Laser beam spy camera joins war on terrorism
A laser that can scan a crowd and identify people who have been handling explosives is being secretly tested at British airports and railway stations. The device - no bigger than a shoe box - could also be used by police and MI5 surveillance teams to identify Islamic terrorists outside mosques or community centres. The laser can pick out suspects in large crowds and highlight explosive residue on their clothing and luggage. Professor John Tyrer, of Loughborough University, who helped to develop the equipment, said: “When you handle an explosive, the chemicals -such as Semtex and TNT - leave traces. With this technology we are able to see this telltale residue and identify possible suspects. Using laser technology we can see the explosives on people's clothes, on their hands or on items like backpacks such as those used by the July 7 London bombers.” He added: “This equipment could be carried by surveillance teams or could be set up to monitor a street, a railway, airport terminal or national stadium.” When the equipment scans a crowd, it alerts an operator when explosive particles are detected.
Echelon (Signals Intelligence)“Trillions of bytes of textual archive and thousands of online users, or gigabytes of live data stream per day that are filtered against tens of thousands of complex interest profiles” Echelon is a system used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept and process international communications passing via communications satellites. It is one part of a global surveillance systems that intercept messages from the Internet, from undersea cables, from radio transmissions, from secret equipment installed inside embassies, or use orbiting satellites to monitor signals anywhere on the earth's surface. The system includes stations run by Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in addition to those operated by the United States. They all form part of the same integrated global network using the same equipment and methods to extract information and intelligence illicitly from millions of messages every day, all over the world. The system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. A chain of secret interception facilities has been established around the world to tap into all the major components of the international telecommunications networks. Some monitor communications satellites, others land-based communications networks, and others radio communications. ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the US and its allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet. The computers at each station in the ECHELON network automatically search through the millions of messages intercepted for ones containing pre-programmed keywords. The thousands of simultaneous messages are read in "real time" as they pour into the station, hour after hour, day after day, as the computer finds intelligence needles in telecommunications haystacks. According to its website, the USA's National Security Agency is "a high technology organization... on the frontiers of communications and data processing". Russia, China, France and other nations also operate worldwide networks.
