#surveillancestate
"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."
-Walter Scott, c.1808
“You can fool all of the people some of time; you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time.”
-Abraham Lincoln, c.1887
#deception #lies #manipulation #uk #westerncivilization #thewest #elites #19thcentury #quotes #sirwalterscott #abrahamlincoln #tangledweb #usa #propaganda #appliedpsychology #socialengineering #massmedia #informationwarfare #psyops #cia #intelligentsia #elitism #tavistock #elitescions #psychologicalwarfare #economicwar #geopolitics #mi6 #mossad #epstein #blackmail #nsa #surveillancestate #endlesswars #edwardsnowden #julianassange
...from May onwards British subjects of His Majesty will have the privilege of having our right to a private life violated by somebody with two X sex chromosomes instead of an X & Y.
How very progressive of the British establishment to ensure equal rights violation opportunities to women. Congratulations to Anne Keast-Butler on becoming head privacy rights violator of GCHQ.
#annekeastbutler #gchq #privacy #uk #rightsviolations #biggovernment #spying #surveillancestate #intel #mi5 #mi6 #britishgovernment #usa #britishintelligence #intelagencies #informationera #informationwarfare #righttoaprivatelife #elites #elitism #progressivism #neoliberalglobalism #bigbrother
https://www.foxnews.com/world/uk-has-named-first-woman-lead-communications-intelligence-agency-gchq
248 days before he died, Dr Vladimir Zelenko posted the attached post on the gab social media platform.
The post represents a concise analysis of the Western elite's obfuscated power structure as Dr Zelenko perceived it to be.
I can't say if this is accurate or not, but I certainly recognise some elements of it as repeating data points.
#drzelenko #drzevzelenko #zelenko #vladimirzelenko #thewest #elites #westerncivilization #powerstructure #elitism #elitistconspiracy #collusion #orchestration #machiavellianism #socialengineering #propaganda #uk #intelligentsia #corporatism #scions #plutocracy #puppetpoliticians #usa #surveillancestate #technocracy #ai #neoliberalism #neofeudalism #wef #technocraticneofeudalism #control #informationcontrol #controlsystem
Data are Liability: Billion-record stolen Chinese database for sale on breach forum
A threat actor has taken to a forum for news and discussion of data breaches with an offer to sell what they assert is a database containing records of over a billion Chinese civilians – allegedly stolen from the Shanghai Police.
Over the weekend, reports started to surface of a post to a forum at Breached.to. The post makes the following claim:
In 2022, the Shanghai National Police (SHGA) database was leaked. This database contains many TB of data and information on Billions of Chinese citizens.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31986441
Nothing tracks like a police state.
And nothing leaks like a police state.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/05/shanghai_police_database_for_sell/
#DataAreLiability #Shanghai #China #Surveillance #SurveillanceState #DataBreach
Bill Gates releases another new book.
#billgates #usa #microsoft #windows #billandmelindagatesfoundation #uk #CIA #mkultra #spying #ciaasset #os #centralintelligenceagency #lifelog #lifelogproject #datamining #gates #4thamendment #surveillancestate #internetspynetwork #spynetwork #technologicalpanopticon #memes #technocracy #panopticon #meme
The elites are unified in their orchestration of events.
Distractions, manufactured consent, perception management, propaganda, social engineering, applied psychology, information control, AI, algorithmic data manipulation, education indoctrination, economic coercion, censorship, globalism, idea propagation, surveillance capitalism, technocratic plutocracy.
#putin #vladimirputin #ukraine #russia #ukraineconflict #USA #UK #ukrainecrisis #ukraineinvasion #wef #ukrainedistraction #psyop #elites #socialengineering #covid #covid19 #appliedpsychology #mrna #staged #forcedvaccination #kissinger #elites #rockefeller #vaccinemandate #elite #globalism #soros #klausschwab #davos #mediamanipulation #msm #controlledopposition #unifiedelites #eliteunification #surveillancestate
The Victorian Premier says the state is heading for a 'vaccine economy', here's what that might look like
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has sent a clear message as to what the future of the economy looks like in the state, saying proof of double vaccination will now be the price of entry.
#news #politics #Australia #PrisonIsland #SurveillanceState #NewNormal #VaccineEconomy #TheGreatReset #Agenda21 #ForcedVaccinations #VaccinePassports #segregation #HumanRights #NWO #covid #coronavirus
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-06/daniel-andrews-vaccine-passport-double-vaccinated/100435606
#wanted #wantedposter #oldwest #georgewbush #georgebush #wbush #BushJr #georgebushjr #dubya #wmd #wmds #wmdhoax #iraq #iraqwar #911 #911anniversary #911falseflag #surveillance #surveillancestate #USA #warcrime #warcriminal #massmurder #warcrimes #warcriminals #zionism #zionist #zionists #greaterisraelproject #iraqwar2 #syria #syrianwar #Iran #iranianregime #Iranianpuppetregime #iranianhostilities #lies #manipulation #deceit #propaganda #intelagencies
US Domestic Surveillance Disclosures pre-dating Edward Snowden's Revelations
Asking for sources of any current activities met with some resistance at HN. Challenged for any awareness of pre-Snowden programmes, I listed a few I was aware of, off the top of my head:
Regards pre-Snowden, the situation was far more than an "open secret", there were multiple documented projects and methods employed. Among them:
2013: Hemisphere, an AT&T call records database dating to the 1980s accessible by the US DEA. (This was publicised near-simultaneously with Snowden's own 2013 disclosures.) https://www.eff.org/cases/hemisphere
2006: Mark Klein and the Room 641A revelations concerning AT&T's beam splitters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
2005, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe, NSA whistleblower, warrantless surveillance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_official)
2004, Russell Tice, NSA surveillance including of congressional members. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2006/01/why-nsa-whistle-blower-russ-tice-may-be-right.html
There were very strong suspicions around the TIA (total information awareness) and USA PATRIOT ACT (2003, 2001). I recall much chatter about this at the time, and the related FISA court, though little by way of specific details of technological measures and methods involved.
Carnivore, a WinNT workstation-based tool, disclosed ~2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software)
There are telephnic data retention programmes, including MAINWAY (revealed in 2006), containing an estimated over 1.9 trillion call-detail records, and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAINWAY
Project ECHELON, with disclosures of varying aspects from 1972 -- 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
There are earlier periods, notably addressed by the FBI's own COINTELPRO archives (https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro), though for my purposes I'm considering "modern" projects to be circa 1990 onwards. (COINTELPRO and the Church Committee hearings resulted in substantial changes, at least publically, to US domestic surveillance).
And I've compiled a long list of pre-1990 references of concerns regarding significant technologists who'd warned of the risks of information technology as a tool of surveillance and control, largely as no such list seemed extant: https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105074933053020193
I'm well aware that documentation of clandestine and national security issues is difficult to come by, see the TK case for one reason why that is.
But that's also why specific documentation is so valuable and why I'd requested that.
Adapted from an HN comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27184956 )
#surveillance #SurveillanceState #SurveillanceCapitalism #NSA #CIA #FBI #Carnivore #ECHELON #PatriotAct #FISA #MAINWAY #Room614A #ATT #MarkKlein #WilliamBinney #RussellTice #Hemisphere #EdwardSnowden #COINTELPRO #ChurchCommittee
We've been thinking about it wrong: The norm has been Insecurity by obscurity
The Crypto AG CIA backdoor story (2020) clarifies to me much of the neverending flood of "outlaw strong crypto" thinkpieces and "lawful access" (a/k/a mandated backdoors) proposals.
I realised today that the whole #SecurityByObscurity discussion was missing a major insight: For much of the Cold War period, the operational standard has been instead #InsecurityByObscurity
Crypto AG was an allegedly secure system which was, obscure to the public, insecure. And that insecurity (along with fear, suprise, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope), seems to have been a key element of US and #FiveEyes surveillance capabilities from the 1950s onward. (I'm aware Crypto AG's role under the CIA begain ~1970.) More recent stories of package intercepts (where backdoors are installed on specific equipment), zero-day hacks (such as are routinely purchased and exploited by Cellebrite, Palantir, the NSO Group, and others, is the logical extension of Crypto AG methods. As is putting a surveillance device in the pockets of the population that the surveillance targets themselves fight amongst themselves to buy.
Our information systems, technology, devices, and infrastructure are, obscure to us, insecure. And we fall for it again and again.
Because while the cryptography of the NSA and Five Eyes, as well as their counterparts worldwide, is no doubt prodigious, the cheapest way to break through a wall is to go around it. By far.
And virtually all the continuous whinging since the early 1990s about the hazards of emerging strong crypto makes vastly more sense in this context. The agencies know their own strengths, weaknesses, and secret weapons. And have been trying to preserve their advantage. (Even though this ultimately puts us all at vastly greater risk.) Their policy recommendations have been premised on this, even if they've been unwilling to admit this publicly.
But yeah, insecurity by obscurity as an operational norm. Describes much of the present Web as well.
Adapted from an earlier Mastodon thread: https://mastodon.social/@natecull/106112437055287730
#CryptoAG #security #surveillance #surveillanceCapitalism #surveillanceState #infosec #infotech
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EFF: The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption
The metamessage to me, especially in light of the Crypto AG disclosures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-security/cia-crypto-encryption-machines-espionage/), is that backdoors have always been the principle means of signals intelligence.
Intercepting the phones, tapping the lines, listening on broadcasts, surveilling deaddrops, compromising encryption, are all far easier than the computationally hard work of cracking strong crypto.
And LEO / Intel don't like to break a sweat.
#EFF #surveillance #SurveillanceState #SurveillanceCapitalism #FBI #NSA #CIA #FiveEyes #Mossad #MI5 #MI6 #Mossad #GRU
LWN: Tackling the Monopoly Problem
There was a time when people who were exploring computational technology saw it as the path toward decentralization and freedom worldwide. What we have ended up with, instead, is a world that is increasingly centralized, subject to surveillance, and unfree. How did that come to be? In a keynote at the online 2021 linux.conf.au event, Cory Doctorow gave his view of this problem and named its source: monopoly.
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/844102/a23d1543b5a55cae/
Note that this is a shared link created by an LWN subscriber. Please consider subscribing to LWN if you value its content and can afford to do so. The site has served the Linux and Free Software community excellently for decades.
#CoryDoctorow #Pluralistic #Monopoly #Decentralisation #Centralisation #Surveillance #SurveillanceCapitalism #SurveillanceState #LinuxConfAU #LWN
Data Facilitates Surveillance, Privacy Violation, and Manipulation Directly Through Increased Efficiences
Digitisation and distribution (to multiple agencies, organisations, and firms) has been ongoing mostly since the 1960s, though accelerating greatly as disk storage costs passed through the threshold of personal-budget levels in the late 1990s.
I'd been working with industry data in the early 1990s, when several analytic departments at a mid-sized firm might share a couple of gigabytes of mincomputer storage. At a conference during the 1990s, in an audience of several hundred data analysts, only a few hands went up for dealing with GB-scale datasets (the raised hand representing telecoms data as I recall). I realised circa 2000 that storage capable of storing a few hundred bytes data (plenty for a basic dossier) on every individual in a large country, or soon the world, would be within a modest household budget. Shortly afterward, the first news stories of data brokers started appearing, as well as Total Information Awareness, often contracting with those same data brokers.
Early social networking sites were beginning to apply collaborative-filtering moderation systems, which I quickly realised, having helped in the design of several myself, were themselves prodigious personal preferences data collection systems on the part of reviewers --- rating systems like many swords cut two ways; reviewers rate content, but ratings and content preferences also rate the reviewers. (An interesting twist on the Quis custodiet ipsos custodes question.)
In 1900, the only routinely digitised mass citizen data were US Census tabulations, updated decadally and not generally accessible. By 1960, telephone, banking, and airlines data (through SABRE) were digitised, largely as with Census data, on punch cards. Tape and further expansion to credit, insurance, and utility data developed by the 1970s, though punch cards remained in heavy use through the 1980s. The first widespread data privacy outcries came in the 1970s, see for example Newsweek's 1970 article, "The Assault on Privacy (1970)" (PDF), though early infotech pioneers such as packet-switched networking pioneer Paul Baran were writing on data, surveillance, privacy, and ethical concerns in the 1960s. (An aside; those publications are freely available online by RAND at my request.) Marketing and advertising were increasingly represented by the 1990s, as well as healthcare data, though records there remained (and still remain) highly fragmented.
By the 1990s, previously offline court and legal documents began getting digitised in bulk (a practice begun years earlier), sometimes by local courts, more frequently by aggreggation services such as LexisNexis, Westlaw, JustCite, HeinOnline, Bloomberg Law, VLex, LexEur, and others who took advantage of pubic access to compile and store their own aggreggations. Often literally by sending individuals to those rural courthouses mentioned above, and recording or duplicating records, one at a time, from clerks.
Access costs matter. And by costs I'm referring to all inputs, not just money: time, knowledge, rates of availability, periodic caps (e.g., 4 records/hr., but a daily cap of 8 records, 16/week, 32/month, effectively imposing an 8 hr/month access restriction), travel, parsing or interpretation, ability to compile independent archives (rather than relying on the source or origin archive), etc.
Aggregation itself is an invasion of privacy. Reduced search, parsing, and inference-drawing costs enable observation, surveillance, and manipulation.
Reduced costs don't simply facilitate existing uses, but facilitate new, lower-value, activities. This is a rephrasing of the Jevons paradox; increased efficiency increases consumption. Trying to reduce consumption through greater efficiency is like fucking for virginity. Another characteristic is that many of these new uses are of very limited, or negative, social benefit. Very often of fraud, or predatory practices.
Technnology is far less an equaliser than a power multiplier, amplifying inequalities. Information technology especially so.
Data corrupts. Absolute data corrupts absolutely.
#data #InfoTech #surveillance #SurveillanceState #SurveillanceCapitalism #privacy #manipulation #DataAggregation #JevonsParadox #ActonsLaw #PaulBaran
Hunting the Hunters: How We Identified Navalny’s FSB Stalkers
... Due to porous data protection measures in Russia, it only takes some creative Googling (or Yandexing) and a few hundred euros worth of cryptocurrency to be fed through an automated payment platform, not much different than Amazon or Lexis Nexis, to acquire telephone records with geolocation data, passenger manifests, and residential data. For the records contained within multi-gigabyte database files that are not already floating around the internet via torrent networks, there is a thriving black market to buy and sell data. The humans who manually fetch this data are often low-level employees at banks, telephone companies, and police departments. Often, these data merchants providing data to resellers or direct to customers are caught and face criminal charges. For other batches of records, there are automated services either within websites or through bots on the Telegram messaging service that entirely circumvent the necessity of a human conduit to provide sensitive personal data.
For example, to find a huge collection of personal information for Anatoliy Chepiga — one of the two GRU officers involved in the poisoning of Sergey Skripal and his daughter — we only need to use a Telegram bot and about 10 euros. Within 2-3 minutes of entering Chepiga’s full name and providing a credit card via Google Pay or a payment service like Yandex Money, a popular Telegram bot will provide us with Chepiga’s date of birth, passport number, court records, license plate number, VIN number, previous vehicle ownership history, traffic violations, and frequent parking locations in Moscow. A sample of the baseline information provided can be seen below, with key personal details censored. ...
https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2020/12/14/navalny-fsb-methodology
h/t @Glyn Moody
#surveillance #DataAreLiability #SurveillanceCapitalism #SurveillanceState #bellingcat #privacy #russia
44 bits
So, a redditor tracked down the location of a monolith placed in the Utah desert a few years ago, recently discovered by authorities, who did not disclose where it was.[1]
I looked at rock type (Sandstone), color (red and white - no black streaks like found on higher cliffs in Utah), shape (more rounded indicating a more exposed area and erosion), the texture of the canyon floor (flat rock vs sloped indicating higher up in a watershed with infrequent water), and the larger cliff/mesa in the upper background of one of the photos. I took all that and lined it up with the flight time and flight path of the helicopter - earlier in the morning taking off from Monticello, UT and flying almost directly north before going off radar (usually indicating it dropped below radar scan altitude. From there, I know I am looking for a south/east facing canyon with rounded red/white rock, most likely close to the base of a larger cliff/mesa, most likely closer to the top of a watershed, and with a suitable flat area for an AS350 helicopter to land. Took about 30 minutes of random checks around the Green River/Colorado River junction before finding similar terrain. From there it took another 15 minutes to find the exact canyon. Yes... I'm a freak.
-- /u/Bear__Fucker @ reddit
It's relatively well known that 33 distinct bits is enough to uniquely identify any individual person now alive on Earth.[2]
Geospatially, assuming 10m resolution, 44 bits is enough to identify any unique location on Earth's land surface. 46 bits buys you the oceans as well.
Searching for a ~1m^2^ monolith visually within a 10m^2^ square is reasonable.
GNU units:
You have: ln((.3 * 4 * (earthradius^2) * pi)/10m^2)/ln(2)
Definition: 43.798784
You have: ln((1 * 4 * (earthradius^2) * pi)/10m^2)/ln(2)
Definition: 45.535749
49 bits gives 1m accuracy, 63 bits 1cm, 69 bits 1mm. Anywhere on Earth, land or sea.
For comparison, cellphone positioning accuracy is typically 8--600m:
- 3G iPhone w/ A-GPS ~ 8 meters
- 3G iPhone w/ wifi ~ 74 meters
- 3G iPhone w/ Cellular positioning ~ 600 meters
https://communityhealthmaps.nlm.nih.gov/2014/07/07/how-accurate-is-the-gps-on-my-smart-phone-part-2/
https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/
The power of disparate data traces to rapidly narrow down search spaces on a specific item, individual, or location, is what makes #BigData aggreggation so powerful, and terrifying.
Notes:
https://old.reddit.com/r/geoguessr/comments/jzw628/help_me_find_this_obelisk_in_remote_utah/gdfbzee/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25199879
https://web.archive.org/web/20160304012305/33bits.org/about/
#privacy4 #location #33bits #44bits #data #deanonimization #DataAreLiability #surveillance #SurveillanceState #SurveillanceCapitalism