Big Brother USA: Surveillance Via “Tagging, Tracking, and Locating” - The Militarization of U.S. Pub

http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2007/09/04/big-brother-usa-surveillance-via-tagging-tracking-and-locating-the-militarization-of-us-public-service-agencies-by-laurel-federbush/

According to the 2005 Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support, “the terrorist enemy now considers the US homeland a preeminent part of the global theater of combat, and so must we.”

The program of “defense transformation,” initiated by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, included, among other things, two particular concepts: “persistent surveillance” and the need to “deny the enemy sanctuary.” In military thinking, these concepts give rise to the need for constant monitoring of individuals suspected of being terrorists.

There is a special term for that: “Tagging, Tracking, and Locating.” The Defense Science Board’s 2004 Summer Study entitled Transition To and From Hostilities has a whole chapter on this, called “Identification, Location, and Tracking in Asymmetric Warfare.” “Asymmetric warfare,” incidentally, refers to war not against other countries but against unconventional enemies, such as “terrorists.” According to the first paragraph of the Study: “U.S. military forces currently have a superb capability for finding and tracking conventional war targets, such as weapons and military facilities. However, these intelligence assets have a poor capability for finding, identifying, and tracking unconventional war targets, such as individuals and insurgent or terrorist groups that operate by blending in with the larger society.”

The study suggests: “Tagging individuals and material can provide a powerful new tool for locating these modern threats. A tag is defined as something that is attached to the item to be located and/or tracked, which increases its ability to be detected or its probability of identification by a surveillance system suitably tuned to the tag. Tags can be either active (such as radio-emitting tags) or passive (such as radio frequency identification tags).” It also says: “The technologies for tagging and associated surveillance represent a very important area for research and technology development.” The report goes so far as to recommend a “Manhattan Project”-like focus on tagging, tracking, and locating. (The Manhattan Project was the effort during World War Two to develop the first nuclear weapons.)

One organization working on tagging, tracking, and locating technologies is the Technical Support Working Group. The Technical Support Working Group, or TSWG, is funded by the Department of Defense and the Department of State, and has many divisions, all of which do research in counterterrorism technology. One of these divisions is the Surveillance, Collection, and Operations Support Subgroup. This Subgroup includes the National Security Agency, the Secret Service, the FBI, the Special Operations Command, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. One of its projects is Tagging, Tracking, and Locating, which is sometimes referred to as “TTL.” The Secret Service, in fact, has been specifically charged by the Department of Homeland Security with spearheading the use of TTL. The subgroup also works on special sensor technologies–sensors being frequently associated with target tracking and other military surveillance applications. According to this subgroup’s own literature, its programs are “classified or highly sensitive. Program requirements, the success of programs, and specific program capabilities cannot be discussed in an open document.”

One of TSWG’s member entities, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), has been given power, under the Bush administration, to engage in counterterrorism actions all over the world. SOCOM is allowed to operate within the United States under certain circumstances. According to the SOCOM 2002 Report Layout, the Special Operations Command “is more heavily involved in Homeland Defense taskings than originally had been expected, with no let-up in sight.” The Report also observes: “…there is a tendency to suggest new roles and missions for the American military, and in particular SOF in the Homeland Defense realm.” The Report expressed the opinion that “care must be taken to avoid diluting SOF’s capabilities by diverting forces to domestic missions, which other agencies should be performing.” Exactly what these domestic missions are, however, is not public knowledge.

Another organization working on TTL technology is the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center–Northeast Region (NLECTC-NE). The NLECTC-NE is actually co-located with the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Information Directorate, in Rome, New York, which develops various kinds of surveillance technology. The fact that these two entities share a location is no coincidence; in fact, they have a partnership which includes the transfer of military technology to law enforcement.

Another radio frequency identification project being sponsored by the military and developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, at least some of whose details are publicly available, is called “Total Asset Visibility,” and it calls for implantable sensors to be used in American soldiers to monitor their physiological reactions to warfare and to keep track of location. The Army Research Office’s Soldier Status Monitoring Project envisions a day when implantable sensors will enable the military to control soldiers’ physiological reactions from afar. If this kind of dehumanizing technology is being developed for American soldiers, one can only wonder what the U.S. government would be willing to do to those it labels “terrorists.”

These tracking methods,,, Continued>>>>
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2007/09/04/big-brother-usa-surveillance-via-tagging-tracking-and-locating-the-militarization-of-us-public-service-agencies-by-laurel-federbush/

has an rfi chip. A neighbor works in a lab at Stanford (which had part of the development contract) and implanted one in the skin of Seamus' neck. I have this thing about the size of a cellphone that will walk me right up to within 20 feet of him (he runs away a lot because he is terrified by the sounds of sailboat races on the Bay).

to keep track of me.