The electronic vice-grip on our civil liberties continues to tighten. From Eric Peters at theburningplatform.com:
Bad enough that we are required by law to present our “papers” – government-issued ID cards, egregiously mislabelled as driver’s licenses – whenever a government bullyboy so demands. Just as in the former East Germany, just as in the former Soviet Union – and in another place whose name it’s hardly necessary to mention.
But in those places – in those times – tyranny was limited somewhat by technology.
In our time, the technology available to tyranny is almost limitless – and the laws which used to at least somewhat protect us have become the means by which technology tyrannizes us.
Corporations, which give a damn about our rights as much as Ted Bundy cared about his victims, provide the technology – and exploit the law – to profit from tyranny.
Government, in a kind of twisted quid pro quo, enacts the laws – and uses the technology created by corporations to intrude ever deeper into our lives.
Think of the Mobile Biometric Driver’s License.
You haven’t heard?
It is the brainchild – and hoped-for profit center – of something called the MorphoTrust – which is one of those corporations that doesn’t give a damn about our rights if there’s a buck to be made from eviscerating them. Morpho – as in morphology – wants to use your smartphone and facial recognition technology it developed to convert your cell phone into a mobile, scannable and downloadable version of your “papers.”
In theory – and in technological fact – a cop would not even need to pull you over to examine your “papers.” He could simply access your phone. Without you even necessarily knowing.
And not just your “papers,” either.
Whatever else you’ve got on your phone. Texts, images, emails and Internet searches. It’s the electronic version of a free-for-all rifling of our persons and effects without our persons or effects even being aware it’s happening.
To continue reading; Your Smartphone, Please
A smartphone now has the role of an electronic MONITORING BRACE for detainees.
I have a psudeo-smartphone, which I keep in a (now illegal to import) slip which blocks all radio. I also leave my driver’s license in my vehicle, which has made more than one aparatchik a little crazy when I say “why should I carry it with me?”. Fuquem. Do everything you can to throw a wrench into their system.
As I have stated in a reply to a previous article. Paraphrasing Churchill, “the Dark Ages may return on the gleaming wings of technology.”