The 9-year-old girl, sitting on a booster seat behind the wheel of her father’s large van, asked the police officer why she was being pulled over.

After all, she had been driving well. She even used her turn signal. Twice.

“She was doing fine,” Brownstown Township Police Detective Lt. Robert Grant said. “And, in fact, as heinous as this is, the little girl looks at the police officer and says, ‘What did you stop me for? I was driving good.’ Incredible. Obviously, the officer told her she was too young to drive.”

It was 2:46 a.m. Oct. 8, and the girl had just left a Citgo gas station at Telegraph and West.

In the passenger seat was her 39-year-old father, suspected of being drunk, police said.

The father, Shawn Weimer, 39, of Brownstown Township now faces charges of felony child abuse and being a habitual offender. A preliminary examination is scheduled today in 33rd District Court in Woodhaven.

http://liarcatchers.com/electronic_surveillance.html

The Free Press could not reach Weimer or his attorney Monday.

On store surveillance video, Weimer brags to a clerk at Citgo about his daughter.

“I got a designated driver,” he said. “Nine years old. Nine. Dad, drinking. Listen, we’re leaving, and she’s driving.”

At one point, the girl said, “And I parked,” as Weimer told the clerk the girl drove all the way to the store.

Police learned about the 9-year-old from a caller who watched the girl get behind the wheel and her father get in the passenger seat.

“She’s like 7 years old, driving,” the caller told the 911 dispatcher. “She’s got her turn signal on and she’s turning right on Beech Daly.”

The 62-year-old New Boston man, who asked that his name not be used because he fears repercussions, said he noticed Weimer talking loudly to the clerk at the gas station, calling his daughter his “little angel.”

The man said he and the clerk remarked that the man seemed drunk.

“I said, ‘That’s nice — he’s got his little angel and he’s going to drive drunk.’ And (the clerk) said, ‘No, he’s not driving — she’s driving.’ ”

The New Boston man followed the van west on West Road and called 911.

“She’s driving pretty good, I’m telling ya — I can’t believe it,” the man told the dispatcher.

Officers caught up with the girl at King Road and pulled across the intersection as she approached.

“She’s right there and put her turn signal on,” the caller said, chuckling. “She just went left. She just went right past your cars — she’s still driving. She’s going west on King.”

Officers finally pulled over the pair near Dean, Grant said Monday.

Weimer told officers he was teaching his daughter to drive, Grant said.

“He was argumentative with us, that it was his right to teach his daughter how to drive,” Grant said.

The girl told officers her father had been drinking whiskey all night, took her out to drive, and then decided to stop at the station, Grant said.

The girl’s parents are separated, and she was with her father for the weekend, he said.

At the police station, Weimer refused to take a breath test, Grant said.

He was charged with second-degree child abuse, a four-year felony, and fourth-degree child abuse, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail.

He also was charged with being a habitual offender and could be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison if convicted.

The habitual offender charge stems from Weimer’s convictions on four felonies: receiving and concealing stolen property, unarmed robbery, felon in possession of a firearm and felony firearm, Grant said.

According to the Michigan Secretary of State’s Office, Weimer was convicted of operating while impaired by liquor in connection with an October 2007 crash in Wyandotte and had his license restricted for a year, spokesman Fred Woodhams said Monday.

Weimer currently has a valid Michigan driver’s license with no points, Woodhams said.

Judge Michael McNally of 33rd District Court arraigned Weimer on Oct. 10.

McNally gave Weimer a personal recognizance bond, with the conditions that he not have contact with his daughter and pay $25,000 if he does not appear in court.

Wayne County Child Protective Services also is investigating the case, Grant said.

ntil this year, IBISS was a classified system, a piece of high-tech wizardry the military used to fight the war on terrorism. The contractor that made the system, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), couldn’t talk about it in public, but that’s changing. IBISS is one of the new products SAIC is hoping to sell to local police stations and fire departments as the defense contractor explores what is known in the industry as “adjacent markets.”

Adjacent markets can mean anything from foreign militaries to the Department of Homeland Security for the industry that makes the computer systems, software, remote sensors, radar and ground stations that comprise Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) for the military.

For the first decade of the war on terrorism, the ISR industry thrived, and companies like SAIC, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin made big profits. Those days are coming to an end though.

On Monday at the annual industry trade conference known as GEOINT, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, broke the news to the assembled contractors: “We are all going to have to share in the pain.” Clapper said, as his office submitted billions of dollars in cuts to the Office of Management and Budget over the next 10 years. The overall annual intelligence budget is about $80 billion annually; most of the details of those budgets however are secret.

Gulu Gambhir, the chief technology officer for the ISR group of SAIC, said he has seen this day coming.

“At SAIC it is certainly no surprise to us that there are pressures on the budget within our key customer space, and we’ve been preparing for these pressures and a potential downturn in certain parts of our ISR market for some time now,” Gambhir told The Daily Beast on Monday.

He added, “A number of our influential products have dual-use capability to locations and missions adjacent to our primary overseas ISR mission. One such example is local law enforcement, emergency first responders and border protection.”

Brad Antle, the president and CEO of Salient Federal Solutions and a former vice president of Lockheed Martin, said, “I think it’s logical to assume your adjacent markets for ISR capability, assuming the federal government won’t let you sell it overseas—and it’s pretty sensitive, so I can’t imagine you are going to get much of that approved for foreign sales—they are going to try to push it down to the state and local governments to see if there is a mission to support.”

Antle said he didn’t think the states and cities had the budget for much of the technology developed for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Maybe some limited cities and states; a city like New York might have some budget to support that, but I can’t see broadly how the customers are going to support customers in ISR.”

Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, said he has seen this trend for a while of military technology developed for uses overseas finding their way to local law enforcement.

“In some ways this is the entire trend we’ve been seeing since 9/11. All kinds of capabilities that were developed with an eye to foreign countries are being turned inward upon the American people,” Stanley said. “We’ve seen this with everything from the NSA to spy satellites even to a lot of the technologies that are moving through what is called the green to blue pipeline, which is to say the military to the police.”

Gambhir said an example of how his company was marketing this new kind of technology was IBISS, a system that uses “through-the-wall radar technology” similar to cell-phone signals. “It allows you to see into the interior of a building to construct a 3-D model of the walls of the building and even see under circumstances people within the building,” he said.

Stanley, who is the co-author of a forthcoming study on the deployment of surveillance drones to U.S. cities, said local police would have to be very careful with this kind of technology. “Police need to be careful with IBISS because the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to use a thermal imaging technology to peer into someone’s home without a warrant.”

Others in the industry agreed that the ISR industry was looking to local and state governments. Jason O’Connor, a vice president for engineering at Lockheed Martin’s Information Systems & Global Solutions, said his company’s products that specialize in searching through seas of random data ranging from recorded video to field reports also can be sold to emergency first responders, border-protection agencies, and police departments.

http://liarcatchers.com/electronic_surveillance.html

“We’ve been successful with our traditional customers in the age of near-endless information availability,” O’Connor said. “We find adjacencies like emergency response, border protection, security, to need those same types of services and products.”

Mark Bigham, a vice president at Raytheon’s Intelligence and Information Systems, said his company, which builds ground stations for satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles, believed it could help companies such as Federal Express develop cargo planes that would not need pilots in the future. He also said his company had proposed a way to reduce 10 percent of the costs of a $1 billion satellite ground-station contract Raytheon won last year.

Police have released surveillance pictures taken of a bank robbery in an attempt to generate leads in the Friday afternoon heist.

http://liarcatchers.com/electronic_surveillance.html

Police say two men wearing multi-colored Rastafarian hats walked into a Lumbee Guaranty Bank at 6313 Raeford Road, handed a teller a note and then grabbed an undisclosed amount of cash. No weapon was shown, and there were no reports of injuries in the robbery reported at 3:32 p.m.

The robbers fled the scene in a maroon Oldsmobile Alero that officers recovered a short distance away from the scene, police said.

Anyone with information is asked to call police at 433-1856 or CrimeStoppers at 483-TIPS.

MIAMI (CBSMiami) – Surveillance photos of a man who robbed Wells Fargo bank branch on Monday have been released by the FBI in hopes that some recognizes him and gives Crime Stoppers a call.

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The robbery happened just after noon the Wells Fargo at 16301 88th Street. Witnesses told investigators the man enter the bank, flashed a gun and demanded money. The FBI said there were customers in the bank at the time of the robbery.

After a teller handed over an undisclosed amount of cash, the man left the bank.

Anyone who recognizes him is asked to call the FBI at (305) 944-9101 or Miami-Dade Crime Stoppers at (305) 471-TIPS. (8477).