21 December 2005

Big Brother is Still Watching You

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For all the paranoid loonies out there I’d just like to remind you that Big Brother is still watching you. Someone at work recieved a notice the other day from Queanbeyan City Council stating they wanted to come out and inspect his pool fence. He’s got a small above ground pool set up in his backyard that he hadn’t told them about. And it wasn’t a dobbing neighbour peeking over the fence or a dog walker.

They had discovered the pool by taking a satellite image of the area that then located the blue spots in peoples yards, determined the address and set out a notice all nice and automatically. So I wouldn’t be putting up any unapproved structures or cutting down any significant trees because Big Brother is watching (at least in Queanbeyan).

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as one has the ability to slice off your hands, and the other can wrap them up for baking…

@Neaderthalis:

Aluminium (elemental symbol Al)and Tin (elemental symbol Sn) are two entirely different things.

Aluminium foil (as in the foil you get in rolls from the supermarket) acts as an antenna much easier than tin foil (which you buy in rolls from engineering supply companies).

Do not confuse the two.

Mr Evil said :

All tin foil will now be microchipped so that the authorites know that “Working Families” are only using it for its intended purpose.

what is its intended purpose?

I make little animals out of it for my kids – cheaper than play dough…

neanderthalsis2:01 pm 13 Jun 08

It is a slow day here so I decided to google “tin foil hats” and found this:

Conspiracy theorists, beware: That aluminum foil beanie – headwear believed, since at least the 1950’s, to stop brain-control rays … may make it easier for THE MAN to read your mind, according to MIT grad students. Inspired by fringe beliefs that invasive radio signals can probe citizens’ thoughts and that the wearing foil on your head may fend them off, an experiment by 4 Ph.D. candidates found that certain key frequencies … owned by the feds, naturally … are actually enhanced by such “protection”.

The students first recorded a baseline transmission from a radio-frequency spectrum analyzer, a device that emits radio waves of various frequencies, to its receiver antenna, located on four test subjects’ bare noggins. Then they preformed the same measurements … sweeping from 10 kilohertz to 3 gigs hertz … while the subjects wore one of three double-layered foil helmets: the “classical” (foil hood wrapped close to the head), the “fez” cylindrical, flat topped hat) and the “centurion” (conical shaped with a peak). The antenna, a stumpy plastic – coating stub was fitted between the helmet and the subject’s cranium to determine how much of a signal was absorbed or deflected before reaching the brain.

What started strictly as “a desire to play with some expensive equipment” ended with surprising results, says lead study author Ali Rahimi, a recent graduate student of MIT’s doctoral program in electrical engineering and computer science. Overall, the foil effectively weakened radio waves by up to 10 decibels over most of the frequency spectrum (there were no significant differences among helmet shapes)
But the 1.2 and 2.6 GHz … which fall within the band reserved for government satellites, GPS systems and mobile-phone corporations … passage throught the foil amplified these waves by 20 to 30 decibels.
Althought Rahimi doesn’t know why the foil increases only those frequencies antenna design is a “black art,” he says — the implications of the research where clear. “it requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC,” the students sagely declared. “If there are radio waves involved in reading minds, aluminum hats aren’t an effective way to counteract them.”

So in conclusion, tin foil amplifies the waves helping the Govt read those nasty little thoughts you were having. They made no mention of the effects of jam / marmalade though. We may have to commission further research on that one.

All tin foil will now be microchipped so that the authorites know that “Working Families” are only using it for its intended purpose.

All passports have the chip now, and all mobile phones have that capability. Guess its time to invest in tin foil and typewriters.

it’s the beginning of the chip invasion, you know….

soon, you will all be micro chipped for access to the emergency ward at TCH, travel on public transport, a bar tab, shopping, and location identification by management.

Australia Card? here comes the Australia chip!

mwaahahaha. hm.

(it won’t make the wait at emergency any faster, they will just be able to tell that the unidentified body is yours)

I just hope I am too old for the upgrade…

Clown Killer12:08 pm 13 Jun 08

Last time I bothered to look up my place on Google Earth the image was from just after the 2003 fires – do they ever update that stuff?

The microchiped bin thing is happening in parts of sydney already (Ryde?).
The aerial photo thing is quite handy, a few years back I was going to put a bay window on my then house in yass, I went to council to see what I would need to do, the council guy pulled up the photo and he could take measurements from it to tell me if it would complied to council guidelines. Saved a bit work that I would have had to otherwise have done.
Councils have been doing this sort of thing for some time.

Bodhichitta said :

NO NO NO. Tin foil actually works as a booster and INCREASES the leakage of brainwave activity to those nasty people.

There was an article a while back that suggested aluminium foil actually worked better as an antenna unless you used almost an entire roll.
Actual foil made of tin would only require a few layers to interfere with weak signals.

But regardless of how you make your foil hat, you’ll also need to fill it with marmalade or a fruit conserve.
You know, to jam the signals.

OOOh, conspiracy theory! Maybe the government is banning laser pointers so we dont rebel and shine them up at the satellites that are violating our backyard privacy. Just like Port Arthur / gun buy back all over again, except no guns, deaths or martin bryant. P.S. If you dont get the analogy i just typed then i wont explain.

No matter how they do it, I agree its scary! Big brother? you ain’t seen nothing yet! The UK is way ahead of us, even the recyle bins have silicone chips on them, something to do with monitoring mis-use I believe. Don’t speed! their equivelent to the rego sticker has a barcode that’s read by the speed cameras, if its out of date, you get caught, it also facilitates the monitoring of your average speed over a given route, so you cant just slow down when you pass a camera then speed up again. Big brother may be here, but he’s just getting started.

All councils have their own mapping systems with up to date aerial photography……I thought everyone new that.

midnitecalla9:20 pm 02 Jan 06

another alternative is to claim its an emergency water reservoir to be used in case of fire.

I doubt that they’re using Google Earth – unless there’s a subscriber version that’s up to the minute. A quick viewing of places around town suggests that the pics are at least a few years old in some instances. For example, numerous buildings constructed in the last 2-3 years are absent and features that have been at our local pre-school for at least the last four years don’t come up.

Option 13: purchase my personally-built laser satellite destroyer. So far as I know it’s not brought any down yet, but I keep trying…

Samuel Gordon-Stewart4:08 pm 21 Dec 05

Option 12: Offer to move the water to Council Reception, this also applies to uncollected garbage, dangerous trees and nosy council workers.

Option 11: Make a pool cover out of flannelette material so that the Queanbeyan City Council just think it’s your shirts out on the washing line.

Option 10 – tell them to mind their own fucking business; and if they want to go for a swim they can damn well buy their own pool.

Option 9: Explain to the council you are increasing their water storage options so that other areas of Struggletown can go ahead and be built.

Absent Diane1:27 pm 21 Dec 05

Option 8 call it water feature and not a pool… see how far you get…

NO NO NO. Tin foil actually works as a booster and INCREASES the leakage of brainwave activity to those nasty people.
Best bet is to use a hat made up of at least 3 inches of lead lining.

Um, from the sound of the article, they just want to suss out the fence around the pool – presumably to a) make sure there is one and b) make sure it’s safe…

Carelessly brushing privacy issues aside, it’s a pretty neat use of using technology that already exists to do something positive (perhaps prevent kids drowning in backyard pools this summer?)

Option 6: Blue dye some lawn

Option Five: Crop a significant crop of pot in your backyard adjacent to said unapproved structure. The powers that be will be to busy wasting your arse for drugs to even care about an unapproved struture.

Option 4 – just don’t chlorinate the pool and let it develop a natural green camouflage

Option 1 : can of spraypaint – paint your pool cover
Option 2 : lie – tell the council that it was a portable pool and it’s now been dismantled
Option 3 : Kick your neighbours teeth in, regardless of if they dobbed, you’ll become one of those ‘horrible neighbours’ and the council won’t go near you.

I’m sure they did just use Google Earth but it was the automatic processing of that info for bureaucratic uses that then becomes a little scary,

it means they’re becoming an invasive and organised and competent bureaucracy, something that everyone should be scared of

I kind of get turned on by the fact that someone is watching..

time for a garden mosaic in the shape of giant one finger salute…

want to bet they just used google earth?

I’m going to cover my whole property with mirrors: that’ll stuff them!

Thank You Google Earth, Bastards!

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