Big Brother

In a new study that has potentially Orwellian implications, ABI Research projects that revenue for video surveillance software will quadruple over the next five years.

About a dozen people from the Knoxville FBI Citizens' Academy took a road trip to the nation's capital last week, a trip that took them to some of the country's most secure places. The city filled with national landmarks is a tourist's treasure, a first time for academy members like Susan Cohen.

In preparation for the Republican National Convention, the FBI is soliciting informants to keep tabs on local protest groups

EVERY car coming into Manchester is being snapped by a new network of police spy cameras. Each day, 600,000 motorists' journeys are being captured, and the data will be stored for five years.

In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House, where the president's henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present.

In 2004, when Bush administration officials unveiled a project to provide every American with an electronic health record by 2014, they pledged to put privacy and security first. But the discovery in April of stolen health records containing sensitive medical information about U.S. patients on a computer server in Malaysia controlled by cyber criminals indicates such records so far do not pass the privacy and security test.

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.

n 2005, Microsoft launched a Location Finder as part of its Live Maps service. The application examined the networks a person was connected to, cross checked his IP address, and then predicted where the person was on a map. It was far from 100 percent accurate, but when it was right, it was ever-so-slightly terrifying. Coupling a person's location with 3D aerial map views, it showed the person a picture of the building he was sitting in with a big "X" on top of it -- giving him the simultaneous sensation of being the CIA agent locating a target, the target expecting an incoming cruise missile, and the viewer of a sophisticated, futuristic spy-movie.

They deal with drug dealers, hostage takers and crazed gunman -- all to keep people safe. And KFOX got a firsthand look at how the El Paso FBI trains. As part of the El Paso FBI's Citizens Academy, average citizens got to stand and watch just feet away as the elite, FBI Swat Team practiced how they would handle a sniper situation.

"The terrorist catastrophes in New York and Washington swept away media comment on other global events taking place on September 11, 2001. Virtually obscured on that historic agreement reached in Lima, Peru by the foreign ministers of the Organization of American States (OAS) on the Inter-American Democratic Charter. –Lou Dobbs, CNN