Snooping On Us

We can all see our privacy is melting away. It not only has to do with government policies, but it is also about scientific breakthroughs. It seems to me it really began when computers were invented and became common. Every computer which was put online was vulnerable to hacking. Some people claim our privacy was really attacked the first time when the government put Project Echelon into existence. Echelon was designed to spy on telephone calls. Originally it had been developed in the 1960s to spy on the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War. Both sides were actively spying on each other, but then it took a more ominous bent. Someone decided it would be great to use this to spy on everyone. That is the problem with these types of discoveries, there is always someone who wants more and doesn’t care if it violates anyone’s rights. To be honest there wasn’t much privacy anyway in the old days on telephone lines since many people had what was known as a party line which was one line used by several families. You could listen to people talking by just picking up the receiver. Maybe this is the reason Echelon was so easy to put into use, the excuse being phone calls were not really very secure anyway.

When the computers became popular the program along with others was used to tap into all our computer communications including our email. Today Echelon has evolved. It is now a global system which intercepts calls and messages from all over the world. This means there is absolutely no privacy in any of our communications unless ironically we write a letter. I have no proof of what I am about to say, but it is believed by some our snail mail, that is ordinary mail sent through the post office, is being logged. This doesn’t mean read, it means everyone we are writing to and everyone writing to us is being recorded. There is an article by the New York Times in the Times Premier, Times Insider online, which states a reporter discovered a small businessman was having his mail tracked and when he checked further he found this had started over a year ago for all of us.

Devices were developed which can see through walls and listen to your conversations by the vibration of the glass in your windows. While these things might be good for law enforcement they have the chance to be misused and by looking at what else has been happening lately they probably have been. As we know there are cameras everywhere and we are promised they are only for traffic or to prevent crimes, but how long will it be before they will be used in civil court cases? It is only a matter of time before someone uses a photo from one of these cameras to prove a cheating husband or wife was somewhere which makes the case against them.

When I was young privacy existed in most cases. As technology raced on, it chipped away at our privacy and we are now at the point where we will soon have our minds read. Our thoughts will not be our own. Β I think a lot of us have seen the pictures of a subject wearing a rubber cap with all sorts of connections plugged into a computer and the brain’s activity being shown on a monitor. Believe me the powers that be would love to be able to read your mind remotely. I know this sounds crazy, but if we track what has been happing with technology and how secret agencies, the military and governments operate we can see this is probable. While it is true there are people working in these places who are decent God fearing people, these organizations as a whole have no conscience. All they care about is knowing everything about everyone, because knowledge is power. It may look like the United States is alone in this, but the truth is every powerful country is involved and these techniques will be spreading.

Recently a brain decoding device was invented by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. To test it they had subjects read a passage out loud. After they did this they were then asked to read in silently and monitored their brain activity while they were reading it. The researchers said when one reads a passage in a book or newspaper they hear a voice in their head. While the researchers have a noble cause, it is said they are trying to create a way for those who cannot talk to converse, it is obvious this system will be misused and militarized in some way. Mind reading research has been racing ahead at breakneck speed and is moving so fast one has to wonder what is happening with it in some of the black projects? Black projects are secret projects which do not even get the oversight of congress. They are so secret only a few people know the extent of any one project because they are compartmentalized.

If we can read a brain by recognizing the areas which light up during its activity, it will be easy to convert this to speech. Imagine someone being questioned and his brain is being recorded as the questions are being asked and then a recording of what he was thinking is played back. What will come next, remote reading of brains? Think of a device which you could aim at someone a distance away and read their brains. Tell me if there is a spy agency on this earth which wouldn’t love to have this. It might even be possible to somehow do this over a phone someday allowing those eaves droppers to not only record the call, but also the thoughts of those on the phone.

Technology is leading us down a path which is harmful to us. Sure it is great to have our toys and perhaps to be able to do things humans have never done before, but is the cost going to be too great? There are some human who just can’t resist taking advantage of every opportunity, no matter who it hurts as long as they benefit and these are the people who many suspect are really controlling the world and they will never let any chance go by to feather their beds and the way the world is set up today money and power talks and as they say, everyone else walks.