Is The Goverment Spying On Us ?

[phoneyLogic]

I think the whole supervising is actually great. Just imagine, in the near future you`ll have camereas with face scan ability, everything you buy, drink and eat will be stored by using your credit card. All the data of your visits at the doctors will be stored for your whole life. Yeah, noone is sitting behind the cameras, but there will be programs which will analyse the whole data automaticly and you'll be tracked. You even get chip marks for your trash bin (I actually have already one).

 

All in all this will have an enormous potential to track you full life into the smalest details. This is freaking awesome. They read your post, they track your way from early morning to evening every day in your life. We will learn so much about mankind. We just need to bring all data together and when we need to analyse the whole bunch and we know what you are probaply thinking and what you are doing the next time :)

[jaysus]

officially the governemnt in the GDR was democratic just like ours/yours... you just didnt really have a choice for whom to vote lol... well we still dont actually -.-

 

and yes, the STASI (Staatssicherheit ~ Country Security) was somekind of secret police or one may say FBI, BKA or somin along those lines, which had the job to "protect the country"

however they were able to recruit about 30-50% of the citizens to spy on their neighbours, kids, wifes and so on simply because the sheeple thought just like you, well, we have nothing to hide right? sucks tho if your husband gets deported never to be seen again the next day you told your superior that he watched west german tv, similiar to carter era usa and his commie hunt, just the other way around...

my neighbours were all stasi for example lol, my grandpa was murdered by them for gaining a bit too much knowledge about some uranium deposits right in the city, my parents were forced to leave the country and our property was confiscated, still dont have it back and prolly never will...

one may think the west might be better, well think again, i nearly landed in jail due to a quarrel bout a girl with some other dude whose father was a cop, id have to pay about 3000 additional euro now to make a drivers liscence due to that poo and get explicitly controlled at airports and the like just due that "data" that is stored...

which may be a small but nevertheless an example of information abuse and the reuslting consequences... once you miss a flight and have to sleep on a bench at an airport due to your data being everywhere you may understand ;)

 

see the problem lies within the system, you never know what intentions your government and its puppets follow or what ideology will be predominant next year, they are politicans or bureaucrats afterall and not reasonable people who look for the best for all.

they follow certain goals which may not be as democratic and liberal as we are made to or want to believe.

 

our current governemnt which was elected about 5yrs ago changed the whole constitution and basicly made it pointless as now everything can be and gets countered within the same article, that was never in the news or anything, so where would here be the surveillance? it has to go both ways at least...

 

its also not about me being paranoid, i dont force any rules or surveillance cams on any one, its the opposite, those that cry for more surveillance are paranoid id say ;)

 

another example,

when i was in egypt a few years back they were all kinda crazy bout terrorists, which may have been valid afterall, anyway, eveywhere you went you had guards at every corner carrying AKs, the cairo museum was the best, 3 security rings, one with bomb sniffing digs, one with scanners and one with human guards... however if someone really wanted to attack that museum he would just have needed to climb the next best roof and he would have been able to shoot straight from the entrance to the end of that museum up to a distance of 5km away... though the whole city basicly... no way to stop that...

you can NOT protect yourself againt terrorism with counter terrorism or surveillance, you need to fight the source of those problems not the symptoms...

 

it's basicly the same discussion in the end as this "shall the law allow for killing", it all points in a direction that we need to trust our governments to be honest and them to respect all opinions and also allow them to flourish, however that has never been anywhere the case, well maybe in christiania... until rescently at least lol... it simply aint not that easy to be fair to a bunch of people and governments dont like it the hard way

 

hey and sorry if its all a bit unsorted, its late and im bloody tired :P

 

edit:

@tomato

LMFAO!!! nice one...

[Vagrant0]

The real problem is the logistics of all these "big brother" conspiracies. In order to have everyone in the country being watched, you would need to have about 1/10th of the population employed just sitting there watching a monitor, another 1/10th of the population maintaining all the deployed equipment, another 1/5th the population doing followup work, manage documents, and other office activities, another 1/10th which is overseeing the 4/10 that are deployed, another 1/10th to oversee the overseers, 1/10th for legal work or to handle internal affairs, which leaves about 3/10 the population to remain oblivious to the process. Meaning that the remaining 30% of the population (about 2% once you exclude children and the disabled) would have to be responsible for all service, manufacturing, and all work that actually generates money for the country.

 

Essentially, everyone can't be watched because everyone doing the watching would have to be watched themselves, and all of this watching would certainly interfere with pretty much all facets of both society and the economy. And, given the rather severe inability that has been demonstrated to prevent real terrorist acts and other crimes, even the system which is in place kinda sucks, and only seems to serve the purpose of spooking paranoid types or making ignorant, law abiding, citizens feel safe.

 

Above all else, one simple fact remains, the Government is both corrupt and totally incompetent, so even if they tried, they would fail from inside long before the excessive security had any impact. Or have you forgotten that many notable politicians happen to have rather unusual interests and anything of this sort would have, and has, backfired against them.

 

Seriously, go to the DMV to get your license renewed some time, after about 30 minutes of standing in line just to be given a form to sign which allows you to enter another line, you'll probably be wondering how ANYTHING in this country actually works.

Edited February 10, 2010 by Vagrant0

[bben46]

Just because you are paranoid it doesn't mean they are not out to get you.

 

Who watches the watchers?

[Balagor]

I think the whole supervising is actually great. Just imagine, in the near future you`ll have camereas with face scan ability, everything you buy, drink and eat will be stored by using your credit card. All the data of your visits at the doctors will be stored for your whole life. Yeah, noone is sitting behind the cameras, but there will be programs which will analyse the whole data automaticly and you'll be tracked. You even get chip marks for your trash bin (I actually have already one).

 

All in all this will have an enormous potential to track you full life into the smalest details. This is freaking awesome. They read your post, they track your way from early morning to evening every day in your life. We will learn so much about mankind. We just need to bring all data together and when we need to analyse the whole bunch and we know what you are probaply thinking and what you are doing the next time :)

 

All this is closer as we think.

I saw a documentary on TV about Japan. Nearly everything is done by the cellphone.

All payments, bus/train/supermarket/resturants/.............you name it.

They simply hold up the phone in front of a scanner, BIP, payment done.

Smart and simple, and I do not realy fear for goverment abuse, but I think

about comercial abuse.

 

This must leave some visible trace, showing how the individual Japanese act, or even how groups act.

Companies can now draw a very accurate map over the consumers, and make

very sufisticated stratigies on how to make targeted efforts.

I don´t know how it works in Japan (they didn´t say), but in DK phone numbers are not a secret,

and are for sale in large scale, for commercial industry.

[Vagrant0]

All this is closer as we think.

I saw a documentary on TV about Japan. Nearly everything is done by the cellphone.

All payments, bus/train/supermarket/resturants/.............you name it.

They simply hold up the phone in front of a scanner, BIP, payment done.

Smart and simple, and I do not realy fear for goverment abuse, but I think

about comercial abuse.

No different than a credit card when you think about it, and the US and most western countries have been using those for awhile. Not sure if you know this, but most Japanese businesses in Japan can't afford to buy into credit card authorization equipment because, like much of the world outside the US, not many people have credit cards. The difference being that a cellphone is easier to access, and is already linked to a paid service, so merchants only need to buy into a single service.

 

As far as marketing information goes, the reality is that there is already an overflow of marketing data available, and most of it obtained willingly. Although some people might not feel comfortable with this data being collected, the reality is that within the vast aggregate of that data, unless you're doing or buying something extremely unusual (which is usually written off as being an anomaly), a single bit of information won't look any different from the few million bits from other people around you that they handle daily. Essentially, being lost in the crowd of data.

[jaysus]

@vargarnt

 

well i have to diagree this time,

total surveillance is not that uneconomical as you may think, take the GDR example, every 3rd person (or more) in that country was a part time (like 99% of all spies they had a normal life besides their spying activity) spy for the government agencies and the country lasted for about 40yrs before going bancrupt/the people getting pissed/the country being sold (actually all 3 at once), now imagine what they could have done with a bunch of computers and cameras who take over that job of actual hobby spies...

with modern video, audio and text filters you can actually let computers do the hard work of spotting somin interesting for you in many cases

 

youre right however that they probably do not spy on you in realtime 100% of the time, however they have the ability to do so, nevertheless they usually use it backwards, meaning to solve a crime after it has been committed, collecting evidence and such but also of course for the advertisement and market research (and i dint agree to have 500 cookies on my pc btw which track my surfing behavior), i started to get calls from all kinds of advertisment dippoos after i gave my telephone number to the city authorities upon citizen registration for example...

[slygothmog]

Some years ago my sister ( a Microbiologist ) was working as part of a team to help a company develop a device that scans your boarding ticket at the airport and analyses it for certain substances to see if you had been handling explosives recently ( which is good ), during a visit to one airport to liaise with the security personnel they proudly showed off another device they had installed, one section of the corridor wall that people needed to pass in order to board a plane was actually a screen about 15ft in lenth that acted like an xray machine but only penetrated beneath the clothing so that people appeard NAKED as they walked past! and yes there where people sat behind this screen monitoring 24/7.

 

I will probably be arrested in 10 mins for telling you this :unsure:

[phoneyLogic]

I will probably be arrested in 10 mins for telling you this :unsure:

:P don't worry, you wont be arrested. It's not a supersecret thing, but it's just used without letting you know about. Its called "Naked Scanner" or "Millimeter Wave Scanner"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_X-ray

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millimeter_wave_scanner

 

You pottentially could see all the details with such devices, but they usually don't. In germany they allready test a computer program which covers your most private parts automatically (awesome btw).

 

@Vargant

Analysing the whole amount of data is not impossible. Do you do Online Shoping, e.g. at Amazone?

So to speak every click you do is tracked - well for everyone, who is logged in (would be possible based on your IP too). Well, you'll get mails which suggest products based on your interest and your browsing history automatically. And this is no big deal or sth. It's doing google, youtube, ... etc pp ... it's nearly realtime and happens incidentally. So all your Credit-Card information and all your cellphone data and so on is already being stored. They wouldn't work without it ;) or you would phone for free or sth.

I'm absolutely sure that it is possible to analyse the whole data automatically. And it would be pointless to collect all these data without doing so.

 

@stasi topic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi

[AncientSpaceAeon]

I think the whole supervising is actually great. Just imagine, in the near future you`ll have camereas with face scan ability, everything you buy, drink and eat will be stored by using your credit card. All the data of your visits at the doctors will be stored for your whole life. Yeah, noone is sitting behind the cameras, but there will be programs which will analyse the whole data automaticly and you'll be tracked. You even get chip marks for your trash bin (I actually have already one).

 

All in all this will have an enormous potential to track you full life into the smalest details. This is freaking awesome. They read your post, they track your way from early morning to evening every day in your life. We will learn so much about mankind. We just need to bring all data together and when we need to analyse the whole bunch and we know what you are probaply thinking and what you are doing the next time :)

That's more about easier life, not privacy or safety. I mean, not everyone in your goverment is the good guys.

 

The chip ? For some reason I can't explain, don't use it.