Many Christians read the prophecy in Revelation 13:16-18 about the prophesied Beast power’s ability to monitor and control all economic/financial/monetary transactions and realize it will have to have “Big Brother” surveillance and control mechanisms at its disposal. I think it is naive of Christians to think that the beast will have massive, global monitoring/control mechanisms over financial matters and not have the same monitoring power over all other aspects of people’s lives as well. A new article in USA TODAY (see link below) reveals just how extensive and pervasive that monitoring power will become, and how pervasive it may already be.
The article reports that you are being monitored far more than you realize. It states that besides being caught many times on camera by “surveillance cameras at airports, subways, banks and other public venues,” you could also unknowingly be “captured in a high-resolution photograph taken from the air or street by Google or Microsoft, as they update their respective mapping services.” Your car’s license plate “will be recorded and time-stamped” as well as you travel on the roads. The article further warns that new technologies will “push the monitoring of human activity far beyond what George Orwell imagined.”
A particularly invasive and pervasive monitoring system for you is now being developed. It uses digital face-mapping technology called “photo tagging” which is being “advocated by Google and Facebook.” This technology will capture the names assigned to all faces posted on Facebook or Google personal media pages to create a facial “tag” for each person. These “tags” can be interconnected with all electronic databases so that your image will be instantly accessible to all public and private surveillance cameras. For example, the article states that a car dealer could “take a photo of you as you step onto his car lot…[and] quickly profile you on the web to gain an edge in making a sale.” This technology could also make it possible for a “stranger in a mall or restaurant” to snap a photo of you and find out much personal information about you via a quick on-line check. While this technology may have benign usages, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that this new technology could be a tremendous boon to rapists, child predators, stalkers, kidnappers, identity-theft practitioners and all kinds of scammers. This has huge legal ramifications. Indeed, I can visualize lawsuits in the future where Facebook, Google or whoever disseminates this information to subscribers are regularly sued as “accessories” to crimes whenever criminals use their monitoring technology to identify and prey on innocent victims.
The article also explains how “most consumers are ignorant about how new smartphones equipped with GPS location finders” are “geotagging” your smartphone’s photos to find out where you are, who you are with, etc. If smartphones can tag all the visual information generated on your smartphone (and send it to whatever government agency stores all this information), it begs the question whether all your audio conversations and text messages are being monitored and stored in a vast government database as well.
Privacy experts are worried about the ramifications of all this massive surveillance that is as pervasive as it is unobtrusive. They have good reason to be worried. Based on the prophecy of Revelation 13:16-18 that the eventual beast power will be able to have technologies to monitor and control all financial transactions, we are approaching a time when all personal privacy is gone.
Some may say “Well, at least I’m free of surveillance in my own home.” You may be wrong. Obviously, your smartphone can gather information on you even in your home. Does your smartphone have the ability to passively monitor and record information even if you shut it “off” so you can’t use it? I have another possibility to share with you that is speculative so please treat it as a speculative possibility, not “gospel,” OK? It was most odd that not long ago the US Government ordered TV transmissions to switch from analog to digital technology which also compelled everyone to buy new digital televisions. This infers that either government was so “in bed” with the makers of digital technologies that it did their bidding or that it had an ulterior motive that was not shared with the public. What follows is a possibility for you to consider.
In order to create a seamless, continuous network capable of spying on everyone at all times via the digital “photo tagging” technology described in the USA TODAY article, it would be necessary to insert digital media devices into every home. Your computer has a unique digital recognition number which distinguishes it from all other computers and this number is traceable whenever you use your computer. Your digital computer has a unique ID number, and your digital television also has a unique serial number. Whenever you buy a digital TV or send in your warranty card, your television’s serial number could be assigned a digital ID number by whoever is monitoring all the information gathered by your smartphones. Is it possible that each digital TV has “monitoring” technology built into it even as smartphones do? Do digital TVs have passive visual and audio monitoring capabilities built into them to monitor the room in which they are placed whenever a government agency (the NSA for example) activates the personal code for the TV registered to you to actively monitor you? Just think of it: as you watch your TV, it may be watching you! Since your digital smartphone can already monitor you, is it such a leap of logic to think your digital TV can do the same thing? If you think I may be a bit paranoid in suggesting this possibility, I’d like to share with you that it was a person who works inside the industry who suggested this technological possibility to me. I’ve decided to share this possibility with the readers of this blog site.
We are certainly entering a “brave new world.” It could be a control freak’s dream: people could be continuously and passively monitored and spied on via the electronic, digital devices they buy without ever being aware that their own digital devices are sending all they do and say to a government data base for either selective or constant monitoring.
I’ll close with three thoughts. (A) If you and your spouse are doing anything in front of your TV set that you don’t want others to watch, you may want to throw a blanket over your TV…just in case these spying technologies are already embedded in digital TVs even as they are already embedded in smartphones, and (B) If the media is already admitting that smartphones can be used to spy on your activities and locations, are there other spying technologies built into them about which we have not been told?
My third thought is biblically-based. Revelation 11:6 prophesies that God’s Two Witnesses, when they appear on the global scene, will be Divinely given the power to “smite the earth with all plagues as often as they will (emphasis added).” This sounds like they can be as general or specific as they want to be in their assigned plagues. Maybe one plague they will send forth is that everyone involved with the beast power’s spying technologies will be smitten with terminal and disfiguring diseases if they dare to access those technologies. That would sure spoil the beast’s plans, wouldn’t it? It is clear that the Two Witnesses will target the beast’s global system with many of their plagues as the beast is so enraged at them by the time their ministry is over that the beast finally is able to kill them (Revelation 11:7-9). The beast will want to kill them far earlier in their ministry, but for three and 1/2 years, they will be Divinely protected and it is those who try to attack the Two Witnesses who will be killed instantly (Revelation 11:5). If you want to read an in-depth analysis of the several biblical prophecies about the Two Witnesses (they are mentioned in more prophecies than Revelation 11), I invite you to read my article, The Two Witnesses, available at the homepage of my website. If you want to keep the information, you better print out a copy. None of us know how long Christians will have a free internet to share information.
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/money/20110126/digitalsensors26_cv.art.htm?loc=interstitialskip
