REPUBLIC REBORN

Before the development and rapid evolution of the world wide web, the information we received about the state of the world, our leaders and their activities, were taken at face value. There was no way to verify the facts, weight alternative opinions or that of the rest of the consumers of the news. Whatever was given, either by radio, television, or newspaper, was taken. There was no alternative.

Fast forward to the present. A seemingly endless array of news and opinion sites pepper the web, giving the reader virtually unlimited choices on what to read. Anyone can start a blog for free. Freedom of the press has come to mean something revolutionary, a revolution greater than that inaugurated by Gutenberg. And with the news now comes another glory of the internet era: the comments section. Here is where the reader can eviscerate Establishment shills, and endlessly debate fellow readers. No where in the history of civilization has this been possible. It becomes almost impossible to overstate the revolution that the internet embodies.

The internet finally wrested control of information away from the Establishment and placed it into the hands of the deplorables. Not Trump’s deplorables, but rather what the Elites surely refer to everyone of us as, the taxpayers, those with normal jobs and normal lives, those without political leverage or hidden power, those who make the world that they control, turn. They have never forgiven us for our use of the internet, and the short work it has made of their designs for our world. And they’ve worked night and day to find ways of taking the internet away from us. Of course, just shutting it down would be to overt. They know that for their plan to be effective, it must be indirect to the point of invisibility. Whether it be herding us into what Matt Drudge dubbed ‘internet ghettos’, such as Facebook and Twitter, where content can be controlled, the plan must not appear as a plan at all.

And now we have Julian Assange recently warning us of the greatest threat to open discourse online, that of the use of artificial intelligence as a tool of internet censorship. From his Twitter he wrote on January 17th:

A nexus point is being reached, with total surveillance removing our ability to hide from our governments, and artificial intelligence silently reclaiming control over the flow of information online merging, with propaganda immaculately embedded within the flow.

The most perfect prison is one that we don’t realize is there at all.

Oklahoma City and Norman-area have one of nation’s highest chromium-6 levels in public water supplies

Posted on January 23, 2018January 23, 2018 by S. Smith

Good god. Apparently the ‘Erin Brockovich’ carcinogen is still floating around in the water we drink and clean ourselves with, threatening our health and that of those around us.

Image result for hexavalent chromium

The cancer-causing industrial chemical, hexavalent chromium, is a popular industrial compound, now finding a second life in our groundwater and our bodies. According to the interactive map, Cleveland and Oklahoma counties have some of the highest concentrations of the chemical in their public water supplies. Moral of the story: drink Fiji?

h/t Catarina

0/24/18 Overnight links

Posted on January 23, 2018January 23, 2018 by S. Smith

Media Post: Supreme Court to hear arguments in Microsoft email privacy case in February

What have I been saying? The Verge: Artificial intelligence is going to supercharge surveillance

Washington Examiner: This email privacy bill is wildly popular. So why won’t it pass?

Washington Times: FBI text messages lost because of ‘misconfiguration issues’ that perplex security experts

Fox News: FBI’s ‘missing’ five months of text messages is worse than Watergate

Committee to Protect Journalists: How US vote to extend NSA program could expose journalists to surveillance

The Hill: After ‘foreign surveillance law’, Congress must demand answers from intelligence community

Bitcoin.com: Is privacy possible in the digital era?

Planet Biometrics: Voiceprints raise surveillance fears

Motherboard: Meet the activist developer who helps journalists protect data and sources

District Sentinel: Pentagon allowed to keep Congress in the dark over Afghan human rights abuses

U-Today: A new kind of propulsion system that doesn’t need a propellant.

01/23/18 Overnight links

Posted on January 22, 2018 by S. Smith

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

01/22/18 Morning links

Posted on January 22, 2018 by S. Smith

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

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

Abort the Surveillance State before its too late

Posted on January 21, 2018January 21, 2018 by S. Smith

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.

Image result for total surveillance

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.

01/22/18 Overnight links

Posted on January 21, 2018January 21, 2018 by S. Smith

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