The Implanted Radio-Frequency Identification Chip: “Smart Cards” in a Surveillance Society

September 11, 2008 in I doubt, I think, The Big Brother, The wall
Tags: big brother, bush, conspiracies, freedom, global control, life, news, politics, privacy, rfid, Surveillance, usa

by Tom Burghardt

Global Research, September 6, 2008

Antifascist Calling…

If incorporating personal details into an RFID (radio-frequency identification) chip implanted into a passport or driver’s license may sound like a “smart” alternative to endless lines at the airport and intrusive questioning by securocrats, think again.

Since the late 1990s, corporate grifters have touted the “benefits” of the devilish transmitters as a “convenient” and “cheap” way to tag individual commodities, one that would “revolutionize” inventory management and theft prevention. Indeed, everything from paper towels to shoes, pets to underwear have been “tagged” with the chips. “Savings” would be “passed on” to the consumer. Call it the Wal-Martization of everyday life.

RFID tags are small computer chips connected to miniature antennae that can be fixed to or implanted within physical objects, including human beings. The RFID chip itself contains an Electronic Product Code that can be “read” when a RFID reader emits a radio signal. The chips are divided into two categories, passive or active. A “passive” tag doesn’t contain a battery and its “read” range is variable, from less than an inch to twenty or thirty feet. An “active” tag on the other hand, is self-powered and has a much longer range. The data from an “active” tag can be sent directly to a computer system involved in inventory control–or surveillance.

But as Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) state in a joint position paper, “RFID has the potential to jeopardize consumer privacy, reduce or eliminate purchasing anonymity, and threaten civil liberties.” As these organizations noted:

While there are beneficial uses of RFID, some attributes of the technology could be deployed in ways that threaten privacy and civil liberties:

* Hidden placement of tags. RFID tags can be embedded into/onto objects and documents without the knowledge of the individual who obtains those items. As radio waves travel easily and silently through fabric, plastic, and other materials, it is possible to read RFID tags sewn into clothing or affixed to objects contained in purses, shopping bags, suitcases, and more.

* Unique identifiers for all objects worldwide. The Electronic Product Code potentially enables every object on earth to have its own unique ID. The use of unique ID numbers could lead to the creation of a global item registration system in which every physical object is identified and linked to its purchaser or owner at the point of sale or transfer.

* Massive data aggregation. RFID deployment requires the creation of massive databases containing unique tag data. These records could be linked with personal identifying data, especially as computer memory and processing capacities expand.

* Hidden readers. Tags can be read from a distance, not restricted to line of sight, by readers that can be incorporated invisibly into nearly any environment where human beings or items congregate. RFID readers have already been experimentally embedded into floor tiles, woven into carpeting and floor mats, hidden in doorways, and seamlessly incorporated into retail shelving and counters, making it virtually impossible for a consumer to know when or if he or she was being “scanned.”

* Individual tracking and profiling. If personal identity were linked with unique RFID tag numbers, individuals could be profiled and tracked without their knowledge or consent. For example, a tag embedded in a shoe could serve as a de facto identifier for the person wearing it. Even if item-level information remains generic, identifying items people wear or carry could associate them with, for example, particular events like political rallies. (“Position Statement on the Use of RFID on Consumer Products,” Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, November 14, 2003)

RFID under the skin

As the corporatist police state unfurls its murderous tentacles here in the United States, it should come as no surprise that securocrats breathlessly tout the “benefits” of RFID in the area of “homeland security.” When linked to massive commercial databases as well as those compiled by the 16 separate agencies of the “intelligence community,” such as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) that feeds the federal government’s surveillance Leviathan with the names of suspected “terrorists,” it doesn’t take a genius to conclude that the architecture for a vast totalitarian enterprise is off the drawing board and onto the streets.

As last week’s mass repression of peaceful protest at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul amply demonstrated, the Bush regime’s “preemptive war” strategy has been rolled out in the heimat. As the World Socialist Web Site reports,

On Wednesday eight members of the anarchist protest group the Republican National Convention Welcoming Committee (RNCWC) were charged under provisions of the Minnesota state version of the Patriot Act with “Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism.”

The eight charged are all young, and could face up to seven-and-a-half years in prison under a provision that allows the enhancement of charges related to terrorism by 50 percent. …

Among other things, the youth, who were arrested last weekend even prior to the start of the convention, are charged with plotting to kidnap delegates to the RNC, assault police officers and attack airports. Almost all of the charges listed are based upon the testimony of police infiltrators, one an officer, the other a paid informant. (Tom Eley, “RNC in Twin Cities: Eight protesters charged with terrorism under Patriot Act,” World Socialist Web Site, 6 September 2008)

As the ACLU pointed out, “These charges are an effort to equate publicly stated plans to blockade traffic and disrupt the RNC as being the same as acts of terrorism. This both trivializes real violence and attempts to place the stated political views of the defendants on trial,” said Bruce Nestor, president of the Minnesota Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. “The charges represent an abuse of the criminal justice system and seek to intimidate any person organizing large scale public demonstrations potentially involving civil disobedience,” he said.

An affidavit filed by the cops in order to allow the preemptive police raid and subsequent arrests declared that the RNCWC is a “criminal enterprise” strongly implying that the group of anarchist youth were members of a “terrorist organization.”

Which, as we have learned over these last seven and a half years of darkness, is precisely the point: keep ’em scared and passive. And when they’re neither scared nor passive, resort to police state tactics of mass repression. While the cops beat and arrested demonstrators and journalists outside the Xcel Energy Center, neanderthal-like Republican mobs chanted “USA! USA!” while the execrable theocratic fascist, Sarah Palin, basked in the limelight. But I digress…

Likened to barcodes that scan items at the grocery store check-out line, what industry flacks such as the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility (AIM) fail to mention in their propaganda about RFID is that the information stored on a passport or driver’s license is readily stolen by anyone with a reader device–marketers, security agents, criminals or stalkers–without the card holder even being remotely aware that they are being tracked and their allegedly “secure” information plundered. According to a blurb on the AIM website,

Automatic Identification and Mobility (AIM) technologies are a diverse family of technologies that share the common purpose of identifying, tracking, recording, storing and communicating essential business, personal, or product data. In most cases, AIM technologies serve as the front end of enterprise software systems, providing fast and accurate collection and entry of data. (“Technologies,” Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility, no date)

Among the “diverse family of technologies” touted by AIM, many are rife with “dual-use” potential, that is, the same technology that can keep track of a pallet of soft drinks can also keep track of human beings.

Indeed, the Association touts biometric identification as “an automated method of recognizing a person based on a physiological or behavioral characteristic.” This is especially important since “the need” for biometrics “can be found in federal, state and local governments, in the military, and in commercial applications.” When used as a stand-alone or in conjunction with RFID-chipped “smart cards” biometrics, according to the industry “are set to pervade nearly all aspects of the economy and our daily lives.”

Some “revolution.”

The industry received a powerful incentive from the state when the Government Services Administration (GSA), a Bushist satrapy, issued a 2004 memo that urged the heads of all federal agencies “to consider action that can be taken to advance the [RFID] industry.”

An example of capitalist “ingenuity” or another insidious invasion of our right to privacy? In 2006, IBM obtained a patent that will be used for tracking and profiling consumers as they move around a store, even if access to commercial databases are strictly limited.

And when it comes tracking and profiling human beings, say for mass extermination at the behest of crazed Nazi ideologues, IBM stands alone. In his groundbreaking 2001 exploration of the enabling technologies for the mass murder of Jews, communists, Roma and gays and lesbians, investigative journalist Edwin Black described in IBM and the Holocaust how, beginning in 1933, IBM and their subsidiaries created technological “solutions” that streamlined the identification of “undesirables” for quick and efficient asset confiscation, deportation, slave labor and eventual annihilation.

In an eerie echo of polices being enacted today against Muslims and left-wing “extremists” by the corrupt Bush regime in their quixotic quest to “keep America safe” in furtherance of capitalist and imperialist goals of global domination, Black writes:

In the upside-down world of the Holocaust, dignified professionals were Hitler’s advance troops. Police officials disregarded their duty in favor of protecting villains and persecuting victims. Lawyers perverted concepts of justice to create anti-Jewish laws. Doctors defiled the art of medicine to perpetrate ghastly experiments and even choose who was healthy enough to be worked to death–and who could be cost-effectively sent to the gas chamber. Scientists and engineers debased their higher calling to devise the instruments and rationales of destruction. And statisticians used their little known but powerful discipline to identify the victims, project and rationalize the benefits of their destruction, organize their persecution, and even audit the efficiency of genocide. Enter IBM and its overseas subsidiaries. (IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, New York: Crown Publishers, 2001, pp. 7-8)

As security and privacy analyst Katherine Albrecht writes describing IBM’s patented “Identification and Tracking of Persons Using RFID-Tagged Items in Store Environments,”

…chillingly details RFID’s potential for surveillance in a world where networked RFID readers called “person tracking units” would be incorporated virtually everywhere people go–in “shopping malls, airports, train stations, bus stations, elevators, trains, airplanes, restrooms, sports arenas, libraries, theaters, [and] museums”–to closely monitor people’s movements. (“How RFID Tags Could Be Used to Track Unsuspecting People,” Scientific American, August 21, 2008)

According to the patent cited by Albrecht, as an individual moves around a store, or a city center, an “RFID tag scanner located [in the desired tracking location]… scans the RFID tags on [a] person…. As that person moves around the store, different RFID tag scanners located throughout the store can pick up radio signals from the RFID tags carried on that person and the movement of that person is tracked based on these detections…. The person tracking unit may keep records of different locations where the person has visited, as well as the visitation times.”

Even if no personal data are stored in the RFID tag, this doesn’t present a problem IBM explains, because “the personal information will be obtained when the person uses his or her credit card, bank card, shopper card or the like.” As Albrecht avers, the link between the unique RFID number and a person’s identity “needs to be made only once for the card to serve as a proxy for the person thereafter.” With the wholesale introduction of RFID chipped passports and driver’s licenses, the capitalist panoptic state is quickly–and quietly–falling into place.

If America’s main trading partner and sometime geopolitical rival in the looting of world resources, China, is any indication of the direction near future surveillance technologies are being driven by the “miracle of the market,” the curtain on privacy and individual rights is rapidly drawing to a close. Albrecht writes,

China’s national ID cards, for instance, are encoded with what most people would consider a shocking amount of personal information, including health and reproductive history, employment status, religion, ethnicity and even the name and phone number of each cardholder’s landlord. More ominous still, the cards are part of a larger project to blanket Chinese cities with state-of-the-art surveillance technologies. Michael Lin, a vice president for China Public Security Technology, a private company providing the RFID cards for the program, unflinchingly described them to the New York Times as “a way for the government to control the population in the future.” And even if other governments do not take advantage of the surveillance potential inherent in the new ID cards, ample evidence suggests that data-hungry corporations will.

I would disagree with Albrecht on one salient point: governments, particularly the crazed, corporate-controlled grifters holding down the fort in Washington, most certainly will take advantage of RFID’s surveillance potential.

In 2005 for example, the Senate Republican High Tech Task force praised RFID applications as “exciting new technologies” with “tremendous promise for our economy.” In this spirit, they vowed to “protect” RFID from regulation and legislation. Needless to say, the track record of timid Democrats is hardly any better when it comes to defending privacy rights or something as “quaint” as the Constitution.

Under conditions of a looming economic meltdown, rising unemployment, staggering debt, the collapse of financial markets and continuing wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. imperialism, in order to shore up its crumbling empire, will continue to import totalitarian methods of rule employed in its “global war on terror” onto the home front.

The introduction of RFID-chipped passports and driver’s licenses for the mass surveillance and political repression of the American people arises within this context.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly, Love & Rage and Antifa Forum, he is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military “Civil Disturbance” Planning, distributed by AK Press.

big-brother, global-control, conspiracies, usa, bush, privacy, freedom, politics, life, news, surveillance

Go Back to Sleep America – the Government is in Charge

September 4, 2008 in Free Information and Media, Human Rights, I doubt, I think, The Big Brother
Tags: 9-11, dissent, Free-Speech, patrotism, police state, Surveillance, terrorism, war

Author: Johnnypeepers

For the U.S. government, it is crucial that Americans never forget that our fundamentalist Muslim enemies are continually plotting our violent extinction. While we fearfully monitor the DHS color-coded threat level index, the enemy is bunkered down in caves with antique Soviet AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenade launchers made in the 80’s, and a rudimentary knowledge of how the Internets work.

Supposedly, on 9/11, radical jihadists penetrated America’s air defense system, defied previously accepted notions of aircraft physics and architectural engineering principles, and transformed the FBI and the CIA into an band of clue-dropping Keystone cops. Although 9-11 Commission Report makes for great fictional reading, as long as the “official” narrative is embraced by a majority of the public, the government can justify its murderous and genocidal foreign land-grab policies unabated.

For the most part, Americans have short attention spans and a limited grasp of the intricacies of international geopolitics. Instead of investing the time it takes to research the long term consequences of U.S. instigated regime change (i.e., Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, Iraq 2003), or understanding the impact of black-op destablization operations (including the immeasurable unintended blowback effects), it is easier to just have a bad guy (or people) to hate. The proles need an evil benchmark for comparison in order to define their patriotic decency and morality. For governments, the employment of an existential bogey-man menace (the CIA funded and trained Mujahideen) is extremely effective in building cohesion and support for policies that ultimately jeopardize the national and economic security of the country and violate domestic and international laws.

With the end of the Cold War, a new formula was necessary to sow panic and fear as a means to boost defense spending and to justify future foreign entanglements. The “clash of civilizations” narrative was employed as a divide and conquer strategy using religion and nationalism to spark post 9-11 enmity with the evil jihadist as public enemy #1. The Hegelaian dialectic is invoked to pit the noble and just “Us” versus the evil and diabolical “Them”. The result the perennial war of terror on unsuspecting foreigners and forfeited individual rights and liberties at home. Instead of the red under every bed, we get the neighborhood al Qaeda cell terrorist who is awaiting secret orders from Islamabad to strike the local shopping plaza.

Operation Mockingbird, a CIA program that was used for decades to illegally influence domestic media, is alive and well in 21st century America. Overt and subliminal social conditioning propaganda is beamed into millions of homes and is absorbed into the brains of the great unwashed. The corporate media and intelligence agencies have long worked hand-in-hand to massage and censor information having the potential to undermine Americans blind allegiance to their political masters (and their nefarious agendas). By exerting gate-keeper control over the information that Americans may access, those that oppose the policies and actions of our handlers are kept to a fairly harmless minimum.

The conformity-inducing educational and pharmacological super structure acts as a deterrent to individualism and to those predisposed to authority questioning. A herd mentality is fostered in the government indoctrination centers (schools) which undermines the student’s critical thinking skills. If the environmental forces are not sufficient to suppress the emerging free-thinker, there is a battery of powerful psychotropic drugs to further nullify the victim. In addition to years of fluoride poisoning, daily doses of psycho-stimulants, anti-depressants, mood stabilizers, and other dangerous and harmful chemicals are employed to interdict those that stray too far from the mind control plantation. After 12 years of inadequate instruction by self-interested bureaucrats who promote rigid conformity and blind obedience to the state, the skulls of mush are then turned over to their corporate overlords or a secondary education indoctrination center.

If the media propaganda, miseducation, and chemical lobotomy mix isn’t enough, more severe methods are employed to suppress information sharing, and to punish those engaged in constitutionally protected exercises of free speech. Whether through COINTELRO style group infiltrations, or through direct violent suppression, the message is clear – shut up. The brutal tactics employed by law enforcement officers at the Republican National Convention underscore our handler’s fear of an enlightened citizenry.

The arrest of photographers, journalists, and individuals peacefully assembled documenting the 2008 Republican convention is a sign of a oppressive government that does not tolerate free speech, the 4th Amendment, or individual rights. Thankfully, many brave citizens and journalists (including I-Witness contributors and Democracy Now host Amy Goodman) have documented the government’s illegal activities.

In a deceptively brilliant Orwellian strategy, those that question the government are identified as unpatriotic America loathers, anarchists, or Marxist agitators. The obedient masses operate in the expected knee-jerk fashion. Unable to contain their disgust, they spit and curse at the sounds and political propaganda images beamed into their brains via Fox News and CNN. Why do the protesters hate America so much? Why can’t they just settle down, get a job, and appreciate living in the greatest country that God gave to the Adamic race? Why can’t everyone think, feel, and act just like me?

I’ll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office. –George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008

New Spy Software Coming On-Line: “Surveillance in a Box” Makes its Debut

August 29, 2008 in Free Information and Media, The wall
Tags: big brother, bush, conspiracies, freedom, global control, life, news, politics, privacy, Surveillance, usa

by Tom Burghardt

Global Research, August 29, 2008

Antifascist Calling… – 2008-08-28

You’ve heard of the FBI’s “Quantico Circuit” and were outraged by illegal warrantless wiretapping by Bushist minions. To no avail, you flooded Congress with emails and phone calls, angered by the bipartisan “FISA Amendments Act of 2008” and the swell party thrown by AT&T for “Blue Dog” Democrats in Denver this week for the convention.

But just in time for a new administration (and the bundles of cash always at the ready for the expanding homeland security market), comes a complete “surveillance in a box” system called the Intelligence Platform!

According to New Scientist, German electronics giant Siemens has developed software allegedly capable of integrating

…tasks typically done by separate surveillance teams or machines, pooling data from sources such as telephone calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions and insurance records. It then sorts through this mountain of information using software that Siemens dubs “intelligence modules”. (Laura Margottini, “Surveillance Made Easy,” New Scientist, 23 August 2008)

New Scientist reports that the firm has sold the system to some 60 countries in Europe and Asia. Which countries? Well, Siemens won’t say.

However, privacy and human rights advocates say the system bears a remarkable resemblance to China’s “Golden Shield,” a massive surveillance network that integrates huge information databases, internet and email monitoring, speech and facial recognition platforms in combination with CCTV monitoring.

Designed specifically for “fusion centers” or their European/Asian equivalents, the Intelligence Platform promises to provide “real-time” high-tech tools to foil terrorist plots before they’re hatched (or keep tabs on antiwar/antiglobalization activists).

The latest item in the emerging “intelligent” software niche market, Intelligence Platform has been “trained” on a large number of sample documents to zero in on names, phone numbers or places from generic text. “This means it can spot names or numbers that crop up alongside anyone already of interest to the authorities, and then catalogue any documents that contain such associates,” New Scientist avers.

In the UK, the Home Office announced it plans to provide law enforcement, local councils and other public agencies access to the details of text messages, emails and internet browsing. This follows close on the heels of an announcement last May that New Labour was considering building a massive centralized database “as a tool to help the security services tackle crime and terrorism.” According to The Guardian,

Local councils, health authorities and hundreds of other public bodies are to be given the power to access details of everyone’s personal text, emails and internet use under Home Office proposals published yesterday.

Ministers want to make it mandatory for telephone and internet companies to keep details of all personal internet traffic for at least 12 months so it can be accessed for investigations into crime or other threats to public safety. …

Conservatives and Liberal Democrats last night branded the measure a “snooper’s charter”. (Alan Travis, “‘Snooper’s charter’ to check texts and email,” The Guardian, Wednesday, August 13, 2008)

A blurb posted on Siemens’ website claims that the “challenge” is “to foster the well-being of law-abiding citizens” and therefore, “authorized groups need to have direct access to communications between suspects, whether it is individuals, groups or organizations. Only then can they take appropriate action, detect, prevent and anticipate crimes and guarantee peace and security.”

In other words, if you’ve got nothing to hide “trust us:” the shopworn mantra of securocrats everywhere. And in today’s climate, this is an especially burdensome challenge for state security and corporate spies who demand “highly-sophisticated, multi-level voice and data recordings” in order to destroy our rights while transforming our respective societies into Orwellian police states. New Scientist reports,

Once a person is being monitored, pattern-recognition software first identifies their typical behaviour, such as repeated calls to certain numbers over a period of a few months. The software can then identify any deviations from the norm and flag up unusual activities, such as transactions with a foreign bank, or contact with someone who is also under surveillance, so that analysts can take a closer look.

But if the experience of U.S. Fusion Centers are any indication of the accuracy of the Siemens system, false positives will be endemic while thousands, if not millions, of perfectly innocent individuals are forever ensnared in the state’s data driftnet. According to the American Civil Liberties Union,

The Justice Department’s 2006 Guidelines envision fusion centers doing more than simply sharing legitimately acquired law enforcement information across different branches of our burgeoning security establishment. The Guidelines encourage compiling data “from nontraditional sources, such as public safety entities and private sector organizations” and fusing it with federal intelligence “to anticipate, identify, prevent, and/or monitor criminal and terrorist activity.” This strongly implies the use of statistical dragnets that have come to be called data-mining. The inevitable result of a data-mining approach to fusion centers will be:

Many innocent individuals will be flagged, scrutinized, investigated, placed on watch lists, interrogated or arrested, and possibly suffer irreparable harm to their reputation, all because of a hidden machinery of data brokers, information aggregators and computer algorithms.

Law enforcement agencies will waste time and resources investing in high-tech computer boondoggles that leave them chasing false leads–while real threats go unaddressed and limited resources are sucked away from the basic, old-fashioned legwork that is the only way genuine terror plots have ever been foiled. (Michael German and Jay Staley, “What’s Wrong with Fusion Centers,” American Civil Liberties, December 2007)

But perhaps “high-tech computer boondoggles” are precisely the point!

After all, the Boeing Company and their sidekicks at SRI International (which describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit research institute”) were recently criticized by a House Science and Technology Subcommittee for “irregularities” in the government’s Railhead program, a suite of software “upgrades” to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), “a vast database of names that feeds the nation’s terrorist watch list,” the Associated Press reported.

Railhead was touted as a “fix” for a system built by Lockheed Martin in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. According to congressional investigators, the system provides data to all federal terrorist watch lists, including the “no-fly” list run by the Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration and the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, a national clearinghouse for federal, state and local fusion centers.

According to the House committee the program is months behind schedule, millions over budget and “would actually be less capable than the U.S. government terrorist tracking system it is meant to replace.” Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported,

When tested, the new system failed to find matches for terrorist-suspect names that were spelled slightly different from the name entered into the system, a common challenge when translating names from Arabic to English. It also could not perform basic searches of multiple words connected with terms such as “and” and “or.” (Siobhan Gorman, “Flaws Found in Watch List for Terrorists, The Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2008)

Leaving aside the racist presuppositions of the Journal, to wit, that Arab = terrorist (no small matter when dealing with nativist yahoos here in the “homeland” or elswehere), as Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) said in a statement, “the program appears to be on the brink of collapse after an estimated half-billion dollars in taxpayer funding has been spent on it.” According to the committee,

The Railhead program had been undergoing an internal technical implosion for more than one year. But public statements and sworn public testimony to Congress from senior officials within the NCTC [National Counterterrorist Center] and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) never revealed the mounting technical troubles, poor contractor management or lax government oversight that appears to have been endemic throughout the program and has led to Railhead’s colossal failure. Astoundingly, the Director of NCTC and the Director of National Intelligence have both specifically pointed to TIDE and NCTC Online as hallmarks of the government’s information sharing accomplishments. (“Technical Flaws Hinder Terrorist Watch List; Congress Calls for Investigation,” Committee on Science and Technology, Press Release, August 21, 2008)

In a technical sense, the NCTC and the ODNI may be correct in touting TIDE and NCTC Online as “hallmarks of the government’s information sharing accomplishments,” if by “sharing accomplishments” they meant handing over unlimited bundles of taxpayer’s hard-earned cash to enterprising contractors!

Gorman reports that in “recent weeks, the government has fired most of the 862 private contractors from dozens of companies working on the Railhead project, and only a skeleton crew remains.” Boeing and SRI’s response? According to the Journal, “calls to officials of Boeing and SRI were not immediately returned.”

I bet they weren’t! Especially since the committee said “Railhead insiders” allege that the government paid Boeing some $200 million to retrofit the company’s Herndon, Virginia office with security upgrades so that top secret software work could be performed there. The government then leased the same office space from Boeing. How’s that for hitting the old corporate “sweet spot.”

None of this of course, should surprise anyone, least of all defense lobby dollar-addicted members of Congress who, like Captain Renault in Casablanca are “shocked, shocked” to find their corporate “partners” have failed to deliver–again.

According to Washington Technology’s list of “2008 Top 100 Government Prime Contractors,” Boeing clocked-in at No. 2 with $9,706,621,413 in taxpayer handouts. No slouches themselves, Siemens placed No. 79 with some $186,292,146 in prime government contracts across an array of defense and civilian agencies. With Railhead’s imminent demise, perhaps the German electronics giant has a future in the U.S. “homeland security” market with its Intelligent Platform?

Then again, perhaps not. Computer security expert Bruce Schneier told New Scientist, “‘currently there are no good patterns available to recognise terrorists,’ he says, and questions whether Siemens has got around this.” But since the business of government is business, maybe they do after all.

Meanwhile, the PRISE consortium of security technology and human rights experts funded by the European Union, called “for a moratorium on the development of fusion technologies, referring explicitly to the Siemens Intelligence Platform,” Margottini reported.

According to New Scientist, PRISE analysts told the EU, “The efficiency and reliability of such tools is as yet unknown. More surveillance does not necessarily lead to a higher level of societal security. Hence there must be a thorough examination of whether the resulting massive constraints on human rights are proportionate and justified.”

But here in the United States concern over trivial things such as “massive constraints on human rights,” unlike state attacks against the “quaint” rights of the average citizen are, like the impeachment of a regime studded with war criminals, most definitely “off the table.”

While the Democrats celebrate Barack Obama’s coronation in Denver this week and the Republicans are poised to do the same for John McCain in the Twin Cities rest assured, administrations may change, but the corporate grift is eternal.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly, Love & Rage and Antifa Forum, he is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military “Civil Disturbance” Planning, distributed by AK Press.

big-brother, global-control, conspiracies, usa, bush, privacy, freedom, politics, life, news, surveillance