Nov 16, 2011

Not content to spy on people using street cameras, the small city of Lancaster, CA, approved a resolution last week that will allow a crime-fighting spy plane to fly overhead and watch what’s going on below.

The city council voted unanimously last week to allow the surveillance to begin next May.

The Cessna 172 fixed-wing aircraft, equipped with infrared imaging and video camera, would fly at altitudes between 1,000 to 3,000 feet, up to 10 hour a day, and feed encrypted video footage directly to the Los Angeles County sheriff’s office.

Instead of being deployed only in response to specific incidents or needs – as most police aircraft is used – the plane would be dispatched for general-purpose surveillance, regardless of whether there’s any suspicion of a crime being committed.

When a 911 call comes in, the location of a suspected crime will be relayed to the aircraft, which will then fly to the scene and begin recording, a sheriff’s spokesman told the Los Angeles Times.

The project, dubbed the Law Enforcement Aerial Platform System, or LEAPS, will cost $1.

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Nov 16, 2011
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From left: Spike, 26; FluxRostrum, 48; and Lorenzo Serna, 31, answer interview questions at the Occupy Wall Street video room in New York City on Nov. 9, 2011.

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

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The revolution may never be televised, but if Occupy activists in a semi-secret media war room in New York’s Bowery district have their way, it will be livestreamed.

Police seizures at occupations, as at the flagship camp in New York City on Tuesday, not to mention rain, cold and theft, are horrible for expensive media gear, as Occupy Wall Street found after setting up an ad hoc media operation in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park in September.

So Occupy Wall Street decided the best way to keep livestreams of the protests online was to move much of the gear to a safer location somewhere indoors.

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Nov 16, 2011

Julian Assange and his lawyer Jennifer Robinson arrive for his extradition hearing at Belmarsh Magistrates' Court in London earlier this year. Matt Dunham/AP

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is seeking to appeal his extradition ruling to Great Britain’s Supreme Court, arguing that he has not been charged with any crime and that the request for his extradition to Sweden was made by a “partisan prosecutor.” Assange will seek permission to appeal on Dec. 5 in Great Britain’s High Court.

Earlier this month, Assange lost a first appeal after a court ruled that he must return to Sweden to face sex-crime allegations in that country.

Assange has not yet been charged with any crimes but is being sought for questioning in Sweden on rape and coercion allegations stemming from sexual relations he had with two women in that country in August 2010.

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Nov 16, 2011

Photo: Dawn Lim/Wired.com

After a day of chants, debates and yelling at the police who evicted them from Zuccotti Square Tuesday, Occupy Wall Street protestors were overtaken by a wave of silence that rippled through the crowd at 5 p.m. as they learned they’d lost a court battle to rebuild the park.

Occupy Wall Street protestors had been hopeful all day that a state court would allow them to re-establish their two-month old encampment in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, which was destroyed 16 hours earlier by hundreds of police officers in a surprise morning raid ordered by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Instead, the court allowed the city’s new rules against structures and sleeping in the park to stand.

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Nov 16, 2011

A hacker apparently broke into the computer system of Santa Clara University to change the grades of more than 60 current and former students, the California school announced on Monday.

The school’s breach came to light after a 25-year-old electrical engineering student named Mark Loiseau announced on Twitter that FBI agents appeared at his off-campus apartment on Monday morning to question him. He said the agents were brandishing copies of his cell phone records, which they had obtained from Verizon.

“Three federal agents just came over to my apartment and grilled me about some hacking scandal at SCU,” Loiseau tweeted. “They had my phone records!”

The university, located in Silicon Valley and run by the Jesuit Order, acknowledged later on its website that it had called in the FBI to investigate after a female student came forward in August to report that one of her grades had mysteriously changed on a recent transcript she had obtained.

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Nov 16, 2011

This snippet from the leaked anti-WikiLeaks document shows U.S. journalists to be targeted in the proposed disinformation campaign.

Online freedom advocates blasted the Electronic Frontier Foundation, onMonday, angry that the digital rights group accepted money for its annual awards ceremony from Palantir, a secretive data mining software firm involved in a convoluted plot to bring down Wikileaks.

Palantir, which has made hundreds of millions of dollars selling high-end data analysis tools to secretive govenerment agencies, was exposed in February as being party to an attempt to win a federal contract to wage a disinformation and hacking campaign against Wikileaks and its supporters, including journalists and Anonymous.

The company is the premier sponsor of the EFF’s award ceremony Tuesday.

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Nov 16, 2011

Technology freedom groups from across the political spectrum urged the Supreme Court on Monday to stop the Federal Communications Commission from enforcing decency standards.

The libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the left-leaningPublic Knowledge and TechFreedom lodged a friend-of-the-court brief with the high court in a case in which an appeals court has ruled the FCC’s decency regulations are “unconstitutionally vague and produced a “chilling effect” on First Amendment speech.

The facts of the dispute concern FCC rulings that “fleeting expletives” uttered during the 2002 and 2003 Billboard Music Awards were indecent. First Cher then Nicole Richie cursed during the shows aired on Fox. In the other dispute, the FCC said ABC violated decency standards when the network aired a brief nude shot of Charlotte Ross buttocks in NYPD Blue.

“From broadcasting to cable to video games to the internet, technology has empowered parents to enforce their own household standards for appropriate content.

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Nov 16, 2011

The nation’s premier anti-hacking law poses a threat to the civil liberties of millions of Americans who use computers and the internet and could lead to the arrest and prosecution of many users who violate the law on a regular basis, says a former federal prosecutor who wants the Computer Fraud and Abuse Actrevised.

“In the Justice Departments view, the CFAA criminalizes conduct as innocuous as using a fake name on Facebook or lying about your weight in an online dating profile. That situation is intolerable,” says Orin Kerr, George Washington University law professor and a former federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section in the Criminal Division.

Currently, the law punishes anyone who intentionally … exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains information from any protected computer.

Kerr is testifying on Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committees Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, and is asking Congress to amend the law to narrow how prosecutors can interpret what it means to exceed authorized access on a computer.

When the legislation was first enacted in the 1980s, it specifically targeted computer hacking and other computer misuse, Kerr argues in a written version of the testimony (.

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Nov 16, 2011

For those wondering what might become of the Occupy movement over time, it might be useful to consider the path of UK Uncut, an activist group in Britain that recently enjoyed its first birthday. And it’s still going strong: On Wednesday, UK Uncut activists infiltrated a business conference in suits and harangued the government’s top tax official during his scheduled speech.

In each of the ways that Occupy is amorphous — the leaderlessness, the consensus-driven organizing process, the lack of specific policy goals — UK Uncut is a shade less so.

UK Uncut’s focus is on protesting government spending cuts, and on pointing out the ways that certain individuals and corporations exploit loopholes or special deals to reduce their tax bills. But that turns out to be a large enough umbrella to let UK Uncut support all sorts of causes — so in addition to organizing its own actions, the group opportunistically supports others it sees as advancing its broadly defined agenda.

In the process, UK Uncut has become a very successful example of a protest organization powered by social media.

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Nov 16, 2011

The monument to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, decorated by Occupy Cal supporters after their eviction.

The Occupy movement took a turn for the symbolic in Berkeley this week, harkening back to a heritage of protest, social unrest, and progressive causes.

And, according to one former member of the Free Speech Movement, which began in the same spot, the implications of the Occupy movement could reverberate for a generation — even if theprotestersonly force small institutional changes.

On Wednesday students and residents of the Bay Area gathered to occupy the space outside Sproul Hall on the UC Berkeley Campus, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in 1964. The Free Speech Movement, after a tumultuous year, ended restrictions on student speech not only at Cal, but universities all over the nation.

It’s been 47 years since the start of theFree Speech Movement, which inspired the anti-Vietnam War movement, the hippies, and perhaps even the internet as we know it.

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