Authorities Plan To Trawl Phone Calls And E Mails For Signs Of "Resentment Toward Government"

Facecrime: Orwellian technology seeks to identify disgrunted Americans as terrorists
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Oct. 01, 2010

Do you resent the government for enforcing Obamacare or raising your taxes? Write about it in an email or talk about it on the phone and you could be placed under surveillance as a potential terrorist, if frightening new technology being shopped to law enforcement agencies is implemented.

Forget pre-crime and get ready for face-crime, Big Brother is set to unleash a new wave of shockingly invasive and Orwellian technology on the American people if a recent symposium in Hamburg New York is anything to go by. Federal agencies, police departments and others were all in attendance to see a demonstration of a system that trawls phone conversations, emails and instant messages to detect “resentment toward government,” alerting authorities to potential “terrorists” who are then placed under surveillance.

The technology was demonstrated to law enforcement officials, mental health professionals, and military representatives at a recent International First Responder-Military Symposium held at Hilbert College.

“A Swiss professor working with a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist who heads the Mind Machine Project there outlined how this program operates through computerized scanning of phone calls and electronic messages sent through e-mail and social networking mechanisms,” reports the Buffalo News.

The system works by detecting “resentment in conversations through measurements in decibels and other voice biometrics,” more specifically the emotional spikes that characterize “hatred and deep resentment toward government.”

“As for written transmissions scrutinized by the computer program, it can detect the same patterns of fixation on specified subjects,” states the report.

Once an individual has been identified as harboring “resentment toward government,” the information can be “passed along to authorities so surveillance can begin.”

Besides law enforcement applications, the program is also designed to aid mental health professionals to help “war veterans” become emotionally stable, chillingly implying that distrust or hatred of government, which was hailed by the founding fathers as a vital virtue, is now considered a mental illness.

Of course, this technology completely violates the 4th amendment, but by introducing it as a tool to fight terrorism, authorities hope to skirt around the issue – the problem being that, as we have exhaustively documented, the federal government now sees any political activity whatsoever, be it anti-war protesters on the left, or anti-big government activists on the right, as potential domestic terrorists.

The technology is rationalized by its adherents, who claim that it will help stop terrorists in their tracks, while also being used against ‘troubled veterans and first responders’.

However, the introduction of a program that closely resembles George Orwell’s “facecrime” in 1984 has little to do with fighting extremist Muslims hiding in caves in central Asia, this is all about targeting the American people with total panopticon-style surveillance, while also creating a chilling atmosphere and reminding people that their every conversation, instant message or email is being scanned by super-computers for any sign of extremism or “resentment toward government”.

As we have seen from the MIAC report, the spying case in Pennsylvania, and a host of others in recent years, the federal government defines "terrorist propaganda" as any material critical of the state, therefore any dissent against Big Brother in a phone conversation or an email would automatically trigger the new technology.

This is not only a constitution killer, it represents a hammer blow to free speech. The Internet as a forum of open discourse and free exchange of ideas will be fundamentally damaged if people live in constant fear of being raided by the feds at any minute because they sounded off about the government in an e mail or a posting on a comment board.

Of course, with distrust towards the state touching all time highs, there are millions of Americans who “harbor hatred and deep resentment toward government,” but that doesn’t mean they plan on bombing federal buildings.

The technofascism blog dug up a couple of quotes from George Orwell’s 1984 that almost precisely describe the exact same technology being used in the legendary dystopia about a totalitarian society that constantly hounds, harasses, and surreptitiously spies on its citizens.

"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime..."

-George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 5

"Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom."

- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 6

Rather than an improper facial expression or nervous tic, which was more within the purview of the equally ludicrous “gait analysis” division of Admiral John Poindexter’s Total Information Office, a program that claimed to be able to identify terrorists by the way they walk, the facecrime technology defines “abnormality” as being critical of the authorities, a frightening throwback to the Soviet psikhushkas -- mental hospitals -- which were used by the state as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally.

Indeed, the establishment media has intensified its dissemination of talking points that attempt to categorize distrust of authority as a mental disorder.

Although it survives under a number of different names with private sector funding, Total Information Awareness was mothballed by Congress in 2003 after widespread criticism that it would lead to the implementation of a “mass surveillance system”. Facecrime goes a step further, it not only creates a mass surveillance system of all our communications, it also corrodes and corrupts people’s confidence in being able to exercise their first amendment right to express “hatred and resentment toward government,” without being harassed and targeted as domestic terrorists.

Facecrime technology is illegal, immoral, anti-American and something that needs to be ditched permanently if the United States and indeed any free country is to heed George Orwell’s warning and resist the descent into totalitarianism.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.