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December 6, 2024
USA: The Surveillance State Is A Reality And People Need To Be Aware Of The Risks And Take Steps To Protect Their Privacy
By John & Nisha Whitehead-All News Pipeline
Mass surveillance is the Deep States version of a gift that keeps on giving.
Geofencing dragnets. Fusion centers. Smart devices. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Drones. Contact tracing apps. License plate readers.Social media vetting.Surveillance towers.
What these add up to is a world in which, on any given day, the average person is nowmonitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different waysby both government and corporate eyes and ears.
Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother.
Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by a vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.
This creepy new era of government-corporate spying in which were being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted has been made possible by a global army of techno-tyrants, fusion centers and Peeping Toms.
Consider just a small sampling of the tools being used to track our movements, monitor our spending, and sniff out all the ways in which our thoughts, actions and social circles might land us on the governments naughty list, whether or not youve done anything wrong.
Tracking You Based On Your Phone and Movements
Cell or mobile phones have becomede factosnitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users movements and travels. For instance, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was able to use geofence data to identify more than 5,000 mobile devices (and their owners) in a 4-acre area around the Capitol on January 6. This latest surveillance tactic could land you in jail for being in the wrong place and time.
Police are also usingcell-site simulators to carry out mass surveillance of protestswithout the need for a warrant. Moreover, federal agents can now employ several hacking methods to gain access to your computer activities and see whatever youre seeing on your monitor. Malicious hacking software can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the personal business of a target.
Tracking You Based On Your DNA
DNA technology in the hands of government officials completes our transition to a Surveillance State. If you have the misfortune to leave your DNA traces anywhere a crime has been committed, youve already got a file somewhere in some state or federal database albeit it may be a file without a name.
By accessing your DNA, thegovernment will soon know everything else about you that they dont already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. After all, a DNA print reveals everything about who we are, where we come from, and who we will be. It can also be used topredict the physical appearanceof potential suspects. Its only a matter of time before the police states pursuit of criminals expands intogenetic profilingand apre-emptive hunt for criminals of the future.
Tracking You Based On Your Face
Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every person who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to identify and track someones movements in real time.
One particularly controversial software program created by Clearview AI has beenused by police, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to collect photos on social media sitesfor inclusion in a massive facial recognition database.
Similarly, biometric software, which relies on ones unique identifiers (fingerprints, irises, voice prints), is becoming thestandard for navigating security lines, as well as bypassing digital locks and gaining access to phones, computers, office buildings, etc. In fact, greater numbers of travelers are opting into programs that rely on their biometrics to avoid long waits at airport security. Scientists are also developing lasers that canidentify and surveil people based on their heartbeats, scents and microbiomes.
Tracking You Based On Your Behavior
Rapid advances inbehavioral surveillanceare not only making it possible for people to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks) but have given rise to wholeindustries that revolve around predicting ones behaviorbased on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations.
One smart anti-riot surveillance system purports topredict mass riots and unauthorized public eventsby using artificial intelligence to analyze social media, news sources, surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.
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Tracking You Based On Your Spending And Consumer Activities
With every smartphone we buy, every Global Positioning System (GPS) device we install, every X or Twitter, Facebook and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases whether at the grocers, the yoghurt shop, the airlines or the department store and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, were helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money and how we spend our time.
Consumer surveillance, by which your activities and data in the physical and online realms are tracked and shared with advertisers, has become big business,a $300 billion industry that routinely harvests your data for profit. Corporations such as Target have not only been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years, but the retailer has also funded major surveillance in cities across the country and developed behavioral surveillancealgorithms that can determine whether someones mannerisms might fit the profile of a thief.
Tracking You Based On Your Public Activities
Private corporations in conjunction with police agencies throughout the country have createda web of surveillance that encompasses all major citiesto monitor large groups of people seamlessly, as in the case of protests and rallies.
They are also engaging in extensive online surveillance, looking for any hints of large public events, social unrest, gang communications and criminally predicated individuals. Defense contractors have been at the forefront of thislucrative market. Fusion centers,$330 million-a-year information-sharing hubsfor federal, state and law enforcement agencies,monitor and report such suspicious behavior as people buying pallets of bottled water, photographing government buildings, and applying for a pilots license as suspicious activity.
Tracking You Based On Your Social Media Activities
Every move you make, especially on social media, is monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.
AsThe Interceptreported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.
This obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have somefrightening consequences in the coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing forNBC News, observed, We may very well face a future wherealgorithms bust peopleen massefor referencing illegal Game of Thrones downloads the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.
Tracking You Based On Your Social Network
Not content to merely spy on people through their online activity, government agencies are now usingsurveillance technology to track ones social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social messages, to ferret out possible criminals.
An FBI document obtained byRolling Stonespeaks to the ease with which agents areable to access address book data from Facebooks WhatsApp and Apples iMessage servicesfrom the accounts of targeted peopleandpeople not under investigation who might have a targeted person within their network. What this creates is a guilt by association society in which we are all as guilty as the most culpable person in our address book.
Tracking You Based On Your Car
License plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars.
With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, affixed to overpasses, cop cars and throughout business sectors and residential neighborhoods, it allows police to track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in whichpolice have mistakenly relied on license plate datato capture suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.
Tracking You Based On Your Mail
Just about every branch of the government from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people.
For instance, the US Postal Service, which has beenphotographing the exterior of every piece of paper mailfor the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Services law enforcement division, theInternet Covert Operations Program(iCOP) is reportedlyusing facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with inflammatory posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid potentially volatile situations.
What Are We To Make Of All This?
Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from these mass spying programs as long as weve done nothing wrong.
Dont believe it.
The governments definition of a bad guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.
As I make clear in my bookBattlefield America: The War on the American Peopleand in its fictional counterpartThe Erik Blair Diaries, surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people weapons of compliance and control in the governments hands havent made America any safer. And they certainly arent helping to preserve our freedoms.
Indeed, America will never be safe as long as the US government is allowed to shred the Constitution.
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