They Thought She Was Crazy: Doctor Extracts RFID Chip From Sex Trafficking Victim
SOURCE
The patient in question was a 28-year-old woman who claimed that she had a GPS tracking device planted in her body. Normally a patient like that would be regarded as crazy, but this woman appeared totally sane, and she had an incision mark on her side. So the doctor decided to check her out anyway. The medical staff at the hospital were stunned when they finally gave her an x-ray.
“Embedded in the right side of her flank is a small metallic object only a little bit larger than a grain of rice. But it’s there. It’s unequivocally there. She has a tracker in her. And no one was speaking for like five seconds — and in a busy ER that’s saying something.”
It turns out that it wasn’t a GPS device, but an RFID chip. “It’s used to tag cats and dogs. And someone had tagged her like an animal, like she was somebody’s pet that they owned.”
In a way, that makes it even creepier than a GPS device. RFID chips have a very short range. To be useful for tracking someone’s position, they would have to be kept confined in an area where the right equipment is in place to send or receive signals from the chip. The doctor would later discover that this woman was a victim of sex trafficking.
Science fiction has been warning about the potential of tracking devices for years, but usually in reference to how the government might use this technology. It just goes to show that the way humans use technology in the real world is often stranger (and creepier) than fiction.
Why the Government Spies on Us
Source: Alice Salles
They exposed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for what it is: a bloated government bureaucracy that has grown much too large to be restrained.
According to the document dump released by Julian Assange’s whistleblower hub, this list of highly confidential information regarding the CIA emerged from the agency’s Center For Cyber Intelligence in Langley, revealing details on the agency’s “global covert hacking program.”
The CIA’s hacking effort has been so powerful and effective, the leaks show, that it includes the weaponization of exploits used against products such as the iPhone, Android phones, Samsung TVs, and Microsoft Windows. This means any of these devices can be used as spying mechanisms at any given time.
But perhaps most troubling is the revelation that the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal over time. That includes viruses, malware, trojans, malware remote control systems, and the previously mentioned weaponized exploits. In so many words, this means the US government has handed over the key to the most intimate secrets of every single one of us to anyone with access to these lost tools. By allowing the CIA to grow so absolutely powerful, we also allowed the agency to be absolutely careless with our own lives.
What have we learned from this? That regardless of how detached we may seem from politics, its influence and power grows as we refrain from restricting it — even if most of those involved aren’t quite aware of the mechanisms that allow for this expansion.
As economist Murray Rothbard wrote in his pivotal essay, Anatomy of the State, the government is entirely wired to be “that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area.” In other words, the state maintains its power through the “use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet…”
But, as Rothbard notes, “the miasma of myth has lain so long over State activity” that many continue to refuse to see the coercion and lack of moral legitimacy that lies at the foundation of the state. Consequently, government is powerful because we, the individuals, have allowed it to have sole guardianship over our property — including self-ownership — and freedoms.
Once government has total control over every basic aspect of our lives, those within government see no boundaries. Why? Because the burden of self-censorship or even personal responsibility doesn’t lie with the individual any longer. Once the government employee crosses over, stepping into a world where he’s protected by an invisible authority, he is no longer a person who is led by the same morals that guided him before he assumed this position — he’s now a bureaucrat. And as such, he now knows he will no longer have to be accountable for his actions.
What does that have to do with the latest revelations on the CIA? When a lack of personal responsibility meets the needs of the monopolistic State, the individual loses any sovereignty he has over his own life. The government worker becomes a thirsty member of the State, always looking for ways to undermine freedom while the so-called private individual becomes just another government enabler under its control.
The CIA has been careless with the tools it uses to spy on all of us, and whether or not we are guilty of committing crimes, it is clear that it has been equally careless with what it’s extracted from us over the years. This invites abuse from inside, which is what we saw happening within the National Security Agency (NSA) after Edward Snowden revealed the massive spying program sweeping our personal data (while also giving malicious elements outside of the CIA the same access to our personal communications).
We only have ourselves to blame for how out of control the CIA has become, and that’s because we have forgotten — or perhaps never knew — that the government’s monopoly over our lives is granted, not warranted. Will the CIA leaks be the straw that broke the camel’s back?
Somehow, I highly doubt it.
