Your freedoms, privacy, and personal autonomy.

Alarming New Surveillance Tools to Keep Tabs on You

Alarming new technologies are emerging that threaten your freedoms, privacy, and personal autonomy. Science fiction is becoming science fact.

Federal schemes to put individuals like you and me under central planners' thumbs seem so fantastic that many people simply refuse to believe they exist. Not that denial is at all surprising – it is merely a human defense mechanism that lets people cope with situations over which they have no control.

The following four technologies may sound too fantastic ever to become practical in the real world...

Computers that read your mind?

Pills that snitch and tell your doctor, or anyone else, if you don't take your medicine?

Cell phones that predict where you are going and report it to local police?

A machine that "knows" what you look like by being fed your toothbrush?

Sounds impossible, but they're all under research and in different stages of development today. They could be on the market sooner than we think, and government agencies and their corporate cronies will have new surveillance tools to aim at and use against innocent, law-abiding citizens.

Four New Surveillance Technologies Coming Soon:
Law Abiding Citizens Beware!

1) Mind Reading Computers – Good and Bad: The melding of mind and computer is shaping up to be a frightening new reality. While there are arguments for potential benefits, the potential for abuse is downright scary:

• Initial research through the University of California, Berkeley found ways to analyze and translate brain activity into actual words. According the Guardian, researchers translated brain activity caused by hearing words such as 'Waldo' and 'property' into recognizable brain patterns. Scientists have the preliminary ability to decode our thoughts into words.
  
  "Potentially, the technique could be used to develop an implantable prosthetic device to aid speaking, and for some patients that would be wonderful. The next step is to test whether we can decode a word when a person imagines it... Perhaps in 10 years it will be as common as grandmother getting a new hip," said director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley, Robert Knight.
  
  The potential of returning speech to those who've lost it would be a great benefit to humanity. The risk? Pleading the Fifth may one day be a futile exercise!
• In other research, scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) to accurately guess which picture, out of a known set of a thousand, a test subject was looking at. Scientists are beginning to crack the code to know what we're seeing in our mind.

Sponsored Message from Independent Living

• British scientists are developing a communication chip that sits on the brain and wirelessly transmits a signal to a receiver on the scalp. It could help people with "severe communication problems or motor neuron disease – like Dr. Stephen Hawking or (the late) Christopher Reeve," says Dr. Jon Spratley, who began research in this area as a Ph.D. student at Birmingham University. "What we have designed would allow them to control a computer with their thoughts. If they imagine their muscles moving, that could flick a light switch for example."
• Last year, German researchers used a driver's brain signals to help apply the brakes on a car. The researchers say their method provides faster reaction times and could help avoid traffic accidents. The risk to privacy? Government may want to force you to use this kind of technology, just like it wants mandatory "flight recorders" and driver cellphone blocking installed into cars today.

As computer and mind research develops and we get a better understanding how the brain processes and stores information, let's hope we don't have to worry about wiretaps or warrantless searches of our thoughts.

2) Spy Pills Snitch If You Haven't Been Taking Your Medicine...

In a recent edition of our monthly Independent Living newsletter (paid subscribers only), we notified members that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is approving "tiny, indigestible microchips capable of being embedded within drugs prescribed by doctors so that patients can be monitored remotely."

These sensors are the size of a grain of sand and made of silicon, magnesium, and copper. It reacts to the digestive juices and actually generates a small electrical impulse that sends out a signal through the body. A special patch can be worn on the skin that reads the signal and simultaneously sends a message to a healthcare provider's mobile phone!

Doctors can make sure you're doing what you're told. "It's like big brother watching you take your medicine," says Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, who touts microchip-laced drugs can help make sure patients take their "required" dosages.

This could be a risk when Obamacare or some other scheme goes into full effect and government doctors are pushed by central government doctrine to make sure the population takes its medicine... "for its own good."

Sponsored Message from Independent Living

Avoid These Simple Privacy Mistakes So Many
People Make to Their Everlasting Regret

Yes, it's possible to stop snoops, busybodies, nosy neighbors, and government bureaucrats cold! Learn how to lower your profile and protect your freedom here.

3) Reverse Engineering Smartphone Records to Predict Where You'll Be... 24 Hours from Now

Researchers from the University of Birmingham, England developed a software program that crunches information like the number of calls you make to a friend, the location of all your friends, your social interactions with them such as meet-ups, your movement patterns, and then predicts where you'll go over the next 24 hours, within 20 feet – "even if you deviate dramatically from routine," says the website Extreme Tech.

Government agencies could add technology like this to their arsenal, not to know where you are or track where you've been, but to know where you'll be in the near future.

4) Using Saliva from Your Toothbrush for Facial Recognition

Scientists have identified five specific genes linked to facial shape and features. Initial DNA studies from the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands help researchers predict features such as hair, skin, the space between the eyes and bridge of the nose, nose length, width between checks bones, and even eye color.

Scientists also discovered how specific genes influence "the gap between the centers of each eye socket being narrower by just 9 millimeters," according to the website New Scientist.

This research is in its preliminary stages, however, the scientists believe their ability will improve as they identify additional genes that affect facial construction. As this research advances, a small DNA sample such as a strand of hair from a comb or saliva from a toothbrush could be enough to create a "police sketch" of your face.

In the near future, we may need to shred our DNA just like we shred important documents today.

Just a few years ago, a mobile phone that could record live video and purchase airline tickets was just part of someone's imagination, today it is reality. At the moment the technologies mentioned above are still under development, but they may soon become part of police-state efforts to control every aspect of our lives and track our every move and even out thoughts.

Stay alert, remain vigilant, and be prepared to hold the line against the next wave of police-state abuses.

Read More