Mexican State Bans Cops From Carrying Cell Phones

MEXICO CITY - First local police in Monterrey lost their assault rifles after an armed confrontation with federal agents while protesting the arrest of cops for alleged gang ties. Now officers inMexico's third-largest city will be stripped of cell phones.

The legislature in Nuevo Leon state, where Monterrey is located, unanimously approved a bill banning city and state police from carrying personal cell phones while on duty in an effort to prevent corrupt officers from communicating with drug gangs. Lawmakers approved the measure late Tuesday, a day after municipal police in Monterrey pulled guns on masked federal agents during a standoff that sent motorists scrambling for cover — and underscored tensions over a crackdown on drug corruption among lawmen.

Earlier this month, federal forces raided police stations in 18 towns in Nuevo Leon, which borders Texas, and detained 78 officers suspected of working with drug smugglers. The operation came after soldiers found lists of police names in the possession of suspecteddrug traffickers in May.

State lawmaker Mirthala Castillo said the cell phone ban would take effect later this month. City police spokeswoman Sidlayin Robles said it was not clear how the ban would be enforced. Officers in Monterrey complained that they are finding themselves unable to do their jobs.

"We patrol certain areas and we have a cell phone so the neighbors can call us if there is trouble," said one officer, who declined to give his name. "If they take away our cell phones, they'll have to call the station first and it will take more time to get there."

He argued that any officers who have taken payoffs from Mexico's brutal drug gangs have no choice: They either have to turn a blind eye to trafficking or be killed. Federal forces have been conducting sweeps across Mexico to round up local officers and politicians accused of collaborating with drug cartels. Among those were 10 mayors in Michoacan, the home state of President Felipe Calderon. Many retired army officers have been called on to run local police forces.

Many city police are furious at seeing colleagues disarmed and dragged away in handcuffs. The friction boiled over Monday evening in Monterrey when local officers protesting the arrest of a police woman who authorities say is a high-ranking member of the Gulf drug cartel blocked streets and then aimed pistols and assault riflesat federal agents who tried to disperse them.

Nuevo Leon's state public safety secretary, Aldo Fasci Zuazua, said state officials stripped municipal police of their automatic riflesbecause of the incident. He said such weapons would be given out to city officers only with special permission.

Mexico's drug violence has claimed more than 10,800 lives since 2006, when Calderon launched his anti-drug campaign. About 45,000 soldiers have been deployed to drug-plagued areas.

On Wednesday, federal police coordinator Gen. Rodolfo Cruz said a shootout in Durango state killed one federal officer and three gunmen. Federal forces detained three alleged members of the Sinaloa cartel after the confrontation late Tuesday in the city of Durango, the state capital.

Cruz said one of the gunmen killed was the top man for the Sinaloa cartel in Durango. Also Wednesday, federal authorities said they have arrested ninestate police officers in the state of Morelos, just outside Mexico City, for their alleged ties to the Beltran Leyva drug cartel.

Source: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090611/ap_on_hi_te/lt_drug_war_mexico_2

Tags: Mexico, Nueva Leon, Federales, Mexican Police, Sinaloa Cartel, Michocan, Durango, Felipe Calderon, Aldo Fasci Zuazua Cartel, Drug Cartels, Corruption, Global Development News, Cell phones,

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Japan Explores Using Cell Phones To Stop Pandemics

TOKYO - A few months from now, a highly contagious disease will spread through a Japanese elementary school. The epidemic will start with several unwitting children, who will infect others as they attend classes and wander the halls.

If nothing is done, it will quickly gain momentum and rip through thestudent body, then jump to parents and others in the community. But officials will attempt to stymie the disease and save the school — using mobile phones.

The sickness will be a virtual one, in an experiment funded by the Japanese government. A subsidiary of Softbank Corp., a major Japanese Internet and cellular provider, has proposed a system that uses phones to limit pandemics.

The exact details have yet to be fixed, but Softbank hopes to pick an elementary school with about 1,000 students and give them phones equipped with GPS. The locations of the children will be recorded every minute of the day and stored on a central server.

A few students will be chosen to be considered "infected," and their movements over the previous few days will be compared with those of everyone else. The stored GPS data can then be used to determine which children have crossed paths with the infected students and are at risk of having contracted the disease.

The families of exposed students will be notified by messages to their mobile phones, instructing them to get checked out by doctors. In a real outbreak, that could limit the rate of new infections.

"The number of people infected by such a disease quickly doubles, triples and quadruples as it spreads. If this rate is decreased by even a small amount, it has a big effect in keeping the overall outbreak in check," said Masato Takahashi, who works on infrastructure strategy at Softbank.

He demonstrates with a calculation: If an infected person makes about three more people sick per day, and each newly infected person then makes another three people sick, on the 10th day about 60,000 people would catch the disease. If each sick person instead infected two people a day, on the 10th day about 1,500 people would get sick.

The experiment was conceived before the current outbreak of swine flu, but has drawn fresh attention now that Japan has the highest number of confirmed cases outside of North America.

It is one of 24 trials the government recently approved as part of a program to promote new uses for Japan's Internet and cellular infrastructure. The country boasts some of the most advancedmobile phone technology in the world. It is blanketed in high-speedcellular networks, and phones come standard with features like GPS, TV and touchless train passes.

The mobile phone market is largely saturated, however, and fees are being driven down by an ongoing price war. For Softbank, a government-backed health-monitoring service could be boon to business.

GPS has its shortcomings, including hazy readings indoors. But Softbank believes it could keep readings accurate to several yards, at least for an experiment in a limited area.

Until now, technologies like GPS have mainly been used to help people figure out where they are and what is nearby. As networked devices like the iPhone become more popular, new applications let people track their children or friends, and could give companies and governments access to their location.

Aoyama Gakuin University, a prestigious school in Tokyo, is givingApple Inc.'s iPhone 3G to students, partially as a way to check attendance via GPS readings from an application running on the phone.

That kind of project raises privacy concerns, and one of the goals of the Japanese experiment is to judge how participants feel about having their location constantly recorded.

If a disease-tracking system were launched for real, no one would be required to sign up, said Takuo Imagawa, an official at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

Another concern for the experiment is how to inform people that they may be infected, even if it's just a virtual disease. "If we don't think carefully about the nature of the warning, people that get such a message could panic," said Katsuya Uchida, a professor at the Institute of Information Security in Yokohama. Uchida serves on a board that evaluates such proposals for the government.

Softbank Telecom, the subsidiary that made the original proposal, might not be chosen by the ministry to run the experiment in the fall. But Takahashi says that whichever company is chosen, he hopes the potential benefits of a monitoring system are enough to persuade people to sign up and reveal their whereabouts.

"I think it would have a bigger impact than Tamiflu," he said.

Source: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090606/ap_on_hi_te/as_tec_japan_mobile_pandemic_stopper_1

Tags: Japan, cell phones, pandemics, Aoyama Gakuin University, Iphone, GPS, Yokohama, Softbank Telecom, Institute of Information Security in Yokohama, Global IT News, Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications,

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