The Police State Creeps Closer

Several worrisome laws that restrict our freedom have been passed recently and now Apple has patented technology which would allow governments and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, from any public gathering or venue they deem "sensitive," meaning that these powers will have control over what can and cannot be documented on wireless devices during any public event.

If this technology had been available in 1963 , the "Zapruder footage," from which we learned so much about the Kennedy assassination (NOTE: subscribers can still listen to these shows), would never have been seen by the public.

The RT website writes: "Those policies would be activated by GPS, and WiFi or mobile base-stations, which would ring-fence (‘geofence’) around a building or a ‘sensitive area’ to prevent phone cameras from taking pictures or recording video."

The Obama administration has told a federal court that the public has no "reasonable expectation of privacy" when it comes to cell phone location data, and says that the authorities have a legal right obtain documents detailing a person’s movements from wireless carriers without a probable-cause warrant. This statement is based on a 1976 Supreme Court precedent stating that this type of data, like banking records, are "third-party records," meaning customers have no right to keep it private.

One photo we CAN keep private is the one that’s taken by a pill we swallow that acts as a camera. Politicians keeping saying we need to keep Medicare costs down, and one of the most expensive aspects to medical care is all those TESTS. If our doctors could then see what was going on inside us as the camera/pill made its way through your body, a lot of those tests could be eliminated.

On the Gizmag website, Ben Coxworth reports that it’s now possible to get images of the inside of the intestinal tract by getting patients to swallow a camera-equipped capsule. A Japanese company claimed it had created this 7 years ago and now another company has announced they’ve created a similar device. Meanwhile, Norwegian researchers say they are developing the "next generation" camera pill.

This technology can also be used in other applications such as the petroleum industry (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show) for inspecting the insides of building and oil drilling pipes (as well as YOUR "pipes").

But back to our civil rights: In Wired.com, David Kravets quotes the recent government statement as saying, "When a cell phone user transmits a signal to a cell tower for his call to be connected, he thereby assumes the risk that the cell phone provider will create its own internal record of which of the company’s towers handles the call. Thus, it makes no difference if some users have never thought about how their cell phones work; a cell phone user can have no expectation of privacy in cell-site information."