The UK Minority Report: Has 'Precrime' Finally Arrived?

by Patrick St James Page 1 of 1 page(s) www.opednews.com

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A recent article in the UK Independent entitled, Police identify 200 children as potential terrorists, heralds what looks to be the unofficial beginning of British law enforcement's own "Pre-crime" program. For the first time, we can begin to see intelligence gathering and emerging technologies converging in a culture of pre-emptive law enforcement. Officials interviewed in this article are keen to play down any concerns about racial or religious profiling, insisting the program is an innocuous one. Civil liberties group may argue otherwise.

The new program known as The Channel Project is being run by the UK's Association of Chief Police Officers and hopes to target children with traits which may indicate an attraction to "extreme" views and a susceptibility to being groomed by "radicalisers" in the future.

In the article, Sir Norman Bettison, Britain's most senior officer in charge of UK terror prevention was quoted as saying, "We are targeting criminals and would-be terrorists who happen to be cloaking themselves in Islamic rhetoric. That is not the same as targeting the Muslim community." Sir Norman goes on to describe how the new "Channel Project" has already intervened in the cases of at least 200 children who they thought to be at risk of "extremism". Sir Norman continued, "What will often manifest itself is what might be regarded as racism and the adoption of bad attitudes towards 'the West'.

The program was started 18 months ago in Sept 2007 and officials are pointing out increased results being generated by their new project- at least by their own standards. In their first 9 months they had originally identified only 10 children up until June 2008. They now have over 200 youngsters on their books. No doubt, by this time next year, those numbers will have tripled or quadrupled.

Here we can see shades of the USA's notorious anti-terror "No Fly" Lists, which grew from a few thousand in 2002, to a monster list containing over 1 million names of US citizens who, according to security agencies, pose a "security risk" to other passengers.

Precrime’s Chief played by Tom Cruise- Minority Report (2002/20th Century FOX).

The concept of 'Precrime' was first introduced in a 1958 short story by visionary science fiction author Philip K. Dick and was later adapted for the big screen in Steven Spielberg's 2002 blockbuster movie The Minority Report. The story illustrates how Tom Cruise's character, Precrime Chief John Anderton, is able to track down and apprehend homicidal criminals before they actually commit their crime. He is aided by a trio of resident psychics called "Precogs" who are kept in a saline flotation tank deep inside Precrime Headquarters. Their brains are hard-wired into a police supercomputer from which Anderton and his colleagues spend their days sifting through "previsions" of future crimes which the psychics have seen in the future.

In this 2054 depiction of Washington DC, future police are within their jurisdiction to make arrests and make criminal indictments based on crimes which, according to police psychics, assailants are certain to commit. From a law enforcement perspective, this adds a radical new extension of traditional police powers which were previously limited to surveillance, establishing probable cause, obtaining a warrant, and then arresting or charging a perpetrator after an actual crime has been committed.

In a bygone era, British scientists and police once indulged in the Victorian fascination of mapping the cranium structures of criminals, hoping to predict "criminal types". A stretch by anyone's imagination, yet, this belief in 'precrime' has deep roots. It ultimately emanates from the idea that science can somehow overcome the complexities of living in a human society. Victorian author H. G. Wells illustrated this idea within the concept of the 'scientific dictatorship', which was later developed by his protégé Aldus Huxley.

Here we are in 2009 where the UK Association of Chief Police Officers' new initiative has already begun to extend its warrant into the future by collating speculative analysis obtained from various 'vigilant' teachers, parents and other community figures who have signed up with the new initiative. Although at present, the UK's Channel Project is only using speculative testimonies, it is foreseeable that in this current media-induced climate of fear, emboldened technocrats will seek to merge their newly formed social networks with various computerized precrime systems similar to ones being developed by the USA's Department of Homeland Security(DHS).

Enter the world of the super crime fighting computer. Originally entitled Project Hostile Intent, the DHS have been developing a sensory feedback system designed to aid security staff in identifying potential wrong-doers in public places like airports and municipal buildings. They attempt to do this by analyzing their pulse rate, breathing, skin temperature and changing facial expressions. This is essentially a souped-up, 3-D version of the tried and tested(and still unreliable) polygraph test. The DHS has since updated this project into a less-hostile-sounding enterprise called the Future Attribute Screening Technologies(FAST) program. As with all of these newly introduced programs, DHS assures the public that FAST has been through stringent privacy controls (pdf) and that the data collected is not necessarily matched to a name. DHS claims that (at least at this stage anyway) their data is only used to make decisions about whether to question someone and is discarded after that session.

Computer muscle is on the increase though and experiments like that of Purdue University's A.I.(Artificial Intelligence) 'predictive data mining' computer systems may eventually come online, adding a third leg to new and emerging modern-day "precrime" applications. A belief in the ability to predict human behavior certainly follows along the technological progression of a technocratic police state, like that of George Orwell's harrowing, yet eerily accurate novel 1984. In a January 2009 edition of Science, a News Focus article by Richard Stone (see also related Science Magazine Podcast) reports work done by a group of social scientists in which they attempt to predict mass social disturbances, large protests and riots. The usefulness of such predictions is far from clear, and yet these social scientists are more than eager to share their mass disturbance predictions with various interested government departments.

The danger here is clear. A very real trend exists post Sept 11^th 2001, whereby nations like the US, Britain and Israel have cleared the path for "pre-emptive attacks" and wars. The examples are now well-documented and form the basis of these nations' foreign policies in the 21^st Century. Downwind from the current orthodoxy of international pre-emptive military policing, we see a domestic trend with entirely new columns of law enforcement and security projects being erected in order to prevent future crimes and terrorist attacks, where an ever-increasing culture of "arrest first, ask questions later" has become acceptable to many law and policy makers.

Taking current trends into account, it is not inconceivable that security agencies will seek to merge the UK's Channel Project-type local intelligence gathering programs with DHS sensor or advanced A.I. data mining systems- in order to create the perfect beast in their ongoing effort to find the next potential criminal or terrorist. But in reality, how effective are these expensive efforts? Does the cost to civil liberties run too high? These are questions that we will surely debating in the coming years.

When we weight-in the number of people in a country like Great Britain against the number of terrorist attack fatalities we can see that the myriad of complex and expensive security applications start to amount to what internationally renowned security technologist and author Bruce Schneier calls "security theatre" - a far cry from risk assessment-based security, or security reality. A country like Great Britain which has a population of 55 million people has not seen, according to official accounts, a terrorist fatality since 2005. This puts the odd of a potential terrorist attack somewhere well above your chances of winning the national lottery jackpot, yet not nearly as imminent as the odds of being killed by a drunk driver or a chronic disease. And the odds of being killed by a terrorist in a country the size of the US are certainly no better.

So if genuinely real risk assessment is not driving this mushrooming security industrial complex, then what is? Few will argue that research grants relating to security applications like RFID or GPS tracking, CCTV MPEG4-based image recognition and data mining are worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year. With the economic downturn affecting most areas of business, the security and surveillance sectors are seeing markets expanding and profits on the rise- a global industry that is now worth hundreds of billions. Driving research and development in these areas, we see the US government spending even more on domestic Homeland Security related research grants now than they have done in the past with traditional academic stables like engineering and mathematics. What this means is that instead of producing a scores of engineers, mathematicians and scientists, countries like the US are instead producing a generation of graduates with advance "Jackboot" science degrees.

If civil liberty laws are relaxed to such a degree that they ultimately become 'irrelevant' in the new climate of the hyper-preemptive security state, then this leaves the door wide open for more experimental precrime-type applications that we are starting to see emerge today. Applications which rely on screening, profiling and speculative intelligence will be used to generate new 'pre-arrest' warrants and could become common practice. The UK's Channel Project should be a stark warning to privacy and civil liberty advocates.

In the same Independent article, a UK Home Office spokesman comments, "We are committed to stopping people becoming or supporting terrorists or violent extremists. The aim of the Channel project is to directly support vulnerable people by providing supportive interventions when families, communities and networks raise concerns about their behavior." The article adds a counter point here, "Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain said the police ran the risk of infringing on children's privacy. He warned: "There is a difference between the police being concerned or believing a person may be at risk of recruitment and a person actually engaging in unlawful, terrorist activity."

Whilst universities, corporations and governments continue to develop precrime-type applications and technologies, privacy advocates will rightly point out that the terms like 'security' and 'liberty' are not likely to coexist happily in this new hyper-security state, one built around a culture of perpetual fear and anxiety.

Of course, America's own founding fathers had a thing or two to say about these affairs of men. Benjamin Franklin left us with this little gem of wisdom:

"They who would give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither- liberty nor security."

Denver Cop Slams CodePink Protester to the Ground

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August 26, 2008

Anti-War Website Operator Threatened By Armed Thugs

Reading Mike Whitney’s account of the harassment of Tom Feeley, the editor and publisher of the Information Clearing House website, I am once again reminded that it is a few minutes before midnight (see Paul Joseph Watson’s account as well). As the clock strikes midnight, our brownshirts will rush in like a plague of locusts, or more accurately an invasion of cockroaches. America will become Nazi Germany, it will become Chile under Pinochet, it will be transformed into a fascist dictatorship. Most of us, distracted by bread and circuses, numbed by incessant propaganda, don’t realize how close at hand this reality is. It is now emerging from the shadows, as Mr. Feeley no doubt understands.

George Grosz: A Writer, Is He? 1934-35.

Nazi Germany, of course, is not an exact parallel. In 1921 Adolf Hitler formed his own private army called Sturm Abteilung, German for Storm Section, and the SA was instructed to disrupt the meetings of political opponents. In large part the SA was comprised of former members of the Freikorps, reactionary thugs organized into gangs after the First World War. As Spartacus Educational explains, Freikorps thugs “had considerable experience in using violence against their rivals” and were inspired after Hitler’s speeches to hunt down, brutalize, and even murder their opponents. Later, select members of the SA would be organized into the Gestapo SS.

Bush’s neocons are nowhere nearly as organized and vicious as the SA brownshirts, although the demented passion and violence is there, the desire to deal with opponents severely is thinly masked, ready to emerge given the right situation. Bush, however, is not Hitler, although his grand daddy helped facilitate Hitler’s crimes. Unlike Hitler, Bush’s neocons do not have at their disposal a mass fascist organization and cannot dispatch paramilitary goon squads and knuckle draggers to deal with opponents. In America, circa 2008, we have yet to experience organized gangs of neocon thugs attacking antiwar activists and truth movement patriots. In America, circa 2008, the intimidation and violence operates in the shadows… for the moment.

It is not clear who exactly threatened and intimidated Tom Feeley and his wife, although a few educated guesses come to mind. It is a matter of documented history that the FBI and recruited local police, under COINTELPRO, used “extralegal” force and violence against opponents of government policies. Such tactics included break-ins, vandalism, assaults, beatings, and — in the case of the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement — murder.

“Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that,” reported the Church Committee back in the mid-1970s, “the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.” In essence, the FBI served as America’s secret police then and continue to do so now. It also on occasion served as an assassination team assigned with taking out leaders like Martin Luther King.

Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, there was no such thing as the Patriot Act, nothing approaching the Military Commissions Act, and certainly nothing of the draconian character of PDD51, basically a plan to declare martial law and implement a dictatorship, provided the right situation or, as in the case of 9/11, the right “terrorist event.” Nixon’s declared “silent majority” pales when compared to Bush’s neocon minority, a gaggle of reactionaries hysterically calling not only for nuking Iran but also rounding up the growing opposition, tasering and beating them, and marching them off to freshly constructed concentration camps built under government contract by Halliburton.

But maybe I am biased, as I have personally experienced the insane wrath of these people. Compared to Mr. Feeley, however, I am fortunate — no thugs showed up uninvited in my kitchen. Instead, they repeatedly emailed and blogged death threats and made harassing telephone calls to my place of employment. Unlike Alex Jones, I was not physically attacked, or did a thug block in my car and demand I forget about the First Amendment. I am fortunate to have only experienced minor harassment.

If you can tell which way the wind is blowing, though, you will realize time is short. It is eleven fifty eight and twenty seconds.

It is no mistake that candidate Obama calls for a “National Security Force” as large and well-funded as the U.S. military, and candidate McCain calls for troops to lock down cities and conduct raids to “fight crime.”

REX-84 was no mistake and the long-standing plans for FEMA detention camps are not happenstance. Operation Cable Splicer and Garden Plot are not the idle meanderings of pencil-necked geeks at the Pentagon. Former Gen. Tommy Franks was serious when he said the Constitution will be jettisoned after the next false flag terror attack. Exercise Vigilant Shield and dozens of other “exercises” conducted by U.S. Northcom, the DHS, and local, state and other federal “responders” has less to do with natural disasters than gearing up for martial law. It’s no mistake the local cops, the National Guard, and Blackwater — under the aegis of FEMA — confiscated firearms in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Likewise, it was no mistake local cops, the Kansas Highway Patrol, ATF, FEMA, and the National Guard confiscated firearms in the aftermath of a tornado in Greensburg, Kansas. Both were incubator studies in tyranny.

No, the Nazi SA comparison does not work — not in America, circa 2008. Tom Feeley and Alex Jones were not kidnapped in the dead of night and found the next morning executed in typical death squad fashion. But after martial law is declared — after the next attack, an attack repeatedly promised by no shortage of government officials and experts — the machinery is firmly in place to turn America into a fascist dictatorship that will make the Nazi corollary pale by way of comparison with its scientific precision.

In the meantime, keep your eye on the clock.

Police Enter Man’s Home For Safety Check( The 4th is gone!!!)

Lakeville police surprise sleeping man with 3 a.m. reminder to lock his doors

Lakeville police surprise sleeping dad with 3 a.m. reminder to lock his doors

By Maricella Miranda
mmiranda@pioneerpress.com

Article Last Updated: 06/20/2008 12:18:41 AM CDT

Troy Molde awoke at 3 a.m. Thursday to police flashlights shining in his face. Two uniformed Lakeville officers were in his bedroom, knocking on the wall to wake him up.

They were there, they said, to warn him to keep his doors closed and locked.

Their surprise visit was part of a public service campaign. Officers had fanned out across the city, leaving notices on doors to remind residents how to prevent thefts by keeping garage doors closed, not leaving valuables in cars and locking windows or doors.

But at Molde's house, they went further.

His two sons, ages 5 and 7, and 5-year-old twin nephews were having a sleepover in the living room. They awoke to find the officers in the house.

"I was violated, but ... I wasn't physically damaged," Molde said of what he considers an invasion of privacy.

The officers told Molde his garage door was open, the TV was on, keys to his truck were left in the ignition and the door to his house was ajar.

Police said the intrusion was justified because the officers' initial door knocks went unanswered. Police went inside to check if anything was wrong, Sgt. Jim Puncochar said.

He said the kids were afraid to wake their dad, so the officers went upstairs.

"It really was suspicious," Puncochar said.

But Molde, 34, said he went upstairs to bed at midnight. Molde didn't shut the garage door, and he remembers leaving the doors to his house closed — but unlocked. The kids fell asleep watching TV.

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Three hours later, he had police in his bedroom. He immediately thought something was wrong.

"I was just dazed," said the 34-year-old dad. "It's not a safe way of (police) protection."

Puncochar said officers left pamphlets Thursday at eight other houses as a friendly reminder of ways residents can avoid becoming victims of crimes, such as burglary.

"We went there to determine that everyone was safe," Puncochar said.

Officers also leave the messages when checking on a home security alarm or to warn of a law violation they see at the residence. The department began using door hangers a year ago to tackle a rise in burglaries in 2006, Chief Tom Vonhof said at the time.

Police say many crimes originate with open garage doors.

Last month, a 52-year-old Burnsville man was stabbed and left to die in his burning town house after two assailants entered his home at 4:30 a.m. by way of an open garage door.

The suspects, who stole the man's car to escape, entered the garage and home through unlocked doors. Police have not found the assailants.

Leaving a door hanger for residents is a method used by other police departments nationally, Vonhof said. It can help create a police presence.

Lakeville police gave Molde a reminder he won't forget anytime soon.

"I haven't figured out what I should do with it yet," Molde said.

Maricella Miranda can be reached at 651-228-5421.