Loss of Privacy

The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice is now piloting a program that will, eventually, make a lie detector test a mandatory part of probation for sex offenders.

A three-year pilot project in East and West Midlands will aim to establish whether polygraph testing should be introduced across England and Wales.

Between 350 and 450 offenders are expected to be tested over the three-year period of the latest pilot scheme. Those who refuse risk being sent back to prison.

Claude Knights, director of the children’s charity Kidscape, said she believed the tests could help to assess risk.

“I’m hoping that this will be an incentive for paedophiles to disclose more information, which would help us to manage their release more effectively.”

What she really meant to say is, “We must think of the children.  Oh, and we must keep these dirty bastards off the street.  This sort of testing is just what we need as an excuse to throw people back into jail.”

The long-expected move had been a commitment of the government, he said, and he was “proud to say that this can now legally happen from Wednesday”.

Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the government is now happy and proud that this can legally happen now?  Have they been doing this all along and just now legalized it?

Up next, all criminals on probation will be required to submit to a polygraph.  Once the criminals are finished and in a database, we’ll move on to people arrested for anything.  Next we’ll move on to speedsters, boy racers, and loiterers.  Don’t worry, citizen, we’ll get to you soon enough.

The Phoenix police department raided the home of Jeff Pataky, a blogger who writes about, and criticizes the Phoenix police department.  The reason behind the raid, Pataky believes, is that sources inside the police department confirmed that the police don’t like him questioning the behavior of the department.

Pataky, a former software sales and marketing executive who now focuses his energy shoveling content on www.badphoenixcops.com, said he believes his online criticism of the department – along with past criticisms of police investigations – led officers to serve a search warrant at his home last week.

“We have heard internally from our police sources that they purposefully did this to stop me,” Pataky said. “They took my cable modem and wireless router. Anyone worth their salt knows nothing is stored in the cable modem.”

As it appears from the current news reports, the police are violating Pataky’s 1st, 4th, and 5th amendment rights as well as Title 18, U.S.C. Section 241 and Title 18, U.S.C., Section 242.

While Pataky’s case is complex and disturbing, they aren’t just targeting him.  Former homicide detective David Barnes was demoted for questioning the handling of evidence in the crime lab.  It appears that anyone who questions the police is a target for harassment.

The entire county has been accused of being corrupt and incompetent [pdf].

Unfortunately, today’s law enforcement is seen as a place filled with tyrannical individuals only interested in themselves and what they can take for themselves.  Instead of being a help to the citizens of the United States, they are a hindrance, becoming the very threat to our security and liberty that they are supposed to protect.

I believe more people would fight back against this sort of behavior if only normal citizens would not be seen as dissenters, “terrorists,” protesters, and a threat to society.  It also doesn’t help that the police are the ones armed to the teeth and can ruin your life with a swift arrest and a blurb on the news.

Two and a half years ago, Mayor Daly said that he wanted a CCTV camera on every street corner by 2016.  It appears that he might just get his wish.  Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he still believes that this will cut crime and, now, give Chicago a shot at hosting the olympics.

Many of these cameras were installed in high crime areas in Chicago.  They are still high crime areas.  Little has changed.  No matter where in the world they are installed, CCTV cameras still don’t prevent crime.

In yet another study, this time in San Francisco, conclusions are made that reinforce previous findings that security cameras don’t work.  Researchers at the University of California have found that cameras in high crime areas do not prevent violent crimes.

The long-awaited study by the UC Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society found the program is hurt by lack of training and oversight, a failure to integrate footage with other police efforts, poor quality cameras, and what may be a fundamental weakness of cameras as anti-crime devices.

Mayor Newsom began the program four years ago, but out of concern for people’s privacy, police are not allowed to monitor cameras in real time. Investigators must wait until a crime is reported before looking at footage.

In what we already know, cameras that are not monitored do nothing except become a witness to the crime.

Security Consultant, Ed Giorgio believes that security and privacy are a zero sum game.  He is often quoted over this matter, however, it is undeniably untrue.  Florida Customs agent, Rafael Pacheco, can attest to this fact.   Pacheco took bribes from drug smuggler, Fidencio Estrada, and then checked federal databases for Estrada.

The factual background in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals’ recent decision to uphold a lower court’s conviction of Estrada details how in early 2000, Pacheco accessed DHS’s billion-record Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS) database looking for any information that the feds had on Estrada…Pacheco also went into the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database in order to dig up information on the warrants that were out for Estrada’s arrest. Pacheco then fed the info back to Estrada, who was better able to elude law enforcement in as he plied his narcotics trade.

This brings up huge privacy concerns over the millions of innocent citizens who have had their information collected and placed into government databases.  Despite the fact that these two men were bust and are now serving time, it brings to light the reality that the US government is rushing far to quickly into obtaining databases on innocent people without spending the time to guarantee their rights.

This single act by Pacheco reveals that creating databases on innocent people, such as REAL-ID and OneDOJ are horrible plans that were never well-thought out.  There are already fears of identity theft with REAL-ID so great that the DHS keeps pushing back the deadline for its full implementation.  It also helps that many states have plans to reject it or have already passed legislation in their states refusing to comply.

After the debacle in the United Kingdom, we can no longer call it fear mongering when we talk about all this information being stored on a single disc or hard drive.  It is easy to copy the information.  It is becoming easier to get the information as the speeds of Internet connections increase.  Your information could be taken from the database and sold off many times before the breach is ever discovered.

These databases are not making us any safer.  They are, instead, creating problems for individual Americans that should never exist.  We now have to worry about our information being placed in a database we have no control over and have to trust that every single person that has access to it will be completely honest in dealing with the database.  That isn’t going to happen.

As in this case, Pacheco was bribed with only $18,000 so he could pay off his auto loan.  What happens when they find someone deeply in debt or has a severely sick kid?  Everyone has their price.  Everyone is corruptible.  You might convince yourself that you’re only looking at one person’s file, and it’s their file, but what happens when they give you enough money to keep an eye on their neighbor’s file?