Traveler

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Traveler (English for "travelers" or "wanderers") is the title of a novel that was published in 2005 in English under the title The Traveler by the author John Twelve Hawks . It is the first part of the Fourth Realm Trilogy , the second part of which The Dark River was released in the summer of 2007. The German translation by Claus Varrelmann and Eva Bonné appeared in spring 2006 under the publishing label Page & Turner by Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Munich, a company of the Random House publishing group.

The book impressed some critics and became an international bestseller.

content

The book is about an alternative contemporary reality, and is interwoven with the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism and other Eastern religions. In this fictional reality, the US and Europe are part of a society that is monitored by a secret organization, the Brotherhood of Tabula . This brotherhood aims at perfect control of the population. Its leitmotif is the Panoptikum prison designed by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham . The monitoring is done by video cameras, central databases, by identifying RFID tags and RTLS location transmitters for every citizen, implanted or housed in an ID card, infrared sensors, thermal imaging cameras and X-ray scanners . The monitoring also takes place through the evaluation of Internet data traffic and telephone connections by software of the secret services that has become known to this day , for example Carnivore . As far as today's surveillance technology is concerned, the novel moves on very well-researched terrain, on the state of the art.

The opponents of this secret organization are a handful of people who have chosen to evade surveillance by living outside the grid and the Harlequins , a handful of fighters who are the bodyguards of the spiritual guides of these people, the Travelers .

The travelers are people who, due to a hereditary disposition, are able to separate their soul, which the novel calls light , from their body. After overcoming certain barriers (water, air, earth, fire) you can switch to a few parallel worlds, called spheres .

The author wants to superficially use the plot of the novel to discuss or discuss topics such as the free will of the individual, the rapid growth of public surveillance measures , the manipulation of the masses' opinion by the mass media by spreading fear, the nature of good and evil, etc. to encourage discussion.

Fiction and reality

The control of humanity by the Brotherhood of Tabula is much like a conspiracy theory .

The monitoring measures described

Eavesdropping on radio telephone calls : The technology and the possible effects are accurately described. The interception of cell phone calls and SMS by law enforcement authorities is already legalized in German-speaking countries. The fact that satellite phones are secure is limited to the encryption of the data. The only advantage of these devices is that the user cannot be located via network access. The content of the conversations can be evaluated as soon as the code is cracked.

Use of biometric data to identify a person : The techniques are in use as described by the author. Searching for people via public surveillance cameras is common practice. However, the author does not mention the high error rate of the technology. In contrast, the techniques described for deceiving the relevant scanners are not necessarily successful.

RFID tags and skimmers : this technology is actually in the middle of its introduction. This also applies to tagging , the implantation of RFID chips under the skin of people and animals. However, as described in the novel, these chips do not need to be recharged regularly. It is now known that companies tryto monitorthe whereabouts of their employees using RFID tags (so-called choke point locating ).

Locating balls : The use of mini transmitters to locate people, animals and objects has long been common practice. The constant miniaturization of these transmitters is what makes technology progress.

Location of GPS receivers : GPS receivers also have compromising emissions. This radiation alone cannot be used to track the receiver over long distances. Systems that are used to locate vehicles, for example, have GPS receivers as well as active transmitters that transmit the relevant data, for example via cellular telephone networks. Remote control of vehicles is technically not possible via GPS, since no addressing and no return channel are defined for GPS. Either appropriately secured vehicles have additional receivers for telemetry signals or a control to which the position of the vehicle is transmitted from the GPS receiver and which enables or blocks control pulses depending on the location.

Splicer : Animals that have been genetically engineered into fighting machines and can repair damaged organs are pure fiction. The fact is that animals are bred and trained for fighting purposes. The result could then look like the splicers described.

Software-supported monitoring of internet traffic : The monitoring of e-mail and online behavior of internet users is a reality (Echelon system). This applies not only to the Internet, which is monitored by the FBI's Carnivore system, but also to many company networks (intranets) that are monitored on behalf of company management. In fact, texts with suspicious keywords are evaluated by these programs. Disguising messages and avoiding certain keywords is a common countermeasure. The assignment of any data traffic to its sender should be largely possible by storing the connection data with the Internet service provider.

Thermal imaging cameras : Thermal rays cannot deliver an image through massive walls that reproduces contours, as described in the novel. You can record the heat radiation from people and objects only when you are directly looking at it and also only show the traces of a person for a certain period of time when you are directly looking at it. However, infrared radiation and visible light are attenuated and scattered by massive walls.

Conclusion

The book is a well-researched, exciting adventure novel. The author shows the realities of a surveillance state and the influencing of the masses. There are references to the worldview of Asian religions. The defense against general surveillance by levitating heroes is unrelated to physics. It is a dystopian novel, the author warns of the possibility of a world of total surveillance.

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