Not new information, but may be the starting point for rebelion; Wikileaks leaks classified US Government military documents.
What may be the biggest turning point for America since Martin Luther King, Wikileaks.org now the center point of providing Government transparency.
The Multi-billion dollar industry of Social Network Spying.
The title explains it all, and thanks to Wiki-leaks we have a lot more information to indulge on.
From WikiLeaks
October 24, 2009
By Tom Burghardt (Global Research)[1]
That social networking sites and applications such as Facebook, Twitter and their competitors can facilitate communication and information sharing amongst diverse groups and individuals is by now a cliché.
It should come as no surprise then, that the secret state and the capitalist grifters whom they serve, have zeroed-in on the explosive growth of these technologies. One can be certain however, securocrats aren't tweeting their restaurant preferences or finalizing plans for after work drinks.
No, researchers on both sides of the Atlantic are busy as proverbial bees building a "total information" surveillance system, one that will, so they hope, provide police and security agencies with what they euphemistically call "actionable intelligence."
Build the Perfect Panopticon, Win Fabulous Prizes!
In this context, the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks published a remarkable document October 4 by the INDECT Consortium, the Intelligence Information System Supporting Observation, Searching and Detection for Security of Citizens in Urban Environment.
Hardly a catchy acronym, but simply put INDECT is working to put a human face on the billions of emails, text messages, tweets and blog posts that transit cyberspace every day; perhaps your face.
According to Wikileaks, INDECT's "Work package 4" is designed "to comb web blogs, chat sites, news reports, and social-networking sites in order to build up automatic dossiers on individuals, organizations and their relationships." Ponder that phrase again: "automatic dossiers."
This isn't the first time that European academics have applied their "knowledge skill sets" to keep the public "safe"--from a meaningful exercise of free speech and the right to assemble, that is.
Last year The Guardian reported that Bath University researchers' Cityware project covertly tracked "tens of thousands of Britons" through the installation of Bluetooth scanners that capture "radio signals transmitted from devices such as mobile phones, laptops and digital cameras, and using the data to follow unwitting targets without their permission."
One privacy advocate, Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International, told The Guardian: "This technology could well become the CCTV of the mobile industry. It would not take much adjustment to make this system a ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure over which we have no control."
Which of course, is precisely the point.
As researchers scramble for a windfall of cash from governments eager to fund these dubious projects, European police and security agencies aren't far behind their FBI and NSA colleagues in the spy game.
The online privacy advocates, Quintessenz, published a series of leaked documents in 2008 that described the network monitoring and data mining suites designed by Nokia Siemens, Ericsson and Verint.
The Nokia Siemens Intelligence Platform dubbed "intelligence in a box," integrate tasks generally done by separate security teams and pools the data from sources such as telephone or mobile calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions, insurance records and the like. Call it data mining on steroids.
Ironically enough however, Siemens, the giant German electronics firm was caught up in a global bribery scandal that cost the company some $1.6 billion in fines. Last year, The New York Times described "a web of secret bank accounts and shadowy consultants," and a culture of "entrenched corruption ... at a sprawling, sophisticated corporation that externally embraced the nostrums of a transparent global marketplace built on legitimate transactions."
According to the Times, "at Siemens, bribery was just a line item." Which just goes to show, powering the secret state means never having to say you're sorry!
Social Network Spying, a Growth Industry Fueled by Capitalist Grifters
The trend by security agencies and their corporate partners to spy on their citizens has accelerated greatly in the West since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
This multi-billion industry in general, has been a boon for the largest American and European defense corporations. Among the top ten companies listed by Washington Technology in their annual ranking of the "Top 100" prime government contractors, all ten--from Lockheed Martin to Booz Allen Hamilton--earned a combined total of $68 billion in 2008 from defense and related homeland security work for the secret state.
And like Siemens, all ten corporations figure prominently on the Project on Government Oversight's Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (FCMD), which tracks "contract fraud, environmental, ethics, and labor violations." Talk about a rigged game!
Designing everything from nuclear missile components to eavesdropping equipment for various government agencies in the United States and abroad, including some of the most repressive regimes on the planet, these firms have moved into manufacturing the hardware and related computer software for social networking surveillance in a big way.
Wired revealed in April that the FBI is routinely monitoring cell phone calls and internet activity during criminal and counterterrorism investigations. The publication posted a series of internal documents that described the Wi-Fi and computer hacking capabilities of the Bureau's Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit (CEAU).
New Scientist reported back in 2006 that the National Security Agency "is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks."
And just this week in an exclusive report published by the British high-tech publication, The Register, it was revealed that "the government has outsourced parts of its biggest ever mass surveillance project to the disaster-prone IT services giant formerly known as EDS."
That work is being conducted under the auspices of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British state's equivalent of America's National Security Agency.
Investigative journalist Chris Williams disclosed that the American computer giant HP, which purchased EDS for some $13.9 billion last year, is "designing and installing the massive computing resources that will be needed to analyse details of who contacts whom, when where and how."
Work at GCHQ in Cheltenham is being carried out under "a secret project called Mastering the Internet." In May, a Home Office document surfaced that "ostensibly sought views on whether ISPs should be forced to gather terabytes of data from their networks on the government's behalf."
The Register reported earlier this year that telecommunications behemoth Detica and U.S. defense giant Lockheed Martin were providing GCHQ with data mining software "which searches bulk data, such as communications records, for patterns ... to identify suspects." (For further details see: Antifascist Calling, "Spying in the UK: GCHQ Awards Lockheed Martin £200m Contract, Promises to 'Master the Internet'," May 7, 2009)
It seems however, that INDECT researchers like their GCHQ/NSA kissin' cousins in Britain and the United States, are burrowing ever-deeper into the nuts-and-bolts of electronic social networking and may be on the verge of an Orwellian surveillance "breakthrough."
As New Scientist sagely predicted, the secret state most certainly plans to "harness advances in internet technology--specifically the forthcoming 'semantic web' championed by the web standards organisation W3C--to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals."
Profiling Internet Dissent
Pretty alarming, but the devil as they say is in the details and INDECT's release of their "Work package 4" file makes for a very interesting read. And with a title, "XML Data Corpus: Report on methodology for collection, cleaning and unified representation of large textual data from various sources: news reports, weblogs, chat," rest assured one must plow through much in the way of geeky gibberish and tech-speak to get to the heartless heart of the matter.
INDECT itself is a rather interesting amalgamation of spooks, cops and academics.
According to their web site, INDECT partners include: the University of Science and Technology, AGH, Poland; Gdansk University of Technology; InnoTech DATA GmbH & Co., Germany; IP Grenoble (Ensimag), France; MSWiA, the General Headquarters of Police, attached to the Ministry of the Interior, Poland; Moviquity, Spain; Products and Systems of Information Technology, PSI, Germany; the Police Service of Northern Ireland, PSNI, United Kingdom (hardly slouches when it comes to stitching-up Republicans and other leftist agitators!); Poznan University of Technology; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria; University of Wuppertal, Germany; University of York, Great Britain; Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Technical University of Kosice, Slovakia; X-Art Pro Division G.m.b.H, Austria; and finally, the Fachhochschule Technikum, also in Austria.
I don't know about you, but I find it rather ironic that the European Union, ostensible guardians of democracy and human rights, have turned for assistance in their surveillance projects to police and spy outfits from the former Soviet bloc, who after all know a thing or two when it comes to monitoring their citizens.
Right up front, York University's Suresh Manadhar, Ionnis Klapaftis and Shailesh Pandey, the principle authors of the INDECT report, make their intentions clear.
Since "security" as the authors argue, "is becoming a weak point of energy and communications infrastructures, commercial stores, conference centers, airports and sites with high person traffic in general," they aver that "access control and rapid response to potential dangers are properties that every security system for such environments should have."
Does INDECT propose building a just and prosperous global society, thus lessening the potential that terrorist killers or other miscreants will exploit a "target rich environment" that may prove deadly for innocent workers who, after all, were the principle victims of the 2004 and 2007 terrorist outrages in Madrid and London? Hardly.
As with their colleagues across the pond, INDECT is hunting for the ever-elusive technological quick-fix, a high-tech magic bullet. One, I might add, that will deliver neither safety nor security but rather, will constrict the democratic space where social justice movements flourish while furthering the reach of unaccountable security agencies.
The document "describes the first deliverable of the work package which gives an overview about the main methodology and description of the XML data corpus schema and describes the methodology for collection, cleaning and unified representation of large textual data from various sources: news reports, weblogs, chat, etc."
The first order of business "is the study and critical review of the annotation schemes employed so far for the development and evaluation of methods for entity resolution, co-reference resolution and entity attributes identification."
In other words, how do present technologic capabilities provide police, security agencies and capitalist grifters with the ability to identify who might be speaking to whom and for what purpose. INDECT proposes to introduce "a new annotation scheme that builds upon the strengths of the current-state-of-the-art," one that "should be extensible and modifiable to the requirements of the project."
Asserting that "an XML data corpus [can be] extracted from forums and social networks related to specific threats (e.g. hooliganism, terrorism, vandalism, etc.)," the authors claim they will provide "different entity types according to the requirements of the project. The grouping of all references to an entity together. The relationships between different entities" and finally, "the events in which entities participate."
Why stop there? Why not list the ubiquitous "other" areas of concern to INDECT's secret state partners? While "hooliganism, terrorism, vandalism, etc.," may be the ostensible purpose of their "entity attributes identification" project, surely INDECT is well aware that such schemes are just as easily applicable to local citizen groups, socialist and anarchist organizations, or to the innumerable environmental, human rights or consumer campaigners who challenge the dominant free market paradigm of their corporate sponsors.
The authors however, couldn't be bothered by the sinister applications that may be spawned by their research; indeed, they seem quite proud of it.
"The main achievements of this work" they aver, "allows the identification of several types of entities, groups the same references into one class, while at the same time allows the identification of relationships and events."
Indeed, the "inclusion of a multi-layered ontology ensures the consistency of the annotation" and will facilitate in the (near) future, "the use of inference mechanisms such as transitivity to allow the development of search engines that go beyond simple keyword search."
Quite an accomplishment! An enterprising security service or capitalist marketing specialist need only sift through veritable mountains of data available from commercial databases, or mobile calls, tweets, blog posts and internet searches to instantaneously identity "key agitators," to borrow the FBI's very 20th century description of political dissidents; individuals who could be detained or "neutralized" should sterner methods be required.
Indeed, a surveillance scheme such as the one INDECT is building could greatly facilitate--and simplify--the already formidable U.S. "Main Core" database that "reportedly collects and stores--without warrants or court orders--the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security," as investigative journalists Tim Shorrock and Christopher Ketchum revealed in two disturbing reports last year.
The scale of "datasets/annotation schemes" exploited by INDECT is truly breathtaking and include: "Automatic Content Extraction" gleaned from "a variety of sources, such as news, broadcast conversations" that identify "relations between entities, and the events in which these participate."
We next discover what is euphemistically called the "Knowledge Base Population (KBP)," an annotation scheme that "focuses on the identification of entity types of Person (PER), Organization (ORG), and Geo-Political Entity (GPE), Location (LOC), Facility (FAC), Geographical/Social/Political (GPE), Vehicle (VEH) and Weapon (WEA)."
How is this accomplished? Why through an exploitation of open source materials of course!
INDECT researchers readily aver that "a snapshot of Wikipedia infoboxes is used as the original knowledge source. The document collection consists of newswire articles on the order of 1 million. The reference knowledge base includes hundreds of thousands of entities based on articles from an October 2008 dump of English Wikipedia. The annotation scheme in KBP focuses on the identification of entity types of Person (PER), Organization (ORG), and Geo-Political Entity (GPE)."
For what purpose? Mum's the word as far as INDECT is concerned.
Nothing escapes this panoptic eye. Even popular culture and leisure activities fall under the glare of security agencies and their academic partners in the latest iteration of this truly monstrous privacy-killing scheme. Using the movie rental firm Netflix as a model, INDECT cites the firm's "100 million ratings from 480 thousand randomly-chosen, anonymous Netflix customers" as "well-suited" to the INDECT surveillance model.
In conclusion, EU surveillance architects propose a "new annotation & knowledge representation scheme" that "is extensible," one that "allows the addition of new entities, relations, and events, while at the same time avoids duplication and ensures integrity."
Deploying an ontological methodology that exploits currently available data from open source, driftnet surveillance of news, broadcasts, blog entries and search results, and linkages obtained through a perusal of mobile phone records, credit card purchases, medical records, travel itineraries, etc., INDECT claims that in the near future their research will allow "a search engine to go beyond simple keyword queries by exploiting the semantic information and relations within the ontology."
And once the scheme is perfected, "the use of expressive logics ... becomes an enabler for detecting entity relations on the web." Or transform it into an "always-on" spy you carry in your pocket or whenever you switch on your computer.
This is how our minders propose to keep us "safe."
CIA Gets In on the Fun
Not to be outdone, the CIA has entered the lucrative market of social networking surveillance in a big way.
In an exclusive published by Wired, we learn that the CIA's investment arm, In-Q-Tel, "want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates--even check out your book reviews on Amazon."
Investigative journalist Noah Shachtman reveals that In-Q-Tel "is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It's part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using "open source intelligence"--information that's publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day." Wired reported:
- Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn't touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what's being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords. (Noah Shachtman, Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm that Monitors Blogs, Tweets," Wired, October 19, 2009)
Although In-Q-Tel spokesperson Donald Tighe told Wired that it wants Visible to monitor foreign social media and give American spooks an "early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally," Shachtman points out that "such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters."
According to Wired, the firm already keeps tabs on 2.0 web sites "for Dell, AT&T and Verizon." And as an added attraction, "Visible is tracking animal-right activists' online campaigns" against meat processing giant Hormel.
Shachtman reports that "Visible has been trying for nearly a year to break into the government field." And why wouldn't they, considering that the heimat security and even spookier black world of the U.S. "intelligence community," is a veritable cash-cow for enterprising corporations eager to do the state's bidding.
In 2008 Wired reports, Visible "teamed-up" with the Washington, DC-based consulting firm "Concepts & Strategies, which has handled media monitoring and translation services for U.S. Strategic Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others."
According to a blurb on the firm's web site they are in hot-pursuit of "social media engagement specialists" with Defense Department experience and "a high proficiency in Arabic, Farsi, French, Urdu or Russian." Wired reports that Concepts & Strategies "is also looking for an 'information system security engineer' who already has a 'Top Secret SCI [Sensitive Compartmentalized Information] with NSA Full Scope Polygraph' security clearance."
In such an environment, nothing escapes the secret state's lens. Shachtman reveals that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) "maintains an Open Source Center, which combs publicly available information, including web 2.0 sites."
In 2007, the Center's director, Doug Naquin, "told an audience of intelligence professionals" that "'we're looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence.... We have groups looking at what they call 'citizens media': people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the internet. Then there's social media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs'."
But as Steven Aftergood, who maintains the Secrecy News web site for the Federation of American Scientists told Wired, "even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically 'open source'."
But as we have seen across the decades, from COINTELPRO to Operation CHAOS, and from Pentagon media manipulation during the run-up to the Iraq war through driftnet warrantless wiretapping of Americans' electronic communications, the secret state is a law unto itself, a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that thrives on duplicity, fear and cold, hard cash.
As published in Global Research. Thanks to Tom Burghardt and Global Research for covering this material. Copyright remains with the aforementioned.
Have you ever wanted to read the new Health Care Bill being formed?
Well here it is 167 pages of 211.
Free Internet Act, They are trying to take away your freedom!
http://www.savetheinternet.com/ - Follow the link to sign a petition against the large Telcom companies. Protect the internet at all costs.Want to learn about what Net Neutrality is : CLICK HEREWhat google says about Net Neutrality:Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet. The Internet has operated according to this neutrality principle since its earliest days... Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet. In our view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity online.—Guide to Net Neutrality for Google Users[3]
Capitalism is widely accepted as Democracy.
What is it that allows us to accept the fact that 1% of the united states carries more money than 95% of Americans? Why is it that we sit and watch as our lives are controlled by the very means that allows us to live? Other countries; Japan, Western Europe, Australia, etc... Have all ready enacted a true democracy, While America the country that invented "true democracy" lays down all and follows for a strict state monopoly capitalism. People easily gain misconceptions on what capitalism is and does for them, I mean with so much media propaganda it's not hard to believe lies. There can be free enterprise with out the need of a hierarchy of corporate pyramid scams, truly the latter is just a euphemism, it is much worse than that. We The United State of America is actually closer to a Dictatorship (If you use the top 1% as a single entity) than a democracy. In contemporary usage, dictatorship refers to an autocratic form of absolute rule by leadership unrestricted by law, constitutions, or other social and political factors within the state. The corporate ladder appoints who survives, and who fails, while using our government to support this. They own what they can get, and do not have remorse. They bypass all of our constitutional laws through money and loop holes.
What more can I say? If you have opposite opinions please leave comments. If you don't believe this at all, then you are just accepting capitalism by default, and have no intention on educating your self, wake up.
http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2007wb-imf-call - Not that I agree with every aspect of this Anarchist Group(So - Called, Since the definition of anarchy was changed from what you probably were taught about it. There are many types, and not all are destructive.
http://www.anarchistnews.org/?q=taxonomy/term/7 - Yes, it all starts as a spark.
http://www.alternet.org/ - Trusty news to compare to the not so trustful corporate media.
There will be more.
What do you think of Obama’s Nobel Prize?
What do you think of Obama's Nobel Prize? US President Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009. Is he a worthy winner? The Nobel Committee hailed Mr Obama's "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples", citing his work to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Mr Obama said that he was "surprised and deeply humbled" by the award and that he did not feel he deserved to be in the company of some of the "transformative figures" who had previously received the award. The US President was chosen ahead of the likes of Morgan Tsvangirai, Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, who had been a favourite for the award.
Is Barack Obama the right choice for the Nobel Peace Prize? If not, who would you have chosen? Send us your comments.
If you are going to leave a comment, leave an educated one, here are some resources:
How some one is nominated for the nobel peace prize: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Peace_Prize
Where Barack Obama started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Committee_on_Foreign_Affairs
Embedded Media, The way coporate power houses control information.
Embedded media is not something new, and it is not just singled out to the US. Embedded media is news media that is distributed through high end chosen media sources, ie Fox news, etc... The problem with this is that most of those chosen newscasters are chosen because they are with in the corporate friend circle. They enjoy the corporate function parties, the tax free "business cars", and the great opportunities of interviewing seemingly untouchable high chairs, the president of the United States being one of them. So in fact the only information you will get from these sources is strongly filtered and pre-programed information. Let's offer you some external links to prove my point:
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/10/04/galbraith-was-ordered-to-cover-up-karzai-fraud/ - Unfiltered and unbiased.
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/10/04/billions-in-us-aid-never-reach-pakistans-military/ - Fox won't even touch that.
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15501 - I doubt if any US broadcasting station would allow this man to report.
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15496 - Oh man, you would probably be drowned as a witch for mentioning this on public TV!
Now as you can see news media that is open, and not embedded is completely different. This has nothing to do with Right or Left wing, which is also a ploy. This is "CENTER" unbiased, real people, real news. Don't continue being satisfied with Embedded media, reach out to the extents of the internet, and find the truth..
BBC -”Big Brother is watching you shop” Old news now current….
I suggest you read the article below. It is funny how BBC released this article recently, but corporations have been using this type of campaigning for years now. Why is it just now that our government claims to start enacting laws against the collection of our personal information.
Where are the people distributing petitions against this, where are the American protesters, and why are we just letting it get this far?
By Michael Fitzpatrick ( - Resource link here - )
A surveillance state, with cameras on every street is commonplace but now Big Business is also turning to Big Brother.
Face recognition, behaviour analysing surveillance cameras, biometric profiling and the monitoring and storing of our shopping patterns has made snooping into our habits, movements and private lives ever easier.
Dismayed at its shrinking power to market to us via traditional media or even the internet, the private sector is now proposing to reach potential customers in ways that critics say should have us all concerned.
"There is an enormous pent-up demand for personalised location advertising, whether it is on your cellphone or PDA, on your radio in your car, or on the billboards you walk by on the streets and inside stores," says Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer of BT.
"This is yet another technological intrusion into privacy. And like all such intrusions, it will be taken as far as the owner of that intrusion finds it profitable."
Emotional reactions
Are adverts watching you?
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New surveillance technology could even evaporate the advertiser's favourite grouse that "half of advertising is wasted, but we don't know which half".
Advertisers are turning to "intelligent" digital billboards that use cameras to watch you watching the ads.
In Germany, developers have placed video cameras into street advertisements attempting to discern people's emotional reactions to the ads, according to the Washington-based privacy advocate outfit the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
It warns that this type of surveillance encroaches on civil liberties. Such face, voice and behaviour technology could be a means of tracking individuals on a mass level across their entire lives, it says.
Pushed by the demands of advertisers and security-minded governments, these technologies are becoming so increasingly smart and intrusive that they now resemble something out of science fiction, it warns.
Science fact
Some of the technology available now seems to have overtaken fiction.
When an interactive ad shouts out to Tom Cruise's character in the 2002 film Minority Report: "John Anderton, you could use a Guinness!" It identified him as he walked through a mall by scanning the unique pattern of his iris.
This is now pretty standard. Face recognition technology is proving to be a handier, more sophisticated tool to pick us out on the street, a crowded room or at passport control.
Such systems are able to automatically detect and identify human faces using recognition algorithms.
The first step for a facial recognition system is to recognise a human face and extract it from the rest of the scene. Next, the system measures the distance between the features -- a distinctive aspect of our faces that does not change with disguises or even surgery.
Matches can then be found in databases in under a second, although 100% accuracy is not yet guaranteed.
Currently the private sector is finding such systems useful for what it calls "targeted marketing," or "dynamic advertising."
Japan's NEC, for instance, sells face-recognition technology to allow advertisers to tailor what ad is showing on a digitised screen depending on the viewer's sex and age.
Tracking systems, such as these, can determine the viewer's gender 85-90% of the time, approximate age and ethnicity, and change the ads accordingly.
NEC denies the system raises privacy concerns as it does not store any images, only the analysed results (age and sex) based on those images.
But as Schneier points out systems like these are likely liable to "function creep" where a technology is brought in for one purpose, to profile your sex while viewing an ad for example, and then begins to push the boundaries.
"Once the cameras are installed and operational, once they're networked to central computers, then it's a simple matter of upgrading the software," he says.
"And if they can do more -- if they can provide more "value" to the advertisers -- then of course they will. To think otherwise is simply naive."
And when advertisers start to follow us, our privacy, our right to be left alone will be severely compromised, he thinks.
More control
EU commissioner Viviane Reding wants to see tighter controls
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Democratic governments, charged with protecting us from such violations, are beginning to wake up to these practices.
The US is about to propose a bill to ensure that consumers know what information is being collected about them. While the EU promises to rigorously police what it claims are already stringent controls on our personal data.
"Europeans must have the right to control how their personal information is used," Viviane Reding, the EU's commissioner for information society and media told BBC news. "We cannot give up this basic principle, and have all our exchanges monitored, surveyed and stored, in exchange for a promise of 'more relevant' advertising."
Despite such assurances, given the pervasiveness of such technologies firstly on the internet and now spreading to the physical world, what we do about them in the next few years will be crucial. It might control our privacy for generations to come say human rights advocates.
"Companies are increasingly impatient to get to us and once these practices are commonplace it will hard to reverse them," says Marc Rotenberg director of EPIC. "Particularly as, ironically, we lose privacy these companies are gaining secrecy."
It would seem sensible to debate now how far business and the state should be allowed to tag us while we still have a privacy to protect.
Major player in the Demise of American structure: “pornography”
Big corporate powers, allowed and promoted by the US government. "So scott??? what are you trying to tell me." You must be thinking.
I'm telling you that human trafficking is a major issue, and watching pornography usually supports those same corporations that want you to stay helpless, and with out knowledge. I can list a few top American porn industries that will be nice and safe in their compound while you struggle. These are the same people that take part in human trafficking as well.
CBS has taken a stand and published this online "http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/21/60minutes/main585049.shtml". I am not sure if it was ever aired, but it still proves my point about the government assisting such terrible things.
Three major steps of control, and America’s Government enforces it????
What I have written is simplified, this issue is far more broad. Start investigating for yourselves. Comments are welcomed.
Step 1: Control of media:
Q. Why can you watch the news in America?
A. You can watch the news in America because of the large corporations that pay millions to the major broadcasters so that they will display their product.
Q. Why would any one on the television ever want to misinform me about anything?
A. Money......
Q. Well how does our political system fit into this scheme, if media corruption is true?
A. Our political system also receives money from these large corporations, VIA the IRS.
Q. How is this affecting me?
A. Every ounce of you is owned. Your freedom is in your choice of income, and then what you will apply your income to. You are given different choices of what you can have from your beginning choice of income. Do you see your freedom, if you do then you belong to the American system.
Step 2: Official Oppression, ie; Police, FBI, CIA, IRS, ect...
Q. Why can my house be searched for any reason?
A. The Patriot ACT.
Q. Why can I be pulled over in any state for any reason.
A. All U.S. states have made laws that make everyday situations suspicious, and anybody can be pulled over for conducting a suspicious act.
Q. What happens if I just protest against what I don't like about the police or government?
A. More than likely you will be harassed by the police, and sometimes convicted of a random crime, so that they can dispose of you at that time.
Q. Sure! Your last answer was bogus, I see protests on TV all the time, that doesn't happen.
A. A magician can disappear easily on TV, and major leaders of certain protest groups will never be publicized (Think about it). If you want to see peaceful protests turn violent by federal, and state police, just youtube it.
Step 3: Limiting funding on education.
Q. What, you have to be kidding me.
A. Nope, idiots can't fight back, let alone understand.
See for your self:
- The national results in international comparisons have often been far below the average of developed countries. In OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment 2003, 15 year olds ranked 24th of 38 in mathematics, 19th of 38 in science, 12th of 38 in reading, and 26th of 38 in problem solving.[81] In the 2006 assessment, the U.S. ranked 35th out of 57 in mathematics and 29th out of 57 in science. Reading scores could not be reported due to printing errors in the instructions of the U.S. test booklets. U.S. scores were far behind those of most other developed nations.[82] . Bill Gates believes that the American high school is "obsolete".[83]
I have to say that I found it extremely hard to find our global ranking in education, but I found our GDP, Population, & Top celebrities easily, strange.....
Education in America is slowly declining, and will only decline more due to our current economic struggles. This will evetually insure the top 1% reign over America. Don't believe that there is a top 1% read this:
Despite strong increases in productivity, low unemployment, and low inflation, income gains since 1980 have been slower than in previous decades, less widely shared, and accompanied by increased economic insecurity. Between 1947 and 1979, real median income rose by over 80% for all classes, with the incomes of poor Americans rising faster than those of the rich.[90][91] Median household income has increased for all classes since 1980,[92] largely owing to more dual-earner households, the closing of the gender gap, and longer work hours, but growth has been slower and strongly tilted toward the very top (see graph).[85][90][93] Consequently, the share of income of the top 1%—21.8% of total reported income in 2005—has more than doubled since 1980,[94] leaving the United States with the greatest income inequality among developed nations.[85][95] The top 1% pays 27.6% of all federal taxes; the top 10% pays 54.7%.[96] Wealth, like income, is highly concentrated: The richest 10% of the adult population possesses 69.8% of the country's household wealth, the second-highest share among developed nations.[97] The top 1% possesses 33.4% of net wealth.[98].