{"id":6657,"date":"2014-01-15T16:47:45","date_gmt":"2014-01-15T21:47:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/home\/?p=6657"},"modified":"2014-01-20T16:16:54","modified_gmt":"2014-01-20T21:16:54","slug":"government-of-the-rich-by-the-rich-and-for-the-rich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/government-of-the-rich-by-the-rich-and-for-the-rich\/","title":{"rendered":"Life in the Electronic Concentration Camp"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Tracked_585x585\"<\/a>\u201c[A security camera] doesn\u2019t respond to complaint, threats, or insults. Instead, it just watches you in a forbidding manner. Today, the surveillance state is so deeply enmeshed in our data devices that we don\u2019t even scream back because technology companies have convinced us that we need to be connected to them to be happy.\u201d\u2014Pratap Chatterjee, journalist<\/p>\n

What is most striking about the American police state is not the mega-corporations running amok in the halls of Congress, the militarized police crashing through doors and shooting unarmed citizens, or the invasive surveillance regime which has come to dominate every aspect of our lives. No, what has been most disconcerting about the emergence of the American police state is the extent to which the citizenry appears content to passively wait for someone else to solve our nation\u2019s many problems. Unless Americans are prepared to engage in militant nonviolent resistance in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, true reform, if any, will be a long time coming.<\/p>\n

Yet as I detail in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State<\/a>, <\/em>if we don\u2019t act soon, all that is in need of fixing will soon be unfixable, especially as it relates to the police state that becomes more entrenched with each passing day. By \u201cpolice state,\u201d I am referring to more than a society overrun by the long arm of the police. I am referring to a society in which all aspects of a person\u2019s life are policed by government agents, one in which all citizens are suspects, their activities monitored and regulated, their movements tracked, their communications spied upon, and their lives, liberties and pursuit of happiness dependent on the government\u2019s say-so.<\/p>\n

That said, how can anyone be expected to \u201cfix\u201d what is broken unless they first understand the lengths to which the government with its arsenal of technology is going in order to accustom the American people to life in a police state and why being spied on by government agents, both state and federal, as well as their partners in the corporate world, is a problem, even if you\u2019ve done nothing wrong.<\/p>\n

Indeed, as the trend towards overcriminalization makes clear, it won\u2019t be long before the average law-abiding American is breaking laws she didn\u2019t even know existed during the course of a routine day. The point, of course, is that while you may be oblivious to your so-called law-breaking\u2014whether it was collecting rainwater to water your lawn, lighting a cigarette in the privacy of your home, or gathering with friends in your backyard for a Sunday evening Bible study\u2014the government will know each and every transgression and use them against you.<\/p>\n

As noted by the Brookings Institution, \u201cFor the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders \u2014 every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the following will show, the electronic concentration camp, as I have dubbed the surveillance state, is perhaps the most insidious of the police state\u2019s many tentacles, impacting almost every aspect of our lives and making it that much easier for the government to encroach on our most vital freedoms, ranging from free speech, assembly and the press to due process, privacy, and property, by eavesdropping on our communications, tracking our movements and spying on our activities.<\/p>\n

Tracking you based on your consumer activities<\/strong>: Fusion centers, federal-state law enforcement partnerships which attempt to aggregate a variety of data on so-called \u201csuspicious persons,\u201d have actually collected reports on people buying pallets of bottled water, photographing government buildings, and applying for a pilot\u2019s license as \u201csuspicious activity.\u201d Retailers are getting in on the surveillance game as well. Large corporations such as Target have been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years. In 2015, mega-food corporations will be rolling out high-tech shelving outfitted with cameras in order to track the shopping behavior of customers, as well as information like the age and sex of shoppers.<\/p>\n

Tracking you based on your public activities<\/strong>: Sensing a booming industry, private corporations are jumping on the surveillance state bandwagon, negotiating lucrative contracts with police agencies throughout the country in order to create a web of surveillance that encompasses all major urban centers. Companies such as NICE and Bright Planet are selling equipment and services to police departments with the promise of monitoring 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 \u201clarge public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals.\u201d Defense contractors are attempting to take a bite out of this lucrative market as well. Raytheon has recently developed a software package known as Riot, which promises to predict the future behavior of an individual based upon his social media posts.<\/p>\n

Tracking you based on your phone activities<\/strong>: The CIA has been paying AT&T over $10 million per year in order to gain access to data on Americans\u2019 phone calls abroad. This is in addition to telecommunications employees being embedded in government facilities to assist with quick analysis of call records and respond to government requests for customer location data. They receive hundreds of thousands of such requests per year.<\/p>\n

Tracking you based on your computer activities<\/strong>: Federal agents now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain access to your computer activities and \u201csee\u201d whatever you\u2019re seeing on your monitor. Malicious hacking software can be installed via a number of inconspicuous methods, including USB, or via an email attachment or software update. It can then be used to search through files stored on a hard drive, log keystrokes, or take real time screenshots of whatever a person is looking at on their computer, whether personal files, web pages, or email messages. It can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the personal business of a target.<\/p>\n

Tracking you based on your behavior<\/strong>: Thanks to a torrent of federal grants, police departments across the country are able to fund outrageous new surveillance systems that turn the most basic human behaviors into suspicious situations to be studied and analyzed. Police in California, Massachusetts, and New York have all received federal funds to create systems like that operated by the New York Police Department, which \u201clinks 3,000 surveillance cameras with license plate readers, radiation sensors, criminal databases and terror suspect lists.\u201d Police all across the country are also now engaging in big data mining operations, often with the help of private companies, in order to develop city-wide nets of surveillance. For example, police in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, now work with IBM in order to \u201cintegrate new data and analytics tools into everyday crime fighting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tracking you based on your face<\/strong>: Facial recognition software promises to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. The goal is for government agents to be able to scan a crowd of people and instantaneously identify all of the individuals present. Facial recognition programs are being rolled out in states all across the country (only twelve states do not use facial recognition software). For example, in Ohio, 30,000 police officers and court employees are able to access the driver\u2019s license images of people in the state, without any form of oversight to track their views or why they\u2019re accessing them. The FBI is developing a $1 billion program, Next Generation Identification, which involves creating a massive database of mugshots for police all across the country.<\/p>\n

Tracking you based on your car<\/strong>: License plate readers, which can identify the owner of any car that comes within its sights, are growing in popularity among police agencies. Affixed to overpasses or cop cars, these devices give police a clear idea of where your car was at a specific date and time, whether the doctor\u2019s office, the bar, the mosque, or at a political rally. State police in Virginia used license plate readers to record every single vehicle that arrived to President Barack Obama\u2019s inauguration in 2009 from Virginia. They also recorded the license plates of attendees at rallies prior to the election, including for then-candidate Obama and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. This data collection came at the request of the U.S. Secret Service. Incredibly, Virginia police stored data on some 8 million license plates, some for up to three years.<\/p>\n

Tracking you based on your social media activities<\/strong>: The 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<\/em>, has astutely observed, \u201cWe may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal \u2018Game of Thrones\u2019 downloads, or run sweeps for insurance companies seeking non-smokers confessing to lapsing back into the habit. Instead of that one guy getting busted for a lame joke misinterpreted as a real threat, the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tracking you based on your metadata<\/strong>: Metadata is an incredibly invasive set of data to have on a person. Indeed, with access to one\u2019s metadata, one can \u201cidentify people\u2019s friends and associates, detect where they were at a certain time, acquire clues to religious or political affiliations, and pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist\u2019s office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner or exchanges with a fellow plotter.\u201d The National Security Agency (NSA) has been particularly interested in metadata, compiling information on Americans\u2019 social connections \u201cthat can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information.\u201d Mainway, the main NSA tool used to connect the dots on American social connections, collected 700 million phone records per day<\/em> in 2011. That number increased by 1.1 billion in August 2011. The NSA is now working on creating \u201ca metadata repository capable of taking in 20 billion \u2018record events\u2019 daily and making them available to N.S.A. analysts within 60 minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tracking you from the skies<\/strong>: Nothing, and I mean nothing, will escape government eyes, especially when drones take to the skies in 2015. These gadgets, ranging from the colossal to the miniature, will have the capability of seeing through the walls of your home and tracking your every movement.<\/p>\n

To put it bluntly, we are living in an electronic concentration camp. Through a series of imperceptible steps, we have willingly allowed ourselves to become enmeshed in a system that knows the most intimate details of our lives, analyzes them, and treats us accordingly. Whether via fear of terrorism, narcissistic pleasure, or lazy materialism, we have slowly handed over our information to all sorts of entities, corporate and governmental, public and private, who are now using that information to cow and control us for their profit. As George Orwell warned, \u201cYou had to live\u2014did live, from habit that became instinct\u2014in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus, we have arrived in Orwell\u2019s world. The question now is: will we take a stand and fight to remain free or will we go gently into the concentration camp?<\/p>\n

WC: 1914<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is most striking about the American police state is not the mega-corporations running amok in the halls of Congress, the militarized police crashing through doors and shooting unarmed citizens, or the invasive surveillance regime which has come to dominate every aspect of our lives. No, what has been most disconcerting about the emergence of the American police state is the extent to which the citizenry appears content to passively wait for someone else to solve our nation\u2019s many problems. Unless Americans are prepared to engage in militant nonviolent resistance in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, true reform, if any, will be a long time coming.<\/p>\n

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