Authored by John W.
Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute
Thanks to the
government’s almost limitless powers made possible by a domestic army of
techno-tyrants, fusion centers and Peeping Toms, Santa can get real-time
reports on who’s been good or bad this year. This creepy new era of
government/corporate spying—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked,
followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—makes the NSA’s rudimentary phone
and metadata surveillance appear almost antiquated in comparison.
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 government’s naughty list.
Tracking you based on
your health status:
In the age of
COVID-19, digital health passports are gaining traction as gatekeepers of a
sort, restricting access to travel, entertainment, etc., based on one’s vaccine
status. Whether or not one has a vaccine passport, however, individuals may
still have to prove themselves “healthy” enough to be part of society. For
instance, in the wake of Supreme Court rulings that paved the way for police to
use drug-sniffing dogs as “search warrants on leashes,” government agencies are
preparing to use virus-detecting canine squads to carry out mass screenings to
detect individuals who may have COVID-19. Researchers claim the COVID-sniffing
dogs have a 95% success rate of identifying individuals with the virus (except
when they’re hungry, tired or distracted). These dogs are also being to trained
to ferret out individuals suffering from other health ailments such as cancer.
Tracking you based on
your face:
Facial recognition
software aims to create a society in which every individual 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 someone’s movements in real-time. One particularly controversial software
program created by Clearview AI has been used by police, the FBI and the
Department of Homeland Security to collect photos on social media sites for
inclusion in a massive facial recognition database. Similarly, biometric
software, which relies on one’s unique identifiers (fingerprints, irises, voice
prints), is becoming the standard for navigating security lines, as well as
bypassing digital locks and gaining access to phones, computers, office
buildings, etc. In fact, greater numbers of travellers are opting into programs
that rely on their biometrics in order to avoid long waits at airport security.
Scientists are also developing lasers that can identify and survey individuals
based on their heartbeats, scent and microbiome.
Tracking you based on
your behaviour:
Rapid advances in
behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be
monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behaviour,
including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole
industries that revolve around predicting one’s behaviour based on data and
surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviours of whole populations.
One smart “anti-riot” surveillance system purports to predict mass riots and
unauthorized public events by using artificial intelligence to analyse social
media, news sources, surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.
Tracking you based on
your spending and consumer activities:
With every smartphone
we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google
account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the
grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every
credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re 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 behaviour
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 surveillance algorithms that can determine whether
someone’s 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 created a web
of surveillance that encompasses all major cities in order to 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.” Defence contractors have been at the forefront of this lucrative
market. Fusion centers, $330 million-a-year, information-sharing hubs for
federal, state and law enforcement agencies, monitor and report such
“suspicious” behaviour as people buying pallets of bottled water, photographing
government buildings, and applying for a pilot’s 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 in order 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.
As The Intercept reported, 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 in order to identify potential extremists
and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behaviour. This
obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have some
frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC
News, observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people ‘en
masse’ for 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 humour.”
Tracking you based on
your phone and online activities:
Cell phones have
become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data
on users’ movements and travels. Police have used cell-site simulators to carry
out mass surveillance of protests without the need for a warrant. Moreover,
federal agents can now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain
access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re 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 social network:
Not content to merely
spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now
using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you
might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in
order to ferret out possible criminals. An FBI document obtained by Rolling
Stone speaks to the ease with which agents are able to access address book data
from Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage services from the accounts of
targeted individuals and individuals not under investigation who might have a
targeted individual 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 neighbourhoods, 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 which police have mistakenly
relied on license plate data to capture out 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 U.S. Postal Service, which has been
photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years,
is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by
the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations
Program (iCOP) is reportedly using 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.”
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. Contact tracing apps.
What these add up to
is a world in which, on any given day, the average person is now monitored,
surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by 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.
As I make clear in my
book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart
The Erik Blair Diaries, surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of
the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s
hands—add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions,
imperfections, or acts of independence.
In an age of over
criminalization, mass surveillance, and an appalling lack of protections for
our privacy rights, we can all be considered guilty of some transgression or
other.
So you’d better watch
out—you’d better not pout—you’d better not cry—‘cos I’m telling you why: this
Christmas, it’s the Surveillance State that’s coming to town, and you’re
already on its naughty list.
20 Years of Government-Sponsored Tyranny:
The Rise of the Security-Industrial Complex from
9/11 to COVID-19
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