FirstNet is an independent authority within the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration. FirstNet is governed by a 15-member Board consisting of the Attorney General of the United States, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and 12 members appointed by the Secretary of Commerce. The FirstNet Board is composed of representatives from public safety; local, state and federal government; and the wireless industry. These dedicated individuals bring their expertise, experience and commitment to serving public safety and meeting the FirstNet mission…
Setting out to meet an ambitious timeline, first responders in three regions of New Jersey are expected later this year to use a new dedicated public-safety LTE network composed entirely of deployable infrastructure operating on 700 MHz Band 14 spectrum licensed to the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet), IWCE’s Urgent Communications reports.
PMC Associates, a New Jersey-based company specializing in mission-critical radio solutions for first responders, is teaming up with Oceus Networks and Fujitsu Network Communications to build the proof-of-concept network, known as JerseyNet.
PMC Associates is providing integration and support services, while Oceus Networks is supplying the LTE core and the radio access network (RAN). Fujitsu is designing, equipping and managing the wireless and wireline backhaul portions of the network.
Bryan Casciano, vice president of sales for PMC Associates, told IWCE’s Urgent Communications that JerseyNet is designed to include more than 30 cells on wheels (COWs) and six systems on wheels (SOWs) that can be deployed in various locations via SUVs, vans or trailers.
Under the terms of its Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) funding, the JerseyNet deployment must be completed by September, a requirement that is expected to be met under the current schedule. “We want to have all of this installed by June,” Casciano told the publication….
The FBI wants greater authority to hack overseas computers, according to a law professor.
A Department of Justice proposal to amend Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure would make it easier for domestic law enforcement to hack into the computers of people attempting to protect their anonymity on the internet.
The change in search and seizure rules would mean the FBI could seize targets whose location is “concealed through technological means”, as per the draft rule (key extract below). Concealed through technological means is legal speak for hosted somewhere on the darknet, using Tor or proxies or making use of VPN technology.
Authority to Issue a Warrant. At the request of a federal law enforcement officer or an attorney for the government: (6) a magistrate judge with authority in any district where activities related to a crime may have occurred has authority to issue a warrant to use remote access to search electronic storage media and to seize or copy electronically stored information located within or outside that district if: (A) the district where the media or information is located has been concealed through technological means; or (B) in an investigation of a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(5), the media are protected computers that have been damaged without authorization and are located in five or more districts.
The DoJ has said that the amendment is not meant to give courts the power to issue warrants that authorise searches in foreign countries. Continue reading →
When fusion centers and their allied federal partners are pinpointed on these United States, it looks less like “We’re here to help you” and more like a military occupation. Dozens of documents and databases were scrubbed to elicit the actual location of these nefarious centers. You could say these GPS positions are a “fusion” of many sources… GPS Points of Interest files for fusion centers and their partners can be downloaded below:
Daily Finance: Puking Monkey is an electronics tinkerer, so he hacked his RFID-enabled E-ZPass to set off a light and a “moo cow” every time it was being read. Then he drove around New York. His tag got milked multiple times on the short drive from Times Square to Madison Square Garden in mid-town Manhattan. This isn’t a part of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, the millions-dollar project emulating London’s Ring of Steel with extreme surveillance.
(If schools are that dangerous, more dangerous it seems than any other area of society, perhaps the simple solution is not to go to school and home educate.)
Person-tracking cameras, geo-tracking throughout building facilitates including transport, electronic access control, armed law enforcement and RFID tagging the occupants. Sound like a prison or high security military base? No.
This is a school district in New Jersey and this is Belleville School District’s reaction to the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school, Newtown, Connecticut as reported in NorthJersey.com and Belleville-Nutley Patch.
Belleville School District seem to be the first school in the US…
The recent release of the NSA spying documents is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ways that you are being tracked. Consider your activities and how they can be tracked via:
Cell phone usage
Smartphone apps
Cell phone cloning
Social media post/tweets/etc
Items you buy with store rewards cards
Items you buy online
Items you buy with credit/debit cards
Your car’s GPS system/On Star system
Your library activity (recorded via your library card)
Breaking up is hard to do, especially when it is with a tracking service like a financial institution. Sometimes you can make a clean break and other times you have to remain “just friends”.
The US government actually has a name for people who have no bank accounts – they call these folks “the unbanked”. The FDIC defines the unbanked as “those without an account at a bank or other financial institution and are considered to be outside the mainstream for one reason or another.” Another term is “the underbanked” – “people or businesses that have poor access to mainstream financial services normally offered by retail banks. The underbanked can be characterized by a strong reliance on non-traditional forms of finance and micro-finance often associated with disadvantaged and the poor, such as check cashers, loan sharks and pawnbrokers.” Continue reading →
…There are 331 million cellphone subscriptions—about 20 million more than there are residents—in the United States. Nearly 90 percent of adult Americans carry at least one phone. The phones communicate via a nationwide network of nearly 300,000 cell towers and 600,000 micro sites, which perform the same function as towers. When they are turned on, they ping these nodes once every seven seconds or so, registering their locations, usually within a radius of 150 feet. By 2018 new Federal Communications Commission regulations will require that cellphone location information be even more precise: within 50 feet. Newer cellphones also are equipped with GPS technology, which uses satellites to locate the user more precisely than tower signals can. Cellphone companies retain location data for at least a year. AT&T has information going all the way back to 2008. Continue reading →
Earlier this year in Wired, writer and intelligence expert James Bamford described the National Security Agency’s plans for the Utah Data Center. A nondescript name, but it has another: the First Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative Data Center. The $2 billion facility, scheduled to open in September 2013, will be used to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store the agency’s intercepted communications—everything from emails, cell phone calls, Google searches, and Tweets, to retail transactions. How will all this data be stored? Imagine, if you can, 100,000 square-feet filled with row upon row of servers, stacked neatly on racks. Bamford projects that its processing-capacity may aspire to yottabytes, or 1024 bytes, and for which no neologism of higher magnitude has yet been coined. Continue reading →
“Cubic is the world’s leading provider of automated payment and fare collection systems and services for the transportation industry.” Cubic’s purchase of Abraxas in 2010 for $124 million (US) in cash made sense looking at where the $1.2 billion dollar Cubic Company does business. A large chunk of that money comes from its Defense Systems and Mission Support Operations segments (where Abraxas is apparently operating). Roughly $415 million comes from its Transportation division.
Cubic’s acquisition of Abraxas and its magic bag full of electronic tracking/snooping tools was made two years prior to the 2012 Olympic Games in London.In 2011. The transit authority there had recently installed video cameras on all of its 191 buses. Continue reading →
“I Lived. I Died. Now Mind Your Own Business.” That’s how I want my tombstone to read.
What do I have to hide? Everything! Which is to say, every piece of personal information someone or something demands to know is something I don’t want to tell because no one has the right to demand access to my life.
The right to privacy rests largely on a presumption of innocence. It assumes that — in the absence of evidence of wrongdoing — an individual has a right to shut his front door and tell other people (including government) to mind their own business. Continue reading →
…It’s getting ever harder, less private, and more hazardous to deal in Federal Reserve Notes. We’re being unsubtly nudged toward the use of noncash techniques — mainly bank instruments and Electronic Funds Transfers — for our routine dealings. Inasmuch as that concentrates the State’s targets for snooping and predation, it suits our political masters very well… via Liberty’s Torch: King Cash.
Disclaimer: The following is a series of fictional accounts of theoretical situations. However, the information contained within was taken from established scientific journals on covered technology and military studies of real life combat scenarios. Alt-Market does not condone the use of any of the tactics described within for “illegal” purposes. Obviously, the totalitarian subject matter portrayed here is “pure fantasy”, and would never be encountered in the U.S. where politicians and corporate bankers are forthright, honest, and honorable, wishing only the sweetest sugar coated chili-dog best for all of mankind…
Imagine, if you will, a fantastic near future in which the United States is facing an unmitigated economic implosion. Not just a mere market crash, or a stint of high unemployment, but a full spectrum collapse driven by unsustainable debt spending and hyperinflationary printing. The American people witness multiple credit downgrades of U.S. Treasury mechanisms, the dollar loses its reserve status, devaluation of the currency runs rampant, and the prices of commodities and imported goods immediately skyrocket. Continue reading →
…. the American Civil Liberties Union shows that phone location tracking has also become a surprisingly common tool of law-enforcement investigations — with, but often without, a warrant.The ACLU recently obtained records from over 200 police departments and other law enforcement agencies around the U.S. They found that “virtually all” of these agencies track the location of cell phones with data supplied by wireless carriers… via ACLU: Most police track phones’ locations without warrants – CNN.com.
Google said Tuesday it will follow the activities of users across e-mail, search, YouTube and other services, a shift in strategy that is expected to invite greater scrutiny of its privacy and competitive practices. The information will enable Google to develop a fuller picture of how people use its growing empire of Web sites. Consumers will have no choice but to accept the changes… via The Washington Post.
” Recently the search giant Google has attempted to provide a less evil option for their National Security Affairs (NSA) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) partners for monitoring American citizens by allowing Google users to modify the profile of ad distribution that the NSA and Department of Homeland Security use to profile potential terrorists. This system was originally called the “Google Cleaner” and was developed by a google employee who is now dead. New Evidence – The DHS and NSA Use Google to Profile You
Most are unaware of the cookies that Google uses to track your behavior on the internet…
There’s plenty of reason to be concerned Big Brother is watching. We’re paranoid not because we have grandiose notions of our self-importance, but because the facts speak for themselves.
Here’s our short list of nine reasons that Wired readers ought to wear tinfoil hats, or at least, fight for their rights and consider ways to protect themselves with encryption and defensive digital technologies.
“… If the Supreme Court finds that law enforcement were within the law when placing a GPS tracking device on the car of suspected drug smuggler and nightclub owner Antoine Jones, it would open the door for even more egregious violations of our privacy. This decision would essentially allow the government to monitor anyone and everyone’s movements without a warrant for any reason or no reason at all… ”
The Justice Department has said that law enforcement agents employ GPS as a crime-fighting tool with “great frequency,” and GPS retailers have told Wired that they’ve sold thousands of the devices to the feds.
But little is known about how or how often law enforcement agents use them. And without a clear ruling requiring agents to obtain a “probable cause” warrant to use the devices, it leaves citizens who may have only a distant connection to a crime or no connection at all vulnerable to the whimsy of agents who are fishing for a case.via Busted! Two New Fed GPS Trackers Found on SUV | Threat Level | Wired.com.
The US Supreme Court delved Tuesday into the issue of privacy amid 21st century technology, hearing arguments on whether police can use a GPS device attached to a vehicle to track a suspect without a search warrant…At issue is whether by attaching a GPS, or Global Positioning System tracking device without a warrant, police violated the man’s constitutional guarantee in the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure…
Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben told the nine justices on the top US court that the GPS device simply monitored the suspect’s location on public streets, which could be done by police visually without the need for a warrant. The US government attorney said the GPS technology simply “can make police more efficient” and that “police efficiency has never been equated with an invasion of privacy.”
But comments from the justices were skeptical. “If you win this case, there is nothing preventing you from monitoring the movements of every citizen of the United States 24 hours a day,” said Justice Stephen Breyer...
Setting out to meet an ambitious timeline, first responders in three regions of New Jersey are expected later this year to use a new dedicated public-safety LTE network composed entirely of deployable infrastructure operating on 700 MHz Band 14 spectrum licensed to the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet), IWCE’s Urgent Communications reports.
The recent release of the NSA spying documents is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ways that you are being tracked. Consider your activities and how they can be tracked via:
Breaking up is hard to do, especially when it is with a tracking service like a financial institution. Sometimes you can make a clean break and other times you have to remain “just friends”.
…There are 331 million cellphone subscriptions—about 20 million more than there are residents—in the United States. Nearly 90 percent of adult Americans carry at least one phone. The phones communicate via a nationwide network of nearly 300,000 cell towers and 600,000 micro sites, which perform the same function as towers. When they are turned on, they ping these nodes once every seven seconds or so, registering their locations, usually within a radius of 150 feet. By 2018 new Federal Communications Commission regulations will require that cellphone location information be even more precise: within 50 feet. Newer cellphones also are equipped with GPS technology, which uses satellites to locate the user more precisely than tower signals can. Cellphone companies retain location data for at least a year. AT&T has information going all the way back to 2008. 
“
“I Lived. I Died. Now Mind Your Own Business.” That’s how I want my tombstone to read.
The Grey Enigma 