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- 2010-Jun-30: A project to build a face tracking robot head, complete with software in Python using the OpenCV library. [9264] [1]
- 2010-Jun-20: The world is full of unsecured security cameras, perhaps your neighbor is watching you? And perhaps Google's facilitation of this constitutes another embarrassing privacy breach in the same vein as ,a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/06/18/1720244/Google-Street-View-Wi-Fi-Data-Includes-Passwords-Email-Content?art_pos=20">drive-by packet sniffing? [9206] [1]
- 2010-Jun-16: big Brother is watching you and Facebook is helping him do it. [9202]
- 2010-Jun-06: The cell phone companies through cell-tower tracking of cell phones have access to your location and are starting to play with that data. [9173]
- 2010-Jun-06: DARPA, in its never ending quest for SkyNet, has a new project called SMITE which is to give computers the ability to identify anomalous behavior patterns. [9169]
- 2010-Apr-23: Sometimes big brother gets caught by his own surveillance, the strange story of urban golfers clashing with Seattle police and the police claiming that their arrest videos were deleted after 90 days. [9092]
- 2010-Apr-21: Some places are boosting their red-light camera revenues by shortening their yellow light durations - some below specifications. [9082]
- 2010-Apr-07: The city of Chicago are thinking about implementing a system called ShotSpotter. This listens for gun shots in your crime ridden sectors and then alerts the EMS teams. Not sure I'd want to live anywhere that this system is useful! [9055]
- 2010-Feb-11: The Obama Administration is pushing for warrantless tracking of cell phone locations. Why not just let Google index it all and put everyone's location tracks up on Google Maps? [8969]
- 2010-Jan-10: It looks like DNA profiles may not be an exact science after all, scientists and lawyers in the US are arguing for the FBI to release its CODIS database for independent research to see if there are any other cases like the white man who was a DNA match for a black man in the Arizona state DNA database. [8910]
- 2009-Dec-03: There appear to be some loop holes in the legal system in the US that are allowing seemingly large amounts of cell phone GPS data to be collected by law enforcement (and perhaps other parties). Discussed here on Slashdot, here on Wired and here is the EFF's take on the matter. Now that Sprint has a web interface for this one wonders if a lot of these requests are happening without the appropriate authorization, perhaps once one is granted access for a case then Sprint does not get in the way of you checking any phone's movements? The potential for this sort of monitoring is pretty amazing, especially if one can get the numbers that a particular phone calls or receives calls from and then trace the movements of those phones. Or perhaps one could do a time and space bounded query: "give me all the phones that were in a 2 block radius of this location between the hours of interest on this date". Yup, big brother is watching you now. [8817]
- 2009-Nov-27: The British national DNA database now contains 5 million DNA profiles, and a claim has been made that their police have been making arrests just to gather DNA samples. Discussed here on Slashdot. [8807]
- 2009-Nov-12: The UK Home Office wants to be Big Brother of the Internet. [8737]
- 2009-Oct-31: Some studies are questioning the safety of terahertz scanner systems, it appears that these can have some sort of effect on DNA where previously they were thought not to affect chemical bonds. [8685] [1]
- 2009-Oct-23: Wireless networking equipment could be used to see through walls. [8658]
- 2009-Oct-09: The UK wants to open up access to their CCTV cameras to the general public who will catch criminals and win cash prizes for doing so. [8611]
- 2009-Sep-13: Big Brother wants to come along for the ride - an insurance company is wanting to install video cameras in its customers cars to check on their driving. [8515]
- 2009-Jul-13: RFID passports have been cloned (discussed here on Slashdot) through a war driving rig. What would he have got if he had just parked in the airport parkade for an hour? He points out that one of the potential issues with the widespread use of RFID tags (for things like drivers licenses and credit cards) is that it would allow the movements of individual people around a city to be easily recorded - just set up these RFID scanners at choke points (office tower front doors, subway station entrances, parkade pedestrian access and car entrances etc.) and you can now track the movements of individual people - and with access to one of the RFID databases (like the driver's license information or a credit card database) one can find out who went where and when. Of course this could be very handy for generating an initial list of possible suspects, so expect banks to have RFID scanners at their doors - and to detain anyone who tries to enter the bank without an RFID tag on them... Another attempt at gathering passport numbers via RFID is discussed here on Slashdot. [7518] [1]
- 2009-Jul-08: Cell phone history data (including geographic position information from connection towers) is becoming more popular with crime investigators. [8235]
- 2009-Jun-23: Lancaster PA is going to crowd source the monitoring of 165 public surveillance cameras. [8185]
- 2009-May-19: The UK has launched a national database of all its children, with a mere 390,000 authorized users it won't be long before someone finds a flash drive with all of its contents in a pub parking lot. [7986]
- 2009-Feb-22: Chicago has been building a street camera surveillance system. [7619]
- 2009-Feb-15: New toll road systems that work by photographing license plates could be put to other uses, like issuing speeding tickets if the average speed of the car (as measured by the distance between entrance and exit toll points and the time taken between them) is too high. [7587]
- 2009-Feb-13: The ARGUS eye-in-the-sky system uses a 1.8 gigapixel imager to keep an eye on up to 40 square kilometers of the ground. At an altitude of 5000m each pixel represents about 15cm on the ground, which would certainly be small enough to track individual people. Of course if it flies lower the it could well track smaller objects. [7572]
- 2009-Feb-11: The UK is planning to keep tabs on its citizens' travel history over a 10 year period. [7560]
- 2009-Feb-10: Could Google's new Latitude (here on Google) bring big brother to the masses? [7552] [1]
- 2008-Dec-25: Big Brother may be sending the wrong people speeding tickets... [7395]
- 2008-Dec-23: From the "Jurassic Park" department: DNA matching blood from inside a mosquito that was found in a stolen car has been used to trap the car thief. [7381] [1]
- 2008-Dec-11: A research group in Japan claims to have produced images received directly from the brain, next step would be to apply this to border crossings... [7332] [1]
- 2008-Oct-20: In the quest for the title of World's Biggest Brother Interpol is after a World Facial Recognition Database. [7053]
- 2008-Sep-28: A national car tracking system has been proposed by private traffic enforcement camera vendors in the US. They expect to be able to use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to track cars as they pass various cameras and to be able to photograph the driver and maybe passengers too. The automobile insurance system should be somewhere behind this too. Australia has just completed a study on doing the same thing, how long until this is international? [6870]
- 2008-Sep-09: Could the NSA be gathering real time location information on millions of Americans through cell phone usage? It rather sounds like this is already being done elsewhere. [6822]
- 2008-Sep-05: The French are thinking of building a big brother database to record information about anyone who is active in politics, unions or likely to breach public order... [6805]
- 2008-Sep-01: Now the much maligned Newark is embracing big brother in the hope of reducing crime. [6776]
- 2008-Aug-25: Siemens is integrating a number of surveillance systems in an attempt to make a single, all-seeing, all-hearing, all-knowing security system. [6730]
- 2008-Aug-14: The UK is looking at building a system to store records of every text, email and browsing session that takes place in the UK. Hard disk manufacturers must be happy. [6683]
- 2008-Aug-03: Police in Washington DC are testing some license plate scanners, these can be mounted on police cars and can scan and check on thousands of license plates per day. Initially the application was to look for stolen cars, but they can also be used to look for lapsed insurance policies and failed emissions inspections (and if this was New York they would be looking for unpaid parking tickets). Even at $25K per scanner this will become another cash cow soon. [6625]
- 2008-Aug-01: The USA's DHS has finally given public details on its policies for border searches of laptops and other electronic devices and documents. In short they can take anything you have, for any (or no) reason and keep it for any length of time. Discussed here on Slashdot. [6619] [1]
- 2008-Jul-20: There have been some reports of false matches in the typical DNA tests that the FBI uses, but the FBI does not want to open its databases to independent investigation. [6553]
- 2008-Jun-07: Big brother wants to see your underwear, the millimeter wave full body scanner system went live in June'08. Discussed here on Slashdot. [6302]
- 2008-Jun-05: 100K cell phone users were secretly tracked (for academic purposes) in space and time by their cell phones. [6284]
- 2008-Jun-04: Big Brother wants to know who is looking at his billboards. [6282]
- 2008-May-27: Buses could be used as mobile sensing platforms, keeping an eye on traffic congestion, road conditions, road surface conditions and with more cameras the city around them. Of course this will never happen because the unions will not allow a device to be installed in a bus that could be used to directly monitor the activities of one of their members. [6235] [1]
- 2008-May-22: In the land of the free only the brave send email from work. Up to 41% of the largest companies regularly review (read) the email their employees send, and 22% of these companies actually employ staff who's primary duty is to do this reading. [6211]
- 2008-May-19: It is now possible for shopping centers to track the movements of customers through the cell phones that they are carrying - I guess we don't need to wait for RFID after all. [6187]
- 2008-May-19: China is trying to build the world's biggest Big Brother surveillance system, the Golden Shield. [6186]
- 2008-May-17: Chicago's big brother CCTV network is getting software from IBM that will allow the computers to monitor the cameras for specific activities or objects (like unattended back packs). [6175]
- 2008-May-07: Apparently the large number of CCTVs that are used in the UK are not making a significant impact on crime. They are probably just weeding out the really stupid criminals, thereby leaving more space for the smarter ones to flourish. [6066]
- 2008-Apr-25: Slashdot discusses the FTC's Red Flag program requires businesses that handle private consumer data to check its customers and suppliers against databases of known online criminals. Looks like someone has figured out a way to build a distributed big brother network in the USA. [5971]
- 2008-Apr-21: The millimeter-wave whole body scanners are going into test to look for concealed weapons at JFK and LAX, Big Brother will really be watching you soon. [5942]
- 2008-Feb-24: Simple infra red head lamps could foil common security camera systems. Or at least mark the wearer as a person of significance (and quickly lead to a close encounter with a tac team). [5146] [1]
- 2007-Oct-12: Face Recognition software in use, reported by the Register , and here too, now in use in Florida in Ybor too, and now in Tampa too. And the first case of mistaken identity . Now the RAND think tank is in favour of its use on a broad scale. Now Borders is going to use it in their stores to identify known shoplifters. And a few days later Borders has decided not to invoke Big Brother. Now the Register reports that these systems are nearly useless. The ACLU has finally spoken on this subject. And this report states that it has not proven to be reliable at the Palm Beach International airport. But the Statue of Liberty is going to give it a try next. [3258]
- 2007-Oct-12: big brother at waldomart? And in casinos too... and at a personal level [3263]
- 2007-Oct-12: Big Brother is going to watch you blush, this way airport security can tell if you are lying... 75% of the time. [3268]
- 2007-Oct-04: Bill Gates must be getting worried about his health, now Microsoft is wanting to make a user-controlled health care historical database. While such a system could be of great benefit to patients (the users) by centralizing all their records and ensuring whole sections don't get lost when a doctor's office moves or closes, and it could also be of great benefit for researchers who could get anonymized access to query the system, there is still the risk that such a system could be very tempting to Big Brother and so it's privacy should also be shielded by strong acts of law. [2535] [1]
- Big brother may not be watching, but he's giving away a cut of the spoils to those who do [5392]
- Turning the tables on big government, now you can find out all there is to know about them. Little brother is watching you. [5444]
- The Spanish embrace big brother, allowing them to drink and leave their money at home. The Japanese are about to track their children with RFID implants. [5456]
- The British are considering adding RFID tags to license plates, big brother hits the motorways! [5461]
- Big brother moves to Baltimore, this city is following the UK's lead in camera monitoring of public areas [5464]
- Big Brother has come to Boston, and he's here to stay [5470]
- The British has embraced Big Brother, apparently they are the heaviest users of surveillance systems to monitor the public [5479]
- Vancouver is now home to Big Brother, and he's drinking in the bar scene [5660]
- Tracking people by their cell phones, big brother is watching (in the UK) [5668]
- Big Brother is setting up to watch the Texas border, supposedly to keep Mexicans out, but I bet the Texans really want to use it to keep the Americans out. The neat thing about this is they are going to try to exploit the bored web surfers of the world to report the infractions. This project still appears to be alive, though with only 21 cameras its hard to see how this covers much of a boarder. [5695] [1]
- Big Brother, in the guise of the NSA, is thinking about mining regular web sites to build dossiers on people ... all people. [5696]
- Apparently Walt is Big Brother's first name, in Sept'06 it was announced that Disney World will soon be taking finger prints of all patrons. Big steps for the the land of the ACLU. [5697]
- Big Brother in the UK is now going to listen in too. Following the Netherlands lead in this area. [5699]
- Big Brother catches a serial killer in Philadelphia [5707]
- Big Brother and DNA test results in the quest for your family tree [5710]
- BigBrother has started watching license plates in Sprindale Ohio. Patrol cars are fitted with and automatic scanner that can read 900 license plates an hour and as it does so it automatically checks to see if the plate is associated with any bad act. The same system has also appeared in British Columbia. [5712]
- BigBrother is now watching your toilet, some tests have been made to monitor the drug usage of entire neighborhoods by taking samples from the sewage and analyzing them. Obviously only a matter of time before the samples are taken at the end of a particular street and then on a house-by-house basis. While this is being applied to look for users of drugs, this should also be very effective in finding drug labs or grow opps as these are bound to flush some identifiable waste products down the drain from time to time. [5714]
- Big Brother calls for more DNA, a judge in the UK has called for everyone there to be DNA sampled and recorded. This might come to an end due to a European Court of Human Rights ruling. [5715]
- Sony is helping Big Brother build a gigapixel imaging system that would be capable of watching car movements through an entire city at once. [5716]
- The British plan to place Big Brother in your back seat, reporting on your every driving flaw [5900]
- A face-search engine may bring Big Brother to the masses. [5930] [1]