The NSA is in the process of profiling every one of us

as horrifying as this sounds, it's no surprise... since the government is collecting information on not only every electronic transaction - from phone calls to atm withdrawals to airline tickets to supermarket affinity card swipes - as well as assembling facial recognition information and feeds from the millions of surveillance cameras located virtually everywhere, the next reasonable step is to do something with it... kevin at cryptogon has been all over this for years (here and here, among others) and i've been posting on it since at least 2006 (here)... the objective clearly is to build not only profiles of individuals but also of their communities, their networks, their behavior patterns, their interests, their allegiances, their movements, their beliefs, and their vulnerabilities... why...? control... the more information the government has about ordinary citizens and their proclivities, the more control can be exercised, and the more control that can be exercised, the greater the opportunity to instill fear which, in turn, increases the control...


from raw story...

NSA whistleblower William Binney was interviewed by internet journalist Geoff Shively at the HOPE Number 9 hackers conference in New York on Friday.

Binney, who resigned from the NSA in 2001 over its domestic surveillance program, had just delivered a keynote speech in which he revealed what Shively called “evidence which we have not seen until this point.”

“They’re pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country … and assembling that information,” Binney explained. “So government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it’s a very dangerous process.” He estimated that something like 1.6 billion logs have been processed since 2001.

a video clip of binney's summary of his talk...


 

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Here we go...! Massive computer power will attempt to predict our every move...!

i've posted a number of times on the technology that has been in place for several years now that is fully capable of processing the vast amounts of data necessary to predict damn near everything a society is going to do... kevin at cryptogon has been a lot more on top of this stuff than i have but this piece from wired's danger room from a few days ago grabbed me...

A research arm of the intelligence community wants to sweep up public data on everything from Twitter to public webcams in the hopes of predicting the future.

The project is the brainchild of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or Iarpa, a relatively new part of the spy community that’s supposed to help investigate breakthrough technologies. While other projects exist for predicting political events, the Open Source Indicators program would be perhaps the first that mines data from social media websites.

The idea is to use automated analysis to sift through the deluge of publicly available data to help predict significant societal events, like a popular revolution. The nascent project, called “Open Source Indicators,” is just the latest move by the national security community to come to grips with the flood of information now available on social media. As Danger Room’s Lena Groeger has reported, it’s also intended to predict natural disasters or economic disruptions.

The science underlying the project is the notion that early indicators of major social upheavals might be hidden in plain, socially-networked sight. “Some of these changes may be indirectly observable from publicly available data, such as web search queries, blogs, micro-blogs, internet traffic, financial markets, traffic webcams, Wikipedia edits, and many others,” the announcement, published August 25, says. “Published research has found that some of these data sources are individually useful in the early detection of events such as disease outbreaks, political crises, and macroeconomic trends.”

Indeed, social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, garnered major attention during recent events like the Arab Spring, and have been credited with helping to organize protesters and even foment revolution. Authoritarian governments trying to hold on to power noted the trend, and attempted at times to shut down access to those sites — and occasionally the Internet as a whole — in the hopes of stymieing efforts to organize protests.

The idea of the U.S. intelligence community culling data from social media is still a new one, and is likely to raise a number of questions. For example: what constitutes public data?

Iarpa, for its part, defines public data as “lawfully obtained data available to any member of the general public, to include by purchase, subscription or registration.” That raises its own host of questions, like whether the intelligence community could register a fake profile on Facebook, in order to “friend” people and obtain more information.

For those who fear the all-seeing surveillance state, Iarpa says there are some things the program won’t do. It won’t be used to predict events in the United States, for instance. Nor will it be used to track specific individuals.

as with most of these "revelations," i firmly believe this kind of thing has been going on for quite some time and is only being outed now because it's become almost a given that it's taking place...

(note: all the emphases added are mine...)

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Life without our controllers

Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails.
Therefore we had no criminals. You can't have criminals without a jail.
We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things.
We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings.
We wanted to have things only in order to give them away.
We had no money, and therefore a man's worth couldn't be measured by it.
We valued the exchange of love, so we did not deal in fear.
We had no written law, no attorney or politicians, therefore we couldn't cheat.
We were in a really bad way before the white man came, and I don't know how we managed to get along for millenniums without the basic things which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a current civilized
society.

-- Lakota Sage Lame Deer (from John Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions)

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Americans should never be compared to primitive, evil foreign Muslim jihadists

glenn is commenting on reaction to markos moulitsas' recently published book, american taliban, and, as usual, offers a much larger and more trenchant observation than would normally be part of a mere book review...

[O]bnoxious jingoism and nationalistic exceptionalism: to wit, no matter how bad the American Right is, they are still Americans, and thus should never be compared to primitive, evil foreign Muslim jihadists. Illustrative of that mentality is this passage from Jamelle Bouie's extremely negative and widely-cited review in The American Prospect:

Like Liberal Fascism, American Taliban is another entry in the tired genre of "my political opponents are monsters" . . . . Yes, progressives are depressed and despondent about the future, but that's no reason for dishonesty and scaremongering, and it doesn't excuse the obscenity of comparing our political opponents to killers and terrorists. As reality-based members of the American community, we have an obligation toward the truth, even when it isn't particularly convenient.

In what universe is it "obscene" to compare the architects of the Iraq War, the torture regime, and endless War with Muslims "to killers and terrorists"? The comparison is true by definition. The people who launched the attack on Iraq are guilty of an aggressive war -- what the Nuremberg prosecutors condemned as the "kingpin crime" that "holds together" all other war crimes -- which killed hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings, turned millions more into refugees, and destroyed an entire nation. The aptly named "Shock and Awe" was designed to terrify an entire civilian population into submission. John Podhoretz criticized the brutal assault on Fallujah for failing to exterminate all "Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35," while his father has spent years agitating for a devastating military attack on Iran. At least 100 War on Terror detainees in American custody died as a result of their treatment, tens of thousands more (including clearly innocent ones) were put in cages for years with no due process (where many remain), and as recent mosque-related controversies reveal, a substantial portion of the American population craves a religious war with Islam. And that's to say nothing of the acts of other countries which this faction supports: from mauling an imprisoned population in Gaza and attacking a harmless, civilian ship in international waters to propping up some of the most oppressive tyrannies on the planet, including many in the Muslim world.

in my travels, i've become acutely aware of a sad and poignant fact... people in other countries seem to have no problem accepting that their leaders are not only capable of bad things, they routinely ENGAGE in bad things, almost always at the expense of the common folk and their welfare...

those of us steeped in the mythology of the united states have this extraordinarily naive notion that we are somehow above all that... sure, we have the occasional miscreant, the government official or corporate titan "gone bad," but, for the most part, we nourish the delusion that the majority of our leaders have our best interests at heart... we can't seem to grasp that while, yes, we do have some wonderful and remarkable people in our midst, we also have some truly evil types, hell-bent on accruing as much money and power as humanly possible, just like - GASP - every other country... and it is THOSE putrid excrescences who, just like in every other country, tend to gravitate to positions where they can pursue their greedy megalomania even if thousands of people have to die to help them achieve their dark aims...

there are fantastic people everywhere and there are assholes and creeps everywhere... what a concept...!

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All state societies be they French, be they American, be they any, are by definition violent systems

the musée du quai branly in paris is hosting an exhibition of ceramics from the peruvian moche culture that flourished between the first and eighth centuries... i have actually seen some of these many years ago during a trip to peru and was stunned at the explicit sex acts depicted... in the news article describing the paris exhibit, the exhibit curator, steve bourget, makes one of the most cogent observations i've yet read about the power of states and organized religions to exert control over people's lives...

Originally interpreted as evidence of a decadent culture, Bourget says the sexual acts should be seen as a visual discourse on the power of the Moche elite.

It's a story that has parallels with modern debates from the burqa to the death penalty.

"All state societies be they French, be they American, be they any, are by definition violent systems," Bourget said.

"The state gives itself the right to kill, to put people in jail, to control them."

In places where the ideological pole is strongest — from the Moche sacrifices through Ancient Rome to modern day Texas — the state tries to magnify its power through ritualized violence.

He says the Moche religion is not the only one to seek to control sexuality. The burqa is a form of control, as is the Catholic aversion to condoms, he says.

"You control sexuality, you control access to it, and in the process you give yourself power over groups, over people and you embed this power into values and you disseminate the values as being part of the population," he says.

"The population accept this because they believe its part of their values. They don't think they are being controlled."

i've been aware for many years that the essence of both state and religious control is based on convincing people that the source of authority and truth lie outside of themselves as individuals... "truth," "normalcy," and the definition of what is "right" and what is "wrong" must not be left to the individual but instead must come from the so-called "legitimate" - socially, religiously or institutionally sanctioned - holders of authority...

the very last thing a state or religious power structure can tolerate is people deciding for themselves what's right and wrong... the belief that we must abdicate our individual power to determine our own truth is succumbing to humanity's biggest lie, a lie that has been used over countless centuries right up to today to keep people in thrall to their masters... when that lie is finally laid to rest, we will finally be on our way to true civilization...

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Watch the Senate shrug off and laugh at those who came to the hearing to support a single-payer health plan

it's pathetic how casually our leaders can totally ignore the people to whom they are supposedly answerable...

from the real news network...

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The destruction of the social contract and the rise of Ron Paul

juan cole shares some observations about how and why a traditional conservative like ron paul is emerging as a serious candidate, but he also puzzles over why, given the bush administration's deliberate campaign to destroy every trace of the social contract, his libertarian orientation is not being more strongly called into question...

Government is a set of bargains, a 'moral economy.' We let the government take a certain proportion of our money, and we expect it to organize services for us that would otherwise be difficult to arrange. Anyone who has studied any history and economics knows that the market is going to leave some people destitute, and you need government to correct for that imbalance. It is no accident that government was invented by irrigation-based societies like Egypt and Iraq, where if someone did not organize the peasants to do the irrigation work and keep it up, everybody would starve.

Bush has broken the US government. The US military was there to protect us. Bush has used it to fight a fascist-style aggressive war of choice. FEMA is there for emergency aid. Bush did not deploy it effectively for New Orleans. Social security lifted the elderly out of the poverty that had often been their fate before the 1930s. Bush declined to use Clinton's surplus to fix the system, and has essentially borrowed against the pensions of us all to pay for his wars. Government is there to ensure our security. Bush has used it to spy on us, to prosecute patently innocent persons, to manipulate the media and instill us with lies and propaganda.

[...]

Given how horribly corporations like Walmart treat their employees, denying them the right to unionize and cleverly avoiding paying anything toward their health insurance, I have never understood why Libertarians think corporations would be nicer to us if we could not organize government protections from them. It is the government of the state of Maryland that protected workers from Walmart's exploitation of them. Libertarian faith in the utopia that comes from the withering of the state strikes me as just as impractical as the similar Marxist theory.

But after 7 years of Bush, I don't find it at all astonishing that large numbers of internet contributors would give Ron Paul money to campaign on getting rid of the Frankenstein' s Monster of a government that George W. Bush has been constructing in his macabre basement of a mind.

a cornerstone of the bush administration policy, driven by such movement conservative ideologues as karl rove and grover norquist, is pure social darwinism*... that particular belief system is, in fact, the underpinning of the global elites that are, even as we speak, directing world events to their own ends (see previous post on alex jones' endgame)... the elites believe that they occupy their privileged and powerful positions because they deserve them... they and only they are worthy to decide the fate of the planet, and everyone and everything on it...

* Social Darwinism is the idea that Charles Darwin's theory can be extended and applied to the social realm, i.e. that just as competition between individual organisms drives biological evolutionary change (speciation) through "survival of the fittest" (not a scientific term itself), competition between individuals, groups, nations or ideas drives social evolution in human societies.

The term was popularized in 1944 by the American historian Richard Hofstadter, and has generally been used by critics rather than advocates of what the term is supposed to represent (Bannister, 1979; Hodgson, 2004).

While the term has been applied to the claim that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection can be used to understand the social endurance of a nation or country, social Darwinism commonly refers to ideas that predate Darwin's publication of his theory. Others whose ideas are given the label include the 18th century clergyman Thomas Malthus, and Darwin's cousin Francis Galton who founded eugenics towards the end of the 19th century.

Some claim that it supports racism on the lines set out by Arthur de Gobineau before Darwin published his theories, which directly contradict Darwin's own work. This classification of social Darwinism constitutes part of the reaction against the Nazi regime and the Holocaust.

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Saturday philosophizin'

an interesting article in today's alternet, written by chris hedges at truthdig...

Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and the author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning."

The relentless drive against abortion by the Christian right ... has nothing to do with the protection of life. It is, rather, a cover for a wider and more pernicious assault against the ability of women to control their own bodies, the use of contraception and sexual pleasure.

[...]

The leaders of this movement understand that the only emotion that cannot be subsumed into communal life, which they seek to dominate and control, is love. They fear the power of love, especially when magnified and expressed through tender, sexual relationships, which remove couples from their control. Sex, when not a utilitarian form of procreation, is dangerous.

They seek to fashion a world where good and evil are clearly defined and upheld by the nation's judicial system. The battle against abortion is a battle to build a society where pleasure and freedom, where the capacity of the individual and especially women to make choices, and indeed even love itself, are banished. And this is why pro-life groups oppose contraception -- even for those who are married. The fight against abortion is the facade for a wider fight against the right of an individual in a democracy.

you probably figured i picked this because i have a few thoughts of my own... why, whatever gave you THAT idea...?

first of all, i do not agree with this statement...

"The leaders of this movement understand that the only emotion that cannot be subsumed into communal life, which they seek to dominate and control, is love."

while i agree that love, "expressed through tender, sexual relationships" is a good thing, to be promoted, cherished and celebrated, not excoriated, love, in all its forms, directly or indirectly, is also most definitely part of communal life... in fact, rather than being something that "cannot be subsumed" in communal life, love subsumes EVERYTHING as the one principle that lies above all else, and, even though the sexual component of love is commonly conducted in private (at least in our current society), love can and should add immeasurably to the richness and quality of that communal life...

now, of course, i understand that when hedges refers to "communal life," he is referring to it as defined by the leaders of the extremist versions of fundamentalist christianity, a definition no different from that subscribed to by leaders of other extreme versions of religious fundamentalism... these leaders seek absolute authority and control over the lives of others, whether or not they subscribe to the tenets of their creed... in fact, one of the main tenets of organized religion in general requires that followers abdicate their personal authority to that of an external authority, usually an appointed or anointed individual, who either serves as the interpreter of absolute truth via the bible or other source, or, in more extreme cases, as the source him- or herself... (david koresh comes to mind...)

hedges again...

[T]heir own experiences ... have led them to build a movement that creates an external rigidity to cope with the chaos of human existence, a chaos that overwhelmed them. They do not trust their own urges, their capacity for self-restraint or judgment.

authentic communal life based on love, imho, recognizes that individuals must look within for truth, encourages that exploration, has expectations that it will occur, and provides the guidance and support necessary for it to proceed naturally in the course of an individual's process of growing and maturing... the "vision quest" of the native americans is a perfect example of how honoring an individual's truth can be built in to the fabric of a community... it's even evident in the bible with the story of john the baptist's sojourn in the desert and christ's journeys into the depths of his own soul...

especially interesting to me is that the expressed purpose of those journeys is to seek truth, and that truth, as so clearly stated by christ himself in the gospels, leads to nothing more or less than love... by contrast, what organized religions have so diligently pursued is to convince their followers that inner truth is not to be trusted, that only an external, "sanctioned" authority can be relied on as the source of truth... most organized religions are, in fact, primarily instruments of control, with the power of that control resting in the hands of a few who guard it jealously and insure that only those who share the same beliefs are admitted to the inner circle...

the inner journey, on the other hand, if conducted with the seriousness and the sense of the sacred that it deserves, will lead to the truth, and the truth will lead, inevitably, to love... with the insights gained by that inner journey as a basis, the individual can then partake in communal life as a full contributor, bringing the wisdom and love uniquely expressed out of having encountered his or her own truth... the purpose of REAL religious leaders is to help guide us on that journey and to recognize that such a journey is an essential part of an individual's life, which, if subjected to external control, loses its value entirely...

on a final note, i think it's abundantly clear that social control based on the requirement that individuals abdicate their personal truth in favor of an external, sanctioned authority is hardly unique to religions... repressive, authoritarian governments of every stripe follow precisely the same path, and even the high priests of our scientific community, who worship at the altar of scientific method, observation, measurement, and objectivity, often demand total obeisance from their followers...

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