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The Greatest Trick Big Brother Ever Pulled

The Greatest Trick Big Brother Ever Pulled

The Greatest Trick Big Brother Ever Pulled

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” is a quote generally attributed to Charles Baudelaire – or possibly Keyser Söze depending on who you ask on the internet. Something similar can be said about Big Brother.

When you think about what our emerging surveillance state will look like, you think 1984. You imagine East Germany powered by Google and Amazon. You recall your favorite dystopian sci-fi film – or maybe horror stories of China’s social credit system. Thoughts of a frustrated middle-aged police chief from a mid-sized Midwestern town attempting to procure security cameras with innovative new features probably don’t come to mind. You definitely don’t think of a guy in a lawn chair jotting down the license plate numbers of passing vehicles in a notebook. And that’s partly how the surveillance state is going to emerge as it creeps its way into one small town at a time.

Whether a surveillance state is the end goal is hard to say. The police chief of Pawnee, Indiana probably isn’t plotting the development of his own mini-Oceania. But, 18,000-plus mini-Oceanias operating across multiple platforms with varying degrees of integration, both locally and nationally, is undoubtedly the direction in which we are heading as salespeople peddle shiny new surveillance gadgets to cities big and small, making often unverified but intuitively appealing claims of how their devices will decrease crime or prove to be useful investigative tools.

Facial recognition tends to be the surveillance gadget that receives the most attention these days. You’ve seen it in movies and maybe feel some unease over visions of government agents sitting in a penumbrous room illuminated only by the faint glow of countless monitors with little boxes tracking the faces of every person walking down a busy city street…

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Big Brother Unchained: UK Government to Abolish Biometrics and Surveillance Safeguards As It Embraces Facial Recognition

Big Brother Unchained: UK Government to Abolish Biometrics and Surveillance Safeguards As It Embraces Facial Recognition

“The lack of attention being paid to [public safeguards] at such a crucial time is shocking, and destruction of the surveillance camera code that we’ve all been using successfully for over a decade is tantamount to vandalism.”

The United Kingdom is at the leading edge of many of the digital authoritarian trends sweeping ostensibly democratic nations. In one of the many dark ironies of our age, it is the government of George Orwell’s native Britain that is seeking to massively escalate its deployment of live facial recognition (LFR) technologies, despite the concerns raised about its potential impact. In late September, 180 rights groups and tech experts called on governments around the world to halt their use of facial recognition surveillance.

On the other side of the English channel, the EU Parliament has voted for a blanket ban on the use of LFR in public spaces, as too have some US cities. By contrast, the UK government is escalating its deployment of the controversial surveillance technology.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the son-in-law of Indian tech billionaire N R Narayana Murthy, is determined to transform the UK into a world leader in AI governance. Said governance apparently involves gutting many of the limited safeguards protecting the public from the potential downsides and dangers of AI, of which there are many. This, of course, is no accident; if there was any time the British public needed those safeguards, it would be right now, as the government unleashes facial recognition technologies across the urban landscape.

As we reported in early August, live facial recognition (LFR) surveillance, where people’s faces are biometrically scanned by cameras in real-time and checked against a database, is being used by an increasing number of UK retailers amid a sharp upsurge in shoplifting — with the blessing, of course, of the UK government…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Slouching Towards 1984

Slouching Towards 1984

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” he portrays English society – renamed Oceania – as a futuristic version of the 1940s Soviet Union. In this invented society that Orwell calls IngSoc –  English Socialism – the populace has even less freedom than the Soviets permitted its citizens  and life consists only of drudgery, loneliness and hideousness. The novel grips the reader with fear and loathing of a totalitarian future enabled by technological advances and prompts one with the question: “Can it, will it happen here?”

It goes without saying that the United States in 2023 bears little resemblance to 1984 Oceania. In Oceania, the state had total control over the language, economy, science, history, personal possessions, personal thoughts, music, art and literature. In the U.S. today, however, it is not difficult to see how government intrusion and control reduces freedom, creates fear and confusion, reduces economic opportunity and prosperity, distorts history and science and creates unnecessary interpersonal conflict.

One of the ways Big Brother, Oceania’s leader, exerted total control was by subverting language. This reduced the capacity to think thoughts not approved by the state. “Newspeak,” as Orwell coined it, consisted only of words that expressed permitted thoughts.

“Thoughtcrime,” another Orwellism, punished illicit thoughts. Illicit action therefore became literally unthinkable. Truth is what Big Brother declared it to be at any given moment: 2+2=5 yesterday and 2+2=4 today. History was constantly and literally rewritten in order to satisfy the “truths” that Big Brother was currently promulgating.

The most nefarious aspect of Big Brother’s rule was of course his brutally enforced elimination of freedom, which he accomplished by suppressing the truth and promulgating lies.

In all eras, in all states, in all political parties, leaders tell lies. The danger arises when the state and state co-opted institutions suppress, eliminate and punish unapproved ideas…

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Inside One Of Big Brother’s ‘Location Harvesting’ Contractors, Which Tracks ‘Hundreds Of Millions’ Of Phones

Inside One Of Big Brother’s ‘Location Harvesting’ Contractors, Which Tracks ‘Hundreds Of Millions’ Of Phones

A Virginia-based software company founded by two US military veterans with backgrounds in intelligence has been tracking hundreds of millions of mobile phones across the world, according to documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

The company, Anomaly Six LLC, draws location data from over 500 apps – partly through their proprietary software development kit (SDK) which they’ve paid to embed directly in some of the apps, while the company gets location data from partner providers. The SDK allows the company to obtain a user’s location if they have allowed the apps in question to access the phone’s GPS coordinates.

App publishers often allow third-party companies, for a fee, to insert SDKs into their apps. The SDK maker then sells the consumer data harvested from the app, and the app publisher gets a chunk of revenue. But consumers have no way to know whether SDKs are embedded in apps; most privacy policies don’t disclose that information. Anomaly Six says it embeds its own SDK in some apps, and in other cases gets location data from other partners. –Wall Street Journal

Anomaly Six holds contracts with several branches of the US Government – although they told the Journal that they ‘restrict the sale of US mobile phone movement data to nongovernmental, private sector clients,’ according to the report. Private sector clients – typically marketing companies or others in the advertising space – buy and sell geolocation data, sometimes ‘reselling it to government agencies or contractors‘ according to the report.

And as the Journal notes, in the case of Anomaly Six, “the direct collection of such data by a business closely linked to US national security agencies is unusual.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Surveillance and Propaganda Work in ‘the Free World’

How Surveillance and Propaganda Work in ‘the Free World’ 

A Bloomberg report of October 22 was concise and uncompromising in declaring Russia to be a surveillance state. Harking back to the good old days of the Cold War, as is increasingly the practice in much of the Western media, Bloomberg recounted that “The fourth of 10 basic rules Western spies followed when trying to infiltrate Russia’s capital during the Cold War — don’t look back because you’re never alone — is more apt than ever. Only these days it’s not just foreigners who are being tracked, but all 12.6 million Muscovites, too. Officials in Moscow have spent the last few years methodically assembling one of the most comprehensive video-surveillance operations in the world. The public-private network of as many as 200,000 cameras records 1.5 billion hours of footage a year that can be accessed by 16,000 government employees, intelligence officers and law-enforcement personnel.”

Terrifying, one might think. Straight out of Orwell’s 1984, that dystopian prediction of what the world could become, as noted in one description of how the face of the state’s symbolic leader, Big Brother, “gazes at you silently out of posters and billboards. His imposing presence establishes the sense of an all-seeing eye. The idea that he is always watching from the shadows imposes a kind of social order. You know not to speak out against The Party — because big brother is watching… The face always appears with the phrase Big Brother is watching you. As if you could forget.” Such is the terrifying Bloomberg picture of Moscow where there are supposedly 200,000 video cameras. You can’t blow your nose without it being seen. And wait for the next phase, in which Big Brother will hear you laugh.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Big Tech & Big Brother Are Going to Join Forces to “Secure Elections”

BIG TECH & BIG BROTHER ARE GOING TO JOIN FORCES TO “SECURE ELECTIONS”

Security teams for Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft met with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence’s office to coordinate a strategy to “secure” the 2020 elections. And by “secure” they mean to manipulate the results of the election in any way possible to get the outcome they desire.

According to a report by RT, the big tech platforms met with government officials at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters on Wednesday, the company has confirmed, boasting that Big Tech and Big Brother have developed a “comprehensive strategy” to get control of previous election-related “vulnerabilities” while “analyzing and getting ahead of new threats.” Those vulnerabilities and threats are the free thinkers who don’t buy the official narrative and dissent against the ruling class.

This is quickly escalating. Expect the censorship, social credit scores, and gun control talk to ramp up as the political class realizes people may not be as easily enslaved as they have imagined. Facebook has scrambled to get in front of the 2020 election after being blamed for Trump’s 2016 electoral victory over merely allowing the “Russian trolls” to buy a bunch of ads. Most of those ads appeared after the vote and had nothing to do with the election. Google, on the other hand, actively attempted to manipulate and rig the election in favor of Hillary Clinton, and the evidence of that indiscretion is rapidly becoming overwhelming.

Google’s potential to sway elections has been the subject of Senate hearings, and yet the company has remained silent on addressing the problem. Subsidiary YouTube, meanwhile, conducted another round of mass censorship last month even while declaring it was an open platform for controversial ideas.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

BigBrotherWatch: Facial Recognition ‘Epidemic’ in the UK

BigBrotherWatch: Facial Recognition ‘Epidemic’ in the UK

BigBrotherWatch: Facial Recognition ‘Epidemic’ in the UK

At TruePublica we have written endlessly about the continued slow strangulation of civil liberties and human rights in Britain. We have warned about the rise of a techno-Stasi-state where technology is harnessed and used against civilians without any debate or indeed any real legal framework.  We have alerted the public on the illegal mass data collections by the government and subsequent loss of much it by MI5 who should not have had it all in the first place. We warned against ‘digital strip searches‘ – an activity of the police of the victims in rape cases, and the fact that Britain is becoming a database state. At TruePublica we have tried to press home the story that surveillance by the state on such a scale, described as the most intrusive in the Western world – is not just illegal, it’s immoral and dangerous. (see our surveillance database HERE).

Here is more evidence of just how dangerous and out of hand this creeping surveillance architecture is becoming. An investigation by Big Brother Watch has uncovered a facial recognition ‘epidemic’ across privately owned sites in the UK. The civil liberties campaign group has found major property developers, shopping centres, museums, conference centres and casinos using the technology in the UK.

Millions of shoppers scanned

Their investigation uncovered the use of live facial recognition in Sheffield’s Meadowhall, one of the biggest shopping centres in the North of England, in secret police trials that took place last year. The trial could have scanned the faces of over 2 million visitors.

The shopping centre is owned by British Land, which owns large areas within London including parts of Paddington, Broadgate, Canada Water and Ealing Broadway. Each site’s privacy policy says facial recognition may be in use, although British Land insists only Meadowhall has used the surveillance so far.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Age of Tyrannical Surveillance: We’re Being Branded, Bought and Sold for Our Data

The Age of Tyrannical Surveillance: We’re Being Branded, Bought and Sold for Our Data

“We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about… Your digital identity will live forever… because there’s no delete button.”—Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Uncle Sam wants you.

Correction: Big Brother wants you.

To be technically accurate, Big Brother—aided and abetted by his corporate partners in crime—wants your data.

That’s what we have been reduced to in the eyes of the government and Corporate America: data bits and economic units to be bought, bartered and sold to the highest bidder.

Those highest bidders include America’s political class and the politicians aspiring to get elected or re-elected. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “If you have been to a political rally, a town hall, or just fit a demographic a campaign is after, chances are good your movements are being tracked with unnerving accuracy by data vendors on the payroll of campaigns.”

Your phones, televisions and digital devices are selling you out to politicians who want your vote.

Have you shopped at Whole Foods? Tested out target practice at a gun range? Sipped coffee at Starbucks while surfing the web? Visited an abortion clinic? Watched FOX News or MSNBC? Played Candy Crush on your phone? Walked through a mall? Walked past a government building?

That’s all it takes for your data to be hoovered up, sold and used to target you.

This is the age of surveillance capitalism.

Incredibly, once you’ve been identified and tracked, data brokers can travel back in time, digitally speaking, to discover where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what you’ve been doing, and what you’ve been reading, viewing, buying, etc.

Once you’ve been identified in this way, you can be tracked endlessly.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is China’s Social Credit System A Preview Of The Coming “Beast System”?

Is China’s Social Credit System A Preview Of The Coming “Beast System”?

Virtually everything that you do online and offline is being monitored, tracked or recorded by someone.  Could you imagine what life would be like if the government compiled all of that information into a giant database and used it to punish those that had engaged in politically-incorrect behavior?  Here in the United States, Internet censorship has escalated dramatically, but over in China the government is cracking down on a much wider array of online and offline activities.  If you fail to make a credit card payment, get into an argument in public or say the wrong thing on social media, you could suddenly find yourself restricted from conducting a whole host of normal economic activities.  The primary marketing slogan for this social credit system is “once discredited, everywhere restricted”

China’s social credit system rates citizens based on their daily behaviour, and this could range from their bank credit to their social media activities.

With a tagline of ‘once discredited, everywhere restricted’, it vows to punish ‘untrustworthy’ citizens in as many ways as possible.

This system sounds like something right out of a George Orwell novel, and even entire businesses can be penalized.  In fact, it is being reported that 3.59 million Chinese businesses were added to “the official creditworthiness blacklist” last year.  The following comes from the South China Morning Post

Over 3.59 million Chinese enterprises were added to the official creditworthiness blacklist last year, banning them from a series of activities, including bidding on projects, accessing security markets, taking part in land auctions and issuing corporate bonds, according to the 2018 annual report released by the National Public Credit Information Centre.

On top of that, millions of ordinary Chinese citizens were restricted from flying and riding on trains last year for engaging in “untrustworthy conduct”

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How 1984 turned into an instruction manual

How 1984 turned into an instruction manual

“Sometimes [two and two are four], Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

One of the key themes from George Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984 is that the Party can do and say whatever it wants.

And more importantly, you must believe it, with all your heart. No matter how absurd.

That’s doublethink. It is impossible for two plus two to equal three, four, and five simultaneously. But if the Party says it is so, it is so.

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If you can’t make yourself believe two contradictory facts simultaneously, that makes you a thought criminal — an enemy of the Party.

Thoughtcrime is thinking any thought that contradicts the Party.

Facecrime is when you have the wrong expression on your face. For instance, if captured enemy soldiers are being paraded through the streets, looking sympathetic is a facecrime.

Newspeak is the language of the Party–one that has painstakingly been removed of unnecessary words, or words that might contradict the Party’s ideals.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

During daily two minutes hatecitizens shout and curse whatever enemies the Party shows them.

And the face of the Party, Big Brother, is watching you. He helps you be a better citizen.

This isn’t just some random literature lesson. Understanding Orwell’s 1984will help you understand 2019 America.

For instance, one California state senator is working on her own version of Newspeak.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Technology: Distracting, Disturbing, Deceiving & Deluding Ourselves to Death

TECHNOLOGY: DISTRACTING, DISTURBING, DECEIVING & DELUDING OURSELVES TO DEATH

“What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. 

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Image result for huxley amusing ourselves to death

Something as mundane as using the restroom at work sometimes ends up triggering deeper thoughts about technology – its benefits, deficiencies and danger to our culture. I’ve been using the same restroom at work for the last twelve years. They remodeled the restroom a few years ago with the latest technology – automatic flushers, automatic soap dispensers, automatic spigots, and automatic towel dispenser. This technology is supposed to make things better, but from my perspective the technology just added complexity, glitches and unnecessary complications.

First off, these technological “improvements” did not eliminate any humans from the equation. The housekeepers responsible for the restrooms continued to be employed. Prior to the remodel they would fill a metal bin with individual paper towels and fill the soap dispenser with liquid soap. Now they have to insert a roll of paper towels in the electronic dispenser and a cartridge of soap in the electronic soap dispenser.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Integrity Initiative: Big Brother’s Minions – or Flim-Flam Artists?

Integrity Initiative: Big Brother's Minions – or Flim-Flam Artists?

Integrity Initiative: Big Brother’s Minions – or Flim-Flam Artists?

I’m not sure what to make of Integrity Initiative (what a great gaslighting name: integrity? Hah hah: no, just furtive paid propaganda and opinion steering). But I watch the unfolding revelations with fascination. Certainly, the whole thing is bigger than it seemed at first and all the documents being revealed appear to be true.

On the one hand, it looks like a group of superannuated old gits gassing on about how warfare today involves everything, especially “information warfare”, while last century it was only bullets. (Ever read any, say, Sun Tzu or Clausewitz? Or, speaking of the last century, Goebbels? How about Bernays?) And how we concerned individuals have voluntarily come together (assisted by £2+ million of the taxpayer’s money) to save democracy. Unpaid, unasked and unplotted. Completely conspiracy-free in fact. (Too late, the documents are out). In short, that the essence of democracy is never to doubt what the Ministry of Truth tells you. There’s a naïve and bubble-like quality to this: they never think any thoughts but their own. So maybe these guys, instead of kveching at the mirror and shouting at the TV set, have figured out how to flim-flam the government into supplementing their pensions in return for pages of conspiracy-babble.

Or are we looking at something rather bigger? As John Helmer points out, there is a long history of British intelligence operating behind such “independent” and “disinterested” coverDid they help start the Russia hysteria in the USA? Did they not only play up the Skripal affair but actually create it? Did they have an effect on Spain and CataloniaInfiltrate Sanders’ campaign? What’s this “impose changes over the heads of vested interests. NB we did this in the 1930s” stuff? Is that a reference to the Zinoviev Letter forgery? (1924 actually, but they don’t look like people who bother to check details). 

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Big Brother Grips Americans’ Minds to Support Invasions

How Big Brother Grips Americans’ Minds to Support Invasions

How Big Brother Grips Americans’ Minds to Support Invasions

On November 29th, Gallup headlined “Democrats Lead Surge in Belief U.S. Should Be World Leader” and reported that “Three-fourths (75%) of Americans today think the United States has ‘a special responsibility to be the leading nation in world affairs,’ up from 66% in 2010. The surge is driven by Democrats, whose belief in this idea has increased from 61% eight years ago to 81% now.” This finding comes even after the lie-based and catastrophic U.S. invasions of Iraq in 2003, and of Libya in 2011 (and of so many others, such as Afghanistan, where the U.S. and Sauds created the Taliban in 1979). Americans — now even increasingly — want ‘their’ (which is actually America’s billionaires’) Government to be virtually the world’s government, policing the world. They want this nation’s Government to be determining what international laws will be enforced around the world, and to be enforcing them. Most Americans don’t want the United Nations to have power over the U.S. (its billionaires’) Government, but instead want the U.S. Government (its billionaires) to have power over the United Nations (which didn’t authorize any of those evil, lie-based, U.S. invasions).

Not only would doing this bankrupt all constructive domestic functions (health, education, infrastructure, etc.) of the U.S. federal Government, but it would also increase the global carnage, as if the U.S. Government hasn’t already been doing enough of that, for decades now.

The leadership for this supremacist craving comes straight from America’s top, not from the masses that are being sampled by the Gallup organization, who only reflect it — they are duped by their leaders. Here is how U.S. President Barack Obama (a Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2009, for nothing at all but his ‘kindly’ but insincere verbiage when he had been a candidate) stated this widespread delusional American belief in American global moral supremacy, when addressing the graduating class at West Point Military Academy, on 28 May 2014:

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The Chinese Government Identifies Citizens By The WAY THEY WALK

The Chinese Government Identifies Citizens By The WAY THEY WALK

Communist Chinese authorities are using “gait recognition” technology to identify Chinese civilians by the way that they walk. The new technology uses body shapes and movement to identify people even when their face is not in the camera.

This dystopian big brother nightmare is quickly becoming a reality for the souls residing in the People’s Republic of China.  Already used by police on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai, “gait recognition” is part of a push across China to develop artificial intelligence and data-driven surveillance that is raising concerns about how far the technology will go.

The software, built by a Chinese artificial intelligence company called Watrix, extracts a person’s silhouette from video and analyses the silhouette’s movement to create a model of the way the person walks. It can identify people from 50 meters away and requires no special camera to do so.

China is building a digital dictatorship to exert control over its 1.4 billion citizens. As if the “social credit” scoring system wasn’t terrifying enough, the country continues to cross the line with surveilling its own people.

“Gait analysis can’t be fooled by simply limping, walking with splayed feet or hunching over, because we’re analyzing all the features of an entire body,” said Watrix chief executive officer Huang Yongzhen. “You don’t need people’s cooperation for us to be able to recognize their identity,” Huang added.

Huang is a former researcher and quite obviously an authoritarian control freak who said he left academia after seeing how promising the technology had become. He then co-founded Watrix in 2016, and his company was incubated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Though the software isn’t as good as facial recognition, Huang said its 94 percent accuracy rate is good enough for commercial use.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Creating a Suspect Society: The Scary Side of the Technological Police State

“If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities.”—Philip K. Dick

It’s a given that Big Brother is always watching us.

Unfortunately, thanks to the government’s ongoing efforts to build massive databases using emerging surveillance, DNA and biometrics technologies, Big Brother (and his corporate partners in crime) is getting even creepier and more invasive, intrusive and stalker-like.

Indeed, every dystopian sci-fi film (and horror film, for that matter) we’ve ever seen is suddenly converging into this present moment in a dangerous trifecta between science and technology, Big Business, and a government that wants to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful—but not without help from the citizenry.

On a daily basis, Americans are relinquishing (in many cases, voluntarily) the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.

As journalist Anna Myers notes, “Fingerprint readers, eye scans, and voice recognition are no longer just the security methods of high-tech spy movies. Millions of mobile phone, bank, and investment customers now have these technologies at their fingertips. Schwab uses voice recognition, Apple uses fingerprints, Wells Fargo scans eyes, and other companies are developing heartbeat or grip technology to verify user identity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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