vzn

vzn
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software engr born 1970. coding from young age. "digital brain" but with lots of feelings too. writing here mainly to publicize a few key issues, let off some steam, & for the feedback. plz write me comments, very much appreciated!! even on old posts!! helps me gauge reader interest/ reaction & steer direction of new posts. oh, and IMs often make my day & I usually reply. and long IM conversations are my favorite.

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cyberpunk
NOVEMBER 12, 2011 3:06PM

"WIN, & NOTHING STOPS POLICE from 24HR SPYING on EVERYONE"

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If you win this case then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States.  You suddenly produce what sounds like 1984.
--Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer

the above quote is from last tuesday at a supreme court hearing. from the foxnews article below. the supreme court is looking into a case where the govt affixed a GPS tracking unit to a suspects car without a warrant and then later successfully prosecuted the suspect for drug dealing based on info obtained from the warrantless tracking.

which gives me the opportunity to unload a long list of links Ive collected on related topics  for years now-- the surveillance state, the national security agency (NSA), cyberwarfare.

this issue bubbled to strong intensity in 2005 when a whistleblower brought to light illegal domestic wiretapping by the NSA of US citizens in collusion with phone companies, allowed by the executive branch. but, congress passed a law permitting "retroactive immunity" to the phone companies that had broken real laws.

but, you dont hear much pushback these days. the bigger public issue looks like the invasive TSA patdowns and xrays.

to me, the issue of surveillance is quite creeping and insidious. its draining away untold billions of dollars of taxpayer money into programs of highly questionable efficacy and overall usefulness. despite some speechifying, obama has inherited yet has not substantially challenged any of this.

its a high-tech, highly funded modern variation on the age-old Police State. living in an unholy, shadowy incestuous nexus between government and corporations and highly advanced technology such as datamining, image/speech processing/recognition, etc.


congress is mostly out of the loop. even the executive branch probably does not have authority to audit these frankenstein-like programs.

in the links below I include info on how the NSA is creating massive datacenters to process the data.

to me, the conclusion is unavoidable/inescapable that the slowly creeping police state is growing like a cancer on normal government infrastructure. and looking at things like TSA overreach into daily air travelling or the GPS case, and other massive homeland security surveillance, its near metastasizing.

* * *

a closely related area is "cybersecurity" and "cyberwarfare". the public has not picked up much on this, but basically the military is in the middle of a major mission creep to define cyberspace as an actual battlefield or "realm of engagement". [I forget the actual technical terms.] in other words a Theatre of Warfare.

the NSA a few years ago seized on this area. with significant pushback by some, even in government or near the NSA itself, who asserted it is not the NSAs role or authority.

a key development in this area is the Stuxnet virus, which was invented to sabotage Iranian reactor centrufuge equipment. credible analysis by many suggests it was created by some conjunction of the israeli and US government.

thats the subject for a whole other post. I collected dozens of links on the subject, but its mostly under the radar of the public, although in cybersecurity circles, its near notorious and infamous at this point.

however I include many links on cybersecurity below. Im heartened to see that some major thinking shift may be going on with some experts and thinktanks openly decrying the overhyped nature of the cybersecurity threat.

it seems somewhat laughable to equate cyberattack with physical kinetic attack like bombs or invasion, but that is exactly what they US Govt is in the middle of blurring and conflating. it would appear that shadowy but powerful bureacrats increase their power by taking new agendas into their expanding pseudo-authority. and we even have the headlines that the government is considering extending the bush "premptive warfare" doctrine to cyberspace.

apparently cybersecurity is seen as a juicy funding plum by the bureacrats. was there some major funding passed by congress? I must have missed that announcement. its not so clear to me. apparently, in warfare, there are fashions that come and go just as in the clothing business.

* * *

my potential silver lining for all this is that we might be seeing some significant pushback. the beginning was around 2005 with the NSA domestic wiretapping. but you see increasing pushback by the court system as with the above supreme court GPS case. in some cases the courts have not challenged the increase in surveillance whatsoever, but after almost 10 years now of a fundamental phase change & shift in government priority, maybe there are some weak signs/glimmers we are finally reaching the point of diminishing returns so to speak [halleluja]. 

I see the judicial system and other government agencies starting to wake up to the extent of the damage. and yes, it is damaging to our civil liberties [remember those?]. so far we dont have very high profile cases except maybe the bradley manning case [who is still slowly rotting away in solitary confinement without trial, last I heard]. and, it was announced that Assange is about to be extradited to Sweden. so this will be in the headlines, but its a slow, drip-drip-drip march.

I see some possibly increasing whistleblower pushback by true, heroic, sacrificing, risk-taking patriots.

alas, we have gotten to this corner after painting into it near-feverishly and near-blindly for over a decade, mainly since 911. the cold war has morphed into the Great War on Terror, but the fine print has turned out to be that it is carried out through massive surveillance, the domestic equivalent of military Warmachine encroachment on civil liberties.

can we turn it around? the Occupy movement has some antagonism to the Corporatocracy that constitutes some of the encroachment. and yes the challenged Finance system has been a well-hidden accomplice/cohort/enabler in this unchecked, machiavellian spread of the Warmachine. elsewhere eg in Egypt, the military did not suppress the movement when given the chance, meeting it face to face. this was a new story and dramatic, history-pivoting twist on the Tianamen square massacre.
 
* * * 

we have to realize that we've been hoodwinked, we've been tricked, we've been bamboozled, we've been betrayed in some of the deepest and most nefarious, malignant, and insidious ways possible. we have not yet fully pulled the fleece from our eyes.
 
in a word, at the least a BOONDOGGLE. and yet, much more sinister. its the beginnings of not merely a police state but a prison state. [its not a coincidence that US has the highest incarceration rates in the world... as I recall, guantanamo, still going strong, was built by haliburton for something like half a BILLION dollars.... and if you think you're safe because its far away in Cuba, I say, think again....]

we've been sold a bill of goods that the government can make us Safer and Secure by taking away our rights. but now you see its the Big Lie, because we have lost both Safety and Security to the sham. we've paid dearly for our mistake. the government teeters right now on either near bankruptcy or draconian cuts. but which I suspect at the moment are not likely to come anywhere near the Warmachine. I hope I am proven wrong. but it will take even more of a mass realization and consciousness shift than we have seen so far.

as pogo said famously long ago, "we have met the enemy, and he is us".
 
so.... we'll see/find out what supreme court justice stephen breyer thinks of the GPS case, & maybe the rest of the Orwellian Police State in something like a year.
 
my modest news bulletin to stephen breyer, since he hasnt seemed to notice, along with the rest of the US judiciary, legislative, & executive branches-- we've already been living in one at least half a decade,  and Id say GPS tracker toys affixed to the bottom of vehicles by police are quite the least of our problems. hint: it has something to do with the new 4th shadow branch of the US which increasingly overshadows, controls, manipulates, coerces, stymies, thwarts, overturns, takes over, disempowers, subjugates, suppresses, oppresses, impales the other 3....
 

gps tracking case

Busted! Two New Fed GPS Trackers Found on SUV | Threat Level | Wired.com 
Supreme Court Hears Whether GPS Counts As 'Big Brother' | Fox News 
Supreme Court Hears Arguments In GPS Case : NPR 

nsa buildout

Utah's $1.5 billion cyber-security center under way | Deseret News 
Internet Evolution - Don Reisinger - Feds Plan Cyber Data Center; Civil Libertarians Shudder 
NSA breaks ground on Utah 'spy center' data center 
NSA's power- and money-sucking datacenter buildout continues 
NSA Supercenters to Store Americans' Private Data Permanently 
Report: NSA creating spy system to monitor domestic infrastructure | The Raw Story 
San Antonio Current - NEWS+FEATURES: The panopticon economy 

cybersecurity, cyberwar

Cyberwar - Halted ’03 Iraq Plan Illustrates U.S. Fear of Cyberwar Risk - Series - NYTimes.com 
Military ready for war in cyberspace | Reuters 
Cyber Command puts its philosophy into action -- Government Computer News 
Terror Goes Online - IEEE Spectrum 
A Turf War Over New Pentagon Cyber Command - The Daily Beast 
June 23, 2009 -- NSA's cyber-security grab is a major expansion of web surveillance - Wayne Madsen Report 
Pentagon may apply preemptive warfare policy to the Internet | The Raw Story 
Paranoia Watch: Ultrasecret NSA Has Conspicuous Role in New Federal Cybersecurity Center - The Daily Beast 
NSA Dominance of Cybersecurity Would Lead to ‘Grave Peril’, Ex-Cyber Chief Tells Congress | Threat Level | Wired.com 
The Raw Story | Top cybersecurity official quits, says NSA has too much power 

overhype

BBC News - Risks of cyber war 'over-hyped' says OECD study 
Pure cyberwar? Not gonna happen 
Think tank: Cyberthreat overrated - Computerworld 
Report: Cyberterror Not a Credible Threat | threatpost 
White House ‘Cyber Czar’ Resigns; Let’s Not Replace Her. | Danger Room | Wired.com 
Boston Review — Evgeny Morozov: Cyber-Scare 
Judging the cyber war terrorist threat : The New Yorker 
Linda Keenan: Shadow Elite: Should We Believe Chertoff On Cyber-War? 
csis.org/files/publication/100311_TheCyberWarHasNotBegun.pdf 
Cyberwar Readiness Recast As Low Priority - Government - Security - Informationweek 
timemilitary.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/wp1124_loving_cyber_bomb.pdf 

mass surveillance

U.S. conducting ‘mass surveillance’ against Arab world: report | The Raw Story 
AP Exclusive: CIA following Twitter, Facebook - Yahoo! News 
Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets | Danger Room | Wired.com 
Voices - ‘Einstein’ replaces ‘Big Brother’ in Internet surveillance 
‘Stellar Wind’ routinely eavesdropped on journalists and public officials 
Pentagon revives Rumsfeld-era domestic spying unit | The Raw Story 
Who’s in Big Brother’s Database? by James Bamford | The New York Review of Books 
» NSA Security running amok to plug leaks about 9/11 Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind! 

external/media pushback

Monitoring America | washingtonpost.com 
The Digital Surveillance State: Vast, Secret, and Dangerous | Glenn Greenwald | Cato Unbound 
Is The NSA's 'Perfect Citizen' The Ultimate Spying Tool? | Fox News 
Google to enlist NSA to help it ward off cyberattacks 
Consumer Watchdog calls for investigation of Google 
» Alex Jones: ‘Zuckerberg and Schmidt stole our privacy’ Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind! 
» Spy Satellites Used to Control American Citizens Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind! 
CDT Wants US Gov't to Detail Computer Monitoring Program CIO.com 
Einstein 3 Nsa | NSA's cyber overkill - Los Angeles Times 
Surveillance Can't Make Us Secure | The Nation 
Big Brother is Watching You: Pervasive Surveillance Under Obama 
» Americans Are Now Living In a Society That Rivals Orwell’s 1984 Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind! 
Ann Jones: The Incredible Shrinking Woman in Post-9/11 Hell 

internal/systemic pushback

Federal Judge Finds N.S.A. Wiretaps Were Illegal - NYTimes.com 
Officials Say U.S. Wiretaps Exceeded Law - NYTimes.com 
Bush’s Secret NSA Spying May Have Tainted Prosecutions, Report Warns | Threat Level | Wired.com 
E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress - NYTimes.com 
Report: NSA surveillance program too secret for its own good 

whistleblowing

The NSA wiretapping story that nobody wanted 
Charges Against the N.S.A.’s Thomas Drake : The New Yorker 
NSA Whistleblower to Plead Guilty to Misdemeanor | Threat Level | Wired.com 
‘John Doe’ Who Fought FBI Spying Freed From Gag Order After 6 Years | Threat Level | Wired.com 

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You are someone that I sometimes disagree with , but I think we both share a tremendous concern about the growing "1984" bent of the government/corporations ( one and the same entity by and large). great Post- I will be reading your links. If you haven't seen them you might wish to comment on these posts:

http://open.salon.com/blog/nick_carraway/2011/11/10/casey_and_jerry_-_black_swans_from_hell

http://open.salon.com/blog/jlw1/2011/11/09/ongoing_sexual_religious_criminal_enterprise
Herr Rudolphus der Rude
November 12, 2011 06:35 PM
The kryptonite to all of this police state hysteria would be to bring a founding father back from the dead. But, of course, we don't live in a science fiction movie, although, then again maybe we do!!?
Sean Fenley
November 12, 2011 07:10 PM
hey token thx for the feedback. life would be boring if we all agreed with each other huh? I think in biology thats called a "monoculture" and its quite susceptible to rampaging viruses. if I had to keep track of everyone on here Ive disagreed with, Id run out of memory.
vzn
November 13, 2011 11:09 AM
hey SF thx for the feedback & from your posts I can tell you're better read than most/many americans. keep up good work man
vzn
November 13, 2011 11:10 AM
Thank you for all this research and information. What a service you do for us.
rated with love
RomanticPoetess
November 16, 2011 11:10 PM
What a krazy lil hobbit you are. In 10 years time you'll be replaced by Robo-vzn...and society will be able to dump you on a floating trash barge along with all de udder malfunctioning droids...wink
Jejune Podiatrist
November 18, 2011 12:08 AM
I think it is very important that we all pay attention to the supreme court. Their rulings can do so much to affect life for all of us and can remain standing for years and years.
Ginny Tonic
November 22, 2011 12:41 PM