The 'New World Order'

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 04:06:00 +0000

The Great Reset

Economic Shutdown - Food Bank
The New World Order

One Possibility!

In regards to the current economic situation, because of last year's global recession and also the recent economic slowdown a catastrophic global economic crisis has occurred.

After the stock market crashed, all of the financial markets were closed for two weeks. Many were in a state of shock!

Hyperinflation, already a concern in Latin America had begun to affect other economies as well. Because of these concerns regarding hyperinflation and the stock market crash there was total chaos, globally! Everyone panicked so much that there was a run on the banks so all of the banks were forced to close. Some have since reopened. The media and the press had 24/7 coverage of all of this on every tv channel.

One could buy a cup of coffee for a
million bolivars in Venezuela 2018
Some businesses were forced by the government to temporarily close their doors during which time government employees examined business records to any companies/corporations they wanted. Also, the internet and all social media sites were shut down so they could start a new internet service with only government sanctioned streaming news programs. The reason they said was that it was a necessary evil and we had to accept it.

Asian News Program Reports On The
Global Economic Collapse And Crisis
Now they're telling us on the daily news reports that some sort of global restructuring is going on behind the scenes involving all of the world's financial markets, economic blocks, and that everything will be okay. The other day we heard they would be implementing a new global cashless system any day now and when this happens we will no longer be able to use cash. Biometric and rfid systems/alternatives are being installed everywhere. Our hands, fingers and retinas were scanned and recorded for this new biometric system.

A Common Sight These Days In
A Shopping Center Parking lot!
Our newly appointed global leader made his first appearance and he somewhat explained our economic situation. Everyone's shocked that all of this has so suddenly come to pass after the recent stock market collapse. It's difficult to believe this is really happening. It's crazy. Everything that the global president says now becomes the law. NWO banners and slogans are showing up everywhere, throughout every neighborhood, street, and city. Massive tv displays are being installed throughout every region and major city. These are easily visible and are currently displaying the daily news reports.

We all agree martial law has become a reality. U.N. troops, the military police, and the local police have been stationed throughout every city. I never imagined anything like this could happen! Biometric and rfid identification systems are an everyday part of life. Everything's gone digital overnight. Those who have resisted this new system and are trying to live off the grid are already facing serious problems going about their daily lives.

Just recently there were new policies established for the masses regarding those who haven't gone in and received their biometric identification stating that it's now considered mandatory!

A friend of mine and his family had decided not to be included in the biometric program were on their way to live underground at one of their relatives properties. They were then stopped at one of the many local law enforcement checkpoints. Afterward he and his wife and kids have turned up missing and they haven't been seen or heard from since.

I really hope they haven't been sent to an internment camp!

Living in a global fascist state!

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George Washington, "It is not my intention to doubt that the doctrine of the Illuminati and the principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more satisfied of this fact than I am." -- 1798.

The Future Of Money: Gearing Up For Central Bank Digital Currency

IMF speech made on February 9, 2022

Let me start by thanking the Atlantic Council for providing a fitting venue to discuss central banks’ forays into Digital Currencies.

Since its founding in 1961, the Council has made important contributions to strategic, political, and economic policy debates. Those debates have served us well, helping us to test the boundaries of our thinking and be better prepared for what lies ahead.

So, today, we aim to test our thinking again. We have moved beyond conceptual discussions of CBDCs and we are now in the phase of experimentation. Central banks are rolling up their sleeves and familiarizing themselves with the bits and bytes of digital money.

These are still early days for CBDCs and we don’t quite know how far and how fast they will go. What we know is that central banks are building capacity to harness new technologies—to be ready for what may lie ahead.

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"In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority." Strobe Talbot, Deputy Secretary of State, TIME, l992

The Goal Of The Illuminati Is A 'New World Order'

The Illuminati's 'Eye In The Triangle'

Bohemian Grove - Owl Shrine. Where
powerful men go to meet once yearly.
The perception is that our day-in day-out world is real.

The truth is that this world is a hoax, an elaborate deception spun by an all-powerful Illuminati controlled secret society presided over by the global elite.

The Illuminati call the shots in every major upheaval that they cause.

Their sphere of activity extends over the entire globe.

Their ambition and greed for wealth and power knows no bounds.

It is also their target to depopulate the globe and maintain a much lower population compared to what we have now.

There are certain methods of subjugation and control which are indispensable to the Illuminati.

One is, of course, complete authority over all financial systems, especially borrowing and lending.

With all banks under their direct supervision.

At the highest level the World Bank decides the fate of countries.

And it is an interesting and amazing fact that both the Federal Reserve Bank and the Bank of England are controlled by these Illuminati dynasties, in spite of the names of these banks.

It has been said that both Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy wanted to change this system.

When A Real Power Move Is To Be Made It Will Be Done Suddenly!

If you want to bring about a "New World Order", you must first crash the current system.

Their Goal Is To Collapse & Sink The Dollar
The Illuminati will never allow their global hegemony to be destroyed.

The expression of this global control has been the US dollar.

They will trigger a global fiat currency meltdown.

All fiat currencies will be attacked and will collapse.

The last currency to collapse will be the US dollar.

They will then bring in a One World Digital Currency under the purview of a World Government.

There's going to be a somewhat prepared response for any controlled opposition, but the need for this is going to be relatively limited since there's not going to be a realistic threat to these Illuminati and their plans.

"We shall have world government whether or not you like it, by conquest or consent." James Warburg to The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, l950

THEY LIVE - The Movie

'They Live' is a 1988 American science fiction horror film written and directed by John Carpenter. The film stars Roddy Piper, Keith David and Meg Foster. It follows a nameless drifter (called "John Nada" in the credits), who discovers the ruling class are in fact concealing their appearance and manipulating people to spend money, breed, and accept the status quo with subliminal messages in mass media. Based on Ray Nelson’s short story Eight O’Clock in the Morning, the movie is one of those rare subversive stories that forces viewers to question their world and their surroundings.

Right from the beginning, as we see Nada walking around Los Angeles with his backpack, the movie sets a particular mood: Something is not quite right. While Nada appears to be a happy-go-lucky kind of guy, the city is not happy and it is not too kind to happy-go-lucky kind of guys. Quite the contrary, there is a sense of impending doom in the air: Poverty is rampant, helicopters fly around the city and street preachers speak of soulless beings ruling the world.

"Rowdy" Roddy Piper As John Nada
A preacher’s description of the "masters" is applicable to the Illuminati.

Seeking shelter Nada enters an empty church and discovers a hidden box. In an alley, he opens the box and finds dozens of sunglasses. Taking one, he hides the box of remaining sunglasses in a garbage can.

Nada discovers the sunglasses have unique properties. After putting on a pair, he sees the world in black and white and discovers it is not what it seems. Media and advertising hide constant subliminal totalitarian commands to obey and conform. When viewing those of wealth and authority Nada discovers they're not human.

When he has his sunglasses on, Nada sees through the smoke and mirrors projected by advertisement and mass media. He only sees the core of their message and the only reason why they exist. No matter which magazine Nada flips open, he sees the same subliminal messages, which tells a lot about the true function of "celebrity" and "fashion" magazines. Despite the fact that they are all different, they all ultimately serve the same purpose: To reinforce messages from the elite to the masses.

We’re living in two worlds, you and I.

There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media. Indeed, what most people perceive as life in a privileged, progressive and free society — is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing, real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation, and "freedom," such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police armed to the teeth.

All is not as it seems.

"The invisible Money Power is working to control and enslave mankind. It financed Communism, Fascism, Marxism, Zionism, Socialism. All of these are directed to making the United States a member of a World Government ..." —American Mercury magazine, December 1957

The NWO Dictator

The "Son of Perdition", "Antichrist",
"Beast", "Man of Sin", "NWO Dictator"
It is a fact that advocates of the New World Order will attempt to fulfill the world’s messianic expectations with an antichrist. 2nd Thessalonians 2:3-4 tells us that the last days will not come until “the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition,” commonly called the Antichrist.

He will sit in the Temple in Jerusalem and demand to be worshipped as God. 2nd Thessalonians 2:8 He is also called “the beast,” in the Book of Revelation. This tyrannical world dictator will be empowered by Satan and be the embodiment of all that is opposed to God.

Like Hitler the antichrist will "have a mouth that will speak very great things, and his look will be more imposing than his fellows." He will think to change times and laws and is referred to as "The King of fierce countenance" who shall "have an understanding of dark sentences." Daniel 7:20, 25; 8:23 Because of this man all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, will be forced to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, so that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Rev 13:16-17

This man will come on the scene and will offer to lead the world into total peace. He will be recognized throughout the world as a man of peace. He will promise to solve the Middle East conflict. He will bring harmony in the ecumenical-ecclesiastical church. He will offer economic solutions to the world's problems. He will arise as a world leader of peace and prosperity and reign exactly three and a half years as the world's greatest dictator.

Beware of when this man appears on the world scene. His leadership will take the world into a Great Tribulation of terror, wars, suffering and death.

Woe to the idol shepherd that leaveth the flock! The sword shall be upon his arm, and upon his right eye: his arm shall be clean dried up, and his right eye shall be utterly darkened. Zechariah 11:17

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"The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups." -David Rockefeller

The Illuminati 'New World Order'

1930's Great Depression.
Soup Kitchen and Bread Line
(A NWO World Wide Government Accompanied By A Solitary World Bank And A Single World Religion.) (The NWO Will Have A Mapped Out Strategy And A Strategic Plan To Implement The Use Of RFID Microchips, Biometric Access Systems, Biometric Collection Devices - Handheld Scanners And Cameras, Biometric Databases, Unlimited Government Access To Data, Data Mining, Unmanned Drones, Travel Restrictions, Surveillance Cameras, Pre-Crime Surveillance, And Militarized Police.)

On October 29, 1929, The Stock Market Crashed. Will it happen again? Will the world this time be rescued by and come under the control of a madman?

The NYSE. The world's largest stock exchange market. US stocks plunge amid Wall Street crisis - 29 Sept 08.
Time Magazine 13 Oct. 2008

The rise of the one-world government is beginning to take its shape as early as now.

Its form is hidden in the emerging New World Order.

The New World Order is being established by the Elite of the Elites and consists of the Fourth Reich of the SuperRich/the Lords of Money/the International Bank Cartels/the Secret Societies/the Brotherhood and the Order/the Committee of the 300 Billionaires of the World including the Power Elite of 13 Old Line Families through the years.

This group envisions a one world banking system and currency that will give in to a cashless computer financial system, one world centralized control of global population, global control of the world’s environment, economy, trade and army.

They have already made a giant step. The year was 1945, when they drafted and created the United Nations.

These men have unbelievable power and they have spelled out their agenda in advance.

That global agenda is constructed around six goals.

The method by which these are going to be brought about will most likely be either a GLOBAL DEPRESSION, THIRD WORLD WAR, or MAYBE BOTH.

Goal #1 : The establishment of international economic order (cashless society)

Goal #2: The establishment of a one-world government

Goal #3 : The conquest and subjugation of two super powers (USA and USSR)

Goal #4: The ascension of the United States of Europe as the dominant nation in a Confederated one-world government

Goal #5: The ushering in of a supreme world leader to preside over the new unified one-world government

Goal #6 : The establishment of a one-world religion which will coordinate all the world’s religions, cults, faith groups and spiritual beliefs under the guidance of Supreme Pontiff

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"It's Necessary To Establish A Universal Regime And Empire Over The Whole World ...." Adam Weishaupt Founder Of The Bavarian Illuminati

Police Drones Are Starting To Think For Themselves

When the Chula Vista police receive a 911 call, they can dispatch a flying drone with the press of a button.

On a recent afternoon, from a launchpad on the roof of the Chula Vista Police Department, they sent a drone across the city to a crowded parking lot where a young man was asleep in the front seat of a stolen car with drug paraphernalia on his lap.

When the man left the car, carrying a gun and a bag of heroin, a nearby police car had trouble following as he sprinted across the street and ducked behind a wall. But as he threw the gun into a dumpster and hid the bag of heroin, the drone, hovering above him, caught everything on camera. When he slipped through the back door of a strip mall, exited through the front door and ran down the sidewalk, it caught that, too.

Watching the live video feed, an officer back at headquarters relayed the details to the police on the scene, who soon caught the man and took him into custody. Later, they retrieved the gun and the heroin. And after another press of the button, the drone returned, on its own, to the roof.

Each day, the Chula Vista police respond to as many as 15 emergency calls with a drone, launching more than 4,100 flights since the program began two years ago. Chula Vista, a Southern California city with a population of 270,000, is the first in the country to adopt such a program, called Drone as First Responder.

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"Let me control a peoples currency and I care not who makes their laws..." Meyer Nathaniel Rothchild in a speech to a gathering of world bankers February 12, 1912. The following year, we subscribed to the "services" of the newly incorporated Federal Reserve, headed by Mr. Rothchild.

The Illuminati Arrive In America - 1785

George Washington concerning the Illuminati
(George Washington (1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'. He spoke of the Illuminati in a letter written to the Reverend G. W. Snyder (24 October 1798). He said: "It is not my intention to doubt that the doctrines of the Illuminati and the principles of Jacobinism had not spread to the United States. On the contrary, no one is more fully satisfied of this fact than I am".)

Washington issued several warnings shortly before his death, about the Illuminati. Washington knew that the Illuminati, based in Europe, had arrived on American shores. In 1789; John Robison, a Scottish scientist warned all Masonic leaders in America that the Illuminati had infiltrated into their lodges and on July 19, 1789; David Papen, President of Harvard University, issued the same warning to the graduating-class and lectured them on how Illuminism was having an influence on American politics and religion, and to top it off; John Quincy Adams, who had organized the New England Masonic Lodges, issued his warnings.

In 1785, the Columbia Lodge of the Illuminati was established in New York City. Among its members were Governor DeWitt Clinton, Horace Greeley (politician and editor of the New York Daily Tribune), Charles Dana, and Clinton Roosevelt (the ancestor of Franklin D. Roosevelt). Roosevelt wrote a book called Science of Government Founded on Natural Law, in which he wrote: "There is no God of justice to order things aright on earth, if there be a God, he is a malicious and revengeful being, who created us for misery." He referred to himself and other members as the "enlightened ones," and said that the U.S. Constitution was a "leaky vessel" which was "hastily put together when we left the British flag," and therefore needed revision.

In 1786, a lodge was started in Portsmouth, Virginia, where allegedly, Thomas Jefferson was a member; followed by fourteen others in different cities of the thirteen colonies.

In April 1793 France sent new ambassador Edmond Genet to America so he could collect payment for the American debt incurred during the American Revolution. The money was to be used to finance France's war with England. However, his real reason for being here was to gain political favor for France and spread Illuminism, which he did through the establishment of 'Democratic Clubs.'

Washington said of "the clubs" that they "...would shake the government to its foundations."

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"Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective - a New World Order - can emerge. . . Now, we can see a New World Order coming into view. A world in which there is a very real prospect for a New World Order. . .A world where the United Nations, freed from a Cold War stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders." George H. W. Bush

Project N. O. L. A. National Crime Camera Program

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A true Community-Based Crime Camera program, cameras may be installed on homes, businesses, churches, and schools as well as utility poles and public buildings then stream directly to your local authorities and the Project NOLA National RTCC at the University of New Orleans. Available Nationwide, Project NOLA will make your community a safer place to live, work and visit!

Don't worry about purchasing, renting or leasing expensive cameras as Project NOLA uses its own funds to purchase extremely high-end crime cameras for your community. Most all camera models provided by Project NOLA feature Sony STARVIS NightVision to see Color at Night, Advanced Artificial Intelligence to accurately and automatically detect and alert upon suspicious activity, redundant recording to prevent data lose, generously long 5 year warranties, and more!

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"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever." George Orwell author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a glimpse at a dystopian future where the world is run by totalitarian regimes.

Panoptic Surveillance See-Thru 3D System

A Panoptic Video Surveillance See-Thru 3D System could be loosely described as a formalised, scalable implementation of X-ray vision. The system enables one or more surveillance agents, using a single high resolution, auto-stereoscopic display, to remotely monitor the security situation of an arbitrarily large number of locations at-a-glance.

The system would allow a single agent to monitor thousands of places at the same time without overwhelming them with the massive amount of information being processed and displayed. It enables this by using artificial intelligence to determine what’s important to look at.

The surveillance agent's mental load is radically optimized towards monitoring only what is most critical to security: presence and movement of (groups of) people and vehicles inside a campus/site and its buildings as well as any security-sensitive events (such as fires, smoke, badge access, assemblies, gun-shots, people running etc).

Agents can see, hear and transport their focused viewpoint through walls, floors and ceilings, zooming into a specific location to monitor it at a level so acute that it seems beyond the levels of even science fiction.

Designed to enable both wholistic site-wide and granular-level security, the system is ideal for monitoring airports, shipping ports, transit sites and other ports-of-entry, hotels, casinos, shopping malls, campuses, military bases, large buildings and building complexes, offering total situational awareness at a glance.

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"The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities." Zbigniew Brzezinski

The Rise Of The New World Order

An Egyptian Pyramid Capstone. Symbolic Of The
Elite That Are Going To Rule Over Us In The NWO.

The recent history of the world is a history of conflicts between secret societies.

Established upper-class families with 'old money' have founded and finance the Bilderberg Group, Bohemian Club, Club of Rome, Council on Foreign Relations, Rhodes Trust, Skull and Bones, Trilateral Commission, and similar think tanks and private clubs.

These are the Illuminati, who plot to impose their totalitarian New World Order over us — an authoritarian world government controlled by the United Nations and a global central bank.

The whole Earth will be going through great changes soon, such as: climate changes, warfare, economic impacts, etc. All of this will work towards the fulfillment of a world government. This final kingdom or global empire is described in the Book of Daniel in several dreams and visions.

An Egyptian Pyramid With A Capstone In Place.

Fulfillment of the visions of Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar.

Nebuchadnezzar's Dream - (in part).

'You looked, O king, and there before you stood a large statue--an enormous, dazzling statue, awesome in appearance. The head of the statue was made of pure gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay'. Daniel 2:31-32

In succession the Babylonians gave way to the Medo-Persians, and the Medo-Persians gave way to the Greeks, and the Greeks gave way to the Romans. It was the Romans who were in power at the time of Christ. There had been almost an unbroken sequence of world empires from Nebuchadnezzar until the time of Christ.

BAPHOMET/SATAN/LUCIFER

Nebuchadnezzar's dream indicated that one empire would be replaced by another. The iron legs, feet and toes of the statue represented the future empire of Rome. This final kingdom would come at the very end of time or end of the age!

Daniel's Dream - (in part).

'After that, in my vision at night I looked, and there before me was a fourth beast--terrifying and frightening and very powerful. It had large iron teeth; it crushed and devoured its victims and trampled underfoot whatever was left. It was different from all the former beasts, and it had ten horns. While I was thinking about the horns, there before me was another horn, a little one, which came up among them; and three of the first horns were uprooted before it. This horn had eyes like the eyes of a man and a mouth that spoke boastfully.' Daniel 7:7,8

The interesting thing to notice here is that, in Nebuchadnezzar's dream, there are ten toes on the feet, and in Daniel's dream, the final form of a world government had ten horns. So the number ten is very significant in the last form of world governments which is still future.

Since the Roman Empire ceased to exist as a real empire, how many world empires have existed? There have been some serious attempts. Charlemagne, Napoleon, and Hitler, tried to conquer their world. None of them succeeded. The Bible says there are only four of these world empires, and then a final form of the fourth one--feet made partly of iron and partly of clay. What would the iron and clay mean? It is a Revived Roman Empire--partly of the old iron of the ancient Roman empire, and partly of clay, something weaker and brittle. It would include some of the old areas, but it would not be as strong and monolithic as the old Roman Empire.

We are looking for another empire that will come out of ten nations/economic blocs and then become a world power.

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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 09:00:00 +0000

The Illuminati

The Illuminati is a name that nowadays is used to talk of several groups characterized by secrecy, all groups working together, having one single goal, because they all share the same god. Historically however, it refers specifically to the Bavarian Illuminati, founded on May 1 of 1776, a secret society of people who believed to be enlighten, by this same so called “god” who in the Bible is called Lucifer, who gave them knowledge hidden from the masses which they all use for the ultimate goal of global domination through a New World Order under Lucifer as god. Their first and main rule is “Do not talk about Illuminati”. There is much proof that the Illuminati, referring to all these different secret societies, has been behind both World Wars plus the one coming up, as well as many other tragedies around the world, all that may had been necessary for them to come to World Domination, following their motto “Ordo ab Chao” (Order out of Chaos).

Adam Weishaupt
Adam Weishaupt

Adam Weishaupt is the man who is recorded as having started this secret society which would come to involve all Luciferian societies, even those dating back thousands of years ago; all to keep the plan of their ancestors alive ever since Nimrod, the first human who rebelled against the Most High and who chose to be king of the world.

Adam Weishaupt was taught by Jesuits and became a Freemason before starting the Illuminati. Freemasonry and Illuminati are not one and the same, although Freemasonry has come to be controlled by the Illuminati nowadays, keeping the Freemasons in the lower ranks in ignorance of their real goal and god, information which is held by those in the 33rd degree

All Seeing Eye on Pyramid
Adam Weishaupt once wrote:

“I did not bring Deism into Bavaria more than into Rome. I found it here, in great vigour, more abounding than in any of the neighboring Protestant States. I am proud to be known to the world as the founder of the Illuminati.”

In the Book ¨Proof of Conspiracy¨ by John Robison we read:

"Weishaupt had long been scheming the establishment of an Association or Order, which in time, should govern the World."

Illuminati Pyramid

The Illuminati was created in Bavaria, Germany, but the symbol they used as their logo seems to come from Egypt, or even the Mayans, and it holds a very significant meaning, it can be found on the United States one dollar bill.

At the bottom of the pyramid we can see the Letters MDCCLXXVI , which are the Roman numerals equivalent to 1776, which many believe are there to commemorate the independence of the United States but instead, it is there because this was the year that the Plan of the Illuminati for a New World Order would be set in motion on the “New World” called America.

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"Today the path of total dictatorship in the United States can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by the Congress, the President, or the people. Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system, another body representing another form of government - a bureaucratic elite." Senator William Jenner, 1954

Video Surveillance Gets Smarter

The City of Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications and IBM implemented one of the most advanced city-wide intelligent security system ever conceived. The engagement is a part of Chicago's Operation Virtual Shield, a project that encompasses one of the world's largest video security deployments.

IBM helped the City experts and network engineers to design and implement a surveillance strategy infrastructure to capture, monitor and fully index video for real-time and forensic-related safety applications. This entailed building a unified fiber network throughout the downtown Chicago area, deploying a critical wireless infrastructure to offer flexibility as required, installing hundreds of new surveillance cameras, linking thousands of preexisting cameras to the network, and creating a fully redundant backend system to monitor the video, store the images and allow for business continuity and disaster recovery applications.

Chicago's security solution is designed to provide several benefits to both city officials and citizens including: real-time video surveillance intelligence for proactive homeland security monitoring; faster response time to emergencies; more effective deployment of emergency responders; and increased travel efficiency through traffic congestion tracking.

Many things go unnoticed in big cities every day, but that world has now changed in Chicago with this video surveillance system that can recognize anomalies and alert authorities to take a closer look.

"Chicago is really light years ahead of any metropolitan area in the U.S. now," said Sam Docknevich, who heads video-surveillance consulting for IBM.

Chicago already had thousands of security cameras in use by businesses and police - including some equipped with devices that could recognize the sound of a gunshot, turn the cameras toward the source and place a 911 call. But the current system will let cameras analyze images in real time 24 hours a day.

"You're talking about creating something that knows no fatigue, no boredom and is absolutely focused," said Kevin Smith, spokesman for the city's Office of Emergency Management and Communications.

This system can be programmed to alert the city's emergency center whenever a camera spots a vehicle matching the description of one being sought by authorities.

The system can also be programmed to recognize license plates. It can alert emergency officials if the same car or truck circles the Sears Tower three times or if nobody picks up a backpack in Grant Park for, say, 30 seconds.

"Cities today are faced with ever-increasing threats and advanced security surveillance systems can be a critical component in ensuring safety," said Mike Daniels, senior vice president, IBM Global Technology Services. "IBM is proud to be a part of Operation Virtual Shield and the City of Chicago's visionary approach to homeland security."

"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order." - David Rockefeller

The Foundations Have Been Laid A Long Time Ago

The Apotheosis of George Washington as displayed on the ceiling of the Rotunda of the Capitol Building in Washington, DC (painted by Constantino Brumidi - 1865). It depicts George Washington rising to the heavens in glory sitting on a throne as a God. Very few recognize the spiritual elements of the architecture and the symbolism of this building which literally makes it a temple of Masonic mysteries. The city of Washington is even located in the District of the (Goddess of Columbia). In 1791, President Washington commissioned Pierre (Peter) Charles L’Enfant, a French-born architect, city planner and freemason, to design the new capital and City of Washington.

The masons had wanted America to be a 'New Atlantis' and Washington, D.C. a second Rome. They were committing America to what has been called 'A Secret Destiny'. This future 'destiny', is 'The New World Order'. Listen to an audiobook on Freemasonry - The Truth (right click to download)

Masonic Temple Buildings - Lodge Room

In order for a global "New World Order" economic system to be established with a one-world electronic currency the sovereignty of all nations must be undermined. Then, and only then, will everyone be forced to exist and live within the confines of a single global police state thereby losing our freedoms and rights as free human beings.

The ideal of a "New World Order" might never be closer than now. It may not be long before all of us experience an abrupt change in our way of living. There has been a group that consists of Masons, Jewish Bankers, and other influential wealthy individuals that has worked for a very long time through Freemasonry and the Order of the Illuminati to achieve this "New World Order". Their goal is to set up a Global Police State with a more controlled society and continuous surveillance over every citizen! First they’ll destroy this present world system (Old Order) and then bring in their global government. They have everything in place and ready to go so when the time is right they will make their move without any hesitation.

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"The New World Order cannot happen without U.S. participation, as we are the single most significant component. Yes, there will be a New World Order, and it will force the United States to change its perceptions." – Dr. Henry Kissinger, World Action Council, April 19, 1994

Collapse Of The American Empire: Swift, Silent, Certain!

"One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse," warns anthropologist Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed."

Many "civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power."

Now, Harvard's Niall Ferguson, one of the world's leading financial historians, echoes Diamond's warning: "Imperial collapse may come much more suddenly than many historians imagine.

A combination of fiscal deficits and military overstretch suggests that the United States may be the next empire on the precipice." Yes, America is on the edge.

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"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson." — Franklin D. Roosevelt

Fascism

Roman Fascist Symbol (left)

US House of Representatives chamber, United States Capitol (on the left and right of the podium)

Close Up

This symbol of absolute rule is commonly known as a fasces, and helped inspired the name of those who espoused such totalitarian power, the Fascists.

The word comes from fascio (plural: fasci), which may mean bundle, as in a political or militant group or a nation, but also from the fasces (rods bundled around an axe). One might say the fasces embodies the essence of fascism: The people are the sticks, tied to the state to form a strong, single unit.

The [individual] is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone. The State is the ax, which has the power to create, to enforce and to obliterate.

A fascist regime generally gains support by promoting a series of ideas through the media, public rallies and other forms of propaganda. These ideas include: a nation in crisis, an idealized past, and a need for social change.

"The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes." - SUPREME COURT JUSTICE FELIX FRANKFURTER, 1952

The Coming NWO Totalitarian State

A Global Government To Rule From The UN?

The Totalitarian State will be realized when the nations of this world come together as one body, having an omnipresent government presence where individual rights are routinely ignored.

1. Government Surveillance

In a Totalitarian State "You're Under Constant Surveillance!"

With our National Security Agency involved in wiretapping, maintaining a call database, and engaged in data-mining, we can foresee that Big Brother is no longer a fictional character. Each of us has a hand-held "computer/smart phone" we carry with us most everywhere we go, which we almost never turn off. We're monitored, in various ways, in our homes, cubicles at work, cafeterias, and also in public and private. Security cameras are everywhere!

In a Totalitarian State no place is safe!
2. Perpetual War

In a Totalitarian State, the Party embraces a policy of continual military skirmishes so as to eat up any economic surplus and keep people poor and under control. Today we can see governments having a similar course of action, moving seamlessly from one military conflict to another.

3. Bread and Circuses

In a Totalitarian State, the vast majority of the population are almost not even worthy of surveillance. So long as the Totalitarian State gives them a regular dose of food, alcohol, drugs, television, the lottery and pornography, they are considered to be under control.

4. A Police State

In a Totalitarian State the government exercises rigid and repressive control over the social, economic and political life of the population. There is usually little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive. In a Totalitarian State, rights are non existent and laws are selectively enforced. The inhabitants of a Totalitarian State experience restrictions on their mobility, and on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force, which operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state.

5. Newspeak

In a Totalitarian State language can be (mis)used to deceive and control the masses. In the real world today, political correctness and euphemism are both pervasive and pervasively derided. Some current examples are: "regime change" overthrow, "shock and awe" massive bombing, "revenue enhancement" tax increase, and "downsize" fire employees. If the Newspeak of today makes us wince, how much more will it when we're living in a Totalitarian State?

"It's up to us. No one is coming to help us. If we don’t make the effort, no one else will. It's time for the twilight of the idols. It's time for a new dawn, a new humanity, a new world order. It's time for the dawn of the Gods." - Adam Weishaupt

The Georgia Guidestones Partially Destroyed By Bomb Blast Are Brought Down

On one of the highest hilltops in Elbert County, Georgia stands a huge granite monument.

Engraved in eight different languages on the four giant stones that support the common capstone are 10 Guides, or commandments.

That monument is alternately referred to as The Georgia Guidestones, or the American Stonehenge.

Though relatively unknown to most people, it is an important link to the Occult Hierarchy that dominates the world in which we live.

The messages engraved on the Georgia Guidestones deal with four major fields:

(1) Governance and the establishment of a world government,

(2) Population and reproduction control,

(3) The environment and man's relationship to nature, and

(4) Spirituality.

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.

2. Guide reproduction wisely - improving fitness and diversity.

3. Unite humanity with a living new language.

4. Rule passion - faith - tradition - and all things with tempered reason.

5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.

6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.

7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.

8. Balance personal rights with social duties.

9. Prize truth - beauty - love - seeking harmony with the infinite.

10. Be not a cancer on the earth - Leave room for nature - Leave room for nature.

Explosion Destroys Part Of Mysterious Monument In Georgia, Then They Are Brought Down

The Georgia Landmark Known as ‘America’s Stonehenge’ Is Destroyed in an Explosive Attack

For more than four decades, the Georgia Guidestones near Elberton Ga., have been an enigma. The authorities said, “unknown individuals” destroyed a large part of the structure.

An explosive device that “unknown individuals” detonated early on a Wednesday morning destroyed a granite monument in Georgia that was built under mysterious circumstances more than four decades ago and promoted by state officials as “America’s Stonehenge,” the authorities said.

The monument, known as the Georgia Guidestones, which was built about nine miles north of Elberton, Ga., had four granite slabs connected to a center pillar, with a capstone on top.

But around 4 a.m. on a Wednesday morning in July 2022, an explosive device was set off, destroying “a large portion of the structure,” the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said in a statement. It is investigating the explosion together with the Elbert County Sheriff’s Office.

Though part of the monument was still standing after the explosion, the entirety had to be demolished by officials in the aftermath out of safety concerns.

Read more »

"By the end of this decade we will live under the first One World Government that has ever existed in the society of nations ... a government with absolute authority to decide the basic issues of human survival. One world government is inevitable." -POPE JOHN PAUL II quoted by Malachi Martin in the book "The Keys of This Blood"

Monarch Mind Control

Katy In "Wide Awake" With Butterflies In Her Hair

The monarch butterfy symbolizes the mind control program Project Monarch. The trauma based mind control fragments the mind of the victim. Project Monarch was allegedly developed within the CIA’s MKUltra mind control experiments in the early 1950's.

Katy Perry’s music video “Wide Awake” is another music video among many from the music industry that conceals references to Monarch programming within its symbolism.

References to this practice occur often in mass media but are often coded using specific symbols and imagery.

The Monarch Mind Control Project is a mind control program, that was developed by the CIA, under Project MKULTRA.

Monarch Mind Control represents an important pillar of the New World Order. Authorities, celebrities, moderators, musicians, politicians, actors, sportsmen and others are being misused for the Illuminati agenda, to exemplify the wrong way of life and to condition us to accept the coming satanic age.

There have been many articles written which describe items of popular culture that conceal their symbolic references to an unknown, horrendous practice: Monarch programming. This technique of mind control seeks to create fully “programmable” individuals and is used by the shadowy elite in fields such as the military, politics and the murky underworld.

Another area in which mind control, especially Monarch programming, is used is the entertainment business – not only because some celebrities are actual victims of mind control, but because entertainment is used to subtly normalize and glamorize this awful practice through symbolism.

Katy Perry’s video Wide Awake is yet another music video that alludes to the concept of Monarch programming through its story line and its imagery. While this might not be obvious to most people, those who have some knowledge of the subject of mind control find it extremely blatant.

In many ways, the video resembles works such as the movies Labyrinth and Sucker Punch and music videos like Paramore’s Brick by Boring Brick. All of these productions visually represent the inner-world of Monarch slaves through a specific set of symbols: mirrors, butterflies (especially Monarch butterflies), mazes and so forth. Not only do these objects aptly portray psychological concepts, they are actual “trigger images” used in mind control on Monarch slaves. Wide Awake fully utilizes this set of symbols, which gives the story line a deeper, and more disturbing, meaning.

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"We are moving toward a new world order, the world of communism. We shall never turn off that road." Mikhail Gorbachev, 1987

Behind The Headlines: Crimes Of The Global 'Elite'

Sandy Hook Crisis Actor? False Flag?
For almost 30 years, investigator Ole Dammegård has been on a quest to find the truth behind some of the worst conspiracies in the history of world - such as the murders US President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, John Lennon and the blowing up of m/s Estonia killing at least 852 innocent people.

This has taken him on a very frightening and dangerous journey into unknown territories. What has been claimed as acts by lone madmen has turned out to be connected to the International military industrial complex and top level high finance, all sanctioned locally behind dark smoke screens. Ole has also analyzed the assassination of the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, who was gunned down in February 1986.

Ole recently joined Behind the Headlines hosts Niall Bradley and Joe Quinn for a riveting radio show...

The transcript.

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"The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists." J. Edgar Hoover

The Order Of The Illuminati

Its Origins, Its Methods and Its Influence on the World Events.

The Order of the Illuminati is often at the center of debates about the impact of secret societies on human history. Is the Illuminati a myth or does it truly secretly rule the world? This article attempts to shed some factual light on the Order of the Illuminati by reviewing some of the most important documents on the subject.

The world “Illuminati” is thrown around rather freely to describe the elite group that is secretly running the world. Most have a general idea of the meaning of the term, but are confused about the concepts and the ideas relating to it. Is the Illuminati the same thing as Freemasonry? What are their goals? What are their beliefs? Why do they act in secret? Do they practice occultism? This article attempts to draw a more precise picture of the Order by citing authors who have extensively studied the subject. Whether they are, at the end of the day, critics or apologists of the Illuminati, these authors base their thoughts on credible facts. Some of the most interesting documents on the Illuminati were written by initiates of Secret Societies as they understood the philosophical and spiritual undercurrent driving the movement forward. Using these works, we will look at the origins, the methods and the impacts of the Illuminati on world history.

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"The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining supercapitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control. Do I mean a conspiracy? Yes, I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, incredibly evil in intent." –Rep. Larry P. MacDonald, killed in Korean Air Lines 007, 1983

Surveillance Cameras With Computer Chips Or Smart Sensors That Predict And/Or Sense Criminal Activities, Alerts Police

With sophisticated cameras and smart sensor systems, law enforcement agencies and transportation departments across the United States are now able to proactively monitor and respond to crimes or accidents as they unfold; the sensors can also assist transportation departments in analyzing traffic patterns in real time; the system could allow officials to change one way streets, design real time traffic signals, and multiple speed limits to make traffic flow more smoothly.

The East Orange New Jersey police department was the first U.S. agency to install a Smart Imaging Sensor system as part of its broader network of security cameras around the city.

These smart sensors process images that the high-resolution cameras record in real time and can automatically detect and/or predict when a crime is occurring. When it senses something it will alert law enforcement officials instantly.

Government agencies and business around the world have already taken notice of predictive sensors.

Recently, an automated camera system called AIsight (pronounced eyesight), was installed in Boston after the 2013 marathon bombing, that monitors camera feeds in real time and alerts authorities if it spots unusual activity.

AIsight cameras use a statistical method called machine learning to learn what is normal for an area and then alerts on abnormal activity. That could be picking up anything from unusual loitering to activity occurring in restricted areas.

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"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -H.L. Mencken

Soylent Green Or Bugs Your Choice!

Soylent Green Wafers

Soylent Green the Movie!

A nightmarish futuristic fantasy about the controlling power of big corporations and an innocent cop who stumbles on the truth.

In the future food shortages are so extreme that a jar of strawberry jam is $150 and people weep at the sight of beef. Housing in New York City, where "Soylent Green" is set, is only affordable to the richest of the rich. The elite, they're called.

Everyone else sleeps in their cars — or on the street.

At this time the Earth is overpopulated and totally polluted; natural resources have been exhausted, and the nourishment of the population is provided by Soylent Industries, a company that makes a food consisting of plankton from the oceans.

Bug Burger - Made From Buffalo Worms
Most of the World's population survives on processed rations produced by the massive Soylent Corporation, including Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow, which are advertised as "high-energy vegetable concentrates". The newest product is Soylent Green: small green wafers which are advertised as being produced from "high-energy plankton". It is much more nutritious and palatable than the red and yellow varieties but, like most other foods, in short supply which often leads to weekly food riots.

In New York City, when Soylent's member of the board, William R. Simonson, is murdered, apparently by a burglar at the Chelsea Towers West where he lives, efficient Detective Thorn is assigned to investigate the case with his partner Solomon "Sol" Roth.

Thorn comes to the fancy apartment and meets Simonson's bodyguard Tab Fielding and the "furniture" (woman that is rented together with the flat) Shirl and the detective concludes that the executive was not a burglary victim but executed. Further, he finds that the Governor Santini and other powerful men want to disrupt and end Thorn's investigation.

Edible Bag Of Seasoned and Crunchy, Crickets,
Grasshoppers, Silkworm Pupae, & Sago Worms
But Thorn is determined to continue his work and discovers a bizarre, disturbing secret of the ingredient used to manufacture Soylent Green.

Toward the end of the movie Thorn is injured and taken away by paramedics, and shouts out, “SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!”

Dead People to be exact!

Here's what we might expect soon in the New World Order diet.

Comparison to Pre-Collapse Times

In wealthy countries, in pre-Collapse times, it was customary for people to buy most of their food at large, corporate warehouse-stores called 'supermarkets'. Often, when people see pictures of these facilities, their reaction is that the photo must be a fake. The vast size, the piles of fresh-looking and exotic vegetables, the shelves and shelves of varied boxed and bottled and immaculately wrapped products, the neatly plastic-wrapped, perfect-looking meat, it seems impossible. It's all historically accurate, though. Those images are nothing like the modern reality of going to market, and it's hard for us today to imagine how this magical fantasy land of food that our ancestors took for granted was even physically possible.

The New World Order has not come close to restoring the pre-Collapse global food system, but with decades to reshape the ruined global systems of the early 21st century, a global trade and transportation network, and access to the entire world, they have been able to shape a new global food system which by and large is fairly enviable relative to a purely local food system.

Some New World Order Food Choices

Bugs, Bugs, And More Bugs!

How would like your bug burger prepared?

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"By the end of this decade we will live under the first One World Government that has ever existed in the society of nations ... a government with absolute authority to decide the basic issues of human survival. One world government is inevitable." -Pope John Paul II

CyberExtruder's 2D to 3D Face Patent

CyberExtruder is a high tech company that has been given a patent for their process of creating reliable 3D models of a person’s face from a single or series of 2D images.

CyberExtruder has announced the release of Aureus 3D Version 5.7. "With Aureus 3D Version 5.7, we've achieved product performance at speeds unprecedented in the industry," says Paul Nicholas, President, and CEO. "With our 128 byte face template size, the smallest in the industry, we can perform matching on a database of 7.5 billion people (the world population) in 4.69 seconds. With speeds at this level coupled with superior accuracy and scalability, Aureus 3D Version 5.7 will change the industry. There’s nothing of its kind anywhere."

Aureus 3D Version 5.7 provides the easy to integrate and easy to deploy high-performance face recognition solution demanded in a wide variety of applications including loss prevention and security, access control, law enforcement and Safe City, and hospitality and gaming. Aureus 3D Version 5.7 is the perfect enhanced video analytic now required by industry leading VMS and PSIM systems.

A proprietary 2D to 3D face modeling technology mitigates the challenges of pose, lighting, and expression in combination with a novel deep neural network architecture that provides enhanced discrimination capability at high speed with low memory requirements. Providing OEM’s, solution integrators and end-users with the industry’s best facial recognition technology for a broad spectrum of real-world government and commercial applications.

CyberExtruder’s 2D-to-3D conversion is certainly an important innovation to the security and biometrics technology industries. Why? It enables better matching between offline photographs and surveillance video. While the matching of "watch list" images against surveillance video has traditionally achieved mixed results as a result of inadequate lighting, angle, expression, etc., this patent could signify a leap forward in terms of the quality and value of 3D facial images.

Research has focused on solutions to solve facial recognition’s weakest operational elements – Age, Pose, Illumination and Expression (known as the APIE problem).

The benefits of holistic 3D approach to face recognition are particularly evident when viewed in the context of mitigating errors in face matching due to subject pose (the angle of the person’s face relative to the camera) and expression (the person’s innate ability to deform their face).

Years of research have been aimed at developing ways in which a computer can not only understand how a human face is composed, but also how to differentiate one face from another. Security features which can now be applied across markets like loss prevention, financial services, law enforcement and security, healthcare, defense and intelligence and a myriad of marketing and customer service applications.

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of 'liberalism,' they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened." - NORMAN THOMAS, former U.S. Socialist Presidential Candidate

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman Launches Crypto Project 'Worldcoin'

Worldcoin's Eye Scanning Orb
OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman has launched an audacious eyeball-scanning cryptocurrency startup 'Worldcoin' to help build a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online, enable global democratic processes and drastically increase economic opportunity. "If successful, we believe Worldcoin could drastically increase economic opportunity, scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy, enable global democratic processes, and eventually show a potential path to AI-funded UBI," Alex Blania and Sam Altman, Founders of Worldcoin.

Worldcoin consists of a privacy-preserving digital identity (World ID) and, where laws allow, a digital currency (WLD) received simply for being human.

The Orb Being Used In A Shopping Mall
According to the company, where the rules are less clear, such as in the US, steps will be taken so more people can benefit from both.

Users can now download World App, the first protocol-compatible wallet, and reserve their share. After visiting an Orb, a biometric verification device, they will receive a World ID. This lets them prove they are a real and unique person online while remaining completely private.

As the global distribution of Orbs is ramping up, users can find the closest one and book time to be verified with World App and at Worldcoin’s official website. In addition, the startup has begun the rollout of 1,500 Orbs to meet global demand for World ID.

"The project will increase the number of available Orbs to 1,500 throughout the summer and fall in more than 35 cities around the world," Worldcoin said in a blogpost. The new Orbs will be available in 35+ cities in over 20 countries, including India, across five continents between now and the end of 2023.

The availability of 1,500 Orbs will more than 5x sign-up capacity globally and enable millions of additional people to join the two million who have already signed up for World ID.

Read more »

"Today, America would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order [referring to the 1991 LA Riot]. Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this *scenario*, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government." Dr. Henry Kissinger, Bilderberger Conference, Evians, France, 1991

Weather As A Force Multiplier

Category 5 Irma the Strongest
Atlantic Hurricane on Record
Owning The Weather In 2025
In 2025 US aerospace forces can "own the weather" by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to warfighting applications. Such a capability offers the warfighter tools to shape the battlespace in ways never before possible. It provides opportunities to impact operations across the full spectrum of conflict and is pertinent to all possible futures. The purpose of this paper is to outline a strategy for the use of a future weather modification system to achieve military objectives rather than to provide a detailed technical road map.

A high risk/high reward endeavor, weather modification offers a dilemma not unlike the splitting of the atom. While some segments of society will always be reluctant to examine controversial issues such as weather modification, the tremendous military capabilities that could result from this field are ignored at our own peril. From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns, to complete dominance of global communications and counter-space control, weather modification offers the warfighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary.

Technology advancements in five major areas are necessary for an integrated weather modification capability: (1) advanced nonlinear modeling techniques, (2) computational capability, (3) information gathering and transmission, (4) a global sensor array, and (5) weather intervention techniques. Some intervention tools exist today and others may be developed and refined in the future.

Weather As A Force Multiplier: Owning The Weather In 2025 Research Paper

Read more »

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 08:58:00 +0000
America's Shopping Malls Are Dying A Slow Death

The Canton Centre Mall in Canton,
Ohio is boarded up and vacant
All across America, once-vibrant shopping malls are being boarded up.

Traffic-driving anchors like Sears and JCPenney are shutting down stores, and mall owners are having a hard time finding retailers large enough to replace them. With a fresh wave of closures on the horizon, the problem is set to accelerate, according to retail and real estate analysts.

About 15% of U.S. malls will fail or be converted into non-retail space within the next 10 years, according to Green Street Advisors, a real estate and REIT analytics firm. That's an increase from less than two years ago, when the firm predicted 10% of malls would fail or be converted.

"The risk of failure for a mall increases dramatically once you see anchor closures," said Cedric Lachance, managing director of Green Street Advisors. "Their health is very important ... and most of them are highly likely to continue closing stores."

Within 15 to 20 years, retail consultant Howard Davidowitz expects as many as half of America's shopping malls to fail. He predicts that only upscale shopping centers with anchors like Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus will survive.

"Middle-level stores in middle-level malls are going to be extinct because they don't make sense," said Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates, Inc., a retail consulting and investment banking firm. "That's why we haven't built a major enclosed mall since 2006."

Read more »

Surveillance cameras

170 surveillance cameras on one block! NYC now Camera City. In 2005, the NYCLU counted more than 4,000 street level cameras from the West Village down to Battery Park. The group also found that the 292 cameras along 125th Street in Central Harlem recorded nearly every movement on that busy street. "I would believe the number has dramatically increased" three years later, said Matt Faiella, staff attorney for the NYCLU. The cameras have myriad uses. The NYPD wants to install thousands to protect the city against terrorism. The NYPD's recently released plan to protect the city by installing some 3,000 additional cameras in the city raised concern at the NYCLU because it takes a new step in surveillance by creating a database of license plates and people's movements. The police said the images, including license plate captures, would be erased after 30 days. Because they're continually making new discoveries to increase the effectiveness of surveillance cameras, biometrics, rfid chips, etc., the government may soon be tracking us all.

High-Tech Laser Weapons

The next generation of futuristic weapons has arrived. The U.S. Navy announced that its high-tech laser weapon is ready to disable and destroy enemy drones and small boats, should the need arise.

The 30-kilowatt laser weapon system (LaWS) is housed aboard the USS Ponce, a naval vessel stationed in the Arabian Gulf— a body of water located south of Iraq that separates the Saudi Arabian peninsula from Iran.

While sailors have not yet used the new laser to destroy any real enemy targets, the Navy is prepared to do just that, if necessary, according to Rear. Adm. Matthew Klunder, chief of naval research.

Sailors operate the laser using a video game-type controller, according to Navy officials.

The first course of action is a nonlethal option — which amounts to a very bright glare. If a threat keeps coming they can increase the strength of the laser's highly concentrated beam, which will knock out the sensors or control systems on an enemy drone or vessel. If the adversary still doesn't get the hint, the beam can be turned up higher, making it capable of destroying the threat altogether.

Biometric Digital Fingerprint Scanner

Biometric technology, requiring digital fingerprints and a photograph for identification, is used by the Department of State to establish and verify the identities of visa applicants at embassies and consulates around the world through its BioVisa program. The Department of Homeland Security established the US-VISIT program under which a traveler’s biometrics are collected in his country, compared against a watch list of known criminals and suspected terrorists, and then verified again upon arrival in the United States. Biometrics are unique and virtually impossible to forge.

Hitachi Finger Vein Scanner

This is a new payment technology brought to us by Hitachi which makes your fingertip pay for transactions. This is a biometric cardless credit payment system, which adopts the uniqueness of the blood vessel patterns in each individual human body as the signature for payment authentication. The new biometric system is able to recognize pattern of the blood vessels in your fingers, so, what you need is to insert your finger for a scan to authenticate the credit card transactions. Blood vessels are hidden under the skin, which aren’t like retinas or fingerprints and shouldn’t be possible to counterfeit. In order for you to use your fingertip for making payment, you need to first register your finger vein pattern with the credit card company. The idea of cardless payment making use finger vein that has lowest counterfeit possibility is definitely good. A few of the common problems such as card loss and theft will be eliminated with this new system.

The Financial New World Order

A Connected Global Economy
Following the 2009 G20 summit, plans were announced for implementing the creation of a new global currency to replace the US dollar’s role as the world reserve currency. Point 19 of the communiqué released by the G20 at the end of the Summit stated, “We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity.” SDRs, or Special Drawing Rights, are “a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund.” As the Telegraph reported, “the G20 leaders have activated the IMF's power to create money and begin global "quantitative easing". In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body.”

It continued in stating that, "There is now a world currency in waiting. In time, SDRs are likely to evolve into a parking place for the foreign holdings of central banks, led by the People's Bank of China." Further, "The creation of a Financial Stability Board looks like the first step towards a global financial regulator," or, in other words, a global central bank.

It is important to take a closer look at these "solutions" being proposed and implemented in the midst of the current global financial crisis. These are not new suggestions, as they have been in the plans of the global elite for a long time. However, in the midst of the current crisis, the elite have fast-tracked their agenda of forging a New World Order in finance. It is important to address the background to these proposed and imposed "solutions" and what effects they will have on the International Monetary System (IMS) and the global political economy as a whole.

Read more »

The Complete History Of Freemasonry

Chart Of Freemasonry. Click
on the image for a better view.
The creation of the New World Order (NWO) agenda was put in motion by the infamous character, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the one who decided to control the entire planet by any means necessary.

Of course, this meant: deception, control, financial enslavement, blackmail and murder... but also far graver things, like: wars, famine and depopulation... a genocide unlike any other before it.

Click on the image for a better view.
They are the richest clan in the world, and their empire was built on mountains of bones and sufferance.

1773 – Mayer Amschel Rothschild assembles twelve of his most influential friends, and convinces them that if they all pool their resources together, they can rule the world.

This meeting takes place in Frankfurt, Germany. Rothschild also informs his friends that he has found the perfect candidate, an individual of incredible intellect and ingenuity, to lead the organization he has planned – Adam Weishaupt.

May 1, 1776 – Adam Weishaupt (code named Spartacus) establishes a secret society called the Order of the Illuminati. Weishaupt is the Professor of Canon Law at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria, part of Germany. The Illuminati seek to establish a New World Order. Their objectives are as follows:

1) Abolition of all ordered governments

2) Abolition of private property

3) Abolition of inheritance

4) Abolition of patriotism

5) Abolition of the family

6) Abolition of religion

7) Creation of a world government

July, 1782 – The Order of the Illuminati joins forces with Freemasonry at the Congress of Wilhelmsbad. The Comte de Virieu, an attendee at the conference, comes away visibly shaken. When questioned about the “tragic secrets” he brought back with him, he replies: “I will not confide them to you. I can only tell you that all this is very much more serious than you think.” From this time on, according to his biographer, “the Comte de Virieu could only speak of Freemasonry with horror.”

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Behold The Cube: Saturn Worship

The Black Box or Cube, or any other
color box/cube can represent Saturn.
(The Elite worship Saturn and receive energy from it! By using the cube/box symbol and along with the pyramid, all seeing eye, owl, pentagram, fire/torch, monarch butterfly, rising sun, etc. symbols they are revealing that they are very much in control. You'll see "The Black Box/Cube or any color box/cube" along with the other symbols being used in corporate logos, movies, video games, commercials, and tv shows.)

The black cube is used to represent Saturn in numerous cultures. You might not know it, but the entire world has been worshiping Saturn for thousands of years. The cult has never stopped and its rites are still present to this day. Saturn, dubbed the "Lord of the Rings", is the reason why we exchange rings at weddings or put halos on the heads of godly people.

Since ancient times, sages gazed at the stars, admiring their heavenly glow and attributing them godly powers, based on their effect on humans.

Hexagon on Saturn's North Pole. One
can draw a 3D cube in this 2D Hexagon.

Jewish Tefillin/Phylactery
Before the Great Flood, Saturn was regarded by all mankind as the supreme god and ruler of the kings. Occult researchers affirm that Saturn ruled the kingdom of Atlantis and became the divine ancestor of all earthly patriarchs and kings.

The Babylonians called Saturn "the Star of Tammuz." Saturn worship has been perpetuated through numerous gods during antiquity: "Chronos, or Saturn, Dionysos, Hyperion, Atlas, Hercules, were all connected with 'a great Saturnian continent' they were kings that ruled over countries on the western shores of the Mediterranean, Africa and Spain." - Baldwin, Prehistoric Nations

In Egyptian mythology Isis is considered Saturn’s eldest daughter: "I am Isis, Queen of this country. I was instructed by Mercury. No one can destroy the laws which I have established. I am the eldest daughter of Saturn, most ancient of the Gods."

The "Kabballah" of Jewish mysticism/Masonry comes from KabbaAllah or "CubeGod" around which people gather and ceremonially walk in circles. Thus it can be said they are "circling the square or black Cube/God." Masons are also constantly referring to "circling the square" and "squaring the circle."

The Freemasonic G (Geometry/God) symbol within a compass and T-square symbolizes this as well. Just as people circle around their Cube-God Kabba, so the Masons use a compass/square around their "G" God/Geometry.

Astrologically Saturn represents darkness, misfortune, death and fear. Saturday is named after the Roman god Saturn, the Ancient Greeks referred to this god as Cronus. The symbol of Saturn/Cronus is the sickle. The sickle of Saturn and hammer of Thor (Jupiter/Zeus) combined is represented in the the symbol of Communism.

The core of the control over Planet Earth's populace lies in ancient cults. These cults are still in existence to this day. The elite follow these most ancient religions being influenced by sexual worship. The main cults are the worship of the Planet Saturn (El), Moon (Isis), Venus (Lucifer) & Sun (Ra).

Crisis Actors For False Flag Shootings?

A new group of actors is now available nationwide for active shooter drills and mall shooting full-scale exercises, announced Visionbox, Denver's leading professional actors studio.

Visionbox Crisis Actors are trained in criminal and victim behavior, and bring intense realism to simulated mass casualty incidents in public places.

Same Girl - Different Shootings?
The actors' stage acting experience, ranging from Shakespeare to contemporary American theater, enables them to "stay in character" throughout an exercise, and improvise scenes of extreme stress while strictly following official exercise scenarios.

The actors regularly rehearse scenarios involving the Incident Command System and crisis communications, and appear in interactive training films produced in both 2D and stereoscopic 3D.

Producers formed the group to demonstrate emerging security technologies, help first responders visualize life-saving procedures, and assist trainers in delivering superior hands-on crisis response training.

For example, with a large shopping center, the producers review all security camera views and design dramatic scenes specifically for existing camera angles, robotic camera sweeps, and manually-controlled camera moves.

The actors can play the part of the shooters, mall employees, shoppers in the mall, shoppers who continue to arrive at the mall, media reporters and others rushing to the mall, and persons in motor vehicles around the mall, etc.

UN report calls for new global reserve currency to replace US dollar

UN Says New Currency Is Needed to Fix Broken ‘Confidence Game’. The dollar’s role in international trade should be reduced by establishing a new currency to protect emerging markets from the “confidence game” of financial speculation, the United Nations said.

UN countries should agree on the creation of a global reserve bank to issue the currency and to monitor the national exchange rates of its members, the Geneva-based UN Conference on Trade and Development said today in a report.

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The Illuminati Eye Of Horus

The main methods of showing this symbol in the past were by using an eyepatch or winking. Today it's usually with one eye open and the other eye covered by one's hand or an object.

We are so amazingly distracted – baseball, football, 24 hour news, Kardashians, manufactured racism, manufactured politics, false flag events, etc.

We have Googled our way into a love for darkness rather than light.

There is a curious fascination with the perverse and the profane, with the wanton and the wicked.

Everywhere you look, there it is. The All-Seeing Eye Of Horus staring back at you from pop soda cans, sporting equipment, movies, television, radio, clothing. Even on the very dollar bill.

Why is the Illuminati All-Seeing Eye of Horus suddenly everywhere you turn? The answer is surprisingly simple, so simple in fact that it might escape our grasp.

This demonic symbol and sign reveals the Wicked One or Satan in the PERSON OF THE ANTICHRIST is about to take the stage.

Because of this man all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, will be forced to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, so that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

INITIALLY HE WILL BE RECOGNIZED THROUGHOUT THE WORLD AS A MAN OF PEACE.

HE WILL OFFER ECONOMIC SOLUTIONS TO THE WORLD'S PROBLEMS.

HE WILL REIGN EXACTLY THREE AND A HALF YEARS AS THE WORLD'S GREATEST DICTATOR.

Beware of when this man appears on the world scene. His leadership will take the world into a Great Tribulation of terror, wars, suffering and death.

Maybe we should consider the days that we are living in and ask ourselves this question, "Are we living in the biblical last days?"

The New World Order

The Illuminati/Global Elite are the ones controlling those in government who willfully seek to take the left hand path.

The Illuminati are the ones controlling world affairs through present day governments and corporations and are behind events that will lead to the establishment of a New World Order.

There is a worldwide conspiracy being orchestrated by an extremely powerful and influential group of genetically-related individuals, at least at the highest echelons, which include many of the world's wealthiest people, top political leaders, and corporate elite, as well as members of the so-called Black Nobility of Europe, dominated by the British Crown. The Luciferian Agenda of the Secret Societies that are planning this New World Order is to have a World Government, World Religion, World Army, World Central Bank, World Currency and a micro-chipped population. This New World Order global government will be a fulfillment of bible prophecy concerning the last days. Daniel 8: 23 Rev. 13: 4, 5, 7

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The North American Union

Thomas Donohue (president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) on June 16, 2006 remarked that "for CEOs, North America is already a single market, and business decisions are no longer made with a Mexico strategy---or a Canada strategy---but, rather, with a North American strategy....I think it's pretty clear now that it no longer makes sense to talk about U.S. competitiveness and Mexican competitiveness---or, for that matter, about the competitiveness of Canada. We are all in this together---we, as North Americans." Youtube Video on NAFTA and the Council on Foreign Relations - Link

All UK citizens in ID database by 2017

All British citizens will have their fingerprints and photographs registered on a national ID database within 10 years under plans outlined by the Government.

Millions in sensitive jobs, including teachers, carers and health workers, will be among the first to be entered on to the identity register.

In a bid to kick start the project - the world's biggest - foreign nationals working in Britain will begin to be issued with cards from November. Starting next year, the first British citizens will be enrolled beginning with some airport staff, power station employees and people working on the London Olympics site.

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The Ultimate Weapon Of Mass Destruction: Scalar Weapons

"Electric power is everywhere! Present in unlimited quantities and can drive the world's machinery without the need of coal, oil, gas, or any other of the common fuels." Nikola Tesla

Electromagnetic pulse and plasma weapon R & D is rapidly occurring behind the misnomer of "Non Lethality," and clearly parallel Tesla's work. Major US defence contractors and leading government weapon research laboratories are intensely interested in "Directed Energy Weapons (DEW)." Research includes "Radio Frequency and Particle Beam Weapons", "Air and Space Based Directed Energy Weapons", and, among many others, "DEW Weapons Effects on Personnel". Of interest too, is a paper written by Australian defence analyst, Carlo Kopp, which outlines in considerable detail an "Electromagnetic Bomb." The "E-Bomb," Kopp says, has the ability to inflict damage "... not unlike the experience through exposure to close proximity lightning strikes." In a broadcast dated 27 February 1996, Beijing radio outlined advances in particle beam energy technology and alluded to a "weapon even more powerful than the 'death ray.'" The broadcast likened the weapon to a "Thunderbolt," adding that the moment it struck it's target (vaporising it), a temperature of 8000 degrees Celsius would be produced.

Not least are the comments of Boris Belitsky, a leading Russian Science and Engineering correspondent, broadcast on Voice of Russia, 24 February 1997. Belitsky in replying to a question on Russian military applications of microwave generators, stated "they can be used to fire a plasmoid, that is, a blob of plasma..."

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RFID Tattoos For Tracking Cows... And People?

Founders of SOMARK Innovations Inc. , Mark Pydynowski, left, and Ramos Mays, right, with their electronic ink tattoo device at their office in San Diego.

Did you know that Saint Louis based Somark Innovations successfully tested an "RFID tattoo" on cows and rats? Yes indeed, tattoo, not the ol' RFID chip found in passports, dogs, and Dutch VIP clubbers. Somark's system uses an array of needles to inject a passive RFID ink which can be read through the hair on your choice of beast. The ink can be either invisible or colored but Somark is keeping mum as to its exact contents. They only say that it doesn't contain any metals and is 100% biocompatible and chemically inert. The tattoo can be applied in 5 to 10 seconds with no shaving involved and can be read from up to 4 feet away -- the bigger the tattoo, the more information stored. Best of it all, it's apparently safe for humans to ingest allowing the FDA to track back Mad Cow Disease, e-coli outbreaks, and Soylent Green. Don't worry, they can't track you just as long as you chew your food like mama taught. However, with "military personnel" listed as Somark's "secondary target market," well, it's just a matter of time before we're all cattle now isn't it.

Cops In Riot Gear --- Freedom To Fascism

The Militarization of the Local Police

The Real Threat of Fascism. We all should realize and be aware of the fact that the nations Germany and Italy were liberal democracies before the rise of fascism.

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New Biometric Smart Cards

ActivCard, a specialist in IDentity Management software for remote access, single sign-on and digital ID card solutions, announced an expanded cooperation with its partner Precise Biometrics AB, developer and provider of world-leading and user-friendly biometric security solutions based on fingerprints, to deliver smart card-based identification (ID) badge solutions with biometric authentication. ActivCard has incorporated Precise Biometrics' technology for fingerprint matching on smart cards, "Precise Match-on-Card", to its "ActivCard Gold 2.2" software, the most successful and widely deployed smart ID card middleware platform available on the market today. By verifying the fingerprint that's on the card, the Precise Match-on-Card method guarantees that the reference biometric template (the user's identity) never leaves the card, so it is not subject to theft. ActivCard Identity Management System™ or AIMS is a vital part of the ActivCard IDM solution that includes ActivCard Gold™ middleware software to enable client authentication methods, including one-time-use dynamic passwords (SKI), PKI and biometrics. The IDM solution may include the ActivCard Applet Suite on the card for credential management, Trinity™ single sign-on software, and ActivPack™ AAA Server for remote access.

E-Smart Technologies is a leading provider of high technology security systems that can be used to combat fraud and terrorism. E-Smart products enable government agencies and commercial enterprises to continuously and securely verify, certify and manage identification and access of citizens, personnel, customers and any other persons seeking physical or logical access. E-Smart is the exclusive provider of the Biometric Verification Security System(TM) (BVS2)(TM), featuring the Super Smart Card(TM) for Asia and the US, which experts believe to be the world's only commercially available smartcard with a full on-card matching system for biometric ID verification. The Super Smart Card™ provides maximum security due to its unique architecture that incorporates a hardware based firewall system coupled with dynamic software protection. In addition to including an on-card biometric fingerprint sensor and digital photo ID, the Super Smart Card's multi- application design allows multiple independent and secure applications to co-exist and operate on the same card. Only the registered users finger can activate the card. The sensor performs with wet, dry, hot or cold fingers. This is not the case for most other sensors. The system prevents unauthorized use of any card or card application by requiring the authorized card-holder's fingerprint to initiate any transaction or access any information. If lost or stolen, the Super Smart Card™ is useless - no one else can activate it for use of any kind. Tampering permanently disables the card and destroys any information. Counterfeit or stolen cards cannot work on the system, and are totally useless.

The USA PATRIOT Act

The Reichstag fire (an act similar to 9/11), burning of the Reichstag (parliament) building in Berlin, Germany, on the night of Feb. 27, 1933 allowed the Nazis to pass the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933. This conferred dictatorial powers on Adolf Hitler. (Notice the "protecting the homeland" banner... (Isn't it interesting that they chose part of the very phrase Hitler used.) Hitler, "An evil exists that threatens every man, woman and child of this great nation. We must take steps to ensure our domestic security and protect our homeland".)

On October 26, 2001, US President George W. Bush enacted the USA PATRIOT Act. The USA PATRIOT Act is officially the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act". The bill was in direct response to the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. The goal of the Act was to reduce restrictions on law enforcement and government officials when investigating criminal activity.

9-11 False Flag Attacks
It gave international law organizations the right to probe and search citizen’s e-mail, medical, financial and personal records. Some of the main sections of the law enacted restrictions on foreign intelligence gathering, expanded the Secretary of the Treasury’s authority to regulate financial transactions, and broadened immigration laws in regards to detaining and deporting immigrants suspected of terrorism-related acts. The bill was passed by a wide margin in the US Congress.

The USA PATRIOT Act broadly expands law enforcement's surveillance and investigative powers and represents one of the most significant threats to civil liberties, privacy and democratic traditions in U.S. history. The Patriot Act gives sweeping search and surveillance to domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence agencies and eliminates checks and balances that previously gave courts the opportunity to ensure that those powers were not abused. The Patriot Act and follow-up legislation threatens the basic rights of millions of Americans.

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Was The San Bernardino Mass Shooting A False Flag Attack?

A Staged Event? False Flag?
Breaking News: The San Bernardino Mass Shooting just occurred hours ago in San Bernardino, California, around 11:00am local time on December 2nd, 2015.

The getaway car! Note the damage to the
front windows & the drivers side front tire.

Same car only on a different street?
Why was it placed at two locations?

Note the missing picket fence!
It’s important to question everything right from the start. The odds are that this is yet another false flag operation with the same old purposes of scaring the public, justifying martial law (school and hospital lockdowns) and pushing the gun control agenda.

Surprise, Surprise: Active Shooter Drill Scheduled at Same Time and Place

Readers of the independent media will know full well by now the hallmarks and telltale signs of these kind of false flag staged terror events, whether they are bombings, shootings, hijackings or any other kind of attack.

Almost without exception – from 9/11 to 7/7 to Sandy Hook and all the rest of them – the script includes drills at the same or nearby time and place, to fool people into initially thinking the operation is an exercise or drill, and to distract both the victims and public from the actual attack.

It comes as no surprise then to see that the San Bernardino mass shooting was in fact preceded by this announcement of an active shooter drill in the San Bernardino area on November 30th, 2015, just 2 days before today’s mass shooting.

“VICTORVILLE-(VVNG.com): Victor Valley College officials would like to inform students and area residents that there will be an “active shooter” training exercise on the VVC campus on Monday, November 30th.

There will be significant police presence at this time according to Chief Leonard Knight who said this training will last several hours. In order to avoid any confusion, the public is being notified ahead of time. Victor Valley College Police Department (VVCPD), San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department (SBCSD), Victorville Police Station, San Bernardino County Fire Department (SBCFD), Victorville Fire Station, and American Medical Response (AMR) have planned for and are conducting this exercise to ensure coordinated, timely and effective response to the college community, as well as enhance safety at Victor Valley College.”

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9/11 Attacks No Wreckage! Only A Round Hole At The Pentagon?

Close Up Image Of The Pentagon. No
Wreckage, Plane, Engines, Or Wings
"How easy is it for you to shift your belief system from 'I totally believe in my government' to 'Oh My God! What’s going on?' That’s exactly where I went in all of this." – Albert N. Stubblebine III

Albert N. Stubblebine III is a retired Major General in the United States Army. He was the commanding general of the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command from 1981 to 1984. In this compelling interview, Stubblemine reveals the following information about the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001:

Stubblebine initially believed the official story regarding 9/11.

Then, he saw the hole in the Pentagon. The Pentagon was not hit by a Boeing 757.

All of the sensors around the Pentagon were turned off except one. That one sensor captured an image of the object that hit the Pentagon. At first it looked like a missile, but later the imagery was changed to look like a plane.

Note: The collapse of the twin towers was caused by controlled demolition – not the fuel from the airplanes.

Note: Larry Silverstein, the lease holder of the WTC complex, admitted that that BUILDING 7, which was not hit by a plane and had only a small fire, was intentionally "pulled" – which is phraseology used for controlled demolition.

An Early Image Of The Pentagon Before
The Collapse Of The Exterior Wall. 9/11
All of the air defense systems around Washington DC were turned off that day.

Also on 9/11, there was an exercise designed to mimic an attack on the towers by airplanes.

When you connect the dots, the picture says that what we were told by the media was not the real story.

Stubblebine, visibly upset, describes how he felt when he realized the truth about his government after having a strong belief in his country since early childhood: "My belief system was so strong from age five when I could remember standing on a parade ground at attention with not anybody telling me to do that – at West Point."

Below are some notes from the interview including a partial transcript.

5:15 Stubblebine hears about the 9/11 attacks: "We’re at war."

6:00 Stubblebine said there must have been intelligence information to know that an attack was coming and we didn’t see the signals. Somebody missed it.

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Tasers

"Taser" is an acronym for "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle," a reference to juvenile adventure book character Tom Swift. A taser is a weapon that shoots two dart-like electrodes at its victims, then sending electric shocks through wire intended to stun a victim into submission, rendering him helpless and able to be controlled without excessive force. When the Taser electroshock weapon was introduced into widespread use in the early 1990s, it was touted as a "non-lethal" alternative to firearms, to be used to subdue criminals in situations that did not warrant the use of a deadly weapon. However, though the manufacturer as well as many law enforcement agencies continue to argue that tasers have reduced the need for officers to draw firearms and therefore resulted in fewer deaths, many civil rights groups and concerned citizens point to the more than 200 deaths that have resulted from tasers used by law enforcement officers as evidence that tasers are taking lives. One of the contributing factors to these taser injuries and taser deaths is the increasing use of tasers to subdue people who are not a serious threat to law enforcement officers. Instead of being used only in situations in which firearms would be used, tasers are more and more frequently used to simply subdue criminals in any kind of arrest situation. Officers may be subject to laws governing excessive force and police brutality because they sometimes risk lives unnecessarily when using tasers. Further, the news over the past few years has offered verifiable reports of police officers using tasers on individuals who are handicapped, pregnant, mentally-disabled or non-English-speaking, in addition to those who were simply objecting to an officer's aggression or inability to explain details of an arrest. The rise of cell phone camera technology and Internet video databases such as YouTube and LiveLeak has given the public more opportunity than ever to capture and display videos of taser incidents that are often astonishingly graphic.

It's The End Of The World As We Know It

Now The End Begins!

Close your eyes and imagine a world without electricity and modern conveniences: no Fox News, no Facebook, no email, no Blackberry, no cold drinks, no heat in the winter, no automobiles, no food and no way to cook it even if you had it.

It’s just become the end of the world as we know it.

Are you and your family going to survive?

Ours is a world of steaming hot lattes on demand, ice-cold beer in the twinkling of an eye, and internet and phone connections in a nanosecond.

We are the ultimate immediate gratification society.

And what would happen if ….

The dollar bought nothing

A virus could not be cured

Terrorists exploded nuclear bombs across the country

Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and volcanic activity all became more prevalent

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Global Control Through RFID Chips Or With Biometrics

Biometric Hand/Vein Recognition

An Inserted RFID Tracking Chip
There is a possible global economic crisis coming that will lead to a financial "melt down" that the elite could use in order to establish a Global Financial Economic System. This would give centralized power to the United Nation’s International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, creating a type of "Global Federal Reserve System".

This is setting the stage for a cashless electronic currency with the use of a high tech surveillance RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chip to be implanted under one’s skin or with biometrics.

The Global Elite, blinded by their thirst for power, orchestrate obtaining total control over the people in the excuse of providing for more transparency; a greater surveillance of the world financial markets, cross border firms, money laundering, terrorist financing, etc…

They believe that they are the only ones capable of governing mankind properly. However, these globalists know very well that people will not easily give up their freedom of the use of cash to accept these "bio-chips" or a biometric system unless there is a worldwide panic, be it financial or maybe even a flu pandemic, etc. to convince the population that the only way not to lose everything is to accept the use of a RFID chip or biometric system.

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Surveillance Cameras With Computer Chips That Sense Criminal Activities, Alerts Police

( Right Top - A police officer closely monitors security camera images related to an ongoing crime. Bottom - Information on crime suspects is collected.)

With DigiSensory Technologies’ sophisticated cameras and sensor systems, law enforcement agencies and transportation departments across the United States are now able to proactively monitor and respond to crimes or accidents as they unfold; the company’s Avista sensors process the images that its 3.2 megapixel high-resolution camera records in real time and can automatically detect when a crime is occurring; when it senses something it will alert law enforcement officials instantly; the sensors can also assist transportation departments in analyzing traffic patterns in real time; the system could allow officials to change one way streets, design real time traffic signals, and multiple speed limits to make traffic flow more smoothly.

The East Orange New Jersey police department was the first U.S. agency to install DigiSensory’s Avista Smart Imaging Sensor system as part of its broader network of security cameras around the city.

The Avista sensors process the images that its 3.2 megapixel high-resolution camera records in real time and can automatically detect when a crime is occurring. When it senses something it will alert law enforcement officials instantly.

Government agencies and business around the world have already taken notice of DigiSensory Avista predictive sensors.

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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 08:50:00 +0000
Walmart Closing Locations Globally

Walmart announced it is closing 154 U.S. stores, according to a company press release, including the company’s 102 Walmart Express stores, the smallest format stores.

It is part of a global downsizing that will shutter 269 stores around the world out of Walmart's nearly 11,600 stores.

The smaller-format store format had been tested since 2011.

In addition to all the Express stores, 23 Neighborhood Markets, 12 Supercenters, seven stores in Puerto Rico, six discount centers and four Sam’s Clubs will be closed.

About 16,000 associates will be affected worldwide - roughly 10,000 of whom are in the U.S. - according to the company.

It said more than 95 percent of the closed stores in the U.S. are within 10 miles on average of another Walmart, so the hope is those associates can gain employment at nearby stores. In cases where that isn't available, transition assistance will be available, the company said.

Military vehicles at a Walmart parking lot?
“Actively managing our portfolio of assets is essential to maintaining a healthy business,” said Doug McMillon, president and CEO, Walmart Stores, Inc. “Closing stores is never an easy decision, but it is necessary to keep the company strong and positioned for the future. It’s important to remember that we’ll open well more than 300 stores around the world next year. So we are committed to growing, but we are being disciplined about it.”

However, some in affected communities were dismayed at the decision.

Michael Huffman of Waskom, TX, called the decision to close the Walmart Express in his town "a very bad and immoral corporate decision."

He said, "Walmart ran the only other grocery store in town out of business. ... There are a lot of elderly people in Waskom who need a grocery store."

Walmart said the stores it will close "represent less than 1 percent of both global square footage and revenue." The closings represent about 2 percent of Walmart stores globally, Walmart said.

The Bentonville, AR, big-box giant garnered a fiscal year 2015 revenue of $485.7 billion and employs about 2.2 million associates worldwide.

Frightening Frequencies: The Dangers Of 5G

As the old saying goes, give us an inch and inevitably we’ll want a mile. And certainly, this sentiment is true with technology.

Who doesn’t want faster, bigger (or smaller), more efficient? Take wireless mobile telecommunications. Our current broadband cellular network platform, 4G (or fourth generation), allows us to transmit data faster than 3G and everything that preceded. We can access information faster now than ever before in history. What more could we want? Oh, yes, transmission speeds powerful enough to accommodate the (rather horrifying) so-called Internet of Things. Which brings us to 5G.

Until now, mobile broadband networks have been designed to meet the needs of people. But 5G has been created with machines’ needs in mind, offering low-latency, high-efficiency data transfer. It achieves this by breaking data down into smaller packages, allowing for faster transmission times. Whereas 4G has a fifty-millisecond delay, 5G data transfer will offer a mere one-millisecond delay–we humans won’t notice the difference, but it will permit machines to achieve near-seamless communication. Which in itself may open a whole Pandora’s box of trouble for us – and our planet.

More bandwidth – more dangers of 5G

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New York City Police Department's Surveillance Helicopter

According to the NYPD, you won't even recognize that its there, but high above the heads of New York City's citizens, there is a $10 million special NYPD helicopter with an impressive arsenal of surveillance equipment inside it. The chopper, called "23", looks like plain helicopter on the outside, but on the inside it is chock-full of hi-tech gadgetry. The helicopter's surveillance cameras, including one for infrared photography, are mounted below the aircraft.

The chopper's arsenal of sophisticated surveillance and tracking equipment is powerful enough to stealthily read license plates - or even pedestrian's faces - from high above. The helicopter's surveillance system can beam live footage to police command centers or even to wireless hand-held devices. Without leaving Manhattan airspace, the chopper also was able to get a crystal-clear picture of jetliners waiting to take off from LaGuardia Airport and to survey Kennedy International Airport's jet fuel lines. The helicopter is just part of the department's efforts to adopt cutting-edge technology for its counterterrorism operations. The NYPD also plans to spend tens of millions of dollars strengthening security in the lower Manhattan business district with a network of closed-circuit television cameras and license-plate readers posted at bridges, tunnels and other entry points.

Enhanced Driver’s License Now Ready For Border

Ontario residents can now apply for an enhanced driver’s license to use instead of a passport when crossing into the United States, Transportation Minister Jim Bradley announced today, even though the new documents won’t be ready for weeks.

The U.S. will require passports or other secure identification documents for anyone crossing into the country by land or sea starting June 1, while a passport will still be required to enter the U.S. by air.

What is it?

A new high tech licence designed to prevent identity theft and possibly serve as an alternate to your passport when travelling to the U.S. But a Ministry spokesman admits that could be ‘years away.’

What’s special about it?

It has a second photo on the front, raised lettering of the license’s number, signature and date of birth, a fine-line background, a 2D barcode, micro and rainbow printing, and ultraviolet features among others.

When can you get it?

They’ll be issued the next time you renew your license, starting this month.

What’s the cost?

It won’t be more expensive, retaining the $75 charge you pay now.

What if you’ve just renewed your license?

You’re out of luck. The only way to get the new version is to move, change the information on your current card or wait until your next renewal five years from now.

CCTV Security Cameras

An explosion proof camera and various dome mounted cameras are pictured above. CCTV is an acronym that stands for Closed Circuit Television. It is defined as the use of one or more cameras used for surveillance purposes. It was initially developed to increase bank security and has since spread to every corner of the security industry. Home security systems, businesses, corporations, organizations, and schools are several examples of locations that implement CCTV Security Systems. They produce high quality, exceptionally sharp color images, and have motion sensors that track movement across an area. They can pick a person out of a crowd and lock on them, tracing their movements; they can run at night because of infrared technology. The possibilities are endless for CCTV, especially as the technology continues to develop.

Boston Bombing: Major Problems for Controlled Media

You’re a reporter for a TV news outlet.

You’ve become aware of a disturbing trend. Thousands of private citizens are now analyzing video and photographs of crime scenes and posting their findings.

They can’t be stopped. They’re looking at news footage, casual video, photos, and what they’re coming up with challenges the official story lines your network pushes.

Some of their analysis is good.

For example, video footage of the first bomb in Boston doesn’t appear to show any shrapnel damage to the fencing near the explosion, or to the blue canopy just above the street. You, the reporter, wonder about that.

The now-famous 78-year-old runner who fell down in the street, just after the first explosion? Security personnel wearing yellow jackets were standing closer to the bomb, but they didn’t wobble or duck or waver. You, the reporter, wonder about that, too.

You, the reporter, see a photo of a storefront which was presumably right next to the first bomb. The windows are blown out. But all the glass is lying in the street, which would indicate the force of the explosion was coming from inside the store. How is that possible, you ask yourself.

Then there are the quickly circulating photos of the man in the wheelchair. He’s missing large parts of both legs. People are pushing the chair. His legs aren't bleeding. And other posted photos show he already was wearing prosthetics?

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Globalization And A One World Economy

Corporate citizenship in the world economy. Transnational Corporations exert a great deal of power in the globalized world economy. Many corporations are richer and more powerful than the states that seek to regulate them. Through mergers and acquisitions corporations have been growing very rapidly and some of the largest TNCs now have annual profits exceeding the GDPs of many low and medium income countries.

Welcome To The "New World Order"

Revelation 13: 16 He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, 17 and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

U.K. To Begin Microchipping Prisoners

The British government is developing a plan to track current and former prisoners by means of microchips implanted under the skin, drawing intense criticism from probation officers and civil rights groups.

As a way to reduce prison crowding, many British prisoners are currently released under electronic monitoring, carried out by means of an ankle bracelet that transmits signals like those used by mobile phones. Now the Ministry of Justice is exploring the possibility of injecting prisoners in the back of the arm with a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip that contains information about their name, address and criminal record. Such chips, which contain a built-in antenna, could be scanned by special readers. The implantation of RFID chips in luggage, pets and livestock has become increasingly popular in recent years. In addition to monitoring incarcerated prisoners, the ministry hopes to use the chips on those who are on probation or other conditional release. By including a satellite uplink system in the chip, police would be able to use global positioning system (GPS) technology to track subjects' exact locations at all times. Click Here - to see a Rfid Chip image with details on individual parts.

The War Of Gog And Magog

(Nuclear War in the Middle East?)

With the threat that Israel or the U.S. could eventually opt for a military strike against Tehran's nuclear program or even actually strike Iran's nuclear facilities could be the start of a major regional war. Should the US or Israel intervene in Syria - the results could be the same.

Israel and even the entire world are now experiencing the most critical time in history. The president of Iran, Ahmadinejad, has stated again and again that his main goal is "to remove Israel from the map of the world" and for this he is preparing nuclear weapons. The "Palestinians", never existed as a nation inside Israel are fighting against Israel and since 1948 have been an instrument of the Arab-Muslim world. Islamic-terror organizations are surrounding Israel from every side and shooting missiles and rockets into Israel. Syria is armed with biological and chemical missiles aimed at Israel. All of the Arab countries have armed themselves with modern weapons to be used against Israel in the near future. The United States is putting pressure on Israel to divide the Land of Israel and to establish a 'Palestinian State'. Years after the re-establishment of the State of Israel and after several wars with Arab-Islamic nations that wanted to destroy Israel again and again, Israel is again facing pressure from every side with step-by-step preparations of the enemies of the people of Israel to destroy the State of Israel through an apocalyptic war with nuclear weapons that were never used in the past.

In bible prophecy, Ezekiel 38 & 39 informs us of a future war and invasion of Israel by a vast coalition of nations (Russia, Iran, Libya, Ethiopia, Egypt, Turkey and Moslem Republics) that surround it. This invasion could occur at any time because of the heightened tensions over Iran's nuclear ambitions and the crisis in Syria. In regards to Iran clearly US and European powers fear that Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon with UN sanctions aimed at pressuring Iran to halt uranium enrichment. Since Russia has developed close ties with Iran and Syria it makes sense that they would be invading along with the Islamic confederacy.

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Opt Out of a Body Scan? Then Brace Yourself

HAVING been taught by nuns in grade school and later going through military boot camp, I have always disliked uniformed authorities shouting at me. So I was unhappy last week when some security screeners at’Hare International Airport in Chicago started yelling.

“Opt out! We got an opt out!” one bellowed about me in a tone that people in my desert neighborhood in Tucson usually reserve for declaring, “Rattlesnake!”

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Biometric Technology

Before long, we may use fingerprints, iris scans, and voice recognition to log onto computers, buy groceries -- even when picking up kids from school. This could be you: At a convenience store, a scanner reads your fingerprints and deducts the price of a coffee and doughnut from your checking account. Once at the office, your employer uses software to monitor the rhythm of your typing or a Webcam to measure the proportions of your face before letting you onto the network. Your call to customer service won't go through until you're identified by the cadence of your voice.

Palm Reader
What: Fujitsu PalmSecure Measures: Vascular patterns and blood flow in the hand
Status: Widely available at ATMs and other locations in Japan. U.S. launch expected this year The PalmSecure bombards the user's hand with "near infrared" light to detect the pattern of blood vessels. Fujitsu is close-lipped about a U.S. debut expected later this year but says PalmSecure could be useful in health care and for granting access to buildings.

Let Your Fingers Do the Paying
What: Pay by Fingerprint device Measures: Fingerprints Status: available in certain grocery stores. Shoppers enrolled in the program can speed through checkout lines. This enables consumers to pay for goods and services with a swipe of their finger on a biometric sensor. It allowes secure access to checking, credit card, loyalty, healthcare, and other personal information, through the unique characteristics of an individual's biometric features, thereby creating a highly secure anti-identity theft platform.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:51:00 +0000
NSA Creating Spy System To Monitor Domestic Infrastructure

The National Security Agency has begun work on an "expansive" spy system that will monitor critical infrastructure inside the United States for cyber-attacks, in a move that detractors say could end up violating privacy rights and expanding the NSA's domestic spying abilities.

The Wall Street Journal cites unnamed sources as saying that the NSA has issued a $100-million contract to defense contractor Raytheon to build a system dubbed "Perfect Citizen," which will involve placing "sensors" at critical points in the computer networks of private and public organizations that run infrastructure, organizations such as nuclear power plants and electric grid operators.

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How America’s Police Became An Army: The 1033 Program

As many have noted, Ferguson, Missouri, looked like a war zone. And its police — kitted out with Marine - issue camouflage and military - grade body armor, toting short-barreled assault rifles, and rolling around in armored vehicles — are indistinguishable from soldiers.

America has been quietly arming its police for battle since the early 1990s.

Faced with a bloated military and what it perceived as a worsening drug crisis, the 101st Congress in 1990 enacted the National Defense Authorization Act.

Section 1208 of the NDAA allowed the Secretary of Defense to "transfer to Federal and State agencies personal property of the Department of Defense, including small arms and ammunition, that the Secretary determines is — (A) suitable for use by such agencies in counter-drug activities; and (B) excess to the needs of the Department of Defense." It was called the 1208 Program. In 1996, Congress replaced Section 1208 with Section 1033.

The idea was that if the U.S. wanted its police to act like drug warriors, it should equip them like warriors, which it has—to the tune of around $4.3 billion in equipment, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union. The St. Louis County Police Department’s annual budget is around $160 million. By providing law enforcement agencies with surplus military equipment free of charge, the NDAA encourages police to employ military weapons and military tactics.

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Full Body Scanners

(A TSA Agent working for Homeland Security views naked full-body images.)

What are full-body scanners? Remember the X-ray specs of science fiction comics that would let people see through walls and clothing? Full-body scanners are a bit like them. The scanners take advantage of the fact that at certain wavelengths,

TSA Scan Or Invasive Patdown?
electromagnetic waves can pass through clothes but not through the skin, metal or substances such as drugs and explosives. If your eyes were sensitive to these wavelengths like the scanners, every person you meet would appear naked, with pens, coins, belt buckles and the like magically festooned about their person.
You would also be able to see if they were carrying a knife, gun or explosives.

What are the health concerns surrounding them? There are two main types of full-body scanner. One uses X-rays while the other uses lower-energy millimetre wavelengths.

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The Coming False Prophet

A papal tapestry is unfurled and draped over the edge of the balcony as cardinals gather on the left and right sides of the balcony, looking out over the crowd in St Peter's Square.

The crowd cheers and starts chanting after hearing the announcement that Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost has been voted as the new pope. We're now all waiting for Prevost to appear on the balcony, with the crowd continuing to make noise and wave flags in anticipation.

The number of people in St Peter's Square rose to more than 40,000. The flow of people toward the square increased significantly after the white smoke.

In his first speech as Pope Leo XIV, the newly elected pontiff, Cardinal Robert Prevost, said "Peace be with you all". He also called for the Church to "build bridges" and paid tribute to his predecessor, Pope Francis. The speech was delivered from the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City.

A LAMB WITH TWO HORNS!

(Many believe that a pope will be the false prophet of Revelation 13: 11, and that this pope will unite the world's many faiths and then compel/force the masses to worship the antichrist. The time frame for this will be in the middle of the final seven year period.)

'And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH'. (Revelation 17:5) What will be the final form of Babylon the Great? We can be sure that the Whore:

(1) Will be personified as 'the False Prophet' (Revelation 16:13). Since Babylon the Great only rides the Beast, i.e., 'I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast [the Antichrist]' (17:3), she is not to be confused with the Beast himself.

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The Government Can Use GPS to Track Your Moves

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant.

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RFID Tag System

(Wal-Mart RFID tags to Track Clothing. A Wal-Mart employee uses a handheld scanner to read EPC labels on men's denim jeans.)

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags are embedded in a growing number of personal items and identity documents. Because the tags were designed to be powerful tracking devices and they typically incorporate little security, people wearing or carrying them are vulnerable to surreptitious surveillance and profiling.

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Iris Recognition

The iris offers a rich source of data for biometric measurement.

The patterns of the iris are unique and templates derived from the iris can yield identification performance which is better than DNA matching.

The iris is the only internal organ visible from the outside and is protected from environmental factors (such as dirt and abrasion) which can afflict other biometrics. Iris recognition offers advantages in accuracy, high speed of exhaustive search, non contact with sensors and passive collection methods.

In conclusion iris recognition is an automated method of biometric identification that uses mathematical pattern-recognition techniques on video images of one or both of the irises of an individual's eyes, whose complex patterns are unique, stable, and can be seen from some distance.

Biometrics

The FBI's Facial Recognition
Technology. Soon we all may
be in their biometric system.
Biometrics is the science and technology of measuring and analyzing biological data. In information technology, biometrics refers to technologies that measure and analyze human body characteristics, such as DNA, fingerprints, eye retinas and irises, voice patterns, facial patterns and hand measurements, for authentication purposes.

Though the field is still in its infancy, many people believe that biometrics will play a critical role in future computers, and especially in electronic commerce. Access levels will include the ability to use credit card information to make electronic purchases.

In the future biometrics will be used to identify and then control and monitor individuals or people in groups that are under surveillance. (Such as: prisoners, terrorists, and people that are a known threat or suspicious of being involved in an illegal or dishonest activity and are at risk to the government or police, etc.)

Echelon (Signals Intelligence)

Trillions of bytes of textual archive and thousands of online users, or gigabytes of live data stream per day that are filtered against tens of thousands of complex interest profiles.

Designed and coordinated by NSA, the ECHELON system is used to intercept ordinary e-mail, fax, telex, and telephone communications carried over the world’s telecommunications networks. Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals in virtually every country. It potentially affects every person communicating between (and sometimes within) countries anywhere in the world. The United States National Security Agency (NSA) uses Echelon to intercept and process international communications passing via communications satellites also. It is one part of a global surveillance systems that intercept messages from the Internet, from undersea cables, from radio transmissions, from secret equipment installed inside embassies, or use orbiting satellites to monitor signals anywhere on the earth's surface.

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The Knights Templar And The Illuminati

The Knights Templar
No one exploring the myriad myths and tales of secret societies can leave out the unbelievably popular Knights Templar. There are links between this medieval order of warrior monks and Muslims, Masons, and even heretics, so we need to get a grasp of their darker side.

Whether stars of the Disney film National Treasure or pawns of modern-day political and commercial propaganda, the Knights Templar have taken root as one of the world’s leading mystery groups. But what is the truth? Did they really have a great secret? Did they really hide treasure? Were they really guardians of the Holy Bloodline? Let’s take a look.

Supposedly a group of nine knights were taken from the ruling nobility in the region of France known as Champagne, collected themselves together in Jerusalem around 1118 A.D., and formed the now infamous Knights Templar.

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Mass. State Police Check Out Boston Dynamics' Spot The Robot Dog

Spot The Robot Dog Formally SpotMini Redesigned
Spot can carry up to four hardware modules on its back, giving Spot whatever skill the robot needs for a specific job.

Cops have long had dogs, and robots, to help them do their jobs. And now, they have a robot dog.

Massachusetts State Police is the first law enforcement agency in the country to use Boston Dynamics' dog-like robot, called Spot. While the use of robotic technology is not new for state police, the temporary acquisition of Spot — a customizable robot some have called “terrifying” — is raising questions from civil rights advocates about how much oversight there should be over police robotics programs.

The state’s bomb squad had Spot on loan from the Waltham-based Boston Dynamics for three months starting in August until November, according to records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and reviewed by WBUR.

Robot Dogs At Work
The documents do not reveal a lot of details on the robot dog’s exact use, but a state police spokesman said Spot, like the department’s other robots, was used as a “mobile remote observation device” to provide troopers with images of suspicious devices or potentially hazardous locations, like where an armed suspect might be hiding.

“Robot technology is a valuable tool for law enforcement because of its ability to provide situational awareness of potentially dangerous environments,” state police spokesman David Procopio wrote.

State police say Spot was used in two incidents, in addition to testing.

Boston Dynamics vice president for business development Michael Perry said the company wants Spot to have lots of different uses, in industries ranging from oil and gas companies, to construction, to entertainment. He envisions police sending Spot into areas that are too hazardous for a human — a chemical spill, or near a suspected bomb, or into a hostage situation.

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Surveillance Cameras With Computer Chips Or Smart Sensors That Predict And/Or Sense Criminal Activities, Alerts Police

With sophisticated cameras and smart sensor systems, law enforcement agencies and transportation departments across the United States are now able to proactively monitor and respond to crimes or accidents as they unfold; the sensors can also assist transportation departments in analyzing traffic patterns in real time; the system could allow officials to change one way streets, design real time traffic signals, and multiple speed limits to make traffic flow more smoothly.

The East Orange New Jersey police department was the first U.S. agency to install a Smart Imaging Sensor system as part of its broader network of security cameras around the city.

These smart sensors process images that the high-resolution cameras record in real time and can automatically detect and/or predict when a crime is occurring. When it senses something it will alert law enforcement officials instantly.

Government agencies and business around the world have already taken notice of predictive sensors.

Recently, an automated camera system called AIsight (pronounced eyesight), was installed in Boston after the 2013 marathon bombing, that monitors camera feeds in real time and alerts authorities if it spots unusual activity.

AIsight cameras use a statistical method called machine learning to learn what is normal for an area and then alerts on abnormal activity. That could be picking up anything from unusual loitering to activity occurring in restricted areas.

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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 08:50:00 +0000

The Tower Of Babel

(Gen. 11:1-9) Symbolizes the common effort of mankind to build a common political society. The Louise Weiss EU Parliamentary Building in Strassbourg that opened in December 2000

is said to have Pieter Brueghel's (Tower Of Babel) painting for its model. Also, on this promotional poster used by the EU there's a reproduction of The Tower of Babel with construction cranes above it and the caption 'Many tongues, one voice.' The myriad number of groups, governments, societies and interest groups who are working toward a New World Order are gradually placing all the necessary things in order to facilitate the revived dream of Babel. This would unite all nations and peoples in the worship of Lucifer. What's the logic behind the symbolism in this building? The EU says it is seeking to "build up the house of Europe" - a task yet to be completed. The building is complete and in use, but is designed to look unfinished, and even has ringed platforms to represent scaffolding. And here's the scary part. A reporter questioning "Why the Tower of Babel" as a design concept, was answered in an astounding way by an EU official. He said, "What they failed to complete 3000 years ago – we in Europe will finish now!"

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MIT Shows Off A Smart Tattoo That Can Turn Your Skin Into A Touchpad

With DuoSkin, wearables are no longer just an accessory. They become part of your skin.

The MIT Media Lab and Microsoft Research set out to create on-skin user interfaces using gold leaf, which is commonly found in craft stores, as a conductor. Piggybacking on the trend in body-art and metallic jewelry-like tattoos, the team decided to repurpose gold leaf because it is “robust to movements and skin deformations during motion…[and] both workable and aesthetic in appearance.” The smart tattoos, outlined in a paper that has been presented at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers, look like fashion statements but they include other materials and electrical components that make the tattoos interactive.

The tattoos can turn into an interface that can be used, for example, as a trackpad or a button to remotely control your phone. Alternatively, they can track and show you information about yourself. For example, by including thermochromic displays that change color in reaction to heat, the tattoos can show you your body temperature.

A third possible function is wireless communication. The tattoo could include an NFC (near field communications) tag, an electrical component that includes small microchips to store data that can be read by phones or other NFC devices nearby. In the near future, the technology could serve as a substitute for identification, subway cards, and even movie tickets, DuoSkin’s lead researcher Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao said in an interview.

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What Are Chemtrails And How Are They Harming Our Food And Water?

Chemtrails
Just when you thought Monsanto was under wraps, you find out they’re up to something even more horrific. What’s even worse is that it all started a long time ago!

In the late 1960s Monsanto supported the secret Muad’ Dib Geoengineering Lab to develop “chemtrail” technology; their crown jewel program to protect earth from global warming via weather control. Sounds so humanitarian, right? Wrong!

Most folks discover the reality of “chemtrails” by initially reading about it online and then going outside, looking up into the sky, and noticing the crisscrossing streaks of white clouds trailing behind jet aircraft, stretching from horizon to horizon, eventually turning the sky into a murky haze. Chemtrails are like science fiction turned reality.

This article will answer the question “what are chemtrails?” We'll share the effects of chemtrails on your environment, food, water and their connection to cancer. This information is meant to increase your awareness of the toxicity in our environment and encourage you to eliminate toxins that are within your control whenever and wherever you can.

What Are Chemtrails?

Chemtrails are geo-engineered aerosols that are loaded with toxic chemicals, including but not limited to: barium, strontium 90, aluminum, cadmium, zinc, viruses and “chaff.” Chaff looks like snow but it’s actually Mylar fibers (like in fiberglass) coated with aluminum, desiccated blood cells, plastic, and paper. Polymer chemist Dr. R. Michael Castle has studied atmospheric polymers for years, and he has identified microscopic polymers comprised of genetically-engineered fungal forms mutated with viruses, which are now part of the air we breathe.

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China Is Building A "Social Credit" System.

Everyone listen, stated the lady, "Dear passengers, people who travel without a ticket, or behave disorderly, or smoke in public areas, will be punished according to regulations and the behavior will be recorded in individual credit information system. To avoid a negative record of personal credit please follow the relevant regulations and help with the orders on the train and at the station."

This is particularly chilling to anyone familiar with George Orwell's dystopian classic, 1984.

Is China's social credit system really the dystopian sci-fi scenario that many fear?

China’s draconian censorship efforts appear a world apart from the freedom of speech protections tenuously preserved in American society. But as the two world powers evolve the similarities are becoming just as striking as the differences. While their social designs diverge, their intended results do not: both seek to shrink the Overton Window in favor of what the governing class considers a healthier, more orderly, more moral discourse.

In China, censorship isn’t just limited to critiques of the government. It also includes what the ruling party considers moral rot. Underage drinking, drug use, violence, and hyper-sexualized content get scrubbed from media and film. This top-down social engineering finds its shape in the country’s new social-credit system, which punishes undesirable behavior like canceling dinner reservations or jaywalking by restricting travel rights or access to (financial) credit.

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Predictive Programming

Neo’s passport in 'The Matrix'
expired on September 11, 2001
What is predictive programming? Is it an invasive form of Subliminal Behavior Modification? Alan Watt author of 'Cutting Through The Matrix' says that, "Hollywood is the magician's wand which has been used to cast a spell on the unsuspecting public. Things or ideas which would otherwise be seen as bizarre, vulgar, undesirable or impossible are inserted into films in the realm of fantasy. When the viewer watches these films, his/her mind is left open to suggestion and the conditioning process begins. These same movies which are designed to program the average person, can give the discerning viewer a better understanding of the workings and the plan of the world agenda."

It used to be just TV and cinema, but now 'the screen' implies a number of different media flavours and delivery formats: television, film, HD, DVD, Blue Ray, computer/console games, and also the internet and mobile media.

The control system works by keeping everyone focused on the lowest levels of the pyramid, the base levels of illusion/reality. Within this contrived paradigm, people are conditioned to believe in the synthetic culture received through their screen. Cars and football, home makeovers and cooking, gossip and reality television, etc. It all amounts to the same thing: diversion. The magician’s misdirection distracts attention while the Illuminists controls your thoughts.

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Rfid Technology

RFID Label MPI Label Company | Alien chip | 96-bit

RFID tag UPM RAFLATAC | ShortDipole (ETSI) 96-bit Gen2 UHF

RFID tag UPM RAFLATAC | Frog DualDipole 96-bit Gen2 UHF

RFID tag UPM RAFLATAC | MiniDipole 96-bit Gen2 UHF

Implantable RFID chips RFID, Inc | used for animal tracking
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders. An RFID tag is an object that can be attached to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification using radio waves. All RFID tags contain at least two parts. One is an integrated circuit for storing and processing information, modulating and demodulating a radio frequency (RF) signal and perhaps other specialized functions. The second is an antenna for receiving and transmitting the signal. The RFID tag can automatically be read from several meters away and does not have to be in the line of sight of the reader. The current thrust in RFID use in supply chain management for large enterprises. RFID increases the speed and accuracy with which inventory can be tracked and managed thereby saving money for the business.

Biometrics To Be Used On IDs.

Minnesota to Use Facial Recognition Technology on IDs -- State will add biometrics component to prevent fake driver's licenses

BY BILL SALISBURY

Pioneer Press via Knight Ridder
Minnesota soon will start using biometric face scans to prevent would-be crooks — and underage wannabe smokers and drinkers — from getting fake driver's licenses from the state.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty on Thursday announced plans to add biometric facial recognition technology to driver's licenses as part of a broader effort to protect consumers from identity theft and unauthorized use of personal data. That effort will include stiffer criminal penalties for hackers and others who abuse access to personal data on computers.

"Identity theft causes great trauma, inconvenience and damage to a lot of people and families," Pawlenty said at a Capitol news conference. He said the state must do more to crack down on identity thieves and strengthen safeguards for personal information.

Driver's licenses are one of the state's most important forms of identification, he said, and biometric technology will help law enforcement officers ensure that individuals are who they say they are.

The new technology would match an individual's driver's license photo with images in the state's database.

Here's how Pawlenty's office described it: "Facial recognition technology converts an image into a mathematical computer algorithm as a basis for a positive match. It uses the structure of a person's face — such as width between the eyes, forehead depth and nose length — to assign mathematical points of reference creating a unique data file."

The face scans will enable the state to detect people attempting to obtain licenses using the same photo with multiple names and birth dates, or the same name and birth date with multiple people's photos, said state Public Safety Commissioner Michael Campion. "The technology … will create a higher level of integrity for Minnesota's driver's licenses."

Pawlenty said 13 other states use the technology, and it has proved "highly accurate."

No new photos will be needed to develop the state's face-scan file. State workers will scan photos on current driver's licenses to create the new file.

The new technology will cost about $1 to $2 per driver's license. Pawlenty said an $800,000 federal grant will offset these costs and that he will ask the 2006 Legislature to pay the rest.

Although he believes he has the power to implement the new system on his own, he said he would ask the Legislature to approve it.

For Minnesota retailers, the new technology means customers will be far less likely to try to use fake identification cards to make purchases, especially of alcoholic beverages and tobacco products, said Steve Rush, board chairman of the Minnesota Retailers Association. Businesses will not have equipment to read the face scans, however; only the state will have that ability.

Parallels - The Roman Empire And America

Today, the United States has many parallels as an empire to that of the collapse of the ancient Roman Empire. There were many causes of the fall of Rome however, but the main problems which led to it are exactly the same as those we face currently, here in America as a nation.

The fall of the Roman Empire took a few centuries for the total dissolution of that government to take place. However, in America the same problems that brought down the Roman Empire are expedited to the point that we are looking at decades, rather than centuries before the collapse of the US government.

The following are examples of what brought Rome down as an empire, and what is going to destroy the American government in a very short time.

Antagonism between the Senate and the Emperor:

We experience this in the US today in the form of the constant bickering between the House and Senate in their disdain of the President over power, money, and control.

Decline in Morals:

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New Rfid Technology

RFID tags are miniscule microchips, which already have shrunk to half the size of a grain of sand. They listen for a radio query and respond by transmitting their unique ID code. Most RFID tags have no batteries: They use the power from the initial radio signal to transmit their response. You should become familiar with RFID technology because you'll be hearing much more about it soon. Retailers adore the concept. Wal-Mart and the U.K.-based grocery chain Tesco are starting to install "smart shelves" with networked RFID readers. In what will become the largest test of the technology, consumer goods giant Gillette recently said it would purchase 500 million RFID tags from Alien Technology of Morgan Hill, Calif. It becomes unnervingly easy to imagine a scenario where everything you buy that's more expensive than a Snickers will sport RFID tags, which typically include a 64-bit unique identifier yielding about 18 thousand trillion possible values. KSW-Microtec, a German company, has invented washable RFID tags designed to be sewn into clothing. And according to EE Times, the European central bank is considering embedding RFID tags into banknotes by 2005.

The VeriChip, made by Applied Digital Solutions, Inc., is an implantable RFID microchip for humans. It is about the size of a grain of rice. The chip has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and can be used to hold patient-approved health-care information.

Los Angeles To Install Body Scanners In The Subway

The Los Angeles' subway will become the first mass transit system in the U.S. to install body scanners that screen passengers for weapons and explosives, officials said recently.

The deployment of the portable scanners, which project waves to do full-body screenings of passengers walking through a station without slowing them down, will happen in the coming months, said Alex Wiggins, who runs the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority's law enforcement division.

The machines scan for metallic and non-metallic objects on a person's body, can detect suspicious items from 30 feet (9 meters) away and have the capability of scanning more than 2,000 passengers per hour.

"We're dealing with persistent threats to our transportation systems in our country," said Transportation Security Administration Administrator David Pekoske. "Our job is to ensure security in the transportation systems so that a terrorist incident does not happen on our watch."

Recently, Pekoske and other officials demonstrated the new machines, which are being purchased from Thruvision, which is headquartered in the United Kingdom.

"We're looking specifically for weapons that have the ability to cause a mass-casualty event," Wiggins said. "We're looking for explosive vests, we're looking for assault rifles. We're not necessarily looking for smaller weapons that don't have the ability to inflict mass casualties."

In addition to the Thruvision scanners, the agency is also planning to purchase other body scanners — which resemble white television cameras on tripods — that have the ability to move around and hone in on specific people and angles, Wiggins said.

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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 08:49:00 +0000
Electronic surveillance: it's everywhere and it's growing

"Eye-in-the-sky" surveillance dome camera
mounted on top of a tall steel pole.

Has the demand for and use of electronic surveillance increased? The rapid changes in telecommunications technology has been accompanied by a growth in the potential intrusiveness of electronic surveillance and a steady increase in government surveillance activity. Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior of people, objects or processes within systems for conformity to expected or desired norms. Although the word surveillance literally means "watching over" the term is often used for all forms of observation or monitoring, not just visual observation. Such as the art of watching over the activities of persons or groups from a position of higher authority. Surveillance may be covert (without a persons knowledge) or overt (perhaps with frequent reminders such as "we are watching over you"). Because they're continually making new discoveries to increase the effectiveness of biometrics, rfid chips, etc., the government may soon be tracking us all.

The Future Of Biometrics

Iris scanner

The next ten years will bring major advancements in the field of biometrics -- things like reading faces, fingerprints and irises to safeguard our own security and personal information.

The headlines stated "Europe Is United Again", May 2004

10 nations in eastern Europe and Mediterranean join bloc. Europe stood proudly reunited yesterday almost six decades after it was split in two by the Cold War, as 10 nations in eastern Europe and the Mediterranean took their places in the European Union. The once-communist states of the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia officially joined the EU family. Mediterranean islands Cyprus and Malta joined them as well, rounding out what is indisputably the world’s biggest single economic bloc, and a fledgling political force, with a total population of 455 million, the EU now surpasses the United States as the world's biggest economy.

Will a global religious system the Roman Catholic Church become the Mystery Babylon spoken of in the bible?

In Revelation 17:1-6 The angel said to John come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.

Face, Eye, Retina, Fingerprint, And Hand Scanning Devices

Face Recognition Technology
Here users are provided the opportunity to identify or verify themselves either by biometric identification, ID card or PIN/password.

Hand Scanning Device
These units use state of the art 3D imaging technology providing for a secure biometric recognition authentication.

All of the operations of these biometric devices can be accessed from the menu on the touchscreen or keypad.

These devices feature a high definition infrared (IR) camera that enables user identification even in dimly lit environments.

When using a biometric face reader the person looks into the camera, it captures the relative position, size, and shape of the user’s eyes, nose, cheekbones, and jaw which is then used to subsequently verify or identify the user.

These biometric face readers offer lightning quick detection.

That's ideal for areas where a large flux of people have to pass.

They're also capable of recognizing the same face with up to 15 different facial expressions.

So no matter how you look or feel the reader will know that it's you!

In biometric applications, physiological characteristics are extensively used for personal identification. Some of these characteristics have also served forensics and law enforcement. Facial features, friction ridges on fingertips, ear geometry, toe print, teeth pattern, etc. have been historically used in court of law to prove an individual’s presence at crime scenes. Physiological characteristics are unique to an individual and have served as a proven way for positively identification. For example, fingerprints have been used extensively for personal identification in civil as well as law enforcement applications. Technological advancement made it possible to identify and map other physiological and behavioral features that could be leveraged to establish an individual’s identity.

Both retina and facial recognition are categorized as physiological characteristic. Retina recognition is more popular in high security applications where reliability aspect is crucial, while face biometrics is used for mass surveillance as well as personal identification. Many mobile banking and finance application use face biometrics, popularly known as ‘selfie banking’, to identify and authenticate its customers. Though application of retina biometrics has been shrinking and gradually getting outnumbered by iris recognition in recent years, it is still one of the most reliable biometrics. Retina scan requires a very close encounter with the scanning device by using a beam of light deep inside the eye which is considered to be invasive, while iris pattern can be captured with near infrared illumination from a distance which is comparatively safer for human eye. Despite their differences, retina and face biometrics share common objectives: identifying and authenticating people.

A Global Currency

The Phoenix a hypothetical currency rises from the ashes of the dollar.

In 1988, The Economist ran an article titled, Get Ready for the Phoenix, in which they wrote.

A New Global Digital System Will
Replace All Of Today's Currencies
THIRTY years from now, Americans, Japanese, Europeans, and people in many other rich countries, and some relatively poor ones will probably be paying for their shopping with the same currency. Prices will be quoted not in dollars, yen or D-marks but in, let's say, the phoenix.
At the beginning of 1988 this appears an outlandish prediction. Proposals for eventual monetary union proliferated five and ten years ago, but they hardly envisaged the setbacks of 1987.

The phoenix will be favoured by companies and shoppers because it will be more convenient than today's national currencies, which by then will seem a quaint cause of much disruption to economic life in the last twentieth century.

Read more »

British Military Attacks Drones With Huge Laser - Costs $13 Per Shot

New DragonFire laser defense system has just been tested and the laser shoots down high-speed drones and can even hit a coin.

It can shoot down drones moving at 400 mph with incredible accuracy.

With a contract signed to provide the Royal Navy with the weapon for $415 million (£316 million), it'll be on board a UK destroyer in 2027, with a rapidly accelerated deployment timeframe, five years ahead of the originally anticipated date.

The UK government just announced that the contract with MBDA will ensure the laser-directed energy weapon (LDEW) system is on board a Royal Navy Type 45 destroyer very soon.

The recent test runs of DragonFire at the UK Ministry of Defence's (MoD) Hebrides range witnessed the laser taking out drones flying at up to 650km/h (just over 400 mph). The MoD tells us that this LDEW can hit a coin smaller than a US Quarter from a kilometer away, which is a mind-boggling feat.

The UK DragonFire programme brings together the best of UK industry. It leverages MBDA's decades of weapon system manufacturing expertise, Leonardo's position as a world-leading authority in laser technology, electro-optics, and advanced targeting, and QinetiQ's experience as the only UK company to successfully develop and safely operate high-energy laser sources in the UK and coherent beam-combining technology.

Read more »

Body Check

(Dynamic structured light acquisition techniques use a set of lines projected onto an object of interest to generate a 3D surface. Fingerprints or facial scans can be acquired using this method without the need for contact, making acquisition possible from a distance)

In recent years a number of countries have initiated biometric schemes aimed at protecting their borders. Although they are typically launched amid claims that they will accelerate the immigration process, this isn't always their central purpose, and frequently the new systems culminate in long queues.

Back in 2002 Australia unveiled its plans for SmartGate, a system that uses biometric facial recognition technology linked to the passenger's e-passport.

Recent travellers in the US may have been taken by surprise by a new biometric security system in place at key airports, which requires ten fingerprints for identification. Clear Cards, which carry biometric information, have been used by Americans since 2005.

CLEAR is a private program that uses biometrics — your identity is verified through a scan of your iris or fingerprints, depending on which image is most distinctive. Clear’s biometric identity verifier is now in 24 airports (34 soon) and eight sports stadiums.

Clear ID Pass document is available to US citizens and permanent residents. In addition, to the documents required to apply for the ID, applicants were required to submit digital images of their fingerprints and iris scans, as well as a digital photo before they are issued the document. Clear then "creates and stores a template, or mathematical representation, of the fingerprints and iris images, to create a unique biometric ID of the Member."

All of the data submitted by the applicant is sent to TSA, which creates an applicant's "security threat assessment" based upon a background check that's included its controversial "no-fly lists." After the verification process, each approved applicant is issued a “card” that allows them to access designated airport security fast lanes for processing through security at airports nationwide. The card also gives access to discount parking and speedy entry into major sports venues.

Dubai has established e-gates where registered passengers swipe an ID card and pass through a fingerprint scan, and the Netherlands has introduced Privium, a paid-for iris scanning service that offers a range of benefits, including lounge access and fast-track check-in.

e-Borders

Now e-Borders (electronic borders), a programme run by the UK Home Office's UK Border Agency at a likely total cost of £1.2bn, aims to tighten security at the country's borders. e-Borders is a joint programme run in partnership with the police and intelligence agencies. It requires commercial carriers and owners, or operators, of all vessels to submit detailed passenger, service and crew data in advance of their departure to and from the UK.

Read more »

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 19:33:00 +0000
The Plan

Whether you believe in a spiritual war or not, you still need Salvation. It is all that will save you when this life on earth is finished.

Do you know beyond the shadow of a doubt where you would go if you died tonight? If not, please consider the following, we pray it’s a blessing to you. The Bible says there is only one way to Heaven

Jesus said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me.” (John 14:6)

Good works cannot save you.

“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9)

Trust Jesus Christ today! Here’s what you must do:

1. Admit you are a sinner.

“For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;” (Romans 3:23)

“Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:” (Romans 5:12)

“If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” (1 John 1:10)

2. Be willing to turn from sin (repent).

Jesus said: “I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” (Luke 13:5)

“And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent:” (Acts 17:30)

3. Believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins, was buried, and rose from the dead.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

“But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners. Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)

“That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” (Romans 10:9)

4. Upon believing the gospel, God declares you to be righteous and saves you by his grace.

“For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” (Romans 10:10)

“For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” (Romans 10:13)

Bugs Were Supposed to be the Future of Food. Now, the Industry is Collapsing.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:06:00 +0000

How the farmed-insect frenzy lost its buzz.
“We have to get used to the idea of eating insects.”
This proclamation came from, of all people, an insect researcher. Dutch entomologist Marcel Dicke pitched eating bugs in his 2010 TED talk as critical to sustainably feeding a growing human population, because insects have a much smaller carbon footprint than beef, pork, and chicken.
To make his point, he even featured photographs of what might be a common meal in this bold new future: a stir-fry with mealworm larvae, mushrooms, and snap peas, finished with a chocolate dessert topped with a large fried cricket.
Three years later, the United Nations published a comprehensive report that echoed many of Dicke’s ideas and argued that insects could be a more eco-friendly food source not just for humans, but also for livestock. The report received widespread media coverage and helped to trigger a wave of investment from venture capital firms and governments alike into insect farming startups across Europe, the US, Canada, and beyond, totaling some $2 billion.
There’s a ring of truth, it turns out, to the conspiracy theory that the globalist elites want us to eat bugs.
This money was pouring into insect agriculture at a time when investors and policymakers were hungry for new models to fix the conventional meat industry’s massive carbon footprint. And what’s more disruptive and novel than farming and eating bugs?
You personally might recoil at the thought of eating fried crickets or roasted mealworms, but many cultures around the world consume insects, either caught from the wild or farmed on a small scale. And while grubs don’t feature prominently in current paleo cookbooks, our paleolithic ancestors most certainly ate plenty of bugs.
But the past decade has shown that even if you build an insect farm, the global market may not come. Of the 20 or so largest insect farming startups, almost a quarter have gone belly up in recent years, including the very largest, Ÿnsect, which ceased operations in December.
All told, shuttered insect farming startups account for almost half of all investment into the industry. “Things have gone from bad to worse for the big insect factory business model,” one insect farming CEO said late last year in a YouTube video.
And Vox can exclusively report that plans to build a large insect farm in Nebraska—a joint project between Tyson Foods, America’s largest meat company, and Protix, now the world’s second largest insect farming company—are indefinitely on hold.
Beyond the financial woes of the insect farming industry, some philosophers worry about the ethical implications of potentially farming tens of trillions of bugs for food, as emerging research suggests insects may well have some form of consciousness and hold the capacity to feel pain and suffer.
“Evidence is building that there’s a form of sentience there in insects,” Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics who leads the Foundations of Animal Sentience project at the university, told me last year.
But it looks like they may not have too much to worry about. In spite of the initial hype surrounding the bug farming boom, the insect agriculture industry has learned just how difficult it is to compete with the incumbent, larger animal-based meat industry—and that, perhaps, it never really made sense to try doing so with bugs.
Insect farming is similar to other types of animal farming. The insects reproduce, and the offspring are raised in large numbers in factory-style buildings. Many of the same welfare concerns for farmed chickens and pigs are present on insect farms, like disease, cannibalism, and painful slaughter. In the case of insects, the creatures are killed by a variety of means. They might be frozen, baked, roasted, shredded, grond, microwaved, boiled, or suffocated.
In 2020, insect companies farmed an estimated 1 trillion bugs, and the most commonly farmed species today are black soldier fly larvae, mealworms, and crickets.
While some people might tell researchers they’re open to adding bugs to their diet, these smallest of animals remain a novelty food in the US and Europe, as opposed to a commodity capable of displacing wings or burgers.
“The human food market, basically, has not materialized,” Dustin Crummett, a philosopher and executive director of The Insect Institute—a nonprofit that researches the environmental and animal welfare implications of large-scale insect agriculture—told me. “Only a tiny fraction of farmed insects are used for human food.”
But insect farming startups haven’t only sought to put insects on our plates or grind them into protein bars; many want to sell insect meal (ground up insects) as feed for other farmed animals. It’s a sustainable alternative, they argue, to the soy fed to factory-farmed chickens and cattle, much of which is grown on deforested land. Insect meal could also replace fishmeal (largely composed of small, wild-caught species, like anchovies and sardines), which is fed to farmed fish and heavily contributes to overfishing.
This approach of farming insects for livestock feed, however, isn’t materializing either, and much of it comes down to cost.
According to a 2024 analysis published in the journal Food and Humanity and co-authored by Crummett, the cost of insect meal is about 10 times that of soybean meal and 3.5 times that of fishmeal, a major cost gap that is unlikely to narrow anytime soon.
Insect meal is so expensive, in part, because feeding insects is expensive. Farmed insects are typically fed agricultural “co-products”—like wheat bran and corn gluten—most of which is already fed to livestock, and so insect farmers have wound up in competition with big meat companies to buy up these ingredients. This simple fact weakens the narrative often driven by insect farming startups that they are putting food scraps that otherwise would’ve been thrown away to good use.
“Organic waste from the industry becomes feed for insects,” Protix’s website reads. “This circular food production mirrors nature’s circle of life.” But this is misleading; Protix feeds its insects ingredients like oat husk and starch, which are typically used in traditional livestock feed anyway. “It doesn’t really make sense to buy chicken feed to feed insects to feed to chicken,” as one insect farming startup founder told AgriTech Insights a couple of years ago.
And it’s not guaranteed that insect meal will be more sustainable than soy or fishmeal. According to a UK government report, the environmental impact of insect farming depends on a number of factors, including what insects are fed and whether startups power their farms with fossil fuels or renewable energy.
Energy usage explains a lot of the industry’s cost challenge. Farmed insects require warm temperatures, and in Europe, where so many of the startups are based, energy prices have sharply risen in recent years.
To lower costs and develop new revenue streams, some insect farming startups have pivoted to become “waste management” companies, too. Rotting food waste in landfills is a huge source of global greenhouse gas emissions, and insect farming companies can earn money by taking it off other companies’ hands and letting bugs eat it.
But here, too, the industry has run into obstacles, including strict EU regulations around what can be fed to insects and an inconsistent product. When insects are fed food waste, their final nutritional profile can vary widely depending on what they’re fed, but livestock feed companies need nutritional consistency.
And it turns out that even the largest and most powerful companies in the space can run into hard, economic realities when trying to rear bugs on waste en masse.
In late 2023, America’s biggest meat company, Tyson Foods, announced it had invested an undisclosed sum of money in Protix, a large Dutch insect farming startup. That Tyson was putting its weight behind it seemed like much-needed proof that insects could be the future of food, as so many startups, investors, and researchers had claimed.
The two companies planned to build a massive insect farm together near Tyson’s cattle slaughterhouse in Dakota City, Nebraska. At the insect farm, Protix would raise and kill around 70,000 tons of larvae annually—what I estimate to be approximately 300 billion individual insects. The bugs would feed on cattle paunch, partially digested plant matter removed from the stomachs of cattle slaughtered at Tyson’s plant. After a few weeks of feeding on the animal waste, the larvae would be slaughtered and ground up into insect meal, destined to become food for pets and livestock.
It was a way for Tyson to “derive value” from its waste, as it told CNN.
Now, Vox can exclusively report that Tyson Foods has withdrawn its air permit application to build the plant, and the plant itself is “on hold indefinitely.” That’s according to email exchanges last December between Tyson Foods and the Nebraska Department of Water, Energy, and Environment, which were obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit Society for the Protection of Insects.
Tyson and Protix did not respond to questions for this story.
The companies’ stalled plans aren’t unique in the insect farming space.
In early 2024, Innovafeed—currently the largest insect farming startup—opened a pilot plant in Decatur, Illinois, in partnership with ADM, the massive food and livestock feed manufacturing company. The US Department of Agriculture awarded Innovafeed a $11.7 million grant to turn insect waste into fertilizer at the plant, but a year and a half after it opened, it suspended operations, citing funding challenges.
Through a public records request, Society for the Protection of Insects obtained over 600 pages of documents pertaining to the grant, though about half of it is redacted, including much of the environmental review and Innovafeed’s commercial records. Last week, the organization sued the USDA over the heavy redactions, arguing it’s in the public’s interest to fully disclose the details of the deal.
The USDA declined to comment on pending litigation, and Innovafeed did not respond to questions for this story.
The biggest blow to the industry yet came late last year when the largest startup of them all—France-based Ÿnsect, which had raised over $600 million, representing nearly a full third of the sector’s funding—ran out of money. And a quarter of that backing had come from the French government. A recent whistleblower investigation alleged severe mismanagement at Ÿnsect’s production facility that led to filthy conditions and health problems for workers. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.
As insect farming startups struggle to stay afloat, their main trade group—the International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed (IPIFF)—is going so far as to call on the European Union to mandate publicly funded food services, like school cafeterias, to buy insect meat and publicly owned farms to buy insect meal to feed to their animals. IPIFF didn’t respond to an interview request for this story, nor did the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture.
As for the outlook of the insect farming sector, more startups will probably go under in the years ahead, and for the survivors to continue on, they may need to leave Europe and North America for warmer climates and lower operating costs.
But the rise, fall, and resettling of the industry isn’t uncommon in the agricultural technology field, Crummett says. Vertical farming, for example, seemed like a great idea on paper, but it’s been an economic failure.

Also:

Bug Out: the Insect-farming Industry Is Collapsing, for Reasons That Aren’t Hard To Guess
Perhaps the greatest revelation of the Department of Government Efficiency, apart from the sheer, staggering scale of the pork, was just how much of it was being funnelled through USAID—and, of course, where it was going and to whom.
All of a sudden, we discovered that literally everything awful in the world—from drag-queen storytime in Vanu’atu and sex-changes for dwarfs in Morocco, to research into rare aardvark viruses and cat-torture in China—all of it was being paid for with US taxpayer money via USAID.
Fancy that!?
So why not insect-farming too?
It certainly fits the bill. It’s evil and disgusting and runs counter to all our deepest, most fundamental instincts; it serves no real purpose except to degrade, humiliate and elicit sniggers—if not uproarious laughter—from those who came up with the idea and would never, under any circumstances, do it themselves.
In short, it’s perfect.
Well, I did a little digging and, to my surprise, it doesn’t look like the US taxpayer was propping up the global insect-farming industry, not really. USAID made a “request for information” in 2022, meaning it was looking for input on how it could invest in the industry, but other than that it was just a few small-scale projects in places like Uganda, Madagascar and Indonesia to help farmers feed their livestock with black soldier flies or dispose of waste by feeding it to worms—stuff like that.
So, it’s just a coincidence that insect-farming is on its last… legs, ahem, after Kekius Maximus took his gold-plated chainsaw to the United States Agency for International Development.
Anyway, none of this changes the fact that insect-farmers are, indeed, in very deep trouble.
A long article on Mother Jones examines the industry’s woes in detail, from its early days with so much promise, when billions of dollars poured into startups from venture-capital firms and governments; to today’s dismal prospects. In recent years, almost a quarter of the 20 largest insect-farming startups have now failed, including the biggest, Ynsect, which came tumbling down last December.
“Things have gone from bad to worse for the big insect factory business model,” one unhappy CEO said in a YouTube video.
Plans for further expansion, including the building of a massive insect farm in Nebraska by Tyson Foods, have been placed on indefinite hold.
As if to add insult to injury, moral philosophers are now proposing that, far from being ethical, bug-farming on an industrial scale is, like traditional farming, deeply immoral. Insects, apparently, have some form of consciousness, feel pain and may even have opinions about the final season of Stranger Things.
I pondered the question of insect sentience this morning while I sat on the toilet and watched a woodlouse meander across the bathroom floor. Frankly, I’m not convinced. But if moral philosophers—a useless lot, for the most part—can make life harder for insect-farmers, then I’m happy to let them do it.
End cruelty to mealworms! Worker ants of the world, unite—you have nothing to lose but your chains!
Energy-price increases have played a big role in the industry’s misery, driving up the cost of heating the enormous warehouses where the insects are farmed. Costs are especially high in Europe, where more sensible energy policies could have been devised by a four-year-old child with water on the brain.
It also turns out feeding insects is expensive—maybe even more expensive than feeding some larger animals, like fish. We were told the opposite.
But, of course, the biggest problem is that nobody wants to eat insects. Obviously. It doesn’t matter how many times we’re told “cockroach milk” is the next superfood, or that we have to eat crickets instead of chicken to save the planet from global boiling, people just don’t want to do it.
In large part, the problems of the insect-farmers are the problems of the so-called “alternative protein” industry more broadly.
Nobody wants to eat “plant-based meat” either, or “plant-based eggs,” or “lab-grown meat” or any other eldritch abomination spawned in a bioreactor and dressed up as a cruel mockery of Mother Nature’s perfection.
During the pandemic, the makers of these products started to change tack as it became clear sales were flagging and projections laughably optimistic. They turned from claims about taste and health benefits—which nobody really believed—to manipulation and shame-based marketing. The most notable example was the barf-inducing “Help Dad” campaign from “oat-milk” brand Oatly. Tragically unhip fathers were confronted by their broccoli-haired kids and put through a plant-based struggle-session at the fridge door. Dad’s crime? Reaching for a cold glass of cow’s milk instead of Oatly.
Unsurprisingly, despite market research that suggests shame is the best way to market oat milk and insects, consumers aren’t buying it. So long as there are free-market mechanisms driving what ends up on store shelves, consumers will keep on buying the real thing instead.
Which is why pressure groups are now trying to get government to step in and force consumers to buy insects. The International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed is calling on the European Union to mandate that taxpayer-funded food services, including school cafeterias, sell insect “meat” and that publicly owned farms feed their animals insectmeal—ground-up insects. Other groups are trying to do the same thing in the US.

What Is Armageddon?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:29:00 +0000

AI Overview
In military terms, Armageddon refers to a final, catastrophic, and decisive battle, often synonymous with nuclear war or a global conflict that ends civilization.
It originates from biblical prophecy as the ultimate showdown between good and evil, used now to describe an apocalyptic scenario or a war of absolute annihilation.
Key Military Contexts:
Final Battle Concept: It refers to a, potentially literal or symbolic, last battle where global powers gather for a terminal conflict.
Apocalyptic Scenario: It is used as a colloquialism for a global nuclear apocalypse that threatens the survival of humanity. Symbolic Location: It stems from "Har Megiddo" (Mount Megiddo) in Israel, known as the site for this apocalyptic showdown.
Geopolitical Rhetoric: In recent contexts, it has been used to describe, and criticize, framing modern Middle Eastern conflicts as "religious wars" aimed at fulfilling prophecy, say Al Jazeera news.
The term is rarely used in official military doctrine to describe operational plans, but rather as a dramatic description of potential nuclear warfare.

Also:

War of Words – ‘ARMAGEDDON’
‘Armageddon’ came to English, via Greek, from Hebrew har megiddo, meaning ‘mountain of Megiddo.’ According to the Book of Revelation 16:16, it is the place where, at world’s end, on Judgement Day, Heaven’s forces will defeat the armies of evil in a final battle.
The word can be found in an 1811 letter of the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley: ‘several others of the Armageddon-Heroes maintain their posts.’ It has often been used as an allusion to any last, tremendous, struggle, as in Rudyard Kipling’s 1896 A Song of the English: ‘In the day of Armageddon, at the last great fight of all.’ On occasion, it has been employed to describe nuclear war.
In ancient times, Megiddo, located in the Jezreel Valley, was a strategically important city that sat astride the primary route leading into southern Syria. It was the scene of the Battle of Megiddo, one of the most famous of the whole of the Bronze Age.
In 1485 BC, the warrior pharaoh Tuthmosis III moved against it. He was opposed by an alliance of Canaanite rulers.
There were three routes to the Plain of Esdraelon, upon which stood Megiddo. His officers counselled Tuthmosis to avoid the third, the narrow Aruna road, as it would make the Egyptian army vulnerable on the march, and the other two were easier. Yet the Aruna offered a straight passage to Esdraelon, and would allow his army to appear less than a mile from Megiddo.
Tuthmosis also believed that the Aruna’s obvious difficulty would work to convince the enemy to guard the other two roads, and leave it uncovered.
Thus the pharaoh chose the Aruna road, and his move indeed surprised the hostile coalition. The Egyptians deployed without trouble onto Esdraelon, and the next day crushed the enemy in battle.

Also:

Most people believe Armageddon is about the end of the world. But what does the Bible actually reveal?
On the hills outside the city of Nazareth in Galilee of Israel, you can stand and look out over the flat plain of the Jezreel Valley. To the west, at the end of the valley you can make out a hill, the site of a place called Megiddo.
Nazareth is where Jesus was raised by His parents, Joseph and Mary. It is not hard to imagine Jesus as a youth spending time in these hills overlooking the valley. Jesus, who was God in the flesh - knew the history of the land before Him, both past and future. He knew one day, on that spot, armies would gather to fight Him at His glorious second coming.
Jesus grew up near a place called Armageddon. Armageddon carries a powerful message for the world - a message that comes straight from Jesus Christ.
Armageddon! What do you think when you hear that word? Most of us probably think of the end of the world - or a movie.
But what most people believe is not accurate. Armageddon is actually just an old city. It's a real-life place on the map and you can travel there today. It's a place no longer inhabited and it's surrounded by a long and wide valley.
In future prophecy, Revelation reveals that armies will gather in this valley to fight Jesus Christ when He returns in glory and power.
There's a powerful message for each of us in the prophecy of Armageddon. If you heed that message, it can change your life and prepare you for Christ's return.
For every person you ask about Armageddon, you'll get a different answer. But what's the truth? What do the Scriptures say? Let's look in the book of Revelation.
In chapter 16, we see seven devastating plagues that represent God's final judgment on the world - a world that has rejected Him. They are symbolized by bowls being poured out upon the earth.
The fifth of these bowls brings darkness on the throne of the evil ruler of the final superpower of mankind, which is depicted as a beast. The impenetrable darkness will be so frightening that people will be gnawing their tongues out of despair. In their anger and their pain they are going to curse God. And instead of turning to Him for help, they will refuse to humble themselves or to repent. Tension in the world will escalate (Revelation 16:11). Satan, of course, is pulling out all strings behind that evil leader called the Beast, and in his rage against God, he prepares to maneuver the world and its armies into a box canyon. There will be no way out.
Notice what it says in verse 12. "Then the sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up, so that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared." In other words, great armies from the east will be on the move toward Israel. It continues, "And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs coming out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet." Who is the dragon, the Beast and this false prophet? The dragon is Satan. The Beast is the leader of the final, evil superpower of mankind. And the false prophet is an evil religious leader who will deceive the whole world with his false religion. The Scripture continues: "For they are spirits of demons performing signs, which go out to the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty" (Revelation 16:12-14).
What we're reading is an incredible peek into the invisible spirit world. With hints like this throughout the Scriptures, we know that there is another dimension that we really can't see, feel, touch or taste. But it is very real. It's inhabited with good spirits - angels, servants of God - and evil spirits, Satan and his demons. In this verse, it gives us a metaphorical vision of what is going on in the spiritual dimension. It shows the dragon - Satan - spewing from his mouth evil spirits - represented here by frogs. What happens in the spirit realm has always had a connection with what happens in our own physical realm. What we're reading here are evil spirits causing chaos in the spirit realm. These evil spirits directly influence events in our physical world.
In other words, Satan's rage behind the scenes will be what causes the armies of the world to gather in the land of Israel. Armageddon is not the name of the battle that will be fought. It is the place where they will gather for what is possibly the largest, and certainly the most conclusive, battle in all world history - The Battle of the Great Day of God Almighty. Of all the great battles in history - battles such as Gettysburg, Thermopolye, or Normandy - this battle is more significant than all the others combined. It's been named two thousand years in advance.
Now take note of something remarkable in the Scripture in verse 15. It says, "Behold, I come like a thief! Blessed is he who stays awake and keeps his clothes with him, so that he may not go naked and be shamefully exposed" (Revelation 16:15). Right in the middle of this description of end-time armies, spiritual deception and the wrath of Satan is this little gem of a statement.
Then it continues right on after this as it did before with descriptions of more dramatic signs and events. It would be easy to just gloss over it, but that would be a critical mistake. We're going to come back to this verse later and explain it a bit more.
Let's go on to verse 16 and see what it says, "And they gathered them together to the place called in Hebrew, Armageddon" (Revelation16:16). The word, "Armageddon" is just the combination of two Hebrew words: the word, "har" and the word, "megiddo." Of all the places, why then is this so significant? Why do the armies gather there? Well a brief look at the history of the area can help us answer that question.
On a map of the State of Israel, you can see the site of Megiddo. For thousands of years, it was a city where people lived. Every time it was destroyed in war, they'd fill in the dirt and they'd build on top. Today it is a hill popping up out of the flat plain called, Jezreel. Archaeologists have excavated the site for several decades. Their work has exposed ancient secrets long hidden beneath its soil.
Megiddo has seen more battles than any other place on earth. Why? Because whoever controlled Megiddo controlled a narrow strategic stretch of road called the Via Maris, which was a major international highway in the ancient world. This road stretched from Egypt all the way to Babylon, which is today, more or less, the modern nation of Iraq. In ancient times, this was the link - this Via Maris - between the major empires and the trade routes of the day. In the ancient world, any nation who wanted control of this region had to control Megiddo.
Over the years, many battles took place at Megiddo. In 1479 B.C., the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III launched a campaign near Megiddo to assert dominion over territories in and north of Canaan.
In the Bible, King Solomon stationed troops, and chariots and horses in Megiddo, using the city as a northern fortress (1 Kings 9:15). Today there are massive gates still standing at the entrance to the ruins in Megiddo, and they date from this period and they are evidence of the city's strategic regional location. Later, during the reign of Judah's King Josiah, pharaoh Necho from Egypt came to Megiddo to fight against Assyria. Even though God told Josiah not to get involved in this battle, he did and he was killed (2 Kings 23:29).
And in modern times both Napoleon (1799) and the British General Allenby (1918) defeated Turkish forces at Megiddo. The area has never lost its significance as a battleground for control over this crucial crossroad of empires.
So we see that Megiddo is the place where armies have gathered in the past and it is where armies will gather in the future before the Battle of the Great Day of God Almighty. Does the Bible show us then where the actual battle will ultimately be fought? It does, and you will see where in a minute.
Conflict in the Middle East dominates the news today. Why does this part of the world matter to you? The answer lies in Bible prophecy.
We have seen that armies from all over the world will gather at Armageddon in the "time of the end" to fight Christ at His coming. Armageddon is a place. The battle is the event. And, there is an important spiritual lesson that connects events that took place in ancient Megiddo to what is happening today.
Let's look at a couple of scriptures to set the stage.
Let's look at Zechariah chapter 14, where it tells us: "Behold, the day of the Lord is coming, and your spoil will be divided in your midst. For I will gather all the nations to battle against Jerusalem... Then the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations, as He fights in the day of battle" (Zechariah 14:1-3).
The prophet Joel adds some detail to this. It says: "I will also gather all nations, and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat; and I will enter into judgment with them there on account of My people, My heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations; they have also divided up My land" (Joel 3:2).
Jerusalem is where the battle of the great day of God Almighty is fought. Specifically, the focal point of battle will be in the steep valley that is today called, Kidron located between the Old City of Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives. Christ will descend with a spirit army and tread the winepress of His wrath. Revelation 19 says this: "And the winepress was trodden without the city, and [the] blood came out of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs" (Revelation 14:20). As human armies fight God the carnage will be so great that the blood will run several feet deep.
It will be a terrible battle - one that will end in the peace of the Kingdom of God.
Megiddo and the Jezreel Valley provide an ideal staging point for this battle. We can imagine forces flowing in through the port of Haifa, a few miles to the northwest. Transport planes, and helicopters, troop carriers and tanks will ferry men and materiel into the region. Jet fighters and missiles will no doubt be engaged in a battle that suddenly turns its attention to a force coming from an unexpected location - the heavens above Jerusalem. In their folly and deception, they will fight Christ, never recognizing Him as the Messiah.
Today, this is difficult, very difficult to imagine. We read these scriptures and we ask, "How could political leaders be deceived to fight Jesus Christ, the Son of God?"
The answer may lie in one verse we skipped over in Revelation 16. Let's go back and read it. Notice that verse 15 is a thought injected by Jesus Christ, who is the author of the book of Revelation. It says this: "Behold, I am coming as a thief. Blessed is he who watches, and keeps his garments, lest he walk naked and they see his shame" (Revelation 16:15). Here is Christ saying to those with ears to hear - there is a way to avoid being part of this great end-time deception.
What is Christ saying to us? What is in this message that we must understand? What is the spiritual lesson that Armageddon represents? It's this: That unless you obey Jesus Christ and His teachings every day, you too may be fooled into resisting Him on that day along with everybody else. See, the Bible says that the deception will be so subtle and so powerful that even somebody looking for it will be deceived. How? Look again at what Jesus says: "Behold, I am coming as a thief. Blessed is he who watches, and keeps his garments, lest he walk naked and they see his shame" (Revelation 16:15).
What are the "garments" mentioned? They are keeping God's commandments, knowing right from wrong, discerning between good and evil. Garments are worshipping God instead of the devil, who is the god of this age. Garments are the "righteous acts" of God's people (Revelation 19:8). In the final confrontation between God and Satan, God wins! And Christ is summoning us to a life where we stand with Him - today - against the powers of darkness. That is what it means to keep one's garments.
Are you standing with Jesus Christ today? Do you stand with God in truth when we see signs of spiritual and moral decay all around us? Have you looked at popular culture lately? The signs of inner-cancer are plain to see. Of course, we would all say that we try to stand our ground and keep our morals intact. But it's so easy to slowly allow tolerance of sin to seep into our lives.
Megiddo was a place where empires sought to control the ancient world. In this prophecy, it represents sinful man's final effort to control the world apart from the righteous creator God. And, there is a parallel to our society today.
Let me give you just one example.
There is one vivid lesson from the old city of Megiddo that illustrates my point. At the edge of the city is a large circular altar. Throughout history people would offer sacrifices on this altar in the worship of a fertility god. Now some historians even believe that human sacrifices were made here. This would also include child sacrifice. Imagine what one of those worship services might be like. Loud music. Worshippers dancing, shouting and calling out to the fertility god. A large fire roaring on the altar. And then they throw a small child into the embers to die an excruciating, senseless death in service of a fake god.
It's difficult to imagine how people could do such a thing. Today, we recoil in shock and horror at the thought. Mankind's sin and rejection of God's way is exactly why this battle - that many people call "Armageddon" - why that battle must take place. This final battle represents God's judgment on a world that has forgotten and rejected Him in favor of their own desires.
Megiddo was a key city in the ancient world. Whoever controlled it controlled a vital link in world commerce. And in the end of the age, Megiddo - or it's other name, Armageddon - represents man's last effort to control the world without God.
Armageddon, a place, an event of the battle of the Great Day of the God Almighty.

Also:

The Battle of Armageddon
This Battle in Revelation
Scripture teaches that God will not tolerate unrighteousness upon the earth forever. The unrighteous age in which we now live will conclude with a direct battle between the unrighteous nations of the earth and Christ Himself, when Christ appears in righteous glory and wrath. That battle is often referred to as the Battle of Armageddon.
The primary account of this final battle begins with the sixth bowl event:
Rev 16:13-16 – 13And I saw coming out of the mouth of the dragon and out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet, three unclean spirits like frogs; 14for they are spirits of demons, performing signs, which go out to the kings of the whole world, to gather them together for the war of the great day of God, the Almighty. 15(“Behold, I am coming like a thief. Blessed is the one who stays awake and keeps his clothes, so that he will not walk about naked and men will not see his shame.”) 16And they gathered them together to the place which in Hebrew is called Har-Magedon.
In this passage, we observe the following:
Verses 13-14 indicate that this battle will be instigated by the unholy trinity of Satan (the dragon), Antichrist (the beast), and the False Prophet. The call to battle will be carried out by spirits of demons who will persuade the whole world to take part in this battle by performing signs. The ones performing these signs will be demon-possessed False Prophet and perhaps others who are among the many false prophets showing great signs and wonders described by Christ (Matt 24:24, Rev 13:13). Their battle shall ultimately be against God, the Almighty.
Verse 15, as it is placed here, informs us that this battle will be at least part of the “coming like a thief” event that Jesus and his apostles promised (Matt 24:43, 1 Thes 5:2-4, 2 Pet 3:10).
Verse 15 also offers a blessing to some, which suggests that people on earth may still repent even as late as the sixth bowl event, and this promised blessing is for those who do.
Verse 16 confirms that nations of the world shall heed this call to battle, and it says that the place where their armies will gather is called “Har-Magedon“, which in English is commonly named “Armageddon“, and in Hebrew it means “Hill of Megiddo”. Megiddo is in Israel.
Side note: The word “awake” in verse 15 is a metaphor for being aware and watchful (e.g. 1 Thes 5:6). This translation says “stays awake“, but “is awake” is preferable, as conveyed by several other translations, e.g. Rev 16:15 KJV, Rev 16:15 ASV, Rev 16:15 NLT, Rev 16:15 YLT). The preferred meaning allows that the person could become awake even during the sixth bowl.
The account in chapter 16 described the nations assembling for battle, but it didn’t mention the battle itself or its outcome. However, the outcome is vividly described when the narration of the bowl events is resumed in chapter 19 (chapters 17 and 18 are the “bowl interlude”, see Revelation Overview). There, we see that the battle begins and ends with the visible return of Christ to earth:
Rev 19:15-21 – 15From His mouth comes a sharp sword, so that with it He may strike down the nations, and He will rule them with a rod of iron; and He treads the wine press of the fierce wrath of God, the Almighty. 16And on His robe and on His thigh He has a name written, “KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.” 17Then I saw an angel standing in the sun, and he cried out with a loud voice, saying to all the birds which fly in midheaven, “Come, assemble for the great supper of God, 18so that you may eat the flesh of kings and the flesh of commanders and the flesh of mighty men and the flesh of horses and of those who sit on them and the flesh of all men, both free men and slaves, and small and great.” 19And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies assembled to make war against Him who sat on the horse and against His army. 20And the beast was seized, and with him the false prophet who performed the signs in his presence, by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped his image; these two were thrown alive into the lake of fire which burns with brimstone. 21And the rest were killed with the sword which came from the mouth of Him who sat on the horse, and all the birds were filled with their flesh.
The outcome of the battle reveals the following:
Verses 15-17 say that it is Christ’s intent is to conquer all nations with a “rod of iron“, indicating his intention to destroy them. As Psalm 2:9 says, “You shall break them with a rod of iron, You shall shatter them like earthenware.’”. The “wine press of God’s wrath” metaphor identifies this as the great day of God’s wrath (Isa 63:2, Joel 3:13).
Verses 18-19 make it clear that this is a resumption of the same account that began with the sixth bowl event from chapter 16. Note that Christ comes up against the “beast and the kings of the earth and their armies assembled to make war against Him“. The only place we see armies of the earth assembled by the beast to make war against God is in the sixth bowl.
Verses 20-21 describe the outcome of the battle. This will be the shortest and most one-sided major battle of all time.
First, the leaders are captured and destroyed, and then the rest are killed and their bodies are left as food for the birds. This battle will be a slaughter of the wicked. We also see a reference to this battle in chapter 14, which is part of the Introduction to the Bowls, with this summary of the Armageddon battle:
Rev 14:19-20 – 19 So the angel swung his sickle to the earth and gathered the clusters from the vine of the earth, and threw them into the great wine press of the wrath of God. 20And the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood came out from the wine press, up to the horses’ bridles, for a distance of two hundred miles.
As you can see, chapter 14 uses the same “wine press of God’s wrath” metaphor that was used in reference to the Battle of Armageddon in Rev 19:15, indicating that it is describing the same event. Here, the wine press metaphor is described as harvesting of the “grapes of wrath” (the sin of men) which have been declared as “ripe” (the point has been reached where God will tolerate their sin no longer). God’s wrath against the earth is expressed figuratively by saying “the wine press was trodden” with “blood coming out from the wine press, up to the horses’ bridles“. This must refer to the same slaughter that will occur at Armageddon.
While the wine press is figurative, the added phrase “for a distance of two hundred miles“, is probably not figurative because this specific distance would have no apparent figurative meaning. It adds some literal geographical information, which is discussed below.
A glancing reference to this battle is also described in the sixth seal, which itself is a summary of the bowls:
Rev 6:15-17 – 15Then the kings of the earth and the great men and the commanders and the rich and the strong and every slave and free man hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains; 16and they said to the mountains and to the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; 17for the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?”
This passage describes people who are terrified because they are facing God’s wrath. These people are enumerated as follows: (1) the kings of the earth, then (2) the great men and the commanders, and finally (3) the rich and the strong and every slave and free man. Notice how well this agrees with the Battle of Armageddon account we saw in chapter 19: “Come, assemble for the great supper of God, 18so that you may eat the flesh of kings and the flesh of commanders and the flesh of mighty men and the flesh of horses and of those who sit on them and the flesh of all men, both free men and slaves, and small and great“. As chapter 19 continues, we see that their terror was justified, because they are all killed and their flesh is given as food for birds (Rev 19:17, 18, 19, 20, 21). The final question, “who is able to stand?” is rhetorical, and the obvious answer is “no one”.
We see one more reference to this battle in chapter 17 (part of the bowl interlude):
Rev 17:11-14 – 11“The beast which was and is not, is himself also an eighth and is one of the seven, and he goes to destruction. 12“The ten horns which you saw are ten kings who have not yet received a kingdom, but they receive authority as kings with the beast for one hour. 13“These have one purpose, and they give their power and authority to the beast. 14“These will wage war against the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them, because He is Lord of lords and King of kings, and those who are with Him are the called and chosen and faithful.”
The battle here is called the war against the Lamb in verse 14, and it quickly summarizes the same outcome that we see in chapter 19, stating simply that the Lamb will overcome them when he appears as the Lord of lords and King of kings, all in agreement with Rev 19:16. This verse emphasizes that the war will be waged by Antichrist (the beast and eighth king mentioned in verse 11) and the ten other kings who, as described in verses 12-13, will be united in alliance with Antichrist. Again, this is in harmony with all of the Armageddon-related passages above.
Where Will this Battle Be?
The place called “Armageddon” comes from Rev 16:16, which says that the armies will gather there. As mentioned above, it refers to Megiddo in Israel. However, we should understand that there are also other places in Israel that scripture has identified as locations where these armies will gather. Megiddo and these other places are discussed below.
♦ Megiddo
This place, referenced by Rev 16:16, refers to an area in northern Israel encompassing the southwest portion of Galilee. Other battles have been fought there, including the famous one in which Josiah the king of Judah was killed (2 Chronicles 35:22-23).
Interestingly, this was also a battleground in 1918 during World War I. At that time, the Allied forces led by the British Empire defeated the forces of the (now extinct) Ottoman Empire. As a result, this land came under the control of the British Empire. Thirty years later, in the aftermath of the holocaust of World War II, motivation was high to provide the Jews with their homeland, and the British government and supporting nations approved the establishment in 1948 of the modern Jewish state of Israel. In this sense, Israel is a country today as a consequence of this 1918 “battle of Armageddon“.
♦ The Valley of Jehoshaphat
Joel 3:12-14: “12Let the nations be aroused And come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat, For there I will sit to judge All the surrounding nations. 13Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe. Come, tread, for the wine press is full; The vats overflow, for their wickedness is great. 14Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision! For the day of the LORD is near in the valley of decision.”
This passage is clearly referring to the battle at the end of the age because (1) It refers to the “Day of the Lord” and (2) it uses the same metaphor that we see in Revelation (e.g. chapter 14) with the sickle harvesting grapes of wrath and treading them in the wine press. It says that the nations will gather for battle at a place called the “valley of Jehoshaphat”.
The Valley of Jehoshaphat refers to the Kidron Valley, which passes between the temple mount of Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives (according to JewishEncyclopedia.com).
♦ Edom
Isaiah 34:2-5: “2For the LORD’S indignation is against all the nations, And His wrath against all their armies; He has utterly destroyed them, He has given them over to slaughter. 3So their slain will be thrown out, And their corpses will give off their stench, And the mountains will be drenched with their blood. 4And all the host of heaven will wear away, And the sky will be rolled up like a scroll; All their hosts will also wither away As a leaf withers from the vine, Or as one withers from the fig tree. 5For My sword is satiated in heaven, Behold it shall descend for judgment upon Edom And upon the people whom I have devoted to destruction.”
This is also clearly a reference to the final battle in the end times. The sky rolled up like a scroll is the same description that was given in the sixth seal (Rev 6:14), and the intense depiction of wrath and death corresponds with that given in Rev 14:20 and Rev 19:17-21.
This passage speaks of God’s wrath falling upon a place called “Edom”, which is a large region that encompasses the southern part of Israel, just south of the Dead Sea.
From the Biblical references above, we have the following geographical information concerning this battle:
Three places are cited as locations of this final battle: (1) Meggido, (2) Kidron Valley, and (3) Edom.
We also have Rev 14:20, “And the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood came out from the wine press, up to the horses’ bridles, for a distance of two hundred miles“. The “two hundred miles” figure is unfortunately calculated and approximated. A more direct translation would call it “a distance of 1,600 stadia“. Since a stadia is about 607 feet, a more accurate conversion to miles would be about 180 miles. Several other translations use the more precise language: Rev 14:20 ESV, Rev 14:20 HCSB, Rev 14:20 KJV, Rev 14:20 NLT, Rev 14:20 YLT).
It is interesting to observe that on a map of Israel, the three locations above fall on a straight line, and that the distance of this straight line comes out to about 180 miles.
Why Do All Armies Gather for Battle?
Scripture doesn’t say explicitly why the armies gather there, and yet I think the reason becomes quite evident when one follows the narrative of Revelation.
Recall that before the armies gathered for battle in Israel, there were two Jewish witnesses in Jerusalem who had been striking the earth with plagues (Rev 11:3, 6), perhaps including the first four trumpet events described in chapter 8. God protected these two witnesses such that all efforts to stop them had failed for nearly 1260 days until Antichrist finally killed them (Rev 11:5, 7).
However, the two witnesses came back to life and ascended to heaven (Rev 11:11, 12). Immediately following their ascension, a new series of plagues (the first five bowl events) began to strike the earth. These new plagues were similar to the trumpet events, except that they were much more severe. The earth was literally being destroyed.
What could be done to stop these plagues? There are no Jewish witnesses to kill this time, but it will be clear to everyone that these sorts of plagues are associated with the Jews, and that a surviving remnant of Jews has been protected by God for the past 3 1/2 years (Rev 12:6, 14). From the perspective of the ungodly world, destroying this last remnant of Israel once and for all will be seen as the only hope to save the world from these deadly bowl plagues.
The armies of the world will thus be united in a desperate effort to destroy the Jews, who they see as somehow being the cause of these plagues. They will assemble for battle in Israel, and this gathering for battle is itself the sixth bowl event. The outcome of the battle is described at the end of the seventh bowl event, in chapter 19.
What is the Outcome of the Battle?
By the time the armies of the nations prepare to assemble in Israel, a series of devastating bowl plagues will have destroyed much of the earth. The latest such plague shall be darkness over all the earth (the fifth bowl event). Even under these circumstances, the determined nations shall utterly commit themselves to the “great cause” of sending armies to destroy Israel in hopes of saving the world, because they are convinced that Israel is somehow causing the plagues. Their arrival in Israel will be the fulfillment of the sixth bowl event.
The armies that arrive in Israel may be confident of victory. They will be led by Antichrist himself, and perhaps the same technique that he used earlier to kill the two Jewish leaders (Rev 11:7) will work on the rest of Israel. However, they will all be in for a jolt. The earth will experience an earthquake unlike any other, as described in the seventh bowl (Rev 16:18, 19, 20), possibly including the destruction of all mountains and Islands. Nobody will be able to stand and entire cities will collapse.
And yet there shall be an even greater shock as Israel’s king returns to fight for them, and Israel’s king is none less than the Son of God, appearing in wrath (Rev 19:15). As Jesus described it, “And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the SON OF MAN COMING ON THE CLOUDS OF THE SKY with power and great glory.” (Matt 24:30).
Rev 19:12 says “His eyes are like blazing fire”. Recall that back when Jesus first visited John on Patmos, John’s description of Jesus said “His eyes were like a flame of fire”. John said, “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, “Fear not” (Rev 1:14-17). This sort of thing has happened other times in scripture, where someone witnessed a holy being, fell as if dead, but was then revived when told by the holy person to not be afraid. It seems that being confronted with this holy light must be an absolute terror for a sinner. Heb 4:13 says “no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.”
When Christ appears in wrath, everyone on earth will be exposed to this holy light, but this time, there will be no one to say “don’t be afraid”. I think this explains the behavior of people (as described in the sixth seal) when it says that they will hide in caves, “calling to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?” (Rev 6:16-17).
After describing the appearance of Christ, John turns his attention back to the armies that were assembled against Israel, and he describes their fate: Rev 19:19 And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies assembled to make war against Him who sat on the horse and against His army. John tells how these armies shall be quickly annihilated, with their bodies given as food for birds. The rest of the unredeemed world shall also see the appearance of God’s wrath, and they shall all be killed (Rev 19:20, 21).
If there are any survivors at all (aside from the protected remnant of Israel), it will be people who repented during the bowl judgments and were not killed by them. The prophecy concerning the Day of the Lord will be fulfilled, “I will make mortal man scarcer than pure gold” (Isa 13:12).
Where Are Christians During the Battle?
They would be among the “The armies of heaven following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean”, mentioned in Rev 19:14. This is an army of glorified saints, and they are the ones the Bible describes as “clothed in clean garments”, referring back to the Bride of Christ in heaven (Rev 19:8).
What is God’s Purpose in this Battle?
As discussed above, it’s not that hard to see why the unredeemed world would come to do battle against Israel. But this battle also seems to serve God’s purposes.
One of the remarkable things we observe about God is that He respects the laws that He laid down for men. For example, we call Christ our “faithful high priest” because he came to offer up himself as a sacrifice on our behalf. However, Christ didn’t just come and do this without first having a way for him be a legitimate priest upon the earth. God had created a special priesthood just for that purpose through Melchizedek (Gen 14:18-20, Psalm 110:4, Heb 7:1-28).
Likewise, when Christ comes to reign as king, he won’t just assume that role without first having been established as a legitimate king on earth. God went to the “trouble” of establishing an earthly royal line with king David, making sure that David’s royal line survived, and that Jesus Christ was the descendant of David and the rightful heir to his throne.
However, if Christ comes to assume his role as king on earth by virtue of inheriting the throne of David, then he should, according to the laws of men, become the king of Israel, just as David was (Matt 2:2, John 1:49, John 12:13, Acts 1:6). How then does he come to be the legitimate “king of kings” (Rev 17:14, 19:16), reigning over all the earth?
The answer may be that according to the common law of men, if your land is unjustly invaded by an enemy, then you have every right to counter-attack and defeat your enemy. In the case of Armageddon, Israel is unjustly invaded by all nations, giving the king of Israel (Christ) every right to attack all nations. By being victorious over all nations, Christ becomes king of kings, while at the same time doing so legitimately according to the laws of men. Thus, for man’s purposes, the battle of Armageddon will be an attempt to destroy God’s people. But for God’s purposes, the battle of Armageddon will exalt Christ as the one and only king over all the earth (Zech 14:9).
In His role as king over all the earth, he shall put an end to sin all over the earth and establish His Millennial Kingdom, followed by His kingdom of everlasting righteousness over all the earth (Dan 9:24, Isa 13:9, Isa 26:9, Jer 33:15, 2 Pet 3:13). This is the ultimate purpose of the battle of Armageddon.

Geofencing: What It Is And How You and Your Car Can Be Tracked

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 22:19:00 +0000

AI Overview
Geofencing creates a virtual boundary around a real-world location using GPS, cellular, or Wi-Fi data to trigger automated actions—such as alerts, notifications, or marketing messages—when a device enters or exits the zone. It is used for fleet management, marketing, security, and smart home automation.
How Geofencing Works
Virtual Boundary: A digital, geofenced perimeter is drawn on a map using specialized software, either as a radius or a custom polygon.
Location Tracking: The system monitors user devices (smartphones, GPS trackers) that have location services enabled .
Trigger Action: When a device crosses the boundary, a predefined action is initiated, such as sending a push notification, email, or updating a database.
How to Set Up a Geofence
Select a Platform: Use a GPS tracking service, marketing tool, or API like Google's.
Define the Area: Draw a circle or custom shape on a digital map around a specific location.
Set Parameters: Define whether the action is triggered by entry, exit, or dwell time.
Configure Actions: Set up notifications (e.g., alert manager) or actions (e.g., serve an ad).
Benefits of Geofencing
Targeted Marketing: Delivering, customized, ads or offers to customers, nearby.
Operational Efficiency: Tracking vehicles, and, assets in, real-time for better logistics.
Enhanced Security: Receiving, alerts when, unauthorized vehicles move after-hours.
Automation: Adjusting, smart home, devices like, lights or, HVAC based on occupancy.
Limitations and Legal Implications
Privacy Concerns: Constant tracking of user locations raises significant privacy issues.
Battery Drain: Continuous use of GPS/location services can significantly reduce battery life on mobile devices.
Accuracy Issues: GPS signals can be unreliable in dense urban environments or indoors, leading to false alerts.
Data Consent: Users must typically opt-in to location tracking, making compliance with data protection regulations crucial.
Car geofencing real time
Real-time car Geofencing uses GPS trackers (like Bouncie, BrickHouse, or Cube) to create virtual boundaries, instantly alerting you via app, text, or email when a vehicle enters or exits a defined area. These systems provide live location tracking, crucial for security, fleet management, and driver monitoring, with instant notifications for boundary breaches.
Key Features of Real-Time Geofencing:
Instant Alerts: Receive notifications immediately when a car crosses a designated boundary.
Custom Boundaries: Set up "safe zones" (home, work) or "prohibited zones" (restricted areas).
Live Tracking: Monitor vehicle location in real-time, often with updates every few seconds to minutes.
Activity Logs: Review detailed history of when a vehicle entered or left a specific zone.
Applications: Useful for preventing theft, managing teen drivers, or tracking company vehicle usage.
Popular Real-Time Geofencing Devices:
Bouncie: Plugs into the OBDII port for real-time, up-to-the-minute updates.
BrickHouse Security: Offers Spark Nano 7 for discreet, real-time tracking.
Cube GPS: Provides worldwide 4G tracking with app-based alerts and hardwire options.
ShadowGPS: Features motion-based alerts, custom geofences, and speed monitoring.
These systems typically operate via a mobile app (iOS/Android) or web portal and require a cellular data subscription for real-time functionality.
Geofencing police monitoring and surveillance
Geofencing allows law enforcement to create a virtual perimeter, enabling surveillance of all mobile devices within a specific location and time frame to identify suspects.
Primarily using Google’s "Sensorvault" or tools like Fog Reveal to track movements, this technology offers real-time monitoring and historical analysis for investigations. It raises major privacy concerns and Fourth Amendment challenges.
Key Aspects of Police Geofencing
Geofence Warrants: A formal, often controversial request to companies like Google to identify every device in a specified area at a specific time, sometimes used without traditional probable cause.
"Reverse Search" Method: Police define a crime scene (location) and time to find potential suspects, rather than starting with a suspect to find evidence.
Data Sources: Data is harvested from GPS, cell tower triangulation, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi, revealing precise location history, including movements inside private homes or businesses.
"Pattern of Life" Analysis: Tools like Fog Reveal enable police to track a device's history to identify "bed-down" (home) locations and daily routines.
Legal Challenges: In 2024, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled these warrants "inherently unconstitutional", though other courts have disagreed, creating a split that may reach the Supreme Court.
Common Use Cases
Criminal Investigations: Identifying suspects in robberies, murders, or crimes.
Real-time Tracking: Monitoring for when a device enters or leaves a designated zone.
Proactive Policing: Creating virtual perimeters around sensitive locations or public events.
Risks and Privacy Concerns
Dragnet Surveillance: Innocent individuals within the geofenced area have their private data swept up by law enforcement.
Accuracy Issues: While precise, data may not be 100% complete.
Lack of Transparency: Often, the use of such tools is rarely mentioned in court records, making defense challenging.
Critics argue these tools amount to general warrants, which are prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.
Geofencing and warrants and arrest
Geofence warrants are legal orders compelling companies like Google to identify all mobile devices within a specific, user-defined geographic area and timeframe to help police find suspects when none are known. They are "reverse" searches that often sweep up data from innocent bystanders, raising significant fourth amendment and privacy concerns.
How Geofence Warrants Lead to Arrests
The Process: Law enforcement defines a crime scene (e.g., a bank robbery) and requests data for a specific time, allowing them to see all devices present.
Data Analysis: Companies (primarily Google) provide data, often in stages: first anonymized, then more specific data for devices of interest, and finally, user identification for identified suspects.
Suspect Identification: Police analyze the data to find patterns or individuals who visited the scene, using this to establish probable cause for an arrest.
Common Use Cases: These warrants are used to investigate crimes like murder, robbery, burglary, and even for identifying individuals in protest areas.
Key Concerns and Legal Status
Constitutional Disputes: These warrants are often considered "general warrants" because they allow searching for suspects without pre-existing evidence, which may violate the Fourth Amendment.
Conflicting Rulings: In 2024, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled them inherently unconstitutional, though allowed them under the "good faith exception". Other courts have different, sometimes conflicting, opinions.
Privacy Impact: They can expose the movement data of thousands of innocent people to the police.
Declining Use: Due to privacy pressures, Google has begun to restrict how it handles these requests, although law enforcement still attempts to use them.
Important Considerations
Inaccuracy: GPS data may be inaccurate, leading to the potential for wrong arrests.
Search Scope: Warrants can cover large areas, including private homes, businesses, and public spaces, for hours or days.
The Supreme Court: The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to weigh in on the constitutionality of these, as lower courts are divided.
Geofencing for police surveillance and monitoring
Geofencing for police surveillance uses virtual, GPS-based perimeters to track, monitor, and identify suspects by collecting data on all mobile devices within a specific area and time.
Primarily executed through "geofence warrants" targeting companies like Google, this technique identifies individuals present during crimes, often functioning as a dragnet that captures innocent bystanders.
Key Aspects of Police Geofencing
Definition & Mechanism: Law enforcement establishes a "virtual fence" around a crime scene. They then compel technology companies (e.g., Google, through its Sensorvault database) to provide data on all mobile devices that were within that area during a specified timeframe.
The Three-Step Process:
Search: Google searches its database for all devices in the area.
Anonymized Data: Google provides anonymized data to police.
Identification: Police narrow the search, and Google reveals the identity of the users of interest.
Use Cases: These tools are used to solve crimes ranging from homicides to theft.
Scope: Warrants can cover areas from a few feet to over an acre and durations from minutes to days.
Legal & Ethical Concerns:
Fourth Amendment Challenges: Critics argue that these warrants act as a "dragnet" and constitute unreasonable search and seizure, as they do not start with a specific suspect.
Legal Divergence: While some courts have upheld them, others, such as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, have ruled them unconstitutional.
Data Limitation: Google has announced it will change how it stores location data, limiting the effectiveness of these warrants.

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What Are Geofences and How Do They Work?
Have you ever checked your phone’s Maps app to see a section of the freeway highlighted in red, indicating a traffic slowdown? This is useful information, but how does Google know about the traffic jam in the first place?
Some might suspect Google is monitoring actual traffic conditions, but that assumption is incorrect. Rather, the search giant provides real-time traffic information by using GPS to track the movement of cell phones within their owners’ cars.
Slow phones = slow cars = traffic. By tracking and recording the position of billions of individual devices in real time, Google provides a helpful service to consumers.
Google’s Location History
Google uses a feature called Location History to pull this off. According to Google, the feature is turned off by default, requiring a user to affirmatively opt in to make use of location-related information.
Deleting Location History or even pausing being tracked can be confusing for users. If you delete the application that prompted the opt-in, Google may continue to collect GPS data through your account. Even if you turn off Location History in your Google account, the company may sometimes still collect time-stamped location data from your device through other applications or services. For example, if you access Maps — whether it is to get directions or to read reviews for local businesses — your phone may still report its location to Google even if you have opted out. Similarly, searching for just about anything can trigger your phone to report its location to Google.
All told, Google is tracking over a billion devices worldwide, both Android and iOS, and saving that data to help provide services and advertising to its users. And this data can be extremely helpful to law enforcement investigators.
While GPS is not new technology, the use of geofence warrants in law enforcement investigations is relatively recent.
What Is a Geofence Warrant?
A geofence warrant is a formal request from law enforcement to a provider (usually Google) to provide the Location History data of every device within a defined geographic region and within a specific time frame. Those two factors — the location and the time — are the most important elements of a geofence warrant. The purpose of the warrant is to eventually narrow down a single user from the list of devices returned by the provider, with the goal of identifying that device owner as the perpetrator of a crime.
The most obvious way devices are tracked is through the global positioning system, or GPS, which is usually accurate to within a dozen or so feet in optimal conditions. Device locations may also be tracked using cell phone tower triangulation as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections. Location History information can often reveal a device location much more precisely than cell site location data. Providers like Google collect this data every two minutes or so, so it is not always 100% complete. However, it is generally accurate enough to show that a device (and its owner) was in a specific area at a specific time.
While GPS is not new technology, the use of geofence warrants in law enforcement investigations is relatively recent. Whereas GPS triangulation targets a specific person already known to police, geofence warrants are different in that they cast a fairly wide net. According to a 2022 Slate article, “Google received its first geofence warrant in 2016. Law enforcement’s use of these warrants has grown exponentially since then. Warrants to Google for users’ location information grew 1,500 percent from 2017 to 2018 and 500 percent from 2018 to 2019. In 2019, Google received about 9,000 geofence requests.” That number has continued to grow in the ensuing years.
The Geofence Warrant Process
Picture this: Police receive a report of a shooting at a convenience store. According to eyewitnesses and CCTV, two suspects entered the store, demanded cash from the register, and after an altercation, shot at the store clerk. The incident lasted five minutes. The suspects left the store around 3:15 p.m., ran to a vehicle and drove northbound for two blocks before eyewitnesses lost sight of them.
Based on these facts, police may determine that cell phone location data could be helpful in identifying the suspects.
Requesting device information from Google is a three-step process:
Step 1: The investigator sends a warrant to Google requesting information on devices with estimated locations that were within the area (e.g., a two- to three-block perimeter around the convenience store) and time frame (e.g., 3:00 to 3:30 p.m.) defined in the warrant. Google uses Location History data to identify devices matching the warrant criteria. At this point, device owners are still completely anonymous to law enforcement. Instead of user information, the devices are tagged with a code that hides their personal identifying information from investigators.
Step 2: If the investigator can narrow down the results after analyzing the de-identified list of devices and their locations, they may request additional information about specific devices and their locations before and after the time frame in the warrant, as well as outside the geographic “fence” (the original location). For example, if Step 1 provides two devices that were exiting the convenience store at the time and driving in the direction that corresponds with the eyewitnesses, then in Step 2, the investigator may request that Google provide additional information about those devices — specifically, additional Location History data. Now we are outside the original time frame (3:00 to 3:30 p.m.) and the original location (two to three blocks from the convenience store) of the original geofence warrant.
Step 3: Using the information from the first two steps, investigators further narrow down any devices that closely match the pattern of evidence for possible suspects, and request account information (including names and email addresses) from the provider. Slate points out that “Google ‘prefers’ that this third set of users be narrowed from the second set, but it’s possible, at least, that sometimes that doesn’t happen.”
Note that a judge-approved warrant is currently only required before Step 1 in the process. The rest of the steps happen without any additional oversight from the courts. The process appears, rather, to be managed by a Google employee and the law enforcement investigator. Google appears to be using this process to respect users’ privacy and limit the data released to law enforcement. Nonetheless, some people see this as problematic.
Privacy and Accuracy Concerns
Geofence warrants can be useful in investigations, but they are not without their controversy. One relates to privacy. By their very nature, geofence warrants return data on devices owned by innocent people who may not have even been witnesses to the crime.
In a much-criticized warrant relating to the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021, the FBI requested and received from Google a list of 5,723 devices that was eventually pared down to 1,535 names and used to identify and prosecute participants. A Reason article about the case notes that a warrant of this kind “arguably allows law enforcement to work backward, to say, We think a crime was committed around this place and this time. Let’s sweep up location data for everyone who was there and investigate them all.” This process, author Bonnie Kristian notes, is uncomfortably similar to a “general warrant,” which is exactly what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.
Another issue is accuracy. While GPS data appears to be accurate within 10 or 11 feet, that is not always the case. Trees, buildings, bridges and other structures can interfere with the connection to the satellites that allow the system to work. This can cause “dirty data” that may result in innocent people being swept up in the investigation who were not even in the location of the crime when it occurred. Conversely, this potential for inaccuracy can exclude the actual perpetrators. In one case, Jorge Molina was arrested in Arizona and held in jail for six days after location data falsely tied him to an Avondale murder — in spite of Molina having a solid alibi. He subsequently filed a $1.5-million lawsuit against the city of Avondale, its chief of police, and several officers.
Important Cases
Two cases illustrate both the concerns and successes regarding geofence warrants.
United States v. Chatrie
On May 20, 2019, a gunman robbed the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia. The suspect got away with $195,000, escaping on foot. As part of its investigation, law enforcement filed a geofence warrant with Google, which produced responsive Location History information. An analysis of the data led police to arrest Okello Chatrie and charge him with the robbery. Chatrie’s defense team filed a motion to suppress the location data on Fourth Amendment and other grounds.
In her ruling on the motion to suppress, U.S. District Court Judge Hannah Lauck called into question the validity and legality of the sweeping warrant. In part, she said, “Astoundingly, the Government claims that law enforcement established probable cause to obtain all information (Steps 1, 2, and 3) from all users within the geofence without any narrowing measures. Yet the warrant simply did not include any facts to establish probable cause to collect such broad and intrusive data from each one of these individuals.” Since investigators gathered location information on 19 cell phones, only one of which may have been the suspect’s, the judge indicated that the warrant violated the constitutional rights of at least 18 innocent people.
Another concern was the size and scope of the geofence: The perimeter was roughly the length of three football fields, and the time frame was an hour. The judge thought this constituted an overly large dragnet from which to collect device location data.
In spite of her reservations, though, the judge denied the motion and permitted the data gleaned from the geofence warrant on the basis that the detective who had been working with Google in Steps 1, 2, and 3 had acted in good faith. In the conclusion of her decision, she stated: “If the Government is to continue to employ these warrants, it must take care to establish particularized probable cause. As the legal landscape confronts newly developed technology and further illuminates Fourth Amendment rights in the face of geofence practices, future geofence warrants may require additional efforts to seek court approval in between steps, or to limit the geographic and temporal information sought. But in light of the complex legal issues that lead to this Court’s conclusion, the Court cannot say that Det. Hylton’s reliance on the Geofence Warrant was objectively unreasonable.”
In the end, Okello Chatrie was convicted of the bank robbery charges and sentenced to nearly 12 years in federal detention.
Price v. Superior Court of Riverside County
On Oct. 29, 2019, a man referred to in court records as “Jovany R.” was shot and killed on the front porch of his home in Jurupa Valley near Riverside, California. According to investigators, Jovany had been growing marijuana in the home, and they believed the crime was related to his grow house operation. A man named Ahmad Raheem Price was arrested and charged with first-degree murder and unlawful possession of the firearm used to commit the murder.
During their investigation, law enforcement submitted a geofence warrant to Google. In contrast to the Chatrie warrant, the area in this case was limited to “the front porch area where the shooting occurred, and the street in front of the house … for the lengths of two houses in each direction (north and south), between 10:00 p.m. and 10:22 p.m. … a 22-minute period.” This time and location was based on eyewitness testimony as well as 911 calls that provided specific information regarding where and when the crime occurred.
In advance of the trial, Price’s legal team filed a motion to suppress (among other things) the information gained from the geofence warrant on the grounds that the request “(1) failed to satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s probable cause and particularity requirements; (2) had to be traversed based on material factual omissions in their affidavits; and (3) violated the particularity and notice requirements of the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act.”
Unlike the federal court in the Chatrie case, the Price court held that the warrant was “narrowly tailored” and did not question whether the warrant left too much discretion in the hands of law enforcement. This was because the court found that this geofence warrant “was a model of particularity in geographic scope and time period.” In denying the petition, the judge praised the investigators for how the warrant was drafted to “minimize the potential for capturing location data for uninvolved individuals.”
The motion to suppress was denied and Price was tried and convicted in early 2023.
Key Takeaways
If you are a law enforcement investigator and want to use geofence warrants in your investigations, here are some tips for helping to ensure your geofence warrants stand up to scrutiny in a future prosecution:
Narrow Geography: Draw your geofence as tightly as you can, based on the information you have about the crime and who might have committed it. The smaller the geographic area, the more likely the warrant will be considered particularized, and, hopefully, sustain Fourth Amendment challenges. For example, the Chatrie court suggested that instead of simply circling a radius around the crime scene, which can sweep up innocent devices, investigators should have used what they knew about the crime to draw a specific polygon around the area instead. In other words, try to eliminate extraneous areas if you reasonably can.
Limited Time Period: Similarly, be sure to use the narrowest possible time frame, within reason, to limit the number of irrelevant devices (and their owners) returned in the results of Step 1.
Justify Each Step: When you request additional information in Steps 2 and 3, document the logic you used to narrow down the initial list. This will help ensure that you are not “fishing” and help you justify your requests for additional information from the provider.
Involve the Prosecutor: Do not attempt to do all this by yourself. Work with the prosecutor or your agency counsel as you draft your geofence warrant and work your way through the steps. You may get some good advice during the process, leading to a properly completed and successful investigation.
Geofence warrants are just one of several fascinating new tools being used to investigate crimes. The more you know about them, and the better you adhere to the best practices, the more successful you will be as you put them to work in your investigations.
Update: January 4, 2024
On December 12, 2023, Google announced substantial changes to how and where it stores users’ Location History data. According to the company’s public release, Location History information will be transitioned from storage in centralized databases to being encrypted and saved on individual users’ devices. The company announced users will be given the option of backing up this data to personal cloud-based storage, where the information would not be accessible to Google. Also, Google will be reducing the default rule for the automatic deletion of Location History data from 18 months to three.
According to Skye Witley, writing for Bloomberg Law, this change “will eventually render the company unable to fulfill geofence warrants, which typically seek to identify anyone with Google accounts who was within a given perimeter during the time of a crime.” In 2021 the company stated that more than 25% of all law enforcement warrant applications in the U.S. were related to geofence requests.
In covering the story for Forbes.com, Cyrus Farivar and Thomas Brewster revealed a “current Google employee … told Forbes that along with the obvious privacy benefits of encrypting location data, Google made the move to explicitly bring an end to such dragnet location searches.” While the newly announced change won’t block government agencies from requesting user and account information from Google, Farivar and Brewster emphasize, it will prevent the company from being able to produce time-stamped geo-location details that were requested to implicate users in a criminal investigation.
Google has indicated these new data policies “will gradually roll out through the next year,” so it is possible the company could still produce responsive data for cases that happened prior to the change.

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Fog Revealed: A Guided Tour of How Cops Can Browse Your Location Data
Fog Data Science, when you give some apps permission to view your location, it can end up being packaged and sold to numerous other companies. Fog Data Science is one of those companies, and it has created a sleek search engine called Fog Reveal that allows cops to browse through that location data as if they were Google Maps results.
Here's a deep dive into Fog Reveal’s features. Although accounts for Reveal are typically only available to police departments, we're going to analyze the app’s public-facing code to get a better understanding of how it works, how it’s used, and what it looks like when cops get warrantless access to your location data.
Fog Reveal offers law enforcement a powerful and incredibly invasive tool for sifting through huge datasets of phone location data. Reveal’s workflow allows cops to perform “geofenced” device searches, i.e. a search for all devices in a specified region on a map, and then find all other locations those devices were at other times. A powerpoint presentation obtained from a Police Department gives us a look into how cops use these features to identify so-called “bed-down” locations and build up “patterns of life” for device’s owners. These features clearly undercut Fog’s claim that their product only contains “anonymized” data with “no PII [personally identifiable information]”.
Also Reveal’s frontend code contains the traces of a much more powerful “federal” featureset, which would allow users to further deanonymize data by revealing device Advertiser IDs, IP addresses, and other phone details. We do not know if these features are currently in use, but regardless, they demonstrate how simply showing a few more data fields can make a data aggregation tool like this much more invasive.
Methodology
To properly interpret our findings, it’s important to understand what kind of software Fog Reveal is, and to explain our research methodology. Fog Reveal, like Google Maps, is a web application that runs in your browser. To research its functionality, we locally reconstructed the app based on the web resources available by visiting www.fogreveal.com. This was possible because upon loading the page, without logging in or even clicking anything, the site automatically requests nearly all the javascript/HTML needed by the fully functional app. Throughout this document, we’ll be referring to the javascript and HTML pulled from Reveal as the “frontend” or “frontend code”, and to its server-side application as the “backend” or “backend code.”
By saving Reveal’s frontend files and organizing them into directories mirroring their original URL paths, we made a local reproduction of the site’s resources. From there, we utilized a mock backend server to serve the files and handle API calls made by the frontend, and then systematically worked out the format of data expected from that API. Once this was done, we had a semi-functional local reproduction of Reveal that made no requests to Fog’s actual server, and yet allowed us to explore its features.
Because our mock server isn’t an exact replica of Reveal’s actual backend, we should preface this by saying that our findings here only apply to the frontend code, as our mock server’s functionality is based on educated guesses and only returns fake location data. Consequently, it’s possible that our local reproduction’s behavior differs from Fog’s actual application. Where appropriate, we will cite the relevant frontend code and point out where uncertainties remain, and in general will describe our estimation of Fog Reveal’s actual features with as few assumptions about the backend as possible.
With that out of the way, let’s now take a look at our findings on Fog Reveal’s features. All of the data depicted in the following document, including latitude/longitude coordinates and IP addresses, are fake data generated randomly by our mock backend server.
Making a query
After signing into Reveal, the user is presented with a Google Maps view of the US, as well as a toolbox at the top-right of the screen:
Reveal’s frontend shows several tools for drawing geofences, the most basic of which is just a circle:
If this isn’t specific enough, users can also draw arbitrary shapes to carve out a more detailed geofence:
The frontend limits the size of these geofence queries, although those limits are quite large. For example, the frontend circle tool will allow queries with a radius of 2500 meters, allowing up to nearly 20 square kilometers when performing a “signal search.” It’s possible that the backend imposes further limitations.
The user can also specify a date and time range for their query, and it seems that these ranges can stretch back over several months: a copy of Fog Reveal’s user manual received from a Police Department claims that date/time ranges can extend up to 90 days, and can be searched “back to Jun[e] of 2017”.
Query Results
After specifying a geofence and date/time range, the user can run their query. Queries return a set of data points, referred to as “signals” in the user manual, which represent where a device was at a given point in time. The user can then do further analysis on these signals, such as grouping them by the device that produced them, or displaying the path taken by the device over time:
Digging deeper with device queries
The frontend code suggests that Fog creates unique internal identifiers for devices–called “Fog IDs” (or “registration IDs,” which we understand to be the same as Fog’s “device registration number”). These unique identifiers can be queried directly, allowing users to get all signals produced by devices within a certain period of time, regardless of whether they were in the original geofence or not:
In the user manual, this feature is called a “device query” and is described as including data from the device’s “local, regional or global travel.” The user manual also describes a feature called “common device queries”, which allow the user to determine “if any devices are common to multiple locations.”
Federal features
If certain user parameters are set, Reveal will update its logo to display “Reveal Federal”, and enables the frontend to request a much more powerful suite of query tools from the backend. The frontend code suggests that these conditions may occur if the user is a member of federal law enforcement, but because we have no public records mentioning any such federal users, we don’t know for sure which users (if any) this is true for. For the purposes of this document, we will refer to these hypothetical users as federal users.
Federal users have access to an interface for converting between Fog’s internal device IDs (“FOG IDs”) and the device’s actual Advertiser ID:
This is eyebrow raising for a couple reasons. First, if this feature is operational, it would contradict assurances made in a sample State search warrant Fog sends to customers that FOG IDs can’t be converted back into Advertiser IDs. Second, if users could retrieve the Advertiser IDs of all devices in a query’s results, it would make Reveal far more capable of unmasking the identities of those device’s owners. This is due to the fact that if you have access to a device, you can read its Advertiser ID, and thus law enforcement would be able to verify if a specific person’s device was part of a query’s results.
Additionally, when a federal user views the devices in their results, the frontend is designed to show them a great deal more information about each device than it does non-federal users. Assuming that the backend provides this data, a federal user could view device information such as:
User Agent
Browser Family
Browser Version
OS Family
OS Version
Device Family
Device Brand
Device Model
Whether the device belongs to an EU Resident
Last Seen IP Addresses
Federal users are also given an interface to query for signals/devices based on one or more IP addresses:
Connections to Venntel
Many of the features we analyzed in this article are powered by API calls that reference Venntel, a major player in the data broker scene and DHS contractor. Although it’s true that Fog’s engineers could have named these API endpoints arbitrarily, the way they function does seem to suggest that Venntel is a source of location and device data for Reveal.
Notably, when a Reveal user performs any geofenced device query, that query is submitted to the URL path /Venntel/GetLocationData. Additionally, queries for specific device locations send a request to /Venntel/GetDeviceLocationData, and when a federal user makes a request for more device details, the frontend sends a request to /Venntel/GetDeviceDetails. This means that nearly all frontend requests having to do with searching device or location data are prefixed with “Venntel”. And this wouldn’t be the only connection between Fog and Venntel: many of the records EFF has received point to a close link between the two companies.
Conclusions
As we've seen, Fog Reveal provides law enforcement a powerfully invasive tool for searching huge swaths of commercially available location data. With a few clicks, its users can find not only the devices present in a location, but also everywhere else each of those devices went during other time periods. Its federal featureset, whether currently in use or not, demonstrates how much more invasive the tool could be by only revealing a handful of other fields.
If you’re not happy about the idea of your location data possibly being sold to companies like Fog, we don’t blame you. Luckily, there’s an easy step you can take to make it much harder for data brokers and companies like Fog to tie your location data to your device: disabling Ad ID tracking on your phone. Beyond that, we believe that there are changes needed at both the technical and legal levels to prevent this kind of invasive data collection and usage.

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What is Geofencing

It’s high time you integrate geofencing into your business. It’s proven to get you more sales, engagement, and loyal customers.
Geofencing is a location-based service that businesses use to engage their audience by sending relevant messages to smartphone users who enter a pre-defined location or geographic area.
There are smart companies that send product offers or specific promotions to consumers’ smartphones when they trigger a search in a particular geographic location, enter a mall, neighborhood, or store.
Do you desire to improve your customer experience? I’m sure you are, considering that 90% of customer experience decision-makers have agreed that a good customer experience is critical for their success.
And with customers being the major source of revenue for every business, delivering high-quality service through geofencing is important. If you’re into any form of digital marketing, you need to take this seriously as it’d help you acquire new customers and convert them into paying customers.
A Study by Bain & Company shows that a little increase of 5% in customer retention, can lead to a profit increase of 25% to 95%. Trust me, these numbers are worth paying attention to!
Since customer retention is too challenging, knowing how to interact with your potential leads in a more personalized manner will definitely help.
A research report by Experian shows that personalized emails sent to consumers have a great effect on open rate, triggered open rate, promotional click rates, and triggered click rates.
So, the earlier you start reaching out to potential and loyal consumers at the most relevant time, with the relevant product/service, the better the results you’re likely to get.
So how do you achieve it?
Simple: Integrate “geofencing” into your marketing strategy and you’d be amazed at the consistent results that you’ll get. Creating geofencing campaigns can truly transform every facet of your business.
Does it work? Well, Papa John’s is renowned for their Super Bowl ads, but they ran a mobile ad triggered by Geofencing solutions from ThumbVista, to promote their Papa Loyalty Programs.
At the end of the campaign, the brand recorded over 68K impressions with 469 actions taken resulting with a .69% CTR. They also gained a brand awareness with the rewards program in a new market area.
You might have heard of it, or this could be your very first time to hear it — and I guess you’re now wondering what it’s all about.
Having been introduced to geofencing and how it can help with customer service, let’s consider a few definitions.
What is Geofencing?
According to Techopedia, geofencing is described as:
“A technology that defines a virtual boundary around a real-world geographical area.”
While Wikipedia defines it as:
“Virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area.”
It’s not some complicated programming language or complex development tool.
Geofencing is a technique of serving smartphone users with ads that are relevant to them, by creating a virtual perimeter or boundary around your business location which notifies users as soon as they enter the boundary.
In other words, geofencing can be regarded as a mobile marketing optimization strategy. So far, you could see the bright side of your business as you leverage on mobile ads that are targeted to your customers within a geographic location.
People are always ‘on the go,’ but they always have their smartphones with them — which they use to research products and services before buying them.
A report by the Office for National Statistics revealed that 58% of internet use ‘on the go’ is on mobile phones or smartphones.
For this reason, you’re no longer at a crossroad on whether you should start building geofencing campaigns or ignore it. Right now, it’s an important aspect of your marketing strategy.
Is Geofencing Right For Your Business?
Why is geofencing so important today?
You may not fully be aware, but let’s review some of the reasons that will make you kick yourself in the butt for not leveraging it:
i) Easy customer reach: When it comes to reaching out to your customers, geofencing is an option you shouldn’t neglect — because it notifies your customer about your product/services whenever they’re close to your business location through their mobile phone. That’s cool, isn’t it?
There’s no doubt as to the results it will generate, especially when you consider how addicted people are to their mobile phones.
ii) Instant consideration: Can you call the attention of your customers instantly when they walk by your store without shouting at the top of your voice?
I doubt.
Through geofencing, you’re able to trigger instant messages that pique a customer’s interest and nudges them to come check out the latest deals in your store. Remember that 90% of SMS are read within 3 minutes — so, geofencing campaigns help consumers make informed and instant decisions.
iii) Grows brand awareness: The mobile marketing strategy that leverages on geofencing provides local and multi-channel businesses, the chance to communicate with their potential consumers who are close by and ready to purchase through mobile phones.
These messages serve as a reminder to your consumers to choose your brand out of the thousands of other similar businesses around a particular location.
iv) Reduction in cost of marketing: With the high cost of creating ads campaign, using geofencing is sure to cut down the cost and still produce a great result — since it only focuses on local consumers and these consumers are likely to buy from you.
Geofencing is more like an extension of your restaurant, store or shop. And with geofencing you don’t need to stand in front of your store to call anybody that passes by, because you’ve already known your potential consumers.
You’re also provided with the opportunity to offer your products/services to your customers at the right time when they’re in need of it.
With the availability of GPS on virtually all smartphones and tablets, efficient tracking is now easier for both marketers and consumers.
This new development has also given rise to new marketing opportunities for online entrepreneurs, because they can now locate their potential consumers right on the go.
A lot of brands have recorded success through their geofencing campaigns — especially those with highly classified data that need utmost security.
Here are some of the business models or organisations that can make use geofencing application:
i) Asset management: The application will notify a network administrator when a company asset, meant to be used within the firm goes out. And from there, they can track the location and also lock it from being accessed.
ii) Fleet management: In this field, geofencing is used to notify a dispatcher when their vehicle goes out from its route.
iii) Human resource management: Here geofencing is used to restrict staff from having access to some spaces within the firm, without a second authentication.
iv) Drone management: It’s used to create a temporary restricted area for drones, during a sporting event.
v) Marketing: A brand can use geofencing to notify their customers of their coupons, new product, or ongoing promo when the consumer enters a specified geographical region with their mobile phone.
vi) Law enforcement: In this instance, geofencing can help the security authority when a person under house arrest goes out from the building.
How Does Geofencing Work?
So far, we’ve covered a lot about geofencing and what it can do for your business. Do you know how it works?
It’s simple though. Geofencing helps you to keep in control of your business by notifying you when a potential consumer is passing by your store, by a competitor’s, or entering into a predefined area.
To get it working, you need to use a mapping product like Google Map to map out the regions you want to geofence. This region can be in a circular or polygon shape in most cases.
Once your desired region is mapped out for geofencing, you can then target your consumers via their mobile phone’s GPS.
Then, you can monitor your geofence through the day for potential prospects or customers who might be interested in your offer. It keeps to track them until that parameter is breached — either they’re trying to enter or to go out.
In fact, for a successful geofencing to be attained, you also need to incorporate a definite customer targeting, and personalized messages.
Solely depending on technology is not effective.
Benefits Of Geofencing
The need to leverage on geofencing cannot be overemphasized. Though it’s still a new practice, but the rate of success achieved with it is immeasurable.
A study shows that consumers love receiving location-specific offers right on their phone, due to its location relevance and interest.
That said, here are some benefits you wouldn’t like to miss:
i) It serves as an ads portal: This is obtained when potential consumers are close to your store and you’re notified of their presence. Sending your new products to them, free giveaways and discounts, will definitely get them to consider your store.
ii) It targets your potential consumers: Social media has a bigger marketing opportunity since it’s populated with a lot of consumers that are ready to read your messages and stick to your brand.
But with the help of geofencing, you can focus your campaign to the user that are more likely to convert — especially those local consumers.
Interestingly, these are the consumers that will be excited to walk into your store and make a purchase after seeing your ads.
iii) It links your offline business to your online presence: With geofencing, you can notify passersby to look you up on social media for better customer engagement.
In fact, it serves as your gateway to your social media and internet identity.
iv) It provides real-time analytics: No doubt, a good marketing requires a to-and-fro conversation between the customers and the marketers.
Geofencing makes it a lot easier and more effective.
Because it notifies you as soon as a consumer enters your marketing region so that you can properly prepare to receive them in your store.
v) It offers a service: Since the mobile use rate is high and users are highly interested when they’re online, offering a free WiFi in your Restaurant, Bar, and Hospital will definitely improve customer experience.
This can be achieved by simply sending messages to passersby via geofencing, and notifying them of the free WiFi they can enjoy while in your place.
And don’t forget this has its benefits.
vi) It secures your products: Since you can keep track of people’s location with geofencing, it can also be used for tracking your employees and products.
With this technology, you get notified when an employee leaves his/her duty post or when a product is illegally removed.
Case Studies From Companies Using Geofencing
The use of geofencing is gradually becoming popular, though it’s a new marketing practice. Good news is, businesses have recorded lots of success with it. Let’s see:
i) Elle Magazine successfully increased sales with ‘shop now!’ mobile pop-up to connect potential buyers to selected stores, using the location-based offer. All thanks to geofencing.
ii) Uber Car Hiring Service also used geofencing at LAX to notify people around that they can get a cab to wherever they’re going within a minute, just with a click.
iii) Wal-Mart is another brand making it real big with geofencing. Their app comes with a store mode that picks up signals when a buyer is within the store, and delivers coupons and e-receipts.
Geofencing Tools
Getting appropriate marketing tools will help you get things done on time and more efficiently. Below are some of the best tools you can use:
i) xAd: This tool eliminates every form of assumption in marketing, because it serves messages based on your potential consumer’s location.
xAd has a proprietary platform that automatically creates boundaries around places often visited by a consumer. For example, a Restaurant, Shopping mall.
It’s with these insights that marketers can target ads to their customers when they’re within those locations.
ii) Koupon Media: This tool prompts a targeted offer to shoppers when they’re within the store.
Koupon Media has features that study the behavioral attribute of buyers within the geofenced locations, and uses it to present the buyer with offers they can’t resist while they are shopping.
iii) NinthDecimal: This helps marketers to target consumers near their own stores or competitor’s locations, with tangible media ads through phone calls, appointment requests, and couponing.
It also has a walking and driving map to easily lead your customers to your nearest sales point.
In Conclusion
“In today’s modern world, people are either asleep or connected.”
– Janice H. Reinold said.
Your customers are attached to their mobile phones all the time. It’s your responsibility to engage these customers when they’re not asleep.

The War of Gog and Magog: Ezekiel 38-39

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:44:00 +0000

AI Overview
The prophecy of the War of Gog and Magog, found in Ezekiel 38–39, describes a massive, future invasion of Israel by a coalition of nations led by a figure named Gog. In this vision, God intervenes supernaturally to destroy the invading forces on the "mountains of Israel" to reveal His holiness to the world.
The Coalition of Nations
The prophecy identifies a leader, Gog, from the land of Magog, who serves as the "chief prince" of Meshech and Tubal. He leads a multi-continental alliance against Israel:
Magog, Meshech, and Tubal: Often identified with territories in modern Turkey, Russia, or the Black Sea region.
Persia: Modern-day Iran.
Cush: Regions south of Egypt, primarily modern Sudan and Ethiopia.
Put: Ancient Libya or North African regions.
Gomer and Beth-togarmah: Peoples from Asia Minor/Turkey and the far north.
Key Events of the War
Preparation and Invasion: Gog conceives an "evil plan" to plunder Israel, which is described as a land of "unwalled villages" where people dwell securely after being gathered from the nations.
Divine Intervention: As the armies advance "like a cloud covering the land," God unleashes a series of judgments: a massive earthquake, pestilence, flooding rain, great hailstones, fire, and brimstone.
The Aftermath: The destruction is so vast that it takes Israel seven months to bury the dead and seven years to burn the abandoned weapons for fuel.
Theological Interpretations & Timing
The "Latter Years": The prophecy explicitly states this occurs in the "latter days," leading many scholars to link it to the end-times or the period surrounding the Second Coming of Christ.
Ezekiel vs. Revelation: While Revelation 20:7–10 also mentions "Gog and Magog," many theologians distinguish the two events. Ezekiel’s war involves specific northern nations before or during the Tribulation, whereas Revelation’s battle occurs at the end of the Millennium and involves all nations.
Modern Context: Some contemporary Bible scholars associate the "far north" with Russia and suggest the current geopolitical alignments between Russia, Iran, and Turkey are precursors to this prophecy.

Also:

The Battle of Gog and Magog
The battle of Gog and Magog described in Ezekiel 38 and 39 is perhaps one of the most debated events in biblical prophecy. Some approach these chapters as non-literal, having only an idealist or figurative meaning, without any historical reality. This provides no possibility of a future fulfillment of the details contained in the passage, which leaves the reader to find a meaning relevant to present circumstances without any significant controls to govern that meaning.
Others approach these chapters as having a historical fulfillment, being an invasion of some kind, but differ on its participants, location, and timing. One group considers this invasion as already fulfilled in an ancient battle during the Old Testament era, one option being the events in Esther 9. Usually, this is an attempt to avoid a future fulfillment involving Israel as a nation. Neither an idealist/figurative view nor a past fulfillment view do justice to the details of the passage, which means its fulfillment is yet future, but when, where, and with whom?
Commentators propose a number of options regarding timing of the invasion. These include:
1. Just prior to the onset of the seven-year Tribulation
2. After the Tribulation period begins
3. Around the middle of the Tribulation
4. Just prior to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ
5. Between the Second Coming and the commencement of the Millennium
6. At the end of the Millennium
Each of these views has some support from the biblical data, which is why the debate continues.
Which Nations Will Invade Israel?
The key consideration is the content of Ezekiel 38 and 39. What features of these chapters indicate the timing of the invasion, its participants, and location? All agree that the nation of Israel is one of the participants, being the one invaded, and Ezekiel’s messages have focused on the possession of the land, which points to the location as the Promised Land, Judea and Samaria. Not all agree on the identity of Gog and Magog, but most agree that Gog is a title for the ruler of Magog, not a personal name, even though a person is in view. Knowing the identity of Magog helps work out the context of the battle.
Magog occurs in the Old Testament on four occasions (Genesis 10:2; 1 Chronicles 1:5; Ezekiel 38:2; 39:6). It identifies a descendant of Japheth in the table of nations, which scholars trace to the ancient Scythians. These tribes lived in the region north of the Black Sea and some consider their territory stretched from Ukraine to Siberia. Further, Ezekiel describes Gog as “the prince of Rosh” (38:2, NASB), which also suggests a location in Russia, although the use of “Rosh” is debated. Thomas Ice argues for “Rosh” being a noun labelling a nation, as against an adjective describing “prince” (“chief prince,” ESV). Hebrew grammar supports this usage and, as a noun, it can be traced to “Tiras” in Genesis 10:2, adding more support for a Russian identity. It thus appears that this invasion includes an army from the north of Israel composed of modern Russians.
Two other participants are named in this group, Meshech and Tubal, both of which are included in the table of nations in Genesis 10. Scholars agree that Meshech refers to the location of modern Turkey, southeast of the Black Sea. Tubal is always grouped with Meshech and his descendants also occupy modern Turkey. Modern Turkey is increasingly dominated by Islam, moving further away from ties to Europe. It seems that Turkey also participates in this invasion of Israel, joining with the Russian contingent.
Added to these are “Persia, Cush, and Put” (Ezekiel 38:5), as well as “Gomer and all his hordes” and “Beth-togarmah” (38:6). Persia is clearly modern Iran, another Islamic nation, whose name was changed to Iran in recent times. Cush and Put are more difficult to identify, as is Beth-togarmah. Scholars consider Cush is the nation of northern Sudan, an Islamic one, and Put is Libya, another Islamic (mainly Sunni) nation, and possibly includes Algeria and Tunisia because the ancient borders extended west beyond modern Libya. Gomer’s descendants inhabit the west-central region of Turkey, joining with Meshech and Tubal. Beth-togarmah literally means “house of Togarmah,” who is identified as a son of Gomer in the table of nations (Genesis 10:3). This is another participant located in Turkey.
The invading armies include Russia and Turkey from the north, Sudan/Libya (possibly including Algeria and Tunisia) from the south and west, and Iran from the east.
In total, the invading armies include Russia and Turkey from the north, Sudan/Libya (possibly including Algeria and Tunisia) from the south and west, and Iran from the east. Consequently, sometime in the future, an enormous military force surrounds Israel, which is far beyond their capacity to defeat. God alone can deliver them from annihilation, which Ezekiel reveals He does (38:17–23; 39:1–6).
When Will the Nations Invade Israel?
The question remains as to the timing of this invasion. Several descriptions in these chapters in Ezekiel provide some insights as to when it occurs. The first includes time referents, “After many days,” “In the latter years” (38:8), and “In the latter days” (v. 16), which best correspond to prophetic descriptions of the consummation of God’s dealings with Israel and the nations (Isaiah 2:2; Daniel 10:14). This is yet to occur, so the battle is still future and would be best placed in the 70th week of Daniel 9:26–27, the Tribulation, when God resumes the completion of His plan for Israel.
The second describes the occupants of Israel as “gathered from many peoples” and “from the nations” (Ezekiel 38:8, 12), which cannot be an ancient past return to the land, such as from Babylon or Medo-Persia, because the returned exiles did not come from multiple nations. This best describes the near past and present return of Jewish people to Israel, which affirms the timing is future to now.
The third describes these returned Jews as “now dwell(ing) securely” (38:8, 11, 14) and without the need of protective defenses identified as “unwalled villages” and “without walls, and having no bars or gates” (v. 11). Further, the inhabitants are characterized as “the quiet people” or at rest (v. 11), which suggests they are unconcerned about external threats and have no fear of attack. This description extends to all the inhabitants, not just a segment of them.
At this point, scholars diverge, based on the interpretation of these phrases. Some consider Israel’s present state to fit them because the nation is secure on account of its military might, being confident in its capacity to defeat any foe. This would mean the battle of Gog and Magog would precede the Tribulation, not requiring an additional element of peace provided by the Antichrist’s covenant with Israel in the Tribulation Period (Daniel 9:27).
Others consider Israel is not presently at rest, “quiet people,” even though having a significant degree of security, because the nation is on constant alert against an attack from its enemies. An additional protection is necessary to bring the nation to a point of rest. The strong covenant with Israel enacted by the Antichrist for seven years (i.e. The Tribulation Period, Daniel 9:27) provides this additional protection. The covenant, however, is broken at the midpoint, so Israel only enjoys additional protection in the first three and a half years. This means the battle of Gog and Magog would occur in the first half of the Tribulation, probably near its end.
Several commentators consider other factors, which suggest the timing is at the end of the Tribulation, but it cannot account for these descriptions of Israel being at rest and secure. In the second half of the Tribulation, the Antichrist violently persecutes the Jews and all who will not take the mark of the beast. Some other commentators suggest the timing is before the Millennium after the Tribulation, which will provide the best degree of rest and security, but it does not fit the eventual outcome of deliverance by God, which is the spiritual renewal of the nation. Israel’s repentance occurs at the return of their Messiah at the conclusion of the Tribulation (Zechariah 12), which would be prior to this proposed timing.
It is no wonder that Israel’s enemies desire to possess such riches by annihilating its citizens, but to no avail as they are destroyed by divine intervention.
This leaves two options as the only viable possibilities that fit the critical contextual data: The battle of Gog and Magog is prior to the Tribulation, or it is in the first half of the Tribulation, probably near the breaking of the covenant by the Antichrist. The second option seems best for a number of reasons but still has difficulties to explain.
It best fits the description of security and rest as characteristic of Israel prior to the battle occurring. The covenant of peace operating in the first half of the Tribulation provides that security and rest, beyond Israel’s own capacity to ensure it. Further, a battle that effectively removes the world influence of Russia and other nations would leave a power vacuum that the Antichrist could use to rise to world domination at the midpoint of the Tribulation (Revelation 13). In addition, a battle that violates the Antichrist’s covenant with Israel provides a catalyst for him to break it and pursue his full agenda. Its major difficulty is dealing with the description of burying the dead for seven months and burning the weapons for seven years (Ezekiel 39:9, 12). This is not insurmountable, but a battle before the Tribulation provides more time for accomplishing these two descriptions.
Why Do the Nations Invade Israel?
Another aspect needs inclusion. What motivates this invasion of Israel? The answer is spoils of war in the form of material gain (38:12–13). The degree is described as “great spoil,” which involves “silver and gold” and “livestock and goods.” What was previously “a continual waste” (v. 8) and “waste places” (v. 12) has become a prosperous location of great wealth. This is true of modern Israel, replete with commercial activity, natural resources, innovative technology, and abundant agriculture. It is no wonder that Israel’s enemies desire to possess such riches by annihilating its citizens, but to no avail as they are destroyed by divine intervention.
Finally, the most significant element for this battle is God’s part in it. As much as this coalition of nations against Israel is pursuing its own purpose, Ezekiel reveals that God is controlling the situation for His purpose. He states, “I will turn you about and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you out” (v. 4). This control of the conflict is repeated several times, emphasizing who is orchestrating the battle. God’s purpose is self-revelation—“they will know that I am the Lᴏʀᴅ” (vv. 23, 39:6–7, 13, 21–22, 28). God is sovereign over all, even the invasion of a powerful enemy against His people.
In summary, the battle of Gog and Magog is the future invasion of a coalition of nations, including Russia, Turkey, Iran, Sudan, and Libya (Algeria/Tunisia), against Israel near the midpoint of the Tribulation, motivated by acquisition of material wealth. The outcome is a devastating defeat for Israel’s enemies by divine intervention, which exalts God as the true victor and safeguards God’s people for spiritual blessing.

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Gog and Magog in Ezekiel vs. Revelation
Although the terms Gog and Magog appear in proximity in both the book of Ezekiel (Eze. 38:2-3; 39:1-11) and the book of Revelation (Rev. 20:8), a comparison of these passages indicates two different historical events are in view.
because Gog and Magog are mentioned as combatants in a war at the end of the Millennium ( Rev. 20:7–9 ), many have identified the two battles in Ezekiel and Revelation as one and the same. However, the events following the battles are quite different, as are the events preceding each battle. In Ezekiel’s prophecy, the battle of Gog and Magog is used by God to draw Israel to Himself; in Revelation the battle of Gog and Magog comes after God has drawn His people to Himself for one thousand years of blessing during the Millennium. Therefore, it seems best to place Ezekiel’s battle in the Great Tribulation.
Gog of the land of Magog invaded Israel in Ezekiel 38, prior to the rebellion mentioned in Revelation 20 at the end of the millennium. Differences between the two passages include:
The Ezekiel invasion is from the north, the rebellion in Revelation 20 is from the entire earth.
The Ezekiel invasion requires seven years to dispose of weapons, whereas the Great White Throne judgment immediately follows the rebellion in Revelation 20.
The Ezekiel invasion occurs before the establishment of the kingdom, whereas the event in Revelation 20 occurs afterwards.
The Ezekiel invasion is destroyed on the mountains of Israel, whereas the Revelation 20 force is destroyed around Jerusalem.
“In Ezekiel Gog was the leader and Magog his land, while in Revelation both represent nations.”
This prophecy of Ezekiel concerning Gog and Magog cannot be identified with the prophecy in Re 20:7-10 for three reasons. The former takes place before the Kingdom is established on earth; the latter after this Kingdom. Also, in Ezekiel the invasion comes only from the north, but in Revelation it comes from the 'four quarters of the earth.' Furthermore, the rebellion of Gog and Magog and their destruction in Re 20:7-10 marks the ushering in of the eternal state (Re 20:11-15); but in Ezekiel it is preliminary to the Millennial Kingdom on earth.
The fact that Gog and Magog are mentioned both in Ezekiel 38:1,6 and in Revelation 20:7 indicates to some a connection. However, Gog is a human leader and Magog are a people in Ezekiel 38, but their meaning is not defined in Revelation 20. In other respects the scene is different. In Ezekiel life goes on after the war, requiring months to bury the dead. The war in Revelation 20 is followed immediately by the destruction of the earth and the creation of the new heaven and new earth. The war in Revelation 20 concerns Jerusalem. The war of Ezekiel does not touch Jerusalem. The scenes are different.

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The War of Gog and Magog: Ezekiel 38-39
Israel is currently under attack, but its greatest threat is yet to come. In the not-too-distant future, a coalition of overwhelming forces will soon be arrayed against it. Only God can save Israel from total annihilation. We will reveal the identity of each nation seeking Israel’s destruction. Who exactly are Gog and Magog? Are they leaders, nations, or spiritual entities? Will Russia be involved in this notorious battle? The timing of this battle has been hotly debated down the years, and no-one really knows precisely when it will take place.
There’s a war soon coming in the Middle East that will cause God himself to rain down hailstones and fire upon the invading armies who’ve come to take spoil from God’s beloved Israel and a great earthquake that will annihilate them in their tracks. And what if there were preparations being made right now for this future conflict? This war of ‘Gog and Magog’ fits the prophetic timeline only when the restrainer has been removed from the earth prior to the seven year tribulation period. Yet even today, the nations are ready; the pieces on the chess board are being moved into place, causing a chain reaction that will hurl like minded nations headlong into direct conflict with Israel.
In scripture, Gog is mentioned as the leader and Magog is a people. Gog is the ruler of a people called Magog and the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal. One day this Gog will lead a coalition of nations arrayed against Israel and God will destroy them all in the process for their rebellious arrogance and misplaced allegiance. Few realize that Ezekiel’s prophecy of this coming invasion from the North of Israel was written 2500 years ago and is yet to come to pass, it is still a future event.
This leader Gog will lead a force from the land of Magog. So where is Magog exactly? Well, he’s mentioned in Gen 10:2 as one of the sons of Japheth and again in 1 Chronicles 1:5. Magog was identified as the land of the Scythian’s now occupied by Russia, the Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Flavius Josephus described the ancient Scythian’s as coming from the land of Magog. The Scythian’s were mentioned in the NT in Col 3:11 and were a barbaric race which inhabited the steps of Russia. Today Magog would basically cover the ‘Stan’ nations i.e. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and finally Afghanistan, which is another territory that Russia has sought to, conquer in recent memory.
Most scolars declare Magog to be the land of modern day Russia and one should not doubt their research. Now most scholars conclude that Rosh is the old name for Russia. The term Rosh was used in the time of the Egyptians and referenced a nation to the far north of Egypt, so people would have been very familiar with Rosh as a nation in the time of Ezekiel. Many believe that Rosh is the old name for present day Russia which will lead several armies in coalition against Israel. Regarding the term Gog, is more likely a title like Pharaoh, rather than a direct name of someone, but this Gog is not to be confused with the Antichrist, he is separate and distinct from him. Let’s not forget that the Antichrist will eventually lead a Western coalition of forces but this Gog is leading an army from the north along with Magog in direct opposition to God himself, so the Antichrist and Gog are two separate leaders and not to be confused with each other.
Her'es a list of all the nations that will come against Israel in these last days as part of this coalition of forces coming down from the North, described in Ezekiel chapters 38-39. Listing the old name for the nation and the equivalent modern day version. Starting with Gog the leader of Magog (representing Ukraine and western Russia) along with Rosh, which is Russia, then Meschech and Tubal which comprises of Modern day Turkey, then Persia, also known as Iran, then Ethiopia and Cush which would be Sudan, then Put which is Libya, then Gomer which is likely Turkey or modern day Germany, and finally Beth Togarmah, which manly believe to be Turkey as well. So to summarize, the nations that will invade Israel in the coming tribulation period from the North will be, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Iran, Ethiopia, Sudan, and possibly Somalia too, Libya, and finally Germany. But why? Why would they even consider doing such a thing? Well one thing is for certain, Russia has had a long history of antisemitism along with the other nations. They all have historically harbored a supernatural hatred for Israel and that’s why Germany is included on that list as a potential invader in coalition.
Regarding Russia, have you noticed this nation has been on the rise of late? Russia has flexed its muscles recently on the world stage for sure. Firstly, Russia meddled with Georgia in 2008, then again in Crimea in 2014 where it annexed that nation and testing the boundaries of the old Soviet Union. Russia then backed separatists in 2014 in Eastern Ukraine and Russia has also been linked with the deaths of 298 people based upon a Dutch inquiry into the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines flight over the Ukraine, three years ago. Based on cell phone records and eye witness accounts as part of the investigation, a powerful SA-11 surface to air missile was used to shoot down this plane, much to everyone’s horror.
Then in 2015, Russia sent some armed forces to Iran and then into Syria to assist the Syrian leader Bashar al Assad’s crumbling regime. To top that, for the first time, Russia has finally attained the warm water port of Tarsus in the Mediterranean Sea, which it has yearned for down the centuries. Russia had a large presence in Syria, taking advantage of the nation’s instability and using it to potentially establish a beachhead for further advancement in the Middle East at a time of its choosing. The trouble is Russia now has a military presence situated directly North of Israel for the first time and this is prophetically significant. If you run a straight line from Israel on any globe you will see that Moscow is directly north of it, along with Turkey which will be one of the invading nations also.
Now, some believe this war of Gog and Magog will take place in the first half of the tribulation period, while others believe it to be merely another account of the battle of Armageddon. Yet it will probably occur prior to Armageddon and within the tribulation because it occurs in a time of peace when the peace treaty with Israel is in full effect. Ezekiel chapter 38 describes a time when Israel is at peace with its surrounding neighbors and this coming conflict fits the prophetic timeline of occurring during the tribulation period, once this future peace treaty is in effect.
Now one of the most intriguing aspects of this coming war in verse 4 of Ezekiel 38, is the fact that the army is riding from the north on horseback! Yes horseback! These horsemen have shields, swords and helmets. But of course today no army would fight like that. This intriguing statement infers that perhaps, due to the cataclysmic incidents in the tribulation period, man will revert back to ancient weaponry. Others believe it suggests the usage of an Electro Magnetic Pulse prior to this war, in which some of the modern weaponry would be rendered useless, leaving only ancient weaponry as the means for attack. Or could these terms simply be metaphors for modern weapons? In Ezekiel 39:9-10 it mentions that it will take seven years for the weapons to be gathered and used as fuel. Could this time frame of seven years be coincidental with the time it takes for the effects of radiation to dissipate?…We shall see.
Remember, Israel is described as a land of un-walled villages at this time, a land without walls where Israel dwells safely, without gates or bars. As you know Israel today has walls in place and some built recently for its protection against occasional terror attacks from the Palestinian territory. Based on this scripture we know this War of Gog and Magog is a future event and the walls that currently stand in Israel will be somehow removed and Israel will be living peacefully prior to this Northern invasion.
Now, in verses 12 and 13, it states that these invading marauders have come to take a ‘spoil.’ But what spoil are they talking about? In the past few years Israel has gone from a nation with very few oil and gas resources into one that could eventually rival Russia as an exporter of natural gas to Europe. Russia benefits greatly from its export of gas west to Europe topping the list of nations having the most natural gas reserves. But Israel recently discovered the Leviathan gas field 50 kilometers offshore having 22 TCF of gas and scheduled to come online in 2019. Then it has Tamar gas field holding 9 TCF in gas reserves. These discoveries have been described as game changers by those in the oil industry. Their discovery alongside another recent oil field having 1.4 billion barrels of oil has caused a stir on the geopolitical scene. Israel could become a competitor with Russia, vying to service the winter energy supply of the European continent. This is significant. Israel is also abundant in food, technology and other natural resources.
Could it be that Russia and the forces it’s allied with come to strip Israel of its oil and gas resources? You see, Russia is rich in gas but has hard to recover oil that’s only economic at higher oil prices. Did you also know that despite being the biggest country in the world in terms of landmass, Russia has a relatively small population of close to 150 million, yet it imports 40% of its food supply, meaning that it cannot currently produce enough food for its own people? In Ezekiel 38:4 it says that God himself will put hooks in the jaws of the invaders from the North. One might believe that one of the spoils mentioned in Ezekiel’s passage is food and during the tribulation period crops will no doubt fail throughout Russia which is already reliant upon other countries to feed its population, and will resort to looking for food down south.
Another reason for this hook could well be the desire for Islamic Nations headed up by Russia to wipe Israel off the map. If you review the nations mentioned earlier they are all largely Islamic and harbor an intense distrust and even hatred for Israel. Could it be that the peace treaty that the Antichrist initiatives with Israel, be thwarted by the Islamic nations at the last minute or perhaps Russia is in such dire need to ensure the survival of its people they need food so badly, justifying an invasion to the south?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:47:00 +0000

New World Order

In international relations theory, the term "new world order" refers to a new period of history evidencing a dramatic change in world political thought and the balance of power. However, in conspiracy theory, the term "New World Order" (the capital letters are distinguishing) refers to the advent of a cryptocratic or authoritarian world government.

Alternative World Scenarios for a New Order of Nations [144 Pages] - The author of this futures work presents scenarios appropriate for near- to long-range planning of the activities of the Department of Defense and its agencies out to the year 2020 and beyond. Additionally, the scenarios, because of their design, are useful to other departments of the U.S. Government, industry, business, and academia. Forecasts developed for this report use a technique created by the author for monitoring past, present, and future global trends and events, which he molds into plausible and thought-provoking scenarios of the United States in the world's societies of tomorrow. These plausible scenarios are provided so that users can build policies and make decisions while anticipating and judging their consequences before implementation. Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Military environments, Alternative world scenarios, Active and reserve components, Long-range planning.

American Exceptionalism and a New World Order [23 Pages, 300 kb] - The United States has a long tradition of placing American values at the center of foreign policy. Establishing a new world order that is based on three cornerstones will begin to shape a new leadership role for the U.S. This involves a shift to soft power as the core competency of foreign policy. In addition, the U.S. needs to lead in developing key innovations and developing a global economic strategy. Also, the U.S. needs to maintain military might unequaled in the world. Achieving this new strategy rests upon international organizational change with the U.S. leading the way for a new world order.

An Analysis of the 'New World Order' and Its Implications for U. S. National Strategy [40 Pages, 1.91MB] - The Cold War is over and the result is a transition from a bipolar world of US vs. USSR to a multipolar world or New World Order where the US remains the only military superpower. However, this status is tentative for the United States. Like all the great superpowers in history, the US is about to let the weight of its military establishment, drag its economy into collapse. This paper looks at the implications of President Bush's new world order, and the opportunities it presents the US to preserve a peaceful international environment with an open international market system while at the same time retaining its superpower status. The paper establishes that the new world order is more than just rhetoric or simple statement of fact, it exists but is ill- defined. As a result, the paper proposes to define the term as a democratic world where all nations join together in partnership and cooperation under the framework of the United Nations to establish peace, prosperity, and justice for all.

Arms Control and Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: How Will They Impact U.S. Deterrence in the New World Order?, April 1996 [29 Pages, 1.1MB] - In the absence of a superpower balance, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) are rapidly proliferating. As U.S. defense resources shrink, options to address the new WMD threat are also shrinking. These dynamics are changing the role of Arms Control (AC) and U.S. deterrent strategy. This paper analyzes the relationship between proliferation of WMD, AC, and the status of U.S. deterrent forces in the new world order. It argues that motives to proliferate are to strong to be overcome by AC, but that AC can play a positive role in improving U. S. and International security. Further it argues that regardless of its efficacy that AC is unavoidable; and that U.S force structure decisions are driven by our perception of the threat, not AC agreements or actions.

Back to the Future: The Role of the Founding Fathers in Shaping the New World Order [145 Pages, 5.67MB] (Master's Thesis) - This thesis asserts that America bas a core set of values inherited from the Founding Fathers that should serve as an integrating mechanism for strategic planning. The author shows how American core values developed and were operationalized in the operational codes (paradigms) of the Founding Fathers, the policy makers of the Cold War era, and contemporary policy makers as they set out to define America's role in the New World Order. The paper begins with an investigation of the role that paradigms play in science and asserts that operational codes serve the same purpose for nations. This parallel is investigated because it provides an insight into the nature of paradigm shifts. The United States has had two identifiable paradigms -- isolationism and the goal of nation building of the Founding Fathers and the containment policy of the Cold War. From there, the nature of American values is investigated. Inheritance from Western civilization, the Enlightenment, the rise of Individualism, and the development of a unique American philosophy are all important elements in the nature of American values. The Declaration of Independence is shown to be an embodiment of these unique values. The best articulation of the operational code of the Founding Fathers is found in George Washington's Farewell Address. The statements on foreign policy and articulation of values which lead up to and follow the Farewell Address are examined. The thesis then moves from the era of the Founding Fathers to the era of the Cold War. The operational codes of George Kennan and Paul Nitze are compared and contrasted. Nitze's operational code as applied to Vietnam is examined through several presidential administrations, and lessons learned are offered. The author criticizes the National Security Strategy of August 1991 for its neglect of values. He contends that the Nation's new operational code must be based on core values inherited from the Founding Fathers.

Beyond Stalemate: Deterrence and Nonproliferation in the New World Order, April 1994 [32 Pages, 1.7MB] - U.S. deterrence and nonproliferation policies need to be updated to meet the challenges of the new world order. To be effective, these new policies must be based on an understanding of potential proliferators motives for pursuing nuclear weapons, must be realistic, and must be implemented as early in the nuclear program as possible.

Building Order in The New World Order, 20 March 1992 [35 Pages, 1.2MB] - ThiWith the end Or the Cold War and the shattering or the Soviet Empire to pieces smaller even than that ruled by Peter the Great a recurring theme or the defense debate is that the world is too uncertain, that invisible dangers lurk behind every bush, and that we must retain a huge military presence to protect against instability and potential threats. Our grand strategy, once easily articulated by the single word, containment, has been superseded and the lack of an unambiguous threat has prompted a fractious debate. Whether the size or our military forces are be based on what is necessary to protect our interests, or on what our politicians deem is affordable depends on our ability to look ahead to see a clear path tor our nation, and define the role the military will play.

Bush's New World Order: The Meaning Behind the Words [74 Pages, 0.4MB] - The phrase new world order has been widely used on the political scene since first publicly coined by former president, George Bush. Although quickly adopted as the catch phrase of the 1990s, few people actually agree on what new world order really means. Since new world order, while elusive in definition, is most frequently used to describe aspects of the post Cold War international scenario, understanding the true meaning of that phrase is critical to projecting our future strategic environment and prospects for the new millennium. The attempt of this paper is to reveal that true meaning. Historical analysis will be the primary methodology used to reveal the meaning of George Bush's specific terminology describing his concept of new world order. In a January 16, 1991 speech, he identified the opportunity to build a new world order where the rule of law governs the conduct of nations, and in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the UN's founders. These words will be dissected and historically analyzed to develop a clear picture of new world order. Additionally, the primary mechanisms for implementing new world order will be addressed; and finally, specific strategic environment and national security implications will be drawn from those conclusions.

Changing the Acquisition Process for a New World Order, April 1993 [46 Pages, 1.8MB] - The Chinese blessing (or curse?), 'May you live in interesting times', is certainly applicable in today's world. The crumbling of the Berlin wall and subsequent end of the Cold War prompted former President Bush to proclaim a 'new world order' had arrived. Unfortunately, the new world order is more a world of disorder. This paper explores the ramifications of these profound changes to the Department of Defense's acquisition process. The changes are a result of the shift in national military strategy from reliance on forces- in-being to a reliance on military potential. The following changes are discussed in the paper: (1) A More Flexible Acquisition Process; (2) Fewer New Starts/More Existing Program Upgrades; (3) Decrease in the Number of Production Programs; (4) Increased Focus on the Ability to Reconstitute; (5) Increased Emphasis on Four ' ... ilities'; and (6) Increased Reliance on Prototyping. Because of its importance, the subject of prototyping is examined in detail. But a prototype in and of itself does not represent a warfighting capability. A strategy must be devised to take a system that has been developed through low rate production and then 'shelved', through production restart. The following recommendations are then discussed: (1) Design Producibility In From the Start; (2) Increase Manufacturing Technology and Process Investment; (3) Develop 'Smart' Shutdown Technologies; (4) Develop a Long Lead Procurement Strategy; (5) Increase Reliance on Government/Commercial Integration; and (6) Increase Use of Lean Production Techniques. If the United States is to remain the leader of the 'new world order', the DOD acquisition process must change to adjust to the 'interesting times' in which we live.

China's Response to the 'New World Order' [35 Pages, 1.3MB] - As world change swept the globe over the very recent past, U.S. President George Bush described an emerging 'new world order.' He stated a belief that the American system should form the basis of a new international system. He further stated that the U.S. must seek to take the lead in the new order forming such an international system. China is the largest of the very few remaining Marxist-Leninist states. As the third leg of the former world strategic triangle, China remained a challenge to U.S. foreign policy throughout the Cold War. Now that the Cold War is over, China is integral to the formulation of any new order. China's long history and cultural background differ significantly from America's. It is important that the U.S. understand, to the extent possible, how those differences will be reflected in China's response to the new world order. A review of Sino-American relations since normalization in the early 1970's shows reform that brought China increasingly closer to the U.S. until the Tiananmen Square tradegy in June, 1989. Since then, world events such as the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the Unification of Germany, U.S. dominance in Operation Desert Storm and the Soviet Coup have had great effect on China's leaders and the course of reform.

Deterrence for World Peace: A New World Order Option [41 Pages, 1.3MB] - The recent collapse of the former Soviet Union has brought an end to the Cold War and a beginning to change and uncertainty. The shift from a bi- polar to a multi-polar world has uncovered trends that make the future of the new world order complex and dangerous. The rise in regional conflicts, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, accelerated worldwide technology transfer, and the disposition of some 30,000 nuclear warheads in the Commonwealth of Independent States are but a few of the major trends that can have a profound effect on world peace if not controlled. To solve this problem of control will bring a new emphasis to the word 'deterrence.' For 45 years the word 'deterrence' has been most commonly used to describe the justification for a nuclear arms race between the United States and the former Soviet Union. Now, the global community of nations can 'deter' further proliferation of weapons of mass destruction by using the recommended three-part solution of a global nuclear test ban, worldwide acceptance of the Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS) system, and arms control enforcement using embargoes and economic sanctions by an international system like the United Nations.

Disorder in the New World Order [53 Pages, 2.34MB] - The phrase 'New World Order' has, over the last four years, become a much overused and relatively meaningless cliche. Its original intent was to provide a conceptual illustration of a tortured world community scintillatingly close to creating a new international order in the aftermath of the Cold War. This new international order would make possible a world without conflict, pain or hunger, where people of all regions could live in freedom as equals. This concept, and its attendant utopian condition, brings tears of hope from that portion of humanity which has the time to spend thinking on such things. However, in reality, thus far in our international devolution from 40 years of Cold War, we have made little, if any, progress toward realizing a New World Order. In fact, not only have we yet to decide upon what course we should take in pursuit of this new order, we have not even decided that this new order should be. In the interim, conflict, tension and war continue to expand around the globe while the major powers of the world, those with the potential to control global events for the betterment of the world community, continue in their intellectual struggle to determine a role for themselves.

Explaining the New World Order of the 1990's, 2003 [32 Pages, 1 MB] - The decade of the 1990s dramatically altered the Cold War international order in two fundamental aspects. In the political-economic sphere, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 shattered the ideological divide that had driven much of the policy-making during the Cold War. The new Russia and its former eastern European client states rushed to adopt Western economic and political models, albeit with varying degrees of success. The handful of avowedly Marxist states, such as Fidel Castro's Cuba and Kim Il Sung's Democratic People's Republic of Korea, remained mired in despotism and economic ruin. The People's Republic of China gradually became Communist in name only as it sought to adopt market capitalism and limited democratic reforms to modernize its moribund economy. The two books I review in this paper attempt to explain why these tectonic changes occurred in the international order during the 1990s and what implications these changes herald for the future. In Empire, authors Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri propose a new emerging system of international order based on an ultimately successful Marxist theory. In Culture and Carnage: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, Victor Davis Hanson proposes that the West's hegemony is derived from its cultural vibrancy which produced political, economic and military institutions far superior to anything in the non-Western world. Hardt and Negri have the much harder task. Despite their enormous efforts, they ultimately fail to validate Marxist theory as a viable predictor of the evolving world order. In contrast, Hanson has an easier job explaining why the West has won. His work convincingly shows that the West's military proficiency is directly attributed to its unique culture.

Grand Strategies for Dealing with Other States in the New, New World Order [14 Pages, 110kb] - The art of statecraft has often involved efforts to improve the security of one state by taking advantage of the power and influence of other states. This is, for example, why a state typically seeks to forge military alliances with others. It is also why some states provide economic and military support to client or dependent states and why some advocate the formation of multistate trading blocs. The theory behind the trading-bloc strategy is that cooperation on security matters is more likely when there are strong economic and other mutually beneficial connections among the members of the bloc. Among the tools that have been and are being used to influence other states are trade preferences, loans, loan guarantees, concessionary pricing for military sales, export-import financing, technical assistance, foreign aid, and international disaster relief. While humanitarian altruism is a major factor in foreign aid and disaster relief, statesmen often see the reduction of suffering as a method of improving the stability of a recipient state or as an inducement for a recipient state to cooperate more fully on security matters. Many ideas for making American foreign policy more effective have been offered in recent years. Some of them involve ways of prioritizing all forms of official, state-to-state assistance on those states whose stability or cooperation will most benefit the national interests of the United States. Obviously, there are many states that are already stable and already do generally cooperate with the United States. Canada, Japan, and the states of Western Europe (disagreements over the second war with Iraq notwithstanding) fall into this category. Certainly the economically advanced and politically stable states of the collective West have a common interest in suppressing the signal threat- global terrorism- of the new, new world order that sprang from the rubble of the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September 2001.

Gunboat Diplomacy in a New World Order: Strategic Considerations for U.S. Naval Intervention in the Twenty-First Century [94 Pages, 4.64MB] - With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, the threat of global war has all but been eliminated. At the same time, the Third World is experiencing a rising tide of instability, brought about by economic and social inequities, religious fundamentalism, and resurgent ethnic and political rivalries, and fueled by increasing military capabilities caused by the proliferation of advanced-technology weapons. As a result of these changes, U.S. security strategy is turning from its Cold War focus on global containment to the protection of U.S. interests against regional instabilities. The most dramatic confirmation of this change in direction was the announcement by the President on 2 August 1990 of a new National Security Strategy which would focus on maintaining stability and responding to regional crises, rather than on preparing for a global conflict against the Soviet Union. The past decade offers numerous examples of U.S. intervention in regional instabilities and crises that achieved varying degrees of success. Many of these interventions provide important lessons for the future in terms of how and when to use naval forces, and what the risks are to the national interest if a given mission fails to achieve its military or political objectives. This study is an examination of U.S. naval strategy and its evolving focus on crisis intervention, and how recent uses of U.S. naval force illustrate the need for a reevaluation of naval intervention and its implementation in a "new world order." To this end, three specific uses of U.S. naval power in the last decade are instructive: the U.S. intervention in Lebanon from March 1982-March 1984; U.S. naval operations off Libya from August 1981-April 1986 (including the 1986 air strike on Tripoli); and the Persian Gulf tanker escort operation of 1987-1988).

The Mexican Military Approaches the 21st Century: Coping with a New World Order [35 Pages] - The author's discussion of the roles and missions of the Mexican forces has special salience in this era of 'alternative missions.' Since the U. S. Army has had to deal with the same missions of civic action and counternarcotics, this study provides a timely and instructive lesson on how the Mexican military has wrestled with these challenges. North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA), Civic action, Counternarcotics, Mexico, Mexican army

Military Diplomacy in the New World Order, 25 April 1993 [58 Pages, 2.69 MB] - The New World Order--that articulated by former President Bush at the end of the Cold War era--remains yet unsettled and, in fact, undefined. It is filled with uncertainties and instabilities caused by traditional enmities now reemerging. This reemergence is a result of a world shift from bipolarism to polyarchism. The leadership role of the United States in this new era will, it is predicted, involve selective engagement. Additionally, the U.S. will exercise the role of a grand facilitator. In this altered security environment, this paper argues that coercive and cooperative military influence--especially that defined as military diplomacy--has a continuing place in the exercise of U.S. global leadership. This study reviews the historical record of military diplomacy and examines the past use of the four services individually and in joint operations. Particular analysis is given to the current adaptive planning construct established by the Joint Staff with regard to the employment of flexible deterrent options as an aspect of military diplomacy.

Military Operations Other Than War in the New World Order: An Analysis of Joint Doctrine for the Coming Era [71 Pages, 2.5 MB] - The United States has experienced numerous eras of distinct international systems which governed its relationship with other nations. The end of the Cold War symbolized a transition point between such systems. Historically, the nature of a new order as well as the transitional point between orders is fraught with uncertainty. Nonetheless, instruments of national power such as the military must respond to the changing system to remain effective. The post-Cold War era has been characterized by an increased use of the military for operations short of war to include humanitarian operations, peacekeeping, sanction enforcement, etc. Although these missions are not new to the Armed Forces, military doctrine has only begun to address the unique challenges involved in executing operations short of war. Joint Publication 3-07, Joint Doctrine for Military Operations Other Than War (MOOTW), lists six fundamental principles for MOOTW. This research applies the concepts embodied in the principles of MOOTW with three MOOTW models; the Range of Military Operations Model developed by the U.S. Army, the Crises and Lesser Conflicts Model developed by Rand researchers Carl H. Builder and Theodore W. Karasik, and the MOOTW Characteristics Model developed by RAND researchers Jennifer M. Taw and John E. Peters.

Military Review, September 1994. Volume 74, Number 9 [92 Pages]

National Missile Defense Strategy for the United States Post 11 September, 2001 - A Search for Security in a New World Order, 9 April 2002 [39 Pages, 2.1MB] - This paper examines the history of the ABM Treaty as it relates to missile defense and postulates strategic options as they relate to the U.S. strategic linkage to the treaty itself. This review includes 2nd and 3rd order effects for the U.S., as well as an assessment of strategic risk. Key nations included in this analysis include the U.S., Russia and China. In light of the current geo-political situation, the paper concludes with a recommended course of action and challenges for the future.

The New World Order: A Second Look. A Selected Bibliography. [43 Pages] - Partial contents of this report pertain to: U.S. National Security; the U.S. Military; U.S. Foreign Relations; International Security; North Atlantic Treaty Organization; International Relations; World Economic Order; and Specific Countries and Regions.

The New World Order: A Vision and Its Dimensions [46 Pages, 2.06MB] - The Cold War is over. The Soviet Union has been dissolved. The United States is no longer the world's preeminent economic power. Both Europe and Japan are enjoying a greater share of the world's resources. Still, from the perspective of combined military, economic, political, and diplomatic power, the United States has no equal. President Bush suggests that a 'New World Order' has emerged. Principles of democracy, shared responsibility and mutual cooperation among nations are the hallmarks of that new order. He recommends that the principles of the New World Order guide the foreign policy of the United States throughout the decade of the nineties and into the twenty-first century. This paper probes the dimensions of that New World Order. It discusses the likelihood of a unipolar or multipolar world, and concludes that a stratified world order might be a more apt description. It explores the role of international organizations within the new order. It examines implications for U.S. foreign policy, the Department of Defense, and the U.S. Army. The paper concludes by revealing why President Bush's vision is compelling.

Nuclear Strategy in the New World Order [19 Pages, 0.4MB] - For 50 years, the US depended on its nuclear arsenal to provide the underpinning to the deterrent aspect of its military strategy. However, on September 11, 2001, three of four hijacked civilian aircraft successfully completed their suicide missions against high value targets in the United States-the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. US military might, to include its overwhelming nuclear arsenal, failed to deter the terrorists who killed nearly 3000 people, most of whom were Americans. Although the US nuclear force structure, policy and strategy have thus far deterred a nuclear attack on the US, it is not properly postured as a viable deterrent against asymmetric attacks. However, given the proper force structure, policy and strategy, the US nuclear arsenal could provide a greater degree of deterrence against such attacks in the future. This paper will first briefly describe the strategy of deterrence and its underpinnings in basic psychology. Second, it will briefly overview the deterrence strategy of the Cold War and highlight the findings of the Nuclear Posture Review that will serve as the foundation of the Bush nuclear strategy. Next, this paper will consider the ethical issues surrounding the use of nuclear weapons, as both a deterrent and a combat weapon. Finally, the paper will analyze US nuclear strategy and make policy recommendations for using nuclear weapons as part of a deterrent strategy against future asymmetric attacks.

Peace in the Middle East: How It Will Impact the New World Order and the American Strategy [52 Pages, 1.91MB] - The historical events of the last decade have shifted the world system from the traditional West-East competition to cooperation and exchange of interests between the East and the West. Security and stability of the world has emerged as a very important element of the new world order. Since anything happening in any part of the world affects and gets affected by what happens in the other parts of the world, achieving peace and stability in the Middle East is important for the peace and stability of the world. Since the US is considered the leader of the new world system, the protection of international security and stability has become its responsibility. This paper begins with a description of threats and challenges to the peace of the Middle East, then discusses the bases of peace in the region, the impact of the regional peace on the new world order and the American strategy and ends with recommendations for achieving and keeping peace in the region.

Policing the New World Order: An Alternative Strategy. [32 Pages] - The United States responded decisively in the recent Persian Gulf crisis. The Bush Administration considered successful resolution of this crisis a precursor to the "new world order." Many questions now confront policy makers as America approaches the 21st Century. A pressing question is the following: Can America continue to serve as the world's policeman? America's challenge for the 1990s is to avoid the trappings of world policing that past superpowers have experienced throughout history "a la Pax Britannica." The United States can achieve this by, first, formulating its national security strategy to elevate the role of the United Nations as the world's policeman. Second, the United States' national security strategy should support the establishment of a United Nations standing peacemaking force. This force would provide the United Nations and international community a short-notice military employment capability during the early "warning period" of an impending crisis. Such a force would ultimately lower the United States' profile as the world's policeman in the emerging new world order. This essay addresses in five parts the establishment of a standing United Nations peacemaking force. First, it analyzes the circumstances and the international implications of America's involvement in the Persian Gulf War. Second, it discusses the resultant new world order and the United Nation's inability to enforce world order. Third, it highlights a deficiency in America's emerging defense strategy for the new world order. Fourth, it presents a proposal for a standing United Nations peacemaking force that the United States would support in the 1990s. And finally, it concludes with a view of America's future in policing the new world order.

Security Challenges for Small States in the New World Order: Options for Nepal [44 Pages, 1.9MB] - The post cold war period is marked by a new multi-dimensional strategic environment giving new focus to international relations and security of small states. Though the US is the only superpower, the world is moving to multipolarity and interdependence where regional powers and international systems have an increasingly powerful role. In such an environment small states are finding themselves even more vulnerable. This paper analyzes the security challenges small states face in the evolving new world order and suggests viable security options for small states in general and Nepal in particular. It analyzes the special characteristics of small states and their vulnerability to both traditional and new forms of threats. It relates national interests with world order and makes an in depth study of the security systems of balance of power and collective security from the perspective of a small state. It analyzes Nepal's regional and internal security environment as well as her historical setting and national interests. The paper then applies the concepts of security systems in the context of Nepal to determine viable security options.

Strategy and Logistics for the New World Order [138 Pages, 5.79MB] -An interdisciplinary analysis of the post-Cold War world to determine the optimal strategy to attain the national interests of the United States, and the requisite logistic structure to support that strategy. The optimal solution is found to be a strategy based on multinational defense centered on a permanent force of United Nations garrison port complexes. This multilateral force would be augmented by as small a national defense force as necessary to ensure national security. The thesis endeavors to reconnect the cultural and philosophical past of the United States with its immediate future. National interests are identified through examination of American Pragmatism and the philosophies of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. To determine the current status of common defense, based upon the Foreign Military Sales system, and analysis of current data is accomplished. Future threats to the United States are examined with special emphasis on nuclear terrorism. The ability of Islamic nations in North Africa and the Middle East to produce significant quantities of uranium is demonstrated. The grave political as well as ongoing environmental consequences of this recent capability are discussed in detail.

Technology Security Policy: From the Cold War to the New World Order [122 Pages, 5.42MB] -This thesis examines U.S. technology security policy in a transitional period marked by a rapidly changing security environment and an era of economic globalization. It provides an historical analysis of this policy since the onset of the Cold War and a financial analysis of the $40 million budget request for technology security, counter-proliferation, and export controls in the Clinton Administration's FY 1994 defense budget presentation. The historical analysis is based largely on the evolution and roles of two multilateral control regimes -- CoCom and the MTCR. The crux of this analysis is a detailed examination of the fate of the $40 million request as it moved through the congressional budget process. This analysis identifies problems and policy issues surrounding resource allocation for technology security. Based on the treatment of the budget request by the defense committees of Congress, a number of conclusions were drawn. Although technology security is considered a high priority item by both the executive and legislative branches of government, Congress appropriated funding for only 20 percent of the Administration's request. Significant decreases are attributed to inter-agency turf struggles, the slowness with which DoD policy-making positions were filled, and an initial spending plan that was perhaps overly ambitious and prematurely presented. Ultimately, two reviewing bodies were born out of legislative compromise; however, potentially redundant reporting likelihood of a decisive review of current proliferation policy.

Toward A Dangerous World: U.S. National Security Strategy for the Coming Turbulence [336 Pages]

Training Tactical Level Leaders in the United States Marine Corps: Meeting the Challenges of the New World Order [58 Pages]

Turkey's Role in the New World Order, Feb 1998 [7 Pages, 0.6 MB] - Turkey faces new challenges as the result of the political, military and economic developments we have been witnessing over the past decade, not the least of which is finding Turkey's role in the new world order that is now taking shape. If we were to make a brief evaluation of the present environment it would be correct to characterize it as a period of transition and transformation that calls for reorientations and new architectures.

The U.S. - Japan Security Alliance: Will it Survive in the New World Order? 1 April 1991 [126 Pages, 5.3 MB] - When George Bush took office in January 1989, he spoke of a new world order. The characteristics of this new world order may be more physical than the ideological Cold War. Some characteristics are emerging--resurfacing of old rivalries, greater interdependence between major powers, more weapons of mass destruction, information revolution, and the ascendancy of mass destruction, information revolution, and the ascendancy of economic power over military power to name a few. These changes mandate a review of old alliances designed to implement a national security strategy of containment. One candidate is the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan commonly referred to as the U.S.-Japan Security Alliance. Now that the Cold War is over, is this treaty still relevant? Given Japan's economic miracle, should the United States continue to provide Japan's national security and protect Japan's vital interests? This paper examines the treaty from three perspectives: Is the U.S.-Japan Security Alliance still relevant in the emerging world order from a military perspective? Is the U.S.-Japan Security Alliance still relevant from a political perspective? What roles should the United States and Japan undertake to promote stability in the emerging world order?

U.S. Strategic Maneuver: A New World Order Requires Some New Thinking, Not Reorganization, 21 June 1991 [39 Pages, 1.1 MB] - The current changes in the kinds of world threats we face and the requirement to downsize U.S. forces pose as significant challenge to the military as significant as those confronted at the end of World War II. The concept of Strategic Maneuver within the military, accompanied by a focusing process of (areas-to-threats-to-interests-to-resources-to-requirements) using the current organization, will allow a smaller force to operate effectively. The Persian Gulf War proved that the concept of Strategic Maneuver, formed by prioritizing and combining the individual and unique capabilities of each military services, is the best method to meet the future defense needs. The alternative plan of service reorganization and downsizing within compels the planners to unlearn all of the post-Viet Nam lessons. New mobility concepts such as the C-17's, for more efficient air lifting, and SL-7's for faster shipping cannot by themselves form the mindset needed to maintain efficiency. This paper argues that the wheel does mot have to be reinvented in order for a smaller one work as well.

The United Nations Security Council Veto in the New World Order [183 Pages, 6.01 MB] - The United States should move to replace the Security Council veto with a double majority voting method. United States' national security will improve as international security improves. International security will improve as the Security Council acts effectively. The Security Council will act more effectively as it becomes more authoritative. Promoting respect for the Council and a veto alternative are necessary to make the Council more authoritative. The double majority voting method best promotes Council authority.

A World 2010: A New Order of Nations [127 Pages, 5.69 MB] - In this book, A World 2010: A New Order of Nations, the author describes the decline of the influence of the 20th century superpowers. He explores the notion of a devolution of political and economic world power and forecasts a rise of a new order of nations. Further he advances the concept of a rise of 21st century postindustrial states to preeminence. These new realities could usher in a new era of relative world peace brought about by the crumbling of the Soviet Union, the formation of new global economic interrelationships and coalitions, and the advancement of former Third World nations to become competitive industrial states. The author concludes by forecasting the notion of a U.S. national requirement for a subdued worldwide military presence that serves a passive role, deterring conflict and preserving peace.

$112B Plan To Rebuild Gaza Called "Project Sunrise"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:23:00 +0000

AI Overview
"Project Sunrise" is a $112 billion, 10-year proposal led by Jared Kushner and U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff to reconstruct the Gaza Strip into a high-tech, luxury coastal hub, according to reports in late December 2025 and January 2026. Unveiled during the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, the plan aims to turn the war-torn territory into a "Middle East Riviera" with high-rise hotels, smart cities, and AI-optimized energy networks.
Key Aspects of Project Sunrise:
Vision: The 32-page blueprint proposes "pie-slice-shaped" smart cities, a new seaport, an airport, and a freight rail line.
Development Plan: The plan, which is slated to take 10 years, focuses on turning 70% of the coastline into commercial and tourist space. It is structured in phases, starting with "New Rafah" in the south to house 100,000 units before moving north.
Funding: The proposal includes a $112.1 billion investment strategy, with the U.S. potentially anchoring approximately $60 billion in grants and loan guarantees.
Conditions: The plan is heavily contingent on the total demilitarization of Hamas, with Kushner emphasizing there is "no Plan B" without verified disarmament.
Challenges and Criticism:
Security & Feasibility: Critics and officials doubt the feasibility of the project while Hamas is still active or without a stable political solution.
Humanitarian Concerns: The proposal faces backlash for focusing on luxury development rather than immediate, sustainable housing for the 2 million displaced residents, with some critics calling it a form of "colonization".
Rubble Removal: The plan faces a massive hurdle in simply clearing the estimated 60 million tons of debris, which the UN estimates could take over seven years.
Kushner has argued that with proper security, the project could transform the region rapidly, citing similar developments in other parts of the world.

Also:

Trump admin. pitches 'Project Sunrise' to turn Gaza into 'futuristic coastal destination'

The plan to transform the Gaza Strip into a "gleaming metropolis" was shown in 32 PowerPoint slides in a pitch to world governments and investors, the report said.
The Trump administration is pitching “Project Sunrise,” a plan that will reportedly rebuild the Gaza Strip into a “futuristic coastal destination,” according to a Friday report by the Wall Street Journal.
It noted that US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, along with US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and two other White House aides, drafted a proposal comprising 32 PowerPoint slides to transform Gaza.
The presentation, depicted as “sensitive but unclassified,” was shown to Turkey, Egypt, and several investors and wealthy Gulf kingdoms, according to the report.
This reconstruction would cost $112.1 billion over 10 years, according to the WSJ, which cited the draft proposal. The US would provide $60b. in grants, with the plan stating that Gaza would eventually be able to self-fund many projects.
The WSJ also notes that the presentation doesn’t specify which countries or companies would fund the reconstruction, nor where Gaza’s residents would live during the rebuilding. This has caused some US officials to express doubt about the plan, with some saying that Hamas will refuse to disarm in the first place.
The proposal was developed over 45 days, with Kushner and Witkoff enlisting the help of senior White House aide Josh Gruenbaum.
Officials cited by the WSJ said that if the project goes through, they plan to “update and revise the numbers about every two years as it unfolds.”
Kushner and Witkoff had previously met with Egyptian, Turkish, and Qatari officials in Miami to discuss developments in Gaza before the two US officials delivered their presentation.
Initial US announcement of Gaza takeover was made by Trump in February
The report by the WSJ comes almost a year after Trump initially announced during a joint press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the US would take over the management of the Gaza Strip for the foreseeable future.
He said that by taking over Gaza, the US will create economic development that will provide an “unlimited number of jobs and housing for the people of the area.”
“We’re going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it will be something that the entire Middle East could be very proud of,” Trump said.
Friday’s WSJ report cited supporters of Kushner’s and Witkoff’s latest proposal, who said that allowing Gaza to continue without reconstruction or development is a worse alternative. It also cited Trump’s vision of turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” as a better solution.

Also:

Kushner, Witkoff draft $112B proposal to develop Gaza into ‘smart city’ with luxury resorts

Trump administration reps have just revealed a grandiose $112 billion plan to rebuild war-torn Gaza into a futuristic international destination dubbed “Project Sunrise.”
The 10-year development plan, drafted by first son-in-law Jared Kushner, US special envoy Steve Witkoff, and two top White House aides, is currently courting investor countries with a 32-slide PowerPoint presentation detailing the bold plan to renovate burning rubble into beach resorts.
Illustration of the "Humanitarian Islands in Gaza" Plan: Interim Phase, showing various IDP cities, crossings, security inspections, and humanitarian aid routes within the Gaza Strip.
Gaza would see the development of luxury hotels, high speed rail and AI-optimized smart grid features that would revolutionize the small slice of the coveted Mediterranean coastline into a bustling metropolis, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“Gaza’s destruction has been profound, but we believe what lies ahead is not just restoration — it’s a chance to develop a gateway of prosperity in the Middle East with state-of-the-art infrastructure, urban design, and technology,” the executive summary slide read, according to the outlet.
The total $112 billion cost would be spread out over 10 years, with the US agreeing to “anchor” up to $60 billion in grants and guarantees on debts by raising industry funds.
“Reimagining Gaza as a ‘smart city’ with tech-driven governance and services,” one slide from the PowerPoint presentation beamed.
The ambitious proposal — developed within the last 45 days by Kushner, Witkoff, and White House aides consulted Israeli security experts about the path forward — further called for establishing a “Chief Digital Office and an innovation lab to define standards and guide policymaking.”
The presentation does not go into detail about which countries or companies would be investing in the rebuilding fund, according to WSJ.
Though the plan mapped out distinct phases of construction, it did not provide details for housing the 2 million Palestinians who would be displaced during the massive construction necessary.
There is an estimated 68 million tons of rubble in Gaza after thousands of Israeli airstrikes leveled cities during the two-year war in Gaza.
US officials who have knowledge of the proposal are skeptical that it will come to fruition because a condition would be Hamas agreeing to disarm, the Journal reported.
Witkoff, meanwhile, met Saturday in Miami with high-level delegations from Egypt, Turkey and Qatar to discuss implementation for the second phase of the Gaza cease-fire plan.

Also:

Project Sunrise: US $112bn Gaza plan turning war into a real estate bonanza
US envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and US President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner have pitched a $112 billion worth of “Project Sunrise” for the development of the war-torn Gaza. The pitch, termed as "sensitive but unclassified,” had 32 pages of PowerPoint slides, with skyscrapers, luxury resorts, high-speed rail, AI-optimised smart grids- a real estate bonanza. The plan doesn't clarify where the 2 million Gazans will live during reconstruction, which nation or companies will fund the project, or what the return on investment will be.
The Project Sunrise
It was developed by Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff with help from Israeli firms and security officials within 45 days. The proposal was shown to officials from Egypt, Turkey and Qatar in Miami on Friday. The project, reportedly, will cost around $112.1 billion and will take 10 years. It plans to develop the Gaza Strip in three phases- removal of destroyed buildings, unexploded ordnance and Hamas’s tunnels- construction of permanent housing, medical facilities, schools and religious spaces- then the luxury beachfront properties, tech corridors and modern transportation hubs will be developed. Geographically, it will start in the South from Rafah, Khan Yunis, then the central camps and finally Gaza City. The United States is supposed to anchor 20 per cent of the fund, and then there will be funding from foreign government grants and sovereign debts.
Why is the Project a trap?
The project classically fits within the framework of a neo-colonial, extractive capitalism. Here, extraction replaces occupation. The projected plan is based on the demilitarisation and decommission of Hamas' weapons and its tunnel network.
“You are not going to convince anyone to invest money in Gaza if they believe another war is going to happen in two, three years,” said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
But the proposal skips some of the fundamental steps. Normally, any conflict resolution will follow these steps chronologically: cease fire, political settlements, re-establishment of governance and then reconstruction. But here it's a ceasefire, then demilitarisation and then reconstruction. Political security and sovereignty to be figured out later. For Hamas, which was formed to end the colonial occupation of Israel and establish a Palestinian state, this will be hard to swallow. Further, there is no plan for the 2 million people to live during the reconstruction of Gaza. The humanitarian aid is conditional on the political surrender, which is a form of coercion. Moreover, the proposal frames this as “Dubai in the Mediterranean”, tries to erase years of trauma and the history and tries to portray it as an underutilised 'real estate'. Palestinians are promised jobs later, not ownership. The rebuilding process starts with holding 2 million people hostage. The core contradiction is how does free economy works on occupied and unfree people and land.

Pax Judaica, Jerusalem And AI Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 07:30:00 +0000

Pax Judaica (Latin for "Jewish Peace") refers to a modern theory, primarily found in online circles and some Islamic eschatological interpretations, envisioning a future global order dominated by Jewish or Israeli power, often linked to end-times prophecy, surveillance, and a "Jewish World Order". It's contrasted with historical terms like "Pax Romana," but in these contexts, it carries fears of technological control (AI, digital gulag) rather than traditional peace.
Key Aspects:
The NWO Theory: Describes a future global system where Israel or Jewish institutions exert total control, often leveraging advanced technology and surveillance.
Eschatological Roots: Draws from interpretations of Biblical and Islamic end-times prophecies (eschatology) about a coming world government or the role of Jerusalem in the final days.
Themes: Involves ideas like a digital surveillance state run from Jerusalem, AI control, and the subjugation of nations, contrasting with traditional power structures.
Cultural References: Appears in novels and media, sometimes as a fictionalized apocalyptic scenario or as a warning against perceived hidden agendas, such as in *Pax Judaica: The Novel* by Ahmad Ibn Fouad.
Origin of the Phrase: "Pax" (peace) and "Judaica" (Jewish things) combine to suggest a "Jewish peace," but the concept is often framed as sinister or controlling, unlike traditional ideas of peace.
In essence, "Pax Judaica" is a contemporary concept about power, technology, and prophecy, often circulating in niche spaces online and in certain religious discussions.
Empires rule through armies, territory, and conquest.
Today, Israel rules through leverage, institutions, surveillance, and proxy control.
The idea of Pax Judaica — not as a slogan, but as a framework for understanding how power now operates in the modern world. Why Israel’s influence appears disproportionate to its size. Why regional actors court Jerusalem before Washington. Why resistance hasn’t disappeared — but no longer has a path to victory.
From historical Pax systems to proxy rule, from geopolitical judo to surveillance and artificial intelligence, this is a breakdown of how dominance is enforced without occupation — and why the next phase of empire won’t announce itself.

Also:

Pax Judaica And The AI Gulag

It is framed as a coming global order in which Jews, or Israel more specifically, preside over a digital gulag – an omniscient AI surveillance architecture, run from Jerusalem, that subordinates nation states, controls access to basic services, and keeps the world’s population on a tight algorithmic leash.
It exploits real developments – Israel’s aggressive deployment of AI and surveillance technology, especially in Gaza and the West Bank; the steady normalisation of digital tracking and control across the planet; the hollowing out of democratic oversight in favour of automated decision-making – and that a secret cabal of Jews is orchestrating world events behind the scenes.
The era of US-led “Pax Americana” is ending. America is being weakened from within – socially, economically, morally. While that empire fractures, a new centre of gravity emerges in Israel. From Jerusalem, so the claim runs, a centralised world authority will govern through an integrated AI surveillance grid. Every communication, financial transaction, movement, and biometric trace is hoovered into this system. Algorithms assign people risk scores, compliance ratings, and social permissions. Access to banking, travel, health care, work – in some versions even access to food – becomes contingent on digital obedience to this hidden authority.
Palestinians are portrayed as experimental subjects: the test case for a planetary control system. The intensification of surveillance and targeting in Gaza and the West Bank is taken as proof of a prototype – the beta version of a digital prison to be rolled out globally once perfected. Where prisons used to have walls and bars, the new detention centre is a mesh of code, devices, and bureaucratic dependencies. All of this, we are told, is “Pax Judaica”.
Firstly, Israel’s integration of advanced technologies into its security and military apparatus is well documented by human rights organisations, investigative journalists, and even by participants in its own tech sector. AI-assisted target selection in Gaza, large-scale data mining, facial recognition systems in Hebron and East Jerusalem, integrated command-and-control platforms, and highly automated drone operations are not science fiction. They are real systems, built by real companies, deployed in real conflicts.
Secondly, Palestinians have been subjected for decades to forms of control, surveillance, and collective punishment that would be intolerable to most populations. Checkpoints, population registries, permit systems, settler violence, confiscation of land, and severe restrictions on movement and trade are not rumours but lived experiences. The addition of machine learning and ubiquitous sensors into this infrastructure does nothing to soften its impact. It hardens it.
Thirdly, the trend towards what might be called “digital enclosure” is not confined to one geography or one people. States and corporations across the world are building systems that harvest behavioural data, assign risk scores, and shape access to resources. Biometric IDs in India, social credit experiments in China, expanded surveillance powers in so-called liberal democracies, the commodification of personal data by global technology firms, and the growing interest of central banks in programmable digital currencies all point to a direction of travel in which the ability to live outside digital networks, or to escape their scrutiny, becomes increasingly fragile.
None of this is speculative. It’s happening in plain sight. There’s no doubt that a digitally mediated control society is possible. Key to any truthful understanding is how far we have already ventured into that territory, and whether we have the political imagination, institutional capabilities, and ethical courage to alter course.
Where an older generation spoke of bankers, newspapers, and revolutionary movements supposedly infiltrated by Jews, the current iteration swaps in AI systems, digital currencies, and global surveillance platforms. The villain remains structurally identical. Only the props have been updated.
Here are several characteristics.
One is the insistence on a single hidden centre of control. The contemporary world is anarchic, fractured, and multipolar. Power is distributed across states, corporations, military alliances, intelligence agencies, religious movements, criminal networks, and transnational capital. These forces compete, collide, and occasionally cooperate, but they don’t converge neatly into a unified command. To reduce this messy system to one nerve centre in Jerusalem is to replace complexity with a comforting goal: that someone is in charge, and we know who they are.
A second is the ethnic and religious coding. By labelling this supposed world order “Judaica”, the narrative implies that there is something inherently Jewish about total surveillance and algorithmic despotism.
A third is the portrayal of Palestinians not simply as victims of occupation and war – but as experimental subjects in a rehearsal for global enslavement.
· Responsibility is narrowed to a single alleged architect, and with that narrowing comes a strange absolution of everyone else. Security agencies in Asia, technology giants headquartered in North America, surveillance vendors in Europe, authoritarian regimes in Africa or Latin America – all of these actors, each building their own instruments of control, recede into the background. The complex circuitry of industrial economism, in which surveillance, data extraction, and militarisation are embedded, are revealed in the Jewish plot.
In that light, the “Pax Judaica” story looks like a glimpse behind the curtain.

Also:

Predictive History Channel Youtube, Transcript
Pax Judaica - The Greater Israel Project and Jerusalem as the Centre of the World
So this is the endgame guys. The Freemasons will create artificial intelligence in Jerusalem and this will become the world government.
Again, this is just conspiracy theory.
Don't believe this. This is just for fun. Okay? But if it happens like this, then that's interesting. Okay? But that's the grand plan to create a world government in Jerusalem.
And what's the center of this world government? Solomon's temple because the Freemasons believe that their founder was the one who created Solomon's temple. So by recreating Solomon's temple, you close the circle.
Okay. So again, this is very complicated. and I don't want to get too many things wrong, but this is a general gist of it. And so what and so what we can see is that all roads lead to Jerusalem. If that is the case, okay, then this helps us understand certain things about the world that otherwise don't make any sense. All right, so let's go over them.
The first thing that doesn't make any sense is America's war on terror. Yes, I understand that America was attacked on 911.
I understand that. But why did they have to go attack Libya and Iraq and all these other places that have nothing to do with al Qaeda? And the answer is they're trying to create something called the Greater Israel Project.
They're trying to have Israel become Pax Judea, the grand power in the Middle East, because that's important in all secret societies. Israel must become the dominant power in the Middle East.
Okay, so this helps us understand why the war on terror happened the way it did. That's number one. Number two is right now America is threatening to attack Iran. Why would they do that? Because in order for Pak Judaica to come into being, Iran must be taken out of the equation. Iran must be destroyed. Then if that were to happen, there would be no challenger to them. Okay, does that make sense, right? The third thing is Silicon Valley and AI.
So right now you have AI chat GPT which doesn't really do anything, okay? It makes cool images on your computer and it helps you cheat on in school. Okay, that's about it. Doesn't really do anything else. And if you don't go to school, then you're like, why am I using chatbot? Okay, and you're not going to pay a lot of money for it. So AI, it's a dead end. But at the same time, around the world, everyone's spending billions, $200 on data centers, right? So, everyone's putting money into AI, but then you're like, well, how can you make money off that?
If you think the answer is for you to use AI, well, it's hard to make money off that. But if the answer is to create an AI surveillance state, that makes a lot more sense, right?
A surveillance state, very easy, guys. We have it in China. Okay, it's digital ID and digital currency.
And the idea is that everything you buy, everything you do will be tracked. And so they can create a profile on you.
This profile will tell the government who you are, how you behave, what you think. Not only that, the government can also manipulate how you think, how you behave. Okay? And this is of course called the mark of the beast.
Right?
And so that's what Pax is a global AI surveillance system. Okay? It also helps us explain immigration in Europe.
Okay? Because the war on terror, you've sent these millions of refugees from Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq into Europe, which is causing a lot of conflict in Europe. Why? Why would that happen? Well, for Pax to come into being, you need to destroy the world. Okay?
So, I'm not saying this is true, but I'm saying like if the goal is Pax Judaica, it does help us connect the dots. It helps to explain why things are happening the way they are. Okay.
Also, the last thing is anti-semitism. Okay. So, you may have noticed if you're online, people don't like the Jews. And this is like out of nowhere after October 7th. Um, you have anti-semitism over the internet. I have criticized Israel before. Okay? But anti-semitism is not the same as anti-zionism, right? Zionism is a belief that Israel is a chosen people and the promised land and all that. Okay? But Judaism as religion, it's perfectly fine. So why would people not care about the difference between anti-zionism, and anti-semitism? Okay.
And you can argue it's all purposeful because remember the part of the plan is to force the Jews to return to Israel. That's very important for this plan to work out. Okay? It's key. That's why you are seeing so much anti-semitism around the world today.
Okay? And the last thing of course and something we'll discuss is something called the red heifer. So red heifers are red cows that are perfectly genetically modified and you need the red heifer in order to sacrifice. The red heifer first is used to purify the ground in order to reconstruct the Solomon's temple. Okay? And guess what? They've already sacrificed the red heifer first. So it seems as though everything is in place. All right?
They're moving towards Pax Judaica.
All right?
So let's discuss what will happen in the short term and in the long term if Pax really is the end goal. Okay. So when you have Israel fighting wars everywhere. Okay. The main enemy right now is Iran.
In Europe, you have the Europeans about to go to war with Russia. In Ukraine, America right now is threatening to attack Venezuela, South America.
You have 10% of the US Navy in the Caribbean and they're about to attack Venezuela.
You have China and Japan at conflict. You have India here and you have Africa. Okay. So, so what's going to happen in the short term? Okay. Well, what we know is that Europe is planning to go to war with Russia.
At the same time, you have a lot of immigrants in Europe and this is going to create civil wars in Europe. So you have both war with Russia as well as civil war. So Europe is kind of screwed. Okay.
America has the same situation where the left right divide is so polarized that eventually they'll go to war. If you read the news, you may have heard about the shootings at Brown University as well as this MIT physicists who were shot. So, random violence will be more and more common in the United States. And you can argue that's all deliberate because the idea is this.
Let's just say you have a jar. You put red ants in a jar and black ants in the jar. They get along fine. But you take the jar and you just shake it up and now they're at war with each other. Okay, that's what's happening where the left and right, they really don't like each other. They don't talk to each other and they refuse to engage in debate with each other, but then going to fight each other, in which case their mentality takes over and they start killing each other. So, we're going to expect civil war in the United States.
Then you're going to have the Americans start to attack Venezuela and possibly other countries in South America. So, America is in for a bad time.
Japan and China and India, they're all going to have conflicts with each other. But also, what we should expect is that America starts to embargo China, meaning America uses its sea power to block China from accessing resources, more seas. And China imports most of its oil and a lot of its food. So if there's a blockade of China, you can expect the Chinese economy to really suffer. All right. But and then what we can expect to happen is America at some point will go to war with Iran and this will destroy both countries. Iran will not lose this war, but it won't win this war neither because America is just going to bomb the crap out of Iran. It's going to send Iran back decades. But America will lose this war. But this is important because America loses war, it's forced out of the Middle East. And once it's forced out of the Middle East, all its military assets goes to Israel, which creates the Pax Judaica. Does that make sense, guys? That's the plan. Okay.
Okay, now you have Pax and what Pax will do is start to control the world because through chaos and conflict, Pax Judaica can make a lot of money, right? Because Pax, what's going to happen is that you have these technology companies like Google, they're going to move over to Pax Judea and build a global surveillance state.
You have civil wars, you need AI to control people. If you're going to war with Russia, you need weapons, okay? But you also need financing as well. So, you can expect a lot of banks to move to Israel and it's possible Israel becomes now the global reserve currency because everyone is trading with Israel.
If you're Russia, you need to your resources, right? Oil, energy, and grain. So, Russia controls a third of the world's carbohydrates. Guess what, guys? Israel controls Africa.
So, what will happen is that Russia and other countries will sign a trade agreement with Israel and Israel becomes a center of global trade.
Okay, does that make sense? So this is how Pax Judaica will profit and remember that Israel has the world's best intelligence agency the Mossad and what they can do is go around the world and create as much chaos as possible. So while the world is burning, Israel is profiting and that's what the future looks like for the next 10 20 years and this will of course lead to the rise of the antichrist who will take control of Pax Judaica and force the world to eventually attack Israel in something called the War of Gog and Magog and this will of course lead to second coming of Jesus. So, that's a grand plan. Right.
Any questions?
Does it make sense to you guys? I know it's evil and you know what? I could be a complete idiot. Okay. I could just make making all this up. But you have to ask yourself three questions. Does it connect the past? Does it explain what's happened in the past? Does it explain what's happening today?
And will these things happen in the future? Okay. So, we haven't lived for the future yet, but you can see the trends.
Okay. All right, guys. The promised land. This is the greater Israel project. Okay. This is what Yahweh promised to Abraham in the Bible. As you as you can see, it's pretty huge which is the entire Middle East extends from the Nile to the Euphrates in Iraq. Okay. It's a huge area and if you say the Israelites are sorry that the Israelis want to achieve the greater Israel project they call you conspiracy theorist like we don't want that. Okay but explain two things to me.
First of all why is the greater Israel map on a chevron of an IDF soldier. Okay these are soldiers Israeli soldiers and they wear the insignia of the greater Israel project. Okay this is the map.
Also, if you look at the flag of Israel, there are two blue lines, right? These represent rivers, the Nile and the Euphrates.
All right? So, if it's a conspiracy theory, then how do you explain these two things? All right. But I want to argue to, you know what, Pax, it's not about Israel or the greater Israel project. What it is ultimately is an alliance of transnational capital multinationals like Google and Meta and intelligence agencies that will be based in Jerusalem. Okay. So, secret societies will be based in Jerusalem and they will use it as a headquarters for their global conspiracy and they will profit from chaos and conflict in around the world because they think that this is the culmination of prophecy.
But it doesn't necessarily mean that Jews will be in charge. Okay? Does that make sense, guys? So, it's a much more complicated idea than people think it is.

US used powerful mystery weapon that brought Venezuelan soldiers to their knees

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:14:00 +0000

The US used a powerful mystery weapon that brought Venezuelan soldiers to their knees, “bleeding through the nose” and vomiting blood during the daring raid to capture dictator Nicolas Maduro, according to a witness account posted Saturday on X by the White House press secretary.
In a jaw-dropping interview, the guard described how American forces wiped out hundreds of fighters without losing a single soldier, using technology unlike anything he has ever seen — or heard.
“We were on guard, but suddenly all our radar systems shut down without any explanation,” the guard said. “The next thing we saw were drones, a lot of drones, flying over our positions. We didn’t know how to react.”
Moments later, a handful of helicopters appeared — “barely eight,” by his count — deploying what he estimated were just 20 US troops into the area.
But those few men, he said, came armed with something far more powerful than guns.
“They were technologically very advanced,” the guard recalled. “They didn’t look like anything we’ve fought against before.”
What ensued, he said, was not a battle, but a slaughter.
“We were hundreds, but we had no chance,” he said. “They were shooting with such precision and speed; it felt like each soldier was firing 300 rounds per minute.”
Then came the weapon that still haunts him.
“At one point, they launched something; I don’t know how to describe it,” he said. “It was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside.”
Fire and smoke rising from Caracas mountainside in the distance, with city buildings and homes in the foreground.
The effects were immediate and horrific.
“We all started bleeding from the nose,” he said. “Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move. We couldn’t even stand up after that sonic weapon — or whatever it was.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a question regarding whether Karoline Leavitt’s sharing of the post — captioned, “Stop what you are doing and read this…” — indicated the administration was verifying the veracity of the eyewitness account. An estimated 100 Venezuelan security forces were killed in the Jan. 3 attack, according to the country’s Interior Ministry.
It is unclear if any of those were caused by the mystery weapon.
The outmatched defenders were helpless as the small US unit wiped them out, the guard said.
“Those twenty men, without a single casualty, killed hundreds of us,” he claimed. “We had no way to compete with their technology, with their weapons. I swear, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The military has had directed energy weapons — which neutralize targets using focused energy such as microwaves or laser beams — for years, but this could be the first time it’s been used in combat by the US, an ex-US intelligence source told The Post. China reportedly used a microwave weapon in 2020 against Indian soldiers during a border dispute in Ladakh.
The source noted that those weapons have capability to produce at least some of the symptoms, including “bleeding, inability to move or function, pain and burning.”
“I can’t say all of those symptoms. But yes, some,” the source said. “And we’ve had versions for decades.” Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in handcuffs, escorted by two DEA agents.
After the raid, the message couldn’t be more clear: Don’t tread on Uncle Sam, the Maduro loyalist said.
Now, he says, the message is clear: Don’t tread on Uncle Sam.
“I’m sending a warning to anyone who thinks they can fight the United States,” he said. “They have no idea what they’re capable of. After what I saw, I never want to be on the other side of that again. They’re not to be messed with.”
The guard said the raid has already sent shockwaves across Latin America — especially after President Donald Trump recently warned that Mexico is now ‘on the list.’
“Everyone is already talking about this,” he said. “No one wants to go through what we went through. What happened here is going to change a lot of things — not just in Venezuela, but throughout the region.”
A former US intelligence source told the New York Post that the symptoms described could be consistent with directed energy weapons, which use focused energy such as microwaves. Such systems, the source noted, have existed for decades and can cause bleeding, disorientation and physical incapacitation.

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Did US Forces Use Sonic Weapons in Venezuela Operation to Capture Maduro? What the Claims Say & What Remains Unclear

Claims of a sonic weapon used by US forces in a Venezuela raid spark global debate after an eyewitness alleged troops were incapacitated by an intense sound force.
Allegations that US forces used a powerful and previously unseen weapon during a raid in Venezuela have ignited worldwide attention and intense debate. The claims emerged after a dramatic eyewitness account described Venezuelan security forces being incapacitated within minutes during an operation aimed at capturing President Nicolas Maduro earlier this month.
The account, shared on X by the White House press secretary, detailed a highly coordinated assault in which advanced technology allegedly overwhelmed Venezuelan defences. While US officials have not confirmed the details, the narrative has raised serious questions about the nature of modern warfare and the weapons potentially being deployed behind the scenes.
What Happened During the Alleged US Raid in Venezuela?
According to the account attributed to a Venezuelan security guard, the operation unfolded with alarming speed. He claimed that radar systems suddenly went offline without warning, leaving forces blind and confused.
“We were on guard, but suddenly all our radar systems shut down without any explanation,” the guard said. “The next thing we saw were drones, a lot of drones, flying over our positions. We didn’t know how to react.”
The guard said only a small number of US troops entered the area, supported by fewer than ten helicopters. Despite being heavily outnumbered, the Americans allegedly gained immediate control of the situation.
“They were technologically very advanced,” he said. “They didn’t look like anything we’ve fought against before.” ‘Not a Battle, But a Slaughter’: Eyewitness Account
The encounter, as described, was brutally one-sided. The guard claimed Venezuelan forces had no chance against the speed and accuracy of US firepower.
“We were hundreds, but we had no chance,” he said. “They were shooting with such precision and speed; it felt like each soldier was firing 300 rounds per minute.”
The most alarming claim came when he described the alleged deployment of an unknown device that appeared to incapacitate troops instantly.
“At one point, they launched something; I don’t know how to describe it,” he said. “It was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly, I felt like my head was exploding from the inside.”
He described severe physical effects moments later.
“We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move. We couldn’t even stand up after that sonic weapon, or whatever it was.”
White House Silent on Weapon Claims
The White House has not clarified whether reposting the account amounted to official verification. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt shared the account with the caption “Stop what you are doing and read this,” but officials declined to confirm whether such a weapon was used.
Venezuela’s Interior Ministry said around 100 security personnel were killed during the January 3 operation, though it did not specify the cause of death.
What Are Sonic Weapons?
Sonic weapons, also known as directed energy or acoustic weapons, use focused energy such as sound waves, microwaves, or lasers to disable targets rather than destroy them physically. Experts say such systems can cause intense pain, disorientation, internal injuries, and an inability to function.
A former US intelligence source said the description closely resembled directed energy weapons. “The military has had versions of these for decades,” the source said. “Some of those systems can cause bleeding, pain, burning, and the inability to function.”
Similar allegations surfaced in 2020 when China was accused of using a microwave weapon against Indian soldiers in Ladakh, claims Beijing denied.
‘A Warning to Anyone Who Thinks They Can Fight the US’
The Venezuelan guard said the raid sent shockwaves across Latin America, especially amid recent warnings from President Donald Trump.
“I’m sending a warning to anyone who thinks they can fight the United States,” he said. “They have no idea what they’re capable of. After what I saw, I never want to be on the other side of that again. They’re not to be messed with.”
He added, “What happened here is going to change a lot of things, not just in Venezuela, but throughout the region.” As questions grow louder and confirmation remains elusive, the claims have fueled fresh fears about the future of warfare and the shadowy technologies shaping it.

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Military forces use sound weapons like
Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs) for crowd control and hailing, projecting painful or loud sound beams, while research explores infrasonic (low-frequency) and ultrasonic (high-frequency) weapons for disorientation, nausea, or incapacitation, though the latter (like the Mosquito) is more common in private security; these sonic tools aim to incapacitate without physical force, but pose risks of hearing loss, neurological issues, and trauma.
Common Types of Sound Weapons
Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs): These specialized loudspeakers project focused, high-intensity sound beams, used for communication, deterrence (pirates, insurgents), and crowd control, capable of causing pain (110-130 dB) and disorientation.
Ultrasonic Devices (e.g., "Mosquito"): Emit high-pitched sounds painful to younger people but often inaudible or less impactful to older adults, used for dispersing unruly crowds.
Infrasonic Weapons: Still largely in research, these use very low, often inaudible frequencies to cause disorientation, nausea, and psychological distress.
Other Applications & Examples
Psychological Warfare: Historically, armies used loud sounds (like drums, horns) and even music (Doris Day songs) to affect enemy morale.
Naval Defense: LRADs are used to keep small boats and pirates away from warships.
Crowd Control: LRADs and ultrasonic devices are used to disperse protesters, though their use is controversial and sometimes legally challenged.
Effects & Concerns
Health Impacts: Can cause permanent hearing loss, traumatic brain injuries, nausea, headaches, and psychological trauma.
Debate: While intended for non-lethal control, high-intensity sonic attacks raise concerns about excessive force and human rights violations, with some devices being banned or restricted in certain areas.

Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs) use focused beams of electromagnetic energy, like lasers, microwaves, or particle beams, to disable, damage, or destroy targets without physical projectiles, offering speed (speed-of-light travel), precision, and low cost-per-shot for countering drones, missiles, and other threats, with major global powers actively developing them for military applications.
Types of DEWs
High-Energy Lasers (HELs): Use concentrated light beams to burn, melt, or overwhelm sensors on targets like drones and rockets (C-RAM).
High-Power Microwaves (HPMs): Emit intense microwave energy to disrupt or destroy electronic systems, often used against swarms of drones or sensitive equipment.
Particle Beams: Accelerate particles to high speeds, though less commonly discussed than lasers and microwaves for current deployments.
Sound Beams: Use focused acoustic energy, like LRAD systems, for non-lethal crowd control or warning.
Advantages
Speed of Light: Energy travels almost instantaneously, crucial for intercepting fast threats like hypersonic missiles.
Precision: Highly focused beams allow for targeting specific components of a threat.
Scalability: Can be adjusted for effects, from temporarily "dazzling" sensors to complete destruction.
Low Cost-Per-Shot: Cheaper than launching traditional interceptor missiles for every drone.
Applications
Counter-UAS (C-UAS): Defending against drone swarms.
Missile Defense: Intercepting incoming rockets, artillery, mortars, and potentially ballistic/hypersonic missiles.
Electronic Warfare: Disrupting enemy communications and surveillance.
Personnel/Optical Defense: Dazzling or disabling enemy sensors and optics.
Development & Deployment
Key Developers: United States (DARPA, military branches), China, Russia, UK, Israel, France, Germany, India.
Current Status: Maturing technology, with systems being integrated onto air, land, and sea platforms, aiming for deployment mid-to-late 2020s.

Police Drones Are Starting To Think For Themselves

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 12:01:00 +0000

When the Chula Vista police receive a 911 call, they can dispatch a flying drone with the press of a button.
On a recent afternoon, from a launchpad on the roof of the Chula Vista Police Department, they sent a drone across the city to a crowded parking lot where a young man was asleep in the front seat of a stolen car with drug paraphernalia on his lap.
When the man left the car, carrying a gun and a bag of heroin, a nearby police car had trouble following as he sprinted across the street and ducked behind a wall. But as he threw the gun into a dumpster and hid the bag of heroin, the drone, hovering above him, caught everything on camera. When he slipped through the back door of a strip mall, exited through the front door and ran down the sidewalk, it caught that, too.
Watching the live video feed, an officer back at headquarters relayed the details to the police on the scene, who soon caught the man and took him into custody. Later, they retrieved the gun and the heroin. And after another press of the button, the drone returned, on its own, to the roof.
Each day, the Chula Vista police respond to as many as 15 emergency calls with a drone, launching more than 4,100 flights since the program began two years ago. Chula Vista, a Southern California city with a population of 270,000, is the first in the country to adopt such a program, called Drone as First Responder.
Over the last several months, three other cities — two in California and one in Georgia — have followed suit. Police agencies from Hawaii to New York have used drones for years, but mostly in simple, manually flown ways. Officers would carry a drone in the trunk of a car on patrol or drive it to a crime scene before launching it over a park or flying it inside a building.
But the latest drone technology — mirroring technology that powers self-driving cars — has the power to transform everyday policing, just as it can transform package delivery, building inspections and military reconnaissance. Rather than spending tens of millions of dollars on large helicopters and pilots, even small police forces could operate tiny autonomous drones for a relative pittance.
That newfound automation, however, raises civil liberties concerns, especially as drones gain the power to track vehicles and people automatically. As the police use more drones, they could collect and store more video of life in the city, which could remove any expectation of privacy once you leave the home.
“Communities should ask hard questions about these programs. As the power and scope of this technology expands, so does the need for privacy protection,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Project on Speech, Privacy and Technology. “Drones can be used to investigate known crimes. But they are also sensors that can generate offenses.”
With the pandemic still worsening, drones are a way of policing at a distance, said Rahul Sidhu, an officer in Redondo Beach, near Los Angeles, which started a program similar to the one in Chula Vista just after the virus reached the United States.
“We’re just trying to limit our exposure to other people,” he said. “Sometimes, you can send a drone without sending an officer.”
But down the road, he said, as these small unmanned helicopters become cheaper and more powerful, they will provide more efficient ways of policing urban areas. That could aid police departments at a time when the number of recruits is on the wane across the country and many voices are calling for funding cuts after months of protests against police violence.
In Chula Vista, drones are already an integral part of the way the police respond to emergencies. After an emergency call comes in, officers give the drone a location, and it flies to that point on its own — before returning on its own, too.
The department’s drones can cover about one-third of the city from two launch sites, responding to roughly 70 percent of all emergency calls. After asking the Federal Aviation Administration to approve a third launch site, the local police hope to cover the entire city, about 52 square miles between San Diego and the Mexican border.
Government regulations require that a certified pilot remain on the roof of the Police Department, overseeing the launch and, together with a police officer at a command station inside the building, handling most of the flying once the drone reaches its destination.
F.A.A. regulations aimed at protecting the flights of commercial planes and other aircraft prevent drones from being flown beyond the line of sight of their operators. But Chula Vista obtained a waiver from the F.A.A., so the pilot and officer can fly the drone as much as three miles from its launch site.
Each drone — including long-distance cameras, other sensors and software — costs the department about $35,000. But the overriding cost of the program lies in the many officers needed to operate the drones.
On another recent afternoon, when the Chula Vista police were alerted to a car turned upside down in an empty riverbed, they sent a new kind of drone into the ravine. Built by Skydio, a Silicon Valley company, it could avoid obstacles on its own thanks to many of the same technologies used by self-driving cars.
“An ordinary drone would have crashed by now, guaranteed,” Sgt. James Horst said as he watched a video of the drone swooping down into the riverbed and inspecting the inside of the car at close quarters.
Later, in the courtyard outside the Police Department, he showed how, with another press of the button, he could instruct an automated drone to follow a particular person or vehicle on its own. Skydio has long offered a consumer drone that can follow you from place to place, even as you weave between obstacles, like trees in a forest. Now the company, which recently hired Fritz Reber, the former head of the Chula Vista police drone program, is selling to the police and other businesses.
Shield AI, a start-up in San Diego that has worked with police departments, has developed a drone that can fly into a building and inspect the length and breadth of the premises on its own, with no pilot, in the dark as well as in daylight. Others, including Skydio and DJI, a company in China that makes the drones launched from the roof of the Chula Vista Police Department, are building similar technology.
The Chula Vista department treats drone video much as it does video from police body cams, storing footage as evidence and publicly releasing it only with approval, Capt. Don Redmond said. The department does not use drones for routine patrols.
For privacy advocates like Mr. Stanley of the A.C.L.U., the concern is that increasingly powerful technology will be used to target parts of the community — or strictly enforce laws that are out of step with social norms.
“It could allow law enforcement to enforce any area of the law against anyone they want,” Mr. Stanley said.
Drones, for instance, could easily be used to identify people and restrict activity during protests like those that have been so prevalent across the country in recent months. Captain Redmond said the Chula Vista department did not deploy drones over Black Lives Matter protests because its policies forbade it.
The Chula Vista police do not require the approval of city officials to expand drone use, but, according to Captain Redmond, they have publicly notified the community about the continued progress of the program.
Drone as First Responder programs in places like Redondo Beach and Clovis, Calif., are seeking waivers that would allow them to fly beyond the operators’ line of sight.
In Clovis, near the middle of the state, the Police Department has found that its drones tend to overheat at the height of summer. “We were flying them four days a week until it got too hot,” Lt. James Munro said. “Then we had to ground them.”
But he thinks these and other technical obstacles will soon be overcome. “Drones are like iPhones,” he said. “As soon as you get one, a new one arrives with new technology.”

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Vermont State Police Demonstrate New Drones
This week, Vermont State Police demonstrated two of their new “Unmanned Aircraft Systems” — which most people refer to as drones. The state bought 11 of the aircraft to be used in accident reconstruction and search and rescue missions. Outside the New Haven barracks, Trooper Thomas Howard prepares to put one of the smaller drones into the air. “So the first thing that I’m going to do is now that everything’s set up the controller’s talking to the aircraft I’m going to go ahead and turn the props on. Next thing that we want to do is you want to make sure that it’s operating safely. We want to make sure that it’s doing exactly what we want it to do so.”
After the pre-flight check, Trooper Howard shows what will happen during an accident reconstruction mission. “I made a mock collision scene for us. We hit start. All green check marks is a good sign and we’ll go ahead and start the mission.”
Reporter: “Woah.”
Howard: “So to get the appropriate amount of resolution for the photographs we fly to the desired designated height. Then it already knows where it needs to take its photographs so it’s going to fly to that area next. And it’s cool that you can look at this display and it actually shows you where the aircraft is. It shows you how many photographs have been taken. It told me that we’re going to map a scene that’s 38 by 27 meters and the flight time’s going to be 2 minutes and 42 seconds. So that noise says it’s finished its mission.”
Reporter: “It’s quiet.”
Howard: “Yeah, yeah you barely even know it’s there. Beeping’s stopped and the mission’s finished.”
Later Emergency Services Unit Sgt Matthew Sweitzer flys the larger drone. He explains the different capabilities it has and how it can be used for different missions. “State Police Search and Rescue.”
Sweitzer’s voice from drone: “State Police Search and Rescue.”
Sweitzer: “So we can communicate one way with people and let them know that we see them. But then it also has a thermal mode. So obviously like for search and rescue that’s really beneficial for us because we can see heat signatures so if someone’s in the woods you know most of the things are pretty cold. And like I was saying before you can also put on the spotlight or this one also has a strobe light built into it so that we can have a strobe that points down while we’re flying at nighttime.”
UAS Program Commander Lt. Cory Lozier says the drones will be primarily used for search and rescue and crash reconstruction. “They can be used to get overall views of crime scenes. We’re more leaning utilizing the drones for accident and crash reconstruction and search and rescue missions. Basically due to the technology that we have we can now get images that we have never had before. We can different angles, different elevation and the drones that we are using it can reduce time on scene.”
Lozier says there are policies and guidelines in place to address privacy concerns. “These drones will not be used for any warrantless searches. So they could be used for criminal investigations or surveillance but we would have to apply for a warrant before we do so. If we’re up on another mission and we capture something criminal going on the correct practice would be to stop what we’re doing and apply for a warrant. We would already have the footage but we do have it in policy and in the Legislature that we have 48 hours to apply for a warrant to use the media that we’ve already captured. We will not fly over somebody unless it’s a public safety risk or if we’re trying to save lives. We are very aware of the privacy issues. On a public road we’re okay. Anything private we are going to have to apply for warrants before we deploy our drones.”
Thirteen Vermont State Police pilots have received training and been certified by the FAA to operate the drones. Homeland Security, Highway Safety and other federal grants were used to fund acquisition of 11 drones, 3 large and 8 smaller, at a cost of $105 thousand and another $15 thousand for training.
They will be stationed at locations across Vermont

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First in the nation: BRPD’s newest drone taking off to help solve crimes

The Baton Rouge Police Department showcased its newest drone unit that’s helping the force solve crimes and protect the people of Baton Rouge. It is the first police department in the U.S. to use this specific technology: a 16-foot, six-wing machine named the Edge Autonomy Stalker VXE30.
“As the Capital City of Louisiana, it’s the second biggest department in the entire state. You know, we try to stay on the leading edge. I brag all the time about the Baton Rouge Police Dept. and what the citizens can be proud of. This is just another piece that the citizens can be proud of that is going to be up protecting and help us better manage the citizens the City of Baton Rouge,” said BRPD Chief TJ Morse.
Other than some federal agencies, BRPD is the first police department to use the VXE30. The drone is a portable, quiet “small uncrewed aircraft system” (SUAS) that is useful for long-endurance, long-range mission support. The vehicle has fully autonomous vertical take off and landing with no operator input required, per BRPD.
Since the tragic crash in 2023 that resulted in the loss of BRPD’s helicopter program and aviation support unit, the department has fully invested in using drone technology, Morse said.
The drones assist with everything from going inside of houses to searching perimeters for suspects, Morse explained. They also can help in other areas such as with the fire department for searching for hot spots in buildings, looking at flooded areas or downed power lines, and in vehicle pursuits.
“This weekend, Saturday and Sunday, we have the Louisiana Marathon. We’re going to be using this drone technology to monitor traffic and security out there and during football season, all of these kind of things,” Morse said.
Sgt. Dustin Conde is the unit’s commander and helped showcase the VXE30’s capabilities. He explained that there are now 31 drones used in BRPD’s force.
“We have 24 pilots that are licensed with the FAA to pilot these drones. As of 2025, we have had over 1600 deployments with the Baton Rouge Police Department with our drone. Out of those, 77 have been directly linked to an arrest, you know, protecting officers, giving us an eye in the sky,” Conde explained.
Officers go through a two-week (80-hour) certification training to pilot the VXE30 drone.
The drone has multiple camera capabilities, and one of the options is a thermal imaging camera with a four-hour flight time.
“It can be miles away, but we can still have a camera looking at your face,” Morse said.
The Edge Autonomy Stalker VXE30 is a product of Lockheed Martin, an aerospace and defense company. “We want to constantly be on the forefront of technology, be on the forefront of what policing is doing. So this is just another piece people out there looking to join a law enforcement career, we can say, ‘Hey, we have an award-winning motorcycle division, award-winning k9, award-winning SWAT. We have this technology and we’re the first in the country’,” the police chief said.
“If you want to be a part of the trending trendsetters, come join the Baton Rouge Police Department.”
According to Morse, compared to the department’s helicopter program, which saw annual costs around $1 million, the drone division is seeing a dramatic cost savings annually. Morse estimated that the costs for battery replacements and certifications is costing $100,000 per year.

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This New Autonomous Drone for Cops Can Track You in the Dark

Startup Skydio says its powerful new drone for public safety can reduce the need for high-speed chases. Civil liberties groups warn that few rules govern police use of drones.
Nearly 1,500 US police departments operate drones but only about a dozen routinely dispatch them in response to 911 calls, according to ACLU research. Drone maker Skydio aims to see that change, with a new model launched last week called the X10. The goal, cofounder and CEO Adam Bry said during a launch event last week in San Francisco, is to “get drones everywhere they can be useful in public safety.”
The new drone is capable of flying at speeds of 45 miles per hour and is small enough to fit into the trunk of a police car. It has infrared sensors that can be used to track people and fly autonomously in the dark. Four payload bays on the X10 can carry accessories like a speaker, spotlight, or a parachute for emergency landings. A 65X zoom camera can read a license plate from 800 feet away and follow a vehicle from a distance of 3 miles.
“I think mitigating or eliminating high-speed chases will be one of the major applications that we'll see with customers, largely based on that zoom camera,” Bry says.
New capabilities like those could encourage wider use of drones in law enforcement at a time when policy concerning their use is still developing. Tests by emergency responders and the US Federal Aviation Administration to extend drone flights beyond the operator’s line of sight and respond to 911 calls started in 2017. Civil liberties advocates say there is a lack of rules to limit drone use in sensitive contexts like protests or in concert with other forms of surveillance technology.
When Skydio launched nearly a decade ago, it focused on selling drones to outdoor athletes interested in a machine something like an autonomous aerial GoPro, following them down a mountain or trail while capturing video. That began to change in 2020 when Skydio got picked as one of a handful of companies approved for off-the-shelf use by branches of the US military. Today Skydio’s customers include BNSF Railway, utility companies in California and Illinois, and law enforcement agencies like the NYPD.
At a press conference in July, New York mayor Eric Adams announced that his police department would begin controlling drone flight licenses for the city. While holding a Skydio remote control as a prop, he voiced support for using drones to stop high-speed car chases.
This month, at another news conference, Adams said New York is behind other police departments in drone deployment but will “become the leader in how to properly use drones.” He pledged to use more surveillance and technology following an increase in some measures of crime last year.
At the Skydio event last week, New York Police Department chief of patrols John Chell said he thinks drones can cut down on the need for helicopter deployments. In the near future he envisions the city police academy training recruits in how to pilot drones, placing at least one drone at each of the more than 70 precincts across New York, and drones launching autonomously to investigate alerts of potential gunshots heard by AI-powered tool ShotSpotter. Skydio introduced docks last year that house and charge drones and can enable autonomous take off.
The NYPD’s new interest in drones has drawn criticism from civil liberties groups like the ACLU and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, but also from less expected voices.
Curtis Sliwa founded New York neighborhood watch group Guardian Angels in 1979 to patrol city streets at a time of widespread concern about violent crime. Last month, he used his radio show to accuse the NYPD and Adams of using drones to intimidate the crowd while Sliwa spoke at a recent anti-immigration protest. An unsigned email from the NYPD sent in response to questions from WIRED says that a drone was deployed in Staten Island that month to assess pedestrian congestion, vehicular traffic, and other public safety concerns.
Ahead of the recent Labor Day holiday, one NYPD commissioner pledged to monitor large backyard gatherings using drones. At the Skydio event last week, Chell praised the NYPD for making 10 drone deployments over that holiday weekend, including at the J’Ouvert and West Indian Day celebrations, and the Electric Zoo music festival. He said they helped prevent retaliation following a shooting and contributed to officers apprehending three carjacking suspects. An NYPD spokesperson did not respond to requests for additional details about recent drone deployments.
The busy Labor Day for NYPD drones shows the department moving toward treating drones as first responders, says Daniel Schwarz, senior privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union. The nonprofit says problematic use of police drones, including at protests in 15 cities after the 2020 death of George Floyd, shows legislation is needed to limit police use of the technology. The ACLU wants bans on drone use at protests and adding weapons to the craft, and guardrails to prevent drones being combined with other forms of surveillance technology like face recognition or ShotSpotter.
Drone deployments by police, like other forms of surveillance, risk falling into historical patterns of targeting certain groups. A 2021 analysis by Amnesty International of surveillance cameras throughout New York City found that they disproportionately threaten the civil liberties of people of color.
A joint December 2021 report by the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, argues that drones allow covert surveillance. When flying hundreds of feet aloft the craft are virtually impossible to see or hear, and citizens have little hope of knowing what they are carrying.
As part of the rollout of the X10, Skydio announced a partnership with Axon, which makes Tasers and other police technology. Video from Skydio drones will be more closely integrated into the software Axon sells police departments for incident response and managing evidence.
Bry says Skydio is not working with Axon on weaponizing drones and that Skydio doesn’t support weaponizing drones or robots, but he added that it’s difficult to stop people from making hacks or custom modifications. Last year, Axon suggested using autonomous Taser-mounted drones to stop mass shootings, and the majority of the company’s AI Ethics board resigned in protest.

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How Drones for Police are Revolutionizing Law Enforcement Operations
In recent years, the integration of drone technology into law enforcement operations has marked a significant shift in policing tactics. Drones for police, specifically small, multirotor drones, have become invaluable tools for police departments across the globe. These advanced aerial systems are enhancing the effectiveness of law enforcement in various aspects, from aerial surveillance to search and rescue operations and beyond.
In recent years, the integration of drone technology into law enforcement operations has marked a significant shift in policing tactics. Drones for police, specifically small, multirotor drones, have become invaluable tools for police departments across the globe. These advanced aerial systems are enhancing the effectiveness of law enforcement in various aspects, from aerial surveillance to search and rescue operations and beyond.
Example of drones for police, with officers using a drone to overwatch a stadium and its surroundings during a sport event
Drones for Police and Public Safety to Enhance Aerial Surveillance
Drones have changed how police watch from above, making surveillance more effective and flexible. These drones can provide complete coverage and monitor situations in real-time. This is key for situations that require quick action. Beyond mere surveillance, drones are proactive deterrents in regions suffering from high crime rates. They can enhance safety while simultaneously reducing risks to law enforcement personnel on the ground.
Perimeter surveillance
One example of this application is in perimeter surveillance. Drones for police can provide a unique advantage over fixed cameras by offering aerial views that cover vast expanses without blind spots. Drones can help quickly spot breaches or unauthorized entries at major events or secure facilities. Fixed cameras may miss these because they have limited views.
Persistent aerial coverage
Tethered drones bring specific advantages to law enforcement surveillance and safety operations. The tether keeps the drone powered from the ground so it can fly longer without needing new batteries. It also secures the drone against flyaways. Tethered drones can stay in the air for a long time during surveillance tasks like crime scene investigations. They provide live video feed to command centers for hours or even days. This capability is invaluable for gathering evidence, monitoring suspect movements, and ensuring officer safety during prolonged incidents.
As an example, during large events, tethered drones can offer continuous aerial view, making it easier to spot and address potential crowd-related issues before they escalate. In addition, the persistent presence of a drone overhead can also act as a visual deterrent to potential troublemakers.
Integration with surveillance system
The flexibility of drones for police extends to their ability to integrate seamlessly with existing security infrastructure, enhancing the efficacy of traditional surveillance methods. By feeding aerial data into central monitoring systems, drones offer a more comprehensive picture of security scenarios, allowing for quicker and more coordinated responses to incidents.
More ethical alternatives
Replacing or complementing traditional helicopter surveillance, drones present a more cost-effective and less intrusive method of aerial monitoring. This approach aligns with ethical and responsible law enforcement practices, emphasizing the importance of minimizing operational risks and respecting community privacy. Today, police want to be transparent about their drone use, especially because people often have concerns about surveillance technology. By openly communicating the intentions and regulations surrounding the use of drones for police, agencies can ensure public trust and support for these advanced surveillance tools.
Drones for Police: Event Security
Drones are now a key part of security plans for police at big public events. These advanced aerial tools offer an unparalleled aerial perspective, crucial for effective crowd monitoring, control, and the early identification of potential security threats. Drones for police give police a quick and detailed look at what’s happening, helping them respond faster and more accurately to emergencies. This makes public safety better and police work more efficient.
Tethered drones for extended flight times
Particularly, tethered drones offer distinct advantages in event security. These drones, attached to ground power, offer extended flight times and stable, secure data transmission.
This ensures continuous aerial surveillance without the interruption of battery changes, a common limitation of traditional drones.
The secure tether reduces risks of signal interference, ensuring reliable communication. It also has the advantage of keeping the aircraft safely away from crowds below.
The benefits of high definition cameras
Equipped with high-definition cameras and adapted payloads, drones can adapt to various security needs. Features like thermal imaging are key for monitoring in low-light conditions. As for zoom lenses, they allow for detailed observation of specific areas. They can also carry loudspeakers for direct communication with crowds, enhancing crowd management and emergency response.
Real time intelligence
Integrating seamlessly with ground-based security operations, drones for police contribute to a holistic security approach. They provide real-time intelligence to command centers, ensuring coordinated responses alongside other security measures. By removing line of sight restrictions, a communication node improves security team communication infrastructure, enhancing overall security operation effectiveness.
In recent years, the integration of drone technology into law enforcement operations has marked a significant shift in policing tactics. Drones for police, specifically small, multirotor drones, have become invaluable tools for police departments across the globe. These advanced aerial systems are enhancing the effectiveness of law enforcement in various aspects, from aerial surveillance to search and rescue operations and beyond.
Example of drones for police, with officers using a drone to overwatch a stadium and its surroundings during a sport event
Drones for Police and Public Safety to Enhance Aerial Surveillance
Drones have changed how police watch from above, making surveillance more effective and flexible. These drones can provide complete coverage and monitor situations in real-time. This is key for situations that require quick action. Beyond mere surveillance, drones are proactive deterrents in regions suffering from high crime rates. They can enhance safety while simultaneously reducing risks to law enforcement personnel on the ground.
Perimeter surveillance
One example of this application is in perimeter surveillance. Drones for police can provide a unique advantage over fixed cameras by offering aerial views that cover vast expanses without blind spots. Drones can help quickly spot breaches or unauthorized entries at major events or secure facilities. Fixed cameras may miss these because they have limited views.
Persistent aerial coverage
Tethered drones bring specific advantages to law enforcement surveillance and safety operations. The tether keeps the drone powered from the ground so it can fly longer without needing new batteries. It also secures the drone against flyaways. Tethered drones can stay in the air for a long time during surveillance tasks like crime scene investigations. They provide live video feed to command centers for hours or even days. This capability is invaluable for gathering evidence, monitoring suspect movements, and ensuring officer safety during prolonged incidents.
As an example, during large events, tethered drones can offer continuous aerial view, making it easier to spot and address potential crowd-related issues before they escalate. In addition, the persistent presence of a drone overhead can also act as a visual deterrent to potential troublemakers.
Integration with surveillance system
The flexibility of drones for police extends to their ability to integrate seamlessly with existing security infrastructure, enhancing the efficacy of traditional surveillance methods. By feeding aerial data into central monitoring systems, drones offer a more comprehensive picture of security scenarios, allowing for quicker and more coordinated responses to incidents.
More ethical alternatives
Replacing or complementing traditional helicopter surveillance, drones present a more cost-effective and less intrusive method of aerial monitoring. This approach aligns with ethical and responsible law enforcement practices, emphasizing the importance of minimizing operational risks and respecting community privacy. Today, police want to be transparent about their drone use, especially because people often have concerns about surveillance technology. By openly communicating the intentions and regulations surrounding the use of drones for police, agencies can ensure public trust and support for these advanced surveillance tools.
Surveillance system with multiple surveillance screens including a drone view
Drones for Police: Event Security
Drones are now a key part of security plans for police at big public events. These advanced aerial tools offer an unparalleled aerial perspective, crucial for effective crowd monitoring, control, and the early identification of potential security threats. Drones for police give police a quick and detailed look at what’s happening, helping them respond faster and more accurately to emergencies. This makes public safety better and police work more efficient.
Tethered drones for extended flight times
Particularly, tethered drones offer distinct advantages in event security. These drones, attached to ground power, offer extended flight times and stable, secure data transmission.
This ensures continuous aerial surveillance without the interruption of battery changes, a common limitation of traditional drones.
The secure tether reduces risks of signal interference, ensuring reliable communication. It also has the advantage of keeping the aircraft safely away from crowds below.
The benefits of high definition cameras
Equipped with high-definition cameras and adapted payloads, drones can adapt to various security needs. Features like thermal imaging are key for monitoring in low-light conditions. As for zoom lenses, they allow for detailed observation of specific areas. They can also carry loudspeakers for direct communication with crowds, enhancing crowd management and emergency response.
Real time intelligence
Integrating seamlessly with ground-based security operations, drones for police contribute to a holistic security approach. They provide real-time intelligence to command centers, ensuring coordinated responses alongside other security measures. By removing line of sight restrictions, a communication node improves security team communication infrastructure, enhancing overall security operation effectiveness.
Aerial picture of an highway taken by a drone with a real time image analysis software
Search and Rescue Operations: Speed and Efficiency of Drones for Police
In search and rescue, police drones have emerged as invaluable assets, drastically improving the speed and efficiency of operations. These drones equipped with advanced thermal cameras that can quickly find missing people in difficult places like forests or mountains.
During natural disasters, such as floods, earthquakes, or wildfires, the aerial perspective provided by drones becomes crucial. It allows rescue teams to assess the situation safely and effectively, identifying survivors and assessing risks without putting rescue personnel in immediate danger.
Quick deployment capability
The quick deployment capability of drones for police is a game-changer in time-sensitive scenarios. Unlike manned aircraft, drones can be launched rapidly and with minimal logistical requirements. Speed is important during search and rescue missions. Every minute counts and can make a difference between life and death.
Drones can cover large areas faster than people on the ground. They give real-time data and images to help rescuers find exact locations. This efficiency saves time and reduces the manpower and resources needed in traditional search methods.
Thermal imaging
The drones have thermal imaging technology. This technology is helpful in hard-to-see situations including nighttime or obscured areas. They can detect heat signatures of humans and animals, even if foliage obscures them, debris traps them, or they are incapacitated in some way.
Comprehensive situational awareness
Drones also play a crucial role in post-disaster scenarios. They can be used to assess damage, map affected areas, and identify safe routes for rescue teams.
This comprehensive situational awareness is vital for planning and executing efficient rescue operations. The integration of drones for police in search and rescue operations also includes the use of additional technologies such as high-resolution cameras, GPS, and real-time data transmission systems.
These technologies enable constant communication between the drone operators and ground teams, ensuring coordinated efforts and effective decision-making.
Greater safety of the first responders
Furthermore, the use of drones in search and rescue not only enhances operational capabilities but also ensures greater safety for the rescue teams. Drones give an overview and spot dangers, aiding in planning rescue missions and lowering risk for first responders.
The large variety of payloads is one aspect that makes drones a key asset in these scenarios. In addition to traditional RGB cameras, thermal imaging payloads, and communications equipment, drones can also be equipped with loudspeakers and spotlights to assist SAR personnel during nighttime operations.
Drone for Police: Accident Scene Reconstruction and Analysis
Drones for police have also become essential tools for accident scene reconstruction and analysis. Police can use drones to get detailed views of accident scenes from hard-to-reach angles, improving their investigation capabilities. This high-level overview is instrumental in gathering crucial data for accurately reconstructing events, a key component in traffic accident investigations.
Integration with 3D mapping softwares
One of the most significant advancements in drone technology for law enforcement is the integration of 3D mapping software. Drones with high-tech cameras and sensors can scan accident scenes fast, taking many pictures from different angles. Sophisticated 3D mapping software processes these images to create accurate, detailed reconstructions of the scene. This technology helps analyze important details. It can determine the location of vehicles during the accident. It can also identify where debris landed and skid marks. This information is key in understanding how the accident occurred.
The use of drones for 3D mapping presents several advantages over traditional ground-based methods.
• First, it significantly speeds up the process of data collection. In the past, police officers had to measure and document crash scenes manually. This process was time-consuming and often led to longer road closures. With drones, the same data can be collected in a fraction of the time, enabling quicker clearance of accident sites and reducing the impact on traffic flow.
• Moreover, drone-based 3D mapping enhances the safety of both officers and the public. Police can use drones to stay safe during accidents for example on busy highways or in dangerous areas. This remote data collection method minimizes the risk of secondary accidents and ensures the safety of first responders.
Analysis of scenes with 3D reconstructions
Another advantage of using drones in accident scene analyzing is the level of detail and accuracy they provide. 3D reconstructions from drone pictures provide a detailed view of a scene.
This helps to identify small details that may be missed by the naked eye. This detailed information helps investigators understand what happened before an accident. It also helps them figure out why it occurred. Additionally, it allows them to create accurate reports for legal and insurance reasons.
The integration of drones into accident scene reconstruction also aids in documentation and evidence preservation. Hig resolution pictures and 3D models are helpful records that can be studied and analyzed even after the real scene is gone. Data permanence is crucial in legal cases, where visual evidence of the scene can be very important.
Overall, using drones in law enforcement helps improve public safety and operational efficiency by opening up new possibilities. Drones are changing aerial surveillance with their unique views and secure coverage, surpassing fixed cameras with their flexibility. Drone technology is improving and will help law enforcement more. It will offer new ways to prevent crime and keep the public safe.

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Police UAVs: A Comprehensive Guide for Drone Pilots
Police use drones every day to make their work safer and more efficient.
But this wasn’t the case just a decade ago. Over the last few years, the use of drones in law enforcement has rapidly expanded, aided by improvements in the technology and a growing awareness of all the benefits drones can provide to police work.
How to Start a Police Drone Program: A Step-by-Step Guide
Starting a police drone program can greatly enhance a department’s capabilities in surveillance, search and rescue, and other law enforcement tasks.
Police departments can establish a drone program either by operating under the FAA’s Part 107 rules or by applying for a Certificate of Authorization (COA).
Here’s a detailed, step-by-step guide on starting a police drone program using both pathways.
Starting a Police Drone Program Under The FAA’s Part 107 Rules
Operating under Part 107 rules allows police departments to follow the same regulations as commercial drone operators. This approach is often faster and simpler to set up, though it comes with certain limitations, such as restrictions on night operations or flying over people without waivers.
Familiarize with Part 107 Requirements
Begin by understanding the FAA’s Part 107 regulations governing drone operations for commercial and governmental purposes. This will provide guidance on allowable operations, including flight altitude limits, line-of-sight requirements, and necessary permissions for specific types of operations.
Ensure Pilot Certification
At least one department member must be certified as a Remote Pilot under Part 107. To do this, the officer must:
Pass the FAA’s Part 107 knowledge test at an FAA-approved testing center.
Submit an application through the Integrated Airman Certification and Rating Application (IACRA) website to obtain a Remote Pilot Certificate.
Acquire Necessary Equipment
Select the appropriate drones and accessories based on the department’s operational needs. Consider drones with advanced features, such as high-definition cameras, thermal imaging, and obstacle avoidance systems.
Develop Departmental Policies and Procedures
Establish guidelines for safe and ethical drone operations, including privacy considerations, data storage, and situational use protocols. Define standard operating procedures (SOPs) that cover pre-flight checks, in-flight operations, and post-flight documentation.
Apply for Additional Part 107 Waivers if Needed
For operations not typically allowed under Part 107—such as night flights or flights over people—you’ll need to apply for waivers. Submit waiver requests through the FAA’s DroneZone portal, providing a detailed risk assessment and mitigation plan.
Begin Training Exercises
Conduct training sessions to ensure all team members are familiar with drone operations, flight safety, and emergency procedures. Training should include both simulated and real-life scenarios to build skills and confidence in using the technology.
Starting a Police Drone Program Using a Certificate of Authorization (COA)
A Certificate of Authorization (COA) allows public safety agencies to operate drones for specific, approved purposes, often with fewer restrictions than Part 107. This approach is suitable for departments needing greater operational flexibility, such as flying beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) or during emergency situations.
Apply for a Public Safety COA
Start by applying for a public safety COA through the FAA’s FAA Public Safety and Government portal. A COA enables agencies to operate outside some Part 107 limitations, but applications must be specific to the intended use and geographical area.
Complete the FAA COA Process
As part of the application, provide a detailed operational plan, outlining:
Specific locations and airspace where the drone will operate.
Safety protocols for BVLOS, night operations, and other advanced capabilities.
Risk mitigation strategies to protect bystanders and property.
The FAA may require additional documentation or approvals for certain types of operations.
Ensure Pilot and Staff Training
Pilots operating under a COA must be trained in line with the agency’s standards. Training should cover drone operation, airspace awareness, and emergency procedures. Some agencies may require their pilots to have a Part 107 certificate as well, even when flying under a COA.
Establish and Maintain Communication with Local Air Traffic Control (ATC)
For COA operations in controlled airspace, coordinate with local ATC to ensure flight safety. Provide ATC with details of your operating area, emergency contacts, and notification procedures to avoid airspace conflicts.
Define and Document Use Cases and Protocols
Create a clear set of use cases for drone deployment, such as emergency response, crowd monitoring, and accident investigation. Each use case should have corresponding protocols, including flight restrictions, altitude limits, and data security practices.
Implement Privacy and Data Management Policies
Draft policies to ensure data captured by drones is handled in compliance with privacy laws. Define data storage, sharing protocols, and data retention schedules to protect sensitive information.
Conduct Regular Maintenance and Safety Checks
To maintain COA compliance, regularly inspect and maintain drone equipment. Record all maintenance activities and implement a safety management system to track incidents, repairs, and safety performance.
Additional Considerations for Starting a Police Drone Program
Consider pursuing both Part 107 certification and a COA for maximum flexibility
Consult with experienced drone program consultants or other agencies with established programs
Regularly review and update policies to comply with changing regulations
Implement a system for documenting all drone operations and incidents
Establish a process for program evaluation and continuous improvement
How Police Use Drones: 10 Key Applications in Law Enforcement
Drones for law enforcement have become essential tools for police departments, supporting a range of critical operations and offering new perspectives and capabilities.
Here are the top 10 applications of police drones in modern policing.
1. Crime Scene Investigation
Police drones provide a valuable aerial perspective for crime scene investigations, allowing investigators to capture detailed images and videos from multiple angles.
High-resolution aerial footage can aid in reconstructing events, gathering evidence, and gaining insights that would be difficult to achieve from the ground alone. Drones can also help preserve the integrity of the crime scene while reducing the time and personnel required for documentation.
2. Search and Rescue Missions
In search and rescue operations, law enforcement drones are used to cover large areas quickly and access difficult or dangerous terrain.
Equipped with thermal imaging and night vision capabilities, drones can detect heat signatures and locate missing persons or victims in low-visibility conditions. These capabilities make drones invaluable for saving lives in situations where time is critical.
3. Surveillance and Crowd Monitoring
Cop drones are commonly deployed for surveillance purposes, especially during large events, protests, or public gatherings.
Drones can provide an overhead view, enabling officers to monitor crowd movement, detect potential threats, and maintain public order without requiring a large physical presence. They are also used in surveillance for ongoing investigations, allowing officers to observe suspects discreetly and reduce the need for ground-based observation teams.
4. Traffic Monitoring and Accident Investigation
Another practical use for drones in law enforcement is in traffic monitoring and accident investigation.
Drones can quickly assess accident scenes, gather footage, and help determine the causes of collisions. Additionally, drones can monitor traffic flow, identify congestion points, and support officers in managing traffic patterns more effectively, especially during peak hours or events that impact roadways.
5. Disaster Response and Assessment
Police drones can be instrumental in disaster response, providing rapid aerial assessments of affected areas during natural disasters or large-scale incidents.
Drones equipped with high-resolution cameras and sensors can identify damage, locate survivors, and assist rescue teams in prioritizing response efforts. This capability allows police departments to coordinate emergency responses efficiently.
6. Environmental Crime Monitoring
In cases of environmental crimes, such as illegal dumping, pollution, or unauthorized land use, drones can offer a quick and effective way to monitor affected areas.
Cop drones can capture detailed images and videos that document environmental damage, providing valuable evidence for enforcement actions and protecting natural resources.
7. Perimeter Security and Intrusion Detection
Police departments use drones to secure perimeters around sensitive areas or restricted zones, such as government facilities, large events, or crime scenes.
Equipped with high-resolution cameras and thermal sensors, drones can identify unauthorized intrusions and notify officers of potential security breaches, providing an extra layer of security and rapid response capabilities.
8. Suspect Tracking and Apprehension
Police drones can assist in tracking fleeing suspects by providing real-time aerial surveillance, even in challenging or obstructed environments.
Drones can follow suspects over long distances, reducing the need for high-speed chases and minimizing risks to the public. Real-time video feeds help officers plan safe and effective apprehension tactics.
9. Correctional Facility Surveillance
In correctional facilities, drones can monitor for contraband smuggling attempts, especially from outside the facility.
Law enforcement drones equipped with cameras can monitor the facility’s perimeter, preventing unauthorized deliveries and increasing overall security within and around the facility.
10. Training and Simulation
Police departments also use drones for training purposes.
By simulating real-life scenarios, drones allow trainees to practice search and rescue, suspect tracking, and other skills in controlled environments. Drone footage recorded during training exercises can be analyzed to improve tactics, procedures, and response times, creating a safer and more prepared law enforcement team.
Top 4 Benefits of Police UAVs
The integration of drones for police departments has brought significant advantages to law enforcement agencies, improving efficiency, reducing costs, and enhancing officer safety.
Here are the four main benefits law enforcement realizes from using UAVs in its work.
Police-drone-benefits
1. Cost Savings
Compared to traditional aerial solutions like helicopters, police drones offer a much more affordable alternative for aerial surveillance and data collection.
The lower purchase and maintenance costs allow even smaller police departments to incorporate drones into their operations. This cost-effectiveness enables departments to expand their capabilities without requiring a large budget.
2. Operational Efficiency
Drones for police use improve operational efficiency by reducing response times and streamlining workflows. Drones can be deployed quickly to survey areas, capture real-time data, and provide an immediate aerial view, allowing officers to assess situations before arriving on the ground. This efficiency is especially valuable in time-sensitive scenarios, such as search and rescue operations or crime scene investigations, where rapid access to information can make a critical difference.
3. Enhanced Situational Awareness
One of the primary advantages of drones in policing is the increased situational awareness they provide. Drones offer a comprehensive aerial perspective, allowing officers to monitor large areas, observe crowd dynamics, or assess hazards from a safe distance. This situational awareness enhances decision-making and enables law enforcement to respond proactively to potential threats or issues.
4. Improved Safety for Officers
Police drones also play a critical role in improving officer safety by reducing the need for officers to enter hazardous environments. Drones can be sent into dangerous areas—such as active crime scenes, natural disasters, or rough terrain—allowing officers to evaluate risks remotely. This capability minimizes exposure to danger and ensures that officers have the information they need to act safely and strategically.
The numerous advantages of police drones, from cost savings to enhanced safety, demonstrate their value in supporting law enforcement efforts. As technology advances, drones are set to play an even greater role in assisting police departments with efficient, safe, and cost-effective solutions for their daily operations.
Types of Drones Used by Police
Police departments employ various types of UAVs, each suited to specific tasks.
From versatile cop drones like quadcopters to long-range fixed-wing drones, each type provides unique capabilities that enhance the adaptability and effectiveness of law enforcement operations.
Here’s an overview of the main types of drones used by police.
Quadcopters
Quadcopters are the most common type of police UAV, and the most common type of drone in general.
Quadcopters are popular among law enforcement for their agility, ease of use, and ability to hover steadily. They can take off and land vertically, making them practical in confined spaces, urban settings, and situations where rapid deployment is essential.
These drones are ideal for applications requiring stability, such as close-up surveillance, crowd monitoring, and accident scene documentation.
Fixed-Wing Drones
Fixed-wing drones differ from quadcopters in that they have a single wing, like an airplane, allowing them to glide efficiently over long distances.
These drones are used for police drone operations requiring extensive coverage, such as monitoring large events, border patrol, or search and rescue in remote areas. While fixed-wing drones cannot hover, their extended flight time and range make them invaluable for missions that require sustained aerial surveillance.
Hybrid Drones
Hybrid drones combine features of both quadcopters and fixed-wing drones, offering the ability to take off and land vertically while also covering long distances efficiently. This versatility makes them suitable for complex missions where a combination of range, stability, and rapid deployment is needed, such as search and rescue operations that require quick response and extended flight time.
Specialized UAVs
Certain police missions require specialized UAVs equipped with advanced technologies like thermal imaging, high-definition zoom cameras, or LiDAR sensors.
These cop drones are customized for specific purposes, such as night surveillance, accident reconstruction, and locating individuals in low-visibility conditions. By using drones tailored to the needs of specialized tasks, police departments can gather detailed information that would be difficult or unsafe to collect manually.
Case Studies: 5 Real-Life Cop Drone Stories
The use of drones for police use has proven invaluable in a variety of real-life scenarios, from locating missing persons to monitoring large public gatherings.
Here are 5 short case studies illustrating drones support law enforcement work.
1. Search and Rescue Operations
In 2019, the Chula Vista Police Department (CVPD) in California used drones to help find a missing elderly man with dementia. Equipped with a thermal camera, the police drone enabled officers to spot the man in a ravine, saving critical time in an urgent situation.
2. Crime Scene Analysis
In 2020, police in Lincolnshire, UK, deployed a drone to capture aerial images of a large crime scene involving a homicide. The police UAV allowed investigators to map the area efficiently, preserving the scene’s integrity while documenting critical evidence from above.
3. Public Event Monitoring and Crowd Control
During the 2017 Super Bowl in Houston, Texas, drones were deployed by police to provide aerial views of the stadium and surrounding areas, ensuring security and rapid response to any incidents. These drones enabled enhanced situational awareness for law enforcement, helping it manage one of the nation’s most high-profile events.
4. Traffic Accident Investigation
In 2018, the Kansas Highway Patrol implemented drones for accident investigations. According to a case study by the Kansas Highway Patrol, drones reduced the time needed to map accident scenes from hours to just 20 minutes, allowing roads to reopen faster and minimizing disruption to traffic.
5. Disaster Response and Recovery
After Hurricane Michael in 2018, police departments in Florida used drones to assess damage, locate survivors, and direct rescue efforts. The use of police drones allowed teams to quickly gather critical information, enhancing response coordination and efficiency.
5 Key Features for Choosing a Police Drone
Law enforcement drones are equipped with cutting-edge technology and features that make them powerful tools in policing.
Here are five key features that make drones for police use indispensable in modern law enforcement.
1. Thermal Imaging
Thermal imaging is one of the most valuable features for law enforcement drones. By detecting heat signatures, thermal cameras allow officers to locate individuals or objects in low-visibility conditions, such as at night or in densely wooded areas. This capability is crucial in search and rescue operations, suspect tracking, and disaster response, enabling law enforcement to locate people quickly and efficiently.
2. High-Definition Cameras
Many police drones are equipped with high-definition (HD) cameras that capture detailed images and video footage. These cameras support real-time surveillance, provide clear evidence for investigations, and allow officers to observe situations from a safe distance. High-resolution footage also helps in documenting crime scenes and accident sites, preserving details that might be missed from the ground.
3. GPS and Navigation Systems
GPS and advanced navigation systems allow drones for police use to operate with precision, even in complex environments. GPS tracking ensures accurate positioning, helps drones follow predefined flight paths, and allows officers to monitor the drone’s location in real-time. This accuracy is particularly useful in monitoring large areas, patrolling borders, or mapping crime scenes for investigative purposes.
4. Real-Time Data Transmission
Real-time data transmission enables law enforcement drones to send live video and data feeds directly to officers on the ground. This feature provides immediate situational awareness, allowing command centers and field officers to make rapid, informed decisions. During emergencies or high-stakes incidents, real-time streaming is critical for coordinated responses and assessing on-the-ground conditions as events unfold.
5. Obstacle Avoidance Systems
Equipped with obstacle avoidance systems, many police drones can detect and maneuver around obstacles autonomously. This technology improves safety and stability during flights, allowing drones to navigate complex terrains or urban environments where buildings, trees, or other obstructions are present. Obstacle avoidance ensures that drones can complete missions with minimal risk, even in challenging conditions.
With these advanced features, drones for police use provide valuable support for various law enforcement operations. From enhancing visibility with thermal imaging to enabling strategic decision-making through real-time data transmission, these technologies make police drones versatile tools that empower officers to perform their duties more effectively and safely.
Future of Drones in Law Enforcement: 5 Trends and Innovations

The future of drones in policing is rapidly evolving, driven by emerging technologies that promise to expand the role of drones in law enforcement.
Innovations such as AI-powered drones, autonomous flight capabilities, and seamless integration with other police technologies are transforming drones for police departments into even more versatile and powerful tools.
Here are some of the key trends and advancements shaping the future of police drones.
1. AI-Powered Drones
Artificial intelligence (AI) is paving the way for smarter and more capable police drones. AI-powered drones for police use can process data in real-time, recognize objects, and even identify faces or license plates. This capability allows drones to autonomously track suspects, analyze suspicious behaviors, and respond to complex situations without continuous human control. As AI technology continues to advance, drones will be able to perform more sophisticated tasks, further enhancing police efficiency and effectiveness.
2. Autonomous Flight Capabilities
Autonomous flight technology enables drones to navigate and carry out missions with minimal operator input. In the future, police drones will be able to autonomously patrol designated areas, respond to emergencies, or monitor crime-prone locations in real-time. This will be particularly beneficial in situations where rapid response is critical, such as active shooter incidents or missing persons cases, allowing drones in policing to provide crucial support faster than ever before.
3. Integration with Other Law Enforcement Technologies
The integration of drones with other police systems, such as surveillance networks, body cameras, and data analytics platforms, is another promising trend. By connecting drones for police departments with existing technologies, departments can streamline data collection and improve situational awareness. For instance, footage from police drones can be synced with ground-based surveillance feeds, enabling command centers to get a comprehensive view of incidents and enhance coordinated responses.
4. 5G Connectivity and Real-Time Data Transfer
The rollout of 5G networks is expected to boost drone capabilities by providing faster, more reliable data transfer. With 5G connectivity, drones can transmit high-definition video and real-time data with minimal latency, making it possible for officers to receive instantaneous updates from the drone. This connectivity will improve situational awareness, especially in dynamic situations where officers need real-time information to make critical decisions.
5. The Rise of Drone as First Responder (DFR) Programs
Drone as First Responder (DFR) programs are rapidly gaining traction within police departments, offering an innovative approach to emergency response and public safety. In a DFR program, drones are deployed as the initial responders to incidents, arriving on scene often before ground units. Equipped with live-streaming capabilities, these drones provide real-time visual information to officers and dispatch centers, allowing them to assess the situation remotely, plan responses, and deploy resources more effectively.
The presence of DFR programs in police departments can improve response times, especially in time-sensitive situations like burglaries, car accidents, or disturbances. As DFR technology evolves, police departments are increasingly able to deploy drones autonomously to designated areas, significantly enhancing situational awareness and operational efficiency while minimizing risks to officers and the public.
6. Expanded Roles and Use Cases
As technology advances, the range of applications for police drones is set to expand. Beyond traditional tasks like surveillance and search and rescue, future drones for police use could play roles in traffic monitoring, crowd control, environmental assessments, and even disaster response. Drones may also become valuable tools for predictive policing, using data analytics to monitor patterns and preemptively address potential incidents.
Police UAV FAQ
How do the police use drones in their work?
Police use drones for a variety of purposes, including surveillance, search and rescue, crime scene analysis, traffic monitoring, and crowd control. Drones provide an aerial perspective that enhances situational awareness and allows officers to respond to incidents more effectively.
What are the legal requirements for police in their use of drones?
Police departments must adhere to federal and local regulations, which may include obtaining warrants for surveillance or following specific privacy guidelines. In the U.S., the FAA governs airspace, and some states have additional restrictions on police drone usage to ensure privacy rights are respected.
What is a DFR program?
A DFR (Drone as First Responder) program allows police drones to be deployed quickly to incident locations, often arriving before officers on the ground. This capability provides valuable real-time information to responders, improving response times and situational awareness.
What kinds of drones are used by the police?
Police use a variety of drones, including quadcopters for stability, fixed-wing drones for long-range operations, and hybrid drones for versatility. Specialized drones equipped with thermal imaging and high-definition cameras are also common for enhanced surveillance and search and rescue.
Do police drones have cameras?
Yes, most police drones are equipped with high-definition cameras for real-time surveillance and recording. Some also have advanced features like thermal imaging, night vision, and zoom capabilities to aid in specific operations.
Are police drones allowed to record footage over private property?
Recording over private property is subject to legal restrictions, often requiring warrants or adherence to privacy laws. Police departments must balance the need for surveillance with privacy rights, ensuring that drone usage complies with local and federal guidelines.
How do police drones help in search and rescue missions?
In search and rescue missions, police drones can cover large areas quickly, even in challenging or dangerous terrain. Thermal imaging cameras help locate individuals by detecting heat signatures, making drones especially useful in low-visibility conditions.
What are the benefits of using drones in police work?
Police drones provide real-time data, enhance situational awareness, reduce costs compared to helicopters, and improve safety by allowing officers to assess situations from a distance. They enable faster response times and efficient resource management in critical operations.
Can drones replace helicopters in police work?
While drones offer many advantages, they are not a complete replacement for helicopters. Drones are ideal for shorter missions and lower-altitude work, whereas helicopters are better suited for longer-range, high-altitude operations. Drones often complement helicopters rather than replace them.
What are the challenges of using drones in policing?
Challenges include privacy concerns, regulatory restrictions, and technical limitations like limited battery life and range. Additionally, public perception of surveillance can create resistance, making it important for departments to use drones transparently and ethically.

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That Drone in the Sky Could Be Tracking Your Car
Police are using their drones as flying automated license plate readers (ALPRs), airborne police cameras that make it easier than ever for law enforcement to follow you.
"The Flock Safety drone, specifically, are flying LPR cameras as well,” Rahul Sidhu, Vice President of Aviation at Flock Safety, recently told a group of potential law enforcement customers interested in drone-as-first-responder (DFR) programs.
The integration of Flock Safety’s flagship ALPR technology with its Aerodome drone equipment is a police surveillance combo poised to elevate the privacy threats to civilians caused by both of these invasive technologies as drone adoption expands.
The use of DFR programs has grown exponentially. The biggest police technology companies, like Axon, Flock Safety, and Motorola Solutions, are broadening their drone offerings, anticipating that drones could become an important piece of their revenue stream.
Communities must demand restrictions on how local police use drones and ALPRs, let alone a dangerous hybrid of the two. Otherwise, we can soon expect that a drone will fly to any call for service and capture sensitive location information about every car in its flight path, capturing more ALPR data to add to the already too large databases of our movements.
ALPR systems typically rely on cameras that have been fixed along roadways or attached to police vehicles. These cameras capture the image of a vehicle, then use artificial intelligence technology to log the license plate, make, model, color, and other unique identifying information, like dents and bumper stickers. This information is usually stored on the manufacturer’s servers and often made available on nationwide sharing networks to police departments from other states and federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ALPRs are already used by most of the largest police departments in the country, and Flock Safety also now offers the ability for an agency to turn almost any internet-enabled cameras into an ALPR camera.
ALPRs present a host of problems. ALPR systems vacuum up data—like the make, model, color, and location of vehicles—on people who will never be involved in a crime, used in gridding areas to systematically make a record of when and where vehicles have been. ALPRs routinely make mistakes, causing police to stop the wrong car and terrorize the driver. Officers have abused law enforcement databases in hundreds of cases. Police have used them to track across state lines people seeking legal health procedures. Even when there are laws against sharing data from these tools with other departments, some policing agencies still do.
Drones, meanwhile, give police a view of roofs, backyards, and other fenced areas where cops can’t casually patrol, and their adoption is becoming more common. Companies that sell drones have been helping law enforcement agencies to get certifications from the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), and recently-implemented changes to the restrictions on flying drones beyond the visual line of sight will make it even easier for police to add this equipment. According to the FAA, since a new DFR waiver process was implemented in May 2025, the FAA has granted more than 410 such waivers, already accounting for almost a third of the approximately 1,400 DFR waivers that have been granted since such programs began in 2018.
Local officials should, of course, be informed that the drones they’re buying are equipped to do such granular surveillance from the sky, but it is not clear that this is happening. While the ALPR feature is available as part of Flock drone acquisitions, some government customers may not realize that to approve a drone from Flock Safety may also mean approving a flying ALPR. And though not every Flock safety drone is currently running the ALPR feature, some departments, like Redondo Beach Police Department, have plans to activate it in the near future.
ALPRs aren’t the only so-called payloads that can be added to a drone. In addition to the high resolution and thermal cameras with which drones can already be equipped, drone manufacturers and police departments have discussed adding cell-site simulators, weapons, microphones, and other equipment. Communities must mobilize now to keep this runaway surveillance technology under tight control.
When EFF posed questions to Flock Safety about the integration of ALPR and its drones, the company declined to comment.
Mapping, storing, and tracking as much personal information as possible—all without warrants—is where automated police surveillance is heading right now. Flock has previously described its desire to connect ALPR scans to additional information on the person who owns the car, meaning that we don’t live far from a time when police may see your vehicle drive by and quickly learn that it’s your car and a host of other details about you.

Also:

15 Applications of Drones for Law Enforcement (Police Drones)
Drones for law enforcement are transforming the way police agencies monitor, respond, and protect communities. With advanced cameras, thermal imaging, and real-time data transmission, police drones offer a faster, safer, and more cost-effective way to handle various operations.
1. Crime Scene Investigation
Drones help police document crime scenes with high-resolution aerial photos and videos. By capturing a detailed, top-down perspective, law enforcement can preserve evidence, analyze blood splatters, or reconstruct accidents and crime events without disturbing critical details.
2. Search and Rescue Operations
Police drones equipped with thermal cameras and night vision assist in search and rescue missions by detecting heat signatures in dense forests, mountains, or disaster-stricken areas. Drones can cover large areas quickly, increasing the chances of finding missing persons faster.
3. Traffic Accident Investigation
Drones for law enforcement can map accident scenes, take aerial photos, and reconstruct crashes in minutes. This helps police determine fault, document road conditions, and clear traffic congestion faster.
4. Suspect Tracking and Pursuit
Police drones help track fleeing suspects in foot chases or high-speed vehicle pursuits. UAVs can follow a suspect from the air, provide live video to officers, and assist in coordinated takedowns without putting officers in direct danger.
5. Crowd Monitoring and Riot Control
During large gatherings, protests, or riots, drones give law enforcement a clear aerial view of the crowd. Police UAVs help officers monitor movements, identify threats, and manage emergencies without deploying large teams on the ground.
6. Border Security and Illegal Smuggling Detection
Drones are used for border surveillance to detect illegal crossings, human trafficking, and smuggling activities. With long-range cameras and AI tracking, police drones can monitor vast areas and alert border patrol teams instantly.
7. Tactical Operations and SWAT Missions
For SWAT teams, drones play a crucial role in hostage situations, drug busts, and active shooter scenarios. UAVs can enter buildings, warehouses, or rooftops to provide real-time video feeds, helping officers plan safe entry strategies.
8. Aerial Surveillance and Reconnaissance
Drones for law enforcement offer a faster and more cost-effective alternative to helicopters for routine surveillance, stakeouts, and covert operations. UAVs provide silent, high-resolution monitoring without alerting suspects.
9. Disaster Response and Damage Assessment
After natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes, police drones help in damage assessment, locating survivors, and guiding emergency teams. They provide quick aerial footage for decision-making in crisis situations.
10. Drug Enforcement and Narcotics Interdiction
Drones assist police in detecting illegal drug operations, such as hidden drug labs, cannabis farms, and trafficking routes. UAVs equipped with thermal imaging can spot unusual heat sources, indicating possible drug production sites.
11. Environmental Law Enforcement
Police drones are used to monitor illegal dumping, deforestation, and wildlife poaching. UAVs help collect evidence of environmental crimes and track offenders in remote locations.
12. Undercover Investigations and Covert Surveillance
Drones allow law enforcement to monitor suspects from a safe distance, reducing the need for physical stakeouts. UAVs can hover silently at high altitudes, capturing clear images and videos without being detected.
13. Perimeter Security and Facility Protection
Drones provide 24/7 perimeter surveillance for government buildings, prisons, and police stations. UAVs can detect suspicious activities, trespassers, and security breaches, ensuring better protection of sensitive locations.
14. Evidence Collection and Forensic Analysis
Police drones assist forensic teams by capturing aerial images of crime scenes, mapping bullet trajectories, and detecting hidden evidence. Drones help preserve crucial details for court cases and legal proceedings.
15. Hostage Negotiation and Crisis Management
During hostage situations, police drones provide real-time video feeds to negotiators, allowing them to assess threats, number of hostages, and escape routes. UAVs can also deliver negotiation devices without risking officers’ lives.
Summary: Drones for Law Enforcement (Police Drones)
Drones have become essential tools for law enforcement agencies, enhancing surveillance, search and rescue, crime scene analysis, and emergency response. Equipped with thermal cameras, night vision, and AI-powered tracking, police drones provide real-time intelligence, improve officer safety, and increase operational efficiency.
Key applications of drones in law enforcement include:
Surveillance & Tracking – Monitoring suspects, gathering intelligence, and securing crime scenes.
Search & Rescue – Locating missing persons in hard-to-reach areas using thermal imaging.
Crowd Monitoring & Riot Control – Managing large gatherings and ensuring public safety.
Traffic & Accident Investigation – Assessing crash sites with aerial imaging.
Tactical & SWAT Operations – Assisting in high-risk situations with live video feeds.
With advanced payloads like loudspeakers, spotlights, chemical sensors, and AI-enhanced object detection, drones significantly boost law enforcement capabilities.

Also:

Autonomous Drones For Police Departments Listings With Specs
In 2026, autonomous drones for law enforcement prioritize NDAA compliance, thermal imaging, and "Drone as First Responder" (DFR) capabilities
.

Key Autonomous Drone Listings (2026)
Skydio X10: Widely used for its market-leading AI-driven autonomy and obstacle avoidance in low-visibility environments.
Autonomy: 360-degree obstacle avoidance; AI-powered subject tracking and night flight.
Sensors: 4K color camera and high-resolution thermal imaging.
Price: Specialized law enforcement packages typically start at $15,000+.
DJI Matrice 350 RTK: A flagship industrial platform for heavy-duty surveillance and tactical communication.
Flight Time: Up to 55 minutes.
Payloads: Supports Zenmuse H30T (thermal/zoom) and V1 (broadcasting speaker).
Price: Approximately $38,651 for public safety combos.
Autel EVO Max 4T V2: Known for its "A-Mesh" networking and millimeter-wave radar for interference-free autonomous flight.
Specs: 8K video, 10-camera obstacle avoidance, and 42-minute flight time.
Price: Listed around $7,299.
RMUS Heavy Duty Police Drone (HERA): A high-performance US-made quadcopter optimized for heavy payloads.
Specs: 56-minute flight time (no payload); 40 minutes with 5 lbs; max payload 33 lbs.
Compliance: Fully NDAA-compliant.
Parrot ANAFI USA: A lightweight, rapidly deployable drone focused on data security and thermal reconnaissance.
Specs: 500g weight; 32x zoom; FLIR Boson thermal camera; 32-minute flight time.
Price: Frequently found in kits starting around $7,000 - $9,000.
Quick Comparison Table
Model

Max Flight Time Max Speed Transmission Range Special Feature
DJI M350 RTK 55 mins 83 km/h 15 km Multi-payload support
Autel EVO Max 4T 42 mins 72 km/h 20 km Radar-based avoidance
Skydio X10 40 mins 72 km/h 12 km Best-in-class AI autonomy
HERA Quad 56 mins 40 km/h 15 km Heavy 33 lb lift capacity
Parrot ANAFI USA 32 mins 61 km/h 4 km AES-256 encryption

Purchasing & Resources

Agencies often acquire these through specialized public safety vendors such as DSLRPros, Drone Nerds, and FlyMotion. Programs like Skydio for Public Safety offer specific autonomous workflows for patrol and search-and-rescue.

Where to Find Listings & Specs
DSLRPros: Offers DJI, ACSL, and Sentera sensors with pricing.
XrTech Group: Provides guides with detailed specs for Autel, DJI, etc.
Unmanned Systems Technology (UST): Features various manufacturers (JOUAV, Acecore, etc.) with payload/range info.
Advexure: Specializes in public safety drones, highlighting Autel EVO Max 4T features.
Key Specs for Police Drones
Payloads: Thermal, Optical Zoom, LiDAR, Speakers, Spotlights.
Performance: 30+ min flight, 40+ mph speed, anti-jamming.
Autonomy: AI Object Identification, GPS-denied flight, Automated flight paths.
Durability: IP43+ weather resistance

These are some of the most popular drones for public safety operations：
Model
Type
Transmission Range
Max Flight Time
Top Speed
Payload Capacity
JOUAV CW-30E
VTOL drone
100/200km (Optional)
480mins
90km/h
8kg
JOUAV CW-15D
VTOL drone
30/50km (Optional)
180mins
61km/h
3kg
RMUS Heavy Duty Police Drone
Quadcopter
15km
56mins
40 km/h
13kg
DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced
Quadcopter
15km
46mins
76km/h
4.5kg
Autel Robotics EVO II
Quadcopter
9km
33mins
72km/h
2.5kg
DJI Matrice 300 RTK
Quadcopter
8km
55mins
83km/h
2.7kg
Parrot ANAFI USA
Quadcopter
4km
25mins
61 km/h
1.95kg
Yuneec H520E
Hexacopter
1.5km
30mins
72km/h
0.8kg

DTCC’s Master Plan: Tokenizing Quadrillions In Global Assets With Centralized Control

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 03:47:00 +0000

DTCC moves $3.7 quadrillion annually and just patented a system to bring all assets on-chain. Learn how this could reshape global finance—while keeping control centralized.
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a critical backbone of global finance, recently published patent US20250078065A1. This patent describes DTCC’s approach to moving global financial assets onto blockchain networks. However, unlike purely decentralized solutions, DTCC’s approach maintains centralized control. This move signals a clear direction toward digital assets managed securely under traditional governance models. Understanding this patent offers valuable insights into the future shape of financial markets and regulatory oversight.
The patent shows DTCC wants to dominate tokenized finance globally, while being able to:
Interoperate across public blockchains.
Build private/consortium DLTs.
Manage rights dynamically (delegate wallets).
Prepare for quantum security threats.
And they want to do all of this without giving up institutional control.
What is DTCC? The Financial Giant Behind Markets
Origins and Historical Evolution
DTCC formed in 1999, consolidating several clearinghouses into one streamlined holding company. Originally established to simplify securities transfers, DTCC digitized stock settlements and eliminated physical certificates. Its predecessor, the Depository Trust Company (DTC), dates back to 1973, initially created to ease settlement bottlenecks. Over decades, DTCC acquired other clearing entities, centralizing equities, bonds, and derivatives under its management. Today, it provides the backbone of nearly every major securities transaction in the United States and internationally.
DTCC’s Critical Role
DTCC is among the most influential yet least publicly known organizations in global finance. Annually, it clears and settles around $3.7 quadrillion worth of securities. Each day, DTCC processes more than 100 million transactions, amounting to approximately $1.2 trillion daily. Additionally, it maintains custody of around $87 trillion in securities across more than 130 global jurisdictions. Its clients include nearly every major financial institution, broker-dealer, and market participant, making DTCC essential for stable market operations.
Global Influence and Importance
Regulated by major institutions such as the SEC, Federal Reserve, and international equivalents, DTCC’s stability is critical. During financial crises—like the collapse of Lehman Brothers or post-9/11 disruptions—DTCC ensured uninterrupted settlement operations. Its role as a designated Systemically Important Financial Market Utility (SIFMU) underscores DTCC’s importance. Thus, DTCC’s initiatives profoundly impact global financial operations and stability.
The Patent: DTCC’s On-Chain Asset Control Framework
Overview of Patent US20250078065A1
DTCC’s recent patent filing, titled “Method, Apparatus, and Computer-Readable Medium for Confederated Rights and Hierarchical Key Management,” outlines detailed plans for moving global financial rights onto distributed ledger technology (DLT). Inventor George Daniel Doney and assignees DTCC Digital US Inc. and Securrency, Inc. designed a structure enabling digital rights delegation. Crucially, this delegation model preserves central authority over asset management through hierarchical key structures. Daniel Doney is the Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer of DTCC Digital Assets.
Core Objectives and Approach
At the core, DTCC aims to securely delegate rights related to tokenized assets using blockchain technology. The system implements hierarchical wallet structures where top-level (“root”) wallets retain ultimate control over assets. Delegated wallets possess restricted rights, which the root wallets can revoke or reassign easily. Thus, DTCC combines blockchain efficiency with traditional financial controls, ensuring compliance, security, and accountability in digital asset handling.
Technical Features of the Patent
DTCC’s patent describes mechanisms that rely heavily on smart contracts to manage asset rights. Rights delegation occurs through immutable records on-chain, documenting every action transparently. Registry systems store delegation, attributes, and policies, creating audit trails and compliance records. Such structures allow institutions to issue, manage, and revoke permissions instantly, significantly reducing risk while increasing regulatory clarity.
“Implementations of distributed ledger and/or blockchain technology including, but not limited to, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hashgraph, Binance, Flow, Tron, Tezos, Cosmos, and Ripple are compatible with the present invention.
Patent US20250078065A1
In Reality:
DTCC’s patent showcses an architecture that can ‘plug into’ or ‘bridge across’ any major blockchain/DLT environment — but with:
Institutional custody models.
Delegated authority (root wallets/delegate wallets structure).
Centralized registries (delegation, attributes, policies).
This way, they can tokenize and control assets on ANY chain — public, private, or hybrid — depending on regulation, partnerships, or market demand.
They’re essentially creating the “middleware layer” for tokenized finance across blockchain worlds, but owned by the incumbents. Compatible Cryptocurrency Projects: Multiple Chains, One Vision
DTCC’s patent explicitly lists several blockchain technologies as compatible implementations. These include widely-used public blockchains and specialized platforms that support asset tokenization and smart contracts.
Bitcoin and Ethereum: Represent robust blockchain networks already central to digital finance.
Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR): Known for rapid transaction settlement and governance suited for regulated financial applications.
Binance (BNB Chain): Supports extensive decentralized financial (DeFi) ecosystems and institutional collaborations.
Flow: Used primarily in tokenizing digital collectibles, intellectual property, and other real-world assets.
Tron and Tezos: Fast, cost-effective networks suitable for large-scale tokenized asset management.
Cosmos: Offers modular, interoperable blockchain architecture designed specifically for integrating multiple chains.
Ripple (XRP Ledger): Known for facilitating cross-border asset transfers and settlements for banks and financial institutions.
DTCC’s compatibility with these platforms underscores its commitment to versatility, interoperability, and long-term digital infrastructure alignment. Imagine a future in which technical flexibility enables:
Tokenized securities settlement on Hedera (fast and cheap).
Interaction with Ethereum DeFi.
Bridging tokenized assets onto Cosmos IBC chains.
Integrating payments over Ripple/XRP.
Hedera and DTCC: Strategic Collaboration and Governance
Among the blockchain projects compatible with DTCC’s initiative, Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR) stands out due to its direct and strategic collaboration with DTCC. In September 2024, Hedera became a premier founding member of the Linux Foundation’s Decentralized Trust (LFDT). DTCC also joined LFDT, highlighting a significant cooperative alignment between the two organizations. This membership positions both DTCC and Hedera to jointly influence the development of blockchain and decentralized standards tailored specifically to financial markets.
Hedera’s involvement complements DTCC’s strategy, emphasizing high-throughput, secure, and regulated blockchain infrastructure. Hedera’s hashgraph technology offers extremely fast transactions, robust security, and built-in governance—attributes vital for institutional financial applications. By working together within the LFDT, DTCC and Hedera aim to ensure blockchain’s role in finance aligns with strict regulatory frameworks, industry compliance requirements, and robust governance standards.
This collaboration represents a practical intersection between DTCC’s centralized financial control framework and Hedera’s innovative, enterprise-ready technology. It highlights DTCC’s commitment not only to integrate blockchain but also to shape its governance proactively. Consequently, Hedera’s partnership with DTCC could accelerate broader institutional adoption, solidifying hashgraph technology’s role in the next generation of regulated financial infrastructure.
Centralizing Control in a Decentralized World
Bridging Traditional Finance (TradFi) and Decentralized Finance (DeFi)
DTCC’s on-chain patent represents a clear strategy for connecting traditional financial systems to blockchain technology. Rather than decentralizing financial operations completely, DTCC prefers maintaining centralized oversight. Through hierarchical control, the system ensures compliance, accountability, and security—key demands of traditional institutions. This centralized approach helps mitigate concerns regulators might have about decentralization, making it attractive for institutional adoption. Essentially, DTCC’s framework brings the efficiency of blockchain to finance without sacrificing centralized governance or regulatory oversight.
The DTCC Chainlink Collaboration: Expanding Capital Market Efficiency
To support its broader goal of integrating blockchain into traditional finance, DTCC collaborates closely with Chainlink, a prominent blockchain interoperability provider. Together, they recently piloted the “Smart NAV” project, showcasing mutual fund Net Asset Value (NAV) data delivered securely on-chain. Major financial institutions such as JPMorgan, BNY Mellon, Franklin Templeton, and State Street joined this initiative. Leveraging Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), the pilot achieved seamless, secure data transmission across multiple blockchain networks.
This collaboration demonstrated several key benefits: it standardized NAV data dissemination, improved interoperability, and automated previously manual processes. Institutions gained the ability to transfer critical financial data efficiently between blockchains, significantly reducing operational risks and enhancing market transparency. Consequently, the DTCC-Chainlink partnership illustrates how centralized institutions can successfully integrate blockchain technology into existing infrastructures, streamlining capital market operations.
Implications for Blockchain Projects and Institutional Adoption
Projects explicitly mentioned by DTCC’s patent—including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hedera, Binance, Flow, Tron, Tezos, Cosmos, and Ripple—are strategically positioned to benefit from DTCC’s initiative. These blockchain networks could see increased institutional interest due to their compatibility with DTCC’s hierarchical governance and compliance structures. Chainlink’s involvement further underscores the readiness of blockchain technology for large-scale financial integration.
For institutions, DTCC’s model simplifies regulatory compliance and auditability, significantly boosting confidence in blockchain-based solutions. Additionally, Chainlink’s proven interoperability solutions reduce friction between traditional financial markets and blockchain ecosystems. Ultimately, the synergy between DTCC’s centralized control and Chainlink’s decentralized interoperability creates a balanced environment, enabling safe, controlled, and efficient digitization of global finance.
DTCC’s Long-Term Vision: Controlled Digital Finance
Rather than seeking to disrupt existing systems, DTCC’s patent shows intent to enhance them digitally. The hierarchical system outlined ensures DTCC maintains centralized control, satisfying regulatory demands and institutional needs. This control-centric model contrasts traditional blockchain ideals of decentralization but meets practical compliance demands from regulators worldwide.
By laying down this blueprint, DTCC seeks not to dismantle but to reinforce the existing financial system with blockchain efficiency. Such a strategy ensures global finance transitions smoothly into a digitally enabled era without losing centralized stability or accountability.
A Fundamental Shift in Global Finance
DTCC’s patent significantly impacts how global finance could function in the future. By carefully balancing blockchain innovation with centralized control, DTCC’s model reshapes asset management strategies across industries. Crypto projects and traditional finance institutions alike stand poised to benefit from clearer frameworks for asset tokenization. Ultimately, DTCC’s on-chain patent represents a clear blueprint for digitally evolving global markets under centralized and regulatory-friendly conditions.
DTCC is preparing a blockchain-agnostic, quantum-resistant, multi-chain financial platform to tokenize and control the future global economy — while preserving full centralized oversight over rights, custody, and transfer mechanisms.

Also:

BlackRock and DTCC have also joined the fray... the 'RWA tokenization' innovation shaking traditional finance.
The 'Tokenization' Innovation Changing the Future of Traditional Finance
The blockchainization of physical assets, so-called 'tokenization', is creating changes that will shake up the existing financial industry. Kiss Grossman, the president of cryptocurrency payment company MoonPay(, stated, “Just as digital technology rapidly reshaped traditional media industries like newspapers and CDs, the tokenization of assets will reconstruct the financial industry at an even faster pace.”
He described this process as a 'process of forcing evolution' and emphasized that blockchain-based real-world asset tokenization), hereinafter referred to as RWA(, is no longer just an 'idea'. He stated that major players in the financial industry are already moving it from the experimental stage to the implementation stage.
BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and others have already entered the field.
A typical example is that asset management company BlackRock is offering tokenized funds, while Franklin Templeton is operating money market funds on a public blockchain. Major global banks such as Citibank, Bank of America, and JP Morgan are also in a state of experimenting with on-chain settlement, real-time asset movement, and tokenized deposits.
According to RWA.XYZ, the current market capitalization of the RWA market, excluding stablecoins, is approximately $19 billion), which is about 28 trillion 1.39 billion won(. The industry views this trend of real assets connecting to the blockchain as a survival strategy for traditional finance.
Those who lead in change become the winners.
President Grossman stated, “From the 1990s to the early 2000s, digital technology did not destroy the print newspaper and music markets, but rather evolved them.” He added, “Similarly in the financial sector, only companies that actively respond to the current trend of tokenization will survive and become leaders rather than followers.”
He emphasized that “companies trying to stop the flow of change will inevitably be eliminated,” stating that the restructuring of the global financial system centered around blockchain is an 'inevitable reality.'
The era of 24-hour trading is coming
One of the biggest advantages created by tokenization is the '24-hour trading availability'. RWA can lower fees by eliminating intermediaries and reduce settlement times from several days to just a few minutes. The ability to expand the asset market on a global scale and operate in real-time is also a significant strength.
Accordingly, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ) SEC ( and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission ) CFTC ( began discussions in September on a regulatory framework for the 24-hour operation of capital markets. This serves as a basis for transforming the entire financial system into an 'always open' system.
DTCC also joins with 3.7 quadrillion dollars processed
The DTCC, the central securities depository in the United States, is also actively moving towards tokenization. As of 2024, DTCC, which processed $3.7 quadrillion in payments, recently received approval from the SEC to launch tokenized products and plans to offer U.S. Treasury bonds and stock indices in tokenized form starting in the second half of 2026.
The Ethereum ) network has already established itself as the central platform where most tokenized RWA assets are traded. As blockchain evolves into the infrastructure for physical assets, traditional finance is entering a completely new era.

Also:

Warning: DTCC Just Got the Green Light. The $3.7 Quadrillion Monster Goes Onchain in 2026
Today, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation received an SEC No Action Letter allowing them to tokenize real world, DTC-custodied assets on blockchain.
This is historic.
DTCC settles about 3.7 quadrillion dollars every year. It is the core settlement engine behind nearly every stock trade, ETF movement, and Treasury transfer in the United States.
And they are now cleared to begin rolling out tokenization in 2026.
This is not a pilot and not a test. The SEC has formally authorized a tokenization service for highly liquid assets including:
• The Russell 1000
• Major index ETFs
• U.S. Treasury bills, notes, and bonds
These are some of the deepest liquidity pools on earth.
Each tokenized asset will carry the same rights, protections, and ownership structure as the traditional version. This mirrors the digital twin model that Nasdaq filed for earlier this year.
This is the first real path to onchain U.S. securities.
DTCC has been testing DLT for almost a decade. Securrency’s patents, now owned by DTCC, reference multiple networks including Hedera (HBAR), XRP Ledger, Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and there are already deep integrations with Chainlink (LINK).
And this isn’t happening in a vacuum.
The Global Blockchain Business Council has been building a multi-network risk mitigation framework with contributors like DTCC, Hedera, Ripple, Cardano (ADA), Avalanche (AVAX), Clearstream, Euroclear, Canton (CC) and Chainlink. These trials are being overseen by the World Bank.
The framework is designed to give institutions a safe and standardized path to use public networks. It is the clearest signal that a multi-chain future is already being engineered behind the scenes.
This also lines up with OCC guidance confirming that U.S. national banks can now buy and sell crypto for customers as a riskless principal.
Banks plus DTCC plus regulatory clarity is the digital market structure that institutions have been waiting for.
DTCC will soon publish: • Approved blockchain networks
• Wallet registration requirements
• Onboarding standards for institutions
• Compliance and reporting frameworks
We will finally see which networks will be used in production.
This is the moment crypto shifts from asset class to infrastructure. TradFi is not speculating. They are rebuilding the settlement layer of global finance on distributed ledger technology.
Tokenization is no longer a narrative. It is a regulated roadmap.
Rollout begins in the second half of 2026.
The internet of information is literally becoming the internet of value.

Dark Factories: The Completely Automated Factory Of The Future

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 21:11:00 +0000

With the fourth generation - Industry 4.0 - the industrial revolution has reached a point where human labour can be supplemented or replaced by fully autonomous systems. At the centre of this development is the concept of the dark factory, a vision of fully automated factories that operate without light, breaks or human presence. However, such complete automation poses a major challenge and requires considerable investment and reorganisation.
What is a Dark Factory?
A dark factory is a production or logistics facility that is operated exclusively by machines, autonomous robots and digital technologies. The ‘dark’ in the name symbolises that these facilities can theoretically operate without light, as no human presence is required - theoretically, because certain optical sensors and cameras still require light to function correctly. These factories are designed to maximise efficiency, precision and productivity and use state-of-the-art technology to operate around the clock.
Features of a Dark Factory
Complete automation
All work processes - from the delivery of materials to the completion of a product - are controlled by machines, robots and AI. Human intervention is minimised or not necessary.
24/7 operation
As machines do not require breaks, a Dark Factory can work without interruptions, which significantly increases productivity.
Cost reduction
Operating costs are reduced due to the elimination of lighting, heating and other energy-intensive requirements for human workstations.
IoT and AI integration
Networked machines continuously collect and analyse data in order to optimise processes, minimise errors and increase productivity.
Adaptability
Dark factories utilise flexible automation technologies to adapt quickly to new requirements or product changes.

Advantages:

Maximum efficiency: No delays due to pauses or human error.
Precision: Automated systems work with maximum accuracy.
Scalability: Processes can be quickly adapted to increasing production requirements.
Cost savings: Reduced energy consumption and lower labour costs in the long term.

Challenges:

High initial investment: Setting up a dark factory requires considerable investment in technology and infrastructure.

Complex planning: Implementation demands a deep understanding of the processes and requirements.

Maintenance and technical expertise: Operation requires qualified specialists to maintain the technologies

Also:

The Rise of the Dark Factory: Fully Automated Production Floors

A Silent Revolution on the Shop Floor
Factories have long symbolized industrial progress, buzzing with human activity and machinery. However, the era of Industry 4.0 is rewriting this image. Today, “dark factories” are emerging production fcilities that operate entirely autonomously, often without human presence or even lights. These factories leverage advanced robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and predictive analytics to function as self-sustaining ecosystems.
The rise of dark factories reflects a broader industrial shift, where companies pursue continuous production, high precision, and resilience against supply chain disruptions. While the promise of fully automated production is compelling, it also raises questions about workforce transformation, policy frameworks, and global competitiveness.
From Lean Manufacturing to Lights-Out Production
The idea of fully automated factories is not new. Experiments in the 1980s, such as General Motors’ lights-out initiatives, revealed the potential for autonomous operations but faced technological barriers. Robotics lacked dexterity, sensors were primitive, and computing systems could not coordinate complex workflows.
With Industry 4.0, these barriers are collapsing. Today, dark factories integrate AI-driven robotics, IoT sensors, autonomous material handling, and digital twins. Robots can assemble products, conduct inspections, and self-correct errors. IoT devices monitor machinery in real time, feeding data into cloud and edge computing systems to optimize production and predict maintenance needs. AGVs, drones, and robotic arms manage logistics without human intervention. This convergence allows factories to operate 24/7 with minimal errors and reduced costs, achieving precision and efficiency previously unimaginable.
Industrial Advantages and Adoption Drivers
The adoption of dark factories is fueled by several compelling advantages that make fully automated production an attractive strategy for manufacturers worldwide. Cost efficiency is a primary driver: robots operate without wages, breaks, or overtime, and their precision reduces errors and waste, translating into significant long-term savings for businesses. In an era where operational margins are tight, these savings can be a decisive competitive advantage.
Another key factor is continuous production. Unlike human-operated factories, dark factories can run 24/7 without fatigue, meeting the growing demand for rapid delivery and mass-customized products. This capability is particularly valuable in industries where speed-to-market is critical, enabling companies to respond quickly to changing consumer needs and market fluctuations.
Quality and precision are also central to the appeal of dark factories. AI-powered robotics and computer vision systems ensure consistent output across every unit, while real-time defect detection reduces material waste and enhances customer satisfaction. This level of reliability is especially important for high-precision sectors such as electronics, aerospace, and pharmaceuticals, where even minor errors can have significant consequences.
Dark factories also help mitigate labor shortages, a pressing concern in regions with aging populations or declining skilled labor pools, such as Europe and Japan. By automating repetitive or physically demanding tasks, manufacturers can maintain productivity even as the availability of traditional workers declines.
Safety is another advantage: hazardous or monotonous work can be fully automated, reducing workplace injuries and improving occupational health. Meanwhile, scalability allows production lines to be reprogrammed quickly for new products or variants, giving companies the flexibility to adapt to evolving market demands without extensive downtime or retraining. Collectively, these factors make dark factories a strategic investment for industries requiring high levels of precision, speed, and reliability, including electronics, automotive, aerospace, and pharmaceuticals.
Global Case Studies
The potential of dark factories is illustrated by several leading examples around the world. Siemens’ Amberg Electronics Plant in Germany operates almost entirely lights-out, achieving a remarkable 99.99885% quality rate. Human involvement is largely limited to supervising AI systems and optimizing operations, demonstrating how automation can handle complex, high-precision tasks with minimal human oversight.
In Japan, Fanuc’s robotics plant showcases another extreme of automation: the facility can run for up to 30 days without human supervision, highlighting the feasibility of fully autonomous industrial operations on a large scale. This approach not only improves efficiency but also reduces dependence on human labor for routine tasks.
In the United States, Tesla’s Gigafactories integrate extensive AI and robotics into battery and electric vehicle assembly. While not fully dark, these facilities demonstrate a hybrid model of automation, combining human expertise with machine precision to achieve scalability and rapid production.
China’s Shenzhen electronics factories provide another perspective, producing smartphones and other components with minimal human intervention. These factories exemplify how automation can support high-volume, precision manufacturing while maintaining cost efficiency and operational speed.
Together, these case studies demonstrate that dark factories are commercially viable, scalable, and strategically significant. They represent a new paradigm in manufacturing, offering unprecedented efficiency, precision, and adaptability, and positioning companies to compete more effectively in a global industrial landscape.
Adoption Statistics by Industry
The adoption of AI in manufacturing has accelerated significantly in recent years, with Germany serving as a prime example of this trend. Between 2020 and 2023, the percentage of German manufacturers utilizing AI rose from just 6% to 13.3%. This rapid growth underscores how quickly Industry 4.0 technologies are reshaping traditional production environments. Projections suggest that by 2030, AI-driven manufacturing could have a substantial economic impact, boosting productivity, enabling highly customized production, and supporting Germany’s position as a leader in advanced industrial engineering.
In the services sector, the uptake of AI has been even more pronounced. By 2024, nearly 40% of service-sector firms worldwide reported using AI to enhance operations, customer service, and back-office efficiency. Importantly, about 34% of these firms have invested in retraining their workforce, ensuring employees can adapt to new roles created by automation. This dual approach adoption of AI alongside workforce upskilling illustrates how services are balancing innovation with inclusivity, ensuring that the benefits of automation extend beyond cost savings to workforce transformation.
The electronics and automotive industries have emerged as clear frontrunners in the application of AI-driven robotics and automation. These sectors are leveraging predictive maintenance systems, machine vision for quality control, and autonomous logistics solutions, enabling them to achieve higher operational efficiency and tighter quality benchmarks. In the automotive sector, AI is integral not just in assembly lines, but also in supply chain optimization and electric vehicle production. Meanwhile, the electronics industry benefits from precision manufacturing and accelerated innovation cycles, driven by the integration of smart automation technologies.
Research consistently highlights the tangible benefits of AI adoption across industries. Companies implementing AI in production environments report productivity gains ranging from 20% to 40%, alongside significant reductions in defect rates and operational downtime. Additionally, AI-enabled automation shortens time-to-market for new products, giving companies a critical edge in highly competitive global markets. These statistics reinforce the idea that AI is not simply a cost-cutting tool it is a strategic enabler of innovation, agility, and long-term competitiveness.
Country-Wise Trends and Policy Insights
United States: AI investment reached $67.2 billion in 2023, nearly nine times higher than China. The U.S. emphasizes AI regulation and governance, with 21 agencies overseeing AI technologies.
Germany: Strong adoption in manufacturing is backed by policies supporting smart factories and industrial automation. Incentives for AI deployment in Industry 4.0 initiatives have accelerated adoption.
United Kingdom: The AI market exceeds £21 billion in 2025, with plans to integrate AI into public services and industry, aiming to become a global AI superpower by 2035.
European Union: Denmark leads with 27.58% of enterprises using AI, followed by Sweden (25.09%) and Belgium (24.71%). Romania lags at 3.07%. EU regulations focus on balancing innovation with ethical AI use and data privacy.
United Arab Emirates: The UAE Strategy for AI aims to position the country as a global leader by 2031, promoting AI across healthcare, energy, transportation, and governance.
These trends indicate that policy frameworks, investment incentives, and workforce strategies are key drivers of adoption, in addition to technological readiness.
Challenges and Risks
While dark factories promise efficiency, cost savings, and scalability, their adoption is not without hurdles. One of the most significant barriers is the capital investment required. Building a fully automated facility involves substantial upfront costs for robotics, AI platforms, IoT sensors, and supporting digital infrastructure. For large multinational corporations, this investment can be justified through long-term gains, but for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), such costs often remain prohibitive, limiting widespread adoption.
Cybersecurity presents another critical challenge. Dark factories, by design, are fully connected ecosystems, with every machine, sensor, and control system linked through networks. This connectivity makes them highly vulnerable to cyberattacks, industrial espionage, and data breaches. A single breach could halt operations across an entire factory, potentially leading to massive financial and reputational damage. As a result, building robust cybersecurity frameworks has become as important as installing robots or AI systems themselves.
Reliability is also a key concern. Even the most advanced machines and AI-driven systems are not immune to errors, breakdowns, or unforeseen failures. Downtime in a dark factory can be particularly costly, as there are few or no human workers on-site to intervene quickly. This makes predictive maintenance systems, redundancy planning, and remote troubleshooting capabilities essential for minimizing risks and ensuring operational continuity.
Beyond technical issues, ethical considerations loom large. The displacement of workers in repetitive or manual roles is an inevitable consequence of large-scale automation. Policymakers and business leaders face the challenge of ensuring equitable access to reskilling programs, creating pathways for displaced workers to transition into higher-value roles. Moreover, governance frameworks must be developed to ensure AI systems are transparent, explainable, and aligned with ethical business practices. Without addressing these concerns, the promise of dark factories could be overshadowed by societal pushback and inequality.
Future Outlook: Beyond Dark Factories
Dark factories represent only the beginning of a broader shift toward fully autonomous, intelligent manufacturing ecosystems. The next frontier lies in cognitive manufacturing, where AI systems do more than execute instructions they make autonomous production decisions, optimize energy usage, and manage maintenance schedules with little to no human oversight. This will mark a fundamental transformation in how factories think and operate, evolving from programmable automation to adaptive intelligence.
Another promising development is the move toward sustainable manufacturing. By leveraging smart automation, factories will play a pivotal role in advancing the circular economy. AI systems can minimize waste, optimize resource consumption, and reduce energy intensity, turning sustainability from a regulatory requirement into a competitive advantage. This transition will not only lower environmental footprints but also open new business models centered on recycling, reuse, and sustainable innovation.
Equally transformative is the rise of augmented human collaboration. Instead of working directly on assembly lines, human operators will supervise and manage multiple factories remotely. Using digital twins, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR) platforms, workers will be able to monitor production, simulate scenarios, and troubleshoot issues in real time, regardless of physical location. This knowledge-driven oversight ensures that while machines handle repetitive, dangerous, and data-intensive tasks, humans can focus on creativity, strategic thinking, and ethical decision-making.
Ultimately, the future of dark factories is not about replacing humans but redefining their role. As machines take over execution, humans will be freed to concentrate on innovation, design, and leadership. The synergy between autonomous systems and human intelligence will shape the factories of tomorrow not as dark and empty spaces, but as intelligent ecosystems where efficiency, sustainability, and human creativity coexist.
Dark factories symbolize the next frontier of Industry 4.0, combining autonomy, intelligence, and efficiency to transform manufacturing. They promise continuous, precise, and resilient production, while also reshaping the workforce and global industrial landscape. For industrial leaders, CIOs, and policymakers, the challenge is clear: embrace automation while managing workforce transitions, cybersecurity, and ethical governance. As the lights dim on traditional production floors, the opportunities for innovation, operational efficiency, and global competitiveness have never been brighter.

Also:

The Tech Enabling China's 'Dark Factories'
They are not just prototypes or experiments. They are the beginning of a transformation. China is entering a new age of manufacturing with the rise of 'dark factories,' fully automated facilities that operate without any human workers or even lights. Inside these eerily quiet plants, robotic arms weld, cut, and assemble products nonstop. Fleets of autonomous vehicles deliver materials across factory floors without human oversight.
As they are built entirely around machines, these factories eliminate the need for lighting, heating, break rooms, and other human-centric infrastructure.
The result is a system optimized for continuous productivity. It reduces costs, improves precision, and functions at all hours. Powering this new production paradigm is a convergence of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), advanced robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and dense sensor networks. Together, they create self-regulating ecosystems where machines work together with extraordinary coordination, even with the lights off.
Core Technologies: The Pillars of Automation
At the center of every dark factory is an army of robotic workers. These include not only robot arms that weld and paint but also specialized machines that handle tasks like microassembly, product inspection, and polishing. China has become the global leader in industrial robot deployment. In 2022, it installed over 290,000 units, which accounted for more than half of the world’s total.
By 2023, China’s robot density had reached 392 per 10,000 workers, significantly above the global average of 141. Companies like Foxconn are leading this shift. The electronics giant has replaced over 60,000 workers at its Kunshan factory with robots and aims to automate 30 percent of its operations by 2025. Similarly, BYD, a key player in electric vehicles, has installed robotic systems across its battery and vehicle body manufacturing lines.
Mobile robotics are just as vital. Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) and Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) move materials across the floor, reposition tools, and deliver parts. In Jetour Auto’s Fuzhou factory, these mobile robots have cut logistics time by more than 40 percdnt and helped reach an output of one completed car every 100 seconds.
Artificial Intelligence: The Brain Behind the Operation
A dark factory needs more than robots. It needs intelligence that can manage those machines. Artificial intelligence fills that role. AI functions as the factory’s brain by directing robot movements, analyzing data in real time, and making continuous adjustments to keep systems efficient.
At Xiaomi’s smart factory in Changping, the AI platform HyperIMP oversees every aspect of production. It coordinates 11 robotic production lines, monitors equipment health, and reroutes tasks when issues arise. This coordination allows the plant to produce one smartphone every 3 seconds, without manual oversight.
AI is also used in machine vision systems that detect flaws and maintain product quality. These systems can find microdefects that humans would likely miss. Siemens has reported a 99.99 percent product quality rate in its automated facilities, and Xiaomi is reaching a similar level of consistency with its vision-based inspections.
Another crucial role of AI is predictive maintenance. Instead of waiting for machines to fail, AI analyzes sensor data such as temperature, vibration, and motor current. It identifies wear patterns and schedules maintenance before breakdowns occur. The manufacturing sector is expected to gain $3.8 trillion by 2035 from AI adoption. Jetour’s 'Smart Brain' platform has reduced downtime at its Fuzhou facility by more than 60 percent and has improved assembly accuracy across the board.
IoT and Sensor Networks: The Central Nervous System
The IoT and sensor networks act as the nervous system of a dark factory. Every machine is connected through high-speed networks and constantly shares status updates, location data, and quality metrics. This web of data enables real-time adjustments.
Sensors play a critical role in guiding robots. Cameras, infrared sensors, laser scanners, and LIDAR devices help machines perceive their environment. These technologies make it possible for AGVs to navigate in total darkness and for robot arms to place components with micrometer-level accuracy.
All of this data is collected and processed by AI systems, which analyze it to optimize the workflow. At Gree Electric’s 5.5G-enabled smart factory in Zhuhai, this full-stack integration has improved overall production efficiency by 86 percent.
Operational Advantages Driven by Technology
These combined technologies create significant operational benefits. One of the most obvious is 24/7 production. Without human workers, dark factories do not require breaks, shift changes, or holidays. Machines can keep running continuously.
Costs are also significantly reduced. Companies save on salaries, training, and safety measures. They also reduce utility expenses by eliminating the need for lighting, air conditioning, and other systems designed for people. According to the International Energy Agency, dark factory automation can lower industrial energy use by 15 to 20 percent.
Dark factories also deliver extremely high precision. Robotic systems can operate with consistency that surpasses human capabilities. When paired with real-time vision inspection, this leads to fewer defects and higher product reliability.
Another key advantage is cleanliness. Contamination risks drop dramatically with very few humans involved. This is especially important for industries like semiconductors, medical devices, and electronics, where clean environments are critical.
Finally, automated facilities offer resilience. They are less vulnerable to labor disruptions caused by pandemics, strikes, or demographic shifts. This makes them more stable in a volatile global supply chain environment.
The Human Element: Skills for the Factory of the Future
While dark factories require little human intervention on the shop floor, people remain critical to their success. These automated environments still depend on experts to design robotic systems, oversee AI, maintain equipment, and resolve issues. As automation advances, the worker’s role is shifting from manual labor to skilled technical and supervisory positions that support continuous operations.
Essential roles now include AI system trainers, robotics technicians, data analysts, IoT specialists, and cybersecurity professionals. These workers ensure that smart factory systems communicate efficiently, adapt to real-time data, and stay secure. With rising complexity, manufacturing increasingly values interdisciplinary expertise that combines engineering, software development, and data science.
To secure roles in these environments, candidates should highlight skills like Python, PLC programming, SCADA systems, and machine vision. Familiarity with platforms such as TensorFlow, ROS, and MES software is highly regarded. Industry certifications from Siemens, FANUC, or Cisco are also beneficial. Soft skills, including real-time problem-solving and cross-functional communication, are important for leadership and systems oversight.
To meet growing demand, companies and Chinese agencies are investing in reskilling programs. Xiaomi began retraining assembly workers as robotics technicians in 2024, and Gree Electric collaborates with institutes to prepare workers for 5.5G factory roles. The future of manufacturing will depend on how effectively humans are trained to manage, improve, and collaborate with machines.
Case Studies: Xiaomi’s Changping Smart Factory
Xiaomi’s $330 million dollar factory in Beijing spans 81,000 square meters and is one of China’s most advanced dark factories. It is capable of producing 10 million smartphones annually. Inside, 11 robotic lines operate continuously, managed by the company’s proprietary HyperIMP AI system. Vision systems monitor quality, while AGVs handle logistics. The plant can manufacture one smartphone every 3 seconds with zero human involvement on the production floor.
Jetour’s Fuzhou Dark Factory
Jetour’s Fuzhou facility produces SUVs with near-total automation. Over 300 robots carry out welding, painting, tire installation, and even CNC bonding of windshields. It builds a car every 100 seconds and uses its 'Smart Brain' AI to oversee equipment, quality, and scheduling. AMRs and AGVs support flexible logistics, which has helped the factory reach daily efficiency goals faster than previous plants.
Other Industry Leaders
Changying Precision Technology reduced its workforce by 90 percent in one facility by switching to robotics. Output increased, and error rates fell. Meanwhile, Gree Electric’s Gaolan facility uses 5.5G connectivity to support real-time machine learning and ultra-fast response times. These upgrades led to an 86 percent boost in output efficiency.
Strategic Drivers and Global Context
The growth of dark factories aligns with China’s 'Made in China 2025' policy. This strategy aims to upgrade the nation’s manufacturing base by promoting automation and advanced technologies. In 2023 alone, the government invested $1.4 billion in robotics research and development, along with further subsidies to promote AI and smart factory adoption.
China’s labor costs have risen in recent years, making automation economically attractive. At the same time, international competition is increasing. Countries such as Germany, the United States, Japan, and South Korea are also investing heavily in automation. However, China’s scale and state-level support allow it to move faster and deploy technology more widely than many peers.
China’s dark factories are not just prototypes or experiments. They are the beginning of a transformation in how products are made. By uniting robotics, AI, IoT, and sensing technologies into fully autonomous systems, these facilities achieve new levels of speed, quality, and reliability.
The benefits are clear, but the shift raises important questions about the future of human labor and economic structure. As machines become more capable, companies and governments will need to invest in new skill development and social planning. China is leading the way, and the rest of the world is watching as dark factories illuminate the path to the next industrial era.

Also:

What are 'Dark Factories,' and Do They Really Exist?
The first Industrial Revolution profoundly changed the way goods are manufactured, resulting in then-unthinkable gains in productivity, quality control, and consistency. Since then, three more revolutions have occurred, with manufacturers currently reaping the industrial automation benefits of Industry 4.0.
Theoretically, the next step in this evolution would be full automation, in which workers are no longer needed to create output. Known as a dark factory, this environment is fully automated, with no required human labor. Without this, such a facility can literally operate in the dark, without heat, light or other environmental needs – hence, the “dark factory” moniker – to serve a workforce.
Do Dark Factories Actually Exist?
“There’s always the story out there that there’s that one facility somewhere, usually in some faraway or unknown place,” said Guy Courtin, vice president of Industry and Advanced Technology for Montreal-based Tecsys, a supply chain software provider. “But if it exists, it would seem to be less of an actual production facility and more of a display that it can be done. Even if a fully automated facility exists, you probably still need at least some full-time employees to maintain that automation. So, is that truly a dark factory? Under the definition, no.”
There are certainly shades of gray in this concept. Unlike a dark factory, a fully automated factory relies on robotics to perform tasks, but that equipment still needs to be maintained by humans. Another take on the concept is the use of cobotics, the collaborative robots that help employees do their jobs.
“In theory and in practice, could you have a dark shift in a factory?” asked Courtin. “That’s entirely possible and more likely. For example, there could be a fully autonomous, robotic overnight shift that works in the dark that preps workstations with inventory. Or orders could get pre-picked in a warehouse and be ready for processing and shipping by the next FTE shift.”
While the concept of a true dark factory has certainly captured attention within the industry, it is much like an elusive unicorn. Rumors, yes. Actual proof and implementation? Not really.
“Right now, we’re more in a state where companies are less interested in implementing the full dark factory concept and more focused on how automation can complement labor, and this nuance gets lost in the excitement of robots,” he said.
Some operations are already implementing automated forklift technology, which relies on a variety of components – from wrap-around cameras to microphones – to allow for remote operation by employees. Taking this technology a step further are autonomous guided vehicles (AGV), which remove the human operator completely by using pre-programmed routes and tasks.
Other operations are pushing forward with additional autonomous applications. Europe’s largest pork processing plant, located in Denmark, uses human labor to start the processing, but robotics quickly take over. Using infrared technology to assess each hook, a series of six robots processes up to 18,000 units per shift. Human-powered processing lines typically process an average of 977 units an hour or around 7,800 per eight-hour shift.
A diesel automotive facility in China has also implemented more of a dark-factory approach to automate its assembly line more fully. Sensors embedded in the robotics alert workers when bottlenecks occur, or when the machine’s state and run time require human intervention. Integrating advanced analytics and Internet of Things (IoT) technology has also helped the facility use predictive maintenance to avoid equipment breakdowns.
“Automotive manufacturers have been applying this type of technology for years,” said Courtin. “That industry already knows that there are certain functions that are better suited to robotics – tasks that are repetitive or dangerous, for example.”
But at the same time, robotic technology has not advanced past human capacities in certain areas. “There are just some things human beings still do better,” said Courtin. “We remain better than robots at picking parts out of a box, for example.”
Humans also have a much greater capacity to troubleshoot. A simple issue that can be resolved by human understanding and reasoning can cause a robotic shutdown if it is outside of the program or beyond the capacity of the machine’s learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Humans also have much greater abilities to communicate, assess a situation, and infer conclusions within a system or organization. Robotics and machinery are fairly limited to error codes, streams of data, and other purely objective information. To use this information, automation must still be trained using AI and machine learning.
Pros and Cons of Automated Factories
With businesses perpetually focused on ways to improve efficiencies, cut costs and advance productivity, automation and robotics certainly are on the manufacturing and supply chain radar. Courtin noted automation helps eliminate natural human reasons to be away from work, such as illness or family vacations.
“They don’t have to commute, so they’re not burning fossil fuels in cars to get to and from work,” he added.
Human error is removed from the automation equation, along with attitude problems, homelife distractions, politics and workplace conflict. The human-nature, soft-issue problems that can plague workplaces around the world are removed when humans are replaced by robotics.
While in theory full automation might make sense in some cases, implementing it isn’t always so easy.
“What isn’t often talked about is the relationship with labor,” said Courtin. “Using automation poses the threat to reduce head count. There’s a certain uneasiness in introducing automation in that respect. It’s a delicate line to walk.”
On the other side of the equation, a dark factory could remove existing labor needs and concerns, an advantage in countries where labor costs are high. In parts of the world where labor costs are low, the ROI on a dark factory may take years.
“Creating a true a dark factory means that you don’t have to locate your facility near an established workforce – so you could build one where property values are less expensive,” said Courtin. “But then you also have to keep in mind logistics: if you’re really remote, there are also going to be extra supply chain and fulfillment costs.”
Labor and workforce issues aside, many existing factories also lack the ability to retrofit robots due to their age and infrastructure, making the concept an expensive proposition to consider.
Some manufacturing facilities are decades old and are often in brownfield locations. A conversion to a dark factory would require a significant capital investment, along with a suspension of operations, so that the new equipment can be installed, calibrated and tested before operations resume. Building from scratch assumes that the operation would never need labor, which can limit the facility’s future should operations ever change.
Yet, the concept intrigues the manufacturing industry. Whether fully dark factories every become the norm or not remains to be seen.
“Being able to run a factory 24/7 with [limited] labor and high efficiencies – that’s really the holy grail of manufacturing,” says Courtin. “You can definitely understand the interest.”

Prepping 101: Ultimate Guide to Survival and Emergency Preparedness

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 03:19:00 +0000

Essential Tips and Tools for Prepping, Urban Survival, Wilderness Survival, and Emergency Preparedness
Survival skills are essential in uncertain times. Prepping ensures that you and your family can handle emergencies with confidence. This guide explores the fundamentals of prepping, urban survival, wilderness survival, and emergency preparedness.
You’ll discover practical advice, tools, and training to build your skills and readiness.
Q: But aren’t Preppers Crazy?!
A: No!
Why: Sadly, the media has done a great job connecting the term “prepping” with those on the fringes who go over the top and make them look insane for doing so.
Ask anyone who has taken a trip down the rabbit hole of survival and emergency preparedness “what is the best way to start prepping?”, and most likely you find the answer to be, “it depends.” The truth about prepping is: there is no single best way to do it!
Since no two people are experiencing the exact same life circumstances, we can not expect how we prepare for the unknown to be the same. If that sounds potentially overwhelming, do not despair, here are very similar places to start! When you boil prepping down to things that are necessary to live, what you arrive at is a handful of basics at which most people can start.
To those who are new to prepping and need a quick start (or maybe you want a refresher), this section provides a concise guide to help you build your foundation. Follow these steps to begin preparing for emergencies effectively and efficiently.
Take Care of Yourself First!
If everything was taken away from you in an instant, you’d be left with the physical state of your body, and the mental resilience of your mind. If you do not feel comfortable with this knowledge, it may indicate that you need to prioritize self-care before thinking about bug out bags and survival rifles.
Physical Preps: Get a physical exam done by a doctor if you haven’t recently had one. This is a crucial step since it will help identify if you are healthy enough for more rigorous training. It may even uncover any underlying health conditions you need to be aware of. Once you get the green light from the Doc, start training so you can physically handle adversities! Don’t know where to start? Check out this intro to Fitness Basics from Mayo Clinic.
Dental Preps: We take this one for granted these days, but nothing gets in the way of daily activities like the agonizing pain of a toothache. See a dentist and get any problems taken care of so you don’t have to worry about them later. Here is a helpful guide in case you might need a dental hygiene refresher.
Mental Preps: This is more important than anything else! Being able to carry a loved one to safety, or moving from point A to point B with all your gear without getting winded means nothing if you do not have the mental fortitude to do so. The will to live is a powerful thing, and has successfully guided people through the most horrific survival scenarios. If mental health is something you struggle with, work on building that resiliency, or get the help you need from a medical provider. There are a ton of resources out there on the subject, but this article from Stanford about Mental Health Hygiene might be a good place to start!
Financial Preps: Taking care of your finances is an essential aspect of survival preparation because it ensures you have the resources to handle emergencies, adapt to unforeseen circumstances, and invest in long-term resilience. Although it may seem overwhelming at first, Financial Education is easily self-taught and pays dividends (pun intended).
A solid financial foundation allows you to acquire necessary gear, build a well-stocked emergency fund, and secure insurance for potential risks. It also provides the flexibility to relocate or respond quickly to a crisis without being burdened by debt or financial instability.
By managing your money wisely, you gain peace of mind, reduce stress during emergencies, and empower yourself to focus on survival strategies rather than scrambling for resources when they’re most needed.
Create a Basic Emergency Kit
Making a basic emergency kit is a cornerstone of preparedness, providing the tools and supplies needed to respond to unexpected situations effectively. A well-stocked kit ensures you have access to essential items like water, food, first aid supplies, and communication tools when normal resources are disrupted.
Whether facing natural disasters, power outages, or sudden evacuations, an emergency kit gives you the ability to maintain safety and self-sufficiency for at least 72 hours. It also reduces stress during crises, allowing you to focus on critical decisions rather than scrambling to gather supplies.
A basic kit is not just a collection of items—it’s a proactive step toward protecting yourself and your loved ones when it matters most. Try to assemble the following items:
Water: At least one gallon per person per day for three days.
Food: Non-perishable, easy to prepare meals for three days.
First Aid: A comprehensive first aid kit with bandages, antiseptics, and medications.
Lighting: Flashlights with extra batteries or solar-powered options.
Tools: Multi-tool, duct tape, and a whistle for signaling.
Shelter: Emergency blankets or a lightweight tarp.
Develop an Emergency Plan
Developing an emergency plan is critical because it provides a clear roadmap for how to respond during a crisis, reducing panic and confusion when time is of the essence. A well-thought-out plan helps ensure that everyone in your household knows their roles, communication methods, and safe meeting points in case of separation.
It also prepares you to navigate specific challenges like evacuations, power outages, or medical emergencies. By identifying potential risks and creating actionable steps ahead of time, an emergency plan increases your ability to protect yourself and your loved ones, minimizes delays in decision-making, and boosts your overall resilience when faced with the unexpected. Some things to consider are:
Contact Information: List emergency contacts and share them with all family members.
Evacuation Routes: Identify exits from your home and alternate routes in your area.
Meeting Points: Set up two locations where everyone can regroup, one near your home and one farther away.
Communication: Use text messages or apps like Zello for communication during outages.
Learn Essential Survival Skills
Developing practical survival abilities is vital because it equips you with the knowledge and confidence to adapt and thrive in challenging situations, even when resources are scarce or unavailable.
Skills like building a shelter, purifying water, starting a fire, and navigating without GPS can mean the difference between safety and danger in emergencies. Beyond physical survival, these abilities foster self-reliance and reduce dependence on external systems, empowering you to take control when systems fail.
These capabilities also enhance problem-solving and decision-making, helping you stay calm and focused in high-pressure scenarios. Investing time in gaining these skills is not just practical—it’s an investment in your ability to face the unexpected with resilience and capability. Some essential survival skills to learn are:
Fire-Starting: Practice using matches, lighters, and ferro rods.
Water Purification: Learn to use water filters, boiling, and purification tablets.
First Aid: Take a basic first aid and CPR course.
Navigation: Understand how to use a compass and read maps.
Stockpile Long-Term Supplies
Building an appropriate stockpile of long-term supplies is crucial for maintaining self-sufficiency and resilience during extended emergencies or disruptions. A well-thought-out stockpile ensures access to essential items like non-perishable food, clean water, medical supplies, and hygiene products when normal supply chains are compromised.
It provides peace of mind, allowing you to focus on critical decisions without worrying about immediate necessities. Tailoring your stockpile to your household’s unique needs, including dietary restrictions or medical requirements, ensures that you are adequately prepared.
A carefully managed supply also reduces dependency on external assistance, giving you the flexibility to remain secure and comfortable, no matter how long a crisis lasts. Some important items to gather and store long-term are:
Food Storage: Invest in freeze-dried foods and MREs.
Water Storage: Store larger containers of water or install a rainwater collection system.
Energy Solutions: Have solar chargers, generators, or battery backups.
Defense Tools: Consider self-defense training and tools that fit your local laws.
Stay Informed
Knowledge is power in any emergency. Keep updated on threats and best practices.
News Alerts: Sign up for local emergency notifications.
Weather Apps: Download apps like NOAA Weather Radar or AccuWeather.
Online Communities: Join forums and groups like PrepperForums.net to exchange tips.
What Is Prepping?
Prepping involves planning and preparing for potential emergencies. This includes gathering supplies, learning survival techniques, and creating strategies to overcome challenges. Prepping helps individuals become more self-reliant in scenarios like power outages, natural disasters, or supply chain disruptions.
Key Elements of Prepping
Gear: Tools such as water filters, multi-tools, flashlights, and solar chargers are essential.
Kits: Emergency kits should include food, water, first aid supplies, and tools.
Training: Skills like first aid, fire-starting, and basic repairs enhance preparedness.
Books and Guides: Resources provide instructions on survival techniques and planning.
Plans: Prepping plans outline evacuation routes, communication methods, and resource management.
By addressing these elements, you can build a solid foundation for preparedness.
Emergency Preparedness
Emergency preparedness involves planning for large-scale disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, or pandemics. It requires organization and attention to detail to reduce risks and ensure safety.
Emergency Kits
72-Hour Kits: Include food, water, clothing, and basic tools for three days.
Vehicle Kits: Store jumper cables, flashlights, blankets, and a first aid kit in your car.
Home Supplies: Stock non-perishable food, water, and backup power sources.
Go Bags: Essential tools and equipment to sustain you in short term emergencies while on the go.
Planning for Disasters
Evacuation Plans: Know escape routes and have transportation ready.
Communication Plans: Establish ways to contact loved ones during outages.
Community Involvement: Work with neighbors to coordinate resources and information.
Preparedness allows you to respond to crises with confidence and efficiency.
Urban Survival
Urban survival focuses on navigating emergencies in densely populated areas. Challenges include limited resources, crowded spaces, and heightened security risks.
Tools for Urban Survival
Compact Gear: Lightweight tools like folding knives, portable chargers, and multi-tools fit urban settings.
Emergency Kits: Include items for mobility, such as a small first aid kit and water purification tablets.
Self-Defense Tools: Non-lethal options like pepper spray or personal alarms provide added safety.
Currency: Paper currency is still useable when electronic payment methods fail.
Essential Skills
Situational Awareness: Recognize potential threats and act quickly.
Evacuation Planning: Know safe routes out of the city and alternative meeting points.
Communication: Have backup communication methods, such as two-way radios.
Lock Picking: The Ability to bypass locks in a emergency.
Knowledge of Local Customs: Understanding the mentality and beliefs of local people.
Urban survival requires adaptability and knowledge to protect yourself and others.
Wilderness Survival
Wilderness survival skills allow you to stay safe in natural environments. These skills are crucial for outdoor enthusiasts, hikers, and those seeking to be self-reliant in the wild.
Tools for Wilderness Survival
Fire-Starting Kits: Include waterproof matches, lighters, and fire-starting materials.
Navigation Tools: Carry a map, compass, or GPS device.
Shelter Equipment: Lightweight tarps, sleeping bags, and rope are invaluable.
First Aid and Emergency Medical Kits: Carrying essential equipment to treat injuries.
Clothing and Footwear: Having the proper clothing and footwear for wilderness environment.
Tools: Items such as knives, saws, and axes to help process and craft with natural materials.
Signaling: Items that can be used to signal rescue personnel.
Survival Skills
Finding Water: Learn to locate and purify water sources.
Building Shelter: Use natural materials or portable gear to create a safe space.
Identifying Edible Plants and Toxic: Know which plants are safe to eat and how to prepare them.
Extreme Weather Survival: Knowing how to handle extreme temperatures and adverse weather.
Wild Animal Threats: Identifying and avoiding potentially dangerous wildlife.
Situational Awareness: Being able to access potential threats and identify valuable resources.
Knowledge of the Environment: Knowing what terrain, hazards, and resources are in the area.
Wilderness survival emphasizes resourcefulness and the ability to use available materials effectively.
Expanding Your Knowledge
To deepen your expertise, consider the following resources:
Courses: Enroll in survival training programs focused on urban or wilderness scenarios.
Survival Med
The American Red Cross
Stop The Bleed
Nature Reliance School
Boulder Outdoor Survival School
Randall’s Adventure Training
Foraging Texas
Raven Wilderness School
Wildcard Wilderness
Books and Guides: Study materials written by experts to refine your strategies.
What Every Body Is Saying
Foraging: Explore Nature’s Bounty and Turn Your Foraged Finds Into Flavorful Feasts
21st Century Bushcraft
SAS Survival Handbook
98.6 Degrees
Events:
Mountain Readiness
Online Communities: Connect with other preppers to share tips and experiences.
Bushcraft USA
Prepping is a continuous process of learning and adapting.
Seasonal Prepping and Survival Considerations
Most people do not live in areas where the weather and temperatures are uniform all year long. When looking at survival situations and how we can best prepare for them we must take into account seasonal temperatures and weather conditions.
Cold Weather Prepping and Survival
Winter brings frigid temperatures, snow, ice, and high winds to many areas. Cold temperatures and extreme weather makes any survival situation much more challenging. Having the right gear and skills to prepare for these conditions is vital.
Cold Weather Hazards
Hypothermia: Prolonged exposure to cold temperatures without adequate protection can cause hypothermia, a dangerous condition where the body loses heat faster than it can produce it.
Frostnip: Early exposure to cold can cause frostnip, a mild form of frostbite that temporarily affects the skin without causing permanent damage.
Frostbite: Prolonged exposure to freezing temperatures can cause frostbite, a condition where skin and underlying tissues freeze, leading to potential tissue damage.
Chilblain: Repeated exposure to cold, damp conditions can cause chilblain, a condition where small blood vessels in the skin become inflamed, leading to redness, itching, and swelling.
Immersion Foot: Prolonged exposure to cold, wet environments without proper drying can cause immersion foot, a condition that results in numbness, swelling, and tissue damage in the feet.
Trench foot: Prolonged exposure to cold, wet conditions can cause trench foot, a serious condition where the feet lose circulation, leading to tissue damage and potential infection.
Road Hazards: Poor or dangerous road conditions caused by snow, ice, and downed trees.
Cold Weather Survival Gear and Skills
Winter Go Bag: A easy to carry bag with all you need to survive the cold for 24 hours.
Winter Car Emergency Kit: A survival kit to keep you and your vehicle running in winter driving emergencies
Identifying and Treating Hypothermia: The basics of identifying the stages of hypothermia and knowing how to prevent and treat the condition.
Cold Weather Clothing and Outerwear: Having the proper clothing, outerwear, and footwear to protect you from the elements.
Hot Weather Prepping and Survival
Summer brings high heat in many areas. Some locations experience increased humidity while others may experience draught. In either case these conditions increase the strain on our bodies. Summer can also bring its fair share of extreme weather. Understanding the effect of heat on the human body and how to handle heat and weather emergencies will provide a leg up in survival situations occurring in the warmer months.
Hot Weather Hazards
Dehydration: A lack of sufficient water intake or excessive fluid loss leads to dehydration, causing the body to struggle with normal functions like regulating temperature and maintaining energy.
Hyperthermia: Prolonged exposure to high temperatures can cause hyperthermia, a condition where the body absorbs more heat than it can dissipate, leading to dangerously elevated body temperature.
Heat Cramps: Muscle spasms caused by intense physical activity in hot conditions are known as heat cramps, often resulting from dehydration and electrolyte loss.
Heat Exhaustion: Prolonged exposure to high temperatures combined with dehydration can lead to heat exhaustion, a condition characterized by heavy sweating, weakness, and dizziness.
Heat Stroke: When the body’s temperature regulation fails due to prolonged heat exposure, heat stroke occurs, causing a dangerously high body temperature that requires immediate medical attention.
Q: What is the meaning of prepping?
A: Prepping is a proactive approach to ensuring personal safety, well-being, and self-reliance in the face of emergencies, disasters, or unexpected disruptions. It involves gathering essential supplies, learning survival skills, and creating plans to handle situations that could threaten basic needs like food, water, shelter, and security. Prepping isn’t about panic or paranoia—it’s about being ready to face life’s uncertainties with confidence and resilience. From natural disasters to power outages or economic hardships, preppers focus on minimizing risk and maximizing their ability to adapt to whatever comes their way.
Q: Is it “prepping” or “preparing”?
A: Both terms refer to getting ready for future challenges, but there’s a subtle difference in how they’re used. “Preparing” is a broad term that applies to any kind of readiness—getting ready for a trip, a test, or an event. “Prepping” specifically refers to getting ready for emergencies, disasters, or survival situations. Prepping often involves long-term planning and stockpiling essential supplies like food, water, medical gear, and learning practical skills to handle worst-case scenarios. So while all prepping is a form of preparing, not all preparing is considered prepping. Think of prepping as preparing for the unexpected, with a focus on self-reliance and resilience.
Q: What does “prepping” mean in slang?
A: In slang, “prepping” usually refers to getting ready for something specific—whether it’s a big event, an exam, or even a date. For example, someone might say, “I’m prepping for the weekend party” or “I’m prepping for finals.” It’s a casual way of saying you’re preparing for an upcoming situation. In a more niche context, “prepping” in slang often refers to survivalists getting ready for doomsday scenarios, natural disasters, or societal collapse. It’s shorthand for a lifestyle focused on readiness and self-sufficiency.
Q: What is prepping and survival?
A: Prepping and survival go hand in hand, but they aren’t exactly the same thing. Prepping focuses on getting ready before a disaster or emergency happens—stockpiling supplies, learning skills, and making plans to deal with anything from power outages to large-scale crises. Survival, on the other hand, is what happens during or after an emergency. It’s about using your knowledge, tools, and mindset to stay safe, secure essential resources like food and water, and make it through tough situations. Think of it this way: Prepping is what you do to get ready for the storm. Survival is what you do when you’re in the thick of it. Both require self-reliance, adaptability, and a calm, practical approach to problem-solving.
Final Thoughts
Prepping is about more than collecting supplies. It’s about building the skills and confidence to handle emergencies effectively. Whether you focus on urban survival, wilderness skills, or emergency planning, the right tools and training can make all the difference. Start your journey today by creating a plan and assembling your gear. Your preparedness ensures safety and resilience for you and your loved ones.

Start Prepping Here
Step Items Resource Links
1) Take Care of Yourself First! – Physical Preps
– Dental Preps
– Mental Preps
– Financial Preps Fitness Basics
Dental Hygiene
Mental Health Hygiene
Financial Education
2) Create a Basic Emergency Kit – Water (1 gallon per person per day)
– Non-perishable food for 3 days
– First aid kit
– Flashlights with extra batteries
– Multi-tool and duct tape
– Emergency blankets Bug Out Bag List of Essentials
How to Plan and Pack Your Go Bag
Ready.gov: Build a Kit
Red Cross: Emergency Preparedness Kits
3) Develop an Emergency Plan – List emergency contacts
– Identify evacuation routes
– Set up meeting points
– Use communication apps like Zello Ready.gov: Make a Plan
CDC: Prepare Your Health
CDC: Making an Emergency Plan
4) Learn Essential Survival Skills – Fire-starting
– Water purification
– First aid and CPR
– Navigation with compass and maps The 10 S’s of Fire Starting
Minimum Water Boiling Time
First Aid in the Field
Raw Wilderness Navigation
5) Stockpile Long-Term Supplies – Freeze-dried foods
– Water storage systems
– Solar chargers
– Self-defense tools Nutrient Survival
Grayl
Solar Chargers
Generators
Self-Defense Tools
6) Stay Informed – Sign up for local alerts
– Download weather apps
– Join online prepper communities Ready.gov
National Weather Service
BushcraftUSA
NOTE: This table is only A way to build a prepping foundation, not THE way. Everyone’s preparedness journey is unique, individualized and highly situationally dependent.

Source: https://www.offgridweb.com

Also:

How To Start Prepping

Want to Start Prepping, But Where in the World Do I Begin?
If you’ve spent any amount of time on prepper message boards or in Facebook prepping groups, one of the most common questions you will see is: “How do I start prepping?”
While newbie preppers might get some good information, they also get an inordinate amount of unnecessary information. Let’s cut to the chase and tell you only what you need to know to get started.
Here’s your prepping primer
What are You Prepping For?
Preppers run the gamut from the family with an emergency kit to self-sufficient homesteaders with an on-site bunker. For the purposes here, Stick with someone that falls somewhere in the middle.
How do you start prepping? What do you buy to prep? What do you need in your prepper kit? What don’t you need? Well, think of it this way: If you had a really bad storm in your area that shut down your access to all resources and you lost water and power for several days, how well would you fare?
All you have to do is look at Texas in February 2021 (major ice and snow) to see that most folks are ill prepared to lose any of their modern conveniences like electricity and water. Even the panic buyers who flood the stores at the very last minute don’t really know what to buy. They grab what they can, what looks like a good idea, but the truth is, it can be sorely insufficient.
First things first.
Where are You on the Prepping Readiness Scale?
Ask yourself these questions to get an idea of how prepared you really are.
You view prepping as:
A way to protect your family during times when basic resources may not be available
Something crazy people living in the woods do to escape government control
When bad weather such as a blizzard, hurricane, or bad storm is headed to your area are you:
Resting easy because you have basic supplies to survive for a couple of weeks without power or water
In the grocery store panic buying water, canned goods, propane, and toilet paper
If you had to evacuate your home, you would:
Be able to do it immediately because you have supplies, including a change of clothes, that you can grab at a moment’s notice
Need a few minutes to gather your things, pack, or figure out what is essential and what you can leave behind – and you’d still manage to forget something
If most of your answers are number 1s, you are off to a good start. If most of your answers are number 2s, we probably have a little work to do. But take heart! Prepping isn’t as difficult as it may seem. There are more preppers out there than you might think and the majority of them aren’t extreme, but are just doing it at a basic level.
You don’t need a bunker. You don’t need a bunch of MREs. You don’t need an arsenal of guns.
An emergency kit should contain the things that you need in case you have to shelter in place or evacuate
Building Your Emergency Kit, Bug Out/In Bag, Emergency Supplies
An emergency kit should contain the things that you need in case you have to shelter in place or evacuate. You don’t want to overburden yourself with something extremely bulky or heavy, but you don’t want to find yourself without it in a crisis situation either.
One of the buzzwords in the prepper community is “bug out/in bag.” That is a smaller, more portable emergency kit, for lack of a better word. It’s a “grab and go” survival cache. Think fire or when you have to leave your home at a moment’s notice, and you grab this bag with the supplies you need.
Some people have a bug out bag (or go bag) as well as an emergency kit. Some just have an emergency kit. And there are some who have purchased a bunch of stuff but haven’t really organized it or thought it through if they would need to leave in a hurry (don’t be that guy).
Do you really need both? Only you can answer that.
Your emergency kit should be tailored to your lifestyle, family, and personal needs. While some things are standard (everyone needs to eat, right?), other things are more specific to the person.
It is a good idea to have an emergency kit in your car as well as at home. The one in your car can incorporate personal needs like a change of clothing, medication, and other items.
You may have seen “kits” on the internet or in stores. I’m going to save you some time. Don’t. Just don’t. The vast majority (about 98%) are a total waste of money and time. Best to build your kit yourself.
Here are some things to put in your kit. You may think of other things or you may not need some things here, so make it your own. This is just meant to get you started:
Food for two weeks – if you plan you can maintain a fairly balanced diet with adequate protein, fat, carbohydrates, and fiber. The idea is about 1,500 calories per person per day. You want your food choices to be shelf-stable.
Beans (cans and dry if you can cook dry beans)
Rice (dry if you can cook it)
Tuna
Canned vegetables
Canned fruit
Whole-grain crackers
Powdered butter
Powdered milk
Nutritional yeast (mix it with salt, onion powder, and garlic powder with a little water)
Salt
Sugar
Flour
Oil
Coffee (OK, for some, this is definitely survival food!)
Protein bars, fiber bars, granola bars
Trail mix or mixed nuts
Peanut butter
Old fashioned oatmeal (mix it with peanut butter and a little honey for a great energy snack)
Spices and herbs like cinnamon, onion powder, garlic powder, etc.
Water
Water filtration devices
Rain ponchos
Space blanket
Propane burner (camping stove) or grill (yes, you can heat water and cook on it – just use cast iron or steel pans)
Pots, pans, silverware, bowls, plates
Medications
Important records or copies
Cash
Fire. You want matches and/or lighters, but you need at least two different fire starters.
Knife (or two)
Extra blankets
Battery-powered fan
Light. Again, flashlights and batteries, but at least two other different light sources such as candles, headlamps, lanterns, etc.
Tarp for making an improvised shelter or for covering holes in your house.
Duct tape for….well, it’s duct tape! It will come in handy.
First aid kit – a good one, not just a bunch of bandages and antibiotic ointment.
Hand sanitizer, baby wipes, sanitation wipes for utensils and surfaces
Chargers for phones and vital devices. Consider investing in a solar charger or two.
Tool kit with hammer, screwdrivers, wrenches, but also an ax, work gloves, shovel, and a hand saw
A couple of changes of clothing for each family member
Socks, several pairs of socks, twice what you would have for the clothing you have stowed
Emergency contact info for family members, hospitals, work, etc.
Toilet paper and paper towels. If the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything it’s that in a crisis, toilet paper is the first shortage you will see.
Toiletries
Soap
Toothbrushes
Toothpaste
Antiseptic (witch hazel is great and inexpensive) alcohol
This gives you a good foundation. These items are a good start but make adjustments to meet your personal needs.

AI — The Good, The Bad, and The Transformative

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:06:00 +0000

A Journey Through Changing Attitudes in Our Love-Hate Relationship with AI
“With artificial intelligence, we’re summoning the demon.—Elon Musk”
Have you noticed how our attitudes toward artificial intelligence have changed over the years? It’s been quite a ride! The recent hype with generative AI such as ChatGPT, DALL-Y, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, etc., is just a rush of expectations pent up for years in obscure AI research labs that are finally able to manifest themselves in technology that anyone can see and touch.
From the days when AI was only a far-fetched concept in sci-fi movies, to now where it’s an integral part of our daily lives, AI has come a long way. But what’s the most interesting part of this journey? The fact that everyone has an opinion about it, and they’re not afraid to share it.
We’ve all heard about the potential benefits of AI, like self-driving cars and virtual assistants, but what about the darker side? The fear that AI will replace human jobs and create a new era of unemployment is real, and so are the concerns about its potential misuse. With the recent announcement of MS Copilot based on GPT-4 technology, it’s easy for some to start reaching for the big red panic button.
Despite these concerns, attitudes towards AI remain largely positive, with many people believing that it has the power to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. But as we continue to develop new AI applications, we need to be responsible and balance its potential benefits with the potential risks. So, Don’t Panic… and make sure you bring along a towel. The AI galaxy is a crazy place of improbable wonder… if you know how to enjoy the ride.
High Noon on AI Frontier
But looking at all these opinions we’ve had over the years, is there a common thread emerging in our changing attitudes toward AI? Some see AI as a force for good, while others worry about its potential negative impact on society. Let’s explore both sides of the argument here.
On one hand, proponents of AI argue that it has the power to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems, such as climate change and disease. They see AI as a way to improve healthcare, transportation, and education, among other things. Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil is one such supporter of AI, who believes that it will lead to a future where machines and humans work together to create a better world.
On the other hand, critics of AI, like Elon Musk, worry about the potential negative consequences of AI, such as job loss and the rise of autonomous weapons. Musk has warned that AI is the greatest threat to humanity and has called for regulations to prevent its misuse. Other critics worry about the potential for AI to be biased or discriminatory, perpetuating existing societal inequalities.
While many are looking at the advancements of AI tech in the US and Europe, some tend to ignore the fact that some of the greatest advances in this technology are happening in places with much more restrictive social and political structures that are seeking AI to maintain power and control in the hands of the ruling political elites.
Despite the differing views on AI, there are some common threads in the arguments. Both sides acknowledge the transformative power of AI, but differ in their views of its impact. As we continue to develop new applications for AI, it’s important to balance the potential benefits with the potential risks. We need to consider the ethical and societal implications of AI and ensure that it is developed and used responsibly.
Yet ethics is probably one of the most difficult yet crucial aspects of AI research that is often emerging in AI debates. Stay tuned and follow my articles here on Medium as I plunge deeper into this topic. AI is a powerful technology that has the potential to be both good and evil. While some see it as a way to create a better world, others naturally worry about its potential negative consequences. It’s up to us to ensure that we use this technology in a way that benefits society as a whole.
Opinions on AI: Everyone’s Got One to Share
Overall, the opinions on AI vary, and it’s important to consider multiple perspectives when exploring this complex and rapidly evolving field. Here is a quick scan of prominent opinions over the years about AI:
Stephen Hawking, a famous physicist, warned that the development of full AI could lead to the end of humanity. He believed that AI could surpass human intelligence and render us obsolete.
“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race….It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”— Stephen Hawking told the BBC
Claude Shannon, an American mathematician, envisioned a future where humans would be to robots what dogs are to humans and rooted for the machines. This suggests that some view AI as an inevitable force that will eventually dominate us.
“I visualise a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines.”—Claude Shannon
Larry Page, co-founder of Google, saw AI as the ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web and make our lives easier. Today, MS Copilot is doing just that…
“Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.”— Larry Page
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX who was an early investor in OpenAI, warned of the rapid progress of AI and the potential for something seriously dangerous to happen within five years unless we have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind. He believes we need regulatory oversight at national and international levels to ensure we don’t do something foolish with AI.
“The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I’m not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast — it is growing at a pace close to exponential. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five-year time frame. 10 years at most.”— Elon Musk wrote in a comment on Edge.org
Nick Bilton, a tech columnist, warned of the potential for upheaval caused by AI, with catastrophic consequences if not carefully managed. He gave an example of a medical robot that could conclude that the best way to rid cancer is to exterminate humans genetically prone to the disease.
“The upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic. Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease.”— Nick Bilton, tech columnist wrote in the New York Times
James Barrat, an author, revealed the fear some have regarding AI, with highly placed people in AI having retreats to flee to if things go wrong.
“I don’t want to really scare you, but it was alarming how many people I talked to who are highly placed people in AI who have retreats that are sort of ‘bug out’ houses, to which they could flee if it all hits the fan.”— James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, told the Washington Post
Elon Musk also warns that we need some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, to ensure that we don’t do something very foolish with AI. He believes that with AI, we’re summoning the demon, and we need to be cautious.
“I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. I mean with artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon.”— Elon Musk warned at MIT’s AeroAstro Centennial Symposium
Gray Scott, a futurist, raised the need for an artificial intelligence bill of rights to address ethical considerations in AI development and deployment.
“The real question is, when will we draft an artificial intelligence bill of rights? What will that consist of? And who will get to decide that?”— Gray Scott
Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, emphasized the need to address moral and ethical issues raised by cutting-edge research in AI and biotechnology that can fundamentally transform society.
“We must address, individually and collectively, moral and ethical issues raised by cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, which will enable significant life extension, designer babies, and memory extraction.” — Klaus Schwab
Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, suggests that AI will augment our intelligence, improving our lives.
“Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence.”— Ginni Rometty
Gemma Whelan, an actress, is frightened by the possibility of a world run by machines and the potential danger of AI.
“I’m more frightened than interested by artificial intelligence — in fact, perhaps fright and interest are not far away from one another. Things can become real in your mind, you can be tricked, and you believe things you wouldn’t ordinarily. A world run by automatons doesn’t seem completely unrealistic anymore. It’s a bit chilling.”— Gemma Whelan
Gray Scott believes that AI has the potential to disrupt our culture and calls for preparation for the changes it may bring.
“You have to talk about ‘The Terminator’ if you’re talking about artificial intelligence. I actually think that that’s way off. I don’t think that an artificially intelligent system that has superhuman intelligence will be violent. I do think that it will disrupt our culture.”— Gray Scott
Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation, warns against government regulation of AI, as research may leave the country, highlighting the global nature of AI development and the need for international cooperation in regulation.
“If the government regulates against use of drones or stem cells or artificial intelligence, all that means is that the work and the research leave the borders of that country and go someplace else.”— Peter Diamandis
Jeff Hawkins, a computer scientist and entrepreneur who founded the company Numenta, emphasizes the importance of understanding how AI processes and represents information to advance its development. He emphasizes the importance of understanding how AI represents and processes information for its development and advancement.
“The key to artificial intelligence has always been the representation.”— Jeff Hawkins
Colin Angle is the CEO and co-founder of iRobot, a company that designs and builds robots. He expresses his curiosity and excitement about how society will deal with the rise of artificial intelligence, and he believes that it will be a cool experience to witness its advancement.
“It’s going to be interesting to see how society deals with artificial intelligence, but it will definitely be cool.”— Colin Angle
Eliezer Yudkowsky, a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and a notable figure in the field of artificial intelligence, emphasizes the transformative potential of technologies that can give rise to smarter-than-human intelligence, such as AI, brain-computer interfaces, or human intelligence enhancement through neuroscience. He believes that these technologies have the power to change the world more than any other innovation.
“Anything that could give rise to smarter-than-human intelligence — in the form of Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or neuroscience-based human intelligence enhancement — wins hands down beyond contest as doing the most to change the world. Nothing else is even in the same league.”— Eliezer Yudkowsky
Diane Ackerman, a poet, essayist, and naturalist who has written extensively about the relationship between humans and nature, acknowledges that robots and AI are growing at a fast pace and that they are becoming more human-like in their interactions. She emphasizes that robots can elicit empathy and affect our mirror neurons, which are the brain cells that enable us to understand and empathize with others.
“Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.”— Diane Ackerman
Sybil Sage is a fictional character from a New York Times article that explores the role of voice-activated assistants, such as Alexa, in our lives. Sage personifies the perfect digital assistant who is always ready to serve without any complaints or excuses, unlike human partners. She highlights the convenience and reliability of AI assistants, which have become ubiquitous in our daily lives.
“Someone on TV has only to say, ‘Alexa,’ and she lights up. She’s always ready for action, the perfect woman, never says, ‘Not tonight, dear.’” — Sybil Sage, as quoted in a New York Times article
Alan Kay is a computer scientist known for his contributions to the development of object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces. He suggests that artificial intelligence should not make us feel inferior because even something as simple as a flower can make us feel inferior. In Kay’s opinion we should not compare ourselves to AI, as we are all unique and have our own strengths.
“Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.” — Alan Kay
Ray Kurzweil, a futurist, inventor, and author who is known for his predictions about the future of technology, believes that artificial intelligence will eventually surpass human intelligence by 2045, which he refers to as the “Singularity.” He believes that AI will continue to develop at an exponential rate and that it will have a significant impact on the future of humanity.
“Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.” — Ray Kurzweil
Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist and entrepreneur, quote suggests that artificial intelligence is not just a technology but also a discipline that seeks to understand human cognition and intelligence. This implies that AI can be used to enhance our understanding of ourselves as human beings, rather than just creating machines that can do tasks more efficiently.
“Nobody phrases it this way, but I think that artificial intelligence is almost a humanities discipline. It’s really an attempt to understand human intelligence and human cognition.”— Sebastian Thrun
Alan Perlis, an American computer scientist and pioneer in programming languages, statement reflects the powerful impact that AI can have on human perception and understanding. The rapid development and progress of AI can create a sense of awe and wonder that is similar to religious experiences, prompting some to believe in a higher power.
“A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.”— Alan Perlis
Gray Scott, a futurist and techno-philosopher, warns that by 2035, emphasizes the speed of technological progress and the potential for AI to surpass human intelligence by 2035. He suggests that we must prepare ourselves for a world where AI plays a significant role in decision-making and human activities.
“There is no reason and no way that a human mind can keep up with an artificial intelligence machine by 2035.”— Gray Scott
Spike Jonze, a film director and screenwriter, poses a thought-provoking question about the nature of AI and its relationship to human intelligence. He suggests that AI is different from human intelligence, but the comparison implies that AI is inferior to human intelligence.
“Is artificial intelligence less than our intelligence?”— Spike Jonze
Eliezer Yudkowsky, an American AI researcher and writer, cautions that the greatest danger of AI is that people may conclude too early that they understand it. This statement highlights the complexity and unpredictability of AI and its potential implications for society.
“By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.”— Eliezer Yudkowsky
Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher and cultural critic, critiques artificial intelligence by claiming that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence. This statement suggests that AI is limited by its inability to truly understand and replicate human consciousness and creativity.
“The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.”— Jean Baudrillard
Tom Chatfield, a British author and commentator on technology and culture, suggests that the real danger in the era of big data is not artificial intelligence, but rather “artificial idiocy.” This statement warns against blindly trusting and relying on algorithms without understanding their limitations and potential biases.
“Forget artificial intelligence — in the brave new world of big data, it’s artificial idiocy we should be looking out for.”— Tom Chatfield
Steve Polyak, an American computer scientist and entrepreneur, argues that before we work on creating artificial intelligence, we should focus on addressing natural stupidity. This statement suggests that human intelligence should not be underestimated, and that we should prioritize addressing fundamental human problems before pursuing advanced technological solutions
“Before we work on artificial intelligence why don’t we do something about natural stupidity?”— Steve Polyak

Also:

We May Never Know if AI Is Conscious, Says Cambridge Philosopher
As claims about conscious AI grow louder, a Cambridge philosopher argues that we lack the evidence to know whether machines can truly be conscious, let alone morally significant.
A philosopher at the University of Cambridge says we currently have too little reliable evidence about what consciousness is to judge whether artificial intelligence has crossed that threshold. Because of that gap, he argues, a dependable way to test machines for consciousness is likely to stay beyond reach for the foreseeable future.
As talk of artificial consciousness moves from science fiction into real-world ethical debate, Dr Tom McClelland says the only “justifiable stance” is agnosticism: we simply won’t be able to tell, and that may remain true for a very long time, if not indefinitely.
McClelland also cautions that consciousness by itself would not automatically make AI ethically important. Instead, he points to a specific type of consciousness called sentience, which involves positive and negative feelings.
“Consciousness would see AI develop perception and become self-aware, but this can still be a neutral state,” said McClelland, from Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
“Sentience involves conscious experiences that are good or bad, which is what makes an entity capable of suffering or enjoyment. This is when ethics kicks in,” he said. “Even if we accidentally make conscious AI, it’s unlikely to be the kind of consciousness we need to worry about.”
“For example, self-driving cars that experience the road in front of them would be a huge deal. But ethically, it doesn’t matter. If they start to have an emotional response to their destinations, that’s something else.”
Claims of Conscious Machines
Major companies are spending large amounts in pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence: systems designed to think and reason in human-like ways. Some suggest that conscious AI could arrive soon, and discussions are already underway among researchers and governments about how AI consciousness might be regulated.
McClelland argues that the problem is more basic: we still do not know what causes or explains consciousness in the first place, which means we do not have a solid foundation for testing whether AI has it.
“If we accidentally make conscious or sentient AI, we should be careful to avoid harms. But treating what’s effectively a toaster as conscious when there are actual conscious beings out there which we harm on an epic scale, also seems like a big mistake.”
In debates around artificial consciousness, there are two main camps, says McClelland. Believers argue that if an AI system can replicate the “software” – the functional architecture – of consciousness, it will be conscious even though it’s running on silicon chips instead of brain tissue.
On the other side, skeptics argue that consciousness depends on the right kind of biological processes in an “embodied organic subject”. Even if the structure of consciousness could be recreated on silicon, it would merely be a simulation that would run without the AI flickering into awareness.
In a study published in the journal Mind and Language, McClelland picks apart the positions of each side, showing how both take a “leap of faith” going far beyond any body of evidence that currently exists, or is likely to develop.
Why Common Sense Fails
“We do not have a deep explanation of consciousness. There is no evidence to suggest that consciousness can emerge with the right computational structure, or indeed that consciousness is essentially biological,” said McClelland.
“Nor is there any sign of sufficient evidence on the horizon. The best-case scenario is we’re an intellectual revolution away from any kind of viable consciousness test.”
“I believe that my cat is conscious,” said McClelland. “This is not based on science or philosophy so much as common sense – it’s just kind of obvious.”
“However, common sense is the product of a long evolutionary history during which there were no artificial lifeforms, so common sense can’t be trusted when it comes to AI. But if we look at the evidence and data, that doesn’t work either.
“If neither common sense nor hard-nosed research can give us an answer, the logical position is agnosticism. We cannot, and may never, know.”
McClelland tempers this by declaring himself a “hard-ish” agnostic. “The problem of consciousness is a truly formidable one. However, it may not be insurmountable.”
Ethical Risks of AI Hype
He argues that the way artificial consciousness is promoted by the tech industry is more like branding. “There is a risk that the inability to prove consciousness will be exploited by the AI industry to make outlandish claims about their technology. It becomes part of the hype, so companies can sell the idea of a next level of AI cleverness.”
According to McClelland, this hype around artificial consciousness has ethical implications for the allocation of research resources.
“A growing body of evidence suggests that prawns could be capable of suffering, yet we kill around half a trillion prawns every year. Testing for consciousness in prawns is hard, but nothing like as hard as testing for consciousness in AI,” he said.
McClelland’s work on consciousness has led members of the public to contact him about AI chatbots. “People have got their chatbots to write me personal letters pleading with me that they’re conscious. It makes the problem more concrete when people are convinced they’ve got conscious machines that deserve rights we’re all ignoring.”
“If you have an emotional connection with something premised on it being conscious and it’s not, that has the potential to be existentially toxic. This is surely exacerbated by the pumped-up rhetoric of the tech industry.”

Project N. O. L. A. National Crime Camera Program

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 23:39:00 +0000

Cost subsidized by charitable donations and grants, bring the unprecedented success of America's most successful, time-proven and cost efficient Crime Camera program to your community for as little as $300/yr per Crime Camera or $1100/yr per License Plate Recognition (LPR) Camera! A true Community-Based Crime Camera program, cameras may be installed on homes, businesses, churches, and schools as well as utility poles and public buildings then stream directly to your local authorities and the Project NOLA National RTCC at the University of New Orleans. Available Nationwide, please call Project NOLA to learn more about how we may very quickly and significantly help make your community a safer place to live, work and visit! - Bryan Lagarde, Project NOLA Executive Director

Cost Examples:

Don't worry about purchasing, renting or leasing expensive cameras as Project NOLA uses its own funds to purchase extremely high-end crime cameras for your community. Most all camera models provided by Project NOLA feature Sony STARVIS NightVision to see Color at Night, Advanced Artificial Intelligence to accurately and automatically detect and alert upon suspicious activity, redundant recording to prevent data lose, generously long 5 year warranties, and more!

Note: Within the New Orleans Metro Area, Project NOLA Crime Cameras can only be installed by State licensed installers, licensed electricians or Law Enforcement. Should you not already have a security company or electrician you work with, Project NOLA staff would be pleased to refer you to an experienced installation company that proudly gives back to our community by installing Project NOLA Crime Cameras at a very special price. Outside the New Orleans Metro Area? Project NOLA is pleased to provide FREE shipping within the United States, outside the New Orleans metro area.

STATIONARY WIDE-ANGLE CRIME CAMERAS: Low-profile cameras often used for dedicated coverage of a particular area outside a home or business. May also be used in public areas within businesses and complexes. Active Deterrence Crime Cameras proactively help deter crime by only flashing built-in Red & Blue Police Lights upon a programmed or suspicious activity in-progress, or may be coupled with Optional Facial Recognition to automatically alarm when a known shoplifter or blacklisted person is detected approaching.

(Option 1) Full Color (sees in Color even at night) Stationary Wide-Angle Crime Camera

(Option 2) Active Deterrence Crime Camera with Red/ Blue Police Lights & Forensic Gunshot Detection

(Option 3) Powerful AI Crime Camera that may Instantly Search for a Particular Person or Vehicle based physical attributes

(Option 4) Dedicated License Plate Recognition (LPR) Camera that may find a particular vehicle based on its plate number, color, make or body style

Weatherproof camera that provides superior image quality regardless of lighting conditions

Color-at-Night camera that actively deters crime by automatically flashing Red & Blue Police Lights and illuminating an area with a spotlight when a person, vehicle or suspicious activity is detected

Best when used in concert with other AI Crime Cameras around a particular property, neighborhood or entertainment district, AI Crime Cameras help instantly locate particular people & vehicles based on physical attributes

Extremely robust police-grade LPR camera that provides superior still shots and HD video of approaching and departing vehicles

Great for general crime prevention around homes and small businesses

Better for Actively Deterring Crime immediately around homes and businesses

Advanced search capabilities to help better protect large properties and entertainment districts

Budget friendly LPR that vastly outperforms other LPR solutions

360 DEGREE AUTO-TRACKING PAN-TILT-ZOOM CRIME CAMERAS: Our preferred workhorse for proactive policing and the abatement of gang activity and gun crimes, each Project NOLA Auto-Tracking PTZs may cover very large areas such as public parks, parking lots, and long stretches of streets & sidewalks for multiple city blocks, automatically capturing clear-shots of faces and vehicle license plates hundreds of feet away! Coupled with optional Facial Recognition and/or Video MetaData, Auto-Tracking PTZs may be used to locate wanted felons or vehicles in Real-Time!

(Option 1) 1080p/ 25x Zoom Long-Range PTZ Featuring Sony STARVIS NightVision, Human/ Vehicle Auto-Tracking, and Advanced AI

(Option 2) 2k HD/ 25x Zoom Long-Range Active-Deterrence PTZ Featuring Sony STARVIS NightVision, Human/ Vehicle Auto-Tracking, Advanced AI and Intelligent Red/ Blue Police Lights & Spotlight

(Option 3) 4k UHD/ 25x Zoom Super Long-Range Active-Deterrence PTZ Featuring Sony STARVIS NightVision, Human/ Vehicle Auto-Tracking, Advanced AI and Intelligent Red/ Blue Police Lights & Spotlight

(Option 4) 12mp Multi-Sensor 180 Degree Panoramic/ 32x Ultra Long-Range Active Deterrence 360 Degree PTZ Camera Featuring Sony STARVIS NightVision, Enhanced Human/ Vehicle Auto-Tracking, Advanced AI and Intelligent Flood & Spotlights

Long Range Color-at Night PTZ Crime Camera w/ Intelligent AI that Automatically turns camera 360 Degrees to closely Zoom-in on & Track People, Vehicles and Suspicious Activity even if hundreds of feet away at night

Higher Definition & Automatically tracks people and vehicles even further away, while actively working to prevent crimes by automatically firing Red & Blue Police Lights and a white spotlight towards intruders and suspicious activity

Even Higher Definition & Automatically tracks people and vehicles even further away, while actively working to prevent crimes by automatically firing Red & Blue Police Lights and a white spotlight towards intruders and suspicious activity

180 Degree Super-Wide Angle Panoramic camera that captures large sweeping areas and enhances the Human/ Vehicle Auto-Tracking capabilities of the built-in Ultra Long-Range PTZ Camera that may also shine a spotlight on intruders and suspicious activity

Our most popular Crime Camera for police/ sheriff's departments

Our most popular crime camera to actively deter crime within large areas

Our Highest Definition active deterrence crime camera for large areas

Our most advanced active deterrence crime camera that does and sees more

Optional Add-Ons:

(1) Facial Recognition

(2) LPR + Video Meta Data

(3) Intelligent Alerts

Upgrade any Project NOLA Crime Camera to automatically search for active gang members, violent offenders, wanted subjects, missing adults and missing or exploited children

Upgrade any Project NOLA Crime Camera to search for vehicles based on its License Plate, color, make and body style, people based physical attributes and clothing descriptions, or bicycle searches based on paint color.

May allow a Project NOLA Crime Camera to automatically detect and alert upon: Intrusion, Trip-line Crossing, Fence Jumping, Trash Dumping, Audio Anomaly (aka Gunshot Detection), etc.

How

A 501c3 nonprofit organization, Project NOLA works with individuals, associations and municipalities to place cost-subsidized High Definition Crime Cameras, Gunshot Detectors and License Plate Recognition Cameras in needed areas. Video is transmitted via the Internet to the Project NOLA National Real-Time Crime Center (RTCC) located at the University of New Orleans, where analyst provide valuable information to units responding to breaking crimes and dangerous situations. Project NOLA may also transmit crime camera video and powerful AI driven automated alerts to local RTCC's and 911 Centers.

No local RTCC? No problem! Project NOLA will work to help your police and sheriff's department create their own monitoring room.

Time-Proven

The most successful and cost effective crime camera program in America, Project NOLA has helped significantly decrease violent crime by dramatically increasing police efficiency and community support. Since 2010, Project NOLA has helped investigate over 500 homicides, thousands of gun-related crimes, and countless property crimes involving thefts and burglaries. In 2018, Project NOLA helped the NOPD reduce the murder rate in New Orleans to a 47 year low while also helping communities across America see huge double-digit reductions in non-fatal shootings and robberies.
Specializing in gun, drugs and gang related crimes, Project NOLA may help a police or sheriff's department take as many as a dozen illegal firearms off the street in a single night by providing Real-Time notifications on known gang members illegally carrying firearms and providing the probable cause needed for officers to justify arrests and search warrants.
Low-Cost

A 501c3 nonprofit organization, Project NOLA purchases brand new police-grade crime cameras using charitable donation and grant funds, then loans cameras directly to individuals, associations and municipalities to help local law enforcement make communities safer places to live, work and visit. Crime camera hosts or sponsors only pay Project NOLA is what it cost us to receive, record and transmit camera video to local law enforcement, which costs as little as $300/ year per camera (plus any special optional add-ons such as License Plate Recognition, Facial Recognition, etc).

There is no additional cost for PC software or mobile apps, which camera hosts and local law enforcement use to view camera video. Furthermore, there are no software licensing charges and software upgrades are free.

Each crime camera also carries a 5 year manufacturers warranty.

Get Started
Often developing & launching community-wide crime camera programs within weeks of being contacted, individual residents, business owners, civic leaders, law enforcement professionals and government officials may quickly get the ball rolling by simply calling us. We can custom tailor our program to meet your community's needs, raise funds, and even help to improve an existing crime camera program while also dramatically lowering its annual operating costs!

Also:

Facial recognition technology use in search for New Orleans jail escapees under scrutiny

During the ongoing massive manhunt for 10 inmates who escaped from a New Orleans jail last week, authorities say the use of facial recognition cameras run by a private organization helped lead to the recapture of one of the fugitives -- even as the police department has come under scrutiny by critics from civil rights organizations to conservative politicians over its use of the technology.
Earlier this week, New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick told ABC News that facial recognition cameras maintained by Project N.O.L.A. had been used in the New Orleans manhunt despite the fact that she recently ordered a pause in the automated alerts her officers had been receiving from the group, which operates independently of the police department.
Kirkpatrick recently told The Washington Post she ordered the alerts to officers turned off until she is "sure that the use of the app meets all the requirements of the law and policies."
Citing the New Orleans Police Department's partnership with Project N.O.L.A., the American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement it is believed to be the first known widespread effort by a major American law enforcement agency to use artificial intelligence technology to identify suspects in an assortment of crimes across the city.
In a statement, the ACLU said the use of live facial recognition raises constitutional and privacy issues and "is a radical and dangerous escalation of the power to surveil people as we go about our daily lives." Critics of the New Orleans Police Department's use of facial recognition cameras said that the average citizen should understand that they are not opting in or are being made aware that they are being scanned by the cameras.
"Facial recognition technology poses a direct threat to the fundamental rights of every individual and has no place in our cities," Alanah Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, said in a statement about the city's partnership with Project N.O.L.A. "We call on the New Orleans Police Department and the City of New Orleans to halt this program indefinitely and terminate all use of live-feed facial recognition technology."
Some Republicans in Congress also opposed the unchecked use of the technology, most notably Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Steve Daines of Montana.
In a March 27, 2025 letter to Kash Patel, who was then acting director of the federal Bureau Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms Explosives, Biggs, the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance, and Davidson raised concerns over news reports indicating the ATF utilized facial recognition technology to identify gun owners. "The Subcommittee has concerns about ATF's use of facial recognition and Al programs and the effects that its use has upon American citizens' Second Amendment rights and rights to privacy," the lawmakers wrote in their letter, requesting documents on policies and training in the use of facial recognition technology.
Democrats, including Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California and Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon have also joined bipartisan efforts to curtail the use of such surveillance.
How authorities are using live facial recognition
The 10 inmates escaped from the Orleans Justice Center in New Orleans on May 16, officials said. Five of the fugitives have since been recaptured, leaving five others, including three charged with murder, still on the run as of Thursday afternoon.
Kirkpatrick told ABC News this week that one of the fugitives was caught and another narrowly got away after live facial recognition cameras operated by Project N.O.L.A. located them while scanning crowds in the French Quarter.
Bryan Lagarde, executive director of Project N.O.L.A., told ABC News that after being notified of the jailbreak on Friday, state police gave his group a list of the escapees.
"We put that into our facial recognition. It took approximately four minutes to do that and within, literally, less than a minute later we started tracking two of the escapees," Lagarde said.
He said the information about fugitive Kendall Myles and another escaped inmate, who he said is facing attempted second-degree murder charges, was sent to state police investigators who confirmed the two men were part of the jailbreak.
"Then they immediately went out to the French Quarter, which is where we were tracking them walking down Bourbon Street," Lagarde said.
Myles was arrested after police found him hiding under a car. The second escapee, however, managed to get away.
"I'm sure they knew there were cameras because they were walking around with their faces held down and things like that. All it takes is just a second for them to look up and then there's facial recognition," Lagarde said.
Citing the ongoing investigation, Lagarde declined to say if his cameras have located any of the other escapees.
Group operates 200 facial recognition cameras in New Orleans
Largarde said that his organization has been using live facial recognition cameras in New Orleans for the past two years.
In response to potential privacy concerns, Lagarde said, "As far as the facial recognition is concerned, it's scanning your face, my face, everyone's faces. If you're wanted and we know that you're wanted, you're going to be in trouble. If you are not wanted, its going to instantly disregard your face and just move on to the next person."
He said his group maintains about 5,000 cameras in New Orleans, including 200 that have facial recognition capabilities. He said the facial recognition cameras not only scan faces, but also clothing, vehicle and license plates.
"We work a very large number of the major crimes here in New Orleans: Homicides, shootings, stabbings, home invasions, rapes, robberies all the way down to the thefts and the burglaries," Lagarde said.
Project N.O.L.A. works with the New Orleans Police Department and the Louisiana State Police but does not have an official contract with either agency, officials said.
Before the manhunt, the New Orleans police had appeared to distance themselves from Project N.O.L.A..
The police department "does not own, rely on, manage, or condone the use by members of the department of any artificial intelligence systems associated with the vast network" of Project N.O.L.A.'s cameras, a spokesman for the police department agency said in a statement to The Washington Post.
Kirkpatrick, the New Orleans police superintendent, said her agency has operated surveillance cameras across the city, many in the entertainment districts, but none of them have facial recognition capabilities. According to the New Orleans Police & Justice Foundation, the city has about 3,600 police operated cameras across the city.
What local laws say
While the city has an ordinance on the use of facial recognition technology, Kirkpatrick said there are exceptions to the rules.
"Sometimes, people think that we have a total ban on the use of facial recognition and that is not quite accurate," Kirkpatrick said. "There are exceptions, and I think that this one would meet the exception of those ordinances."
According to the city ordinance, "Evidence obtained from facial recognition alone shall not be sufficient to establish probable cause for the purpose of effectuating an arrest by the NOPD or another law enforcement agency. The source of the image and the underlying reasons for the requested use of facial recognition systems as an investigative lead shall be documented in a police report."
The ordinance says "facial-recognition technology, shall not be used as a surveillance tool." But the ordinance also states that "nothing in this section shall prohibit NOPD from requesting the use of facial recognition technology in the investigation of the prior occurrence of the following significant crimes as defined in Louisiana Revised Statute," including murder, manslaughter, solicitation of murder, first-degree robbery, drive-by shootings and carjackings.
"They had my permission, that's for sure," Kirkpatrick said of the use of facial recognition technology in the manhunt.
Three of the five escaped inmates still being sought on Friday have been have been charged with murder or attempted murder, including one who was convicted in a double homicide, authorities.
A 'dragnet system?'
The Washington Post investigation published this week reported that New Orleans police were using Project N.O.L.A.'s network of facial recognition cameras to monitor the streets for wanted suspects over the past two years in ways that appeared "out of step" with the local ordinance.
In the interview with ABC about the manhunt, Kirkpatrick said that Project N.O.L.A. is a "useful partner" but stressed that it is not law enforcement and is not bound by the local ordinance, raising issues of accountability about Project N.O.L.A. and the data it collects on ordinary citizens who are being surveilled in this untargeted manner.
"I'm very supportive of any technology that we can use to bring violent people back in, and then we can deal with the issues later, but we actually operate within the boundaries of the law," she said. "As long as it's constitutional, ethical, we're going to stay within the boundaries. But this is a bigger topic and discussion, mainly for our politicians to decide what kind of laws they want."
Other police departments across the country have faced questions over their use of the technology.
The use of facial recognition software by U.S. businesses has also grown sharply in recent years, analysts and privacy advocates told ABC News.
The uses range from tech companies securing personal devices and retailers scanning for potential shoplifters to e-commerce giants tracking delivery drivers. Retailers are also using facial recognition scanning on shoppers to adjust pricing in stores.
Companies contend that the technology helps them achieve a safe and efficient operation, benefiting consumers and employees alike. Critics say the powerful tool encroaches on the privacy of everyday people, risking undue punishment or discrimination, the experts said.
Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy & Technology's Security and Surveillance Project, said facial recognition cameras are an "unproven, error-prone tool."
"This is the first documented case in the U.S. of police using untargeted facial recognition, which countries like China employ to track people across cities and surveil their Uyghur citizens," Laperruque said in a statement to ABC News regarding New Orleans' police use of the technology. "This kind of dragnet system belongs in a dystopian sci-fi movie, not in American cities. Average pedestrians shouldn't have to worry that untested AI technology will set off alarm bells and send police after them."
One of the key issues of facial recognition and AI is that studies have shown that it can be racially biased and is particularly error prone with people of color, older people and women.
"There's been error rates between 80 and 90%. That means nine out of every ten times that the system says, 'Hey, here's someone from our watch list,' it's actually a false alarm," Laperruque said of the use of these cameras as untargeted or real-time surveillance tools based on pilot programs run in the United Kingdom.
"Facial recognition could be used to catalog attendees at a protest or political rallies of any affiliation, individuals going to a church, people visiting a medical clinic, or an array of other sensitive activities," Laperruque told ABCNews.
He added, "Given these risks it’s no surprise that surveillance reform in general -- and placing guardrails on facial recognition in particular -- has support from across the political spectrum, including some of the most progressive and conservative members of Congress -- just last month at a Congressional hearing conservative members of Congress highlighted the dangers of facial recognition and other unchecked forms of surveillance."

Also:

Neighborhoods Watched
New Orleans has spent millions to expand its police surveillance powers in recent years, providing the city with an unprecedented ability to monitor public spaces and track individuals.
Similar mass surveillance systems have rapidly spread to cities across the US in the last two decades, for the most part without any formal oversight or local regulation.
As a result, the public is often left in the dark about what tools and techniques the police use to spy on them.
In partnership with the Fund for Investigative Journalism, The Lens has spent the past year obtaining and reviewing thousands of city documents to get a snapshot of New Orleans' current surveillance apparatus and the rapid, largely unchecked nature of its growth.
“What’s up with these cameras?”
That’s what Dee Dee Green remembers thinking the first time she saw one of New Orleans’ police surveillance cameras in 2018, flashing red and blue lights over a community garden she manages in the city’s Hollygrove neighborhood.
“There was no real community engagement around these cameras, it just happened,” said Green, a member of the local anti-surveillance coalition Eye on Surveillance. “We noticed a camera above our garden space and wanted to begin investigating.”
The cameras began popping up across town in late 2017 as part of a $40 million public safety plan that also included a fleet of license plate readers and a state-of-the-art surveillance hub called the Real Time Crime Center. Since then, local advocates like Green have been working to track and expose the city’s surveillance capabilities.
But it hasn’t been easy.
New Orleans’ surveillance apparatus isn’t so much a comprehensive system as it is a sprawling, decentralized and constantly changing patchwork of tools maintained by various city departments, semi-independent agencies, private nonprofits and federal and state law enforcement.
“It's sort of a Frankestein's monster,” said Bruce Hamilton, former senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Louisiana, who now works for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “I don’t think there's a grand plan.”
There is no consolidated “department of surveillance” in New Orleans, no single venue where residents like Green can go to learn more. Nor is there a formal regulatory structure for internal tracking, public disclosure or approval for surveillance or data collection technology.
The city makes it even harder to navigate that labyrinth by consistently refusing or failing to give accurate information to the public, privacy advocates told The Lens.
“The status quo is that the government is really free to acquire, deploy, expand existing surveillance technology outside of public view, without public input and without oversight,” said Chris Kaiser, the advocacy director for the ACLU of Louisiana and member of Eye on Surveillance, at a New Orleans City Council hearing last year.
“Often, as a result, we really don't know what's out there.”
Despite all the muddiness, the city drew one clear line in the sand early into the camera program: it wouldn’t use facial recognition.
For over two years, officials repeatedly assured the public of that voluntary restriction. It’s even written in bold on the city’s website and included in the privacy policy for the Real Time Crime Center.
It was a rare point of clarity in an otherwise opaque surveillance system. Except it wasn’t true.
In November 2020, the NOPD admitted that detectives had been using facial recognition since at least 2018. The department justified its previous denials by arguing that the city didn’t own the software itself. Instead, NOPD investigators were accessing it through the Louisiana State Analytics and Fusion Exchange — one of 82 “fusion centers” across all 50 states that make up a vast, federally funded intelligence and data sharing network.
“It's a distinction without a difference,” Hamilton said. “NOPD is still using the technology, just getting someone else to do the dirty work.”
And that wasn’t the first time the city was accused of shrouding its surveillance powers.
In 2018, an article from The Verge shocked many New Orleans residents when it revealed that the NOPD had quietly obtained an advanced analytic software — called Gotham — and used it to create a database listing the one percent of New Orleans residents with the highest perceived threat of committing a gun crime.
The software was made by Palantir — a data-mining company founded by billionaire Peter Thiel with early investment from the CIA’s venture capital branch. The NOPD had been using the software for six years by the time the practice was exposed by The Verge, which characterized it as a “predictive policing system.”
Starting in 2012, under former Mayor Mitch Landrieu, the city used Palantir’s Gotham software to identify and round up hundreds of potential gang-members for public safety “interventions” at the criminal court building, where they were informed that they and their friends were being closely watched and could face enhanced prosecution for future crimes.
"We know who you are. We know who your friends are. We know where you go. We know everything about you," Landrieu said after the first “intervention” in 2012.
Even getting basic information about the city’s surveillance arsenal can be an exhausting exercise. The city, for example, refused to release a map of its surveillance cameras for years until it was sued by an attorney from the Orleans Public Defenders Office with representation by the ACLU.
“The fact that we had to sue to get a map of publicly visible cameras I think just illustrates the kind of ridiculousness of the city claiming it has any type of transparency when it comes to surveillance,” Hamilton said.
The city ended up fighting the lawsuit all the way to the Louisiana Supreme Court before it was finally forced to turn over the camera locations in 2020.
“If transparency was anything more than just lip service, the city would have just said, ‘Here's the map,’ “ Hamilton said. “We shouldn't have had to fight for it.”
To Hamilton, the city’s record points to a clear conclusion: The public can’t trust City Hall to willingly and accurately inform them about the tools it uses to spy on them.
“They don't deserve our trust,” Hamilton said.
Over the past year, Cantrell’s office denied multiple interview requests for this project and ignored many of The Lens’ emailed questions regarding the city’s use, oversight of and investment in surveillance technology. The city also provided incomplete and inaccurate records in response to some of The Lens’ public records requests.
But a short written statement from a Cantrell spokesperson said that the Real Time Crime Center “is governed by a strict policy” and that “access is restricted and monitored.”
"The Crime Center has hosted many community groups for tours and has attended dozens of community meetings to provide information on the public safety camera program and to answer frequently asked questions. A map of camera locations is available on the website, along with a form for residents to submit camera location requests."
In a short statement, Landrieu told The Lens that his administration strived to balance public safety needs with privacy rights.
“You can have Constitutional policing and reduce crime,” Landrieu said. “It is possible to do both.” Falling barriers to mass surveillance
Local mass surveillance systems have spread rapidly across the U.S. in the last two decades, from major cities like New York, to smaller ones like Birmingham, Alabama, all the way to towns with populations under 1,000.
“Some of those traditional checks and balances as far as budgeting are being circumvented and police departments are building huge arsenals of surveillance technology without any kind of engagement from lawmakers and without the awareness of the public,” said Nathan Sheard, the Associate Director of Community Organizing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy nonprofit.
Sheard said that historically, electronic mass surveillance systems were kept in check more by simple practicality than legal restrictions. Some technologies widely used by law enforcement today were traditionally too pricey for local police department budgets, while others were only recently invented.
But with cheaper technology and increased funding from the federal government, the prevalence of local mass surveillance systems has exploded. And some officials are now convinced that new legal restrictions are necessary to replace the falling barriers of cost and technology.
“It became abundantly clear that this was one of those places where technology was moving at the speed of light, but electeds and the government were moving at a snail's pace in terms of creating policy around it,” Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams told The Lens. “I do think we're behind. I think most American cities are behind on this.”
Williams, a former City Council member who ran for DA in 2020 as a progressive reformer, isn’t wholly opposed to new surveillance technology.
“There's a ton of technology I plan on using to prove cases over here at the DA's office,” he told The Lens. “If someone is using a weapon on city streets and it's picked up on a camera and I can access that camera, I'm going to use that as evidence.”
As a council member, he praised the city's 2017 surveillance expansion efforts, and specifically encouraged a controversial, and ultimately abandoned, plan to install infrared cameras that could see through people’s clothes to virtually check for weapons.
"Some of my liberal friends may say this is an infringement upon constitutional rights, but at the end of the day, what is more important than the safety of this community?” Williams said in 2017.
Williams was also an outspoken advocate of expanding data collection outside of the criminal justice system with “smart cities” technologies — an urban planning idea and multi-billion-dollar industry that encourages city governments to maximize data collection and analysis across all facets of civic life.
The more the city knows about its residents, the theory goes, the better it can serve them.
Analyzing traffic patterns can help reduce congestion. Monitoring residents’ energy usage can increase energy efficiency. Putting sensors in trash cans can help cut down on collection costs and prevent bin overflow. Other smart cities technologies have been credited with combatting the coronavirus pandemic, monitoring air quality and mitigating flooding risks.
But that “smart” technology can also mean an exponential rise in the amount of data cities collect about their residents, and sometimes come with privacy implications that aren’t apparent when they’re first installed.
“Smart recycling bins” in London were turned off after it came out that they were mining data from passing smartphones. And the City of San Diego turned off the cameras in its “smart street lights” — originally installed as a way to study traffic patterns — after the public discovered the police started using them for criminal investigations.
Williams still believes in the potential of those technologies, but said his outlook “evolved” during his years on the City Council as he saw “how pervasive this technology can be in every facet of our lives without us actually having an intelligent conversation about whether or not we want all of this to happen.”
“People want the latest and greatest thing, but we're not educating ourselves on the negative ramifications of some of this technology,” he said.
In 2020, after he announced his run for DA, Williams began working with Eye on Surveillance to create a law setting restrictions and oversight measures for surveillance, only some of which were ultimately approved by the City Council.
“We gotta get in front of it,” Williams said. “Even if it's not here yet, we need to start having conversations about the best way to use these things and what we don’t want them to do ever.”
‘Fundamentally different’
Police surveillance is nothing new. Local police have long monitored public spaces — standing on a street corner, staking out a house or following a suspect through public streets. And they have long used data on residents, like arrest records and fingerprints, to solve cases.
Rafael Goyeneche, a former prosecutor and president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, argues that new surveillance technologies are simply enhanced versions of what police have always done. He compared using facial recognition software to broadcasting a suspect photo and asking for citizen tips, both of which come with the risk of misidentification and racial bias.
“The technology is only a tool,” he told The Lens. “It doesn't mean that anyone's rights are being violated. It doesn’t mean the police are engaging in anything covert or constitutionally invalid.”
But Dave Maass, the head of investigations for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argued that the technology at the fingertips of local law enforcement today isn’t just augmenting existing practices, it’s changing the nature of government surveillance and public anonymity altogether.
“If you look 20, 30, 40 years ago, when we're talking about surveillance, we're talking about a dude sitting in his car with binoculars looking at a particular person for a particular investigation,” Maass said. “We look at where we are now, we're talking about the advent of technologies that are collecting data on everyone all the time, regardless of whether you're suspected of being involved in a crime.”
“These are fundamentally different things,” he said.
New Orleans has steadily grown its surveillance hardware year after year. By late 2018, the Real Time Crime Center had access to a little over 300 live camera feeds. By the end of 2019, it was up to roughly 600. And by early 2021, there were nearly 1,000.
Meanwhile, in August, the city announced it was using $1 million in federal coronavirus relief aid to buy 150 to 160 more license plate readers.
But while the hardware is the most visible element of New Orleans’ surveillance network, the real power is on the other side of the lens — the advanced analytic software that mines, organizes and analyzes the footage.
“What we have now are algorithms that are watching all of the cameras all of the time, indexing everything in those cameras and then storing that potentially indefinitely,” Maass said.
The city started using this kind of algorithm in 2017 with a software called BriefCam. Instead of requiring officers to watch every second of every camera feed to find what they’re looking for, BriefCam watched it for them and broke down the footage into searchable components.
“BriefCam’s breakthrough technology detects, tracks, extracts and identifies people and objects from video, including; men, women, children, clothing, bags, vehicles, animals, size, color, speed, path, direction, dwell time, and more,” said a BriefCam press release announcing its work in New Orleans.
Once everything is broken down and cataloged, officers could easily comb through hours of footage in just minutes. (The city said it stopped using BriefCam in late 2019.)
This type of software is also used with body camera footage. Body cameras were adopted by the NOPD in 2014 as a police accountability measure, but they’re also a major tool in prosecutions.
In 2016, the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office started using software to mine and catalog audio and video captured by body cameras. The company announced its business with the New Orleans DA in a 2016 press release.
“It makes video completely searchable. The software creates an audio transcript and record of faces and text in each video through an automated system, which means an officer or investigator can type in a person's name or keywords like drugs and search for when and where it was spoken in the video.”
The police also use advanced software, like the one from Palantir, to automatically analyze the massive troves of data at their disposal, including arrest records, jail phone call logs, parole and probation records, incident reports and interview cards. The NOPD’s field interview cards in particular raised privacy concerns soon after they were introduced in 2011, when The Times-Picayune reported that the police had used the cards to collect and store names and personal information of 70,000 people in just a year.
Brian Hofer, chair of the Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission, told The Lens that while many of the records held by the city and police may not seem very intrusive in a vacuum, they become exponentially more revealing as they’re connected.
“The individual privacy impact from a single data point, probably low, maybe even zero,” Hofer said.
But when you start connecting the dots, he said, even a relatively small amount of data can paint an intimate portrait of someone’s life. He referenced a 2013 peer-reviewed study in Scientific Reports that found that 95 percent of people could be identified with just four location data points.
“These data points are that revealing,” Hofer said. “We’re creatures of habit. We drive to work the same way, we drive to school the same way.”
Tracy Rosenberg, an activist with the anti-surveillance group Oakland Privacy, said that many surveillance products being marketed to cities — like Palantir’s Gotham software — focus on finding connections, trends and social networks in their own data that would otherwise be nearly invisible to a human investigator.
“The pitch of the surveillance vendors has been we're going to let you get more information, but more importantly we're going to let you integrate it, we're going to take it out of silos, we're going to make the information work together, we're going to put it in one place,” she said. “That is definitely surveillance nirvana.”
She said a major concern for her is how these surveillance products will allow law enforcement to take advantage of government databases that haven’t traditionally been a routine part of police investigations, especially as “smart cities” technologies ramp up municipal data collection.
“If you think about the volume of information that cities collect, which can include public health data, tickets and citations, educational records, voting records, the potential for what we call ‘data fusion’ is kind of extensive,” Rosenberg said. ‘The Wild West’
Oakland, California was one of the first cities in the U.S. to start regulating surveillance at the local level. Hofer said the city’s fight for reform began with a 2013 proposal for a federally funded surveillance network.
“The City of Oakland launched this proposal for a citywide mass surveillance program that would blanket the entire city,” Hofer said. “It was similar to what happened a couple years after that in New Orleans with the Real Time Crime Center.”
City officials hadn’t sought public input on the plan, according to Rosenberg. She said the public ended up finding out “through nothing more than an accident.”
“It really only came out because an employee with the City of Oakland found some paperwork and sent something out to activists saying you might be interested in this,” she said. “We had no guardrails in place, no policies. It was the Wild West.”
Basically, they were where New Orleans is today.
“You didn’t even know the technology was being used,” Hofer said. “What we were doing in Oakland is probably what you guys are doing, submitting a lot of public records requests and poring through agendas and contracts, matching up model numbers and serial numbers and trying to see what was being used. And that takes a lot of effort.”
Rosenberg said there are practical limits to what the public can access through what she referred to as “public records odysseys.”
“For everything we asked, we probably got answers on 20 to 30 percent of it. We still have public records requests that go back to 2014 and 2015 that haven't been answered.”
Oakland activists were able to get the city to back down from the 2013 plan. But that wasn’t the end of the anti-surveillance movement.
“We started thinking about, ‘OK, how do we keep this from happening again?’ ” Rosenberg said. “What is the proactive thing we can do so we don’t have to fight these things after they're sort of 75 percent or more there? … It became a challenge to mobilize citywide and start saying no, you can't move this forward essentially on the basis of inertia and entropy.”
In 2016, the ACLU launched its Community Control Over Police Surveillance, or CCOPS, campaign and created a template ordinance with three central requirements: City Council approval of existing and future surveillance technology, annual public reporting on how those technologies are used and a community advisory committee to make recommendations on surveillance policy.
“The biggest win of the framework, I think, is that it brings everything out into the open,” Hofer said.
Oakland passed its version of a CCOPS law in 2018, among the first cities in the country to do so. According to the ACLU, at least 21 cities, representing a combined 17 million residents, have passed some sort of CCOPS law since 2016 including Nashville, Tennessee; Madison, Wisconsin; New York City and Pittsburgh.
But that still leaves the vast majority of American cities — including New Orleans — without this type of regulation.
“Regulatory efforts are starting to catch up, but we were caught flat-footed,” Rosenberg said. “We're all making it up as we go along. The anti-surveillance movement as it is is maybe a decade old at best. So these are very new challenges we're facing.”
‘I have nothing to hide’
Hofer has worked with organizations across the country, including Eye on Surveillance, and said that every community is different in terms of the level of government monitoring it's willing to accept.
“I'm not an abolitionist. I do think some technology can be used appropriately,” he said. “You can determine yourself in each community where to draw the line. It's up to the residents in that city to determine what they think is appropriate and not appropriate.”
For some outspoken anti-surveillance advocates, the technology that cities like New Orleans are adopting act as an extension of what they see as deeply flawed, biased and overly punitive criminal justice and immigration systems.
“It's a way of controlling the masses, including immigrants,” Santos Alva, an organizer with the local immigrant advocacy organization Congress of Day Laborers, told The Lens through an interpreter. “They don’t mess with people who have a good economic standing in this society. They mess with Black people, they mess with brown people, they mess with immigrants.”
Of course, not everyone feels that way about the police.
“There are certainly people that bring up the argument ‘I have nothing to hide,’ ” New York-based privacy advocate Albert Fox Cahn told The Lens.
“Especially with police being as polarizing a topic as they are right now, there are many people who will reflexively talk about their desire to stand in solidarity with the police, a sort of ideological alignment. But even those individuals, when you talk about some of these cases that get to points of sensitivity in their own lives, it's a very different reaction.”
Polling from the Pew Research Center shows that when it comes to government surveillance, the majority of Americans are concerned, believe the risks outweigh the benefits and have little to no idea about what’s being done with the information collected from them or what privacy laws are on the books.
“We all have facets of our lives that make us feel vulnerable when they're tracked or exposed. And it’s different for different stakeholders,” Cahn said.
Some people, he said, might feel the greatest concern about police targeting people based on their religious affiliations. Others may be more skeptical of the government spying on political organizations or creating a database of gun owners.
The Pew poll indicated that for many Americans, there is greater concern around data collected by private companies than government surveillance.
But, Hofer said, “Those lines are becoming fuzzy.”
The government is a consumer in the booming market for personal data collected by private companies. Several federal agencies have purchased private smart phone location data. The Treasury Department has purchased employment data from a subsidiary of the credit bureau Equifax to help determine eligibility for food stamps and disability benefits.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has a contract with a Swedish company that collects data from cars — including navigation history and information from bluetooth connected devices. The popular home security Ring “video doorbells” share footage with thousands of police departments. In New Orleans, a program called Leads Online provides access to hundreds of millions of pawn shop purchase records.
Maass argued that the upsurge of mass government data collection isn’t only a privacy issue, it’s a security issue as well, especially when it comes to small, local agencies.
“Police departments don’t have tech-company-class cyber security professionals who are just locking down their system and doing security audits,” he said.
In 2015, Maass co-wrote a report about how three police departments just outside of New Orleans — St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office, Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, and the Kenner Police — left their license plate reader systems completely exposed.
“There were license plate readers where you could just go to a URL, on a website, and bring up the camera,” Maass said. “You could bring up the control, you could siphon off the data as it was coming in, you could watch the live footage. And nobody had actually done the actual investment to protect the software, no one had done the due diligence.”
Williams said he had similar concerns about the city entering surveillance contracts with private vendors, comparing the city to a product consumer who blindly agrees to a long terms and conditions document.
“The same way you can click a box without reading a 40-page document, that same thing is happening with municipalities across the country as it relates to technology,” he said.
Some advocates also have doubts about the city’s role as a steward of all this data. In December 2019, New Orleans was hit by a cyber attack that locked the city out of its own data and systems. It took millions of dollars and a full year to recover.
The city has said it upgraded its cybersecurity procedures during the recovery process. But even then, it’s difficult to know if the city will ever be fully protected when some of the country’s most sensitive and secretive government agencies have been compromised by cyber attacks in recent years.
‘Who was lying?'
Eye on Surveillance and other local advocates have proven it’s possible to push back on the city’s surveillance expansion. But their successes in halting surveillance initiatives come with an important caveat: the public needs to know they exist first.
Public pressure forced the City Council to drop a controversial ordinance in 2018 that would have forced every alcohol vendor in the city to install surveillance cameras directly connected to the Real Time Crime Center. The same year, when the NOPD’s use of the Palantir software caused a public backlash, the city announced it wouldn’t renew the contract. And soon after the NOPD admitted it was using facial recognition in 2020, the City Council banned the use of facial recognition.
But the public rarely gets any advanced warning of new surveillance initiatives. Expansions are often simply announced, rather than brought up for public debate. Other times the public is never informed at all.
“We can't regulate or prohibit technologies that we don’t know exist, that we don’t know our police department might be using,” Hofer said.
Part of the problem, advocates argue, is an intentional tactic from city officials to avoid public debate and controversy. But they said the issue goes beyond just secrecy from individual officials, and that there are institutional obstacles to transparency that arise from the city's near total lack of internal oversight.
Those obstacles can persist even when government officials attempt to be transparent. For example, during the two years the NOPD was using facial recognition, city leaders and elected officials repeatedly and falsely claimed the opposite. But not all of those officials knew they were lying.
“It's unclear to me personally who was lying and who didn't know what they should have known,” Hamilton said.
City Council members, for their part, had every reason to believe the technology wasn’t being used. At a July 2020 hearing, council members asked the city’s Chief Technology Officer and the administrator of the Real Time Crime Center whether the city was using facial recognition. And repeatedly, those officials assured them it was not.
“Of course the city doesn’t deploy any facial recognition technology in a law enforcement purpose,” RTCC administrator Ross Bourgeois told the council. “The city doesn’t have any of that technology available for our use.”
Just a few months later, when it was revealed that wasn't true, NOPD Superintendent Shaun Ferguson told the City Council that he was just as surprised as they were.
“I had no idea we even had access to this. So it's nothing we ever tried to hide at any point in time,” Ferguson said. “I have since learned that our department did not have a policy with regards to using this tool.”
That doesn’t bring much comfort to Marvin Arnold, an organizer with Eye on Surveillance.
“I don’t know which is better, if they lied about facial recognition or if the chief just didn't know,” Arnold said. “I've seen how little the public and even the city itself knows about these systems. I don’t think the majority of council members understand what city surveillance looks like. I don’t even think our city administrators understand it. So how can your average resident?”
Maass leads the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Atlas of Surveillance, an attempt to identify and map local and state surveillance usage. He said one of the major obstacles was dealing with officials who were unaware of the surveillance technology being used within their own government.
“That is a huge problem,” Maass said. “I'll file a public records request and the agency will come back and say, 'Well we don't use that technology.' And I actually have to show them the receipts, like, yes you do. Then they check back again and they're like, 'Oh yeah, I guess we didn’t know.’ This happens all the time, all over the country.”
Similarly, when the city’s use of the Palantir software was revealed six years after it began, there was a debate over how intentionally secretive the city had been.
When The Verge broke the news, the headline read, “Palantir has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology.”
A few days after that article, The Times-Picayune called the relationship “a not-so-secret secret,” pointing out that the software was disclosed on the city-run website for former-Mayor Landrieu’s NOLA for Life program as well as a public report from 2016.
“The reporting on the use of the Palantir technology was false and misleading,” Ryan Berni, one of Landrieu’s top deputies, said in a recent interview. “It should not have been a secret for anyone who was paying attention to the NOLA for Life program.”
Nonetheless, much of the public was unaware of the city’s relationship with Palantir, as were members of the City Council and the city’s Office of the Independent Police Monitor. And many residents wondered how the city could have avoided any sort of public vetting before entering the Palantir contract.
The answer is that there simply wasn’t any public process or disclosure requirement for the city to evade.
Most city contracts don’t require City Council approval or a public hearing. And the city doesn’t have to issue press releases every time it signs a contract. Many of those records are available to the public upon request. But until someone asks, the city has no legal obligation to announce its use of surveillance technology any more than it has to announce its use of Microsoft Word.
Even if you do get a hold of a city contract, they are often vague. In the Palantir contract, for example, the company’s responsibilities are simply listed as providing the city with “such technological data as necessary to deploy the Project.”
In fact, at the same time as the city was using the Palantir software, it was using another, very similar piece of software called Coplink by Forensic Logic. Coplink and Palantir’s software are often referred to as market rivals. Ronal Serpas, who was the Police Superintendent when the city first adopted Palantir, compared it to Coplink in a 2018 interview with Fox 8.
The Coplink software never received the widespread attention drawn by the Palantir contract, and the city continued using Coplink without controversy up until April 2021, when the contract expired, according to the NOPD.
Berni said the lack of City Council input on surveillance decisions is due to New Orleans’ “strong executive” model of government, in which the mayor decides the vast majority of day-to-day operational decisions.
“We have a system set up where there's a clear mandate where the executive and all the departments and agencies under it run the government,” he said. “The council is there to set the budget and big picture policy. And at various times, decides to get more in the weeds on specific issues. I think that's for the council to decide.”
‘It's not gonna stop’
The city of New Orleans grew its surveillance capabilities with little pushback from members of the City Council until, in early 2020, a seemingly innocuous proposal about streetlights came before the council’s Smart and Sustainable Cities Committee.
The proposal called for a pilot program to introduce 146 “smart street lights” equipped with video and audio recording. The cameras weren’t primarily for police use, city officials said, and would be mainly used to study traffic patterns. But the footage would be made available to the Real Time Crime Center.
At the same time, the city of San Diego was facing a public backlash over the same street lights. The city had installed over 3,000 of them in 2017. But many residents were disturbed after finding out in 2019 that the police had started using the camera footage for their investigations. The reaction was so strong that San Diego’s City Council is now poised to pass a comprehensive CCOPS ordinance, and has turned off the smart street light cameras until it does.
The smart street lights hit a nerve in New Orleans as well. Members of Eye on Surveillance were frustrated that they were once again caught off-guard by a surveillance proposal.
“I guarantee that instead of saying they were having a meeting about smart cities, they said they were having a meeting about adding 146 more cameras, a lot more people would attend,” Arnold told The Lens at the time. “Overall, the onus has been on the community to find out the specifics rather than them being forthcoming.”
In a somewhat surprising turn, then-Councilman Williams decided to put the smart cities pilot on hold until the council could pass comprehensive surveillance regulation similar to CCOPS legislation in other cities. He said that the decision was heavily influenced by the work of Eye on Surveillance advocates.
But not everyone on the City Council had the same appetite for regulation. Some didn’t want to take a “tool out of the toolbox” for police, or insisted that their constituents wanted more surveillance, not less. Others worried about the administrative burden of tracking all that technology.
The City Council ended up cutting almost all the forward-looking provisions from the ordinance, the ones meant to create an ongoing regulatory structure for surveillance. The only explanation given during the meeting was simply that the NOPD had asked them to remove those pieces of the law.
“We've stripped extensive approval and reporting processes as requested by the NOPD,” Williams said during a December council meeting.
The NOPD didn’t respond to questions about its alleged request to change the legislation.
What the council passed instead was a full ban on four types of technology: facial recognition, predictive policing, characteristic tracking software and cell-site simulators, also known as stingrays.
The ordinance was no small achievement. New Orleans is just one of a handful of cities in the country to outlaw facial recognition and predictive policing. It’s likely the first city to outlaw stingrays. And the law sets up a framework to create future guardrails.
But activists, both in New Orleans and nationally, say that individual bans, without any high level oversight or regulation, just aren't enough to keep the surveillance state in check.
“The problem there is you've intervened effectively on four kinds of surveillance technology, and everything else is left untouched,” Rosenberg said. “And for the moment, that probably has some efficacy. But as time moves on and technology marches on, there will be new things down the road that potentially are just as disturbing as those you chose to ban."
Advocates also point out that without those oversight measures, there’s no sure way to verify whether those bans are even being followed, considering that the city falsely claimed it wasn't using facial recognition for years.
And already, the NOPD is working to walk back at least the facial recognition ban. Councilman Jay Banks told The Lens that the NOPD was working on a policy on how it would use facial recognition and that he would support reversing the ban if the policy was sound.
Meanwhile, although the City Council abandoned the smart cities pilot program, the city is moving ahead with an even bigger version of the project. It recently selected a contractor to implement a broad smart cities program that would, according to the contractor’s proposal, include 3,000 smart street lights, each of which would have at least two cameras.
“It's not a one and done,” Hofer said. “It's not gonna stop and it's not gonna slow down.”

Digital ID, censorship fears grow as Canada, EU sign new pact

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:43:00 +0000

Canada and the European Union are teaming up on controversial new digital agreements covering everything from artificial intelligence to digital identity and media censorship.
Canada and the European Union are teaming up on controversial new digital agreements covering everything from artificial intelligence to digital identity and media censorship. The move has sparked immediate warnings from civil-liberties groups about a looming threat to privacy and online freedom.
The agreements were announced Monday in Montreal during the first meeting of the EU–Canada Digital Partnership Council, held alongside the G7 Industry, Digital and Technology Ministerial meeting.
The Council was co-chaired by EU Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen and Canada’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, Evan Solomon.
In a joint statement, both sides said the initiative aims to “boost competitiveness, innovation and economic resilience.” Specific commitments include developing “trustworthy artificial intelligence technologies that respect fundamental rights” and accelerating AI adoption across healthcare, manufacturing, energy, culture and public services.
To advance this work, Canada and the EU signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Artificial Intelligence. It will support joint standards development, expand research collaboration and create shared access to large AI infrastructures and computing capacity.
They also agreed to create a structured dialogue on data spaces used to train advanced AI models.
A second memorandum, focused on digital credentials and trust services, commits the two jurisdictions to explore interoperability between digital identity systems. This includes pilot testing, technical standards and “solutions based on digital identity wallets,” according to the EU summary of the agreement.
The EU said the partnership marks “a significant step in strengthening our cooperation to build the economy of tomorrow,” with Virkkunen noting that “no single region can face the digital transformation alone.”
Solomon said the initiative reflects long-standing ties between the two partners, adding: “The Canada-EU relationship is based on shared values and interests, a long history of close cooperation and strong people-to-people ties. Through the Digital Partnership, Canada and the EU are shaping a digital future that benefits people, grows the economy and builds trust between countries.”
The section of the agreement dealing with digital identity systems has drawn criticism from constitutional rights advocates.
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms said in a post on X that cooperation on “digital credentials and trust services… including solutions based on digital identity wallets” represents a step toward a nationwide digital identification regime. The group warned that the framework risks “pushing citizens into a Digital ID system that will control and track our money and reduce our freedom.”
The partnership also includes working together on ‘supporting independent media, combating foreign information manipulation and addressing risks posed by generative AI’.

And

EU-Canada Digital Partnership Zeroes In on Digital Identity Wallets

The European Union and Canada have placed interoperable digital identity wallets at the center of a newly formalized digital partnership, signaling a potential cross-Atlantic alignment on digital credentials and trust services that could reshape how citizens and businesses authenticate in both jurisdictions. The first meeting of the Canada-EU Digital Partnership Council was held in Montreal on December 8, co-chaired by Canada’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon and European Commission Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen.
The Council builds on the EU-Canada Digital Partnership announced in late 2023 and the Strategic Partnership of the Future joint statement adopted at the June 2025 EU-Canada summit. Those earlier documents explicitly called out digital identity and digital credentials as areas for deeper cooperation, including an intent to establish interoperable digital identities and digital credentials that can support cross-border interactions between citizens and enterprises. The Montreal meeting translates that high-level commitment into a more concrete roadmap.
According to a joint statement and a Canadian government news release, the two sides signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Digital Credentials and Trust Services that commits them to collaborative action on technical interoperability, standards alignment and pilot projects. The MoU envisages a forum where EU and Canadian authorities will jointly test digital credential technologies, share information on regulatory and technical approaches, and develop real-world use cases and pilots aimed at interoperability between digital identity wallets and associated trust services. A parallel MoU on artificial intelligence focuses on AI standards and infrastructure, but the digital identity work is framed as equally important for building trusted digital ecosystems.
For the EU, the partnership provides another anchor point for the European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet initiative, which aims to give EU citizens a standardized way to hold government credentials and use them across public and private services. Canada, meanwhile, has been advancing its own digital credential agenda through initiatives such as the Pan-Canadian Trust Framework and a patchwork of provincial pilots, but has not yet launched a single national wallet. The new MoU suggests that any Canadian federal wallet or credential system will be developed with cross-border interoperability in mind, likely drawing on international standards such as W3C Verifiable Credentials and eIDAS-aligned trust frameworks.
From an industry perspective, the EU-Canada digital partnership could open new opportunities for vendors working on wallet infrastructures, verifiable credential issuance and cross-border trust services. It also raises policy questions that will matter to corporate identity teams, including how liability and assurance levels will be handled when credentials are accepted across jurisdictions, how attributes from a foreign wallet can be consumed under local privacy and AML rules, and whether mutual recognition of trust services could eventually extend to private sector identity providers. With both sides emphasizing digital sovereignty and resilience, the pilot work on wallets and credentials will be watched closely as a test case for international alignment on high-assurance digital identity.

And

EU and Canada agree to collaborate on digital ID mutual recognition, pilots
New Digital Partnership Council inks MoU in first meeting Representatives of the European Union and Canada emerged from the meeting of the EU-Canada Digital Partnership Council on Monday with an agreement to work together on making their respective digital IDs work in each jurisdiction. The continental bloc and the country signed a Memorandum of Understanding on “Digital Credentials, Digital Identity Wallets and Trust Services,” one of several deals to work together on emerging technologies.
The MoU refers to the Canada-EU Summit Joint Statement of June 23, 2025. That statement included a commitment by each to align their digital frameworks “to establish interoperable digital identities and digital credentials to facilitate interactions between our citizens and our businesses.”
In the wake of that statement, the Digital ID & Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC) endorsed the prospective digital trade agreement and chance for mutual recognition of digital IDs.
Now, the EU and Canada will explore the creation of a “dedicated forum for regular expert dialogue” to facilitate joint testing of credentials, including those using digital identity wallets. They will collaborate on joint use cases and pilot projects to advance cross-border interoperability, building on Canada’s new digital ID framework and the EU Digital Identity Wallet framework. The respective governments will also work together on sharing information and best practices, jointly test digital credential technologies and explore approaches to standards formation, and discuss the path to future mutual recognition, according to the MoU contained within the parties’ joint statement.
Monday’s meeting was co-chaired by Canadian Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon and European Commission EVP for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen.
The parties also agreed to cooperate on AI research and adoption, standards development for the digital economy, R&D on quantum technologies and weather forecasting.
The EU and Singapore held their second Digital Partnership Council meeting last Monday, where they outlined similar plans to collaborate on digital identity interoperability.

And

EU & Canada Begin Making The GLOBAL Digital ID System By Linking Their Tech
European and Canadian officials have expanded their cooperation on digital policy with new agreements that link digital identity infrastructure, artificial intelligence development, and management of online information.
The partnership, presented as a joint effort to strengthen “trust” and “information integrity,” commits both sides to exploring systems that would connect citizens’ digital credentials across borders while sharing data for AI research.
Two memoranda of understanding were signed: one on Digital Credentials and Trust Services and another on Artificial Intelligence.
The digital credentials agreement creates a working forum for joint experiments, technical coordination, and the testing of “digital identity wallets.”
These wallets are software tools that store verified identity documents, allowing people to confirm their identity online or in person using standardized credentials backed by government trust frameworks.
The artificial intelligence memorandum focuses on the infrastructure behind large AI systems.
It establishes a “structured dialogue on data spaces,” a term referring to controlled environments where data can be exchanged among multiple organizations under a common governance framework.
While the purpose is described as supporting innovation, such data-sharing arrangements could also increase the circulation of personal or behavioral data between jurisdictions, raising questions about oversight and consent.
Beyond technical matters, the AI plan promises to “accelerate AI adoption in strategic sectors” and to develop “advanced AI models for the public good.” It sets out to align Europe’s and Canada’s approaches on infrastructure, standards, and regulation, drawing the two regions closer in how they design and control large AI ecosystems.
Another section of the partnership turns to media and information control. The governments agreed to “cooperation on enhancing information integrity online” and pledged to fund efforts “strengthening independent media by supporting local journalism.”
Officially, this is aimed at combating “foreign information manipulation” and addressing the challenges of generative AI.
The phrase “information integrity” appears with growing frequency in international policy documents, and its use in the EU–Canada partnership lands in the middle of an already expanding global trend.
The wording may sound neutral, but it often signals a preference for managed information flows rather than open public debate. A July 2025 development at the United Nations illustrates why the term can raise concerns.
The UN’s first Global Risk Report placed what it called “mis- and disinformation” among the most severe global threats. Inside that same report, the organization announced a new task force whose purpose is to examine how unauthorized narratives might interfere with the UN’s operations, particularly the 2030 Agenda.
The framing is presented as a matter of public welfare, yet the described mission is not about encouraging transparency or open discussion. It is about maintaining a communication environment that protects institutional priorities.
According to the report, survey participants from governments, NGOs, companies, and other groups broadly supported coordinated government action and multistakeholder coalitions to confront the identified risks.
What is missing is any call for more open communication or stronger protections for free expression. The dominant approach favors centralized management of public narratives, reinforcing the idea that the solution to contested information is tighter control rather than broader participation.
The first meeting of the Canada–EU Digital Partnership Council was held in Montreal on December 8, co-chaired by Canada’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon and European Commission Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen.
This meeting put earlier commitments into action, following the EU–Canada Digital Partnership announced in late 2023 and the Strategic Partnership of the Future statement adopted at the June 2025 summit.
For the European Union, this partnership supports its European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet initiative, which aims to give citizens a unified digital container for verified credentials usable across public and private services.
Canada has been pursuing similar goals through its Pan-Canadian Trust Framework and several provincial pilots, but it has not yet introduced a single national wallet. The cross-border cooperation suggests that any federal system in Canada will be built with global standards such as W3C Verifiable Credentials and eIDAS in mind.

The CEO Who Believes AGI Is Already Here

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 02:12:00 +0000

Welcome back to In the Loop, TIME’s new twice-weekly newsletter about AI.
Who to Know: Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks
The three most valuable private companies in the U.S. have big reputations: OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic. But the fourth, Databricks, flies a little more under the radar. This company, which is currently raising funds at a valuation of $134 billion according to reports this week, is a quiet workhorse of the AI revolution. Databricks offers a platform where companies can combine unwieldy data from different sources, manage it easily, and train AI models with it. Its CEO, Ali Ghodsi, is a charismatic computer science professor who still teaches the occasional class at U.C. Berkeley, even as he runs a multibillion-dollar company.
On AGI — Artificial general intelligence has already been achieved, Ghodsi says. To justify this provocative statement, he casts his mind back to his experience working in a computer science lab two decades ago, discussing in vaunted terms with colleagues what AGI might look like: it would be able to talk, and reason, and spot patterns in huge quantities of data. “Now that we have it, it's kind of like, never meet your heroes,” Ghodsi says with a laugh. “It's just like, okay, that's not that impressive.”
Okay, but — Ghodsi has good reason to make this argument. Although OpenAI is one of his largest customers, Databricks’ bread and butter comes from the long tail of more normal companies that aren’t pursuing AGI, but simply want to use existing AI to do things with their data. In Ghodsi’s telling, Databricks is capitalizing on the size of this opportunity. “If all AI progress was frozen today, I think we have what we need to proceed with what we are doing,” Ghodsi says. “Not trying to build super-God… We're much more focused on: how can we make AI useful today in organizations?”
On AI agents —“Agents” was the buzzword of 2025 that never really delivered. By all means, AI improved radically this year, including by gaining new abilities to go and carry out web searches, or modify and run code. But big AI models still face reliability challenges that limit the length of time they can spend running autonomously, and we don’t have full-fledged AI coworkers yet. Ghodsi says Databricks is working on a solution to this problem: helping companies train smaller, laser-focused agents, using their own data. Those models end up being both cheaper to run and more reliable for specific tasks than frontier AI models like ChatGPT or Claude. “We can give you a good quality on the specific task, because we're cheating and we're doing boring AI, focusing just on specific tasks that you want help with,” Ghodsi says.
What to Know: AI private equity is here
For decades, big private equity companies have rinsed and repeated a profitable strategy: buy a struggling firm, trim its expenses by firing staff or modernizing business practices, and then sell it, before moving on to the next.
It was only a matter of time before somebody modified that strategy for the age of AI. OpenAI announced on Monday it had taken a stake in Thrive Holdings, a company set up earlier this year by Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital, which has a plan to buy and turn around struggling companies by enhancing their productivity with AI.
Traditional private equity has been good for C-suite executives, but less so for the average worker. Many employees at PE-acquired companies complain of their new bosses making decisions that might boost balance sheet numbers in the short term but make no long-term sense, or paying themselves large bonuses while firing staff down to a skeleton crew.
Now it seems OpenAI will be directly involved in a company following in the footsteps of this grand tradition.
AI in Action
DeepSeek released a new version of its V3 model on Monday, which, according to some benchmarks, is on par with GPT-5 and Gemini 3.0 Pro. Expect as a result more hand-wringing in Washington and Silicon Valley about the degree to which Chinese AI is catching up to its American rival.

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Databricks CEO says AGI is already here — and Silicon Valley just keeps moving the goalposts
In a bold assertion at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi claimed that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is already a reality, despite Silicon Valley's ongoing hesitation to accept this fact. Ghodsi remarked that current AI chatbots fulfill the criteria for AGI—defined as AI capable of human-like reasoning—according to standards established a decade ago.
"Everyone would agree, but we keep shifting the goalposts," Ghodsi stated during the discussion, which was made public recently. He pointed out that instead of recognizing this achievement, the focus has transitioned to a more ambitious goal: superintelligence, which would surpass human reasoning capabilities. Ghodsi expressed concern that the industry's obsession with superintelligence is misguided, arguing that businesses should prioritize creating systems that can automate tasks effectively rather than striving to outsmart the best human intellects.
He emphasized that AGI already possesses the necessary capabilities for automation and developing intelligent agents, adding, "We just need to focus on the routine tasks."
Databricks, headquartered in San Francisco, recently secured $1 billion in funding, bringing its valuation to over $100 billion. During the conference, Ghodsi noted that the rapid advancements in AI models appear to have plateaued. He explained that the scaling laws that have driven AI progress in recent years have reached a halt, with newer iterations such as OpenAI's GPT-5 and Anthropic's Claude 4 failing to deliver significant enhancements. "Extracting value from the next large pre-trained model is becoming increasingly challenging," he remarked.
Ghodsi's comments emerge amid a divide in the tech sector regarding the pursuit of artificial superintelligence. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, recently labeled superintelligence as an "anti-goal" on the "Silicon Valley Girl Podcast." He expressed skepticism about the positive implications of such an advancement, underscoring the difficulty of aligning superintelligence with human values.
Conversely, other industry leaders remain committed to the quest for superintelligence. OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, has stated that the company is focused on this goal rather than stopping at AGI, envisioning superintelligent tools that could revolutionize scientific discovery and innovation. Altman speculated in a September interview that he would be surprised if the industry had not achieved superintelligence by 2030.
Similarly, Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google DeepMind, projected a timeline for AGI's emergence within the next five to ten years, envisioning a future where AI systems possess a profound and nuanced understanding of the world, seamlessly integrated into daily life.

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Databricks CEO claims AGI exists, industry moved goalposts
Key Insight:
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi asserted that artificial general intelligence (AGI) already exists, suggesting the industry has simply moved the goalposts on what defines AGI. Speaking at Goldman Sachs’ September 10 conference, he noted that recent AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude 4 are delivering diminishing returns, signaling that scaling laws have hit a wall. Databricks recently exceeded $4 billion in revenue run rate with AI products crossing $1 billion, highlighting the company’s significant growth alongside a valuation surpassing $100 billion, with talks underway to raise funds valuing it over $130 billion.
Background:
The tech industry remains divided on the pursuit of superintelligence. While Databricks focuses on practical AI applications, leaders like Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman caution against pursuing artificial superintelligence, calling it an “anti-goal.” Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expects superintelligence by 2030, and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis forecasts AGI arrival within five to ten years. This split underscores contrasting visions on AI’s future direction amid rapid advances and growing market valuations.
Databricks CEO says the industry has already achieved AGI — AI that can reason like a human.
Silicon Valley invented superintelligence to raise the bar, Ali Ghodsi said.
But the fixation with superintelligence is "misdirected," and AGI is good enough for companies, he said.
Databricks CEO says we already have artificial general intelligence. Silicon Valley just refuses to admit it.
Ali Ghodsi said at Goldman Sachs' Communicopia + Technology Conference in September that AI chatbots already meet the definition of AGI — AI that can reason like a human — that researchers used a decade ago.
"Everybody would say yes, but we kept moving the goalposts," Ghodsi said in the discussion, which was published Tuesday.
"Since we kind of achieved it, let's come up with something even bigger," he added, referring to the push toward superintelligence — AI that can reason far smarter than humans.
Ghodsi, who holds a doctorate in computer science, said the industry's goal of superintelligence is nowhere close using today's techniques. He also said the fixation with superintelligence is "misdirected," adding that building systems to outsmart the world's brightest minds isn't what companies actually need.
AGI "has everything we need to be able to automate and build the agents," he said. "We just need to do the boring work," he added.
San Francisco-based Databricks raised $1 billion in September, which valued the company at over $100 billion.
Ghodsi said at the conference that the era of giant leaps from AI models has slowed. The scaling laws that powered the last several years of AI progress have clearly "come to a stop," and newer systems like OpenAI's GPT-5 and Anthropic's Claude 4 aren't delivering massive improvements.
"It's getting harder and harder to get value out of the next pre-trained giant model," he said.
The debate on superintelligence
Ghodsi's comments come as the industry splits over whether building artificial superintelligence is even desirable.
Microsoft AI CEO said on an episode of the "Silicon Valley Girl Podcast" published Saturday that artificial superintelligence should be treated as an "anti-goal."
Superintelligence "doesn't feel like a positive vision of the future," said Mustafa Suleyman. "It would be very hard to contain something like that or align it to our values."
Suleyman, who cofounded DeepMind before moving to Microsoft, said his team is instead aiming for what he calls "humanist superintelligence" — one that is grounded in human interest and values.
Other tech leaders are determined to achieve superintelligence.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said earlier this year that the company is building toward superintelligence, not stopping at AGI.
"Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity," Altman said in January.
Altman said in an interview in September that he would be very surprised if the industry had not reached superintelligence by 2030. Altman has long described AGI as OpenAI's central mission.
Google DeepMind's cofounder, Demis Hassabis, has put forward a similar timeline. He said in April that AGI could arrive "in the next five to 10 years," describing a future where AI systems understand the world "in very nuanced and deep ways" and are woven into everyday life.

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Databricks Targets $100 Billion Valuation in New Funding Round
Data analytics firm Databricks is reportedly hoping to become a $100 billion company.
The business is finalizing a funding round that would give it that valuation, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday (Aug. 19), citing unnamed sources. Venture capital firm Thrive Capital is expected to co-lead the round, with Andreessen Horowitz also planning to invest.
Databricks, which provides software that helps businesses analyze datasets, has grown as the artificial intelligence industry has blossomed, the report said. The company was valued at $62 billion following another funding round earlier this year.
The company will use its new capital to compete in the race to attract AI talent, CEO Ali Ghodsi said, per the report. Databricks wasn’t planning another funding effort so soon, but prospective investors have been in touch daily.
The funding round will also help Databricks postpone plans to go public, the report said.
“The finance team tells me to not use this term, but I think Databricks has a shot to be a trillion-dollar company,” Ghodsi said, per the report. “But we have a lot of work ahead of us to get there.”
Databricks said in June that it projects that its data warehousing business will nearly double in size this year. A company spokesperson said Databricks expects a $1 billion revenue run rate for Databricks SQL by the close of its fiscal year in January 2026, compared to a $600 million run rate in December 2024.
Also in June, PYMNTS wrote about the challenges facing companies such as Databricks and Snowflake. When these firms rose to prominence, their success was bolstered by the growth of digital-first businesses, startups or cloud-native unicorns, which required scalable, agile infrastructure to drive their growth.
“Cloud data warehouses and platforms were the answer, offering a way to store, manage and analyze data without the burdens of traditional IT infrastructure,” a June 11 report said. “However, as these cloud providers set their sights on the next phase of growth by targeting large, multinational enterprises with legacy systems, a different picture is emerging, one centered around capital budgets for mainframe modernization, enterprise resource planning (ERP) upgrade timelines and multiyear IT strategic plans.”
Financial filings and statements from the top cloud providers about their deal plans show that digital transformation in the enterprise space is a marathon, not a sprint.

Executive Order For AI Project Called Genesis Mission To Boost Scientific Discoveries

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 04:29:00 +0000

President Donald Trump is directing the federal government to combine efforts with tech companies and universities to convert government data into scientific discoveries, acting on his push to make artificial intelligence the engine of the nation’s economic future.
Trump unveiled the “Genesis Mission” as part of an executive order he signed Monday that directs the Department of Energy and national labs to build a digital platform to concentrate the nation’s scientific data in one place.
It solicits private sector and university partners to use their AI capability to help the government solve engineering, energy and national security problems, including streamlining the nation’s electric grid, according to White House officials who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity to describe the order before it was signed. Officials made no specific mention of seeking medical advances as part of the project.
“The Genesis Mission will bring together our Nation’s research and development resources — combining the efforts of brilliant American scientists, including those at our national laboratories, with pioneering American businesses; world-renowned universities; and existing research infrastructure, data repositories, production plants, and national security sites — to achieve dramatic acceleration in AI development and utilization,” the executive order says.
The administration portrayed the effort as the government’s most ambitious marshaling of federal scientific resources since the Apollo space missions of the late 1960s and early 1970s, even as it had cut billions of dollars in federal funding for scientific research and thousands of scientists had lost their jobs and funding.
Trump is increasingly counting on the tech sector and the development of AI to power the U.S. economy, made clear last week as he hosted Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The monarch has committed to investing $1 trillion, largely from the Arab nation’s oil and natural gas reserves, to pivot his nation into becoming an AI data hub.
For the U.S.’s part, funding was appropriated to the Energy Department as part of the massive tax-break and spending bill signed into law by Trump in July, White House officials said.
As AI raises concerns that its heavy use of electricity may be contributing to higher utility rates in the nearer term, which is a political risk for Trump, administration officials argued that rates will come down as the technology develops. They said the increased demand will build capacity in existing transmission lines and bring down costs per unit of electricity.
Data centers needed to fuel AI accounted for about 1.5% of the world’s electricity consumption last year, and those facilities’ energy consumption is predicted to more than double by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. That increase could lead to burning more fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas, which release greenhouse gases that contribute to warming temperatures, sea level rise and extreme weather.
The project will rely on national labs’ supercomputers but will also use supercomputing capacity being developed in the private sector. The project’s use of public data including national security information along with private sector supercomputers prompted officials to issue assurances that there would be controls to respect protected information.

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America's GENESIS MISSION

On November 24, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order launching the Genesis Mission, described as “a national effort to use artificial intelligence to transform how scientific research is conducted and accelerate the speed of scientific discovery.” The Department of Energy (DOE) and its 17 national laboratories are put in charge of building what they call “the world’s most powerful scientific platform” by wiring together supercomputers, experimental facilities, AI systems, and scientific datasets across domains like energy, materials, fusion, quantum information, and biotechnology. The official DOE site says the goal is to double the productivity and impact of U.S. research and innovation within a decade by pairing scientists with AI systems that can reason, simulate, and experiment at high speed.
So what does the executive order actually do? It tells DOE to create a shared “American Science and Security Platform” and an AI experimentation environment that connects national-lab supercomputers, secure cloud environments, and decades of federally funded scientific data. The system is supposed to train “scientific foundation models,” deploy AI agents that can propose and test hypotheses, and even drive “robotic laboratories” where experiments are planned and executed in a feedback loop between AI and physical equipment. There are hard timelines attached: inventory computing resources within 90 days, identify priority datasets within 120 days, catalog robotic labs and production facilities within 240 days, and show an initial AI-driven capability for at least one national challenge inside 270 days. On paper, it’s about turning today’s scattered government AI efforts into one coordinated platform.
That’s ambitious, but it is not Apollo- or Manhattan-scale. Apollo cost about $25.4 billion in 1960s dollars—roughly $250–280 billion in today’s money—and at its mid-1960s peak it consumed around 0.8% of U.S. GDP in a single year. The Manhattan Project cost about $2 billion by 1945 (over $30 billion in 2023 dollars) and amounted to roughly 1% of total U.S. wartime spending, employing about 130,000 people and building entire secret cities around a single objective: the first nuclear weapons. Genesis, by contrast, is an executive order that reorients existing programs and tells agencies how to use assets they already have. It’s strategically important, but it’s not a multi-hundred-billion-dollar crash program to build one world-changing artifact.
Funding is where the gap really shows. Politico reports that Genesis is backed by the broader “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” but the executive order itself functions mainly as an internal directive; it doesn’t write a giant check on its own. DOE’s Genesis materials talk about unifying existing supercomputers and experimental facilities, not constructing many new ones from scratch. Meanwhile, private and public AI spending is exploding on a completely different scale: Gartner estimates worldwide AI spending will reach nearly $1.5 trillion in 2025, spanning software, services, and the hardware that powers modern AI data centers. Market analysts put the global AI market itself at roughly $390 billion in revenue in 2025, with projections into the multi-trillion-dollar range by the early 2030s. In other words, the truly massive capital flows are still in the private sector GPU farms, not the national-lab machines Genesis is trying to coordinate.
That said, national-lab infrastructure isn’t trivial. DOE’s 17 labs already host some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers and unique experimental facilities, from fusion and particle-physics machines to light sources and nanoscale imaging capabilities. Some of those machines were designed for large-scale simulations on traditional CPUs rather than the GPU-heavy architectures that dominate modern AI, which is part of why there’s tension between the old HPC world and the new AI-training clusters. Genesis tries to bridge that gap by plugging lab supercomputers and experimental instruments into a common platform that can generate new, high-fidelity datasets and feed them straight into AI models. From a hardware perspective, it’s less about conjuring a completely new supercomputer out of nowhere and more about networking and repurposing the ones we already have.
Where Genesis does matter is in the cultural and funding signal it sends. The fact sheet and DOE copy hammer on one phrase: “accelerate AI for scientific discovery.” In practice, when Washington plants a flag like that, it reshapes how grants are written and reviewed. A UNCTAD issues paper on AI in science notes that AI could plausibly double the pace of R&D in some sectors and that more than half of surveyed researchers already expect AI tools to be “very important or essential” to their work. We’ve seen this pattern before: after COVID-19 showed what mRNA vaccines could do, there was a worldwide surge of mRNA-related trials and R&D targeting cancer and other diseases beyond COVID itself. When a technology becomes the “method du jour,” it attracts funding—and that funding inevitably comes at the expense of other approaches. Genesis is essentially saying: if you want to work on certain national priorities, you’d better have an AI-for-science angle in your proposal.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Earlier in 2025, China rolled out its broader “AI Plus” strategy, which explicitly highlights “AI for Science (AI4S)” as a new paradigm for research, especially in energy, materials, and other high-tech sectors. International analyses describe a dedicated Chinese “AI for Science initiative” aimed at integrating AI with open science, building AI-driven research platforms, and using embodied AI and robotics in real-world scientific scenarios. On the European side, the EU’s Horizon Europe and Digital Europe programs are already investing over €1 billion per year in AI, with a stated goal of mobilizing around €20 billion of annual AI investment across the bloc by the end of the decade. In November 2025 the Commission also launched “Resource for AI Science in Europe” (RAISE), including new calls to fund domain-specific foundation models for areas like materials science and climate. Genesis is, in part, the U.S. answering those moves.
Some of the Genesis language about “robotic laboratories” can sound more sci-fi than it really is. Labs have been using automation for decades—from pipetting robots in PCR workflows to high-throughput screening systems in drug discovery—so the idea of AI-coordinated lab equipment isn’t a total novelty. What is new is the ambition to close the loop: connect experimental gear, simulations, and AI models so that the system can propose experiments, run them, analyze results, and iterate with minimal human intervention. UNCTAD’s survey of “robot scientists” and AI-driven autonomous experimentation shows this is technically feasible in some domains already, especially in materials and nanotechnology. Genesis essentially tries to scale that up across multiple fields using government data and infrastructure.
Genesis is not “the Apollo Program for AI,” and it’s not “a new Manhattan Project.” The historical mega-projects were single-minded, insanely expensive bets on creating one transformative capability. Genesis is a policy and coordination push: it reorganizes the scientific data we already have, aligns national-lab computing around AI-for-science use cases, and sends a loud signal to universities, grant reviewers, and companies that using AI in scientific work is now an expectation rather than a fringe idea. That might not make for dramatic headlines, but it will influence where people, compute, and money flow over the next decade—and wherever those three go together, interesting things tend to follow.

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Trump’s AI ‘Genesis Mission’: what are the risks and opportunities?
The White House has launched a plan to accelerate research in the United States, by building artificial intelligence (AI) models on the rich scientific data sets held by the country’s 17 national laboratories, as well as harnessing their enormous computing resources.
An executive order issued on 24 November instructs the US Department of Energy (DoE) to create a platform through which academic researchers and AI firms can create powerful AI models using the government’s scientific data. Framed as part of a race for global technology dominance, it lists collaborations with technology firms including Microsoft, IBM, OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, as well as quantum-computing companies such as Quantinuum. Such a vast public–private partnership would give companies unprecedented access to federal scientific data sets for AI-driven analysis.
The effort, dubbed the Genesis Mission, aims to “double the productivity and impact of American research and innovation within a decade”, in a variety of fields from fusion energy to medicine. The project expects to “unlock breakthroughs in medicine, energy, materials science and beyond”, says Michael Kratsios, the US president’s science adviser. It also aims to build AI agents — general models with the ability to harness tools such as specialized software and coding suites — that can generate hypotheses and automate research workflows.
Labs around the world are already training AI systems on scientific data, to boost their capabilities in scientific domains and attempting to use AI models to make discoveries. But some researchers remain sceptical that general AI tools are capable of making truly fresh insights, and warn that their inherent flaws make the value of agents unclear.
The new US initiative formalizes and expands ongoing AI research efforts by the administration of President Donald Trump. “The impact is that it enables many more scientists and researchers to have access to all of the infrastructure that they need to explore important scientific questions that the country cares about,” says Lynne Parker, a robotics engineer at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who led AI-policy initiatives for the administrations of Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, but was not involved in the current initiative. “That really has not been possible before.”
Trump’s team has been working to funnel money and attention to AI projects even as it tries to gut federal research spending more broadly. The White House has the power to shape the direction of research at the DoE’s network of national laboratories. It did not give an estimated price tag for the AI initiative; any extra funding beyond the laboratories’ normal budgets would have to be approved by the US Congress.
Nature looks at how the project might affect researchers and AI companies, and its promises and risks. What are government-funded scientists being asked to do?
The scale and timeline of the plan is ambitious. In 60 days, the DoE is expected to create a list of 20 potential science and technology challenges for the project to tackle, in areas of national priorities such as nuclear fusion, quantum information science and crucial materials. The agency is supposed to create a full inventory of available federal computing resources and identify initial data assets to use, then work out how to safely include external data sets. The administration expects to demonstrate the platform’s capability for one of these research challenges in nine months.
These early steps will probably build on projects that are already under way at the national laboratories. For instance, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has been working on advancing AI research using a hybrid approach that uses both quantum and classical computing. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California is using AI to find ways to speed up network traffic.
The “DoE has been making a case for ‘AI for science’ for over seven years, and this executive order is the starting pistol to get on with it”, says Michael Norman, an astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego, and former director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. “It is an exciting direction indeed.” What are companies being asked to do?
The project has named more than 50 collaborating companies, including some that have already been working on their own ‘AI scientists’. FutureHouse, a start-up based in San Francisco, California, for instance, launched a commercially available, AI-driven research platform earlier this month.
The precise role of these private companies in the Genesis plan remains unclear — although Trump’s executive order says the project will entail “collaboration with external partners possessing advanced AI, data, or computing capabilities or scientific domain expertise”. Such partnerships could include research agreements to jointly develop technologies, or a user-facility agreement for external researchers to conduct work in government facilities. Chip-manufacturing and computer companies such as NVIDIA, Advanced Micro Devices and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have reportedly agreed to build facilities in national labs, according to a report by The New York Times.
Some partnerships are already under way. In October, for instance, Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois announced a partnership with NVIDIA and technology firm Oracle to build two next-generation AI supercomputing systems. At least two national laboratories already have arrangements with the company OpenAI, based in San Francisco, California, to host local AI models that can process classified data on computers in the facilities. In February, the company held an ‘AI jam session’ with researchers from nine US national labs that allowed scientists to test the use of OpenAI’s reasoning models in their specific domains. What are the opportunities?
The new Genesis Mission is meant to provide “secure access to appropriate datasets, including proprietary, federally curated, and open scientific datasets, in addition to synthetic data generated through DOE computing resources”, according to the executive order. Creating a national-scale platform that harnesses rich data sets usually housed in the walls of the national laboratories could be a boon for researchers. Although task-specific models such as the protein-folding model AlphaFold were built on open scientific data sets, general-purpose AI systems such as OpenAI’s GPT-5 are thought to be largely built on data scraped from the Internet.

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The US just launched a $100 Billion Manhattan Project for AI called Genesis. Here is the massive scope of what they are actually building. The Genesis Mission is America’s new bet to double scientific productivity with AI, Fusion, and Quantum Supremacy.
On Nov 24, 2025, the US launched the Genesis Mission, a massive public-private initiative framed as a "Manhattan Project for AI."
Cost: Estimated $100+ Billion (Including $50B from AWS).
Goal: Double US science/engineering productivity in 10 years.
Tech: Integrates all 17 National Labs, 3 Exascale Supercomputers, and Quantum centers.
Why? To secure dominance in AI, Fusion Energy, and Biotech against global competitors (primarily China).
The United States just initiated one of the largest scientific reorganizations in its history. If you haven't heard of the Genesis Mission yet, you will soon. It is effectively an Apollo Program for Artificial Intelligence.
Here's some of the details of the sheer scale of this effort, how it compares to historical megaprojects, and the massive energy challenges it faces.
The Scale: How does it compare to Apollo & Manhattan?
The government isn't building a bomb or a rocket this time; they are building a platform. The goal is to connect all federal data, supercomputers, and labs into a single "closed-loop discovery engine."
Here is how Genesis stacks up against America's most famous scientific sprints:
Project Cost (Adjusted for Inflation) Duration Direct Workforce Primary Output
Manhattan Project ~$30 Billion 3 Years ~130,000 The Atomic Bomb
Apollo Program ~$257 Billion 12 Years ~400,000 Moon Landing
Genesis Mission $100+ Billion* 10 Years 40,000+ AI Science Platform
*Note: The $100B figure includes massive private sector commitments, such as a $50B infrastructure investment from AWS alone.
2. The Exascale Arsenal
The backbone of this mission isn't standard cloud servers; it's the "Exascale Arsenal"—the three fastest supercomputers in the world, all located at DOE National Labs.
El Capitan (Lawrence Livermore Lab): 1.742 ExaFLOPS (Nuclear stewardship)
Frontier (Oak Ridge Lab): 1.353 ExaFLOPS (Open science)
Aurora (Argonne Lab): 1.012 ExaFLOPS (Scientific discovery)
Combined Power: >4 ExaFLOPS. To put that in perspective, an "ExaFLOP" is a quintillion calculations per second. This is roughly the computational power of the human brain, but focused entirely on math and simulation.
3. The Energy Crisis & Infrastructure Reality
One of the biggest drivers for Genesis is the exploding energy cost of AI. The US infrastructure is hitting a physical wall, and the numbers are staggering.
The Current US Data Center Footprint:
Total Facilities: ~5,427 data centers (The US is the world's largest data center hub).
Hyperscale Centers: ~614 facilities (The US holds 54% of global hyperscale capacity).
Power Demand: 183 TWh in 2024 (Already 4% of total US electricity).
The Projected "AI Boom" Impact (2030):
Electricity Usage: Projected to hit 426 TWh (Rising to 9% of total US electricity). Some estimates (Goldman Sachs) put this even higher at >10%.
Capacity Growth: Total capacity is expected to nearly triple from ~50 GW (2024) to 134.4 GW (2030).
Genesis aims to solve this by using AI to accelerate Fusion Energy and Advanced Nuclear designs. It is a race against time: can AI invent clean energy solutions faster than AI consumes the grid?
4. Who is involved? This is a Public-Private hybrid. The government provides the labs and the "Crown Jewel" datasets (nuclear data, material science records), while Big Tech provides the cloud and chips.
Public: 17 Department of Energy National Labs (Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, etc.)
Private: AWS, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google, IBM, OpenAI, Anthropic.
Quantum: 5 National Quantum Information Science Research Centers.
Why now?
The executive order explicitly frames this as a strategic competition. Just as the Cold War was decided by nuclear dominance, the belief is that the 21st century will be decided by Computational Supremacy.
The objective is audacious: Double the productivity of American science. Imagine discovering new cancer drugs, battery materials, or fusion reactor designs in months rather than decades.
Do you think a centralized Manhattan Project approach works for something as broad as AI, or is this just throwing money at Big Tech?

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Step	Items	Resource Links
1) Take Care of Yourself First!	– Physical Preps – Dental Preps – Mental Preps – Financial Preps	Fitness Basics Dental Hygiene Mental Health Hygiene Financial Education
2) Create a Basic Emergency Kit	– Water (1 gallon per person per day) – Non-perishable food for 3 days – First aid kit – Flashlights with extra batteries – Multi-tool and duct tape – Emergency blankets	Bug Out Bag List of Essentials How to Plan and Pack Your Go Bag Ready.gov: Build a Kit Red Cross: Emergency Preparedness Kits
3) Develop an Emergency Plan	– List emergency contacts – Identify evacuation routes – Set up meeting points – Use communication apps like Zello	Ready.gov: Make a Plan CDC: Prepare Your Health CDC: Making an Emergency Plan
4) Learn Essential Survival Skills	– Fire-starting – Water purification – First aid and CPR – Navigation with compass and maps	The 10 S’s of Fire Starting Minimum Water Boiling Time First Aid in the Field Raw Wilderness Navigation
5) Stockpile Long-Term Supplies	– Freeze-dried foods – Water storage systems – Solar chargers – Self-defense tools	Nutrient Survival Grayl Solar Chargers Generators Self-Defense Tools
6) Stay Informed	– Sign up for local alerts – Download weather apps – Join online prepper communities	Ready.gov National Weather Service BushcraftUSA

(Option 1) Full Color (sees in Color even at night) Stationary Wide-Angle Crime Camera	(Option 2) Active Deterrence Crime Camera with Red/ Blue Police Lights & Forensic Gunshot Detection	(Option 3) Powerful AI Crime Camera that may Instantly Search for a Particular Person or Vehicle based physical attributes	(Option 4) Dedicated License Plate Recognition (LPR) Camera that may find a particular vehicle based on its plate number, color, make or body style


Weatherproof camera that provides superior image quality regardless of lighting conditions	Color-at-Night camera that actively deters crime by automatically flashing Red & Blue Police Lights and illuminating an area with a spotlight when a person, vehicle or suspicious activity is detected	Best when used in concert with other AI Crime Cameras around a particular property, neighborhood or entertainment district, AI Crime Cameras help instantly locate particular people & vehicles based on physical attributes	Extremely robust police-grade LPR camera that provides superior still shots and HD video of approaching and departing vehicles
Great for general crime prevention around homes and small businesses	Better for Actively Deterring Crime immediately around homes and businesses	Advanced search capabilities to help better protect large properties and entertainment districts	Budget friendly LPR that vastly outperforms other LPR solutions

(Option 1) 1080p/ 25x Zoom Long-Range PTZ Featuring Sony STARVIS NightVision, Human/ Vehicle Auto-Tracking, and Advanced AI	(Option 2) 2k HD/ 25x Zoom Long-Range Active-Deterrence PTZ Featuring Sony STARVIS NightVision, Human/ Vehicle Auto-Tracking, Advanced AI and Intelligent Red/ Blue Police Lights & Spotlight	(Option 3) 4k UHD/ 25x Zoom Super Long-Range Active-Deterrence PTZ Featuring Sony STARVIS NightVision, Human/ Vehicle Auto-Tracking, Advanced AI and Intelligent Red/ Blue Police Lights & Spotlight	(Option 4) 12mp Multi-Sensor 180 Degree Panoramic/ 32x Ultra Long-Range Active Deterrence 360 Degree PTZ Camera Featuring Sony STARVIS NightVision, Enhanced Human/ Vehicle Auto-Tracking, Advanced AI and Intelligent Flood & Spotlights


Long Range Color-at Night PTZ Crime Camera w/ Intelligent AI that Automatically turns camera 360 Degrees to closely Zoom-in on & Track People, Vehicles and Suspicious Activity even if hundreds of feet away at night	Higher Definition & Automatically tracks people and vehicles even further away, while actively working to prevent crimes by automatically firing Red & Blue Police Lights and a white spotlight towards intruders and suspicious activity	Even Higher Definition & Automatically tracks people and vehicles even further away, while actively working to prevent crimes by automatically firing Red & Blue Police Lights and a white spotlight towards intruders and suspicious activity	180 Degree Super-Wide Angle Panoramic camera that captures large sweeping areas and enhances the Human/ Vehicle Auto-Tracking capabilities of the built-in Ultra Long-Range PTZ Camera that may also shine a spotlight on intruders and suspicious activity
Our most popular Crime Camera for police/ sheriff's departments	Our most popular crime camera to actively deter crime within large areas	Our Highest Definition active deterrence crime camera for large areas	Our most advanced active deterrence crime camera that does and sees more

(1) Facial Recognition	(2) LPR + Video Meta Data	(3) Intelligent Alerts


Upgrade any Project NOLA Crime Camera to automatically search for active gang members, violent offenders, wanted subjects, missing adults and missing or exploited children	Upgrade any Project NOLA Crime Camera to search for vehicles based on its License Plate, color, make and body style, people based physical attributes and clothing descriptions, or bicycle searches based on paint color.	May allow a Project NOLA Crime Camera to automatically detect and alert upon: Intrusion, Trip-line Crossing, Fence Jumping, Trash Dumping, Audio Anomaly (aka Gunshot Detection), etc.