Originally posted on Quora March 23, 2023
The USSA police state has surveillance tech that the Stasi and Gestapo could only ever dream of. While the latter relied on a network of informal snitches, crude bugging devices and wiretapping the former has an astronomically larger and unencumbered information flow on all of their targets from their digital persona that extends beyond wiretapping, bugging rooms and even national security letters (field office subpoenas to cell phone and internet service providers) into location tracking, remote eavesdropping and biometric Identity.
Geofencing
Last year it was revealed that the CDC purchased the cell phone location data of 50 million Americans from safegraph, a company that accessed such data in the first place by paying app developers to embed their harvesting code.
In 2021 the FBI used a type of dragnet surveillance called a geofence warrant to track down and investigate everyone in the vicinity of the Capitol that day whose cell phone had pinged off the nearest tower or connected to the nearest wifi. Criminal investigations were conducted on people even without evidence of a crime, which being in the wrong place at the wrong time is not.
This type of dragnet isn’t limited to the Feds either. Municipal pds and sheriffs used it to spy on church attendees throughout 2020 and 2021 buying data from the same company as the CDC. And no mobile data is not anonymized despite police claims to the contrary. We’ve known this is a lie for at least the past decade.
Roving bugs
In the early 2000s it was widely acknowledged that the FBI and other Feds had the ability to remotely activate smart phone and computer microphones and eavesdrop on private conversations and even take pictures without the end user’s knowledge. Despite assurance that such tech would only be used against organized crime the Feds have deployed it against protesters who are temporarily detained. The newest version is cloning SIM cards to keep tabs on communications among political dissidents not using messaging apps with end-to-end encryption (which is most of them). The closest thing local pd have to this type of dragnet surveillance is cell site simulators they receive through grant programs from DHS, DOJ, FBI and other Fed agencies. Similar to geofencing, cell site simulators colloquially known as stingrays can be used to intercept SMS and calls that ping to it. Little is known about their official use since they are hidden behind NDAs.
Biometric ID
This is the newest and perhaps the most insidious one is facial recognition software. It is indisputably used to track individual movements around SMART cities by both private and public institutions. Private institutions like Madison Square Garden entertainment use it to discriminate against employees of law firms that litigate against them or one of their many subsidiaries, regardless of whether they are actively involved in any lawsuit against MSG entertainment. Public institutions like police use it to arrest people for crimes they did not commit or tracking down protesters after the protest. At least 6 federal agencies use facial recognition to create leads in criminal investigations and at least 10 use it for research and development such as being able to identify individuals in masks. Universities have coerced their online students to download facial recognition and behavioral tracking apps that record their behavior in their own homes to enforce so-called academic integrity. And as with most regulations of new tech the industry writes them, as Microsoft did in Washington state in 2020. While facial recognition is all the rage, little attention is paid to the other emerging forms of biometric ID like quantum tattoos for medical records and conglomerates like Facebook selling sensitive medical data extracted from hospital websites to third party advertisers. The worst is yet to come.
