Civil rights group Big Brother Watch has accused Britain of having an out-of-control surveillance culture that is doing little to improve public safety.
Christian Science Monitor
London
London is considered the most spied-on city in the world, courtesy of its ubiquitous CCTV cameras, purportedly there to reduce crime. But according to a recent report, there's been little or no change in London's crime rates since they were more widely installed in the mid 1980s.
Privacy activists are worried that Britain will become the bleak totalitarian society George Orwell painted in his classic novel “1984,” where citizens were spied on and personal freedom sacrificed for the benefit of an all-powerful state.
“We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society where we’re watched from control rooms by anonymous people, says Emma Carr of the BBW. “The worrying thing is that we don’t actually know how many CCTV cameras there are out there."...[Full Article]
Privacy International, one of the world's leading privacy organizations, last year released the results of a multi-year investigation into the shadowy world of the commercial surveillance industry. Dubbed "Big Brother Inc.," the investigation placed the spotlight on dozens of companies that specialize in covert surveillance technologies that are typically sold directly to governments and law enforcement agencies.
While governments in Asia and the Middle East have provided a ready market for technologies that can monitor Internet activities, Canada's new online surveillance legislation features provisions that appear to open the door to bringing such tools here...[Full Article]
OTTAWA - Jessie Sansone and his family are reeling after he was arrested and strip searched by police after his four-year-old daughter drew a picture of a man with a gun in her Kitchener, Ont., kindergarten class.
The 26-year-old father of four said Saturday the sketch was supposed to be him, getting the bad guys and monsters.
The school must have thought differently, as after Nevaeh drew it Wednesday, the school contacted Family and Children's Services and they called police.
Waterloo Police met Sansone at the school when he tried to pick up his kids he was told he was charged with possession of a firearm. He was then handcuffed and put him in one of the several squad cars waiting outside, he said...[Full Article]
KITCHENER — A Kitchener father is upset that police arrested him at his children's' school Wednesday, hauled him down to the station and strip-searched him, all because his four-year-old daughter drew a picture of a gun at school.
"I'm picking up my kids and then, next thing you know, I'm locked up," Jessie Sansone, 26, said Thursday.
"I was in shock. This is completely insane. My daughter drew a gun on a piece of paper at school."
The jackasses involved in this debacle - Child Services and the Waterloo Regional Police - crawl out from under their rocks to defend their ridiculous actions.
What if there was a little box that could be placed in your home that could.....
.... track every Google search that you ran?
.... see who you email?
.... see from whom you receive emails?
.... watch your keystrokes to learn all your passwords?
.... turn on a camera and watch you at any given time?
.... gather information about your likes, dislikes, political affiliations and religious beliefs?
.... dispense all of the above personal data to fusion centers, whose only purpose is to put together profiles of you and your family?
As it turns out, there is such a box, and if you are reading this, you're on it right now. You not only voluntarily brought this device into your home, you paid good money for it. Your computer is spying on you...[Full Article]
Hawaii's legislature is weighing an unprecedented proposal to curb the privacy of Aloha State residents: requiring Internet providers to keep track of every Web site their customers visit.
Its House of Representatives has scheduled a hearing this morning on a new bill (PDF) requiring the creation of virtual dossiers on state residents. The measure, H.B. 2288, says "Internet destination history information" and "subscriber's information" such as name and address must be saved for two years.
H.B. 2288, which was introduced Friday, says the dossiers must include a list of Internet Protocol addresses and domain names visited. Democratic Rep. John Mizuno of Oahu is the lead sponsor; Mizuno also introduced H.B. 2287, a computer crime bill, at the same time last week...[Full Article]
Google has already been collecting some of this information. But for the first time, it is combining data across its Web sites to stitch together a fuller portrait of users.
Consumers won’t be able to opt out of the changes, which take effect March 1. And experts say the policy shift will invite greater scrutiny from federal regulators of the company’s privacy and competitive practices...[Full Article]
January 20, 2011 - The police department in the city of East Orange, New Jersey is installing red spotlights to remotely shine on those police believe are about to commit a crime. (Jan. 20)
Dr. Mark Maybury, the United States Air Force Chief Scientist, is stepping outside of the typical areas in which an Air Force Chief Scientist operates and into the digital realm.
Maybury seeks to develop something he has dubbed “Social Radar” which would monitor information coming from just about every source imaginable: television, all Internet communications, radio, official reports, and more, in order to look into the hearts and minds of target populations and perhaps even predict future events.
The Department of Defense (DOD) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have been working on technology along these lines for some time now, but Maybury’s vision seems even more expansive and hard to believe than anything I’ve previously heard of or read about.
(Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's command center routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report, according to a government document.
A "privacy compliance review" issued by DHS last November says that since at least June 2010, its national operations center has been operating a "Social Networking/Media Capability" which involves regular monitoring of "publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites and message boards."
The purpose of the monitoring, says the government document, is to "collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture."...[Full Article]
Thursday, January 12, 2012 Brandon Turbeville Activist Post
Over the past few months, I have written several articles dealing with the coming cashless society and the developing technological control grid. I also have written about the surge of government attempts to gain access to and force the use of biometric data for the purposes of identification, tracking, tracing, and surveillance.
Unfortunately, the reactions I receive from the general public are almost always the same. While some recognize the danger, most simply deny that governments have the capability or even the desire to create a system in which the population is constantly monitored by virtue of their most private and even biological information. Others, either gripped by apathy or ignorance, cannot believe that the gadgets given to them from the massive tech corporations are designed for anything other than their entertainment and enjoyment.
However, current events in India should serve not just as a warning, but also as a foreshadowing of the events to come in the Western world, specifically the United States.
Recently, India has launched a nationwide program involving the allocation of a Unique Identification Number (UID) to every single one of its 1.2 billion residents. Each of the numbers will be tied to the biometric data of the recipient using three different forms of information – fingerprints, iris scans, and pictures of the face. All ten digits of the hand will be recorded, and both eyes will be scanned...[Full Article]
It's unclear exactly why, but the Department of Homeland has been operating a "Social Networking/Media Capability" program to monitor the top blogs, forums and social networks online for at least the past 18 months. Based on a privacy compliance review from last November recently obtained by Reuters, the purpose of the project is to "collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture." Whatever that means. Either way, the list of sites reported by Reuters reveals in a Wednesday afternoon exclusive is pretty intriguing...[Full Article]
CHARLTON (CBS) – A Charlton mom says her local library crossed the line when they sent police to collect her daughter’s overdue library books.
Her mom says the 5-year-old girl was so afraid that she burst into tears.
Charlton Police Sergeant Dan Dowd stopped by the home of Shannon Benoit to let her know that her daughter had two books several months overdue which needed to be returned or paid for...[Full Article]
In 2011, we watched as tech villains found creative new ways to violate our privacy. They misappropriated our social networking profiles, stalked us through our phones, and plucked secrets from our wifi networks. To help you better prepare for 2012's inevitable privacy attacks, we enumerate below the most worrisome threats you should monitor in the coming year...[Full Article]
A recent Brookings Institution report has now confirmed what many have suspected for some time – that the United States government (and virtually every other government in the world) has the capability to monitor and record nearly every interaction that occurs within its national borders.
For years, those individuals who have tried to warn others of the creeping surveillance state were met with denials and catcalls of “conspiracy theory,” as well as the famous claims that it was not physically possible to monitor everyone.
This new report, however, shattersthe delusional rationalities of the uninformed into a million pieces.
Councils across the country have recruited thousands of ‘citizen snoopers’ to report ‘environmental crime’.
They target dog foulers, litter louts and neighbours who fail to sort their rubbish properly.
The volunteers act as the ‘eyes and ears’ of their neighbourhoods and are encouraged to take photos of ‘environmental crime’ and send them in with location details for a rapid response.
They are given hand-held GPS computers for the task or phone cards to cover the cost of using their own devices. Evidence gathered this way is sometimes used in criminal prosecutions.
There are already 9,831 snoopers signed up – a 17 per cent increase on the number two years ago – and a further 1,310 are set to be recruited and trained as part of schemes run by 18 councils.
Volunteers often apply to become ‘street champions’ through council websites, but many have also been lured by recruitment drives in local newspapers.
Critics said yesterday the trend to create an army of neighbourhood detectives was leading to a Big Brother society and a culture where prying on neighbours was considered the norm.
Nick Pickles, director of the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: ‘It should be deeply troubling for us all that councils seem not content with their own snooping and are now recruiting members of the public to assist them...[Full Article]
An Android developer recently discovered a clandestine application called Carrier IQ built into most smartphones that doesn't just track your location; it secretly records your keystrokes, and there's nothing you can do about it. Is it time to put on a tinfoil hat? That depends on how you feel about privacy.
The reason for this invasive Android app seems reasonable enough at face value. Even though it's on most Android, BlackBerry and Nokia devices, most users would never know that Carrier IQ is running in the background, and that's sort of the point. Described on the company's website as software to gain "unprecedented insight into their customers' mobile experience," Carrier IQ is ostensibly supposed to help mobile carriers and device manufacturers gather data in order to improve their products. Tons of applications do this, and you're probably used to those boxes that pops up on your screen and ask if you want to help the company by sending your data back to them. If you're concerned about your privacy, you just tap no and go about your merry computing way. As security-conscious Android developer Trevor Eckhart realized, however, Carrier IQ does not give you this option, and unless you were code-savvy and looking for it, you'd never know it was there. And based on how aggressive the company has been in trying to keep Eckhart quiet about his discovery, it seems like Carrier IQ doesn't want you to know it's there either...[Full Article]
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Attention holiday shoppers: your cell phone may be tracked this year.
Starting on Black Friday and running through New Year's Day, two U.S. malls -- Promenade Temecula in southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va. -- will track guests' movements by monitoring the signals from their cell phones.
While the data that's collected is anonymous, it can follow shoppers' paths from store to store.
The goal is for stores to answer questions like: How many Nordstrom shoppers also stop at Starbucks? How long do most customers linger in Victoria's Secret? Are there unpopular spots in the mall that aren't being visited?
While U.S. malls have long tracked how crowds move throughout their stores, this is the first time they've used cell phones.
But obtaining that information comes with privacy concerns...[Full Article]
An armed robber burst into a Northeast Washington market, scuffled with the cashier, and then shot him and the clerk’s father, who also owned the store. The killer sped off in a silver Pontiac, but a witness was able to write down the license plate number.
Police figured out the name of the suspect very quickly. But locating and arresting him took a little-known investigative tool: a vast system that tracks the comings and goings of anyone driving around the District.
Scores of cameras across the city capture 1,800 images a minute and download the information into a rapidly expanding archive that can pinpoint people’s movements all over town.
Police entered the suspect’s license plate number into that database and learned that the Pontiac was on a street in Southeast. Police soon arrested Christian Taylor, who had been staying at a friend’s home, and charged him with two counts of first-degree murder. His trial is set for January.
More than 250 cameras in the District and its suburbs scan license plates in real time, helping police pinpoint stolen cars and fleeing killers. But the program quietly has expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago.
With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles.
Nowhere is that more prevalent than in the District, which has more than one plate-reader per square mile, the highest concentration in the nation. Police in the Washington suburbs have dozens of them as well, and local agencies plan to add many more in coming months, creating a comprehensive dragnet that will include all the approaches into the District.
“It never stops,” said Capt. Kevin Reardon, who runs Arlington County’s plate reader program. “It just gobbles up tag information. One of the big questions is, what do we do with the information?”...[Full Article]
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones Prison Planet.com Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Americans are now living in a society that in some cases is more draconian, more invasive and more Orwellian than the dystopian tyranny fictionalized in Orwell’s chilling classic Nineteen Eighty-Four. On almost every front, American citizens are under an equal or greater threat of abuse, control and more pervasive and high-tech surveillance than anything Winston Smith ever faced.
Compare life in Oceania to life in 2011 America, with quotes from George Orwell’s 1984 appearing in italic.
“In general you could not assume that you were much safer in the country than in London. There were no telescreens, of course, but there was always the danger of concealed microphones by which your voice might be picked up and recognized.”
Americans will now too have their every utterance listened to by Big Brother in public through surveillance-capable street lights now being installed in major cities across the country which can record private conversations. Just as the citizens of Oceania could never be sure of their privacy, Charlotte’s Deputy Homeland Security chief told the local Fox network earlier this week that Americans “would never know” whether or not the government was listening.
“In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people’s windows.”
America in 2011 is more advanced than Orwell’s Oceania in that it doesn’t have to rely on expensive helicopters to spy on citizens. That job has now been entrusted to unmanned drones that not only act as surveillance devices, they can also carry tasers that deliver incapaciating electric shocks to “suspected” criminals.
“It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.”
Facecrime is now a reality in 2011 with the aid of behaviometrics – a new omnipresent surveillance technology developed for the US Air Force and destined to be used in law enforcement to “monitor suspicious behavior”. The system revolves around a camera that tracks facial movements biometrically in order to build a psychological profile of the individual under surveillance. The movements of the muscles in your face will alert Big Brother, through the process of “behavior analysis,” to your presence as a suspicious individual who may be engaging in the act of thought crime, or God forbid, planning a public protest.
“It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak — ‘child hero’ was the phrase generally used — had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.”
As part of Homeland Security’s See Something, Say Something program, Americans are being bombarded at every level, from Wal-Mart, to football games, to hotel rooms, with messages encouraging them t to report their fellow citizens for engaging in “suspicious activity,” which as we have documented, includes mundane behavior such as paying with cash, opposing surveillance, using a video camera, talking to police officers, wearing hoodies, driving vans, writing on a piece of paper, and using a cell phone recording application.
Schools are also now training children to be “eco-spies” by reporting on their parents’ bad recycling habits, encouraging kids to “re-educate” them into compliance.
“Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.”
Just as the citizens of Oceania were constantly bombarded with propaganda from the state via telescreens, Americans are now being subjected to the same onslaught in the form of spurious “alerts” from the federal government that are delivered through numerous platforms, including LED screens on the ‘Intellistreets’ lighting network, televisions at Wal-Mart stores that play Janet Napolitano’s “See Something, Say Something” diatribe, FEMA’s Emergency Alert System that can hijack all conventional boradcast communications, and mandatory government messages that will appear on all new cellphones from the end of next year. And if that isn’t enough, the Washington Post today called for the Internet to also be brought under the auspices of a government takeover switch. Whereas Winston Smith only had to put up with Big Brother lecturing him via telescreens, Americans will be peppered with propaganda from every conceivable direction.
“In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.”
American citizens are not merely “disappearing” without a trial, as happened those who had comitted thoughtcrime in 1984, they are being directly assassinated via Predator drone strikes with no oversight and no legal process whatsoever. As the case of U.S. citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki shows, Americans are now at risk of falling victim to a program of state-sponsored assassination should they be designated “terrorists”. In Orwell’s 1984, miscreants were tortured and brainwashed, but they were not murdered on a whim by government decree before at least being given the opportunity to recant.
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.”
Illiteracy rates in many large states are rising. One in seven Americans cannot read anything more challenging than a children’s picture book. Americans are being dumbed-down by an onslaught of fluoride in the water, cultural decay that celebrates stupidity over intelligence, and a public school system in terminal decline. Attention spans are shortening as Americans are fed a constant diet of mind-numbing “entertainment”. Vocabularies are shrinking as many Americans can barely express themselves. Whereas in 1984, higher-level thinking was destroyred directly by the state, in 2011 America the entertainment industry is doing just as good a job if not better.
“In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for ‘Science’. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty.”
Technology is being used to crush human liberty and eviscerate our privacy. Every technological advancement, from Facebook to the IPhone, brings with it a further assault on privacy. The U.S. judicial system is identifying ways to legalize constant surveillance over every American, most recently with the effort to give authorities the power to secretly track Americans through clandestine global positioning systems attached to their vehicles.
“Only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate the full force of the word bellyfeel, which implied a blind, enthusiastic, and casual acceptance difficult to imagine today.”
Orwell’s “bellyfeel” is our cognitive dissonance. This is the process of having blind faith in an explanation or a fact so long as it comes from the establishment – the actual truth of the matter bears no significance. Bellyfeel enables Americans to unquestionably accept everything they are told without the need for critical thinking. On the eve of the invasion of Iraq, 69% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, despite there being no evidence whatsoever that it was true.
These are just a handful of examples that illustrate how Americans and westerners in general are now living in a society that rivals and in some cases outstrips the world of Winston Smith in 1984. Smith was eventually made to love Big Brother and accept that two plus two equals five if the authorities say it does.
The question is, will Americans ever reclaim their sense of dignity and freedom or – like the Party members in Orwell’s Oceania – will they learn to love their servitude?
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.
