EN — LARRY ROMANOFF: Police State America — Chapter 5 — Other Surveillance

 

Police State America –Volume One

Chapter 1-The Rise of the Police State

Chapter 2 — The FBI

Chapter 3 –COINTELPRO

Chapter 4 — Universal Public Surveillance

Chapter 5 — Other Surveillance

Chapter 6 — Searching for Anarchists, or Maybe Just Political Activists

Chapter 7   — Winning the Information War

Chapter 8 — Arbitrary and Unaccountable Law Enforcement

Chapter 9 — The Militarisation of the Police

Chapter 10 — Occupy Wall Street

Chapter 11 — Intimidating the Media & Subverting the Press

Chapter 12 — The Short Road: Democracy to Fascism

Chapter   13 — The Next American Revolution? Anticipated Civil Unrest

Police State America

Chapter 5 — Other Surveillance

 

CHINESE    ENGLISH

 

 Police State America – Volume One free e-book 

 

 

Large surveillance centers are becoming increasingly common in the US, now existing in many cities including New York and Washington, DC, authorities claiming their necessity in combating terrorist threats and reducing crime, but all internal documentation reveals their focus on tracking only political protesters. In a proposed new surveillance center for Oakland, California, in thousands of pages of internal documents released, there is no mention of crime. Instead, all references were to monitoring the Occupy Wall Street and Trayvon Martin protests as well as other political rallies. In fact, the Director of this project had written, “Oakland’s long history of civil discourse and protest adds to the need (for the surveillance center). The Oakland Emergency Operations Center has been partially or fully activated more than 30 times in the past three years to respond to large demonstrations and protests.” And Oakland’s Director of Security described the system as a tool that would help to “control labor strikes and community protests”. It was quite clear that the targets of this massive new surveillance system were not terrorists or criminals but civil protests and political demonstrations. The civil rights implications are obvious.

 

Another surveillance method that appears to be experiencing increasing employment is the indiscriminate – and illegal – placing of GPS trackers on private automobiles without judicial warrants. One judge, writing of the power of modern technology, wrote, “A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups – and not just one fact about a person, but all such facts.” Yet another surveillance system being implemented by the US Department of Homeland Security is a license plate tracking system consisting of license plate readers, which scan the tag of every vehicle crossing their paths. DHS claims this will assist in apprehending fugitive aliens, but a database containing records of the coming and going of hundreds of millions of vehicles seems a bit excessive for the location of a handful of minor fugitives.

 

 

And yet another surveillance scheme, this time originating in New York but certain to spread nationwide,is the use of powerful imaging detection body scanners to be deployed throughout the city, similar to, but much more powerful than, those used at US airports. These are high-tech radiation detectors that measure the energy emitted from a human body, and can detect most objects being carried by a person, and are in reality a method of conducting illegal full body searches of anyone walking the streets. This program is being developed jointly by the city of New York and the Pentagon, which cooperation immediately raises many questions. The problem is not simply the forcible exposure to unknown persons prying underneath one’s clothing, but the potentially disastrous biological consequences, since these terahertz scans interfere with the functioning of the human organism. In an article in the MIT’s Technology Review, it was stated that the THz waves used by the scanners can actually “unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication”.

 

If this isn’t bad enough,the US Department of Homeland Security has now adopted a laser-based molecular scanner that from 50 meters can detect minute traces of most molecules on your body, clothing or luggage, can identify what you ate for breakfast and can gauge your body’s adrenaline level, all without your knowledge.They plan to install these scanners in all airports and border crossings, and perhaps in a great many other places, and will be able to scan not only passengers or travelers but all random citizens. They claim a small portable device will soon be available which could conceivably be used in large numbers and in all urban locations. When we combine this with their face recognition software, the license-plate scanners, the mobile phone and GPS information, the picture becomes increasingly one of a desperate fascist police state obsessed with civilian control.

 

We further have transit authorities in most US cities quietly installing audio and video surveillance systems on public buses that can record and store all conversations, combine them with GPS data and access them remotely to track the movement of passengers throughout the cities. We also have espionage street lights that contain microprocessors essentially the same as a mobile phone and with Wi-Fi capability, and loaded with “homeland security applications” which can capture images and record conversations, all for the stated – but obviously false – purpose of making people “more informed and safer”. All these and more are small parts of an expanding civilian surveillance system that – in a normal world – would have no use or purpose. The narrative is being rewritten to suggest “minor intrusions” solely to protect citizens from non-existent terrorist threats, but clearly the false threat is being propagated to justify increasing political surveillance. Big Brother will soon be watching and hearing everything.

 

We have recently read of the surprise discovery that automobiles can be remotely controlled through their electronics, and of cases where it appears the FBI and/or CIA used this method to permanently rid themselves of journalists whose investigations were becoming troublesome. It would seem these prior experiences have proven sufficiently efficacious and the police authorities’ ambitions sufficiently unlimited that we now have a new program in place. In early 2014 it was reported that the US, UK and EU are implementing a secret plan to give the state the power to control all cars. This was first presented as the ability to turn off auto engines by remote control, but expanded into something far more sinister, into a plan to fit sensors in all autos that would control acceleration, braking and other functions. The sensors would communicate wirelessly in real time with a central traffic control system that would provide the state with a permanent database of the travel details of every car and driver and permit the central system to fully control every car at any time. A number of auto manufactures were reported to already be developing such a system. In the case of the UK, these plans were presented as a means of “reducing greenhouse gases and offsetting global warming”, which has to be one of the biggest lies ever told. Another justification promoted for this strategy was the avoidance of high-speed chases of criminals such as bank robbers who might take risks to escape after a crime, and that these events “can be dangerous for citizens”. There is no logical justification for such a system since the number of high-speed police chases in any large city can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and it appears certain this is just one more arrow in the quiver of population control for the purpose of containing civil and political protests.

 

 

The proposal is to install this technology in all American and European-made vehicles worldwide, and able to be effected in any nation. The attraction is that government authorities would have unlimited ability to disable the cars of dissidents and political activists and which, with real-time GPS tracking, would serve to create a kind of “electronic fence” to control a civilian population.It should be clear that the potential for abuse is unlimited, since these systems are already known to control not only the ignition but acceleration, steering and brakes, among other things. The US has also been feverishly developing a massive, and very secret, domestic intelligence-gathering program that, according to the Wall Street Journal, scans and stores the travel records of most automobiles in the US, through sophisticated license plate readers and trackers. The stated primary goal is to combat drug trafficking, but this also can be only another huge lie. The number of serious drug traffickers in the US could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand, and no government would embark on a universal billion-dollar program to capture the license plate numbers of every vehicle in the country for the sake of apprehending what in most cases would be minor criminals.

 

In both the US and UK, the state will be tracking the position and movements of all vehicles in the country, in real time, 24 hours a day, storing that information in a permanent database. This is not about saving the environment or preventing drug trafficking; it is about knowing the past and present whereabouts in real time of every vehicle owner, and of being able to remotely take full control of that vehicle at any time. In spite of the foolish rhetoric about the ozone, these overwhelming measures, combined with the almost total communications gathering, all collected on millions of people not suspected of any crime, lead only to conclusions of monitoring and control of the entire civilian population. Fascist police state.

 

One major part of the ‘car culture’ that has always existed in Western countries is that most people learned to perform routine maintenance and often to conduct repairs on their vehicles, including cars and farm machinery, just as we all did with our bicycles. This was true partly because autos were mechanical and therefore not difficult to understand and repair, and partly due to the high cost of professional labor. No longer. The US automakers, pushed by their intelligence agencies, are now mounting a campaign for legislation to prohibit owners from working on their own cars. The stated reason is that modern vehicles are “too complex” for home mechanics to fix, but the companies are not primarily focused on the mechanical parts but on the electronics, and propose to amend the IP copyright laws to prevent car owners from disassembling the computer code in automobile chips, to prevent the public from learning what those programs actually do, and especially to prevent the public from altering the software to prevent external hacking and manipulation of their cars. The automakers claim the code contains only diagnosis and repair software, but that is clearly no longer true. Equally, the claims about protecting the security of drivers and passengers are almost certainly being used to disguise rather more threatening intentions and purposes. Police-state mass vehicle control is not possible if the public are able to access and modify the computer code that permits this control.

 

There is yet another development that will not only enhance the ‘electronic fence’ functions and opportunities available to authorities, but that could potentially – and easily – transfer control of our automobiles and activities to departments like Homeland Security. In late 2014, it was revealed that Apple (and not only Apple, but Homeland Security and the US Department of Defense) had developed methods of adding functions that would convert an iPhone into an auto remote control that could lock and unlock doors and start or turn off the engine, according to its distance from a vehicle. Apple has already filed patents for precisely such applications that would function without an owner even touching the phone. According to reports, various American firms and government organisations are actively researching this “accessory control with geo-fencing” technology. The issue of course is that it has become exceedingly simple for authorities, espionage agencies and those with the technical know-how, to obtain full control of a mobile phone and all its functions, giving them the corresponding full control of our use of our own vehicle. Apple’s voice-activated assistant, Siri, can connect to various in-car systems like Apple’s CarPlay, and potentially with all auto functions. Given the history and recent revelations of domestic espionage within the US, from facial and license plate recognition to phone surveillance and automobile control, protestations by the authorities that “we would never do that”, need to be recognised as the nonsense they are. In practice, it is becoming exceedingly difficult to avoid visions of a ‘terminator-style’ police state in America.

 

Smartphones may yet be our undoing. Researchers Zhang and Shi at MIT discovered that smartphone apps – like the popular game Angry Birds – continuously use your phone’s GPS and Wi-Fi to track your location, collect the names of your contacts, and transmit that information even when the apps are not being used. We now know that it is possible to remotely activate various features of a smart phone, such as the recording function and the GPS – even if the phone is turned off – and without awakening the phone or giving any signal that this action is occurring. And we know that the conversations thereby recorded can be transmitted to another phone and all traces of that activity deleted. This became public because the FBI used it to trap some Mafia members, and the technique slipped out in the courtroom. Since then, many have verified this.

 

We know that our physical location can be, and sometimes is, monitored and recorded, on a 24-hour basis using both the phone companies’ cell network logs and the GPS function on our own phones. From an article in Time Magazine, When you carry a cell phone, it is constantly sending signals about where you are. It “pings” nearby cell-phone towers about every seven seconds so it can be ready to make and receive calls. When it does, the phone is also telling the company that owns the towers where you are at that moment – data the company then stores away indefinitely.”US Federal agencies claim they can, by remotely activating the GPS function, trace a mobile phone owner to within only a few meters, 24 hours a day.After a period of monitoring, they can pinpoint where you live, where you work, where you have lunch, the routes you normally take, the places you frequent or inhabit, and the friends you visit.And by downloading your contact lists and intercepting your calls, emails and messages, they can soon know who all your friends and contacts are, where you meet them, and what you discuss.The only way to prevent this is to remove the battery or, better yet, the SIM card, from a phone. Records are maintained indefinitely of all email addresses and phone numbers used, all instant messaging accounts, as well as the contact information for every person you know – both personal and business. These same authorities claim that, if they are interested, they can not only know where to find you at any time of any day, but can construct a profile of virtually your entire behavioral pattern, just from recording and examining all of your communication and movement history over a period of time.Combined with this, the knowledge of all your internet activity, including all searches, all clicked links, all websites visited, they boast they can know you better than you know yourself.

 

Air travel in the US is exceedingly uncomfortable for many people, travelers having to undergo fingerprinting, full-body X-ray scans and full-body searches, all in the name of the fictitious war on terror. Even small children are affected by these provisions, as are the infirm and elderly, all being subjected to either a dangerous level of radiation or an extremely intrusive body search that can only be classified as humiliating and public sexual molestation. In spite of the many years’ duration of this offensive program and the many millions of travelers subjected to these procedures, no terrorists have ever been discovered. International passengers are now being fingerprinted, going in or out, and the US demands passenger lists from every airline flying to (or over, or past) North America, even if they aren’t going to the US.

 

US border officials and customs agents now have authority to search and seize computers and other electronic equipment even when there is no suspicion of illegality or of a crime having been committed.They may do this on their authority, and there is no appeal. Your computer may – or may not – be returned to you, and there is no appeal about this either. Tens of thousands of both American citizens and foreigners regularly experience these searches; often, the equipment is not returned until weeks or months later, if at all.A Canadian Ph.D. student at McGill University in Montreal was travelling to New York on an Amtrak train when his laptop was searched and confiscated by US customs officers. He was removed from the train in handcuffs and held in a jail cell for several hours before being released without charge or explanation. When his laptop was returned two weeks later, he found that many of his personal files had been searched, including photos and emails, and some deleted. Searches used to be permitted only when an officer could claim “reasonable cause”to suspect a crime, and could justify this presumption in court, but this is no longer the case. In a truly surreal turn of events, the US government claims that searches made with reasonable cause are “unreasonable”because divulging the cause of the suspicioncould “lead to lawsuits and the divulgence in court of national security information”. When such specious reasoning is used to justify searches that are now made without any cause, we have a fascist dictatorship by definition. Can you imagine the media firestorm that would erupt if Russia or China were to engage in such stupidity with such a transparently false and lame excuse? But in utopian America, these searches are the hallmark of a democracy.

 

Passing through US customs has become an unbearable experience for a great many people, the border guards too frequently exhibiting pathological tendencies, being offensive, harsh, insulting, thoughtless and insensitive, brutal, reckless, often threatening and excessively intimidating, and increasingly able to act in an unpredictable and capricious manner that sometimes includes violence. Even without the violence or threatened violence, the experience is often humiliating.In one case in late 2013, US federal border agents demanded that an 85-year-old woman remove her diaper in the presence of several agents on the pretext of searching her for drugs, at which time the incontinent woman had a bowel movement and was then abandoned by the agents to clean herself up and proceed to her plane. Many women have complained of being subjected to strip searches and cavity searches, these apparently being enjoyed by many border guards. Typically, women are stripped fully naked and examined in their vagina and anus, without explanation or justification, and then released. One man, whose business took him across the US border regularly, finally filed a massive lawsuit after experiencing his 8th cavity search in only several weeks.

 

The US creation and practice of its “no fly” list is another indication of a repressive police state, one that deserves to be roundly condemned as hysteria. The list, apparently containing more than one million names, is secret, but we can be almost certain that its inhabitants are not ‘terrorists’ in any sense of that word but are instead civil activists and political dissidents. If the US actually had more than one million terrorists sufficiently dangerous to keep them out of airplanes, the country would have disintegrated long ago. It seems abundantly clear that the only reason for the existence of this list is to control and punish political dissension. The FBI will give no information as to who is on the list or why they are there, and will not inform anyone in advance of their inclusion on that list, on the basis that this would inform ‘terrorists’ as to which of their members had been ‘discovered’.

 

 

Moreover, to remove a name from this list is virtually impossible even in the case of clear error, and in any event extremely expensive. In one celebrated case, US Senator Ted Kennedy was refused permission to board a commercial flight for this reason; his political power was only borderline sufficient to remove his name and permit him to travel in his own country.

 

Rahinah Ibrahim. Source

In another case, a Ph.D. student, who was in a wheelchair due to a recent operation, was travelling to Hawaii to give a paper when she was handcuffed, arrested and strip-searched, imprisoned and held without communication, and finally permitted to leave the country only to travel to her home country of Malaysia. She was never permitted to return to the US to complete her studies. After seven years of litigation in lower courts and appeals courts and legal fees of almost $4 million, it was finally revealed that an FBI agent had merely made a mistake when completing a form, and had ticked the wrong box. During the proceedings, both US Attorney-General Eric Holder and National Intelligence Director James Clapper – the same man who lied openly to Congress about the NSA spying – testified repeatedly that to disclose the reason this woman was detained, or even to acknowledge that she was on the ‘no fly’ list, “would cause serious damage to US national security“. For seven years they blocked her attempts to clear her name. She was not even permitted to return to the US to attend her own trials. Finally, under extreme court pressure, the government admitted to its error. In the trials, Attorney-General Holder lied repeatedly to the court, assuring the judge that he would not use a state secrets excuse simply “to conceal administrative error or prevent embarrassment”, and yet that was precisely what he had done,destroying the future career of a completely innocent person in the process.

Police State America –Volume One

Chapter 1-The Rise of the Police State

Chapter 2 — The FBI

Chapter 3 –COINTELPRO

Chapter 4 — Universal Public Surveillance

Chapter 5 — Other Surveillance

Chapter 6 — Searching for Anarchists, or Maybe Just Political Activists

Chapter 7   — Winning the Information War

Chapter 8 — Arbitrary and Unaccountable Law Enforcement

Chapter 9 — The Militarisation of the Police

Chapter 10 — Occupy Wall Street

Chapter 11 — Intimidating the Media & Subverting the Press

Chapter 12 — The Short Road: Democracy to Fascism

Chapter   13 — The Next American Revolution? Anticipated Civil Unrest

 

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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 —Dealing with Demons).

 

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at:

2186604556@qq.com 

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