“…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.”

———————————–

Michael Sny­der, BLN Con­tribut­ing Writer

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.

Source:  http://blacklistednews.com/19_Signs_That_America_Is_Being_Systematically%20_Transformed_Into_A_Giant_Surveillance_…/21672/0/0/0/Y/M.html?morestories=%20obinsite