This week's technology round-up is a doozy. You've been warned.

• First, a video on third party tracking. It's pretty cool and involves zombies. Watch it if you have 45 min.

• Sprint and HTC are running a spyware program called Carrier IQ, which sends loads of user information back to the companies, presumably to sell to other firms for marketing purposes. The captured data, sold to who-knows-who (including possibly law enforcement), "include your location, when you open an app and what app you open, what media you play and when you play it, when you receive an SMS, when you receive a call,  when your screen turns off or on, and what keys you press in your phone dialer."
• As we've suspected for a long time, DHS' biometrics anti-immigrant program S-Comm has been facing push back from state governments. It has even caused a rift between the FBI and ICE; the former complaining that they do not want to get in the middle of a fight between states and immigration enforcement. Unfortunately, however, the FBI is squarely in the middle of the debate, most centrally because the technology requires that the FBI serve as a middleman for the fingerprint data. (The images below are from SComm FOIA files requested by a group of civil liberties and immigration rights organizations led by the Center for Constitutional Rights. Click on the images to see larger versions.)

• PBS' "Media Shift" and WITNESS video have produced a really interesting document about the problems everyday new media makers should consider when they press 'record'. In a world full of CCTV cameras, the authors ask about the ethics of video recording from the ground-up, and propose that we ought to have some basic groundrules regarding protecting anonymity and privacy in the digital age. 
• Reports from Twitter today suggest that the NYPD is again deploying the LRAD sound weapon, which emits a piercing sound capable of causing permanent hearing loss and internal organ damage. The LRAD was initially developed for the US Navy, for use against pirates and enemy ships. The LRAD in use today is a handheld device. Photos below courtesy of Twitter user @jopauca:

• In world surveillance news, we've got reports that Iran — like Syria and other regimes in the Middle East and Central Asia — is using Western surveillance equipment to repress democracy activists. And Brazil is catching fusion center fever; in advance of the 2014 World Cup and the upcoming Olympics, Rio has created an incredibly expensive system of surveillance, centered in a futuristic control room replete with 80 HD screens showing live feeds from thousands of cameras. Mexico City has also opened a fusion center. And in London, the Metropolitan police has purchased a fleet of spy planes capable of surveilling and disrupting mobile communications. 
• Meanwhile, Houston area police are getting ready to deploy drones that have weapons capabilities. 
• The NYTimes has a piece from last week describing commercial applications for face recognition technology. According to the Times, bars in some cities are now using face recognition paired with social media to alert customers considering dropping in about who is in the bar (translation: how many women are in the bar at any given moment).
• Personal car spying. Good times:

• The Massachusetts-based war industry giant Raytheon has secured yet another big contract with DHS, this time to streamline ICE's communications and information sharing platforms. Could this have something to do with SComm roll-out nationwide? Raytheon was also contracted to build the backbone for the fusion center here in Massachusetts, the Commonwealth Fusion Center, in Maynard.