Control Grid: The Prison Without Bars

Recent revelations of the NSA spying on American citizens re-awakened debates about big brother and when state surveillance of its citizens goes too far.

The fact is that the modern implementation of the prison planet has far surpassed even Orwell's 1984 and the only difference between our society and those fictionalized by Huxley, Orwell and others, is that the advertising techniques used to package the propaganda are a little more sophisticated on the surface.

Yet just a quick glance behind the curtain reveals that the age old tactics of manipulation of fear and manufactured consensus are still being used to force humanity into accepting the terms of its own imprisonment and in turn policing others within the prison without bars.

All over the United States, Canada and Britain, surveillance camera systems are being installed on street corners, in public bathrooms, in residential neighborhoods, and even in parks and forests. We are asked to trust the government underlings who control them that they are working for our best interests as said underlings are caught using the cameras to spy on naked women in their homes.

In the UK, government programs encourage citizens to spy on their neighbors and report suspicious activity as part of a CCTV channel subscriber package.

Homeland Security funding is being utilized to fund this mass expansion of the surveillance state in the US as city and state officials clamor at the teat of Big Brother to milk the cash cow of the police state and win the contracts for installing more and more sophisticated spy cameras.

The government demands to know everything about our private lives and catalogue, file and index every aspect of our existence, yet government itself becomes more and more secret with each passing day as it engages in escalating criminal activities.

The warning of Rousseau, that "man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains" has come to pass. A majority of Westerners define freedom as the freedom to have a television and shop at Wal Mart. True freedoms, innate freedoms are no longer understood or practiced by a majority.

The most fundamental freedom, freedom of speech, is now subject to free speech zones. Areas that coincidentally preclude anywhere where media would be present, any place that the speech would be heard. The message is clear, you have freedom of speech but only if nobody can hear that speech.

Full body scanners that produce a photo fit of our naked bodies are being introduced into airports and trains.

RFID tracking tags are being added to every item we purchase, sending out a surveillance hum back to Big Brother HQ from the warehouse to the landfill.

Toll roads that read sensors on our license plates are taxing and tracing us across the country. GPS Black boxes in our cars report back to the government on exactly where we have traveled and where we are heading.

Small towns in Florida were already running scans on cars three years ago and that program has vastly expanded across the country.

Security blimps that are used against insurgents in Iraq are soaring high in major cities to report suspicious activity.

Spy satellites are used by the USDA to monitor farmer's activities and ensure they are complying with federal demands. Police helicopters are used in Arizona to make over flights of private property and check that owners are keeping their swimming pools clean. If he pools are not green the owners face immediate fines and even jail sentences.

Londoners are encouraged by the government to report on their neighbors via a huge poster and radio campaign organized by the Metropolitan Police. They are urged to watch for suspicious activity that could denote terrorist activity. Getting a refund on a credit card purchase, owning a vehicle and living in a house are three potential terrorist red flags according to the government.

Posters at bus terminals inform Londoners that they are 'secure beneath the watchful eyes' of Big Brother.

Government and media establishment organs demonize disposable phones and link them with terrorism because the phones can't be tracked 24/7 by government spy systems.

Our digital cable boxes and TIVO systems are recording what we watch to create psychological algorithms which are stored on government databases. These systems track what we watch, for exactly how long we watch it, and what our psychological score is based on those factors.

The US State Department directs a new program that enables the Mexican government to intercept phone conversations and online messages from every telecommunications network within Mexico.

DNA databases are instituted in Britain to record the DNA of anyone arrested. even if they are not charged their DNA record remains in the database. Laws are then passed with make every offence arrestable. Examples of those caught up in the database include a schoolgirl who threw a snowball at a police car.

Entrepreneurs, industry leaders and former government officials advocate taking the implantable ID chip as it becomes a necessity to access VIP areas in trendy bars and Mexican judicial workers are ordered to take it or lose their jobs.

Remote lie detectors have been developed for use initially in airports in which laser beams are bounced off a by passer's skin to try and denote signs of stress which could indicate the will to commit acts of terrorism. Brain scanners in Boston Logan airport also target suspicious individuals.

This is the prison without bars. This is the panopticon, a prison so constructed that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times, without being seen. This is a portrait of the accelerating movement by western governments to erect giant, powerful, all-pervading mass surveillance, tracking and control grids that will keep all populations firmly under the baleful and watchful gaze of Big Brother.

Orwell's 1984 was a picnic in comparison to the wielding cogs of the prison planet infrastructure that are being put in place all around us.

The choice is ours. As we hurtle towards the end of the first decade of the new millennium, are we content to accept the terms of our own imprisonment and live as slaves in a high tech rat maze, or, like the ones who went before us, will we cast off the shackles of servitude and serfdom, and reclaim our God given right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?