U.K. UAV competition

The U.K. Ministry of Defence is holding its Grand Challenge, which calls for the design of a platform with a high degree of autonomy that can detect, identify, monitor, and report a comprehensive range of military threats in an urban environment

Cyber cafes to be monitored in India

Indian police places biometric systems and CCTV in more than 150 cyber cafes in order to catch cyber criminals in the act

NASA's UAV helps fight California wild fires

Fire crews are fighting more than 1,700 blazes that have blackened 829,000 acres of California this fire season; they need all the help they can get -- and NASA extends such help by lending the state a modified Predator UAV

BAE adds to its autonomous airship portfolio

New airship, developed by Lindstrand Technologies, can carry payloads such as high-tech surveillance equipment up to 150 kg in weight to heights of more than 6,500 feet

Impinj acquires Intel's RFID assets

Intel's New Business Initiatives (NBI) incubator helped develop the award-winning R1000 RFID reader chip, which integrates onto a single chip 90 percent of the components required for a reader radio; Impinj acquires the R1000 reader chip

Developing a UAV concept of operations

There are more and more UAVs in service, performing more and more missions; there is a growing need to coordinate the use of these systems and impose a coherent concept of operations on their use

Northrop's Florida unit to get $185M for surveillance systems

Congress's supplemental war-time bill, which President George Bush recently signed, includes nearly $185 million for Northrop Grumman's Joint STARS combat surveillance aircraft program

U.S.-EU private data sharing agreement near

The United States and the EU are near an agreement to share private data of their citizens, including credit card information, travel history, and internet browsing information; one issue yet to be resolved: the right of EU citizens to sue the U.S. government for mishandling the information

U.K. to set up massive national drivers' surveillance scheme

The United Kingdom is often called the Surveillance Society, what with the hundreds of thousands of CCTVs on street corners and along highways. The Labor Party government wants to take a step further as plans were revealed for a pay-as-you-drive tax using the ability of cameras to monitor motorists' every move. The Sunday Express's Kirsty Buchana writes that hundreds of monitoring stations would be used to track cars every five seconds -- with daily itemized accounts of all trips made by Britain's thirty million drivers. The monitoring equipment needed to target road users round-the-clock is revealed in Labor's tender document for controversial road pricing. Tories branded it as "sinister," and accused the government of being "at war with the motorist." The document will also fuel fears of a mass expansion of Big Brother state and raise concerns about the security of detailed information being collected on millions of drivers.

In a surprise U-turn, Chancellor Alistair Darling announced during last month's Budget that the government was pushing ahead with national road pricing -- just one month after Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly appeared to shelve the idea. more