By Robert Heiney
It’s fun to watch the blustering, posturing and outright lying when a big news story exposing some government malfeasance shows up on prime time. Amidst the recent revelations that the National Security Agency has been spying on millions of terrorists, oops, I mean American citizens, we find the usual federal government thugs.
Robert Heiney
This Orwellian article crosses the line. I had to look twice to be sure it wasn't penned by Glen Beck or Franz Kafka.
We know the US government through its various spy agencies increasingly is using technology to spy domestically on American citizens.
It’s been widely reported that these same taxpayer funded spy agencies have direct pipelines to ISP’s such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others. They simply scoop your data right up without even asking permission.
The US federal government is building and may have completed a 1,000,000 sq/ft facility for the purpose of collecting every phone call, email, web search, and more for storage on its super computer(s). This facility is in Utah.
The smart grid includes a Wide Area Network (WAN) enabling it to download utility user information that will be relatively limited in the beginning but as smart appliances become more prevalent, much more customer information will be uploaded to utility servers.
If the US government is now collecting information from your internet provider on everything you do, why wouldn’t the government in the future collect data on your electric usage via utility servers?
Especially when you consider the $11 billion dollar investment of taxpayer money into the “smart grid”.
You are a knowledgeable engineer and communications expert. The US government has over the past few decades initiated a substantial domestic surveillance system that is the envy of dictatorships worldwide. I am sorry if you disagree but the evidence is simple and easy to find and verify.
And the stated purpose of the smart grid is to manage electric use remotely so it can be turned off when government bureaucrats deem necessary.
The information collected is nothing different than any provider collects and has collected for at least 100 years, and the data collected is a lot more secure than it has been for the past 100 years. I can't understand the fuss.
As for the smart meters, I'm not doing anything sinister with my toaster. I care less about what my toaster tells someone.
I don't think smart meters are such a big benefit, because our real problem is poor planning by our local EMC. They will provide the same poor outage prevention and horrible restoration practices with or without magical meters in the equation.