1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

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

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/14/in-undisclosed-cia-investments-social-media-mining-looms-large/
http://www.salon.com/2008/07/23/new_churchcomm/  MainCore
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/opinion/capitol-attack-cellphone-data.html
http://www.amazon.com/Battlefield-America-War-American-People/dp/1590793099

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/05/aclu-dea-documents-spy-program-millions-drivers-passengers
http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/08/social-networking-usage-2005-2015/
http://www.startribune.com/politics/statelocal/284945781.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/12/30/judge-gorsuch-on-arrrest-warrants-and-doppler-radar-devices/
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/how-many-times-have-the-cops-photographed-your-license-plate/article/2547247
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/03/government-surveillance_n_5084623.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2154861/U-S-surveillance-cameras-use-eyes-pre-crimes-detecting-suspicious-behaviour-alerting-guards.html
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-06/fingerprint-scanner-captures-prints-20-feet-away
http://www.cnet.com/news/police-radar-gun-that-shows-if-youre-texting/
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/first-came-the-breathalyzer-now-meet-the-roadside-police-textalyzer/
http://www.latimes.com/local/crime/la-me-lapd-cameras-20150205-story.html
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/05/your-samsung-smarttv-is-spying-on-you-basically.html
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323997004578641993388259674


Digital Trails: How The FBI Is Identifying, Tracking, & Rounding-Up Dissidents

Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “Americans deserve the freedom to choose a life without
surveillance and the government regulation that would make that
possible. While we continue to believe the sentiment, we fear it may
soon be obsolete or irrelevant. We deserve that freedom, but the
window to achieve it narrows a little more each day. If we don’t act
now, with great urgency, it may very well close for good.”

    - Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, New York Times

Databit by databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps.

With every new smart piece of smart technology we acquire, every new
app we download, every new photo or post we share online, we are
making it that much easier for the government and its corporate
partners to identify, track and eventually round us up.

Saint or sinner, it doesn’t matter because we’re all being swept up
into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between
those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

This is what it means to live in a suspect society.

The government’s efforts to round up those who took part in the
Capitol riots shows exactly how vulnerable we all are to the menace of
a surveillance state that aspires to a God-like awareness of our
lives.

Relying on selfies, social media posts, location data, geotagged
photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing,
government agents are compiling a massive data trove on anyone and
everyone who may have been anywhere in the vicinity of the Capitol on
January 6, 2021.

The amount of digital information is staggering: 15,000 hours of
surveillance and body-worn camera footage; 1,600 electronic devices;
270,000 digital media tips; at least 140,000 photos and videos; and
about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones.

And that’s just what we know.

More than 300 individuals from 40 states have already been charged and
another 280 arrested in connection with the events of January 6. As
many as 500 others are still being hunted by government agents.

Also included in this data roundup are individuals who may have had
nothing to do with the riots but whose cell phone location data
identified them as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Forget about being innocent until proven guilty.

In a suspect society such as ours, the burden of proof has been
flipped: now, you start off guilty and have to prove your innocence.

For instance, you didn’t even have to be involved in the Capitol riots
to qualify for a visit from the FBI: investigators have reportedly
been tracking—and questioning—anyone whose cell phones connected to
wi-fi or pinged cell phone towers near the Capitol. One man, who had
gone out for a walk with his daughters only to end up stranded near
the Capitol crowds, actually had FBI agents show up at his door days
later. Using Google Maps, agents were able to pinpoint exactly where
they were standing and for how long.

All of the many creepy, calculating, invasive investigative and
surveillance tools the government has acquired over the years are on
full display right now in the FBI’s ongoing efforts to bring the
rioters to “justice.”

FBI agents are matching photos with drivers’ license pictures;
tracking movements by way of license plate toll readers; and zooming
in on physical identifying marks such as moles, scars and tattoos, as
well as brands, logos and symbols on clothing and backpacks. They’re
poring over hours of security and body camera footage; scouring social
media posts; triangulating data from cellphone towers and WiFi
signals; layering facial recognition software on top of that; and then
cross-referencing footage with public social media posts.

It’s not just the FBI on the hunt, however.

They’ve enlisted the help of volunteer posses of private citizens,
such as Deep State Dogs, to collaborate on the grunt work. As Dinah
Voyles Pulver reports, once Deep State Dogs locates a person and
confirms their identity, they put a package together with the person’s
name, address, phone number and several images and send it to the FBI.

According to USA Today, the FBI is relying on the American public and
volunteer cybersleuths to help bolster its cases.

This takes See Something, Say Something snitching programs to a whole new level.

The lesson to be learned: Big Brother, Big Sister and all of their
friends are watching you.

They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you
go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what
you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being 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.

Simply liking or sharing this article on Facebook, retweeting it on
Twitter, or merely reading it or any other articles related to
government wrongdoing, surveillance, police misconduct or civil
liberties might be enough to get you categorized as a particular kind
of person with particular kinds of interests that reflect a particular
kind of mindset that might just lead you to engage in a particular
kinds of activities and, therefore, puts you in the crosshairs of a
government investigation as a potential troublemaker a.k.a. domestic
extremist.

Chances are, as the Washington Post reports, you have already been
assigned a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—so police are
forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker
depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a
comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular
medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have
committed a crime.

In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially
anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for
example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren’t inclined to
march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

The government has the know-how.

It took days, if not hours or minutes, for the FBI to begin the
process of identifying, tracking and rounding up those suspected of
being part of the Capitol riots.

Imagine how quickly government agents could target and round up any
segment of society they wanted to based on the digital trails and
digital footprints we leave behind.

Of course, the government has been hard at work for years acquiring
these totalitarian powers.

Long before the January 6 riots, the FBI was busily amassing the
surveillance tools necessary to monitor social media posts, track and
identify individuals using cell phone signals and facial recognition
technology, and round up “suspects” who may be of interest to the
government for one reason or another.

As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government
agencies have increasingly invested in 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.

All it needs is the data, which more than 90% of young adults and 65%
of American adults are happy to provide.

When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of
laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal
and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry
about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

As for the Fourth Amendment and its prohibitions on warrantless
searches and invasions of privacy without probable cause, those
safeguards have been rendered all but useless by legislative end-runs,
judicial justifications, and corporate collusions.

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored,
managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but
to our government and corporate rulers.

Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his
daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in
more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and
ears. A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re
walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking
to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some
government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening
in and tracking your behavior.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that
monitor your purchases, web browsing, social media posts and other
activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

For example, police have been using Stingray devices mounted on their
cruisers to intercept cell phone calls and text messages without
court-issued search warrants. Doppler radar devices, which can detect
human breathing and movement within a home, are already being employed
by the police to deliver arrest warrants.

License plate readers, yet another law enforcement spying device made
possible through funding by the Department of Homeland Security, can
record up to 1800 license plates per minute. Moreover, these
surveillance cameras can also photograph those inside a moving car.
Reports indicate that the Drug Enforcement Administration has been
using the cameras in conjunction with facial recognition software to
build a “vehicle surveillance database” of the nation’s cars, drivers
and passengers.

Sidewalk and “public space” cameras, sold to gullible communities as a
sure-fire means of fighting crime, is yet another DHS program that is
blanketing small and large towns alike with government-funded and
monitored surveillance cameras. It’s all part of a public-private
partnership that gives government officials access to all manner of
surveillance cameras, on sidewalks, on buildings, on buses, even those
installed on private property.

Couple these surveillance cameras with facial recognition and
behavior-sensing technology and you have the makings of “pre-crime”
cameras, which scan your mannerisms, compare you to pre-set parameters
for “normal” behavior, and alert the police if you trigger any
computerized alarms as being “suspicious.”

State and federal law enforcement agencies are pushing to expand their
biometric and DNA databases by requiring that anyone accused of a
misdemeanor have their DNA collected and catalogued. However,
technology is already available that allows the government to collect
biometrics such as fingerprints from a distance, without a person’s
cooperation or knowledge. One system can actually scan and identify a
fingerprint from nearly 20 feet away.

Developers are hard at work on a radar gun that can actually show if
you or someone in your car is texting. Another technology being
developed, dubbed a “textalyzer” device, would allow police to
determine whether someone was driving while distracted. Refusing to
submit one’s phone to testing could result in a suspended or revoked
driver’s license.

It’s a sure bet that anything the government welcomes (and funds) too
enthusiastically is bound to be a Trojan horse full of nasty, invasive
surprises.

Case in point: police body cameras. Hailed as the easy fix solution to
police abuses, these body cameras—made possible by funding from the
Department of Justice—turn police officers into roving surveillance
cameras. Of course, if you try to request access to that footage,
you’ll find yourself being led a merry and costly chase through miles
of red tape, bureaucratic footmen and unhelpful courts.

The “internet of things” refers to the growing number of “smart”
appliances and electronic devices now connected to the internet and
capable of interacting with each other and being controlled remotely.
These range from thermostats and coffee makers to cars and TVs. Of
course, there’s a price to pay for such easy control and access. That
price amounts to relinquishing ultimate control of and access to your
home to the government and its corporate partners. For example, while
Samsung’s Smart TVs are capable of “listening” to what you say,
thereby allowing users to control the TV using voice commands, it also
records everything you say and relays it to a third party, e.g., the
government.

Then again, the government doesn’t really need to spy on you using
your smart TV when the FBI can remotely activate the microphone on
your cellphone and record your conversations. The FBI can also do the
same thing to laptop computers without the owner knowing any better.

Drones, which are taking to the skies en masse, are the converging
point for all of the weapons and technology already available to law
enforcement agencies. In fact, drones can listen in on your phone
calls, see through the walls of your home, scan your biometrics,
photograph you and track your movements, and even corral you with
sophisticated weaponry.

All of these technologies add up to a society in which there’s little
room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence,
especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls,
monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your
purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

These digital trails are everywhere.

As investigative journalists Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson
explain, “This data—collected by smartphone apps and then fed into a
dizzyingly complex digital advertising ecosystem … provided an
intimate record of people whether they were visiting drug treatment
centers, strip clubs, casinos, abortion clinics or places of worship.”

In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to
be tracked, catalogued and targeted.

As Warzel and Thompson warn:

    “To think that the information will be used against individuals
only if they’ve broken the law is naïve; such data is collected and
remains vulnerable to use and abuse whether people gather in support
of an insurrection or they justly protest police violence… This
collection will only grow more sophisticated… It gets easier by the
day… it does not discriminate. It harvests from the phones of MAGA
rioters, police officers, lawmakers and passers-by. There is no
evidence, from the past or current day, that the power this data
collection offers will be used only to good ends. There is no evidence
that if we allow it to continue to happen, the country will be safer
or fairer.”

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American
People, this is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the
American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary
and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, Big
Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.

There is no gray area any longer.