Surveillance Society - Final Warning

“The false security of a surveillance society threatens to turn our country into a place where individuals are constantly susceptible to being trapped by data errors or misinterpretations, illegal use of information by rogue government workers, abuses by political leaders – or perhaps most insidiously, expanded legal uses of information for all kinds of new purposes. It threatens to worsen the imbalance of power between the weak and the strong, and the government and the people, and have an enormous chilling effect on our open society where citizens have always lived secure in the knowledge that the government will leave them alone if they’re not involved in wrongdoing.” - ACLU: Even Bigger, Even Weaker report 2007.

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Don’t Taze Me Bro… TTZZZ

Whenever I see cases of police belligerance and brutality it shocks me. When such officers are brought to justice they seem to get away with murder – in many cases literally, the senior officers never condemn their behaviour and in many cases they go back on duty after ‘disciplinary’ rather than legal charges. Police violence is becoming increasingly acceptable to a generally naïve public who can’t see where it’s leading.

Tasers are now being considered for use in the UK – and they won’t be brought out only when a person is suspected of being armed. They will become a normal part of police powers to be used with the officers’ ‘discretion’. In our country there is a strong resistance to police powers – e.g., ‘I am going to continue to go about my business unless you arrest me’ and that is going to conflict strongly with police officers’ instincts towards controlling a situation by ordering people about at the end of a taser gun and which they are doing far more often now that many of them have firearms. A person has a right to ask why they are being ordered about before complying - questionning orders is an essential control against a police state. However, police officers tend not to see it that way.

I certainly wouldn’t argue with a police officer who has a gun, whereas I used to know my rights and would face down an officers attempts to control me confident that I am a law-abiding person: ‘Arrest me or I’m going to continue about my business’. Police should maintain order by initially upholding the law, as they are trained to do, rather than by attempting to directly control situations which they are trained to do as a last resort. That has been turned on its head and we are now on the road towards a police state where officers rush into situations with the sense that they are there to control rather than uphold the law - the law itself should be used in order to provide the necessary degree of public order.

With a taser on the belt the sense of police confidence and control will have the upper hand so that it becomes possible to make the challenge ‘stand still or I will shock you, don’t walk away or I will shock you’ rather than ‘I am arresting you for xxx, if you resist with violence then I may shock you’. This is increasingly the case in the US where control has become the norm for police rather than maintaining the rule of law, e.g. Fouad Kaady, and only the other day the incident at the John Kerry talk which I guess is now sub-judice, and this: Man tasered while handcuffed to hospital bed in order to insert a catheter. Tasers and other violent ‘non-lethal’ but nevertheless often lethal weaponry are taking us all down a one-way slope towards submitting to the police instincts of controlling the public’s every move rather than upholding the rule of law. It may only be a small number of officers who engage in unnecessary violence in order to directly control a situation where no crime has been committed but acceptance of ’shoot first then ask questions later’ leads to a powerful change of culture. Government officials in the US and UK seem to be doing nothing to stop it. The rule of law must prevail, not state control.

False Flag: Unthinkable, Hypocritical, Fascist, but true?

“This isn’t about party, it isn’t about Bush Bashing. It’s about our country, our constitution, and our future. … Your countrymen have been murdered and the more you delve into it the more it looks as though they were murdered by our government, who used it as an excuse to murder other people thousands of miles away.” -Lt. Col. Shelton F. Lankford, U.S. Marine Corps (ret).

The more I read about the 9/11 truth movement the more convinced I am that the US government has to answer some serious questions or be put on trial. If there turns out to be truth in the idea that 9/11 was an inside job then all the world’s citizens need to be asking themselves what to do about it.

The internet is the biggest tool we have against state power and control. How long before some ‘terrorist act’ or ’state of emergency’ either wipes out the internet or provides and excuse to close it down. We are coming close to a time when the machiavellian in this world are about to be outed - and they are going to find extreme machiavellian ways to prevent this and to maintain the hierarchical order that they benefit from. In fact governments are already working on ways to keep us all in our place: Total Information Awareness is aimed at this role (see my post Social Network Analysis and Thought Crime)

I will not be surprised if by 2015 there is a state of emergency in the US - under which a fascist state eventually takes over (if that’s not already happening). I will eat my words if this doesn’t happen but all the evidence I see indicates to me that the US government is going to take more and more extreme actions in the face of: global energy depletion, global resource and ecological depletion, a need for global depopulation, growing citizen empowerment and peer to peer communication which governments find hard to control and threatening to power, the fragility of urbanisation, etc, etc.

Social Network Analysis and Thought Crime

If you think that the ‘war on terror’ couldn’t get any worse then think again. The rise in the use of social network analysis will soon permit governments to predict everything about your behaviour. Social network analysis (combined with neural network artificial intelligence) is basically self-organising principles turned into a tool of the state. This means that the war on terror (i.e., the war on all dissent) will enable the state to control your every move.

The way it works is complex but in simple terms looks like this: Mining data about people’s habits and associations in the form of telecommunications data, financial transaction data, and demographics (among many other categories) allows a government to predict through Social Network Analysis (SNA) the behaviour of individuals which threaten it through terrorism or other subversion of state power. This technique is much more likely to be used against activists and dissenters because the state knows that these people are the real threat against it.

If that doesn’t sound alarming enough then the following example ought to get your attention: A self-organising cell-like network of activists are planning a campaign. Security services obtain the telephone call records for one of the members of the group due to earlier analysis of members of another group. These show connections with 100 others who are also politically affiliated with various causes. A few happen to be extremists and a potential conspiracy is asserted. A court is persuaded to serve a warrant to obtain other records. The agents then put the financial transactions and all other information held in official records, such as arrests at protests, into the analysis. From the aggregation of the most innocuous details (e.g. grocery bill this week combined with a visit to the library) SNA and AI makes an inference that this person’s behaviour is similar to that of known terrorists. Hence, an individual’s intentions can be predicted long before the person engages in any identifiable criminal act. This is a powerful tool against true terrorism - but it is also a powerful tool of state repression. Total Information Awareness can therefore be achieved in a way that not only supports defence applications but which also makes Big Brother a reality. When the state begins to argue for checking up on otherwise innocent people (clean skins) because their ‘profile is suspect’ in some way such as ‘indicates a strong propensity towards criminality’, then Big Brother will have come of age. This stuff is still in its infancy and it needs to be stopped now before we all become prisoners of the state.

However, things may already be worse than they seem. Using SNA and AI it is possible that security services have already uncovered otherwise highly private groups of activists and dissenters and inserted themselves into those organisations at key nodes. Thus it is entirely possible that dissenting movements are already being controlled and emasculated by governments.

In other words state control may have already started and in time it could become absolute; Total Information Awareness is a distinct likelihood. Thought crime could be predicted and corrected without the subject even knowing about it. If you are an activist or campaigner working against the state and the corporations that support it then you need to consider getting yourself off the records as much as possible - although, due to the insidious power of social network analysis you will never be entirely out of their gaze: They will know that there is someone with certain characteristics at certain locations and will focus resources on finding out who they are and what their intentions are. In time these processes will become very cheap so that the state will find it irresistible to use them ubiquitously. However, there are things you can do:

Use cash for any transactions related to your activism - travel costs and subsistence. Although even transactions not related to activism will have some predictive power. However, the fact that you withdraw cash will also provide predictive power so try to randomise your patterns. Better still work entirely in cash and don’t use a bank account - although this will also ring alarm bells for them.

Have an anonymous mobile phone to use in association with your activism and only use it in towns other than your home town. TURN IT OFF before travelling home. However, as above even your home telephone will give some useful data that too can be predictive of your behaviour.

Don’t use a car - number plate recognition is now ubiquitous. Don’t use your own computer - use an internet cafe (vary the location) and use a different alias and password for every site that you use or they’ll soon build up a picture of you as a person of interest.

Campaign against identity cards. Get off the electoral roll if you are on it. Don’t engage with the government - e.g. social security, health, etc etc. In other words, disconnect from the system as much as possible. All that data is very useful in predicting your behaviour and correcting it Winston Smith.