Educational CyberPlayGround ®

Surveillance Capitalism the 21st Century Empire

ESPIONAGE

Google's 21st-Century Empire 25 12 Countries don't control the internet. Companies do.
“Within 25 years of the invention of the World Wide Web, a handful of private (mostly Silicon Valley) companies have become dominant. Some—Microsoft, Amazon, Apple—have achieved market power through a familiar route: selling products or services for money. Others, like Google and Facebook, have a different kind of power, one that we're only beginning to understand. They have conquered the world through what Shoshana Zuboff, a professor at Harvard Business School, calls surveillance capitalism, a big data world in which we're the products.”

As of 2013, the NSA's bitcoin tracking was achieved through program code-named OAKSTAR, a collection of covert corporate partnerships enabling the agency to monitor communications, including by harvesting internet data as it traveled along fiber optic cables that undergird the internet. Specifically, the NSA targeted bitcoin through MONKEYROCKET, a sub-program of OAKSTAR, which tapped network equipment to gather data from the Middle East, Europe, South America, and Asia, according to classified descriptions. As of spring 2013, MONKEYROCKET was “the sole source of SIGDEV for the BITCOIN Targets,” the March 29, 2013 NSA report stated, using the term for signals intelligence development, “SIGDEV,” to indicate the agency had no other way to surveil bitcoin users. Emin Gun Sirer, associate professor and co-director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts at Cornell University, told The Intercept that financial privacy “is something that matters incredibly” to the bitcoin community, and expects that “people who are privacy conscious will switch to privacy-oriented coins” after learning of the NSA's work here. Despite bitcoin's reputation for privacy, Sirer added, “when the adversary model involves the NSA, the pseudonymity disappears. … You should really lower your expectations of privacy on this network.”
Green, who co-founded and currently advises a privacy-focused bitcoin competitor named Zcash, echoed those sentiments, saying that the NSA's techniques make privacy features in any digital currencies like Ethereum or Ripple “totally worthless” for those targeted. The NSA's interest in cryptocurrency is “bad news for privacy, because it means that in addition to the really hard problem of making the actual transactions private … you also have to make sure all the network connections [are secure],” Green added 2018

The Use of Encrypted, Coded and Secret Communications is an "Ancient Liberty" Protected by the United States Constitution.

  1. D. Protection of Personal Privacy

  2. The Founders used secret communications methods to deny information to those not intended to receive it and to act as a "secure seal."[226] Abigail Adams summed it up neatly when she said that there were certain personal topics that she could not address in correspondence with her husband because of the lack of a cipher at a time when John Adams was in Paris.[227]Jefferson, Madison and others used ciphers to protect information about their romantic intentions.[228]Randolph corresponded with Madison about the painful topic of his wife's cancer.[229] Aaron Burr used a cipher to correspond with his daughter after his acquittal on treason charges, seeking to protect himself and his daughter from further governmental inspection.[230]Personal life suffered without secure communications.

    VII. Conclusion

  3. "Because of foreign and domestic threats to liberty and freedom, codes and ciphers became integral elements in American public and private communication."[231]This summation of early American history shows that Americans have long enjoyed the ancient liberty of the use of ciphers, codes and other forms of secret writing. The federal government has, for only two generations, enjoyed the ability to quickly override consumer use of cryptography through powerful decryption technology. The government's superior decryption capacity is threatened (or perhaps it has practically evaporated) when average citizens can and do encrypt their communications and their records using powerful encryption products.
  4. Absent abandonment of current government policy, the courts will inevitably be called upon to judge the balance between the government's asserted powers and the Ancient Liberty of secret communication.[232]Technological development should not have the effect of making Americans less free than the Founders. When the courts do eventually confront the issue, it is hoped that the judges do so with full knowledge of the technological and legal history of encrypted communications, and will recognize and uphold this Ancient Liberty.

 

FBI's literal motto: Keep Fear Alive!

It's Time to Break Up the NSA Bruce Schneier CNN

Why Michael Moore is launching TrumpiLeaks
2017 The power and the importance of whistleblowing is part of the American tradition and as old as the republic itself. Donald Trump thinks he's above the law. He acts like he's the above the law. He's STATED that he's above the law. And by firing Sally Yates, Preet Bharara and James Comey (3 federal officials with SOME authority to hold him accountable) he's taken the first few steps to make it official. go to TrumpiLeaks - Download Signal
Michael Moore's Signal phone number: 929-451-7267

My special report on hidden ID printer codes from 1999
At the time, many observers were highly skeptical of my statement in this regard. They were proven incorrect. IDs in Color Copies--A PRIVACY Forum Special Report ~Lauren Weinstein

2017 How NSA leaker Reality Leigh Winner gets caught because they ID'd the printer she used. EXPLANNED by Robert Graham @ErrataRob
Reality Winner was outed by invisible dot patterns added by printers!!
The Intercept run by Glenn Greenwald totally blew it! You can't trust them.
They released documents on election tampering from an NSA leaker. Later, the arrest warrant request for an NSA contractor named "Reality Winner" was published, showing how they tracked her down because she had printed out the documents and sent them to The Intercept. The document posted by the Intercept isn't the original PDF file, but a PDF containing the pictures of the printed version that was then later scanned in. The problem is that all new printers print nearly invisibly yellow dots that track down exactly when and where documents, any document, is printed.
Because the NSA logs all printing jobs on its printers, it can use this to match up precisely who printed the document. In this post, I show how. She also emailed the media outlet from her work computer.
TAKE AWAY: don't send anything to the intercept they aren't trustworthy! here's what journalists and sources can learn from the new NSA contractor document leak. A tool to remove the yellow tracking dots from PDF files. By @gszathmari

RUSSIAN MILITARY INTELLIGENCE executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November's presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept. The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.

CounterSabotage -- A Counterintelligence Function by Eric W. Timm

Counterintelligence operations consist of obtaining and analyzing information on the adversary and then using it against him in accordance with the requirements of the situation and in the light of our knowledge of his practices and psychological outlook. An ideal counterintelligence system anticipates the enemy's move, notionally satisfies his needs, and indeed operates a notional intelligence service for him. This deception eliminates or at least minimizes the introduction of unknown enemy agents, lulling the enemy into a false sense of security. When properly carried out, counterintelligence operations will prevent the enemy from mounting intelligence operations.


2015 Seymour Hersh breaking his biggest blockbuster story of the Obama Era. The Killing of Osama bin Laden Seymour M. Hersh debunking the official heroic White House story about how Navy SEALs took out Osama Bin Laden in a daring, secret nighttime raid in the heart of Pakistan.
Hersh's press colleagues tried smearing Seymour Hersh's bombshell reporting on CIA domestic spying program 40 years ago. The 1974 exposé of the CIA's massive, illegal domestic spying program, MH-CHAOS, which targeted tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of Americans, mostly antiwar and leftwing dissidents. Hersh is better known today for his My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib exposés, but it was his MH-CHAOS scoop, which the New York Times called “the son of Watergate,” that was his most consequential and controversial—from this one sensational exposé the entire intelligence apparatus was nearly taken down. Hersh's exposés directly led to the famous Church Committee hearings into intelligence abuses, the Rockefeller Commission, and the less famous but more radical Pike Committee hearings in the House.

EDWARD SNOWDEN

He would also begin to appreciate the enormous scope of the NSA's surveillance capabilities, an ability to map the movement of everyone in a city by monitoring their MAC address, a unique identifier emitted by every cell phone, computer, and other electronic device.

If the government will not represent our interests,” he says, his face serious, his words slow, “then the public will champion its own interests. And whistle-blowing provides a traditional means to do so.”

James Bamford

THE MOST WANTED MAN IN THE WORLD.

James Bamford
James Bamford literally wrote the book on the National Security Agency, spending 30 years obsessively documenting the secretive agency in print. Today, for the first time, he tells the story of his brief turn as an NSA whistleblower.
"I confess to feeling some kinship with Snowden. Like him, I was assigned to a National Security Agency unit in Hawaii—in my case, as part of three years of active duty in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Then, as a reservist in law school, I blew the whistle on the NSA when I stumbled across a program that involved illegally eavesdropping on US citizens. I testified about the program in a closed hearing before the Church Committee, the congressional investigation that led to sweeping reforms of US intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Finally, after graduation, I decided to write the first book about the NSA. At several points I was threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act, the same 1917 law under which Snowden is charged (in my case those threats had no basis and were never carried out). Since then I have written two more books about the NSA, as well as numerous magazine articles (including two previous cover stories about the NSA for WIRED), book reviews, op-eds, and documentaries." BY James Bamford

William Binney

 

 

** 10/2/14 Alexa O'Brien an independent journalist Presentation of Retired NSA technical director, William Binney Explains Snowden Docs. How the current NSA mass surveillance regime differs from aspects of an earlier less expensive program, called THINTHREAD, which both he and the former NSA senior computer scientist, Edward Loomis, invented.

9/15/14 Treasure Map's goal is to create an “interactive map of the global internet” in “almost real time.” Employees of the so-called “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance — England, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — can install and use the program on their own computers. It evokes a kind of Google Earth for global data traffic, a bird's eye view of the planet's digital arteries. Treasure Map is a vast top secret NSA program to map the global internet. Companies and some of its customers, have been penetrated by the U.S. National Security Agency and British spy agency GCHQ. The program doesn't just seek to chart data flows in large traffic channels, such as telecommunications cables. Rather, it seeks to identify and locate every single device that is connected to the internet somewhere in the world—every smartphone, tablet, and computer—”anywhere, all the time,” according to NSA documents. Its internal logo depicts a skull superimposed onto a compass, the eyeholes glowing demonic red.

8/13/14 Reagan-Era Order on Surveillance Violates Rights, Says Departing Aide
"It's a problem if one branch of government can collect and store most Americans' communications, and write rules in secret on how to use them — all without oversight from Congress or any court, and without the consent or even the knowledge of the American people,” Mr. Tye said. “Regardless of the use rules in place today, this system could be abused in the future."

There is No 4th Amendment

 

Oct 12, 2014 Laura Poitras talks about "CITIZENFOUR," her documentary about Edward Snowden, the NSA, and surveillance, during a Q&A at the 52nd New York Film Festival, wins Oscar for best documentary in 2015.

 

2014 Why your privacy matters Glenn Greenwald

 

Four Ways You Can Protect Yourself From Digital Surveillance

NSA ANT product data for RAGEMASTER Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum @ioerror appelbaum.net gave a speech at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany, in which he detailed techniques that the simultaneously published Der Spiegel article he coauthored indicate the NSA uses in its surveillance efforts in the US and internationally. The prices of the items in the catalog range from free (typically for software) to US$250,000
ANT product Data: The #NSA's #GOPHERSET is what becomes possible when you have the keys to a SIM castle, explained by their own leaked documents.

 

10/13/14 Millions of voiceprints quietly being harvested as latest identification tool 'Voice biometrics will be the de facto standard in 2-3 years' More than 65m voiceprints already on databases.

"off-the-shelf digital implants readily available to the smallest nat'l agencies and the largest city police forces" https://t.co/5Bo79qlrNJ - Amie Stepanovich (@astepanovich) October 30, 2014

The Free Internet Project
Laws to protect Internet freedoms. The Free Internet Project is a nonprofit whose mission is to provide the public with information about the latest legal and technological efforts to protect Internet freedoms around the world.

NSA and the Companies they work with
One of the NSA's most important secrets, is the "relationships" between "U.S. Corporate partners" and the agency division that taps fiber optic cables.

ARGUS

 

The airborne panopticon: How plane-mounted cameras watch entire cities. See the "basic capabilities" that BAE was authorized to show. 1 million terabytes a day saved forever. The ARGUS array is made up of several cameras and other types of imaging systems. The output of the imaging system is used to create extremely large, 1.8GP high-resolution mosaic images and video. The U.S. Army, along with Boeing, has developed and is preparing to deploy a new unmanned aircraft called the "Hummingbird." It's is a VTOL-UAS (vertical take-off and landing unmanned aerial system). Three of them are being deployed to Afghanistan for a full year to survey and spy on Afghanistan from an altitude of 20,000 feet with the ability to scan 25 square miles of ground surface.

 

 

Who Controls Big Data?

THE GOOD NEWS: YOU'RE NOT PARANOID

The modern American surveillance state is not really the stuff of paranoid fantasies; it has arrived. The American Surveillance State owes the public an explanation. The public needs to decide if these policies are right or wrong.

Surveillance

 

8/13 14 EU Lawyers Confirm 'General And Blanket Data Retention Is No Longer Possible' In European Union
Here's what paragraph 59 of the ruling saysMoreover, whilst seeking to contribute to the fight against serious crime, [the Data Retention] Directive 2006/24 does not require any relationship between the data whose retention is provided for and a threat to public security and, in particular, it is not restricted to a retention in relation (i) to data pertaining to a particular time period and/or a particular geographical zone and/or to a circle of particular persons likely to be involved, in one way or another, in a serious crime, or (ii) to persons who could, for other reasons, contribute, by the retention of their data, to the prevention, detection or prosecution of serious offences.

7/14/14 GCHQ has tools to manipulate online information, leaked documents show Documents leaked by Edward Snowden reveal programs to track targets, spread information and manipulate online debates.

6/3/14 REVEALED: GCHQ's BEYOND TOP SECRET Middle Eastern INTERNET SPY BASE Snowden leaks that UK.gov suppressed. Above-top-secret details of Britain's covert surveillance programme - including the location of a clandestine British base tapping undersea cables in the Middle East - have so far remained secret, despite being leaked by fugitive NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden. Government pressure has meant that some media organisations, despite being in possession of these facts, have declined to reveal them. Today, however, the Register publishes them in full. See Broadband

5/12/14 Glenn Greenwald: how the NSA tampers with US-made internet routers The NSA has been covertly implanting interception tools in US servers heading overseas - even though the US government has warned against using Chinese technology for the same reasons. While American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers, foreign organisations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones. A June 2010 report from the head of the NSA's Access and Target Development department is shockingly explicit. The NSA routinely receives - or intercepts - routers, servers and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers. The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users. The document gleefully observes that some "SIGINT tradecraft … is very hands-on (literally!)".

Mike O'Dell ~ The things that have been revealed about how the US has behaved in the last 15 years are precisely the things which, during the Cold War, were cited as things the US would never do, and hence distinguished the US from The Bad Guys. If we don't want to be The Bad Guys, stop pretending we can behave like them and get away with it. The entire purpose of the Constitution was to ensure that the govenment isn't making up rules as it sees fit for its convience. The fact that nobody has gone to jail for the gross violations committed over the last 15 years is a Constitutional Attrocity. The fact the Supreme Court has decided to have the Constitution reprinted on 4"x4" squares in 400 sheet rolls doesn't make it right; it only makes it legal.

5/13/14 In the future, the robots may control you, and Silicon Valley will control them Welcome to the horror show that is the 'internet of things' - hyper-intelligent software, vulnerable hardware ... and a whole new level of privacy invasion

5/21/14 Facebook App Knows What You're Hearing, Watching
Facebook's mobile app just grew a keen sense of hearing. The app has the ability to recognize music and television shows playing in the vicinity of users. The feature is designed to make it easier for users to share. What Facebook users share will boost the value of ads sent to 1.28 billion users.
The audio-recognition feature works similar to the app Shazam, which also can identify music and television programming using the built-in microphones in mobile phones. Facebook says the app can recognize a live show within 15 seconds. Facebook also said it reached deals with music-streaming sites, including Spotify and Rdio, to enable Facebook users to play previews of songs that others have shared using the audio-recognition feature. The feature is optional and can be switched on and off.
If enough users opt in this could give Facebook enough data to start compiling television ratings. Even if users decide not to share what they're hearing or watching.
Facebook will hold onto the data in anonymous form, keeping tabs on how many users watched particular shows. Users who begin a post after turning on the feature will notice a tiny audio equalizer with undulating blue bars, indicating the app has detected sound and is attempting to match it to a song or television show. Once the app finds a match, users will see the title of the song and a thumbnail, such as an album cover or a photo of a talk-show host. By tapping on the show or song, users can post it to their news feeds. Facebook already knows what they're seeing and hearing.

 

Sneakers (1992): My Voice Is My Passport

 

It's all About the Information

 

Patriotism, Propoganda and Protest

 

Patriotic Dissent

Read aloud the entire text of the Declaration of Independence if we want to know what America is all about, the Declaration, rather than the U.S. Constitution, is the place to start. Dissent is central to democracy, and although I believe dissent should be civil, its centrality doesn't fade when it isn't. Insults aimed at government officials provide a check to those in power who may be tempted to think of themselves in grandiose terms, above the rest of humanity and hence not subject to insults. The essential function of dissent is to remind the rulers that they serve the ruled.

Journalists: The benchmark of truth tellers, who do their best keep there promise. It just seems impossible to find people like this now, which is why pundits mean less than ever before. The politicians, and the media have squandered it's social currency, the publics' trust.

 

The 21st Century Schizoid Man appears on the cover of the 1969 record album "Court of the Crimson King" a dystopian montage of horrific images in which lyricist Pete Sinfield conflated the first world war with that of Vietnam. The song was dedicated to the former US vice president Spiro Agnew, bane of anti-war protestors in the first Nixon administration.

Bruce "Utah" Phillips The Past Didn't Go Anywherea story that give the advice that you must make your own decisions and think for yourself.
"You know you love the country, you just can't stand the government. Get it straight!"

 

The promise of the individual, power to the people, the ideals of radical self-sufficiency that ruled the counter-culture movement became enshrined in the promise of the stand-alone Personal Computer.

Snowden's big truth: We are all less free and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, is in dire need of an update and our own passivity makes us all complicit with what is, in truth, a massive surrender of our Constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties.

The Googles of the world do not have the power to detain us under secret warrants. It is dangerous to believe in "restraints" upon government power, because, as many here have noted, we have applied the restraints again and again, only to find that what was made illegal (domestic spying) is now legal once again.

Everybody Sing: Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone.
~ Joni Mitchell

Use ixquick Encrypts All Searches

Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers 7/2013

Tap It: The NSA Slow Jam goremy

 

#Privacy #warrantless surveillance #NSA
admits listening to phone calls without warrants NSA analysts could also access the contents.

 

Secrets and Lies

 

Snowden has exposed the operation of the world's most powerful state-sponsored cyberespionage of a community that most prizes individual freedom. Hero or not, Snowden will go down in history as a whistle-blower who triggered a moral earthquake which few individuals in the world can escape.

A Long History of Untruthiness by U.S. Intelligence
America's chief intelligence officers have a longstanding history of untruthiness -- testifying falsely and fearlessly. They are caught in a dilemma -- sworn to secrecy yet sworn to tell the truth. Sometimes they get their facts wrong; that's human error. But sometimes their untruths are conscious. Soldiers can die as a consequence. This practice can slowly corrode a cornerstone of democracy, the rule of law. The question to Clapper from the Senate Intelligence Committee was straightforward: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper simply answered: “No.” Now, almost four months later, he concedes: “My response was clearly erroneous.” He corrected the record only after the metadata program was revealed by the meta-leaker Edward Snowden. Clapper joins a grand tradition. Allen Dulles, the Cold War commander of the Central Intelligence Agency, was a champion at untruthiness.

The most effective way for the United States to prevent Snowden from leaking more secrets is to collect and store fewer secrets. People can't keep secrets. Tell one person, you've told them all.

 

Soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere are presumably told they're getting their limbs blown off and their psyches devastated to defend freedom. But seems the freedom is a mirage in the first place, and they're not even allowed the freedom to inform themselves! US military blocks entire Guardian website for troops stationed abroad Troops deployed to Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East and South Asia have 'theater-wide block' to Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/01/us-military-blocks-guardian-troops

Secrets and Lies:
Every credit has its debit, every positive its negative. So for every secret there must be a lie, and every lie must be kept secret.
This is the currency of power today. Fiat truth.
We are not allowed to have any secrets any more. And yet those who insist they must know the truth about us, who spy upon us to extract our secrets, tell us. in return, only lies. It is a dangerous, corroding imbalance of power, because lies, like debts, compound.
Living the lie: We all know the famous Goebbels quote,
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
From Sadam's weapons of mass destruction and missiles that could hit us in just 40 minutes of sexed up bullshit, to the stress tests that show us every bank is perfectly solvent and however many billions they launder they are never guilty and no one goes to gaol because they are too big to fail and too connected to even question. “He has told the people of the world and the United States that there is mass unlawful interception of their communications, far beyond anything that happened under Nixon,” Assange said of Snowden. "They want to be able leverage anyone in the country." William Binney NSA whistleblower, on why the NSA is scooping up, well, everything. Blackmail is the name of the game.

Nothing happens without the law and the lawyers.
Law is the world's second oldest profession. These whores walk the halls of congress plying their trade and the hipocrites exist to take your money and property and thats all it is has been. How better for the greedy to endless take what they want except by the "law" or lack there of and secret courts.

Ever since the founding of the Republic,
the relationship between Yale and the "Intelligence Community" has been unique. To Hegel, our world is a world of reason. The state is Absolute Reason and the citizen can only become free by worship and obedience to the state. Hegel called the state the "march of God in the world" and the "final end". This final end, Hegel said, "has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state." Both fascism and communism have their philosophical roots in Hegellianism. Nathan Hale, along with three other Yale graduates, was a member of the "Culper Ring," one of America's first intelligence operations. Established by George Washington, it was successful throughout the Revolutionary War.