The new ‘Police Air Force’

How  the UK’s new Police Chief is promoting the civil use of drones amid pan-European calls for UAV liberalisation.

This month sees the launch of the National Police Air Service (NPAS) a new cross-boundary cost-saving venture that joins all of the UK’s regional police air capabilities into one umbrella organisation – in effect a new national police air force. The objective of the NPAS is to allow faster, cheaper and more efficient coordinated helicopter response across the country

How to down a drone…

“If you’ve done nothing wrong… you have nothing to fear.”

This year a UK Home Office backed coalition of regional Police Authorities will embark on a project to extend their national surveillance network by deploying unmanned airborne surveillance drones across the country. It’s planned that in the build up to 2012 the drones will be used to foil potential terrorist attacks, detect illegal immigration planning to cross the channel (by flying over France?), monitor anti-social behaviour and public order situations (demonstrations) and of course to gather intelligence on subversive activities.

The introduction of these drones represents a significant expansion of the surveillance state, planned and delivered by un-democratic consortium of police authorities and loosely regulated by vague and rarely tested laws. With this expansion of the surveillance state should come an equal counter-response probing the legal and practical boundaries of surveillance:

What methods can be used to disrupt or destroy drone technology?

Mischief Theory and Practise Part Two: ‘Deconstruction’

“Encouraging Destructiveness
It should be pointed out to the saboteur where the circumstances are suitable, that he is acting in self-defense against the enemy, or retaliating against the enemy for other acts of destruction. A reasonable amount of humor in the presentation of suggestions for simple sabotage will relax tensions of fear.”

‘SIMPLE SABOTAGE FIELD MANUAL’
Office of Strategic Services
Washington, D. C.
17 January 1944

Existing within the urban environment necessitates an escalating war of resistance over un-requested invasive messages – the high science of communication or the blunt hammer of advertising: billboards, subway lcd screens, street advertising, point of sale, free papers, guerilla marketing, the subliminal, the liminal and the blatantly overt. ‘Everything that is made can be unmade’ – in this spirit we explore the tactical opportunities to degrade, disrupt and ultimately reclaim our space.

Musical roads of the world.

Steen Krarup Jensen and Jakob Freud-Magnus building the Asphaltophone

back in the seventies novelty cereal packet gifts reached a zenith of inventiveness and surreality.My particular favourite was a sound player ‘toy’ – basically a strip of red plastic, shaped like a cable tie, with audio samples encoded into grooves in the strip. The idea was to fit one end to a hole in the empty cereal packet and run your fingernail along the strip at a constant speed. the cereal box acted as an sound box, amplifying the vibrations delighting the astonished breakfast audience with audio clips from history, if my memory serves me correctly, Chamberlain’s “…and here is the paper” and Churchill’s ” some chicken, some neck” amongst others.

how to be invisible

I’ve always been of the opinion that people over concerned with surveillance and data security are displaying the first stages of clinical paranoia. It’s well known, for those that care to look, that the UK police and military have in their possession technology which enables them to track individuals movements visually and electronically (think of google maps ++), trace your behaviour (spending, travelling, health, political persuasion), listen in to conversations and so-on – our only real defence against this intrusion has been the plod/MOD’s incompetence at cross referencing and interpreting the mass of data they’ve so carefully collated.

Britain is one of the world’s most surveyed society; It is estimated (2002 figures) that the United Kingdom is watched by over 4.2 million CCTV cameras. This equates to one camera for every fourteen people; each UK subject is recorded on average by up to three hundred cameras a day. Surveillance has become part of our lives; we’ve become used to accepting surveillance as a shield against crime and terrorism, sacrificing our privacy for the apparent greater good. However a recent trend is the movement of commercial organisation into the field of surveillance and “dataveillance” – using similar unregulated techniques and technologies global corporations are starting to watch you. Is it time to get paranoid?

Free wireless: A Geek-free guide to thieving wifi:

“They have monopolised everything that it is possible to monopolise; they have got the whole earth, the minerals in the earth and the streams that water the earth. The only reason they have not monopolised the daylight and the air is that it is not possible to do it. If it were possible to construct huge gasometers and to draw together and compress within them the whole of the atmosphere, it would have been done long ago, and we should have been compelled to work for them in order to get money to buy air to breathe.”

Robert Tressell ‘The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists’

A Geek-free guide to thieving wireless:

Everyone knows that ‘the best things in life are free’ so; here’s how to reclaim what was once designated as a junk frequency of the radio spectrum i.e. wifi/wireless 802.11#, and has now been commoditised by the likes of the monopolistic British Telecom. NB: This is intended as a laypersons’s practical guide to the art of wifi liberation and not an in-depth technical thesis on the subject. It’s also intended to stimulate debate and counter to the increased criminalisation of the practice. In the UK “Dishonestly obtaining free internet access is an offence under the Communications Act 2003 and a potential breach of the Computer Misuse Act” so here’s how it can be done: