Smart Grid is part of a global initiative to manage information, all information. This is not some dire fictional prediction; it exists right now, right here in the United States, and thanks to President Obama, the Secretary of the Treasury can lend the Western Area Power Administration (WAPA), a division of the Department of Energy, $3.25 billion to implement Smart Grid.
Ostensibly, Smart Grid is about energy efficiency and climate change. This intelligent power grid gathers information about individual energy use via sensors embedded in the transmission lines and in homes and businesses. The government, via WAPA, will know what temperature at which you keep your home or business. If you keep your domicile warmer or cooler than the temperature approved by the federal government, you pay more. To some, this is an acceptable arrangement, until they discover what else Smart Grid can do.
This is another means by which the federal government can keep tabs on what you do and where you go. Think keeping track of thermostat settings is harmless? Think using your credit/debit card to make all of your purchases (travel destinations, pharmaceuticals, books, etc) is harmless? What about drivers licenses that now have electro-magnetic strips on them? How about OnStar, the emergency help system that will eventually be used to stop your vehicle on police command, or cellphone GPS so authorities can track where you are?. All of these seemingly harmless systems taken by themselves are just that, harmless. But, given this latest push to implement this Smart Grid plan within 60 days, a larger more sinister picture is developing.
IBM and GE will receive billions of dollars under the federal governments implementation of Smart Grid. Appliances, cars, home furnishings, even clothing are all becoming more intelligent and the devices that allow this intelligence will be able to be accessed by anyone with the proper equipment. In the wrong (or right) hands data collected from these many devices can tell the government everything about you and anyone who is in your house or place of business, at any time.
The world is becoming increasingly interconnected and interactions between all of these various systems will grow exponentially. A Smart Grid set up to capture and catalog all of those seemingly innocuous transactions can paint a very clear picture of you and your lifestyle. The dire vision as laid out in George Orwell’s book 1984 about our future is coming true, today.
Our political leaders are not the only ones who have been handed a mandate for change. Leaders of businesses and institutions everywhere have a unique opportunity to transform the way the world works.
Global integration is upon us. It is becoming an acceptable and necessary part of our everyday lives and is gently lulling us into a false sense of security. As the world becomes smarter through the integration of systems monitoring such diverse concerns as climate change, global supply chains, money transactions, and security, we are falling under the spell cast by a government that covets as much information as it can get on its citizens.
Homeland Security and the FBI have been obsessing over plans to document palm prints, eye scans and tattoo mapping of every U.S. citizen and anyone who crosses our borders. Will this information assist them in fulfilling their mandate to protect Americans? The vast majority of Americans will never consider committing a terrorist act against their neighbors, family or anyone else. How is collecting information on these people going to better serve the FBI and Homeland Security or us?
The final legal threshold preventing the FBI from monitoring Americans without probable cause was crossed when a special appeals court ruled that criminal prosecutors should be able to request the bugging of suspected terrorists. And the court system consistently sides with law enforcement, in all matters.
A computer system, developed under the Total Information Awareness System by the Bush Administration, was set up to monitor every American’s credit card transactions, phone calls and even borrowed library books in an anti-terrorist measure under the auspices of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The agency is also funding the development of technologies to allow the Government to track e-mail, internet use, travel, and bank records, medical files and every type of accessible private and public data into what the Pentagon described as “one centralized grand database”.
This “grand database” was authorized under the scare of terrorism. But, who is terrorizing whom?
The Patriot Act increased powers for intelligence agents to monitor citizens.
Bureau of Prisons ordered by US Justice Department to alter its rules to allow the monitoring of lawyer-client conversations without court order or supervision.
A presidential executive order allowed military tribunals for anyone deemed by the Justice Department to be an “enemy combatant”, for which there is no legal definition.
We have already seen laws changed or flat out broken in order to spy on American citizens. We have learned of bills passed allowing data collection of American citizens. We have witnessed the growth of one the largest bureaucracies ever developed (Homeland Security) under the guise of preventing terrorism to reach America’s shores.
And now, the Smart Grid, set up to collect all information possible, is becoming a reality. Do you still need convincing that all of these ‘harmless’ single events does not mean that our government is bent on monitoring every aspect of our daily lives? Does there have to be nefarious reasons for someone to want to implement such an intrusive and all-inclusive system? Once this system is in place evil will find it easier to do as it wishes.
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