Spies In Your Living Room

This is an old email, not a proper blog post:

You probably already know 95% of this, maybe you ever know more than I. But since I spent two hours trying to explain high-tech surveillance to my brother and my best friend, I figured I might as well cc: you it, just in case there's something to be learned. I don't really know why I bother sometimes, it's like beating my fist against a wall most times. I'm like Sisyphus over here, and I kind of wish the boulder would vamp left every once in a while. Or Prometheus, and that damn bird would find someone else's foie gras on which to dine. Or Hercules having to sanitize the Augean stables. I could go on with the classical references, but most times I just feel like a pooper-scooper following one of Hannibal's war elephants. It's dirty work, but someone's got to.

I am what I am. I'd rather be normal, but why bitch about something over which I have no control. I can tell you the satellite unlock code from "The Running Man" eve though it's been years since I watched it last. But if you ask me what I ate for dinner three days ago I'd have to get back to you. It's a strange way to live, it's not as extreme as Rain Man or anything close, but many things that most people find incredibly difficult are for me the easiest, and most things that normal people don't give a second thought to are like solving Rubik's Cube for me. But syndromes and disorders and all the rest are, in my opinion, part of the greater control mechanism we are being placed under. One more excuse to get medicated, get therapied, be controlled.

Maybe I am some kind of developmentally-disabled mental midget.  I mean, who can argue with the DSM? But as long as I have one free mind listening to me I think I'll press on. Thanks for listening.

Here is the email I wrote to the others:

Did you read this story about the school principal who called a kid into his office and said he knew he had done something (as yet un-named) in his bedroom? And he knew because he remotely turned on the webcam in the laptop which every student in the district is issued? Obviously the infraction must involve something either sexual or relating to alcohol or drugs since it is being kept secret. But the laptop spying thing is no secret, these stories have been popping up all over the country for years. I've already told you about Google's white paper detailing their plan, since implemented, to use the microphone and webcam in your computer to spy on you without your knowledge or consent [link]. I tried to go back and find the original source articles since I know you don't trust Jones and his people, but they were nowhere in the top few pages either on Google Web or News. Maybe I'll go straight to AP, Reuters and the Guardian and see if I can dig them up later. You'll have to trust me that when the story broke I id read the mainstream source articles. As you may or may not know, Google doesn't even need a special worm or anything to accomplish this. You have Adobe, neé Macromedia, Flash installed, it's running in the background any time you have a web browser window open, and is default settings are to let any site use your camera and mic both unless you specifically go into the Flash settings for the site you're currently on. And you don't need to be on Google's site or one of the many domains they own -- nearly every site sends data back and forth to a little known service called Google Analytics, which Google uses as a carrot for other sites to send the user data, in return for usage statistics and demographic breakdowns of their sites' traffic, for free. What this does is open a tunnel for any data Google wants to collect through your browser. Sometime, go into the folders where your cookies are stored and open some of them in a text editor. Most are not plain text, so will appear as gibberish, but some are, and you'll be surprised the level and breadth of information a cookie can transmit.

The police openly admit that they want a backdoor into people's computers, but the government officially denies that the NSA has been given a new backdoor into Windows 7. I have no doubt that is technically correct, since every Windows release since the first 32-bit version, Windows 95 has had a backdoor, and maybe the FBI has the key to it, or DIA. NSA can't do everything. All the NSA did was "...the NSA helped Microsoft with the “Security Compliance Management Toolkit.” I like that name -- they're big into management to make us comply. I already told you that Bill Gates is the so of the founder of Planned Parenthood, on record, a eugenicist organization which has done more than any other to ensure that today, more black babies in America are aborted each year than are born. Did you know that? And I don't have the evidence but Alex Jones seems to be positive that Gates is now run by, or at least caves in from time to time to the government. Remember the decade-long federal lawsuit against Microsoft for forcing Windows users to have Internet Explorer on their systems, and how that suddenly went away in a poof after they must have spent hundreds of millions of dollars pursuing it? They get a slap on the wrist now and then for stupid ideas like Windows Genuine Advantage and I know the Euros are still after them for the IE issue, but what could have literally brought the entire company down in our court system is now a distant memory. Power players like Microsoft and the federal government do not change policy positions without a quid pro quo. Here's BBC News on the quo. Here's an an article from 1999 on how the NSA got inside Windows, except I'm willing to bet that instead of exploiting a flaw unbeknownst to Microsoft, a deal was agreed to. This is an 11-year-old article from Germany, not Alex Jones or my paranoid ravings. Most people had never used the Internet in 1999, and certainly almost no one at the time was aware of things like viruses, spyware, trojans, worms, encryption and the advanced privacy issues we deal with today.

I've told you about Echelon. The scary thing about it is that it is what was in place and operational in the 1970s in America, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and their English-speaking territories and protectorates. Here's Steve Kroft on 60 minutes with a short piece. Not exactly a fringe source. CNN, 2000. Here's a very good overview with footnotes. Here are resources from the liberal Federation of American Scientists, the same pacifist group that runs the Doomsday Clock, you know, Two Minutes To Midnight? That was the late '70s, based on early '70s technology, and it employed computer systems as powerful and with capabilities up to par with modern supercomputers in the public domain, your Deep Blue and weather-prediction systems and your fluid dynamics simulators. In the '90s, when Internet traffic and cell phone traffic started to wax as land line phones, fax machines, and the older methods of communication were waning, the government was ready with Carnivore. NSA shadow taps at major telephone hubs, Electronic Frontier Foundation. Here is a court affidavit from a former telecom employee with technical descriptions of the equipment and their operation and pictures of the secret rooms. If you don't want to spend the time to read any of these links, look at the pictures, for the sake of the sweet... Here's a piece from the New York Book Review, again, not a fringe or far-right-conspiracy source -- occasionally I even learn something new: "Yottabyte." 10^24 power -- the level in bytes which the NSA is expected to suck into their language and pattern-recognition computers by 2015. The article says that's a septillion, orders of magnitude below the nonillion odds of me with the cops, but I promised to shut up about that. But when the name "Carnivore" got around the media, and people didn't like the fact that the FBI could read all of their communications, in addition to the NSA which had been for decades, they changed the name to DCS1000. I think that was my first digital camera, or something very close to it. Harmless, DCS1000. It stood for Digital Control System, which is the entire goal of the eugenicist, neo-fascist technocracy into which we are currently being propelled.

That was the mid '90s. Then they went to a software package called PROMIS. If you're like 99% of the brain dead people in this country, you'd type "PROMIS" into Wikipedia and find, oh, it's a harmless little thing used by the Australian civil police. You would never learn that another piece of software called PROMIS was created by the Department of Justice in the late '70s because different government computer systems couldn't talk to each other, and certain offices were unable to share information with others in different locales as a result. The government contracted a private software firm to create a program which would act as a kind of universal translaor between different computer systems, programs, file types and data transmission methods. You never used a mainframe -- I did as a student and as part of my job for my first three years at Trinity. It was top of the line, an IBM System/360 with all the options, I mean we had hard drives in addition to tape drives. The drives themselves were the size of the washing machine and the disk packs looked very much like cake carriers, but it was top of the line. Trying to gt a mainframe to talk to a different manufacturer's one, even if they were using programs written in the same language, was a nightmare, much less getting one to talk to a PC. The government could not talk to itself, and that's where PROMIS came in. The trouble is, instead of simply paying the software writers what they deserved for producing a miracle, they decided to steal the software and make further modifications themselves. A federal court eventually found the government guilty of piracy and ordered a settlement, but that has not stopped it from distributing what ended up as one of the world's most powerful information accumulation, pattern recognition, behavior prediction and result distribution programs to every major government agency and defense contractor, including a known gift to Lockheed-Martin, which at the time had Lynne Cheney on its board. Do you see how this works?

So that was the '90s. I've no idea what they are using these days. I've heard rumors, but I have no hard facts, so I won't bother. Every cell phone has a GPS chip capable of tracking it to within two meters, by law. Every phone, by law is able to be activated by law enforcement to transmit audio on demand, and with phones which have cameras, video on demand, even when the phone is turned off, as long as the battery is not disconnected. Have you wondered why the iPhone and many other high-end phones no longer have a detachable battery, but instead an irreplaceable, internal one? Sure, part of it might be so that when the battery loses the ability to hold a charge you have to buy a whole new phone. The real reason is so that the spy ability is always at the ready. I have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that your computer is compromised, that your phone calls have always been, your email has always been, you didn't even need me to tell you that your web searches are cached and used in algorithms for advertising. Your webcam and microphone are able to be activated at Google's discretion as are the GPS, microphone and camera in your Blackberrys. I'm not going into the alleged microphones and cameras in cable boxes now that they have upload capability. I cannot definitively prove that, though there is evidence that Scientific Atlanta has been doing it since 1996. I am sitting in front of a Scientific Atlanta HDTV box as I write. I don't know. But everyone knows their Tivo boxes gather data and upload it -- that's how we knew that the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction was the most replayed moment in TV history.

Add it up, the spies in the same room as you right now. Your computer itself through Google and the government separately, your cell phone, maybe your cable box, definitely your DVR. You might go days without turning any one of these on, but they are constantly sending data about you and your behaviors which you are not aware of. I don't know about you, but I don't very appreciate being under the all-seeing stare of the Panopticon. Wake up to the fact that privacy has been almost completely destroyed in this technocracy. Get informed, get pissed, and do something. It's very nearly too late.

Did you read the news that Citi Bank now has informed its customers they may require a 7-day hold on a customer request to withdraw funds from any account? Ask yourself why they would implement this policy. The answer is that the banks are very close to crashing the dollar and the rest of the world's currencies. They are making it legal for them to steal everyone's money. You will be left covering your junk with one hand and your crack with the other, and it will happen sooner than you care to think. The old cartoon of a guy left wearing a wooden barrel are too optimistic. You will be left with zero, they are planning to do it forthwith and they are actuating the legal chicanery which will allow them to get away with it. Look it up, all of it. That's why I gave you links this time. Two minutes to midnight I wish. We're at about T-minus 12 seconds. Take that to the bank.