UK Is Ready for Its Closeup

(NEWSER) - Surveillance cameras are nearly worthless in the fight against crime, a London police report concluded, with fewer than one crime solved annually for every 1,000 cameras.The UK is one of the world's most monitored countries, with one camera for every 14 people and 1 million cameras in London alone. Yet the internal report, obtained by the Telegraph, says that untrained officers used images ineffectively when they bothered to look at all. More»

NCTC can hold it 5 years now, instead of 180 days

(NEWSER) - The latest privacy flap: New rules will permit a federal counterterrorism agency to hang onto private data collected on US citizens—even those with no known ties to terror groups—for five years instead of 180 days, report the Washington Post and New York Times . The rules approved by Eric Holder and the Justice Department are designed to give new leeway to the National Counterterrorism Center to aggressively mine the data. More»

Companies will have to keep complete record on every UK citizen

(NEWSER) - The UK government is working on an anti-terror plan that would require service providers to record and store details on every call, text, email, or even Twitter direct message sent by anyone in the country—along with all their complete browsing history. Companies would then keep that info on file for a year, allowing the government "real time" access to it whenever necessary. The Home Office is currently negotiating the deal with Internet companies, and could announce it as soon as May, the Telegraph reports. More»

'1984 is here at last,' says dissenting judge

(NEWSER) - Police can secretly track your movements with a GPS device attached to your car, and come into your driveway in the middle of the night to install it—all without a warrant, a federal court has ruled. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has twice let stand the conviction of Juan Pineda-Moreno, a man suspected of growing marijuana whose movements were tracked on GPS by the police, Time reports. That means that warrantless vehicular surveillance is now the law of the land in the nine western states, including California, under the Ninth Circuit's jurisdiction. More»

Say stigmatizing community fosters far-right violence

(USER SUBMITTED) - British anti-terrorism strategy is wrong to focus on Muslims when far-right extremists actually pose a far greater threat to national security, says a Muslim police officers' association previously backed by PM Gordon Brown. The group warned that anti-terrorism strategies that stigmatize Muslim communities are racist and could increase far-right violence against ethnic minorities, the Daily Telegraph reports. More»