Mass Surveillance and State Control: The Total Information Awareness Project

By Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D. (Psychology Today):

Did you know that The Department of Defense has an ongoing research project to remote control soldier's emotions and tolerance for stress?  A soldier who didn't display fear in dangerous situations and didn't experience fatigue, would make a better fighting machine.  And what better way to turn a human being into a mere machine devoid of personal freedom and autonomy.  In a world that is under total surveillance, there is not likely to be much we could call freedom.  Freedom to speak or think would be freedom to speak or think what the authorities permit.

In my new book, Mass Surveillance and State Control: The Total Information Awareness Project, I detail the ways in which our personal privacy has been and continues to be eroded and how we are now heading toward a brave new world of total information awareness and control.  Now afoot is an interconnected web of trends toward greater and greater modes of control, which will predictably advance with the advent of new technologies and the loosening of constitutional safeguards against the abridgment of privacy.  Accordingly, what is needed now more than ever before in the history of humankind is a vigilant, well organized, grass roots effort to stem this malignant tide before it is too late.
 
Steadily escalating is the program of warrantless wiretapping of millions of American's personal, electronic communications, which began under the Bush administration.  This mass dragnet of personal email messages, phone calls, and Internet searches is now being done with a virtual blank check from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FIS) courts, which were originally created in 1978 to assure that, in gathering foreign intelligence, the government would not abridge the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans.

The Obama administration has blocked law suits against telecom companies such as AT&T for assisting the National Security Agency in this mass dragnet of electronic communications; and it has also sealed up the ability of American citizens to seek redress by suing the federal government, even if it can be shown that such wiretaps had been unlawfully conducted.

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Did you know that Thomson Reuters, which controls Reuter's News Service, now also maintains a massive data warehouse consisting of the personal information of millions of Americans?  This includes health, credit card, and banking records, and virtually all other online, personal data.  Military contractors such as Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) supply data mining software to government agencies such as the NSA, which enables these agencies to analyze the information in this massive database, including integrating it with other personal data such as email and phone conversations, web sites you have visited, and Internet searches you have conducted.

Did you consider that the software, which integrates and parses through this massive web of information, is prone to yielding false positives?  In other words, by some fluke, you can end up on a government watch list, or worse, branded an "unprivileged enemy belligerent," taken into custody, and given "enhanced interrogated."  It is no longer a matter of thinking you have nothing to hide when everyone is now considered a terrorist suspect.

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