A recent USA Today article sums up our modern privacy dilemma with one sentence: “With tiny tech, a video little brother is always watching”.

From the article –

Welcome to the era of citizen journalism.

“Video empowers the individual against big brother,” says Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California.

“Little brother is now watching back,” says Silicon Valley futurist Paul Saffo.

Citizens have been videotaping police and other incidents for more than a decade. One of the most notorious was the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1991.

But these days it doesn’t just happen piecemeal; taking videos and uploading them to the Internet is all the rage, thanks to tiny, inexpensive cameras, often embedded in cellphones, and the homemade video boom online.

When Richards started ranting at the comedy club last month, a patron went for his camera, a small Canon Powershot, says Harvey Levin of TMZ.com, the celebrity website that posted the video. Levin will not say whether TMZ paid for the video. He says the patron never planned on taking it and wants to remain anonymous.

“People would ordinarily never think of getting a shot off of their camera and sending it to someone like me when they’re eating at a deli and suddenly Paris Hilton walks in,” Levin says. “It’s created an army of passive paparazzi.

“It’s not that everybody has a camera. It’s that everybody has a cellphone and the cellphones all have cameras now.”

Call it cell-veillance.

Source: With tiny tech, a video little brother is always watching

TechEBlog has published their list of the top five strangest webcams. The list includes such webcams as the “USB Webcam with Telescopic Lens” the “360-Degree Webcam” and a stuffed animal webcam called the “Puppy Dog Webcam”.

You can view the entire webcam list along with descriptions and pictures @ Top 5 Strangest Webcams.

CNET News is reporting on a new use of cell phone mics by the FBI as eavesdropping devices. The FBI is using a “roving bug” technology that allows them to remotely activate a user’s cell phone mic to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The “roving bug” technology allows for eavesdropping even in surveillance situations where the user’s cell phone is powered off.

From CNET News —

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone’s microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a “roving bug,” and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

Nextel cell phones owned by two alleged mobsters, John Ardito and his attorney Peter Peluso, were used by the FBI to listen in on nearby conversations. The FBI views Ardito as one of the most powerful men in the Genovese family, a major part of the national Mafia.

The surveillance technique came to light in an opinion published this week by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. He ruled that the “roving bug” was legal because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to permit eavesdropping even of conversations that take place near a suspect’s cell phone.

Kaplan’s opinion said that the eavesdropping technique “functioned whether the phone was powered on or off.” Some handsets can’t be fully powered down without removing the battery; for instance, some Nokia models will wake up when turned off if an alarm is set.

Source: FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool

Here is an interesting site that allows you to trace a networked computer’s IP address, down to the nearest country, city, zip code – and have the location plotted on a Google map.

Search and Map IP Addresses

Wired News is reporting on a new technology startup called Reputation Defender that promises to help users delete and clean up their online reputation ( for a fee of course ).

From the article –

The mistakes you make on the internet can live forever — unless you hire somebody to clean up after you.

A new startup, ReputationDefender, will act on your behalf by contacting data hosting services and requesting the removal of any materials that threaten your good social standing. Any web citizen willing to pay ReputationDefender’s modest service fees can ask the company to seek and destroy embarrassing office party photos, blog posts detailing casual drug use or saucy comments on social networking profiles.

Source: Delete Your Bad Web Rep