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Orwell’s Triumph: How Novels Tell the Truth of Surveillance
Orwell’s Triumph: How Novels Tell the Truth of Surveillance
When government agencies and private companies access and synthesize our data, they take on the power to novelize our lives. Their profiles of our behavior are semi-fictional stories, pieced together from the digital traces we leave as we go about our days. No matter how many articles we read about this process, grasping its significance is no easy thing. It turns out that to understand the weird experience of being the target of all this surveillance — how we are characters in semi-true narratives constructed by algorithms and data analysts — an actual novel can be the best medium.
Book of Numbers, released earlier this month, is the latest exhibit. Written by Joshua Cohen, the book has received enthusiastic notices from the New York Times and other outlets as an ambitious “Internet novel,” embedding the history of Silicon Valley in a dense narrative about a search engine called Tetration. Book of Numbers was written mostly in the wake of the emergence of WikiLeaks and was finished as a trove of NSA documents from Edward Snowden was coming to light. Cohen even adjusted last-minute details to better match XKeyscore, a secret NSA computer system that collects massive amounts of email and web data; in Book of Numbers,Tetration has a function secreted within it that automatically reports searches to the government. As Tetration’s founder puts it, “All who read us are read.”
Ben Wizner of the ACLU, who is Cohen’s friend and Snowden’s lawyer, has praised the novel’s depiction of the “surveillance economy,” as he puts it. “There’s a frustration on the law and advocacy side about how abstract some of these issues can seem to the public,” Wizner told the Times. “For some people, the novelist’s eye can show the power and the danger of these systems in ways that we can’t.”
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Emails Reveal Coziness Between Koch Lobbyists and Regulators
Emails Reveal Coziness Between Koch Lobbyists and Regulators
The close ties between corporate interests and the regulators who are supposed to police them contributes, many argue, to fundamentally lax oversight.
Emails I recently obtained through a records request show how cozy a Koch Industries lobbyist is with officials at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the primary regulator for derivatives and commodity trading.
Though Koch Industries is better known for using its considerable political machine to promote fossil fuel industry priorities and tax cuts for the wealthy, the company also has a major stake in the financial markets via its business unit devoted to commodity speculation. Notably, the very first oil-indexed price swap was pioneered by a Koch trader in 1986, and the infamous “Enron Loophole” that deregulated the trading of credit default swaps was engineered by a lobbying team that included two Koch lobbyists.
The recent lobbying campaign around derivatives is already paying off. As Zach Carter of the Huffington Post reported, the House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a major regulatory roll-back supported by Wall Street banks and the Kochs. The legislation would affect the post-financial crisis reforms designed to rein in the global derivatives market.
Just as Citigroup lobbyists authored their own deregulation bills in Congress, the Koch emails reveal just how comfortable the regulators and the lobbyists who curry their favor feel with each other, even as the latter are besieging the former with information and pressure that benefits their very rich clients.
Gregory Zerzan, a former Treasury Department official during the George W. Bush administration, went on to work for the International Swaps and Derivatives Association before becoming a Koch lobbyist.
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Spy agencies target mobile phones, app stores to implant spyware
Users of millions of smartphones put at risk by certain mobile browser gaps, Snowden file shows
Canada and its spying partners exploited weaknesses in one of the world’s most popular mobile browsers and planned to hack into smartphones via links to Google and Samsung app stores, a top secret document obtained by CBC News shows.
Electronic intelligence agencies began targeting UC Browser — a massively popular app in China and India with growing use in North America — in late 2011 after discovering it leaked revealing details about its half-billion users.
Their goal, in tapping into UC Browser and also looking for larger app store vulnerabilities, was to collect data on suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets — and, in some cases, implant spyware on targeted smartphones.
The 2012 document shows that the surveillance agencies exploited the weaknesses in certain mobile apps in pursuit of their national security interests, but it appears they didn’t alert the companies or the public to these weaknesses. That potentially put millions of users in danger of their data being accessed by other governments’ agencies, hackers or criminals.
“All of this is being done in the name of providing safety and yet … Canadians or people around the world are put at risk,” says the University of Ottawa’s Michael Geist, one of Canada’s foremost experts on internet law.
CBC News analysed the top secret document in collaboration with U.S. news site The Intercept, a website that is devoted in part to reporting on the classified documents leaked by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The so-called Five Eyes intelligence alliance — the spy group comprising Canada, the U.S., Britain, Australia and New Zealand — specifically sought ways to find and hijack data links to servers used by Google and Samsung’s mobile app stores, according to the document obtained by Snowden.
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The FBI Busts Up Another of its Own Terrorist Plots and Politicians Rush to Blame the First Amendment
The FBI Busts Up Another of its Own Terrorist Plots and Politicians Rush to Blame the First Amendment
Like other recent sensational “terror plots,” however, the criminal complaint unsealed yesterday demonstrates the key role of an undercover law enforcement informant in both formulating and facilitating the alleged plot. It doesn’t appear that Velentzas or Siddiqui actually planned or attempted to bomb any target, nor is there any evidence of discussions about how to create a bomb before the introduction of the informant into their lives.
While Velentzas appeared to have latent sympathy with the Islamic State, contrary to sensational media reports she is not alleged in the criminal complaint to have had any contact with the group.
Their discussions allegedly progressed, with the informant and Velentzas meeting to talk in greater detail about how to create a bomb, using information gleaned from The Anarchist Cookbook, and discussing whether it would be appropriate to target a gathering of police officers with such a device. At several points in the complaint, Velentzas indicates her reticence about doing anything that might harm “regular people,” even criticizing the Boston Marathon bombers for killing and injuring civilians. During this time, the informant also provided both Velentzas and Siddiqui with printed copies of Inspire, including selected passages about how to create explosives.
– From the Intercept article: Informant Provided Bomb-Making Manual to Alleged “ISIS-Inspired” Plotters
What does a government wanting its population to remain in fear so as to justify a total surveillance state, and a military-intelligence industrial complex hooked on billions in wasteful corporate welfare do in the absence of genuine terrorist plots? Create artificial plots, naturally.
This disturbing trend has been covered here at Liberty Blitzkrieg and elsewhere in recent years. Read the following articles for a couple of recent examples:
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BRITAIN USED SPY TEAM TO SHAPE LATIN AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION ON FALKLANDS
BRITAIN USED SPY TEAM TO SHAPE LATIN AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION ON FALKLANDS
Faced with mounting international pressure over the Falkland Islands territorial dispute, the British government enlisted its spy service, including a highly secretive unit known for using “dirty tricks,” to covertly launch offensive cyberoperations to prevent Argentina from taking the islands.
A shadowy unit of the British spy agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had been preparing a bold, covert plan called “Operation QUITO” since at least 2009. Documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, published in partnership with Argentine news site Todo Notícias, refer to the mission as a “long-running, large scale, pioneering effects operation.”
At the heart of this operation was the Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group, known by the acronym JTRIG, a secretive unit that has been involved in spreading misinformation.
The British government, which has continuously administered the Falkland Islands — also known as the Malvinas — since 1833, has rejected Argentine and international calls to open negotiations on territorial sovereignty. Worried that Argentina, emboldened by international opinion, may attempt to retake the islands diplomatically or militarily, JTRIG and other GCHQ divisions were tasked “to support FCO’s [Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s] goals relating to Argentina and the Falkland Islands.” A subsequent document suggests the main FCO goal was to “[prevent] Argentina from taking over the Falkland Islands” and that new offensive cyberoperations were underway in 2011 to further that end.
Tensions between the two nations, which fought a war over the small archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean in 1982, reached a boil in 2010 with the British discovery of large, offshore oil and gas reserves potentially worth billions of dollars.
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MEXICO’S JOURNALISTS GRAB A TECH SHIELD AS THEIR FIGHT AGAINST THE ESTABLISHMENT ESCALATES
MEXICO’S JOURNALISTS GRAB A TECH SHIELD AS THEIR FIGHT AGAINST THE ESTABLISHMENT ESCALATES
Mexico, a country where tens of thousands have been killed in drug-related violence, and where government officials have been complicit in corruption, murders, and disappearances, seems like a natural place to launch a safe, anonymous way for sources to get information to journalists.
That’s the idea behind MéxicoLeaks, a platform launched this month by a consortium of news outlets and advocacy groups in Mexico. The site allows whistleblowers to anonymously submit information via the Tor browser, which masks their location.
But MéxicoLeaks has already caused a scandal, culminating in the firing of one of Mexico’s most popular journalists, radio personality Carmen Aristegui, and her staff of reporters. Although MéxicoLeaks promises a secure channel for activists who otherwise face brutal retribution for speaking out, its launch comes at a time when other protections for journalists, including their job security and physical safety, are crumbling.
Aristegui and her reporters say that the radio network that runs their show used their involvement with MéxicoLeaks as a pretext to fire them. The real goal, they believe, was to suppress oppositional journalism. “They seemed so determined to strike us down,” Irving Huerta, a 27-year-old investigative journalist with Aristegui’s unit, told The Intercept in an interview.
Staffers on Aristegui’s program had previously clashed with the network over exposés on the First Lady of Mexico’s real estate dealings, among other critical reports, Huerta says, and he believes powerful people wanted to see the show end.
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Did Max Boot and Commentary Magazine Lie About Edward Snowden? You Decide.
June 6, 2015
Did Max Boot and Commentary Magazine Lie About Edward Snowden? You Decide.
In the neocon journal Commentary, Max Boot today complains that the New York Times published an op-ed by Edward Snowden. Boot’s objection rests on his accusation that the NSA whistleblower is actually a “traitor.” In objecting, Boot made these claims:
It is literally the supreme act of projection for Max Boot to accuse anyone of lacking courage, as this particular think tank warmonger is the living, breathing personification of the unique strain of American neocon cowardice. Unlike Snowden — who sacrificed his liberty and unraveled his life in pursuit of his beliefs — the 45-year-old Boot has spent most of his adult life advocating for one war after the next, but always wanting to send his fellow citizens of his generation to die in them, while he hides in the comfort of Washington think tanks, never fighting them himself.
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