American Freedom: Myth, or ‘Dirty Joke?’
Posted by feww on June 7, 2013
‘PRISM’: Anything So Patently Evil, Applied on Such Grand Scales, WILL Backfire in Big Ways
For the past five years, FIRE-EARTH Moderators have protested about censorship of news and information and abuse of their intellectual property rights, posted on this as well as several affiliated blogs, by Google and their business partners.
Slide No 5 does NOT include companies that are protected by the NSA-FBI in their joint venture Internet spy program.
The following are the facts about data mining, information censorship and related issues based on professional and personal experiences of the Blog Moderators, their colleagues and friends.
- PRISM cannot operate successfully without the collaboration of the so-called tech giants, which include Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple according to the report.
- Twitter is notably absent from the program (refused to cooperate?)
- The scope of data mining as it pertains to commercial participants goes all the way down to smaller companies and includes blog and micro-blog providers like Twitter [the surveillance world’s preferred weapon of choice because of the ease by which it’s data-mined] and WordPress, which host FIRE-EARTH.
- The roots of large-scale data mining operations are sewn in industrial espionage and have very little to do with the so called “war-on-terror.” [The Benghazi planned murders, massive government monitoring of the AP, recent IRS shenanigans … provide ample proof.]
- Note: Industrial espionage, or economic espionage, is the stealing of commercial data and secrets from its legitimate owners for use by other parties. This form of espionage is conducted solely for commercial purposes and has little to do with national security. Furthermore, this type of theft is NOT usually perpetrated by foreign governments, as the current case clearly shows.
- While the tech giants have denied any knowledge of PRISM, or similar programs operating under other acronyms, the fact remains that the government programs do not have the ability to instantly remove, or bury unwanted materials posted on the Internet, as experienced by the blog moderators. Google does!
- Note: Despite FIRE-EARTH’s unsurpassed record of accurate disaster forecasts, the blog traffic was cut down overnight by 80-90 percent on January 29, 2013.
- “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” said a career intelligence officer who [allegedly] leaked PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy.
- Despite any Psyop undertones that maybe hidden in the above statement, pointing to “self-censorship,” FIRE-EARTH moderators experience the real-time surveillance almost constantly.
Related Links
- Disaster Trading June 3, 2013
Fire Earth 
NB said
Monday, June 17, 2013
NSA Spying Helped by “Military Digital Complex” and Commercialized Internet
Today, the Guardian features a live chat with leaker Edward Snowden.
ROBERT McCHESNEY, rwmcchesney@gmail.com
McChesney is author of the recently released book Digital Disconnect. He said today: “Much of the coverage of the NSA spying scandal has underplayed crucial context: The capacity of the government to engage in constant surreptitious monitoring of all civilians has been greatly enhanced by the commercialization of the Internet. Moreover, the commercialized Internet, far from producing competition, has generated the greatest wave of monopoly in the history of capitalism. The giant monopolistic firms that rule the Internet — Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Version, AT&T, Comcast, Microsoft — all have tremendous incentive to collect information on people. There is a great deal of profit for these firms and others to work closely with the national security apparatus, and almost no incentive to refuse to participate. In short, there is a military-digital complex deeply embedded into the political economy and outside any credible review process by elected representatives, not to mention the public. It is an untenable situation for a self-governing society.”
McChesney is professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He notes in Digital Disconnect (the latest of several books he has published on media and democracy):
“The domination of the Internet by a handful of monopolists, as well as the emerging cloud structure of the Internet, is perfect for the government. It need deal with only a handful of giants to effectively control the Internet. …
“The monopolistic firms that have capitalized on the digital revolution have grown to world-historical proportions. In 2012, four of the ten largest U.S. corporations in terms of market valuation, including number one and number three, were Internet giants Apple, Microsoft, Google, and AT&T. Add IBM and that is five of the top ten. If one goes down through the top thirty, the list then includes Verizon, Amazon, Comcast, and Disney, as well as the Internet giants that depend less directly on the consumer market: Intel, Cisco, Qualcomm, and Oracle. That is thirteen of the top thirty firms. In comparison, the top thirty firms include only two of the ‘too big to fail’ banks that have earned so much notoriety for their dominance of the political economy. …
“The Internet has been embraced by the military and national security agencies, which are determined to make it their own. It ‘is a surveillance tool made in heaven,’ John Naughton [technology columnist of the London Observer] writes, ‘because much of the surveillance can be done, not by expensive and fallible human beings, but by computers.’ In 2012 the U.S. military formally stated that it ‘intended to treat cyberspace as a military battleground,’ and the most important battleground at that. The National Security Agency is completing a $2 billion complex in Utah that will be the cumulonimbus of Internet clouds. Its ‘near-bottomless databases’ will include ‘the complete contents of private e-mails, cell phone calls, and Google searches as well as all sorts of personal data trails.’ The NSA then has enormous capacity to slice and dice the contents. As James Bamford [a journalist who has covered the NSA extensively for three decades] observes, for the first time since Watergate, ‘the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the U.S. and its citizens.'”
The week before the Guardian made the Snowden leaks public, McChesney was on FAIR’s radio program, CounterSpin: “It’s really the worst possible scenario for a free society, when you have an economy dominated by a handful of monopolistic giants working hand in hand with a national security state that’s completely off-limits to public review to monitor the population. It’s not a tenable situation for a free society.”
http://www.accuracy.org
comment said
“Government Surveillance, Corporate Power”
HEIDI BOGHOSIAN, director@nlg.org
Author of Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power and Public Resistance, Boghosian said today: “The Obama administration has built on the worst abuses of Bush’s ‘anti-terrorism’ surveillance agenda, expanding and institutionalizing warrantless domestic surveillance, criminalizing certain Internet activity, tightening government secrecy, all based on increasingly secret interpretations of laws like the USA PATRIOT Act.
Boghosian, who is executive director of the National Lawyers Guild added: “This comes in a context of the administration prosecuting several whistleblowers, including Bradley Manning, information activist Jeremy Hammond, who recently pleaded guilty to publicizing internal emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, and Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide after facing 35 years in prison for downloading freely available academic material.
“The Verizon revelations are just the tip of the iceberg. Over-collection of data on a routine basis is not only bad intelligence practice but it also makes us less safe. Some have cited the Boston bombings case as justification for blanket surveillance, but it shows the opposite — targeted intelligence gathering about specific suspects is a much better method of law enforcement than spying on the entire population.
“Every day, individuals routinely make their personal information available through retail loyalty cards, or through their online purchasing habits. This information is collected, stored and made available to large data aggregators and brokers who in turn package it according to different demographics, and sell it to other entities, including government agencies. The current revelations show the U.S. government has gone far beyond making limited, specific requests and is in fact harvesting almost every transaction, online and in real time. People need to be aware that personal information, once gathered and stored, may not only contain inaccuracies but may very likely be used for purposes other than what it was initially obtained for.
“Information providers like Apple and Google turn information over to government agencies as a quid pro quo; government agencies either look the other way or levy relatively small fines or punishments for gross invasions of privacy such as Google’s Street View project which was obtaining residents’ wireless data. Silicon Valley controls the way information flows across borders and is in many ways the new ‘Wall Street.'”
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
RuffleTheTeacher said
I believe it appears your traffic was cut, but it may only be number manipulation. When I first posted my Youtube vid about Sgr A* back in Mar 2008, I started to see manipulation of my views. I was also logged out of YT multiple times and comments were either removed completely or shuffled to page 15 so they could not be read.
The ruling of these secret courts would be, I assume, you cannot stop freedom of speech, but you can keep people from hearing it.
I always used to say if your not being censored, you don’t know the truth. If two people have conclusions that are accurate, but they never know other people have reached the same conclusions, they are both still lone voices in the dark. Its “how to stop a revolution 101”. “If only someone felt the same way…”
feww said
“if your not being censored, you don’t know the truth”
That’s a valid point.
“If two people have conclusions that are accurate, but they never know other people have reached the same conclusions,”
That’s also true.
In our case, the main aspect of this “information burial,” which we believe is perpetrated by Google and its partners, is the effective “privatization” of data posted on this blog.
Read FIRE-EARTH earthquake forecasts and additional comments we’ve made concerning the Japan region, then compare the timeline with the recent turmoil in the Japan stock market, and you’ll probably find the connection.
related link: https://feww.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/disaster-trading/
In the old horse-and-cart paradox, the friction on Google’s feet is much greater than the friction on the government’s wheels.
RuffleTheTeacher said
“In the old horse-and-cart paradox…”
Information is power. Whomever is the merchant of information would be in the driver’s seat, so to speak. I believe that Google will give you the answer to any question you ask it, classified or not. You just have to ask the right question.
I came upon the glossary of terms for the Intra-agency field guide a few years back. It defines all the ABCs of all the programs of NASA, DoD, and others so communications between the groups is clearer. I never found the actual field guide (I tried hard!) but the point is the glossary… NOT classified?!! Really? Some bumbling bureaucrat thought a glossary isn’t a secret document… Post it!!
To err is human. To grab that data and store it for all eternity before it is yanked off the net is why Google is in the drivers seat. Certanily interesting times we live in, eh?