Crapaganda.com

The ultimate goal of a large-scale project known as “Wooffan SS” was for dogs to take over as SS officers, spies, and concentration camp guards. The Telegraph sifts through the sordid kennel of history:

The Germans viewed canines as being almost as intelligent as humans and attempted to build an army of fearsome ’speaking’ dogs, extraordinary new research shows. Hitler hoped the clever creatures would learn to communicate with their SS masters — and he even had a special dog school set up to teach them to talk. The incredible findings show Nazi officials recruited so-called educated dogs from all over Germany and trained them to speak and tap out signals using their paws.

The Germans hoped to use the animals for the war effort, such as getting them to work alongside the SS and guard concentration camps to free up officers. The bizarre ‘Wooffan SS’ experiment has come to light after years of painstaking research by academic Dr Jan Bondeson into unique and amazing dogs in history.

The school, based in Leutenburg near Hannover and led by headmistress Margarethe Schmitt, was set up in the 1930s and continued throughout the war years. It was reported to have had some success, with dogs tapping out words with their paws. Some of them were able to imitate the human voice and one, when asked who Adolf Hitler was, is said to have replied ‘Mein Fuhrer’.

Several companies are raking in the dough selling plastic bracelets. Power Balance one of the most popular of the so called performance bands is manufactured in China and sells for more than $30.

After a little testing it is easy to figure out that the only this the plastic jewelry is doing for you is making you poorer.

Maybe it helps by balancing your wallet by removing all of your hard earned cash.

The personal effects of Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, will be sold via an online auction by the U.S. Marshals beginning May 18. U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell of the Eastern District of California ordered the sale in August 2010. Proceeds from the auction will be used to compensate Kaczynski’s victims.

The auction will run from May 18 to June 2. The online catalog, which will include approximately 60 lots of property, will be on gsaauctions.gov beginning May 18. Items to be sold include personal documents, such as driver’s licenses, birth certificates, deeds, checks, academic transcripts, photos, and his handwritten codes; typewriters; tools; clothing; watches; several hundred books; and more than 20,000 pages of written documents, including the original handwritten and typewritten versions of the “UnabomManifesto.”

“The U.S. Marshals Service has been given a unique opportunity to help the victims of Theodore Kaczynski’s horrific crimes,” said U.S. Marshal Albert Nájera of the Eastern Districtof California. “We will use the technology that Kaczynski railed against in his variousmanifestos to sell artifacts of his life. The proceeds will go to his victims and, in a very smallway, offset some of the hardships they have suffered.”Photos of selected auction lots are available at www.flickr.com/photos/usmarshals/(click on “Sets”). The catalog, photos and descriptions of all the lots will be available at www.gsaauctions.gov when the auction goes live on May 18.

See: US Marshall Service Press Release

Wired and iFixIt have teamed up to dismantle an FBI tracking device. These are the  ones that the FBI surreptitiously places in the bumper of your car so they can track your movements.

This is what they found:

We partnered with Wired to bring you a peek inside an FBI car-tracking device. The device is similar to the one Yasir Afifi found underneath his car. If you’re curious where this one came from, Wired has posted a writeup about Karen Thomas, the woman who found this tracker under her car. They’ve also posted a video of Kyle doing the teardown.

The device comprises of a GPS unit for receiving the car’s position, an RF transmitter for relaying your location to the interested authority (aka the FBI), and a set of sweet D-cell batteries that power the whole enchilada. But we didn’t stop there, of course. Read on to find out exactly what components make this secretive device tick.

Disclaimer: We love the FBI. We’ve worked with them on several occasions to fight crime and locate criminals. We’ve helped them with instructions on gaining entry into certain devices. We have nothing against them, and we hope they don’t come after us for publishing this teardown.

Did you know that police cars these days are now outfitted with cameras that can automatically scan all license plates within their visual range? Cameras mounted on a patrol car driving 80 mph can capture plates from cars driving the opposite way traveling at the same speed. Side-mounted cameras can be used to collect plates in a parking lot as the officer cruises leisurely back and forth through the lanes! Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technologies mounted on police cars and various stationary sites are vastly improving the monitoring capabilities of the police force, and pissing off civil rights groups just as effectively.

The goal behind using ALPR monitoring is to track criminals. A “hot list,” provided by the FBI, is downloaded every day. The list includes perpetrators of all kinds, including illegal drivers such as those with suspended licenses or without insurance, but also more hardened criminals with warrants. They even track sex offenders. If a wanton criminal or a stolen vehicle turns up, the system notifies police who can then react quickly. In addition to spotting criminals, the data collected by the cameras can be mined in the event of a major incident such as a terrorist attack. Law enforcement officials could go back and see who was in the area at the time of the attack. The automated system is capable of scanning 10,000 license plates per hour and running checks on 2,000 to 2,500 of them against the “hot list” in a 10 hour shift. By comparison, the fastest police officers run about 100 plates per 10 hour shift. And the cameras are better at their job–they don’t tire at the end of their shift. Cruise shotgun with British Columbia’s Sergeant Rick Stewart in the video below for a demonstration of ALPR technology. Awesomely, he actually gets a hit during the taping: a stolen vehicle involved in an armed robbery.

The plate trackers were developed in 1992 at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom to help track terrorists. Several different technologies are combined to produce the system’s automated sophistication. A platefinder firmware continually searches the camera’s field of view for license plates. Once a license plate is detected the dual lens camera is activated, capturing images in both visible and infrared light. The infrared lens enables the camera to capture the plate in all kinds of weather conditions and even in complete darkness. A triple flash technology is also used that varies the flash, shutter, and gain settings over multiple images to adjust to different light and weather settings. A computer selects the best image for processing and that image is then read by an optical character recognition engine. The OCR engine can be generic or customized to the style of license plate found in a particular state or country. Because plates come in all shapes and sizes a good OCR engine will be flexible, reading plates from skewed and off-axis angles, and having different sizes, syntax rules, and designs. Processors will then take the data and store it in multiple formats for different types of downstream analyses.

Along with police vehicles, the cameras are also being mounted onto stationary sites such as toll booths and speed monitors: those roadside panels that tell you, “You’re driving this fast.” During last year’s World Series, San Francisco’s law enforcement used ALPR to monitor cars in the vicinity of AT&T Park. The San Francisco Chroniclerecently reported that the city’s crime fighters have placed the cameras on six of their cruisers–that’s adding to the ten which already had them. As of this time last year,Los Angeles had 26 cameras.

At $20,000 a pop, the plate scanners aren’t cheap. But the increased monitoring efficiency and accuracy make them well worth the cost to law enforcement personnel. A study performed by the Association of Chief Police Officers concluded that using the cameras increased arrest rates in the UK ten times the national average.

Big Brother Never Sleeps

Not surprisingly, the increasing use of automated plate recognition to track drivers has raised the ire of the ACLU and other privacy advocate groups. In addition to a general distaste for being monitored all the time, the major objection being brought against plate recognition technology is the possibility that the data might be used for purposes other than tracking criminals. A recent article in Time described a hypothetical divorce case where the movements of a person could be used as circumstantial evidence to argue adultery. Law enforcement officals everywhere are doing their best to assuage these sorts of fears. Sergeant Dan Gomez, who runs the LAPD’s Tactical Technology Unit, emphasized that their license plate data is heavily guarded with strict protocols that an investigator must go through if he wants to follow up on a particular car.

Given such famous privacy gaffe’s like President Bush’s wire-tapping and, most recently, the discovery that Apple iPhones and iPads are storing data on their customers’ whereabouts, I really can’t blame anyone for crying foul as the scanners show up on our neighborhood police cars and street corners. It seems like we’re constantly having to assess the sincerity of our technocrats when they tell us, “Honestly, there’s nothing to worry about.” Didn’t we all kind of know that Google was keeping tabs on what we asked them to look up for us? But even as the details of our lives are ever more embedded into our hard drives we continue sit back and trust the powers that be to not take advantage of us (Intriguingly, if you Google the words “Google” and “privacy,” the first four hits are google.com statements detailing their privacy policy. Suspicious, no?).

Look, I think the technology is great. By all means, nab the bad guys. But I’m also thankful that we have groups like the ACLU that raise these important questions that I’m sure most of us share. If science is too important to be left to scientists, technology is too important to be left to those who make it. In my opinion, the world really is looking more and more like Orwell’s “1984.” It’s probably a good thing, from time to time, to give Big Brother a punch in the nose.

Source: Singularity Hub

Part 1

Part 2

After years of saying it was unavailable, the State of Hawaii has released a photo of President Obama’s Birth Certificate.  First we were told that they could not locate the original. Then they told us that because it was a government document it could not be released.  Now into the third year of his presidential term the elusive document just appears. Was it because Donald Trump had never brought it up before?

Click document for larger view

Here is the “Birth Certificate” released the first time around:

Click document for larger view

The U.S. Department of State is proposing a new Biographical Questionnaire for passport applicants. The proposed new Form DS-5513 asks for all addresses since birth; lifetime employment history including employers’ and supervisors names, addresses, and telephone numbers; personal details of all siblings; mother’s address one year prior to your birth; any “religious ceremony” around the time of birth; and a variety of other information.  According to the proposed form, “failure to provide the information requested may result in … the denial of your U.S. passport application.”

The State Department estimated that the average respondent would be able to compile all this information in just 45 minutes, which is obviously absurd given the amount of research that is likely to be required to even attempt to complete the form.

The proposed “Biographical Questionnaire” follows the introduction in December 2010 of a new Form DS-11 for all passport applicants. It seems likely that only some, not all, applicants will be required to fill out the new questionnaire, but no criteria have been made public for determining who will be subjected to these additional new written interrogatories.

It’s not clear from the supporting statement, statement of legal authorities, or regulatory assessment submitted by the State Department to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) why declining to discuss one’s siblings or to provide the phone number of your first supervisor when you were a teenager working at McDonalds would be a legitimate basis for denial of a passport to a U.S. citizen.

The State Department deadline for submitting comments to the OMB on this proposal was April 25, 2011. (Under the Paperwork Reduction Act,  OMB must approve and assign an OMB control number before any new form can be used.) Details and instructions for submitting comments are in the Federal Register notice (also available here as a PDF):

(Note that the proposed form itself was not published in the Federal Register. A copy was eventually provided to Papers, please after they requested it from the Department of State, and it is viewable here.)

You can view the comments docketed to date here. (There’s sometimes a delay of up to several days before comments are docketed, so don’t panic if you don’t see yours immediately.)

Extra points to the person who gives the best answer in the comments to the question, “Please describe the circumstances of your birth including the names (as well as address and phone number, if available) of persons present or in attendance at your birth.”

Source: PapersPlease.org

“Police in the US now rival criminals, and exceed terrorists as the greatest threat to the American public.”

Yes, there are bad cops everywhere, but the corrupt, racist, and violent New Orleans police department — in which officers engage in rape, arson, kidnapping, bank robberies, and murder, and citizens are arrested for little or no reason, held without charges for months, and routinely brutalized and tortured — is a different matter altogether. It is little exaggeration to say that the NOPD has become a criminal gang terrorizing the city’s residents. The New Statesman reports:

Something terrible lies at the heart of New Orleans – a rampant, widespread and apparently uncontrollable brutality on the part of its police force and its prison service. The horrors of its criminal justice system from decades before Hurricane Katrina and up to now lie somewhere between, with little exaggeration, Candide and Stalin’s Gulags.

Spit on the sidewalk here, and you may be arrested – New Orleans has the highest incarceration rate of any city in the United States – and if you’re poor and black and can’t pay bail, you will enter a place where any protection under the American constitution and the Bill of Rights is stripped away. You will wait weeks or months to be charged, whether innocent or not, and in the meantime you will be subjected to foul, overcrowded jail conditions, prisoner-to-prisoner violence and the brutality of the deputies who guard you.

On 17 March this year, the federal department of justice (DoJ) decided that enough was enough and it has made moves to have the New Orleans police department (NOPD) placed under the supervision of a federal judge. The New Orleans jail system will likely follow.

The department released a report covering only the past two years and ignoring several current federal investigations of police officers for murder. It says, more or less, that the NOPD is incapable on any level; that it is racist; that it systemically violates civil rights, routinely using “unnecessary and unreasonable force”; that it is “largely indifferent to widespread violations of law and policy by its police officers” and appears to have gone to great lengths to cover up its shootings of civilians. “NOPD’s mishandling of officer-involved shooting investigations,” the report says, “was so blatant and egregious that it appeared intentional in some respects.”

Source: DisInfo.com