I wonder if this will get noticed

Looking in my window right now.

Do you ever wonder if the things you write online or say on the phone are being picked up by the supercomputers of some super-secret agency, which then sends serious looking dudes in black outfits and night vision goggles out to your house to peer in your windows?

I do.

Reviewing a book about privacy, Ronald Bailey writes in The Wall Street Journal:

It's worth recalling the Pentagon's attempt to deploy Total Information Awareness, in which a gigantic data-mining enterprise would troll through commercial and government databases to generate data profiles of any American based on his credit-card purchases, travel itineraries, telephone records, email, medical histories and financial information.

Public outrage supposedly stopped the program, yet it turns out that the National Security Agency is building a huge data center in Utah that may well realize the earlier program's surveillance goals. Even now, according to a 2010 article in the Washington Post, "every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications." 

News reports in July revealed that, in the past year alone, cellphone carriers responded to 1.3 million demands from law enforcement for subscriber records, including text messages and caller locations. Mr. Keizer asserts, rightly, that "the ultimate check on government as a whole is its inability to know everything about those it governs." State ignorance is its citizenry's bliss.

I'd just like to say to the smarty pants NSA that if you can find my keys I'd appreciate it.

It's getting real spooky out there

Boo! I see you!

Too many people want to know what I'm doing.

The Army is testing its $517 million spy blimp in the skies over the New Jersey military base where the German airship Hindenburg crashed in 1937.

Bosses who want help gauging employees' morale can now turn to Microsoft's workplace social network, Yammer. A new feature offers managers a kind of emotional surveillance system, showing which feelings workers are expressing in messages posted to a company's Yammer network, which has similarities to both Facebook and Twitter.

A new app released by President Obama’s campaign team has raised privacy fears. The free Obama for America app – which can be downloaded for the iPhone and Android – gives users the first name, last initial, gender and addresses of registered Democrats. “Sign up to canvass—then get started right away with a list of voters in your neighborhood. Access scripts and enter feedback and responses in real time as you go,” the campaign states on its website.

When Google imagines the future of Web search, it sees a search engine that understands human meaning and not just words, that can have a spoken conversation with computer users and that gives users results not just from the Web but also from their personal lives.

I see you, too.

A dramatic new way to track criminals and potential terrorists was unveiled Wednesday by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly. It melds cameras, computers and data bases capable of nabbing bad guys before they even know they’re under suspicion. The system uses 3,000 cameras positioned in Lower Manhattan south of Canal Street, river to river, and between 30th and 60th streets, river to river. It links up to license plate readers, 911 calls and other NYPD data records.

Researchers at University College of London have applied principles of radar used in defense and designed a detector using home based Wi-Fi routers to spy on people across walls. Using the principles behind the Doppler effect they have built a prototype unit that uses Wi-Fi signals and recognizes frequency changes to detect moving objects.

They're watching you

Major websites such as MSN.com and Hulu.com have been tracking people's online activities using powerful new methods that are almost impossible for computer users to detect, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The new techniques, which are legal, reach beyond the traditional "cookie," a small file that websites routinely install on users' computers to help track their activities online. Hulu and MSN were installing files known as "supercookies," which are capable of re-creating users' profiles after people deleted regular cookies, according to researchers at Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley.

As consumers become savvier about protecting their privacy online, the new techniques appear to be gaining ground.

Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate, identified what is known as a "history stealing" tracking service on Flixster.com, a social-networking service for movie fans recently acquired by Time Warner Inc., and on Charter Communications Inc.'s Charter.net.

Such tracking peers into people's Web-browsing histories to see if they previously had visited any of more than 1,500 websites, including ones dealing with fertility problems, menopause and credit repair, the researchers said. History stealing has been identified on other sites in recent years, but rarely at that scale.

Gathering information about Web-browsing history can offer valuable clues about people's interests, concerns or household finances, the Journal says. Someone researching a disease online, for example, might be thought to have the illness, or at least to be worried about it.

Creepy.

What your digital photos reveal about you

I watch too many crime shows on TV, but one thing I know is the good guys can zero in on the bad guys by tracking their cell phones. It seems like every show uses cell phone tracking in one way or another. I have no idea if any of this is true.

PC World says some of it is: The geotagging data contained in many mobile phone images lets strangers know exactly where you are. Whoa, dude!

When you upload an image to Twitter a subset of the 75 million Twitter users will know your exact location. Digital photos automatically store a wealth of information--known as EXIF data--produced by the camera. Most of the data is harmless, but about 3 percent of all photos posted on Twitter contain location data, and that figure is growing. Anyone on the Web who can read the data knows where the photographer was standing.

Thank goodness I don't know how to do that! Here's what can happen:

Mayhemic Labs' Ben Jackson detailed how he found personal details about a man in a photo. Using accompanying geotagging data, Jackson located the man's house on Google Earth. Then he found a name associated with the house where the photo was taken, leading him to a Facebook account that yielded a birth date, marriage status, and friends. A second username listed on the Facebook page led to a second Twitter account, and so forth. The point here is that once you start pulling on the thread of information contained in a geotagged image, a single photo can reveal a whole trove of personal data--far more than you might think.

Book 'em, Dano!

PC World explains the science and how to disable the geotagging feature on smart phones here.