by Jim Marrs
By early 2006, fears of mandatory chipping became reality when a Cincinnati video surveillance firm, CityWatcher.com, began to require employees who worked in its secure data center to implant the VeriChip device into their arm.
Many also feared that the microchips were being included in the swine flu vaccine. In September 2009, VeriChip Corp. announced that its stock shares had tripled after the company was granted an exclusive license to patents for “implantable virus detection systems in humans.” The system used biosensors that can detect swine flu and other viruses and was intended to combine with VeriChip’s implantable radio frequency identification devices (RFIDs) to develop virus triage detection systems, microchips in one’s bloodstream broadcasting the body’s information to whoever has a reader device.
The use of GPS devices is reminiscent of the 1987 film The Running Man, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger is equipped with a collar that will blow his head off if he leaves a certain area. So, if microchipping the population sounds like something from a science fiction movie, consider that the giant drug corporation Novartis has already tested a microchip that reminds a person to take his or her medicine by transmitting a signal to a receiver chip implanted in the patient’s shoulder. The pill itself contains a tiny “harmless” microchip that signals the receiver chip each time a pill is taken. If the patient fails to take a pill within a prescribed time period, the receiver chip signals the patient or a caretaker to remind the person. Novartis’s head of pharmaceuticals, Joe Jiminez, said testing of the “chip in the pill” to a shoulder receiver chip had been carried out on twenty patients by the close of 2009.
One shouldn’t count on government watchdog organizations to always maintain privacy rights. In late 2002, the American Civil Liberties Union gave its stamp of approval to an electronic tracking system that uses GPS satellites to track suspects and criminals. Created by the Veridan company of Arlington, Virginia, this “VeriTracks” system not only keeps tabs on convicted criminals but also on suspects. It can even match a person’s position to high-crime areas or crime scenes and suggest that the person may be involved in law breaking. Law enforcement agencies can create “electronic fences” around areas they deem off-limits to those wearing a cell-phone-size GPS receiver. The person who wears the module must tie it around his or her waist while an electronic bracelet worn on the ankle acts as an electronic tether to the GPS receiver that records the person’s exact position. Should the wearer move outside the proscribed area, the authorities are signaled and a police unit is dispatched. At night, the wearer must place the module in a docking system to recharge batteries and upload its data to a central headquarters, which checks to see if the wearer has been at any crime scenes.
How do you get someone to agree to this monitoring system? Sheriff Don Eslinger of Seminole County, Florida, answered, “It’s either wear the GPS device or go to jail. Most of them find this much more advantageous than sitting in a cold jail cell, and it also saves us between $45 and $55 a day.” Eslinger said his county had equipped ten pretrial suspects with the GPS device as a condition of making bond. According to Eslinger, county officials hoped to expand the program to include nonviolent probationers and parolees.
For many, using GPS tracking devices to track criminals makes sense. Yet, disturbingly, surveillance technology has not been limited to felons and probationers. In Texas, some one thousand teenage drivers allowed an unnamed insurance company to place a transponder in their vehicles to keep track of their speed on the road.
Texas representative Larry Phillips introduced a bill in 2005 that would have required all state automobile inspection stickers to carry a built-in electronic transponder. The device would transmit information like the car’s vehicle identification number (VIN), insurance policy number, and license plate number, and should the owner’s insurance expire, the person would be mailed a $250 ticket. This bill was not passed.
The firm Digital Angel has developed a wristband that allows parents to log on to the Internet and instantly locate their children, who must wear the bracelet. Another company, eWorldtrack, is working on a child-tracking device that will fit inside athletic shoes. The German firm Siemens has tested a seven-ounce tracking device that allows constant communication between parents and their children.
Author and political critic Joe Queenan quipped, “Fusing digital mobile phone technology, a satellite-based global positioning system and good old-fashioned insanity, the device can pinpoint a child within several yards in a matter of seconds.”
Support has grown in the American legal system for GPS surveillance technology. In spring 2002, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled it was okay for police to hide electronic monitoring devices on people’s vehicles without a warrant for as long as they want. The court ruled that there is “no reasonable expectation of privacy” on the outside of one’s vehicle and that attaching an electronic device to a man’s car bumper did not constitute unreasonable search or seizure. In early 2004, a Louisiana court ruled it was permissible for police there to make warrantless searches of homes and businesses even without probable cause.
In September 2009, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the state constitution allows police to break into a suspect’s car to secretly install a GPS tracking device, provided that authorities have a warrant before they do so. The unanimous ruling upheld the drug trafficking conviction of Everett H. Connolly, a Cape Cod man who was tracked by state police in 2004 after they installed a GPS device in his minivan. The court declared the GPS device an “investigative tool” and said it did not violate the ban on unreasonable search and seizure in the state’s Declaration of Rights.
“We hold that warrants for GPS monitoring of a vehicle may be issued,” Justice Judith Cowin stated in the court’s opinion. “The Commonwealth must establish, before a magistrate…that GPS monitoring of the vehicle will produce evidence that a crime has been committed or will be committed in the near future.” Generally, search warrants expire after seven days, yet the court said GPS devices can be installed for up to fifteen days before police must prove that the devices need to remain in place.
In an attempt to provide protection against the widespread use of GPS devices by law enforcement, William Leahy, chief counsel for the Committee on Public Counsel Service, said the court’s ruling means that police must persuade a judge they have probable cause before the GPS devices can be installed.
ECHELON AND TEMPEST
THOUGH GPS AND SURVEILLANCE systems are reasons for serious concern, the two greatest electronic threats to American privacy and individual freedom are Echelon and TEMPEST.
“The secret is out,” wrote Jim Wilson in Popular Mechanics. “Two powerful intelligence gathering tools that the United States created to eavesdrop on Soviet leaders and to track KGB spies are now being used to monitor Americans.” Echelon is a global eavesdropping satellite network and massive supercomputer system that operates from the National Security Agency’s headquarters in Maryland. It intercepts and analyzes phone calls, faxes, and e-mail sent to and from the United States, both with or without encryption. Encrypted messages are first decrypted and then joined with clear messages. The NSA then checks all messages for “trigger words” with software known as “Dictionary.” Terms like “nuclear bomb,”
“al Qaeda,” “Hamas,” “anthrax,” and so on are then shuttled to appropriate agencies for analysis.
Although speculation and warnings about Echelon were circulating on the Internet for a number of years, it was not until 2001 that the U.S. government finally admitted the program’s existence. This admission came after high-profile investigations in Europe discovered that Echelon had been used to spy on the two European companies Airbus Industries and Thomson-CSF.
Though the U.S. government revealed Echelon’s use in 2001, the government had been using an early version of Echelon in the late 1960s and 1970s. During that time, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon used NSA technology to gather files on thousands of American citizen
s and more than a thousand organizations opposed to the Vietnam War. In a program called Operation Shamrock, the NSA collected and monitored nearly every international telegram sent from New York.
Although paid for primarily by U.S. taxpayers, Echelon is now multinational and involves nations like the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and even Italy and Turkey. Most of the information that comes from Echelon goes to the CIA. According to Popular Mechanics’s Wilson, “Based on what is known about the location of Echelon bases and satellites, it is estimated that there is a ninety percent chance that NSA is listening when you pick up the phone to place or answer an overseas call. In theory, but obviously not in practice, Echelon’s supercomputers are so fast, they could identify Saddam Hussein by the sound of his voice the moment he begins speaking on the phone.”
Amazing as all this technology may sound, because the government now acknowledges its existence may mean that it is phasing the program out for another technology. The next system that the government uses may be a ground-based technology known as TEMPEST. To prevent your computer from causing static on your neighbor’s TV, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) certifies all electronic and electrical equipment. TEMPEST, or Telecommunications Electronics Material Protected from Emanating Spurious Transmissions, technology stemmed from simply shielding electronic equipment to prevent interference with nearby devices. But in the process of preventing unwanted electronic signals, researchers learned how to pick up signals at a distance. Advances in TEMPEST technology mean that somewhere out there, someone may be able to secretly read the displays on machines like personal computers, cash registers, television sets, and automated teller machines (ATMs) without the person using those machines knowing it.
Jim Wilson wrote that documents now available from foreign governments and older sources clearly show how these systems are used to invade our right to privacy. “We think you will agree it also creates a real and present threat to our freedom.”
In September 2002, the Associated Press obtained U.S. government documents that showed that the Bush administration would create a fund that would combine tax dollars with funds from the technology industry to pay for “Internet security enhancements.” Under the title “Executive Summary for the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace,” the documents discussed “sweeping new obligations on companies, universities, federal agencies and home users” to make the Internet more secure, presumably from terrorists.
This new Internet strategy was headed up by Richard Clarke, formerly a top counterterrorism expert in both the Bush and Clinton administrations, and Howard Schmidt, a former senior executive at Microsoft Corp. When released in 2003, the plan offered more than eighty recommendations for tightening Internet security.
THE CYBERSECURITY ACT OF 2009
ONE REASON THE GLOBALISTS want to shut down the free flow of information is that it interferes with their fearmongering and sociopolitical manipulation. With the introduction of Senate Bills No. 773 and 778, by Democratic senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, legislators continued to put the power to shutter free speech into the hands of the executive branch. These bills are part of what is called the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, and they essentially give the president of the United States the power to shut down Internet sites he feels might compromise national security.
The bills put forth the idea of creating a new Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor to protect the nation from cybercrime, espionage, and attack. The new cybersecurity adviser would report directly to the president. In the event of cyberattack, which is ill defined in the proposed laws, the president, through this national cybersecurity adviser, would have the authority to disconnect “critical infrastructure” from the Internet, which would include citizens’ banking and health records. According to an early draft of the bill, the secretary of commerce would have access to all privately owned information networks deemed critical to the nation “without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access.”
In talks to Congress, Senator Rockefeller warned that “we must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs.” And the bills’ cosponsor, Maine Republican senator Olympia Snowe, said that failure to pass this law would risk a “cyber-Katrina.” However, privacy advocates immediately attacked the legislation. Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy & Technology, stated, “The cybersecurity threat is real, but such a drastic federal intervention in private communications technology and networks could harm both security and privacy.”
Larry Seltzer, a technology writer for the Internet news source eWeek, agreed with Harris. “The whole thing smells bad to me. I don’t like the chances of the government improving this situation by taking it over generally, and I definitely don’t like the idea of politicizing this authority by putting it in the direct control of the president.”
Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that by concentrating Internet control in one individual, the Internet could actually become less safe. When one person can access all information on a network, “it makes it more vulnerable to intruders,” argued Granick. “You’ve basically established a path for the bad guys to skip down.” Granick added that the nonspecific scope of this legislation is “contrary to what the Constitution promises us.” Should the Commerce Department decide to use information gained while accessing “critical infrastructure” on the Net against the user, privacy would be lost. According to Granick, this is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Article IV, which states the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated….”
“Who’s interested in this [legislation]?” asked Granick. “Law enforcement and people in the security industry who want to ensure more government dollars go to them.”
TAKE A NUMBER
WITH HIGH-POWERED TECHNOLOGY AND the right legislation in place, America is coming closer and closer to the totalitarian surveillance society that George Orwell described in 1984.
Consider how the government has effectively enumerated the American citizenry over fifty years:
1935—Social Security initiated.
1936—The current Social Security numbering system begins.
1962—The IRS starts requiring Social Security numbers on tax returns even though Social Security cards plainly state the number was “Not for Identification.”
1970—All banks require a Social Security number.
1971—Military ID numbers are changed to Social Security numbers.
1982—Anyone receiving government largesse is required to obtain a Social Security number.
1984—Anyone being declared a dependent for IRS tax purposes needs a Social Security number. Within two years, even newborn babies were required to have a Social Security number under penalty of fine.
Free people are individuals. Enslaved serfs are numbered chattel. If Americans are to remain a truly free people, tight restrictions must be placed on the microchipping of the population as well as the frequency of times the State requires one to present a number for identification. At the rate things are going, George Orwell’s 1984 vision of psychological and electronic tyranny is almost upon us.
HOMELAND SECURITY
IF SURVEILLANCE OF THE American public is being centralized, then it makes sense that the nation would need a more centralized law enforcement agency—in other words, a national police force.
During his nearly forty-year career as director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover continuously argued against the need for a national police force. This may have been due more to maintaining the independence of his bureau than any personal regard for civil liberties. Yet Hoover’s objection struck a chord with the majority of Americans.
But with the hurried passage of a law creating the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in November 2002, a nationalized police force was formed. This act was the greatest restructuring
of the federal government since the National Security Act of 1947, yet this time it didn’t include any of the previous act’s deliberation and review. After 9/11, President Bush argued that this needed to be done rapidly, because the country faced “an urgent need, and [the government needed to move] quickly…before the end of the congressional session.” Thus began the push to create the Department of Homeland Security with Tom Ridge holding a cabinet-level position controlling more than 170,000 federal employees and twenty-two federal agencies.
Despite congressional misgivings, the Homeland Security Act passed speedily through Congress with little or no revision. In the U.S. Senate, the proposal to create the department passed on a 98–1 vote (one senator did not vote). (As a side note: apparently, senators were so confident that they were about to do a genuine service for America that they voted themselves a pay raise for the fourth consecutive year.) The Homeland Security bill was signed into law by President Bush on November 25, 2002.
With the new office, Bush wanted to bring a myriad of government agencies under one central control. The agencies responsible for border, coastline, and transportation security were now under the command of the new office, and Bush remarked, “The continuing threat of terrorism, the threat of mass murder on our own soil, will be met with a unified, effective response.” By 2006, Homeland Security encompassed more than eighty-seven thousand government jurisdictions at both the state and local level, with additional directorates carrying names, both familiar and not, such as Preparedness, Science & Technology, Management, Policy, FEMA, the TSA, Customs, Border Patrol, the INS, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the Secret Service.
Equally disturbing as Homeland Security’s power was the news that the federal General Services Administration (GSA) had asked for $481.6 million in discretionary funds in its fiscal 2009 budget request, constituting a 103 percent increase from the $237.7 million in fiscal 2008. Legislators had earmarked the increase for the initial construction of a new DHS headquarters.