Building a bigger police state

By Libby

If you still think that the US is not slipping slowly into totalitarianism, this is the must read of the day. The police state is knocking at our door. China is leading the way with the help of US corporations with their own version of homeland security called Golden Shield.

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.

It's the ultimate tool for population control. It was used in the recent protests in Tibet in conjuction with local police and state friendly media. It's being built with the help of corporations like L-1 Identity Solutions, a major U.S. defense contractor that produces passports and biometric security systems for the U.S. government, who managed to find a loophole in the prohibition against providing such technology.

The company intitally denied any involvement and when confronted with proof of its business dealings, refused to comment. They already have their own database of 60 million records of Americans. And L-1 is not the only company interested in breaking into the Chinese surveillance state market. GE, IBM, UT and of course, Google and Yahoo have all done trade related in some way Golden Shield. The financial incentives to break into a global market worth an estimated $200 billion are great. China alone is estimated at $33 billion. What's a little human suppression compared to that kind of dough?

But that's in China and we're not like them, you say? Think again.

Empowered by the Patriot Act, many of the big dreams hatched by men like Atick 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. 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.

The Fourth Amendment prohibition against illegal search and seizure used to protect us from this sort of infringement but thanks to a power mad administration and the spineless legislative branch that enabled them, that's no longer true. We don't even have redress in the courts any more. As the NYT reported yesterday:

President Bush has the legal power to order the indefinite military detentions of civilians captured in the United States, the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled on Tuesday in a fractured 5-to-4 decision.

Think about that. The president has the power to declare any US citizen or legal resident an enemy of the state and can hold then indefinitely without charge. And don't hope for technology to save you. When the protests started in Tibet, the Chinese government limited or blocked access to the internet, blocked phone calls and assembled their most wanted list from surveillance tapes, which were duly publicized by their media. They didn't even need to send in the storm troopers to gain control.

You don't need a crystal ball to see that China's present is our future. [hat tip to our invaluable researcher, Kat]

Comments

[mds]

In the conclusion of his long opinion, Judge Wilkinson said terrorism cases presented courts with special challenges.

“We may never know,” he said, “whether we have struck the proper balance between liberty and security, because we do not know every action the executive is taking and we do not know every threat global terror networks have in store.”

(Emphasis added)

Judge Wilkinson sure raised the key point there... in his opinion upholding the right of the President to detain anyone he wants forever. Our country is indeed pretty well screwed.

[Kat]

Alternet reposted Democracy Now's recent http://www.alternet.org/workplace/91656/?ses=9260d41bb1785ea97391ed1ad43abe3e>interview with Naomi Klein. It's garnered 113 comments so far.

I hope everyone takes your link, and reads the entire Rolling Stone article.

The Constitution be damned when there are piles of money to be made from herding sheeple.

After all, laws - and consequences for those who break them - are for us little people.

[Libby]

MDS, that line chilled me too. We are truly screwed.

Kat, the readers here will here will click the link. It's truly frightening.

[darms]

In TX, Grits for Breakfast tells us that the feds tried to force the state to install license plate readers along certain highways & intersections. So what if the laws here only permit "red-light cameras" at intersections. Ever thought surveillance is yet another reason these damned rethugs are so enthusiastic about toll roads?

I'm glad to be 52 and have no kids, my life will soon be over and I have no stake in the future, none whatsoever.

[Libby]

Darms, I hope you still have many good years left and thanks to the pointer to Scott's blog. I haven't been over there in way too long. He's one of my favorites but alas, with so many blogs, I don't get around much anymore.

[security cameras michigan]

In business, nobody wants to come across as "big brother". Although, the god;s honest truth. Is that if your losing money in this day and age...you're out of business.

[Tilton]

Badly need your help. We can be sure that the greatest hope for maintaining equilibrium in the face of any situation rests within ourselves.
I am from Djibouti and too bad know English, give true I wrote the following sentence: "Rae, after reading your reply, I think I can safely assume you don; t spend much on health care."

Thank you very much ;-). Tilton.