The Verge: The NSA’s voice-recognition system raises hard questions for Echo and Google Home

The Intercept: Top Republican warns that under new spending bill “the intelligence community could expend funds as it sees fit”

and Techdirt: Spending bill would give Administration direct control of surveillance spending

Activist Post: Congress quietly pushing bill to require national biometric ID for all Americans

Zero Hedge: Paul Craig Roberts: The NSA is a blackmail agency

Reason: Suspicionless immigration bus sweep caught on video

Richmond-Times Dispatch: If you regulate free speech, who decides what is acceptable?

Cosmos: Sci-fi tractor beam gets one step closer

Techdirt: Report shows US law enforcement routinely engages in parallel construction. This should be a huge story, but a quick Google search shows that only a handful of websites are covering it.  Basically, police use illegal surveillance methods to gather evidence in criminal cases.  But for the evidence to be admissible in court, the methods used must be legal.  So the cops have to concoct a fake narrative as to how they gathered the evidence.  It’s lying to the judge and the jury, and it obscures just how prevalent illegal tactics are used in criminal cases.  And it is probably very difficult to detect.  This story is more proof that police departments need to be restrained by independent oversight committees.

Telecoms: Microsoft gets support of privacy groups in battle against US

and more from Gizmodo: Nearly everyone backs Microsoft in landmark email privacy case…except the DOJ

Computer Weekly: European Parliament votes to restrict exports of surveillance equipment.  Europe getting it right.  It’s important to note that the bill would specifically prohibit the export of surveillance to Third World tyrants who have no Constitutional restraints on abusing their citizens.  The US, however, has no qualms whatsoever about selling weapons and surveillance tech to any tin-pot dictators.

Zero Hedge: Wikileaks’ Assange keeps warning of AI censorship, and it’s time we started listening.  Assange is warning of the coming automated Surveillance State, and yes, we should listen.

SWNS: A history of CCTV surveillance in Britain. Brits live under the most omnipotent Surveillance States in the West, with the story noting that the country has more CCTV cameras per person than any other country in the world. 2.2 billion pounds are spent each year on these surveillance devices.

Information Age: The evolution of artificial intelligence

Maybe we should force Zuckerberg to submit to a Turing test. Or the Voight-Kampff: Phys: Facebook to train 65,000 in French jobs scheme

Yes, the Surveillance State is alive and well, tracking our movements, reading our emails, cataloging our daily activities, creating and storing digital dossiers on us all and placing them in a mammoth database.  BUT, but.  It’s still unformed, in a state of chrysalis. It hasn’t yet reached that future point where turning back would be almost impossible.

There is a feeling of a totalitarian, technocratic egg in the middle of hatching at the moment.  Drone technology, real-time facial recognition, a slave race of quasi-AI programs, algorithms that put total surveillance on auto-pilot, this and much, much more is speeding towards a nexus point, where the chaos of data that this technology is gulping up will be brought into a state of order and control.  It’s like a young animal testing its boundaries, discovering its potential.  And the potential this technology has is to realize Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.  Total, real-time surveillance of every individual on the planet.  And the means to quickly and easily sift and act on the relevant information.

Governments murder and enslave.  This is the most important lesson of the history of the human race.  The greatest lie is that we can control that institution to any degree.  And the greatest lie of democracy is that “we are the government”.  Our very survival depends on knowing the vast difference between ruler and ruled, between Crown and Subject.

Looking past all the propaganda about “public service” that governments of the world engage in, focus on one number: 262 million. That is the number of unarmed civilians murdered by their own governments during the 20th century.  Professor R.J. Rummel, who came up with the number, dubbed this phenomenon “democide”.  Now, did the human race suddenly because abnormally blood-thirsty during the 20th century?  What accounts for the greatest letting of civilian blood in our history?  The answer is that governments, for the first time in history, had the means to carry out mass murder on an industrial scale, easily and quickly.  The means made the difference.  The weapons, chemicals, machines, etc., were at their disposal for the first time in history.

Governments of the world are gaining, through technology, virtually limitless technology to surveil their citizens, predict their movements and actions.  The Surveillance State is giving governments of the world the means for total enslavement of their populations.  Does that sound like hyperbole?  Just remember, 262 million.

The hubris of the belief that we can control the most murderous institution ever created by man is similar to the belief that one can train a crocodile.  We are the ones being trained.

What we mean by Surveillance State is really the inability to hide from our own government, which is probably the most important survival strategy we possess.  When we can no longer evade our government, for whatever reason, we are at its mercy.  This is the reason to oppose seemingly innocuous programs like a small surveillance drone for the local police department.   That drone, once embedded within your local department, will soon become equipped with facial recognition tech.  Then it will have internet access, and upload its video feed to a database that other law enforcement agencies can access. Its data will be fed to algorithms that will catalogue and predict your movements, creating a near-perfect picture of your entire life.  This information will complement every other piece of information that other tentacles of the Surveillance State is busy capturing.

But its hard, so very hard to stop a process that’s being fed by our addiction to the “dopamine-driven feedback loop” of social media, our addiction to the latest shiny tech, which fuels Silicon Valley to create and innovate, and who thereby does the NSA and the Pentagon favors for favorable treatment in return.

This meandering harangue has been meant to restate just why we oppose total surveillance of our entire lives by our government.  Because governments by their nature murder, enslave, and control.  Total surveillance would give governments an almost limitless ability to accomplish these.  So, we must resist.

Japan Times: Today’s newspapers wouldn’t publish the Pentagon Papers.  Too true, although more specifically today’s establishment newspapers wouldn’t publish them.  They would most likely surface at Wikileaks, with mainstream papers denouncing their release.

Mashable: Pentagon’s proposed nuclear strategy elevates cyberattacks to a terrifying new realm. So a nuclear response to a cyberattack sounds reasonable to the people in charge at the Pentagon.

Washington Times: Report finds ‘chaos’ in Trump’s first travel ban

The Times: Spying fears over Portal, Facebook’s new home camera

Zero Hedge: FBI “loses” five months of text messages between anti-Trump agents

Activist Post: Kentucky House passes bill to put limits on drones, help thwart federal surveillance program

Reason: Tennessee’s haircut cops bust barbers who lack high school diplomas

CNET: What it’s like inside Amazon’s new, futuristic store

Bitcoinist: Judgment Day! Conspiracy group claims bitcoin created by rogue AI

Fascinating–British Psychological Society: Psilocybin plus meditation and spiritual training leads to lasting changes in positive traits

And more: Magic mushrooms: Treating depression without dulling feelings 

ABC News: Oklahoma lawmaker sues private investigator after discovering tracking device on car

Bloomberg: Dire military warnings at odds with Pentagon chief’s shutdown message

Fortune: Section 702: Six more years of surveillance

CNBC: The NSA knows who you are just by the sound of your voice–with tech predating Apple and Amazon

CNET: NSA surveillance programs live on, in case you haven’t noticed

Reason: ‘Fake news’ is not an excuse to regulate the internet

High Times: Is Oklahoma getting ready to vote on medical marijuana?

Libertarian Institute: Trump versus the world

Axios: Google CEO: AI will have bigger impact than discovery of fire

PhysToday: Intercontinental quantum communication achieved

Forbes: What would you see as you fell into a black hole?

All five of Oklahoma’s congressional representative’s rejected surveillance reform, voting to reauthorize the spying that Edward Snowden currently lives in exile for exposing.  Not too surprising, as Tom Cole, James Lankford and the other three Republicans have been nothing more than automated rubber stamps for increased military spending and surveillance powers.

I realize this is week-old news, but it still strikes me as more bleak confirmation that not one spine exists among the five.  I think Oklahoma is ripe for at least one Congressman to have even a quarter of the courage as Amash and Paul have.

Cole himself said he has seen no abuse of 702, but clearly there has been, particularly with the revelation of rampant FISA court abuse.  How could they not have known?  The answer: of course they did.  They just didn’t care.  They just spewed the two-decade old “protect Americans from terrorists” trope to rationalize everything.

Ed: Despite having been absent for four days, about 70% of you are still here reading.  I appreciate that very much.  The lesson I’ve learned is this: don’t use a computer charger equipped for a much more powerful computer on a dinky old Chromebook.  It shall be fried.

The gnawing fear at the back of the mind of many people throughout history has been that we may just be a brain in a vat, being fed impulses, imprisoned in a never-ending dream.  Or merely a creation of someone else’s dream.

The past few years have seen more and more people ask a similar question that appears more likely: are we living in a computer simulation?  Given the frenetic pace of computer graphics, it’s not far-fetched to believe that we are ourselves plugged into some digital “game”, developed sometime in the far future.  What could be the purpose of such a simulation? Maybe we entered the simulation of our own free will, eager to experience life on the eve of some technological revolution.  Maybe we are ourselves AI beings who wish to experience ancient biological life through the eyes of our imperfect creators.

Or we’re the digital copy of a real person living inside an advanced dating app, a la Black Mirror’s episode ‘Hang the DJ’.

Dreams feel real at the time we are experiencing them.  The sensory experience within dreams is almost indistinguishable from waking life. It’s only after the dream that we realize it was “only a dream”.

Typing on this keyboard, drinking this coffee feels real right now.  But in the same way that its difficult to remember dreams, I’ve only had vague memories of “waking life” while inside a dream.

This train of thought brings with it the truth that we would never truly know whether we were in the “real” world, even if we were brought out of the simulation.

Theoretical physicists at Oxford have appeared to definitively laid to rest the notion that we could be living inside a computer simulation.

According to the theorists, simulating various quantum phenomena is impossible in principle, due to the exponential complexity of the number of particles being simulated. “The researchers calculated that just storing information about a couple of hundred electrons would require a computer memory that would physically require more atoms than exist in the universe.”

But why should we assume that the physical laws within the simulation apply also in the “real” world? The universe in the “real” world could be vastly different than what we currently experience.

What’s more, if we are indeed living within a computer simulation, and we also develop our own convincingly real simulation that also allows users to create their own simulations within it, where does it end?  How would we ever know when we finally escaped the simulation and entered the real world?

One thing about the simulation problem, once that doubt enters your mind, it never leaves.

Computer is back, Republic Reborn is back

ACLU: NYPD union’s lawsuit could reverse-engineer body cameras into surveillance tools

Sara Carter: Bombshell House intelligence report details extensive FISA abuse

The Hill: It’s time to take our privacy back from tech companies

The Intercept: When it comes to voice identification, “the NSA reigns supreme”

EFF: EFF to Supreme Court: Protect the privacy of cross-border data

Engadget: China uses facial recognition to monitor ethnic minorities

Venture Beat: Black Mirror’s mind-reading tech could be here sooner than you think

Techdirt: After the ‘Octopus Incident’ White House threatened to to stop ‘menacing logos’ from spy satellites

Alternet: Trump is turning the State Department into a global weapons dealer

FEE: Stop calling it an opioid crisis

Nature News: ‘Dark matter’ DNA influences brain development

While I still adhere to a rudimentary ‘imperfect creator’ theory, I don’t think it shows up in the very first intelligent design textbook.  Sheesh.

Phone blogging has proven impossible thus far.

Defense One: Why the President’s FISA fix is bad news for privacy, good news for Russian agents

Washington Examiner: Rep. Devin Nunes accuses FBI, DOJ of demonstrating abuse of government surveillance programs

Wired: Congress renews FISA, and makes it even worse

Tulsa World: Oklahoma congressmen vote to reauthorize NSA surveillance in opposition to privacy reforms

The Federalist: “Don’t be evil”?  Google is becoming a Police State

Techdirt: Chinese internet users start to rebel against lack of online privacy

Live Science: Wild rumors fly as Pentagon shuts down questions on secretive Zuma mission

The Guardian: Nuclear war became more likely this week–here’s why

Venture Beat: Drone trends to watch in 2018: Big data, flying taxis, and home security

The Conversation: A speed limit for quantum computers?

Vox: What telescopes see when looking at black holes

Keeping it real: High Times: Are aliens watching us because they want our weed?

Useful. For me, anyway. National Review: Five rules for writers