A new U.K. law, expected to be announced during the Queen’s Speech in May, would allow the Government Communications Headquarters ( — a British intelligence agency — to have unlimited access to a wealth of information about U.K. citizens’ communications. The law, which proponents claim is necessary for tackling terrorism and crime in general, would allow the GCHQ to pull up records concerning any citizen’s phone calls, text messages, emails, and web history. At the moment, access to such information requires the permission of a Magistrate, much in the same way search warrants work in the United States. The new law, however, would remove this step.

Step one of achieving a dystopia  is having the physical infrastructure to monitor large amounts of people at all times. Step two is having the software (or manpower I guess) to parse it all. A Japanese surveillance company has just made huge strides in that second part. The company, Hitachi Kokusai Electric, is just finishing development of a facial recognition system that, given enough footage, can scan and index around 36 million faces in just around 1 second. You’d need a pretty insane amount of footage before that calculation time became non-trivial.

Everybody knows that you don’t say “bomb” at an airport. It’s just a bad idea. But how about social media? You can say anything you want there, can’t you? You should be able to figure out the answer to that question. The answer is, yes, technically you can, but if you say certain things, the Department of Homeland Security is going to take notice. We’ve known for a while that the government has had its eye on social media and after Leigh Van Bryan was arrested for tweeting the words “destroy” and “America” in that order, it became clear that tweets can be taken very, very seriously, but how many words could possibly be on the DHS’s watch-list. A bunch. A whole bunch.

Google is planning to allow users worldwide to opt-out from their Wi-Fi hotspot location database later this fall. The announcement, made on the search giant’s European public policy blog, is surely a response to legal troubles the company has encountered after it was revealed that the process of mapping these hotspots also captured information about individual Wi-Fi devices like computers and smartphones. Google has also run into legal trouble when the company admitted in 2010 that it had inadvertently intercepted fragments of data being sent over the networks it was mapping.

The information in this database allows Google to estimate the geographic position of a user based on the known positions of Wi-Fi hotspots. Early iterations of the iPhone determined location in the exact same manner, using a database from SkyHook. To create their own database, Google’s streetview cars were equipped with Wi-Fi sniffing sensors that mapped the location of every wireless device they came across, as well as some they didn’t intend.

Researchers at Rice University have developed a system for remotely searching images stored on mobile devices. The goal of the software, called Theia, is to give searchers a near-realtime view of what is being photographed on with now-ubiquitous camera phones. It’s like that bit in The Dark Knight where Batman turns every phone in Gotham into a sonar/microphone, except with pictures and it’s for real.

Obviously, there are going to be some privacy concerns with something like this, but let’s focus on why this information would be useful. The most dramatic example would be that of a lost or abducted child. With Theia, law enforcement could search cell phones the world over for the child, hoping to catch an image accidentally caught by someone’s phone. The hope is that with the staggering number of camera-equipped cellphones in the world, someone will catch what you’re looking for — intentionally or not.

The system works through a server for addressing the searches and an app installed onto the phones.

The recent riots around London shocked the world, and the media was quick to pick up reports that rioters were using social media platforms such as Twitter to stay one step ahead of police. According to the Guardian, UK Prime Minister David Cameron has announced that in response his government will seek a means to ban individuals using such services for nefarious means.

Speaking to the House of Commons, Thinq_ quotes Cameron as saying:

Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were, organised via social media. [...] Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.

Cameron added that the Home Secretary Theresa May will be meetings with RIM, Facebook, and Twitter representatives to discuss the matter. Though this is the first announcement by Cameron, it comes after several arrests were already made for inciting violence via social media. The Guardian says that three people have been arrested in connection with their use of the BlackBerry Messenger service, and other arrests have stemmed from inciting violence through Facebook.

(UK Guardian, Thinq_ via Slashdot, image via George Rex)

Hong Kong based newspaper Apple Daily claims that the electronic devices the Chinese government calls “inspection and quarantine cards” and are required for certain cars are actually listening devices. The newspaper, which has an anti-establishment reputation in China, has released several photos identifying the components they claim are used to listen in on drivers.

Consumer electronics giant Cisco is facing down a lawsuit brought by 11 members of the Chinese religious group Falun Gong which claim that the company was complicit in the Chinese crackdown on the religion. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong grew to massive popularity in China until it was outlawed by the government in 1999. Since then, members of the group have reportedly been the victims of numerous human rights abuses.

The suit claims that Cisco competed forcefully for a contract with the Chinese government, knowing full well that their surveillance technology “Policenet” would be used to monitor and repress Falun Gong online activities. Falun Gong claims that as a result of Cisco’s successful contract bid, over 5,000 members of their religion were arrested, possibly tortured or killed.

Cisco has stated that they are not at fault, and will fight the suit “vigorously” in American courts. A Cisco representative has stated that the company operates no networks in China and followed U.S. export policies for technology and did not customize the Policenet system — which Falun Gong refers to as “Golden Shield” — in any way for use by the Chinese government. The suit was filed in San Jose, California, and there is no word as to when it is expected to go to trial.

(CNET via Slashdot)

The fight against Internet smut is an old one, and a challenge ofsysiphusian futility. But researchers MyungJong Kim and Hoirin Kim at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have presented a new weapon in the fight for decency. They’ve recently unveiled new software that analyzes the sound of video clips to determine whether or not the video is pornographic. Like Justice Potter Stewart, this software should know it when it it hears it.

The new technique uses the Radon transform (you know, “the integral transform consisting of the integral of a function over straight lines” named after Johann Radon) to analyze the audio of suspect materials, and determine if the contents fit the profile of pornography. After analyzing numerous half-second audio clips with their system, the researchers released several shocking conclusions about the sounds of sex.

On the heels of the furor over the iPhone’s unsecured location log, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the iPhone continues to store location data in the consolidated.db file even when location services are disabled on the phone. This is in direct opposition with previous statements from Apple, unrelated to this recent revelation, which claimed that users could opt out of all location gathering operations.

In their follow-up research to last week’s revelation about the consolidated.db location information, the WSJ found that deactivating location services from the iOS settings panel did not stop data from being logged.