While Pandemic Destroys Lives, The Surveillance State Celebrates
by Lee Camp via ConsortiumNews.com,
ZeroHedge.com
Wed, 05/06/2020
If we don’t fight back against the secretive surveillance state growing steadily around us, your wife/husband may find out you love a Cinnabon more than you love her/him. And that might be just the beginning of it.
While many of us remain quarantined – inexorably welded to our home/apartment/RV in an abandoned Walmart parking lot – the surveillance state is actually stretching its legs, brought out for a run by our friendly neighborhood oligarchs like a young golden retriever let off its leash on a nice day. Unfortunately, in this case what it’s retrieving is all of our information, movements, thoughts and desires.
Right now violations of American’s privacy rights do not hold many people’s attention. We’re too busy adapting to a new, confusing, and anxiety-filled form of existence. (Last week I myself finally saw my dentist, my therapist and my prostitute all via Zoom calls. Unfortunately, I had performance anxiety – but that was with the therapist [flaccid super-ego].)
More Americans have now been killed by Covid-19 than were killed during the Vietnam War. (I mean Americans killed in Vietnam of course. “Others” killed have never much mattered to us.) As the virus death toll rises, various governments around the world have discussed using smart city technology to trace where infected people go and who they come in contact with. At first that sounds great. What kind of psychopath doesn’t want to end this pandemic? But it turns out there’s one problem with allowing the moneyed rulers to track every man, woman, and child. That problem — stop me if you guessed it — is that they’re tracking every man, woman, and child.
As was written in the crazy anarchist rag known as Forbes Magazine:
“…the use of masses of connected sensors makes it clear that the coronavirus pandemic is–intentionally or not – being used as a testbed for new surveillance technologies that may threaten privacy and civil liberties. So aside from being a global health crisis, the coronavirus has effectively become an experiment in how to monitor and control people at scale.”
Oh goody! I love being gerbilized for the ruling elite. (Maybe they’ll give us yummy treats – like carrots or cucumbers.) And it’s not just your phones they’re tracking in these “smart cities.”
Forbes again:
“Making use of a traffic light indicator system, their algorithm is able to anonymously identify and label people who maintain safe distances, while flagging violations.”
If they’re able to track “violators” who follow within a flying spit particle of someone else, then it stands to reason they could choose to track pretty much any other type of behavior. Such surveillance activity can effectively shut down all dissent or resistance, both large-scale and small. For example: would my hobby of mooning every Bank of America be an arrestable offense? Is a gentlemanly mooning illegal now? I thought this was a free country. What happened to “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled asses?” Apparently, they didn’t mean it. Now our asses have to be covered and they can’t even be huddled — they have to be 6 feet apart.
Data Governance and SMART cities, @NTusikov lays down the concerns. (Giulia Forsythe, Flickr)
Point is, the reason police officers post up every two blocks in minority neighborhoods is ostensibly to “catch” people committing crimes. But as we know from the stats, most of these “crimes” are really nothing — loitering, noise complaints, open alcoholic beverages, possession of a half a joint. Essentially the surveillance creates or stirs up the “crimes” in order to lock up people of color, thereby protecting the class structure and insulating the rich.
As we’ve seen in dictatorships the world over (most of them friends-with-benefits of the American government) a police state can be used (abused?) to arrest anyone the rulers desire. Now imagine a state where those political elite know exactly how and where you walk at all times — what you do, where you do it, and why you did it.
Dystopian Hellholes
They’re calling this kind of surveillance “smart cities,” but a more accurate term would be “dystopian surveillance state hellholes.” However, that name doesn’t fit on the signage as easily as “smart city.” It’s similar to how landlords give the shittiest apartment buildings grandiose names like “The Cromwell” or “The Victorian.” When you see a name like that, you know it has “the Bed Bugs.” But they often throw in “Le Black Mold” free of charge. Hence, the fact they’re calling these “smart cities” scares the shit out of me.
The Rest…HERE
