BIG BROTHER SPIES ON WHOM? For nearly a half century a primary influence upon all our live

BIG BROTHER SPIES ON WHOM?


   For nearly a half century a primary influence upon all our lives
has been the fact that Russia exist as an implacable, unswervable
danger to our way of life. Thus we justify confiscatory taxes,
mushrooming government spending, various "police actions" in which a
good many "policemen" died, and, for a long time, a peacetime draft.
And, although they are much less in the public eye, spy satellites.

    I believe most Americans would be surprised to learn of the
enormity of this satellite network, not only in terms of the hardware
in space, but also the hardware on earth required to service it, and
the large number of people involved in the systems. of course, all of
this expenditure of valuable resources is justified by that old
bugaboo, Communism. But now that Communism is being discarded - at
least in its most obvious and inefficient form - won't this satellite
network be allowed to fade away? I d on't think so. In fact, as the
idea of one-world government becomes ever closer to reality, the
existing satellite systems will fit into the picture so perfectly that
one might almost believe that surveillance of our Russian "enemies"
was merely a ruse to get the stuff into space in the first place. I am
assuming that, gathered under one super-government by means of
one-world currency, there might be among us at least a few individuals
who feel sufficiently oppressed to attempt to refrain their freedom. A
sort of underground, in other words. But Big Brother is watching, and
far more efficiently than George Orwell ever dreamed.

   For almost twenty years now, a satellite named Rhyolite has been
able to monitor telephone calls from space. In fact, it can monitor
11,000 such calls simultaneously. Additionally, it can listen in on
walkie-talkie communications, and intercept telemetry signals. Newer
satellites of the same type, over twenty-two thousand miles in space,
can intercept microwave transmissions and radio traffic.

  Of course, there are the old plain-Jane photographic type spy
satellites, too. Armed with image-enhancement devices, these can give
incredible data. For instance, the KH-11 satellite, equipped with
something akin to a telescope with flexible mirrors to adapt to the
distortions of the atmosphere, can read the license plates of the
cars in your driveway! If you happed to leave a copy of this Bulletin
in your back yard, the reconnaissance expert who studies the images
from this satellite may be able to re ad the society's name from the
top of this page.

   The Lacrosse satellite doesn't use light waves to record images -
that would limit its use to clear skies and daylight. Rather, it beams
microwaves down to earth, and measures their reflected energy on a
grid of thousands of detectors on panels twelve by forty-eight feet!
From two hundred and seventy-five miles above the earth, this
technology can yield images of objects as small as three feet across,
day or night, cloud cover or not. Incidentally, this satellite costs
about half a billion - in the sam e league as the B2 bomber. There are
critics aplenty of this "Stealth" aircraft, but I've heard no
criticism of the stealth satellite. Of course, the aircraft is only
useful in bombing enemy targets, whereas the satellite can assist in
bringing troublemak ers under control without all that messy nuclear
debris and loss of property.

  So we are free men and women, right? Yes, sure we are. Of course,
the government can keep track of our spending via the paper trail we
leave with checks and credit cards. When the magnetic stripes are put
into our currency, it will even be able to tell the amount of money
we're carrying as we pass through detectors, without our even being
aware of it. If we attend a seminar on, let us say, "personal
freedom," our license plates may be detected from hundreds of miles
away, via satellite. Our phone calls can be overheard without the
clumsy and detectable addition of a "bug" to our line; and should we
become so paranoid as to communicate by walkie-talkie, even that will
be heard by Big Brother. Don't even think about ham radio!

   It is especially galling that all of this is justified by the need
for "security". Security for whom? Does the rabbit feel secure,
knowing he is watched by the fox?

From: The Bulletin of the Monetary Realist Society, July 1990, #120
      P.O. Box 31044, St. Louis, Mo. 63131