Filed under: 1984, Big Brother, bilderberg, biometrics, Control Grid, Dictatorship, Empire, Fascism, Health Care Bill, health care reform, human rights, medical industrial complex, microchip, nanny state, New World Order, NWO, obama deception, obamacare, orwell, Police State, PositiveID, Real ID, RFID, slavery, Verichip
Microchipping Americans Found in Health Care Bill
Daily Paul
August 30, 2009
“Buried deep within the over 1,000 pages of the massive US Health Care Bill (PDF) in a “non-discussed” section titled: Subtitle C-11 Sec. 2521— National Medical Device Registry, and which states its purpose as:
“The Secretary shall establish a national medical device registry (in this subsection referred to as the ‘registry’) to facilitate analysis of postmarket safety and outcomes data on each device that—‘‘(A) is or has been used in or on a patient; and ‘‘(B) is a class III device; or ‘‘(ii) a class II device that is implantable.”
In “real world speak”, according to this report, this new law, when fully implemented, provides the framework for making the United States the first Nation in the World to require each and every one of its citizens to have implanted in them a radio-frequency identification (RFID) microchip for the purpose of controlling who is, or isn’t, allowed medical care in their country.
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/media/pdf/111/AAHCA09001xml.pdf
Filed under: 1984, Big Brother, bilderberg, biometrics, cancer, cashless society, Control Grid, Dictatorship, Empire, Fascism, gps, Illuminati, implantable microchips, IOT, microchip, microchips, nanny state, Nazi, New World Order, NWO, orwell, Police State, PositiveID, Real ID, RFID, slavery, Spy, spychips, Surveillance, Verichip
Cartoon: Verichip/PositiveID Infomercial
RFID Chip Implants Cause Cancer in Lab-Rats
VeriChip’s Merger With Credit Monitoring Firm Worries Privacy Activists
Filed under: 1984, atlanta, biden, Big Brother, big pharma, biometrics, cancer, Congress, Control Grid, dangerous vaccinations, deadly vaccinations, deadly vaccines, Dictatorship, Empire, Eugenics, Fascism, flu shot, Genocide, georgia, government control, gps, health and environment, House, Human Experiments, human rights, implantable microchips, john roberts, malthusian, malthusian catastrophe, mandatory microchips, mandatory vaccination, mandatory vaccinations, mandatory vaccine, medical Experiments, medical industrial complex, microchip, nanny state, Nazi, New World Order, NWO, orwell, parental rights, Police State, RFID, Senate, slavery, Spy, supreme court, Surveillance, Vaccine, Verichip, We Are Change | Tags: 2010 georgia legislative session, casey cagel, david ralston, don thomas, sharon cooper
Georgia: Mandatory Vaccination and Forced Microchipping
Hundreds of Public Workers Injured by Mandatory Vaccines
Filed under: 1984, Big Brother, bilderberg, biometrics, cashless society, Control Grid, Dictatorship, Empire, Fascism, gps, Holocaust, Illuminati, implantable microchips, internet of things, IOT, mandatory microchips, microchip, microchips, nanny state, Nazi, New World Order, NWO, orwell, Police State, Real ID, RFID, slavery, Spy, spychips, Surveillance, transponder chips, Verichip | Tags: digital television
Ex-IBM Employee: The Real Reason TV Went Digital is Because Analog Frequencies Interfere With RFID
AFP
January 21, 2010
According to a former 31-year IBM employee, the highly-publicized, mandatory switch from analog to digital television is mainly being done to free up analog frequencies and make room for scanners used to read implantable RFID microchips and track people and products throughout the world.
So while the American people, especially those in Texas and other busy border states, have been inundated lately with news reports advising them to hurry and get their expensive passports, “enhanced driver’s licenses,” passport cards and other “chipped” or otherwise trackable identification devices that they are being forced to own, this digital television/RFID connection has been hidden, according to Patrick Redmond.
Redmond, a Canadian, held a variety of jobs at IBM before retiring, including working in the company’s Toronto lab from 1992 to 2007, then in sales support. He has given talks, written a book and produced a DVD on the aggressive, growing use of passive, semi-passive and active RFID chips (Radio Frequency Identification Devices) implanted in new clothing, in items such as Gillette Fusion blades, and in countless other products that become one’s personal belongings. These RFID chips, many of which are as small, or smaller, than the tip of a sharp pencil, also are embedded in all new U.S. passports, some medical cards, a growing number of credit and debit cards and so on. More than two billion of them were sold in 2007.
Whether active, semi-passive or passive, these “transponder chips,” as they’re sometimes called, can be accessed or activated with “readers” that can pick up the unique signal given off by each chip and glean information from it on the identity and whereabouts of the product or person, depending on design and circumstances, as Redmond explained in a little-publicized lecture in Canada last year. AFP just obtained a DVD of his talk.
Noted “Spychips” expert, author and radio host Katherine Albrecht told AMERICAN FREE PRESS that while she’s not totally sure whether there is a rock-solid RFID-DTV link, “The purpose of the switch [to digital] was to free up bandwidth. It’s a pretty wide band, so freeing that up creates a huge swath of frequencies.”
As is generally known, the active chips have an internal power source and antenna; these particular chips emit a constant signal. “This allows the tag to send signals back to the reader, so if I have a RFID chip on me and it has a battery, I can just send a signal to a reader wherever it is,” Redmond stated in the recent lecture, given to the Catholic patriot group known as the Pilgrims of Saint Michael, which also is known for advocating social credit, a dramatic monetary reform plan to end the practice of national governments bringing money into existence by borrowing it, with interest, from private central banks. The group’s publication The Michael Journal advocates having national governments create their own money interest-free. It also covers the RFID issue.
“The increased use of RFID chips is going to require the increased use of the UBF [UHF] spectrum,” Redmond said, hitting on his essential point that TV is going digital for a much different reason than the average person assumes, “They are going to stop using the [UHF] and VHF frequencies in 2009. Everything is going to go digital (in the U.S.). Canada is going to do the same thing.”
Explaining the unsettling crux of the matter, he continued: “The reason they are doing this is that the [UHF-VHF] analog frequencies are being used for the chips. They do not want to overload the chips with television signals, so the chips’ signals are going to be taking those [analog] frequencies. They plan to sell the frequencies to private companies and other groups who will use them to monitor the chips.”
Albrecht responded to that quote only by saying that it sounds plausible, since she knows some chips will indeed operate in the UHF-VHF ranges.
“Well over a million pets have been chipped,” Redmond said, adding that all 31,000 police officers in London have in some manner been chipped as well, much to the consternation of some who want that morning donut without being tracked. London also can link a RFID chip in a public transportation pass with the customer’s name. “Where is John Smith? Oh, he is on subway car 32,” Redmond said.
He added that chips for following automobile drivers – while the concept is being fought by several states in the U.S. which do not want nationalized, trackable driver’s licenses (Real ID ) – is apparently a slam dunk in Canada, where license plates have quietly been chipped. Such identification tags can contain work history, education, religion, ethnicity, reproductive history and much more.
Farm animals are increasingly being chipped; furthermore, “Some 800 hospitals in the U.S. are now chipping their patients; you can turn it down, but it’s available,” he said, adding: “Four hospitals in Puerto Rico have put them in the arms of Alzheimer’s patients, and it only costs about $200 per person.”
VeriChip, a major chip maker (the devices sometimes also are called Spychips) describes its product on its website: “About twice the length of a grain of rice, the device is typically implanted above the triceps area of an individual’s right arm. Once scanned at the proper frequency, the VeriChip responds with a unique 16 digit number which could be then linked with information about the user held on a database for identity verification, medical records access and other uses. The insertion procedure is performed under local anesthetic in a physician’s office and once inserted, is invisible to the naked eye. As an implanted device used for identification by a third party, it has generated controversy and debate.”
The circles will keep widening, Redmond predicts. Chipping children “to be able to protect them,” Redmond said, “is being promoted in the media.” After that, he believes it will come to: chip the military, chip welfare cheats, chip criminals, chip workers who are goofing off, chip pensioners – and then chip everyone else under whatever rationale is cited by government and highly-protected corporations that stand to make billions of dollars from this technology. Meanwhile, the concept is marketed by a corporate media that, far from being a watchdog of the surveillance state, is part of it, much like the media give free publicity to human vaccination programs without critical analysis on possible dangers and side effects of the vaccines.
“That’s the first time I have heard of it,” a Federal Communications Commission official claimed, when AFP asked him about the RFID-DTV issue on June 2. Preferring anonymity, he added: “I am not at all aware of that being a cause (of going to DTV).”
“Nigel Gilbert of the Royal Academy of Engineering said that by 2011 you should be able to go on Google and find out where someone is at anytime from chips on clothing, in cars, in cellphones and inside many people themselves,” Redmond also said.
To read Redmond’s full lecture, go to this online link:
IBM and the Holocaust
Filed under: 1984, Airport Security, Big Brother, bilderberg, biometrics, Control Grid, DHS, Dictatorship, Empire, FAA, Flight 253, Fox News, gps, Homeland Security, implantable microchip, microchip, microchips, passport, Police State, Propaganda, RFID, RFID bracelet, shock bracelet, Surveillance, taser, Taser Guns, War On Terror | Tags: Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, christmas bomber, Electro-Musclar Disruption, EMD Safety Bracelet
Fox News Hypes RFID Tracking Shock Bracelet
Filed under: 1984, Avocare, Big Brother, bilderberg, biometrics, cancer, cashless society, Control Grid, corporations, corporatism, credit card, Dictatorship, digital angel, Empire, endgame, Fascism, fda, gps, health and environment, health care, internet of things, IOT, mandatory microchips, microchip, microchips, nanny state, New World Order, NWO, orwell, Police State, PositiveID, RFID, slavery, Spy, Steel Vault, Surveillance | Tags: discover, master card, visa
VeriChip’s Merger With Credit Monitoring Firm Worries Privacy Activists
Wired
December 10, 2009
Remember VeriChip, the Florida company that once dreamed of injecting its human-implantable RFID microchips in everyone from immigrant guest workers to prison inmates?
We haven’t heard much from the company since a dipping stock price nearly got it delisted from the NASDAQ in March. But it’s still alive, and in November it pulled off a seemingly incongruous acquisition. Now called PositiveID, the new company is a merger between VeriChip and Steel Vault, the people behind NationalCreditReport.com.
With a human-implantable microchip maker now running a credit-scoring and identity-theft-protection website, privacy activists are worried again. “The attraction to investors is the potential for synergies,” says Mark Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “You have to anticipate over time there will be an attempt to integrate the services.”
“Sci-fi wise, you could have a chip read by a scanner that determines your credit-worthiness,” says Evan Hendricks, editor of Privacy Times. “Or you could have a credit card implant.”
VeriChip and its former owner Applied Digital have been drawing fire since 2004, when the FDA approved the rice-sized injectable RFID for human use. While the company primarily pushed the chip as part of a system to index medical records — a kind of subcutaneous MedAlert bracelet — Richard Sullivan, then-CEO of Applied Digital, had a penchant for wantonly confirming every nightmare of cybernetic social control.
After 9/11, it was Sullivan who announced the VeriChip would be perfect as a universal ID to distinguish safe people from the dangerous ones. He dreamed of GPS-equipped chips being injected into foreigners entering the United States, prisoners, children, the elderly. He thought the VeriChip would be used as a built-in credit or ATM card.
Indeed, in 2004, one of VeriChip’s earliest deployments was at a Barcelona nightclub, where VIP patrons could pay 125 euro to get the chip installed in their arms as a debit card for drinks.
But today, Sullivan’s replacement says the company has no plans to market the VeriChip as a path to instant credit, despite the recent acquisition.
With his white-buttondown shirt open at the chest, PositiveID CEO Scott Silverman spoke about the merger in an interview at the company’s office suite in Delray Beach, Florida. “Using the chip to relate to the credit-reporting services of NationalCreditReport.com, or even using it for financial transactions … has not been a part of our business model for five years or more, since Sullivan’s been gone, and is not part of our business model moving forward,” he says.
Silverman also backed away from some of the Orwellian ideas floated by his cyberpunk predecessor. “I can tell you that … putting [the chips] into children and immigrants for identification purposes, or putting them into people, especially unwillingly, for financial transactions, has [not] been and never will be the intent of this company as long I’m the chairman and CEO,” he says.
Yet in 2004, Silverman told the Broward-Palm Beach New Times that the VeriChip could be used as a credit card in coming years. And in 2006, he went on Fox & Friends to promote the chipping of immigrant guest workers to track them and monitor their tax records.
And ahead of the recent merger, VeriChip gave a presentation to investors hinting there would be some cross-pollination between the two sides of the business. It plans to “cross-sell its NationalCreditReport.com customer base” (.pdf) the Health Link service and vice-versa. So, Americans with implanted VeriChips will be encouraged to divulge their finances to PositiveID, while credit-monitoring customers will be marketed the health-record microchip.
Critics of chipping are moved by a variety of concerns, ranging from the pragmatic to the religious — anti-RFID crusader Katherine Albrecht believes the technology is the Mark of the Beast predicted in the Book of Revelation, but also doubts its efficacy as a medical tag: VeriChip’s instruction manual warns that the chip may not function in ambulances and areas where there are MRI and X-ray scanners.
Security is another issue. RFIDs can generally be scanned from distances much greater than the official specs suggest. Nicole Ozer at the ACLU of Northern California notes that after Wired magazine writer Annalee Newitz experimentally cloned her VeriChip in 2006, the company continued calling it secure.
But human chipping has high-profile fans as well, including former Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, who left his job as overseer of the FDA in 2005 — a year after VeriChip’s approval — to join the company’s board of directors. Thompson announced he would personally join the 700 to 900 Americans who have the chip installed in their bodies. (He later reportedly reneged.)
Whatever its plans for the future, PositiveID is focused on its original mission for now: implants tied to medical records. On December 1, the new company announced it’s collaborating with Avocare, a Florida health care business, in the hopes of bringing its “health care identification products” to 1 million patients.
Credit Card Companies Refuse Mythbusters to Test RFID
Filed under: 1984, 3rd reich, 4th reich, Big Brother, biometrics, brain manipulation, cameras, cancer, Concentration Camp, Control Grid, corporatism, data mining, death camps, Dictatorship, digital angel, Echelon, Empire, endgame, Eugenics, Fascism, final solution, Genocide, global takeover, Globalism, government control, government takeover, gps, health and environment, Hitler, hollerith, Holocaust, IBM, internet of things, IOT, mandatory microchipping, manipulation, microchip, microchips, nanny state, Nazi, nazi germany, New World Order, NWO, Oppression, orwell, Police State, Population Control, Raytheon, RFID, RFID bracelet, Science and technology, slavery, Spy, Surveillance, surveillance cameras, swine flu, swine flu vaccine, Total Information Awareness, traffic cameras, Verichip, WHO | Tags: internet regulation, Ubiquitous computing, Ubiquitous living, Ubiquitous positioning, utopia, verimed, Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool
One Mainframe To Rule Them All
Filed under: 1984, 2-party system, anti gun, Barack Obama, Big Brother, bilderberg, biometrics, Bush Sr., cap-and-trade, carbon dioxide, Carbon Tax, Christopher Monckton, climate change, Co2, common currency, Communism, copenhagen, Copenhagen treaty, Credit Crisis, DEBT, Dictatorship, DNA Database, Dollar, dollar collapse, Economic Collapse, economic depression, Economy, Empire, energy, energy tax, environmental taxation, Fascism, Federal Reserve, fiat currency, g20, george h. w. bush, george soros, global bankers, global central bank, global climate treaty, global currency, global economy, global elite, global government, global police force, global tax, global treasury, Global Warming, global warming treaty, Globalism, globalists, Great Depression, Greenback, Gun Control, gun control treaty, health care reform, hyperinflation, imf, IMF bonds, Inflation, International Banks, international criminal court treaty, international treaty, internationalism, internationalist, internationalists, internet, jerome corsi, left right paradigm, Lord Christopher Monckton, market manipulation, neocons, New World Order, NWO, obama, obama deception, obamacare, One World Government, orwell, SDR, SDRs, single currency, socialism, sovereignty, subprime, subprime lending, super currency, Surveillance, truth movement, UN, united nations, US Economy, us sovereignty, Wall Street, World Bank, world currency, world government, world police force, world tax
Obama Will Surrender America To World Government
NoWorldSystem.com
October 17, 2009
“Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective – a New World Order – can emerge. . . Now, we can see a New World Order coming into view. A world in which there is a very real prospect for a New World Order. . .A world where the United Nations, freed from a Cold War stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders.” -George H.W. Bush
The Minnesota Free Market Institute hosted an event at Bethel University in St. Paul on Wednesday evening. Keynote speaker Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, warned the American people to stop Obama from signing a ‘global climate treaty’ at the climate change conference in Copenhagen in December 7-18 that will ultimately surrender U.S. sovereignty to a World Government under the guise of helping the environment.
With every passing day it becomes more evident that Obama is nothing more than a globalist, it is obvious from health care reform that he doesn’t care about the middle class, he is in the pocket of the internationalist elite like Kissinger and the rest of the global elite that wish to establish a World Government Dictatorship under the auspices of the United Nations.
If this international climate change treaty passes, Americans will have no choice but to pay a global climate tax that will be paid directly to the United Nations, at first the tax will be introduced to the public gradually such as a barely noticeable tax at the gas pump, which will later be increased once it has been officially established.
The Bilderberg Group has discussed this new global tax this year among many other things like creating a fast-but-painful depression to better establish a New World Order. The IMF, a United Nations entity has already declared itself the global central bank that will set regulations and issue a global currency to the nations. People like George Soros, IMF and the World Bank are betting against the dollar and with the help of the Federal Reserve will topple the dominance of the U.S. dollar in the world market to destroy the U.S. economy and force the global dictatorship on the western hemisphere.
We are beginning to see the emergence of a New World Order this year, with talks of a new global currency, a global climate tax, a global police force with access to a worldwide database of DNA, biometric and fingerprint records, an international gun-control treaty, an international criminal court treaty, the internet moving towards world government it’s crystal clear what is about to happen in this country.
Obama Poised to Cede US Sovereignty, Claims British Lord
Russian Scholar Says US Will Collapse By 2010 – Re-Colonization of America Before 2011
Filed under: 1984, andrew Napolitano, Big Brother, biometrics, Control Grid, Dictatorship, DMV, Echelon, Empire, facial recognition, FBI, federal crimes, health care reform, illegal search, Judge Napolitano, Media, nanny state, obamacare, Oppression, orwell, police crimes, Police State, privacy rights, search warrant, Surveillance | Tags: dmv photo records, dmv photos
FBI Doing Facial Recognition Scans on DMV Photo Records
Filed under: 1984, Alex Jones, ATF, BATF, BATFE, Big Brother, Bill Clinton, biometrics, China, Communism, Control Grid, Coverup, CS Gas, Dictatorship, DNA Database, domestic terror, domestic terrorism, Empire, Eugenics, Fascism, FBI, federal crimes, fingerprints, Genocide, global government, global police force, government crimes, government genocide. child murder, government murder, Holocaust, infanticide, international police force, interpol, janet reno, kofi annan, militarization, Military, Military Industrial Complex, military posse comitatus, Nazi, nazi germany, nerve gas, New World Order, NWO, orwell, peace prize, police brutality, police crimes, Police State, Raid, Ruby Ridge, rwanda, State Sponsored Terrorism, Surveillance, Troops, UN, united nations, US Treasury, Waco, world government, world police force | Tags: Col. Dallaire, FLIR, Nobel Committee, orward-Looking Infrared, Romeo Dallaire
Waco Siege “Enforcer” To Lead Global Police Force
Man who both approved and covered-up government slaughter of 76 people, including 20 children, will lead move to establish international model of law enforcement
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
October 12, 2009
 Ronald K. Noble |
UN and Interpol officials will meet today to discuss the formation of a “global police force” that would enjoy access to a worldwide database of DNA, biometric and fingerprint records. The effort will be spearheaded by a man known as “The Enforcer” who helped federal authorities both conduct and cover up the murderous Waco siege which killed 76 people in 1993.
“Interpol and the United Nations are poised to become partners in fighting crime by jointly grooming a global police force that would be deployed as peacekeepers among rogue nations riven by war and organized crime, officials from both organizations say,” reports the New York Times.
The emergence of a global police force is of course something that people like Alex Jones have been warning about for well over a decade. The global police force, just like the world army, is a key centerpiece of the march towards a dictatorial global government.
Those who were once called paranoid conspiracy theorists for claiming that the plan all along has been to centralize law enforcement into a global body run by the world government under the auspices of the UN and Interpol have been proven right once again.
For a taste of what Americans who aren’t so favorable to taking orders from foreigners on home soil can expect, consider the fact that the secretary general of Interpol, and one of the men at the forefront of setting up the global police force, is none other than Ronald K. Noble.
Noble, who is known as “The Enforcer,” has been instrumental in working with Chinese authorities to provide policing in the Communist country for major national events. However, his most notorious role was in ordering and then, in his position as Undersecretary for Enforcement of the United States Department of the Treasury, whitewashing the actions of the BATF following the federal government’s murderous siege on the Branch Davidian compound at Waco which killed 76 people including more than 20 children and two pregnant women in April 1993.
As Carol Moore writes, “Noble had approved the decision to go ahead with the raid,” and therefore, “had little interest in issuing a report that either would challenge significantly the BATF’s investigation or modus operandi or would admit these led to crimes against the Davidians.”
Noble ignored in his report more than a dozen eyewitness reports, along with photographic and video evidence, of a BATF helicopter firebombing the Waco church during the siege. He also ignored David Koresh’s July 1992 invitation to the BATF to inspect the Waco compound, which if it had gone ahead could have prevented the siege and the murder of 76 innocent people altogether.
February 28, 1993, Waco Siege.
“During the hearing, Friend-of-Bill Webster Hubbell denied repeatedly that he and Clinton had discussed the Waco situation informally, and improperly. However, an Associated Press article claimed Hubbell had revealed he was giving Clinton updates on Waco. And House staffers discovered a memorandum in which then-Treasury official Ron Noble asserted Hubbell would take the matter up with Clinton if the Treasury Department’s review did not downplay BATF errors. Clearly, Noble condones covering up government crimes against citizens,” writes Moore.
Noble was picked directly for the position of secretary general at Interpol by fellow Waco siege accomplice, former Attorney General Janet Reno.
During his September 2005 secretary general re-election acceptance speech in Berlin, Noble attributed Interpol’s ‘rebirth’ to the events of 9/11, saying that the terrorist attacks allowed the organization to go from being treated as largely irrelevant to setting it on the path to becoming an international police force.
Noble told the New York Times that one of the main roles of the global cops would be to stop people to check their identities against a global database.
“The police will be trained and equipped differently with resources,” Mr. Noble said. “When they stop someone, they will be consulting global databases to determine who they are stopping.”
As we previously reported, Interpol is setting up a huge biometric facial scan database of international travelers so they can cross-check everyone against a database of terror suspects, international criminals and fugitives. The database will hold the records of every citizen who has ever traveled in and out of the virtually every country in the world, representing intelligence agency style bulk interception of information.
According to the NY Times report, Interpol agents would be given special electronic passports that would allow them to speedily cross international borders.
“With the meeting of justice ministers on Monday, which coincides with a general assembly of Interpol police members, the group is expected to debate the global police issue and to craft a declaration that would lead to an action plan for international police peacekeeping within 12 months,” reports the Times.
The danger of having a global police force conducting law enforcement on U.S. soil under the control of Interpol and the UN is self-evident. Global cops who do not have to swear an oath to uphold the Constitution have no obligation to follow it. Operating outside of the realms of the U.S. legal system, global cops will have carte blanche to snatch, grab and intern citizens without recourse. A highly centralized system of policing guarantees hardly any liability whatsoever and therefore encourages rampant illegality and police brutality.
With many experts predicting a Soviet-style collapse of the United States within the next few years, the prospect of U.N. peacekeepers and Interpol global cops ordering Americans around is a harrowing possibility.
The fact that this move is all being spearheaded by a man known as “The Enforcer” who was instrumental in ordering the killing of 76 innocent people at Waco, including 20 children, and then covering it up, should send shock waves through the liberty movement and lead to intense scrutiny on Noble’s position at Interpol and his agenda to head up a global police force.
Support Your Global Police?
Lew Rockwell.com
October 14, 2009
When last we checked in with Ronald K. Noble, he was enjoying a lucrative career as a reward for helping cover up a crime against humanity in which he was deeply implicated.
In 1994, Noble was appointed undersecretary of the Treasury Department, a position that appears to have been created especially for him by then-Attorney General Janet Reno.
A year earlier, both Reno and Noble had been involved in the decision-making process leading to the April 19 holocaust at Mt. Carmel, in which scores of people were immolated as a result of what at very best could be called the depraved indifference of presiding federal officials.
During the hours leading up to that atrocity, FBI-operated tanks filled the Branch Davidian sanctuary (a combination worship space and living area invariably referred to as a “compound” once it came under federal assault on February 28) with a highly combustible variant of CS gas that was banned for battlefield use by an international treaty.
Around noon, something – an upended Coleman lantern, a badly thrown Molotov cocktail, one of hundreds of “ferret” rounds fired by FBI commandos – ignited a small fire that was quickly propagated into a blaze by the arid Texas prairie wind. Much of the world watched in horror on live television as the sanctuary burned to the ground, bringing to an agonizing end the lives of scores of people trapped within.
The victims had already endured fifty days of torment and ridicule by a government that had attacked their home without legal cause, killing several of their friends in the process. Firemen and other emergency personnel were prevented from reaching the site before the flames had consummated their awful work. This was supposedly done to protect the emergency workers from attack by the people who were being consumed by the fire.
A more plausible explanation is that the people who had arranged that holocaust were trying to keep independent witnesses away from the scene of their crime. Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) footage of the event provides damning evidence that FBI commandos (and, reportedly, at least a few Delta Force operators) directed automatic weapons fire into the burning sanctuary, cutting off escape routes and cutting down anyone who attempted to flee.
A wrongful death lawsuit filed on behalf of Davidian survivors and the estates of the victims listed Noble among the “U.S. Treasury officials” who “planned, organized, and or led” the original February 28 assault against Mt. Carmel, despite knowledge that the warrants were obtained “without probable cause and with defects that rendered them illegal.”
Those same officials, continued the complaint, permitted the assault to proceed “even though they knew that the Davidians were expecting an assault by law enforcement and, thus, were in a state of mortal terror,” and “were so reckless in their preparation for and planning of this assault, that they did not even have a written plan in place prior to conducting the attack.”
Noble was thus deeply involved in the decisions that led to the avoidable deaths of six members of the Branch Davidian sect, and four ATF stormtroopers, on February 28. His involvement in the planning and execution of the siege and the final April 19 assault isn’t as significant. But he played the definitive role in covering up those crimes by serving as the “lead investigator” in the Clinton administration’s internal “inquiry” into the federal atrocities at Waco.
So patently fraudulent was Noble’s “investigation” that a second bogus inquiry was necessary: In 2000, Attorney General Reno chose former Missouri Senator John Danforth to preside over an “independent” investigation that was mounted in what proved to be a successful effort to derail the wrongful death lawsuit cited above.
By that time, however, Noble – who had been given the Alexander Hamilton Award by the Treasury Department, as if anything named after that individual could be construed as an honor – had been given another coveted post with Reno’s help: He was nominated to serve as secretary-general of Interpol, a position he occupies to the present day.
On October 12, Noble’s agency announced that it would be collaborating with the United Nations by providing technical support – including access to voluminous, detailed databases – to UN “peacekeeping” personnel, including those that belong to the world body’s police force, UNPOL.
Noble himself said that his organization is pursuing a “visionary model,” an “alliance of all nations” under a “global police doctrine.” This would, in effect, create the first genuinely planetary police force in human history.
 |
In an address before justice and law enforcement officials from more than 60 nations who had assembled in Singapore, Noble elaborated on that “visionary model”: “In the framework of our partnership with the UN, INTERPOL will provide deployed police peacekeepers with access to the world’s only secure global police communications system; global police databases including names of criminals, fingerprints, DNA profiles, stolen passports, and stolen vehicles; and specialized investigative support in key crime areas, including fugitives, drugs, terrorism, trafficking in human beings, and corruption.”
Apart from some very serious issues of jurisdiction and sovereignty, the most troubling aspect of INTERPOL’s “visionary model” is its potential to help create a UN-directed global panopticon – a “Your Papers, Please” system of world-wide scope.
It would certainly be of great use to the UN’s International Criminal Court, a pseudo-judicial body that claims global jurisdiction.
Significantly, one of the “core” offenses recognized in the ICC Statute is genocide, as that offense is defined in the UN’s Genocide Convention. Article II of that instrument describes the offense of genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical [sic], racial or religious group”:
“(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part….”
Some very serious and sober people contend that this definition is over-broad. No serious person of a constitutionalist bent considers the UN or its treaties a legitimate source of law.
However, it would be expected that Noble, as someone working to provide that body with a rudimentary global constabulary, would be among those who accept the legitimacy of its treaties. But to do so would put Noble in a completely untenable position: He is directly implicated in an assault that resulted in the near-destruction of an entire religious community, which – by the UN’s definition – qualifies as a form of attempted genocide.
At the very least, he is an accessory after the fact to genocide (once again, as defined by the UN). Given the UN’s history, however, that line on Nobel’s résumé might actually be counted on the asset side of the ledger.
Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who headed the organization’s “peacekeeping” division before being appointed to the top post, was censured in the so-called Carlsson Report on the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which claimed as many as a million lives.
Annan had received detailed advance intelligence about the impending massacres of the Tutsis from both the on-scene UN commander, Canadian Colonel Romeo Dallaire,* and various informants within the Hutu-led government. He nonetheless continued with the program to disarm the Rwandan civilians and ordered Dallaire to burn his own sources by sharing his intelligence with the same regime that was planning the slaughter.
After the report came out in 1999, a group of Rwandan survivors, working with Australian attorney (and former UN investigator) Michael Hourigan, attempted to file a lawsuit against Annan and others implicated in the Rwandan genocide. But, drat the luck, wouldn’t you just know that UN officials are clothed in official immunity for such trivial offenses as aiding and abetting genocide, as long as this is done in an “official capacity.”
So rather than being sued or prosecuted, Annan had to settle for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. That was the most offensive selection ever made by the Nobel Committee. Well, at least until this year.
Thanks to the near-ubiquity of inconspicuous digital cameras and the technological blessing of internet file-sharing sites, Americans are just now coming to realize how commonplace criminal abuse by the police has become – and how difficult it is to hold an abusive police officer accountable for crimes against innocent people. But this is the square root of the problem we would confront in the event that the UN actually created the global police force the foundation of which is being laid by Noble and his comrades.
It’s entirely typical of the UN that its secretary general was implicated in what has been described as “the first undisputable genocide since the UN Charter was signed,” and that a key architect of its “crime-fighting” agenda was involved in planning and covering up a quasi-genocidal massacre here in the United States. This is a useful illustration of the fact that even though abolishing the UN wouldn’t solve all or even most of our problems, it’s a badly overdue step in the direction of restoring moral sanity.
*Despite the fact that Col. Dallaire tried to prevent the genocide, he blamed himself for the tragedy, which included the death of many men under his command. He returned to Canada where he descended into alcoholism and suicidal depression, even as Annan was elevated to the post of secretary general. I interviewed Dallaire by telephone several years ago and discovered, to my amazement, that he still believes in the misguided principle of “collective security,” even if he is understandably jaded about the UN as the vessel of that vision.
U.N. GENOCIDE
Filed under: 1984, augmented earth, Big Brother, biometrics, cameras, cell phone, cell phones, CNN, Control Grid, Darpa, data mining, Dictatorship, Echelon, Empire, global elite, global government, Globalism, google, google earth, government control, government takeover, gps, internet, Internet 2, internet 3, internet of things, internet police, IOT, Media, microchip, microchips, Microsoft, nanny state, New World Order, NWO, Oppression, orwell, Pentagon, Police State, RFID, RFID bracelet, Science and technology, south korea, Spy, Surveillance, surveillance cameras, Total Information Awareness, traffic cameras, uav, Verichip | Tags: intel, internet regulation, korea, motorola, National Intelligence Council, new songdo city, NIC, seoul, u-city, Ubiquitous computing, Ubiquitous living, Ubiquitous positioning, utopia, Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool
Editor’s Note: This could be the start of the New World Order MATRIX, where every ‘thing’ in the world can be located and tracked on the internet
Augmented Google-Earth Tracks Real-Time People, Cars, Weather
Cryptogon
September 30, 2009
The surveillance side of this is the chickenfeed. There’s something far more sinister than the simple surveillance… an angle we haven’t heard about yet.
Tice never did tell his story to Congress about this different aspect of the program.
Well, my guess is that it has something to do with providing surveillance data for this SEAS World Sim thing, and that individual Americans are being watched and potentially targeted with it. Tice’s background seems to involve a lot of traditional electronic warfare, radar and ELINT stuff. Maybe Tice’s deal involved the collection of the mobile phone GPS and/or triangulation data which would provide realtime spacial/geographic data to the SEAS system. In other words, SEAS sees you. They could bring up a map of a city and plot your path based on the information that your phone is exchanging with the mobile network.
—Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation
Via: Popular Science:
Researchers from Georgia Tech have devised methods to take real-time, real-world information and layer it onto Google Earth, adding dynamic information to the previously sterile Googlescape.
They use live video feeds (sometimes from many angles) to find the position and motion of various objects, which they then combine with behavioral simulations to produce real-time animations for Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth.
They use motion capture data to help their animated humans move realistically, and were able to extrapolate cars’ motion throughout an entire stretch of road from just a few spotty camera angles.
From their video of an augmented virtual Earth, you can see if the pickup soccer game in the park is short a player, how traffic is on the highway, and how fast the wind is blowing the clouds across the sky.
Up next, they say they want to add weather, birds, and motion in rivers.
Ubiquitous Computing: Big Brother’s All-Seeing Eye
Filed under: 1984, 1st amendment, Ahmadinejad, Anti-War, army, Big Brother, big pharma, biometrics, brain manipulation, Checkpoints, Control Grid, CS Gas, Darpa, Department of Defense, Detainee, Dictatorship, Dissent, DoD, domestic terror, domestic terrorism, Empire, free speech, Iran, medical industrial complex, mental health screening, Military, Military Industrial Complex, MKultra, nerve gas, Oppression, orwell, Pentagon, Police State, Protest, protests, Psychotronic weapons, riot, robot, Science and technology, strange news, super weapons, Surveillance, Tehran, Torture, Troops, urban warfare, US Constitution, War On Terror | Tags: lie detection, lie detector, mind drugs, mind reading, neuroscience, pharmacological land mines, soldier, telekinesis, telepathy, u.s. soldiers
Should we fear neuro-war more than normal war?
FP
September 7, 2009
A new opinion piece in Nature (ungated version via a somewhat dubious Website) takes biologists to task for allowing the militarization of their work for the development of neuro-weapons — chemical agents that are weaponized in spray or gas form to induce altered mental states.
The Russian military’s use of fentanyl to incapacitate Chechen terrorists — and kill 120 hostages in the process — during the 2002 Nord-Ost seige was something of a wakeup call in this area. It’s no secret that the U.S. and other militaries are interested in these potential weapons (I wrote about a 2008 DoD-commisioned study on cognitive enhancement and mind control last November.) According to the Nature story, some companies are now marketing oxytocin based on studies showing that in spray form, it can increase feelings of trust in humans, an application discussed in the 2008 study.
Blogger Ryan Sager wonders what would have happened if the Iranian government had had such a weapon during this summer’s protests. He continues:
Now, some would argue that the use of non-lethal agents is potentially desirable. After all, the alternative is lethal measures. But the author of the opinion piece, Malcolm Dando, professor of International Security in the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University in the UK, doesn’t see it that way:
At the Nord-Ost siege, for instance, terrorists exposed to the fentanyl mixture were shot dead rather than arrested. Likewise, in Vietnam, the US military used vast quantities of CS gas — a ‘non-lethal’ riot-control agent — to increase the effectiveness of conventional weapons by flushing the Viet Cong out of their hiding places.
While we might want to believe that we would use such weapons ethically going forward, the idea of a dictator in possession of such weapons is rather chilling — moving into science-fiction-dystopia territory.
I suppose. Though I think I’m going to continue to be most worried about them having nuclear weapons. The Iranian regimes rigged an election; killed tortured and hundreds of protesters; and coerced opposition leaders into giving false confessions. I don’t think it would have been that much worse if they had had weaponized oxytocin on their hands.
Sager is right that this is a topic worthy of debate, but I find it strange that research on weapons designed to incapacitate or disorient the enemy seems to disturb people a lot more than research on weapons designed to kill them. As for the idea that neurological agents could facilitate other abuses, Kelly Lowenberg writes on the blog of the Stanford Center for Law and the Neurosciences:
Or is our real concern that, by incapacitating, they facilitate brutality toward a defenseless prisoner? If so, then the conversation should be about illegal soldier/police abuse, not the chemical agents themselves.
I think this is right. New technology, as it always does, is going to provoke new debates on the right to privacy, the treatment of prisoners, and the laws of war, but the basic principles that underly that debate shouldn’t change because the weapons have.
Filed under: 1984, 2-party system, 4th amendment, 9/11, Airport Security, Barack Obama, Big Brother, biometrics, Control Grid, DHS, Dictatorship, DMV, domestic terror, domestic terrorism, Drivers License, Empire, Fascism, Hitler, Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, left right paradigm, michael chertoff, nanny state, national id, national socialist, Nazi, neocons, Neolibs, New World Order, NWO, obama, orwell, Police State, Real ID, RFID, right to privacy, S. 1261, Surveillance, US Constitution, War On Terror
REAL ID Back From The Dead
Richard Esguerra
Electronic Frontier Foundation
August 24, 2009
In February, the opponents of REAL ID were given a bit of hope when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that she wanted to repeal the REAL ID Act, the federal government’s failed plan to impose a national identification card through state driver’s licenses. But what has taken place since is no return to sanity, as political machinations have produced a cosmetic makeover called “PASS ID” that has revived the push for a national identification card.
The PASS ID Act (S. 1261) seeks to make many of the same ineffectual, dangerous changes the REAL ID Act attempted to impose. Fundamentally, PASS ID operates on the same flawed premise of REAL ID — that requiring various “identity documents” (and storing that information in databases for later access) will magically make state drivers’ licenses more legitimate, which will in turn improve national security.
Proponents seem to be blind to the systemic impotence of such an identification card scheme. Individuals originally motivated to obtain and use fake IDs will instead use fake identity documents to procure “real” drivers’ licenses. PASS ID creates new risks — it calls for the scanning and storage of copies of applicants’ identity documents (birth certificates, visas, etc.). These documents will be stored in databases that will become leaky honeypots of sensitive personal data, prime targets for malicious identity thieves or otherwise accessible by individuals authorized to obtain documents from the database. Despite some alterations to the scheme, PASS ID is still bad for privacy in many of the same ways the REAL ID was. And proponents of the national ID effort seem blissfully unaware of the creepy implications of a “papers please” mentality that may grow from the issuance of mandatory federal identification cards. Despite token provisions that claim to give states the freedom to issue non-federal identification cards, the card will be mandatory for most — the PASS ID Act seeks to require everyone to show the federally recognized ID for “any official purpose,” including boarding a plane or entering a federal building.
At the moment, health care reform is commanding tremendous attention and effort on the hill, so the PASS ID Act seems to be on the backburner for now. But after the August recess, anything can happen. So stay tuned for more about PASS ID and critical opportunities to flag your opposition to this flawed national ID scheme.
Filed under: 1984, agriculture, Big Brother, biometrics, cargill, consolidation, Control Grid, department of agriculture, digital angel, Echelon, fda, food safety, global elite, global government, Globalism, gps, Mad Cow, mandatory microchipping, michigan, microchip, Monsanto, nanny state, New World Order, NWO, Oppression, organic, orwell, RFID, Science and technology, Spy, Surveillance, USDA, Verichip | Tags: internet of things, microchip implant cancer, National Animal Identification System, rfid cancer, Ubiquitous living, utopia
Amish farmers lose court battle against RFID
Beasts must still be numbered, says court
The Register
July 31, 2009
Michigan farmers have failed in their attempt to block the introduction of RFID tags for cattle, despite arguments about the cost and the risk of upsetting an otherwise benevolent deity.
The case was bought by the catchily-named Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defence Fund (FTCLDF), representing small farmers in Michigan as well as a group of six Amish farmers: the former concerned about the cost of the tags, while the latter were more worried about eternal damnation brought on by applying numbers to God’s own cattle.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) tried to get the case dismissed back in November last year, but only now has it managed to have the case thrown out on the basis that it is a Michigan ruling and thus subject to state laws, rather than part of any agenda being set by the USDA as part of the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), against which the plaintiff’s case was based.
Even in Michigan the law is intended to be voluntary, but the plaintiffs clearly believe that the voluntary status is just a ruse under which a mandatory ruling can be later implemented, which would threaten their livelihoods, or eternal souls, as appropriate. It’s worth noting, as the Judge did, that even Amish cattle already have numbered metal ear studs, so the contention that numbering cattle is against God’s law was already in shaky ground.
As for the USDA agenda, RFID Journal covers the case in some detail including quotes from a Michigan representative explaining:
“We implemented this program nearly 10 years ago… This was done pre-NAIS. Michigan is the only state with a mandatory electronic animal-tracking program, but it is also the only state with documented bovine TB cases”
Electronic tracking, in this instance, doesn’t necessarily mean RFID tags. The same thing can be, and is, achieved using the existing metal studs, with the data gathered electronically whenever the cattle are moved. But such assurances aren’t going to dent a good conspiracy theory about federal control.
National Animal Identification System
Insane Food Bill 2749 Passes House On 2nd Try. HR 2749: Totalitarian Control Of Our Food Supply
Filed under: 1984, 1st amendment, 9/11 Truth, Airport Security, Anti-War, Australia, Big Brother, biometrics, Bloggers, Britain, California, cashless society, cell phones, Censorship, China, Cold War, Congress, Control Grid, copyright, Darpa, data mining, DHS, Dictatorship, Dissent, Echelon, Empire, Europe, european union, facebook, False Flag, free speech, George Bush, Germany, global elite, global government, Globalism, google, gps, Homeland Security, inside job, internet, Internet 2, internet blackout, internet censorship, Internet Filtering, internet of things, internet police, IOT, IP, ISP, John McCain, john roberts, korea, london, Media, michael chertoff, microchip, microchips, Microsoft, nanny state, New World Order, New York, Oppression, orwell, Pentagon, Police State, Propaganda, RFID, RIAA, Science and technology, south korea, Spy, Surveillance, Tony Blair, uav, United Kingdom, US Constitution, Verichip, War On Terror, White House | Tags: HP, incheon, intel, internet regulation, john reid, korea, motorola, National Intelligence Council, new songdo city, NIC, NWO, paul otellini, privacy, Recording Industry Association of America, seoul, u-city, Ubiquitous computing, Ubiquitous living, Ubiquitous positioning, utopia, Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool, VIRAT
Australia To Enforce Mandatory Chinese-Style Internet Censorship
Government to block “controversial” websites with universal national filter
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
October 29, 2008
The Australian government is set to impose Chinese-style Internet censorship by enforcing a universal national filter that will block websites deemed “controversial,” as part of a wider agenda to regulate the Internet according to free speech advocates.
A provision whereby Internet users could opt out of the filter by contacting their ISP has been stripped from the legislation, meaning the filter will be universal and mandatory.
The System Administrators Guild of Australia and Electronic Frontiers Australia have attacked the proposal, saying it will restrict web access, raise prices and slow internet traffic speeds.
The plan was first created as a way to combat child pornography and adult content, but could be extended to include controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia,” reports the Australian Herald Sun.
Communications minister Stephen Conroy revealed the mandatory censorship to the Senate estimates committee as the Global Network Initiative, bringing together leading companies, human rights organisations, academics and investors, committed the technology firms to “protect the freedom of expression and privacy rights of their users”. (Complete black is white, up is down, double talk).
Human Rights Watch has condemned internet censorship, and argued to the US Senate “there is a real danger of a Virtual Curtain dividing the internet, much as the Iron Curtain did during the Cold War, because some governments fear the potential of the internet, (and) want to control it.”
Speaking from personal experience, not only are “controversial” websites blocked in China, meaning any website that is critical of the state, but every website the user attempts to visit first has to pass through the “great firewall,” causing the browser to hang and delay while it is checked against a government blacklist.
This causes excruciating delays, and the user experience is akin to being on a bad dial-up connection in the mid 1990’s. Even in the center of Shanghai with a fixed ethernet connection, the user experience is barely tolerable.
Not only are websites in China blocked, but e mails too are scanned for “controversial” words and blocked from being sent if they contain phrases related to politics or obscenities.
Googling for information on certain topics is also heavily restricted. While in China I tried to google “Bush Taiwan,” which resulted in Google.com ceasing to be accessible and my Internet connection was immediately terminated thereafter.
The Australian government will no doubt insist that their filter is in our best interests and is only designed to block child pornography, snuff films and other horrors, yet the system is completely pointless because it will not affect file sharing networks, which is the medium through which the vast majority of such material is distributed.
If we allow Australia to become the first “free” nation to impose Internet censorship, the snowball effect will only accelerate – the U.S. and the UK are next.
Indeed, Prime Minister Tony Blair called for Internet censorship last year.
In April 2007, Time magazine reported that researchers funded by the federal government want to shut down the internet and start over, citing the fact that at the moment there are loopholes in the system whereby users cannot be tracked and traced all the time. The projects echo moves we have previously reported on to clamp down on internet neutrality and even to designate a new form of the internet known as Internet 2.
Moves to regulate the web have increased over the last two years.
– In a display of bi-partisanship, there have been calls for all out mandatory ISP snooping on all US citizens by both Democrats and Republicans alike.
– In December 2006, Republican Senator John McCain tabled a proposal to introduce legislation that would fine blogs up to $300,000 for offensive statements, photos and videos posted by visitors on comment boards. It is well known that McCain has a distaste for his blogosphere critics, causing a definite conflict of interest where any proposal to restrict blogs on his part is concerned.
– During an appearance with his wife Barbara on Fox News in November 2006, George Bush senior slammed Internet bloggers for creating an “adversarial and ugly climate.”
– The White House’s own de-classified strategy for “winning the war on terror” targets Internet conspiracy theories as a recruiting ground for terrorists and threatens to “diminish” their influence.
– The Pentagon has also announced its effort to infiltrate the Internet and propagandize for the war on terror.
– In an October 2006 speech, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff identified the web as a “terror training camp,” through which “disaffected people living in the United States” are developing “radical ideologies and potentially violent skills.” His solution is “intelligence fusion centers,” staffed by Homeland Security personnel which will are already in operation.
– The U.S. Government wants to force bloggers and online grassroots activists to register and regularly report their activities to Congress. Criminal charges including a possible jail term of up to one year could be the punishment for non-compliance.
– A landmark November 2006 legal case on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America and other global trade organizations sought to criminalize all Internet file sharing of any kind as copyright infringement, effectively shutting down the world wide web – and their argument was supported by the U.S. government.
– A landmark legal ruling in Sydney goes further than ever before in setting the trap door for the destruction of the Internet as we know it and the end of alternative news websites and blogs by creating the precedent that simply linking to other websites is breach of copyright and piracy.
– The European Union, led by former Stalinist John Reid, has also vowed to shut down “terrorists” who use the Internet to spread propaganda.
– The EU data retention bill, passed after much controversy and implemented in 2007, obliges telephone operators and internet service providers to store information on who called who and who emailed who for at least six months. Under this law, investigators in any EU country, and most bizarrely even in the US, can access EU citizens’ data on phone calls, sms’, emails and instant messaging services.
– The EU also proposed legislation that would prevent users from uploading any form of video without a license.
– The US government is also funding research into social networking sites and how to gather and store personal data published on them, according to the New Scientist magazine. “At the same time, US lawmakers are attempting to force the social networking sites themselves to control the amount and kind of information that people, particularly children, can put on the sites.”
Governments are furious that their ceaseless lies are being exposed in real time on the World Wide Web and have resolved to stifle, regulate and control what truly is the last outpost of real free speech in the world. Internet censorship is perhaps the most pertinent issue that freedom advocates should rally to combat over the course of the next few years, lest we allow a cyber-gag to be placed over our mouths and say goodbye to our last medium of free and open communication.
DARPA building search engine for video surveillance footage
Ars Technica
October 21, 2008
The government agency that birthed the Internet is developing a sophisticated search engine for video, and when complete will allow intelligence analysts to sift through live footage from spy drones, as well as thousands of hours worth of archived recordings, in order to spot a variety of selected events or behaviors. In the past month, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced nearly $20 million in total contracts for private firms to begin developing the system, which is slated to take until at least 2011 to complete.
According to a prospectus written in March but released only this month, the Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) will enable intel analysts to “rapidly find video content of interest from archives and provide alerts to the analyst of events of interest during live operations,” taking both conventional video and footage from infrared scanners as input. The VIRAT project is an effort to cope with a growing data glut that has taxed intelligence resources because of the need to have trained human personnel perform time- and labor-intensive review of recorded video.
The DARPA overview emphasizes that VIRAT will not be designed with “face recognition, gait recognition, human identification, or any form of biometrics” in mind. Rather, the system will search for classes of activities or events. A suggested partial list in the prospectus includes digging, loitering, exploding, shooting, smoking, following, shaking hand, exchanging objects, crawling under a car, breaking a window, and evading a checkpoint. As new sample clips are fed into the system, it will need to recognize the signature features of new classes of search terms.
EU Set to Move ‘Internet of Things’ Closer to Reality
Daniel Taylor
Old-Thinker News
November 2, 2008
If the world-wide trend continues, ‘Web 3.0′ will be tightly monitored, and will become an unprecedented tool for surveillance. The “Internet of Things”, a digital representation of real world objects and people tagged with RFID chips, and increased censorship are two main themes for the future of the web.
The future of the internet, according to author and “web critic” Andrew Keen, will be monitored by “gatekeepers” to verify the accuracy of information posted on the web. The “Outlook 2009″ report from the November-December issue of The Futurist reports that,
“Internet entrepreneur Andrew Keen believes that the anonymity of today’s internet 2.0 will give way to a more open internet 3.0 in which third party gatekeepers monitor the information posted on Web sites to verify its accuracy.”
Keen stated during his early 2008 interview withThe Futurist that the internet, in its current form, has undermined mainline media and empowered untrustworthy “amateurs”, two trends that he wants reversed. “Rather than the empowerment of the amateur, Web 3.0 will show the resurgence of the professional,” states Keen.
Australia has now joined China in implementing mandatory internet censorship, furthering the trend towards a locked down and monitored web.
The Internet of Things
Now, the European Union has announced that it will pursue the main component of Web 3.0, the Internet of Things (IoT).
According to Viviane Reding, Commissioner for Information Society and Media for the EU, “The Internet of the future will radically change our society.” Ultimately, the EU is aiming to “lead the way” in the transformation to Web 3.0.
Reporting on the European Union’s pursuit of the IoT, iBLS reports,
“New technology applications will need ubiquitous Internet coverage. The Internet of Things means that wireless interaction between machines, vehicles, appliances, sensors and many other devices will take place using the Internet. It already makes electronic travel cards possible, and will allow mobile devices to exchange information to pay for things or get information from billboards (or streetlights).”
The Internet of Things consists of objects that are ‘tagged’ with Radio Frequency Identification Chips (RFID) that communicate their position, history, and other information to an RFID reader or wireless network. Most, if not all major computer companies and technology developers (HP, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, etc.) are putting large amounts of time and money into the Internet of Things.
Cisco and Sun Microsystems have founded an alliance to promote the Internet of Things and further its implementation.
South Korea is at the forefront in implementing ubiquitous technology and the Internet of Things. An entire city, New Songdo, is being built in South Korea that fully utilizes the technology. Ubiquitous computing proponents in the United States admit that while a large portion of the technology is being developed in the U.S., it is being tested in South Korea where there are less traditional, ethical and social blockades to prevent its acceptance and use. As the New York Times reports
“Much of this technology was developed in U.S. research labs, but there are fewer social and regulatory obstacles to implementing them in Korea,” said Mr. Townsend [a research director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California], who consulted on Seoul’s own U-city plan, known as Digital Media City. ‘There is an historical expectation of less privacy. Korea is willing to put off the hard questions to take the early lead and set standards.’”
An April 2008 report from the National Intelligence Council discussed the Internet of Things and its possible implications.
A timeline shown in the April 2008 NIC report
The report outlines uses for the technology:
“Sensor networks need not be connected to the Internet and indeed often reside in remote sites, vehicles, and buildings having no Internet connection. Smart dust is a term that some have used to express a vision of tiny, wireless-connected sensors; more recently, others use the term to describe any of several technologies that range from the size of a pack of gum to a pack of cigarettes, and that are widely available to system developers.
Ubiquitous positioning describes technologies for locating objects that may reside anywhere, including indoors and underground locations where satellite signals may be unavailable or otherwise inadequate.
Biometrics enables technology to recognize people and other living things, rather than inanimate objects. Connected everyday objects could recognize authorized users by means of fingerprint, voiceprint, iris scan, or other biometric technology.”
These trends towards internet censorship and the internet of things are undoubtedly going to continue, but restricting your free speech and violating your privacy will be harder with your outspoken resistance.
DARPA spies on analyst brains; hopes to offload image analysis to computers
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20..-image-analysis-to-computers.html
Security services want personal data from sites like Facebook
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oct/15/terrorism-security
UK.gov says: Regulate the internet
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/20/government_internet_regulation/
Filed under: 1984, army, Big Brother, biometrics, Control Grid, Darpa, microchips, Military, Military Industrial Complex, Oppression, Pentagon, Police State, Posse Comitatus, RFID, robot, Science and technology, super weapons, Surveillance, Taser Guns, Troops, uav, urban warfare, Verichip | Tags: Future Combat Systems, Multi-Robot Pursuit System, soldiers, Steve Wright, u.s. soldiers
Packs Of Robots Will Hunt Uncooperative Humans
New Scientist
October 23, 2008
The latest request from the Pentagon jars the senses. At least, it did mine. They are looking for contractors to provide a “Multi-Robot Pursuit System” that will let packs of robots “search for and detect a non-cooperative human”.
One thing that really bugs defence chiefs is having their troops diverted from other duties to control robots. So having a pack of them controlled by one person makes logistical sense. But I’m concerned about where this technology will end up.
Given that iRobot last year struck a deal with Taser International to mount stun weapons on its military robots, how long before we see packs of droids hunting down pesky demonstrators with paralysing weapons? Or could the packs even be lethally armed? I asked two experts on automated weapons what they thought – click the continue reading link to read what they said.
Both were concerned that packs of robots would be entrusted with tasks – and weapons – they were not up to handling without making wrong decisions.
Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University is an expert on police and military technologies, and last year correctly predicted this pack-hunting mode of operation would happen. “The giveaway here is the phrase ’a non-cooperative human subject’,” he told me:
We can also expect such systems to be equipped with human detection and tracking devices including sensors which detect human breath and the radio waves associated with a human heart beat. These are technologies already developed.”
What do you make of this? Are we letting our militaries run technologically amok with our tax dollars? Or can robot soldiers be programmed to be even more ethical than human ones, as some researchers claim?
Filed under: 1984, 4th amendment, Airport Security, Big Brother, biometrics, Britain, cell phones, civil liberties, civil rights, Control Grid, Dictatorship, DMV, DNA Database, domestic terrorism, Empire, Europe, european union, facial recognition, FBI, fingerprints, global government, global police force, Globalism, internet police, interpol, london, microchip, microchips, Military Industrial Complex, nanny state, New World Order, NWO, Oregon, orwell, Police State, smoking ban, Surveillance, United Kingdom, US Constitution, War On Terror, world police force | Tags: cop cams, International Criminal Police Organization, Northrop-Grumman, red light camera, Server in the Sky, speeding
Global Police Plan International Face Scanning Database
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
October 20, 2008
Global security authorities are to push for a huge biometric facial scan database of international travelers so they can cross-check everyone against a database of terror suspects, international criminals and fugitives.
Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization, is planning to expand its role into the mass screening of passengers moving around the world by creating a face recognition database to catch wanted suspects, reports the London Guardian.
The database will hold the records of every citizen who has ever traveled in and out of the virtually every country in the world, representing intelligence agency style bulk interception of information and sounding alarm bells for civil liberties groups.
Two months ago we reported on the moves underway to phase out passport control officers at airports and replace them with biometric face scanning cameras. The automated face recognition gates match passengers to a digital image stored on a microchip in the new e-passports.
Interpol wants a facial database to be linked into this technology and used in conjunction with its already existing fingerprint and DNA databases, according to Mark Branchflower, head of Interpol’s fingerprint unit.
We have previously noted that the vast array of databases currently being employed by intelligence agencies, government and law enforcement agencies worldwide were designed to be linked together in a system which will tie in the management and control of all facets of life for citizens to one central hub.
Earlier this year we reported on the announcement of a vast intelligence program to establish a global biometric database known as “Server in the Sky” that will collate and provide an ” International Information Consortium” with access to the biometric measurements and personal information of citizens across the globe in the name of fighting the “war on terror”.
As reported by the London Guardian, the plan is being formulated by the FBI with the cooperation of the home offices and law enforcement agencies of American allies. The technology is being supplied by the US defense company Northrop Grumman.
Furthermore, the use of such technology, as we have already seen, will not be limited to the passport control office.
A 2007 British government report muted an extensive upgrade to cctv systems all across the country to incorporate facial scanning technology. The report suggested a central database of every camera and a network allowing access to it could be beneficial.
In the US there are several schemes that use Facial Recognition Technology in conjunction with Federal agencies, tying the technology to traditional documents such as drivers licenses, passports and credit cards.
A biometric face recognition system has already been approved in China and is expected to be used at airports, customs entrances, banks, post offices, residential areas and other public places in the near future.
Other proposals include placing the cameras in every seat on aircraft and installing software to try and automatically detect terrorists or other dangers caused by passengers.
We are assured that cigarette vending machines will employ the technology in order to enforce smoking laws. Similarly, supermarkets in the UK have already started trialing the technology with the justification being a crackdown on underage drinking.
In Japan facial scanning cameras are being installed in train and bus stations to replace tickets in a move to make the individual features of the face a “unique bar code” as part of an antiterrorism and anticrime initiative.
Police in Tokyo are also asking home and shop owners to mount the cameras outside their properties. “Police investigating an incident in the neighborhood would have access to these images.” according to reports.
Cell phones and computers are now also being produced with face scanning cameras.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics..canner-liberty
Oregon DMV To Use Facial Recognition Software
http://www.kuik.com/Article.asp?id=954317&spid=
Orwellian U.K. Angers People With Tree Cameras, Snooping Kids
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=..=home
Speed cameras will track drivers for 30 miles
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/3163410/..ivers-for-miles.html
Filed under: 1984, Big Brother, big pharma, biometrics, brain manipulation, brainwashing, Child Abuse, Conditioning, Control Grid, DNA Database, education, education system, medical industrial complex, MKultra, Oppression, orwell, Science and technology, strange news, war on drugs | Tags: cogs, congnition enhancing drugs, mind drugs, neuroscience, performance enhancers
Children Could Be Given ’Smart Drugs’ In School
Laura Clark
DailyMail
September 19, 2008
Schools should be prepared to ensure all pupils have access to brain-enhancing ’smart drugs’, according to forecasts by Government-funded researchers.
Teachers may risk discriminating against poorer pupils if they fail to give all children the same chances to take a new generation of pills that boost attention, concentration and memory.
Research led by Bristol University predicts that within a generation, cognition-enhancing drugs – or ‘cogs’ – will be so advanced that teachers and parents will be able to ‘manipulate biology’ to enhance children’s brainpower.
But schools will be forced to address ‘ethical issues about haves and have-nots’, the researchers envisage.
‘If ‘cogs’ are only available to those who can afford to pay for them, what does this mean for equality in education?’ the report said.
‘In the future it may be unethical to deny the chance for pupils to take advantage of such enhancements.
‘What might this mean for education in the future?
‘Educators will at least need to know about what smart drugs are being taken by their pupils.
‘They may need to have a hand in deciding whether some pupils need to take such drugs.’
Schools may also need to introduce drug-testing to monitor and regulate the use of performance enhancers, according to the researchers, who were commissioned by Futurelab, a think-tank and charity funded by the Government to help shape the future of education.
The study paints a picture of a brave new world of education, where pupils’ DNA profiles would be stored on memory sticks to allow teachers to tailor lessons more effectively.
Brain scanners would give staff real-time read-outs of children’s pupils’ thinking, allowing for a more personalised approach.
Filed under: 1984, 4th amendment, Big Brother, biometrics, brain manipulation, Checkpoints, Control Grid, DHS, Dictatorship, Dissent, Empire, Fascism, Homeland Security, mental health screening, Military, Military Industrial Complex, Minority Report, nanny state, Nazi, Oppression, orwell, Police State, precrime, Psychotronic weapons, Science and technology, super weapons, Surveillance, thought crime, thought criminal, US Constitution, War On Terror | Tags: lie detector, mind reading scanner, PHI, physiological screeners, physiological screening, Project Hostile Intent, Transportation Security Administration
Homeland Security Previews Physiological Bio-Screeners
Polygraph like machines to “spot terrorists” by scanning general public for anxiety
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
September 19, 2008
The Department of Homeland Security has previewed new technology that they promise will help rout out terrorists and other dangerous people in public places by covertly bio-scanning subjects as they walk past sets of cameras.
It may seem Orwellian, but on Thursday, the Homeland Security Department showed off an early version of physiological screeners that could spot terrorists, reports USA Today.
According to DHS officials, the scanners work like polygraphs but without the subjects having to be wired up to them. They measure body temperature, pulse and breathing regularity. Any sudden changes recorded could indicate “the kind of anxiety exuded by a would-be terrorist or criminal.”
According to the report, the new technology will not just be limited to use in airports:
The system would be portable and fast, said project manager Robert Burns, who envisions machines that scan people as they walk into airports, train stations or arenas. Those flagged by the machines would be interviewed in front of cameras that measure minute facial movements for signs they are lying.
Law experts have charged that the technology constitutes a government enforced “medical exam” which would violate civil rights.
There can be no doubt that this technology is part of Homeland Security’s Project Hostile Intent (PHI) program, on which we reported just over one year ago.
Scientists were tasked by the DHS to develop technology by 2010 that can scan the bodily functions of citizens, without them knowing, and uncover any possible hostile intent or deception.
The DHS revealed to The New Scientist that it wishes to develop a lie detector-type test that can be used remotely, which was described as “an advantage because it would not interfere with the flow of a crowd and it could be used without the target’s knowledge.”
Other technology to be used for PHI includes lasers, cameras, eye trackers, microphones and heart rate and breathing sensors.
The new technology complements already escalating security measures in airports and train stations such as biometric body scans, lie detector tests, behavior analysis, facial analysis and spot teams to spy on passengers.
In addition, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) started conducting random additional at-gate screening earlier this year of airline passengers who display “involuntary physical and physiological” actions indicating stress, fear or deception.
To anyone who remembers Poindexter’s gait analysis this is pretty disturbing stuff.
We are being acclimatized to these things, first within airports and stations. Technology and measures that you don’t even see used in prisons or high security facilities are being passed off as completely normal in public places.
Furthermore, from the wording in these reports, it is clear that the intention is to roll out the exact same measures throughout public places in major cities and subject the general public to intense airport style harassment on the city streets.
How long before we see checkpoint officials inspecting internal passports and consumers body scanned merely to enter a supermarket or a sports arena?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne..ort-screening-could-read-minds.html
Pre-Crime Detector Shows Promise
http://www.newscientist.com/blog..r-is-showing-p.html
DHS Physiological Screeners To Fight Terrorists
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7012355008
Filed under: 1984, Big Brother, biometrics, Britain, Canada, cashless society, cell phone, Control Grid, corporations, credit card, Europe, european union, gps, Mexico, microchip, national id, New World Order, New York, North American Union, orwell, Real ID, RFID, Science and technology, stasi, stasi tactics, Surveillance, United Kingdom, Verichip, War On Terror | Tags: Enhanced Drivers License, future, futurist
Future Cashless Society: The Card That Runs Your Life
NY to issue ID cards with RFID chip
Times Union
September 13, 2008
Starting Tuesday, New Yorkers will be able to buy new driver’s licenses containing a radio chip that will let them travel between the U.S. and Canada or Mexico without a passport.
The new Enhanced Drivers License, which will cost an additional $30 on top of the standard $50 license fee, also will allow those on boats or ships to travel to Bermuda and Caribbean nations without a passport.
Starting in June, federal law will dictate that passports or other proof of citizenship — or an enhanced license — will be needed to visit neighboring countries, including Canada and Mexico.
Using your chipped cell-phone to purchase items
Rebecca Camber
UK Daily Mail
September 9, 2008
Once you wouldn’t leave home without it. But the credit card could soon be cashing in its chips.
Experts predict that paying by plastic will make way for payments by mobile phone, key fob or even fingerprint.
Like the cheque book, video cassette and CD before it, the plastic credit card could be on the way out within five years, according to leading financiers.
Yesterday Barclaycard, which introduced the UK’s first credit card in 1966, announced it was pouring millions into developing ‘contactless payment technology’.
The group has already developed a credit card that can be read without having to be taken out of a wallet.
It hopes to take contactless payments a step further with chips that can be inserted into mobile phones, enabling shoppers to buy items by simply holding their handsets over them.
http://noworldsystem.com/2008/09/02..e-mythbusters-to-test-rfid/
Judge rules probable cause of criminal activity needed to get cell location data
http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/12/judge..-needed-to-get-ce/
Big Brother is watching you…. Council to fingerprint staff as they clock in for work
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-..ncil-fingerprint-staff-clock-work.html
Council uses anti-terror rules to spy on man with noisy wardrobe
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ne..an-with-noisy-wardrobe.html
Anger as car journey data stored
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/pressass/..-6323e80.html
Council snoops use anti-terror laws to spy on punt operators
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-..py-punt-operators.html
Filed under: 1984, Big Brother, biometrics, cashless society, Control Grid, corporations, credit card, hackers, mandatory microchips, microchip, microchips, nanny state, New World Order, orwell, Police State, RFID | Tags: discover, discovery channel, mythbusters, texas instruments, visa
Credit Card Companies Refuse Mythbusters to Test RFID
Filed under: 1984, 1st amendment, 2-party system, 4th amendment, ACLU, Airport Security, apple, army, Barack Obama, biden, Big Brother, biometrics, Bush Sr., CIA, civil liberties, civil rights, Congress, copyright, Department of justice, Dianne Feinstein, DOJ, EFF, FBI, FCC, fingerprints, FISA, free speech, George Bush, Hillary Clinton, House, Iraq, joe biden, John McCain, left right paradigm, Microsoft, Military, nanny state, nation building, neocons, Neolibs, net neutrality, NSA, obama, occupation, OKC bombing, orwell, Patriot Act, Police State, Posse Comitatus, privacy rights, RIAA, Robert Gates, Ron Paul, Russ Feingold, Senate, Spy, Surveillance, tax, Taxpayers, telecoms, TSA, US Constitution, verison, war on drugs, War On Terror, warrantless search, warrantless wiretap, White House | Tags: Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Act, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Digital Telephony law, Drano bomb, drug paraphernalia, ebay, Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act, Improvised Munitions Handbook, kazaa, marijuana, news corp., Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995, p2p, Perform Act, pgp, rave act, Senate Foreign Relations committee, tommy chong, Violent Crime Control Act, XM, Yahoo!, zfone
Joe Biden’s pro-RIAA, pro-FBI tech voting record
CNET
August 23, 2008
By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET’s Technology Voters’ Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP.
That’s probably okay with Barack Obama: Biden likely got the nod because of his foreign policy knowledge. The Delaware politician is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee who voted for the war in Iraq, and is reasonably well-known nationally after his presidential campaigns in 1988 and 2008.
Copyright
But back to the Delaware senator’s tech record. After taking over the Foreign Relations committee, Biden became a staunch ally of Hollywood and the recording industry in their efforts to expand copyright law. He sponsored a bill in 2002 that would have make it a federal felony to trick certain types of devices into playing unauthorized music or executing unapproved computer programs. Biden’s bill was backed by content companies including News Corp. but eventually died after Verizon, Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and Yahoo lobbied against it.
A few months later, Biden signed a letter that urged the Justice Department “to prosecute individuals who intentionally allow mass copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks.” Critics of this approach said that the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, and not taxpayers, should pay for their own lawsuits.
Last year, Biden sponsored an RIAA-backed bill called the Perform Act aimed at restricting Americans’ ability to record and play back individual songs from satellite and Internet radio services. (The RIAA sued XM Satellite Radio over precisely this point.)
All of which meant that nobody in Washington was surprised when Biden was one of only four U.S. senators invited to a champagne reception in celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hosted by the MPAA’s Jack Valenti, the RIAA, and the Business Software Alliance. (Photos are here.)
Now, it’s true that few Americans will cast their votes in November based on what the vice presidential candidate thinks of copyright law. But these pro-copyright views don’t exactly jibe with what Obama has promised; he’s pledged to “update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated.” These are code words for taking a more pro-EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) than pro-MPAA approach.
Unfortunately, Biden has steadfastly refused to answer questions on the topic. We asked him 10 tech-related questions, including whether he’d support rewriting the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as part of our 2008 Technology Voters’ guide. Biden would not answer (we did hear back from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Ron Paul).
In our 2006 Technology Voters’ Guide, which ranked Senate votes from July 1998 through May 2005, Biden received a mere 37.5 percent score because of his support for Internet filters in schools and libraries and occasional support for Internet taxes.
Privacy, the FBI, and PGP
On privacy, Biden’s record is hardly stellar. In the 1990s, Biden was chairman of the Judiciary Committee and introduced a bill called the Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Act, which the EFF says he was “persuaded” to do by the FBI. A second Biden bill was called the Violent Crime Control Act. Both were staunchly anti-encryption, with this identical language:
It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications services and manufacturers of electronic communications service equipment shall ensure that communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by law.
Translated, that means turn over your encryption keys. The book Electronic Privacy Papers describes Biden’s bill as representing the FBI’s visible effort to restrict encryption technology, which was taking place in concert with the National Security Agency’s parallel, but less visible efforts. (Biden was no foe of the NSA. He once described now-retired NSA director Bobby Ray Inman as the “single most competent man in the government.”)
Biden’s bill — and the threat of encryption being outlawed — is what spurred Phil Zimmermann to write PGP, thereby kicking off a historic debate about export controls, national security, and privacy. Zimmermann, who’s now busy developing Zfone, says it was Biden’s legislation “that led me to publish PGP electronically for free that year, shortly before the measure was defeated after vigorous protest by civil libertarians and industry groups.”
While neither of Biden’s pair of bills became law, they did foreshadow the FBI’s pro-wiretapping, anti-encryption legislative strategy that followed — and demonstrated that the Delaware senator was willing to be a reliable ally of law enforcement on the topic. (They also previewed the FBI’s legislative proposal later that decade for banning encryption products such as SSH or PGP without government backdoors, which was approved by one House of Representatives committee but never came to a vote in the Senate.)
“Joe Biden made his second attempt to introduce such legislation” in the form of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which was also known as the Digital Telephony law, according to an account in Wired magazine. Biden at the time was chairman of the relevant committee; he co-sponsored the Senate version and dutifully secured a successful floor vote on it less than two months after it was introduced. CALEA became law in October 1994, and is still bedeviling privacy advocates: the FBI recently managed to extend its requirements to Internet service providers.
CALEA represented one step in the FBI and NSA’s attempts to restrict encryption without backdoors. In a top-secret memo to members of President George H.W. Bush’s administration including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and CIA director Robert Gates, one White House official wrote: “Justice should go ahead now to seek a legislative fix to the digital telephony problem, and all parties should prepare to follow through on the encryption problem in about a year. Success with digital telephony will lock in one major objective; we will have a beachhead we can exploit for the encryption fix; and the encryption access options can be developed more thoroughly in the meantime.”
There’s another reason why Biden’s legislative tactics in the CALEA scrum amount to more than a mere a footnote in Internet history. They’re what led to the creation of the Center for Democracy and Technology — and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s simultaneous implosion and soul-searching.
EFF staffers Jerry Berman and Danny Weitzner chose to work with Biden on cutting a deal and altering the bill in hopes of obtaining privacy concessions. It may have helped, but it also left the EFF in the uncomfortable position of leaving its imprimatur on Biden’s FBI-backed wiretapping law universally loathed by privacy advocates. The debacle ended with internal turmoil, Berman and Weitzner leaving the group and taking their corporate backers to form CDT, and a chastened EFF that quietly packed its bags and moved to its current home in San Francisco. (Weitzner, who was responsible for a censorship controversy last year, became a formal Obama campaign surrogate.)
“Anti-terror” legislation
The next year, months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995. It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and wiretap laws, creating a new federal crime of “terrorism” that could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S. military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent detection of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review. The Center for National Security Studies said the bill would erode “constitutional and statutory due process protections” and would “authorize the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to investigate and prosecute based on political beliefs and associations.”
Biden himself draws parallels between his 1995 bill and its 2001 cousin. “I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill,” he said when the Patriot Act was being debated, according to the New Republic, which described him as “the Democratic Party’s de facto spokesman on the war against terrorism.”
Biden’s chronology is not accurate: the bombing took place in April 1995 and his bill had been introduced in February 1995. But it’s true that Biden’s proposal probably helped to lay the groundwork for the Bush administration’s Patriot Act.
In 1996, Biden voted to keep intact an ostensibly anti-illegal immigration bill that outlined what the Real ID Act would become almost a decade later. The bill would create a national worker identification registry; Biden voted to kill an Abraham-Feingold amendment that would have replaced the registry with stronger enforcement. According to an analysis by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the underlying bill would have required “states to place Social Security numbers on drivers licenses and to obtain fingerprints or some other form of biometric identification for licenses.”
Along with most of his colleagues in the Congress — including Sen. John McCain but not Rep. Ron Paul — Biden voted for the Patriot Act and the Real ID Act (which was part of a larger spending bill). Obama voted for the bill containing the Real ID Act, but wasn’t in the U.S. Senate in 2001 when the original Patriot Act vote took place.
Patriot Act
In the Senate debate over the Patriot Act in October 2001, Biden once again allied himself closely with the FBI. The Justice Department favorably quotes Biden on its Web site as saying: “The FBI could get a wiretap to investigate the mafia, but they could not get one to investigate terrorists. To put it bluntly, that was crazy! What’s good for the mob should be good for terrorists.”
The problem is that Biden’s claim was simply false — which he should have known after a decade of experience lending his name to wiretapping bills on behalf of the FBI. As CDT explains in a rebuttal to Biden: “The Justice Department had the ability to use wiretaps, including roving taps, in criminal investigations of terrorism, just as in other criminal investigations, long before the Patriot Act.”
But Biden’s views had become markedly less FBI-friendly by April 2007, six years later. By then, the debate over wiretapping had become sharply partisan, pitting Democrats seeking to embarrass President Bush against Republicans aiming to defend the administration at nearly any cost. In addition, Biden had announced his presidential candidacy three months earlier and was courting liberal activists dismayed by the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping.
That month, Biden slammed the “president’s illegal wiretapping program that allows intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on the conversations of Americans without a judge’s approval or congressional authorization or oversight.” He took aim at Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for allowing the FBI to “flagrantly misuse National Security Letters” — even though it was the Patriot Act that greatly expanded their use without also expanding internal safeguards and oversight as well.
Biden did vote against a FISA bill with retroactive immunity for any telecommunications provider that illegally opened its network to the National Security Agency; Obama didn’t. Both agreed to renew the Patriot Act in March 2006, a move that pro-privacy Democrats including Ron Wyden and Russ Feingold opposed. The ACLU said the renewal “fails to correct the most flawed provisions” of the original Patriot Act. (Biden does do well on the ACLU’s congressional scorecard.)
“Baby-food bombs”
The ACLU also had been at odds with Biden over his efforts to censor bomb-making information on the Internet. One day after a bomb in Saudi Arabia killed several U.S. servicemen and virtually flattened a military base, Biden pushed to make posting bomb-making information on the Internet a felony, punishable by up to 20 years in jail, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
“I think most Americans would be absolutely shocked if they knew what kind of bone-chilling information is making its way over the Internet,” he told the Senate. “You can access detailed, explicit instructions on how to make and detonate pipe bombs, light-bulb bombs, and even — if you can believe it — baby-food bombs.”
Biden didn’t get exactly what he wanted — at least not right away. His proposal was swapped in the final law for one requiring the attorney general to investigate “the extent to which the First Amendment protects such material and its private and commercial distribution.” The report was duly produced, concluding that the proposal “can withstand constitutional muster in most, if not all, of its possible applications, if such legislation is slightly modified.”
It was. Biden and co-sponsor Dianne Feinstein introduced their bill again the following year. Biden pitched it as an anti-terror measure, saying in a floor debate that numerous terrorists “have been found in possession of bomb-making manuals and Internet bomb-making information.” He added: “What is even worse is that some of these instructions are geared toward kids. They tell kids that all the ingredients they need are right in their parents’ kitchen or laundry cabinets.”
Biden’s proposal became law in 1997. It didn’t amount to much: four years after its enactment, there had been only one conviction. And instead of being used to snare a dangerous member of Al Qaeda, the law was used to lock up a 20-year old anarchist Webmaster who was sentenced to one year in prison for posting information about Molotov cocktails and “Drano bombs” on his Web site, Raisethefist.com.
Today there are over 10,000 hits on Google for the phrase, in quotes, “Drano bomb.” One is a video that lists the necessary ingredients and shows some self-described rednecks blowing up small plastic bottles in their yard. Then there’s the U.S. Army’s Improvised Munitions Handbook with instructions on making far more deadly compounds, including methyl nitrate dynamite, mortars, grenades, and C-4 plastic explosive — which free speech activists placed online as an in-your-face response to the Biden-Feinstein bill.
Peer-to-peer networks
Since then, Biden has switched from complaining about Internet baby-food bombs to taking aim at peer-to-peer networks. He held one Foreign Relations committee hearing in February 2002 titled “Theft of American Intellectual Property” and invited executives from the Justice Department, RIAA, MPAA, and Microsoft to speak. Not one Internet company, P2P network, or consumer group was invited to testify.
Afterwards, Sharman Networks (which distributes Kazaa) wrote a letter to Biden complaining about “one-sided and unsubstantiated attacks” on P2P networks. It said: “We are deeply offended by the gratuitous accusations made against Kazaa by witnesses before the committee, including ludicrous attempts to associate an extremely beneficial, next-generation software program with organized criminal gangs and even terrorist organizations.”
Biden returned to the business of targeting P2P networks this year. In April, he proposed spending $1 billion in U.S. tax dollars so police can monitor peer-to-peer networks for illegal activity. He made that suggestion after a Wyoming cop demonstrated a proof-of-concept program called “Operation Fairplay” at a hearing before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee.
A month later, the Senate Judiciary committee approved a Biden-sponsored bill that would spend over $1 billion on policing illegal Internet activity, mostly child pornography. It has the dubious virtue of being at least partially redundant: One section would “prohibit the broadcast of live images of child abuse,” even though the Justice Department has experienced no problems in securing guilty pleas for underage Webcamming. (The bill has not been voted on by the full Senate.)
Online sales of Robitussin
Around the same time, Biden introduced his self-described Biden Crime Bill of 2007. One section expands electronic surveillance law to permit police wiretaps in “crimes dangerous to the life, limb, and well-being of minor children.” Another takes aim at Internet-based telemedicine and online pharmacies, saying that physicians must have conducted “at least one in-person medical evaluation of the patient” to prescribe medicine.
Another prohibits selling a product containing dextromethorphan — including Robitussin, Sucrets, Dayquil, and Vicks — “to an individual under the age of 18 years, including any such sale using the Internet.” It gives the Justice Department six months to come up with regulations, which include when retailers should be fined for shipping cough suppressants to children. (Biden is a longtime drug warrior; he authored the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act that the Bush administration used to shut down benefit concerts.)
Net neutrality
On Net neutrality, Biden has sounded skeptical. In 2006, he indicated that no preemptive laws were necessary because if violations do happen, such a public outcry will develop that “the chairman will be required to hold this meeting in this largest room in the Capitol, and there will be lines wandering all the way down to the White House.” Obama, on the other hand, has been a strong supporter of handing pre-emptive regulatory authority to the Federal Communications Commission.
Tommy Chong: Biden ’authored the bill that put me in jail’
KXMB
August 24, 2008
It turns out that Obama’s new running mate is one of the leading crusaders in the war on drugs. Which isn’t something that’s likely to sit well with Obama’s base of young, college-aged supporters
Earlier this week, in an interview with the Washington Post, Tommy Chong was asked what the average citizen can do to further the cause of decriminalization. “Check out the people you’re voting for,” Chong replied. “For instance, Joseph Biden comes off as a liberal Democrat, but he’s the one who authored the bill that put me in jail. He wrote the law against shipping drug paraphernalia through the mail – which could be anything from a pipe to a clip or cigarette papers.”
Barack Obama’s V.P. selection Sen. Joe Biden also spnsored the Rave Act, which targets music events where drug use is allegedly prevalent.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5670703&page=1
Barack Obama: The Next PRESIDENT Is Joe Biden
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RElChQ6g2Io
VP Choice Biden Unpopular in Iraq: He’s creator of the idea of dividing Iraq
http://africa.reuters.com/world/news/usnLN96984.html
Biden’s Bill: The Patriot Act
http://www.tnr.com/columnist..582-b6ec-444834c9df73&k=93697
Biden called for unilateral Iraq invasion – in 1998
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5492
Filed under: 1984, Big Brother, biometrics, Checkpoints, Congress, Control Grid, DHS, domestic terrorism, Drivers License, Homeland Security, house senate, Illegal Immigration, Immigration, Mexico, microchip, property rights, RFID, Surveillance, Taxpayers, Texas, War On Terror | Tags: Secure Fence Act, us passport
Homeland Security Tracks U.S. Citizens Coming from Mexico
Washington Post
August 20, 2008
The federal government has been using its system of border checkpoints to greatly expand a database on travelers entering the country by collecting information on all U.S. citizens crossing by land, compiling data that will be stored for 15 years and may be used in criminal and intelligence investigations.
Officials say the Border Crossing Information system, disclosed last month by the Department of Homeland Security in a Federal Register notice, is part of a broader effort to guard against terrorist threats. It also reflects the growing number of government systems containing personal information on Americans that can be shared for a broad range of law enforcement and intelligence purposes, some of which are exempt from some Privacy Act protections.
While international air passenger data has long been captured this way, Customs and Border Protection agents only this year began to log the arrivals of all U.S. citizens across land borders, through which about three-quarters of border entries occur.
The volume of people entering the country by land prevented compiling such a database until recently. But the advent of machine-readable identification documents, which the government mandates eventually for everyone crossing the border, has made gathering the information more feasible. By June, all travelers crossing land borders will need to present a machine-readable document, such as a passport or a driver’s license with a radio frequency identification chip.
The Border Fence is a Scam
PBS
August 18, 2008
In 2006, Congress authorized the Secure Fence Act – a multi-billion dollar plan to build hundreds of miles of fencing along the southern border of the United States to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants and provide security from potential terrorism. But what was built to fight illegal immigration has turned into a nightmare for many Americans living along the U.S.-Mexico border. The fence, which will cover less than half of the actual border, inexplicably cuts through the middle of some properties, while leaving others untouched. Many question if it can keep people from sneaking in at all.
This week, NOW senior correspondent Maria Hinojosa travels to Texas to meet border families who fear losing their property, their safety, and their way of life. We also follow an investigative reporter who questions whether certain landowners are getting preferential treatment.
Is America’s border fence working, or an utter waste?
Filed under: 1984, 2nd Amendment, anti gun, Big Brother, biometrics, Britain, California, CCTV, Control Grid, Dictatorship, Drivers License, education, education system, Empire, Europe, european union, facial recognition, Gun Control, nanny state, orwell, Police State, RFID, stasi, stasi tactics, Surveillance, United Kingdom, US Constitution, Washington D.C. | Tags: Firearms and Explosives, Home Office, Judge John A. Mendez, license plate, plate scan, Ramon Michael Clark, sacramento, Tobacco
Thumb-print required for buying bullets in California
Niesha Lofing
Sacramento Bee
August 14, 2008
A Sacramento man pleaded guilty Tuesday to possession of ammunition by a felon after buying bullets from a local sporting goods store.
Ramon Michael Clark, 31, entered his guilty plea in federal court before U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez, according to a news release by the office of U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott.
Clark’s illegal activity came to light as a result of a pilot program requiring merchants to collect identifying information from people buying ammunition.
Clark bought 50 rounds of .25 caliber ammunition from Big 5 Sporting Goods on Mack Road in February.
Clark was required to submit his driver’s license and a thumbprint to complete the sale in compliance with a recently enacted ordinance, the release states.
Sacramento police used the information to determine that Clark had been convicted of possessing marijuana for sale and possessing narcotics while armed, both felonies.
Clark is scheduled to be sentenced by Mendez at 9:30 a.m. Nov. 4.
He faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, the release states.
The case resulted from joint investigation by Sacramento police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
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Future Drugs Will Make Troops Want to Fight
Potential technologies to picture what someone is thinking, drugs that give soldiers super-human power and awareness, robots controlled with the brain and land-mines that release drugs to incapacitate suspects is in the works.
Wired
August 13, 2008
Drugs that make soldiers want to fight. Robots linked directly to their controllers’ brains. Lie-detecting scans administered to terrorist suspects as they cross U.S. borders.
These are just a few of the military uses imagined for cognitive science — and if it’s not yet certain whether the technologies will work, the military is certainly taking them very seriously.
“It’s way too early to know which — if any — of these technologies is going to be practical,” said Jonathan Moreno, a Center for American Progress bioethicist and author of Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense. “But it’s important for us to get ahead of the curve. Soldiers are always on the cutting edge of new technologies.”
Moreno is part of a National Research Council committee convened by the Department of Defense to evaluate the military potential of brain science. Their report, “Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies,” was released today. It charts a range of cognitive technologies that are potentially powerful — and, perhaps, powerfully troubling.
Here are the report’s main areas of focus:
- Mind reading. The development of psychological models and neurological imaging has made it possible to see what people are thinking and whether they’re lying. The science is, however, still in its infancy: Challenges remain in accounting for variations between individual brains, and the tendency of our brains to change over time.
One important application is lie detection — though one hopes that the lesson of traditional lie detectors, predicated on the now-disproven idea that the physiological basis of lying can be separated from processes such as anxiety, has been learned.
Mind readers could be used to interrogate captured enemies, as well as “terrorist suspects” passing through customs. But does this mean, for example, that travelers placed on the bloated, mistake-laden watchlist would have their minds scanned, just as their computers will be?
The report notes that “In situations where it is important to win the hearts and minds of the local populace, it would be useful to know if they understand the information being given them.”
- Cognitive enhancement. Arguably the most developed area of cognitive neuroscience, with drugs already allowing soldiers to stay awake and alert for days at a time, and brain-altering drugs in widespread use among civilians diagnosed with mental and behavioral problems.
Improved drug delivery systems and improved neurological understanding could make today’s drugs seem rudimentary, giving soldiers a superhuman strength and awareness — but if a drug can be designed to increase an ability, a drug can also be designed to destroy it.
“It’s also important to develop antidotes and protective agents against various classes of drugs,” says the report. This echoes the motivation of much federal biodefense research, in which designing defenses against potential bioterror agents requires those agents to be made — and that raises the possibility of our own weapons being turned against us, as with the post-9/11 anthrax attacks, which used a military developed strain.
- Mind control. Largely pharmaceutical, for the moment, and a natural outgrowth of cognitive enhancement approaches and mind-reading insight: If we can alter the brain, why not control it?
One potential use involves making soldiers want to fight. Conversely, “How can we disrupt the enemy’s motivation to fight? […] How can we make people trust us more? What if we could help the brain to remove fear or pain? Is there a way to make the enemy obey our commands?” - Brain-Machine Interfaces. The report focuses on direct brain-to-machine systems (rather than, for example, systems that are controlled by visual movements, which are already in limited use by paraplegics.) Among these are robotic prostheses that replace or extend body parts; cognitive and sensory prostheses, which make it possible to think and to perceive in entirely new ways; and robotic or software assistants, which would do the same thing, but from a distance.
Many questions surrounding the safety of current brain-machine interfaces: The union of metal and flesh only lasts so long before things break down. But assuming those can be overcome, questions of plasticity arise: What happens when a soldier leaves the service? How might their brains be reshaped by their experience?
Like Moreno said, it’s too early to say what will work. The report documents in great detail the practical obstacles to these aims — not least the failure of reductionist neuroscientific models, in which a few firing neurons can be easily mapped to a psychological state, and brains can be analyzed in one-map-fits-all fashion.
But given the rapid progress of cognitive science, it’s foolish to assume that obstacles won’t be overcome. Hugh Gusterson, a George Mason University anthropologist and critic of the military’s sponsorship of social science research, says their attempt to crack the cultural code is unlikely to work — “but my sense with neuroscience,” he said, “is a far more realistic ambition.”
Gusterson is deeply pessimistic about military neuroscience, which will not be limited to the United States.
“I think most reasonable people, if they imagine a world in which all sides have figured out how to control brains, they’d rather not go there,” he said. “Most rational human beings would believe that if we could have a world where nobody does military neuroscience, we’ll all be better off. But for some people in the Pentagon, it’s too delicious to ignore.”
Brain will be battlefield of future, warns US intelligence report
The Guardian
August 14, 2008
Rapid advances in neuroscience could have a dramatic impact on national security and the way in which future wars are fought, US intelligence officials have been told.
In a report commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency, leading scientists were asked to examine how a greater understanding of the brain over the next 20 years is likely to drive the development of new medicines and technologies.
They found several areas in which progress could have a profound impact, including behaviour-altering drugs, scanners that can interpret a person’s state of mind and devices capable of boosting senses such as hearing and vision.
On the battlefield, bullets may be replaced with “pharmacological land mines” that release drugs to incapacitate soldiers on contact, while scanners and other electronic devices could be developed to identify suspects from their brain activity and even disrupt their ability to tell lies when questioned, the report says.
“The concept of torture could also be altered by products in this market. It is possible that some day there could be a technique developed to extract information from a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects,” the report states.
The report highlights one electronic technique, called transcranial direct current stimulation, which involves using electrical pulses to interfere with the firing of neurons in the brain and has been shown to delay a person’s ability to tell a lie.
Drugs could also be used to enhance the performance of military personnel. There is already anecdotal evidence of troops using the narcolepsy drug modafinil, and ritalin, which is prescribed for attention deficit disorder, to boost their performance. Future drugs, developed to boost the cognitive faculties of people with dementia, are likely to be used in a similar way, the report adds.
Greater understanding of the brain’s workings is also expected to usher in new devices that link directly to the brain, either to allow operators to control machinery with their minds, such as flying unmanned reconnaissance drones, or to boost their natural senses.
For example, video from a person’s glasses, or audio recorded from a headset, could be processed by a computer to help search for relevant information. “Experiments indicate that the advantages of these devices are such that human operators will be greatly enhanced for things like photo reconnaissance and so on,” Kit Green, who chaired the report committee, said.
The report warns that while the US and other western nations might now consider themselves at the forefront of neuroscience, that is likely to change as other countries ramp up their computing capabilities. Unless security services can monitor progress internationally, they risk “major, even catastrophic, intelligence failures in the years ahead”, the report warns.
“In the intelligence community, there is an extremely small number of people who understand the science and without that it’s going to be impossible to predict surprises. This is a black hole that needs to be filled with light,” Green told the Guardian.
The technologies will one day have applications in counter-terrorism and crime-fighting. The report says brain imaging will not improve sufficiently in the next 20 years to read peoples’ intentions from afar and spot criminals before they act, but it might be good enough to help identify people at a checkpoint or counter who are afraid or anxious.
“We’re not going to be reading minds at a distance, but that doesn’t mean we can’t detect gross changes in anxiety or fear, and then subsequently talk to those individuals to see what’s upsetting them,” Green said.
The development of advanced surveillance techniques, such as cameras that can spot fearful expressions on people’s faces, could lead to some inventive ways to fool them, the report adds, such as Botox injections to relax facial muscles.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/aug/13/military.neuroscience
Future Wars To Be Fought With Mind Drugs
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