News: Swiss Federal Roads Office considers introducing GPS surveillance for speeders

According to an article in Dem Bund, the Federal Roads Office has supported a suggestion to force known speeders to have a GPS device installed in their cars that would allow federal authorities to identify if the driver violates speed limits. The measure would be a condition for the reinstatement of a driver's license which had previously been revoked for excessive speeding.

Update: Border Laptop Searches

From Privacy.org I previously reported on searches of laptops at US borders, now the Department of Homeland Security have published a Privacy Impact assessment declaring that laptops are equivalent to briefcases and backpacks and that it has authority to seize the devices and copy stored data whether or not wrongdoing is suspected.

News: Programme Can Reveal the Sexual Orientation of Social Network Users

From Privacy.org: 2 students at MIT have developed a program, nicknamed project Gaydar, which will predict sexual orientation on the basis of who the individual 'friends' on social networking sites:

“Even if you don’t affirmatively post revealing information, simply publishing your friends’ list may reveal sensitive information about you, or it may lead people to make assumptions about you that are incorrect,” said Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights organization in San Francisco. “Certainly if most or many of your friends are of a particular religious or political or sexual category, others may conclude you are part of the same category - even if you haven’t said so yourself.”

News: UK Environment Agency's use of RIPA Slammed

The Daily Telegraph reports that government officials investigating 'illegal disposal of waste' improperly tracked cars and trespassed on private property under home office advice. The Office of Surveillance Commissioners found evidence of the breeches last year, but the tactics continued to be used until the Environment Agency recently announced a suspension of their use 'pending a legal judgement':

Reports from recent inspections show that “fundamental flaws” were discovered in some of its operations. The surveillance commissioner has also repeatedly raised concerns over the proportionality of the Environment Agency’s operations.
The reports – marked “restricted” - show that in 2007 the Home Office advised officials that “affixing a magnetic device to a vehicle on the public highway” was “not a criminal offence” and “putting an arm into a wheel arch or under the frame of a vehicle is straining the concept of trespass.”

The Environment Agency continues to trial a network of informants and intends to contruct 'a national spy network' the Commissioner reported.

EU Funding New Database to be used to Identify 'Abnormal Behaviour'

From the Daily Telegraph: the EU is funding a 5 year project entitled INDECT (Intelligent information system supporting observation, searching and detection for security of citizens in urban environment) which aims 'to develop computer programmes which act as "agents" to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers' in order to identify so called 'abnormal' behaviour.

A number of interest groups have criticised the program:

Stephen Booth, an Open Europe analyst who has helped compile a dossier on the
European justice agenda, said these developments and projects such as Indect
sounded "Orwellian" and raised serious questions about individual liberty.
"This is all pretty scary stuff in my book. These projects would involve a huge invasion of privacy and citizens need to ask themselves whether the EU should be spending their taxes on them," he said. "The EU lacks sufficient checks and balances and there is no evidence that anyone has ever asked 'is this actually in the best interests of our citizens?'"

[Liberty's Shami Chakrabarti commented] "Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society. "It's dangerous enough at national level, but on a Europe-wide scale the idea becomes positively
chilling."