<\/p>\n
\n “If, as it seems, we are in the process
\nof becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the
\nethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be:
\ncheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic
\ngadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the
\nauthorities.” \u2014 Philip K. Dick<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention
\nand willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national
\ncrisis after another in order to expands its powers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on
\nillegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety
\nschemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses
\nto pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the
\npolice state’s hands.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It doesn’t even matter what the nature of
\nthe crisis might be \u2014 civil unrest, the national emergencies,
\n“unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal
\norder, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health
\nemergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters” \u2014 as
\nlong as it allows the government to justify all manner of government tyranny in the
\nso-called name of national security.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Now we find ourselves on the brink of a possible
\ncoronavirus contagion. I’ll leave the media and the medical community to
\nspeculate about the impact the coronavirus will have on the nation’s health,
\nbut how will the government’s War on the Coronavirus impact our freedoms?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
For a hint of what’s in store, you can look
\nto China \u2014 our role model for all things dystopian \u2014 where the contagion
\nstarted. In an attempt to fight the epidemic, the government has given its
\nsurveillance state apparatus \u2014 which boasts the most expansive and
\nsophisticated surveillance system in the world \u2014 free rein. Thermal scanners
\nusing artificial intelligence (AI) have been installed at train stations in major
\ncities to assess body temperatures and identify anyone with a fever. Facial
\nrecognition cameras and cell phone carriers track people’s movements
\nconstantly, reporting in real time to data centers that can be accessed by
\ngovernment agents and employers alike. And coded color alerts (red, yellow and
\ngreen) sort people into health categories that correspond to the amount of freedom
\nof movement they’re allowed: “Green code, travel freely. Red or
\nyellow, report immediately.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Mind you, prior to the coronavirus outbreak, the
\nChinese surveillance state had already been hard at work tracking its citizens
\nthrough the use of some 200 million security cameras installed nationwide. Equipped
\nwith facial recognition technology, the cameras allow authorities to track so-called
\ncriminal acts, such as jaywalking, which factor into a person’s social credit
\nscore.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Social media credit scores assigned to Chinese
\nindividuals and businesses categorize them on whether or not they are
\n“good” citizens. A real-name system \u2014 which requires people to use
\ngovernment-issued ID cards to buy mobile sims, obtain social media accounts, take a
\ntrain, board a plane, or even buy groceries \u2014 coupled with social media credit
\nscores ensures that those blacklisted as “unworthy” are banned from
\naccessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train. Among
\nthe activities that can get you labeled unworthy are taking reserved seats on trains
\nor causing trouble in hospitals.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That same social credit score technology used to
\nidentify, track and segregate citizens is now one of China’s chief weapons in
\nits fight to contain the coronavirus from spreading. However, it is far from
\ninfallible and a prime example of the difficulties involved in navigating an
\nautonomous system where disembodied AI systems call the shots. For instance, one
\nwoman, who has no symptoms of the virus but was assigned a red code based on a visit
\nto her hometown, has been blocked from returning to her home and job until her color
\ncode changes. She has been stuck in this state of limbo for weeks with no means of
\nchallenging the color code or knowing exactly why she’s been assigned a red
\ncode.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Fighting the coronavirus epidemic has given China
\nthe perfect excuse for unleashing the full force of its surveillance and data
\ncollection powers. The problem, as Eamon Barrett acknowledges in Fortune magazine,
\nis what happens after: “Once the outbreak is controlled, it’s
\nunclear whether the government will retract its new powers.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The lesson for the ages: once any government is
\nallowed to expand its powers, it’s almost impossible to pull back.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, in the U.S., the government thus far
\nhas limited its coronavirus preparations to missives advising the public to stay
\ncalm, wash their hands, and cover their mouths when they cough and sneeze.
\nDon’t go underestimating the government’s ability to lock the nation
\ndown if the coronavirus turns into a pandemic, however. After all, the government
\nhas been planning and preparing for such a crisis for years now.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The building blocks are already in place for such
\nan eventuality: the surveillance networks, fusion centers and government contractors
\nthat already share information in real time; the government’s massive
\nbiometric databases that can identify individuals based on genetic and biological
\nmarkers; the militarized police, working in conjunction with federal agencies, ready
\nand able to coordinate with the federal government when it’s time to round up
\nthe targeted individuals; the courts that will sanction the government’s
\nmethods, no matter how unlawful, as long as it’s done in the name of national
\nsecurity; and the detention facilities, whether private prisons or FEMA internment
\ncamps, that have been built and are waiting to be filled.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Now all of this may sound far-fetched to you now,
\nbut we’ve already arrived at the dystopian futures prophesied by George
\nOrwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and
\nPhilip K. Dick’s Minority Report. It won’t take much more to
\npush us over the edge into Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, in which the majority of
\nhumanity is relegated to an overpopulated, diseased, warring planet where the
\ngovernment employs technologies such as drones, tasers and biometric scanners to
\ntrack, target and control the populace. Mind you, while these technologies are
\nalready in use today and being hailed for their potentially life-saving, cost-
\nsaving, time-saving benefits, it won’t be long before the drawbacks to having
\na government equipped with technology that makes it all-seeing, all-knowing, and
\nall-powerful \u2014 helped along by the citizenry \u2014 far outdistance the
\nbenefits.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
On a daily basis, Americans are relinquishing (in
\nmany cases, voluntarily) the most intimate details of who we are \u2014 their
\nbiological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial
\ncharacteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.) \u2014 in order to
\nnavigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Consider all the ways you continue to be tracked,
\nhunted, hounded, and stalked by the government and its dubious agents:
\n – By tapping into your phone lines and cell phone
\ncommunications, the government knows what you say. By uploading all of your emails,
\nopening your mail, and reading your Facebook posts and text messages, the government
\nknows what you write.
\n – By monitoring your movements with the use of
\nlicense plate readers, surveillance cameras and other tracking devices, the
\ngovernment knows where you go. By churning through all of the detritus of your life
\n\u2014 what you read, where you go, what you say \u2014 the government can predict
\nwhat you will do.
\n – By mapping the synapses in your brain,
\nscientists \u2014 and in turn, the government \u2014 will soon know what you
\nremember. By mapping your biometrics \u2014 your “face-print” \u2014
\nand storing the information in a massive, shared government database available to
\nbureaucratic agencies, police and the military, the government’s goal is to
\nuse facial recognition software to identify you (and every other person in the
\ncountry) and track your movements, wherever you go.
\n – And by accessing your DNA, the government will
\nsoon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family
\nchart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to
\nfollow orders or chart your own course, etc.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Of course, none of these technologies are
\nfoolproof. Nor are they immune from tampering, hacking or user bias. Nevertheless,
\nthey have become a convenient tool in the hands of government agents to render null
\nand void the Constitution’s requirements of privacy and its prohibitions
\nagainst unreasonable searches and seizures.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The ramifications of a government \u2014 any
\ngovernment \u2014 having this much unregulated, unaccountable power to target,
\ntrack, round up and detain its citizens is beyond chilling. Imagine what a
\ntotalitarian regime such as Nazi Germany could have done with this kind of
\nunadulterated power. Imagine what the next police state to follow in Germany’s
\nfootsteps will do with this kind of power. Society is rapidly moving in that
\ndirection.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We’ve made it so easy for the government to
\nwatch us. Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend,
\nwhere you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what
\nyou’re watching on television and reading on the internet. Every move you make
\nis being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a
\npicture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if
\nit becomes necessary to bring you in line.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Chances are, as the Washington Post has
\nreported, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat assessment score
\n\u2014 green, yellow or red \u2014 so police are forewarned about your potential
\ninclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in
\nthe military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a
\nparticular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have
\ncommitted a crime. In other words, you’re most likely already flagged in a
\ngovernment database somewhere.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The government has the know-how. Indeed, for
\nyears now, the FBI and Justice Department have conspired to acquire near-limitless
\npower and control over biometric information collected on law-abiding individuals,
\nmillions of whom have never been accused of a crime. Going far beyond the scope of
\nthose with criminal backgrounds, the FBI’s Next Generation Identification
\ndatabase (NGID), a billion dollar boondoggle that is aimed at dramatically expanding
\nthe government’s ID database from a fingerprint system to a vast data
\nstorehouse of iris scans, photos searchable with face recognition technology, palm
\nprints, and measures of gait and voice recordings alongside records of fingerprints,
\nscars, and tattoos.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Launched in 2008, the NGID is a massive biometric
\ndatabase that contains more than 100 million fingerprints and 45 million facial
\nphotos gathered from a variety of sources ranging from criminal suspects and
\nconvicts to daycare workers and visa applicants, including millions of people who
\nhave never committed or even been accused of a crime. In other words, innocent
\nAmerican citizens are now automatically placed in a suspect database.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
For a long time, the government was required to
\nat least observe some basic restrictions on when, where and how it could access
\nsomeone’s biometrics and DNA and use it against them. That is no longer the
\ncase.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The information is being amassed through a
\nvariety of routine procedures, with the police leading the way as prime collectors
\nof biometrics for something as non-threatening as a simple moving violation. The
\nnation’s courts are also doing their part to “build” the database,
\nrequiring biometric information as a precursor to more lenient sentences. And of
\ncourse Corporate America (including Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) has made it so
\neasy to use one’s biometrics to access everything from bank accounts to cell
\nphones. We’ve made it so easy for the government to target, identify and track
\nus.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Add pre-crime programs into the mix with
\ngovernment agencies and corporations working in tandem to determine who is a
\npotential danger and spin a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral
\nsensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity
\nreports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and
\ncitizen spies, and you having the makings for a perfect dystopian nightmare. This is
\nthe kind of oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package foreshadowed by
\nGeorge Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Remember, even the most well-intentioned
\ngovernment law or program can be \u2014 and has been \u2014 perverted, corrupted
\nand used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the
\nequation. In the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to
\nmalevolent purposes. Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the
\nAmerican people add up to a society in which there’s little room for
\nindiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical
\ngenius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary
\nand liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, Big Brother and
\nFather Knows Best all rolled into one. It turns out that we are Soylent
\nGreen.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The 1973, film of the same name, starring
\nCharlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, is set in 2022 in an overpopulated,
\npolluted, starving New York City whose inhabitants depend on synthetic foods
\nmanufactured by the Soylent Corporation for survival. Heston plays a policeman
\ninvestigating a murder, who discovers the grisly truth about the primary ingredient
\nin the wafer, soylent green, which is the principal source of nourishment for a
\nstarved population.
\n “It’s people. Soylent Green is
\nmade out of people,” declares Heston’s character.
\n“They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be
\nbreeding us like cattle for food.” Oh, how right he was.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Soylent Green is indeed people or, in our case,
\nSoylent Green is our own personal data, repossessed, repackaged and used by
\ncorporations and the government to entrap us. Without constitutional protections in
\nplace to guard against encroachments on our rights when power, technology and
\nmilitaristic governance converge, it won’t be long before we find ourselves,
\nmuch like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent Green, looking back on the
\npast with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what
\nwe wanted, think what we wanted, and go where we wanted without those thoughts,
\nwords and movements being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as
\nGoogle, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by
\nmilitarized police with their army of futuristic technologies. We’re not quite
\nthere yet. But that moment of reckoning is getting closer by the minute.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In the meantime, we’ve got an epidemic to
\nsurvive, so go ahead and wash your hands. Cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze.
\nAnd stock up on whatever you might need to survive this virus if it spreads to your
\ncommunity.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We are indeed at our most vulnerable right now,
\nbut as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American
\nPeople, it’s the American Surveillance State \u2014 not the coronavirus
\n\u2014 that poses the greatest threat to our freedoms.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
By John W. Whitehead, constitutional
\nattorney, the founder and president of The Rutherford Institute.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
yogaesoteric<\/strong><\/p>\n March 26, 2020<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-society-1602-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23375\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}