Birds of a Feather: The So-Called Internet “Privacy Activists,” the Intelligence Services and Big Tech
Yasha Levine’s recent book “Surveillance Valley” is a MUST READ! Relatively short and very much to the point, this volume–subtitled “The Secret Military History of the Internet”–chronicles the fact that the Internet is a weapon, developed as part of the same group of overlapping DARPA/Pentagon projects as Agent Orange. In posts and programs to come, we will more fully develop the basic themes set forth in the excerpt recapped in this post: 1 )The Internet is a weapon, developed for counter-insurgency purposes. 2) Big Tech firms network with the very intelligence services they publicly decry. 3) Big Tech firms that data mine their customers on a nearly unimaginable scale do so as a direct, operational extension of the very surveillance function upon which the Internet is predicated. 4) The technologies touted by the so-called “Privacy Activists” such as Edward Snowden and Jacob Applebaum were developed by the very intelligence services they are supposed to deflect. 5) The technologies touted by the so-called “Privacy Activists” such as Edward Snowden and Jacob Applebaum–such as the Tor Internet function and the Signal mobile phone app– are readily accessible to the very intelligence services they are supposed to deflect. 6) The organizations that promote the alleged virtues of Snowden, Applebaum, Tor, Signal et al are linked to the very intelligence services they would have us believe they oppose. 7) Big Tech firms embrace “Internet Freedom” as a distraction from their own willful and all-embracing data mining and their ongoing conscious collaboration with the very intelligence services they publicly decry.
Cyber Attribution, the Macron hacks, and the Existential Threat of Unwarranted Certainty
Did you hear the big new hacking news? It’s the The news about ‘Fancy Bear’ already getting ready to wage a new hacking campaign against US politicians? If not, here’s a brief summary: Trend Micro, a Japanese cybersecurity firm, just issued a new report purporting to show that ‘Fancy Bear’ has already set up multiple phishing websites intended to capture the login credentials to the US Senate’s email system. And Trend Micro is 100 percent confident this is the work of ‘Fancy Bear’, the Russian military intelligence hacking team. What led to Trend Micro’s 100 percent certainty that these phishing sites were set up by ‘Fancy Bear’? It appears to be based on the similarity of this operation to the Macron email hack that impacted hit French election last year. The same hack that the French cybersecurity agency said was so unsophisticated that any reasonably skilled hackers could have pulled them off. And the same hacks comically included the name of a Russian government security contractor in the meta-data and were traced back to Andrew ‘weev’ Auernheimer. That’s the hack that this current Senate phishing operation strongly mimics that led to Trend Micro’s 100 percent certainty that this is the work of ‘Fancy Bear.’ So how credible is this 100 percent certain cyber attribution? Well, it’s possible Trend Micro is correct, it’s also extremely possible they aren’t correct. That’s going to be the topic if this post, because Trend Micro is far from alone in making cyber attribution an exercise in gambling with existential risks.
The 99% Dynamic
Fascism and the Dangers of Economic Concentration 1980 broadcast highlights economic concentration and its historical relationship to fascism. Read more »
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