Monday, May 28, 2012

RFID

students are not the only ones being tracked via RFID, the newer Texas drivers license has RFID and so do the US passports. just last year if students played hooky the judge would make 'em wear an ankle monitor tracking device, such devices were initially only worn by certain criminals the government wanted to keep track of. now they're cyber tracking everybody. under apartheid in south africa it's citizens had to carry their travel documents to go from Durban to Port Elizabeth and show their documents at the various check points. that would be like us having to stop at a check point and show our drivers license just to go from Houston, TX to Austin,TX a check point just to verify ones whereabouts. not even a sobriety check excuse. but hey we don't need that we have TX DOT checking that via technology on the toll roads and the cameras on our streets. when did we decide to turn the police into cyber stalkers. i don't think they even had that in mind when they signed up.
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students are being tracked

Students will be tracked via chips in IDs By Francisco Vara-Orta Updated 10:07 a.m., Saturday, May 26, 2012 Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/education/article/Students-will-be-tracked-via-chips-in-IDs-3584339.php#ixzz1wCTgTePJ Northside Independent School District plans to track students next year on two of its campuses using technology implanted in their student identification cards in a trial that could eventually include all 112 of its schools and all of its nearly 100,000 students. District officials said the Radio Frequency Identification System (RFID) tags would improve safety by allowing them to locate students — and count them more accurately at the beginning of the school day to help offset cuts in state funding, which is partly based on attendance. Northside, the largest school district in Bexar County, plans to modify the ID cards next year for all students attending John Jay High School, Anson Jones Middle School and all special education students who ride district buses. That will add up to about 6,290 students. The school board unanimously approved the program late Tuesday but, in a rarity for Northside trustees, they hotly debated it first, with some questioning it on privacy grounds. State officials and national school safety experts said the technology was introduced in the past decade but has not been widely adopted. Northside's deputy superintendent of administration, Brian Woods, who will take over as superintendent in July, defended the use of RFID chips at Tuesday's meeting, comparing it to security cameras. He stressed that the program is only a pilot and not permanent. “We want to harness the power of (the) technology to make schools safer, know where our students are all the time in a school, and increase revenues,” district spokesman Pascual Gonzalez said. “Parents expect that we always know where their children are, and this technology will help us do that.” Chip readers on campuses and on school buses can detect a student's location but can't track them once they leave school property. Only authorized administrative officials will have access to the information, Gonzalez said. “This way we can see if a student is at the nurse's office or elsewhere on campus, when they normally are counted for attendance in first period,” he said. Gonzalez said the district plans to send letters to parents whose students are getting the the RFID-tagged ID cards. He said officials understand that students could leave the card somewhere, throwing off the system. They cost $15 each, and if lost, a student will have to pay for a new one. Parents interviewed outside Jay and Jones as they picked up their children Thursday were either supportive, skeptical or offended. Veronica Valdorrinos said she would be OK if the school tracks her daughter, a senior at Jay, as she always fears for her safety. Ricardo and Juanita Roman, who have two daughters there, said they didn't like that Jay was targeted. Gonzalez said the district picked schools with lower attendance rates and staff willing to pilot the tags. Some parents said they understood the benefits but had reservations over privacy. “I would hope teachers can help motivate students to be in their seats instead of the district having to do this,” said Margaret Luna, whose eighth-grade granddaughter at Jones will go to Jay next year. “But I guess this is what happens when you don't have enough money.” The district plans to spend $525,065 to implement the pilot program and $136,005 per year to run it, but it will more than pay for itself, predicted Steve Bassett, Northside's assistant superintendent for budget and finance. If successful, Northside would get $1.7 million next year from both higher attendance and Medicaid reimbursements for busing special education students, he said. But the payoff could be a lot bigger if the program goes districtwide, Bassett said. He said the program was one way the growing district could respond to the Legislature's cuts in state education funding. Northside trimmed its budget last year by $61.4 million. Two school districts in the Houston area — Spring and Santa Fe ISDs — have used the technology for several years and have reported gains of hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for improved attendance. Spring ISD spokeswoman Karen Garrison said the district, one-third the size of Northside, hasn't had any parent backlash. In Tuesday's board debate, trustee M'Lissa M. Chumbley said she worried that parents might feel the technology violated their children's privacy rights. She didn't want administrators tracking teachers' every move if they end up outfitted with the tags, she added. “I think this is overstepping our bounds and is inappropriate,” Chumbley said. “I'm honestly uncomfortable about this.” Northside has to walk a tightrope in selling the idea to parents, some of whom could be turned off by the revenue incentive, said Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland-based consulting firm. The American Civil Liberties Union fought the use of the technology in 2005 at a rural elementary school in California and helped get the program canceled, said Kirsten Bokenkamp, an ACLU spokeswoman in Texas. She said concerns about the tags include privacy and the risks of identity theft or kidnapping if somebody hacks into the system. Texas Education Agency spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson said no state law or policy regulates the use of such devices and the decision is up to local districts. wraytex 8:04 AM on May 25, 2012 As long as we keep passing bonds the schools will keep finding creative ways to spend the funds. REPLY (18) (4) POPULARITY: 14 | | [Report Abuse] 2 replies Mongo 1:28 AM on May 25, 2012 Fact is, the school doesn't care where the kids are after first period, as long as they get that money rolling in... REPLY (18) (5) POPULARITY: 13 | | [Report Abuse] 3 replies Dave_Hardesty 11:22 AM on May 25, 2012 Dave Hardesty Continued Apart from my employment from Lockheed and working independently from them and Singer Business Machines and their affiliates, I helped to develop such technologies for the purpose of locating buried cables and tracking tagged animals resident on government property in CA. It's easy to detect RFID chips, and the data contained on them (as much as 64K bytes of information), from a distance greater than 35 feet. I know because working with such things have I have done so. If the student is carrying the card, like a credit card, they can be tracked as easily as driving down the street with the antenna/sensor and recording the data indicating they are there with a laptop. It's that easy and the equipment to do so isn't very expensive. Credit agencies say it can't be done with their cards. Criminals do it all the time in Credit Card ID theft, which is the fastest rising cyber crime today. Congressional law says Credit Agencies have to tell you this. With animals and animal control or locating buried utility cables, such things are good. When it comes to the ability to track people or steal credit card information to illegally purchase things, read stolen property, it's wrong. Beware of what you allow and justify with "safety" or "convenience," telling you it's "no big deal" if the government or some private individual does it. As with most things that have been done for our good and convenience, it has has been far to easy, for such information to get into the wrong hands to be used against you. There you have it from someone who helped to develop such things. If this goes through, wrap the card in metal foil or case when you don't want it read. Don't stick it in the microwave because it could damage to the oven by fire. Go Rough Riders! REPLY (12) (0) POPULARITY: 12 | | [Report Abuse] 3 replies View Comments (70)
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Thursday, April 5, 2012

profit from wiretaps

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/04/03/these-are-the-prices-att-verizon-and-sprint-charge-for-cellphone-wiretaps/

Andy Greenberg, Forbes Staff
Covering the worlds of data security, privacy and hacker culture.
SECURITY | 4/03/2012 @ 3:01PM |43,224 views

These Are The Prices AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Charge For Cellphone Wiretaps

If Americans aren’t disturbed by phone carriers’ practices of handing over cell phone users’ personal data to law enforcement en masse–in many cases without a warrant–we might at least be interested to learn just how much that service is costing us in tax dollars: often hundreds or thousands per individual snooped.

Earlier this week the American Civil Liberties Union revealed a trove of documents it had obtained through Freedom of Information Requests to more than 200 police departments around the country. They show a pattern of police tracking cell phone locations and gathering other data like call logs without warrants, using devices that impersonate cell towers to intercept cellular signals, and encouraging officers to refrain from speaking about cell-tracking technology to the public, all detailed in a New York Times story.

But at least one document also details the day-to-day business of telecoms’ handing over of data to law enforcement, including a breakdown of every major carrier’s fees for every sort of data request from targeted wiretaps to so-called “tower dumps” that provide information on every user of certain cell tower. The guide, as provided by the Tucson, Arizona police department to the ACLU, is dated July 2009, and the fees it lists may be somewhat outdated. But representatives I reached by email at Verizon and AT&T both declined to detail any changes to the numbers.

Here are a few of the highlights from the fee data.

Wiretaps cost hundreds of dollars per target every month, generally paid at daily or monthly rates. To wiretap a customer’s phone, T-Mobile charges law enforcement a flat fee of $500 per target. Sprint’s wireless carrier Sprint Nextel requires police pay $400 per “market area” and per “technology” as well as a $10 per day fee, capped at $2,000. AT&T charges a $325 activation fee, plus $5 per day for data and $10 for audio. Verizon charges a $50 administrative fee plus $700 per month, per target.
Data requests for voicemail or text messages cost extra. AT&T demands $150 for access to a target’s voicemail, while Verizon charges $50 for access to text messages. Sprint offers the most detailed breakdown of fees for various kinds of data on a phone, asking $120 for pictures or video, $60 for email, $60 for voice mail and $30 for text messages.
All four telecom firms also offer so-called “tower dumps” that allow police to see the numbers of every user accessing a certain cell tower over a certain time at an hourly rate. AT&T charges $75 per tower per hour, with a minimum of two hours. Verizon charges between $30 and $60 per hour for each cell tower. T-Mobile demands $150 per cell tower per hour, and Sprint charges $50 per tower, seemingly without an hourly rate.
For location data, the carrier firms offer automated tools that let police track suspects in real time. Sprint charges $30 per month per target to use its L-Site program for location tracking. AT&T’s E911 tool costs $100 to activate and then $25 a day. T-Mobile charges a much pricier $100 per day.

Here's How Law Enforcement Cracks Your iPhone's Security Code (Video)
Andy Greenberg
Forbes Staff

NSA's New Data Center And Supercomputer Aim To Crack World's Strongest Encryption
Andy Greenberg
Forbes Staff
In an emailed statement to me, a Verizon spokesperson told me that the company doesn’t charge police in “emergency cases, nor do we charge law enforcement for historical location information in non-emergency cases.” He added that the company doesn’t “make a profit from any of the data requests from law enforcement.” A Sprint spokesperson sent me a statement saying that the company similarly doesn’t charge law enforcement for data requests in “exigent circumstances.”

“Fees are charged to law enforcement in other circumstances such as court ordered requests and it’s important to note that any fee charged is for recovery of cost required to support these law enforcement requests 24/7,” she writes.

T-Mobile declined to comment, and an AT&T spokesperson referred me to the company’s privacy policy, pointing out a specific line that reads, “We do not sell your personal information to anyone for any purpose. Period.”

That claim is “simply misleading,” says Catherine Crump, an attorney with the ACLU who coordinated the group’s FOIA project. “That’s a curious definition of ‘sell,’ given that they seem to be charging money for people’s information on a regular basis and handing it over to law enforcement agencies around the country.”

I’ve embedded the Tucson police department document below. The ACLU has created a summary of the very large collection of data it’s obtained here, and the full collection can be found here.
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forget ur right to privacy

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/03/16/nsas-new-data-center-and-ultra-fast-supercomputer-aim-to-crack-worlds-strongest-crypto/
SECURITY | 3/16/2012 @ 4:23PM |9,043 views

NSA's New Data Center And Supercomputer Aim To Crack World's Strongest Encryption
Andy Greenberg, Forbes Staff
Covering the worlds of data security, privacy and hacker culture.


James Bamford has a way of digging up the facts that lend credence to America’s worst privacy fears about its own government. Now the author and investigative reporter who wrote the definitive portraits of the National Security Agency in his books The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets and The Shadow Factory has drawn a picture of ubiquitous surveillance that seems mind-boggling even by NSA standards.

In his just-published cover story for Wired, Bamford lays out the NSA’s plans for a vast new facility in Bluffdale, Utah that aims to become a storage and analysis hub for the record-breakingly massive collections of Internet traffic data that the NSA hopes to gather in coming years not from just foreign networks, but domestic ones as well.

The story adds confirmation to what the New York Times revealed in 2005: that the NSA has engaged in widespread wiretapping of Americans with the consent of firms like AT&T and Verizon. But more interestingly–and more troubling in the eyes of many who value their privacy–it details the Agency’s plans to crack AES encryption, the cryptographic standard certified by the NSA itself in 2009 for military and government use and until now considered uncrackable in any amount of time relevant to mortals.

Using what will likely be the world’s fastest supercomputer and the world’s largest data storage and analysis facility, the NSA plans to comb unimaginably voluminous troves of messages for patterns they could use to crack AES and weaker encryption schemes, according to Bamford’s story. A few of the facts he’s uncovered:

The $2 billion data center being built in Utah would have four 25,000 square-foot halls filled with servers, as well as another 900,000 square feet for administration.
It will use 65 megawatts of electricity a year, with an annual bill of $40 million, and incorporates a $10 million security system.
Since 2001, the NSA has intercepted and stored between 15 and 20 trillion messages, according to the estimate of ex-NSA scientist Bill Binney. It now aims to store yottabytes of data. A yottabyte is a million billions of gigabytes. According to one storage firm’s estimate in 2009, a yottabyte would cover the entire states of Rhode Island and Delaware with data centers.
When the Department of Energy began a supercomputing project in 2004 that took the title of the world’s fastest known computer from IBM in 2009 with its “Jaguar” system, it simultaneously created a secret track for the same program focused on cracking codes. The project took place in a $41 million, 214,000 square foot building at Oak Ridge National Lab with 318 scientists and other staff. The supercomputer produced there was faster than the so-called “world’s fastest” Jaguar.
The NSA project now aims to break the “exaflop barrier” by building a supercomputer a hundred times faster than the fastest existing today, the Japanese “K Computer.” That code-breaking system is projected to use 200 megawatts of power, about as much as would power 200,000 homes.
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Wednesday, August 24, 2011

THREAT LEVEL

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/08/nokia-siemens-spy-systems/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

warning if the technology is abused in the middle east and the same technology is available here what makes anybody think it cannot/ will not/ nor is not/ happening here.
what were the inventors thinking when they invented the stuff to do this!!creepy slimy stalker spies leapt out from the comic books into real life people,straight from sci-fi into your pocket.
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Tuesday, May 17, 2011

wake up

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