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The Near Future: When Silver Does not Protect Your Privacy
That it is a discrete and private means of storing value is one of the central-most cited arguments by proponents of silver. The same arguments are provided for gold, platinum and palladium ownership as well. But, as we find ourselves amid the end of privacy, we will have to come to terms with the reality that our gold and silver is not as private as we would like to believe, even when we hold onto the coins and bars in our own homes.
The government is unleashing a swathe of new technology aimed to usher in the reign of the technocratic state in which technology maintains increasingly tighter regiments of order within society. During the new system’s puberty, in which human policing could be obsolete, a rare instance in history sees men and women put behind the controls of some of the most invasive techniques of surveillance and investigation ever available. This leaves the rest of exposed to identity theft, fraud and political persecution.
A rather mundane technology able to discover inanimate objects like precious metals is Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR), a geophysical technique that uses radar pulses to image the subsurface. The method uses electromagnetic radiation in the microwave band (UHF/VHF frequencies) of the radio spectrum, and detects the reflected signals from subsurface structures. GPR can be used in rock, soil, ice, fresh water, pavements and structures and can detect objects, changes in the material, and voids and cracks.
And this is a pretty straight-forward, well-understood technology available to just about anybody with varying levels of functionality. This technology alone would give governments the ability to discover what sorts of inanimate objects are located in a family home, from drugs to books to precious metals. Silver and the precious metals complex is an excellent means of storing wealth, time-tested as it is. Not only does one get to physically hold onto a thing of socio-economic and historical value, but also onto something that is needed in order to persist at the level of technology man has achieved. A money and a resource. But, rarely pondered is the inherent risk of your precious metals stash: that it is physical, and you must hold onto it somewhere, opening oneself up to the possibility of unwanted attention.
Police agencies are rolling out sophisticated spy technologies aside from GPR. University College London researchers created the first device that can be used to detect movement through walls using present WiFi signals. The device the two designed is about the size of a suitcase. The device works like radar, depending on the Doppler effect; that is, radio waves changing frequencies as they reflect off of moving objects so as to identify motion. With a radio receiver and two antennas and a signal-processing unit, the device monitors baseline WiFi frequency in an area for changes that represent movement. Tests have demonstrated the device determining a person’s location, speed and direction through a foot-thick brick wall. According to Popular Science, the technology can be used for domestic use as well as scanning buildings during combat. And, naturally, for combat domestically. The system does not emit any radio waves and so cannot be detected.
In Boston, a thermal imaging project was put on hold by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts over privacy concerns. The mouths of Boston authorities were watering in the hopes of deploying aerial and street-level photos over four square miles of the city with infrared cameras that were said to “show heat loss in the city homes.” Now environmentalism beats privacy concerns. The ACLUM posited that the cameras would reveal too much information regarding what was going on inside the homes. The company who produced the cameras, Sagewell, says that the cameras can take up to 20,000 images of homes per day. The authorities are gaining significantly increased access to portraits of our personal lives, exposing us to the risk of rogue – or really just playing their part – officials.
Precious metals consist of their own unique atomic structure. These atomic structures are understood and the specific information bounced off, say, a big stack of coins and bars could potentially be detectable by near-future police and military agencies – that is, if they are not already.
Of all that we know about precious metals, particularly gold and silver, it would not be difficult to bounce an electronic frequency off the metals and research the behavior of the returned waves. We know the atomic mass of gold and silver, the number of protons/electrons, number of neutrons and the density of each metal.
AG47
Name: Silver
Symbol: Ag
Atomic Number: 47
Atomic Mass: 107.8682 amu
Melting Point: 961.93 °C (1235.08 K, 1763.474 °F)
Boiling Point: 2212.0 °C (2485.15 K, 4013.6 °F)
Number of Protons/Electrons: 47
Number of Neutrons: 61
Classification: Transition Metal
Crystal Structure: Cubic
Density @ 293 K: 10.5 g/cm3
Color: silver
Number of Energy Levels: 5
- First Energy Level: 2
- Second Energy Level: 8
- Third Energy Level: 18
- Fourth Energy Level: 18
- Fifth Energy Level: 1
AU79
Name: Gold
Symbol: Au
Atomic Number: 79
Atomic Mass: 196.96655 amu
Melting Point: 1064.43 °C (1337.5801 K, 1947.9741 °F)
Boiling Point: 2807.0 °C (3080.15 K, 5084.6 °F)
Number of Protons/Electrons: 79
Number of Neutrons: 118
Classification: Transition Metal
Crystal Structure: Cubic
Density @ 293 K: 19.32 g/cm3
Color: Gold
Color: Gold
Number of Energy Levels: 6
- First Energy Level: 2
- Second Energy Level: 8
- Third Energy Level: 18
- Fourth Energy Level: 32
- Fifth Energy Level: 18
- Sixth Energy Level: 1
Just imagine if one day you were at home and police officer came to your day regarding a burglary in your neighborhood. Let’s say they were tipped off to the precious metals in your house by the aforementioned GPR or local police records of bullion buying and selling. You might consider opening the door, at least, to talk to the officers. Upon doing so, the police officers force their way into your home and, fearing for your life, you realize the officers are there to steal one thing from you: your silver bullion. They hold a knife to your throat as they tie you up.
Sadists in Costumes Police the Streets of America
That’s basically what happened to a 52-year old man in Chilliwack, Canada, who was robbed of US $750,000 worth of silver bars in broad daylight. However, the burglar’s posed as police officers before being let in, exploiting the man’s trust of authority. Police officers exploit that trust at epidemic proportions. Because it would have been too expensive to cover, the silver was not insured.
There are options outside of one’s home for storing silver and precious metals, such as a local bank branch. These come with considerable risk as well, however, as the bank cannot be perfectly secure and if there is any sort of emergency during non-banking hours you might not have access to your precious metals. Perhaps a local bullion dealer offers another solution, but the issue here arises both in limiting business hours and whether or not your metals are allocated or unallocated, and whether you can trust the business or not. Further, in the case that a government agency put pressure on a specific dealer, how can you be sure what their reaction would be and if your assets would be safe and kept private.
Related Article: How to Securely Store Your Precious Metals
Bullion dealers are under vast pressure to follow the Know Your Customer privacy-evading banking tactics of the post-9/11 world. With as much money that flows through even small-to-medium sized bullion dealers, they will take measures to protect their business by recording personal details of customers. If your metal is being shipped to you, then it is likely that your name and address has been recorded by your bullion dealer. Unlike with bitcoin, it is not easy through a non-local bullion dealer to purchase an item, pay for the item privately and have your item – whatever accoutrement if may be – shipped to Joe Whomever You Like.
This is key. As was reported here, the feds are already targeting gold and silver shops as potential tax evaders and money-laundering operations. These shops hold sensitive personal information regarding the holders of silver bullion, leaving one who purchases gold and silver at risk in the face of potential rogue employees or demanding local, state or federal agencies auditing a such dealer:
Recently brought to the attention of SV is the possible visitation by federal agents of retail-level gold and silver dealers. These visitations, it has been suggested, could also be used as ways of tricking dealers into breaking laws.
An anonymous source at a retail-level bullion dealer has told SV that, in early March 2012, his shop was visited by a thirtysomething man.
“He walked into the shop and asked for a couple of Silver American Eagles. We then informed him of the California sales tax we would have to charge on his transaction, since it was below $1500. Then he went against this and claimed that the government would not tax money, such as gold and silver, and that the other shops do not charge him tax. We went back and forth, denying dropping the tax, until he left.”
The anonymous source then says that the individual went outside and sat in a white Dodge van sporting government license plates.
Of course, it is no surprise that the federal government would be keen on such schemes. That the mans’ line of reasoning so closely followed the line of thinking sported by libertarian-minded gold and silver holders suggests that the argument against the sales tax could have been scripted.
Contrary to popular belief, precious metals do not offer the most supreme form of financial privacy. As the world moves towards a united dystopian play, there is no telling what sort of new technology governments and debt collectors will employ in the pursuit of discovering secret financial assets. In the new world order, holding precious metals must only be considered as one private means of storing value.
All the risks of using bitcoins are present when using the dominant financial system. It’s quite obvious considering the systemic fraud of the way things are that bitcoin can only be safer. As long as you stay away from fantastical bitcoin schemes promising too-good-to-be-true returns, so far in the bitcoin experiment you would have been fine assuming you did not wrongly speculate on market volatility. The reasons to use bitcoin are much greater and diverse than the reasons to use the dominant financial system. For instance, allowing bitcoins to freely circulate will increase options for payment available to all consumers. From a merchants’ perspective, bitcoins can only bring more business, not less.
The costs of using bitcoin for both consumers and businesses are much less than dominant financial system instruments like debit cards and credit cards. For a business, once a transaction is completed, there are no chargebacks on bitcoin, a relief to the small business owner who has ever had to deal with such a chargeback. The processing fee at places like BitPay is less than 1%. The bitcoins can be easily exchanged into USD, CAD, MXN, EUR or GBP and direct deposited into their account daily for a mere 2.69% fee including the processing fee.
Where silver and precious metals fail to protect your privacy and you from political persecution, bitcoin does not. Precious metals serve as a surefire way to preserve ones assets in the face of global currency devaluation. A maelstrom of defaults, inflation, deflation, hyperinflation will attitudinize the future, and from the ashes of a standardized, stubborn system many solutions and safehavens help individuals posture themselves in more ways than one. Of course, holding bitcoin alone is, in my opinon, as risk as holding any one thing. In the modern age, we can not only move into alternative currencies, we can diversify in them as well.
Rebel’s Portfolio: Precious Metals & Bitcoin
2012-09-20 02:23:37
Source: http://silvervigilante.com/the-near-future-when-silver-does-not-protect-your-privacy/
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