Understand The Times, International

Virtually everything that you do is being watched. Do you drive a car? Do you watch television? Do you use a cell phone? As you do any of those things, information about you is being recorded and tracked. We live at a time when personal privacy is dying. And it is not just governments that are doing this. In fact, sometimes private companies are the biggest offenders. It turns out that gathering information about all of us is very, very profitable. And both government entities and private companies are going to continue to push the envelope when it comes to high tech surveillance until people start objecting to what they are trying to do. If we continue down the path that we are currently on, it is inevitable that we will end up living in an extremely restrictive �Big Brother� police state where basically everything that we do is very closely watched, monitored, tracked and controlled. And such a day may be much closer than you think. The following are 10 examples of how �Big Brother� is steadily creeping into our daily lives�

#1 Our cars are rapidly being transformed into high tech �Big Brother� surveillance devices. In fact, a push is being made to require all new vehicles to include very sophisticated black box recorders...As if the government wasn�t already able to track our movements on the nation�s highways and byways by way of satellites, GPS devices, and real-time traffic cameras, government officials are now pushing to require that all new vehicles come installed with black box recorders and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, ostensibly to help prevent crashes.

#2 A new Michigan law will ban thousands of preppers and small farmers from owning farm animals. What are they going to do next? Ban us from growing our own food?

#3 Have you ever collected anything? If so, the FBI might swoop in and grab your collection someday even if you have not committed a crime. If you think that this sounds crazy, you should consider what happened to a man named Don Miller recently...FBI agents Wednesday seized "thousands of cultural artifacts, including American Indian items, from the private collection of a 91-year-old man who had acquired them over the past eight decades.The FBI did not have any evidence that a crime had been committed prior to seizing the collection, and Mr. Miller has not been arrested or charged with any crime. The FBI says that it is going to catalog the collection �to determine whether some of the items might be illegal to possess privately".

#4 A father of a 4-year-old girl has been told that he will no longer be alowed to send healthy homemade lunches with his daughter when she attends her pre-kindergarten program because they conflict with federal guidelines.

#5 Do you watch television? Well, if you have a newer television there is a very good chance that your television is watching you as well...In November, the British tech blogger Doctorbeet discovered that his new LG Smart TV was snooping on him. Every time he changed the channel, his activity was logged and transmitted unencrypted to LG. Doctorbeet checked the TV�s option screen and found that the setting �collection of watching info� was turned on by default. Being a techie, he turned it off, but it didn�t matter. The information continued to flow to the company anyway.

#6 A plan that is being proposed in Fairfax County, Virginia would ban "frequent and large gatherings at neighborhood homes". This would include parties, scout gatherings and home Bible studies.

#7 At a public school in Florida, a 12-year-old boy has been banned from reading the Bible during �free reading time��A Florida schoolteacher humiliated a 12-year-old boy in front of an entire class after she caught him reading the Bible during free reading time.

#8 In the USSA, a young child cannot even build a tree fort with his friends without the threat of being confronted by the police state. Just consider what happened to one little fifth-grade boy down in Georgia a few weeks ago...A fifth-grader says he was terrified when a police officer pointed a gun at him and his friends while they built a tree fort. Omari Grant, 11, said he and his friends often play in a wooded area behind his home and were building a fort when a neighbor in the next subdivision called police to complain about what the boys were doing. The officer reportedly used very filthy language as he pointed his gun at the boys, and he forced them to get out of the tree and lay down on the ground.

#9 People like to joke about �the eye in the sky�, but it is no joke. Technology that was originally developed for �blanket surveillance� during the Iraq war is now returning home...Persistent Surveillance Systems has developed a surveillance camera on steroids. When attached to small aircraft, the 192-megapixel cameras record the patterns of the planetary life they fly over for hours at a time. According to the Washington Post, this will give the police and other customers a �time machine� they can simply rewind when they need it. Placed strategically at the highest points of any town or city, these cameras could provide the sort of blanket surveillance that�s hard to avoid.

#10 Have you ever purchased storable food? If so, you should know that it is now considered to be �suspicious activity� in some areas of the country. Just check out what is happening in New York state...1-866 SAFE NYS is part of Safeguard New York, an NY State counterterrorism program that uses promotional material to encourage citizens to report people for engaging in �suspicious activity�.which makes them stand out from others�. An accompanying letter provided by the state trooper listed such �suspicious activity� as the purchase of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), flashlights, weather proof ammunition, night vision equipment, match containers, or gas masks.