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Security firms working on devices to spot would-be terrorists in crowd Scientists and engineers have been asked to devise ways of analysing people's behaviour and physiology from afar, in the hope they may reveal clues about their mental state and even their future intentions. Under Project Hostile Intent, scientists will aim to build devices that can pick up tell-tale signs of hostile intent or deception from people's heart rates, perspiration and tiny shifts in facial expressions. The project was launched by the US department of homeland security with a call to security companies and government laboratories for assistance. According to the timetable set out, the new devices are expected to be trialled at a handful of airports, borders and ports of entry by 2012. The plans describe how systems based on video cameras, laserlight, infra-red, audio recordings and eye tracking technology are expected to scour crowds looking for unusual behaviour, with the aim of identifying people who should be approached and quizzed by security staff, New Scientist magazine reports. The project hopes to advance a security system already employed by the US transportation security administration that monitors people for unintentional facial twitches, called "micro-expressions", that can suggest someone is lying or trying to conceal information....
Secrecy may be spy program's defense The Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program has a built-in feature the Justice Department believes may shield it from ever being challenged as unconstitutional: secrecy. The administration has acknowledged it intercepted some U.S. telephone conversations without warrants as it hunted for terrorists. Whose calls? The government isn't saying. And since only those who were spied on have grounds to sue, it's almost impossible to mount a successful legal challenge. A federal appeals court in Ohio dismissed one such challenge last month because the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups could not prove the government had listened to their conversations. The court did not rule on whether the program was constitutional. Unless the government decides to release information about its wiretaps — as part of a criminal case, for example — the Justice Department said Monday the constitutional question may never be answered. A senior Justice Department official made the comments at a briefing before a hearing Wednesday in San Francisco, where lawyers are trying to challenge the program's legality. The official, who insisted on anonymity because of the pending litigation, said such challenges must first clear a difficult hurdle. "They would have to somehow get, through discovery or admission from government, that they had in fact been surveilled," the official said....
Upkeep Of Security Devices A Burden In 2003, the FBI used a $25 million grant to give bomb squads across the nation state-of-the-art computer kits, enabling them to instantly share information about suspected explosives, including weapons of mass destruction. Four years later, half of the Washington area's squads can't communicate via the $12,000 kits, meant to be taken to the scene of potential catastrophes, because they didn't pick up the monthly wireless bills and maintenance costs initially paid by the FBI. Other squads across the country also have given up using them. "They worked, and it was a good idea -- until the subscription ran out," said Mike Love, who oversees the bomb squad in Montgomery County's fire department. At the local level, he said, "there is not budget money for it." Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the area has received more than $1 billion in federal money to strengthen first responders and secure the region. That money has bought satellite phones, radios, protective suits, water-security monitors and a host of other items. But local officials are grappling with how to maintain the huge infusion of equipment....
Fear, Frenzy, and FISA Like Bill Murray's hapless weatherman in Groundhog Day, America is locked in a perpetual September 12, 2001. How else to explain this weekend's frenzied passage of a sweeping amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), effectively authorizing the program of extrajudicial wiretaps first approved in secret by President George W. Bush shortly after the terrorist attacks of 2001? How else to make sense of a Democratic Congress capitulating to the demands of a wildly unpopular executive for yet another expansion of government surveillance powers, mere months after the disclosure of the rampant abuses that followed the last such expansion? The hasty passage of the massive USA PATRIOT Act, a scant 45 days after those attacks, was ill-considered but understandable. Six years later, however, the administration has grown comfortable with the prerogatives panic affords. And, perversely, it has learned that it can continue to wield those prerogatives even under a Democratic majority, provided it insists on regarding Congress always and only as a last resort. Consider the provenance of this "emergency" legislation. President Bush first authorized the National Security Agency to carry out a range of surveillance activities without court order, the full scope of which is still unknown, but which at the least included monitoring communications between persons in the United States and targets abroad. (Wholly international communications had always been exempt from the privacy restrictions imposed by U.S. law.) When this was revealed by The New York Times late in 2005, the administration insisted that national security required that intelligence agents be allowed to bypass even the super-secret—and highly compliant—FISA courts. Then, following the 2006 midterm elections, which gave Democrats a congressional majority, the Department of Justice abruptly announced that it had found a way to work within FISA after all. Finally, according to The LA Times, a spring ruling by a FISA court judge found that even this restricted version of the six-year-old program ran afoul of the law. Suddenly it became urgent that Congress "modernize" what was invariably described as "the 1978 FISA statute," conjuring images of forlorn agents in white polyester leisure suits vainly hunting for al-Qaeda terrorists hidden under Pet Rocks. Yet FISA had already been updated dozens of times since its initial passage, including six major amendments since the September 11 attacks, giving the administration myriad opportunities to request all the "modernization" it required, subject to thorough public debate....