Biometrics, the Prison Within -- TripWires, Totalitarianism, and Technoids

Biometrics, the Prison Within -- TripWires, Totalitarianism, and Technoids

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Owen Myles, Contributor
Activist Post

Some time near February of 2012, Wikileaks, which is is presently enduring its second week of ongoing DDoS attacks, had begun releasing millions of hacked Stratforemails, i.e., the Global Intelligence Files. Over the last few days, newly analyzed content from those emails involving TrapWire has begun surfacing around the Web.

Responsibility for originally acquiring the emails has been attributed to Anonymous. As the name should indicate, the identity of Anonymous — aside from occasional arrests or confessions — is self-described. It seems inevitable that many, including even directly-opposing groups and individuals share this name. Failure for certain agencies to exploit such an opportunity would require improbable strategical retardation. For this reason, Anonymous productions should be given the benefit of their name unless otherwise verified.

Regardless of who Anonymous actually was at the time of the Stratfor leaks, some interesting information has certainly come of it. For some who pay special attention to this field, it is not so much a surprise as it is an affirmation. Surveillance is a very popular sport amongst our frightfully feisty overlords, but not so much for their subjects. They generally advertise it only where it will encounter the least amount of angry pitchforks.

Perhaps it was the same Anonymous that produced the video below — a video quite beautifully, but depressingly putting the colossal surveillance empire we now face into perspective:

Part 1: “Anonymous – Big Brother is Watching (Prepare to End of Privacy)”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKaG9pfEFSQ – REMOVED

Part 2: “Anonymous – Big Brother is Watching (Prepare to End of Privacy)”



A surveillance empire is indeed closing in; silently from some directions, and boldly from others. India is forcing their entire population into biometric registration; the U.S. military and Afghan government have begun imposing biometric registration throughout Afghanistan; the U.K. — theLHC of surveillance — is desperately trying to make Orwell look like an unimaginative bore, and other nations such as Mexico are floundering in suit. Even Brazil is wiggling lustfully for a biometric future.

The sane person may wonder: can such an enormous addition to the already-vast Control that so overtly and unfairly mismanages this world be trusted to use this new tool? Whether they can or not, they plan on using it like a super-voluminous Swiss Army knife of domination.

The FBI’s IAFIS and DHS’s IDENT biometric systems are merging into into NGI which already contain data for 1/3 of the U.S. population; freakish proposals like E-Verify are brooding; drones are being deployed throughout the U.S.; whole cities have been transformed into electric Skinner-Boxes, and even the realm of the mind is being stalked. Corporations have merged with government on nearly all matters; Microsoft watches us; Monsanto (FDA) seeks control of our food supply; Academi does our killing; Serco and GEO Group harvest criminals; dubious Israeli companies manage sensitive U.S. telecommunications infrastructures (in secret), and on and on. But thankfully, we have Stratfor to manage “global intelligence” for us. Maybe they should change their motto to: “Getting vital data to the plebeians — because the government never will.”

Biometrics as a widely applied science is exploding. From yourkeystrokes to your shopping cart, you are leaking a perpetual trail of what has been for nearly the whole of humanity’s existence private or non-existent data. Far beyond the stale cookies and LSO‘s of the browser, we are being mined, existentially.

If not yesterday, then before long, streetlights will instruct and admonish you, your grocery-store will scour your purchasing habits and even your face and send your daughter coupons for baby products before either of you know she’s pregnant -- andGoogle will gather your voice and other biometrics for the NSA, and the NSA will pimp it to VIP customers. Or maybe your carwill find your mood intolerable and drive you to the nearest FAST machine for screening. And when the great hero of biometrics fails, the TSA will oblige you with good old-fashioned organic molestation at one of many omnipresent checkpoints.

With artificial climates defining the outdoors, artificial-intelligence confining our conduct, artificial food nourishing us, and an artificial media suspending our heads in the artificial clouds, it looks like without an epic solar-flare or global holocaust, we’ll all eventually exist in some surreal virtual-reality representation of the ids of our masters, with a few allotted virtual-liberties to keep us working.

Technology is a part of us; as we develop, learn and strive for a will unrestricted by hitherto unsubdued limitations, it is a necessary phase — but one which should be executed through self-definition and self-determination. It is frightening to see us so prematurely thrust into the reckless and impatient fantasies of the few, whose version of the phase is not evolution, but is a masquerade.