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Borrowing from technology for tracking pets, a U.S. company on Thursday launched Mexican sales of microchips that can be implanted under a person's skin and used to confirm health history and identity. The microchips, already available in the United States, could tap into a growing industry surrounding Mexico's criminal concerns. Kidnappings, robberies and fraud are common here, and Mexicans are constantly looking for ways to protect themselves against crime. The microchip, the size of a grain of rice, is implanted in the arm or hip. Hospital officials and security guards use a scanning device to download a serial number, which...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate voted on Thursday to cut off funding for a widely criticized computer-surveillance program that would comb travel records, credit-card bills and other private records to sniff out suspected terrorists. In a military spending bill it passed unanimously, the Senate forbade the Defense Department to spend any portion of its $369 billion budget on the Terrorism Information Awareness program, brushing aside a request by the Bush administration to keep development efforts intact. "No funds appropriated or otherwise made available to the Department of Defense .... may be obligated or expended on research and development on...

California same-sex couples get tax break Randol White, Gay.com / PlanetOut.com Network Thursday, July 10, 2003 / 04:20 PM SUMMARY: The state of California will soon give registered domestic partners the same tax break on property transfers as married couples. The state of California will soon give registered domestic partners the same tax break on property transfers as married couples. California's elected tax board passed the proposed tax rule change on Wednesday with a 3-2 vote that followed party lines. The revision will take effect in two months, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The State Board of Equalization's openly...

U.S. cops eye spy cameras Mike Luippold works on a surveillance camera at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco recently. DARPA’s software could identify vehicles by size, colour, shape and license tag, and even by the faces of drivers and passengers. Photo: George Nikitin/AP Associated Press WASHINGTON — Police can envision limited domestic uses for an urban surveillance system the Pentagon is developing but doubt they could use the full system, which is designed to track and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a city. Dubbed "Combat Zones That See," the project is intended to help the U.S....

By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - The Pentagon (news - web sites) is developing an urban surveillance system that would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a foreign city. AP Photo   Dubbed "Combat Zones That See," the project is designed to help the U.S. military protect troops and fight in cities overseas. Police, scientists and privacy experts say the unclassified technology could easily be adapted to spy on Americans. The project's centerpiece is groundbreaking computer software that is capable of automatically identifying vehicles by size,...

Every child born in the UK could be genetically screened and the data stored to plan their future healthcare under government proposals for a massive expansion of genetic testing. John Reid, the new Secretary of State for Health, said the UK was on the threshold of a revolution in healthcare. "Increasing understanding of genetics will bring more accurate diagnosis, more personalised prediction of risk, new gene-based drugs and therapies and better targeted prevention and treatment," he said. The controversial proposal for testing newborn babies was announced in a White Paper that promised £50m to expand the ability of the NHS...

<p>WASHINGTON — Coming to you soon from the Pentagon: the diary to end all diaries -- a multimedia, digital record of everywhere you go and everything you see, hear, read, say and touch.</p> <p>Known as LifeLog, the project has been put out for contractor bids by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (search), or DARPA, the agency that helped build the Internet and that is now developing the next generation of anti-terrorism tools.</p>

2. Orders Not to Disclose the Existence of a Warrant, Subpoena, or Court Order 18 U.S.C. § 2705(b) states: A governmental entity acting under section 2703, when it is not required to notify the subscriber or customer under section 2703(b)(1), or to the extent that it may delay such notice pursuant to subsection (a) of this section, may apply to a court for an order commanding a provider of electronic communications service or remote computing service to whom a warrant, subpoena, or court order is directed, for such period as the court deems appropriate, not to notify any other...

Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) (From the Patriot Act) A full technical analysis of the system is available by clicking here (TCP ports, DLL info, etc covered) Section 216 Pen Register and Trap and Trace StatuteThe pen register and trap and trace statute (the "pen/trap" statute) governs the prospective collection of non-content traffic information associated with communications, such as the phone numbers dialed by a particular telephone. Section 216 updates the pen/trap statute in three important ways: (1) the amendments clarify that law enforcement may use pen/trap orders to trace communications on the Internet and other computer...

<p>DNA evidence apparently has led to a suspect in the Louisiana serial killer case, but it also created a problem for Shannon Kohler.</p> <p>Now, with suspect Derrick Todd Lee in custody, Kohler wants his DNA sample back. Police aren't willing to return it.</p>

A Spy Machine of DARPA's Dreams   By Noah Shachtman It's a memory aid! A robotic assistant! An epidemic detector! An all-seeing, ultra-intrusive spying program! The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index all the information and make it searchable. What national security experts and civil libertarians want to know is, why would the Defense Department want to do such a thing? The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture...

Radio tags the size of a grain of sand could be embedded in the euro note if a reported deal between the European Central Bank (ECB) and Japanese electronics maker Hitachi is signed. Japanese news agency Kyodo was reportedly told by Hitachi that the ECB has started talks with the company about the use of its radio chip in the banknote. The ECB is deeply concerned about counterfeiting and money-laundering and is said to be looking at radio-tag technology. Last year, Greek authorities were confronted with 2,411 counterfeiting cases and seized 4,776 counterfeit banknotes, while authorities in Poland nabbed a...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) - The Pentagon assured Congress that its planned anti-terror surveillance system will only analyze legally acquired information and changed the name of the project to help allay privacy concerns that prompted congressional restrictions.</p> <p>The Total Information Awareness program now under development by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, will henceforth be named the Terrorism Information Awareness program.</p>

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon assured Congress that its planned anti-terror surveillance system will only analyze legally acquired information and changed the name of the project to help allay privacy concerns that prompted congressional restrictions. The Total Information Awareness program now under development by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, will henceforth be named the Terrorism Information Awareness program. Advertisement In report ordered by Congress 90 days ago, DARPA said the old name ``created in some minds the impression that TIA was a system to be used for developing dossiers on U.S. citizens. That is not DoD's (Department...

WASHINGTON (AP) - To track and thwart terrorists, the Pentagon wants to give U.S. agents fingertip access to records from around the world that could fill the Library of Congress more than 50 times. The library's collection includes more than 18 million books. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency says in its documents that it is trying to design software that could access and analyze an unprecedented amount of data, ``measured in petabytes.'' In computer jargon, a byte is what it takes electronically to represent one letter of the alphabet. A petabyte is a quadrillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000, bytes. Most personal...

<p>It's a memory aid! A robotic assistant! An epidemic detector! An all-seeing, ultra-intrusive spying program!</p> <p>The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index all the information and make it searchable.</p>

When you live in a country founded on fundamental principles of freedom, individuality and privacy, and those rights begin disappearing, unusual things begin to happen. Perhaps none so unusual as a forum in Washington last month, where the left and right wings came together to discuss prominent legislation in the nation's war on terrorism. The topic: government responses to Sept. 11 that go beyond fighting terrorism and infringe on the privacy rights of ordinary Americans. Rarely, if ever, do groups as far apart on the ideological spectrum as the American Civil Liberties Union and Eagle Forum come down on the...

Data Recorders In Your Car Shawn Boyd reporting Last Updated: May 14, 2003 Data recorders that work like those on commercial airliners are now standard equipment on most cars, they have been for several years. Two court cases are putting the information found on two black boxes to work for prosecutors in Florida and right here. Edwin Mantos' trial began Wednesday in Broward County Florida. He's accused of running his Trans-Am into two teenage girls last August killing them. Data downloaded from his car's black box showed he was going 114 mph just before he hit them. Diana Santi...

Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. announced Tuesday he has established a gun crime task force that will rely on so-called consent searches of cars in the city, a practice that has been restricted among Milwaukee police. Police Chief Arthur Jones was conspicuously absent from Clarke's news conference, attended by Mayor John O. Norquist, County Executive Scott Walker, U.S. Attorney Steven M. Biskupic and others. Clarke said Jones was "not invited, for no particular reason." The chief said later that he didn't respond to Clarke's earlier effort to involve him because "it wasn't necessary," and that he hoped deputies'...

High Court to Rule on Police Roadblocks By The Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court said Monday it will give police clearer rules for using random roadblocks to track down criminals without violating the privacy rights of other motorists. The court will hear arguments next fall on whether police can set up checkpoints to seek information about a recent crime, then arrest drivers for unrelated wrongdoing.Three years ago, justices curbed the use of random roadblocks for general law enforcement. Illinois, supported by 14 other states, asked the court to clarify how far police may go.Northwestern University law...