Indeed, coming to you at the Continental Cup in St. Albert this week is an experiment which Warren Hansen of the Canadian Curling Association believes will be the future.
“I think if all of this works well, fans will soon be able to listen to what’s going on with the curlers as they discuss shot strategy on every sheet.
“It’s progressing there in our minds right now. We’re just not sure how quickly things will be able to move.
“We will be experimenting with getting the transmitter situation correct at the Continental Cup so the special FM radio bugs will be able to be used at the Scotties in Charlottetown and the Tim Hortons Brier in London.
“For the Continental Cup, anyone who brings an FM radio to the venue can easily tune into the TSN commentators on the broadcast. We’ll get this up and running by the Scotties where fans will be able to either bring their own radio or purchase one of the inexpensive headsets from from our merchandise area.”
Curling TV numbers have become the phenomenon of the sports world.
Indeed, four of the teams competing for the Continental Cup — Canada’s Kevin Martin, Norway’s Thomas Ulsrud, Germany’s Andrea Schopp and Canada’s Cheryl Bernard — all played before almost seven million on Canadian television alone during the gold-medal games of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games.
As was the case with the Torino 2006 and Salt Lake 2002 Olympics, the TV numbers reported around the world were mind boggling for the often ridiculed sport where they throw rocks at houses and sweep pimpled ice with brooms.
“The use of rf mics is what has set curling apart from all other sports and has been a contributing factor to the large television numbers we enjoy today,” Hansen, a former Brier winner curling with Hec Gervais, who also won three Little Grey Cups playing football with the Edmonton Huskies.
“We also allow the cameras in very tight on the curlers so someone sitting in their living room feels as if they are right there in the conversation between the skip and vice skip.
“It is the only sport where the television viewer feels as if they are in the midst of the action. I believe the result is that it has brought in a great many viewers who otherwise may not be there.”
The trouble is, it meant that the guy watching at home for free on TV was, although missing the live atmosphere and the experience of being there, which was phenomenal at the Vancouver Olympics, was being cheated out of the thing which has made the sport compelling on TV.
This will now bring that component into play for those sitting in the stands.
“Our initial plan is to easily make it possible for all fans to listen to the FM signal provided by TSN. Making the rf mics available on every sheet would be the next step. but we aren’t there yet.”
If this becomes a part of the live curling experience, it will be a legacy of the Vancouver Olympics where the bugs were made available to the crowd and Edmonton radio host Jackie Ray Greening, the organizing committee chairman of the 2005 Brier, 2007 Worlds and 2009 Olympic Trials here, delivered a running commentary to the crowd, directing their attention from one sheet to the other.
“The experiment with Jackie Rae worked very well, which is why we’re expanding the idea this year with plans to create something even more extensive for the future.
“I thing one of the reasons it was especially popular in Vancouver was because a large percentage of the audience was not very familiar with curling,” said Hansen.
“Actor Donald Sutherland was at the venue a lot in the latter days and he always had on a headset.”
BY ERICA VIRTUE Sunday Observer writer virtuee [at] jamaicaobserver [dot] com
Sunday, January 09, 2011
In the face of increasing claims by local law enforcement officials that criminals are using cellular phones to assist in the commission of serious crimes, controversy continues to swirl around whether the police should have more far-reaching powers to bug the phones of suspected criminals.
Although more reliance is now being placed on telecommunications technologies, long used by other jurisdictions to trap suspected wrong-doers, wiretapped evidence remains excluded from Jamaican courts unless it is being used to corroborate evidence already in place.
Wiretapped evidence is also inadmissible in Jamaican courts if permission to place the bug was not given by a High Court judge.
In contrast, state-sanctioned eavesdropping on phone conversations is a facility widely used by the United States in its pursuit of wrongdoers.
Information in the possession of the Sunday Observer showed that between January 2004 and March 2005, ‘Big Brother’ eavesdropped on 4,000 phones calls into and out of five different countries — one of them being Jamaica — in an effort to trap suspected drug-traffickers, including five Jamaicans. These were calls made to 94 different suspected drug dealers’ phones.
Executive director of local human rights lobby group Jamaicans For Justice (JFJ), Dr Carolyn Gomes, accepts law enforcement officials referencing telephone conversations in order to corroborate evidence in a criminal matter.
“The simple answer is no, I do not have a problem with them checking for usage rather than listening in. Even with that there are some questions of privacy, but that may be easier to live with for the time being,” Gomes told Sunday Observer.
However, she is vehemently opposed to anything making it easier for the police to bug the phones of average Jamaicans. According to Gomes, being able to hold private conversations is a fundamental and constitutional right, and “everyone should be able to hold their personal and private conversations without law enforcement listening in”.
“I support the use of more and better technology, but no to more bugging,” Gomes insisted.
Former police commissioner-turned-politician Lucius Thomas, while supporting citizens’ right to privacy, said the police must be given the necessary means available to fight crime.
“There is a huge volume of work involved in intercepting telephone calls. So you would want to target the individuals involved in crimes such as murders and drug trafficking, which itself has led to murders,” Thomas told Sunday Observer.
“But I am one of those who support the information flow that you need to use the technology to enhance the investigative skills of the police officers. So I would want the police to have greater access to individuals suspected of being great security risks to the country,” Thomas said.
He complained that the process of securing the warrant was tedious and once acquired, the document carried an expiry date.
“Given what law enforcement is all about; given the advancement in technology and given the criminals’ access both local and otherwise, and with the advent of the Internet and cyber-crimes, I believe that police should have easier and greater access to the phones of those individuals,” Thomas insisted.
On the other hand, Assistant Police Commissioner Les Green said the police have adequate powers to wiretap and he was satisfied with what currently existed.
“I do not see the current process involved in securing the warrant for wiretaps being too onerous,” Green told Sunday Observer. He also said that recent amendments to the existing laws have made it easier for the police to tap the phones of suspected criminals.
“I dare say what we have needs a bit of fine tuning, but it’s for us to use the powers that we have,” he said.
The wiretap law, which was passed by the Senate in February 2002, allows the security forces to apply to a Supreme Court judge for an order to intercept the electronic communication of people suspected of involvement in drug trafficking, terrorism, murder, treason, kidnapping or abduction, gun-running and money laundering.
Twenty-eight days after permission is obtained, the police must re-apply for the wiretaps to continue being used.
Prior to that, there was no legislation regulating wiretaps and the authorisation for bugging people’s phones came from the prime minister after a submission from the national security minister, following a request from the security forces.
The then administration moved to change the system after a scandal in 2000 when a civilian-led intelligence group that operated within the police organised crime unit apparently went on a freelance wire-tapping spree. A number of politicians were alleged to have been among the people whose phone conversations were intercepted.
The intelligence group’s head, Roderick ‘Jimmy’ McGregor, having first denied it, later admitted to the illegal wiretaps, which led to the downfall of some police officials and the unit being disbanded.
Former Police Commissioner Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin is supporting the position offered by Green.
“We can only use wiretapped evidence to corroborate other evidence in the hands of investigating authorities. It cannot be used as ‘stand-alone’ evidence. And there is really nothing stopping the local police from using wiretap evidence in regular policing duties,” Lewin said in a Sunday Observer interview.
“But, if the current system isn’t busted, then there is no need to fix it,” he suggested.
When the United States used wiretap evidence to make the case against former Tivoli Gardens don, Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, it led to a quarrel between Kingston and Washington and a refusal by Jamaica to extradite Coke, who the US had indicted on drug-trafficking and racketeering charges.
Prime Minister Bruce Golding later insisted that the police officer who had access to wiretaps from Coke’s phones, illegally passed the evidence on to the US, instead of to local authorities.
Golding said that the US was not on the list referenced on the court order allowing local law enforcement to tap the accused former area leader’s phone and should not have been allowed to access the information obtained via the bug.
Lewin, in an earlier interview, dubbed the policeman at the centre of the issue ‘Constable Red Herring’ implying that he was just a scapegoat. He also told the Sunday Observer that the prime minister’s claim that wiretap evidence gathered in the Coke case illegally changed hands, was unfounded.
Former Attorney General A J Nicholson, who was Jamaica’s chief legal advisor at the time when the request came from the United States, said the use of the information was permissible under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty which Jamaica signed with its northern neighbour.
Former National Security Minister Dr Peter Phillips said this Treaty set the policy.
“This is not a pact, which I believe is the word the prime minister used at the Area Council 1 meeting in August (2010),” Phillips said. “It is a memorandum of understanding which settled on what access people would have. Prior to that, there had been no formal arrangement. People would get access, but there was nothing that would provide a basis for an agreement. But these arrangements existed before me, and so it was just a matter of formalising a tradition which had long existed.”
It was that tradition that led to the bugging of the phones of Jamaican Norris ‘Dedo’ Nembhard, who former US President George W Bush designated a drug kingpin, as well as those of Leebert Ramcharan and Donovan Williams.
Nembhard was extradited to the US in July 2008, while Ramcharan and Williams were handed over to US authorities in 2007. The three are currently serving time in US prisons.
Phillips said as far as he could recall, that anti-drug operation spanned several countries including Jamaica, Colombia, The Bahamas, the United Kingdom and the United States, and wiretapping was not an issue anywhere else.
“No, I don’t recall it being an issue by anyone,” said Phillips. “But I wasn’t directly involved, it would have been the director of public prosecutions on our end. But in all of this, if you look at the cases, I don’t think anybody raised the matter of the use of and even the exchange of wiretapped evidence.
“The law is clear as far as I am advised. The commissioner of police and the chief of defence staff have access to it, and they can use it for law enforcement purposes and that includes co-operating with other states,” added the former security minister.
In late November 2010, the prime minister said legislation would be brought to Parliament to amend current provisions in the Interception of Communication (Wiretapping) law.
He is attempting to close a loophole in the current system to make it mandatory for wiretap information secured in Jamaica to be handed to designated local authorities before it is passed to anyone outside of the country.
You may not believe to see it but Rupert Murdoch‘s British tabloid News of the World has rules.
The paper suspended assistant editor Ian Edmondson yesterday for approving hacking into the voice mail of Sienna Miller.
According to Bloomberg the suspension came after Miller alleged in a lawsuit that Edmondson had “approved a contract with an investigator to eavesdrop on personal messages between her, her friends and business associates” and paid him $3,900 to do so.
People grumbling to friends about their health or waiting times at hospitals is nothing new. But as more choose to do so on internet forums and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, they may be surprised to learn that hospitals and healthcare professionals are “listening in”.
Organisations such as the Care Quality Commission, the health and social care regulator, and several NHS hospitals are starting to trawl the web for clues about where they need to investigate low standards or direct extra resources.
Social-media monitoring is becoming common in the private sector, as companies listen out for complaints about their own services, or those of competitors, to help poach customers.
In the public sector, where the pace of technological change is often glacial, “eavesdropping” on online conversations can tap opinions from people who may not want to fill in a formal survey form.
The commission has been working with Qinetiq, the defence technology company and former government agency, to help it scan and automatically categorise internet comments. Similar technology is used by security services to look for terrorist “chatter” online.
The commission plans to pilot the service early next year, initially looking at comments on hospital websites, local news reports and health forums – all with the intention of helping its inspectors to prioritise the sites they need to investigate more closely.
The system, which builds on its existing information gathering and management technology, could then be extended to Twitter and Facebook, said Richard Hamblin, the commission’s director of intelligence.
From next spring, the commission will regulate 45,000 nursing homes, GP surgeries, dental practices and other healthcare outfits, up from 27,000 today – although it will not have new funds to increase its team of inspectors in proportion.
“We are being forced to think about how to do more with less,” said Mr Hamblin. “Even if you quadrupled [staffing], you would not get round as many as you would want to, so you need to get smarter about where the biggest risks are and concentrate resources there.”
The agency uses a team of four to categorise manually about 1,000 comments from 15 different sources every month. It is testing cutting-edge linguistic technology developed by a team at Oxford University to categorise automatically more qualitative information.
That will allow new data to be processed from a greater number of sources from around the web, and the same team can move into more sophisticated tasks, analysing the results. The project is likely to cost less than half that of processing the information manually over its first year.
Within the NHS, many hospitals – including London’s St George’s Trust, West Middlesex and Barts – and primary care trusts have created Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Although most use social networks only to share information and health tips, some are used to scan for patients tweeting about their ailments or treatment, mentioning the hospital’s name.
A group of NHS social media enthusiasts hold a virtual meeting on Twitter every Monday to discuss how best to use the new channels.
Samuel Ridge, senior communications manager for St George’s Trust, said the hospital had picked up on concerns tweeted by a kidney patient and photographs posted of damaged facilities.
“[Patients] speak openly and honestly in what is a friendly but public environment. These informal forums don’t exist within the NHS,” he said.It’s quite early days but we have quite comprehensive monitoring in place. It gives us a clear impression about what people feel about us as a hospital and the NHS.”
Mr Ridge admits that this “eavesdropping” could raise questions about patient confidentiality. His team is careful not to reveal personal information by replying to patients in public; individual follow-ups are always made by phone, e-mail or private message.
“We are not playing big brother,” Mr Ridge says. “If we can provide support to patients via that medium, it’s a brave step to make but there might be some strong patient benefits.”
The ongoing criminal case involving Sacramento real estate magnate Michael Lyon is prompting Sacramento’s district attorney to seek legislative relief for alleged victims of video voyeurism.
At issue: the state’s three-year statute of limitations, which sets a limit on the time prosecutors can initiate criminal proceedings after the offense occurred. Each state determines its own statute of limitations for criminal and civil matters, which aims to balance a victim’s right to justice with a would-be defendant’s right to be free from open-ended legal action.
Memories fade, investigations grow stale and witnesses die or move away.
In California and elsewhere, though, the statute of limitations for video voyeurism has presented a quandary for law enforcement officials, who say predators often operate for years before their activities are discovered. When they are, evidence may literally be staring investigators in the face, but the case is “too old” to seek justice for victims in the criminal courts.
“It’s just basic fairness here,” said Sacramento County Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney Jeff Rose.
“The whole purpose of somebody having surreptitious recordings is to keep it secret. Therefore, they get rewarded if they keep it secret long enough i.e., three years where they can never be prosecuted. Somehow, that just doesn’t seem fair.”
Rose said the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office has asked the California District Attorneys Association to back legislation that would start the meter running when the illegal videotaping is discovered not when the offenses occurred.
In Lyon’s case, investigators have discovered sordid images of people being secretly taped in private acts dating back to at least 1988, including two former nannies, sources told The Bee.
However, given the three-year statute of limitations, the District Attorney’s Office was able to bring charges based only on Lyon’s alleged sexual encounters with three prostitutes in 2008 and 2009.
Wiretap charges filed
In late August, Lyon, 54, stepped down as CEO of the company his father founded amid an investigation into whether he had illegally recorded houseguests, friends and prostitutes with cameras hidden in bathrooms and bedrooms.
A 16-month federal probe was closed that same month after the U.S. attorney’s office concluded it lacked the evidence to bring federal charges. But the Sacramento County sheriff and district attorney picked up the investigation in light of the allegations of long-running illegal taping and arrested the prominent businessman in November.
Lyon faces four felony counts of recording confidential communications, charges that stem from allegations that he recorded his sex acts with three prostitutes, without their knowledge, over the past three years. His attorney, William Portanova, has said his client will fight the charges, and Lyon is expected to enter a plea at his next hearing on Jan. 12.
Portanova has repeatedly said Lyon did nothing wrong and recently told The Bee that his client “does not electronically eavesdrop on anybody without their permission, period, plain and simple.”
Lyon is being charged under the state’s wiretapping law, which makes it a crime to record or eavesdrop on private communications which has been interpreted in California to include sexual relations. The state also has a law specifically addressing video voyeurism, a misdemeanor with a one-year statute of limitations.
By filing under the wiretapping law, the district attorney was able to pursue the more serious felony charges and get a wider berth with a three-year statute of limitations. While the current case revolves around prostitutes, Rose recently told The Bee that prosecutors may be able to present the older evidence involving the nannies, houseguests and others to establish a pattern of conduct.
Cory Salzillo, director of legislation for the California District Attorneys Association, said the group will have no formal position on the proposal to change the statute of limitations until after the legislation committee meets in January.
Statutes trail technology
Meanwhile, the idea intrigues several legal experts and victims rights advocates, who say many states’ statute of limitations on illicit recording failed to keep pace with technology and the increasing ease with which unsuspecting victims can be monitored.
Law enforcement documents reviewed by The Bee indicate Lyon concealed high-tech cameras inside clock radios and other household items. Detectives who served search warrants at his home and on his vehicles seized computers, cameras, digital storage devices and a pair of high-tech eyeglasses that can be used to watch videos or make recordings, court documents indicate.
Rose said California’s statute of limitations treats similar crimes unevenly. For instance, in cases of fraud, the three-year time period in which prosecutors can bring charges begins when the crime is discovered. Rose likened fraud to video voyeurism, in that perpetrators of both crimes rely on secrecy and deception and often avoid detection for years.
“Why shouldn’t it be the same in these cases?” he asked.
California’s civil courts also are less restrictive, with victims of illegal taping given one year to file suit from the time the crime was discovered.
In fact, Lyon is being sued by a former nanny and a long-time family friend for allegedly videotaping them secretly when both were teenagers. The two, whose names were not revealed in the lawsuit, accuse Lyon of committing “an egregious breach of societal norms” by taping them while they used bathrooms in his homes.
The former nanny was taped in the shower and bathroom of the Lyon family vacation home near Lake Tahoe sometime around 1992, according to law enforcement documents reviewed by The Bee. The woman was about 16 at the time she was recorded emerging from the shower and blow-drying her hair, the documents state.
The other plaintiff is a family friend who was 18 at the time he was recorded in 2006 while in the bathroom of the Lyon’s Arden Arcade-area home.
Shock is still fresh
Despite the passage of time, the injuries are fresh to the plaintiffs, who recently had to identify themselves on tapes recovered by the FBI, said their attorney, Robert Zimmerman. The recordings have revealed numerous people not just prostitutes who were captured in private moments in Lyon’s homes, the attorney said.
“When you see the cross-section of people involved in this secret monitoring, it just violates trust on so many different levels,” Zimmerman said.
Portanova, Lyon’s attorney, said the limits on prosecuting alleged crimes “are on the books for a reason.” Evidence gets old, memories falter.
“It is difficult to prove your defense years after the fact,” he said. “Generally speaking, the most heinous crimes like murder have no statutes of limitations, and of course that makes sense. But most misdemeanor crimes are prosecutable within a year or the opportunity to prosecute is gone forever, as it should be.”
Every crime misdemeanors and felonies has its own statute of limitations enacted by the Legislature over the past 100 years, he said.
“There’s a balance that has to be found between rational law enforcement and the ability of an individual to gather evidence to meet the accusation,” Portanova said.
Others believe the balance has tipped too far toward defendants when it comes to video voyeurism.
Susan Howley of the National Center for Victims of Crime said she believes it “makes a lot of policy sense” for states to re-examine their statutes for these unique crimes, especially with advancing technology.
“When you have cases like this where you have significant evidence and the prosecutor believes he or she can move forward and make the case there shouldn’t be an arbitrary cutoff of justice here,” she said.
“For many victims, it can be just as devastating even after the passage of time.”
CATCHING UP WITH THE LYON CASE
In late August, real estate magnate Michael Lyon, 54, stepped down as CEO of the company his father founded amid an investigation into whether he had illegally recorded houseguests, friends and prostitutes with cameras hidden in bathrooms and bedrooms.
A 16-month federal probe was closed that same month after the U.S. attorney’s office concluded it lacked the evidence to bring federal charges.
The Sacramento County sheriff and district attorney picked up the investigation in light of the allegations of long-running illegal taping and arrested Lyon in November. He faces four felony counts.
Lyon’s attorney has said his client will fight the charges, and Lyon is expected to enter a plea at his next hearing on Jan. 12.
You may not believe to see it but Rupert Murdoch‘s British tabloid News of the World has rules.