By
Victor Thorn
December 19, 2012
As technological innovation advances in ways very
few could have predicted, and the cost to
produce these new gadgets rapidly declines, it
was only a matter of time before these twin forces would spread to the
surveillance sector. Whether you think it’s a
good thing that technology is simplifying your
life, or you fear the far-reaching surveillance society, one thing’s for
certain: The snooping’s here to stay and it’s touching everyone’s life.
Arguably, the clearest and most ominous
example of how technology has crept into our
lives is the drone. Known formally as an
unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), drones have
been employed in war zones in pursuit of enemy
forces, and are now being utilized by local
police forces across the United States purportedly to
fight crime. The use of these devices will spread in the coming years, with their sizes shrinking to dimensions
only imaginable in science fiction movies.
Besides the all-seeing UAVs, police patrol cars are being
outfitted with surveillance technology known
as “extraction devices,” which are capable of
downloading data and images from cell phones, including photos and videos.
These snooping tools override hidden
information, can secure passwords and scoop up information on the cell phone
user’s whereabouts. Local law enforcement agencies
have allied themselves with the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) and are forcing wireless providers
to surrender private text messages.
In New York City, a separate social media
eavesdropping
unit has been established to follow the users on Facebook and Twitter, two of the most popular social media websites which allow users to stay in
touch via messages and photos. While the nation’s
capital has incorporated automated license plate readers that snap pictures of
vehicles traveling inside Washington, D.C.,
other large cities are looking to facial
recognition technology to scan crowds for wanted individuals.
Perhaps the most controversial of the known
surveillance devices is the so-called “Mobile
Backscatter Vans.”Utilizing Transportation
Security Administration x-ray technology,
“these pornoscanner wagons look like regular vans and will cruise America’s streets, peering through the cars and clothes of anyone in range of its mighty isotope-cannon,” writes Cory Doctorow.
Technology is playing a vital role in this
breach of our civil liberties, as well. As AMERICAN FREE PRESS has chronicled, “smartmeters” track a homeowner’s
energy consumption, while Hollywood-like science-fiction
“pre-crime” gadgetry predicts behavior patterns
and targets those deemed to be “potential” rapists, thieves and murderers. Steven
Spielberg’s Minority Report wasn’t too far off from the
future when it was released to audiences in 2002. The film is set in the year
2054, where the police apprehend criminals
based on foreknowledge provided by psychics.
Right out of that movie, Massachusetts Institute of Technology is experimenting
with facial expression machines that can determine
from afar what a person is feeling.
Behind these space-age advancements lurk
corporations like Google and Apple that track data from
smartphones or data mine personal information, such as credit information or
tax records. If consumers log on to any type
of product that is embedded with certain
computer surveillance technology, it is likely that somebody somewhere is amassing and storing information derived from it.
If Internet service providers decide that
subscribers are downloading too many movies on their computers, they can limit access to the Internet
through a process known as “shaping bandwidth.” And
don’t be too surprised if banks soon place
microchips on credit cards that can transmit purchases
directly to marketing agencies.
AFP has reported in depth on a San Antonio school
district’s placement of radio frequency identification (RFID) implants on
student IDs. Broken by AFP’s Mark Anderson, that story worked its way to other news media across the country.
Unfortunately, though, the trend is expanding.
.
.
In the fall of 2012, high schools from Maryland
to Massachusetts did away with daily roll calls, instead issuing ID
cards to students so they could check in by swiping their cards through
terminal readers. Educators near Philadelphia went above and beyond this, sending kids home with laptop computers
that recorded their actions via hidden computer
cameras, called webcams.
Governments from the local level all the way up
to D.C. have been encouraging the good, old-fashioned snitch
culture under the “See Something, Say
Something” program, whereby neighbors turn in neighbors, for things like
questioning the official version of 9-11 or
for owning guns or stockpiling food.
In 2004, DHS came under fire for enrolling truck
drivers into a highway watch program, where
they could report allegedly suspicious behavior. Following that program, the
agency released a list of “characteristics”
that qualify Americans as “domestic
terrorists.”
As author Jim Redden stated in his book Snitch
Culture, “Citizens are being turned into the eyes and ears of
the state.”
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ALL YOUR DATA NOW ON FILE
By Victor Thorn
Now that it’s been established how the surveillance
state spies on its citizens, the next step is
to decide who falls under its critical stare.
The following December 5 quote from the independent news and commentary website “Washington’s Blog” can be used as a gauge in determining whether you’re a target:
“The American government is collecting and storing virtually every phone call, purchase, email, text message, Internet search and social media communication, as well as health information, employment history [and] travel and student records.”
Unless you live under a rock, it’s nearly
certain that your name is on
this list. However, it’s obvious that after
datamining billions of pieces of information,
the National Security Agency (NSA) and DHS don’t possess
the manpower to analyze all of these entries. So
why do they want access to a seemingly infinite amount of personal
transactions?
NSA whistleblower William Binney, a former codebreaker
and esteemed mathematician, provided the
answer during a December 4 interview with news
agency RT.
“I don’t think [the government] is filtering it,” Binney said in reference to all this amassed information. “They’re just storing it. So if they want to target you, they would go into that database and pull out your data.”
In other words, if someone is placed on a
government enemy list, private information that has been amassed over the past
decade can be used as raw material.
“No one is excluded,” Binney insisted. “This can happen to anyone.”
To ensure that nobody goes unobserved, the Obama
administration has endorsed the construction
of a $2B NSA puzzle palace in Bluffdale, Utah. In AFP’s April 16 edition, Ralph Forbes reported on this vast, new super
spy center that, when completed, will be five
times the size of the U.S. Capitol.
As Shadow Factory author James Bamford wrote for Wired magazine on March 15, “[Bluffdale] is the
realization of the ‘total information awareness’ program created during the
first term of the Bush administration ~ an effort
that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it
caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.”
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AMERICANS ARE NOT ALONE .
. .
By Victor Thorn
Though America’s spy culture has reached ominous
levels, it could be worse. By all standards,
China usually tops the list for Big Brother powers,
followed by North Korea at a close second. Not surprisingly, England and the U.S. also rank highly as the West catches up with the East.
In addition to innumerable surveillance cameras,
China’s capital city of Beijing boasts 1.4M “public order volunteers” who
proudly rat out fellow citizens who they feel
are defying government mandates.
The Chinese people are so crippled by fear of their police state that in September a toddler was run over twice by automobiles and lay bleeding in the street, still alive, yet not a single passerby intervened. The infant later died as a result of this apathy.
“In a country where the rule of law doesn’t exist, human-rights activists mysteriously disappear, and the power of the corrupt ruling Communist Party is limitless.”
North Korea’s hermit empire isn’t any better.
Residents in this information vacuum are so insulated that the
state-run media recently floated a delusional
propaganda story about discovering a lair of unicorns in order to bolster their
nation’s supposed cultural superiority.
On July 19, the Committee on Human Rights (CHR) detailed North Korea’s dictatorship. “The North Korean
people suffer under a level of oppressive control few societies in the past
century have had to endure,” noted CHR in its profile on the
communist country.
In the UK, nearly 2M closed-circuit TV cameras
saturate public squares, hotels, lampposts, taverns, malls, movie theaters,
intersections and classrooms. Reporters
estimate that one camera now exists for every 32 English citizens.
UK attorney Michael Mansfield bemoaned a recent
proposal to store all emails and phone calls in a massive database:
“That these surreal proposals should even be contemplated shows how far beyond Orwell’s worst fears we have traveled.”
CAN WE GET OBAMA TO START KEEPING PRIVACY
PROMISES?
By Victor Thorn
During an October 3 radio appearance, Wall
Street Journal columnist Julia Angwin said that Americans today are the most spied upon culture in world history.
“The U.S. surveillance regime,” said Ms. Angwin, “has more data
on the average American
than the Stasi ever did on East Germans.”
During a December 6 AFP interview, Ernest
Hancock, publisher of the pro-liberty magazine Freedom’s Phoenix, echoed this viewpoint.
“The Stasi secret police wished they had the surveillance capacity our government now has,” said Hancock. “The question isn’t whether they’d make use of it. Of course they would. The feds are able to monitor everything we say, and since they can, they’re doing it.”
“Obama promised his supporters that there were going to be less civil rights violations and more transparency, but these promises have been violated. When seeing TSA agents inside airports, I ask, how the heck did they [the government] get us to accept this? They did it through indoctrination and incremental conditioning. The king has now gotten inside people’s minds.”
Hancock continued:
“We can all agree that what’s happening is wrong. We need a real revolution between the ears. If you read the Declaration of Independence, it lets you recognize when the government is doing the wrong thing.”
As a staunch Ron Paul supporter, Hancock sees
hope coming from the next generation.
“The government’s efforts and attitudes toward the individual will be their greatest downfall,” he said.
“A change will come from
‘Generation Next’
exerting their freedom.
Once they realize the
irrelevancy of the federal government,
a paradigm shift will
sweep across our planet.”
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