Friday, January 30, 2015

Smart Meter & Smart Grid Abuse

Your home appliances will soon be remotely controlled by the government Posted on January 29, 2015 Written by naturalnews.com
Increas­ingly, our free­dom and auton­omy are threat­ened by those who seek to mon­i­tor and con­trol every aspect of our daily lives. George Orwell’s “Big Brother” from the novel 1984 is a pale threat in com­par­i­son to the dystopian real­ity our lead­ers which have cre­ated for us since that book was pub­lished more than six decades ago.
Orwell clearly fore­saw a future in which the state watches over and micro­man­ages the lives of its sub­jects, but even he could scarcely have imag­ined the degree of sur­veil­lance and con­trol that tech­nol­ogy would make possible.
I also believe that he hoped we would avoid allow­ing this to hap­pen — it seems clear that the book was designed as a warn­ing, as were many oth­ers that were pub­lished in the 20th cen­tury. Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451 and Huxley’s Brave New World are just two famous exam­ples that come to mind.
One of the prob­lems is that our free­doms are taken away incre­men­tally, in small units and in the name of “national secu­rity” or “tech­no­log­i­cal progress” — we don’t see the cumu­la­tive effect until it’s too late to do any­thing about it.
The lat­est encroach­ment on our pri­vacy and daily actions comes in the form of what is being called “smart grid” technology.
UK util­ity com­pany North­ern Pow­er­grid Hold­ings Co. (which is owned by mega-billionaire War­ren Buf­fett) is coop­er­at­ing with Siemens AG towards a planned test of a smart grid which will be able, accord­ing to Bloomberg.com, “to con­trol when con­sumer appli­ances will be used in the home.
Being able to bet­ter man­age when elec­tric­ity flows allows util­i­ties to lower con­sumer costs by reduc­ing the need for new equip­ment, and to bet­ter han­dle surges and gaps from inter­mit­tent sources such as wind and solar. The pilot pro­gram, known as the Customer-Led Net­work Rev­o­lu­tion, involves just 12,000 house­holds in the U.K. and is one of only a few such projects being tested worldwide.”
It seems clear that the term “Customer-Led Net­work Rev­o­lu­tion” is designed to give the impres­sion that con­sumers are some­how behind the imple­men­ta­tion of this tech­nol­ogy, which is highly unlikely indeed.
The truth is that the smart grid will not only allow the providers of elec­tric­ity con­trol over con­sumer usage but will also pro­vide a detailed pic­ture of the customer’s energy con­sump­tion habits.
This may seem innocu­ous enough on the sur­face, but it’s not hard to imag­ine this abil­ity being used to invade pri­vacy and keep an even closer watch over the daily activ­i­ties of citizens.
Soon, the author­i­ties may be exam­in­ing your behav­ior at home in detail: “What’s he doing in his work­shop at 3am? Could it be crim­i­nal activ­ity?”, etc.
It’s inter­est­ing how the War­ren Buf­fetts of this world seem so intent on help­ing us man­age our lives. It seems very con­sid­er­ate, but I often won­der what the real pur­pose is.
And, as Melissa Melton of The Daily Sheeple points out, why is it that the pow­ers that be are so con­cerned with help­ing us save money on elec­tric­ity, when they actively dis­cour­age any efforts towards inde­pen­dence of the grid on our parts?
In Melton’s words: Smart grid tech­nol­ogy is one more rung on the lad­der to a com­plete tech­no­cratic slave grid where aus­ter­ity and arti­fi­cial scarcity rule the day.”
In some states in the U.S. (includ­ing Florida and Texas), it is vir­tu­ally ille­gal to live off the grid. There have been sev­eral cases where those who have man­aged to live inde­pen­dently off the power grid have been treated as criminals.
We once lived in a soci­ety where self-reliance and inde­pen­dence were con­sid­ered pos­i­tive qual­i­ties. It seems that nowa­days these traits are deemed not only as out of fash­ion, but as direct threats to the cen­tral authority.
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