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[hellgremlin]

All of you are, by now, familiar with the NSA scandal making the rounds. Long story short, the US is spying on you. Right now.

I've been commenting on the topic on CNN's website, among others, but CNN's is where the fun went down. I noticed a specific poster behaving in a pretty consistent, predictable way: trying to draw focus away from the nature of the leak, trying to cast focus on the leaker, doing everything in his power to edit the discourse taking place in a fashion that appeared haphazard, but to my eyes, showed signs of coordination I'd expect from my own goons. In short, I saw my own tradecraft being practiced. I am a master at image control, and this was what this person was doing.

So I composed a post on CNN, taking special care to fit every single one of CNN's rules for public discourse, to ensure it couldn't be censored at will. Since my opponent was in an NSA thread, and going on and on about how America needs surveillance to protect itself against the threat of terrorism, I helpfully pointed out that the CIA trained Osama Bin Laden.

This did not sit well with our new friend. His reply?

He first had my post deleted, even though I managed to archive a copy pre-emptively, and again to clarify, it contained not an iota of anything deserving censorship. He then did something fascinating, and were it not for my frequent exposure to threats, chilling...

He stated that my deleted post was in fact plagiarized. I did not mention working as a journalist. To a journalist, an accusation of plagiarism is a career-ender. The threat isn't what matters, though.

What matters is that someone pretending to be a random run of the mill poster on CNN was capable of finding out who I am, what my job is, and what threat to tailor specifically to that profile to elicit the most effect, clearly having considerable experience in the field. What matters is that he was capable of doing this within seconds of me challenging him to play hardball with me. What also matters a lot, is that an organization in the US government is quite literally *editing the reality of public discourse on a real-time basis* on their major, trusted news networks, in order to shift attention away from the big revelation: that they're spying on everyone.

Oh, and the kicker? The article he claimed I plagiarized, was one I had personally referred to in dozens of discussions elsewhere. Almost as though it were pulled from my browser history. I cannot understate the short reaction time he had. This was someone looking at a file.

Fun stuff. A few weeks ago, I discovered that the freedom against unreasonable search and seizure no longer exists in the US, and hasn't for a while.

Today I discovered their much-vaunted press freedom is about as real.

Well gents, nice knowing you, but I've decided to embark on a lifetime of pissing off the world's biggest nuclear-armed superpower. I imagine the Hellfire missiles are on their way already, so it won't be a tremendously long lifetime.

[Saede Riordan]

Thanks Obama.

This is freaky and relevant to my interests though. The more you know...

Seems like the internet is starting to mobilize though, there's anti-spying protests planned for the 4th. Just gotta get stuff like the above, out there, and into the spotlight, show people what's really happening.

Let me know if I can help.

[hellgremlin]

No help required. The post I made being up serves enough purpose, I plan to share my experience elsewhere :p

edit: and all the anti-spying protests in the world will be about as effective at stopping spying, as all its anti-war protests have been at stopping war.

[Silas Vitalia]

No help required. The post I made being up serves enough purpose, I plan to share my experience elsewhere :p

edit: and all the anti-spying protests in the world will be about as effective at stopping spying, as all its anti-war protests have been at stopping war.

Now for the real head-scratcher; you are assuming you were interacting with a person.   

[hellgremlin]

I'm assuming nothing, it could well have been a teenager with good acting skills

But hey, if I get shot in the face with a polonium shark with ricin nipples, y'all know who did it.

[orange]

Teenager with good acting skills... got it.



The old guys need to say pop and pull their heads out of their asses.

The people with "right" background to hold Top Secret clearances and do the grunt work bought into the propaganda of America is better because of the values we hold sacred, those enshrined in the Constitution.*  The old guys forget the because.

*Which by the way the military swears oaths to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  Violating the Constitution starts to make you look a lot like #2.



Hellgremlin, stay alert, stay safe, stay alive.

[Shiori]

Plagiarism being an effective threat in your case could be a complete coincidence. "It's plagiarized" is a pretty common excuse for getting something you don't like pulled, and you have no other, valid excuses. Googling a few key phrases in your post could've been all it took for him to find the article you were referring to, and also takes just seconds.

[Anslol]

Data manipulation and press black outs are nothing too new. It's been going on for quite a while. You just get used to spotting the misinformation and attempts to guide the conversation and ignore it, forcing the topic to keep popping up. Not much else you can do, save for pick apart their attempts with logic and facts that cannot be manipulated.

Information warfare best warfare.

[Aelisha Montenagre]

I agree with Shiori's assessment, though the important aspect f your message, the 'spying is possible, real and happening now in real time against the average man' is still a vital message to bear. 

With modern computer technology, especially the 'Distributed yet Centralized' paradigm for current internet architecture, it is almost impossible to keep your data out of the public domain.  No facebook, twitter, linkedin or so on?  Still no problem to dig you up. 

Got a job?
Claim benefits of any kind?
Attended University post 1991?
Attended a publicly funded school (state funded) since the late 90's?
Ever filled in a census form?
Own a car?  Own a license?

None of the data on you is new.  In fact, since the last turn of the century (1900), documentation of your capabilities, memberships, social standing and likely affluence has been on the rise.  The key difference now is the speed with which it may be accessed, and the sophistication of meta-data aggregation - the construction of a personality profile from disparate data.  It is so common now that people use 'Aggregation Apps' for FUN.  Check out some of the apple and android 'social presence' calculators or Gallery Builder Apps that take your social media and build up a picture of the last X years of your life in entertaining, but terrifying, detail.  This is data you CHOOSE to share.  What about the data you HAVE to share?

My worry is not so much that this metadata is being accessed, more how it is being used.  We are seeing the Phrenology of our age, where we are weighed, measured and potentially found wanting by our casual, professional and personal metadata that we never had a choice in submitting in the first place.  being watched?  Sure, nothing new, not too worried.  Having my skull measured because my 'meta data Neanderthal nasal structure is indicative of secessionist tendencies?' (to borrow the Phrenology metaphor). No thanks. 

There is one line, IMO, in any free society.  You're not being watched any more than your neighbours, and no one is being watched more than your government.  Due to technology being adopted by governments prior to legislation on proper use and ethical use in political level legal proceedings, this line is being erased.  Not blurred or crossed.  Just hand waved as an 'infinitesimally small region in which all the bad people we scare you with stories of could possibly hide'.   This is an unacceptable state of affairs, not because of the fact it happens, but because of the manner in which it does.

[orange]

There is one line, IMO, in any free society.  You're not being watched any more than your neighbours, and no one is being watched more than your government.  Due to technology being adopted by governments prior to legislation on proper use and ethical use in political level legal proceedings, this line is being erased.  Not blurred or crossed.  Just hand waved as an 'infinitesimally small region in which all the bad people we scare you with stories of could possibly hide'.   This is an unacceptable state of affairs, not because of the fact it happens, but because of the manner in which it does.

When the news broke (as in evidence was presented of what people suspected was going on), I had to think really hard about what was causing my discomfort.  It wasn't that data about me was being collected in an overly broad manner in the name of security (most of my life events are on file with the government in one way or another anyway).

It was that I was lied to and told it was not happening.  It was that General Officers rejected their oaths to defend the Constitution in order to provide the sense of security to ignorant politicians.

[Aelisha Montenagre]

I think that this is largely a cultural difference between us, as in the UK we've languished under a system of governance that pretty much makes 1984 look like a liberal haven since the start of the Cold War and beyond it's end. 

I can, however, empathize wholeheartedly with the lies being the primary source of injury.  Being lied to in a counter-constitutional manner is the very essence of an assault on fundamental freedoms guaranteed to you by your leaders.  Having no such guarantees here, I am less shocked and haven't been 'unconstitutionally lied to', but the abuse of meta data in a manner conducive to discrimination and sociological 'zoning' is abhorrent to me.

[Esna Pitoojee]

The thing that gets me, is that whatever the government did - private companies have been doing for so much longer, and quite likely on a larger scale (interesting point - in order to operate it's PRISM operation, the US government purchased a commercially available data gathering and analysis program, because their own systems were years behind what companies were producing. That's right - they bought something that anyone else could buy as well, for the right amount of money).

I've had numerous experiences with "unnerving" amounts of information being linked to me online by companies - watch one pony gif linked to me as a URL by another EVE player? Suddenly Google wants to sell me oodles of MLP stuff (nothankyou). A while back I went on a weeklong vacation, during which I stayed in a few different hotels. Despite not using this computer to purchase the rooms, post any rating or response on the hotel's website, or log on through that particular hotel's wireless network, I have since been bombarded by adds asking me how my stay was and wanting to know if I would like a better rate on subsequent visits. That's right: Even with no direct digital track, the hotel has found my primary computer and is now essentially stalking me. I've blocked spam mail from companies, only to have them send from an alternate address plaintively asking why I cut them off and if a discount could renew our friendship.

If these were a people, I could probably get a court order to tell them to stop.


tl;dr - rabble about the government all you want; there's a legitimate argument there. Just don't forget that any watching the government does, private corporations are probably doing faster, more cheaply, and on a much larger scale. But we can't stop them, it'd be "anti-job-making" or somesuch similar BS.

/bitter

[Pieter Tuulinen]

First of all, I have no connections with any intelligence service either presently nor in the past. I have never held a comission in any armed forces. I have never had a security clearance better than RESTRICTED.

That said.

America is not what a lot of its citizens think it is. There is no international rule of law that it is not willing to almost casually violate in the pursuit of it's goals. Last century saw the implentation of realpolitik - that is the understanding by a government that it's citizenry is ready (if not eager) to accept large scale violation of the fundamental ethics of their society provided that they are not directly affected or confronted with the reality of it.

Most people, in any nation, do not really care what their government does abroad or to foreign nationals. Regarding the recent NSA leaks, for example, there is absolutely ZERO controversy about America using it's priviliged control of the Internet's backbone to spy on foreign nationals. This is clearly unsupportable, ethically. Either such spying is wrong for everyone or it is wrong for nobody.

The Patriot Act and the other ordinances that sprang up around the Department of Homeland Security are the most recent and obvious breaches - but a student of history can easily point to earlier ones. Renditioning was alive and well long before 2001. The CIA's history is redolent with the stink of shallow graves.

This is not to say that any other country is any better. This is the Age of Plausible Deniability. If you're an old sod like me you'll remember Season Two of X-Files, where Mulder reports that "Apology is now policy." referring to the government of the day's habit of doing whatever the hell it wanted to and then simply apologising and punishing a few scapegoats when caught.

Now governments refuse to apologise.

[Shiori]

Oh, America; that's the place where you're constitutionally guaranteed to never be forced to quarter soldiers in your home, but the government doesn't quite dare to promise that they won't level it (and you) with a drone-launched Hellfire missile instead, right?

[Sakura Nihil]

The only way to end a Hellgremlin is with Hellfire?