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Shadow Government

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March 27, 2024, 12:55:24 pm Mark says: Shocked Shocked Shocked Shocked  When Hamas spokesman Abu Ubaida began a speech marking the 100th day of the war in Gaza, one confounding yet eye-opening proclamation escaped the headlines. Listing the motives for the Palestinian militant group's Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, he accused Jews of "bringing red cows" to the Holy Land.
December 31, 2022, 10:08:58 am NilsFor1611 says: blessings
August 08, 2018, 02:38:10 am suzytr says: Hello, any good churches in the Sacto, CA area, also looking in Reno NV, thanks in advance and God Bless you Smiley
January 29, 2018, 01:21:57 am Christian40 says: It will be interesting to see what happens this year Israel being 70 years as a modern nation may 14 2018
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October 16, 2017, 03:28:18 am Christian40 says: anyone else thinking that time is accelerating now? it seems im doing days in shorter time now is time being affected in some way?
September 24, 2017, 10:45:16 pm Psalm 51:17 says: The specific rule pertaining to the national anthem is found on pages A62-63 of the league rulebook. It states: “The National Anthem must be played prior to every NFL game, and all players must be on the sideline for the National Anthem. “During the National Anthem, players on the field and bench area should stand at attention, face the flag, hold helmets in their left hand, and refrain from talking. The home team should ensure that the American flag is in good condition. It should be pointed out to players and coaches that we continue to be judged by the public in this area of respect for the flag and our country. Failure to be on the field by the start of the National Anthem may result in discipline, such as fines, suspensions, and/or the forfeiture of draft choice(s) for violations of the above, including first offenses.”
September 20, 2017, 04:32:32 am Christian40 says: "The most popular Hepatitis B vaccine is nothing short of a witch’s brew including aluminum, formaldehyde, yeast, amino acids, and soy. Aluminum is a known neurotoxin that destroys cellular metabolism and function. Hundreds of studies link to the ravaging effects of aluminum. The other proteins and formaldehyde serve to activate the immune system and open up the blood-brain barrier. This is NOT a good thing."
http://www.naturalnews.com/2017-08-11-new-fda-approved-hepatitis-b-vaccine-found-to-increase-heart-attack-risk-by-700.html
September 19, 2017, 03:59:21 am Christian40 says: bbc international did a video about there street preaching they are good witnesses
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Mark
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« on: June 13, 2011, 07:51:32 am »

Shadow Government



THE HIGH-TECH SURVEILLANCE TRAP HAS BEEN SET

Security cameras, surveillance of your financial transactions, radio frequency spy chips hidden in consumer products, tracking of your internet searches, and eavesdropping on your e-mail and phone calls. Without your knowledge or consent, every aspect of your life is observed and recorded. But who is watching the watchers?

An ultra-secret global elite, functioning as a very real shadow government controls technology, finance, international law, world trade, political power, and vast military capabilities. Those who hold power are invisible to all but a few insiders. Those unrivaled leaders answer to no earthly authority, and they won't stop until they control the world.

In Shadow Government, Grant Jeffrey removes the screen that up to now, has hidden the work of these diabolical agents. Jeffrey reveals the biblical description of Satan's global conquest and identifies the tools of technology that the Antichrist will use to rule the world.

Your eyes will be opened to the real power that is working behind the scenes to destroy America and merge it into the coming global government. Armed with this knowledge, you will be equipped to face spiritual darkness with the light of prophetic truth.

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« Reply #1 on: June 15, 2011, 03:25:56 am »

I hope to watch this one, it looks informative and educational.  Shocked
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« Reply #2 on: June 15, 2011, 09:55:39 am »

Me too!
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« Reply #3 on: December 09, 2011, 11:17:29 am »

My daughter's Social Studies Assignment this week -
She HAD to take a picture of what food we had in the
Pantry, Freezer and Fridge along with a picture of her family!

http://sherriequestioningall.blogspot.com/2011/12/my-daughers-social-studies-assignment.html



Proof  the Assignment page of Social Studies on her school's website (you can see my name on the side)

My daughter is in middle school.  2 days ago she had a Social Studies assignment that she HAD TO DO!  She had no choice as she would get an F if she did not do the required assignment!

What was that assignment?

She had to take a picture of our food pantry and the food in it and she had to take a picture of our Freezer and Fridge with what amount of food we had, how much was spent on food per week and she had to bring in a picture of her family!

It really bothered me and I did not want her to do it, but she got upset and said she had to do it and that is was just for comparing to food people eat in other countries!

I allowed her to take the pictures and take a picture of her and I for the project.


Now, I have been thinking about it this morning with the information about the Federal Government going to the Mormon Food Pantry demanding a list of who has purchased bulk food.

AND the White House Unveiling plans of using schools, teachers and Community leaders (Churches) to find out about people and who may be terrorist, due to not agreeing with the government.



So now that I am thinking about this - is this part of the government using the schools to find out how much food people have and to get pictures of the family?  Is this going to be the way they operate......the teachers give kids classroom assignments and threaten F's if they don't do them?

I now, don't believe it was an innocent school assignment, it most probably was a Federal Government controlled assignment for the kids.

I would like to know, has anyone else in the country have had their kids have the same assignment?

I am in  East Tennessee (Knoxville), I am revealing this due to people wondering where, but I will not give the school name that is giving too personal information.

Here is a post from last year and CPS investigating me/ interviewing my kid about how much food we had, our going camping and about me being a blogger.   
http://sherriequestioningall.blogspot.com/2010/12/is-govt-trying-to-find-out-who-has-what.html
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« Reply #4 on: December 09, 2011, 08:08:38 pm »

This is a SOCIAL STUDIES ASSIGNMENT Huh

When I was in elem/jr high, Social Studies was only about HISTORY. No, I'm no way endorsing the draconian public school system, but pt being that it has REALLY, REALLY changed since the 1980's(when I was there), and I thought that period was bad enough!

What's next? Students have to break into their neighbor's homes to take pictures?
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« Reply #5 on: December 10, 2011, 03:32:44 am »

The public system has been using the little tikes for spying on adults for decades. What better way for government to get access to your home than being invited in by little Johnny that doesn't know they are being used to circumvent the law. No warrant needed!

And these people are teaching children? More like brainwashing them.  Roll Eyes
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« Reply #6 on: June 19, 2012, 07:19:40 am »

Surveillance Society Surging
By Terry James
Rapture Ready

America is about to experience what citizenry in Britain have been going through for some time. The assault on U.S. privacy has been undergoing a metamorphosis for decades, but until very recently, the barriers have seemed to at least hold back unbridled Big Brotherism in this nation.

One journalist reported from England in a chapter for one of my books:

If you want to be a film star, come to Britain. We’re all on camera. All you have to do is walk through any town or drive down any road and you are watched, filmed, and monitored. When my wife, Pat, and I tour America , we feel neglected because the roadside cameras are no longer ever-present—not yet. As the world moves towards a “Big Brother” society beyond the nightmares of author George Orwell, who predicted a world in which the state watched everyone in his 1948 classic novel, 1984, it is like we are inmates of a high-tech prison. Big Brother really is watching us in Europe. The rest of the world is not far behind. (Alan Franklin, "Big Brother is Watching," The Departure).

It seems that now Alan and Pat won’t be sensing that they are neglected when they come to America. Strides are being made—in the name of commerce—to make sure that we are all on Candid Camera.

Drone Invasion
We have been listening to the debate for some time now about the drones that have spied on, then, in some cases, hunted down and taken out high-priority terrorist targets in some places in the Middle East. Now, the drones are being seen and reported more and more in the homeland. The most recent flap has been brought to our attention by U.S. Senator Rand Paul, who says such surveillance is becoming akin to violating the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. That’s the one that, in part, prohibits illegal searches and seizures of private citizens and their properties.

This past week, a story surfaced outlining the technology’s invasive nature.

Planes able to photograph sunbathers in their back gardens are being deployed by Google and Apple. The U.S. technology giants are racing to produce aerial maps so detailed they can show up objects just four inches wide. But campaigners say the technology is a sinister development that brings the surveillance society a step closer. Google admits it has already sent planes over cities while Apple has acquired a firm using spy-in-the-sky technology that has been tested on at least 20 locations, including London. Apple’s military-grade cameras are understood to be so powerful they could potentially see into homes through skylights and windows. The technology is similar to that used by intelligence agencies in identifying terrorist targets in Afghanistan. (Vanessa Allen, "Software Giants Will Use Military-Grade Cameras to Take Powerful Satellite Images," Rapture Ready News, 07:04)

People have embraced their satellite-to-vehicle capabilities in searching out locations while traveling. Browsers on the Internet love sometimes taking the virtual tours down the streets of cities throughout the nation. The convenience and entertainment presented by technology continues their desensitizing effects on the American public to the dangers inherent in such surveillance advances.

Global Control
Homeland security agencies—which have proliferated since 9/11 and the radical Islamist attacks—seem oblivious to complaints that they are becoming increasingly invasive. It is troubling, although thoroughly fascinating, to witness how global control, long ago prophesied by the only source who knows the end from the beginning, is coming to fulfillment in our time.

It is no longer difficult to imagine how Antichrist and his regime of absolute control will have the technological facilities to keep tabs on every victim during the Tribulation. Developments in the global monetary world are moving along the necessity of bringing about that end-times system of control. The powers that be must find a way to make all conform to a singular methodology in transacting business. There must be a completely changed economic order in order to establish even a modicum of stability to a world gone mad in terms of economic insanity.

Satan moves malevolently on the minds of mankind, as the apostle Paul told us:

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12).

All people of planet earth must be made to cooperate with the regulations the powers dictate. This means everyone must be observed at all times, which is where this is all leading. In my view, this is the major reason for the surging surveillance society we are considering here.


http://www.bibleprophecyblog.com/2012/06/surveillance-society-surging.html#
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« Reply #7 on: June 20, 2012, 02:20:34 pm »

Acxiom Corp: The 'faceless organization that knows everything about you'
An Arkansas company you've probably never heard of knows more about you than some of your friends, Google, and even the FBI — and it's selling your data


When you think of the surveillance state, you usually think of snoopy alphabet-soup government agencies like the FBI, IRS, DEA, NSA, or TSA, or cyber-snoops at Facebook or Google, says Natasha Singer in The New York Times. But there's a company you've probably never heard of that "peers deeper into American life," and probably knows more about you than any of those groups: Little Rock–based Acxiom Corp. Jeffrey Chester at the Center for Digital Democracy has dubbed Acxiom "Big Brother in Arkansas," while Gizmodo's Jamie Condliffe calls it the "faceless organization that knows everything about you." Here's what you should know about the company:

What is Acxiom Corp., and what does it do?
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. "In essence, it's as if the ore of our data-driven lives were being mined, refined, and sold to the highest bidder, usually without our knowledge," says The Times' Singer.

What kind of data does it have?
"If you are an American adult," says Singer, "the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on." It does more than collect that information, though. It uses it to pigeonhole people into one of 70 very specific socioeconomic clusters in an attempt to predict how they'll act, what they'll buy, and how companies can persuade them to buy their products. It gathers its data trove from public records, surveys you've filled out, your online behavior, and other disparate sources of information, then sells it to banks, retailers, and other buyers.

Do other companies do this, too?
Yes, it's a very competitive and lucrative business — Acxiom reported a $77.26 million profit last fiscal year, and it's the No. 2 company in the business, after Epsilon. But analysts say that Acxiom has the world's largest database on consumers. "There are a lot of players in the digital space trying the same thing," Piper Jaffray analyst Mark Zgutowicz tells The New York Times. "But Acxiom's advantage is they have a database of offline information that they have been collecting for 40 years and can leverage that expertise in the digital world."

Is this legal?
Yes, but the Federal Trade Commission is asking Congress to step in to make the data-marketing industry more transparent. Unlike consumer reporting agencies that compile and sell your credit score, date-miners like Acxiom don't have to tell individuals what they know about them. Privacy and consumer advocates say that's troubling, since the companies are selling sensitive, potentially embarrassing, and possibly false information about you, and you can't correct errors. As FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz says, Acxiom and its peers are "the unseen cyberazzi who collect information on all of us," and we should have the right to know what they've found.

How sketchy is this?
If you're worried about Google or Facebook tracking you online, or holes in your iPhone security, this is much worse, says Gizmodo's Condliffe. We sort of knew that commercial data-miners existed, but "Acxiom operates on a terrifying scale," and it's very likely that the company has an ever-growing dossier of 1,500 data points on you. The Times' "alarmist piece" about Acxiom conspiring to serve you "extremely accurate ads" would be more frightening, says Kashmir Hill at Forbes, if, on the same day, on the same page, the paper hadn't run "an alarmist piece about how it's impossible to know a person's age online, and thus impossible to keep creepy old pedophiles from lurking on kids' sites." Well, which is it? The media is sending mixed message on the state of online privacy, and this is just one extreme example.

Read the entire article at The New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/technology/acxiom-the-quiet-giant-of-consumer-database-marketing.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

http://theweek.com/article/index/229508/acxiom-corp-the-faceless-organization-that-knows-everything-about-you
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« Reply #8 on: June 20, 2012, 03:45:29 pm »

Here’s another mega-multinational corporation that controls…like…everything.



The Guardian has called Serco "probably the biggest company you've never heard of".[5]

Serco operates in various sectors:

·   Home Affairs: Serco operates the National Border Targeting Centre for the UK Border Agency and provides the Carrier Gateway - the interface between carriers and the Agency.[6]

·   Transport: Serco operates London's Docklands Light Railway,[7] Woolwich Free Ferry[8] and the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme[9] (all for Transport for London), and Great Southern Railways in Australia.[10][11] Serco also has a joint venture with Abellio, the UK arm of Dutch national rail operator Nederlandse Spoorwegen, to operate passenger trains in the UK: Serco-Abellio has a 25 year concession for Merseyrail in Liverpool and operates Northern Rail services in the north of England.[12] Serco also operates the Dubai Metro.[13] Serco formerly operated the Copenhagen Metro with Ansaldo STS, until selling its share with effect from 1 January 2008.[14] In addition, Serco Rail Operations operates infrastructure monitoring trains in the UK.[15] Serco's Home Affairs division, run by Tom Riall, also operates speed camera systems throughout the UK and designs, writes and tests the software that controls the matrix message signs, signals, emergency roadside telephones (SOS) and traffic monitoring on England's motorway network including the National Traffic Control Centre.[16]

·   Science: Serco manages the UK's National Physical Laboratory.[17][18] and also provides IT Services, Industrial Support and Cryogenic Operations Support and Maintenance at CERN.[19] Serco also controls the National Nuclear Laboratory.[20]

·   Detention: Serco supplies electronic tagging devices for offenders and asylum seekers.[21] In Britain, Serco runs four prisons, a Young Offenders Institution and a Secure Training Centre.[22] It also operates two Immigration Removal Centres.[23][24] Serco is also responsible for the contracted-out court escort services in the south-east area (formerly a role undertaken by HM Prison Service).[25] In addition, Serco runs partly privatised Hünfeld Prison in Hesse, Germany.[26] In Australia Serco runs Acacia Prison in Western Australia[27] and Borallon Correctional Facility in Queensland[28] as well as the national contract for immigration detention centres, including Christmas Island and the Villawood detention centre in Sydney.[29] [30] In Auckland, New Zealand Serco runs the Mt Eden remand prison [31] and in March 2012 was awarded the contract to build an operate a 960 bed prison at Wiri.[32]

·   Defence: Serco holds defence contracts worldwide including the UK Government’s first modern outsourced contract for the maintenance of the UK Ballistic Missile Early Warning System at RAF Fylingdales;[33] contracts are also held for the operation and maintenance of RAF Brize Norton,[34] RAF Halton[35] and RAF Northolt[35] in the UK and RAF Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic.[35] Serco also provides support services to garrisons in Australia.[36] Serco also manages many aspects of operations at the Defence College of Management and Technology in Shrivenham.[37] Serco is one of three partners in the consortium which manages the Atomic Weapons Establishment.[38] Serco also has a 15 year contract worth £400 million to provide facilities management services to Dstl.[39]

·   Royal Navy marine services: Serco Denholm, a joint venture with the Denholm Group, is responsible for fleet support at the three main UK naval bases, HMNB Portsmouth, HMNB Devonport and HMNB Clyde.[40]

·   Aviation: Serco provides air traffic control services at international airports in the United Arab Emirates[41] and at some smaller airports in the USA and Canada.[42][43] Since 2004 Serco have also had £5m a year from the US government to manage airports in Iraq.[44] Serco also operate Scatsta Airport on Shetland.[45] In June 2010 Serco signed a £4million contract to operate all air traffic control services for Coventry Airport.[46]

·   Health: Serco provide facilities management services at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital,[47] Leicester Royal Infirmary,[48] Wishaw General Hospital[49] and at Plymouth's Derriford Hospital.[50] Serco provides pathology services to Guy's and St. Thomas' and King's College NHS trusts through GSTS Pathology.[51]

·   Education: Serco holds a 10 year contract with Bradford City Council to manage and operate the local education authority,[52] providing education support services to the City's schools, and similarly manages and operates Walsall[53] and Stoke-on-Trent local education authorities.[54] Serco is one of Ofsted's three Regional Inspection Service Providers, responsible for school inspections in the English Midlands.[55] Serco is also the provider of a Student information system, Facility, used in schools and colleges in several countries.[56]

·   Drivers' licensing: Serco, through a purpose-made division Serco DES, holds a 10 year, $114 million contract with the Province of Ontario to operate the province's DriveTest driver examination centres. These tests include vision, road, and knowledge tests for all persons seeking to become a licensed automobile driver in the province.[42]

·   Leisure: Serco operates a number of leisure centres across the UK including the Manchester Aquatics Centre, the aquatic venue for the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester.[57]

·   Serco also administers a number of publicly funded websites in the UK, including the Business Link website.[58]

·   Serco presently runs the IT Infrastructure for the London Borough of Southwark winning the 5 year tender in 2007.[59]

·   Serco has a contract with the City of Chicago, Illinois to enforce parking meter regulations.[60]

·   Serco publishes a magazine, Ethos Journal, to stimulate thought and provoke reaction to the big issues shaping the world of public services. Ethos is aimed at public sector leaders, politicians, academics and policy specialists debating the future of public services today.[61]
Serco operates in Continental Europe, the Middle East, the Asia Pacific region and North America, but the majority of its turnover still comes from the UK.

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« Reply #9 on: June 22, 2012, 10:00:12 am »

Data Mining: Big Corporations Are Gathering Every Shred Of Information About You That They Can And Selling It For Profit

When most people think of "Big Brother", they think of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Department of Homeland Security and other shadowy government agencies.  Yes, they are definitely watching you, but so are many big corporations.  In fact, there are some companies that are making tens of millions of dollars by gathering every shred of information about all of us that they can and selling it for profit to anyone willing to pay the price.  It is called "data mining", and these data miners want to keep track of literally everything that you do.  Most people know that basically everything that we do on the Internet is tracked, but data mining goes far beyond that.  When you use a customer rewards card at the supermarket, the data miners know about it.  When you pay for a purchase with a credit card or a debit card, the data miners know about it.  Every time you buy a prescription drug, that information is sold to someone.  Every time you apply for a loan, a whole host of organizations is notified.  Information has become an extremely valuable commodity, and thanks to computers and the Internet it is easier to gather information than ever before.  But that also means that our personal information is no longer "private", and this trend is only going to get worse in the years ahead.

You have probably never even heard of many of these companies that are making millions of dollars selling your personal information.  Acxiom and Epsilon are two of the biggest names in the industry, and most of the time they are selling your information to companies that want to sell you stuff.

Almost every single day, very personal information about you is being bought and sold without your permission and it is all perfectly legal.

A recent article in The Week says the following about Acxiom....

An Arkansas company you've probably never heard of knows more about you than some of your friends, Google, and even the FBI — and it's selling your data
The scale of the information gathering that Acxiom does is absolutely mind blowing.  If you can believe it, Acxiom actually keeps track of more than 190 million people inside the United States....

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.
So what does Acxiom want to know about you?

Everything.

The following is from a recent New York Times article about Acxiom....

IT knows who you are. It knows where you live. It knows what you do.

It peers deeper into American life than the F.B.I. or the I.R.S., or those prying digital eyes at Facebook and Google. If you are an American adult, the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on.
Companies such as Acxiom literally want every shred of information about you that they can possibly get.

Once they gather all that data, Acxiom analyzes it, packages it and sells it to large corporations such as Wells Fargo, HSBC, Toyota, Ford and Macy's.

And being in the "Big Brother business" is very, very profitable.

Acxiom made more than 77 million dollars in profits during their latest fiscal year.

Some members of Congress are very alarmed by all of this.  According to U.S. Senator John Kerry, this industry is virtually unregulated....

"There's no code of conduct. There's no standard. There's nothing that safeguards privacy and establishes rules of the road."
So what do big corporations do with all of this data after they purchase it from companies like Acxiom?

Well, for one thing, they use it to try to predict how you will behave.  A Daily Beast article gave some examples of how this works....

Predicting people’s behavior is becoming big business—and increasingly feasible in an era defined by accessible information. Data crunching by Canadian Tire, for instance, recently enabled the retailer's credit card business to create psychological profiles of its cardholders that were built upon alarmingly precise correlations. Their findings: Cardholders who purchased carbon-monoxide detectors, premium birdseed, and felt pads for the bottoms of their chair legs rarely missed a payment. On the other hand, those who bought cheap motor oil and visited a Montreal pool bar called "Sharx" were a higher risk. "If you show us what you buy, we can tell you who you are, maybe even better than you know yourself," a former Canadian Tire exec said.
I don't know about you, but I find that a bit creepy.

Later on in that same article, how some U.S. companies are using this kind of information was explained....

Other industries have bolstered their bottom lines by predicting how consumers will behave, according to Super Crunchers. UPS predicts when customers are at risk of fleeing to one of its competitors, and then tries to prevent the loss with a telephone call from a salesperson. And with its “Total Rewards” card, Harrah’s casinos track everything that players win and lose, in real time, and then analyze their demographic information to calculate their “pain point”—the maximum amount of money they’re likely to be willing to lose and still come back to the casino in the future. Players who get too close to their pain point are likely to be offered a free dinner that gets them off the casino floor.
So is all of this data gathering harmless?

Does it simply make our economy more efficient?

Or is there a greater danger here?

At some point could all of our personal information be used for more insidious purposes?

One thing is for sure - this is a trend that is not going away any time soon.

As our society becomes even more integrated through the Internet, data gathering is going to become even more comprehensive.

Eventually these complicated computer algorithms will be able to make very detailed predictions about your future behavior with a very, very high degree of accuracy.

When you add government snooping into the equation, it becomes easy to see why privacy advocates are going crazy these days.

Our society is literally being transformed into a technological monitoring grid.  Virtually everything we do is monitored, tracked and recorded in some way.

If we are not very careful, eventually we could end up living in a society that is much more oppressive than anything George Orwell ever dreamed of.

So what do you think of all of this snooping, spying and data mining?

Do you believe that it is harmless or do you believe that it represents a significant threat?

Feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below....

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/data-mining-big-corporations-are-gathering-every-shred-of-information-about-you-that-they-can-and-selling-it-for-profit
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« Reply #10 on: July 19, 2012, 04:15:59 am »

Obama's FBI sends agents to pro-lifer's home
Texas activist draws hour-long visit from feds with warning not to be violent


You’re a Christian immigrant to the U.S. with a wife and newborn, but you feel strongly about the pro-life issue and periodically appear at a local abortion business to protest the killing and offer counseling should someone want that advice.

Then one day there’s a knock on your door, and two FBI agents identify themselves and start asking questions: Do you know pro-life protesters who are violent? Do you know pro-life activists who may be violent? To what church or church groups do you belong? What makes you believe in your cause? Why do you protest abortion? Are your friends aggressive or abrasive?

The interview stretches on.

Intimidated?

Then they note that you have a new family.

“You wouldn’t want to be apart from your wife and newborn,” they tell you. What about your mother-in-law, a nationally known pro-life activist? “Did you get your activist and pro-life ideas from her? Did she train or teach you?”

Are you intimidated now?

Then they warn that you shouldn’t trespass (even though you didn’t). Asked about the warning and why it was delivered, it gets repeated. And you’re told you cannot threaten violence, such as saying “If you get an abortion, I’ll see something bad happens to you.”

How about now?

That’s the experience of Andy Moore, an activist who has just launched AbortionWiki.org, which aims eventually to be a complete dossier on the abortion industry worldwide.

He’s the son-in-law of pro-life activist Jill Stanek, a speaker, blogger and writer who was a registered nurse at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Ill., when she discovered babies were being aborted alive there and left to die on closet shelves without medical care.

She later exposed that Barack Obama opposed legislation that would have required doctors to provide assistance to babies that survive abortion attempts, a position that critics described essentially as infanticide.

The intimidation concerns the Life Legal Defense Foundation, which has advised Moore to have someone video his protest activities. The group promises to defend him if the need arises.

Allison Aranda, senior staff counsel, charges the Obama administration “is essentially engaging in a witch hunt.”

“From the moment the new administration took office, the DOJ has been targeting peaceful pro-life sidewalk counselors,” she said. “They have come out guns blazing on several occasions, often bringing allegations that could later not be substantiated or in some cases clearly proven to be false.”

Stanek, who wrote about the episode on her website, noted that Aranda has seen the federal government use the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act to attack pro-life counselors. The federal law keeps pro-life counselors away from abortion business front doors.

“The DOJ is using tactics that amount to legal extortion,” Stanek said. “They have filed these frivolous claims against innocent people who don’t have the finances to hire big shot attorneys. The DOJ then kindly offers to settle the case if the counselor simply agrees to stay so many yards away and pay a couple thousand dollar fine.”

Dana Cody, the executive director for Life Legal, told WND that the foundation for such aggressive tactics against innocent pro-life activists comes directly from the top. It was the FBI that set up a training program held several years ago for police who are called to respond to conflicts between abortion businesses and pro-life protesters.

The training manual for that event, she said, was written by Planned Parenthood, the abortion industry’s biggest player in the U.S., and the National Abortion Federation.

When asked why no pro-life perspectives were included, federal officials stonewalled, she said.

These actions are “very chilling,” she told WND, “on private citizens, law-abiding citizens who are engaging in policy making speech in the public forum.

“To make matters worse, why are they asking questions about [Stanek]? Reports show that pro-life people are considered domestic terrorists. Is she on that list? How did they make the connection? That’s the chilling factor.”

Moore told WND that the FBI warned him specifically against obstructing vehicle access to abortion businesses, something he did not do.

“They also warned of threats of violence,” he said. “The example they gave is I could not just walk up to a car and say, ‘If you go ahead and get an abortion, I will make sure something bad happens to you.’”

Moore said the FBI told him there were three red flags in his file. He once used a bullhorn at a protest and was told by police it violated a noise ordinance. He hasn’t used it since. He also was accused by an unidentified person of trespassing, which he denies, and a clinic complained he was too aggressive.

“I’m out there telling the truth,” he told WND. “That might not be desirable to some people.”

Moore said he repeatedly was asked to name names of those who might be “violent or engaging in questionable activities.” But the agents assured him it would “not be snitching.”

Aranda said that when the government “determined that the evidence wasn’t quite what they thought it would be to proceed on a FACE claim against Andy, they turned their intimidating interrogation into a fishing expedition about the personal life of Jill Stanek.”

“Targeted bullying by our government because of an individual’s viewpoint and willingness to share that message in the public square is intolerable,” she said. ” … We will not back down, and we will not be threatened.”

Stanek said it stands to reason “that the Obama administration would be interested in me.”

“This has probably been a long time coming,” she said. “But to reiterate Allison’s point, we will not back down, and we will not be threatened.”

It was only weeks earlier that WND reported Barack Obama’s hand-picked attorney general, Eric Holder, called it quits in a standoff with a pro-life sidewalk counselor in Denver. The agreement to drop a case included having the government paying $120,000 for bringing a claim that the district court judge determined lacked evidence.

And in a Florida case involving Mary Susan Pine, U.S. District Judge Kenneth L. Ryskamp openly speculated that there was a cozy relationship between an abortion clinic and federal prosecutors that could warp justice.

As Ryskamp recently dismissed the abortion clinic access complaint against the woman for lack of evidence, he charged that there appeared to be collusion and that if there had been a little more evidence, he might have taken action.

“It is rather curious that the Department of Justice was able to meet with the [Presidential Women's Center in West Palm Beach, Fla.] staff and police officers the very next day after the alleged violations occurred. It is also curious that the government failed to make any efforts to obtain the identities of the passengers who are the alleged victims in this case – the court finds it hard to believe that the government was completely unaware of the existence of the sign-in sheets and video surveillance system,” he wrote.

The judge said the court “can only wonder whether this action was the product of a concerted effort between the government and the PWC, which began well before the date of the incident at issue, to quell Ms. Pine’s activities rather than to vindicate the rights of those allegedly aggrieved by Ms. Pine’s conduct.”

“If this is the case, the court would be inclined to sanction the government with, at a minimum, an adverse inference. Given the absence of further evidence substantiating the court’s suspicions, the court is not authorized to do so,” the judge wrote.

The judge’s 21-page ruling granting Pine a summary judgment and clearing her of the charges said the entire episode raised questions.

“The court is at a loss as to why the government chose to prosecute this particular case in the first place,” Ryskamp wrote. “The record [is] almost entirely devoid of evidence that Ms. Pine acted with the prohibited motive and intent or that Ms. Pine engaged in any unlawful conduct. The government has failed to create a genuine issue for trial on all three elements of its FACE (Federal Access to Clinic Entrances) claim, and Ms. Pine is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.”

Federal officials sued her under the FACE act, a civil action, after they alleged she talked to occupants in a car while they were going into a parking lot – and may or may not have been going to an abortion business.

The Denver case involved Ken Scott, a pro-life advocate who was targeted by five federal prosecutors for passing out information outside of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Denver.

But U.S. District Court Judge Philip Brimmer dismissed 10 motions made by federal prosecutors in the case. The federal government decided shortly later to abandon its campaign against Scott.

http://www.wnd.com/2012/07/obamas-fbi-sends-agents-to-pro-lifers-home/
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« Reply #11 on: September 25, 2012, 04:14:43 am »

19 Signs That America Is Being Systematically Transformed Into A Giant Surveillance Grid

You are being watched.  The control freaks that hold power in the United States have become absolutely obsessed with surveillance.  They are constantly attempting to convince the American people that we are all "safer" when virtually everything that we do is watched, monitored, tracked and recorded.  Our country is being systematically transformed into a giant surveillance grid far more comprehensive than anything George Orwell ever dreamed of.  If you still believe that there is such a thing as "privacy" in this day and age, you are being delusional.  Every single piece of electronic communication is monitored and stored.  In fact, they know that you are reading this article right now.  But even if you got rid of all of your electronic devices, you would still be constantly monitored.  As you will read about below, a rapidly growing nationwide network of facial recognition cameras, "pre-crime" surveillance devices, voice recorders, mobile backscatter vans, aerial drones and automated license plate readers are constantly feeding data about us back to the government.  In addition, private companies involved in "data mining" are gathering literally trillions upon trillions of data points about individual Americans each year.  So there is no escape from this surveillance grid.  In fact, it has become just about impossible to keep it from growing.  The surveillance grid is expanding in thousands of different ways, so even if you stopped one form of surveillance you would hardly make a dent in the astounding growth of this system.  What we desperately need is a fundamental cultural awakening to the importance of liberty, freedom and privacy.  Without such an awakening, the United States (along with the rest of the planet) is going to head into a world that will make "1984" by George Orwell look like a cheery story about a Sunday picnic.

The following are 19 signs that America is being systematically transformed into a giant surveillance grid....

#1 New Software That Will Store And Analyze Millions Of Our Voices

Did you know that there is software that can positively identify you using your voice in just a matter of seconds?

Law enforcement authorities all over the U.S. are very eager to begin using new Russian software that will enable them to store and analyze millions of voices....

    ‘Voice Grid Nation’ is a system that uses advanced algorithms to match identities to voices. Brought to the US by Russia’s Speech Technology Center, it claims to be capable of allowing police, federal agencies and other law enforcement personnel to build up a huge database containing up to several million voices.

    When authorities intercept a call they’ve deemed ‘hinky’, the recording is entered into the VoiceGrid program, which (probably) buzzes and whirrs and spits out a match. In five seconds, the program can scan through 10,000 voices, and it only needs 3 seconds for speech analysis. All that, combined with 100 simultaneous searches and the storage capacity of 2 million samples, gives SpeechPro, as the company is known in the US, the right to claim a 90% success rate.

#2 Unmanned Aerial Drones Will Be Used Inside The U.S. To Spy On You

Unmanned aerial drones have been used with great success by the U.S. military overseas, and now the U.S. government is promoting their use to local law enforcement authorities all over America.

The following is from a recent GAO report....

    "Domestically, state and local law enforcement entities represent the greatest potential users of small UAS [unmanned aircraft systems] in the near term because they can offer a simple and cost effective solution for airborne law enforcement activities"

That report also discussed how there are 146 different models of these drones made by 69 different companies throughout the United States....

    "According to an industry trade group, local law enforcement can potentially choose from about 146 different types of small UAS being manufactured by about 69 different companies in the U.S."

Since our overseas wars are slowing down, somebody has got to keep these drone companies in business.

So the goal is to eventually have thousands of these drones spying on all of us.

In the years ahead, our skies will likely be filled with these things.  Many of them are incredibly quiet and can gather information about you from far above.  In fact, one could be directly over your home right now and you may never even know it.

In fact, the U.S. government is already using some of these unmanned drones to quietly spy on farmers in Nebraska and Iowa according to a recent article by Kurt Nimmo....

    Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is using aerial drones to spy on farmers in Nebraska and Iowa. The surveillance came under scrutiny last week when Nebraska’s congressional delegation sent a joint letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

    On Friday, EPA officialdom in “Region 7” responded to the letter.

    “Courts, including the Supreme Court, have found similar types of flights to be legal (for example to take aerial photographs of a chemical manufacturing facility) and EPA would use such flights in appropriate instances to protect people and the environment from violations of the Clean Water Act,” the agency said in response to the letter.

#3 High Tech Government Scanners That Can Secretly Scan You From 164 Feet Away

A new scanner that has just been developed can scan your body, your clothes and your luggage from 164 feet away.

According to Gizmodo, these very creepy scanners will soon be used at airports and border crossings all over America....

    Within the next year or two, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will instantly know everything about your body, clothes, and luggage with a new laser-based molecular scanner fired from 164 feet (50 meters) away. From traces of drugs or gun powder on your clothes to what you had for breakfast to the adrenaline level in your body—agents will be able to get any information they want without even touching you.

    And without you knowing it.

    The technology is so incredibly effective that, in November 2011, its inventors were subcontracted by In-Q-Tel to work with the US Department of Homeland Security. In-Q-Tel is a company founded "in February 1999 by a group of private citizens at the request of the Director of the CIA and with the support of the U.S. Congress." According to In-Q-Tel, they are the bridge between the Agency and new technology companies.

    Their plan is to install this molecular-level scanning in airports and border crossings all across the United States.

#4 The DNA Of Newborn Babies Born All Over The United States Is Systematically Collected

These days, the invasion of our privacy begins just after birth.

Did you know that the DNA of almost every newborn baby in the United States is systematically collected and stored in databases?  Unfortunately, most new parents don't even realize what medical personnel are doing when this takes place....

    The DNA of virtually every newborn in the United States is collected and tested soon after birth. There are some good reasons for this testing, but it also raises serious privacy concerns that parents should know about.

    States require hospitals to screen newborns for certain genetic and other disorders. Many states view the testing as so important they do not require medical personnel to get parents’ express permission before carrying it out. To collect the DNA sample, medical personnel prick the newborn’s heel and place a few drops of blood on a card. There is one question that new parents rarely ask: What happens to the blood spots after the testing is done? This is where newborn screening becomes problematic.

#5 Twitter Is Being Used To Monitor You

Hopefully you understand by now that nothing you do on the Internet will ever be private again.

According to a recent article by Susanne Posel, Twitter is being used as a law enforcement tool more than it ever has been before....

    Twitter has released a report confirming that the US government leads the world in requesting information on their citizens. The Transparency Report shows the US government has made requests that are infringing on American privacy rights. Twitter states that "we’ve received more government requests in the first half of 2012, as outlined in this initial dataset, than in the entirety of 2011."

#6 Your Cell Phone Is Spying On You

If you want to have no privacy whatsoever, own a cell phone and carry it around with you constantly.

Your cell phone is constantly tracking everywhere that you go and it is constantly making a record of everything that you do with it.

For example, did you know that authorities are using cell phones to record the identities of people that attend street protests?

The following is what one private investigator recently told a stunned audience....

    One of the biggest changes is the ability to track your physical location. I'm sorry I came in at the end of the previous talk. I heard them talk about surveying cell phones with a drone, in a wide area -- this is something that is done routinely now. I can tell you that everybody that attended an Occupy Wall Street protest, and didn't turn their cell phone off, or put it -- and sometimes even if they did -- the identity of that cell phone has been logged, and everybody who was at that demonstration, whether they were arrested, not arrested, whether their photos were ID'd, whether an informant pointed them out, it's known they were there anyway. This is routine.

At this point, law enforcement authorities are requesting information from cell phone companies about individual Americans over a million times a year as a recent Wired article detailed....

    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.

#7 Students Are Increasingly Being Tracked By RFID Microchips

RFID microchips are increasingly becoming a part of our every day lives.  In fact, some school districts are now using them to track school attendance.  Just check out what is happening in one school district down in Texas....

    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.

#8 Spy Cams In Hospitals To Monitor Handwashing

Would you want a surveillance camera watching you in the restroom?

Don't laugh - this is actually happening in some places.  The following is from a recent Natural News article....

    Here goes the last great American sanctuary from intrusion- bathrooms with spy cams. Going to the bathroom has now been monitored in a hospital in NY where sensors were placed on the doors to identify workers entering and exiting and cameras placed to view sinks to insure proper hand hygiene.

#9 Spyware That Monitors The Behavior Of Government Workers

According to the Washington Post, the federal government is now actually using advanced spyware to closely monitor the behavior of some government employees while they are at work....

    When the Food and Drug Administration started spying on a group of agency scientists, it installed monitoring software on their laptop computers to capture their communications.

    The software, sold by SpectorSoft of Vero Beach, Fla., could do more than vacuum up the scientists’ e-mails as they complained to lawmakers and others about medical devices they thought were dangerous. It could be programmed to intercept a tweet or Facebook post. It could snap screen shots of their computers. It could even track an employee’s keystrokes, retrieve files from hard drives or search for keywords.

#10 The NSA Warrantless Surveillance Programs

Virtually every single electronic communication in the world (including all phone calls, all faxes, and all emails) is intercepted and recorded by an international surveillance network run by the NSA and several other large international intelligence agencies.

For a long time this was an "open secret" that everyone kind of knew about but that nobody ever did anything about.

Fortunately, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is now fighting back, and they have three former NSA employees on their side....

    Three whistleblowers – all former employees of the National Security Agency (NSA) – have come forward to give evidence in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) lawsuit against the government's illegal mass surveillance program, Jewel v. NSA.

    In a motion filed today, the three former intelligence analysts confirm that the NSA has, or is in the process of obtaining, the capability to seize and store most electronic communications passing through its U.S. intercept centers, such as the "secret room" at the AT&T facility in San Francisco first disclosed by retired AT&T technician Mark Klein in early 2006.

    "For years, government lawyers have been arguing that our case is too secret for the courts to consider, despite the mounting confirmation of widespread mass illegal surveillance of ordinary people," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "Now we have three former NSA officials confirming the basic facts. Neither the Constitution nor federal law allow the government to collect massive amounts of communications and data of innocent Americans and fish around in it in case it might find something interesting. This kind of power is too easily abused. We're extremely pleased that more whistleblowers have come forward to help end this massive spying program."

According to one of the whistleblowers, the NSA "has the capability to do individualized searches, similar to Google, for particular electronic communications in real time through such criteria as target addresses, locations, countries and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email."

#11 Pre-Crime Surveillance Technology

Did you think that "pre-crime" was just something for science fiction movies?

Unfortunately, that is no longer the case.  A company known as BRS Labs has developed "pre-crime surveillance cameras" that they claim can identify potential terrorists and criminals even before they strike.

Yes, this sounds like a bunch of nonsense, but some law enforcement authorities are taking this quite seriously.  In fact, dozens of these "pre-crime surveillance cameras" are being put up at major transportation hubs all over 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.

#12 Mobile Backscatter Vans

Do you think that you can get away from the TSA scanners by simply refusing to fly and by avoiding all U.S. airports?

Don't be so sure.

In fact, law enforcement authorities all over the country will soon be driving around in unmarked vans looking inside your cars and even under your clothes using the same backscatter technology currently being used 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."

#13 Automated License Plate Readers

In a previous article, I discussed a Washington Post article that detailed how automated license plate readers are now 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.

#14 Data Mining

Private companies are almost more eager to invade your privacy than the government is.

In fact, there are a whole bunch of very large corporations that are making a fortune by 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 of the largest data mining companies is known as Acxiom.  That firm has actually compiled information on more than 190 million people in the United States 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.

#15 The Growing Use Of Facial Recognition Technology

Most Americans do not realize this, but the use of facial recognition technology has absolutely exploded in recent years.

For example, did you know that there are now 32 states that use some type of facial recognition technology for DMV photos?

That is why they give you such strict instructions when you get your DMV photo taken.  They want your photo to be able to work with the database.

But the government is not the only one using creepy facial recognition technology.  The following is from a recent article by Naomi Wolf....

    A software engineer in my Facebook community wrote recently about his outrage that when he visited Disneyland, and went on a ride, the theme park offered him the photo of himself and his girlfriend to buy – with his credit card information already linked to it. He noted that he had never entered his name or information into anything at the theme park, or indicated that he wanted a photo, or alerted the humans at the ride to who he and his girlfriend were – so, he said, based on his professional experience, the system had to be using facial recognition technology. He had never signed an agreement allowing them to do so, and he declared that this use was illegal. He also claimed that Disney had recently shared data from facial-recognition technology with the United States military.

    Yes, I know: it sounds like a paranoid rant.

    Except that it turned out to be true. News21, supported by the Carnegie and Knight foundations, reports that Disney sites are indeed controlled by face-recognition technology, that the military is interested in the technology, and that the face-recognition contractor, Identix, has contracts with the US government – for technology that identifies individuals in a crowd.

#16 Rapid DNA Testing

But what law enforcement authorities like even better than facial recognition technology is DNA testing.

The following is from a recent article by Ellen Messmer....

    It's been the FBI's dream for years -- to do near-instant DNA analysis using mobile equipment in the field -- and now "Rapid DNA" gear is finally here.

    The idea is that you simply drop into the system a cotton swab with a person's saliva, for example, and the "Rapid DNA" machine spits out the type of DNA data that's needed to pin down identity. Now that such equipment exists, the FBI is pushing to get it into the hands of law enforcement agencies as soon as possible.

#17 The FBI's Next Generation Identification System

It was recently announced that the FBI is spending a billion dollars to develop a "Next Generation Identification System" that will combine the most advanced biometric identification technologies to create a database superior to anything that law enforcement in the United States has ever had before....

    The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has begun rolling out its new $1 billion biometric Next Generation Identification (NGI) system. In essence, NGI is a nationwide database of mugshots, iris scans, DNA records, voice samples, and other biometrics, that will help the FBI identify and catch criminals — but it is how this biometric data is captured, through a nationwide network of cameras and photo databases, that is raising the eyebrows of privacy advocates.

    Until now, the FBI relied on IAFIS, a national fingerprint database that has long been due an overhaul. Over the last few months, the FBI has been pilot testing a facial recognition system — and soon, detectives will also be able to search the system for other biometrics such as DNA records and iris scans.

#18 The NYPD's Domain Awareness System

Local law enforcement agencies around the country are also spending big bucks to upgrade their surveillance capabilities.  The new "Domain Awareness System" that the NYPD just put in was described in a recent article by Neal Ungerleider....

    The New York Police Department is embracing online surveillance in a wide-eyed way. Representatives from Microsoft and the NYPD announced the launch of their new Domain Awareness System (DAS) at a lower Manhattan press conference today. Using DAS, police are able to monitor thousands of CCTV cameras around the five boroughs, scan license plates, find out the kind of radiation cars are emitting, and extrapolate info on criminal and terrorism suspects from dozens of criminal databases ... all in near-real time.

But don't think that you are getting off the hook if you don't live in New York City.  The truth is that Microsoft has big plans for putting in these kinds of systems nationwide.

#19 Trapwire

Did you know that a huge network of incredibly advanced spy cameras is currently being installed nationwide?

Yes, I know that it sounds like something off of a television show, but this is actually true.  It is called "Trapwire", and I described this emerging system in one of my recent articles....

    "You are being watched.  The government has a secret system - a machine - that spies on you every hour of every day."  That is how each episode of "Person of Interest" on CBS begins.  Most Americans that have watched the show just assume that such a surveillance network is completely fictional and that the government would never watch us like that.  Sadly, most Americans are wrong.  Shocking new details have emerged this week which prove that a creepy nationwide network of spy cameras is being rolled out across the United States.  Reportedly, these new spy cameras are "more accurate than modern facial recognition technology", and every few seconds they send back data from cities and major landmarks all over the United States to a centralized processing center where it is analyzed.  The authorities believe that the world has become such a dangerous place that the only way to keep us all safe is to watch what everyone does all the time.  But the truth is that instead of "saving America", all of these repressive surveillance technologies are slowly killing our liberties and our freedoms.  America is being transformed into an Orwellian prison camp right in front of our eyes, and very few people are even objecting to it.

An RT article was one of the first news sources to reveal some of the shocking details about this new program....

    Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology — and have installed it across the US under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.

    Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence. It’s part of a program called TrapWire and it's the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America’s intelligence community. The employee roster at Arbaxas reads like a who’s who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and the corporation's ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented.

So after reading all of the information above, is there anyone out there that still doubts that America is being transformed into a giant surveillance grid?

The frightening thing is that there is a large percentage of the American people that are aware of many of these things, but they are convinced that these technologies are actually making society "better" and "safer".

We desperately need to wake up America while there is still time.  Please share this article with your family, your friends and your social media contacts on the Internet.

If we can get enough people to wake up, perhaps there is still enough time to turn this country in a different direction.

Will the final chapters of our history be a complete and total nightmare or will the final chapters of our history be the greatest chapters of all?

The choice, America, is up to you.

http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/19-signs-that-america-is-being-systematically-transformed-into-a-giant-surveillance-grid
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« Reply #12 on: November 09, 2012, 12:25:26 pm »

A Trip to the Grocery in the Near Future

by Natty Bumppo
November 8, 2012 05:30 ET

With all the new technologies in place and those being tested on the American public to keep us safe, I thought we should take a look into the future of grocery shopping.

It is the 7th of the month and according to the Dept. of Homeland Security’s new “Travel Now” program. This is the 1st of 2 days your family is permitted to visit the grocery store for the week. The day is sunny and beautiful this is Sunday and your children are at home and want to go shopping with you. So you load them up into their proper restraints and off you go.

Then while you are driving through town the bio-metric scanner determines what you have in your vehicle, guns, knives, drugs, liquor and what trouble you would be in if you have a copy of the Scriptures, the car did not shut down so you continue on. And that is not all, because as soon as you arrive at your destination, the local Pigly Wigly grocery. You then must walk through a body scanner with a retina scan to determine you really are what your National I.D. card says since you are one of the last holds outs to ‘get chipped’ and also to make sure that those are your children. For your sakes I really hope the scanner does not have some technical glitch that day because you will never see your children again.

After you gather your groceries into your cart and you are approved by Michele Obama’s calorie counting police, you get to the checkout lane and discover that the RFID in your cell phone used for purchases mistakenly doubled the gas purchase you made earlier which will take a month to refund if you can prove you only received the 5 gallons at 50 credits to begin with that now you don’t have enough credits remaining to make the purchase of the entire contents of your cart. No problem you say, just remove a couple items and it’s a go, but then a red light begins to flash while your items were scanning.

Unfortunately you took out the wrong items. You should have kept the carrots and not the bag of cookies. Because the calorie count fail safe installed 2 days earlier by the Michele Obama’s calorie counting police at the isle’s scanner told that you have an unhealthy cart and you are again required to go through the store and re-examine all potential purchases as you go through the process again. Finally you are cleared to return to your car from the local Pigly Wigly. You are so thankful that that was your first demerit at the grocery, 2 more and you would be required to take a special class on ‘healthy hearts and healthy homes’. After the class and if you receive 2 more demerits then your children would be removed from your unhealthy home and placed with a government approved ‘healthy hearts and healthy homes’ facility until they become of age after reeducation to remind you about proper dieting and report back to their superiors on your behavior. Your scared because your oldest is 7 and your youngest is 4 and they never come back to the families until the age of 10.

Now that you are back at your car (after going through the body scanner again verifying that you did not have an extra item in your purse which you did not pay for) with such relief that you made it out of the grocery in one piece with your 2 children. You load up your purchases and get the kiddos in their proper restraints and you settle in for the trip back home. Then half way home you see flashing lights in the rear view mirror and you pull over knowing that you were not speeding wondering what this was for. The officer approaches and asks for your copy of receipt of purchases from the local Pigly Wigly and you quickly comply because you know if you don’t have the required paperwork in a timely manner you are charged 15 credits per minute of the officers time after the initial 2 minute grace period. The officer tells you that according to the Bio-Metric scan at the intersection that you were missing 1 bottle of shampoo and 1 bag of cookies.

You quickly explain that the shampoo is there and that you stopped at a friends home and your children and theirs ate the cookies and you discarded the package at their home. The officer then takes down the name of your friend to verify your story and to check if too many calories were brought into that residence. However you cannot find the shampoo. But to your relief the officer notified you that someone seen you drop it as you were loading your vehicle and reported it to the proper authorities. This is not good as you soon find out, because of recent terrorist activities this could easily be seen as a potential threat of an exploding device concealed as a bottle of shampoo. However because of the timely reporting of the eyewitness and the quick response of the city’s finest. You will not be held for an indefinite period of time for the case to be resolved, but will be under house arrest for the next 2 weeks to determine the contents of the shampoo bottle.

 
Finally arriving at home, with your 2 children and remaining groceries, you consider yourself fortunate.

http://johngaltfla.com/wordpress/2012/11/08/a-trip-to-the-grocery-in-the-near-future/
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« Reply #13 on: November 15, 2012, 05:37:49 am »

DARPA Sponsors Surveillance Technology For Department Of Pre-Crime To Predict Future Behavior


The dizzying speed of the growth of the surveillance state and the increasing sophistication of the tools used to build it are paid for in large measure by funds doled out by the Army’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). At The New American we have chronicled the various projects sponsored by the über-secret research and development arm of the military. One of the newest technologies being pursued by DARPA will not only widen the field of vision of government’s never-blinking eye, but it purports to predict the behavior of those being watched. Forbes reports that DARPA has contracted with scientists at Carnegie Mellon University to develop “an artificial intelligence system that can watch and predict what a person will ‘likely’ do in the future using specially programmed software designed to analyze various real-time video surveillance feeds. The system can...


rest: http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/item/13613-darpa-sponsors-surveillance-technology-to-predict-future-behavior
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« Reply #14 on: November 24, 2012, 06:30:50 am »

Government Surveillance On Citizens Rising


As the inferno of the David Petraeus scandal continues to burn, the latest Google Transparency Report shows government surveillance is starting to heat up. "This is the sixth time we’ve released this data, and one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise," Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst, explains on Google's blog. Between January and June of this year governments from around the world filed 20,939 requests with Google to access data on 34,614 accounts. According to company data, during that same time frame last year, governments made 15,744 requests on 25,342 accounts. The majority of government requests filed in the first six months of 2012 were made by the United States, followed by India, Brazil and France.

http://news.discovery.com/tech/google-transparency-report-government-surveillance-121115.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1
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« Reply #15 on: November 24, 2012, 06:35:58 am »

California Gets Face Scanners To Spy On Everyone All At Once

In a single second, law enforcement agents can match a suspect against millions upon millions of profiles in vast detailed databases stored on the cloud. It’s all done using facial recognition, and in Southern California it’s already occurring. Imagine the police taking a picture: any picture of a person, anywhere, and matching it on the spot in less than a second to a personalized profile, scanning millions upon millions of entries from within vast, intricate databases stored on the cloud. It’s done with state of the art facial recognition technology, and in Southern California it’s already happening. Though that pool of potential matches could include millions, the company says that by using the “best available facial recognition algorithms” they can scour that data set in a fraction of a second in order to send authorities all known intelligence about anyone who enters a camera’s field of vision. “Live high definition video enables FaceFirst to track and isolate the face of every person on every camera simultaneously,” the company claims on their website.

http://rt.com/usa/news/california-facefirst-surveillance-recognition-908/
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« Reply #16 on: December 05, 2012, 06:21:19 am »

'Everyone in US under virtual surveillance' - NSA whistleblower

video at site: http://rt.com/usa/news/surveillance-spying-e-mail-citizens-178/

The FBI records the emails of nearly all US citizens, including members of congress, according to NSA whistleblower William Binney. In an interview with RT, he warned that the government can use this information against anyone.

Binney, one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in the history of the National Security Agency, resigned in 2001. He claimed he no longer wanted to be associated with alleged violations of the Constitution, such as how the FBI engages in widespread and pervasive surveillance through powerful devices called 'Naris.'

This year, Binney received the Callaway award, an annual prize that recognizes those who champion constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal or professional lives.

RT: In light of the Petraeus/Allen scandal while the public is so focused on the details of their family drama, one may argue that the real scandal in this whole story is the power, the reach of the surveillance state. I mean if we take General Allen – thousands of his personal e-mails have been sifted through private correspondence. It’s not like any of those men was planning an attack on America. Does the scandal prove the notion that there is no such thing as privacy in a surveillance state?

William Binney: Yes, that’s what I’ve been basically saying for quite some time, is that the FBI has access to the data collected, which is basically the emails of virtually everybody in the country. And the FBI has access to it. All the congressional members are on the surveillance too, no one is excluded. They are all included. So, yes, this can happen to anyone. If they become a target for whatever reason – they are targeted by the government, the government can go in, or the FBI, or other agencies of the government, they can go into their database, pull all that data collected on them over the years, and we analyze it all. So, we have to actively analyze everything they’ve done for the last 10 years at least.

RT: And it’s not just about those, who could be planning, who could be a threat to national security, but also those, who could be just…

WB: It’s everybody. The Naris device, if it takes in the entire line, so it takes in all the data. In fact they advertised they can process the lines at session rates, which means 10-gigabit lines. I forgot the name of the device (it’s not the Naris) – the other one does it at 10 gigabits. That’s why they're building Bluffdale [database facility], because they have to have more storage, because they can’t figure out what’s important, so they are just storing everything there. So, emails are going to be stored there in the future, but right now stored in different places around the country. But it is being collected – and the FBI has access to it.

RT: You mean it’s being collected in bulk without even requesting providers?

WB: Yes.

RT: Then what about Google, you know, releasing this biannual transparency report and saying that the government’s demands for personal data is at an all-time high and for all of those requesting the US, Google says they complied with the government’s demands 90 percent of the time. But they are still saying that they are making the request, it’s not like it’s all being funneled into that storage. What do you say to that?

WB: I would assume that it’s just simply another source for the same data they are already collecting. My line is in declarations in a court about the 18-T facility in San Francisco, that documented the NSA room inside that AST&T facility, where they had Naris devices to collect data off the fiber optic lines inside the United States. So, that’s kind of a powerful device, that would collect everything it was being sent. It could collect on the order over of 100 billion 1,000-character emails a day. One device.

RT: You say they sift through billions of e-mails. I wonder how do they prioritize? How do they filter it?

WB: I don’t think they are filtering it. They are just storing it. I think it’s just a matter of selecting when they want it. So, if they want to target you, they would take your attributes, go into that database and pull out all your data.

RT: Were you on the target list?

WB: Oh, sure! I believe I’ve been on it for quite a few years. So I keep telling them everything I think of them in my email. So that when they want to read it they’ll understand what I think of them.

RT: Do you think we all should leave messages for the NSA mail box?

WB: Sure!

RT: You blew the whistle on the agency when George W. Bush was the president. With President Obama in office, in your opinion, has anything changed at the agency, in the surveillance program? In what direction is this administration moving?

WB: The change is it’s getting worse. They are doing more. He is supporting the building of the Bluffdale facility, which is over two billion dollars they are spending on storage room for data. That means that they are collecting a lot more now and need more storage for it. That facility by my calculations that I submitted to the court for the Electronic Frontiers Foundation against NSA would hold on the order of 5 zettabytes of data. Just that current storage capacity is being advertised on the web that you can buy. And that’s not talking about what they have in the near future.

RT: What are they going to do with all of that? Ok, they are storing something. Why should anybody be concerned?

WB: If you ever get on the enemies list, like Petraeus did or… for whatever reason, than you can be drained into that surveillance.

RT: Do you think they would… General Petraeus, who was idolized by the same administration? Or General Allen?

WB: There are certainly some questions, that have to be asked, like why would they target it to begin with? What law were they breaking?

RT: In case of General Petraeus one would argue that there could have been security breaches. Something like that. But with General Allen  – I don’t quite understand, because when they were looking into his private emails to this woman.

WB: That’s the whole point. I am not sure what the internal politics is… That’s part of the program. This government doesn’t want things in the public. It’s not a transparent government. Whatever the reason or the motivation was, I don’t really know, but I certainly think that there was something going on in the background that made them target those fellows. Otherwise why would they be doing it? There is no crime there.

RT: It seems that the public is divided between those, who think that the government surveillance program violates their civil liberties, and those who say, 'I’ve nothing to hide. So, why should I care?' What do you say to those who think that it shouldnt concern them.

WB: The problem is if they think they are not doing anything that’s wrong, they don’t get to define that. The central government does, the central government defines what is right and wrong and whether or not they target you. So, it’s not up to the individuals. Even if they think they aren't doing something wrong, if their position on something is against what the administration has, then they could easily become a target.

RT: Tell me about the most outrageous thing that you came across during your work at the NSA.

WB: The violations of the constitution and any number of laws that existed at the time. That was the part that I could not be associated with. That’s why I left. They were building social networks on who is communicating and with whom inside this country. So that the entire social network of everybody, of every US citizen was being compiled overtime. So, they are taking from one company alone roughly 320 million records a day. That’s probably accumulated probably close to 20 trillion over the years.

The original program that we put together to handle this to be able to identify terrorists anywhere in the world and alert anyone that they were in jeopardy. We would have been able to do that by encrypting everybody’s communications except those who were targets. So, in essence you would protect their identities and the information about them until you could develop probable cause, and once you showed your probable cause, then you could do a decrypt and target them. And we could do that and isolate those people all alone. It wasn’t a problem at all. There was no difficulty in that.

RT: It sounds very difficult and very complicated. Easier to take everything in and…

WB: No. It’s easier to use the graphing techniques, if you will, for the relationships for the world to filter out data, so that you don’t have to handle all that data. And it doesn’t burden you with a lot more information to look at, than you really need to solve the problem.

RT: Do you think that the agency doesn’t have the filters now?

WB: No.

RT: You have received the Callaway award for civic courage. Congratulations! On the website and in the press release it says: “It is awarded to those, who stand out for constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal or professional lives.” Under the code of spy ethics – I don’t know if there is such a thing – your former colleagues, they probably look upon you as a traitor. How do you look back at them?

WB: That’s pretty easy. They are violating the foundation of this entire country. Why this entire government was formed? It’s founded with the Constitution and the rights were given to the people in the country under that Constitution. They are in violation of that. And under executive order 13526, section 1.7 – you can not classify information to just cover up a crime, which this is, and that was signed by President Obama. Also President Bush signed it earlier as an executive order, a very similar one. If any of this comes into Supreme Court and they rule it unconstitutional, then the entire house of cards of the government falls.

RT: What are the chances of that? What are the odds?

WB: The government is doing the best they can to try to keep it out of court. And, of course, we are trying to do the best we can to get into court. So, we decided it deserves a ruling from the Supreme Court. Ultimately the court is supposed to protect the Constitution. All these people in the government take an oath to defend the Constitution. And they are not living up to the oath of office.             

video at site: http://rt.com/usa/news/surveillance-spying-e-mail-citizens-178/
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« Reply #17 on: December 11, 2012, 09:32:35 am »

BIG BROTHER’S LISTENING
Government officials installing audio surveillance systems on public buses


The era of private conversations on city buses — and even on San Francisco’s iconic streetcars — may be coming to an end. 

Government officials are quietly installing sophisticated audio surveillance systems on public buses across the country to eavesdrop on passengers, according to documents obtained by The Daily. Plans to implement the technology are under way in cities from San Francisco to Hartford, Conn., and Eugene, Ore., to Columbus, Ohio.

Linked to video cameras already in wide use, the microphones will offer a formidable new tool for security and law enforcement. With the new systems, experts say, transit officials can effectively send an invisible police officer to transcribe the individual conversations of every passenger riding on a public bus.

But the deployment of the technology on buses raises urgent questions about the boundaries of legally protected privacy in public spaces, experts say, as transit officials — and perhaps law enforcement agencies given access to the systems — seem positioned to monitor audio communications without search warrants or court supervision.

“This is very shocking,” said Anita Allen, a privacy law expert at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s a little beyond what we’re accustomed to. The adding of the audio seems more sensitive.”

In San Francisco, for example, transit officials recently approved a $5.9 million contract to install a new audio-enabled surveillance system on 357 buses and trolley cars over four years, with an option for 613 more vehicles. The contract, signed in July, specifies both modern buses and historic trolley cars.

A spokesman for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, Paul Rose, declined to comment on the surveillance program. But procurement documents explain the agency’s rationale.

“The purpose of this project is to replace the existing video surveillance systems in SFMTA’s fleet of revenue vehicles with a reliable and technologically advanced system to increase passenger safety and improve reliability and maintainability of the system,” officials wrote in contract documents.

In San Francisco, the Department of Homeland Security is funding the entire cost with a grant. Elsewhere, the federal government is also providing some financial support. Officials in Concord, N.C., for example, used part of a $1.2 million economic stimulus grant to install a combined audio and video surveillance system on public transit vehicles, records show.

The Lane Transit District in Eugene, Ore.; the Bay Area Transportation Authority in Traverse City, Mich.; the Central Ohio Transit Authority in Columbus; CT Transit in Hartford; and Athens Transit in Athens, Ga., have also been pursuing similar systems, documents show. The Maryland Transit Administration, which serves Baltimore, announced a bus recording system last month. The agency started recording audio on 10 public buses, with plans to expand the system to 340 more. Each bus uses six cameras. A recorder stores 30 days of data, the Baltimore Sun reported.

rest big article: http://www.thedaily.com/article/2012/12/10/121012-news-bus-audio-surveillance/

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« Reply #18 on: December 13, 2012, 06:32:19 am »

Privacy Losses Alarm As Biometric Identification Explodes Worldwide

Quote
The government's new privacy legislation has removed the ban on biometric data being handed to crime-fighting agencies. Officials say the move could be of immense benefit in fighting crime, although privacy lobbysists liken it to a "Big Brother" development. The Attorney-General's Department revealed that police will be able to ask private companies - including shops, pubs and clubs - to hand over their patrons' facial scans. "These changes will allow, for example, a pub to pass on to police a face scan of someone involved in a glassing attack," a spokeswoman told News Ltd. "Or, police could ask a government agency to help them identify an alleged murderer through matching an image obtained via CCTV (closed circuit television) with client photos. "The spokeswoman said the Privacy Act would "not compel" any company or government agency to hand over biometric data to law enforcement bodies.

BIOMETRIC facial scans taken for passports, drivers' licences or nightclub entry can now be stored in police and spy agency databases, under changes to Australia's privacy laws.

The Gillard government's new privacy legislation has removed the ban on biometric data being handed to crime-fighting agencies.

Officials say the move could be of immense benefit in fighting crime, although privacy lobbysists liken it to a "Big Brother" development.

The Attorney-General's Department revealed that police will be able to ask private companies - including shops, pubs and clubs - to hand over their patrons' facial scans.

"These changes will allow, for example, a pub to pass on to police a face scan of someone involved in a glassing attack," a spokeswoman told News Ltd.

"Or, police could ask a government agency to help them identify an alleged murderer through matching an image obtained via CCTV (closed circuit television) with client photos.

"The spokeswoman said the Privacy Act would "not compel" any company or government agency to hand over biometric data to law enforcement bodies.

Biometric data has now been reclassifed as "sensitive data", meaning government agencies must apply stronger privacy safeguards.

"Information can only be shared with law enforcement agencies in strictly limited circumstances with increased privacy protections," the spokeswoman said.

The power for police to store biometric data that was originally provided for a passport or driver's licence is buried within 290 pages of explanatory memorandum for the legislative amendments, passed during parliament's final sitting week this year.

The document explains that the federal Information Commissioner will draw up guidelines for the transfer of biometric data to crime-fighting agencies.

It cites a "practical example" of the change as "the automatic provision of biometric information and templates by a non-enforcement agency into a database operated by an enforcement body."

"This is currently a gap in the enforcement-related activity exception in the Privacy Act that prevents this increasing activity from occurring," it says.

"The privacy safeguard for this new proposal is that the activity in question would be subject to ongoing oversight by the Information Commissioner through guidelines."

Australian Council for Civil Liberties president Terry O'Gorman blasted the changes as a "Big Brother" invasion of privacy.

He said law enforcement agencies must not be handed biometric data automatically, but should have to obtain a warrant.

"This is increasing law enforcement agencies' access to data without judicial supervision," he said."(This type of scan) is something you never thought - let alone consented - would end up in a police database. Databases can be misused, and not just in totalitarian countries.'

Mr O'Gorman said "wishy washy" guidelines drawn up by the Information Commissioner "will make you feel good, but they're just useless".

"We need privacy cops out there investigating breaches," he said.

The new legislation will take force in 15 months' time, to give government agencies and private companies time to comply.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Immigration Department already use biometric facial scans - a digital scan that shows a person's facial contours - stored on a microchip in passports.

NSW, Victoria and Queensland are using biometric facial recognition technology in new licences. And some banks are considering introducing biometric voice recognition data on ATMs.

Biometric scans are also growing popular with pubs and clubs to identify and screen patrons.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ipad/cops-bid-for-biometrics/story-fnbzs1v0-1226533078328

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« Reply #19 on: December 19, 2012, 08:09:51 am »

Surveillance State: Ecuador Implements “World’s First” Countrywide Facial And Voice-Recognition System

The United States is often considered a world leader when it comes to deploying the latest biometric security and surveillance technologies. But it could have an unlikely new competitor: Ecuador. According to Russian company the Speech Technology Center, the small Latin American country has successfully completed installation of “the world’s first biometric identification platform, at a nation-wide level, that combines voice and face identification capabilities.” As I reported back in September, Speech Technology Center operates under the name SpeechPro in the United States. The company’s controversial technology enables authorities to build a massive database containing several million “voiceprints” of known criminals, suspects, or persons of interest.

more: http://stratrisks.com/geostrat/9919
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« Reply #20 on: December 19, 2012, 11:25:47 am »

And knowing how good they are getting with 3d animation, the goal of the media industry to have literal digital actors to replace real humans doing the actual acting work is getting real close. Tying in digitally-created voices with a high-quality 3d character, overlay it in a video sequence of say a street shooting at night, and bingo, somebody just committed a crime without being there. Even completely re-creating a real location, say the street that a shooting took place, has become so good you can't tell it's 3d when they do quick cut shots where you see it for maybe 2-3 seconds at most. Toss in some low lighting and you can visually hide that fact it isn't real.

You want to keep a check on where 3d artists talents are, just look here...

(formerly called "HighEnd3d", my old stomping grounds)
http://www.creativecrash.com/

Is it real? Nope, all fake and 3d.
http://www.creativecrash.com/marketplace/3d-models/architecture/scenes/public-work/c/conference-room-038


Imagine the above scene done in a video, a quick shot of some event in that room, a room that doesn't even exist.


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« Reply #21 on: December 29, 2012, 09:49:49 am »

Senate renews government surveillance measure

Civil rights campaigners voiced dismay on Friday over the US Senate's re-authorization of the government's warrantless surveillance program, and the defeat of two amendments that would have provided for basic oversight of the eavesdropping.

The Senate voted 73-23 to extend the law, called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act, for five years. The House of Representatives has already passed the measure, which President Obama has said he will sign.

But while the program was extended as expected, campaigners saw a silver lining in that the vote was closer than when the legislation was first introduced in 2008.

"We're incredibly disappointed, not just that it passed, but that they rejected some very moderate amendments that wouldn't have interfered with the collection of intelligence," said Michelle Richardson, an ACLU expert on surveillance issues.

An amendment by senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon would have required the secret court that oversees surveillance requests to disclose "important rulings of law." It failed 37-54. An amendment by Merkley's fellow Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden would have required the government to estimate the number of US citizens it had spied on. It fell by a narrower margin, 43-52.

"We're actually pleased that so many [Senate] members today want more transparency," Richardson said, pointing to the 43 votes for Wyden. "There were more members voting for transparency and accountability than there were in 2008. The amendments did better this time."

The amended FISA Act was passed in 2008 to retroactively cover Bush-era domestic surveillance. The law permits the National Security Agency to track communication between foreign targets and people inside the United States without obtaining a warrant. Critics say it violates fourth amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. NSA whistleblower Bill Binney has estimated that the agency, under protection of the law, has "assembled" 20 trillion transactions between US citizens.

Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, said in debate on the Senate floor that the surveillance program provides useful intelligence and does not target US citizens. She opposed both oversight amendments but agreed in principle to release unclassified summaries of actions taken by the secret court.

The Obama administration has already begun reviewing FISA court decisions to see what can be released, Richardson said.

"I think we have a long and slow fight on this, but we'll eventually get there," Richardson said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/28/senate-approves-government-surveillance-measure
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« Reply #22 on: January 19, 2013, 05:40:04 am »

Americans endorse spycams, getting used to drones

A new poll has uncovered a “shocking willingness” on the part of Americans to give up their privacy and freedoms for the sake of “safety,” just at a time when the Obama administration is launching an assault on the self-defense rights guarded by the Second Amendment.

“As leaders in Washington prepare an assault on the Second Amendment, a majority of Americans – 61 percent – said they believe that domestic use of drones by government and law enforcement agencies represents a violation of people’s right to privacy,” said Fritz Wenzel, president of Wenzel Strategies.

It was his public-opinion research and media consulting company, Wenzel Strategies, that released the results of a telephone poll conducted for WND. It was taken Jan. 9-12 and carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3.22 percentage points.

Wenzel said the federal government “has announced plans to use drones domestically in certain circumstances, and the survey finding that 20 percent are just fine with that is shocking.”

Another 18 percent said they aren’t sure about whether the spy drones would violate the privacy of citizens.

“But the survey also shows a shocking willingness of Americans to forfeit their freedoms to the government under the guise of safety, as a plurality of 46 percent said they believe local governments should use cameras to monitor traffic on public roadways,” he said.

The survey recalls Benjamin Franklin’s admonition, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Some 20 percent of respondents said local and state law enforcement agencies should have and use drones with live-broadcast cameras. Of those who considered themselves “very liberal,”  28 percent supported the idea, while only 16 percent of the “very conservative” favored it.

The right end of the political spectrum was more confident of its position, with 72 percent expressing the belief that drones violate privacy laws and only 12 percent were unsure. On the liberal end of the scale, only 46 percent said drones violate privacy and 26 percent were uncertain.

But the poll also indicated Americans have grown accustomed to intrusions by the government.

While 61 percent of Americans still say drones, a relatively new development, violate privacy, only 40 percent say the same thing about red-light cameras, which have been around years longer.

Added Wenzel: “Another 40 percent said they should not be used because they violate the privacy of citizens. At the same time, however, a plurality of 46 percent said they believe those cameras are first and foremost a government grab for cash from citizens and secondly a tool to improve safety. Another 42 percent said they think the cameras mainly promote safe motoring.”

Still, the question about the use of red-light cameras drew a huge split between the left and right ends of the political scale. Some 52 percent of the “very liberal” said government should use cameras, and only 26 percent said they violate privacy. On the other end of the scale, the “very conservative” by a large majority, 59 percent, said they violate privacy. Only 31 percent said government should use the camera.

While red-light and speeding cameras are routine across the country, it also has been confirmed that drones already are spying on Americans.

Records recently released to the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed the federal government has approved dozens of licenses for unmanned aerial surveillance drones across the United States.

The organization reported there are licenses held by state and local law enforcement agencies, universities along with the Air Force, Marine Corps and DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Some of the records show drones used for purposes as sensible as helping the U.S. Forest Service fight forest fires. But other purposes, such as performing aerial observation of houses when serving warrants or covert surveillance of drug sales, have prompted EFF to question privacy issues.

“Perhaps the scariest is the technology carried by a Reaper drone the Air Force is flying near Lincoln, Nev., and in areas of California and Utah,” EFF reports. “This drone uses ‘Gorgon Stare’ technology, which Wikipedia defines as ‘a spherical array of nine cameras attached to an aerial drone … capable of capturing motion imagery of an entire city.’ … This technology takes surveillance to a whole new level.”

The use of military drones further raised flags in a New York Times report last year, when reporter Mark Mazzetti joined a group of observers watching drone use at Holloman Air Force Base in remote New Mexico and discovered the military was practicing for foreign missions by spying on American vehicles.

“A white SUV traveling along a highway adjacent to the base came into the cross hairs [of the drone's view] and was tracked as it headed south along the desert road,” Mazzetti wrote. “When the S.U.V. drove out of the picture, the drone began following another car.

“‘Wait, you guys practice tracking enemies by using civilian cars?’ a reporter asked,” according to Mazzetti. “One Air Force officer responded that this was only a training mission, and then the group was quickly hustled out of the room.”

EFF clarified that while the U.S. military doesn’t need an FAA license to fly drones over its own military bases, which is “restricted airspace”, it does need a license to fly in the national airspace, which is almost everywhere else in the U.S.

“And, as we’ve learned from these records,” EFF reports, “the Air Force and Marine Corps regularly fly both large and small drones in the national airspace all around the country.”

The response so far has included a plan from Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey to create guidelines and limitations on how the Federal Aviation Administration licenses drones.

In related research, Wenzel also found that one in seven Americans sees a dictator in the nation’s future, and another one in five says it eventually will break up into several sovereign regions. The survey revealed that more than one in four believe the United States likely will collapse not just in their lifetime, but in the next decade.

Also, Wenzel earlier revealed that the seeds of tyranny already are present in America, with a heavily armed law enforcement presence and a population holding a disbelief that their government could do anything that would make them want to revolt.


Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/americans-endorse-spycams-getting-used-to-drones/#sw4kF6O1bXqV4g5k.99
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« Reply #23 on: January 19, 2013, 11:23:40 am »

Americans endorse spycams, getting used to drones


Americans it seems are also getting used to gay marriage, abortion, evolution, and slowly but surely more gun control restrictions.

2Th_2:15  Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.
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« Reply #24 on: February 02, 2013, 05:45:29 am »

Big brother to log your drinking habits and waist size as GPs are forced to hand over confidential recordsData includes weight, cholesterol, BMI, family health history and pulse rate
Doctors will be forced to reveal alcohol consumption and smoking status

Privacy campaigners described it as 'biggest data grab in NHS history'
Part of new Health Service programme called Everyone Counts
Officials insisted data will be anonymous and deleted after analysis


GPs are to be forced to hand over confidential records on all their patients’ drinking habits, waist sizes and illnesses.

The files will be stored in a giant information bank that privacy campaigners say represents the  ‘biggest data grab in NHS history’.

They warned the move would end patient confidentiality and hand personal information to third parties.

The data includes weight, cholesterol levels, body mass index, pulse rate, family health history, alcohol consumption and smoking status.

Diagnosis of everything from cancer to heart disease to mental illness would be covered. Family doctors will have to pass on dates of birth, postcodes and NHS numbers.

Officials insisted the personal information would be made anonymous and deleted after analysis.

But Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, said: ‘Under these proposals, medical confidentiality is, in effect, dead and there is currently nobody standing in the way.’ Nick Pickles, of the privacy group Big Brother Watch, said NHS managers would now be in charge of our most confidential information.

He added: ‘It is unbelievable how little the public is being told about what is going on, while GPs are being strong-armed into handing over details about their patients and to not make a fuss.

‘Not only have the public not been told what is going on, none of us has been asked to give our permission for this to happen.’

The data grab is part of Everyone Counts, a programme to extend the availability of patient data across the Health Service.

GPs will be required to send monthly updates on their patients to a central database run by the NHS’s Health and Social Care Information Centre.

Health chiefs will be able to demand information on every patient, such as why they have been referred to a consultant. Another arm of the NHS will supply data on patient prescriptions.

In a briefing for GPs, health chiefs admit that ‘patient identifiable components’ will be demanded, including post code and date of birth.
NHS officials insist the information centre will be a ‘safe haven’ for personal data, which will be deleted soon after it is received.
The information will be used to analyse demand for services and improve treatment.

But a document outlining the scheme even raises the prospect of clinical data being passed on or sold to third parties.

It states: ‘The patient identifiable components will not be released outside the safe haven except as permitted by the Data Protection Act.

‘HSCIC ... will store the data and link it only where approved and necessary, ensuring that patient confidentiality is protected.’

Patients will not be able to opt out of the system.

Before the election the Tories condemned the creation of huge databases – including the controversial NHS IT project – and insisted it would roll back ‘Labour’s database state’.

But last month, in the first sign of a dramatic shift away from this position, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said he wanted millions of private medical records to be stored and shared between hospitals, GPs, care homes and even local councils. He sold the programme as part of plans for a ‘paperless NHS’ by 2018 and claimed ‘thousands of lives’ would be saved.

But details of the changes have raised serious concerns among civil liberties and privacy campaigners, as well as health professionals
Last night GPs’ leaders said the latest proposals were too broad.

‘Patients must be given the option to opt out of any scheme that seeks to transfer identifiable information about them from their records to another source,’ said a BMA spokesman.

‘This opt-out should be widely advertised and explained in order that patients are reassured and understand the process being carried out.’
Phil Booth of the campaign group NO2ID said an unprecedented volume of data would be ‘sucked up’.

‘People have to trust in the notion of medical confidentiality. They expect to be able to talk in confidence to their GP,’ he said.

‘They don’t expect their private conversations to be uploaded on to a national database where they will be made available for any number of purposes for the benefit of persons unknown.’

A spokesman for the NHS said last night: ‘The NHS constitution makes clear what information can be used for by the NHS and this proposal complies exactly with that.’



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2272166/Big-brother-log-drinking-habits-waist-size.html#ixzz2Jk1Us7tI

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« Reply #25 on: February 03, 2013, 01:55:30 am »

Quote
‘Patients must be given the option to opt out of any scheme that seeks to transfer identifiable information about them from their records to another source,’ said a BMA spokesman.

Well, people want a lot of things, but this stuff won't go away, and it won't be optional.
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« Reply #26 on: February 03, 2013, 02:03:51 am »

‘People have to trust in the notion of medical confidentiality. They expect to be able to talk in confidence to their GP,’ he said.

‘They don’t expect their private conversations to be uploaded on to a national database where they will be made available for any number of purposes for the benefit of persons unknown.’


There are already audios on buses now to record conversation and they can do it through smartphones yeah you have to be wise as a serpent when it comes to speaking about private issues.
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« Reply #27 on: April 08, 2013, 10:25:59 am »

IRS collecting tax payer information from Facebook and Twitter

You have until April 15th to file a return - and the IRS will be collecting a lot more than just taxes this year.

According to several reports, the agency will also be collecting personal information from sites like Facebook and Twitter.

It says the effort is to catch people trying to beat the system, but some say it goes too far.

Attorney Kristen Mathews warns to be careful with what you say on social media platforms.

She has concerns the government is pushing the limits of what has historically been considered private.

"There are laws that regulate the government's ability to get a hold of things like credit card transaction history. But those laws have become more permissive in the last several years, particularly after 9-11, and so some might say those laws are no longer in line with the average expectation of privacy," says Mathews.

The government has said it would only check a Facebook page or twitter account if there is already red flag in a tax form.

Read more: http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/21905788/irs-collecting-tax-payer-information-from-facebook-and-twitter#ixzz2PszOPyqM
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« Reply #28 on: April 08, 2013, 02:40:43 pm »

24  And when they were come to Capernaum, they that received tribute [money] came to Peter, and said, Doth not your master pay tribute?
25  He saith, Yes. And when he was come into the house, Jesus prevented him, saying, What thinkest thou, Simon? of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or tribute? of their own children, or of strangers?
26  Peter saith unto him, Of strangers. Jesus saith unto him, Then are the children free.
27  Notwithstanding, lest we should offend them, go thou to the sea, and cast an hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up; and when thou hast opened his mouth, thou shalt find a piece of money: that take, and give unto them for me and thee.
Matthew 17:24-27 (KJB)
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« Reply #29 on: May 01, 2013, 08:43:49 am »

Bloomberg: You Will Never Know Where Our New Spy Cameras Are

New York City police officials intend to expand the already extensive use of surveillance cameras throughout town. The plan, unveiled Thursday, comes as part of a drive for increased security around the US following the Boston Marathon attack. New York City Police Department Commissioner Ray Kelly announced the plan during a press conference with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in which the two announced that the suspected Boston Marathon bombers were planning to attack New York next. The pair said they hope to discourage criminals by using so-called “smart cameras” that will aggregate data from 911 alerts, arrest records, mapped crime patterns, surveillance cameras and radiation detectors, among other tools, according to The Verge. “You’re never going to know where all of our cameras are,” Bloomberg told reporters gathered outside City Hall.“And that’s one of the ways you deter people; they just don’t know whether the person sitting next to you is somebody sitting there or a detective watching.”

http://rt.com/usa/bloomberg-never-know-where-cameras-477/
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