In America, TV watches YOU

CIA to spy on peo­ple through house­hold items – From RT.com

With a grow­ing num­ber of ‘smart gad­gets,’ spy­ing on homes may start to become much eas­ier. In fact, CIA Chief David Petraeus admit­ted that Amer­i­cans were effec­tively bug­ging them­selves and mak­ing it easy for spy agen­cies to peek in on their lives.

Speak­ing at a sum­mit for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s ven­ture cap­i­tal firm, Petraeus noted that new devices that link ‘dumb’ home appli­ances such as refrig­er­a­tors, ovens and light­ing sys­tems to the Inter­net could “change our notion of secrecy.”

“‘Trans­for­ma­tional’ is an overused word, but I do believe it prop­erly applies to these tech­nolo­gies, par­tic­u­larly to their effect on clan­des­tine trade­craft,” Petraeus noted.

“Items of inter­est will be located, iden­ti­fied, mon­i­tored, and remotely con­trolled through tech­nolo­gies such as radio-frequency iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, sen­sor net­works, tiny embed­ded servers, and energy har­vesters — all con­nected to the next-generation Inter­net using abun­dant, low-cost, and high-power com­put­ing,” Petraeus explained. “The lat­ter now going to cloud com­put­ing, in many areas greater and greater super­com­put­ing, and, ulti­mately, head­ing to quan­tum computing.”

In the mean­time, the biggest microchip com­pany in the world, ARM, pre­sented new proces­sors that can be implanted into nearly any house­hold appli­ance and con­nect it to the Inter­net so that the appli­ance could be remotely con­trolled in tan­dem with other appli­ca­tions. The com­pany described the con­cept as the “Inter­net of things.”

The National Secu­rity Agency is already build­ing a gigan­tic super­com­puter to process this gigan­tic amount of infor­ma­tion. It’s a $2 bil­lion Utah-based facil­ity that can process yot­tabytes (a quadrillion giga­bytes) of data, accord­ing to the Giz­mondo tech­nol­ogy blog. It will be the cen­ter­piece for the Global Infor­ma­tion Grid and is set to go live in Sep­tem­ber 2013.

These lat­est announce­ments paint a some­what Orwellian pic­ture of the future, with TV’s spy­ing on their view­ers and beds record­ing the dreams of those sleep­ing in them. Per­haps this data would then be sent to the Utah super­com­puter, which would assess the person’s pros and cons. And what if the com­puter uses sta­tis­tics to deci­pher the like­li­hood that that per­son will com­mit a crime? A score could land you in jail – for a crime that had not yet happened.

But even now we see how peo­ple are being arrested for post­ing online or click­ing the wrong but­ton in the pri­vacy of their own home. A British teenager is set to appear in court on charges of racially aggra­vated assault after post­ing com­ments about six British sol­diers killed in Afghanistan.

Pub­lished March 17 , 2012 on rt.com.

Posted by Randa Wagner on Apr 26 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.