Michael — The Economic Collapse May 9, 2013

What do speed traps, parking tickets, toll roads, speed cameras and red light cameras all have in common?  They are all major revenue sources for state and local governments.  All over America today there are state and local governments that are drowning in debt.  Many have chosen to use “traffic enforcement” as a way to raise desperately needed revenue.  According to the National Motorist Association, issuing speeding tickets raises somewhere between 4.5 billion and 6 billion dollars in the United States each year.  And the average price of a speeding ticket just keeps going up.  Today, the national average is about $150, but in many jurisdictions it is far higher.  For example, more than 16 million traffic tickets are issued in the state of California each year, and the average fine is approximately $250.  If you are wealthy that may not be much of a problem, but if you are a family that is barely scraping by every month that can be a major financial setback.  Meanwhile, America’s roads are also being systematically transformed into a surveillance grid.  The number of cameras watching our roads is absolutely exploding, and automated license plate readers are capturing hundreds of millions of data points on all of us.  As you drive down the highway, a police vehicle coming up behind you can instantly read your license plate and pull up a whole host of information about you.  This happened to me a few years ago.  I had pulled on to a very crowded highway in Virginia and within less than a minute a cop car had scanned me and was pulling me over because one of my stickers had expired.  But these automated license plate readers are being used for far more than just traffic enforcement now.  For example, officials in Washington D.C. are now using automated license plate readers to track the movements of every single vehicle that enters the city.  They know when you enter Washington, and they know when you leave.  So where is all of this headed?  Do we really want to live in a “Big Brother” society where the government constantly tracks all of our movements?

Back in the old days, the highways of America were great examples to the rest of the world of the tremendous liberties and freedoms that we enjoyed.  Americans loved to hop into their vehicles and take a drive.  But now government is sucking all of the fun out of driving.  The control freak bureaucrats that dominate our political system have figured out that giant piles of money can be raised by turning our roads into revenue raising tools.

At this point things have gotten so bad that even some police officers are admitting what is going on.  Just check out what a few of them told Car and Driver…

The president of a state police union isn’t pretending it doesn’t happen. James Tignanelli, president of the Police Officers Association of Michigan union, says, “When elected officials say, ‘We need more money,’ they can’t look to the department of public works to raise revenues, so where do they find it? Police departments.

“A lot of police chiefs will tell you the goal is to have nobody speeding through their community, but heaven forbid if it should actually happen—they’d be out of money,” Tignanelli says.

Police Chief Michael Reaves of Utica, Michigan, says the role of law enforcement has changed over the years. “When I first started in this job 30 years ago, police work was never about revenue enhancement, but if you’re a chief now, you have to look at whether your department produces revenues,” he says. “That’s just the reality nowadays.”

And as the economy has gone downhill, many jurisdictions have massively jacked up traffic fines.  According to the Los Angeles Times, various traffic fines in the Los Angeles area are far higher than they once were…

If you’re caught running a red light in Los Angeles, be prepared to shell out $446, up from $271 eight years ago. Make a rolling right turn at a stoplight and the ticket comes to $381 — more than double what it cost in 2008.

And of course the cost to the driver does not end with the ticket.  Your car insurance will likely go up as well.  In fact, one study found that a driver that just gets one speeding ticket will pay an additional 20 percent for car insurance for the next three to six years.

That can add up to a lot of money.

But politicians just keep wanting to find a way to issue even more tickets.  One of the hottest trends all over the country is to automate the issuing of traffic tickets by installing cameras.  According to USA Today, this has become a huge growth industry…

Sales of the cameras have nearly quadrupled since companies moved to digital and wireless technology in the mid-2000s. The number of local contracts for cameras was up to 689 last year, from 155 in 2005, according to industry data complied by market leader American Traffic Solutions (ATS).

And these automated traffic cameras can raise an enormous amount of cash.  Just check out what has been happening in Washington D.C.…

The speeding and traffic light cameras have become more lucrative as their number in the District has increased. Combined, they issued tickets valued at $24.4 million in 2007. That figure more than doubled by 2010, to $50.9 million, and it reached $84.9 million in the last fiscal year.

But as annoying as those traffic cameras are, automated license plate readers are perhaps even more insidious.

The amount of data that these automated license plate readers are capturing is astounding.  The following is from a recent article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation…

Photographing a single license plate one time on a public city street may not seem problematic, but when that data is put into a database, combined with other scans of that same plate on other city streets, and stored forever, it can become very revealing. Information about your location over time can show not only where you live and work, but your political and religious beliefs, your social and sexual habits, your visits to the doctor, and your associations with others. And, according to recent research reported in Nature, it’s possible to identify 95% of individuals with as few as four randomly selected geospatial datapoints (location + time), making location data the ultimate biometric identifier.

Our license plates have essentially become “our papers” which the government can read whenever it would like without even asking for our permission.

According to L.A. Weekly, local police agencies in the L.A. area have captured more than 160 million data points on private citizens using these automated license plate readers…

L.A. Weekly has learned that more than two dozen law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County are using hundreds of these “automatic license plate recognition” devices (LPRs) — units about the size of a paperback book, usually mounted atop police cruisers — to devour data on every car that catches their electronic eye.

The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and the Los Angeles Police Department are two of the biggest gatherers of automatic license plate recognition information. Local police agencies have logged more than 160 million data points — a massive database of the movements of millions of drivers in Southern California.

Each data point represents a car and its exact whereabouts at a given time. Police have already conducted, on average, some 22 scans for every one of the 7,014,131 vehicles registered in L.A. County.

As the use of these devices becomes more widespread and they become even more sophisticated, eventually the government will know where almost all of us are and what almost all of us are doing at all times.

The following is a brief except from a Washington Post article that detailed how automated license plate readers are now being used to create a “dragnet” that will track the movements of all vehicles from the time that they enter Washington D.C. to the time that they leave…

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.

This is just the beginning.

For now, as long as you carefully obey all traffic laws and you don’t work in a major city like Washington D.C., the changes that are happening probably do not affect you too much.

But the key is to see where all of this is going.  Our roads are slowly but surely being transformed into a revenue generating control grid.  And this is just yet another example of how government feels the need to constantly watch, monitor, track and regulate everything that we do.

Does anyone else feel like the life is slowly being choked out of our society, or am I alone?

Source

Jim Stone — The Rebel.org May 5, 2013

FBI agent Tim Clemente admitted on MSM that ALL phone calls, texts, and e-mails are permanently captured and stored by the NSA, and have been for some time ON ALL AMERICANS, so in the case of Tammerlan and his wife, they simply pulled up all his past phone conversations and played them back. This is also being done on you, even if all you ever do is talk football and fishing. Interesting it is those calls between him and his wife netted nothing.

So as I have already said in the past, the police state is totally ubiquitous and a full blown reality, this is not the result of a warrant, it is a full time always on recording of everything on everyone everywhere. Read the following, quoted from the Guardian, and weep. Yep, there will be NO rebellion if it is EVER discussed over the phone. We are already SCREWED.

The following was reported by The Guardian:

Continues …

JD Heyes — Natural News April 29, 2013

Apparently Americans who employ hydroponics are the newest targets in an insane “drug war” that has gone from bad to ludicrous since it was first “declared” in the early 1980s.

Consider this case in point: A couple of years ago, narcotics officers knocked on the door at the home of a man who had just purchased a seed starter kit from a local gardening shop. The police officers were demanding to know just what it was he was planning to grow.

“Tomatoes,” he told them, and the officers finally left – but only after they were convinced he was not growing marijuana.

Since that day the gardener, who asked the Kansas City Star not to identify him over fears he would once again be hassled by police, began parking a block away from that same garden center, in order to avoid police stakeouts.

The harassment of hydroponic gardeners has only gotten worse since them.

In fact, owners of garden centers are increasingly complaining that police surveillance and stakeouts are hurting their businesses – sometimes even driving smaller garden centers out of business. Few people, it seems, are comfortable shopping under the watchful eyes of the Police State.

A number of customers, the paper said, have reported being followed home by police after making their purchases, regardless of what they were growing.

‘You don’t hear about when there is no case’

As is always the case, cops are defending this horrendous abuse of the public trust by saying, you know, such surveillance is necessary and prudent because it is keeping marijuana off the streets. To even believe such nonsense makes you wonder if the narcotics officers making that claim are smoking dope themselves.

Police say that local narcotics officers have been watching hydroponics shops – which sell equipment for growing produce indoors – for years. They write down license plate numbers of customers and then follow up with search warrants after first looking through their garbage for any evidence of drug use. They say all of this is justified because marijuana growers shop at hydroponic shops too – in addition to the vast majority of customers who grow flowers and crops inside their homes.

Sometimes such arrests become high-profile events. Many times, however, there are no cases to make.

“[What y]ou don’t hear about are the cases where there is no case,” attorney Cheryl Pilate told the Star. She added that she wonders how often innocent people are questioned by police just for shopping at a hydroponics gardening store.

She knows of what she speaks. She is currently representing a Leawood, Kan., family that was the target of an April 20, 2012 drug raid in which officers turned up no evidence – zero – of illegal substances. That family, Robert and Adlynn Harte, were raising tomatoes and other veggies that grow under lights.

They were never even told why they were targeted, so they have filed a suit against the Johnson County, Kan., Sheriff’s Department “to gain access to records that would reveal why they were initially under suspicion,” the Star reported.

The couple, and their attorney, believe that they were suspected of growing illicit drugs in part because they shopped at Green Circle Hydroponics, one of three local stores that specialize in indoor gardening supplies.

The Police State is bad for business

That explanation would not surprise Jeffrey Hawkins, owner of a similar gardening center called Hooked On Ponics. His place, too, is under constant police surveillance; he knows this because his customers have told him of being questioned after they have shopped there, including one woman who grows orchids.

“What they do is target all the grow shops,” Hawkins, who said he closed his original store in Liberty, Kan., after business dropped off due to police scrutiny, told the paper. He said he now operates on weekends at a northeast Kansas City flea market.

“It’s a serious problem,” he said. “They profile people.”

The surveillance and harassment of customers “is getting more serious,” said Sam Williams, the owner of Grow Your Own Hydroponics in Independence, Mo.

“It’s not right. They’re driving business away from me,” he said.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://www.kansascity.com

http://www.naturalnews.com/hydroponics.htm

Doubts over Department of Homeland Security surveillance are nothing new – especially after a Senate committee found “fusion centers” were breaching civil liberties. Now, documents show the agency spies on peaceful demonstrations “as a matter of policy.”

The latest round of documents, acquired by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) through a Freedom of Information Act request, provide concrete evidence of routine DHS surveillance of peaceful demonstrations.

The ‘fusion centers’ and DHS ‘Mega Centers’ were said to be born as part of a post-9/11 bid to coordinate intelligence gathering efforts among local police, the DHS and the FBI on anti-terrorism efforts.

Now, according to the thousands of pages of documents received by the PCJF, we know that these centers did, in fact, assist in coordinating intelligence gathering – though in this case, on the Occupy movement and other free speech protests.

According to the PCJF, the new material includes details of DHS surveillance of protests in Asheville, North Carolina; Miami, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale and Jacksonville, Florida; Lansing and Detroit, Michigan; Denver, Colorada; Kansas City, Missouri; Los Angeles; Boston; Dallas and Houston, Texas; Minneapolis;Jersey City; Phoenix, Arizona; Lincoln, Nebraska; Chicago; Salt Lake City and elsewhere.

In addition to simple surveillance, documents also reveal a more proactive approach taken in other instances:

“In preparation for planned protests in New York City on October 15, 2011, the DHS documents show coordination between federal and local authorities to use New York City’s permitting scheme to frustrate, obstruct or stop free speech activities.”

The PCJF also believes that its FOIA released documents indicate instances of “off the books” – that is, illegal – intelligence collection:

As one DHS agent writes in response to a request for information on the Occupy movement in New England, “This meeting should be finishing up soon and I’ll have access to a non-DHS computer that will allow me to do more looking.”

So, is this more evidence of the DHS missing the mark on its principal mission, which is to concentrate its efforts on terrorist concerns?

According to the Senate’s bipartisan Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which released its findings following a two-year long probe of the matter, “more often than not” information collected and shared at DHS fusion centers was “unrelated to terrorism.”

The whole Senate report portrayed many of the Homeland Intelligence Reports (HIRs) circulated by DHS between its fusion centers as dubious at best:

“Of the 386 unclassified HIRs that DHS eventually published over the 13-month period reviewed by the Subcommittee investigation, a review found close to 300 of them had no discernible connection to terrorists, terrorist plots or threats.”

Much like the ultimate findings of that Senate report, the PCFJ is left wondering why the DHS Threat Management Division directed Regional Intelligence Analysts to produce a “Daily Intelligence Briefing” that included a category on “Peaceful Activist Demonstrations.”

Source

The Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn’t have the ability to monitor everyone’s one-on-one Internet chats in real-time just yet, but the agency’s chief lawyer says all that should soon change.

FBI general counsel Andrew Weissman discussed the Justice Department’s power to put pressure on cyber-criminals during an address last week at the National Press Club in Washington, and during the engagement he opened up about what exactly the country’s top domestic police patrol wants in their bag of tricks: By the years’ end, the attorney says the FBI hopes to be able to snoop on conversations that occur over the Web by gaining access to up-to-the-second feeds of seemingly secretive chats.

Currently telecommunications within the United States can be bugged with a court’s approval thanks to 1994’s Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. Weissman, however, warns that as technology advances, agencies like the FBI become increasingly out of luck in terms of tracking down criminals who’ve moved operations off the streets and onto the Web.

“The problem is where we are today. The way we communicate is really not limited to telephone nowadays and sort of the old fashioned picking up the phone and calling someone,” Weismann said.

Online services such as Gmail, Google Voice and DropBox dominate our online lives, Weissman said, but legislation does not yet exist that lets law enforcement tap into Internet accounts with the cyber-equivalent of snooping in on a phone call. While the FBI may obtain court orders to collect archived Internet conversations from the administrators of email services such as Gmail, Weissman said that won’t do. The ability to actually intercepting online chats is something the FBI wants to have, and Weissman said they are working on having it ready by the end of the year.

“You do have laws that say you need to keep things for a certain amount of time, but in the cyber realm you can have companies that keep things for five minutes,” he said. “You can imagine totally legitimate reasons for that, but you can also imagine how enticing that ability is for people who are up to no good because the evidence comes and it goes.”

Weissman said that legislation in other countries allow law enforcement there to intercept real time dialogs. With such an option overseas, tracking so-called cyberterrorists is as easy as eavesdropping on a phone call.

“We don’t have the ability to go to court and say we need a court order that actually requires the recipient of that order to effectuate the intercept. Other countries have that and I think most people who are not lawyers sort of assume that’s what you’re getting when you go to court,” he said. “You think that you’re getting an order that says, ‘Recipient, you have to actually effectuate the communication.’ Well that’s not what you get. You get something that says that you have to provide technical assistance.”

“The problem with not having [that ability in America] is that we’re making the ability to intercept communications with a court order increasingly obsolete,” Weissman added. “Those communications are being used for criminal conversations, by definition…and so this huge legal apparatus that many of you know about to prevent crimes, to prevent terrorist attacks is becoming increasingly hampered and increasingly marginalized the more we have technology that is not covered by CALEA. Because we don’t have the ability to just go to the court and say ‘You know what, they just have to do it.’”

Weissman added that the ability to obtain a court order that can track Internet chats in real-time “is a huge priority for the FBI” that, although in the works, was halted by last year’s presidential election. Now with the 2012 race out of the picture — and the country’s most transparent president ever elected for another round — the FBI aims to iron out a deal that will let Internet companies like Google tap into their data to watch what’s happening on the Web in instances where waiting five minutes just won’t do. Weissman even hinted at being able to intercept messages sent over entirely different sites, such as a game of Scrabble conducted over Facebook.

Meanwhile, that archived information is still as sought after as ever before. Google’s admitted in the back in January that government requests for user data skyrocketed by 25 percent in the last year, with the US leading the field by far in calls for data disclosure. When Google released statistics only a few weeks earlier showing the first six months of requests, the trend was already something that was hard to ignore.

“This is the sixth time we’ve released this data, and one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise,” Google acknowledges in a blog post published Tuesday, November 13.

Source

As drone usage by the federal government, police agencies and – soon – universities and other private entities increase, more Americans are becoming understandably concerned that unmanned aerial vehicles could be utilized to violate privacy provisions outlined in the U.S. Constitution.

A much-less talked about problem; however, is the issue of public safety, and one the Federal Aviation Administration has yet to answer adequately: How much of a problem will the proliferation of drones – mostly smaller UAVs especially – pose to regular air traffic?

Attack of the (small) drones?

This potential for disaster was brought to light recently when a commercial airline pilot approaching JFK International Airport in New York City spotted what he described as an unidentifiable, drone-like aircraft hovering near his plane as he landed.

The New York Post reported that something called the Joint Terror Task Force is now investigating what an Alitalia pilot described as “a black drone” that he said was hovering just 200 feet or so from his aircraft about three miles east of the airport as he made an approach from Brooklyn.

One source told the paper: “He was very clear as to what he saw.”

“The unmanned aircraft was described as black in color and no more than three feet wide with four propellers,” said an FBI statement.

The Post said the pilot informed investigators the flying object was at an altitude of about 1,800 feet and looked like “a black drone about a meter square, with helicopter rotors on the corners.”

The presence of the drone-like object “didn’t require the pilot of the jet to take any evasive action, and it didn’t interfere with the aircraft,” said an unidentified source who spoke with the paper.

Was it just a model airplane hobbyist or terrorist monitoring air traffic lanes?

As a result, the pilot landed safely – but that was this time.

The task force has launched a full-scale investigation, and the Federal Aviation Administration - the agency charged with approving commercial and law enforcement drone applications – is also investigating.

The Post said other sources noted that there was a good chance the drone that was spotted was likely being operated by a model-aircraft enthusiast. Still, the sighting was the first of its kind so close to an aircraft, veteran observers said.

“In all the years I’ve been with the airport, I can’t remember a similar incident,” one investigator said. “Whether this is a hobbyist or not, it raises serious concerns.”

The Christian-Science Monitor reported that the FAA requires that drones being flown by, for example, law enforcement entities, keep them at 400 feet or below. So chances are good that this drone was not being operated by police.

Who was operating it? And what were they doing operating a drone in a well-established commercial airliner landing approach path?

What kind of casualties would disabling a plane on approach over NYC cause? Could a drone be used to cause such damage?

More drones coming, so get ready

Drone request applications flowing into the FAA have than doubled, from 146 in 2009 to 313 in 2011, the CSM reported. And while most of those have come from law enforcement agencies, as the technology to make smaller, more capable drones increases, the implications for both privacy rights and potential terrorist attacks becomes clear.

Just as it would not take much to re-task a tiny drone for the purposes of spying on ordinary Americans, it would take perhaps just as little an effort for a terrorist to guide one into the path of an approaching airliner, perhaps lodging the small UAV into an engine intake, which would cause an immediate failure and possibly even an in-flight explosion.

Drone technology, unfortunately, is something we cannot un-invent. But it is something we had better figure out how to deal with and apply appropriately.

Sources:

http://www.nypost.com

http://www.csmonitor.com

http://www.naturalnews.com/drones.html

Source

The legacy of Rothschild Zionist agent, dual American and Israeli citizen, son of a rabbi, and architect of the U.S. Patriot Act Michael Chertoff lives on. The former “chief” of DHS (Department of Homeland Security) has been gone since 2009 but the seeds of his foundation are coming into true fruition with the recent introduction of the General Atomics “domestic” surveillance Predator drone (operated by remote control with no pilot on board). 

DHS customized specifications include but not limited to:

1) The ability to identify any human being with a gun.

2) Signals interception to capture (record) cell phone conversations.

3) Direction finding technology to find out where the cell phone conversation took place.

A predator is defined thusly; one that victimizes, plunders, or destroys, especially for ones own gain.  This must be seen for what it is.  George Orwell’s 1984 delivered directly to the American people via the military industrial complex.  In what was most likely intended to be an act of defiance to his puppet masters, president Eisenhower (former General and overseer of the murder of millions of defenseless Germans after world war II) warned the world about the military industrial complex with his farewell address to the nation in 1961.  In all likelihood, he was unwittingly and unknowingly being used to fulfill the occult doctrine of “Truth or Consequences”.  I quote from page 56 of Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare by Michael A. Hoffman II.

“If the truth of what the cryptocracy has perpetrated is grasped and acted upon, the consequences for the conspirators will be annihilation. But if the people fail to perceive the truth or fail to act on their perception, thus rendering unto the Process a kind of tacit consent born of apathy, amnesia and abulia, the consequences for the conspirators will be a giant step in the advancement of their system of control, that is to say ever tighter bonds of enslavement of humanity.”

These brilliant words of wisdom ring much truer today than when they were written in 2001.  Enslavement of humanity in general and America in particular has been on the fast track since “9/11″ and the United States of America domestic Predator drone is a huge step closer towards a universal one world slave state.  

DHS built domestic surveillance tech into Predator drones

Declan McCullagh – CSNET March 2, 2013

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has customized its Predator drones, originally built for overseas military operations, to carry out at-home surveillance tasks that have civil libertarians worried: identifying civilians carrying guns and tracking their cell phones, government documents show.

The documents provide more details about the surveillance capabilities of the department’s unmanned Predator B drones, which are primarily used to patrol the United States’ northern and southern borders but have been pressed into service on behalf of a growing number of law enforcement agencies including the FBI, the Secret Service, the Texas Rangers, and local police.

Homeland Security’s specifications for its drones, built by San Diego-based General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, say they “shall be capable of identifying a standing human being at night as likely armed or not,” meaning carrying a shotgun or rifle. They also specify “signals interception” technology that can capture communications in the frequency ranges used by mobile phones, and “direction finding” technology that can identify the locations of mobile devices or two-way radios.

Continues …

I took this picture while visiting the USA in 2006. One weekend, I was invited to participate in a peace rally at the city’s central park. While sitting there with a few friends, I looked around. It looked like a huge picnic. People sitting in small groups, far enough from each other to allow privacy. Suddenly, I heard a helicopter. It was a noise foreign to the place. Instinctively, I stood up and moved next to the nearest tree; from the improvised stronghold I looked around. The noise was everywhere and seemed to originate nowhere. Looking upwards, I readied my camera. Suddenly a black chopper approached us. At its lower front side was a surveillance pod. It travelled above the people filming them; it looked like a scene taken from George Orwell’s 1984 . I kept walking around the tree so that the iron-beast won’t have a direct sightline with me. “Cover your face,” I told my friends who were sitting in the open. Instead of obeying the urgent order, they questioned me why. Disappointed, I kept pointing my tiny camera at the violator hoping to get a good picture.

Not far from the scene of that crime, I found the sticker reproduced here. It was placed next to the library; one of the librarians was busy trying to destroy it. As I approached with the camera, she returned to the library. The sign is quite specific; all the actions it correctly attributes to the government are serious violations of local laws, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The American Government considers itself above the law, free to violate its own citizens and guests

God Bless Associated Press!

Associated Press is one of the world’s largest news agencies. Centered in New York, it provides material to almost 2,000 newspapers around the world. One doesn’t expect from such an organization to be respectful of human rights; simply it is strongly related to the establishment. Yet, on February 21, 2013, it published an astonishing document titled The Al-Qaida Papers – Drones. The title is linked to their site; I strongly recommend downloading the document. Before the astonishing text, the agency placed a notice: “This document is one of several found by The Associated Press in buildings recently occupied by al-Qaida fighters in Timbuktu, Mali. Below are the original in Arabic and a translation in English.” There is no proof of that, but it doesn’t matter. The document is a self-defense guide against American killer drones

The document begins with an almost academic review of the war, claiming, “Americans fully realize that they are in the 10^th year of war and that they were economically exhausted and suffered human losses, and they were confronted with public pressure backed by the Congress in a way that it made the honorable and responsible withdrawal from the war as a prime goal of the White House.” The Drone War is presented as an alternative military strategy enabling the USA to continue its war without being economically depleted or suffer human losses and avoid the American public opinion pressure. Following a riveting analysis of costs, the document describes 22 techniques used for protection against this illegitimate assassination machines. The text was written in Yemen, a main target of killer drone attacks, but was allegedly found in Mali, were local victims have adapted the techniques to the different ground conditions and available materials.

Most of the techniques would be immediately recognized by those with even a basic military training. Don’t create routines, keep quiet, avoid obvious patterns, scatter away, use decoys, and use topography in your favor. Basic jamming is described; more advanced techniques are referred to. The first recommendation is: “It is possible to know the intention and the mission of the drone by using the Russian made ‘sky grabber’ device to infiltrate the drone’s waves and the frequencies. The device is available in the market for $2,595 and the one who operates it should be a computer know-how.” Where can one find a discount? Unluckily, they didn’t share that valuable detail.

No less interesting due to its disclosure of Western terror techniques is the following comment: “The drones used in the attacks in Swat Valley depend on electronic chips or radioactive dyes placed at the target by the spy or the agent then the guided missiles come directly toward these targets.” Sadly, this probably discloses the attack technique used against the American citizens assassinated by the USA in Yemen; probably they were carrying such devices. We are living in tough times; governments ignore the basic laws awarding them legitimacy. Help against their violence is scarce; yet, sometimes it arrives from the empire’s heart. God Bless Associated Press!

Really?

Why should the Heart of Darkness allow such a publishing? Is the document real? Most probably this is an attempt by the American security services to stain all its citizens so that they should be treated as lepers, suspected of unwillingly cooperating with evil. Childish; after all, this can be thwarted. AP, do you mind publishing also that part?

Source

As if police in most major cities didn’t have enough to do already, now they are being deployed as enforcers for the nanny state.

Cops in Naperville, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, have arrested two mothers after they attempted to block utility workers from installing so-called “smart meters” on their homes. The women, who were known to be vocal opponents of the wireless electric meters, apparently, were not the only smart meter opponents, however, because city officials told the Chicago Tribune they have ordered police to accompany utility crews as they install the meters on other homes where they were previously sent away.

“The previous installation attempts were met with some resistance and we wanted to ensure our employees’ safety,” City Manager Doug Krieger told the paper.

Translation: Your home isn’t really your home anymore.

Your home is not your castle

According to the paper Naperville has installed about 57,000 smart meters already and is about 99 percent finished with the process. Officials say the meters will make the city’s electrical system more efficient and reliable and will also reduce costs.

But the Naperville Smart Meter Awareness group says they are concerned about the health, security and privacy aspects of the wireless smart meters. They group, which was led by the two women who were arrested, has a federal lawsuit pending against the city.

Malia “Kim” Bendis, one of the two, was charged with a pair of misdemeanors, the Tribune said – attempted eavesdropping and resisting a peace officer. The other woman, Jennifer Stahl, also received two citations – interfering with police and preventing access to customer premises. Again, your home is not your home in Naperville, apparently.

Upon her release, Stahl said when she refused a smart meter for her home utility installers accompanied by cops cut a bicycle lock she had put on her fence before entering her backyard. After that little incident of trespassing, she said she had no choice but to stand in front of her old meter, refusing to move.

“It was forced on my house today,” she said, according to the paper. “It was really a violation. I violated something, but I’ve been violated too so I guess we’re now in a society of violating one another.”

Naturally, the city is defending its actions. Officials say the smart meters are no big deal – they are safe, they are “smart,” they will save residents money and they will improve the efficiency of the electrical grid.

But privacy advocates like Stahl and Bendis are rightfully concerned about what personal information and data the systems are relaying back to – whomever.

Others are also worried about the anti-privacy implications associated with smart meter technology. National Geographic outlined such concerns in a recent report:

In theory, the information collected by smart meters could reveal how many people live in a home, their daily routines, changes in those routines, what types of electronic equipment are in the home, and other details. “It’s not hard to imagine a divorce lawyer subpoenaing this information, an insurance company interpreting the data in a way that allows it to penalize customers, or criminals intercepting the information to plan a burglary,” the private nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation noted in a blog post about smart meters.

Plus, to add insult to injury, the smart meters come with added costs, at least for Naperville residents: According to the Tribune, “there is a $68.35 initial fee for a non-wireless meter plus a $24.75 monthly fee for reading it” (our emphasis). So, not only do Naperville residents not have a choice whether or not they get one, they are going have to pay a monthly stipend for the “privilege” of having their civil rights violated.

And just exactly how are these devices supposed to save residents money, when they cost more per month just to have? If the meters don’t save residents more than $25 a month, it looks to us like electric bills in Naperville just went up.

‘We have the right to violate your rights’

Stahl has it right. She says residents who want a non-wireless meter shouldn’t have to pay for it because, after all, if the city utility is foisting it on residents, the cost should be on the city. She says she represents other homeowners who were unable to continue refusing the installation.

“I have not done the work of attempting to educate the community and advocating for the right of anybody in Naperville to refuse the smart meter just to stand off to the side,” she said.

When Bendis exited the police department, a handful of smart meter opponents were there to cheer her. Citing advice from her attorney, however, she declined comment to the press.

Krieger was unrepentant, as expected, as well as dismissive of homeowners’ concerns.

“The city has always had and maintains the right to access our equipment, and…we were simply exercising that right,” he told the paper.

Sources:

http://www.chicagotribune.com

http://news.nationalgeographic.com

http://www.naturalnews.com/smart_meters.html

Source

The national security state has an annual budget of around $1 trillion. [3] Of that huge pile of money, large amounts go to private companies the federal government awards contracts to. Some, like Lockheed Martin or Boeing, are household names, but many of the contractors fly just under the public’s radar. What follows are three companies you should know about (because some of them can learn a lot about you with their spy technologies).

L3 Communications

L3 is everywhere. Those night-vision goggles the JSOC team in Zero Dark Thirty uses? That’s L3 [4]. The new machines that are replacing the naked scanners at the airport? That’s L3. [5] Torture at Abu Ghraib? A former subsidiary of L3 was recently ordered to pay $5.28 million to 71 Iraqis who had been held in the awful prison.  [6]

Oh, and drones? L3 is on it. [7] Reprieve, a UK-based human rights organization, earlier this month wrote on its Web site: [8]

“L-3 Communications is one of the main subcontractors involved with production of the US’s lethal Predator since the inception of the programme. Predators are used by the CIA to kill ‘suspected militants’ and terrorise entire populations in Pakistan and Yemen. Drone strikes have escalated under the Obama administration and 2013 has already seen six strikes in the two countries.”

Unsurprisingly, L3 Communications is well connected beyond the national security community. Its chief financial officer recently spoke at Goldman Sachs, [9] at what the financial titan hilariously refers to as a “fireside chat.”

L3 also supplies local law enforcement with its night-vision products [10] and makes a license-plate recognition (LPR) device [11], a machine with disturbing implications. [12] LPR can be mounted on cop cruisers or statically positioned at busy intersections and can run potentially thousands of license plates through law enforcement databases in a matter of hours. In some parts of the country LPR readers can track your location for miles. As the Wall Street Journal noted [13], surveillance of even “mundane” activities of people not accused of any crime is now “the default rather than the exception.”

L3 Communications embodies the totality of the national security and surveillance state. There is only minimal distinction between its military products and police products. Its night-vision line is sold to both military and law enforcement. Its participation in the drone program is now, as far as we know, limited to countries in the Middle East and North Africa. But in the words of the New York Times editorial board, [14] “[i]t is not a question of whether drones will appear in the skies above the United States but how soon.” The NYT estimates the domestic drone market at $5 billion, likely a conservative estimate, and contractors will vie for that money in the public and private sphere. L3′s venture into airports, the border of where domestic policy meets foreign policy in the name of national security, is therefore significant both symbolically and materially.

In many ways, that is the most important story of the post-9/11 United States: the complete evaporation of the separation of foreign and domestic polices. Whether we’re talking about paramilitarized police, warrantless wiretapping, inhumane prison conditions, or drone surveillance, there exist few differences between a United States perpetually at war and a United States determined to police and imprison its people in unacceptable ways and at unacceptable rates.

Harris Corporation: Stingray “IMSI catcher”

Harris Corp. is a huge provider [15] of national security and communications technology to federal and local law enforcement agencies. Though many people have never heard of it, Harris is a major player in the beltway National Security community. President and CEO William M. Brown was recently appointed to the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee [16], and in 2009 the Secret Service offered [17] Harris a contract to train its agents in the use of Harris’ Stingray line. The Secret Service awarded the company additional contracts in 2012. [18]

If you’ve heard of Harris at all, it’s likely been because its controversial Stingray product has been getting attention [19] as an information-gathering tool with major privacy implications. The Stingray allows law enforcement to cast a kilometers’ wide digital net over an area to determine the location of a single cell phone signal – and in the process collect cell data on potentially hundreds of people who aren’t suspected of any crimes. EFF claims the device is a modern version of British soldiers canvassing the pre-Revolutionary colonies, searching people’s homes without probable cause – exactly what the Fourth Amendment was created to prevent. EFF describes [20] the process this way:

“A Stingray works by masquerading as a cell phone tower—to which your mobile phone sends signals to every 7 to 15 seconds whether you are on a call or not— and tricks your phone into connecting to it. As a result, the government can figure out who, when and to where you are calling, the precise location of every device within the range, and with some devices, even capture the content of your conversations.”

According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), [21]the FBI has been using similar technology since 1995. But a recent federal case, United States v. Rigmaiden, has raised Fourth Amendment questions [19] regarding whether law enforcement officials need to obtain a warrant before employing a Stingray. The judge in that case determined that the government hadn’t provided enough information about how the devices work, and ordered [22] that the information collected in Rigmaiden couldn’t be used in court.

What’s especially troubling about Stingrays is that the government either won’t say, or doesn’t understand, how the technology works. The WSJ reported [22] that the US Attorney making the requests “seemed to have trouble explaining the technology.”

And it’s not just the federal government that uses Stingrays. As Slate notes, [23]referencing FOIA documents recently obtained by EPIC, “the feds have procedures in place for loaning electronic surveillance devices (like the Stingray) to state police. This suggests the technology may have been used in cases across the United States, in line with a stellar investigation by  [24]LA Weekly  [24]last year, which reported that state cops in California, Florida, Texas, and Arizona had obtained Stingrays.”

Harris has been tightlipped about the Rigmaiden case, but expect to be hearing a lot about Stingrays in the future.

BI2 Technologies

BI2 makes a fine pitch. Its iris-scanning technology can be made to sound [12] very appealing. Iris scans are relatively non-invasive, there’s no touching involved so the likelihood of spreading disease is reduced, and as B12 states on its Web site [25], “there are no lasers, strong lights or any kind of harmful beams.” It also claims that iris scanning is “strictly opt-in,” and that a “user” (who in most cases would be better described as an “arrestee”) “must consciously elect to participate” in the scanning. (When I was arrested by the NYPD while covering a protest, the scan was voluntary — though the NYPD didn’t tell me that, a protester did. But if I refused to submit to it I could have been punished with an extra night in jail.)

Reuters reported [26] that BI2′s iPhone-based iris scanner — called MORIS — is capable of taking an accurate scan from four feet away, “potentially without the person being aware of it.” MORIS has drawn harsh condemnation from the ACLU. The primary concern from privacy advocates is that law enforcement will deploy this technology in an overly broad way. ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley told Reuters that he didn’t want the police “using them routinely on the general public, collecting biometric information on innocent people.”

MORIS isn’t just for irises; it also scans faces. In 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported [27]that the sheriff’s office in Pinellas County, Florida, “uses digital cameras to take pictures of people, download the pictures to laptops, then use facial-recognition technologies to search for matching faces.” New database technology like Trapwire, a data mining system that analyzes “suspicious behavior” in purported attempts to predict terrorist behavior, makes face scanning potentially more worrisome. Trapwire uses at least [28] “CCTV, license-plate readers, and open-source databases” as input sources, and although it doesn’t employ facial-recognition software, the incentives to combine these types of technology is clear.

Beginning in 2014, BI2 will manage a national iris-scan database for the FBI, called Next-Generation Identification (NGI). [29]Lockheed Martin is also involved in building the database. [30]Much of BI2′s iris data comes from inmates in 47 states, [31] and despite BI2′s claims that iris scanning can’t be gamed, that is not the case. Experts showed [32] last summer that the iris can be “reverse-engineered” to fool the scanners, which are generally thought to be more accurate than fingerprinting.

The usual suspects lamented in 2011 that iris scanning [33] isn’t used at airports or borders, but security creep is difficult to combat, especially once “national security” is invoked. Just days ago it was reported that the FBI [34] is teaming with the Department of Homeland Security to ramp up iris scanning at US borders. AlterNet has previously reported that the Department of Defense [35] scans the irises of people arriving at and departing from Afghanistan.

The story of BI2 is important because the initial technology is superficially appealing. The company’s first projects were called the Child Project, designed to help locate missing children; and Senior Safety Net, developed to identify missing seniors suffering from Alzheimer’s. According to B12′s Web site, sheriffs’ departments in 47 states use the BI2 iris-scanning device and database [36], which makes it easy to mobilize support to facilitate the safe return of children and seniors.

While the desire to find missing children and seniors is perfectly legitimate, the collection of biometric data is a pandora’s box. Once it’s opened, it’s proven difficult if not impossible to limit.

Source

Introduction by Paul Powers – Jan 31, 2013

The “natural energy emitted by people” referred to in the beginning of this article is more commonly know as an aura. Not visible by the naked eye, it is most certainly there. The same is of course true of the energy that enables man made wireless technology (radio, television, cell phones etc). It is believed by some experts that these man made frequencies, particularly the newer ones, may interfere with and cause damage to the human energy field. The negative and harmful effects of constant exposure to cell phones are very well documented as they have been in use by the general public for over twenty years. 21st century terahertz scanner technology will most likely prove to be much worse. The United States Transportation Security Administration had almost 400 terahertz X-ray body scanners in use by November, 2010 (remember the underwear bomber and Senator Joe Lieberman).

Leading the way in this technology that steals your privacy and possibly your physical well being (or worse) is the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). America’s finest scientific research university has its origins deeply rooted in black magic and occultism financed by top illuminati families such as Guggenheim and Rockefeller. Without question the father of American rocket science is Dr. John (Jack) Whiteside Parsons, cofounder of Caltech’s infamous Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Aerojet Corporation, and inventor of jet assisted takeoff (JATO). Parsons was a product of what is known as generational satanism. In fact, he was a descendant of one of the founders of the Hell Fire Club of Britain. His first official experimental rocket test for Caltech which began the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was done on Halloween of 1936 in the area of the Arroyo Seco River near the Devil’s Gate Dam (get it) next to Pasadena.

Six years after the Halloween “black christening” of the JPL, the self proclaimed most evil man alive and black magician of the British “elite” (Aleister Crowley) made Parsons the Grand Master of the California branch of his Ordo Templi Orientis (Order of Oriental Templars). Another six years later in 1952, he was killed in a explosion of mercury fulminate. Mercury (Hermes) in roman/greek mythology is the messenger of the gods whose was responsible for conducting the souls of the dead to Hades (hell).

Mercury (Hermes) is also considered to be the father of occult wisdom, the founder of astrology, the discoverer of alchemy, and according to Albert Mackey’s encyclopedia of freemasonry “one of the founders of masonry”. Jack Parsons was both literally and figuratively destroyed by “Mercury”. Parsons crater on the battered dark side of the moon is named after him.

Police Tool Targets Guns

Tamer El-Ghobashy – Wall Street Journal Jan  23, 2013

The New York Police Department is testing a new device it says can detect firearms concealed beneath layers of clothing, a high-tech crime-fighting tool seemingly torn from the pages of science fiction.

The so-called T-Ray machine detects terahertz radiation, a high-frequency electromagnetic natural energy that is emitted by people and can penetrate many materials, including clothing.

“If something is obstructing the flow of that radiation, for example a weapon, the device will highlight that object,” said Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who described the device Wednesday in a speech at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

News of the device prompted concerns from privacy advocates, though they also saw a potential benefit: It might render unnecessary the legally disputed police policy of stopping and frisking people who haven’t been first identified as suspects in crimes.

In an image displayed by Mr. Kelly, the T-Ray scanner highlighted the body of a plainclothes officer in neon green—with a gun clearly visible as a black shape. The image was captured with the officer standing about 30 feet away.

You get a sense of why we’re so hopeful about this tool,” Mr. Kelly told the audience, which was mostly members of the New York City Police Foundation, a nonprofit group that raises money for the department.

Another photo showed the machine, tripod-mounted and about the size of an old-style projection television and housed in blue plastic. Officials said in its current form, the machine could be mounted on a truck and deployed to sites identified as prone to gun violence.

Continues …

A Texas high school banned a second-year student from classes after she refused to wear an ID badge containing an RFID chip. The school district uses the tags in order to game the attendance system for better funding.

Students at some schools in the Northside Independent School District, a public school district serving the San Antonio area, have been required to carry student IDs containing RFID chips since the schoolyear began last fall. John Jay High, where Angela Hernandez was enrolled, is one of the schools included in the initiative.

RFID, which stands for radio frequency identification, involves the use of radio and electromagnetic fields to disseminate information for the purposes of tracking and identification.

RFID is commonly used to keep track of livestock. At schools in the Northside Independent district, the chips monitor students’ movements on campus for attendance records, which are tightly linked to the amount of funding public schools receive each year.

After she refused to wear the tracking device, the district told 15-year-old Hernandez in November that she would have to find another school to attend that didn’t use the tags unless she chose to comply with John Jay’s rules.

Hernandez, a strict Christian, sued the district as a result, claiming that the device is the “Mark of the Beast” mentioned in the Revelation of John, an important part of the Bible held to describe the apocalypse.

“It’s obvious that John Jay High School has no interest in putting their students first, which is a sad reflection on our educational system,” said John Whitehead, president of the group that defended Hernandez in court, as quoted by Wired.

A Texas federal judge and a federal appeals court both ruled that the school’s decision had not violated Hernandez’s freedom of religion. That ruling was because the school eventually moved to allow Hernandez to go to class without the tracking device, while still insisting that she wear it. In any case, the district told Hernandez and her family that she would no longer be able to attend John Jay after January 22, when the next semester begins.

As is the case with most public schools in the US, each district’s funding is determined largely as a result of its daily attendance records. Traditionally, teachers take roll calls at the beginning of classes. If the student happens to be late, the school could lose funding because there is no record of his being there.

With the RFID tracking system, school administrators can count a student as being in attendance as long as he or she is somewhere on the school’s campus that day. By this method, the district gets its portion of funding linked to that student.

Source

Some fashonistas strive for sexy when it comes to clothes, but one artist from New York is taking a rather utilitarian approach with outfits — he’s about to unveil a whole line of garments designed to make the wearer nearly invisible to drones.

Brooklyn-based artist Adam Harvey used to work primarily with photography, but he undertakes an entirely different medium with his newest project. He says that in the years since the United States post-9/11 PATRIOT Act has been in place, cameras have stopped becoming “art making tools” and have instead become “enablers of surveillance societies.”

That was Harvey’s explanation last year when he discussed his projects with the website Rhizome. At the time, Harvey was experimenting with how household make-up could render it harder for computers to use facial recognition programs to pluck people out of crowds. And while the practice of examining facial features using biometrics and sophisticated surveillance cameras has certainly intensified in the months since, Harvey has found another type of evasive practice that is a bit harder to avoid: the drone.

The United States currently has a modest arsenal of unmanned aerial vehicles — UAVS, or drones – that it uses in surveillance missions on its border with Mexico and in war zones overseas. By the year 2020, however, the Federal Aviation Administration expects the number of domestic drones in American airspace to be as large as 30,000.

At the moment, law enforcement agencies across the country are trying to get their hands on their own surveillance drones, some of which “can zoom in and read a milk carton from 60,000 feet,” according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And while escaping a space-age robotic spy machine thousands of feet above the Earth might not be as easy as, say, putting on some blush or mascara to make it harder to be detected, Harvey has designed an entire clothing line that will help disguise people from the all-seeing eye of Big Brother.

On January 17, Harvey will unveil Stealth Wear at a studio in London. There he’ll debut his “new counter surveillance fashions” that he plans to also test before his private audience.

“Building off previous work with CV Dazzle, camouflage from face detection, Privacy Mode continues to explore the aesthetics of privacy and the potential for fashion to challenge authoritarian surveillance,” the press release reads.

In collaboration with NYC fashion designer Johanna Bloomfield, Harvey has tried to tackle “some of the most pressing and sophisticated forms of surveillance today.”

Ultimately, it’s a fashion statement that says an earful to those enabling a growing spy state.

“I think building privacy into modern garments can make them feel more comfortable and, like armor, more protected,” Harvey told Rhizome last year. “Data and privacy are increasingly valuable personal assets and it doesn’t make sense to not protect them. It’s also a great conversation starter.”

Harvey hopes to get those conversations starting next week in London, where he will unveil an anti-drone hoodie and matching scarf, a shirt that shields the wearer from X-rays and a pocket protector that he says blocks cell phones from sending and receiving signals.

For the hoodie and scarf set, Harvey and Bloomfield use materials designed to thwart thermal imaging, which the artist says most UAVs employ in order to zero-in on targets. The t-shirt allegedly protects a person’s internal organs from harmful X-rays and the “Off Pocket” pants accessory disconnects mobile devices from service providers with special materials.

“Smartphones infiltrate our senses. They cause anxiety, phantom vibrations, and keep us on alert,” he told Rhizome. “We expend energy maintaining an always-on connection. Smartphones should come with a switch to turn this off, but they don’t. Turning my iPhone off and back on takes 45 seconds. Using flight mode is also clumsy. I wanted a way to quickly and politely disconnect myself without relying on the phone’s software or hardware features. The Off Pocket circumvents this design flaw.”

“[W]hen I first modified my pants with signal attenuating fabric, it felt odd to be unplugged. It was as if I had blocked out part of the world, covered my ears, or closed my eyes. But then I adjusted and realized that I had just opened them again.”

The artist says accompanying each project will be either recorded and in-person demonstrations that reveal the process behind each specific technology and counter technology relevant to his work.

Speaking to the UK’s Register back in 2010, Harvey said even then that surveillance was becoming more prevalent.

“The number of sensors that are going into the public spaces has been increasing,” he said, adding that we very well might be “heading to the point where we as a society need to think about what we are comfortable with.”

“Maybe you could go to a privacy hair stylist in the future,” he quipped.

Source

The head of the New York City Police Department announced this week that the largest local law enforcement agency in the United States might soon rely on spy drones for conducting surveillance.

During an open conversation held Thursday between Reuters editor-in-chief Stephen Adler and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, the chief of police confirmed that New York’s boys in blue aren’t entirely opposed to acquiring an unmanned aerial vehicle for the sake of security.

“We’re looking into it,” Kelly reportedly told an audience at the 92nd Street Y Thursday evening. “Anything that helps us.”

Jill Colvin, a producer for the website DNAinfo, says Kelly told his crowd that adding an UAV to their arsenal of surveillance tools could come in handy during future mass protests in the Big Apple. For starters, she reports, Kelly said cops could begin with using basic civilian models that are available for purchase online and in stores.

“You can go to Brookstone and buy a drone,” Kelly told the crowd.

“The only thing we would do is maybe use the cheap $250 ones to take a look and see the size of the demonstration or something along those lines,” Colvin quotes him as saying.

The Federal Aviation Administration is still ironing out a rulebook for how UAVs will be used domestically in the years to come. Currently, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on the spy planes to secure the country’s borders. Dozens of smaller agencies across the country have applied to use drones too, though, a decision that has led to a large amount of concern from civil liberty advocates that say blanketing surveillance violates the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

“The law hasn’t caught up with the technology,” Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told the Oakland Tribune last year. “There are no rules of the road for how they operate these things.”

Months earlier, Timm and another member of the EFF led a discussion about drones at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in New York. There they said the surveillance drones currently being manufactured have the capability to “zoom in and read a milk carton from 60,000 feet” in the air.

Just recently, the sheriff of Alameda County, California postponed a public discussion regarding his plans to procure a surveillance drone after news of the proposal spurred a grassroots opposition campaign. Down state in San Diego, the county Sheriff’s Office has come under fire from journalists who say law enforcement is withholding information about plans for an UAV. When the website MuckRack insisted they had proof that San Diego County was issued information about obtaining a drone, officials fired back “there is very little public benefit in the release of such records.”

Should New York City secure a drone of their own, there is little one could do that isn’t already possible in NYC. As of last year, the NYPD had access to around 2,000 surveillance cameras on just the island of Manhattan.

Source

Obama, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, stated that mental-health services must be made more available, presumably to stave off future killers.

Of course, this is monstrously wrong, since so many killers have acted under the compelling influence of SSRI antidepressants and other brain meds. The drugs are known to induce violence.

More mental health means more murders.

Now we hear that Joe Biden’s presidential task force on gun control is meeting with psychiatrists. Here is what they’re discussing:

Databases. They want to tighten background checks on people who buy guns, and the checks could include discovering whether applicants have ever been under psychiatric care, and if so, what diagnosis(es) was made.

In order to do that, there will have to be a comprehensive database and a tracking system that extends into, and from, every psychiatrist’s front desk. Law-enforcement will have access to that database.

What happened to doctor-patient confidentiality? It’s possible this issue can be skirted merely by affirming that a gun-applicant has seen a psychiatrist at some point in time—which fact could exclude him from purchasing a weapon.

Organized psychiatry would, of course welcome a comprehensive database of Americans who have obtained psychiatric care. It makes their profession seem even more official than it already is. And it imparts a tinge of USSR-like power.

The implication: “We know who you are. We know you’ve been under the care of a psychiatrist. Wherever you live and work, we can call you crazy if we want to.”

This always was part of the psychiatric agenda, behind the smooth facade of “offering help to those in need.”

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is also sensitive to the fact that many Americans would never walk into a shrink’s office if they thought that would hinder their chance of owning a gun.

But weighing the pros and cons, the advantage is on the side of linking gun-ownership-refusal with psychiatric-treatment history. That makes the APA more powerful. It brings them closer in concert with law-enforcement.

It essentially makes the APA and all its doctors into cops right along side local police forces, state police, the FBI, the ATF, DHS, and the US Marshals Service.

Who could resist that promotion?

Of course, in any case involving a murderer, where it’s suspected that a psychiatric drug induced the violence, unearthing that possibility would be cut off at the pass. The sordid facts would be protected/buried by the full force of the federal government. Another perk.

Local mental-health clinics (drug dispensaries) would bloom like weeds. After all, how are you going to prevent violence unless you corral millions more Americans and put them in front of a shrink or a suitable surrogate for “pre-screening?” It’s The Minority Report come to life.

This system eventually burgeons into a full national program to cut violent crime through prevention. And who will be in charge of making delicate judgments about the likelihood that any person will commit murder? The psychiatrists, naturally. More power for them.

This goes beyond deciding whether a resident of the US can own a gun. It invades any aspect of a person’s life to assess his “mental predisposition.” That’s precisely the kind of infrastructure that would come into being.

Don’t imagine for a moment that psychiatrists actually have the ability to make scientific calls on these questions. Their entire pantheon of 297 official mental disorders is such a pathetic fraud that not one physical test exists to make a diagnosis.

No blood test, no urine test, no saliva test, no brain scan, no genetic test.

But that’s never stopped them before, and it wouldn’t stop them in the new Psychiatric Police State. They’d keep winging it, and they’d realize they have to err on the side of caution, to avoid getting caught with their pants down, when a killer is found to have received “clearance” from a psychiatrist to own a gun or walk around unsupervised.

Therefore, many more Americans would be marked down for “special tracking” and mandatory 72-hour holds in mental lockups.

While in such custody, the strategy would be to load up the patient with as many drugs as possible, to render him docile after release.

Is this entire nightmare scheduled to happen this year? Of course not. But gradual steps eventually add up to a fully boiled frog.

In the world of brain research, the principal push is toward creating the conditioned human. Behind the mask of curing disease, that’s the real agenda. And it ties in quite nicely with a culture in which every human is looked upon as a potential threat to life and limb of his fellow humans.

The shrinks will say they care. They’ll say they only want what’s best for you. They’ll say these mental disorders only need the right drugs to keep them under control. They’ll say we’re all in this together. They’ll say their diagnosis-treatment is the most humane program ever devised in the history of the planet. They’ll say it’s all about greatest good for the greatest number. They’ll say whatever they need to.

Biden and Obama are trying to make a definitive move to take away guns. But for the psychiatrists, this is a trial balloon. Inside the profession, there will be debates about whether linking gun ownership to psychiatric history is a plus or a minus for shrinks.

Will it enhance or injure their reputation and standing? What about doctor-patient confidentiality?

But the first steps are being contemplated. The issue is on the table.

In the “old psychiatry,” before smooth PR and modern marketing really took over, doctors were far more ready to make predictions about the future political ramifications of their work. Absolute madmen like Dr. Jose Delgado and Dr. Ewen Cameron went public with the idea that no human being has an inherent right to his own personality.

The true role of psychiatry, they asserted, was to re-invent human character, personality, behavior, and thought, from the ground up.

Well, decades later, with psychiatry and pharmaceutical companies tied to the hip as one juggernaut, and with marketing departments modulating their pronouncements to fit these times, a redux- prospect is emerging.

Psychiatry can pick up its old political and social banners again. It can enter into an even closer embrace with big government. It can announce that violence can be substantially curbed through an expansion of mental-health services. It can frame this program as both a humane necessity and a leap ahead into “a better world for all of us.”

It can begin, cautiously, at first, to bring back the utopian promises.

“We have the science. Our understanding of the brain is expanding every day. We’re literally seeing why and how conflict arises between people, and we’re seeing it in the folds and channels of that wondrous brain. And we can do something about it. We’re on the cusp of a new dawn…”

Yes, the psychiatric police are ready to take the next step.

Meanwhile, behind certain closed doors: “Gentlemen, it’s interesting, isn’t it, how so many killings over the last twenty years have been committed by people under the influence of our drugs. And yet, we use the murders to prove how people need more of these same drugs. Sales skyrocket. And now we can become plainclothes cops with more ultimate power than any cops in history…”

Jon Rappoport

The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Source

The Obama administration overruled recommendations from within the US Department of Homeland Security and implemented new guidelines earlier this year that allow the government to gather and analyze intelligence on every single US citizen.

Since the spring, a little-know intelligence agency outside of Washington, DC has been able to circumvent the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution and conduct dragnet surveillance of the entire country, combing massive datasets using advanced algorithms to search and seize personal info on anyone this wish, reports the Wall Street Journal this week.

There’s no safeguard that says only Americans with criminal records are the ones included, and it’s not just suspected terrorists that are considered in the searches either. The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) has been provided with entire government databases and given nearly endless access to intelligence on everyone in the country, regardless of whether or not they’ve done anything that would have made them a person of interest. As long as data is “reasonably believed” to contain “terrorism information,” the agency can do as they wish.

What’s more is the NCTC can retain that information for years, reviewing it whenever they’d like to take a look.

The update to the agency’s policies, reported by RT at the time and reexamined this week in the Journal, expose any person in the country to invasive and nearly endless government surveillance.

“This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public,” Mary Ellen Callahan is reported by the Journal to have said during a Situation Room meeting earlier this year within the walls of the White House. At the time, Callahan was chief privacy officer at DHS as well as one of the only staffers inside the Obama administration concerned with what was about to happen.

According to documents obtained by the Journal through Freedom of Information Act requests and conversations between the paper and persons familiar with that Situation Room sound-off, Ms. Callahan unsuccessfully argued against updating a 2008 Justice Department memo about what intel the NCTC can have and how they use it. Just weeks after that meeting, new guidelines were authorized and, within months, Ms. Callahan was working elsewhere.

Despite her efforts, a 32-page document, “Guidelines for Access, Retention, Use and Dissemination by the National Counterterrorism Center and other Agencies of Information in Datasets Containing Non-Terrorism Information,” went into effect, and with that the NCTC was no longer restricted to only terrorism-related intelligence and instead

“The 2008 memo’s title referred to NCTC’s access to ‘terrorism information’ contained in non-terrorism datasets. The 2012 title simply refers to ‘information’ in those datasets,” reports the Journal. “The removal of the world ‘terrorism’ is an indication of how this memo expands NCTC’s mandate to allow surveillance of US citizens based on more than just the terrorism information.’”

Indeed, the changes aren’t just within the name of the document. The 2012 update to the NCTC’s data-mining policies expand the intelligence the agency can comb while at the same time removing safeguards that were in place for privacy’s sake. Under the new rules, data on innocent Americans can be retained for five years, and intel on anyone “reasonably believed to constitute terrorism information” can be kept until the end of time.

“It’s breathtaking” in its scope, one former senior administration official tells the Journal.

According to the paper, “flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others” can be collected indefinitely and searched at will within the NCTC, an agency only nine years old and not nearly as well-known as her sister spy groups: the CIA and FBI.

Once the NCTC has the info, though, they can decide who else can be made privy to it. If the US government is so inclined, intelligence on specific citizens can be sent to any foreign nation in the world.

“Literally anything the government collects would be fair game, and the original agency in charge of protecting the privacy of those records would have little say over whether this happened, or what the spy agency did with the information afterward,” writes Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s DC branch. Calabrese testified before Congress earlier this year, and in a blog post authored by him in July, he describes just how detrimental the new policies are to personal privacy.

“That sharing can happen in relation to national security and safety, drug investigations [or] if it’s evidence of a crime or to evaluate sources or contacts. This boundless sharing is broad enough to encompass disclosures to an employer or landlord about someone who NCTC may think is potentially a criminal, or at the request of local law enforcement for vetting an informant,” he writes.

On the blog PrivacySOS, civil liberties advocate Kade Crockford condemns the spy program by saying any safeguard that could be implemented wouldn’t end what appears to be a serious constitutional violation.

“And even if it was an effective anti-terrorism technique, widespread, warrantless surveillance of every single living human being – suspicious or not – damn sure isn’t democratic practice. We are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty in this country, not the other way around,” Crockford writes.

In his post from earlier this year, the ACLU’s Calabrese says the real dangers could come if the government decides to supplement their statistics with other private information purchased from third-parties.

“What if that spy agency could add commercial information, anything it – or any other federal agency – could buy from the huge data aggregators that are monitoring our every move?” he asks.

Meanwhile, in-between Calabrese’s original post and the Journal’s article from this week, search giant Google confirmed that the federal government has sent more requests for personal user data in 2012 than ever before.

“This is the sixth time we’ve released this data, and one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise,” Google explained last month.

The latest revelation from the Journal of course is but the most recent installation in what has become a remarkable year in terms of finding out the truth about Uncle Sam’s shocking full-fledged surveillance. Throughout 2012, several former employees of the National Security Agency (NSA) have stepped up and given interviews about the grievances with the office, particularly their disregard for the privacy of Americans.

“When you open up the Pandora’s Box of just getting access to incredible amounts of data, for people that have no reason to be put under suspicion, no reason to have done anything wrong, and just collect all that for potential future use or even current use, it opens up a real danger — and to what else what they could use that data for, particularly when it’s all being hidden behind the mantle of national security,” NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake told Current TV host Eliot Spitzer earlier this year.

Journalist Julia Angwin writes for the Journal that the DHS is currently working out the details on how to provide the NCTC with new lists of data, but acknowledges that every federal agency can come up with their own rules regarding what they want handed over.

Earlier this month, former NSA analyst William Binney spoke with RT and said that the FBI — who maintains databases that can be requested by the NCTC under their latest policies — has been storing the emails of every person in America for at least a decade.

“So, yes, this can happen to anyone. If they become a target for whatever reason – they are targeted by the government, the government can go in, or the FBI, or other agencies of the government, they can go into their database, pull all that data collected on them over the years, and we analyze it all. So, we have to actively analyze everything they’ve done for the last 10 years at least,” he said.

Upon winning a Callaway award for civic courage in DC last month, Mr. Binney explained that he and other former NSA agents “could not be accessories to violations of the US Constitution.” Ms. Callahan has since left her post within the NCTC and is now practicing law in the nation’s capital focusing specifically on privacy.

Source

Pilotless planes have taken one step closer to reality after BAE systems revealed it will test a new fighter jet next year.

The company is set to win two contracts including one for the Mantis, which can fly on its own for 24 hours with no cockpit and no human on board.

If all goes as planned the artificial intelligence could mean the end of fighter pilots in the UK and bring down the curtain on conventional aircraft like the F-35.

And come 2013 the Mantis will be making its first flight over Britain as it is tested to see if it works.

BAE even claims that the technology could one day be used to pilot commercial jets in a similar way to driverless trains now.

According to The Times, the BAE deal is a joint project between the Ministry of Defence in the UK and the French government and is worth around £40 million.

British taxpayers will effectively be contributing for the project, which also aims to develop drones for reconnaissance and information gathering.

It is the Mantis however that will get most of the attention.
BAE has said it is perfect for ‘dull, dirty or dangerous’ missions, such as bombing runs on suspected Al Qaeda targets.

It is not a drone as such, but rather a robotic plane which has a far wider range of equipment and capabilities.

The Mantis can do the surveillance work of four helicopters, find its own targets and deliver deadly missiles, all without the aid of a crew on board.

Flights will cover 750 miles and it will travel up to 15,000ft above the Irish sea during tests.

According to BAE systems it will have an ‘electronic eye’, or cockpit mounted camera, so that a flight test observer and a supervisor can watch what is happening on the ground on computers

They will remotely control the takeoff and landing but once in the air the craft flies itself, although the Mantis does have an infra-red camera so that it can land itself in an emergency.

Next year there are expected to be 20 test flights, each lasting around three hours.

One fully operational it will be able to reach 60,000ft and carries surveillance equipment so advanced it can decrypt and listen to mobile phone messages instantly in mid-air.

It had been feared that cuts the Ministry of Defence could shelve Mantis, but the project now appears to be going ahead.

Chris Boardman, BAE’s head of military aircraft, told The Times: ‘There is a good likelihood that we will move ahead on what might be financially modest but strategically very important contracts.

‘It will take a decade to mature for production and operation the next generation of technology. We understand the constraints of the current financial climate but we need to start doing what we need to do.’

Source

The FBI has the e-mails of nearly all US citizens, including congressional members, according to NSA whistleblower William Binney. Speaking to RT he warned that the government can use information against anyone it wants.

­One of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history resigned in 2001 because he no longer wanted to be associated with alleged violations of the constitution.

He asserts, that the FBI has access to this data due to a powerful device Naris.

This year Binney received the Callaway award. The annual award was established to recognize those, who stand out for constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal or professional lives.

RT: In light of the Petraeus/Allen scandal while the public is so focused on the details of their family drama one may argue that the real scandal in this whole story is the power, the reach of the surveillance state. I mean if we take General Allen – thousands of his personal e-mails have been sifted through private correspondence. It’s not like any of those men was planning an attack on America. Does the scandal prove the notion that there is no such thing as privacy in a surveillance state?

William Binney: Yes, that’s what I’ve been basically saying for quite some time, is that the FBI has access to the data collected, which is basically the e-mails of virtually everybody in the country. And the FBI has access to it. All the congressional members are on the surveillance too, no one is excluded. They are all included. So, yes, this can happen to anyone. If they become a target for whatever reason – they are targeted by the government, the government can go in, or the FBI, or other agencies of the government, they can go into their database, pull all that data collected on them over the years, and we analyze it all. So, we have to actively analyze everything they’ve done for the last 10 years at least.

RT: And it’s not just about those, who could be planning, who could be a threat to national security, but also those, who could be just…

WB: It’s everybody. The Naris device if it takes in the entire line, so it takes in all the data. In fact they advertised they can process the lines at session rates, which means 10 gigabit lines. I forgot the name of the device (it’s not the Naris) – the other one does it at 10 gigabits. That’s why the building Buffdale, because they have to have more storage, because they can’t figure out what’s important, so they are just storing everything there. So, e-mails are going to be stored there for the future, but right now stored in different places around the country. But it is being collected – and the FBI has access to it.

RT: You mean it’s being collected in bulk without even requesting providers?

WB:Yes.

RT: Then what about Google, you know, releasing this biannual transparency report and saying that the government’s demands for personal data is at an all-time high and for all of those requesting the US, Google says they complied with the government’s demands 90% of the time. But they are still saying that they are making the request, it’s not like it’s all being funneled into that storage. What do you say to that?

WB: I would assume, that it’s just simply another source for the same data they are already collecting. My line is in declarations in a court about the 18-T facility in San Francisco, that documented the NSA room inside that AST&T facility, where they had Naris devices to collect data off the fiber optic lines inside the United States. So, that’s kind of a powerful device, that would collect everything it was being sent. It could collect on the order over one hundred billion one thousand character e-mails a day. One device.

RT: You say they sift through billions of e-mails. I wonder how do they prioritize? How do they filter it?

WB: I don’t think they are filtering it. They are just storing it. I think it’s just a matter of selecting when they want it. So, if they want to target you, they would take your attributes, go into that database and pull out all your data.

RT: Were you on the target list?

WB: Oh, sure! I believe I’ve been on it for quite a few years. So I keep telling them everything I think of them in my e-mail. So that when they want to read it they’ll understand what I think of them.

RT: Do you think we all should leave messages for the NSA mail box?

WB: Sure!

RT: You blew the whistle on the agency when George W. Bush was the President. With President Obama in office, in your opinion, has anything changed at the agency – in the surveillance program? In what direction is this administration moving?

WB: The change is it’s getting worse. They are doing more. He is supporting the building of the Buffdale facility, which is over two billion dollars they are spending on storage room for data. That means that they are collecting a lot more now and need more storage for it. That facility by my calculations that I submitted to the court for the electronic frontiers foundation against NSA would hold on the order of 5 zettabytes of data. Just that current storage capacity is being advertised on the web that you can buy. And that’s not talking about what they have in the near future. 

RT: What are they going to do with all of that? Ok, they are storing something. Why should anybody be concerned?

WB: If you ever get on the enemies list, like Petraeus did or… for whatever reason, than you can be drained into that surveillance.

RT: Do you think they would… General Petraeus, who was idolized by the same administration? Or General Allen?

WB: There are certainly some questions, that have to be asked, like why would they target it (to begin with)? What law were they breaking?

RT:In case of General Petraeus one would argue that there could have been security breaches. Something like that. But with General Allen  – I don’t quite understand, because when they were looking into his private e-mails to this woman.

WB: That’s the whole point. I am not sure what the internal politics is… That’s part of the program. This government doesn’t want things in the public. It’s not a transparent government. Whatever the reason or the motivation was, I don’t really know, but I certainly think, that there was something going on in the background, that made them target those fellows. Otherwise why would they be doing it? There is no crime there.

RT: It seems that the public is divided between those, who think that the government surveillance program violates their civil liberties, and those, who say: “I’ve nothing to hide. So, why should I care?” What do you say to those, who think that it shouldnt concern them.

WB: The problem is if they think they are not doing anything that’s wrong, they don’t get to define that. The central government does, the central government defines what is right and wrong and whether or not they target you. So, it’s not up to the individuals. Even if they think they are doing something wrong, if their position on something is against what the administration has, then they could easily become a target.

RT: Tell me about the most outrageous thing that you came across during your work at the NSA.

WB: The violations of the constitution and any number of laws that existed at the time. That was the part that I could not be associated with. That’s why I left. They were building social networks on who is communicating and with whom inside this country. So that the entire social network of everybody, of every US citizen was being compiled overtime. So, they are taking from one company alone roughly 320 million records a day. That’s probably accumulated probably close to 20 trillion over the years. The original program that we put together to handle this to be able to identify terrorists anywhere in the world and alert anyone that they were in jeopardy. We would have been able to do that by encrypting everybody’s communications except those, who were targets. So, in essence you would protect their identities and the information about them until you could develop probable cause, and once you showed your probable cause, then you could do a decrypt and target them. And we could do that and isolate those people all alone. It wasn’t a problem at all. There was no difficulty in that.

RT: It sounds very difficult and very complicated. Easier to take everything in and…

WB: No. It’s easier to use the graphing techniques, if you will, for the relationships for the world to filter out data, so that you don’t have to handle all that data. And it doesn’t burden you with a lot more information to look at, than you really need to solve the problem.

RT: Do you think that the agency doesn’t have the filters now?

WB: No.

RT: You have received the Callaway award for civic courage. Congratulations! On the website and in the press release it says: “It is awarded to those, who stand out for constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal or professional lives.” Under the code of spy ethics (I don’t know if there is such a thing) your former colleagues, they probably look upon you as a traitor. How do you look back at them?

WB: That’s pretty easy. They are violating the foundation of this entire country. Why this entire government was formed? It’s founded with the constitution and the rights were given to the people in the country under that constitution. They are in violation of that. And under executive order 13526, section 1.7 (governing classification) – you can not classify information to just cover up a crime, which this is- and that was signed by President Obama. Also President Bush signed it earlier executive order, a very similar one. If any of this comes into Supreme court and they rule it unconstitutional, then the entire house of cards of the government falls.

RT: What are the chances of that? What are the odds?

WB: The government is doing the best they can to try to keep it out of court. And, of course, we are trying to do the best we can to get into court. So, we decided it deserves a ruling from the Supreme court. Ultimately the court is supposed to protect the constitution. All these people in the government take an oath to defend the constitution. And they are not living up to the oath of office.              

RT: Thank you for this interview.

WB: You are welcome.

Source

IT’S a future far from Ponch and Jon, the Los Angeles-based motorcycle officers of “CHiPs,” a TV series that rose to popularity in the 1970s. In this take on the California Highway Patrol of 2025, patrol cars and motorcycles would be replaced by computerized drones; chips take over CHiPs.

Here, the highway patrol vehicles of the future will be mostly self-driving, if you accept the solutions offered by the entries in this year’s Design Challenge, an annual competition organized in conjunction with the Los Angeles auto show. For the last nine years, the Design Challenge has invited automakers’ advanced design studios to dream up proposals for sci-fi automotive futures tied to specific themes, including cars that weighed less than 1,000 pounds or that were destined for Hollywood roles. This year’s competition asked designers to envision the highway patrol car of 2025.

By coincidence or destiny, designers at several companies came up with concepts for robotic, autonomously driven vehicles on ground, water and air. These future police cruisers — usually presented as story boards rather than actual vehicles — recall today’s Predator and Global Hawk drones, stars of the anti-insurgency efforts. They may give new meaning to those signs that read “Speed limit enforced by aircraft.”

In the future, as the organizers outlined it, “the vehicle should empower highway patrol officers to meet new demands and effectively both ‘protect and serve’ the public while considering not just enforcement needs but emission concerns, population growth and transportation infrastructure.” The world of 2025, the participants seem to agree, will be a place where traffic has grown exponentially, infrastructure has deteriorated, environmental constraints have increased — and highway patrol budgets have been reduced.

As envisioned by Honda R&D Americas’ advanced design studio in Pasadena, Calif., the future Honda CHP Drone Squad includes four-wheel Auto-Drones, like cars, and two-wheel Moto-Drones, like motorcycles. The proposal offers a future where the Auto-Drone functions as something of a command vehicle — manned or unmanned — that deploys Moto-Drones, even while on the move. The Moto-Drones could be rigged for a variety of different response or rescue tasks. While such vehicles might be decades from reality, the flexibility of this strategy could offer companies that built both types of vehicles an advantage in securing government contracts.

At the BMW DesignworksUSA studio in Newbury Park, Calif., designers dreamed up the E-Patrol (Human-Drone Pursuit Vehicle). In this arrangement, the officer and drone would work in harmony, like today’s officers and their K-9 partners. The BMW drone team would be able to deploy a flying drone, which resembles a high-tech Jet Ski cruise missile, or one of a pair of unicyclelike robotic vehicles to chase lawbreakers. And if the suspect doesn’t pull over? In the E-Patrol vision, the BMW designers say, their drone would disable the vehicle with an electromagnetic impulse.

The Subaru Highway Automated Response Concept vehicles, developed by Subaru Research and Development in Japan and designed specifically for Hawaii, are powered by renewable energy — and they have aquatic capability. “The cutting-edge SHARC patrol vehicles will provide an innovative, affordable and environmentally conscious solution for 24-hour highway monitoring,” the designers say.

The Volt Squad, dreamed up at General Motors’ Advanced Design Center in North Hollywood, Calif., is a set of future patrol vehicles that would take advantage of the propulsion system engineered for the Chevrolet Volt. The squad is composed of three different types of vehicles that still contain human officers. Each type is specially designed to observe, pursue or engage — the last term left menacingly undefined.

Judges for the Design Challenge include Tom Matano, director of the industrial design program at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco; Imre Molnar from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit; and Stewart Reed, chairman of the transportation design department at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The winner will be announced on Thursday at an event in conjunction with the auto show

Source  

You are being watched.  The control freaks that hold power in the United States have become absolutely obsessed with surveillance.  They are constantly attempting to convince the American people that we are all “safer” when virtually everything that we do is watched, monitored, tracked and recorded.  Our country is being systematically transformed into a giant surveillance grid far more comprehensive than anything George Orwell ever dreamed of.  If you still believe that there is such a thing as “privacy” in this day and age, you are being delusional.  Every single piece of electronic communication is monitored and stored.  In fact, they know that you are reading this article right now.  But even if you got rid of all of your electronic devices, you would still be constantly monitored.  As you will read about below, a rapidly growing nationwide network of facial recognition cameras, “pre-crime” surveillance devices, voice recorders, mobile backscatter vans, aerial drones and automated license plate readers are constantly feeding data about us back to the government.  In addition, private companies involved in “data mining” are gathering literally trillions upon trillions of data points about individual Americans each year.  So there is no escape from this surveillance grid.  In fact, it has become just about impossible to keep it from growing.  The surveillance grid is expanding in thousands of different ways, so even if you stopped one form of surveillance you would hardly make a dent in the astounding growth of this system.  What we desperately need is a fundamental cultural awakening to the importance of liberty, freedom and privacy.  Without such an awakening, the United States (along with the rest of the planet) is going to head into a world that will make “1984″ by George Orwell look like a cheery story about a Sunday picnic.

The following are 19 signs that America is being systematically transformed into a giant surveillance grid….

#1 New Software That Will Store And Analyze Millions Of Our Voices

Did you know that there is software that can positively identify you using your voice in just a matter of seconds?

Law enforcement authorities all over the U.S. are very eager to begin using new Russian software that will enable them to store and analyze millions of voices….

‘Voice Grid Nation’ is a system that uses advanced algorithms to match identities to voices. Brought to the US by Russia’s Speech Technology Center, it claims to be capable of allowing police, federal agencies and other law enforcement personnel to build up a huge database containing up to several million voices.

When authorities intercept a call they’ve deemed ‘hinky’, the recording is entered into the VoiceGrid program, which (probably) buzzes and whirrs and spits out a match. In five seconds, the program can scan through 10,000 voices, and it only needs 3 seconds for speech analysis. All that, combined with 100 simultaneous searches and the storage capacity of 2 million samples, gives SpeechPro, as the company is known in the US, the right to claim a 90% success rate.

#2 Unmanned Aerial Drones Will Be Used Inside The U.S. To Spy On You

Continues in full at source…