In the past, compiling all of that information would take a great deal of time. But now tech giants such as Microsoft, Motorola, Cisco and Palantir are selling “fusion systems” to governments all over the planet. These “fusion systems” can instantly integrate surveillance data from thousands of different sources, and this has totally transformed how law enforcement is conducted in many of our largest cities.
Arthur Holland Michel is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and he was given a tour of a “fusion system” that is used by the city of Chicago called Citigraf…
On another occasion, Arthur Holland Michel got the opportunity to test out the “fusion system” that Microsoft had built for New York City…
The NYPD official showed me how he could pull up any city resident’s rap sheet, lists of their known associates, cases in which they were named as a victim of a crime or as a witness, and, if they had a car, a heatmap of where they tended to drive and a full history of their parking violations. Then he handed me the phone. Go ahead, he said; search a name.
A flurry of people came to mind: Friends. Lovers. Enemies. In the end, I chose the victim of a shooting I’d witnessed in Brooklyn a couple of years earlier. He popped right up, along with what felt like more personal information than I, or even perhaps a curious officer, had any right to know without a court order. Feeling a little dizzy, I gave the phone back.
On the other side of the Atlantic, a joint European surveillance project known as ROXANNE is causing a great deal of concern…
An acronym for Real time netwOrk, teXt, and speaker ANalytics for combating orgaNized crimE, it was announced in November the Republic’s involvement in the project currently being developed in Switzerland.
A biometrics based platform ostensibly to monitor and crack down on organised crime, an additional application of ROXANNE which its creators advertise freely is the ability to monitor those guilty of alleged hate speech and political extremism.
Strict new laws against “hate speech” and “political extremism” are being instituted all over Europe, and this new tool will help to track down “thought criminals”.
In particular, this new tool will be heavily monitoring “social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube as well as normal telecommunications platforms”…
They really do want to control what all of us do, say and think, and the Big Brother surveillance grid is becoming more suffocating with each passing year.
If we do not put limits on this technology while we still can, it is just a matter of time before our society becomes a dystopian nightmare far more horrible than anything than George Orwell ever dared to imagine.
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