Visitors passing through London’s Heathrow airport on the way to next year’s Olympics can no doubt have confidence in the airport’s security systems. But they might be surprised to learn that, courtesy of a European Commission grant, they will be subsidising their own surveillance, and that they will be watched by an Israeli firm that provides monitoring systems for the West Bank separation barrier.
The Olympics will provide a live test for a “Total Airport Security System” (TASS), backed with an £8 million EU grant from research spending. The project promoters give little detail, but say that different scenarios will be tested at Heathrow, involving “integrating and fusing different types of selected real-time sensors and sub-systems for data collection in a variety of modes”.
The TASS consortium includes Britain’s airport operator BAA, which is obviously in need of an EU hand out, having made a £200 million loss last year. But the lead roles are being taken by firms from Israel, not an EU country at last checking. VERINT Systems (Israel) will coordinate, while surveillance know-how will be provided by Elbit Security Systems. Elbit’s supply of Big Brother cameras to the West Bank wall have led to it being dropped as an investment by some pension funds, and the Commission itself considers the separation barrier illegal where it is built on Palestinian land. It is worth noting that intellectual property created in the course of EU research projects (eg new surveillance systems) remains the property of the firms involved, so in theory EU money could pay for development of systems that will ultimately be planted atop an illegal wall and used to keep an eye on the Palestinians!
Considering that the TASS project will result in a high-tech system that can profitably marketed to airports around the world, it is unclear why the Commission needs to dole out this corporate welfare. Defence giant BAE Systems is also taking part, being clearly unable to fund research and development from its £1 billion 2010 profit. BAE is separately involved in 12 similar EU research projects, funded with another £71 million in taxpayers’ cash.
The TASS project website is here: http://www.tass-project.eu/
A version of this article was published in Private Eye magazine.
#1 by Betterworld on July 8, 2011 - 7:38 pm
The EU desperately needs a form of repressive policing similar to that employed by Israel in order to prepare for a future people’s revolution, the looming “European Spring”.
All imperialist systems require repression to survive and the first step in the process is to identify and isolate the leaders of the popular reaction and confine them.
Automatic, remote, real-time, detection using biometric and other data acquired from life (face recognition, DNA acquisition, body weight measurement, skin temperature, volatile organic compound analysis, digital signal tracking, etc) allows individual suspects, even if heavily disguised, to be found in a crowd, tracked remotely over vast distances and all their communications recorded, down to individual conversations held in private at any location. All of this can be done without the target being aware that they are under surveillance.
The EU is merely using the Olympic Games as a pre-purchase trial of the technology of repression in preparation for its acquisition. It will then be made available to client elites to put down future popular anti-imperialist uprisings in any of its member nations.
No political system can impose the economic losses on citizens that the ECB has done in the past 18months and hope to avoid a popular revolt. National governments who sold membership of the EU to their electorate on the basis of prosperity cannot now hold onto power in the face of the opposite economic dynamic. The EU, through the agency of its rogue ECB, is making de facto slaves of its former citizens in a dozen countries, whilst enriching a handful of corporations and individuals, some of which are not even based inside the EU.
The Commission, the only decision making political body outside of North Korea that still meets in secret, will decide on the purchase of the system following the Olympic trial. It will not specifically tell the citizens of its purchase, or that they have paid for their own repression. It will, in stead, announce certain anti-terrorist capacities that have been strengthened to protect the citizenry.
Readers of the works of George Orwell will recognise the process.
#2 by Lawrence on July 9, 2011 - 10:18 am
Betterworld
You are right about the eu revolution in the not too distant future.
However, whatever the eu doe sis not going to save it and its elite from the wrath of the people when they revolt.
The French Revolution and the Russian Revolution are prime examples of what is going to happen in the eu whatever they do to try to prevent it.
The fate of Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling is also a prime example of what will happen to the eu elite and their local Quislings at the national level when the people throughout the eu revolt in the Great European Revolution to free themselves from the eu yoke and take back their Independence and Freedom.
#3 by Joe on July 12, 2011 - 4:21 pm
It has been my direct life esperience that socialism requires repression to sustain itself, not what you’re theatrically trying to call “imperialism”. While measures that you criticize are worthy of that criticism, you’re forgetting what is at the very heart and nature of what people now try to call the “solidarity” vision of society, communitarianism, and other forms of collectivism.
#4 by Lawrence on July 12, 2011 - 11:38 pm
Joe, carry on dreaming.
Maybe when the euro and the eu are finished you will wake up to reality.
#5 by Betterworld on July 13, 2011 - 12:07 am
Joe:
The US political class refuses to acknowledge US imperialism, yet the rest of the known universe recognises it for what it is. So it is with the EU. Failure to recognise (in some, studied failure) should not be confused with absence.
I have little interest in past experiences which may have distorted your understanding: they do not confer an excuse for any unwillingness to face reality.
Either the people are sovereign or they are oppressed. Period.
#6 by Lawrence on July 13, 2011 - 3:16 pm
Enjoy Joe
The euro and the eu are going down under and nothing can save them.
FRANCE is next in line.
http://www.mmnews.de/index.php/wirtschaft/8170-euro-krise-frankreich-bald-pleite
Euro-Schulden-Krise: Frankreich bald pleite? Euro-debt crisis: France broke quickly? (France next in trouble)
#7 by Joe on July 14, 2011 - 5:35 pm
Facts, please. The ENTIRE world, or just the one you imagine to share your outlook? It’s statistically impossible for the ENTIRE world to see concensus on anything else but your assertion? Methinks not.
As to your strange opinion-based commentary on what I experienced directly, well, I’ll leave that up to you.
Besides, you’re looking at this rather selectively as though one thing that you hate is at one end of the scale, and one thing that you idolize is at the other. The chances of that matching the reality of EVERY HUMAN on earth is impossibly small.
Besides, I didn’t mentioned the United States. You did in the reflexive Pavllovian tradition of “radical thinkers” who have a grand history of not really thinking for themselves.
Having not mentioned the EURO either in the post you chose to attach your tirade, I can only say that nothing just “disappears”. It will change in value, it’s governance might change, or some such.
A monetary union without a political union is a stretch, and highly experimental. It can work, but not at the level it’s shown in the past.
How does your bombastic statement work out in fact? Does the Greek government suddenly one day say that they will only colllect taxes in Drachma? Not quite.
As to a lowering of ratings, the US will also likely go to AA, just as the article you linked plausits about any national bank in red. Not so fast… it isn’t that simple.
Outside of the you statement that you convey as fact which is a supposition or opinion, the Euro shows no sign of actually disappearing. It might lose value. The ECB might have to grossly restructure all sorts of member-government held debts, and continue to backstop the banks, but I would only say “it’s a goner” when there are objective reasons to say that. It might disappear someday, but there is nothing out there that says to me that it’s certain, or even if it was a certainty, on what sort of time scale it would happen.
Now to your obfuscation about “imperialism”. Imperialism is authoritarianism which forces itself on other societies. I’m sure you’ll look up inveted reasons to believe that America is the only “imperialist” that ever existed, but in fact look at the political systems that have forced themselves on others, and they have all originated on the European continent, and used the populist appeal of elite-government-class led command economy.
I lived it. Judging by your ardor, you didn’t.
Operating on the foregone conclusion that the US has a class structure of the type lingering in Europe is incorrect and ignorant. To say flatly that you expect a society to “aknowledge” something that is an opinionated supposition, and then feigning horror that they don’t agree with you points up an inate lack of seriousness on you part.
Just a suggestion: why not find a way to stroke your ego that doesn’t require the rest of humanity to absolutely agree with you? Doesn’t it dawn on you that your assumed unanimity, should it ever come to pass, be the essense of the Imperialism that you fancy as your straw man?
Besides, if the US is “imperialist”, why was it then Detschland’s original postwar “zahlmeiter” when the French and Dutch were punitively trying to annex parts of Germany, planning to force those populations out en masse, and reproducing the animus that the Versailles treaty represented to the defeated of the Great War?
Your objective capacity, like the social value of your ideology is useless when it isn’t as murderously dangerous as history has shown it to be over and over.
#8 by Betterworld on July 14, 2011 - 7:20 pm
I had to re-read my own comments as I didn’t recognise the views you have attributed to me. Thankfully, they are not present.
But I hope you feel better now anyway.
#9 by Joe on July 15, 2011 - 5:16 pm
Really? The usual 30 year old repetative dreck about Americahhhhh-evil!, Imperialism, the Euro,.. It magically appeared in your comments to me despite the fact that they aren’t cited in Steven Gardner’s post?
What’s hilarious to me is that you actually find the will to say that someones’ life experience is a “distortion” of the understanding of reality. I now see what you mean by that. You prefer approved truthes to facts or reasoned observations.
#10 by Joe on July 18, 2011 - 4:12 pm
Not quite. But when you see Italian-issued 10 year bonds hit 7,5%, start hoarding canned goods and spirit stove fuel to barter with during the zombie apocalypse.
Actually, I’m kidding. It will look just like the early 1980s.
The problem with the article you cited was the other trash they put up that makes it a lot less believable: the same old adolescent trash about “wondering why we need money” and all the other hippy era catchphrases that “radical” Germans have always hung on to 30 years longer than the rest of civilization.
France’s central bank looks as good as can be expected in the decaying west. Even 10 years out France’s bond are lower than the estimated rate of inflation, which means investors are willing to PAY THE BANK interest for them, for the safety that they offer.
#11 by Lawrence on July 25, 2011 - 12:49 pm
Still of the same opinion Joe?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14271936
Greece rating cut by Moody’s amid default warning
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/25/us-markets-ratings-greece-idUSTRE76O0I420110725
Moody’s cuts Greece debt rating three notches to Ca