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Big Brother 2016: Beyond Orwell’s wildest dreams

By Sam Gerrans  | RT | June 8, 2016

Media is doling out in bite-sized bits what we already knew: we are being tracked and traced, recorded and stored.

The Guardian recently told us that – shock – Google is storing lots of information about us; meanwhile, the wildly different Independent gently awakens us to the fact that Facebook is doing something almost identical. Both articles contain instructions on how to appear to thwart these intrusions.

Oh well, click, click, yawn. Safe again.

An Orwellian present

Most people who read my column will have read Orwell’s 1984. And most who haven’t will have seen the film (the one with John Hurt, I hope). If you haven’t done either, go and do one of them right now.

Orwell’s famous dystopian vision describes a world in which the State knows everything about you. He had entitled his book The Last Man – meaning by that: The last true man left on earth. It was changed – perhaps fortuitously – by the publisher.

The book fed a slew of references into the culture, seemingly understood even by those who had never read it: Big Brother, Doublespeak, Sex Crime, Winston Smith.

The world Winston inhabits is physically viler and more obviously brutal that ours – at least if you live outside the perimeters of the wars the US is waging directly or indirectly. Its architecture and ambiance are, likewise, orders of magnitude darker and more depressing than ours – parts of inner cities excepted.

Orwell’s Doublespeak is more directly relevant to our experience today. With things now routinely called by something other than their proper names – men ‘identifying’ as women, women ‘identifying’ as men, men ‘identifying’ as dogs, and forty-six-year-old fathers ‘identifying’ as six-year-old girls – our world is littered with an increasing number of obvious truths which must be resolutely ignored on the grounds of political necessity.

Doublespeak has hamstrung academia – rendering whole swathes of it inoperative, and much of the rest of it either irrelevant, farcical or pernicious.

In our day-to-day exchanges it has resulted in smile-fronted loneliness and lurking suspicion as necessary features of a life wherein those of us who comment openly upon the Spandex-coated bars of our prison are treated as pariahs and lepers.

As in Orwell’s world, our language is undergoing a thinning process and morphing into a ghettoized Newspeak and Twitteresque literary shorthand. Our grandparents knew what it was to speak and write well because they acknowledged an objective standard. Those who attained it were regarded as exemplars, and those who had not could see what remained to be done. Now, as in so much else, mediocrity and approximation are defended as acceptable standards; simply noticing one’s own shortcomings is elitist – and, therefore, contemptible – while commenting on another’s is an outright sin.

The result is a common language attenuated to the point where being correctly understood is increasingly difficult, and the scope for being wrongfully construed almost unlimited.

But here the overlap in terms of content between our world and Orwell’s thins out in favor of a stark – and for some disarming – stylistic dissonance.

Orwell’s world is bleak. It is dark. The walls are covered – at best – by poorly applied institutional paint and creeping mold. The lights hang by a rat-eaten wire and flicker erratically, serving only – to plunder Milton – to discover sights of woe, regions of sorrow, doleful shades. Orwell’s “boot stamping on a human face – forever” is congruent in Hollywood terms with the scenery.

But our world is not like that. At least, not yet. Much of it is shiny and manicured – and not only for the technocrats and Inner Party members, but also for the drones of the Outer Party like Winston Smith.

Today, Smith does not wear dungarees and inhabit cold, dark corners creeping with vermin. He wears clothes which look something like what he sees on TV. He makes his car repayments. True, what he buys has the obsolescence of Orwell’s world, but that is due to a design philosophy geared to keep the drones shopping, rather than a simple inability to produce at all.

These seeming contradictions are difficult to process. A system which tortures you and stamps on your face might still be identified by the proles in their current state of conditioning as an enemy. But boot-stamping is not our experience – again, at least not yet.

The Big Brother of our experience has a public relations department and a team of designers with bed-head haircuts working on more palatable and fabulous ways to sell you servitude. Our prison does not simply consist of bars. It consists of hi-tech, ergonomically designed, ambient-adjustable bars. And it is policed by people who want you to call them by their first name; who are trained to seem to agree with you; who sit patiently when you talk, and then tell you to have a nice day.

If this seems unconnected with your current worldview, consider that some of the highest-profile puppets we vote for recently attended the opening of the Gotthard Tunnel, Switzerland – without batting an eyelid.


Online 1984

Our online experience broadly resembles our offline experience.

Sure, if you are deep in the bowels of Badnet – downloading a program you just discovered you really need but don’t want to pay for from a site featuring languages you don’t understand and from which windows with images of scantily dressed females jump out erratically at you – then you expect nasties. It feels dodgy and dangerous – and it is.

But Facebook and Google don’t feel like that. They are shiny, convenient heavens generated by serried ranks of earnest, enthusiastic angels in love with what they do. They love you, too. They don’t love you individually, but they love you mathematically; they love you when enough of you say the same thing to them for it to be incrementally advantageous to do something about your prayers. The world they produce feels professional and safe, something like a cross between a business park, a shopping mall where everything is free, and a children’s nursery.

This does not feel like a place where boots stamp on faces forever.

Collecting data

A common misconception about this ergonomic, customer-service Big Brother decked out in primary colors is that he couldn’t possibly watch everyone at the time.

But it doesn’t work like that. Mostly, he doesn’t care what you are doing on a day-to-day basis.

When databases were created in the 1970s, storing stuff was very expensive. That’s why they used the relational data model: it could cram more stuff into less space.

Now storing stuff costs nothing. I bought a 16 GB USB memory stick for the price of two cups of coffee last week. So they are not watching you. They are storing what you do.

Firstly, in case they need it. As morals, mores and norms are re-engineered and hemorrhage and coalesce in new configurations and are downloaded as normative updates by a population unable to concentrate or remember, everyone eventually will be a criminal – at least retrospectively. There is no future-proofing compliance with this new system of control. No matter how quickly you take the upgrades in Newthink, proof of your Oldthink will be accessible and visible to those who care to use it against you.

Secondly, they are building profiles. They want to know who the troublemakers are.

Those at the helm couldn’t care less what you think currently. If you are intelligent and happen to have spent your time online researching rather than looking at compilations of top goal-scoring moments, pornography, or highly pixelated editions of the Simpsons’ back catalog, that is likely to have rendered you a social outcast sheltering under the bridge of your own Cassandra complex yelling at random passing cars. So they don’t care about you – at least, not yet.

What they are on the lookout for in the current phase is a rogue idea. They are afraid that some bright individual will find the solar plexus of the psychological control grid and start jumping up and down on it. And they are also making sure existing powerful entities don’t go off the reservation of what is agreed by the guiding think tanks and conclaves of the mighty.

What to do?

We incline toward fight or flight. Many feel their security lies in keeping their heads down, by conforming. While I understand the feeling, my opinion is that no amount of conformity will be enough to placate what is coming. This system does not simply want conformity – although it does require it – it will not rest until it has your homage. For myself, my mind is made up: I will not bow to the new idol.

Armchair heroism is easy, it is true. But I know one thing: Room 101 will hold much less terror for me if I ever have to enter it, if I know then that I stood up now and spoke out while I could, leveraging what intelligence God saw fit to give me.

And that is something no boot can stamp out of existence.

Sam Gerrans is an English writer, translator, support counselor and activist. He also has professional backgrounds in media, strategic communications and technology. He is driven by commitment to ultimate meaning, and focused on authentic approaches to revelation and realpolitik.

@SamGerrans

June 9, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , | 1 Comment

European Commission’s Hate Speech Deal With Companies Will Chill Speech

By Jillian York | EFF | June 3, 2016

A new agreement between the European Commission and four major U.S. companies—Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft—went into effect yesterday. The agreement will require companies to “review the majority of valid notifications for removal of hate speech in less than 24 hours and remove or disable access to such content,” as well as “educate and raise awareness” with their users about the companies’ guidelines.

The deal was made under the Commission’s “EU Internet Forum,” launched last year as a means to counter what EDRi calls “vaguely-defined ‘terrorist activity and hate speech online.’” While some members of civil society were able to participate in discussions, they were excluded from the negotiations that led to the agreement, says EDRi.

The agreement has been met with opposition by a number of groups, including EDRi (of which we’re a member), Access Now, and Index on Censorship, all of which have expressed concerns that the deal with stifle freedom of expression. The decision has also sparked debate on social media, with a wide variety of individuals and groups opposing the decision under the hashtag #IStandWithHateSpeech.

But you don’t have to stand with hate speech to stand against this decision. There are several reasons to oppose this Orwellian agreement. First, while Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights allows states to limit freedom of expression under select circumstances, such limitations are intended to be the exception, and are permitted only to protect the following:

  1. The rights or reputations of others,

  2. national security,

  3. public order,

  4. public health, or

  5. morals.

These limits must also meet a three-part test as defined by the ICCPR: be defined by law; have legitimate aim; and be truly necessary. While some of the speech that concerns the Commission may very well qualify as illegal under some countries’ laws, the method by which they’ve sought to limit it will surely have a chilling effect on free speech.

In addition, as EDRi points out, despite a lengthy negotiation between companies and the Commission, “hate speech” remains vaguely-defined. Companies have been tasked with taking the lead on determining what constitutes hate speech, with potentially disastrous results.

In fact, social media companies have an abysmal track record when it comes to regulating any kind of speech. As Onlinecensorship.org’s research shows, speech that is permitted by companies’ terms of service is often removed, with users given few paths to recourse. Users report experiencing bans from Facebook for 24 hours to up to 30 days if the company determines they’ve violated the Community Standards—which, in many cases, the user has not. Requiring companies to review complaints within 24 hours will almost surely result in the removal of speech that would be legal in Europe.

By taking decision-making outside of the democratic system and into backrooms, and granting corporations even greater control, the European Commission is ensuring a chill on online speech.

June 3, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Why Today’s Privacy-Invading Online Ecosystem May Not Last

By Jay Stanley | ACLU | May 31, 2016

In recent years we have seen the growth of an enormous infrastructure for routine commercial surveillance on the internet. This infrastructure includes not only “free” advertising-based services like Google and Facebook, but also a largely invisible system of ad networks that track people across the different sites they visit. While most people are not familiar with the extent of tracking and/or are uncomfortable with it, the advertising industry would like to normalize this surveillance and have us believe that humanity has reached some new phase where privacy is not as important as it once was.

I have seen this firsthand in the current battle over whether the FCC should extend longstanding privacy protections from old communications networks like the telephone, to the newest communications network, broadband internet service.

As I have discussed before, when an American picks up the phone to call a suicide hotline, an outreach service for gay teens, or a cancer doctor, he or she doesn’t have to worry that the phone company will sell that information to others, thanks to a privacy law (section 222 of the Communications Act) that prohibits such privacy invasions. There is no reason why that same privacy protection should not apply to the internet, which has superseded the telephone system as the most important communications network in Americans’ lives. Chairman Tom Wheeler of the FCC is moving to do just this — apply the traditional privacy protections of the Communications Act to broadband internet access service — and on Friday the ACLU filed comments with the FCC supporting that agency’s proposal.

The influence and example set by the advertising-based services that use the internet have loomed large in the efforts of industry to convince the FCC not to apply the law as clearly written. And some of the people I’ve discussed broadband privacy with have just shrugged their shoulders at the issue, as if privacy has already been so compromised online that one more set of rules won’t really make a difference.

The broadband providers are trying to milk that attitude for all it’s worth. They’re asking the FCC not to enforce the law precisely because they want to get in the game — grab short-term profits by monitoring communications as they provide internet service, just like many of the companies that use the internet do. They are pointing to the Googles and Facebooks of the world and saying, “why should we be subject to stricter rules than they are?”

It’s a big mistake to view things that way. There is a fundamental difference between the destinations at the edges of the network that people choose to use online, and can abandon for a competitor virtually at the click of a mouse, and the internet infrastructure itself. Broadband providers have the potential to monitor not just one area of a customer’s internet use, but all of them. We pay for broadband, it is not a free, ad-supported service. And the state of competition among broadband carriers (oligopolistic at best) is such that they have significant market power, and even where equivalent competitive options are available, the switching costs can be considerable. Most importantly, perhaps, the broadband providers are clearly covered by those privacy protections in the Communications Act, and the edge providers are not.

But there’s one more big reason that we should not consider the online advertising system to be a normalized part of life: it is far from clear that it is here to stay. As we stressed to the FCC in our comments, the online ecosystem is a fluid, rapidly changing environment, where consumers can stampede from one web service to another at a whim, where empires rise and fall seemingly overnight (for example Myspace, Friendster, Netscape, RealNetworks, Orkut, and Digg), or across a decade (for example AOL or Yahoo). The ad-based regime of today may look completely different in a few years.

There’s reason to think it will. While some communications infrastructures have been regularly spied upon from time to time throughout history, in the end people need, and always demand, privacy. As historian David Kahn put it, invasions of privacy contradict

a long evolution toward the secrecy of communications. Centuries ago, people in England, France and the German states fought for the right to send letters without their being opened by the ‘black chambers’ of absolutist monarchs.

Across Europe, Kahn writes,

the public knew about the letter-opening and hated it. The pre-revolutionary French assembly, the Estates-General, received complaints from all regions of France and from all classes of society about this invasion of their thoughts. A month after the fall of the Bastille, Article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man held that citizens may write with freedom — in effect nullifying the right of the government to read letters. In the United States, the 1792 law establishing the Post Office forbade its agents from illegally opening the mail entrusted to it.

In 1794 Prussia enacted a law punishing letter-opening, Kahn writes, and “other states of Germany and elsewhere in Europe followed.” In 1844 the British Parliament “exploded” when an Italian visitor learned his letters had been opened, and the resulting “uproar” ended the practice.

More recently, the revelations about wholesale spying by the NSA have created a new firestorm of controversy—and a worldwide movement toward increasing the protection of privacy through both political and technological means.

In the end, people demand privacy. Confidentiality and control over the information about oneself that one disseminates are an inherent part of human life, and privacy is a core human need. When communications media are not regarded as trustworthy and private, people seek out other means of communicating — or demand change in the media they do use.

Often there is a lag, sometimes substantial, between when people first lose their privacy and when they begin to understand and resent that loss, and demand its correction. It is just this lag that the advertising industry is currently depending upon in today’s online edge-provider ecosystem. But this ecosystem, in which millions of people appear to have traded their privacy for free online services, evokes profound discomfort in many people, according to numerous polls.

In short, while many industry players would like to proclaim the advent of a “new era” in which privacy matters less, nothing could be further from the truth. The current prevalence of privacy invasions among certain edge providers does not enjoy wide legitimacy and should not be used to justify a betrayal of legally clear, culturally deep, and historically longstanding protection for privacy in our essential communications infrastructure. We must not let the essentially corrupt practices that happen to dominate our online ecosystem at the current moment in time be imported into the essential communications infrastructure on which that ecosystem lives. As one commentator put it, “we are only in the Middle Ages of digitization. The Renaissance has yet to come.”

June 2, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

The Lingering Danger of Google & Facebook

By Ulson Gunnar – New Eastern Outlook – 30.04.2016

During the 2011 Arab Spring, it was clear to those who bothered to look, that the US State Department and the various arms of soft power attached to it were directly responsible for what was otherwise initially passed off as a spontaneous, region-wide uprising.

Eventually, what was dismissed as “conspiracy theory” regarding the US-backed nature of the uprising, was finally admitted to by the New York Times in an April 2011 article titled, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” which admitted that:

A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.

 The New York Times would go on to admit direct ties between the above-mentioned organizations and both the US Congress and the US State Department.

The article would also admit:

Some Egyptian youth leaders attended a 2008 technology meeting in New York, where they were taught to use social networking and mobile technologies to promote democracy. Among those sponsoring the meeting were Facebook, Google, MTV, Columbia Law School and the State Department.

The 2008 meeting wasn’t the only one. And, as it would turn out, Facebook and Google’s role in preparing the ground for the Arab Spring, quite literally years before the “spontaneous” protests erupted, was much more complicated than merely being sponsors of a single event in New York.

Hillary Clinton was serving as US Secretary of State both during and in the lead up to the Arab Spring. She even attended via teleconference one of these “technology meetings” briefly mentioned by the New York Times.

Also attending the meetings were actually staff from the US State Department and various staff from both Google and Facebook. Also in attendance were members of the US media. In other words, the event was not only sponsored by the US government and these two tech-giants, it was organized and conducted by them as well. Their event program (PDF) makes this abundantly clear.

The purpose was clearly to create a unified network combining the US State Department’s direction, the tech-giant’s technical capabilities, and influence of the US media together to overwhelm the information space when finally the time came for the Arab Spring to unfold. And overwhelm it did. The governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya fell, with violence and even war breaking out in the latter three, while Syria to this day remains engulfed in violence that began in the wake of the 2011 operation.

More recently, e-mails leaked from then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reveal further details on just how close the tech-giants work with the government. Some could even say they are an extension of the government.

A CBS article titled, “Clinton Emails Show State Department’s Close Relationship With Google,” reveled that:

The latest release of emails sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server reveals a close relationship between Google and the State Department.

A 2012 email recently uploaded onto Wikileaks’ searchable archive came from Google Ideas director Jared Cohen, who formerly worked as an advisor to Secretary Clinton, indicates that Google wanted to help bolster support for those who defected from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military.

It also showed that before launching a “defection tracker” Cohen wanted the State Department to weigh in on the idea and potentially provide feedback.

Not only does the leak expose what appears to be a revolving door between the tech-giant and the US State Department, but it exposes the fact that regardless of who is working where, Google was working in tandem with the State Department. Cohen was actually listed in the above cited event program as Policy Planning Staff of the Office of the Secretary of State meaning that before moving to Google he was working with Google to undermine various foreign governments, and continued to do so after he moved from government to the private sector.

Just Warming Up 

Google and Facebook are still very much engaged in information warfare for the US government and the special interests that it serves. Likewise, the US State Department is still very much in the business of subverting foreign nations by recruiting, training, equipping and directing collaborators from targeted nations.

Facebook, for example, has expressed plans to get everyone on the planet on the Internet. The seemingly humanitarian mission is in all actuality an attempt to get the world on Facebook, which through its algorithms and ability to censor, ban and delete accounts at will, would virtually control what the world saw and didn’t see.

More forward-thinking states like Russia and China have noted this reality of the 21st century battlefield and have responded by creating their own domestic versions of Google and Facebook. An arms race of sorts has begun between these competing services both in terms of reach and capabilities for everything from artificial intelligence deep learning algorithms to the ability to control and influence the flow of information over and within borders.

Tech-centric US-funded nongovernmental organizations have begun to spring up alongside their traditional US-funded collaborators in nations around the world, specializing in doing many of the sort of workshops initially conducted by the US State Department, Google and Facebook before the Arab Spring. For nations either not aware of this or incapable of responding to this threat, it could be comparable to a new weapon of war taking to the battlefield one has no defense to or anything which which to strike back with.

This threat will only increase, with the “information war” becoming more and more literal as advances are made in information technology. The US is openly using information technology to augment its hegmonic ambitions around the world, with e-mail leaks confirming what many have already suspected all along. What is more worrisome is the collaborations and technologies being used now that are not being disclosed or “leaked.”

For nations around the world, raising literacy in terms of information technology and the threat it poses can help inoculate their populations from the overwhelming nature of foreign-backed operations like the Arab Spring. By creating and cultivating a domestic information technology sector and recruiting talent before the US does, creating competitive services like Russia’s VK and China’s Baidu not only serves as a means of improving and diversifying one’s economy, but can also serve as an important pillar of national security in the 21st century.

April 30, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

China to Ban Online Foreign Media After March 10 – Statement

No Chinese Spring

Sputnik – 19.02.2016

BEIJING – Foreign companies will be banned from publishing online in China from March 10, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television said in a joint statement Friday.

“Sino-foreign joint ventures and foreign businesses shall not engage in online publishing services,” the regulations state.

The rules apply to “informative, ideological content text, pictures, maps, games, animation, audio and video digitizing books and other original works of literature, art, science and other fields.”

Joint projects are required to apply for special permission to carry out such activities from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, according to the new rules.

Domestic online media are required to inform the relevant authorities about their sources of funding, expenditure, personnel, domain name registration as well as being required to keep all servers and equipment in China.

Online outlets are prohibited from publishing information that may cause “harm to national unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity,” “spread rumors, disturb social order or undermine social stability,” and harm “social morality or endanger national cultural tradition,” among others.

Foreign websites, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a number of Western publications remain inaccessible in China. Beijing has adopted a series of normative and ideological directives in recent years requiring national internet providers and media to closely monitor the quality of information disseminated online.

February 19, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

The Zuckerberg Donation and a Legacy of Control

By Alfredo Lopez | This Can’t Be Happening! | December 17, 2015

When I was very young, my parents used to tell me why having “lots of toys” wasn’t a good idea. “The more you have, the more you want,” they would say. I didn’t have many toys — we were poor — so the idea of possessions feeding greed didn’t make much sense to me then.

But I’ve learned the truth of that statement from observation over the years and lately I’ve been observing Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg is a 31-year-old computer programmer who did two things that made him famous: he founded Facebook, the social networking super service, and, as a result, he amassed a fortune worth about $46 billion. His bank account is as large as the capitalization of many countries.

How he got to these lofty heights of wealth and cultural impact is a matter of often fierce debate — he’s been sued by former “partners” several times. But what’s more important than how he got control of Facebook is what he’s constructed with it: a ubiquitous presence in the lives of a billion people with the potential to frame and manipulate their communications, their relationships and, to a frighteningly large extent, their lives.

So last month, when Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced in a letter to their new baby — a rather novel way to package a press release — that, over the course of their lives, they will give almost all their Facebook shares to a project called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the world took note.

The Initiative, they explained, would “advance human potential and promote equality” in health, education, scientific research, and energy. In short, change the world: on its face, a worthy cause. But, like many of Zuckerberg’s plans and projects, this one has another side that is darker, more cynical and, even if only partially successful, a potential nightmare for the human race.

How many zeroes are there in $46 billion? More than most of us will ever see. So it’s tough for us “average people” to fathom what a billionaire does with his or her money. Even living the most opulent life-style imaginable wouldn’t start to dent those savings in a bank — the interest alone would pay for everything you could imagine owning. That, in a sense, is Mark Zuckerberg’s dilemma. At 31, he has so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it.

So he follows a long capitalist tradition called philanthropy. In projects that range from supporting education to enhancing Internet access world-wide to tackling specific social problems, Zuckerberg has thrown money at social inequality like a park visitor throws bread-crumbs to pigeons…except the pigeons actually benefit.

When he gave $100 million to the Newark Public Schools, the money was largely wasted with very little impact on the quality of education in that embattled city. When he has joined other rich philanthropists, like Warren Buffett, in a string of similar projects — funding schools or programs in other U.S. cities, giving major endowments to hospitals or funding initiatives in Global South countries — they have usually fallen short of their expectations or projected expectations that didn’t make much sense in the long term. Some good happens but the social problems remain and often deepen.

At the same time, he’s used his wealth and power to launch Internet projects like one that brings together almost a million software developers to work on Facebook improvement and another, called Beacon, that enables people to share information with their Facebook friends based on their browsing activities on other sites (also providing a huge resource to advertisers and marketing people).

In the Summer of 2013, Zuckerberg launched “Internet.org” whose stated purpose is to bring internet access to over 5 billion people world-wide. The access, however, is partial; only certain websites will be seen by these newly connected people in part because many of the world’s governments don’t allow full access to the Internet. Users will, however, be able to fully access Facebook.

Then there’s Facebook itself which continues to expand. With over a billion users, the company has control over the information, data and communications of much of the human race. All of it is contained in an Internet protocol that feels like the conversation at a party where everyone’s had a few drinks. Short statements followed by long strings of one sentence responses, fattened by photos and videos with no real explanation of their importance and a huge “friends” section. It’s a snapshot of your life without the depth, thinking and development that makes it precious to the rest of us.

But that basic information is very valuable to advertisers and marketing companies who can use your activities and friends lists to develop a consumer profile of you. Facebook sells it to them and then fashions advertising programs that display ads that reflect your buying patterns and insert them into the flow of messages (at a premium advertising rate). It also turns the information over to government spy agencies like the NSA.

Facebook admits no sin. It claims that its user agreement allows it to “share relevant information on users” with advertisers for the users’ “convenience” (and, of course, to generate fantastic revenue) and that it can’t legally refuse to share information the NSA demands. None of which changes the reality of what it does and the potential impact that this has on people’s lives.

There’s a common thread to Zuckerberg’s projects. Those that are completely devoid of benefit to him and his company usually fall short of expectations. Projects that are at least partially successful, while they may benefit people, return a hefty benefit for Facebook.

Throughout all of this, Zuckerberg has trotted the globe projecting an image of a young genius whose altruism and concern for the planet and its people drive his daily activities. He’s written about all the time and been the subject of a major motion picture, The Social Network, although it portrays him in a less than flattering light.

What’s interesting about this record of double-edged philanthropy and innovation is that, contrary to the movie’s depictions of him as a snide self-absorbed jerk, Zuckerberg is by most accounts a friendly, open, funny and fairly humble guy. He and his wife have eschewed ostentatious shows of wealth, travelled mainly to speak with leaders and thinkers world-wide (rather than spend months lounging on beaches) and spent most of their time as a couple doing the things normal couples do (like walk around places rather than take a limousine). What’s more, people who know and work with him insist that his concern for the world is not only honest but consuming. In short, they say, he’s the real deal.

The question, however, is can the real deal be all that real using wealth generated by a morally corrupt economic system that pursues profit over any aspect of human life or well-being? In other words, can you provide a nutritious meal when the food is poisoned?

The answer, demonstrated throughout history, is “no”. You can’t and neither can Mark Zuckerberg.

Philanthropy is about control and always has been. The great philanthropists who’ve left their footprint in huge foundations and museums and universities were also among the most exploitative and viciously repressive capitalists of their time. Morally trapped by their immense fortunes, they have sought to control, not only the daily work activities of people (the source of their wealth), but our culture, education, thinking, social life and the other activities that consume every single second of our existence.

Such control protects their wealth in many ways but that’s not the principal reason for this “giving”. Their motivation is to shape our society as they shape our days. Like monarchs dictating reality from a throne, they want it all and, through philanthropy, they get it.

This is the culture in which Mark Zuckerberg functions. His projects have in common a certainty that his perspective and interests (and the system that creates them) offer a future to the human race no other perspective can. His internet projects not only develop internet skill but tie people to Facebook and the “quick message” and superficial relationship culture it drives. Even with his Internet.org project, Zuckerberg can’t conceive of a world in which people make their own decisions about where to go and what to do on the Internet. He is, effectively, trying to take control of the world.

His latest project is an illustration of that approach. Rather than create a foundation, the couple has created a limited partnership corporation, a legal form that has tax benefits, avoids much of the government scrutiny foundations deal with and allows for a much greater secrecy in its functioning and decision-making. A red flag is now flying.

That corporation, one would assume, will now dole out money to projects with potential but who decides the potential? We don’t know but since the corporation belongs to Mark and Priscilla one would assume that they have a big say. As a corporation, it doesn’t have to limit spending to non-profit ventures; it can invest in companies and profit-making projects if it wants. It can even invest in Zuckerberg companies and projects: basically, funding his own work.

While they are busy doling, by the way, Chan and Zuckerberg are still firmly in control of their assets since all that is happening is that the stock of Facebook is cashed in and put into the new company’s bank account with considerable tax benefits (since it’s a reinvestment).

Zuckerberg has yet to specify the projects his new venture will fund but, based on his past, we can confidently speculate. He will continue to encourage development as a way of molding human activity in accord with his vision of it. He will use that spectacular wealth to take even greater control of culture and education. Most of all, he will continue to spread his grasp of the Internet, the one thing that enables human interaction and resists this kind of control.

If Facebook is Zuckerberg’s vision of what on-line communications should be, the remarkable wealth of knowledge, shared thinking, compared experiences and, let us not forget, organizing that has become possible with the Internet will progressively be reduced to a ping-pong game of superficial statements and “likes”. If that vision is imposed through funding of education and other aspects of development, creativity and independent critical thinking will suffer and the kind of machine-like “competence” Zuckerberg frequently champions will hammer another nail in humanity’s coffin. If his funding is used to encourage development projects like the ones he has supported in the past, the cooperativism and the coop movement, the most exciting and potentially game-changing movement in today’s world, will find itself battling against odds that are even greater than the odds it currently faces.

In short, he would end up doing much more harm than good, playing a destructive kind of monopoly with real streets, buildings and lives.

Rich people can’t avoid acting that way and that’s why even “progressive” billionaires like Zuckerberg or Buffett are really part of an anti-future. The schemes and projects and reforms they think up in small groups and fund with large money will never improve the world fundamentally. The only way to do that is to build a world where people like them can never exist and such wealth can never be amassed. It’s hard to imagine the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative contributing that world.

December 18, 2015 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Economics, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Onlinecensorship.org Tracks Content Takedowns by Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Media Sites

New Project Will Gather Users’ Stories of Censorship from Around the World

EFF |November 19, 2015

San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Visualizing Impact launched Onlinecensorship.org today, a new platform to document the who, what, and why of content takedowns on social media sites. The project, made possible by a 2014 Knight News Challenge award, will address how social media sites moderate user-generated content and how free expression is affected across the globe.

Controversies over content takedowns seem to bubble up every few weeks, with users complaining about censorship of political speech, nudity, LGBT content, and many other subjects. The passionate debate about these takedowns reveals a larger issue: social media sites have an enormous impact on the public sphere, but are ultimately privately owned companies. Each corporation has their own rules and systems of governance that control users’ content, while providing little transparency about how these decisions are made.

At Onlinecensorship.org, users themselves can report on content takedowns from Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, and YouTube. By cataloging and analyzing aggregated cases of social media censorship, Onlinecensorship.org seeks to unveil trends in content removals, provide insight into the types of content being taken down, and learn how these takedowns impact different communities of users.

“We want to know how social media companies enforce their terms of service. The data we collect will allow us to raise public awareness about the ways these companies are regulating speech,” said EFF Director for International Freedom of Expression and co-founder of Onlinecensorship.org Jillian C. York. “We hope that companies will respond to the data by improving their regulations and reporting mechanisms and processes—we need to hold Internet companies accountable for the ways in which they exercise power over people’s digital lives.”

York and Onlinecensorship.org co-founder Ramzi Jaber were inspired to action after a Facebook post in support of OneWorld’s “Freedom for Palestine” project disappeared from the band Coldplay’s page even though it had received nearly 7,000 largely supportive comments. It later became clear that Facebook took down the post after it was reported as “abusive” by several users.

“By collecting these reports, we’re not just looking for trends. We’re also looking for context, and to build an understanding of how the removal of content affects users’ lives. It’s important companies understand that, more often than not, the individuals and communities most impacted by online censorship are also the most vulnerable,” said Jaber. “Both a company’s terms of service and their enforcement mechanisms should take into account power imbalances that place already-marginalized communities at greater risk online.”

Onlinecensorship.org has other tools for social media users, including a guide to the often-complex appeals process to fight a content takedown. It will also host a collection of news reports on content moderation practices.

For Onlinecensorship.org:
https://onlinecensorship.org

Contact:

Jillian C. York
Director for International Freedom of Expression
jillian@eff.org

Ramzi Jaber
Co-founder and co-director of Visualizing Impact
Ramzi@visualizingimpact.org

November 22, 2015 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Copyright Infringement Claim Filed By Sandy Hook Charity Kingpin

Memory Hole Blog | September 22, 2015

On September 17 MHB reported on a copyright infringement claim filed with Facebook by an anonymous party against the “Sandy Hook Hoax” Fb page alleging ownership of the Lenie Urbina/Avielle Richman photographs. The copyright claimant has been revealed in the emails below as one Thomas Bittman, co-founder of the lucrative “Sandy Hook Promise” charity. The 501(c)3 has been a key proponent of gun control and mental health protocols that it argues will curb mass shootings, while pulling on the heartstrings of America to the tune of tens of millions of dollars in the wake of the December 14, 2012 Sandy Hook massacre event.

What’s significant here is whether Bittman actually holds the copyright to the images in question, and if he’s not just prompting Facebook to abuse the entire DMCA process intended to address legitimate copyright claims. If so, Bittman has likely committed perjury and is subject to being sued for filing a false copyright infringement claim. “If you send a cease-and-desist letter to an infringer,” under DMCA,

there is a risk that the infringer may file a lawsuit in the infringer’s jurisdiction naming you as a defendant and seeking a declaratory judgment that your copyright is invalid. One recent court decision found that the sending of a single cease-and-desist letter into the state was enough to subject the defendant to personal jurisdiction in that state.

If you send a DMCA takedown notice that is both false and meant in bad faith (such as to harass, or doesn’t state a real claim), you have committed perjury. Though unlikely, if the party you sent the takedown notice to decided to pursue this in court, you could face all of the consequences that your state imposes on people who lie in court.

Most MHB readers will likely agree that such legal action against parties that have sought to terrorize the US citizenry and enrich themselves on an entirely dubious incident is richly deserved. We do hope Mr. Anthony Mead pursues this matter to the fullest extent provided by law.

September 28, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Data sharing deal with US must end due to ‘mass surveillance’ – EU court advisor

RT | September 23, 2015

The European Court of Justice’s top legal aid has said that a 15-year-old agreement that eases the transfer of data between the EU and the US should be ended, accusing American intelligence services of conducting “mass, indiscriminate surveillance.”

The ECJ’s advocate-general, Yves Bot, said on Wednesday that the Safe Harbour agreement does not do enough to protect the private information of EU citizens once it arrives in the US, adding that it should have been suspended.

Safe Harbour allows US firms to collect data on their European customers. The system is used by Google, Facebook, and more than 4,000 other companies.

However, it also allows the NSA to use the Prism surveillance system exposed by Snowden to wade through the personal data, communication, and information held by nine internet companies.

Using Facebook as an example, Bot said that users “are not informed that their personal data will be generally accessible to the United States security agencies.”

“Such mass, indiscriminate surveillance is inherently disproportionate and constitutes an unwarranted interference with the rights guaranteed by articles seven and eight of the charter [of fundamental rights of the EU],” he said, adding that European internet users have no effective judicial protection while the data transfers are happening.

Bot added that if any EU country believes that transferring data to overseas servers undermines the protection of citizens, it has the power to suspend those transfers “irrespective of the general assessment made by the [EU] commission in its decision.”

But despite allegations from Bot, Facebook has denied accusations that it provides ‘backdoor’ access to its servers.

Sally Aldous, a spokeswoman for the social media giant, said on Wednesday that the company “operates in compliance with EU Data Protection law. Like the thousands of other companies who operate data transfers across the Atlantic we await the full judgment.”

“We have repeatedly said that we do not provide ‘backdoor’ access to Facebook servers and data to intelligence agencies or governments,” she said.

Although Bot’s opinions are not binding, they are typically followed by the ECJ’s judges, who are considering a complaint about the arrangement in the wake of US surveillance revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The EU court’s decision is expected in the next four to six months.

The European Commission has been in talks with the US for two years, discussing ways to strengthen the Safe Harbour framework amid calls for its suspension.

Meanwhile, many US companies have praised the 2000 Safe Harbour deal, saying it helps them avoid complicated checks to transfer vital data, including payroll and human resources information.

An end to the agreement would cause a headache for US companies operating in the EU, as well as bring about the potential for a varying of national approaches, lawyers said, as cited by Reuters.

It comes just six months after 27-year-old Austrian law student Max Schrems filed a complaint against Facebook, alleging the social media site was helping the NSA harvest email and other private data by forwarding European data to servers in the US.

September 23, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Facebook snoops on people just like NSA – Belgian watchdog to court

RT | September 21, 2015

Facebook is spying on people in “the very same way” that the US’s National Security Agency (NSA) does, said the Belgian data protection watchdog at a court hearing where the social network stands accused of violating the privacy of internet users.

“When it became known that the NSA was spying on people all around the world, everybody was upset. This actor [Facebook] is doing the very same thing, albeit in a different way,” said Frederic Debussere, a lawyer representing the Belgian privacy commission (BPC) at the Monday court hearing.

The Belgian watchdog has filed a lawsuit against the social network, accusing it of breaching EU law and violating the privacy rights of internet users. The BPC issued a report in March, arguing that Facebook tracked everyone, even users who had logged-out and people who don’t even have a Facebook account at all, via the use of cookies and the ‘like’ or ‘share’ buttons which can be found on more than 13 million websites worldwide.

This is possible, the report claimed, because the cookies are automatically installed on the computers of internet users each time they visit a page containing a Facebook plug-in, such as the ‘like’ button.

According to EU law, websites must ask for a user’s permission before installing any cookies. This is why Facebook’s policy is considered to in “violation of the European law” by the BPC.

The BPC is now threatening Facebook with a daily fine of €250,000 ($280,213).

“Don’t be intimidated by Facebook. They will argue our demands cannot be implemented in Belgium alone. Our demands can be perfectly implemented just in this country,” said Frederic Debussere, addressing the court.
Facebook has consistently denied all accusations and claimed that its practices are in compliance with EU law, accusing the BPC of presenting false reports.

“We will show the court how this technology protects people from spam, malware, and other attacks, that our practices are consistent with EU law and with those of the most popular Belgian websites,” a Facebook spokesperson said, as quoted by the Guardian.

Addressing questions about the company’s cookie policy, another Facebook representative, Paul Lefebvre, said that “they allow Facebook Ireland to identify bad faith attempts to gain access via the browser being used,” adding that if Belgium imposed a ban on this Facebook activity, the country “would become a cradle for cyber terrorism.”

Additionally, Facebook rejects the very idea it could be held accountable in Belgium as the company’s European headquarters are located in Dublin, Ireland, and its activities watched over by that country’s data protection authority.

The company does not rule out returning to talks with the BPC.

The case is now being closely watched by the rest of the EU’s 28 privacy watchdogs, including that of Holland, which has also started to question Facebook’s activities and privacy policy.

READ MORE: 

Facebook ‘breaks EU laws’ tracking all visitors, even non-users – report

Fact: Facebook tracks non-users – says ‘fix already underway’

‘No respect for users, no precise answers:’ Facebook privacy policies slammed by Belgian watchdog

September 21, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Analog resistance: Activists protest CISA by faxing Congress

RT | July 28, 2015

Privacy activists are flooding Congress with messages of opposition to the cyber surveillance bill due to be considered by the Senate, using faxes rather than emails in order to poke fun at lawmakers’ antiquated understanding of technology and privacy.

Fight for the Future, a nonprofit fighting for privacy and against government surveillance, has set up a page dubbed “Operation: Fax Big Brother,” which lets anyone generate and customize a fax protesting the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA). Each fax is then sent to all 100 Senators. The group has not said how many faxes have been sent so far.

CISA sailed through the Senate Intelligence Committee in March, with Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden being the sole dissenter. Senate is expected to take up a vote on the bill before the August 7 recess. A similar proposal, known as CISPA, was approved by the House of Representatives in 2013 but died in the Senate after public opposition compelled President Barack Obama to threaten a veto.

“Groups like Fight for the Future have sent millions of emails, and they still don’t seem to get it,” Evan Greer, the group’s campaign manager, told the Guardian. “Maybe they don’t get it because they’re stuck in 1984, and we figured we’d use some 80s technology to try to get our point across.”

According to the group, since 2012 civil liberties activists have sent hundreds of thousands of calls and tweets and over 2.6 million emails to Congress opposing overreaching cybersecurity laws. However, the fax stunt does not just have publicity value. Lawmakers often use analog technology like faxes and pagers in order to hide their digital tracks from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) inquiries, claims a Senate staffer who spoke to the Guardian.

Sponsored by Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, CISA seeks to enlist the support of corporations in collecting user data in the name of cybersecurity, providing them with liability protection if they share the data with federal agencies such as the NSA. Once they have the data, federal agencies would be able to share it freely with each other. What’s more, information shared with the government by the companies will be specifically exempt from FOIA disclosures.

Gabe Rottman, a legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, described the bill as a “new and vast surveillance authority that might as well be called Patriot Act 2.0 given how much personal information it would funnel to the NSA.”

The US Chamber of Commerce and a number of major corporations are backing the bill. In addition to Facebook and Google, Comcast and AT&T also favor CISA, as do Bank of America and Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.

Proponents of CISA have cited a spree of data breaches over the past year, from corporations such as Sony and healthcare provider Anthem to government agencies including the Department of State and Office of Personnel Management (OPM), as a reason to beef up cybersecurity. Critics have countered that CISA is not doing anything to protect networks from threats, and everything to vacuum up Americans’ data.

“With all these breaches, there’s a lot of fearmongering going on in DC,” says Fight for the Future’s Greer. “They just say: ‘This is a problem – we’ve got to do something!’ And this is the something they’re going to do. It’s not just that this won’t fix things – it’ll make them worse. And it’ll give sweeping legal immunity to some of the largest companies in the world and open us all up to new forms of surveillance.”

July 28, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Facebook’s Internet.org, the Anti-Net Neutrality in Action

By Steve Straehley | AllGov | April 26, 2015

The idea sounds great—provide Internet access for the millions of people in developing areas that don’t have it. But in the process of putting that knowledge at the fingertips of that under-served community, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet.org has drawn a bright line between the haves and have-nots.

Zuckerberg’s plan, developed with manufacturers such as Nokia, Ericsson, Qualcomm and Samsung, allows free access via mobile phones in developing areas only to certain parts of the Internet. Surprise—Facebook is one of the applications able to be reached by way of the Internet.org app. Wikipedia is also available as are weather and a few other sites. But if you want to go to a site not on the app, you must either pay a fee or you’re out of luck.

Latin American leaders, such as Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, have applauded the Internet.org strategy, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). But others, including Carolina Botero, executive director of the Karisma Foundation in Bogotá, have reservations. Karisma supports the positive use of technology as it pertains to human rights. Botero said: “We have serious concerns that Internet.org is presented as a public policy strategy for universal access to the Internet. This initiative compromises everyone’s rights and blurs the government’s obligation to reduce the digital divide for its citizens for compromised access to certain applications. No matter how interesting they are, these services are associated with a commercial interest of a multinational which the state is directly supporting.”

Zuckerberg claims that because Internet.org doesn’t specifically block sites or charge sites more to run faster, the app conforms with net neutrality principles. But more businesses are starting to see it the other way and are opting out of the program, among them a group of Indian publishers.

“We support net neutrality because it creates a fair, level playing field for all companies—big and small—to produce the best service and offer it to consumers,” The Times Group, one of the publishers that withdrew from Internet.org, said in a statement. Other Indian companies to opt out of Internet.org are travel website Cleartrip and information site Newshunt. “What started off with providing a simple search service has us now concerned with influencing customer decision-making by forcing options on them, something that is against our core DNA,” Cleartrip said in a statement, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“The problem runs deeper than simply which sites to which poor users should have subsidized access,” wrote EFF’s David Boagado and Katitza Rodriguez. “It lies in the very concept that Facebook and its corporate partners, or governments, should be able to privilege one service or site above another. Despite the good intentions of Facebook and the handful of allied companies, Internet.org effectively leaves its users without a real Internet in the [Latin American] region.”

The result is “having access to only a sliver of what is supposed to be the worldwide web,” wrote Issie Lapowsky at Wired. “As we’ve said before, this creates ‘an Internet for poor people.’”

Zuckerberg’s response, basically, is that half a loaf is better than none. “Arguments about net neutrality shouldn’t be used to prevent the most disadvantaged people in society from gaining access or to deprive people of opportunity,” he wrote April 17 in a Facebook post. “Eliminating programs that bring more people online won’t increase social inclusion or close the digital divide. It will only deprive all of us of the ideas and contributions of the two thirds of the world who are not connected.”

To Learn More:

Does Internet.org Leave Latin Americans Without A Real Internet? (by David Bogado and Katitza Rodriguez, Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Mark Zuckerberg Can’t Have It Both Ways on Net Neutrality (by Issie Lapowsky, Wired )

Indian Companies Pull Out of Internet.org amid Battle over Net Neutrality (by Aditi Malhotra, Wall Street Journal )

Supreme Court Upholds Cyber Freedom in India (by Karan Singh, AllGov India )

April 26, 2015 Posted by | Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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