Big Brother is Watching…and Listening

by Philip Hodges 
 
TrapWire is a company that uses an intelligence gathering software that is designed to analyze human behavior and to predict and prevent terrorist attacks based on behavior patterns. Stratfor (Strategic Forecasting, Inc.) is another company that specializes in intelligence through sophisticated networks of surveillance cameras positioned in big cities throughout the U.S. and abroad. Stratfor and TrapWire have allegedly teamed up in delivering a “product” that not only watches us with fancy cameras but can also analyze the way we walk and our facial expressions to determine whether or not we might commit a terrorist attack. According to e-mails intercepted by Wikileaks, TrapWire technology is being implemented as an international surveillance system to be used by big city law enforcement agencies in the U.S. The NYPD, the White House and other places around the world like Scotland Yard and the Canadian Royal Mounted Police are clients already.
Voice Grid Nation is another surveillance program also being used by U.S. law enforcement that operates not by seeing, but hearing. This is Russian technology brought to the U.S. by the Russia Speech Technology Center. Russia Today reports:

When authorities intercept a call they’ve deemed ‘hinky’, the recording is entered into the VoiceGrid program, which (probably) buzzes and whirrs and spits out a match. In five seconds, the program can scan through 10,000 voices, and it only needs 3 seconds for speech analysis. All that, combined with 100 simultaneous searches and the storage capacity of 2 million samples, gives SpeechPro, as the company is known in the US, the right to claim a 90% success rate.

So, we have an international surveillance system being implemented with software that will detect “suspicious” behavior patterns, and now we have Russian technology being used to build up a database of our voices, similar the FBI’s billion-dollar facial recognition program that it’s rolling out. Soon, I’m sure they’ll have technology that knows how each of us smells.

These subjects are usually kept under wraps by the mainstream media. But people are finding out about these Big Brother programs, and they’re not liking them. Referring to a Monmouth University poll that addressed Americans’ opinion of surveillance drones, the Government Accountability Office noted:

Concerns include the potential for increased amounts of government surveillance using technologies placed on UAS [Unmanned Aircraft Systems], the collection and use of such data, and potential violations of constitutional Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Additionally, a June 2012 poll conducted by Monmouth University reported that 42 percent of those sampled were very concerned about their own privacy if U.S. law enforcement started using UAS with high tech cameras, while 15 percent said they were not at all concerned.

15% don’t seem to care about the growing trend toward an Orwellian surveillance state. These 15% are naive to put so much trust in their government to keep them safe. Of course, they’d probably be happy to live in a prison cell knowing that at least they’re secure.