Taking Back Our Stolen History
Smart Cities
Smart Cities

Smart Cities

Orwellian cities of the future being built all over the world that are designed to track your every move using smart technology. The plot to create the total surveillance state under the guise of making cities “smart” will cost mostly willing taxpayers trillions of dollars, too. Smart cities are designed by corporations like IMB, Microsoft, and Cisco and will utilize the “Internet of Things”, a system of objects networked with RFID, to collect data from every device possible ostensibly to to manage assets and resources efficiently. Your TV, appliances, and thousands of TV cameras, scanners, and listening devices will track you throughout the city… all for your safety if you buy that!

Smart City technology is brought to us exclusively by Big Tech corporations in the name of Technocracy and Sustainable Development. With the advent of sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs, massive amounts of data collected from sensors of all types can be analyzed in real-time, displaying the results in a multi-dimensional model. What are sensors? Cameras, microphones, self-driving vehicles, license-plate readers, cell phones, Bluetooth devices, Smart Meters and all connected devices in Smart Homes. Thanks to real-time connections between autonomous vehicles, road censors and central computers equipped with AI, they will be able to navigate any and all roadways with authority and impunity. They will also inform on you every inch of the way.

A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, “Smart Cities Will Know Everything About You,” published in July 2015 exemplifies the epitome of what is wrong with the direction we are headed in terms of implementation of ‘smart grid’ and ‘smart city’ initiatives.

The author of the WSJ article is the CEO of a “data science consultancy” called Profusion.  Supposedly these people “believe passionately in the transformative power of data.”

Does it seem reasonable that a “data science consultancy” would be objective in assessing the risks involved with tracking peoples’ every movement in a smart city?  Yet, here are a few examples of what the CEO of Profusion wrote:

“In a fully ‘smart’ city, every movement an individual makes can be tracked.”

“By analyzing this information using data-science techniques, a company could learn not only the day-to-day routine of an individual but also his preferences, behavior and emotional state.  Private companies could know more about people than they know about themselves.”

“Businesses could market divorce services to couples who, through data analysis, are shown to exhibit behavior that indicates that their relationship could be in trouble …”

Based upon the above horrifying thoughts, the author of the WSJ article concludes:

“A smart city doesn’t have to be as Orwellian as it sounds.  If businesses act responsibly, there is no reason why what sounds intrusive in the abstract can’t revolutionize the way people live for the better by offering services that anticipates their needs;”

Profusion acknowledges that the direction we are headed ‘sounds Orwellian’.  That is because it is Orwellian. Profusion hopes that we will trust “businesses to act responsibly.”  Why would we do that?  This is our freedom and liberty we are talking about, not that of businesses. Reviewing the smart city issue, A 2014 article regarding the progress of smart city efforts in Songdo, South Korea gives us an idea of how smart cities will know everything about us.  Here are a few excerpts:

“The concept of a smart city is not Korean; it was envisioned by IT conglomerates such as Cisco and IBM in order to find new markets for their products.”

“The concept is simple: the city is filled with sensors and cameras at every corner (monitoring temperature, traffic, electricity) that are all interconnected and linked to a central ‘brain’ that computes all this information in real time in order to optimize the management of the city, minute by minute.”

“I realized that these IT companies made reality the infamous ‘telescreen’ imagined by George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984.”

“Actually, governments do not really need telescreens: the smartphones that we carry all the time can already be used to spy on us 24/7.”

“In an interview…, the French science-fiction writer Alain Damasio declared that ‘believing that a technology can make us happier is the expression of a huge fatigue of being.’  According to him, believing that technology can help us to become better people just means that we are sickened by our own lives.”

“Notwithstanding the dangers, Korea seems determined to go faster than ever.”

“I am sometimes wondering whether Korea is prefiguring humanity’s future:  a future in which each individual will be utterly alone, facing a telescreen [or smartphone] that will be one’s only friend and minder.  The futuristic nightmare envisioned by Orwell more than half a century ago might be even worse than his deepest fears.”

So-called “smart cities,” as designed by corporations like IMB and Cisco, will utilize the “Internet of Things,” or IoT, a system of objects networked with RFID, the end result being “a world where every object — from jumbo jets to sewing needles — is linked to the Internet,” as Helen Duce, the RFID Technology Auto-ID European Center at the University of Cambridge, envisions it.

As an example of the sort of system envisioned, Information World cites the massive and unprecedented surveillance system built by Microsoft for the New York Police Department.

Known as the Domain Awareness System, New York’s surveillance apparatus “takes advantage of the 3,000 closed-circuit TV cameras currently in place in Lower and Midtown Manhattan, which will soon be installed in the outer boroughs as well,” according to Stephanie Mlot of PCMag.com. “It can tap into tools like the NYPD’s recently deployed radiation sensors and license plate readers as well as crime records, 911 calls, video tape footage, and more to connect the dots on crime. The new process will help to generate and refine leads, identify patterns, and optimally deploy manpower, said Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly.”

Mayor Bloomberg, New York’s renowned government nanny, and the NYPD exploited the attacks of September 11, 2001, to argue for the creation of their high-tech surveillance system. The NYPD, however, soon began to use the system for routine police work, a migration undoubtedly encouraged by its public-private partner, Microsoft.

Unless humanity takes action soon to rein in its would-be omniscient rulers, the technological dystopia being erected all around you will ensure that governments and dictators know virtually everything about everyone — perhaps more than individuals know even about themselves. The plot to create the total surveillance state under the guise of making cities “smart” will cost taxpayers trillions of dollars, too. But the price tag in terms of lost privacy and liberty will be far higher.

As the concept of “smart” cities continues to evolve with technology, countless definitions and terms to describe the scheming have been proposed. Discussing a planned “smart” city in South Korea, Frederic Ojardias, Ph.D., at Seoul National University’s Graduate School of International Studies said the concept is simple. “The city is filled with sensors and cameras at every corner (monitoring temperature, traffic, electricity) that are all interconnected and linked to a central ‘brain’ that computes all this information in real time in order to optimize the management of the city, minute by minute,” he said to describe the vision.

According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, “smart cities” bring together technology, government, and society to enable a smart economy, smart environment, smart living, smart governance, and more. There are also a number of technologies associated with smart cities. Among them: “Intelligent lighting; Smart building controls; Wireless charging for automobiles; Facial recognition; Wind turbines; Intelligent Buildings; A connected self-aware environment;” and much more.

And that is just the beginning, with tech giants coming up with new technology every day that could be used to improve lives — or destroy liberty and privacy. Already, the former head of the NSA and CIA has been boasting that “we kill people based on metadata.” With “smart” cities providing unfathomable amounts of data to authorities, Americans can expect the lawlessness to continue accelerating if nothing changes.

Of course, “smart” technology is already ubiquitous, from so-called “smart” phones that double as portable espionage devices to “smart” meters used (when they are not exploding at least) to spy on people’s water and electricity use. Smart TVs now spy on their users, too. Schools are doing it as well. According to news reports, in London, data gathered from cameras is cross-referenced with government lists of people who have paid their driving fees, allowing violators to be identified and punished. Authorities in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Stockholm, and other cities are also openly and purposely trying to become “smart.” In South Korea and the United Arab Emirates, fully “smart” cities are being designed and built from the ground up.

With facial-recognition software now extremely advanced, and billions of people around the world posting their data and pictures online through social-networking services, hand-held “smart” technology has already created potentially totalitarian tools far beyond anything George Orwell could have imagined in his worst nightmares. Even years ago, U.S. cities were exposed rolling out so-called “Intellistreets” streetlights that double as Big Brother espionage tools to listen in on conversations. Entire smart cities are the next logical step, and the establishment is going all out to promote them as it works to abolish cash and shift everything online at the same time.

During a recent visit to India, for example, Obama pledged some $4 billion in U.S. taxpayer “investments and loans” to help Indian authorities build infrastructure, including $2 billion for the government there to create “smart cities.” Speaking to a large crowd, Obama said America was committed to the “smart cities” concept, linked to United Nations “sustainability” programs such as Agenda 21, and would help the Indian government pay to build them. To start with, 100 Indian cities are going to be made “smart.”

“We are ready to join you in building new infrastructure … roads and airports, the ports and bullet trains to propel India into the future,” Obama told Indians, without offering any hints on where the debt-riddled federal government would get the funds to propel India into the future or why U.S. taxpayers should fund it. “We are ready to help design smart cities.” Critics lambasted the scheme from all angles, pointing out that the U.S. government is already drowning in debt and that the whole “sustainability” theme behind the radical “smart cities” agenda represents a major threat to liberty, markets, and more.

Around the same time, arch sustainability profiteer (and self-styled inventor of the Internet) Al Gore joined with former Mexican President Felipe Calderón at the World Economic Forum to demand that all cities worldwide be made “smart.” For a mere $90 trillion (as a starting point), the two globalist crusaders against carbon dioxide explained, every city in the world could be made much denser — a so-called “smart city” in which citizens would be packed in like sardines, and hence, easier to control.

Under the Gore-Calderón vision, personal transportation such as cars would be phased out as the “smart cities” of the future force everyone to either walk or rely on government-run transportation to get around. Ironically, perhaps, more than 1,700 private jets descended on Davos for the confab so its occupants could plot new ways to reduce the CO2 emissions of the unwashed masses as they are corralled into their “smart” cities (often at gunpoint). Of course, the plan to pack humans into tiny cities is not new, and has been advancing under UN “Agenda 21” and other schemes for more than two decades. And the UN has been promoting “smart” cities since at least 2009, when UN chief Ban Ki Moon called for “better, more equitable urban planning” and “new ideas from smart cities around the world” to guide “sustainable urbanization.”

Alleged benefits of the interconnected ecosystem of data-gathering technology, such as better traffic management, catching criminals, and a smaller “carbon footprint” for city residents, are being shouted from the rooftops by those seeking to push the agenda — governments, profiteers, futurists, and others. Businesses, too, will be able to harness the gargantuan amounts of data being produced to target individual consumers. The darker side of the shift toward intelligence-gathering everything, everywhere, however, has been largely buried from public discourse — not to mention the dangers of combining all of the information with emerging “artificial intelligence” technologies.

In a recent puff piece promoting the potential benefits of “smart cities” in the Wall Street Journal, CEO Mike Weston with the “data-science” consulting firm Profusion offered some terrifying insight into the awesome powers that will be available to the rulers of these future Orwellian cities. “In a fully ‘smart’ city, every movement an individual makes can be tracked,” Weston observed, noting that governments and municipalities from Boston to Beijing were pledging billions of tax dollars to the plot. “The data will reveal where she works, how she commutes, her shopping habits, places she visits and her proximity to other people.”

While Weston focuses largely on the profit opportunities surrounding all of that data for marketers, and ethical concerns for businesses, the same data will also enable authorities to compile unimaginably detailed profiles of every single individual. “By analyzing this information using data-science techniques, a company could learn not only the day-to-day routine of an individual but also his preferences, behavior and emotional state,” the CEO explained. “Private companies could know more about people than they know about themselves.” And, of course, so could governments, hacker spies working for the regime in Beijing, and even private-sector criminals with access to the surveillance data.

Weston claims that a smart city “doesn’t have to be as Orwellian as it sounds.” That is true. But considering governments’ track records on snooping — think NSA, KGB, Stasi, and so on — the likelihood of smart cities not ending up as Orwellian as they sound is probably slim to none. With the added “smartness” of emerging technologies, and with some two thirds of humanity expected to live in cities within a few decades, the possibilities for controlling and oppressing mankind in previously unimaginable ways are almost endless. Rulers will soon, if they do not already, be able to know more about the individuals they rule than those individuals know themselves.

Of course, technology, in and of itself, is not the problem or the threat. Instead, the threat comes from totalitarian-minded governments, globalists, politicians, dictators, and bureaucrats anxious to further oppress the public and further empower themselves. From the UN and the World Bank to the Obama administration and the European Union super-state, the establishment is planning to bring “smartness” to a city near you in the near future. Based on their track record so far, however, it should be beyond clear that the “smart” cities are a dumb and dangerous idea — especially if you value liberty and privacy.

“Microsoft, who announced their ‘CitiNext’ smart city in 2013, has a great and long-standing relationship with government, law enforcement, and even intelligence agencies in the form of helping to fund fusion centers as well as provide fusion center technology,” writes Network World. The technology magazine quotes Dave Mosher, Microsoft VP in charge of program management, who admits the transnational tech corporation “is looking at smaller municipalities, law enforcement agencies and companies that handle major sporting events.” In other words, the market for surveillance extends beyond police departments and government agencies.

The “multi-device ecosystem” proselytized by Microsoft and documented intelligence asset Google provides an ideal foundation for the sort of all-encompassing and artificially intelligent surveillance envisioned by the global elite. Smart cities, smart meters, smart growth — such catchy phrases pushed by sharp ad campaigns are instrumental to the lingua franca of control.

Increasingly, if we continue to use technology, millions will be pushed into the “cloud,” a “shared service” and “converged infrastructure” where we no longer control or even own our own data, but it is housed on a centralized computer behind a wall emblazoned with terms of service and contractual stipulations.

This scheme is ideal for control freaks who obsessively collect data for the sake of formulating social profiles and building mountainous electronic dossiers, primarily for the art of ferreting out potential threats to the establishment and the corporatist-fascist status quo. Nazi Germany’s Gestapo and East German’s Stasi were also obsessed with this sort of detail-driven data collection, but could at best only imagine the technological advances utilized by the modern authoritarian state.

Microsoft peddles its brave new world of gadgets and devices tapping into big data as representing the “sort of efficiency” that might “not only save lives during an emergency but also drive day-to-day savings that total millions, and perhaps even billions, of dollars over time,” while simultaneously downplaying its work on the sort of massive surveillance system that sits in Bluffdale, Utah. Some reports suggest that the NSA “data center could hold as much as 5 zetabytes, an astronomical sum equivalent to 62 billion stacked iPhone 5s,” Fox News reported.

NSA revelations and censorship purges have taught us that large transnational corporations like Microsoft, Apple, Google, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are not adverse to cooperating with the surveillance state / deep state and their efforts are hidden behind facile denials and slick public relations campaigns.

In China, where all of this massive surveillance is weaponized against civilians, Technocrats have implemented a Social Credit Score assigned by algorithm, to all 1.4 billion inhabitants. By 2020, China intends to have 600 million facial recognition cameras installed, or about one camera for every 4 citizens. All of them will transmit their images in real-time to central computers running sophisticated AI programs. Each person in the big-data database will have their personal data pulled from every conceivable location in the nation. By the time that they know who you are, what you are, what you do, what you think and what you intend to do, their AI algorithms will calculate and assign to you a Social Credit Score that will limit or expand whatever privileges you will have from that time on. The Social Credit Score system is coming to America as well, unless we somehow convince our own officials that this is a horrible idea that will utterly destroy the American dream.

One main object of Technocracy and Sustainable Development is to transfer resources from the hands and ownership of people and their representative institutions into the hands of a global common trust operated by the global elite. When David Rockefeller founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973 to create a “New International Economic Order”, grabbing resources became the master plan and Sustainable Development, aka Technocracy, became the means to that end.

Cities don’t have physical resources like farming, minerals, timber, etc. Rather, it is the rural areas of the world where such resources are found and developed. In preparation of taking over swaths of rural areas, Technocrats developed two coordinated strategies: First, move people from rural to urban settings and second, keep them there.

The United States contains 2.27 billion acres of land. The Federal government owns some 650 million acres, representing over 28% of our total land mass. Most Federal land is in the western states, which is rich with natural resources. The U.S. Constitution does not provide for broad Federal land ownership, but that has not stopped the government from ever-expanding its portfolio. Apologists for Federal ownership claim that the people of the U.S. own the land and therefore it is justified, but in fact, much of the Federal ownership is completely inaccessible to the public.

In China, where Technocracy reigns, land grab policies are more direct. For instance, it unveiled a plan in 2014 to summarily move 250 million farmers off their land by 2026 and into megacities that had already been constructed but sat vacant. The vacated farm land is being combined into giant factory farms to be operated by advanced technology such as agricultural robots and automated tractors. Ostensibly, the farmers who refuse to leave will be helped along with the barrel of a gun.

Once relocated into cities of the government’s choosing, these farmers will fall into a social engineering machine that will continuously surveil them, track them, assign social credit scores to limit their access to privileges, etc. They will never regain enough resources or mobility to leave their assigned cities. In other words, they will be trapped.

Around the world, there are several common Smart City commonalities which can be easily observed in practice and literature:

  1. Surveillance. Biometric, geo-spatial tracking, financial, social media, etc. A population that is surveilled can be easily controlled.
  2. Transportation. Force people out of private vehicles into shared public transportation such as scooters, bicycles, busses, light rail, etc. Without private transportation, you are locked into the city and out of the rural area.
  3. Data. Collect real-time data from the Internet of Everything (IoE). IoE is an extension of the Internet of Things to include people as well.
  4. Control. Social engineering is always leading the thought process of Smart City development. However, the “engineers” are always self-appointed and unelected Technocrats who decide what citizens should or should not do, where they should or should not go, with whom they should or should not associate with, etc.

All of this fits the original definition of Technocracy as seen in The Technocrat magazine in 1939:

Technocracy is the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population.

Original Technocrats viewed people as nothing more than resources on the same level as other animals and natural resources on the planet. Their goal was – and still is – to apply “science” to the efficient balancing of resources by controlling production of goods and services as well as their consumption. The objects of this social engineering would have no more control over their own lives than the cattle in a feed lot.

Smart Cities and Regionalization

In the United States, Smart City policies are increasingly being imposed by regionalization.

The National Association of Regional Councils (NARC) is a non-governmental organization that “serves as the national voice for regions by advocating for regional cooperation as the most effective way to address a variety of community planning and development opportunities and issues.” According to its website, there are over 500 regional councils in all 50 states serving areas ranging from less than 50,000 to more than 19 million.

These regional entities, known as Councils of Governments (COGs) or Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs), impose Sustainable Development policies on all targeted communities, cities and counties within their supposed jurisdiction, bypassing the officially elected representatives. The NARC literature is very clear regarding its purpose:

NARC supports Federal consultation of local governments in formulating environment, energy and land use policies… community resilience planning to mitigate the impacts of extreme weather events… expand Federal incentives to reduce energy dependence and promote renewable energy use… multi-jurisdictional solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions… empowering regions to utilize the opportunities created by technology and data, included automated and connected vehicles… public and private investments that provide regions with the tools they need to create economically vibrant and sustainable communities.

In 2019, a new regionalization scheme was launched in Arizona called the Smart Region Initiative (SRI). It will create implementation policies for Smart City technology throughout a given region of cities and counties. As Patrick Wood wrote in February 2019,

The Phoenix area Smart Region Initiative is a pilot program to see how much sovereignty can be stripped from member cities without a mass uprising by disenfranchised citizens. With no elected officials, SRI seeks domination over 22 cities and 4.2 million people to dictate uniform implementation of Smart City policies and technology.

If this pilot is successful, it will be rolled out across the nation for the rapid installation of Smart City tech, including 5G small cell towers, smart street lights with cameras, sensors, and listening devices, smart street technology for autonomous vehicles, data collection technology, and so on.

Sources: