On Q Professional Investigations

Lo-Jack for students?

That’s what a large Houston, Texas school district has tested in two of its schools this year and will make mandatory for all students in the coming weeks. The reason? Well, school officials say due to overcrowding they need to keep track of the whereabouts of students for safety reasons.

So how does this work? There would be a small microchip embedded into a card, which students would wear on a lanyard around their neck during school hours. The card emits a radio frequency picked up by scanners positioned throughout the school. This program isn’t void of protesting parents and students that feel it impedes on their constitutional rights. However, those parents may be in for a shock when they realize that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in the past that some freedoms enjoyed by those outside of school are restricted when a student is in school, mostly for the safety of the student body.

Should a school be allowed to put GPS tracking devices on its students? It certainly sounds like an invasion of privacy and the ACLU, of course, is weighing in on the issue. This Texas school and all schools for that matter have a responsibility to keep our children safe. Supporters have argued that many schools are overcrowded and a lot of shenanigans can happen, such as fights, kids skipping school and even abductions. A device such as this could help to solve student issues and perhaps save a life.

I think it’s a mistake to create a card that acts as the main identifying mark of student. The role of administrators is to operate the school safely and teach our youth. However, with such high salaries of superintendents, they might want to consider alternative concepts, such as taking a pay cut and hiring a few more security personnel to secure the premises rather than eliminate a person’s identity.

But hey, it’s only my opinion. What do you think?

Is Big Brother watching you?

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Just as the U.S. Department of Agriculture mandates Radio Frequency Identification Device chips to monitor livestock, a Texas school district just begun implanting the devices on student identification cards to monitor pupils’ movements on campus, and to track them as they come and go from school.

Tagging school children with RFID chips is uncommon, but not new. A federally funded preschool in Richmond, California, began embedding RFID chips in students’ clothing in 2010. And an elementary school outside of Sacramento, California, scrubbed a plan in 2005 amid a parental uproar. And a Houston, Texas, school district began using the chips to monitor students on 13 campuses in 2004.

It was only a matter of time. Radio frequency identification devices are a daily part of the electronic age, and are fast becoming a part of passports, libraries and payment cards, and are widely expected to replace bar-code labels on consumer goods.

And it appears that the educational move to Big Brother-style monitoring is motivated mainly by money, despite privacy and health concerns.

Two schools at the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio began issuing the RFID-chip-laden student-body cards when classes began last Monday. Like most state-financed schools, their budgets are tied to average daily attendance. If a student is not in his seat during morning roll call, the district doesn’t receive daily funding for that pupil, because the school has no way of knowing for sure if the student is there.

But with the RFID tracking, students not at their desk but tracked on campus are counted as being in school that day, and the district receives its daily allotment for that student.

“What we have found, they are there, they’re in the building and not in their chairs. They are in the cafeteria, with counselors, in stairwells or a variety of places, some legitimately and some not,” district spokesman Pascual Gonzalez said in a telephone interview. “If they are on campus, we can legally count them present.”

The Spring Independent School District in Houston echoed the same theory when it announced results of its program in 2010. “RFID readers situated throughout each campus are used to identify where students are located in the building, which can be used to verify the student’s attendance for ADA funding and course credit purposes,” the district said.

But privacy groups are wary.

“We don’t think kids in schools should be treated like cattle,” Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in a telephone interview. “We generally don’t like it. My take on RFID is it’s fine for products, but not so much for people. That’s one of the places where the lines need to be drawn. ”

But there appears to be dozens of companies who see no need to draw such a line and offer their RFID wares to monitor students in what is still a tiny but growing market. Among the biggest companies in the market: AT&T.

“One day soon, home room teachers in your local middle and high schools may stop scanning rows of desks and making each student yell out ‘Here!’ during a morning roll call. Instead, small cards, or tags, carried by each student will transmit a unique serial number via radio signal to an electronic reader near the school door,” AT&T says in its RFID-student advertising materials.

Gonzalez said there has been minimal parental and student opposition to the program at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School. The pilot project could expand to the Northside Independent School District’s 110 other schools, he said.
As for privacy, the system only monitors a student’s movements on campus. Once a student leaves campus, the chips no longer communicate with the district’s sensors.
He said the chips, which are not encrypted and chronicle students only by a serial number, also assist school officials to pinpoint where kids are at any given time, which he says is good for safety reasons. “With this RFID, we know exactly where the kid is within the school,” he said noting students are required to wear the ID on a lanyard at all times on campus.

The lack of encryption makes it not technically difficult to clone a card to impersonate a fellow student or to create a substitute card to play hooky, and makes the cards readable by anyone who wanted to install their own RFID reader, though all they would get is a serial number that’s correlated with the student’s ID number in a school database.

EPIC’s Rotenberg was among about two dozen health and privacy advocates who signed an August position paper blasting the use of RFID chips in schools.

The paper, which included signatures from the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation and, among others, Big Brother Watch, said the RFID systems may have “potential” (.pdf) health risks, too.

“RFID systems emit electromagnetic radiation, and there are lingering questions about whether human health might be affected in environments where the reading devices are pervasive,” the paper said. “This concern and the dehumanizing effects of ubiquitous surveillance may place additional stress on students, parents, and teachers.”

Gonzalez said John Jay High has 200 surveillance cameras and Anson Jones Middle School, about 90.

“The kids,” he said, “are used to being monitored.”

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It’s a little black box perched on a police car, and it’s always watching.

When 87-year-old Katherine “Kit” Grazioli’s body turned up along a dirt road in the foothills west of Colorado Springs last November, the little black box spied her stolen car within hours.

On the car door, police say, were the fingerprints of her killer.

Over the past two years, roof-mounted license-plate readers — a kind of high-tech surveillance camera — have quietly led authorities in the Pikes Peak Region to scores of stolen vehicles. They also have helped capture fugitives and kept tabs on paroled sex offenders — all by automatically scanning roads and parking lots with lightning-fast optics capable of photographing a license plate in the blink of an eye, or hundreds of license plates during a single patrol.

But according to documents obtained by The Gazette under the Colorado Open Records Act, the devices are watching more than just law breakers.

Colorado Springs police reports show that use of license-plate readers has allowed the city’s police department to construct a searchable databank containing hundreds of thousands of license plates belonging to ordinary drivers, with each entry disclosing when, and where, police last spied a certain vehicle.

The information — which potentially gives investigators a view into where people travel and how they spend their time — is characterized in internal police documents as a “massive intelligence database.”

Privacy advocates complain the databanks fail to exclude law-abiding drivers, who they say are likely unaware of the scope of monitoring.

“You’re talking about a record of movements over time of hundreds of thousands of innocent persons,” said Mark Silverstein, legal director of Colorado’s branch of the ACLU, which is mounting a nationwide effort to learn more about how license plate data is used. “It certainly is extremely powerful technology.”

Colorado Springs police defend their use of the devices as a lawful and effective crime-fighting tool.

Police received three license plate readers as part of a 2009 state grant that supplied eight devices to five local agencies.

The city’s Police Department serves as a central repository for data collected by the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office and police in Monument, Fountain, Manitou Springs and Woodland Park.

In the past year, the database has grown to include more than 1.1 million vehicles, according to a Colorado Springs police tally for the 2011-2012 fiscal year ending in June.

And police, who haven’t publicly announced the database, may be looking to expand their data-sharing capabilities.

In April, police sent a representative to the Littleton Police Department, where “multiple agencies” discussed the possibility of pooling their information, or “hosting all of our data in one place,” as Lt. Jane Anderson wrote in an annual report that disclosed few details about the meeting.

Lance Clem, of the Colorado Department of Public Safety, said he was unaware of any plans to create a formal, centralized database of license plates at the state level. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation is the agency that maintains the state’s criminal information databases.

Colorado Auto Theft Prevention Authority grants have purchased about 30 license plate readers for agencies across Colorado in the past several years, Clem said. The department doesn’t track license-plate readers purchased independently, he said.

Local and regional law enforcement groups say the device does little more than snap pictures on public roads, where drivers have diminished expectations of privacy.

“It’s similar to you writing down the license plates that you see on the roadway,” said Capt. Dave Santos of the Colorado State Highway Patrol, who added that the department’s license-plate readers are dedicated to the purpose of recovering stolen vehicles and nabbing auto thieves.

“I don’t see the violation of privacy. I just don’t.”

Santos added that in Colorado, driving is a privilege rather than a right, and he drew a legal distinction between tracking license plates and individuals.

Privacy advocates counter that widespread license-plate tracking could have a chilling effect on private business conducted in public — such as parking outside counseling meetings, doctors’ offices or political protests.

“Our movements — especially if they’re tracked with the precision of GPS locations — could reveal things that some people want to keep private,” Silverstein said.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police, a nonprofit that supports use of the devices, warned members in a recent policy paper they could be courting controversy by storing information on the vehicles of law-abiding drivers.

To mitigate fears of a “Big Brother” surveillance program, some law enforcement agencies limit the scope of their database, purging information every 60 or 90 days, according to media reports.

Police in Colorado Springs keep information for a year at a time, Anderson said in an interview.

Anderson said Colorado Springs police are prohibited from using the data for personal reasons, and they train reader-car operators to take steps to confirm information returned by its license plate database.

Philip Dubois, a Colorado Springs defense attorney, called storing information on law-abiding drivers a “ham-fisted” approach to policing in the digital age — and one likely to draw scrutiny by the courts.

Dubois argued that a police officer snapping photos on a public street probably wouldn’t violate expectations of privacy, but a network of cameras taking thousands of snapshots a month may change the equation, especially when combined with searchable database technology.

“The government tries to stay ahead of technology, and almost always oversteps its bounds when it does,” he said. Before the courts weighed in, Dubois said, law enforcement groups used similar arguments to defend warrantless eavesdropping on telephone calls and secretly planting GPS units on cars.

The reach of the program is made possible by the incredible capabilities of license-plate readers, which have been in automated toll booths for years and became staples of airport parking lots after Sept. 11, 2001.

When a reader car is on patrol, multiple infrared cameras snap pictures of every vehicle in its midst, including cars behind it, traveling in the oncoming lanes, or parked on the side of the road, according to police.

The device’s text-recognition software can “read” license plates from all 50 states, regardless of light conditions.

“The system is limited only by the number of plates that are able to pass in front of the camera,” according to an internal policy document signed by Colorado Springs Police Commander Mark Smith.

Much of the investigative work is done automatically, with the software comparing license plate numbers against any number of law enforcement databases compiling arrest warrants, unpaid speeding tickets and other violations.

When such a car is located in real time, the device alerts its operator.

Alternatively, police can turn to the database of license plates for a list of results showing when and where a vehicle was last spotted.

After major crimes outside Colorado Springs, El Paso County sheriff’s deputies use one of two reader cars to document license plates in the vicinity — looking for witnesses and suspects alike.

A license-plate reader was recently installed at the El Paso County jail, and will soon begin sweeping the parking lot to vet jail visitors, said Sheriff Terry Maketa, adding that jailers used to run visitors for open warrants as a matter or routine. He said the practice became unsustainable within the past 15 years because the jail gets too many visitors to personally check.

Maketa said the camera in question — with a price tag of $15,000 — was purchased with money from an auto theft prevention grant.

The use of reader cars has been consistent with the laws, and aimed at balancing public safety with privacy, he said.

He characterized his office’s three license-plate readers as one more tool to stretch thin resources. Maketa said he recently purchased $85,000 facial-recognition software that will allow deputies to snap a picture with their cell phones and determine if someone is wanted for any crimes.

Within a year, it could be possible to automatically search commercial surveillance footage for wanted persons, Maketa said, adding that license-plate recognition software is also rapidly advancing.

“The courts are going to struggle with these questions as technology evolves,” he said.

What the courts decide will largely determine how law enforcement groups use readers, Maketa said, adding that cameras could one day be placed in enough locations to capture most drivers entering the city.

While police say the devices are principally used to combat car theft, figures show they produce more results when it comes to combing through license plates and comparing plates against a “hot list” of wanted vehicles maintained by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

During the 2011-2012 fiscal year, license plate readers led a regional auto theft task force to recover 76 stolen vehicles — about 6 percent of the 1,264 cars that were reported stolen in Colorado Springs alone.

During the same period, the readers automatically identified 14,745 other crimes and led to 129 felony arrests — among them Marcus Allen Smith, the 22-year-old accused in Grazioli’s Nov. 23 strangulation and abduction.

In that case, an officer equipped with a license-plate reader car found Grazioli’s stolen car in an apartment complex parking lot near her home, and fingerprints on the door matched those found in Grazioli’s house.

The devices are routinely deployed to large community events, documents show.

Figures from police show that hundreds of license plates are scanned, and stored, for every “hit” that is returned.

During a two-day enforcement sweep split between the Balloon Classic in Colorado Springs and the Colorado State Fair in Pueblo last September, Colorado Springs police and their partner agencies “read” 217,000 license plates.

Out of those, the agencies recovered one stolen car and made one felony arrest, on suspicion of felony possession of drugs, police figures show.

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Call it Invasion of the iPhone Snatchers: a new FinFisher-based spyware is built to infect iPhones and iPads (and Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone gadgets too) in order to take over the device completely – all unbeknownst to the user.

The smartphones and tablets will innocently appear to be themselves, but in reality the mobile malware is working in the background to track the device’s location, monitor activity and intercept communications including emails, voice calls and text messages.

Ironically, the malware was likely developed with the intention of aiding law enforcement. Citizen’s Lab at the University of Toronto has found that the functionality and mechanisms dovetail with Gamma Group UK’s product for tracking mobile devices.

“When FinSpy Mobile is installed on a mobile phone it can be remotely controlled and monitored no matter where in the world the target is located,” reads the product information. However, officials at the company have confirmed that a demonstration copy of its software has been stolen. Citizen’s Lab suspects that it is now spreading, in slightly altered form, at the hands of more nefarious elements.

The virus propagates itself via text message and email, prompting a user to download a bogus “system update” or click on an infecting link.

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It could be time for you to start worrying about what Facebook might be doing with the identity information collected on you and “tagged” photos.

The Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information in Germany has announced legal action against the company and charged that Facebook’s use of facial-recognition technology is illegal.

In addition, the Federation of German Consumer Organizations is ordering Facebook to stop giving third-party applications users’ data without their consent.

If the social network doesn’t do this by Sept. 4, the FGCO will sue. Earlier this month, Norway also announced that it is looking into the legality of the social network’s use of face-matching technology.

Unlike the United States, Germany has regulations that allow Internet users control over their data.

Regarding photo tags, a Facebook spokesperson told CNET: “We believe that the photo tag suggest feature on Facebook is fully compliant with EU data protection laws. During our continuous dialogue with our supervisory authority in Europe, the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner we agreed to develop a best practice solution to notify people on Facebook about photo tag suggest.”
Facebook: facial recognition profiles without user consent

A number of companies – like Facebook, Apple and Google – have facial recognition or detection as an automatic part of various services and apps.

With Apple and Google, users must opt-in, and they can opt-out. While its users can remove tags, Facebook’s facial recognition feature is active by default.

But what happens with that information? It’s not just that Facebook is using facial recognition (biometric data) to increase the worth of its data for sale, trade, or for whatever currency it’s lining litterboxes with in Menlo Park.

In its December 2011 comments the Electronic Privacy Information Center told the Federal Trade Commission:

(…) the Commission should specifically prohibit the use of Facebook’s biometric image database by any law enforcement agency in the world, absent a showing of adequate legal process, consistent with international human rights norms.

Facebook reportedly possessed an estimated 60 billion photos by late 2010, and approximately 2.5 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook each month.

The democratization of surveillance

EPIC’s comments came after the FTC held a day-long forum called “Face Facts: A Forum on Facial Recognition Technology,” focusing on the commercial applications of facial recognition technology and its potential privacy implications.

The “Face Facts” participants came from disparate sides of the discussion. They included FTC attorneys, the Face.com CEO, Facebook’s senior privacy advisor and director, and reps from Google, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the Center for Democracy and Technology and the ACLU.

Demos were done for participants by Intel AIM Suite (Audience Impression Metrics: a CMS-friendly and API-ready, public-use face detection software product) and Andrew Cummins, self-described strategy expert in tech/defense markets and the chief technology officer of controversial app-maker SceneTap.

There was also a representative from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Interestingly, in 2010 NIST tested various facial recognition systems and found that the best algorithm correctly recognized 92 percent of unknown individuals from a database of 1.6 million criminal records.

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz opened “Face Facts” saying this summit was timely because, “Facebook has launched new facial recognition technology” and that “These sorts of technologies have already taken hold in law enforcement and the military; in that area, they are as controversial as they are interesting.”

I’m not sure if his use of a clip from the Tom Cruise film Minority Report in his opening remarks was meant to be ironic or not. Perhaps Mr. Leibowitz misses working for the MPAA (where he was chief lobbyist until being tapped for the FTC by George W. Bush in 2004).

Leibowitz did say, “We must confront openly the real possibility that these technologies, if not now, then soon, may be able to put a name with the face, so to speak, and have an impact on our careers, credit, health, and families.”

The Face Facts meeting raised an alarm for privacy organizations; Privacy Rights Clearinghouse director Beth Givens stated outright that there is insufficient public awareness about all aspects of facial recognition tech, and zero auditing mechanisms in place for any entity using the technologies.

Six months after the FTC meeting, Facebook acquired one of the biz-dev side participants, Face.com.

It’s clear that after meetings and summits, even with good intentions for privacy protections, regulators like the FTC are merely only still on the outside looking in.

Ties between video profiling in private and government sectors more murky than ever

Back in July at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing Senator Al Franken said, “Facebook may have created the world’s largest privately held database of face prints without the explicit knowledge of its users.”

Franken continued to link the holes in citizen protections and stressed implications with the then-new Federal Bureau of Investigation facial-recognition pilot program.

Franken stated that any law-enforcement gains from the program could come at a high cost to civil liberties. “The FBI pilot could be abused to not only identify protesters at political events and rallies, but to target them for selective jailing and prosecution, stifling their First Amendment rights,” he said.

Think about the implications of facial recognition profiles on social media sites along with current trends in cybersecurity legislation hysteria.

Remember CISPA? The surveillance bill would have given Homeland Security a backdoor pass to access your email, private information and social network data without a warrant or notice if it fit into a plan to stop “cybersecurity” threats. CISPA would have made it so that Facebook would be completely unrestricted (say, by your rights) to cooperate with Homeland Security to the fullest extent.

Just in the past few weeks, information has surfaced from a Wikileaks leak of private intelligence documents that the purpose of a surveillance product called TrapWire is to combine various intelligent surveillance technologies with tracking and location data, individual profile histories from various sources (datamining and social media), and image data analysis (such as facial recognition; TrapWire’s video component) to monitor people under the guise of threat detection.

TrapWire is a commercial product sold to and implemented by private entities, the US Government “and its allies overseas.”

Too little FTC, too late?

Facial recognition technologies are no longer held back from commercial sectors by high costs and poor accuracy and are quickly becoming directed at recording faces in public places and business establishments, rather than only online.

The FTC had impressed the point that the avenue of interest for “Face Facts” would solely address commercial uses and does not address the use of facial recognition technologies for security purposes or by law enforcement or government actors.

Right now there is nothing that requires any private entity to provide the individual with notice that facial recognition information is being collected, or the duration of the period in which the information will stored, or used.

There is nothing preventing private entities (businesses, app developers, data brokers or advertisers) from selling, trading, or otherwise profiting from an individual’s biometric information – or from disclosing or disseminating the information without obtaining the individual’s consent or pursuant to a valid warrant or subpoena.

It will be interesting to see how Facebook handles its newest privacy problem in Germany.

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Possibly as early as 2013, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will be able to beam a laser at us from 164 feet (50 meters) away, analyzing the molecules of our bodies, our clothes, our luggage, whatever meal we’re digesting inside our guts, whatever gun powder residue might have clung to terrorists, whatever drugs are floating around in our urine or glommed onto the soles of our shoes, and how nervous we might be according to our adrenaline levels, all without patdowns or having to touch us at all, without us even knowing it’s happening.

Human body, courtesy of ShutterstockThe news comes from a researcher who chooses to remain anonymous.

He’s currently completing his PhD in renewable energy solutions and published the news of this impending death of privacy on Gizmodo.

Regardless of his anonymity, the researcher backs up the premise with publicly available information.

For one thing, in November 2011, the technology’s inventors were subcontracted by In-Q-Tel, an organization that defines itself as a bridge between the CIA and new technology companies, to work with DHS.

In-Q-Tel describes the technology as a “synchronized programmable laser” for use in the biomedical, industrial and defense and security communities.

The anonymous researcher writes that DHS plans to install this molecular-level scanning in airports and border crossings across the US.

The “official, stated goal” is to quickly identify explosives, dangerous chemicals, or bioweapons at a distance, he writes, and will likely be used to scan absolutely anybody and everybody:

The machine is ten million times faster—and one million times more sensitive—than any currently available system. That means that it can be used systematically on everyone passing through airport security, not just suspect or randomly sampled people.

The technology isn’t new: it’s just “millions times faster and more convenient than ever before,” the researcher writes.

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New details from Iron Mountain show the extent to which employees leaving employment will take confidential company data with them when they go.

Iron Mountain surveyed 2000 French, German, British and Spanish office workers across all business sectors. They wanted to learn staff attitudes to company data when either moving on to a different job – or getting fired. The clear implication is that workers have a feeling of personal ownership when they are involved with the collection of that data.

Across Europe, more than half of office workers (51%) will take data with them when the switch jobs. It’s slightly less in the UK at 44%. The main reason is not malice, but a belief that they have a right to the data they helped create, and a belief that it will help in any future job.

It’s not just databases. Of those who do take information, 46% walk off with presentations, 21% with company proposals, 18% with strategic plans, and another 18% with product/service roadmaps – all of which, says Iron Mountain, represents highly sensitive and valuable information that is critical to a company’s competitive advantage, brand reputation and customer trust.

“As businesses across Europe rush to tighten up their data protection policies in advance of new EU legislation,” comments senior vice president Patrick Keddy, “it is extremely worrying to see that employees are leaving jobs with highly sensitive information.” The problem is that the standard company security model is based on stopping electronic malware getting in, rather than documents getting out. “Companies concerned about information security tend to focus on building a fortress around their digital data and then forget about the paper and the people,” he added.

It’s a problem that just gets worse in difficult economic times. If an employee is sacked or laid off, the survey showed that as many as 31% would deliberately remove and share confidential information. These findings, said Keddy, “highlight the need for information management policies to be developed closely with Human Resources as part of a Corporate Information Responsibility program.”

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It’s a bit of a wonder that communism hasn’t fallen to its knees, screaming, “You win!” at Nike. Since 2006, the company has implanted tracking sensors into its line of Nike+ sneakers, a practice you would think certainly has political implications. A couple of weeks ago, the Hyperdunk (basketball) and Lunar (training) both received the Nike+ treatment with an updated “pressure sensor,” becoming the Hyperdunk+ and Lunar TR1+ respectively with glow-in-the-dark details. Both shoes boast sensors embedded in the “corners” of the sole and a processor in the middle that uploads all its information wirelessly to an app in your phone. This information includes how fast you’re going, your reps, and how high you’re jumping. It also calibrates your capacity for greatness based on ability and comparative effort. In other words, it knows how hard you’re trying. Drop a thousand crates of them on North Korea and it’s curtains for their labor camps.

On one hand, it’s a little scary: these shoes are kind of spying on you. Especially since the app also encourages you to upload showoff videos, and compete against others. Embed a GPS in these sneakers and suddenly you have a device that effectively puts you in jail while making you feel like you’re free. We don’t really know where all this information is going, do we? But whatever, honestly, that dark paranoia melted away after I put them on. I am used to wearing heels every day. It was extremely foreign to me to buckle down and purchase flat sandals this summer, so to wear actual sneakers is like an epiphany for my feet. These shoes were incredible (and disclaimer: no one at VICE or at Nike harassed me to write about the experience, by the way, which is extremely rare)—light, springy, insanely comfortable, and somehow exciting. They felt like I was wearing a space-age fish. I have no idea what that actually means, as up until this point I had been legitimately terrified of fish. Yes, somehow this sneaker not only lazered through my conspiracy fantasies, it also cured a phobia. Powerful.

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In its first ever transparency report, Twitter reported Monday that the United States leads the pack when it comes to government demands for user data, having filed 679 requests in the first half of the year.

Worldwide, Twitter said it has received more government demands for data in the first six months of this year than all of last year.

In Twitter’s Transparency Report, it said it has complied with 75 percent of user-data disclosure demands by producing “some or all information” requested by U.S. authorities. Globally, the average was 63 percent.

Data previous to 2012 was not available. Twitter said it notifies its users of government demands “unless prohibited by law.”

The closest country behind the United States was Japan, which lodged 98 requests with a 20 percent Twitter compliance rate. The United Kingdom and Canada came in with 11 requests, with an 18 percent compliance rate. All of the other countries in the 23-nation Twitter report registered with less than 10 government demands.

“We’ve received more government requests in the first half of 2012, as outlined in this initial dataset, than in the entirety of 2011,” Twitter said on its blog.

The disclosure follows Google’s lead — nearly two years ago, when the search giant turned heads by publishing a treasure trove of data surrounding government demands for user data, in addition to information on the number of takedown notices connected to copyright infringement.

“Wednesday marks Independence Day here in the United States. Beyond the fireworks and barbecue, July 4th serves as an important reminder of the need to hold governments accountable, especially on behalf of those who may not have a chance to do so themselves,” Twitter said.

The Twitter report came the same day a New York state judge ordered the San Francisco-based microblogging site to divulge the tweets and account information allegedly connected to an Occupy protester.

Twitter did not say whether, at least in the United States, the authorities presented probable-cause warrants for user data. Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr.’s ruling Monday did not require local prosecutors to have probable cause to get the tweets and accompanying account information of an Occupy protester.

The company, however, listed a few reasons why it does not acquiesce to all government-issued, user-data requests.

“We do not comply with requests that fail to identify a Twitter user account. We may seek to narrow requests that are overly broad. In other cases, users may have challenged the requests after we’ve notified them,” Twitter said. Most famously, Twitter successfully fought to allow individuals being investigated for their connections to WikiLeaks to challenge requests for their Twitter data.

In a separate reporting category, Twitter said it received 3,378 requests to remove copyrighted material from Twitter in the United States for the first half of the year. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires internet service providers to remove works, at the copyright holder’s request, to avoid legal liability.

Overall, Twitter said it removed 38 percent of the material specified in the takedown requests. Among other reasons, Twitter said it does not comply with all requests because sometimes they “fail to provide sufficient information” or were “misfiled.”

Twitter also reported that it did not comply with any of the handful of requests from France, Greece, Pakistan, Turkey and the United Kingdom to remove content that is illegal in those nations.

Twitter’s not the first to follow Google’s transparency lead – Dropbox, LinkedIn, SpiderOak and SonicNet beat Twitter to it.

Among those who ought to be next: Facebook, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Yahoo, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Microsoft.

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The President of the United States is not going to pay your utility bill.

Atmos Energy is warning customers about the latest version of a scam that promises federal stimulus money for utility bills in exchange for a customer’s personal information. The scam artist provides a bank routing number that supposedly has an account with funds to pay past due bills.

However, there is no such program and customers should never give personal information to anyone who is not an authorized agent of any utility company.

Atmos Energy previously warned customers about the scam in May but has been receiving calls this week from customers who received the bank routing number. The North Carolina Attorney General issued a warning about this scam June 28 and utilities in Florida have also reported a similar effort.

According to Better Business Bureau reports, scammers have visited customers in person, posted fliers and used social media and texting to send messages claiming that President Obama will provide a credit or directly pay utility bills.

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