The SOCC and The Matrix

How far are we going to allow them to go? This is active NOW! Is our only recourse to head for the hills and hope no one can find us?

"Surveillance is in the saddle. Responding to the latest Justice Department terror alert, Washington police opened the Joint Operation Command Center (SOCC). In it, 50 officials monitor a wall of 40 video screens showing images of travelers, drivers, residents and pedestrians.
These used to be the Great Unwatched, free people conducting their private
lives; now they are under close surveillance by hundreds of hidden cameras.
A zoom lens enables the watchers to focus on the face of a tourist walking
toward the Washington Monument or Lincoln Memorial.

The monitoring system is already linked to 200 cameras in public schools.
The watchers plan to expand soon into an equal number in the subways and
parks. A private firm profits by photographing cars running red lights;
those images will also join the surveillance network.

Private cameras in banks and the lobbies and elevators of apartment
buildings and hotels will join the system, and residents of nursing homes
and hospitals can look forward to an electronic eye in every room. A
commercial camera atop a department store in Georgetown catches the faces
of shoppers entering malls, to be plugged into omnipresent SOCC. Digital
images of the captured faces can be flashed around the world in an instant
on the Internet. Married to face-recognition technology and tied in to
public and private agencies around the world, an electronic library of
hundreds of millions of faces will be created. Terrorists and criminals -
as well as unhappy spouses, runaway teens, hermits and other law-abiding
people who want to drop out of society for a while - will have no way to
get a fresh start."


The rest of the article is here:
lists.elistx.com...

The official SOCC site is at:
www.winbournecostas.com...

If you aren't aware of the Matrix program (not the movie), read this:
www.theregister.co.uk...
and this:
www.iir.com...

Great information, thanks for posting.

How much more obvious must this tradegedy become,
before the awakening? May he who knows, be merciful.

I came across this quote, and although it wasn't written about us, it seems to be pretty applicable to our situation. The question is, if we recognize it, can we change it?

This quote is well over one hundred years old. Alexander Tyler was writing about the fall of the Athenian Republic:
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage."


[Edited on 29-9-2003 by jezebel]

Thatnks for the info. A lot of interesting stuff in there.

we know it exists but what can we do about it even if we were trying to overun the system they would know because they can see everything

Well I for one wlecome the extra eyes. With so much street crime (it's risen by about 300% in 10 years) I don't feel safe walking about anymore. the more cameras the safer you feel, that is until the cameras are in your home. Thats too far

Lax immigration has led to increased crime where I am.

This they did delibertly.

Athens was not the democracy that people blieved that it was. Some of the other greek city states were at times more democratic.

Increasingly the public realm is outside your front door wherever that is and there is no guarantee of any privacy once you venture out there.

Watch the Minority Report... This brings to mind the part where Tom Cruise's character was trying to get somewhere, yet being recognized by all of the cameras everywhere...

Then, once disguised, he would even trigger customized advertising to address him by name as he went by store windows, etc.

Creepy? Hell yes....but inevitable....

Originally posted by chebob
Well I for one welcome the extra eyes. With so much street crime (it's risen by about 300% in 10 years) I don't feel safe walking about anymore. the more cameras the safer you feel, that is until the cameras are in your home. Thats too far

Feeling safe is not the same as actually being safe. The feeling of safety is exactly the illusion that they are going for. If they can convince enough people that monitoring all citizens, (including their children in public school) to the point that our every move is recorded, and stored in a database designed to watch for and identify possible "terrorists" or "enemy combatants", is necessary for our protection we will have driven one more nail into the Constitution's coffin. The government has no right to spy on it's own citizens, especially when ANYONE can be classified as a terrorist with no more evidence, beyond the word of Ashcroft, needed for proof.

If and when the government decides to take the next step toward total military control of U.S citizens, and starts to monitor people in their homes, "for the preservation of National Security", it may well be too late, and protest will be futile.

The decline from republic to dictatorship is never done in one fell swoop, it takes many small, stealthy, seemingly justified, steps to reach the point of absolute tyranny.
To accept the initial, seemingly harmless, transitions into a police state , with the assumption that you will still be able to retain enough power or freedom to prevent the final transitions, is foolish.

Everytime I see this ever-increasing loss of freedoms, I just have the desire to go curl up in a ball somewhere, and never show my face again. man. It just really gets me down how much we're actually being watched/controlled by the government that is supposedly run by us.
Oh well. All I can do is fight the personal battles that arise, and make it hell for them.

I have recently watched a news show about something like this, and in several cities the results have been dis-appointing at best.

They used examples of trying to ID criminals wanted, etc on the fly, but the system had major difficulties doing this.

One city I recall, used a similar system to look for the wanted and had it on for about two years, and if I remember right only two arrests were made, and it didnt matter if it was automated or manned.

But then again, technology seems to advance.

I personally wouldent have a problem with the system as long as you could stop advertisments calling your name and it wasnt in your home.
If it was done properly it would an end to crime really.