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Big Brother Gets a Brain
Gregus writes "The Village Voice delves into the DARPA's latest plan to track people and vehicle movement in cities, ostensibly for urban warfare, though this would be really handy watching 'suspicious' people in any city. "The goal, according to a recent Pentagon presentation to defense contractors, is to 'track everything that moves.' " The actual DARPA RFP and briefings. I just feel more safe all the time."
I pretty much guessed as much when the DMV in our state issued everyone new license plates. The primary difference was that the new kind are many times more reflective than the old ones, making them ideal for tracking via camera at lengthy distances.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Either that or people that don't like the idea of being followed 24-7 by a computer system, monitored by a random individual that can look up what the hell they want to about you. I work for the government in Britain, and I accept that while I am in the building my movements will be monitored, but when I leave I can do pretty much what I want, without the worry of people watching me, making assumptions based on someone I walked past on the street. At this rate the next stpe will be to accept this as evidence in a case, at which point you have to worry about people being falsely imprisoned due to their system saying "X has followed the same route as Y to every day at precisely 12:30 pm, therefore we have reason to imprison him under the homeland security act" Would it be my fault that I get the same bus to lunch every day as a terrorist??
It's an astonishing book, but the basic premise is that constant war is a means of keeping resources scarce, purely in order to maintain class distinction. If the plebians get too rich and well educated, they'll start to question why they need a ruling class at all, and the ruling class would rather be comfortable in a land of poverty than revoltingly rich in a land of plenty. The whole Big Brother culture is just a consequence of that (from the need to cover up the futility of the war), not the cause.
While it's true that USKA burns up hundreds of billions of USD a year (possibly a trillion if you count the stuff that isn't counted) in moving guns, tanks and bombs around the world, the goal does seem to be global imperialism rather than domestic scarcity. Sure, plenty of people are starving, but our middle classes are fatter and happier in terms of consumer toys than even the Inner Party in 1984.
Then again, that's pretty much what Winston Smith believes until he reads the book, so what do I know? The goal might be different, but the methods seem largely the same; an eternal war that can't be won against a foe with a constantly changing face, surveillance of citizens in the name of this war, arrest and detainment without due process, parading and show trials of prisoners for propaganda value, WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, the whole works.
But I still can't figure out what the goal is. If it's merely self preservation for the incumbent autocrats, then that's understandable but both disappointingly unimaginative and largely unncessary - 98% of US Congressional incumbents already get reelected, and hereditary ruling dynasties are now as accepted in the USA as in Airstrip One. What more do they want? What is the point of moving further towards a police state? Any ideas?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
1984 was cool because everyone got thin and flat, big screen tvs in the apartments - for free!
Sure, the downside was that you were monitored, but the units were shiny!
The Big Brother type stuff has always been a dualism for me - part of me thinks it cool to be able to track XYZ and watch the stats of it all, but then there is the part of me that doesn't really personally want to be watched so much.
Of all of the Big Brother type things, my favorite of all time was the AT&T Labs thing where there were units installed into the ceiling tiles that would monitor locations of id trasnmitters that were in id cards, worn by employees.
It would allow someone to finger a user and see what room in a building he/she is in. Or a room could be fingered and then you could see a list of users that are in that room.
That is cool as hell - you could set it up to have a GUI with the building blueprints, and you could setup stats. Show that Joe User spends 5 hours everyday at his desk, and 3 hours at the watercooler.
Cool in the sense that I like it and I'm a stats junkie, but in reality, I'm not so sure I want someone to be able to track that I spend N minutes of the day in the toilet, and then the rest curled up in a ball under my desk, crying. Although I'm pretty certain the resolution on these things isn't good enough to determine the difference between sitting at my desk or sleeping under my desk.
Also, it is an id badge that one wears - one could easily leave it anywhere and bypass the system. That is why we must all get them implanted immediately. Did I just say that?
I am pretty sure this is it here, the Active Badge (the same people that brought us VNC, antoher incredibly cool tool).
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
For those not in the UK, the above comment is actually very funny. Feel free to laugh heartily and mod up, therefore conveying the image that a lot of UK people are reading this, and consequently making us feel more at home with the content!
Joking aside, being able to track vehicular activity is one thing, being able to identify the person or persons within that vehicle is an entriely different matter.
My brother is serving in Iraq now. Although the army is able to track all vehicles and pinpoint their movements, during the war they still attacked and killed people on their own side because they could not identify the people in those vehicles.
Only a minor detail but one which is pretty significant.
~~~~~~~~~ "I must create my own system, or be enslav'd by another man's." William Blake, Jerusalem.
The answer sadly is deeply embodied in a belief in controlling other people's moral behavior.
The dogma that comes hand in hand with most of the control freaks in Washington is that of ultra-conservatism, and the feeling of betrayal by the court system in terms of moral erosion.
These people are acting in a manner that is so close to that of the fundamentalist Muslim radicals they love to hate that it is simply amazing to me.
None the less, I believe their agenda and repressive actions will be short lived just as all their predecessors movements have been in this country.
One needs only to look at probation's short life, or the political legacy of Joe McCarthy to observe the fate of the current moral extremists.
Fair comment. Religious dogma is so alien to me that I find it hard to remember about it, even when the leaders of Oceana have prayer sessions before making important decisions. I'm not sure what's more worrying; that they think they hear answers, or that they actually hear answers.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Even if they get the infrastructure set up, how do they implement this in our legal system? I figure that the images they have will be grainy, black and white, and of blurry, moving cars at night. I don't see how you can hand that to a jury and say, "Well, even though you can't see anything here, our program is nearly 87% certain that this car is in fact the car of the defendant." Is 13% reasonable doubt? Is 12%? We know that .5% isn't, or cases involving DNA evidence would be thrown out. At what point does jury duty become the analysis of quantatative figures as opposed to qualitative arguments?
To some extent I feel like a logical justice system is a step forward for society. At the same time, I'd prefer a trial by my peers, were I ever faced with the choice. Some day a jury deliberation may be number crunching:
"Well, the computer on 4th and Broad Street has determined with 75 percent probability that the defendant was moving towards the scene of the crime, and the computer on 5th and Broad Street gives us a 80 percent probability that he stopped at the scene. That gives us a 95% degree of probability that he was at the scene at the time of the murder. According to the Numerical Methods Act of 2015, we have to convict him."
while (!sleep){
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We're playing compare and contrast with 1984, remember? Middle class Americans have cars, they have televisions and DVD players and computers and washing machines and (by and large) reliable electricity for them, have mortgages and detatched houses with basements and garages. Sure, they have to work to keep them, but that's still half way to Orwell's utopian alternative to war austerity. Outer Party 1984ians work 60+ hours a week, 90 if they are redacting large parts of history, for no reward, remember?
Heck, if you're on welfare in the USA, you've still got far, far more than 1984's proles. You have your own viewscreen, and it doesn't watch you (yet). You can eat more or less what you want in terms of fat, carbs and protein. You get more than 20 grams of chocolate a week, and you don't have to get your gin on the black market. Orwell's proles would be delighted to live in 2003 America.
As for education, the vast majority of the US middle class are literate and have a political education that goes (barely, but measurably) beyond simple indoctrination. Whether they retain that knowledge, or act on it, is largely a matter of choice, but they aren't denied the opportunity.
On the other hand, the US middle class are brainwashed with jingoistic flag-worshipping propaganda from an early age, and I'm not disagreeing with your premise that consumer debt is a millstone round most peoples' necks, but it's a millstone of their making. If you want to step out of the rat race and live on minimum wage or welfare, you're free to do so. Orwell's characters - proles and party both - don't have that luxury.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Um, further to my other reply, while we turned Prohibition around, we didn't manage to do anything about other recreational drugs, did we? We can roll them back three steps, but if they took four forward, that still leaves us one step closer to the sort of Nanny State that exists on Airstrip One.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
that Conservatives stood for smaller government... surely creating equipment to monitor each street in the country (because it seems to me it'd be a lot easier to install cameras, or use existing ones in our own cities rather than it would be to send technicians out to a war zone and start installing cameras while people are shooting at you!) is the opposite of that.
As a matter of fact, the first time you do something "erratic" or "suspicious" to the computer system and it sends a police car to follow you around and/or arrest or harrass you, you will be so glad we live in a free country that is just protecting us from terrorists.
I'm in my late 20's so I still get harrassed often by police because young men often look suspicious to police because of our age and when we do suspicious things such as drive around or walk. Just last week I was followed around my apartment complex all the way to my house because I looked suspicious... I was going to ask the officer what the problem was but unfortunately there is no way to question my local police...
Once I tried talking to one as he was about to follow me into my gated apartment complex (a separate incident) after he unsuccessfully tried to guess a gate code for a few minutes rather than using the emergency code (because he really just wanted to drive around and harrass people and had no reason to be there). I told him, very politely, actually, because a friend of mine who is a policeman in Ft. Lauderdale that was visiting me was in the car with me, "Sir, please use your gate code". He then almost broke down the gate with the car that my taxes in part paid for and screamed (at the top of his lungs and in a very inappropriately rude and loud response to a very calm statement on my part (I have a witness)) "Boy, move your car or I'm gonna arrest you and kick your A**". After being threatened by the cop, my Policeman buddy explained to me that, though the cop was being a prick, was absolutely wrong, was trying to break into my neighborhood (there is an emergency gate code for official police business he did not use and the fact that he was trying for about five minutes to guess a resident gate code so it wouldn't be on the record that he used the emergency code for no emergency), and threatened to beat the crap out of me, I better let him in because I should show him some respect.
After this incident, I am afraid to speak to police because, in their line of work my friend told me, they are suspicious of everyone for their own safety. That's fine, and I think wise, but there is a serious difference between being overly cautious and suspicious and beind downright disrespectful, threatening, and harassing young people and minorities because we all "look suspicious". Perhaps I should spray paint my hair grey so I don't "look suspicious" anymore.
I know my experiences with police have been extremely mild in comparison with other people's experiences, fortunately for me, I never was up to no good when encountering police. Well, this is certainly an off-topic rant, but it goes to show how enthusiastic I am to be visually followed around a city, marked as "suspicious" because I'm young, then pinpointed for harrassment by the police.
Surely there are more respectful ways to treat americans!
-Joe
If we're all god's children, what's so special about Jesus? - Jimmy Carr
Way back in the 1980s I used to do a lot of travel between England and Ireland. As an American citizen liveing in Ireland, I carried a passport issued by the US Consulate in Dublin.
I swear, every time I was stopped at Heathrow, they'd pull out the book of wanted IRA men and compare my picture to every damned one. Thank you, NORAID.
More recently, passing through Gatwick, I had my picture taken and compared programatically to a list of wanted faces. The camera was right out there in front of me. I've yet to experience the same in the U.S.
I guess the point is that the US may be going to hell, but it's doing so more slowly than everywhere else.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Your arguments are almost completely based upon personal conviction, thus they are difficult to reason with.
However, I must take issue with you on this point:
For over 95% of the inhabitants of this planet, spiritual matters are a factor in life.
This is simply not true. According to Encarta, non-believers comprise approximately 21 percent of the people on the planet.
Just because your broadly defined "organized religions" are a majority in a sense, does not indicate, to me or most others who value the idea of democracy, that they should inflict others with rigid and arbitrary personal morays.
Also, I find this interesting:
People's convictions don't change simply because you change a law
Right. Laws change because societies convictions change.
Also, many of the religions you are putting under the same hat embrace diversity. Even some Christians believe it or not.