Tag: mass surveillance

Real ID Is Not About Keeping You Safe

Today, after nearly two decades of implementation and delays, the federal government’s new identification requirements for traveling by plane domestically or entering federal buildings technically go into effect. This federally-compliant ID card—known as Real ID—can only be attained with specific records and documents laid out by the federal government. It’s labeled by a black or gold star in the upper right corner.

Even though DHS Secretary Kristi Noem promised that, at least initially, people without a Real ID will only have to face some “extra scrutiny” at security checkpoints, it’s safe to assume that, as the full requirement sets in over the next several weeks and months, some number of people will show up to airports unaware that they no longer have the documents required to board their plane. And, because the process of getting through most domestic airports was grueling enough before the deadline, many expect air travel to be especially arduous during the transition.

Because of the absoluteness of this new requirement and the harsh punishments for non-compliance—just picture what would happen to you if you tried to get into a federal building or onto a plane without the accepted forms of ID—it can be easy to write off the Real ID requirement as some new rule that, while annoying, is probably being implemented for a good reason.

It’s not.

As mentioned above, the Real ID Act was passed twenty years ago in 2005. It was one of the many measures rolled out in the wake of the 9/11 attacks that was presented to the public as being necessary to ensure that similar attacks would never happen again.

The original bill specified that the federal government would refuse to accept any form of ID that did not meet the requirements Congress had passed by May of 2008. But as that date drew closer, few states had implemented the new provisions. Some governors had vocally refused to comply because they opposed what was, in effect, the implementation of a national identification database.

That prompted the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to delay the deadline several times—first to 2011, then a complicated range of deadlines from 2013 to 2017 based on age and state of residence, and then to one universal deadline in October 2020.

Then the pandemic hit, and the deadline was extended again to 2021, then 2023, and finally to today, May 7, 2025.

If these new ID requirements were as crucial to the safety of air travelers—and the American public at large—as the federal government has claimed, the sheer time it’s taken to implement would be unacceptable. That alone is a sign that, perhaps, the federal government’s motivations are not what they say.

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Be Not Enticed To Tyranny: Oppose The Surveillance State

A surveillance state is being erected around the American public at an alarming rate. In many urban and suburban settings, anyone traveling on public streets or sidewalks will have his image captured by the ubiquitous surveillance cameras. A leisurely stroll around the neighborhood, as well as any conversation along the way, might be recorded if the city uses surveillance-enabled street lights. Even our own front yards might not be safe from the prying eyes of the state if a neighbor has a “smart” doorbell that shares data with law enforcement.

Rural areas are not exempt from this intrusion. Automatic License Plate Reader cameras (ALPRs, often contracted under the brand name FLOCK), are being placed on rural highways and on county lines in an increasing number of areas. Audio and video surveillance now cover remote corners of the Amazon Basin. Satellite technology could ensure that, one day, no square foot of the planet is unobserved.

The power of the modern surveillance state is without historical precedent. The argument that “there is no expectation of privacy in public” no longer adequately addresses the huge quantities of data that surveillance apparatus captures, stores, and analyzes.

While civil rights and other niche groups are sounding the alarm about the dangers of Big Brother, critics are surprisingly underrepresented among popular news outlets. When the topic of citizen surveillance is covered at all, these stories are often portrayed as a benign solution to a dangerous problem with the dangers to civil liberties receiving a brief nod, if even mentioned.

So why does the average citizen not have greater concern over these intrusions upon their civil liberties, in some cases even championing it? One answer to that question might be that these systems are a Trojan Horse. While they are dressed up as a gift that will protect society from all that they fear, it is the gift itself that poses the greatest threat.

The use of fear to gain power is a tale as old as time, but our unprecedented access to information has not made us any less vulnerable to it. Each decade of the lives of the modern citizen has brought about its own moral panic with the accompanying “solution.” From the Satanic Panic to the War on Drugs, fear has driven consistent relinquishment of our individual rights over time.

The justification for the modern surveillance state began on Sept. 11, 2001. The fear inspired by those terrible events was the foundation for the unconstitutional provisions of The PATRIOT Act, the advent of real-time crime centers, and the birth of the TSA. Public fear of terrorism enabled the government to impose security measures that would never have been tolerated in the absence of a crisis.

With greater public acceptance of an increasingly Orwellian environment, expanding surveillance from the airport into the streets required only amplifying stories of gang warfare, a problem portrayed as solvable only with the rampant use of cameras. 

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The Next Phase Of Surveillance? Getting Under Your Skin

AI and transhumanism: Hackable animals

My friends, let me introduce you to Yuval Noah Harari, a man chock-full of big ideas. He explained during the COVID crisis:

“COVID is critical because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimize, total biometric surveillance. If we want to stop this epidemic, we need not just to monitor people, we need to monitor what’s happening under their skin.”

In a 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, Harari repeated this idea: “What we have seen so far is corporations and governments collecting data about where we go, who we meet, what movies we watch.

The next phase is the surveillance going under our skin … He likewise told India Today, when commenting on changes accepted by the population during COVID-19:

“We now see mass surveillance systems established even in democratic countries which previously rejected them, and we also see a change in the nature of surveillance. Previously, surveillance was mainly above the skin; now we want it under the skin.

“Governments want to know not just where we go or who we meet. They want to know what’s happening under our skin: what is our body temperature; what is our blood pressure; what is our medical condition?”

Harari is clearly a man who wants to … get under your skin. He just might succeed.

Another recent interview finds him waxing philosophical:

“Now humans are developing even bigger powers than ever before. We are really acquiring divine powers of creation and destruction. We are really upgrading humans into gods. We are acquiring, for instance, the power to re-engineer human life.”

As Kierkegaard once said of Hegel when he talks about the Absolute, when Harari talks about the future, he sounds like he’s going up in a balloon.

Forgive me, but a few last nuggets from professor Harari will round out the picture of his philosophy, and his lofty hopes and dreams:

“Humans are now hackable animals. You know, the whole idea that humans have this soul or spirit, and they have free will and nobody knows what’s happening inside me, so, whatever I choose, whether in the election or in the supermarket, that’s my free will — that’s over.”

Harari explains that to hack human being, you need a lot of computing power and a lot of biometric data, which was not possible until recently with the advent of AI.

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Digital ID is a danger to us all

Few things stir the imagination of conspiracy theorists like the prospect of a government-backed digital-identity scheme. The obsessive advocacy of digital ID by Tony Blair of all people is just more grist to their mill. But there are perfectly rational reasons to be wary of the British state’s digital-ID scheme. For one thing, it will make us less safe.

As I recently reported in the Telegraph, I was contacted by a senior civil servant working on One Login, the UK’s digital-identity project. Announced in 2021 and developed by the Government Digital Service (GDS), One Login has absorbed over £300million in public funds so far. It is ultimately designed to help citizens access hundreds of government services and, in the shape of the gov.uk wallet, retain digital documents including an individual’s driving licence. It currently processes the sensitive personal and biometric data for three million citizens, but that number is expected to rise as the service expands.

What the senior civil servant told me was disturbing. He arrived on the project in 2022 to set up an information-assurance team, which performs a function similar to that of an auditor, assessing risk. At One Login, he found a chaotic and insecure work culture. The system was being accessed by users with ‘do anything’ system-administrator privileges thousands of times a month. Many of these users did not have the recommended security-clearance level required to work with the sensitive personal data of millions of citizens. Moreover, the GDS did not mandate locked-down workstations for staff working from home, or for the hundreds of contractors developing the system – a legacy of the GDS’s ‘geeks in jeans’ culture once eulogised by commentators. The civil servant also discovered that part of the system was being developed in Romania, a nation named by Oxford University researchers as one of the world’s ‘key cyber-crime hotspots’.

It would only take one developer with the right administrator privileges to create havoc on the system, perhaps developing ‘back doors’ into One Login that no one would even be aware of.

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New York Is Quietly Rolling Out Precrime Surveillance Tech

Picture this: it’s rush hour in New York City. A guy in a Mets cap mutters to himself on the F train platform, pacing in tight circles. Nearby, a woman checks her phone five times in ten seconds. Overhead, cameras are watching. Behind the cameras? A machine. And behind that machine? An army of bureaucrats who’ve convinced themselves that bad vibes are now a crime category.

Welcome to the MTA’s shiny new plan for keeping you safe: an AI surveillance system designed to detect “irrational or concerning conduct” before anything happens. Not after a crime. Not even during. Before. The sort of thing that, in less tech-horny times, might’ve been called “having a bad day.”

MTA Chief Security Officer Michael Kemper, the man standing between us and a future where talking to yourself means a visit from the NYPD, is calling it “predictive prevention.”

“AI is the future,” Kemper assured the MTA’s safety committee.

So far, the MTA insists this isn’t about watching you, per se. It’s watching your behavior. Aaron Donovan, MTA spokesperson and professional splitter of hairs, clarified: “The technology being explored by the MTA is designed to identify behaviors, not people.”

And don’t worry about facial recognition, they say. That’s off the table. For now. Just ignore the dozens of vendors currently salivating over multimillion-dollar public contracts to install “emotion detection” software that’s about as accurate as your aunt’s horoscope app.

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“Stop The Digital Control Grid…”

Catherine Austin Fitts (CAF), publisher of “The Solari Report,” is back to update us about the “Fast-Approaching Digital Control Grid.”  (CAF) told us last time here on USAW, “There is no bigger ongoing battle for lovers of freedom than the battle taking place over the freedom killing idea of digital ID.”  

But it’s more that just ID, it’s an entire control grid that is being quietly built that is like a frog being put into pot and the water being brought to a boil.  

CAF explains, “You know our goal at Solari is each person has a free and inspired life.  So, we have been working for several years to stop financial transaction control.“

”  If you get the ability to track each person and control their transactions, so if they don’t do what you say, they can turn off your money.  That is game over for the Constitution and for human liberty.  If you look at how the control grid is coming together, there are many different pieces.  There is digital ID, all digital currency or transaction system to a social credit system to the management to certain kinds of data and back-up energy.  There are many different pieces.  We look at the pieces, and we look at them as one-off things such as, oh, I don’t mind having a ‘Real ID’ because I can see why they might want a federal ID, or a passport or whatever.  Each one of these things looks nonthreatening and even convenient, but when they snap together, they are in a control grid, and it’s completely something else.  When Trump was elected, I was shocked to see, almost immediately, the President announce the Stargate AI initiative with the mRNA vaccines, which to me is the internet of bodies.”

CAF put together a long list of Trump Administration actions that are speeding up what looks like a control grid.  It’s called “The Fast-Approaching Digital Control Grid.”  It lists things such as crypto friendly currency actions, private Central Bank Digital Currency, shrinking banking sector, DOGE, undisclosed Epstein files and many more red flag items that could be used to allow crime to continue and build a digital prison for “We the People.”  While the Trump Administration brings change at a record pace, not a single thing has been done to find out about the “$21 Trillion Missing Money” that has been well documented by CAF and Michigan State Professor Dr. Mark Skidmore.  The money has been stolen from America, and the silence about this is deafening.  CAF says,

“We know there has been tremendous fraud in the financials of the US government.  We know that has happened.  If you look at all the things that you or I would do to figure out what had happened, where the money went and how do we get it back, that’s not what they are doing. . . . If you look at how we would do a successful operation to reengineer government and identify the real fraud and stop it, I don’t see any indication that they are doing that.  I do see some selected efforts that are probably sincere. . . . They are shutting things down lots of us would like to see shut down. . . . We know how to stop the death and disabilities that come from the Covid 19 vax injection, but you go the CDC website, and they are still recommending the Covid injections.”

The massive crime going on with government accounting makes it necessary for the control grid.  CAF explains, “What happened in the last Trump Administration is they adopted FASAB 56.  FASAB 56 basically said they could take the books of the US government dark.“

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Declassified Biden-Era Domestic Terror Strategy Reveals Broad Surveillance, Tech Partnerships, and Global Speech Regulation Agenda

A once-classified federal strategy paper has surfaced, pulling back the curtain on how the Biden administration planned to address domestic terrorism. Released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard after legal pressure from America First Legal (AFL), the document shows a government effort that stretches far beyond traditional national security work.

We obtained a copy of the documents for you here.

The 15-page plan, dated June 2021, outlines a series of objectives aimed at curbing domestic extremism. What’s caught critics’ attention, however, is how broadly the strategy defines the threat. Violence is only part of the concern. The rest seems focused on speech, ideology, and the online flow of information.

AFL sounded the alarm in an April 2 letter, accusing the administration of turning federal power inward. The group warned that officials were labeling “disfavored views” as “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “hate speech” and then moving to suppress them under the banner of national security. The letter called it an attempt to “weaponize” the government against its own citizens.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

Tulsi Gabbard responded on April 5, thanking AFL “for your work” and promising action. “We are already on this,” she said, “and look forward to declassifying this and other instances of the government being weaponized against Americans.” She pledged to restore “transparency and accountability” across the intelligence community.

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European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy, Framing Mass Surveillance as “Lawful Access”

The EU is once again looking for a way to undermine end-to-end encryption in the name of strengthening law enforcement capabilities, this time via a new strategy, ProtectEU.

The internal security strategy, announced this week by the EU Commission, is presented as a “vision and workplan” that will span a number of years but stops short of making concrete policy proposals.

A press release asserts that the current geopolitical environment is one of “growing” threats from hostile states, and mentions powerful criminal groups and terrorists who are “operating increasingly online” – as well as “surging cybercrime and attacks against our critical infrastructure.”

With the threat elements defined in this way, the EU’s new strategy focuses on six areas, one of them being “more effective tools for law enforcement” – which is where online encryption comes under attack.

When it describes how the groundwork might be laid for mandating encryption backdoors, the EU chooses to use euphemisms such as creating roadmaps for “lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement” and seeking “technological solutions for accessing encrypted data.”

A technology roadmap on encryption would allow for these “solutions” to be found. The EU is not alone in searching for mechanisms to, eventually, legislate against encryption, but these initiatives are invariably met with warnings from both tech companies and civil rights and privacy advocates.

The key issue is that encryption provides both for private communications (which is what law enforcement wants access to) and also the technical security of those communications, financial transactions, etc.

The new EU strategy promises that cybersecurity and fundamental rights will be protected as a future encryption backdoor is implemented.

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Congressional Hearing Reveals Stablecoins And CBDCs Share The Same Financial Control Risks

A congressional hearing on digital currencies rarely makes headlines. Yet, this week’s debate over stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) revealed more than technical disagreements; it exposed deeper anxiety about financial power, privacy, and control in an increasingly digital world.

The conversation unfolded along predictable lines. Those skeptical of CBDCs warned of creeping surveillance and government overreach. Advocates, meanwhile, framed it as a necessity, a matter of American competitiveness in a world where China and Europe are already moving ahead. Yet what emerged, almost inadvertently, was a realization that the supposedly safer alternative, privately issued stablecoins, carries many of the same risks.

While CBDC opponents championed stablecoins as the free-market alternative, testimony from industry leaders revealed that stablecoins — despite their branding as decentralized, private-sector solutions — already carry many of the same risks. The ability to freeze assets, enforce government mandates, and track transactions is a present reality, especially when combined with Know Your Customer (KYC) laws which eradicate privacy.

The core argument against CBDCs is simple: they give the federal government unprecedented control over personal finances. Randall Guynn, Chairman of the Financial Institutions Group at Davis Polk & Wardwell, issued a stark warning.

“A CBDC would give the Federal Reserve staff a direct window into virtually every transaction every person in America makes,” he said. “And at least one of them won’t be able to resist the temptation to use that information to promote what they consider to be worthy political goals.”

His comments echoed a broader concern: a US CBDC could function as a financial surveillance tool, much like China’s digital yuan. In China, authorities can track purchases in real-time and even restrict how certain funds are spent. Many fear the US government could use a CBDC to implement similar controls — whether to enforce political objectives, regulate behavior, or even deplatform individuals from the financial system.

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Finland’s Big Bet on Biometrics: Crime-Fighting Tool or Privacy Nightmare?

Finland has come out with a plan to expand the use of biometric data, with a new a new proposal from the country’s Interior Ministry.

Even as the push to introduce various forms of advanced biometric surveillance, including that incorporating facial recognition, is gaining momentum in countries around the world – so is the pushback from civil rights and privacy campaigners, which ensures that such initiatives these days rarely fly under the radar.

Finland’s Interior Ministry announced on its website that the proposal aims to amend existing rules on biometric data stored by the police and the immigration service – stored, that is, in Finnish citizens’ ID cards, and registers containing biometric data of foreigners.

The government says the intent is not only to strengthen crime prevention – but also to “improve the conditions for using biometrics in law enforcement.”

In addition to the collection of data captured by facial recognition devices, the proposal includes DNA samples and fingerprints taken from suspects. The process is then to attempt to match this biometric data with other types already contained in the law enforcement’s databases – for “crime prevention and investigative purposes.”

The groups keeping a close eye on this development are warning about some of the issues that crop up time and again around similar legislative efforts: the wording that allows for future “mission creep”- as well as unsatisfactory level of provisions that would guarantee against any abuse of such highly sensitive personal information.

Currently, the Finish proposal is yet to be presented to the lawmakers – the Interior Ministry is seeking comments before this can happen. And while the announcement of the proposal goes into the intent driving it, it is short on detail regarding the elephant in the room – privacy safeguards.

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