US Army Seeks New Technology To Replace GPS

The US army is working to limit its dependence on GPS by developing the next generation of navigation technology, including a tiny autonomous chip, the director of the Pentagon's research agency said Wednesday.

Among the fears: the GPS signal could be scrambled by an adversary, as happened recently in South Korea.

Starting in 2010, DARPA has been working on a variety of programs aimed at developing new navigation and positioning technology -- at first with the goal of extending their reach to places where satellites don't work, such as underwater.

But now, amid fears of over-reliance on -- and possible vulnerabilities with -- global positioning satellites, experts are looking to create not just a companion, but an alternative to GPS.

To that end, researchers at DARPA and the University of Michigan have created a new system that works without satellites to determine position, time and direction, all contained within a eight-cubic-millimeter chip.

The tiny chip holds three gyroscopes, three accelerometers and an atomic clock, which, together, work as an autonomous navigation system.

DARPA envisages using this technology to replace GPS in some contexts, especially in small-caliber ammunition or for monitoring people.

Another approach would use existing signals, such as those generated by broadcast antennas, radios, telephone towers and even lightning to temporarily replace GPS.

Secret Court Document Finds Spy Techniques Unconstitutional

Justice Department Fights To Keep It Hidden

By Ryan W. Neal

The Justice Department may soon be forced to reveal a classified document that details unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens. The Justice Department has fought to keep the document secret for about a year, but a recent court order demands that they respond to a formal request filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation by next week, June 7, 2013.

This document was first revealed last July by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., to call attention to an expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008 -- which then-Sen. Barack Obama voted for . According to Wyden, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the government violated the Fourth Amendment. The FISC mostly operates in secret, so the actual court decision remained classified. Wyden was only able to say the FISC decision existed; he was unable to disclose any details about the actual surveillance techniques that were deemed unconstitutional or how many Americans they affected.

The EFF took legal action to learn more about the FISC decision. An initial victory in a district court established in the public record that the Justice Department does possess an 86-page FISC decision on unconstitutional surveillance methods that was published Oct. 3, 2011. The decision found that some techniques were “unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment,” and that the court concluded that “on at least one occasion,” the Justice Department “circumvented the spirit of the law.”

The EFF’s next goal is to make the actual FISC decision public. The EFF had submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for the document to be declassified, but the Justice Department objected to the FOIA request on the grounds that making the FISC decision public would damage national security. It also argued that it didn’t even have the proper legal authority to release the FISC decision. A district court ruled in favor of the Justice Department and upheld the decision to keep the FISC document a secret.

The EFF decided to take its case directly to the FISC last week, and filed a motion to disclose the court records. On Friday, FISC Judge Reggie B. Walton ordered the Justice Department to submit any argument against the motion no later than 5 p.m. on June 7.

Of course, the Justice Department is likely to return with many of the same arguments as before. The difference, as Slate points out, is that this time the FISC, which has been under fire for its lack of transparency, will be deciding on the arguments. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is working on a law that requires declassified versions of FISC decisions be made available to the public.

This could be an opportunity for the FISC to show that it is willing to be transparent. After all, it’s a decision it made nearly 20 months ago that was designed to protect the American people from unconstitutional intrusion by their government.

New technologies have made it easier for the Justice Department to spy on Americans, but others have fought back recently. Google has publicly fought against National Security Letters requesting user data, and more recently, a judge rejected and exposed an FBI proposal to use malware to turn a personal computer into a surveillance device. 

Would You Ever Know If The Government Is Tracking You?

By Patrick C. Toomey

Court rulings unsealed last week in Washington show for the first time a behind-the-scenes legal battle over when the government should have to tell you that it's tracking your location and reading your email. These documents—which came to light only as the public learned more about the government's controversial investigation of Fox News journalist James Rosen—reveal significant new details about the government's obligation to provide notice, after the fact, when it obtains geolocation data or obtains stored email messages. Indeed, the court orders bring to light a striking contrast: federal prosecutors in Washington routinely provide notice to individuals they track using cell-phone geolocation data, even if that notice is delayed, yet the government strenuously resists giving any notice to individuals when searching and reading their emails.

The government is required to tell you when it listens in on your phone calls or searches your home. Now, it appears that at least some prosecutors provide delayed notice when they use cell-phone data to track your location in real-time. If prosecutors in Washington can provide such notice, then prosecutors elsewhere should be doing it too. Last year, the public learned that the phone companies receive a staggering 1.3 million surveillance requests per year, many of which are likely for geolocation data. Although notification is apparently the norm in Washington we're not aware of similar practices anywhere else in the country.

As for government searches of your personal email account, you will likely never know—unless you are ultimately charged with a crime or your email service provider voluntarily tells you about the search (something few do, often because the government obtains a gag order). The lack of notice for email searches appears to be a central question in court documents unsealed last week, which show the government trying to convince at least three judges that it has no duty to provide notice to email subscribers.

The new details emerged in a series of court opinions debating whether the government was ever required to tell Rosen that it had obtained a warrant to search his Gmail account. Relying on the convoluted and outdated federal statute governing email searches—the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA)—the government argued that it was excused from providing notice. U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola of the D.C. District Court rejected the government's argument and highlighted the perverse consequences of its position. Pointing out that federal prosecutors in Washington typically provide notice when tracking a person's movements using cell-phone data, Judge Facciola wrote:

[T]he user of a cell phone whose telecommunications data has been intercepted and captured pursuant to a warrant would ultimately learn that the government has been surveilling her, even though a portion of that surveillance may have occurred when she was in a public place. The e-mail account holder, on the other hand, would never learn of the search of the entire contents of her email account. Thus, as the government would have it, while it would have to tell a person that it followed his movements one day as he walked from K Street to Connecticut Avenue, it would never have to tell him that it has read and copied the entire contents of the e-mail account that he opened when he arrived at his office on K Street.

While the government was unable to convince Magistrate Judge Facciola, it appealed and ultimately persuaded Chief Judge Royce Lamberth that it had no obligation to notify Rosen of the email search. In particular, Chief Judge Lamberth held that the government's duty to provide notice was satisfied when investigators presented the warrant to the email service provider—in this case, Google. Magistrate Judge Facciola had previously rejected the government's interpretation of the notification statute, describing it as a "meaningless act of telling the ISP what it already knows." Facciola also observed that "[i]t is irrational to think that Congress would . . . grant the government a perpetual dispensation from ever notifying a person of the remarkable intrusion that a search of his email account creates."

These court opinions and filings tell us a great deal about how the government interprets its authority to obtain highly personal information, and the extent to which it interprets the law to avoid informing individuals when they have been spied upon. The documents also prompt further questions and significant concerns. For instance, we learned for the first time that federal prosecutors in Washington generally give delayed notice to the targets of cell-phone geolocation tracking—but what about prosecutors in other parts of the country, at the federal, state, and local level? Is this practice the result of a specific court ruling confined to our nation's capital, or does it reflect a national policy adopted nation-wide by the Department of Justice?

Even more, the documents show that the government seeks to access ever-greater quantities of our personal information with even less protection for individuals. Our email accounts contain vast amounts of private information, including personal communications, financial records, and other sensitive material. Yet courts do not even mandate the kind of notice that would be required if the government wanted to rifle through the letters we keep at home. Our laws have not caught up to the reality of today's electronic communications. The government should be required to notify individuals it targets for searches, whether electronic or physical, even if that notice is delayed for a time. Currently, individuals will only learn of these electronic searches if and when they are charged with a crime. The strange result of this policy: innocent people who are never charged will never learn that they were the subject of government surveillance and this type of intrusive search.

The Department of Justice has long kept the public in the dark about the scale of its surveillance activities. Such secrecy over surveillance powers is simply not appropriate in a democracy.

Navigating The Cosmos With Space GPS

Image via: DiscoveryMagazine.com

Spacecraft could one day navigate through the cosmos using a particular type of dead star as a kind of GPS.

German scientists are developing a technique that allows for very precise positioning anywhere in space by picking up X-ray signals from pulsars.

These dense, burnt-out stars rotate rapidly, sweeping their emission across the cosmos at rates that are so stable they rival atomic clock performance.

This timing property is perfect for interstellar navigation, says the team.

If a spacecraft carried the means to detect the pulses, it could compare their arrival times with those predicted at a reference location. This would enable the craft to determine its position to an accuracy of just five kilometres anywhere in the galaxy.

"The principle is so simple that it will definitely have applications," said Prof Werner Becker from the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching.

"These pulsars are everywhere in the Universe and their flashing is so predictable that it makes such an approach really straightforward," he told BBC News.

The proposed technique is very similar to that employed in the popular Global Positioning System, which broadcasts timing signals to the user from a constellation of satellites in orbit.

Currently, mission controllers wanting to work out the position of their spacecraft deep in the Solar System will study the differences in time radio communications take to travel to and from the satellite. It is a complex process and requires several antennas dotted across the Earth.

It is also a technique that is far from precise, and the errors increase the further away the probe moves.

For the most distant spacecraft still in operation - Nasa's Voyager probes, which are now approaching the very edge of the Solar System, some 18 billion km away - the errors associated with their positions are on the order of several hundred km.

Even for a probe at the reasonably short separation of Mars, the positioning uncertainty can be about 10km.

"It becomes possible with the development of lightweight X-ray mirrors," said Prof Becker.

"These are on the way for the next generation of X-ray telescopes. Current mirrors have a 100 times more weight and would be completely unusable.

"In 15-20 years, the new mirrors will be standard and our device will be ready to be built."

The scientist believes his navigation solution will certainly find use on Solar System probes, providing autonomous navigation for interplanetary missions and perhaps for future manned ventures to Mars where high performance systems will be an absolute requirement for safety reasons.

Via: "The BBC"

5 Creepy New Ways You Are Being Tracked

By Alex Kane,

1. GPS Devices In Candy Bars

Nestle really wants to find you--so much so that they’re placing Global Positioning System devices in their products,CBS News reports. 

The Nestle “We Will Find You” campaign has started in the United Kingdom. CBS reports that “once the winning candy bar wrapper is opened, the tracking device will go off and Nestle officials will be able to find the exact location of the customer.”

Once Nestle literally finds you, the customer can win over $16,000.

2. Forget ATM Cards--Use Your Hand!

In Japan, the Ogaki Kyoritsu Bank wants you to never have to remember to take your debit card to an ATM machine. Instead, customers will be allowed to “withdraw cash, make deposits and check account balances through simple palm scans,” according to The Japan Times.

The paper reports that all customers have to do to use the service is “input their birthday, put their palm on the scanner and input their PIN code.” On Thursday, the palm scanning system will expand to 18 branches.

3. Voice Identification By Law Enforcement

A Russian-owned company called SpeechPro has invented a tool so law enforcement authorities can identify a caller by their voice. U.S. authorities are looking into whether they can bring the practice here after successful trial runs in Mexico. Slate reports that “the company is working with a number of agencies in the United States at a state and federal level.”

The New York Observer notes that privacy activists are bound to be upset by SpeechPro’s products. “The blurb for  VoiceGrid ID  has a particularly dystopic echo, offering a ‘voice data management solution with unlimited database size’ in addition to system architecture that scale all the way up to ‘national system deployments.’”

4. Undercover Agents Using Cell Phones

Pacific Standard magazine picks up on a National Journal report that police in Tampa during the Republican National Convention “tried out a new system that turned ‘off-the-shelf smartphones and tablets into tools for sending real-time video, voice, and data.’”

In other words, as the magazine put it: “The guy next to you taking cellphone snapshots may not be a fellow traveller, but an undercover officer sending real-time video to a distant spy center.”

Furthermore, the National Journal reports, the phones used by Tampa police were linked up with “fixed-surveillance camera feeds… global-positioning system information, and traditional radio traffic.”

5. Followed To The Grave

The square digital barcodes that you can scan with a SmartPhone are now being used on headstones, the markers placed over graves.

NPR reports that these QR Codes are being developed by Lori and Rick Miller so that families can set up a website for deceased loved ones that is triggered by scanning your SmartPhone.

The Millers “are launching a new business called Digital Legacy's to sell the tags. Visitors to a tagged grave can pull out their smartphones, scan the QR symbol, and be sent to a personalized Web page for the deceased,” according to NPR.

Lori Miller tells NPR that “they can just upload the photos to the website and we can build their website for them...They give us a biography of their loved ones, and they can upload videos and backgrounds and music."

Other people besides the Millers have had similar ideas.

“And, as Lori Miller points out, the QR codes offer everyone a chance to get to know a stranger whose name or death date makes a passerby curious,” reports NPR.

Via: "Alter-Net"

Full-Body Scan Technology Deployed In Street-Roving Vans

By Andy Greenberg
Aug. 24 2010 - 12:00 pm
Courtesy Of "Forbes Magazine"

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As the privacy controversy around full-body security scans begins tosimmer, it’s worth noting thatcourthouses andairport security checkpoints aren’t the only places where backscatter x-ray vision is being deployed. The same technology, capable of seeing through clothes and walls, has also been rolling out on U.S. streets.

American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. While the biggest buyer of AS&E’s machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S.

“This product is now the largest selling cargo and vehicle inspection system ever,” says Reiss.

Here’s a video of the vans in action.

The Z Backscatter Vans, or ZBVs, as the company calls them, bounce a narrow stream of x-rays off and through nearby objects, and read which ones come back. Absorbed rays indicate dense material such as steel. Scattered rays indicate less-dense objects that can include explosives, drugs, or human bodies. That capability makes them powerful tools for security, law enforcement, and border control.

It would also seem to make the vans mobile versions of the same scanning technique that’s riled privacy advocates as it’s been deployed in airports around the country. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is currently suing the DHS to stop airport deployments of the backscatter scanners, which can reveal detailed images of human bodies. (Just how much detail became clear last May, when TSA employee Rolando Negrin was charged with assaulting a coworker who made jokes about the size of Negrin’s genitalia after Negrin received a full-body scan.)

“It’s no surprise that governments and vendors are very enthusiastic about [the vans],” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC. “But from a privacy perspective, it’s one of the most intrusive technologies conceivable.”

AS&E’s Reiss counters privacy critics by pointing out that the ZBV scans don’t capture nearly as much detail of human bodies as their airport counterparts. The company’s marketing materials say that its “primary purpose is to image vehicles and their contents,” and that “the system cannot be used to identify an individual, or the race, sex or age of the person.”

Though Reiss admits that the systems “to a large degree will penetrate clothing,” he points to the lack of features in images of humans like the one shown at right, far less detail than is obtained from the airport scans. “From a privacy standpoint, I’m hard-pressed to see what the concern or objection could be,” he says.

But EPIC’s Rotenberg says that the scans, like those in the airport, potentially violate the fourth amendment. “Without a warrant, the government doesn’t have a right to peer beneath your clothes without probable cause,” he says. Even airport scans are typically used only as a secondary security measure, he points out. “If the scans can only be used in exceptional cases in airports, the idea that they can be used routinely on city streets is a very hard argument to make.”

The TSA’s official policy dictates that full-body scans must be viewed in a separate room from any guards dealing directly with subjects of the scans, and that the scanners won’t save any images. Just what sort of safeguards might be in place for AS&E’s scanning vans isn’t clear, given that the company won’t reveal just which law enforcement agencies, organizations within the DHS, or foreign governments have purchased the equipment. Reiss says AS&E has customers on “all continents except Antarctica.”

Reiss adds that the vans do have the capability of storing images. “Sometimes customers need to save images for evidentiary reasons,” he says. “We do what our customers need.”

What do you think? Do AS&E’s vans threaten your privacy? Do airport full-body scans? Or are either one–or both–a fair price for the security they could provide? Let me know your thoughts in comments below.