“Every person, place, and thing on this planet will be connected [to the iris system] within the next 10 years”
Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
Thursday, Aug 19th, 2010
A biometrics research and development company is set to roll out iris recognition technology across an entire city in a move that it claims will create a real life Minority Report society where anyone taking a train or shopping in a department store will have their eyes scanned by hi-tech sensors.
Global Rainmakers Inc. (GRI), based out of headquarters in New York, has announced that it will use the technology to begin creating what it claims will be “the most secure city in the world” in Leon, one of Mexico’s largest cities.
The move will see GRI’s “eye swipe” machines, which come in a variety of different shapes and sizes, hooked up to a huge iris database created in conjunction with Leon law enforcement authorities.
“In the future, whether it’s entering your home, opening your car, entering your workspace, getting a pharmacy prescription refilled, or having your medical records pulled up, everything will come off that unique key that is your iris,” Jeff Carter, CDO of GRI tells tech website FastCompany.com.
According to the article, “Criminals will automatically be enrolled, their irises scanned once convicted. Law-abiding citizens will have the option to opt-in.”
Yet Carter seems confident that everyone, whether a criminal or not will soon be hooked into the database:
“Every person, place, and thing on this planet will be connected [to the iris system] within the next 10 years,” he says.
In Carter’s hideous control freak vision of the future, anyone taking money out of an ATM, paying for items in a store or simply catching a bus will have to stare directly into the beast system while “Police officers will monitor these scans and track the movements of watch-listed individuals.”
Carter even alludes to Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, noting that the system will operate to a degree even more controlling than in the cult classic dystopian story.
Not even the “dead eyeballs” seen in Minority Report could trick the system, he says. “If you’ve been convicted of a crime, in essence, this will act as a digital scarlet letter. If you’re a known shoplifter, for example, you won’t be able to go into a store without being flagged. For others, boarding a plane will be impossible.”
One of the blinking iris scanners is revealed in the video below:
This scanner can process 50 people per minute, while the other smaller units seen in the picture at the top of this article can scan between 15-30 people’s irises per minute.
“Phase one” of the plan encompasses placing the machines in law enforcement facilities, security check-points, police stations, and detention areas, while “Phase two” will see the technology integrated into public locations across the city. This speaks volumes. Integrate the criminals and prisoners first, then simply shift the prison framework out into society. Presumably “Phase 3″ will be to begin implementing the thing in every city in the world.
There isn’t even any pretence of a benign agenda behind this – it is a bold in your face admission of a plan to force every human being into a big brother system by hooking it up to the essential amenities and infrastructure of the city. The stated aim is to monitor everyone, everywhere, all the time – the perfect technological matrix-like prison system.
This system is the ultimate perversion of humanity, taking what makes us all unique and using it to catalogue every one of us as if we are sheep or cattle on a plantation. It represents the screaming death knell of freedom.
Mr Carter and GRI don’t care about that though, they want you to know that your freedom is already utterly dead, so resistance is futile:
“The banks already know more about what we do in our daily life–they know what we eat, where we go, what we purchase–our deepest secrets,” he says. “We’re not talking about anything different here–just a system that’s good for all of us.”
Carter also has a warning for any sheep who think they can stray from the flock:
“When you get masses of people opting-in, opting out does not help. Opting out actually puts more of a flag on you than just being part of the system. We believe everyone will opt-in.”
Carter even speaks of tailoring the technology to “enable advertisers to track behavior and emotion” by scanning people’s eyes from when they look at a billboard to when they enter a store and purchase the product.
Minority Report was written as a stark warning of what may happen in the future should society be engulfed by invasive technology and begin to regard privacy and civil liberties as antiquated. Yet increasingly it, and other works like it, have become the handbooks for those who would gladly see the planet fully transformed into a giant fascist control grid if it means they can swim in the filthy meaningless lucre and revel in the pathetic soulless power trip it will generate for them.
This technology is here now – it is not some paranoid geek’s frightening description of a distant future. it is time to grow up, wake up and take note of what our society is being transformed into.
Readers may politely and constructively voice their disapproval of GRI’s plan to cover the planet with biometric iris scanners here. We can only pray that citizens of Leon will raise hell with their elected representatives over the invasion coming their way and refuse to allow their city to become a testing ground for a monstrous worldwide big brother control system.
