You have a good point shadow...BUT....we are looking at society as it is today in 2007 with the leaders we have in place TODAY. But we don't know what or who the future will bring on society. This surveillance technology, which I know has been around for a long time, would be absolutely disaterous in the wrong hands! Cause ya know what....as boring as my life may be....I don't want anyone or any government entity watching or listening in on it! And that is 'my' constitutional right.
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
Yeah, imagine this, and this is a possible scenario on how things COULD play out. Let's just say that I'm a Republican who is running for a seat this November on the County Legislature.
Guess I better send any of my remarks via e-mail, considering the fact that someone would probably get their hands on my phone call to my mother and decide that there's something in it they can use in an upcoming election, like how I said "I remember the country we came from and wish we could be back there again." I may be thinking about taking a vacation to "the mother land" (whereever that is), but the competition would say "See how much they care about the county? They don't even want to be here."
If someone tries to use information against you that was obtained illegally they could be prosecuted for illegal wire tapping. I've been finger and palm printed, got a mug shot, and had my whole back ground investigated at least 3 times due to my job b4 I retired. Once was for KAPL clearance, once for clearance to work in maximum security prisons, and last was to get my pistol permit. The government already knows more about me than I do so what can I hide from them?
Growing use of biometric scanners helps employers, angers workers BY DAVID B. CARUSO The Associated Press
NEW YORK — Some workers are doing it at Dunkin’ Donuts, Hilton hotels, even at Marine Corps bases. Employees at a growing number of businesses around the nation are starting and ending their days by pressing a hand or finger to a scanner that logs the precise time of their arrival and departure — information that is automatically reflected in payroll records. Manufacturers say these biometric scanners improve efficiency and streamline payroll operations. Employers big and small buy them with the dual goals of curtailing fraud and automating outdated record keeping systems that rely on paper time sheets. The new systems, however, have raised complaints from some workers who see the efforts to track their movements as excessive or even creepy. “They don’t even have to hire someone to harass you anymore. The machine can do it for them,” said Ed Ott, executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO. “The palm print thing really grabs people as a step too far.” The International Biometric Group, a consulting firm, estimated that $635 million worth of these high-tech devices were sold last year. Protests over using palm scanners to log employee time have been especially loud in New York City, where officials are spending $410 million to install an automated attendance tracking system that may eventually be used by 160,000 city workers. Scores of civil servants who are members of Local 375 of the Civil Service Technical Guild rallied Tuesday against a plan to add the city medical examiner’s office to the list of 17 city agencies which already have the scanners in place. The scanners have rankled draftsmen, planners and architects in the city’s Parks Department, which began using them last year. “Psychologically, I think it has had a huge impact on the work force here because it is demeaning and because it’s a system based on mistrust,” said Ricardo Hinkle, a landscape architect who designs city parks. He called the timekeeping system a bureaucratic intrusion on professionals who never used to think twice about putting in extra time on a project they cared about, and could rely on human managers to exercise a little fl exibility on matters regarding work hours. “The creative process isn’t one that punches in and punches out,” he said. A spokesman for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Matthew Kelly, said the system isn’t meant to be intrusive and has clear benefi ts over old-style punch clocks or paper time sheets. The city expects to save $60 million per year by modernizing a complicated record keeping system that now requires one fulltime timekeeper for every 100 to 250 employees. The new system, dubbed CityTime, would free up thousands of city employees to do less paper-pushing. Another benefit of the system is curtailing fraud. Several times each year, New York City’s Department of Investigation charges city employees with taking unauthorized time off and then filling out a false timecard later to make it look as though they worked. Other cities have embraced similar technology. Cities as big as Chicago and as small as Tahlequah, Okla., have turned to biometric ID systems to record employee work hours in recent years. Ingersoll Rand Security Technologies, the Campbell, Calif.-based manufacturer of the hand scanners being used in New York, said it has easily sold more than 150,000 of the devices worldwide to clients including Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s franchises, Hilton hotels and even Marine Corps bases that use them to track civilian work hours. Jon Mooney, Ingersoll Rand Security Technologies’ general manger of biometrics, said the privacy concerns are unfounded. The hand scanners don’t keep large databases of people’s fingerprints — only a record of their hand shape, he said. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees complained vigorously two years ago after the city of Pittsburgh proposed installing fingerprint readers. “We had a lot of questions, a lot of concerns, and so far they haven’t put it in,” said AFCME Council 84 Director Richard Caponi. Union officials in New York said they are concerned that the machines could eventually be used not just to crack down on employees skipping work, but to nitpick honest workers. “The bottom line is that these palm scanners are designed to exercise more control over the workforce,” said Claude Fort, president of Local 375. “They aren’t there for security purposes. It has nothing to do with productivity . . . It is about control, and that is what makes us nervous.”
RICHARD DREW/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS An employee of the New York City Parks Department uses a palm scanner as he arrives for work on Wednesday.
Is this any different than having to scan your ID card in a reader which logs who you are, what time you entered, and when you left a building? That technology has been around for 20 years and has been used to gain entry into secure buildings by the company I used to work for.
Just because someone is 'scanned in' doesn't mean they're gonna hustle but on the assembly line.....and it only streamlines the taxes and matches it to our income tax forms so they know who is filing-or not quicker......commit a crime outside work---bingo,,,,,you're it.....it cannot make people more honest and it wont speed up the system......it is just tracable 'ants'......
scenario---you own National grid money for the month and you are late paying it.....they track your hand to work and have access to your paycheck(which is actually virtual money,like hedge funds)....the government will make employers give your # to all vendors in the area and whamo......you have no more control over your time or money and the 'cartel' wins......there is no more straw for the bricks...... >
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
Is this any different than having to scan your ID card in a reader which logs who you are, what time you entered, and when you left a building? That technology has been around for 20 years and has been used to gain entry into secure buildings by the company I used to work for.
This technology has been around for years...but it was exactly as you say shadow, it was usually for security purposes in a highly secured area. It was never intended for the everyday to work person.
I mean like will McDonald's, Burger King, Dunkin Donuts workers have to 'scan in'? Who knows, they may have to do that already. I don't actually know.
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
CIA enlists Google's help for spy work US intelligence agencies are using Google's technology to help its agents share information about their suspects Jonathan Richards
Google has been recruited by US intelligence agencies to help them better process and share information they gather about suspects.
Agencies such as the National Security Agency have bought servers on which Google-supplied search technology is used to process information gathered by networks of spies around the world.
Google is also providing the search features for a Wikipedia-style site, called Intellipedia, on which agents post information about their targets that can be accessed and appended by colleagues, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The contracts are just a number that have been entered into by Google's 'federal government sales team', that aims to expand the company's reach beyond its core consumer and enterprise operations.
In the most innovative service, for which Google equipment provides the core search technology, agents are encouraged to post intelligence information on a secure forum, which other spies are free to read, edit, and tag - like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
Depending on their clearance, agents can log on to Intellipedia and gain access to three levels of info - top secret, secret and sensitive, and sensitive but unclassified. So far 37,000 users have established accounts on the service, and the database now extends to 35,000 articles, according to Sean Dennehy, chief of Intellipedia development for the CIA.
"Each analyst, for lack of a better term, has a shoe box with their knowledge," Mr Dennehy was quoted as saying. "They maintained it in a shared drive or Word document, but we're encouraging them to move those platforms so that everyone can benefit."
The collection of articles is hosted by the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, and is available only to the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence agencies.
Google's search technology usually rates a website's importance by measuring the number of other sites that link to it - a method that is more problematic in a 'closed' network used by a limited numbr of people. In the case of Intellipedia, pages become more prominent depending on how they are tagged or added to by other contributors.
As well as working with the intelligence agencies, Google also provides services to other US public sector organisations, including the Coast Guard, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
Often, the contract is for something as simple as conducting earch within an organisation's own database, but in the case of the Coast Guard, Google also provides a more advanced version of its satellite mapping tool Google Earth, which ships use to navigate more safely.
There is no dedicated team promoting sales of Google products to the British Government, but a Google spokesperson said the company did target public sector organisations such as councils, schools and universities through the team that run AdWords, its internet advertising platform.
If I am understanding this correctly, which I may not be, but Google will also have access to this information, right?
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
EDITORIALS Terrorist ties or not, we will wiretap you
Back in July, more than 2 1 /2 years after The New York Times exposed it, Congress legitimized the Bush administration’s illegal warrantless eavesdropping program. Would it have done so if it knew that personal calls between American citizens at home and abroad, having absolutely nothing to do with terrorists or terrorism, were being monitored at a National Security Agency (NSA) listening post in Georgia? That is what two former Arab linguists have alleged, both to ABC News and to author James Bamford, an expert on intelligence agencies, whose new book, “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America,” was released Tuesday. During the long debate and negotiations over revamping the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which the administration had brazenly violated by ordering wiretaps without the special FISA court’s permission, President Bush and his intelligence officials repeatedly assured the nation that only American citizens in this country with ties, or suspected ties, to al-Qaida were being targeted. Not so, say the two whistleblowers. Calls home to wives and girlfriends from military officers, aid workers, journalists, etc., in Iraq were routinely intercepted. These communications were not only listened to but recorded — and those involving pillow talk or phone sex were then played back for people’s amusement. The whistleblowers say that when they questioned the legality of this with their superiors, they were told intelligence agency lawyers had approved it. That, presumably, was based on the same unconstitutional claim of executive power that Bush had used to justify defying Congress, ignoring FISA and conducting the warrantless wiretap program. Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has opened an investigation; and Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter, chairman and ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, respectively, have done the same. If the claims turn out to be true, Congress shouldn’t cave, as it did with FISA, when it restored the authority of the FISA courts but also expanded executive authority in this area while granting retroactive immunity to everyone involved, including the telecom companies. Such abuses of civil liberties and the right to privacy are not even remotely connected to national security, and the Bush administration shouldn’t be allowed to confl ate and politicize them, as it has so often in the past.
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