NYPD Disbands Muslim Surveillance Program

breitbart

By AWR Hawkins

The surveillance unit came "under fire by community activists who accused the department of abusing civil rights."

According to the Associated Press, the surveillance unit "relied on plainclothes officers to eavesdrop on people in bookstores, restaurants, and mosques."

Starting in 2011, "the AP documented that police had systematically spied on Muslim neighborhoods, listened in on sermons, infiltrated colleges, and photographed law-abiding citizens as part of a broad effort to watch communities where terror cells might operate."

This documentation came in a series of reports that "stirred debate over whether the NYPD was infringing on the civil rights of Muslims and illegally engaging in religious and ethnic profiling."

The AP reports also revealed then-police commissioner Ray Kelly "had brought in a CIA official to help develop an intelligence division unlike that of any other U.S. police department." This "prompted an investigation by the CIA's inspector general," which found the agency had not broken any laws forbidding it from "domestic spying."

However, the IG did criticize a CIA agent's involvement "without sufficient supervision."

Meet John Brennan, Obama’s Assassination Czar

pjmedia.com/  Patrick Poole

motherjones.com

A relatively unnoticed article by Associated Press reporter Kimberly Dozier two weeks ago outlined new Obama administration policy changes which consolidated power for authorizing drone attacks and assassinations under political appointees within the White House.

The article identifies White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan as the official assuming the role of Obama’s de facto assassination czar, raising concerns even within the Obama administration that the White House is increasingly turning into “a pseudo-military headquarters” under the direction of just a few senior Obama administration officials.

Adding to these concerns are serious questions about Brennan’s qualifications for this role.

Even before the 2008 election, eyebrows were raised over Brennan’s role in the Obama campaign. An employee of The Analysis Corporation, of which Brennan was CEO, had improperly accessed passport information for Hillary Clinton, Obama’s Democratic primary challenger at the time, and GOP nominee John McCain. At the time, Brennan was a top adviser to the Obama campaign, and Brennan’s employee was not fired. (One of the key witnesses in the case was found murdered in his car outside his church while the investigation was still ongoing.)

Brennan was involved in administration intrigue related to the release of convicted Libyan Pan Am Flight 103 bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi from a Scottish jail in August 2009. At the time of Megrahi’s release — when he returned to Libya to a national hero’s welcome — Brennan described the release as “unfortunate, inappropriate, and wrong” and called for his reimprisonment. However, Obama administration documents obtained by The Sunday Times revealed that the White House had secretly informed Scottish authorities that they found compassionate release more palatable than the reimprisonment of Megrahi in Libya.

Brennan also came under fire after would-be underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab nearly brought down a U.S.-bound Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day 2009. British intelligence authorities had notified their U.S. counterparts of an “Umar Farouk” meeting with al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, and Abdulmutallab’s father had warned of his son’s increasing extremism to CIA officials at the U.S. embassy in Nigeria. However, Abdulmutallab was never added to the U.S. no-fly list, nor was his U.S. visa revoked.

Following this stunning and nearly fatal intelligence failure which prompted members of both the House and Senate Intelligence oversight committees to call for his resignation, Brennan lashed out at the Obama administration’s critics in a USA Today editorial. He claimed that the “politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda.”

Brennan also defended treating Abdulmutallab as a criminal by having his rights read to him upon arrest and trying him in civilian court, rather than transferring the would-be bomber to military custody as an enemy combatant.

Just days later, Brennan gave a speech to Islamic law students at New York University, where he was introduced by Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America. Mattson, who had been involved with the Obama inaugural prayer service, had come under fire then for her organization’s longstanding terrorist support.

During his NYU speech, Brennan defended the administration’s highly unpopular move to try al-Qaeda operations chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court (which the administration eventually backed away from). He claimed that terrorists are the real victims of “political, economic and social forces,” said that Islamic terrorists were not jihadists, referenced “Al-Quds” instead of Jerusalem, and described the 20 percent of former Guantanamo detainees returning to terrorist activities as “not that bad” when compared to ordinary criminal recidivism.

During a talk at the Nixon Center in May 2010, Brennan said that the administration was looking for ways to build up “moderate elements” of the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah.

Two weeks later, at a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Brennan defended the Islamic doctrines of jihad as “a holy struggle” and “a legitimate tenet of Islam.”

These missteps and misstatements by Brennan prompted the Washington Times to editorialize in June 2010 that “President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser knows very little about terrorism, and that’s scary for America,” and to warn that “Mr. Brennan’s curious views may be part of a larger move by the O Force to redefine terrorism”.  More >>

Thanks ‘Liberals’ For All You’ve Done to Protect Us From Terrorists Like This One

FrontPage Magazine/ By Daniel Ashton

Also there are thousand of cases like this one:

Cameras May Soon Recognize Criminals by Their Gait [Video]

Scientific American

The capture and analysis of surveillance footage has been an indispensable tool for U.S. counterterrorism and law enforcement in the past decade. Video analysis software has improved since the 9/11 terrorist attacks—it can be programmed to identify certain patterns and colors, for example, and to issue security alerts when these characteristics are detected. But as terrorists and criminals change their tactics to slip through security the surveillance technologies designed to stop or catch them must likewise become more sophisticated.

 

INTRINSIC BIOMETRICS: Unique movement can be used to identify people, even separating politicians from the comedians imitating them. Image: N.Y.U. Movement Lab

One of the biggest challenges to improving video analytics is programming the software to identify specific people and objects under a variety of conditions, such as poor lighting, cluttered backgrounds and subtle changes in appearance (such as facial hair). Video analytics has a lot of room to improve in these areas with the help of software that sharpens computer vision, enhances facial- and pattern-recognition capabilities, and captures the motion of people and things passing in front of the camera's lens. [See our earlier coverage of post-9/11 security and surveillance.]

A team of New York University researchers has homed in on motion capture as a particularly promising approach to analysis. Associate computer science professor Chris Bregler is studying whether potential security threats can be identified via unique patterns of movement. How might someone walk if he was carrying a bomb in his backpack?

A person's body moves differently when it must compensate for some unnatural burden, such as a heavy backpack or even high-heeled shoes, says Bregler, who performs much of his research out of N.Y.U.'s Movement Lab, a motion-capture studio and research group housed at the school's ITP Tisch School of the Arts. When a person is weighed down by a backpack, for example, his or her feet will strike the ground with greater force than they otherwise would. Yet a person with natural-grown weight learns how to counterbalance it and maintain an even stride, he adds.

Bregler and his team have identified certain movement signatures with the help of the same motion-capture technology used for special effects in the Lord of the Rings​ and Harry Potter movies. Reflective markers placed at various locations on a special motion-capture suit can be picked up by a series of cameras that Bregler places in a circle around the Movement Lab. As a person in the suit moves, the cameras capture information about the reflective markers and feed the data to software that maps the location of each marker on a computer screen.

Outside the laboratory, however, the real world poses problems for motion-capture research—there simply are not enough motion-capture suits for everyone to wear. As a result, Bregler's team is developing software that can detect a person's motion signature without the markers.

Their GreenDot project trains cameras to scan the surroundings and identify spots that are unique, such as the way light reflects off a shirt's button differently than it does off the shirt's fabric. These spots are then represented as green dots on the computer screen. "Wherever you have texture [the software] can find something and track it from frame to frame," Bregler says. GreenDot's objective is to program a computer to recognize a person based on his or her motions. The software should even be able to identify a person's emotional state, cultural background, and other attributes based on movement.

Bregler's motion-analysis research attracted the attention of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency​ (DARPA) in 2000 as a possible means of identifying security threats. Following 9/11 his researched ramped up thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation​ and the U.S. Office of Naval Research. Law enforcement and counterterrorism organizations already had facial-recognition technology but were looking for additional ways to better make sense of countless hours of surveillance footage.

New York City's Police Department and Mayor Michael Bloomberg's security staff also expressed an interest in Bregler's research in 2004. "They asked us if we could detect suicide bombers, and that's why we started the experiment studying artificial weight," he says.

Facial recognition has in recent years matured to the point where it is useful but only if the subject is within six or so meters from the camera, Bregler says. "That's why we're working on something called intrinsic biometrics, which studies your body patterns, your timing, the way you walk, the way you use your hands when you speak," he adds. "These are very hard to fake."

Based on the decade or so it took for facial recognition to become reliable, Bregler estimates intrinsic biometrics is years away from maturity. Ten years after facial recognition started yielding meaningful results, it has moved beyond the realm of security and is being used by Facebook, Google, Apple's iPhoto and a number of other commercial applications. "We are just starting with intrinsic biometrics so estimating from the past it probably takes five to 10 more years before it becomes as accurate as facial recognition and other biometrics," he adds.