"The FBI has launched an investigation into a Pennsylvania school district that has been accused of spying on students through webcams on laptops it issued to those students..." (more)
Gimme Back My Face
"The user points the camera at a person across the room. Face recognition software creates a 3-D model of the person's mug and sends it across a server where it's matched with an identity in the database. A cloud server conducts the facial recognition since and sends back the subject's name as well as links to any social networking sites the person has provided access to..." (more)
AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance
"The phone company uses Hancock-coded software to crunch through tens of millions of long distance phone records a night to draw up what AT&T calls 'communities of interest' — i.e., calling circles that show who is talking to whom.
The system was built in the late 1990s to develop marketing leads, and as a security tool to see if new customers called the same numbers as previously cut-off fraudsters — something the paper refers to as 'guilt by association'..."
"When police search a DNA database, they're usually looking for the person who left behind the blood or semen at a crime scene. But there's another technique, where they can search for people who ALMOST match the DNA sample -- namely, the suspect's family. Once they find a near match, investigators can start looking at that person's relatives as possible suspects in the crime." (more)
"Anyone with an e-mail account likely knows that police can peek inside it if they have a paper search warrant. But cybercrime investigators are frustrated by the speed of traditional methods of faxing, mailing, or e-mailing companies these documents. They're pushing for the creation of a national Web interface linking police computers with those of Internet and e-mail providers so requests can be sent and received electronically." (more)