Complete Control, (Scientific Dictatorship), 2005.
 Complete Control, (Scientific Dictatorship), 2005. “The eye you see isn’t an eye because you see it; it’s an eye because it sees you.” -Antonio Machado (1875- 1939),
There is no road, translation Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney, 2003, page 76. "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: America’s role in the Technetronic Era, 1971, page "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 The Puzzle Palace, James Bamford, 1982, page 477. “Counting
up sleepers…? Just how do we do it…?
Really
quite simply. There’s nothing much to it.
We
found how many, we learn the amount
By an
Audio-Te-ly-O-Tally-O Count. On a
mountain, halfway between Reno and Rome,
We
have a machine in a Plexiglas dome,
Which
listens and looks into everyone’s home.
And
whenever it sees a new sleeper go flop, It jiggles and lets a new Biggel-Ball
drop.
Our
chap counts these balls as they plup in a cup.
And
that’s how we know who is down and who’s up.”
-Dr. Seuss,
Sleep Book, 1962. “The real issue at stake is not personal privacy, which is an ill defined concept, greatly varying according to the cultural context. It is power gains of bureaucracies, both private and public, at the expense of individuals and the non-organized sectors of society, by means of gathering of information through direct observation and by means of intensive record keeping.” -Klaus Lenk, Information
Technology and Society, in Microelectronics and Society, Gunter Friedrichs,
ed., 1982, page 284. "One of the most suprising things about the ongoing coverage of surveillance in the popular media is that in the media's rush to quote a privacy advocate on the latest loss to privacy, we hardly ever hear about what must be one of the most important issues of all: the ongoing shifts of power and domination inherent in the tooling and retooling of surveillance programs...the turn to the computerization of surveillance and administration represents a revolutionary shift in administrative power of the state system. As similar trends occur in the workplace, the schools, the streets, and the markets for things like insurance and healthcare, it seems remarkable that the American discussion of surveillance is virtually silent on the transformations of power that are manifest in these changes." -John Gilliom, Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy, 2001, page 128-129. "...information technologies are control technologies,..." -Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., The Surveillance Society: Information Technology and Bureaucratic Control, Journal of Communication, 39 (3), Summer, 1989, page 65. “Any type of organism can be identified by examination of DNA sequences unique to that species. Identifying individuals is less precise, although when 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.” -Human Genome Project Information, DNA Forensics, U.S. Department of Energy Genome Program's Biological and Environmental Research Information System, October 09, 2009. “DNA is to the Twenty-First century what fingerprinting was to the Twentieth. The widespread use of DNA evidence is the future of law enforcement in this country.” -Deborah
Daniels, Assistant United States Attorney General for Justice Programs, quoted
in ‘White House seeks to expand DNA database’, USA Today, Richard Willing, March
15, 2003. “Biometrics are not the first technical effort to connect bodies to identities. Several key nineteenth-century developments in identification systems evidence a perceived need to use the body itself as a marker of identity at this time of modern state expansion. These included the application of photography for identification purposes, the relatively short-lived and sporadically applied method of anthropometry, and the much more successful and enduring scientific method of dactyloscopy, or fingerprinting. While these efforts to devise identification systems were motivated by the problem of identifying criminals and criminal recidivists, the imperative to identify criminals, and the systems elaborated to do so, overlapped with systematic state efforts to identify and distinguish between citizens and non-citizens. In the United States as elsewhere, fear of criminals and fear of foreigners blended into one another…Computerized forms of bodily identification are in many ways consistent with these earlier state efforts, and similarly tied to cultural preoccupations with constructing the limits and possibilities of the nation-state.” -Kelly Gates, The Past
Perfect Promise of Facial Recognition Technology, Institute of Communications
Research University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ACDIS Occasional Paper,
2004, page 5. “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…” -Developments in Surveillance Technology, An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control, Scientific and Technological Options Assessment, January 6, 1998, page 9. "we can almost read people’s thoughts". -Denis Le Bihan, researcher at the French Atomic Energy Commission, quoted in 'Advances in Neuroscience May Threaten Human Rights', Nature, January 22, 1998, page 316. "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 Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, Religions for a Galactic Civilization, in Science Fiction and Space Futures, Eugene M. Emme, ed., 1982, page 188. “Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.” -Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society, 1953, page 50. "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, 2001, page 1. “Standardization is essential for the mass deployment and diffusion of any technology….When everyday items come equipped with some or all of the five senses (such as sight and smell) combined with computing and communication capabilities, concepts of data request and data consent risk becoming outdated. Invisible and constant data exchange between things and people, and between things and other things, will occur unknown to the owners and originators of such data. The sheer scale and capacity of the new technologies will magnify this problem. Who will ultimately control the data collected by all the eyes and ears embedded in the environment surrounding us?” -ITU Internet Reports 2005: The Internet of Things –
Executive Summary, November, 2005, page 8. "The revolution in urban surveillance will reach the next generation of control once reliable face recognition comes in. It will initially be introduced at stationary locations, like turnstiles, customs points, security gateways etc. to enable a standard full face recognition to take place...We are at the beginning of a revolution in 'algorithmic surveillance' - effectively data analysis via complex algorithms which enable automatic recognition and tracking. Such automation not only widens the surveillance net, it narrows the mesh." -Algorithmic Surveillance Systems, An Appraisal of the
Technologies of Political Control, Scientific and Technological Options
Assessment, September 1998.
"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… This massive cluster of networked data will eventually become so pervasive and powerful that it will respect no physical boundaries -- and perhaps no current laws. Once this information is stored in one or more cloud-based databases, it may be accessed and used in ways that individuals never envisioned or intended." -Erica Orange, Mining Information from the Data Clouds, The Futurist, v. 43, no. 4, July/August 2009, p. 21. "If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him". -Armand Jean du Plessis, Duke and Cardinal de Richelieu, French statesman and politician (1585-1642). Be the first to post a comment. | ||||||||||||
