Google Censorship – How It Works

by THEUNHIVEDMIND, theunhivedmind.com
September 14th 2011 9:50 PM

An anticensorware investigation by Seth Finkelstein

http://sethf.com/anticensorware/general/google-censorship.php

Abstract: This report describes the system by which results in the Google search engine are suppressed.
Google Exclusion, introduction

Google is arguably the world’s most popular search engine. However, contrary perhaps to a naive impression, in some cases the results of a search are affected by various government-related factors. That is, search results which may otherwise be shown, are deliberately excluded. The suppression may be local to a country, or global to all Google results.

This removal of results was first documented in a report Localized Google search result exclusions by Benjamin Edelman and Jonathan Zittrain , which investigated certain web material banned in various countries. Later, this author Seth Finkelstein discussed a global removal arising from intimidation generated from the United Kingdom town of Chester, in Chester’s Guide to Molesting Google .

My discussion here is not meant to criticize Google’s behavior in any way. Much of it is in reaction to government law or government-backed pressure, where accommodation is an understandable reaction if nothing else. Rather, documenting and explaining what happens, can inform public understanding, and lead to more informed resistance against the distortion of search results created by censorship campaigns.
How it works

A Google search is not simply a raw dump of a database query to the user’s screen. The retrieval of the data is just one step. There is much post-processing afterwards, in terms of presentation and customization.

When Google “removes” material, often it is still in the Google index itself. But the post-processing has removed it from any results shown to the user. This system can be applied, for quality reasons, to remove sites which “spam” the search engine. And that is, by volume, certainly the overwhelming application of the mechanism. But it can also be directed against sites which have been prohibited for government-based reasons.

Sometimes the fact that the “removed” material is still in the index can be inferred.
Global censorship

For the case of Chester , which concerned a single “removed” page, the internal indexing of the target page could be established by comparison with a search for the same material on another search engine.

Consider a Google search for the word “lesbian” on the site torkyarkisto.marhost.com . It returns a page titled “The Kurt Cobain Quiz”, with a count of

Results 1 – 1 of about 2

The “about” qualifier there represents many factors, but sometimes encompasses blacklisted pages. This can be seen here by comparing to an AltaVista search for the word “lesbian” on the site torkyarkisto.marhost.com

There are two pages visible in that case, the “Quiz” page, and the “Chester” page which caused all the trouble in the first place.

Since we know the “Chester” page was once in the Google index, it must be the other page referred to in “about 2″. QED.
Local censorship

In this situation, comparing results from the different Country Google searches, is often revealing. The tests are often best done using the “allinurl:” syntax of Google, which searches for URLs which have the given components (note the separate components can appear anywhere in the URL, so “allinurl:stormfront.org” is “stormfront” and “org” in the URL, not just the string “stormfront.org” as might be naively thought). Stormfront.org is a notorious racist site, often banned in various contexts.

Consider the following US search:

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&q=allinurl%3Astormfront.org

This returned: Results 1 – 27 of about 50,700.

Now compare with the German counterpart (Google.DE):

http://www.google.de/search?num=100&hl=en&q=allinurl%3Astormfront.org

This returned: Results 1 – 9 about 50,700.

Immediate observation: The rightmost (total) number is identical. So identical results are in the Google database. It’s simply not displaying them. How is it determining which domain results to display?

Note the hosts of which “stormfront.org” URLs are visible on the German page:

irc.stormfront.org:8000/
www4.stormfront.org:81/
lists.stormfront.org:81/

What do these all have in common?
They all have a port number after the host name.
The exclusion pattern obviously isn’t matching the “:number” part of the URL.
It’s matching a pattern of “*.stormfront.org/” in the host, as in the following which are displayed the US search, but not the German search.

www.stormfront.org/
kids.stormfront.org/
women.stormfront.org/
nna.stormfront.org/
www4.stormfront.org/

Even more interesting, the German page has a broken URL listed at the bottom: http/www.stormfront.org/quotes.htm . That’s not a valid URL, so it seems to escape the host check.

Thus, the suppression again appears to be implemented as a post-processing step using very simple patterns of prohibited results.

The same behavior is observed in a German “stormfront.org” images search
This returned: Results 1 – 6 about 1,410.
Versus a US “stormfront.org” images search
This returned: Results 1 – 18 about 1,410.
(note identical right-hand numbers, and hosts matching “*.stormfront.org/” pattern are suppressed in the German results)

And also in a German “stormfront.org” directory search
This returned: Results 1 – 8 about 15.
Versus a US “stormfront.org” directory search
This returned: Results 1 – 10 about 15.
(note again identical right-hand numbers, and hosts matching “*.stormfront.org/” pattern are suppressed in the German results)
Conclusion

Contrary to earlier utopian theories of the Internet, it takes very little effort for governments to cause certain information simply to vanish for a huge number of people.

Version 1.0 Mar 10 2003
Support

This work was not funded by anyone, and has no connection to any organization. In fact, if anyone is providing financial support for such projects, the author would like to know.

Note: Some of this material appeared earlier in the author’s Infothought blog

Mail comments to: Seth Finkelstein

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See more of Seth Finkelstein ‘s Censorware Investigations

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Facebook criticised for ‘tracking’ logged-out users

by Christopher Williams, theunhivedmind.com
September 26th 2011

Facebook faces criticism over the way it continues to store and access information about users who have logged out of their account.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/8789942/Facebook-criticised-for-tracking-logged-out-users.html

The controversy was sparked by Nik Cubrilovic, an Australian technology entrepreneur, who found that even after he logged out of the social network, it delivered “cookies” to his web browser that could be used to track visits to other websites.

Cookies are small text files used by websites to store user preferences and the contents of online shopping carts, among other functions.

When users log out of websites cookies are often deleted, but Mr Cubrilovic found that Facebook only altered them, while continuing to store data such as his account ID.This unique identifier could be used to track logged-out users when they visit other websites that have integrated Facebook functions, such as the “Like” button, he said.

“Logging out of Facebook only de-authorizes your browser from the web application, a number of cookies (including your account number) are still sent along to all requests to facebook.com,” Mr Cubrilovic said in a widely-shared blog posting.

“The only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate browser for Facebook interactions.

“There is never a clean break between a logged in session and a logged out session.”

In response, Gregg Stefancik, a Facebook engineer, denied the cookies were designed to track logged-out users.

“Our cookies aren’t used for tracking. They just aren’t,” he wrote.

“Instead, we use our cookies to either provide custom content (e.g. your friend’s likes within a social plugin), help improve or maintain our service (e.g. measuring click-through rates to help optimize performance), or protect our users and our service (e.g. defending denial of service attacks or requiring a second authentication factor for a login from a suspicious location).”

He also emphasised that Facebook does not share or sell the information it gathers about users, and said that the information the cookies report to Facebook when a logged-out user visits a third party site is not “personally identifiable”.

But the explanation failed to placate Mr Cubrilovic, who also joined in criticism of Facebook’s new “frictionless sharing” features, announced last week, which shares details of what users are watching or reading automatically.

“The privacy concern here is that because you no longer have to explicitly opt-in to share an item, you may accidentally share a page or an event that you did not intend others to see,” he said.

Original Page: http://theunhivedmind.com/wordpress/?p=2530

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Sock puppets, twitterjacking and the art of digital fakery

by THEUNHIVEDMIND, theunhivedmind.com
September 29th 2011

Stuart Jeffries

http://m.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/29/sock-puppets-twitterjacking-digital-fakery?cat=technology&type=article

In the 1970s, Italian philosopher Umberto Eco took a trip through the US. He stopped off at wax museums, Las Vegas and Disneyland and found a dense, semiotic landscape of fakes that trumped the relatively boring desert of the real. At one point on his journey, Eco wrote: “When, in the space of 24 hours, you go (as I did deliberately) from the fake New Orleans of Disneyland to the real one, and from the wild river of Adventureland to a trip on the Mississippi, where the captain of the paddle-wheel steamer says it is possible to see alligators on the banks of the river and then you don’t see any, you risk feeling homesick for Disneyland, where the wild animals don’t have to be coaxed. Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can.”
I reread Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality recently when thinking about the manifold kinds of fakery in the digital age – fake Twitter feeds, phoney Facebook accounts, staged internet suicides, and those Wikipedia pages undetectably mined with lies. Today’s digital technology offers us even more chances than Disneyland ever could to revel in hyperreal – or perhaps that should read cyberreal – fakery. And we eagerly explore those opportunities for reasons about which Eco was unwittingly prescient when in 1975 he wrote “the frantic desire for the Almost Real arises only as a neurotic reaction to the vacuum of memories; the Absolute Fake is offspring of the unhappy awareness of a present without depth.”
Hence, perhaps, some of my favourite satirical fake Twitter feeds. Such as “Dick Cheney”: “Won a baboon on eBay. Condition as-is, but I’m going to use the little guy for parts anyway. Never know when the ticker might blow a valve.” Or “Osama Bin Laden”: “Door-tag from UPS Ground says hazardous materials can’t be delivered – curse the infidels! Off to UPS depot.” Or Transformers director “Michael Bay”: “No, I don’t know who ‘Fellini’ is and quite frankly I don’t give a shit.”
Hence, too, ITV’s risible recent booboo when it had to apologise for showing footage purporting to be from an IRA propaganda video that turned out to be footage from a video game. Its documentary Exposure was aimed at showing links between Gadaffi and the IRA. But what was hilarious about the story was not so much ITV’s apology, but what Marek Spanel, chief executive of the game’s developer Bohemia Interactive Studio, told games website Spong: “We consider this as a bizarre appreciation of the level of realism incorporated into our games.” The game looked so real that it could pass as something better than a fake.
Or, too, phoney Facebook pages such as the one purporting to be that of a teacher in Bloomington, Indiana and including inappropriate messages to students, such as: “Happy birthday, you have my permission to get intoxicated.” Now police are considering bringing charges of identity theft – if they can find the culprit.
Perhaps Jennie Bone should also ask the police about her identity theft. Earlier this year, her husband Peter Bone MP raised questions in the house about tweets purporting to be from his wife that were really concocted by some so-far unidentified satirist. The impersonator posted comments on Twitter such as, “All eyes on PMQs – will Mr Cameron do his best to give me pleasure today? I live in hope”; “Liberal euronut bias even in Daily Mail today – is nothing sacred? EU won’t bribe me with cheap phone bill”; and “Preparing stuffed marrow for dinner.”
Peter Bone told the Commons that his wife’s twitterjacker “could put something racist or pornographic on at any time”. Perhaps, but it seems unlikely: many fake Twitter feeds risk diverging significantly from the impersonated’s real views or tones only at the risk of losing coveted plausibility. Last year, for instance, the great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas was twitterjacked. At 5.38pm on 29 January, “Jürgen Habermas” tweeted: “It’s true that the internet has reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public sphere of writers and readers.” At 5.40pm: “It also counterbalances the deficits from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting insofar as…” At 5.41pm: “…it reintroduces deliberative elements in communication. Besides that, it can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes…” At 5.44pm: “But the rise of millions of fragmented discussions across the world tend instead to lead to fragmentation of audiences into isolated publics.”
I fed these tweets into Google and found that they were all taken from footnote three to the English translation of Habermas’s funtime 2006 paper Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? Somebody had tweeted Habermas’s real words without his imprimatur – hardly the hoax of the century. But Habermas told me later: “It irritated me because the sender’s identity was a fake.”
Neither fake Jennie Bone nor phoney Jürgen Habermas, though, was as contemptible as what Professor Orlando Figes did. The historian posted disparaging reviews of books by rivals on Amazon, using the alias “historian” – and thus making him guilty of what’s known as sock puppetry. His posts described Rachel Polonsky’s book Molotov’s Magic Lantern “hard to follow” and Robert Service’s Comrades “awful”, while praising his study of Soviet family life, The Whisperers, for leaving “the reader awed, humbled, yet uplifted”.
To do a spot of sock puppetry or twitterjacking is so technically easy that, for some, it becomes irresistible. It can boost your reputation and damage someone else’s – until that horrible moment you get found out. One of the lures doing so is, as Eco found, dull reality gets trumped by fakery. In dreary reality, the lesbian blogger in Damascus is an uninterestingly heterosexual American studying in Edinburgh.
It’s perhaps fitting that some of this fakery touched on the Middle East, since it was there that, according to the late French philosopher of the hyperreal Jean Baudrillard, one of the modern world’s biggest fakes, namely the first Gulf war, happened – or, rather, did not. Baudrillard argued that even though real violence happened in this alleged conflict, the US-led coalition was fighting a virtual war while the Iraqis tried to fight a traditional one – the two could not entirely meet. The suggestion that what happened in Kuwait and Iraq in 1990-91 amounted to war was therefore, Baudrillard contended, a fake: rather it was “an atrocity masquerading as war”.
This is an age in which technology makes it easier than ever to lie or concoct fakes, but, quite often, makes it harder than ever to prevent oneself being found out. Michael Bay recently digitally inserted old footage of a chase sequence from his 2005 flop The Island in Transformers: Dark of the Moon – but was quickly exposed by bloggers. The speed with which a fake is exposed is perhaps the only heartening aspect of this story.
In another example, adventurer Greg Mortenson was exposed for writing a bestseller that partially faked his experiences among Pakistani villagers. He was hardly the first faux memoirist; indeed, you could sense Guardian journalists shaking their heads sadly as they typed: “The troubled world of book publishing has become almost wearily accustomed to receiving yet more bad news of a critically acclaimed memoir that turns out to have been partly or entirely fabricated.”
Mortenson is author of the bestselling Three Cups of Tea, a memoir so convincing and moving that not only did the book sell 4m copies, but Barack Obama gave $100,000 of his Nobel prize to Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute. It tells of how he stumbled into the village of Korphe, where locals saved his life and inspired him to give something back by devoting himself to building schools in the area. Only one problem: according to fellow adventurer Jon Krakauer, who has written an ebook called Three Cups of Deceit, none of that happened. “The first eight chapters of Three Cups of Tea are an intricately wrought work of fiction presented as fact,” Krakauer said, accusing Mortenson of “fantasy, audacity and an apparently insatiable hunger for esteem”. The extent of the fake is still being unravelled.
A similar apparently insatiable hunger for esteem is, it is claimed, what motivated Independent journalist Johann Hari to plagiarise quotes for his interviews. In his initial mea culpa, Hari denied plagiarism: “When you interview a writer … they will sometimes make a point that sounds clear when you hear it, but turns out to be incomprehensible or confusing on the page. In those instances, I have sometimes substituted a passage they have written or said more clearly elsewhere on the same subject for what they said to me, so the reader understands their point as clearly as possible.”
That was only part of his transgression. He also used a sock puppet “David r” to edit his Wikipedia profile and malign his critics.
In one sense, perhaps, the Johann Hari who won many awards for his reporting is, like Disneyland’s fake New Orleans, a hyperreal construct. Possibly, the actual Johann Hari suspected his intolerable mediocrity and so re-presented himself through online fakery. And, just as Eco felt a nostalgia for the fake Mississippi paddle-steamer trip when going on the phoney Disneyland one, so the disgraced Johann Hari may feel nostalgia for his faked-up hyperreal self.
Hari is yet another example of what human beings do given half the chance – namely, present themselves as what they are not. Remember Second Life? Me neither, but apparently it allowed mediocre muppets (such as myself) to reinvent themselves as sexy avatars, as hyperreal projections of their fantasies. The digital age facilitates the creation of such alternative identities in cyberspace. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek in The Cyberspace Real writes: “The ‘real’ upon which cyberspace encroaches is thus the disavowed fantasmatic ‘passionate attachment’, the traumatic scene which not only never took place in ‘real life,’ but was never even consciously fantasized”.
Žižek writes that online we can create a “space of false disidentification”, by which he means we can put on a mask to reveal who we want to be if not who we truly are. “Is this logic of disidentification not discernible from the most elementary case of ‘I am not only an American (husband, worker, democrat, gay …), but, beneath all these roles and masks, a human being, a complex unique personality’ (where the very distance towards the symbolic feature that determines my social place guarantees the efficiency of this determination), up to the more complex case of cyberspace playing with one’s multiple identities?” Furthermore, online we can assume or play with fake identities – sadist, masochist, toxic blog-poster, cookie-jar-collecting weirdo – that we would never admit to or condone in the real world.
But Žižek spots a lie in this purported revelation of our true selves online: “[T]he much celebrated playing with multiple, shifting personas (freely constructed identities) tends to obfuscate (and thus falsely liberate us from) the constraints of social space in which our existence is caught.” Facebook friends may well not be real ones; losing yourself in your World of Warfare avatars’ lifestyle issues wastes valuable time you could spend changing your real world.
There is so much digital-age fakery that scepticism is readily engendered by anything that might seem phoney. When, for instance, Alex Thomas and Scott Jones were photographed snogging in the street during the Vancouver ice-hockey riots earlier this year, some thought the picture was fake. The shot looked so much like a photographer’s wish fulfilment, it had to be phoney. But it wasn’t.
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, says: “The digital age is difficult. We’re in a Foucauldian postmodern world where we can’t tell the truth from fakery.”
Mayer-Schönberger argues that several things are happening in the digital age that undermine our ability to tell the fake from the real. “We see more and more of plagiarism in the digital age than in the analogue.” But what is more problematic, he argues, is when faked information or faked personas pose as authentic. “In George W Bush’s presidential campaign against John Kerry there was a report claiming Kerry’s military record was faked. The internet was very fast as revealing that document was a forgery. Because it was put online, several experts saw that the document was typed on a typewriter that didn’t exist in the 1970s and so the document was quickly exposed as a fake.”
This is heartening – the internet being the solution to, rather than cause of, fakery. But, for Mayer-Schönberger, the problem in the digital era is that we don’t have heuristics or rules of thumb to expose its characteristic fakes. “In the digital world, by contrast with the analogue, the idea of original and copy doesn’t apply any more.” He points out that Adobe now advertises its flagship upgrade project as being able to take two photographs of a person and to transfer a smile seamlessly from one image to the other. There are also digital services in the US that will remove your ex-partner from your photos. “Is that fakery? Yes. Is that ethically problematic? I don’t know, but legally it could be odd. Imagine your ex is charged with murder and she comes to you asking for those photos of your trip to Hawaii – which were taken at the same time as the murder took place somewhere else – as evidence to clear her name. But you’ve had her erased from the images. The technical tools are powerful but the social or legal or ethical tools can’t keep up.”
Cyberspace, he argues, is so riven with fakes and errors that institutions have been compelled to take remedial action to maintain their integrity. Take Wikipedia. It had a crowdsourcing model of information dissemination – whereby entries could be written and corrected by anybody, the hopeful aim being that this process would result in pages that were unimpeachably true (a beautiful dream, but beautiful nonetheless).
“But there was a problem,” says Mayer-Schönberger, “that there was a lot inaccuracy and fake information. Wikipedia needed to develop structures to overcome this problem and basically this has involved the return to an old hierarchy that the crowdsourcing model was supposed to overcome. Now you trust not the editor but the super-editor or the super-super editor. It’s hierarchy of trust.”
So what’s his prognosis for online fakery? “It’s going to get much worse because technical rules to stop it are often almost impossible to implement. When you send a jpeg you may have photoshopped it but there’s no way of the recipient determining what has been photoshopped. You could just say it has been cropped rather than that the content has been changed – somebody taken out of the picture, someone else put in – but it is almost impossible to prove. Increasingly, you can’t tell truth from lies in the digital age.”
Mayer-Schönberger and I conducted this interview on Skype while he was holidaying in the Austrian Alps. At one point, he held up his webcam to show me marvellous views of lakes and mountains. Or did he? Given what digital tools are capable of, perhaps that wasn’t Austria or Viktor Mayer-Schönberger at all.
• As the result of a production error, a number of the links in this article were broken. They have now been fixed.

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Homeland Security moves forward with ‘pre-crime’ detection

by Declan McCullagh, theunhivedmind.com
October 7th 2011 6:00 AM

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20117058-281/homeland-security-moves-forward-with-pre-crime-detection/?tag=mncol;1n

An internal U.S. Department of Homeland Security document indicates that a controversial program designed to predict whether a person will commit a crime is already being tested on some members of the public voluntarily, CNET has learned.

If this sounds a bit like the Tom Cruise movie called “Minority Report,” or the CBS drama “Person of Interest,” it is. But where “Minority Report” author Philip K. Dick enlisted psychics to predict crimes, DHS is betting on algorithms: it’s building a “prototype screening facility” that it hopes will use factors such as ethnicity, gender, breathing, and heart rate to “detect cues indicative of mal-intent.”

The latest developments, which reveal efforts to “collect, process, or retain information on” members of “the public,” came to light through an internal DHS document obtained under open-government laws by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. DHS calls its “pre-crime” system Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST.

“If it were deployed against the public, it would be very problematic,” says Ginger McCall, open government counsel at EPIC, a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C.

It’s unclear why the June 2010 DHS document (PDF) specified that information is currently collected or retained on members of “the public” as part of FAST, and a department representative declined to answer questions that CNET posed two days ago.

Elsewhere in the document, FAST program manager Robert Middleton Jr. refers to a “limited” initial trial using DHS employees as test subjects. Middleton says that FAST “sensors will non-intrusively collect video images, audio recordings, and psychophysiological measurements from the employees,” with a subgroup of employees singled out, with their permission, for more rigorous evaluation.

Related stories:
• How 9/11 attacks reshaped U.S. privacy debate
• White House: Need to monitor online ‘extremism’
• How companies use Wi-Fi to track you

Peter Boogaard, the deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, provided a statement to CNET that said:

The department’s Science and Technology Directorate has conducted preliminary research in operational settings to determine the feasibility of using non-invasive physiological and behavioral sensor technology and observational techniques to detect signs of stress, which are often associated with intent to do harm. The FAST program is only in the preliminary stages of research and there are no plans for acquiring or deploying this type of technology at this time.

FAST is designed to track and monitor, among other inputs, body movements, voice pitch changes, prosody changes (alterations in the rhythm and intonation of speech), eye movements, body heat changes, and breathing patterns. Occupation and age are also considered. A government source told CNET that blink rate and pupil variation are measured too.

A field test of FAST has been conducted in at least one undisclosed location in the northeast. “It is not an airport, but it is a large venue that is a suitable substitute for an operational setting,” DHS spokesman John Verrico told Nature.com in May.

Although DHS has publicly suggested that FAST could be used at airport checkpoints–the Transportation Security Administration is part of the department, after all–the government appears to have grander ambitions. One internal DHS document (PDF) also obtained by EPIC through the Freedom of Information Act says a mobile version of FAST “could be used at security checkpoints such as border crossings or at large public events such as sporting events or conventions.”

Internal DHS document says FAST “will help protect the public while maintaining efficiency and security”
(Credit: U.S. Department of Homeland Security)

It also says that the next field trial of FAST will involve members of the public who “have food service experience” and are paid “to work at a one day VIP event.” Most of the document is redacted, but each person is apparently told to act normally or to do something demonstrating “mal-intent,” such as being told to smuggle a recording device into the VIP event. The trick, then, is to see if FAST can detect which is which.

It’s not clear whether these people were informed that they’re participating in a FAST study.

McCall, the EPIC attorney who has been pressing the department to obtain these internal documents, said it’s time for the DHS Privacy Office to review the current state of the FAST project. What appears to be the most recent privacy analysis (PDF) was completed in December 2008 and contemplates using “volunteer participants” who have given their “informed consent.”

“They should do a privacy impact assessment,” McCall said.

DHS is being unusually secretive about FAST. A February 2010 contract (PDF) with Cambridge, Mass.-based Draper Laboratory to build elements of the “pre-crime” system has every dollar figure blacked out (a fleeting reference to an “infrared camera” remained).

Relying on ambiguous biological factors to predict mal-intent is worrisome, says McCall. “Especially if they’re going to be rolling this out at the airport. I don’t know about you, but going to an airport gives me a minor panic attack, wondering if I’m going to get groped by a TSA officer.”

Update 2:12 p.m. PT: A Homeland Security spokesman has just provided this additional statement to CNET: “The FAST program is entirely voluntary and does not store any personally-identifiable information (PII) from participants once the experiment is completed. The system is not designed to capture or store PII. Any information that is gathered is stored under an anonymous identifier and is only available to DHS as aggregated performance data. It is only used for laboratory protocol as we are doing research and development. It is gathered when people sign up as volunteers, not by the FAST system. If it were ever to be deployed, there would be no PII captured from people going through the system.” (The DHS Privacy Office has said that the system does contain personally-identifiable information and that FAST “is a privacy sensitive system.” DHS defines a privacy sensitive system as “any system that collects, uses, disseminates, or maintains” personally-identifiable information.)

Original Page: http://theunhivedmind.com/wordpress/?p=4819

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The Database: Why Criminal Governments Spy On Citizens

by THEUNHIVEDMIND, theunhivedmind.com

http://www.alt-market.com/articles/293-the-database-why-criminal-governments-spy-on-citizen

At the very foundation of perhaps every modern day conflict between the expansive powers of unchecked bureaucracy and the dwindling freedoms of the ordinary citizen dwells the vital issue of privacy. Privacy and the right to hold personal and political views without being singled out and scrutinized by government is absolutely essential to any society which dares to deem itself “fair and just”. Ultimately, without the presence of these two liberties, and without people to defend them, a nation is ill equipped to circumvent the growth of tyranny, and anyone claiming to be “free” in the midst of such a culture is living a delusion of the highest order.

Often, social engineers attempt to direct debate over the issue of privacy towards rationalizations of relative morality, or artificially delineated priorities. We quibble over the level of government intrusion that should be tolerated for the sake of the “greater good”. We struggle with questions of bureaucratic reach, wondering at which point we should consider government a threat to the safety and liberty of the people, rather than a servant and protector. The dialogue always turns towards “how much” room government should be given to lumber about our personal lives. Rarely do we actually confront the idea that, perhaps, government should not be welcomed at all into such places.

Really, what makes a governmental entity so special that it should be allowed free access to the activities of the average citizen? Why should ANY intrusion of privacy be tolerated, let alone the kind that goes on today? Our most important concern is not how much leeway our government should be given to snoop into our pocket books, our medical records, our education, our political leanings, or our child rearing philosophies, but rather, whether or not they fulfill any purpose whatsoever through these actions. Is the government, as it exists now, even necessary, or does it cause only harm?

Under tyranny, privacy is usually the first right to be trampled in the name of public safety. Its destruction is incremental and its loss a victim of attrition in the wake of more immediate crisis. Disturbingly, many people become so fixated upon the threats of the moment that they lose complete track of the long term derailment of their own free will in progress. Government, no matter how corrupt, is seen as an inevitability. Conditioned by fear, desperation, insecurity, and sometimes greed, we begin to forget what it was like to live without prying eyes constantly over our shoulders. In the past decade alone, Americans have witnessed a substantial invasion of our individual privacy as well as a destabilization of the legal protections once designed to maintain it. Not just America, but most of the modern world has undergone a quiet program of surveillance and citizen cataloging that goes far beyond any sincere desire for “safety” and into the realm of technocratic domination.

Spying on U.S. citizens by a host of alphabet agencies has been going on for decades, but the actual cataloging of the public by government became most direct during WWII, which saw the use of the Census Bureau as a tool for collecting the names and residencies of Japanese Americans, as well as the highly illegal and unconstitutional internment of these innocents and their families:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=confirmed-the-us-census-b

The creation of lists designed to brand dissenters, activists, and even average passive persons has only become more prevalent since. From the McCarthy witch hunts (based on some real threats but skewed by McCarthy’s ignorance of the bigger picture), to the Cointelpro antics of the Vietnam era, government spying and cataloging has been a way of life and an expected prerequisite part of the relationship between citizenry and leadership. Though consistently opposed, surveillance has become ingrained into our social framework.

In 1978, the Foreign Intelligence Information Act (FISA) was signed by Jimmy Carter into law. The claimed purpose of this act was to confront the extensive abuses of power initiated by the Nixon administration, and to ensure that intelligence agencies were never used again as tools for suppressing political opposition or activist groups. Instead, the act merely became a cover for even more surveillance of American citizens. FISA’s use was expanded far beyond the realm of “foreign intelligence” by both the Bush and Obama Administrations to include vast warrantless wire tapping programs and internet monitoring against U.S. citizens in tandem with telecom companies who are now immune from civil litigation should their intrusions ever be discovered. In 2010, orders for FISA surveillance were up 19%, and not a single request was turned down. This included over 24,287 national security information requests by the FBI pertaining to over 14,000 U.S. persons:

http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/2010rept.pdf

In 2002, the Bush Administration established the Information Awareness Office (IAO) under the supervision of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Using what they call “Total Information Awareness”, and stemming from the usurping authority of the Patriot Act, this project’s purpose is to monitor vast swaths of domestic communication, as well as collect a massive database of the personal information of every U.S. citizen, including phone calls, emails, social networking records, medical records, and financial records without search warrant authorization:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/feb/18/september11.usa

In the UK, a national database including biometrics has been ordered for completion by 2017, including the issuance of a microchipped ID card:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1580895/All-UK-citizens-in-ID-database-by-2017.html

A similar action has been taken by the government of India for citizens “below the poverty line”, supposedly, to make welfare programs easier to administer. Of course, nearly half of India’s population is under the international poverty line:

http://www.mit.gov.in/content/national-citizen-database

In 2009, the Russian government gave itself sweeping powers to spy on citizens, including unlimited access to all private mail without a warrant:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/5878430/Kremlin-gives-itself-powers-to-spy-on-all-Russian-mail.html

Last month, the Obama Administration launched a website called ‘Attack Watch’. Its purpose? To monitor and catalog all internet based opponents of the Obama presidency. Obama supporters can “report” attacks on the White House using the website by sending an email or twitter:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/obama-attack-watch-website-to-help-supporters-fight-back/

And most recently, the Federal Reserve itself launched a new strategy called the “Social Listening Platform”, which is designed to compile and monitor lists of Fed opponents and critics in a vast database, while at the same time watching billions of web conversations and blogs for negative influence against the central bank:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/44701381/The_Fed_Wants_to_Be_Your_Facebook_Friend

Obviously, the current levels of surveillance against citizens has gone way beyond the old excuse of “defense against terrorism”, and jaunted into the realm of Orwellian thought police. The Fed, for instance, has always claimed that its privately controlled banking structure is valuable to the U.S. government and the economy because it allows them a level of political independence that is useful in applying “objective” solutions to economic problems. Yet, they now insist on tracking the political views and opinions of their opponents in the general populace! This hardly sounds “objective” to me…

If the Fed wants to know what we think of them, they certainly don’t need to covertly monitor our communications or writings. All they have to do is ask us! Of course, this kind of tactic has less to do with knowing our opinions, and more to do with silencing our opinions.

To understand the concept of the subversion of dissent through surveillance, we must examine two factors. First, is the reality of the spying itself, which we just outlined clearly above. Second, are the common arguments and talking points used by the champions of Big Brother culture, and how nonsensical they can be. Let’s take a look some of these arguments now…

1) If You Have Nothing To Hide, Then You Have Nothing To Fear From Government Surveillance

At bottom, whether we have “something to hide” or not is none of the government’s concern unless they can provide probable cause. This issue is directly dealt with in the 4th Amendment to the Constitution. It is NOT subject to wild interpretations or matters of stipulation. No national emergencies, wars, terrorist enemies, nor little green men from outer space take precedence over the rights of the individual to be secure from constant and unwarranted scrutiny. In a free country, all men are innocent until proven guilty, but in a surveillance slave culture, everyone is treated as a potential criminal.

2) Surveillance Makes Our Country Safer

Regardless of the society at risk, or the government involved, history has shown that the act of government spying is rarely if ever about citizen safety. Rather, it is invariably about protecting the establishment power structure itself, especially when that structure has committed heinous transgressions and criminal behavior that inspire the citizenry to overthrow it. The more offensive and corrupt the government, the more surveillance that government thrusts upon the public. Guaranteed. The safety provided by the state is, in general, an illusion, and the prevention of danger is hardly successful enough to warrant the faith that the populace places in the establishment. Citizens ultimately provide their own safety, or none at all. Governments cannot save you from danger, they can only give you a superficial sense of comfort. A social placebo to ease the constant paranoia they simultaneously strive to perpetuate.

3) The Authorities Already Know Everything About Us Anyway, So A Little More Surveillance Won’t Matter

The magic of faulty logic is apparent in its circular nature. One lie feeds into another until a complete, but erroneous, idea is born. Again, the question needs to be raised; what makes the inhabitants of government so trustworthy or upright that they deserve to expect full knowledge of our personal lives? What they know or do not know already is utterly irrelevant to this question. Being privy to public information databases does not qualify an individual to walk into your home, track your phone calls and emails, or place you on a list of undesirables. So, why should it be any different for a government?

4) Our Government Is Elected By The People, So If You Don’t Like Surveillance, Vote Them Out

The ignorance of this response is hopefully apparent to most readers. In an election dynamic controlled by a two party system in which both parties represent the top 1% or less of global elitists, and not the people, voting on the national level is hardly meaningful or effective. There is only one Ron Paul, and few others in government with similar convictions or principles. Therefore, regardless of how we vote, the system is designed to continue forward in the construction of a surveillance society. Our government today is NOT elected by the people. Not as long as the false left/right paradigm remains.

5) All Individuals Should Make Sacrifices For The Greater Good

The “greater good” is a matter of perspective. My definition is certainly much different from that of an elitist or a collectivist. Ideally, any widely applied view of this elusive greater good should be built upon the foundation of inherent conscience, and be driven by true sincerity and empathy for the future of humanity. This future, if it is to be any future worth living in, must include those liberties and desires for self determination that exist in every one of us. There is no group (an abstract concept) that is worth the sacrifice of these principles. There is no group that is worth more that the individuals which make its existence possible. The greater good then, logically, should revolve around the nurturing of strong individuals, without which, the group crumbles into chaos and dust. Supplanting individualism for the sake of a surveillance society always leads to such an end.

As stated above, government spying and cataloging of citizens is a means to several ends. It is meant to create fear, doubt, and self censorship. It is meant to divert attention away from the legitimate criminal behaviors of authorities and towards the inevitable and justifiable reactions of those in opposition. It is meant to create efficiency in subversion. Meaning, when smaller forces (corrupt governments) seek to destabilize and diminish larger forces (populations), efficiency of action is the key. By identifying, then targeting and defaming specific and prominent critics of the Fed, for example, rather than making broad based attacks on all of us, the central bank is more likely to dissuade the growth of dissent, and chill the air for leadership figures in the movement. That is, if they are successful…

The great anxiety here is one of “what if”? What if they target you? Or me? What happens then? My personal response; who cares! The more people who effectively endure as obstacles to centralization of control, the more people they have to add to their ridiculous lists. Eventually, with catalogs of millions cluttering the war room, the very tactic of government spying becomes futile. The key is to cast off the dread of the machine and realize that none of us is alone in the fight. The juggernaut is hollow. Its terrible roar is choked with smoke. It rolls forward only because we have not yet dared to stand in its path. It is weak, and indeed, we may find, its doubts are far heavier than ours.

You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com

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The Tools of America’s Future Police State | THE UNHIVED MIND

The Tools of America’s Future Police State

by John Galt, theunhivedmind.com
December 19th 2011

http://johngaltfla.com/wordpress/2011/12/19/the-tools-of-americas-future-police-state/

Now that the NDAA has pretty much guaranteed that the entire country is about to be subjected to illegal search and seizures, beyond what has been occurring under the Patriot Act, I think a glimpse into the various instruments the government is acquiring to monitor and enforce whatever plans they have for its citizens is in order. I discussed these instruments of liberty’s destruction on last Tuesday’s program as I was quite angry about the alleged Tea Party patriots of the House of Representatives failing to address the Constitutional concerns.

The various tools listed below are creations primarily for the U.S. military, however, and I must emphasize this point, as has been witnessed over the last decade many of these tools have been transferred to the civilian law enforcement sector. The Predator drone is the first example followed by the LRAD as displayed below but advancements in robot technology and other programs will give LEO’s the same punch as small military units. I submit that the abuses of our civil rights which have accelerated since 2002 will only get worse with more unauthorized searches using scanning technology and DARPA contrivances. Below is a short list of some of the tools the American people wills see soon, if not already, as law and order break down.

Images and summaries of 1-6 from InformationWeek.com:

1. A160 Hummingbird

The A160 Hummingbird, manufactured by Boeing, is an unmanned surveillance helicopter equipped with a Forester radar antenna that’s capable of identifying troops and vehicles by penetrating the foliage below. DARPA and the U.S. Special Operations Command have ordered A160s. (Image: DARPA)

2. Vulture Program

DARPA’s Vulture program aims to develop an unmanned aircraft that’s capable of remaining aloft for five years, performing satellite-like intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and communications over areas of interest. (Image: DARPA)

3. Big Dog

Big Dog is a DARPA-funded, four-legged robot that would be used to support military operations in rough terrain. Components include a small engine and a PC board to control the robot. (Image: U.S. Marine Corps)

4. Legged Squad Support System

The Legged Squad Support System, or LS3, is a joint effort between DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office and the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. The program goal is to develop a quadruped platform that will augment troops by carrying equipment autonomously. (Image: Department of Defense)

5. System F6

DARPA’s Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying Spacecraft United by Information Exchange (System F6) program aims to show that conventional satellites can be replaced by smaller “cluster-flown” spacecraft modules that are wirelessly networked. (Image: DARPA)

6. Tactical Ground Reporting System

DARPA’s Tactical Ground Reporting System is a multimedia reporting system that lets soldiers on patrol collect and share information to improve situational awareness. The system’s graphical interface can be used to collect and search multimedia data such as voice recordings, digital photos, and GPS routes. (Image: DARPA)

And now for some not from InformationWeek which should raise an eyebrow or two…

The LRAD Sound Cannon has been deployed and proved quite successful in crowd control engagements in Cairo, Iraq, and throughout the U.S. at the various “Occupy” protests:

Lastly, MIT has developed a phased array radar system which allows the military (aka, soon the domestic law enforcement) the ability to see through almost any type of structure including concrete walls. What this allows the enforcement personnel to do is not only identify the number of human threats but enables the operator to see what types of weapons are inside of the structure.

To read the story in full, click on the title below, video is from the ABC News story:
MIT Develops New Radar Technology: Military Could See Through Walls

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Brainwashing America, Pentagon-style!

by THEUNHIVEDMIND, theunhivedmind.com

http://rt.com/usa/news/darpa-fast-pentagon-narrative-151/

The Pentagon’s DARPA agency is trying to figure out how propaganda works on the people.

The Pentagon is about to crank the propaganda machine up to 11. According to a new report, the Department of Defense is attempting to find out what makes a person easily influenced in hopes of swaying them towards supporting their own causes.

In a report published this week by Wired.com’s Danger Room, they reveal that Pentagon researchers working in its DARPA division has begun work on a program called Narrative Networks. Under this initiative, scientists in the high-techh Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are scanning brain patterns and other body functions to see how stories shape the minds of audiences, and who is most vulnerable to be swayed by persuasion. From there, the DoD can counter brainwashed terrorists with an agenda of their own.

Or, perhaps, brainwash anyone they chose.

“The government is already trying to control the message, so why not have the science to do it in a systematic way?”a researcher close to the project told the Danger Room.

A neuroscience researcher involved in the project adds that scientists are specifically looking into how story-telling shapes the minds of listeners so that they can identify who is most vulnerable to the recruiting tactics of terrorists. In its first stages, the Narrative Networks projects aims to “explore the function narratives serve in the process of political radicalization and how they can influence a person or group’s choice of means (such as indiscriminant violence) to achieve political ends.” And to figure this out, they will be investigating the role that social media has on peoples’ thinking process.

Do you “like” your friend’s Facebook post? DARPA wants to know why. Soon after, they hope, you’ll be giving them the thumbs up yourself.

In the second face, Danger Room reports, researchers will be constructing hardware and software to analyze how people perceive stories, going as far as to use non-detectable sensors to monitor internal and external reactions.

Sound space age? It’s coming sooner than you think.

Last week RT reported that the Department of Homeland Security has already begun work on an operation called the FAST project, in which they’ve monitored the psychophysiological measurements of test subjects’ breathing, blink patterns and speech rhythms in order to pin-point security threats based solely on biological functions.

Did reading this make you uneasy? The government wants to know (and they already might).

Original Page: http://theunhivedmind.com/wordpress/?p=6900

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