TrapWire: Wikileaks reveals ex-CIA agents running a face-recognition profiling company that surveils NYC subways, London stock exchange, Vegas casinos and more

TrapWire: Wikileaks reveals ex-CIA agents running a face-recognition profiling company that surveils NYC subways, London stock exchange, Vegas casinos and more:
Douglas sez:

Newly released WikiLeaks publications from the Stratfor leak reveal much about Trapwire, a multi-country surveillance network run by a private US company, Abraxas, led by ex-CIA operatives. The network operates in NYC subways, the London Stock Exchange, Las Vegas casinos, and more. It uses real-time video facial profiling and is linked to red-flag databases.

Here is a US GOV pdf diagramming its workings. Here is an RT article on the subject.

The WikiLeaks publications related to Trapwire are difficult to access now because WikiLeaks.org and many of its mirrors are under heavy DDOS attack. (Good time to donate!) However you can see the publications here via Tor.

Australian activist @Asher_Wolf is organizing a nonviolent campaign against Trapwire, including an effort to spam the network with creative false positives.

TrapWire: International Surveillance Coordination Network

(Thanks, Douglas!)


The social science of IUDs

[Some excellent points about this (IMHO) underutilized form of birth control. Also: DIY, anyone? 😉 -egg]

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The social science of IUDs

IUDs are the weird form of birth control. We don’t really know exactly how they work, for instance. And they’ve been largely unpopular my entire lifetime—really, ever since a couple of poorly designed IUDs set off a mini-panic in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But IUDs are effective birth control. The ones that you can buy today are safe. And, more importantly, they represent birth control that you don’t have to think about, and birth control that is really hard to get wrong.

If you’ve ever done research on the effectiveness of various methods of birth control, you’ll notice that the statistics usually come with a little asterisk. That * represents a concept that few of the people who rely on birth control ever think about—perfect use. Let’s use condoms as an example. With perfect use, 2 out of 100 women will get pregnant over the course of a year’s worth of condom-protected sex. Without perfect use—maybe you don’t use a condom every time, maybe you don’t put it on right when you both get naked—the number of accidental pregnancies jumps to 18 out of 100. The same basic problem affects birth control pills, as well. Ladies, did you know you’re supposed to take those things at the same time of day every day? That’s the kind of use error that can make a difference between 1 out of 100 women getting pregnant in a year, and 9 out of 100 getting pregnant.

In contrast, IUDs represent a fit-it-and-forget-it method of birth control. Which is a big part about why they’re up there with outright sterilization as the most effective means of birth control available. Bonus: Depending on which kind you use, you can avoid hormonal side effects. This, experts say, is why IUDs are experiencing something of a resurgence in popularity. In an article at Wired, Jennifer Couzin-Frankel writes that 5.5 percent of American women who use birth control use IUDs. That’s up from only 1.3 percent in 1995.

Somewhat unbelievably, no one is quite sure how they work, but the theory goes like this: The human uterus has one overriding purpose, which is to protect and sustain a fetus for nine months. If you stick a poker-chip-sized bit of plastic in there, the body reacts the way it does to any foreign object, releasing white blood cells to chase after the invader. Once those white blood cells are set free in the uterus, they start killing foreign cells with efficient zeal. And sperm, it turns out, are very, very foreign. White blood cells scavenge them mercilessly, preventing pregnancy. In copper- containing IUDs, metal ions dissolving from the device add another layer of sper…

Bruce Conner’s "Mea Culpa" film for Eno and Byrne

Bruce Conner’s “Mea Culpa” film for Eno and Byrne:

At Saturday’s “This Must Be The Place” post-punk film festival in San Francisco, I was bowled over by Beat filmmaker/photographer/assemblage artist Bruce Conner‘s short film for the song “Mea Culpa” from Brian Eno and David Byrne’s “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.” Among dozens of other films, Conner created “America is Waiting” for another Eno/Byrne song and, before those, “Mongoloid” for Devo in 1978.


When you can and can’t take pictures

[Excellent. Answer: you can take pictures. -egg]
[BoingBoing]

DC police chief issues extremely excellent guidelines on citizens taking pictures of cops:

As part of a settlement with Jerome Vorus, who was ordered to stop taking pictures by DC cops, DC chief of police Cathy Lanier has issued guidelines to her officers on citizen photography of police activities. They are extremely excellent guidelines, too, as Timothy Lee writes in Ars Technica:

“A bystander has the same right to take photographs or make recordings as a member of the media,” Chief Lanier writes. The First Amendment protects the right to record the activities of police officers, not only in public places such as parks and sidewalks, but also in “an individual’s home or business, common areas of public and private facilities and buildings, and any other public or private facility at which the individual has a legal right to be present.”

Lanier says that if an officer sees an individual recording his or her actions, the officer may not use that as a basis to ask the citizen for ID, demand an explanation for the recording, deliberately obstruct the camera, or arrest the citizen. And she stresses that under no circumstances should the citizen be asked to stop recording.

That applies even in cases where the citizen is recording “from a position that impedes or interferes with the safety of members or their ability to perform their duties.” In that situation, she says, the officer may ask the person to move out of the way, but the officer “shall not order the person to stop photographing or recording.”

She also notes that “a person has the right to express criticism of the police activity being
observed.”

There is more, and it’s all excellent. We have the good folks at the ACLU to thank for helping Mr Vorus win his settlement with the DC police.

DC police chief announces shockingly reasonable cell camera policy

(Thanks, Ben!)

(Image: 12.MPDC.HorseMounted.SE.WDC.23March2012, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from perspective’s photostream)