Some Steps:

1. Wear clothing that matches the environment. For example, if the background directly behind you will be the white siding of a house wear a white/grey shirt. Do not wear a single shirt, but try to layer your clothing so that spectators won’t make out the human silhouette. Wear clothes that are atleast a size too big, so you look like a big blob of something, that no one would think is human.
2. Wear navy blue or dark green if spying on grass. Black is a bit too dark, so you will be noticed.
3. Control your breathing and let your night vision adjust so you don’t step on sticks or something. This is especially important when you are near the person you are spying on, or in hearing range of them.
4. When moving, make slow, fluid movements, so that people watching won’t be drawn to your movements.
5. Move with your surroundings to be harder to catch sight of. Like, if your behind some bushes, and the wind blows, and you are standing still, it will be easy to spot you among the bushes.
6. Know the layout of the place you are spying on and how many occupants live there.

Some  Tips:

• Don’t push your luck.
• Don’t get caught as it will be hard to explain your situation. However, if you know the person well, it is often times more simple to make an excuse.
• Wear a face concealer or something. While not necessary, it helps so that if the person sees you.
• If a light is on in a window you are looking into, there will be a glare. This means the person inside can’t really see you and you can see inside better. However, if the spy victim looks out the window, run away slowly.
• The brighter the light inside the person’s room the better off you are.
• Laying down on your stomach on any terrain that looks a bit like your clothes will make you really hard to see and will make it easy for you to observe with a scope or binoculars.
• Tell your parents you’re going to the store or friends’ house because your parents would never let you go spying outside in the night.

Warnings:

• Don’t get caught or you could be in major trouble!
• Spying can be illegal at times, so judge whether or not what you’re doing is worth the risk of getting caught.
• Make sure the person you are spying on doesn’t have a dog, because if the dog sees you, he/she will bark.
• Obviously, don’t spy through a front window facing a street or where neighbors could easily see you. They will alert the residents or handle you themselves.
• Don’t breathe on the window or it will get steamy and the person will notice. Also, try to stay as far away from the window as possible and still get a good view. You can stay completely out of sight sometimes, especially if you use binoculars.

1. Plan your every move at your starting point or base.
2. Follow your plan.
3. Be alert. If there are any flaws like your target moves out of place, you’ll have to wing it and carry out the rest of the plan from there.
4. Take whatever information you need. eg: secret times/dates, what they do in spare time.
5. Sneak away unnoticed. Be aware of everyone and everything at all times so nothing catches you by surprise.
6. Walk quietly. Avoid wearing jeans, sweatpants, chains, board short, or any other noisy clothing and stick to carpet as much as possible, as tile or any other surface can cause you to make unnecessary noises.
7. Wear colors that will provide you with camouflage. If you are sneaking around at night, black may be your best option, if you are spying during the day, match the wall. If you can’t find anything that will allow you to blend in, try to avoid anything bright.
8. Use binoculars for long distance spying.
9. Know your house. If you have to cross a wood section of flooring, know where the creaky ones are. Keep in mind that the floor creaks less near the walls.
10. Slide on tiles using socks or slippery shoes as “ice skates”. It’s a lot easier, quieter, and fun!
11. Pull back your hair and hide it under a bandanna or beanie. If you have bright red hair, be especially careful to hide it.
12. Avoid animals. They give excellent tip-offs by running and jumping up at you, or looking at you and meowing/barking.
13. Buy a cheap baby-camera. It looks cutesy, but it’s a cheap effective camera.
14. Come up with a code system and spy name. Not only is this fun, but if you are working with a team, it will help you communicate. For instance, if things go wrong you could whisper “Code Blue Code Blue this is not a drill!”

source

Neighbors spying on neighbors? Mothers forced to turn in their sons or daughters? These are images straight out of George Orwell’s 1984, or a remote totalitarian state. We don’t associate them with the land of the free and the home of the brave, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t happen here. A senior congressman, James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), is working quietly but efficiently to turn the entire United States population into informants–by force.

Sensenbrenner, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman, has introduced legislation that would essentially draft every American into the war on drugs. H.R. 1528, cynically named “Safe Access to Drug Treatment and Child Protection Act,” would compel people to spy on their family members and neighbors, and even go undercover and wear a wire if needed. If a person resisted, he or she would face mandatory incarceration.

Here’s how the “spy” section of the legislation works: If you “witness” certain drug offenses taking place or “learn” about them, you must report the offenses to law enforcement within 24 hours and provide “full assistance in the investigation, apprehension and prosecution” of the people involved. Failure to do so would be a crime punishable by a mandatory minimum two-year prison sentence, and a maximum sentence of 10 years.

Here are some examples of offenses you would have to report to police within 24 hours:

• You find out that your brother, who has children, recently bought a small amount of marijuana to share with his wife;
• You discover that your son gave his college roommate a marijuana joint;
• You learn that your daughter asked her boyfriend to find her some drugs, even though they’re both in treatment.

In each of these cases you would have to report the relative to the police within 24 hours. Taking time to talk to your relative about treatment instead of calling the police immediately could land you in jail.

In addition to turning family member against family member, the legislation could also put many Americans in danger by forcing them to go undercover to gain evidence against strangers.

Even if the language that forces every American to become a de facto law enforcement agent is taken out, the bill would still impose draconian sentences on college students, mothers, people in drug treatment and others with substance abuse problems. If enacted, this bill will destroy lives, break up families, and waste millions of taxpayer dollars.

Despite growing opposition to mandatory minimum sentences from civil rights groups to U.S. Supreme Court Justices, the bill eliminates federal judges’ ability to give sentences below the minimum recommended by federal sentencing guidelines. This creates a mandatory minimum sentence for all federal offenses, drug-related or not.  Read more

“See who your neighbors are,” says the breathless e-mail from FelonSpy.com, promising to expose “all the people close to your home that have been convicted of ANY felonies.”

Click on the link and enter your address, and you’ll see a highly detailed Google map with red pins/balloons on it, each containing an offender’s name, age and felony offense.

If you haven’t seen an e-mail like this already, you will soon.

Unfortunately for the criminally curious, FelonSpy.com is a hoax. The realistic-looking arrest data plotted on it is randomly generated, says the site author, who spoke with msnbc.com on the condition of anonymity. But the persistence of the gag, which was dispelled by hoax-busting Web site Snopes.com in February, speaks to how curious American are about their neighbors and about neighborhood crime. And while FelonySpy.com isn’t real, a host of new Web sites offering maps with just slightly less detailed crime data are trying to capitalize on our seemingly endless appetite for the old-fashioned police blotter.

The Internet is uniquely qualified to offer users such intensely local news. Reading through pages and pages of police reports listed on newspaper pages was a challenge; entering your home address into a form and seeing a map of recent police events near your home is easy — and just about irresistible.

Chicago resident and journalist Adrian Holovaty started a site called ChicagoCrime.org in 2005 after persuading city police to share crime data with him. After receiving a grant from the Knight Foundation, he expanded the service to several other major U.S. cities and widened the data stream to include other municipal events, like permit applications. His project is now called Everyblock.com, and covers nine of the largest U.S. cities, including New York, Washington D.C., and Seattle.

“We spend a lot of time trying to convince local governments to open up data that citizens might be interested in,” Holovaty said. “If you live in an urban area, so much is happening around you, and there are so many media outlets and blogs and government Web sites with bits of news, it’s hard to keep track of.”

Despite all those news outlets, only the most dramatic crimes ever make news – even though a broken car window down the block is probably more interesting than a murder which takes place across the city. Everyblock.com tries to plug that information gap.

Holovaty said he will soon offer the software he’s developed for free to municipalities around the country.
“It’s an experiment in journalism,” he said.

Crimereports.com, based in Utah, uses a different model. The firm charges local police departments $99-$199 per month to publish their data on the CrimeReports’ Web site. So, far, says founder Greg Whisenant, 260 cities have signed up since the service launched in May of 2007.

“I like the idea of putting more knowledge and more information into the hands of people,” he said. “The chief complaint from police is that the public is not engaged. Well, this gets the public engaged.”
Some states, such as Utah, have signed up with CrimeReports and given their municipalities licenses to use the service.

“I think CrimeReports is the future,” said Utah attorney general Mark Shurtleff. “People are really excited about it here.” He says about half of Utah cities are already up and running on the site.

CrimeReports also lets visitors register to receive e-mails every time there’s an incident near their home. About 20,000 users have registered, Whisenant said.

Data not detailed
Be warned: Voyeurs who’ve seen the fake details offered in the FelonySpy.com hoax might be disappointed when logging in to Everyblock.com or CrimeReports.com. The crime-mapping services should not be confused with paid criminal background checks on individuals. Instead, the sites chiefly offer aggregated data for small geographic areas. In nearly all cities that are publishing crime information online, the crime data is severely limited by police. Exact addresses are omitted, so crimes are only plotted to the block level.
In most cases, names are omitted too, and there’s no narrative or description of crime events. In fact, users who pull up their street will really only see a bunch of icons or pushpins signifying types of crimes — commonly robberies, burglaries or assaults — that occurred nearby. All the sites say they are trying to persuade police agencies to supply more specific data.

Still, even limited data is of use to residents, says Colin Drane, a Baltimore resident who founded SpotCrime.com, which operates now in 150 cities.

“It creates accountability for the powers that be,” he said. Recently, he had a GPS gadget stolen from his car in front of his home, and after filing a police report, felt underwhelmed by the response. “But if it’s at least a data point on a map, you can feel you did something, alerted your neighbors.”
SpotCrime doesn’t charge police departments to publish their data; instead Drane sells advertisements on his site. He also has a new site, UCrime.com, which offers similar service for college campuses around the country.

‘Subject to misinterpretation’
Police departments have used crime-mapping software internally for some time, but the sudden proliferation of public-facing crime mapping tools raises interesting questions. Databases have the same seductive quality as photographs, in that people tend to see them as infallibly accurate. In fact, both pictures and databases can lie, or at least be subject to interpretation. A police department that does a poor job feeding data into the system might appear safer than a nearby department that aggressively publishes incidents, for example. And a string of car thefts by one criminal could suddenly make one block stand out on a map of pushpins. That could be devastating to a homeowner who’s just put their place on the market.

“Crime data is subject to misinterpretation. That is a challenge. But this is a starting point,” Whisenant said, adding that he thinks the good far outweighs the bad. “The fact that it might be misconstrued doesn’t justify not sharing it. We are giving the public the ability to really be informed.”

Holovaty said an important debate has yet to take place about increased release of police data and other local information. In London, for example, some have complained that block-by-block publication of police reports will reinforce stereotypes about bad neighborhoods. But ultimately, he said, crime data belongs to the public.

“Every database is flawed, but having the data is better than not having the data,” he said.

There are other hazards which have emerged in the race to map crime data, says Holovaty. When municipalities turn to for-profit companies to publish public information, there’s a risk that the data will no longer be free to citizens. He says some towns’ relationship with CrimeReports is exclusive, and those towns refuse to share their crime data with his Everyblock project. SpotCrime’s Drane had the same complaint.

“I’m concerned about anything that creates a monopoly on this data,” Drane said.

Whisenant said his firm doesn’t sign exclusive contracts with municipalities, but some do find it inefficient to work with more than one vendor for crime mapping services.

Drane said he hopes there will be many “positive unintended consequences” to publication of the crime data. Citizens might provide additional, voluntary number-crunching and help police pick out patterns, for example. At a bare minimum, residents can get immediate word of a crime spree in their neighborhood and take prompt action — the same way homeowners now get warning that a bad weather is on the way.

“We want to be the AccuWeather of crime,” Drane said, referring to the popular weather forecasting site.

Source

Americans speak out against telecom immunity, urging Congress to stand up to the Bush administration and stop the spying. A video from People For the American Way and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Alex hasn’t been himself lately. Now he’s talking on the phone with some chick about Tony Danza and baked ziti