District Must Explain Object in the Ceiling

Everett School District officials can and should put to rest any lingering controversy over the Kay Powers case. It may be as simple as answering one question:

What was the cone-shaped object that several teachers report seeing in the ceiling of Powers' classroom last spring?

Lawmakers Propose Mandatory Business Surveillance Cameras

Bethlehem lawmakers are taking big steps to help prevent and fight crime.

A new bill could soon make surveillance cameras mandatory for hundreds of businesses. But some people argue it's unfair to many small business owners.

Looking For Lessons in Past Wiretapping Battle

In the good old days, there were copper lines and the feds liked to tap them. Then came digital switches and phones that could roam, and the feds wanted to tap them, too.

And in 1994, after acrimonious debate that ripped apart an emergent tech-focussed civil liberties group, the feds won and the phone system's architecture would have surveillance baked into the switches in perpetuity.

A Next-Generation System Enables Persistent Surveillance of Wide Areas

Finding, tracking, and monitoring events and activities of interest on a continuous basis are critically important for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). In particular, we want to monitor large areas (tens of square kilometers) with sufficiently high resolution for distinguishing and tracking dismounts (persons) and vehicles. This is a challenge because imagery for a square kilometer at 15cm ground space distance (i.e., the size of the pixels on the ground) requires more than 44 million pixels. We also want to monitor these areas on a persistent basis using unmanned autonomous systems (UASs).