Police are using DHS grant money to spy on us using private surveillance cameras

Scranton, PA -  Authorities in Scranton are looking to increase surveillance all over the city. Not by adding more cameras, but by adding more spying eyes looking at the cameras already in place.

Where does it end? Will we be surveilled everywhere we go by police & private companies?

Scranton City Council announced this week that it is applying for a DHS grant that would create community-wide surveillance for Scranton Police.

But the grant money wouldn’t pay for any cameras. It would pay for software that would allow Scranton Police to tap into private surveillance systems.

Police in Philadelphia have even coined a name for registering your private cameras with them its called ironically enough "SAFECAM"

"Registering your camera not only helps deter crime, but assists the Department in its overall crime prevention strategy in your neighborhood. Protect yourself, your family and your community by registering with SafeCam."

“If we’re to have 100 camera feeds here we can look at those feeds and see what direction the suspect didn’t go in. Even more importantly also, we can see which direction they didn’t go in, we don’t have to send officers where they don’t have to be,” said Scranton Police Chief Carl Graziano.

Chief Graziano said Scranton City Council is looking to buy software that would allow officers to tap into private surveillance systems, with permission, and show more than 100 video feeds on a wall at Scranton Police Headquarters.

Once the monitors are in place, all Scranton police need is an I.P. address for any existing surveillance system for any private institution in the city.

And what's the common denominator being spouted by government employees? Why its safety of course at the expense of our privacy. The comment below is a perfect example:

“And anything that would be fed into the Scranton Police Department from our sites can also help our tenants and out residents and protect them even further,” said Karl Lynott of the Scranton Housing Authority.
http://wnep.com/2014/05/30/scranton-police-plans-for-expanded-security/

Noam Chomsky: A surveillance state beyond imagination is being created in one of the freest countries in the world

In the past several months, we have been provided with instructive lessons on the nature of state power and the forces that drive state policy. And on a closely related matter: the subtle, differentiated concept of transparency.

The source of the instruction, of course, is the trove of documents about the National Security Agency surveillance system released by the courageous fighter for freedom Edward J. Snowden, expertly summarized and analyzed by his collaborator Glenn Greenwald in his new book, " No Place to Hide."

The documents unveil a remarkable project to expose to state scrutiny vital information about every person who falls within the grasp of the colossus - in principle, every person linked to the modern electronic society.

Nothing so ambitious was imagined by the dystopian prophets of grim totalitarian worlds ahead.

It is of no slight import that the project is being executed in one of the freest countries in the world, and in radical violation of the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights, which protects citizens from "unreasonable searches and seizures," and guarantees the privacy of their "persons, houses, papers and effects."

To defend state power and private economic power from the domestic enemy, those two entities must be concealed - while in sharp contrast, the enemy must be fully exposed to state authority.

Throughout, the basic principle remains: Power must not be exposed to the sunlight. Edward Snowden has become the most wanted criminal in the world for failing to comprehend this essential maxim.

The principle was lucidly explained by the policy intellectual Samuel P. Huntington, who instructed us that "Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate."

In brief, there must be complete transparency for the population, but none for the powers that must defend themselves from this fearsome internal enemy.
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-surveillance-state-beyond-imagination-being-created-one-freest

A surveillance commencement address to the Class of 2014:

Internet Class of 2014, I’m in awe of you! To this giant, darkened auditorium filled with sparkling screens of every sort, welcome!

It would, of course, be inaccurate to say, as speakers like me once did, that after four years of effort and experience you are now about to leave the hallowed halls of this campus and graduate into a new and adult world. 

That bright and shiny world of online wonders has -- as no one could have failed to notice by now -- also managed to drop the most oppressive powers of the state and the corporation directly into your lap, or rather your laptop, iPad, and smartphone. You -- yes, I mean you with that smartphone in your pocket or purse -- are a walking Stasi file.  “Your” screen, in fact, all the screens on the walls of this vast room and in your hands really belong to them. It’s no more complicated than that. The details hardly matter.

Yes, you or this college paid for them. You yak endlessly with your friends on them, do your business on them, and pay your bills with them. You organize, complain, and opine on them. You find your way around and connect with acquaintances, friends, lovers, even strangers, via them.  You could no longer imagine living without them. And yet the much-ballyhooed techno-liberation they offer you is actually your prison.

True or not, I remember being told long ago that certain tribal peoples on first contact with the camera refused to be photographed, fearing that those photos could take possession of and steal their souls, their spirits. In the twenty-first century, thanks to the techno-wizardry of both the state and the corporation, what once might have been dismissed as superstition has become a kind of reality.

Thanks to those ubiquitous “private” screens that you’re under the impression you own but that are in most ways that matter owned by others, “they” can possess “you.”  Without your feeling the pain of it, you are constantly being observed, measured, and carved up into your many discernable traits.  Those traits are then reassembled, corporately bundled like so many financial derivatives, and sold off to the highest bidders.  Your soul, that is, is being corporately possessed and disassembled into a bevy of tastes, whims, typologies, and god knows what else for the marketplace.

Meanwhile, the national security state has your number, too, and it won’t hesitate to come calling.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re phoning, emailing, or playing video games -- the national security state wants YOU.  Again, details aside, it isn’t all that complicated.  The ever-expanding post-9/11 apparatus of surveillance and power has come to treat Americans as if we were a foreign population.

It’s all being done in the name of your safety and of security “threats” that only grow, as that national security apparatus continues to engorge itself on your communications, while becoming ever more technologically skilled and inventive.

You are officially what it must protect, which also means that you are officially its target.  To protect you, it must know you.  I mean really know you, lest you turn out to be what it’s protecting Americans from.  It must know you every which way, whether you want to be known or not, and above all, for your own safety, its access to you must be untrammeled, while -- it’s your safety at stake! -- your access to it must be nonexistent.  Hence, the heavy-handed use of classification, the endless attempts to cut down on unsupervised contact between members of the U.S. intelligence community as well as retired brethren and the press, the muzzling of thousands of people a year by the FBI, and the fierce campaigns that have been launched against whistleblowers and to prevent whistleblowing.  Above all, you must not know what your government knows about you.

It doesn’t matter whether Democrats or Republicans are in charge in Washington, whether the politicians in question happen to be chanting “big government” or “small government.”  No matter what they say, almost all of them bow down before the oppressive powers of the state.  They worship (and fund) those powers and, in the process, grant that state-within-a-state ever more powers lest they someday be blamed for another 9/11.  Any attempts at “reforms” that might limit those powers turn out, in the end, to be just window dressing.  You, the once-upon-a-time citizen, now prospective subject and object of the national security state, are at least theoretically the ultimate grantor of these powers, even if you now seem to have no control over them whatsoever.

This, then, is the sea in which you swim and, in case you hadn’t noticed, the nets of corporate and government phishing are in the water, already being drawn up around you.

It’s your generation, not mine, that will be forced to make something of this particular mess, if anything is to be made of it and we are not to become the possessions of the national security state and our personalities and traits turned into the personal equivalents of financial derivatives.  Still, for what it’s worth, I have a feeling that answers won’t be found in the river of shadows that is the online world.  I doubt you’ll be able to encrypt your way out of our present dilemma or hack your way out of it either; nor will you be able to simply ignore it to death.  There is, I suspect, only one way to change our lives when it comes to the increasingly oppressive powers of the surveillance state and its corporate doppelgangers: you’ll have to step out of that world of shadows and into the increasingly surreal and shadowy world that surrounds and feeds on them.

You can’t fight a national security state or a corporate selling state, both operating in the shadows via the shadowy world of the Internet -- not when so much of their power, their essential structures, and their operations are located in the perfectly surreal world beyond the screen, the one that they would like to put beyond your reach.  That’s why, on this grey and overcast day outside this auditorium, my urge is to graduate you from the world of shadows where you’ve spent so much of your last years into the increasingly shadowy off-screen world where what matters most still exists.

Unfortunately, there is no obvious gate off this campus.  When you've snapped the last graduation selfie on that smartphone of yours, when your gowns and caps are returned and your schoolbooks sold off, you’ll have to find your own way into our confusing world amid all those shadows.  All I can do, graduates of the Internet class of 2014, is wish you luck and say that what you do (or don’t do) will matter.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/05/29-2

CNN claims big brother surveillance makes life better: