Among other ideas, the EU diplomats discussed the option of creating a certificate of security in the sphere of tourism under the provisional name “COVID-19 passport”, which would refer to the health status of the owner of the document, and enable him/her to travel to the EU and Schengen States.
Read more . . .“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.” — Professor Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Read more . . .Facebook, Google, Twitter and other giant social media companies—working closely with intelligence agencies and governments—are seeking to leverage their role as mechanisms of communication to become instruments of censorship and repression. In the process, they are turning one of the most important and liberating technological advances of the 21st century, the growth and expansion of artificial intelligence, into a mechanism for police control and dictatorship.
Read more . . .Information we collect: your name, email address, telephone number or credit card to store with your account, when you watch a video on YouTube, visit a website that uses our advertising services, or view and interact with our ads and content. This information includes your hardware model, operating system version, unique device identifiers, and mobile network information including phone number. We collect your search queries, phone number, calling-party number, forwarding numbers, time and date of calls, duration of calls, SMS routing information and types of calls, Internet protocol address, device event information such as crashes, system activity, hardware settings, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request and referral URL, cookies that may uniquely identify your browser or your Google Account, your location, including IP address, GPS, and other sensors that may, for example, provide Google with information on nearby devices, Wi-Fi access points and cell towers. We may also store information on your device using mechanisms such as browser web storage (including HTML 5) and application data caches.
Read more . . .Governmental spending on products and services for homeland security should reach $141.6bn worldwide in 2009… The high priority given to homeland security has made that market one of the few recession-resistant sectors of the defence industry, some experts believe.
Read more . . .In a report published this month into the UK government’s Prevent counter-terrorism strategy, CAGE warned that Muslim communities were being subjected to “cradle-to-grave” levels of surveillance and discrimination that go beyond the policies used against suspected communist sympathisers in the United States at the height of the Cold War.
Read more . . .The White House Office of the Press Secretary June 29, 2011 http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/06/29/remarks-john-o-brennan-assistant-president-homeland-security-and-counter Remarks of John O. Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, on Ensuring al-Qa’ida’s Demise – As Prepared for Delivery Paul H. Nitze School of … Read more . . .
“Al Qaeda seeks to bleed us financially by drawing us into long, costly wars that also inflame anti-American sentiment,” John Brennan, President Obama’s counter-terrorism advisor, said in a speech Wednesday unveiling the new strategy. “Going forward, we will be mindful that if our nation is threatened, our best offense won’t always be deploying large armies abroad but delivering targeted, surgical pressure to the groups that threaten us.”
Read more . . .You Can Take the 9/11 Security State From My Cold, Dead, Top Secret Hands By Spencer Ackerman May 11, 2011 Osama bin Laden’s death was the end result of a massive investment in surveillance and spy tools that arose … Read more . . .
EU funding ‘Orwellian’ artificial intelligence plan to monitor public for “abnormal behaviour” The European Union is spending millions of pounds developing “Orwellian” technologies designed to scour the internet and CCTV images for “abnormal behaviour”. By Ian Johnston 9:08PM BST 19 … Read more . . .
Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web MonitoringBy Noah Schachtman, Wired.com, 28 July 2010 The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses … Read more . . .
US to access Europeans’ bank data in new deal BBC (8 July 2010) Euro MPs have approved a new deal to allow US anti-terror investigators to access Europeans’ bank data. The vote followed tough negotiations with US authorities after a … Read more . . .
You Are Under Surveillance Public space is increasingly policed by hidden surveillance systems. The private life of the individual is secretly captured, mapped, collected, and owned in effigy by a cabal of private business operations—the security industry. Ironically, as communities … Read more . . .
Debunking a myth: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear By Toby Stevens on February 25, 2009 9:07 PM Computer Weekly The idea that an individual can live in a surveillance society with nothing to fear so long as … Read more . . .
German Police Open Mail at Random by Markus Schlegel,24 May 2007 Germany’s executive branch seems to get ever more out of control. In a report in today’s online edition, eco-left oriented newspaper Tageszeitung (taz) reports about random controls in central … Read more . . .
A truism perhaps, but before resorting to brute force and open repression to halt the “barbarians at the gates,” that would be us, the masters of declining empires (and the chattering classes who polish their boots) regale us with tales of “democracy on the march,” “hope” and other banalities before the mailed fist comes crashing down.
Read more . . .Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects AgencyUnited States Department of Defense, in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying information technology to counter transnational threats to national … Read more . . .
Did Bush’s Terrorist Surveillance Program Really Focus on American Journalists? By Scott Horton Harpers Magazine, 22 January 2009 For the last several weeks, Michael Hayden, the former CIA director who previously led the NSA, has been sweating bullets. In recent … Read more . . .
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oct/15/terrorism-security The Guardian, 15 October 2008 Security services want personal data from sites like Facebook Ministers say terrorists and other criminals are using free websites as a way of concealing their communications The government is drawing up plans to give … Read more . . .
U.S. Government Starts secret Spy Program in Mexico http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2007/4/2/18923/15941 By Erich Moncada, Posted on Mon Apr 2nd, 2007 at 06:09:23 PM EST An American corporation is in charge of monitoring all types of communications in the country. On March 5, … Read more . . .