On Saturday, we talked about how you are being followed on the internet, even if you think you aren’t. Yes, I know there are plenty of people out there who claim they can’t be tracked because of their elite computer skills. All evidence says they are wrong, but I won’t be able to convince them otherwise, so I won’t try. A great example is how I replaced my electronic locks on my safe with mechanical locks. That step makes it more difficult to get in, but not impossible. Sure, there are things I can do to make it harder to get in, but I can never make it impossible.
It gets worse than that- you are being followed in meat space, as well, whether you realize it or not, and it isn’t just license plate readers. As you travel, the things that travel with you are constantly emitting electronic signals unique to you, and those are being used to monitor your every move.
Your Bluetooth earbuds, your cell phone, even the tire pressure monitors in your car (which have been required in every car made in the past 25 years), are constantly sending out electronic signals that can and are being used to track your movements. They are even using the chips embedded in your pets to keep track of your location. It’s pervasive, and there is no hiding from it. Defense contractor Leonardo is promoting a new technology called SignalTrace that will package plate cameras with sensors that can scrape unique identifiers tied to your smart devices and make that data available to law enforcement:
SignalTrace works by linking devices that regularly travel together, correlating them to license plates, then using them to track where you are. We’ve all been aware for years how cameras could track a car’s whereabouts at any given time. Throw in personal identifiers, and the job of tying an individual or multiple people to that vehicle becomes trivial, and not something anyone can simply opt out of. Now they know where you are, and how you got there. Like Flock is already doing, if the company’s tracking systems decide you are acting suspiciously, they report their findings to the government.
The company claims to “capture device frequencies emitted into the air” and “does not decrypt or capture the contents of the devices or their communications.” Which is how these firms are able to evade culpability for the surveillance they enable. Whether they’re cracking encryption or not, the results are the same: they know where you go, who you associate with, and combined with your internet habits, what you are doing there.
The companies are using the camera network not just to investigate based on suspicion, but to generate suspicion itself- it’s a way for police to make an end run around Constitutional protections. The company isn’t subject to protections against search and seizure, so they scoop up all of this information, then present it to the police, and there isn’t a damned thing you can do about it.
How difficult is it to track someone’s entire life? I can match your car, your earbuds, your cell phone, and every other piece of electronics you own. This allows me to match your online life with your physical one. This is why the people who were conspiring with Trump left all electronics at home and communicated only through 2 meter HAM radios. Once the powers that be know who you are, they can read all of your traffic. The Feds have been tapping the phones of the Portland Antifa crowd. Well, not exactly tapping. They cloned the SIM cards of protesters that they came in contact with, and then were able to intercept calls made to that device. The fact that none of them have been arrested makes one wonder, but that’s off topic for this post.
Predictably, the police are already misusing this technology. In Orlando, a woman was jailed for 13 days when vehicle tracking said she was the one who caused a deadly accident before fleeing the scene. All the cops did was scan the database for every car matching the description of the one fleeing the scene, and Lindsay Isaacs’ black Dodge Durango had recently driven through the area, so police found and arrested her. It turns out that her car had driven through 2 minutes before the accident, and she had no idea that a deadly crash had even occurred. When FHP caught up with her, there was no damage to her car, but that didn’t matter, the cops merely lied and claimed there was. It took her a month to clear her name. It turns out, the vehicle actually involved in the crash was a maroon Durango. She is suing the FHP.
“I feel there’s really no way of fixing what they did to me. It will always hurt me. My reputation was ruined. I’m still receiving death threats and hate. It’s very hard,” Isaacs said.
Alisa Lee Montalvo, 47, of Deltona, was arrested and charged with 9 crimes for that crash, including three counts of vehicular homicide, three counts of leaving the scene of a crash with death, leaving the scene of a crash involving serious bodily injury, reckless driving, and tampering with evidence. (As an aside, in my opinion, there is a good chance she will walk. If I were her attorney, I would introduce to the jury evidence that the police lied to arrest someone else for this crash, then I would attempt to convince the jury that, if they lied in this case once and manufactured evidence, what’s to say they aren’t doing so now? Reasonable doubt all day.)
There are even those who say it’s no big deal, because their shopping habits are benign, the equivalent of “If you have nothing to hide, you should let the police search your home,” but the troubling part isn’t the technology itself or whether or not you value privacy—it’s the complete absence of meaningful limits on how it is being deployed. Every year brings new ways to collect, store, and analyze information about ordinary people, while the legal protections meant to restrain government surveillance continue to erode.
They can paint a pretty accurate picture of your entire life by knowing what you read, your shopping habits, your political opinions, and your whereabouts at any time of the day, and given the time and access, the powers that be can find a law you’ve broken. That’s a certainty.
Each and every one of us is responsible for reading, understanding and following over one million pages of laws, regulations, and court decisions- with complete understanding. If one were to begin studying these laws at age 12 by reading 50 pages per day, by age 67 you would have read all of them. The only problem is that, at the current rate, the government would have added another 500,000 pages of laws and 28 years of reading to your quest while you were busy reading. s of the year 2000 (the last time it was counted) there were nearly 1.7 million regulatory crimes that a person could commit in this country.
If you are spraying insect killer on some ants using a bug spray that says spray from 6 inches away, but you spray from 8 inches, you are a Federal criminal, because failure to follow label instructions is a Federal crime. If you are buying a gun and you live in Florida, you had better use the abbreviation of FL as your address, because using the old abbreviation of FLA is a felony and can land you in prison.
Why is this happening? Ayn Rand gives us an insight into this:
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
Truer words were never spoken. More laws equals more crimes, which equals more criminals, which equals more power for those enforcing the laws.
The result is a system where everyone is monitored, everyone is cataloged, and anyone can become a suspect based on flawed data, bad assumptions, or outright misconduct. History has repeatedly shown that powers granted in the name of public safety rarely remain confined to their original purpose. Once a surveillance system is built, the pressure is always to expand it, not dismantle it. The question is no longer whether the government can track your movements and associations in near real time; it is whether there will be any meaningful safeguards left when that power is inevitably abused.
The answer to that is, of course, there aren’t, nor will there be.
There is only one destination for the path we are on: tyranny, enslavement, and the complete control of everything. That will eventually lead to revolution. Whether or not that will happen in my productive lifetime is anyone’s guess.
