The future of ‘privacy’ is the continued trend of its evisceration to nothing at all, with ‘life’ resembling a future more akin to that of a science fiction novel than anything with freedom. COVID passports are not the only example of this, but rather, how surveillance systems based on supertechnology that once freed man is being used to enslave him.
CNN reports that the famous Italian tourist city of Venice is proudly implementing one of such systems, which allows the government to track all people from a central control room.
They’re watching you, wherever you walk. They know exactly where you pause, when you slow down and speed up, and they count you in and out of the city.
What’s more, they’re tracking your phone, so they can tell exactly how many people from your country or region are in which area, at which time.
And they’re doing it in a bid to change tourism for the better.
Welcome to Venice in a post-Covid world. The canal city may have been known as La Serenissima, or The Most Serene, during its centuries ruling the waves as the powerful Republic of Venice.
In the past few years, however, things have become rather less serene, thanks to the almost 30 million visitors who descend each year on the city of just 50,000 inhabitants.
Before Covid-19 struck, tourists were arriving in often unmanageable numbers, choking the main streets and filling up the waterbuses. Authorities had tried various measures, from introducing separate residents’ lines at major vaporetto (waterbus) stops to bringing in turnstiles that would filter locals from tourists on busy days. A planned “entrance tax,” due to debut in 2020, has been postponed to January 2022, due to the pandemic.
But as well as controlling footfall, the authorities wanted to track tourism itself — not just by registering overnight guests but, in a city where the vast majority of visitors are daytrippers, by counting exactly who is in the city — and where they go.
Enter the Venice Control Room.
A state-of-the-art ‘control tower’
The Venice control room, which opened in October 2020, is logging the movements of people int the city — in an attempt to manage the overtourism problem
The control room logs everything from water levels to the main routes people are taking around the city.
On the island of Tronchetto, next to the two-mile bridge separating Venice from the Italian mainland, the Control Room opened in September 2020. A former warehouse that had been abandoned since the 1960s, it’s part of a new headquarters for the city’s police and government — a self-described “control tower” for the city.
The building has offices for the mayor, other dignitaries, and a large CCTV room, with cameras feeding in images from around the city, watched over by the police.
So far so normal. But then, across the corridor, there’s the Smart Control Room — another bank of screens with images and information coming live from around the lagoon. They’re not being monitored for crime, though; they’re feeding information to the authorities that will create a profile of the hordes of people visiting Venice. The hope is that gathering the information will not only track footfall now, enabling the authorities to activate turnstiles and start charging for entrance on busy days. Eventually, they hope that the data will help create a more sustainable tourism plan for the future. (source)
If one believes this is about ‘tourism’, one is most likely in a state of severe delusion. While certainly such data can be used to help with ‘tourism’, a lot of tourism as a trend is disappearing, or getting a lot smaller than before. The real reason for such surveillance is what it always has been, which is the centralization of power and control, and the domination of life for the many by a tiny few. It is a hallmark of totalitarianism, and something that Hitler or Stalin could only have dreamed of, but is being implemented in real time.
If Venice can do this, it is not just going to stop there. It will expand to other major cities, and possibly even small towns, so that none will be able to hide from it. The proliferation of drones will only make this more popular, since once they are able to be cheaply mass produced, it will be but to make an army of drones to enforce control on the rest of humanity that will only bring to a fuller conclusion the philosophies that have already been normalized in the name of ‘safety’ and profit at the loss for the many.
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