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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/youd_better_watch_out_the_surveillance_state_is_making_a_list_and_youre_on_it

You’d Better Watch Out: The Surveillance State Is Making a List, and You’re On It

“He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows when you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness’ sake!”
—“Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”

You’d better watch out—you’d better not pout—you’d better not cry—‘cos I’m telling you why: this Christmas, it’s the Surveillance State that’s making a list and checking it twice, and it won’t matter whether you’ve been bad or good.

You’ll be on this list whether you like it or not.

Mass surveillance is the Deep State’s version of a “gift” that keeps on giving…back to the Deep State.

Geofencing dragnets. Fusion centers. Smart devices. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.

What these add up to is a world in which, on any given day, the average person is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother.

Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by a vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.

This creepy new era of government/corporate spying—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—has been made possible by a global army of techno-tyrants, fusion centers and Peeping Toms.

Consider just a small sampling of the tools being used to track our movements, monitor our spending, and sniff out all the ways in which our thoughts, actions and social circles might land us on the government’s naughty list, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.

Tracking you based on your phone and movements: Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels. For instance, the FBI was able to use geofence data to identify more than 5,000 mobile devices (and their owners) in a 4-acre area around the Capitol on January 6. This latest surveillance tactic could land you in jail for being in the “wrong place and time.” Police are also using cell-site simulators to carry out mass surveillance of protests without the need for a warrant. Moreover, federal agents can now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on your monitor. Malicious hacking software can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the personal business of a target.

Tracking you based on your DNA. DNA technology in the hands of government officials completes our transition to a Surveillance State. If you have the misfortune to leave your DNA traces anywhere a crime has been committed, you’ve already got a file somewhere in some state or federal database—albeit it may be a file without a name. By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. After all, a DNA print reveals everything about “who we are, where we come from, and who we will be.” It can also be used to predict the physical appearance of potential suspects. It’s only a matter of time before the police state’s pursuit of criminals expands into genetic profiling and a preemptive hunt for criminals of the future.

Tracking you based on your face: Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to identify and track someone’s movements in real-time. One particularly controversial software program created by Clearview AI has been used by police, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to collect photos on social media sites for inclusion in a massive facial recognition database. Similarly, biometric software, which relies on one’s unique identifiers (fingerprints, irises, voice prints), is becoming the standard for navigating security lines, as well as bypassing digital locks and gaining access to phones, computers, office buildings, etc. In fact, greater numbers of travelers are opting into programs that rely on their biometrics in order to avoid long waits at airport security. Scientists are also developing lasers that can identify and surveil individuals based on their heartbeats, scent and microbiome.

Tracking you based on your behavior: Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations. One smart “anti-riot” surveillance system purports to predict mass riots and unauthorized public events by using artificial intelligence to analyze social media, news sources, surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.

Tracking you based on your spending and consumer activities: With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time. Consumer surveillance, by which your activities and data in the physical and online realms are tracked and shared with advertisers, has become big business, a $300 billion industry that routinely harvests your data for profit. Corporations such as Target have not only been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years, but the retailer has also funded major surveillance in cities across the country and developed behavioral surveillance algorithms that can determine whether someone’s mannerisms might fit the profile of a thief.

Tracking you based on your public activities: Private corporations in conjunction with police agencies throughout the country have created a web of surveillance that encompasses all major cities in order to monitor large groups of people seamlessly, as in the case of protests and rallies. They are also engaging in extensive online surveillance, looking for any hints of “large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals.” Defense contractors have been at the forefront of this lucrative market. Fusion centers, $330 million-a-year, information-sharing hubs for federal, state and law enforcement agencies, monitor and report such “suspicious” behavior as people buying pallets of bottled water, photographing government buildings, and applying for a pilot’s license as “suspicious activity.”

Tracking you based on your social media activities: Every move you make, especially on social media, is monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line. As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. This obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC News, observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads… the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”

Tracking you based on your social network: Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals. An FBI document obtained by Rolling Stone speaks to the ease with which agents are able to access address book data from Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage services from the accounts of targeted individuals and individuals not under investigation who might have a targeted individual within their network. What this creates is a “guilt by association” society in which we are all as guilty as the most culpable person in our address book.

Tracking you based on your car: License plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, affixed to overpasses, cop cars and throughout business sectors and residential neighborhoods, it allows police to track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture out suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.

Tracking you based on your mail: Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”

Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from these mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.

Don’t believe it.

The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands—haven’t made America any safer. And they certainly aren’t helping to preserve our freedoms.

Indeed, America will never be safe as long as the U.S. government is allowed to shred the Constitution.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57391.htm

The unavoidable crash

The world economy is lurching towards an unprecedented confluence of economic, financial, and debt crises, following the explosion of deficits, borrowing, and leverage in recent decades.

In the private sector, the mountain of debt includes that of households – such as mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, student loans, personal loans; businesses and corporations – bank loans, bond debt, and private debt; and the financial sector – liabilities of bank and non-bank institutions. In the public sector, it includes central, provincial, and local government bonds and other formal liabilities, as well as implicit debts such as unfunded liabilities from pay-as-you-go pension schemes and healthcare systems, all of which will continue to grow as societies age.

Just looking at explicit debts, the figures are staggering. Globally, total private- and public-sector debt as a share of GDP rose from 200 per cent in 1999 to 350 per cent in 2021. The ratio is now 420 per cent across advanced economies, and 330 per cent in China. In the United States, it is 420 per cent, which is higher than during the Great Depression and after World War II.

Of course, debt can boost economic activity if borrowers invest in new capital – machinery, homes, public infrastructure – that yields returns higher than the cost of borrowing. But much borrowing goes simply to finance consumption spending above one’s income on a persistent basis – and that is a recipe for bankruptcy. Moreover, investments in ‘capital’ can also be risky, whether the borrower is a household buying a home at an artificially inflated price, a corporation seeking to expand too quickly regardless of returns, or a government that is spending the money on ‘white elephants’, that is, extravagant but useless infrastructure projects.

OVER-BORROWING

Such over-borrowing has been going on for decades, for various reasons. The democratisation of finance has allowed income-strapped households to finance consumption with debt. Centre-right governments have persistently cut taxes without also cutting spending, while centre-left governments have spent generously on social programmes that aren’t fully funded with sufficient higher taxes. And tax policies that favour debt over equity, abetted by central banks’ ultra-loose monetary and credit policies, have fuelled a spike in borrowing in both the private and public sectors.

Years of quantitative easing and credit easing kept borrowing costs near zero, and in some cases even negative – as in Europe and Japan, until recently. By 2020, negative-yielding dollar-equivalent public debt was US$17 trillion, and in some Nordic countries, even mortgages had negative nominal interest rates.

The explosion of unsustainable debt ratios implied that many borrowers – households, corporations, banks, shadow banks, governments, and even entire countries – were insolvent ‘zombies’ that were being propped up by low interest rates, which kept their debt-servicing costs manageable. During both the 2008 global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis, many insolvent agents that would have gone bankrupt were rescued by zero or negative interest rate policies, quantitative easing and outright fiscal bailouts.

But now, inflation – fed by the same ultra-loose fiscal, monetary, and credit policies – has ended this financial Dawn of the Dead. With central banks forced to increase interest rates in an effort to restore price stability, zombies are experiencing sharp increases in their debt-servicing costs. For many, this represents a triple whammy, because inflation is also eroding real household income and reducing the value of household assets, such as homes and stocks. The same goes for fragile and over-leveraged corporations, financial institutions and governments: they face sharply rising borrowing costs, falling incomes and revenues, and declining asset values all at the same time.

Worse, these developments are coinciding with the return of stagflation – high inflation alongside weak growth. The last time advanced economies experienced such conditions was in the 1970s. But at least back then, debt ratios were very low. Today, we are facing the worst aspects of the 1970s stagflationary shocks alongside the worst aspects of the global financial crisis. And this time, we cannot simply cut interest rates to stimulate demand.

After all, the global economy is being battered by persistent short- and medium-term negative supply shocks that are reducing growth and increasing prices and production costs. These include the pandemic’s disruptions to the supply of labour and goods; the impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine on commodity prices; China’s increasingly disastrous zero-COVID policy; and a dozen other medium-term shocks – from climate change to geopolitical developments – that will create additional stagflationary pressures.

Unlike in the 2008 financial crisis and the early months of COVID-19, simply bailing out private and public agents with loose macro policies would pour more gasolene on the inflationary fire. That means there will be a hard landing – a deep, protracted recession – on top of a severe financial crisis. As asset bubbles burst, debt-servicing ratios spike, and inflation-adjusted incomes fall across households, corporations, and governments, the economic crisis and the financial crash will feed on each other.

LEAST RESISTANCE

To be sure, advanced economies that borrow in their own currency can use a bout of unexpected inflation to reduce the real value of some nominal long-term, fixed-rate debt. With governments unwilling to raise taxes or cut spending to reduce their deficits, central-bank deficit monetisation will once again be seen as the path of least resistance.

But you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Once the inflation genie gets out of the bottle – which is what will happen when central banks abandon the fight in the face of the looming economic and financial crash – nominal and real borrowing costs will surge.

The mother of all stagflationary debt crises can be postponed, not avoided.

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https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/12/14/in-honor-of-a-truth-teller/

In Honor of a Truth Teller 

Richard Gage, who founded Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and grew the membership to 3,000 architects & engineers who know for certain that the official story of the collapse of the three WTC skyscrapers is false, organized an online remembrance on December 9 of David Ray Griffin, a distinguished scholar of impeccable  integrity who recently died. I was invited to participate.  

David Ray Griffin:  Truth Teller

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts, Ph.D.

David Ray Griffin was a man who could differentiate between good and evil, and he recognized the power of evil.  When the event known as 9/11 occurred, Griffin deduced from the inadequacy of the official explanation, and from the evil use of 9/11, both at home and abroad, that the Cheney-Bush neoconservative regime made of 9/11, that much was amiss.  He set aside his work on the philosophy of religion and scientific naturalism to investigate and provide a true account, which he provided in a large number of books, perhaps a dozen.

Others, of course, also contributed to establishing the facts.  Among them are Richard Gage, fearless scientists such as Steven Jones, Niels Harrit, and physicist David Chandler, the others on this program, and Graeme MacQueen who exposed the anthrax deception.  

David Ray Griffin stayed on the case, book after book, and hammered it home.  

People interested enough to pay attention have for the most part concluded that the neoconservatives who occupied the highest offices in the Pentagon, State Department, and National Security Council, all under Cheney’s protection and, thereby, President Bush’s, attacked our country in order to have their “new Pearl Harbor” to free them to decimate the Middle East and North Africa in the interests of Israel.  Of course many other people benefitted.  For example, the military-security complex’s profits and the enemies of the US Constitution. The Bush regime suspended habeas corpus and asserted the medieval right of casting people into prison without evidence presented to a judge and jury and obtaining conviction.  The Obama regime went further and asserted the right of the President of the United States to execute American citizens on suspicion alone without due process.

In my opinion David Ray Griffin was alarmed by the ability of evil to use the American government for evil aims.

I think David Ray Griffin concluded that we had no chance of throwing off the evil that is engulfing us unless the people understood that the narrative given them was false.  He relied on logic to establish the falsity of the official narrative of 9/11.  

The question before us is: how powerful is truth and the logic that supports it? The answer is not reassuring.  Remember the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. All known evidence refutes that he was killed by Oswald.  No known evidence supports the official narrative.  Yet the official narrative still stands.  It stands because no US government, regardless of party in power, will acknowledge a criminal action by the US government.

The event known as 9/11 is also exposed. But the official story remains in place.  It the government doesn’t admit it, historians and “fact checkers” repeat the false accounts as proof that the true accounts are false.  It seems to be the case that it is only the word of the liar that counts.

Those of us, still extant, who respect truth and know that evil cannot be held in check if truth is suppressed, have as our obligation to continue David Ray Griffin’s opposition to the rising power of evil.