TBR News December 7, 2019

Dec 06 2019

The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. December 7, 2019:“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.
Commentary for December 7: “Because Trump was so enraged at what he perceived as snide mockery of him in England, the orders have gone out to the American media not to mention the incident nor comment on it in any way.
Scanning the media today, I can see that the matter has been quietly dropped. The senior staff at the White House is afraid that either Trump will go ballistic on camera and say dangerously stupid things or have another heart attack, hence the requested media silence.
The staff will find something else, less provocative, for him to worry, and rant, about.
Instead of Secret Service guards protecting Trump, it would be more to the point to have a platoon of psychologists and ward attendants controlling him.
And here is a song being sung, away from White House ears for sure, about Trump. I give the first verse. Other ones are very disrespectful….
(This is to the tune of the “Camptown Races’)
‘Republican Senators sing this song, doo-dah, doo-dah,
Donald Trump is never wrong, all the doo-dah day.
Going to lie all night, going to lie all day…
He takes drug money from the Russian mob
And that’s all we have to say’

The Table of Contents
• FBI warns that smart TVs may be spying on users
• U.S. Supreme Court rejects Trump bid to resume federal executions
• American official mass surveillance of the public
• The Season of Evil

FBI warns that smart TVs may be spying on users
December 5, 2019
by Marty Johnson
The Hill
An FBI field office is warning consumers that smart TVs can be hacked and used for spying.
“Beyond the risk that your TV manufacturer and app developers may be listening and watching you, that television can also be a gateway for hackers to come into your home,” the bureau’s office in Portland, Ore., said in a report on Tuesday.
“A bad cyber actor may not be able to access your locked-down computer directly, but it is possible that your unsecured TV can give him or her an easy way in the backdoor through your router,” the FBI added.
The report also gives consumers several ways to protect against such attacks.
“Know exactly what features your TV has and how to control those features,” the FBI suggests. “Do a basic Internet search with your model number and the words ‘microphone,’ ‘camera,’ and ‘privacy.’ ”
Smart TVs are able to directly connect to the internet, allowing consumers to stream their favorite shows and movies through apps like Netflix, Hulu and Disney Plus.

U.S. Supreme Court rejects Trump bid to resume federal executions
December 6, 2019
by Lawrence Hurley
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday rejected a request by President Donald Trump’s administration to proceed with plans to carry out the first executions of federal death row inmates since 2003.
The justices left in place a hold imposed by a federal judge on four executions that had been scheduled by U.S. Attorney General William Barr for this month and next month as Trump’s administration embraces the death penalty at a time when increasing numbers of states have given up the practice.
The brief order said that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that is now considering the case should rule “with appropriate dispatch.”
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote a separate statement, joined by fellow conservatives Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, saying the appeals court should be able to rule within 60 days.
“The government has shown that it is very likely to prevail when this question is ultimately decided,” Alito wrote.
The administration turned to the Supreme Court after the appeals court on Dec. 2 refused to immediately allow the executions to resume.
“The courts have made clear that the government cannot rush executions in order to evade judicial review of the legality and constitutionality of its new execution procedure,” said Shawn Nolan, a lawyer for death row inmates.
Department of Justice spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said that while it was disappointed with the ruling, “we will argue the case on its merits in the D.C. Circuit and, if necessary, the Supreme Court.”
Separately, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago on Friday granted a request made by the Trump administration and lifted a stay of execution for death row inmate Daniel Lewis Lee, who the government had wanted to execute on Monday. But as a result of the Supreme Court action, his execution will now be delayed.
In the Washington case, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in November put on hold the planned executions until a long-running legal challenge to the Justice Department’s lethal injection protocol can be resolved.
Most executions in the United States have been carried out by states rather than the federal government, which has gone 16 years without carrying out the death penalty. Protracted litigation over the drugs used in lethal injection executions prevented the government from continuing the practice.
The inmates scheduled for execution by lethal injection all were convicted in federal courts of murder.
Lee was scheduled to be the first of the group to be executed, at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana on Monday. Most male federal death row inmates are imprisoned in the Indiana prison.
A white supremacist, Lee was convicted in Arkansas in the suffocation deaths carried out with an accomplice of a gun dealer, the man’s wife and her 8-year-old daughter in 1996.
Wesley Purkey was scheduled to be executed at the same prison next Friday.
Purkey was convicted in the 1998 kidnapping, rape, murder and dismembering of a 16-year-old girl in Kansas. Purkey separately pleaded guilty in the bludgeoning death of an 80-year-old woman.
Purkey’s lawyers have filed a separate challenge to his execution, saying he should be spared because he has developed Alzheimer’s disease.
Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; editing by Grant McCool

American official mass surveillance of the public
December 5, 2019
by Michael Hunt
Millions of Americans, and other nationalities, are spied on daily and vast amounts of personal data acquired and stored.
The cover story is that this is designed to “locate and neutralize” Muslim terrorists, both inside and outside of the United States, but in fact, according to a U.S. Army document, the actual purposes of the mass surveillance is to build significant data bases on any person likely to present a domestic threat to established authority.
This fear has its roots in massive popular rejection of the Vietnam war with its attendant mass meetings, defiance of the government and the development of ad hoc student groups firmly, and often very vocally, opposed to the war.
There was a great deal of civic unrest on college campuses throughout the 1960s as students became increasingly involved in a number of social and political movements ranging from the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Rights Movement, and, of course, the Anti-War Movement. Over 30,000 people left the country and went to Canada, Sweden, and Mexico to avoid the draft.
The bureaucracy then found itself under siege and has stated subsequently that this must not happen again and that any kind of meaningful civil disobedience is to get negative mention in the media and members of such groups subject to arrest and detention.
The Obama administration punished any government whistle-blower with such severity as to discourage others from revealing negative official information.
FEMA has a network of so-called “detention camps” throughout the United States, most only sites, to be used in the event of noteworthy civil disturbance.
The current programs of mass surveillance are known and approved at the highest levels in the government, to include the President
Government, faux government, and government-subsidized private organizations.
The high technology consists of such subjects as surveillance cameras in public places, drones, satellites, interceptions of telephone, computer and mail communications.
There are as of this instance, no less than five million names on the officlal government Terrorist Identies Datamart Environment list and nearly sixty thousand names on the TSA no-fly list.
The projected, in-use currently, programs are:
1. Federal control of all domestic media, the internet, all computerized records, through overview of all domestic fax, mail and telephone conversations,
2 .A national ID card, universal SS cards, being mandatory,
3. Seizure and forced deportation of all illegal aliens, including millions of Mexicans and Central Americans, intensive observation and penetration of Asian groups, especially Indonesian and Chinese,
4. A reinstitution of a universal draft (mandatory service at 18 years for all male American youths…based on the German Arbeitsdienst.
5. Closer coordination of administration views and domestic policies with various approved and régime supportive religious groups,
6. An enlargement of the planned “no travel” lists drawn up in the Justice Department that would prevents “subversive” elemetst from flying, (this list to include “peaceniks” and most categories of Muslims)
7. The automatic death penalty for any proven acts of sedition,
8. The forbidding of abortion, any use of medical marijuana,
9. Any public approval of homosexual or lesbian behavior to include magazines, websites, political action groups and soon to be forbidden and punishable.
The government intelligence agencies and their allied private contractors now regularly accesses all emails, chats, searches, events, locations, videos, photos, log-ins and any information people post online with a warrant, which the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court always grants secretly and without being ever made public.
And the revelation of Prism, a secret government program for mining major Internet companies, states that the government now has direct access to Internet companies’ data without a warrant.
Every company impacted – Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype, PalTalk and AOL – publically deny knowing about the program or giving any direct access to their servers. These denials are intented to bolster public confidence in their services because in reality, all of these entities cooperate fully with requests for customer information.
Google is the supplier of the customized core search technology for Intellipedia, a highly-secure online system where 37,000 U.S. domestic and foreign area spies and related personnel share information and collaborate on investigative missions.
And there is absolutely nothing one can commit to the Internet that is private in any sense of the word
In addition, Google is linked to the U.S. spy and military systems through its Google Earth software venture. The technology behind this software was originally developed by Keyhole Inc., a company funded by Q-Tel http://www.iqt.org/ , a venture capital firm which is in turn openly funded and operated on behalf of the CIA.
Google acquired Keyhole Inc. in 2004. The same base technology is currently employed by U.S. military and intelligence systems in their quest, in their own words, for “full-spectrum dominance” of the American, and foreign, political, social and economic spheres.
However, Internet Service Providers and the entertainment industry are now taking Internet monitoring to a whole new level….
If someone downloads copyrighted software, videos or music, all Internet service providers (ISP) have the ability to detect this downloading.
The vast majority of computer surveillance involves the monitoring of data and traffic on the Internet. In the United States for example, under the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act, all phone calls and broadband Internet traffic (emails, web traffic, instant messaging, etc.) are required to be available for unimpeded real-time monitoring by Federal law enforcement agencies., to include the FBI, NSA, the CIA and the DHS.
There is far too much data on the Internet for human investigators to manually search through all of it and so automated Internet surveillance computers sift through the vast amount of intercepted Internet traffic and identify and report to human investigators traffic considered interesting by using certain “trigger” words or phrases, visiting certain types of web sites, or communicating via email or chat with suspicious individuals or groups. Billions of dollars per year are spent, by agencies such as the Information Awareness Office, NSA, and the FBI, to develop, purchase, implement, and operate systems such as Carnivore, NarusInsight, and ECHELON to intercept and analyze all of this data, and extract only the information which is useful to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. One flaw with NSA claims that the government needs to be able to suck up Internet data from services such as Skype and Gmail to fight terrorists: Studies show that would-be terrorists don’t use those services. The NSA has to collect the metadata from all of our phone calls because terrorists, right? And the spy agency absolutely must intercept Skypes you conduct with folks out-of-state, or else terrorism. It must sift through your iCloud data and Facebook status updates too, because Al Qaeda.Terrorists are everywhere, they are legion, they are dangerous, and, unfortunately, they don’t really do any of the stuff described above.
Even though the still-growing surveillance state that sprung up in the wake of 9/11 was enacted almost entirely to “fight terrorism,” reports show that the modes of communication that agencies like the NSA are targeting are scarcely used by terrorists at all.
Computers can be a surveillance target because of the personal data stored on them. If someone is able to install software, such as the FBI’s Magic Lantern and CIPAV, on a computer system, they can easily gain unauthorized access to this data. Such software can be, and is installed physically or remotely. Another form of computer surveillance, known as van Eck phreaking, involves reading electromagnetic emanations from computing devices in order to extract data from them at distances of hundreds of meters. The NSA runs a database known as “Pinwale”, which stores and indexes large numbers of emails of both American citizens and foreigners.
Email
The government agencies have been fully capable to look at any and all emails.
A warrant can easily grant access to email sent within 180 days. Older emails are available with an easier-to-get subpoena and prior notice.
Government officials also are fully capable of reading all the ingoing and outgoing emails on an account in real time with a specific type of wiretap warrant, which is granted with probable cause for specific crimes such as terrorism.
Google received 122,503 user data requests involving 2,375,434 users from the U.S. government in 2019. It granted about 98 percent of those requests.
Microsoft, with its Outlook/Hotmail email service, received 61,538 requests involving 52,291 users in 2019, granting 92 percent of those requests.
Phones
With the advent of smartphones and SIM cards, cellphones are no longer strictly for storage of digits and 180-character short messages.
Cellphones assist in navigating for car trips, to enable making Internet purchases and to watch events on television stations. It is possible to deposit checks with a bank app and a camera, locate businesses of interest and also to use transportation by using a QR-code.
Phones hold our coupons, our favorite cat videos and functions as a credit card when we forget ours at home.
The NSA collects subscriber information from major cell phone carriers. This information is primarily based on metadata, such as location and duration of calls, along with numbers dialed, all in search of links to suspected terrorists.
In 2013, to date, law enforcement agencies made 12.3 million requests for subscriber information.
These government requests for surveillance information from the NSA, are limited to metadata. That doesn’t mean that the content of conversations is off-limits. To listen in, the government just needs a warrant, one that’s granted through the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The court approves almost every request, fully denying just nine out of 133,900 government applications for surveillance over its 39-year existence, according to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reports submitted to Congress.
Although this is not new technology, law enforcement authorities are using our own cell phones to spy on us more extensively than ever before as a recent Wired article described….
Mobile carriers responded to a staggering 1.3 million law enforcement requests last year for subscriber information, including text messages and phone location data, according to data provided to Congress.
A single “request” can involve information about hundreds of customers. So ultimately the number of Americans affected by this could reach into “the tens of millions” each year.
The number of Americans affected each year by the growing use of mobile phone data by law enforcement could reach into the tens of millions, as a single request could ensnare dozens or even hundreds of people. Law enforcement has been asking for so-called “cell tower dumps” in which carriers disclose all phone numbers that connected to a given tower during a certain period of time.
So, for instance, if police wanted to try to find a person who broke a store window at an Occupy protest, it could get the phone numbers and identifying data of all protestors with mobile phones in the vicinity at the time — and use that data for other purposes.
Perhaps you should not be using your cell phone so much anyway. After all, there are more than 500 studies that claim to show that cell phone radiation is harmful to humans.
The official and unofficial tapping of telephone lines is widespread. In the United States for instance, the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) requires that all telephone and VoIP communications be available for real-time wiretapping by Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Two major telecommunications companies in the U.S.—AT&T Inc. and Verizon—have contracts with the FBI, requiring them to keep their phone call records easily searchable and accessible for Federal agencies, in return for $1.8 million dollars per year. Between 2003 and 2005, the FBI sent out more than 140,000 “National Security Letters” ordering phone companies to hand over information about their customers’ calling and Internet histories. About half of these letters requested information on U.S. citizens.
In 2019, the FBI sent out nearly 200,000 such demands.
Human agents are not required to monitor most calls. Speech-to-text software creates machine-readable text from intercepted audio, which is then processed by automated call-analysis programs, such as those developed by agencies such as the Information Awareness Office, or companies such as Verint, and Narus, which search for certain words or phrases, to decide whether to dedicate a human agent to the call.
Law enforcement and intelligence services in the United Kingdom and the United States possess technology to remotely activate the microphones in cell phones, by accessing phones’ diagnostic or maintenance features in order to listen to conversations that take place near the person who holds the phone.
Mobile phones are also commonly used to collect location data. The geographical location of a mobile phone (and thus the person carrying it) can be determined easily even when the phone is not being used, using a technique known multilateration to calculate the differences in time for a signal to travel from the cell phone to each of several cell towers near the owner of the phone. The legality of such techniques has been questioned in the United States, in particular whether a court warrant is required. Records for one carrier alone (Sprint), showed that in a given year federal law enforcement agencies requested customer location data 8 million times.
Credit cards
Think Uncle Sam knows where you buy your coffee? He might be able to tell you the exact cafe.
It all starts with that stripe on the back of your credit card, which gets swiped through thousands of readers every year.
That solid black bar is made up of millions of iron-based magnetic particles, each one 20-millionths of an inch wide. Each credit-card owner has a personalized strip full of intimate data sitting right inside his or her pocket. Any purchase can be traced directly back to your wallet.
Although the scope of credit-card tracking efforts are unknown, the Journal reported that the NSA has established relationships with credit card companies akin to those that they had established with phone carriers, which provide them with data under warrant, subpoena or court order. These former officials didn’t know if the efforts were ongoing.
What could they find? Based on the technology of the mag stripe, quite a bit.
Even with just the metadata – digitally contained bits of information – on a credit card, they could most likely see when and where a purchase was made, and how much it cost.
Whether they’re walking to work, withdrawing money from an ATM or walking into their favorite local grocer, Americans could be within sight of one of the United States’ estimated 130 million surveillance cameras.
Police use them to monitor streets, subways and public spaces. Homeowners put them on their houses. Businesses mount them in stores and on buildings.
In Boston, for example, the FBI used still photos and video pulled from cameras to identify suspects after the Boston Marathon bombing. The images showed the suspects making calls from their cellphones, carrying what the police say were bombs, and leaving the scene.
New high-tech, high-definition security camera manufacturers give police departments the options of thermal imaging, 360-degree fields of view and powerful zoom capabilities for identifying people. Advances in camera technology enable new ways to monitor American citizens.
Surveillance cameras are video cameras used for the purpose of observing an area. They are often connected to a recording device or IP network, and may be watched by a security guard or law enforcement officer. Cameras and recording equipment used to be relatively expensive and required human personnel to monitor camera footage, but analysis of footage has been made easier by automated software that organizes digital video footage into a searchable database, and by video analysis software (such as VIRAT and HumanID).
The amount of footage is also drastically reduced by motion sensors which only record when motion is detected. With cheaper production techniques, surveillance cameras are simple and inexpensive enough to be used in home security systems, and for everyday surveillance.
In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security awards billions of dollars per year in Homeland Security grants for local, state, and federal agencies to install modern video surveillance equipment. For example, the city of Chicago, Illinois, recently used a $5.1 million Homeland Security grant to install an additional 1250 surveillance cameras, and connect them to a centralized monitoring center, along with its preexisting network of over 12,000 cameras, in a program known as Operation Virtual Shield. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley announced that Chicago would have a surveillance camera on every street corner by the year 2016.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a research project called Combat Zones That See that will link up cameras across a city to a centralized monitoring station, identify and track individuals and vehicles as they move through the city, and report “suspicious” activity (such as waving arms, looking side-to-side, standing in a group, etc.).
The U.S.government initially claimed that cameras were meant to be used for traffic control, but many of them ended up using them for general surveillance. For example, Washington, D.C. had 5,000 “traffic” cameras installed under this premise, and then after they were all in place, networked them all together and then granted access to the Metropolitan Police Department, so they could perform “day-to-day monitoring”.
The development of centralized networks of CCTV cameras watching public areas – linked to computer databases of people’s pictures and identity (biometric data), able to track people’s movements throughout the city, and identify whom they have been with – has been argued by some to present a risk to civil liberties. Trapwire is an example of such a network.
Drones
As many as 30,000 domestic drones will travel the skies above U.S. soil within 20 years, according to a report for Congress by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Congress has called on the FAA to integrate unmanned aircraft into the national air system by 2000.
Already, the FAA has approved domestic drone use by 81 agencies, including schools, police departments and the Department of Homeland Security.
Among the applicants approved: the Arlington Police Department in Texas; California State University in Fresno; Canyon County Sheriff’s Office in Idaho; the city of Herington, Kan.; the Georgia Tech Research Institute; Kansas State University; the Miami-Dade Police Department in Florida; the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources; the Seattle Police Department; and the Universities of Alaska at Fairbanks, California-Davis and Florida.
Although these drones range in size, most are able to hover tens of thousands of feet in the sky, collecting images of people on the ground below.
Based on current trends – technology development, law enforcement interest, political and industry pressure, and the lack of legal safeguards – it is clear that drones pose a looming threat to Americans’ privacy.
Law enforcement agencies all over the United States are starting to use unmanned drones to spy on us, and the Department of Homeland Security is aggressively seeking to expand the use of such drones by local authorities….
The Department of Homeland Security has launched a program to “facilitate and accelerate the adoption” of small, unmanned drones by police and other public safety agencies, an effort that an agency official admitted faces “a very big hurdle having to do with privacy.”
The $4 million Air-based Technologies Program, which will test and evaluate small, unmanned aircraft systems, is designed to be a “middleman” between drone manufacturers and first-responder agencies.
The EPA is already using drones to spy on cattle ranchers in Nebraska and Iowa. Will we eventually get to a point where we all just consider it to be “normal” to have surveillance drones flying above our heads constantly?
The FBI uses aerial surveillance drones over US soil, and has agreed that further political debate and legislation to govern their domestic use may be necessary.
The Bureau’s director admitted it uses drones to aid its investigations.
However, the potential for growing drone use either in the US, or involving US citizens abroad, is an increasingly charged issue in Congress, and the FBI acknowledged there may need to be legal restrictions placed on their use to protect privacy.It is known that drones are used by border control officials and have been used by some local law enforcement authorities and Department of Homeland Security in criminal cases.
“To the extent that it relates to the air space there would be some communication back and forth [between agencies],” former FBI director Mueller said.
“Pre-Crime” Surveillance Cameras
Also aiding and abetting police in their efforts to track our every movement in real time is Trapwire, which allows for quick analysis of live feeds from CCTV surveillance cameras. Some of Trapwire’s confirmed users are the DC police, and police and casinos in Las Vegas. Police in New York, Los Angeles, Canada, and London are also thought to be using Trapwire.
Using Trapwire in conjunction with NGI, police and other government agents will be able to pinpoint anyone by checking the personal characteristics stored in the database against images on social media websites, feeds from the thousands of CCTV surveillance cameras installed throughout American cities (there are 8,200 CCTV cameras tracking the public in the New York subway system alone), as well as data being beamed down from the more than 30,000 surveillance drones taking to the skies within the next eight years. Given that the drones’ powerful facial recognition cameras will be capable of capturing minute details, including every mundane action performed by every person in an entire city simultaneously, soon there really will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, short of living in a cave, far removed from technology.
NGI will not only increase sharing between federal agencies, opening up the floodgates between the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Defense, but states can also get in on the action. The system was rolled out in Michigan in February 2012, with Hawaii, Maryland, South Carolina, Ohio, New Mexico, Kansas, Arizona, Tennessee, Nebraska, and Missouri on the shortlist for implementation, followed by Washington, North Carolina, and Florida in the near future.
Going far beyond the scope of those with criminal backgrounds, the NGI data includes criminals and non-criminals alike – in other words, innocent American citizens. The information is being amassed through a variety of routine procedures, with the police leading the way as prime collectors of biometrics for something as non-threatening as a simple moving violation. For example, the New York Police Department began photographing irises of suspects and arrestees in 2010, routinely telling suspects that the scans were mandatory, despite there being no law requiring defendants to have their irises scanned. Police departments across the country are now being equipped with the Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System, or MORIS, a physical iPhone add-on that allows officers patrolling the streets to scan the irises and faces of individuals and match them against government databases.
To start with, there’s the government’s integration of facial recognition software and other biometric markers into its identification data programs.
The FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) system is a $1 billion project that is aimed at dramatically expanding the government’s current ID database from a fingerprint system to a facial recognition system. NGI will use a variety of biometric data, cross-referenced against the nation’s growing network of surveillance cameras to not only track your every move but create a permanent “recognition” file on you within the government’s massive databases. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab are developing software that can read the feelings behind facial expressions. In some cases, the computers outperform people. The software could lead to empathetic devices and is being used to evaluate and develop better advertisements.
By the time it’s fully operational in 2019, NGI will serve as a vast data storehouse of “iris scans, photos searchable with face recognition technology, palm prints, and measures of gait and voice recordings alongside records of fingerprints, scars, and tattoos.” One component of NGI, the Universal Face Workstation, already contains some 13 million facial images, gleaned from “criminal mug shot photos” taken during the booking process. However, with major search engines having “accumulated face image databases that in their size dwarf the earth’s population,” the government taps into the trove of images stored on social media and photo sharing websites such as Facebook.A company known as BRS Labs has developed “pre-crime” surveillance cameras that can supposedly determine if you are a terrorist or a criminal even before you commit a crime and dozens of these cameras are being installed at major transportation hubs in San Francisco….
In its latest project BRS Labs is to install its devices on the transport system in San Francisco, which includes buses, trams and subways.
The company says will put them in 12 stations with up to 22 cameras in each, bringing the total number to 288.
The cameras will be able to track up to 150 people at a time in real time and will gradually build up a ‘memory’ of suspicious behavior to work out what is suspicious.
Mobile Backscatter Vans
Police all over America will soon be driving around in unmarked vans looking inside your cars and even under your clothes using the same “pornoscanner” technology currently being utilized by the TSA at U.S. airports….
American intelligence agencies are set to join the US military in deploying American Science & Engineering’s Z Backscatter Vans, or mobile backscatter radiation x-rays. These are what TSA officials call “the amazing radioactive genital viewer,” now seen in airports around America, ionizing the private parts of children, the elderly.
These porno scanner wagons will look like regular anonymous vans, and will cruise America’s streets, indiscriminately peering through the cars (and clothes) of anyone in range of its mighty isotope-cannon. But don’t worry, it’s not a violation of privacy. As AS&E’s vice president of marketing Joe Reiss sez, “From a privacy standpoint, I’m hard-pressed to see what the concern or objection could be.”
RFID Microchips
Most Americans don’t realize this, but RFID microchips are steadily becoming part of the very fabric of our lives. Many of your credit cards and debit cards contain them. Many Americans use security cards that contain RFID microchips at work. In some parts of the country it is now mandatory to inject an RFID microchip into your pet.
District officials said the Radio Frequency Identification System (RFID) tags would improve safety by allowing them to locate students — and count them more accurately at the beginning of the school day to help offset cuts in state funding, which is partly based on attendance.
Automated License Plate Readers
Automated license plate readers are being used to track the movements of a vehicle from the time that it enters Washington D.C. to the time that it leaves….
More than 250 cameras in the District and its suburbs scan license plates in real time, helping police pinpoint stolen cars and fleeing killers. But the program quietly has expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago.
With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles.
Nowhere is that more prevalent than in the District, which has more than one plate-reader per square mile, the highest concentration in the nation. Police in the Washington suburbs have dozens of them as well, and local agencies plan to add many more in coming months, creating a comprehensive dragnet that will include all the approaches into the District.
Data Mining
The government is not the only one that is spying on you. The truth is that a whole host of very large corporations are gathering every shred of information about you that they possibly can and selling that information for profit. It is called “data mining”, and it is an industry that has absolutely exploded in recent years.
One very large corporation known as Acxiom actually compiles information on more than 190 million people in the U.S. alone….
The company fits into a category called database marketing. It started in 1969 as an outfit called Demographics Inc., using phone books and other notably low-tech tools, as well as one computer, to amass information on voters and consumers for direct marketing. Almost 50 years later, Acxiom has detailed entries for more than 290 million people and 189 million households in the U.S., and about 1,500 million active consumers worldwide. More than 23,000 servers in Conway, just north of Little Rock, collect and analyze more than 50 trillion data ‘transactions’ a year.
Cable television spying
When people download a film from Netflix to a flatscreen, or turn on web radio, they could be alerting unwanted watchers to exactly what they are doing and where they are.
Spies will no longer have to plant bugs in your home – the rise of ‘connected’ gadgets controlled by apps will mean that people ‘bug’ their own homes.
The CIA claims it will be able to ‘read’ these devices via the internet – and perhaps even via radio waves from outside the home.
Everything from remote controls to clock radios can now be controlled via apps – and chip company ARM recently unveiled low-powered, cheaper chips which will be used in everything from fridges and ovens to doorbells.
These web-connected gadgets will ‘transform’ the art of spying – allowing spies to monitor people automatically without planting bugs, breaking and entering or even donning a tuxedo to infiltrate a dinner party.
‘Particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft. Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters – all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing.’
One of the world’s biggest chip companies, ARM, has unveiled a new processor built to work inside ‘connected’ white goods.
The ARM chips are smaller, lower-powered and far cheaper than previous processors – and designed to add the internet to almost every kind of electrical appliance.
It’s a concept described as the ‘internet of things’.
Futurists think that one day ‘connected’ devices will tell the internet where they are and what they are doing at all times – and will be mapped by computers as precisely as Google Maps charts the physical landscape now.
The forced conversion to High Definition TV means we will only be able to receive a digital TV signal instead of an analog TV signal. This began in 2009. The surveillance specialists have the ability to manipulate that digital signal in any direction desired, for any purpose desired.
In addition, all of the newer wide-screen High Definition TVs found in retail outlets today have both tiny cameras and audio detection devices covertly installed within them so the NSA can both observe and listen to everything within it operatinal radius. The conversion boxes that have been offered with those free government coupons will have the same detection and surveillance devices.
And covert monitoring/tracking chips have been installed in all automobiles manufactured since 1990
1. Don’t buy the newer HD TVs and don’t get their conversion box. Forget getting TV from broadcast or cable or satellite directly. One idea is to watch TV shows from your older computer with currently availabe TV reception hardware/software (newer computers probably have the surveillance devices installed) or send the video and audio from the computer into the AV jacks on your TV or VCR.
2. Watch TV shows from programs previously recorded on VHS tapes or from DVDs using your older TV and VCR equipment. This could become a cottage industry overnight if enough people become aware of the covert surveillance agenda riding along on the coattails of the forced conversion to High Definition digital television.
3. You can listen to only television audio from many inexpensive radios that include the TV audio bands from channel 2-13 In most cases, audio is good enough for me. I’m mainly looking for those few comedy offerings here and there that will provide a laugh. Most sitcoms are just awful: ‘boring’ or ‘banal’ would be complimentary descriptions.
There are also many “black box technologies” being developed out there that the public does not even know about yet.
Then there are the nation’s public schools, where young people are being conditioned to mindlessly march in lockstep to the pervasive authoritarian dictates of the surveillance state. It was here that surveillance cameras and metal detectors became the norm. It was here, too, that schools began reviewing social media websites in order to police student activity. With the advent of biometrics, school officials have gone to ever more creative lengths to monitor and track students’ activities and whereabouts, even for the most mundane things. For example, students in Pinellas County, Fla., are actually subjected to vein recognition scans when purchasing lunch at school.
Of course, the government is not the only looming threat to our privacy and bodily integrity. As with most invasive technologies, the groundwork to accustom the American people to the so-called benefits or conveniences of facial recognition is being laid quite effectively by corporations. For example, a new Facebook application, enables businesses to target potential customers with specialized offers. Yet another page borrowed from Stephen Spielberg’s 2002 Minority Report, the app works like this: businesses install cameras at their front doors which, using facial recognition technology, identify the faces of Facebook users and then send coupons to their smartphones based upon things they’ve “liked” in the past.
Making this noxious mix even more troubling is the significant margin for error and abuse that goes hand in hand with just about every government-instigated program, only more so when it comes to biometrics and identification databases. Take, for example, the Secure Communities initiative. Touted by the Department of Homeland Security as a way to crack down on illegal immigration, the program attempted to match the inmates in local jails against the federal immigration database. Unfortunately, it resulted in Americans being arrested for reporting domestic abuse and occasionally flagged US citizens for deportation. More recently, in July 2012, security researcher Javier Galbally demonstrated that iris scans can be spoofed, allowing a hacker to use synthetic images of an iris to trick an iris-scanning device into thinking it had received a positive match for a real iris over 50 percent of the time.
The writing is on the wall. With technology moving so fast and assaults on our freedoms, privacy and otherwise, occurring with increasing frequency, there is little hope of turning back this technological, corporate and governmental juggernaut. Even trying to avoid inclusion in the government’s massive identification database will be difficult. The hacktivist group Anonymous suggests wearing a transparent plastic mask, tilting one’s head at a 15 degree angle, wearing obscuring makeup, and wearing a hat outfitted with Infra-red LED lights as methods for confounding the cameras’ facial recognition technology.
Consider this, however: while the general public, largely law-abiding, continues to be pried on, spied on and treated like suspects by a government that spends an exorbitant amount of money on the security-intelligence complex (which takes in a sizeable chunk of the $80 billion yearly intelligence budget), the government’s attention and resources are effectively being diverted from the true threats that remain at large – namely, those terrorists abroad who seek, through overt action and implied threat, to continue the reign of terror in America begun in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Mobile carriers responded to a staggering 5.3 million law enforcement requests last year for subscriber information, including text messages and phone location data. ,
The revelation marks the first time figures have been made available showing just how pervasive mobile snooping by the government has become in the United States.
The companies said they were working around the clock and charging millions in fees to keep up with ever-growing demands. At least one of the carriers urged Congress to clarify the law on when probable-cause warrants were required to divulge customer data
The number of Americans affected each year by the growing use of mobile phone data by law enforcement could reach into the tens of millions, as a single request could ensnare dozens or even hundreds of people. Law enforcement has been asking for so-called “cell tower dumps” in which carriers disclose all phone numbers that connected to a given tower during a certain period of time.
So, for instance, if police wanted to try to find a person who broke a store window at an Occupy protest, it could get the phone numbers and identifying data of all protestors with mobile phones in the vicinity at the time — and use that data for other purposes.
“We cannot allow privacy protections to be swept aside with the sweeping nature of these information requests,” Markey said in a statement. Markey divulged the data Monday, a day after leaking it to The New York Times.
The carriers have refused for years to make clear to Americans how much data they keep and for how long — or how often — and under what standards — data is turned over to authorities. The newly released data shows that the police have realized the country has moved to an age when most Americans carry a tracking device in their pockets, leaving a bread crumb trail of their every move and electronic communication.
The reports showed that AT&T, the nation’s second largest carrier, received about 125,000 requests from the authorities in 2007 — mushrooming to more than 12,260,000 last year. It charged $2.8 million for the work in 2007 and $11.25 million last year. Though AT&T promises in its own human rights policy that it will “generate periodic reports regarding our experience with such requests to the extent permitted by the law,” the company has never done so until requested by Congress.
Verizon, the nation’s largest carrier, did not provide a clear breakdown as did AT&T, but said it also received about 760,000 requests last year, and added that the numbers are growing at a rate of about 15 percent annually.
Oddly, the third largest carrier, Sprint said it has received nearly double what each of the top two reported: 500,000 requests last year. Finally, the last of the top four carriers, T-Mobile, declined to divulge how many requests it gets. But it said in the last decade, the numbers have increased by up to 16 percent annually.
Overall, the companies said they respond to tens of thousands of emergency requests annually when authorities ask for data claiming there is an imminent threat of death or serious injury. Sprint, for example, said it handles those via fax from law enforcement.
The figures come as Twitter and Google have also reported a major uptick in the number of government demands for user-information data. Twitter, for example, said it received more requests for data in the first half of this year than all of last year. The United States was responsible for the bulk of the requests.
The carriers said they responded to police emergencies, subpoenas and other court orders. They did not clearly say how many times they responded to probable-cause warrants. That’s because much of Americans’ mobile-phone data is not protected by the Fourth Amendment.
“AT&T does not respond to law enforcement without receipt of appropriate legal process,” Timothy McKone, an AT&T vice president, wrote Markey as part of the congressional inquiry. “When the law requires a warrant for disclosure of customer usage information, AT&T requires that a warrant be required — as is also the case for court orders, subpoenas or any other form of legal process.”
AT&T: The category PSAP stands for Public Safety Answering Point, which takes emergency 911 calls for subscriber data.
McCone said the company employs more than 100 full-time staffers and “operates on a 24/7 basis for the purpose of meeting law enforcement demands.”
All the while, the Justice Department employs a covert internet and telephone surveillance method known as pen register and trap-and-trace capturing. Judges sign off on these telco orders when the authorities say the information is relevant to an investigation. No probable cause that the target committed a crime — the warrant standard — is necessary.
Pen registers obtain non-content information of outbound telephone and internet communications, such as phone numbers dialed, and the sender and recipient (and sometimes subject line) of an e-mail message. A trap-and-trace acquires the same information, but for inbound communications to a target.
According to a separate report, from 2004 to 2009, the number of those have more than doubled to 23,895. The Justice Department has failed to report figures for 2010 and 2011. The American Civil Liberties Union has sued the Justice Department, seeking the records.
What’s more, the government asserts, and judges are sometimes agreeing, that no warrant is required to obtain so-called cell-site data which identifies the cell tower to which the customer was connected at the beginning of a call and at the end of the call. Such location data can be collected by mobile phone companies whenever a phone is turned on, making it possible for police to obtain, without probable cause, a detailed history of the movement of a phone.
Sprint said sometimes it’s hard for the company to know whether it is being properly served, and that the legal standard of whether a probable-cause warrant was needed is unclear.
“Given the importance of this issue, the competing and at times contradictory legal standards, Sprint believes Congress should clarify the legal requirements for disclosure of all types of location information to law enforcement personnel,” Voyan McCann, a Sprint vice president, wrote.
The use of the television set as a receiver for illegal and clandestine listening purposes and got an enormous response. When concerned people asked me how to neutralize this, I told them to disconnect their set from the cable hookup and I am told that many do. All it takes is a knuckle-dragger down at the cable head and very simple equipment (according to a friend in the New Jersey Bell labs) to reverse the system and listen. One doesn’t need elaborate and expensive equipment to neutralize this. Simple disconnection is much more effective in the end.
There exists a top-secret NSA program called NUCLEON, which intercepts telephone calls, especially out-of-country, and routes the spoken words to a database.
Harvest
In April 1958, the final design for the NSA-customized version of IBM’s Stretch computer had been approved, and the machine was installed in February 1962. The design engineer was James H. Pomerene, and it was built by IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York. Its electronics (fabricated of the same kind of discrete transistors used for Stretch) were physically about twice as big as the Stretch to which it was attached. Harvest added a small number of instructions to Stretch, and could not operate independently.
An NSA-conducted evaluation found that Harvest was more powerful than the best commercially available machine by a factor of 50 to 200, depending on the task.
One purpose of the machine was to search text for key words from a watchlist. From a single foreign cipher system, Harvest was able to scan over seven million decrypts for any occurrences of over 7,000 key words in under four hours.
The computer was also used for codebreaking, and this was enhanced by a system codenamed Rye, which allowed remote access to Harvest. According to a 1965 NSA report, “RYE has made it possible for the agency to locate many more potentially exploitable cryptographic systems and `bust’ situations. Many messages that would have taken hours or days to read by hand methods, if indeed the process were feasible at all, can now be `set’ and machine decrypted in a matter of minutes”.Harvest was also used for decipherment of solved systems; the report goes on to say that, “Decrypting a large batch of messages in a solved system [is] also being routinely handled by this system”.
Harvest remained in use until 1976, having been in operation at the NSA for fourteen years. Part of the reason for its retirement was that some of the mechanical components of Tractor had worn beyond use, and there was no practical way to replace them. IBM declined to re-implement the architecture in a more modern technology.
Social network analysis
One common form of surveillance is to create maps of social networks based on data from social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter as well as from traffic analysis information from phone call records such as those in the NSA call database, and others. These social network “maps” are then data mined to extract useful information such as personal interests, friendships & affiliations, wants, beliefs, thoughts, and activities.
Many U.S. government agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are investing heavily in research involving social network analysis. The intelligence community believes that the biggest threat to U.S. power comes from decentralized, leaderless, geographically dispersed groups of terrorists, subversives, extremists, and dissidents. These types of threats are most easily countered by finding important nodes in the network, and removing them. To do this requires a detailed map of the network.
The purpose of the SSNA algorithms program is to extend techniques of social network analysis to assist with distinguishing potential terrorist cells from legitimate groups of people…. In order to be successful SSNA will require information on the social interactions of the majority of people around the globe. Since the Defense Department cannot easily distinguish between peaceful citizens and terrorists, it will be necessary for them to gather data on innocent civilians as well as on potential terrorists.
AT&T developed a programming language called “Hancock”, which is able to sift through enormous databases of phone call and Internet traffic records, such as the NSA call database, and extract “communities of interest”—groups of people who call each other regularly, or groups that regularly visit certain sites on the Internet. AT&T originally built the system to develop “marketing leads” but the FBI has regularly requested such information from phone companies such as AT&T without a warrant, and after using the data stores all information received in its own databases, regardless of whether or not the information was ever useful in an investigation.
Some people believe that the use of social networking sites is a form of “participatory surveillance”, where users of these sites are essentially performing surveillance on themselves, putting detailed personal information on public websites where it can be viewed by corporations and governments. About 20% of employers have reported using social networking sites to collect personal data on prospective or current employees.
Biometric surveillance
Biometric surveillance is any technology that measures and analyze human physical and/or behavioral characteristics for authentication, identification, or screening purposes. Examples of physical characteristics include fingerprints, DNA, and facial patterns. Examples of mostly behavioral characteristics include gait (a person’s manner of walking) or voice.
Facial recognition is the use of the unique configuration of a person’s facial features to accurately identify them, usually from surveillance video. Both the Department of Homeland Security and DARPA are heavily funding research into facial recognition systems The Information Processing Technology Office, ran a program known as Human Identification at a Distance which developed technologies that are capable of identifying a person at up to 500 ft by their facial features.
Another form of behavioral biometrics, based on affective computing, involves computers recognizing a person’s emotional state based on an analysis of their facial expressions, how fast they are talking, the tone and pitch of their voice, their posture, and other behavioral traits. This might be used for instance to see if a person is acting “suspicious” (looking around furtively, “tense” or “angry” facial expressions, waving arms, etc.)
A more recent development is DNA fingerprinting, which looks at some of the major markers in the body’s DNA to produce a match. The FBI is spending $1 billion to build a new biometric database, which will store DNA, facial recognition data, iris/retina (eye) data, fingerprints, palm prints, and other biometric data of people living in the United States. The computers running the database are contained in an underground facility about the size of two American football fields.
The Los Angeles Police Department is installing automated facial recognition and license plate recognition devices in its squad cars, and providing handheld face scanners, which officers will use to identify people while on patrol.
Facial thermographs are in development, which allow machines to identify certain emotions in people such as fear or stress, by measuring the temperature generated by blood flow to different parts of their face. Law enforcement officers believe that this has potential for them to identify when a suspect is nervous, which might indicate that they are hiding something, lying, or worried about something.
Aerial surveillance
Aerial surveillance is the gathering of surveillance, usually visual imagery or video, from an airborne vehicle—such as an unmanned aerial vehicle, helicopter, or spy plane
Digital imaging technology, miniaturized computers, and numerous other technological advances over the past decade have contributed to rapid advances in aerial surveillance hardware such as micro-aerial vehicles, forward-looking infrared, and high-resolution imagery capable of identifying objects at extremely long distances. For instance, the MQ-9 Reaper, a U.S. drone plane used for domestic operations by the Department of Homeland Security, carries cameras that are capable of identifying an object the size of a milk carton from altitudes of 60,000 feet, and has forward-looking infrared devices that can detect the heat from a human body at distances of up to 60 kilometers. In an earlier instance of commercial aerial surveillance, the Killington Mountain ski resort hired ‘eye in the sky’ aerial photography of its competitors’ parking lots to judge the success of its marketing initiatives as it developed starting in the 1950s.
HART program concept drawing from official IPTO (DARPA) official website
The United States Department of Homeland Security is in the process of testing UAVs to patrol the skies over the United States for the purposes of critical infrastructure protection, border patrol, “transit monitoring”, and general surveillance of the U.S. population. Miami-Dade police department ran tests with a vertical take-off and landing UAV from Honeywell, which is planned to be used in SWAT operations. Houston’s police department has been testing fixed-wing UAVs for use in “traffic control”.
The United Kingdom, as well, has built up a fleet of surveillance UAVs ranging from micro-aerial vehicles to full-size drones, used by police forces throughout the U.K.
In addition to their surveillance capabilities, MAVs are capable of carrying tasers for “crowd control”, or weapons for killing enemy combatants.
Programs such as the Heterogenous Aerial Reconnaissance Team program developed by DARPA have automated much of the aerial surveillance process. They have developed systems consisting of large teams drone planes that pilot themselves, automatically decide who is “suspicious” and how to go about monitoring them, coordinate their activities with other drones nearby, and notify human operators if something suspicious is occurring. This greatly increases the amount of area that can be continuously monitored, while reducing the number of human operators required. Thus a swarm of automated, self-directing drones can automatically patrol a city and track suspicious individuals, reporting their activities back to a centralized monitoring station
Data mining and profiling
Data mining is the application of statistical techniques and programmatic algorithms to discover previously unnoticed relationships within the data. Data profiling in this context is the process of assembling information about a particular individual or group in order to generate a profile — that is, a picture of their patterns and behavior. Data profiling can be an extremely powerful tool for psychological and social network analysis. A skilled analyst can discover facts about a person that they might not even be consciously aware of themselves.
Economic (such as credit card purchases) and social (such as telephone calls and emails) transactions in modern society create large amounts of stored data and records. In the past, this data was documented in paper records, leaving a “paper trail”, or was simply not documented at all. Correlation of paper-based records was a laborious process—it required human intelligence operators to manually dig through documents, which was time-consuming and incomplete, at best.
But today many of these records are electronic, resulting in an “electronic trail”. Every use of a bank machine, payment by credit card, use of a phone card, call from home, checked out library book, rented video, or otherwise complete recorded transaction generates an electronic record. Public records—such as birth, court, tax and other records—are increasily being digitized and made available online.
In addition, due to laws like CALEA, web traffic and online purchases are also available for profiling. Electronic record-keeping makes data easily collectable, storable, and accessible—so that high-volume, efficient aggregation and analysis is possible at significantly lower costs.
Information relating to many of these individual transactions is often easily available because it is generally not guarded in isolation, since the information, such as the title of a movie a person has rented, might not seem sensitive. However, when many such transactions are aggregated, they can be used to assemble a detailed profile revealing the actions, habits, beliefs, locations frequented, social connections, and preferences of the individual. This profile is then used, by programs such as ADVISE and TALON, to determine whether the person is a military, criminal, or political threat.
In addition to its own aggregation and profiling tools, the government is able to access information from third parties — for example, banks, credit companies or employers, etc. — by requesting access informally, by compelling access through the use of subpoenas or other procedures, or by purchasing data from commercial data aggregators or data brokers. The United States has spent $370 million on its 43 planned fusion centers, which are national network of surveillance centers that are located in over 30 states. The centers will collect and analyze vast amounts of data on U.S. citizens. It will get this data by consolidating personal information from sources such as state driver’s licensing agencies, hospital records, criminal records, school records, credit bureaus, banks, etc. — and placing this information in a centralized database that can be accessed from all of the centers, as well as other federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Under United States v. Miller (1976), data held by third parties is generally not subject to Fourth Amendment warrant requirements.
Corporate surveillance
Corporate surveillance is the monitoring of a person or group’s behavior by a corporation. The data collected is most often used for marketing purposes or sold to other corporations, but is also regularly shared with government agencies. It can be used as a form of business intelligence, which enables the corporation to better tailor their products and/or services to be desirable by their customers. Or the data can be sold to other corporations, so that they can use it for the aforementioned purpose. Or it can be used for direct marketing purposes, such as the targeted advertisements on Google and Yahoo, where ads are targeted to the user of the search engine by analyzing their search history and emails (if they use free webmail services), which is kept in a database.
For instance, Google, the world’s most popular search engine, stores identifying information for each web search. An IP address and the search phrase used are stored in a database for up to 18 months. Google also scans the content of emails of users of its Gmail webmail service, in order to create targeted advertising based on what people are talking about in their personal email correspondences. Google is, by far, the largest Internet advertising agency—millions of sites place Google’s advertising banners and links on their websites, in order to earn money from visitors who click on the ads. Each page containing Google advertisements adds, reads, and modifies “cookies” on each visitor’s computer.
These cookies track the user across all of these sites, and gather information about their web surfing habits, keeping track of which sites they visit, and what they do when they are on these sites. This information, along with the information from their email accounts, and search engine histories, is stored by Google to use for building a profile of the user to deliver better-targeted advertising.
According to the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute that undertake an annual quantitative survey about electronic monitoring and surveillance with approximately 300 U.S. companies, “more than one fourth of employers have fired workers for misusing e-mail and nearly one third have fired employees for misusing the Internet“.More than 40% of the companies monitor e-mail traffic of their workers, and 66% of corporations monitor Internet connections. In addition, most companies use software to block non-work related websites such as sexual or pornographic sites, game sites, social networking sites, entertainment sites, shopping sites, and sport sites. The American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute also stress that companies “tracking content, keystrokes, and time spent at the keyboard … store and review computer files … monitor the blogosphere to see what is being written about the company, and … monitor social networking sites“.Furthermore, about 30% of the companies had also fired employees for non-work related email and Internet usage such as “inappropriate or offensive language“ and ”viewing, downloading, or uploading inappropriate/offensive content“.
The United States government gains access to these databases, either by producing a warrant for it, or by simply asking. The Department of Homeland Security has openly stated that it uses data collected from consumer credit and direct marketing agencies—such as Google—for augmenting the profiles of individuals whom it is monitoring. The FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and other intelligence agencies have formed an “information-sharing” partnership with over 34,000 corporations as part of their Infragard program.
The U.S. Federal government has gathered information from grocery store “discount card” programs, which track customers’ shopping patterns and store them in databases, in order to look for “terrorists” by analyzing shoppers’ buying patterns.
Human operatives
Organizations that have enemies who wish to gather information about the groups’ members or activities face the issue of infiltration.
In addition to operatives’ infiltrating an organization, the surveilling party may exert pressure on certain members of the target organization to act as informants (i.e., to disclose the information they hold on the organization and its members).
Fielding operatives is very expensive, and for governments with wide-reaching electronic surveillance tools at their disposal the information recovered from operatives can often be obtained from less problematic forms of surveillance such as those mentioned above. Nevertheless, human infiltrators are still common today. For instance, in 2007 documents surfaced showing that the FBI was planning to field a total of 15,000 undercover agents and informants in response to an anti-terrorism directive sent out by George W. Bush in 2004 that ordered intelligence and law enforcement agencies to increase their HUMINT capabilities.
Satellite imagery
On May 25, 2007 the U.S. Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell authorized the National Applications Office (NAO) of the Department of Homeland Security to allow local, state, and domestic Federal agencies to access imagery from military intelligence satellites and aircraft sensors which can now be used to observe the activities of U.S. citizens. The satellites and aircraft sensors will be able to penetrate cloud cover, detect chemical traces, and identify objects in buildings and “underground bunkers”, and will provide real-time video at much higher resolutions than the still-images produced by programs such as Google Earth.
Identification and credentials
One of the simplest forms of identification is the carrying of credentials. Some nations have an identity card system to aid identification, whilst many, such as Britain, are considering it but face public opposition. Other documents, such as passports, driver’s licenses, library cards, banking or credit cards are also used to verify identity.
If the form of the identity card is “machine-readable”, usually using an encoded magnetic stripe or identification number (such as a Social Security number), it corroborates the subject’s identifying data. In this case it may create an electronic trail when it is checked and scanned, which can be used in profiling, as mentioned above.
RFID and geolocation devices
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tagging is the use of very small electronic devices (called “RFID tags”) which are applied to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification and tracking using radio waves. The tags can be read from several meters away. They are extremely inexpensive, costing a few cents per piece, so they can be inserted into many types of everyday products without significantly increasing the price, and can be used to track and identify these objects for a variety of purposes.
Many companies are already “tagging” their workers, who are monitored while on the job. Workers in U.K. went on general strike in protest of having themselves tagged. They felt that it was dehumanizing to have all of their movements tracked with RFID chips. Some critics have expressed fears that people will soon be tracked and scanned everywhere they go.
RFID chip pulled from new credit card
Verichip is an RFID device produced by a company called Applied Digital Solutions (ADS). Verichip is slightly larger than a grain of rice, and is injected under the skin. The injection reportedly feels similar to receiving a shot. The chip is encased in glass, and stores a “VeriChip Subscriber Number” which the scanner uses to access their personal information, via the Internet, from Verichip Inc.’s database, the “Global VeriChip Subscriber Registry”. Thousands of people have already had them inserted.
CNET News.com’s chief political correspondent, Declan McCullagh, speculated that, soon, every object that is purchased, and perhaps ID cards, will have RFID devices in them, which would respond with information about people as they walk past scanners (what type of phone they have, what type of shoes they have on, which books they are carrying, what credit cards or membership cards they have, etc.). This information will, and is, be used for identification, tracking, or targeted marketing
The Global Positioning System (GPS)
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a space-based global navigation satellite system (GNSS) that provides location and time information in all weather, anywhere on or near the Earth, where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites. It is maintained by the United States government and is freely accessible by anyone with a GPS receiver with some technical limitations which are only removed for military users.
The GPS project was developed in 1973 to overcome the limitations of previous navigation systems, integrating ideas from several predecessors, including a number of classified engineering design studies from the 1960s. GPS was created and realized by the U.S. Department of Defense (USDOD) and was originally run with 24 satellites. It became fully operational in 1994.
In addition to GPS, other systems are in use or under development. The Russian GLObal NAvigation Satellite System (GLONASS) was in use by only the Russian military, until it was made fully available to civilians in 2007. There are also the planned European Union Galileo positioning system, Chinese Compass navigation system, and Indian Regional Navigational Satellite System.
Basic concept of GPS
A GPS receiver calculates its position by precisely timing the signals sent by GPS satellites high above the Earth. Each satellite continually transmits messages that include
• the time the message was transmitted
• precise orbital information (the ephemeris)
• the general system health and rough orbits of all GPS satellites (the almanac).
The receiver uses the messages it receives to determine the transit time of each message and computes the distance to each satellite. These distances along with the satellites’ locations are used with the possible aid of trilateration, depending on which algorithm is used, to compute the position of the receiver. This position is then displayed, perhaps with a moving map display or latitude and longitude; elevation information may be included. Many GPS units show derived information such as direction and speed, calculated from position changes.
Three satellites might seem enough to solve for position since space has three dimensions and a position near the Earth’s surface can be assumed. However, even a very small clock error multiplied by the very large speed of light— the speed at which satellite signals propagate — results in a large positional error. Therefore, receivers use four or more satellites to solve for the receiver’s location and time. The very accurately computed time is effectively hidden by most GPS applications, which use only the location. A few specialized GPS applications do however use the time; these include time transfer, traffic signal timing, and synchronization of cell phone base stations.
Although four satellites are required for normal operation, fewer apply in special cases. If one variable is already known, a receiver can determine its position using only three satellites. For example, a ship or aircraft may have known elevation. Some GPS receivers may use additional clues or assumptions (such as reusing the last known altitude, dead reckoning, inertial navigation, or including information from the vehicle computer) to give a less accurate (degraded) position when fewer than four satellites are visible.
In the U.S.,federal agencies and local police have planted hidden GPS tracking devices in people’s vehicles to monitor their movements, without a warrant. In early 2009, they were arguing in court that they have the right to do this.
Several cities are running pilot projects to require parolees to wear GPS devices to track their movements when they get out of prison.
Postal services
As more people use faxes and e-mail the significance of surveilling the postal system is decreasing, in favor of Internet and telephone surveillance. But interception of post is still an available option for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, in certain circumstances.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation have performed twelve separate mail-opening campaigns targeted towards U.S. citizens. In one of these programs, more than 215,000 communications were intercepted, opened, and photographed.
It should also be noted that the USPS now scans all mail submitted for delivery. This includes letters and packages of all kinds. The scanned mail information, now obligatory, is sent on a daily basis to the FBI for storage so that whenever the Bureau wants to know about mail sendings and deliveries for an individual, their files will show what was sent, and what was delivered to a specific address and who the sender was.

The Season of Evil
by Gregory Douglas

Preface
This is in essence a work of fiction, but the usual disclaimers notwithstanding, many of the horrific incidents related herein are based entirely on factual occurrences.
None of the characters or the events in this telling are invented and at the same time, none are real. And certainly, none of the participants could be considered by any stretch of the imagination to be either noble, self-sacrificing, honest, pure of motive or in any way socially acceptable to anything other than a hungry crocodile, a professional politician or a tax collector.
In fact, the main characters are complex, very often unpleasant, destructive and occasionally, very entertaining.
To those who would say that the majority of humanity has nothing in common with the characters depicted herein, the response is that mirrors only depict the ugly, evil and deformed things that peer into them
There are no heroes here, only different shapes and degrees of villains and if there is a moral to this tale it might well be found in a sentence by Jonathan Swift, a brilliant and misanthropic Irish cleric who wrote in his ‘Gulliver’s Travels,”
“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most odious race of little pernicious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
Swift was often unkind in his observations but certainly not inaccurate.

Frienze, Italy
July 2018-August 2019

                          Chapter 20

Connie the Manageress always allowed the decayed author to stay free in one of the units she managed when he was on a tour, and she was delighted to observe that the Master, as she called him, was interested in her sixteen year old niece with whom she had been burdened when her brother and sister-in-law had been convicted of drug offenses.
When she had casually informed her British visitor that one of her tenants was apparently well connected and certainly a man of means, Tolliver had indeed become very interested. Another member of the Inner Circle was always welcome and no one joined that elevated society unless they had money.
Although Chuck went to some trouble to avoid the man whom he personally considered an unbalanced fanatic, he was unable to entirely escape the machinations of the redoubtable Connie.
Several nights later, she and her friend appeared at the door just after Chuck had finished his dinner and was showing Lars how to operate the complex dishwasher.
Tolliver was tall and stooped, with dyed black hair, a large nose and sagging chin wattles. He was wearing a cheap blue blazer with some kind of school tie that looked like something one would find in a book on skin diseases. Baggy flannel slacks and suede loafers with fancy tassels completed his wardrobe.
The author had the habit of sucking on his upper plate while looking around furtively, no doubt searching for hidden microphones or ninja assassins hiding in closets.
“Mr. Tolliver, please let me introduce Mr. O’Rourke!”
She was wearing a bright ruby-hued dress with incredible décolletage. If she leaned over, Chuck thought, someone could probably milk her. She did look somewhat like an abandoned dairy to his particular eye and the Englishman looked like a hairdresser trying very hard to be masculine but without much real success.
Chuck shook the large, damp hand without enthusiasm.
“I’m pleased to meet you.” He was not and he was less pleased when his visitors sat down in his living room on the white leather sofa.
“My friend tells me your father is in Congress,” Tolliver began. He had an annoying habit of looking over the top of his half-glasses when he spoke and gave the impression of a high school biology teacher inspecting a very dead frog destined to be dissected by a queasy tenth grade neophyte biologist.
“Yes, he is. Actually, my step-father.”
He did not sit down but stood behind a chair facing them and rested his hands on the back.
“Constance tells me that you might find my lecture interesting. I am going to speak to a gathering of students at De Anza College tomorrow night and perhaps you might like to attend. Tickets are most reasonable but since you are a friend of Constance, I will give you two passes. One for your friend of course.”
Lars was watching them from the kitchen without much enthusiasm. The dishwasher was making enough noise to drown out the conversation and when Tolliver nodded and smiled at him, he smiled back out of reflex.
There was a tentative, soft knocking at the door which no one but Lars heard so he opened it to discover the niece with her hand raised to knock again.
She looked considerably younger than sixteen, something that immediately drew Lars’ interest and he graciously opened the door and stood to one side as she came in.
“Hi,” she said in a timid voice, “my aunt Connie is in here and I was supposed to come over. My name is Gwenneth but people call me Gwen.”
“And my name,” said a suddenly activated Lars, “is Eric and you can call me anything but late to dinner.”
She giggled and he admired. She had nice legs but was somewhat underdeveloped elsewhere which may have caused her some embarrassment at the swimming pool but absolutely delighted both Lars and Eric.
“Is that you dear?” queried her aunt in a hoarse voice, “come on in and join us.”
It proved to be a thoroughly unpleasant encounter for Chuck who had gone to some pains to adjust himself to Lars’ aberrations and had neither intention nor desire to add to the collection.
Tolliver went on about his Real Truth, his many enemies and his hope for final victory when the Eloy would come into their own and cast the dark demons, and their allies, into some sort of a bottomless pit.
It took several intent glances at his watch, two wide-jawed yawns to set the stage for the statement that the scion of government had to arise early to buy a new car.
Even then, Tolliver stood in the entrance hall and kept waving his hands about like an Italian tenor for another twenty minutes.
With the door closed behind the trick or treat crowd, Chuck made an obscene gesture at it.
“Jesus H. Christ, Lars, don’t ever let those assholes back in here. The older ones suffer from mental constipation and verbal diarrhea and the niece is a giggling twit and don’t think I didn’t notice your manly erection when you were goggling at her. I’m really surprised you didn’t have at her right on the dining room table.”
Lars’ face became a deep red.
“I can’t help myself, Chuck. She really turned me on. I’d like to…”
“Oh no,” said Chuck as he put the chain on the door, “I have no interest in your perverse lust. We agreed you would keep your thoughts to yourself, didn’t we?”
“What if I see her by the pool? Do you want me to be rude and ignore her?”
“No, but don’t grope her or let your trouser snake peek out from the edge of your trunks. I told you before to watch it, didn’t I? Look, you want to look at farms and I have agreed to go along with this. At the end of the week, I’m going to buy a very expensive cross between a truck and a van so we can take a pleasant trip back to jar head country. Keep it in your pants until then, OK?”
Lars shrugged.
“OK, I will.”
But he didn’t and the results were completely unexpected.
While Chuck was alternately pouring over road maps, checking AAA travel guides and making the rounds of various car dealerships, Lars spent a good deal of his spare time hanging around the pool area where he knew his new interest could occasionally be found, the top of her swim suit discreetly enhanced with small pieces of Styrofoam. She had tried handkerchiefs but they got wet, lost their bulk and contributed nothing to the desired effect.
Lars could be very subtle when on the hunt and his encounters with Gwen were often and seemingly accidental.
While her aunt was extolling the fame of Mr. Tolliver, she found him to be unattractive and very boring. Lars, on the other hand, was a splendid sight in his swimming briefs and she began to fantasize about what he looked like without them.
Theirs was a relationship comprised entirely of needs unfulfilled but greatly anticipated.
The accidental encounters in the pool increased in frequency and growing intensity so that within three days, they had arrived at the point where both, by mutual consent, were considering waiting until the pool lights were turned off at midnight and immersing themselves in the liquid darkness for experimentation and fulfillment.
Tolliver, dimly aware that his budding prize was losing interest in him, began to maintain vigils near the pool and, if he saw the laughing and fumbling pair in the water, would complain loudly to his hostess.
She, ever eager to serve the Master and share Discipline with him, began to berate her ungrateful niece, pointing out to her that while Lars certainly was very good looking, Mr. Tolliver was an Important man and one to pay attention to.
Connie became shrill and hectoring because her gardener lover had fled the complex and was now working for an Asian gardening firm.
She missed his sweating body and its absence drove her to seek other pleasures of a less acceptable nature.
It was Connie who suddenly changed her outward attitude, openly encouraging her increasingly hormonal niece in her new interests. It took very little to convince the girl that Connie was her real friend and that perhaps she could help her achieve her bubbling desires.
Perhaps, she told the girl, she and her friend Mr. Tolliver, could bring the couple together and help them both achieve what both so obviously and frantically wanted.
Gwen, who had little experience with sex other than to occasionally watch her mother having sexual encounters when her father was off selling drugs, was more than willing to cooperate with her Medusa of an aunt and so it came about that on a warm Autumn evening when Chuck was absent in San Francisco inspecting cars the four of them had what appeared to be a spontaneously friendly meeting in Chuck’s apartment.
Lars was too besotted with his new prey to be overly suspicious and when, after a few drinks, an interesting tableau was suggested by Tolliver, he could see the immediate possibility of consummating his lust albeit with the aid of others. Eric had a certain amount of exhibitionism intermingled with his other sterling qualities and so when Tolliver jokingly suggested that the pair might like to participate in a Discipline session, he viewed this as an interesting variation on an ancient theme.
Tolliver had been plying his intended victims with a special concoction he called the ‘Virgin’s Downfall’ and which consisted of two hundred proof vodka mixed with orange juice. The trick was to start out with a very little vodka and a great deal of orange juice, gradually reversing the mixture until the desired effect of numb weightlessness had been achieved. Two pair of handcuffs, his whip, a video camera, gags, some nylon rope and a jar of cold cream were on hand in a frayed piece of aircraft carryon luggage and underneath his blazer and flannels, he was wearing leather briefs that were cut high to compress his flabby stomach.
His co-conspirator was similarly attired under her print summer dress and as the evening wore on, Connie spent more and more time staring at Lars’ crotch with the same thoughts entertained by her now befuddled niece.

(Continued)

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