A school, in the South of Wales, has recently began the implementation of a new scheme in which it aims to fingerprint the 1,400 attending pupils in a bid to automate class registrations.

Parents of the children that attend the school, in Porth County, were notified little more than a week before the scheme was put into practice. The headmaster of the school defends the decision, claiming that

“it wasn’t necessary for us to seek parental consent in this. It’s a system that has been approved by the DfES and it’s supported by Capita SIMS…..There are 1,400 students in the school and we had two phone calls…the parents were perfectly happy.”

The system, known as VeriCool, is developed by a sector of General Dynamics, and aims to provide biometric scanning for each classroom. General Dynamics is best known for specialising in producing systems for the military and intelligence services.

The move has met with much controversy, with parents and privacy advocates airing their concerns. David Clouter of leavethemkidsalone argued that taking the register was an important way for teachers to establish contact with each individual pupil at the start of a class and that its role would not substitute manual registers, for instance, in the case of a fire.

Your Response : The Register - Letters

Note: Interestingly, I was recently speaking to a driving instructor. I have been wondering, for some time now, why plastic ID card driving liscences have been introduced when drivers are still required to carry the paper counter-part. The instructor informed me that the common theory is that it is part of the initial phase of the governments biometric national ID card scheme. The idea being that we will put up less of a fight if we are already used to carry an ID card of sorts - a way of slowly introducing us to the idea of a full national ID scheme / database. Coupled with the reported incident of schools implementing fingerprint scanning systems, we clearly ARE slipping further towards that Orwellian society that we resent so much.

“The European Commission has opened a public consultation on the use of surveillance technology in civil society.

At the initiative’s heart is the desire to work with industry to create more and better surveillance systems that it can use to monitor the public in order to prevent terrorist attacks.

The EC Directorate-General for Justice, Freedom and Security said in a statement it would publish a green paper*, inviting consultation on “what role the Union could play in order to foster detection technologies in the service of the security of its citizens”.

The green paper was drawn up from the results of a conference of “major European business” and the public sector last November, called the Public-Private Security Dialogue: Detection Technologies and Associated Technologies in the Fight against Terrorism……”

Read more at : The Register - Tell the EC about surveillance

On September 2, 2006 a revised version of the NSA Central Security Service policy 1-23 was noticed to contain the following allowances which clearly breach the freedoms of American Citizens…

(S/SI) Foreign communications of, or concerning, United States persons that are intercepted by the United States Signals Intelligence System may be retained in their original form or as transcribed only:

(a) if processed so as to eliminate any reference to United States persons;

(b) if necessary to the maintenance of technical data bases. Retention for this purpose is permitted for a period sufficient to allow a thorough exploitation and to permit access to data that are, or are reasonably believed likely to become, relevant to a current or future intelligent requirement. Sufficient duration may vary with the nature of the exploitation. In the context of a cryptanalytic effort, sufficient duration may consist of a period of time during which encrypted material is subject to, or of use in, cryptanalysis. In the case of international commercial communications that may contain the identity of United States persons and that are not enciphered or otherwise thought to contain secret meaning, sufficient duration is one year unless the Deputy Director for Operations, National Security Agency, determines in writing that retention for a longer period is required to respond   to authorized foreign intelligence or counterintelligence requirements;

D. (C) Signals Intelligence: Search and Development.

The United States Signals Intelligence System may conduct search and development activities with respect to signals throughout the radio spectrum under thefollowing limitations:

1. Collection. Signals may be collected only for the purpose of identifying those signals that:

(a) may contain information related to the production of foreign intelligence or counterintelligence;

(b) are enciphered or appear to contain secret meaning;

(c) are necessary to ensure efficient signals intelligence collection or to avoid the collection of unwanted signals; or

(d) reveal vulnerability of United States communications security.

“A new Toronto Star article from Michael Geist not only describes why Canadian Ministers of Education are pushing a copyright proposal that will harm Internet access, but also reveals how a copyright group is seeking to create a new license for Internet content. Access Copyright, a copyright collective, wants to use a new international text standard to license everything from books to blogs. Geist outlines in his blog how Canadians can fight back against these bonehead proposals.”

Ever get annoyed when looking at photos and you just can’t remember where it was taken? Well soon that will be a thing of the past. It’s almost September, the second month of the year when Sony changes its product range. This September sees the release of the GPS-CS1, a 9cm GPS receiver. The idea behind the CS1 is to allow photographers to overlay their images onto the Google maps framework. It does this by synchronising the GPS log file with the timestamp found in your photo’s EXIF metadata.

Updating every 15 seconds, the CS1 records your position via GPS to a plain text log file. Using this data, the photograph’s timestamp and the bundled Picture Motion Browser web software, you can view the exact location where you took the picture, along with a thumbnail of the image itself. Example here: http://www.sony.jp/products/Consumer/Peripheral/GPS/GPS-CS1K/TryMapView/try.html (Internet Explorer Only)

Sony has guaranteed that the unit will work with all Sony cameras released after August, perhaps as the software will start to come in the box. However, providing your camera supports the EXIF 2.1 metadata standard, there is no reason that the software wouldn’t work with your camera.

Sony GPS-CS1 Specification

Of course there are certain privacy issues that come into play when dealing with GPS, and the CS1 is no exception. Get hold of one and you have a full history of where the owners been. Drop one in a bag and you have a relatively cheap surveillance device - perfect for stalking that desired girl or unfaithful partner. The software works with Google maps, meaning the data is being sent over the Internet and available for snoopers to get a hold of and if Google logs, then its trivial for the government to find out where you’ve been and at what time.

Men are from Mars, women from Venus, and Firefox from outer space, or so it would seem. A creative group of Linux enthusiasts, from the Oregon State University in the States, took to the countryside recently in a bid to carve a giant Firefox logo into the surrounding rural area.

Surpassing Mozilla’s PR stunt of building a public access Firefox lover’s database, the group has upped a number of photos at the groups University web site here.

With reference to our recent report on the RIAA attempts at suing a dead man. It would appear that the huge, and largely negative, response across the worlds media may have quelled the monoliths copyright thirst. RIAA spokesperson, Jonathan Lamy, said that, “out of an abundance of sensitivity, we have elected to drop this particular case.” Or not as the case maybe, given that this renewed view on its victims comes just days after the media tore the RIAA a new asshole.

Earlier this week we reported on the re-application of the RIPA act with all of its glorious additions. Yet once again, as before, the proposal is coming under fire left right and center. For example, it is likely that people will start to disregard the security implications that encryption has to offer, after all, why encrypt data when you have to decrypt it for any moron who asks, and who wants to go to prison because they forgot their key to 2006_financial_report.pdf.enc

More Information: BBC - Police decryption powers ‘flawed’

As if they couldnt crawl any lower, in the case Warner Bros vs Scantlebury, the RIAA are continuing their case against, the now deceased, Mr Scantlebury who passed away before his trial was resolved. The RIAA have given Mr Scantlebury’s family, a very kind and heartfelt, 60 days to grieve before taking depositions from the Scantlebury family.

More Information: Recording Industry vs The People [blog]

On 30th August, the Home Office conclude their musing of, as yet, un-included portions of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000). Portions that will give police not only full access to peoples encrypted data, but full a history of a person’s communications records.

Further Information: Spyblog Conference Details & information