If you have had a chance to look around today, you may have seen increase of smart phone zombies walking around parks and neighborhoods. I witnessed at least two close calls near a train stop and on the train, I saw at least 6 people buried in their phones looking for Poke balls and eggs.

Yes, you heard right, Poke balls. Pokémon is back after 20 years of what I thought was obscurity is now a new game for your smart phone where people are urged to get up off their butts and use their phone to go to real world locations to find Poke stuff.

However, being a so-called conspiracy analyst, I have to be the party pooper and warn you that while searching for Pokémon in the game, you and your phone get the bonus of becoming an Orwellian real time spy bot, complete with video, audio and tracking your every movement. Not to mention records of whom you interact with.

It sounds like a game that creates an immediate and convenient panopticon complete with data mining capabilities and interaction analysis. This would also raise alarms for any discerning individual with regard to privacy.

I guess anyone could have figured that one out, right?

So far, we have not heard of any fatalities happening because of the mega-hyped app but I predict there will be all kinds of problems that will spring up from a game that is a great opportunity to create candidates for Darwin’s waiting room.

While I applaud a new game that gets kids and others to walk, I can also tell you it will most certainly become a tool for the surveillance state and a tool for criminal activity.

Going outside and enjoying nature, talking to people, and briskly walking are a great habits for cardio vascular exercise, and, will do wonders for those obese kids that eat crap and obsess over Minecraft. However, wandering around in the middle of a city glaring at your phone, walking into people having no idea where you are or what you are doing is another thing entirely.

I know I am sounding like a critical parent but when my wife ask me at lunch what I was discussing on my show I told her “Pokemon Go” and two teenagers with skateboards were distracted and looked up and said “yea.”

In its first days, Pokémon Go is going fast and is doing quite well.

The app’s popularity comes from the popularity of the Nintendo franchise. It also likely stems from the game’s novelty: It lets you interact with the real world, using a Smartphone as a guide in physical space. In some cases it even asks you to go to the gym and find Poke potions and other such doodads.

However, there have been some drawbacks to the game; people already are using it for criminal activity.

Opportunistic criminals have been taking advantage of the game’s mechanics to lure unsuspecting players into traps and then mug them, police say.

The O’Fallon Police Department in Missouri, announced on Sunday that it has arrested four people it suspects of using “Pokémon Go” to track down players before stealing their valuables. According to USA Today, the four suspects — all teens — are allegedly behind 10 or 11 robberies. The suspects reportedly had a handgun.

There is also a story coming from the internet that a character called Koffing, a purple little monster that actually farts a poisonous gas and has skull and crossbones on his chest was found at the Holocaust Museum.

This has prompted to the curators to say that playing Pokémon in the museum is inappropriate.

Adding insult to injury, the poisonous gas emitting monster is seen on player’s smart phones hovering near the Helena Rubenstein Auditorium, which by the way shows testimonials of Jews that survived the gas chambers.

This story comes from the Washington Post on a tip from a deleted post online; however, there are other websites and Twitter posts that say Koffing appearing at the Museum is not a hoax.

Niantic Labs is the game’s co-creator. It is a Skunkworks project that was created inside Google six years ago. It spun out of Google last fall, but has kept its core objective: Tapping in Google Maps massive mapping data for mobile games that co-mingle with the real world.

Niantic released its first multiplayer game, called Ingress, in 2012.

Niantic, which was formed by John Hanke.

Hanke founded Keyhole, which was funded by CIA investment, which later became Google Earth.

Keyhole received funding from a firm called In-Q-Tel, a government-controlled venture capital firm that invests in geospatial surveillance. The funds In-Q-Tel gave Keyhole mostly came from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), whose primary mission is “collecting, analyzing, and distributing geospatial intelligence.”

Another problem is privacy advocates are saying that with any app you need to be careful about who you give your information to.

Lots of apps have sketchy privacy policies and that’s nothing new. But the first set of alarms go off as soon as you realize that Pokémon Go’s policy does seem a bit more liberal than most, because not only are you giving Pokémon Go access to your location and camera, you’re also giving it full access to your Google account.

Granted, Pokémon Go has a perfectly legitimate reason to want access to things like your location and camera. It needs the former to put you on the right map and the latter to make use of its augmented reality feature. But with those allowances, Pokémon Go (or rather, its parent company Niantic) not only knows where millions of people are at any given point, they could also very well figure out who they’re with, what’s going on around them, and where they’re likely headed next.

So let’s say you are an if you are an Intel agency and you want photos of the inside of a home or business, you just spawn desirable Pokémon monster, ball, egg, or potion and any other related objects there, and let totally unaware and distracted citizens take the photos for you, with devices they paid for, and those citizens pay for the experience.

It turns everyone into spy bots and actually creates a voluntary panopticon.

A panopticon is actually a well-designed prison where there is a tower in the middle where the watchman can see every prisoner.

The panopticon allows a watchman to observe occupants without the occupants knowing whether or not they are being watched. As a metaphor, the panopticon is now being used as a way to trace the surveillance tendencies of Orwellian or despotic governments. It is an easy euphemism that defines the way surveillance is used today and what Pokémon Go seems to be.

If someone is lured by an alphabet agency into a location where there is a pokemonster, all they have to do is snap photos of the place, confirm they were there and have all of the photos and locations sent to a massive database with the augmented Pokémon removed obviously. The photos will be GPS tagged, as well as having the phones internal gyro embed x/y/z orientation of the camera angle in the phone. These photos could be put together, much like Google street view but now more intrusive.

It’s easy to see why the CIA would have an interest in the software behind Pokémon Go; the game utilizes the player’s camera and gyroscope to display an image of a Pokémon as though it were in the real world, such as the player’s apartment complex or workplace bathroom.

Software like that could theoretically turn millions of Smartphone users into spies who take real-time, ground-level footage of their cities and homes, reaching into dark alleyways and basements which spy satellites and Google cars can’t reach.

Evil geniuses I am sure are marveling at this secret spy tool.

Something similar to this was seen in the Batman film, The Dark Knight. Bruce Wayne intentionally places back door software into cell phones sold by his company to implement a city-wide sonar grid in order to find the whereabouts of the Joker.

Luscious Fox, the character played by Morgan Freeman sums it up quiet well in the film after seeing the panopticon made by Bruce Wayne saying, “Beautiful, Unethical, Dangerous.” He tells Batman that spying on 30 million people is not his job and that after he helps him with the surveillance, he will resign from Wayne Enterprises.

So as you’re catching Pokeballs with all the other sheep, you very well may be creating a cache of high-res, data-rich images to get siphoned directly into the NSA and CIA data base located in Bluffdale, Utah.

At last glance, Pokémon Go is surpassing Porn as everybody’s favorite search term on Google. Since July 8th, Over 60% of those who have downloaded the app in the US are using it daily, meaning around 3% of the entire US Android population are users of the app. This metric, which we refer to as Daily Active Users, has put Pokémon GO neck and neck with Twitter, and in a few more days, Pokémon GO will likely have more Daily Active Users than Facebook.

The app was being used for an average of 43 minutes, 23 seconds a day, higher than Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, and Messenger.

The average time that users spend on Facebook is nearing an hour. That’s more than any other leisure activity surveyed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the exception of watching television programs and movies an average per day of 2.8 hours.

It’s more time than people spend reading which is about 19 minutes; participating in sports or exercise about an average of 17 minutes; or social events which has now been lowered to four minutes. It’s almost as much time as people spend eating and drinking – and more time than the average person has sex.

Pokémon is about to surpass all of this. Doesn’t that make you feel a little uncomfortable?

Especially when work productivity is extremely low and our social cohesiveness is next to zero. Plus, imagine people who text while driving as they have one other distraction to deal with. In fact, the state of Washington issued a statement telling players not to drive while playing.

In a tweet today, the Washington DOT advised fans to play the game safely. “No Pokemoning from behind the wheel,” the government agency said in its message, which was accompanied by an animated GIF of the Pokémon Eevee.

There are also other government agencies that are urging players to look up once and a while and pay attention to surroundings.

This surprisingly was very bad advice for a young woman in Wyoming. Nineteen-year-old Shayla Wiggins jumped a fence to capture a nearby Pokémon, but instead discovered the dead body of a man who is believed to have drowned in the Big Wind River.

So now I guess you have to decide for yourself if you wish to make a Faustian bargain with Pikachu — the little yellow devil who once gave Japanese children photosensitive epilepsy when a Pokémon episode strobed red flashes and cause them all to go into a trance and throw up.

After 20 years, a different Pokémon sickness has returned and this time it has everyone in a trance making them unlikely spies for the shadowy elite that want full spectrum dominance.

Let the games begin.

https://soundcloud.com/groundzeromedia/a2016-7-12

Written by Ron Patton