Happy Holidays 2021

[grarpamp]

> Wake up and fight back


You'd Better Watch Out: The Surveillance State Has A Naughty List, And
You're On It

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/have_you_been_naughty_or_nice_the_surveillance_state_has_a_list_and_youre_on_it

https://www.fastcompany.com/90701879/many-vaccine-passports-have-security-flaws-heres-how-to-make-them-safer
https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/florida-v-harris/
https://www.10tv.com/article/news/local/central-ohio-covid-19-detecting-k9s-changing-how-covid-testing-is-done/530-88753b47-fa53-40cb-865f-af5d8b7a7969
https://apnews.com/article/asia-pacific-lifestyle-coronavirus-pandemic-science-health-facf2e85a67e985e87d71edd5307c181
https://www.cnet.com/news/clearview-ai-set-to-get-patent-for-controversial-facial-recognition-tech/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/travel/biometrics-airports-security.html
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/surveillance-technology-biometrics
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202112/rostec-turns-behavior-analytics-development-to-smart-anti-riot-surveillance-system
https://thereboot.com/how-surveillance-advertising-seized-our-data-and-hijacked-the-web/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-25/how-target-tgt-police-surveilled-black-neighbors-in-inner-cities
https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/atlantas-surveillance-network-keeps-growing-and-growing-and/
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/how-the-cops-watch-your-tweets-in-real-time/
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474444/raytheon-riot-software-tracks-people--predicts-future-behavior.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/20-years-after-9-11-fusion-centers-have-done-little-n1278949
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/why-fusion-centers-matter-faq
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/14/in-undisclosed-cia-investments-social-media-mining-looms-large/
https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/careful-what-you-tweet-police-schools-tap-social-media-track-4b11215908
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/quick-and-dirty-guide-cell-phone-surveillance-protests
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/17/los-angeles-police-surveillance-social-media-voyager
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/whatsapp-imessage-facebook-apple-fbi-privacy-1261816/
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/license-plate-scanners-were-supposed-to-bring-peace-of-mind-instead-they-tore-the-neighborhood-apart/
https://nsa.gov1.info/partners/index.html
https://reason.com/2013/07/03/us-post-office-taking-pictures-of-all-ou/
https://news.yahoo.com/the-postal-service-is-running-a-running-a-covert-operations-program-that-monitors-americans-social-media-posts-160022919.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9595879/USPS-uses-facial-recognition-Clearview-AI-fake-identities-online-snoop-Americans.html
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_age_of_no_privacy_the_surveillance_state_shifts_into_high_gear


    “He sees you when you’re sleeping
    He knows when you’re awake
    He knows when you’ve been bad or good
    So be good for goodness’ sake!”
    - “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”

Santa’s got a new helper.

No longer does the all-knowing, all-seeing, jolly Old St. Nick need to
rely on antiquated elves on shelves and other seasonal snitches in
order to know when you’re sleeping or awake, and if you’ve been
naughty or nice.

Thanks to the government’s almost limitless powers made possible by a
domestic army of techno-tyrants, fusion centers and Peeping Toms,
Santa can get real-time reports on who’s been good or bad this year.
This creepy new era of government/corporate spying—in which we’re
being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold
and targeted—makes the NSA’s rudimentary phone and metadata
surveillance appear almost antiquated in comparison.

Consider just a small sampling of the tools being used to track our
movements, monitor our spending, and sniff out all the ways in which
our thoughts, actions and social circles might land us on the
government’s naughty list.

Tracking you based on your health status. In the age of COVID-19,
digital health passports are gaining traction as gatekeepers of a
sort, restricting access to travel, entertainment, etc., based on
one’s vaccine status. Whether or not one has a vaccine passport,
however, individuals may still have to prove themselves “healthy”
enough to be part of society. For instance, in the wake of Supreme
Court rulings that paved the way for police to use drug-sniffing dogs
as “search warrants on leashes,” government agencies are preparing to
use virus-detecting canine squads to carry out mass screenings to
detect individuals who may have COVID-19. Researchers claim the
COVID-sniffing dogs have a 95% success rate of identifying individuals
with the virus (except when they’re hungry, tired or distracted).
These dogs are also being to trained to ferret out individuals
suffering from other health ailments such as cancer.

Tracking you based on your face: Facial recognition software aims to
create a society in which every individual who steps out into public
is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled
with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition
technology allows the government and its corporate partners to
identify and track someone’s movements in real-time. One particularly
controversial software program created by Clearview AI has been used
by police, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to collect
photos on social media sites for inclusion in a massive facial
recognition database. Similarly, biometric software, which relies on
one’s unique identifiers (fingerprints, irises, voice prints), is
becoming the standard for navigating security lines, as well as
bypassing digital locks and gaining access to phones, computers,
office buildings, etc. In fact, greater numbers of travelers are
opting into programs that rely on their biometrics in order to avoid
long waits at airport security. Scientists are also developing lasers
that can identify and surveil individuals based on their heartbeats,
scent and microbiome.

Tracking you based on your behavior: Rapid advances in behavioral
surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be
monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior,
including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to
whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based
on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors
of whole populations. One smart “anti-riot” surveillance system
purports to predict mass riots and unauthorized public events by using
artificial intelligence to analyze social media, news sources,
surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.

Tracking you based on your spending and consumer activities: With
every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter,
Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use
for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines
or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay
for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier
for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we
spend our money, and how we spend our time. Consumer surveillance, by
which your activities and data in the physical and online realms are
tracked and shared with advertisers, has become big business, a $300
billion industry that routinely harvests your data for profit.
Corporations such as Target have not only been tracking and assessing
the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing
patterns, for years, but the retailer has also funded major
surveillance in cities across the country and developed behavioral
surveillance algorithms that can determine whether someone’s
mannerisms might fit the profile of a thief.

Tracking you based on your public activities: Private corporations in
conjunction with police agencies throughout the country have created a
web of surveillance that encompasses all major cities in order to
monitor large groups of people seamlessly, as in the case of protests
and rallies. They are also engaging in extensive online surveillance,
looking for any hints of “large public events, social unrest, gang
communications, and criminally predicated individuals.” Defense
contractors have been at the forefront of this lucrative market.
Fusion centers, $330 million-a-year, information-sharing hubs for
federal, state and law enforcement agencies, monitor and report such
“suspicious” behavior as people buying pallets of bottled water,
photographing government buildings, and applying for a pilot’s license
as “suspicious activity.”

Tracking you based on your social media activities: Every move you
make, especially on social media, is monitored, mined for data,
crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are,
what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it
becomes necessary to bring you in line. As The Intercept reported, the
FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing
in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine
constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential
extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of
anti-government behavior. This obsession with social media as a form
of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming
years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC News, observed, “We may
very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for
referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads… the new software has
the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media
user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”

Tracking you based on your phone and online activities: Cell phones
have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital
location data on users’ movements and travels. Police have used
cell-site simulators to carry out mass surveillance of protests
without the need for a warrant. Moreover, federal agents can now
employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain access to your
computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on your monitor.
Malicious hacking software can also be used to remotely activate
cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the
personal business of a target.

Tracking you based on your social network: Not content to merely spy
on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are
now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the
people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through
social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals. An FBI
document obtained by Rolling Stone speaks to the ease with which
agents are able to access address book data from Facebook’s WhatsApp
and Apple’s iMessage services from the accounts of targeted
individuals and individuals not under investigation who might have a
targeted individual within their network. What this creates is a
“guilt by association” society in which we are all as guilty as the
most culpable person in our address book.

Tracking you based on your car: License plate readers are mass
surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers
per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and
store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture
in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement,
fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons
in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers
now in operation throughout the country, affixed to overpasses, cop
cars and throughout business sectors and residential neighborhoods, it
allows police to track vehicles and run the plates through law
enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing
people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not
infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have
mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture out suspects only
to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.

Tracking you based on your mail: Just about every branch of the
government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and
every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector,
authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S.
Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every
piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on
Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the
Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert
Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition
technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out
potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims
the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job
scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help
postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”

Fusion centers. Smart devices. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror
watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners.
Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology.
Contact tracing apps.

What these add up to is a world in which, on any given day, the
average person is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in
more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and
ears.

Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother.

Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by a
vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and
robotic snoops.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the
American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair
Diaries, surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the
American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s
hands—add up to a society in which there’s little room for
indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence.

In an age of overcriminalization, mass surveillance, and an appalling
lack of protections for our privacy rights, we can all be considered
guilty of some transgression or other.

So you’d better watch out—you’d better not pout—you’d better not
cry—‘cos I’m telling you why: this Christmas, it’s the Surveillance
State that’s coming to town, and you’re already on its naughty list.