14 Incredibly Creepy Surveillance Technologies That Big Brother Will Soon Be Using To Spy On You

[Lauren Johnson]

Most of us don't think much about it, but the truth is that people are being watched, tracked and monitored more today than at any other time in human history. The explosive growth of technology in recent years has given governments, spy agencies and big corporations monitoring tools that the despots and dictators of the past could only dream of. Previous generations never had to deal with "pre-crime" surveillance cameras that use body language to spot criminals or unmanned drones watching them from far above. Previous generations would have never even dreamed that street lights and refrigerators might be spying on them. Many of the incredibly creepy surveillance technologies that you are about to read about are likely to absolutely astound you. We are rapidly heading toward a world where there will be no such thing as privacy anymore. Big Brother is becoming all-pervasive, and thousands of new technologies are currently being developed that will make it even easier to spy on you. The world is changing at a breathtaking pace, and a lot of the changes are definitely not for the better. The following are 14 incredibly creepy surveillance technologies that Big Brother will be using to watch you....


#1 "Pre-Crime" Surveillance Cameras
A company known as BRS Labs has developed "pre-crime" surveillance cameras that can supposedly determine if you are a terrorist or a criminal even before you commit a crime.
Does that sound insane? Well, authorities are taking this technology quite seriously. In fact, dozens of these cameras are being installed at major transportation hubs in San Francisco....

In its latest project BRS Labs is to install its devices on the transport system in San Francisco, which includes buses, trams and subways.
The company says will put them in 12 stations with up to 22 cameras in each, bringing the total number to 288.
The cameras will be able to track up to 150 people at a time in real time and will gradually build up a memory' of suspicious behaviour to work out what is suspicious.

#2 Capturing Fingerprints From 20 Feet Away
Can you imagine someone reading your fingerprints from 20 feet away without you ever knowing it?
This kind of technology is actually already here according to POPSCI....

Gaining access to your gym or office building could soon be as simple as waving a hand at the front door. A Hunsville, Ala.-based company called IDair is developing a system that can scan and identify a fingerprint from nearly 20 feet away. Coupled with other biometrics, it could soon allow security systems to grant or deny access from a distance, without requiring users to stop and scan a fingerprint, swipe an ID card, or otherwise lose a moment dealing with technology.
Currently IDair's primary customer is the military, but the startup wants to open up commercially to any business or enterprise that wants to put a layer of security between its facilities and the larger world. A gym chain is already beta testing the system (no more using your roommate's gym ID to get in a free workout), and IDair's founder says that at some point his technology could enable purchases to be made biometrically, using fingerprints and irises as unique identifiers rather than credit card numbers and data embedded in magnetic strips or RFID chips.

#3 Mobile Backscatter Vans
Police all over America will soon be driving around in unmarked vans looking inside your cars and even under your clothes using the same "pornoscanner" technology currently being utilized by the TSA at U.S. airports....

American cops are set to join the US military in deploying American Science & Engineering's Z Backscatter Vans, or mobile backscatter radiation x-rays. These are what TSA officials call "the amazing radioactive genital viewer," now seen in airports around America, ionizing the private parts of children, the elderly, and you (yes you).
These pornoscannerwagons will look like regular anonymous vans, and will cruise America's streets, indiscriminately peering through the cars (and clothes) of anyone in range of its mighty isotope-cannon. But don't worry, it's not a violation of privacy. As AS&E's vice president of marketing Joe Reiss sez, "From a privacy standpoint, I'm hard-pressed to see what the concern or objection could be."

You can see a YouTube video presentation about this new technology right here.
#4 Hijacking Your Mind
The U.S. military literally wants to be able to hijack your mind. The theory is that this would enable U.S. forces to non-violently convince terrorists not to be terrorists anymore. But obviously the potential for abuse with this kind of technology is extraordinary. The following is from a recent article by Dick Pelletier....

The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants to understand the science behind what makes people violent, and then find ways to hijack their minds by implanting false, but believable stories in their brains, with hopes of evoking peaceful thoughts: We're friends, not enemies.
Critics say this raises ethical issues such as those addressed in the 1971 sci-fi movie, A Clockwork Orange, which attempted to change people's minds so that they didn't want to kill anymore.
Advocates, however, believe that placing new plausible narratives directly into the minds of radicals, insurgents, and terrorists, could transform enemies into kinder, gentler citizens, craving friendship.
Scientists have known for some time that narratives; an account of a sequence of events that are usually in chronological order; hold powerful sway over the human mind, shaping a person's notion of groups and identities; even inspiring them to commit violence. See DARPA proposal request HERE.

#5 Unmanned Drones In U.S. Airspace
Law enforcement agencies all over the United States are starting to use unmanned drones to spy on us, and the Department of Homeland Security is aggressively seeking to expand the use of such drones by local authorities....

The Department of Homeland Security has launched a program to "facilitate and accelerate the adoption" of small, unmanned drones by police and other public safety agencies, an effort that an agency official admitted faces "a very big hurdle having to do with privacy."
The $4 million Air-based Technologies Program, which will test and evaluate small, unmanned aircraft systems, is designed to be a "middleman" between drone manufacturers and first-responder agencies "before they jump into the pool," said John Appleby, a manager in the DHS Science and Technology Directorate's division of borders and maritime security.

The fact that very few Americans seem concerned about this development says a lot about where we are as a nation. The EPA is already using drones to spy on cattle ranchers in Nebraska and Iowa. Will we eventually get to a point where we all just consider it to be "normal" to have surveillance drones flying above our heads constantly?
#6 Law Enforcement Using Your Own Cell Phone To Spy On You
Although this is not new technology, law enforcement authorities are using our own cell phones to spy on us more extensively than ever before as a recent Wired article described....

Mobile carriers responded to a staggering 1.3 million law enforcement requests last year for subscriber information, including text messages and phone location data, according to data provided to Congress.

A single "request" can involve information about hundreds of customers. So ultimately the number of Americans affected by this could reach into "the tens of millions" each year....

The number of Americans affected each year by the growing use of mobile phone data by law enforcement could reach into the tens of millions, as a single request could ensnare dozens or even hundreds of people. Law enforcement has been asking for so-called "cell tower dumps" in which carriers disclose all phone numbers that connected to a given tower during a certain period of time.
So, for instance, if police wanted to try to find a person who broke a store window at an Occupy protest, it could get the phone numbers and identifying data of all protestors with mobile phones in the vicinity at the time and use that data for other purposes.

Perhaps you should not be using your cell phone so much anyway. After all, there are more than 500 studies that show that cell phone radiation is harmful to humans.
#7 Biometric Databases
All over the globe, governments are developing massive biometric databases of their citizens. Just check out what is going on in India....

In the last two years, over 200 million Indian nationals have had their fingerprints and photographs taken and irises scanned, and given a unique 12-digit number that should identify them everywhere and to everyone.
This is only the beginning, and the goal is to do the same with the entire population (1.2 billion), so that poorer Indians can finally prove their existence and identity when needed for getting documents, getting help from the government, and opening bank and other accounts.
This immense task needs a database that can contain over 12 billion fingerprints, 1.2 billion photographs, and 2.4 billion iris scans, can be queried from diverse devices connected to the Internet, and can return accurate results in an extremely short time.

#8 RFID Microchips
In a previous article, I detailed how the U.S. military is seeking to develop technology that would enable it to monitor the health of our soldiers and improve their performance in battle using RFID microchips.
Most Americans don't realize this, but RFID microchips are steadily becoming part of the very fabric of our lives. Many of your credit cards and debit cards contain them. Many Americans use security cards that contain RFID microchips at work. In some parts of the country it is now mandatory to inject an RFID microchip into your pet.
Now, one school system down in Texas actually plans to start using RFID microchips to track the movements of their students....

Northside Independent School District plans to track students next year on two of its campuses using technology implanted in their student identification cards in a trial that could eventually include all 112 of its schools and all of its nearly 100,000 students.
District officials said the Radio Frequency Identification System (RFID) tags would improve safety by allowing them to locate students and count them more accurately at the beginning of the school day to help offset cuts in state funding, which is partly based on attendance.

#9 Automated License Plate Readers
In a previous article, I quoted a Washington Post piece that talked about how automated license plate readers are being used to track the movements of a vehicle from the time that it enters Washington D.C. to the time that it leaves....

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.

#10 Face Reading Software
Can computers tell what you are thinking just by looking at your face?
Don't laugh.
Such technology is actually being actively developed. The following is from a recent NewScientist article....

IF THE computers we stare at all day could read our faces, they would probably know us better than anyone.
That vision may not be so far off. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab are developing software that can read the feelings behind facial expressions. In some cases, the computers outperform people. The software could lead to empathetic devices and is being used to evaluate and develop better adverts.

#11 Data Mining
The government is not the only one that is spying on you. The truth is that a whole host of very large corporations are gathering every shred of information about you that they possibly can and selling that information for profit. It is called "data mining", and it is an industry that has absolutely exploded in recent years.
One very large corporation known as Acxiom actually compiles information on more than 190 million people in the U.S. alone....

The company fits into a category called database marketing. It started in 1969 as an outfit called Demographics Inc., using phone books and other notably low-tech tools, as well as one computer, to amass information on voters and consumers for direct marketing. Almost 40 years later, Acxiom has detailed entries for more than 190 million people and 126 million households in the U.S., and about 500 million active consumers worldwide. More than 23,000 servers in Conway, just north of Little Rock, collect and analyze more than 50 trillion data 'transactions' a year.

#12 Street Lights Spying On Us?
Did you ever consider that street lights could be spying on you?
Well, it is actually happening. New high tech street lights that can actually watch what you do and listen to what you are saying are being installed in some major U.S. cities. The following is from a recent article by Paul Joseph Watson for Infowars.com....

Federally-funded high-tech street lights now being installed in American cities are not only set to aid the DHS in making "security announcements" and acting as talking surveillance cameras, they are also capable of "recording conversations," bringing the potential privacy threat posed by Intellistreets' to a whole new level.

#13 Automated ISP Monitoring Of Your Internet Activity
As I have written about before, nothing you do on the Internet is private. However, Internet Service Providers and the entertainment industry are now taking Internet monitoring to a whole new level....

If you download potentially copyrighted software, videos or music, your Internet service provider (ISP) has been watching, and they're coming for you.
Specifically, they're coming for you on Thursday, July 12.
That's the date when the nation's largest ISPs will all voluntarily implement a new anti-piracy plan that will engage network operators in the largest digital spying scheme in history, and see some users' bandwidth completely cut off until they sign an agreement saying they will not download copyrighted materials.
Word of the start date has been largely kept secret since ISPs announced their plans last June. The deal was brokered by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and coordinated by the Obama Administration.

Spying On Us Through Our Appliances
Could the government one day use your refrigerator to spy on you?
Don't laugh.
That is exactly what CIA Director David Petraeus says is coming....

Petraeus says that web-connected gadgets will 'transform' the art of spying - allowing spies to monitor people automatically without planting bugs, breaking and entering or even donning a tuxedo to infiltrate a dinner party.

'Transformational' is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,' said Petraeus.
'Particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft. Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters - all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing.'

Petraeus was speaking to a venture capital firm about new technologies which aim to add processors and web connections to previously 'dumb' home appliances such as fridges, ovens and lighting systems.

For many more ways that Big Brother is spying on you, please see these articles....
"Every Breath You Take, Every Move You Make 14 New Ways That The Government Is Watching You"
"30 Signs That The United States Of America Is Being Turned Into A Giant Prison"
The things that I have written about above are just the things that they admit to.
There are also many "black box technologies" being developed out there that the public does not even know about yet.
So how far will all of this go?
Has Big Brother already gone way too far?
Please feel free to post a comment with your opinion below....


http://endoftheamericandream.com/archive...spy-on-you

[Peter Lemkin]

Good one! Where is #1? Without it, however, it is a scary witch's brew of items - many already being used to some extent; and there are a few I could name that were not on this list! :gossip: Welcome to the electronic police-state! To me, what is more disturbing than the above and those not listed here is that most in America and the World are NOT Demanding An End To This Trend Immediately! Once in place, such measures will never be removed - only refined and added to!!!!

[Lauren Johnson]

Good one! Where is #1? Without it, however, it is a scary witch's brew of items - many already being used to some extent; and there are a few I could name that were not on this list! :gossip: Welcome to the electronic police-state! To me, what is more disturbing than the above and those not listed here is that most in America and the World are NOT Demanding An End To This Trend Immediately! Once in place, such measures will never be removed - only refined and added to!!!!

Peter, I included #1. It wasn't very important. It is only about pre-crime surveillance. After all, you could only get busted for thinking about committing a crime, .... or an unwelcome act of any kind. Bit deal.

[Dawn Meredith]

Good one! Where is #1? Without it, however, it is a scary witch's brew of items - many already being used to some extent; and there are a few I could name that were not on this list! :gossip: Welcome to the electronic police-state! To me, what is more disturbing than the above and those not listed here is that most in America and the World are NOT Demanding An End To This Trend Immediately! Once in place, such measures will never be removed - only refined and added to!!!!

Peter, I included #1. It wasn't very important. It is only about pre-crime surveillance. After all, you could only get busted for thinking about committing a crime, .... or an unwelcome act of any kind. Bit deal.

Just like the damn film Minority Report, and you only thought it was a bad movie.

[Seamus Coogan]

Good one! Where is #1? Without it, however, it is a scary witch's brew of items - many already being used to some extent; and there are a few I could name that were not on this list! :gossip: Welcome to the electronic police-state! To me, what is more disturbing than the above and those not listed here is that most in America and the World are NOT Demanding An End To This Trend Immediately! Once in place, such measures will never be removed - only refined and added to!!!!

Peter, I included #1. It wasn't very important. It is only about pre-crime surveillance. After all, you could only get busted for thinking about committing a crime, .... or an unwelcome act of any kind. Bit deal.

Just like the damn film Minority Report, and you only thought it was a bad movie.

ROFL God Dawn wasn't that movie a piece of shit? The precog crime stuff is lunacy! Indeed, how can I single out one thing from this it's all crazy! Great post Lauren by the way!

[Peter Lemkin]

30 Signs That The United States Of America Is Being Turned Into A Giant Prison ]sorry, some repetition with first post]

If you live in the United States of America, you live in a giant prison where liberty and freedom are slowly being strangled to death. In this country, the control freaks that run things are obsessed with watching, tracking, monitoring and recording virtually everything that we do. Nothing is private anymore. Everything that you do on the Internet is being monitored. All of your phone calls are being monitored. In fact, if law enforcement authorities suspect that you have done something wrong, they will use your cell phone microphone to listen to you even when you think your cell phone is turned off. In many areas of the country, when you get into your car automated license plate readers track you wherever you go, and in many major cities when you are walking on the streets a vast network of security cameras and "smart street lights" are constantly watching you and listening to whatever you say. The TSA is setting up "internal checkpoints" all over the nation, Homeland Security is encouraging all of us to report any "suspicious activity" that our neighbors are involved in and the federal government is rapidly developing "pre-crime" technology that will flag us as "potential terrorists" if we display any signs of nervousness. If you are flagged as a "potential terrorist", the U.S. military can arrest you and detain you for the rest of your life without ever having to charge you with anything. Yes, the United States of America is rapidly being turned into a "Big Brother" prison grid, and most Americans are happily going along with it.

The sad thing is that this used to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave".

So what in the world happened?

A fundamental shift in our culture has taken place. The American people have eagerly given up huge chunks of liberty and freedom in exchange for vague promises of increased security.

Our country is now run by total control freaks and paranoia has become standard operating procedure.

We were told that the terrorists hate our liberties and our freedoms, and that we needed to fight the terrorists so that we could keep our liberties and our freedoms.

But instead, the government keeps taking away all of our liberties and our freedoms.

How in the world does that make any sense?

Have the terrorists won?

As a country, we have moved so far in the direction of communist China, the USSR and Nazi Germany that it is almost impossible to believe.

Yes, turning the United States of America into a giant prison may make us all slightly safer, but what kind of life is this?

Do we want to be dead while we are still alive?

Is this the price that we want to pay in order to feel slightly safer?

Where are the millions of Americans that still yearn to breathe free air?

America is supposed to be a land teeming with people thirsting for independence. For example, "Live Free or Die" is supposedly the official motto of the state of New Hampshire.

But instead, the motto of most Americans seems to be "live scared and die cowering".

We don't have to live like this.

Yes, bad things are always going to happen. No amount of security is ever going to be able to keep us 100% safe.

We need to remember that a very high price was paid for our liberty and we should not give it up so easily.

As one very famous American once said, when we give up liberty for security we deserve neither.

The following are 30 signs that the United States of America is being turned into a giant prison....

#1 A new bill that is going through the U.S. Senate would allow the U.S. military to arrest American citizens and hold them indefinitely without trial. This new law was recently discussed in an article posted on the website of the New American....

In what may be a tale too bizarre to be believed by millions of Americans, the U.S. Senate appears ready to pass a bill that will designate the entire earth, including the United States and its territories, one all-encompassing "battlefield" in the global "war on terror" and authorize the detention of Americans suspected of terrorist ties indefinitely and without trial or even charges being filed that would necessitate a trial.

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham is a big supporter of the bill, and he says that it would "basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield".

According to the PPJ Gazette, the following are three things that this new law would do....

1) Explicitly authorize the federal government to indefinitely imprison without charge or trial American citizens and others picked up inside and outside the United States;

(2) Mandate military detention of some civilians who would otherwise be outside of military control, including civilians picked up within the United States itself; and

(3) Transfer to the Department of Defense core prosecutorial, investigative, law enforcement, penal, and custodial authority and responsibility now held by the Department of Justice.

#2 U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman is asking Google to install a "terrorist button" on all Blogger.com blogs so that readers can easily flag "terrorist content" for authorities.

#3 Most Americans have no idea how sophisticated the "Big Brother" prison grid has become. For example, in Washington D.C. the movements of every single car are tracked using automated license plate readers (ALPRs). The following comes from a recent Washington Post article....

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.

#4 In some American schools, RFID chips are now being used to monitor the attendance and movements of children while they are at school. The following is how one article recently described a program that has just been instituted at a preschool in California....

Upon arriving in the morning, according to the Associated Press, each student at the CCC-George Miller preschool will don a jersey with a stitched in RFID chip. As the kids go about the business of learning, sensors in the school will record their movements, collecting attendance for both classes and meals. Officials from the school have claimed they're only recording information they're required to provide while receiving federal funds for their Headstart program.

#5 Increasingly, incidents of misbehavior at many U.S. schools are being treated as very serious crimes. For example, when a little girl kissed a little boy at one Florida elementary school recently, it was considered to be a "possible sex crime" and the police were called out.

#6 But what happened to one very young student in Stockton, California earlier this year was even worse....

Earlier this year, a Stockton student was handcuffed with zip ties on his hands and feet, forced to go to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and was charged with battery on a police officer. That student was 5 years old.

#7 In the United States today, police are trained to respond to even the smallest crimes with extreme physical force. For example, one grandfather in Arizona was recently filmed laying unconscious in a pool of his own blood after police rammed his head into the flood inside a Wal-Mart on Black Friday night. It was thought that he was shoplifting, but it turns out that he says that he was just trying to tuck a video game away so other crazed shoppers would not grab it out of his hands.

#8 Did you know that the government actually sets up fake cell phone towers that can intercept your cell phone calls? The following is how a recent Wired article described these "stingrays"....

You make a call on your cellphone thinking the only thing standing between you and the recipient of your call is your carrier's cellphone tower. In fact, that tower your phone is connecting to just might be a boobytrap set up by law enforcement to ensnare your phone signals and maybe even the content of your calls.

So-called stingrays are one of the new high-tech tools that authorities are using to track and identify you. The devices, about the size of a suitcase, spoof a legitimate cellphone tower in order to trick nearby cellphones and other wireless communication devices into connecting to the tower, as they would to a real cellphone tower.

The government maintains that the stingrays don't violate Fourth Amendment rights, since Americans don't have a legitimate expectation of privacy for data sent from their mobile phones and other wireless devices to a cell tower.

#9 U.S. border agents are allowed by law to search any laptop being brought into the United States without even needing any reason to do so.

#10 In the United States of America, everyone is a "potential terrorist". According to FBI Director Robert Mueller, "homegrown terrorists" represent as big a threat to American national security as al-Qaeda does.

#11 Most Americans are not that concerned about the Patriot Act, but that might change if they understood that the federal government has a "secret interpretation" of what the Patriot Act really means. U.S. Senator Ron Wyden says that the U.S. government interprets the Patriot Act much more "broadly" than the general public does....

"We're getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says."

#12 The FBI is now admittedly recording Internet talk radio programs all over the United States. The following comes from a recent article by Mark Weaver of WMAL.com....

If you call a radio talk show and get on the air, you might be recorded by the FBI.

The FBI has awarded a $524,927 contract to a Virginia company to record as much radio news and talk programming as it can find on the Internet.

The FBI says it is not playing big brother by policing the airwaves, but rather seeking access to what airs as potential evidence.

#13 The federal government has decided that what you and I share with one another on Facebook and on Twitter could be a threat to national security. According to a recent Associated Press article, the Department of Homeland Security will soon be "gleaning information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook for law enforcement purposes".

#14 What you say on your cell phone is never private. The truth is that that the FBI can demand to see your cell phone data whenever it wants. In addition, according to CNET News the FBI can remotely activate the microphone on your cell phone and listen to whatever you are saying....

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a "roving bug," and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

#15 In some areas of the country, law enforcement authorities are pulling data out of cell phones for no reason whatsoever. According to the ACLU, state police in Michigan are now using "extraction devices" to download data from the cell phones of motorists that they pull over. This is taking place even if the motorists that are pulled over are not accused of doing anything wrong.

The following is how a recent article on CNET News described the capabilities of these "extraction devices"....

The devices, sold by a company called Cellebrite, can download text messages, photos, video, and even GPS data from most brands of cell phones. The handheld machines have various interfaces to work with different models and can even bypass security passwords and access some information.

#16 The federal government has become so paranoid that they have been putting GPS tracking devices on the vehicles of thousands of people that have not even been charged with committing any crimes. The following is a short excerpt from a recent Wired magazine article about this issue....

The 25-year-old resident of San Jose, California, says he found the first one about three weeks ago on his Volvo SUV while visiting his mother in Modesto, about 80 miles northeast of San Jose. After contacting Wired and allowing a photographer to snap pictures of the device, it was swapped out and replaced with a second tracking device. A witness also reported seeing a strange man looking beneath the vehicle of the young man's girlfriend while her car was parked at work, suggesting that a tracking device may have been retrieved from her car.

Then things got really weird when police showed up during a Wired interview with the man.

The young man, who asked to be identified only as Greg, is one among an increasing number of U.S. citizens who are finding themselves tracked with the high-tech devices.

The Justice Department has said that law enforcement agents employ GPS as a crime-fighting tool with "great frequency," and GPS retailers have told Wired that they've sold thousands of the devices to the feds.

#17 New high-tech street lights that are being funded by the federal government and that are being installed all over the nation can also be used as surveillance cameras, can be used by the DHS to make "security announcements" and can even be used to record personal conversations. The following is from a recent article by Paul Joseph Watson for Infowars.com....

Federally-funded high-tech street lights now being installed in American cities are not only set to aid the DHS in making "security announcements" and acting as talking surveillance cameras, they are also capable of "recording conversations," bringing the potential privacy threat posed by Intellistreets' to a whole new level.

#18 If you choose to protest in the streets of America today, there is a good chance that you will be brutalized. All over the United States law enforcement authorities have been spraying pepper spray directly into the faces of unarmed protesters in recent weeks.

#19 In many areas of the United States today, you will be arrested if you do not produce proper identification for the police. In the old days, "your papers please" was a phrase that was used to use to mock the tyranny of Nazi Germany. But now all of us are being required to be able to produce "our papers" for law enforcement authorities at any time. For example, a 21-year-old college student named Samantha Zucker was recently arrested and put in a New York City jail for 36 hours just because she could not produce any identification for police.

#20 According to blogger Alexander Higgins, students in kindergarten and the 1st grade in the state of New Jersey are now required by law to participate "in monthly anti-terrorism drills". The following is an excerpt from a letter that he recently received from the school where his child attends....

Each month a school must conduct one fire drill and one security drill which may be a lockdown, bomb threat, evacuation, active shooter, or shelter-in place drill. All schools are now required by law to implement this procedure.

So who in the world ever decided that it would be a good idea for 1st grade students to endure "lockdown" and "active shooter" drills?

To get an idea of what these kinds of drills are like, just check out this video.

#21 With all of the other problems that we are having all over the nation, you would think that authorities would not be too concerned about little kids that are trying to sell cups of lemonade. But sadly, over the past year police have been sent in to shut down lemonade stands run by children all over the United States.

#22 The federal government has decided to invest a significant amount of time, money and energy raiding organic farms. The following example comes from Natural News....

It is the latest case of extreme government food tyranny, and one that is sure to have you reeling in anger and disgust. Health department officials recently conducted a raid of Quail Hollow Farm, an organic community supported agriculture (CSA) farm in southern Nevada, during its special "farm to fork" picnic dinner put on for guests -- and the agent who arrived on the scene ordered that all the fresh, local produce and pasture-based meat that was intended for the meal be destroyed with bleach.

#23 It is an absolute disgrace that all of us (including grandmothers and young children) must either go through body scanners that reveal the intimate details of our naked bodies or endure "enhanced pat-downs" during which our genitals will be touched before we are allowed to get on an airplane.

It is also an absolute disgrace that the American people are putting up with this.

#24 Invasive TSA security techniques are not just for airports anymore. Now, TSA "VIPR teams" are actively conducting random inspections at bus stations and on interstate highways all over the United States. For example, the following comes from a local news report down in Tennessee....

You're probably used to seeing TSA's signature blue uniforms at the airport, but now agents are hitting the interstates to fight terrorism with Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR).

"Where is a terrorist more apt to be found? Not these days on an airplane more likely on the interstate," said Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons.

Tuesday Tennessee was first to deploy VIPR simultaneously at five weigh stations and two bus stations across the state.

TSA "VIPR teams" now conduct approximately 8,000 "unannounced security screenings" a year at subway stations, bus terminals, ports and highway rest stops.

#25 More than a million hotel television sets all over America are now broadcasting propaganda messages from the Department of Homeland Security promoting the "See Something, Say Something" campaign. In essence, the federal government wants all of us to become "informants" and to start spying on one another constantly. The following comes from an article posted by USA Today....

Starting today, the welcome screens on 1.2 million hotel television sets in Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, Holiday Inn and other hotels in the USA will show a short public service announcement from DHS. The 15-second spot encourages viewers to be vigilant and call law enforcement if they witness something suspicious during their travels.

#26 Certain "types" of American citizens are being labeled as potential threats in official U.S. government documents. An unclassified Department of Homeland Security report published a couple years ago entitled "Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment" claims that a belief in Bible prophecy "could motivate extremist individuals and groups to stockpile food, ammunition and weapons." The report goes on to state that such people are potentially dangerous.

#27 Back on February 20, 2009, the State of Missouri issued a report entitled "MIAC Strategic Report: The Modern Militia Movement". That report warned that the following types of people may be potential terrorists....

*anti-abortion activists

*those that are against illegal immigration

*those that consider "the New World Order" to be a threat

*those that have a negative view of the United Nations

#28 As I have written about previously, a very disturbing document that Oath Keepers has obtained shows that the FBI is now instructing store owners to report many new forms of "suspicious activity" to them. According to the document, "suspicious activity" now includes the following....

*paying with cash

*missing a hand or fingers

*"strange odors"

*making "extreme religious statements"

*"radical theology"

*purchasing weatherproofed ammunition or match containers

*purchasing meals ready to eat

*purchasing night vision devices, night flashlights or gas masks

Do any of those "signs of suspicious activity" apply to you?

#29 Soon you may get labeled as a "potential terrorist" if you are just feeling a little nervous. A new "pre-crime" technology system that is currently being tested by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will soon be in use all over the nation. It is called "Future Attribute Screening Technology" (FAST), and it is very frightening. The following description of this new program comes from an article in the London Telegraph....

Using cameras and sensors the "pre-crime" system measures and tracks changes in a person's body movements, the pitch of their voice and the rhythm of their speech.

It also monitors breathing patterns, eye movements, blink rate and alterations in body heat, which are used to assess an individual's likelihood to commit a crime.

The Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) programme is already being tested on a group of government employees who volunteered to act as guinea pigs.

#30 The truth is that nobody puts more people into prison than America does. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and the largest total prison population on the entire globe.

To read about some of the crazy things that the control freaks running things have planned for the future, just check out this article by Natural News: "10 outlandish things the 'scientific' controllers have in mind for you in the near future".

Once again, despite all of this outrageous "security", it is inevitable that a lot of really bad things are going to happen in the United States in the years ahead.

When there are incidents of violence, it is also inevitable that there will be calls for even more "Big Brother" security measures.

We are going to be caught in a never ending spiral of tyranny where the "solution" is always even tighter security.

Eventually, we will have lost all of our liberties and freedoms, and we will probably be even less safe than we are today.

Do not be deceived. We could put a soldier on every corner, a video camera in every room of every home and an RFID chip in every citizen but that would not make us "safe".

Every single lawmaker that is backing these laws which strip our liberties and freedoms away deserves to be voted out of office.

If you love the United States of America, please stand up and say something while you still can.

Please use this article and other articles like it as tools. Share them with your friends and your family. If we can get enough people to wake up, perhaps there is still enough time to turn the direction of this country around.

[Peter Lemkin]

How Many Millions of Cellphones Are Police Watching?
13th July 2012


" … By the New York Times' count, cellphone companies responded to 1.3 million demands for subscribers' information last year from law enforcement. … "

By Megha Rajagopalan

ProPublica, July 11, 2012

In response to a congressional inquiry [1], mobile phone companies on Monday finally disclosed just how many times they've handed over users' cellphone data to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. By the New York Times' count [2], cellphone companies responded to 1.3 million demands for subscribers' information last year from law enforcement. Many of the records, such as location data, don't require search warrants or much court oversight.

Both police and cell service providers had long resisted releasing details on the scope of cellphone surveillance. But the new disclosures from cellphone companies still leave a slew of unanswered questions. Here's what we have yet to learn.

So more than a million people had their cellphone records picked up law enforcement surveillance?

Actually, it's probably far more than that, but we can't know for sure.

While the Times calculated the number of overall requests from law enforcement, each of those requests could cover more than one person.

For instance, when seeking location information, law enforcement agencies frequently ask for "tower dumps," which list every phone in range of a cell tower at a particular time. In cities, where cell towers are located close together, it is possible that the locations of thousands of people might be swept up in a single request.

Even outside of urban areas, ubiquitous small boxes known as microcells, which help you get cell reception in crowded places like shopping malls, also record highly precise location data. Sprint noted in its letter to Congress [3] that each subpoena it received "typically" asked for information on multiple subscribers.

The Times' calculation also doesn't include specifics from T-Mobile, one of the four largest carriers, because it refused to provide them [4], saying "T-Mobile does not disclose the number of requests we receive from law enforcement annually."

When do police have the right to snoop on your location data?

The law isn't settled yet, but location information is generally far easier for police to get than a warrant for a wiretap.

A warrant is generally required for police to place a wiretap or track phones in real time, meaning police must have proof they have probable cause that the search will reveal evidence of a crime. But for police to get location data, many courts hold that police need only show that the data would contain "specific and articulable facts" related to a case.

Privacy activists have long held that requests for location data require a search warrant to be constitutional. They say police are essentially using cellphones as tracking devices. But the Supreme Court hasn't ruled on the issue, and Congress has yet to pass a law addressing it.

Police obtain court orders for basic subscriber information so frequently that some mobile phone companies have established websites here's one [5] with forms that police can fill out in minutes.

The Obama Administration's Department of Justice has said mobile phone users have "no reasonable expectation of privacy [6]."

For their part, cellphone companies have supported congressional efforts to make it tougher for police to get location records. An industry representative spoke at House hearing in favor of a bill [7] that would require law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant before demanding mobile phone users' location information.

Exactly who are police tracking?

It's unclear how connected to a criminal investigation you have to be for law enforcement agencies to request your cellphone information. Stephen Smith, a magistrate judge in southern Texas who has advocated for clearer standards for location data requests, said law enforcement authorities sometimes even request information for every mobile phone a suspect has called.

"If you call and order a pizza, they might request the delivery guy's records," Smith said. These court orders are usually kept secret during an ongoing investigation, police don't want to tip off a suspect but as a result, the vast majority of cellphone subscribers being tracked have no idea police or the FBI have their historical location information, whether they were suspected of a crime or not.

What sorts of investigations do the requests serve?

It's not clear.

Police departments have frequently argued that requiring a warrant to obtain cellphone location information would cripple investigations into violent crimes like kidnapping. But it's unknown what proportion of law enforcement requests actually relate to these types of serious crimes.

"If 80 percent are for drug cases or robberies and two percent are for child sexual predators, it would help if you could put a number on those things," Smith said. "We'd be in a better position to legislate."

So what data did police request the most?

That's also unclear.

Most of the companies didn't release an exact breakdown of police requests. So we don't know how many of the requests were for location data and how many were for call records, billing information or other data.

Some of the overall numbers leave questions too. Sprint has about half the subscriber base of Verizon and AT&T. But it reported that it received about 500,000 requests overall from law enforcement last year. That far outpaces its competitors.

We spoke to Sprint spokeswoman Stephanie Vinge Walsh who said that Sprint counted each person whose data is sucked up via a police request. It's not clear exactly how the other companies totaled the requests they handled.

Which agencies have been requesting the data?

Once again, we don't know.

The cellphone companies didn't say what proportion of requests was made by federal authorities and what proportion came from state and local police departments.

The American Civil Liberties Union earlier this year culled data from dozens of police departments, showing wide discrepancies [8] in the ease with which police could obtain cellphone location data. Some police departments routinely obtained warrants; others requested swathes of records with far less court oversight. In response to a question from Congress about whether police had misused phone tracking, T-Mobile said it had identified two cases, which it referred to the FBI.

What does law enforcement do with the data after it's collected?

It depends on who is requesting it.

As Smith, the Texas magistrate judge, pointed out in a recent paper [9], any information that's not used as evidence in court is unlikely to become public. Cellphone companies' data retention policies [10] vary widely, and the duration of time law enforcement hangs on to the data it obtains is unknown.

http://www.propublica.org/article/how-ma...e-watching

[Peter Lemkin]

Spying on Americans through Cellphone Carriers
NSA Spying: 'If We Tell You, We'll Have to Kill You'

by Tom Burghardt


Global Research, July 14, 2012
Antifascist Calling...

What most Americans are blissfully unaware of is the fact that they carry in their pockets what have been described as near-perfect spy devices: their cellphones.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=31899