Police State 2.0: Soon To Be Released

Rolling Stone Magazine recently published a story of such tremendous import that every freedom loving American needs to read it. We are slowly being lulled into a surveillance society so complete that privacy will be something you can only read about in history books. There is big money to be made in high-tech surveillance so don’t be fooled into believing it cannot happen here.

London is under constant surveillance via CCTV cameras o every street corner, China’s internet has become a conduit through which Chinese authorities can monitor internet sites in real time and identify both the site owners and visitors, America’s police departments are salivating at the possibility of having drones and other high-tech security toys they can use ‘for our protection’. Homeland Security wants national ID cards that can track everywhere you go, the FBI wants massive databases on every American complete with every bit of biometric data they can get their paranoid hands on. Corporations have been tracking employee email. The NSA, under the direction of a very paranoid White House, has already used telecom companies to spy on our cell phone calls and internet traffic, and it is only a matter of time before banks and credit card companies will fall under the same directives.

How far away are we from having facial recognition software that can match a human face to a database within one second? We are less than one year away. Why is this ability being developed? Where is this ability being tested and perfected? China. Right now. You think they won’t sell this technology to any country who wants it? It’s all about money and control.

L-1 Identity Solutions, based in Connecticut, already has a stake in China’s development of software they, L-1, developed. L-1 is a one-stop shop for biometrics. Thanks to board members like former CIA director George Tenet, the company rapidly became a homeland-security heavy hitter. L-1 projects its annual revenues will hit $1 billion by 2011, much of it from U.S. government contracts. Licensing their software to any Chinese company is against U.S. policy, but it obviously didn’t concern L-1. Like I said, it’s all about the money. And the government contracts that L-1 is thriving on is of course our tax dollars.

Many other U.S. companies are charging into China, eager to make a profit from helping China spy on its citizens. The risk of violating the law does not deter these companies from helping the Communist Party spend billions of dollars building Police State 2.0. As long as they make big profit, they will do it. This isn't an unfortunate cost of doing business in China: It's the goal of doing business in China.

Taken from the article:

As The New York Times recently reported, aiding and abetting Beijing has become an investment boom for U.S. companies. Honeywell is working with Chinese police to "set up an elaborate computer monitoring system to analyze feeds from indoor and outdoor cameras in one of Beijing's most populated districts." General Electric is providing Beijing police with a security system that controls "thousands of video cameras simultaneously, and automatically alerts them to suspicious or fast-moving objects, like people running." IBM, meanwhile, is installing its "Smart Surveillance System" in the capital, another system for linking video cameras and scanning for trouble, while United Technologies is in Guangzhou, helping to customize a "2,000-camera network in a single large neighborhood, the first step toward a citywide network of 250,000 cameras to be installed before the Asian Games in 2010." By next year, the Chinese internal-security market will be worth an estimated $33 billion — around the same amount Congress has allocated for reconstructing Iraq.

All of this activity in China is just a run up to what we can expect to see here in the U.S. Every Chinese security firm is hatching some kind of plan to break into the U.S. market.

The Defense Department has already attempted China’s grand experiment with something called Total Information Awareness, a virtual, centralized grand database that would create constantly updated electronic dossiers on every citizen, drawing on banking, credit-card, library and phone records, as well as footage from surveillance cameras. Although Total Information Awareness was scrapped after the plans became public, large pieces of the project continue, with private data-mining companies collecting unprecedented amounts of information about everything from Web browsing to car rentals, and selling it to the government.

Empowered by the Patriot Act, many of the big dreams have already been put into practice at home. New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., are all experimenting with linking surveillance cameras into a single citywide network. Police use of surveillance cameras at peaceful demonstrations is now routine, and the images collected can be mined for "face prints," then cross-checked with ever-expanding photo databases.

We condemn China for human rights violations and yet we have Guantanamo Bay. Our constitution prohibits illegal search and seizure yet police departments and the federal government find ways around it all in the name of fighting crime, immigration and terrorism.

China is becoming more like us in very visible ways (Starbucks, Hooters, cellphones that are cooler than ours), and we are becoming more like China in less visible ones (torture, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, though not nearly on the Chinese scale).

There are a lot of people in our federal government that would do what China is doing in many of its cities, if they could. And we already have proof that they are not intimidated by the law.