Surveillance Today

Recently an article appeared talking about a research paper and how conversations could be recovered and audio recordings made just by observing vibrations in a lightbulb in your area. Scientists are saying the lightbulb vibrates differently as we are talking and they can discover what we are saying by these different vibrations. For example, if you say the word car, the lightbulb vibration would be mostly the same every time somebody in the room said that. It seems like it is just a matter of matching vibrations to a dictionary of words, but I really don’t know the ins and outs of this technology. By the way this technology is being called Lamphone.

In that same vein, several years ago scientists had admitted they could pick up conversations by just telling how the window glass vibrated in a room where people were talking. Theoretically you could just sit outside of a building, aiming a device at the window of the apartment in which people were talking and even though you are out of audio range the conversation could be recovered. This gives some people and uncomfortable feeling, knowing anything they say in the privacy of their own home could still be recorded without devices being in the home. You have to wonder how many times this may have been used on different embassies around the world and by different players? Did the recent microwave attack on our embassy in Cuba have anything to do with trying to intercept conversations?

It was a lot harder to find out what people were saying in the old days. There were only a few ways of doing this. One way was planting a spy in the room, another was having a place nearby, perhaps leading to a vent in the room where one could place their ear next to. There is also the old method of putting an empty water glass against the outside of the wall of the room people were talking in and placing your ear against it. Today none of this is necessary.

We have more ways of communicating than ever today. We can talk to people in person, talked to them on a house or cell phone, communicate by email or even talk to them on our computers and other computerlike devices. It seems like a lot of work if not impossible to check what people are saying. Project Echelon has been listening to everyone’s phone calls in the entire world. It started in 1971 and became the premier way to monitor phone calls and not only is the United States involved but so are Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom. As technology progressed the job of monitoring all these phone calls has become much easier. It has been estimated about 4,000,000,000 phone calls are made at day on the earth. Today computer hard drives which stored data have gotten so large it would not be a problem using the large capacity ones to store all of phone calls made one day and still have room left. Currently Samsung makes a hard drive which holes almost 31 TB of storage and I bet the US government has privately made even more storage available on some of their  hard drives.

It is very simple for cameras and microphones to be planted in one’s house or place of business and even Mafia kingpins were brought down by recorded conversations taking place in their favorite restaurants. What they didn’t know was the feds had taped microphones under the tables. Microphones and even cameras can be hidden almost everywhere. Someone you’re talking to could have it on his person and you would never know because it would look like something else, such as a tie clip or pendant. The only problem with carrying one of these devices is getting feedback in front of the people you’re trying to record.

It used to be the police would just tap into a phone line you used and hear everything you were saying without you ever knowing they were doing this. They can’t very well do this anymore since most people don’t have a landline. What they can do is use programs like Echelon to watch your phone.

The passing of the Patriot Act eroded many of our rights. One of the reasons is, it has been interpreted very broadly to allow agencies to surveill us. The idea of the act was to prevent terrorism by allowing the government to surveil terrorists. It turns out everyone is being watched especially if you have an automobile. Most of us now use E-Z Pass to pay tolls when we are driving. The data obtained is being used to track people. This way government agencies know where you started out from and where you went. They may not know the exact location you went to after you got off the road, but eventually they would find that out also. One of the things which is now been allowed are roving wiretaps in the name of John Doe. This gives permission for a government agency to tap into any method you have for transmitting a message. I guess having Echelon was not enough for some agencies.

We have been told not to worry about all the cameras because they will never be used in civil litigation. Photos are being taken of our license plates and surveillance cameras in public places are taking our pictures. In some cases, piecing all these photos together actually shows you what direction a person came from and probably where they’re going. Using GPS on cell phones to track people is very easily done.

There is no privacy anymore and anybody who thinks there is, is only fooling themselves. Those days are gone forever and probably will never come back. As many of us know, devices are being worked on that can read our brains. I call this the ultimate assault on any secrets we have left. Humans need to be able to maintain some secrets, it is just human nature because we don’t want others to know our private family dealings.