Here's a scary Orwellian scenario - is it future reality?

[jojo54]

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/14572623.htm

The title is Surveillance and it's snowball effect. Rick Horowitz writes about the future and how our right to privacy MAY be severely compromised. The scary part is, I feel the author may be talking about the present, not the future.

Note: This is a futuristic, fictional opinion. There is no year given but I perceived it to be '06 or '07.

1. June 1: An article in today's edition of USA Today revealed that all domestic vehicles sold in this country in the last four years have been secretly equipped with electronic devices that enable their locations to be precisely and constantly monitored by the National Security Agency. The newspaper reported that the Big Three automakers - General Motors, Ford and Daimler-Chrysler - were approached by government officials shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and agreed to install the GPS devices on all their vehicles.

2. June 9: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales refused today to address new reports that the Bush administration has directed the National Security Agency to intercept and inspect all letters and packages mailed within the United States.

3. June 22: Reports of a secret government program to install high-definition cameras in some 30,000 "neighborhoods of interest" were met today with strong reactions from congressional leaders and civil-liberties groups. For their part, administration officials from President Bush on down claimed that the story, in today's New York Times, was blown out of proportion and risked undercutting vital antiterrorism activities.

July 4: In his annual holiday message, the president referred only generally to today's story in the Los Angeles Times revealing that the National Security Agency has installed highly sensitive miniature microphones inside more than 25,000,000 American homes, with more to come over the next six months.


The full fictional account is on the link above.

[lectrobyte]

1. They are probably doing most of that already. Got On Star?

[jojo54]

3. No, I don't. Don't plan to, either.

Thank goodness * doesn't get a third term. I have a feeling that if that were the case, in another 5 years we'd hear that chips will be implanted in all newborn babies whether we want it or not.

[MadHound]

5. How about a cell phone

Hell, they can track your position via your cell phone down to three feet. In fact here in Missouri three cities, St. Louis, Columbia and KC have all contracted with a private firm to "monitor traffic" via peoples' cell phones. Not only do they know your exact position, but also how fast your moving.

Welcome to the brave new world:eyes:

[jojo54]

6. Yes, I do have a cell.

At the time that I got one, I thought it would be beneficial to get off the teet of big business phone companies, so I got rid of the land line, relying solely on my cell.

It's a damn shame that nowhere is safe these days. But ya know what? If it's a choice between tracking my cell phone and cameras in my HOUSE, .....well, I guess you know which one I'd choose.

[MadHound]

7. Well, it's just a matter of time in my opinion

Unless the American public wakes up and gets really pissed off, we're going to see this ongoing creep, and pretty soon the only place that is truly private will be the inside of your head:shrug:

[The2ndWheel]

9. Unless they read your mind

Which if they have enough information in databases about you, they can basically do.

[TechBear_Seattle]

2. And the official responses...

1. "The trend towards installing GPS devices in American automobiles predates 9/11 by several years, and American automakers already had a policy in place for building cars and trucks with GPS devices that could be activated when a car owner wished to register with OnStar or some other in-demand service. The sheer number of vehicles with GPS devices means that the vast majority of Americans have not been tracked by any government agency."

2. "This policy was implemented after the anthrax scare, out of necessity for the safety of the American public. The huge volumn of mail means that, again, very few Americans have had their privacy violated."

3. "The presence of high-definition cameras keeping watch on public spaces has been a fact for more than a decade, and has proven highly effective in catching thieves, muggers, and child molesters. Certainly the public will recall the video tapes, taken from such high-definition cameras, that led to the capture of kidnappers and other criminals. By providing federal money, we have increased the number of such cameras that help to keep you safe."

4. "No comment at this time, due to the on-going investigation by Congress."

[jojo54]

4. You pegged that just right! n/t

[Stalwart]

10. Owner's Choice?

Examine this:

"with GPS devices that could be activated when a car owner wished to register with OnStar"

When the car owner wished? How about when the owner did not activate it but the government activated it without the knowledge or desire of the car owner?

Is there a physical switch to deactivate OnStar like deactivating a passenger side air bag?

If so, how does the owner know that OnStar is truly deactivated?

Impending revelations by Tice regarding satellite surveillance of Americans had me wondering what of any value could show up in a satellite picture, even if they have the resolution capability of a couple feet.

Satellites are also used in the OnStar system. Maybe it is not a picture that they are looking at but location tracking information? The intelligence value of association of location to an individual (and when) is as much value as who a person is contacting by telephone (and when). The location of two individuals in physical proximity gives as much information as the connection of two telephone numbers.

Is Serius radio only a satellite signal receiving device? What might it be transmitting?

[The2ndWheel]

8. Welcome to the Machine

http://www.chelseagreen.com/2004/items/welcome/Excerpt2

A couple of years ago, the United States government began bringing together information-gathering programs under a vast surveillance network called Total Information Awareness (TIA). TIA was a program of the Information Awareness Office, which in turn is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), run by the Pentagon.

Those in charge would like to be able to provide their agents with instantaneous access to records from around the world. A lot of records. In its advice to corporations that may contract to provide some of this information, DARPA states, “The amount of data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes.” One byte is the amount of memory it takes to store one letter. One petabyte is one quadrillion bytes. That’s one with fifteen zeros after it. This means that those in power want to maintain a database that would be more than fifty times larger than all of the books in the Library of Congress, or somewhere on the order of a billion books.

This information could include financial, health, shopping, telephone, employment, and library records, fingerprints, DNA samples, gait analyses, brain scans, surveillance photographs, information on whom and how you love (including audio and video recordings of your most intimate moments), recordings of phone conversations, copies of emails, maps of Internet activities, information on addictions or other exploitable weaknesses, and all sorts of other information no sane person could even dream of collecting. Even if the project were to use only one petabyte of storage, that would still be enough to amass forty pages of text for each person on the planet.