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July 11, 2012 - InfoWars Nightly News
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Thank you.
It's Wednesday, July 11th.
I'm Paul Joseph Watson.
This is InfoWars Nightly News.
Tonight, on the InfoWars Nightly News, Paul Joseph Watson speaks with campaigning against camera surveillance's Steve Jolly about the war on privacy worldwide.
Plus, the United Nations Arms Treaty and what it means for our Second Amendment rights.
Then, is the Internet rewiring our brains?
All that and more on the InfoWars Nightly News.
Top story tonight.
Garbage collectors trained to spot terrorists before RNC.
Garbage collectors are being trained by police to be on the lookout for terrorists in the run-up to this year's Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida.
The terrorist depicted in the role-playing scenario, used to train garbage workers, is a young white woman, while her victim is a Middle Eastern man.
Quote, anarchists, terrorists, plain old thieves and creeps, your new foe wears work boots and fluorescent vests.
Meet the Garbage Men, reports the Tampa Bay Times, noting that police are involved in training garbage collectors to quote, spot suspicious activity on their routes in preparation for this August's RNC in Tampa.
And this story goes on to talk about how the Garbage Men all get a special certificate and a special little baseball cap for graduating as snitches into this Waste Watch program.
And again, as we talk about tonight in the interview with Steve Jolley, this is the application of the Panopticon system on a societal level.
This is about empowering blue-collar workers using the Delphi technique to somehow think that they themselves have a stake in the police state, that they're upholding America.
And it's the same with, you know, Janet Napolitano empowering Walmart shoppers to spy on each other.
Highway Watch and all these other programs that foster this tattletale society by getting the very, you know, minimum wage blue-collar workers to do all the legwork and then reward them with some kind of special certificate like they're ace spies working for the homeland.
And as all the academic studies have proven, and the historical record has proven, the only thing that this ever does is breed distrust, resentment, fear and paranoia, because obviously that's the purpose.
And remember back in 2002 there was this big uproar about Operation Tips, which was the genesis for all this, you know, the cable guy spying on you, the postman spying on you, basically anyone who comes near your property.
And that was disbanded, that was defunded by Congress, precisely for the reason that you can't have Americans spying on Americans.
And yet it continues today, under all these different guises, many of them run by Homeland Security, you know, right down to the hot dog vendors at the Super Bowl.
And is this what America's really supposed to be about?
Americans spying on each other for the homeland?
And you saw the DHS-funded study last week, which went absolutely viral after it was on the Drudge Report, defined those quote, reverent of liberty as terrorists.
And of course in this training program with the garbage workers in Tampa, The terrorist is depicted as a young white girl while the victim is a Middle Easterner.
So they've moved on from the mythical threat posed by Middle Easterners.
They've already moved from that paradigm.
Now the real threat has been reclassified as the American people, mainly as the politically active middle-class American, which seems to feature prominently in all these characterizations of terrorists.
And this garbage program in Tampa is just another escalation of that.
And you know, if we're going to have a sophisticated domestic spying network, why are we empowering garbage collectors to run it?
East Germany, they had the Star City, at least in Russia they had the, in the Soviet Union they had the KGB.
So again, it's all about empowering these blue collar workers because that's your everyday people.
They want to get everyday people spying on each other.
It doesn't make anyone safe.
All the facts have proven it.
All the studies have proven it.
Has no effect but to create fear, paranoia, distrust because that's precisely what they need, what they require to unfold their police state.
Next story by KurtNemoInfoWars.com, Pentagon takes over civilian duties and sprays mosquitoes in Florida.
Officialdom in Miami-Dade is working with the U.S.
Air Force to spray mosquitoes.
This newest round of mosquito control involves a large C-130 cargo plane based in Ohio to spray Homestead, ARB and communities of Doral, West, Sweetwater, Kendall, Homestead, Florida City and areas of East US-1 where heavy concentrations of mosquitoes have been reported.
CBS Miami reports.
So, another move in this reorientation of the military to its involvement with domestic affairs.
You remember the Washington Post story, you know, the Northcom infestation of America by 2011, 20,000 active duty troops conducting law enforcement and crowd control duties.
Now we have numerous examples of that and in fact U.S.
Chief of Staff of the U.S.
Army in a recent foreign affairs piece, that's of course the Council on Foreign Relations journal, wrote an article to that effect in which he outlayed the fact that the main focus of the U.S.
military is to reorient its purpose, its directive, its role to domestic law enforcement.
So yet another example of that in Florida.
Fox News, U.N.
arms treaty could put U.S.
gun owners in foreign sites, say critics.
A treaty being hammered out this month at the United Nations, with Iran playing a key role, could expose the records of America's gun owners to foreign governments, and critics warn eventually put the Second Amendment on global trial.
International talks in New York are going on throughout July on the final wording of this so-called Arms Trade Treaty, which supporters such as Amnesty International USA say would rein in unregulated weapons that kill an estimated 1,500 people daily around the world.
Of course, Most of that figure is made up by all these rebel clashes which people like Amnesty International are actually involved in in funding and propagating through their propaganda.
Got virtually nothing to do with the situation in the United States but they're using it as a kind of end run around the Second Amendment.
And critics including NRA's Wayne LaPierre, who remember said that basically if he got a second term Obama would seek to virtually nullify the Second Amendment completely.
LaPierre warned the treaty would mark a major step towards the eventual erosion of the US Constitution's Second Amendment gun ownership rights.
Americans, quote, just don't want the UN to be acting as a global nanny with a global permission slip stating whether they can own a gun or not, Lapierre said.
It cheapens our rights as American citizens and weakens our sovereignty, he warned in an exclusive interview with Fox News.
So again...
The UN has been at this for years.
More than a decade ago, they came out with a similar treaty which said that private ownership of firearms threatens the legitimate power monopoly of the state.
What is a power monopoly of the state?
It's a dictatorship.
And in dictatorships, the general public are not normally armed with private guns for their own personal protection.
New York Times reports Russia sending warships on manoeuvres near Syria.
Russia said Tuesday it had dispatched a flotilla of 11 warships to the eastern Mediterranean, some of which would dock in Syria.
It would be the largest display of Russian military power in that region since the Syrian conflict began almost 17 months ago.
Nearly half of the ships were capable of carrying hundreds of marines.
The announcement appeared intended to punctuate Russia's effort to position itself as an increasingly decisive broker in resolving the anti-government uprisings in Syria, Russia's last ally in the Middle East and home to Tartus, its only foreign military base outside the former Soviet Union.
So again, the central question driving this whole Syria issue is if or when Russia will back down just like they did with Libya.
I've predicted that they will eventually back down and cut some kind of deal.
But it seems that Hillary Clinton's effort to lecture the Russians into doing just that this past weekend has been met with a forceful response.
Numerous warships now on their way to Syria.
And as, you know, commentators have pointed out, Syria is to Russia what Israel is to the United States, so while Russia's presence is likely to delay a planned NATO-led attack, the fact that Putin's always talking out the other side of his mouth, telling the Western media one thing while telling, you know, the Russian media and the Middle Eastern media another, is a hint that
You know, Russia's having second thoughts on this, but the fact that they've sent out these warships to perform aggressive maneuvers, again, brings the question to the fore.
But again, if Russia does step down like they did with Libya, they'll be empowering the NATO-backed terrorist rebels to take over the country of Syria, and of course, install themselves as puppets of NATO.
Just interesting to see how Russia's going to respond.
People are still baffled as to their behaviour because, as I said, sometimes they say one thing and do another.
Sometimes they tell different media organisations different things depending on where they are and what kind of propaganda they're looking to project.
So we'll continue to watch that one with interest.
American's confidence in television news drops to new low.
This is out of Gallup.
American's confidence in television news is at a new low by one percentage point with 21% of adults expressing a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it.
This marks a decline from 27% last year and from 46% when Gallup started tracking confidence in television news in 1993.
So, you know, by a score of more than half since 93, Americans have lost trust in the mainstream media.
And confidence in newspapers is also down by a half since its peak in 1979.
By coincidence, again, we have CNN's ratings dropping to all-time lows as they get caught pumping out the war propaganda, specifically in relation to Syria.
With other network news channels having the same problems.
They had the report about a week ago, CNBC, the financial network, all their major news programs are losing viewers.
And so it's not only a testament to the truth movement, and you know, the growth of the alternative media, but these news networks and their corporate backers really have no one to blame but theirselves.
If you ever get a guy on mainstream media that even tells a little bit of the truth, you know, people like, whether it be the Young Turks guy on the left who was on MSNBC, you know, Lou Dobbs on the right with CNN, their existence in that sphere of the establishment media is finite.
If they dare, if they dare just tell a little bit of the truth, they're given literally a couple of weeks and they're gone.
And, you know, remember the Young Turks guy was told directly, despite the fact he was getting outstanding ratings for an MSNBC show, that, quote, because the people in Washington didn't like what he was saying, they wanted him off the air.
And he was given a choice, either tone it down, either talk about what we want you to talk about, and not any of this other stuff, or you're gone.
And he took the decision, and he's gone.
So you've got a mainstream media Daring or being forced to dip its toe into the truth just a little bit by giving these guys platforms, you know, simply to remain relevant.
But even that's not allowed to run on for any decent length of time because people just get too nervous and before you know it, they're gone.
But you know, if it's an info war that's going to change minds, change behaviour, ultimately change the world for the better, then the figures are definitely in our favour.
Confidence in mainstream media collapsing at all-time record levels.
Daily Beast reports, is the web driving us mad?
Questions about the Internet's deleterious effects on the mind are at least as old as hyperlinks.
But even among web skeptics, the idea that a new technology might influence how we think and feel, let alone contribute to a great American crack-up, was considered silly and naive, like waving a cane at electric light or blaming the television for kids these days.
Instead, the Internet was seen as just another medium, a delivery system.
Not a diabolical machine.
It made people happier and more productive.
And where was the proof otherwise?
Now, however, the proof is starting to pile up.
The first good peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet blasts of web utopians have allowed.
The current incarnation of the Internet, portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive, Maybe making us not just dumber or lonelier, but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention deficit disorders, even outright psychotic behaviour.
Our digitised minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.
So another story about how people's addiction to social networking websites And they kind of paint a broad brush, they try and denounce the whole internet with this, but it's mainly social media.
How it's literally driving people mad by rewiring their brains to resemble drug addicts.
The case they used to illustrate it is this Kony 2012 guy, the producer, the main guy who was in the film.
Of course you will remember, went completely nuts, stripped naked, you know, started beating his fists on the sidewalk, screaming out loud.
And apparently they explain it, whether it's true or not, Is that it was all because of his obsession with the reaction to his film on social networks.
So he became so enthralled and obsessed by both the positive and negative reaction that it just literally rewired his brain and sent him over the edge.
So while, you know, the internet's proven great in terms of the info war, we've got a whole generation of people on the flip side of that who are having their brains rewired and regressing back into childhood-style behaviours, you know, this demand to always have attention for every little Facebook link they post or every little comment they want to get.
And what it's doing, according to this article which cites this study, is creating what scientists call associative thinking, which serves to reduce attention span, reduce the ability to concentrate, and actually reduces the empathy of human beings, because, you know, we're bombarded by so many graphic images.
And people are just spending their whole time on the Internet.
They're not forming real physical relationships with people.
They're not going outside.
They're getting locked in this box of the World Wide Web.
Which is kind of ironic, seeing as I'm talking to you sat behind a computer and you're probably watching this on YouTube.
But we need to get outside and experience real life as much as we can.
Because this obsession with social networks, as these studies show, is creating a generation of apathetic, nihilistic, attention span lacking wireheads, whose entire lives are just a waste of time.
So we need to occasionally turn off, unplug ourselves from the Matrix.
Time.com reports H1N1 vaccines linked to Guillain-Barré syndrome but not birth defects.
How safe are flu vaccines?
Two studies show that the H1N1 vaccine poses no risk of birth defects when given to pregnant women.
Other studies say something else.
But does slightly increase the risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a reversible autoimmune disorder, in patients over 50.
This was a study published in the Journal of American Medical Association.
And they claim that it had no effect on birth defects.
I've read other stories about studies that say the opposite.
But that it does cause this autoimmune system.
A separate group of scientists in Quebec looked at the risk of Guillain-Barre Syndrome in millions of people given the vaccine in Canada from 2009 to 2010.
So it's having these side effects.
We've got new stories about vaccines in Cambodia.
Looks like they've hushed it up.
Dozens of kids dead after receiving a vaccine.
So while the vaccine industry is desperate to keep this kind of stuff under wraps, it does keep creeping out in these studies which we post on an almost daily basis.
If you go to the Science and Technology section on PrisonPlanet.com you'll find many similar stories.
Salon.com reports Bertha fears Obama re-election.
We will be hunted down like dogs if Obama is re-elected, says Bertha Joseph Farrah.
And this is Salon.com, but it's actually the Southern Poverty Law Center has been afforded its own special section within this news website to spew its propaganda.
Certain things should not be mixed together.
Bleach and ammonia, white wine and red meat.
Alex Jones and Joseph Farah.
Proof of the latter mixture's toxicity came last week when Jones, the gravelly-voiced internet personality, best known for his obsession with truth or theories about the government's supposed complicity in 9-11, interviewed Farah, the moustachioed overlord of all things Bertha, on his radio show.
And, uh, basically goes on to relate the story that we covered, which was linked on the Drudge Report, about how Farah had this drone, he lived in a remote property out in Northern Virginia, nothing surrounding it, out walking his dog and noticed a friendly little spy drone was surveying his property.
So this article basically goes on to try and make fun of it in the usual pathetic, weak, done-to-death, sophomoric, strawman, hit-piece way.
And it's par for the course, because as we've exhaustively documented with numerous articles, the SPLC is nothing but a parasitic organisation that basically secures its funding by manufacturing the myth, like in this story, that people like Alex Jones and Joseph Fair are somehow leading this army of non-existent violent right-wing extremists, in this case, to somehow declare war on drones and shoot down drones.
It's funny though, when they actually try to provide examples of these so-called extremists that we're all supposed to be leading, it's the likes of Richard Popolosky, who was of course the guy who had a domestic complaint with his mother about his dog peeing on the carpet, got into the firefight with cops.
Who of course, I think it was two of which unfortunately died.
But then the media suddenly came out and said, Oh!
You know this guy Popoloski, the cop killer, he was an Alex Jones fan!
He was an InfoWars.com fan.
Of course, when we actually checked back on the comments that he had made on InfoWars.com, He hated Alex Jones.
He was constantly attacking us.
And in fact, several big publications, media publications, had to retract that smear.
But guess who didn't?
That's right, the Southern Poverty Law Center.
They were also similarly hesitant to retract the fact that comments on their own website for a period of months Included a statement by somebody who openly expressed their desire to see Alex Jones executed.
Again, they weren't that concerned about extremism when it's directed at the likes of us.
But God forbid should Joseph Farah go and complain about drones surveying his property because that makes him the extremist in their eyes.
But we've documented the fact.
SPLC.
Tens of millions of dollars a year.
To demonize politically active Americans as domestic terrorists.
If they didn't do it, they wouldn't get the funding, they would cease to exist.
They're called the most profitable civil rights charity in America.
And now they're given platforms in the establishment media by the likes of Salon.com.
So again, they can continue their demonisation campaign, but as we've documented with Mark Potok and the rest of them on numerous occasions, it's done for very little other reason than to demonise their political enemies, chill free speech and justify their giant budget which comes in at the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year.
So another massive, massive fail on behalf of the SPLC.
Quote of the day on Infowars Nightly News.
Quote, we are moving toward a new world order.
The world of communism.
We shall never turn off that road.
Mikhail Gorbachev, 1987.
And certainly now in the years since we've seen the very worst aspects of monopoly, capitalism and communism forming as this New World Order unfolds.
And isn't it interesting that Mr Gorbachev went on to become a prominent figure within the United Nations, which through its Agenda 21 program, through its arms treaty for a gun grab to kill the Second Amendment, is continuing the march towards that New World Order with every single step.
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This is where you can go to meet like-minded people in your area, work on activist projects, attend special events.
You can set up your own blog there.
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PlanetInfoWars.com.
We're going to come back after this quick break with Steve Jolly, Anti-Big Brother Crusader.
We'll be back.
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It's Paul Joseph Watson back with InfoWars Nightly News and before I introduce our next guest, I'm just going to read this quote from Glenn Greenwald, the online writer, because it really encapsulates why this issue of mass surveillance really underpins everything else.
And this is what he wrote.
Quote, this topic is central to all other activism because the surveillance state hovers over any attempts to meaningfully challenge state or corporate power.
It doesn't just hover over it.
It impedes it and deters it and chills it.
That's its intent.
It does that by design.
And so understanding what the surveillance state is, how it operates, and most importantly, how to challenge it, is an absolute prerequisite to any sort of meaningful activism to challenge state and corporate power.
And on that note, I'm going to introduce Steve Jolly, who is a major anti-Big Brother crusader there in the UK, of course Guardian contributor, Liberty Human Rights Award nominee, and spokesman for No CC TV.
Steve Jolly, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me on, Paul.
Now just to begin, tell us briefly about how you fell out of love with Big Brother and decided to watch the Watchers.
It wasn't something I'd given a great deal of thought to, other than being annoyed by the excessive level of camera surveillance in the UK.
You know, you're sitting in restaurants or a bar and you've got cameras watching you.
But I didn't really give it that much thought until something happened on my doorstep.
In my neighborhood in Birmingham, UK, the second biggest city outside of London, a couple of years ago, hundreds of cameras just started appearing from nowhere.
Nobody knew what they were for or who put them there and we were told at the time that this is just a community safety scheme and that the government, the Home Office, had provided a grant for communities for enhanced safety and to improve your quality of life.
You know, that sort of thing.
But it really, from the beginning, it didn't stack up and these cameras were put in really odd positions in residential neighbourhoods and they seemed to be forming a circle around a couple of districts, a couple of residential communities.
And I quickly discovered that The whole thing was a lie.
It was a surveillance operation, an intelligence-gathering exercise.
It was funded by three and a half million pounds of counter-terrorism money that ACPO, that's the Association of Chief Police Officers, had requested from the Home Office.
And they just said, yeah, we need this money to spy on Muslims in Birmingham because they might be al-Qaeda sleeper cells.
That was basically the logic behind it.
And there was that suspicion from the beginning.
We found the evidence, proved that the police had been lying, and basically I went to the media, blew the whistle, made sure the story kept being exposed in the media.
Basically, the police were battered by a barrage of negative publicity until eventually, after six or eight months, they were forced to scrap the scheme because the cover had been blown.
There was massive public uproar.
These cameras were described in the press as the world's most controversial set of CCTV cameras.
And as a result of that, the scheme was scrapped.
They were completely removed, and it was a massive victory for civil liberties.
So that's where it started.
I wasn't an activist before that happened.
But obviously, as a result of that, I was researching into the surveillance camera issue as well because these cameras were mainly automatic number plate recognition cameras There were well over a hundred of those.
there were some CCTV cameras as well.
And shockingly, there were 72 hidden covert cameras forming two, what the police call a ring of steel, around two neighbourhoods.
So you couldn't get in or out without being tracked and all your movements being recorded.
I then looked at the rest of the cameras, and I thought, well, is there anything odd about the other ones that most people consider to be normal?
And what I discovered was that although people believe that they deter crime and catch criminals, they don't.
That's an absolute lie.
There's been over 15 years worth of research, academic studies and reports, that pretty much all conclude that CCTV has had little or no effect on crime.
There's at least 15 reports that I can point you to on our website that say just that.
And the Home Office, which commissioned many of these reports, along with the police, they know this.
They know that it's failed to tackle crime.
And yet they relentlessly pursue and persist with this policy.
So, you know, you have to wonder, if the stated aim isn't being met and the policy makers know this, why do they continue with the policy?
Is there another agenda?
And that's when I joined No CCTV as a spokesman and I've been campaigning and writing about the issue for the last three years.
And talking about that other agenda, as he said, we know they don't stop crime.
We know it's about tracking our movements for the police state.
But as he said, this is also a psychological process.
This is about changing our very patterns of thought and behaviour.
So tell people about this panopticon effect and how it's related to mass surveillance.
Well, there's a secondary effect of surveillance.
If it doesn't deter crime and catch criminals, then there is a secondary effect, which may actually be the primary intention.
And that is the psychology, the psychological effect of mass surveillance.
In Britain now, we're coming to the point where we've almost got a seamless surveillance So, you could be in a building, you could be inside, outside, you could be on the street, you could be in a bus, train or a taxi, a restaurant, a pub, almost anywhere.
Even in a toilet, they're in toilets now.
So, it's seemingly inescapable and ubiquitous.
And what it does is it's a psychological effect of the belief that you're constantly being watched, or that you might be constantly being watched.
Even if the Even if the surveillance is patchy and sporadic, even if no one's watching, even if it's not even recorded, even if the cameras don't even work.
They could be dummy cameras.
The psychological effect comes into play then.
It's the belief that you are continually being watched.
And what that does is it makes the subject into their own overseer.
It sort of internalizes, interiorizes that surveillance so that people become their own watcher.
And the effect of that is to increase conformity and to challenge anything outside of the accepted norms.
And it's really sort of quite a powerful automated system of mass control that could be achieved by this psychological effect.
So that's really quite creepy and scary.
And moving on to the new level of this, which is obviously we've focused heavily on it here at InfoWars, is this IntelliStreets network which is being rolled out in major cities in the United States, which is basically a networked hub of streetlights which are connected via wireless internet.
And they double as Homeland Security Announcement Towers, basically, recording conversations, obviously filming people at the same time, recording how many people go past a certain area.
So tell us about the next level of digitised mass surveillance, now that it's all going HD, specifically in reference to this IntelliStreet programme.
I mean, IntelliStreets is really alarming.
It's the Orwellians' telescreen, isn't it?
It's the television screen, the camera in the street that can listen to you and talk to you and bark orders and monitor you.
Apparently these systems can...
They can count people in the proximity, track people from lamppost to lamppost, listening, talk to you.
I mean, you know, it's really quite excessive and extreme.
And you have to wonder how much more extreme it could become.
Apparently London has been chosen as the first city To have its own operating system.
This is based on the idea of the smart city, the smart grid.
So that everything that's digitized could potentially connect and communicate and talk to everything else.
And this is moving into the realms of a vast, sprawling, digitized system where all forms of digital data can be connected and collated, sifted, analyzed and compiled.
And moving on to the, because the obvious fear that we normally come across and it is happening is, you know, the show us your papers checkpoints, the TSA on the highways, which is all unfolding.
But at the same time we have this more insidious thing which in the UK is called ANPR, in the US it's called ALPR.
Literal invisible checkpoints through licensed scanning cameras.
Tell us about how that's started to unfold in the past couple of years.
It's already pretty big in the UK.
We've got over 10,000 of these ANPR cameras on the motorway network, the major roads, petrol stations.
It's a network that's been erected by stealth, with no law to allow it, no statutory instrument, no permission granted, no public debate or parliamentary debate.
It's all done, again, by the Association of Chief Police Officers who write policy over here in the UK.
But it's spreading over to the States as well.
What it is, is an enormous network that will monitor, log, store, record every vehicle journey.
The justification given for it is that it can track stolen vehicles.
It can catch people through vehicles that are connected to crime in some way.
And what's not to like about that?
You know, that's how it's sold.
But what they don't sell you It's an enormous intelligence-gathering tool, building reams of data, not just about where you've been, but it effectively investigates you in real time for a whole variety of offences.
It'll check you against tax insurance and crime databases.
But it would also build intelligence files on where you've been and draw connections between places and people.
And the potential power of it and the potential for mission creep and abuse is sort of built into the system and it's inevitable.
But what they represent is, as you say, it's an automated checkpoint.
It's a virtual checkpoint, an invisible checkpoint.
You're not going to be stopped by an armed police officer and told to show your papers.
It's done automatically without you noticing.
So you just drive past.
You don't know this is happening.
And what's happening in the UK is that these cameras are being used to create virtual borders.
So we have rings of steel around cities, even small towns or communities within a city.
We've got virtual borders being created between counties, between, over in the States, you know, I can imagine that there'll be between counties, between States, around cities.
These are virtual borders that check you simply for driving around.
This is an enormously powerful tool, and the police are really interested in data mining that information.
It's not just the 2% data that they currently say they're using, which is crime-related data, so vehicles connected to crime, wanted people, stolen cars, that sort of thing.
It's the 98% of data that they're really interested in now, in sifting and analysing that.
And basically that's all the innocent people, the people who've done nothing wrong.
There's no reason for suspicion, but the suspicion is now automatic.
And what this could spell, you know, if it goes ahead in the state, to the extent that it's happening here in the UK, is that, you know, it could spell the end of that great American freedom, that symbol of American freedom, which is the freedom of the open road.
If you have a massive network of invisible digital borders and checkpoints, then that's obviously intended to impede the freedom of movement and unchecked freedom of movement.
But this relates to the whole digital panopticon.
Which is that you're free to come and go, or at least apparently so, it appears so, as long as you're constantly monitored.
And this hunger for data, and compiling data, is almost an obsession.
And it gives more power than a bad man should have, or a good man should want.
And that's the problem with it.
And it goes across the various forms of surveillance.
And I mean it's, you know, who needs the black box?
There's all, there's again all this fear about putting black box data recorders in cars, you know, for the carbon tax by the mile.
Who needs it when every petrol station, every car park, you know, every speed camera you go past, this thing recognises your licence plate.
It makes the black box redundant.
And it gives a whole new level of control to it.
Moving back though to the psychological aspect, We had this poster campaign in London a few years ago where it said basically, you film a surveillance camera, you're a terrorist.
They said the neighbours report the suspicious activity prevented a bombing because somebody was filming a surveillance camera.
So they're trying to characterise people who are sceptical of being surveilled 24 hours a day as extremists and terrorists.
But there's also another side to it which is a PR campaign which actually is trying to get the public to, like Winston in 1984, love Big Brother.
Tell us about that.
Absolutely.
Well, that's the manufacturing of consent.
And it's happened very successfully in the UK, to the extent where most people tend to support CCTV.
They believe that it prevents crime, that it catches criminals, and therefore it can only be a good thing.
But this is the message that's been sold to us over the last 20 or 30 years.
It's completely contradicted by the evidence.
Part of the success of this strategy depends on people really buying into it and supporting it.
There's a lot of text in some of the legislation that's in the UK that states that one of the main aims of The policy to do with surveillance cameras is increasing public support for it.
So one of the key elements to the strategy of introducing surveillance is selling it to the public.
And this is a relentless process.
It goes on every day.
You hear so many stories in the media that suggest That CCTV is a wonderful thing, or that AMPR cameras will be a wonderful thing to keep you safe and catch more bad guys.
And I was reading a copy of Jane's Police Product Review, which is quite a scary catalogue of technological biometrics and police weaponry.
And there was an article in there saying that the manufacturing of consent and the propaganda has been very successful in the UK, but that there's more opposition to it, to the surveillance agenda in the States, and they'll have to work hard to win people over.
So they're actually suggesting that they use the same techniques, the same strategy that's worked so well in the UK, and they're going to be promoting the idea that this is a great way to prevent terrorism.
And obviously to catch drug dealers or whatever sort of demonized criminal you care to choose.
And it's the conditioning, the training of the public consciousness to buy into it, because it's all supposed to be being carried out with our support, with our consent.
They're not openly saying this is something that we're doing to you.
They're still sort of pretending that this is something that the people want and we're doing it for you.
And it's important that they keep up that pretense and that people buy into that.
So there's a lot of effort that goes into persuading the public to support it.
And that is a major part of the problem in that a lot of people do.
And also in the US, recently we had the drone industry come out and said they were concerned about public perception about the mass drone surveillance that's now causing uproar and they said that they would need a PR campaign to pacify the public to accept that.
So that's definitely an aggressive frontal assault.
But really one of the key points is victories, because you've had victories.
People often think in this surveillance thing that it's just a juggernaut, that it's going to keep rolling forever and they can do nothing about it.
But there's two specific examples where you've actually had direct victories and rolled back some of this surveillance, so just talk about those briefly.
That's right and it's a really important point actually because when you look at the surveillance agenda and the various aspects and elements to it, there are loads of tentacles that all seem interconnected.
It can seem overwhelming and it can give people the impression that they're helpless and powerless and there's not much they can do about it.
But there is, there is.
But you do have to do something.
You can't just sort of wish that somebody else would do something about it.
People do have to get involved.
But individual projects can be overturned.
But each individual step needs to be challenged because each step forward is permission to take another step.
So it's an incremental pushing forward of the agenda.
And there's two examples.
I can give a project champion in Birmingham, which was a massive intelligence spying operation.
And, you know, three and a half million pounds.
It was probably years in the planning.
And because it was the Home Office, the government and the police, people said to me, there's no way that you'll get that overturned.
You know, there's nothing you can do about that.
But I proved them wrong because there was huge uproar, public opposition, loads of media attention and it was so damaging in terms of PR for the police that they basically were forced to remove the whole thing.
And a similar thing happened in Oxford in the UK.
Oxford City Council attempted to mandate the introduction of CCTV cameras in all taxis Not just CCTV, but listening CCTV.
So this was CCTV that would record all your private conversations.
And this was announced as if it was a good thing, and it was perfectly normal.
But there was local opposition.
The taxi drivers themselves weren't happy about it.
They didn't want it.
There were loads of local people who were just incensed and outraged by it.
We had campaign groups like Big Brother Watch that got involved in advocacy and eventually the council just realised that it was a non-starter so they said we're not just simply not going to pursue those plans anymore and that was overturned and these things can be quashed.
But you do have to work, you do have to challenge them.
It's not good enough just to simply say, oh, this is dreadful.
Local people, individuals, not just national campaign groups, have to really realise that this agenda can be challenged, but you do have to challenge each individual step and it can be done.
Now just here in closing, any other key issues with the surveillance state and then go on to plug these two big activist events that are coming up because that's key as it relates to fighting back against Big Brother and also plug the website.
Any other key issues you want to throw in here towards the end?
Well, drones, as you know, is a huge issue.
Because what we're seeing there, particularly in America, is the importing of the military industrial complex.
The military technology used in the Middle East, used in war zones, is being imported.
into the domestic civilian sphere for policing.
So we've got, you're seeing drones in America equipped with surveillance cameras instead of Hellfire missiles, but perhaps they could carry both.
We're not seeing that yet in the UK, but we know that BAE Systems are working with the police in developing drones for surveillance, but they're being very secretive about that.
Another issue that's really big is internet surveillance.
In Britain we have the so-called Snoopers Charter, which is precisely what it is, the Draft Communications Bill, which proposes that every scrap of electronic data should be recorded, monitored and kept.
Because everything you say can and will be taken down and used as evidence against you.
And that's what we used to tell people who had been arrested.
Now the government is telling it to the entire population.
You're all suspects.
So that's an enormous worry.
And over in the stairs you have the NSA.
Which, I mean, the vastness of the ambitions of the NSA to record every scrap of information about everyone.
It's a similar principle.
And what we're talking about is the introduction of a totalitarian system of government.
And as you said, it sits over all other forms of activism.
If it chills free speech and inhibits activism and protests... Remember, protest isn't a crime.
Peaceful protest is an essential part of democracy.
But it's going to be difficult if you cannot speak to somebody without... away from the prying eyes of the government that you're challenging and protesting about.
But, you know, there is a movement.
There are people that are doing stuff.
For instance, in Berlin last year, 7,000 people assembled and protested in the streets of Berlin against Big Brother government surveillance.
Now, not one media outlet in Britain mentioned that.
Russia Today covered it.
And it's happening, but if it's not being reported, it doesn't mean it's not happening.
But Freedom Not Fear is happening again this year, 14th to the 17th of September, and it's in Brussels, so they're taking the fight to the EU.
And I'm sure there'll be a similar number of people, probably more, and I hope there'll be more reporting of that.
Another thing that's happening next year, 2013, is International 1984 Action Day.
Now this is a worldwide series of events, it's going to be an annual event.
That date was chosen to coincide with the publication of George Orwell's 1984, which is about 63 years ago now.
So that's happening next summer.
There are all sorts of groups that are campaigning against this, and individuals too.
People just need to get involved and do their bit and realise that this is a huge threat to freedom, but there is something they can do, but we do need to challenge it.
If people want more information on the CCTV, Surveillance Camera aspects, they can go to no-cctv.org.uk.
There's a lot of information there.
That's it really.
I think the time's up, but we've got to stand up to Big Brother and fight back.
And one of our slogans is now, when will you fight back?
Because the time is now.
And you're living proof of the fact that one man, working with a group of other people, can fight back against Big Brother because you did it in Birmingham by helping to scrap that Ring of Steel surveillance system.
So we'll be sure to have you back on InfoWars Nightly News, but for the moment, Steve Jolly, thanks for joining us.
Thank you very much.
Again, I urge you to subscribe at PrisonPlanet.tv.
That's where you get all the exclusive media content and it helps support this network.
That's going to do it for this edition of InfoWars Nightly News.
I've been your host, Paul Joseph Watson.
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