Now NATO is getting in on the digital snooping racket

21st Century Wire says…

Why is it compulsory that the state, or this case the military confab known as NATO, to have to hijack all of our digital devices throughout Europe? Is it even legal?

Already, we know the extend that Britain’s GCHQ and their mother ship – the NSA, located in Washington DC and Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, but what is the legal level they are operating on here? It is clear that there is none. Only a blanket justification is given by the state and its militarised agencies… “it’s all for national security”. That old script should be retired, and fast…
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Technocracy is slowly replacing Democracy in the West. In debt crippled countries, such as Italy, Greece and Spain, no politician dares press the default reset button, so the Anaconda debt is delivering slow inexorable death.

Because our political representatives lack the spine to bite that bullet, elections have become a charade. Financial markets, the shadowy Gnomes of Zurich, have begun choosing our political leaders.

But these Goldman Sachs friendly, loan shark, technocrats are only one arm of an octopus that is emerging as the real power in the Western world. Lesser known are the companies that own valuable patents and, like conjurers, roll out dazzling new scientific gadgets. This is the technology which, in public hands, should now be liberating us all from drudgery and freeing up our leisure time, but in private hands it is doing precisely the opposite.

When our MPs, journalists and lawyers store their phone contact book data using a ‘Synch’ service, or back up documents in ‘The Cloud’ they have no idea where their precious work will end up. They share that data unthinkingly with businesses that can quietly copy it, sell it on, or even corrupt it before they let them have it back.

These technocrats of the ‘digital revolution’ are planning decades ahead. They steal a march on elected governments using ‘commercial confidentiality’ to keep press, politicians and the public in the dark. In the age of mass surveillance and communication trawling, they can buy intelligence on what elected politicians are about to do, or even thinking of doing, and pour vast resources into counter-moves.

Technocrats under the bonnet

The front cover of this week’s Autoweek magazine is a case in point: ‘Who is in control of your car? The Government and private entities can now control your car remotely’. It raises enormous questions about the reliability and hackability of Audi, Toyota, Mercedes and other ‘computer assisted’ vehicles. Who is liable for death or injury if a Toyota’s onboard computer freezes causing‘unintended acceleration’? The Toyota CEO? The programer? Who?

Award winning investigative journalist, Michael Hastings, died in a ball of flames while driving a 2013 Mercedes through L A in the early hours of Tuesday, 18th June 2013. He had been to see his friend, Jordanna Thigpen, on the night he died, asking to borrow her Volvo as he believed his Mercedes C250 ‘was being tampered with’.

According to his wife, Elise Jordan, Michael had begun investigating new CIA Director John Brennan’s ‘War on The Press’. Echoing the Watergate scandal, Hastings expressed his belief that the CIA, with or without authorization, had begun using sophisticated military psychological warfare techniques against domestic journalists and politicians.

Even former US National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism, Richard Clarke, weighed in saying that such a single vehicle crash was “consistent with a car cyber attack.” Like heart attacks these ‘Boston brakes’ incidents are rumored to be a favorite of organized crime and intelligence services since they’re so easy to put down to ‘misfortune’.

Our judicial, police and investigative journalists are simply unable to understand complex, commercially sensitive technology, let alone gather enough evidence to decide whether these catastrophes are accidents… or assassinations. So if Michael Hastings’ death means nothing else, it should signal loud and clear that we have to catch up, or watch our liberties crumble.

Technocrats in our schools

The more inconspicuous a technology, the longer it’s likely to stay unregulated, and the younger those testing it, the more likely users will accept it without question as cool and fashionable. Schools need then to be particularly vigilant, making sure technological ‘improvements’ really are necessary, and trials are not simply commercial bribes for the technocrats to get their ‘foot in the door’.

One of the least well understood and virtually unregulated secretive technology is the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip. These are tiny printed circuit wireless ‘transponders’, used mostly for tracking stock but increasingly in contactless payment cards. These chips are electronically active for years, some indefinitely, and reply to radio ‘pings’ with a little ‘ping’ of their own, returning their identity and position.

The UK government made iris scans, facial recognition, fingerprinting and palm printing, known collectively as ‘biometrics’ of schoolchildren subject to parental consent in September 2013, with the Protection of Freedoms Act. Schools that want to automate entry, dinner and library systems, rather than punishing children who refuse to participate as they used to do, are now finding more and more pupils are opting out.

 

Unfortunately though, RFID is set to take over where biometrics left off. From 2010 to February 2013, West Cheshire College near Liverpool gave all their students tags to wear with ‘433MHz compatible’ chips. These tags not only enabled students to use facilities as they were told but, with sensors around the school, let teaching staff and others track students around the campus as moving blobs on a video screen.

In February 2013, on the same day that a national newspaper telephoned West Cheshire’s head teacher to ask about it, Zebra and West Cheshire College pulled the RFID sensors, tags and other equipment out of the college immediately. Reportedly deploying them soon after to track a large herd of cattle.

NATO’s hidden RFID detectors

Zebra’s jumpy response is less extraordinary though when you consider evidence that the tags the children were told to wear were not just trackable by Zebra and West Cheshire College, but also by the military. NATO have a secretive RFID system called ‘In Transit Visibility Network’ with 433MHz sensors all over North America and Western Europe designed to keep an eye on its munitions, tanks and other equipment as they move about.

While NATO have a legitimate right to keep an eye on their kit, they do not have the right to set up a network which can secretly follow our cars, (many of which are now chipped during manufacture), our phones, our credit cards and our children as they innocently go about their day.

Without asking a single judge, jury, politician or talk show host, NATO and their Military Industrial technocratic friends are turning every single human being they are supposed to be protecting into a criminal suspect. Rather than a digital revolution their vision is for a digital cage. Never have the diseased nightmares of tyrants been so close to being realized as on their watch.

The civilized world must now nail both vehicle computers and this RFID technology, make it subject to individual and parental consent, as Britain did with biometrics. And we’d better act fast before our schools and our streets become digital prisons and our children are voyeuristically followed everywhere they go, by the military. 

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.