Operation Target Occupy: press restrictions, preemptive arrests, and undercover operations

FBI driven, real-time face recognition of political demonstrators

Thursday technology links round-up

Militarization of the police: Bloomberg’s army

I wonder if the NYPD folks in blue were surprised to hear today that they constitute Mayor Mike Bloomberg's own, personal army. In remarks he gave last night at Cambridge's own MIT, Commander in Chief Mayor Bloomberg announced, 

Sukey app helps you escape from the kettle!

Good to know there are techies on the side of the demonstrators, too. Last month there was a flurry of news around the release of the "I'm Getting Arrested" app, which sends an alert to family or friends, updates your Twitter announcing you've been snagged, and deletes the contents of your phone with the push of one button. Pretty neat.

History channel to air ‘Off the Grid’, escape from urban surveillance reality TV

It's a novel concept for reality TV: task some private industry spooks and some eager would-be reality TV stars with the urban jungle surveillance race of our times. The spooks used all tools available to modern police departments and the two regular guys tried to escape the matrix, and get out of Los Angeles without getting picked up by the ever watchful eye. The prize? If the guys escaped unseen, they take home a million bucks.

New series: a surveillance tech tool a week

Lockheed Martin wants to make DNA scooping easier for police

Remember when we told you about how the non-proft Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) and Lockheed Martin had gotten together to publish a pretty self-serving paper describing law enforcement technology needs? Remember how during the research for that paper, Lockheed and PERF asked hundreds of police officers if having faster DNA processing would help them do their business better? Remember how we said that was a little suspicious, given that Lockheed does lots of R&D to develop products just like that?

Missing the point: PERF and the surveillance industrial complex

The LED Incapacitator

Back in the first few weeks of the Occupy Wall Street movement, we heard strange rumors circulating on Twitter suggesting that the NYPD had used some kind of strobe light to prevent journalists from filming them. Then Russia Today released this video, proving the allegations were true:

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