Governments Are Killing Privacy & Freedom.
Do You Have A Plan?
Governments around the world are working to kill privacy in all its forms, and most people have no idea that it's happening. Even those who know about it don't seem to comprehend how fast it's coming, or how radically it will change their day to day lives. Even fewer have any sort of plan for how to exist in a world where anything they say or do could be recorded and stored for eternity in a giant A.I. powered data center, and can be retrieved at will by any bureaucrat looking to assert his authority or law enforcement officer looking for someone to feed into the court system. Words you typed into social media ten years ago could be found by a system of artificial intelligence that is always looking, always cataloging, and always reporting, making you a prime candidate to send to the for-profit prison system. Thought crimes will become hate crimes in a system that demands obedience and passivity above all else.
Already, cities are filling up with surveillance cameras that stare at us constantly, scanning our faces and recording our license plate numbers. Even a visit to a friend's house results in our images being uploaded by a doorbell camera to a data center, and often these cameras are accessible by law enforcement officials without a warrant. Actually these doorbell cameras don't even need you to approach a house; they can record you casually walking by on a public sidewalk with your wife. Or was that the person you're having an affair with? The camera captures it, either way.
Police forces are now using drones to spy on you from the sky. These drones can hover almost silently hundreds of feet above, videotaping your actions. Want to smoke a joint in your backyard? Look up.
But these aren't the only threats to privacy. Cars will soon be equipped with kill switches so that the police, and possibly others, can shut it off and stop you in your tracks. In-car cameras, already standard in some cars, will silently watch you as you drive. Where is the video sent? Who can view it? Can you have the videos deleted, or are they stored forever, able to be retrieved by strangers with an agenda? The cameras are another layer of surveillance on top of the GPS system built in to most cars now that relay your driving data to a number of third parties, possibly including your insurance company. Even if you don't have GPS, you most likely carry your phone with you everywhere. Today's phones are less communication devices and more surveillance and tracking devices, monitoring everything and selling your data to the highest bidder.
I suppose you could stay home but if you have a "smart" TV, it probably has a camera hidden in the screen plus the ability to record conversations in your home. Any device with voice control, such as Amazon Alexa and some streaming video boxes, could potentially eavesdrop on your most intimate or angry moments. We're told these devices don't watch or listen without our permission, but companies have already been caught violating that promise.
As if all of the above wasn't bad enough, the worst is yet to come. There is a worldwide agenda to lock down the internet. The internet has become the public square, the place where mankind exposes government tyranny and corporate corruption. In a world that is transitioning into a global police state, free and open communication is seen as a threat. At first, social media and "adult" sites (the definition of "adult" sites being extremely vague) are being targeted by requiring users to prove they're legal adults before being able to log in. The verification system used will vary from state to state, but most favor a scheme where your driver's license is uploaded to a third-party company chosen by the government that will confirm you are who you say you are and then provide you with a code to use when accessing restricted sites. Another proposal is more extreme, requiring your computer's operating system to lock you out of restricted sites until your computer receives a code from the third party authorization company. Age verification exposes your true identity to people who don't have to expose their identity to you, and this in turn makes you vulnerable to government officials who want to end free speech and prosecute people for "wrong-think". And once any sort of age verification system is put into place, it will be expanded as part of a full digital ID system that will be used to identify you all day, every day, on the internet and in the real world. Instead of being an independent, free, private person, you'll become a trackable commodity, and the data generated by your mundane living will be sorted and sold and have more value to information brokers than anything you produce in your 9-5 job. But you won't receive any of that value. You're the cow, not the rancher.
And I predict that eventually, within 5 years, all access to the internet will be shut off at the ISP level unless you have permission from the government, which will monitor every keystroke, every site visited, and every comment made, everything dumped into an A.I. data center for review. Speak out against the establishment? Maybe you'll just be "re-educated". Maybe you'll be jailed. Or maybe they'll turn off your bank account for a month or two.
All of these things are either coming soon, or they're already here. So I ask again: Do you have a plan?
Will you quietly obey, try to "go along to get along" in the hope you'll be left alone? Will you risk everything and fight back against this digital tyranny? Will you look for workarounds, such as ways to spoof age verification or avoid ISP blocking? Or will you turn away from the internet and enjoy an analog life, focusing on what's real and can't be shut off from afar?
My own plan is to fight back for as long as I can and hope someone smarter than me invents a private, functional way around the tyranny. If that way doesn't appear, I'll stop using all internet-connected devices except when absolutely necessary to survive, such as buying food, renewing my driver's license, or paying a bill. As for all the cameras and drones, the defensive options are very limited. Moving to a rural area and limiting time spent in cities and on highways is about all we can do at this point until better solutions are found.
For now, I'm buying a lot of books, real books, printed on paper, that can never be censored once they're on my shelf.
Because the digital world is a trap. The future is analog.
[Image by Riki32 from Pixabay]
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