Shadow Government Page #5

---

to be sitting there watching

everybody there's not enough resources for

that, but the computers can do it.

Now that we have almost unlimited storage

capacity

on computer hard drives it's possible to record

everything that happens in front of a video

camera or

every transaction that occurs you know in

a credit

card database for example and that that information

is actually becoming immense it was revealed

in

the New York Times that Wal-Mart's database

was

as big as if not bigger than the entire internet.

After 9/11 a lot of the failures to prevent

the attacks were attributed rightly or

wrongly to the failure of different government

agencies to share data with each other

to form a complete picture that would have

identified the terrorists before they got

on the airplane and so those walls between

government agencies are coming down.

And then it turns out you know, in the US

there's data the government is prohibited

from

collecting itself but which it can perfectly

well

go buy on the open market from private vendors.

Even you know where there are walls that are

supposed to keep the data separate they come

down.

It's pretty much across the board this ongoing

demand

for linking more and more information on individuals

you know, what you purchase the credit card

verses

what your telephone says where you are now.

Is this an opportunity to send you a text

message and to remind

you to go to the grocery store if they have

a sale on orange

juice I mean this is the kind of vision that

many people have

and they spend a lot of effort moving towards

that vision.

The computerized age where information doesn't

vanish into the air but is always been

recorded somewhere and then collected and

aggregated into a database is that every

purchase you make every step you take where

there's a public video surveillance camera,

you know, when you use a credit card, the

searches you do on Google all these things

get collected and the way the law looks at

it right now is well you typed in that

search trend into Google so you knew they

were going to get it of course they have the

ability to keep it and because as a practical

matter we have this giant information

collecting system the threat to privacy today

is far greater than it ever has been.

It's more like the creation of an encyclopaedia

and if you think about an encyclopaedia you

know back in the old days when we had and

A:

through Z encyclopaedia you wouldn't sit down

and read every single volume but when you

wanted to look up Amazonian tree frogs or

the

country of Columbia it was right there at

your

fingertips and so I think what's happening

with the databases is the best way to understand

it, is that you're just a blip on the

screen right now but the moment someone wants

to look you up and wants to drill down and

find out about you they open up your entry

and

at that point all of this data that's been

collected really would paint a shockingly

detailed picture of a single person's life.

When Big Brother is government what are the

consequences well government

can take away my liberty you know, if Big

Brother is industry

maybe my finances at my credit card company

or my bank oh they

could just broke my credit worthiness, they

might take my money.

So the consequences of whom the Big Brother

is are nontrivial

if there have been other attacks and more

pressure was

put on more privacy put at risk the consequences

for Big

Brother could have been really large because

what if more and

more Americans were caught up in a dragnet

more and more

innocent Americans caught up in a dragnet

believed to be

terrorists, might be terrorists which there

scared of you kind

of thing you know, those consequences are

really extreme.

There's a push for every nation on the globe

to identify and number

all of it's citizens were seeing this happening

in China where

you've got over a billion people that have

now been issued unique

ID cards, literally national ID cards with

radio frequency

devices in them that can be used to track

them and identify

them at a distance you see now it's happening

in Mexico they're

going to be doing national ID cards to all

the citizens in

Mexico 1.2 billion people in India about to

go into a database.

Virtually every country on the globe you know

I go to the doctor I have a lab test

done my blood is there they sequence it they

know something about me but they also

know something about my family and even if

I agree that they could use it for research

to what extent that I now bring my family

and release information about them.

This is an RFID credit card and they have

been tens of millions if not

hundreds of millions of these issued and the

vast majority of people who are

carrying them don't actually realize that

there is RFID in them there's

nothing on it anywhere that says RFID there's

a small symbol on the back that

if you know what it means then you would know

what it was but if you're

just looking at it it's just another logo

you have no way of knowing that

there is an RFID chip in it the problem with

this is that because you don't

know that there is and RFID in it you won't

take any steps to protect it.

Which means that I can come along with a device

like this I bought this

on eBay for about two hundred dollars and

it reads these RFID credit

cards it gives me full card information that

is sufficient to process a

credit card transaction so using my two hundred

dollar device I've got

all of these people walking around with all

of these credit cards in their

pockets that they don't know have RFID and

that they don't know how

vulnerable they are to off-the-shelf devices

like this that can read

their credit card information and then conduct

transactions with there

credit card without that card ever leaving

your wallet what kind of

questions could someone ask about you that

will be answered by a database

that kept track of where you were, why did

you visit that person's

house, what should we know that that person

was holding a meeting of the

Communist Party or gee you go to this place

every Wednesday at noon,

well it's easy to find out that that's a church

and there's Alcoholics

Anonymous meetings there's a million ways

that simply knowing where someone

is on a regular basis allows you a tremendous

amount of information.

I believe the American people and indeed the

people of the world are in that same position

we've got a couple of little tiny glimmers

that there's something wrong that there are

databases being collected but what my research

for the last ten years has been about is trying

to identify the black balk of that iceberg

floating under the water so we don't hit it.

There is no question that we are being monitored

all the

time all of us that's not science fiction

that's fact.

But who is controlling the information?

Who's watching the watchers?

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes