Signalfire

MAPUTO — Deadly protests that paralysed Mozambique’s capital last week were spurred by a text message that went viral on Maputo’s cell phones, signalling the power of new technology in the hands of the poor.

It is difficult to find a mobile phone user who did not get the anonymous SMS message presaging the three days of violence which left 13 dead and about 400 wounded as police clashed with people protesting sharp increases in the cost of living.

“Mozambican, prepare yourself to enjoy the great day of the strike,” it said.

“Let’s protest the increase in energy, water, mini-bus taxi and bread prices. Send to other Mozambicans.”

The message, and the ensuing unrest, shows the new organisational power cell phones have brought to the poor in a country where 65 percent of the population lives in poverty but exercises little political clout.

“That message went around to the whole world,” said Samira, a 35-year-old who lives in Mafalala, a neighbourhood of tin shacks on the edge of Maputo that saw some of the deadliest violence.

“Even me, when I saw the message I forwarded it to other people. To my friends, my sister. ‘I’m asking you, please read this message’.”

“There have been protests before, but they were never organised by SMS,” said Hares Serafim Mulango, an 18-year-old high school student from Mafalala.

“SMS is easier, because with SMS they tell you about situations far away from you.”

Organising formal protests is difficult in Mozambique, where getting a permit to march is a time-intensive bureaucratic procedure.

The explosion of cell phones has given the poor access to a political platform unavailable to them before.

“This technology is a new way of giving a voice, of giving power, of giving a means of expression that poor people themselves don’t have,” Joao Pereira, director of the Mozambican Civil Society Support Mechanism, told AFP.

“That group is never represented. That group is made up of the people who vote the least,” he said.

Only about a quarter of Mozambique’s 20 million people have cell phones, but that’s twice as many people as have access to electricity, and the number has been growing by about 50 percent a year since 2004, according to the UN’s International Telecommunication Union.

The cell phone messages added to the embarrassment the protests posed for President Armando Guebuza and ruling party Frelimo, in power since Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975.

Guebuza swept to victory in a 75-percent landslide in elections last year, but his government has been unable to stop the recent slide of Mozambique’s currency, the metical, which has plunged 43 percent against the South African rand.

The drop in value has made residents of the import-dependent country struggle to buy basic necessities.

After an emergency cabinet meeting Thursday ended with an appeal for calm and a statement that price increases were “irreversible”, more text messages circulated criticising the government’s response.

“Mozambicans, the government appears to have met just for a coffee and whiskey and not to resolve the problems of the people,” said one message.

Pereira said cell phone technology is giving the poor a voice in politics in a country with a weak opposition, and where media are dominated by the state-owned newspaper and television station.

“It’s an instrument of empowerment. It’s a way of increasing the participation of the most marginalised parts of this society in the democratic system,” he said.

The usual suspects turned up at a recent police technology exposition — night-vision goggles, high-powered guns and bulletproof vests.

Most of the devices displayed at the Police Trexpo East last week cost a pretty penny — thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions of dollars. But in the middle of the elaborate and the high-end, there were plastic orange sticks no longer than a straw.

The uncomplicated rods are meant to secure firearms during training while easing the nerves of all involved. A gun can’t fire with one inside its barrel, and the bright orange stick is clearly visible to those at the other end of the weapon. It alleviates worry and eliminates the possibility of someone getting shot.

John Carlin offered his invention for free at the expo. They would’ve cost just $5 if he had charged for them. “It’s as simple as it gets,” Carlin said.

In recent years, 30 police officers have been shot and killed during training exercises. This month, an officer in Montreal was shot in the leg during a drill. And Carlin, himself a firearms instructor, never cared for looking down the barrel of a gun during his own classes.

A retired police officer from Minnesota, Carlin’s admittedly low-tech product attracted quite a buzz even among the SWAT vehicles, lasers and weaponry.

Many technologies showcased at the expo could cross over from law enforcement to military to homeland defense efforts. Companies and organizations large and small came from all over the country to promote their products. In all, there were more than 130 exhibits at the expo, sponsored by POLICE Magazine.

Here’s a taste of some of the exhibits:

* From Michigan, EOTech’s holographic weapon sights maintain accuracy if covered in snow, mud or even cracked. No matter the obstruction, a target will continue to show up in the form of a star that looks like a red fireworks explosion.
* From Oklahoma, Simulator Systems International offers three kinds of robots named for snakes — the Copperhead, the Sidewinder and the Python. The latter can tow about 200 pounds, climb stairs and blast someone with a taser or pepper spray, sales representative Terrance Blacknell explained.
* From Kentucky, ARE Innovations co-owner Jim Bolen makes and sells goggles that can suddenly take away or restore one’s vision. Originally made for athletes looking to improve reaction times, they have been recast for military and law enforcement personnel. A recent experiment in Franklin, Ohio, found police officers recognizing and responding to threats three seconds quicker after using the goggles. “You see with your brain, not your eyes,” Bolen said.
* From Washington D.C., the Department of Homeland Security demonstrated a few of its inventions, including a forensic camera designed for mass transit. Last year, DHS rigged a retired transit bus with explosives and 16 of the prototype cameras. The bombs blew the bus to pieces and sent the cameras flying in all directions. All the cameras survived, and memory chips containing video leading up to the detonation also survived in 14 of the cameras. Testing will continue on cameras deployed on regular bus routes and trains. Several major U.S. cities, as well as the Transportation Security Administration, are interested in the technology, DHS officials said.
* The folks at DHS also showed off its Light Emitting Diode-Incapacitator, or LEDI. The flashlights send out a combination of wavelengths to flashblind and disorient a human target. The device’s range goes up to about 50 feet. It could be used for riot control, in prisons, by SWAT teams and against snipers or hijackers.
* From Pennsylvania, Crime Scene Clean-Up was there to promote its services to make horrific remnants disappear. The company specializes in cleaning up after murders, suicides and decompositions. In one year, the company disposed of 50 tons of hazardous and medical waste.
* Also from Pennsylvania, Mobile Concepts by Scotty had a “purpose-built” vehicle on site. The company can put everything from communication satellites and surveillance cameras to flat-screen TVs and gun racks on a truck. Mobile Concepts has provided vehicles for U.S. Customs and Border Protection for processing and detainment, the Army’s mobile command centers in Iraq and for Pennsylvania Emergency Management mobile commands.
* From New Hampshire, Insight Technology produces an array of night vision and illumination devices. Insight allowed visitors to try out its new thermal imaging binoculars, which revealed the infrared footsteps of expo attendees long after they disappeared from normal sight.

By Angelique Carson

Smart grids are the future of power, but what does that mean for the future of privacy?

The transmission networks spanning nations to provide light, heat and electricity will soon undergo a radical transformation. Most of the world’s developed countries have invested in or plan to invest huge sums to implement smart energy infrastructures within the next two decades. The “smart grid” will revolutionize the way utilities and consumers measure and monitor electricity usage. It is expected to save money and aid energy conservation. But the grid will also result in massive amounts of new data, data that can reveal intimate details about households and the people who live in them. The risk of exposure or misuse of such data creates a new set of concerns for consumers and privacy professionals.

The smart grid will rely on “smart” meters, which will record household energy consumption and communicate it back to power providers. These new smart meters will replace the electromechanical meters that are attached to most households across the world today.

Smart appliances, which are being developed and sold by some of the world’s largest manufacturers, will enhance the intelligent grid, feeding smart meters with real-time information about electrical use down to the appliance level-smoothie at seven, treadmill at eight, for example. (According to a recent Zpryme report, the global market for household smart appliances is projected to reach $15.12 billion in 2015.) This precision will allow utility companies to analyze peak power usage times and set electric rates accordingly. In turn, households will gain a tool for more efficient management of their energy consumption, which they could use to lower costs and conserve energy. For example, customers will have the ability to time their laundry chores for off-peak energy hours.

When the grid, the meter, and the appliances are implemented and integrated, consumers will be able to fine-tune their energy consumption to get the best rates and utilities will be able to more effectively manage power distribution and identify and resolve problems remotely.

The savings potential is expected to be massive. The grid is also expected to help power suppliers prevent blackouts and brownouts by allowing for power distribution to be delivered more evenly and on a need-based schedule.

Nations and utilities are investing in the development of the smart grid, and many companies have already deployed smart meters. But while those involved throw millions, even billions, toward the grid, cautioning voices are calling for privacy protections.

“We are talking about implementing a very new type of network…a network that people are always attached to,” says Rebecca Herold, CIPP, founder of Rebecca Herold and Associates, LLC. Herold has led the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) Smart Grid privacy subgroup since June 2009 and co-authored the NIST report on smart grid privacy, which is under review by NIST and expected to be published soon.

The information collected on a smart grid will form a library of personal information, the mishandling of which could be highly invasive of consumer privacy,” said Christopher Wolf, co-author with Jules Polonetsky of a whitepaper published by the Future of Privacy Forum and the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario. “There will be major concerns if consumer-focused principles of transparency and control are not treated as essential design principles, from beginning to end.”

Utilities are aware of the privacy concerns, according to Rick Thompson, the president of Greentech Media (GTM), which publishes market research on smart grids. “It’s absolutely on their radar,” he says, adding, “That doesn’t mean they have a full understanding or solution to solve that problem, but I think it’s an area that they are investigating heavily.”

It’s an area worthy of investigation, according to many. Some say the smart grid will be “bigger than the Internet,” which will result in an exponential increase of coveted, valuable and potentially identifiable data.

“You come into new types of privacy issues because you are now revealing personal activities in ways that are not historically, or have not been considered to date as being personally identifiable information,” Herold says.

Beyond knowing how often the refrigerator opens or what time the garage door activates each morning, grid data may be a way of discerning when a household is empty or full, when family members go to bed at night or what time the kids come home from school.  Marketers might want to tap into the data to find out when a household might be due for a new refrigerator or washing machine. Law enforcement might be interested in corroborating a story. An insurance company might want to know if a homeowner’s alarm was turned on when a burglary occurred.  A divorce attorney might want to subpoena energy-use records to aid a case.

Who owns the data?

In a recent newspaper article, Simon McKenzie, the chief executive of a New Zealand electricity supplier, said in that country, where hundreds of thousands of smart meters are currently being installed, “…we’re starting to see the retailers and network companies say: ‘Hey, there’s a number of different ways that we haven’t even considered that we could utilize this data…to provide better service or solutions to customers.” The full potential of smart grids has yet to be realized, McKenzie told The New Zealand Herald.

But should retailers and other entities have access to the data? That is a question being examined on a global scale.

In response to the McKenzie’s comments, New Zealand Privacy Commissioner Marie Shroff said that companies need to be transparent about what information is being tracked and collected. “People need to be able to make fully informed decisions before agreeing to the new technology,” Shroff said.

Others call for limited use of data gleaned from smart grids.

“The risk with a rich new data source is the temptation to use the information for more than originally intended,” Australian Privacy Commissioner Karen Curtis told those attending a smart infrastructure conference earlier this year.

That’s why it will be crucial to answer the question of who owns and has access to consumers’ energy usage data, which could reveal existing and emerging types of personally identifable information, Herold says.

It’s a familiar question for privacy pros, who have grappled with it in other areas of practice, but perhaps less familiar for utilities. In a recent study, GTM asked utility companies who owns the granular data collected by smart meters-the utility company, the consumer, or a third party. The results showed a decided lack of consensus.

“The interesting thing is that it was pretty well split evenly between those three options,” said GTM’s Thompson. Of the companies surveyed, 39 percent said the data belonged to the consumer, 29 percent said the utility, itself, owned it, and 32 percent were unsure.

[Chart from Greentech Media's 2010 North American Utility Smart Grid Deployment Survey]

The president of an advocacy group for the smart grid industry is more decided on the topic. “The consumer should always have access to that data,” says Kathleen Hamilton, president of the GridWise Alliance, which counts more than 100 companies and organizations as members. “I think the consumer is going to be the owner of that data,” Hamilton said. “But I think what consumers don’t understand is that when they give their data to others, if there aren’t privacy provisions in place, they can use the data in ways that either the consumer may not agree with or think is appropriate.”

That’s a worry many can relate to and a debate that must play itself out soon, as 70 percent of North American utility companies polled for the aforementioned GTM survey indicated that smart grid projects were either a “strong” or “highest” business priority between now and 2015. Governments keen to the potential have invested heavily in smart grid infrastructures. In the U.S., President Obama allocated $3.4 billion in national stimulus monies to utility companies last year to incent development of smart grid technologies. The European Parliament’s passage of the 3rd Energy Package last year will outfit 80 percent of EU electricity customers with smart meters by 2020. In Sweden, smart meters are now mandated by the government. The UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, parts of Asia, Denmark, and the Netherlands have all reported plans to build intelligent grids. And the Chinese government has allocated $7.3 billion to grid projects in 2010.

It is clear that the potential privacy pitfalls loom large. Less clear is the best solution to prevent them.

“I think there are still a lot of questions out there about what the correct solution might be,” says GTM’s Thompson, predicting that solutions will vary based on the regulations of various regions.

Like other areas of data privacy, regulation is a word that could divide the debate in the months and years to come.

Some predict smart grid privacy issues to be bigger in Europe than other places due to the strength of the bloc’s Data Protection Directive.

So far in the U.S., regulation has focused primarily on securing the grid infrastructure from cyber attack. For example, the Grid Reliability and Infrastructure Defense (GRID) Act, introduced in April, charges the FERC with safeguarding the transmission grid from cyber threats. The bill also tasks FERC with enforcing privacy measures, stating “the commission shall protect from disclosure only the minimum amount of information necessary to protect the reliability of the bulk power system and defense critical electric infrastructure.” The House passed the bill in June but the Senate has yet to vote.

Other bills focus on ensuring consumers have access to the data their homes’ meters produce.  In March, Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA), chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, introduced The Electric Consumer Right to Know Act (e-KNOW), legislation to ensure consumers have access to free, timely and secure data about their energy usage. It also calls for the FERC to develop national standards for consumer energy data accessibility, to help utilities and state regulatory agencies formulate their policies, according to Markey’s Web site.

State lawmakers have begun drafting their own legislation. In Colorado, a state where smart meter implementation is already widespread, Senate Bill 10-180 calls for the creation of a task force to recommend measures to “encourage the orderly implementation of smart grid technology” in that state. The bill says that one of the issues the task force must determine is the potential impacts on consumer protection and privacy.

A call for standards

Privacy experts say the lack of legal protection surrounding the smart grid is concerning. They are calling for standards.

“In the absence of clear rules, this potentially beneficial smart grid technology could mean yet another intrusion on private life,” Jim Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) said in a March filing to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which held a three-day hearing that month to explore smart grid policies.

“The PUC should act now, before our privacy is eroded,” Dempsey wrote.

The CDT teamed with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on the filing, urging the CPUC to adopt “comprehensive privacy standards for the collection, retention, use and disclosure of the data” gleaned from the smart grid.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology smart grid privacy subgroup, which Herold leads, has released two drafts of the privacy chapter “Smart Grid Cyber Security Strategy and Requirements.” The document includes a privacy impact assessment and addresses possible risks the smart grid presents-including cyber attacks, data breaches and the vulnerability of interconnected networks’ increased exposure to potential hackers.

The draft says that while most states have laws in place regarding privacy protection, those laws do not necessarily relate to the types of data that will be within the smart grid, and many existing laws are specific to industries other than utilities. The group recommends that provisions be included within privacy laws to protect the consumer data held by utility companies. The final NISTIR 7628 Version 1 is expected soon, after which it will be submitted to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

Minimize, destroy, build privacy in

As with other privacy debates, those pushing for smart infrastructure privacy protections espouse mantras often heard in data protection circles-data minimization, data destruction and privacy by design.

Utilities should minimize the amount of household data collected and should keep it for the shortest amount of time possible, advocates say, in order to minimize the risk associated with storing such data.

Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian agrees. In her whitepaper, she also cautions that privacy concerns must be considered early in the planning stages in order to mitigate the risks surrounding the revealing data meters collect.

By designing privacy into the grid, “we can have both privacy and a fully functioning smart grid,” Cavoukian wrote in a Toronto Star Op-Ed.

The government of Ontario has committed to the installation of smart meters in every home and business by the end of 2010 and Cavoukian has partnered with major utilities to develop “gold standards” for building privacy into grid projects.

Some privacy advocates point to Ontario’s Hydro One as a utility company setting the standard for baking privacy provisions into its policy before deploying smart meters. Rick Stevens, director of distribution development at Hydro One says the protection of consumer’s information was built into smart meters’ designs based on Ontario’s privacy regulations.

“The regulations certainly set the context for the project,” Stevens said. “We’re just really ensuring that we bake those protections into the product that we put out there. Given that this is new technology, we’re going to be very careful to protect consumer interest as we roll these out. I know we, as an industry, take it very seriously.”

Hydro One has 1.1 million meters already deployed, and at least 700,000 of them are currently reporting data back to the utility on an hourly basis. Stevens says that, as a rule, the utility does not sell customers’ data to third parties and would only share data after obtaining written authorization customers.

The president of LinkGard Systems, an Armenian software maker, says his company’s Energy Management System, which is currently being tested in the U.S., was built with privacy in mind. “It is our strong belief that the utility company has no need to control individual appliances in a residence or a commercial location,” said Hovanes Manucharyan. “The same effect can be achieved by using solutions that don’t require the customer to expose their private energy usage information…We feel that this model is friendlier towards privacy since the utility doesn’t need to acquire, store and manage potentially private data from a customer.”

Hovanes said the stronger regulatory framework of the EU could result in slightly different implementations of smart grid technologies in that market.

Beyond PII

We haven’t yet heard a debate on whether our garage door-opening habits qualify as personal data, but it’s a question that privacy experts say should be answered.

“People have to realize it’s a new type of network,” says Herold. “It’s ‘always on,’ passively collecting information about people in their homes. It’s more than just PII, it’s personal activities,” she adds.

This is what concerns a California man who staged a dramatic protest recently when Pacific Gas & Electric attempted to install a smart meter at his home. Calling it an “unconstitutional invasion of his privacy” he locked his existing meter, saying, “PG&E needs to be stopped in their tracks here.”

Education needed

But smart meters are being rolled out in many places and typically without protest. Indeed, though smart grids are certainly on the radar of utilities and governments, most consumers are in the dark. According to a recent Harris Interactive poll, 68 percent have never heard of the smart grid and 63 percent “draw a blank” about smart meters. Experts say that will change.

“You are going to see a lot more awareness over the next 24 months,” says Greentech Media’s Rick Thompson, “but in terms of becoming a true household name, I’d say that’s still three to five years out.” Thompson says utility companies are just starting to understand the importance of launching educational campaigns aimed at consumer awareness.

A newly formed coalition of companies and organizations-the nonprofit Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative-hopes to increase consumer awareness in the area. “The grid is not really smart unless the consumers are able to be active participants,” said Katherine Hamilton of the GridWise Alliance, one of the founding members of SGCC.

Hydro One’s Stevens says building consumer awareness by communicating the cost-savings potential and environmental benefits is what helped make his company’s transition to smart meters successful in Ontario.

“For the most part it’s been positive,” Stevens said. “I think the reason for that is the type of information we’ve been able to provide to customers.”

Stevens said, however, given his company’s success with smart meters, that the only reason to have increasing regulations in the future would be if issues arise that require them.

When asked whether utility companies’ self-regulatory efforts will be sufficient to stave off regulations, Herold said it’s important to consider just how many different players will be involved in the smart grid, including non-energy sector companies creating applications and appliances.

“Self-regulation is a good goal, but when you start looking realistically, how do you ensure entities consistently provide protections throughout the entire smart grid if you don’t establish requirements they must all follow?” Herold asks.

She points to the healthcare and financial industries as evidence that regulations are often necessary.

“It’s always important, in dealing with privacy, to not only take what we know from past experiences, but also have our minds open to possible impacts going forward.”

Some say that having the right people on board will help companies avoid issues. “One of the key things utilities should be doing today is training and hiring privacy professionals,” says Future of Privacy Forum Director Jules Polonetsky, CIPP. “Data enables the grid, but could also be its Achilles heel, if companies don’t have the experts in place to help shape decisions as the grid is being built.”

Stevens agrees, saying that it’s in the utility industry’s best interest to maintain consumer privacy protections moving forward.

“It’s a necessity,” he says. “Otherwise, it’ll backfire on us.”

This article was originally published in the July 2010 edition of the International Association of Privacy Professionals’ member newsletter, The Privacy Advisor, and is reprinted here with permission.

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/smart-grids-and-the-future-of-privacy

Aug 24,– SPRING VALLEY LAKE — Community leaders want to send a message: If you plan to commit a crime in Spring Valley Lake, don’t forget to smile for the camera.
S p r i n g Va l l ey L a ke A s s o c i at i o n’s b o a rd o f directors recently approved a $175,000 contract to install a high-tech wireless video surveillance system across the community, including in its equestrian estates.

The cameras will capture “evidence — quality” footage both day and night, SVLA General Manager Jon Sabo said. Both the San Bernardino County Sheriffs Department and the California Highway Patrol can access the feeds and use the tapes to help prosecute criminals.

And while the cameras won’t be capable of capturing sound, Sabo said license plate and vehicle recognition abilities will be built into the system.

Sabo said they expect to have cameras at six locations by Christmas, with the potential for 22 sites at build-out.
“Some of the cameras will be visible and some will not,” he said, with footage streaming into SVLA’s public safety dispatch center.

The board last year approved $175,000 for a first phase of the project, Sabo said, to do engineering work and a technical analysis. The community now has “several” limited systems in operation at public spaces across the community.

Earlier this month, during a special meeting, the board approved another $175,000 for the project this fiscal year. Sabo said much of that second-phase funding will go toward building out the wireless network and to install receiving equipment.

It’s possible that they could go to a third phase next year, according to Sabo, but that hasn’t yet been determined.

“We just want to make sure that we keep people as safe as possible,” said Ernie Martell, vice president of SVLA’s board of directors. With the economy being what it is, Martell said the board fears incidents of theft and vandalism could otherwise get worse.

“There are so many significant benefits in knowing how to better manage inventory and better serve customers”

NEW YORK — Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) is putting electronic identification tags on men’s clothing like jeans starting Aug. 1 as the world’s largest retailer tries to gain more control of its inventory. But the move is raising eyebrows among privacy experts.

The individual garments, which also includes underwear and socks, will have removable smart tags that can be read from a distance by Wal-Mart workers with scanners. In seconds, the worker will be able to know what sizes are missing and will also be able tell what it has on hand in the stock room. Such instant knowledge will allow store clerks to have the right sizes on hand when shoppers need them.

The tags work by reflecting a weak radio signal to identify the product. They have long spurred privacy fears as well as visions of stores being able to scan an entire shopping cart of items at one time.

Wal-Mart’s goal is to eventually expand the tags to other types of merchandise but company officials say it’s too early to give estimates on how long that will take.

“There are so many significant benefits in knowing how to better manage inventory and better serve customers,” said Lorenzo Lopez, a Wal-Mart spokesman. “This will enhance the shopping experience and help us grow our business.”

Before the rollout, Wal-Mart and other stores were using the tags, called radio frequency identification tags, only to track pallets or cases of merchandise in their warehouses. But now the tags are jumping onto individual items, a move that some privacy experts describe as frightening.

Wal-Mart, which generated annual revenue of a little more than $400 billion in its latest fiscal year and operates almost 4,000 stores, has huge influence with suppliers. That makes other merchants tend to follow its lead.

“This is a first piece of a very large and very frightening tracking system,” said Katherine Albrecht, director of a group called Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering.

Albrecht worries that Wal-Mart and others would be able to track movements of customers who in some border states like Michigan and Washington are carrying new driver’s licenses that contain RFID tags to make it easier for them to cross borders.

Albrecht fears that retailers could scan data from such licenses and their purchases and combine that data with other personal information. She also says that even though the smart tags can be removed from clothing, they can’t be turned off and can be tracked even after you throw them in the garbage, for example.

Wal-Mart officials said they are aware of privacy concerns but insist they are taking a “thoughtful and methodical approach.”

Dan Fogelman, a Wal-Mart spokesman said that the smart label doesn’t collect customer information.

“Wal-Mart is using it strictly to manage inventory. The customer is in complete control,” he said. Fogelman added that Wal-Mart’s readers identify only inventory it has in the store.

To placate privacy concerns, Wal-Mart, which is financing some of the suppliers’ costs, is asking vendors to embed the smart tags in removable labels and not embed them in clothing.

Wal-Mart plans to educate customers with the new program through in-store videos and through signs posted in the stores that educate customers about the program.

Jul 22, 2010

MOSCOW – Militants burst into a hydroelectric plant in Russia’s volatile Caucasus region yesterday in a brazen dawn attack, killing two people and setting the facility ablaze with a string of blasts.

The unknown attackers also bound two plant employees with duct tape before laying mines in the turbine room.

The explosions set off a blaze in the engine room of the station, which is tucked away in a forest in the unrest-hit Kabardino-Balkaria region.

The blasts shut down the plant.

RusHydro, the state-run power group that runs the plant, called the blasts a “terror attack”.

White smoke billowed from the plant and masked security officials were seen outside its premises, according to footage aired on national television.

A regional policeman said “the assailants or their accomplices” briefly attacked a local police building in the town of Baksan, possibly to deflect attention from the later attack.

The authorities are battling a Muslim insurgency in the Caucasus, where Moscow fought two bloody wars against Chechen separatists in the 90s. Militants there have long pledged to destroy key infrastructure sites.

FSB security service chief Alexander Bortnikov told President Dmitry Medvedev that steps had been taken to “increase the protection of strategic sites” after the attack, the Kremlin said.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin urgently convened officials for a meeting, his spokesman said.

Kabardino-Balkaria is part of the Caucasus but has until now seen less of the unrest that characterises the simmering guerilla conflict between Russian forces and Islamist rebels in Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan. AFP

July 22, 2010

VANDALS and arsonists who deliberately target Bahrain’s electricity network are costing the country more than BD100,000 every year, the GDN has learnt.

Authorities are now in the process of removing overhead power lines and replacing them with underground cables, putting the power network out of the reach of rioters.

They are also refurbishing substations, making them harder for vandals to penetrate.

“We are removing all wooden coverage from substations in order to make them less prone to catch fire,” Electricity and Water Authority (EWA) chief executive Dr Abdulmajeed Al Awadhi told the GDN.

“We are placing iron gates on them and even though it costs more, it’s worth it because in the long run they will be protected from any future vandalism.”

“This is the direct result of the riots that are happening in Bahrain.”

In the meantime, the EWA is appealing for communities to intervene and prevent such attacks, saying innocent people suffer when substations, pylons and streetlights are targeted.

“These acts of sabotage harm the community as a whole – they do not just destroy electricity boxes, forcing the government to pay extra money to repair them,” added Dr Al Awadhi.

“The rioters usually target substations, overhead cables and streetlights.

“Torching all these power transmissions will create a short circuit, leading to complete blackouts in the area.”

He said the cost of repairing such equipment was more than BD100,000 a year, adding the money could be better spent elsewhere.

“When rioters torch a substation, it costs us around BD10,000, while we lose over BD3,000 when streetlights are attacked and another BD25,000 when overhead cables are destroyed,” explained Dr Al Awadhi.

“We don’t have the exact costs, but annually we pay over BD100,000 to repair the damage these vandals commit.

“Each overhead cable is 50 metres long and when they destroy 50 cables, then the costs are immense.”

He revealed vandals were risking their own lives in attacks on the power grid, often pulling down overhead electricity lines with crude homemade lassos.

“The vandals take a rope, tie a stone to it and throw it on the overhead cables before pulling them down,” he explained.

“First of all, this is dangerous and secondly they cut the cables, which causes a power blackout in the area.”

He said the damage did not just affect the national budget, but also placed a strain on government manpower – since maintenance teams have to be sent out to repair the damage.

“These actions place pressure on manpower because I have to deploy dozens of my employees to the site each time something like this happens,” said Dr Al Awadhi.

“The second one of our substations are attacked, we have to go there and restore it which takes time, effort and a lot of hard work.

“This affects our flow of work because my employees have to work overtime, I have to call in contractors to fix the problem and pay for the spare parts.

“On top of that our work disturbs the traffic flow.”

Dr Al Awadhi is now calling on communities to educate young people about the consequences of attacking public property.

“Raising awareness is very important because these vandals should know that when they torch electricity boxes they are not just harming the government, but their families as well,” he said.

“Their friends and families live in these areas and they are left without electricity for hours until we fix it. These are their homes – why would they do this?

“It is the responsibility of everyone in the community because only with mass effort can we reach our youth.

“Raising awareness can be done through education, media, speeches in mosques and political movements.

“From our side, we always try to advocate the importance of keeping public property safe because it has a negative effect on the community when it is vandalised.

“We also try to fix the problem immediately so that we show citizens and these saboteurs that Bahrain is thinking of the interest of its people and their comfort first.”

He revealed the process of removing overhead power lines and replacing them with underground cables had been ongoing for the past five years.

“We have been working on this for the past five years and it will not happen overnight,” he added.

“The project is conducted on the sidelines of renovating Bahrain’s roads.

“As workers fix the streets in each area, we step in and remove the overhead power transmissions and place them underground.

“By placing the cables underground, we make them safe from vandals who know they can’t reach them, because it’s very dangerous as the cables don’t have protective installations.

“We have also completed 50 per cent of moving the internal components of street lights into substations for more protection.”

The GDN reported last week that youths who torched tyres on Bahrain’s roads were unleashing a potentially deadly cocktail of toxic chemicals into the air, which could lead to cancer and other serious illnesses.

http://www.thirdfactor.com/

SHENZHEN(CHINA): Last month, while enthusiastic consumers were playing with their new Apple iPhone 4, researchers in Silicon Valley were engaged in something more serious.

They cracked open the phone’s black plastic shell and started analyzing the new model’s components, trying to unmask the identity of Apple’s main suppliers. These “teardown reports” provide a glimpse into a company’s manufacturing.

What the latest analysis shows is that the smallest part of Apple’s costs are here in Shenzhen, where assembly-line workers snap together things like microchips from Germany and Korea, American-made chips that pull in Wi-Fi or cell phone signals, a touch-screen module from Taiwan and more than 100 other components.

But what it does not reveal is that manufacturing in China is about to get far more expensive. Soaring labor costs caused by worker shortages and unrest, a strengthening Chinese currency that makes exports more expensive, and inflation and rising housing costs are all threatening to sharply increase the cost of making devices like notebook computers, digital cameras and smart phones.

Desperate factory owners are already shifting production away from this country’s dominant electronics manufacturing center in Shenzhen toward lower-cost regions far west of here, even deep in China’s mountainous interior.

At the end of June, a manager at Foxconn Technology – one of Apple’s major contract manufacturers – said the company planned to reduce costs by moving hundreds of thousands of workers to other parts of China, including the impoverished Henan province.

While the labor involved in the final assembly of an iPhone accounts for a small part of the overall cost – about 7 percent by some estimates – analysts say most companies in Apple’s supply chain – the chip makers and battery suppliers and those making plastic moldings and printed circuit boards – depend on Chinese factories to hold down prices. And those factories now seem likely to pass along their cost increases.

“Electronics companies are trying to figure out how to deal with the higher costs,” says Jenny Lai, a technology analyst at CLSA, an investment bank based in Hong Kong. “They’re already squeezed, so squeezing more costs out of the system won’t be easy.”

Apple can cope better than most companies because it has fat profit margins of as much as 60 percent and pricing power to absorb some of those costs. But makers of personal computers, cell phones and other electronics – including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and LG – deal with much slimmer profit margins, according to several analysts. “The challenges are going to be much bigger for them,” Lai said. Most other industries, from textiles and toys to furniture, are under considerably more pressure.

One way to understand the changes taking shape in southern China is to follow the supply chain of the iPhone 4, which was designed by Apple engineers in the United States, sourced with high-tech components from around the world and assembled in China. Shipped back to the United States, the iPhone is priced at $600, though the cost to consumers is less, subsidized by AT&T in exchange for service contracts. “China makes very little money on these things,” said Jason Dedrick, a professor at Syracuse University and co-author of several studies of Apple’s supply chain. Much of the value in high-end products is captured at the beginning and end of the process, by the brand and the distributors and retailers.
According to the latest teardown report compiled by iSuppli, a market research firm in El Segundo, California, the bulk of what Apple pays for the iPhone 4’s parts goes to its chip suppliers, like Samsung, Toshiba and Broadcom, which supply crucial components, like processors and the device’s flash-memory chip.

In the iPhone 4, more than a dozen integrated circuit chips account for about two-thirds of the cost of producing a single device, according to iSuppli.

Apple, for instance, pays Samsung about $27 for flash memory and $10.75 to make its (Apple-designed) applications processor; and a German chip maker called Infineon gets $11.72 a phone for chips that send and receive phone calls and data. Most of the electronics cost much less. The gyroscope, new to the iPhone 4, was made by STMicroelectronics, based in Geneva, and added $2.60 to the cost.

The total bill of materials on a $600 iPhone – the supplies that go into final assembly – is $187.51, according to iSuppli.

The least expensive part of the process is manufacturing and assembly. And that often takes place here in southern China, where workers are paid less than a dollar an hour to solder, assemble and package products for the world’s best-known brands.

No company does more of it than Foxconn, a division of the Hon Hai Group of Taiwan, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer.

With 800,000 workers in China alone and contracts to supply Apple, Dell and HP, Foxconn is an electronics goliath that also sources supplies, designs parts and uses its enormous size and military-style efficiency to assemble and speed a wide range of products to market.

“They’re like Walmart stores,” Dedrick said. “They’re low-margin, high-volume. They survive by being efficient.”

The world of contract manufacturers is invisible to consumers. But it’s a $250 billion industry, with just a handful of companies like Foxconn, Flextronics and Jabil Circuit manufacturing and assembling for all the global electronics brands.

They compete fiercely on price to earn small profit margins, analysts say. And they seek to benefit from tiny operational changes.

When a company is operating on the slimmest of profit margins as contract manufacturers are, soaring labor costs pose a serious problem. Wages in China have risen by more than 50 percent since 2005, analysts say, and this year many factories, under pressure from local governments and workers who feel they have been underpaid for too long, have raised wages by an extra 20 to 30 percent.

China’s currency has also appreciated sharply against the U.S. dollar since 2005, and after a two-year pause by Beijing, economists expect the renminbi to rise about 3 to 5 percent a year for the next several years.

“It takes 3,000 procedures to assemble an HP computer,” says Isaac Wang, an iSuppli analyst based in China. “If a contract manufacturer can find a way to save 10 percent of the procedures, then it gets a real good deal.”

Contract manufacturers like Foxconn are now searching for ways to reduce costs. Foxconn is considering moving inland, where wages are 20 to 30 percent lower. The company is also spending heavily on manufacturing many of the parts, molds and metals that are used in computers and handsets, even trying to find larger and cheaper sources of raw material.

“We either outsource the components manufacturing to other suppliers, or we can research and manufacture our own components,” says Arthur Huang, a Foxconn spokesman. “We even have contracts with mines which are located near our factories.”

Many analysts are optimistic the big brands will find new innovations to improve profitability. But within the crowd, there is growing skepticism about China’s manufacturing model after years of pressing workers to toil six or seven days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day.

“We’ve concluded Hon Hai’s labor-intensive model is not sustainable,” says Wang at iSuppli Research. “Though it can keep hiring 800,000 to 1 million workers, the problem is these workers can’t keep working like screws in an inhuman system.”

This type of low-end assembly work is also no longer favored in China, analysts say, because it does not produce big returns for the companies or the country. “China doesn’t want to be the workshop of the world anymore,” says Pietra Rivoli, a professor of international business at Georgetown University and author of “The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy.”

“The value goes to where the knowledge is.”

The high-speed Sapsan train was halted for several hours on Sunday after its power was cut and windshield was broken, in what Russian Railways is calling an act of sabotage.

The Sapsan train, which travels from Moscow to St. Petersburg at 200 kilometers to 250 kilometers per hour, has provoked the outrage of those who live near the railway, many of whom have vented their anger by pelting the passing train with rocks and ice.

A foreign object was hung from the overhead cable that delivers electricity to the train. When a rod connecting the train with the cable ran up against the object, the cable broke loose at high speed and shattered the windshield in the process.

“An act of vandalism is suspected behind the incident. The police are investigating,” a spokeswoman for Russian Railways said, asking not to be identified in line with company policy.

Transportation police confirmed that there was an incident near the village of Leontyevo, in the Tver region, that caused electricity to be cut to the train at 9:32 p.m. Sunday, but said no criminal activity had yet been confirmed.

“An investigation team of eight officers visited the scene and found no signs of criminal activity,” a spokeswoman for the transportation police said, asking not to be identified. She added that the power cable that was torn during the incident was taken for inspection.

Leontyevo has become the epicenter of a popular revolt against the Sapsan. In January, villagers were caught throwing ice and rocks at the train. One of the vandals said he had become outraged after a blast of air caused by the train knocked him off his feet.

Many others, however, are upset that the introduction of the train caused a number of local commuter trains to be canceled, creating huge inconveniences for people of the region.

The vandalism comes after two major terrorist bombings of the Nevsky Express train, which travels along the Moscow-St. Petersburg route: one in August 2007, in which 30 people were injured, and another in November 2009, in which 28 people were killed and 90 were injured.

The incidents have raised concerns that authorities and the railway are not doing enough to provide security.

Russian Railways provides tight surveillance along the 650-kilometer route, but it is hard to track every individual along its length, the company’s spokeswoman said.

Both terrorist attacks and acts of vandalism can be prevented, if proper engineering solutions are introduced, said Mikhail Blinkin, director of research programs at the Scientific Research Institute of Transport and Road Engineering.

In most places throughout the world, high-speed highways and railways are built outside residential areas and are fenced to avoid all kinds of accidents, Blinkin said.

“In this country, they launched a high-speed train to run on a conventional track — the Oktyabrskaya railway. The project came under fire from experts at the time, but no one would even listen.”

Twin power poles in Ayutthaya province have been damaged in bomb attacks police say were linked to the ongoing political turmoil, especially Saturday’s violent clashes in Bangkok which left scores killed and wounded.

Of the eight legs on the two 44metretall poles, one was blown off by C4 explosives while another two legs were damaged. A second pack of explosives wrapped around one leg was defused by police bomb disposal units.

Provincial Electricity Authority officials said many poles could have collapsed in a chain reaction if the twin poles had been brought down, possibly causing power blackouts in parts of Pathum Thani and Nonthaburi and property damage estimated at Bt200 million.

The defused bomb did not explode because the alarm clockenabled detonator failed. Each pack contained around 1.5 pounds of C4 explosives.

Loud explosions were heard by local residents on Sunday night but no one noticed the damage until yesterday morning. The poles are located at the 5152 km markers of Phaholyothin Road in Bang Pain district.

As Silicon Valley slept a year ago tonight, the wireless wonderland in which it existed — a dream world where mobile devices made instant communication not only possible, but almost unavoidable — disappeared suddenly, like Alice, down a hole.

In this case, it was a manhole in South San Jose, which someone breached in the middle of the night and cut fiber-optic cables critical to a vast communications network. When residents of Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties awoke the morning of April 9, it was to a world completely remade with the stroke of a chain saw.

Despite a reward of a quarter-million dollars and investigations by San Jose police, the Santa Clara County sheriff and the FBI, no one was arrested for cutting the lines, which belonged to AT&T. It now seems unlikely anyone ever will be prosecuted, an outcome Jennifer Ponce, coordinator of emergency services for Morgan Hill, called “depressing.”

Equally troubling is the likelihood that it will happen again, unless Silicon Valley tech giants, which rely on the underground network of cables and wires to go on reinventing the future, make a large capital investment in upgrading the grid.

“I don’t think you can ever prevent something like that from happening without a major infrastructure investment from the private sector,” said Dave Snow, Santa Clara County logistics section chief.

Someone undoubtedly will have to make a large capital investment
Advertisement
to assure that all the grids — electric, transportation and communications — aren’t knocked out for days during such natural disasters as earthquakes. Cash-strapped city and county governments would like to shift the burden to companies that profit from those systems.

“The one thing you can’t do in government nowadays,” Snow said, “is buy things just in case. A large part of our effort is going toward pre-disaster contracting. The first day or two you’re on your own, but you know that support is on its way.”

One company that has made a significant investment in keeping the communications network running smoothly is Cisco, which dispatched its Darth Vader-like NERV (Network Emergency Response Vehicle) to Morgan Hill last year, allowing that city to quickly restore its 911 service. “It’s got cameras, satellite reconnections, and devices that allow you to cross-connect radio frequencies,” said Bert Hildebrand, Santa Clara County director of communications. “They can restore telephone and Internet, which is a capability we don’t have. It’s very cool.”

Cows & colts

Having learned its lesson the hard way, AT&T has already begun making one improvement to the system. The company actually had backup fiber-optic lines, right next to the bundle that got cut. “We had the protection, but it was in the same manhole,” said AT&T spokesman John Britton. Since then, the company has devised a “different geography” for its backup lines expected to be ready by midsummer.

Though the sabotaged wires belonged to AT&T, the incident also knocked out a bundle of lines the company leased to Verizon, sole provider of landline service in South County. Additional cuts were later discovered to wires at two locations in San Carlos, and at Hayes Avenue and Cottle Road in San Jose. Verizon lost service to more than 52,000 households, including disruptions to cellular and Internet service.

Verizon has
beefed up its fleet COWs (cell on wheels) and COLTs (cell on light truck) to handle such emergencies in the future. And other companies have made similar investments.

Wireless communication had become like the air we breathe — all around us and always available — and then it was gone. Landlines went dead, cell phones didn’t work and the Internet flickered off in Morgan Hill, Gilroy and San Jose. It took more than 24 hours to fully restore service, a disconcertingly dark day during which the entire communications grid’s vulnerability to a single point of failure was exposed.

“Wireless calls or data connections are only wireless between the device and the nearest antenna,” explained Heidi Flato, spokeswoman for Verizon Wireless. “From there, they travel over fiber optic systems, through switches and other facilities. Basically, your cell phone is only as good as the network it’s riding on.”

Sabotage was immediately suspected because AT&T’s contract with the Communications ers of America had expired only four days before the lines were cut. After the incident, AT&T spokesman John Britton noted that opening the manhole cover where the fiber optic lines were buried required a special tool.

To pull off such a caper, said Dave Snow, the county’s logistics section chief, “You kind of have to know what you’re doing. Nobody would stand in water and operate a chain saw on electrical lines unless they knew exactly what they were doing.”

Investigation ends

AT&T offered a reward of $100,000 for information leading to arrest and conviction, and the next day raised it to $250,000, one of the largest bounties for an act of vandalism in the company’s history. “That is a huge, huge sum of money,” Britton said, “so we obviously were hoping that would be sufficient motivation to generate a lot of positive leads for the police.”

When the FBI joined the investigation, authorities even considered a legal provision — enacted after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — which made vandalism against a telecommunications network “an act of terrorism,” according to Britton.

He said AT&T’s asset protection division worked closely with police. “We definitely wanted to see whoever committed these terrible acts prosecuted and convicted,” Britton said. “It went far beyond an attack on the network. It was an attack on the people who live in the communities served by the network.”

And then, on Sept. 1, the criminal investigation by San Jose police ended almost as suddenly as it began.

That was the same day the Communications Workers of America approved a new contract with AT&T. “I’m not going to speculate about the incident,” CWA communications director Candice Johnson said in an e-mail. She denied any culpability by union members.

The communications giant’s spokesman refused to speculate on a connection between the simultaneous ending of union strife and the criminal investigation. “All those labor things are in the rearview mirror,” Britton said simply. “From what I know, we cooperated 100 percent with the police department.”

AT&T has bolstered its security, attempting to limit the damage that any future attack could cause, but not even a company of its scope can post a guard over every manhole. “Customers today are demanding connectivity everywhere,” Britton said. “Not just in homes and businesses, not just to make a phone call, or get an e-mail, or send a text message. It’s a tweet, or they want to check in on Facebook, and you now have millions of people who are conditioned to do that. When it’s taken away, it affects them in a big way. And we don’t like it when that happens.”

“The ability to control the cell phone switch—and through it, the cell
phone system—can be a tool of singular power in the search for infor-
mation superiority. To demonstrate as much, this chapter outlines a
systems concept of cell phone switch control and user registration,
illustrates how such control can be used to facilitate counterinsurgency
operations, and addresses issues associated with making the system
work in the interest of the government.
If, as noted, insurgencies are about individuals who choose to
align with or oppose the constituted government in greater or lesser
degree, then information about individuals at a fine-grain level is cen-
tral to countering insurgency. To know how people are moving and
interacting on a day-to-day basis, there is no information quite as rich
as that which the cell phone system routinely collects by the minute.
Every time someone makes a phone call, some switch, in the normal
course of doing its job, records who is calling, where the caller is, who
is being called, where the called party is, and how long the call lasts.”

Byting Back: REGAINING INFORMATION SUPERIORITY AGAINST 21ST-CENTURY INSURGENTS pp 43 ( RAND corporation)

Counter-insurgency warfare is by its very nature an intensive boots-on-the-ground endeavor, but that hasn’t stopped U.S. forces in Afghanistan from leveraging technology in the fight against the Taliban.

Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles prowl the skies over Afghanistan’s mountain passes, deserts and agricultural belts — including Marjah, in Helmand Province, where heavy fighting is now taking place — searching out insurgent groups and intelligence-designated targets.

Land-based high-resolution cameras with infrared and thermal capabilities scan the horizon around bases and isolated outposts for suspicious movement.

Troops on patrol, meanwhile, employ high-tech identification devices to help ferret out terrorist suspects.

“The greatest advantage the insurgent has is that he doesn’t wear a uniform and identify himself as a combatant,” said a senior Marine staff officer with Task Force Leatherneck in Helmand Province. “What this system does is provide an opportunity to identify them through the exploitation of biometric material.”

The Biometric Automated Toolset (BAT) is basically a laptop computer with separate plug-in units that record mug shots, fingerprints and retinal characteristics. Personal data — such as name, date of birth, home village, father’s and grandfather’s names — are entered into the laptop with the biometric data and transmitted to the United States, where the information is permanently entered into a database and cross-checked against previously entered files. Within that database are fingerprints taken from previously detained individuals or from seized arms and munitions caches and improvised explosive devices.

“If there is a match, just as in any criminal database, it would identify the person as a person of interest and whether or not he should be detained immediately,” said the officer who requested anonymity

Troops not carrying a BAT system use a HIIDE (Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment) unit which resembles a camera. A lens captures retinal details while fingerprints are obtained through the use of a top-mounted panel on the device. Troops have to take personal details with pen and paper, but these are later entered into the BAT computer along with the captured images.

Troops using either system download regular suspect watch-list updates.

“The HIIDE is like an iPod, you download your favorite music from a database and then go listen to it,” the officer said. “I take my HIIDE, plug it into the database and download the database and then I’m off and running.”

In Marjah, where thousands of U.S., British and Afghan forces are currently clearing out the last major Taliban stronghold in Helmand Province, BAT and HIIDE will come into their own when major clearing operations finish and troops establish a cordon sanitaire of patrol bases around its major population areas.

The details of adult males in villages will recorded and entered into the main BAT database by soldiers on their daily patrols, who will also take normal photographs of the men in front of their homes for easy, daily reference.

“It’s a good tool and no one since I’ve been here has objected to giving us their information,” Marine Corp. Caleb Owens, of Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marines. “We tell them it’s so we can give them ID cards.”

Marines of 2-2 operate in the Garmser District of Helmand Province in Southern Afghanistan. They BAT or HIIDE virtually every adult male in their area of operation and later give them laminated identification cards.

Marines say the information and cards are important in helping them identify who belongs in their area and who doesn’t. And since improvised explosive devices are constantly being planted and found in their area of operation, recorded biometrics such as fingerprints could help turn up suspects.

In other areas of Afghanistan, troops are more selective about who is entered into the database and who is not. In Logar province, for example, soldiers late last year were only recording the information of individuals who acted suspiciously or gave suspicious answers when approached and questioned by soldiers.

In Helmand’s Nawa district, which is next to Marjah, Marines have used both approaches, depending on their unit and command instructions.

“This is not a criminal database by itself, it is a national database, so from this database you can produce all sorts of stuff which are basic population-control measures so you know what you’re up against,” a Marine officer said.

Afghanistan’s population is estimated at more than 28 million and few have any sort of government-issued identification.

The BAT system is not new. In Iraq 2.5 million people were entered into the database, military sources told DefenseNews last year. Included in that number were tens of thousands of Sons of Iraq (SOI) volunteers — many of them former insurgents — who later worked with U.S. and Iraqi troops as neighborhood guards.

Lisa Swan, with the U.S. Army’s Biometric Task Force, told DefenseNews that the BAT system resulted in more than 400 “high-value” suspects being arrested in 2008 in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Three days after a flash mob of local high school students disrupted the Gallery mall, heightened security made a repeat unlikely.

Police officers stationed at each entrance to the mall yesterday served as a reminder of Tuesday’s incident, which involved more than 150 students and resulted in 16 arrests and $700 of damage in a nearby Macy’s.

Lois Ladd of Edwardsville, Ill., who was visiting Philadelphia for the weekend, said she has never seen so much security at a mall.

“Everybody has security at every door,” she said.

Anxhela Disha, a student at Delaware County Community College, was sitting on a bench outside the mall waiting to meet her boyfriend.

She said that the two of them regularly spend time at the mall but that this was her first time back since Tuesday’s incident.

“There are just more people,” she said. “More police, and more people.”

But the scene inside seemed calm. In the mall’s food court, only a few students were gathered, and security guards had little to do.

This reporter was escorted off the premises and was told that reporters were not allowed to interview anyone in the mall.

Despite one student’s assurances that crowds were only small because “nobody is down here yet,” the number of students outside the mall never grew beyond a few small groups.

Four students, from Mastery Charter School and the Community College of Philadelphia, said the security guards at one entrance discouraged them from going inside.

“We were trying to get in, and the cops just crossed their arms and shook their heads,” said Hanani Brooks, a student at Mastery. “But they’ll let us back in eventually. We’re their main source of income.”

Savon Hutchinson, another Mastery student, said he and his friends weren’t involved in the flash mob, but had heard about it.

Even though it’s not really talked about at school, “everyone knows,” he said.

In general, mallgoers said they saw nothing to concern them yesterday.

“My boyfriend told me, ‘Stay inside, don’t go out,’ ” Disha said. “But I think I’ll be OK.”

By: MTI
2010-02-04 09:42
Ukrainians protesting against a new computer system which checks how long a visitor has stayed from the other side of the border lifted their blockade of the Tiszabecs-Vilok crossing point in the early hours of Thursday, Hungarian police told MTI.
The protest was triggered by the introduction of a computer system which is able to instantly check how long a national from either side of the border has stayed in the other country.
Ukrainian nationals are allowed to stay in Hungary for a maximum 90 days bracketed within a period of half a year. The restriction applies to those living in the border regions, as well as to Hungarian citizens visiting Ukraine, press officer Gergely Fulop said.
Whereas this rule has been long-standing, until now the length of the stay had not been closely monitored.

Israel’s Mossad espionage agency used Trojan Horse programs to gather intelligence about a nuclear facility in Syria the Israel Defense Forces destroyed in 2007, the German magazine Der Spiegel reported Monday.

According to the magazine, Mossad agents in London planted the malware on the computer of a Syrian official who was staying in the British capital; he was at a hotel in the upscale neighborhood of Kensington at the time.

The program copied the details of Syria’s illicit nuclear program and sent them directly to the Mossad agents’ computers, the report said.

Israel’s September 6, 2007, raid on the al-Kabir site in Syria’s eastern desert is said to have knocked out the country’s reportedly nearly-completed reactor.

Israel has refused from the beginning to comment on, confirm or deny the strike, but after a delay of several months Washington presented intelligence purporting to show the target was a reactor being built with North Korean help.

Der Spiegel further reported on Monday that prior to the strike, the IDF Military Intelligence unit, 8200, listened in on conversations between officials at the Syrian reactor and North Korean experts.

from: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1125312.html

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Read more…

ISLAMABAD: Renewed pitched battles erupted around the Taliban stronghold of Sararogha with 28 militants and five soldiers killed in fresh clashes, as US drones, after a brief lull fired missiles targeting a hideout in North Waziristan killing five other insurgents.

Read more…

Flying frying machine gives car a nasty burn

Vid US-based arms’n'airliners globocorp Boeing has released video of its aircraft-mounted ray cannon, the Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) in operation.

Read more…

After complaints about American dominance of the internet and growing disquiet in some parts of the world, Washington has said it will relinquish some control over the way the network is run and allow foreign governments more of a say in the future of the system.

Icann – the official body that ultimately controls the development of the internet thanks to its oversight of web addresses such as .com, .net and .org – said today that it was ending its agreement with the US government.

The deal, part of a contract negotiated with the US department of commerce, effectively pushes California-based Icann towards a new status as an international body with greater representation from companies and governments around the globe.

Icann had previously been operating under the auspices of the American government, which had control of the net thanks to its initial role in developing the underlying technologies used for connecting computers together.

But the fresh focus will give other countries a more prominent role in determining what takes place online, and even the way in which it happens – opening the door for a virtual United Nations, where many officials gather to discuss potential changes to the internet.

Icann chief Rod Beckstrom, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Washington insider who took over running the organisation in July, said there had been legitimate concerns that some countries were developing alternative internets as a way of routing around American control.

“It’s rumoured that there are multiple experiments going on with countries forking the internet, various countries have discussed this,” he said. “This is a very significant shift because it takes the wind out of our opponents.”

He added that the changes would prove powerful when combined with upcoming plans to allow web users to use addresses with names in Chinese, Arabic or other alphabets other than Latin. Many countries have lobbied for the shift in recent years, as the expansion of the web reaches out deeper into society and business.

While the issue reached critical mass in emerging economies such as China, it is not the only country that has lobbied for a change. Earlier this year European officials said that they did not think it was proper for America to retain so much control over the global computer network.

Viviane Reding, the EU’s commissioner for information society and media, said she was pleased that Washington chose to make the shift.

“I welcome the US administration’s decision to adapt Icann’s key role in internet governance to the reality of the 21st century,” she said. “If effectively and transparently implemented, this reform can find broad acceptance among civil society, businesses and governments alike.”

Meanwhile Nominet – the British organisation that handles the day-to-day running of .uk domain names – said that Icann had started a trend for companies with internet influence to appear more open and accountable.

“Putting public interest first will also be a focus for the UK internet community over the coming months as there is growing support for Nominet to develop more of a public interest role,” said Nominet’s chief executive, Lesley Cowley.

The new agreement comes into force immediately. It replaces the old version which had been in place since 1998 and was scheduled to expire today.

Beckstrom suggested that bringing more countries to the table was the best way of ensuring the long term future of the internet.

“We’re more global, period. The chances of the internet holding together just went up, the cohesion just went up,” he said. “We expect more active involvement from governments, a higher level of participation from many governments and we’re already hearing about more governments joining the team… This was, ironically, a power move from the US.”

from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/30/icann-agreement-us

NEW DELHI: Intelligence agencies have asked the government to consider blocking Skype as operators of the popular global VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) engine are refusing to share the encryption code that prevents Indian investigators from intercepting conversations of suspected terrorists.

The Cabinet Committee on Security has accepted the recommendation in principle but has not set a date for initiating action. The urgency to track Skype calls stems from the fact that terrorists — as the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai showed — are increasingly using VoIP services. The shift to VoIP has been prompted by the growing ability of intelligence agencies to intercept mobile and other calls.

Read more…

The Obama administration will largely preserve Bush-era procedures allowing the government to search — without suspicion of wrongdoing — the contents of a traveler’s laptop computer, cellphone or other electronic device, although officials said new policies would expand oversight of such inspections.

Read more…

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

Read more…

Greenpeace have cited Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo as among the worst environmental offenders, when it comes to using toxic materials in their manufacturing. Read more…

Poland has violated its obligation towards the EU in connection with GMO, the European Tribunal of Justice has declared in Luxembourg. Poland, which fighting to become a GMO free-zone had been in dispute with the European Commission over GMOs for years and finally passed a law banning GMO seeds on April 27, 2006.
Read more…

Backers of a proposed $20 million business park in the New River Valley are courting three companies to locate at an interim site in Fairlawn, according to Pulaski economic development director John White. Read more…

FBI agents have arrested a man suspected of posting online messages threatening the life of a California transit cop who was involved in a controversial shooting earlier this year. Read more…

By Philip Bethge

Cattle cloning has long been standard practice in the United States. Now EU agriculture ministers have decided that cloned meat and milk should be allowed onto the European market. Not everyone is pleased.

Anyone who considers creation sacred should make sure they never talk to a cattle breeder. In-vitro fertilization, artificial insemination and embryo transfer are the terms of their trade. And now another word from the lexicon of reproductive medicine has joined the breeder’s jargon: cloning.

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