SpyGearCo: Spy and Surveillance

There have been numerous reports over the years of nursing home abuses, and there have been Congressional investigations into this abuse.

Nursing homes are often understaffed, and sometimes staffed with unqualified or under-qualified caregivers. True but sad there is a lot of abuse in our nursing homes and I for one would never send my parents to one.

In fact Attorney General Eliot Spitzer today announced the arrest of 19 employees at two separate nursing homes in Rochester and Cortland where hidden cameras revealed distressing evidence of patient neglect.

These and other patient neglect cases were the catalyst for a report prepared by the Attorney General’s office that details staffing levels at nursing homes throughout the state.

Hidden camera reporting has exposed systemic racial discrimination, critical weaknesses in airport security, gross incompetence by law enforcement officers and abhorrent patient care in nursing homes and hospitals, however, a recent investigation by Consumer Reports found poor care in nursing homes is still extremely common, especially in the for-profit chains that have become the dominant force in the industry.

The report urges consumers to visit homes, actively monitor the level of care being delivered, and talk to others with family members or friends in the home. “Caregivers in understaffed nursing homes need as many residents as possible to be asleep,” he explains, “because there is not sufficient staff to adequately care for all the residents when they are awake. That’s how bad caregivers need to be watched by the latest hidden camera technology.

Hidden cameras consistently reveal chronic patient neglect and pervasive falsification of care records by nursing home employees. According to officials, hidden cameras revealed that licensed professionals repeatedly failed to provide care or treatment to the resident, and then falsified records to report that proper care had been administered.

For example, nineteen employees at two New York State nursing homes where hidden cameras revealed distressing evidence of patient neglect have been arrested, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Hidden Cameras, Surveillance for Business, Video Surveillance Systems. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comment will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.

Age discrimination is the practice of letting a person’s age unfairly become a factor when deciding who receives a new job, promotion, or other job benefit. This article focuses on using the World’s Smallest Spy Cam Real Time Video/Audio Recorder in your shirt to catch employers drawing the age discrimination card on you. Give that there is a recession going on, it’s important to try and get the goods on the creeps trying to prevent you from getting a job in this tuff economy! Here is some important information to be aware of about age discrimination.

Age discrimination is active just about everywhere, and it is going to be almost impossible to stop. Analyses find that perceived age discrimination is high in the 20s, drops in the 30s and peaks in the 50s. Additionally, the primary driver of perceived age discrimination is age – not cohort or historical period.

These findings suggest that perceived age discrimination is a useful indicator of population-level exposure to work-related age discrimination among women. Using a nationally-representative sample of persons aged 25-74 from the Midlife Development in the United States survey, this study finds that perceived age discrimination is associated with higher psychological distress and lower positive well-being.

Perceived age discrimination is more negatively associated with women’s mental health than men’s. For example a 54 year old man said he is beginning to suspect that age discrimination is a real factor for not getting the job he interviewed for even though he was thoroughly qualified for the position.  The fact that several employers have not hired me cuts against the idea that age discrimination is at work, since it is hard to believe that all of these employers are engaging in the same form of discrimination, he says.

In addition to lost sales, age discrimination is increasing wage costs and turnover, the problem of age discrimination appears to be widespread.

You must also maintain detailed records as required by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which can take action against an employer if it feels discrimination has occurred. If an employer proves that the age discrimination was “willful,” then back pay damages are doubled.

A jury agreed with the employee, but an appeals court overruled the jury, stating that the employee had to offer additional proof that he was discriminated against—just proving that the company lied about why they fired him was not enough to prove age discrimination.

Every state has its own laws making age discrimination illegal, and employees may still take action under those state laws. Age discrimination in employment has received mounting attention over the past two decades, and from various cross-cutting social science disciplines. If the people who were hired for those positions were substantially younger — as in, 10 or more years — and their qualifications are inferior to yours, you may in fact have a valid age-discrimination claim, he says.

Age discrimination legislation due to be introduced next year is likely to prove a far bigger headache to employers than sex, race or disability discrimination laws, according to a new study by employment law advisers, Croner. But the penalties for workplace age discrimination will be just as severe as for other forms of discrimination. Age discrimination is active just about everywhere, and it is going to be almost impossible to stop.

Using a nationally-representative sample of persons aged 25-74 from the Midlife Development in the United States survey, this study finds that perceived age discrimination is associated with higher psychological distress and lower positive well-being.

Be advised, though, that age discrimination is very hard to prove. One of the tools an employee can use to prove age discrimination is comments made at the workplace.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Hidden Cameras, Spy Cam, Surveillance News. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comment will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.

While media stories have focused on potential abuse and inattention being reasons parents should consider using a nanny cam, some sitters have indicated a camera can provide a positive connection with the families while at work.

Child abuse is doing something or failing to do something that results in harm to a child or puts a child at risk of harm. More parents are considering using hidden in-home surveillance devices to watch their child’s caregiver.

Some parents handle the situation by telling a potential care provider upfront that a nanny cam will be used so that they can feel comfortable and confident about their child’s care. It’s then up to the provider to accept or decline the position with a family who uses a nanny cam.

Nanny Cam May Leave Home Exposed Other Uses For In-Home Surveillance Spy cams can be used for many other reasons than just child care. Disadvantages of Using a Nanny Cam Studies and polls show that many care providers are not necessarily against video taping of child-provider interaction, it’s just that they want to know about it.  

A young girl, Rachel told us, in tears just short of hysteria, that her distress was due to her belief that Lisa had been sexually abused by the 12-year-old girl Rachel had entrusted with babysitting her for the previous year.

For instance, to her paternal aunt, she described objects that the baby sitter, whose supposed abuses Lisa had previously “refused to discuss,” had inserted into Lisa’s vagina, urethra and anus.

While media stories have focused on potential abuse and inattention being reasons parents should consider using a nanny cam, some sitters have indicated a camera can provide a positive connection with the families while at work.  

Although they may escape their childhood sexual abuse in adolescence, it is rare for these offenders to be involved in a healthy sexual relationship. Predisposed offenders tend to commit offences which are violent in nature and involve young victims (under six years of age).

Now, with no evidence and wrongly, she believed the sitters we had left her with to have been sexually dangerous to her.

Spy Shops, an international retail chain, reports a 25 percent increase in sales of these devices–often called “nanny cams,”–over the past five years.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 11:47 pm and is filed under Hidden Cameras, Home Security, Spy Cam. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comment will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.

Facial Recognition Surveillance 101:

Facial Recognition Surveillance–Hidden passive surveillance cameras that can be set up to monitor an entrance way of any type of building to accurately identify a potential suspect, terrorist or wanted person against a database of millions of suspect images in less than one second.

Facial recognition surveillance systems have been deployed in casinos worldwide, performing one-to-many matching against a database of casino offenders.

Cost:

Adding biometrics to time and attendance processes, for example, helps prevent hourly employees from punching time cards for their absent friends, a practice that is estimated to cost employers hundreds of millions of dollars annually. A facial recognition server controlling access at a facility with up to 30,000 persons would cost about $15,000. As the size of the database and the number of attempted matches increased, so would a system’s cost.

Recognition:

In addition, because facial images can be captured from video cameras, facial recognition is the only biometric that can be used for surveillance purposes. Multiple biometrics could be two types of biometrics, such as combining facial and iris recognition. Although facial recognition performs much worse than fingerprint and iris recognition, it remains attractive because facial images are used in a wide variety of identification documents.

The performance of facial recognition technology is affected greatly by environmental factors, especially lighting conditions. Some people assume that the imaging of their irises will reveal their medical data, such as heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure, but images of the iris acquired for iris recognition reveal no information about a persons health.

Hand geometry and iris and facial recognition have been deployed at ATMs in North America, Europe, and Asia. Facial recognition is also being used for criminal identification, although the technology does not provide the same high degree of accuracy as the older technology. One prototype system integrates fingerprint and facial recognition technologies to improve identification.

Technology:

Until recently, face-recognition technology was fodder for science fiction. The facial recognition technology may replace human eyes that scan crowds for familiar faces.  Improved cameras and equipment for surveillance have been implemented in a variety of venues in an attempt to increase accuracy of images provided to security personnel.

Why Facial?:

Facial recognition technology automates the processing of existing surveillance photography. Facial recognition software can be deployed on existing video surveillance systems. Facial recognition is used to compare people with matching names to determine whether the faces also match.

The device accurately authenticates a person’s identification document, takes a picture of the person and compares the facial photo to a database of known criminals or persons on the no-trespass list.

When an image is taken of a person’s face, the image is analyzed and compared with other photographic images of facial captures to determine if a match exists. The second scenario uses an automated facial recognition system at the ports of entry that can observe a person’s face and check the observed facial features against a watch list of people who should be denied access to the country.

For instance, for a surveillance system, the biometrics may be faces captured from mug shots provided by a law enforcement agency. The face is the only biometric used in a viable recognition technology that is able to operate without a user’s cooperation, since a CCTV camera need only capture a picture for the technology to generate a template. The system will capture a face biometric, which will be used in a search against a central criminal watch list database.

In addition, because facial images can be captured from video cameras, facial recognition is the only biometric that can be used for surveillance purposes.

This makes an identification system more suitable for surveillance in conjunction with closed-circuit television (CCTV) to spot suspected criminals whose facial characteristics have been captured and stored in a database on a template. The technology can perform a one-to-many match against this database in less than 15 seconds, and about 15,000 images are captured daily. The more data that is captured the better the potential for achieving high performance levels.

Department of Defense contract for the continued development of facial-recognition surveillance systems usable in operational environments and suitable for use in high-security applications. Increased security concerns have created a need for reliable forms offacial recognition.

Some systems simply measure distances between the eyes, nose and other facial features, while others attempt to compare and categorize facial features against a table of different pre-determined nose, eye, and mouth shapes. However, in high volume applications that use images, such as drivers license programs, facial recognition surveillance and/or authentication systems, or national ID programs, it may not be feasible to use portrait photographs submitted by the applicant as the image source.

Regardless of the method used, an enrollment process is required to capture a biometric sample, extract and encode the sample as a biometric template, and store the data in a database for future comparisons.

Benefits:

Once that identity is established, the benefits of strongly binding the individual to that identity can be gained.

By examining the attributes of the target device, the attributes applied to the subject are also known.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Apartment & Campus Security, Surveillance News, Video Surveillance Systems. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comment will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.

Many people don’t know that there are significant problems with child abuse and stealing by nannies.

For example, A nanny in Manhasset Hills was arrested after tapes showed her dragging a baby across the floor and hitting him.

NANNY-CAM ABUSE BUST A nanny has been arrested after the parents of a 2-year-old. “It’s just parents who can go to work and actually have the peace of mind that the nanny is doing the job”.

More people should be using these “nanny cams” as a tool, as a device to monitor and maintain good child care. It is extremely important to research a nanny’s background before leaving your children alone with one. There you will find an array of cameras and recording systems, but the most popular, in this case, is the “Nanny Cam DVD Player”.  

Hopefully you will not discover any kind of neglect or child abuse, but if you do, video footage from a hidden nanny cam will be your eye witness in a prosecution. It is estimated that as many as 70 percent of caregivers lose their jobs because of what parents see on hidden cam videos. It is amazing that it was all captured on DVD Video.

This amazing video actually caught the nanny abusing their baby all over the house.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 12:04 am and is filed under Hidden Cameras, Spy Cam. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comment will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.

Verbal abuse is a difficult emotional problem, but there is hope if the abuser is willing to confront his sin and get help. Frequently, the perpetrator of verbal abuse is male and the victim is female, but not always.  

The research on which the report is based points out that children who are the target of frequent verbal mistreatment exhibit higher rates of physical aggression, delinquency, and social problems than other children.

This despite the fact that one national study found that 63 percent of American parents reported one or more instances of verbal aggression, such as swearing at and insulting their child. Other researchers have associated childhood verbal abuse with a significantly higher risk of developing unstable, angry personalities, narcissistic behavior, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and paranoia.

Obviously, there are no adequate reasons as to why some adult female teachers choose to exploit children with verbal abuse. I have known of a few teachers, in my childhood, that yelled at the child trying their best to climb the rope and when they could not do it, the gym teacher called them names and scolded them in front of the entire gym class.

When a teacher takes part in verbally, emotionally, or inappropriately touching or molesting a minor, it is time for them to be removed from their position as teacher.

What’s worse is schools authorities cut secret deals with abusive teachers so abusers moved around to other districts to do it again.

Now parents of verbally abused children are fighting back and planting video and audio devices on their children to catch verbally abusing teacher abusing their child. This video catches a teacher in the act of abusing her child.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 1:06 am and is filed under Hidden Cameras, Spy Cam. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comment will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.