Recently I’ve been see­ing a lot of talk about a new game Google is devel­op­ing for Android, called Ingress. I’ve noticed that so far nobody seems to have noticed an unin­tended (pre­sum­ably) con­se­quence of the game: peo­ple play­ing it will be trav­el­ing around to libraries, post offices, cour­t­houses, fire sta­tions, mon­u­ments, and the like, stand­ing around for sev­eral min­utes, and then mov­ing on to another loca­tion in a seem­ingly ran­dom pattern.

What the peo­ple writ­ing about Ingress as a game seem to have missed is that it’s fairly well known by peo­ple who pay atten­tion that the gov­ern­ment tracks everyone’s move­ments using the loca­tion data from their cell phone ser­vices. The strange and erratic move­ments of Ingress play­ers are bound to drive the secret police­men respon­si­ble for such spy­ing berserk, which I con­sider to be a huge ben­e­fit. I’m con­sid­er­ing get­ting a Nexus 7 just so I can help con­fuse Big Brother.

Your car, tracked: the rapid rise of license plate read­ers [Ars Tech­nica]

A look at one of the less-known tech­nolo­gies that the gov­ern­ment uses to spy on people.

Insert Coin: Eyez 720p video-recording glasses (video). We first heard about the Eyez video record­ing glasses con­cept back in March, when those famil­iar black frames packed a 1080p cam­era, 16GB of flash mem­ory, WiFi, and dual exawatt-class lasers (ok, we made that last part up). Named for the product’s “utopic vision,” ZionEyez now has a pro­to­type with a more grounded spec list, includ­ing a 720p cam­era and 8GB of mem­ory, along with micro-USB and Blue­tooth con­nec­tiv­ity for live­cast­ing to Qik or LiveStream… [Engad­get]

This would be a really handy thing to be wear­ing if you’re going some­place that’s likely to have a cop infestation.

Sprint fed cus­tomer GPS data to cops over 8 mil­lion times.

Christo­pher Soghoian, a grad­u­ate stu­dent at Indi­ana University’s School of Infor­mat­ics and Com­put­ing, has made pub­lic an audio record­ing of Sprint/Nextel’s Elec­tronic Sur­veil­lance Man­ager describ­ing how his com­pany has pro­vided GPS loca­tion data about its wire­less cus­tomers to law enforce­ment over 8 mil­lion times. That’s poten­tially mil­lions of Sprint/Nextel cus­tomers who not only were prob­a­bly unaware that their wire­less provider even had an Elec­tronic Sur­veil­lance Depart­ment, but who cer­tainly did not know that law enforce­ment offers could log into a spe­cial Sprint Web por­tal and, with­out ever hav­ing to demon­strate prob­a­ble cause to a judge, gain access to geolo­ca­tion logs detail­ing where they’ve been and where they are.

[Ars Tech­nica]

It’s well known by now (at least, to any­one who pays atten­tion) that cell phones are used to spy on the loca­tion and move­ment of their own­ers. This is the first solid infor­ma­tion I’ve seen on just how often the cops spy on people–and keep in mind that this is only one com­pany. It’s pretty much guar­an­teed that other com­pa­nies are equally eager to col­lab­o­rate with Big Brother.