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The Hissy Fit Generation and The Loss of Free Speech VI: The Jekyll & Hyde of Social Media (3)

“People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form. It is utterly strange to hear my many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are.”

— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

Censorship and Fakebook News

Since the fake news trope has been doing the rounds Facebook is now the Establishment’s social media tool of choice to combat the rise of alternative news outlets, as well as more mainstream but editorially more responsible news rooms such as Russia’s wildly popular flagship news network RT. Under the banner of “tackling fake news” Zuckerberg’s crusade is the perfect platform for the terminally offended and the easily swayed by the vast echo chamber of predominantly left-liberal delusions that make up Facebook’s political discourse. News is further filtered, sanitised and put through the algorithmic grinder of FB’s ideology.

It doesn’t matter whether you are left or right leaning in your views – one political belief censored in favour of another is bad news for free speech and democracy. Indeed, in late 2016 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to employ a few websites that would have the honour of labelling stories as “fake news” according to an agreed media consensus. These include ABC News, Factcheck.org and PolitiFact, and the so-called myth-busting website Snopes.com. According to conservative website The Daily Caller there is a problem: “Almost all of the writers churning out fact checks for Snopes have a liberal background, and many of them have expressed contempt for Republican voters. The Daily Caller could not identify a single Snopes fact-checker who comes from a conservative background. Snopes did not respond to a list of questions from The DC regarding the site’s ideological leaning.” ^[1] Match this with Facebook curators and you are unlikely to get unbiased news, rather it will be selected according to what is deemed acceptable to modern day, left-liberal thinking. As discussed previously such thinking is no longer the kind of leftism that values free speech but has slipped into opinion-hungry authoritarianism.

Debunking spurious news stories is less admirable when it comes from mega-corporations who are walking in step with Establishment, the cogs of which are greased by psychopathic perceptions. Thankfully, a large proportion of the public are simply not buying it.^[2]This is due to the hard evidence provided by independent media of the very thing of which it has been accused: propagating lies and fake news propaganda. This is what makes it so painfully ironic. The mainstream media is, and has always been fake news. It has been caught red-handed, with its pants down on numerous occasions, peddling sometimes subtle psyops and on other occasions ludicrous BS that would have made Machiavelli cry with shame. Whether it’s 24hr fear-mongering, Deep State anti-Russian propaganda, paid-up editorials, or the ping-pong of culture wars, the MSM has been at the forefront of the most atrocious fake news for many decades.

Facebook has elected to take on the “disinformation” circulating from alternative news outlets and conveniently forget the most obvious examples of fake news which was spread by most of the corporate-chained MSM. The explosive details of tacit media support and collusion for the Clinton election campaign exposed in the Wikileaks Podesta emails and by The Intercept was purposely omitted and suppressed by Facebook, Google and Twitter as a matter of policy – policy which is founded on personal opinion of their CEOs and shaped by the Liberal arm of the Establishment. This included drafting news pieces and handing them to suitably “friendly” media plants dotted around MSM outlets. ^[3]An internal strategy document dated January 2015 reads: “As we discussed on our call, we are all in agreement that the time is right [to] place a story with a friendly journalist in the coming days that positions us a little more transparently while achieving the above goals.” ^[4]All of this and more was happily shared on social networks with Facebook as the primary disseminator.

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The Hissy Fit Generation and The Loss of Free Speech VI: The Jekyll & Hyde of Social Media (2)

“It is no longer possible to stand up for all speech.”

— Sinead McSweeney, Twitter’s vice president of public policy and communications for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa

***

“The First Amendment doesn’t protect a user’s speech on a private company’s site. On the contrary, the First Amendment protects Facebook’s right to say what can appear on its platform.”

— Jack Smith, Business Insider

Whether we have our faces glued to the smartphone in the street or feverishly checking our Twitter and Facebook accounts on our lap top at work, face-to-face interaction is fast being replaced by social media, which has society built around it. These networks offer steadily diminishing returns on social investment since a large proportion is rooted in self-promotion, self-admiration and the endless noise of opinions. The latter is drawn from a long since compromised mainstream media that has the audacity to charge alternative media with propagating “fake news,” a meme expressly created by neo-Cold War strategists within the Deep State to counter the non-existent presence of Russian interference in US elections. Opinions therefore are useful for creating emotional capital and the noise of distraction for the rest of us, so that intel agencies can continue to extract all the data they want.

Meantime, young adults are having to cope with an economic time-bomb; the legacy of poor parenting and a lack of play; minimal contact with nature and poor social skills. On top of a pervasive technology that is re-wiring the brain from easily accessible hardcore porn to virtual and highly superficial forms of exchange which, by their very nature, “optimise” and “compress” information down to soundbites. The pace of information exchange and the ratio of quantity over quality means that the highs and consequent lows are making addicts and infants out of many millennials and Generation Zer’s. The neuro-hacking of culture over the last few decades has given us a crisis in the young, now exacerbated by social media and smartphone technology. Yet, such technology is here to stay. So, can we turn it around and apply its true potential?

First, we must dig deep in order to find out what’s truly going on.

***

Facebook, more popular than Google, is now herding over 2 billion users and growing faster than any year since 2012. According to Tech Crunch the platform hasn’t lost its popularity with”66 percent of Facebook’s monthly users return each day now compared to 55 percent when it hit 1 billion.” The social networking giant has an enormous influence on young minds and society as a whole in ways we are only just beginning to fathom.

Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered his new mission statement to “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” This has to get the prize for the most disingenuous statement since George W. Bush claimed he was bringing freedom to Iraq. The world is getting closer together all right but we ‘ain’t holding hands. Rather, we are giving over our freedom and the very kernel of our minds to a new form of corporatism and surveillance. Analysts can barely keep up with how Facebook and other social media platforms are literally redesigning our lives and psychology.

As smartphone usage attests, there are voluminous studies indicating how social media (Facebook) is bad for your health. A family member often tells me: “Time just seems to disappear when I’m checking Facebook…It’s like I’m under a spell!” Two hours almost seem like two minutes. Yet, they frequently come away feeling exhausted rather than inspired. Why? University of Kent psychologists wrote in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology that compared to general internet use Facebook and its related stimuli can lead us to underestimate time. Although general internet use has the same effect, Facebook was the worst offender for such time distortion. The distortion of time locks us into a greater exposure to social media and internet surfing than we realise, suggesting that our mind is in a specific state of addictive suggestibility.^[1]They found that it was Facebook-related images that changed how we pay attention to this visual stimuli, and likely plays a significant part in the rise of internet addiction as a whole.

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The Hissy Fit Generation and The Loss of Free Speech VI: The Jekyll & Hyde of Social Media (1)

By M.K. Styllinski

“Social media spark a revelation that we, the people, have a voice, and through the democratization of content and ideas we can once again unite around common passions, inspire movements, and ignite change.”

― Brian Solis, Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web

***

“Ignorance meets egoism, meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

— Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur

The above quotations from writers Brian Solis and Andrew Keen are equally valid. Social media has already offered enormous benefits to connect, share and liberate humanity. It has revolutionised business as a marketing tool and allowed us an instantaneous global reach. Yet, technology – as everything else – always presents a choice between a Jekyll or Hyde application. Which perception and allotted values gain dominance will logically characterise how it develops. The internet and social media is still very much driven by the same pathology of Mr. Hyde that has been bludgeoning ordinary humanity into submission since the rise of the oil industry to the emergence of big data as the new oil. Consequently, Hyde is subsuming Jekyll at a faster rate with its moral character disappearing fast.

Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple surpass the national GDP of many countries and have more overt and covert control over our lives than the State – if indeed there is much difference. Monopolisation is too weak a word to describe how these companies seek to dominate our lives through the kind of advertising, marketing and data capitalisation that is literally predicting our every move. We are becoming the new algorithms in a vast simulation of global consumption and predictive analysis. This is inseparable from the National Security State and its SMART surveillance infrastructure. The new frontiers of social media are redefining communication fully enmeshed in the propaganda of eco-SMART cities of the future and the visions of the technocrats.

The 1960’s saw a genuine revolutionary spirit of inquiry and an expansion of awareness which was comprehensively hijacked by the Establishment. Now, we have the same commercialisation, consolidation, centralisation and control (the 4C’s) appearing in the 2000’s to divert and re-direct the enormous creativity present in humanity in partnership with this technology. To do so, the Establishment and its agencies must ensure that generations of young adults are suitably disconnected from perennial values and re-connected – even addicted – to technology as an end in itself; to be made to believe that their lives and their eco-SMART future is inevitable. Social media and its communication and consumer platforms are part of this agenda, about which most of us are wholly unaware.

“But I couldn’t do without my smart phone…”

And that’s how it works. Tweak society just enough so that such tools become indispensable because infrastructure, economics and commerce is built around it. Once again, technology is not the problem, it is those with the money and mindset that determine its trajectory. The reasons why must be understood in order to have the choice to resist such impositions. Our freedom of mind depends on it.

Before we get into the murky world that is Facebook, this somewhat lengthy post will start with the new human appendage granting entry into social media – and just about everything else – the smart phone.

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Technocracy XV: A Post Human World? (1)

By M.K. Styllinski

“The Purpose of Biotechnology is the End of Death.”

– Martine Rothblatt, CEO Therapeutics Corp.

© infrakshun

The above quote sums up the whole drive behind transhumanism – fear of death and the (androgynous) bodycentrism as arbiter of consciousness.

It would be churlish in the extreme to say that aspects of new technologies in the realm of medicine do not have enormous potential. Researching cures for diseases and the general enhancement of human life are unquestionably benefits to be welcomed, yet, altruistic advancement is not the perception that dominates in centres of power and influence. The presumption of innocence has been discarded along with any notion of privacy and independence. It is the same persistent beliefs which are being enforced by societies’ self-proclaimed wardens that humanity needs micro-managing because, like an unruly child we will only resort to bad deeds unless we are placed in various forms of shackles – seen and unseen. Monitoring and tagging the population is proceeding in order to banish every trace of uncertainty; to prepare the masses for large-scale social, economic and even environmental upheaval.

To the techno-religious ideology that flows through the currents of a SMART Surveillance Society (SSS) it is transhumanism which is set to be at the forefront of humanity’s technological transformation. A Technocracy is closely embedded in such values despite genuine protestations to the contrary. Those that do reject such a notion are not likely to remain in the vanguard for very long.

© infrakshun

Technology, like any other tool in human hands, can be an extraordinarily powerful and liberating way to actualise our inner realities and manifest our desires. Since this series is about how psychopaths infect creativity and flip it on its head to induce entropy, then we should be monitoring very closely where this particular revolution is heading. From so-called primitive society, to the agricultural, industrial, and now the Eco-Smart-Information Age, there are extraordinary opportunities with their attendant risks. As new “change agents” work to manage and transform the old world into a new technocratic vision for all, the probability of this new transformation evolving into something other than the cherished ideals hold futurists so rapt, is very real indeed.

Awareness of ponerology in this context does not negate SMART society but perhaps considerably modifies its soaring ideals. This doesn’t mean we return to living in mud huts either. It does however demand that we use discernment and discrimination when new paradigms come along offering the kind of ideological Utopias so familiar down through history. This also doesn’t mean that technological change will not offer radical transformation. It just depends exactly what trajectory we are following and whether or not its coordinates have already been mapped in advance.

A revealing talk was given by South Korean Dr. Seang-Tae Kim, President of National Information Society Agency (NIA), South Korea on October 25, 2011 on the emergence of SMART growth. He spoke about the “Mega Trend of Future Society” and its “Paradigm shift” which will lead to SMART technologies redesigning the world. He believes this heralds a more “human-oriented” focus stemming from the rise of an aging population and the awareness of networking and a “knowledge-based economy.” Theories of “High Concept” creativity and empathy he believes, must be integral to SMART emergence to function. “Consumers” will be “Pro-sumers” generating enormous wealth outside of the normal capitalist channels thus stimulating a new innovation philosophy across bi-lateral networks of merging digital and analogue systems. A “Dream Society” characterises the New Revolution and it is brimming with hope and energy.

Seang-Tae Kim believes that a new technological humanism or human-oriented society can turn the highly volatile risks of an aging population, geo-conflict and the threat of Climate Change into a more streamlined and cost effective vision. Indeed, it is inevitable, he opines, due to the global budget deficit that demands change and where traditional government must be transformed into open government by the power of the people. For Seang-Tae Kim and other SMART-transhumanists, he advocates people power which is beyond the Fordism of the factory-line toward a more promising Post-Bureaucratic Age. He believes that local society and feudalism, government power and industrial society must naturally give way to an open-source infrastructure, an “eco-system of new values”, and a “value oriented eco-system.” This will apparently be predicated on a “platform strategy” which naturally encourages group power. (For a fascinating book on open source software and infrastructure see The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust by Robert David Steele).

Exciting as that sounds, can such system bypass the integration, dependency and invasive nature of the SMART Surveillance State (SSS) away from pathogenic control? Does an “open source everything” mixed with the philosophy of transhumanism represent an inevitable push away from State centralisation and bland techno-homogeneity? Or, is this merely an end-game reinvention of Empire at a higher turn of the spiral? If the latter, how can we avoid SSS ideals being vectored into the same old patterns? Denial of the dark side of human progress has persistently got us into collective pickles. Yet, we remain strangely blind to the fact.

Like the transformation of society, the metamorphosis of the human being is an integral part of transhumanism beliefs. Sandwiched between the SMART Grid implementation, post-modernism, cyber-activism and virtual reality, transhumanism, sees the merging of man and machine as just a cosmic nano-second away. Replacing an arthritic hip or elbow joint with the help of embedded nanotech is something desirable to most people. Yet, this is small fry for those who wish to use nano-devices and neuro-prostheses to change us into something other than human – a post human.

In March 2012, media entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov made the ambitious claim that he planned to ‘transplant’ a human mind into a robot body in 10 years. According to the Russian this would herald the next stage of science and a ‘new human body.’ The promise of an atheistic immortality is the driving force behind the project which Itskov claims has more than 30 scientists working on it. Uploading minds without surgery would be the next challenge where bodies are left behind in favour of cybernetic super-humans merging with a bio-genetic, virtual world of limitless potential. The project is modelled after the James Cameron movie Avatar where human soldiers use sophisticated technology to inhabit the bodies of human-alien hybrids as they embark on an invasion of another world. ^{^[1]}

Smart Society Building design in Taiwan Source: From Danish http://www.almeresmartsociety.net/ ‘Design in a smart society – Dream or Reality?’

This is a fairly accurate description of the dreams of your average transhumanist who believes that the merging of man and machine offer the best of all evolutionary outcomes. While the transhumanism movement has many different permutations of opposing views there are some fundamental themes that remain sacrosanct:

The evolution of humanity
Biotechnological enhancement that will extend and exceed ordinary human capabilities
A focus on longevity, radical life extension and immortality
A focus on human happiness that can become a permanent state of mind with the help of technology.

Transhumanists see the rise of the machines as a chance to reach an integration and synthesis of biology, genetics, cybernetics, naotechnology and artificial intelligence. In doing so, they believe we will transcend the limitations of human biology and the fixity of the machine to become a hybrid superman with a vastly more intelligent brain thus leading to a quantum leap in human evolution, otherwise known as the “Singularity.” This is a culmination of human evolution that has reached its sell-by date and must become fused with a SMART world convergence of biotechnology, robotics, and biometrics, inaugurating the next and most decisive step ever in the history of human evolution: The Post-Human Age. The technological component of the singularity posits a robotic “intelligence explosion” based on an exponential curve of “recursive self-improvement.” which will either draw humanity – or those choosing such a fusion – into its slipstream.

Another form of aggregate swarm intelligence; a technocratic version of the Hive Mind rather than true freedom and individuality?

Transhumanists tell us we can alter the nature and meaning of strictly organic evolution. The combination of new cognitive tools interfacing with artificial intelligence, molecular biology and the modification of emotional and mental states means the list of potential “enhancements” is never-ending. Although there is a chic, techno-spirituality, even an obvious alchemical metaphor within transhumanist discourse, the movement has historically remained an atheist/materialist ideology as the name implies. The belief has more potent implications for its direction than the mechanics of the movement itself as we shall see.

Moving back to our old Fabian and Social Darwinist Mr. Julian Huxley, it was he who coined the term ‘transhumanism’ in 1957, fitting technocracy neatly into his well-watered vision of evolutionary humanism, the genetic legacy of which he can thank his grandfather, Darwinist Thomas Henry Huxley. Transcendence, in strictly materialist terms was the goal. Transhumanism provided the imagination, hope and intellectual rigour to seed a new ideology and its conceptual framework. The systems theory of cybernetics would play a large part in its development and the parallel evolution of ecology and new physics which would be taken up with a passion, decades later.

Acting as a bridge to New Age philosophies that would surface in the late 1960s-1970s, a fusion of ecology, transhumanism and the Human Potential Movement can now be seen. (The influential Barbara Marx-Hubbard is one such Elite-lauded advocate of “bad seed” transhumanism). Two of Huxley’s close friends John Burdon, Sanderson Haldane and John Desmond Bernal who were major shapers of transhumanist thought also happened to be members of the communist party. Whereas Huxley was passionate about eugenics and saw it as integral to the development of transhumanism as a whole, Haldane was a population geneticist. Whilst not comfortable with what he saw as the “poor science” of eugenic theory, he nevertheless permitted its inclusion in the transhumanist vision. J.D. Bernal’s expertise lay in crystallography and molecular biology and shared his friend’s desire to see a new social order based around a gradual engineering of the social organism.

Another dear friend of Huxley’s was our equally dedicated Fabian guru of the 1920s and 30s: H.G. Wells. The writer’s extraordinary books did not just offer a way to funnel his eerily accurate predictions into popular literature but also served as microcosms of technocratic ideals. Wells saw Technocracy as the ideal way to manage the masses and he was wholly dedicated to the principle of neo-Feudalism as the way to control the destiny of nations.

Sir Julian Huxley and Barbara Marx-Hubbard

By the 1960s other names were caught up in promoting the philosophy in popular culture and academia such as Ray Kurzweil, Frank P. Tipler, Eric K. Drexler, Hans Moravec and Marvin Minsky, all of whom contributed richer and more diverse versions of transhumanism and the Singularity. According to some, the human species has the potential to flower but not before artificial intelligence (AI) has competed for supremacy with humanity. Once this has been thrashed out in true Terminator-trilogy-fashion then humanity can get on with being the cyber-sapiens or Marx-Hubbard’s New Age version of “Homo-Universalis” and presumably upload themselves into any sector they choose.

Transhumanism reached a watershed in 1998 with the founding of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) by philosophers Nick Bostrom and David Pearce, closely followed by their “Transhumanism Declaration.” This helped to bring prominence to other organisations and groups such as Extropy Institute and the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. As the internet took off so did the transhumanist philosophy. Cyberspace was, after all, the natural medium for the propagation of the movement’s ideas.

Ray Kurzweil is perhaps the most well-known author, inventor and futurist introducing an almost evangelist fervour to his eschatological version of transhumanism. Kurzweil published The Age of Spiritual Machines, (1998) about the future of AI and biotechnology; Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (2004) co-authored with medical doctor Terry Grossman and explored human health and nutrition; The Singularity is Near (2005) Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (2009) and his latest How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed was published in 2012. All of the concepts contained in these books features in a recent documentary film Transcendent Man (2013) exploring the life of Kurzweil.

What is more interesting however, February 2009 saw Kurzweil collaborate with Google and the NASA Ames Research Centre, to announce the creation of the Singularity University Training Centre for corporate executives and government officials. The mission of the university is to “assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges”. ^{^[2]}Ray Kurzweil does for transhumanism what Maurice Strong did for UN Agenda 21 since he appears to be on the advisory board of almost anything remotely AI or transhumanist-related. Which is why he is also on the board of Martine Rothblatt’s Therapeutics Corp.)

Raymond Kurzweil at the Singularity Summit at Stanford in 2006 (wikipedia)

Moscow was the venue for the Global Future International Congress “A New Era for humanity” which took place in February of 2012 and in June 2013. Organised by the Global Future 2045 (GF2045) a non-profit organization that has: “… the goal of creating a network community with the world’s leading scientists in the field of life extension and to support them as an investment hub, contributing to various projects.” ^{^[3]}

Hosted by Kurzweil, it offered an uncompromising vision of a future for post-humanity where bio /nanotechnology, AI, cognitive applications, and cybernetics would allow the mass replacement of our drearily inadequate selves. The distinguished panel of speakers and guests were writers, anthropologists, astrophysicists, NASA scientists, historians, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers and many others from specialist fields of technology. The message was yet another indication that the “accelerated” nature of technology and the “race to save the world” hadn’t lessened in its intensity, nor had the belief in technology as saviour.

On the website an introductory 7 minute video with a soaring orchestral score has a narrative which imparts the following nuggets to look forward to:

2012: the emergence of new transhumanist movements & parties amid the on-going socio-economic crisis
2012-2013: new centres for cybernetic technologies to radically extend life
2014: The “race for immortality” starts
2015: “Find ways to transfer our personality to an artificial carrier – the robotic human copy or “Avatar.”
2015-2020: Robots to replace human manufacturing & labour, servant tasks; thought controlled robots to displace travel needs; flying cars, thought-driven communications implanted in bodies or “sprayed on skin.”
2025: The creation of an autonomous system providing life support for the brain that is capable of ‘interacting with the environment’; brains transplanted into avatar bodies greatly expanding life and allowing complete sensory experiences.
2030-2035: Reverse-engineering of the human brain already being mapped out, wherein science comes “… close to understanding the principles of consciousness.”
By 2035: First successful transplantation of personality to other data receptacles and the “epoch of cybernetic immortality begins.”
2040-2050: Bodies “… made of nano-robots” taking any shape, alongside holographic bodies.
2045-2050: Drastic changes to the social structure and sci-tech development. Tipping the hat to the UN, conflict and violence is “not permitted.” Instead, the priority is given to “spiritual self-improvement.” “A New Era of neo-Humanity Dawns”…

According to the website: www.gf2045.com the Russian GF2045 group met to draft a: “resolution that will be submitted to the United Nations demanding the implementation of committees to discuss life extension Avatar projects as a necessary tool in the preservation of humankind.”

Martine Rothblatt in 2010. (wiki)

An attendee of the follow up conference in 2013 was aforementioned Martine Rothblatt founder and CEO (and fittingly transgender) of biotech company United Therapeutics Corp. Rothblatt has introduced the concept of “mind clones” where the human mind is created from a “mind-file” of our social networking data and other personality sources. S/he believes the capability to do so will be made possible in under twenty years time. She even used the personality of her dead wife to create a droid template example of what transhumanists would love to see as commonplace. Cartesian dualism and atheist paradise? Or merely the next stage in our evolution?

Rothblatt sees “… the market opportunities as limitless” where everyone will be seeking to make a digital copy of their thoughts of their memories, thoughts and feelings to be made manifest in a droid of their making. Grabbing a slice of the artificial action, Rothblatt believes is inevitable: “We all want an i-phone, we all want a social media account and we are all going to want a mind clone.” ^{^[4]}

Speak for yourself Martine.

And what would you know? Amazon and Google are extremely keen on this type of artificial intelligence.

(The concept of transgenderism and androgyny has an occult-esoteric element within transhumanist discourse, something which Rothblatt appears to personify and something that will be explored further in the Occult Transhumanism).

To reiterate, it could be said that these imaginative interpretations of one possible future without awareness of the ponerological basis of psychopathy “demanding” anything (and worse still, receiving it) would be a recipe not for human freedom but more ways to welcome its opposite. An alternative future that is drawn from exactly the same technocratic tenets will be a decidedly Dystopian one and no less probable should we allow ourselves to be guided down these grandiose beliefs. That’s not to say we have not been affected positively by technology since the Industrial Revolution. Improvements in health and sanitation; air travel; photography; computers, medical advances and information technology have positively reshaped the world. Once again, it is the perception of reality that will define how these technological innovations are used and whether a healthy techno-culture can exist.

“The biocomplexity spiral is a depiction of the multileveled complexity of organisms in their environments, which is seen by many critics as the ultimate obstacle to transhumanist ambition.” (wikipedia)

The other problem with transhumanism is the adherence to a belief that evolution is dependent on machines to take us to the next level. Nature is inherently unpredictable and disruptive since that is the whole reason how non-linear evolution occurs – far from equilibrium. It is therefore outside human-implanted notions of intelligent design. Aside from obvious hubris, attempts to replicate, emulate nature may be partially possible, but to try and go beyond bio-complexity itself is to re-enact an unnecessary mythology which is Promethean/Luciferian in its ambition.

There are many advocates who advise caution in the development of technology. Kurzweil, to be fair, does his fair share of warning the faithful of its potential slip into Darth Vader territory. Nonetheless, once the momentum gains more traction it is unlikely that any safeguards will be present, let alone feature as a primary component to secure an ethical and moral foundation. Indeed, as this series of posts has hopefully indicated, there are signs it is being absorbed into exactly the same mainframe of Official Culture and its overseeing Establishment.

At present, such an ideology is highly attractive to a variety of intelligent people, many of whom are sincere in their beliefs to improve societies. One advocate defined transhumanism in simplest terms as: “… the idea that human kind can use science and technology to become more than what we are and help those interested in doing the same and in protecting the freedom for all to decide for themselves how to be happy, in other words ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’.” Surely, is this not something we ALL want? Unfortunately, the reality of transhumanism routinely goes way beyond such simple definitions, and their lies the problem since it plays into – and is promoted by – the more pathological elements of the movement.

Moreover, it is precisely this pathology to which transhumanism in particular lends itself, namely: clusters of psychopaths and social dominators straddling all social domains for whom this ideology undoubtedly appeals to the workings of their “machine minds”. Naturally, this won’t be acknowledged by its adherents since the dependence on our chosen belief tends to prohibit negative associations. Consequently, wealthy techno-psychopaths bring with them a great deal of charisma, PR and investment disbursed through the various connected branches that make up the movement: from Hollywood, media, social science and the military-corporate complex.

As rapid advances in AI, quantum computing, neurology and robotics continue then it is simple logic that the time will approach when a digital map of the human brain will be placed into machines and eventually surpassed just as Rothblatt has indicated. It is then that a potential separation will occur between two types of human beings, perhaps labelled the “organics” and the “post-humans” and in much the same way as normal people are unconsciously separated from a variety of psychopaths and sub-categories of the same.

If we are already embedded in the SMART infrastructure how likely is it that we will have a choice which breakaway civilisation to follow? Or, will “group consciousness”, communitarian “consensus” and SMART “efficiency” simply decide for you?

Notes

[1] ‘Who wants to live forever? Russian project aims to transplant a human brain into a ‘Davros’-style robot body within 10 years’ By Rob Waugh Daily Mail, March 2 2012.
[2] ‘The Singularity Is Near: Mind Uploading by 2045?’by Tanya Lewis, June 17, 2013. | ‘Future of Artificial Intelligence in Mind Clones’ bloomberg.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bqZp9TPYVk
[3] FAQ | “Singularity University.” Singularityu.org. September 9, 2008.
[4] Gf2045.com

Technocracy XIV: Psycho-Civilised

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards”

– Aldous Huxley

Note: A re-read of ‘Satan’s Little Helpers VII: Mind War’ is advised.

The SMART-Surveillance Grid allows improvements in telecommunications, electricity provision and home functionality. It offers an exciting integration of eco-economics and energy saving technology along with the “Internet of Things” (IoT) and “Network of Things” (NoT) which is offering to revolutionise transport, communications and urban infrastructure as a whole. With embedded surveillance it permits advertisers, marketeers to access human minds as never before. Authorities can also tap in and use this consumerist techtopia to trap criminals and would-be “terrorists”. It requires that the State and Official Culture become so integrated through technology that the line will be blurred. Security and collectivism will be encouraged to a degree that compliance will be seen as good citizenship insofar as it maintains the urban environment and social provision. A new social contract will be loaded in favour of the State through a form of satiated servitude. (The Illuminist-Enlightenment thinkers would be well pleased).

So-called terrorists, dissidents/activists, protestors and ordinary citizens will need to be very concerned indeed on the road to SMART society as true individual thinking outside the box will slowly become frowned upon since it will not be conforming to the precept of a “psycho-civilised” society. The path of access to this dystopian view starts with ubiquitous surveillance.

As one short example illustrates, Britain’s Leeds-based Metropolitan Police Force is using a surveillance system procured from Datong plc., past customers of which have been the US Secret Service, the Ministry of Defence and unsavory regimes in the Middle East. The system is disguised as a mobile phone network which transmits a signal allowing the police or any other authority: “… to shut off phones remotely, intercept communications and gather data about thousands of users in a targeted area,” … “Strictly classified under government protocol as “Listed X”, it can emit a signal over an area of up to an estimated 10 sq.km, forcing hundreds of mobile phones per minute to release their unique IMSI and IMEI identity codes, which can be used to track a person’s movements in real time.” ^{^[1]}

This is just one regional police force.

While the online company Amazon will track you via your Kindle reader for targeted advertising pathway prediction, the authorities will do the same based on the accumulated data to which it has access. It will not be for what you might buy, rather it will access what you may be thinking and your likely course of action on the “threat assessment” scale. There is precious little happening to prevent Google and other information technology companies from rolling out the SMART Internet of Things infrastructure which has enormous implications for a privacy and collective freedoms. Wi-Fi is destined to play a huge role.

Urban law enforcement and Telephone towers with technology which allows multiple receive-transmit capability

The social benefits of providing free access to Wi-Fi hot spots for those in low-income brackets and incentives for business travellers are shielding plans by the U.S. Department of Defence: “… to build robots that configure themselves into ad hoc wireless networks within urban areas” which were already well underway in 2007. Seizing control of internet communications and tracking individuals in urban areas is a necessary by-product of the technocratic SMART society. If that fails, the military are well placed to set up these Wi-Fi networks in a matter of hours or less. The Department of Defence (DOD) Homeland Security, Canadian, Israeli and NATO forces regularly conduct war-game exercises with Wi-Fi networks at the heart of operations. A DOD announcement for contractors as described by journalist Mark Baard discloses operations whereby:

“… soldiers will be able to drop robots, called LANdroids … when they arrive in a city. The robots will then scurry off to position themselves, becoming nodes for a wireless communications network…The Wi-Fi antennae dotting the urban landscape will serve not only as communications relays, but as transponders that can pinpoint the exact positions of individual computers and mobile phones…where GPS loses site of a device (and its owner), Wi-Fi will pick up the trail. The antennae will also relay orders to the brain-chipped masses, members of the British Ministry of Defense and the DOD believe.” ^{^[2]}

As people become more accustomed to SMART technology and RFID tagging this will lead to the acceptance of our “need” to ensure greater technological “freedom.” As well as the technological capabilities of HAARP lying in the background in some form or another and married to these advances in technology, is it such a huge leap of imagination to think that once we are fully enmeshed in this SMART society where everything is habitually integrated that it would not be easy to begin directly assessing, monitoring and “downloading” material directly into the mass mind? Television has already served this purpose well, albeit in a more indirect fashion. With this in mind, though some have since expired and at least one is no longer listed (as of 1990) the US patent office listed the following successful registrations dating back to 1992:

U.S. Patent 5159703: Silent Subliminal Presentation System. (issued 1992) U.S. Patent 5507291: Method and an associated apparatus for remotely determining information as to a person’s emotional state. (issued 1996) U.S. Patent 5629678: Implantable transceiver – apparatus for Tracking and Recovering Humans. (issued 1997) U.S. Patent 6014080: Body worn active and passive tracking device (issued 2000) U.S. Patent 5868100: Fenceless Animal control system using GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) Location information. (issued 1999)^{^[3]}

US patent No. 5507291 filed on April 5, 1994 shows the level advancement at the public level. What goes on beyond top secret levels of the National Security State is anyone’s guess. The patent’s “abstract” is described as follows:

“In a method for remotely determining information relating to a person’s emotional state, an waveform energy having a predetermined frequency and a predetermined intensity is generated and wirelessly transmitted towards a remotely located subject. Waveform energy emitted from the subject is detected and automatically analyzed to derive information relating to the individual’s emotional state. Physiological or physical parameters of blood pressure, pulse rate, pupil size, respiration rate and perspiration level are measured and compared with reference values to provide information utilizable in evaluating interviewee’s responses or possibly criminal intent in security sensitive areas.” ^{^[4]} [Emphasis mine]

And US patent No. 5159703, filed on December 28, 1989:

“A silent communications system in which nonaural carriers, in the very low or very high audio frequency range or in the adjacent ultrasonic frequency spectrum, are amplitude or frequency modulated with the desired intelligence and propagated acoustically or vibrationally, for inducement into the brain, typically through the use of loudspeakers, earphones or piezoelectric transducers. The modulated carriers may be transmitted directly in real time or may be conveniently recorded and stored on mechanical, magnetic or optical media for delayed or repeated transmission to the listener.” ^{^[5]} [Emphasis mine]

In the late Lt. Colonel Michael Aquino’s book: Mind War he explores psychological operations in combination with emerging technologies such as EM waves, Silent Sound and ionospheric mind control. Let’s not underestimate the power inherent within the human body /mind complex. After all, the electrical energy that powers each cell in our bodies works out at 30 million volts per metre, the equivalent voltage of a bolt of lightning. ^{^[6]}Power within can be, as it were, reverse-engineered. From a footnote in the same chapter if you didn’t catch the first time, read it again in this context:

“… the NSA’s electronic surveillance system can simultaneously follow and handle millions of people. Each of us has a unique bioelectrical resonance frequency in the brain, just like we have unique fingerprints. With electro-magnetic frequency (EMF) brain stimulation fully coded, pulsating electromagnetic signals can be sent to the brain, causing the desired voice and visual effects to be experienced by the target. This is a form of electronic warfare. U.S. astronauts were implanted before they were sent into space so their thoughts could be followed and all their emotions could be registered 24hrs a day. […]

“When a 5-micromillimeter microchip (the diameter of a strand of hair is 50 micromillometers) is placed into optical nerve of the eye, it draws neuroimpulses from the brain that embody the experiences, smells, sights and voice of the implanted person. Once transferred and stored in a computer, these neuroimpulses can be projected back to the person’s brain via the microchip to be re-experienced. Using a RMS, a land-based computer operator can send electromagnetic messages (encoded as signals) to the nervous system, affecting the target’s performance. With RMS, healthy persons can be induced to see hallucinations and to hear voices in their heads. Every thought, reaction, hearing and visual observation causes a certain neurological potential, spikes, and patterns in the brain and its electromagnetic fields, which can now be decoded into thoughts, pictures and voices. Electromagnetic stimulation can therefore change a person’s brainwaves and affect muscular activity, causing painful muscular cramps experienced as torture.”

Citizens Against Human Rights Abuse (CAHRA) supports many of the claims of systematic surveillance stalking and virtual torture from electromagnetic waves and interference. According to one researcher amongst many, Dr. Armen Victoria’s 1998 essay regarding ‘The Military Use of Electromagnetic Microwave and Mind Control Technology’ states the capability of cloning human EEGs for targeted mind control purposes where a variety of emotional responses and instinctive reactions: “… have been identified and isolated from the EEG, as ’emotion signature clusters’. Their relevant frequencies and amplitudes have been measured, then the very frequency/amplitude cluster is synthesised and stored on another computer, each one of these negative emotions properly and separately tagged. ‘They are then placed on the Silent Sound carrier frequencies and will silently trigger the occurrence of the same basic emotion in another human being.” ^{^[7]}

It appears that The Tri-Service Electromagnetic Advisory Panel (TERP) represents the interests of all three military services in the US. It is still conducting some of the most advanced research in the world which in turn, stems from the investigations made by the Russian pioneers in mind control technology during the early 1960s and 1970s. The U.S. Air Force has been researching ocular injury by exposure to millimetre wave system, bio-effects of High Power Microwave in low microwave regions (S band) and Radio Frequency Radiation (RFR). The use of High Power Microwave (HMP), by each of the military services seems to be commonplace. Judging by the wealth of research on the subject the US Navy is also getting extremely excited at the prospect of utilising electro-magnetic waves as a psychotronic weapon. We may then understand that the invasion of Iraq not only represented an opportunity to plunder a nation for resources and stake claim to a long held geopolitical prize, but to test out new developments in microwave weaponry and experiment with the latest PSYOPS.
As Guardian columnist John Sutherland put it: “The battlefield will be the testing ground for the US samurai. No more rhesus monkeys or pigs but real, live Iraqis.” ^[8]

According to Dr. Oliver Lowry who has had the dubious honour of working for the US military on several classified projects, Iraqi soldiers were the latest unwitting guinea pigs to further such advances, one of those being Silent Sound Spread Spectrum (SSSS), sometimes called SQUAD:

… According to statements made by captured and deserting Iraqi soldiers, however, the most devastating and demoralizing programming was the first known military use of the new, high-tech, type of subliminal messages referred to as ultra-high-frequency “Silent Sounds” or “Silent Subliminals”. Although completely silent to the human ear, the negative voice messages placed on the tapes alongside the audible programming by PSYOPS psychologists were clearly perceived by subconscious minds of the Iraqi soldiers and the silent messages completely demoralized them and instilled a perpetual feeling of fear and hopelessness in their minds. ^{^[9]}

Humans are highly sensitive and susceptible to a variety of electromagnetic frequencies – natural or artificial. The human body is a highly sensitive package of water, bio-chemicals, and electromagnetic energies. The introduction and exposure to various kinds of external micro or EM waves of any kind whether from mobile phones RFIDs or even wind-farm infra-sound does and will have an effect on the human being in ways we do not understand. Consider also that the geo-magnetic sensitivity in animals and other living organisms concentrations of ferromagnetic material – most notably magnetite. The same levels of magnetite conductor / receptor bio-mineralization were discovered to exist in the human brain in the early 1990s. The authors of one paper say that the presence of the particles may account … for a variety of biological effects of low-frequency magnetic fields.” ^{^[10]}

Electric field of the heart on the surface of the thorax, recorded by Augustus Waller (1887).

Weapons which target the mind and nervous system of selected individuals also has a long tradition. Reports of systematic mind stalking, harassment of individuals, testing and deployment of electronic and electromagentic devices (EMF) by government/outsourced agencies have been surfacing in the United States, North/South Korea and various countries in Europe. This has eroded human rights comprehensively with the added bonus for the persecutors that it is almost impossible to confirm and verify that which is literally “all in the mind”.

Though information in electronic/electromagentic or “non lethal Weaponry” is largely classified there is sufficient evidence from modern history and individual reports to reach the conclusion in a court of law that the targeted, micro-social use of behaviour modification technology is being used against individuals and activist groupings.

Interest in a variety of EMF weaponry had already begun at the beginning of the 20th Century with the genuis of Nikola Tesla and his experiments with radar and electrical energy. Concentrating and directing a beam of electromagnetic energy over a certain distance took hold of Tesla’s mind until his death in 1943. It seems the military-industrial complex heavily saturated in Nazi philosophy and science simply subverted Tesla’s genius and extended his advances in the field.

DARPA have been on the case since the Cold War with their 1958 research into combating Soviet advances in electromagnetic weapons and defenses. The capability to disrupt human emotions, inflict pain and fragment the personality was already well underway during pre and post-war experimentation under Operation MK-ULTRA, Project MONARCH, Project PANDORA and the development of PSYOPS and CoIntelpro emerging against the background of the civil rights movement of the 60s and 70s; behaviour modification had a new platform to play with.

Since that time with the enormous advances in “new concept” warfare there is every likelihood that a fusion of this military-intel science is not only being used as form of macro-social engineering and a monopoly of media-led propaganda, but the use of mass mind, ionosphere technology (fomerly labelled HAARP) to influence whole regions, even countries. It is therefore not a huge leap of imagination to recognise that the precision use of psychotronic weaponry to target selected individuals by the National Security State apparatus is in existence and heavily funded by black budgets.

Well in advance of the war on terror hoopla, Neo-Conservative regime change and the sky-rocketing increase in human/drug trafficking, mind control technologies were telegraphed to the military-intelligence faithful as the tool of choice to keep the world in line. The Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, published in 1994: ‘The Revolution in Military Affairs and Conflict Short of War’ by LTC James Kievit, Dr. Steven Metz. In the paper, the authors state the following drawn from their “hypothetical future scenario”:

The president was thus amenable to the use of the sort of psychotechnology which formed the core of the RMA (revolution in military affairs)… it was necessary to rethink our ethical prohibitions on manipulating the minds of enemies (and potential enemies) both international and domestic… Through persistent efforts and very sophisticated domestic ”consciousness raising”, old-fashioned notions of personal privacy and national sovereignty changed. As technology changed the way force was applied, things such as personal courage, face-to-face leadership, and the ‘warfighter’ mentality became irrelevant. […] Potential or possible supporters of the insurgency around the world were identified using the comprehensive Interagency Integrated Database. These were categorized as ‘potential’ or ‘active’, with sophisticated personality simulations used to develop, tailor and focus psychological campaigns for each“. So the Institute of Strategic Studies supposed that in the year 2000 those technologies would be that advanced that it will be possible to deprive human being of his freedom and adjust his personality to the needs of ruling elite. Most probably those technologies were at this level already in 1994.

Put this together with Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation (SEAS), the SMART grid, MAIN CORE, biological and PSYOPS warfare and you begin to get the idea that the technology of assymetric warfare isn’t just about geostrategy to dis-empower traditional enemies such as Iran, Russia and China. It is about war against domestic population by stealth and in plain sight. According to Project Censored’s 2006 paper titled: ‘US Electromagnetic Weapons and Human Rights’ offers a broad brush synthesis of the field and confirms the black budget capabilities available since the Zio-Conservative false-flag coup of 9/11:

“Michael Vickers, senior adviser to the Secretary of Defensefor the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review and principal strategist for the largest covert action program in the CIA’s history, recently testified on the importance of black operations: “US Special Operations Command’s (SOCOM) emphasis after 9/11 has been to make white SpecialOperations Forces (SOF) more gray and black SOF more black. It is imperative, however, that white and black SOF be integrated fully from a strategic perspective.” ^{^[11]}

Source: Petri Ticklen at http://alicefish.net/MindAttack.htm Original source: Against Electronic Mind-Control International /http://againstmindcontrol.tripod.com/liber.html

Since the war on terror propaganda has now made sure that activists, dissidents and indeed anyone overtly successful in criticising government policy is shut down, detained or harassed it is hardly shocking to discover that some of these covert programs have been targeting people for experimentation in CIA rendition centres, prisons, psychiatric wards and across the general public with immunity. Project Censored authors state:

“…Hundreds of people continue to assert that a person or persons, whom they do not know,have been targeting them with electromagnetic weapons in a widespread campaign of either illegal experimentation or outright persecution. These experiences involved a number of discrete phenomena:

Hearing voices when no one was present.

Feeling sensations of burning, itching, tickling, or pressure with no apparent physical cause.

Sleeplessness and anxiety as a result of “humming” or “buzzing”.

Loss of bodily control, such as twitching or jerking of an arm or leg suddenly and without control.

Unexpected emotional states, such as a sudden overwhelming feeling of dread, rage, lust or sorrow that passes as quickly as it arises. ^{^[12]}

And the industry of non-lethal weaponry (NLW) is steadily increasing playing a dominant role in asymmetric warfare abroad as well as crowd control closer to home. The market for NLW will apparently double by 2020. ^{^[13]} That means big money. Almost ten years ago:

“…the Air Force issued $24 million in contracts for “Electro Magnetic Effects Research and Development” to Northrup Gruman, Voss Scientific, Lockheed Martin, ElectroMagnetic Applications, and SAIC among others. The DOD viewed electromagnetic research and development as a key component in future wars as early as the 1990s. Emmett Paige Jr., Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence declared in 1996 that, ‘Well over a decade ago, a Soviet general reportedly said something like ‘to prevail in the next conflict, one must control the electromagnetic spectrum.’ That statement proved true in the Bacca Valley and on deserts in Iraq. The Department of Defense is committed to ensuring that ‘in the next conflict it is we who will control the spectrum. We know its value’. Increasingly, the value of non lethal weapons continues to rise as they produce fewer images of death in the media than traditional weapons.’

In addition to DOD contractors, the realm of non-lethal weapons extends into the universities with millions of dollars in scholarships and research fellowships. Pennsylvania State University, sponsors the Institute for Non-Lethal Defense Technologies (INLDT), the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey has the Stress and Motivated Behavior Institute, University of New Hampshire houses the Non-lethal Technology Innovation Center, and many US military schools have classes directly related to non-lethal weapons technology. There are also numerous conferences each year hosted by the Department of Defense, contractors and universities. The business of non-lethal weapons is expanding and will continue to grow. In 2006, the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate received $43.9 million compared to $25.8 million in 2000. ^{^[14]}

By 2011, this had increased to $138 million, reaching $140 million in 2013. ^[15] If we read the US Department of Defence’s Annual Non-Lethal Weapons Program Annual reports, it would leave you feeling suitably humbled and sentimental, beaming with national pride that Uncle Sam and its numerous military bases are making the world a less lethal. Apart from such delusions, what is more interesting is how such NLW advances are leaking into law enforcement and perceived “National Security.” A passage from Project’s Censored’s report concerning one Eldon Byrd a medical engineer, underscores this point:

“After working on the Polaris submarine, which carried long-range nuclear weapons, Byrd developed non-lethal weapons with reversible effects. He regarded this as a humanitarian alternative to ‘punching holesin people and having their blood leak out’ in battle. His inventions used magnetic fields at biologically active wave frequencies to affect brain function. Byrd could put animals to sleep at a distance and influence their movements. When the success of his research became evident, suddenly he was pulled off the project and it went “black.” He believes the electromagnetic resonance weapons he developed have been used for psychological control of civilians rather than for exigencies in battle. That is, to ensure his participation, he was uninformed about the true nature of the project. Byrd’s case also illustrates how morally tolerable operations may transition to morally intolerable operations, or at least rise above the atrocity line.” ^{^[16]}

It is this intentional compartmentalisation and factional nature of operations and directives within military and intelligence agencies which allows pathological leadership to develop.

Back in 2006, Congress and George W. Bush signed the Military Commission Act of 2006. which allowed torture and suspension of due process as acceptable. Since that time, torture apologists from law, academia and the military have come out to justify such actions as necessary for the “greater good” once again, trashing the very concept of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and basic notions of conscience. The Anglo-American-Zionist Establishment is perfectly happy to use all and everything in its means to achieve its ends including the use of technology that cannot be detected nor recognised by Official Culture.

The somewhat infamous Dr. José Delgado Director of Neuropsychiatry at Yale University Medical School in the 1960s and 70s, and later Professor of Neurobiology in Madrid, Spain, had gained quite an internet following of shock and revulsion based around his similar pathological view of the capabilities of psychosurgery. He urged the U.S. government to make “control of the mind” a national goal. ^{^[17]} He cheerily – and perhaps ill-advisedly – voiced his opinion and those of his superiors regarding the future:

“We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Someday, armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain”. ^{^[18]}

Dr. José Delgado was nothing if not thorough in his research. In 1965, The New York Times reported on Delgado’s successful experiment in the use of electronic implants connected to the motor nervous system of a bull – the unfortunate animal was stopped from charging by remote radio-control. The bizarre capabilities of surveillance was demonstrated when he surgically implanted a cat with an electronic implant which transmitted everything the poor moggy was seeing and hearing to a TV monitor.

The Doctor’s foray into publishing produced Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psycho-civilized Society (1969) which helped to confirm his Dr. Evil status on the net – not without justification. The doc is messianic in his belief that humans will undergo “psycho-civilization” by uploading the contents of their brains directly to machines and vice versa. With statements like that it is unlikely that he limited his experiments to animals. According to a 2001 interview for Cabinet magazine conducted by artists and writers Magnus Bärtås and Fredrik Ekman there are still many of Delgado’s descriptions in his own articles and reports of how he moved from animals to humans in contemporary American medical libraries. The reporters relate how Delgado, Dr. Mark, and other colleagues: “describe what was the first clinical use of Intracerebral Radio Stimulation (IRS) on a human being. The stimoceiver itself only weighed 70 grams and was held fast by a bandage.”

Dr. Jose Delgado, deep brain stimulation (DBS) researcher at Yale University and author of the book, Physical Control of the Mind (Third Edition: 1986)

In an article called “Radio Control Behavior” in the February 1969 issue of The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease there are descriptions of patients who had undergone procedures to attach the device to their brains.

Case studies include:

… A black fourteen-year-old girl on the border of developmental disability who grew up in a foster home suddenly goes into a fury that leads to the death of her two stepsisters. A thirty-five-year old white industrial designer who ends up killing his wife and children flies into a rage when other motorists try to overtake him and he chases them and tries to run them off the road. Their aggressive behavior is supposed to be registered by the stimoceiver in the way a seismograph registers the earth’s tremors and the same stimoceiver is then to “turn them off” via the FM transmitter. ^{^[19]}

In the interview Delgado admits that as far as he was aware nothing came of the IRS device due to the complexity of the brain and the unreliability of the mapping: “We never knew which parts of the brain we were stimulating with the stimoceiver. We didn’t even manage to prevent epileptic attacks, which we thought would be the simplest of things. We never found the area where epilepsy attacks originate.” ^{^[20]}

The authors reveal their surprise at his: “casual attitude towards the stimoceiver which was heralded as a great contribution to science.” Although Delgado’s attitude conforms to later developments regarding the brains plasticity and almost holographic nature, normal practice for radar experiments in psychological control were to appropriate and integrate into covert programs. After all, mind control operations were/are still continuing. It was at the congressional hearings on the CIA sponsored MK-ULTRA operations that Delgado made his famous declaration of psychosurgery. It seems highly improbable that such experiments were ignored especially when they often yielded startling results.

To illustrate the effectiveness of electro-stimulation Delgado and his colleagues: “… orchestrated violent scenes in the lab” descriptions of which were captured in the book: The Brain Changers: Scientists and the New Mind Control (1973) by Maya Pine who relates one incident typical of the research in question:

As the film opens, the patient, a rather attractive young woman, is seen playing the guitar and singing “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” A psychiatrist sits a few feet away. She seems undisturbed by the bandages that cover her head like a tight hood, from her forehead to the back of her neck. Then a mild electric current is sent from another room, stimulating one of the electrodes in her right amygdala. Immediately, she stops singing, the brainwave tracings from her amygdala begin to show spikes, a sign of seizure activity. She stares blankly ahead. Suddenly she grabs her guitar and smashes it against the wall, narrowly missing the psychiatrist’s head. ^{^[21]}

As the authors delved deeper into the experiments on people Delgado became suspicious and tense. He terminated the interview not long after. Rather than regretting his time of psychosurgery innovation it is likely that Delgado was feeling petulant about being left out of the loop after his data was integrated into the continuing experimentation. He may have had considerable lack of success with the vagaries of brain plasticity but his work on animals was highly valued during the parallel mind control work of MK-ULTRA and other operations. Though unconfirmed, it is thought that Delgado worked on Project PANDORA as part of the CIA’s experiments into electromagnetic modulation with particular attention to scrambling the minds of soldiers on the battlefield. It was at exactly the same time that the CIA began to conduct radiation experiments on the US population, just prior to Delgado starting his research on electro-magnetic radiation and its capacity for influencing people’s consciousness.

After the 1974 congressional hearings the Doctor continued his animal research managing to link his brain implants with computers. This was documented in “Two-Way Transdermal Communication with the Brain” published in 1975 where he stated:

“The most interesting aspect of the transdermal stimoceivers is the ability to perform simultaneous recording and stimulation of brain functions, thereby permitting the establishment of feedbacks and ‘on-demand’ programs of excitation with the aid of the computer. With the increasing sophistication and miniaturization of electronics, it may be possible to compress the necessary circuitry for a small computer into a chip that is implantable subcutaneously. In this way, a new self-contained instrument could be devised, capable of receiving, analyzing, and sending back information to the brain, establishing artificial links between unrelated cerebral areas, functional feedbacks, and programs of stimulation contingent on the appearance of pre-determined patterns” ^{^[22]}

In true “mad professor” fashion, Delgado continued his experimentation on an island in Bermuda, where a group of gibbons were placed at his disposal. Naturally, the doctor had them all fixed with electronic brain implants which led him to discover how to build and destroy social orders using electrical brain boosts. ^{^[23]} This would have been right up the technocratic street that was emerging in the warfare-ridden 1970s. So, this begs the question: after over thirty years of electronic implant tinkering what has the Pentagon, DARPA, NSA and unknown agencies come up with besides the RFID tagging systems? Our old friend the Nazi-tainted IBM needs to be brought in here.

Reflect on this confidential memo covertly obtained all the way back from October, 1995 from INTELLI-CONNECTION, a Security Division of IBM. In the form of an office memo, it reveals some interesting information. An edited extract follows:

THE I.B.M. 2020 NEURAL IMPLANT

CONFIDENTIAL, LIMITED DISTRIBUTION ONLY, LEVEL 9 COMMUNICATION, 2020 NEURAL CHIP IMPLANT

   “Federal regulations do not yet permit testing of implants on prisoners, but we have entered into contractual testing of our product. We have also had major successes in privately owned sanitariums with implant technology… In California, several prisoners were identified as members of a security threat group, EME, or Mexican Mafia.

   They were brought to the health services unit at Pelican Bay and tranquilized with advanced sedatives developed by our Cambridge, Massachusetts laboratories.

   The implant procedure takes about 60-90 minutes depending on the experience of the technician. We are working on a device that will reduce that time by as much as 60 per cent. The results of implants on 8 prisoners yielded the following:

   Implants served as surveillance monitoring devices for threat group activity. Implants disabled two subjects during an assault on correctional staff. Universal side effects in all 8 test subjects revealed that when the implant was set to 116 Mhz all subjects became lethargic and slept an average of 18-22 hours per day. All subjects refused recreation periods for 14 days during the 116 Mhz test evaluation…”

   Each subject was monitored for aggressive activity during the test period and the findings are conclusive that 7 out of 8 test subjects exhibited no aggression, even when provoked. Each subject experienced only minor bleeding from the nose and ears 48 hours after the implant due to initial adjustment.

   Each subject had no knowledge of the implant for the test period and each implant was retrieved under the guise of medical treatment. The security windfall from the brief test period was tremendous. Security officials now know several strategies employed by the EME that facilitate the transmission of illegal drugs and weapons into their correctional facilities … In Massachusetts, the Department of Corrections had already entered into high level discussions about releasing certain offenders to the community with the 2020 neural chip implants.” ^{^[24]}

What is the probability that such technology has been way in advance of anything we see from outsourced DOD departments which are overt and relatively open to public discourse? What of deep black projects far away from any oversight? Might we assume that such R & D may be in development, the results of which could be used on the potential activist, dissident or “terrorist” when the SMART-Surveillance society (SSS) is fully integrated into a comfortable, consumerist paradise?

If we take the infestation of Satanic Ritual Abuse networks which appear to be seated in most centres of power and seeping into the waiting SSS managed by mind control technology both overt and covert, this is surely worse than any science-fiction novel we can imagine. If we are to give credence to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s visions, which in any case, may simply be explanatory notes to his fellow comrades signalling what will happen, the technology may already be in place and operational.

In his 1970 book Between Two Ages Brzezinski writes:

“… of a future at most only decades away,” upon which he related the opinion of an experimenter in intelligence control who asserted: ‘I foresee a time when we shall have the means and therefore, inevitably, the temptation to manipulate the behavior and intellectual functioning of all the people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain.” ^{^[25]}

This is the darker side of the transhumanism crowd and which permeates social network corporations, military-intelligence and the DARPA inspired National Surveillance state. The music emanating from SMART grid technology is that of the Pied Piper lulling his followers into a false dawn. Saturating ourselves in W-Fi and locking ourselves into a EMF grid; making our gadgets indispensable for our most basic daily needs is exactly what this mainframe seduction is all about.

Part of being psycho-civilised is that we become seduced by the promise of more and more access, increasing efficiency and the ever smaller distance between “want” and “have.” The problem is, it appears to be an illusion, engineered with great precision, doffing it’s hat to ecological principles and economic alternatives whilst retaining a core-machine centralisation.

If we do not see the Magician behind these pretty lights and virtual enticements, these amenities offering a New Order of efficiency and ease, we will end up exactly as Henry David Thoreau wrote about his fellow man whom he believed had become : “… as tools of their tools.” When that happens and in combination with our illustrious pathocratic leaders, there may be very few choices to think freely, let alone act. We will be quite literally lost in the “simulation and simulacra”.

That is the antithesis of SMART.

Notes

[1] ‘Met police using surveillance system to monitor mobile phones’ The Guardian October 3, 2011.
[2] ‘Urban Wireless to Serve Intel and PSYOP forces’ by Mark Baard parallelnormal.com, July 19, 2007.
[3] http://www.patft.uspto.gov/
[4] ‘Method and an associated apparatus for remotely determining information as to person’s emotional state’ Inventors: Stirbl; Robert C. (New York, NY), Wilk; Peter J. (New York, NY) Appl. No.: 08/222,835 Filed: April 5, 1994 / 5,507,291 Stirbl et al. April 16, 1996. www. patft.uspto.gov/
[5] ‘Silent subliminal presentation system’ Inventors: Lowery; Oliver M. (Norcross, GA) Appl. No.: 07/458,339 Filed: December 28, 1989, issued as United States Patent 5,159,703, October 27, 1992. www. patft.uspto.gov/
[6] Utility Services in India’ | http://www.indiaonline.in/About/utilities/index.html
[7] The Military Use of Electromagnetic Microwave and Mind Control Technology’ by Dr Armen Victorian Lobster Magazine 1998. [8] ‘Horrifying US Secret Weapon Unleashed In Baghdad’ By Bill Dash, rense.com August 25, 2003.
[9] .‘Ariel Mind Control’ by Judy Wall, Editor/Publisher Resonance Newsletter of the MENSA Bioelectromagnetics Special Interest Group http://www.raven1.net/commsolo.htm
[10] ‘Magnetite Biomineralization in the Human Brain’ by Joseph L. Kirschvink, Atsuko Kobayashi-Kirschvink and Barbara J. Woodford, National Academy of Sciences. | Vol. 89. Biophysics, 1992.
[11]’US Electromagnetic Weapons and Human Rights’ By Peter Phillips, Lew Brown and Bridget Thornton, As Study of the History of US In telligence Community Human Rights Violations and Continuing Research in Electromagnetic Weapons, Completed December 2006, Sonoma State University, Project Censored Media Freedom Foundation.http://www.projectcensored.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/ElectromegnaticWeapons.pdf
[12] Ibid.
[13] ‘Non-Lethal Weapons (NLW): Industry, Technologies & Global Market’ 2014-2020 Aug 19, 2014 |http://www.marketwatch.com/story/non-lethal-weapons-nlw-industry-technologies-global-market-2014-2020-2014-08-19
[14] Ibid.
[15] http://jnlwp.defense.gov/Portals/50/Documents/Press_Room/Annual_Reviews_Reports/2013/DoD_Non-Lethal_Weapons_Program_Annual_Review_11.19.2012_HTML_format_v1.pdf
[16] Many accounts on psychotronic abuse are available to read in books and online. Some links: http://mindjustice.org/ | http://freedomfightersforamerica.com/victims_statements_pg1 [16] op.cit Philips, Brown, Thornton.
[17]The People Shapers by Vance Packard, published by Little, Brown & Co., 1977, (p.4).
[18] Joseph Delgado February 24, 1974 edition of the CONGRESSIONAL RECORD (MKULTRA hearings) No. 26, Vol.118.
[19] ‘Psychocivilization and Its Discontents: An Interview with José Delgado’ by Magnus Bärtås and Fredrik Ekman, Cabinet magazine, Issue 2 Mapping Conversations Spring 2001.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22] ‘Two-Way Transdermal Communication with the Brain,’ Delgado, Lipponen, Weiss, del Pozo, Monteagudo, and McMahon, a co-operative publication of the Medical University of Madrid, Spain, and Yale University Medical School, 1975.
[23] Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness Jim Keith, IllumiNet Press, 1999. (p.99)
[24] ‘The IBM 2020 Neural Implant’ The Phoenix Project, Dr. Al Overholt, quoting from The California Sun, by Herb Dorsey, Feb. 1997. See also: (http://www.trufax.org/reports/2020.html)
[25] op. cit. Brzezinski (p.15) (Between Two Ages)

Technocracy XII: Google’s World

“It’s a future where you don’t forget anything…In this new future you’re never lost…We will know your position down to the foot and down to the inch over time…Your car will drive itself, it’s a bug that cars were invented before computers … you’re never lonely … you’re never bored … you’re never out of ideas … We can suggest where you go next, who to meet, what to read…What’s interesting about this future is that it’s for the average person, not just the elites.”

– Google CEO Eric Schmidt on his vision of the future

Perhaps the most iconic representation of the internet is the search engine and household name Google Inc. that now eclipses Microsoft Corp. for its sheer omnipresence.

Innovations in aerial mapping has taken the internet by storm over the last several years. This is, in part, thanks to the ease of access available on Google’s own websites as well as mobile phones, android phones, tablet PCs and most other devices. With Google Maps ™ and Google Earth ™ Incorporating aerial and satellite photography together with comprehensive street mapping, the company has created a user-friendly virtual world that is unquestionably fascinating and practical. At the same time, you will not get anything closer to a simplified template of mass surveillance already being used at a higher level by the intelligence apparatus.

Since Apple Inc. in 2012, had more cash in the bank than the US government, we can see why it is one of a number of companies at the cutting edge of so many SMART platforms currently manifesting out of the hovering Cloud Drive of new ideas. In combination with this rival company which employs the most invasive military grade monitoring technology on its own products, Google is still pushing ahead with the experimentation of new technology that will create a virtual 3D rendering of the planet. Apple meanwhile, has tested its own similar “spy technology” on scores of locations around the world. ^{^[1]}

Google and Apple have been constantly battling petitions, complaints and protests around privacy and surveillance issues and it is easy to see why. CEO Larry Page and co-founder Sergey Brin are sitting at the top of a vast monopolistic leviathan which has begun to flex its corporate muscles in the last few years. According to The Wall Street Journal: “Google has ratcheted up competition with established websites by developing its own specialized services and often promoting them above regular search results in recent years.” All of Google’s products may appear randomly mixed in with other results but there is no indication that they are in actual fact, Google-sponsored content. ^{^[2]} The European Union agrees and anti-trust investigations into Google’s treatment of search engine results continue. Yet these commercial manipulations are just part of a more worrying development.

From January 2012, Google combined the privacy policies for all of its many applications into one Google umbrella. These include “Google search,” “Gmail”, “Google Maps,” “Google+,” “YouTube,” and “Android mobile” as well as over 60 others. When you input information onto any of those sites then it becomes shared amongst them all. ^{^[3]} Opting out? Not possible. Unless, that is, you never wish to use the internet again. An extremely complete picture of your online activity is now possible. However, bearing in mind what we have explored so far, Google has been doing this all along, it’s just decided to come clean as it will not be able to go to the next phase of snooping if it doesn’t. If you’re the owner of an Android phone then this is like having a permanent Google eye observing your actions wherever you are. Google’s insistence that this would make the user experience more beneficial is once again missing the point, notwithstanding its other research activities under Google X which is rivalling DARPA for its Big Brother applications.

Android is a Linux-based operating system for SMART phones, tablet computers and other similar mobile devices. Google’s Android mobile phone has been popular due to Android’s large community of developers writing applications (“apps”) offering 500,000 from the app store run by Google. As of December 2011, the estimated number of applications downloaded from the Android Market exceed 10 billion. ^{^[4]}Yet, certain gifted techies from the public are keeping the search giant on its toes. What the Federal Trade Commission failed to discover, twenty-five year-old computer scientist Jonathan Mayer did not. He found that Google was secretly planting cookies on millions of iPhone browsers. Mayer thinks iPhones were purposely targeted by Google. ^{^[5]} Nor is it the first time that the public acted on their “hunches.”

According to ProPublica an investigative journalist organisation:

A privacy official in Germany forced Google to hand over the hard drives of cars equipped with 360-degree digital cameras that were taking pictures for its Street View program. The Germans discovered that Google wasn’t just shooting photos: The cars downloaded a panoply of sensitive data, including emails and passwords, from open Wi-Fi networks. Google had secretly done the same in the United States, but the FTC, as well as the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees broadcast issues, had no idea until the Germans figured it out. ^{^[6]}

Similarly, the privacy watchdog in 2011 Greece banned Google Inc. from gathering detailed, street-level images for a planned expansion of its panoramic Street View mapping service.^{^[7]}

Google Maps Street-view car Source: aol.com

At the end of 2011 Trevor Eckhart, a security researcher and Android operating system developer discovered something a little less celebratory running in the background of these Android devices. The culprit was ostensibly a diagnostic software tool called Carrier IQ or CIQ which was integrated deep within the device. It was able to monitor, record, and transmit private data and interactions. According to Eckhart this included the ability to “… monitor every single individual keystroke and every interaction with the screen for that matter, along with encrypted Internet browsing sessions and searches, GPS data, network data, battery data, among other pieces of information which many people would likely like to keep private.” ^{^[8]}

Carrier IQ proceeded to sue Eckhart for copyright infringement, a groundless accusation which was immediately retracted when the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) took on Ekhart’s case. Carrier IQ continues to claim innocence, disregarding Eckhart’s research claiming keystrokes are recorded.

Online journalist Maddison Ruppert takes up the story:

As a result of Eckhart’s findings, lawsuits have been filed against Carrier IQ, HTC, Samsung, Apple, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, and Motorola, alleging that it breaches the Federal Wiretap Act, Stored Electronic Communications Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Despite the company’s insistence to the contrary, the suit alleges that, “[i]n addition to collecting device and service-related data, Carrier IQ’s software can collect data about a user’s location, application use, Web browsing habits, videos watched, texts read and even the keys they press.” The establishment media has come to the aid of their corporate cronies, citing so-called experts who “debunked” Eckhart’s findings.^{^[9]}

Six big corporations with vested interests in profits and PR took on Eckhart’s research to ensure that Android had no publicity and reassured the public that it was all nonsense. However, their evidence for these assurances was less than convincing. If the key stroke accusation proved to be untrue, this still left the admitted ability of Android devices to collect data “… that would be able to determine the exact person who is using the phone, what programs they are running, when they charge the battery, what calls they make and where…”

After Vice President Andrew Coward of Carrier IQ software made conciliatory remarks to the computer news outlet CNET he also offered the following howler which tells us a lot about either the ignorance of the man or his capacity for disingenuous statements: “… we did not expect that we would need to be so open and transparent about everything … We recognized as the crisis kind of developed that that was required for us to clear our name. That was a huge learning process …”

God forbid in the age of surveillance and data mining that a software company or any other business swiping the public’s data without telling them should be “open and transparent.” The opposite was perhaps the general idea and he never imagined such a carrier would be discovered. This is especially curious when Coward himself admitted to CNET that: “…the Carrier IQ software is embedded into the device to make it not only hard to detect, but nearly impossible for any regular user to remove or control.” ^{^[10]}

As of December 2011, Apple’s iPhone also had the Carrier IQ software but with minor adjustments. They have since removed it from future models. (However, Apple’s has assisted the push to get the populace accustomed to biometric ID usage with its 2013 iPhone 5s which includes a “Touch ID” sensor, or fingerprint sensor. If it’s on my iPhone then all is well…). According to United States Patent 8,254,902 Apple has yet again proved its cozy relationship to law enforcement by helpfully providing a “Kill Switch” for its mobile devices because: “covert police or government operations may require complete ‘blackout’ conditions.”

Ask yourself what conditions would require such a move where all devices are summarily turned off? Public interest or private need?

Google Inc. has another contribution to the SMART Grid in the form of the Google Wallet application for Android and iPhones. The app. offers wireless payment capabilities by using a sensor located on a designated ticket vending machine. Train and bus tickets are accessed from what appears to be a similar process to bar-code scanning but with the extra method of “near field communication,” where data transmission can take place when phone and sensor are about a one or two feet away from each other. The transaction is completed when the user receives confirmation on his phone. Google Wallet is currently compatible with prepaid Google cards and Mastercards.

Scanning via your i-phone

It does sound very convenient doesn’t it?

And it probably is if you don’t think about the fact that it takes us one step closer to a chip in the arm and a cashless society, something which is embedded in the SMART Grid design itself. However, its actual arrival may be longer than we think. This is partly to do with the global nature of drug smuggling and money laundering where cash is king. (Just ask HSBC). But to be sure, a global electronic currency is coming and from which it will be near impossible to opt out. ^{^[11]} That may not necessarily be a bad thing, it all depends if it is a truly transparent and open source. Who lies behind the formation and organisation of the world of cyber currency is key. For example, so far, the rise of Bitcoin seems a much better bet than anything Google could provide since the parameters of Bitcoin appear to be truly emancipatory, with encryption and transparency operating in the hands of people and none of the official culture middle men, i.e. lawyers, brokers and speculators. The proof will be in the pudding.

Google’s Android and Apple’s i-Phone both have voice recognition apps. Speak into your phone in a normal voice and it will answer any number of queries such as maths problems, directions – complete with a map popping up, showing your route – as well instantaneous translations form one language to another and the dictation of email and text messages. So how does it do it? Well, it is but one result of Google’s artificial intelligence programs and as Slate.com’s delighted online techie enthuses, the apps obtain their power: “… by analysing impossibly huge troves of information. For the speech system, the data are a large number of voice recordings. If you’ve used Android’s speech recognition system, Google Voice’s e-mail transcription service … or some other Google speech-related service, there’s a good chance that the company has your voice somewhere on its servers. And it’s only because Google has your voice—and millions of others—that it can recognize mine.” ^{^[12]}

ANew York Times’ article of 2013 reported on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) testing of its Biometric Optical Surveillance System, or BOSS that: “… pair[s] computers with video cameras to scan crowds and automatically identify people by their faces.” They have also been busy creating a system of voice recognition software that can analyse and determine whether or not a person is drunk, angry, or lying. A Homeland Security News Wire article called “Voice biometrics: the next generation lie detectors” published in December 2011 describes how several research teams are working away across the United States on various programs one of which can “deconstruct an individual’s speech pattern to see if they are being honest by searching for cues like volume, changes in pitch, pauses between words, and other verbal signs.” Another system is under development whereby an individual’s emotions can be analysed “… by using mathematical algorithms that scan hundreds of vocal cues like pitch, timing, and intensity.” Funding has come from the US Air Force. ^{^[13]}

Of course, voice recognition and many other so called “innovations” which have been perfected and adapted to the SMART public have been considered obsolete by the private military-corporate complex for quite some time. The technology is being allowed into the public arena alongside developments in governmental sponsored and outsourced changes in infrastructure designed to revolutionise the nature of society.

Not wanting to left out of the silicon rush Microsoft demonstrated in early 2013 how webs surfers could get a feeling for a bar or restaurant by using a smartphone microphone app 6 to 10 second audio samples are taken, extracted data processed so that: “… the size of the crowd, the level of chatter, and the music volume can then be classified as “‘low,’ ‘normal,’ or ‘high.’ As MIT Tech Review’s Jessica Leber reported on March 11, 2013: “The app could even tell a searcher what song is playing.” Later in the year to complement this, Microsoft researchers came up with a system which can predict your physical location up to three weeks in the future. They did so by creating new techniques which made use of volunteers going about their daily lives and who each carried a GPS device much the same way they carried a cell phone. Neither of these two advances is in the public domain but given the pace of change it shouldn’t be too long.

Meanwhile, British scientists have used the social networking website Twitter to create a computer program called “Emotive” to “map the mood of the nation.” The software works by: “accessing the emotional content of postings on the social networking site.” According to the Loughborough University research team it works by scanning up to 2,000 tweets a second which the program rates for expressions from a list of eight human emotions drawn from each tweet. These are: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, shame and confusion. The grandiose and simplistic claim on a par with Pre-Crime technology of Homeland Security is that: “Emotive could help calm civil unrest and identify early threats to public safety” by tracking “criminal behaviour or threats to public safety.” Since over “500 million people across the world use Twitter, and more than 340 million tweets are posted daily,” then, that’s quite a demographic. Academics involved with the program then made the gargantuan leap that this technology: “may be able to guide national policy on the best way to react to major incidents…”

Social networking represent fertile for mining emotions tailored to predesigned outcomes. “The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found that people mirror the positive or negative emotions that their friends express in their posts—all without the aid of nonverbal cues like body language or tone of voice. Image credit: Bryan Kramer from his article: The Emotions of Social Sharing

Google was recently granted permission and issued a patent under the title of “Advertising based on environmental conditions” to maximize its profits and snooping ability to unheard of levels. Software collates and analyses background noises during your online phone call to effectively take an auditory snapshot of your environment and use the data to create a tailor-made advert for you that comes that bit closer to the ad man’s idea of perfection and our idea of a commercial dystopia. Here’s the patent description:

A computer-implemented method comprising: receiving, from a computing device, a search request comprising (i) information about a first environmental condition of the computing device, and (ii) one or more search terms; parsing the search request; selecting, from the search request based on parsing, the information about the first environmental condition; identifying an advertisement based on the first environmental condition and at least one of the one or more search terms; providing the advertisement to the computing device; receiving one or more of an audio signal, an image signal, or a video signal from a sensor of the computing device; and determining a second environmental condition based on the one or more of the audio signal, the image signal, or the video signal. ^{^[14]}

John Simpson, the spokesman for Consumer Watchdog observes: “What these unilateral decisions by Google and Facebook demonstrate [referring to the forced usage of the timeline feature] is a complete disregard for their users’ interests and concerns,” continuing: “It’s an uncommonly arrogant approach not usually seen in business, where these companies believe they can do whatever they want with our data, whenever and however they want to do it,” he said. ^{^[15]}

Not content with prising open our private lives on the internet, Google intends to virtually sit on our face and look through our eyes. Google X has come up with “Project Glass” and its “augmented reality” glasses (or headsets) still at the prototype stage; the next step up from your Smartphone, becoming as close to a natty cyborg as it is possible to be. The glasses will allow you to instantly read text messages, pull up maps, emails and all manner of useful and potentially accident inducing possibilities. More functions will be added over time. With live streams put through the glasses they could revolutionise media, communications, business and – amateur porn… Or stall at the first hurdle.

Controlled by voice or via a small touch-pad on the right arm of the device it can be connected to the internet via a phone cable and lasts for several hours, which will eventually be extended to a day, according to the developers. Prices start from $1500. What is more, Google will have it all stored and ready for multiple purposes.

Regardless of whether Project Glass gets off the ground or is just another gimmick, it heralds a significant change in the way we interface with the material world. Myk Willis Computer consultant who attended the June 2012 Google’s I/O developers’ conference had this to say about the product and the more probable future of what is dubbed “wearable computing”:

When we look back 10 years or so in the future, it’s going to be so cheap to integrate computing and communication into everything that it’s going to stop being about gadgets. The real impacts of wearable computing are most likely to come in things that don’t look like computers at all. […]

Computing is infusing every physical object that we interact with, so I think that’s going to end up being the more important angle. It’s not that we’re inventing new gadgets that people can wear. We are taking things that people wear or can carry with them and infusing them with intelligence, computing and connectivity. ^{^[16]}

The problem is, Google will be gathering real-time information about your every move, something intelligence agencies will be falling over themselves to mine. That is, like Facebook and most social networking platforms, they aren’t in bed with Google from the outset, which seems like a certainty to me. Privacy? Nice idea. What else are we going to be “infusing” into our neural networks which will have the ability to make life easier, faster and accessible?

Darkly comical in the context of Google is the company’s co-founder and CEO Larry Page who refutes the charge by Edward Snowden and many other whistleblowers that they have been inside the CIA and NSA’s pocket for some time. Indeed, since Google is accepted as the leading search and internet tech-company in the world, accounting for 90 per cent of search engine traffic in the UK alone and is the user application of choice for virtually everyone it is simply inconceivable that Google has somehow kept itself immune from the intelligence apparatus. Without them, corporations of that size and magnitude wouldn’t be able to exist in their present form. This is especially true with their dominance in the surveillance and telecommunications game.

Scott Huffman, Google’s engineering director, says the company’s intention is to: “… transform the ways people interact with Google”. And that largely benign wish for many of Google’s employees happens to fit into the “transformation” that is very much part of the social engineering discussed on this blog. Google’s intention is to recalibrate all devices so that they exist not just in our pockets “… but all around us in every room” then it behooves the relevant agencies to get on aboard such an enthusiastic vision early on – which is probably exactly what they did. ^{^[17]}

The Circle By Dave Eggers (2013)

How does the All Seeing Eye of Google, SMART devices, the Internet of things integrated with our social networks change our daily lives? Author David Eggers has more than a good idea as to how it could morph into something less than convenient. Eggers’ book The Circle paints a truly Orwellian picture of a surveillance state welcomed with open arms by the global population. Privacy is jettisoned and their lives directed and managed by a single corporation: the Circle, a mutant blend of Google, Facebook and Twitter. Since the idea of hiding any information from another is abhorrent and against the whole concept of naturally free world of sharing then to delete any information is deemed a crime. With a direct homage to George Orwell’s 1984 and its paramoralism, the Circle employs the absolute mantras of: “SECRETS ARE LIES,” “SHARING IS CARING,” and “PRIVACY IS THEFT.”

Seen as a Dystopian satire by reviewers it is much more than that, since it perfectly describes aspects of our present let alone our future. Eggers provides a mirror for how technology provides accelerated communication, entertainmen and seeming efficiency while at the same time ensuring compliance and a sickly positive affirmation hardwired into the user experience. Health monitoring of bio-signatures linked to records and location support the contouring of the correct existential meaning mixed together in the blender of the social networking matrix. Nano-cameras placed in every nook and cranny of the world ensure that an optimal mood is maintained along with access to every product you desire. In the end, products determine sense of self and purpose. As everyone is a user it is impossible to opt out of what is essentially a vast system of mind control through homogenisation and uniformity by sensation and instant gratification. Vacuous and empty lives are propagated so that the line between the user and the used becomes impossible to find. A reduction of crime – even its disappearance – Yes. But the cost would be of what it means to be human: creativity, spontaneity, originality and innovation would be crushed under a technopoly of plenty inhabited by “followers” “likes” and “friends” who are merely numbers in a programming matrix and a peripheral relation to objective reality. Eggers book asks the question how much are we prepared to sacrifice? And in doing so, is this ultimate transparency really what it purports to be?

Despite these CEO protestations that public “trust” is essential to the success of Google it becomes rather insulting when we know that Google headquarters and their advancing technology is monitored and directed both inside the corporation and outside by the NSA. As discussed, the mainstream media has been suspiciously hysterical about Snowden and the NSA and happily ignoring AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein and others who have been warning us since 2005 about the fact that the NSA has been wired into top internet companies’ servers, Including Google and Facebook.

With Google co-founder and Chairman Eric Schimdt willing to swallow nanobots to spring-clean his inner workings and uber-geeks like the Vice President of GoogleSearch Ben Gomes welcoming the company as a utilitarian presence in every aspect of our bodies and minds, it begs the question of whether there will be a choice.

Google promotion for “Project Glass”

In an interview with The Independent newspaper in July, 2013 Gomes gives us some idea what he thinks about our future. Presently residing at the Google HQ, Building 43 or the “Googleplex” he is an example of a techie genius who sees the unstoppable wave of innovation in this sphere as a wholly positive outcome for all concerned. Ben Gomes talks with barely concealed excitement about a “new epoch”. Waxing lyrical about Google’s new vast information resource Knowledge Graph he exclaims “It’s a meld of all the world’s interests and information needs,” which will accessed by voice commands anywhere you find yourself. The ultimate pot of gold for Gomes is a chip embedded in the brain which he believes is “far from a sci-fantasy.” Indeed, the employment of transhumanist guru Ray Kurzweil believes that in under twenty years “… the size of blood cells … we’ll be able to send them inside our brain through the capillaries, and basically connect up brain to the cloud.” The “cloud” meaning a vast virtual storage system which is already a reality. ^{^[18]}

As director of engineering, Kurzweil’s Singularity University – of which Google is a partner – feeds into the worrying trajectory that Google is inside the Elite’s obsession with transhumanism. DARPA is merging with Google innovation and thus pulling the internet under its influence where robotics, surveillance and human augmentation do indeed merge on behalf of those forces which care nothing for visions for human betterment.

Radical life extension has made transhumanist eyes bulge with anticipation, a belief which seems thick on the ground at Google HQ. The corporation recently launched a new company called “Calico” aimed at human lifespan and solving aging-related diseases. Like Bill and Melinda Gates, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have a keen interest in genetics and life extension. As explained in the 2005 book: The Google Story by David A. Vise, Google geeks have been put to work to assist the revolution by generating: “… a gene catalogue to characterize all the genes on the planet and understand their evolutionary development. Geneticists have wanted to do this for generations … Google will build up a genetic database, analyze it, and find meaningful correlations for individuals and populations.” ^{^[19]}

And it is here where we see a mind meld of transhumanist exuberance, technical genius and wilful blindness as to the nature of who is guiding who. Clearly, when such a concept is embraced by people at the frontline of such advances which has already taken on a life of its own, they are likely to be assisting in much more than simply technical innovation for its own sake. Every action has a moral and ethical dimension which is smoothed over with lullabies of technocratic peace and harmony. Google, along with the Information Age, is in danger of becoming just another arm of Pathocracy as complete as media, television, industry and agribusiness. If we want to opt out of this integration into the SMART-grid will we be able to do so if our very lives are dependent on its functionality? Moreover, would such rogue thinking be allowed to threaten the infrastructure in this singular future?

Neural networks are not the only bio-real estate available for redesigning. Locator information can be purloined from nearby phones to ping back-and-forth to gain the most accurate coordinates of the person being tracked. Not exactly heart-warming when genetically modified food and gene-twisting technology meets in a grim embrace inside the human body.

So, what’s so special about DNA? We’ll have a look-see in the next post.

Update: See also: Data is the New Oil

Notes

[1] ‘Apple has more cash in the bank than the U.S. Treasury has left to spend’ By Matthew Humphries http://www.geek.com Jul. 29, 2011|‘Apple ‘spy planes’ to film homes from the air’ “Apple has recruited a private fleet of aeroplanes equipped with military standard cameras to produce 3D maps so accurate they could film people in their homes through skylights, according to reports.” By Nick Collins, Telegraph, 11 Jun 2012.
[2] ‘Rivals Say Google Plays Favorites’ by Amir Efrati, The Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2010.
[3] ‘Google will know more about you than your partner’: Uproar as search giant reveals privacy policy that will allow them to track you on all their products’ by The Daily Mail by Ted Thornhill, 3 March 2012.
[4] ‘Google’s 10 Billion Android App Downloads: By the Numbers’. By Christina Bonnington, Wired December 2011.
[5] ‘How a Lone Grad Student Scooped the Government and What It Means for Your Online Privacy’by Peter Maass, ProPublica, June 28, 2012.
[6] Ibid.
[7] ‘Google’s Street View rejected in Greece over privacy’RINF http://www.rinf.com.
[8] ‘The Carrier IQ Conspiracy’ by Madison Ruppert, December 16, 2011 Activist Post, http://www.activistpost.com.
[9] Ibid.
[10] ‘What does Carrier IQ do on my phone–and should I care?’ by Elinor Mills, CNET, http://www.cnet.com December 1, 2011.
[11] ‘The Cashless Society is Almost Here – And With Some Very Sinister Implications’ By Patrick Henningsen 21st Century Wire: […] It’s arguable that we approaching the cusp of that US Dollar collapse, and perhaps a Euro implosion on the back end of it. Risks of hyper inflation are very real here, but if you control the money supply might already have a ready-made solution waiting in the wings, you will not be worrying about the rift, only waiting for the chaos to ensue so as to maximise your own booty from the crisis.
Many believed that the global currency would be the SDR unit, aka Special Drawing Rights, implemented in 2001 as a supplementary foreign exchange reserve asset maintained by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). SDRs were not considered a full-fledged currency, but rather a claim to currency held by IMF member countries for which they may be exchanged for dollars, euros, yen or other central bankers’ fiat notes.
With the SDR confined to the upper tier of the international money launderette, a new product is still needed to dovetail with designs of a global cashless society.
Two new parallel currencies are currently being used exclusively within the electronic, or cashless domain – Bitcoin and Ven.
Among the many worries Ben Bernanke listed in his speech at the New York Economic Club last week was the emergence of Bitcoin. But don’t believe for a second that these digital parallel currencies are not being watched over and even steered by the money masters. Couple this latest trend with done deals by most of the world’s largest mobile networks this month to allow people to pay via a mobile ‘wallet’, and you now have the initial enabler for a new global electronic currency.
These new parallel cashless currencies could very quickly end up in pole position for supremacy when the old fiat notes fade away as a result of the next planned economic dollar and euro crisis.
Both Bitcoin and Ven appear on their surface to be independent parallel digital money systems, but the reality is much different. In April 2011, Ven announced the first commodity trade priced in Ven for gold production between Europe and South America. Both of these so-called ‘digital alternatives’ are being backed and promoted through some of the world’s biggest and most long-standing corporate dynasties, including Rothschild owned Reuters as an example, which should be of interest to any activist who believes that a digitally controlled global currency is a dangerous path to tread down. (Read more at http://www.21stcenturywire.com/2012/11/29/the-cashless-society-is-almost-here-and-with-some-very-sinister-implications/)
[12] ‘Google has developed speech-recognition technology that actually works.’ By Farhad Manjoo, April 6, 2011,www.slate.com.
[13] ‘Facial Scanning Is Making Gains in Surveillance’, Charlie Savage New York Times, August 21, 2013.
[14] ‘Advertising based on environmental conditions’ Inventors: Heath; Taliver Brooks (Mountain View, CA) Assignee: Google Inc. (Mountain View, CA) Appl. No.: 12/017,613 Filed: January 22, 2008 / Issued March 20 2012, US patent number: 8,138,930.
[15] Quotation from ‘Big Brother Google just got bigger’ By Madison Ruppert Editor of endthelie.com, January 24 2012.
[16] ‘U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program’ Wall Street Journal, June 6 2013.
[17] ‘Project Glass: Developers’ verdicts on Google’s headset’ By Laura Locke, BBC News, June 28, 2012.
[18] ‘Inside Google HQ: What does the future hold for the company whose visionary plans include implanting a chip in our brains?’ Ian Burrell, The Independent July 20, 2013.
[19] p.285; Vise, David A.;The Google Story (2008) Published by Pan.

Technocracy XI: Social (SMART) Grid and “Cognitive Infiltration”

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Yahoo! and others have offered new ways to chat, make friends, speed-date and keep in touch with family wherever you are. It has revolutionized information in ways which we are only just beginning to understand. The networks have become such a normal part of our daily lives in such a short time that it is only recently that serious questions about privacy and surveillance have filtered through to the MSM. But ethical questions are being left behind as the Information Age surges ahead. Indeed, if you don’t have a Facebook account then you have already consigned yourself to the hinterlands of suspicion and abnormality. According to some, this may even be a red-flag for suspected terrorist or paedophile. Such is the power of social networking websites on society and the ridiculous assumptions now circulating. ^{^[1]}$billion companies like Twitter and Facebook have become the largest database on the global population, representing a free and easy resource for intelligence agencies to data-mine. With over 900 million active users it is not difficult to see how useful data catchment could be.

Growing awareness that social networks are being used by intelligence agencies to monitor citizens’ activities prompted cyber-consumer advocate Electronic Frontier foundation (EFF) to file requests in October 2009 to provide records about federal guidelines on the use of social networking sites for investigative or data-gathering purposes. Among other issues related to surveillance as discussed previously, they sued the CIA, the US Department of Defence, Department of Justice and three other government agencies for allegedly refusing to release information on their involvement in social networks. The cases are on-going.

There are so many dubious aspects to Facebook aside from its intelligence connections and origins it is hard to know where to start. We will pinpoint a few however.

The company makes no secret of is its drive to know everything about its members. It wants to extract and mine as much the data from them as is humanely possible and then make it available to all kinds of interested parties. The implications of their drive to happily make your social life – including information you might not ordinarily reveal – fully integrated into the net experience is of course, never discussed. Facebook has been busily creating “Shadow Profiles” in a bid to extract even more information. Using various functions on the software interface which encourages users to share personal data of other users and non-users of Facebook such as mobile phone synchronization, search queries, friend invitations, email-provider imports and instant messaging means that even if you don’t use Facebook you may have a profile nonetheless. ^{^[2]}

Since Facebook is such a fan of being “social by default” then it shouldn’t be concerned when the tables are turned. Since Facebook revealed in 2012 that more than 83 million Facebook accounts (8.7% of total users) were fake accounts, ongoing controversies with privacy issues, class action lawsuits and litigation as well as the virtual ownership of members’ profiles, it is hardly surprising this was reflected in the stock value which dropped below $20 in the same year. ^[3]

“You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.”

– Facebook Terms of Service. (It has since been updated yet protests groups claim little has changed).

When independent software developer Pete Warden crawled all the data that Facebook’s privacy settings changes had made public, the company sued him. This occurred before the Open Graph API system which means they were planning to make the data publicly available anyway. As Vice President of Engineering at Border Stylo Dan Yoder comments: “Their real agenda is pretty clear: they don’t want their membership to know how much data is really available,” stating further: “It’s one thing to talk to developers about how great all this sharing is going to be; quite another to actually see what that means in the form of files anyone can download and load into MatLab.” ^{^[4]}

In 2010, a Canadian security researcher Ron Bowes created a specific crawler script which he then used to take information from Facebook’s open access directory. He managed to download 2.8Gb of personal details including credit card numbers, account names, profile URLs and contact details; names of those users’ friends, (even with hidden profiles) and more intimate photos of over 100 million Facebook users. This cache of private information gold was then dumped on P2P file-sharing service BitTorrent, which was subsequently downloaded by scores of major corporations many hundreds of times. The point was not the relative ease by which such data was “stolen,” though this is an important issue, it was the fact that the data is already publicly available, provided Facebook members have not chosen to hide their profile from search results. ^{^[5]}

As of 2012, there are now a raft of members, celebrities, underwriters and advertisers all taking a cut of Facebook profits. On the management board is co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg with the largest ownership percentage of an individual at 28% (he is worth $33.1Billion) with co-founders Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Sean Parker taking between 6-4%. Venture capital company Accel Partners, Russian internet firm Mail du Ru take 10% repsectively and former PayPal CEO and venture capitalist Peter Thiel 3%. Thiel sums up Facebook’s history of double-dealing and entrepreneurship very well.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg

The first lump sum from his venture capital funding amounted to $500,000 – a tidy sum no doubt drawn from his £3bn hedge fund Clarium Capital Management and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. Thiel is the Author of an anti-multicultural missive The Diversity Myth and on the board of VanguardPAC a radical internet-based Neo-Conservative pressure group that was apparently set up to attack MoveOn.org, a left-liberal pressure group website. VanguardPAC’s mission is to “reshape America and the globe” according to Neo-Conservative values – the type of values which are still carving up the Middle East. Thiel is certainly not the shy and retiring type and promotes a New World Technocracy laced with transhumanist and right-wing conservatism. The Guardian’s Tom Hodgkinson summarises Thiel’s curious mélange of fascist views: “… since the 17th century, certain enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes’ famous characterisation of life as ‘nasty, brutish and short’, and towards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now exists in imaginary things.” ^{^[6]}

Peter Thiel: Technocratic Neo-Conservative

From where did Theil obtain his inspiration? Stanford’s University’s René Girard and his mimetic theory that states all cultures and ancient societies were built on the victimisation and an eventual sacrifice of the innocent, even though they believed they were guilty. Mythology was used to legitimise and rationalise the fact that society was founded on violence. If Girard believes that people are sheep and will follow the one strongest in the herd then according to Hodgkinson:

“The theory would also seem to be proved correct in the case of Thiel’s virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook. Girard is a regular at Thiel’s intellectual soirees. What you don’t hear about in Thiel’s philosophy, by the way, are old-fashioned real-world concepts such as art, beauty, love, pleasure and truth.” ^{^[7]}

Perhaps this is something that may be said for much of the neo-feudalist collectives currently infiltrating our social systems?

Consider the other board member of Facebook, Jim Breyer a partner in the venture capital firm Accel Partners who put $12.7m into Facebook in April 2005:

“…. On the board of such US giants as Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment, he is also a former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Now these are the people who are really making things happen in America, because they invest in the new young talent, the Zuckerbergs and the like. Facebook’s most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock’s senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What’s In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA. After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which “identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions”. ^{^[8]} [Emphasis mine]

With significant lobbying costs totalling over $41,000 in just one quarter of 2010 the focus of their expenditure was primarily intelligence agencies such as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA). It was the only internet company to do so out of Google, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple. The DNI is an umbrella office founded in the wake of 9/11 synthesizing intelligence from 17 agencies (including the CIA) and advises the President on privacy and federal cyber-security policy.

Which begs the question: Is Facebook lobbying merely to keep their operations free from interference for their Intel handlers?

Meanwhile, Facebook, Blogs, newspapers, radio TV channels, and internet chat rooms are poured over and monitored by the Open Source Centre or “vengeful librarians” – even the constant “tweets” from the Twitter network reaching over 5 million per day. Information is gathered by an army of analysts to find the low-down on the emotional level of a certain city demographic or whether a country is ready to be invaded or …”Democratised.”

“Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.”

– Richard Stallman, software freedom activist

It is now common knowledge that The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s command centre monitors blogs, forums newsgroups and message boards on a daily basis. Scores of popular websites, including Twitter, Facebook, WikiLeaks, Hulu, and many alternative and left-leaning news sites also come under the umbrella of US surveillance.

Among the many examples that the Obama Administration has provided and which go above and the beyond the Neo-Conservative crimes of the Bush-Cheney cabal is President Obama’s regulatory Czar and legal scholar Cass Sunstein. Just before his appointment as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, this gentleman managed to add to the grand façade that is American democracy by writing a 30-page academic paper co-authored with Adrian Vermule entitled: “Conspiracy Theories.” In the paper he suggested the government should “infiltrate” social network websites, chat rooms and message boards. This “cognitive infiltration,” according to Sunstein, should be used to enforce a U.S. government ban on “conspiracy theorizing.” This ban would be imposed on such heresies as anti-anthropocentric global warming; the World Trade Centre attacks on 911 were an inside job; Al-Qaeda is a US government-created mercenary unit for hire and a range of other proven conspiracy facts, most of which feature on this blog. By “conspiracy theory” Sunstein defines it as “an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.”

Heaven forbid we should try to expose that …

And of course, Sunstein implies that that there are no conspiracies operating in government, banking and corporate activities and if you are one of the mentally deranged few that believe so, then medical help and a good psychologist is the only path open to you. It seems everyone is a potential extremist if you are aren’t giving the government a virtual back-rub. He further suggests: ““… a distinctive tactic for breaking up the hard core of extremists who supply conspiracy theories: cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial cognitive diversity.” ^{^[9]}

Cass Sunstein 2011, (AP Photo)

Sunstein’s objective is to raise: “… doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action,” which places a whole new angle on some of many trolls and trouble-makers who periodically appear on website forums to sow seeds of discontent in ways which follow distinct patterns of emotional programming indicative of paid disinformation agents. Indeed, PSYOPS targeting the web have been in operation for several years, possibly since the internet’s inception in some form or another. Sunstein’s suggestions are merely an updating of the US Dept. Defence’s Information Operations Road Map of the future. ^{^[10]}

To make sure such a future – and the mass mind – is firmly where it should be DARPA means to keep biometrics and the internet connected to the same port (which, one day soon, may be located at the back of our skulls). Pentagon scientists are helpfully creating a program to use biometrics as a platform for creating a “cognitive fingerprint” which would dispense with all those passwords building up in our little black books. Which means, according to their website: “… validating any potential new biometrics with empirical tests to ensure they would be effective in large scale deployments.” Named the Active Authorisation Program (AAP) it offers deep analysis of the user’s cognitive processes and thus their online behaviour in the hope of inventing new forms of biometrics so that your identity can be ascertained.

Parallel to this grateful assistance in making our lives so much more efficient and safe, online tech journal Security Ledger reported in April 2013 on one time hacker and DARPA’s cyber chief Peiter “Mudge” Zatko heading to Google Inc. Joining Google’s Motorola Mobility’s Advanced Technology & Projects (ATAP) group, it has a mission to deliver “breakthrough innovations to the company’s product line on seemingly impossible short time-frames.” While Microsoft continues to track users of the Windows phones which have a unique ID that interacts with Wi-Fi locations and GPS to know anyone’s longitude and latitude. Customer privacy isn’t a big issue for Microsoft and really any of the big internet companies. Google knows the password of every Android device (phone or tablet) which has ever logged on to a particular Wi-Fi network. (Android accounts for 79 per cent of phones shipped worldwide).

Business Insider’s article of August 14th, 2013 alerted us to the fact that if you are one of 400 million persons who chose Gmail then you can also expect no privacy at all. In a class action complaint of 2013 Google responded by claiming “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.” So, be warned, even though it is unlikely you’ll be able to avoid Google even if you wanted to.

It seems Google and DARPA are courting each other for good reason.

Notes

[1] Is not joining Facebook a sign you’re a psychopath? Some employers and psychologists say staying away from social media is ‘suspicious’ Daily Mail, 6 August 2012.
[2] ‘Facebook Is Building Shadow Profiles of Non-Users’ October 18 2011, http://www.slashdot.org
[3] “Facebook: About 83 million accounts are fake”. USA Today. August 3, 2012.
[4] ‘Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook’ by Dan Yoder http://www.gizmodo.com May 3 2010.
[5] ‘How 100 million Facebook users ended up in a list on BitTorrent’ Jemima Kiss, The Guardian, 29 July 2010.
[6] ‘With friends like these …’ by Tom Hodgkinson, The Guardian May 2010.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] ‘Conspiracy Theories’ by Cass R. Sunstein (Harvard Law School) and Adrian Vermeule (Harvard Law School) January 15, 2008, Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 08-03, U of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 199 U of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 387. [ During my own experience in working for several alternative news websites there was no question that persistent problems from site “trolls” on the relevant forums fell into this category. Some exhibited high knowledge on certain specialist subjects and exhibited a standard formula for contouring ideas and concepts which included the very same “cognitive infiltration” tactics cited by Sunstein and often in a highly elaborate form. Once “outed” they were gone but often the damage was already done].
[10] As part of the “Information Dominance” strategy of the Pentagon, ‘The Information Operation Road Map’ was a paper commissioned in 2003 and declassified in 2006. It was personally approved by the then Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. It included details of major PSYOPS disinformation campaigns to place false stories in newspapers and the internet as well as the kind of beginings of “cognitive infiltration” that Sunstein was so keen to see materialise.

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The Politics of Entrapment IV: Peverted Justice and Porn Bombing

“We are the Perverted-Justice Foundation. Of course, those new to our foundation likely have no idea what that means. This is a foundation unlike most, if any, other foundations you’ll ever run across. We’re a foundation that does not simply thunder about a problem, we don’t merely advocate or preach against an issue from a distance. No, our foundation is a pro-active endeavor. We’re aggressive. We’re confrontational. We believe you have to be to make a difference in the fight against predators and pedophiles. We don’t wring our hands and say “they’re so evil, what can be done!” We find a way to get things done.”

– pervertedjustice.com

Whether that “aggression”, “confrontation” and “getting things done” amounts to truly improving the situation or perpetuating the crimes is a question at least some who can still think attempting to ask amid all the gnashing of teeth. History tells us that vigilantism – whether in the street on the internet – is a cathartic experience for the ones doing the perceived purging, but less objective when it comes to targeting who is innocent and who is guilty. Indeed, with this kind of mindset it seldom seems to matter. It is the same ruinous, neo-conservative reflex to cleanse the world of complicated issues by using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

The internet has already spawned its own version of reflexive and ill-informed initiatives which serve to increase the peripheral ability for psychopaths to extort and control. The distortion of facts, the suppression of real issues and possible solutions are thus kept out of reach. Seemingly with the help of the public, those that are willing to seek retributive justice and project their own fears into the emotional maelstrom can find all they need with Perverted Justice.com. This particular website is but one example of vigilantism and police entrapment American style. It has formed a “gateway” for recruiting “volunteer contributors who pose as underage children in chat rooms. Posing from a variety of ages (standard ages are 10-15), these contributors simply go into chat rooms with fake online screen names and wait for predators to instigate conversation with them.”

Xavier Von Erck, the website owner, claims to target and expose “wannabe pedos” from online chats which have been recorded after the fact and where many have been arrested, convicted and placed on the California sex register. You are able to send the target an email (assuming he still has an account which is unlikely) and: “… If no police agency expresses interest in prosecuting those adults, we post them publicly on our website … Regardless of past interaction with police, we make an effort to present each case to police so that there is an opportunity to prosecute before the log is posted on this site.” ^{^[1]}

Xavier Von Erck, 2006

Once the wannabe predator has been sufficiently stimulated and worked up into a frenzy of deviancy, phone numbers are taken and addresses given, ready for the police show down. The chat room dialogue is then posted on the website with a photo for all to see. Votes are then offered on how “slimy” the person is considered to be. Though this kind of puerile behaviour is the least of the problems on the site, it gives an indication of the intent of the website owner and the people he has employed to run it. Some believe that responses such as these, far from helping to address society’s problem of paedophilia and child rape crime, actually help to create it.

Von Erck provides an extensive FAQ section where all seems above order and meticulously thought out. There are a few problems with this set up however. It appears “Xavier Von Erck” or real name: Phillip Eide, a 26 year old computer gamer of Portland, Oregon, the owner and “director of operations” set up Perverted-Justice over 12 years ago with a strict “Rule of No First Contact” which was observed for the first 2 years. An immediate ban from the site would follow if any member contacted the police or news outlet regarding their ensnarement.

Several years ago the rule was “relaxed” largely due to pressure from ex-members who formed an alternative site corruptedjustice.com (which is no longer in existence) to alert the public that all was not rosy in the land of alleged paedophile busting. Since the PJ’s inception they have claimed to have “busted” over 600 men (as of 2005) with no police involvement. Since then, from the wikipedia listing we learn: “… online operations have led to 314 convictions as of March 28, 2009, with over 200 more currently awaiting trial, and an average of 25 arrests a month for the year of 2006.”

Corrupted Justice (CJ) raised some vital points when they asked:

“How many of those 600 were actual predators who were [allowed to] walk free because the vigilantes didn’t involve police? How many of those people were actually innocent and mistakenly ruined as a result of being targeted by untrained, anonymous Internet cop-wannabes?” The answers are less than encouraging.

Of the 15 plus “group media busts” in which they involve the television media in their stings is minimal at best, with the end result that the predators walk away suitably embarrassed and angry and no doubt still at large. According to CJ: “Out of 1106 men they have ‘busted’, only 42 convictions have resulted.” What is even more disturbing is that very few of the alleged ‘busts’ do not have much to do with child solicitation. On the CJ website it states: “The tiny percentage of their “busts” which have resulted in an arrest were virtually all a result of media reports, phone calls to police from neighbors, etc. after the fact. – The result – Mostly plea-bargains to minor charges because of a lack of usable evidence. Since the taping for February 3rd’s Dateline program, Perverted-Justice has resumed ‘busting’ people with absolutely no law enforcement involvement, preferring instead to let their anonymous members dish out their own form of ‘justice’ ”. ^{^[2]}

True to form this has inevitably led once again to a number of recent cases since the Dateline taping which have: “… mistakenly begun anonymously threatening completely innocent, non-involved people by telephone and e-mail…”

This is akin to rattling a hornet’s nest and then running for cover. CJ asked in their editorial last year: “…what ever happened to the One Thousand and Sixty Four potential predators they busted but for which they didn’t contact the police? They are living in your community instead of sitting in jail where many of them may belong…”

(Wikipedia)

Other substantiated claims against Perverted Justice include:

The employment of minors in explicit online sex chats.
Anonymous harassment and terrorization campaigns against those targeted.
Identity theft against critics of Perverted Justice.
Serious threats, defamation against journalists, attorneys and other child-protection organizations who have voiced concerns regarding the group’s vigilante tactics.
Classic psychopath tactics of denigrating critics by conversive thinking, paramoralisms and paralogical conclusions
No evidence of any actual recognized or legitimate law enforcement training for Perverted-Justice members has been made public other than the “extensive training” claimed by present members.

Though the intent may be to inform and defend children, the route taken to convictions are dangerously close to vigilantism dispensing with the “rule of law” however inadequate this may seem. Once “adult citizens” follow the already extremely suspect version of entrapment then the concept of law and justice becomes less than meaningless where a judge and jury are simultaneously acting as creators and instigators of crimes.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his tabloid news corporation MSNBC screened the “Dateline” show “To Catch a Predator” and paid Perverted Justice over $100,000 to participate in the programme. This is understandable, as the level of trashy voyeurism is matched by the other. However a “reputable” news corporation is not usually so up front about paying for stories and compensating sources, yet this is exactly what they did while watching the ratings climb, pandering to the same old propaganda which enraptured over 8 million viewers. It is tabloid T.V. at its worst yet remains a sure-fire winner for those seeking short-term profits from long-term misery.

In combination with PJ’s activities such exploitative programming merely make predators far more aware of legitimate police stings (a term to be used loosely) and to make the field of child molestation and paedophilia reduced down to nothing more than pop-corn entertainment. All this feeds into the overall impression that PJ and other sites and TV programmes are something other than an altruistic community protection. More likely it is part of a further operation to muddy the issues involved in sexual exploitation. Think War on Terror and we have the same programme – different channel.

Having originally wrote notes for this piece in 2005, it is perhaps most significant that no more than a year later a report from 2007 which gave a powerful indication that this was a police/FBI entrapment scam designed to create predators in much the same way that the FBI create terrorists. (See The Terror Industry). In an article by now defunct operationawareness.com it highlights reports filed to the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s Cyber-tipline, that members of PJ were possessing and disseminating images of child pornography. The article observed:

“NBC Universal, which airs the Dateline show is currently facing two lawsuits for numerous improprieties. The first lawsuit filed by a former NBC producer is seeking $1 million in damages for the wrongful termination. The firing came after the producer questioned the shows ethics and legalities. The second lawsuit seeks $100 million in damages and is brought by the surviving family members of one of the shows “targets”, who committed suicide as the NBC Dateline and Perverted Justice crew descended upon his home when he failed to show up at the “sting house”. Initial reports are that there was no valid arrest warrant for the man and one police officer on the scene was quoted as saying “that’ll make some good tv” after the man took his life.

Trouble has been circulating around the Perverted-Justice group almost from the beginning for working in tandem with NBC. They have been accused as “staging the news” and NBC reportedly pays Perverted Justice $100,000 per episode. Critics worry that this is a big incentive to do whatever possible to create a sting scenario – anything from false accusations to manufacturing evidence. Perverted Justice, is the group responsible for baiting what they term “would be child molesters” online by posing as minors. Although it is also being reported that they use real minors to lure their targets- raising concerns that Perverted Justice is exploiting minors to achieve their goals.” ^{^[3]}

Unfortunately, letting the authorities know about one of their pet entrapment projects is a little like alterting the wolf that one of his lambs has wriggled through the fence. Sure enough, the presence of Perverted Justice remains as strong as ever and is still mining the internet for innocent and guilty alike. The title of this website is of course extremely apt: a perversion of justice is most certainly taking place and which will boost the child porn entrapment industry whilst feeding into the worst forms of vigilantism buttressed by superficial training schemes. What hope can we have from amateur law enforcement wannabees when the law and justice itself is fully compromised? The upshot of this, yet again, is a public concentration on the effects rather than the root cause, and clever displacement of focus away from Establishment abuse. Moreover, it means real predators will go further underground while true paedophiles seeking help for their condition can be assured of a climate of demonisation and ostricisation from such outfits. You will seldom see a more egotistical, righteous and dangerous forum for self-appointed judge and jury than this entrapment model.

***

Way back in August 2004, KenoshaOnline, a news portal for Kenosha and Wisconsin was forced to shut down its anonymous forum due to repeated spamming from a Defence Department source with “links to incest, bestiality, gay sex and other inappropriate media.” ^{^[4]} KenoshaOnline’s John Norquist contacted the Pentagon regarding the “porn bombs” but the Department of Defence refused to comment. The site’s traffic saw a significant fall once the forum was disconnected. Perhaps this has a connection the fact that our beloved government workers at the Pentagon were investigated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2006 concerning the purchase of child pornography online and discovered: “… more than 250 civilian and military employees of the Defense Department — including some with the highest available security clearance — who used credit cards or PayPal to purchase images of children in sexual situations.” With assistance from the Pentagon’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) it was found that at least 30 Defence Department employees “… staffers for the secretary of defense, contractors for the ultra-secretive National Security Agency, and a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency” were all in possession of child pornography.” However not only did the DCIS open investigations into just 20 percent of the individuals identified, it prosecuted “… just a handful.” ^{^[5]}

According to John Cook of The Upshot:

“… new Project Flicker investigative reports obtained by The Upshot through the Freedom of Information Act, which you can read here, show that DCIS investigators identified 264 Defense employees or contractors who had purchased child pornography online. Astonishingly, nine of those had “Top Secret Sensitive Compartmentalized Information” security clearances, meaning they had access to the nation’s most sensitive secrets. All told, 76 of the individuals had Secret or higher clearances. But DCIS investigated only 52 of the suspects, and just 10 were ever charged with viewing or purchasing child pornography.” ^{^[6]}

Meantime, the American public has 24 hr warrantless wire-tapping, intrusive searches at the airport, No knock SWAT raids, unlawful take-down of websites and numerous other unconstitutional actions, whilst government employees have a great deal of immunity from this encroaching police state. Which brings us back once again, to the presence of blackmail and sexpionage as another reason why over 80% of cases were not investigated. While as of 2015, the case “remains open” it seems it hasn’t stopped Pentagon employees appetite for child porn, in whatever guise that maybe. Indeed, one individual attempted to do so 12,000 times. ^{^[7]}

In 2013, the National Security Agency offers evidence that it had the same ultra-hypocrisy as the Pentagon in that it sees nothing wrong with accruing vast amounts of information from its citizens internet browsing history – most importantly, what pornography websites they visit – while their many of their employees enjoy viewing a deviant brand of the same. Indeed, targeting muslims in this context, is all part of the war on terror, they explain. But if you think that such practices are restricted to the terror industry, think again. This is surveillance which affects everyone. Using pornography and entrapment operations have multiple purposes to that end.

The pornography business can be used as a means of social control for a variety of purposes. Even Google has had to defend itself since August 2004 from the likes of US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who had been pressing the search engine giant to release data about people’s searching habits on the internet. ^{^[8]} The Justice Department was keen to view specific information, including the types of queries submitted by users and the websites in its index. Not one to be accused of worrying too much about the privacy of its users, Google believes the criteria is too broad and “threatens trade secrets.” It fell to privacy groups to warn that user identities could be indirectly revealed, especially with the government’s new drive to collect data for “fighting crime and terrorism.” Their justification was the enforcement of pornography laws with special attention to the 1998 Child Protection Act which was blocked by the Supreme Court due to legal challenges regarding how it was enforced. Gonzales sought a court order to force the company to part with the records. (This is strangely hypocritical since the search engine is already in bed with the CIA).^{^[9]}

Over eleven years later and things haven’t improved. Amid the scandal of illegal surveillance by the UK’s GCHQ and America’s NSA revealed by whistleblower Edward J. Snowden the public is getting an idea just how bad it really is under the well-marketed, Goldman Sacs-funded Presidency of Barack Obama. (Although whether this is just a sophisticated psychological operations pantomime is anyone’s guess). Care of his confidente Glenn Greenwald, Snowden’s Leaked documents have shown that porn still plays a part in mass surveillance and intelligence tools. The latest leak has the NSA targeting activists’ and dissidents’ web history in order to locate visits to pornography sites in order to launch a future smear campaign. The claimed target of the social engineering initiative were Muslim radicals but in actual fact were only those critical of government policies.

In an appendix to the leaked document published by the Huffington Post Mr. Greenwald and his fellow journalists describe these individuals stating:

One target’s offending argument is that ‘Non-Muslims are a threat to Islam,’ and a vulnerability listed against him is ‘online promiscuity.’ Another target, a foreign citizen the NSA describes as a ‘respected academic,’ holds the offending view that ‘offensive jihad is justified,” and his vulnerabilities are listed as ‘online promiscuity’ and ‘publishes articles without checking facts.’ A third targeted radical is described as a ‘well-known media celebrity’ based in the Middle East who argues that ‘the U.S perpetrated the 9/11 attack.’ Under vulnerabilities, he is said to lead ‘a glamorous lifestyle.’ A fourth target, who argues that ‘the U.S. brought the 9/11 attacks on itself” is said to be vulnerable to accusations of ‘deceitful use of funds.’ The document expresses the hope that revealing damaging information about the individuals could undermine their perceived ‘devotion to the jihadist cause.’ ^{^[10]}

When we know that mass surveillance has been in operation for decades, and there is a high probability that most sting operations on child pornography are police entrapments then this is merely confirmation that targets are compromised by monitoring and recording their browsing history. These operations successfully make the final case for blackmail and/or to discredit individuals by a sophisticated process of leakage via social networks and media. Or as the appendix states: by “viewing sexually explicit material online or using sexually explicit persuasive language when communicating with inexperienced young girls.”

As multiple agencies are cited in the memo it is obvious that they had full awareness of the program and supported its objectives. This should not be anything other than business as usual since US intelligence used the same tactics to discredit so-called members of Al-Qaeda and even Osama bin Laden himself. Recall the juvenile allegations of USB sticks “filled” with pornography and jars of vasoline found at Osama bin Laden’s compound, following the U.S. deathstrike on him in May 2011. This was all part of the same propaganda exercise to revitalise the mythos of Osama as a depraved pervert as well as an evil head of the War on Terror. It’s merely another example of a familiar tactic that is used to eliminate critics.

Keep in mind that if you use the internet then your personal data is up for grabs. If you have the temerity to speak out against the surveillance state and if you have a history of looking at pornographic websites then you can be sure that this is all logged, recorded and filed for future use. Just make sure you don’t become too vocal against your beloved government who only has your protection at heart …

The internet-based Inquisition21 group which we looked at briefly in a previous post were seeking to bring a class action law suit against UK police for the Landslide/Operation Ore scandal and were subsequently delisted by Google. They believed this was due to the nature of the evidence they were sharing concerning child porn police corruption. After refusing to comment on the action Google issued a general statement yet failed to confirm that the Inquisition21 website had breached any of the guidelines. The censorship came just as the site was about to make potentially damaging disclosures about the handling of the Operation Ore investigations. ^{^[11]}

While a reform of sex laws are periodically needed for improvement on a variety of bills and clauses, the introduction of measures, in effect, hand over responsibility to government bit by bit and decreases our own response-ability, often without the relevant information as to why such laws are considered so essential for our children’s protection and safety. In reality, freedom and responsibility are deeply connected and if one is curtailed the other will inevitably follow. The end result (and purpose) is that governments leverage greater and greater control under the prextexts of child pornography, the War on Terror and the War on Drugs, while its citizens scratch their heads and wonder how on earth it could have happened.

Notes

[1] http://www.pervertedjustice.com
[2] Ibid.
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20121102181540/http://www.operationawareness.com/custom3_1.html
[4] ‘Pentagon declined to investigate hundreds of purchases of child pornography’The Upshot By John Cook September 3, 2010.
[5] Ibid.
[6] ‘Pentagon employee tried to access porn sites at work more than 12k times last year’ Russia Today,
January 07, 2015.
[7] See also: ‘Is Pentagon flooding Kenosha site with porn?’ By Rachel Campbell, The Journal Times , Racine WI, August 26, 2004.
[8] ‘Google defies US over search data’ BBC News, Friday, 20 January 2006.
[9] Former CIA agent and computer expert Robert David Steele, who has close connections with top Google directors, suggested that Google co-operated with the CIA. Steele is was the second-ranking civilian (GS-14) in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence from 1988-1992 and a former clandestine services case officer for the CIA. His latest accusations against Google have raised the possibility that other accusations are now credible and that Google is truly censoring in places far from China and much nearer home. For example, Google has been caught censoring recent programmes and critiques critical of the Iraq war. On the October 2006 Alex Jones radio programme, Steele said, “I think that Google has made a very important strategic mistake in dealing with the secret elements of the U.S. government – that is a huge mistake and I’m hoping they’ll work their way out of it and basically cut that relationship off. Google was a little hypocritical when they were refusing to honor a Department of Justice request for information because they were heavily in bed with the Central Intelligence Agency, the office of research and development.”
[10] Document 3RA/501518-12 “Terrorism/Islamic Radicalization Global Radicalizers vulnerable in terms of Authority.” – ‘NSA spied on ‘radicalisers’ porn surfing so as to discredit them, reveals Snowden,’ By John Leyden, The Register, November 27th 20013.
[11] ‘Google erases Operation Ore campaign site’ by Lucy Sheriff, The Register, September 21, 2006.