a row, she raised her arms above her head, jumping and kicking.

While a female detective lifted a nearby couch looking for evidence, another sheriff’s detective focused on pin action.

So, how did they get caught?  That’s right, the drug dealer they were looking for had a hidden security camera hooked up and recorded the whole thing.

What Star Trek Predicts About The Future of Information Security from ha.ckers.org is an insightful look at how, in the future, we’ll still be screwing things up.  Even with the best intentions, we’ll probably never get information security 100% right.