Amazon already has eyes in your home… Now, it wants to use its drones to spy on you, too… In the mailbag: “I personally owe my life to cannabis”…
You and your family move into a well-heeled neighborhood.
People are quiet. They keep to themselves.
But you’re eager to meet your new neighbors. So you walk next door to say hello.
Only when you get to your neighbor’s front door, a computer-generated voice asks you to present your face for a scan at a tiny doorbell camera.
The voice then asks you to scan your fingerprint… and give a voice sample.
You wait while your neighbor’s security system sends your biometric data to a government database.
“I’m sorry, sir. You’ve been flagged as ‘suspicious’ and denied entry. If you try calling again, we will alert the police.”
Then you remember: You were arrested over a bar fight when you were 18. You didn’t start the fight. But you’ve been in a police database ever since.
Your neighbor programed her enabled home security system to reject all callers who match records in police files.
That’s thanks to Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras.
They’re the fastest-growing home-improvement gadgets since the remote-controlled garage door opener.
You may have seen one at a neighbor’s front door. You may even own one yourself…
Amazon’s Ring doorbell
Ring is the doorbell camera company Amazon bought in 2013 for $1 billion.
Ring doorbells have a miniature video camera in the buzzer. These cameras are hooked up to the internet. This lets you see, hear, and speak to people at your front door from your phone, tablet, or PC.
Ring’s doorbell cameras even monitor your home when it’s dark out using infrared night vision.
It wants you to think of Ring as an around-the-clock sentry for your home.
But as we’ll show you today… what it really means is Big Brother’s on your doorstep.
The ultimate goal of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos isn’t for you to be safe in your home. It’s to build a surveillance network that reaches from the government all the way to your front door.
In fact, we launched The Daily Cut last August with the mission of exposing what’s going on.
You can catch up in full here and here on the close ties between Silicon Valley and the national security faction of the Deep State (NSA, CIA, FBI, etc.).
But in short, the Deep State isn’t some cabal of Washington bureaucrats and Obama holdouts that meets in a dark room. It’s a much more complex entity. And it bridges the public and private sectors.
Colleague Dan Denning has been keeping a close eye on the Deep State over at our Bonner-Denning Letter. Here’s how he describes it…
The Deep State is not a tightly run conspiracy. It’s a cartel of interests brought together for the sake of wealth, power, privilege… and self-preservation.
The Deep State is about using power to serve its own interests and to enrich those connected to it.
So, it’s only natural that it values surveillance and eavesdropping tech. As everyone who seeks to rule without authority knows, the best way to hold onto power is to create a docile population.
And nothing makes a population more docile than around-the-clock surveillance.
I (Chris) have been so interested in these connections that a couple of years back, I met with former Capitol Hill insider Mike Lofgren to find out more.
Mike is a former Congressional staffer with top-secret clearance. He’s also one of the few D.C. insiders to blow the whistle on the Deep State. And he’s written an excellent book about it, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government.
Here’s how Lofgren describes the connection between Silicon Valley and the Deep State…
The Deep State’s spy agencies are utterly dependent on Silicon Valley’s technology – data from social networks, email accounts, cellphones, and so on – and cooperation to perform their missions.
I want to stress that this is the furthest thing from a conspiracy theory. What’s important to understand about the Deep State is its sheer everyday-ness. It is the vector sum of all the petty bureaucratic agendas of agencies, major corporations, and think tanks – all marching like a colony of driver ants to maximize their advantage.
That’s what makes Amazon cameras so creepy. The footage it captures via its Ring neighborhood surveillance network will allow the folks at the NSA access to every home in America with Ring cameras installed.
As we’ve been showing you, its Echo smart-home speakers record private conversations and send them back to Amazon.
And the company has filed for a patent to add its controversial face-recognition software, Rekognition, to its Ring doorbell cameras.
Here’s how the American Civil Liberties Union reported it…
While the details are sketchy, the application describes a system that the police can use to match the faces of people walking by a doorbell camera with a photo database of persons they deem “suspicious.”
Likewise, homeowners can also add photos of “suspicious” people into the system and then the doorbell’s facial recognition program will scan anyone passing their home. In either case, if a match occurs, the person’s face can be automatically sent to law enforcement, and the police could arrive in minutes.
That’s according to a recent patent the feds have granted the company.
It’s for a drone-based surveillance service. Here’s a mock-up of how it would work…
You’ve probably heard that Amazon wants to use drones to deliver packages to your door.
Well, the company’s patent documents reveal these delivery drones “may perform a surveillance action at a property of an authorized party” and could “image the property to generate surveillance images.”
Here’s Dan with more…
Job number one for Amazon’s unmanned drones is to deliver packages to customers. Job number two? Have a look around to see if everything is hunkydory in your neighborhood. Presumably with cameras that are armed with Amazon’s facial-recognition software. That way, Amazon’s drones will be able to ID “suspicious” individuals against police databases.
And that just scratches the surface. Amazon will also help the feds store “biometric” data (fingerprints, face scans, iris scans, voice samples, DNA samples, etc.). Dan again…
Amazon’s Web Service (AWS) division offers “cloud” storage services. In other words, folks pay Amazon to store their data for them. And AWS will help the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with a new cloud-based database to store biometric data on American citizens.
And we’re talking some of the most intimate “data” you possess. DHS already tracks you based on your fingerprints, your iris scans, and facial recognition. But a new federal plan calls for also tracking palm prints, your DNA, individual scars, and even tattoos – all of which Amazon will store on its servers so it’s readily available to the feds.
The feds are on their way to keeping tabs on us all – with the help of Silicon Valley companies such as Amazon…
But there are steps you can take to shore up your privacy.
That’s why Dan has put together a new presentation. It lists six specific steps… and five places to be invested in… to protect your money and privacy in the face of this assault on your liberties.
It’s a step-by-step alternative to serving up your privacy and data on a silver platter.
Simply put, a bolthole is a place you can go to when it all hits the fan…
It’s also a place outside the reach of the growing Surveillance Society.
As regular readers know, Dan has been working on finding the places in the U.S. where you can enjoy a higher quality of life… and a lower cost of living… on a beautiful property.
Here’s Dan once more…
My goal is to help you find a bolthole that’s not on the far side of the world and that you can still obtain and enjoy. The good news is that there are dozens of small towns and cities that meet the above criteria, and within those towns and cities, thousands of already-built homes, ranches, cabins, and farms are for sale and waiting for a new owner.
Check out the latest places he’s pinpointed to escape the Deep State and the best ways to protect your privacy right here.
Regards,
Chris Lowe
June 24, 2019
Dublin, Ireland