Monday, October 10, 2016

Counterpunch: Bill Blunden's "Facing Down the Panopticon"

What follow are two brief excerpts from Bill Blunden's 8-12-16 Counterpunch article entitled "Facing Down the Panopticon":

"An army of networked kiosks is invading New York City. Hundreds of them. They’re large vertical slabs, practically ten feet tall and chock full of sensors. Reminiscent of the mysterious black monoliths from Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001. These kiosks are replacing the city’s aging public telephone booths and after this initial wave of monoliths hits Gotham there will be thousands more installed throughout the city. John Young, the architect who runs the web site Cryptome, has called this forest of kiosks 'the largest urban spying system in the United States' [...].

"Officials from the FBI indicate that monitoring someone around the clock requires a group up to roughly forty agents working in multiple shifts. All told the FBI employs something in the ballpark of 35,000 people. Even if the bureau devoted all 35,000 of these people to surveillance (which they don’t), they’d be limited to monitoring less than a thousand targets. And keep in mind that there are up to 10,000 terror investigations active at any point in time. Hopefully this provides some context."


The preceding paragraph contains an illuminating statistic, one that sheds light on why the Powers That Be deem it necessary to farm out unconstitutional surveillance assignments to gangstalking organizations such the LEIU and SAIC.  (For more information about the LEIU, see my 1-18-16 blog post entitled "A World of Stalking Fools:  Strange Tales of Homeland Security and the Future of Mass Surveillance (Part Two:  Total Deniability)."  For more about SAIC, see my book Chameleo:  A Strange but True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Homeland Security (OR Books, 2015). 




To read Bill Blunden's entire article, click HERE.

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