Tag Archives: Monitoring

9 Reasons Why You Could Be a Terrorist

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James Wesley, Rawles has been in law enforcement for the past 18 years. He recently wrote a blog on SurvivalBlog expressing his concern with law enforcement teachings, specifically in regards to potential domestic terrorism.

Wesley points out the change of law enforcement training sponsors.
Before they were supported by the “local community” but now Big Brother ( represented here by the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Transportation Security Agency) dominates the training sessions and is concerned with profiling potential terrorists.

According to Wesley this list contains traits and characteristics that Big Brother believes make you a potential terrorist:

  1. Holding Second Amendment-oriented views. (NRA or gun club membership, holding a CCW permit)
  2. Reading survivalist literature. (fictional books such as “Patriots” and “One Second After” are mentioned by name)
  3. Being self-sufficient (stockpiling food, ammo, hand tools, medical supplies)
  4. Fearing economic collapse (buying gold and barter items)
  5. Holding religious views concerning the book of Revelation (apocalypse, anti-Christ)
  6. Expressing fears of Big Brother or big government (Oops)
  7. Being homeschooled
  8. Declaring Constitutional rights and civil liberties
  9. Believing in a New World Order conspiracy

Wesley observes how easy it can be to target someone as a potential terrorist. Here he remembers a lecture that uses a plumber as an example:

The officers were told how to use his employment as a plumber as further evidence of terrorism.  The suspect’s employment would be described as an elaborate scheme to justify possessing pipes and chemicals so as to have bomb making materials readily available

To drive the point home Wesley puts it in laymen’s turns:

It is easy to frame anyone for possessing bomb making materials (or other crimes) if the officer knows what items to list in the report and how to link these items to terrorism.

Wesley goes on to provide multiple ways to calm polices’ phobia of anything without a badge. But after reading this article, meant to enlighten us on how to avoid an ignorant fascist militant dictatorship, my fear of Big Brother’s constant oppressive presence has only been reinforced.

Via: Survival Blog

Intel aircraft over NYC tapped cell phone calls

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SIGINT (Signal Intelligence) aircraft such as this one, bristling with antennae, swirled above New York after this week's failed bombing attempt. Photo: US Navy

That’s how officials caught up with the stumblebum Times Square terrorist:

“In the end, it was secret Army intelligence planes that did him in. Armed with his cell phone number, they circled the skies over the New York area, intercepting a call to Emirates Airlines reservations, before scrambling to catch him at John F. Kennedy International Airport.”

via Army Intelligence Planes Led To Suspect’s Arrest – wcbstv.com.

Scientists: Vaccines provide "herd immunity"

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Naked apes. Photo: Peter O'Connor/Flickr CC

By using “herd,” the scientific community belies its insensitivity, if not its outright contempt, for the rest of humanity.

Dose the kids, protect the “herd.” That’s the language hardhearted epidemiologists are using to describe how vaccinations work to protect human populations:

“An unusual study done in 49 remote Hutterite farming colonies in western Canada has provided the surest proof yet that giving flu shots to schoolchildren protects a whole community from the disease. Although previous studies have demonstrated what scientists call ‘herd immunity,’ none have been so incontrovertible, because they were done in less isolated places with more sources of flu passing through.

Stanhope to English, Irish, herd: "Go to hell."

Credit Canadian conspiracy historian Alan Watt, for noting how scientists use the word, “herd,” in a way that fails to jibe with any citation in popular dictionaries.

The scientists are, however, using the same, precise language of that obnoxious prig, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield,  Philip Dormer Stanhope (click the excerpt below, for the full text):

via NYT: Flu shots in kids provide ‘herd immunity’ – The New York Times- msnbc.com.

Northeastern’s smart shirt to prevent pitcher’s elbow

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This week, in User Friendly, we glimpse the smart fabrics that many of us will soon be sporting, regularly.

“A sensor-covered ‘datalogging’ compression shirt for baseball pitchers, which detects signs of bad mechanics before they lead to torn ligaments, is an example of how e-textiles can support good health.”

More: Northeastern’s smart shirt aims to prevent pitcher’s elbow – The Boston Globe.

Privacy alert: Will dummies buy the fed's "smart meter" line?

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Gotcha! Through smart metering, utilities and the feds will widen their nets. (Photo: McKay Savage/Flickr CC)

The word “privacy” appears not once, in a 1,500-word request for public comment on the smart grid, released by the White House this week.

That’s because your individual privacy is the obstacle that the government, aided by the utility companies, hopes to overcome with so-called smart meters — devices that will reveal precisely how you are using the electricity you paid for.

Research into the smart grid, which includes the use of smart meters, has been paid for by hundreds of millions of your tax dollars.

So far, the only discernible benefits of the smart meters will go to the utility companies and government investigators. (No potential savings for consumers have been demonstrated.)

One question from the Office of Science and Technology does glance on the privacy issue:

“Who owns the home energy usage data? Should individual consumers and their authorized third-party service providers have the right to access energy usage data directly from the meter?”

Obviously, individual consumers own the juice they pay for, not the utilities. Therefore, they should own the data on where it goes on their property, be it to their electric heaters or marijuana grow bulbs.

But if the government was truly concerned about individual privacy, the same question would read:

“Should individual consumers *OR* their authorized third-party service providers have the right to access energy usage data directly from the meter?”

I believe the question is not written that way because the utility companies — just like the phone companies and ISPs — are not on the consumer’s side. Rather, they have a track record of collaborating with the authorities in their investigations of “suspicious behavior,” which typically means using a lot of electricity.

via Consumer Interface With the Smart Grid (at Cryptome)

Coke's face-match trickery makes suckers of Facebookers

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Barr. DavidAll06/Flickr CC

I sure hate what Bob Barr put us through, back when he was leading the effort to impeach Bill Clinton.

But the man makes perfect sense when he’s talking about the privacy threats posed by intrusive, government spy technologies.

Here, Barr reveals the problem with the ungodly mashup of facial recognition software and social media, in Coca Cola “Facial Profiler” campaign:

Coca Cola is a multi-national corporation which means it operates in conjunction with and under the watchful eye of our and other national governments around the globe. Posting a picture on Coke’s website or Facebook may on the surface appear to be a harmless act; but giving a multinational corporation access to a digitized photo of one’s self contributes to the building of a globally accessible database that can be used for facial-recognition cameras and systems. The privacy implications associated with having potentially hundreds of millions of digital pictures from people throughout the world in a database or databases is astounding.

via Facial profiling and Coke Zero game | The Barr Code.

The CIA-backed technology that searches your face for signs of “bad intents” already exists, of course.

Poppa Baard. Photo: Chris Taggart

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This bit reminds me, by the way, of my own observation last October that Bob Barr looks like a Baard.

$125 for state behavior surveillance system

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Photo: Caitlin B/Flickr CC

Photo: Caitlin B/Flickr CC

The government wants to know what makes masses eat and smoke so much.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with Recovery Act dollars, is looking for plans that will “change the environment in which eating, tobacco use, and physical activity occur, and impact population groups rather than individuals.”

Any proposal must be crafted toward changing group behavior, rather than helping individuals, according to the grant announcement:

State Supplemental Funding for Healthy Communities, Tobacco Control. Diabetes Prevention and Control. and Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System

via Grants.gov – Find Grant Opportunities – Opportunity Synopsis.

Infodemiology: Public health at the "granular" level

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Photo: Mike Burns. Flickr/CC

Photo: Mike Burns. Flickr/CC

Epidemiology used to rely on aggregated data, reports gathered from public health clinics and hospitals, VA hospitals and military bases.

But with individuals so eagerly coughing-up their intimate details to Google and Facebook, scrubbing health data (presuming that’s what government scientists *want* to do) will be impractical, the feds will tell us.

If you actually come down with the flu, and the doctors want to know who you’ve been in physical contact with, your trusty cellphone could soon tell them.

And someday, scientists hope, this “infodemiology” might help forecast and track a flu epidemic the way experts monitor the weather.

via Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Hoping sick mob will blog.

Massive national study to determine causes of autism

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Call to use National Children’s Study to see if vaccines *do* cause autism:

The NCS will establish over one hundred study centers across the US to test the blood of 100,000 newborns for scores of synthetic chemicals, including many EDCs. (Workers have already begun going door-to-door enrolling pregnant moms into the program.) For the next 21 years, scientists will carefully follow the children’s health, comparing the body burden of chemicals at birth to diseases developed later in life.

The NCS may be our generation’s best chance to solve the autism riddle. It is exactly the type of study needed to tease out the subtle relationships that may exist between autism and chemicals.

via Harvey Karp: Cracking the Autism Riddle: Toxic Chemicals, A Serious Suspect in the Autism Outbreak.

The astronomically higher autism risk that military families face suggests that heavy metals might be to blame.

Queen Beatrix wants to read your meter

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Not sure if I trust them. Photo: CC/The Green Part of Ireland

Not sure if I trust them. Photo: CC/The Green Part of Ireland

A recently proposed Dutch law would make it an “economic crime” to refuse a smart meter.

The Irish Greens are also high on the wireless technology, which allows utilities to peer into your home, and determine how much electricity you are using to power individual items.

And now, in the United States, T-Mobile will soon be baking its SIM cards into smart meters from the spooky-sounding company, Echelon.

Echelon’s Networked Energy Services System (Ness) includes meters that can read your water and gas consumption, too. And some Echelon meters emit alarms when your credit with your utility, or state, runs short.

More about Echelon (the corporation), and the elite pedigree of its investors, in my next post.

Here’s a bit of that Dutch story:

I hope the debate on smart metering will not grow silent because of a small and unclear victory in our First Chamber. We need to critically watch the developments in respect of smart metering and urge research into less intrusive alternatives such as in-home displays, specified energy bills, and the use of statistical and anonymised data.

via No to mandatory smart metering does not equal privacy! « Weblog Law & Technology.