I love technology. As long as I can remember, I’ve always been attracted to things that have buttons, dials, switches, lights, antennas and circuit boards. It is an inescapable fact that modern society is dominated by technology. One down side of this situation is that technology makes it easier for would-be government tyrants to violate your rights and invade your privacy.
Communist China seems to be providing numerous surveillance templates that other governments around the world are trying to copy. This morning, I read a story from the New York Times about how China is monitoring, recording and censoring text messages sent using the Chinese version of the popular Skype Internet messaging service. Personal information is stored, possibly to be used for future retribution, on users who send messages containing certain restricted words. These words include those related to the religious group Falun Gong, Taiwan independence, democracy, the Chinese Communist Party and the Voice of America. The Skype messaging service is owned by Internet auction titan eBay.
Not to be outdone by the Chinese, the British government, in collusion with the European Union’s council of ministers, recently adopted a plan allowing British police to routinely hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant. A story from England’s The Sunday Times describes the plan, which includes a technique the government goons call “remote searching.” British police and other government snoops are now hacking into any computer any time that they like, in order to copy the contents of hard drives and install spyware and keystroke-logging programs. Warrantless hacking of a homeowners’ personal wireless network is allowed. The plan also calls for French, German and other European Union forces to ask British officers to hack into someone’s UK computer and hand over any material gleaned. Naturally, this is all being done in the name of fighting terrorism and crime, the same claim made by the Communist Chinese.
Feeding the surveillance frenzy is the U.S. government’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Reported by the Wall Street Journal, DHS has started the first phase of a controversial satellite-surveillance program innocuously called the “National Applications Office.” As if Google Earth and Google Street View weren’t creepy enough, the National Applications Office is designed to give federal, state and local officials access to U.S. spy satellite imagery. Satellites that were once used by the CIA to spy on foreign enemies will now be used by local agencies to spy on whomever they please.
Sadly, unconstitutional warrantless searches are nothing new to U.S. citizens. Police have long used thermal imaging and infrared technologies to remotely search homes. Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) can be used to detect heat signatures on the outside of homes that can indicate, among other things, the presence of high-intensity lights being used to cultivate marijuana plants. The Supreme Court ruled in 2001, in Kyllo V. United States, that such searches were illegal unless police first obtain a search warrant.
Many people contend that police still use FLIR to conduct illegal searches; even going so far as to randomly aim their equipment at houses just to see what can be detected. To prove the point, a group of activists, led by former police officer Barry Cooper, decided to try running a sort of reverse-sting operation. The group rented a house last December in Odessa, Texas and set up a plant-growing operation using grow lights similar to those used to cultivate marijuana. The difference here was that they weren’t growing pot; instead, they were growing two small Christmas trees.
Less than 24 hours later, Odessa narcotics agents, with weapons drawn, raided the house. Instead of coming away with the bust of the week, they were greeted by grow lights, two Christmas trees, cameras recording the entire event, and a poster informing them that they had been set up. Isn’t technology wonderful?