Two major flaws in computer chips (dubbed Meltdown and Spectre) could leave a huge number of computers and smartphones vulnerable to security concerns. The flaws could allow an attacker to read sensitive data stored in the memory, like passwords, or look at what tabs someone has open on their computer, and everyone can be affected.
According to CNN Tech, the flaws exist in processors, the building blocks of computers that act as the brain. Modern processors are designed to perform something called “speculative execution.” That means they predict what tasks they will be asked to execute and rapidly access multiple areas of memory at the same time.
But Joe Joseph of the Daily Sheeple believes that this is a very big deal and one that hasn’t really gotten much time on the mainstream media’s news cycle. “Is it fear mongering?” Joseph asks. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
The chips themselves need to be replaced to completely fix this problem. Which is part of the larger issue, considering the Intel chips are found in everything from personal computers to medical equipment. Researchers say that almost every computing system, including desktops, laptops, smartphones, and cloud servers, is affected by the Spectre bug. Meltdown appears to be specific to Intel (INTC) chips. “More specifically, all modern processors capable of keeping many instructions in flight are potentially vulnerable. In particular, we have verified Spectre on Intel, AMD, and ARM processors,” the researchers said.
“This seems to me to be a little fishy,” Joseph says. “I think at its core, we are subject to vulnerabilities on various things; whether it be software, whether it be hardware, we’re always subjected to these vulnerabilities. Not to mention, how many backdoors have been built into existing software, brought to you by Microsoft and Google and other manufacturers where government has basically demanded that these backdoors beput in there. I mean, we allow it anyway.“
That is not to say this is not important, Joseph says. The fix is just so “gargantuan” in nature, adding to trepidations. “I don’t know if anybody’s checked, but processor chips aren’t cheap,” Joseph adds. Then he continues, saying: “Think about this…”
“China owns 90% of the rare earth elements mined in the world. 90%! A lot of these chips rely on rare earth elements to be manufactured. Now, we are beholden to China to get the resources to replace all these chips. That’s gonna take time. So, there’s a lot of things here that kinda smell fishy to me,” Joseph said.
There are plenty of red flags surrounding this vulnerability. Joseph only mentions a few, but it should not be taken lightly. There are government officials and perhaps deep state officials as well, already neck deep in the waters of potentiality. This appears to be fear mongering at its finest, but that doesn’t negate the fact that everyone should keep an eye on Spectre and Meltdown.
Apple stands accused of breaking a French law which makes it illegal to "deliberately reduce the lifespan of a product to increase the rate of replacement.”
With most global markets closed for Christmas, the only overnight action was in Asia, which saw Chinese equities fall with tech stocks and names linked to Apple the worst performers after a report that Apple cut forecast iPhone X sales forecasts, while property firms surged on speculation of coming consolidation. As a result, after opening higher, the Shanghai Composite Index closed 0.5% lower on the day, the blue-chip CSI 300 Index fell 0.3%, the Shenzhen Composite Index retreated 0.9%, while the ChiNext small-cap and tech Index dropped 1.3%. The PBOC"s refusal to conduct a reverse repo for the second day did not boost the market mood.
The biggest Asian losers were Apple suppliers after the Taipei-based Economic Daily News reported that Apple has cut its sales forecast for the iPhone X by 40% from 50 million in Q1 to only 30 million. The report also noted that Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant stopped recruiting workers. Following the news, Apple supplier Lens Technology Co. dropped 8.4% to be among worst performers on the ChiNext measure; Shenzhen Sunway Communication Co. -2.2%, Luxshare Precision Industry and GoerTek both dropped at least 4%. As the table below shows, it was a sea of red for Apple suppliers.
Offsetting the drop in tech names was strength among property firms: Gemdale rose 6.3% as the best performer on CSI 300 measure after Citic Securities analysts said that the planned strict implementation of property curbs in 2018 would boost industry consolidation and benefit big companies. Unless, of course, it ends up crippling the business for everyone in which case today"s spike will promptly turn into a selloff.
Elsewhere in open Asian markets, Japan"s Nikkei erased early losses and scraped out gains on Monday as expectations that the Bank of Japan would buy more exchange-traded funds (ETFs) offset drops by financial stocks, Reuters reported. Movements in Japanese equities were confined to a narrow range with foreign investor presence lacking due to Monday"s closure of other major markets for Christmas; as a result, the Nikkei finished 0.16% higher at 22,939.18.
Of Tokyo"s 33 subsectors, 10 were in the red, led by securities T and banking after their U.S. financial peers lost steam on Friday following their recent strong performance. Denim clothing store operator Jeans Mate 7448.T soared 20.2 percent after reporting that December existing store sales increased 13.2 percent from a year earlier. Furniture and interior goods seller Nitori Holdings 9843.T sank 6.4 percent after the company saw its operating profit for the nine months through to Nov. 20 rise a modest 0.3 percent to 70.4 billion yen ($621.58 million).
Cryptocurrency related shares slipped following recent wild swings in bitcoin. Internet provider GMO Internet which is engaged in the "mining" of bitcoin, fell 4.8%. Remixpoint, an operator of virtual currency trading post services, dropped 4%.
In FX, it was a quiet session, with the only major mover once again out of China, where the yuan surged over 240bp to hit 6.5514 per USD at one point, the strongest since mid-September. Earlier in the day, the PBOC raised the yuan’s fixing by 138bp to 6.5683 per USD, the highest since Sept. 20. The dollar was little changed against other major currencies on Monday in holiday-thinned trading while the cost of swapping the yen for the dollar jumped as banks scrambled to raise dollars for the year-end period.
With most currency trading centers except for Tokyo shut on Monday for Christmas, trading volume was less than 20 percent of the average for major currency pairs including the euro/dollar and the dollar/yen.
According to Reuters, the discount for buying the yen at future dates widened sharply as non-U.S. banks, which typically buy dollars now with sell-back contract at a future date, scrambled to procure greenbacks for the year-end. The one-week forward discount starting from Wednesday jumped to 0.23 yen from around 0.04 yen in the middle of last week.
“Because foreign banks are away and few market players are eager to offer dollars, the forward market is very thin,” said a currency trader at a major Japanese bank. “The market is very volatile and there are hardly any trades beyond one week."
Unregulated social media platforms pose significant societal risks. That"s what we found out after the 2016 election, when it became clear that social media had been used for political mass manipulation in the world"s oldest democracy.
We should not be surprised. Despite a large scale scientific study conducted by Facebook in 2012 demonstrating that users" moods could be manipulated via messages fed to them, it continued to maintain a position of "algorithmic neutrality" on content. Given what we"ve witnessed, this won"t do going forward.
The Facebook study of 2012 had sparked outrage and concern around the use of data for social experimentation without consent of human subjects. It was worrisome that data usage policies of virtually all digital platforms had become increasingly rapacious over the years, allowing them to do what they please with the data they collect assiduously. Facebook"s social experiment wouldn"t have been approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) for university research involving human subjects.
But the outrage has resulted in little thus far. There was no regulatory body and there still isn"t one that addresses unethical or harmful uses of platform data even though the implications are arguably as serious as those involving national security. The very real possibility that a party with meager resources can potentially influence a democratic election represents an incalculable "externality" imposed on us through a trust vulnerability in our social media ecosystem.
Because trust is so important when it comes to our money, we have historically held banks and financial firms to much higher standards of compliance and control than other businesses. Financial institutions are required to follow well-defined processes with oversight and failsafe plans aimed at minimizing risk and maximizing public trust.
The terror attacks of 2001 ushered in stringent Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations requiring such institutions know their customers in great detail. The 2008-2009 crisis resulted in further regulation aimed at mitigating economic instability and curbing the use of funds for financing terrorism and other illicit activity.
In contrast, the news industry is expected to largely regulate itself. We pride ourselves on our freedom of the press, and the freedom of expression. Indeed, one of the wonders of the Internet era is the empowerment of individuals as publishers on digital platforms.
However, unlike news organizations whose reputations ultimately depend on careful verification, we have allowed digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter to function without much regard to the risks of propaganda and bias they create. They are now promising us they will do better in the future by employing more people for fact checking. Would we have trusted the bankers with such a promise after the financial crisis and left them alone to regulate themselves?
An important lesson learned from the rise of digital platforms is that they disrupt industries by blurring the boundaries between them. Which industry does Amazon belong to? What about Google? Facebook? Apple? The answers are increasingly vague. And yet regulation continues to be siloed largely by industry, like finance, retail, and telecommunication despite their increasing irrelevance in classifying some of our largest and most powerful businesses.
KYC is critical to finance because every industry uses financial services. Since digital platforms are becoming similarly ubiquitous to virtually every industry, KYC requirements should be considered for them, similar to those for financial institutions.
Advertisements on mass media are plain for everyone to see, and political ads require disclosing who paid for them. Yet in the narrowcasting world of digital targeting it is possible for parties to target individuals with customized hate speech ads completely under the radar without the public or regulators ever noticing, or even without the platform designers being aware of their algorithms being used in ways they had never envisioned or intended!
Requiring KYC requirements on digital platforms is not new. Airbnb already does an automated KYC in real time through verification of government issued IDs. Social media platforms could be required to do something similar but with the added restriction of requiring foreign publishers to obtain legitimate U.S. issued IDs to advertise in the U.S. This would pre-empt the use of legitimate identities issued by governments who may be sponsors of illicit activity or harmful propaganda.
Secondly, we need better guidelines around the ethical use of data, especially around profiling and social manipulation. Business should follow IRB policies around the use of human subjects for social experimentation similar to university researchers, regardless of their stated data usage policies which most individuals don"t even read let alone understand.
For too long, regulators have turned a blind eye to the use of data, emboldening digital platforms to do as they please with no oversight. We need something more proactive approach, where social platforms disclose broadly their data mining goals and policies and demonstrate that they are not violating the implicit intentions of users who entrusted them with their data. These points are not intended to be critical of Facebook and Twitter, but a warning that social media platforms in general pose risks that need to be considered seriously by regulators in free societies.
There are no easy answers, but turning a blind eye to this new Internet phenomenon will continue to expose us to considerable peril in the future. The U.S. government and our regulators need to understand how digital platforms can be weaponized and misused against its citizens, and equally importantly, against democracy itself.
* * *
Scared yet... you should be... you"ll be begging for governemnt to regulate the freedom of speech out of social media soon enough... because it"s for your own security... or democracy itself is at stake - right? </sarc..>
Prices has hit an all time high of $800, and it is now the processing nearly double the number of transactions of bitcoin at a million a day.
As we enter 2018, I think Ethereum will be the next Facebook due to the massive amount of use cases that i am finding in major industries that benefit greatly from decentralization & transparency.
Ethereum is basically the app store for blockchain.
It allows creators to build and run apps without having to worry about the underlying “operating” system just like Apple.
Here are some of the areas to look out for:
Fundraising and ICOs
ICOs are the largest real world use case for ethereum. Traditionally, to fund your idea, you would have to borrow money from a bank, give up a lot of equity to a VC, or get an expensive loan from people lending sites. Basically, ICOs is a kickstarter on steroids.
As the founder of fundyourselfnow.com, I have worked with entrepreneurs all over the world on their product to get it ready for their ICOs. Many come from developing nations such as Indonesia (EagleCoin) and India (WandX) where it would have been extremely hard to raise significant funding for their idea due to lack of local investors.
ICOs are democratizing funding and spawning the next wave of innovation from young hungry entrepreneurs all over the world who will eventually contribute back to their local communities for a better future.
Payments & Lending
Currently, the crypto-currencies are quite hard to spend. Crypto credit card companies such as TenX, Monaco, Tokencard are stepping in to fill in the gap. All of them are built on the ethereum network. I personally hold a TenX Card and have used it to spend on daily goods and services using bitcoin.
Monaco in particular, has gotten official approval from VISA to issue cards to Singapore residents. Expect to see a huge increase in actual cryptocurrency spending & adoption 2018 as many of these crypto-card companies get official approval from VISA or MasterCard.
There has also been a rise of ethereum based lending solutions, such as SALT lending and ETHLend. The interest rates are expected to be fairer than getting from a bank, and people globally can gain access to financing even without a bank account.
I expect that 2018 will be the year where we will help lot of the unbanked get included in this new digital world.
Gambling
The gambling industry is ripe for disruption. 2017 started off with a very simple dice game, etheroll. You send ether to a smart contract and winnings are sent to you in a matter of minutes. Etheroll has over 260,000 ethers wagered so far (Around 2000m USD), which is incredible considering how simple and basic the game is.
Keep an eye out on Edgeless and Funfair in 2018 as one of them could potentially grow to become the largest online global casino. They have significant advantages over traditional real world casinos:
There is no capital controls
Anonymous, money doesn’t flow through the banking system
Trustless smart contract to process payouts and ensure fairness of game.
Gaming
The virtual nature of gaming lends itself incredibly well for the blockchain. Many successful gaming companies have started to include tokens in their games/product to fund their gaming ecosystem.
Here are some of the interesting ways tokens are used (not exhaustive):
Decentraland?—?Buy Land in their virtual world. Virtual worlds has been around since 2003 with Second Life and Ethereum might be the fuel that makes it finally takes off
Engin Coin?—?Used to create virtual goods that people that can on their marketplace. Instead of using “gold” in most games, expect games in 2018 to require you to use their own Ethereum game token to make & trade items.
CryptoKitties?—?Tokens represents a digital cat in the blockchain. Over 17m worth of cats were transacted since they launched early Dec , with the most expensive cat sold for more than 100k USD.
What more interesting is that with the use of Ethereum tokens for games, this could potentially mean that you could eventually trade items across games. For example, you can trade an Enjin Coin Item for land in decentraland through decentralized exchanges using the ENJ/MANA trade pair. Virtual worlds economies which are currently “silo-ed” could potentially change with the ability to “trade” across worlds.
Final Words
I see the money flowing into Ethereum and the overall cryptocurrency market as a positive. The technology underpinning Ethereum has a lot of real world usage that has yet to be unlocked and money is being funneled into innovative ethereum projects via ICOs at an incredible rate.
Mark Zuckerburg started facebook at the young age of 20 about 13 years ago, and it has completed changed the way we interact with our friends and family.
Vitalik, founder of Ethereum, started Ethereum also at the young age of 20 too about 3 years ago. I strongly believe that within the next 10 years, Ethereum will radically change the we interact with our world.
In the years since the first dot-com bubble burst, Silicon Valley has become emblematic of the intensifying wealth inequality that’s making life increasingly unaffordable for millions of working- and middle-class Americans.
And while the unprecedented wealth creation in the region has helped enrich hundreds of thousands of tech workers and entrepreneurs, virtually everybody else in the region – from college students to the cafeteria workers and janitors who service the headquarters of storied tech firms like Google and Facebook – has suffered from rising rents and a cost of living that’s far outstripped wage inflation.
Now, a study has found that more than one in four Silicon Valley residents is food insecure – meaning they go without at least one meal or rely on food pantries due to lack of financial resources, according to researchers at the Second Harvest food bank.
Using hundreds of community interviews and data modeling, a new study suggests that 26.8% of the population – almost 720,000 people – meet this ignominious designation. Furthermore, nearly a quarter are families with children.
“We call it the Silicon Valley paradox,” says Steve Brennan, the food bank’s marketing director. “As the economy gets better we seem to be serving more people.” Since the recession, Second Harvest has seen demand spike by 46%.
The Guardian interviewed local residents who qualify as food insecure for a story about the worsening wealth gap in one of the wealthiest regions in the US.
Karla Peralta is surrounded by food. As a line cook in Facebook’s cafeteria, she spends her days preparing free meals for the tech firm’s staff. She’s worked in kitchens for most of her 30 years in the US, building a life in Silicon Valley as a single mother raising two daughters.
But at home, food is a different story. The region’s soaring rents and high cost-of-living means that even with a full-time job, putting food on the table hasn’t been simple. Over the years she has struggled to afford groceries – at one point feeding her family of three with food stamps that amounted to $75 a week, about half what the government describes as a “thrifty” food budget. “I was thinking, when am I going to get through this?” she said.
In a region famed for its foodie culture, where the well-heeled can dine on gold-flecked steaks, $500 tasting menus and $29 loaves of bread, hunger is alarmingly widespread, according to a new study shared exclusively with the Guardian.
According to the Guardian, the food bank is literally at the center of the Silicon Valley boom – both literally and figuratively. It sits just half a mile from Cisco’s headquarters and counts Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg among its major donors. But the need it serves is exacerbated by this industry’s wealth; as high-paying tech firms move in, the cost of living rises for everyone else.
As we’ve pointed out, faced with some of the most expensive rental housing in the nation, some Bay Area residents are feeling priced out and are seeking low-cost alternatives like living in their cars, or commuting nearly two hours to work each way.
All of this is happening as the Nasdaq – which includes many of the tech behemoths like Facebook, Google and Apple that are based in the region – reached an all-time high above 7,000 on Monday.
Food insecurity often accompanies other poverty indicators, such as homelessness. San Jose, Silicon Valley’s largest city, had a homeless population of more than 4,000 people during a recent count.
For workers like Karla Peralta – the Facebook cafeteria worker who shared the story of her daily struggles with the Guardian – there’s a stark division between well-heeled salaried tech workers at Facebook, and others like herself who work under contract.
What’s worse, many workers like Peralta are finding themselves mired in an uncomfortable gray area: they make too much to qualify for government assistance, but not enough to get by.
These days Peralta earns too much to qualify for food stamps, but not enough not to worry. She pays $2,000 a month – or three-quarters of her paycheck – to rent the small apartment she shares with her youngest daughter. “Even just the two of us, it’s still a struggle.” So once a month, she picks up supplies at the food bank to supplement what she buys at the store.
She isn’t one to complain, but acknowledges the vast gulf between the needs of Facebook employees and contract workers such as herself. “The first thing they do [for Facebook employees] is buy you an iPhone and an Apple computer, and all these other benefits,” she laughs. “It’s like, wow."
Second Harvest is the only food bank serving Silicon Valley. It’s also one of the largest in the country. In any given month, it provides meals for 257,000 people. It served 66 million pounds of food last year. When the Guardian visited its cavernous, 75,000 square foot main warehouse space, boxes of produce stretched to the ceiling. Strip lights illuminated crates of cucumbers and pallets of sweet potatoes with a chilly glow. Volunteers in PayPal T-shirts packed cabbages and apples that arrived in boxes as big as paddling pools, while in the walk-in freezer turkeys waited to defrost.
To Silicon Valley’s wealthy tech workers, the struggles of the hundreds of thousands of working poor in the region are often invisible.
“Often we think of somebody visibly hungry, the traditional homeless person,” Brennan said. “But this study is putting light on the non-traditional homeless: people living in their car or a garage, working people who have to choose between rent and food, people without access to a kitchen."
He added, “you’re not thinking when you pick up your shirts from dry cleaning, or getting your landscaping done, or going to a restaurant, or getting your child cared for, ‘is that person hungry?’ It’s very easy to assume they are fine."
The cost of housing is one of the biggest contributor to inequality – and the main reason many workers in the region are forced to go hungry. In Santa Clara County, the median price of a family home has reached a new high of $1.125 million, while the supply of homes continues to shrink. A family of four earning less than $85,000 is now considered low income. Meanwhile, the median income in the US is less than $60,000.
These realities mean food insecurity cuts across lines of race, age and employment status.
Minority communities in the Bay Area have been hit the hardest.
The Latino community is “passing through a hard time”, says Vicky Avila-Medrano, a food connection specialist. She runs a program that sends current and former food bank users out into the community, which has been disproportionately affected by the cost-of-living crisis.
“Here in Silicon Valley, we have a big problem. This is a beautiful place to live for people in the tech industry, but we are not working in that industry."
Of course, the problems posed by rising rents aren’t unique to the San Francisco Bay Area. As we noted back in October, rental costs growing faster than disposable income for 22 consecutive months. In September, rent ate up more disposable income than at any prior time in history.
All of this underscores the hypocrisy of the ultra-liberal Bay Area. While well-heeled tech workers spurn anybody who disagrees with their narrow-minded worldview in the name of progress, many of these same workers drift through their daily routines largely ignorant of the dire circumstances of the people who handle their dry cleaning and prepare their food.
Google famously fired former engineer James Damore for publishing an open letter pointing out flaws in the company’s diversity hiring program.
Meanwhile, the more than 10,000 employees who work at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. are some of the biggest contributors to wealth inequality in the region.
While we"re sure the Bay Area"s insistence on social equality in the workplace is well intentioned, progress won"t feed the working poor.
When WWII ended and the American deep state welded the national security establishment into place with the National Security Act, the world entered into a new era: the era of the military-industrial complex.
But when the Cold War ended and the “Clash of Civilizations” became the new existential threat, the deep state found an opening for another paradigm shift. As the all-pervasive threat of terrorism became the carte blanche for total surveillance, the powers-that-shouldn’t-be found the organizing principal of our age would not be military hardware, but data itself. Welcome to the age of the information-industrial complex.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
It is not difficult to see why these words passed so quickly into the political lexicon. Think of their explanatory power.
Why did the US use inflated estimates of Russian missile capabilities to justify stockpiling a nuclear arsenal that was more than sufficient to destroy the planet several times over?
The military-industrial complex.
Why did America send 50,000 of its own to fight and die in the jungles of Vietnam, killing untold millions of Vietnamese (not to mention Cambodians)?
The military-industrial complex.
Why did the US use the public’s fear and anger over 9/11 and a phony panic over non-existent weapons of mass destruction to justify the illegal invasion and trillion-dollar occupation of Iraq?
The military-industrial complex.
Why did Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama expand the fictitious “war on terror” into Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia, refuse to close Guantanamo despite his earlier promises to the contrary, commit US forces to “kinetic military action” in Libya without so much as seeking Congressional approval, and launch a new era of covert drone warfare?
When you think about it, it’s rather remarkable that such a phrase was ever uttered by a President of the United States, much less a former five-star general. Could you imagine any modern-day President talking about something like the “military-industrial complex” and its attempted “acquisition of unwarranted influence” without immediately dismissing the idea as a conspiracy theory? Over the decades there has been much speculation about Eisenhower’s use of the phrase, and what precisely he was warning against. Some have argued that the phrase was prompted by Eisenhower’s discovery that the Rand Corporation was grossly misrepresenting the Soviet’s military capabilities to John F. Kennedy, who ended up using the Rand invented (and completely fictitious) “missile gap” threat as a cornerstone of his 1960 presidential election campaign.
Whatever the case, it is perhaps time to revisit Eisenhower’s most famous speech. What Eisenhower is ultimately describing is the rise of American fascism; the merger of government and corporate power. What term can better capture the nature of early 21st century American political life? Is there any longer any doubt that the military-industrial complex has reached its ultimate expression in firms like Blackwater (aka “Xe” aka “Academi”) and its military contractor brethren? Is there any other word but “fascism” to describe a state of affairs when a Secretary of Defense can commission a study from a private contractor to examine whether the US military should be using more private contractors, only for that same Secretary of Defense to leave office and become president of the company that conducted the study, only to leave that company to become Vice President of the US and begin waging a war that relies heavily on no-bid contracts awarded to that same company based on the recommendation that it made in its original study? Yet this is precisely the case of Dick Cheney and Halliburton. It would be difficult to think of a more blatant example of the military-industrial complex fascism that Eisenhower was warning of.
But as it turns out, there was another warning about fascism embedded in that farewell address that has received far less attention than the “military-industrial complex” formulation, perhaps because there is no catchphrase hook to describe it:
“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.”
Given that this warning came in 1961, before the age of communications satellites or personal computers or the internet, it was a remarkably prescient observation. If scientific research half a century ago was dominated by federal grants and expensive computer equipment, how much more true is that for us today, half a century later?
So what is the problem with this? As Ike explained:
“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Here, again, the warning is of fascism. But instead of the military-industrial fascism that dominated so much of the 20th century, he was describing here a new fascistic paradigm that was but barely visible at the time that he gave his address: a scientific-technological one. Once again, the threat is that the industry that grows up around this government-sponsored activity will, just like the military-industrial complex, begin to take over and shape the actions of that same government. In this case, the warning is not one of bombs and bullets but bits and bytes, not tanks and fighter jets but hard drives and routers. Today we know this new fascism by its innocuous sounding title “Big Data,” but in keeping with the spirit of Eisenhower’s remarks, perhaps it would be more fitting to call it the “information-industrial complex.”
The concept of an information-industrial complex holds equally explanatory power for our current day and age as the military-industrial complex hypothesis held in Eisenhower’s time.
Why is a company like Google going to such lengths to capture, track and database all information on the planet?
The information-industrial complex.
Why were all major telecom providers and internet service providers mandated by federal law to hardwire in back door access to American intelligence agencies for the purpose of spying on all electronic communications?
The information-industrial complex.
Why would government after government around the world target encryption as a key threat to their national security, and why would banker after banker call for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to be banned even as they plan to set up their own, central bank-administered digital currencies?
The information-industrial complex.
The effects of this synthesis are more and more felt in our everyday lives. Every single day hundreds of millions of people around the world are interfacing with Microsoft software or Apple hardware or Amazon cloud services running on chips and processors supplied by Intel or other Silicon Valley stalwarts. Google has become so ubiquitous that its very name has become a verb meaning “to search for something on the internet.” The 21st century version of the American dream is encapsulated in the story of Mark Zuckerberg, a typical Harvard whizkid whose atypical rise to the status of multi-billionaire was enabled by a social networking tool by the name of “Facebook” that he developed.
But how many people know the flip side of this coin, the one that demonstrates the pervasive government influence in shaping and directing these companies’ rise to success, and the companies’ efforts to aid the government in collecting data on its own citizens? How many know, for instance, that Google has a publicly acknowledged relationship with the NSA? Or that a federal judge has ruled that the public does not have the right to know the details of that relationship? Or that Google Earth was originally the brainchild of Keyhole Inc., a company that was set up by the CIA’s own venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, using satellite data harvested from government Keyhole-class reconnaissance satellites? Or that the former CEO of In-Q-Tel, Gilman Louie, sat on the board of the National Venture Capital Association with Jim Breyer, head of Accel Partners, who provided $12 million of seed money for Facebook? Or that, in 1999, a back door for NSA access was discovered in Microsoft’s Windows operating system source code? Or that Apple founder Steve Jobs was granted security clearance by the Department of Defense for still-undisclosed reasons while heading Pixar in 1988, as was the former head of AT&T and numerous others in the tech industry?
The connections between the IT world and the government’s military and intelligence apparatus run deep. In fact, the development of the IT industry is intimately intertwined with the US Air Force, the Department of Defense and its various branches (including, famously, DARPA), and, of course, the CIA. A cursory glance at the history of the rise of companies like Mitre Corporation, Oracle, and other household electronics and software firms should suffice to expose the extent of these relations and the existence of what we might dub an “information-industrial complex.”
But what does this mean? What are the ramifications of such a relationship?
Although the signs have been there for decades, perhaps the most startling example of what lies at the heart of this relationship has been revealed by the whistleblowers at the heart of the National Security Agency, one of the most secretive arms of the American intelligence apparatus. While Edward Snowden has received the most attention with his “revelation” of the PRISM program, much of the information about the NSA’s ability to surveil all electronic communications has been revealed over the past decade by NSA whistleblowers like Russ Tice, William Binney, Thomas Drake and J. Kirk Wiebe, third-party contractors like Snowden and AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, and independent journalists like James Bamford. Together, the story they tell is of a truly Orwellian society in which all communications are being captured and analyzed by the NSA, and, with the advent of facilities like the new data center in Utah, presumably stored indefinitely for use at any future time in any future investigation for any pretense by anyone with authorization to access that data. According to Snowden, this includes lowly third-party contractors like himself operating at NSA subcontractors like Booz Allen Hamilton in the vast (and expanding) private intelligence industry that has grown up around the information-industrial complex in the exact same way as private military contractors like Blackwater formed around the military-industrial complex.
In some ways, this information-industrial complex is even more insidious than its military-industrial counterpart. For all of the ills caused by the military-industrial complex (and there are many), at the very least it required some sort of excuse to drain the American people’s resources, and its failures (like the Vietnam quagmire or the debacle in Iraq) happened in the clear light of day. In the information-industrial complex, where vast spying programs happen in the shadows and under the cover of “national security,” it takes whistleblowers and insiders willing to risk it all even to find out what is being done by these shadowy agencies and their private-sector contractors. Even worse, the entire Orwellian spy grid is being run on the flimsiest of pretenses (the “war on terror”) that has no defined end point, and “justifies” turning that spy grid inward, on the American people themselves.
Surely Eisenhower never envisaged the monstrosity that this information-industrial complex has become, but the foresight he had in identifying its early stages over half a century ago is remarkable. The problem is that we are even further away from heeding the warning that he delivered in that 1961 address than we were at that time:
“It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system—ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.”
If only this were the rhetoric that was shaping today’s debate on the issue, instead of the well-worn canard that we must “strike a balance” between freedom and security. Sadly, until such time as the National Security Act of 1947 is repealed and the cover of national security is lifted from the dark actors that populate this sector, the information-industrial complex is unlikely to be quashed—or even hampered—anytime soon.
Following today"s crypto-rout which saw bitcoin plunge as low as $10,000, down over 30% on the day, and nearly 50% from its Sunday high of just below $20,000, the HODLers and no longer HODLing and instead are rushing to get out. So, in taking a page from the futures markets, the largest US crypto-exchange, Coinbase, said on Friday that buying and selling was temporarily disabled due to high traffic.
"Investigating - All buys and sells have been temporarily disabled. We are working on a fix and apologize for any inconvenience," Coinbase said on its status website at 8:11am PST (11:11am ET).
Just over 20 minutes later the company added in a subsequent statement that "due to today"s high traffic, buys and sells may be temporarily offline. We"re working on restoring full availability as soon as possible."
On Thursday, Coinbase had temporarily disabled buys and sells at 5:57 p.m., ET, according to its status website. The issue was resolved within 15 minutes.
Bitcoin had dropped traded about 17% lower near $13,000 on Coinbase as of noon, rebounding more than 20% from intraday session lows. As reported previously, Coinbase"s mobile app recently became the most downloaded application in the Apple App store.
A woman in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing has been offered a second refund after faulty facial recognition software on two iPhone X handsets allowed her colleague to unlock them.
As The South China Morning Post reports, the woman, identified only by her surname Yan, told the Jiangsu Broadcasting Corporation that despite activating and configuring each phone’s facial recognition software, her work colleague was able to get into both devices on every attempt.
Yan said the first time it happened, she called the Apple hotline, but the staff would not believe her.
Shen then went with her colleague to the nearest Apple store, where her colleague used facial recognition on the phone to demonstrate the issue to staff, according to the report.
The store said the camera might be faulty and gave Yan a refund. But the new iPhone X that she bought also had the same problem, prompting the shop to offer another refund, the report said.
No details were given about whether the woman decided to purchase a third iPhone X.
Apple did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
So the question is... does the iPhone X (or its operating system) think all young Chinese women look the same? ... and therefore, is it racist?
Lost in all of the theoretical debate about how evil ISPs will create a have/have-not divide in Internet access, is the reality that it already exists along with massive subsidies to the biggest bandwidth pigs on the planet – Facebook, Google, Twitter, Netflix and the porn industry.
Under Net Neutrality these platforms flourished along with the rise of the mobile internet, which is now arguably more important than the ‘desktop’ one in your home and office.
Google and Apple control the on-ramps to the mobile web in a way that Net Neutrality proponents can only dream the bandwidth providers like Comcast and AT&T could.
Because, in truth, they can’t. Consumers are ultimately the ones who decide how much bandwidth costs, not the ISPs. We decide how much we can afford these creature comforts like streaming Netflix while riding the bus or doing self-indulgent Instagram videos of our standing in line at the movies (if that’s even a thing anymore).
Non-Neutrality Pricing
Net Neutrality took pricing of bandwidth out of the hands of consumers. It handed the profits from it to Google, Facebook and all the crappy advertisers spamming video ads, malware, scams, and the like everywhere.
By mandating ‘equal access’ and equal fee structures the advertisers behind Google and Facebook would spend their budgets without much thought or care. Google and Facebook ad revenue soared under Net Neutrality because advertisers’ needs are not aligned with Google’s bottom line, but with consumers’.
And, because of that, the price paid to deliver the ad, i.e. Google’s cost of goods sold (COGS), thanks to Net Neutrality, was held artificially low. And Google, Facebook and the Porn Industry pocketed the difference.
They grew uncontrollably. In the case of Google and Facebook, uncontrollably powerful.
That difference was never passed onto the ISP who could then, in turn, pass it on to the consumer.
All thanks to Net Neutrality.
Undercapitalized Growth
With the rise of the mobile web bandwidth should have been getting cheaper and easier to acquire at a much faster rate than it has. But, it couldn’t because of Net Neutrality. It kept rates of return on new bandwidth projects and new technology suppressed.
Money the ISP’s should have been spending laying more fiber, putting up more cell towers, building better radios went to Google to fritter away on endless projects that never see the light of day.
The ISP’s actually suffered under Net Neutrality and so did the consumers.
And therefore, Net Neutrality guaranteed that the infrastructure for new high-speed bandwidth would grow at the slowest possible rate, still governed by the maximum the consumer was willing to pay for bandwidth, rather than what the consumer actually demanded.
And, once obtained that power was then used to punish anyone who held different opinions from the leadership in Silicon Valley.
Think it through, Net Neutrality not only subsidized intrusive advertising, phishing scams and on-demand porn but also the very censorship these powerful companies now feel is their sacred duty to enforce because the government is now controlled by the bad guys.
Getting rid of Net Neutrality will put the costs of delivering all of this worthless content back onto the people serving it. YouTube will become more expensive for Google and all of the other content delivery networks. Facebook video will eat into its bottom line.
The ISP’s can and should throttle them until they ‘pay their fair share,’ which they plainly have not been.
The Net effect of Net Neutrality is that your ISP may charge you more in the short run for Netflix or Hulu. Or, more appropriately, Netflix and Hulu will have to charge you more and we’ll find out what the real cost of delivering 4k streaming content to your iPhone actually costs.
But, those costs will then go to the ISP’s such that they can respond to demand for more bandwidth. Will they try and overcharge us? Of course. AT&T is just as bad as Google and/or Facebook.
But, we have the right to say no. To stop using the services the way Net Neutrality encouraged us to through mispricing of service. If the ISP’s want more customers then they’ll have to bring wire out to the hinterlands.
Inflated Costs, Poor Service
Net Neutrality proponents kept telling us this was the way to help keep the internet available to the poor and the rural. Nonsense. It kept the internet from expanding properly into the hinterlands.
I live just over the county line in rural North Florida. To the south is a town with cable and DSL. Between cable franchise monopolies retarding expansion across county lines and Net Neutrality keeping margins thin, my home was 10 years behind everyone else getting decent bandwidth to keep up with the needs of the modern Internet.
Bandwidth needs artificially inflated, I might add, by the misaligned cost structure engendered by Net Neutrality in the first place.
It took forever for my phone provider to upgrade the bandwidth across the county line. I begged them for a second line for internet service, they wouldn’t even talk to me. Why? The return on that new line wasn’t high enough for them.
If Google was passing some of the profits from Adwords onto the ISPs I’d have multiple choices for high-speed internet versus just one DSL provider.
As always, whenever the political left tries to protect the poor they wind up making things worse for them.
The Ways Forward
The news is good for a variety of reasons. With Net Neutrality gone a major barrier to entry for content delivery networks is gone.
Blockchain companies are building systems which cut the middle man out completely, allowing content creators to be directly tipped for their work versus being supported by advertising no one watches, wants or is swayed by.
Services like Steemit and the distributed application already built and to be built on it point the way to social media cost models which are sustainable and align the incentives properly between producers of content and consumers.
Steem internalizes the bandwidth costs of using the network and pays itself a part of its token reward pool to cover those costs. So, all that’s left is content producer and their fans. Advertisers are simply not needed to maintain the network.
Net Neutrality was a trojan horse designed to replicate the old shout-based advertising model of the golden age of print and TV advertising. It was a way to control the megaphone and promote a particular point of view.
Look no further than the main proponents of it. George Soros and the Ford Foundation are two of the biggest lobbyists for Net Neutrality. Only the political left and its Marxian fantasies of evil middle men creating monopolies fell for the lies, as they were supposed to.
The rest of us were like, “Really? This is not a problem.” And it wasn’t until you looked under the hood and realized all they stood to gain by it.
Now, with Net Neutrality gone the underlying problem can be addressed; franchise monopolies of cable and phone companies in geographic areas. These laws are still in effect. They still hang like a spectre over the entire industry. Like Net Neutrality, these laws concentrate capital into the hands of the few providers big enough to keep out the competition.
So, instead of championing the end of franchise monopolies, which county governments love because they get a sizable cut of the revenue to fund non-essential programs, the Left made things worse by championing Net Neutrality.
That also needs to end. Even if you believe that franchise monopolies were, at one point, necessary. They are not now. IP-based communication is now fundamentally different than copper wire for discrete services like phone and cable. Let people run all the copper and fiber they want. There’s plenty of room in the conduit running under our sidewalks and streets.
Let a thousand flowers bloom, as the great Lew Rockwell once told me.
Avondale, a secretive Alabama-based drugmaker, has gained unwanted national attention after the company increased the price of a bottle of vitamins to almost $300 that can be bought on the internet for $5.
In the latest example of price-gouging in America’s lightly regulated pharmaceutical industry, records show Avondale inflated the price of Niacor, a prescription-only version of niacin, by “809 percent last month, taking a bottle of 100 tablets from $32.46 to $295”, according to the Financial Times.
Niacor is the prescription form of niacin, a type of vitamin B3 that is used to treat high cholesterol and the increased risk of a heart attack. With one easy search on Google, a generic version of Niacor can be bought for $5.75 on Jet.com - meanwhile, if the consumer wants the prescription brand, well, they might have to sell their Apple Watch.
Avondale’s development of price-gouging is certainly bad timing on management’s behalf when considering Martin Shkreli, who in the past year has become the most hated man in America after he bought the rights to a drug, then raised prices by 5,500 percent. In the world of Big Pharma, buy-and-raise schemes are not limited to just Shkreli, but it’s rampant across the industry, such as Valeant Pharmaceuticals who has been accused of raising drug prices by more than 5,000 percent.
The Financial Times said Avondale acquired the rights to Niacor from Upsher Smith, a division of Japan’s Sawai Pharmaceutical, earlier this year. The buy-and-raise scheme was immediately applied to Niacor, as management faced little or no competition among other drugmakers, along with limited government regulation.
Niacor isn’t the first time the company inflated drug prices, management “increased the price of SSKI by 2,469 percent, taking a 30ml bottle from $11.48 to $295,” according to the Financial Times.
According to the data provider Iqvia, there were almost 19,000 prescriptions written for Niacor in 2016. Niacor has been described as a drug with a fast absorption rate, making it popular with the medical community. Most people are oblivious to the sharp increase of Niacor, because of the secrecy surrounding drug prices are not usually disclosed to the public.
Michael Rea, chief executive of Rx Savings said, “this is the latest example of an inefficient US market where the consumer, payer and doctor don’t have all of the information available to make a financially sound choice, which makes software to help cut what people spend on medicine.”
He warned: “They are caught in a web of inefficiency and are being taken advantage of.”
FT could not get in contact with anyone associated with Avondale, which was started in 2016 by Mark Pugh, an executive behind several pharmaceutical companies. A spokesman from Upsher confirmed the sale of products to Avondale, but could not provide further information on the price increase.
Mr Pugh has held several executive roles in the drugmaking industry, sometimes at companies that have implemented very sharp price increases. A 2014 biography says he has “more than 20 years of industry experience” and a “documented record of success in identifying and capturing new business opportunities to build high-profit, high-growth corporations”.
Acrogen did not return a request for comment made through its website. Emails to the company were returned undelivered. Mr Pugh did not respond to a request for comment through LinkedIn.
A spokesperson for Upsher confirmed it had sold the two products to Avondale, but declined to make the terms of the deal public and did not explain why it did not announce the transaction at the time.
It declined to say whether it continues to manufacture the product on behalf of Avondale, or whether it was aware the new owner planned to raise the price sharply.
There are several components, but the real shocker is that more of us aren’t embracing the current age of access to mastery of any topic. But that may not be so surprising—most of us were taught to be passive learners, to just “get through” school. It’s easy to be lazy. The rewards of becoming an autodidact, though, include igniting inner fires, making new connections to knowledge atnd skills you already have, advancing in your career, meeting kindred spirits, and cultivating an overall zest for life and its riches.
One good reason to dive head first into self-initiated learning is that much of what you were taught is already obsolete. “Knowledge workers succeed not based on what they know, but rather how they learn,” writes James Marcus Bach in his book, Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. He dropped out of school when he was 14 and, in the early days of home computing, taught himself enough to become a software tester for Apple. He’s now an independent consultant.
Bach’s philosophy is rebellious yet inclusive: “Intellectual buccaneering is about self-education, but schools are OK, too. I’ve learned in schools, and I’ve learned from people who were trained in schools. I happily plunder knowledge wherever I find it. I don’t seek the destruction of schools. I am out to dismantle something else—the popular belief that schooling is the only route to a great education and that the best students are those who passively accept the education their schools offer.”
While some of you will be familiar with the educational concept of unschooling, it’ll probably be new to most of you. Personally, I never looked into the concept until I became a parent a couple of years ago, and it was my wife who first became fascinated with the idea and bought a bunch of books on the topic. I’m really glad she did.
The book we’re currently reading is by a fascinating individual named Ben Hewitt, titled Home Grown. Back in 2014, Ben wrote an excellent article for Outside Magazine in which he provided a concise description of what unschooling is. It’s quite distinct from home-schooling, which most people are already familiar with.
There’s a name for the kind of education Fin and Rye are getting. It’s called unschooling, though Penny and I have never been fond of the term. But “self-directed, adult-facilitated life learning in the context of their own unique interests” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so unschooling it is.
It is already obvious that unschooling is radically different from institutionalized classroom learning, but how does it differ from more common homeschooling? Perhaps the best way to explain it is that all unschooling is homeschooling, but not all homeschooling is unschooling. While most homeschooled children follow a structured curriculum, unschoolers like Fin and Rye have almost total autonomy over their days. At ages that would likely see them in seventh and fourth grades, I generously estimate that my boys spend no more than two hours per month sitting and studying the subjects, such as science and math, that are universal to mainstream education. Not two hours per day or even per week. Two hours per month. Comparatively speaking, by now Fin would have spent approximately 5,600 hours in the classroom. Rye, nearly three years younger, would have clocked about half that time.
If this sounds radical, it’s only because you’re not taking a long enough view, for the notion that children should spend the majority of their waking hours confined to a classroom enjoys scant historical precedent.
Even to someone like me, an individual who finds the concept of authority and involuntary activity revolting, unschooling seemed a bit radical for our family when I first read about it. Nevertheless, as I’ve considered it in more over the past few months, it’s become more and more appealing. To get an even better sense of what it’s all about, let’s read some more excerpts from the Outside article referenced above:
The boys will pay the bus no heed because its passing is meaningless to them. Maybe they have never ridden in a school bus, and maybe this is because they’ve never been to school. Perhaps they have not passed even a single day of their short childhoods inside the four walls of a classroom, their gazes shifting between window and clock, window and clock, counting the restless hours and interminable minutes until release.
Maybe the boys are actually my sons, and maybe their names are Fin and Rye, and maybe, if my wife, Penny, and I get our way, they will never go to school.
Hey, a father can dream, can’t he?…
The first incidence of compulsory schooling came in 1852, when Massachusetts required communities to offer free public education and demanded that every child between the ages of 8 and 14 attend school for at least 12 weeks per year. Over the next seven decades, the remaining states adopted similar laws, and by 1918, the transition to mandated public education was complete.
It was not long before some parents and even educators began to question the value of compulsory education. One of those was John Holt, a Yale graduate and teacher at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School who published his observations in How Children Fail in 1964. Ultimately selling more than a million copies, it was an indictment of the education system, asserting that children are born with deep curiosity and love of learning, both of which are diminished in school.
Holt became a passionate advocate for homeschooling, which existed in a legal gray area, but he quickly realized that some parents were simply replicating the classroom. So in 1977, in his magazine, Growing Without Schooling, he coined a new term: “GWS will say ‘unschooling’ when we mean taking children out of school, and ‘deschooling’ when we mean changing the laws to make schools noncompulsory and to take away from them their power to grade, rank, and label people, i.e. to make lasting, official, public judgments about them.”
In addition to fundamental curricular differences, there is also something of a cultural schism between the two styles. Home-schooling is popularly associated with strong religious views (in a 2007 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, 83 percent of homeschooling parents said that providing “religious or moral instruction” was part of their choice), while unschooling seems to have no such association. “Unschooling has always been sort of code for being secular,” explains Patrick Farenga, who runs the unschooling website JohnHoltGWS.com. “It’s about understanding that learning is not a special skill that happens separate from everything else and only under a specialist’s gaze. It’s about raising children who are curious and engaged in the world alongside their families and communities.”
I can almost hear you thinking, Sure, but you live in the sticks, and you both work at home. What about the rest of us? And it’s true: Penny and I have made what most would consider an extreme choice. I write from home, and we both run our farm, selling produce and meat to help pay the bills. Everyone we know who unschools, in fact, has chosen autonomy over affluence. Hell, some years we’re barely above the poverty line. But the truth is, unschooling isn’t merely an educational choice. It’s a lifestyle choice.
Unschooling is also perfectly legal in all 50 states, so long as certain basic stipulations—from simple notification to professional evaluations, “curriculum” approval, and even home visits—are met. But many unschoolers have been reticent to stand up and be counted, perhaps because the movement tends to attract an independent-thinking, antiauthoritarian personality type.
Of course, unschooling is not the only choice. Increasingly, families are turning to options like Waldorf, the largest so-called alternative-education movement in the world. It was founded in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1919, based on the teachings of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who believed that children learn best through creative play. In 1965, there were nine Waldorf schools in the U.S.; today there are 123.
So what prompted me to shift from, “this seems interesting, but it’s probably not for us,,” to “this might work for our family,” in just a matter of months? For one thing, I have a fundamental issue with forcing kids to sit in a classroom all day with other kids of the exact same age, while being forced to learn in the same way and at the same pace. Second, with all the information currently available online, the resources for thoughtful parents and curious kids is simply extraordinary and unprecedented. Typical schooling seems very outdated in this reality, and I’m not the sort of person who just does things because it’s what everybody else does. Finally, I started to ponder some less obvious downsides to traditional schooling. What if we want to go on an adventure as a family. Whether desert camping in Morocco, or a drive up to Montana, our ability to do such trips would be confined by school schedules. We’d have to take trips at the same time as all the other kids, which just rubs me the wrong way.
Ultimately, my wife and I haven’t decided on exactly what we’re going to do, and we plan on keeping an open mind about all options and taking cues from our kids themselves as they are each unique individuals with their own desires and needs. This post isn’t about making the case for a particular type of educational path, but to get people aware of the various options out there and inspire everyone to think outside of the box.
From a societal perspective, the reality is unschooling necessitates at least one person to be a stay at home parent. In the case of Ben Hewitt, he works from home and his wife is also there. That’s the ideal situation in my opinion, and it’s simply not an option for the overwhelming majority of U.S. families. In fact, most households consist of two parents working full-time just to make ends meet. This is a tragedy since it stifles household creativity and forces everybody into a stressed out box where family becomes an afterthought.
My wife and I are in a fortunate position which gives us options, and we will explore them all. That said, the choice to potentially unschool is not something I take lightly. If we decided to go down that route, I’d have to change a lot about how I do things. At the moment I spend most of my day reading and writing for the purposes of this website. If we accepted the enormous responsibility that comes with having kids at home, I’d want to dedicate far more time during the day to interacting with our children. My everyday life would be affected in a very significant way.
Parenthood is a tremendous honor and responsibility, and it saddens me that so many parents don’t have the opportunity we do to be so engaged with our children on daily basis. Given this reality, it’s important that those of you fortunate enough to be home with your kids think deeply about the options available before doing something just because everybody else does. The world’s changing fast and it’s crucial we raise as many children as possible who can think independently and ensure the future looks very different in a positive way from the one we’re living in. Humanity depends on it.
Finally, here are a few resources readers pointed me to on the subject of unschooling. If you have any other good ones, please share in the comment section.
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No, this particular bit of Yuletide gift-giving comes courtesy of the Deep State (a.k.a. the Surveillance State, Police State, Shadow Government and black-ops spy agencies).
If this power-hungry cabal gets its way, the government’s power to spy on its citizens will soon be all-encompassing and permanent.
“PRISM” lets the NSA access emails, video chats, instant messages, and other content sent via Facebook, Google, Apple and others. “Upstream” lets the NSA worm its way into the internet backbone—the cables and switches owned by private corporations like AT&T that make the internet into a global network—and scan traffic for the communications of tens of thousands of individuals labeled “targets.”
Under Section 702, the government collects and analyzes over 250 million internet communications every year. There are estimates that at least half of these contain information about U.S. residents, many of whom have done nothing wrong. This information is then shared with law enforcement and “routinely used for purposes unrelated to national security.”
Mind you, Section 702 gives the government access to the very content of your conversations (phone calls, text messages, video chats), your photographs, your emails.
So beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead.
For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government.
This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.
The government’s “technotyranny” surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it’s hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins.
The short answer: they have become one and the same entity.
The police state has passed the baton to the surveillance state.
This hasn’t fazed President Trump who, much like his predecessors, has thus far marched in lockstep with the dictates of the police state.
Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by the U.S. government’s vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.
Talk about a system rife for abuse.
Ask the government why it’s carrying out this warrantless surveillance on American citizens, and you’ll get the same Orwellian answer the government has been trotting out since 9/11 to justify its assaults on our civil liberties: to keep America safe.
Yet warrantless mass surveillance by the government and its corporate cohorts hasn’t made America any safer. And it certainly isn’t helping to preserve our freedoms. Frankly, America will never be safe as long as the U.S. government is allowed to shred the Constitution.
Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying program because they’re only looking to get the “bad” guys who are overseas.
Don’t believe it.
Warrantless mass surveillance of American citizens is wrong, un-American, and unconstitutional.
Clearly, the outlook for reforming the government’s unconstitutional surveillance programs does not look good.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, whenever the rights of the American people are pitted against the interests of the military/corporate/security complex, “we the people” lose. Unless Congress develops a conscience—or suddenly remembers that they owe their allegiance to the citizenry and not the corporate state—we’re about to lose big.
It’s time to let Section 702 expire or reform the law to ensure that millions and millions of Americans are not being victimized by a government that no longer respects its constitutional limits.
Mark my words: if Congress votes to make the NSA’s vast spying powers permanent, it will be yet another brick in the wall imprisoning us within an electronic concentration camp from which there is no escape.
Apple stands accused of breaking a French law which makes it illegal to "deliberately reduce the lifespan of a product to increase the rate of replacement.”
Apple has admitted to deliberately slowing down older iPhones when they roll out software updates—and they claim it is a "feature."
