"The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. [...] [T]he capacity to assert social and political control over the individual will vastly increase. It will soon be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and to maintain up-to-date, complete files, containing even the most personal information about the health or personal behavior of the citizen in addition to more customary data. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities."
-Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages, 1971."that [surveillance] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology ... I don't want to see this country ever go across that bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [NSA] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return." - Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho), 1975, quoted in James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace.
“[W]hen DNA sequencing technologies progress further, direct characterization of very large DNA segments, and possibly even whole genomes, will become feasible and practical and will allow precise individual identification.”
-The Human Genome Project
“New technologies which were originally conceived for the defense and intelligence sectors have after the cold war rapidly spread into the law enforcement and private sectors …there has been a political shift in targeting in recent years. Instead of investigating crime (which is reactive) law enforcement agencies are increasingly tracking certain social classes and races of people living in red-lined areas before a crime is committed…”
-Scientific and Technological Options Assessment, 'An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control', September 1998.
"we can almost read people’s thoughts".
-Denis Le Bihan, quoted in 'Advances in Neuroscience May Threaten Human Rights', Nature, 1-22-1998.
“Many of the non-lethal weapons under consideration utilize infrasound or electromagnetic energy (including lasers, microwave or radio-frequency radiation, or visible light pulsed at brain-wave frequency) for their effects. These weapons are said to cause temporary or permanent blinding, interference with mental processes, modification of behavior and emotional response, seizures, severe pain, dizziness, nausea and diarrhea, or disruption of internal organ functions in various other ways."
- Steve Aftergood, The Softkill Fallacy, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, v. 50(5) pp 40-45, Sept/Oct 1994.
"Techniques such as Genetic engineering, psychoactive drugs and electronic control of the brain make possible a transformation of the species into docile, fully-obedient, 'safe' organisms."
-William Sims Bainbridge, Deputy Director of The National Science Foundation.
"The convergence of Web technology, wireless networks and portable client devices provide new opportunities for computer communications systems designs. At HP Labs we have been exploring these opportunities through an infrastructure to support “ web presence” for people, places and things. Our goal is a bridge between the World Wide Web and the physical world we inhabit... It also includes the ability to provide people, places and things – electronic or otherwise – with a web resource that is used to store information about them and which is automatically correlated with their physical presence." -Hewlett Packard: People, Places, Things: Web Presence for the Real World
"People will have to
accommodate themselves with the idea that their lives will be highly
documented and that records provided both knowingly and unknowingly are
part of a global digital future." -Erica Orange, Mining
Information from the Data Clouds, The
Futurist, July-August edition
"If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him".-Cardinal Richelieu
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