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Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month. "I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects." Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too. "I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' " That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security. No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely....
Sheriff's border unit makes presence felt "We're the new kids on the block," said Sgt. James Murphy, who heads the six-deputy unit, formerly known as Safe Streets. In four months, deputies have become accustomed to the hair-raising dashes through the desert - in one recent nine-hour shift, there were two - and they can even steer with their knees while listening to the dispatcher and checking for updates on their laptops. Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said he created the Border Crime Unit in response to a series of high-profile rip-offs in which bandits stalked and attacked smugglers for their loads of people or drugs. "We had five homicides in a few months. When it started happening near Green Valley - near a retirement community - it was clear we had to do something," Murphy said. Drug loads are often worth more than $500,000, and smugglers usually are paid about $2,000 per load, Murphy said. That ups the ante on what people are willing to do to get away. Dupnik said each year the county spends about 10 percent of its budget, or $11 million, dealing with border-related crime, which the county defines as any crime involving illegal immigrants....
Drug smugglers using official Texas vehicles Since 2005, federal and state law enforcement officials have known drug smugglers were using fake Texas Department of Transportation vehicles to haul their cargo all over the Lone Star State. But, more than two years later, and despite a major prosecution of the 11 people involved in the scam by Johnny Sutton of the U.S. attorney's office – the official known for handing two Border Patrol agents jail sentences of more than 10 years apiece – the fraudulent trucks are still being found carrying their illicit loads. In August, Texas state troopers found one of the fake trucks in East Texas carrying 1,000 pounds of marijuana. The truck had a TxDOT logo on the door, but reflective stripes on the side of the vehicle were slightly different from official trucks....
Las Vegas becoming a security lab This city, famous for being America's playground, has also become its security lab. Like nowhere else in the United States, Las Vegas has embraced the twin trends of data mining and high-tech surveillance, with arguably more cameras per square foot than any airport or sports arena in the country. Even the city's cabs and monorail have cameras. As the U.S. government ramps up its efforts to forestall terrorist attacks, some privacy advocates view the city as a harbinger of things to come. In secret rooms in casinos across Las Vegas, surveillance specialists are busy analyzing information about players and employees. Relying on thousands of cameras in nearly every cranny of the casino, they evaluate suspicious behavior. They ping names against databases that share information with other casinos, sometimes using facial-recognition software to validate a match. What happens in Vegas does indeed stay in Vegas -- for a lot longer than most patrons realize....
Tomato Juice Spill Causes Long Lines At LaGuardia Tempers grew short at LaGuardia Airport Saturday. The American Airlines terminal was brought to a near-standstill because of an equipment malfunction, but it was the reason for the malfunction that really had people fuming. People were welcomed to Terminal D of LaGuardia Airport with a line so long, it was difficult to tell where it began, or where it ended - all because someone spilled tomato juice on an x-ray machine. When CBS 2 HD told one woman the reason for the delays, she asked if we were "kidding," but it was no joke. The Transportation Safety Administration confirmed the spill knocked out one of the five units that screen thousands of passengers here each day. "That's insane," said Dallas bound passenger Pat Jones. "That shouldn't be our problem, should it?" But it was. Few could believe that a major airline terminal could be thrown into chaos by such a simple problem. "It makes one very sad and very worried," said Bonnie Schmitta. The line to screen passengers stretched down the length of several city blocks, yet a spokesman for the Transportation Safety Administration shrugged off the incident, saying: "That's the risk you take when you deal with technology."....Aren't you glad we made all these folks Federal employees?