The Ministry of Truth: Weeding-Out Pre-Criminals for the Secret State.

42-years ago, in 1968, the essential apparatus for a police state was in place...a reporting structure in line with the technology of the day: old-fashioned shoe leather and manila folders.  This organization of activities, functions, processes, etc., was created in order to cover millions of Americans, conducting law-abiding lives. In other words, agents who normally did security checks, also monitored dissent.  7-years later, in 1975, Senator Frank Church headed a congressional commission to investigate widespread abuses by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies, laying the groundwork for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.  Imagine that kind of time-frame in today's world!

Senator Church warned about government’s power to turn surveillance technologies on its own citizens, a warning, even more crucial as we transform into the digital age. On the one hand, ultimate first amendment-enabling technology has leveled the playing field like never before. On the other hand, the foundation for an Orwellian type of investigative government exists like never before.

“ . . . the Internet of Things refers to the seamless connection of devices, sensors, objects, rooms, machines, vehicles, etc, through fixed and wireless networks. Connected sensors, devices and tags can interact with the environment and send the information to other objects through machine-to-machine communication . . . The Semantic Web promotes this synergy: even agents that where not expressly designed to work together can transfer data among themselves when the data come with semantics.” -- Internet Governance and critical Internet resources

Anyway, remember the concept of "pre-crime" -  part of the predictive behavior model that describes stopping crimes before they happen - in the movie Minority Report, set in the year 2054? Well, the electronic police state, if not already here, arrived... a few years early.

The stage was set in the 1990s, when the data industry mushroomed. Vast computer systems quietly gathered staggering amounts of personal information we the people willingly feed to cell-phone networks, really surveillance networks, that continuously track us through sensors on ATM machines, credit card readers, the Internet, electronic fingerprint readers, convenient tollbooths that sense transponders on cars, etc.

Then, on 9/11/2001, the largest terrorist attack, on U.S. mainland in history, occurred.  This gave the powers the perfect excuse to merge the government and private data mining companies.  Choicepoint won a $67 million contract with the Justice Department, and other data companies serve/served as a private intelligent operation for the government. As you can see, data is a valuable commodity.

Fast forward 45 days to October 26, 2001, and with very little public debate, lawmakers passed the Patriot Act, dismantling limits Congress created in the 1970s in response to widespread abuse on the monitoring of citizens. National security officials began using the data mining system, Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX)— a powerful tool for tracking terrorists.

Data mining tools like MATRIX create new information by giving investigators the power to discern patterns and apply profiles, thus creating the ability to cut across sales and police records, coming up with links in an instant instead of days, weeks, months and sometimes, years.

So, what's the big deal?

Well, if the FBI suspects one person they are going to try to round up as much information on every single person the suspected person has come into contact with. In other words, "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" transforms from harmless fun to potentially deadly serious.

Why deadly serious?

Everyone is familiar with Google Earth, right? And drones? And the CIA?  Google who knows more about all of us than God is linked to the U.S. spy and military systems through the technology behind Google Earth software.   You see, the software was originally developed by Keyhole Inc., a company funded by  In-Q-Tel,  the CIA's semi-private investment company.  This same technology is currently used by U.S. military and intelligence systems for “full-spectrum dominance” of the planet and geospatial intelligence used in drone attacks that kill people.

The CIA and Google are both backing the company, Recorded Future, that monitors the web in real time.  They say  it uses that information to predict the future. The CIA’s semi-private investment company, In-Q-Tel, and Google Ventures, the search giant’s business division had partnered-up with Recorded Future, which scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the "invisible links" between people, institutions, actions and incidents, here and now, and the "predicted future".  In-Q-Tel also invested in Visible Technologies, a software firm specializing in monitoring social media.

The ‘Visible’ technology can automatically examine more than a million discussions and posts on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, and so forth each day. The technology also ‘scores’ each online item, assigning it a positive, negative or mixed or neutral status, based on parameters and terms set by the technology operators. The information, thus boiled down, can then be more effectively scanned and read by human operators.

Privacy International rated eight countries as 'endemic surveillance societies' and the U.S. is one.

No, this is not the surveillance society George Orwell wrote about. We feed our personal information to Big Brother, voluntarily. Why?  For a variety of conveniences, discounts, and because we don't want to be left out, but we don’t want to know how the electricity gets to the light switch; we just want to flick it on.

The bottom line is that we are fast approaching a genuine surveillance society in the U.S. Already, our every move, transaction, communication is recorded, compiled, and stored away, ready to be accessed and used against us by the authorities on demand. No court order needed.

Links: 

10 Ways We are Being Tracked and Traced

Authorities Plan To Trawl Phone Calls And E Mails For Signs Of “Resentment Toward Government”

Data Mining and Homeland Security

E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress

Feds Use Pre-Crime To Target Disgruntled Veterans

Google and NSA The world's largest Internet search company and the world's most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity.

Mind Machine Project at MIT

Pinwale still going strong under Obama.

Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Assessment - debunked the utility of data-ming and link analysis as effective counterterrorism tools.

Recorded Future A White Paper on Temporal Analytics

Social Intelligence - data-mines the social networks to help companies decide if they really want to hire you.”

State Electronic Harrassment or "Cyberstalking" Laws

Top Secret America  investigation disclosed that the government has built a huge, complex and hard to manage national security and intelligence system.  Google supplies mapping and search products to the U.S. secret state and that their employees, outsourced intelligence contractors for the Defense Department, may have filched their customers’ wi-fi data as part of an NSA surveillance project