The off-topic forum
Governments Will Use Whatever Technology Is Available To Combat Their Primary Enemy – Their Own Population
By interestrateripoff, June 19, 2013 in The off-topic forum
interestrateripoff
Carry on banking.....
Location:Ponzi Land
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/19/nsa-surveillance-attack-american-citizens-noam-chomsky
The actions of the US government in spying on its and other countries' citizens have been sharply criticised by Noam Chomsky, the prominent political thinker, as attacks on democracy and the people.
"Governments should not have this capacity. But governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy – which is their own population," he told the Guardian.
In his first public comment on the scandal that has enveloped the US, UK and other governments, as well as internet companies such as Google and Microsoft, Chomsky said he was not overly surprised technology and corporations were being used in this way.
"This is obviously something that should not be done. But it is a little difficult to be too surprised by it," he said. "They [governments and corporations] take whatever is available, and in no time it is being used against us, the population. Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich."
Chomsky, who has strongly supported the Occupy movement and spoken out against the Obama administration's use of drones, warned that young people were much less shocked at being spied on and did not view it as such a problem.
"Polls in the US indicate there is generational issue here that someone ought to look into – my impression is that younger people are less offended by this than the older generation. It may have to do with the exhibitionist character of the internet culture, with Facebook and so on," he said. "On the internet, you think everything is going to be public."
If people are liberated about what they post can it really be used against them? It's only going to become and issue when someone turns up and threatens them, which when everyone is doing it you have "safety" in numbers as it's impossible to jail everyone.
Although if you record and log everything the information becomes meaningless and you can't process it all.
http://www.mobilemastinfo.com/stats-and-facts/
The average UK consumer sends 50 texts a week, with over 150 billion text messages sent in 2011.
The shear volume of the inane drivel that will pass through the network means it's impossible to effectively monitor.
Polls in the US indicate there is generational issue here that someone ought to look into – my impression is that younger people are less offended by this than the older generation.
Chomsky is delusional. His mind-set is a function of baby-boomer America -- safe and coddled in a world of jobs-for-life and any foreign threat contained on the other side of a vast ocean. America is no longer the reigning super power and the world is filled with conflicts. Young people see that.
BalancedBear
That may be so, but the world has been filled with conflicts for a long time. However it becomes a bit hypocritical for the US and UK to go to war around the world to introduce "freedom and democracy" when they are removing freedom all the time from their own citizens.
Young people are less likely to have had information held by the state used against them. The long you live, the more information the state has, the more likely they come to you about something.
HMRC are monitoring Facebook just for starters.
About Me: Minskyite
http://www.guardian....ns-noam-chomsky
http://www.mobilemas...tats-and-facts/
When you can record and log everything forever then you can process a much smaller cross-section of the population retroactively at your leisure. That's what Bluffdale is intended to accomplish. 'Everything Forever' should be the NSA's motto.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/14/nsa-utah-data-facility
Mormon country between the Wasatch and Oquirrh mountains, nestled on the outskirts of Bluffdale (population 7,598), it was designed to be largely anonymous. Instead, after Guardian disclosures of data-mining programs involving millions of Americans, the Utah Data Center provokes an urgent question: what exactly will it do?The NSA says it will not illegally eavesdrop on Americans but is otherwise vague. Its scale is not in doubt. Since January 2011 a reported 10,000 labourers have built four 25,000-sq ft halls filled with servers and cables, plus an additional 900,000 sq ft of space for technical support and administration. Generators and huge fuel and water tanks will make the site self-sustaining in an emergency.
Outside experts disagreed on the centre's potential. Some said it will just store data. Others envisaged a capacity to not just store but analyse and break codes, enabling technicians here to potentially snoop on the entire population for decades to come.
William Binney, a mathematician who worked at the NSA for almost 40 years and helped automate its worldwide eavesdropping, said Utah's computers could store data at the rate of 20 terabytes – the equivalent of the Library of Congress – per minute. "Technically it's not that complicated. You just need to work out an indexing scheme to order it."
Binney, who left the agency in 2001 and blew the whistle on its domestic spying, said the centre could absorb and store data for "hundreds of years" and allow agencies such as the FBI to retroactively use the information.
He said the centre will likely have spare capacity for "brute force attacks" – using speed and data hoards to detect patterns and break encrypted messages in the so-called deep web where governments, corporations and other organisations keep secrets. There would be no distinction between domestic and foreign targets. "It makes no difference anymore to them."
James Bamford, author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, said the public had yet to grasp the significance of Utah's data-mining. "It's basically a hard-drive. It's also a cloud, a warehouse. It'll be storing not just text and audio but pictures and video. There's a lackadaisical attitude to this. People pay no attention until it's too late." Bamford wrote a cover story about the centre for Wired last year.
Brewster Kahle, a co-founder of the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based non-profit that hoovers up knowledge in a digital equivalent of the library of Alexandria, said technology facilitated near-ubiquitous snooping. "If one had the opportunity to collect all the voice traffic in the US it would cost less than the Pentagon spends on paperclips. Storage these days is trivial, it's not a problem."
We should all make sure we include words the stasi seem particularly interested in like "jihad" "god is great" "EDL/BNP" "Kill Blair" and other words that might set off their snooping alarms. If we all send these words, they'll have to monitor every text, phone call, internet communication and so on. Which of course cant be done.
Nuggets Mahoney
Location:The Friend Zone
About Me:Doesn't believe anything. Has many suspicions.
There's absolutely no need to process all the data collected for that collecting to be an effective mechanism of control
There's always the possibility that it is your data which is being focused on. Consequently, you end up getting into the habit of policing your own thoughts and actions, just in case They are watching you (wiki: Panopticon).
As a bonus feature, if TPTB decide to fit someone up They will have a back-catalogue of material on each and every one of us they can selectively edit at leisure.
Orwell got it years ago. Even though Nineteen Eighty-Four is often billed as being about the technology of surveillance, the psychology and conditioning associated with being surveilled is more profound
Exactly. Foucault's work on this is very interesting, from what I remember of it!
The psychology of the Panopticon was thus that prisoners would never be certain whether or not they were being observed. Its significance for Foucault was that it reflected much of the philosophy of observation that has become a guiding principle of policing in the modern state. The use of video cameras both in cities and on roads employs the same principle of observation, so that the citizen is never entirely sure whether or not they are being watched.
Foucault & Panopticism
Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.
Wondering why you haven't seen more about the NSA story in the media ... ?
MoD serves news outlets with D notice over surveillance leaks
Defence officials issued a confidential D notice to the BBC and other media groups in an attempt to censor coverage of surveillance tactics employed by intelligence agencies in the UK and US.
Editors were asked not to publish information that may "jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel" in the warning issued on 7 June, a day after the Guardian first revealed details of the National Security Agency's (NSA) secret Prism programme.
http://m.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/defence-d-bbc-media-censor-surveillance-security
fluffy666
Location:Bath-ish
I'd beg to differ on the 'can't be done' bit.. pattern recognition, even this kind of very complicated and non-obvious recognition, can be automated, and if it can be automated then the processing power is there.
If the above is a problem, all you need is a few high-profile cases of people being seriously harassed for a year or two as a result, that will cut the volume down.
Switching of your telescreen (sorry, facebook account) is an act of great suspicion..
This is true. To some extent, there are only two ways around this.. a very well enforced 'right to privacy' - very hard to achieve - or the opposite, a completely transparent society in which absolutely everything is public. Bear in mind that the transparent society applies to everyone.. which means that the government as well.
thecrashingisles
Suspended in gif
I've characterised it in the past as the celebrification of ordinary people.
Previously you had to be really quite famous to have a level of intrusion into your personal life and a paper trail of all the things you've done so that someone who'd never met you might be able to comment on intimate details of your past. Now that is the reality for all of us, but it doesn't mean that all privacy has gone, just that if you want privacy you have to specifically seek it out.
okaycuckoo
Vaclav Havel comes at it from a different angle - the state co-opts everyone into living the lie through ritual, especially through consumerism.
"...they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system."
The attempt to live in truth attracts persecution. But the attempt is inevitable, and the powerless can engage even though they have no politics.
He was talking about the Prague Spring and Charter 77 - inspired many in the Solidarnosc movement. But I think his main criticism was of big states in the west, with state communism being just a sub-set.
I like the idea of the individual being able to cut himself off, not necessarily in a political way but at the level of awareness. No, not sleep.
http://en.wikipedia....f_the_Powerless