The National Security Agency's domestic spying program.

By Laura Poitras:

It took me a few days to work up the nerve to phone William Binney. As someone already a “target” of the United States government, I found it difficult not to worry about the chain of unintended consequences I might unleash by calling Mr. Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency turned whistle-blower. He picked up. I nervously explained I was a documentary filmmaker and wanted to speak to him. To my surprise he replied: “I’m tired of my government harassing me and violating the Constitution. Yes, I’ll talk to you.”

Two weeks later, driving past the headquarters of the N.S.A. in Maryland, outside Washington, Mr. Binney described details about Stellar Wind, the N.S.A.’s top-secret domestic spying program begun after 9/11, which was so controversial that it nearly caused top Justice Department officials to resign in protest, in 2004.        “The decision must have been made in September 2001,” Mr. Binney told me and the cinematographer Kirsten Johnson. “That’s when the equipment started coming in.” In this Op-Doc, Mr. Binney explains how the program he created for foreign intelligence gathering was turned inward on this country. He resigned over this in 2001 and began speaking out publicly in the last year. He is among a group of N.S.A. whistle-blowers, including Thomas A. Drake, who have each risked everything — their freedom, livelihoods and personal relationships — to warn Americans about the dangers of N.S.A. domestic spying.        To those who understand state surveillance as an abstraction, I will try to describe a little about how it has affected me. The United States apparently placed me on a “watch-list” in 2006 after I completed a film about the Iraq war. I have been detained at the border more than 40 times. Once, in 2011, when I was stopped at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and asserted my First Amendment right not to answer questions about my work, the border agent replied, “If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics.”’ As a filmmaker and journalist entrusted to protect the people who share information with me, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to work in the United States. Although I take every effort to secure my material, I know the N.S.A. has technical abilities that are nearly impossible to defend against if you are targeted. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html?_r=1

Disney, biometrics and the department of defense.

The Department of Defense (DOD) has been interested in Disney Amusement Parks for decades. Known as Operation Mickey Mouse, the DOD has been studying Disney’s use of technology and coercion techniques. The DOD has also been working in conjunction with Disney to collect information on Beta testing operations that the popular theme park uses on their customers. Best of all, who would ever suspect Disney of being a front for the US government?

Through the Freedom of Information Act, the Disney Corporation hands over to the DOD all data on their customers. The DOD has an overabundance of information on the general public going back decades thanks to their relationship with Disney. After the DOD analyses and profiles their data from Disney, it is ready to be used to the US government for whatever purposes they deem fit.

Within the Disney walls and on their cruise ships, a separate digital monetary system is used. Customers trade their paper money for a digital card or voucher to purchases goods and services. On the cruise ship alone, the value of the digital Mickey money is determined prior to boarding. The card can be used at the ship, as well as at designated ports of call where the ship docks. As a programming technique, this digital money as replacing paper dollars conditions customers to think this idea is superior to carrying cash. This is reminiscent of the push of debit cards by banks in the 90’s.

The small cities Disney has created through their compound, although seemingly harmless, can harness quite a bit of private information on unsuspecting customers. All movements of patrons are tracked and traced through a myriad of cameras strategically placed throughout the theme parks.
Facial recognition technology is a part of Disney’s new cruise liners. Moving Art lines the walls of the ship to entertain the passengers. This pictures move in response to the passenger’s facial movements, ensuring that the same sequence will not play twice. Although this may entertain, the passenger’s facial movements are being recorded by the computers within the pictures at all times.

Disney’s private island, Castaway Cay, uses an array of photographs taken of the passengers, with or without their permission or prior knowledge. When a passenger wants to purchase one of these photographs, they use an encoded voucher (digital Mickey money). The facial recognition software works much like Facebook’s new photo tag application. Then the passenger can choose to have an album created through the use of this technology. Photos, regardless of whether or not they are sold to passengers, are entered into a data base for future use. Because the photographs are legally property of Disney, they can be used at the corporation’s discretion.

Disney theme parks became the first to use biometrics at their ticket entrances.

According to Janel Pisorchik, Director of Business Operations at Accesso (a Florida based electronic ticketing and eCommerce solutions company):

Disney was the first theme park to introduce Biometrics to the entrance process. The initial type of technology used was hand geometry. This was an effective deterrent to help decrease the number of tickets from being resold. However, from an operational perspective, explaining the enrollment & verification process to the guests entering the parks was a little challenging.
http://occupycorporatism.com/disney-biometrics-and-the-department-of-defense/

Pointing out the peaks of the massive surveillance iceberg.

Every time a shutter blinks in one of the millions of cameras mounted on stoplights or building corners, the faces of those within the sight of the lens are instantly recorded and saved to a database kept somewhere for use by someone for some purpose.

The New American has been at the forefront of the coverage of the proliferation of many of the powerful and prolific surveillance technologies deployed in the United States. One of the most robust of these systems is the software connecting a network of cameras known as TrapWire.

TrapWire is a massive and technologically advanced surveillance system that has the capacity to keep nearly the entire population of this country under the watchful eye of government 24 hours a day. Using this network of cameras and other surveillance tools, the federal government is rapidly constructing an impenetrable, inescapable theater of surveillance, most of which is going unnoticed by Americans and unreported by the mainstream media.

Unlike other elements of the central government’s cybersurveillance program, word about TrapWire was not leaked by Obama administration insiders. The details of this insidious surveillance scheme were disclosed by WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group founded by Julian Assange.

The TrapWire story percolated from the millions of e-mails from the Austin, Texas-based private intelligence-gathering firm Stratfor, published this year by WikiLeaks. Covering correspondence from mid-2004 to 2011, these documents expose Stratfor’s “web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods.”

As a review of the news shows, however, TrapWire is only one strand of the wide web of surveillance being woven around the world.

For instance, at an appearance at a computer hacking conference in July National Security Agency (NSA) chief General Keith Alexander made a pitch for giving his agency greater control over the traffic on the information superhighway:

What we need for cybersecurity is something analogous to that. Think of us as the EZ Pass on the highway. When you go down the highway, and you go down the EZ Pass lane, what you're doing is sending that code. That system is not looking in your car, reading the e-mail, or intercepting anything, it's just getting that code.
There is evidence that NSA already has more information than many would imagine. A former NSA insider delivered the keynote address at another conference of hackers and claimed that the snoops in government are working tirelessly to compile a complete database on all Americans.

"Domestically, they're pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country and assembling that information, building communities that you have relationships with, and knowledge about you; what your activities are; what you're doing. So the government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it's a very dangerous process,” said William Binney, former NSA employee turned whistleblower.

Available evidence suggests that all three branches of the central government are cooperating in the enlargement and improvement of the intelligence community’s capacity to collect and catalog an immense array of citizens’ personal data.

How far has the plan progressed? That is difficult to say, as those responsible for producing and protecting the systems are professional secret-keepers. The examples provided above are undoubtedly only the visible peaks of an immense information iceberg, the bulk of which is safely submerged.

Take TrapWire for example. Although many of the details remain undisclosed, it is known that the infrastructure of TrapWire was designed and deployed by Abraxas, an intelligence contractor based in Northern Virginia headed and run by dozens of former American surveillance officers. As one article described it: “The employee roster at Abraxas reads like a who’s who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and the corporation's ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented."

And according to an article published by transparency advocacy group Public Intelligence, Stratfor e-mails suggest that TrapWire is in use by the U.S. Secret Service, the British security service MI5, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, as well as counterterrorism divisions in both the Los Angeles and New York Police Department and the LA fusion center. The e-mails also suggest that TrapWire is in use at military bases around the country. A July 2011 email from a "Burton" to others at Stratfor describes how the U.S. Army, Marine Corps, and Pentagon have all begun using TrapWire and are "on the system now." Burton described the Navy as the "next on the list."

One e-mail in a set stolen from global intelligence firm Stratfor by the "hacktivist" group Anonymous and leaked via WikiLeaks states:

We have an agreement in principle with Abraxas [TrapWire] to provide "streaming sitreps" to their clients via their desktop/homepage by the end of July. Their clients include Scotland Yard, #10 Downing, the White House, and many MNC's [multinational corporations].
Much investigative work remains to be done if those concerned with the protection of personal liberties are to prevent the ship of state from striking one of these icebergs and sinking. Fortunately, there are several organizations and individuals committed to uncovering the hidden threats to our freedom.

 At The New American we are committed to exposing all such violations of our constitutionally protected rights.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/item/12719-pointing-out-the-peaks-of-the-massive-surveillance-iceberg

The ultimate goal of the surveillance state.

Surveillance is coming at us from all angles. Chips, drones, TSA checkpoints, smart meters, back-doored electronic products, video cameras, spying home appliances; our phone calls and emails and keystrokes and product purchases are recorded.

The government and its allied corporations will know whatever they want to know about us.

What then?

What happens when all nations are blanketed from stem to stern with surveillance?

Smart meters give us one clue. Public utilities, acting on government orders, will be able to allot electricity in amounts and at times it wishes to. This is leading to an overarching plan for energy distribution to the entire population.

Claiming shortages and limited options, governments will essentially be redistributing wealth, in the form of energy, under a collectivist model.

National health insurance plans (such as Obamacare) offer another clue. Such plans have no logistical chance of operating unless every citizen is assigned a medical ID package, which is a de facto identity card. In the medical arena, this means cradle-to-grave tracking.

Surveillance inevitably leads to: placing every individual under systems of control. It isn’t just “we’re watching you” or “we’re stamping out dissent.” It’s “we’re directing your participation in life.”

As a security analyst in the private sector once told me, “When you can see what every employee is doing, when you have it all at your fingertips, you naturally move on to thinking about how you can control those patterns and flows of movement and activity. It’s irresistible. You look at your employees as pieces on a board. The only question is, what game do you want to play with them?”

Every such apparatus is ruled, from the top, by Central Planners. When it’s an entire nation, upper-echelon technocrats revel in the idea of blueprinting, mapping, charting, and regulating the flows of all goods and services and people, “for the common good.”

Water, food, medicine, land use, transportation—they all become items of a networked system that chooses who gets what and when, and who can travel where, and under what conditions.

This is the wet dream of technocrats. They believe they are saving the world, while playing a fascinating game of multidimensional chess.

As new technologies are discovered and come on line, the planners decide how they will be utilized and for whose benefit.

In order to implement such a far-reaching objective, with minimal resistance from the global population, manufactured crises are unleashed which persuade the masses that the planet is under threat and needs “the wise ones” to rescue it and us.

We watch (and fight in) wars and more wars, each one exacerbated and even invented. We see (planned) drought and famine. We are told about desperate shortages and a frying Earth. We are presented with phony epidemics that are falsely promoted as scourges.

The only response, we are led to believe, is more humane control over the population.

Read more:
http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/the-ulimate-goal-of-the-surveillance-state/

This is how we know the shocking facts about spy campaign 'TrapWire' Are true.
http://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-how-we-know-that-the-shocking-revelations-about-trapwire-spying-are-true-2012-8

Biometrics of next generation: An overview:
http://biometrics.cse.msu.edu/Publications/GeneralBiometrics/JainKumarNextGenBiometrics_BookChap10.pdf