Latest news with #surveillance
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
Brooklet drugstore burglarized
BROOKLET, Ga. (WSAV) — The Brooklet Police Department (BPD) are asking for the public's help to find possible suspects tied to a burglary at the Brooklet Drugstore. The burglary happened early Friday morning. BPD says they are looking for three individuals wearing dark clothing. Their identities remain unknown at this time. BPD is asking nearby businesses and people who live in the downtown Brooklet area to review their surveillance footage from that time. Any suspicious activity may be critical to the investigation. Anyone with information is asked to contact BPD directly at 912-842-9911. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
Three teens charged with assaulting street violin player at Erie bus stop
The Erie Bureau of Police has charged three teenagers with assault for punching and kicking a 23-year-old man at a bus stop at the corner of Peach and West Ninth streets. Deputy Chief Rick Lorah said the incident, which occurred May 20 at around 3 p.m., began as an argument between the parties aboard an EMTA bus and then turned physical at the bus stop. Lorah said he couldn't confirm what triggered the argument. '(The victim) was on the ground and sustained injuries consistent with getting punched and kicked while down, consistent with being assaulted by multiple actors,' Lorah said. The victim, who Lorah said frequently played the violin in the area as a busker, sustained non-life-threatening injuries and was treated at a local hospital. Lorah said five teenagers were at the scene but two didn't participate in the assault. More: "We will openly and happily smash you": More revealed in Erie biker fight with 16 charged He said police were able to track down the teenagers after speaking to witnesses and the bus driver and looking at surveillance video from the bus and surrounding businesses. The three teenagers will appear in juvenile court at a later date. A.J. Rao can be reached at arao@ Follow him on X @ETNRao. This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Street violin player assaulted at Erie bus stop; three teens charged
The Guardian
14 hours ago
- General
- The Guardian
A dystopian surveillance fear has become reality in Texas
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of 'lo and behold, the dystopian thing that women and activists warned would happen ends up happening'. This time the issue is automated license plate readers (ALPRs), which capture (no prizes for guessing!) license plate data and allow law enforcement to build a picture of where a particular vehicle has been. There's no opting out of being tracked: if you drive, you should simply assume that these cameras, which are sometimes hidden in objects like traffic cones, are logging your movements. And you should assume that this license plate data can be combined with other surveillance data to paint a very detailed picture of your life. Privacy only exists for our billionaire overlords these days. The rest of us are just data points. There are obviously plenty of legitimate uses to ALPRs. Their proponents will wax lyrical about how they can help solve carjackings and kidnappings. But, like all technology, they are ripe for abuse. They are particularly ripe for abuse in an increasingly authoritarian US, full of lawmakers who want to control women's bodies. Back in 2022, a few months after Roe v Wade was overturned, the Guardian published a piece on ALPRs warning that 'an expanding web of license plate readers could be 'weaponized' against abortion'. It focused on a company called Flock, one of the big players in this space, which promises a 'holistic solution to crime'. Flock's technology could be used to 'criminalize people seeking reproductive health and further erode people's ability to move about their daily lives free from being tracked and traced', one expert told the Guardian at the time. Another civil rights expert warned that Flock, which has stated that it is happy to provide technology to help enact whatever laws have been passed, 'illustrates how surveillance isn't actually about benefiting society or protecting people – it's about enforcing the political goals of those in power'. Unfortunately, all these experts have been proved right. This week 404 Media reported that a Texas police officer used Flock to perform a nationwide search of more than 83,000 ALPR cameras while looking for a woman who had had an abortion. Abortion is almost entirely illegal in Texas but law enforcement reportedly looked at cameras in states such as Washington and Illinois where abortion is legal. Anti-abortion voices love to argue that they're not trying to control women, they're trying to protect women. Funnily enough this same talking point came up in this case. Sheriff Adam King of Johnson county, Texas, told 404 Media that the woman had self-administered the abortion 'and her family was worried that she was going to bleed to death, and we were trying to find her to get her to a hospital.' He added: 'We weren't trying to block her from leaving the state or whatever to get an abortion. It was about her safety.' Perhaps this was true in this case. Many of the details are still unclear so it's hard to tell. But even if this was purely benevolent surveillance, you can certainly see where all this is headed. 'This incident is undeniably a harbinger of more AI-enabled reproductive surveillance and investigations to come,' Ashley Emery, senior policy analyst in reproductive health and rights at the National Partnership for Women & Families, told 404 Media. 'Especially for women of color who are already over-surveilled and over-policed, the stakes couldn't be higher.' 'Texas is the land of freedom,' Governor Greg Abbott recently proclaimed. If you're a woman in Texas, however, 'freedom' seems to have quite a strange definition. Not only are you not allowed freedom over your reproductive decisions, a number of Texas city councils (some of which are composed entirely of male lawmakers) have been trying to pass travel bans that would stop Texans from driving to abortion appointments in other states. Abortion bans, attempted travel bans, and a network of surveillance technology that can be used to enforce these bans: this is what 'freedom' for women in Texas looks like. In the weeks and months after the 2023 Lahaina fire, 'one in six female fire survivors surveyed felt forced to engage in sexual acts in exchange for basic necessities such as food, clothing and housing', reports Nina Lakhani. 'Sexual violence has become so widespread in Darfur that many people chillingly speak about it as unavoidable,' Médecins Sans Frontières states in a horrifying update on the crisis. 'While Saudi Arabia celebrates being awarded the Fifa men's World Cup and meticulously promotes itself on the global stage as reformed, women who have dared to publicly call for more rights and freedoms have faced house arrest, jail and exile,' the Guardian reports. Saudi Arabia, it should be noted, has had a lot of help promoting itself as 'reformed' by the US media, which has run numerous puff pieces on Mohammed bin Salman – also known as the 'bone saw' prince. She was watering flowers when she was killed in an airstrike. The charred bodies of seven of Dr. Alaa al-Najjar's 10 children arrived at her hospital. Two others, including a seven-month-old, remain missing, presumably under the rubble. Despite pretending to be outraged about the slaughter in Gaza, the UK has sent its trade envoy to Israel to boost commercial links. Meanwhile US lawmakers are cheering the killing on. The percentage of mothers reporting 'excellent' mental health dropped from 38% in 2016 to 26% in 2023. This decline was observed across nearly every socioeconomic subgroup examined. Sign up to The Week in Patriarchy Get Arwa Mahdawi's weekly recap of the most important stories on feminism and sexism and those fighting for equality after newsletter promotion Pretty sure Pauline Al Said, who has been fined for stealing more than £1,000-worth of Le Creuset cookware, steaks, wine and gin, has taken a page out of the high-society scammer Anna Delvey's book. If you can grift your way to viral fame and a Netflix series then crime really does pay! (This should not be read as encouragement to do crime.) The lyrics include the following: 'Kathryn Bromwich from the Guardian states that Trans people make up roughly 0.5% of the UK population and are twice as likely to be victims of crime than cis people.' Nash told Attitude that she came out with the song because of JK Rowling's anti-trans activism. 'I just wanted it to be on record, in music history and in feminist history, for there to be somebody else in culture that is saying that I just don't believe that's feminism,' Nash told Attitude. The Euphoria actor, who has spoken out about being objectified by fans, is now selling soap made with her used bathwater. Un-brie-lievable. Here you go! You're welcome. Doug the Pug, a canine influencer with millions of followers, has received an honorary degree from the University of New Haven in Connecticut in 'Furensic Science'. He's already got an unofficial dogtorate in cuteness. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
The Guardian
15 hours ago
- Health
- The Guardian
US immigration authorities collecting DNA information of children in criminal database
US immigration authorities are collecting and uploading the DNA information of migrants, including children, to a national criminal database, according to government documents released earlier this month. The database includes the DNA of people who were either arrested or convicted of a crime, which law enforcement uses when seeking a match for DNA collected at a crime scene. However, most of the people whose DNA has been collected by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), the agency that published the documents, were not listed as having been accused of any felonies. Regardless, CBP is now creating a detailed DNA profile on migrants that will be permanently searchable by law enforcement, which amounts to a 'massive expansion of genetic surveillance', one expert said. The DNA information is stored in a database managed by the FBI called the Combined DNA Index System (Codis), which is used across the country by local, state and federal law enforcement to identify suspects of crimes using their DNA data. Wired first reported the practice and the existence of these documents, and estimates there are more than 133,000 migrant teens and children whose DNA has been collected and uploaded to Codis. One of them was just four years old. 'In order to secure our borders, CBP is devoting every resource available to identify who is entering our country. We are not letting human smugglers, child sex traffickers and other criminals enter American communities,' Hilton Beckham, assistant commissioner of public affairs at CBP, told Wired in a statement. 'Toward this end, CBP collects DNA samples for submission to the FBI's Combined DNA Index System … from persons in CBP custody who are arrested on federal criminal charges, and from aliens detained under CBP's authority who are subject to fingerprinting and not otherwise exempt from the collection requirement.' Experts at Georgetown University and the Center on Privacy and Technology published a report last week that found that CBP was collecting the DNA of almost every migrant detained, regardless of how long they were detained. The agency has added more than 1.5m DNA profiles to Codis since 2020, a 5,000% increase in just three years, according to the report. It's a 'massive expansion of genetic surveillance and an unjustified invasion of privacy,' according to one of the authors of the report, Emerald Tse. 'The program reinforces harmful narratives about immigrants and intensifies existing policing practices that target immigrant communities and communities of color, making us all less safe,' Tse said in a statement. The documents CBP published, which detail each individual whose DNA was swabbed, their age and country of origin, where they were transferred to, and what they were charged with, date back to as early as 2020. The latest document published is from the first quarter of 2025. There are hundreds of thousands of entries of people whose DNA has been collected by CBP between 2020 and 2024. Of the more than 130,000 individuals who were children or teens, nearly 230 were children under the age of 13 and more than 30,000 were between 14 and 17 years old, according to Wired. CBP first launched a pilot program to begin collecting detainees' DNA data in 2020, in accordance with a Department of Justice rule that gave the agency three years to comply with a new requirement to collect genetic samples and upload it to Codis. At the time, CBP wrote that it was collecting DNA data from non-US citizens who had been detained between the ages of 14 and 79. The Department of Homeland Security and CBP policy generally states that children under 14 are not obliged to have their DNA information collected, though there is some discretion afforded to field officers. However, this pace of genetic data collection would not have been possible in a criminal legal context, according to the Center on Privacy and Technology and Georgetown report. 'Until 2020, almost all the DNA profiles in Codis's 'offender' database were added by state and local police and other criminal law enforcement agencies,' the report reads. 'In the criminal context, there are some limitations on when, how and from whom criminal law enforcement agencies can take DNA which make the process of amassing samples cumbersome and resource-intensive.' Sign up to TechScape A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives after newsletter promotion The expansion was possible partly because there are fewer limitations on DNA collection within the context of immigration. 'In the immigration context, the only limitation on DNA collection is that a person must be 'detained'. But the meaning of the term 'detained' in the immigration context is notoriously broad, vague and ever shifting,' the report reads. According to the CBP website, the agency sends the DNA data directly to the FBI and does not store or maintain the DNA data itself. That genetic information is stored by the FBI indefinitely, according to the Center on Privacy and Technology and Georgetown report. 'How would it change your behavior to know that the government had a drop of your blood – or saliva – containing your 'entire genetic code, which will be kept indefinitely in a government-controlled refrigerator in a warehouse in Northern Virginia'?' the report reads, quoting CBP's documents. 'Would you feel free to seek out the medical or reproductive care you needed? To attend protests and voice dissent? To gather together with the people of your choosing?'
Free Malaysia Today
18 hours ago
- General
- Free Malaysia Today
Fake transit ploy foiled at KLIA, 105 foreign nationals ordered to leave
The border control agency said it would enhance its surveilance at all international gateways in the country and conduct thorough checks on all foreigners entering or leaving the country. PETALING JAYA : An attempt by a group of foreign nationals to enter the country on the pretext of being here on transit was thwarted by the Malaysian border control agency at KLIA on Thursday. The agency said that over 400 individuals from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India were screened during a targeted operation at Terminal 1, Bernama reported. 'Of these, 105 were found not to meet entry requirements and were subsequently ordered to return to their countries of origin. 'The tactic involved claiming to be transiting through Malaysia en route to a third country,' the agency was quoted as saying in a statement. However, investigations conducted in collaboration with the airlines revealed that their connecting flight tickets to these third-country destinations had been cancelled as soon as the individuals boarded their flights to KLIA. 'This was a deliberate ploy to mislead immigration officers,' it said. The agency said it would enhance its surveilance at all international gateways in the country and conduct thorough checks on all individuals entering or leaving Malaysia. It also issued a stern warning, stressing that no leniency would be shown to any party, including immigration officers found to be negligent or complicit, who will face disciplinary and legal action.
