Tuesday, July 15, 2014

The Tools of Tyranny.



RE: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-online-polls-ways-british-spies-seek-control-internet/

These are the devices used by GCHQ to subvert privacy and the integrity of the internet. Everything on this list of capabilities is illegal. Anyone not using these methods under color of official authority would be prosecuted.

These are the tools of tyranny. Like all tools, they are agnostic, they may be used for good or for evil. Because GCHQ is a foundational part of FVEY, and because FVEY is now the malignant shadow of the internet, these tools are typically put to evil purposes. These are not the only tools that tyranny has available, it has many tools, but the surveillance behemoth consists of many constituent parts, and those parts have tools which pertain to them. In this case, these tools pertain to JTRIG. Our compliments to Mssrs. Snowden and Greenwald for the documentation.

The primary problem that we now have is an utter deficit of trust. No one trusts NSA / GCHQ / FVEY. We repeatedly see their leadership lie, or they engage in traditional bureaucratic stratagems like the infamous Five D's, (Destroy, Deny, Delay, Degrade, Disrupt, Deceive),* or the old "Admit nothing, deny everything, demand proof, make counter accusations," that some of us learned in our Intelligence 101 coursework. These are their reflexes, and they would rather lie to us than tell us the truth. They completely forget that they serve us, not the other way around.

It is unwieldy to type NSA / FBI / GCHQ / FVEY, so I will just call the meta-organization comprising FVEY and allied international SIGINT agencies the Panopticon. The Panopticon's fetish for secrecy has morphed into a contempt for all who are not them. Civilians are akin to cattle, we are taxpayers, not much different from the batteries needed by the electronic devices of the Panopticon. They lie to us automatically now, not even realizing that when they do this, they sow the seeds of their own eventual destruction. This is a natural law, when taken to its logical conclusion. All that it takes is time, and ignorance, and malign intent. All three are abundant in the current zeitgeist.

Governments may not lie to their citizens and expect to last. Because lying is now such a commonplace, because spin is now the norm, rather than the exception, it illustrates how far the relationship between the rulers and the ruled has deteriorated. When the people cannot believe anything stated by the government, we stop listening. When we stop listening, we disobey, and when we disobey, we go to jail, or we throw down. When the citizenry cannot petition its government for the redress of grievances, what is left? Violence. When a government rules with tyrannical intent, what is left? Violence. In fact, revolutionary violence. This is the path that the Panopticon is on. It is the path that we are all on. Tyranny begets violent resistance. This, too, is a natural law. Absent reforms, these are all inevitabilities.

None of this is rocket science. We saw the first symptoms of revolution spasm at the Bundy Ranch. Many of us recognized the idiosyncratic indicators of freedom immediately. Fortunately the Obama administration also recognized that the Bundy Ranch was a potential flashpoint, and it backed off and it avoided further confrontation. The point is, the situation in America has deteriorated to a point where a significant segment of the citizenry is prepared to resist the government by force of arms. That significant segment of the citizenry consists of just plain folks, folks who have guns, folks who will not be pushed around. We will not lay down our arms. We will not file peaceably to the cattle cars. We will not be incarcerated. This is the current assessment of the situation, the state of objective conditions, in America today: a significant percentage of the populace is ready to wage war against its own government. It does not matter that this potentially violent percentage is a minority. History is made by small cabals acting in secrecy. Small groups can move the world, if they have the right lever in their hands. As our history teaches us, even a lone gunman can change history, if he has the right target in his sights. A singleton cannot be anticipated, nor predicted. He just needs to be lucky once. 

The government cannot confiscate our weapons. That would cause an immediate outbreak of revolutionary violence, and we would probably hang Eric Holder, Valerie Jarrett, and Barack Obama from lamp posts. The government can interfere with ammunition availability, and I expect that it will, but this also contains the potential to push Americans into open rebellion. When the government in New York outlawed certain weapons and large capacity magazines, the citizens of that state ignored the law. We have a situation in New York where large numbers of state residents are now de facto felons. No one seems too concerned about this, except the government, which literally does not know what to do. 

In the meantime, true patriots are stewing over the abuses represented by the JTRIG tools of tyranny, and other grave offenses perpetrated by the Panopticon against we, the people. True patriots are deeply angered by the contempt that our governments display for us. These tools illustrate the depths to which our governments will stoop, the extremes to which they go. Nothing is off limits for the Panopticon. After all, we are just cattle. We are just batteries. We pay our taxes, and the Panopticon keeps the lights on. Then it resumes feasting on its own domestic populations.

Ultimate sovereignty rests with the people. The consent to be ruled is ours to bestow and ours to retract. The right to rebel is inherent in the nature of mankind. The threat represented by the Panopticon to us all, worldwide, is naked and unmistakable.

I wish that I could have confidence that electoral politics could steer us through these rough shoals of the waning days of the Obama administration. Because no one listens to anyone else these days, because our governments lie to us so often and so badly, it is inevitable that the coming confrontation will be violent. 

At what point do my words cross the threshold to incitement? I foretell. I do not commit. I observe the extremes of the current political situation, I call a spade a spade, I do not mince words. I am not a fortune teller nor a prophet. At most, I am a rudimentary mathematician, and I am adding up the sums of our days and ways in the era of the internet.

Those who would circumvent the coming violence should consider that it is easily prevented. All that is necessary is that our governments must stop lying to us. Tall order? Why? The arrogance of the rulers makes it unlikely that truth will become a sudden vogue, but it could happen. It would be better than violent revolution. Nobody wants that. I wish harm on no man. But I see much harm coming, storm clouds are gathering, and when our government points the machinery of mass surveillance at us, when our governments fear we, the people, the temperature rises, and all that it takes is one misstep, and the first shots of the Second American Revolution will be fired. 

As the man said in Reno: we will let them fire the first shots. We shall fire the rest.

*The Five D's are now six, with the addition of Delay to the sequence. 

Sunday, July 13, 2014

All Hail the Surveillance Leviathan

All Hail the Surveillance Leviathan

There is now no question that we the "paranoid" were not paranoid enough. A year of Snowden publications underscores that we will never have enough tinfoil. 

The deep state is midwifing a global panopticon. Future historians, if there are future historians, will record that this decade witnessed a newborn technology that is more dangerous than the atom bomb. Nuclear weapons can eradicate all life on the planet, except for insects: the surveillance Leviathan can enslave us all.

The only purpose that a transnational panopticon can serve is a despotic totalitarianism that is worldwide in scope. I am not the first to make this observation. That honor goes to Mr. William Binney, veteran of 32 years of service with NSA, designer of THINTHREAD, who warned mankind about the behemoth rising for years before any of us heard the name Snowden. Mr. Binney was the first to describe the surveillance Leviathan in terms of despotism and totalitarianism. The fact that few of us know Mr. Binney's name, despite thousands of news reports and articles that cite him, betrays the effectiveness of our systems of mass control. Mankind is hypnotized. We are entranced, in a form of slavery. Within our collective nightmare some of us know it.

As our collective consciousness recoils from this technology, as some of us struggle to snap out of our daze, we are confronted by our own image in a mirror which mercilessly reflects our worst attributes: this technology of mass surveillance is agnostic, it can be used for good, or for evil, but because our civilization can never return to our blissful prelapsarian state of ignorance, we are doomed to occupy ringside seats to the subjugation of humanity. It is happening right now, in our lifetimes, as we dance to the tedious metronome of our waking trance. We did this to ourselves. Our mirror does not lie.

We cannot unlearn this technology, nor can we hoard it, nor monopolize it, though we will try. Other governments now understand that this technology exists in nascent form. It can be recreated. It can be rediscovered. In a misdeed that echoes the Promethean revelation of fire, what NSA and GCHQ did is they imagined the irreversible machinery of mass surveillance, and over time, given the massive resources of the US government and the liberty afforded by classified budgets, they built it. NSA and GCHQ changed everything. Then Binney blew NSA's cover. He was ignored. Years later, Snowden flew to Hong Kong, and he blew the cover of FVEYs. Snowden was not ignored.

Now the governments of the world covet the technology. And not just governments. Mafias. Hackers. Private corporations. Indeed, much of this technology is owned by private corporations. That we do not know which ones, and to what degree, illustrates our peril. Does anyone doubt that the future belongs to descendants of Google and Akamai? No elected representative of the people, as irrelevant as they are in the waning days of the American empire, has any oversight of the board meetings of Google. Most of us have not heard of Akamai.

This technology can be stolen, its software can be transmitted, its hardware can be purchased from private firms, and as Snowden proved in an act that will reverberate down the ages, its catalogues, its user manuals, its PowerPoint stacks, all can be purloined. The only way that we can turn back the clock now is if the Holy Mother of All EMPs fuses all the circuits and melts all the ubiquitous electronics of modern society into slag. Or if a benevolent architect of the universe takes pity on us and provokes sterilizing sunspots that relapse us back to a pre-historic state of grace. No legislation will save us. No politician, no judicial oversight, no human agency can impose transparency, as the surveillance Leviathan serves itself, and it shrugs off all efforts to bridle it. This genie is out of the bottle. Failing an apocalypse that demolishes civilization, it cannot be reversed, thwarted, or contained.

Know this: The deep state must function within the void created by our ignorance. Classification regimes are abused to thwart effective oversight, to embargo entire categories of human knowledge, and to abet governments that wield the power of information to rule. State secrecy seeks to prevent mankind from understanding the concentric characteristics, capabilities and dimensions of a system principally comprised of FVEYs, with NSA at its heart. NSA does not want you peeking beyond the veil. Knowledge is reserved for those with clearances, for those with a need to know that perpetuates the system. And we consent. Humanity is easily led, we focus on daily tasks, we forget quickly, and we are readily diverted by bread and circuses. The problem for the deep state is, if enough of us awake and recognize what is happening, the danger exists that we will seek to unplug the system. NSA's mortal fear is that its tyranny will engender yet another potentially fatal heretic, another Snowden. We foes of the surveillance Leviathan await him, our next prophet.

This is why NSA wants you focused on Snowden, that imperfect messenger who again rang the alarm first set off by William Binney. And this is why you must forget Snowden. If you wish to wake up, you must read the heretical texts, you must read the Snowden documents, and you must draw the inescapable conclusions that they reveal to you for yourself. Fear not. There is redemption on the far side of the Snowden exegesis. As you read them, the shock of recognition that you experience is the sensation of your consciousness awakening. Suddenly you hear the music. You understand that you are hypnotized. You realize that you exist in a dream state, you suddenly know that mass media orchestrates our societies, all for the benefit of a system that serves only itself. 

This is why I believe that the Snowden texts must ultimately be published in their entirety, without redactions. This means you, Mr. Greenwald. All of them. They are the patrimony of humanity, and you are only a steward. You are a good steward, and I thank God that destiny in the form of Snowden chose you, but when you ask yourself who and what you are protecting by a piecemeal release of redacted data over a protracted period, you soon realize that you are defending evil. Our Republic has been hijacked. America is all but lost. Absent a Second American Revolution, we may not be able to save her. In the meantime, humanity is naked before the looming shadow of the surveillance Leviathan.

Mass surveillance is implemented for purposes of control. Populations, entire societies, are its targets. This is why the collection systems are principally pointed at the domestic populations of the FVEY consortium, and only secondarily at actual terrorists, or foreign governments, or targets pertaining to hostile intelligence services. More Americans and other Westerners are under surveillance by the NSA / FBI and FVEYs than the combined populations of North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and China. NSA and GCHQ are looking at us. Not at them. On those rare occasions when actual perpetrators are apprehended or interdicted by the systems, the acolytes that run them, the elite caste of SIGINT analysts that are anointed to run the searches, they celebrate, and they tell themselves that they are protecting our society while they are complicit in our enslavement. 

The systems silently continue collecting, insatiably, without pause, storing everything in databases that will soon be comprehensive and permanent, as enduring as anything made by the hands of man. The Constitution, the Fourth Amendment, are ignored, the DIRNSA and the DNI lie, the Attorney General lies, our President lies, and the body politic of the Republic sickens. The omniscient eyeball does not blink. When sufficient storage comes online, NSA will achieve its heart's desire of collecting everything and saving everything, forever. The new NSA center in Utah is merely the first repository that will retain every quotidian and digital detail of the minutiae of our lives. The acolytes of this system, we can call them the priests of the panopticon, they will do anything to prevent the system from going dark. They believe in the surveillance Leviathan. 

The global panopticon is not yet complete, it is in its infancy, but as it absorbs new capabilities through bilateral agreements with the national SIGINT agencies of countries worldwide, the surveillance Leviathan creeps closer to the ultimate irrelevance of the Westphalian nation state. It is transnational. It is Leviathan. Black budgets will build more data centers. It will be abused. Because it exists, and because mankind is fallen, the technology will be adapted for evil and control. 

Nothing digital or electronic is off limits to this transnational meta organization. It will enable instantaneous and comprehensive scrutiny of every human on the planet. Omniscience, in short. 

"Dystopia" does not quite cover what we have done to ourselves.