BIG BROTHER’S TECHNOLOGY

In light of recent legislation, the only factor required today to turn the United States into the type of dictatorship described in the novel 1984 is the technology to do so. Such technology was largely unavailable in 1984 but it is today.

Consider the gradual encroachment made by the government in assigning each and every member of the United States a computer or identity number:

■ 1935—Social Security initiated.

■ 1936—The current Social Security numbering system began.

■ 1962—The IRS started requiring Social Security numbers on tax returns even though Social Security cards plainly stated the number was “Not For Identification.”

■ 1970—All banks were required to have your Social Security number.

■ 1971—Militar y ID numbers were changed to Social Security numbers.

■ 1982—Anyone receiving any sort of government largess was required to obtain a Social Security number.

■ 1984—Any person being declared a dependent for IRS tax purposes required a Social Security number. Within two years, even new-born babies were required to have a Social Security number under penalty of fine.

A national identification card has been talked about for years but civil libertarians have consistently cooled the public's receptivity to such a concept—until now.

In mid-2002, even as the initial fear over 9/11 began to subside, Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia, citing increased concerns over terrorism, introduced legislation in Congress called the Driver's License Modernization Act of 2002 (H.R. 4633). This bill was styled as a law, which would set uniform standards for drivers’ licenses in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

But it also included provisions to establish a national database and identification system. This bill codified a plan previously sent by Congress to the Department of Transportation urging the development of electronic “smart” drivers’ licenses that contain embedded programmable computer chips that could be checked by law enforcement authorities across the nation.

“So it's more of a national ID system [emphasis in the original], a linking of Department of Motor Vehicles—and the records they keep on you—across state lines, with some extra on-card security measures thrown in,” wrote Frank Pellegrini of Time.com. “The plan, Congress hopes, will be cheaper and easier to implement, and less likely to incur the talk-show ire of civil libertarians and states’ rights purists (the same type who squawked in 1908 when the FBI was born). But the approach is mere stealth—50 different state ID cards all linked together is pretty much the same as one national ID card, just as all those new quarters are still worth 25 cents each, no matter which state is on the back.”

The House bill also states the new ID card must “conform to any other standards issued by the Secretary [of Transportation],” an open invitation for bureaucrat tinkering.

Libertarians rejoiced when Moran's bill failed to become law but warned that most states now issue drivers’ licenses with a magnetic strip capable of carrying computer-coded information.

New York City became one of the first major cities to announce plans to try out micro-chipped identification cards for the city's 250,000 employees. Some 50,000 officers and workers for the NYPD were scheduled to receive ID cards.

The state-of-the-art plastic cards contain microchips, holograms and other security devices to prevent theft and to track employee work hours. On the front of this picture ID is the Statue of Liberty and two chips, one containing fingerprints and handprints and the other filled with personal information, including blood type and emergency telephone numbers. Police officials said eventually the ID cards will used in conjunction with “biometric” hand scanners to ensure the person bearing the card is the correct one. They also hoped to save money in computing pay-checks by using the cards to keep track of employee hours.

Pellegrini and others have warned that the real fight will come over when and where citizens will have to show such IDs. “The average American's driver's license gets a pretty good workout these days. He said, “certainly far more than traffic laws themselves would seem to warrant—but you can only get arrested for driving without one. If the US domestic response starts to resemble Zimbabwe's, which passed a law in November [2001] making it compulsory to carry ID on pain of fine or imprisonment, well, that's something to worry about.”

According to author Steven Yates, a teaching fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, “The long and the short of it is, the Driver's License Modernization Act of 2002 would bring us closer than ever before to establishing a comprehensive national ID system. The present excuse is that extreme measures are necessary to ‘protect us against terrorism.’

“It is a testimony to how much this country has changed since 9/11 that no one has visibly challenged H.R. 4633 as unconstitutional and incompatible with the principles of a free society. The 1990s gave us the obviously corrupt Clinton Regime and a significant opposition to federal power grabs. Now it's Bush the Younger, beloved of neocons [neo-conservatives] who see him as one of their own and believe he can do no wrong… Clearly, the slow encirclement of law-abiding US citizens with national ID technology would advance such a cause [globalism or The New World Order] while doing little if anything to safeguard us against terrorism.”

Yates also offered up a vision of the near future that disturbs many thinking people. He noted that if the feds really wanted to stifle dissent, they could ‘freeze’ the dissident's assets by reprogramming his database information. Scanners would not recognize him and he would become officially invisible, unable to drive or work legally, have a bank account, buy anything on credit, or even see a doctor. “Do we want to trust anyone [emphasis in the original] with that kind of power?” he asked.

It is just such a prospect that concerns many Christians, who see government control through computers and identification computer chips as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy warning that no one will be able to conduct business without the “mark of the Beast.” This theme also was the premise of the popular Sandra Bullock film, The Net, and the Left Behind book series which have sold more than 50 million copies.

Lest anyone think this is naïve or even paranoid nonsense, consider that in late October 2002, Applied Digital Solutions, Inc., a high-tech development company headquartered in Palm Beach, FL, announced the launching of a national promotion for its new subdermal personal verification microchip. Entitled “Get Chipped,” the promotion is hyping a device that can be implanted under a person's skin to transmit data to various locations. Describing the “VeriChip,” company literature states it is “an implantable, 12mm by 2.1mm radio frequency device…about the size of the point of a typical ballpoint pen. It contains a unique verification number. Utilizing an external scanner, radio frequency energy passes through the skin energizing the dormant VeriChip, which then emits a radio frequency signal containing the verification number. The number is displayed by the scanner and transmitted to a secure data storage site by authorized personnel via telephone or Internet.”

In addition to “VeriChip Centers” in Arizona, Texas and Florida, the firm also fields the “ChipMobile,” a motorized marketing and “chipping” vehicle. The new “Get Chipped” campaign was launched just days after the Food and Drug Administration ruled that the chip is not a regulated medical device.

Uses for the chip include controlling access to non-public facilities such as government buildings and installations, nuclear power plants, national research laboratories, correctional institutions and transportation hubs, either by itself or in conjunction with exiting security technologies such as retina scanners, thumbprint scanners or face recognition devices. Company officials envision the chip will come to be used in a wide range of consumer products including PC and laptop computers, personal vehicles, cell phones, homes and apartments. They said the implanted chip will help stop identity theft and aid in the war against terrorists.

By early 2006, fears of the chip became reality when a Cincinnati video surveillance firm, CityWatcher.com, began to require its employees to implant the VeriChip device in their arm.

Several members of Congress seemed quite at home with the idea of a national ID card or chip. Rep. Jane Harman of California said, “I think this issue must be looked at. We don't automatically have to call it a national ID card, that's a radioactive term, but we can certainly think about smart cards for essential functions, but we need the database to support that.”

This need for a national database was addressed in the USA PATRIOT Act, Which authorized $150 million in tax money for the “expansion of the Regional Information Sharing System [to] facilitate federal-state-local law enforcement response related to terrorist acts.”

Asked if she thought the public was ready for such measures, Harman replied, “I think most people are really there. Keep in mind that if we have a second wave of attacks. The folks who are raising objections will probably lose, totally.”

Others agree, such as District of Columbia Mayor Anthony A. Williams, who only added to the fear factor when he warned, “We are in a new…really dangerous world now, and we have to maintain a higher level of security.”

Williams’ plan for increased security was to emulate such cities as London and Sydney by installing hundreds of video cameras throughout the city of Washington, all linked to a central command office. Williams predicted that Washington eventually will have such a surveillance system as England which boasts more than two million cameras in airports, train stations, streets and neighborhoods.

Asked if such a scheme would seriously impact individual civil rights, Williams admitted, “There will be trade-offs.”

The Nevada Supreme Court in spring 2002 ruled it was okay for police to hide electronic monitoring devices on people's vehicles without a warrant for as long as they want. The court ruled that there is “no reasonable expectation of privacy” on the outside of one's vehicle and that attaching an electronic device to a man's car bumper did not constitute unreasonable search or seizure. In early 2004, a Louisiana court ruled it was permissible for police there to make warrantless searches of homes and business even without probable cause.

Then there must be some consideration of eavesdropping technology, which includes the two greatest electronic threats to privacy and individual freedom: “Echelon” and “Tempest.”

“The secret is out,” wrote Jim Wilson in Popular Mechanics. “Two powerful intelligence gathering tools that the United States created to eavesdrop on Soviet leaders and to track KGB spies are now being used to monitor Americans.”

Echelon, the previously discussed global eavesdropping satellite network and massive super computer system, is operated from the Maryland headquarters of the National Security Agency. It intercepts and analyzes phone calls, faxes and email sent to and from the United States, both, with or without encryption. Encrypted messages are first decrypted and then joined with clear messages. The total is then checked by software known as “Dictionary” for “trigger words.” Such terms as nuclear bomb, al Qaeda, Hamas, anthrax, etc. are then shuttled to appropriate agencies for analysis.

Although speculation and warnings about Echelon were circulating on the Internet for a number of years, it was not until 2001 that the US Government finally admitted to its existence. This came about because of high-profile investigations in Europe where it was discovered that Echelon had been used to spy on Airbus Industries and Thomson-CSF, two European companies. In actuality, the government had been using an early version of Echelon even as it was evolving into the futuristic tool of today. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon used National Security Agency (NSA) technology to gather files on thousands of American citizens and more than 1,000 organizations, mostly those opposed to the Vietnam War. In a program called “Operation Shamrock,” the NSA collected and monitored nearly every international telegram sent from New York.

Although paid for primarily by US taxpayers, Echelon is now multinational, involving overseas clients such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and even Italy and Turkey. Information gleaned from Echelon flows mostly to the CIA. According to investigator Jim Wilson, “Based on what is known about the location of Echelon bases and satellites, it is estimated that there is a ninety percent chance that NSA is listening when you pick up the phone to place or answer an overseas call. In theory, but obviously not in practice, Echelon's supercomputers are so fast, they could identify Saddam Hussein by the sound of his voice the moment he begins speaking on the phone.”

Amazing as all this may sound to those unfamiliar with Echelon, the sheer fact that the government now acknowledges it may indicate that it already has become obsolete, largely due to burgeoning Internet traffic. Researchers now believe that Echelon may be phased out in favor of a ground-based technology known as “Tempest,” which secretly reads the displays on personal computers, cash registers, television sets and automated teller machines (ATMs).