surveillance

More than a year has passed since reports surfaced that certain major U.S. telephone companies had granted government spies access to customer records as part of a Bush administration warrantless wiretapping program. Now a congressional committee has decided to investigate those claims.

The Democratic leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee sent letters on Tuesday to AT&T, Verizon and Qwest Communications International posing a detailed set of questions about their procedures for supplying records in response to government demands. Committee Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.), telecommunications subcommittee Chairman Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and oversight … Read more

Score one for the skeptics on the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee.

Under fire from politicians citing privacy worries, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is delaying plans--previously slated to kick in Monday--to begin making detailed spy-satellite images available to a wider range of government agencies.

A Wall Street Journal report in August first revealed publicly that the agency planned on October 1 to open what it has dubbed the National Applications Office (NAO), drawing a rash of questions from politicians who complained they had been left out of the discussion. (Homeland Security has maintained, however, … Read more

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Every ATM snaps your mug, and each time you get into a taxi your photo is recorded as well. According to the BBC, our images are captured an average of 300 times each day. While we've grown used to these security cameras in our malls and at stoplights, the influx of surveillance cameras in our public spaces should be of great concern to everyone.

As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago has 560 crime cameras that are actively monitored for criminal activity. In London there are more than 10,000 cameras. These so-called "crime cameras" have multiple roles: they are intended to provide evidence of crimes when they occur, they are meant to deter criminals, and they are a reminder that Big Brother is watching.

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Now that we have cameras tiny enough to wend their way through the human body, it's not entirely surprising that there's a camcorder the size of a pack of gum. (In fact, we're more surprised that people are still chewing Wrigley's Doublemint.)

Nevertheless, SpyGadgets says its "Micro-Camcorder" is the "smallest high-resolution, real-time digital camcorder ever produced." (Couldn't they cram any more qualifiers into that claim?) Marketing-speak aside, this $295 surveillance gadget is supposed to record both audio and up to 33 hours of video on a 1GB micro-SD card--but, as Gizmodo … Read more

President Bush this week ventured by helicopter to the National Security Agency's Maryland headquarters, where he made a public, photographed, 6-minute plea to Congress: Make expanded Internet and phone surveillance powers permanent.

Without an extension of the "tools" provided by the Protect America Act, which is set to expire February 1, "our country will be much more vulnerable to attack," Bush said Wednesday, according to the White House's transcript of his remarks.

The president said Congress must heed the repeated statements by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell about the importance of the temporary … Read more

President Bush's nominee to replace departing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has a history of sticking up for the electronic-surveillance powers expanded by the controversial USA Patriot Act.

That's one of the tidbits about retired federal judge Michael Mukasey that the White House is playing up--in boldface type, no less--as part of a fact sheet distributed as the president announced his pick Monday.

Mukasey, a Reagan appointee with 18 years of experience as a district judge in New York, aired an apparently pro-Patriot Act position in a 2004 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, suggesting that the law gave … Read more

Earlier this week, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told a Senate committee that a recent expansion of electronic snooping law helped lead to a recent trio of terror arrests in Germany.

Now he's publicly admitting that he was wrong, which may complicate the Bush administration's efforts to renew and further expand the controversial new law.

"The Protect America Act was urgently needed by our intelligence professionals to close critical gaps in our capabilities and permit them to more readily follow terrorist threats, such as the plot uncovered in Germany," he said in a statement issued … Read more

Spying on other people's PCs can be such a hassle. For one thing, you've got to find a way to surreptitiously install key-logging software or other surveillance hardware. But the clever blokes at U.K.-based Spy Warehouse have come up with a practical alternative: Why not give the subject a new keyboard already equipped for espioniage?

Its "Covert Keylogger Keyboard" is a Microsoft board outfitted with a 2MB storage device that SCI FI Tech says can track up to 2 million keystrokes. There are just two problems: Only one of them has been made--for 215 … Read more

WASHINGTON--A recent expansion of U.S. eavesdropping law helped lead to the high-profile arrest of three terrorism suspects in Germany last week, the nation's intelligence director told senators on Monday.

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell credited Congress's much-criticized update of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last month with making "significant contributions" that ultimately allowed the U.S. government to aid German investigators. The apprehensions targeted what were described as Islamic militants plotting attacks against sites regularly visited by Americans.

McConnell spoke at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing here, which was … Read more