Tag: internet

Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the Military Origins of the Internet

As the digital revolution was underway in the mid-nineties, research departments at the CIA and NSA were developing programs to predict the usefulness of the world wide web as a tool for capturing what they dubbed “birds of a feather” formations. That’s when flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in rhythmical patterns.

They were particularly interested in how these principles would influence the way that people would eventually move together on the burgeoning internet: Would groups and communities move together in the same way as ‘birds of a feather, so that they could be tracked in an organised way? And if their movements could be indexed and recorded, could they be identified later by their digital fingerprints?

To answer these questions, the CIA and NSA established a series of initiatives called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) to directly fund tech entrepreneurs through an inter-university disbursement program. Naming their first unclassified briefing for computer scientists ‘birds of a feather,’ which took place in San Jose in the spring of 1995.

Amongst the first grants provided by the MDDS program to capture the ‘birds of a feather’ theory towards building a massive digital library and indexing system – using the internet as its backbone – were dispersed to two Stanford University PHD’s, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who were making significant headways in the development of web-page ranking technology that would track user movements online.

Those disbursements, together with $4.5 million in grants from a multi-agency consortium including NASA and DARPA, became the seed funding that was used to establish Google.

Eventually MDDS was integrated into DARPA’s global eavesdropping and data-mining activities that would attempt total information awareness over US citizens. Few understand the extent to which Silicon Valley is the alter-ego of Pentagon-land, even fewer realise the impact this has had on the social sphere.   But the story does not begin with Google, nor the military origins of the internet, it goes back much further in time, to the dawn of counterinsurgency and PSYOPs during the second world war.

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How the West Was Won: Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the Military Origins of the Internet

If insurgency is defined as an organised political struggle by a hostile minority, attempting to seize power through revolutionary means, then counterinsurgency is the military doctrine historically used against non-state actors, which sets out to infiltrate and eradicate those movements.

Unlike conventional soldiers, insurgents are considered dangerous, not because of their physical presence on the battlefield, but because of their ideology.

As David Galula, a French commander who was an expert in counterinsurgency warfare during the Algerian War, emphasised:

“In any situation, whatever the cause, there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral majority, and an active minority against the cause. The technique of power consists in relying on the favourable minority in order to rally the neutral majority and to neutralise or eliminate the hostile minority.”

Over time, however, the intelligence state lost touch with reality, as the focus of its counterinsurgency programs shifted from foreign to domestic populations, from national security risks to ordinary citizens, particularly in the wake of 9/11 when the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, began mapping out the Internet.

Thanks to Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, we now know that the NSA were collecting 200 billion pieces of data every month, including the cell phone records, emails, Web searches and live chats of more than 200 million ordinary Americans. This was extracted from the world’s largest Internet companies via a lesser-known data mining program called Prism.

There’s another name for this, and its total information awareness; the highest attainment of a paranoid state seeking absolute control over its population. What ceases to be worth the candle is that people’s right to privacy is enshrined under the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

Few understand how lockdowns are ripples on these troubled waters. Decades of counterinsurgency waged against one subset of society, branded insurgents for their Marxist ideals has, over time, shifted to anyone holding anti-establishment views. The predictive policing of track and trace and the theory of asymptomatic transmission are the unwelcome repercussions of the intelligence state seeking total information awareness over its citizens.

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South Africa enforces sweeping internet censorship law to tackle “hate speech”

The South African government has enforced a controversial internet censorship law that was passed in 2019. Legal experts have raised concerns about the law being abused.

On March 3, South Africa’s Film and Publications Board (FPB) announced that the law had come into effect on March 1. Internet users violate the law if they post prohibited content, which is defined as content that could be deemed incitement of violence, war propaganda, child pornography, and hate speech.

The law has raised concerns among legal experts as it could be used to restrict free speech and was became law surprisingly quickly.

From My Broadband:

“However, media and civil society only learned that this had happened on the day the law came into effect because the Film and Publications Board (FPB) invited the press to attend a media briefing about it on 3 March.

This is because the Government Printing Works has not published gazettes to its website since mid-January, effectively cutting citizens off from essential information about what their government is doing.”

Dominic Cull, the founder of legal consultancy firm Ellipsis Regulatory Solutions, said: “One of my big objections is that if I upload something which someone else finds objectionable, and they think it hate speech, they will be able to complain to the FPB.”

“If the FPB thinks the complaint is valid, they can then lodge a takedown notice to have this material removed.”

Cull also pointed out that the FPB does not have elected officials; it is composed of government appointees, people who should have no authority to make decisions on constitutional and free speech issues.

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Ukraine asks for Russia to be kicked off the internet

The internet is more than just hardware. It’s also a global network of shared standards and protocols. Some, such as Domain Name Server (DNS), provide the master address list for all internet resources. 

Now, because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Andrii Nabok, Ukrainian representative on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov, have asked that Russia’s top-level domains (TLD), such as .ru, .рф, and .su be revoked along with their associated Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates.  

Why? To stop the Russian propaganda machine, and prevent further propaganda and disinformation.

“These atrocious crimes have been made possible mainly due to the Russian propaganda machinery using websites continuously spreading disinformation, hate speech, promoting violence and hiding the truth regarding the war in Ukraine,” Nabok said.

Fedorov has also asked that RIPE NCC, the regional Internet registry for Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Central Asia, withdraw Russia and its Local Internet Registries (LIR) rights to use their assigned IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and to block their DNS root servers.  

If it were to happen, the move would be unprecedented. While Russia has deliberately disconnected itself from the internet in the past as a security test, this is an entirely different proposition. 

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NPR Declares Using Wrong Colour Emojis is Probably RACIST

In another example of the establishment left’s obsessive grift with race and social segregation, publicly funded NPR published a story claiming that if you use the wrong colour emoji in text messages in relation to your own skin colour, you are probably a racist.

In the article titled  “Which skin color emoji should you use? The answer can be more complex than you think”, writers Alejandra Marquez, Janse Patrick Jarenwattananon, and Asma Khalid (it took three of them to take on this weighty subject) argue that choosing to use a yellow emoji, rather than a white, brown or black one is “the neutral option” that will leave the respondent free to “focus on the message” rather than race.

Of course, any rational person wouldn’t immediately see an emoji in a text and start thinking about race. Not these taxpayer funded hacks though.

They even went around interviewing people for the piece.

One interviewee said “I present as very pale, very light skinned. And if I use the white emoji, I feel like I’m betraying the part of myself that’s Filipino.”

The interviewee continued, “But if I use a darker color emoji, which maybe more closely matches what I see when I look at my whole family, it’s not what the world sees, and people tend to judge that.”

OMG, what a terrible dilemma to be in.

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Senate Bill Creates Massive Surveillance Program to Scan All of Your Online Messages

 People don’t want outsiders reading their private messages —not their physical mail, not their texts, not their DMs, nothing. It’s a clear and obvious point, but one place it doesn’t seem to have reached is the U.S. Senate.

A group of lawmakers led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have re-introduced the EARN IT Act, an incredibly unpopular bill from 2020 that was dropped in the face of overwhelming opposition. Let’s be clear: the new EARN IT Act would pave the way for a massive new surveillance system, run by private companies, that would roll back some of the most important privacy and security features in technology used by people around the globe. It’s a framework for private actors to scan every message sent online and report violations to law enforcement. And it might not stop there. The EARN IT Act could ensure that anything hosted online—backups, websites, cloud photos, and more—is scanned.

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Concerned about Your Privacy? 6 Ways to Reduce the Amount of Internet Data that Has Been Collected on You

Most businesses want to generate as much profit as possible.  That’s always been true.  Data collection can be very profitable – sometimes even more so than selling products and services.  Data collection for the purpose of marketing more products and services to customers as well as selling customer data to third parties is sometimes referred to as “Surveillance Capitalism”.  Many businesses collect personal data on customers even when customers aren’t aware of it or have freely consented to it.  The examples are countless and include utility companies that install hazardous electric, gas, and water “Smart” Meters (see 1, 2, 3) on homes throughout communities worldwide.

It’s overwhelming to think about how much data has been collected on us – even children.  The good news is that there are ways to reduce some of this.

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Is a new kind of religion forming on the internet?

“It just doesn’t sit right with me,” begins a TikTok by a user named Evelyn Juarez. It’s a breakdown of the tragedy at Astroworld, the Travis Scott concert in early November where eight people died and more than 300 were injured. But the video isn’t about what actually happened there. It’s about the supposed satanic symbolism of the set: “They tryna tell us something, we just keep ignoring all the signs,” reads its caption, followed by the hashtags #wakeup, #witchcraft, and #illuminati.

Juarez, a 25-year-old in Dallas, is a typical TikToker, albeit a quite popular one, with 1.4 million followers. Many of her videos reveal an interest in true crime and conspiracy theories — the Gabby Petito case, for instance, or Lil Nas X’s “devil shoes,” or the theory that multiple world governments are hiding information about Antarctica. One of her videos from November suggests that a survey sent to Texas residents about the use of electricity for critical health care could signify that “something is coming and [the state government] knows it.”

Her beliefs are reminiscent of many others on the internet, people who speak of “bad vibes,” demonic spirits, or a cosmic calamity looming just over the horizon, one that the government may be trying to keep secret. Juarez tells me she was raised Christian, although at age 19 she began to have a more personal relationship with God outside of organized religion.

Today, she identifies more as spiritual, as an increasing number of young people do, many of them working out their ideas in real time online. They may talk about manifesting their dreams and faceless sex traffickers waiting to install tracking devices on women’s parked cars. Some might act almost as prophets or shamans, spreading the good word and guiding prospective believers, while others might just lurk in the comments. They might believe all or only some of these ideas — part of the draw of internet spirituality is that it’s perfectly pick-and-choosable — but more than anything, they believe in the importance of keeping an open mind to whatever else might be out there.

I asked Joseph Russo, a professor of anthropology at Wesleyan University, if this loosely related web of beliefs could ever come together to form into its own kind of religion. “I think it already has,” he says.

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Japan breaks world record for fastest internet speed

Engineers in Japan have set a new world record for fastest internet speed — and it’s so fast, you’d be able to download nearly 80,000 movies in just one second.

Need for speed: Internet speed is typically measured by how much data can be transmitted between two devices in one second.

The new record is 319 terabits per second (Tb/s). That’s double the previous world record for fastest internet speed and about 7.6 million times faster than the average home internet speed in the U.S. (42 megabits per second). 

Fiber-optic cables: Different types of internet connections transmit data over different types of hardware. The old dial-up connections, for example, relied on telephone wires, while the fastest kind of internet available today — fiber — uses fiber-optic cables.

These cables transmit data using pulses of light, which travel along thin optical fibers with glass or plastic cores.

To break the record for fastest internet speed, researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology developed an experimental optical fiber with four cores, instead of just one.

They then combined their fiber with a laser that fired pulses at different wavelengths and multiple signal amplification techniques. This enabled them to transmit data over a distance of more than 1,800 miles at 319 Tb/s. 

Perfect fit: The laser and amplifiers used to break the fastest internet speed record are not cheap, so don’t expect 300 Tb/s home internet any time soon. 

However, there is one part of the experiment that could have an impact on your life in the not-so-distant future: the optical fiber.

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