>>22113534

Mass surveillance is the Deep State’s version of a “gift” that keeps on giving…back to the Deep State.

Geofencing dragnets. Fusion centers. Smart devices. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Drones. Contact tracing apps. License plate readers. Social media vetting. Surveillance towers.

What these add up to is a world in which, on any given day, the average person is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother.

Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by a vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.

This creepy new era of government/corporate spying—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—has been made possible by a global army of techno-tyrants, fusion centers and Peeping Toms.

Consider just a small sampling of the tools being used to track our movements, monitor our spending, and sniff out all the ways in which our thoughts, actions and social circles might land us on the government’s naughty list, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.

Tracking you based on your phone and movements: Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels. For instance, the FBI was able to use geofence data to identify more than 5,000 mobile devices (and their owners) in a 4-acre area around the Capitol on January 6. This latest surveillance tactic could land you in jail for being in the “wrong place and time.” Police are also using cell-site simulators to carry out mass surveillance of protests without the need for a warrant. Moreover, federal agents can now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on your monitor. Malicious hacking software can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the personal business of a target.

Tracking you based on your DNA. DNA technology in the hands of government officials completes our transition to a Surveillance State. If you have the misfortune to leave your DNA traces anywhere a crime has been committed, you’ve already got a file somewhere in some state or federal database—albeit it may be a file without a name. By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. After all, a DNA print reveals everything about “who we are, where we come from, and who we will be.” It can also be used to predict the physical appearance of potential suspects. It’s only a matter of time before the police state’s pursuit of criminals expands into genetic profiling and a preemptive hunt for criminals of the future.

Tracking you based on your face: Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to identify and track someone’s movements in real-time. One particularly controversial software program created by Clearview AI has been used by police, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to collect photos on social media sites for inclusion in a massive facial recognition database. Similarly, biometric software, which relies on one’s unique identifiers (fingerprints, irises, voice prints), is becoming the standard for navigating security lines, as well as bypassing digital locks and gaining access to phones, computers, office buildings, etc. In fact, greater numbers of travelers are opting into programs that rely on their biometrics in order to avoid long waits at airport security. Scientists are also developing lasers that can identify and surveil individuals based on their heartbeats, scent and microbiome.

https://americafirstreport.com/youd-better-watch-out-the-surveillance-state-is-making-a-list-and-youre-on-it/

>>22113887

part 2

Tracking you based on your behavior: Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations. One smart “anti-riot” surveillance system purports to predict mass riots and unauthorized public events by using artificial intelligence to analyze social media, news sources, surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.

Tracking you based on your spending and consumer activities: With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every X/Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time. Consumer surveillance, by which your activities and data in the physical and online realms are tracked and shared with advertisers, has become big business, a $300 billion industry that routinely harvests your data for profit. Corporations such as Target have not only been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years, but the retailer has also funded major surveillance in cities across the country and developed behavioral surveillance algorithms that can determine whether someone’s mannerisms might fit the profile of a thief.

Tracking you based on your public activities: Private corporations in conjunction with police agencies throughout the country have created a web of surveillance that encompasses all major cities in order to monitor large groups of people seamlessly, as in the case of protests and rallies. They are also engaging in extensive online surveillance, looking for any hints of “large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals.” Defense contractors have been at the forefront of this lucrative market. Fusion centers, $330 million-a-year, information-sharing hubs for federal, state and law enforcement agencies, monitor and report such “suspicious” behavior as people buying pallets of bottled water, photographing government buildings, and applying for a pilot’s license as “suspicious activity.”

Tracking you based on your social media activities: Every move you make, especially on social media, is monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line. As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. This obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC News, observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads… the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”

Tracking you based on your social network: Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals. An FBI document obtained by Rolling Stone speaks to the ease with which agents are able to access address book data from Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage services from the accounts of targeted individuals and individuals not under investigation who might have a targeted individual within their network. What this creates is a “guilt by association” society in which we are all as guilty as the most culpable person in our address book.

https://americafirstreport.com/youd-better-watch-out-the-surveillance-state-is-making-a-list-and-youre-on-it/

>>22113892

part 3

Tracking you based on your car: License plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, affixed to overpasses, cop cars and throughout business sectors and residential neighborhoods, it allows police to track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture out suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.

Tracking you based on your mail: Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”

https://americafirstreport.com/youd-better-watch-out-the-surveillance-state-is-making-a-list-and-youre-on-it/

>>22113682

Los Angeles Police Department Chief Jim McDonnell is standing by California’s leaders in defying President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed mass deportations.

This comes after Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and Attorney General Rob Bonta have taken a defensive posture over the state’s immigrant population. Trump’s plan to deport would begin with criminally convicted illegal immigrants and then focus on immigrants who already have deportation orders. Still, Newsom and Bonta pledged to protect immigrants.

McDonnell told the Associated Press that his department does not enforce immigration laws according to Special Order 40, a department policy prohibiting action related to immigration status established in 1979. Instead, he is working with Mexican and Central American consulate offices to protect the immigrant population.

To follow through with Trump’s policies would be “undercutting our primary mission, which is to be able to build public trust to work with every member of all of our communities, to be able to have hope that people will come forward if they were a victim of crime, a witness to a crime,” according to McDonnell.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/crime/3250761/lapd-chief-joins-movement-protect-immigrants-trump-policies/

>>22113803

>>22113897

All but one member of the Ypsilanti City Council thought it was a good idea on Tuesday to remove the Pledge of Allegiance from meetings.

“Really, our role is to our residents here in the community, here in the city of Ypsilanti,” said council member Desirae Simmons, who brought the resolution to do away with the pledge she said is redundant. “And so I guess that’s what I took my oath of office to, and I think that that’s sufficient.”

The proposal to remove the pledge first surfaced at the board’s organizational meeting last week, but members delayed a decision until Tuesday, WEMU reports.

Simmons told council members she believed the pledge was a waste of time.

“I know I don’t feel comfortable pledging allegiance to a flag,” she said. “And so, I don’t participate in that, so I wanted to bring it up as a formal change to our agenda.”

Council member Roland Tooson was the only member on the six-member board to oppose the proposal at the Dec. 3 meeting, according to MLive.

“If anybody doesn’t want to say it, I feel like we just individually take the stance and not say it,” he said. “I don’t think we should take it off the agenda completely.”

The Ypsilanti City Council meetings previously started with a moment of silence and the pledge, and Mayor Nicole Brown told the board she’d prefer to keep the moment of silence to “maintain the few moments that we have for us to center ourselves.”

“I do enjoy the quit for a second,” she said. “For me, I feel like I need that.”

“It’s possible that the moment of silence at one point was prayer,” Clerk Tracey Boudreau said, suggesting an “invocation” to start the meeting. The council also considered “grounding” practices and breathing exercises to replace the pledge, MLive reports.

“Often councils will do an invocation where it could be interpreted as religious, but they would invite a member of a different religious organization to every meeting,” she said.

Council member Me’Chelle King supported the prayer, but the idea met resistance from Brown.

“I like it just because again, we would be bringing community from different spaces – Not just Baptist, not just non-denomination,” King said. “I like that we would be including the greater community as a part of our meeting.”

The council ultimately voted 5-1 to remove the pledge, with Brown, Simmons, King, Steve Wilcoxen, and Patrick McLean in favor, and Tooson opposed. Council member Amber Fellows was absent. The council did not vote to replace the pledge with something else.

City Manager Andrew Hellenga told MLive the vote was necessary to remove the pledge because it’s tradition, but Brown sets the agenda and can replace it with something else, if she desires.

Folks online were not impressed by the decision to ditch the Pledge of Allegiance, with dozens sounding off on X.

“It makes sense,” one user posted. “They don’t like the constitution, this country, or the flag. So every meeting they are forced to lie by making the pledge.”

“They hate America and American values,” wrote another. “They are eliminating one by one.”

“Seriously? Who the hell do they think they work for?” yet another post read. “They should all be fired.”

Other reactions:

“They don’t want to be part of America, then they don’t need federal tax (dollars).”

“OMG Michigan is getting as ridiculous as California. Ya’ll have real problems yet here you are. (Clown emojis)”

“What is wrong with people!”

“Vote the whole council out”

“Disgusting”

https://www.themidwesterner.news/2024/12/ypsilanti-city-council-eliminates-pledge-of-allegiance-councilwoman-claims-i-dont-feel-comfortable/

>>22113907

>>22113991

>>22114000

they are totally safe in states such as california, new york, illinois, etc.