Loss of Privacy

The city of Rotterdam, The Netherlands has installed cynicism hotlines so that individuals can report their coworkers who are too cynical about work.

Since last week civil servants in Rotterdam can report ill-tempered colleagues to an online ‘cynicism’ hotline. The city says the move is part of a drive to improve the working environment.

The announcement on the city administration’s intranet has caused a stir among the more than 14,000 civil servants in Rotterdam. Some say the measure is superfluous; others fear it will encourage snitching among colleagues. “It’s just another case of the nanny state,” sighed one civil servant who requested anonymity.

A spokesperson for the city denied the initiative encourages snitching. “Perhaps the word hotline was ill-chosen, “he said. “It is not about punishment, but about support. It is not about specific people, it is about a specific type of behaviour. People are bothered by negative behaviour.”

I’m afraid my first thought was not nanny state, but big brother and/or stasi state.

Although the new fusion centers are being staffed with non-federal people, they will have access to military documents and much more.  This is due to the belief that there is no longer a division between military and intelligence information.

Under the program, authorized state, local or tribal officials will be able to access pre-approved data on the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. However, they won’t have the ability to upload data or edit existing content, officials said. They also will not have access to all classified information, only the information that federal officials make available to them.

The non-federal officials will get access via the Homeland Security department’s secret-level Homeland Security Data Network. That network is currently deployed at 27 of the more than 70 fusion centers located around the country, according to DHS. Officials from different levels of government share homeland security-related information through the fusion centers. (Ben Bain, “DOD opens some classified information to non-federal officials,” Federal Computer Week, September 17, 2009)

Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has encouraged the explosive growth of fusion centers. As envisaged by securocrats, these hybrid institutions have expanded information collection and sharing practices from a wide variety of sources, including commercial databases, among state and local law enforcement agencies, the private sector and federal security agencies, including military intelligence.

But early on, fusion centers like the notorious “red squads” of the 1960s and ’70s, morphed into national security shopping malls where officials monitor not only alleged terrorists but also left-wing and environmental activists deemed threats to the existing corporate order.

It is currently unknown how many military intelligence analysts are stationed at fusion centers, what their roles are and whether or not they are engaged in domestic surveillance.

As they currently exist, fusion centers are largely unaccountable entities that function without proper oversight and have been involved in egregious civil rights violations such as the compilation of national security dossiers that have landed activists on various terrorist watch-lists.

Read the painstakingly detailed article at Global Research.

Project Indect is the culmination of five years of research aimed at developing computer programs that can monitor information from every corner of the internet, including what was once thought very private.  Not only can it process information from websites and forums, but from p2p programs, file servers and individual computers.  Project Indect’s objective is to detect threats as well as abnormal behavior and violence.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of human rights group Liberty, described the introduction of such mass surveillance techniques as a “sinister step” for any country, adding that it was “positively chilling” on a European scale.

Stephen Booth, an Open Europe analyst who has helped compile a dossier on the European justice agenda, said these developments and projects such as Indect sounded “Orwellian” and raised serious questions about individual liberty.

“This is all pretty scary stuff in my book. These projects would involve a huge invasion of privacy and citizens need to ask themselves whether the EU should be spending their taxes on them,” he said.

“The EU lacks sufficient checks and balances and there is no evidence that anyone has ever asked ‘is this actually in the best interests of our citizens?’”

Of course it’s not in the best interests of the citizens.  It’s in the best interest of those who stand to profit and gain from the information collected.

Miss Chakrabarti said: “Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society.

But, it’s okay if we do it “in the name of the children” or to protect the citizens from some, as yet unknown, bad guy.

According to the official website for Project Indect, which began this year, its main objectives include “to develop a platform for the registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information and automatic detection of threats and recognition of abnormal behaviour or violence”.

It talks of the “construction of agents assigned to continuous and automatic monitoring of public resources such as: web sites, discussion forums, usenet groups, file servers, p2p [peer-to-peer] networks as well as individual computer systems, building an internet-based intelligence gathering system, both active and passive”.

In plain English, this means, “We are going to watch every single thing you do, put it in a database somewhere, and use it against you at the first opportune moment.”

What has been known to those with common sense has now been verified by a internal report in the United Kingdom.

Interception of Communications Commissioner, Paul Kennedy, has compiled figures for the United Kingdom in which he states that more than 500,000 requests were made last year to spy on individuals via private email and telephone records.

Each request allows public bodies to access data – which includes telephone records, email and text message traffic – but not the actual content of conversations or messages.

“It doesn’t allow you to see the content of the message or conversation. It’s about the who, where and when – the time element essentially in directed surveillance,” a Home Office spokesman said.

The vast majority of requests to snoop on people’s records were made by the police and security services.

But the report found that some were granted to council officials investigating trivial offences like dog fouling, fuelling concern that the act is being misused.

While the report is new, the stories in them aren’t.  It has been discussed many times over the past year that UK officials are abusing the system, yet little has been done.  Unfortunately, too many people believe that individual privacy needs to be sacrificed for the illusion of security.  The government is supposed to work for us, but we continually allow them to walk all over us and do as they please as they set in motion more and more controls to keep us in our place.