This once sounded like a “tinfoil hat” thing to say.
It branded you a kook… or a conspiracy theorist.
Now, it’s mainstream news.
Take this Wall Street Journal report from last week…
Government officials across the U.S. are using location data from millions of cellphones in a bid to better understand the movements of Americans during the coronavirus pandemic and how they may be affecting the spread of the disease.
The federal government, through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and state and local governments have started to receive analyses about the presence and movement of people in certain areas of geographic interest drawn from cellphone data, people familiar with the matter said. The data comes from the mobile advertising industry rather than cellphone carriers.
Let me strip out what’s essential for you. If you have a smartphone connected to the internet… the authorities know where you are 24/7.
But as longtime readers know, this kind of digital surveillance isn’t an aberration…
As we’ve been banging on about here at Legacy Research, the rise in digital surveillance is a trend in motion.
As our cofounder, Bill Bonner, put it in these pages in May 2019…
It’s the bitter fruit of the Information Age. Using the latest in surveillance technology, AI, and Big Data, the feds can keep track of everybody all the time. The temptation will be irresistible to use these tools to control people in the U.S.
Throughout history, any technology – whatever it is – has been taken up by the elite and used by them to increase their control over the rest of the population.
Will that be bad? Well, it depends. I won’t like it. Our readers may not like it. But most Americans will like it just as they do in most of China. They’ll say, “Well, it’s so much safer now because we’ve gotten the bad guys off the streets.”
Governments across the world are awarding themselves wartime powers… and populations lurch into panic mode.
In Brazil, politicians in the city of Recife are tracking at least 700,000 smartphones to find out where people are disobeying lockdown rules.
In India, people suspected of having the coronavirus have had their hands indelibly stamped, and are being tracked using their mobile phones and personal data…
And the Israeli government is using technology it developed for counter-terrorism operations. It can track the physical locations of all cell phones in the country, as well as monitor calls and messages.
This is the perfect time to ramp up surveillance. People are scared. They’ll accept the hit to their civil liberties gladly.
The Chinese Communist Party has built the world’s first digital police state.
It’s designed to tighten the Party’s grip on power. And China’s president for life, Xi Jinping, heavily backs it.
It’s a mix of facial recognition… GPS tracking… financial tracking… mandatory social networks… and even gait analysis (tracking you by how you walk).
And it’s not just the Chinese feds who are expanding their digital surveillance powers.
In September 2018, I showed you how U.S. cops are using face-recognition dragnets to track residents of Orlando, Florida.
And 27 U.S. airports use face-recognition scans instead of boarding passes. Last April, Homeland Security said that within four years, it plans to scan the faces of 97% of passengers flying out of the country.
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security tracks you based on your fingerprints, your iris scans, and facial recognition.
And a new federal plan calls for also tracking palm prints, your DNA, individual scars, and even tattoos.
This is some of the most intimate “data” you possess.
Washington says its aim with the phone tracking is to “create a portal for federal, state and local officials” with all the data. It will contain geolocation data in up to 500 cities across the U.S.
That’s a treasure trove of surveillance data.
Do you think the feds are just going to close that portal after they open it?
If you do, I have a bridge to sell you.
This is the playbook from 9/11. Congress used the attack to pass draconian new laws restricting the most basic of freedoms – habeas corpus.
Here’s our other cofounder, Doug Casey, on that…
After 9/11, in addition to Homeland Security, we got the Patriot Act, with, among other things, its suspension of habeas corpus. That means that the government can lock anybody up for any reason and not even have to tell them why.
Accuse them of being an “enemy combatant” – a neologism that justifies anything, and is robotically and thoughtlessly accepted by Boobus americanus – and anything is possible. Including a trip to a CIA black site in some Third World hellhole.
This is something I thought was settled in Western Civilization with the Magna Carta and King John. But we’re going backwards in most areas of personal freedom. And America, of all places, is leading the way – even while falling behind economically.
And I get that. America is supposed to be the land of the free, after all.
But look out your window… Consider your situation. Whether you’re for or against the lockdowns, one thing is clear: Governments are in charge.
It’s lockdowns now. The next step is mandatory GPS tracking.
It’s an attack on one of the most fundamental of our liberties – freedom of action.
This won’t protect you completely… but it’s a good step in the right direction.
The government is harvesting data mainly from third-party apps on your smartphone to track you.
If you have location data turned on in these apps, they’re sharing your location.
Believe it or not, the mobile marketing industry has billions of geographic data points on hundreds of millions of U.S. mobile devices. It sells this data to the highest bidder. So pay particular attention to Step No. 4…
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Delete your Facebook account – We think we have to be connected all the time. But by staying on the platform, you’re sharing massive amounts of personal data about yourself with the world. You can’t be a private citizen and be on Facebook. Find out how to permanently pull the plug here.
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De-Google your life – The way to stop Google – and the NSA – from tracking every web search you type and every webpage you visit is to ditch Google’s search engine and the Google Chrome web browser. DuckDuckGo won’t track you like Google does. And it offers a decent search service.
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There’s also the Epic Privacy Browser – It works just like Chrome, except it doesn’t store data on you. You can also try Startpage for a search engine that doesn’t track and store your search queries. Firefox is the least intrusive of your mainstream browser options (Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer).
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Buy a “dumb” phone – This is the only way to stop broadcasting your exact location 24 hours a day. An unlocked phone with 16MB of memory and a 2 megapixel camera will set you back about $25. You won’t be able to play Candy Crush while you’re standing in line waiting for your caramel latte at Starbucks. But a dumb phone will relieve you of the urge to constantly fiddle with your “smartphone.” Result: more free time and a less cluttered brain.
Regards,
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Chris Lowe
April 2, 2020
Dublin, Ireland
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