U.S. - The number of court-approved wiretaps rose 34 percent last year, though an unspecified amount of the increase was the result of changed reporting procedures.
According to a report by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, federal wiretaps rose 82 percent in 2010 from the previous year while state applications rose 16 percent. Combined, 3,194 wiretaps were authorized — 1,207 by federal judges, 1,987 by state judges. (more)
KS - A Garden City businessman and former vice president of the USD 457 Board of Education has been accused of placing and using a concealed camcorder to eavesdrop in the women's bathroom at his business.
John Scheopner, 56, was arrested at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday in Finney County on allegations he used a concealed camcorder to eavesdrop on a 53-year-old Garden City woman, a 28-year-old Lakin woman and a 32-year-old Garden City woman in the women's bathroom at Scheopner's Water Conditioning, 2203 East Fulton Plaza, according to Garden City Police Sgt. Michael Reagle. Scheopner allegedly eavesdropped on the 32-year-old woman twice, Reagle said. (more)
Zimbabwe’s dreaded and notorious spy agency the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) was thrown into turmoil Thursday evening after a London based independent radio station published details of some 480 plus state security agents, many behind acts of torture, murder and abductions. (more)
MELBOURNE'S inner-city surveillance camera network is to expand amid revelations it captures one potential crime every 90 minutes. (more)
Suspected US spy Sarah Shourd, who was released by Iran on humanitarian grounds, has changed her tune about the treatment she received while in the Islamic Republic. (more)
A Russian colonel was convicted of treason for betraying a group of spies in the United States, including Anna Chapman, a court spokeswoman told CNN Monday. (more)
How did scientists build a better spy plane? A little bird told them. Engineers have developed a micro air vehicle (MAV) that mimics the flight abilities of the swift, a passerine bird renowned for its aerial acrobatics. Camera-mounted MAVs are frequently used in reconnaissance and rescue missions to scope out a dangerous situation before humans go in. (more) (video)
If you're the parent of a teen or young driver, listen up. NBC's PC Mike Wendland has found some apps that will let you spy on your kids driving, almost as if you're right there in the passenger seat. Warning: Your kids aren't going to like this. (more) (alternate video link)
...Nathan Kotylak... When his beloved Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup ice hockey championship on June 15, Nathan...joined a gang of rioters in downtown Vancouver, who did what rioters everywhere always do: break shop windows, burn cars, and fight the power. Police managed to arrest a few of the worst (or slowest) offenders on the spot, but rioters have always been able to take advantage of the anonymity afforded by the mob.
Until now.
The upstanding citizenry of Vancouver, shocked and embarrassed that their city had become synonymous with hooliganism (which is not a Canadian virtue), called for something to be done about this outbreak of anarchy.
Within a few hours, one of those citizens had set up a blog, theVancouver 2011Riot Criminal List, where they solicited all of the imagery captured during the riots - photographs from newspaper reporters, video footage from television helicopters, even images snapped on mobiles, uploaded to the web.
Vancouverites set to work, digging up an enormous wealth of material...
We're coming into the 'Era of Omniscience'. Anything that depends on limited knowledge - or, as the strategists term it, 'informational asymmetry' - has begun to fall apart. Whether you're a rioter or a vigilante, a cop or a criminal, a resident or an alien... (more) (sing-a-long)
Smartphones are impressive devices, to say the least. A smartphone user can consume TV, music & movies; communicate via streaming video; check the weather; record audio; take professional quality video footage; snap high quality photos… The list just continues to grow and grow. With all of these incredible capabilities, why not add surveillance?
A recent article over at the Atlantic highlights a fascinating project by 23-year-old hacker Rich Jones. CopRecorder (iPhone) and OpenWatch (Android) are part of an experiment Jones describes as "a global participatory counter-surveillance project which uses cellular phones as a way of monitoring authority figures." In short, CopRecorder and Openwatch are apps that covertly record audio during encounters with authority figures, enabling the user to submit the audio anonymously to the OpenWatch site.
Here's a brief explanation of the project (plus instructions for installation): (more)
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a Microsoft patent application that reaches back to December 2009 and describes “recording agents” to legally intercept VoIP phone calls.
The “Legal Intercept” patent application is one of Microsoft’s more elaborate and detailed patent papers, which is comprehensive enough to make you think twice about the use of VoIP audio and video communications. The document provides Microsoft’s idea about the nature, positioning and feature set of recording agents that silently record the communication between two or more parties.
The patent was filed well before Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype and there is no reason to believe that the patent was filed with Skype as a Microsoft property in mind. [Other than governments worldwide might pay a bundle to be able to eavesdrop on Skype calls.] However, the patent mentions Skype explicitly as an example application for this technologyand Microsoft may now have to answer questions in which way this patent applies to its new Skype entity and if the technology will become part of Skype. (more)
Korea - Rep. Kim Jae-yoon (right), the main opposition Democratic Party’s chief secretary at the National Assembly’s Culture, Sports, Tourism Broadcasting and Communication Committee, and the party`s floor spokesman Hong Young-pyo submit Sunday documents to Yeongdeungpo Police Station. The party seeks a police probe into suspected eavesdropping into the party chief’s office in parliament. (more)
A German chemicals company said on Monday its managers have begun keeping their mobile phones in biscuit tins during meetings in order to guard against industrial espionage.
"Experts have told us that mobile phones are being eavesdropped on more and more, even when they are switched off," Alexandra Boy, spokeswoman for Essen-based specialty chemicals maker Evonik, told AFP.
"The measure applies mostly when sensitive issues are being discussed, for the most part in research and development," she said, confirming a report in business weekly Wirtschaftswoche.
Biscuit tins have a so-called Farraday cage effect, she said, blocking out electromagnetic radiationand therefore preventing people from hacking into mobile phones, not only for calls but also to get hold of emails. (more) (sing-a-long)
Actually, this is a fairly good MacGyver on their part. However, professional enclosures with padding and internal white noise generators are also available.
Microsoft has been granted a patent for technology that acts as a wiretap of sorts for Internet communication, allowing governments or other law-enforcement authorities to record the data without detection.
Dubbed "Legal Intercept," using the technology means "data associated with a request to establish a communication is modified to cause the communication to be established via a path that includes a recording agent" that silently records the data, according to a filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In other words, the technology intercepts Internet communications data so it can be recorded for the purposes of reviewing it later by, presumably, government or law-enforcement officials.
"Sometimes, a government or one of its agencies may need to monitor communications between telephone users," Microsoft said in the filing, describing how a recording device can be placed at a central office to record communications over a traditional telephone network.
But with Voice over IP and other Internet-based communications, "the [conventional] model for recording communications does not work," according to Microsoft. (more)
Last week, China opened its eighth National Intelligence College on the campus of Hunan University in the central city of Changsha. Since January, similar training schools have opened inside universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Xian, Qingdao and Harbin. The move comes amid growing worries in the West at the scale and breadth of Chinese intelligence-gathering, with MI5 saying that the Chinese government "represents one of the most significant espionage threats to the UK"... The new schools aim to transform and modernize the Chinese intelligence services, producing spies who are trained in the latest methods of data collection and analysis. Each school will recruit around 30 to 50 carefully-selected existing undergraduates each year...
The United States has a similar project, named the National Security Education Program (more)
The Cattleman's Beef Board has admitted its CEO eavesdropped on conference calls between the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and members of the Federation of State Beef Councils...
The response to NCBA states that Ramey admitted to repeatedly listening in unannounced to NCBA-organized conference calls with state beef council executives, and that he listened to a recording of one of those calls...
Ramey eavesdropped on conference calls during the time NCBA was working to restructure its board, which could have impacted the Federation of State Beef Councils and decisions on checkoff allocations, said Lynn Heinze, Beef Board vice president of communications. (more)
Problem 1: Conference calls very often contain highly confidential and sensitive information – such as Board and Executive Management Team calls, Intellectual Property discussions, high value business deal talks, or crisis management calls. Problem 2: Traditional conference bridges make it difficult to control who is on a call. Long lived PINs are often distributed freely, making conference calls easy to access by unauthorized parties such as ex-employees.
Cellcrypt Secure Conference Service™ is a solution for extra-secure access and encrypted calling within a secure conference bridge, accessible from cell phones. Cellcrypt secure conference calling uses strong cryptographic authentication in combination with pre-defined phone numbers to ensure that only authorized phones can join. The service has an easy-to use web-based management console for setting up any number of bridges with eligible participants defined using a white list policy.
An optional policy setting enables eligible participants to gain access to the bridge from a standard phone, if required, using a pre-defined phone number and PIN. This allows an administrator to mix unencrypted calls from selected phones over the public telephone network with secure calls from other locations where calling is a concern. (more)
Scientists have shown off a "cloaking device" that makes objects invisible - to sound waves.
It uses simple plastic sheets with arrays of holes, and could be put to use in making ships invisible to sonar or in acoustic design of concert halls.
Much research has been undertaken toward creating Harry Potter-style "invisibility cloaks" since the feasibility of the idea was first put forward in 2006.
Those approaches are mostly based on so-called metamaterials, man-made materials with properties that do not occur in nature. The metamaterials are designed such that they force light waves to travel around an object; to an observer, it is as if the object were not there.
But researchers quickly found out that the mathematics behind bending these light waves, called transformation optics, could also be applied to sound waves. (more)
Note: This naturally occurs in humans between the ages of 2-20.
Prague - The policeman who gained access to wiretapping of influential people's mobile phones managed to circumvent "all control mechanisms" that are to prevent such situations, Czech Police President Petr Lessy said...
The policeman from Varnsdorf, north Bohemia, is suspected of having fraudulently monitored the recordings of wiretapped phone calls of influential judges, officials, journalists and lobbyists, including Klaus's chancellor Jiri Weigl and secretary Ladislav Jakl and Constitutional Court chairman Pavel Rychetsky. (more)
CO - A man has been dubbed the "Porta-Potty Peeper" after he hid in the tank of a portable toilet.
"I was at the yoga festival, doing a little bit of yoga, and I’m just seeing all these goddesses," Luke Chrisco, who said he is a voyeur and not a rapist, told FOX31 Denver. "It seems crazy, but I just felt like I was being blessed by their energy, even though it was unintentional."
Chrisco, 30, added the idea of waiting in a tank of waste and urine to spy on women at the yoga festival in Boulder, Colorado, didn’t bother him.
"There’s bacteria in there, but to me it’s just normal ... we all have bodily fluids,” he said. “It seems terrible, but it didn’t actually smell that bad or anything. I still would have done it even if it smelled a little weird, because where there is muck, there is gold."
Police believe Chrisco has spied on at least 200 women in Boulder and hundreds more across the US and Europe. (more)
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a Microsoft patent application that reaches back to December 2009 and describes “recording agents” to legally intercept VoIP phone calls. 
Dubbed "Legal Intercept," using the technology means "data associated with a request to establish a communication is modified to cause the communication to be established via a path that includes a recording agent" that silently records the data, according to a filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. 
Last week, China opened its eighth National Intelligence College on the campus of Hunan University in the central city of Changsha. Since January, similar training schools have opened inside universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Xian, Qingdao and Harbin. 
The Cattleman's Beef Board has admitted its CEO eavesdropped on conference calls between the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and members of the Federation of State Beef Councils... 
