Bruce Schneier writes about how mass surveillance is not an effective way to find terrorists:

"No matter how sophisticated and super-duper are NSA’s methods for identifying terrorists, no matter how big and fast are NSA’s computers, NSA’s accuracy rate will never be 100% and their misidentification rate will never be 0%. That fact, plus the extremely low base-rate for terrorists, means it is logically impossible for mass surveillance to be an effective way to find terrorists…

Suppose that there are 1,000 terrorists there as well, which is probably a high estimate. The base-rate would be 1 terrorist per 300,000 people. In percentages, that is .00033%, which is way less than 1%. Suppose that NSA surveillance has an accuracy rate of .40, which means that 40% of real terrorists in the USA will be identified by NSA’s monitoring of everyone’s email and phone calls. This is probably a high estimate, considering that terrorists are doing their best to avoid detection. There is no evidence thus far that NSA has been so successful at finding terrorists. And suppose NSA’s misidentification rate is .0001, which means that .01% of innocent people will be misidentified as terrorists, at least until they are investigated, detained and interrogated. Note that .01% of the US population is 30,000 people…"

The Washington Post reports on an “Orwellian” plan to track college students:

“‘Is there some reason to reverse three decades of [privacy] policy and go down this Orwellian road?’ asked Christopher B. Nelson, the president of St. John’s College, during a conference call with reporters to call attention to a new survey on the subject.

The controversial concept of a national student ‘unit’ tracking system has been floating around for about two years. It was given a boost last month when Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education released a draft report endorsing such a plan. . .

The United States Student Association views the proposal ‘as a massive invasion of student privacy,’ according to the group’s legislative director, Rebecca Thompson.

‘It’s cradle-to-grave tracking,’ said Rolf Wegenke, president of the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. ‘It can easily be connected to other databases and be connected to basic freedoms.’”

Computer security experts believe that the voting machines used in the United States are vunerable to hacking:

"It gets scarier. The best minds in the computer-security world contend that the voting terminals can’t be trusted. Listen, for example, to Avi Rubin, a computer-security expert and professor at Johns Hopkins University who was slipped a copy of Diebold’s source code earlier this year. After he and his students examined it, he concluded that the protections against fraud and tampering were strictly amateur hour. “Anyone in my basic security classes would have done better,” he says. The cryptography was weak and poorly implemented, and the smart-card system that supposedly increased security actually created new vulnerabilities. Rubin’s paper concluded that the Diebold system was “far below even the most minimal security standards.”"

If you are concerned about election fraud and want to stay on top of the latest news about insecure voting machines, check out BlackBoxVoting.org. This will again be big news in the next election.

Related articles:

• 100,000 errors in the 2004 presidential election
• Maryland votes against electronic voting machines
• A movement for open-source voting machines

Wired.com has an article about a new book on RFID titled Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID.

"A new book by privacy advocates makes the case that corporations and government agencies are in collusion to put tiny radio transmitters on nearly everything we buy…

Albrecht and McIntyre make a staggering accusation in Spychips: that Philips, Procter and Gamble, Gillette, NCR and IBM are conspiring with each other and the federal government to follow individual consumers everywhere, using embedded radio tags planted in their clothing and belongings…

In one example, Gillette vice president of global business management Dick Cantwell in quoted in a 2001 Technology Review article as saying he looks forward to the company using (RFID) readers ‘to track consumer use of its products at home.’"

Big Brother will be watching.

In an article entitled Agents’ visit chills UMass Dartmouth senior, the government visits the home of a college student who checked out the wrong book at the library:

"A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s tome on Communism called The Little Red Book. …

The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a ‘watch list,’ and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.

‘I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of the book,’Professor Pontbriand said. ‘Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that’s what triggered the visit, as I understand it.’"

ComputerWorld.com is running an article about how Maryland has voted against Diebold electronic voting machines:

"The state House of Delegates this week voted 137-0 to approve a bill prohibiting election officials from using AccuVote-TSx touch-screen systems in 2006 primary and general elections. . . .

If the bill becomes law, the state’s Diebold systems will be placed in "abeyance" and the vendor will be required to equip them so that they provide the requisite paper trail, she said.

Healey said the law would require that the machines provide a paper trail before the 2008 elections or Diebold would risk losing its contract with the state."

The Secret Service has secretly made a deal with several printer manufacturers to track everything that comes out of your printer. Do you own a color printer? It may be secretly applying a near-invisible series of dots to each print that identify your printer’s serial number, the time and date of prints, and possibly other identifying information. Rigged printers include certain models made by Xerox, Dell, Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark, Toshiba, and IBM, among others. The EFF has published a list of known affected printers. If you find this too hard to believe, check out this tutorial on how to read the secret tracking code that your printer may be applying to your prints.

This raises some serious questions. If the government has secretly made deals with printer manufacturers to spy on you, what other kinds of deals have been made, or will be made? Does the government have other secret deals with computer manufacturers? Software manufacturers? Cell phone manufacturers? The recent revelation of cell phone tapping by the NSA shows that your electronics are without a doubt spying on you. This can only get worse as we move into the age of RFID chips. More about RFID coming soon.

BlackBoxVoting.org continues to investigate the electronic voting machines used in the 2004 Presidental Election. They found that:

"The internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night.

After investing over $7,000 and waiting nine months for the records, Black Box Voting discovered that the voting machine logs contained approximately 100,000 errors. According to voting machine assignment logs, Palm Beach County used 4,313 machines in the Nov. 2004 election. During election day, 1,475 voting system calibrations were performed while the polls were open, providing documentation to substantiate reports from citizens indicating the wrong candidate was selected when they tried to vote."

Reuters reports that the New York Times is suing the Pentagon about the recent domestic spying by the NSA.

“The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires the federal government to obtain warrants from a secret federal court for surveillance operations inside the United States.”

For readers not familiar with the domestic spying program, more information can be found on Wikipedia. (Wikipedia is written by the viewers and is normally a very good resource, but always be aware that it is easily edited by anyone.)

Contrary to suspicions that were reported in BBC, Microsoft claims that they will not put a secret government backdoor into their new Vista operating system.