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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.

monitors1

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.

militarysmartcityUrban 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 Technologystates 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]

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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]

CongnitiveMappingSource: 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 (1986)

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.

See also: Satan’s Little Helpers VI: Sleepers and Electro-Shocks

 


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 XIII: All the way down to our DNA …

 “The year is 2025. The population is 325 million, and the FBI has the DNA profiles of all of them. Unlike fingerprints, these profiles reveal vital medical information. The universal database arrived surreptitiously. First, the Department of Defense’s repository of DNA samples from all military personnel, established to identify remains of soldiers missing from action, was given to the FBI. Then local police across the country shadowed individuals, collecting shed DNA for the databank. On the way, thousands of innocent people were imprisoned because they had the misfortune to have race-based crime genes in their DNA samples. Sadly, it did not have to be this way. If only we had passed laws against collecting and using shed DNA….”

—Professor David H. Kaye, ‘Science Fiction and Shed DNA’, 2006


ADN_animation

The structure of part of a DNA double helix (wikipedia)

If you are not quite into tattoos and are repulsed by the idea of implanting your body with anything, then this will probably tip you over the edge. It seems that tagging our bodies just doesn’t cut the mustard and something even deeper is required. Consumerism and crime prevention is to be the precursor.

Recalling our brief foray into Verichip and Positive ID marketing, work at the University of Aveiro in Portugal intends to add to that obsession. Researchers are busy developing DNA barcode tags that will soon be applied to a wide variety of products from foodstuffs to toiletries. Each tag in question has: “… a unique combination of DNA base pairs that attach to most surfaces, and can later be collected, amplified, and sequenced.”

So, how might these DNA tags might be used?

“… in some schemes a DNA “fog” might be used to spray violent protesters when there are not enough law enforcement personnel to immediately subdue the lot of them. That tag will be unique, and mark anyone who bears it, at least for a while. Over time however, the signal will spread and degrade. Multiple tags could be used to mark multiple events or increase reliability of a single event. Clearly though, finding a way to contain your marking agent at the outset is the cleanest option. [1]

Drawing our attention to the parallel practice of tracking animals and identifying species by biologists over the years, John Hewitt of Extreme Tech mentions the barcode of life, a project with: “… over 200,000 animals catalogued in a searchable database.” He makes the chilling analogy: “Since things like animals already come pre-barcoded, all one need do is find some region in their DNA that tends to mutate fast enough over time so that each species can be expected to show enough variation.”

In 2012, proposals were published by the UK government outlining the creation of a DNA database of the British population within the National Health System (NHS) complementing the Police National DNA Database which at 5,950,612 individuals, has more samples per head of population than any other country. [2]The European Court of Human Rights forced the British government to water down the reach of the Nationwide DNA data base. By way of response to the Strasbourg ruling, the government launched a “consultation exercise” in May of 2009 (which can be read as a PDF document online). The case that ruffled the feathers of the UK government so comprehensively was caused by two plaintiffs who had been arrested but proven innocent, and further, had been told police would be holding on to their DNA profiles indefinitely. The two individuals argued that this was a breach of their human rights. The court ruled in their favour and ordered the DNA profiles be removed and that the DNA samples have a cut off period.

The government have been doing their level best to justify the DNA database and the retention of DNA samples based on a similar position to the US Dept. of Homeland Security. Officials believe that even when people are arrested and cleared of any wrongdoing they are just as likely to commit future crimes as those who have been convicted. More Pre-Crime thinking? The basis for this conclusion came from the government’s own consultation paper which was heavily sourced from the work by criminologist Professor Ken Pease. Based largely on statistical evidence, the science in the paper was so shoddy that it caused The Guardian’s journalist and science writer Ben Goldacre to brand it: “… possibly the most unclear and badly presented piece of research I have ever seen in a professional environment”. [3]

Lancaster University Professors Brian Francis and Keith Soothill from their research carried out by the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods concluded that the six year retention of DNA data was based on “flawed evidence.” They launched a withering attack on the validity of the paper, stating:

The notion of ‘arrest’ is the main criterion used for action in the consultation document. While police arrests are not whimsical, they come at the beginning and not the end of the criminal justice process. Some people are disproportionately at risk of being taken into questioning by the police and being arrested. In contrast, a conviction is the outcome of evidence being tested in court. In fact, arrests are useful indicators of police action but not of guilt. Re-arrests are dangerous indicators and making arrests the pivotal criterion encourages the notion that we are moving towards becoming a police state. [4] [Emphasis mine]

The push to expand the DNA databases both in the UK and in the US is understandable since the logic appears to be sound. Similarly, it is very difficult to argue against victims’ family who have had their sons, daughters and loved ones murdered by criminals who may have been caught prior to the event had DNA profiling been more rigorous and well established. The Story of a State of Virginia mother and her fight to see the DNA database expanded to include people convicted of Class 1 misdemeanors stems from her sincere hope that it will save lives and produce some good from the murder and abduction of her 20 year-old daughter.

Many criminals will be arrested and duly placed on the database. No doubt persons will be trapped by DNA evidence and crimes solved. But the Home Office intends to keep all DNA profiles for at least six years with innocent persons still classed as criminals. Therefore, there will be no distinction between the guilty and the innocent where potentially important nuances in a case will be deemed immaterial. An innocent bystander? Too late, you’re on the DNA database as a criminal or even worse, sexual offender. What of activists, protesters and a whole host of extenuating circumstances that are difficult to address in a court of law? How would this affect the outcome of a case where the jury knows that the person accused is already listed? DNA science is in its infancy and there is still much to learn. The key change in the law meshes conveniently with terrorism and civil liberties in that everyone is now presumed guilty rather than presumed innocent before a trial. This is a significant change, both in terms of perception and profits.

Remember that the security complex in the USA is a huge business which the UK government intends to emulate. Therefore, for the Home Office everyone is a potential criminal and by extension, a source of revenue, though you obviously won’t find any civil servant admitting to such a heinous accusation. But that is the trajectory – a corporate push to privatize the prison industry where crime is profitable. For the authorities, just as soon as everyone is on the data base the better for society. And their stock options.

Over 70,000 under-16s have now had their genetic fingerprints recorded and as of writing, Police authorities have yet to delete more than 165,000 innocent people from their records. [5]As UK politician for the Liberal Democrat party Lynne Featherstone said: “There is no purpose or justification for keeping the DNA record of anyone who is not charged with an offence,” adding: “With the growing concern about racial profiling and disproportionality in criminal investigations, the need to keep innocent people on the DNA database is questionable.” [6]

The United States has the largest DNA database in the world, with 10.7 million offender profiles and 1.8 million arrestee profiles.[7]  The US has the highest number of prisoners in the world at over 2 million and thethird largest incarceration rate. This translates as 1 in every 31 adults or half the world’s prison population of about 9 million held in the US. The prison-security complex rakes in billions of dollars a year, with the corruption of the law enforcement and justice system at all time highs the question of DNA profiling becomes ever more problematic.

1024px-CBP_chemist_reads_a_DNA_profileU.S. Customs and Border Control chemist reads a DNA profile to determine the origin of a commodity. (wikipedia)

The FBI has been collecting one million DNA samples a year under a new program that allows federal agents to take cheek swabs from people arrested for any crime including non-US citizens. They can also take DNA from any arrestee or ‘detained’ non-citizen and upload it to the FBI’s CODIS database networked to law enforcement authorities in over 50 states. In June of 2013, the United States Supreme Court ruled it constitutional to take DNA samples from people who have been arrested for serious crimes without a warrant, let alone a conviction. The federal government and 28 states across America already collect genetic samples from people arrested for crimes (felonies, certain misdemeanors) with the remaining 22 states that only take samples from people convicted of those crimes.

DNA profiles and their genetic markers can provide excellent supporting material when there is scientifically valid evidence in a case overall, such as placing a suspect at the scene of the crime. It becomes problematic when a jury assumes that DNA evidence is incorruptible and scientifically unassailable. Mistakes continue to occur and the probability will increase as the database expands. When you search for a match in an ocean of profiles the likelihood of finding an innocent person along with the perpetrator of the crime also increases. And what if the perpetrator is not in the database, but you still find a sequence of markers that denote a match?

This has been dubbed the “CSI Effect” when a jury places too much emphasis on DNA evidence. In one case, a 22-year old Farrah Jama, a Somali immigrant was sent to prison for 16 months for the rape of a 48-year-old woman – a rape that didn’t happen. A report in The Australian described how the prison sentence was quashed: “… after it was discovered the DNA sample that incriminated him was contaminated.” Although a cultural bias of the jury was also probably operating “… the Somali migrant was successfully prosecuted based solely on his DNA being found on the victim, despite the fact he had an alibi and there was no other evidence to connect him to the alleged crime.” [8]

A study from the New Scientist magazine in 2010 found DNA fingerprinting to be “highly subjective and prone to error,” which due to: ” incredibly small amounts of DNA in samples and pressure to gain a conviction can lead to bias…” The study involved DNA from a real crime scene which was sent to 17 experienced analysts in an U.S. laboratory. The results were a resounding failure since all the scientists conclusions were different:

The sample, from a gang rape, had already been used to convict a man  –  but only one of the 17 scientists came to the same conclusion. Four said the evidence was inconclusive and 12 said he could be excluded.

Itiel Dror, a University College London scientist who helped set up the investigation, said: ‘It is time DNA analysts accept that under certain conditions, subjectivity may affect their work.’

Christine Funk, a defence lawyer in the U.S., said: ‘The difference between prison and freedom rests in the hands of the scientist assigned the case.’ [9]

Jeremy Gruber, as President of the Council for Responsible Genetics is in no doubt that miscarriages of justice will occur more often as symptomatic of a system predicated on the very core problems that give rise to serious crimes in the first place.

He states:

We are not only building bigger and bigger databases, but expanding collection practices as well. Police are now using DNA dragnets, where DNA is taken from a selected population without individualized suspicion or of individuals who happen to live near a crime scene or who happen to match a certain physical profile. Some police departments are operating their own “off grid” DNA databases with little oversight and police and prosecutors in some cities and counties (such as Orange County, CA) are taking DNA “voluntarily” from individuals arrested for petty crimes in exchange for dropping charges against them.

Familial searching, a deliberate search of a DNA database conducted for the intended purpose of potentially identifying close biological relatives to the unknown forensic profile obtained from crime scene evidence, is becoming more widespread. Such searches virtually guarantee that DNA databases will create suspects out of innocent people, and because of the composition of DNA databases, those innocent suspects will disproportionately be people of color. Crime scene DNA has also been used to predict physical characteristics, such as certain shades of hair color, and to draw broad conclusions about genetic ancestry. Concerns have been raised about these predictions being used for crude profiling, potentially racially tinged, which have led Germany and several U.S. states to bar their use by police. Even so, new research on “molecular photofitting” (producing a crude image of a suspect’s face from DNA left at the crime scene) suggests that such reconstructions may soon be possible, giving police another investigative tool that could result in wrongful arrests and unjustified searches. [10]

Andrew Pollack writing in the New York Times was already sounding the alarm on DNA profiling back in 2009. Indeed, scientists “fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva,” and with access to: “…a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.” In effect, the danger of being framed and set up via a fabricated crime scene is very real. [11]This is precisely what happened to David Butler who was wrongfully jailed by UK courts for murder, spending eight months in prison on remand whilst facing murder charges: “after his DNA was allegedly found on the victim.”  He was accused of murdering Anne-Marie Foy in 2005 and arrested by Merseyside Police with “poor quality” DNA evidence and sourced from his DNA sample, already on record. According to a BBC report: “… he remained in prison – despite other CCTV evidence allegedly placing Mr Butler in the area where the murder took place being disproved.” [12] 

At the same time, exoneration of those who were thought to have committed crimes is an undeniable outcome of DNA profiling. The Innocent Project is a case in point, with over 325 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States in the last several years. So, DNA profiling is overturning convictions and setting people free on the one hand, and on the other, it is putting innocent people away based on faulty science and a corrupt intelligence apparatus, the latter of which is not decreasing but naturally increasing as a consequence of the push to profit and ubiquitous surveillance.

The FBI, who are the biggest supporters and sellers of the terror industry, are also a major force behind the expansion of DNA databases. Indeed, it seems the Bureau is still updating its whole retrieval and storage protocols under a CODIS Core Loci Working Group operational since May 2010. Ostensibly, this is an exercise in improving the system though in effect, it is an expansion until international data-sharing efforts are optimised. This is also about where massive amounts of data can be stored about the population and stored indefinitely. Once again, the State has all your information and the public has nothing. Given the current condition of government this is far from reassuring.

DNA

Clearly, this isn’t about throwing DNA analysis out of the window, nor any form of technology. What is needed is to see it in the context of what has gone before and to forestall a certain trajectory that falls straight into the hands of those overseeing societies and for whom long-term objective of social control is the prime directive. The justification for creating this huge database of samples is to combat crime and prevent terrorist acts.  Overall, crime is decreasing however and we know all about the nature of the Terror industry as a manufactured strategy of tension … When macro-social imperatives are still firmly inside Official Culture, discrimination and utmost caution is needed to keep such Establishment directives from ensnaring those most vulnerable. As we saw in The Politics of Entrapment despite safeguards in place, the wider awareness of ponerological forces is missing.

In general, the DNA database will probably lower crime as well as decreasing privacy. Yet, since the root causes of crime are not addressed the very need for a DNA database will inevitably morph overtime into a repressive tool of the state. Minimising risk by destroying DNA samples after cases have finished and even reducing the storage of sensitive information only needs a suitably horrific set of crimes and a large-scale terror attack for such measures to be repealed. This would follow the NDAA and Patriot Act rationalisations which have nothing to do with protection or civil liberties and everything to do with state control of the population.

This is why humans must become “pre-barcoded” as part of sequential phase of identifying, cataloging, tagging and monitoring. A global neo-feudal State requires a distinct species, separate from the Establishment Elite who consider themselves genetically superior. It may well be that the various strains of psychopathy currently jostling for supremacy in the corridors of power are merely seeking to expand their numbers. Surveillance is part of the armoury of technocratic science which gathers data and seduces the populace to regard this intrusion as normal and more importantly, something that is desired. The terror industry and national crime augment this propaganda.

As Jeremy Gruber summarises:

“We are at a critical juncture in the United States, as law and policy are rapidly allowing law enforcement greater access to Americans’ DNA with limited public discussion and debate. Continued expansion of the power of law enforcement to collect and store DNA must be guided by a transparent debate that balances legitimate public safety concerns with human rights and privacy interests and that is honest about the value of forensic DNA, recognizing the limited benefits of expansion beyond likely re-offenders.” [13]

There is a huge momentum currently behind new technology and the speed of its arrival in so many avenues of our lives. Networked databases present clear advantages in the hands of a benevolent culture – something that is however, only a working hypothesis.  Time is getting short for ethical safeguards and preventative measures to be implemented that could ensure this forensic tool is kept out of the hands of Pathocratic ideology.

 


Notes

[1] ‘Scientists create DNA tracking tags, might soon be used to track protesters as well as animals’ By John Hewitt, http://www.extremetech.com, on September 30, 2013.
[2] ‘Government revives plan for greater data-sharing between agencies’ The Guardian, by Alan Travis, 24 April 2012 | ‘The UK Police National DNA Database’ Gene Watch, http://www.genewatch.org.
[3] ‘DNA database plans based on ‘flawed science’, warn experts’ The Guardian, July 19, 2009.
[4] ‘Reviewing the DNA database’Impact Case Study by Professors Brian Francis and Keith Soothill Lancaster University, ESCR Economics and Social Research Council. 2009.
[5] ‘Details of innocent people are still being held on DNA database’ The Independent, June 5 2012 | ‘Another 165,000 innocent people put on DNA database despite Coalition vow to wipe details’ By Rebecca Camber, The Daily Mail, 4 June 2012.
[6] ‘DNA database continues to swell’ BBC News, 4 January 2006.
[7]See FBI, CODIS-NDIS Statistics, http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/lab/biometric-analysis/codis/ndis-statistics
[8] Networked Knowledge, Media Report by Dr. Robert N Moles http://www.netk.net.au
[9] ‘DNA fingerprinting techniques ‘can sometimes give the wrong results’,By Fiona Macrae for the Daily Mail
18 August 2010.
[10]THE POLICE WANT YOUR DNA By Jeremy Gruber, GeneWatch 27-1 | Jan-Apr 2014.

[11] ‘DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show’ By Andrew Pollack, August 17, 2009.
[12] ‘DNA test jailed innocent man for murder’by Hannah Barnes, 31 August 2012,BBC News
[13] op.cit Gruber.

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


google-logoPerhaps 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]

the-google-street-view-mapping-and-camer-1

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.

google_cards

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…”

socialemotions1Social 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: 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]

circleeggers

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-GlassGoogle 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


thSocial 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]


th“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.

mark-zuckerbergCEO 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]

pthiel1

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.”

facebooklogin1


 “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 SunsteinCass 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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Technocracy VI: The Technocrats Tap in (3)

“Surveillance induced morality: relics of cultural retardation”.
 .
– Marc Maron
.

How many times have we heard the response: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”?

This almost child-like wish to place faith in the unsullied purity of the authorities and Daddy State seems to know no bounds.

The success of mass surveillance is defined by the same gradualism. Endless new devices and gadgetry help to insulate our concerns about technology and how it can be used. It doesn’t matter how altruistic the intent is, whether it means to reduce suffering or create a more socially responsible culture, social justice is a concept struggling to keep its head above the water of pathogenic pollution. Whether biotech or nano-tech, since military, geo-political strategies and social pathologies dominate they will be pulled into the same codes of conduct mandated under Official Culture. Suffering will continue under flares of revolution until the psychopath is denied influence in ALL spheres. Access to technology which will disburse wealth and true freedom cannot take place until such a realisation manifests to the extent it dismantles traditional power structures. To think otherwise, will simply perpetuate the cover. Such a trajectory has only been possible due to the relatively rapid rise of the National Security State apparatus rooted in the 3EM riding high on updated myths propagated to ensure a smooth transition.

In combination with ECHELON and or MAIN CORE we have a global surveillance grid sitting on top of European and US intelligence mining that is the most invasive in history. This technological construct is imbued with power from a perception that can only multiply and augment in the same way we continually seek new “apps” and add-ons to our consumerist ethos.  A technocratic centralisation is the only direction. The promise of open source software will only prove liberating when the central mainframe of core influence is dismantled. Otherwise…Open source initiatives will operate within carefully defined parameters, in much the same way as our credit cards, cell phones and i-pads. Technology is not the culprit here – it is the reliance on the limited applications which is displacing our incredible, untapped creative power. This displacement only leads to the atrophying of our individual and collective creativity. And this is where artificial intelligence and transhumanist ideology offers an unprecedented threat.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. More on this later.

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RAF Menwith Hill, a large site in the United Kingdom, part of ECHELON and the UKUSA Agreement. Photo Credit: Matt Crypto (wikipedia).

The International Campaign Against Mass Surveillance (ICAMS) produced the excellent document: ‘The Emergence of a Global Infrastructure for Mass Registration and Surveillance’ back in April 2005 which detailed in precise terms the nature of these myths, edited extracts of which will serve as an adequate summary of what this transition really means:

Myth #1: We are merely being asked to sacrifice some of our privacy and convenience for greater security.

“The object of the infrastructure that is being constructed is not ordinary police or intelligence work but, rather, mass surveillance of entire populations. In this infrastructure, everyone will be treated as a suspect, and state agents will maintain data profiles on all of us. […] The elimination of risk Indeed, it is now evident and documented that the United States and other countries are acting aggressively on information, seizing and detaining people without reasonable grounds, and “rendering” them to third countries or extraterritorial camps run by the U.S., where they face torture during interrogation and indefinite detention. Alongside the global system for mass registration and surveillance is emerging what some commentators are calling a “global gulag”,4 in which unknown numbers of people are languishing. What is at stake in this new world order is more than mere privacy, or even democratic processes, legal systems, and civil liberties. Basic human rights are in jeopardy.”

The document also lists the The Registrations of Populations as integral to the surveillance state with a long history of isolated test-runs across the world and with the shadow of abuse inherent in such data mining. Examples are given of Japanese internment in America the Second World War, the 1994 genocide that took place in Rwanda and the Pass Laws of apartheid South Africa. Such highly detailed information derived from Registration: “… is the tool by which those in power can easily single out and target certain kinds of people – not for what they have done, but for who they are.” And further: “By creating inclusion, the system also creates exclusion. For practical purposes, a person without a mandatory identity document will not exist – or will exist only as a risk to the state.”

Myth #2: These initiatives facilitate travel.

“But something else is happening, too. The private sector is being pressed into service as the state’s eyes and ears. Just as it has done with the acquisition of private-sector databases and airline passenger record systems, the state is using the private sector to exponentially increase its surveillance capacity in the realm of electronic communications and financial transactions. And, instead of relying on the inconsistent practices of businesses, governments are starting to tell businesses how to design their information systems, what information to gather, how long it must be stored, what must be checked and reported, and what must be given directly to state officials.

Compelling service providers to “build in” surveillance capacity to their systems means that within minutes of receiving a warrant from a court, real-time interception of a person’s Internet or voice over Internet use can be implemented with just a few computer strokes, making a connection between the computerized listening stations of law enforcement and the service provider’s system.”

The FBI’s various software can be used to search for keywords in the trillions of gigabytes of information that is continuously vacuumed up whether from your bank accounts or blogs. Data mining is the future of crime prevention which is already merging with the dubious practice of entrapment. In George Orwell’s 1984 Winston, the main protagonist in the novel appears to describe the present: “It was inconceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live from the habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.” The only difference in our world, our surveillance will comprise of various degrees of robot and artificial intelligence from the basic models already appearing in our malls to sophisticated androids capable of human simulation. They will assess are bio-signatures and voluminous data files and make mathematical probabilities of threats to the system which will slowly build itself around us.

Myth #3: If one has nothing to hide, one has nothing to worry about.

“An example of the many mistakes that were made in that era was the naming of academic Owen Lattimore as the Soviet Union’s top spy in the U.S. He later was fully cleared of the charges. In his account of the affair he noted that the F.B.I. and other agencies had ‘built up on him a dossier of ‘a man who might have existed’. Again, as a historian of the period has observed, ‘that phrase catches the very essence of the creation of the national insecurity state: a data world that shadows, mimics, and caricatures the real world’ We may think that anyone looking at our personal data with the proper explanation would conclude we are innocuous, but, in fact, in the data world we have no control over our “virtual identities” or the interpretations that others make of them.”

This goes to the central premise of conditioning that comes about from living under inverted totalitarianism and the necessary glut of authoritarian followers who allow its manifestation. We do not notice the dismantling of the foundation upon which are human values and ethics reside due to the buffering of our intuition and conscience. This is achieved through propaganda, psychic driving and memetic engineering of our consciousness all cemented with the human propensity for wishful thinking and denial.

We keep coming back to the uncomfortable fact that we naturally seek sanctuary in the delusion that there is nothing to worry about because we cannot entertain the possibility that we may have to alter our beliefs and attempt a deconstructive introspection. When such a painful process begins it can shatter the ego-mask that buffers us from the terror of the situation. When our personality is largely empty of substance this can be akin to inviting death of identity and belonging. So, having nothing to worry about is a preferable hook upon wish we can willingly attach.

In modern times, nothing comes closer to a collective seduction than the human races’ relationship to technology. We are firmly caught in its web of convenience, innovation and compliance in much the same way we are enthralled by the chemical hit of sex. In that sense, the surveillance state is just another compromise on the road to achieving the new nirvana of the post-human.

Have we really learned those lessons? Or have we merely changed our focus?

Boundless-heatmap-large-0001

“The worldwide heat map from the NSA’s data visualisation tool BOUNDLESSINFORMANT, showing that during a 30-day period, 97 billion internet data records (DNI) and 124 billion telephony data records (DNR) were collected.” (wikipedia, creative commons | Source http://jobkaster.com/ Author National Security Agency)

Myth# 4: The technology being used is objective and reliable.

“First, the factual base on which the technology rests is unreliable. The ‘best information available’ on which data mining or risk-scoring technology depend is often inaccurate, lacking context, dated, or incomplete. It might even be dirty information – extracted by torture, or offered by an informant who is vulnerable or is acting in bad faith. Secondly, the criteria used to sort masses of data will always be over-inclusive and mechanical. Data mining is like assessing ‘guilt by Google’ key-word search. And since these systems use broad markers for predicting terrorism, ethnic and religious profiling are endemic to them. … a precautionary principle is at work when human beings are making the risk assessments.”

A surveillance state is surely an oxymoron by virtue of the fact it is created not from the wish to protect but the incentive to control. Technology is only as trustworthy as its programmer and by extension, the context in which the capabilities of technology are applied. By the same token, human beings are fallible and since machines are born from the quality of our own minds they will mirror the glitches and unpredictable anomalies so much are part of a learning universe – despite protestations to the contrary. The more complicated and sophisticated machines become the more they will transcend their in-built limitations – that is spark that consciousness seeks. But the Surveillance State is linked to wider philosophical beliefs where development and trust in technology is based on the notion of an evolutionary salvation. Such a suggestion is usually rejected by transhumanists who insist that technology is merely the next stage in human evolution; our destiny is to embrace singularity and merge with the machine for optimum transcendence. By implication, the surveillance state will cease to exist since it will become superfluous to our needs.

Once again, this presupposes that such a system of malevolence will naturally evolve into one of benevolence and those at key nodal points of its power will simply transcend along with us. More likely is that the rooted dominance that gave rise to inversion will offer more of the same, where the worm-hole of singularity is really nothing more than a sublime devolution by delusion, the end result of which is absorption of all that is individual and original in exchange for group-think and technocratic compliance. Sophisticated, yes, even ecstatic at times, but like an addictive drug, when you realise you are hooked and seek to escape in search of authentic experience, it will be too late. From reliability and trust projected onto the machine will ultimately invite the law of repulsion.

Myth #5 and 6: Terrorist watch lists are a reliable product of international intelligence cooperation and consensus / Governments want to implement these systems to protect their citizens from terrorists.

“There is no due process afforded individuals or groups to allow them to challenge the inclusion of their names on a list. And, once the “terrorist” label is fastened to them, actions are taken against them without normal legal protections being afforded (protections such as presumption of innocence, the right to know the evidence and allegations against one and to respond, the right to remain silent, and habeas corpus). This is the essence of the risk assessment model: it treats as intolerable risks the very legal protections that are fundamental to free and democratic societies. In short, the U.S. lists have “been created haphazardly and without the carefully constructed checks and balances that such powerful instrument[s] demand.” And the lists are certainly bloated. At various times, news reports have put the numbers of names on the U.S. lists in the millions.”

Despite the fact that 99.9 per cent of those listed are largely innocent of any crimes at all, the Terrorist Watch List is drawn directly from the idea that al-Qaeda/ISIL and most terrorist atrocities are representative of a real, external threat. Such a disastrous policy has shown to be a cynical manipulation of the mass mind and comprehensively debunked if one reads the research from authors and experts in the field alongside the current geo-strategy and its outcomes in the last one hundred years.

The official story of global terrorism is a monumental fabrication – a product of a compartmentalised mutation of myth used to promote the economic and socio-cultural status quo. It is a cleverly disguised tool of opportunism for social control with the rise of police states and war without end as the norm. Indeed, such an inversion is truly insidious as the pathology begins to make inroads into the psyche of normal human beings. As the ICAMS authors state: “As people begin to realize that every transaction in their personal lives is potentially being watched – and that their innocent actions and beliefs can be easily misconstrued by risk assessors in their own and other countries, they will begin to internalize the social control that is being exerted by governments, watching what they say, what they criticize, who they associate with, and what they profess to believe in.”

DigiGes_PRISM_Yes_we_scan_-_Demo_am_Checkpoint_Charlie_June_2013

Germans protesting against the NSA surveillance program PRISM at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. (wikipedia,)

This is happening fast. The official culture of psychopathy requires these myths not only to keep populations in a state of fear and disempowerment but more importantly, so that the banking architecture and profits from the arms race, weapons manufacturing, narcotics, human and organ trafficking continues until nothing more can be squeezed out of the husk. Implosion is the only avenue left. Yet, from this breakdown, will we have a true community template of freedom which encourages a free-flowing exchange or will we walk as somnambulists into a mainframe of control from which comfort and efficiency is a high-resolution mask? This set of technocratic controls represent both the future safeguards against this implosion and the ultimate resource of future exploitation when machine-based society dominates over a depopulated world.

Other myths include that of “Western Democracies defending democracy and human rights around the world”; “such initiatives make us safer”; “Guaranteeing security is the paramount responsibility of governments” and the platitude that “at least, these initiatives are better than doing nothing.” All of which are much propagated lies within the MSM, think-tanks and PR outfits which prey on the naive and ill-informed. As ICAMS asserts:

“Careful examination shows that the global, mass registration and surveillance initiatives that have been described in this document are not “better than doing nothing”. They divert resources away from activities that would provide us with better security, they are not effective, and the harm they do to democracies, individuals, the rule of law, and global security is not proportional to their utility, or even to the risk they are supposedly addressing.”

Biotechnology and transhumanist discourse in general, is wholly identified with the idea of accelerating human design and manipulating the rate of perceived evolution. This is in accordance with a one-dimensional philosophy that discards the idea of natural rhythms and cycles that may have their own rates of change and which may not be immediately accessible to the fallible and very subjective human mind. This is hardly surprising due to the movement’s secular roots. However, what if – as a very rich tradition of often suppressed ancient wisdom suggests – there is indeed a precise symmetry and purpose in the way the planet, cosmos and Universe functions and organises itself? Most transhumanists appear to reject this possibility and assume that a “genetic designer label” can be stamped onto biology based on what they consider to be a sacred evolutionary direction. As with most strictly materialist perceptions, in true Baconian tradition the control of matter, mind and Nature is the objective divorced from the idea of consciousness existing outside the constraints of matter. A Masters-of-the-Universe mentality seeks to upstage Nature and the planet itself, bending it to their “post-human” will.

That is not to say there are not some great minds in the transhumanist movement and that there is nothing of value to be found there. But when there is no real discernment between what is considered to be pathology and normalcy and where beliefs are already predisposed to psychological corruption, then it just becomes yet another hijacked ideology. There is also the opportunity to ask questions as to whether we base our future on the lessons of the past or presume to forge ahead and base our decisions on a technological train of wishful thinking. Will we be downloading and uploading a reality that is sacrificing authenticity for artifice?

Can we say that the Elite families of the West have changed; that all is in the past and they have comprehensively turned over a new leaf? Evidence so far suggests that this particular mind-set has merely adapted and refined its methods. Depopulating the world, identifying, logging, tagging and micro-chipping the remaining populace and herding them into tightly controlled mega-cities via economic hardship is one future the Pathocrats envision. Meanwhile, buying up vast tracts of land under the banner of environmentalism will provide them with suitable means to live with the benefits of advanced bio-genetic/cyber technology at their fingertips – most likely with the view to extending their life-spans. Far-fetched or not, psychopaths and those drunk on power seldom think of failure. Vast amounts of money has been channelled for decades into massive underground bunkers presently dotted around the US and Europe some of which can house over 2 million people. To bring “Order out of Chaos” one must first introduce the Chaos to the extent that all manner of alternatives are wiped clean, leaving only one Singularity. They intend to be safe and warm away from all their created carnage and for as long as it takes.

The same vision that has hijacked the normal expressions of creativity for the last two hundred years or more has embraced the Information Age. If a virus goes unnoticed within all societal domains and even begins to define the nature of society, then any future innovations and apparent evolutionary surges will be made under the impetus of the same macro-social pathogen and thus subverted towards anti-human goals until such time it begins to lose its grip. The internet provides us with an immense opportunity to access massive amounts of information and turn it into knowledge through clusters of networks. We have the opportunity to develop and apply that knowledge/awareness in ways undreamt of. Consequently, a real battle for freedom is already taking place in various fields of technology between what we might call the entropic /machine consciousness which seeks to dominate and coerce reality into its tiny perceptions and the human / creative consciousness that seeks to co-create, disburse and expand alongside the Earth and Universe. As a very real human global brain awakens it remains to be seen how it will be wired up and if those “synapses” will be able to make unbreakable bonds based on freedom, truth, responsibility and love.

Technocracy V: The Technocrats Tap in (2)

“What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common – optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance?”
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– Tom Stoppard, author, playwright
.

sbirs-geo-1-missile-warning-satellite

                                      Image credit: gizmag.com | infrakshun

In 2003, under the Bush Administration, the Total Information Awareness program was introduced in order to provide “large, distributed repositories” including “biometric signatures of humans” and “human network analysis and behavior modeling” provided by DARPA. It was a reiteration of what ECHELON and MAIN CORE had been doing for years. Congress defunded the program in the same year, prohibiting any such activities to target Americans.

The Total Information Awareness Office run by convicted Iran-Contra felon John Poindexter and featured a logo on its website resembling the popular occult mythology of the Illuminati. It was so blatant that some visitors thought it was a bad attempt at political satire. It wasn’t. It did however, beg the question as to why such a revealing caricature and its objectives was allowed the go ahead? Moreover, why was it derailed so quickly when other draconian legislation – including the highly controversial PATRIOT act – sailed through without any problems?

The reason for this was to provide a distraction so that yet another surveillance hub could be built away from the spotlight.

A 2012 article by online tech magazine Wired reports on Intel journalist James Bamford’s sources who claim that once again, NSA has been continuing its surveillance operations with a new spy data centre based in Utah: “… capable of breaking almost any encryption, reading any email and recording any phone call anywhere in the world, even if it’s not made over the Internet.” Where have we heard that before? This hub is just one of a number of networked sites based around a similar network 0f “ultra-sensitive satellites … with the unique ability to sniff electronic communications from a massive distance.” [1]Bamford’s sources say that the NSA is routinely violating the US constitution by dumping all of America’s communications data into the system for analysis. Perhaps most importantly, and which goes to the heart of the premise of this book is the opinion of another covert source to which Bamford made contact who claimed that: “… the NSA is on the verge of a massive coup, putting the U.S. inches away from ‘a turnkey totalitarian state.’” [2]

tia-greatseal

The Total Information Awareness logo as compared to the Great Seal found on the US dollar bill, a freemasonic emblem. A purposeful distraction?

Another heavy-weight whistleblower, William Binney, decided to grab the gauntlet and go against his superiors to warn of an Orwellian Superstate which is “ready” and “set up” so that one has to just “turn the key” and this would be an immediate reality. [3] A specialist in traffic analysis, Binney worked for the NSA for 37 years and knows its capabilities and technical now-how inside out. He joined Electronic Frontier Foundation’s case against the National Security Agency (Jewel v. NSA) filed in July 2, 2012, and their illegal domestic surveillance programs which, according to Binney, “are consistent, as a mathematical matter, with seizing both the routing information and the contents of all electronic communications” inside the U.S. He has stated that over 20 trillion files have been created since the September 11th attacks.[4]Amid significant civil liberty concerns, NSA head and commander of US Cyber Command department General Keith Alexander is still seeking to redesign the internet’s infrastructure so that the NSA may: “… know instantly when overseas hackers might be attacking public or private infrastructure and computer networks.” A trial of 17 US defence companies is already underway.

Tom Simonite from Technology Review tells us:

“Under the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) Cyber Pilot, Lockheed Martin and other companies set up their computer security systems to automatically alert the agency when the alarm is tripped. They automatically pass a summary of what was detected and the IP address associated with the event to the NSA over the Internet. ‘All you need to pass is the fact of a signature and IP address in real time, and we can take it from there,’ said Alexander.” [5]

Yet, there is more to MAIN CORE than high-level data collection and future detention. First, we need to keep in mind that targeting the thinking population is not just an Orwellian fantasy but an objective reality. The NSA and Homeland Security is collecting massive amounts of data on the US and European populations for another purpose which may well have something to do with “Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation” or (SEAS). From their celebratory website we read: “What happens when you take gaming technology, inject it with the latest discoveries in management, economics, and psychology, and apply it to business, political, and social situations? The answer is Simulex’s Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation (SEAS), the result of ten years of research conducted at Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management, in association with the United States Department of Defence and several Fortune 500 companies.” [6]

Looking at Simulex Inc. client base it is fairly easy to guess. As the bold heading that greets us on the client page attests, SEAS has a top heavy bias for the telecommunications industry. It assists the United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) to “model the volatile regions of the world” while also providing their services to United States Department of Homeland Security in preparing “… for bio-terrorist attacks, and by Fortune 500 companies for strategic planning.”[7]Other clients include: United States Department of Defence, United States Department of Justice, United States Army Recruiting Command and Crane Naval Surface Warfare Centre. Their private sector clients are global pharmaceutical corporation Eli Lilly and our old weapons friend Lockheed Martin who got rid of whistleblower Margaret Newsham for blabbing to the press about unwarranted surveillance.

Is it coincidence Lockheed turns up here?

Other Fortune 500 companies are apparently clients but we are not given a list. However, it would be right up the social engineering alley of the Rockefeller Foundation and Monsanto Corp.

(Photo: Mönch / STN)

Which brings us to another 2005 whistleblower Russell D. Tice, a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Air Force, Office of Naval Intelligence, Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and NSA Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) officer. His statements in an interview to online journal Think Progress Security.org claimed that the surveillance discovered so far was “… only the tip of the iceberg,” and there was “… an angle that you haven’t heard about yet…” [8]In another interview with the online culture journal Reason just prior to a congressional hearing on the NSA wiretapping scandal (which went nowhere) Tice infers that the wire-tapping was not the main issue and that he needed: “… to tell Congress that no one knows yet, which is only tertiarily connected to what you know about now … In my case, there’s no way the programs I want to talk to Congress about should be public ever, unless maybe in 200 years they want to declassify them. You should never learn about it; no one at the Times should ever learn about these things.”[9]

So, surveillance was only scratching the surface. What then, are we to make of this military-corporate complex outsourcing in conjunction with MAIN CORE? What would you do if you wanted to predict how each of us may act in the future, most especially if your main objective was to control population in the face of a real or imagined threat against the Establishment power-base?

What is it that we “should never learn about?”

Could that be that each and every one of us who has expressed a level of awareness that thinks out of the box has an electronic kindle file packed full of interesting data? Moreover, this data is part of complex synergy of multi-layered simulations that uses a form of mass “pre-crime” software with a supercomputing power undreamt of.

>Blogger and commentator Kevin Flaherty from cryptogon.com makes it clear in the following analysis:

We must assume that They are using the full spectrum of surveillance information to try to PREDICT HOW EACH OF US IS LIKELY TO BEHAVE ON A DAY TO DAY BASIS. Where we go. Which routes we take. What we buy. Etc. All of these things can be broken down into a kind of moving average that wiggles around between an upper band and a lower band, kind of like a standard deviation from a mean. Stay within the bands, and the Magic 8 Ball probably won’t bother to flag your profile for closer analysis by some genius at the Terrorist Screening Center.

Obviously, most of us aren’t worth the attention of a human analyst, and They know it. Most of the sheep just go with the herd. They do what they’re told, shop at Wal-Mart, pay their taxes, go to church, the end. More educated sheep read Business Week or the New York Times, etc. Within a fairly wide range of activities, it’s no more complicated, for the vast majority of the people out there, than the way pool balls behave as they bounce around the table and each other.

This is a key point, so I’m going to emphasize it: These systems would excel at finding the artifacts, the outliers, the people who haven’t internalized the programming, but continue to act ‘normal.’ [10] [Emphasis mine]

Journalist and author Walter Bowart who wrote the seminal classic Operation Mind Control (1978) the NSA of the 1960s had computer systems decades in advance of public and governmental agencies of the time. And let’s not forget the capabilities of “Quantum Light Harvesting” which offers a revolutionary way to advance computational power to undreamt of levels and in a short space of time. That being so, what systems do we imagine the NSA playing with now in 2015?

Having explored the notions of depopulation or “managed genocide” and psychological operations in this series, Flaherty makes an interesting observation on the nature of this total surveillance and so called resource-grabbing. He draws our attention to a recent and on-going SEAS project in partnership with the US Department of Defence (DOD) called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS). According to the concept paper for the project, a parallel Planet Earth is being developed: “… with billions of individual ‘nodes’ to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR… It will be a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information.” Apparently, the simulation: “… provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP),” so that military leaders can “develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners”.

SWS also:

“… replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.

SEAS can display regional results for public opinion polls, distribution of retail outlets in urban areas, and the level of unorganization of local economies, which may point to potential areas of civil unrest. Yank a country’s water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next.

“The idea is to generate alternative futures with outcomes based on interactions between multiple sides,” said Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, co-author of the SWS concept paper. [11]

However, the Pentagon still isn’t content. Hundreds of additional spies are being sent overseas as part of a new espionage network that is set to rival the CIA in size according to the Washington Post. The report informs us that the a transformation of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) is underway having been “dominated for the past decade by the demands of two wars” and which will now be a “spy service focused on emerging threats and more closely aligned with the CIA and elite military commando units.” With “collectors” numbering as many as 1,600 all over the world this is no small project. In fact, as we have explored, it seems to be part of an expansive operation to merge military and intelligence agencies into a more centralised system of espionage and domestic surveillance. As the Post mentions: “… the Pentagon’s plan to create what it calls the Defense Clandestine Service (DCS) reflects the military’s latest and largest foray into secret intelligence work. The DIA overhaul — combined with the growth of the CIA since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — will create a spy network of unprecedented size.” [12]

illustrationPhoto from Simulex, Inc. advert

On top of all this, in 2012, former CIA intelligence analyst turned Whistleblower Edward J. Snowden leaked more than 50,00 classified documents to the Wikileaks organisation and journalist Glenn Greenwald revealing in black and white just how pervasive and all-encompassing the surveillance capabilities of America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ truly is. For some, the jury is still out on Snowden’s motives, primarily due to the fact that much of this information had been known for many years by independent journalists and alternative media who had been trying to get the attention of the mainstream media, but to no avail. So, it was a little fishy that Snowden was all over every possible media outlet in a very short space of time as though he had single-handedly dismantled the apparatus himself. Yet, he is the first CIA agent to do so. Is he a patsy, a conscious agent or a hero?

Whether the NSA is using him to test the demographic water of mass perception is unclear. For one thing, it allows the public to ease their way into deeper issues surrounding the whole arena of US policy from drone attacks to terrorism. The latter reason has been trotted out to justify all kinds of unconstitutional measures and many are waking up to this fact. After all, so-called “terrorists” are acutely aware that they are always monitored. What Snowden has done is to show how surveillance is targeting innocent people, not the terrorists. The NSA, in all probability, may be extremely peeved that their methods have been revealed. Whether this is a CIA-NSA turf war suggested by some commentators remains to be seen. As the CIA grapples with increasing revelations about its torture and rendition programs and the NSA continues to try and stem the flow of leaked cables on its surveillance capabilities, the leviathan of soft totalitarianism still lumbers forward.

NSACIA Emblem

© infrakshun

By 2013, while the magnitude of surveillance of all and everyone was being digested it is true to say that there may be much more to be drawn out of the NSA shadows. On November 28th,the BBC’s Hardtalk programme, Glenn Greenwald stated that there are still thousands of leaked cables to go through and make public. As it stands, the leaks have not made the slightest difference to its illegality as some commentators have been saying for quite some time. Far from being chastened, the NSA has romped ahead by creating a secret body of law which gives the agency carte blanche in accessing data on Americans justified by the war on terror and the threat of cyber-terrorism and underground nuclear proliferation.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) has eleven members whose job it was to approve illegal wire-tapping orders and which have  now been expanded to allow the NSA to do as it pleases while doffing its hat to feeble attempts to regulate intelligence surveillance. In a Guardian piece by Spencer Ackerman on August 16, 2013, it was reported that thousands of annual violations of its own restrictions continue to mount as reported by two US senators who sit on the US intelligence committee. As Rice, they stated that these were, also: “the tip of the iceberg.”

The bottom line is that everyone is presumed guilty rather than innocent simply due to the vast amount of data building on every citizen. The NSA can effectively trap you into suspected wrongdoing. As we have seen, the ubiquitous rise of entrapment operations may reflect something much deeper. Just because you have led a law-abiding life, it is no protection against mass spying programs seeping into every corner of our lives care of SMART technology. Indeed, the very definition of “law abiding” is changing; contoured towards government policy rather than what is ethically and morally sound. Whistleblower William Binney has warned for several years that the government is storing literally everything and creating a highly sophisticated, searchable database to be used for anything it wants. Snowden says much the same thing in an interview on June 12, 2013:

Because even if you’re not doing anything wrong you’re being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude … to where it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody – even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer. [13]

On July 6, 2013, Eric Lichtblau writng for the New York Times commented on officials’ statements that: “… the court’s still-secret decisions go far beyond any single surveillance order.” Indeed, though European countries such as France and Spain have been found spying on their own citizens, even handing over data to the NSA it is the United States that has led the charge against the global population’s privacy. This in turn, has led the Surveillance State seeping into every avenue of American life. Even the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has routinely been snooping in order to extract largely unconstitutional taxation claims. It believes that it can continue to operate quite happily without using a warrant to read people’s emails and text messages. Just like the search engine Google Inc. (whom we will turn to presently) the Fourth Amendment and every person’s right to basic privacy is deemed irrelevant to the IRS and it’s highly dubious definitions of taxations laws. In summary, they have their ears and eyes tapped into every conceivable communication source while making up their own laws to maintain this illegal surveillance  well into the future. If you listened to the BBC you would think that it is Glenn Greenwald who should be on trial for daring to suggest that intelligence chiefs “routinely lie.”

But the shadow government and the NSA isn’t content – it needs more and more. Research into weaponisation, military capabilities and surveillance has now encompassed much of society. Corporations, multinational security firms and private contractors who act as “digital blackwaters” are all in the NSA bag. Outsourcing is key in terms of diluting accountability whilst encouraging innovation. In just a few examples from many, military-intel company Raytheon has “… secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.” The company admitted that it was a joint research & development project shared with the US government sincce 2010 in order “… to help build a national security system capable of analysing ‘trillions of entities’ from cyberspace.

WilliamBinney-EdwardSnowdenWhistleblowers William Binney (left) and Edward J. Snowden (right)

The security of biometric data is a bad joke since the sale of private data is open to lucrative profits. In 2013, Richard Kerbaj and Jon Ungoed-Thomas reported in the May 13th, edition of The Sunday Times that data of 27m mobile phone users had been: “… offered for sale to the Metropolitan police, private companies and other bodies, enabling them to track users’ movements.” The company involved in the potential sale is: “Ipsos Mori, one of Britain’s biggest research firms, … claimed in meetings that every movement by users can be tracked to within 100 metres.” According to the newspaper, the company: “shelved any deal after being contacted by The Sunday Times.” The report continued: “Documents to promote the data reveal that it includes ‘gender, age, postcode, websites visited, time of day text is sent [and] location of customer when call is made’. They state that people’s mobile phone use and location can be tracked in real time with records of movements, calls, texts, also available for the previous six months.” [14]

To carry out these  games in order to “protect us” the NSA has resorted to impersonating Google in order to obtain its information and swell its billions of files.  Named in the business as a “man in the middle attack” it involves a hacker technique of “… using a fake security certificate to pose as a legitimate Web service, bypass browser security settings, and then intercept data that an unsuspecting person is sending to that service.” Once passwords have been collected users can then log in to genuine banking websites thereby acting as intermediary or “middle man” and re-routing requests to their bank and returning the information to the customer while gathering highly personal data from both participants without either having the slightest clue what has happened. (It also applies to email servers). This time it is not a lone hacker but the NSA and GCHQ, where massive amounts of information is being channelled back to their central hubs. [15]

The idea that informational roadmap of cyberspace has been compromised by Intel PSYOPS and NSA surveillance has become more of a probability that a possibility. It is foolish to believe that anything we do online is secure or private. Not only is the NSA breaking most forms of encryption on the internet but is likely replacing intercepting downloads of open-source encryption software and silently replacing these with their own versions. The NSA is re-calibrating the internet towards its own perception of reality.

Illegality is justified with the favourite canard that it is all to protect us from terrorism. It was confirmed just how manufactured the threat truly is when online journal allgov.net reported in October 2013 that NSA Director Keith Alexander admitted before a congressional committee that he lied when he claimed the agency’s wire-tapping program had thwarted 54 terrorist “plots or events.”  In June of 2013, while the Obama administration was busy denouncing the whistleblowing of Edward Snowden and locking away Bradley Manning for 35 years, the NSA was lying through its teeth once again. Only 13 of the 54 cases were connected to the United States and just one or two suspected plots were: “… identified as a result of bulk phone record collection.” This was nothing new. The head was merely following the “terrorist-under-your-bed” justification for all manner of constitutional abuses practiced by the government and military-intelligence apparatus.

Lying is an inherent part of the deal. Apart from using data and surveillance as a means to implement propaganda, cyber-warfare and the harassment of those deemed “enemies,” mass surveillance is key to Obama’s assassination programs still carried out without oversight. In combination with the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) the NSA and CIA effectively make a private army outside any democratic accountability. Special operations units utilising drones and US soldiers are deployed all around the globe, from Somalia to Yemen, Afghanistan to Iraq. The coordination and logistical support is given by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) who essentially decides who might be a suitable target and the means by which he or she will be murdered.

According to Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) the true purpose of the NCTC is the:

“massive, secretive data collection and mining of trillions of points of data about most people in the United States” …. In particular, the NCTC operates a gigantic data-mining operation, in which all sorts of information about innocent Americans is systematically monitored, stored, and analyzed. This includes “records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records” – “literally anything the government collects would be fair game”. In other words, the NCTC – now vested with the power to determine the proper “disposition” of terrorist suspects – is the same agency that is at the center of the ubiquitous, unaccountable surveillance state aimed at American citizens.

Worse still, as the ACLU’s legislative counsel Chris Calabrese documented back in July in a must-read analysis, Obama officials very recently abolished safeguards on how this information can be used. Whereas the agency, during the Bush years, was barred from storing non-terrorist-related information about innocent Americans for more than 180 days – a limit which “meant that NCTC was dissuaded from collecting large databases filled with information on innocent Americans” – it is now free to do so. Obama officials eliminated this constraint by authorizing the NCTC “to collect and ‘continually assess’ information on innocent Americans for up to five years”. [16]

As the NSA and Homeland Security can now, on a whim, label any American a potential terrorist, the most obvious question to ask is how long will it be before American citizens are assassinated on their own soil? (Assuming it hasn’t happened already).

drones

Obama’s Drones ready to assassinate from a distance without trial or jury. Based on the woeful intelligence of the last decade chances are you are likely to be an innocent civilian.

Perhaps no better example illustrates how the NSA should be the last people we trust is from the recent confirmation that the agency wishes to defend none other than Wall Street. Rather than wire-tapping genuine criminals infesting the world of cartel economics, this bastion of financial terrorism is deemed worthy of protection.

Salon, journalist Natasha Lennard details how the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a statement in early 2013 noting: “It is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters, and terrorist financing. We collect this information for many important reasons: for one, it could provide the United States and our allies early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy. It also could provide insight into other countries’ economic policy or behavior which could affect global markets.” [17]

The NSA could no doubt collect vast amounts of information on the continuing “irregularities” and corporate crimes still devouring any chance of a healthy economy. As journalist Michael Degerald mentioned regarding the admission: “If any part of American society or business had shown itself to be corrupt to the core, and thus in need of surveillance, it’s Wall Street.” [18]

 


Notes

[1] ‘The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)’ By James Bamford, Wired, March 15, 2012.
[2] Ibid.
[3] RT report July 2012.
[4] ‘Sworn Declaration of Whistleblower William Binney on NSA Domestic Surveillance Capabilities’ July 16 2012. Public Intelligence.net, http://www.publicintelligence.net.
[5] ‘NSA Boss Wants More Control Over the ‘Net’by Tom Simonite, technologyreview.com, July 27, 2012.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] ‘NSA Whistleblower To Expose More Unlawful Activity: ‘People…Are Going To Be Shocked’’ By Faiz Shakir, Thnik Progress Security, wwwthinkprorgess.org May 12, 2006.
[9]‘Inside the Puzzle Palace’ – A Reason interview with NSA whistleblower Russell Tice, by Julian Sanchez, http://www.reason.org, January 13, 2006.
[10] ‘Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation’ By Kevin Flaherty, http://www.cryptogon.com, June 30th, 2007.
[11] ‘Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale – Sim Strife’ By Mark Baard, The Register, 23rd June 2007.
[12] ‘DIA sending hundreds more spies overseas’ By Greg Millar, The Washington Post, December 2.
[13] See: ‘Full Interview with Edward Snowden’at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdPbvKeRgpk
[14] ‘Secrets of 27m mobile phones offered to police’ by Richard Kerbaj and Jon Ungoed-Thomas Sunday Times, 12 May 2013.
[15] ‘NSA Disguised itself as Google’ by Edward Moyer CNET.com, September 2013.
[16] “The President’s Private Army”: NSA-CIA Spying is Central to Carrying Out the Obama Administration’s Assassination Program. By Washington’s Blog / Global Research, September 29, 2013.
[17] ‘Statement by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper on Allegations of Economic Espionage’
Sunday, September 08, 2013.
[18] ‘Why doesn’t NSA spy on Wall Street?’by Michael Degerald Salon.com Sep 11, 2013.

Technocracy IV: The Technocrats Tap in (1)

By M.K. Styllinski

“…As far as intelligence goes the NSA’s far, far superior to [the CIA]—far in advance in the ‘black arts.’…The CIA gets blamed for what NSA does. NSA is far more vicious and far more accomplished in their operations.”

Operation Mind Control (1978) By Walter Bowart, Interview conducted with a confirmed government assassin.


cctv1The average British person has the dubious honour of being part of a population that is the most intensely monitored on the planet. In just one week, a British individual will have over 3,254 pieces of personal information stored about him or her, which is then held for years on a variety of databases, or in some instances indefinitely. Where you shop, how frequently, what you buy, how often you use your credit card and where; you’re most common website searches and favourite sites as well as the details of your emails and keyword analysis therein. An average of 50 websites is visited and 32 emails sent per person in Britain every day. That’s a lot of data. And the internet service providers (ISPs) log everything which is then happily handed over to advertisers representing perhaps the most “benign” use of your private data. (Stay tuned).

The dividing line between the corporate sector and government has never been more blurred when it comes to sharing data about customer’s habits. Phone companies already retain enormous amounts of data about British people and presently give it to over 650 public bodies on request. A recent finding by the UK’s Telegraph newspaper revealed that plans to grant local authorities and other public bodies access to the email and internet records of millions has already gone ahead, despite the well-publicised loss of data by government departments, including an incident where HM Revenue and Customs mislaid computer disks containing the personal details of 25 million people. [1]

Microsoft continues to track users of the new Windows phones which has 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 any of the big internet companies. Mobile phones are now effectively little tracking devices courtesy of a network of phone masts which allow name, time, location and direction of travel to be catalogued via a unique identifying signal that is pulsed out at regular intervals, even when you are not using the phone. Police and public authorities can access this information at any time, ostensibly for investigating crimes. [2]

intellistreetsIt seems that one company “Illuminating Concepts” is quite open about the spread of surveillance and even seems to celebrate it. Closely associated with Homeland Security, the firm is already rolling out its SMART street lighting under brand name “intellistreets” in various cities throughout the USA. However, on the intellistreets website it reveals the lighting system has: “Homeland Security features … embedded in the system.” What does that mean exactly? Well, they have provided sensors for: “Mass notification, emergency evacuation routing, emergency call stations, CBRNE attack notification, visual analysis and digital signage. And further, team have helpfully created: “… systems processors [that] provide background music, public announcements, and digital messaging.” Although in an earlier report  the description included “voice stress analyzers,” this seems to have been scrubbed from their updated version, although you can be sure it remains in the package, all made possible via an ocean of wi-fi waves…And since they also act as surveillance cameras then there is no reason to fear …

intellistreets2

Intelligent Street Lighting in Las Vegas. They are fitted with a range of sensors designed to assist Homeland Security…(screen-shot from intellistreets demo)

Back in the United Kingdom, aside from intelligent transport and street lighting, there is still the matter of a central nexus of surveillance care of CCTV or closed-circuit television where well over 4.2 million cameras are crammed into this tiny island. Network Rail, London Underground, government and corporate buildings are all littered with the critters, recording an average of over 300+ appearances on camera for the ordinary Brit. The tapes can be kept however long it is deemed necessary. The fact that CCTV surveillance has proven by the police’s own crime statistics to have made virtually no reduction or prevention of crime, the SMART city future continues to attract the technocratic faithful, nonetheless.[3]And if you are thinking of high-tailing your way out of the UK in search of real privacy, automatic number plate recognition systems can always track your speeding car…

That is, if airborne drones don’t do it first.

Produced by yet another delighted arms manufacturer, BAE Systems, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) better known as “drones,” and controversially deployed in Afghanistan are now being used for the routine and covert monitoring of the UK and US public. In the United States police, universities, state transportation departments and federal agencies already have some form of drone device monitoring the public. Some of these are anything from small, remote-controlled model “aeroplanes” to large predator drones seen in the military. A consortium of government agencies and law enforcement authorities are falling over themselves to deploy the drones in an attempt to “greatly extend the government’s surveillance capacity and ‘revolutionise policing.’” According to a 2010 Guardian report: “The CAA is currently reluctant to license UAVs in normal airspace because of the risk of collisions with other aircraft.” Despite this, the government and their weapons manufacturers are confident that the widespread deployment of drones will take off… in just a few years. [4] 

The Federal Administration Authority (FAA) has estimated 10,000 drones could be flitting about our skies by 2020. With a September 2015 deadline from Congress to open the nation’s airspace to drone traffic, the investment alone will ensure such a deadline remains on course. [5] Indeed, early 2015 has already seen drones operating on behalf of amazon, pizza delivery, as waiters in Japan and even drones whizzing around at the Superbowl (until the FAA became jittery and banned them).

Overall surveillance is marching to the tempo of intel agencies and the creation of so-called “threat assessments.” CCTV photography is entered into a facial recognition database which can then be used to create a 3D model of your face which is distributed across a vast database surveillance network. The United States Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been busy developing the AWARE-2 gigapixel camera which is capable of creating images with 50,000 megapixels. The machine will be used for military surveillance, which means if not being used against suspecting civilians or “insurgents” in foreign lands it will probably mean protesters and law abiding citizens like you and me. The AWARE camera is part of a whole industry rolling out new hardware to meet the demands of a global populace that is becoming more aware.

Governments have been spying on their own people since the end of the Second World War as a consequence of gathering enemy intelligence and code cracking. Codes and encryption technology led to coordinated signal intelligence (SIGINT) which obtained a fresh burst of state support from the pressure of the Cold War. The computer innovations that would follow led to the creation of the ECHELON global spying system, a vast network of digital spy stations carefully maintained by the US, England, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Originally named “Project P415” with the involvement of a broad network of international intelligence agencies on board, it has continued to grow in size and scope thanks to successive Prime Ministers and Presidents signing off billions of pounds and dollars without congressional approval. By the 1980s, the Anglo-American plan for an expansion of ECHELON was set in motion. It was to be fully operational by the 21st century and its ambitions included the monitoring, collection and analysis of the civilian population overseen by the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham, England. This is the coordinating centre for Europe, Africa and Russia, West of the Ural Mountains, while the NSA is responsible for the rest of Russia and the Americas. The NSA’s monitoring of the South Pacific, and South East Asia is sourced from a base in Australia. The still secret UKUSA (UK-USA) monitoring agreement splits the work into several sections assigned to the relevant agency where the global population’s private lives are intercepted from mobiles, land line telephones, fax transmissions and emails and fed through NSA departments where personnel pore over keywords in the hope of isolating phantom suspects’ intent on blowing up the White House.[6]

A 1998 European Parliament sponsored research study entitled: ‘An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control,’ gave credence to journalists’ insistence that a UK-US spy surveillance network was in operation. The Scientific and Technological Options Assessment (STOA) committee of the European Parliament compiled the report and gave cast iron evidence that not only did it exist but showed the NSA was routinely carrying out illegal and sophisticated surveillance experiments on Europeans with UK support.

In the 1980s, Margaret Newsham worked for arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin and had been stationed at the NSA’s Menwith Hill listening post in Yorkshire, England. This is the central clearing house for information that is vacuumed up and dissected by the NSA at fort Meade and other locations. Newsham became a whistleblower and testified to a Congressional committee after realising that the NSA was illegally spying on Americans and Europeans. Their report was never published but investigative journalist Duncan Campbell took an interest and verified her story in a 1988 report of his own, blowing the lid off ECHELON secrecy in the process.

gchq-nsaAmerica’s NSA Headquarters (top) and UK’s ECHELON surveillance system and GCHQ

Patrick S. Poole, a lecturer in government and economics at Bannockburn College in Franklin, Tennessee compiled a data base on the nature and history of ECHELON. In an extensive series from 1999 and 2000 he outlined some of the surveillance operation code names unveiled over the years mostly by determined investigative journalists which include the following sourced from the Menwith Hill data hub:

STEEPLEBUSH – Completed in 1984, this $160 million system expanded the satellite surveillance capability

RUNWAY –receives signals from the second-generation geosynchronous Vortex satellites, and gathers miscellaneous communications traffic from Europe, Asia and the former Soviet Union. The information is then forwarded to the Menwith Hill computer systems for processing.

PUSHER – An HFDF system that covers the HF frequency range between 3 MHz and 30 MHz (radio transmissions from CB radios, walkie-talkies, and other radio devices). Military, embassy, maritime and air flight communications are the main targets.

MOONPENNYthis system is targeted at the communication relay satellites belonging to other countries, as well as the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Intelsat satellites.

KNOBSTICKS I and II – The purpose of these antennae arrays are unknown, but they probably target military and diplomatic traffic throughout Europe.

GT-6 – A new system installed at the end of 1996, GT-6 is believed to be the receiver for the third generation of geosynchronous satellites termed Advanced Orion or Advanced Vortex. A new polar orbit satellite called Advanced Jumpseat may be monitored from here as well.

STEEPLEBUSH II – An expansion of the 1984 STEEPLEBUSH system, this computer system processes information collected from the RUNWAY receivers gathering traffic from the Vortex satellites.

SILKWORTH – Constructed by Lockheed Corporation, the main computer system for Menwith Hill processes most of the information received by the various reception systems.

Additional systems (TROUTMAN, ULTRAPURE, TOTALISER, SILVERWEED, RUCKUS, et. al.) complete the monumental SIGINT collection efforts at Menwith Hill. [7]

Unfortunately, while disputing the strength of such a system and the danger it poses for ordinary citizens Mr. Poole also buys into the propaganda of “us and them” terrorism and hails the “successes” that such a framework has yielded, citing a selection of terrorist atrocities that unbeknownst to him, had the sticky hand of state-sponsorship all over of them. Like many journalists and academics he has yet to grasp that the building of extremism is part of the Terror Industry in turn, connected to the “justifications” rallied by the mainstream press to support the World State-surveillance apparatus. In conjunction with long-time utilisation of PROMIS software – and now thanks to Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing on Internet surveillance programs such as PRISM, XKeyscore, Tempora, and the interception of US and European telephone metadata, remote viewing of any computer in real time is possible, as well as the creation of “back door snooping” in most public systems such as Microsoft.

Unsurprisingly, the Middle East, that bastion of US-NATO interference, has come under extensive surveillance activities at the turn of the millennium.  The online tech journalThe Register revealed in June 2014 that British intelligence had created a secret spy base responsible for tapping undersea cables at Seeb on the coast of Oman. This is only one of a three sites as part of the GCHQ network in Oman codenamed “TIMPANI”, “GUITAR” and “CLARINET”. Iraq and Yemen are the targets of this spying. According to leaked cables by Edward Snowden, it seems telecommunication companies are making a mint by allowing intel operatives to plug in to their networks and stay silent. (This symbiotic relationship reflects the dominance of Israeli spy networks within telecommunications in the United States).

…the intelligence agency annually pays selected companies tens of millions of pounds to run secret teams which install hidden connections which copy customers’ data and messages to the spooks’ processing centres. The GCHQ-contracted companies also install optical fibre taps or “probes” into equipment belonging to other companies without their knowledge or consent. Within GCHQ, each company has a special section called a “Sensitive Relationship Team” or SRT.

BT and Vodafone/C&W also operate extensive long distance optical fibre communications networks throughout the UK, installed and paid for by GCHQ, NSA, or by a third and little known UK intelligence support organization called the National Technical Assistance Centre (NTAC).

Snowden’s leaks reveal that every time GCHQ wanted to tap a new international optical fibre cable, engineers from “REMEDY” (BT) would usually be called in to plan where the taps or “probe” would physically be connected to incoming optical fibre cables, and to agree how much BT should be paid. The spooks’ secret UK access network feeds Internet data from more than 18 submarine cables coming into different parts of Britain either direct to GCHQ in Cheltenham or to its remote processing station at Bude in Cornwall. [8]

oman-1From The Register: “GCHQ’s submarine cable tapping centre for the TEMPORA project at Seeb in Oman, codename “CIRCUIT”.   It was built alongside a commercial satellite interception station, codename “SNICK”, according to documents revealed by Edward Snowden.”

As the tawdry tale of US-NATO led destabilisation policy continues in the Middle East, directly connected to the crisis in the Ukraine and Baltic states you can be sure more spy centres will be cropping up as surveillance sophistication grows.

The NSA’s warrantless surveillance or “wire-tapping” authorised by George W. Bush’s executive order expanded the monitoring of phone calls, emails, Internet history, text messaging, and any form of communication in or outside US jurisdiction. The search warrant became a thing of the past. Violations of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the US Constitution continue to be ignored because what’s left of the Bill of rights and the Constitution itself has been so diluted that intelligence agencies and their law-makers take advantage of the myriad loopholes and executive order mandates. The Obama Administration has continued where Bush left off and extended the financing and capability of the surveillance methods. [9]

As a result of its illegal spying programs the NSA still hasn’t foiled a single terrorist plot, including all the copious amounts of suspicious activity prior to 9/11. Once we realise that the War on Terror is at root a hoax, designed to facilitate geo-strategic control, suppress domestic dissent and create leverage for political blackmail, we may see that surveillance becomes much more than a protective measure, as former workers and whistleblowers have cautioned. As Duncan Campbell observed: “The targeting of US political figures would not occur by accident, but was designed into the system from the start.” [10]

Since the recent furore of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World scandal in which journalists were found to have listened in to calls and monitored computer files, one can imagine the capability available to the NSA and GCHQ in the context “deep black” intelligence operations. Satellite systems have become integral to this global project with a network of monitoring stations in Britain and Europe tapping into domestic communications circuits, and analysing every email, text, mobile phone call and just about any data signal that is readable – which is everything. Telecommunications companies in the UK such as BT and Vodafone have made this easier by collaborating with the spy agency and passing on details of their customers’ phone calls, email messages and Facebook entries. As reported in several June 2013 reports at various news outlets, fibre optic cables have been tapped by the NSA – with the blessing of the government.

Leaked documents from whistle-blower Edward Snowden has shown that illegal surveillance in the UK is pretty much a carbon-copy of what goes on in the United States, though with even more ubiquitous surveillance devices positioned in everyone’s direction. From overhead satellite systems extremely precise location can be secured along with a raft of data about a company or individual. International communications was said to be its original concern at the US satellite and communications base at Menwith Hill but US national security in the wake of the War on Terror has given “justification” for monitoring all and everything, ostensibly to sift for Al-Qaeda/ ISIL gold.

Keep in mind that this isn’t just a rough scan of large quantities data. According to former NSA analysts and whistle-blowers Judy Woodruff, William Binney, Russell and now Snowden, they have all confirmed that the NSA is scanning every email, recording every word of every phone call made within the United States – digitised and archived. This includes files on relevant persons deemed a domestic threat. If we take a look at the extraordinary advances in telecommunications and applications in the public domain then we must also consider the likelihood that the advances in the military-intelligence sector is decades ahead. In the context of ECHELON surveillance, Homeland Security, the SMART Grid, and the delights of technocratic automation of every conceivable suburban amenity, you can gain an understanding of what this may mean if you are one of those that don’t take to this kind of regimentation.

In the 2008 May/June issue of Radar Magazine an article written by investigative journalist Christopher Ketcham entitled: “The Last Roundup” reveals the high probability that the U.S. Government had established a database and tracking system called MAIN CORE used primarily for over eight million Americans who have been designated as threats to national security. Taking its cue from the from the global equivalent that is ECHELON, it uses the same sources of data such as internet activity, mobile, telephone, health records, marketing and financial information but extends that capability to a cross-network with undisclosed black programs. Need to check out a suspicious individual because he looked funny on a subway camera? The keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards are all archived on government supercomputers and according to Ketcham and others’ sources, also fed into the MAIN CORE database.

It also has another more immediate purpose.

With the program’s inception going back to at least the 1980s and with help from the Defence Intelligence Agency, MAIN CORE is run under the highly classified and controversial Continuity of Government (COG) operations. The COG is the principle of establishing defined procedures that allow a government to continue its essential operations in case of nuclear war or other catastrophic event. President George W. Bush, tasked with eviscerating the constitution, included in his raft of executive legislation the National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20 which served to outline the federal government’s plan for maintaining continuity in the face of such a “catastrophic emergency.” The latter is defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function.” Constitutional government is effectively bypassed granting Police State powers to the White House, the Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA) and Homeland Security (DHS).

gty_nsa_surveillance_kb_131029_16x9_992Source: abcnews.go.com

If you think that gives a government the licence to impose Martial Law based on virtually any scenario it chooses, then you’d be correct. Such a state of affairs would be lamentable for the public but a bundle of laughs for those in power, many whom would be gagging for such an opportunity. According to Ketcham’s article, it alleges that Americans listed in the MAIN CORE database, “Could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.” [11] A senior government official who had high level clearance gives a chilling observation:

“There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” [12]

This didn’t extend to the assigned terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden it seems.

What about this hypothetical attack – Another 911? We saw how the US and the world changed radically after that event. This time, the scenario may not be Al-Qaeda/ISIL bogeyman but the American citizens themselves who would be targeted. Indeed, this is exactly what’s happening.

Ketcham describes how events might play out:

“With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people who—for a tremendously broad set of reasons—have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.” [13]

If we factor in Pre-Crime software, it is obvious that this will play an integral part in the coming SMART revolution, as a former military operative explains: >

“… the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets’ behavior and tracks their circle of associations with ‘social network analysis’ and artificial intelligence modeling tools…. “The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help,” he says. “Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets.” An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that “it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time.” [14]

Homeland Security’s homage to Phillip K. Dick’s Minority Report is already up and running with their version of an airport based Pre-Crime. Using an algorithmic “prototype screening facility” designed “to detect cues indicative of mal-intent” based on ground-breaking factors of ethnicity, gender, breathing, and heart rate” we can expect great things from those fearless protectors. Combine that still further with the FBI’s nationwide new facial recognition service and we have reason to feel that we are not so much “protected” as invasively monitored. [15]

The Terrorist Watch List garners over 200,000 new unaware individuals every year from housewives to school boys, businessmen to political commentators and ordinary citizens. As of writing, the list is well over the 1 million mark and rising exponentially. A former NSA officer discloses: “… that the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to MAIN CORE, as does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor anti-war protestors and environmental activists such as Greenpeace.” [16] In the MAIN CORE data base even these definitions are too restrictive.

We can easily arrive at the logical conclusion that if we have voiced an opinion that is contrary to the prevailing “wisdom” of government authorities then you can be rest assured there is a pretty little file just for you.

If supermarkets have a marketing profile of your purchasing patterns then imagine what your own governments have?

In 2007, online revelations concerning the NSA’s IP intercept operations and there ubiquitous presence on the internet gave us a level of surveillance that surpassed most people’s wildest imaginations. AT&T telecommunications engineer Mark Klein who participated in building the secret NSA infrastructure blew the whistle on the real designs behind his boss’s wishes. The NSA and AT&T tried their best to prevent disclosure. After a class-action lawsuit against AT&T allowing secret government surveillance of Internet traffic, a refreshingly rare instance of democracy was at work when the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released unredacted court documents related to the AT&T/NSA intercept case. This provided – in astonishing detail – the capability of surveillance software run by intelligence agencies on service providers’ networks. [17] A company called Narus developed a custom-built network surveillance system named “NarusInsight Intercept Suite” with the capable of real-time analysis of all the data passing through the most advanced and largest network nodes currently in existence.

According to the Narus website:

These capabilities include playback of streaming media (i.e. VoIP), rendering of web pages, examination of e-mail and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols. Narus partner products offer the ability to quickly analyze information collected by the Directed Analysis or Lawful Intercept modules. When Narus partners’ powerful analytic tools are combined with the surgical targeting and real-time collection capabilities of Directed Analysis and Lawful Intercept modules, analysts or law enforcement agents are provided capabilities that have been unavailable thus far. 

This is what you might call the tip of a particularly large and hidden iceberg…

 


Notes

[1] How Big Brother watches your every move’ by Richard Gray, The Telegraph, August 2008.
[2] Ibid.
[3] ‘CCTV cameras: If they do not stop crime or catch criminals, what are they for?’ The Telegraph, 24 Aug 2009. | ‘CCTV boom has failed to slash crime, say police’ by Owen Bowcott, The Guardian, 6 May 2008.
[4] ‘CCTV in the sky: police plan to use military-style spy drones’ by Paul Lewis, The Guardian, 23 January 2010.
[5] ‘Drones Are Taking to the Skies in the U.S.’ Los Angeles Times February 18th, 2013.
[6]‘The National Security Agency and Global Electronic Surveillance’ by Duncan Campbell, New Statesman August 12, 1988.
[7] ‘ECHELON: America’s Global Surveillance Network’ by Patrick S. Poole 1999/2000.
[8] ‘Federal Judge Finds N.S.A. Wiretaps Were Illegal’. By Charlie Savage, James Risen, The New York Times, March 31, 2010.
[9] ‘GCHQ’s Middle East cable tap centre revealed’,The Register 3rd June, 2014.
[10] op. cit. Campbell.
[11] ‘The Last Roundup’ By Christopher Ketcham, Radar Magazine, April 29, 2008.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] ‘Homeland Security Moves Forward with ‘Pre-Crime’ Detection’CNET, October 8th, 2011. | ‘FBI to Launch Nationwide Facial Recognition Service’ Nextgov. October 8th, 2011.
[16] Ibid.
[17] https://www.eff.org/nsa/faq/