We kinda cheered every time someone ran a red light in LJ and the big, flashy light went off.

 miamizsun wrote: 
I saw a local parking enforcement car with no less than 12 cameras mounted on it aiming in every conceivable direction so they don't miss a single plate. Bizarre. 

Let him watch THIS.....

Your Car is Being Watched

Police forces and private companies are scanning auto license plates and building huge databases of location information—whether or not the owners of the cars have done anything wrong. WSJ's Julia Angwin reports.

House Approves Sweeping, Warrantless Electronic Spy Powers | Threat Level | Wired.com

(...) The National Security Agency told lawmakers that it would be a violation of Americans’ privacy to disclose how the measure is being used in practice. The NSA said the “NSA leadership agreed that an IG (Inspector General) review of the sort suggested would further violate the privacy of U.S. persons.”

hippiechick wrote:

The author of this breathless article seems to know next to nothing about detection technology, laser optics, spectroscopy, or the other technologies required to make this work. I'm not surprise s/he wants to remain anonymous.

The company has built tunable lasers with some clever wavelength modulation. That's it. They don't have any detection technology—they can't receive any of the signals the laser is supposed to generate from its target.

What's more it operates in the mid-infrared. One of the claims in the article is that this can be used for biodetection, something I spent a few years at. No, it can't. IR is useless for detecting microbes unless you're blasting it into a test tube swarming with cell colonies in a very dark room. The signal levels from a few cells (all you'll ever see on somebody walking around) are so miniscule it takes a very dark place with very very sensitive photodetectors to see anything at all, let alone anything that would let you discriminate between species.

The signals you'd be trying to measure to detect, say, explosives would be incredibly tiny, so weak that background noise in a normal environment would swamp the signal. If you could blast a big heap of them you might be able to tell what it was, but that doesn't require a laser.

Genia Photonics (the company mentioned in the article) only built half the system the article is talking about, the illumination part. It's assuming the other half (the detection part) is a done deal, and it isn't. The breathless claims about wavelengths that penetrate clothing are partly true—terrahertz waves go right thru a lot of things, because organic molecules (the stuff clothes and people and explosives are made of) absorb very poorly in the terrahertz range. Which means they aren't very useful for the kind of spectroscopy they're talking about. But their laser doesn't generate terrahertz radiation, it generates mid-IR radiation, orders of magnitude shorter wavelengths. Just like the remote control for your TV.

This all reminds me of an episode from the early '70s, when my dad brought home one of the first modem terminals so he could program from home. It was the size of a suitcase and (even by today's dial-up standards) incredibly slow, but it was fast enough to let him write code.

We had a party line, and he kept it tied up quite a bit. To minimize conflict with the other household sharing the line he contacted the phone company and called them from work. He explained that he was using a device to communicate with a computer, and that if they wanted to use the phone to just pick it up. If they heard a strange noise that would be his modem, he'd see his signal get scrambled and would know they wanted to use the line and he'd sign off and take a break.

The nice lady on the other end of the line thanked him and hung up, then he got a call from the phone company. A panicked lady called them to complain that there was a computer using her phone, it could hear everything she said, and she demanded something be done about it.

We got a private line.

 hippiechick wrote: 



No big deal.

I have assumed for years the govt. knows EVERYTHING about me. I pity the fool that has to review/update my file, pretty boring stuff.

The Secret Government Laser That Instantly Knows Everything About You

 oldslabsides wrote: 
http://www. radioparadise. com/content. php? name=Forums&file=showtopic&topic_id=4954&x=3353949

He's also watching your tweets, and has no sense of humor whatsoever.

Online Photos Can Say Much More than 1000 Words

In this expanding world of technology, it is becoming more difficult to keep your privacy intact. But did you know your online photos may be sharing more about you and your personal life than just your words? Every time you upload a picture online, it's not just the picture you are showing off. The photo file also contains metadata that is storing your digital camera's serial number and GPS location. With this information and without any warning, someone could know exactly who you are and maybe even where you are without any more information than the smiling photo you posted on the web. However, there are programs and software you can download that can remove the EXIF metadata from your photos so you can upload them with a peace of mind that no one can trace. Here is a step-by-step guide of the CyberGuy recommended way to save your privacy from the snapshot spies.

1. Download this free program, EXIF Tag Remover. 2. Once Downloaded, open the program. 3. Select the picture or pictures you want to "Clean" 4. Select whether you want to keep the original picture after you remove the EXIF tag or delete it. 5. Choose which tags you want to delete, then click start