Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever.
Didn't we just discover the FBI was spying on members of Congress and the press without permission or anyone's knowledge? Is anyone doing anything about it? No, sure doesn't seem like it. I think the average citizen has convinced themself that 'why would anyone care about me? I am of no consequence.' Until you are and the red guard needs to find you.
AI is going to be used to eliminate the private sphere altogether. All transactions and all comings and goings can be connected together and patterns drawn…I’m frankly not really sure if this can be stopped in any way. I doubt it.
Yep, when an AI is expressing concern about you keeping late hours (when you hadn't even raised the issue), things have definitely gone too far.
Looks like Amazon running that Ring commercial during the Superbowl turned out to be a wake up call for a lot of people, but I suspect it's too late.
This stuff is all creepy AF.
Of course, I am old, and I read a lot of science fiction from age 12 on, so I'm one step ahead of all y'all Muggles. I've been dreading the coming of our robot overlords for decades now.
Considering the seriousness of this subject, I am sure there are many elder folk pondering, if not planning, a subscription to a Nest or Ring system with only safety in mind. Old folk mostly live within day to day goals. It’s an emotional trap for many of them because the larger dangers are just too overwhelming to take in.
Nearly a decade ago, our landlord installed cameras throughout our building in NYC. The tenants vociferously objected: a security camera system is monitored, whereas a surveillance system is not. This was surveillance, not security. At least we felt we should have access to it - if it was really for our benefit. The answer was no. Last year, our landlord changed the locks on our front door and installed a digital key fob system. This time nobody bothered to object. We are now tracked on entering our home and using the elevator to reach some floors. It's creepy. They are watching us - and listening to us - all the time. They know more about us than we know about each other.
When the CIA paid Bezos $600M back in 2014 to do their cloud storage/computing - and Amazon had only a fraction of the experience in the field that IBM had (who lost the bid) it was clear exactly WHAT Bezos would be doing for the CIA.
First he bought the WaPo for a grossly low price of only $300M, then he went to work spying on Americans (and the world) via Alexa, delivery schedules, purchases, and any and all data it could collect. The drone delivery was the perfect culmination.
Today, Amazon's marketplace isn't profitable. It's their government contracts that are taking in the bucks.
The whole "porch pirates" thing sounded suspiciously like brownshirts terrorizing Germans, and nearly a century ago...create a problem/fear, then race in to look like the hero when you solve it (Ring)
There are police First Response drone systems starting to be set up in many communities including smaller suburbs in the Midwest. They’re authorized to scrape ALL electronic data and visual ID along the path to the call scene and surrounding area of the event. This no-warrant info is sent to a national security center(s) for real-time analysis and stored (of course). If your house is anywhere near the route taken, your privacy (your kids playing in the yard, e.g.) is now theirs.
Everything we read, watch, or listen to about politics and culture is all a distraction from the surveillance state being built right under our noses with our tacit consent
It is also my opinion that Google is at heart a criminal organization delving far into the private lives of everyone without the means or knowhow to escape it. Gmail? I don't think so. Amazon isn't any better.
The government, for "national security" reasons dontcha know, has to have its feet in the backdoors of everything. Yet it is this same government whose Pentagon has never passed an audit, is over $38T in debt, and still refuses to release all the JFK (or Epstein) files. In JFK's case, it's SIXTY (60) years after the fact.
Existing political parties (which mostly work in opposition to the people's voice) are not inclined to help with this. In a sense, we are the political party we've been waiting for, though only if we keep ourselves from becoming corrupted in the ways that political factions usually get corrupted. I don't know if my use of "political party" is the best term here, given all the flaws that parties tend to have. But it might be helpful to think of what a smart political party would do, if it wants to enact Bill-of-Rights-style constitutional amendments (or get the courts to recognize fairer interpretations of the existing text of the US Constitution) in a situation where it knows it's nowhere near having the ability to pass these things into law and won't be much better off after the next elections either. It's possible to think in the longer term instead of being too absorbed by grimness. The aftermath of World War II was in many places a good step forward for freedom; and the same goes for the aftermath of World War I. I don't want to have a world war, which would cause immense suffering and does risk making things worse. But catastrophes that are on more or less the scale of a world war are clearly going to be in our future in some form or other, though we should try to avert them and shouldn't try to make them more likely. It is worth thinking of what we can do know that will strengthen good principles in the long run, despite inevitable setbacks, and do some of the groundwork for better arrangements and rights protections in a way that will hold up over time for the aftermath, when a lot of better things may suddenly become possible.
It is so much worse than you know. I am a targetted individual and I have experienced horrors of AI malware of my own device (computers) do all sorts of things to prevent me from sharing information. I am a software innovator so I have some idea of what can be attributable to bugs or user error. This "thing" appeared to be intelligent in a variety of ways. Possibly a swiss army type suite of tools but it seemed to work across default apps as well as various third party apps.
We are already completely monitored, and when needed, quarantined.
I doubt that another Snowden revelation would even break the news anymore. Need a different strategy that goes beyond the digital matrix.
Or we accept 1984, and love the boot. What choices.
Anyone have a sense for how this works with Blink? I have 3 cameras, don't pay for a subscription and, supposedly, data is only being collected locally.
There's no telling what they do today, and even if you get a geek to watch network traffic and clear it, there's no telling what Blink will do tomorrow.
Solution 1) open-source or homebrew hardware
Solution 2) keep your cameras on a VLAN without internet access
I can already see your expression.Heh heh heh. Big tech are waging a tech war against our privacy. Check out https://www.home-assistant.io/
Feed them misinformation regularly. Not all the time, just take a little time to feed these corporations misinformation. Then what is all the data worth?
Didn't we just discover the FBI was spying on members of Congress and the press without permission or anyone's knowledge? Is anyone doing anything about it? No, sure doesn't seem like it. I think the average citizen has convinced themself that 'why would anyone care about me? I am of no consequence.' Until you are and the red guard needs to find you.
AI is going to be used to eliminate the private sphere altogether. All transactions and all comings and goings can be connected together and patterns drawn…I’m frankly not really sure if this can be stopped in any way. I doubt it.
Especially not with tech bros building "data centers" all over the country.
Yep, when an AI is expressing concern about you keeping late hours (when you hadn't even raised the issue), things have definitely gone too far.
Looks like Amazon running that Ring commercial during the Superbowl turned out to be a wake up call for a lot of people, but I suspect it's too late.
This stuff is all creepy AF.
Of course, I am old, and I read a lot of science fiction from age 12 on, so I'm one step ahead of all y'all Muggles. I've been dreading the coming of our robot overlords for decades now.
A huge welcome back to Substack.
Considering the seriousness of this subject, I am sure there are many elder folk pondering, if not planning, a subscription to a Nest or Ring system with only safety in mind. Old folk mostly live within day to day goals. It’s an emotional trap for many of them because the larger dangers are just too overwhelming to take in.
Nearly a decade ago, our landlord installed cameras throughout our building in NYC. The tenants vociferously objected: a security camera system is monitored, whereas a surveillance system is not. This was surveillance, not security. At least we felt we should have access to it - if it was really for our benefit. The answer was no. Last year, our landlord changed the locks on our front door and installed a digital key fob system. This time nobody bothered to object. We are now tracked on entering our home and using the elevator to reach some floors. It's creepy. They are watching us - and listening to us - all the time. They know more about us than we know about each other.
If they listen to me they will hear nothing but my cursing THEM every single day.
When the CIA paid Bezos $600M back in 2014 to do their cloud storage/computing - and Amazon had only a fraction of the experience in the field that IBM had (who lost the bid) it was clear exactly WHAT Bezos would be doing for the CIA.
First he bought the WaPo for a grossly low price of only $300M, then he went to work spying on Americans (and the world) via Alexa, delivery schedules, purchases, and any and all data it could collect. The drone delivery was the perfect culmination.
Today, Amazon's marketplace isn't profitable. It's their government contracts that are taking in the bucks.
The whole "porch pirates" thing sounded suspiciously like brownshirts terrorizing Germans, and nearly a century ago...create a problem/fear, then race in to look like the hero when you solve it (Ring)
This is depicted in Fahrenheit 451.
There are police First Response drone systems starting to be set up in many communities including smaller suburbs in the Midwest. They’re authorized to scrape ALL electronic data and visual ID along the path to the call scene and surrounding area of the event. This no-warrant info is sent to a national security center(s) for real-time analysis and stored (of course). If your house is anywhere near the route taken, your privacy (your kids playing in the yard, e.g.) is now theirs.
Everything we read, watch, or listen to about politics and culture is all a distraction from the surveillance state being built right under our noses with our tacit consent
Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, is associated with the phrase "You'll own nothing and be happy," Not even your face.
In my humble opinion, Google is a .gov organization without the URL extension. There is good reason to believe Google was initially funded by the CIA:
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e
It is also my opinion that Google is at heart a criminal organization delving far into the private lives of everyone without the means or knowhow to escape it. Gmail? I don't think so. Amazon isn't any better.
The government, for "national security" reasons dontcha know, has to have its feet in the backdoors of everything. Yet it is this same government whose Pentagon has never passed an audit, is over $38T in debt, and still refuses to release all the JFK (or Epstein) files. In JFK's case, it's SIXTY (60) years after the fact.
Existing political parties (which mostly work in opposition to the people's voice) are not inclined to help with this. In a sense, we are the political party we've been waiting for, though only if we keep ourselves from becoming corrupted in the ways that political factions usually get corrupted. I don't know if my use of "political party" is the best term here, given all the flaws that parties tend to have. But it might be helpful to think of what a smart political party would do, if it wants to enact Bill-of-Rights-style constitutional amendments (or get the courts to recognize fairer interpretations of the existing text of the US Constitution) in a situation where it knows it's nowhere near having the ability to pass these things into law and won't be much better off after the next elections either. It's possible to think in the longer term instead of being too absorbed by grimness. The aftermath of World War II was in many places a good step forward for freedom; and the same goes for the aftermath of World War I. I don't want to have a world war, which would cause immense suffering and does risk making things worse. But catastrophes that are on more or less the scale of a world war are clearly going to be in our future in some form or other, though we should try to avert them and shouldn't try to make them more likely. It is worth thinking of what we can do know that will strengthen good principles in the long run, despite inevitable setbacks, and do some of the groundwork for better arrangements and rights protections in a way that will hold up over time for the aftermath, when a lot of better things may suddenly become possible.
It is so much worse than you know. I am a targetted individual and I have experienced horrors of AI malware of my own device (computers) do all sorts of things to prevent me from sharing information. I am a software innovator so I have some idea of what can be attributable to bugs or user error. This "thing" appeared to be intelligent in a variety of ways. Possibly a swiss army type suite of tools but it seemed to work across default apps as well as various third party apps.
We are already completely monitored, and when needed, quarantined.
I doubt that another Snowden revelation would even break the news anymore. Need a different strategy that goes beyond the digital matrix.
Or we accept 1984, and love the boot. What choices.
Anyone have a sense for how this works with Blink? I have 3 cameras, don't pay for a subscription and, supposedly, data is only being collected locally.
There's no telling what they do today, and even if you get a geek to watch network traffic and clear it, there's no telling what Blink will do tomorrow.
Solution 1) open-source or homebrew hardware
Solution 2) keep your cameras on a VLAN without internet access
I can already see your expression.Heh heh heh. Big tech are waging a tech war against our privacy. Check out https://www.home-assistant.io/
I don't understand all that, but my kids will.
Thanks for the link.
Why am I getting Greenwald emails now from both substack and locals? Am I being charged for two subscriptions now for the same thing?
Thank you Thank you Thank you Glenn. Been reading your work for several years. Appreciate this. Privacy is freedom.
Feed them misinformation regularly. Not all the time, just take a little time to feed these corporations misinformation. Then what is all the data worth?