Surveillance

A submarine-hunting surveillance ship will be christened today in Washington state, the Navy announced Tuesday. The ceremonies for the surveillance ship Bold will be at the Tacoma Boatbuilding shipyards in Tacoma, with Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) making the main speech.

Investigators don't know where 15-year-old Sierra LaMar is, but they are almost certain she is dead. For more than two months, the high school cheerleader's family has been holding out hope. They have organized repeated searches of the Northern California neighborhood where she disappeared and made numerous public appeals for help. On Tuesday, even as authorities announced the arrest of a 21-year-old suspect on suspicion of murder, Marlene LaMar vowed not to stop looking for her daughter.

Westside drivers, are you ready for your close-ups? Beverly Hills wants to launch a pilot program using photo radar to nab speeders in 25-mph residential zones. The plan might seem extreme, but Mayor Steve Webb said the city must do something novel to curb drivers who diverge from the city's increasingly congested main thoroughfares, such as Santa Monica and Wilshire boulevards, onto tree-lined side streets as they make their way to jobs, schools and shopping.

LONDON - The British government is scrambling to fend off accusations of trying to turn the country into a virtual police state with plans to conduct some trials in secret and allow authorities to track the phone calls, emails, text messages and online activity of the entire population. Civil liberties advocates are aghast over revelations this week that officials are preparing to introduce legislation to expand state surveillance in the interests of national security. Separately, the government of Prime Minister David Cameron is proposing that certain civil court proceedings take place behind closed doors if sensitive matters of intelligence are involved.

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.

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.

Her debut provocation, 1993's "Boxing Helena," revealed the limits of artistic heredity, and now director Jennifer Lynch -- daughter of David -- has returned with the prankish, ultra-violent hell ride "Surveillance." But, again, her quest to unnerve feels forced.

Re "Spying up, but terror cases drop," May 12 Civil liberties groups suggest that decreased numbers of terrorism prosecutions are evidence that government surveillance of terrorist suspects is ineffective. The more obvious conclusion is that these measures have acted as a deterrent and, along with many other techniques, have helped federal authorities keep us safe from further domestic attack. Brian Snaer San Marino Have we grown so afraid of attacks that we will give up our rights?

LONDON - The British government is scrambling to fend off accusations of trying to turn the country into a virtual police state with plans to conduct some trials in secret and allow authorities to track the phone calls, emails, text messages and online activity of the entire population. Civil liberties advocates are aghast over revelations this week that officials are preparing to introduce legislation to expand state surveillance in the interests of national security. Separately, the government of Prime Minister David Cameron is proposing that certain civil court proceedings take place behind closed doors if sensitive matters of intelligence are involved.

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.

A grainy surveillance tape from the Orange County high school where a Marine sergeant was shot to death by a sheriff's deputy shows a white sport-utility vehicle slamming through a gate leading to the campus. A Sheriff's Department patrol car enters the San Clemente High School parking lot a short time later, and three more squad cars and an unmarked unit follow, the tape shows. The surveillance video, which was provided to The Times on Tuesday, captures what appears to be the minutes leading up to the fatal shooting of Sgt. Manuel Loggins Jr., a career Marine who died behind the wheel of his white GMC sport-utility vehicle with his young daughters in the back seat.

Twenty years ago, a reunified Germany opened the archives of the East German secret police, the dreaded Stasi, to the public. Thousands of Germans were horrified to learn that their friends and neighbors had been spying on them for the repressive East German government. Now, Germans are once again dismayed by their country's intelligence service. First, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution came under fire after the revelation that a group of neo-Nazis had allegedly committed at least 10 killings while eluding authorities with apparent ease.

By a surprisingly unanimous vote, the Supreme Court this week ruled that police must obtain a warrant before attaching a tracking device to a car or other vehicle. The decision is a welcome affirmation of the constitutional right to privacy in an era of advanced technology. But the majority opinion's rationale was needlessly narrow. Whether there is a broad right to freedom from new kinds of intrusive electronic surveillance remains to be answered. The case involved the conviction of Antoine Jones, a suspected drug dealer in the District of Columbia who was arrested after being monitored for 28 days by a global positioning system device surreptitiously attached to his Jeep by law enforcement agents without a warrant.

After a wave of killings of homeless men in the area, police said Wednesday that they are looking for a "serious, dangerous serial killer operating in Orange County. " Investigators believe that one person is responsible for stabbing three middle-aged homeless men in 10 days and have formed a task force of police from Anaheim, Placentia and Brea to investigate the incidents. "We believe these murders were likely committed by the same suspect and feel he is extremely dangerous to the public," Anaheim Police Chief John Welter said at a news conference.

Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said. Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

The radar-evading drone that crash-landed over the weekend in Iran was on a mission for the CIA, according to a senior U.S. official, raising fears that the aircraft's sophisticated technology could be exploited by Tehran or shared with other American rivals. It was unclear whether the drone's mission took it over Iran or whether it strayed there accidentally because of technical malfunctions, the official said. Though the drone flight was a CIA operation, U.S. military personnel were involved in flying the aircraft, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy involved.

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.

Slain federal drug agent Enrique Camarena told his killers that agents knew the whereabouts of two of Mexico's most powerful drug lords but did not pursue them because they feared for their own lives, according to a tape-recording of Camarena's torture made public Monday. In a chilling transcript of Camarena's ordeal, filed in Los Angeles federal court, the Drug Enforcement Administration agent is heard complaining to his captors that U.S.

Kenya's government has made an urgent appeal to the Obama administration for the Pentagon to provide intelligence and logistical support to Kenya's faltering month-old military operation in Somalia against the Shabab, a powerful Al Qaeda-linked militia. Administration officials are considering the request, which came through the State Department, to provide military surveillance and reconnaissance that could include imagery from drone aircraft. Such aid would represent a significant expansion of U.S. involvement in the chaotic East African nation.

Should the police be allowed to affix an electronic tracking device to a suspect's car without a warrant and follow his every movement for a month? That was the question at an oral argument at the Supreme Court on Tuesday. The justices expressed unease with such pervasive surveillance, with one comparing it to George Orwell's "1984. " Their misgivings reflect a sense on the part of many Americans, including this editorial board, that there's something creepy about round-the-clock electronic surveillance.