Read The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy Online
Authors: Jim Marrs
L
OVERS OF LIBERTY REJOICED
when Moran’s bill failed to become law and the ensuing REAL ID Act bombed in the state houses. However, most states now issue driver’s licenses with a magnetic strip capable of carrying computer-coded information.
Driver’s licenses are not the only ID cards to contain computer-coded information. New York City became one of the first major cities to announce plans to try out microchipped identification cards for the city’s 250,000 employees. Some 50,000 officers and workers for the NYPD were scheduled to receive ID cards. The state-of-the-art plastic cards contain microchips, holograms, and other security devices to prevent theft. On the front of this picture ID is the Statue of Liberty and two chips, one containing fingerprints and handprints and the other filled with personal information, including blood type and emergency telephone numbers. Police officials said that eventually the ID cards will be used in conjunction with “biometric” hand scanners to ensure the person bearing the card is the correct one. They also hoped to save money in computing paychecks by using the cards to keep track of employee hours.
Time
’s Frank Pellegrini has warned that the real fight for privacy will be over when and where citizens will have to show such IDs. “The average American’s driver’s license gets a pretty good workout these days,” he said, “certainly far more than traffic laws themselves would seem to warrant—but you can only get arrested for
driving
without one. If the US domestic response starts to resemble Zimbabwe’s, which passed a law in November [2001] making it compulsory to carry ID on pain of fine or imprisonment, well, that’s something to worry about.”
In 2002, author Steven Yates, a teaching fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, warned, “The long and the short of it is, the Driver’s License Modernization Act of 2002 would bring us closer than ever before to establishing a comprehensive national ID system. The present excuse is that extreme measures are necessary to ‘protect us against terrorism.’
“It is a testimony to how much this country has changed since 9/11 that no one has visibly challenged H.R. 4633 as unconstitutional and incompatible with the principles of a free society. The 1990s gave us the obviously corrupt Clinton Regime and a significant opposition to federal power grabs. Now it’s Bush the Younger, beloved of neocons [neoconservatives] who see him as one of their own and believe he can do no wrong…. Clearly, the slow encirclement of law-abiding US citizens with national ID technology would advance such a cause [globalism or the New World Order] while doing little if anything to safeguard us against terrorism.”
Yates predicted a chilling future where the feds could stifle dissent by “freezing” a dissident’s assets by reprogramming his or her database information. Scanners would not recognize the dissenter and he or she would become officially invisible, unable to drive or work legally, have a bank account, buy anything on credit, or even see a doctor. “Do we want to trust
anyone
[original emphasis] with that kind of power?” he asked.
Already the practice of marking people for identification through computer systems is being played out in private industry. In late October 2002, Applied Digital Solutions, Inc., a high-tech development company headquartered in Palm Beach, Florida, announced a national promotion named “Get Chipped” for its new subdermal personal verification micro-chip. Applied Digital Solutions company literature states that its “VeriChip” is “an implantable, 12mm by 2.1mm radio frequency device…about the size of the point of a typical ballpoint pen. It contains a unique verification number. Utilizing an external scanner, radio frequency energy passes through the skin energizing the dormant VeriChip, which then emits a radio frequency signal containing the verification number. The number is displayed by the scanner and transmitted to a secure data storage site by authorized personnel via telephone or Internet.”
The chip can be used to access nonpublic facilities such as government buildings and installations, nuclear power plants, national research laboratories, correctional institutions, and transportation hubs, either by itself or in conjunction with existing security technologies such as retinal scanners, thumbprint scanners, or face recognition devices. Applied Digital Solutions officials believe the chip will eventually be used in a wide range of consumer products, including PC and laptop computers, personal vehicles, cell phones, and homes and apartments. They said the implanted chip will help stop identity theft and aid in the war against terrorists.
In addition to “VeriChip Centers” in Arizona, Texas, and Florida, the firm also fields the “ChipMobile,” a motorized marketing and “chipping” vehicle. The firm’s Get Chipped campaign was launched just days after the Food and Drug Administration ruled that the chip is not a regulated medical device.
Tommy Thompson, a former Wisconsin governor and secretary of health and human services in the George W. Bush administration, subsequently joined the board of directors of VeriChip. He pledged to get chipped and encouraged Americans to do the same so their electronic medical records would be available in emergencies.
By early 2006, fears of mandatory chipping became reality when a Cincinnati video surveillance firm, CityWatcher.com, began to require employees who worked in its secure data center to implant the VeriChip device into their arm.
Many also feared that the microchips were being included in the swine flu vaccine. In September 2009, VeriChip Corp. announced that its stock shares had tripled after the company was granted an exclusive license to patents for “implantable virus detection systems in humans.” The system used biosensors that can detect swine flu and other viruses and was intended to combine with VeriChip’s implantable radio frequency identification devices (RFIDs) to develop virus triage detection systems, microchips in one’s bloodstream broadcasting the body’s information to whoever has a reader device.
The use of GPS devices is reminiscent of the 1987 film
The Running Man,
in which Arnold Schwarzenegger is equipped with a collar that will blow his head off if he leaves a certain area. So, if microchipping the population sounds like something from a science fiction movie, consider that the giant drug corporation Novartis has already tested a microchip that reminds a person to take his or her medicine by transmitting a signal to a receiver chip implanted in the patient’s shoulder. The pill itself contains a tiny “harmless” microchip that signals the receiver chip each time a pill is taken. If the patient fails to take a pill within a prescribed time period, the receiver chip signals the patient or a caretaker to remind the person. Novartis’s head of pharmaceuticals, Joe Jiminez, said testing of the “chip in the pill” to a shoulder receiver chip had been carried out on twenty patients by the close of 2009.
One shouldn’t count on government watchdog organizations to always maintain privacy rights. In late 2002, the American Civil Liberties Union gave its stamp of approval to an electronic tracking system that uses GPS satellites to track suspects and criminals. Created by the Veridan company of Arlington, Virginia, this “VeriTracks” system not only keeps tabs on convicted criminals but also on suspects. It can even match a person’s position to high-crime areas or crime scenes and suggest that the person may be involved in law breaking. Law enforcement agencies can create “electronic fences” around areas they deem off-limits to those wearing a cell-phone-size GPS receiver. The person who wears the module must tie it around his or her waist while an electronic bracelet worn on the ankle acts as an electronic tether to the GPS receiver that records the person’s exact position. Should the wearer move outside the proscribed area, the authorities are signaled and a police unit is dispatched. At night, the wearer must place the module in a docking system to recharge batteries and upload its data to a central headquarters, which checks to see if the wearer has been at any crime scenes.
How do you get someone to agree to this monitoring system? Sheriff Don Eslinger of Seminole County, Florida, answered, “It’s either wear the GPS device or go to jail. Most of them find this much more advantageous than sitting in a cold jail cell, and it also saves us between $45 and $55 a day.” Eslinger said his county had equipped ten pretrial suspects with the GPS device as a condition of making bond. According to Eslinger, county officials hoped to expand the program to include nonviolent probationers and parolees.
For many, using GPS tracking devices to track criminals makes sense. Yet, disturbingly, surveillance technology has not been limited to felons and probationers. In Texas, some one thousand teenage drivers allowed an unnamed insurance company to place a transponder in their vehicles to keep track of their speed on the road.
Texas representative Larry Phillips introduced a bill in 2005 that would have required all state automobile inspection stickers to carry a built-in electronic transponder. The device would transmit information like the car’s vehicle identification number (VIN), insurance policy number, and license plate number, and should the owner’s insurance expire, the person would be mailed a $250 ticket. This bill was not passed.
The firm Digital Angel has developed a wristband that allows parents to log on to the Internet and instantly locate their children, who must wear the bracelet. Another company, eWorldtrack, is working on a child-tracking device that will fit inside athletic shoes. The German firm Siemens has tested a seven-ounce tracking device that allows constant communication between parents and their children.
Author and political critic Joe Queenan quipped, “Fusing digital mobile phone technology, a satellite-based global positioning system and good old-fashioned insanity, the device can pinpoint a child within several yards in a matter of seconds.”
Support has grown in the American legal system for GPS surveillance technology. In spring 2002, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled it was okay for police to hide electronic monitoring devices on people’s vehicles without a warrant for as long as they want. The court ruled that there is “no reasonable expectation of privacy” on the outside of one’s vehicle and that attaching an electronic device to a man’s car bumper did not constitute unreasonable search or seizure. In early 2004, a Louisiana court ruled it was permissible for police there to make warrantless searches of homes and businesses even without probable cause.
In September 2009, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the state constitution allows police to break into a suspect’s car to secretly install a GPS tracking device, provided that authorities have a warrant before they do so. The unanimous ruling upheld the drug trafficking conviction of Everett H. Connolly, a Cape Cod man who was tracked by state police in 2004 after they installed a GPS device in his minivan. The court declared the GPS device an “investigative tool” and said it did not violate the ban on unreasonable search and seizure in the state’s Declaration of Rights.
“We hold that warrants for GPS monitoring of a vehicle may be issued,” Justice Judith Cowin stated in the court’s opinion. “The Commonwealth must establish, before a magistrate…that GPS monitoring of the vehicle will produce evidence that a crime has been committed or will be committed in the near future.” Generally, search warrants expire after seven days, yet the court said GPS devices can be installed for up to fifteen days before police must prove that the devices need to remain in place.
In an attempt to provide protection against the widespread use of GPS devices by law enforcement, William Leahy, chief counsel for the Committee on Public Counsel Service, said the court’s ruling means that police must persuade a judge they have probable cause before the GPS devices can be installed.
T
HOUGH
GPS
AND SURVEILLANCE
systems are reasons for serious concern, the two greatest electronic threats to American privacy and individual freedom are Echelon and TEMPEST.
“The secret is out,” wrote Jim Wilson in
Popular Mechanics
. “Two powerful intelligence gathering tools that the United States created to eavesdrop on Soviet leaders and to track KGB spies are now being used to monitor Americans.” Echelon is a global eavesdropping satellite network and massive supercomputer system that operates from the National Security Agency’s headquarters in Maryland. It intercepts and analyzes phone calls, faxes, and e-mail sent to and from the United States, both with or without encryption. Encrypted messages are first decrypted and then joined with clear messages. The NSA then checks all messages for “trigger words” with software known as “Dictionary.” Terms like “nuclear bomb,”
“al Qaeda,” “Hamas,” “anthrax,” and so on are then shuttled to appropriate agencies for analysis.
Although speculation and warnings about Echelon were circulating on the Internet for a number of years, it was not until 2001 that the U.S. government finally admitted the program’s existence. This admission came after high-profile investigations in Europe discovered that Echelon had been used to spy on the two European companies Airbus Industries and Thomson-CSF.
Though the U.S. government revealed Echelon’s use in 2001, the government had been using an early version of Echelon in the late 1960s and 1970s. During that time, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon used NSA technology to gather files on thousands of American citizens and more than a thousand organizations opposed to the Vietnam War. In a program called Operation Shamrock, the NSA collected and monitored nearly every international telegram sent from New York.
Although paid for primarily by U.S. taxpayers, Echelon is now multinational and involves nations like the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and even Italy and Turkey. Most of the information that comes from Echelon goes to the CIA. According to
Popular Mechanics
’s Wilson, “Based on what is known about the location of Echelon bases and satellites, it is estimated that there is a ninety percent chance that NSA is listening when you pick up the phone to place or answer an overseas call. In theory, but obviously not in practice, Echelon’s supercomputers are so fast, they could identify Saddam Hussein by the sound of his voice the moment he begins speaking on the phone.”