From
Derailing Democracy:
The America the Media Don’t Want You to See
by David McGowan:
Face recognition systems
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“The revolution in urban surveillance will reach the next generation of control once reliable face recognition comes in. In fact, an American company, Software and Systems, has trialed a system in London which can scan crowds and match faces against a database of images held in a remote computer.”
Scientific and Technological Options Assessment (STOA)
“An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control”
September 1998
http://cryptome.org/stoa-atpc.htm
“People don’t quite get it yet... soon there will be computer files of facial images, and when you walk in [a building], your face will be instantly scanned by the computer, so you’ll be recognized by name. All these devices can be linked together and allow police to spy in real time...”
— Marc Rotenberg
head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center
quoted in Rolling Stone #819
August 1999
“Technologically, facial recognition is fairly cutting edge, but the concept behind it is really quite simple. Each person’s facial features from the eyes to the jaw are shaped and positioned in subtly different ways. The software is trained to measure spatial relationships among facial features and to convert that information into a mathematical map of the face...
“While humans might be easily fooled by changed facial hair or glasses, the computer sees through those things... Likewise, an aging suspect is not a problem, because even as a person sprouts wrinkles or gains weight, the basic facial features don’t change all that much.”
Congressional Quarterly, Inc.
“The Digital Mugshot”
“A small New Hampshire company that wants to build a national database of driver’s license photographs received nearly $1.5 million in federal funds and technical assistance from the U.S. Secret Service last year, according to documents and interviews with officials involved in the project...
“As the company lobbied to gain access to motor vehicle files, officials apparently told few people about its ties to the Secret Service or the money it received from Congress. State legislators, motor vehicle administrators and others who worked with the company said in interviews they had no inkling that federal officials might be involved.”
Washington Post
February 18, 1999
Gait identification system
“A new security system being developed in Britain can identify individuals by the unique way in which they walk. Unlike faces and irises, someone’s gait can be spotted from a great distance with low-resolution cameras and so be observed from just about any angle. It is also very difficult to mask...”
New Scientist
“Tripped Up: Watch How You Walk, You May Incriminate Yourself”
December 4, 1999
http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19991204/newsstory3.htm
DNA fingerprinting
“[The] FBI and each of the 50 states are building an interlinked computerized database that already has a backlog of 1 million blood and tissue samples taken from crime scenes and convicted offenders... Attorney General Janet Reno is calling for DNA fingerprinting of everyone arrested in the United States, potentially as many as 15 million people a year.”
— Paul DeRienzo and Joan Moossy
“Gene Cops”
In These Times
December 1999
Motor vehicle tracking
“Similarly, Vehicle Recognition Systems have been developed which can identify a car number plate then track the car around a city using a computerised geographic information system. Such systems are now commercially available.”
Scientific and Technological Options Assessment (STOA)
“An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control”
September 1998
http://cryptome.org/stoa-atpc.htm
“Receivers for Global Positioning System satellites will become a feature in every new car’s navigation system, perhaps allowing a system ‘hacker’ to track your whereabouts to a centimeter’s accuracy.”
San Jose Mercury News
July 1, 1996
Surveillance drones
“In the skies above cities will soon appear some tiny, pilotless aircraft that might be mistaken for model airplanes. They’re not. Inside will be high-resolution cameras that can make out small objects from hundreds of yards, infrared detectors that can see in the dark — and maybe even chemical sensors that can pinpoint drugs in the area... And they’re just one small ripple in the wave of the future. Across the country police agencies are extending the long arm of the law by using eerily invasive high technology to speed the work of catching crooks, tracking stolen goods and snooping on suspected wrongdoers.”
The Wall Street Journal
December 12, 1990
See also:
http://www.reptilianagenda.com/img/i101899b.html
The above page (about the middle of it) provides photographs of three models of U.S. military surveillance drones — named “Dragon Drone UAV”, “Dragon Warrior”, and “Dragon Eye”.
Cell-phone location tracking
“In Japan, cell phones are used to track the precise whereabouts of their users (the software lets you punch in someone’s phone number and gives back his location, even the floor he’s on). A locational capacity is coming soon to American cell phones by order of the Federal Communications Commission.”
— William Greider
“The Cyberscare Of ’99”
Rolling Stone #819
August 1999
“Law enforcement officials with a judge’s order will be able to determine the general location of wireless phone callers under new standards adopted Friday by the Federal Communications Commission. Privacy advocates criticized the action, charging that the FCC has compromised people’s privacy by allowing law enforcement officials to use mobile phones as tracking devices.”
San Jose Mercury News
August 28, 1999
Visual surveillance satellites
“The official anti-missile (SDI) scheme calls for a constellation of surveillance satellites (Brilliant Eyes), watching for fiery rocket plumes, the telltale indicator of an enemy launch... In the unofficial version, much of which has been invented in Livermore (a U.S. government laboratory in California), the Eyes will be equipped with radar, lasers, telescopes, antennae and sensors to allow military commanders to see practically every square foot of Earth — and analyze that information instantly.”
San Jose Mercury News
August 2, 1992
Wiretapping
“Without debate or notice, U.S. lawmakers...approved a proposal (House Resolution 3694) long sought by the FBI that would dramatically expand wiretapping authority — an idea Congress openly rejected three years ago. The provision, allowing law enforcement agencies more easily to tap any telephone used by or near a targeted individual instead of getting authorization to tap specific phones, was added to the Intelligence Authorization conference report during a closed-door meeting...”
Reuters
October 8, 1998
HR 3694 was signed into law by President Clinton October 20, 1999, becoming Public Law #105-272.[2]
“[T]he 1994 Communications Assistance in Law Enforcement Act (CALEA)...gave the FBI extraordinary power to demand that telephone companies rebuild their networks to make wiretapping easier.”
The CATO Institute
“The Federal Communications Commission on Friday approved a series of telephone industry standards aimed at bringing law enforcement wiretaps into the Digital Age... The FCC will require telecommunications companies to provide six of nine new surveillance capabilities that have been on the ‘wish list’ of the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation... phone companies will have to equip their cellular towers to allow court-authorized traces of cellular phone calls. They also will have to equip their services so that wiretaps can be made of conference calls... The FCC order implements the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.”
Los Angeles Times
August 28, 1999
Project Echelon
“Australia has become the first country openly to admit that it takes part in a global electronic surveillance system... The disclosure is made today...by Martin Brady, director of the Defence Signals Directorate in Canberra. Mr. Brady’s decision to break ranks and officially admit the existence of a hitherto unacknowledged spying organisation called UKUSA is likely to irritate his British and American counterparts...
“Together with the giant American National Security Agency (NSA) and its Canadian, British, and New Zealand counterparts, DSD operates a network of giant, highly automated tracking stations that illicitly pick up commercial satellite communications and examine every fax, telex, e-mail, phone call, or computer data message that the satellites carry...
“Information is also fed into the Echelon system from taps on the Internet, and by means of monitoring pods which are placed on undersea cables. Since 1971, the U.S. has used specially converted nuclear submarines to attach tapping pods to deep underwater cables around the world.”
The Age
“Careful, They Might Hear You”
May 23, 1999
Data warehouses
“Twenty-four hours a day, Acxiom electronically gathers and sorts information on about 196 million Americans. Credit card transactions and magazine subscriptions. Telephone numbers and real estate records. Car registrations and fishing licenses. Consumer surveys and demographic details.”
Washington Post
March 8, 1998
explaining the functioning of the nation’s largest data warehouse
“In a flash, data warehouses can assemble electronic dossiers that give marketers, insurers and in some cases law enforcement a stunningly clear look into your needs, lifestyle and spending habits.”
Washington Post
March 8, 1998
“The number of data warehouses...now exceeds 1,000, a tenfold increase in five years... Analysts at the META Group estimate that the money spent on building and maintaining data warehouses will increase from about $2 billion in 1995 to more than $10 billion in the year 2000.”
Washington Post
March 8, 1998
National ID cards
“[The national ID card will have a] magnetic strip on it in which the bearer’s unique voice, retina pattern, or fingerprint is digitally encoded.”
— Senator Dianne Feinstein
(D) California
author of the national ID law
“[A]fter October 1, 2000, Federal agencies may only accept as proof of identity driver’s licenses that conform to standards developed by the Secretary of the Treasury.”
Public Law 104-208, Part B, Title IV, Section 656
Cyber surveillance
“The Microsoft Corporation moved to defuse a potentially explosive privacy issue today, saying it would modify a feature of its Windows 98 operating system that has been quietly used to create a vast database of personal information about computer users...[which] could result in the ability to track a single user and the documents he created across vast computer networks... subpoenas might allow authorities to gain access to information that would otherwise remain private and unavailable.”
New York Times
March 7, 1999
“[T]he serial number embedded in each new Pentium III will enable online marketers, even governments, to track computer users’ movements on the Internet...”
New York Times
February 19, 1999
(Intel officials claim that this feature is no longer active on their chips, a stance they took only after the ID feature was publicized in the mainstream media.)
“It would be beneficial for Internet service providers to capture and retain Caller ID data on persons accessing ISP lines. The capturing of Caller ID data will greatly assist law enforcement...”
— FBI Director Louis Freeh
speaking before a Senate Subcommittee, 1998
“The Clinton Administration has developed a plan for an extensive computer monitoring system, overseen by the Federal Bureau of Investigation... The plan calls for the creation of a Federal Intrusion Detection Network, or Fidnet, and specifies that the data it collects will be gathered at the National Infrastructure Protection Center, an interagency task force housed at the Federal Bureau of Investigation... it would put a new and powerful tool into the hands of the FBI.”
New York Times
July 28, 1999
“The Justice Department wants to make it easier for law enforcement authorities to obtain search warrants to secretly enter a suspect’s home or office and disable security on personal computers as a prelude to a wiretap or further search, according to documents and interviews with Clinton administration officials. In a request set to go to Capitol Hill, the Justice Department will ask lawmakers to authorize covert action...”
Los Angeles Times
August 20, 1999
See-through-walls surveillance
“Three high-tech labs are in the final stages of developing a new form of radar device that can see through walls by broadcasting radio signals across broad bands of the spectrum to pinpoint a hidden suspect... [Raytheon] promises MARS [Motion and Ranging Sensor] will spot a lurking fugitive 100 feet away. That kind of range — achieved by adapting military missile guidance technology — is enough to find someone hiding two stories up inside a building...
“Raytheon’s Motion and Ranging Sensor system scientists at Georgia Tech are working on [another] system — a lightweight through-the-wall radar system that fits inside a flashlight... ‘We’re trying to reach every policeman on the beat,’ said Gene Greneker, the scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute who developed the radar flashlight... The demand for these products is high, and the National Institute of Justice has placed through-the-wall surveillance at the top of its scientific funding priority list for the past two years.”
Sightings
“New X-Ray Vision Will Let Cops See Through Walls”
July 21, 1999
Related pages
America’s Techno-Fascist Future
Domestic Oppression in America
Taking Action Against American Terrorism
Bibliography
Snitch Culture:
How Citizens Are Turned Into the Eyes and Ears of the State
by Jim Redden
published by: Feral House
Thanks to misused computer technology, we are now living in a surveillance society far more insidious and pervasive than anything George Orwell could have imagined. Officials from both political parties of the United States government have spent decades building a vast domestic intelligence network to track every man, woman and child from birth to death.
“There is no war on crime. There is no war on drugs, no war on terrorism. There is only the ongoing effort by the federal government to collect as much information on as many people as possible.”
— Jim Redden
“Redden traces the history of the snitch’s role in surveillance, from its birth in the corporation (with Alan Pinkerton) to its growth in government spying efforts (COINTELPRO, for example) and its current omnipresence (there are tip-off [telephone] lines even for elementary kids).
“The author also provides case studies that illustrate how snitches have ruined the lives of innocent people. Snitch Culture... succeeds as a comprehensive study of malevolent tactics employed by the government and the private sector.”
— Rachael Rakes
review in The Progressive
August 2001
Derailing Democracy:
The America the Media Don’t Want You to See
by David McGowan
War At Home:
Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It
by Brian Glick
Body of Secrets:
Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
by James Bamford
In 1962, U.S. military leaders had a top-secret plan for committing terrorist attacks on Americans in Miami and Washington D.C., while blaming Cuba. Codenamed “Operation Northwoods”, the plan was intended to provide the propaganda necessary to create popular support for an invasion of Cuba.
Censored 2000:
The Year’s Top 25 Censored Stories
by Peter Phillips & Project Censored
Pirates and Emperors, Old and New:
International Terrorism in the Real World
by Noam Chomsky
Against Empire
by Michael Parenti
The Beast Reawakens
by Martin A. Lee
What Uncle Sam Really Wants
by Noam Chomsky
The Sword and the Dollar:
Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race
by Michael Parenti
The Hidden Persuaders:
What makes us buy, believe – and even vote – the way we do?
by Vance Packard
Deadly Deceits:
My 25 years in the CIA
by Ralph W. McGehee
The Weapons of American State Terrorism
Surveillance