Reuters via Yahoo! reports, “American[s]… are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior [US] government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions… There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council… Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.” [emphasis added]
Naturally enough, some people have a problem with this.
One could rail against the unfairness of it all, post angry comments below blog posts, or even go to the extreme of sending a sharply worded email to someone in power. As an act of absolute desperation, one might wait two, four, or six years and… vote. Alternatively, one could look for the investment implications.
Because I am neither licensed nor qualified to offer investment advice, and everything that I post here is for educational and entertainment purposes only, I will not make any speculative recommendations, but I will provide some guidelines for forming and testing your own hypotheses.
First, consider that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has begun testing a project to predict future crimes on members of the public, called the Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) project. FAST “is designed to track and monitor, among other inputs, body movements, voice pitch changes, prosody changes (alterations in the rhythm and intonation of speech), eye movements, body heat changes, and breathing patterns.” Best of all, a field test was performed at a large venue in the USA earlier this year.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) [i.e., national police] by mid-January 2012 will activate a nationwide facial recognition service in some US states that will allow local police to identify unknown subjects in photos.
In other words, privacy is dead.
Love it or hate it, ask yourself, “Who benefits?”
You might not be able to stop Rome from burning, but you can try to profit from it, so that you avoid being a burden on others.
Invest accordingly.
Prof. Evans