New UN Privacy Chief Proclaims – UK Digital Surveillance is “Worse than Orwell”

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Cannataci says we are dealing with a world even worse that anything Orwell could have foreseen. “It’s worse,” he said. “Because if you look at CCTV alone, at least Winston was able to go out in the countryside and go under a tree and expect there wouldn’t be any screen, as it was called. Whereas today there are many parts of the English countryside where there are more cameras than George Orwell could ever have imagined. So the situation in some cases is far worse already.

– UN Privacy chief, Joseph Cannataci

The UN special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci, pulls no punches when it comes to privacy. It’s hard to disagree with what he has to say.

From the Guardian:

The first UN privacy chief has said the world needs a Geneva convention style law for the internet to safeguard data and combat the threat of massive clandestine digital surveillance.

Speaking to the Guardian weeks after his appointment as the UN special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci described British surveillance oversight as being “a joke”, and said the situation is worse than anything George Orwell could have foreseen.

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Why They Spy – Cory Doctorow Writes about IT-Powered Feudalism

Screen Shot 2015-03-10 at 2.38.00 PMThe amount a state needs to expend on guard labour is a function of how much legitimacy the state holds in its population’s reckoning. A state whose population mainly views the system as fair needs to do less coercion to attain stability. People who believe that they are well-served by the status quo will not work to upset it. States whose populations view the system as illegitimate need to spend more on guard labour.

Why spy? Because it’s cheaper than playing fair. Our networks have given the edge to the elites, and unless we seize the means of information, we are headed for a long age of IT-powered feudalism, where property is the exclusive domain of the super-rich, where your surveillance-supercharged Internet of Things treats you as a tenant-farmer of your life, subject to a licence agreement instead of a constitution.

From Cory Doctorow’s Guardian article: Technology Should Be Used to Create Social Mobility – Not to Spy on Citizens

At this point, only the most clueless and gullible amongst us thinks that government surveillance has anything to do with stopping terrorism. Nevertheless, it remains as important as ever to explain to people the true reason behind the elimination of the 4th Amendment. Namely, protecting the oligarchy from restless plebs.

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Big Barbie is Watching You – Meet the WiFi Connected Barbie Doll that Talks to Your Children and Records Them

Screen Shot 2015-02-23 at 2.04.22 PMEarlier this month, I highlighted the fact that the latest Samsung Smart TV can and will listen to your conversations, and will share the details with a third party in the post: A Very Slippery Slope – Yes, Your Samsung Smart TV Can Listen to Your Private Conversations.

Well a couple of weeks later, and we learn that Mattel’s latest high-tech Barbie doll will bring the “internet of things” right into your child’s playpen. From the The Register:

Toymaker Mattel has unveiled a high-tech Barbie that will listen to your child, record its words, send them over the internet for processing, and talk back to your kid. It will email you, as a parent, highlights of your youngster’s conversations with the toy.

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A Very Slippery Slope – Yes, Your Samsung Smart TV Can Listen to Your Private Conversations

Screen Shot 2015-02-09 at 12.00.50 PMThe biggest story in the tech world today is the revelation that Samsung’s Smart TV can and will listen to your conversations, and will share the details with a third party. Yes, you read that right. Here’s the actual language from the privacy policy itself:

“Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.”

Naturally, this has freaked people out and led to multiple comparisons to 1984 and the ubiquitous Big Brother. It was framed exceptionally well by EFF activist Parker Higgins in the following tweet:

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While the privacy policy statement is disturbing in its own right, the extent of how creepy it is has to do with the fact that this information will be shared with a “third party.” This begs the question, who is this third party? Corynne McSherry, the intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has some thoughts. From the Daily Beast:

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The “Insider Threat Program” and the Government’s War on Whistleblowers

Screen Shot 2014-07-24 at 1.23.52 PMThe Obama Administration’s Orwellian government employee snitch network, dubbed the “Insider Threat Program,” first made headlines about a year ago. I found it to be so disturbingly significant I wrote a post about it titled: The 3 Key Takeaways from the Ridiculous “Insider Threat Program.” Those 3 key takeaways were that it…

  1. Creates a horrible and counterproductive work environment where everyone distrusts everyone else.
  2. Solidifies the fact the government is not interested in solving problems, but rather is focused on continuing the cronyism and criminality and merely covering it up.
  3. Exposes how completely hopeless and terminal the status quo is.

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How British Spies “Seed the Internet with False Info, Control YouTube Pageviews and Manipulate Online Polls”

Screen Shot 2014-07-16 at 2.25.47 PMThanks to Edward Snowden, we now have proof about an incredible set of tools used by the British equivalent of the NSA, known as the GCHQ, or Government Communications Headquarters. These tools will essentially confirm every single conspiracy theory you could have ever imagined when it comes to propaganda on the Internet. It allows British intelligence officers to: “manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, ‘amplify’ sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be ‘extremist.'”

Being the creative folks that they are, GCHQ even came up with code words to describe each “product.” These include, UNDERPASS (for poll manipulation), SILVERLORD (for censorship), GESTATOR (for the manipulation of YouTube views), PREDATORS FACE (for DDOS attacks), the list goes on…

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NSA Whistleblower Speaks: “The Ultimate Goal is Total Population Control”

At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the U.S. This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.

– NSA Whistleblower Bill Binney

Long-time readers of Liberty Blitzkrieg will be no strangers to Bill Binney, one of the earliest NSA whistleblowers. Well before anyone had ever heard of Edward Snowden, in July 2012, I posted the following: NSA Whistleblower: U.S. Government Creating Dossiers on Millions of Citizens. In it, I noted:

Bill Binney is no joke. He worked for the NSA for 30 years before resigning because of concerns he had regarding illegal spying on U.S. citizens in 2001. It seems that the claim I and many others have made for years, that the “War on Terror” is a gigantic fraud used to instill fear and further the creation of an unconstitutional surveillance state in America is absolutely true. The “terrorists” they have declared war on are the American people themselves. 

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Google Has Received 250,000 Article Removal Requests as Internet Censorship Takes Off in Europe

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

– From George Orwell’s 1984

The reason Big Brother and his band of technocrat authoritarians spend so much time and effort erasing history in the classic novel 1984, is because they are a bunch of total criminals and they know it. Their grip on power is made so much easier if the proles are kept ignorant, confused and in the dark. This strategy is not just fiction, it is the philosophy of tyrants and authoritarians throughout history.

While the internet is an amazing tool for communication and free speech, we must also be aware of how it can be abused by those in power who wish to whitewash history. For more on this epic struggle, read the post, Networks vs. Hierarchies: Which Will Win? Niall Furguson Weighs In. In it, Mr. Furguson explains that the biggest threat to networks overcoming hierarchies is if government technocrats are able to gain a hold of the technological tools we now use to communicate with each other. He fears this is already happening with the NSA’s PRISM program and the complicity of all the major tech companies in the agency’s unconstitutional spying.

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The NSA Claims it is “Too Big to Comply” with a Court Order

Screen Shot 2014-06-10 at 11.35.48 AMThe fact that that the NSA is now claiming it is “Too Big to Comply” with a court order is an extremely important revelation since it further proves that the super rich and super powerful are in no way shape or form subject to the same laws as the rest of us. The mega banks are “Too Big to Fail,” multi-national corporations are “Too Big to Pay Taxes” and the government is just “Too Big to be Useful.” The rule of law no longer exists in America (remember Jon Corzine), which in turn means there is no longer a functioning society. This may not be obvious to most people at the moment, but it will become painfully clear to everyone in time unless these trends are reversed.

The specific incident I have chosen to highlight to demonstrate this point today relates to the NSA’s claim that it cannot comply with a court order because it’s essentially too complex and compliance will damage “national security.”

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New Massive Federal Database to Hold Financial Information on Hundreds of Millions of Americans

Screen Shot 2014-05-30 at 12.26.47 PMThe war on privacy continues unabated, as the U.S. government continues to prove time and time again that it views the citizenry as a bunch of cattle to be branded, herded and dealt with at will. It doesn’t seem to bother anyone in the establishment that the public has lost all faith in institutions and so-called “authority” (a concept which I do not believe in to begin with). The evidence of a growing number of Orwellian databases being created has been available for quite some time. Most recently, I covered this topic in the following articles:

FBI Plans to Have 52 Million Photos in Facial Recognition Database by 2015

Guess What’s Hidden in the Immigration Bill? A National Biometric Database for Citizens

Moving along, the public faces another sinister and unacceptable invasion to our privacy. A national financial database is being planned, which would contain the most intimate details of our entire financial lives. It may apply to as many as 227 million Americans. We learn from the Washington Examiner that:

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