May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-) Skepticism and critical thinking is not panacea, but can help to understand the world better
Total Surveillance Regime: Big Uncle is Watching You
Mass surveillance is equal to totalitarism. As Joseph Goebbels professed:
"if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear"
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
- Goethe
1984 is supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual
The troubling aspect about these disclosures is not so much their significance today, but
what surveillance on the nation bodes for the future. Given human nature I am not optimistic.
NSA staff and private contractors have unfettered access to this information. I have a hard
time believing that not one of them has used that access to information for personal or political
gain. This system makes insider trading, industrial espionage, blackmail, and extortion an almost
inevitable outcome. --
The Guardian (from comments).
A new round of debates about the dominance of military industrial complex and the level of control
it exerts over the US civil society was caused by recent revelations about NSA activities in the USA.
It might well be the Rubicon was crossed around JFK assassination time. On August 17, 1975 Senator
Frank Church stated on NBC's Meet the Press without
mentioning the name of the NSA (Church
Committee - Wikipedia ):
In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government
has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through
the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or
potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned
around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability
to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no
place to hide.
If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the
technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to
impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort
to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within
the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there
to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess
this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that
abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.[11]
In other words expansionism and mission creep are immanent qualities, the second nature of large bureaucracies, and
unless there is countervailing force. In the absence of countervailing forces they tend to escape from civil control and form a state within a state.
In a way any state with powerful three-letter agencies stand with one leg in a tyranny, even if it
calls
itself a democracy. And that fact was already known to everybody in 1975 (Church
Committee). Actually just after president
Kennedy assassination, which, no matter which version of events you adopt, in all cases indirectly pointed
out that three letter agencies jumped out of control of civil government. As one Guardian reader commented
"The pernicious thing is that it is in the nature of bureaucracies in general and spy agencies in particular
to expand beyond reason unless there is effective oversight."
The nature of bureaucracies in general and spy agencies in particular to expand beyond
reason unless there is effective oversight. In the case of intelligence agencies it has proven
impossible for civil authorities to control them. Recent stories about CIA spying on the US
Senate Intelligence Committee just prove this.
A statement issued Thursday morning by a C.I.A. spokesman said that John O. Brennan, the
agency’s director, had apologized to Ms. Feinstein and the committee’s ranking Republican,
Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, and would set up an internal accountability board to review
the issue. The statement said that the board, which will be led by a former Democratic senator,
Evan Bayh of Indiana, could recommend “potential disciplinary measures” and “steps to address
systemic issues.”
But anger among lawmakers grew throughout the day. Leaving a nearly three-hour briefing about the
report in a Senate conference room, members of both parties called for the C.I.A. officers to be
held accountable, and some said they had lost confidence in Mr. Brennan’s leadership. “This is a
serious situation and there are serious violations,” said Mr. Chambliss, generally a staunch ally
of the intelligence community. He called for the C.I.A. employees to be “dealt with very
harshly.”
Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado and another member of the Intelligence Committee,
demanded Mr. Brennan’s resignation. “The C.I.A. unconstitutionally spied on Congress by hacking
into the Senate Intelligence Committee computers,” he said in a written statement. “This grave
misconduct not only is illegal but it violates the U.S. Constitution’s requirement of separation
of powers.
You can't get a more solid proof of total surveillance... Please note that Brennan
continued his tenure as the head of CIA; attempts to depose him after the incident by some Senators
failed. That suggest who was the winner in this skirmish.
That also means that contrary to common perception intelligence agencies are political players
and as such are quite capable to defend their staffing and resource consumption levels, despite inefficient waist of resources
as typical for large bureaucracies. In other words they are no longer technocratic, but tend to
emerge as political bodies, the core of the "deep
state" (see
Bureaucracy as
a Political Coalition). The story of John Brennan the former head of CIA in Obama administration
tell volumes about such tendencies. During and after 2016 Presidential elections he emerged as a
powerful political broker, later aligning with Hillary Clinton in efforts to form a political
coalition capable of deposing President Trump.
We can admire the immortal foresight and moral courage of Secretary of State Henry Stimson's who closed the Cipher
Bureau in 1929. But this highly ethical, moral and courageous act deprived the US of the capacity
to read foreign diplomatic cables as world-wide threats grew. So it was quickly reversed.
In a way technology dictates the level of government surveillance in the society and in "Internet
society" it looks like this level is permanently set on "high". That does not mean that we can't
fight it. Yes, we can and one factor that played into the hands of defenders of personal privacy is
the you can't drink from a fire hose: as soon as you connect too much information it devalues
itself. Also methods of "injecting" false metadata into your profile are reality available. for
example for Internet browsing anybody with programmable keyboard can do that. That means that you
the set of sites you visited no longer can be considered authentic in "Post-Snowden" world. That
dooms effort to assign you a level of "loyalty" based on your browsing history, which is very
temping for three letter agencies to do. Recent failed attempt to create a site that claffies
some sites are "Russian propaganda" sites belong to this category (Washington
Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group.)
But such attempts were just shifted to another domain -- "leak prevention" training:
Part of the
“Unauthorized Disclosure” training includes watching a
Fox News clip on the crackdown on leaks and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ statement
announcing an increase in criminal leak investigations. A
student guide from the Insider Threat Awareness training includes the McCarthyesque request
that employees report on each other for “general suspicious behaviors,” including “Questionable
national loyalty” such as “Displaying questionable loyalty to US government or company” or
“Making anti-U.S. comments.” Never mind that the only oath government employees take is to the US
Constitution, not to any government official or the US government itself and certainly not to a
private company.
This also opens people to browsing blackmail.
In this sense post-snowmen world is inherently more difficult for three-letter agencies to navigate.
Technology changes can really change the society. And not always in a beneficial for the society way.
There is such thing as "blowback" in technologies. We can view recent NSA activities revealed by Snowden
as a classic example of such blowback connected with the spread of Internet and cloud based
technologies. In a way Internet begets surveillance. And you can do nothing about it. As
former Sun CEO Scott McNealy (born November 13, 1954) said "You have zero privacy
anyway. Getoverit." (see also Privacy is
Dead – Get Over It).
I think that the first attempt to create a comprehensive nation-wide intelligence network that monitors
sentiments of the citizens and hunt enemies of the state goes as far back as Napoleon and his famous
minister of police Joseph Fouché.
Or may be it even goes as far back as to
Byzantine Empire with its first in history organized network of spies. As for recording of mail
envelopes, we can even claim that this function for international mail (in a form of "black chambers")
is as old as states are. In the USA it started in full force in August 1919 when
J. Edgar Hoover became head
of the Bureau of Investigation's
new General Intelligence Division—also known as the Radical Division because its explicit
goal was to monitor and disrupt the work of domestic radicals.
Recording of all email envelopes started long before email was
invented and became established practice since the WWII for all regular mail entering or leaving the
country. It just got a new name now -- collection of metadata and the technology that allow
correlation of multiple sets of metadata exposing hidden "networks".
Recording metadata of phone calls and often the calls themselves first started before WWII and technology
was first polished on international calls, which for obvious reasons are of great interest to all governments.
As intelligence agencies were one of the first to deploy computers after WWII it would be naive to
assume that IBM/360 mainframes were not used to analyze collection of metadata of international calls
as early as in
1960th.
Hoover and his chosen assistant, George Ruch monitored a variety of U.S. radicals with the intent
to punish, arrest, or deport them. Targets during this period included Marcus Garvey; Rose Pastor Stokes
and Cyril Briggs; Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman; and future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter,
whom Hoover nicknamed as "the most dangerous man in the United States". So those
radicals served a guinea pigs for polishing methods of collection of communications using electronic
means of surveillance.
So it would be a mistake
to assume that such activities started with 9/11 events and that Bush II was totally responsible
for converting the USA into national-security state. The technology was ready at least 15
years before 9/11 (explosive growth of internet in the USA started in 1996) and new methods of
collection of information that are technically available are always adopted and used by clandestine agencies. They tend to adopt technology
as soon as it is available, being, in a pervert way, classic "early adopters" of any communication
or computer technology.
And this happens not only in the USA, although the USA as the technological leader was
probably most profoundly
affected.
The creation and use of databases of personal information and the systematic records (archives) of
communications of citizens started simultaneously with NSA creation. The first targets were mail and
telegraph. Some of this experience came from specialists of Third Reich who were brought to the
country after the WWII. At the height of the Cold War
in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI. and Allen
Dulles at the CIA. aggressively recruited former Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,”
declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed
what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich. The agency hired one former
SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of “minor
war crimes.” And in 1994, a lawyer with the CIA pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into
an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania,
according to a government official (In Cold War, U.S.
Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis - NYTimes.com).
We don't know when it was extended on domestic calls, but from purely technical perspective this was
a trivial extension of already existing and polished capacity and probably abuse was stated
gradually as soon as power of computers allow that.
But what is true is that after 9/11 and the passage of the USA Patriot Act, the USA government got all the pre-conditions
necessary for installing a regime of aggressive total surveillance. Which actually was a hidden intent
and 9/11 was just a convenient pretext much like Tonkin incident in Vietnam war. And in this respect
Ed Snowden, whatever is his motivation (which might be
not as simple as most people assume), did the right thing, when he with the risk to his life informed
the US public and the world about those activities. You may approve those revelations, you may disapprove
them (and they did damage the USA as a state and devalue many methods which were extremely effective
before the revelations), but keeping them secret from the US public is a crime.
NSA technically is a data collection agency. While it has legitimate function to monitor information
that is crossing the national border as well as intercept communication of the US adversaries (which
is a very flexible category those days ;-), we need to understand that the abuse of this function is
inevitable. That actually the nature of the beast -- like any bureaucratic
organizations they tend to expand their sphere of activities and escape form control -- and in this
sense existence of powerful state intelligence agencies is incompatible with the democracy. In
this sense the appointment of
Allan Dulles (who paradoxically was appointed the director under
Eisenhower administration in 1952; Eisenhower warnings about the danger of military-industrial
complex notwithstanding) was really unfortunate.
But the capacities to do this
type of work had grown dramatically over last four decades. In a way NSA became a victim of growing
power of computers as well inherent tendency of bureaucracies, especially government bureaucracies
to expand and self-justify their expansion. The classic case was the USSR where KGB was a real "state
within the state" and sometimes it was not completely clear whether the Party controls KGB or KGB controls
the Party.
But the capacities to do this
type of work had grown dramatically over last four decades. In a way NSA became a victim of growing
power of computers and as well inherent tendency of bureaucracies, especially government bureaucracies
to expand and self-justify their expansion. The classic case was the USSR where KGB was a real "state
within the state" and sometimes it was not completely clear whether the Party controls KGB or KGB controls
the Party.
There is deep analogy between financial services and intelligence services. Both try to escape
from the control of democratic society. Both try to control the society instead of serve it. As they
operate with large and uncontrolled amount of money soon after their creation inevitably the "the
tail wagging the dog" (Merriam-Webster):
the tail wagging the dog —used to describe
a situation in which an important or powerful person, organization, etc., is being controlled by
someone or something that is much less important or powerful
At some point the permanent
unelected bureaucracy, became the shadow government instead of facilitating the decisions of elected
officials. This process proceeds quicker if a sociopath manage to slip to the role of the head of
such an organization. That's what the term "deep state" is about. Some authors such as
Douglas Horne view JFK assassination as a political coup d'état launched from the highest
levels of US leadership (JFK’s
War with the National Security Establishment Why Kennedy Was Assassinated). Here is a quote from
the foreword by Jacob G. Hornberger:
By the end of November 1961, profoundly dissatisfied with his own national security advisory
apparatus, President Kennedy had firmly pushed back against the national security establishment
(in this case the NSC, the State Department, and the CIA) by purging and/or reshuffling many of
the civilian hawks in his own administration into other positions, and by placing officials more
in line with his own views into key positions. [A change in the top leadership at the Pentagon
was to come later, in 1962.] Throughout 1961, the new President had painfully but quickly learned
to be quite skeptical of the advice he was receiving, pertaining to matters of war and peace,
from his hawkish advisors; and as 1961 progressed, John F. Kennedy repeatedly demonstrated what
the hawks in government (the majority) no doubt considered a disturbingly independent (and
increasingly all-too-predictable) frame of mind in regard to the national security
recommendations he was receiving from the “sacred cows” and “wise men” in Washington, D.C. As I
shall demonstrate in these essays, by the end of 1962, the national security establishment in
Washington D.C., which had quickly come to know JFK as a skeptic during
1961, had come to view him as a heretic; and by November of 1963, the
month he was assassinated, they no doubt considered him an apostate,
for he no longer supported most of the so-called “orthodox” views of the Cold War priesthood.
Increasingly alone in his foreign policy judgments as 1963 progressed, JFK was nevertheless
proceeding boldly to end our “Holy
War” against Communism, instead of trying to win
it. In retrospect it is clear that the national security establishment wanted to
win our own particular “jihad” of the
post-WW II era by turning the Cold War against the USSR into a “hot war,” so that we could
inflict punishing and fatal blows upon our Communist adversaries (and any other forces we equated
with them) on the battlefield. It was this desire for “hot war” by so
many within the establishment — their belief that conventional “proxy wars” with the Soviet Bloc
were an urgent necessity, and that nuclear war with the USSR was probably inevitable — to which
President Kennedy was so adamantly opposed. And it was JFK’s profound determination to avoid
nuclear war by miscalculation, and to eschew combat with conventional arms unless it was truly
necessary, that separated him from almost everyone else in his administration from 1961
throughout 1963, as events have shown us.
Total surveillance is not so much about terrorism. It's also and mainly about the control of
the society by unelected elite. Terrorism is a false pretext
-- a smoke screen, if you like. Let's state clearly -- the main goal of total surveillance was the same
since it was introduced in Nazi Germany: "Let them be afraid". It's the same as in former German Democratic Republic (with
its famous Stasi). In all cases it is to prevent any challenge to the ruling elite or in the
terminology of neoliberal "color revolutions" prevent "regime
change", unless it is initiated by more powerful foreign three letter agencies and
significantly higher level of financial resources (that's why three letter agencies of newly minted
xUSSR state in several cases were unable to prevent color revolutions of their territories).
In other words surveillance and intelligence agencies are part and parcel of the totalitarian state.
And Sheldon Volin actually created a term for such "pseudo-democratic" regime --
inverted totalitarism.
Unlike classic totalitarism it generally tend to avoid using violence to crush the
dissidents and opposition to the current elite. More "soft" subversive methods are enough. In this
sense the story of crushing "of "Occupy Wall Street" movement is a testament of their
efficiency.
State actors and well funded terrorist organization are a difficult nut to crack. Any
"custom" encrypted communication is far more difficult for intercepting party to decode, then
"standard" encryption methods. Some encryption methods virtually guarantee that it is
impossible without stealing the key. Even detecting the fact of communication for such parties
nowadays is very difficult as it can be hidden in some "carrier" transmission (steganography)
or split into multiple channels. Those who have access
to technology and to "know how" including the most recent exploits are well armed to
resist attempt to intercept their communication. That includes most powerful foreign states.
That means that NSA has great difficulties intercepting and decoding traffic
that is intended to be hidden from state actors. Modern encryption systems such
One-Time-Pad virtually guarantee
that you get the "insider information" of the pad used (typically from a mole) they are
impenetrable. Even regular encryption methods can be enhanced by additional step of compressing the
files transmitted (which by and large eliminates redundancy if done properly and do not leave "tell"
sign of the method encryption used) . Decoding is easier when standard algorithms with
possible backdoors are used but even in this case I have doubts
(Triple DEC). That's why attempts to compensate this deficiency are being developed and one
obvious path is intercepting regular citizen communication of foreign countries which are
considered to be unfriendly or adversarial to current the US foreign policy goals (which is the
expansion and maintenance of global the Us-led neoliberal empire).
But the situation with "open" traffic is completely different. Million of people
outside the USA use Facebook, Amazon, Gmail and similar platforms. Which makes them a low
hanging fruit and here NSA is the king of the hill. Government officials also sometimes use
regular email and social sites (see
Hillary Clinton email scandal).
So intelligence agencies were provided with an important opening (and it might well be that the
dramatic growth of Webmail has something to do with their interests)
At the same time the abundance of information, as Biney mentioned, creates another problem -- the problem
of "drinking from a fire hose" -- they tend to collect too much information and are swamped with the volume. Of cause correlation of open traffic
of "suspicious persons" can reveal some hidden information, but this is a pretty expensive
undertaking, because by definition (unless this is Hillary Clinton ;-) those persons are aware that they are watched,
typically are
trained to avoid surveillance (including electronic) and behave accordingly. for example
General Petraeus used an interesting method to communicate with his
biographer and mistress (The
Washington Post) :
They wrote their "intimate messages" as
draft e-mails in a shared Gmail account,
according to the AP, allowing them to see one anothers' messages while leaving a
much fainter data trail. When messages are sent and received, both accounts record the
transmission as well as such metadata as the IP addresses on either end, something the
two seemed to be seeking to avoid.
Petraeus and Broadwell apparently used a trick, known to terrorists and teen-agers
alike, to conceal their email traffic, one of the law enforcement officials said.
Rather than transmitting emails to the other's inbox, they composed at least some
messages and instead of transmitting them, left them in a draft folder or in an
electronic "dropbox," the official said. Then the other person could log onto the
same account and read the draft emails there. This avoids creating an email trail
that is easier to trace.
With the power of modern computers,
decoys and steganography offer almost unlimited possibility to obscure the traffic.
Concern about the NSA assault on our privacy is no paranoid fantasy. In the
words of an agency PowerPoint slide released by Snowden, the goal is to "collect it all", "process
it all" and "know it all". The massive surveillance program is a clear violation of the Forth
amendment prohibiting "unreasonable searches" of "persons, houses, papers, and effects" without
"probable cause."
- Gene Epstein. "In defence of Snowden",
review of "No Place to Hide" Barrons, Jan 5, 2015, p 17
According to
UN Human Right Council Report (17 April 2013) innovations in technology not only have increased
the possibilities for communication and protections of free expression and opinion, enabling anonymity,
rapid information-sharing and cross-cultural dialogues. They also simultaneously increased opportunities
for State surveillance and interventions into individuals’ private communications facilitating to transformation
of the state into National Security State, a form of corporatism characterized
by continued and encompassing all forms of electronic communication electronic surveillance of all citizens.
Now every Internet or smartphone users probably understand that since probably 2003 or even earlier that that he/she is watched 24
by 7, or as Soviet dissidents called it "Was placed under the [surveillance] dome". Some question that we need to ask ourselves
are:
When the quantity of collected data turns into quality. At some point the amount of collected
information about the person, no matter how trivial, allows things that are drastically different
then simple monitoring of traffic for suspicious elements. It is essentially step up from STASI-style dossier mechanism on most
adult citizens of the USA (and not only USA). Accidentally STASI was created exactly the same year
as NSA, in 1950 and now some of their activities look more and more like identical twins.
And with the level on Internet communications many people have, such "per person" dossier quickly
reaches to the "critical mass" of facts
In a way
You really already
live in a virtual prison watched 24 by 7 by unknown to you guards. For example, just tracking metadata of all
the calls from your cell phone along with GPS information is almost equivalent hiring a private detective to watch
you. Add to this all your credit card records, Amazon orders and browsing records, your emails and SMS and you can beat capability of
a regular private "gum shoes" watching you, by a wide margin spending just cents of a
dollar.
And this is only a start as I did not mention your own "self-revelation"
activities on social sites like Facebook. And if you add to this your web logs (which, by the way, record every
site you visited and every page you browsed) and your posts at Web forums (if any), photo sharing and
your files at cloud storage sites (if you participate)
along with the ability to store collected information for, say, 20 years or your lifetime electronically, and STASI efforts in
human surveillance looks like an expensive and amateurish overkill. Using Internet and
smartphone surveillance you can get much better
information on an individual for much less money/effort using modern technology alone, without any
gum shoes and/or informers.
Note that in this case there no need to look deep into your personal computer (other to collect
private keys in case you use encryption). You essentially volunteer most of the data by the fact
that you are using cell phone, credit card and email/social sites. In other words as
Scott McNealy noted in
1999 Privacy
is Dead – Get Over It. As Bruce Shneier noted (Metadata
Equals Surveillance - Schneier on Security):
Back in June, when the contents of Edward Snowden's cache of NSA documents were
just starting to be revealed and we learned about the NSA collecting phone
metadata of every American, many people -- including President Obama -- discounted
the seriousness of the NSA's actions by saying that it's just metadata.
Imagine you hired a detective to eavesdrop on someone. He might plant a bug in
their office. He might tap their phone. He might open their mail. The result would
be the details of that person's communications. That's the "data."
Now imagine you hired that same detective to surveil that person. The result
would be details of what he did: where he went, who he talked to, what he looked
at, what he purchased -- how he spent his day. That's all metadata.
When the government collects metadata on people, the government puts them under
surveillance. When the government collects metadata on the entire country, they
put everyone under surveillance. When Google does it, they do the same thing.
Metadata equals surveillance; it's that simple.
Metadata proved to be an extremely powerful way to reveals the person lifestyle and views.
Actually no less clearly then the direct interception
of the content of emails and phone calls. Systematic, total analysis of metadata of cell phone
calls was first used against Iraq insurgents as knowledge of Arabic language is not a strong point
of US military, or three letter agencies. And it proved to be a great success, as it allows to narrow the set of suspects
quickly and cheaply (the USA controlled all cell networks in the country). But later this initial
success was extended and became a universal surveillance tool within the USA, which is more powerful
then in Iraq as you can also analyze the content of messages such as emails or instant messages.
And as you add to phone calls Internet communications logs and metadata such as emails and web logs
and top it with credit card transactions, any person is actually like a bug under extremely powerful
and very cheap microscope.
Should you think twice about what are you sharing with others via your Web communications?
to some extent you should. Pointless relevation of information about yourself but also about your family and friends
is dangerious. The sad truth is that just by
the fact of using all those modern gargets and social networks you already is sharing a lot more personal
information than you intend to share... This self-exposure is actually a build-in feature
of sites such as Facebook. And taken as a whole for a considerable period of time your online activities
create a personal cloud of information about you. Which can along with the state be used by
criminals or other parties. It is not that NSA knows about you more then your
spouse, but it knows enough. And as you can see from the picture below is not a good thing. Look at the picture attentively,
it really deserves your uninterrupted attention:
Even if we assume that data collection is passive and never used, it is like a ticking
bomb or "skeleton in the closet" and as such is a powerful method of control of population. Not
the different from what was used by KGB in the USSR or STASI in East Germany. And probably
more effective as quick dissipation of Occupy Wall Street crowds had shown us.
So it does not really matter much what the data are collected for and what is the official justification
of such a collection. The mere fact of collection changes the situation to the worse, making the opposition
to the system practically impossible and personally costly. The net result is what is matter. And the net result definitely
resembles a move in the direction of a tyranny of the top 1%. As Senator Frank Church said in 1975:
"I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to
it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology
operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That
is the abyss from which there is no return.".
Today his words sound even more true then in 1975 when computers were still in their infancy and
mainframes dominated the computer landscape. With the proliferation of cheap electronic devices such
as PCs and laptops, tablets and cell phones this really became "the abyss from which there is
no return".
So the real, the key goal is not what is officially declared (Orwell style permanent war on terrorism).
It is control of population like in was in the USSR and Eastern Germany. In a way we are all Eastern
Germans now, but in a completely different sense then Kennedy meant when he proposed his famous
phrase
(Ich bin ein Berliner)
Convenience of access to information has a side effect that it makes collection of information about
you trivial and at the same time comprehensive. It is to keep the elite safe from common folks, not
all those lies about national security. It is all about the security of the elite.
The story of J. Edgar
Hoover suggests that "knowledge is power" and the top brass of intelligence agencies routinely
and consistently develops a pathological addiction to collecting "skeletons in the closet" for the
people in power. This is a part of more complex trend due to which intelligence agencies often
are called as "shadow government". Often such people actually derive pleasure from having power over
nation politicians due to knowing some secret and embarrassing information on them.It is
in this sense (and also die to capability to conduct clandestine operations) troika of NSA, CIA and
FBI represent real, although shadow government of the country. This is the danger Senator Church
warned us, but the horse probably left the barn at the time of assignation of President Kennedy.
Please note that none of presidents was able to fire
J. Edgar Hoover He died
in his position of the head of FBI. The ability to manipulate other, even very powerful people is
very tempting. As Kissinger used to say "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac." A related questions
are:
Whether NSA spied and "collected dirt" on members of Congress? Some information suggests
that they did:
Is executive branch interested in continuation of this practice? The answer is yes.
As Conor Friedersdorf noted on Feb 5, 2014 in
The Atlantic magazine "The phone dragnet gives the executive branch all the information
it needs to blackmail or discredit multiple legislators. It's a temptation to abuse."
Does NSA directly or indirectly has ties to the financial sector especially related to
the providing them with the information on the flow of funds of the foreign competitors ?
(see
Asia
Times, Dec 18, 2013). As
Henry A.
Wallace noted:
"Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the
common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do
not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic
extortion.
Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political
power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they
may keep the common man in eternal subjection.
They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the
Constitution.
They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time
of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead. "
..."If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power
ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States.”
It the situation irreversible? In other words did 1984 dystopia materialized in slightly
different, slightly more gentle form? Probably yes. Cutting funds to three letter agencies would
be a small step in right direction. But the main value of 9/11 for the US establishment was that
it made such moves impossible. Also the elite as a whole is not interesting in dismantling the tool
that serve its interests so well even if it has some side effects on the elite members themselves
(looks at the discussion of surveillance over Trump and members of his team).
A related question is:
Is transformation of USA into USSA (United Secret Services of America) compete or just
started. The answer is that it is almost complete. This is just another confirmation of
The Iron Law of Oligarchy
All-in-all it's a good time to smell the coffee and talk about the rise of a new mutation of totalitarism
(or may be even neofascism -- as it is, essentially, the merger of corporate and state interests) in the
US after 9/11. That's exactly what this "Internet-inspired" flavor of total surveillance due to modern
technical capabilities means. There is also distinct shadow of STASI in all those activities. And some
countries got into similar trap before, so nothing is new under the sun. As Reinhold Niebuhr noted:
"Communism is a vivid object lesson in the monstrous consequences of moral complacency about
the relation of dubious means to supposedly good ends."
There is actually little difference between total surveillance as practiced by NSA and what was practiced
by three letters agencies of Eastern block dictatorships such as STASI and KGB. The key goal in both
cases is protection and preservation of power of existing elite against the will of common people. So
this is more about oppression of 99.9% from top 0.1% then surveillance per see.
We should view Snowden revelations in a larger context. Much of what he revealed about militarization
of cyberspace was already known at the time when
Flame and
Stuxnet worms were discovered in 2011. He just dot the i's and cross the t's , so speak. As a result
of his revelations, as
The
National Interest noted:
An increasing number of adversaries and even allies are coming to believe that the United
States is militarizing cyberspace — and that impression of hubris and irresponsibility is beginning
to have a real-world impact.
...The Snowden leaks have brought Stuxnet, the U.S.-Israeli program allegedly used to attack Iranian
computer systems, back into public debate — and reminded us that the real damage of the Snowden
revelations will be international.
...the perception that the United States has become a danger to the global internet is a cause
for concern. In their understandable anger at the considerable damage Snowden has done (in the
near term at the very least) to the operations of NSA and their allies, U.S. security officials should
not lose sight of this fact.
Snowden’s claims build on the Stuxnet revelations. In doing so, they reinforce an impression
of overbearing U.S. cyberpower (military and commercial) being used irresponsibly. That is strikingly
at odds with the U.S. self-image as a standard bearer of internet freedom and “borderless” exchange,
but it is a view that resonates around the world.
In fact the USA policies are stimulating economic and political rivals around the globe to organize
and present unified front against this new and dangerous form of total surveillance. As well as
implement similar domestic systems. In other words a new arm race started.
As methods and infrastructure of those activities are now revealed, the genie is out of the bottle
and can't be put back -- the US now should expect the same or worse treatment from other nations.
Which can be no less inventive, or even more inventive the USA specialists in this area. And in
this new arm race economically weaker nations actually has some leverage. Blowback, a CIA term for
unintended consequences of foreign, military, or clandestine policies, can be similar to the blowback
of politically organizing Islamic radicals to fight Soviets in Afghanistan in the past.
Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, probably already
waits patiently for her meeting with the NSA brass.
Blowback can irreparably damage the ability of the United States to obtain crucial information
in foreign environments that are poorly understood in Washington. The cultural divide that exists
when operating away from home means that CIA and NSA frequently work overseas through a network of
liaison contacts. This in theory limits their activity, but it broadens their ability to collect
information that can only be plausibly obtained by a local organization with local capabilities.
Though nearly everyone also operates clandestinely outside the parameters of the established relationships
insofar as it is possible or expedient to do so, there is an awareness that being caught can
cause grave damage to the liaison relationship. Because being exposed is nearly always very
painful, such operations are normally limited to collection of critical information that the liaison
partner would be unwilling to reveal.
So while it might be comforting to claim that “everyone does it” at least some of the time,
and it may even be true that local spy agencies sometimes collaborated with NSA, the United States
has a great deal to lose by spying on its friends. This is particularly true as Washington,
uniquely, spies on everyone, all the time, even when there is no good reason for doing so.
Centralization of user activities on sites like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, LinkedIn,
with email account mainly at Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo mail along with many positive aspects has tremendous
negative side effects. The most significant is that it created a way too easy opportunity both for those
organizations as well as government agencies and large corporations to data mine email and Web communications
of millions of Americans critical about government (see
Total control:
keywords in your posts that might trigger surveillance) and all foreigners who use those
services (and that includes a significant part of European population and Russia, who have Gmail, Facebook
or Yahoo accounts). The history of "total surveillance" suggests that it tends to be abused. It is also
huge, irreparable breach on trust in relation to allies. Closely resembles the situation in family when
wife or husband learn that the other hired detective to snoop on you.
The analogy with KGB surveillance of dissidents (the Soviet term for total surveillance was "to be
under the 'dome' ") and, especially, Stasi
(viewing the film "The Lives of Others" might help to understand the phenomenon of "total surveillance")
are way too close. At the same time there is an important difference: while such regime does mean indirect
(and pretty effective) intimidation of dissidents, cases of prosecution on the base of the those data
are either few or non existent, which is a big difference with KGB or
Stasi practice. The latter aggressively
pursued those who got in their net trying either to convert them into informers or charge them with
the some suitable article of Criminal Code. In some cases that practice lead to suicides. So here we
can talk more properly talk about total surveillance an instrument of
Inverted Totalitarism, or totalitarism in velvet
gloves.
We are talking about "passive total surveillance" and temporary (which might be several years or
your lifetime) storage of all intercepted data. But in a way, Senator McCartney was probably right about
"Communists sympathizers" and communist infiltration, he just was completely wrong about who they are
;-).
The famous The Police hit Every
Breath You Take should probably be the theme song for the NSA. As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us
in his famous speech:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous
rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Snowden revelations are not something new. The only real revelation was how much of it was going
on domestically and gory details of such activities. Before 9/11 the NSA was basically prohibited from
operating domestically. Of course it violates those prohibitions, but there were no systematic internal,
all encompassing technical surveillance infrastructure in place. Now it is build and is deployed nation-wide.
And that's a big change, big difference. Due to "novel" interpretation of a few provisions in the Patriot
Act they created domestic dragnet which encompass most types of Internet communications. In addition
to intercepting more then 70% of Internet traffic they also enjoy direct access to major cloud providers.
Total continued surveillance even without taking any action on collected data is totalitarian by
its nature as it put severe restrictions of the freedom of expression. And like in the USSR, it does
change people behavior on the Web. People start thinking about consequences and this page is one of
attempts to collect information that might help you to see "bigger picture".
The key mechanism here, well known to those who used to live in the USSR before its dissolution is
that people do react on the fact that everything they email, visit, buy on Amazon, etc is registered
in giant database outside of their control. Internet will never be the same for most people after Snowden
revelations...
The key mechanism here, well known to those who used to live in the USSR before its dissolution
is that people do react on the fact that everything they email, visit, buy on Amazon, etc is registered
in giant database outside of their control. Internet will never be the same for most people after
Snowden revelations...
For example, no one in sound mind can now trust "cloud services" provided by Facebook, Google, Yahoo,
Microsoft, etc. So attractiveness of Gmail, Hotmail and such are now different, then it was before.
And separation of mail accounts between "junk mail" account and important mail account is something
to think about. With the latter never in the cloud. In a way excessive using cloud services from a fashionable
trend now became kind of indication of a person stupidity.
In a way excessive using of cloud services from a fashionable trend now became an indication
of a person stupidity. There is no real justification of providing all your emails and address
book to strangers who can abuse this information without your knowledge.
At the same time it is stupid to dramatize the situation. Still, what is really striking is the grotesque
disproportionally of all this NSA surveillance "superdome" to the task of keeping the country safe from
foreign enemies (NSA statute is about watching foreign communications), begging obvious questions of
institutional sanity and competence. They turned all their super powerful collection mechanisms inside
the country and now they drink from a firehouse. That means that the results and possibilities of abuse
are pretty much predictable. Too many false positives create real danger of not to picking up weak signal.
So the other question is "Who the hell made these decisions?" That's a lot of taxpayers money and I
am not sure that they are well spend.
As for breach of privacy anyone with connected to Internet PC, the first thing to understand
that if somebody stores data in the cloud they should not expect any privacy, unless they encrypt them.
Expecting that your unencrypted data are private is a sign of personal stupidity, no more no less. If
somebody, who is keeping his address book in Google assumes that it remains private, that his own illusion.
That has nothing to do with the reality.
And it not that only NSA threatens our privacy. After all there are millions of PC users that have
computer(s) infected by spyware, which turns them into zombies, externally controlled monitoring devices.
And such software BTW can pick up and offload, or
encrypt for ransom all your data. I do not see much protest over this situation iether. Microsoft
greed and stupidity is one reason for this dismal situation, but essentially any OS is vulnerable if
enough money is invested in finding exploits. And NSA actually created a market for such exploits.
Now there are multiple "security firms" that do nothing then find "zero day" exploits and sell them
to the highest bidder (which is of course government agencies). Does not this reminds you 'war
on drugs"?
In a way, any networked computer is an unsecure computer and should be treated as such.
See Privacy is
Dead – Get Over It. The same thing can be mentioned about a cell phone that is outside some metal
box. That's two basic "laws of security" in the current environment.
But more important problem here is not snooping per se, but its interaction with self-profiling that
you provide via social sites. If you are too enthusiastic about Facebook or Google++ or any similar
site and engage regularly and indiscriminately in this "vanity fair" activity that simply means Privacy is Dead
– Get Over It. You killed it yourself. The essence of the situation was exposed well in a humorous
form in the following
Amazon review of Orwell's
novel 1984
Note to US Congress and house of representatives: This is a fictional book, not an
instruction manual...
Now we know what would a perfect prototype of Bid Brother ;-). The song (Every
Breath You Take ) should probably be the theme song for the NSA. And not only NSA, but its counterparts
in other parts of the globe; I think, other things equal, citizens of some other countries would greatly
prefer NSA to their domestic counterparts.
Cell phones, laptops, Facebook, Skype, chat-rooms: all allow the NSA and other similar agencies to
build a dossier, a detailed profile of a target and anyone associated with him/her. And the number of
people caught up in this dragnet can be huge. The NSA say it needs all this data to help prevent another
terrorist attack like 9/11. They lie. In order to find the needle in the haystack, they argue, they
need access to the whole haystack. But one interesting side effect is that now they are drinking from
the fire hose, so to speak.
Another interesting side-effect of the Snowden disclosures that the term ‘metadata’ became a common
word in English language. With the growing understanding that metadata includes enough personal information
to built a detailed profile of a person without even listening into content of communications. This
technology was invented in Iraq war for fighting insurgents (were phone companies were controlled by
US) and now is applied at home. In fact, by just using electronic communications, you are sharing a
lot more personal information than you think. It's a reflection of a fact that it is very cheap to collect
and analyses information about your electronic communications. The digital revolution which led to an
explosion in cell phone and internet use, also led to an explosion of snooping after you by the governments.
We need to distinguish "total collection" of data from "total analysis" (or creation of dossiers
on everybody as was practiced by STASI and friends). Raw data contain both "signal" and "noise". Analysis
or data mining of those raw data is the process of extraction of useful signal from the noise. Of course
we should be so naive that to assume that "signal" is related to purely terrorist activities. As recently
published documents had shown, the NSA interests are much wider ;-). In bald terms, it sets out its
mission:
“Leverage unique key corporate partnerships to gain access to high-capacity international fiber-optic
cables, switches and/or routes throughout the world.”
Along with major fiber-optic cables in the US, the NSA has access to data gathered by close intelligence
partners such as Britain’s GCHQ.
Sometimes it appear to me that like Uncle Sam got "red disease" and now is trying to imitate "total
surveillance" mantra of KGB, STASI and similar agencies on a new technological level. And the key lesson
from Soviet experience is fully applicable to the current situation in the USA: when government consider
everybody as a potential enemy you better watch your back. And having a cyberstooge following your every
step more closely that it was possible for STASI spooks and informers is something you need to react
to. Reading your address book, mail, list of books that you bought or borrowed from the library, analyzing
your circuit of friends is what STASI was really good at. And it might well be that some unemployed
specialists have found a new territory to apply their substantial talents.
The Snowden documents show that the NSA runs these surveillance programs through “partnerships” with
major US telecom and internet companies. That means that if you are customer of those major telecom
and Internet companies you are like a bug under the microscope.
It is important to understand that metadata of your communications will always be exposed (it other
words you are always walking "naked" on the Internet) because those new surveillance capabilities are
immanent properties of Internet protocols, as we known it. There is no way to encrypt connection metadata:
this is technically impossible unless you owns a vast private VPN network (some large corporations do),
but even in this case I have doubts. Even snail-mail metadata are collected (and from 50th to 80th letters
were opened and selectively copied by CIA). Diplomatic mail might still be secure, but that's about
it.
Like with any new development there are countervailing trends that after Snowden revelation went
in overdrive and can seriously affect NSA capabilities.
One is switching to encrypting communication with most websites such as YouTube. That prevent simple
harvesting of video that you watched from HTTP logs (but does not prevent harvesting -- it can be done
using other methods)
The second is usage of software like Tor, although I think all connection to Tor sites are closely
monitored by NSA.
The third is usage of your own cashing DNS proxy to limit number of DNS requests you make.
I also think that all those development might give steganography a huge boost.
The other areas of technology that might get huge boost due to Snowden revelations is "Browsing imitating
internet robots" technology which permit to drown NSA collection devices in spam -- fake accesses to
web sites that is very difficult to distinguish from real browsing, but that make all statistical metrics
applied to your Web traffic useless. For example top visited pages became completely bogus.
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely".
Lord Acton(1834–1902)
As Lord Acton(1834–1902) noted long before NSA started collecting all Internet communications
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". The history of "total surveillance"
suggests that this is unavoidable side effect on the very institution that conducts: such an institution
tends to escape the control of civil society and became a shadow power, the element of "deep state".
The first grave consequence of total surveillance is that it tends to be abused. The history
of "total surveillance" suggests that this is unavoidable side effect on the very institution
that conducts: such an institution tends to escape the control of civil society and became a shadow
power, the element of "deep state".
And the ability to intercept electronic communications gives those who are in charge of such collection
tremendous political power. Please remember that
J. Edgar Hoover was director
of FBI very long time partially because he dug a lot of dirt on politicians of his time including both
Kennedys. According to President
Harry S Truman, Hoover
transformed the FBI into his private secret police force. He used the FBI to harass political dissenters
and activists, to amass secret files on political leaders, and to collect evidence using illegal methods.
Essentially for half of the century he and his organization were out of control "state within the state"
and nobody could do anything about it. Only after his death some measures were taken.
It's not that expanding bureaucracy per se is a problem. I doubt that those in the bureaucracy of
those agencies do not think about larger consequences for societies of their attempts to expand their
sphere of influence. It is much worse: they definitely knew about possible consequences, but go "full
forward' anyway preferring job promotions and expansion of their influence. Like bureaucrats often do,
they betrayed their nations like nomenklatura betrayed the people of the USSR (with a similar
fig leaf of nice slogans about freedom as a smoke screen for pretty nefarious activities).
In case of NSA, this data on you, or particular political or social movement (for example "Occupy
Wall Street") can be mined at any time, and what is even worse can be used to destroy any new political
movement. And please remember that NSA is a just part of military-industrial complex, an entity that
has some interesting political characteristics related to the term "the acquisition of unwarranted
influence" . As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us in his famous farewell speech (which introduced
the term "military-industrial complex"):
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous
rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
People seldom understand that all three letter agencies are not just part of military industrial complex,
but are the key parts. While ability of weapon manufactures to buy or just simply control Congress members
matters, three-letter agencies is where "unwarranted influence" fully materialize. By definition they
are out of control and as any bureaucracy they want to grow. That was clear to Senator Frank Church
who stated on August 17, 1975 NBC's
Meet the Press:
In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States
government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that
go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at
enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be
turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the
capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would
be no place to hide.
If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the
technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to
impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to
combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within
the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there
to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess
this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that
abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.[11]
...let us be realistic and not fall for the usual story of this being a discrete event (all the
latest surveillance, that is).
This dates back to the founding of the Financial-Intelligence-Complex during and in the aftermath
of World War II, by the Wall Streeters for their super-rich bosses, the Rockefellers, Morgans, du
Ponts, Mellons, Harrimans (now Mortimers), etc.
The most important factor that needs to be taken into account is the total surveillance make organized
opposition to the regime impossible. So welcome to nicer, gentler, but no less totalitarian world of
1984 (aka "Back in USSR"). The key equation is very simple:
total surveillance = total control
That simple fact was well understood by various dictators and totalitarian regimes long ago, but
none of them has had even a tiny fraction of technical capabilities NSA has now. I think one
of the reason that Occupy movement completely dissipated so fast was that they were like
a bug under microscope of the government. And government want them to stop harassing Wall Street sharks
for their 2008 crisis misdeeds.
Another important effect of "total surveillance" is instilling fear in the citizenry; fear that our
thoughts, words and relationships are subject of interception and analysis; fear that all the content
we access on the internet will be exposed. This fear can cause us to withdraw from public spaces like
producing this website, censor our communications, refrain from accessing certain sites, buying certain
books, etc.
An important effect of "total surveillance" is instilling fear in the citizenry; fear
that our thoughts, words and relationships are subject of interception and analysis; fear that
all the content we access on the internet will be exposed. This fear can cause us to withdraw
from public spaces like producing this website, censor our communications, refrain from accessing
certain sites, buying certain books, etc.
In other words understanding that you are watched on 24 x 7 basis modifies behavior and makes self-censorship
your second nature exactly the same way as in any totalitarian state, but without any physical coercion.
Here is one telling comment from
Secret to Prism program Even bigger data seizure
wtpayne
Indeed: The intentions and motivations of the agencies in question; the degree of oversight
and so on; is almost irrelevant. To a certain extent, I am content to believe that the intentions
of the perpetrators is good; and that the oversight and abuse prevention systems that they have
in place are strong.
However, none of that matters if people self-censor; if people worry, not about what the
government of today will find objectionable, but what the government of tomorrow will not like.
In effect, we end up censoring ourselves from a hypothetical worst-case future government.
We will concentrate on technical side of the this operation, trying to understand how much information
can be stored about a regular "Joe Doer" based on technical capabilities that are available. Let's assume
that we deal with mostly "passive surveillance": collection and storage of vast amount of Internet traffic
on special computers using either mirrored ports on the key routers or special access to key providers
of cloud services.
We can probably assume that several layers of storage of those data exist:
Running buffer (contains all data for all users, probably just for a couple of weeks or
a month). By definition it contains "everything". All you activity, be it email, web browsing, instant
messaging of ftp transfers.
Temporary storage (which might be several years, but probably is between five and ten
years). Some of this permanent storage cloud provider users create themselves. A good example is
the Send folder they maintain on cloud email provider. This temporary storage might also include
all your Web logs and Web searches. Temporary storage of Weblogs are probably limited to metadata (proxy logs) because of large volume.
Permanent, which is invoked if you got under active surveillance or belong to some kind
of group, which is classified as treat to the state and as such is monitored. We can only guess what it involves and how much information is
stored in this case, but installation of some malware on your computer is not out of question. This
permanent storage includes but is not limited to
Your address book (several generations)
All you searches on major search engines
All your text email (not sure about graphic files)
Twits and SMS messages.
Phone conversations metadata.
Skype conversations
Technology development creates new types of communications as well as new types of government surveillance
mechanisms (you can call them "externalities" of new methods of communication). Those externalities,
especially low cost of mass
surveillance (Wikipedia), unfortunately, bring us closer to the
Electronic police state
(Wikipedia) or National Security State whether we want it or not. A
crucial element of such a state is that its data gathering, sorting and correlation on individual
citizens are continuous,
cover a large number of citizens and all foreigners, and those activities are seldom exposed.
Cloud computing as a technology that presuppose storing the data "offsite" have several security
problems, and one of them is that it is way too much "surveillance friendly" (Misunderstanding
of issues of security and trust). With cloud computing powers that be do not need
to do complex job of recreating TCP/IP conversations on router level to capture, say, all the emails.
You can access Web-based email mailbox directly with all mails in appropriate mailboxes and spam filtered.
This is a huge saving of computational efforts ;-).
It means two things:
In first thing to understand that government is profiling you even if you did nothing wrong
(see
The Government is Profiling You MIT Video). Creation of Internet just put those processes into
overdrive mode.
The modern capability of storage of data provide the capability of storing the following information
about you for several years (five years minimum), if not for a lifetime:
Metadata for your phone calls. This metadata is extremely revealing; investigators
mining it might be able to infer whether we have an illness or an addiction, what our religious
affiliations and political activities are, and so on.
Actual content (mp3 file or similar format) of all your Skype phone calls (the saying
is that "there is no free lunch" has now a new meaning here ). This is less important as getting
those calls transcribed is a difficult undertaking.
Metadata of pages that you assessed (visited websites). For a considerable period of
time (over a year) those data in a standard
HTTP log format are extremely revealing as for your political and social views, as well as
well as general interests. Sophisticated log analysis programs are available (so called proxy
log analyzers). This reveals all your downloads, software that you are using and many, many other
things. Essentially now you like a bug under the microscope.
Your purchases on major Internet sites (Amazon, eBay) and all purchases using major credit
cards. This is even more revealing then you web activity, as you put money were your interests
are. Buy books that interest you, and so on. Also extremely revealing as for your political and
social views, as well as well as general interests.
All the content you put on social sites such as Facebook. Here people usually reveal quite
a bit about themselves. As many people have presence simultaneously in Google, Facebook and
LinkedIn, total information includes your education, current qualification and possibly resume.
Address book and calendar on sides such Gmail, Hotmail or
Yahoo mail.
It puts you essentially in a situation of a bug under microscope on Big Brother. And please understand
that modern storage capabilities are such that it is easy to store several years of at least some of
your communications, especially emails.
The same is true about your
phone calls metadata,
credit card transactions and your activities on major shopping sites such as Amazon, and eBay. But here
you can do almost nothing. Still I think our support of "brick" merchants is long overdue. Phones are
traditional target of government three letter agencies (WSJ)
since the WWII. Smartphones with GPS in addition to land line metadata also provide your current geo
location. Some point out that using basic phone slightly preferable to smartphone (both in a sense
of absence of geodata and the possibility to install spyware on it -- there is simply no RAM to do
anything sophisticated). But I do not think you can do much here
I think our support of "brick" merchants is long overdue. And paying cash in the store
in not something that you should try to avoid because credit card returns you 1% of the cost of
the purchase. This 1% is actually a privacy tax ;-)
Total continued surveillance even without taking any action on collected data is totalitarian by
its nature as it put severe restrictions of the freedom of expression and it changes people behavior
on the Web. In this sense, Senator McCartney was probably right about "Communists sympathizers" and
"KGB infiltration", he just was completely wrong about who they are ;-).
The centralization of searches on Google (and to a lesser extent on Bing -- the latter is
standard with new Windows installation) are also serious threats
to your privacy. Here diversification between three or more search engines might help a bit.
But limited your time behind the computer is probably more efficient. Generally here I do not think much can be done. Growth of
popularity of Duckduckgo suggests that people are
vary of Google monopolizing the search, but it is unclear how big are the advantages. You can also save
searches as many searches are recurrent and generally you can benefit from using your personal Web proxy
with private cashing DNS server. This way to can "shrink" your radar picture, but that's about it.
If you are conserved with you "search" profile, you can replay some searches to distort it. In any
case, search
engines are now an integral part of our civilization, whether we want it or not.
Collection of your searches for the last several years can pretty precisely outline sphere of your
interests. And again technical constrains on storage of data no longer exists: how we can talk about
privacy at the age of 3 TB harddrives for $99. There are approximately
314 million
of the US citizens and residents, so storing one gigabyte of information for each citizen requires just
400 petabytes. Which is clearly within the current capabilities of storage technology. For comparison
In July 2012 it was revealed that
CERN amassed about 200 petabytes
of data from the more than 800 trillion collisions
In August 2012, Facebook's
Hadoop clusters include the largest single
HDFS cluster known, with more than
100 PB physical disk space in a single HDFS filesystem
By some estimates, storage capabilities of the US government are around 5 zeta bytes.
The analogy with KGB surveillance of dissidents (the term was "to be under the "kolpak" (dome) ")
and, especially, Stasi (viewing the
film "The Lives of Others" might help to understand the phenomenon of "total surveillance") are way
too close. And psychological effects of anticipating that you are under total surveillance are well
depicted in the final of the film The Conversation (1974)
directed by famous Francis Ford Coppola
At the same time there is an important difference: while both regimes creates implicit intimidation
and squash dissent, cases of prosecution on the base of the those data are either few or non existent.
Which is a big difference with KGB or
Stasi practice, which aggressively pursued those dissidents who got in their net, trying either
to convert them into informers, or prosecute them using the existing articles of Criminal Code. In some
cases that led to suicides. So here we can talk more about
Inverted Totalitarism, a velvet gloves mode
of suppressing of dissent.
Still it is now dramatically more clear then before that centralization of email accounts and user
activities on sites like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, LinkedIn, with email accounts mainly
at Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo mail is far from being a positive development. Along with many positive
aspects has tremendous negative side effects. Essentially it turns users into spies on themselves in
a way that would be a dream by Stasi. The most significant is that it created an easy opportunities
to data mine email databases both for those organizations as well as various government agencies and,
possibly (in a limited way for special payment) by large corporations.
Those tendencies probably should be at least resisted, but we do not have means to reverse them.
Attempts to data mine email and Web communications of millions of Americans critical about government
(see Total
control: keywords in your posts that might trigger surveillance) and all foreigners who use
those services (and that includes a significant part of European population and xUSSR area, who often
use Gmail, Facebook or Yahoo accounts) means that the country became a National Security State. With
all relevant consequences of such a transformation.
And interest in content of your "cloud based" email is not limited to the government:
A sweeping Wall Street Journal investigation in 2010 found that the biggest U.S.
websites have technologies tracking people who visit their pages, sometimes upwards of 100 tools
per site. One intrusive string of code even recorded users’ keystrokes and transmitted them
to a data-gathering firm for analysis.
“A digital dossier over time is built up about you by that site or third-party service or
data brokers,” says Adam Thierer, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center’s Technology
Policy Program at George Mason University. “They collect these data profiles and utilize them to
sell you or market you better services or goods.”
This is what powers the free Internet we know and love; users pay nothing or next to nothing
for services — and give up pieces of personal information for advertisers in exchange. If you search
for a Mini Cooper on one website, you’re likely to see ads elsewhere for lightweight, fuel-efficient
cars. Companies robotically categorize users with descriptions such as “urban upscale” to “rural
NASCAR” to tailor the advertising experience, says Jim Harper of the libertarian Cato Institute.
“They’ll use ZIP codes and census data to figure out what their lifestyle profile is.”
Most of the site you visit those days was found via search engine, often Google. But Google is interested
in more then search terms you use and sometimes plays with you a nasty trick: "Google may choose
to exhibit its search results in the form of a 'URL redirector,'" reads Google's main privacy policy.
That means that any time it wishes Google can spy on your Web activity:
"When Google uses a URL redirector, if you click on a URL from a search result, information
about the click is sent to Google."
Few people check the URL before clicking on Google search results, so in a way this is perfect spying
tool.
But there is another powerful spying tool in Google arsenal -- Google toolbar, and I am not sure
that all those trick were not reused in Google browser. Google Toolbar sends all user clicks to
Google, if advanced mode is enabled (and many people do enable it because they want to have spelling
correction available which, conveniently for Google, belongs to the set of advanced features).
This way you voluntarily subscribe to a 24x7 monitoring of your web activity using spyware that is installed
on your computer with your consent. For the same reason recent smartphones fashion looks greatly misguided.
It is better to use regular phone, then smartphone, and the last thing you probably want on your smartphone
is Android OS or iOS, or windows 8 OS. In some deep way unlocked Nokia 1280 looks now much more attractive
(and is way cheaper ;-).
Google Toolbar in advanced mode is another common snooping tool about your activities. It
send each URL you visit to Google and you can be sure that from Google several three letter agencies
get this information as well. After all Google has links to them from the very beginning:
As soon as they realize that they are watched, people start thinking about consequences and this
article is a pretty telling (albeit slightly paranoid ;-) illustration of the effect. The key mechanism
here, well known to those who used to live in the USSR before its dissolution is that people preemptively
change their behavior, if they know or suspect that they got "under the dome" of government surveillance,
that all their emails are intercepted, all web site visits recorded, anything they buy on Amazon, etc
is registered in giant database outside of their control.
The angle under which will we try to cover the story is: the situation is such and such, now
what? What are the most appropriate actions and strategy of behavior of people who are concerned
about their privacy and no longer trust "cloud services" provided by Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft,
etc ( and those who trust those providers should probably stop reading at this point). It is impossible
to close all those accounts. But some can and should be closed; for example POP3 mail can replace web
mail for all "important" mail; this way you avoid "cloud storage" of all your important correspondence.
It is impossible not to use search engines, but you can chose which search language to use. It is impractical
not to use smartphone and for Android phone you can't avoid registration -- that's the only way to get
updates from Google, but you can root the phone, remove some snooping components and use Firefox instead
of Chrome. But not it is clear that if mobile web browsing and checking email on your phone is not your
thing you are better off with a very simple phone such as Nokia 1280.
The first and the most obvious "change we can believe in" is that we need to change our attitude
toward cloud services and especially cloud services from large providers. Now the most reasonable assumption
is that most national cloud providers including major retailers are in bed with the government three
letter agencies. So you need to be careful what you browse for on Amazon, similarly to what you write
from Gmail and Hotmail.
In a way, excessive usage of cloud services from a fashionable trend now became kind of indication
of a person stupidity. It is important to understand that for anybody more or less competent with
computers (or willing to learn), anything Facebook or Gmail or Hotmail can offer, regular
small ISP account with Cpanel can offer with less risk for your privacy for, say, $5 a month or less.
And your privacy definitely cost more then $60 a year.
In a way excessive using of cloud services from a fashionable trend now became an indication
of a person stupidity. For anybody more or less competent with computers (or willing to learn),
anything Facebook or Gmail can offer, regular ISP account with Cpanel can offer too with less
risk for your privacy.
At the same time it is also stupid to over-dramatize the situation and isolate yourself by abandoning
Internet communications and restricting usage of cell-phone. The reasonable hypothesis is that today’s
surveillance is a side effect of new technological developments and it is a new fact of life. It is
just a new level of information gathering, which has been going on since the Byzantine Empire. And it
is still limited by technological capabilities of sifting through mass of communications. But at the
same time, quantity does at one point turns into quality, so the danger is real and as such could providers
are suspect by definition. In no way they are new level of technological development. In sense they
are one step forward, two sets back.
Also being engages in foreign wars has an interesting side effect that technologies invented come
home and used against citizens (naked
capitalism). That's actually the origin of indiscriminant collection of metadata used now.
But at the same time we need to understand that there are millions of PC users that have computer(s)
infected by spyware, which can make your computer a zombie. And world did not perished due to that.
Still the key lesson is unmistakable: from now on, any networked computer is an unsecure computer
that can't be trusted really confidential information, unless it is isolated by firewall and proxy.
And if we assume that it is unsecured computer, them it should be treated it as such. The first step
is that all confidential data should be deleted and moved to removable storage. In case you need to
work with it as much as possible should be done on non-networked computers, limiting the exposure of
your data to bare minimum. And the less powerful computer you use for processing you confidential data,
the best; the less powerful OS you use, the best (what about using Windows 98 or DOS for those who can
still remember it ? ;-). From now on "retro-computing" movement now is inherently linked with the issues
of security and privacy and might get a new life.
This retro-computing idea might create a new life for abandoned computers that are in excess in almost
every family ;-) See
Privacy is Dead
– Get Over It. The same thing can be mentioned about a cell phone, which should be as simple as
possible. Not all people really benefit from browsing the Web from their smartphones. If you are really
paranoid you can think storing you cell phone at home in a metal box ;-).
In other words there are two new "laws of computer security":
secure computer is non-networked computer
secure cell-phone is a cell-hone in a metal box or without a battery.
But more important problem here is not snooping per se, but voluntarily self-profiling that you provide
via social sites. If you are way too enthusiastic about Facebook or Google++ or any similar site and
engage regularly and indiscriminately in this "vanity fair" activity you put yourselves voluntarily
under surveillance. So not only
Privacy is Dead
– Get Over It. You killed it yourself. The essence of the situation was exposed well
in a humorous form in the following
Amazon review of Orwell's
novel 1984
Note to US Congress and house of representatives: This is a fictional book, not an
instruction manual...
BTW just after Prism program was revealed in June 2013,
Nineteen Eighty-Four became a bestseller on Amazon. As of June 15, 2013 it was #87 in Fiction. If
you never have a chance to read it, please do it now. and again, if you think that this revelation of
Prism program is a big news, you probably are mistaken. Many people understood that as soon new technical
capabilities of surveillance are available they are instantly put to use. As John H. Summers noted in
his review (The
Deciders - New York Times) of John Mill "Power
elite":
...official secrecy steadily expanded its reach.
"For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency'
without a foreseeable end,"
Mills wrote in a sentence that remains as powerful and unsettling as it was 50 years ago.
"Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed
a paranoid reality all their own."
Facebook has nothing without people
silly enough to exchange privacy for photosharing
The key problem with social sites is that many people voluntarily post excessive amount of personal
data about themselves, including keeping their photo archives online, etc. So while East Germany analog
of the Department of Homeland Security called Ministry for State Security (Stasi)
needed to recruit people to spy about you, now you yourself serves as a informer voluntarily providing
all the tracking information about your activities ;-).
Scientella, palo alto
...Facebook always had a very low opinion of peoples intelligence - and rightly so!
I can tell you Silicon Valley is scared. Facebook's very existence depends upon trusting young
persons, their celebrity wannabee parents and other inconsequential people being prepared to give
up their private information to Facebook.
Google, now that SOCIAL IS DEAD, at least has their day job also, of paid referral advertising
where someone can without divulging their "social" identity, and not linking their accounts, can
look for a product on line and see next to it some useful ads.
But Facebook has nothing without people silly enough to exchange privacy for photosharing.
... ... ...
Steve Fankuchen, Oakland CA
Cook, Brin, Gates, Zuckerberg, et al most certainly have lawyers and public relations hacks
that have taught them the role of "plausible deniability."
Just as in the government, eventually some low or mid-level flunkie will likely be hung out
to dry, when it becomes evident that the institution knew exactly what was going on and did nothing
to oppose it. To believe any of these companies care about their users as anything other than
cash cows is to believe in the tooth fairy.
The amount of personal data which users of site like Facebook put voluntarily on the Web is truly
astonishing. Now anybody using just Google search can get quit substantial information about anybody
who actively using social sites and post messages in discussion he/she particulates under his/her own
name instead of a nickname. Just try to see what is available about you and most probably your jaw would
drop...
This is probably right time for the users of social sites like Facebook, Google search, and Amazon
(that means most of us ;-) to think a little bit more about the risks we are exposing ourselves. We
all should became more aware about the risks involved as well as real implications of the catch phase
Privacy is Dead
– Get Over It.
This is probably right time for the users of social sites like Facebook, Google search,
and Amazon (that means most of us ;-) to think a little bit more about the risks we are exposing
ourselves.
If there is one thing we can take away from the news of recent weeks it is this: the modern
American surveillance state is not really the stuff of paranoid fantasies; it has arrived.
Citizens of foreign countries have accounts at Facebook and mail accounts in Gmail, hotmail and Yahoo
mail are even in less enviable position then the US citizens. They are legitimate prey. No legal protection
for them exists, if they use those services. That means that they voluntarily open all the information
they posted about themselves to the US government in addition to their own government. And the net is
probably more wide then information leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden suggests. For any large
company, especially a telecom corporation, operating is the USA it might be dangerous to refuse to cooperate
(Qwest case).
Former Qwest CEO Joseph
Nacchio, convicted of insider trading in April 2007, alleged in appeal documents that the NSA
requested that Qwest participate in its wiretapping program more than six months before September
11, 2001. Nacchio recalls the meeting as occurring on February 27, 2001. Nacchio further claims that
the NSA cancelled a lucrative contract with Qwest as a result of Qwest's refusal to participate in
the wiretapping program.[13]
Nacchio surrendered April 14, 2009 to a federal prison camp in Schuylkill, Pennsylvania to begin
serving a six-year sentence for the insider trading conviction. The United States Supreme Court denied
bail pending appeal the same day.[15]
It is not the case of some special evilness of the US government. It simply is more agile to understand
and capitalize on those new technical opportunities. It is also conveniently located at the center of
Internet universe with most traffic is flowing via US owned or controlled routers (67% or more). But
it goes without saying that several other national governments and a bunch of large corporations also
try to mine this new gold throve of private information on citizens. Probably with less sophistication
and having less financial resources.
In many cases corporations themselves are interested in partnership with the government. Here is
one telling comment:
jrs says on June 8, 2013
Yea in my experience that’s how “public/private partnerships” really work:
Companies DO need protection FROM the government. An ill-conceived piece of legislation
can put a perfectly decent out of business. Building ties with the government is protection.
Government represents a huge market and eventually becomes one of the top customers
for I think most businesses (of course the very fact that a government agency is a main
customer is often kept hush hush even within the company and something you are not supposed
to speak of as an employee even though you are aware of it)
Of course not every company proceeds to step 3 -- being basically an arm of the government
but ..
That means that not only Chinese citizens already operate on the Internet without any real sense
of privacy. Even if you live outside the USA the chances are high that you automatically profiled by
the USA instead of or in addition to your own government. Kind of
neoliberalism in overdrive mode: looks like we all
are already citizens of a global empire (Let's call it " Empire of Peace" ) with the capital in Washington.
It is reasonable to assume that a massive eavesdropping apparatus now tracks at least an "envelope"
of every electronic communication you made during your lifetime. No need for somebody reporting about
you like in "old" totalitarian state like East Germany with its analog of the Department of Homeland
Security called the Ministry for State Security (Stasi).
So in this new environment, you are like Russians used to say about dissidents who got under KGB surveillance
is always "under the dome". In this sense this is just an old vine in a new bottles. But the global
scope and lifetime storage of huge amount of personal information for each and every citizen is something
new and was made possible the first time in world history by new technologies.
It goes without saying that records about time, sender and receiver of all your phone calls, emails,
Amazon purchases, credit card transactions, and Web activities for the last decade are stored somewhere
in a database and not necessary only government computers. And that means that your social circle (the
set of people you associate with), books and films that you bought, your favorite websites, etc can
be easily deducted from those records.
That brings us to an important question about whether we as consumers should support such ventures
as Facebook and Google++ which profile you and after several years have a huge amount of pretty private
and pretty damaging information about you, information which can get into wrong hands.
The most constructive approach to NSA is to view is a large government bureaucracy that expanded
to the extent that quantity turned into quality.
Any large
bureaucracy is a political coalition with the primary goal of preserving and enhancing of its own
power, no matter what are official declarations. And if breaching your privacy helps they will do it.
Which is what Bush government did after 9/11. The question is how much bureaucratic bloat resulting
in classic dynamics of organizational self-aggrandizement and expansionism happened in NSA. We don't
know how much we got in exchange for undermining internet security and US constitution. But we do know
the intelligence establishment happily appropriated billions of dollars, had grown by thousand of employees
and got substantial "face lift" and additional power within the executive branch of government. To the
extent that something it looks like a shadow government. And now they will fight tooth-and nail to protect
the fruits of a decade long bureaucratic expansion. Now it is an Intelligence Church and like any religious
organization they do not need fact to support their doctrine and influence.
Typically there is an infighting and many factions within any large hierarchical organization, some
with and some without factual awareness of the rest. Basically any hierarchical institution corporate,
religious, military will abuse available resources for internal political infighting. And with NSA "big
data" push this is either happening or just waiting to happen. This is a danger of any warrantless wiretapping
program: it naturally convert itself into a saga of eroding checks and disappearing balance. And this
already happened in the past, so in a way it is just act two of the same drama (WhoWhatWhy):
After
media
revelations of intelligence abuses by the Nixon administration began to mount in the wake of
Watergate, NSA became the subject of Congressional ire in the form of the United States Senate Select
Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities—commonly
known as the “Church Committee” after its chair, Senator Frank Church (D-ID)—established on January
17, 1975. This ad-hoc investigative body found itself unearthing troves of classified records from
the FBI, NSA, CIA and Pentagon that detailed the murky pursuits of each during the first decades
of the Cold War. Under the mantle of defeating communism, internal documents confirmed the executive
branch’s use of said agencies in
some of the most fiendish acts of human imagination (including refined psychological torture
techniques), particularly by
the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Cold War mindset had incurably infected the nation’s security apparatus, establishing
extralegal subversion efforts at home and
brutish control abroad. It was revealed that the FBI
undertook a war to destroy
homegrown movements such as the Black Liberation Movement (including Martin Luther King, Jr.), and
that NSA had indiscriminately
intercepted the communications of Americans without warrant, even
without the President’s
knowledge. When confronted with such nefarious enterprises, Congress sought to rein in the excesses
of the intelligence community, notably those directed at the American public.
That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American
would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything. Telephone conversations,
telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny,
if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence
community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no
way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government,
no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability
of this technology. I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability
that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies
that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never
cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.
The reforms that followed, as enshrined in the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act (FISA) of 1978, included the establishment of the
Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC): a specially-designated panel of judges who are allowed
to review evidence before giving NSA a warrant to spy on Americans (only in the case of overseas
communication). Hardly a contentious check or balance, FISC
rejected
zero warrant requests between its inception in 1979 and 2000, only asking that two warrants
be “modified” out of an estimated 13,000.
In spite of FISC’s rubberstamping, following 9/11 the Bush administration began deliberately bypassing
the court, because even its minimal evidentiary standard was too high a burden of proof for the blanket
surveillance they wanted. So began the dragnet monitoring of the American public by
tapping the country’s major
electronic communication chokepoints in collusion with the nation’s largest telecommunications
companies.
When
confronted with the criminal conspiracy undertaken by the Bush administration and telecoms, Congress
confirmed why
it retains the lowest approval rating of any major American institution by “reforming” the statute
to accommodate the massive law breaking. The
2008 FISA Amendments Act
[FAA] entrenched the policy of mass eavesdropping and granted the telecoms retroactive immunity
for their criminality, withdrawing even the negligible individual protections in effect since 1979.
Despite initial opposition, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama
voted for
the act as one of his last deeds in the Senate.
A few brave (and unsuccessful) lawsuits
later, this policy remains the status quo.
Similarly we should naturally expect that the notion of "terrorist" is flexible and in certain cases
can be equal to "any opponent of regime". While I sympathize NYT readers reaction to this incident (see
below), I think it is somewhat naive. They forget that they are living
under neoliberal regime which like any rule of top
0.01% is afraid of and does not trust its own citizens. So massive surveillance program is a self-preservation
measure which allow to crush or subvert the opposition at early stages. This is the same situation as
existed with Soviet nomenklatura, with the only difference that Soviet nomenklatura was more modest
pushing the USSR as a beacon of progress and bright hope of all mankind ;-). As
Ron Paul noted:
Many of us are not so surprised.
Some of us were arguing back in 2001 with the introduction of the so-called PATRIOT Act that it
would pave the way for massive US government surveillance—not targeting terrorists but rather
aimed against American citizens. We were told we must accept this temporary measure to provide
government the tools to catch those responsible for 9/11. That was nearly twelve years and at least
four wars ago.
We should know by now that when it comes to government power-grabs, we never go back to the
status quo even when the “crisis” has passed. That part of our freedom and civil liberties once
lost is never regained. How many times did the PATRIOT Act need renewed? How many times did FISA
authority need expanded? Why did we have to pass a law to grant immunity to companies who hand
over our personal information to the government?
And while revealed sources of NSA
Prism program
include Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and others major Internet players, that's probably
just a tip of the iceberg. Ask yourself a question, why Amazon and VISA and MasterCard are not on the
list? According to
The Guardian:
The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook,
Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.
The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called Prism, which allows
officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and
live chats, the document says.
... ... ...
Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is
our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007. It was followed by Yahoo
in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally
Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers
due to come online.
Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications
networks
... ... ...
A chart prepared by the NSA, contained within the top-secret document obtained by the Guardian,
underscores the breadth of the data it is able to obtain: email, video and voice chat, videos,
photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details, and
more.
So while the document does not list Amazon, but I would keep fingers crossed.
To be aware about a situation you need to be able to formulate and answer key questions about it.
The first and the most important question is whether the government is engaged in
cyberstalking of law abiding
citizens. Unfortunately the answer is definite yes, as oligarchy needs total control of prols. As a
result National Security State rise to prominence as a dominant
social organization of neoliberal societies, the societies
which characterized by very high level of inequality.
But there are some additional, albeit less important questions. The answers to them determine utility
or futility of small changes of our own behavior in view of uncovered evidence. Among possible set of
such question I would list the following:
Is the only way to have reasonable privacy with computer is to be physically disconnected
with the network?
Is limiting the usage of large providers like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and usage of small
ISP for your email and personal Web pages makes you any more secure? After all it is much easier
to collect data from large providers then from hundreds of smaller providers. At the same time your
data are allowing via big routers in major telecom companies no matter whether you are using large
or small ISP.
Should you switch from Webmail back top POP3 account and deliver at the least most important
mail to your PC instead of keeping it stored on the web servers ? Please note that FBI developed
the computer programs "Magic
Lantern" and CIPAV, which they
can remotely install on a computer system (for example, using Microsoft Windows updates program),
in order to monitor a person's computer activity. But here you probably need a court order to install
them.
Is Facebook and similar social sites provides any real value to you and your family? Is
your visibility of the Web is more important to you then your privacy, because two are generally
incompatible. Is all this vanity fair activity worth possible negative consequences (including stalking
of minors by criminals) that you and your family can face?
Should some group of specialists, for example psychiatrists resort back to handwriting on
paper and/or now write client notes in code as an attempt to reassert some level of confidentiality?
Note the PGP is not a panacea; it can be safely used only on non-network connected computers due
to existence of programs like
Magic Lantern
which can retrieve private keys directly from your computer. But transferring files via "air link"
is very inconvenient.
There are also some minor questions about efficiency of "total surveillance approach". Among them:
More people die daily from (1) car accidents and (2) gang violence in one day then people who
died due to 9-11 accident. Should not billions or dollars spent by NSA be utilized by different agencies
for preventing death toll mentioned above?
Even if NSA algorithms are incredibly clever they can't avoid producing large number of false
positives. The question arise how many innocent people are monitored as the result of this externality.
The other part of understand the threat is understanding is what data are collected. The short answer
is all your phone records and Internet activity (RT
USA):
The National Security Agency is collecting information on the Internet habits of millions of innocent
Americans never suspected of criminal involvement, new NSA documents leaked by former intelligence
contractor Edward Snowden suggest.
Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported Monday that
top-secret documents
included in the trove of files supplied by the NSA contractor-turned-leaker Edward Snowden reveal
that the US intelligence community obtains and keeps information on American citizens accumulated
off the Internet without ever issuing a search warrant or opening an investigation into that person.
The information is obtained using a program codenamed Marina, the documents suggest, and is kept
by the government for up to a full year without investigators ever having to explain why the subject
is being surveilled.
“Marina has the ability to look back on the last 365 days' worth of DNI metadata seen by the
Sigint collection system, regardless whether or not it was tasked for collection,” the Guardian’s
James Ball quotes from the documents.
According to a guide for intelligence analysts supplied by Mr. Snowden, “The Marina metadata
application tracks a user's browser experience, gathers contact information/content and develops
summaries of target.”
"This tool offers the ability to export the data in a variety of formats, as well as create
various charts to assist in pattern-of-life development,” it continues.
Ball writes that the program collects “almost anything” a Web user does online, “from
browsing history – such as map searches and websites visited – to account details, email activity,
and even some account passwords.”
Only days earlier,
separate disclosures
attributed to Snowden revealed that the NSA was using a massive collection of metadata to create
complex graphs of social connections for foreign intelligence purposes, although that program
had pulled in intelligence about Americans as well.
After the New York Times broke news of that program, a NSA spokesperson said that “All data
queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period.” As Snowden documents continue
to surface, however, it’s becoming clear that personal information pertaining to millions of US citizens
is routinely raked in by the NSA and other agencies as the intelligence community collects as much
data as possible.
In June, a top-secret document also attributed to Mr. Snowden revealed that the NSA was collecting
the telephony metadata for millions of Americans from their telecom providers. The government has
defended this practice by saying that the metadata — rough information that does not include the
content of communications — is not protected by the US Constitution’s prohibition against unlawful
search and seizure.
“Metadata can be very revealing,” George Washington University law professor Orin S. Kerr
told the Times this week. “Knowing things like the number someone just dialed or the location
of the person’s cellphone is going to allow them to assemble a picture of what someone is up to.
It’s the digital equivalent of tailing a suspect.”
According to the Guardian’s Ball, Internet metadata picked up by the NSA is routed to the Marina
database, which is kept separate from the servers where telephony metadata is stored.
Only moments after the Guardian wrote of its latest leak on Monday, Jesselyn Radack of the Government
Accountability Project read a statement before the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties,
Justice and Home Affairs penned by none other than Snowden himself.
“When I began my work, it was with the sole intention of making possible the debate we see
occurring here in this body,” Snowden said.
Snowden, who has been granted temporary asylum in Russia after being charged with espionage in
the US, said through Raddack that “The cost for one in my position of returning public knowledge
to public hands has been persecution and exile.”
There are limits of this "powerful analytical software" as it currently used. As we mentioned above, even if NSA
algorithms are incredibly clever they can't avoid producing large number of false positives. After two
year investigation into the post 9/11 intelligence agencies, the Washington Post came to conclusion
that they are collecting more information than anyone can comprehend ("drinking from a firehose" or
"drowning is a sea of data"):
Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billions
e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into
70 separate databases"
First of all there is a classic problem of "signal vs. noise" (infoglut) in any large scale data
collection and presence of noise in the channel makes signal much more difficult to detect.
Analysts who make sense of document and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying
share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year -- a volume so large
that many are routinely ignored
The enormity of the database exacerbate the problem. That's why NSA is hunting for email on cloud
providers, where they are already filtered from spam, and processing required is much less then
for emails intercepted from the wire data. Still even with the direct access to user accounts, the volume of
data, especially graphic (pictures) and video data, is really huge and that stress the limits of processing
capabilities and storage.
Existence of Snowden saga when a single analyst was able to penetrate the system and extract considerable
amount information with impunity suggests that the whole Agency is mess, probably like is
typical for any large organization with a lot of incompetents or, worse, careerists and psychopaths at
the helm (see Toxic Managers). Which is typical for government agencies and large corporations.
Still the level of logs collection
and internal monitoring in NSA proved to be surprisingly weak, as there are indirect signs that the agency does not
even know what reports Snowden get into his hands. In any case we, unless this is a very clever inside
operation, we need to assume that Edward Snowden stole thousands of documents, abused his sysadmin position
in the NSA, and was never caught. Here is one relevant comment from
The Guardian
carlitoontour
Oh NSA......that´s fine that you cannot find something......what did you tell us, the World
and the US Congress about the "intelligence" of Edward Snowden and the low access he had?
SNOWDEN SUSPECTED OF BYPASSING ELECTRONIC LOGS
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. government's efforts to determine which highly classified materials
leaker Edward Snowden took from the National Security Agency have been frustrated by Snowden's
sophisticated efforts to cover his digital trail by deleting or bypassing electronic logs,
government officials told The Associated Press. Such logs would have showed what information
Snowden viewed or downloaded.
The government's forensic investigation is wrestling with Snowden's apparent ability
to defeat safeguards established to monitor and deter people looking at information without
proper permission, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they
weren't authorized to discuss the sensitive developments publicly.
On the other hand government agencies were never good in making huge and complex software projects
work. And large software projects are a very difficult undertaking in any case. Even in industry 50%
of software projects fail, and anybody who works in the industry knows, that the more complex the project
is the higher are chances that it will be mismanaged and its functionality crippled due to architectural
defects ("a camel is a horse designed by a committee"). It is given that such project will be
over budget. Possibly several times over...
But if money is not a problem such system will eventually be completed ("with enough thrust pigs
can fly"). Still there’s no particular reason to think that corruption (major work was probably
outsourced) and incompetence (on higher management levels and, especially on architectural level as
in "camel is a horse designed by a committee") don't affect the design and functionality of
such government
projects. Now when this activity come under fire some adjustments might be especially badly thought out
and potentially cripple the existing functionality.
As J. Kirk Wiebe, a NSA insider, noted
"The way the government was going about those digital data flows was poor formed, uninformed.
There seen to be more of a desire to contract out and capture money flow then there was a [desire}
to actually perform the mission".
See the interview of a trio of former National Security Agency whistle-blowers to USA TODAY ( J.
Kirk Wiebe remarks starts at 2:06 and the second half of it continues from 6:10):
In military organizations the problem is seldom with the talent (or lack of thereof) of individual
contributors. The problem is with the bureaucracy that is very effective in preventing people from exercising
their talents at the service of their country. Such system is deformed in such a way that it hamstrings
the men who are serving in it. As a results, more often then not the talents are squandered or misused
by patching holes created by incompetence of higher-up or or just pushed aside in the interdepartmental
warfare.
In a way, incompetence can be defined as the inability to avoid mistakes which, in a "normal"
course of project development could and should be avoided. And that's the nature of military bureaucracy
with its multiple layer of command and compete lack of accountability on higher levels.
In addition, despite the respectable name of the organization many members of technical staff are
amateurs. They never managed to sharpen their technical skills, while at the same time acquiring the
skills necessary to survive the bureaucracy. Many do not have basic academic education and are self-taught
hackers and/or "grow on the job". Typically people at higher level of hierarchy, are simply not experts
in software engineering, but more like typical corporate "PowerPoint" warriors. They can be very shred
managers and accomplished political fighters, but that's it.
This is the same situation that exists in security departments of large multinationals, so we can
extrapolate from that. The word of Admiral Nelson "If the enemy would know what officer corps will confront
them, it will be trembling, like I am". Here is Bill Gross apt recollection of his service as naval
officer (The
Tipping Point) that illustrate the problems:
A few years ago I wrote about the time that our ship (on my watch) was almost cut in half by an
auto-piloted tanker at midnight, but never have I divulged the day that the USS Diachenko came within
one degree of heeling over during a typhoon in the South China Sea. “Engage emergency ballast,” the
Captain roared at yours truly – the one and only chief engineer. Little did he know that Ensign Gross
had slept through his classes at Philadelphia’s damage control school and had no idea what he was
talking about. I could hardly find the oil dipstick on my car back in San Diego, let alone conceive
of emergency ballast procedures in 50 foot seas. And so…the ship rolled to starboard, the ship rolled
to port, the ship heeled at the extreme to 36 degrees (within 1 degree, as I later read in the ship’s
manual, of the ultimate tipping point). One hundred sailors at risk, because of one twenty-three-year-old
mechanically challenged officer, and a Captain who should have known better than to trust him.
Huge part of this work is outsourced to various contractors and this is where corruption really creeps
in. So the system might be not as powerful as many people automatically assume when they hear the abbreviation
of NSA. So in a way when news about such system reaches public it might serve not weakening but strengthening
of the capabilities of the system. Moreover, nobody would question the ability of such system to store
huge amount of raw or semi-processed data including all metadata for your transactions on the Internet.
Also while it is a large agency with a lot of top mathematic talent, NSA is not NASA and motivation
of the people (and probably quality of architectural thinking about software projects involved) is different
despite much better financing. While they do have high quality people, like most US agencies in general,
large bureaucracies usually are unable to utilize their talent. Mediocrities with sharp elbows, political
talent, as well as sociopaths typically rule the show.
That means two things:
The easy part of this is the "total surveillance of electronic communications" project: to
store the "envelope" of each phone message, email, credit card transaction, etc. Analyze and correlated
the set of this envelopes to discover daily activity patterns, their change over time, social circle,
etc. That collection will contain some junk, but generally completely gives up your social circle
and your interests. Such records are pretty compact so the lifespan of your communications stored
is at least five and probably for more then ten years. So assumption of a lifespan storage is the
most realistic one. You can introduce some noise into some of those collection channels (for example,
by using a robot visiting certain sites such as Sport Illustrated, and Washington Post will distort
the picture of your Internet activities) but it is much more difficult to introduce noise into phone
call records and emails.
Several other nations have access to the metadata for the USA originated phone calls (for
providers they serve) via outsourcers of phone billing, such as Israel's Amdocs, the largest phone-billing
services company in the world:
The difficult part is the analysis of the messages body. For example:
Automatic transcribing of phone messages is a very difficult problem. Even the slightest
noise is deadly as we can see from the experience with Dragon (let's say that NSA solved the problem
of adapting to a new voice which Dragon can't solve). Dragon 12 running of dual core 3.8GHz PC
demonstrates the difficulties very well. Even a small amount of noise kills the quality of automatic
transcription.
Analysis of email body for certain keywords easily can be perform automatically, but to
understand the context of usage of "trigger" words is extremely difficult. This task is still
on the cutting edge of modern computer science. From the public document that exists (see
Total
control: keywords in your posts that might trigger surveillance) I have impression that they
try to overreach (which is standard bureaucratic tendency in such cases). That means that such
an extraction might produces too many false positives, and needs to be manually correlated with
other data.
Recognition of faces from street and security cameras is even more difficult problem.
Data mining of blogs is difficult for a different reason: not only detecting who is
who requires getting IP from particular provider (this is an easy part), just the total volume
is enormous. Many people create dozens of messages a day. There is a special category of graphomans,
that specialize on participating in various forums and those are people who have high change to
trigger "blind" keyword search. The USA government can afford to have, say, several zetabytes
of storage capacity in NSA-controlled datacenters, but its capabilities are still limited. It
can't replicate all the Internet over time. Videos are especially problematic and are more difficult
to analyze then text or HTML, or XML documents. Even low quality voice (with reverberation for
example) is very difficult to analyze automatically.
Video streams are huge and probably impossible to store. In a way the fact that most
modern computer have face camera is not only creating problem for NSA, it actually create the
problem for Internet as a whole ;-). Indiscriminate interception and storage are out of question:
lovers of "here is what my dog is doing" clips are able to saturate all available storage in no
time.
So even with huge amount of subcontractors that can chase mostly "big fish". Although one open question
is why with all those treasure trove of data organized crime is so hard to defeat. Having dataset like
this should generally expose all the members of any gang. Or, say, network of blue collar insider traders.
So in an indirect way the fact that organized crime not only exists and in some cities even flourish
can suggest one of two things:
NSA generally limits availability of those "integrated" data sets to terrorism networks, political
protest, foreign organizations and "suspicious nationals" activities. It is difficult and inefficient
"to cover the whole field" although spying after activities of a foreign corporation can be more
lucrative them spying after a member of terrorist networks ;-). Some sources mention the current
capabilities as around 100K-200K people who can be "electronically followed" simultaneously. It is
reasonably to expect high level of secrecy and that means that data are not shared unless absolutely
necessary (The
Guardian):
The presentation claims Prism was introduced to overcome what the NSA regarded as shortcomings
of Fisa warrants in tracking suspected foreign terrorists. It noted that the US has a "home-field
advantage" due to housing much of the internet's architecture. But the presentation claimed "Fisa
constraints restricted our home-field advantage" because Fisa required individual warrants and
confirmations that both the sender and receiver of a communication were outside the US. "Fisa
was broken because it provided privacy protections to people who were not entitled to them," the
presentation claimed. "
It took a Fisa court order to collect on foreigners overseas who were communicating with other
foreigners overseas simply because the government was collecting off a wire in the United States.
There were too many email accounts to be practical to seek Fisas for all."
... ... ...
A senior administration official said in a statement: "The Guardian and Washington Post articles
refer to collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act. This law does not allow the targeting of any US citizen or of any person located within the
United States.
"The program is subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Executive
Branch, and Congress. It involves extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court, to
ensure that only non-US persons outside the US are targeted, and that minimize the acquisition,
retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about US persons.
Methods based on "beyond the envelope" analysis are not efficient against reasonably sophisticated
opponents, who understand the fact that the communication will be intercepted and possibly
(superficially) analyzed. In a typical "bullet-armor" competition, that opens new impetus for
"bad guys" inventing new and improving old steganography methods. As with interception of talk between
Soviet fighter pilots and their command posts had shown, usage of slang makes the voice data almost
inpenetratable. Another example would be calling Goldman Sacks "a vampire squid", which implies that
your counterpart read
Matt Taibby article or related financial blogs, or to call Facebook "lichiko" which implies knowing
Russian. Person without this context can't make a connection. With such substitutions you need a
huge amount of ( rapidly shifting ) cultural context to understand the meaning of even simple phases.
This context is missing on the other side of the pond. And even specialists can represent certain
problems. For example Jargon
File (and more) is needed to understand the talk of hackers. Fenia,
the language of the thieves is Russia was so distinct from ordinary Russian that it almost qualifies
as a separate language which makes it foreign for outsiders. The same it true about criminal subculture
in other countries (see
Police and criminal
slang ).
Storage of actual data involves certain technical difficulties and first on all physical limitations
of available storage. We probably can talk about several thousand
Petabytes that government can
store. In comparison:
Google processed about
24 petabytes of data per day in 2009
AT&T transfers about
30 petabytes of data through its networks each day
The Internet Archive
contains about 10 petabytes in cultural material as of October 2012
In August 2011, IBM was reported to have built the largest storage array ever, with a capacity
of 120 petabytes
In July 2012 it was revealed that
CERN amassed about 200
petabytes of data from the more than 800 trillion collisions
In August 2012, Facebook's
Hadoop clusters include the largest single
HDFS cluster known, with more
than 100 PB physical disk space in a single HDFS filesystem
In May 2013, Microsoft
announce that as part of their migration of Hotmail accounts to the new Outlook.com email system,
they'd migrated over 150 Petabytes of user data in six weeks.
There is also a question of complexity of analysis:
We can assume that simple things are extracted correctly. But more complex things might be
not. There is no question that a map of your phone calls, your Amazon and eBay purchases, credit
card transactions and other straightforward things can be recreated "exactly". Also can be recreated
data that can tell approximately where you were and what you was doings on any particular day. The
map of your phone contacts (people who called you and people who you call) and your emails gives
a pretty good estimate of your social circle. With multiple data sources any individual posting
in blogs can be identified with 90% or better accuracy, no matter what nicknames he/she uses
and whether he/she avoids registration and provide truthful information during it. So in a way there
is no need to do something complex as simple methods provide treasure trove of data.
There are also “junk in, junk out” issues including spam in email, telemarketers calling
your land line, there are always "strange" sites you accidentally visit during your browsing. While
they can be filtered, signal can be filtered with them (why bad guys can not disguise themselves
as telemarketers or porno sites owners?) and then system became useless against bad guys. If not
that noise subtly corrupts the data, noise and data can be really undistinguishable. BTW closed source
security-related software will always be somewhat more problematical then open source, since algorithms
used may be far from perfect and are result more of a "trading horses" between power groups involved
in development, then honest scientific research. Open source software such as CPU emulators can be
used as steganography engine that requires particular processor on the other side for recreation
of the message. And you can chose some really exotic CPU like Knuth Mix.
Errors in algorithms and bugs in those programs can bite some people in a different way then branding
them as "terrorists". Such people have no way of knowing why all of a sudden, for example, they
are paying a more for insurance, why their credit score is so low no matter what they do, etc. In no
way government in the only one who are using the mass of data collected via Google / Facebook / Yahoo
/ Microsoft / Verizon / Optonline / AT&T / Comcast, etc. It also can lead to certain subtle types of
bias if not error. And there are always problems of intentional misuse of data sets having extremely
intimate knowledge about you.
Corporate corruption can lead to those data that are shared with the government can also be shared
for money with private actors. Inept use of this unconstitutionally obtained data is a threat to all
of us.
Then there can be cases when you can be targeted just because you are critical to the particular
area of government policy, for example the US foreign policy. This is "Back in the USSR" situation in
full swing, with its prosecution of dissidents. Labeling you as a "disloyal/suspicious element"
in one of government "terrorism tracking" databases can have drastic result to your career and you never
even realize whats happened. Kind of Internet era
McCarthyism .
Obama claims that the government is aware about this danger and tried not to overstep, but he is
an interested party in this discussion. In a way government is pushed in this area by the new technologies
that open tremendous opportunities for collecting data and making some correlations.
That's why even if you are doing nothing wrong, it is still important to know your enemy, as well
as avoid getting into some traps. One typical trap is excessive centralization of your email on social
sites, including using a single Webmail provider. It is much safer to have mail delivery to your computer
via POP3 and to use Thunderbird or other email client. If your computer is a laptop, you achieve, say,
80% of portability that Web-based email providers like Google Gmail offers. That does not mean that
you should close your Gmail or Yahoo account. More important is separating email accounts into "important"
and "everything else". "Junk mail" can be stored on Web-based email providers without any problems.
Personal emails is completely another matter.
Technology development create new types of communications as well as new types of government surveillance
mechanisms (you can call them "externalities" of new methods of communication). Those externalities,
especially low cost of mass
surveillance (Wikipedia), unfortunately, bring us closer to the
Electronic police state
(Wikipedia) or National Security State whether we want it or not. A
crucial element of such a state is that its data gathering, sorting and correlation are continuous,
cover a large number of citizens and all foreigners and those activities are seldom exposed.
Cloud computing as a technology that presuppose storing the data "offsite" on third party servers
have several security problems, and one of them is that it is way too much "surveillance friendly"
(Misunderstanding
of issues of security and trust). With cloud computing powers that be do not need to do complex
job of recreating TCP/IP conversations on router level to capture, say, all the emails. You can access
Web-based email mailbox directly with all mails in appropriate mailboxes and spam filtered. Your address
book is a bonus ;-). This is huge saving of computational efforts.
"... The United States is seeking all proceeds earned by Snowden for the book, the Justice Department said. The lawsuit also names the "corporate entities" behind the book's publication as nominal defendants. ..."
"... Ben Wizner, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who represents Snowden, said the lawsuit was without merit. "This book contains no government secrets that have not been previously published by respected news organizations," he said in a statement, adding that Snowden would have submitted it for review if he thought the government would review it in good faith. ..."
The United States filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked
secret documents about U.S. telephone and internet surveillance in 2013, saying his new book violates non-disclosure agreements.
The Justice Department said Snowden published his memoir, "Permanent Record," without submitting it to intelligence agencies for
review, adding that speeches given by Snowden also violated nondisclosure agreements. In 2013, Snowden wrote "Everything You Know
about the Constitution is Wrong."
The United States is seeking all proceeds earned by Snowden for the book, the Justice Department said. The lawsuit also names
the "corporate entities" behind the book's publication as nominal defendants.
Ben Wizner, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who represents Snowden, said the lawsuit was without merit.
"This book contains no government secrets that have not been previously published by respected news organizations," he said in a
statement, adding that Snowden would have submitted it for review if he thought the government would review it in good faith.
Representatives for the book's publisher, Macmillan Publishers, and its unit Henry Holt & Co, did not immediately respond to requests
for comment.
Snowden has lived in Russia since he revealed details of U.S. intelligence agencies' secret surveillance programs.
Though he is viewed by some as a hero, U.S. authorities want him to stand in a criminal trial over his disclosures of classified
information.
Speaking by video link at an event in Berlin to promote the book, Snowden said that while he had signed a non-disclosure agreement
to maintain secrecy, he had also sworn an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution.
"You've told the government you're not going to talk to journalists. You've told them you're not going to write a book," Snowden
said. "At the same time you have an oath to defend the Constitution. And the secret that you are asked to protect is that the government
is violating that Constitution and the rights of people around the world."
Reporting by Makini Brice; Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball in Washington and Paul Carrell in Berlin; Editing by Marguerita
Choy and Lisa Shumaker Our Standards: The Thomson
Reuters Trust Principles.
the important side effect of dominance in advertizing is a huge surveillance mechanism of Big
Brother type that come with it. Google essentially is able to see what particular individual is
viewing, unless special steps like blocking Google advertizing server IPs, modifying the page of
the fly or disabling Javascript are taken. It does not need access to web server logs, his own
advertizing servers produce logs that are equitant if not better.
Fifty Attorney Generals from 48 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico announced
on Monday that they are launching an anti-trust investigation into Google. This investigation
would be in addition the one that the Justice Department's already conducting. Here's what
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who's leading the case, had to say when he made the
announcement on Monday.
KEN PAXTON: This is a company that dominates all aspects of advertising on the internet and
searching on the internet as they dominate the buyer side, the seller side, the auction side
and even the video side with YouTube. And right now, we're looking at advertising, but the
facts will lead to where the facts lead. And even as we speak, been up here about a minute,
there'll be 3.8 million searches and a lot of advertising dollars just made in every minute
that one of these people speaks.
GREG WILPERT: Other major tech companies that have come into the crosshairs of various state
and federal government agencies for anti-trust investigations are Facebook, Apple and Amazon.
According to a New York Times analysis, Google is facing five major investigations,
Facebook eleven, and Apple and Amazon are each facing three. Each area of anti-competitive
behavior is different, depending on the market that each one of these companies dominates.
Joining me now to discuss the wave of anti-trust investigations against Google and other
tech companies is Bill Black. He is a white-collar criminologist, former financial regulator,
and Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He's
also the author of the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One . Thanks for
joining us again, Bill.
BILL BLACK: Thank you.
GREG WILPERT: So it's interesting that a Republican State Attorney General is taking the
lead on this, Ken Paxton. And that California isn't even a part of the case, along with
Alabama. What's going on here? What's your analysis?
BILL BLACK: Okay, so the reason the state AGs are getting involved in general in lots of
different things, and going all the way back to the runup to the great financial crisis, is
that the United States Department of Justice has basically abandoned cracking down
significantly on elite white-collar crimes in general and anti-trust in particular. Now,
there's an exception -- cartels. They actually are moderately vigorous until the Trump
administration, but in lots of other areas, not so. And so the states felt that the only way
that you could have any effective action was to have the states take the lead. But the states
lack the capacity to take the lead.
They just don't have -- All the 50 states plus Puerto Rico and DC together do not have the
resources in anti-trust, for example, that the federal government has just in its anti-trust
division. And that's not even mentioning the FBI, which does the real investigations, and which
the states have no real counterpart to. And so the only way the states could even try to be
effective was to link together. And they did this in the runup to the great financial crisis
sufficiently, effectively, that the federal government actually sought to block the states from
bringing this action, claiming that it was preempted, so this is continuing that practice.
They weren't able to get California and they weren't able to get Alabama. So they weren't
able to get Alabama on the usual conservative grounds of "why should we sue anybody, the
powerful?" But they weren't able to get California of course in part because the state AG is a
Democrat, and his leading source of contributions, or among his three leading sources of
contributions is Google. And this is one of the real problems with state AGs. They're statewide
races, you have to get elected, and they're expensive races, so you're always seeking political
contributions and such. That, of course, is something that the US Attorney General doesn't have
to do and allows him or her to be more independent.
Then the next question is the states have to face the question always in these kinds of
cases that the federal government doesn't face. And that's "who's going to be in charge?" It's
obviously that the US Attorney General, unless he has to recuse himself, is in charge at the
federal level. But the state level, it's a matter of negotiation. For reasons that pass all
understanding, they put Paxton, one of the absolute most notorious state Attorney Generals in
the United States, in charge. Paxton is trying to raise political contributions on the basis of
this investigation. He sent out an email seeking funds, and I quote "we will continue to fight
for your rights and to protect you from monopolistic practices by liberal elites in DC or in
Silicon Valley." Now here's a hint, Attorney Generals are not supposed to go after liberals or
conservatives or moderates.
That is completely antithetical to the idea of justice, but Paxton is not functioning like
an independent, honest person. He's someone who is intensely politically ambitious, who hates
anybody who he perceives as even moderate -- much less, liberal or progressive and such -- and
he wants to use this investigation as a weapon to go after his political opponents. And on top
of that, get paid off, to get a fine that he can use to tout as a success, and to use that
resources to do the same type of thing in going after other folks. So again, I have no idea why
the state AGs who are Democrats were willing to allow Paxton to take the lead role because it's
going to discredit the entire investigation.
GREG WILPERT: I think that's really interesting to see this kind of battle going on,
essentially within the elite circles of the United States. It's really breaking out into the
open in this case, if that's the real motivation behind -- Well, he said it himself. His real
motivation is to go after the liberal elites, which he sees Google and Facebook as being a part
of. But I want to turn to the actual issue of anti-trust and monopolies. Now, clearly Google
dominates the search market. There's no doubt about that. It's practically the only search
engine anyone uses. However, in advertising, Google is not actually a monopoly, at least if one
looks at its market share by revenues, where it has a 38% share of digital advertising revenues
and Facebook has 22%. Now, give us an idea as to why Google's dominance in search and
advertising should actually perhaps be a concern. Is that concern real? And also, if
advertisers can simply go elsewhere if they feel that Google isn't treating them fairly, why
should their practices in this area be of concern?
BILL BLACK: Okay, so one of the things I teach is anti-trust and such. Monopoly is not the
same thing as monopoly power. When we use the word "monopoly," we typically mean one entity
that controls nearly everything. There are cases, but they're rare in life where there is
actually a monopoly. Long before you have exclusive control over a market, however, you have
some degree of market power. How much is incredibly complex and depends on the inner play. But
one of the things is, say, use your numbers, we have somewhere around 30 to 40% of control
here. We've got a competitor who has 20 and another competitor who has 20. Well then that makes
it pretty easy for the three of us to collude. And we can collude implicitly, right? Just don't
rock the boat. Anybody that really tries to undercut on fees, then we rush in and we match that
and maybe we even cut a little more to show them how vigorous we're going to be. So economists
have long been concerned anytime a company gets even close to the degree of market domination
that you talked about, so it's not silly in the least that they're worried about it.
Now here's the kicker: people may remember Bork and the phrase "to be Borked." Well one of
the reasons he was not approved by the Senate to be a Supreme Court Justice is that he was
leading the right-wing movement to say that essentially we should get rid of anti-trust. In the
specific context of Silicon Valley and any high tech entity in which numbers matter,
penetration matters, the argument from the Right is that there are "network effects." In other
words, when I use my email, it's much more valuable if I can talk to everybody than if I can
just talk to the 10,000 people who have to be subscribers, in the old days, of some particular
email service. And those kind of network effects are fairly common within tech, typically
because of this desire to communicate and to search, in this case, much more broadly. So that
leads to something close to what, in the old days in economics we would refer to as a "natural
monopoly." A natural monopoly just means that there are so many economies of scale, that
whoever gets big actually gets cheaper, and they have a competitive advantage over any rivals
in those circumstances.
But we want the efficiency of that network and the conservatives are unwilling to do a
hybrid, saying, "Okay, we'll have a network that covers everybody, but we'll treat it like a
common carrier, and we'll make sure that the private entity doesn't become the
multi-billionaire because of the profit from these things." So the conservatives want us just
to walk away and let some people become extraordinarily rich and then use their market power,
if they choose, to say "I actually don't want those people spreading their views, so I'm going
to make life difficult for them." So there's also a political rationale, political science
rationale, freedom rationale for saying "you shouldn't let a private company that is not
subject at least to the duties of treating everyone fairly have this kind of monopoly power
position."
GREG WILPERT: I want to dig a little bit deeper exactly on that issue actually. In the past,
major anti-trust cases simply broke up the monopoly; such as, happened with Standard Oil in
1911 and AT&T in 1982. But is that even an option in cases for Facebook and Google? You're
speaking about the network effects and they're obviously quite strong in the case of Facebook
and Google. That is, do we really want a dozen different search engines or a dozen different
baby Facebooks? In other words, wouldn't turning over the company to its users or to some other
-- What would a possible alternative look like instead of breaking it up, or is that the only
solution?
BILL BLACK: I don't think it is the only solution, but it's been the only solution that the
Right has been willing to contemplate and to oppose as well, by the way. Again, their position
is "we should just allow this network to be created and allow private parties to gain
supernormal profits." In economic jargon, that just means a hell of a lot of money. This is why
these people are multi-multi-billionaires, is they control something that has immense monopoly
power, and therefore is able to charge more than they should, and that's inefficient. So the
efficiency condition should be, "Yes, you create the network, but you don't allow a particular
party to become immensely rich from it. You run it instead as essentially a regulated public
utility." That says, "No, you can just get a normal return out of all of this. But yes, we'll
allow a fully efficient network to be created,"
When you treat it like a public utility, then it has traditionally at law, doctrines of
fairness and such that you can't discriminate against the use, that you can't use it as a
weapon against your enemies and such, so you have to take all customers on the same terms
whether they're big customers or little customers and such. Of course, that harks back to an
earlier dispute and one of the first things that the Trump administration sought to eliminate,
was any duty on the part of these private monopolies to treat people fairly. So it's quite
interesting that the Trump administration is now investigating that which it previously
blessed. And of course, the Trump administration has announced that it's going to use the
anti-trust laws as a weapon against their political enemies -- the car companies, for daring to
agree with California to produce fewer greenhouse gases.
GREG WILPERT: Yeah. I just want to return to the issue of this particular case now with Ken
Paxton and Google because obviously, or not obviously, but presumably, he would probably favor
a decision that would actually weaken the power of Google and Facebook by breaking it up, which
I would think the Democratic state Attorney Generals that are behind this case probably
wouldn't necessarily favor. So how are they ever going to come to a resolution in this case, or
is this just going to be tied up in the courts forever?
BILL BLACK: So this issue actually cuts across all kinds of ideological dimensions. You have
the Texas AG, arguably the most conservative state AG in the country, someone who doesn't care
about anti-trust at all, suddenly becoming the great enforcer of antitrust because it's his
political opponents. You've got Democrats who often think that monopoly power has gone too far
going, "Okay, I'll do a deal with the devil -- Paxton -- on this."
But now, and I mean just like today, the Koch Brothers Foundation has gotten involved. And
it's sending out this major effort to get the population to turn against their state AGs
because of this very investigation and the Facebook investigation as well. The Koch brothers
fear that if this precedence gets created, of actually reinvigorating the anti-trust laws, they
could be in the sights of particular Attorney Generals as well. I don't want to say that only
conservative or Republican AGs use these laws against their political opponents because there
have been a series of scandals involving Democrats as well and it's not so much political
there. It's fundraisers. Whoever raises money for them, they help out. You draw the money
largely from plaintiff's lawyers and the plaintiff lawyers would really, really, really love it
if the state AGs would bring an action against the very folks that they too are suing. That
would help their litigation a great deal. So, there are a series of scandals involving
Democrats and Republicans in these Attorney General-type suits.
"... The Inteligence elite mistake their power over people -- and the unspeakable sums of money that are flooded into their agencies -- for success. As you might imagine, that has spelled disaster where ever in the world that they operate. God help the society where they gain the upper hand. Like in the United States, for example. Their minds are broken beyond repair because reality actively lies to them. ..."
Court: FBI Must Destroy Memos Calling Antiwar.com a Threat
Ruling comes after a eight-year battle over secret surveillance of the popular website after
9/11.
By KELLEY BEAUCAR VLAHOS • September 12, 2019
In a major victory for Antiwar.com, free speech and journalism, a federal appeals court has
ruled that the FBI must expunge surveillance memos that agents had drafted about the website's
co-founders Eric Garris and Justin Raimondo in the early years following the 9/11 attacks.
"It's been a long fight and I'm glad we had an outcome that could might affect future FBI
behavior," said Garris, who runs Antiwar.com, based in the San Francisco Bay area. "I just wish
Justin was still here to know that this has happened."
Raimondo, 67, passed away in June from a long bout with cancer. He and Garris had sued the
FBI in 2013 demanding it turn over all the memos and records it was keeping on the two men and
the website, which has been promoting anti-interventionist news and views from a
libertarian-conservative perspective since 1995
They won their case, and in 2017 the FBI agreed to turn over all the memos and settle their
legal fees, $299,000, but the final expungement of two key memos involving intelligence
gathered on the men and Antiwar.com, had yet to be expunged from the agency's record...
It all began when an observant reader brought a heavily redacted 2004 memo to Antiwar.com's
attention in 2011. It was part of a batch of documents the reader had obtained through FOIA
requests. It was clear from the documents' contents that the FBI had been collecting
information and records on Raimondo and Garris for some time. At one point the FBI agent
writing the April 30, 2004 memo on Antiwar.com recommended further monitoring of the website in
the form of opening a "preliminary investigation to determine if [redaction] are engaging in,
or have engaged in, activities which constitute a threat to national security."
Why? Because the website was questioning U.S. war policy ...
Agents noted that Antiwar.com had, or linked to, published counter-terrorism watch lists
(already in the public domain). The FBI noted at least two of Raimondo's columns and wondered
openly, "who are (Antiwar.com's) contributors and what are the funds utilized for?" This, after
acknowledging there was no evidence of any crime being plotted or committed.
Other things noted in the documents::
-- Garris had passed along a threat he received on Sept. 12, 2001 from a Antiwar.com reader
obviously disgruntled with the website's coverage of 9/11. The subject line read, "YOUR SITE IS
GOING DOWN," and proceeded with this missive: "Be warned assholes, ill be posting your site
address to all the hack boards tonight your site is history."
Concerned, Garris forwarded the email to the FBI field office in San Francisco. Garris heard
nothing, but by January 2002, it turned up again, completely twisted around, in a secret FBI
memo entitled, "A THREAT BY GARRIS TO HACK FBI WEBSITE."
It turns out this "threat" went on to justify, at least in part, the FBI's ongoing interest
in monitoring the website.
-- The FBI took interest in Raimondo's writing about a 2001 FBI investigation of five
Israeli nationals who were witnessed smiling and celebrating and taking pictures of the burning
Twin Towers from a rooftop perch across the river from Manhattan in Union City, New Jersey, on
9/11. After witnesses called the police, the individuals, who all worked for a local moving
company, were taken into custody and grilled by FBI and CIA for two months after it was deemed
their work visas had expired. They were eventually deported without charge.
Raimondo, in writing about the case in 2002, linked to an American-generated terror
watchlist (which had been published elsewhere on the Internet) that went out to Italian
financial institutions and included the name of the man who owned the New Jersey moving company
in question.
-- The FBI noted Antiwar.com was cited in an article, the name of the author redacted, about
U.S aid to Israel.
-- They also noted that Raimondo had appeared on MSNBC to talk about his opposition to the
Iraq War.
-- It also cited an article that listed Antiwar.com as a reference was handed out in 2002 at
a "peaceful protest" at a British air base in the U.K.
-- The FBI was watching a member of a domestic neo-Nazi group who had "discussed a website,
Antiwar.com" while encouraging fellow members at a conference to "educate themselves" about the
Middle East conflict.
-- The agency said a special agent's review of hard drives seized during an investigation of
an unnamed subject, revealed that the subject had visited Antiwar.com between July 25, 2002 and
June 15, 2003, "among many other websites."
The FBI acknowledged it searched the Web, as well as Lexis-Nexis, the Universal Index (FBI
central records), the agency's Electronic Case File, Department of Motor Vehicles and Dunn
& Bradsheet (credit reports) for information on Antiwar.com and for "one or more
individuals" working for the website.
Looking back, it's hard to fathom how such tiny (Constitutionally protected) crumbs led the
FBI to the conclusion that Garris and Raimondo, two dedicated activists (Raimondo was also a
prolific author) with decades of time in California's political trenches, might be a "threat to
national security," but there you are...
The case decided on Wednesday revolved around two remaining memos that the FBI had so far
refused to expunge. One involved the call Garris made to the FBI in 2002. The U.S. Court of
Appeals for the 9th Circuit in Northern California found that the government did not have a
compelling law enforcement reason to keep them.
"Maintenance of a record that describes only First Amendment activity and does not implicate
national security is not pertinent to the FBI's authorized activities," the court
concluded...
Garris said he was relieved and elated that the court was able to end this ugly chapter for
the website...
Not to mention that casual erasures of any part of the Bill of Rights by government are
frickin' scary, as are casual acceptance and rationalization of same by ordinary Americans
(and/or those seeming like ordinary Americans).
In his memoir, True Compass , Ted Kennedy said that LBJ told him that LBJ considered
the FBI culpable in the assassination of JFK, in that the FBI had had its eye on Oswald and
considered him dangerous, but never warned the Secret Service.
Many years later, we have failures by the FBI and CIA to coordinate and act upon intel
involved in 911. They did nothing about reports from citizens of the suspicious activities of
the Saudi assassins while the assassins were in the US, such as taking flying lessons, but
saying they didn't need to learn how to land. Moreover, the FBI and CIA had months of Arab
conversations awaiting translation because of a shortage of translators cause by the FBI's and
CIA's unwillingess to use Arab translators.
Then we have two warnings, not from ordinary citizens, but from the Russian government, that
the Tsarnaevs were a threat. Now, that alone sure sounds to me like probable cause for
surveillance. However, the FBI interviewed them and supposedly was unable to justify doing
anything else.
So, we have culpability in a Presidential assassination AND two terrorist attacks. And that
certainly can't be all before and after 1960. For instance, speaking of JFK, there was the Bay
of Pigs fiasco. On the bright side, that taught JFK to squint at the CIA and the military,
which, in turn, may have avoided nuclear disaster over the Cuban missile "crisis." (When we
place missiles somewhere, it's defense on our part and a deterrent; when another nation,
especially Russia, does the same, it's casus belli , unless some brilliant politicians
can scale it "all the way down" to a "crisis" or a "national emergency." Our hypocrisy
sickens.
BTW, according to the memoir, JFK was questioning our Vietnam involvement and Bobby Kennedy
had flat out become convinced that bombing should stop immediately and peace negotiations
should begin. He volunteered to negotiate the peace himself, but LBJ refused. So, that's
another thing Bobby and Jack had in common. (Interestingly to me, by Ted's own account, he was
the last of the three Kennedy brothers to lose support for the Vietnam War!)
The socially destructive solutions designed by the Intelligence Communities since the
mid-20th century are paying off in one way:
There is now a copious amount of research and data, that once harnessed and put to work,
will clearly demonstrate without doubt how tragic and destructive their outcomes have been.
They have accomplished precisely the opposite of the goal they were reaching for. For example,
apply their social engineering to reduce the number of terrorists in a region, and in less than
a decade the region will be overrun with terrorists.
Use their strategic genius to stop the flow of drugs from hot-spots of the world, and in
another decade, much of the world will be saturated with illegal drugs.
Humanity throughout the world are the losers, and they pay dearly for the blindness of
Nazi-mentored techniques and strategies that are embraced by intelligence agencies and military
intelligence. In the long term, they are bringers of chaos.
The nazis always lose. Ever since we brought them to America after World War II to teach us
their techniques -- the US has lost every war it attempted. The effects of this influence has
turned America into a prison complex.
The Inteligence elite mistake their power over people -- and the unspeakable sums of
money that are flooded into their agencies -- for success. As you might imagine, that has
spelled disaster where ever in the world that they operate. God help the society where they
gain the upper hand. Like in the United States, for example. Their minds are broken beyond
repair because reality actively lies to them.
If you ask them to send a rocket to the moon, they'll wait until the full moon is directly
overhead, then fire the rocket. They are void of subtlety. The failure will be classified and
forgotten.
We need Taoist leaders if we want to solve real world problems.
Before 9/11 it would have been illegal for CIA to be operating within the U.S.
Yes, the Central Intelligence Agency -CIA, was prohibited by Law to operate within
the USA, This Law/limitation of the power of a Spy Agency, was designed to limit Government
intrusion into the lives of American Citizens. [Bitter laughter in this space]
1. Imagine how much more illegal it must be for a Spy Agency of any Foreign Government to
operate within the territorial limits of the United States.
2. Does the Zionist Spy Agency, MOSSAD , come to mind? Indeed.
3. In 2019, we Americans suffer the daily intrusion into our private affairs of as many
as 16 Secret Agencies, in addition to the most powerful Spy Agency MOSSAD , (which
certainly controls the CIA, NSA, FBI, many local Police Departments, and the other Secret
Agencies- those of the Armed forces, etc.).
*Good political news goes in this space [ ]. The dismissal of one Yahoo – by a Yahoo
– to be replaced by another Yahoo – does not count.
@Durruti The many whistleblowers (Snowden etal) have explained that international
intelligence agencies have circumvented local government restrictions on domestic
surveillance by trading data.
So, England can legally spy on Americans. America can legally spy on English folks.
Swap data.
Voila!
(Mossad can spy on everybody and trade with everybody–fun, fun, fun.)
Though it's easy to imagine the outpouring of fury and wall to wall media coverage --
complete with urgent Congressional hearings -- should such allegations center on any other
foreign country caught spying on the White House (let's say Russia for example), the bombshell
Politico report has barely made a dent in the mainstream media or big cable networks'
coverage.
This is partly because the administration's own reaction has been muted, as the report notes
that "the Trump administration took no action to punish or even privately scold the Israeli
government" after being informed by US intelligence that Israel likely planted the devices.
Politico's sources in most instances held top intelligence and national security posts, who
describe the following of the
recovered spy devices :
The miniature surveillance devices, colloquially known as "StingRays," mimic regular cell
towers to fool cell phones into giving them their locations and identity information .
Formally called international mobile subscriber identity-catchers or IMSI-catchers, they also
can capture the contents of calls and data use .
The devices were likely intended to spy on President Donald Trump, one of the former
officials said, as well as his top aides and closest associates -- though it's not clear
whether the Israeli efforts were successful.
From the moment the report was unveiled early Thursday, Israel's stance has been to
vehemently deny, and to even suggest the accusations are tinged with "anti-Semitism".
The statement from the prime minister's office added, "There is a longstanding
commitment, and a directive from the Israeli government not to engage in any intelligence
operations in the U.S. This directive is strictly enforced without exception."
Uh huh... Sure. So how do you explain Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell then?
Come on readers. Next they'll be saying Israel controls all levels of government through
political donations. Possible from the $2 Billion a year they get? Anybody know how much
total Israeli contributions go to the Pres, Congress etc?
I was hoping to see a comment from Einstein, but cant find him. Wonder where he is. I
guess we will just have to lower our standards and look to ZD1 for the real scoop.
David Warner Mathisen definitely know what he is talking about due to his long military career... Freefall speed
is documented and is an embarrassment to the official story, because freefall is impossible for a naturally
collapsing building.
Now we need to dig into the role of Larry Silverstein in the
Building 7 collapse.
Notable quotes:
"... Below is a video showing several film sequences taken from different locations and documenting multiple angles of World Trade Center Building 7 collapsing at freefall speed eighteen years ago on September 11, 2001. ..."
"... The four words "Building Seven Freefall Speed" provide all the evidence needed to conclude that the so-called "official narrative" promoted by the mainstream media for the past eighteen years is a lie, as is the fraudulent 9/11 Commission Report of 2004. ..."
"... Earlier this month, a team of engineers at the University of Alaska published their draft findings from a five-year investigation into the collapse of Building 7 ..."
"... This damning report by a team of university engineers has received no attention from the mainstream media outlets which continue to promote the bankrupt "official" narrative of the events of September 11, 2001. ..."
"... its rate of collapse can be measured and found to be indistinguishable from freefall speed, as physics teacher David Chandler explains in an interview here (and as he eventually forced NIST to admit), beginning at around 0:43:00 in the interview. ..."
"... the collapse of the 47-story steel-beam building World Trade Center 7 into its own footprint at freefall speed is all the evidence needed to reveal extensive and deliberate premeditated criminal activity by powerful forces that had the ability to prepare pre-positioned demolition charges in that building ..."
"... Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming, to the point that no one can any longer be excused for accepting the official story. Certainly during the first few days and weeks after the attacks, or even during the first few years, men and women could be excused for accepting the official story (particularly given the level to which the mainstream media controls opinion in the united states). ..."
"... Additionally, I would also recommend the interviews which are archived at the website of Visibility 9-11 , which includes valuable interviews with Kevin Ryan but also numerous important interviews with former military officers who explain that the failure of the military to scramble fighters to intercept the hijacked airplanes, and the failure of air defense weapons to stop a jet from hitting the Pentagon (if indeed a jet did hit the Pentagon), are also completely inexplicable to anyone who knows anything at all about military operations, unless the official story is completely false and something else was going on that day. ..."
"... In addition to these interviews and the Dig Within blog of Kevin Ryan, I would also strongly recommend everybody read the article by Dr. Gary G. Kohls entitled " Why Do Good People Become Silent About the Documented Facts that Disprove the Official 9/11 Narrative? " which was published on Global Research a few days ago, on September 6, 2019. ..."
"... on some level, we already know we have been bamboozled, even if our conscious mind refuses to accept what we already know. ..."
"... Previous posts have compared this tendency of the egoic mind to the blissfully ignorant character of Michael Scott in the television series The Office (US version): see here for example, and also here . ..."
"... The imposition of a vast surveillance mechanism upon the people of this country (and of other countries) based on the fraudulent pretext of "preventing terrorism" (and the lying narrative that has been perpetuated with the full complicity of the mainstream media for the past eighteen years) is in complete violation of the human rights which are enumerated in the Bill of Rights and which declare: ..."
"... David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University. ..."
Below is a video showing several film sequences
taken from different locations and documenting multiple angles of World Trade Center Building 7 collapsing at freefall speed eighteen
years ago on September 11, 2001.
The four words "Building Seven Freefall Speed" provide all the evidence needed to conclude that the so-called "official narrative"
promoted by the mainstream media for the past eighteen years is a lie, as is the fraudulent 9/11 Commission Report of 2004.
Earlier this month, a team of engineers at the University of Alaska
published their draft findings from a five-year investigation into the collapse of Building 7, which was not hit by any airplane
on September 11, 2001, and concluded that fires could not possibly have caused the collapse of that 47-story steel-frame building
-- rather, the collapse seen could have only been caused by the near-simultaneous failure of every support column (43 in number).
This damning report by a team of university engineers has received no attention from the mainstream media outlets which continue
to promote the bankrupt "official" narrative of the events of September 11, 2001.
Various individuals at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tried to argue that the collapse of Building
7 was slower than freefall speed, but its rate of collapse can be measured and found to be indistinguishable from freefall speed,
as physics teacher David Chandler explains in an
interview
here (and as he eventually forced NIST to admit), beginning at around 0:43:00 in the interview.
Although the collapse of the 47-story steel-beam building World Trade Center 7 into its own footprint at freefall speed is all
the evidence needed to reveal extensive and deliberate premeditated criminal activity by powerful forces that had the ability to
prepare pre-positioned demolition charges in that building prior to the flight of the aircraft into the Twin Towers of the World
Trade Center (Buildings One and Two), as well as the power to cover up the evidence of this criminal activity and to deflect questioning
by government agencies and suppress the story in the mainstream news, the collapse of Building 7 is by no means the only evidence
which points to the same conclusion.
Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming, to the point that no one can any longer be excused for accepting the official story. Certainly
during the first few days and weeks after the attacks, or even during the first few years, men and women could be excused for accepting
the official story (particularly given the level to which the mainstream media controls opinion in the united states).
However, eighteen years later there is simply no excuse anymore -- except for the fact that the ramifications of the admission
that the official story is a flagrant fraud and a lie are so distressing that many people cannot actually bring themselves to consciously
admit what they in fact already know subconsciously.
For additional evidence, I strongly recommend the work of the indefatigable Kevin Robert Ryan , whose blog at Dig Within should be required reading for every man and woman in the united
states -- as well as those in the rest of the world, since the ramifications of the murders of innocent men, women and children on
September 11, 2001 have led to the murders of literally millions of other innocent men, women and children around the world since
that day, and the consequences of the failure to absorb the truth of what actually took place, and the consequences of the
failure to address the lies that are built upon the fraudulent explanation of what took place on September 11, continue to
negatively impact men and women everywhere on our planet.
Additionally, I would also recommend the interviews which are archived at the website of Visibility 9-11 , which includes valuable interviews with Kevin Ryan
but also numerous important interviews with former military officers who explain that the failure of the military to scramble fighters
to intercept the hijacked airplanes, and the failure of air defense weapons to stop a jet from hitting the Pentagon (if indeed a
jet did hit the Pentagon), are also completely inexplicable to anyone who knows anything at all about military operations, unless
the official story is completely false and something else was going on that day.
I would also strongly recommend listening very carefully to the series of five interviews with Kevin Ryan on Guns and Butter with Bonnie Faulkner, which can be found in the
Guns and Butterpodcast archive here . These interviews,
from 2013, are numbered 287, 288, 289, 290, and 291 in the archive.
I would in fact recommend listening to nearly every interview in that archive of Bonnie Faulkner's show, even though I do not
of course agree with every single guest nor with every single view expressed in every single interview. Indeed, if you carefully
read Kevin Ryan's blog which was linked above, you will find a
blog post by Kevin Ryan dated June 24, 2018 in which he
explicitly names James Fetzer along with Judy Woods as likely disinformation agents working to discredit and divert the efforts of
9/11 researchers. James Fetzer appears on Guns and Butter several times in the archived interview page linked above.
That article contains a number of stunning quotations about the ongoing failure to address the now-obvious lies we are being told
about the attacks of September 11. One of these quotations, by astronomer Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996), is particularly noteworthy --
even though I certainly do not agree with everything Carl Sagan ever said or wrote. Regarding our propensity to refuse to acknowledge
what we already know deep down to be true, Carl Sagan said:
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.
We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even
to ourselves, that we've been taken.
This quotation is from Sagan's 1995 text, The Demon-Haunted World (with which I have points of disagreement, but which
is extremely valuable for that quotation alone, and which I might suggest turning around on some of the points that Sagan was arguing
as well, as a cautionary warning to those who have accepted too wholeheartedly some of Sagan's teachings and opinions).
This quotation shows that on some level, we already know we have been bamboozled, even if our conscious mind refuses to accept
what we already know. This internal division is actually addressed in the world's ancient myths, which consistently illustrate that
our egoic mind often refuses to acknowledge the higher wisdom we have available to us through the reality of our authentic self,
sometimes called our Higher Self. Previous posts have compared this tendency of the egoic mind to the blissfully ignorant character
of Michael Scott in the television series The Office (US version): see
here for example,
and also here .
The important author Peter Kingsley has noted that in ancient myth, the role of the prophet was to bring awareness and acknowledgement
of that which the egoic mind refuses to see -- which is consistent with the observation that it is through our authentic self (which
already knows) that we have access to the realm of the gods. In the Iliad, for example, Dr. Kingsley notes that Apollo sends disaster
upon the Achaean forces until the prophet Calchas reveals the source of the god's anger: Agamemnon's refusal to free the young woman
Chryseis, whom Agamemnon has seized in the course of the fighting during the Trojan War, and who is the daughter of a priest of Apollo.
Until Agamemnon atones for this insult to the god, Apollo will continue to visit destruction upon those following Agamemnon.
Until we acknowledge and correct what our Higher Self already knows to be the problem, we ourselves will be out of step with the
divine realm.
If we look the other way at the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children on September 11, 2001, and deliberately
refuse to see the truth that we already know deep down in our subconscious, then we will face the displeasure of the Invisible Realm.
Just as we are shown in the ancient myths, the truth must be acknowledged and admitted, and then the wrong that has been done must
be corrected.
In the case of the mass murder perpetrated on September 11, eighteen years ago, that admission requires us to face the fact that
the "terrorists" who were blamed for that attack were not the actual terrorists that we need to be focusing on.
Please note that I am very careful not to say that "the government" is the source of the problem: I would argue that the government
is the lawful expression of the will of the people and that the government, rightly understood, is exactly what these criminal perpetrators
actually fear the most, if the people ever become aware of what is going on. The government, which is established by the Constitution,
forbids the perpetration of murder upon innocent men, women and children in order to initiate wars of aggression against countries
that never invaded or attacked us (under the false pretense that they did so). Those who do so are actually opposed to our government
under the Constitution and can be dealt with within the framework of the law as established by the Constitution, which establishes
a very clear penalty for treason.
When the people acknowledge and admit the complete bankruptcy of the lie we have been told about the attacks of September 11,
the correction of that lie will involve demanding the immediate repeal and dismantling of the so-called "USA PATRIOT Act" which was
enacted in the weeks immediately following September 11, 2001 and which clearly violates the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Additionally, the correction of that lie will involve demanding the immediate cessation of the military operations which were
initiated based upon the fraudulent narrative of the attacks of that day, and which have led to invasion and overthrow of the nations
that were falsely blamed as being the perpetrators of those attacks and the seizure of their natural resources.
The imposition of a vast surveillance mechanism upon the people of this country (and of other countries) based on the fraudulent
pretext of "preventing terrorism" (and the lying narrative that has been perpetuated with the full complicity of the mainstream media
for the past eighteen years) is in complete violation of the human rights which are enumerated in the Bill of Rights and which declare:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,
shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing
the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
That human right has been grievously trampled upon under the false description of what actually took place during the September
11 attacks. Numerous technology companies have been allowed and even encouraged (and paid, with public moneys) to create technologies
which flagrantly and shamelessly violate "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" and
which track their every move and even enable secret eavesdropping upon their conversation and the secret capture of video within
their homes and private settings, without any probable cause whatsoever.
When we admit and acknowledge that we have been lied to about the events of September 11, which has been falsely used as a supposed
justification for the violation of these human rights (with complete disregard for the supreme law of the land as established in
the Constitution), then we will also demand the immediate cessation of any such intrusion upon the right of the people to "be secure
in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" -- including the cessation of any business models which involve spying on men and
women.
Companies which cannot find a business model that does not violate the Bill of Rights should lose their corporate charter and
the privilege of limited liability, which are extended to them by the people (through the government of the people, by the people
and for the people) only upon the condition that their behavior as corporations do not violate the inherent rights of men and women
as acknowledged in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
It is well beyond the time when we must acknowledge and admit that we have been lied to about the events of September 11, 2001
-- and that we continue to be lied to about the events of that awful day. September 11, 2001 is in fact only one such event in a
long history which stretches back prior to 2001, to other events which should have awakened the people to the presence of a very
powerful and very dangerous criminal cabal acting in direct contravention to the Constitution long before we ever got to 2001 --
but the events of September 11 are so blatant, so violent, and so full of evidence which contradicts the fraudulent narrative that
they actually cannot be believed by anyone who spends even the slightest amount of time looking at that evidence.
Indeed, we already know deep down that we have been bamboozled by the lie of the so-called "official narrative" of September 11.
But until we admit to ourselves and acknowledge to others that we've ignored the truth that we already know, then the bamboozle
still has us .
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog
site, internet forums. etc.
David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne
Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster
Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature
and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University.
David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne
Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster
Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature
and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University.
Meet American Empire's 'Doctor Death'
Stephen Kinzer's new book shows how Greatest Generation spooks justified their horrific experiments on
unwitting Americans.
By
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
•
September 10, 2019
In the 1962 film
adaptation of Richard Condon's
The Manchurian Candidate,
a diabolical North Korean doctor named Yen Lo tells Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw to "pass the time with a little
solitaire." These trigger words, accompanied by a Queen of Diamonds playing card, prompts the lanky soldier to get up,
and when instructed, brutally kill two of his own comrades sitting on the stage, both of whom appear under the same
trance as Raymond.
Later, we find out this was not a dream but a real test of Shaw's programming through
elaborate mind control, undertaken before he is sent home to the United States as a sleeper agent for a Communist Party
cell, led by his own mother. "His brain has not only been washed, as they say, but cleaned," declares a gleeful Dr. Lo.
"The Manchurian Candidate" (1962, Universal Artists)
The film
was released when the country was in a state of high Cold War anxiety. The idea that the Communists were deep into
finding a way to brainwash and program individuals to deploy as weapons of war was not new, of course. It was just
finding its way into the increasingly paranoid popular culture. But what Americans did not know was that our own
government was in part responsible for those stories as a cover for their own brainwashing experiments, which were
racing along at the speed of a freight train.
Advertisement
In 1953,
Allen Dulles
told a group of fellow Princeton alumni that the U.S. was far behind the Russians and North Koreans in "brain warfare."
He warned of a mind control gap that would likely grow because "we in the West..have no human guinea pigs to try these
extraordinary techniques."
This was a lie of breathtaking proportions. For several years, his CIA had already
been conducting extreme experiments on unwitting "human guinea pigs" at black sites in France, Germany, and South Korea.
Shortly after he broadcast this cynical lament to the Princeton lads, he approved MK-ULTRA, the most illicit and morally
corrupt intelligence program in American history (that we know of). In it, the CIA tested a stomach roiling variety of
unregulated drugs, electro-shock, sensory deprivation, and other extreme techniques on unwitting souls across the United
States -- in "safe houses," prisons, psychiatric hospitals, doctors' offices -- even in the CIA itself. People died, went
crazy, or withered away in a vegetative state, often with little or no clue of what had happened to them.
In
Poisoner in Chief,
released today, journalist and author Stephen Kinzer makes Dr. Sidney Gottlieb the manifestation of the U.S.
government's Cold War obsession with winning, its warped moral compass, and its utter disregard for the law. From 1951
to the late 1960s, under Dulles' protection, Gottlieb was the principal player in what can only be called a maniacal
mission to find the perfect drug to destroy/control/reprogram the human mind (he believed, though he was never able to
prove, that the drug was LSD).
Gottlieb was also the chief scientist in a CIA program that developed poisons with
which to assassinate world leaders (failed attempts included Cuba's Fidel Castro and Congolese Prime Minister Patrice
Lumumba), tested aerosol-delivered germs and deadly gases, and honed extreme torture techniques. He's been called Dr.
Death, Washington's "official poisoner," and a mad scientist. But "Sidney Gottlieb" never became a household name,
mostly because he never paid for his crimes. Thanks to Deep State politics, statutes of limitations, a great lawyer, and
depressingly weak congressional investigators, Gottlieb was able to take the worst of his secrets to the grave in 1999.
Now, pulling together a trove of existing research, newly unearthed documents, and
fresh interviews, Kinzer puts the fetid corpus of American Empire back under a microscope. It isn't pretty -- but it is
instructive.
"Commitment to a cause provides the ultimate justification for immoral acts.
Patriotism is the most seductive of those causes," Kinzer surmises in an attempt to give context to Gottlieb and Dulles,
and Gottlieb's closest patron and conspirator,
Richard Helms,
who served as CIA chief after
Dulles and during the later years of MK-ULTRA.
"Some do things they know are wrong for what they consider good reasons," Kinzer
continued. "No one else of Gottlieb's generation, however, had the government-given power to do so many things that were
so profoundly and horrifically wrong. No other American -- at least, none that we know of -- ever wielded such terrifying
life-or-death power while remaining so completely invisible."
With so much material to work with,
Poisoner
in Chief
is a parade of outrages. But by the time the twisted calliope falls
silent, two major themes are left to contemplate.
First, Gottlieb did not emerge in a vacuum but in the primordial ooze of moral
justification following World War II. While America was putting its public virtue on display during the
Nuremberg trials
, the army under the Joint Intelligence
Objectives Agency was courting Nazi scientists who had been involved in the most grotesque human experimentation
imaginable during the war. Their expertise in biological warfare and psychoactive drugs was highly prized. The Americans
had to make sure, after all, that the commies didn't get to them first.
So under
Operation
Paperclip
, the army "bleached" their records and brought these men in among several hundred other scientists,
engineers, and technicians who served the Third Reich. Instead of prison, they were settled into comfortable obscurity
in suburban Washington, working for the U.S. government.
For those whose crimes were not so easily scrubbed, the army found ways to collaborate
with them overseas in even less controlled environs. Like
Kurt Blome
, a Nazi scientist who deliberately
infected prisoners with deadly viruses, including the plague, at the Auschwitz concentration camp and other sites. After
saving him from the gallows at Nuremburg, officials quietly installed him in the European Command Intelligence Center at
Oberursel, West Germany -- otherwise known as "Camp King" -- to conduct more experiments, but on our side.
The same went for Japanese scientist
Shiro Ishi,
who was
reportedly responsible for some 10,000 deaths in and around his
Manchurian complex called
Unit 731 during the war. His ghastly activities included everything from slow-roasting test subjects with electricity,
to amputating limbs and dissecting people alive to monitor their slow deaths. At one point, he lined up naked Chinese
women and children to see how long they would live after being struck by shrapnel in the buttocks. He also created tons
of anthrax that was later used to kill thousands of Chinese civilians.
But instead of bringing this monster to justice, U.S. agents granted Ishi and his
Japanese collaborators immunity and obtained all of his research on how toxins affect the body -- including all of the
tissue slides from people whose organs were taken out while they were still alive. "Scientists at Camp Detrick
(Maryland) were delighted," Kinzer writes.
"Thus did the man responsible for directing the dissection of thousands of living prisoners escape punishment," he
adds, noting that Ishi and his minions were deployed to U.S. detention centers in East Asia, where they "helped
Americans conceive and carry out experiments on human subjects that could not legally be conducted in the United States.
Secondly, Kinzer highlights how easily American government officials adopted their
former wartime foes' detached, ruthless approach to human experimentation, embarking without guidance or oversight on
what appears to be a fanatical quest without consequences. At a time when many Americans were zooming to suburbia in
search of "Leave it to Beaver," Gottlieb was hiring people like George White, straight out of
"The Sweet Smell of Success."
White was "a hard charging narcotics detective who lived large in the twilight world
of crime and drugs" writes Kinzer. In 1953 he started setting up "safe houses" in New York and San Francisco where he
would use pay hoodlums and prostitutes in drugs and dough to dose unsuspecting subjects with increasing amounts of LSD
at "parties" while the CIA peeped the action from two-way mirrors outfitted with cameras.
Meanwhile, Gottlieb gave tons of cash and LSD to doctors like Harris Isbell at the
Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky. "Officially this center was a hospital, but it functioned more like a
prison," writes Kizner. "Most inmates were African American from the margins of society. They were unlikely to complain
if abused."
And abused they were, like most of the test subjects at the prison programs financed
by the CIA. If they were told they were part of a test (agreement was typically in exchange for something, like good
behavior credits or high grade heroin), they weren't told what kind of drugs they were given or how much. Many of the
experiments involved dosing subjects with greater and greater amounts of LSD over long periods of time. Gottlieb wanted
to see at what point the mind would dissolve. "He was pleased to have secured a supply of 'expendables' across the
United States," Kinzer notes.
Certainly his test subjects at the CIA interrogation cites overseas were "expendable."
Kinzer offers a number of cases in which foreign detainees, usually suspected spies, were given massive amounts of
different drugs "to see if their minds could be altered." Others were given electro shock. They were later killed, "and
their bodies burned."
Then there were the seemingly random tragedies. Like art student Stanley Glickman who
was believed to be drugged directly by Gottlieb while at a Paris cafe in 1952, and then taken into a hospital where more
"testing" occurred. It was the end of "his productive life," writes Kinzer. Glickman died alone and mentally ill in New
York city several decades later. Or Frank Olson, a CIA scientist who "fell or jumped" from a Manhattan hotel window
after being unwittingly dosed at a "retreat" hosted by Gottlieb a week earlier. Though his family tried, they were never
able to pin his strange death on Gottlieb or the government.
"A Clockwork Orange" (Warner Bros./1971)
Kinzer shows that sometimes paranoia comes from a very real place -- that Big Brother was
not only watching, but for nearly 20 years he was drugging and testing germs and other toxins on unsuspecting Americans
like they were laboratory animals. And Gottlieb, Dulles, and Helms were no fictional spawn of an over-active
imagination. They were highly respected and powerful men with a combined 105 years of government service. They
were
the
system.
So how do we digest this today? We can start by acknowledging that the ends will
always justify the means because the government always gets away with it. And we are still living with the effects. The
torture techniques set into motion in the 1950's, for example, later surfaced in the dark corners of the
Phoenix Program
in Vietnam, and more recently in the dirty cells of
Abu Ghraib detention center.
Indeed, with a head full of Red Menace and lord knows what else, these so-called
stalwart men of the "Greatest Generation" pounded the earth as though America owned the world. Perhaps it did. American
Empire had many faces during the Cold War, and thanks to Kinzer, Sidney Gottlieb is one you shouldn't forget.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is
e
xecutive
editor at
.
Follow her on Twitter
@Vlahos_at_TAC
Think of the internet as a tollway with booths at either end and monitoring along the way.
When you control a booth, for example, you can see which cars pass by.
I have seen that process in action and am in favor of privacy tools (VPN, control of Java
scripts, ad/malware blockers, etc) to preserve some semblance of anonymity. Even with those
in place, there are still ways for actors to observe. Be guided accordingly.
Very difficult to provide choke points – but I am sure they are working on it.
Because almost everything depends upon instantaeous network connectivity, such as power
systems, logistics systems, communication systems, transport systems, defence systems and
banking systems, among others, any interference is going to have side effects that could be
quite serious.
In addition, systems are becoming more and more distributed, with no central control point
– blockchain being a recent example.
For example, I stopped using youtube.com years ago. Mostly I use bitchute to watch some
things directly, view videos through a search engine like DuckDuckGo or view videos embedded
in websites like NC.
Bitchute uses bittorrent to transmit videos – meaning that the viewers of the videos
also provide the bandwidth to each other – a peer to peer transmission method –
so there is almost no bandwidth cost to Bitchute and no central point of control. The more
users or 'nodes', the better the system works.
Youtube, on the other hand, can control or 'choke' content, but it has huge central server
bandwidth costs.
As I see it, YouTube is going to morph into a proprietary Netflix-type of service in just
a few years. Garage-produced indie content and alternative media startups will probably move
to a different platform.
Those measures are nothing special. They are typical for any war or any coup d'état to install totalitarian regime in the
country. Fritened people are easily manipulated. . The only question against whom the war was launched and what was real origin of
9/11. Here 1984 instantly comes to mind.
Next week will be the
18th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Politicians and bureaucrats wasted no time after that
carnage to unleash the Surveillance State on average Americans, treating every person like a
terrorist suspect.
Since the government failed to protect the public, Americans somehow
forfeited their constitutional right to privacy. Despite heroic efforts by former NSA staffer
Edward Snowden and a host of activists and freedom fighters, the government continues ravaging
American privacy.
Two of the largest leaps towards "1984" began in 2002.
Though neither the
Justice Department's Operation TIPS nor the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program was
brought to completion, parcels and precedents from each program have profoundly influenced
subsequent federal policies.
In July 2002, the Justice Department unveiled plans for Operation TIPS -- the Terrorism
Information and Prevention System.
According to the Justice Department website, TIPS would
be "a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors,
ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity."
TIPSters would be people who, "in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to serve
as extra eyes and ears for law enforcement." The feds aimed to recruit people in jobs that "make
them uniquely well positioned to understand the ordinary course of business in the area they serve,
and to identify things that are out of the ordinary." Homeland Security director Tom Ridge said
that observers in certain occupations "might pick up a break in the certain rhythm or pattern of a
community." The feds planned to enlist as many as 10 million people to watch other people's
"rhythms."
The Justice Department provided no definition of "suspicious behavior" to guide
vigilantes.
As
the public began to focus on the program's sweep, opposition surfaced; even the U.S. Postal Service
briefly balked at participating in the program. Director Ridge insisted that TIPS "is not a
government intrusion." He declared, "The last thing we want is Americans spying on Americans.
That's just not what the president is all about, and not what the TIPS program is all about."
Apparently, as long as the Bush administration did not announce plans to compel people to testify
about the peccadilloes of their neighbors and customers, TIPS was a certified freedom-friendly
program.
When Attorney General John Ashcroft was cross-examined by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) on TIPS at
a Judiciary Committee hearing on July 25, he insisted that
"the TIPS program is
something requested by industry to allow them to talk about anomalies that they encounter."
But, when George W. Bush first announced the program, he portrayed it as an administration
initiative. Did thousands of Teamsters Union members petition 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue over
"anomalies"? Senator Leahy asked whether reports to the TIPS hotline would become part of a federal
database with millions of unsubstantiated allegations against American citizens.
Ashcroft told Leahy, "I have recommended that there would be none, and I've been given assurance
that the TIPS program would not maintain a database." But Ashcroft could not reveal which federal
official had given him the assurance.
The ACLU's Laura Murphy observed,
"This is a program where people's activities,
statements, posters in their windows or on their walls, nationality, and religious practices will
be reported by untrained individuals without any relationship to criminal activity."
San Diego law professor Marjorie Cohn observed, "Operation TIPS will encourage neighbors to
snitch on neighbors and won't distinguish between real and fabricated tips. Anyone with a grudge or
vendetta against another can provide false information to the government, which will then enter the
national database."
On August 9, the Justice Department announced it was fine-tuning TIPS, abandoning any "plan to
ask thousands of mail carriers, utility workers, and others with access to private homes to report
suspected terrorist activity," the
Washington Post
reported. People who had enlisted to be
TIPSters received an email notice from Uncle Sam that "only those who work in the trucking,
maritime, shipping, and mass transit industries will be eligible to participate in this information
referral service." But the Justice Department continued refusing to disclose to the Senate
Judiciary Committee who would have access to the TIPS reports.
After the proposal created a fierce backlash across the political board, Congress passed
an amendment blocking its creation.
House Majority Leader Richard Armey (R-Tex.) attached
an amendment to homeland security legislation that declared, "Any and all activities of the federal
government to implement the proposed component program of the Citizen Corps known as Operation TIPS
are hereby prohibited." But the Bush administration and later the Obama administration pursued the
same information roundup with federally funded fusion centers that encouraged people to file
"suspicious activity reports" for a wide array of innocuous behavior -- reports that are dumped into
secret federal databases that can vex innocent citizens in perpetuity.
Operation TIPS illustrated how the momentum of intrusion spurred government to propose
programs that it never would have attempted before 9/11.
If Bush had proposed in August
2001 to recruit 10 million Americans to report any of their neighbors they suspected of acting
unusual or being potential troublemakers, the public might have concluded the president had gone
berserk.
Total Information Awareness: 300 million dossiers
The USA PATRIOT Act created a new Information Office in the Pentagon's Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
In January 2002, the White House chose retired admiral
John Poindexter to head the new office. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer explained, "Admiral
Poindexter is somebody who this administration thinks is an outstanding American, an outstanding
citizen, who has done a very good job in what he has done for our country, serving the military."
Cynics kvetched about Poindexter's five felony convictions for false testimony to Congress
and destruction of evidence during the investigation of the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages exchange.
Poindexter's convictions were overturned by a federal appeals court, which cited the immunity
Congress granted his testimony.
Poindexter committed the new Pentagon office to achieving Total Information Awareness (TIA).
TIA's mission is "to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists -- and decipher their plans --
and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat terrorist
acts,"
according to DARPA. According to Undersecretary of Defense Pete Aldridge, TIA would
seek to discover "connections between transactions -- such as passports; visas; work permits;
driver's licenses; credit cards; airline tickets; rental cars; gun purchases; chemical purchases --
and events -- such as arrests or suspicious activities and so forth." Aldridge agreed that every
phone call a person made or received could be entered into the database. With "voice recognition"
software, the actual text of the call could also go onto a permanent record.
TIA would also strive to achieve "Human Identification at a Distance" (HumanID),
including "Face Recognition," "Iris Recognition," and "Gait Recognition."
The Pentagon
issued a request for proposals to develop an "odor recognition" surveillance system that would help
the feds identify people by their sweat or urine -- potentially creating a wealth of new job
opportunities for deviants.
TIA's goal was to stockpile as much information as possible about everyone on Earth -- thereby
allowing government to protect everyone from everything.
New York Times
columnist William
Safire captured the sweep of the new surveillance system: "Every purchase you make with a credit
card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you
visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you
make, every trip you book, and every event you attend -- all these transactions and communications
will go into what the Defense Department describes as 'a virtual, centralized grand database.'"
Columnist Ted Rall noted that the feds would even scan "veterinary records. The TIA believes that
knowing if and when Fluffy got spayed -- and whether your son stopped torturing Fluffy after you put
him on Ritalin -- will help the military stop terrorists before they strike."
Phil Kent, president of the Southeastern Legal Foundation, an Atlanta-based public-interest law
firm, warned that TIA was "the most sweeping threat to civil liberties since the Japanese-American
internment." The ACLU's Jay Stanley labeled TIA "the mother of all privacy invasions. It would
amount to a picture of your life so complete, it's equivalent to somebody following you around all
day with a video camera." A coalition of civil-liberties groups protested to Senate leaders, "There
are no systems of oversight or accountability contemplated in the TIA project. DARPA itself has
resisted lawful requests for information about the Program pursuant to the Freedom of Information
Act."
Bush administration officials were outraged by such criticisms.
Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared, "The hype and alarm approach is a disservice to the public . I
would recommend people take a nice deep breath. Nothing terrible is going to happen." Poindexter
promised that TIA would be designed so as to "preserve rights and protect people's privacy while
helping to make us all safer." (Poindexter was not under oath at the time of his statement.) The
TIA was defended on the basis that "nobody has been searched" until the feds decide to have him
arrested on the basis of data the feds snared. Undersecretary Aldridge declared, "It is absurd to
think that DARPA is somehow trying to become another police agency. DARPA's purpose is to
demonstrate the feasibility of this technology. If it proves useful, TIA will then be turned over
to the intelligence, counterintelligence, and law-enforcement communities as a tool to help them in
their battle against domestic terrorism." In January 2003, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) learned
that the FBI was working on a memorandum of understanding with the Pentagon "for possible
experimentation" with TIA. Assistant Defense Secretary for Homeland Security Paul McHale confirmed,
in March 2003 testimony to Congress, that the Pentagon would turn TIA over to law-enforcement
agencies once the system was ready to roll.
DARPA responded to the surge of criticism by removing the Information Awareness Office
logo from the website.
The logo showed a giant green eye atop a pyramid, covering half the
globe with a peculiar yellow haze, accompanied by the motto "Scientia est Potentia" (Knowledge is
Power).
Shortly after DARPA completed a key research benchmark for TIA, Lt. Col. Doug Dyer, a DARPA
program manager, publicly announced in April 2003 that Americans are obliged to sacrifice some
privacy in the name of security:
"When you consider the potential effect of a terrorist
attack against the privacy of an entire population, there has to be some trade-off."
But nothing in the U.S. Constitution entitles the Defense Department to decide how much privacy or
liberty American citizens deserve.
In September 2003, Congress passed an amendment abolishing the Pentagon's Information Office and
ending TIA funding. But by that point, DARPA had already awarded 26 contracts for dozens of private
research projects to develop components for TIA. Salon.com reported,
"According to
people with knowledge of the program, TIA has now advanced to the point where it's much more than a
mere 'research project.' There is a working prototype of the system, and federal agencies outside
the Defense Department have expressed interest in it."
The U.S. Customs and Border
Patrol is already using facial recognition systems at 20 airports and the Transportation Security
Administration is expected to quickly follow suit.
Two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo sent a secret memo
to the White House declaring that the Constitution's prohibition on unreasonable searches was null
and void:
"If the government's heightened interest in self-defense justifies the use of
deadly force, then it also certainly would justify warrantless searches."
That memo
helped set federal policy until it was publicly revealed after Barack Obama took office in 2009.
Unfortunately, that anti-Constitution, anti-privacy mindset unleashed many federal intrusions that
continue to this day, from the TSA to the National Security Agency to the FBI and Department of
Homeland Security.
If you want a vision of the future, don't imagine "a boot stamping on a human face -- for
ever," as Orwell suggested in 1984 . Instead, imagine that human face staring mesmerized
into the screen of some kind of nifty futuristic device on which every word, sound, and image
has been algorithmically approved for consumption by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ("DARPA") and its
"innovation ecosystem" of "academic, corporate, and governmental partners."
The screen of this futuristic device will offer a virtually unlimited range of
"non-divisive" and "hate-free" content, none of which will falsify or distort the "truth," or
in any way deviate from "reality." Western consumers will finally be free to enjoy an
assortment of news, opinion, entertainment, and educational content (like this Guardian
podcast about a man who
gave birth , or MSNBC's latest bombshell about
Donald Trump's secret Russian oligarch backers ) without having their enjoyment totally
ruined by discord-sowing alternative journalists like Aaron Maté or satirists like
myself.
"Fake news" will not appear on this screen. All the news will be "authentic." DARPA and its
partners will see to that. You won't have to worry about being "influenced" by Russians, Nazis,
conspiracy theorists, socialists, populists, extremists, or whomever. Such Persons of Malicious
Intent will still be able to post their content (because of "freedom of speech" and all that
stuff), but they will do so down in the sewers of the Internet where normal consumers won't
have to see it. Anyone who ventures down there looking for it (i.e., such "divisive" and
"polarizing" content) will be immediately placed on an official DARPA watchlist for "potential
extremists," or "potential white supremacists," or "potential Russians."
Once that happens, their lives will be over (i.e., the lives of the potentially extremist
fools who have logged onto whatever dark web platform will still be posting essays like this,
not the lives of the Persons of Malicious Intent, who never had any lives to begin with, and
who by that time will probably be operating out of some heavily armed, off-the-grid compound in
Idaho). Their schools, employers, and landlords will be notified. Their photos and addresses
will be published online. Anyone who ever said two words to them (or, God help them, appears in
a photograph with them) will have 24 hours to publicly denounce them, or be placed on
DARPA’s watchlist themselves.
Totalitarian ideologies live by lies and contradiction. For example, the slave-state of
North Korea , ruled by
a hereditary dictatorship, proclaims itself a Democratic People's Republic when it is neither
democratic, popular, nor a republic. In Nineteen Eighty-Four , Orwell wrote of how "the names of the
four Ministries by which [the oppressed population is] governed exhibit a sort of impudence in
their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the
Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with
starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary
hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink ."
Defending the death-machine
You could, then, call GCHQ and the NSA part of the Ministry of Morality. While breaking laws
against surveillance and trying to destroy freedom of expression and enquiry, they pretend that
they're caring, ethical organizations who defend the oppressed and want to build a better
world. In fact, of course, GCHQ and the NSA are defending the death-machine of the military-industrial
complex , which has been wrecking nations and slaughtering civilians in
the Middle East (and elsewhere ) for
decades. They're also defending the traitorous Western governments that first import
millions of Third-Worlders , then use the resultant crime, terrorism and racial conflict to
justify
mass surveillance and harsh laws
against free speech .
Quote: Orwell didn't foresee the celebration of homosexuality by totalitarians, but he did
explain it.
If you read Anthony Burgess' The Wanting Seed he writes about the roles of gays in
dystopia. He also talks about race, two things that Orwell and Huxley didn't. The Wanting
Seed is just as important in the world of dystopia as Brave New World or 1984.
one way George Orwell got the future completely wrong
That assumes he was writing about the future. He was mocking the Soviet "justice" system
in the recent past. The man was a satirist, after all. How did Stalin's men treat sexual
deviation?
1) The iniquities of the members of one skyfairy cult are not evidence for the virtues of
another such organisation and never will be.
2) It seems likely to me that homosexuality is a feature of overpopulation and may be a
natural population control mechanism. Experiments have shown that rats kept in overcrowded
conditions exhibit homosexual tendencies and also become more violent towards other rats. I
doubt that it is purely a coincidence that homosexuality first became notable round about the
time that humans started living in cities. Other species have means of controlling their
populations, rabbits for example can reabsorb their embryos if the population count is too
high, seals can freeze the development of their foetuses etc. I see no rational purpose in
demonising homosexuals and I am certainly not going to let the purveyors of ancient
superstitious claptrap do my thinking for me. Cue howls of outrage from both skyfairy
cultists and from queers (if they are happy to use the word I don't see why I shouldn't)
3) It seems to me that the Zionist bankers have essentially bankrupted the western world
in an attempt to bring the rest of the world under their control, they have failed. They are
now attempting to mobilise any and all sections of the population that identify as minorities
as allies against the majorities in those countries, importing as many more as they can get
away with. What sense does it make to reinforce their narrative that it is heterosexual
whites v everyone else? because that is exactly what some people are doing. The Zionists are
making their following as broad as possible while attempting to narrow ours, why play into
their hands? Opposition to immigration for example does not have to be presented as a racial
issue, many people here in the UK were opposed to mass immigration from eastern Europe on
purely economic grounds, Poles and Lithuanians are not a different race and hardly even a
different culture. Do you really think that Blacks and Latinos that have been in the US for
generations are uniformly delighted about a new influx of cheap labour? Do you really believe
that Muslims are the natural allies of Jews or of homosexuals? If you actually put some
thought into the struggle rather than relying on superstitious claptrap and bigotry you might
be able to start pushing back.
So, Western civilization is going to collapse because of a few fairies & fag
hags?
Yes, it looks as if it will collapse. Not because the fairies and fag hags are
all-powerful, but because we have had it so good & easy for so long that we've gotten
weaker than any determined, focused fairy or hag.
Leftism in general, which I characterize as a mass adoption of a "mental map" (the gross
oversimplification of infinite reality people use to navigate their lives) highly estranged
from underlying reality, is Nature's "suicide switch" for an organism that has grossly
overgrown its ecological niche.
Today people believe palpably unreal things, in incredibly large numbers, with incredibly
deep fervor. The poster-child is the belief in the efficacy of magical incantations (statute
legislation) to change Actual Reality. If "we" want to end racism (however we define it in
the Newspeak Dictionary) then we just pass a law and "pow!" it's gone. (When that doesn't
work, we pass another law, and another and another and another, always expecting a different
result.)
Ditto the banking (and monetary) system. Money used to be basically a "receipt" for
actually having something IN HAND to take to the market and engage in trade. This was the
essence of Say's Law, "in order to consume (buy something) you must first produce."
Some clever Machiavellians figured out that if you could "complexify" and obscure the
monetary system enough, you could obtain the legal right to create from thin air the
ability to enter that market and buy something, which stripped to its essence is the crime of
fraud.
Banking has been an open fraud for a very long time, certainly since the era of naked fiat
money was introduced in the 1960's. But as long as everyone went along with the gag, and
especially once Credit Bubble Funny Money started fueling a debt orgy and rationalizing an
asset price mania, everyone thought "we could all get rich."
Today we have vast claims on real wealth (real wealth is productive land, productive plant
& equipment and capital you can hold in your hands, so to speak.) But we have uncountable
claims on each unit of real capital. The Machiavellians think that they will end up holding
title to it all, when the day comes to actually make an honest accounting. I suspect that
they lack the political power to pull that off, but only time will tell.
When this long, insane boom is reconciled, a lot of productive capital will turn out to be
nothing but vaporware and rusting steel. Entire industries arose to cater to
credit-bubble-demand, and when the bubble eventually ceases to inflate, demand in (and the
capital applied to) those industries will collapse. How many hospitals do you need when no
one has the money to pay for their services, and the tax base has burned to the ground?
Simple formula. Liberalism was the defense of the individual against the group.
All one needs to do is a simple substitution. Minorities , environment , animals etc are a
means by witch one can make individuals into the institutionalized oppressor. Even better is
the so called intersectional mini oppressions which make nearly all victims which in turns
makes all guilty. State intervention must increase .Guilty people , as all religions of the
world understand, are easily dominated and controlled.
The power the individual is destroyed by its own momentum.
@Digital Samizdat The Bolsheviks first pushed "free love" – easy divorce, abortion
and homosexuality. There even was serious discussion about whether or not to abolish
marriage. They reversed themselves and by the time WWII broke out, the official culture of
the Soviet Union was more socially conservative than that of the US. Even in the 1980s, the
Commies were tough on gays, lesbians and druggies.
At TruePublica we have written endlessly about the continued slow strangulation of civil liberties and human rights in Britain.
We have warned about the rise of a
techno-Stasi-state
where technology is harnessed and used against civilians without any debate or indeed any real legal framework. We have alerted the
public on the illegal mass data collections by the government and
subsequent loss of much it by MI5 who should not have had it all in the first place. We warned against '
digital strip
searches ' – an activity of the police of the victims in rape cases, and the fact that Britain is becoming a
database state . At TruePublica
we have tried to press home the story that surveillance by the state on such a scale, described as the most intrusive in the Western
world – is not just illegal, it's immoral and dangerous. (see our surveillance database
HERE ).
Here is more evidence of just how dangerous and out of hand this creeping surveillance architecture is becoming. An investigation
by Big Brother Watch has uncovered a facial recognition 'epidemic'
across privately owned sites in the UK. The civil liberties campaign group has found major property developers, shopping centres,
museums, conference centres and casinos using the technology in the UK.
Millions of shoppers scanned
Their investigation uncovered the use of live facial recognition in Sheffield's Meadowhall , one of the biggest shopping
centres in the North of England, in secret police trials that took place last year. The trial could have scanned the faces of
over 2 million visitors.
The shopping centre is owned by British Land, which owns large areas within London including parts of Paddington, Broadgate,
Canada Water and Ealing Broadway. Each site's privacy policy says facial recognition may be in use, although British Land insists
only Meadowhall has used the surveillance so far.
Last week, the Financial Times revealed that the privately owned Kings Cross estate in London was using facial recognition,
whilst Canary Wharf is considering following suit. The expose prompted widespread concerns and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan,
to write to the estate to express his concerns. The Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham has launched an investigation.
Last year, the Trafford Centre in Manchester was pressured to stop using live facial recognition surveillance following an
intervention by the Surveillance Camera Commissioner. It was estimated that up to 15 million people were scanned during the operation.
" Dark irony" of China exhibition visitors scanned
Big Brother Watch's investigation has also revealed that Liverpool's World Museum scanned visitors with facial recognition
surveillance during its exhibition, "China's First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors" in 2018. Director of Big Brother Watch
Silkie Carlo described it as "dark irony" noting that "this authoritarian surveillance tool is rarely seen outside of China" and
warning that "many of those scanned will have been school children".
The museum is part of the National Museums Liverpool group, which also includes the International Slavery Museum, the
Museum of Liverpool and other museums and art galleries. The museum group said it is "currently testing the feasibility of using
similar technology in the future".
" Eroding freedom of association"
Big Brother Watch's investigation also found that the Millennium Point conference centre in Birmingham uses facial recognition
surveillance "at the request of law enforcement", according to its privacy policy. In recent years, the area surrounding the conference
centre has been used for demonstrations by trade unionists, football fans and anti-racism campaigners. The centre refused to give
further information about its past or present uses of facial recognition surveillance. Millennium Point is soon to host a 'hackathon'.
A number of casinos and betting shops also have policies that refer to their use of facial recognition technology including
Ladbrokes, Coral and Hippodrome Casino London.
Director of Big Brother Watch, Silkie Carlo, said:
There is an epidemic of facial recognition in the UK.
The collusion between police and private companies in building these surveillance nets around popular spaces is deeply
disturbing. Facial recognition is the perfect tool of oppression and the widespread use we've found indicates we're facing
a privacy emergency.
We now know that many millions of innocent people will have had their faces scanned with this surveillance without knowing
about it, whether by police or by private companies.
The idea of a British museum secretly scanning the faces of children visiting an exhibition on the first emperor of China
is chilling. There is a dark irony that this authoritarian surveillance tool is rarely seen outside of China.
Facial recognition surveillance risks making privacy in Britain extinct.
Parliament must follow in the footsteps of legislators in the US and urgently ban this authoritarian surveillance from
public spaces.
"... Today, it might be argued, Americans have been plunged into our own bizarre version of 1984 . In our world, Donald Trump has, in some sense, absorbed into his own person more or less everything dystopian in the vicinity. ..."
"... In some strange fashion, he and his administration already seem like a combination of the Ministry of Truth (a ministry of eternal lies ), the memory hole (down which the past, especially the Obama legacy and the president's own discarded statements , disappear daily), the two-minutes-hate sessions and hate week that are the essence of any of his rallies ("lock her up!," " send her back! "), and recently the "hate" slaughter of Mexicans and Hispanics in El Paso, Texas, by a gunman with a Trumpian "Hispanic invasion of Texas" engraved in his brain. And don't forget Big Brother. ..."
"... In some sense, President Trump might be thought of as Big Brother flipped. In The Donald's version of Orwell's novel, he isn't watching us every moment of the day and night, it's we who are watching him in an historically unprecedented way. ..."
"... In his book, he created a nightmare vision of something like the Communist Party of the Stalin-era Soviet Union perpetuating itself into eternity by constantly regenerating and reinforcing a present-moment of ultimate power. For him, dystopia was an accentuated version of just such a forever, a "huge, accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment of time," as a document in the book puts it, to "arrest the course of history" for "thousands of years." ..."
"... In other words, with the American president lending a significant hand, we may make it to 2084 far sooner than anyone expected. With that in mind, let's return for a moment to 1984 . As no one who has read Orwell's book is likely to forget, its mildly dissident anti-hero, Winston Smith, is finally brought into the Ministry of Love by the Thought Police to have his consciousness retuned to the needs of the Party. In the process, he's brutally tortured until he can truly agree that 2 + 2 = 5. Only when he thinks he's readjusted his mind to fit the Party's version of the world does he discover that his travails are anything but over. ..."
I, Winston Smith I mean, Tom Engelhardt have not just been reading a dystopian novel, but,
it seems, living one -- and I suspect I've been living one all my life.
Yes, I recently reread George Orwell's classic 1949 novel, 1984 . In it, Winston Smith, a secret opponent of the totalitarian world of Oceania,
one of three great imperial superpowers left on planet Earth, goes down for the count at the
hands of Big Brother. It was perhaps my third time reading it in my 75 years on this
planet.
Since I was a kid, I've always had a certain fascination for dystopian fiction. It started,
I think, with War of the
Worlds , that ur-alien-invasion-from-outer-space novel in which Martians land in
southern England and begin tearing London apart. Its author, H.G. Wells, wrote it at the end of
the nineteenth century, evidently to give his English readers a sense of what it might have
felt like to be living in Tasmania, the island off the coast of Australia, and have the
equivalent of Martians -- the British, as it happened -- appear in your world and begin to
destroy it (and your culture with it).
I can remember, at perhaps age 13, reading that book under the covers by flashlight when I
was supposed to be asleep; I can remember, that is, being all alone, chilled (and thrilled) to
the bone by Wells' grim vision of civilizational destruction. To put this in context: in 1957,
I would already have known that I was living in a world of potential civilizational destruction
and that the Martians were here. They were then called the Russians, the Ruskies, the Commies,
the Reds. I would only later grasp that we (or we, too) were Martians on this planet.
The world I inhabited was, of course, a post- Hiroshima , post-
Nagasaki one. I was born on July 20, 1944, just a year and a few days before my country
dropped atomic bombs on those two Japanese cities, devastating them in blasts of a kind never
before experienced and killing more
than 200,000 people. Thirteen years later, I had already become inured to scenarios of the
most dystopian kinds of global destruction -- of a sort that would have turned those Martians
into pikers -- as the U.S. and the Soviet Union (in a distant second place) built up their
nuclear arsenals at a staggering pace.
Nuclear obliteration had, by then, become part of our everyday way of life. After all, what
American of a certain age who lived in a major city can't remember, on some otherwise perfectly
normal day, air-raid sirens suddenly beginning to howl outside your classroom window as the
streets emptied? They instantly called up a vision of a world in ashes. Of course, we children
had only a vague idea of what had happened under those mushroom clouds that rose over Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. As we huddled under our desks, hands over heads, " ducking
and covering " like Bert the Turtle while a radio on the
teacher's desk blared Conelrad
warnings , we knew enough, however, to realize that those desks and hands were unlikely to
save us from the world's most powerful weaponry. The message being delivered wasn't one of
safety but of ultimate vulnerability to Russian nukes. After such tests, as historian Stephen
Weart recalled in his book Nuclear Fear ,
"The press reported with ghoulish precision how many millions of Americans 'died' in each mock
attack."
If those drills didn't add up to living an everyday vision of the apocalypse as a child,
what would? I grew up, in other words, with a new reality: for the first time in history,
humanity had in its hands Armageddon-like possibilities of a sort
previously left to the gods. Consider
, for instance, the U.S. military's Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) of 1960 for a
massive nuclear
strike on the Communist world. It was, we now know, meant to deliver more than 3,200
nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets, including at least 130 cities. Official, if then secret,
estimates of casualties ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured (and probably
underestimated the longer term effects of radiation).
In the early 1960s, a commonplace on the streets of New York where I lived was the
symbol for "fallout
shelters" (as they were then called), the places you would head for during just such an
impending global conflagration. I still remember how visions of nuclear destruction populated
my dreams (or rather nightmares) and those of my friends, as some would later admit to me. To
this day, I can recall the feeling of sudden heat on one side of my body as a nuclear bomb went
off on the distant horizon of one of those dreams. Similarly, I recall sneaking into a Broadway
movie theater to see On the
Beach with two friends -- kids of our age weren't allowed into such films without
parents -- and so getting a glimpse, popcorn in hand, of what a devastated, nuclearized San
Francisco might look like. That afternoon at that film, I also lived through a
post-nuclear-holocaust world's end in Australia with no less than Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and
Fred Astaire for company.
An All-American Hate Week
So my life -- and undoubtedly yours, too -- has been lived, at least in part, as if in a
dystopian novel. And certainly since November 2016 -- since, that is, the election of Donald
Trump -- the feeling (for me, at least) of being in just such a world, has only grown stronger.
Worse yet, there's nothing under the covers by flashlight about The Donald or his invasive
vision of our American future. And this time around, as a non-member of his "base," it's been
anything but thrilling to the bone.
It was with such a feeling growing in me that, all these years later, I once again picked up
Orwell's classic novel and soon began wondering whether Donald Trump wasn't our very own
idiosyncratic version of Big Brother. If you remember, when Orwell finished the book in 1948
(he seems to have flipped that year for the title), he imagined an England, which was part of
Oceania, one of the three superpowers left on the planet. The other two were Eurasia
(essentially the old Soviet Union) and Eastasia (think: a much-expanded China). In the book,
the three of them are constantly at war with each other on their borderlands (mostly in South
Asia and Africa), a war that is never meant to be either decisive or to end.
In Oceania's Airstrip One (the former England), where Winston Smith is a minor functionary
in the Ministry of Truth (a ministry of lies, of course), the Party rules eternally in a world
in which -- a classic Orwellian formulation -- "WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS
STRENGTH." It's a world of "inner" Party members (with great privilege), an outer circle like
Smith who get by, and below them a vast population of impoverished "proles."
It's also a world in which the present is always both the future and the past, while every
document, every newspaper, every bit of history is constantly being rewritten -- Smith's job --
to make it so. At the same time, documentation of the actual past is tossed down "the memory
hole" and incinerated. It's a world in which a "telescreen" is in every room, invariably
announcing splendid news (that might have been terrible news in another time). That screen can
also spy on you at just about any moment of your life. In that, Orwell, who lived at a time
when TV was just arriving, caught something essential about the future worlds of surveillance
and social media.
In his dystopian world, English itself is being reformulated into something called Newspeak,
so that, in a distant future, it will be impossible for anyone to express a non-Party-approved
thought. Meanwhile, whichever of those other two superpowers Oceania is at war with at a given
moment, as well as a possibly mythical local opposition to the Party, are regularly subjected
to a mass daily "two minutes hate" session and periodic "hate weeks." Above all, it's a world
in which, on those telescreens and posters everywhere, the mustachioed face of Big Brother, the
official leader of the Party -- "Big Brother is watching you!" -- hovers over everything,
backed up by a Ministry of Love (of, that is, imprisonment, reeducation, torture, pain, and
death).
That was Orwell's image of a kind of Stalinist Soviet Union perfected for a future of
everlasting horror. Today, it might be argued, Americans have been plunged into our own bizarre
version of 1984 . In our world, Donald Trump has, in some sense, absorbed into his own
person more or less everything dystopian in the vicinity.
In some strange fashion, he and his
administration already seem like a combination of the Ministry of Truth (a ministry of
eternal lies ), the memory hole (down which the past, especially the
Obama legacy and the president's own
discarded statements , disappear daily), the two-minutes-hate sessions and hate week that
are the essence of any of his rallies ("lock her up!," " send her
back! "), and recently the "hate" slaughter of
Mexicans and Hispanics in El Paso, Texas, by a gunman with a Trumpian
"Hispanic invasion of Texas" engraved in his brain. And don't forget Big Brother.
In some sense, President Trump might be thought of as Big Brother flipped. In The Donald's
version of Orwell's novel, he isn't watching us every moment of the day and night, it's we who
are watching him in an historically unprecedented way. In what I've called the
White Ford Bronco presidency , nothing faintly like the media's 24/7 focus on him has ever
been matched. No human being has ever been attended to, watched, or discussed this way -- his
every gesture, tweet, passing comment, half-verbalized thought, slogan, plan, angry outburst,
you name it. In the past, such coverage only went with, say, a presidential assassination, not
everyday life in the White House (or at
Bedminster , Mar-a-Lago, his rallies, on Air Force One, wherever).
Room 101 (in 2019)
Think of Donald Trump's America as, in some sense, a satirical version of 1984 in
crazed formation. Not surprisingly, however, Orwell, remarkable as he was, fell short, as we
all do, in imagining the future. What he didn't see as he rushed to finish that
novel before his own life ended makes the Trumpian present far more potentially dystopian than
even he might have imagined. In his book, he created a nightmare vision of something like the
Communist Party of the Stalin-era Soviet Union perpetuating itself into eternity by constantly
regenerating and reinforcing a present-moment of ultimate power. For him, dystopia was an
accentuated version of just such a forever, a "huge, accurately planned effort to freeze
history at a particular moment of time," as a document in the book puts it, to "arrest the
course of history" for "thousands of years."
Yes, in 1948, Orwell obviously knew about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the weaponry that went
with them. (In 1984 , he even mentions the use of such weaponry in the then-future
1950s.) What he didn't imagine in his book was a dystopian world not of the grimmest kind of
ongoingness but of endings, of ultimate destruction. He didn't conjure up a nuclear apocalypse
set off by one of his three superpowers and, of course, he had no way of imagining another kind
of potential apocalypse that has become increasingly familiar to us all: climate change.
Unfortunately, on both counts Donald Trump is proving dystopian indeed. He is, after all,
the president who threatened
to unleash "fire and fury like the world has never seen" on North Korea (before
falling in love with its dictator). He only recently claimed he could
achieve victory in the almost 18-year-old Afghan War "in a week" by wiping that country "off
the face of the Earth" and killing "10 million people." For the first time, his generals
used
the "Mother of all Bombs," the most powerful weapon in the U.S. conventional arsenal (with a
mushroom cloud that, in a test at least, could be seen for 20 miles), in that same country,
clearly to impress him.
More recently,
beginning with its withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, his
administration has started trashing the Cold War-era nuclear architecture of restraint that
kept the great-power arsenals under some control. In the process, it's clearly helping to
launch a
wildly expensive new nuclear arms race on Planet Earth. And keep in mind that this is happening
at a time when we know that a relatively localized nuclear war between regional powers like
India
and Pakistan (whose politicians are once again at each other's throats
over Kashmir ) could create a global nuclear winter and
starve to death up to a
billion people.
... ... ...
And keep in mind as well that our own twisted version of Big Brother, that guy with the
orange hair instead of the mustache, could be around to be watched for significantly longer,
should he win the election of 2020. (His polling numbers have, on the whole, been slowly rising ,
not falling in these years.)
In other words, with the American president lending a significant hand, we may make it to
2084 far sooner than anyone expected. With that in mind, let's return for a moment to
1984 . As no one who has read Orwell's book is likely to forget, its mildly dissident
anti-hero, Winston Smith, is finally brought into the Ministry of Love by the Thought Police to
have his consciousness retuned to the needs of the Party. In the process, he's brutally
tortured until he can truly agree that 2 + 2 = 5. Only when he thinks he's readjusted his mind
to fit the Party's version of the world does he discover that his travails are anything but
over.
He still has to visit Room 101. As his interrogator tells him, "You asked me once what was
in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is
in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world." And that "worst thing" is always adjusted to the
specific terrors of the specific prisoner.
So here's one way to think of where we are at this moment on Planet Earth: Americans -- all
of humanity, in fact -- may already be in Room 101, whether we know it or not, and the truth
is, by this steaming summer, that most of us should know it.
It's obviously time to act on a global scale. Tell that to Big Brother.
tomdispatch.com The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of
the Strategic Culture Foundation. Tags: Big BrotherOrwell
"... The other aspect this control and coup was NACA being taken over by Nazi Intel/strategists/scientists/war planners through Paper Clip and other relations of the Dulles family were involved with this. Dulles had not one patriotic bone in his body but only cared about elitism, and power. Yes, he made patriotic statements but they were as thin as his skin. ..."
Because "The links between high government officials, CIA, FBI, and organized crime is
astonishing." we will never have an answer, just like John Kennedy, MLK, etc.
In the grand scheme of things, there is a compelling historical argument for the idea that
when the NSA/CIA was created, Dulles found an opportunity to consolidate control of
information and by logic, populations which was in reality, a velvet coup.
The other aspect this control and coup was NACA being taken over by Nazi
Intel/strategists/scientists/war planners through Paper Clip and other relations of the
Dulles family were involved with this. Dulles had not one patriotic bone in his body but only
cared about elitism, and power. Yes, he made patriotic statements but they were as thin as
his skin.
"... Latest is the secretive Andy Pryce squandering millions of public money on the "Open Information Partnership" (OIP) which is the latest name-change for the Integrity Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, just like al-Qaeda kept changing its name. ..."
"... In true Orwellian style, they splashed out on a conference for "defence of media freedom", when they are in the business of propaganda and closing alternative 'narratives' down. And the 'media' they would defend are, in fact, spies sent to foreign countries to foment trouble to further what they bizarrely perceive as 'British interests'. Just like the disgraceful White Helmets, also funded by the FO. ..."
"... "The Guardian is struggling for money" Surely, they would be enjoying some of the seemingly unlimited US defense and some of the mind control programmes budgets. ..."
OffGuardian already covered the Global Media Freedom Conference, our article
Hypocrisy Taints UK's
Media Freedom Conference , was meant to be all there was to say. A quick note on the obvious hypocrisy of this event. But, in
the writing, I started to see more than that. This event is actually creepy. Let's just look back at one of the four "main themes"
of this conference:
Building trust in media and countering disinformation
"Countering disinformation"? Well, that's just another word for censorship. This is proven by their refusal to allow Sputnik or RT
accreditation. They claim RT "spreads disinformation" and they "countered" that by barring them from attending. "Building trust"?
In the post-Blair world of PR newspeak, "building trust" is just another way of saying "making people believe us" (the word usage
is actually interesting, building trust not earning trust). The whole conference is shot through with this language
that just feels off. Here is CNN's
Christiane Amanpour :
Our job is to be truthful, not neutral we need to take a stand for the truth, and never to create a false moral or factual equivalence."
Being "truthful not neutral" is one of Amanpour's
personal sayings
, she obviously thinks it's clever. Of course, what it is is NewSpeak for "bias". Refusing to cover evidence of The White
Helmets staging rescues, Israel arming ISIS or other inconvenient facts will be defended using this phrase – they will literally
claim to only publish "the truth", to get around impartiality and then set about making up whatever "truth" is convenient. Oh, and
if you don't know what "creating a false moral quivalence is", here I'll demonstrate: MSM: Putin is bad for shutting down critical
media. OffG: But you're supporting RT being banned and Wikileaks being shut down. BBC: No. That's not the same. OffG: It seems the
same. BBC: It's not. You're creating a false moral equivalence . Understand now? You "create a false moral equivalence" by
pointing out mainstream media's double standards. Other ways you could mistakenly create a "false moral equivalence": Bringing up
Gaza when the media talk about racism. Mentioning Saudi Arabia when the media preach about gay rights. Referencing the US coup in
Venezuela when the media work themselves into a froth over Russia's "interference in our democracy" Talking about the invasion of
Iraq. Ever. OR Pointing out that the BBC is state funded, just like RT. These are all no-longer flagrant examples of the media's
double standards, and if you say they are , you're "creating a false moral equivalence" and the media won't have to allow
you (or anyone who agrees with you) air time or column inches to disagree. Because they don't have a duty to be neutral or show both
sides, they only have a duty to tell "the truth" as soon as the government has told them what that is. Prepare to see both those
phrases – or variations there of – littering editorials in the Guardian and the Huffington Post in the coming months. Along
with people bemoaning how "fake news outlets abuse the notion of impartiality" by "being even handed between liars the truth tellers".
(I've been doing this site so long now, I have a Guardian-English dictionary in my head).
Equally dodgy-sounding buzz-phrases litter topics on the agenda. "Eastern Europe and Central Asia: building an integrated support
system for journalists facing hostile environments" , this means pumping money into NGOs to fund media that will criticize our
"enemies" in areas of strategic importance. It means flooding money into the anti-government press in Hungary, or Iran or (of course),
Russia. That is ALL it means. I said in my earlier article I don't know what "media sustainability" even means, but I feel I can
take a guess. It means "save the government mouthpieces". The Guardian is struggling for money, all print media are, TV news
is getting lower viewing figures all the time. "Building media sustainability" is code for "pumping public money into traditional
media that props up the government" or maybe "getting people to like our propaganda". But the worst offender on the list is, without
a doubt "Navigating Disinformation"
"Navigating Disinformation" was a 1 hour panel from the second day of the conference. You can watch it embedded above if you really
feel the need. I already did, so you don't have to. The panel was chaired by Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian Foreign Minister. The
members included the Latvian Foreign Minister, a representative of the US NGO Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Ukrainian
Deputy Minister of Information
Have you guessed what "disinformation" they're going to be talking about? I'll give you a clue: It begins with R. Freeland, chairing
the panel, kicks it off by claiming that "disinformation isn't for any particular aim" . This is a very common thing for establishment
voices to repeat these days, which makes it all the more galling she seems to be pretending its is her original thought. The reason
they have to claim that "disinformation" doesn't have a "specific aim" is very simple: They don't know what they're going to call
"disinformation" yet. They can't afford to take a firm position, they need to keep their options open. They need to give themselves
the ability to describe any single piece of information or political opinion as "disinformation." Left or right. Foreign or domestic.
"Disinformation" is a weaponised term that is only as potent as it is vague. So, we're one minute in, and all "navigating disinformation"
has done is hand the State an excuse to ignore, or even criminalise, practically anything it wants to. Good start. Interestingly,
no one has actually said the word "Russia" at this point. They have talked about "malign actors" and "threats to democracy", but
not specifically Russia. It is SO ingrained in these people that "propaganda"= " Russian propaganda" that they don't need
to say it.
The idea that NATO as an entity, or the individual members thereof, could also use "disinformation" has not just been dismissed
it was literally never even contemplated. Next Freeland turns to Edgars Rinkēvičs, her Latvian colleague, and jokes about always
meeting at NATO functions. The Latvians know "more than most" about disinformation, she says. Rinkēvičs says disinformation is nothing
new, but that the methods of spreading it are changing then immediately calls for regulation of social media. Nobody disagrees. Then
he talks about the "illegal annexation of Crimea", and claims the West should outlaw "paid propaganda" like RT and Sputnik. Nobody
disagrees. Then he says that Latvia "protected" their elections from "interference" by "close cooperation between government agencies
and social media companies". Everyone nods along. If you don't find this terrifying, you're not paying attention. They don't say
it, they probably don't even realise they mean it, but when they talk about "close cooperation with social media networks", they
mean government censorship of social media. When they say "protecting" their elections they're talking about rigging them. It only
gets worse. The next step in the Latvian master plan is to bolster "traditional media".
The problems with traditional media, he says, are that journalists aren't paid enough, and don't keep up to date with all the
"new tricks". His solution is to "promote financing" for traditional media, and to open more schools like the "Baltic Centre of Media
Excellence", which is apparently a totally real thing .
It's a training centre which teaches young journalists about "media literacy" and "critical thinking". You can read their depressingly
predictable list of "donors" here . I truly wish I was joking. Next
up is Courtney Radsch from CPJ – a US-backed NGO, who notionally "protect journalists", but more accurately spread pro-US propaganda.
(Their token effort to "defend"
RT and Sputnik when they were barred from the conference was contemptible).
She talks for a long time without saying much at all. Her revolutionary idea is that disinformation could be countered if everyone
told the truth. Inspiring. Beata Balogova, Journalist and Editor from Slovakia, gets the ship back on course – immediately suggesting
politicians should not endorse "propaganda" platforms. She shares an anecdote about "a prominent Slovakian politician" who gave exclusive
interviews to a site that is "dubiously financed, we assume from Russia". They assume from Russia. Everyone nods.
It's like they don't even hear themselves.
Then she moves on to Hungary. Apparently, Orban has "created a propaganda machine" and produced "antisemitic George Soros posters".
No evidence is produced to back-up either of these claims. She thinks advertisers should be pressured into not giving money to "fake
news sites". She calls for "international pressure", but never explains exactly what that means. The stand-out maniac on this panel
is Emine Dzhaparova, the Ukrainian First Deputy Minister of Information Policy. (She works for the Ministry of Information – nicknamed
the Ministry of Truth, which was formed in 2014 to "counter lies about Ukraine". Even
The Guardian thought that sounded dodgy.)
She talks very fast and, without any sense of irony, spills out a story that shoots straight through "disinformation" and becomes
"incoherent rambling". She claims that Russian citizens are so brainwashed you'll never be able to talk to them, and that Russian
"cognitive influence" is "toxic like radiation." Is this paranoid, quasi-xenophobic nonsense countered? No. Her fellow panelists
nod and chuckle. On top of that, she just lies. She lies over and over and over again. She claims Russia is locking up Crimean Tartars
"just for being muslims", nobody questions her. She says the war in Ukraine has killed 13,000 people, but doesn't mention that her
side is responsible for over 80% of civilian deaths.
She says only 30% of Crimeans voted in the referendum, and that they were "forced". A fact not supported by
any polls done by either side in the last
four years, and any referenda held
on the peninsula any time in the last last 30 year. It's simply a lie. Nobody asks her about the journalists
killed in Ukraine since their
glorious Maidan Revolution . Nobody questions the fact that she works for something called the "Ministry of Information". Nobody
does anything but nod and smile as the "countering disinformation" panel becomes just a platform for spreading total lies.
When everyone on the panel has had their ten minutes on the soapbox, Freeland asks for recommendations for countering this "threat"
– here's the list:
Work to distinguish "free speech" from "propaganda", when you find propaganda there must be a "strong reaction".
Pressure advertisers to abandon platforms who spread misinformation.
Regulate social media.
Educate journalists at special schools.
Start up a "Ministry of Information" and have state run media that isn't controlled, like in Ukraine.
This is the Global Conference on Media Freedom and all these six people want to talk about is how to control what can be said,
and who can say it. They single only four countries out for criticism: Hungary, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Russia .and Russia takes
up easily 90% of that. They mention only two media outlets by name: RT and Sputnik. This wasn't a panel on disinformation, it was
a public attack forum – a month's worth of 2 minutes of hate. These aren't just shills on this stage, they are solid gold idiots,
brainwashed to the point of total delusion.
They are the dangerous glassy eyes of a Deep State that never questions itself, never examines itself, and will do anything it
wants, to anyone it wants whilst happily patting itself on the back for its superior morality. They don't know, they don't care.
They're true believers. Terrifyingly dead inside. Talking about state censorship and re-education camps under a big sign that says
"Freedom". And that's just one talk. Just one panel in a 2 day itinerary filled to the brim with similarly soul-dead servants of
authority. Truly, perfectly Orwellian.
Read and be appalled at what America is up to .keep for further reference. We are in danger.
Tim Jenkins
It would serve Ms. Amanpour well, to relax, rewind & review her own interview with Sergei Lavrov:-
Then she might see why Larry King could stomach the appalling corporate dictatorship, even to the core of False & Fake recording
of 'our' "History of the National Security State" , No More
Amanpour was forced to laugh uncontrollably, when confronted with Lavrov's humorous interpretations of various legal aspects
of decency & his Judgement of others' politicians and 'Pussy Riots' >>> if you haven't seen it, it is to be recommended, the whole
interview, if nothing else but to study the body language and micro-facial expressions, coz' a belly up laugh is not something
anybody can easily control or even feign that first spark of cognition in her mind, as she digests Lavrov's response :- hilarious
Einstein
A GE won't solve matters since we have a Government of Occupation behind a parliament of puppets.
Latest is the secretive Andy Pryce squandering millions of public money on the "Open Information Partnership" (OIP) which
is the latest name-change for the Integrity Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, just like al-Qaeda kept changing its name.
In true Orwellian style, they splashed out on a conference for "defence of media freedom", when they are in the business
of propaganda and closing alternative 'narratives' down. And the 'media' they would defend are, in fact, spies sent to foreign
countries to foment trouble to further what they bizarrely perceive as 'British interests'. Just like the disgraceful White Helmets,
also funded by the FO.
Pryce's ventriloquist's dummy in parliament, the pompous Alan Duncan, announced another £10 million of public money for this
odious brainwashing programme.
Tim Jenkins
That panel should be nailed & plastered over, permanently:-
and as wall paper, 'Abstracts of New Law' should be pasted onto a collage of historic extracts from the Guardian, in
offices that issue journalistic licenses, comprised of 'Untouchables' :-
A professional habitat, to damp any further 'Freeland' amplification & resonance,
of negative energy from professional incompetence.
Francis Lee
Apropos of the redoubtable Ms Freeland, Canada's Foreign Secretary.
The records now being opened by the Polish government in Warsaw reveal that Freeland's maternal grandfather Michael (Mikhailo)
Chomiak was a Nazi collaborator from the beginning to the end of the war. He was given a powerful post, money, home and car by
the German Army in Cracow, then the capital of the German administration of the Galician region. His principal job was editor
in chief and publisher of a newspaper the Nazis created. His printing plant and other assets had been stolen from a Jewish newspaper
publisher, who was then sent to die in the Belzec concentration camp. During the German Army's winning phase of the war, Chomiak
celebrated in print the Wehrmacht's "success" at killing thousands of US Army troops. As the German Army was forced into retreat
by the Soviet counter-offensive, Chomiak was taken by the Germans to Vienna, where he continued to publish his Nazi propaganda,
at the same time informing for the Germans on other Ukrainians. They included fellow Galician Stepan Bandera, whose racism against
Russians Freeland has celebrated in print, and whom the current regime in Kiev has turned into a national hero.
Those Ukrainian 'Refugees' admitted to Canada in 1945 were almost certainly members of the 14th Waffen SS Division Galizia 1.
These Ukie collaboraters – not to be confused with the other Ukie Nazi outfit – Stepan Bandera's Ukrainian Insurgent Army -were
held responsible for the massacre of many Poles in the Lviv area the most infamous being carried out in the Polish village of
Huta Pienacka. In the massacre, the village was destroyed and between 500] and 1,000 of the inhabitants were killed. According
to Polish accounts, civilians were locked in barns that were set on fire while those attempting to flee were killed. That's about
par for the course.
Canada's response was as follows:
The Canadian Deschênes Commission was set up to investigate alleged war crimes committed by the collaborators
Memorial to SS-Galizien division in Chervone, Lviv Oblast, western Ukraine
The Canadian "Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes" of October 1986, by the Honourable Justice Jules Deschênesconcluded that in
relation to membership in the Galicia Division:
''The Galicia Division (14. Waffen grenadier division der SS [gal.1]) should not be indicted as a group. The members of Galicia
Division were individually screened for security purposes before admission to Canada. Charges of war crimes of Galicia Division
have never been substantiated, either in 1950 when they were first preferred, or in 1984 when they were renewed, or before this
Commission. Further, in the absence of evidence of participation or knowledge of specific war crimes, mere membership in the Galicia
Division is insufficient to justify prosecution.''
However, the Commission's conclusion failed to acknowledge or heed the International Military Tribunal's verdict at the Nuremberg
Trials, in which the entire Waffen-SSorganisation was declared a "criminal organization" guilty of war crimes. Also, the Deschênes
Commission in its conclusion only referenced the division as 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (Galizische Nr.1), thus in legal
terms, only acknowledging the formation's activity after its name change in August 1944, while the massacre of Poles in Huta Pieniacka,
Pidkamin and Palikrowy occurred when the division was called SS Freiwilligen Division "Galizien". Nevertheless, a subsequent review
by Canada's Minister of Justice again confirmed that members of the Division were not implicated in war crimes.
Yes, the west looks after its Nazis and even makes them and their descendants political figureheads.
mark
Most of these people are so smugly and complacently convinced of their own moral superiority that they just can't see the hypocrisy
and doublethink involved in the event.
Meanwhile Owen Jones has taken to Twitter to rubbish allegations that a reign of terror exists at Guardian Towers – the socialist
firebrand is quoted as saying 'journalists are free to say whatever they like, so long as it doesn't stray too far from Guardian-groupthink'.
Good analysis Kit, of the cognitive dissonant ping pong being played out by Nazi sympathisers such as Hunt and Freeland.
The echo chamber of deceit is amplified again by the selective use of information and the ignoring of relevant facts, such
as the miss reporting yesterday by Reuters of the Italian Neo-Nazi haul of weapons by the police, having not Russian but Ukrainian
links.
Not a word in the WMSM about this devious miss-reporting as the creation of fake news in action. But what would you expect?
Living as I do in Russia I can assure anyone reading this that the media freedom here is on a par with the West and somewhat
better as there is no paranoia about a fictitious enemy – Russians understand that the West is going through an existential crisis
(Brexit in the UK, Trump and the Clinton war of sameness in the US and Macron and Merkel in the EU). A crisis of Liberalism as
the failed life-support of capitalism. But hey, why worry about the politics when there is bigger fish to fry. Such as who will
pay me to dance?
The answer is clear from what Kit has writ. The government will pay the piper. How sweet.
I'd like to thank Kit for sitting through such a turgid masquerade and as I'm rather long in the tooth I do remember the old
BBC schools of journalism in Yelsin's Russia. What I remember is that old devious Auntie Beeb was busy training would be hopefuls
in the art of discretion regarding how the news is formed, or formulated.
In other words your audience. And it ain't the public
The British government's "Online Harms" White Paper has a whole section devoted to "disinformation" (ie, any facts, opinions,
analyses, evaluations, critiques that are critical of the elite's actual disinformation). If these proposals become law, the government
will have effective control over the Internet and we will be allowed access to their disinformation, shop and watch cute cat videos.
Question This
The liberal news media & hypocrisy, who would have ever thought you'd see those words in the same sentence.
But what do you expect from professional liars, politicians & 'their' free press?
Can this shit show get any worse? Yes, The other day I wrote to my MP regards the SNP legislating against the truth, effectively
making it compulsory to lie! Mr Blackford as much as called me a transphobic & seemed to go to great length publishing his neo-liberal
ideological views in some scottish rag, on how right is wrong & fact is turned into fiction & asked only those that agreed with
him contact him.
Tim Jenkins
"The science or logical consistency of true premise, cannot take place or bear fruit, when all communication and information is
'marketised and weaponised' to a mindset of possession and control."
B.Steere
Mikalina
I saw, somewhere (but can't find it now) a law or a prospective law which goes under the guise of harassment of MPs to include
action against constituents who 'pester' them.
I only emailed him once! That's hardly harassment. Anyway I sent it with proton-mail via vpn & used a false postcode using only
my first name so unlikely my civil & sincere correspondence will see me locked up for insisting my inalienable rights of freedom
of speech & beliefs are protected. But there again the state we live in, i may well be incarcerated for life, for such an outrageous
expectation.
Where to?
"The Guardian is struggling for money"
Surely, they would be enjoying some of the seemingly unlimited US defense and some of the mind control programmes budgets.
Harry Stotle
Its the brazen nature of the conference that is especially galling, but what do you expect when crooks and liars no longer feel
they even have to pretend?
Nothing will change so long as politicians (or their shady backers) are never held to account for public assets diverted toward
a rapacious off-shore economic system, or the fact millions of lives have been shattered by the 'war on terror' and its evil twin,
'humanatarian regime change' (while disingenuous Labour MPs wail about the 'horrors' of antisemitism rather than the fact their
former leader is a key architect of the killings).
Kit remains a go-to voice when deconstructing claims made by political figures who clearly regard the MSM as a propaganda vehicle
for promoting western imperialism – the self-satisfied smugness of cunts like Jeremy Cunt stand in stark contrast to a real journalist
being tortured by the British authorities just a few short miles away.
It's a sligtly depressing thought but somebody has the unenviable task of monitoring just how far our politicians have drifted
from the everyday concerns of the 'just about managing' and as I say Mr Knightly does a fine job in informing readers what the
real of agenda of these media love-ins are actually about – it goes without saying a very lengthy barge pole is required when
the Saudis are invited but not Russia.
Where to?
This Media Freedom Conference is surely a creepy theatre of the absurd.
It is a test of what they can get away with.
Mikalina
Yep. Any soviet TV watcher would recognise this immediately. Message? THIS is the reality – and you are powerless.
mark
When are they going to give us the Ministry of Truth we so desperately need?
"... We know our disinformation program is complete when almost everything the American public believes is false.' ..."
"... Using groundbreaking camera and lighting techniques, Riefenstahl produced a documentary that mesmerized Germans; as Pilger noted, her Triumph of the Will 'cast Adolf Hitler's spell'. She told the veteran Aussie journalist the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the "submissive void" of the public. ..."
"... All in all, Riefenstahl produced arguably for the rest of the world the most compelling historical footage of mass hysteria, blind obedience, nationalistic fervour, and existential menace, all key ingredients in anyone's totalitarian nightmare. That it also impressed a lot of very powerful, high profile people in the West on both sides of the pond is also axiomatic: These included bankers, financiers, industrialists, and sundry business elites without whose support Hitler might've at best ended up a footnote in the historical record after the ill-fated beer-hall putsch. (See here , and here .) ..."
"... The purpose of this propaganda barrage, as Sharon Bader has noted, has been to convince as many people as possible that it is in their interests to relinquish their own power as workers, consumers, and citizens, and 'forego their democratic right to restrain and regulate business activity. As a result the political agenda is now confined to policies aimed at furthering business interests.' ..."
Here was, of course, another surreal spectacle, this time courtesy of one of the Deep State's most dangerous, reviled, and divisive
figures, a notable protagonist in the Russia-Gate conspiracy, and America's most senior diplomat no less.
Not only is it difficult to accept that the former CIA Director actually believes what he is saying, well might we ask, "Who can
believe Mike Pompeo?"
And here's also someone whose manifest cynicism, hypocrisy, and chutzpah would embarrass the much-derided
scribes and Pharisees of Biblical days.
We have Pompeo on record recently in a rare moment of
honesty admitting – whilst laughing his ample ass off, as if recalling some "Boy's Own Adventure" from his misspent youth with a
bunch of his mates down at the local pub – that under his watch as CIA Director:
We lied, cheated, we stole we had entire training courses.'
It may have been one of the few times in his wretched existence that Pompeo didn't speak with a forked tongue.
At all events, his candour aside, we can assume safely that this reactionary, monomaniacal, Christian Zionist 'end-timer' passed
all the Company's "training courses" with flying colours.
According to Matthew Rosenberg
of the New York Times, all this did not stop Pompeo however from name-checking Wikileaks when it served his own interests. Back
in 2016 at the height of the election campaign, he had ' no compunction about pointing people toward emails stolen* by Russian hackers
from the Democratic National Committee and then posted by WikiLeaks."
[NOTE: Rosenberg's omission of the word "allegedly" -- as in "emails allegedly stolen" -- is a dead giveaway of bias on his part
(a journalistic Freudian slip perhaps?), with his employer
being one of those MSM marques leading the charge with the "Russian Collusion" 'story'. For a more insightful view of the source
of these emails and the skullduggery and thuggery that attended Russia-Gate, readers are encouraged to
check this out.]
And this is of course The Company we're talking about, whose past and present relationship with the media might be summed up in
two words:
Operation Mockingbird (OpMock). Anyone vaguely familiar with the well-documented Grand Deception that was OpMock, arguably the
CIA's most enduring, insidious, and successful
psy-ops gambit, will know what
we're talking about. (See
here ,
here ,
here , and
here .) At its most basic, this operation was all about propaganda and censorship, usually operating in tandem to ensure all
the bases are covered.
After opining that the MSM is 'totally infiltrated' by the CIA and various other agencies, for his part former NSA whistleblower
William Binney recently added , ' When it
comes to national security, the media only talk about what the administration wants you to hear, and basically suppress any other
statements about what's going on that the administration does not want get public. The media is basically the lapdogs for the government.'
We know our disinformation program is complete when almost everything the American public believes is false.'
In order to provide a broader and deeper perspective, we should now consider the views of a few others on the subjects at hand,
along with some history. In a 2013 piece musing on the modern significance of the practice, my compatriot John Pilger
ecalled a time when he met
Leni Riefenstahl
back in 70s and asked her about her films that 'glorified the Nazis'.
Using groundbreaking camera and lighting techniques, Riefenstahl produced a documentary that mesmerized Germans; as Pilger
noted, her Triumph of the Will 'cast Adolf Hitler's
spell'. She told the veteran Aussie journalist the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the
"submissive void" of the public.
All in all, Riefenstahl produced arguably for the rest of the world the most compelling historical footage of mass hysteria,
blind obedience, nationalistic fervour, and existential menace, all key ingredients in anyone's totalitarian nightmare. That it also
impressed a lot of very powerful, high profile people in the West on both sides of the pond is also axiomatic: These included
bankers, financiers, industrialists,
and sundry business elites without whose support Hitler might've at best ended up a footnote in the historical record after the
ill-fated
beer-hall
putsch. (See
here , and here .)
" Triumph " apparently still resonates today. To the surprise of few one imagines, such was the impact of the film -- as casually
revealed in the excellent 2018 Alexis Bloom documentary Divide and
Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes -- it elicited no small amount of admiration from arguably the single most influential propagandist
of recent times.
[Readers might wish to check out Russell Crowe's recent portrayal of Ailes in Stan's mini-series
The Loudest Voice , in my view one the best performances of the man's career.]
In a recent piece unambiguously titled "Propaganda Is The Root Of All Our Problems", my other compatriot Caitlin Johnstone also
had a few things to
say about the subject, echoing Orwell when she observed it was all about "controlling the narrative".
Though I'd suggest the greater "root" problem is our easy propensity to ignore this reality, pretend it doesn't or won't affect
us, or reject it as conspiratorial nonsense, in this, of course, she's correct. As she cogently observes,
I write about this stuff for a living, and even I don't have the time or energy to write about every single narrative control
tool that the US-centralised empire has been implementing into its arsenal. There are too damn many of them emerging too damn
fast, because they're just that damn crucial for maintaining existing power structures.'
Fittingly, in a discussion encompassing amongst other things history, language, power, and dissent, he opined, ' Determining how
individuals communicate is' an objective which represents for the power elites 'the best chance' [they] have to control what people
think. This translates as: The more control 'we' have over what the proles think, the more 'we' can reduce the inherent risk for
elites in democracy.
' Clumsy men', Saul went on to say, 'try to do this through power and fear. Heavy-handed men running heavy-handed systems attempt
the same thing through police-enforced censorship. The more sophisticated the elites, the more they concentrate on creating intellectual
systems which control expression through the communications structures. These systems require only the discreet use of censorship
and uniformed men.'
In other words, along with assuming it is their right to take it in the first place, ' those who take power will always try to
change the established language ', presumably to better facilitate their hold on it and/or legitimise their claim to it.
For Oliver Boyd-Barrett, democratic theory presupposes a public communications infrastructure that facilitates the free and open
exchange of ideas.' Yet for the author of the recently published
RussiaGate and Propaganda: Disinformation in the Age of Social Media , 'No such infrastructure exists.'
The mainstream media he says, is 'owned and controlled by a small number of large, multi-media and multi-industrial conglomerates'
that lie at the very heart of US oligopoly capitalism and much of whose advertising revenue and content is furnished from other conglomerates:
The inability of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that can encompass histories, perspectives and vocabularies
that are free of the shackles of US plutocratic self-regard is also well documented.'
Of course the word "inability" suggests the MSM view themselves as having some responsibility for maintaining such an egalitarian
news and information environment. They don't of course, and in truth, probably never really have! A better word would be "unwilling",
or even "refusal". The corporate media all but epitomise the " plutocratic self-regard" that is characteristic of "oligopoly capitalism".
Indeed, the MSM collectively functions as advertising, public relations/lobbying entities for Big Corp, in addition to acting
as its Praetorian bodyguard , protecting their secrets,
crimes, and lies from exposure. Like all other companies they are beholden to their shareholders (profits before truth and people),
most of whom it can safely be assumed are no strangers to "self-regard", and could care less about " histories, perspectives and
vocabularies" that run counter to their own interests.
It was Aussie social scientist Alex Carey who
pioneered the study of nationalism ,
corporatism , and moreso for our purposes herein, the
management (read: manipulation) of public opinion, though all three have important links (a story for another time). For Carey, the
following conclusion was inescapable: 'It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that
we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.' This former farmer
from Western Australia became one of the world's acknowledged experts on propaganda and the manipulation of the truth.
Prior to embarking on his academic career, Carey was a successful sheep
grazier . By all accounts, he was a first-class judge of the
animal from which he made his early living, leaving one to ponder if this expertise gave him a unique insight into his main area
of research!
In any event, Carey in time sold the farm and travelled to the U.K. to study psychology, apparently a long-time ambition. From
the late fifties until his death in 1988, he was a senior lecturer in psychology and industrial relations at the Sydney-based University
of New South Wales, with his research being lauded by such luminaries as Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, both of whom have had a thing
or three to say over the years about The Big Shill. In fact such was his admiration, Pilger
described him as "a second Orwell", which in anyone's lingo
is a big call.
In fact, for anyone with an interest in how public opinion is moulded and our perceptions are managed and manipulated, in whose
interests they are done so and to what end, it is as essential reading as any of the work of other more famous names. This tome came
complete with a foreword by Chomsky, so enamoured was the latter of Carey's work.
For Carey, the three "most significant developments" in the political economy of the twentieth century were:
the growth of democracy the growth of corporate power; and the growth of propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against
democracy.
For Carey, it is an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is 'distinctive'
of totalitarian regimes. Yet as he stresses: the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda
is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is
vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not).' In this context, 'conventional
wisdom" becomes conventional ignorance; as for "common sense", maybe not so much.
The purpose of this propaganda
barrage, as Sharon Bader has noted, has been to convince as many people as
possible that it is in their interests to relinquish their own power as workers, consumers, and citizens, and 'forego their democratic
right to restrain and regulate business activity. As a result the political agenda is now confined to policies aimed at furthering
business interests.'
An extreme example of this view playing itself right under our noses and over decades was the cruel fiction of the "
trickle down effect " (TDE) -- aka the 'rising tide that would lift all yachts' -- of
Reaganomics . One of several mantras that defined Reagan's
overarching political shtick, the TDE was by any measure, decidedly more a torrent than a trickle, and said "torrent" was going up
not down. This reality as we now know was not in Reagan's glossy economic brochure to be sure, and it may have been because the Gipper
confused his prepositions and verbs.
Yet as the GFC of 2008 amply demonstrated, it culminated in a free-for all, dog eat dog, anything goes, everyman for himself form
of cannibal (or anarcho) capitalism -- an updated, much
improved version of the no-holds-barred mercenary mercantilism much reminiscent of the
Gilded Age and the
Robber Barons who 'infested' it, only one
that doesn't just eat its young, it eats itself!
Making the World Safe for Plutocracy
In the increasingly dysfunctional, one-sided political economy we inhabit then, whether it's widgets or wars or anything in between,
few people realise the degree to which our opinions, perceptions, emotions, and views are shaped and manipulated by propaganda (and
its similarly 'evil twin' censorship ,) its most adept practitioners, and those elite, institutional, political, and corporate entities
that seek out their expertise.
It is now just over a hundred years since the practice of propaganda took a giant leap forward, then in the service of persuading
palpably reluctant Americans that the war raging in Europe at the time was their war as well.
This was at a time when Americans had just voted their then-president
Woodrow Wilson back into office for a second term, a victory
largely achieved on the back of the promise he'd
"keep us out of the War." Americans were
very much in what was one of their most
isolationist
phases , and so Wilson's promise resonated with them.
But over time they were convinced of the need to become involved by a distinctly different appeal to their political sensibilities.
This "appeal" also dampened the isolationist mood, one which it has to be said was not embraced by most of the political, banking,
and business elites of the time, most of whom stood to lose big-time if the Germans won, and/or who were already profiting or benefitting
from the business of war.
For a president who "kept us out of the war", this wasn't going to be an easy 'pitch'. In order to sell the war the president
established the Committee on Public Information
(aka the Creel Committee) for the purposes of publicising the rationale for the war and from there, garnering support for it
from the general public.
Either way, Bernays 'combined their perspectives and synthesised them into an applied science', which he then 'branded' "public
relations".
For its part the Creel committee struggled with its brief from the off; but Bernays worked with them to persuade Americans their
involvement in the war was justified -- indeed necessary -- and to that end he devised the brilliantly inane slogan,
"making the world safe for democracy"
.
Thus was born arguably the first
great propaganda catch-phrases of the modern era, and certainly one of the most portentous. The following sums up Bernays's unabashed
mindset:
The conscious, intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic
society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power
of our country.'
The rest is history (sort of), with Americans becoming more willing to not just support the war effort but encouraged to view
the Germans and their allies as evil brutes threatening democracy and freedom and the 'American way of life', however that might've
been viewed then. From a geopolitical and historical perspective, it was an asinine premise of course, but nonetheless an extraordinary
example of how a few well chosen words tapped into the collective psyche of a country that was decidedly opposed to any U.S involvement
in the war and turned that mindset completely on its head.
' [S]aving the world for democracy' (or some 'cover version' thereof) has since become America's positioning statement, 'patriotic'
rallying cry, and the "Get-out-of-Jail Free" card for its war and its white collar criminal clique.
At all events it was by any measure, a stroke of genius on Bernays's part; by appealing to people's basic fears and desires, he
could engineer consent on a mass scale. It goes without saying it changed the course of history in more ways than one. That the U.S.
is to this day still using a not dissimilar meme to justify its
"foreign entanglements" is testament to both its utility and durability.
The reality as we now know was markedly different of course. They have almost always been about power, empire, control, hegemony,
resources, wealth, opportunity, profit, dispossession, keeping existing capitalist structures intact and well-defended, and crushing
dissent and opposition.
The Bewildered Herd
It is instructive to note that the template for 'manufacturing consent' for war had already been forged by the British. And the
Europeans did not 'sleepwalk'
like some " bewildered herd ' into this conflagration.
For twenty years prior to the outbreak of the war in 1914, the then stewards of the British Empire had been diligently preparing
the ground for what they viewed as a preordained clash with their rivals for empire the Germans.
To begin with, contrary to the opinion of the general populace over one hundred years later, it was not the much touted German
aggression and militarism, nor their undoubted imperial ambitions, which precipitated its outbreak. The stewards of the British Empire
were not about to let the Teutonic upstarts chow down on their imperial lunch as it were, and set about unilaterally and preemptively
crushing Germany and with it any ambitions it had for creating its own imperial domain in competition with the Empire upon which
Ol' Sol never set.
The "Great War" is worth noting here for other reasons. As documented so by Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty in their two books
covering the period from 1890-1920, we learn much about propaganda, which attest to its extraordinary power, in particular its
power to distort
reality en masse in enduring and subversive ways.
In reality, the only thing "great" about World War One was the degree to which the masses fighting for Britain were conned via
propaganda and censorship into believing this war was necessary, and the way the official narrative of the war was sustained for
posterity via the very same means. "Great" maybe, but not in a good way!
The horrendous carnage and destruction that resulted from it was of course unprecedented, the global effects of which linger on
now well over one hundred years later.
Such was the
enduring power
of the propaganda that today most folks would have great difficulty in accepting the following; this is a short summary of historical
realities revealed by Macgregor and Docherty that are at complete odds with the official narrative, the political discourse, and
the school textbooks:
It was Great Britain (supported by France and Russia) and not Germany who was the principal aggressor in the events and actions that
let to the outbreak of war; The British had for twenty years prior to 1914 viewed Germany as its most dangerous economic and imperial
rival, and fully anticipated that a war was inevitable; In the U.K. and the U.S., various factions worked feverishly to ensure the
war went on for as long as possible, and scuttled peacemaking efforts from the off; key truths about this most consequential of geopolitical
conflicts have been concealed for well over one hundred years, with no sign the official record will change; very powerful forces
(incl. a future US president) amongst U.S. political, media, and economic elites conspired to eventually convince an otherwise unwilling
populace in America that U.S. entry onto the war was necessary; those same forces and many similar groups in the U.K. and Europe
engaged in everything from war profiteering, destruction/forging of war records, false-flag ops, treason, conspiracy to wage aggressive
war, and direct efforts to prolong the war by any means necessary, many of which will rock folks to their very core.
But peace was not on the agenda. When, by 1916, the military failures were so embarrassing and costly, some key players in the
British government were willing to talk about peace. This could not be tolerated. The potential peacemakers had to be thrown under
the bus. The unelected European leaders had one common bond: They would fight Germany until she was crushed.
Prolonging the Agony details how this secret cabal organised to this end the change of government without a single vote being
cast. David Lloyd George was promoted to prime minister
in Britain and Georges Clemenceau made prime minister
in France. A new government, an inner-elite war cabinet thrust the Secret Elite leader, Lord
Alfred Milner into power at the very inner-core of the
decision-makers in British politics.
Democracy? They had no truck with democracy. The voting public had no say. The men entrusted with the task would keep going till
the end and their place-men were backed by the media and the money-power, in Britain, France and America.
Propaganda Always Wins
But just as the pioneering adherents of propaganda back in the day might never have dreamt how sophisticated and all-encompassing
the practice would become, nor would the citizenry at large have anticipated the extent to which the industry has facilitated an
entrenched, rapacious plutocracy at the expense of our economic opportunity, our financial and material security, our physical, social
and cultural environment, our values and attitudes, and increasingly, our basic democratic rights and freedoms.
We now live in the Age of the Big Shill -- cocooned in a submissive void no less -- an era where nothing can be taken on face
value yet where time and attention constraints (to name just a few) force us to do so; [where] few people in public life can be taken
at their word; where unchallenged perceptions become accepted reality; where 'open-book' history is now incontrovertible not-negotiable,
upon pain of imprisonment fact; where education is about uniformity, function, form and conformity, all in the service of imposed
neo-liberal ideologies embracing then prioritising individual -- albeit dubious -- freedoms.
More broadly, it's the "Roger Ailes" of this world -- acting on behalf of the power elites who after all are their paymasters
-- who create the intellectual systems which control expression through the communications structures, whilst ensuring these systems
require only 'the discreet use of censorship and uniformed men.'
They are the shapers and moulders of the discourse that passes for the accepted lingua franca of the increasingly globalised,
interconnected, corporatised political economy of the planet. Throughout this process they 'will always try to change the established
language.'
And we can no longer rely on our elected representatives to honestly represent us and our interests. Whether this decision making
is taking place inside or outside the legislative process, these processes are well and truly in the grip of the banks and financial
institutions and transnational organisations. In whose interests are they going to be more concerned with?
We saw this all just after the
Global Financial Crisis
(GFC) when the very people who brought the system to the brink, made billions off the dodge for their banks and millions for
themselves, bankrupted hundreds of thousands of American families, were called upon by the U.S. government to fix up the mess, and
to all intents given a blank cheque to so do.
That the U.S. is at even greater risk now of economic
implosion is something few serious pundits would dispute, and a testament to the effectiveness of the snow-job perpetrated upon Americans
regarding the causes, the impact, and the implications of the 2008 meltdown going forward.
In most cases, one accepts almost by definition such disconnects (read: hidden agendas) are the rule rather than the exception,
hence the multi-billion foundation -- and global reach and impact -- of the propaganda business. This in itself is a key indicator
as to why organisations place so much importance on this aspect of managing their affairs.
At the very least, once corporations saw how the psychology of persuasion could be leveraged to manipulate consumers and politicians
saw the same with the citizenry and even its own workers, the growth of the industry was assured.
As Riefenstahl noted during her chinwag with Pilger after he asked if those embracing the "submissive void" included the liberal,
educated bourgeoisie? " Everyone ," she said.
By way of underscoring her point, she added enigmatically: 'Propaganda always wins if you allow it'.
Greg Maybury is a freelance writer based in Perth, Australia. His main areas of interest are American history and politics
in general, with a special focus on economic, national security, military, and geopolitical affairs. For 5 years he has regularly
contributed to a diverse range of news and opinion sites, including OpEd News, The Greanville Post, Consortium News, Dandelion Salad,
Global Research, Dissident Voice, OffGuardian, Contra Corner, International Policy Digest, the Hampton Institute, and others.
nottheonly1
This brilliant essay is proof of the reflective nature of the Universe. The worse the propaganda and oppression becomes, the greater
the likelihood such an essay will be written.
Such is the sophistication and ubiquity of the narrative control techniques used today -- afforded increasingly by 'computational
propaganda' via automated scripts, hacking, botnets, troll farms, and algorithms and the like, along with the barely veiled
censorship and information gatekeeping practised by Google and Facebook and other tech behemoths -- it's become one of the
most troubling aspects of the technological/social media revolution.
Very rarely can one experience such a degree of vindication. My moniker 'nottheonly1' has received more meaning with this precise
depiction of the long history of the manipulation of the masses. Recent events have destroyed but all of my confidence that there
might be a peaceful way out of this massive dilemma. Due to this sophistication in controlling the narrative, it has now become
apparent that we have arrived at a moment in time where total lawlessness reigns. 'Lawlessness' in this case means the loss of
common law and the use of code law to create ever new restrictions for free speech and liberty at large.
Over the last weeks, comments written on other discussion boards have unleashed a degree of character defamation and ridicule
for the most obvious crimes perpetrated on the masses through propaganda. In this unholy union of constant propaganda via main
stream 'media' with the character defamation by so called 'trolls' – which are actually virtual assassins of those who write the
truth – the ability of the population, or parts thereof to connect with, or search for like minded people is utterly destroyed.
This assault on the online community has devastating consequences. Those who have come into the cross hairs of the unintelligence
agencies will but turn away from the internet. Leaving behind an ocean of online propaganda and fake information. Few are now
the web sites on which it is possible to voice one's personal take on the status quo.
There is one word that describes these kind of activities precisely: traitor. Those who engage in the character defamation
of commenters, or authors per se, are traitors to humanity. They betray the collective consciousness with their poisonous attacks
of those who work for a sea change of the status quo. The owner class has all game pieces positioned. The fact that Julian Assange
is not only a free man, but still without a Nobel price for peace, while war criminals are recipients, shows just how much the
march into absolute totalitarianism has progressed. Bernays hated the masses and offered his 'services' to manipulate them often
for free.
Even though there are more solutions than problems, the time has come where meaningful participation in the search for such
solution has been made unbearable. It is therefore that a certain fatalism has developed – from resignation to the acceptance
of the status quo as being inevitable. Ancient wisdom has created a proverb that states 'This too, will pass'. While that is a
given, there are still enough Human Beings around that are determined to make a difference. To this group I count the author of
this marvelous, albeit depressing essay. Thank you more that words can express. And thank you, OffGuardian for being one of the
last remaining places where discourse is possible.
Really great post! Thanks. I'm part of the way through reading Alex Carey's book: "Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate
Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty," referenced in this article. I've learned more about the obviously verifiable history of
U.S. corporate propaganda in the first four chapters than I learned gaining a "minor" in history in 1974 (not surprisingly I can
now clearly see). I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in just how pervasive, entrenched and long-standing are the
propaganda systems shaping public perception, thought and behavior in America and the West.
Norcal
Wow Greg Maybury great essay, congratulations. This quote is brilliant, I've never see it before, "For Carey, the following conclusion
was inescapable: 'It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from
propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.' "
Too, Rodger Ailes was the man credited with educating Nixon up as how to "use" the TV media, and Ailes never looked back as
he manipulated media at will. Thank you!
nondimenticare
That is also one of the basic theses of Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize speech.
vexarb
I read in 'Guns, Germs and Steel' about Homo Sapiens and his domesticated animals. Apparently we got on best in places where we
could find animals that are very like us: sheep, cattle, horses and other herd animals which instinctively follow their Leader.
I think our cousins the chimpanzee are much the same; both species must have inherited this common trait from some pre-chimpanzee
ancestor who had found great survival value in passing on the sheeple trait to their progeny. As have the sheep themselves.
By the way, has anybody observed sheeple behaviour in ants and bees? For instance, quietly following a Leader ant to their
doom, or noisily ganging up to mob a worker bee that the Queen does not like?
I'd say the elites are both for and against. Competing factions.
It's clear that many are interested in overturning democracy, whilst others want to exploit it.
The average grunt on the street is in the fire, regardless of the pan chosen by the elites.
To
buy his favorite oatmeal, Gregory Kelly drives to a city 40 miles away rather than sharing his
data with an online retailer, or purchasing it from the company's web site, "which he says is
riddled with tracking software from Google," according to the Washington Post:
"I'm just not
sure why Google needs to know what breakfast cereal I eat," the 51-year-old said. Kelly is one
of a hearty few who are
taking the ultimate step to keep their files and online life safe from prying eyes :
turning off Google entirely. That means eschewing some of the most popular services on the Web,
including Gmail, Google search, Google Maps, the Chrome browser, Android mobile operating
software and even YouTube. Such never-Googlers are pushing friends and family to give up the
search and advertising titan, while others are taking to social media to get the word out.
Online guides have sprouted up to help consumers untangle themselves from Google.
These intrepid Web users say they'd rather deal with daily inconveniences than give up
more of their data. That means setting up permanent vacation responders on Gmail and telling
friends to resend files or video links that don't require Google software. More than that, it
takes a lot of discipline.
While there's no data on how many people are avoiding Google, the article points out that
DuckDuckGo is now averaging 42.4 million searches every day -- up from 23.5 million a
year ago.
But at least one Berkeley tech consultant acknowledged that "the improvement is mostly in
the category of self-righteousness." Seeking an office software with better privacy
protections, he's now paying $100 a year for a subscription to Microsoft Office 365.
"... Any candidate that is publicly against the empire is the enemy of not only the state, it's quislings in the media, the corporations who profit from it and the party machines of both the GOP and the DNC. That is Gabbard's crime. And it's the only crime that matters. ..."
"... This represents an intervention into her ability to speak to voters and, as such, is a violation of not only her First Amendment rights but also, more critically, campaign finance law. ..."
"... On a day when it became clear to the world that Robert Mueller led an investigation to affect the outcome of the 2018 mid-term elections (and beyond) while attempting to overthrow an elected President, Gabbard attacking the one of the main pillars of the information control system is both welcome and needed. ..."
"... Her filing this lawsuit is making it clear that even a fairly conventional Democrat on most all other issues is to be marginalized if she criticizes the empire. ..."
"... You can disagree with Tulsi on many things but she is absolutely right and the only one who gets the real problem.Military Industrial Complex & The Empire. ..."
Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI)
is suing Google
. It's about time someone did. It's one thing to for conservatives and libertarians to be outraged by their treatment
by the tech giant, it's another for them to go after a female Democrat.
Since Trump's election the campaign to curtail free speech has went into overdrive and we are now far beyond Orwell's dystopian
vision in 1984 in terms of technological infrastructure.
Google makes Big Brother look like George Carlin's the Hippy Dippy Weather Man with the "hippy dippy weather, man." The drive
to stamp out all forms of political division has only one thing animating it, protecting the drive of the elites I call The Davos
Crowd to erect a transnational superstate to herd humanity to their vision of sustainability.
Gabbard is the only person running for the Democratic nomination worth any amount of my time. Her fundamental criticisms of the
U.S. warfare state are spot on. She's sincere about this. It's costing her stature within her own party.
She's a committed anti-imperialist. She's also young, inexperienced and a little bit naive. But that, to me, is part of her charm.
It means she is still malleable. She's smart enough to be outraged about where we are headed and young enough to be flexible about
what the solutions are to stop it from happening.
So, as such, she's the perfect champion for the defenders of free speech and critics of the U.S. empire. A young, attractive,
intelligent woman of mixed-race heritage with a service record who stands athwart the mainstream on the most important issue in politics
today: the U.S. empire.
The entire time I was growing up the prevailing wisdom was Social Security was the third rail of U.S. politics. That, like so
many other pearls of wisdom, was nonsense.
The true third rail of U.S. politics is empire.
Any candidate that is publicly against the empire is the enemy of not only the state, it's quislings in the media, the corporations
who profit from it and the party machines of both the GOP and the DNC. That is Gabbard's crime. And it's the only crime that matters.
For that crime Google acted to blunt interest in her campaign in the critical hours after the first democratic debate. So, Gabbard,
rightly, sued them.
The two main points of her lawsuit are:
1) suspending her Google Ad account for six hours while search traffic for her was spiking and
2) Gmail disproportionately junked her campaign emails.
This represents an intervention into her ability to speak to voters and, as such, is a violation of not only her First Amendment
rights but also, more critically, campaign finance law.
Whether this lawsuit goes anywhere or not is beside the point. Google will ignore it until they can't and then settle with her
before discovery. Gabbard doing this is good PR for her as it sets her on the right side of an incredibly important issue, censorship
and technological bias/de-platforming of political outsiders.
It's also good because if she does pursue this principally, it will lead to potential discovery of Google's internal practices,
lending the DoJ a hand in pursuing all the big tech firms for electioneering.
On a day when it became clear to the world that Robert Mueller led an investigation to affect the outcome of the 2018 mid-term
elections (and beyond) while attempting to overthrow an elected President, Gabbard attacking the one of the main pillars of the information
control system is both welcome and needed.
Her filing this lawsuit is making it clear that even a fairly conventional Democrat on most all other issues is to be marginalized
if she criticizes the empire.
As libertarians and conservatives it is irrelevant if she is conventional in other areas. It doesn't matter that she's been to
a CFR meeting or two or that she's anti-gun. She's not going to be president.
This is not about our virtue-signaling about the purity of essence of our political figures. They are tools to our ends. And on
now two incredibly important issues leading up to the 2020 election Tulsi Gabbard is on the right side of them.
She is someone we can and should reach out to and support while she makes these issues the centerpiece of her campaign. Her timing
is even more excellent than what I've already stated.
Filing this lawsuit is a pre-emptive strike at Google now that she's qualified for the next two Democratic debates. And it may
assist her in breaking out of the bottom tier of the Democratic field, Ron Paul style if she gets her opportunity.
Shedding light on Google's anti-free speech practices is a fundamental good, one we should celebrate. Dare I say, it's double
plus good.
* * *
Join
my Patreon
and
install Brave
if you both hate big tech censorship and the empire in equal
measure.
You can disagree with Tulsi on many things but she is absolutely
right and the only one who gets the real problem.Military
Industrial Complex & The Empire.
If you won't kill this problem
you can virtue signal about your left and right opinions about
your perfect candidate as much as you want without getting
anything done ( Trump). Purism won't help you. It only gets you
distracted and controlled by the elites.
The point of this article is that Gabbard is taking on GOOGLE,
for screwing with her account. See Google demonitizes, deboosts,
deplatforms people without them even knowing it, and diddles their
search algorythms NOT ONLY against conservatives, but for
independent democrats like Gabbard. THAT'S THE POINT, not who or
what Gabbard stands for. The dem party did the same to Gabbard
during the 2016 election, cut her off from financing, because she
supported Bernie Sanders.
This is the sort of **** things dim's do, and progressive
companies like Fakebook, Twatter and Goolag. Now Gabbard may not
have views that we can support, but if she is taking on GOOLAG,
than we should stand like a wall behind her. This is a big threat
to 1st amendment rights.
Good point, chunga. She is already being given the Ron Paul
treatment by MSM (they either slam her as basically a naive
fool, or just ignore her), so no way does she rise to the top
of the **** pile of Blue Team candidates. Would make a good
run as an independent, and maybe wake some people up.
"... I favor the notion that the Internet's gift of vastly more accessible information and greater and less expensive communication is exposing more of corruption in government that continues an ancient trend, this web site being a sterling example. ..."
Quite a few people couldn't help but notice that the country was shifting into a
dis-informational mode several years ago. So much for the Information Age, the Internet and
hand held ( communication ) devices to increase awareness. It was noticed by some folks even
here at CN that tendencies had come ito play that were reminiscent of Orwell's dystopian yet
fictional accounts in the novel 1984. This entire Russiagate episode could just as easily
have come from 1984's Ministry of Information as our own Intelligence Services and might have
been just as boring if it had . Meanwhile us , prols, just go with the flow and don't really
care. Are things that much different than they have ever been? I rem,ember the Waterdate
hearings and the Iran-Contra Hearings, Ken Starr's Investigation. I'm a little to young to
remember the Warren Commission or Senator Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare but I do remember
the 9/11 Commission and WMGs in Iraq.. I remember wrote a paper on Propaganda films in WW II.
Is this episode really all that different?
@ "Quite a few people couldn't help but notice that the country was shifting into a
dis-informational mode several years ago. So much for the Information Age, the Internet and
hand held ( communication ) devices to increase awareness. "
You address a topic I've pondered long and hard. Although I can cite scant evidence, I
can't help but wonder: Are we instead only noticing -- because of the far wider availability
of information via the Internet -- a disinformation phenomenon that is perhaps centuries old
if not still older?
Huxley's Brave New World was published in 1931, Orwell's 1984 in 1949. Dickens' Bleakhouse
was serialized in 1852-53. All can be fairly said to deal with a perception that those who
control government are dishonest and corrupt, based on then-current norms. E.g., Dickens
noted in the preface of his first edition that his fictional Jarndyce and Jarndyce largely
paralleled the sadly real Thellusson v Woodford. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thellusson_v_Woodford
Such precedents argue against the "disinformational mode" being of recent origin.
I favor the notion that the Internet's gift of vastly more accessible information and
greater and less expensive communication is exposing more of corruption in government that
continues an ancient trend, this web site being a sterling example.
When Alex Stamos announced that the Internet Research Agency's ad buys were a drop in
the ocean, Zuckerberg was promptly taken to the Congressional Woodshed and told to report
to the Atlantic Council. Those two billion-odd fake accounts may be a fraud perpetrated on
the advertisers, but they are invaluable to US "law" enforcement and to US propaganda, where
the ability to open a fake account on Facebook gives the illusion of privacy.
With all due respect to Mr. Greenspan and his Lowell House creds, I think he fails to
understand that Facebook is now an NSA asset.
This is a fascinating article and it certainly put a smile on my dial. As an asset for use
by governments around the world, Facebook may be too invaluable to just let sink. One guy
reported that he was in a meeting with Facebook’s top brass including the Zuck when a
head honcho of the FBI came into the meeting and sang Zuck’s praises for all the help
that Facebook gave the FBI. So the question remains. Just how many “real” Facebook
accounts does Facebook have? Ones that people check on daily. Now that is the killer
question.
I have three Facebook accounts. The two I never ever look at are the one for my cat and
the one for my feminine alter ego. My own account is used for only one thing, watching
"People You May Know" to see how far they've penetrated my graph; occasionally disturbing,
occasionally hilarious. I've never looked at my "wall", issued or accepted a friend request,
posted anything, messaged anyone but they have my email, and wow do I hate this company!
May 2018, a woman I loved and was ultimately going to get to move in died (age 70, natural
causes). Twice a week on average I get emails from Facebook inviting me to read her most
recent messages. You can imagine how I feel about that. SHE DED!
Facebook has boasted on the order of 2-3 billion users, a significant percentage of the
world's population, and I don't believe a word of it. One may assume that the early adopters
were people with more tech savvy, affluence and most important, leisure time to screw around
on the internet, and the proles don't have a lot of leisure time. Moreover, the value to the
advertiser of a set of eyeball impressions is directly related to the amount of disposable
income those eyeballs have, and sure, India has about one and a half billion people, but a
lot of them have zero disposable income and zero leisure time.
"Based on a combination of publicly available research and Plaintiffs' own analysis, among
18-34 years-olds in Chicago, for example, Facebook asserted its Potential Reach was
approximately 4 times (400%) higher than the number of real 18-34 year-olds with Facebook
accounts in Chicago. Based on a combination of publicly available research and Plaintiffs'
own analysis, Facebook's asserted Potential Reach in Kansas City was approximately 200%
higher than the number of actual 18-54 year-olds with Facebook accounts in Kansas City. This
inflation is apparent in other age categories as well."
"These foundational representations are false. Based on publicly available research and
Plaintiffs' own analysis, Facebook overstates the Potential Reach of its advertisements. For
example, based on publicly available data, Facebook's purported Potential Reach among the key
18-34 year-
22 old demographic in every state exceeds the actual population of 18-34 year-olds ."
"... Russiagate, the most extensive disinformation/propaganda campaign since Iraqi WMD, has fallen/is falling apart without any need to reference fake Facebook accounts. ..."
"... The Collusion narrative/conspiracy theory was preposterous from the get-go, riven with internal inconsistencies, and the recent Federal court ruling that prevents Mueller from continuing to publicly accuse Concord management of "undermining our democracy" (that's a hot one) discredits the second of the three bases of the narrative. ..."
Russiagate, the most extensive disinformation/propaganda campaign since Iraqi WMD, has
fallen/is falling apart without any need to reference fake Facebook accounts.
The Collusion narrative/conspiracy theory was preposterous from the get-go, riven with
internal inconsistencies, and the recent Federal court ruling that prevents Mueller from
continuing to publicly accuse Concord management of "undermining our democracy" (that's a hot
one) discredits the second of the three bases of the narrative.
Someday the McResistance TM and unhinged liberals possessed by magical thinking must grapple
with the fact that Trump was elected in America, by Americans, and that there is no Santa
Claus.
"... Facebook hasn't provided any data to clarify the matter, in fact their data further confuses it. In that respect it resembles a Madoff-style scheme. And that will become terribly relevant once revenue growth slows down. ..."
From an investor point of view, revs are growing very nicely albeit at a slowing rate and
forward earning valuations are not atrocious. 47% rev growth in 2017. 37% rev growth in
2018.
24% rev growth forecast for 2019. 21% rev growth forecast in 2020. Those rev growth rates
are over the moon compared to the SP500.
Who gives a rat's ass about fake accounts as long as the revs are growing.
And Singer, poor fella, he was crying in his beer back in August because he probably lost
money when the stock price went down following an announcement that rev growth rates would
predictably slow. If the cry-baby didn't sell, the market has made him pretty much whole
again.
If and when rev growth falls off a cliff instead of a natural rate of deceleration, then
the fake accounts may become material. Even if revs fall off a cliff, there is little to no
likelihood you will find a Madoff of Ponzi lurking around the corner.
It sounds like revenue is only growing because advertisers aren't aware of the fake
accounts and related puffery.
That will only remain true for so long. Facebook hasn't provided any data to clarify
the matter, in fact their data further confuses it. In that respect it resembles a
Madoff-style scheme. And that will become terribly relevant once revenue growth slows
down.
Fortunately, elites never go after each other so Z and friends will be fine. No worries
there.
FB fake accounts were an issue for a very long time. It pops up now and then, and then is
ignored. Unfortunately.
Google, TBH, has a not dissimilar problem, although it's more obvious to the buyers. That
is, it can't tell how many clicks (don't even mention "impressions") are bots. And it has no
incentive to put anything strong there, to the contrary, it has incentive to show some
captures, but as few as possible.
After all, advertisers pay for clicks and impressions, and you don't want to drop those
numbers that your revenue depends on, do you?
If you business model is "user is the product", then of course you have an incentive to
fake the users..
While email and web activity of employees is definitely monitored, all other monitoring
usually is pretty fragmentary. Often on a corporate smartphone there are two zones -- secure zone
where you access corporate network and email and private zone where you have access to the
internet via you provider and traffic is not monitored other then for the volume.
Keeping track of all those details (and some of them will be wrong) is just too expensive and
few corporation outside FIRE sector so that.
In short anything that opens company to a lawsuit will be monitored, but outside of that
companies actually are not interested in the information collection as it opens them to
additional liability in save of suicides and such.
Mining data from social media is a different complex topic and requires a separate
article.
Notable quotes:
"... From there, the company even sees as Chet logs onto the guest Wi-Fi connections at places like the coffee shop in the morning. Many companies require additional authentication when they try to access company information from unsecure Wi-Fi networks. ..."
"... Then, as Chet gets to his desk, his web browsing is tracked along with his email. New software breaks down how workers interact with email and how quickly colleagues reply in an attempt to see which employees are most influential . Some software on company computers even snaps screenshots every 30 seconds to evaluate productivity and hours worked. ..."
"... Even Chet's phone conversations can be recorded, transcribed and monitored. Companies use this information to find subject matter experts and measure productivity. Even conference room discussions and meetings can now be recorded and analyzed by software. ..."
Orwell, Inc.: How Your Employer Spies On You From When You Wake Up Until You Go To Bed
An increasing number of large companies are using data from employees' electronic devices to
track such personal details like when you they wake up, where they go for coffee in the
morning, their whereabouts throughout the entire day, and what time they go to bed according to
a new Wall
Street Journal article. What's the company explanation for this type of spying?
"An increasing number of companies are keeping track of such information to flag
potentially suspicious activity and measure work-life balance," the article claims.
The article walks through the day in the life of a fictional worker, Chet. It starts by
noting that his employer logs the time and his location when he first wakes up to check his
e-mail in the morning.
From there, the company even sees as Chet logs onto the guest Wi-Fi connections at
places like the coffee shop in the morning. Many companies require additional authentication
when they try to access company information from unsecure Wi-Fi networks.
Then, a Bluetooth device and his ID badge mark what time he arrives at the office while
tracking his movement around the building. These technologies are supposedly used to see what
teams collaborate frequently and to make sure that employees aren't accessing unauthorized
areas.
Then, as Chet gets to his desk, his web browsing is tracked along with his email. New
software breaks down how workers interact with email and how quickly colleagues reply in an
attempt to see which employees are most influential . Some software on company computers even
snaps screenshots every 30 seconds to evaluate productivity and hours worked.
Even Chet's phone conversations can be recorded, transcribed and monitored. Companies
use this information to find subject matter experts and measure productivity. Even conference
room discussions and meetings can now be recorded and analyzed by software.
At the end of the day, if Chet goes to the gym or for a run, the company will know that too
and just how many calories he has burned: his fitness tracker logs how many steps he takes and
what exercise, if any, he is doing. Companies then use that information to determine how
frequently employees are exercising and whether or not they should be paying for health and
fitness services.
They retain firms that track us on our social media accounts. Supposedly to defend against
workplace violence threats. And then there are the cameras. We never really know. Just do my
job and keep personal use of company resources to a minimum.
The operation known as "LifeLog" was replaced the very day that Face Book came into
being?
Life Log : The objective of the LifeLog concept was "to be able to trace the 'threads' of
an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships", and it has the ability
to "take in all of a subject's experience, from phone numbers dialed and e-mail messages
viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone". [1]
My takeaway from all this is that many, perhaps most, human institutions are corrupt and
that there is no basis from which most people are able to discern truth from lies or right
from wrong. This explains the ability of the Power Elite to easily divide people against each
other. For example, you cannot debate a Liberal because they have their basis for truth on
their personal feeling or emotions. Many conservatives do as well, but they are closer in
their thingking to the foundation from which truth sits upon.
Edward Snowden, former NSA employee. Snowden is an absolute supporter of encryption of all
stored and transmitted content. Now there are many applications that have encryption
features. And among them there are common and well-known messengers, such as, for example,
WhatsApp, Telegram and others.
The former NSA agent also advises to secure his computer, in particular, the hard drive.
On the Internet you can find instructions on how to do this. Usually used special software.
For example, for Windows, there is a program preinstalled in advanced versions of the OS --
BitLocker, for Mac -- FileVault. Thus, if the computer is stolen, the attacker will not be
able to read your data.
Password Managers A useful thing that most people do not even think about. Such programs
allow you to keep your passwords in order - to create unique keys and store them. According
to Snowden, one of the most common problems with online privacy is leaks.
Tor. The former NSA official calls the anonymous Tor network "the most important
technological project to ensure the confidentiality of those currently used." He stated that
he uses it on a daily basis. Tor allows you to "cover up traces" on the Internet, that is, it
provides anonymity, making it difficult to determine the person's IP address and
location.
Also, Snowden told how to avoid total surveillance. For example, special services that can
remotely turn on a microphone or camera on a smartphone and start listening. The answer is
simple - pull out the microphone and camera modules from the device. Instead, it is proposed
to use an external accessory and disconnect from the selfie and never use it.
The only safe way is to abstain as much as possible, which is now next to impossible.
Security is only as protected as the weakest link. Consider a person who uses their smart
phone giving Google or Apple the permissions needed to use their OS's and apps; we do not
even know exactly how much info we agreed to give away. Consider all the contact info that
your friends, relatives, work or other organizations you associate with have on their devices
and how vulnerable they make it; they are not as cautious as you and some people using these
things do not even think about security; it never occurs to them.. .. just some musing on my
part.
Jeez, I used to sign a quarterly affirmation that I complied with all of the companies
electronic communication monitoring policies...and they made us sign that we understood that
they had climbed up our *** and pitched a tent.
One of the reasons they had to find a replacement for me when I quit.
If you're using your employer's devices, facilities, or networks, you should assume they
are tracking what you're doing, and they have every right to do so. When I buy your company's
products or services, I don't want to have to pay for your time spent messing around at
work.
I can't read the article since it's behind a paywall, but I don't see how your waking and
sleeping time and "work life balance" could be tracked unless you are using your employer's
devices or networks outside of work. Which is friggin stupid if you do it.
Actually it doesnt work like that... Chet isn't informed of this happening. The fact that
the company does this is buried in vague language in the 500 page employee handbook that Chet
has to sign when he is hired. Chet is just like anyone else with a company provided
electronic device. All companies monitor and track everything they can with the electronic
devices they provide. If you have one and th think your company doesnt do it... you are
naive.
Chet has the ability to determine when and where he uses the work-provided devices. And
why does work have access to his fitness tracker? Supplied by his employer too? Really, Chet
had options
Not with me... I have a personal phone and when I am not at work I keep my work phone at
home turned off. My emails are forwarded to my personal device and any voicemail I get also
gets forwarded to my personal device. I never place personal calls with my work phone and I
turn it off the second I leave work to go home.
What a waste of resources. If you want to see what I do, just ask. I'll show you how I
accomplish my work-related duties. How I manage my time at work. Where I go to cry and regret
my life choices.
The amount of data collected by various companies is just staggering. Any person in the USA is really like a bug under the
microscope. The question arise why we still have organized crime unless this is a branch of CIA.
Notable quotes:
"... Not to mention the legally required auto and homeowner's insurance, which can only be obtained through private corporations. Both of which maintain histories on your driving and lifestyle habits to determine how much of your wage to pocket. ..."
"... Even basic healthcare is only provided through private insurance that you are legally required to pay. And these insurance companies desperately try to charge you extra or cancel you for pre-existing conditions. ..."
"... The liberty of Americans has to be redefined. Where liberty is no longer to live a life of freedom from coercion, but to only live a life of coercion from government, except when the coercion involves a private corporation, then it is perfectly acceptable. And Americans have readily given up their liberty. ..."
The government actually has little influence in our lives. But it doesn't need to. Life's necessities are all controlled by
private corporations. The key to the control is the removal of liberty. If housing costs so much that I have to obtain a mortgage
to buy basic shelter, then my credit score determines my ability to obtain adequate shelter. The same works with rent. And I can't
pay for either of those things without a wage based job. And I can't be hired into one of those without the proper credentials
being bestowed upon me by some school, and I cannot have any felony arrests in my background. And transportation to my job generally
requires a car and another loan with the associated credit score.
Not to mention the legally required auto and homeowner's insurance, which can only be obtained through private corporations.
Both of which maintain histories on your driving and lifestyle habits to determine how much of your wage to pocket.
Even basic healthcare is only provided through private insurance that you are legally required to pay. And these insurance
companies desperately try to charge you extra or cancel you for pre-existing conditions.
The government actually doesn't have to control you. They've turned over the destruction of your liberty to private corporations
who are all working hard to nudge you to accept their rules through various subtle systems.
And unless you have enough money to own your own house and cars, and not actually have to work, you have no choice but to be
obedient.
The only real difference between China and the US is that the Chinese have no expectation of liberty. They understand from
birth that they must be obedient.
The liberty of Americans has to be redefined. Where liberty is no longer to live a life of freedom from coercion, but to only
live a life of coercion from government, except when the coercion involves a private corporation, then it is perfectly acceptable.
And Americans have readily given up their liberty.
1984, Brave New World, and Idiocracy look more and more like Documentaries now.
Notable quotes:
"... Describing the protagonist Winston Smith's frugal London flat, he mentions an instrument called a 'telescreen', which sounds strikingly similar to the handheld 'smartphone' that is enthusiastically used by billions of people around the world today. ..."
"... At the same time, the denizens of 1984 were never allowed to forget they were living in a totalitarian surveillance state, under the control of the much-feared Thought Police. Massive posters with the slogan 'Big Brother is Watching You' were as prevalent as our modern-day advertising billboards. Today, however, such polite warnings about surveillance would seem redundant, as reports of unauthorized spying still gets the occasional lazy nod in the media now and then. ..."
"... In fact, just in time for 1984's anniversary, it has been reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) has once again been illicitly collecting records on telephone calls and text messages placed by US citizens. ..."
"... Another method of control alluded to in 1984 fell under a system of speech known as 'Newspeak', which attempted to reduce the language to 'doublethink', with the ulterior motive of controlling ideas and thoughts. ..."
"... Another Newspeak term, known as 'facecrime', provides yet another striking parallel to our modern situation. Defined as "to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense." It would be difficult for the modern reader to hear the term 'facecrime' and not connect it with 'Facebook', the social media platform that regularly censors content creators for expressing thoughts it finds 'hateful' or inappropriate. ..."
"... 'Hate speech' is precisely one of those delightfully vague, subjective terms with no real meaning that one would expect to find in the Newspeak style guide. Short of threatening the life of a person or persons, individuals should be free to criticize others without fear of reprisal, least of all from the state, which should be in the business of protecting free speech at all cost. ..."
"... Another modern phenomenon that would be right at home in Orwell's Oceania is the obsession with political correctness, which is defined as "the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against." But since so many people today identify with some marginalized group, this has made the intelligent discussion of controversial ideas – not least of all on US college campuses , of all places – exceedingly difficult, if not downright dangerous. Orwell must be looking down on all of this madness with much surprise, since he provided the world with the best possible warning to prevent it. ..."
70 years ago, the British writer George Orwell captured the essence of technology in its ability to shape our destinies in his
seminal work, 1984. The tragedy of our times is that we have failed to heed his warning.
No matter how many times I read 1984, the feeling of total helplessness and despair that weaves itself throughout Orwell's masterpiece
never fails to take me by surprise. Although usually referred to as a 'dystopian futuristic novel', it is actually a horror story
on a scale far greater than anything that has emerged from the minds of prolific writers like Stephen King or Dean Koontz. The reason
is simple. The nightmare world that the protagonist Winston Smith inhabits, a place called Oceania, is all too easily imaginable.
Man, as opposed to some imaginary clown or demon, is the evil monster.
In the very first pages of the book, Orwell demonstrates an uncanny ability to foresee future trends in technology. Describing
the protagonist Winston Smith's frugal London flat, he mentions an instrument called a 'telescreen', which sounds strikingly similar
to the handheld 'smartphone' that is enthusiastically used by billions of people around the world today.
Orwell describes the ubiquitous device as an "oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror" affixed to the wall that "could be dimmed,
but there was no way of shutting it off completely." Sound familiar?
It is through this gadget that the rulers of Oceania are able
to monitor the actions of its citizens every minute of every day.
At the same time, the denizens of 1984 were never allowed to forget
they were living in a totalitarian surveillance state, under the control of the much-feared Thought Police. Massive posters with
the slogan 'Big Brother is Watching You' were as prevalent as our modern-day advertising billboards. Today, however, such polite
warnings about surveillance would seem redundant, as reports of unauthorized spying still gets the occasional lazy nod in the media
now and then.
In fact, just in time for 1984's anniversary, it has been
reported that the National Security
Agency (NSA) has once again been illicitly collecting records on telephone calls and text messages placed by US citizens. This latest
invasion
of privacy has been casually dismissed as an "error" after an unnamed telecommunications firm handed over call records the NSA
allegedly "hadn't requested" and "weren't approved" by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In 2013, former CIA employee
Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA's intrusive surveillance operations, yet somehow the government agency is able to continue
– with the help of the corporate sector – vacuuming up the private information of regular citizens.
Another method of control alluded to in 1984 fell under a system of speech known as 'Newspeak', which attempted to reduce the
language to 'doublethink', with the ulterior motive of controlling ideas and thoughts. For example, the term 'joycamp', a truncated
term every bit as euphemistic as the 'PATRIOT Act', was used to describe a forced labor camp, whereas a 'doubleplusgood duckspeaker'
was used to praise an orator who 'quacked' correctly with regards to the political situation.
Another Newspeak term, known as 'facecrime', provides yet another striking parallel to our modern situation. Defined as "to wear
an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense."
It would be difficult for the modern reader to hear the term 'facecrime' and not connect it with 'Facebook', the social media platform
that regularly censors content creators
for expressing thoughts it finds 'hateful' or inappropriate. What social media users need is an Orwellian lesson in 'crimestop',
which Orwell defined as "the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought." Those
so-called unacceptable 'dangerous thoughts' were determined not by the will of the people, of course, but by their rulers.
And yes, it gets worse. Just this week, Mark Zuckerberg's 'private company'
agreed to give French authorities the "identification
data" of Facebook users suspected of spreading 'hate speech' on the platform, in what would be an unprecedented move on the part
of Silicon Valley.
'Hate speech' is precisely one of those delightfully vague, subjective terms with no real meaning that one would expect to find
in the Newspeak style guide. Short of threatening the life of a person or persons, individuals should be free to criticize others
without fear of reprisal, least of all from the state, which should be in the business of protecting free speech at all cost.
Another modern phenomenon that would be right at home in Orwell's Oceania is the obsession with political correctness, which is
defined as "the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people
who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against." But since so many people today identify with some marginalized group, this
has made the intelligent discussion of controversial ideas – not least of all on US college
campuses , of all places – exceedingly difficult,
if not downright dangerous. Orwell must be looking down on all of this madness with much surprise, since he provided the world with
the best possible warning to prevent it.
For anyone who entertains expectations for a happy ending in 1984, be prepared for serious disappointment (spoiler alert, for
the few who have somehow not read this book). Although Winston Smith manages to finally experience love, the brief romance – like
a delicate flower that was able to take root amid a field of asphalt – is crushed by the authorities with shocking brutality. Not
satisfied with merely destroying the relationship, however, Smith is forced to betray his 'Julia' after undergoing the worst imaginable
torture at the 'Ministry of Love'.
The book ends with the words, "He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother." Will we too declare, like Winston Smith,
our love for 'Big Brother' above all else, or will we emerge victorious against the forces of a technological tyranny that appears
to be just over the horizon? Or is Orwell's 1984 just really good fiction and not the instruction manual for tyrants many have come
to fear it is?
An awful lot is riding on our answers to those questions, and time is running out.
You have probably seen the bumper sticker that says: "Shit Happens." Some people are just
lucky, I suppose, and odd coincidences mark their lives.
When he was just out of Columbia College and working for a reputed CIA front company,
Business International Corporation, Barack Obama had a chance encounter with a young woman,
Genevieve Cook, with whom he had a 1-2 year relationship.
Like Obama and at about the same
time, Cook just happened to have lived in Indonesia with her father, Michael Cook, who just
happened to become Australia's top spook, the director-general of the Office of National
Assessments, and also the Ambassador to Washington.
Of course, Obama's mother, as is well-known, just happened to be living in Indonesia with
Barack and Obama's step-father, Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian military officer, who had been
called back to Indonesia by the CIA supported General Suharto three months before the CIA coup
against President Sukarno. Suharto subsequently slaughtered over a million Indonesian
Communists and Indonesian-Chinese.
As is also well-known, it just so happened that Obama's
mother, Ann Dunham, trained in the Russian language, after teaching English in the US Embassy
in Jakarta that housed one of the largest CIA stations in Asia, did her "anthropological" work
in Indonesia and Southeast Asia financed by the well-known CIA conduits, USAID and the Ford
Foundation.
Then there is Cook's stepfather, Philip C. Jessup, who just happened to be in
Indonesia at the same time, doing nickel-mining deals with the genocidal Suharto
government.
Anyway, "shit happens." You never know whom you might meet along the way of life.
Major American corporations, including online and retail businesses, employers and
landlords are using Secret Surveillance Scores to charge some people higher prices for the
same product than others, to provide some people with better customer services than others,
to deny some consumers the right to purchase services or buy or return products while
allowing others to do so and even to deny people housing and jobs.
The Secret Surveillance Scores are generated by a shadowy group of privacy-busting firms
that operate in dark recesses of the American marketplace. They collect thousands or even
tens of thousands of intimate details of each person's life – enough information, it is
thought, to literally predetermine a person's behavior – either directly or through
data brokers. Then, in what is euphemistically referred to as "data analytics," the firms'
engineers write software algorithms that instruct computers to parse a person's data trail
and develop a digital "mug shot." Eventually, that individual profile is reduced to a number
– the score – and transmitted to corporate clients looking for ways to take
advantage of, or even avoid, the consumer. The scoring system is automatic and instantaneous.
None of this is disclosed to the consumer: the existence of the algorithm, the application of
the Surveillance Score or even that they have become the victim of a technological scheme
that just a few years ago would appear only in a dystopian science fiction novel. (
source )
These scores are used to discriminate based on income.
Written by lawyers Laura Antonini, the policy director of the Consumer Education Foundation,
and Harvey Rosenfield, who leads the foundation, the complaint highlights four areas in which
companies are using surveillance scoring: pricing, customer service, fraud prevention, and
housing and employment.
"This is a way for companies to discriminate against users based on income and wealth,"
Antonini
told The Hill .
"It can range from monetary harm or basic necessities of life that you're not
getting."
Antonini and Rosenfield argue that the practices outlined in the complaint are illegal
– and that consumers are largely unaware that they're being secretly evaluated in ways
that can influence how much they pay online.
"The ability of corporations to target, manipulate and discriminate against Americans is
unprecedented and inconsistent with the principles of competition and free markets,"
the complaint reads . "Surveillance scoring promotes inequality by empowering companies to
decide which consumers they want to do business with and on what terms, weeding out the people
who they deem less valuable. Such discrimination is as much a threat to democracy as it is to a
free market."
Stores are using this scoring system to charge you higher prices.
The filing points to a
2014 Northeastern University study exploring the ways that companies like Home Depot and
Walmart use consumer data to customize prices for different customers. Rosenfield and
Antonini replicated the study using an online tool that compares prices that they're charged
on their own computers with their own data profiles versus the prices charged to a user
browsing sites through an anonymized computer server with no data history.
What they found was that Walmart and Home Depot were offering lower prices on a number of
products to the anonymous computer. In the search results for "white paint" on Home Depot's
website, Rosenfield and Antonini were seeing higher prices for six of the first 24 items that
popped up.
In one example, a five-gallon tub of Glidden premium exterior paint would have cost them
$119 compared with $101 for the anonymous computer.
A similar pattern emerged on Walmart's website. The two lawyers found the site was
charging them more on a variety of items compared with the anonymous web tool, including
paper towels, highlighters, pens and paint.
One paper towel holder cost $10 less for the blank web user. (
source )
To see screenshots of different "personalized" prices shown for items from Home Depot and
Walmart, please see
pages 12-16 of the complaint. The examples presented demonstrate just how much these
inflated prices for common household goods can really add up.
The travel industry is
particularly sneaky.
A few days ago, we reported on
hidden fees that could be costing you big bucks . The travel industry is a particularly
large offender when it comes to sneaky fees, and they are also implicated in this scheme:
Travelocity. Software developer Christian Bennefeld, founder of etracker.com and
eBlocker.com, did a sample search for hotel rooms in Paris on Travelocity in 2017 using his
eBlocker device, which "allows him to act as if he were searching from two different"
computers. Bennefeld found that when he performed the two searches at the same time, there
was a $23 difference in Travelocity's prices for the Hotel Le Six in Paris.
CheapTickets. The Northeastern Price Discrimination Study found that the online bargain
travel site CheapTickets offers reduced prices on hotels to consumers who are logged into an
account with CheapTickets, compared to those who proceed as "guests." We performed our own
search of airfares on CheapTickets without being logged in. We searched for flights from LAX
to Las Vegas for April 5 through April 8, 2019. Our searches produced identical flight
results in the same order, but Mr. Rosenfield's prices were all quoted at three dollars
higher than Ms. Antonini's.
Other travel websites. The Northeastern Price Discrimination Study found that Orbitz also
offers reduced prices on hotels to consumers who were logged into an account (Orbitz has been
accused of quoting higher prices to Mac users versus PC users because Mac users have a higher
household income); Expedia and Hotels.com steer a subset of users toward more expensive
hotels; and Priceline acknowledges it "personalizes search results based on a user's history
of clicks and purchases. (
source )
There is an industry that exists to evaluate you and sell your data to
companies.
The complaint also describes an industry that offers retailers evaluations of their
customers' "trustworthiness" to determine whether they are a potential risk for fraudulent
returns. One such firm – called Sift – offers these evaluations to major companies
like Starbucks and Airbnb. Sift boasts on its website that it can
tailor "user experiences based on 16,000+ real-time signals – putting good customers in
the express lane and stopping bad customers from reaching the checkout."
The Hill contacted Sift for comment, and the company was not able to respond. But, back in
April, a Sift spokesperson told
The Wall Street Journal that it rates customers on a scale of 0 to 100, likening it to a
credit score for trustworthiness.
While credit scores can wreak havoc on a person's ability to make big purchases (and
sometimes, gain employment), they at least are transparent. Surveillance scoring is not. There
is NO transparency for consumers, and Rosenfield and Antonini argue that companies are using
them to engage in illegal discrimination while users have little recourse to correct false
information about them or challenge their ratings.
We are being spied on and scored on a
wide variety of factors.
"In the World Privacy Forum's landmark study "The Scoring of America: How Secret Consumer
Scores Threaten Your Privacy and Future," authors Pam Dixon and Bob Gellman identified
approximately 44 scores currently used to predict the actions of consumers," the
complaint explains:
These include:
The Medication Adherence Score, which predicts whether a consumer is likely to follow a
medication regimen;
The Health Risk Score, which predicts how much a specific patient will cost an insurance
company;
The Consumer Profitability Score, which predicts which households may be profitable for a
company and hence desirable customers;
The Job Security score, which predicts a person's future income and ability to pay for
things;
The Churn Score, which predicts whether a consumer is likely to move her business to
another company;
The Discretionary Spending Index, which scores how much extra cash a particular consumer
might be able to spend on non-necessities;
The Invitation to Apply Score, which predicts how likely a consumer is to respond to a
sales offer;
The Charitable Donor Score, which predicts how likely a household is to make significant
charitable donations;
The Pregnancy Predictor Score, which predicts the likelihood of someone getting pregnant.
(
source )
The government isn't doing anything to stop these practices.
Back in 2014, the Federal Trade Commission held a workshop on a practice they call
"predictive scoring" but the agency has done little since to reign in the practice. Antonini
said that their complaint is pushing the agency to reexamine the industry and investigate
whether it violates laws against unfair and deceptive business practices,
according to The Hill :
"It's far, far worse than when they looked at it in 2014," she said. "There's an
exponentially larger amount of data that's being collected about the American public that's
in the hands of data brokers and companies. Their ability to process that data and write
algorithms have also improved exponentially. " (
source )
We seem to be past the point of expecting our data to remain private, The
Introduction to the complaint begins with a passage that sums up reality for us now:
This Petition does not ask the Commission to investigate the collection of Americans'
personal information. The battle over whether Americans' personal data can be collected is
over, and, as of this moment at least, consumers have lost. Consumers are now victims of an
unavoidable corporate surveillance capitalism.
Rather, this Petition highlights a disturbing evolution in how consumers' data is deployed
against them. (
source )
We can't go anywhere without being surveilled now.
It is now impossible to shop in any large chain stores without being spied on. Stores are
starting to use "smart coolers", which are refrigerators equipped with cameras that scan
shoppers' faces and make
inferences on their age and gender. And, a recent article from Futurism describes how security
cameras are no longer being used solely to reduce theft:
"Instead of just keeping track of who's in a store, surveillance systems could use facial
recognition to determine peoples' identities and gathering even more information about them.
That data would then be out there, with no opportunity to opt out. ( source )
A new ACLU
report titled "The Dawn of Robot Surveillance" describes how emerging AI technology enables
security companies to constantly monitor and collect data about people.
"Growth in the use and effectiveness of artificial intelligence techniques has been so
rapid that people haven't had time to assimilate a new understanding of what is being done,
and what the consequences of data collection and privacy invasions can be," the report
concludes.
"... Google, Facebook and Twitter will track you even if you don't use their services. Firefox recently disabled all the add-ons I used to block these trackers. Firefox now whitelists Google. Screw them, I switched to Brave. ..."
"... No browser is secure. ..."
"... People would be very naive to think that anything done online is "hidden", regardless of the software, VPN, ad-block, browser, or anything else they use to attempt to block or obfuscate their activity. All that stuff does is alert the "authorities" that you want to hide your online activities, which earns you an automatic red flag and more in-depth tracking and surveillance. ..."
"... If you don't want to be tracked, don't use technology that can track you (i.e., anything Internet- or GPS-connected). It's that simple. And don't be so naive as to think that switching from one browser to another or adding an adblock is going to protect you from being tracked. People need to get real about this. ..."
"... These people are not omnipotent. Nor are they the best and brightest. ..."
"... HOWEVER - if you know you are being Spied on then You have the advantage. You can misdirect, misinform, decoy etc ..."
"... Yes, you can do those things, but just like there are AIs that can detect forgeries, there are AIs that can detect when you're purposely trying to cover your Internet tracks, so why bother? ..."
"... Your profile was developed years ago already. Nothing you do now will change that, except if you stop all Internet activity and wear a hat, sunglasses and burka every time you go outdoors. Oh, and never live in the same place for more than a few months. ..."
"... Most of the smart people have been replaced by H1Bs, wahmen, and minorities. My evidence, besides inside info, is that Google has not created anything innovative in-house since Gmail. ..."
"... One should have NO expectation of privacy especially at work and on work's computers. ..."
"... There is no privacy. Once you venture onto the internet nothing is secret, private, or able to be hidden. Not convinced that Firefox is really any better than others. ..."
Google's Chrome is essentially spy software according to
Washington
Post
tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler, who spent a week analyzing the popular browser and
concluded that it "looks a lot like surveillance software."
Fowler has since switched to
Mozilla's Firefox
because of its default privacy settings, and says that it was easier
than one might imagine.
My tests of Chrome vs. Firefox
unearthed a personal data caper of
absurd proportions
. In a week of Web surfing on my desktop,
I discovered
11,189 requests for tracker "cookies"
that Chrome would have ushered right onto my computer
but were automatically blocked by Firefox.
These little files are the hooks that data
firms, including Google itself, use to follow what websites you visit so they can build profiles
of your interests, income and personality.
Chrome welcomed trackers even at websites you would think would be
private
. I watched Aetna and the Federal Student Aid website set cookies for Facebook
and Google. They surreptitiously told the data giants every time I pulled up the insurance and
loan service's log-in pages.
And that's not the half of it.
Look in the upper right corner of your Chrome browser.
See a
picture or a name in the circle? If so, you're logged in to the browser, and Google might be
tapping into your Web activity to target ads
. Don't recall signing in? I didn't,
either.
Chrome recently started doing that automatically when you use Gmail.
-
Washington
Post
Meanwhile,
Chrome is even worse when it comes to mobile devices -
reporting the precise
location of Android users unless location sharing is turned off, in which case it will send out
your rough coordinates.
Cookie monsters
According to one study, tracking cookies from third-parties are on
92% of websites
.
The
Washington Post
, for example, uses around 40 - which the company said is "average for
a news site," and says they are designed to deliver better-targeted ads and track ad performance.
But cookies can also be found on websites with no advertising.
Both Aetna and the FSA service said the cookies on their sites help measure their own
external marketing campaigns.
The blame for this mess belongs to the entire advertising, publishing and tech industries.
But what responsibility does a browser have in protecting us from code that isn't doing
much more than spying?
-
Washington
Post
Mozilla to the rescue
?
For the past four years or so, Firefox browser has had a built-in anti-tracking feature for the
past four or so years in its "private" browsing mode. Earlier this month, Mozilla
activated this
feature for normal browsing mode
. While ads will still appear, Firefox is now separating
cookies in real time to determine which ones are required for a website to function correctly, and
which ones are simply spies.
Apple
began to block cookies on their Safari mobile browser starting
in 2017, using an algorithm the company calls "intelligent tracking protection."
Chrome, meanwhile,
continues to welcome cookies onto your computer and phone
with open arms. That said, the company announced last month that it would require third-party
cookies to better identify themselves, which will supposedly allow them to apply better controls.
That said, the company did not offer
The Post
a timeline or say whether it would employ
default tracking blockers.
I'm not holding my breath. G
oogle itself, through its Doubleclick
and other ad businesses, is the
No. 1 cookie
maker -- the
Mrs. Fields of the Web
. It's hard to imagine Chrome ever cutting off Google's
moneymaker. -
Washington
Post
"Cookies play a role in user privacy, but a narrow focus on cookies obscures the broader privacy
discussion because it's just one way in which users can be tracked across sites," according to
Chrome's director of product management, Ben Galbraith. "
This is a complex problem, and
simple, blunt cookie blocking solutions force tracking into more opaque practices
."
Giving up on Google
In his decision to kick Chrome to the curb, Fowler cites a
blog post
by Johns Hopkins associate professor Matthew Green, who said last year he was "done" with the
browser.
Like Green, I've chosen Firefox, which works across phones, tablets, PCs
and Macs. Apple's Safari is also a good option on Macs, iPhones and iPads, and the niche
Brave
browser
goes even further in trying to jam the ad-tech industry.
What does switching to Firefox cost you? It's free, and downloading a
different browser is much simpler than changing phones.
In 2017, Mozilla launched a new version of Firefox called
Quantum
that
made it considerably faster. In my tests, it has felt almost as fast as Chrome, though
benchmark
tests
have found it can be slower in some contexts. Firefox says it's better about managing
memory if you use lots and lots of tabs.
Switching means you'll have to move your bookmarks, and Firefox
offers
tools to help.
Shifting passwords is easy if you use a
password
manager
. And most browser add-ons are available, though it's possible you won't find your
favorite. -
Washington
Post
Perhaps Fowler can reach out to some of his
Washington Post
colleagues
to see what their many sources in the US intelligence community think of Chrome vs. Firefox...
Google, Facebook and Twitter will track you even if you don't use
their services.
Firefox recently disabled all the add-ons I used
to block these trackers. Firefox now whitelists Google. Screw
them, I switched to Brave.
Brave automatically blocks ads, trackers, scripts and upgrades
HTTP to HTTPS.
They also don't seem to mind that I still use all the add-ons
that Firefox disabled.
Maybe god got tired of watching everything we do and hired Google
to do the job. Maybe if we donate some money to Google, they can
make some of our past actions from the web deleted.
If you like Chrome's interface but don't want to share every last
detail of your online life with the Googlebergs, SRWare's Iron
browser is a good alternative.
No browser is secure. Firefox jumped the shark when their board
made that gentleman resign several years ago because he supported
traditional marriage.
This article doesn't mention browser
add-ons that block cookies and trackers.
Ghostery
Adblock
Adblock plus
Adblock for YouTube
There are many more. Just search Google extensions for
Adblockers and pick which ones floats your buoy
If privacy and anonymity are your goals, and you don't mind some
impact on the way you usually use the Internet, then Tor is the
solution you seek. Tor (The Onion Router) is actually a system
more than just a browser.
The Tor browser connects to the Tor
network and uses technology originally developed by the United
States Naval Research Laboratory to provide secure communications
for intelligence assets (spies, diplomats, etc.).
oday, millions of people around the world who need serious
privacy protection use Tor. We're talking about those intelligence
assets, along with activists, whistleblowers, police, citizen
journalists, and anyone else who is willing to trade some
convenience and speed for greater privacy and anonymity.
The Tor browser is based on Firefox. While it is designed for
browsing the public Internet (the Clearnet) just like Firefox is,
Tor doesn't connect directly to a resource in the Clearnet. All
communications between your Tor browser and a Clearnet resource
pass through the Tor network of volunteer-run routers.
Messages between the Tor network and the Clearnet resource are
not encrypted. However, thanks to the design of the Tor network,
the resource cannot see your IP Address. It can only see the IP
Address of the Tor server that it is connected to. This makes you
anonymous in that there is no way, short of hacking the Tor
network (or you doing something stupid), of connecting your
messages to your address.
People would be very naive to think that anything done online is
"hidden", regardless of the software, VPN, ad-block, browser, or
anything else they use to attempt to block or obfuscate their
activity. All that stuff does is alert the "authorities" that you
want to hide your online activities, which earns you an automatic
red flag and more in-depth tracking and surveillance.
You know
I'm right about this.
If you don't want to be tracked, don't use technology that can
track you (i.e., anything Internet- or GPS-connected). It's that
simple. And don't be so naive as to think that switching from one
browser to another or adding an adblock is going to protect you
from being tracked. People need to get real about this.
The article is not keeping it real.
As a law abiding citizen, I'm not worried about "the
authorities" knowing that I post on ZeroHedge. The invasive
nature of private companies selling my data without
compensating me offends me, and I'm not comfortable with the
idea that some kid (or an AI) at Facebook or Google can
activate my camera and read my emotions as I look at a meme or
read an article.
Everyone should strive to stay offline as
much as possible, but we should also take all legal measures to
protect our privacy. Of course the government can track you;
that doesn't mean you should make your life an open book to the
data pimps.
Everyone
has things that they would prefer to keep
private. That's why the Fourth Amendment exists.
Brave browser is a much better option than firefox. Strips away
all crap and even pays you to watch ads if you enable it and its
available in your area. Completely changes the model for how ads
and revenue to content creators are set up.
Yes, you can do those things, but just like there are AIs that
can detect forgeries, there are AIs that can detect when you're
purposely trying to cover your Internet tracks, so why bother?
Your profile was developed years ago already. Nothing you do
now will change that, except if you stop all Internet activity
and wear a hat, sunglasses and burka every time you go
outdoors. Oh, and never live in the same place for more than a
few months.
Most of the smart people have been replaced by H1Bs,
wahmen, and minorities. My evidence, besides inside
info, is that Google has not created anything innovative
in-house since Gmail.
One should have NO expectation of privacy
especially
at
work and on work's computers.
They don't just own that hardware, they legally own all that
data on the drives.
There is no privacy. Once you venture onto the internet nothing
is secret, private, or able to be hidden. Not convinced that
Firefox is really any better than others.
VPN usage can be hidden by using an Obfuscated VPN if you really
do no want your ISP to know you are using a VPN.
But even with a
naked VPN your data is encrypted.
Or you can use a double VPN if you are concerned.
Or TOR if data speed is not an issue.
If you test your VPN security and privacy on the various tests
sites you will find that your IP address is gone and replaced. You
ought to secure your browser with privacy extensions to ensure
nothing else leaks.
We connect to Chinese and other streaming TV that is blocked in
our country. They are smart enough to know to block a VPN, but
don't recognize a double VPN for some reason, or XOR. And streams
at TV quality download to our TV.
Don't believe this BS. VPN providers have known IP addresses.
You don't need any special tricks to know that if you are
connecting to a VPN provider's IP you are using a VPN.
There
is a lot of horseshit passed around as knowledge by people
pimping VPN's. VPN's provide a brick in the wall of security
but aren't the magic pill people pimp them as.
Obfuscation requires compatible software on both ends. It
doesn't matter if your VPN claims to use it. That will only
work from your router to the VPN provider - whose IP's are
known.
The push for Firefox is because Firefox is ideologically compliant
in blocking websites that question the globalist degeneration of
the free world. Mozilla joined up with George Soros to block
websites that publish "fake news" or spread "hate" as defined by
groups like the ADL, SPLSC, etc. Look up Mozilla's MITI program.
I only use Chrome for the pr0n sites (different nick). Firefox is
for my D.G.Neree stuff (main nick). Opera is for my real name stuff (I won't tell you). Now I have installed Brave too and it will be for my political
commentaries (still searching for a nick)
You installed Google software on your device. You now have no
privacy, even if Google appears to not be running, it will have
a monitoring program running, recording everything you do.
I use Vivaldi, which was developed by one of the Opera
co-founders. I believe it has Chrome behind it, but I have both
Ad-block and Ghostery. I also have gone deep into the settings,
customizing it exactly the way I want it. Constantly delete all
history, cookies, etc. So I see no ads on ZH whatsoever. I also
use a VPN.
Stop being stupid. You installed someone else's software on
your device, it can now read everything - it can even send
screen grabs to Google - your privacy is no more.
I used to like Opera, but the Chinese bought the company. That
ended my use of Opera.
See my post above on Vivaldi.
I used to really like Firefox, but they bug you to log in
now. I don't want a Firefox account and won't ever sign up for
one!
Google recently were in the process of rewriting the
Chromium engine that Opera and Vivaldi among others use as a
basis of their browsers. Microsoft is also following suit
rewriting Edge with the Chromium engine. Back to the new
Chromium release, Google had written the new engine to
remove all Ad Blocking hooks, that would mean if you were
using say Brave along with an ad blocker, your ad blocker
would be disabled. The browser publishers threw a fit such
that Google said they were rethinking that decision, most
publishers said they would not use the new engine as well. I
haven't seen any recent developments since Google made that
statement. As a note Firefox does not use the Chromium
engine.
Here is what Google has noted about disabling ad
blockers in the latest version:
Google Chrome
Adblock was great when it first came out, but it sold out to
the advertisers a long time ago. Since adblock plus actually
allows ads and trackers now, i'm not sure what benefit there is
in using it. Ublock Origin blocks ads.
"You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard,
and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
Who could have predicted that 70 years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, "He loved Big Brother," we would
fail to heed his warning and come to love Big Brother.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone
-- to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the
age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink -- greetings!"
-- George Orwell
1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree
with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven
society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes.
The government, or "Party," is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: "Big Brother is watching you."
We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers
as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
―George Orwell
Much like Orwell's Big Brother in 1984 , the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley's
A Brave New World , we are churning out a society of watchers who "have their liberties taken away from them, but rather enjoy
it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing." Much like Atwood's
The Handmaid's Tale , the
populace is now taught to "know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up
to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that
they will
accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away ."
And in keeping with Philip K. Dick's darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state -- which became the basis for
Steven
Spielberg's futuristic thriller Minority Report -- we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing,
all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few
skulls to bring the populace under control.
What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.
Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike -- facial recognition,
iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on -- are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network
aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the
dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming
our reality .
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
―George Orwell
The courts have
shredded the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors
without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary
America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what
happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe,
pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible
to say which was which."
We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.
What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus,
the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data
management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds
the growth of governmental overreach.
In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles
have spread worldwide. For example, USA Today reports that five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the homeland security
business was booming to such an extent that it
eclipsed mature
enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue. This security spending to private corporations such as
Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others is
forecast to exceed
$1 trillion in the near future.
The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections
null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the
"security/industrial complex" -- a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant
surveillance -- has come to dominate the government and our lives. At three times the size of the CIA, constituting one third of
the intelligence budget and with its own global spy network to boot, the NSA has a long history of spying on Americans, whether or
not it has always had the authorization to do so.
Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is
paying the price? The American people, of course.
Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that
there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably
give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry at all costs. As Orwell explains:
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power,
pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know
what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian
Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended,
perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there
lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention
of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution;
one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture
is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
"The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it."
― George Orwell
How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.
In totalitarian regimes -- a.k.a. police states -- where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the
government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises
itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.
Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is transformed into mindless automatons. In
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451
, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize
the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.
In Huxley's Brave New World
, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through
the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality
are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.
And in Orwell's 1984
, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history
and punish "thoughtcrimes." In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother,
while the Ministry of Peace deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation),
the Ministry of Love deals with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment,
education and art (propaganda). The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
All three -- Bradbury, Huxley and Orwell -- had an uncanny knack for realizing the future, yet it is Orwell who best understood
the power of language to manipulate the masses. Orwell's Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such
words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary. To give a
single example, as psychologist Erich Fromm illustrates in his afterword to 1984 :
The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as "This dog is free from lice" or
"This field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politically free" or "intellectually free," since political
and intellectual freedom no longer existed as concepts .
Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where
only that which is "safe" and "accepted" by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will
pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.
This is the final link in the police state chain.
"Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."
-- George Orwell
Americans have been
conditioned to accept routine incursions on their privacy rights . In fact, the addiction to screen devices -- especially cell
phones -- has created a hive effect where the populace not only watched but is controlled by AI bots. However, at one time, the idea
of a total surveillance state tracking one's every move would have been abhorrent to most Americans. That all changed with the 9/11
attacks. As professor Jeffrey Rosen observes, "Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives
under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and
stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable,
a dystopian fantasy of a society that
had surrendered privacy and anonymity ."
Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry -- mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the
face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield,
and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all -- we have nowhere left to go.
We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.
In search of so-called terrorists and extremists hiding amongst us -- the proverbial "needle in a haystack," as one official termed
it -- the Corporate State has taken to monitoring all aspects of our lives, from cell phone calls and emails to Internet activity
and credit card transactions. Much of this data is being fed through
fusion centers across the
country, which work with the Department of Homeland Security to make threat assessments on every citizen, including school children.
These are state and regional intelligence centers that collect data on you.
"Big Brother is Watching You."
―George Orwell
Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you
use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at
the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most
locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked
by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information
about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the U.S. government.
The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices,
traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.
Speech recognition technology now makes it possible for the government to carry out massive eavesdropping by way of sophisticated
computer systems. Phone calls can be monitored, the audio converted to text files and stored in computer databases indefinitely.
And if any "threatening" words are detected -- no matter how inane or silly -- the record can be flagged and assigned to a government
agent for further investigation. Federal and state governments, again working with private corporations, monitor your Internet content.
Users are profiled and tracked in order to identify, target and even prosecute them.
In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you're guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in
how the government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless
of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.
"Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull."
― George Orwell
Here's what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it's not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you
think that is being tracked and targeted. We've already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime
legislation that cracks down on so-called "hateful" thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on
various subject matter.
Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly,
control the populace, and it's not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA is now designing an artificial intelligence
system that is designed to anticipate your every move. In a nutshell, the NSA will feed vast amounts of the information it collects
to a computer system known as Aquaint (the acronym
stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence), which the computer can then use to detect patterns and predict behavior.
No information is sacred or spared.
Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking
sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared
freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS. One NSA researcher actually quit the Aquaint program, "citing concerns over
the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability."
Thus, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised
of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).
Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever."
-- Orwell
So where does that leave us?
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not
to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us
on a daily basis.
It won't be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we
wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored
by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police
with their army of futuristic technologies.
To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government's roaming
eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.
Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw.
So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?
We're running out of options.
As I make clear in my book
Battlefield
America: The War on the American People , we'll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions
offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form
of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.
Yet as Aldous Huxley acknowledged in
Brave New World Revisited
: "Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern
themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot,
not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology
and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it."
There are three big reasons why. First, the rise of the internet, which undermined traditional newspaper revenue models,
especially classified ads. Second, the Great Recession, which tanked employment of all kinds. Third and most importantly, the
rise of online monopolies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
It raises a question: How can we stop these corporate behemoths from strangling the life out of American journalism? A good place
to start would be breaking up the tech giants, and regulating the online advertising market to ensure fair competition.
Spending on digital advertising is
projected
to surpass
the traditional sort in 2019 for the first time, and you will not be surprised to learn where that money is going.
Last year, Google alone was estimated to make
more
than $40 billion
in online advertising with
$4.7
billion of that coming from news content
, according to a new report from the News Media Alliance. That is nearly as much as
the $5.1 billion the entire American news industry earned in online ads. What's more, Google "only" accounts for
37
percent
of the online ad market. Facebook makes up another 22 percent -- an effective duopoly that has only been partially
disrupted by (who else?) Amazon, which has moved aggressively into the market over the last few years and now takes up 9 percent.
That is why journalism has continued to flounder even as the broader economy has improved a lot, and why even digital native
companies like
Buzzfeed
and
Vox
are
struggling
to keep their heads above water. For instance, as Josh Marshall of
Talking Points Memo
explains
,
Google runs the major ad market (DoubleClick), is the largest purchaser on that market (through Adexchange),
and
has
privileged access to all the valuable data thus obtained. Its "monopoly control is almost comically great," he writes -- and
that's just one company. Just as online ad revenue got to the point where it might replace print ads, internet behemoths have
sucked up a huge majority of it, leaving news companies to fight over scraps, or desperately pivot to alternative revenue models
like video content or subscriptions.
Remarkably, there appears to be some bipartisan support for regulatory action to give news companies a leg up. Hearings are
scheduled on Tuesday for a bill which would grant news companies an exemption to antitrust law,
reports
CNN
, "allowing them to band together in negotiations with online platforms."
This would probably be worth trying, but it's likely not nearly aggressive enough. The journalism industry is fragmented,
damaged, and cash-poor, and would surely struggle to compete with Google and Facebook even if it could coordinate properly. It's
telling that only Amazon --
another
gargantuan, hugely profitable tech colossus -- has managed to compete even a little.
A better approach would be to simply break up and regulate these companies. Following American antitrust law, force Alphabet
(Google's parent company) to break all its major parts into separate companies -- Google for search, YouTube for video,
DoubleClick for ads, Analytics for audience analysis, and so on. Do the same for Facebook, forcing it to split off Instagram and
Whatsapp.
Then regulate the online ad market. It is outrageous for one company to both run the major ad market and have first bite at sales
on that market, because it puts other sellers and buyers at an unfair disadvantage -- as Marshall notes, "the interplay between
DoubleClick and Adexchange is textbook anti-competitive practice." Breaking DoubleClick out into a different company would solve
that particular instance of abuse of market power, but it probably wouldn't be the end of it. An online ad sales platform (like
many internet businesses) has high fixed costs but very low marginal costs -- meaning it costs a great deal to set up all the
servers and networks, but almost nothing to serve one additional ad. Once a company has achieved massive scale, like Google has
with DoubleClick, it has an ever-increasing advantage over any would-be competitors. That's the classic definition of a natural
monopoly, which if left to its own devices will certainly abuse its market power just like
Gilded
Age railroads
.
Therefore, abuse of market power should be banned outright with
common
carrier regulations
mandating equal prices for equal services across the whole online ad business -- either that, or
DoubleClick should be nationalized outright and run as a public utility.
For many years, Big Tech had a glossy reputation, portraying itself as the vanguard of a new high-tech future where fancy gadgets
and websites would solve all our problems. It turns out it is just another grubby corporate sector, ruthlessly seeking profit no
matter who or what gets trodden underfoot in the process. It's long since time we brought these companies to heel. Cracking them
up and regulating their markets is a good place to start.
"... The internet, as Yasha Levine showed us in an admirable and unfortunately neglected book last year, was always envisioned by the military industrial complex responsible for its creation as a tool for surveillance. ..."
"... It should come as no surprise that neoliberal capitalism, the only system with even more global reach than the American armed forces (with which big tech is increasingly allied anyway), would turn it to the very purpose for which it was designed. There was never going to be another way. ..."
"... We can insist on disclosure, but nobody is ever going to read through those terms of service documents. We can also attempt to limit the relationship between digital advertising and free social media services, but the latter could not exist without the former. Nor could the unlimited amount of "content" produced by wage slaves or unpaid amateurs. ..."
"... The fact that hundreds of companies know virtually everything about me because I use technologies that are all but unavoidable for anyone who participates in modern life is terrifying. ..."
"... I wonder how many other people now think that the old arrangement -- in which we took photos with real cameras and paid people at department stores to make prints of them and shared them in the privacy of our homes with people we really love, and had beautifully clear conversations on reliable pieces of hardware, and paid for newspapers that offered good wages to their writers and editors thanks to the existence of classified ads -- was so bad. ..."
Nothing in our conversations about the pros and cons of the modern internet seems to me more
naïve than our complaints about privacy.
... ... ...
The problem is that Facebook is not really a bookstore in this analogy -- at least not in
any straightforward sense. To understand what they do you have to imagine a chain for whom
selling books is not really the point; the books, which are rather enticingly free, are only
there to give the store's owners a sense of what you might be interested in, information that
they then sell to other companies that will in turn try to hawk everything from clothing to
medicine to political candidates. If you think the neat blue website pays engineers hundreds of
millions of dollars to let you share dog scrapbooks and spy on your old high-school classmates
out of the goodness of its founders' hearts, you're delusional.
But the issues go well beyond any single platform or website. The internet, as Yasha
Levine showed us in an admirable and unfortunately neglected book last year, was always envisioned by the
military industrial complex responsible for its creation as a tool for surveillance.
It should come as no surprise that neoliberal capitalism, the only system with even more
global reach than the American armed forces (with which big tech is increasingly allied
anyway), would turn it to the very purpose for which it was designed. There was never going to
be another way.
This doesn't necessarily mean that we have to live with the status quo. It is possible to
imagine a future in which the moral hazard of putting all the information available from search
engines and email use into the hands of private corporations disappeared. Instead of Google and
Gmail we could have a massive Library of Congress search engine and a free -- with paid
upgrades available for those who need additional storage -- Postal Service email platform. I
for one would not mind entrusting Uncle Sam with the knowledge that the phrase beginning with
"M" I am most likely to search for information about is "Michigan football recruiting."
The sad truth, though, is that these things have already been tried . Very few people remember now
that the post office once attempted to get into the email business and made various attempts to
keep digital commerce within the purview of the government rather than in the hands of private
corporations. These efforts failed time and again, often due to Silicon Valley lobbying
efforts. (Internal incompetence was also an issue: imagine paying $1.70 per email
in 2002.)
This problem might be solved easily enough if those corporations had no say in the matter,
like the coal companies under the post-war Labour government in Britain. But even if forcibly
nationalizing search, email, and other basic internet services now seems like the ideal
solution, it would involve the most radical use of government power since the New Deal. I doubt
there is a single member of Congress who would even entertain the idea. What does that leave
with us? A box of Band-Aids for some gaping wounds. We can insist on disclosure, but nobody
is ever going to read through those terms of service documents. We can also attempt to limit
the relationship between digital advertising and free social media services, but the latter
could not exist without the former. Nor could the unlimited amount of "content" produced by
wage slaves or unpaid amateurs.
I don't mean to sound unduly cynical. The fact that hundreds of companies know virtually
everything about me because I use technologies that are all but unavoidable for anyone who
participates in modern life is terrifying.
I wonder how many other people now think that the old arrangement -- in which we took
photos with real cameras and paid people at department stores to make prints of them and shared
them in the privacy of our homes with people we really love, and had beautifully clear
conversations on reliable pieces of hardware, and paid for newspapers that offered good wages
to their writers and editors thanks to the existence of classified ads -- was so bad.
In the future we should be more mindful of the power of technology to destroy things we
value. But how many of those things are still left?
"... For the United States, as for all warlike nations, military power has traditionally been the decisive factor determining whether it wins or loses its campaigns to capture or subdue other countries. World War II was the climax of that bloody history. ..."
"... It was not only the Dulles brothers, however, who brought the United States into the regime-change era in the early 1950s. Eisenhower himself was a fervent advocate of covert action. Officially his defense and security policy, which he called the "New Look," rested on two foundations, a smaller army and an increased nuclear arsenal. In reality, the "New Look" had a third foundation: covert action. Eisenhower may have been the last president to believe that no one would ever discover what he sent the CIA to do. With a soldier's commitment to keeping secrets, he never admitted that he had ordered covert regime-change operations, much less explained why he favored them. ..."
For most of history, seizing another country or territory was a straightforward proposition.
You assembled an army and ordered it to invade. Combat determined the victor. The toll in death
and suffering was usually horrific, but it was all done in the open. That is how Alexander
overran Persia and how countless conquerors since have bent weaker nations to their will.
Invasion is the old-fashioned way.
When the United States joined the race for empire at the end of the 19th century, that was
the tactic it used. It sent a large expeditionary force to the Philippines to crush an
independence movement, ultimately killing some 200,000 Filipinos. At the other end of the
carnage spectrum, it seized Guam without the loss of a single life and Puerto Rico with few
casualties. Every time, though, U.S. victory was the result of superior military power. In the
few cases when the United States failed, as in its attempt to defend a client regime by
suppressing Augusto Cesar Sandino's nationalist rebellion in Nicaragua during the 1920s and
30s, the failure was also the product of military confrontation. For the United States, as for
all warlike nations, military power has traditionally been the decisive factor determining
whether it wins or loses its campaigns to capture or subdue other countries. World War II was
the climax of that bloody history.
After that war, however, something important changed. The United States no longer felt free
to land troops on every foreign shore that was ruled by a government it disliked or considered
threatening. Suddenly there was a new constraint: the Red Army. If American troops invaded a
country and overthrew its government, the Soviets might respond in kind. Combat between
American and Soviet forces could easily escalate into nuclear holocaust, so it had to be
avoided at all costs. Yet during the Cold War, the United States remained determined to shape
the world according to its liking -- perhaps more determined than ever. The United States
needed a new weapon. The search led to covert action.
A news agency
During World War II the United States used a covert agency, the Office of Strategic
Services, to carry out clandestine actions across Europe and Asia. As soon as the war ended, to
the shock of many OSS agents, Harry Truman abolished it. He believed there was no need for such
an agency during peacetime. In 1947 he changed his mind and signed the National Security Act,
under which the Central Intelligence Agency was established. That marked the beginning of a new
era. Covert action replaced overt action as the principal means of projecting American power
around the world.
Truman later insisted that he had intended the CIA to serve as a kind of private global news
service. "It was not intended as a 'Cloak & Dagger Outfit!'" he wrote. "It was intended
merely as a center for keeping the President informed on what was going on in the world [not]
to act as a spy organization. That was never the intention when it was organized." Nonetheless
he did not hesitate to use the new CIA for covert action. Its first major campaign, aimed at
influencing the 1948 Italian election to ensure that pro-American Christian Democrats would
defeat their Communist rivals, was vast in scale and ultimately successful -- setting the
pattern for CIA intervention in every Italian election for the next two decades. Yet Truman
drew the line at covert action to overthrow governments.
The CIA's covert-action chief, Allen Dulles, twice proposed such projects. In both cases,
the target he chose was a government that had inflicted harm on corporations that he and his
brother, John Foster Dulles, had represented during their years as partners at the globally
powerful Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. In 1952 he proposed that the CIA
overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, whose government was carrying out land reform
that affected the interests of United Fruit. By one account, State Department officials "hit
the roof" when they heard his proposal, and the diplomat David Bruce told him that the
Department "disapproves of the entire deal." Then Dulles proposed an operation to overthrow
Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, who had nationalized his country's oil industry.
Secretary of State Dean Acheson flatly rejected it.
White House resistance to covert regime-change operations dissolved when Dwight Eisenhower
succeeded Truman at the beginning of 1953. Part of the new administration's enthusiasm came
from Allen Dulles, Washington's most relentless advocate of such operations, whom Eisenhower
named to head the CIA. The fact that he named Dulles's brother as secretary of State ensured
that covert operations would have all the necessary diplomatic cover from the State Department.
During the Dulles brothers' long careers at Sullivan & Cromwell, they had not only learned
the techniques of covert regime change but practiced them. They were masters at marshaling
hidden power in the service of their corporate clients overseas. Now they could do the same
with all the worldwide resources of the CIA.
It was not only the Dulles brothers, however, who brought the United States into the regime-change era in the early
1950s. Eisenhower himself was a fervent advocate of covert action. Officially his defense and security policy, which he called
the "New Look," rested on two foundations, a smaller army and an increased nuclear arsenal. In reality, the "New Look" had a
third foundation: covert action. Eisenhower may have been the last president to believe that no one would ever discover what he
sent the CIA to do. With a soldier's commitment to keeping secrets, he never admitted that he had ordered covert regime-change
operations, much less explained why he favored them. He would, however, have had at least two reasons.
Since Eisenhower had commanded Allied forces in Europe during World War II, he was aware of
the role that covert operations such as breaking Nazi codes had played in the war victory --
something few other people knew at the time. That would have given him an appreciation for how
important and effective such operations could be. His second reason was even more powerful. In
Europe he had had the grim responsibility of sending thousands of young men out to die. That
must have weighed on him. He saw covert action as a kind of peace project. After all, if the
CIA could overthrow a government with the loss of just a few lives, wasn't that preferable to
war? Like most Americans, Eisenhower saw a world of threats. He also understood that the threat
of nuclear war made overt invasions all but unthinkable. Covert action was his answer. Within a
year and a half of his inauguration, the CIA had deposed the governments of both Guatemala and
Iran. It went on to other regime-change operations from Albania to Cuba to Indonesia.
Successive presidents followed his lead.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was once again free to launch
direct military invasions. When it found a leader it didn't like -- such as Saddam Hussein or
Muammar Qaddafi -- it deposed him not through covert action, but by returning to the approach
it had used before World War II: the force of arms. Covert efforts to overthrow governments
have hardly ceased, as any Iranian or Venezuelan could attest. The era when covert action was
America's principal weapon in world affairs, however, is over. That makes this a good time to
look back.
Metrics for covert action
Books about the Cold War heyday of covert action era are a mini-genre. Lindsey A. O'Rourke's
contribution is especially valuable. Unlike many other books built around accounts of CIA
plots, Covert Regime Change takes a scholarly and quantitative approach. It provides
charts, graphs, and data sets. Meticulous analysis makes this not the quickest read of any book
on the subject, but certainly one of the best informed. Chapters on the disastrous effort to
overthrow communist rule in Eastern Europe, which cost the lives of hundreds of deceived
partisans, and on the covert-action aspects of America's doomed campaign in Vietnam are
especially trenchant.
O'Rourke identifies three kinds of covert operations that are aimed at securing perceived
friends in power and keeping perceived enemies out: offensive operations to overthrow
governments, preventive operations aimed at preserving the status quo, and hegemonic operations
aimed at keeping a foreign nation subservient. From 1947 to 1989, by her count, the United
States launched 64 covert regime-change operations, while using the overt tool -- war -- just
six times. She traces the motivations behind these operations, the means by which they were
carried out, and their effects. Her text is based on meticulous analysis of individual
operations. Some other books about covert action are rip-roaring yarns. This one injects a dose
of
rigorous analysis into a debate that is often based on emotion. That rigor lends credence to
her conclusions:
When policymakers want to conduct an operation that they know violates international
norms, they simply conduct it covertly to hide their involvement.
Covert missions typically have lower potential costs than their overt counterparts, but
they are also less likely to succeed.
Can interveners acquire reliable allies by covertly overthrowing foreign governments?
Overall, I find the answer is no. Covert regime changes seldom worked out as intended.
The new leader's opponents often accused him of being a U.S. puppet and, in some cases,
even took up arms against the regime. In fact, approximately half of the governments that
came to power in a U.S.-backed covert regime change during the Cold War were later violently
removed from power.
States targeted in a covert regime-change operation appear less likely to be democratic
afterward and more likely to experience civil war, adverse regime changes, or human-rights
abuses
Covert regime changes can have disastrous consequences for civilians within the target
states. Countries that were targeted by the United States for a covert regime change during
the Cold War were more likely to experience a civil war or an episode of mass killing
afterward.
Even nominally successful covert regime changes -- where U.S.-backed forces came to power
-- seldom delivered on their promise to improve interstate relations.
Although these conclusions are not new, they have rarely if ever been presented as the
result of such persuasive statistical evidence. Yet even this evidence seems unlikely to force
a reassessment of covert action as a way to influence or depose governments. It is an American
"addiction." The reasons are many and varied, but one of the simplest is that covert action
seems so easy. Changing an unfriendly country's behavior through diplomacy is a long, complex,
multi-faceted project. It takes careful thought and planning. Often it requires compromise.
Sending the CIA to overthrow a "bad guy" is far more tempting. It's the cheap and easy way out.
History shows that it often produces terrible results for both the target country and the
United States. To a military and security elite as contemptuous of history as America's,
however, that is no obstacle.
Although covert regime-change operations remain a major part of American foreign policy,
they are not as effective as they once were. The first victims of CIA overthrows, Prime
Minister Mossadegh and President Arbenz, did not understand the tools the CIA had at its
disposal and so were easy targets. They were also democratic, meaning that they allowed open
societies in which the press, political parties, and civic groups functioned freely -- making
them easy for the CIA to penetrate. Later generations of leaders learned from their ignorance.
They paid closer attention to their own security, and imposed tightly controlled regimes in
which there were few independent power centers that the CIA could manipulate.
If Eisenhower could come back to life, he would see the havoc that his regime-change
operations wreaked. After his overthrow of Mossadegh, Iran fell under royal dictatorship that
lasted a quarter-century and was followed by decades of rule by repressive mullahs who have
worked relentlessly to undermine American interests around the world. The operation he ordered
in Guatemala led to a civil war that killed 200,000 people, turning a promising young democracy
into a charnel house and inflicting a blow on Central America from which it has never
recovered. His campaign against Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, which included the
fabrication of a poison kit in a CIA laboratory, helped turn that country into one of the most
violent places on Earth.
How would Eisenhower respond to the long-term disasters that followed his covert action
victories? He might well have come up with a highly convincing way to excuse himself. It's now
clear, he could argue, that covert action to overthrow governments usually has terrible
long-term results -- but that was not clear in the 1950s. Eisenhower had no way of knowing that
even covert regime-change operations that seem successful at the time could have devastating
results decades later.
We today, however, do know that. The careful analysis that is at the center of Covert
Regime Change makes clearer than ever that when America sets out to change the world
covertly, it usually does more harm than good -- to itself as well as others. O'Rourke
contributes to the growing body of literature that clearly explains this sad fact of
geopolitics. The intellectual leadership for a national movement against regime-change
operations -- overt or covert -- is coalescing. The next step is to take this growing body of
knowledge into the political arena. Washington remains the province of those who believe not
only that the United States should try to reconfigure the world into an immense American sphere
of influence, but that that is an achievable goal. In the Beltway morass of pro-intervention
think tanks, members of Congress, and op-ed columnists, America's role in the world is usually
not up for debate. Now, as a presidential campaign unfolds and intriguing new currents surge
through the American body politic, is an ideal moment for that debate to re-emerge. If it does,
we may be surprised to see how many voters are ready to abandon the dogma of regime change and
wonder, with George Washington, "Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?"
This article was originally published in the June 2019 edition ofFuture of Freedom .
This post was written by: Stephen Kinzer Stephen Kinzer is an author and
newspaper reporter. He is a veteran New York Times correspondent who has reported from more
than 50 countries on five continents. His books include "Overthrow" and "All the Shah's Men".
A new report by The Intercept has unearthed some stunning quotes from Facebook's lawyers as
the controversial social media giant recently battled litigation in California courts related
to the Cambridge Analytica data sharing scandal. The report notes that
statements from Facebook's counsel "reveal one of the most stunning examples of corporate
doublespeak certainly in Facebook's history" concerning privacy and individual users'
rights.
Contrary to CEO Mark Zuckerberg's last testimony before Congress which included the vague
promise, "We believe that everyone around the world deserves good privacy controls," the latest
courtroom statements expose in shockingly unambiguous terms that Facebook actually sees privacy
as legally "nonexistent" -- to use The Intercept's apt description of what's in the courtroom
transcript -- up until now largely ignored in media commentary. The courtroom debate was
first reported by Law360 , and captures the transcribed back and forth between Facebook
lawyer Orin Snyder of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher and US District Judge Vince Chhabria.
The Intercept cites multiple key sections of the transcript
from the May 29, 2019 court proceedings showing Snyder arguing essentially something the
complete opposite of Zuckerberg's public statements on data privacy , specifically, on the idea
that users have any reasonable expectation of privacy at all.
There is no privacy interest , because by sharing with a hundred friends on a social media
platform, which is an affirmative social act to publish, to disclose, to share ostensibly
private information with a hundred people, you have just, under centuries of common law,
under the judgment of Congress, under the SCA, negated any reasonable expectation of privacy
.
As The Intercept commented of the blunt remarks ,
"So not only is it Facebook's legal position that you're not entitled to any expectation of
privacy, but it's your fault that the expectation went poof the moment you started using the
site (or at least once you connected with 100 Facebook "friends")."
Privacy invasion, is similar to rape - one is an invasion of the body, the other, of the
soul..
However, if you don't want your privacy invaded, stop using Facebook, WhatsApp, and all
the other privacy invading apps they offer, and find platforms that respect your rights to
your privacy..
On the other hand, stop sharing extremely intimate details if you'd rather have them be
off limits - do mano a mano sharing, so you can know who leaked what, and when..
Still, monetizing the souls of folks, without their consent, is egregious, and yet, you
get what you pay for..if it's free, you're the product, or more accurately, the cow, or
better yet, the gold laying geese, or most egregiously, the snitch, snitching on
yourself..
Zuckerberg, is NOT anyone's definition of a honest person..his contraption began with a
theft, is based on a deception, and operates via blackmail, for the purpose of control..how
you describe such a person, is your prerogative, cheers...
"Let me give you a hypothetical of my own. I go into a classroom and invite a hundred
friends. This courtroom. I invite a hundred friends, I rent out the courtroom, and I have a
party. And I disclose — And I disclose something private about myself to a hundred
people, friends and colleagues. Those friends then rent out a 100,000-person arena, and they
rebroadcast those to 100,000 people. I have no cause of action because by going to a hundred
people and saying my private truths, I have negated any reasonable expectation of privacy ,
because the case law is clear."
...is spurious because, in his example, it is the friends who are disseminating the
information, but Facebook is more like the person who he rented the hall from...
disseminating the information. It would be like 101 bankers setting up a meeting in a
Marriott, and discussing business plans and tactics, as the Marriott records and sells that
information to credit unions. Claiming the Bankers gave up any right to privacy... because
there were over 100 of them in that banquet room.
In the case of the Marriott recording and selling information that is passed in their
banquet rooms... would the Facebook attorney agree that is acceptable? To be consistent he
must.
"... With nearly 6 million Americans unemployed and regular bouts of layoffs in the U.S. tech industry, major American tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel Corporation are nonetheless moving key operations, billions in investments, and thousands of jobs to Israel -- a trend that has largely escaped media attention or concern from even "America first" politicians. The fact that this massive transfer of investment and jobs has been so overlooked is particularly striking given that it is largely the work of a single leading neoconservative Republican donor who has given millions of dollars to President Donald Trump. ..."
"... In this report, MintPress identifies dozens of former members of an elite Israeli military intelligence unit who now hold top positions at Microsoft, Google and Facebook. ..."
"... Yet, some of these tech giants, particularly those based in the U.S., are heavily investing in their Israeli branches while laying off thousands of American employees, all while receiving millions of dollars in U.S. government subsidies funded by American taxpayers. ..."
"... Particularly troubling is the fact that, since SUNC's founding, the number of former Unit 8200 members in top positions in American tech companies has skyrocketed. Based on a non-exhaustive analysis conducted by Mintpress of over 200 LinkedIn accounts of former Israeli military intelligence and intelligence officers in three major tech companies, numerous former Unit 8200 alumni were found to currently hold top managerial or executive positions in Microsoft, Google and Facebook. ..."
"... Similarly, at Google, 28 former Unit 8200 members at the company were identified from their LinkedIn accounts. Among them are Google's Engineering Director, its strategic partner manager, two growth marketing leads, its lead technical manager, and six product and program managers, including Google's manager for trust and safety search. ..."
"... Netanyahu further outlined this policy at the 2019 Cybertech conference in Tel Aviv, where he stated that Israel's emergence as one of the top five "cyber powers" had "required allowing this combination of military intelligence, academia and industry to converge in one place" and that this further required allowing "our graduates of our military and intelligence units to merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners." The direct tie-ins of SUNC to Netanyahu and the fact that Paul Singer has also been a long-time political donor and backer of Netanyahu suggest that SUNC is a key part of Netanyahu's policy of placing former military intelligence and intelligence operatives in strategic positions in major technology companies. ..."
"... This concern is further exacerbated by the deep ties connecting top tech companies like Microsoft and Google to the U.S. military. Microsoft and Google are both key military contractors -- Microsoft in particular, given that it is set to win a lucrative contract for the Pentagon's cloud management and has partnered with the Department of Defense to produce a "secure" election system known as ElectionGuard that is set to be implemented in some U.S. states for the 2020 general election. ..."
Several U.S. tech
giants including Google, Microsoft and Intel Corporation have filled top positions with former
members of Israeli military intelligence and are heavily investing in their Israeli branches
while laying off thousands of American employees, all while receiving millions of dollars in
U.S. government subsidies funded by American taxpayers.
With nearly 6
million Americans unemployed and regular bouts of layoffs in the U.S. tech industry, major
American tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel Corporation are nonetheless moving key
operations, billions in investments, and thousands of jobs to Israel -- a trend that has
largely escaped media attention or concern from even "America first" politicians. The fact that
this massive transfer of investment and jobs has been so overlooked is particularly striking
given that it is largely the work of a single leading neoconservative Republican donor who has
given millions of dollars to President Donald Trump.
To make matters worse, many of these top tech companies shifting investment and jobs to
Israel at record rates continue to collect sizable U.S. government subsidies for their
operations while they move critical aspects of their business abroad, continue to layoff
thousands of American workers, and struggle to house their growing company branches in Israel.
This is particularly troubling in light of the importance of the tech sector to the overall
U.S. economy, as it
accounts for 7.1 percent of total GDP and 11.6 percent of total private-sector payroll.
Furthermore, many of these companies are hiring members of controversial Israeli companies
-- known to have spied on Americans, American companies, and U.S. federal agencies -- as well
as numerous members of Israeli military intelligence as top managers and executives.
This massive transfer of the American tech industry has largely been the work of one leading
Republican donor -- billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who also funds the
neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Islamophobic and hawkish
think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC),
and also funded the now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI).
Singer's project to bolster Israel's tech economy at the U.S.' expense is known as Start-Up
Nation Central, which he founded in response to the global Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS)
movement that seeks to use nonviolent means to pressure Israel to comply with international law
in relation to its treatment of Palestinians.
This project is directly linked to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in recent
years has publicly mentioned that it has been his "deliberate policy" to have former members of
Israel's "military and intelligence units merge into companies with local partners and foreign
partners" in order to make it all but impossible for major corporations and foreign governments
to boycott Israel.
In this report, MintPress identifies dozens of former members of an elite Israeli
military intelligence unit who now hold top positions at Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
Singer's nonprofit organization has acted as the vehicle through which Netanyahu's policy
has been realized, via the group's close connections to the Israeli PM and Singer's long-time
support for Netanyahu and the Likud Party. With deep ties to Netanyahu, the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and controversial tech companies -- like Amdocs -- that spied
on the American government, this Singer-funded organization has formed a nexus of connections
between the public and private sectors of both the American and Israeli economies with the
single goal of making Israel the new technology superpower, largely at the expense of
the American economy and government, which currently gives $3.2 billion in aid to Israel annually.
Researched and developed in Israel
In recent years, the top U.S. tech companies have been shifting many of their most critical
operations, particularly research and development, to one country: Israel. A 2016
report in Business Insider noted that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple
had all opened up research and development (R&D) centers in recent years, with some of them
having as many as three such centers in Israel, a country roughly the size of New Jersey. Other
major tech companies that have also opened key
operation and research centers in Israel include Sandisk, Nvidia, PayPal, Palantir and Dell.
Forbes noted last year that the world's top 10 tech companies were now "doing
mission-critical work in Israel that's core to their businesses back at HQ."
Yet, some of these tech giants, particularly those based in the U.S., are heavily investing
in their Israeli branches while laying off thousands of American employees, all while receiving
millions of dollars in U.S. government subsidies funded by American taxpayers.
For example, Intel Corporation, which is the world's second largest manufacturer of
semiconductor computer chips and is headquartered in California, has long been a major employer
in Israel, with over 10,000 employees in the Jewish state. However, earlier this year, Intel
announced that it would be
investing $11 billion in a new factory in Israel and would receive around $1 billion in an
Israeli government grant for that investment. Just a matter of months after Intel announced its
major new investment in Israel, it announced a new round of layoffs in
the United States.
Yet this is just one recent example of what has become a trend for Intel. In 2018, Intel
made public its plan to invest
$5 billion in one of its Israeli factories and
had invested an additional $15 billion in Israeli-created autonomous driving technology a
year prior, creating thousands of Intel jobs in Israel. Notably, over that same time frame,
Intel has cut nearly 12,000 jobs in the United
States. While this great transfer of investment and jobs was undermining the U.S. economy and
hurting American workers, particularly in the tech sector, Intel received
over $25 million dollars in subsidies from the U.S. federal government.
A similar phenomenon has been occurring at another U.S.-based tech giant, Microsoft.
Beginning in 2014 and continuing into 2018, Microsoft has laid off
well over 20,000 employees , most of them Americans, in several different rounds of staff
cuts. Over that same time period, Microsoft has been on a hiring spree in Israel, building
new
campuses and investing billions of dollars
annually in its Israel-based research and development center and in
other Israeli start-up companies , creating thousands of jobs abroad. In addition,
Microsoft has been pumping millions of dollars into technology programs at Israeli universities
and institutes, such as the Technion Institute .
Over this same time frame, Microsoft
has received nearly $197 million in subsidies from the state governments of Washington,
Iowa and Virginia.
Though Israeli politicians and tech company executives have praised this dramatic shift as
the result of Israel's tech prowess and growing reputation as a technological innovation hub,
much of this dramatic shift has been the work of the Netanyahu-tied Singer's effort to counter
a global movement aimed at boycotting Israel and to make Israel a global "cyber power."
Start-Up Nation Central and the Neocons
In 2009, a book titled Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle ,
written by American neoconservative Dan Senor and Jerusalem Post journalist Saul Singer
(unrelated to Paul), quickly rose to the New York Times bestseller list for its
depiction of Israel as the tech start-up capital of the world. The book -- published by the Council on Foreign Relations,
where Senor was then serving as Adjunct Senior Fellow -- asserts that
Israel's success in producing so many start-up companies resulted from the combination of its
liberal immigration laws and its "leverage of the business talents of young people with
military experience."
"The West needs innovation; Israel's got it," wrote Senor and Singer. In a post-publication
interview with the blog
Freakonomics , Senor asserted that service in the Israeli military was crucial to
Israel's tech sector success, stating that:
"Certain units have become technology boot camps, where 18- to 22-year-olds get thrown
projects and missions that would make the heads spin of their counterparts in universities or
the private sector anywhere else in the world. The Israelis come out of the military not just
with hands-on exposure to next-gen technology, but with training in teamwork, mission
orientation, leadership, and a desire to continue serving their country by contributing to
its tech sector -- a source of pride for just about every Israeli."
The book, in addition to the many accolades it received from the mainstream press, left a
lasting impact on top Republican donor Paul Singer, known for funding the most
influential neoconservative think tanks in America, as noted above. Paul Singer was so inspired
by Senor and Singer's book that he decided to spend
$20 million to fund and create an organization with a similar name. He created the Start-Up
Nation Central (SUNC) just three years after the book's release in 2012 .
To achieve his vision, Singer – who is also a top donor to the Republican Party and
Trump – tapped Israeli economist Eugene Kandel, who
served as Netanyahu's national economic adviser and chaired the Israeli National Economic
Council from 2009 to 2015.
Senor was likely directly involved in the creation of SUNC, as he was
then employed by Paul Singer and, with neoconservatives Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan,
co-founded the FPI, which Singer had long funded before it closed in 2017. In addition, Dan
Senor's sister, Wendy Singer (unrelated to either Paul
or Saul), long-time director of Israel's AIPAC office, became the organization's executive
director.
SUNC's management team, in addition to Eugene Kandel and Wendy Singer, includes Guy Hilton
as the organization's general manager. Hilton is a long-time marketing executive at Israeli
telecommunications company Amdocs, where he "transformed" the company's marketing organization.
Amdocs was once highly controversial in the United States after it was revealed by a 2001 Fox News
investigation that numerous federal agencies had investigated the company, which then had
contracts with the 25 largest telephone companies in the country, for its alleged role in an
aggressive espionage operation that targeted the U.S. government. Hilton worked at Microsoft
prior to joining Amdocs.
Beyond the management team, SUNC's board of directors includes Paul Singer, Dan Senor and
Terry Kassel -- who work for Singer at his hedge fund, Elliott Management -- and Rapheal Ouzan.
Ouzan was
an officer in the elite foreign military intelligence unit of Israel, Unit 8200, who
co-founded BillGuard the day after he left that unit, which is often compared to the U.S.'
National Security Agency (NSA). Within five months of its founding, BillGuard
was backed by funding from PayPal founder Peter Thiel and former CEO of Google, Eric
Schmidt. Ouzan is also connected to U.S. tech companies that have greatly expanded their
Israeli branches since SUNC's founding -- such as Microsoft, Google, PayPal and Intel,
all of which
support Ouzan's non-profit Israel Tech Challenge.
According to reports from the time published in Haaretz and Bloomberg , SUNC
was explicitly founded to serve as "
a foreign ministry for Israel's tech industry " and "
to strength Israel's economy " while also
aiming to counter the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to use a
nonviolent boycott to end the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Israeli
apartheid, as well as the growth of illegal Jewish-only settlements in occupied Palestinian
territory.
Since its founding, SUNC has sought to transfer tech jobs from foreign companies to Israel
by developing connections and influence with foreign governments and companies so that they
"deepen their relationship with Israel's tech industry." Though SUNC has since expanded to
include other sectors of the Israeli "start-up" economy, its focus has long remained on
Israel's tech, specifically its cybersecurity industry. Foreign investment in this single
Israeli industry has grown from $227 million in
2014 to $815 million in 2018.
In addition to its own activities, SUNC appears to be closely linked to a similar
organization, sponsored by
Coca Cola and Daimler Mercedes Benz, called
The Bridge , which also seeks to connect Israeli start-up companies with large
international corporations. Indeed, SUNC, according to its website , was actually
responsible for Daimler Mercedes Benz's decision to join The Bridge, thanks to a delegation
from the company that SUNC hosted in Israel and the connections made during that visit.
Teaming up with Israel's Unit 8200
Members of Israel's signals intelligence Unit 8200 work under a Saudi flag. Photo | Moti
Milrod
Notably, SUNC has deep ties to Israel's military intelligence unit known as Unit 8200 and,
true to Start Up Nation' s praise of IDF service as key to Israel's success, has been
instrumental in connecting Unit 8200 alumni with key roles in foreign companies, particularly
American tech companies. For instance, Maty Zwaig , a former lieutenant colonel
in Unit 8200, is SUNC's current director of human capital programs, and SUNC's current manager
of strategic programs, Tamar Weiss , is also a former member
of the unit.
One particularly glaring connection between SUNC and Unit 8200 can be seen in Inbal Arieli , who served as
SUNC's Vice President of Strategic Partnerships from 2014 to 2017 and continues to serve as a
senior adviser to the organization. Arieli, a former lieutenant in Unit 8200, is the founder
and head of the 8200 Entrepreneurship and Innovation Support Program (EISP), which was the
first start-up accelerator in Israel aimed at harnessing "the vast network and entrepreneurial
DNA of [Unit] 8200 alumni" and is currently one of the top company accelerators in Israel.
Arieli was the top executive at 8200 EISP while working at SUNC.
Another key connection between SUNC and Unit 8200 is SUNC's promotion of Team8, a
company-creation platform whose CEO and co-founder is Nadav Zafrir, former commander of Unit
8200. In addition to prominently featuring Team8
and Zafrir on the cybersecurity section of its website, SUNC also sponsored a talk
by Zafrir and an Israeli government economist at the World Economic Forum, often referred to as
"Davos," that was attended personally by Paul Singer.
Team8's investors include Google's Eric Schmidt,
Microsoft , and Walmart
-- and it recently hired former head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, retired Admiral Mike
Rogers. Team8 described the decision to hire Rogers as being "instrumental in helping
strategize" Team8's expansion in the United States. However, Jake Williams, a veteran of NSA's
Tailored Access Operations hacking unit, told CyberScoop :
"Rogers is not being brought into this role because of his technical experience. It's
purely because of his knowledge of classified operations and his ability to influence many in
the U.S. government and private-sector contractors."
In addition to connections to Unit 8200-linked groups like Team8 and 8200 EISP, SUNC also
directly collaborates with the IDF in an initiative aimed at preparing young Israeli women to
serve in Unit 8200. That initiative, called the CyberGirlz Club , is jointly
funded by Israel's Defense Ministry, SUNC and the Rashi Foundation, the philanthropic
organization set up by the Leven family of Perrier-brand water, which has close ties to the
Israeli government and IDF.
"Our aim is to bring the girls to this process already skilled, with the knowledge needed to
pass the exams for Unit 8200 and serve in the military as programmers," Zwaig told Israel National
News .
Seeding American tech
The connections between SUNC and Unit 8200 are troubling for more than a few reasons, one of
which being that Unit 8200, often likened to the U.S.' NSA, closely coordinates with Israel's
intelligence agency, the Mossad, and is responsible for 90 percent of the intelligence material
obtained by the Israeli government, according to its former commander Yair Cohen. Cohen
told
Forbes in 2016, that "there isn't a major operation, from the Mossad or any
intelligence security agency, that 8200 is not involved in." For obvious reasons, the fact that
an organization founded by an American billionaire is actively promoting the presence of former
military intelligence officers in foreign companies, specifically American companies, while
also promoting the transfer of jobs and investment to that same country, is very troubling
indeed.
Particularly troubling is the fact that, since SUNC's founding, the number of former Unit
8200 members in top positions in American tech companies has skyrocketed. Based on a
non-exhaustive analysis conducted by Mintpress of over 200 LinkedIn accounts of former
Israeli military intelligence and intelligence officers in three major tech companies, numerous
former Unit 8200 alumni were found to currently hold top managerial or executive positions in
Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
At Microsoft, managers for at least 15 of the company's products and programs -- including
Microsoft's lead managers for engineering, product strategy, threat analytics and cloud
business intelligence -- publicly listed their affiliation with Unit 8200 on their LinkedIn
accounts. In addition, the general manager of Microsoft's Israeli
Research and Development Center is also a former member of Unit 8200. In total, of the 200
accounts analyzed, 50 of them currently worked for Microsoft.
Similarly, at Google, 28 former Unit 8200 members at the company were identified from their
LinkedIn accounts. Among them are Google's Engineering Director, its strategic partner manager,
two growth marketing leads, its lead technical manager, and six product and program managers,
including Google's manager for trust and safety search.
Facebook also has several Unit 8200 members in prominent positions, though fewer than Google
and Microsoft. MintPress identified at least 13 Unit 8200 alumni working for Facebook,
including its director of engineering, lead manager for express wi-fi, and technical program
manager. Notably, Facebook
has spent the last several years collaborating with Israel's government to censor Israel's
critics.
Of course, there is likely much more influence of Unit 8200 on these companies than this
non-exhaustive analysis revealed, given that many of these companies acquired several Israeli
start-ups run by and staffed by many Unit 8200 alumni who subsequently went on to found new
companies and start-ups a few years or shortly after acquisition. Furthermore, due to the
limitations of LinkedIn's set-up, MintPress was not able to access the complete list of
Unit 8200 alumni at these three tech companies, meaning that the eye-opening numbers found were
generated by a relatively small sample.
This jump in Unit 8200 members in top positions in tech companies of global importance is
actually a policy long promoted by Netanyahu, whose long-time economic adviser is the chief
executive at SUNC. During an interview with Fox News last year,
Netanyahu was asked by Fox News host Mark Levin if the large growth seen in recent years
in Israel's technology sector was part of Netanyahu's plan. Netanyahu responded, "That's very
much my plan It's a very deliberate policy." He later added that "Israel had technology because
the military, especially military intelligence, produced a lot of capabilities. These
incredibly gifted young men and women who come out of the military or the Mossad, they want to
start their start-ups."
Netanyahu further
outlined this policy at the 2019 Cybertech conference in Tel Aviv, where he stated that
Israel's emergence as one of the top five "cyber powers" had "required allowing this
combination of military intelligence, academia and industry to converge in one place" and that
this further required allowing "our graduates of our military and intelligence units to merge
into companies with local partners and foreign partners." The direct tie-ins of SUNC to
Netanyahu and the fact that Paul Singer has also been a long-time political donor
and backer of Netanyahu suggest that SUNC is a key part of Netanyahu's policy of placing
former military intelligence and intelligence operatives in strategic positions in major
technology companies.
Notably, just as SUNC was founded to counter the BDS movement, Netanyahu has asserted that
this policy of ensuring Israel's role as a "cyber power" is aimed at
increasing its diplomatic power and
specifically undermining BDS as well as the United Nations, which has repeatedly condemned
Israel's government for war crimes and violations of international law in relation to the
Palestinians.
Building the bi-national surveillance state
Top U.S. tech companies have filled top positions with former members of Israeli military
intelligence and moved strategic and critical operations to Israel, boosting Israel's economy
at the expense of America's, and SUNC's role in this marked shift merits scrutiny.
A powerful American billionaire has built an influential organization with deep connections
to the U.S.-Israel lobby (AIPAC), an Israeli company that has been repeatedly investigated for
spying on the U.S. government (Amdocs), and the elite Israeli military intelligence unit (Unit
8200) that has used its influential connections to the U.S. government and the U.S. private
sector to dramatically shift the operations and make-up of major companies in a critical sector
of the U.S. economy.
Further consider that U.S. government documents leaked by Edward Snowden have flagged Israel
as "leading threat" to the infrastructure of U.S. financial and banking institutions, which use
much of the software produced by these top tech companies, and have also flagged Israel as a
top espionage threat. One U.S. government document cited Israel as the third most aggressive
intelligence service against the U.S. behind Russia and China. Thus, Paul Singer's pet project
in Start-Up Nation Central has undermined not only the U.S. economy but arguably U.S. national
security as well.
This concern is further exacerbated by the deep ties connecting top tech companies like
Microsoft and Google to the U.S. military. Microsoft and Google are both key military
contractors -- Microsoft in particular, given that it is set to win a lucrative contract for
the Pentagon's cloud management and has partnered with the Department of Defense to produce a
"secure" election system
known as ElectionGuard that is set to be implemented in some U.S. states for the 2020
general election.
"... I agree with the premise, that the NARRATIVE is the means by which oligarchy rules the masses. ..."
"... As Mencken stated (approx) "the common man avoids the truth [because] it is dangerous, no good can come of it, and it doesn't pay." ..."
"... Americans are propagandized from childhood, and it's very hard for most to break free, even if they want to. In my case, a rather abusive childhood made me disinclined to accept conventional wisdom. ..."
"... The proverbial man in the street is well aware that capitalism/politics is a racket and openly say so. ..."
"... The falling numbers in the 'democracies' who now bother to vote is an indication of this, as is the growing political unrest in the heartlands of the Anglo-Zionist empire. It is not possible to 'fool all of the people all of the time'. Whether they do anything about it is another matter. ..."
"... These are dangerous times, but that is the usual condition when the structure of any social and political order is beginning to crumble. Ultimately, the Anglo-Zionist empire is, to use Lenin's description 'A colossus with feet of clay.' No empire lasts forever, and the US is not exceptional in this respect. The real problem is that the demise of the US hegemonic project will taken down the rest of the planet with it. ..."
Thank you Caitlin for this piece. Depressing but not unexpectedly so. And if my late
husband's FB friends (as I've mentioned on here before) are anything to go by, the
overwhelmingly bourgeois crowd will continue to be *willingly* propagandized with the
Russophobic, Sinophobic and Iranophobic lies of commission and omission that regale them via
MSDNC, NPR, PBS, BBC and the so-called "progressive" press (e.g. The guardian, Jacobin, the
NYT).
These friends post pro-Demrat, pro-Russiagate, consider the choice to be between Warren
and Klobuchar (?), and concentrate their minds on *progressive* ideations: sexual
preference/"gender" identity/racial/ethnic identity and now and then a little on climate
change (especially via the "green ND" – saving capitalism being all consuming or
ignored). Never a word about income inequality, about the ongoing slaughter in Yemen, of the
ongoing, never-ending nightmare of Palestinian life, of what we have done to Libya, Iraq or
Afghanistan or are doing to Syria. Not a word about the immorality, illegality of our
economic sanctions against NK, VZ, Iran nooo. Nary a peep about what we (US-UK-AU) are doing
to Assange .
These really existing realities as lived by "others" whether the poor within these borders
or the darker hued folks far from these shores do *not* matter one iota, certainly not by
comparison with being able to vacation in this or that place, buy a bigger house, more
clothes, demonstrate one's *Progressiveness.*
I agree with the premise, that the NARRATIVE is the means by which oligarchy rules the
masses.
For example, we are now being inundated with the NARRATIVE that Iran is attacking Japanese
oil tankers. Pure nonsense, but the media is an adjunct of the bankster/military/oil
industrial complex.
Politicians are merely puppets doing the bidding of their pay masters.
Sam F , June 14, 2019 at 05:46
Yes, money control of mass media is the problem. Such articles may help some with doubts
to formulate an awareness that leads to admission of the problem. The major factor in
admissions is the rare direct experience, which may include a story close to home, a personal
loss due to narrative control. Of course the majority seek the mass media narrative because
it directs them to safety and profit in their social and economic dependent relationships.
Our unregulated market economy encourages the selfishness that enslaves the people to money
power. As Mencken stated (approx) "the common man avoids the truth [because] it is
dangerous, no good can come of it, and it doesn't pay."
I hope to set up a college of policy debate CPD constituted to protect all points of view,
and to conduct moderated text-only debate among experts of several disciplines, of the status
and possibilities of each world region, and the policy options. Debate summaries commented by
all sides are to be made available for public study and comment. The CPD would bring the
knowledge of society into public debate, educate the electorate, discourage propaganda, and
expose the wrongs of society and the corruption of government that desperately needs
reform.
The debates will require a higher standard of argument in foreign and domestic policy on
both right and left, ensure that all points of view are heard, and require all challenges to
be answered. This would have much reduced the group-think that led to our mad wars since
WWII. Extreme and naïve politicians will be easier to expose, and media commentators
will have a starting point and a standard for investigation and analysis.
Zhu , June 14, 2019 at 04:14
Americans are propagandized from childhood, and it's very hard for most to break free,
even if they want to. In my case, a rather abusive childhood made me disinclined to accept
conventional wisdom.
Donald Duck , June 14, 2019 at 03:18
"The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation." I have forgotten who actually said this
but it seems appropriate for our age. I think the mass of people are very well aware of what
is going on. The proverbial man in the street is well aware that capitalism/politics is a
racket and openly say so.
The falling numbers in the 'democracies' who now bother to vote is an indication of
this, as is the growing political unrest in the heartlands of the Anglo-Zionist empire. It is
not possible to 'fool all of the people all of the time'. Whether they do anything about it
is another matter.
If note is taken of the David Icke phenomenon it is possible to identify a growing
awareness of the of ordinary people to the crimes of the rich and powerful.
These are dangerous times, but that is the usual condition when the structure of any
social and political order is beginning to crumble. Ultimately, the Anglo-Zionist empire is,
to use Lenin's description 'A colossus with feet of clay.' No empire lasts forever, and the
US is not exceptional in this respect. The real problem is that the demise of the US
hegemonic project will taken down the rest of the planet with it.
Zhu , June 14, 2019 at 04:21
"Quiet desperation" is ftom Thoreau. The colossus with the feet of clay is the Biblical
book of Daniel, the dream of Nebuchadnezzar.
Neither Reptilans nor Zionists make us Americans commit the crimes and follies we do. We
oirselves are responsible.
T.J , June 14, 2019 at 02:43
Caitlin Johnstone has concisely and precisely, in this article, provided a compendium of
ideas and sources to explain how the powerful through it's control of propaganda corrupts
democracy to the core. Laziness, ignorance and acceptance of the status quo prevents the vast
majority from acknowledging this to be the case. As Caitlin states it takes courage to reject
the "narrative control matrix " of the powerful and that can only be achieved by changing our
relationship with that narrative. This, of course, takes time and effort but is liberating
nonetheless.
"... Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness -- a philosophy that discourages diversity -- has become a guiding principle of modern society. ..."
"... We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state. ..."
"... What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach. ..."
"... In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide. For example, USA Today reports that five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the homeland security business was booming to such an extent that it eclipsed mature enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue. This security spending to private corporations such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others is forecast to exceed $1 trillion in the near future. ..."
"... Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS. One NSA researcher actually quit the Aquaint program, "citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability." ..."
"You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard,
and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." -- George Orwell, 1984
Who could have predicted that 70 years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, "He loved Big Brother," we would
fail to heed his warning and come to love Big Brother.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone
-- to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the
age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink -- greetings!" -- George Orwell
1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree
with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven
society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes.
The government, or "Party," is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: "Big Brother is watching
you."
We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers
as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."―George Orwell
Much like Orwell's Big Brother in 1984 , the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley's
A Brave New World , we are churning out a society of watchers who "have their liberties taken away from them, but rather enjoy
it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing." Much like Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
, the populace is now taught to "know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected
up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that
they will
accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away ."
And in keeping with Philip K. Dick's darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state -- which became the basis for
Steven
Spielberg's futuristic thriller Minority Report -- we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing,
all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few
skulls to bring the populace under control.
What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.
Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike -- facial recognition,
iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on -- are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network
aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the
dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming
our reality .
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."―George
Orwell
The courts have
shredded the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors
without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary
America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what
happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe,
pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible
to say which was which."―George Orwell, Animal Farm
We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.
What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice.
Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance
and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on
and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.
In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles
have spread worldwide. For example, USA Today reports that five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the homeland security
business was booming to such an extent that it
eclipsed mature
enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue. This security spending to private corporations such as
Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others is
forecast to exceed
$1 trillion in the near future.
The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections
null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the
"security/industrial complex" -- a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant
surveillance -- has come to dominate the government and our lives. At three times the size of the CIA, constituting one third of
the intelligence budget and with its own global spy network to boot, the NSA has a long history of spying on Americans, whether or
not it has always had the authorization to do so.
Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is
paying the price? The American people, of course.
Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that
there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably
give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry at all costs. As Orwell explains:
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power,
pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know
what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian
Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended,
perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there
lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention
of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution;
one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture
is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
"The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it." ― George Orwell
How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.
In totalitarian regimes -- a.k.a. police states -- where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the
government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises
itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.
Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is transformed into mindless automatons. In
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 , reading is banned
and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and
render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.
In Huxley's Brave New World , serious literature,
scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning,
social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and
abnormal.
And in Orwell's 1984 , Big Brother does
away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish "thoughtcrimes."
In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the Ministry of Peace
deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation), the Ministry of Love deals
with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda).
The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
All three -- Bradbury, Huxley and Orwell -- had an uncanny knack for realizing the future, yet it is Orwell who best understood
the power of language to manipulate the masses. Orwell's Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such
words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary. To give a
single example, as psychologist Erich Fromm illustrates in his afterword to 1984 :
The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as "This dog is free from lice" or
"This field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politically free" or "intellectually free," since political
and intellectual freedom no longer existed as concepts .
Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where
only that which is "safe" and "accepted" by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will
pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.
This is the final link in the police state chain.
"Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious." --
George Orwell
Americans have been
conditioned to accept routine incursions on their privacy rights . In fact, the addiction to screen devices -- especially cell
phones -- has created a hive effect where the populace not only watched but is controlled by AI bots. However, at one time, the idea
of a total surveillance state tracking one's every move would have been abhorrent to most Americans. That all changed with the 9/11
attacks. As professor Jeffrey Rosen observes, "Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives
under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and
stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable,
a dystopian fantasy of a society that
had surrendered privacy and anonymity ."
Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry -- mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the
face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield,
and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all -- we have nowhere left to go.
We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.
In search of so-called terrorists and extremists hiding amongst us -- the proverbial "needle in a haystack," as one official termed
it -- the Corporate State has taken to monitoring all aspects of our lives, from cell phone calls and emails to Internet activity
and credit card transactions. Much of this data is being fed through
fusion centers across the
country, which work with the Department of Homeland Security to make threat assessments on every citizen, including school children.
These are state and regional intelligence centers that collect data on you.
"Big Brother is Watching You."―George Orwell
Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you
use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at
the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most
locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked
by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information
about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the U.S. government.
The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices,
traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.
Speech recognition technology now makes it possible for the government to carry out massive eavesdropping by way of sophisticated
computer systems. Phone calls can be monitored, the audio converted to text files and stored in computer databases indefinitely.
And if any "threatening" words are detected -- no matter how inane or silly -- the record can be flagged and assigned to a government
agent for further investigation. Federal and state governments, again working with private corporations, monitor your Internet content.
Users are profiled and tracked in order to identify, target and even prosecute them.
In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you're guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in
how the government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless
of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.
"Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull." ― George Orwell
Here's what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it's not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you
think that is being tracked and targeted. We've already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime
legislation that cracks down on so-called "hateful" thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on
various subject matter.
Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly,
control the populace, and it's not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA is now designing an artificial intelligence
system that is designed to anticipate your every move. In a nutshell, the NSA will feed vast amounts of the information it collects
to a computer system known as Aquaint (the acronym
stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence), which the computer can then use to detect patterns and predict behavior.
No information is sacred or spared.
Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking
sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared
freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS. One NSA researcher actually quit the Aquaint program, "citing concerns over
the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability."
Thus, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised
of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).
Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever." -- Orwell
So where does that leave us?
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not
to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us
on a daily basis.
It won't be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we
wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored
by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police
with their army of futuristic technologies.
To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government's roaming
eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.
Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw.
So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?
We're running out of options
As I make clear in my book
Battlefield America: The
War on the American People , we'll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered
up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed
vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.
Yet as Aldous Huxley acknowledged in Brave New World Revisited : "Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only
those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society,
most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere
else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist
the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it."
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The corrupt establishment will do anything to suppress sites like the Burning Platform from revealing the truth. The corporate media
does this by demonetizing sites like mine by blackballing the site from advertising revenue. If you get value from this site, please
keep it running with a donation. [Jim Quinn - PO Box 1520
Every hour taxpayers in the United States are paying $32,077,626 for
Total Cost of Wars Since 2001.
