Guest post by Leo Hohmann
It’s not about writing tickets, saving lives or fighting climate change; it’s about knowing where every digitally marked human being is at all times
The digitization of transportation is kicking into high gear.
I reported on my Substack recently about a citizen backlash in San Diego over that city’s plans to embed mass-surveillance technology along highways, at intersections, light poles, etc.
So-called “smart city” technology includes ultra-high resolution, internet-connected cameras, license-plate readers, facial-recognition scanners and speakers. It will set the framework for digital eyes and ears to spy on citizens 24/7, uploading personal data in real time to be perused and analyzed by law enforcement, financial decision-makers and other third-party stakeholders.
I reported on June 28 on how the Atlanta airport in cooperation with Delta Airlines is offering specialized “hands free” and “card free” services to air passengers who agree to take a biometric digital ID driver’s license containing a facial scan. But I also discovered that American citizens are having their faces scanned by facial-recognition software, often without their permission, before they board international flights leaving not just Atlanta but many other U.S. airports.
The tools of the surveillance state, however, are not just being installed in major cities and international airports.
Kootenai County in North Idaho is also up against a smart city plan.
And the city of Jackson, Wyoming, last week became the latest to install AI-powered mass surveillance cameras.
According to Frontline News, cameras using automated license-plate recognition (ALPR) technology can scan passing cars and capture license-plate numbers, makes and models, colors, and identifying markers such as bumper stickers or broken tail lights.
They then use artificial intelligence to break this data down into searchable queries and match them against the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC). If there is a match, a real-time alert is sent to law enforcement.
The cameras feed into a centralized mass camera network owned by the manufacturer, Flock Safety, which it calls a “public safety platform.”
Last Wednesday, the Jackson Town Council voted to spend $185,000 to install 30 ALPR Falcon cameras from Flock Safety, but even those who voted in favor of the purchase expressed trepidation.
“I don’t like this particular arc of this particular part of history,” said Councilman Josh Schechter. “I’m screaming ‘stop’ as I vote ‘yes.’”
Councilwoman Sell Chambers also expressed her concerns but went ahead and voted “yes” anyway.
“I have traditionally been anti-surveillance, I think it has been a slippery slope,” Chambers said. “But I just think that that ship has sailed. We are so under surveillance, like constantly, everywhere.”
The contact points of the developing digitized “smart cities” are all encompassing.
The globalist establishment at all levels of government is working with corporate America toward the online digitization of everything. Whether it’s your energy usage, transportation habits, healthcare, government services, your appliances, your banking and financial practices, or your buying habits (eating too much meat or buying too much ammo?), the system wants to have it all inventoried and placed on a centralized digital ledger powered by AI and blockchain.
An August 15, 2021 article posted by the World Bank on the website of the World Economic Forum, notes:
“The notion of smart cities relies on a range of technologies—including the internet of things (IoT), mobile solutions, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain. Because of this connection with technology, we’ve had concerns about how smart cities will address issues such as data privacy and social exclusion. We see a risk that urban areas with poor web connectivity could be left out of the smart-cities trend.”
Notice how they gloss over the privacy issue and then lament the fact that poor people with “poor web connectivity” are not able to join the technocratic free-for-all that leads to the creation of smart cities and ultimately the cradle-to-grave control of a 15-minute city.
The World Bank article was posted to the WEF website two years ago. Many more areas of the country have since been outfitted with 5G wireless capability, which started under the Trump administration and continues under Biden.
Over 2,000 cities across 43 states have already installed Flock Safety’s ALPR digitally connected cameras, according to the Daily Wire. The devices can also be purchased by private individuals, businesses, schools and homeowners’ associations, which can create their own “hot lists.” Hundreds of HOAs are reportedly using the digitally connected cameras.
Frontline News reports that Flock Safety also sells other devices such as Raven, an audio device built to detect the sounds of gunshots, breaking glass, sawing metal or screeching tires. It’s all logged, scored and stored in the cloud.
Frontline further reports that aside from being used to “fight crime” ALPR cameras are being used in some countries to enforce climate mandates.
In the U.K. and Europe, Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras are placed around Ultra-Low Emission Zones, areas only accessible to low-emission vehicles. Cars that do not meet the city’s environmental standards are charged a daily fee for entering these zones, which in London costs £12.50 ($16.00). Fines are levied against cars which the cameras catch entering these zones without an authorization sticker.
All of these cameras and scanners are scooping up ever-more granular data which is then processed, not by your local sheriff’s office or elected officials, but by algorithms powered by artificial intelligence.
Most of the money flowing into cities to pay for these Orwellian technological instruments comes through the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration.
Nearly every state has a “Traffic Management Center” and these technological hubs are also placed in metropolitan areas.
A Traffic Management Center, or TMC, is a hub and the various hubs fit into a broader Traffic Management System or TMS. They are funded by what’s called a Pooled Fund Study or PFS.
You can read all about TMC’s and TMS’s on the U.S. Department of Transportation website.
The following projects were selected for funding in 2021:
1. Sharing information and practices on TMS emerging topics
2. Integrating and using new data sources in TMSs
3. Options for TMS’s to receive and share data with multiple
sources
4. Developing multi-year plans to guide TMS’s strategic
direction and future investments
5. Using data from social media to improve the management and operation of TMS’s.
As you can see, they are tightly focused on gathering and “sharing” the personal data they are collecting on every individual. They are even collecting data from your personal social media accounts.
After reading a few of these documents, it becomes obvious why WEF advisor and Israeli transhumanist Yuval Harari says that the only real value a human being will have in the coming digitized society of the Great Reset will be for his or her “data.”
Kootenai County, with just over 170,000 in population, is the most populous county in otherwise rural North Idaho. That’s quite small compared to a city like Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Austin, Texas, Columbus, Ohio, or Los Angeles, all of which have had Traffic Management Centers for years.
The TMC is presented as a panacea to make your life easier, safer, more secure and more convenient.
A highly paid bureaucrat or government contractor will swoop into town and promise the locals everything from an end to congested roads, to reduced numbers of traffic-law violators and highway accidents, to reduced air pollution, and even less violent crime. They will cite biased studies and reports and use slick PowerPoint presentations.
There is no legitimate data to prove they will accomplish any of those lofty goals, but there is plenty of reason to be concerned about privacy violations.
This isn’t about writing tickets and making people safe. This is about knowing where everyone is at all times.
The Kootenai Metropolitan Planning Organization, or KMPO, has budgeted for and wants to install a Traffic Management Center, which will consist of a 6,000-square-foot hub for data collection on basically everything that moves in North Idaho.
The invasive nature of this data-collection factory has attracted the attention of the citizens’ group North Idaho Slow Growth, which has a website at NISLOWGrow.org, along with a growing following of more than 350 persons. It provides information on how to fight smart cities.
More information can be found at STOPSMARTCITIES.ORG.
A TMC is basically where all the data gets fed that is collected by hundreds of surveillance cameras in a city, county or state, and the amount of data being fed to these centralized hubs only increases over time.
The purpose of Georgia’s TMC, according to the Georgia Intelligent Transportation Society, is to “work behind the scenes to provide statewide incident management through a three-phase process,” according to its website.
A Georgia TMC operator “monitors the roadways and collects real-time information from Video Detection System cameras along the interstates.”
These TMC spy hubs are presented as extremely non-threatening in their official mission but the real purpose is much more invasive and all-encompassing than simply looking for accidents and informing the motorists about alternative routes.
The Georgia website admits that after the data is collected it is “confirmed and analyzed,” then it is “communicated” to outside sources including the media and motorists who have the TMC app on their cellphones. This information is also communicated through so-called changeable message signs on the roadways. Anyone who has traveled the highways of America in recent years can attest that the electronic message boards also serve as annoying conduits of official state propaganda: wear your seatbelt, stay awake, be watchful of your speed. During the Covid outbreak these signs shouted at you to “wear your mask” and “get your Covid vaccine.”
Much of these roadway services are already duplicated by Google Maps and other phone apps for people who desire them.
So, then, why have a TMC?
These technology hubs will ultimately serve as the “brain” for individual smart cities and the broader smart-grid network linking cities and states together.
At its root, the TMCs are an intelligence-gathering operation implemented under the guise of traffic management.
The purpose is not to save lives but to control behavior and effectively cripple Americans’ longstanding freedom of movement.
The long-term plan is to entirely automate all transportation, using driverless cars, kill switches and social-credit scoring systems to define and limit the extent to which individuals are allowed to travel.
Essentially, all transportation will be public transportation.
If you own your car but some outside entity has the ability to disable it with a kill switch, do you really own it? No. You may hold the deed to the vehicle but you no longer have access to private transportation. Your freedom of mobility is now exercised at the pleasure of the state and its corporate (fascist) partners.
In fact, the Biden administration was able to include a clause in the 2021 infrastructure bill passed by Congress that requires all auto manufacturers to include a remote kill switch in every new vehicle that rolls off assembly lines starting in 2025.
Americans were told this bill was about restoring America’s roads and bridges, which is what most of us think about when we hear the word “infrastructure.” But this bill would have more accurately been called the “Digital Infrastructure Bill” because it had little to do with improving transportation and everything to do with installing and upgrading the smart-grid network.
All intersections, state and federal highways, bike paths, crosswalks, offices and office parks, walking paths, recreational parks, the workplace, even the home will become monitored territory.
The Intelligent Transportation Society (ITS) is an extremely creepy organization from which emanates much of the lobbying on Capitol Hill along with the philosophical support for smart cities. This group will hold its 2023 ITS World Congress in Suzhou, China, on October 16-20. The location is no coincidence. China is the leader in the implementation of smart-grid surveillance technology and has been declared the “model” for “many countries” by World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab. ITS states on its website that its goal is the complete “electrification” and digitization of highway travel.
Congress appears to be completely on board with the creation of a surveillance state similar to China’s.
In May 2023, the Intelligent Transportation Society joined with Dell Technologies, chipmaker Intel, and several other tech companies to send a letter to Rep. Sam Graves, R-Missouri, chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and ranking Democrat member Rep. Rick Larsen, calling for them to “express their strong support for HR 1500, the ITS Integration Act.”
The letter states that this bill, “takes important steps towards ensuring we use digital tools, such as data, to operate more efficiently, effectively, and safely on American roads. We urge you to move this legislation through the Committee.”
So, the nearly trillion-dollar infrastructure bill passed in 2021 was just the beginning of the process of rewiring America’s cities for total information awareness. Reading this letter, or the ITS press release, you will not see any concerns about privacy, only the fluffy promises of a safer, more secure, cleaner and more “efficient” transportation system.
The Nazis were also very efficient. They ran their tyrannical regime like a well-oiled machine.
The dark side of the movement toward smart-city, smart-grid technology is rarely discussed out in the open. The media ignores it.
Elitist gatekeepers use deceptive language to cloud the true outcome of these systems, which are designed to bring about the end of private transportation and freedom of movement. Once this technology is fully installed and people become trained to obey it, every smart city will become a 15-minute city.
What do I mean by people being “trained to obey” the smart city’s AI-driven instructions? When a smart city is fully built out and becomes a 15-minute city, its digital technology will also require a biometric digital ID for every human being living in or passing through that city. This ID will be your “credentials” for moving about in that city and will likely be tied to your social credit score and the digital tokens in your bank account.
Just like you will need to have your digital ID to attend certain events and enter venues within the smart city, you will eventually need a digital ID to log onto the internet, to drive on the system’s roads, to receive the system’s healthcare, even to buy and sell at the system’s stores.
The bottom line is that smart cities will become digital slave camps.
That may sound extreme to those who have not studied this technology and its capabilities, and how it’s already being used in China, which we know is the model for technocrats worldwide based on the comments of billionaire elites associated with the World Economic Forum and the United Nations.
The fact is, the elites have been talking for decades about their desire to develop digitized slave camps.
In his 1971 book, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote with confidence that such a society loomed just over the horizon. Over 50 years ago, before the Internet was invented, he wrote:
“The technotronic 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, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era
But people are fighting back, in liberal urban areas like San Diego and conservative areas like Kootenai County.
The citizens’ group in North Idaho has launched a website and paid for billboards on major thoroughfares educating citizens on the dark side of smart city technology.
Many have come out to public meetings to voice their opposition to the TMC.
“I was never political until Covid hit,” said Jennifer Noel, who moved two years ago from Hawaii to North Idaho. “Over the last couple of months I have seen a lot of people stepping into their power. There’s a diverse group. I can see a switch going on. I think people are finding us. We have to believe it, and if we are made in the image of God aren’t we supposed to be powerful?”
Let me know in the comments below if you’ve noticed smart-city techno-spyware being installed in your city.
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The post Hohmann: Fighting back against Smart Cities: From San Diego to North Idaho to Wyoming, Residents are Getting Fed Up with the Growing Surveillance Network Modeled after That of Communist China appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
