I’m not going to write too much about this tonight because no one is around and why waste my talent..LOL. But we are being conditioned to accept a state of total surveillance. The government wants to know where you are? They don’t need no stinking probable cause, they just tell a judge that your whereabouts are relevant to an ongoing investigation and voila they can hone in on your cell phone and nail down your position to within 30 feet.
Either we get Congress to pass new laws protecting our privacy or it’s going to be Big Brother all the time.
Hay, the cool kids are still here.
you too can prove it to yourself.
http://www.zapchecker.com/
This little sucker will detect your microwave oven two rooms away. In fact if you live in a urban setting it will show that you do live in constant RF radiation bombardment. Place it on the table next to your cell phone and time the RF bursts as your cell phone interrogates it’s surrounding towers.
http://www.3nw.com/pda/radar_with_cell_phones__look_at_celldar.htm
http://www.braino.org/blog/archives/000758.php
http://www.dailywireless.org/2007/09/21/celldar-monitoring-traffic-via-cell-radiation/
We first have to get a Congress with some spines instead of the candy ass blue dogs who will give shrub anything.
Maybe that’s why Joe Lieberman is so cozy with W…I wonder where Joe was when the Justice Department “pinged” his cell phone??
I’m just trying to figure out why I got a cell phone call from 0000123456 twice…
Boo, a viola is a musical instrument. Or was that a subtle joke and I missed it???
if you want to see some action on fisa and the continuing unwarranted intrusions into your 4th amend. rights, get a sizable number of the 200 million + cell phone users in this country to drop their plans and refuse to use them…talk about an impact!
the teleCONs would change their tune in a ny minute…we’d have a bill on the presidents desk before you could say enessay. [never happen]
dylan said it best: money doesn’t talk, it swears…
lTMF’sA
BADGES?
Just who in the fuck do we think we are?
Buckaroo!
One of many reasons I don’t have a cell phone. I’m probably the least interesting person possible in terms of surveillance- ooh look, she just checked out a book on water quality! But it just feels damn unAmerican to put up with it. I’m ornery that way.
it’s a trap we live in, they have baited, and we showed up ; )
changing life style is one way, but you better have the money on your hip, or a niche that allows you to be without most of the traps.
I’m going to get there again, and counting the days, a watched pot takes a long time to boil…
I’m seriously thinking about the ozarks this round…to stay..
peace be with you all…
wado
No TV. Big Brother can’t watch me while I’m watching them. :pfffft:
No cell phone. If They want to put a leash on me, they’ll damn well not make me pay for it!
No GPS. No FastTrack, no Onstar, no navigator reporting position and trajectory… no car. When they put GPS in sneakers, I’ll go barefoot.
I simply don’t trust my own government to not misuse data. The feds can’t avoid losing massive amounts of it, and I’m tired of being compromised because some idiot left a laptop in his car.
Only insecure authoritarians feel a need to know everything about everybody… so why should I enable control freaks?
In order to do its job of being a cell phone, the cell phone system HAS to track you. It cannot function otherwise.
The decision to use a cell phone is a decision to have the cellphone system track you 24/7 whenever the thing is turned on (which is likely all the time, unless you pull the batteries out). If you are using GPS, (which you certainly should NOT be!) it is tracking you down to the yard of latitude and longitude.
I don’t think people really get GPS: It means your cellphone company, the feds, and your local constable know not only when you visited and how long you spent at the lefty bookstore, but what shelves you perused (bombmaking? organic gardening?) and how long you conversed at the checkout counter. None of this matters unless they take an interest in you, at which point you are totally screwed.
I know we are nearly all American technophiles here, but I have to break to you some hard news:
There are some technologies you CANNOT USE if you value either privacy or freedom (or perhaps life, as well). The folks who run cellphone companies just aren’t trustworthy: You have no practical way of keeping them from selling your information to . . . anyone who will pay for it, not to mention anyone who can flash a badge.
Legislation won’t help much, certainly not against the government, nor even against the large corporations–who is going to enforce it? You simply do not know what country you are living in if you think such a thing is remotely possible.
You can, of course, store the batteries externally, and use the cell phone for the one thing that it is actually good for–emergency phone calls in a real emergency situation. Except during the emergency itself, of course, the phone is off and empty and you take no calls.
Sooner or later, of course, you will cave and start using the thing for “convenience.” And start compromising yourself and your friends.
Sucker.
I listened to a portion of an interesting piece on NPR yesterday about retailers using a fingerprint system for payments. The German students interviewed thought that it was very convenient. No purse or wallet to bother with, just put your finger on a little electronic pad, and voila! Your bank account is debited.
Of course, you must submit your fingerprints and bank info to the database collection and storage business, but what possible problem could that cause? It’s all so, um, what’s the word…..? Convenient!
If someone gets your credit card info, you can invalidate the credit card.
If someone gets the encoding (however it’s done) of your biometric information (fingerprint, retinal print, whatever) what do you do?
Nothing. You are screwed. Totally.
You have a free choice of methods of committing suicide.