Today, shocking news on the surveillance front…

It involves spy balloons… the Pentagon… and the permanent surveillance of U.S. citizens without their consent.

And as you’ll learn… it’s another worrying development in the rapid rollout of a U.S. surveillance state.

First, a quick note on this week’s stock market action…

Yesterday, the S&P 500 plummeted 3%. It’s the second time in two weeks we’ve seen stocks fall off a cliff like that.

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And as stocks tanked yesterday, safe-haven gold spiked.

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Gold is now up 19% so far this year. That compares with a gain of 13% for the S&P 500.

But forewarned is forearmed…

Longtime readers know our mission at The Daily Cut (and everything we publish at Legacy Research).

We put you ahead of the big money-making market trends. But we also keep a lookout for collapses… disasters… and ruinous losses.

And we’ve been urging you to play defense in your portfolio all year.

Simply put, we’ve been recommending you up your levels of cash and gold… and take some profits on your stocks.

But with surveillance on the rise, a bear market could be the least of your worries…

We’ve been tracking the rapid rise in state surveillance powers since we launched The Daily Cut last August. The reason is simple…

There’s no point in having wealth if you no longer have your freedom.

And as we’ve been showing you, the U.S. is following the lead of China… and rapidly becoming a surveillance state.

U.S. police departments around the country are deploying face-recognition dragnets. And the Department of Homeland Security is already rolling out face-recognition technology at 17 airports.

Meanwhile, the eavesdropping arm of the Deep State, the National Security Agency (NSA), is vacuuming up vast troves of data. These come from Big Tech firms – such as Facebook and Google – that collect private information on every American with a smartphone or an internet connection.

Colleague Dan Denning summed it up best in an email to the team at Legacy…

The U.S. federal government wants to be the worst version of the Old Testament God – omniscient, omnipresent, vengeful and jealous.

And if the latest snooping piece by the U.S. feds doesn’t shock you… nothing will.

The Pentagon just launched spy balloons over five U.S. states…

That’s going by documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

They reveal the Pentagon has been testing experimental high-altitude surveillance balloons. Their targets: Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Illinois.

And according to the FCC filing, they’ll “provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats.”

There’s no doubt these balloons are powerful surveillance tools…

Here’s how our tech expert Jeff Brown put it to readers of The Bleeding Edge, our free technology-investing newsletter…

The balloons can monitor everything on the ground in those states in real time. This includes every moving vehicle within a 25-mile radius of each balloon.

These balloons are an amazing engineering feat. They’re solar-powered. And they rise to the stratosphere, 65,000 feet above the Earth’s surface. That means we can’t even see them. From there, they hover and monitor everyone’s activity within their surveillance net.

But the Pentagon’s spy balloons don’t just have cameras keeping an eye on folks in the five Midwestern trial states.

They also carry hi-tech radars that can track multiple vehicles, day or night, simultaneously. So the Pentagon doesn’t have to worry about weather conditions spoiling the view.

Just think of the power of this kind of surveillance…

Using these balloons, the Pentagon can track every vehicle… in every state under surveillance… wherever they go.

Maybe that’s to the union house, the church, the mosque, a political rally, or the Alzheimer’s clinic. And it’s all happening without Americans’ consent. Jeff…

The Pentagon says this is to monitor drug trafficking and homeland security threats. But it is gathering data on everyone. It will know exactly where everyone is and what they are doing at all times. U.S. taxpayers in those five states certainly didn’t consent to that.

The company behind this is Raven Aerostar. It also makes balloons for Google. They’re designed to provide internet access to areas without network coverage right now. But Google captures all the data gathered by these balloons… effectively surveilling its customers.

So the same company selling spy balloons to the Pentagon is also selling to Google. This certainly makes me uncomfortable. The eye in the sky is now watching us. It’s in five states for now. It could one day be nationwide.

This doesn’t mean all technology is bad…

Quite the contrary.

In fact, Jeff believes that owning the right tech stocks… and holding them over the long run… is critical if you’re serious about building wealth over the next decade and beyond.

And this is going to get even more important as tech fills ever-larger parts of our lives.

As we’ve been showing you, there are a number of tech megatrends already in motion. For instance, self-driving cars… artificial intelligence (AI)… and augmented reality (AR).

But there’s one piece of bleeding-edge technology that unites them all.

Jeff will be briefing Legacy readers on this next Thursday, August 22 at 8 p.m. ET. As you’ll see, we’re about to enter what he calls the “Final Phase of the 5G Boom”…

And if Jeff is right, folks have a real shot at watching a series of small investments return 500%… 1,000%… and even more.

Reserve your spot right here.

And stay tuned for Monday’s Cut

We’ll have more for you from Jeff about the 5G boom… and why it’s central to a battle against China that America must win.

Regards,

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Chris Lowe
August 15, 2019
Dublin, Ireland