Wow, this is the best piece by James Corbett I’ve seen in a while. It’s an etude on government surveillance that starts out mundane and crescendoes into the “science fiction-esque”.
1. Privacy of Garbage – Programs like WM’s “Waste Watch Driver Training Program” are training garbage men to spy on customers.
2. Privacy of Location – The ubiquity of cellphones or what Corbett calls “Personal Tracking Devices” has long been eroding users’ privacy of location, due to the nature of how cellular signals are sent and received by local towers. Turning on your GPS merely pinpoints your location down to the square foot.
Privacy of location is being further eroded by a ubiquity of CCTV cameras in public spaces. In China, which Corbett calls the testing ground for “Any New World Order social experiment”, CCTV cameras are being connected to facial recognition technologies, which the government proudly claims will be able to match every one of China’s 1.3 billion citizens with their government ID photos.
3. Privacy of Thought – Person-to-person mind messaging via digital brain connection, machines that can decode and process what someone is looking at in real time and computers that can translate thoughts into words are just a few of the new technologies that could enable Big Brother to read your thoughts and arrest you for thought crimes.
4. Privacy of Transaction – Credit cards have long been eroding this right and the war on cash would demolish this completely.
5. Privacy of DNA – Every newborn in the US, Canada, Australia and numerous other countries has blood collected from a heel prick at the time of birth and that sample is stored in government archives. Corbett says, “This is the genetic database that no one ever talks about and is already decades old.” Who owns this data? Why, the private companies contracted to collect and store it do.
Corbett warns that we’re giving up not just our privacy but our humanity and we’re gradually losing our ability to fight back against whatever automated dictatorship emerges in the future.
