Feds creating database to track hate speech on Twitter

Truth is Treason in an Empire of Lies

The federal government is spending nearly $1 million to create an online database that will track “misinformation” and hate speech on Twitter. Those behind the grant say: “This service could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate.” 

George Orwell was right all along. #doublespeak

This caged bird will be told what to sing.

The National Science Foundation is financing the creation of a web service that will monitor “suspicious memes” and what it considers “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on political activity online.

The “Truthy” database, created by researchers at Indiana University, is designed to “detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution.”

One G-man’s “social pollution” is another free man’s First Amendment right. The very term sounds like something out of a 1920s Italian fascist tract. And why is the federal government even deciding which ideas are “false and misleading,” let alone tracking them?

According to the project’s grant, the service “could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate.”

In 2004, dissent was “the highest form of patriotism.” A decade later, it’s called “subversive propaganda” and categorized as the lowest form of treason. Truthy would add a button to Twitter so that people could report their neighbors and family members for Thoughtcrime against the State.

Filippo Menczer (who sounds like an author of that 1920s Italian fascist tract) is Truthy’s lead investigator and closely affiliated with “non-partisan” groups like President Obama’s Organizing for Action, Moveon.org and Greenpeace. The software’s very name comes from ardent conservative hater Stephen Colbert.

It’s hard to denounce the more paranoid allegations of Obama’s opponents when his administration routinely goes beyond their wildest imaginings.  We are definitely living in George Orwell's 1984.

These guys know their Orwell. Only a government inspired by the Ministry of Truth would quash “subversive propaganda” in the name of “open debate.”

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10 George Orwell Quotes that Predicted Life in 2014 America

Written by Justin King | The Anti-Media

George Orwell ranks among the most profound social critics of the modern era. Some of his quotations, more than a half a century old, show the depth of understanding an enlightened mind can have about the future.

1)  “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”

Though many in the modern age have the will to bury their head in the sand when it comes to political matters, nobody can only concern themselves with the proverbial pebble in their shoe. If one is successful in avoiding politics, at some point the effects of the political decisions they abstained from participating in will reach their front door. More often than not, by that time the person has already lost whatever whisper of a voice the government has allowed them.

Little Rock Implements Orwellian Police State: Operation Ceasefire

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."

--George Orwell

by Mark Daniels

Arkansas Police Accountability Project

(Little Rock, AR) Little Rock Police Department's Operation Ceasefire:  Necessary Police Action or A Slippery Slope Spiraling Downward Toward an Orwellian Nightmare?  

As reported by local news, this year is being called one of the deadliest in Little Rock history with a total of 29 homicides so far.  To fight back, the Little Rock Police Department has implemented Operation Ceasefire to saturate neighborhoods notorious for crime.  Fox16's Melissa Schroeder recently did a ride along with SWAT officers and reported that "Little Rock SWAT officers are out in full force--seven days a week from 3-11 p.m.--working to stop crimes before it starts".

"SWAT officers are out in full force...working to stop crime before it starts"?  

Some people may say that police actions such as this are necessary to fight violent crime while others will counter that we are already on a slippery slope spiraling downward toward a truly Orwellian nightmare with increased militarization of the local police departments, increased reports of police brutality and the largest per capita prison population in the world.  Arkansas jails and prisons are vastly overcrowded and while the establishment politicians are willing to concede the fact that we need reform to address the problem, neither the Democrat or Republican candidate for Governor is willing to acknowledge the empirical data that proves drug policy is a major contributing factor.  Fortunately, the Libertarian Party candidate, Frank Gilbert, is not only willing to acknowledge the empirical data, he has stated that he will pardon all persons imprisoned in Arkansas for non violent drug offenses.  Mr. Gilbert also supports legalizing marijuana.

The Stated Goal  and Alternative Solutions

The stated goal of the Operation Ceasefire program is to decrease violent crime, most of which is related to the drug trade. However, the violence of the drug war is a direct result of prohibition, and the best way to stop that violence is to end prohibition; not to implement an Orwellian Police State * (see description at the end of this article).

As explained in this article, 8 reasons to end prohibition of all drugs immediately:

The steady increase in violent crime over the past few decades is directly correlated with the escalation of the drug war. As we saw during the times of alcohol prohibition, when you ban any inanimate object, you create an incentive for people to get involved in the black market distribution of that object. Since there is no accountability, or means of peaceful dispute resolution within the black market, buyers and sellers are forced to resort to violence as their sole means of handling disagreements.

Eventually, this violence spills over into the everyday world and effects everyone’s lives. No one could imagine Budweiser and Miller Lite in a back alley gunfight, but less than a century ago during alcohol prohibition, distributors of the drug were involved in shootouts on a regular basis, just as drug gangs are today. Of course, all of this violence came to an immediate end when alcohol was legalized, however, it was not long before the establishment found a new crusade in the drug war, which allowed them to continue the same policy just with different substances.

There is significant evidence that legalizing or decriminalizing drugs actually does reduce violent crime. The murder rate in Denver was actually cut in half following marijuana legalization.

As reported by Glenn Greenwald in Drug Decriminalization in Portugal:  Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies, since Portugal decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin, on July 1, 2001, none of the nightmare scenarios touted by pre-enactment decriminalization opponents--from rampant increases in drug usage among the young to the transformation of Lisbon into a haven for "drug tourists"--has occurred.  In fact, the empirical data indicates that decriminalization has had no adverse effect on drug usage rates in Portugal.  Although drug usage rates have remained roughly the same or even decreased slightly, drug-related pathologies--such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage--have decreased dramatically. Furthermore, the data show that, judged by virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework has been a resounding success. Within this success lie self-evident lessons that should guide drug policy debates around the world. Read the Full White Paper Here 

A Nationwide Campaign

Little Rock's Operation Ceasefire is most likely part of a Nationwide Campaign which began in the mid-1990's in the City of Boston.  As reported by Melanie W. Rambaud in Behind the Guns: The Failure of Boston’s Operation Ceasefire Intervention to Address the Root Causes of Youth Homicide: 

Operation Ceasefire was an ineffective long-term youth violence reduction intervention because it was limited to a deterrence strategy. As a public health intervention, deterrence is ineffective to change behavior, particularly gun violence, because it does not address the root causes of behavior. Violence is multi-factorial with both individual and societal causes, it requires multi-faceted efforts. In order to effectively intervene it is important to understand that violence emerges from multiple and complex environmental, economical, and cultural factors. An effective violence reduction intervention must then be a comprehensive, community-oriented approach that focuses on the circumstances that put people at high risk of engaging in or being victimized by violence. What is essential is a long-term community mobilization strategy focused on prevention that promotes youth development in the context of their community and does not emphasize punishment as a deterrent to reduce youth gun violence. 

In sum, we are provided a false choice by the Little Rock Police Department:  tolerate increased violence from "criminals" or tolerate an increased level of police action which often leads to violence. The real choice is between an Orwellian nightmare or effective and efficient police and drug policy. What are your thoughts? Are the human and financial costs of these type of police actions justified or do you think it would be better to end the war on drugs?

For more information and to get involved, please visit Arkansas Police Accountability Project's Facebook page.

*Orwellian Police State

Eric Arthur Blair, known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic.  His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic socialism.

He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945).  

Nineteen Eighty-Four popularised the adjective Orwellian, which describes official deception, secret surveillance, and manipulation of the past by a totalitarian or authoritarian state.

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Derrick J's Victimless Crime Spree

I just ordered my copy of "Derrick J's Victimless Crime Spree" Directors Cut by Derrick J Freeman. It's a great deal, and a great film.

http://amzn.to/UF0LJU

You can also watch it free here:
http://www.victimlesscrimespree.com/

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A Final Warning From George Orwell

Youtube

Enjoy this article? Help vote it up the 'Vine. You can also support this information by voting on Reddit and Current.

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US government to set up internet Ministry of Truth as communist-style government-run media

George Orwell predicted full media control in 1984

J.D. Heyes
Natural News

It sounds like such an innocent idea, one rooted in "fairness" and wrapped in good intentions. An internet "ministry of truth," run either by the federal government or the United Nations, to protect against "misinformation and rumors" that find their way to the information superhighway.

Such an agency "would have to be an independent federal agency that no president could countermand or anything else because people wouldn't think you were just censoring the news and giving a different falsehood out."

Quote of the Day: George Orwell on War

Activist Post

The following is a series of quotes presented by Zen Gardner at Before It's News.  This introduces his article where he outlines the dangers of the National Security state.  The reason why George Orwell seems to have so accurately predicted what we are in the midst of today is precisely because it is nothing new.  We have a chance -- once again -- to fight the tyranny that has landed on our doorstep.  Let's see if we can get it right this time.

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Our Time of Universal Deceit Needs An Orwell

Paul Craig Roberts
VDare

If we were to be blessed with a 21st century George Orwell, he would coin a new “speak” to apply to “support the troops.” Would he call this “Deceptive Speak”?  Or would he be more clever?

The words certainly deserve an Orwellian name.  The catch-phrase was rolled out the minute the war started, which makes one wonder about its public relations origin.  Who can oppose supporting the troops, at least before we learned from WikiLeaks and Abu Ghraib of the intentional killing of civilians and torturing of whoever happened to be rounded up in the various sweeps? All for the fun and games of it.

“Support the troops” originated in the public relations department of the military/security complex. What “support the troops” really means is to support the profits of the armaments industry and the neoconservative ideology of US world hegemony.

“Support the troops” is a clever PR slogan that causes Americans to turn a blind eye to the brutal exploitation of our soldiers and military families for profit and for an evil ideology.


Our soldiers and military families are paying for the Bush/Cheney/Obama/neocon wars with lives, limbs, post-traumatic stress, suicides, broken marriages, children without fathers, wives without husbands, and parents without sons and daughters.

“Support the troops” is one of the most cruel hoaxes in human history, and yet the vast majority of the population has fallen for it. “War Is Peace.”

When a people are so gullible, it is little wonder that they can be marched off to unaffordable open-ended wars based on nothing but lies, deceptions, and fabrications.

America produces an endless supply of material for a new Orwell.  Imagine what an Orwell could do with Hillary’s recent speech on America’s firm commitment to dissent and the First Amendment. CIA veteran Ray McGovern stood with his back to Hillary in an act of dissent from the Obama administration’s policy of coercing Internet companies into helping to eliminate WikiLeaks as a source of information.  McGovern was dragged beaten and bloody from the room, while Hillary continued praising America’s commitment to dissent and freedom of information.

To capture this level of hypocrisy requires a George Orwell. “Dissent Is Subversion.”

“Globalism” is another doctrine that needs Orwell’s illumination. Globalism, which presidents since Clinton have told us we can’t do without, enriches transnational corporations and turns workers into serfs who cannot earn enough to pay their bills.  “Poverty Is Wealth.”

The police state measures that accompany the fake “war on terror” subject Americans to far more danger and insecurity than could ever be realized from terrorists other than those of the state itself.   “Captivity Is Freedom.”

In his marvelous book, The Emotional Lives Of Animals, Marc Bekoff describes the devastating impact on animals of being kept in small cages.  US soldier Bradley Manning has been kept illegally in an even smaller cage for eight months with no end in sight. At his press conference on March 11, one reporter found the courage to ask President Obama about the conditions of Manning’s confinement.  The great and noble president of the United States replied that he had asked the Pentagon and was assured that the conditions of Manning’s confinement “are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards.” Only a George Orwell could do justice to an American president who thinks that keeping a US soldier in conditions worst than those that drive caged animals insane is “appropriate.”

The US government, which is profligate in its wars, profligate in tax cuts and bailouts for the mega-rich, and profligate in giving unlimited monopoly power to unregulated  financial institutions, blames the resulting financial crisis on “handouts” to the poor and “entitlements” to the elderly.  Such deception needs more than exposure.  It cries out for a 21st century Orwell.

Paul Craig Roberts  was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term.  He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal.

RELATED:
Obama: Torturer-in-Chief

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Big Brother: The Orwellian Nightmare Come True

Mark Dice
Infowars

When George Orwell (pen name of Eric Blair) first published his famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was the year 1949, and it told a dark story of what he envisioned life may be like in the future-in the year 1984. His book, as well as his name, have become synonymous with privacy concerns involving technology and also an all-powerful, oppressive ruling elite that strictly governs the activities of the population with an iron fist.

Orwell’s book is where we get the term Big Brother from, such as when people say “Big Brother is watching you.” When people say this, they’re referring to the omniscient surveillance system described in the novel that continuously watched and listened to people-even in their own homes. When we call something Orwellian to describe the invasiveness of certain technology or government policies, we are also referring to George Orwell’s nightmarish vision he described in his novel. There are several other terms that Orwell himself coined in Nineteen Eighty-Four, such as doublethink, thoughtcrime, and memory hole, which have also become part of our vernacular.

Even if you have not read the book or seen the film, you are still undoubtedly familiar with the issues that make up the storyline, such as the high-tech surveillance system watching and listening to everyone in order to keep them in line with the government (called the Party in the novel). You are probably also familiar with the concept of a small elite ruling class (what Orwell calls the Inner Party) living in luxury and wielding unimaginable power over lower level citizens. In the novel, people have lost their freedom, their critical thinking skills, and even the ability to love due to the cultural depths society has sunk to as a result of Big Brother’s control. The reason Nineteen Eighty-Four remains so popular, and the reason society has adopted vocabulary from the book, is because it serves as more than merely a fictional novel for the reader’s entertainment. The novel served (and continues to serve) as a stark warning of what the future may hold if we don’t resist invasive technology and oppressive government policies, or if the population at large becomes so lost in a world of pop culture, sports entertainment, or our own selfish desires, that we simply don’t care. My new non-fiction book, Big Brother: The Orwellian Nightmare Come True, looks at technology that now exists or is under development and will exist in the near future, that threatens to make our world just as horrific or even worse than the world George Orwell described. I have assembled information from mainstream news sources, industry experts, and even patent numbers of the most invasive and sinister Orwellian devices anyone could dream of. We will also look at actual government programs and policies that seem as if they came right out of Orwell’s dark imagination, such as the government secretly paying mainstream media reporters to act as gate-keepers and propagandists for the establishment, and the FBI illegally spying on and smearing peaceful political activists who were seen as problematic.


I am certainly not anti-technology. Technology is a fantastic tool which can benefit those who use it, or harm them, depending on the intentions of the person designing it or using it. Technology has brought us amazing inventions that would seem supernatural to civilizations that lived just a few hundred years ago. Arthur C. Clark, the author of 2001 a Space Odyssey, was correct when he said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” While this magical technology has brought us the convenience of calling our friends or family on our cell phones, allowing us to talk with them from virtually anywhere in the world, and given us the ability to watch events on the other side of the earth unfold live on television, and other wonders such as the Internet, DVR recorders, YouTube, Excel spread sheets, word processors, e-mail, Facebook, and more; it has also brought us identity theft, illegal wiretaps, Peeping Toms using hidden video cameras, cyber stalkers, and worse. If you have ever left your cell phone at home when you’ve left the house for the day, you’ve realized how much we depend on technology for what have become common and necessary activities. If you’ve ever been at home when the electricity unexpectedly goes out, you have also realized how much we take for granted in our modern world.

Unfortunately, with tremendous advances in technology often come unforeseen consequences. Nobody could have envisioned young teenage girls taking nude photos of themselves with their cell phone cameras and sending them to their boyfriends, and then having the boyfriends forward them to others, eventually ending up on the cell phone of someone over the age of eighteen, resulting in what is essentially child pornography in their possession. The music and film industries certainly didn’t anticipate millions of Internet users downloading music and movies for free, sometimes before the products are even officially released. And when Albert Einstein was searching for the laws of physics to learn how our Universe functioned, he could have never imagined that his work would be used to design weapons capable of destroying the entire earth. It seems that the dark minds of men in power always strive to build sinister devices designed to enable them to hold onto their power, no matter how disastrous the consequences.

In my book I will show you some of the sinister inventions currently in operation, as well as the ones on the drawing boards, and the ones mad scientists are hoping to one day create. Facial recognition video cameras that can pick you out of a crowd of tens of thousands of people in a split second, machines that can read your mind, high-tech killer-robots, psychotronic weapons that can literally put voices in people’s heads, and more. You will see beyond a doubt that George Orwell’s description of Big Brother was chillingly accurate, and perhaps not as horrific as the reality we may one day face. Like a Pandora’s Box, once much of this technology is created, there will be little hope of stopping it or even regulating it.

If one reads old Popular Mechanics magazines from the 1950s, one can realize how wrong, and even silly, the techno-utopian dreamers were in the past. Many were led to believe that by the twenty-first century we would all be living lives of luxury like the Jetsons, with large blocks of free time to enjoy ourselves as we had most manual labor and menial tasks taken care of by robots and computers. Yet more than a decade into the twenty-first century, we still need to spend time cooking and cleaning, and commuting to work and raising the kids, and fixing up the house and countless other tasks and obligations that are required of us in our daily lives. Our cars must still continuously be maintained, the oil needs to be changed, the engine serviced, the tires rotated and replaced, and the average vehicle now costs as much as a house did for people just two generations ago. The grass still needs to be cut, the bushes need to be trimmed, and things around the house continue to break and need to be fixed or replaced. People are working longer hours, having less time with their families, having to retire later in life, and are having less savings than past generations. Where is this techno-utopia that so many had promised would come in the near future?

Instead of living lives of luxury and leisure, now many people can’t escape their job even after they leave the office. Where once we left work and were outside of the reach of our boss, now he or she can call us on our cell phone at anytime, day or night, and expects a promptly returned phone call or e-mail.

People are being turned into numbers and statistics, and mathematical formulas are used by employers to determine whether an employee is being efficient enough. It’s difficult to get a person on the phone when calling a company’s customer service department, and social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace have turned everyone into their own favorite celebrity and supplement actual friendships and interactions. People don’t need to get together for a dinner party to catch up on each other’s lives anymore; we just monitor their newsfeed on Facebook from the comfort of our own home while sitting in our favorite chair getting fatter from lack of exercise and a poor diet. Where we once discussed politics and religion with our friends and neighbors, such topics have become taboo and are replaced with the enticing entertainment of celebrity news as most people feel that it is more important to know about who our favorite celebrities are dating than it is to know what bills are being introduced and voted on in the halls of Congress or our own city council. It’s interesting that while people seem to be getting dumber, computers are getting smarter.

We are becoming a nation of morons who can’t think for themselves, and are being dehumanized into nothing more than a mentally enslaved workforce who are constantly being monitored, databased, and kept in line by the fear of the omniscient Big Brother technology that has gotten so advanced and so cheap, that the watchful eyes of surveillance cameras are mass produced, almost as if they were disposable.

At a presentation at the 2010 DICE Summit (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain), an annual meeting of videogame executives, Jesse Schell, the former Creative Director of the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, gave a speech on the future of gaming and talked about how in the future, “Before too long we’re going to get to the point where every soda can, [and] every cereal box is going to be able to have a CPU, a screen, and a camera on board it, and a Wi-Fi connecter so that it can be connected to the Internet.”

He concluded his speech by saying that our children and grandchildren will be able to know exactly what books we’ve read, what foods we ate, and practically everything we’ve done in our entire lives. He gave this speech not to warn people about these Orwellian technologies, but he was extremely excited about them, and looked forward to them.

“You have no idea what books your grandparents read, or where they went on a daily basis, but these sensors that we’re going to have on us and all around us everywhere are going to be tracking and watching what we’re doing forever,” Schell said. He concludes by saying that because we will all be constantly watched and our actions and interests databased forever, that we’ll possibly be better people and be nicer and make better decisions because of the fear of judgment from others. Is this the kind of world you want to live in? Well, it’s the kind of world that’s rapidly approaching.

Big Brother: The Orwellian Nightmare is meant to serve as a warning for what is already here, and what is soon to come. It is to encourage people to think about how to possibly prevent or minimize dramatic hazards to our lives by the very technology we have created. It is my goal to give you an accurate forecast of the coming storm so that you as an individual, and we as a society and species, may be better equipped to handle it when it hits. It is my hope that we do not lose our privacy, freedom, or our humanity in this 1984-style New World Order.

RELATED ARTICLES:
10 Ways We Are Being Tracked, Traced, and Databased
How Close Are We to a Nano-based Surveillance State?
DNA "Genetic Patdown" Being Introduced to Airports by DHS
The Singularity Movement, Immortality, and the Post-Human 

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Lies Across America

“Every single empire, in its official discourse, has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.” – Edward Said

Jim Quinn
The Burning Platform

The increasingly fragile American Empire has been built on a foundation of lies. Lies we tell ourselves and Big lies spread by our government. The shit is so deep you can stir it with a stick. As we enter another holiday season the mainstream corporate mass media will relegate you to the status of consumer. This is a disgusting term that dehumanizes all Americans. You are nothing but a blot to corporations and advertisers selling you electronic doohickeys that they convince you that you must have. Propaganda about consumer spending being essential to an economic recovery is spewed from 52 inch HDTVs across the land, 24 hours per day, by CNBC, Fox, CBS and the other corporate owned media that generate billions in profits from selling advertising to corporations schilling material goods to thoughtless American consumers.  Aldous Huxley had it figured out decades ago:


“Thanks to compulsory education and the rotary press, the propagandist has been able, for many years past, to convey his messages to virtually every adult in every civilized country.”

Americans were given the mental capacity to critically think. Sadly, a vast swath of Americans has chosen ignorance over knowledge. Make no mistake about it, ignorance is a choice. It doesn’t matter whether you are poor or rich. Books are available to everyone in this country. Sob stories about the disadvantaged poor having no access to education are nothing but liberal spin to keep the masses controlled. There are 122,500 libraries in this country. If you want to read a book, you can read a book. The internet puts knowledge at the fingertips of every citizen. Becoming educated requires hard work, sacrifice, curiosity, and a desire to learn. Aldous Huxley describes the American choice to be ignorant:

 “Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.”

It is a choice to play Call of Duty on your PS3 rather than reading Shakespeare. It is a choice to stand on a street corner looking for trouble rather than reading Hemingway. It is a choice to spend Black Friday in malls fighting other robotic consumers for iSomethings, the latest innovative, advanced TVs, flashy Rolexes, and ostentatious Coach bags rather than spending the day reading Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, a brilliant Pulitzer Prize winning history of the outset of World War I, which would provide insight into what could happen on the Korean Peninsula. It is a choice to watch 6 hours per day of Dancing With the Stars, American Idol, Brainless Housewives of Everywhere, or CSI of Anywhere rather than reading Orwell or Huxley and discovering that their dystopian warnings have come true.

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Orwell's Oceania: GPS and the Police State We Inhabit

John W. Whitehead
Lew Rockwell

Voicing his discontent with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling in United States v. Pineda-Moreno, which declared the warrantless use of a GPS tracking device to be constitutional, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski warned, "We are taking a giant leap into the unknown, and the consequences for ourselves and our children may be dire and irreversible. Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we’re living in Oceania."

Indeed, we are already living in George Orwell’s totalitarian state known as Oceania, where the all-seeing government sees and tracks everything we do. By asserting that the police can constitutionally sneak onto a private driveway without a warrant and stick a GPS tag on your car so that they can remotely track you, the Ninth Circuit didn’t necessarily break any new ground. Rather, they merely confirmed what we have suspected all along: that the concept of private property is dead and along with it, the right against unreasonable searches and seizures once protected by the Fourth Amendment.


Having outstripped our ability as humans to control it, technology has become our Frankenstein’s monster. Delighted with technology’s conveniences, its ability to make our lives easier by doing an endless array of tasks faster and more efficiently, we have given it free rein in our lives, with little thought to the legal or moral ramifications of doing so. Thus, we have no one but ourselves to blame for the fact that technology now operates virtually autonomously according to its own invasive code, respecting no one’s intimate moments or privacy and impervious to the foibles of human beings and human relationships.

For example, consider how enthusiastically we welcomed Global Positioning System (GPS) devices into our lives. We’ve installed this satellite-based technology in everything from our phones to our cars to our pets. Yet by ensuring that we never get lost, never lose our loved ones and never lose our wireless signals, we are also making it possible for the government to never lose sight of us, as well.

GPS, originally known as Navstar, is funded and operated by none other than the U.S. Department of Defense. The U.S. military controls the satellites used by GPS devices and transmits signals to ground GPS receivers. The U.S. Air Force, by means of ground stations, sustains 24 operational GPS satellites at all times. These synchronized satellites emit signals at the same time. A GPS receiver located on earth collects the signals that travel at the speed of light. The receiver calculates the distance to the satellites by determining the time it takes for the emitted signal to reach the GPS receiver. Once a time is determined for at least four of the GPS satellites, the receiver can pinpoint your location in three dimensions, including latitude, longitude, and altitude.

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Related Article:
10 Ways We're Being Tracked, Traced, and Databased


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