Each day, it seems, marketers go further in their quest to deliver messages so engaging and personalized that one cannot help feeling special. The latest step will be seen today in four cities when Mini USA begins delivering custom messages to Mini Cooper owners on digital signs the company calls “talking” billboards.

Experts from the University of California, Davis warned this week that the reliability of fingerprint biometrics has declined considerably due to technological concerns and a growing world population.

Police are holding a review of much-criticised “stop and search” powers over concerns the tactic used to target possible terrorists was causing more harm than good by alienating the Muslim community.

THE intelligence agencies are monitoring every Muslim who travels from Britain to Mecca on pilgrimage in a wider effort to piece together intelligence on suspected Al-Qaeda terrorist activity.
A senior Whitehall official has disclosed that the operation targeting trips to the holy city in Saudi Arabia by more than 100,000 British Muslims is part of a trawl by MI5 and MI6 for information about movements of suspected terrorists.

The chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence rejected yesterday the Bush administration’s contention that it had brought the National Security Agency’s controversial domestic eavesdropping program into compliance with the law, saying he wants strict new rules requiring the government to obtain a separate warrant every time it places a wiretap on a U.S. resident.

A program to standardize state driver’s licenses to create a de facto national I.D. should use a third-party — most likely a private contractor — to verify that a person is eligible for a driver’s license or state identification card, according to a document provided to 27B by a privacy activist.

Detectives in the cash-for-honours inquiry were forced to “hack” into Downing Street computers in the search for evidence, The Sunday Telegraph has discovered.

A cutting-edge fingerprint identification system to be put in place across Delhi courts shortly will effectively mean that anyone - convict or surety provider or staff - wishing to misrepresent himself, tamper or misplace court records will have to put together an operation on the lines of Tom Cruise and Jean Reno in Mission: Impossible.

The American Civil Liberties Union today released a new report revealing that the Pentagon monitored at least 186 anti-military protests in the United States and collected more than 2,800 reports involving Americans in an anti-terrorist threat database.

A Defense Department database devoted to gathering information on potential threats to military facilities and personnel, known as Talon, had 13,000 entries as of a year ago — including 2,821 reports involving American citizens, according to an internal Pentagon memo to be released today by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The UK government’s ID cards scheme has attracted heavy criticism from a senior Liberal Democrat MP, following the publication last month of an official report into a pilot biometrics programme.

The American military and the Central Intelligence Agency have a “long-standing” policy of obtaining banking and credit card information on US citizens, according to news reports published over the weekend.

US Vice-President Dick Cheney has admitted that the US military and CIA have been spying on the financial dealings of Americans — intelligence gathering normally authorized only by civilian policing agencies.

Moves to share people’s personal details across Whitehall have provoked a civil liberties uproar and accusations that the Government has taken another step towards “a Big Brother state”.

MOTORBIKE enthusiasts Tania and Dave Winterburn have hit out at “big brother” proposals to monitor bikers and force them to cut their speed.