- EXAMPLE ONE: MONITORING OF MOVEMENT: For all of human history, tracking the simple movement of people is universally (and rightly) seen as yielding valuable intelligence about their behavior and intentions. In the past, if you wanted to track the movements of individuals, you needed to have a human (or humans) tasked with physically trailing them which is limited in scope by the human resources that are available. By necessity, not everyone could be followed. Modern totalitarian societies have tried to get around and expand the scope of this by enlisting (via malignant coercion) untrained and unpaid people to assist. In other words, your fellow citizens, friends, and even family members. All totalitarian states do this by default, but some, such as The German Democratic Republic (the Orwellian-y named East Germany) made nearly an art form out of this. But they still suffered the resource limitation of a human that had to collect, collate, and flag irregularities that needed formal investigation. Furthermore, this data collected was extremely unwieldy in its employment to tyrannize, because it had to be stored, categorized, preserved, and retrieved as needed to carry out their tyrannical tasks.
Today, your movements are easily tracked. These observations I make are of my own state, but I have traveled extensively enough to know it is by no means unique. There are cameras set up at nearly every intersection worthy of traffic lights in my state (and some that aren't). These cameras can image license plates on the front and back of cars (also mandated in my state) as they speed through the busy intersection there is optical character resolution on those images to derive the license plate number in a text form from the captured image. The images are likely kept for short period of time before they FIFO out (First In, First Out) but the text version of the plate number which takes up almost no space is now sent along a network connection with the date/time stamp, and the location of the camera, either in a simple number identifier, or in actual GPS coordinates. All this takes up almost zero space. These elements, date, time, plate number, geographic location, are all stored on cheap, massive storage. It is stored for years. If a government agency has reason to ask, they can look at your movements for the past five years (last I heard) but I will bet it is a lot longer into the past. (NOTE: I say all this because there are cameras at nearly every intersection, connected to...something. And they aren't being used for traffic enforcement.)
This is simple information. And you add to this information on toll both electronic pass information, credit card purchase information, or even face recognition cameras) But if someone has a need to know if the movements of two people have ever coincided in the past five years, how difficult would it be to pull up the plate number for each person's vehicle, look at all the GPS coordinates for the last five years, enter a parameter stating how close you wish the GPS coordinates to be for matching purposes, and run a query? To take it a step further-how difficult would it be to get lists of people, and have the system automatically tabulating these distances for overlap, and automatically flag a human when an overlap occurs. Or to flag when six or more people overlap? And seeing the unethical way the FBI uses information (for example, their deliberate and formal use of the 302 Form consisting of notes taken by agents instead of an actual voice recording to memorialize interviews or interrogations) if they said innocently to you: "Where were you on the night of August 22 of 2019?" and you answer "I think I was working that day" but they have already run a query on you, so they know you work in Philadelphia, but you forgot you had taken the day off and had gone to Maryland to go on a crabbing excursion in the Chesapeake Bay. You have just lied to the FBI. And looking at the way General Flynn and George Papadopoulos were treated on this very charge, it isn't hard to imagine how they use it with everyday people-like those who went to the 1/6 protest.
So this is simple information, stored and tracked. They can even track you easily when you go to a sporting event. I went to an NFL game a few years back, and this is an example of what kind of information is available. You can go to a website, put in the name and date of the event, enter your seat number, and see this:
Not in the least bit difficult to do facial recognition on that, so they would know where you are even if you went in someone else's vehicle. - EXAMPLE TWO: MONITORING OF SPEECH: This one is understood by everyone, especially us here at FR. There are several enormous facilities in the US (last I checked, there were three of them, but could be more) that every single email and text communication is routed through. Some years back, I was very much into looking at my email headers whenever there was something I was suspicious about, spam, etc. When you plugged that email header into a web page, it would spit back a graphical representation of the general path of your email. Point A, starting off in Prague, Point B, routing through Germany, then to New York, or Podunk, whatever. I began to notice some years back, the same three facilities would appear in all of the route maps, and they were named very specifically. And they appeared in ALL route maps. When I asked someone, they said they were large NSA facilities that stored and analyzed emails. All of them. From everyone. Then, at some point...I stopped seeing any reference to those facilities altogether.
NOTE: This disappearing behavior reminded me of using Google Earth to look at the satellite map of an old Naval Communications Station my family lived on back in the Seventies that had been abandoned for a few decades. It was fun, we could see our old house, that kind of thing. One night, my brother and I were looking at it on Google Earth, and it had changed. Now, there appeared to be what looked like an airstrip for small planes with taxiways and such, but...even that didn't look right. It was odd. Then, on a trip out to that part of the country sometime in the early-mid 2000's, I decided to find the base and see if I could enter. When I got there, there was no guard shack, just an automated arm across the road that was in the raised position, and all was deserted, so I drove onto the base. I found our old house, the front door was wide open, and it was in disrepair. I took a bunch of pictures, and began to drive around the base. I wanted to go see the large 80 foot diameter radio dish they used to bounce radio waves off the moon to the other side of the mid-late 2000's. The huge dish had been removed, and as I was going to visit the old Boy Scout camping ground, I saw a video camera in the middle of nowhere on a stalk, and decided I had seen enough and left. I lost those pictures of our old house, and a couple of years later, when I was in the area, I decided to drive over and see if I could get on the base. It is about a tenth of a mile or two off the main road on a straight access road to where the old guard shack used to be, and I passed a new sign that said: Department of Homeland Security Counterterrorism Facility. Looking ahead, where there used to be a raised arm blocking the road, there was a two story building in the middle of the road, buildings on each side, and what I took to be two stories of bullet proof glass stretching across all three buildings. I had the creepy sensation that there were a lot of eyes looking at me as I drove up, and when the guard greeted me I said "I used to live here and was hoping to get on the base to take pictures, but...I guess that isn't going to happen now, right?" and the guard, not saying anything, shook his head from side to side. So I turned around and left.
As I drove away, I knew instantly what my brother and I had seen on Google Earth that so puzzled us: It wasn't a small airfield with taxiways at all...it was an evasive driving training course. I had taken a screen capture of it, and you could see a roundabout, parking lots, Y intersections, 4-way stops, etc. But when we went to look at it, the map showed...the old base, and the evasive driving course was no longer visible.
That is how I felt when I saw those NSA facilities scrubbed from my graphical searches of email headers. The company that provides that service must have been "requested" to omit the display of those NSA facilities in their mapping.
The point of all this is, there is a huge amount of personal information being captured on us every day, all day, and all night. It is being stored. I have absolutely zero doubt that AI has been employed to comb through these Petabytes of information and perform analysis. You won't have a person walking around reading every single thing you say or write, but you will have an electronic entity doing just that, categorizing, flagging, etc. Just like this post of mine right here. They don't need humans any more to comb through it. They have electronic slaves to do that, and they flag it to a human based on the surveillance requests and parameters applied.