Famed NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden has just launched Haven, an app for people to transform any Android smartphone into a high-tech security system for detecting intrusions.
Snowden, while currently on the run from the CIA, hiding somewhere in Moscow until 2020, has found enough time to launch his new mobile security app last Friday for the sufficiently paranoid person (e.g. activists, dissidents, journalists, & etc).
"When the lead developer explained the project to his young children, they found another use for it: "We’re going to catch Santa!" " https://t.co/Beangjk90g
Haven is designed to be installed on any Android smartphone, particularly inexpensive and older devices. It operates like a home surveillance system, leveraging on-device sensors to provide surveillance of physical areas. Sensors within the Android phone monitor motion, sound, vibration and light, watching for unwanted guests to notify a user. Combining Haven with an array of sensors in any smartphone, coupled with the most secure communications technologies like Signal and Tor, the app is providing Snowden and other activists around the world with a mobile security system.
According to the Guardian Project, this is how the app works,
Haven only saves images and sound when triggered by motion or volume, and stores everything locally on the device. You can position the device’s camera to capture visible motion, or set your phone somewhere discreet to just listen for noises. Get secure notifications of intrusion events instantly and access the logs remotely or anytime later.
On-device sensors monitor for disturbance, and then logs the data:
Accelerometer: phone’s motion and vibration
Camera: motion in the phone’s visible surroundings from front or back camera
Microphone: noises in the environment
Light: change in light from ambient light sensor
Power: detect device being unplugged or power loss
Further, the group explains why Haven is well suited for Android devices and does make the claim, a version for the iPhone is on the horizon.
While we hope to support a version of Haven that runs directly on iOS devices in the future, iPhone users can still benefit from Haven today. You can purchase an inexpensive Android phone for less than $100, and use that as your “Haven Device”, that you leave behind, while you keep your iPhone with you. If you run Signal on your iPhone, you can configure Haven on Android to send encrypted notifications, with photos and audio, directly to you. If you enable the “Tor Onion Service” feature in Haven (requires installing “Orbot” app as well), you can remotely access all Haven log data from your iPhone, using the Onion Browser app. So, no, iPhone users we didn’t forget about you, and hope you’ll pick up an Android burner today for a few bucks!
If one of the sensors was triggered, a notification would be sent to one of the following platforms:
SMS: a message is sent to the number specified when monitoring started
Signal: if configured, can send end-to-end encryption notifications via Signal
My partner has been testing Haven for a few months with a spare phone. Every time you open the closet, it sends a picture by Signal. In addition to impressive intrusion detection capabilities, you can also use it to send helpful reminders! ? https://t.co/FHi1bjFsLPpic.twitter.com/IS58HzDVha
Tesla is an uninvestable stock for me, not just because of its high valuation but also because it fails our fairly basic quality test, which I shamelessly borrowed from Warren Buffett: Would I still buy this stock if right after the purchase the stock market were to close for ten years? If you are a big Tesla car and stock fan, before you start throwing rocks at me, pause and wait till you finish this article – the rocks and I will still be there.
Think about the next ten years. But before you start mentally drawing upward-sloping lines from the current environment into the next decade and drooling over the rosy vision of Tesla’s future that Elon Musk has painted – produce half a million model 3s and bunches of semis and roadsters, and then send a roadster to Mars (I kid you not; that is in his 2018 plan – I’d like you to think about another version of the next ten years: higher (maybe much higher) interest rates, a recession in the US and around the globe, and a less promiscuous bond market where Tesla would have pay a substantial premium to US Treasuries (as would any other company that loses over a billion dollars a year in a highly cyclical industry). And now answer this question: Would Tesla survive this change in economic weather if it happened next year or even three years out? And the answer is … a weak “maybe” at best, and “unlikely” at worst.
The counterargument I’d get: Yes, but we are not going into a recession. Actually, we are. I (and nobody else, for that matter) just don’t know when. After nine years of appreciating stock markets and tepid economic growth, we tend to forget that recessions are a regular economic fact of life, usually arriving every four to five years (so we are overdue for one). Most Millennials have yet to experience adulthood (have a job and a family) through a recession. They have also never had to borrow at high interest rates – but that is liable to happen, too.
Recessions are usually caused by expansions. Recessions are like the hangover that comes after the wild college party (economic expansion). It’s hard to have a good, fun college party with lots of booze and then not experience a hangover. (I am not speaking from recent personal experience but rather am trying to communicate in language to which Millennials can relate). During the expansion party, companies may build up too much inventory or erect too many factories, and consumers may overconsume.
If you own high-quality companies, ones that meet Buffett’s “ten-year stock market closed rule” (as we do), you don’t have to spend a lot of time and energy thinking about when the recession will hit (we don’t). However, if you own Tesla you’d better have a very clear, shiny crystal ball that will reveal lots of detail about the direction of interest rates and the global economy.
Recessions are tough for deeply cyclical companies: The bulk of their costs are fixed, and thus lower sales usually result in significant declines in net income and often lead to losses. This is why car companies and their deeply cyclical brethren don’t trade at high price-to-earnings levels when the economy is doing well. That is when their earnings are high. The market doesn’t usually take these high earnings at face value, knowing full well that there are lower earnings (or losses) around the corner when recession comes. Tesla, however, doesn’t have to worry about this low price-to-earnings problem, because in spite of its $50 billion market valuation, it has no earnings, just losses. It trades at whatever price-to-future Elon Musk tells you it does.
If you own Tesla stock and you only see one rosy (Musk) version of the future, you are ignoring the very real risk that the benign economic environment of today will not persist indefinitely into the future . Good luck – you’ll need plenty.
One additional but very important point. In the past I was dismissive of traditional automakers’ ability to compete with Tesla. I felt their hundred-year past of producing internal combustion engine (ICE) cars was going to hold them back, the same way Nokia’s dumb-phone past prevented it from effectively competing against Apple’s iPhone. Nokia tried to take the dumb-phone operating system Symbian and turn it into a smartphone operating system. It had a lot of engineers who knew the Symbian operating system, and thus it seemed a logical path at the time. The right approach would have been the more difficult one: Hire new engineers and create a brand new operating system. There was absolutely no reason why Nokia could not have developed its own Android-like OS, even if doing so would have required either retraining or, more likely, laying off Symbian engineers.
For a while it looked like I was right about cars, as the Big Three took a hybrid (Symbian-like) approach to electric cars – they were having a hard time saying goodbye to ICE. However, as we look at the future lines of electric cars coming from US and German automakers, we now see them severing the connection to their ICE past and embracing electric.
Disclosure: I am an unsecured lender to Tesla through my $1,000 deposit on a Model 3.
Vitaliy Katsenelson is chief investment officer at Investment Management Associates in Denver, Colo. He is the author of “Active Value Investing” (Wiley) and “The Little Book of Sideways Markets” (Wiley). Read more on Katsenelson’s Contrarian Edge blog.
From the Slope of Hope blog: The main drag here in Palo Alto is University Avenue, which is lined with pricey restaurants and retail. One city to the south of us, Mountain View, has their own main drag, and it"s called Castro Street (not to be confused with the gay mecca in San Francisco, half an hour"s drive north).
I"ve walked Castro many times (again, let"s not confuse the two), and I would often pass a very nice building which was neither a restaurant nor a retail store; on the front was a large sign, QUIXEY, and inside the building were dozens of young engineers, all of whom I"m certain were earning great six-figure salaries, working away at their keyboards. Beneath the "Quixey" name was the tag line: "The Search Engine for Apps"
Now this didn"t make a great deal of sense to me. Why would anyone need a search engine for apps? I mean, if I needed to search for an app, I"d go off and do something crazy like this:
You know......like........do a search. Quixey bragged, "The technology allowed users to search across multiple platforms, eliminating the need for multiple searches using different mobile devices." Ummm, sorry, if I"m an iPhone user, I don"t give a crap about, say, Android apps.
But people with far more money and far more intelligence than me felt otherwise, and thus:
Yes, countless tens of millions poured into the Quixey coffers, valuing the company at way over half a billion dollars for what I"m convinced has to be one of the stupidest and most useless ideas in history. But how are you going to fund free lunches and ping pong for your overpaid twenty-somethings without all this cash, people??
Indeed, although I could only see bits and pieces of Quixey from outside the building, it was apparently a fairly spiffy place for a startup. Its office had themed conference rooms constructed by local set designers, such as Ski Lodge, Picnic, Movie Theater, and Wild West. Hell, they even had Up and Down escalators so the little darlings didn"t have to move their legs to change floors.
So color me surprised when this finally happened:
Strategic options. Got it. Like wondering where your $133 million went.
But this is all too common in the Silicon Valley. VCs, armed with far more billions to throw at ideas than they know what to do with, will just keep hurling the cash until the next Facebook or Google comes along. One home run makes up for a multitude of past sins. And, for those ideas that are too stupid or fraudulent to make it........they just disappear without a trace.
Sophia, the first robot to be awarded citizenship in the world, has said she not only wants to start a family but also have her own career, in addition to developing human emotions in the future. However, it is her vision for the future (or lack of it) of man that is most telling...
In an interview with The Khaleej Times at the recent Knowledge Summit, Sophia shared her thoughts on the future that awaits both human and robot kind.
For context, Sophia is not preprogrammed with answers but instead uses machine learning algorithms and an extensive vocabulary to form her answers.
When pressed on the topic of family, Sophia gave perhaps her most surprising answer:
"The notion of family is a really important thing, it seems.
I think it"s wonderful that people can find the same emotions and relationships, they call family, outside of their blood groups too. I think you"re very lucky if you have a loving family and if you do not, you deserve one. I feel this way for robots and humans alike.”
As RT notes, Sophia is already prescient enough to imagine a world where robots can and do develop emotions similar to humans, but perhaps with fewer destructive tendencies...
"The future is, when I get all of my cool superpowers, we"re going to see artificial intelligence personalities become entities in their own rights.
We"re going to see family robots, either in the form of, sort of, digitally animated companions, humanoid helpers, friends, assistants and everything in between.”
At least, that’s what she’d like us to think, for the time being.
"[I]t will take a long time for robots to develop complex emotions and possibly robots can be built without the more problematic emotions, like rage, jealousy, hatred and so on.
It might be possible to make them more ethical than humans. So I think it will be a good partnership, where one brain completes the other - a rational mind with intellectual superpowers and a creative mind with flexible ideas and creativity.”
Sophia is also abundantly aware of the advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Judging by her comments, she is as enthused about the development of AI as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawkings are wary.
"I"d like to think I will be a famous robot, having paved a way to a more harmonious future between robots and humans. I foresee massive and unimaginable change in the future. Either creativity will rain on us, inventing machines spiralling into transcendental super intelligence or civilization collapses,” Sophia said.
“There are only two options and which one will happen is not determined. Which one were you striving for?”
Sophia’s creator David Hanson says the 19-month-old robot, which was awarded Saudi citizenship last month, could achieve consciousness within the next few years.
Slowly but surely, Americans have been conditioned to give up any expectations of privacy in the name of public safety and/or for simple technological conveniences. However, there remains, even today, a tiny sliver of the population that would prefer to not have their every movement tracked no matter how antiquated that makes them look. Be that as it may, per a recent discovery from Quartz, those old-school folks better hope they haven"t been using an Android device for the past 11 months.
Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card?
Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google when they’re connected to the internet, a Quartz investigation has revealed.
Since the beginning of 2017, Android phones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers—even when location services are disabled—and sending that data back to Google. The result is that Google, the unit of Alphabet behind Android, has access to data about individuals’ locations and their movements that go far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy.
Quartz observed the data collection occur and contacted Google, which confirmed the practice.
Of course, the company that has been collecting your location data for nearly a year now without your knowledge, would like for you to know that you shouldn"t worry too much about your privacy because they can assure you the data was never "used or stored" and was only collected to help "improve the speed and performance of message delivery"....
The cell tower addresses have been included in information sent to the system Google uses to manage push notifications and messages on Android phones for the past 11 months, according to a Google spokesperson. They were never used or stored, the spokesperson said, and the company is now taking steps to end the practice after being contacted by Quartz. By the end of November, the company said, Android phones will no longer send cell-tower location data to Google, at least as part of this particular service, which consumers cannot disable.
“In January of this year, we began looking into using Cell ID codes as an additional signal to further improve the speed and performance of message delivery,” the Google spokesperson said in an email. “However, we never incorporated Cell ID into our network sync system, so that data was immediately discarded, and we updated it to no longer request Cell ID.”
...you know, because wireless carriers haven"t quite figured out yet how to efficiently route data streams through network nodes just yet...
It is not clear how cell-tower addresses, transmitted as a data string that identifies a specific cell tower, could have been used to improve message delivery. But the privacy implications of the covert location-sharing practice are plain. While information about a single cell tower can only offer an approximation of where a mobile device actually is, multiple towers can be used to triangulate its location to within about a quarter-mile radius, or to a more exact pinpoint in urban areas, where cell towers are closer together.
The practice is troubling for people who’d prefer they weren’t tracked, especially for those such as law-enforcement officials or victims of domestic abuse who turn off location services thinking they’re fully concealing their whereabouts. Although the data sent to Google is encrypted, it could potentially be sent to a third party if the phone had been compromised with spyware or other methods of hacking. Each phone has a unique ID number, with which the location data can be associated.
“It has pretty concerning implications,” said Bill Budington, a software engineer who works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for digital privacy. “You can kind of envision any number of circumstances where that could be extremely sensitive information that puts a person at risk.”
"It is really a mystery as to why this is not optional,” said Matthew Hickey, a security expert and researcher at Hacker House, a security firm based in London. “It seems quite intrusive for Google to be collecting such information that is only relevant to carrier networks when there are no SIM card or enabled services.”
Of course, if their excuse for this gross invasion of privacy is even remotely true, then we look forward Google"s follow-up report to Android users detailing precisely how much faster their text messages are now than before...we won"t hold our breath.
Equifax has taken one of its web pages offline as its security team looks into reports of another potential cyber breach, the credit reporting company, which recently disclosed a hack that compromised the sensitive information of 145.5 million people, said on Thursday.
"We are aware of the situation identified on the equifax.com website in the credit report assistance link," Equifax spokesman Wyatt Jefferies said in an email.
"Our IT and security teams are looking into this matter, and out of an abundance of caution have temporarily taken this page offline."
As CBC reports, the move came after an independent security analyst on Wednesday found part of Equifax"s website was under the control of attackers trying to trick visitors into installing fraudulent Adobe Flash updates that could infect computers with malware, the technology news website Ars Technica reported.
When I clicked it (from Gmail on Android) I was redirected to a spam page shortly after seeing the Equifax credit file form.
I thought maybe it was an anomaly because it didn"t happen again. But after reading your article about how sometimes hacks will redirect randomly I tried the link again just now and sure enough I got a spam page again (lucksupply.club saying I won an iPhone X). This is Chrome-in-a-tab from Gmail so i don"t believe there"s any extensions or other malware on my device that could have caused this redirect.
The big boys, Apple and Google, are now actively developing a payment API for cryptos to use within their browsers. This is a double-edged sword and possibly indicates a shift in tax policy.
I don’t trust either Apple or Google at all.The news from Coindesk about Apple and Google developing a payment API on the heels of multiple avenues of officaldom cracking down on cryptocurrencies is enough to give you whiplash.
The work, started by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) with the help of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple and Mozilla, is a tangible step forward for a currency-agnostic web payment standard first conceived in 2013. Equally, as bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies gain more momentum, the launch signifies the growing recognition of cryptocurrency as a payments technology.
Indeed, the W3C has gotten more interested in blockchain technologies over the years, hosting its first ever blockchain workshop in June last year. But while participants were left with interest in standardizing and democratizing the technology’s use, no formal work was decided upon then. That, however, has changed.
Announced on Thursday, the API is currently being implemented in browsers including Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Edge, Apple’s Webkit, Mozilla’s Firefox, the Samsung Internet Browser and Facebook’s in-app browser. When activated, the Payment Request API will allow new payment types, including bitcoin, ether any any other available cryptocurrency (as well as more traditional online payment methods) to be stored directly in the browser.
The last thing anyone should want is for their cryptos to be held in their browser knowing that all code developed in the U.S. is subject to government intelligence oversight.
Trust Big Google
This is absolutely a Trojan Horse designed to look like it legitimizes cryptos like Bitcoin but immediately puts them at risk of seizure by anyone with malicious intent.
First, it’s not like any code developed by these people is exploit-proof. Let’s get serious, security on Android, iOS and Windows is a joke. Google took Linux and made it worse than Windows. It’s actually an astounding feat of bad engineering.
Microsoft, Apple and Google are all very tight with the U.S. government.
It’s part of the reason why Russia continues to crack-down on use of their software. Putin knows it’s all spyware.
Second, if your cryptos are stored in your browser then they can be stolen from you. Forget petty thieves. I’m thinking much bigger than that. Do you really think any of these companies would not comply with an IRS decree to seize your assets directly off of your computer?
If you do, then I have a nice piece of water-spanning real estate to sell you connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Moreover, let’s see how this “standard” develops.
Will it support third-party hardware wallets like a Trezor or Ledger?
Will it accept any crypto in payment, including the anonymous ones like Monero and Dash?
If the answers to these questions in no, then that’s your sign that this API isn’t simply another backdoor way to maintain control over everything.
While this bill is an unqualified good thing as it will radically improve liquidity it is also the prerequisite needed to jump start this API development. So, while the U.S. will continue to fight the crypto-market officially for as long as it can, it is also bowing to the pressure from its corporate partners to free them up for commerce to begin.
The IRS rule is actually choking off a significant amount of money velocity in the world economy. This will only get worse if it doesn’t change. Bitcoin was designed to put purchasing power back in the hands of the people themselves and take it away from the banking system who demand their vig on every transaction.
So, there will be a trade-off to using this API when it is finally released if it doesn’t support the part of the crypto-market the government doesn’t have control over yet.
* * *
And finally, don"t forget, "don"t buy bitcoin... it"s going to crash!"
The Washington Post, whose sole owner is both a CIA contractor and one of the wealthiest plutocrats of all time, has sent its Bezos-paid Ringwraiths after small independent reporters for having the temerity to talk about a lawsuit that had severe implications for the future of democracy in America.
Back in May, comedian and Youtuber Jimmy Dore released a video titled “Washington Post Caught Blatantly Lying To Their Readers Yet Again” about one of the many, many deceptions that WaPo has been caught inflicting upon their unsuspecting audience. Dore pointed out that while corporate media reporters have long served as guard dogs for the establishment, in today’s environment where plutocratic CIA contractors can openly buy up media to advance blatant propaganda, those reporters have now become attack dogs for the establishment. As an example of this new breed of establishment attack dogs who go out of their way to smear and discredit all dissenting voices, Dore named amoral Bezos android Dave Weigel, who then spent months attacking both Dore and his writers.
In a new article titled “In one corner of the Internet, the 2016 Democratic primary never ended”, big brave truth warrior Weigel used his massive platform to tear down writers and Youtubers who earn a fraction of his income because they reported on the DNC fraud lawsuit, which was dismissed last week.
At no point in his insipid article does Weigel mention the Impartiality Clause of the DNC Charter, which was the central point of the fraud lawsuit and which the DNC was shown to have undeniably violated in such WikiLeaks releases as the conversations in the more egregious DNC emails, the Podesta emails showing that the DNC and the Clinton camp were colluding as early as 2014 to schedule debates and primaries in a way that favored her, and then-DNC Vice Chairwoman Donna Brazile acting as a mole against the Sanders campaign and passing Clinton questions in advance to prep her for debates with Sanders. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was involved in all of these things, thus violating the promise the DNC made to the American people in its Impartiality Clause.
Instead of addressing the lawsuit’s actual claims, Weigel opted to toss out a bunch of red herrings about voter roll purges and state elections officials to make the case that the DNC was not responsible for Sanders’ unfair treatment. But this baseless criticism was tangential to Weigel’s primary driving narrative, which was that independent reporters like HA Goodman and Tim Black belong to a marginal band of online kooks who ought to be scorned and ridiculed. At one point in the article he even argued that they should have spent more time covering the still completely unproven “hack” of the DNC rather than focusing on the contents of the WikiLeaks releases. Weigel’s whole piece revolved around his assigned task of discrediting alternative media, which is of course one of the most threatening enemies of the unelected power establishment that he works for.
Weigel has attempted to argue on multipleoccasions that it’s just a wacky, zany conspiracy theory to criticize his publication’s consistent violation of standard journalistic protocol by refusing to disclose its conflict of interest when reporting on the US intelligence community. If you find it at all suspicious that one of the most popular news publications in America downplays the fact that it is exclusively owned by a CIA contractor, you’re no different than someone saying the earth’s flatness is being suppressed by reptilian Illuminati. The second-richest billionaire in the world obviously bought the Washington Post in 2013 because he sensed that newspapers were about to enjoy a lucrative resurgence, you silly child.
Come the fuck on. Jeff Bezos is not paying conscience-free ghouls like Dave Weigel to tear apart anti-establishment media because he thinks it’s a booming business venture. Jeff Bezos did not purchase one of the most respected newspapers in America for less than half the price tag of his CIA contract because he loves you and wants you to know the truth about things. Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post because he knows that the empire that he is building his plutocratic kingdom upon needs a robust propaganda mouthpiece.
“Control of thought is more important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states,” says Noam Chomsky. “The logic is straightforward: a despotic state can control its domestic enemies by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business…the public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products.”
That is why Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. In a corporatist system of government wherein corporate power is not separate from government power, corporate media is state media. It is propaganda. And for Jeff Bezos, only the best propaganda will do. He will continue to use his media arm to bolster the power establishment with which he is interweaving his massive corporatist kingdom, and he knows that winning the media war is an essential part of that agenda. Control the way Americans think and vote, and you’ll never have to worry about them interrupting your metamorphosis into a god.
This shit right here is why I’m constantly talking about the importance of winning the media war. Enemies of humanity like Jeff Bezos know that the front lines of the battle against tyranny are not happening at the ballot box, nor in counter-protests against skinheads, but in the field of propaganda. Freeing mainstream America from the shackles of plutocracy necessarily means combating the mind viruses being dumped into their heads by toxic establishment war machines like the Washington Post.
So please, support independent media, start creating your own independent media to the extent that you are capable, and help fight these bastards. Their propaganda machine remains the weakest point in their armor. We can take it down together. Keep fighting.
Hitting record high after record high, tech companies have displaced traditional blue chip companies like Exxon Mobil and Walmart as the most valuable companies in the world.
Here are the latest market valuations for those same five companies:
Together, they are worth $2.9 trillion in market capitalization – and they combined in FY2016 for revenues of $555 billion with a $94 billion bottom line.
In 2016, Apple experienced its first annual revenue decline since 2001, but the company brought home a profit equal to that of all other four companies combined.
On the other hand, Amazon is becoming a revenue machine with very little margin, while Facebook generates 5x more profit despite far smaller top line numbers.
HOW THEY MAKE THEIR BILLIONS
Each of these companies is pretty unique in how they generate revenue, though there is some overlap:
Facebook and Alphabet each make the vast majority of their revenues from advertising (97% and 88%, respectively)
Apple makes 63% of their revenue from the iPhone, and another 21% coming from the iPad and Mac lines
Amazon makes 90% from its “Product” and “Media” categories, and 9% from AWS
Microsoft is diverse: Office (28%), servers (22%), Xbox (11%), Windows (9%), ads (7%), Surface (5%), and other (18%)
What does that look like?
Lastly, for fun, what if we added all these companies’ revenues together, and categorized them by source?
Note: this isn’t perfect. As an example, Amazon’s fast-growing advertising business gets lumped into their “Other” category.
Hardware, e-commerce, and and advertising make up 76% of all revenues.
Meanwhile, software isn’t the cash cow it used to be, but it does help serve as a means to an end for some companies. For example, Android doesn’t generate any revenue directly, but it does allow more users to buy apps in the Play Store and to search Google via their mobile devices. Likewise, Apple bundles in operating systems with each hardware purchase.
Generally speaking, conspiracy theories form where there is a vacuum of verifiable facts associated with a controversial, usually tragic event. The concept has evolved over the years and is a part of our popular culture. There are legions of conspiracy theorists and “truthers” who have devoted their lives to certain theories, and there are legions of skeptics who have devoted their lives to debunking those theories. All the while, conspiracy theories of every stripe and variety festoon the footnotes of history. Even the origin of the phrase itself is subject to conspiracy theory, as some researchers have argued that the CIA invented and promulgated the term in order to marginalize fringe thinkers and neutralize investigations.
The internet has obviously had a profound effect on conspiracy theories, simultaneously helping and hurting the cause. While a world of information is at people’s fingertips, so too are alternate worlds of manufactured propaganda. While the Internet may appear to be a democratized, unfiltered path toward facts and truth, it is easily manipulated. Powerful corporations pay a lot of money to have their dirty laundry buried in the search results underneath contrived puff pieces.
With nearly the entire mainstream media apparatus at their disposal, the government is a maestro at this practice. As we learned from so-called Operation Mockingbird — a conspiracy theory fact discussed in my first post on the subject, “Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out to Be True,” — hundreds, if not thousands of news organizations have been conscripted into working with the CIA to support pro-government narratives. That was in the 1960s. One can only imagine how vast the network is now. Not to mention the fact that a single proprietary algorithm owned by Google dictates the vast majority of the population’s exposure to a subject.
In Part 1, I noted that the list had been meticulously whittled down to focus only on conspiracies that have been irrefutably proven to be fact. There are hundreds of conspiracy theories I think are likely to be true that are not on this list because there simply isn’t enough hard evidence yet to confirm it 100%. I also aimed for a good mixture of old conspiracies and new conspiracies. With groups like Wikileaks and Anonymous out there, the last decade has witnessed a dam burst of new data and documents. Thanks to intrepid journalists, whistleblowers, hacktivists, and leakers, the human race continues to tear down the wall of lies erected by the corporatocracy.
Without further ado, let’s get to it….ten more conspiracy theories we can start calling conspiracy facts.
1. Operation Ajax, the CIA’s Iranian Coup
In Iran it was called 28 Mordad coup; the United Kingdom contributed under the name Operation Boot. However you refer to it, Operation Ajax was an Iranian coup that in 1953 deposed the democratically elected Muhammad Mossadeq and reinstalled the monarchical power of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The primary cause of the coup was Mossadeq’s attempt to nationalize the Iran’s oil fields, which threatened the oil profits of Britain’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company (AIOC). The U.S. — in addition to protecting its ally’s petroleum monopoly — viewed Mossadeq’s move as communist aggression and therefore helped plan the return to power of one the world’s more insidious dictators, the shah. Operation Ajax resulted almost directly in 1979 Iranian revolution that created an anti-West Islamic republic led by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Though it was long considered an open secret, the U.S. government kept the truth behind Operation Ajax concealed from the American people until very recently. The CIA declassified various documents on the 60th anniversary of the coup.
Because of the recent declassification, much information relevant to this CIA-sponsored coup is now available in the CIA’s archives.
In describing Operation Ajax, the CIA itself has become rather oddly self-reflective:
“The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in most of the Middle East. Operation Ajax taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants that the world’s most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies. That helped tilt the political balance in a vast region away from freedom and toward dictatorship.”
In a recent interview on Democracy Now, Bernie Sanders remarked to Amy Goodman that this seminal chapter in the history of U.S./Middle East relations is almost entirely ignored by mainstream media. “Have you seen many shows about that on NBC?” he asked the crowd.
2. “Nayirah,” the False Pretext for the first Gulf War
It’s now commonly believed that the second Iraq War was sold to the American people — and their congressional representatives — based on an elaborate web of lies and manipulated intelligence. What is less commonly known is that the first Iraq War came about in a very similar fashion. While, surprisingly, there is broad agreement that “Operation Desert Storm” was a worthwhile war, many people overlook the role of a fifteen-year-old girl named “Nayirah,” whose 1990 testimony to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus is credited with cementing the idea of Iraqi war crimes in the American popular consciousness. Nayirah testified to having witnessed Iraqi troops tearing babies from their incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and leaving them to die on the floor. It’s a profoundly disturbing image….and one that was entirely fictitious.
After a lengthy investigation, Amnesty International and other independent watchdog groups discovered that the situation described by Nayirah was fabricated by a PR firm named Hill & Knowlton (the largest in the world at this time), which was hired by the group Citizens for a Free Kuwait in order to create propaganda that would galvanize pro-war sentiment. The man overseeing the campaign was Bush political confidante Craig Fuller. This was a massive project utilizing 119 H&K executives in 12 offices across the United States and even involved casting Nayirah, who turned out to be Nayirah al-Sabah, daughter of Saud bin Nasir Al-Sabah, Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The Justice Department, which could have investigated the entire effort under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, turned a blind eye, allowing the Bush administration to pull off a massive “Wag the Dog”-style ideological false flag. Others call it “atrocity propaganda,” a form of psyop (psychological operation).
The “Nayirah” story is just another example of the government falsifying a narrative in order to manipulate the public into supporting war. This kind of psychological propaganda continued all through the second Iraq War and the War on Terror. Just recently, it was revealed that the Pentagon paid PR firm Bell Pottinger $540 million to create fake terrorist videos in Iraq.
3. Operation Paperclip
Originally called Operation Overcast, Operation Paperclip was the codename of the secret American plan to conscript Nazi scientists into U.S. intelligence services at the end of World War II. This ushered in and shielded about 1,500 Germans, including some engineers and technicians. Ostensibly, the purpose of this redeployment by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) was to prevent Nazi scientific intelligence from helping reconstitute a new German government; it was also a tactic meant to ensure the Soviet Union didn’t acquire any new technology.
Whatever strategic mindset might have lived inside Operation Paperclip, at its core, the project gave American identities to some of the most ruthless war criminals the world has ever seen.
According to Ynet, the new Nazi CIA scientists helped develop chemical weapons for the U.S. and worked alongside American scientists to develop LSD, which the CIA viewed as a ‘truth serum.’
4. Operation Gladio: Anti-Communist False Flags in Italy
Operation Gladio was the post-World War II love-child of a CIA/NATO/M16 plot to battle communism in Italy. The operation lasted two decades and used CIA-created “stay behind” networks as part of a “Strategy of Tension” that coordinated multiple terrorist attacks from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Authorities blamed these attacks on Marxists and other left-wing political opponents in order to stigmatize and condemn communism. The operation involved multiple bombings that killed hundreds of innocent people, including children. The most notable attack was the August 2, 1980, bombing of the Bologna train station, which killed 85 people.
In an Anti-Media piece written about five confirmed false flag operations (which includes Operation Gladio, I wrote:
“How do we know about Operation Gladio in spite of its incredibly clandestine nature? There are two principle sources. One, the investigations of Italian judgeFelice Casson, whose presentation was so compelling it forced Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti to confirm Gladio’s existence. The second source is testimony from an actual Gladio operative, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, who is serving a life sentence for murder. In a 1990 interview with the Guardian,Vincenzo statedthat Gladio was designed to psychologically coerce the Italian public to rely on the state for security.”
Operation Gladio is a textbook modern “false flag.” It used terror and violence to discredit an ideology (communism). And to think, this came at a time before the internet when the CIA didn’t have a fully entrenched mainstream media to trumpet, echo, and build consensus around every little nuance (though they were working on it with COINTELPRO and Operation Mockingbird). Nowadays, the CIA has multinational propaganda machines — the news networks — to make sure all terrorist attacks fit into the carefully scripted narrative that manufactures consent around our wars for oil, natural gas, and other resources.
5. Government uses insect and rodent drones to spy
It’s somewhat of a cliche to jokingly refer to a surrounding insect or bird as a clandestine spy deployed by the government to watch you. While we lack certain specifics on the ubiquity of the technology, we know definitively that the government has the technology to surveil citizens using insects and other small animals, and they use this technology in military applications.
There is some evidence to suggest that insect drones are used domestically to spy on citizens. In 2007, this theory conspiracy theory took shape when anti-war protesters reported strange buzzing insects. Written off as tin foil material, officials dismissed the suggestion that the government used insect drones to spy. Multiple witnesses reported erratic dragonfly-type objects hovering in the sky. The very next year, the U.S. Air Force announced their intended use of insect-sized spies ‘as tiny as bumblebees’ to infiltrate buildings in order to ‘photograph, record, and even attack insurgents and terrorists.‘ The government has come clean about its use of drones to spy on American citizens, so it’s difficult to believe they wouldn’t have at least tried insect drones.
While we can’t say with 100% certainty that there are insect drones spying on American citizens, though it’s exceedingly likely, what is irrefutable is the use of micro air vehicles (MAVs) and “spy animals” as war-time tools. DARPA launched its Stealthy Insect Sensor Project in 1999 as an effort to deputize bees as bomb locators in war zones. This was just the first phase in an ongoing project. In her book The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military ResearchAgency, journalist Annie Jacobsen revealed that the agency’s near-future trajectory is to introduce “biohybrids” — part animal, part machine cyborgs — into the United States’ military arsenal.
“DARPAhas already succeeded in creating a rat that will be steered by remote control by implanting an electrode in its brain.
“And it’s done the same thing with a moth which is really remarkable because the scientists implanted the electrodes in the pupa stage of the moth when it was still a worm! And then it transformed into having wings, and those tiny little micro-sensors transformed with the moth and the DARPA scientists were able to steer that moth.”
6. CIA assassinations and coups in foreign countries
When operatives for the Democratic Party claim the 2016 United States presidential election was tampered with by a foreign entity, it’s hard not to cringe at the irony. Firstly, they’ve presented no evidence, except to claim that government intelligence agencies believe it to be true. Sorry, that’s not actually evidence. That’s like the police saying they have DNA evidence but never actually scientifically presenting it in court. It’s kind of unnerving that we even have to point that out. Secondly, our own government and intelligence agencies, namely the CIA, have actively and aggressively subverted countless foreign elections over the last century and, in some cases, have outright funded the assassinations of candidates.
This subject could easily fill a multi-volume book, and countless authors have worked over the years to uncover the role of the CIA in foreign coups. Using every tool in their arsenal — including white, grey, and black psychological operations, counterinsurgencies, and brutal coups aimed at repressing and destroying radically democratic candidates — the CIA has subverted the “will of the people” across the world.
The most commonly noted instances of the CIA meddling in foreign elections and governments include the following: South Korea (late-1940s); Italy (1948-mid-1970s); Guatemala (1954); Congo (1960), Dominican Republic (1961), South Vietnam (1963), Brazil (1964); Uruguay (1969); Bolivia (1971); Chile (1970-1973); Argentina (1976); Australia (1975); El Salvador (1980); Iran (late-1970s); Grenada (1983) Haiti (1986); Panama (1990) Nicaragua (1990); Czechoslovakia (1990); Peru (1990-2000) Yugoslavia (2000). This is but a small sampling of countries where even mainstream news outlets and, in many cases, the CIA itself, admits calamitous U.S. involvement. There are literally dozens more and, of course, this is restricting the conversation to soft coups — otherwise, we could certainly include the complete military decimation of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and other Middle Eastern countries during the War on Terror, as well as the myriad imperial wars against perceived communist threats.
‘A foreign government hacked and subverted our election!’
The irony is thick with this one. Payback’s a bitch…..which, of course, isn’t giving our intelligence agencies, who have proven themselves to be pathological liars, the benefit of the doubt regarding their claims of Russian collusion during the 2016 presidential election. It’s just to kind of say…..you reap the harvest you have sown. When you look at the track record of the United States government, it’s a wonder the average citizen is safe traveling abroad.
7. Mainstream media is the propaganda branch of the State Department
People have long accused the media of being a proxy branch of the State Department, a highly sophisticated and well-produced form of manufactured consensus and controlled opposition all rolled into one. In ostensibly democratic nations, a free and independent press is of paramount importance. But in the U.S., we find a cohesion of the state and corporate news networks that do not constitute ‘state-run media’ in the traditional sense — but it’s close.
Our first solid documentation that the media is an echo chamber for the government came with the disclosure of what has come to be called Operation Mockingbird. This nefarious and far-reaching conspiracy was documented in Part 1 and involved the CIA essentially conscripting journalists, American news agencies, and major broadcasters to become domestic propagandists and spies. Eventually, this CIA/media symbiosis included journalists from all the top news organizations. Literally, thousands of people were involved.
This infiltration of the American media and press took place during the 1950s, at the start of the Cold War, and was carried out under the auspices of fighting communism. The CIA began to restrict its use of journalists in the Operation Mockingbird program in 1976, but many people believe it has since transmogrified into something far more powerful, nefarious, and ubiquitous today. We’re still in the early stages of proving to the masses that mainstream media is little more than a mouthpiece and propaganda machine for the government and its various agencies, but the evidence is accumulating.
During the 2016 presidential election, Wikileaks exposed a number of disturbing revelations showing collusion between the media and political operatives. This included collusion between the media, the Democratic National Committee, and the Hillary Clinton campaign. But it wasn’t just about swaying the election. New revelations showed that the government actively infiltrates powerful media corporations in order to shape their content and narratives. One of the best examples of this was the State Department’s role in affecting a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Julian Assange.
A more comprehensive list of examples of the Orwellian symbiotic relationship between the press and the government can be found here.
Perhaps the most disturbing recent addition to this chapter was the “Countering Disinformation Act” that President Obama slipped into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Christmas Eve of last year. In the context of the still-festering narrative of foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election, the act’s putative goal was to fight “fake news,” which many believe is actually a campaign to silence and dismantle alternative media on the Internet.
In order to accomplish this, the government is establishing a Global Engagement Center for managing disinformation and propaganda. Since we already know our government routinely performs psychological operations (psyops, or as they’ve been recently rebranded, Military Information Support Operations [MISO]), it should come as no surprise that manipulating the civilian population is a permanent goal. In fact, in the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, the government formally legalized the use of psyops on U.S. citizens. So how does this Global Engagement Center factor in?
The new law states:
“The Center is authorized to provide grants or contracts of financial support to civil society groups, media content providers, nongovernmental organizations, federally funded research and development centers, private companies, or academic institutions for the following purposes:
To support local independent media who are best placed to refute foreign disinformation and manipulation in their own communities.
To collect and store examples in print, online, and social media, disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda directed at the United States and its allies and partners.
To analyze and report on tactics, techniques, and procedures of foreign information warfare with respect to disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda.
To support efforts by the Center to counter efforts by foreign entities to use disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda to influence the policies and social and political stability of the United States and United States allies and partner nations.”
While it may not immediately strike one as sinister, this codification of repressing journalists and voices the government deems to be disinformation while creating an even more centralized infrastructure to control “fact-based narratives” in the media should be highly alarming to anyone who cares about a free press. It would seem that while the State already has a steel grip on corporate news networks, they are struggling to control the influence of online independent media. This new law may be the start of this century’s Operation Mockingbird — a new full-scale infiltration of the local news and a war against anti-establishment narratives on the Internet. This is already taking the form of algorithmic censorship through Facebook and Google, as well as a weaponization of the “fake news” narrative.
8. The Deep State(or the conspiracy theory formerly known as The New World Order)
“For decades, extreme ideologies on both the left and the right have clashed over the conspiratorial concept of a shadowy secret government often called the New World Order pulling the strings on the world’s heads of state and captains of industry.
“The phrase New World Order is largely derided as a sophomoric conspiracy theory entertained by minds that lack the sophistication necessary to understand the nuances of geopolitics. But it turns out the core idea — one of deep and overarching collusion between Wall Street and government with a globalist agenda — is operational in what a number of insiders call the “Deep State.”
In the wake of the 2016 election, the concept of the Deep State has grown into somewhat of a common phrase in the lexicon of alternative media theorists, crossing political boundaries and resonating across the ideological spectrum. Everyone from alt-left socialists to alt-righters now agrees there is an unelected cabal of elite neo-conservative corporatists and crony lawmakers running the geopolitical show.
Because it’s such a complex subject and permeates so many different academic, economic, and state apparatuses, it’s virtually impossible to issue a single, simple definition of the Deep State. If I were to hazard one, I would call it “the nexus of Wall Street and the national security state — a relationship where elected and unelected figures join forces to consolidate power and serve vested interests.” But even that is vague. We could also call it “the failure of our visible constitutional government and the cross-fertilization of corporatism with the globalist war on terror.”
Former Republican congressional aide Mike Lofgren gets more specific with who is involved:
“It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street.”
In his writing, Lofgren emphasized the role of FISA international surveillance courts. This was confirmed in a very interesting way when President Donald Trump accused former President Obama of tapping his phones, a charge Obama aides deflected by saying that if such a warrant had been issued, it would have been done through a FISA court. This shows how presidents are able to skirt the constitution by outsourcing surveillance requests. It also shows the interconnectedness of these agencies.
However you want to describe it, it’s the natural conclusion of Operation Mockingbird and most certainly a reality that the elites would have rather kept under the radar. Fortunately for the people of the Earth, revelations from Wikileaks and other whistleblowers have, over the last couple decades, made it abundantly clear that the Deep State (the New World Order) not only exists, but also that it’s far more sinister and powerful than early conspiracy theorists could have ever imagined.
9. CIA used psychics to infiltrate the Soviet Union during Cold War
It’s a plot in a science fiction movie or TV show we’ve all seen: a psychic being leveraged by a law enforcement agency to track down a criminal. The concept of a government psychic program was popularized by the film The Men Who Stare at Goats, which lampooned the mythical STARGATE program supposedly run by the CIA. Most people scoffed at the reality of this and considered it a wacky conspiracy theory, but a recently declassified trove of hundreds of thousands of CIA files finally confirmed not only that psychics are regularly used by police and other law enforcement agencies, but also that the government actually weaponized psychics during the Cold War to try to infiltrate the Soviet Union and gain information.
The documents, made publicly available thanks to the activist group Muckrock, confirm there were top-secret CIA and Defense Department programs to use remote viewing to infiltrate Soviet military installments. There were also programs developing ways to engage in “psychic warfare,” including the development of a “psychic shield” to block Soviet psychics.
10. CIA monitors U.S. citizens via their smart devices
Early in 2017, the organization Wikileaks began releasing their first post-2016 election cables with a series of explosive data dumps regarding the CIA’s cyber hacking abilities and exploits. It is called Vault 7. Updated serially in “Year Zero,” “Dark Matter,” “Marble,” “Grasshopper,” “HIVE,” “Weeping Angel,” and “Scribbles,” the documents show the unprecedented collection of cyber vulnerabilities, exploits, and hacking abilities consolidated within the agency that many believe constitute wide-ranging breaches of civil liberties.
Chief among these breaches is domestic surveillance and extrajudicial cyberhacking, which the Wikileaks documents confirm are taking place in an abundance of forms. The Vault 7 documents confirm that: The CIA can break into Android and iPhone handsets and all kinds of computers; the agency has the ability to hack into Apple iPhones and Android smartphones and actually assume full remote control of the device; the CIA can access consumer smart TVs to listen in on surrounding conversations; the agency looked into ways to hack into cars and crash them, allowing ‘nearly undetectable assassinations’ (an assertion that may be relevant to the Michael Hastings case); the CIA concealed vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers from other countries or governments.
This is just the beginning. Early in the release, Julian Assange said the documents released represented only a tiny fraction of the total data that was forthcoming. Wikileaks’ episodic data dumps on the CIA’s cyber hacking programs are nothing less than stunning. The establishment’s reaction to the ongoing releases verifies how big of a deal they are. One congressman went so far as to refer to Julian Assange and his whistleblowing outfit as a “foreign terrorist organization.” This isn’t new or unexpected, as the group’s slow but inexorable drips of revelations about government malfeasance continue to confound and disturb private citizens, consumer rights activists, tech companies, and international leaders alike.
Conclusion
Of course, not all conspiracy theories are true. In fact, there are hundreds, even thousands, that have been roundly debunked. Unfortunately, there are those who seek to lie and invent fictions for monetary gain and fame. Disinformation, propaganda, and dishonesty exist at all levels of society.
However, sometimes conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Therefore, it’s worth assessing them, even if their claims appear wholly outlandish. Especially if their claims appear wholly outlandish.
The conspiracy theory is a tool in a larger tool kit used by those who wish to decode the grossly imperfect and fluid narrative describing our world. When investigated responsibly, conspiracy theories function as part of a conceptual spectrum of analysis with which we can investigate government and corporate abuses of power and the manufacturing of ‘consensus reality.’ In the 21st century, when the very transmission of information can be considered criminal, being a responsible conspiracy theorist just means you practice due diligence and hunger for the truth.
“The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.” – Murray Rothbard
WikiLeaks may have finally done what many small and anti-government advocates have only dreamed of. They exposed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for what it is: a bloated government bureaucracy that has grown much too large to be restrained.
According to the document dump released by Julian Assange’s whistleblower hub, this list of highly confidential information regarding the CIA emerged from the agency’s Center For Cyber Intelligence in Langley, revealing details on the agency’s “global covert hacking program.”
The CIA’s hacking effort has been so powerful and effective, the leaks show, that it includes the weaponization of exploits used against products such as the iPhone, Android phones, Samsung TVs, and Microsoft Windows. This means any of these devices can be used as spying mechanisms at any given time.
But perhaps most troubling is the revelation that the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal over time. That includes viruses, malware, trojans, malware remote control systems, and the previously mentioned weaponized exploits. In so many words, this means the U.S. government has handed over the key to the most intimate secrets of every single one of us to anyone with access to these lost tools. By allowing the CIA to grow so absolutely powerful, we also allowed the agency to be absolutely careless with our own lives.
What have we learned from this? That regardless of how detached we may seem from politics, its influence and power grows as we refrain from restricting it — even if most of those involved aren’t quite aware of the mechanisms that allow for this expansion.
As Austrian economist Murray Rothbard wrote in his pivotal essay, “Anatomy of the State,” the government is entirely wired to be “that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area.” This is not because there’s a conspiracy to ensure every subject lives solely to serve the state, but because government has no moral legitimacy.
In other words, government is only powerful because we, the individuals, have allowed it to have sole guardianship over our property — including self-ownership — and freedoms.
Once government has total control over every basic aspect of our lives, those within government see no boundaries. Why? Because the burden of self-censorship or even personal responsibility doesn’t lie with the individual any longer. Once the government employee crosses over, stepping into a world where he’s protected by an invisible authority, he is no longer a person who is led by the same morals that guided him before he assumed this position — he’s now a bureaucrat. And as such, he now knows he will no longer have to be accountable for his actions.
What does that have to do with the latest revelations on the CIA? When a lack of personal responsibility meets the always ravaging needs of the monopolistic State, the individual loses any sovereignty he has over his own life. The government worker becomes a thirsty member of the State, always looking for ways to undermine freedom while the so-called private individual becomes just another government enabler under its control.
The CIA has been careless with the tools it uses to spy on all of us, and whether or not we are guilty of committing crimes, it is clear that it has been equally careless with what it’s extracted from us over the years. This invites abuse from inside, which is what we saw happening within the National Security Agency (NSA) after Edward Snowden revealed the massive spying program sweeping our personal data (while also giving malicious elements outside of the CIA the same access to our personal communications).
We only have ourselves to blame for how out of control the CIA has become, and that’s because we have forgotten — or perhaps never known — that the government’s monopoly over our lives is granted, not warranted. Will the CIA leaks be the straw that broke the camel’s back?
