The legislation is part of a much wider memorandum of understanding between the E.U., the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Norway, a nonmember European nation. That agreement allows authorities to conduct telecom surveillance across international borders, according to a Europol document leaked to members of the European Parliament.

If approved, the agreement would permit real-time, remote monitoring of e-mail, as well as of calls placed on satellite telephone networks such as those maintained by Iridium and Globalstar. Unlike most laws in Europe, the agreement will allow law enforcement to listen in without a court order.

Ironically, in September, the European Parliament called for accountability of Echelon, the U.S. National Security Agency's spying network that is reportedly able to intercept, record, and translate any electronic communication--telephone, data, cellular, fax, e-mail, or telex.

Under European law, representatives of each member nation can pass legally binding resolutions. Further, the resolutions don't require the approval of either the European Parliament or the individual parliaments of EU members.

Joseph Farah, WorldNetDaily

* Your e-mail communications and phone calls overseas are being intercepted by a global government surveillance system.

* Your cellular phone calls to your elected government officials are being monitored by the same mysterious Echelon program controlled by the U.S. National Security Agency.

* Your international faxes are also being copied and analyzed by this 50-year-old international civilian espionage organization.

"Wow," you say. "This is scary stuff. How could our government get away with this? Whatever happened to our right of privacy?"

Most of what we know about Echelon we owe to the investigative reporting of New Zealander Nicky Hager, who spent 12 years digging into the system--work that resulted in the 1996 book Secret Power: New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network.

Here's how Echelon works: First, it targets all international phone company tele-communications satellites from five ground intercept stations. Second, the system targets other civilian communications satellites. And third, another group of facilities monitors international communications as they are relayed from undersea cables to microwave transmitters.

Sounds like an impossible task, doesn't it? But just think of how easy it is for your own personal computer to search the Internet for keywords. That's the same concept employed by Echelon. Each country involved in the program selects categories of intercept interest and corresponding keywords and phrases. Through this method, Echelon has the potential to intercept millions of communications.

The civil rights implications of such spying by our own government is chilling, but it's pretty much old hat. The late CIA Director William Colby testified to Congress more than 20 years ago that the NSA monitored every overseas call made from the United States.

(Dad:) Please use wisdom in what you say on the phone, dear Family. You can save your security as well as lots of time and money by simply saying what you need to and then getting off. There's no need to be paranoid about phone calls, but from what I've seen and heard from some of your spirit helpers, you could stand to be a little more concerned about your security and that of others.

Director Simon Davies said the time was now right for the awards. "Surveillance has now become an inbuilt component of every piece of information technology on the planet, we've got a long way to go to wind the clock back," he said.

Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, a listening station used by America's National Security Agency and described as the biggest U.S. spy station in the world, won the special lifetime achievement award.

The report cites many Western European countries, Adventist Press Service said. It noted a 1997 Austrian law that prohibits giving official recognition to any religion other than the 12 that already exist. In Greece, where 97% of citizens are considered to be members of the Orthodox Church, Protestants, Catholics, and other minorities are victims of discrimination, the Helsinki report says. Other nations of the European Union are in the process of preparing laws to reinforce the status of traditional religions while limiting smaller groups.

Recent investigations have been carried out by the French, Belgian, and German parliaments into the activities of minority religions under the guise of investigating "dangerous sects" and "psycho-groups." These governments have often prominently listed such groups as Jehovah's Witnesses, Hasidic Jews, charismatic Roman Catholics, evangelical Protestants and the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) to "warn" the public against them. Additionally, pan-European institutions such as the European Parliament and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe are considering issuing reports on "sects" that call for national "advice and information centers" to control "sects" and disseminate information on these "harmful" or "dangerous" groups.

(Jesus:) Let those who would poke their finger in My eye and persecute My children beware! I am merciful and long-suffering and bear long with man, but those who not only reject My message but hinder and harm My messengers fill their cup of iniquity quickly and will find themselves facing My wrath if they do not repent!

By Mark Boal, Village Voice

NEW YORK -- Cameras stare as you browse at Barnes and Noble or rent a video at Blockbuster. They record the way you handle the merchandise at Macy's or how you glide to the music at the Union Square Virgin Megastore. Grab latte at Starbucks, and cameras are watching every sip you take. Peering from skyscrapers with lenses that can count the buttons on a blouse three miles away, they watch every move you make.

With little public awareness and no debate, the scaffolding of mass surveillance is taking shape. "I feel like Paul Revere, shouting 'The cameras are coming, the cameras are coming.'" says Norman Siegel, the New York Civil Liberties Union's executive director.

All summer, a crew of NYCLU volunteers scoured Manhattan on a mission to pinpoint every street-level camera. Next month, Siegel will unveil their findings: a map showing that cameras have become as ubiquitous as streetlights. It's impossible to say how many lenses are trained on the streets of New York, but in one eight-block radius, the NYCLU found over 300 in plain sight. And as one volunteer acknowledges, "There are tons of hidden cameras we didn't catch."

That's because it's routine in the security trade to buttress visible cameras with hidden ones, "so everything's covered and it doesn't look like a fortress," as one consultant says. If you listen to the people who install them, cameras are as common and elusive as shadows.

New York is hardly the only spy city. More than 60 American urban centers use closed-circuit television in public places. In Baltimore, police cameras guard downtown intersections. In San Francisco, tiny cameras have been purchased for every car of the subway system. In Los Angeles, the camera capital of America, some shopping malls have central surveillance towers, and to the north in Redwood City, the streets are lined with parabolic microphones. Even in rustic Waynesville, Ohio, the village manager is proud of the cameras that monitor the annual Sauerkraut Festival.

America is fast becoming what Gary Marx calls "a surveillance society," where the boundary between the private and the public dissolves in a digital haze. "The new surveillance goes beyond merely invading privacy … to making irrelevant many of the constraints that protected privacy," Marx writes in Undercover: Police Surveillance in America. For example, mass monitoring allows police to eliminate cumbersome court hearings and warrants. Immediately after a crime, cops check cameras in the vicinity that may have captured the perpetrator on tape.

So, as surveillance expands, it has the effect of enlarging the reach of the police. Once it becomes possible to bank all these images, and to call them up by physical typology, it will be feasible to set up an electronic sentry system giving police access to every citizen's comings and goings.

This apparatus isn't limited to cameras. Recent mass-transit innovations, such as the MetroCard, are also potential surveillance devices. A MetroCard's magnetic strip stores the location of the turnstile where it was last swiped. In the future, Norman Siegel predicts, it will be possible for police to round up suspects using this data. E-Z Passes already monitor speeding, since they register the time when drivers enter tollbooths. Once transportation credits and bank accounts are linked in "smart cards" (as is now the case in Washington, D.C.), new surveillance vistas will open to marketers and G-men alike.

Already the FBI clamors for the means to monitor any cell-phone call. Meanwhile other government agencies are developing schemes of their own. The Department of Transportation has proposed a rule that would encode state drivers' licenses, allowing them to double as national identity cards. Europeans know all about internal passports, but not even the East German Stasi could observe the entire population at a keystroke. "What the secret police could only dream of," says privacy expert David Banisar, "is rapidly becoming a reality in the free world."

What's more, spy cams are getting smaller and cheaper all the time. "A lens that used to be 14 inches long can now literally be the size of my fingernail," says Gregg Graison of the spy shop Qüark. Such devices are designed to be hidden in everything from smoke detectors to neckties.

"Once the new surveillance systems become institutionalized and taken for granted in a democratic society," warns Gary Marx, they can be "used against those with the 'wrong' political beliefs; against racial, ethnic, or religious minorities; and against those with lifestyles that offend the majority."

New York police taped large portions of the Million Youth March in Harlem. Social psychologists say that taping political events can affect a participant's self-image, since being surveilled is unconsciously associated with criminality. Ordinary citizens shy away from politics when they see activists subjected to scrutiny. As this footage is splayed across the nightly news, everyone gets the message: hang out with dissenters and you'll end up in a police video.

But even ordinary life is altered by surveillance creep. Once cameras reach a critical mass, they create what the sociologist Erving Goffman called, "a total institution," instilling barely perceptible feelings of self-consciousness. Deprived of public privacy, most people behave in ways that make them indistinguishable: you're less likely to kiss on a park bench if you know it will be on film. Over the long run, mass monitoring works like peer pressure, breeding conformity without seeming to.

Communications professor Carl Botan documented these effects in a 1996 study of workplace surveillance. Employees who knew they were being surveilled reported higher levels of uncertainty than their co-workers: they were more distrustful of bosses, their self-esteem suffered, and they became less likely to communicate. The result was "a distressed work force."

It's a brave new world. There are thousands of watchers in Spycam City--a ragtag army as likely to include your neighbor as your boss or the police. In 1998, anybody could be watching you.

(David:) Poor Orwell, if he'd walk into the world today and see just what it's really like, he'd probably die of fright! In his day it was all science fiction, a make-believe story to entertain people, but now it's reality--one that's not going to go away. Soon enough the Antichrist will be able to control the masses, and he'll be keeping an eye on you.

Geoff Metcalf

"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," Edmund Burke said. What he didn't say was just what a persistent, consistent, stubborn cuss evil can be.

There have been numerous attempts to introduce and mandate a national identification card system. Freedom lovers have fought time and time again to impede the progress of the controllers. However, it seems no sooner do we win a skirmish than our would-be masters attack again … and again, and again, and again.

Like the proverbial bad penny, the national ID beast is back again … with a vengeance. The U.S. Department of Transportation has published the proposed "Driver's License/SSN/National Identification Document" guidelines. This draconian disaster will compel all states to comply within the next two years. The "Notice of Proposed Rule Making" establishes the "standard feature" requirements for driver's license cards and other "identification" documents.

Under the provisions of the last assault on privacy, no later than Oct. 1, 2000 all state driver's licenses must be linked to the social security number of the individual. State ID cards must also be linked to social security numbers.

Each individual must submit biometric identification which will be compiled in a national database. The biometric component of choice currently is fingerprints, which is already in effect in many states like California, but retinal scans and DNA prints are also being considered.

Every driver's license or ID card will be required to include a magnetic strip, imbedded computer chip which will contain the social security number information.

All Americans will be required to present this new federally approved ID whenever you apply for a job. Before being hired you will have to be checked against the national database. Why? Supposedly to determine if you are a potential terrorist (which could include membership in a patriot organization, militia, or publisher or writer of any "anti-government" newsletter, etc.) You will also need your government approved ID to travel.

Without the new and improved government ID you will not be able to seek medical care. Medicare and other state services are already linked to the social security number. This would be extended to all medical care, even if you pay for it yourself. You will not be able to enroll your children in school. Eventually all children will have their very own ID card, and national databases will maintain their vaccination records, behavioral problems, and history of drug use, etc.

If you decide to flee your new draconian control beasts, you'll have a problem. Passports will only be issued to those who already have the federal approved ID card.

You will not be allowed to work without this new federally mandated mark. State licensing will be extended to virtually everything, thereby making it illegal to work without a license--and guess what? You can't get a license to work without first presenting your federally approved national ID. Banking? No federal ID, no banking, no check cashing, no loans.

This is NOT radical right-wing paranoia. Most of the elements of the new proposed national ID system are already in place NOW. The next step is for all information to be coordinated and completely accessible to any and all bureaucrats for their arbitrary and capricious abuse.

The national ID card itself (which you will be required to carry) will have a magnetic strip (or chip) which is imbedded in it. That means YOU (when you have your mandated national ID card on your person) could be tracked wherever you go. Privacy will be an anachronism.

As George Washington observed, "Government is not reason: It is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

(David:) Amen! You tell'm, George! The colonists went to the U.S. to escape tyranny, and look what America has turned into! And as this dear fellow has pointed out, look what's yet to come! There's coming a day that men won't be able to buy or sell without the Mark of the Beast, and it won't be long now.

The intelligence game has expanded beyond the shadowy realm where the world's spy agencies exist and has gone commercial in the form of competitive intelligence, as those in the profession like to call it. A former Canadian military intelligence analyst, Thomson looks for a whole list of things such as new facilities being built and how much product is sitting in the company's yard. He even compares the number of cars in the employees' parking lot to previous photos to see how many shifts are working and how large they are so he can judge productivity.

But abuses of this video technology have become increasingly common. National food chain Dunkin' Donuts was forced to remove its video-surveillance technology when employees used it to listen in on regular customers. And in England--the most videotaped society in the world--B-grade filmmakers have raided footage from public video cameras to make risqué movies, often featuring unsuspecting couples.

"Video surveillance has become the latest [quick fix] that will solve society's needs," says John Banisar, a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "It's seemingly mushrooming out of control without any restrictions of its use."

Tony Vinson and Karl Langheinrich

Australia is the world leader in adopting new technology, in particular personal information and communication devices. Surveillance technologies exist which are capable of recording conversations through walls and seeing around corners or in the dark.

The number of applications for warrants for listening devices in NSW [the Australian state of New South Wales] exceeds the number of applications for listening devices and wiretaps in the whole of the United States. On a comparative population basis, in 1995 instead of 1,341 such applications, the number in NSW should have been 26.

Closed circuit television is used extensively in situations as varied as public transport, ATMs, in large retail stores, shopping centers and malls, the foyers of hotels and large offices, lifts or car parks, and sporting arenas.

The new surveillance triggers a shift from targeting a specific subject to categorical suspicion--of young, ethnic groups, the family and friends of prisoners, to mention only three groups.

In the workplace, movements can be tracked by electronic devices, telephones monitored, speed of work measured and workers observed without their knowledge. Miniaturized "tiny brother" cameras are used to do this and are able to catch more details in low light and are capable of being installed anywhere and everywhere.

Paranoid? You will be, as the modern workplace descends into a den of electrified suspicion that puts more and more workers on the payroll of Big Brother.

Monitoring the rate of "keystroke" activity is already a common way of making sure employees work diligently. However, the new package is a real ghost in the machine, not only allowing a suspicious boss to monitor his workers' screens as they type, but also recording their every activity to be played back at leisure or in speeded up time. For the truly voyeuristic boss the program can be tailored so that when an employee takes home the office laptop, it will e-mail regular reports on how it is being used.

The use of CCTV (closed circuit television) is the biggest growth area in the industrial security industry, and many people may not realize that their "swipe" cards used to gain access to the building can also be used by a computer to log their comings and goings, as can the new type of "smart lights" which switch on only when there is someone beneath them. These can alert CCTV cameras to movement at a desk, while telephone software analyzes numbers dialed and received.

In America a recent survey by the American Management Association showed that 40 percent of employers kept a track of employees' telephone calls, and 16 percent used CCTV. In Britain a new report called the technology "the new industrial tyranny" that makes surveillance of the assembly line look like a "Sunday school picnic."

"I think this is going to serve as a warning to a lot of people who have sensitive material on the computer, because it's really open to invasion," said Barry Steinhardt, president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Many people overestimate the amount of privacy they have on a computer. In some ways, this kind of trespass is extraordinary, but the truth is, we should not be surprised."

A study, carried out by the scientific research and documentation center of the Dutch Ministry of Justice, revealed in 1996 that police in the Netherlands intercept more telephone calls than their counterparts in the United States, Germany or Britain. In absolute figures, the Dutch tapped three times more phone lines than the U.S. agencies.

The magazine said that the DGSE, the French secret service, had established listening posts in the Dordogne region of Southern France and also in its overseas territories, including French Guiana and New Caledonia. One senior official within this branch of the French secret service was quoted as saying: "This is the game of the secret war. Our job is to do as they do, and to be just as good at it."

All American military communications are encrypted and even France, with its sophisticated systems, would not be able to decode them. However, the U.S. government has so far prevented companies from encrypting commercial traffic to any significant level, and French intelligence would have no difficulty in breaking the simple codes and listening in to communications of companies such as Boeing, which might provide invaluable information for French firms.

These plans are part of a wave of controversial initiatives dubbed "The Surveillance Attack" by the national press. The proposed laws originally included officially sanctioned wiretapping of journalists, medical professionals, and suspected criminals until they were watered down by public outrage.

Vendors in Akihabara, the Tokyo district crammed with electrical appliance shops, say that anxious mothers are snapping up the bugs--a tiny UHF transmitter and a receiver that sell for 65,000 yen ($460). Armed with receivers, mothers station themselves outside school to check what their offspring are talking about and whether they are safe. The bugs have a range of about 300 yards. Better-off parents engage the services of private detectives to conduct the surveillance.

The International Newsletter of Banking and Freedom

By Patrick O'Connor

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a good friend of mine, a self-confessed "electronic nerd" who casually mentioned that the US government recently launched a new satellite into space.

Nothing unusual in this, you might think. But this is no ordinary satellite. When it beams down to Earth, this satellite can read handwritten documents. A great improvement, my friend said, over the existing spook satellites which can only read license plate numbers!

He went on to say that the US government is working on a satellite capable of looking through walls. This should give you pause to reflect when taking a shower!

I was skeptical that things had really gotten so bad, so I decided to do some poking around and called some of my old friends in the "spook business" to see if they could put me in the picture. Below, I outline just some of what I learnt.

Phones. There is an agency in the US which, with the assistance of its sister agency in the UK, can completely blanket the world with its eavesdropping capabilities. The agency obviously doesn't listen to every conversation, but it does listen to and record any conversation containing a key word.

It works like this: You are talking to aunt Sally and you mention that Uncle Ralph's boy, Fred, was recently apprehended for selling drugs. Bingo… "Selling drugs" activates a "key word" computer program and your conversation is automatically recorded.

You can be talking in English, Spanish, Hindustani or any of 120 languages. It doesn't matter: the computer is programmed to be fluent in all of them.

The "Big Ear," as it is nicknamed, will then store your conversation until its content can be filtered through another program. If this program determines your conversation is "significant," a government operative will listen to it and on the basis of what he hears, he can launch further monitoring of your calls or prompt an investigation into your affairs.

The "Big Ear" is not programmed to put conversations into their proper context. So be careful not to use words such as "money" and "laundering" in the same sentence. "Dad sent me some money because I don't even have enough to get my laundry." It is always a good idea to be circumspect when using the phone. You may be using "key words" in a totally innocent manner, but this could still draw you under the spotlight.

Have you ever received complaints from friends that they can't reach you on your private phone line, because it's always engaged? If this ever happens to you, call in a security expert to check your phone instruments. You may be the victim of the Hook.

The Hook is a small, almost undetectable computer chip placed in the telephone. It enables the person who placed it to send a signal down your line. This signal activates your phone in such a way it becomes a transmitter and will relay any conversation held near the phone back to the eavesdropper. In this way, your private conversations can be monitored and recorded from any location in the world. What gives the Hook away is that your phone will be engaged whenever the snoop monitors the private conversations in your home or office.

(David:) You'd better watch out for your conversations on the phone, folks! These may seem to be days of relative peace and openness, but the Enemy is always watching and listening, and some of his cohorts in worldly governments may be monitoring your lines. You're not evildoers, but you'd better avoid all appearance of evil, and avoid saying anything that could cause you or other dear ones you're talking to any trouble. Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

Geoff Metcalf

Privacy has become an anachronism, something that we used to have but which is almost nonexistent nowadays. It is illegal for the United States to spy on its citizens … kinda. The laws have been circumvented by a mutual pact among five nations. Under the terms of the UKUSA agreement, Britain spies on Americans and America spies on British citizens, and then the two conspirators trade data.

This system is called ECHELON, and has been kicking around in some form longer than I have. The result of the UKUSA treaty signed by the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand was and is to have a vast global intelligence monster which allegedly shares common goals. The system is so "efficient" that reportedly National Security Agency (NSA) folk from Fort Meade can work from Menwith Hill in England to intercept local communications without either nation having to burden themselves with the formality of seeking approval or disclosing the operation.

The London Telegraph reported in December of last year that the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament had officially confirmed the existence and purpose of ECHELON. "A global electronic spy network that can eavesdrop on every telephone, e-mail and telex communication around the world will be officially acknowledged for the first time in a European Commission report."

The report noted: "Within Europe all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency, transferring all target information from the European mainland via the strategic hub of London, then by satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill, in the North York moors in the UK.

"The ECHELON system forms part of the UKUSA system, but unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations and businesses in virtually every country."

Long ago and far away, Adolf Hitler was talking to Hermann Rauschning and said, "The people about us are unaware of what is really happening to them: They gaze fascinated at one or two familiar superficialities, such as possession and income and rank and other outworn conceptions. As long as these are kept intact, they are quite satisfied. But in the meantime they have entered a new relation: a powerful social force has caught them up. They themselves are changed. What are ownership and income to that? Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings."

I see someone has made a TV movie of "Brave New World." Are we to view it as a work of fiction, or a foreshadowing of what looms in the very near future?