Noam Chomsky on technology…
Tag: police state
The Left Got What It Wanted – So Now What?
There is no schadenfreude in seeing the Left destroy everything it touches – because its claws tear all of us as well…
What was the purpose for the insane opposition of the Left between 2017 and 2021? To usher in a planned nihilism, an incompetent chaos, a honed anarchy to wreck the country in less than a year?
Then
No sooner had Donald Trump entered office than scores of House Democrats filed motions for impeachment, apparently for thought crimes that he might, some day, in theory, could possibly commit.
Foreign Policy published an article by a liberal Obama Administration lawyer outlining all the ways to remove an elected president as soon as possible—including consideration of a military coup.
The FBI and the entrenched bureaucrats at the Justice Department continued their prior failed efforts during the campaign to seed the lies of the fabricated Steele dossier and Fusion GPS. A 22-month-long and $40 million hoax ended with the special counsel himself, a doddering Robert Mueller, swearing under oath that he essentially knew nothing about the dossier or Fusion GPS—the twin catalysts that had prompted his very own investigation.
Fired FBI Director James Comey—a lion on Twitter, and a lamb when under oath—on over 240 occasions testified to the Congress that he either did not know or could not remember, when asked details about the collusion fraud that the philosopher G-man had helped perpetuate.
No one worried about the weaponization of government. So, we went right from the nefarious legacy of John Brennan (who lied under oath to Congress twice), James Clapper (who lied under oath to Congress once), James Comey (who leaked confidential presidential memos), Andrew McCabe (who gave false testimony to federal investigators), Lisa Page (who was fired from the special counsel’s legal team for various unprofessional conduct), Peter Strzok (about whom there is not enough space to detail his transgressions), and the now convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith onto the next round of impeachments.
Tyrants of the Nanny State: When the Government Thinks It Knows Best
“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”—Simone Weil, French philosopher and political activist
We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, carried out in the so-called name of the national good by an elite class of governmental and corporate officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.
We, the middling classes, are not so fortunate.
We find ourselves badgered, bullied and browbeaten into bearing the brunt of their arrogance, paying the price for their greed, suffering the backlash for their militarism, agonizing as a result of their inaction, feigning ignorance about their backroom dealings, overlooking their incompetence, turning a blind eye to their misdeeds, cowering from their heavy-handed tactics, and blindly hoping for change that never comes.
BBC Anchor Claims Arguing Against Surveillance State “Was A Fair Talking Point In The 1990s, But People Are Over That Now”
An arrogant BBC News anchor lectured a privacy advocate Tuesday who argued that a rise in violent crime, particularly against women, cannot be countered by eroding freedom and further empowering the surveillance state.
Following the announcement that police in the UK are setting up a scheme to use CCTV cameras to watch women at night to make them ‘feel safer’, Madeline Stone of the privacy advocate group Big Brother Watch argued that there are already masses of surveillance cameras everywhere and they do not make people any safer or prevent crime.
Stone emphasised that adding more cameras strips away privacy and is in no way a solution to the problem, including harassment of and violence against women.
“But the woman is asking for the camera to be on them, so this is not a breach of civil liberties,” the anchor responded, referring to the scheme which uses an opt-in app.
Stone replied that having an anonymous stranger tracking a woman’s movements via a camera isn’t going to help, but was continuously interrupted by the anchor who repeatedly stated “if it’s something that’s going to make you feel safer,” it will be welcomed.
Pelosi Doubles Down on IRS Looking Into Bank Transactions
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has doubled down on a provision in the Democrats’ multi-trillion-dollar reconciliation bill that would allow the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to see information on all Americans’ bank transactions totaling $600 or more. Republicans and banks have raised the alarm about the provision, reporting that their constituents and clients are deeply concerned about the proposal.
Since the introduction of their reconciliation bill, Democrats have insisted that the bill will not add to the debt or the deficit, claiming that all new spending in the bill will be paid for.
Along with significantly increasing marginal tax rates to pay for the bill, Democrats proposed and wrote into the bill a section to allow the IRS to gather Americans’ private information from banks, including information on all transactions totaling more than $600.
Keep this in mind…
Government Eyes In the Sky
In August 2016, Bloomberg Businessweek revealed the existence of a pilot program being operated by the Baltimore Police Department in which small manned aircraft circled over the city all day, using cameras to continuously photograph a 32-square-mile area and giving police the ability to retroactively track any vehicle or pedestrian within that area. It was the ultimate Big Brother “eye in the sky”—and yet the Baltimore police had not notified the public or even the mayor or city council about the program. Revelation of the secret program generated a storm of controversy, and eventually it was put on hold—though in December 2019, the city’s police commissioner announced that the program would be revived.
The technology behind the Baltimore program involves pointing multiple cameras toward the ground and stitching those images together into a single, larger photograph. It also uses computers to automatically correct for the changing camera angles of the circling planes as well as factors such as topographic variances and lens distortion.
The result is a surveillance system of enormous power, able to reconstruct the movements of all visible vehicles and pedestrians across a city—where they start and finish each journey and the paths they take in between. It can allow tracking of a great proportion of people’s movements throughout a city.
Schools gave laptops to kids during pandemic — then they spied on the students for their own good
Schools across the United States reportedly handed out laptops to pupils for distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic — and then spied on them with the very same electronic device, according to a Monday report from The Guardian.
What are the details?
According to recently released research from the Center for Democracy and Technology, 86% of teachers polled said their schools provided electronic learning devices — such as tablets, laptops, and Chromebooks — for students to use at home at nearly double the rate when compared year over year.
Many of those devices, however, were reportedly being used to monitor students — even going as far as to “[comb] through private chats, emails, and documents” — in order to protect them from harassment and suicidal ideations.
The research noted that more than 80% of teachers surveyed admitted that their schools used such surveillance software on those student devices.
One anonymous administrator told the Center for Democracy and Technology that many teachers believe that spying on kids for the greater good will have only positive impacts on the students being surveilled.
FB “whistleblower” saga has propelled push for social media “permits”
Apparently emboldened by a recent “Facebook whistleblower’s” congressional testimony and media tour, an op-end has surfaced on project-sindicate.org exploring how information could be further and more efficiently contained and obscured from users, beyond “old-fashioned” ways like censorship and downranking.
And Steven Hill, formerly of the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) – an outfit dedicated to “radically reimagining our digital infrastructure” – has an appropriately radical idea: introduce digital operating permits and “protect people” by not allowing more than 1,000 to see a particular post.
To make the idea somewhat palatable, it was introduced under the guise of a novel way of dealing with what everybody seems to agree needs to be dealt with: tech monopolies. But the tech monopoly horse has left the barn a long time ago, and it seems that a degree of regulation will now be needed to rein it in and then allow natural ways of dealing with monopolies – fair competition and innovation to take care of the problem.
But Hill thinks the way to make them less dominant is by making major social media sites’ audiences artificially smaller. And since an average person hardly communicates with 1,000 people “in real life” (notwithstanding that people’s digital lives have very much become a part of their “real” one), Hill doesn’t think that users would be “deprived” by this limitation.
But right away, the true nature of this extraordinarily dystopian idea reveals itself to be not to truly limit the power of tech monopolies, but to make sure that the message that does get out to a lot of people (so, more than 1,000 at a time) is very controlled.
Days After Cops Raid Home, 3D Gun Legend ‘JStark’ Found Dead of ‘Heart Attack’ at 28
The 3D gun pioneer, who invented the rapid-fire 3D-printed gun that could be entirely printed at home, “JStark” has died, according to German magazine Der Spiegel. He passed away in his home, according to the magazine, of a heart attack. He was just 28-years-old.
After his invention of the FGC-9 in 2020, JStark became a well-cherished internet hero and news of his death is sending shockwaves through his popular channels. According to Der Spiegel, JStark died on Friday, October 8 of a heart attack.
The magazine reports that it “appears” his death was natural and police ruled out foul play. Adding to the suspicious nature of a 28-year-old man, who appeared to be in good health, dying of a heart attack, however, is the fact that days before he died, on October 6, police raided his home.
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