[cia-drugs] The Perpetual Surveillance Society

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The Perpetual Surveillance Society Radio frequency identification tags are another means by which the barriers between citizens and the state are being gradually eroded. By George Monbiot  Posted February 23, 2006. It received just a few column inches in a couple of papers, but the story I read last week looks to me like a glimpse of the future. A company in Ohio called CityWatcher has implanted radio transmitters into the arms of two of its workers. The implants ensure that only they can enter the strongroom. Apparently it is "the first known case in which U.S. workers have been tagged electronically as a way of identifying them." The transmitters are tiny (about the size of a grain of rice), cheap ($150 and falling fast), safe and stable. Without being maintained or replaced, they can identify someone for many years. They are injected, with a local anesthetic, into the upper arm. They require no power source, as they become active only when scanned. There are no technical barriers to their wider deployment. The company that makes these "radio frequency identification tags," the VeriChip Corp., says they "combine access control with the location and protection of individuals." The chips can also be implanted in hospital patients, especially children and people who are mentally incapacitated. When doctors want to know who they are and what their medical history is, they simply scan them in. This, apparently, is "an empowering option to affected individuals." For a while a school in California toyed with the idea of implanting the chips in all its pupils. A tag like this has a maximum range of a few meters. But another implantable device emits a signal that allows someone to be found or tracked by satellite. The patent notice says it can be used to locate the victims of kidnapping, or people lost in the wilderness. There are, in other words, plenty of legitimate uses for implanted chips. This is why they bother me. A technology whose widespread deployment, if attempted now, would be greeted with horror, will gradually become unremarkable. As this happens, its purpose will begin to creep. At first the tags will be more widely used for workers with special security clearance. No one will be forced to wear one; no one will object. Then hospitals -- and a few in the United States are already doing this -- will start scanning their unconscious or incoherent patients to see whether or not they have a tag. Insurance companies might start to demand that vulnerable people are chipped. The armed forces will discover that they are more useful than dog tags for identifying injured soldiers or for tracking troops who are lost or have been captured by the enemy. Prisons will soon come to the same conclusion. Then sweatshops in developing countries will begin to catch on. Already the overseers seek to control their workers to the second, determining when they clock in, when they visit the toilet, even the number of hand movements they perform. A chip makes all this easier. The workers will not be forced to have them, any more than they are forced to have sex with their bosses, but if they don't accept the conditions, they don't get the job. After that, it surely won't be long before asylum seekers are confronted with a similar choice: You don't have to accept an implant, but if you refuse, you can't stay in the country. I think it will probably stop there. I don't believe that you or I, or most comfortable, mentally competent people will be forced to wear a tag. But it will become an increasingly acceptable means of tracking and identifying people who could be a danger to themselves, or who could be at risk of sudden illness or disappearance, or who are otherwise hard for companies or governments to control. They will, on the whole, be people whose political voice is muted. As it is with all such intrusions on our privacy, it won't be easy to put your finger on exactly what's wrong with this technology. It won't really amount to a new form of control, as all the people who accept the implants will already be subject to monitoring or tracking of one kind or another. It will always be voluntary, at least to the extent that anything the state or our employers want us to do is voluntary. But there is something utterly revolting about it. It is another means by which the barriers between ourselves and the state, ourselves and the corporation, ourselves and the machine are broken down. In that tiny capsule we find the paradox of 21st century capitalism: A political system that celebrates choice, autonomy and individualism above all other virtues demands that choice, autonomy and individualism are perpetually suppressed. While implanted chips will not lead to the mass scanning of the population, another use of the same technology quite possibly will. At the end of last month, a leaked letter from Andy Burnham, Britain's Home Office minister, revealed that the identity cards for which we will involuntarily volunteer will contain radio frequency identification chips. This will allow the authorities to read the cards with a scanner. I propose that as the technology improves, the police will be able to scan a crowd and (assuming everyone is carrying his voluntary-compulsory ID card) produce a list of people in it. I further propose that it will take only a year or two for this to seem reasonable. Already we have become used to the police filming demonstrations for the same purpose. When they started doing it, about 10 years ago, it caused outrage. It gave us the impression that by protesting we became suspects. But now we don't even notice them, not even to the extent of waving and shouting, "Hello, Mum." Like every other intrusion on our privacy, they have become normal. I also propose that the mass scanning these identification chips will allow will be assisted by another kind of surveillance technology. Last week, campaigners in west Wales obtained a letter sent by the Welsh Development Agency to Ceredigion County Council. It revealed that the agency, with the help of the European Union, is setting up an industrial estate outside Aberystwyth. Its purpose is the "market acceleration" of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). With the help of companies such as Bae Systems, Rolls Royce and our new friend Qinetiq, the agency hopes to find the best way of encouraging the "routine operation of UAV systems UK-wide." Ceredigion council's website lists various functions of the UAVs, of which the first is "law enforcement." So the police won't even have to be there. Someone sitting in a control room could fly a tiny drone (some of them are just a few inches across) equipped with a receiver over the heads of a crowd and, with the help of our new identity cards, determine who's there. It sounds quite mad, just as the idea of biometric identity cards in the United Kingdom once did. All these new technologies somehow contrive to seem both wildly implausible and entirely likely. There will be no dramatic developments. We will not step out of our homes one morning to discover that the state, or our boss, or our insurance company, knows everything about us. But, if the muted response to the ID card is anything to go by, we will gradually submit, in the name of our own protection, to the demands of the machine. And it will not then require a tyrannical new government to deprive us of our freedom. Step by voluntary step, we will have given it up already. ... Da nada / Il ne rein / It is nothing Posted by: anothername on Feb 23, 2006 4:40 AM "I think it will probably stop there. I don't believe that you or I, or most comfortable, mentally competent people will be forced to wear a tag." Oh, how sweet the words of innocents ring. I have pointed out before that where we are now with national standards being imposed for drivers' licenses and other forms of identification started in the 1980's. States argued that it was too easy for people to register in multiple states for welfare. Of course outrageous taxpayers wanted the government to compile data to stop the abuses. (Probably it started earlier, but this is how far my memory goes back on this item.) To people I know who insist that every sexual predator be thrown in jail for life, if not hanged, because the children must be protected, I ask what happens when gays are thrown into jail just for not being heterosexual. The response is that the public accept gays now, so that wouldn't happen. Next time I hear that, I am going to ask point blank if the person would stand up and march to protect the rights of gays. All too often, the excuse is that we must keep the children safe and anyone who is not a deviant will not be harmed. Alas, it is the people who control the instituations that get to decide who is a deviant. A mother who works? A teenager who does not agree to a drug test? A worker who wants to take a bathroom break? The issue of public versus private goes back millenia, however. Living in a small nomadic tribe, how private was anything? Living in a small town where most people know each other, how private are one's actions? Living in a large city, where people are right on top of each other in terms of living space, actions may be observed, but the observers do not know automatically whom they are observing. What still sends shivers down my spine was when I was on a trip and turned on the Weather Channel. There was a live picture of a person walking down a street I walked down almost every day. There was this woman, bundled up against the weather so not identifiable that particular time, blindly going about her business, unaware that her image was being broadcast on live television across the country. Now all I have to do is imagine that woman with a chip in her and the viewer being not a person seeking updates on weather conditions, but a government worker tracking odd behavior. (Remember Farenheit 451? An early morning walker was arrested in place of the person sought because anyone walking was considered odd. That is reality now, too.) ... tracking of in-person dissident communications Posted by: wli on Feb 25, 2006 8:31 PM   This is really about tracking locations and determining who met whom in person by geographical proximity. That's the last method of communication no longer amenable to wiretapping, barring bugging the population en masse, for which the RFID fiasco is essentially a euphemism. The way this is analyzed is called network analysis . It is also crucially important to understand what military doctrine actually considers counterinsurgency and counterterrorism; they are not what most would expect. The way this is intended to work is in conjunction with the rest of the Total Information Awareness -style data mining dissident dragnet. If you routinely show up in the same areas as someone who bought books critical of the regime or read websites critical of the regime, this RFID junk is meant to flag you. It's also important to take a longer-range view. The databases, regulations, and policies now in use for whatever the renamed Total Information Awareness data mining effort is called were originally set up in the 1980's where PROMIS was used to construct a blacklist of 100000 dissidents to be rounded up and disposed of. Nowadays, the software is far more advanced, and the databases far more extensive and interconnected. Credit card transactions are cross-referenced with store sale records which in turn are cross-referenced with product databases, and so everything you buy is known. The target is ultimately political groups, and true to this form, the no-fly list prominently features those whose purchasing records feature books by various dissidents, political paraphernalia of the "wrong persuasion," and the like, in addition to figures like Ted Kennedy and the authors of such literature. Mass RFID bugging is, as with most such measures, directed at the left. There is also something of a cyclical nature to these efforts, yet every time they recur they find the ground quite well-softened by the prior "excesses." In like fashion, one should not expect to see the actual consequences of RFID bugging and tracking until the next nadir of governance, barring the possibility that this one may very well have crossed some event horizon of totalitarianism.   http://www.alternet.org/rights/32645/ Complete archives at http://www.sitbot.net/ Please let us stay on topic and be civil. OM YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS  Visit your group "cia-drugs" on the web.    To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]    Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.