Big Brother Arrives With Iris Eye-Scan ID On , ATMs, PCs, CellPhones

  "There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—-did live, from habit that became instinct-—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." - George Orwell 1984 -

The year 1984 has come and gone, but the political philosophy of 1984 seems alive and well as the 21st Century marches forward into a brave new world. Alphabet soup lettered agencies seem to be springing up anew each day that passes, like fresh weeds after a summer thunderstorm. And as security trumps liberty, the observation by one of the earliest Americans—Benjamin Franklin—comes to mind: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Airport scanners, aerial observation drones above major cities, cyclopean cameras appearing on every city street corner...and now a Puerto Rico based company is working to convince the federal government to mandate iris-detection technology for communications, transportation, banking, retail purchases…Just about everything.  Massive databases would drive all activities based on your own unique iris-scan. Once in place, anyone refusing an iris-scan may be held criminally liable, face fines, prison sentences, or…just left alone with no place to live, no job, no money, no food. In essence, no life. It's an electronic world in some ways worse than that imagined by Orwell. A world where the ultimate rulers are passionless machines deciding who is and is not a citizen. And eventually, who can and cannot live. All this from a new security technology? Indeed. American society is already coming close to that with the ubiquitous social security numbers, the iris scanning just speeds up the process of moving everyone to the next level. Hector Hoyos wants to watch the watchers that are watching everyone else. Hoyos, the founder and CEO of Hoyos Corporation, manufactures iris photographing technology. As some patents on proprietary iris-scanning technology will soon expire making the cost of utilizing the devices on a mass scale much less expensive, Hoyos wants to introduce it into places that literally touch everyone's lives.During late 2011 his company plans to introduce a portable, hand-held scanner making it easier to scan and identify indivuals much more easily and efficiently. Hoyos is pushing for the scanners to become universal. Writing about the concept of universal iris scans, the tech site popsci.com observes "—ubiquitous iris scans result in a world where no one can hide, neither from the government nor from Gap advertisements. Unless you want to swap eyes with someone else." That's the problem; there will be no escape. And the entity leaning towards introducing, and then mandating, and then enforcing this type of Big Brother technology is government at every level. Oh sure, many of the Fortune 1000 companies are covertly—or not so covertly—advocating iris-scan technology too. They see it as a boon for marketing and inventory purposes. But making life a little easier and more productive for sales departments, corporate buyers, and accounting divisions is not worth the trade-off: a gradual move towards complete loss of liberty, privacy and eventually individuality. The new iris-scanning technology is not like the kind that existed 30 years ago. Iris-scanners now are smaller, faster, scan at higher resolutions, and can read the iris without the subject even being aware it's done. The watchers can scan, search, verify and identify a person in a matter of seconds. Currently, iris recognition technology is being used to access security areas by the military, government and corporations. Some prisons have incorporated the technology as well as some European airports.The mass drones that populate the cities of Big Brother's world are not that far off when the world is crammed with scanners, sensors, trackers and nameless, faceless people monitoring every move that people make. And who will be assigned to watch the watchers?
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away…There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime…" – George Orwell, 1984.
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Homeland Security To Test Walk-By Iris Scanners
A new generation of cameras that capture images from 6 feet away instead of a few inches has sparked interest from Big Brother, said Patrick Grother, a National Institute of Standards and Technology computer scientist. The technology also has sparked objections from the American Civil Liberties Union. ACLU lawyer Christopher Calabrese fears that the cameras could be used covertly. "If you can identify any individual at a distance and without their knowledge, you literally allow the physical tracking of a person anywhere there's a camera and access to the Internet,"
In 2007, the U.S. military began taking iris scans of thousands of Iraqis to track suspected militants. 
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