This is a utility that will attempt to guess Mother's Maiden Names for children whose parents were married in Texas. An attacker could acquire the information to launch the attack however she pleases. However, the most obvious place to acquire this sort of information is Texas birth records.

Texas Mother's Maiden Name Discovery

I did not wind up appearing in many of the photos posted. This photo is from the Anonymous Blogging round table discussion at the Vandy Freedom Forum. I think this is the point where I was explaining to Bennett Haselton (of peacefire.org) how design flaws present in his Circumventor software could easily lead to people getting killed.

Rattle at BlogNashville via Hoder's Flickr Stream

] Initially, police will place six cameras in the Cleveland
] Park area of east Nashville and also downtown in the
] tourist-heavy Second Avenue and Broadway district.
]
] If the system works out, the department plans to buy more
] cameras and build a more expansive network throughout the
] city.

There were planning to record audio as well, but apparently they couldn't defend that politically. Soon everywhere you go outside the police will be watching you. Better be carefull about loitering in a parking lot. Especially if you look like you might be young or not sufficiently white or otherwise undesirable. I wonder if they'll start following people from bars back to their cars and radio dispatch to pull them over?

This isn't going on in Nashville because it is particularly needed in Nashville. Its going on in Nashville because people in Nashville aren't willing to resist it.

Nashville Police to install city wide video surveillance system.

"It looks like your search terms were detected by the
Total Information Awareness filter..."

clippy.gif (GIF Image, 308x123 pixels)

] The "suicide bomber" clips a shrapnel-filled belt around
] his waist and buttons up his jacket to conceal it.
]
] As he turns back and forth in front of a semicircular
] white panel about the size of a shower cubicle, a
] computer monitor shows the metal-packed cylinders
] standing out clearly in white against his body.
]
] This is no real security alarm: It's a demonstration at
] the British technology group Qinetiq of a scanning device
] that sees under people's clothes to spot not just metal
] but other potential threats, like ceramic knives or
] hidden drugs.

Sounds like what was called Millimeter Wave in the novel Snowcrash, right? Well, guess what the technology is called.. Millimeter Wave. Yep, life continues to imitate fiction.

I just left a message on George Orwell's VMB telling him to screw himself.

Airport scanners keep it anonymous | CNET News.com

] It works like this: The calls are recorded by
] geo-stationary spy satellites and listening stations,
] such as the UK's Menwith Hill, which combine
] satellite-intercepted calls and trunk landline intercepts
] and forward them on to centres, such as the US' Fort
] Meade, where supercomputers work on the recordings in
] real time.

] A SAM-650 product is called a 192 GFLOPS DSP
] supercomputer by TMS. It is just 3U high and has 24 DSP
] chips and is positioned as a back-end number cruncher
] controlled by any standard server - a similar
] architecture to that used by Cray supercomputers. There
] are vast streams of information coming from recorded
] telephone conversations. The ability to have the DSPs
] work in parallel speeds up analysis enormously. Spinning
] hard drives can't feed the DSPs fast enough, nor are they
] quick enough for subsequent software analysis of the
] data. Consequently TMS uses its solid state technology to
] provide a buffer up to 32GB that keeps the DSPs operating
] at full speed.
]
] A cluster of five SAM-650's provides a terra flop of
] processing power; one trillion floating point operations
] per second.

Techworld.com - Want to know the hardware behind Echelon?

] When Robert Moran drove back to his law offices in Rome,
] N.Y., after a plane trip to Arizona in July 2003, he had
] no idea that a silent stowaway was aboard his vehicle: a
] secret GPS bug implanted without a court order by state
] police.
]
] A federal judge in New York ruled last week that police
] did not need court authorization when tracking Moran from
] afar. "Law enforcement personnel could have conducted a
] visual surveillance of the vehicle as it traveled on the
] public highways," U.S. District Judge David Hurd wrote.
] "Moran had no expectation of privacy in the whereabouts
] of his vehicle on a public roadway."

Comments from Decius:

Yowzer... The police "could have" visually observed the vehicle, but they didn't. They attached a tracking device to it. A tracking device it a wholly different animal and has wholly different privacy implications. The expense require to visually track an individual car's every movement, without being observed, is extremely high. An individual might have no expectation of privacy with regard to the specific location of his car at a specific time, but there is a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to the specific location of his car at every time.

One might also inquire as to whether this tracking device stopped working the minute this individual pulled off of a public road and onto private property? Its doubtful.

This ruling implies that as one tracking device has no privacy implications, then presumably 1000 tracking devices have no privacy implications, as 1000*0=0. Moving from the idea that the police have every right to tail your car on a public road to the idea that the police can electronically track the location of every car at every time is a massive leap of logic that has little basis in common sense.

Furthermore, one would think that the process of attaching a tracking device would have some private property concerns. Is it legal for me to attach anything I want to your car? Can I put a audio recording device on your car? (Apparently so, according to one of the rulings in this article!)

Anothing article linked in here discusses a very very tenuous barrier that the courts established to prevent the FBI from wiretapping cars using their on-star systems. Apparently its only illegal if it might interfere with emergency road side services!

We're rapidly approaching a period of time when technologies like these will allow the police to monitor your every movement and record your daily conversations. If we will not properly apply the 4th amendment to this domain the results will be terrible.

No court order required for GPS bugs! (More dumb judges.)

Ordering a pizza in a surveillance society.

ACLU - Pizza Flash

] Most Instant Messenger users broadcast when they sign on,
] sign off, go idle, and flag themselves as away. This
] presence information is typically innocuous, useful for
] knowing if your buddies are available to chat. But when
] monitored continuously, over long time periods, those few
] signals tell a lot. This website lets you record and
] analyze anybody's IM activity.

Somebody is watching you... for someone else.

IM Watching.net

The Department of Justice claims that it needs these, and other, search powers to combat terrorism. A provision slipped into an appropriations bill allows the FBI to obtain personal financial information from banks, insurance companies, travel agencies, real estate agents, stockbrokers, the U.S. Postal Service, jewelry stores, casinos and car dealerships without a warrant.

Bruce Schneier with one of those articles that makes you get up and look around outside your house or apartment.

Newsday.com - Opinion