In the United States, personal and financial privacy is gone. The PATRIOT Act killed them. Sadly, most people either don't realize this, or if they do, they don't give a damn.
Right this instant, many of the eerie predictions of science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick and futurist George Orwell have become facts of American life.
Only 10 years ago, Steven Spielberg’s action film Minority Report, based on a story by Philip K. Dick, offered movie audiences a chilling, special-effects, techno-vision glimpse of a future in which the government and police are pervasive and omnipresent. And if you step out of line, dark-clad SWAT teams will ensure your compliance.
That day is now near in America.
Digital Spying
Ever heard of government-developed software called ThinThread orTrailblazer? These computer programs collect and correlate data from emails, phone calls, credit card payments, ATMs and internet searches and then combine it all to analyze each person and produce a police profile.
The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is now engaged in a massive secret surveillance operation on Americans, according to one of its creators, Bill Binney, who quit after 32 years at the NSA rather than be a party to what he calls “a civil liberties nightmare come true.”
Seven months ago, I told you that the NSA is building America’s largest-ever spy center in the Utah desert – and it will be watching you (if it isn’t already). This is the same NSA that 10 years ago secretly saddled us with the Constitution-busting ECHELON spy program.
This Utah NSA project is just one part of a snooping system. Presidents Bush and Obama’s massive surveillance of all our telephone calls and Internet activity has been exposed, but not stopped. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You may have read about iris scanners, RFID chips that trace movements and purchases, voice analyzers and fingerprint readers … or you might simply look up and see the millions of CCTV cameras arrayed in public places that use Trapwire, which allows for quick police analysis of live feeds from surveillance cameras.
Now, the FBI has announced the Next-Generation Identification program (NGI), a plan to spend $1 billion of your tax dollars to build a new type of facial recognition database that will allow FBI agents to identify suspects and “people of interest” using security footage from public cameras.
What Does NGI Mean to You?
The NGI program is already operational as a pilot program in some areas, and the FBI says NGI will be ready for national use in 2014.
Government and police agencies will combine a person’s face with other biometric data like fingerprints, iris scans and voice identification to determine their identity. NGI starts with millions of criminal records and drivers’ licenses, but it’s only a matter of time before the government taps into the wealth of photos stored on social media and image sharing websites such as Facebook.
After that, police will then have a record of your face accurate enough to let them pick you out of a crowd anywhere you go.
Plans include having more than 30,000 surveillance drones flying the U.S. skies within eight years. Each drone could sport a powerful facial recognition camera capable of capturing minute details, including every act performed by every person in an entire city simultaneously. Soon there really will be nowhere to hide in the U.S. … except in a cave.
Undoubtedly, secretly tracking people’s movements constitutes a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, but the FBI ignores that and claims NGI is legal under guidelines established by the U.S. Privacy Act!
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