Corporations & our govt. are using smart meters and much more to spy on us
The U.S. Department of Energy has admitted that privacy and data access is a concern as far back as 2010 in a report on the smart meter technology.
Click here to read the report.
“Advances in Smart Grid technology could significantly increase the amount of potentially available information about personal energy consumption,” reads a statement from the report, titled “Data Access and Privacy Issues Related to Smart Grid Technologies.”
The report states, “Such information could reveal personal details about the lives of consumers, such as their daily schedules (including times when they are at or away from home or asleep), whether their homes are equipped with alarm systems, whether they own expensive electronic equipment such as plasma TVs, and whether they use certain types of medical equipment.”
Julian Assange: ‘We’re heading towards a dystopian surveillance society’ click here to watch the video.
1) U.S. Congressional Research Service report, "Smart Meter Data: Privacy and Cybersecurity" (February 2012)
With smart meters, police will have access to data that might be used to track residents’ daily lives and routines while in their homes, including their eating, sleeping, and showering habits, what appliances they use and when, and whether they prefer the television to the treadmill, among a host of other details.
Source: https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42338.pdf – see page 7 (page 10 of the PDF)
2) Colorado Power Utility Commission report, "Smart Metering & Privacy: Existing Law and Competing Policies" (Spring 2009)
First, the privacy concerns are real, and should be addressed proactively in order to protect consumers. Second and related, a salient privacy invasion—were it to happen and get press—could create significant opposition to smart grid deployment efforts
Source: http://www.dora.state.co.us/puc/DocketsDecisions/DocketFilings/09I-593EG/09I-593EG_Spring2009Report-SmartGridPrivacy.pdf – see page 6
3) California Public Utility Commission press release, "California Commission Adopts Rules to Protect the Privacy and Security of Customer Electricity Usage Data" (July 2011)
Our action today will protect the privacy and security of customer usage data while enablingutilities and authorized third-parties to use the information to provide useful energy management and conservation services to customers.
I support today’s decision because it adopts reasonable privacy and security rules and expandsconsumer and third-party access to electricity usage and pricing information. I hope this decision stimulates market interest.
Source:http://smartenergyportal.net/article/california-commission-adopts-rules-protect-privacy-and-security-customer-electricity-usage-d
4) San Fransico Chronicle article, "California Utilities Yield Energy Use Data" (July 2013)
California’s electric utilities last year disclosed the energy-use records and other personal information of thousands of customers, according to reports the companies filed with state regulators.
The vast majority of those disclosures – 4,062 – were made by one utility, San Diego Gas and Electric Co. In 4,000 of those cases, the information was subpoenaed by government agencies.
New digital smart meters being installed throughout the state can measure a home’s energy use hour by hour, showing when residents leave for work, go to sleep or travel on vacation. Older analog meters, which measured cumulative energy use over the course of a month, couldn’t do that.
“Before smart meters, what happened inside houses couldn’t be revealed unless there was a police officer inside with a warrant,” Ozer said.
Source: http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Calif-utilities-yield-energy-use-data-4611159.php
5) Raab & Associates, Steering Committee report (February 2013) – Under the heading “Strategic (3-10 years)”:
New tools for mining data for intel
Under the heading “Transformational (10+ years)”:
Centralized intel combined with widespread local/distributed intel and data mining and analytics becomes core competency
Source: http://magrid.raabassociates.org/articles/raab%20subcommittee%20update%20draft.ppt
View slide 17 only (PDF): http://www.takebackyourpower.net/documents/RaabDraft-17.pdf
6) Wired.com, "CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher" (15 Mar 2012)
‘Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing,’ Petraeus said, ‘the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.
“Petraeus allowed that these household spy devices “change our notions of secrecy” and prompt a rethink of “our notions of identity and secrecy.” All of which is true — if convenient for a CIA director.”
Source: http://www.wired.com/2012/03/petraeus-tv-remote/
http://www.activistpost.com/2014/04/industrys-own-words-6-admissions-of-in.html#more
http://tomfernandez28.com/2014/04/17/is-your-homes-energy-meter-spying-on-you/
Every aspect of your life is being tracked by corporations & government agencies: Information about our innocuous public acts is denser in urban areas, and can now be cheaply aggregated. Cameras and sensors, increasingly common in the urban landscape, pick up all sorts of behaviors. These are stored and categorized to draw personal conclusions — all of it, thanks to cheap electronics and cloud computing, for affordable sums. “People in cities have anonymity from their neighbor, but not from an entity collecting data about them,” said Deirdre Mulligan, a professor at the iSchool at the University of California, Berkeley. “These are far more prevalent in cities.” A company called LocoMobi announced it had acquired Nautical Technologies, the license plate recognition technology of a Canadian company called Apps Network Appliances. This gear sits at the entrance of a parking lot, identifying the license plates of incoming cars. That data goes to the cloud computing infrastructure of Amazon Web Services. When a car pulls out of the lot, the camera takes another picture, computers calculate how long a car was parked, and a charge is applied. The company’s co-founder foresees tying the system to a car’s navigation system, enabling drivers to find and reserve nearby parking spots without wasteful driving. A license plate is certainly public information, and this all seems like a boon for drivers. “We can have so much fun with this,” the co-founder of LocoMobi, Barney Pell, who is also its chairman, said. “Imagine knowing that people who park here also park there – you’ve found the nearby stores, their affinities. You could advertise to them, offer personalized services, provide ‘passive loyalty’ points that welcome them back to an area.” It’s a little like the way a company called Euclid Analytics uses the pings when a smartphone looks for a Wi-Fi antenna (something that phones do as a matter of course) to track people moving through a crowded mall. Euclid says it does not collect personally identifying information, though it could figure out a lot by examining those movements. In London, a software engineer inferred a significant amount of personal information by looking at public data about bicycle rentals. The more recording devices we put in the world, the more once-evanescent things take on lasting life. Our speech is increasingly recorded and given new meaning when it is analyzed. This week, it emerged that Google has filed a patent to take its Google Glass recording technology (already responsible for a few urban scuffles) onto contact lenses. Many of the technologists involved in data aggregation see a benefit to civil society. “So many of our urban problems have to do with people breaking rules and cheating systems, then disappearing,” Mr. Pell said. He noted behaviors like parking in handicapped spaces with illegitimate tags, or running red lights. “If compliance is information rich, our lives won’t have this death of 1,000 little cuts.” “What happens when every secret, from who really did the work in the office, to sex, to who said what, is that we get a more truthful society,” said David Friedberg, founder and chief executive of Climate Corporation, a big data analysis company that Monsanto bought last year. “Technology is the empowerment of more truth, and fewer things taken on faith.” Public awareness of now hidden behaviors, he said, “is a conversation that will happen.” That sense of where tech will take us is its own faith, Ms. Mulligan of Berkeley said. “There is an idea here that data is truth, and that’s not always true,” she said. “You may know who is running a red light, but you don’t know if there is a sick kid in the back seat, and they are racing to the hospital.” More important, she said, that deferral to data comes at the expense of people making real choices about how to behave. “If you want people to act morally, you don’t tell them what they can and can’t do. We all need to think about the effect on others, what should be done,” she said.http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/19/how-urban-anonymity-disappears-when-all-data-is-tracked/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1&
Biometric tracking (spying) is closer than you think:
In some areas of the world, payment systems that require palm scanning or face scanning are already being tested. We have entered an era where biometric security is being hailed as the “solution” to the antiquated security methods of the past. We are being promised that the constant problems that hackers are causing with our credit cards, bank accounts, ATM machines and Internet passwords will all go away once we switch over to biometric identification. And without a doubt, we have some massive security problems that need to be addressed.
Do you really want a machine to read your face or your hand before you are able to buy anything, sell anything or log on to the Internet? Do you really want “the system” to be able to know where you are, what you are buying and what you are doing at virtually all times? Biometric security systems are being promoted as “cool” and “cutting edge”, but there is also potentially a very dark side to them that should not be ignored.
The following is a brief excerpt from a recent Fox News article entitled “Biometric security can’t come soon enough for some people“…
In a world where nearly every ATM now uses an operating system without any technical support, where a bug can force every user of the Internet to change the password to every account they’ve ever owned overnight, where cyber-attacks and identity theft grow more menacing every day, the ability to use your voice, your finger, your face or some combination of the three to log into your e-mail, your social media feed or your checking account allows you to ensure it’s very difficult for someone else to pretend they’re you.
Almost everyone would like to make their identities more secure. Nobody actually wants their bank accounts compromised or their Internet passwords stolen. But there is a price to be paid for adopting biometric identification. Your face or your hand will be used to continually monitor and track everything that you do and everywhere that you go. Here is some more from that Fox News article…
Friday, we made Ryan King the most verified man in Brooklyn.
“Verified,” a fingerprint-recognition device chirped back at Ryan after he placed his finger on the reader.
“Verified,” a facial-recognition device said to Ryan after scanning his face.
Ryan works at the American headquarters for FingerTec, a Malaysian company replacing PINs, usernames, and typed passwords with fingers and faces we don’t need to memorize.
Biometric scanners are already being used in dining halls on college campuses all across America:
Hand geometry readers have been fairly common on campus for years but more recent deployments are leveraging fingerprint and even iris biometrics to link students with transactions. Physical access is the hallmark biometric application but the technology has been gaining popularity in food service and other sectors to expedite transactions.
The social stigma attached to biometrics is also being lifted, as students are becoming more comfortable with the technology, says Brian Adoff, executive vice president at NuVision. The inclusion of a fingerprint scanner on the latest iPhone is just one indication that the younger generation is comfortable with biometrics.
“Administrators have a greater fear of the technology than students,” says Bob Lemley, director of software development at the CBORD Group. “Students are growing up with the technology so they don’t think about it as much as the older generations.”
Georgia Southern University can attest to that fact. The school deployed iris biometrics at its dining hall and only two students out of 5,400 refused to enroll, says Richard Wynn, director of the university’s Eagle Card Program.
The University of Kentucky spent $5 million in surveillance cameras.
University of Kentucky security officials say they're catching more criminals on campus without any extra patrols -- and their crime-fighting tools are there for all to see, on light poles, emergency call stations -- even in front of Commonwealth Stadium.
"The system will actually be able to have almost 2,000 cameras by the time the project is through," said Joe Monroe, chief of UK Police. Click here to read more.
Young people tend to be less alarmed by this technology, and so that is where it is being pushed. If you can believe it, biometric scanners are even going to be used at Six Flags amusement park this summer…
A new scanning system at Six Flags sounds like it’s from the future, but the biometric scanner aims to make faster entrances for season pass holders.
When guests arrive at the front gate for the first time of the season, they will present their voucher and a scanner processes an image of their fingerprint, assigning a unique set of numbers that are used to validate the pass holder’s card each visit.
The first visit should take only about 20 seconds to set up the card, as opposed to the additional time of taking a photo and getting it printed on the card, according to spokeswoman Elizabeth Gotway.
This kind of reminds me of the new “MagicBands” at Disney parks. Disney seems to think that parents and kids will have no problems wearing RFID tracking devices that allow them to buy stuff and monitor wherever they go.
This technology is going to keep spreading, and it is going to become harder and harder to avoid it. And it is easy to imagine what a tyrannical government could do with this kind of technology. If it wanted to, it could use it to literally track the movements and behavior of everyone.
We are already starting to see the establishment of massive biometric databases. One of these is the FBI’s facial recognition database that is a part of their “Next Generation Identification” program. It is being projected that the FBI will have compiled 52 million of our “face images” by the year 2015. Given enough time, eventually I am sure that they would have all of our faces in their computers.
http://thetruthwins.com/archives/what-will-you-do-when-you-can-no-longer-buy-or-sell-without-submitting-to-biometric-identification
We have become a nation of spies: Anonymous tips can lead to your arrest
The Supreme Court says an anonymous tip can be sufficient to justify a decision by police to pull a car over on suspicion of reckless or drunken driving.
The justices voted 5-4 Tuesday to uphold a traffic stop in northern California in which officers subsequently found marijuana in the vehicle. The officers themselves did not see any evidence of reckless driving.
Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas found the tip reliable because the caller proved to be correct about the truck's license plate and its approximate location when police caught up to it about 18 minutes after the call. The claim of recklessness proved sufficient to establish the likelihood that the driver was drunk (though in this case, Navarette was sober).
"Unconfirmed reports of driving without a seatbelt or slightly over the speed limit, for example, are so tenuously connected to drunk driving that a stop on those grounds alone would be constitutionally suspect," Justice Thomas wrote. "But a reliable tip alleging the dangerous behaviors discussed above generally would justify a traffic stop on suspicion of drunk driving."
Although the arresting officer in this case saw no indication of impaired driving after following the truck for five minutes, the majority found that this did not dispel the suspicion that the driver was intoxicated.
"It is hardly surprising that the appearance of a marked police car would inspire more careful driving for a time," Justice Thomas wrote. "Of course, an officer who already has such a reasonable suspicion need not surveil a vehicle at length in order to personally observe suspicious driving."
"So long as the caller identifies where the car is, anonymous claims of a single instance of possibly careless or reckless driving, called in to 911, will support a traffic stop," Justice Scalia wrote. "This is not my concept, and I am sure would not be the Framers', of a people secure from unreasonable searches and seizures."
"After today's opinion all of us on the road, and not just drug dealers, are at risk of having our freedom of movement curtailed on suspicion of drunkenness, based upon a phone tip, true or false, of a single instance of careless driving."
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the dissent in which he called Thomas’ opinion “a freedom-destroying cocktail.”
Scalia made headlines last week when he told a crowd of law school students last week that if taxes in the U.S. become too high then people “should revolt.”
http://washington.cbslocal.com/2014/04/22/scalia-court-upholding-traffic-stop-based-on-anonymous-tip-a-freedom-destroying-cocktail/
http://thenewspaper.com/news/43/4392.asp
