How to Tell if Someone's Lying to You

Interactive slideshow providing ten tips on how to tell if someone's lying to you. These can of course be interpreted in different ways and applied under specific circumstances only. Some are very practical though :

01. Watch Body Language
02. Seek Detail
03. Beware Unpleasantness
04. Observe Eye Contact
05. Signs of Stress
06. Listen for the Pause
07. Ask Again
08. Beware Those Who Protest Too Much
09. Know Thyself
10. Work on Your Intuition

Two more I can add -- answering without being asked, and on purposely stating the possibility as a negative statement already. Here's the article itself, as well as several more handy tips on detecting lies. Don't forget - if someone's being too nice with you, it means they're beating you already.

Ear whisper courtesy of Cartoonstock.com

London's Police Experimenting with Head-Mounted Surveillance Cameras

Innovative, but a full scale violation of privacy -- what privacy with walking CCTVs nowadays?!

"The world draws ever-closer to the dystopia imagined in Hollywood blockbusters -- police in London are to be equipped with head-mounted cameras which will record everything in the direction the officer is looking. The tiny cameras are about the size of an AA battery and can record images of an extremely high quality.

Claimed to be a deterrent for anti-social behaviour, the first run of head-cams are being tested by eight Metropolitan beat officers this month. If successful, all police officers will eventually be equipped with a head camera.

These new 'robocops' add to the growing number of surveillance machines that peer at the public. Cynics argue that the logical progression of the police head-cam will be head-cameras that all citizens are required to wear. The video data would be relayed back to a central database where transgressions are recorded by a computer."

George Orwell is definitely turning upside down in his grave in the time of writing, and it's entirely up to you to come up with the possible scenarios for abusing this innovation -- The Final Cut too, has a good perspective.

Think that's not enough to raise your eyebrows? British Telecom is also about to "put thousands of spy camera recorders in its phone boxes and beam suspects mugshots to police. Cameras stationed on top of lampposts near the kiosks will send images to hidden digital video recorders inside the booths. Suspects photos will then be messaged almost instantly to hand-held digital assistants used by police and emergency services."

Issues to keep in mind:
- No more tax payers' money wasted on CCTVs to only cover the blind spots introduced by the old ones, now you have the "walking CCTVs" taking care
- Face and voice recognition, as well as parabolic type of remote listening capabilities will be the next milestones to reach
- Data collected would prove invaluable to ongoing investigations, and you know, "computers never lie" so digitally introducing minor motives here and there becomes a handy weakness
- More entertaining reality shows will follow for the purpose of communicating the value of the cameras to the general public
- Someone will sooner or later find a way to jam the stream

There's a saying about not looking anyone straight into the eyes on the mean streets of New York, guess the same applies to not looking straight into the eyes of London's police anymore. Every country needs an EFF of its own, especially the U.K these days. To illustrate what I have in mind, EPIC's listing the U.K at the top of the leading EU surveillance societies, and you may also find the U.K's opinion on its state of total surveillance, informative as well.

Finger-mounted keyboard chick courtesy of Kittytech.

Widener University Forensics Course

Just noticed that the reading materials for the course are also listing my "Steganography and Cyber Terrorism Communications" post. Looks nice!

Satellite Imagery Trade-offs

Informative to know :

"Eventually, Andersen said, the big but light telescopes could solve a spy-satellite conundrum. Now, those camera equipped satellites must fly closer to Earth to generate usable pictures. That means their orbits exceed the speed of Earth’s rotation, so the satellites cannot spend much time photographing one location. If spy satellites had huge telescopes, they could be placed higher above the planet in an orbit that moves at the same speed as Earth’s rotation, so they could photograph the same region constantly."

There's just one tiny comment that makes a bad impression - “That way, you could keep a constant eye on someone like Osama bin Laden” he said." In exactly the say way a security consultant wrongly tries to talk top management into increasing a budget by using the buzzword cyberterrorism, it wouldn't work and it's a rather desperate move. Even though, in case you're interested in keeping track of Bin Laden's desert trips, make sure you add a detection pattern for a white horse riding through Afghanistan.

Go through some of my previous posts to catch up with my comments on related topics.

U.S No-Fly-List Enforced at Deutsche Bank NYC

Apparently, the no-fly-list has been recently used as an access control measure at the Deutsche Bank's NYC's office according to the DealBreaker :

"We hear Deutsche Bank’s super-suped-up security extends beyond just the beefy armed guards patrolling the street outside its headquarters at 60 Wall. Yesterday apparently a consultant who was scheduled to attend a meeting at the bank was denied entry because his name appears on the federal “no fly” list. “It was the most intense security I've seen, except for maybe the Israeli consulate,” a source who was present when the consultant was denied entry tells DealBreaker."

While that's a very unpragmatic paranoia, a U.S congresswoman seems to have recently experienced the "no-fly-list trip" too :

"Sanchez said her staff had booked her a one-way ticket from Boise, Idaho to Cincinnati through Denver. Her staff, however, was prevented from printing her boarding pass online and were also blocked from printing her boarding pass at an airport kiosk. Sanchez said she was instructed to check in with a United employee, who told her she was on the terrorist watch list. The employee asked her for identification, Sanchez recalled. "I handed over my congressional ID and he started laughing and said, 'I'm going to need an ID that has your birthday on it,'" Sanchez said in a phone interview with The Associated Press. The employee used Sanchez's birth date to determine that she was not the same Loretta Sanchez listed in the database and she was able to board her flight, she said."

Bureaucrats don't just slow down innovation and take credit for it, but when they also fall down from a window it takes a week for them to hit the ground.

Jihadi PSYOPS - CIA Attacks on Terrorist Websites

Last week, the Internet Haganah reported on rumors around jihadist forums, namely, that the CIA has been attacking jihadi web sites.

Now while this is totally untrue -- the CIA would rather be monitoring instead of shuting them down, or shut them down only after they've gathered enough info -- it's a good example of twisting the facts to improve the productivity and self-esteem of the jihadists supposed to strike back.