Conflict & Security archives: September-October 2004

• 29 October 2004
  

  "Your competitor has a wildly successful web-based tool which is being used by many of your customers. Do you (A) give up and get out of the business; (B) set up a team of product developers to make a competing product; or (C) hack into the competitor's website, steal the code, and for good measure hire their critical employees to develop an exact duplicate of their website. If you answered (C) then congratulations and welcome to the new world of competitive hacking." Learn how some companies are using hacking as a part of their business strategy, in the Register.

• 28 October 2004
  

  "It's been a year since US and British agents boarded a German ship in the Mediterranean Sea that led to the exposure of the unimaginable: a vast black-market nuclear arms bazaar operating under superpower radar for more than a decade...But government officials and experts say that in today's world, where both major presidential candidates say nuclear proliferation is the nation's most critical security threat, much more needs to be done." A year after uncovering a vast underground nuclear market, experts say that the U.S. has done little to punish those responsible and has failed to curb the threat of nuclear proliferation. Learn more in the Christian Science Monitor.

• 27 October 2004
  

  "The threat of biological weapons is real and needs to be tackled now, medical experts warn. The British Medical Association says the window of opportunity to take action is shrinking fast. It said the threat had intensified since it first published a report on biological weapons in 1999. Five years on, the threat of weapons that could target specific ethnic groups is no longer theoretical and is approaching reality, says the report." A recent report published by the British Medical Association, warns that the threat posed by biological weapons is actually growing. Learn more at the BBC.com.

• 26 October 2004
  

  "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission removed its massive public reading room from the Internet Monday after nuclear safety activists and media organizations found several documents on it containing sensitive information they said could help terrorists. The information included floor plans for nuclear laboratories at several universities, specifying the types and locations of nuclear materials they use. The NRC said the removal of the online document library is temporary and that documents will be posted again after they are scrubbed of sensitive information. Critics said the action was too late -- coming three weeks after the problem was first publicized -- and too drastic, involving the removal of thousands of non-sensitive documents." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 25 October 2004
  

  "Analysts say several factors have combined to make identity theft a particularly intractable crime: the growth of the Internet and digital finance, decades of expanding consumer credit worldwide, the hodgepodge nature of local and federal law enforcement, and the changing but often still inadequate regulations governing the credit industry. Everyone is fair game. Thieves recently snatched the identity of a three-week-old infant in Bothell, Wash. And authorities say that the dead have been favorite targets of identity thieves for years. Nor is identity theft limited to people. A growing number of thieves now assume the false guise of entire companies, adopting a business's employer identification number to secure commercial loans, corporate leases or expensive office products." The New York Times examines the growing epidemic of ID theft in this in-depth report.

• 22 October 2004
  

  "During World War II, a letter that took months to arrive was the only form of communication from the front lines. Today, American men and women fighting in Iraq often have instant communications with friends and families in the USA. And while cell phones and e-mails have helped boost morale for those serving in the military, they have also caused new challenges for commanders in the field, who can face second-guessing of their decisions almost immediately by friends and relatives of service personnel. The instant communication can also cause problems for Defense officials in Washington, who would prefer a tighter grip on reports from the battlefield." Learn why some field commanders view cell phones and email as security threats, in USA Today.

• 21 October 2004
  

  "Organized crime rings and petty thieves are flocking to the Internet like start-ups in the go-go '90s, federal authorities say — establishing a multibillion-dollar underground economy in just a few years. 'Willie Sutton used to say he robbed banks because that's where the money is,' says FBI Agent Keith Lourdeau, an expert on cybercrime. 'The same applies today to crooks and the Internet.' The Internet's growth as an economic engine, particularly for financial transactions, is feeding the felonious frenzy...The surge in cybercrime has triggered changes not only in criminal behavior but also in law enforcement." The power of the internet is drawing criminals from a wide variety of backgrounds, and changing the nature of law enforcement. Learn more in USA Today.

• 20 October 2004
  

  "When David Lochbaum perused a government Web site one day last summer, he came across documents he thought would be of limited value to the public -- but a potential bonanza for terrorists. Included in a Nuclear Regulatory Commission report on Waterford III Nuclear Power Station near New Orleans, Louisiana, were diagrams showing all the toxic chemicals and pipelines near Waterford III -- including the natural gas pipelines that lace through the complex. Lochbaum isn't alone in finding sensitive material on the NRC Web site. In a four-hour time span recently, Scott Portzline, a Pennsylvania piano tuner and civic activist, found material about four university nuclear laboratories, including floor plans and lists of the radioactive materials they use." Learn more at CNN.com.

• 19 October 2004
  

  "With Election Day fast approaching, it was only a matter of time before the usual congressional shenanigans that typically punctuate the political season. This time, politicians appear to have seized on what could be called the Patriot Act strategy, drafting antiterrorism legislation in secret and then ramming it through the Senate and House of Representatives with minimal debate. The vehicles chosen for this strategy are two bills described as being inspired by the 9/11 Commission's report, a politically potent text that's become a best-selling book. While portions of the massive legislation are no doubt praiseworthy, other important sections--especially those envisioning stuffing more information into government databases--deserve special scrutiny from privacy hawks." Learn more about new legislation that worries privacy advocates in ZDnet News.

• 18 October 2004
  

  "US presidential candidates George W Bush and Senator John Kerry don't see eye to eye on much of anything, but in their first debate they found one point of agreement: that the single greatest danger to national (and global, we presume) security was the prospect of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists and detonated in a major population center…The chances of that happening sooner rather than later are pretty close to a hundred percent and you'd better get ready for it - and I don't mean get ready for a 'dirty bomb' filled with radioactive waste." In this disturbing article, journalist Mark Erikson examines the threat of terrorists using nuclear weapons. Learn more in the Asia Times.

• 15 October 2004
  

  "January 15, 2005 - a Saturday - will almost certainly pass quietly on the bucolic Redmond, Wash., campus of Microsoft. But for those in the field of information technology security, who often make a sport of following the company's struggles to secure its products, the date is certain to attract some notice: it's the third anniversary of a now-famous internal Microsoft e-mail dubbed the 'Trustworthy Computing' memo...Those inside and outside Microsoft credit Trustworthy Computing with setting in motion vast changes that have improved the security of many of Microsoft's products. At the same time, customers and industry experts wonder aloud whether Microsoft will ever fully realize Gates' vision, taming the company's massive stores of legacy software code and reconciling its desire to please consumers with its duty to protect them from threats." Learn more in Network World Fusion.

• 14 October 2004
  "Despite the number of IT security products and services cramming the market, businesses are more exposed than ever to emerging threats, according to industry experts speaking at the Etre technology conference in Cannes. 'Enterprises are more exposed than a year ago. The hackers have won!' said Eli Barkat, managing director of venture capital firm BRM Capital, who has been involved in investing in security firms. Barkat cited a lack of innovation in the security industry as why the situation has not improved. Mike Dalton, president of McAfee in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, agreed that the security situation is dire, but said that innovation was not necessarily the roadblock. A major problem is a lack of integration in security products, he said." Learn more at Network World Fusion.

• 13 October 2004
  "Big Brother may not be watching you, but Big Employer probably is. In an era in which workers with Internet connections have found ever more ways to amuse themselves -- from feeding their EBay obsession to instant messaging their buddies -- employers have also found new technological tools to put a damper on such diversions. Consider Christopher Faulkner, who runs C I Host, a Web-hosting firm that keeps a close eye on what its 190 employees do in San Jose, Los Angeles, Chicago and Texas. He watches what Web sites they go to, restricts instant messaging to fellow employees and uses software to monitor their every keystroke." Learn more about the ways in which some employers try to keep track of cyber-slackers, in the San Francisco Chronicle.

• 12 October 2004
  "Amid the torrent of jabber in Internet chat rooms - flirting by QTpie and BoogieBoy, arguments about politics and horror flicks - are terrorists plotting their next move? The government certainly isn't discounting the possibility. It's taking the idea seriously enough to fund a yearlong study on chat room surveillance under an anti-terrorism program...Trying to monitor the sea of traffic on all the chat channels would be like assigning a police officer to listen in on every conversation on the sidewalk - virtually impossible. Instead of rummaging through megabytes of messages, RPI professor Bulent Yener will use mathematical models in search of patterns in the chatter." Learn more in the Washington Post.

• 11 October 2004
  "The biggest threat facing the United States - and the world - is the spread of nuclear material to rogue states and terrorists. So say terrorism experts. Both major American presidential candidates concurred in last week's televised debate. So why is the US moving plutonium from military to less secure civilian control? And why, critics ask, is it embarking on research programs that teach other nations how to use plutonium in nuclear power plants after a quarter-century of opposing such moves? That's what Tom Clements wants to know." Although politicians agree that the spread of nuclear material should be curbed, a group of activists is trying to demonstrate how much less secure materials like plutonium have become. Learn more in the Christian Science Monitor.

• 8 October 2004
  "For years, they worked in shadowy corners of the electronic world. Spammers tried to get around filters and other network defenses to plant their junk e-mail. Virus writers exploited computers to take them over. Now, they're starting to work together. Their emerging alliance is straining already embattled spam and virus defenses. For users, it means the Internet has grown more risky. 'They're learning from each other,' says John Pironti, a security consultant at Unisys, the multinational information technology company." Learn more about this disturbing alliance in the Christian Science Monitor.

• 7 October 2004
  "Businesses and government agencies must re-examine the growing threat of cyberterrorism to automated computer systems running power grids, dams and other industrial facilities, security experts said Tuesday. From 1982 until about 2000, problems with such systems usually were associated with internal accidents or inappropriate employee behavior, said Eric Byres, manager of Critical Infrastructure Security Research at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. But a review by Byres of the last three years showed that 90% of these problems come from break-ins by hackers and computer viruses." Some specialists worry than all automated industrial systems are vulnerable to attacks from hackers or terrorists. Learn more in USA Today.

• 6 October 2004
  "New software at Hewlett-Packard was supposed to get orders in and out the door faster at the computer giant. Instead, a botched deployment cut into earnings in a big way in August and executives got fired...Computer code foul-ups also recently held the budget hostage in Tacoma, Wash., delayed financial aid to university students in Indiana and caused retailer Ross Stores's profits to plummet 40% after a merchandise-tracking system failed. Such disasters are often blamed on bad software, but the cause is rarely bad programming. As systems grow more complicated, failures instead have far less technical explanations: bad management, communication or training." Learn more in USA Today.

• 5 October 2004
  "The United States' new biometric system of border controls violates civil rights without delivering security, the head of the London-based civil liberties watchdog Privacy International has warned. The system involves a 'wholesale and aggressive violation' of privacy but was also likely to generate errors and eventually collapse under its own weight, Privacy International director Simon Davies said. Davies was speaking after the release of a critical report on the US Visitor & Immigration Status Indication Technology System published a day after the system, which began operating in January, was extended to cover the citizens of 27 'visa waiver' countries - including the UK. Germany, and Japan - whose populations are considered to be 'friendly.'" Learn more in Computer Weekly.

• 4 October 2004
  "It is a military axiom that every war is a testing ground for something - tactics, weapons, doctrine, logistic support arrangements, etc. US forces in Iraq are continuing that tradition. But this time the lab rat is something distinctly unconventional: weapons that are less than lethal, commonly referred to as non-lethal weapons (NLW). NLW were considered especially valuable in non-traditional operations where high collateral damage can inflame the situation, put US lives at risk, and undermine the political objectives of the mission." As the U.S. military finds itself fighting in urban areas among civilian populations, more research is being done on non-lethal weapons. Learn more in the Asia Times.

• 1 October 2004
  "The American military has begun planning for combat in space, an Air Force report reveals. And commercial spacecraft, neutral countries' launching pads -- even weather satellites -- are all on the potential target list. 'Air Force Doctrine Document 2-2.1: Counterspace Operations' is an apparent first cut at detailing how U.S. forces might take out an enemy's space capabilities -- and protect America's eyes and ears in orbit. Signed by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper, the unclassified report sketches out who would be in command during a space fight, what American weapons would be used and which targets might be attacked." Learn more in Wired News.

• 30 September 2004
  "Organisations such as al-Qaeda, ETA en PKK are copying Nigerian scams to fund terrorism, two Dutch experts told Dutch daily De Telegraaf this week. Dutch criminal investigation department, say there is 'strong evidence' from international crime fighting organisations such as the FBI that at least some of the terrorist funding is coming from advanced fee fraud. Using the internet to raise funds is fairly risk free, experts say. According to an Interpol report prepared for the US House Committee on International Relations earlier this year, intellectual property crimes are indeed a growing resource for terrorist groups from Northern Ireland to the Arab world, including al-Qaeda and Hizbullah." Learn more in the Register.

• 29 September 2004
  "The United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency warned Friday of growing concern about cyber attacks against nuclear facilities. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced in a statement that it was developing new guidelines aimed at combating the danger of computerized attacks by outside intruders or corrupt insiders. 'For example, software operated control systems in a nuclear facility could be hacked or the software corrupted by staff with insider access,' the group said. Last year the Slammer worm penetrated a private computer network at Ohio's idled Davis-Besse nuclear plant and disabled a safety monitoring system for nearly five hours." Learn more in Security Focus News.

• 28 September 2004
  "In the name of homeland security, America's spy imagery agency is keeping a close eye, close to home. It's watching America. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, about 100 employees of a little-known branch of the Defense Department called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — and some of the country's most sophisticated aerial imaging equipment — have focused on observing what's going on in the United States. Their work brushes up against the fine line between protecting the public and performing illegal government spying on Americans." The government is using satellite technology to monitor on activity within the United States. Learn more in USA Today.

• 27 September 2004
  "Making copies of something important? Photocopiers are the latest networked devices to fall prey to hackers armed with nothing more than Google's search engine. Hackers are using search engines to watch what people photocopy. Using Google hacks -- requests typed into the search engine that bring up cached information on networks -- hackers are discovering and using login details for networked photocopiers so they can watch what is being copied. 'You don't have to be a genius to do this,' said Jason Hart, security director at Whitehat UK. 'You can see what people are photocopying on your monitor. You just have to search for online devices on Google.'" Learn more about this disturbing manner of hacking at ZDnet.com.

• 24 September 2004
  "Last year I was the victim of identity theft, a sobering reality in today's world. An unscrupulous criminal managed to social engineer his way past the formidable security checks and balances provided by my credit card company, my bank, and one of my investment accounts. He methodically researched my background and personal information until he could successfully impersonate me, and then subsequently set forth to change the mailing addresses of my most important financial statements. It was a harrowing experience, and one worth explaining in the context of the online world." Identity theft is a growing problem, perhaps more so than many of us think. Kelly Martin, editor of SecurityFocus, looks at the real-life experience from a security tech's viewpoint at Britain's Register.

• 23 September 2004
  "Rats equipped with radios that transmit their brainwaves could soon be helping to locate earthquake survivors buried in the wreckage of collapsed buildings. Rats have an exquisitely sensitive sense of smell and can crawl just about anywhere. This combination makes them ideal candidates for sniffing out buried survivors. For that, the animals need to be taught to home in on people, and they must also signal their position to rescuers on the surface. In a project funded by DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, Linda and Ray Hermer-Vazquez of the University of Florida in Gainesville have worked out a way to achieve this." No one questions the intelligence of rats, but can they be "man's best friend"? Perhaps they can, according to this report at Britain's New Scientist.

• 22 September 2004
  "Pipe dreams of a cheaper, shorter and safer trade route between China and Europe through Myanmar to the Bay of Bengal are once again edging onto official agendas. High oil prices, competitive advantages and strategic imperatives are set to midwife this route that might have painful implications for Southeast Asia's ports and shipping. Driving a modern transport network through Myanmar from Yunnan province following an age-old trade route to the sea should cut shipping bills significantly by saving a week or more on shipping time from China to key European markets. Yunnan, situated in the southwest corner of China, borders Tibet, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. It would also ease fears of disruption to Middle East oil supplies should terrorists wreak havoc on Southeast Asia's pirate-infested Malacca Strait." Learn more in the Asia Times.

• 21 September 2004
  "The cybersleuths who helped smoke out some of the biggest crooks online can be as reclusive as their prey. Tucked inside an inconspicuous office in a business park on the banks of the Monongahela River, two dozen employees of the National Cyber-Forensics & Training Alliance quietly peck away at PCs in small cubicles. Here, the nation's cyberequivalent of CSI relies on a computer lab that simulates Internet attacks and diagnostic tools that extract clues from tainted PCs and suspicious Web sites. Yet few people are aware of the non-profit group. 'I chuckle whenever people complain nothing is being done to stop cybercrime,' says investigator Sarah Patrick, who — like a dozen other college students — monitors Web sites and chat rooms from a desktop computer in a small, unadorned cubicle. 'What have I been doing the past nine months?'" Learn more about the people who track down cyber-criminals in USA Today.

• 20 September 2004
  "What would it take to get someone to turn in one of those spammers who send millions of unwanted e-mails? At least $100,000, the Federal Trade Commission figures. Six-figure incentives are the only way to persuade people to disclose the identity of co-workers, friends and others they know are responsible for flooding online mailboxes with unsolicited pitches for prescription drugs, weight loss plans and other products, according to an agency report Thursday. The commission said a government-funded reward system could work if the payoff was between $100,000 and $250,000 -- higher than rewards in most high-profile criminal and terrorism cases." A report by the Federal Trade Commission indicates that it will take high bounties to curb spammers. Learn more at CNN.com.

• 17 September 2004
  "Lightweight, flexible body armor that looks like dragon scales and is more comfortable to wear than today's bulletproof vests could be available within two years. The armor, designed to stiffen when hit with a high-velocity projectile, also will provide increased ease of movement and more body coverage. Today's bulletproof vests are made from strong fibers that absorb the impact of a projectile. For added protection, ceramic plates often are inserted into the vests. The problem with these vests, says Chuck Canterbury, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, is that they hinder movement by weighing officers down." Read more about this new, high-tech body armor in USA Today.

• 16 September 2004
  "It's the kind of E-mail that grabs you by the collar and doesn't let go. On a Saturday afternoon last January, a message hit the in-box of BetCBSports.com, threatening to knock the online gambling site offline in prime sports-betting season if the company didn't pay up. 'You have 3 choices. You can make a deal with us now before the attacks start. You can make a deal with us when you are under attack. You can ignore us and plan on losing your Internet business,' the E-mail read. It was no bluff. Within three hours, the site was taken down by what's known as a distributed denial- of-service attack." Learn more about the problems associated with cyber-extortion in Information Week.

• 15 September 2004
  "North Korea might test a nuclear weapon in the near future, though it apparently didn't explode one over the weekend. Iran is forging ahead with nuclear activities despite objections from much of the rest of the world. South Korea, it turns out, produced some fissile material a few years ago. The Seoul government didn't know what was going on - or so it says. The global effort to curb nuclear proliferation may now be facing some of its most daunting challenges in years. Taken separately, the news items above are bad enough. But some experts worry that, added together, they might spiral into a whole more dangerous than the sum of its parts." Learn more about this terrifying issue in the Christian Science Monitor.

• 14 September 2004
  "Jason Larsen types in a few lines of computer code to hack into the controls of a nearby chemical plant. Then he finds an online video camera inside and confirms that he has pumped up a pressure value. 'It's the challenge. It's you finding the flaws,' he said when asked about his motivation. 'It's you against the defenders. It comes from a deep-seeded need to find out how things work.' Larsen, 31, who wears his hair long and has braces on his teeth, is a computer hacker with a twist. His goal is not to wreak havoc, but to boost security for America's pipelines, railroads, utilities and other infrastructure, part of a project backed by the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, or INEEL." Learn more about these government sponsored hackers at News.com.

• 13 September 2004
  "Making the genetic codes of dangerous pathogens a secret will not save anyone from bioterrorism and may make the population vulnerable to attacks from Mother Nature, scientists said on Thursday. Scientists now freely share information on the genomes of all sorts of bacteria and viruses, many of them potential biowarfare agents, and that should continue, the National Research Council committee said. 'There is nothing singly more sinister about the genome of plague than there is about the genome of a lot of other microorganisms,"'said Dr. Stanley Falkow, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University in California, who chaired the committee. Falkow and a panel of biologists and experts on bioweapons, genomics and security were asked to study whether there should be restrictions on this free flow of information and if so, how to do it." Learn more in Yahoo News.

• 10 September 2004
  "Microscopic traces of pollen are increasingly being used by world police forces to track down both victims and offenders. 'Pollen is everywhere, and most of it doesn't travel very far from its point of origin,' said forensics expert Tony Brown at a UK conference. Not only was pollen from each species unique, it was also readily identifiable, enabling investigators to tie people or vehicles to specific locations. Brown, who helped pin blame on the Bosnian Serbs for the 1995 murder of thousands of Muslim men at Srebrenica, said it was now possible to identify specific species of plant from the pollen." New technologies are allowing forensic scientists to analyze pollen residue to solve criminal investigations. Learn more at CNN.com.

• 9 September 2004
  "The RNC, of course, like the Democratic convention in Boston before it, was a high-priority 'national-security event.' But the conventions were also a showcase for state-of-the-art security measures, and now many of the same technologies are being used regularly at airports, seaports, urban centers and rail stations around the country...American life is now accompanied by the 24-hour whir of 300 BioWatch detectors in 30 major urban centers, with more to come. They are air-filtered devices that regularly trap samples; the newest ones can do their own genome tests, then automatically shoot messages by cell phone to control centers if anthrax or other bioweapons are detected. Chemical-weapons detectors will alert the Feds to attacks like the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attack on the Tokyo subway. Learn about some of the high-tech security measures that are being employed across the U.S. in Newsweek.

• 8 September 2004
  "Betty Carty figured she ought to be in the digital fast lane. Last Christmas, Carty purchased a Dell desktop computer, then signed up for a Comcast high-speed Internet connection. But her new Windows XP machine crashed frequently and would only plod across the Internet. Dell was no help. The PC maker insisted — correctly — that Carty's hardware worked fine. But in June, Comcast curtailed Carty's outbound e-mail privileges after pinpointing her PC as a major source of e-mail spam. An intruder had turned Carty's PC into a 'zombie,' spreading as many as 70,000 pieces of e-mail spam a day." An increasing number of hackers are turning personal computers into "zombies" in order to turn a profit. Learn more in USA Today.

• 7 September 2004
  "Already coined as Russia's September 11 by various Russian pundits and editorials, the tragic slaughter of hundreds of innocent people in a middle school in Beslan has the potential to trigger a major tremor in the foreign policy charted by President Vladimir Putin, perhaps even as far as heralding a new chapter in US-Russia relations, much to the chagrin of the so-called Eurasianists around Putin who have for a long time been advising him to steer clear of the US's 'war on terrorism.'" Recent acts of horrific terrorism within Russia have added a new dimension to the complex U.S. - Russian relationship. Learn more in the Asia Times.

• 6 September 2004
  "There's little doubt nowadays that the 21st century is shaping up to be a very unstable era in human history. Non-state actors like al-Qaeda are stepping up their fight against nation-states, employing mostly conventional, low-tech solutions to their acts of terrorism. Yet there is a new frontier emerging in the War on Terror – cyber terrorism. As the internet continues to grow in popularity and usage around the globe, more malevolent forces are using the web as a means to spark fear and spread their messages of hate and violence." Learn more about this issue in the Technology Review.

• 3 September 2004
  "Antivirus researchers have uncovered a startling increase in organized virus- and worm-writing activity that they say is powering an underground economy specializing in identity theft and spam...The link between viruses, worms and the underground criminal economy, however, goes back to long before the latest version of MyDoom, says Mikko Hypponen, antivirus research director at F-Secure Corp. in Helsinki, Finland. Starting with the initial outbreak of MyDoom in January, Hypponen began to notice that what had previously been considered little more than a rogue virus-writing subculture actually had a significant link to organized efforts to use malicious code to make money." Learn more in the Technology Review.

• 2 September 2004
  "It's not often that results from conferences on mathematics make the news, but that's precisely what happened last month at the annual Crypto conference in Santa Barbara, CA when researchers from France, Israel, and China all showed that they had discovered flaws in a widely used algorithm called MD5—an algorithm that I wrote about in some detail last month. The 'when life gives you lemons, make lemonade' message that came out of the conference was that this process of breaking codes and developing even stronger ones is all part of the cryptographer’s game. But what if a fundamental breakthrough in mathematics rendered useless all of the fancy encryption that the world now depends upon?" Learn more about this interesting question in the Technology Review.

• 1 September 2004
  "Big Brother is always watching in Britain. An estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit TV cameras observe people going about their everyday business, from getting on a bus to lining up at the bank to driving around London. It's widely estimated that the average Briton is scrutinized by 300 cameras a day. The phenomenon is enabled by the arrival of digital video, cheap memory and sophisticated software. And Britain is acknowledged as the world leader of Orwellian surveillance -- perhaps because it has the experience of Irish terrorism, and is on guard for even worse today." Great Britain leads the world in surveiling its own citizens. Yet, despite the Orwellian connotations, few British citizens actually seem to mind. Learn more at CNN.com.
  
  Back to Conflict and Security Archives