The west is becoming a Police State

When I lived in Iraq one of the things I longed for was living a life where my personal integrity was respected. Not being afraid that the phone might be tapped, that mail have been opened or that someone sitting next to me might be spying on me in case I held some views the government did not approve of.

When I came back to Sweden after living in Iraq for many years it took me quite some time before I felt comfortable talking on the phone or talking with governmental agencies. I knew I was in Sweden and here it was a free society but many years in Iraq had affected me. Mentally I knew it was safe but emotionally I got worried, did I say the right thing, was I being spied upon etc…A person who has not lived in a surveillance society might find it very difficult to understand how utterly controlled one becomes when it is a government that decides what the proper views are.

After some time I finally felt emotionally comfortable. The days of surveillance were over!

I remember that before the US war on Iraq there were arguments that Iraqis should finally have freedom of speech and not being spied on and documented in governmental files. What was not included in that argument was that while Iraqis would not be surveillanced by people working for Saddam the rest of us in the west would soon be survellianced in much more insidious ways by our own governments.

The other day in a forum the debate was about the surveillance society we are turning into. The argument by people that are for it was that as long as you are not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about. Then someone suggested that’s when you tell a guy “well then let me see your wife take a shower. I mean as long as she is not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about.”

What the EU and the US governments are doing is to turn our societies into a controlled surveillanced one under the pretext of a “war on terror” and “protection of the public”. They do this while the majority of people seem to be hypnotised by the argument “as long as I am not doing anything wrong I have nothing to worry about”.

Well we’ve got a lot to worry about.

Our governments have been doing a lot of things wrong. Lies, killing innocent people, putting innocent people in prison without trial, an illegal war based on lies, setting up secret prisons all over the world and torturing people. They can NOT be trusted and should never be given the power over our lives. Ask yourself who is surveillancing THEM?

Just look at how our governments in the west is selling weapons and giving support to both the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan that speaks volumes about what sort of controlled society and police state we’ll soon have if we don’t make our protests more effective.

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* Word on the street ... they’re listening
Police and councils are considering monitoring conversations in the street using high-powered microphones attached to CCTV cameras, write Steven Swinford and Nicola Smith.

The microphones can detect conversations 100 yards away and record aggressive exchanges before they become violent.

The devices are used at 300 sites in Holland and police, councils and transport officials in London have shown an interest in installing them before the 2012 Olympics.

The interest in the equipment comes amid growing concern that Britain is becoming a “surveillance society”. It was recently highlighted that there are more than 4.2m CCTV cameras, with the average person being filmed more than 300 times a day. The addition of microphones would take surveillance into uncharted territory.

* Sign our pledge on Internet freedom
Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information.

The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments – with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world – are cracking down on freedom of expression.

Amnesty International, with the support of The Observer UK newspaper, is launching a campaign to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress.

In November 2006, governments and companies from all over the world will attend a UN conference to discuss the future of the Internet. You can help us send a clear message to them that people everywhere believe the Internet should be a force for political freedom, not repression.

Sign our pledge on Internet freedom by clicking here

* Analysis: 'Total Information' lives again
The new system is bound to attract controversy because of its similarity to the Total Information Awareness or TIA program, a project run by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

That program also aimed to detect patterns of suspect terrorist behavior by data-mining huge stores of information about everyday transactions like credit card purchases, telephone calls and travel records.

Alarmed by the privacy and civil liberties implications of the program, Congress in 2003 cut all funding for it, but research continued in different agencies, funded by appropriations in the classified intelligence annex to the Defense Department budget.

Most of that continuing research was conducted by the Advanced Research and Development Activity, a unit formerly based at the National Security Agency but now part of Negroponte's office. The National Journal, which first revealed the existence of Tangram last week, said that office would oversee the new program, too.

"The administration has flat out ignored Congress," said Sparapani. "They renamed it, re-tied the bow around it and off they went."

* US licence to snoop on British air travellers
Britons (all EU members too) flying to America could have their credit card and email accounts inspected by the United States authorities following a deal struck by Brussels and Washington.

By using a credit card to book a flight, passengers face having other transactions on the card inspected by the American authorities. Providing an email address to an airline could also lead to scrutiny of other messages sent or received on that account.

* Terrorist Profiling, Version 2.0
Intelligence and privacy experts who reviewed the document said that it reaffirms their long-held belief that many computerized terrorist-profiling methods are largely ineffective. It also raises significant privacy concerns, because to distinguish terrorists from innocent people, a system that's as broad as Tangram purports to be would require access to many databases that contain private information about Americans, the experts said, including credit card transactions, communications records, and even Internet purchases.

* Leading surveillance societies in the EU and the World

Each year since 1997, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Privacy International have undertaken what has now become the most comprehensive survey of global privacy ever published. The Privacy & Human Rights Report surveys developments in 70 countries, assessing the state of technology, surveillance and privacy protection.

The most recent report published in 2006 is probably the most comprehensive single volume report published in the human rights field. The report runs to almost 1,200 pages and includes about 6,000 footnotes. More than 200 experts from around the world have provided materials and commentary. The participants range from law students studying privacy to high-level officials charged with safeguarding constitutional freedoms in their countries. Academics, human rights advocates, journalists and researchers provided reports, insight, documents and advice.

This year Privacy International took the decision to use the report as the basis for a ranking assessment of the state of privacy in all EU countries together with eleven benchmark countries. This project was first considered in 1998 but was postponed pending availability of adequate data. We now have the full spectrum of information at our disposal and we hope to publish the rankings on an annual basis.

* No privacy for laptops
"Currently we don't know what happens to all the files and information that is copied by customs once a person is not found to have anything incriminating. This is something that needs to be resolved, as there remains the threat of misuse. The one thing that is certain is that the customs and border authority can share the information with all other U.S government agencies,".

* Airport to track passengers
The UK’s third largest airport is looking to use RFID to help boost retail sales by tracking passenger movements.

* Allt fler arbetsgivare använder GPS för att lokalisera firmabilar och anställda.
More and more employers use GPS to keep track on company cars and employees.

* Surveillance technology
IBM, the leading provider of global security services, today introduced a service product that contains the industry’s most advanced digital surveillance technology, code-named “S3.” IBM’s new Digital Video Surveillance (DVS) service product leverages IBM hardware, software, research and services to enable real-time access to critical security information, providing businesses the ability to detect patterns or search for particular attributes and alert authorities of any suspicious or anomalous behaviour in real-time.

* Even if they're off, cellphones allow FBI to listen in
"This is a kind of surveillance we've never really seen before. The government can and will exploit whatever technology is available to achieve their surveillance goals. This is of particular concern, considering the proliferation of microphones and cameras in the products we own," said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

* Olympics audio surveillance row
A new civil liberties controversy has flared up over the news that police chiefs are considering using high-powered microphones to "eavesdrop" - as critics will see it - on crowds at the London 2012 Olympics.

"As you walk down the street you expect to be able to have a private conversation," he said.

"If you can't guarantee that - and here is someone speaking who has been pretty tough in terms of what should be available to protect society - I believe we have slipped over the edge."

* EU: Phone and internet records to be kept for 2 years for police access

* Britain is 'surveillance society'
Fears that the UK would "sleep-walk into a surveillance society" have become a reality, the government's information commissioner has said.

Richard Thomas, who said he raised concerns two years ago, spoke after research found people's actions were increasingly being monitored.

Researchers highlight "dataveillance", the use of credit card, mobile phone and loyalty card information, and CCTV.

Monitoring of work rates, travel and telecommunications is also rising.

There are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain - about one for every 14 people.

But surveillance ranges from US security agencies monitoring telecommunications traffic passing through Britain, to key stroke information used to gauge work rates and GPS information tracking company vehicles, the Report on the Surveillance Society says.

It predicts that by 2016 shoppers could be scanned as they enter stores, schools could bring in cards allowing parents to monitor what their children eat, and jobs may be refused to applicants who are seen as a health risk.

* How we are being watched
Legal and logistical obstacles stand in the way of a massive Big Brother-esque database but information is being gathered on almost everything we do.

Everything from shopping tags to mobile phones has the potential to be watching us.

* Consumer concern over RFID tags
At least once consumer group - Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (Caspian) - has claimed that RFID chips could be used to secretly identify people and the things they are carrying or wearing.

All kinds of personal belongings, including clothes, could constantly broadcast messages about their whereabouts and their owners, it warned.

* Spy Blog - SpyBlog.org.uk
This United Kingdom based blog attempts to draw public attention to, and comments on, some of the current trends in ever cheaper and more widespread surveillance technology being deployed to satisfy the rapacious demand by state and corporate bureaucracies and criminals for your private details, and the technological ignorance of our politicians and civil servants who frame our legal systems.

The hope is that you the readers, will help to insist that strong safeguards for the privacy of the individual are implemented.

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The best way to avoid having a bunch of angry people from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan or any other country attack the west is by changing western countries behaviour in those countries.

- Stop committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Iraq or any other country.

- Stop selling weapons to the military dictator Mosaref and working with him as a close partner against his own people.

- Stop killing innocent Afghani people and then hiding it by saying they were Taliban or yet another mistake.

- Stop selling weapons and giving support to the religious dictatorship in Saudi Arabia.

- Stop supporting the apartheid state of Israel.

- Find a solution to the Kashmir problem.

- Start taking the millennium goals more seriously.

ALL these are actions that must be taken if we want peace in the whole world. These sorts of actions must be taken by the democratic governments if they really want to protect their people.

People on the top are very aware of that oil is ending and it will have enormous impact on the way our societies function. Climate change is happening and it will have enormous impact on millions of people. These are threats to the continuation of “our way of life” in the west.

When I look at it, it’s very clear that western democratic governments are engaged in a sinister manipulating game which objective is to keep people living in the west under strict surveillance so that some of us don’t engage in changing the world to a more just one. And at the same time keep people in countries outside the west poor and/or oppressed ready to be sacrificed when our own way of life is threatened.