The Morning Roar: Police Are Testing a “Live Google Earth,” 90% of NY Gun Owners Refuse Compliance With SAFE Act, And FBI Plans To Have 52 Million In NGI Database By Next Year
Welcome to your Tuesday edition of The Morning Roar! Today we have a police state theme throughout the roar. This was not planned intentionally. Each article covers an avenue the police state is actively encroaching upon individual rights or ways the despots are planning to extend their reach further into the live's of American citizens.Police Are Testing A “Live Google Earth" To Watch Crime As It OccursThere is an intriguing new technology innovated by Persistent Surveillance Systems that would allow planes to be outfitted with cameras that would allow the pilots to record a 25-square-mile quadrant of land for as long as six hours. According to the creators of the technology the cameras cannot see into homes or identify faces, but potentially could track everything that moves in a city. Gizmodo provided an excellent overview and video of this controversial technology.
The Center for Investigative Reporting takes a look at a number of emerging surveillance technologies in a new video, but one in particular stands out: A wide-area surveillance system invented by Ross McNutt, a retired Air Force veteran who owns a company called Persistent Surveillance Systems.
McNutt describes his product as "a live version of Google Earth, only with TiVo capabilities," which is intriguing but vague (and also sounds a lot like the plot of this terrible Denzel movie). More specifically, PSS outfits planes with an array of super high-resolution cameras that allow a pilot to record a 25-square-mile patch of Earth constantly—for up to six hours.
It's sort of similar to what your average satellite can do—except, in this case, you can rewind the video, zoom in, and follow specific people and cars as they move around the grid. It's not specific enough to ID people by face, but, when used in unison with stoplight cameras and other on-the-ground video sources, it can identify suspects as they leave the scene of a crime.
The technology by itself is a wonderful innovation and could have many uses that might increase the quality of life for mankind. The issue that surely will arise is the inconvenient reality that law enforcement will likely secure monopoly rights to the use of this technology and others like it.
Based on this assumption, the door is left open to the threat that abuse of the technology could be committed by those with monopoly privileges. There would be no mechanism to regulate abuse of the potentially invasive technology. Those with the ability to utilize the revolutionary technology would be the same group trusted to police abuse. This is what we call a conflict of interest.
90% of NY Gun Owners Refuse Compliance With SAFE ActAnother state appears to be thumbing their nose to the anti-gun crowd and their draconian gun regulations. First, in January the citizens of Connecticut ignored a new law which required owners of "assault" weapons and large capacity magazines to register their firearms and accessories by January 1st. As many as a quarter million Connecticut residents courageously ignored the unconstitutional call to register their arms. Now gun owners in the state of New York appear to be standing firm behind their Second Amendment right to bear arms.The website Bearingarms.com is citing purported leaks from NY officials that as many as 99.5% of New Yorkers are refusing to comply with the NY SAFE Act by not registering their "assault" weapons.
Unfortunately for the Governor and his allies, it appears that the open revolt of most of the state’s law enforcement leaders against NY SAFE—who correctly view the law as a blatantly unconstitutional assault on the state constitution and the Second Amendment—means that noncompliance is overwhelming.While NY State Police refuse to publicly share the number of firearms that have been registered (citing a provision of the NY SAFE Act itself), leaks purporting to be from within the agency suggest that compliance might be as low as just 3,000-5,000 firearms. There is no way to conclusively verify this paltry figure which suggests that 99.5% of New Yorkers are thumbing their noses at Albany, but it may very well be a credible figure.
We will continue to watch the situation in New York closely, just as we have kept a watchful eye on Connecticut to observe the State's next move. The recent situation at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada taught us a valuable lesson. If enough people stand in opposition to the State, then the State is sometimes forced to give in to the will of the people, at least temporarily. Surely, the State will try other avenues to grab the guns of law-abiding citizens in New York and Connecticut, just as the Feds will return to the Bundy Ranch in the future. This is why we must stay ever vigilant in our defense of liberty.FBI Plans To Have 52 Million In Next Generation Identification (NGI) Database By Next YearWe saved the most disturbing police state invasion of your privacy for last. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is reporting, based on records received in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, that the FBI plans to expand the face recognition component, NGI, in their biometric database to include as many as 52 million face images by 2015. Even more shocking, the database will consist of non-criminal as well as criminal photos.
One of our biggest concerns about NGI has been the fact that it will include non-criminal as well as criminal face images. We now know that FBI projects that by 2015, the database will include 4.3 million images taken for non-criminal purposes.Currently, if you apply for any type of job that requires fingerprinting or a background check, your prints are sent to and stored by the FBI in its civil print database. However, the FBI has never before collected a photograph along with those prints. This is changing with NGI. Now an employer could require you to provide a “mug shot” photo along with your fingerprints. If that’s the case, then the FBI will store both your face print and your fingerprints along with your biographic data.
Fourth Amendment violation anyone? I would say I'm surprised by this nugget uncovered by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, but nothing really shocks me anymore. I'd be more surprised if the FBI was NOT using DMV photos to build their NGI database. Oh wait, the FBI probably will be doing this shortly. The thorough EFF article goes on to reveal that the company responsible for building the NGI's facial recognition component, also built face recognition systems used by 35 state DMVs. How convenient!
The company responsible for building NGI’s facial recognition component—MorphoTrust(formerly L-1 Identity Solutions)—is also the company that has built the face recognition systems used by approximately 35 state DMVs and many commercial businesses. MorphoTrust built and maintains the face recognition systems for the Department of State, which has the “largest facial recognition system deployed in the world” with more than 244 million records, and for the Department of Defense, which shares its records with the FBI.The FBI failed to release records discussing whether MorphoTrust uses a standard (likely proprietary) algorithm for its face templates. If it does, it is quite possible that the face templates at each of these disparate agencies could be shared across agencies—raising again the issue that the photograph you thought you were taking just to get a passport or driver’s license is then searched every time the government is investigating a crime. The FBI seems to be leaning in this direction: an FBI employee email notes that the “best requirements for sending an image in the FR system” include “obtain[ing] DMV version of photo whenever possible.”
And this is why we can't let statists have nice things. If you had any doubt that law enforcement would abuse the high-resolution cameras discussed in the first segment of today's roar, then hopefully the FBI's NGI database puts that story in the proper perspective. The revelation that the FBI could potentially have your face in a biometric database, even if you've never received a speeding ticket, should be enough to make the most ardent defender of centralized State power curious to know the consequences associated with ceding a vast amount of power to a central authority.Read The Morning Roar every weekday Monday-Friday!The Lions of Liberty are on Twitter, Facebook & Google+Receive access to ALL of our EXCLUSIVE bonus audio content – including “Conspiracy Corner”, “Degenerate Gamblers” and the “League of Liberty Podcast” by joining the Lions of Liberty Pride and supporting us on Patreon!
