Inside San Diego’s metropolitan area, California’s second largest city, home to some 275,000 residents, has made the history books. Their mark on history will be a dark one as they become the first city in America to be completely monitored by spy drones.
“On a per capita basis, they’re probably the most or one of the most surveilled cities in the country,” said Brian Hofer, executive director of the Oakland-based privacy advocacy group Secure Justice. “Pretty much the minute you walk outside your front door and move about your daily life, you’re going to be tagged and tracked by some law enforcement agency, even though you’ve likely never been suspected of any wrongdoing.”
Chula Vista’s drone program didn’t come to fruition over night. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies coordinated with with Chinese drone manufacturers and unscrupulous actors in Big Tech and have implemented the program over the course of several years.
In 2020, as fearful citizens begged the government for safety that never came, they willingly accepted this egregious invasion of privacy.
“The(Police) department is considering one strategy to use drone-mounted speakers to communicate and reach vulnerable populations in inaccessible areas of the city, like large urban canyons with homeless encampments,” the Chula Vista Police Department said in a press release when they began to spy on citizens 24/7. “Unsheltered persons are particularly vulnerable to the current pandemic, and their safety and welfare is important to stopping the spread of the disease.”
The company who manufactures the drones had no problem admitting the “Orwellian” nature of such a program. “What we saw in China, and what we’re probably going to see around the world, is using drones with cameras and loudspeakers to fly around to see if people are gathering where they shouldn’t be, and telling them to go home,” Spencer Gore, chief executive of U.S.-based drone company Impossible Aerospace, said. “It seems a little Orwellian, but this could save lives.”
“People don’t realize the depths of Chinese espionage and the fact that they use any opportunity,”said Jim Lewis, a researcher at the DC-based, bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We face the biggest espionage battle we’ve ever had with China. The way people engage in espionage has changed. It’s moved largely to technology and digital devices.”
As we’ve seen with other Orwellian moves like license plate scanners and surveillance cameras, this drone program will not remain solely in Chula Vista and other states have already begun similar programs.
As I’ve documented here before Biometrics and other assorted forms of global mass surveillance technologies have become a part of our world that we can no longer escape. The seeming inevitability of a Technological- Technocratic Panoptican is a reality we must face going forward into the future.While the Paradigm of Public safety/Security from Terrorism that enshrined the foundations of this system have faded from the Corporate media’s spotlight,with 2020 and the “global pandemic” of Covid-19 we’ve entered into a new paradigm, that of Bio-security and Medical martial law.
And so I rounded up these series of Articles closing out 2020 with the theme of Biometrics and Facial recognition and their continual incremental encroaching upon citizens privacy and civil liberties.
2020 was the year of the Mask. While the effectiveness of such a measure against the Novel coronavirus is somewhat contested and vigorously opposed by some,Face masks became the defining feature and social divisor of 2020. Since the majority of the population was forced to wear masks, that presented a bit of a problem with existing facial recognition technology. While most liberty minded people,and those opposed to Orwellian intrusion saw this a good thing, The US govt obviously did not….But fear not citizens because D.H.S. is working around that problem to protect you (?) from ” security threats” No Terrorist in a face diaper is going to foil D.H.S. No Sir!!!!!
The Homeland Security Department, one of the government’s biggest biometrics systems users, is now steering research to confront the complexities limiting existing technology and help push forward tools to safely verify people’s identities at security checkpoints in a pandemic. Initial results from one recent effort “are actually quite promising,” Using not Photoshop but a tool like it, NIST created digital masks over faces in DHS operational images. Officials subsequently compared how facial recognition algorithms performed on those photos, as well as images of the same people without synthetic masks edited on to cover their faces.
Conducted at the Maryland Test Facility, the latest rally put those face and/or iris acquisition systems to work, as well as 13 matching algorithms—with support from 582 human volunteers. With the heaps of photos collected, DHS is able to essentially standardize image output and get a strong grip on what all the cameras are capturing. The systems are able to hone in on unique human features such as head shape, and faces’ periocular region—or the areas around individuals’ eyes—that remain uncovered when masks are worn.
DHS selected six systems to test this go-around, which is fewer than usual for such events but made sense to abide by COVID-19 protocols
Phew…what a relief to know that while forging tech to invade on the public’s privacy,no volunteers were exposed to COVID. My virtue signal receptors are pleased to hear that…..
Drones to police the Drones
Within the past 2 years we have seen an exponential rise in the commercial/privatized use of Drones. While the military has popularized their use as flying messengers of death, the use of drones in the private sector has found a new utility- Surveillance of the populace. You can call it Drones watching Drones. In real life scenarios that seem to mirror some of the most dystopian sci fi visions of films like They live,or Captive state, have now come to pass. Drones are now being used to fight the new “invisible enemy” COVID-19. Drone company Draganfly made more than a few headlines,by getting itself involved with projects related to surveillance and tracking of suspected Covid infections. Draganfly partnered with the Australian DOD and got in on the action with the near draconian lockdowns in Australia. And it doesn’t just stop there:
The goal, say organizers, is not to identify sick individuals. Instead, it will collect real-time statistical data about the possible spread of the disease. Drones are just part of this system, which will leverage other cameras around the world, such as CCTV cameras. They will all feed images and video into software developed by healthcare and AI company Vital Intelligence, Inc. – Dronedj.com
So it’s a small Globally surveilled world after all….
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA, issued a broad agency announcement solicitation for its latest attempt to improve biometrics at range, the Biometric Recognition and Identification at Altitude and Range, or BRIAR, program. (Boy they sure do love Acronym’s)
The BRIAR program aims to develop software algorithm-based systems capable of performing whole-body biometric identification at long-range and from elevated platforms,” the call states, outlining a three-phase process to prototype and test novel ways to incorporate multiple biometric signatures—such as face, gait and body type—to improve identification and verification at long ranges and steep angles.The BRIAR program will combine multiple biometric factors, including face, stride and “anthropometric classifications” like height and gender to improve match rates.
And just to appeal to the PC virtue signaling crowd : “The program also hopes to attune for racial diversity by using “robust, demographically diverse, domain-relevant biometric data,” . Whatever that innocuous statement means…. The fact is that this surveillance tech is not only detrimental to all citizens privacy,but that it has also been utilized disproportionately against minorities .
2020 had become the year of Global lockdown’s (setting a precedent for 2021?) Surveillance,Tracking and Political repression have all been justified with the “threat” of COVID-19, As noted before Australia and other Asian nations have had the largest increases in public surveillance due to the COVID pandemic. Not more than 2 years ago it seemed as though worldwide a majority of the world’s population were pissed off for one reason or another and were willing to get out in the streets to push back against governments and their overreach. But then Covid-19 came along and the global lockdowns began,with nary a word of protest in response to the “justified” draconian measures.
Public Consciousness is key in opposing Mass surveillance
While the Surveillance state continues to grow by leaps and bounds, there have been a few roadblocks offered up by the public in response to these intrusions into the public’s privacy. The aforementioned Dragnfly Pandemic temperature scanning drone program that was to be rolled out in Westport CT saw enough citizen response that the police dept was forced to axe the entire “Flatten the curve” pilot program.
Various Public advocacy groups voiced their concerns over,and called for a halt to a proposed Customs and Border protection plan involving Biometric data collection. The U.S. Customs and border protection (USCBP) had proposed an expansion of it’s own biometric data collection capabilities in September of 2020, the proposal sought to add the collection of palm prints, photographs for facial recognition, voice prints, iris images and DNA for tests to determine genetic relationships to its pre-existing biometric practices, which include collecting fingerprints and signatures of immigrants. Where that will ultimately go remains to be seen.
In New York State Facial recognition being used in schools was banned,being the first state to officially stop(for now) the deployment of these technologies in a public education setting. The law didn’t create a permanent ban,but rather a temporary stop on it’s use until 2022.
In June, the ACLU of New York sued the state education department over the installation of a facial recognition system in Lockport City Schools, a district near Niagara Falls. The state’s approval of this technology showed a “dangerous lack of oversight and an alarming misunderstanding of the way it analyzes student data,” the civil liberties group said. The implementation of the system violated students’ rights to privacy, the lawsuit argued, because the district wanted to sync their data to local, state, and federal crime databases.
School officials defended the system, saying it would help identify school shooters as they enter the building, allowing shootings to be prevented.
And so there you go with the old tried and true appeal to “public safety”, or the even sappier “keeping your kids safe from drugs and violence”, while indoctrinating them to accept a system of Mass surveillance and no personal privacy. As these technologies continue to develop,and are increasingly marketed to the public sector it’s up to us The public to stay informed of how,and when these technologies are being used against us. While the global surveillance industry will continually take advantage of the public’s vulnerabilities to “security risks” it’s important to remember that it won’t just stop there,The Covid pandemic and it’s response highlight that we are moving into a post security and Terrorism oriented (indoctrinated?) world,and that now even Bodily autonomy is at risk of being seized all in the name of “Protection”
The truth is slowly becoming stranger than fiction in the modern police/warfare state. Recently declassified information about an experiment out of the little known Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) backs up this notion and is cause for major concern.
For a bit of background history The SCO was launched in 2012 as a means of secretly strategizing for a war against China and Russia. Outside of this one video, they just released, very little is known about their experiments or weapons building.
Saber rattling with China and Russia is an insane and asinine move, but by releasing the video below, the US is doing exactly that.
Future warfare plans for China and Russia have slim chances of success in an overt confrontation, So longer term plans call for Asymetric and Even Robotic warfare.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter disclosed the existence of Micro-drones that can be launched from the flare dispensers of F-16s and F/A-18 fighter jets traveling at the speed of sound. As the drones are released, tiny propellers provide them with the propulsion they need to find each other and create a swarm.
The idea of weaponized swarming micro-robots deployed by one of the most destructive governments in the history of the world — shocks the conscience. However, the war-mongering bureaucrats in D.C. are patting themselves on the back and using the release of this video to justify stealing even more of your tax dollars.
The notion that the US is preparing for the rise of threats across the globe rings hollow to those who’ve been paying attention and realize that the US creates the conflicts only to play the role of savior — an ostensible measure used to enrich those who profit from war.
Police are now voicing their concerns about domestic drone use — specifically, they want the option to be able to employ weaponized drones in the future, should the need arise.
As if police brutality and aggression weren’t already an epidemic in the United States, police departments in Connecticut oppose a bill to outlaw the weaponization of drones. The bill also addresses unmanned aerial vehicles fitted with cameras, and their potential to violate the privacy rights of individuals. But law enforcement departments in the state appear far more concerned with being deprived of the possibility of arming them with weapons, rather than cameras.
In 2015, North Dakota passed a law granting police the right to arm drones with “less than lethal” weaponry. Quietly slipping under the radar of the public and the media, the bill as originally written by its sponsor, Representative Rick Becker, banned all weapons on police drones — until a powerful police lobby had its way with the original draft. ‘less than lethal’ is quite a misnomer. Besides maiming and seriously injuring people, many of those options can also be fatal — particularly Tasers.
Police made the argument that armed drones in law enforcement could be an effective weapon for public safety.
“We’ve had a report that somebody’s going to fly a drone into an airplane, into an engine, or it’s a weaponized drone,” Farmington Police Chief Paul Melanson said. “We’re concerned and we don’t have those answers yet.”
Joining the battle to prevent police spying by drone, the ACLU was slated to testify about the Connecticut bill on Tuesday. ACLU of Connecticut testified against allowing police to arm drones, saying it could open the door even more to excessive use of force.
*Seizing upon the opportunities of new technologies, It’s time for the government to restrict your use and access, While they have the ability to arm the same technology with weapons and riot control functions and use it against you.
Assemblyman Mike Gatto a California lawmaker introduced legislation this week that would require owners of drones to get insurance and license plates, similar to the requirements for motor vehicles. The bill is called the Drone Registration/Omnibus Negligence-prevention Enactment (DRONE) Act of 2016 and would tighten the restrictions on personal drones even further than they have been already. The bill has technical requirements as well and would require all personal drones to be tracked by GPS and an automatic shut off to prevent them from crossing paths with airplanes.
The privacy concerns surrounding drone registration has grown with the FAA’s admission that the registration information would be available to anyone with an Internet connection. This means that addresses and other sensitive personal information of drone owners would be publicly listed, creating an obvious safety hazard. The FAA says that the names and addresses would not be searchable; however, if you have the number to someone’s drone, you can easily pull up their address and other personal information.
The registration move was just the beginning of a slippery slope that will quickly bring far-reaching, local, state and federal restrictions on drone operators.
Professor William C. Bradford, assistant professor from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point recently declared that professionals critical of the “War on Terror” constitute a “treasonous” opposition that should be subject to military force.
He believes the U.S. should have the right to attack people who are critical of U.S. military operations — specifically, professionals, legal scholars, journalists, and other people effectively spreading ideas that oppose war.
Using the excuse that victims would be “lawful targets,” Bradford argues that “law school facilities, scholars’ home offices and media outlets where they give interviews” should be targeted with military force to suppress dissent. He asserted that the war on terror should be expanded, “even if it means great destruction, innumerable enemy casualties, and civilian collateral damage.”
Ironically, Bradford has a Master of Laws (LL.M.) degree from Harvard University with a focus in Human Rights Law.
This is a man who is apparently incorporating his violent philosophy into his teaching at West Point. He started on August 1st 2015 — after he published his article.
This is only the tip of the iceberg in forming a complete understanding of the ideological fabric held by many of the war hawks in U.S. Military.
*One more victory for the Technocratic Police State that is developing and enveloping all around us. How long until this creeps into the “domestic Terrorism” surveillance realm? any bets?
Thanks to a last-minute push by a pro-police lobbyist, it is now legal for law enforcement in North Dakota to fly drones armed with ‘less lethal’ weapons such as rubber bullets, tear gas, tasers, sound cannons and pepper spray. State Rep. Rick Becker introduced H.B. 1328, the law both banned weaponized drones and established a procedure for law enforcement to seek a warrant before using drones in searches. Only the warrant requirement survived.
After the state officially signed Becker’s original bill into law back in April, the state house committee then allowed North Dakota Peace Officer’s Association lobbyist Bruce Burkett to amend HB 1328. Burkett’s amendment reversed the original bill’s course on outlawing the weaponization of drones, instead changing the bill’s language to allow drones to carry “less than lethal” weapons.
The American Civil Liberties Union argues that police drones are a new kind of threat to that compromise between security and liberty. The group supports laws to restrict law enforcement’s use of them, and makes a compelling case that absent such restraints the technology is fundamentally at odds with the Bill of Rights.
Law enforcement and their union lobbyists are assuring lawmakers that drones would only be used in non-criminal situations, like a missing person case or for photographing crime scenes. This begs the question of why they would need such ominous legislation if they say they’ll never use it?
“Less lethal weapons” can kill. At least 39 people have been killed by police Tasers in 2015 so far, according to The Guardian. Bean bags, rubber bullets, and flying tear gas canisters have also killed and maimed people in the U.S. and abroad.
University researchers in Texas say they are designing a new type of drone – one that could be controlled simply and only with a soldier’s mind.If successful, the project would allow soldiers to command future drones in ways beyond simple navigational commands. While troops would be able to order a drone to “move left” and “move right,” it would potentially enable them to command the vehicles to travel over specific geographic installations and send critical data back to their operators.
While the goal of controlling vehicles by way of the mind is still ways off, the hope is that by studying brain signals and magnetic waves, the researchers will be able link the activity to specific commands that can eventually be received by an advanced drone.
These commands would be relayed by sophisticated electroencephalogram systems (EEG) that can process brain signals.
Once developed, mind-controlled drones would significantly reduce the amount of supplies that troops have to carry into combat zones, the chairman of the university’s electrical and computer engineering department, Daniel Pack, believes.
While the project is primarily funded by the Department of Defense and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the researchers also think the technology will have important uses for those with disabilities.( way to put a cushy “humanitarian twist in there)
The always-innovating Los Angeles Police Department is testing a potential addition to its fleet of vehicles: a military-grade electric motorcycle.
Designed “exclusively for military use in the US Special Operations Forces,” the Zero MMX runs almost silently and can operate on and off-road for up to 164 miles on a charge, according to a press release by the manufacturer. Capable of traveling in over three feet of water and producing 68 pound-feet of torque, the stealthy vehicle reaches a top speed of 85 MPH.
Electric motorcycles are not the only vehicles the LAPD may use in coming years. In May, the department received two unmanned aerial vehicles from the city of Seattle. Originally purchased for $82,000, the city eventually banned their use after a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation informed the public of their existence. The drones were then given to Los Angeles.
Purchasing equipment intended for military use is becoming more common among American local police forces. Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, otherwise known as MRAPs, are increasingly handed out by the Pentagon to localities across the country.
LAPD considers deploying unmanned drones for ‘tactical events’
Late last month, the LAPD received two Draganflyer X6 unmanned drones as a ‘gift’ from the Seattle Police Department, in what seems to have been an effort by the latter to avoid public uproar.
At a news conference Thursday at LAPD headquarters, Chief Charlie Beck revealed the unmanned drones could assist police forces in “standoffs, perimeters, suspects hiding…and other tactical events.”
“We’re interested in those applications,” he said.
Beck responded to criticism of the plans by human rights and privacy groups by explaining that the technology is already “in the hands of private citizens” and corporations, so why shouldn’t law enforcement experiment with the devices as well?
Sounds like it’s only a matter of time before they get one of these Bad Boys to start hunting down “criminals” and “Domestic Terrorists”
This wasn’t your typical hockey riot in Los Angeles. Several videos have been posted online showing what has been described as hockey fans destroying a Los Angeles Police Department drone.
The video was taken just outside the Staples Center Friday night after the LA Kings beat the New York Rangers to claim the NHL’s Stanley Cup.
Realize the lies 