16 March 2014

The Legal and Technological Matrix for a Brave New Dystopia (2/4)


The New Paradigm

Computer technology is no longer a tool of industrial society, it's at the heart of society...a new society which is in the process of establishing itself and the new parameters by which it will function and govern. While we're all playing with our gadgets, the social fabric is being re-woven and as I've indicated I think most people are in fact missing the magnitude and fundamental nature of the change.

There are things happening, voices in the wilderness but if you spend your time plugged into the mainstream you are sure to be missing it. I go online and deliberately watch some mainstream news from time to time. It's all smut and entertainment. There literally is no actual news programming coming from American networks anymore. If that's your source for insight and information then you're going to be completely in the dark.

Whether you like Michael Hastings or not, the circumstances and timing of his death are more than a little suspicious. What is the significance of his reporting? What was he revealing about the new paradigm? The Stratfor Leaks are devastating to the Establishment. They contain so many informative clues as to the nature of the Security State. His reporting had helped (whether he meant to or not) to bring down Stanley McChrystal and he was in the process of writing about John Brennan.


If after Assange and Snowden you have any doubts that the government is absolutely going after whistleblowers, leakers and the journalists who are facilitating these activities then read the story of Barrett Brown. While Brown is certainly not heroic, moral, or perhaps even a very intelligent character, the way the government went after him over Stratfor is worth considering.



Again as some have pointed out...when Ellsberg leaked The Pentagon Papers, the Nixon administration went after him but no one really considered going after the New York Times.

Today, the actual media outlets that publish the leaks are being labeled as terrorists. This allows the government to move against them in violation of any concept of transparency or due process. The military has a chain of command which is supposed to create accountability. In fact it is often used to suppress dissent or concerns regarding legality. The new privatized world does not even possess these mechanisms. If anything there are arbitration boards which if you know anything about those, they're something of a joke and heavily weighted against anyone who would raise a concern.

If the government is breaking the law and there's no way to report it, if all whistleblowing is gagged...then any notion of democracy or representative government has ended.

We're all terrorists now...

If you write in a manner critical of government policy and your criticisms happen to vaguely coincide with the criticisms levied by an official 'terrorist' group...then you can be accused of collaboration and can be labeled a terrorist.

My writings could be labeled as terroristic. Even the fact that you're reading them can mean you're collaborating with terrorists.

Do I think they're going to come after you or me? No, not particularly. But the net is being cast over a wider sea and the forces in our society are dynamic. Today all is well, but what about tomorrow?

Is it just about Islamic terrorism?

The Corporate powers behind industrial agriculture are pushing for a terrorist designation not just for the ELF (Earth Liberation Front) activist-saboteurs but anyone who even photographs or gathers evidence from a farming site.

The banking and insurance industries want regulation and control. Too much is on the line to consider operating otherwise. They fear alternative economies, cyber-currencies, leaks and loopholes.

The Corporatocracy

There are many lessons to be learned from Wikileaks and the Snowden files but one really telling point concerns the degree the government is in collaboration with Corporate Interests.

Orwell couldn't have even dreamed of this. While his ideas seemed nigh on impossible when we actually reached the year of 1984 (as we all watched the Apple Macintosh commercial)...within just a few short years we have reached Orwell's vision, and surpassed it.

He envisioned a surveillance state but couldn't have imagined an era with programmes like 'Upstream' which taps into hardware, let alone the PRISM programme. This isn't a partisan issue. It was started by Bush and continued by Obama. There's been no 'change'.

But perhaps even more disturbing, what we really have is the TIA (Total Information Awareness) project dreamed up by John Poindexter. Even though the project was officially killed in 2003, it has lived on in mutated form. Orwell couldn't have dreamed of the data collection and filtering capacity...let alone the ability to cross reference, analyze and synthesize the data. Cloud Computing isn't just about storing your hard drive online. This is a whole new way of sifting information and cross-referencing it. The dystopian nightmares of Philip K. Dick are on the verge of becoming true. We're on the cusp of thought-crime becoming a reality.

The kinds of Thought-crime the Establishment is going to notice are not coming from the Christian Right or the Tea Party. That is unless they turn violent, which they might in a few years.

They engage in political criticism, but they are partisans with their party-backers in control of vast swathes of the government and many of the institutions engaged in the actual surveillance.

The real dissidents are people like me... people who are criticizing the heart of the system and trying to expose it. Unlike the whistleblowers, hacktavists, and leakers my goals are not political but I doubt a government official is going to pick up the nuance of what I'm saying. The bottom line is my words are subversive to the established order.

Under the new paradigm if I'm criticizing US foreign policy or Globalization I can be accused of aiding and abetting the enemies of the United States.

But if the Church has baptized these practices and joined in them, then I am duty bound to speak and expose their works of darkness. Thankfully in the past we've had an open society with free speech. That era may be coming to an end and we need to be thinking about what that means.

The Capitalist system wedded to an incomprehensibly vast Military Complex has generated a host of shadowy hedge-fund created firms like Endgame which seek to infiltrate networks, engage in espionage and sabotage. Agents Provocateurs have been utilized and I believe some of these private contractors exist for this purpose.

Who are the people in these hedge-funds? Where are they raising their investment money? The ties to the intelligence community are hard to dispute. Are these the same people operating in the black budget world... a realm where the intelligence agencies raise their own funds through legitimate and often illegitimate business? This is the shadow-world of drug money, organized crime and money laundering. One is reminded of the BCCI and Vatican Bank scandals. Like TIA, they fold, fall into the shadows, morph and reappear.

Character assassination and intimidation are the name of the game. Not only are these agencies and corporations pushing for backdoor access into software and cyber networks, they want the 'keys to the kingdom' as Lavabit found out after Snowden appeared on the radar.

They wanted the SSL protocols so that not only could they surveil, they could masquerade as the webhost itself. Any company unwilling to submit faces severe repercussions. And yet in this case the 'they' (meaning the authorities) are often working at the behest of other corporations or the authorities are themselves 'other corporations' hired by the government. It's amazing how this is working out. The lines are completely blurred.

I applaud Ladar Levinson's integrity to simply suspend operations rather than surrender his data (and integrity) to a government now completely out of control.

These same cyber intimidators pursue anyone who seeks to circumvent their sentry networks. You can attempt to utilize networks like TOR in order to communicate and web-surf anonymously...something now critical for investigative journalism... but the cyber-mercenaries (who again sometimes work 'officially' for the government and sometimes don't) will attack your computer with Malware and if that fails, agents will show up at your door. The use of drone technology is also worth noting. Predator drones firing missiles over American cities isn't likely, but UAV's will be increasingly utilized in the realm of surveillance. The legal framework has already been established.

If you seek to circumvent the Insurance and Banking cabal or the IRS they will sabotage your systems and steal your goods. The Bitcoin project has learned this the hard way. While some have scoffed at the apparent suicide of a Bitcoin related CEO, there's a long track record that gives anyone who is watching a reason to be suspicious.
CONTINUE READING PART 3