I always feel like somebody's watching me...

[truth]

City ramps up 'Operation Disruption'
Police to add 50 new remote-controlled camera installations.


Tribune staff reports

April 6, 2004, 11:09 AM CDT

Chicago police announced today they will add 50 new remote-controlled camera installations, which now will contain gunshot-detection equipment, as part of their ongoing "Operation Disruption" against drugs and gang violence.

The $2.8 million expansion, in which the pole-mounted, bulletproof cameras will join 30 already deployed in high-crime areas of the city, was disclosed by Mayor Richard Daley and police officials at a news conference this morning at the Bronzeville police headquarters on the city's South Side.

Daley said the new camera pods will contain "the most sophisticated crime-fighting technology in the country."

The cameras are encased in white steel boxes bearing the Chicago Police Department seal and flashing blue strobe lights. The first units went up last summer and were credited by police with helping to bring about a marked drop in crime where they were installed.

Existing pods will be retrofitted with the same technology as the new ones, and will able to pinpoint gunshots within 20 feet and transmit the data via a microwave network to two police surveillance centers, officials said. The upgrades will be operational in September.

"This is a cost-effective crime-fighting tool that allows us to use state-of-the-art technology with minimal additional manpower," Daley said. "Best of all, the technology is paid for with money seized from drug dealers, so they're paying us to disrupt their crimes."

"We installed 30 Operation Disruption camera pods with one idea: To hit gangbangers in the pocketbook by disrupting the narcotics trade and by sending a message to gang members that they are being watched," said First Deputy Police Supt. Dana Starks.

"Community feedback has been overwhelmingly positive," he said. "Control of corners once crawling with narcotics traffic has been returned to law-abiding families, and crime has decreased."

In areas where the surveillance cameras have been deployed in the last seven months, police calls have declined by 44 percent, Starks said. Narcotics calls are down by 76 percent and incidents of serious crime by 17 percent, while narcotics arrests have increased by 61 percent.

The new pods will go into areas prone to gang and drug-related violence, and existing pods will be moved around based on police analysis of narcotics activity, intelligence on gang rivalries, violent-crime incidents and community input, Starks said.

"In order to disrupt gangs," he said, "we need to be as mobile and as flexible as they are."
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

[CaddyDaddy77]

Seems we are following our counterparts across the pond.

Stuck in my head for the rest of the day....

Who's watching
Tell me who's watching
Who's watching me

I'm just an average man with an average life
I work from 9 to 5, hey hell, I pay the price
All I want is to be left alone, in my average home
But why do I always feel
Like I'm in the Twilight Zone? and...

I always feel like somebody's watching me
And I have no privacy, whoa-oa-oa
I always feel like somebody's watching me
Tell me, is it just a dream

When I come home at night
I bang the door real tight
People call me on the phone I'm trying to avoid
Or can the people on TV see me, or am I just paranoid?
When I'm in the shower, I'm afraid to wash my hair
Cause I might open my eyes and find someone standing there!
People say I'm crazy, just a little touch
But maybe showers remind me of "Psycho" too much
That's why...

I always feel like somebody's watching me
And I have no privacy, whoa-oa-oa
I always feel like somebody's watching me
Who's playing tricks on me?

Who's watching me
I don't know anymore!
Are the neighbours watching me?
Who's watching
Well is the mailman watching me?
Tell me who's watching
And I don't feel safe anymore, oh what a mess
I wonder who's watching me now
Who?
The IRS?!

I always feel like somebody's watching me
And I have no privacy, whoa-oa-oa
I always feel like somebody's watching me
Tell me is it just a dream
I always feel like somebody's watching me
And I have no privacy, whoa-oa-oa
I always feel like somebody's watching me
Who's playing tricks on me?
Who's watching me?
I always feel like somebody's watching me
Oooh, whoa-oa-oa
I always feel like somebody's watching me
Tell me, can it be?
Who's watching me?
I always feel like somebody's watching me
Whoa-oa-oa
I always feel like somebody's watching me
Who's playing tricks on me?
Who's watching me?
I always feel like somebody's watching me
Can I have my privacy
I always feel like somebody's watching me
Who's playing tricks on me?

[road trip]

Time to turn the radio back on...

I can't finish the day with that song in my head!!

[lemon boy]

Hell, just about 20 years late in his predictions but that fella Orwell sure was smart.

[boarderline]

Beware.

New Software Seeking State Tax Scofflaws
Sat Apr 3, 3:32 PM ET

Add Technology - AP to My Yahoo!

By MARTIN FINUCANE, Associated Press Writer

BOSTON - Tax scofflaws, beware! A pack of digital bloodhounds may be on your trail. State revenue agencies across the nation are hunting for tax evaders with new high-tech tools: computer programs that mine an increasing number of databases for clues on the finances of people and businesses.

If your name is flagged, expect a letter or a call.

"It's the new trend. It's where everybody is headed," said Verenda Smith, government affairs associate at the Federation of Tax Administrators, which represents state tax agencies. "The greatest value of these systems is in finding patterns that the human eye isn't that good at seeing."

In Massachusetts, for example, the state tax agency can scan a U.S. Customs and Border Protection database of people who paid duties on big-ticket items entering the country — so anyone who fails to pay the state the required 5 percent "use tax" gets flagged.

The state has also tried comparing motor vehicle registration data with tax returns, looking for people who might be driving Rolls Royces or Jaguars but declaring only a small income, Revenue Commissioner Alan LeBovidge said.

"They're able to drill or mine increasingly large amounts of information from various sources. Activities that would have previously taken them years of work can now be done within seconds," said Amar Gupta, co-director of the Productivity From Information Technology research center at MIT's Sloan School of Management. "The dynamics have changed."

The new tools have reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in increased tax collections, officials say. But the government's growing sophistication at collecting and scrutinizing data about taxpayers is sounding alarms among privacy advocates.

The Federation of Tax Administrators doesn't keep a definitive list of states using the technology, but Massachusetts, Texas, California, Washington, Virginia, Iowa and Florida are known to be leaders in the trend, which began in the late 1990s. The IRS is also using the techniques.

Revenue agency officials say the systems make them more efficient, with audits tending to yield more. They also say innocent people who shouldn't be audited at all are less likely to be bothered.

The tax agencies' "data warehouses" can stockpile data from state and federal agencies and, in some cases, private sources. And they are using new tools to analyze the data, including "data-mining" software that can scrutinize mountains of information to find patterns or establish relationships.

Tax officials say many of the databases they use have been available to them for years — but it has never been so easy to integrate and analyze them.

That ease with which government can now measure up our lives troubles Chris Hoofnagle, associate director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based privacy group.

He worries that the growing database culture in the United States "can empower the state over individuals or increase the power of the state."

"It can be used maliciously," said Hoofnagle.

Government data-mining sparked controversy last year, forcing a shutdown of the Pentagon (news - web sites)'s Total Information Awareness project to plumb public and private records for clues about terrorism. More recently, privacy concerns led several states to drop out of the Matrix crime database system.

The digital dossier-building among tax agencies doesn't just pinpoint which taxpayers should be audited. The analyzing systems can automatically generate letters to taxpayers and help locate people who have changed their addresses.

The Massachusetts system mixes databases from the IRS and Customs, along with state motor vehicle, incorporation and professional licensing records. The state tax agency says it uses other databases, but won't name them.



Officials in Massachusetts and several other states said, however, that their agencies did not buy information from the sometimes-controversial vendors that aggregate and sell vast amounts of personal data about individuals.

For its part, the IRS "has contracted with several companies that assist the agency with data mining, primarily the agency's own data, and to build case models to identify non-compliant taxpayers," said agency spokeswoman Nancy Mathis.

The Massachusetts agency has brought in $47 million thanks to the system since its June 2002 inception, LeBovidge said. California officials estimate that for the four years ending in fiscal 2003, their new system brought in $260.6 million — while Texas says is data-mining tech has harvested more than $362 million since the late 1990s.

As an example of a successful case, Massachusetts officials said IRS records led them to a man who worked in the state but had not bothered to file state income taxes. He had to cough up $33,000.

LeBovidge says it's unfair to call database-mining Orwellian.

"We're asking people to pay their taxes that are legitimately due," he said. "And if we don't have people pay the taxes that are due, then we have to ask the people that are stepping forward to pay more. And that's not fair."

LeBovidge now unabashedly dreams of a day when people won't even have to fill out their income tax forms: The government will have so much information about people's finances that it can simply fill out tax forms and mail them to taxpayers to be endorsed.

California has taken a step in that direction, mailing 23,000 pre-filled-out forms to taxpayers who have simpler types of returns, a small fraction of the state's 15 million business and private returns, said Denise Azimi, spokeswoman for the California Franchise Tax Board,

She said an upgrade to California's "non-filer" system that began in the late 1990s offered the state an increased data warehousing and analysis capability. The system brings together multiple databases, including records from the IRS, state agencies, banks and brokerage houses to try to identify tax cheats.

In its data-mining for tax cheats, Texas uses a pattern-recognition technology similar to what credit card companies use to flag unusual charges.

Looking at a restaurant, for example, the system can examine the cigarette, alcohol and sales taxes collected and compare the numbers to what would be expected of a typical restaurant, flagging numbers that seem out of whack, said Billy Hamilton, Texas deputy comptroller. Texas also scans Federal Aviation Administration (news - web sites) records for people who have bought planes and failed to pay a sales or use tax.

For privacy advocates, such methods can violate a fundamental privacy principle: data collected for one purpose shouldn't be used for another without a person's permission.

James Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology says said he wouldn't go so far as to call for eliminating data-mining for tax cheats.

But they should be "subject to checks and balances," he said, with those targeted given a chance to dispute a state's findings.

"Are people innocent until proven guilty," he said, "or are they guilty by computer match until proven innocent?"

[mr_gyptian]

Truth, something tells me these cameras/detection equipment will be concentrated South of State and west of 90. that is unless they're trying to cut down on all the crime in the Lincoln Park, Lakeview, and gold coast areas.

[irul&ublo]

Whatever happened to Rockwell, anyway?