In Farmington Hills, Michigan intelligent lights will soon be keeping a watchful eye over its citizens. But is it really for entertainment and safety or a gross invasion of privacy?
“In each lighting fixture or each lighting pole, there is processor very much like an iPhone. And it takes inputs and outputs and talks back and forth. And the poles actually talk to each other,” said Ron Harwood.
When you step come into view of the street light, there is a camera that spots you, and the person on the other side sees you by white specs on a black screen. The camera senses that somebody is there, and if wants, it can even take your picture.
The system is also capable of recording conversations making critics cry invasion of privacy.
“This is not a system with spook technology. It’s much more transparent. It can just talk to you and say, don’t fall over Niagara Falls,” said Harwood.
It may be able to just make a stupid joke about Niagara Falls, but the fact that it can spot you, track you, and record your conversations is, indeed, spook technology. It’s worrisome that people are simply accepting a program such as this as the normal course of events. If no one in Farmington Hills fights against it, it will start showing up elsewhere in the United States.
The Department of Homeland Security has moved its “see something say something” program into the hotel industry in an effort to stop all the terrorists that are, apparently, staying in hotels.
The PSA, which will be interspersed with other messages on the welcome screen, will be the same in all 5,400 hotels that LodgeNet serves. It ends by telling viewers to contact “local authorities.”
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says that reaching the “millions of guests that stay at hotels and motels each year is a significant step in engaging the full range of partners in our Homeland Security efforts.”
The federal government gained access to hotel TV sets by forming a partnership with the hotel industry’s largest association — the A
American Hotel & Lodging Association — which connected DHS with LodgeNet, the industry’s largest TV-content provider.
By entering hotels at a time when the hospitality industry is on the rebound, the government has the power to tap a growing, captive audience. Recent research from LodgeNet says 98% of hotel guests turn on their hotel TV, and the average guest keeps it on for more than three hours per day.
Ann Parker, a LodgeNet spokeswoman, is completely behind the new initiative.
“It’s about everyone doing their part to help keep each other and the country safe,”
But critics of the campaign point out potential pitfalls. Josh Meyer of the Washington-based National Security Journalism Initiative predicts it will generate “a huge amount of potentially baseless tips that will inundate local, state and federal law enforcement authorities.”
DHS spokesman Peter Boogaard, however, cites successful citizen interventions, such as the May 2010 incident in which two street vendors helped thwart a car bombing attempt in New York City’s Times Square by noticing a smoking vehicle and reporting it to police.
The difference here is that you are unlikely to see overly suspicious behavior in a hotel. What you will see is people acting normally and going about their day. You do not know who the employees of the hotel are, so there is no way for you to report if a person is doing something wrong. Comparing a smoking vehicle to people in a hotel is like comparing apples to oranges. This program is only used as a way to instill fear.
Out of the ordinary doesn’t equate to terrorism. Stepping into other people’s private business under the pretense of preventing terrorism, however, seems to be the modus operandi of the government.
H.R. 358, also known as the Protect Life Act, has passed in the House of Representatives and now moves on to the Senate for voting. This new piece of legislation would remove women’s rights that go back to the Reagan Administration.
The bill is officially known as the Protect Life Act, but it, sadly, restricts women’s access to reproductive health care services. Those who support the bill say it is merely changing a small part of the Affordable Care Act so that US taxpayer money will not be used to fund abortions. The fact is, this is already prohibited under the Affordable Care Act. H.R. 358 goes even farther than the Hyde Amendment as it restricts women who have have private insurance from spending their own private money on health insurance.
“Extremists prevailed today in the House of Representatives,” said Debra Ness of the National Partnership for Women and Families, “proving again that they are badly out-of-touch with the majority of Americans who want lawmakers to focus on economic recovery, jobs and promoting, rather than restricting, affordable, quality health care – not [on] an extreme, anti-woman agenda.”
The bill, H.R. 358, about which we have written extensively, revives the earlier failed Stupak amendment, which would force health plans to drop comprehensive coverage in state health insurance exchanges, cutting off millions of women from the benefits they receive today and prevent women from paying for health insurance with abortion coverage with their own money.
H.R. 358 contains other provisions revealing complete disregard for women’s health and lives. It permits states to enact sweeping refusal laws that would allow health plans to refuse to cover women’s preventive services, including birth control, without cost-sharing — undoing a new protection under health reform supported by 66 percent of Americans. It also codifies and significantly expands an already expansive refusal clause (also known as the Weldon amendment) without any regard for patient rights or protections. Under current law (through the 2004 Weldon amendment), hospitals, health care facilities, and insurance plans can refuse to provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions. The Weldon amendment has no protections for patients to ensure they have access to care and information in a timely manner. H.R. 358 codifies this unfair and discriminatory provision. H.R. 358 further allows health care entities–hospitals, clinics–to refuse to “participate in” abortion care. This could mean that a hospital employee with no medical training or role in a patient’s treatment decisions could refuse to process bills, handle medical records, or even set up an examination room for a patient seeking abortion care.
And finally, it overrides protections for pregnant women under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. EMTALA was enacted in 1986 to ensure public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay, including women in active labor. Under EMTALA, hospitals must stabilize a pregnant patient who, for example, is facing an emergency obstetric condition or life-threatening pregnancy and either treat her–including an emergency abortion–or if the hospital or staff objects, to transfer her to another facility that will treat her.
H.R. 358 overturns decades of precedent guaranteeing people access to lifesaving emergency care, including abortion care and says its ok that a pregnant woman fighting for her life be left to die.
The president strongly opposes H.R. 358 and it is likely to fail in the Senate, but it is important to understand that the republicans continue to push for this type of national policy. By doing so, they are telling women that they no longer matter in this world and are merely baby carriers.
The city of Atlanta, Georgia is home to the Video Integration Center, allowing city police to monitor over a hundred public and private CCTV cameras. This isn’t enough, however, for the police. They want more monitoring.
Talks are underway to link up with more cameras at CNN Center, Georgia State University, the Georgia World Congress Center and MARTA, along with cameras in Buckhead.
Officials say hundreds or thousands more private-sector cameras will eventually feed into the center.
“This is just the beginning,” said Dave Wilkinson, president of the Atlanta Police Foundation, which helped raise money for the center. “This is going to grow by leaps and bounds over the years. The goal, of course, is to have the entire city blanketed.”
Officials insist cameras linked to the center will only watch areas the public could already see. The city’s law department is drafting rules for the center, Ferguson said.
Unfortunately, officials are not talking to each other as you cannot blanket a city yet only have cameras where the public can already see. The two statements are incompatible. Yet, city officials are okay with tracking innocent people as they go about their daily lives.
“I should hope the public is not okay with it,” said Brett Bittner, executive director of the Libertarian Party of Georgia. “We’re talking about filming every aspect of people’s lives once they step out of the house.”
This is never acceptable and it doesn’t help fight crime. One only need to look at the massive test case of the United Kingdom where people are already on camera once they leave their homes. Crime hasn’t dropped there as a result of intruding cameras at all.
