Wired Wonders: Rhodes Had its Colossus. We Have Our Old Folks

Trends in miniaturization point to remarkable results around 2015: Device sizes will shrink to molecular dimensions; switching energies will diminish to the scale of molecular vibrations. With devices like these, a million modern supercomputers could fit in your pocket. Detailed studies already show how such devices can work and how they can be made, using molecules as building blocks.

Wired Wonders: Rhodes Had its Colossus. We Have Our Old Folks

As a device shrinking to pocket size, the telephone is subsuming the rest of our technological baggage – the fax machine, the pager, the clock, the compass, the stock ticker, and the television. A sign of the telephone’s power: It is pressing the computer into service as its accessory, not the other way round … The telephone is not just a device. It is a network … As the network spreads, it is fostering both the universality and the individuality of human discourse. The Net itself, the world’s fastest-spreading communications medium, is the telephone network in its most liberating, unruly, and fertile new guise. Thus Bell’s child is freeing our understanding of the possibilities that lie in ancient words: neighborhood and meeting and information and news.

Big Brother Wants to Look in Your Bank Account: The U.S. Government is Constructing a System to Track All Financial Transactions in Real-Time – Ostensibly to Catch Criminals. Does That Leave You With the Warm Fuzzies – or Scare You Out of Your Wits?

Although still in its embryonic stage and in spite of the looming privacy obstacle it will inevitably confront, FinCEN is seen by many in the government as the catalyst for a powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing, global, financial-tracking organization.

Big Brother Wants to Look in Your Bank Account: The U.S. Government is Constructing a System to Track All Financial Transactions in Real-Time – Ostensibly to Catch Criminals. Does That Leave You With the Warm Fuzzies – or Scare You Out of Your Wits?

“The risk of the CIA getting its hands on this is serious – we know the kind of unscrupulous people who populate the spook world. This kind of financial data, when coupled with other information like a person’s credit history, could be used for blackmail, bribery, and extortion.” DTS could present an inviting mechanism for quieting unwanted dissent or for defanging an unruly congressional leader bent on exposing some questionable CIA operation.

Big Brother Wants to Look in Your Bank Account: The U.S. Government is Constructing a System to Track All Financial Transactions in Real-Time – Ostensibly to Catch Criminals. Does That Leave You With the Warm Fuzzies – or Scare You Out of Your Wits?

More likely than not [a full-time DESIST/FinCEN system] would identify scores of previously unknown financial conduits to terrorists … The DESIST/FinCEN system would be able to identify terrorist financial movements in real-time, thus providing early warning of potentially imminent terrorist actions. Some within the intelligence community take it still another step: They would have the system tied into the private computers that hold credit card transactions “so that we could have nearly instant time-tracking capability,” according to one source who works closely with the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center … [It] could monitor on a real-time basis the financial activity of narcotics traffickers, since drug dealing also is within the purview of the CIA.

Big Brother Wants to Look in Your Bank Account: The U.S. Government is Constructing a System to Track All Financial Transactions in Real-Time – Ostensibly to Catch Criminals. Does That Leave You With the Warm Fuzzies – or Scare You Out of Your Wits?

In the near future, all of these government databases will be interfaced by way of AI/MPP technology … The pure power of such a “database of databases” terrifies critics.

Big Brother Wants to Look in Your Bank Account: The U.S. Government is Constructing a System to Track All Financial Transactions in Real-Time – Ostensibly to Catch Criminals. Does That Leave You With the Warm Fuzzies – or Scare You Out of Your Wits?

Such a database … would provide a wealth of information … Like the baseball diamond in “Field of Dreams,” build this database and they will come. Eventually, whether legally or illegally, they will gain access to this database.

Big Brother Wants to Look in Your Bank Account: The U.S. Government is Constructing a System to Track All Financial Transactions in Real-Time – Ostensibly to Catch Criminals. Does That Leave You With the Warm Fuzzies – or Scare You Out of Your Wits?

[DTS] would fundamentally change the relationships among banks, consumers, and the government in ways that have implications beyond banking policy. Our open and democratic society would be changed profoundly if any agency of the government maintained the scope of information on private citizens described in this proposal. It raises questions about our democracy that would have to be addressed by the highest policymaking levels of government.

Big Brother Wants to Look in Your Bank Account: The U.S. Government is Constructing a System to Track All Financial Transactions in Real-Time – Ostensibly to Catch Criminals. Does That Leave You With the Warm Fuzzies – or Scare You Out of Your Wits?

Two of the latest electronic inroads into the financial records of private citizens and businesses are “Operation Gateway,” a FinCEN initiative, and the proposed Deposit Tracking System, which other intelligence agencies would like to see established. Both are inherently prone to abuse and provide a disturbing indication of the direction in which the government is moving.