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360 Degree Surveillance: How Police Use Public-Private Partnerships to Spy on Americans

John & Nisha Whitehead

“We live in a surveillance state founded on a partnership between government and the technology industry.”
Law Professor Avidan Y. Cover

In this age of ubiquitous surveillance, there are no private lives: everything is public.

Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices.

There are roughly one billion surveillance cameras worldwide and that number continues to grow, thanks to their wholehearted adoption by governments (especially law enforcement and military agencies), businesses, and individual consumers.

With every new surveillance device we welcome into our lives, the government gains yet another toehold into our private worlds.

Indeed, empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, police have become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.

As law professor Avidan Y. Cover explains:

A key feature of the surveillance state is the cooperative relationship between the private sector and the government. The private sector’s role is vital to the surveillance both practically and legally. The private sector, of course, provides the infrastructure and tools for the surveillance… The private sector is also critical to the surveillance state’s legality.

Under the third-party doctrine, the Fourth Amendment is not implicated when the government acquires information that people provide to corporations, because they voluntarily provide their information to another entity and assume the risk that the entity will disclose the information to the government.

Therefore, people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their calling data, or potentially even their emails. As a result, the government does not normally need a warrant to obtain information transmitted electronically.

But the Fourth Amendment is not only a source of protection for individual privacy; it also limits government excess and abuse through challenges by the people. The third-party doctrine removes this vital and populist check on government overreach.

Critical to this end run around the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents is a pass play that allows police to avoid public transparency requirements (open bids, public meetings, installation protocols) by having private companies and individuals do the upfront heavy lifting, leaving police to harvest the intel on the back end.

Stingray devices, facial recognition technology, body cameras, automated license plate readers, gunshot detection, predictive policing software, AI-enhanced video analytics, real-time crime centers, fusion centers: all of these technologies and surveillance programs rely on public-private partnerships that together create a sticky spiderweb from which there is no escape.

As the cost of these technologies becomes more affordable for the average consumer, an effort underwritten by the tech industry and encouraged by law enforcement agencies and local governing boards, which in turn benefit from access to surveillance they don’t need to include in their budgets, big cities, small towns, urban, suburban and rural communities alike are adding themselves to the surveillance state’s interconnected grid.

What this adds up to for government agencies (that is, FBI, NSA, DHS agents, etc., as well as local police) is a surveillance map that allows them to track someone’s movements over time and space, hopscotching from doorbell camera feeds and business security cameras to public cameras on utility poles, license plate readers, traffic cameras, drones, etc.

It has all but eliminated the notion of privacy and radically re-drawn the line of demarcation between our public and private selves.

Over the past 50 years, surveillance has brought about a series of revolutions in how governments govern and populations are policed to the detriment of us all. Cybersecurity expert Adam Scott Wandt has identified three such revolutions.

The first surveillance revolution came about as a result of government video cameras being installed in public areas. There were a reported 51 million surveillance cameras blanketing the United States in 2022.

It’s estimated that Americans are caught on camera an average of 238 times every week (160 times per week while driving; 40 times per week at work; 24 times per week while out running errands and shopping; and 14 times per week through various other channels and activities). That doesn’t even touch on the coverage by surveillance drones, which remain a relatively covert part of police spying operations.

The second revolution occurred when law enforcement agencies started forging public-private partnerships with commercial establishments like banks and drug stores and parking lots in order to gain access to their live surveillance feeds.

The use of automatic license plate readers (manufactured and distributed by the likes of Flock Safety), once deployed exclusively by police and now spreading to home owners associations and gated communities, extends the reach of the surveillance state that much further afield.

It’s a win-win for police budgets and local legislatures when they can persuade businesses and residential communities to shoulder the costs of the equipment and share the footage, and they can conscript the citizenry to spy on each other through crowdsourced surveillance.

The third revolution was ushered in with the growing popularity of doorbell cameras such as Ring, Amazon’s video surveillance doorbell, and Google’s Nest Cam.

Amazon has been particularly aggressive in its pursuit of a relationship with police, enlisting them in its marketing efforts, and going so far as to hosting parties for police, providing free Ring doorbells and deep discounts, sharing “active camera” maps of Ring owners, allowing access to the Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal, which enables police to directly contact owners for access to their footage, and coaching police on how to obtain footage without a warrant.

Ring currently partners with upwards of 2,161 law enforcement agencies and 455 fire departments, and that number grows exponentially every year. As Vice reports, “Ring has also heavily pursued city discount programs and private alliances with neighborhood watch groups.

When cities provide free or discounted Ring cameras, they sometimes create camera registries, and police sometimes order people to aim Ring cameras at their neighbors, or only give cameras to people surveilled by neighborhood watches.”

In November 2022, San Francisco police gained access to the live footage of privately owned internet cameras as opposed to merely being able to access recorded footage. No longer do police even have to request permission of homeowners for such access: increasingly, corporations have given police access to footage as part of their so-called criminal investigations with or without court orders.

We would suggest a fourth revolutionary shift to be the use of facial recognition software and artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics, clothing, behavior and car, thereby synthesizing the many strands of surveillance video footage into one cohesive narrative, which privacy advocates refer to as 360 degree surveillance.

Finally, Wandt sees autonomous cars equipped with cameras that record everything around them as yet another revolutionary expansion of surveillance to be tapped by police.

Yet in the present moment, it’s those public-private partnerships that signify a watershed moment in the transition from a police state to a surveillance state and sound a death knoll for our privacy rights. This fusion of government power and private power is also at the heart of the surveillance state’s growing stranglehold on the populace.

As always, these intrusions into our personal lives are justified in the name of national security and fighting crime. Yet while the price to be paid for having the government’s so-called protection is nothing less than our right to privacy, the guarantee of safety remains dubious, at best.

As a study on camera surveillance by researchers at City University of New York concluded, the presence of cameras were somewhat effective as a deterrent for crimes such as car burglaries and property theft, but they had no significant effect on violent crimes.

On the other hand, when you combine overcriminalization with wall-to-wall surveillance monitored by police in pursuit of crimes, the resulting suspect society inevitably gives way to a nation of criminals. In such a society, we are all guilty of some crime or other.

The predatory effect of these surveillance cameras has also yet to be fully addressed, but they are vulnerable to being hacked by third parties and abused by corporate and government employees.

After all, power corrupts. We’ve seen this abuse of power recur time and time again throughout history. For instance, as an in-depth investigative report by the Associated Press concludes, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.

As the AP reports, federal officials have also been looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.

These cameras—and the public-private eyes peering at us through them—are re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear and, in the process, empowering “people to not just watch their neighborhood, but to organize as watchers,” creating not just digital neighborhood watches but digital gated communities.

Finally, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity. As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.

No one knows, but it’s a pretty good bet that the surveillance state will be keeping a close watch on anyone seen as a threat to the government’s chokehold on power.

It’s George Orwell’s 1984 on a global scale.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, Orwell’s dystopian nightmare has become our looming reality.

Originally published by the Rutherford Institute
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected]

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David
David
Feb 5, 2023 1:15 PM

Can’t you just power down your phones when you’re not using them? Or leave them at home?

wardropper
wardropper
Jan 27, 2023 2:52 PM

Perhaps behind all this is just good ol’-fashioned voyeurism.
After all, there are very few establishment institutions that have not become perverted in some way . . .
At any rate, I no longer attribute to today’s ‘authorities’ any human qualities related to intelligence. The whole state apparatus has become a thuggish, robotic juggernaut as far as ordinary, decent people are concerned.

Paul Vonharnish
Paul Vonharnish
Jan 27, 2023 2:50 PM

Humans seem to enjoy novelty. Let’s all take selfies! Hundreds of them. Millions of them!!! Then we can make selfies of ourselves taking selfies. Let’s pay other selfies to take selfies of themselves making videos of us watching them making videos of themselves…

mgeo
mgeo
Jan 27, 2023 8:00 AM

Hi Admin, my comment at Jan 27, 2023 7:25 AM is pending. Thanks.

mgeo
mgeo
Jan 27, 2023 7:25 AM

The principle obsessions of government are
:- political views and activities
:- associtates, to build a global map.

The changes that facilitated spying (beyond images), as well as ICT crime include
:- phasing out analogue alternatives
:- ubiquity of personal ICT devices
:- popularity of social media and “smart” appliances
:- image recognition, e.g., finding or matching a photo   
:- speech analysis and voice recognition, that make speech as useful as text, or even more so
:- wireless links, even to pherpheral devices
:- batteries that cannot be removed
:- slowed-down start-up 
:- ICT-based payment
:- streaming, cloud storage and cloud computing 
:- remote monitoring of a major ICT system as a service
:- RFID stickers on products
:- cards or stickers for identification or access. 

Johnny
Johnny
Jan 27, 2023 4:49 AM

Some practical suggestions on how to cope with the tsunami of Shit:
https://orgrad.wordpress.com/a-z-of-thinkers/paul-cudenec/

Albert Anderson
Albert Anderson
Jan 27, 2023 4:34 AM

Used to be they did it differently, like we all used to do work differently, but in the end, it’s always been the same thing. Remember the dossiers on MLK Jr, Malcom X, John Lennon? Remember J. “Cross dressing hypocrite” Edgar Hoover? Could probably find some Socrates quotes about it. There’s a common denominator involved, our own governments. All we need to do is say, “hey, governments, stop that!” And we’ll all live happily ever after. Except our governments, they’ll be pissed.

eman
eman
Jan 27, 2023 6:52 AM

Governments are non human organizations (NHOs); those in charge of the operations and who speak for the NHO have super human powers <because bestowing super human powers to NHO leadership, is the nature of any NHO). From birth to death our society is taught to listen to the NHO. Schools are NHOs. churches are NHOs, corporations are NHOs. The entire nation state system consist of 256 or so NHOs, each organized more or less as a corporation and each developing its own laws, cultures, rules, etc. I call the nation states<= crucibles because the nation states blend humans to accept and to conform to the culture, law, history, and purpose of the nation state, but the nation state serves the interest of those hidden, the Oligarch. It is in the nation state that humans are taught to ignore that which is not put forth by a super human in charge of a NHO. Pavlov could not have asked for more.

The people benefiting from the NHO remain hidden, the executive operations of the NHOs are done in secret and all the governed submissive human ever sees is the super human speaking his garbage as if it were beneficial to humanity. The NHOs coordinate with each other so their message is similar because it is the result of secret planning and secret intentions. Humanity vs. the Non Human. THE ADVENT OF FUNCTIONAL SELF OPERATING ROBOTS IS GOING TO PROVE MY POINT. but historically mankind has been led by the NHOs. Mankind is trained from Birth to death vulnerable to give preference to and to listen to the superhuman in charge of the NHO. Its our fault we cannot see the forest for the trees.

Separating the government NHOs into other types of NHO enterprises has been a powerful expression of divide and control strategy. all monopoly power initially belongs to the government, without government no new NHOs can be spawned. Spanning new NHOs from the government allows to give part of the monopoly power of government to private for profit interest. So much has been given, that humanity has now a very big problem: the private for profit interest have many of the monopoly powers that once belonged to government and the spawned NHOs are bigger than the governments that are supposed to regulate them. The child is more powerful and richer than the parent.

Edwige
Edwige
Jan 27, 2023 10:34 AM

They also had “dossiers” on Peter Mandelson and Harriet Harman. Doesn’t mean very much.

Johnny
Johnny
Jan 27, 2023 3:56 AM

An excellent piece here: https://nevermoremedia.substack.com/p/compassion-for-the-covid-cult
Plus some classic memes.
Enjoy.

George Mc
George Mc
Jan 27, 2023 5:14 PM
Reply to  Johnny

Not sure if this was amongst the memes – but it sums the whole thing up:

Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil

Johnny
Johnny
Jan 27, 2023 2:56 AM

Mass surveillance exists for two reasons:
•The pathetic paranoia of the 1%.
•The pathetic pursuit of profit.
Next thing you know it’ll be mandatory to have a camera in your coffin.

niko
niko
Jan 27, 2023 12:54 AM

Whitehead’s exceptional to his profession.

comment image?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

wardropper
wardropper
Jan 27, 2023 2:58 PM
Reply to  niko

Which would naturally point the finger at the way in which they are educated . . .
If having justice as the primary goal was a fundamental tenet of their professional training, a lawyer would once more be a respected person.

But the fundamental tenet is now money, and, as with medical doctors, the financial incentives overrule quaint old ideas like the Hippocratic Oath and pursuit of the truth.

Thomas L Frey
Thomas L Frey
Jan 27, 2023 3:49 PM
Reply to  wardropper

Education or the nature of humans attracted to the profession?

Thomas L Frey
Thomas L Frey
Jan 27, 2023 3:49 PM
Reply to  niko

LOL
Just like Law Enforcement Officers

snafuman
snafuman
Jan 29, 2023 4:35 PM
Reply to  niko

Beautiful. I’m gonna have to “borrow” this one. You have my undying gratitude.

STJOHNOFGRAFTON
STJOHNOFGRAFTON
Jan 27, 2023 12:47 AM

Under FOI we should be able to see surveillance footage of where we’ve been and what we’ve been up to. Failing that, to find out what you’ve done with yourself, enable Google Maps Timeline.

les online
les online
Jan 26, 2023 9:26 PM

It’s been quite a few years since i was Morally Outraged / Scandalised / Shocked by media stories of Corruption…It seemed such scandals were less about the corruption that is endemic & essential to the functioning of our economic system, more about what to expect if caught at it..(Very Victorian: Beneath the veneer of Respectability lurks….)
Having lost my Faith i’m less inclined to think “Silly for getting caught”, more likely to think “Silly if you’re not doing it !”
“The Night of the Long Knives” is a standard feature on internal party politics… Corruption is so widespread in the Communist Party of China that every member turns a blind eye to it until it can be weaponised for use against an internal party rival…Ukraine is the latest to use claims of “corruption” as the cover story to purge its upper ranks…Will we ever learn the real reason ?

Edwige
Edwige
Jan 27, 2023 10:39 AM
Reply to  les online

Hitler’s and (for Brits anyway) MacMillan’s ‘Knights of the Long Knives’ are still well known.

Less well remembered is Gerald Ford’s ‘Halloween Masscre’ That was when Poppa Bush became director of the CIA (despite no previous CIA connections…. cough, cough). Also receiving major promotions on that day were Rumsfeld and Cheney.

mgeo
mgeo
Jan 28, 2023 4:49 AM
Reply to  les online

Related:
:- Alliances that every oligarch (plutocrat or government official) builds.
:- Unquestionable authority of government prosecution to act or not.
:- Evaluation and grooming of judges before promotion.
:- Wide variations in judicial sentences.
:- Convenient loopholes in laws.

Freecus
Freecus
Jan 26, 2023 8:32 PM

The MetaVerse looks a lot like SWS, which is based on SEAS.

Johnny
Johnny
Jan 27, 2023 5:45 AM
Reply to  Freecus

SEAS hey?
Some Evil Arseholes Spying.
Paranoid pricks.
When they are staring at their own mortality some of them may realise they wasted their pathetic lives in the pursuit of hobgoblins and Mammon.

Thomas L Frey
Thomas L Frey
Jan 26, 2023 8:30 PM

Toll Roads, Mixed Use Urban Developments, Product Research and Development, Agricultural Development, etc.

Nothing is going to change until the criminals are dragged into the street and given some old fashioned justice. The system is not going to do it.

Criminals move at Warp Speed, while the JustUs system moves at a snails pace, if at all.

The Tree of Liberty is thirsty.

Paul Prichard
Paul Prichard
Jan 26, 2023 7:53 PM

Your alternative update on #COVID19 for 2023-01-25. In footsteps of Andrew Bridgen, another MP (Esther McVey) asking inconvenient questions. IVM is effective (blog, gab, tweet).

Ananda
Ananda
Jan 27, 2023 8:31 AM
Reply to  Paul Prichard

asking inconvenient questions 3 years later…………………….
Esther McVey LOL
You lot fool for any old shite.

Clutching at straws
Clutching at straws
Jan 26, 2023 7:53 PM

Interestingly, in France, where I live, the right to a private life is taken pretty seriously.

Originally proposed in 1803, the law has not lost it’s teeth since!

Version en vigueur depuis le 19 juillet 1970
Modifié par Loi n°70-643 du 17 juillet 1970 – art. 22 () JORF 19 juillet 1970
Création Loi 1803-03-08 promulguée le 18 mars 1803
Modifié par Loi 1927-08-10 art. 13

Chacun a droit au respect de sa vie privée.
Les juges peuvent, sans préjudice de la réparation du dommage subi, prescrire toutes mesures, telles que séquestre, saisie et autres, propres à empêcher ou faire cesser une atteinte à l’intimité de la vie privée : ces mesures peuvent, s’il y a urgence, être ordonnées en référé.

Translation:
Everyone has the right to respect for their private life.
The judges may, without prejudice to compensation for the damage suffered, prescribe all measures, such as sequestration, seizure and others, capable of preventing or putting an end to an invasion of the privacy of private life: these measures may, if urgent, be ordered in summary proceedings.

So, Macron has a huge problem.

The French will not be chipped.

Nor will they bend over for the sharp shock of digital surveillance.

Their resistance to the “passe sanitaire” saved many of us from travel restrictions over the past few years.

Whilst a lot of the French are died in the blood socialists they are NOT, for the larger part communists
(Apart from someone I know who professes to be a communist and insists I pay him for his goods in cash -. No doubt in order to distribute it fairly to the proles)

Quite the opposite. The French are probably the most protectionist, insular people on earth.

Nowhere near globalist.

France are 7/ 1 to be the next to leave EU.

Where does that leave the EU globalist project ?

Brexit was the pause to the EU globalist expansion.

Expect Italy, Greece and Poland to lead the way to collapse of the EU.

Good or bad ?

We’ll see.

les online
les online
Jan 26, 2023 9:33 PM

There are two ways to obtain your compliance: The Chinese Water Torture way (drip, drip, drip, drip….), or the American CIAs Waterboarding method (bucket after bucket after bucket….)
You dont get to choose…

boxofcrayons
boxofcrayons
Jan 26, 2023 11:47 PM

France is a perverted shadow of it’s former self, but then, where isn’t.

Candledark
Candledark
Jan 27, 2023 1:05 AM

Only the villages are still French. Ever been to Marseille, Bordeaux or Lyon and stepped 50 yards outside the city center?

John Milton
John Milton
Jan 27, 2023 6:19 AM
Reply to  Candledark

Mass immigration of the worst kind by design

Clutching at straws
Clutching at straws
Jan 27, 2023 9:10 AM
Reply to  Candledark

Yup. 751 ZUS (“Sensitive” zones)

https://sig.ville.gouv.fr/atlas/ZUS

The provinces are definitely NOT like the cities

Hank
Hank
Jan 27, 2023 4:09 AM

There’s a lot pending on France.

Clutching at straws
Clutching at straws
Jan 28, 2023 8:58 AM
Reply to  Hank

Last week 1Million took to the streets in Paris alone to protest against proposed raise in pension age from 62 to 64.

Say what you like about the French but they’re very good at windows and demos.

Ort
Ort
Jan 28, 2023 9:58 PM

I root, root, root for the French.

But I hope I’m just insufficiently informed, because I have the impression that Emperor Macron’s mailed-fisted, hobnailed-booted, eye-gouging Imperial Goon Squads were depressingly effective in quashing public protest movements, e.g. the Yellow Vests. 😫 🇨🇵

Veri Tas
Veri Tas
Jan 27, 2023 8:18 PM

I saw them obediently give police their phones with their vaxx passport in cafes when the state’s brown blue shirts came through checking who was vaxxed or who wasn’t.

And of the 65.6 m people in France 53.7 m have been double vaxxed.

Clutching at straws
Clutching at straws
Jan 28, 2023 8:54 AM
Reply to  Veri Tas

Some did.

The others remember what happened to collaborators and went out to the streets.

Clive Williams
Clive Williams
Jan 30, 2023 6:18 AM

Thank you for that, I didn’t know you lived in France, or I forgot browsing.
It’s so difficult for me with one thing and another other side of the Atlantic.
Thx

niko
niko
Jan 26, 2023 7:46 PM

One of the first fronts opportunists of crisis found to build back better in my former home of New Orleans after Katrina was a surveillance system rolled out overnight (hmm, as if waiting in the wings) with proliferation of video cameras and private security. Most people’s homes remained in ruins, still abandoned along lonely streets. But disaster capital couldn’t wait to secure the territory for its further conquest, if only to welcome back returning residents to new and improved conditions of life under occupation in “the city that care forgot” (and that forgot to care).

From mop-up ops of Blackwater mercenaries to BlackRock raids on real estate, New Orleans restoration was a forerunner of the public-private partnership plans that have come to define the consolidation of the fascist corporate state. Where before ruling elites have had to resort to rackets of representative government and constitutional facade under what Sheldon Wolin called inverted totalitarianism, now they’re able to go more direct in governing subjects by bringing the deep state out of the shadows under technocracy. And to add insult to injury, it will still be the public paying for private tyranny over our lives, just to make sure sovereigns in name only remain subject to the rentier class and its governance by debt, until we happily own nothing.

In the surveillance revolutions covered above by the Whiteheads, you can follow the phasing in of infrastructure for the internet-of-things-and-bodies control grid which will become the perfect panopticon for 360% population management. It will be the perfect complement in the (not so) physical world to the virtual world’s 24/7 tracking of our digital identities, which will overtake our material identity and reality.

This kind of metaphysical inversion reveals the nihilistic depths of the psychopathy now seeking the singularity of biodigital convergence (they even want to build this anti-matter, anti-life system underwater, in the depths of the oceans!). Of course, the Whiteheads can only cover here so much when it comes to all that’s waiting in the wings for our welfare and safety. Drones, satellites, nano-insects…no space or time will be permitted to exist outside the Net.

I simply can’t imagine such horrors of Progress, which I suppose is why relics of humanity like myself will eventually be eliminated. The (in)security state is set to do most all of us in, in the mother of all shit storms that is the Great Reset. It’s a mad vision of the future, already here, we need to fight, if only for the sake of saner perspectives beyond the prisons of perception.

Hank
Hank
Jan 27, 2023 4:23 AM
Reply to  niko

Already here? Where. Covid narrative is finished. People are not jabbing anymore. MSM is losing the voice and woke politics is being exposed. You can travel mostly anywhere without digital ID or covid vax. UK just said no more vax for under 50.

In case you haven’t noticed things are looking a lot better than they did 2 years ago except for the unfortunate injuries and lost ones. Inflation sucks but it has come and gone in the past.

If you keep listening to the MSM you will think you’re losing or in the minority but open your eyes and ears and you will find the opposite.

There’s a lot pending on people’s will no doubt but doom and gloom is not the way.

peterpaul
peterpaul
Jan 27, 2023 2:22 PM
Reply to  Hank

Are we not now entering phase 2 – either war, economic collapse or something more significant as in food shortages? Which would mean the Covid scam and resulting injections have done their job. We may just be seeing the results of this as more and more people become ill or die as you outline. The expectation of where we are would have been gamed for these outcomes, I’m sure. There will need to be an event, phase 2 that is quite significant to drown out the compounding death problem that will intensify and not going away.

Since the attack on the wider public we’ve seen a number of the visible perpetrators move on suggesting this end, being the pandemic action and solution strategy; Scott Morrison, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Jacinda Ardern,… and I’m sure we’ll shortly hear of Trudeau etc. acting out the ‘I’m leaving’ sketch too. Joe Biden, soon likely to be replaced, though his announcement will be ‘I’m ummm, umpa lumpa good are we, I am errrr…where’s the kids? Ummm, smells goood. What security risk!?!’ Which allows for the finger pointing and lessons learned, positioning for the new respective incumbents.

I agree at present it does feel that the jackboot has been slightly lifted from our heads, slightly; though the knee on the neck is firm enough to stifle breathing. We’re going nowhere yet.

Hank
Hank
Jan 28, 2023 2:49 AM
Reply to  peterpaul

Soon Biden and Macron will be gone and Just In Castro too.

Things are happening if you look.

niko
niko
Jan 27, 2023 11:35 PM
Reply to  Hank

Thanks for offering your perspective. Here’s some of mine.

For nearly seven decades, I’ve lived through fascism creeping along in the US, with a populace incrementally pulled along into increasingly totalitarian conditions (aka the slow boil). There’s been earlier turning points, like 9/11, when I heard people say similarly that the waning of initial shock and awe meant that life had resumed more or less familiar, normal routines. As Dubya instructed, we were all free to shop again. Only new additions, or conditions, had crept into our lives, and kept accumulating thereafter to the advantage of a security state on steroids since, such that even before 2020 the future was already here and the matrix was just not a movie.

Much of this accretion was dismissed with It’s-only reasoning. It’s only an inconvenience when I have to go through the checkpoints at the airport (or stadium, or school, or…). It’s only video cameras to catch crime on reality TV. Edward Snowden, tell me something I didn’t already know. Whatever way it got spun, even if that meant taking pride in being cynically savvy about one’s subjection to the apparatus. And yeah, inflation sucks. But just because it’s come and gone in the past partially accounts for increasing immiseration of people to the point where techno-feudal oligarchs now expect us to resign ourselves to serfdom.

I hear you saying enough people have wised up that the jig is up. Given precedent, I’m not inclined to place much confidence in public opinion polls or passive noncompliance with what’s not being pressed upon people like before. Science of social engineering is most effective in staggered implementation of goals, asymmetric alternation of reward and punishment, strategy of tension and release.

It’s precisely in times when cause for alarm is not so apparent that crucial gains can be made, including in areas you mention (e.g., the WHO treaty negotiations and pandemic preparedness infrastructure and international medical passports and permanent protocols in health care…). When lines of attack have been repositioned, will people be prepared to resist, or simply submit as before once the heat is turned back up?

I don’t tune into MSM, which among other objectives of mind control produces a passive population of spectators to the worst we can be. Talk about doom and gloom! My eyes and ears don’t see or hear much different, however, when I’m among people pretty well conditioned to remain passive when it comes to actually living in the real rather than reel world.

After all that’s happened, I’d feel a lot more confident and hopeful that ‘we’re not going to take this anymore’ if there were more organized movement to bring down the biosecurity state already built. Heads should be rolling all around (metaphorically speaking!) and heads of state brought before tribunals for crimes against humanity, if you ask me. But last I looked, the same faces are in high places, while some with blood on their hands have retired with benefits.

A lot’s in the eye of the beholder, but I don’t think tyrants fall by tweeting them away or that conditions of our servitude change until we more actively challenge our oppressors and build our own better alternatives to their corruption and criminality. Short of such radical resistance, it seems supposing radical evil will end on its own is wishful thinking and whistling in the dark.

Fyi:
The Parallel Society vs Totalitarianism | How to Create a Free World

Hank
Hank
Jan 28, 2023 3:52 AM
Reply to  niko

Could they have done what they have without convid? Now that that narrative has collapsed big time everything else they try will be questioned. If one looks at it on a global scale India and China never took the mrna jabs, Africa never did and never had a problem. There’s half of the population. Brics.

Even MSM is now questioning whether the jab does harm.

You don’t seem to have confidence in people? If they weren’t forced to take the jab how many would have? Only the MSM make you think the majority is with them. The silent majority is real. Just look how social media has turned.

Just have a look at all the CEO’s that have resigned or “moved on”. Same goes for Government figures. When the likes of Soreazz say Xi is a problem that tells me all I need to know about China. Now if this group of people were winning they’d be popping champagne bottle instead of leaving, especially since they have someone like Bidan in the role. 

Instead they look more the fools every day.

If you want the people to support you, you need good energy and a positive outlook. Doom n gloom saps the energy. Good leaders never promote doom n gloom.

Pending the next few months will be very interesting.

Edwige
Edwige
Jan 27, 2023 10:42 AM
Reply to  niko

And despite all that surveillance New Orleans still somehow manages to be the current murder capital of the USA (and it’s not like there’s any lack of competition)….

niko
niko
Jan 27, 2023 5:29 PM
Reply to  Edwige

Right on. And some (gangsta) denizens even take pride in it. And as if tit for tat, NOLA excels in police brutality and murder. Also, Orleans Parish Prison leads the nation in jailing and retaining people (not for lack of competition there, either!). Nothing pays like the criminal justice system.

James R
James R
Jan 26, 2023 7:13 PM

‘Eye in the sky’ by The Alan Parsons Project ‘spookily’ captures the essence of the rapidly folding origami of our panoptiCon.

Annie
Annie
Jan 26, 2023 6:14 PM

Also when we go onto site’s do we actually know what we are agreeing to?I don’t read the small print, Also unless you write your name in capital letters or sign it it’s null and void so who is in the wrong the it’s not me.

Annie
Annie
Jan 26, 2023 6:04 PM

Animals kill each other for food or for s*x.Humans kill millions for power nowhere in the animal kingdom would a colony kill their own kind because they want some shiny or black gold?They would work together not against each other.Thats how messed up the capalists are they are just evil pure evil.

Paul Watson
Paul Watson
Jan 26, 2023 8:45 PM
Reply to  Annie

Satanic influence

S Cooper
S Cooper
Jan 26, 2023 5:35 PM

“Sowing fear in the general population and going after petty criminals is a diversion from going after really nasty major criminals.”
comment image
comment image

Annie
Annie
Jan 26, 2023 6:07 PM
Reply to  S Cooper

👍

Pakistanicream
Pakistanicream
Jan 28, 2023 11:31 AM
Reply to  S Cooper

S Cooper, good image with excellent information.

George Mc
George Mc
Jan 26, 2023 5:33 PM

I’m a total luddite so forgive me if the following ruminations may seem a bit naïve.

I always took it for granted that everything I do on the internet must be accessible to “Someone” – by which I mean somebody “up there” in the upper echelons of the intelligence agencies which I have no doubt are being used by the oligarchical powers who are gathering an ever more concentrated hold on their power. I assume it works on surveillance software since the idea of every internet user being monitored by an actual person would be unwieldy.

So this software would be programmed to search for key terms e.g. “Al Qaeda”, “deep state” etc. and if more than a certain number of such terms pop up in a single server’s comment catalogue then perhaps some actual person may be having a little look in.

And I always had a suspicion of the various ways in which a person could be totally discredited and destroyed. The sci-fi series Colony even gave an example of the very thing that I was musing on: a person who has become a real danger to the lords above may be subjected to invisible (to him) downloads of kiddie porn and so would be set the means of branding him a paedo. One way of continuing this would be for the porn to be set to get sent to everyone on the person’s mailing list. At least one of the recipients would be shocked enough to contact the police …. and the rest not only follows inevitably but even features people who would be acting in all honesty not aware that they are being used as actors in a set up.

mgeo
mgeo
Jan 27, 2023 7:46 AM
Reply to  George Mc

The laws are getting more restrictive. We supposedly must report some types of crime, even when there are no victims. Even the discretion of judges is being reduced.

hotrod31
hotrod31
Jan 27, 2023 10:57 AM
Reply to  mgeo

‘Judges’, unfortunately … are part-of-the-system. Academics, judges, medicos have been deafeningly silent about the things they should be hollering from the proverbial rooftops. Most have become captive to their ‘lifestyles’ and wouldn’t dream of ‘rocking-the-boat’. To say that they have been shameful, would be an understatement …

Howard
Howard
Jan 26, 2023 5:16 PM

Added to the three “revolutions” cited by Adam Scott Wandt and a fourth “revolution” offered by the Whiteheads, I would add a fifth – the very one, in fact, which makes the other four possible.

That would be the public’s overwhelming support of surveillance. As in so many other areas of society, the majority are only too glad to give up a little freedom for a little security.

It isn’t just the Covid “virus” people fear: it’s just about everything. And, unfortunately, they imagine technology will allay those fears.

Velvet Revolution
Velvet Revolution
Jan 26, 2023 5:29 PM
Reply to  Howard

One way to get people used to the fact they are always being surveilled, is to basically come out and tell them they are. After the initial uproar, they get used to it and with the support of the ever-obedient media, people are convinced it is for their own good and if they are not doing anything wrong, they needn’t worry their little heads about it.

End of protest.

When did this (or one of the biggest) revelations in this regard make it to the masses?

The minute Snowden came on the scene.

Ort
Ort
Jan 26, 2023 8:59 PM
Reply to  Howard

I concur, and your point takes me back to a comment I published elsewhere in February, 2014, in response to an article entitled ‘I Want Them To Be Worried We’re Watching… To Never Know When We’re Overhead.‘. Here’s the lede, followed by my response:
____________________________________

“I want them to be worried that we’re watching. I want them to be worried that they never know when we’re overhead.”

That’s what Police Chief Richard Biehl of Dayton, Ohio told the Washington Post while referring to the people of his city as he supported new aerial surveillance technology that would allow his officers to “track every vehicle and person across an area the size of a small city, for several hours at a time.”
____________________________________

Chief Biehl has gotten with the program and internalized it, thus transmogrifying himself into a Personified Panopticon for the imperial Amerikan hive-mind collective.

Unfortunately, these monsters are at least partially created and sustained by a fearful and unreflective public that craves paternalistic authoritarian domination– i.e., a public that’s made to feel constantly afraid and insecure, and believes that high-tech policing is necessary and justified to protect decent folk from a vicious, predatory criminal underclass.

It’s hard to overcome the ostensibly “common-sense” view that the more cameras there are around, the better the chances of at least catching criminals after the fact– and it’s a given that decent, law-abiding folk have nothing to fear from law enforcement/state surveillance.

It’s only “anecdotal”, I know– but a while back an innocent bicyclist was randomly set upon and brutally assaulted by a group of thugs on one of Philadelphia’s riverside drives. It was indeed one of those ugly, pointless violent crimes.

Afterwards there was much discussion about whether a system of surveillance cameras should be installed along these parkways, which include grassy areas bordering the Schuylkill River and have long been family-friendly recreational areas.

The last I heard, this proposal fizzled out because municipal, state, and federal authorities squabbled over the funding source; no one could propose an acceptable way to pay for it. But public opinion was solidly pro-surveillance. Everyone featured in local news “Man Person in the Street” interviews wanted those cameras, and many indignantly complained that they should’ve been put up long ago!

I wish it were otherwise, but my guess is that most of the residents of Dayton aren’t too bothered by Chief Biehl’s perspective. After all, it’s obvious to them that his ominous words are only meant for, and are applicable to, the Bad Guys.

mgeo
mgeo
Jan 27, 2023 7:57 AM
Reply to  Ort

As the article stated, and as was known since at least 2017, the cameras may reduce some petty crimes but do not reduce violent omes.

Ort
Ort
Jan 27, 2023 8:21 PM
Reply to  mgeo

Indeed. I was pointing out that the public clamor for more and better police surveillance is not founded on a rational or factual analysis of the cameras’ effectiveness.

I think the unfortunate attraction for this pseudo-solution is similar to the appeal of the Megadeath Virus of Doom “public-health measures”, including the jabs.

That is, my guess is that too many people would respond to your factual rebuttal by cheerfully, if superciliously, saying things like, “Well, they can’t hurt!”– and, of course, “Better safe than sorry!” 😟

Hemlockfen
Hemlockfen
Jan 26, 2023 4:56 PM

If they had this technology in the 70s, most people would have been arrested and jailed at some point in time. I don’t know how today’s young people can handle it. I would not have lasted long on the “outside”. It is like being in digital jail. All people do stupid stuff all the time. They always have. Why must it be digitally documented? Society is not getting any better with the technology in place. It seems to be worsening, if anything.

S Cooper
S Cooper
Jan 26, 2023 4:34 PM

https://imgflip.com/i/54sjtv

https://imgflip.com/i/31txoe

“A new national pastime, shooting out traffic cameras?”

Hemlockfen
Hemlockfen
Jan 26, 2023 5:02 PM
Reply to  S Cooper

Another excuse for government to develop a gun owner database. A quick search could narrow down the possible suspects based the type of bullet. Bongino has warned about the prospect more than once. Shooting cameras makes complete sense. Probably would be one of the “culprits” if I was a kid today.

Gordon McRae
Gordon McRae
Jan 27, 2023 5:27 AM
Reply to  Hemlockfen

Don’t worry. Anti surveillance technology should be along shortly. We can hope.

wardropper
wardropper
Jan 27, 2023 3:05 PM
Reply to  Gordon McRae

And the patent will be secured by Lockheed . . .