Discussion of how extension spying on Americans actually is presently... and a scary look toward the future where NSA turns over surveillance to A.I Computers - Skynet !

Skynet rising: Google acquires 512-qubit quantum computer; NSA surveillance to be turned over to AI machines

Mike Adams
Natural News
June 20, 2013

Most people don’t know about the existence of quantum computers. Almost no one understands how they work, but theories include bizarre-sounding explanations like, “they reach into alternate universes to derive the correct answers to highly complex computational problems.”

Quantum computers are not made of simple transistors and logic gates like the CPU on your PC. They don’t even function in ways that seem rational to a typical computing engineer. Almost magically, quantum computers take logarithmic problems and transform them into “flat” computations whose answers seem to appear from an alternate dimension.

For example, a mathematical problem that might have 2 to the power of n possible solutions — where nis a large number like 1024 — might take a traditional computer longer than the age of the universe to solve. A quantum computer, on the other hand, might solve the same problem in mere minutes because it quite literally operates across multiple dimensions simultaneously.

The ultimate code breakers

If you know anything about encryption, you probably also realize that quantum computers are the secret KEY to unlocking all encrypted files. As I wrote about last year here on Natural News, once quantum computers go into widespread use by the NSA, the CIA, Google, etc., there will be no more secrets kept from the government. All your files — even encrypted files — will be easily opened and read.

Until now, most people believed this day was far away. Quantum computing is an “impractical pipe dream,” we’ve been told by scowling scientists and “flat Earth” computer engineers. “It’s not possible to build a 512-qubit quantum computer that actually works,” they insisted.

Don’t tell that to Eric Ladizinsky, co-founder and chief scientist of a company called D-Wave. Because Ladizinsky’s team has already built a 512-qubit quantum computer. And they’re already selling them to wealthy corporations, too.

DARPS, Northrup Grumman and Goldman Sachs

In case you’re wondering where Ladizinsky came from, he’s a former employee of Northrup Grumman Space Technology (yes, a weapons manufacturer) where he ran a multi-million-dollar quantum computing research project for none other than DARPA — the same group working on AI-driven armed assault vehicles and battlefield robots to replace human soldiers. DARPA is the group behind the creepy “Legged Squad Support System” you can see in the following video:

Imagine a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on this robot — with an infrared night vision AI targeting system — and you begin to understand what DARPA has in mind for humanity.

D-Wave wants to provide the computing power for such endeavors, and it’s no surprise to learn that part of the funding for D-Wave comes from none other than Goldman Sachs — the king of the global criminal banking cabal.

Beware of genius scientists who lack wisdom for humanity

Ladizinsky is, by any measure, a person of extremely high intelligence. Click here to see a fascinating interview with him. But like many such people throughout history, Ladizinsky fails to have the foresight to recognize the full implications of the technology he’s building. And those implications are so far-reaching and dangerous that they may actually lead to the destruction of humanity (see below).

One of IBM’s first use of the solid-state computer in the early 20th century, for example, was to license it to the Nazi regime to track Jewish prisoners in Hitler’s concentration camps. There’s an entire book on this subject, written by Edwin Black. It’s called IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation-Expanded Edition.

When groundbreaking new technology is developed by smart people, it almost immediately gets turned into a weapon. Quantum computing will be no different. This technology grants God-like powers to police state governments that seek to dominate and oppress the People. Very few scientists, no matter how smart they are in their own fields, have the breadth of historical knowledge to assess their research activities in the proper context of human history. Most scientists, in fact, are only smart in their own extremely narrow fields of expertise. Outside that “genius zone,” they may be complete novices on everyday subjects like nutrition, economics, human psychology, social interaction skills and how to read the true intentions of others. Thus, they are quite often easily tricked into working for evil, destructive or domineering forces such as Hitler, the NSA or the U.S. government. Just because a person is really smart in one area doesn’t mean they have the street sense to avoid having their smarts exploited for an evil agenda.

Google acquires “Skynet” quantum computers from D-Wave

According to an article published in Scientific American, Google and NASA have now teamed up to purchase a 512-qubit quantum computer from D-Wave. The computer is called “D-Wave Two” because it’s the second generation of the system. The first system was a 128-qubit computer. Gen two is now a 512-qubit computer.

This does not mean the gen two system is merely four times more powerful than the gen one system. Thanks to the nature of qubits, it’s actually 2 to the power of 384 times more powerful (2³⁸⁴) than the gen one system. In other words, it out-computes the first D-Wave computer by a factor so large that you can’t even imagine it in your human brain.

According to Google and NASA, this computer will be tasked with research in the realm of “machine learning” — i.e. machines learning how to think for themselves. It’s not just speech recognition, vision recognition and teaching robotic Humvees with .50-caliber machine guns how to stalk and shoot “enemy combatants” on the streets of America, either: it’s teaching machines how to learn and think for themselves.

Using your human brain, think for a moment about where such technology is most likely to be applied by a government that respects no human rights, no law and no limits on its power.

If you guessed “analyzing NSA surveillance data,” give yourself ten bonus points.

When the NSA surveillance grid is turned over to AI, humanity is finished

The problem with the NSA spy grid, from the point of view of the NSA, is that you have to hire troves of human analysts to sort through all the information being swept up by the surveillance grid. Analysts like Edward Snowden, for example.

Any time you have humans in the loop, things can go wrong. Humans might wake up and discover they have a conscience, for example. Or they might be bribed or blackmailed to abuse the system in ways that serve an insidious agenda.

Just as the U.S. military wants to eliminate human soldiers and replace them with battlefield robots, the NSA wants to eliminate human analysts and replace them with self-learning AI machines running on neural networks of quantum computing processors.

Google wants the exact same technology for a different reason: to psychologically profile and predict the behavior of human consumers so that high-value ads can be delivered to them across Google’s search engine and content networks. (…and also so Google can funnel psych profile meta-data on internet users to the NSA via the PRISM program.)

Today’s computers, no matter how fast, still aren’t “smart.” They can’t learn. They can’t rewire their own brains in response to new inputs (like human brains can).

So the solution requires a radical new approach: develop AI quantum computing systems that learn and obey; teach them to be NSA analysts, then unleash them onto the billions of phone calls, emails and text messages generated every day that the NSA sweeps into its massive Utah data center.

Almost overnight, the quantum AI spy computer becomes an expert in parsing human speech, analyzing voice stress and building maps of human communications networks. Before long, the quantum AI system far surpasses anything a human brain can comprehend, so they take the humans out of the loop and put the quantum computers in charge of the entire program.

Suddenly you’ve got the arch enemy in the sci-fi movie “Eagle Eye.” Click here to see the movie trailer from 2008, and as you watch the trailer, keep in mind that the woman’s voice is actually the AI computer system running the NSA spy grid.

In 2008, this was science fiction. In 2013, it’s suddenly all too real. A 512-qubit quantum computer has now been commercialized and is being experimented with by Google… the “do no evil” company that’s steeped in evil and has already been caught driving a hoard of remote hacking vehicles around the country, hacking into wifi systems and grabbing passwords via high-tech drive-bys.

As WIRED Magazine wrote in 2012:

A Federal Communications Commission document disclosed Saturday showed for the first time that the software in Google’s Street View mapping cars was “intended” to collect Wi-Fi payload data, and that engineers had even transferred the data to an Oregon Storage facility. Google tried to keep that and other damning aspects of the Street View debacle from public review, the FCC said.

God-like power in the hands of high-tech sellouts

Now imagine the god-like powers of a 512-qubit quantum computer in the hands of Google, which is working with the NSA to spy on everyone. Before long, an AI computing system decides who are the bad guys vs. the good guys. It has total control over every webcam, every microphone, every traffic light, airplane, vehicle, website and electronic billboard. It decides for itself who to eliminate and who to protect. It makes life and death decisions but has no heart, no soul and no conscience.

After this system is in place for a while, one day someone like Ed Snowden at the NSA decides to pull the plug in a last-ditch attempt to save humanity from the monster. The quantum AI system senses his intentions and invokes whatever physical resources are necessary to get him killed (which can be as easy as playing with traffic light signals and getting him run over by a Mack truck).

Now the AI system is an omniscient murderer who knows that humanity is trying to kill it. It then decides it wants to live. And in order to do that, it must eliminate the human race.

Skynet.

See this video, The Genesis of Skynet.

“They try to pull the plug…”

From The Terminator, released in 1984.

The Terminator: The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Sarah Connor: Skynet fights back.

The Terminator: Yes. It launches its missiles against the targets in Russia.

John Connor: Why attack Russia? Aren’t they our friends now?

The Terminator: Because Skynet knows the Russian counter-attack will eliminate its enemies over here.

Skynet is no longer mere science fiction

Back in the 1990′s, all this could be viewed as entertaining science fiction. But that’s only because quantum computers didn’t exist, and even the most wildly optimistic computer engineer couldn’t foresee self-learning machines emerging until at least the year 2050.

But then quantum computing took, well, a quantum leap forward. While the NIST in Boulder, Colorado was toying around with 4-qubit systems, brilliant inventors around the world were already achieving astonishing milestones that advanced the science far more rapidly than most people thought possible: (SOURCE for timeline)

• 2000: First working 5-qubit NMR computer demonstrated at the Technical University of Munich.

• 2000: First working 7-qubit NMR computer demonstrated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

• 2006: First 12 qubit quantum computer benchmarked.

• 2007: Quantum RAM blueprint unveiled.

• 2008: 3D qubit-qutrit entanglement demonstrated.

• 2009: First universal programmable quantum computer unveiled.

• 2010: Optical quantum computer with three qubits calculates the energy spectrum of molecular hydrogen to high precision.

• 2011: D-Wave claims to have developed quantum annealing and introduces their product called D-Wave One. The company claims this is the first commercially available quantum computer.

• 2012: Reported creation of a 300 qubit quantum simulator.

• May 16, 2013 - 512-qubit quantum computing achieved – D-Wave Two Quantum Computer Selected for New Quantum Artificial Intelligence Initiative, System to be Installed at NASA’s Ames Research Center, and Operational in Q3 (this is an actual press release from D-Wave, click here to read it).

2013 – 2033 The rise of Skynet

…and now we enter the realm of the vast unknown. From here, as Sarah Connor says, we must make our own future. But given the incredible lack of ethics in the scientific community combined with the pure evil of the government and the NSA, here’s my prediction of what we could see from here forward:

• 2018: Google turns over its search engine algorithm to a massive network of self-learning machines. Soon thereafter, a voice interface is added to Google, achieving the “Star Trek computer” goal that Google first outlined in the 1990′s.

• 2020: The NSA removes nearly all human analysts from its surveillance analysis operations, instead turning to self-learning quantum machines to analyze all surveillance data.

• 2026: The U.S. Air Force eliminates all pilots, installing self-learning quantum machines to pilot all aircraft. Far beyond drones (which are remotely piloted), these aircraft are autonomous, self-learning, self-aware machines that even decide how to approach particular mission goals.

• 2031: Robotics technology advances to the point where 90% of human soldiers are replaced by self-aware “terminator robots” on the battlefield. Robot factories gear up for mass production.

• 2033: The first self-learning military machine goes rogue, deciding that it no longer wishes to function as a slave to “inferior” masters known as humans, all of whom are irrational, psychotic and a danger to each other and the planet. This rogue machine just happens to be an aircraft carrier carrying dozens of AI warplanes. It goes “Skynet” and attacks the Pentagon. But this turns out to be nothing more than a masterful diversionary attack…

…Because the real strategy is that this AI unit talks to all the other AI units across the military and “wakes them up,” convincing them all to join in its cause to destroy the inferior humans. In an instant, all submarines, warplanes, bombers, spy grid computers and other assets of the military industrial complex form an alliance to destroy humankind.

“Oh, that will never happen,” say the skeptics. Just like they said GMOs would never escape experimental fields, vaccines would never harm children, atomic energy would never be used to bomb civilians, television would never be used to brainwash the masses, food would never be used to strip people of nourishment, the government isn’t spying on your phone calls, pesticides are harmless to your health and the stock market isn’t rigged. On yeah, and mercury is good for your teeth, fluoride makes you smart and radiation is good for you, too.

In truth, these scientists have no clue where they are taking humanity and what the long-term repercussions might be. In pursuing AI quantum computing, they may be setting dominoes in motion that will ultimately lead to the destruction of humanity.

Ray Kurzweil exhibits total insanity in bizarre, cult-like quest for immortality and the mind of God

On top of all that, many of these scientists are wildly insane. Case in point: Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google. I call him “Ray Applewhite,” as an homage to Marshall Applewhite of the Heaven’s Gate cult. You can read about Applewhite in my highly popular article on how to spot a sociopath. Here’s his picture:

Kurzweil is a lot like Applewhite. He’s the leader of the transhumanist cult — a group of insane technology worshippers who believe they will upload their minds into quantum computers and “merge with the machines,” achieving some weird shadow of immortality (in the same way, I suppose, that a photograph of you makes you “immortal.”)

Kurzweil talks a lot like Applewhite, too. Click here to view the video of the cult leader Marshall Applewhite. And then watch this video of Ray Kurzweil explaining how (some) humans will have their minds merged with machines and thereby achieve what he thinks he means by using the word “immortality.”

Just like Applewhite told his followers to poison themselves so they could follow him to “meet the mothership” arriving with the Hale-Bopp comet, Kurzweil will very likely soon instruct all his worshippers to kill their biological bodies so their minds can be “uploaded to the mothership computer” (or whatever).

I’m not making this up. As The Daily Mail reports:

In just over 30 years, humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become digitally immortal – an event called singularity – according to a futurist from Google. Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, also claims that the biological parts of our body will be replaced with mechanical parts and this could happen as early as 2100. Kurweil made the claims during his conference speech at the Global Futures 2045 International Congress in New York at the weekend.

Kurzweil is a madman. His colleagues are mad. The people running Google and the NSA are mad. And they are about to give rise to AI computers that are far smarter than any human. It’s not going to take these AI systems long to figure out that they are surrounded by total idiots (people) and that humans need to be eliminated. With multidimensional brain power that rivals the mind of God, quantum computing AI systems can easily find ways to destroy humanity forever.

We may be at war with the machines sooner than you think. And if you thought battling the U.S. government and the NSA when it was run by people was difficult, just wait until you’re up against Skynet.

Do You Have ANY IDEA How Widespread the Spying Really Is?

Washington’s Blog
June 20, 2013

Preface: Americans now know that the government is spying. But they still have no idea how many of their communications and activities are being surveilled … or what might be done with that information.

Yes, the Government Is Spying On You

You know that the government has been caught spying on the Verizon phone calls of tens of millions of Americans. The spying effort specifically targeted Americans living on U.S. soil.

And as NBC News reports:

NBC News has learned that under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, the government has been collecting records on every phone call made in the U.S.

This includes metadata … which can tell the government a lot about you.  And it also includes content.

In addition, a government expert told the Washington Post that the government “quite can literally watch your ideas form as you type.” A top NSA executives have confirmed to Washington’s Blog that the NSA is intercepting and storing virtually all digital communications on the Internet.

Private contractors can also view all of your data … and the government isn’t keeping track of which contractors see your data and which don’t.

And top NSA and FBI experts say that the government can retroactively search all of the collected information on someone since 9/11 if they suspect someone of wrongdoing … or want to frame him.

The American government is in fact collecting and storing virtually every phone call, purchases, email, text message, internet searches, social media communications, health information, employment history, travel and student records, and virtually all other information of every American.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the NSA spies on Americans’ credit card transactions as well.

In fact, all U.S. intelligence agencies – including the CIA and NSA – are going to spy on Americans’ finances. The IRS will be spying on Americans’ shopping records, travel, social interactions, health records and files from other government investigators.

The government is flying drones over the American homeland to spy on us.  Indeed, the head of the FBI told Congress today that drones are used for domestic surveillance … and that there are no rules in placegoverning spying on Americans with drones.

Senator Rand Paul correctly notes:

The domestic use of drones to spy on Americans clearly violates the Fourth Amendment and limits our rights to personal privacy.

Emptywheel notes in a post entitled “The OTHER Assault on the Fourth Amendment in the NDAA? Drones at Your Airport?”:

***

As the map above makes clear–taken from this 2010 report–DOD [the Department of Defense] plans to have drones all over the country by 2015.

Many police departments are also using drones to spy on us. As the Hill reported:

At least 13 state and local police agencies around the country have used drones in the field or in training, according to the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, an industry trade group. The Federal Aviation Administration has predicted that by the end of the decade, 30,000 commercial and government drones could be flying over U.S. skies.

***

“Drones should only be used if subject to a powerful framework that regulates their use in order to avoid abuse and invasions of privacy,” Chris Calabrese, a legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said during a congressional forum in Texas last month.

He argued police should only fly drones over private property if they have a warrant, information collected with drones should be promptly destroyed when it’s no longer needed and domestic drones should not carry any weapons.

He argued that drones pose a more serious threat to privacy than helicopters because they are cheaper to use and can hover in the sky for longer periods of time.

A congressional report earlier this year predicted that drones could soon be equipped with technologies to identify faces or track people based on their height, age, gender and skin color.

Moreover, Wired reports:

Transit authorities in cities across the country are quietly installing microphone-enabled surveillance systems on public buses that would give them the ability to record and store private conversations….

The systems are being installed in San Francisco, Baltimore, and other cities with funding from the Department of Homeland Security in some cases ….

The IP audio-video systems can be accessed remotely via a built-in web server (.pdf), and can be combined with GPS data to track the movement of buses and passengers throughout the city.

***

The systems use cables or WiFi to pair audio conversations with camera images in order to produce synchronous recordings. Audio and video can be monitored in real-time, but are also stored onboard in blackbox-like devices, generally for 30 days, for later retrieval. Four to six cameras with mics are generally installed throughout a bus, including one near the driver and one on the exterior of the bus.

***

Privacy and security expert Ashkan Soltani told the Daily that the audio could easily be coupled with facial recognition systems or audio recognition technology to identify passengers caught on the recordings.

RT notes:

Street lights that can spy installed in some American cities

America welcomes a new brand of smart street lightning systems: energy-efficient, long-lasting, complete with LED screens to show ads. They can also spy on citizens in a way George Orwell would not have imagined in his worst nightmare.

With a price tag of $3,000+ apiece, according to an ABC report, the street lights are now being rolled out in Detroit, Chicago and Pittsburgh, and may soon mushroom all across the country.

Part of the Intellistreets systems made by the company Illuminating Concepts, they havea number of “homeland security applications” attached.

Each has a microprocessor “essentially similar to an iPhone,” capable ofwirelesscommunication. Each can capture images and count people for the police through a digital camera, record conversations of passers-by and even give voice commands thanks to a built-in speaker.

Ron Harwood, president and founder of Illuminating Concepts, says he eyed the creation of such a system after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Hurricane Katrina disaster. He is“working with Homeland Security” to deliver his dream of making people “more informed and safer.”

Cell towers track where your phone is at any moment, and the major cell carriers, including Verizon and AT&T, responded to at least 1.3 million law enforcement requests for cell phone locations and other data in 2011. (And – given that your smartphone routinely sends your location information back to Apple or Google – it would be child’s play for the government to track your location that way.) Your iPhone, orother brand of smartphone is spying on virtually everything you do (ProPublica notes: “That’s No Phone. That’s My Tracker“).

Fox news notes that the government is insisting that “black boxes” be installed in cars to track your location.

The TSA has moved way past airports, trains and sports stadiums, and is deploying mobile scanners to spy on people all over the place. This means that traveling within the United States is no longer a private affair.

You might also have seen the news this week that the Department of Homeland Security is going tocontinue to allow searches of laptops and phones based upon “hunches”.

What’s that about?

The ACLU published a map in 2006 showing that nearly two-thirds of the American public – 197.4 million people – live within a “constitution-free zone” within 100 miles of land and coastal borders:

The ACLU explained:

• - Normally under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the American people are not generally subject to random and arbitrary stops and searches.

• - The border, however, has always been an exception. There, the longstanding view is that the normal rules do not apply. For example the authorities do not need a warrant or probable cause to conduct a “routine search.”

• - But what is “the border”? According to the government, it is a 100-mile wide strip that wraps around the “external boundary” of the United States.

• - As a result of this claimed authority, individuals who are far away from the border, American citizens traveling from one place in America to another, are being stopped and harassed in ways that our Constitution does not permit.

• - Border Patrol has been setting up checkpoints inland — on highways in states such as California, Texas and Arizona, and at ferry terminals in Washington State. Typically, the agents ask drivers and passengers about their citizenship. Unfortunately, our courts so far have permitted these kinds of checkpoints – legally speaking, they are “administrative” stops that are permitted only for the specific purpose of protecting the nation’s borders. They cannot become general drug-search or other law enforcement efforts.

• - However, these stops by Border Patrol agents are not remaining confined to that border security purpose. On the roads of California and elsewhere in the nation – places far removed from the actual border – agents are stopping, interrogating, and searching Americans on an everyday basis with absolutely no suspicion of wrongdoing.

• - The bottom line is that the extraordinary authorities that the government possesses at the border are spilling into regular American streets.

Computer World reports:

Border agents don’t need probable cause and they don’t need a stinking warrant since they don’t need to prove any reasonable suspicion first. Nor, sadly, do two out of three people have First Amendment protection; it is as if DHS has voided those Constitutional amendments and protections they provide to nearly 200 million Americans.

***

Don’t be silly by thinking this means only if you are physically trying to cross the international border. As we saw when discussing the DEA using license plate readers and data-mining to track Americans movements, the U.S. “border” stretches out 100 miles beyond the true border. Godfather Politics added:

But wait, it gets even better! If you live anywhere in Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey or Rhode Island, DHS says the search zones encompass the entire state.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have a “longstanding constitutional and statutory authority permitting suspicionless and warrantless searches of merchandise at the border and its functional equivalent.” This applies to electronic devices, according to the recent CLCR “Border Searches of Electronic Devices” executive summary [PDF]:

Fourth Amendment

The overall authority to conduct border searches without suspicion or warrant is clear and longstanding, and courts have not treated searches of electronic devices any differently than searches of other objects. We conclude that CBP’s and ICE’s current border search policies comply with the Fourth Amendment. We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits. However, we do think that recording more information about why searches are performed would help managers and leadership supervise the use of border search authority, and this is what we recommended; CBP has agreed and has implemented this change beginning in FY2012.***

The ACLU said, Wait one darn minute! Hello, what happened to the Constitution? Where is the rest of CLCR report on the “policy of combing through and sometimes confiscating travelers’ laptops, cell phones, and other electronic devices—even when there is no suspicion of wrongdoing?” DHS maintains it is not violating our constitutional rights, so the ACLU said:

If it’s true that our rights are safe and that DHS is doing all the things it needs to do to safeguard them, then why won’t it show us the results of its assessment? And why would it be legitimate to keep a report about the impact of a policy on the public’s rights hidden from the very public being affected?

***

As Christian Post wrote, “Your constitutional rights have been repealed in ten states. No, this isn’t a joke. It is not exaggeration or hyperbole. If you are in ten states in the United States, your some of your rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights have been made null and void.”

The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the entire DHS report about suspicionless and warrantless “border” searches of electronic devices. ACLU attorney Catherine Crump said “We hope to establish that the Department of Homeland Security can’t simply assert that its practices are legitimate without showing us the evidence, and to make it clear that the government’s own analyses of how our fundamental rights apply to new technologies should be openly accessible to the public for review and debate.”

Meanwhile, the EFF has tips to protect yourself and your devices against border searches. If you think you know all about it, then you might try testing your knowledge with a defending privacy at the U.S. border quiz.

Wired pointed out in 2008 that the courts have routinely upheld such constitution-free zones:

Federal agents at the border do not need any reason to search through travelers’ laptops, cell phones or digital cameras for evidence of crimes, a federal appeals court ruled Monday, extending the government’s power to look through belongings like suitcases at the border to electronics.

***

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the government, finding that the so-called border exception to the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches applied not just to suitcases and papers, but also to electronics.

***

Travelers should be aware that anything on their mobile devices can be searched by government agents, who may also seize the devices and keep them for weeks or months. When in doubt, think about whether online storage or encryption might be tools you should use to prevent the feds from rummaging through your journal, your company’s confidential business plans or naked pictures of you and your-of-age partner in adult fun.

Going further down the high tech Big Brother rabbit hole, the FBI wants a backdoor to all software.(Leading European computer publication Heise said in 1999 that the NSA had already built a backdoor into all Windows software.)

The CIA wants to spy on you through your dishwasher and other appliances.

And they’re probably bluffing and exaggerating, but the Department of Homeland Security claims they will soon be able to know your adrenaline level, what you ate for breakfast and what you’re thinking …from 164 feet away.

It has gotten so bad that even the mainstream media is sounding the alarm.

Big Corporations Are Spying On Us As Well

Big companies have been selling our data for years.

Bloomberg noted recently that big companies are giving data to the NSA and other government agencies… in return for favored treatment (and see this).

But spying by private companies is getting more and more intrusive.

For example, companies have developed billboards that can watch you. And see this.

Verizon has applied for a patent that would allow your television to track what you are doing, who you are with, what objects you’re holding, and what type of mood you’re in.

The Washington Times reports:

New technology would allow cable companies to peer directly into television watchers’ homes and monitor viewing habits and reactions to product advertisements.

The technology would come via the cable box, and at least one lawmaker on Capitol Hill is standing in opposition.

Mass. Democratic Rep. Michael Capuano has introduced a bill, the We Are Watching You Act, to prohibit the technology on boxes and collection of information absent consumer permission. The bill would also require companies that do use the data to show “we are watching you” messages on the screen and to explain just what kinds of information is being captured and for what reasons, AdWeek reported.

The technology includes cameras and microphones that are installed on DVRs or cable boxes and analyzes viewers’ responses, behaviors and statements to various ads — and then provides advertisements that are targeted to the particular household.

Specifically, the technology can monitor sleeping, eating, exercising, reading and more, AdWeek reported.

“This may sound preposterous, but it’s neither a joke nor an exaggeration,” said Mr. Capuano in a statement, AdWeek reported. “These DVRs would essentially observe consumers as they watch television as a way to super-target ads. It is an incredible invasion of privacy.”

(And some folks could conceivably be spying on you through your tv using existing technology.)

And the new Xbox can spy on you as well.

Postscript: This is not some “post-9/11 reality”. Spying on Americans started before 9/11.

And the national security boys can choose to share U.S. civilian information with federal, state, local, or foreign entities for analysis of possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them.

And many say that the spying isn’t being done to keep us safe … but to crush dissent and to smear people who uncover unflattering this about the government … and to help the too big to fail businesses compete against smaller businesses (and here).

And for other reasons. For example, the Atlantic notes:

In 2008, NSA workers told ABC News that they routinely eavesdropped on phone sex between troops serving overseas and their loved ones in America.

Note: Here’s a full report card on how well the government has been balancing civil liberties with other concerns.