Telecom companies are currently scrambling to implement fifth-generation cellular network technology. But the world of 5G is a world where all objects are wired and constantly communicating data to one another. The dark truth is that the development of 5G networks and the various networked products that they will give rise to in the global smart city infrastructure, represent the greatest threat to freedom in the history of humanity.
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
STEVE MOLLONKOPF: 5G will upgrade the human experience at home and across industries as we connect virtually everything. By 2020, analysts estimate that there will be more than 20 billion installed IoT devices around the world, generating massive amounts of data. With access to this kind of information, industries of all kinds will be able to reach new levels of efficiency as they add products, services, and capabilities.
SOURCE: CES 2017 Qualcomm Keynote: A Vision for Our 5G Future
As you may have heard by now, telecom companies are currently scrambling to implement fifth-generation cellular network technology. Dubbed “5G,” these networks will make use of millimeter electromagnetic waves, also dubbed Extremely High Frequency, or EHF radiation, to transmit information faster than ever before. 5G networks promise to deliver data 100 times faster than the existing 4G networks and to reduce latency as much as 98%.
The promise of 5G was promoted by Tom Wheeler, then-Chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), when he made a presentation on the US government’s vision for the rollout of 5G in America in 2017.
TOM WHEELER: Yes, 5G will connect the internet of everything. If something can be connected, it will be connected in the 5G world. But with the predictions of hundreds of billions of microchips connected in products from pill bottles to plant waterers, you can be sure of only one thing: The biggest Internet of Things application has yet to be imagined. [. . .] Here’s the key: The interconnected world that we live in today is the result of decisions made a decade ago. The interconnected world of the future will be the result of decisions we must make today, and that is why 5G is a national priority.
SOURCE: Former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler Advocating for 5G Broadband Wireless
But after the initial surge of hype that surrounds any new technology, the dark reality of this new 5G-connected “Internet of Things” is starting to come to light. The most immediately apparent aspect of this dark reality is the danger to human health that the 5G network’s ubiquitous and powerful transmitters present. As an increasing body of research shows, the harmful effects of electromagnetic radiation present in current mobile technologies will be amplified by orders of magnitude in the much more powerful (and much denser) Extremely High Frequency radiation network that 5G relies on. As retired US government career scientist Dr. Ronald M. Powell noted in his comment to the FCC on the proposed 5G rollout, this technology must be opposed because:
“It would greatly extend FCC’s current policy of the MANDATORY IRRADIATION OF THE PUBLIC without adequate prior study of the potential health impact and assurance of safety. It would IRRADIATE EVERYONE, including the most vulnerable to harm from radio frequency radiation: pregnant women, unborn children, young children, teenagers, men of reproductive age, the elderly, the disabled, and the chronically ill.”
But another, even more neglected aspect of the 5G dark reality is that in a world where all objects are wired and constantly communicating data to one another through a 5G network—an “Internet of Things” (IoT), in other words—privacy and security would be next to impossible. Even the mainstream is now admitting that the unprecedented amounts of data flowing through the 5G network—from appliance usage to personal communications to transaction information—is a treasure trove that, if it were to fall into the wrong hands, would be a formidable weapon.
JADEN URBI: Huawei wants to become a major player in 5G outside of China. But it’s facing pressure internationally because of cybersecurity concerns dogging the company. The U.S. is urging its allies to block Huawei from 5G projects in their countries.
SOURCE: Why The US Thinks Huawei Is A National Security Threat
ELIZABETH LEE: [Zvi] Marom says China is using mobile technology as a tool for spying, and he’s seen the evidence.
ZVI MAROM: They are actually using it for massive surveillance against their own population. We looked on the Huawei equipment to the level of every single chip there, and what we found is not very pleasant. This is not a commercial company’s stuff. This is a kind of military grade stuff.
SOURCE: Is 5G Chinese Technology a Threat to US National Security?
GLENN BECK: We have China coming in with their 5G network, all of the things that we’re . . . It’s like we’re living in 1956 and they’re not. And they don’t care about rights. They don’t care about people.
SOURCE: 5G and total surveillance – Forget about your privacy
The implication of these mainstream pundits’ pontifications is that 5G only represents a threat in the hands of the Russians or the Chinese or other supposed “enemies of America.” But what about the companies that are manufacturing these products? Why are the Big Tech giants, who have so signally abused the public’s misplaced trust for decades, now to be trusted with creating Big Databases of sensitive personal information on every imaginable aspect of our daily lives? And why are the governments of the US and its allies around the globe—governments that have been caught time and again illegally spying on their own populations and violently suppressing dissent—suddenly to be trusted as stewards of such a system?
The truth is that the development of 5G networks and the various networked products that they will give rise to in the global smart city infrastructure, represent the greatest threat to freedom in the history of humanity.
This is The 5G Dragnet.
You’re tuned in to The Corbett Report.
The vision of the future offered by the proponents of this next-generation cellular technology is one in which every object that you own will be a “smart” object, communicating data about you, your movements and your activities in real time via the ultra-fast 5G network. From the grandiose—self-driving cars and remote surgery—to the mundane—garbage cans that let garbage trucks know when they’re full—everything around us will be constantly broadcasting information through the Internet of Things if the 5G boosters get their way.
But beyond the glossy sci-fi fantasy presented in the slick advertisements for this “smart” world of the future is a creepy and unsettling glimpse into a technological dystopia. One in which “social experiences” are “shared” by strapping VR goggles to your face and interaction with humans is reduced as much as possible in favor of interaction with machines, gadgets and personal assistants that are there to cater to your every whim . . . for a price. And, as some are only now starting to realize, the price that one pays for this world of robotic comfort and convenience is control. Control over our data. Control over our security. And control over our lives.
ABBY LAVIDAO: We just hooked up the Nest maybe a month ago.
JENNA HANCHARD: Abby Lavidao and Conrado Cossalo wanted something to keep their family safe, so they installed “Nest,” a smart home security camera system.
LAVIDAO: What drives me crazy is—so yesterday was the only day I decided to stay home. He’s always here. They never had said anything. Ever.
HANCHARD: Yesterday Abby was alone with her two kids when she started hearing voices coming from their Nest.
LAVIDAO: Then they started cussing and saying “shut the eff up you n-word.”
HANCHARD: At that point, Abby had figured out that someone had hacked into their security systems. She called her partner.
LAVIDAO: Conrado, somebody is in the Nest and is watching us and is talking to us right now.
SOURCE: Nest cam hacked! Family verbally abused through in-home camera
STACEY HIGGINBOTHAM: I think within five years most people will have at least—[interrupted by blender] Jesus!
NEIL KARLINSKY: That is something out of a horror movie right there.
HIGGINBOTHAM: Man, can you imagine if— [laughing]
KARLINSKY: Like, we knew something was going to go on. That scared the tar out of me.
HIGGINBOTHAM: Yeah, that—That was a real jump.
AMIR ETEMADIEH: And we’re going to go ahead and unlock the door. Her back door.
[Door unlocks]
HIGGINBOTHAM: Oh.
KARLINSKY: I think that was your lock.
HIGGINBOTHAM: That was our lock.
KARLINSKY: Let’s go look. Come on.
KARLINSKY (VOICE-OVER): And that isn’t any laughing matter.
KARLINSKY: See, but that’s the real fear, right? You know, the other stuff is kind of funny, whatever, but I mean, someone can unlock your house . . .
HIGGINBOTHAM: Although, if someone really wants to get into your house, you can pick the lock—
KARLINSKY: Yeah, but isn’t that the modern-day— [door locks] There it goes again. Isn’t that the modern-day lock pick? There’s a guy outside with a laptop who is opening and closing your door lock.
HIGGINBOTHAM: It is. And I don’t like it.
SOURCE: Are Smart Homes the Future of High-Tech Living?
ANDY GREENBERG (VOICE-OVER): After their stunt on the highway, Chris and Charlie still wanted to show me a couple of other tricks. Below a certain speed they can control the Jeep’s steering as long as it’s in reverse, pop its locks, mess with the speedometer, and, of course, disable the brakes.
ANDY GREENBERG (IN CAR): OK, hold on tight. Hold on. Oh sh**.
It isn’t hard to see why these smart technologies, and the 5G network that enables them, are a security concern. And, in that context, it isn’t hard to see why Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE are now being targeted as potential national security threats and barred from developing 5G network infrastructure in country after country. After all, with access to that much data and information—let alone the ability to communicate with, hack into, or disable everything from our “smart” TV to our “smart” door locks to our “smart” car—a potential adversary with control of the 5G network would have nearly limitless power to surveil and control a target population.
But given that these powers—the ability to access our most intimate data and to take control of our homes and personal appliances—are not bugs but features of the 5G-connected Internet of Things, the question is: Why is there such a headlong rush to connect this network? Is demand for smart dishwashers and smart toothbrushes and smart baby monitors really so overwhelming that it requires us to put the security of our homes, our possessions and our families at risk? What is really driving this frenzy for a world where every new object we buy presents another potential vulnerability, another device that can be hacked into to steal our information, to track our location, to record our conversations and to disable our appliances?
One answer to this question lies in the fact that intelligence agencies—whether Chinese or Russian, CIA or MI6, Mossad or CSIS—will make use of the vast amounts of data flowing through these networks to spy on the public. In fact, the members of the so-called “intelligence community” do not even hide this fact; they openly gloat about it.
In 2012, then-CIA Director David Petraeus admitted at a summit hosted by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, that the CIA was not just able to but actually eager to use these smart devices as a tool for spying:
“‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,” Petraeus was quoted as saying, “particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft. [. . .] Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters – all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing.”
Lest there be any doubt about the intelligence community’s intentions to use these devices to spy on the population, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper confirmed this approach in a report to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2016:
“Smart” devices incorporated into the electric grid, vehicles—including autonomous vehicles—and household appliances are improving efficiency, energy conservation, and convenience. However, security industry analysts have demonstrated that many of these new systems can threaten data privacy, data integrity, or continuity of services. In the future, intelligence services might use the IoT for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials.
Whistleblowers from within the intelligence establishment—whistleblowers like Russ Tice and Bill Binney, who are actively shunned by the same mainstream media that breathlessly reported on Edward Snowden—have already laid out in exhaustive detail how the NSA is collecting all data flowing through the internet as we know it. Every phone call. Every email. Every web search. Every file stored to the cloud. Everything that passes from one computer or phone to another is being stored, catalogued, data-based and data-mined to construct detailed profiles of ordinary citizens.
But now the 5G network is promising to deliver us not an internet of phones and computers but an internet of things, from cars and watches to fridges and hats to milk jugs and floor tiles. When every manufactured object is broadcasting information about you and your activities to the world at large by default, and when it is discovered that opting out of this surveillance grid is not an option, the true nature of this 5G panopticon will finally begin to dawn on the public. But by that point it will already be too late.
NARRATOR: Cities use data every day, everything from showing you when your next train will arrive to measuring the air quality in different neighborhoods. Typically all this information is spread out across a ton of different agencies and companies in a bunch of different file formats and spreadsheets. But at Quayside we have the chance to start from scratch and build a single unified digital platform that’s transparent, open, and accessible for everyone working to make our cities better.
SOURCE: Meet Sidewalk Toronto: Kristina and Craig Talk Open Urban Data
TINA YAZDANI: The leaders behind Toronto’s first data-driven smart city are under fire tonight after yet another resignation. This time, a member of Waterfront Toronto’s digital advisory panel quit and wrote a strongly worded letter on her way out, sharing her deep concerns about privacy and data control.
SOURCE: Sidewalk Labs advisory panel member resigns, highlights privacy concerns
STEVE PAIKIN: I want to get some feedback now from the former information and privacy commissioner from the province of Ontario, who, when you were here discussing this very topic, you were kind of bullish about it. And then I just couldn’t happen but help notice that you’ve resigned from your involvement in all this. What happened?
ANA CAVOUKIAN: And I didn’t. . . I didn’t do it lightly. I wanted to draw attention to the fact that we had to make sure that all the personal data that was being collected automatically by the sensors and other technologies were de-identified at source—anonymized at source—
PAIKIN: “De-identified” meaning . . .?
CAVOUKIAN: Meaning no personal identifiers. You wouldn’t know it’s Ana Cavoukian walking, or you [walking], or this is my car, or anything. And the reason that was critical is unlike most uses of what I call operational data, where the individual—the data subject—can exercise some control over the use—the operation of that data. They can consent to it, they can revoke consent, they can choose not to consent. They have some sense of control with the data. Here you have no control. It’s all being collected automatically with the emerging technology sensors all picking up data.
SOURCE: A Year of Planning Quayside
But it is not just the intelligence agencies or the Big Tech conglomerates who are set to profit from the creation of this newer, stickier world wide web. In fact, the 5G-enabled Internet of Things is a necessary part of the creation of the system of total control—physical, financial and political—that the technocrats have been lusting over for a century now.
As viewers of Why Big Oil Conquered The World will know by now, the technocrats are adherents of an ideology dubbed “technocracy,” which holds that all modern-day problems—be they social, economic or political—can be solved by the scientific engineering of society. In the technocrats’ vision, teams of engineers, scientists, economists and other specialists—if given access to enough data about the world around them—could scientifically balance production and consumption such that inflation, recession, geopolitical conflict and other sources of strife will be eliminated forever.
As the co-founder of Technocracy, Inc., M. King Hubbert, laid out in the group’s founding document, the “Technocracy Study Course,” the amount of data needed to bring this techno-utopian vision to reality is truly mind-boggling.
In the Technocracy Study Course, Hubbert, like a good technocrat, laid out the exact conditions that would need to be met for this vision to come to pass. According to him, technocracy would require:
- all energy usage and all consumer spending throughout the nation to be calculated and registered on a continuous and instantaneous basis;
- a 24/7 inventory of all production and consumption;
- a complete registry of all products available for sale, where they were produced, how much energy was expended in their production, and where and when they were sold;
- and, finally, a “specific registration of the consumption of each individual, plus a record and description of the individual.
Hubbert’s vision was not just that of a totalitarian society in which every detail of every interaction was recorded and reported to a central authority, but, for the 1930s, the concept of continuously and instantaneously updated registries of every good in the economy was not just audacious, but borderline insane.
SOURCE: Why Big Oil Conquered The World
As unimaginable as a real-time database keeping track of every transaction and every manufactured product in the economy was in the 1930s, that is exactly the world we are looking at as smart meters collect information on smart appliances connected to other smart objects through the Internet of Things. And, crucially, the sheer amount of data being generated in this smart grid and the constant, real-time communication required to keep the system functioning would be impossible without the 5G network.
5G is not just a neutral mobile network. It is the backbone for a system of total surveillance, which has been written about and worked toward for the better part of a century. The world of the technocrats—the world of the smart grid and the world of constant, real-time surveillance of everything—would not be possible without the 5G network that is being installed right now.
And, as Josh Del Sol—of the Take Back Your Power movement that is organizing resistance to smart meters, 5G networks and other harmful technologies—explains, the world of the technocrats is a world where privacy is a thing of the past.
JOSH DEL SOL: With the smart meters, they’ll be able to tell exactly what’s going on in your home down to the micro-second based upon 24/7 communication with all of your appliances. Which will also in the future, if this goes through fully and if there’s not a public backlash, all of your appliances will need to have a wireless transmitter on them and they’ll need to certified under some “smart program.”
So this means not only—just stepping aside for one moment from the health issue—this means that not only is your smart meter emitting on average 13,000 microwave pulses per day but every one of your appliances is going to be doing the same thing because it will be needed to be communicating with the smart meter itself. So that is a serious concern and we’ll get into that a little bit later. But as far as the privacy issue, just diving right in, the current CIA Director, David Petraeus, was quoted as saying, “We’re gonna use smart-appliances to spy on you,” and it’s very much just putting it out there. It’s kind of like, it’s getting to a point now, James—and I’m sure you’re seeing this—it’s, like, they’re just getting more and more in your face. And it’s kind of like this collective force of the controllers and they’re kind of saying, “This is what we’re gonna do and what are you gonna do about it?” So they’re almost challenging us in a schoolhouse bully sort of way: “What are you going to do about it?”
SOURCE: Corbett Report Radio 230 – Take Back Your Power with Josh Del Sol
It should be clear by this point that the vision of the technocrats is in fact a nightmare for free humanity. It must be resisted every step of the way, and the battle over the 5G network rollout will be the front lines of this battle in the next few years.
Thankfully, resistance is forming as the public is increasingly becoming aware of the health risks of 5G.
Over 180 scientists and doctors from 36 countries have submitted a formal appeal to the European Union warning of the potential serious health risks of 5G.
City officials in Portland, Oregon, are suing the federal government to stop 5G transmitters from being installed on city property, with councilors considering “asking the federal government to study the health impacts of 5G on humans and make that information publicly available.”
This past March, Florence City Council invoked the precautionary principle when passing a motion that halts permission for 5G installation until a proper demonstration of the technology’s safety.
The Russian Defense Ministry has refused to transfer frequencies for 5G operation, effectively delaying 5G rollout in the country for years.
Plans to deploy a 5G network in Brussels were halted earlier this year because, according to environment minister Céline Fremault, “The people of Brussels are not guinea pigs whose health I can sell at a profit.”
It is heartening to see that the health effect of the Extremely High Frequency radiation emitted by 5G transmitters is finally starting to break through to the public consciousness. But if we concentrate solely on the health effects of 5G, we risk falling into a trap. If the only danger of 5G were the danger to our health, then, if the safety of the technology could be demonstrated to the public or an equivalent, less harmful technology could be deployed, then there would be no more reason to resist.
To concentrate solely on the health effects of 5G is to miss the broader picture of total surveillance in the technocratic dystopia that this technology enables. In this picture, the 5G network is a platform for a system in which every action, every transaction, every interaction that we have in our daily life is monitored, data-based and analyzed in real time.
The 5G Dragnet is cinching like a noose around our necks. But will the public become informed of the dangers of this technology in time to stop the technocrats’ vision from becoming our nightmare?
DONALD TRUMP: Secure 5G networks will absolutely be a vital link to America’s prosperity and national security in the 21st century. 5G will be as much as 100 times faster than the current 4G cellular networks. It will transform the way our citizens work, learn, communicate, and travel. It will make American farms more productive, American manufacturing more competitive, and American health care better and more accessible. Basically, it covers almost everything, when you get right down to it. Pretty amazing.
And just as 4G networks paved the way for smartphones and all of the exciting breakthroughs they made possible—so many things—this will be more secure and resilient. 5G networks will also create astonishing and really thrilling new opportunities for our people, opportunities that we’ve never even thought we had a possibility of looking at.
We cannot allow any other country to out-compete the United States in this powerful industry of the future. We are leading by so much in so many different industries of that type, and we just can’t let that happen.
The race to 5g is a race America must win, and it’s a race, frankly, that our great companies are now involved in. We’ve given them the incentive they need. It’s a race that we will win.
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