Published to TLB by TABU
Big Brother ‘Smart’ Cities: Denver vies to become the Future of Police States
(also home to the Occult Denver Airport and mass Deep Underground Military Bases (DUMB)
There is a town 31 miles west of Tokyo where street lights turn on as people walk past at night. Rooftop solar panels power the hundred-plus homes during the day, while fuel cells and batteries take over in the evenings at this year-old community on the site of a former Panasonic factory.
Public transportation is in walking distance, although electric cars and bicycles are available to borrow. And now, this smart-city experiment known as the Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town is coming to Denver from Japan.
Panasonic has taken the lead in defining what makes a city smart. And in Colorado, far from Fujisawa and a population that is four times more dense than Denver, Panasonic isn’t using the same format. Camera monitors with accurate facial recognition? With privacy concerns, developers expect something less obtrusive.
Shared cars available to borrow? Shuttles are more likely, plus there will be parking garages and lots. Energy-saving street lights that light up only when people walk by? Too many liability issues here, Doyle said. However, dimming the street lights may be a possibility.
The Future Is Smart Dust Cities that Monitor and Control All (for your own safety, security and convenience, of course)
Why even bother attaching sensors to actual things? What if they just floated all around us in.
The “Internet of Things”—or the idea of connecting all machinery, buildings, and stuff, together into one big sensing, recording, and data-logging mega-network—is a hot concept in industry at the moment. Companies like General Electric and Cisco are busy making a node of everything. But, to some people, the “Internet of Things” is yesterday’s buzz-topic. The future is even more ubiquity (if that’s possible). It’s something called Smart Dust.
That’s right. “Smart” and then “Dust.” What in the world is that? “Sensors that float in the air throughout the entire city and track movement, biometric indicators, temperature change, and chemical composition of everything in their city,” as Dan Rowinski, writing in ReadWrite Future Tech, explains.
That’s much better than a few sensors here and there:
Putting sensors on stuff? Boring. What if the sensors were in the air, everywhere? They could monitor everything—temperature, humidity, chemical signatures, movement, brainwaves—everything.
New cars to record your iris, fingerprints, voice and blood pressure!
According to Biometricupdate.com, Eyelock’s iris authentication process takes less than five seconds to complete.
S.F. seeks face-detecting cameras to check streets
(note: Samsung, the same company that uses their TV’s to spy on you and record you and family in your home!)
The Samsung Techwin security cameras that the agency is seeking can detect multiple faces at a time, notice changes in scenery and alert viewers when people cross a designated line, according to company marketing materials.
Those technical specifications could make the cameras a useful surveillance tool — making the devices a cause for concern among privacy activists who worry they could facilitate mass government snooping.
“San Francisco thought they were upgrading their 18,000 lamps with LEDs and a wireless control system, when they realized that they were in fact laying the groundwork for the future intelligent public space,” LLGA cofounder Sascha Haselmeyer tells Open Source Cities.
San Francisco isn’t the first city to bring this new form of surveillance to light — literally — but it might be the biggest. In 2011, Farmington Hills, Michigan became the first city in the US to rely on something called the Intellistreets project to watch over pedestrians. For $3,000 a piece, those high-tech luminaries don’t just provide light, but also record audio and video, all data that can be sent from device to device.
Biometric Banking: Iris Scanners Coming to ATMs, Developed by Company Accused of Election Fraud
University of California President Janet Napolitano Ordered Spyware Installed on UC Data Networks
(and why did the UC system hire former Dept of Homeland Insecurity as their Chief???
Private companies are making huge profits from every part of our justice system
Data Mining Students Through Common Core
Today, private companies hold contracts that allow them to profit from all corners of America’s criminal justice system. Consequently, many people charged with crimes are exposed to the profit-seeking of companies every step of the way, from entering the system to being released. These graphics depict the possible paths of people charged with different offenses, revealing the various privatized services provided by the corrections industry
Private Corporation Giving Cops Free License Plate Scanners in Exchange for All Data they Collect
Texas police departments are conspiring with a private company called Vigilant Solutions in an outrageous scheme to maximize the extortion of citizens, while collecting reams of personal information to use for commercial profit. In the deal—dubbed “warrant redemption”—Texas law enforcement agencies get free automated license plate readers (ALPRs) as well as access to Vigilant’s massive database and analytical tools. In exchange for this, police departments give Vigilant all of the data they collect on drivers, along with access to information about all outstanding court fees. The cops don’t pay a dime, and Vigilant uses this information for nearly unlimited commercial purposes.
Big Brother is having a field day in Fresno [California] with scary surveillance technology
Fresno’s [California] police department is now using technology to assess the threat levels of its residents. Utilizing software that analyzes a variety of data, including social media postings, a threat level can be assigned pretty much the same way a credit score is assigned.
Fresno police swear by their system. It’s housed in a control room that brings to mind the one that Batman (Christian Bale) put Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) in charge of in an effort to key in on The Joker (Heath Ledger) in The Dark Knight. Oh yeah … it’s that kind of party. According to the Washington Post:
“On 57 monitors that cover the walls of the center, operators zoomed and panned an array of roughly 200 police cameras perched across the city. They could dial up 800 more feeds from the city’s schools and traffic cameras, and they soon hope to add 400 more streams from cameras worn on officers’ bodies and from thousands from local businesses that have surveillance systems.”
“The cameras were only one tool at the ready. Officers could trawl a private database that has recorded more than 2 billion scans of vehicle licenses plates and locations nationwide. If gunshots were fired, a system called Shot Spotter could triangulate the location using microphones strung around the city. Another program, called Media Sonar, crawled social media looking for illicit activity. Police used it to monitor individuals, threats to schools and hash-tags related to gangs.”
Big Government Demanding Employers Get Employees Healthy or Else Pay Fines
It may be an offer employees simply can no longer refuse.
Workers increasingly are being told by their companies to undergo health screenings and enroll in wellness programs, as a way to curb insurance costs. Many employees now face stiff financial penalties — often in the form of higher premiums — if they do not have their cholesterol checked or join programs to lose weight or better manage diabetes.
And a ruling late last month by a federal judge in Wisconsin is likely to further embolden companies to prod workers to join these programs, despite growing concerns over employee privacy and health management.
The court decision is the latest setback for the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which in the last few years has pursued legal action against programs it says violated federal anti-discrimination laws.
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TLB recommends other informative articles at TABU; Towards A Better Understanding
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