surveillance

Good day everyone.

I hope you would all excuse me for writing in English. I read some Dutch and would like to get feedback from Europeans' perspective.

I have found the recent wave of surveillance in North America very annoying and frightening to some extent. Especially annoying is a new secret surveillance agents program that has recently been put in place in the U.S. and Canada. The striking thing about it is that the surveillance agents use funny gadgets. The most typical are ear phones and ipods or CD players or things of that sort. The surveillance agents walk around with these pretending to be listening to music. But they also use cell phones, lap tops, or have casts on their arms and legs pretending to have injured limbs, or they walk with canes or roll around in wheel chairs. There are bugs and cameras hidden in these, and the ipods are especially used as a communication device. (The news about Apple's spectacular success in the market with its ipods is only a cover for the many surveillance agents wearing them on streets and in metros.) As for the surveillance agents, they range from teenagers through young adults to senior citizens, but the most notable are disgruntled males, since it is especially the economically dispossessed who would take up this job. This is especially the case in North America. The surveillance agents ride in metros and buses, sit in coffee houses, or just walk around the streets. They are everywhere. These amateur agents don't particularly follow the targets of their surveillance, but are simply installed in every corner of the environment in which their target moves about. Although the program is supposed to be classified or things like that, it is actually widely known.

People are told that, oh, these are for your safety, but these agents are turning neighborhoods into very freaky places. The days of traditional techniques of special agents following specific persons or of using cameras are gone in North America. This new thing is especially introduced by the Department of Homeland Security in the United States. And by now DHS has operations around the world. It has thus brought this program to Europe and Asia as well.