Secret Cobham Security LE Spy Gadget Surveillance Catalog Escapes Into The Wild

The link is here, though it is fairly innocuous compared to a lot of the tech which is out there. The real stuff does not get an advertising budget, and a printed flyer.

The interesting parts to me are:

Page 34-35 – shows the usage of their mobile mesh network to coordinate coverage, and a rough diagram of the potential positioning of assets.

Imagine it is ten years from now. As a member of the dissident Alt-right, you are being chased by the government, which has identified you as an enemy of good-think, a creator of bad-feel, and issued a Kill-On-Sight warrant for you. You have to link up with one of Vox Day’s Vile Faceless Minions who will help spirit you out of the country to the last respite of freedom and justice in Mother Russia. You tossed your phone and keep checking your six, walking through choke-points and doubling back to see if you encounter an in-person follow. You watch for vehicular offloading foot ahead of you, give everyone you pass a stink-eye to see if they look awkwardly uncomfortable, but nothing.

As you make your way through the city, unbeknown to you, you have been tracked at every step using a mixture of mostly cameras and a few in-person surveillance, situated at the tops of every building, looking down on you, and handing you off from building-top observation post to building top observation post, all in the hopes of capturing a priceless minion for interrogation, torture, and turning into an asset. Did you think of that before hand?

Notice every building top is covered, but there is only one guy in the field, one aviation, and two cars on loiter. I’ll bet every city is bristling with static observation posts today, set up in apartments, lofts over stores, building tops, and so on, usually consisting of an almost undetectable camera, or occasionally some people just looking like two or three gang members smoking weed on top of the building, or a homeless guy encamped up there. But in reality, they are really watching all important decision points of travel, and are wired in via a mesh network to a central control facility. After 9/11, no expense was spared, and now that is all out there, sitting around with nothing to do nine times out of ten, except offer favors to the powerful to keep the money train flowing.

And have no doubts, there are a lot more foot and vehicular loose in this country than that cartoon would indicate. I don’t want to imagine how thoroughly the cities are covered by video.

Page 43 – this quote –

“Cameras are typically deployed hidden in covert vehicles so that recording of illegal activity can take place.”

Ever notice a parked car you drove by which was oddly out of place, and wonder if it was a static video-surveillance monitoring post? It can be anywhere – only pattern recognition, an eye for detail, a familiarity with what is to be expected in your environment, and a certain element of paranoia can reveal it to you. Don’t go looking too closely, because if you see it, it cannot be unseen.

Page 105 – Interesting for several reasons. First, notice that all you have to do is have your phone in the vicinity of one of their units, and they can immediately grab control of it. Not maybe, nor it is not a lot of work, or a painful, arduous task. Just click the button, and you have it. That is not hacking – that is a design, put there purposely, which could easily be protected against, but isn’t.

Once they have it, they can listen to your calls, grab your texts messages, put the phone in blind call mode to listen through the mics and track it geographically in real time to within less than one meter, and, once they have access to the phone, they can turn on the cameras, and get full access to everything on the phone, from banking to text history, using products not in the catalog. Notice, they don’t need anyone’s help to do that. The cell phone carrier doesn’t get involved, there is no court order if they don’t want to, and there is nobody they say, “May I?” to, or who finds out after the fact. It just happens.

What is problematic is they could never use this evidence in a court, so they just take it and file it away. Once that becomes procedure, and is done regularly with the knowledge that it is illegal wiretapping, but no care of it, it becomes nothing to do it for anyone who is politically connected enough to potentially bring Congress to the party to rein it all in. The entire situation in our government now is mutual blackmail over the threat of making a mess. Yeah, you can continue to run your stingrays, but George Soros wants to know when that Cisco-IBM-Apple merger is going to happen. Given him that, and my subcommittee on Homeland Security will look the other way on the illegal wiretapping you do elsewhere, and I get a big fat campaign contribution from Soros. The only currency is blackmail, and they’ve turned it into an economy.

Even worse, I’m sure they do this to a lot of random people during down time just to fuck around, to see what is happening that might be interesting, and pass the time. To them it is like flipping channels on the TV. There is a lot of surveillance out there with lots of interesting toys, and not a lot of interesting things going on. Don’t think that nobody is listening. If the battery is in your cell phone, you are broadcasting.

The rest of the catalog is interesting to see how they conceal audio and video recording devices. Ever pass a streetlight or garbage can and realize there were cameras that look just like that? It is also interesting to see how similar Chinese knock-offs of those devices are often easily available online at multiple sites, to civilians, for very low cost – and they perform just as well.

Finally, this is not the hardcore stuff. This is the stuff a company makes, and openly puts in a catalog that might escape into the wild. There is a ton of stuff, ranging from some designed to intrude into the most private spaces of your house and car from the public areas outside, probably up to gamma radiation emitters that can quietly kill someone from down the street, that no company is going to admit to making. Here is a story of an NSA whistleblower who worked on directed energy weapons, who believes she is getting hit with something.

The bottom line is there are no rules anymore. If you can imagine it, somebody is making it, and someone else is using it as we speak, and the only oversight is “Can I get away with it without being caught?”

Eventually it will all be available to the powerful freely, because like r-selection, all of this is a scale, and we are already heading that way. This ends with some sort of psuedo-oligarchy deploying all of this and even killing innocent people at some point, to hide everything they are doing. Look at history and you see it is in human nature. It is only a matter of time before “dissidents” are being killed regularly, as a matter of course.

I really don’t see a happy ending for any of this, because either it is left in place, and America is just this weird, dystopian science fiction novel, where everyone is fucked over by anyone who can, using this machinery, or it all gets pulled as the Apocalypse hits, and incidents like 9/11 become a weekly occurrence, because all of this is the only reason terrorism is not running wild right now, given all the radical Muslims we have.

The point we are at, between the massive Muslim immigration courtesy of Bush and Obama, and the surveillance state which both have had a hand in creating, those are the only two options for the future.

You wonder why I look at the economic collapse and yawn?