Surveillance

This historic town, where America's founding fathers plotted during the Revolution and Milton Hershey later crafted his first chocolates, now boasts another distinction. It may become the nation's most closely watched small city. Some 165 closed-circuit TV cameras soon will provide live, round-the-clock scrutiny of nearly every street, park and other public space used by the 55,000 residents and the town's many tourists.

The sunglasses are equipped with a fiber-optic video camera. The umbrella is bulletproof. The baseball cap repels bullets and knives. The shirt button is actually a surveillance microphone. The pen pulled from a breast pocket activates a tiny tape recorder. It's all available at your local spy shop. Technologically advanced surveillance and anti-bugging gadgetry, once limited to military and law enforcement personnel, has gone civilian.

If you ever dreamed of being James Bond, you'll be glad to know that the San Fernando Valley has its very own "Q." Located behind an alarm-equipped lobby, sentry cameras and a bullet-resistant glass door is the unassuming suite housing the Privacy Connection, one of several "spy shops" in Southern California.

Law enforcement leaders who pushed for a ballot initiative requiring sex offenders in California to be tracked by satellite for life are now saying that the sweeping surveillance program voters endorsed is not feasible and is unlikely to be fully implemented for years, if ever.

Federal safety officials called for railroads to install cameras and voice recorders in every locomotive cab in the nation as they publicly warned Thursday that cellphone texting by engineers and conductors was a growing and lethal danger. The call came as members of the National Transportation Safety Board publicly concluded their investigation into the deadly collision of a commuter train and a freight train in Chatsworth in 2008 -- a crash they blamed on a Metrolink engineer who passed a stop signal as he sent a message from his phone.

Video surveillance has become commonplace in many American workplaces, but now this type of electronic snooping has reached a new frontier: the employee bathroom. That little-known fact was discovered this week by chagrined workers at the Consolidated Freightways truck terminal in the Riverside County community of Mira Loma. Many of the terminal's 600 employees are furious after learning that their restroom visits may have been captured on video.

The Pentagon said Thursday that it intends to spend $400 million to develop a giant dirigible that will float 65,000 feet above the Earth for 10 years, providing unblinking and intricate radar surveillance of the vehicles, planes and even people below. "It is absolutely revolutionary," Werner J.A. Dahm, chief scientist for the Air Force, said of the proposed unmanned airship -- describing it as a cross between a satellite and a spy plane. The 450-foot-long craft would give the U.S.

A senior U.S. lawmaker said Thursday that unmanned CIA Predator aircraft operating in Pakistan are flown from an air base in that country, a revelation likely to embarrass the Pakistani government and complicate its counter-terrorism collaboration with the United States. The disclosure by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, marked the first time a U.S.

The number of Americans being secretly wiretapped or having their financial and other records reviewed by the government has continued to increase as officials aggressively use powers approved after the Sept. 11 attacks. But the number of terrorism prosecutions ending up in court -- one measure of the effectiveness of such sleuthing -- has continued to decline, in some cases precipitously.

The U.S. government, without the knowledge of many banks and their customers, has engaged for years in a secret effort to track terrorist financing by accessing a vast database of confidential information on transfers of money between banks worldwide. The program, run by the Treasury Department, is considered a potent weapon in the war on terrorism because of its ability to clandestinely monitor financial transactions and map terrorist webs.

You're never alone in Hawthorne's Eucalyptus Park. At least not since police mounted four video cameras in the city park in April, sending real-time images to the station through a wireless connection, giving officers the ability to watch the entire 6.2 acres. The experiment with the cameras is part of a mushrooming trend to deter or fight crime by installing video cameras in public places. San Francisco, Baltimore, Atlanta and Chicago have all placed cameras on streets and plazas.

Federal safety officials called for railroads to install cameras and voice recorders in every locomotive cab in the nation as they publicly warned Thursday that cellphone texting by engineers and conductors was a growing and lethal danger. The call came as members of the National Transportation Safety Board publicly concluded their investigation into the deadly collision of a commuter train and a freight train in Chatsworth in 2008 -- a crash they blamed on a Metrolink engineer who passed a stop signal as he sent a message from his phone.

Iraqi insurgents have intercepted live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, tapping a key component of the Pentagon's vaunted surveillance and weapons system with a $26 program available on the Internet. Militants did not hack into any military communications systems, officials said, but instead were able to view raw satellite feeds of live video shot by cameras on the unmanned 27-foot planes. The drones, flown by pilots based in the U.S., use satellite feeds to transmit video. Officials said they have evidence that video feeds were intercepted in Iraq and do not believe any feeds were intercepted in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

Months before a team of terrorists killed about 170 people in coordinated attacks in Mumbai, India, a Chicago man was conducting surveillance of the hotels and other locations that would come under assault, prosecutors said Monday. David Coleman Headley was charged by federal authorities with conducting surveillance that helped plan the November 2008 attacks. Prosecutors say Headley, a Pakistani American, spent more than two years visiting locations including the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel that was stormed by gunmen.

A plan to patrol Lancaster with an airplane that would record the movements of people on the ground has stoked the concerns of civil liberty advocates while being embraced by some residents who say they would support any means to crack down on crime. The piloted plane would circle the High Desert town 16 hours a day, recording video footage that would be transmitted to law enforcement officials, according to the plan. The plane, its designer said, would fly at an altitude of about five miles, making it all but invisible to residents.

The ninth-season winner of the reality TV show "Big Brother" told a federal agent that he used his $500,000 prize to buy thousands of oxycodone pills and resell them, authorities said. Adam Jasinski, 31, of Delray Beach, Fla., has been charged with attempting to sell 2,000 pills in Massachusetts to a government witness. Jasinski won $500,000 on "Big Brother 9" in April 2008. The CBS reality show features contestants who live under constant surveillance and vote once a week to evict each other in hopes of becoming the last houseguest standing and winning the grand prize.

A dozen surveillance cameras have been installed inside a San Fernando Valley tunnel that has been hard-hit by graffiti vandalism. The 711-foot tunnel on Sherman Way under the Van Nuys Airport has been riddled with graffiti for years, and residents were fed up, said Stacy Bellew, a spokeswoman for Los Angeles City Councilman Tony Cardenas. "Our main message was, 'Taggers beware. You are entering a no-tag zone,' " Bellew said. "If you decide to get out of your car and tag, we are going to catch you at every angle."

Former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden angrily struck back Saturday at assertions that the Bush administration's post-9/11 surveillance program was more far-reaching than imagined and was largely concealed from congressional overseers. In an interview with the Associated Press, Hayden said that top members of Congress were kept well informed all along the way, notwithstanding protests from some that they were kept in the dark.

The Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 surveillance efforts went beyond the widely publicized warrantless wiretapping program, a government report disclosed Friday, encompassing additional secretive activities that created "unprecedented" spying powers. The report also raised new questions about how the Bush White House kept key Justice Department officials in the dark as it launched the surveillance program.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has decided to kill a controversial Bush administration program to use U.S. spy satellites to collect domestic intelligence for counter-terrorism, law enforcement and security, a senior Homeland Security official said Monday evening. The National Applications Office program was established in 2007 to provide up-to-the-minute electronic intelligence to local and state law enforcement.