A Pandemic of Surveillance

Pandemic maps are all the rage, these days, but the latest one from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a little different; instead of viral hotspots, it displays a plague of official snoopiness, arranged by location and sortable by technology. While it documents intrusions that predate the current crisis, the Atlas of Surveillance is all too relevant to the age of coronavirus. Concerns about curtailing contagion help to normalize detailed scrutiny of people’s lives and drive us toward a pervasive surveillance state.

“The Atlas of Surveillance database, containing several thousand data points on over 3,000 city and local police departments and sheriffs’ offices nationwide, allows citizens, journalists, and academics to review details about the technologies police are deploying, and provides a resource to check what devices and systems have been purchased locally,” EFF announced on July 13.

Users can click on the map to see what surveillance technologies are used in specified localities. If you want to see what’s going on in your area, the map is searchable by the name of a city, county, or state. The map can also be filtered according to technologies such as body-worn cameras, drones, and automated license plate readers.

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The Surveillance State: How to Disappear

With each passing day, supposedly ‘free and democratic’ western governments are working overtime to emulate the type of surveillance states we see in countries like China and North Korea. The goal is 24/7 digital tracking of every citizen, and this authoritarian agenda is being accelerated during the current manufactured COVID-19 ‘crisis.’ Besides going off-grid to a remote rural area, is it still possible to opt-out? 

To answer this question, you will first need to audit which lines of tracking are currently in use.

Is it possible for a person to successfully evade this rapidly emerging Orwellian grid of surveillance and social control?

Even when wearing a mask in public, the State and its corporate enablers still have multiple lines of tracking honed on members of the public.

To create effective privacy shields, it is first necessary to deconstruct your current web of digital networks. In addition, there are also a number a new tools at your disposal.

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