Okay, it’s not still Wednesday, but here are the rest of the LsTG anyways.

1. Monbiot on Prison Population

[’Mind Forged Manacles’, in The Guardian, via Rinf.com]

On Friday, the government released new figures for the prison population(2). It broke all records, yet again. It has risen by 38% since Labour came to power(3), and now stands at 83,181. What does the government intend to do about it? Lock more people up. It is building enough new cells to jail 96,000 people by 2014(4). At the beginning of this month it laid out its plans for Titan prisons: vast broiler units, which will each house 2,500 people(5). But they’ll be only just big enough: the government expects the number of cons to rise to 95,600 in six years(6).

As ever, Britain appears to be chasing the United States. In both absolute and relative terms, the USA’s prison population is the highest on earth: one percent of its adult population is behind bars(7). This is five times our preposterous rate and six times Turkey’s(8). It is over twice the rate of the nearest contender, South Africa(9). If you count the people under community supervision or on probation, the total rises to over 7 million, or 3.1% of the adult population(10). Black men who failed to complete high school in the US have a 60% chance of ending up in jail(11). I feel I need to say that again: 60% of unqualified black men go to prison. It’s beginning to look as if the state has stopped imprisoning individuals and started locking up a social class. Is this what we aspire to?

2. Free Markets Can No Longer Be Trusted

(Ambrose Evans Pritchard, EU-wide ’super regulator’ poses threat to City of London, in The Telegraph.)

The last time we heard this kind of language was in the Great Depression, or Nazi Germany. Take your pick: markets have run out of control and there will be political consquences that will be no more pleasant, and probably less so, for most of us.

“A top cast of European statesmen has issued a blistering denunciation of financial markets and called for a creation of a pan-EU body to protect the citizens against the “social risk” posed by modern capitalism.

“The financial world has accumulated a massive amount of fictitious capital, with very little improvement for humanity,” said the group in an open letter to the European Commission and the EU presidency.

Free markets cannot ignore social morals. Decent capitalism needs effective public policy. But when everything is for sale, social cohesion melts and the system breaks down,” it said.”

3. ‘I’ve got bad intentions’

[ on Global Research.]

The US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) plans to have 500 “behavior detection officers” (BDOs) in airports by the end of this year. The job of the BDOs will be that of examining passengers for “body language and facial cues … for signs of bad intentions.’ They look for what the experts call “micro-expressions.’ Fear and disgust are the key ones, he said, because they’re associated with deception. That would make me a prime candidate for scrutiny and possibly trouble because if I ever had to go through airport security procedures, I would have those “micro-expressions” of disgust and fear of arrest.

McClatchy Newspapers reported in an article, “New airport agents check for danger in fliers’ facial expressions,’ (August 2007) that Jay Cohen, undersecretary of Homeland Security for Science and Technology, “wants to automate passenger screening by using videocams and computers to measure and analyze heart rate, respiration, body temperature and verbal responses as well as facial micro-expressions.’

4.1 ‘Intelligent’ CCTV cameras

(via The Scotsman)

In fact there already cameras that “listen” in West London, but the article doesn’t mention that. Perhaps they didn’t know.

‘”INTELLIGENT” CCTV cameras are being developed in the UK which will be able not only to see trouble but to hear it.
The technology allows the sounds of breaking glass, shouting, or the noise of a crowd gathering to be “learned” by software in the cameras.

The three-year project by the University of Portsmouth aims to adapt artificial-intelligence software already being developed to identify visual patterns. ”

4.2 ‘ New intelligent CCTV cameras can see and hear‘

This article from The Telegraph has more detail. You have to love the paragaph: ‘Although the new system will inevitably raise concerns about the unstoppable march of the “surveillance state”, with one CCTV camera for every 14 people in the UK, Dr Brown said there were no plans for the system to record conversations.’

A team at the University of Portsmouth has already developed software which enables cameras to spot visual clues to anything from violent crime to vandalism, by looking for tell-tale signs such as someone raising their arm suddenly or even a snapped car aerial.

Now the artificial intelligence software is being taught to recognise sounds which are associated with crimes, including breaking glass, shouted obscenities and car alarms going off. Cameras which ‘hear’ the sounds will automatically swivel to the direction they have come from, and will alert the person monitoring the system to a possible crime in progress.”

5. Online ID has big backing

…. but a shambolic website. Here it is. [Via the NYT.]

” Microsoft, Google and PayPal, a unit of eBay, are among the founders of an industry organization that hopes to solve the problem of password overload among computer users.

The Information Card Foundation is an effort to create a single industrywide approach to managing identity online that promises to reduce drastically the use of passwords and create a system that is less vulnerable to fraud.

The idea is to bring the concept of an identity card, like a driver’s license, to the online world. Rather than logging on to sites with user IDs and passwords, people will gain access to sites using a secure digital identity that is overseen by a third party.”

6. Hacked Oysters

Via Wired, a pleasant reminder that whatever systems are designed by those in the business of managing population information, they will eventually be hacked. Perhaps the speed with which this particularly insidious tracking technology has been fallen will chill innovation in the area. Or perhaps Oyster will be, in a decade, as much a relic of our surveillance State as the Stasi’s millions of unread documents.

“Dutch security researchers rode the London Underground free for a day after easily using an ordinary laptop to clone the “smartcards” commuters use to pay fares, a hack that highlights a serious security flaw because similar cards provide access to thousands of government offices, hospitals and schools.”