Edward Snowden – Permanent Record – democracy + mass surveillance is no democracy – “the cloud” largely a DELL and CIA invention – Snowden and Socrates thinkers of society

07.Nov.2021

the positive vision (always start with something positive)

if big data about every keystroke every step we make (the police: every step you make) algorithms determine how mankind will live

and thus:

technology is “neutral” until it is used for good or evil, users shall
- 1) learn responsibility (e.g. take care of a pet, peter parker principle etc.), because with reckless users comes reckless usage
  - develop a positive vision of the future:
    - a good life for all life in the universe (except mosquitos and nasty bacteria)
    - want a future that:
      - people cooperate in peace, without anyone being “the boss” but cooperatively for win-win outcomes (better survivability of all mankind in the universe (the multiplanetary challenge is still MASSIVE!))
      - creative people that have positive interesting ideas and the social skills to communicate them in fun and educating way
      - instead of more police with more weapons: gap between rich and poor needs to close! every company and every person needs to pay at least 10% tax on income! (globally, also a massive challenge for decades to come?)
      - a world in which problems are actually solved collectively (everybody! the rich and the poor! the lobbyists and the politicians!) for the best of all
    - avoid:
      - a world in which lobbyists prevent solutions to problems to “pile up” to the extend of “problem-everest-mountain” and then mankind is really f***ed.
      - power greedy people exploiting technoloy to “rule the world” and by rule: cause other people senseless suffering like building shiny but stupid pyramids that serve only the pride of the boss but have no use for 99.9%
      - a world in which the rich exploit more and more of the planet, nature and the poor and pay no taxes
- 2) they shall learn how to program (preferably in a GPL licenced language without backdoors in compilers)
- 3) all data generated by the people belongs to the people (in anonymized form)

… is it collected anyhow? (if not by USA, then by Russia or China?)

(but the first considers itself a human rights protecting democracy (moral high ground) while the other two are pretty officially not democracies, democracy should try to develop itself further but in a positive, not dystopian direction))

“Any elected government that relies on surveillance to maintain control of a citizenry that regards surveillance as anathema to democracy has effctively ceased to be a democracy” (Edward Snowden, Permanent Record)

the dystopian future

the fun example: the self driving car that forces us to walk X-D (because gyro sensors say: too fat)

the less fun example: the CIA is brain-scanning the world… who of what fraction has what sentiment and where is the world heading (unfortunately guess, they won’t stop with the observer role, but actively engage to steer the course, who calls the shots? the elected politicians? (also a lot of corrupt and greedy that do not have the best of the nation in mind))

how it already is

‘”You are aware of the fact that somebody can know where you are at all times, because you carry a mobile device, even if that mobile device is turned off,” he said. “You know this, I hope? Yes? Well, you should.”

“It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information,” Hunt said. After that mark is reached, Hunt said, the agency would also like to be able to save and analyze all of the digital breadcrumbs people don’t even know they are creating.

“You’re already a walking sensor platform,” he said, nothing that mobiles, smartphones and iPads come with cameras, accelerometers, light detectors and geolocation capabilities.’

“Technology in this world is moving faster than government or law can keep up,” he said. “It’s moving faster I would argue than you can keep up: You should be asking the question of what are your rights and who owns your data.”

watch the full presentation https://ytpak.net/watch?v=GUPd2uMiXXg

src: CIA’s chief technology officer, speaking before a crowd of tech geeks at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York City, CTO Ira “Gus” Hunt https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cia-gus-hunt-big-data_n_2917842

“Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.”
“Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read.”
“Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God.”
“Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe.”
“Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor”

from: Snowden: “Permanent Record”

The concept is always the same: how to sell a product, that collects data that then get’s sold.

The user basically pays for his/her own data collection infrastructure.

‘In fact, Dell had even tried 4 years previously to trademark the term “cloud computing” but was denied.’
“was amazed at how willingly people were signing up, so excited at the prospect of their photos and videos and music and e-books being universally backed up and available that they never gave much thought as to why such an uber-sophisticated and convenient storage solution was being offered to them for “free” or for “cheap” in the first place”

“The cloud” was effective a sales term for Dell to sell to the CIA as it was for Amazon and Apple and Google to sell to their users”
“I can still close my eyes and hear Cliff schmoozing some CIA suit about how “with the cloud, you’ll be able to push security updates across agency computers worldwide” or “when the cloud’s up and running, the agency will be able to track who has read what file worldwide”
“The cloud was white and fluffy and peaceful, floating high above the fray.”
“Though many clouds make a stormy sky, a single cloud provided a benevolent bit of shade. It was protective. I think it made everyone think of heaven”
“Dell along with the largest cloud-based private companies, Amazon, Apple and Google regarded the rise of the cloud as a new age of computing. But in concept, at least, it was something of a regression to the old mainframe architecture of computing’s earliest history, where many users all depended upon a single powerful central core that could only be maintained by an elite cadre of professionals.”
“The world had abandoned this “impersonal” mainframe model only a generation before, once businesses like Dell developed “personal” computers cheap enough and simple enough to appeal to mortals.”
The renaissance that followed produced desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones all device that allowed people the freedom to make an immense amount of creative work. The only issue was – how to store it?”

taken from: Edward Snowden’s “Permanent Record” Autobiography, a very very very recommended read! https://archive.org/details/edwardsnowdenpermanentrecordme_201912

well to be honest now that MicroSD cards can hold up to 256GB for cheap (on the size of a finger nail) storage should not be the problem to privacy anymore should it?

STAY HEALTHY & GET AN EDUCATION ABOUT WHAT IS RIGHT AND WRONG! (if the family could not do that properly)
KICK OUT THOSE ALEXAS AND SIRIS!
- those devices have one purpose only: to record as much private data about the user as possible
- stop buying iPhones, iPads and Macbooks altogether
- talk to family and friends about the problem that permanent surveillance without knowing what bored lonely intelligence agent without supervision is listening (for fun) to what recording, actually destroys free speech and builds the dreaded digital 1984 dictatorship envisioned by George Orwell
- mail or submit support request through web dashboard SpaceX and Twitter Elon that partnering with Google ain’t cool (they will also want full access to all Tesla cars data)
REMOVE THE WIFI FROM KINDLES!
- those damn devices do not need what book was read at what speed and how often and on what page the user currently is
SUPPORT SNOWDEN ON Substack
- SUBSCRIBE TO SNOWDENS NEWSLETTER
FOLLOW SNOWDEN ON Twitter
IT IS A SHAME! $5M of revenue from sales of Snowden’s Autobiography are being confiscated by the US.
- Snowden needs and his family need any support he can get
give Freifunk anonymizing VPN routing a shot!

PS: Mario Draghi and others try to promote the cool-aid of “global problems need global solutions”… which for “them” translates into “global control” (they don’t care about solutions).

This is completely UNNECESSARY!

It would be WAY BETTER to have (as much as possible) independent countries and nations come together on regular basis (as already happening with UN and G20) to agree-by-reason on solutions to global problems such as tax-avoidance and climate-change.

GLOBAL CONTROL will not AUTOMATICALLY bring GLOBAL SOLUTIONS X-D

Permanent Record: excerpt

“A website that tells you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Hayden isn’t offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of subtle coercion.

We can’t allow ourselves to be used in this way, to be used against the future.

We can’t permit our data to be used to sell us the very things that must not be sold, such as journalism.

If we do, the journalism we get will be merely the journalism we want, or the journalism that the powerful want us to have, not the honest collective conversation that’s necessary.

We can’t let the godlike surveillance” (AI!) “we’re under be used to “calculate” our citizenship scores, or to “predict” our criminal activity; to tell us what kind of education we can have, or what kind of job we can have, or whether we can have an education or a job at all; to discriminate against us based on our financial, legal, and medical histories, not to mention our ethnicity or race, which are constructs that data often assumes or imposes.

And as for our most intimate data, our genetic information: if we allow it to be used to identify us, then it will be used to victimize us, even to modify us—to remake the very essence of our humanity in the image of the technology that seeks its control.

Of course, all of the above has already happened.”

“Our data wanders far and wide. Our data wanders endlessly.

We start generating this data before we are born, when technologies detect us in utero, and our data will continue to proliferate even after we die.

Of course, our consciously created memories, the records that we choose to keep, comprise just a sliver of the information that has been wrung out of our lives—most of it unconsciously, or without our consent—
by business and government surveillance.

We are the first people in the history of the planet for whom this is true, the first people to be burdened with data immortality, the fact that our collected records might have an eternal existence.

This is why we have a special duty.

We must ensure that these records of our pasts can’t be turned against us, or turned against our children.

Today, the liberty that we call privacy is being championed by a new generation.

Not yet born on 9/11, they have spent their entire lives under the omnipresent specter of this surveillance.

These young people who have known no other world have dedicated themselves to imagining one, and it’s their political creativity and technological ingenuity that give me hope.

Still, if we don’t act to reclaim our data now, our children might not be able to do so.

Then they, and their children, will be trapped too—each successive generation forced to live under the data specter of the previous one, subject to a mass aggregation of information whose potential for societal control and human manipulation exceeds not just the restraints of the law but the limits of the imagination.” (Page 283)

Snowden on the foot steps of Socrates and other great thinkers of society?

At least 10 scientists and philosophers were killed by the Catholic Church for “disbelieve”.
Thousands are still killed today by radical Islamists for “disbelieve”.
Socraters (400 BC) one of the greatest philosophers of ancient Greece also had to pay the ultimate price, by refusing to leave his country, so it is a good thing, Snowden did leave his country, otherwise he would probably be dead by now.
- that Snowden ended up in Moscow was shier luck, because foreign minister John Kerry (btw member of Skull and Bones Society) canceled his passport while in flight from China to Russia
- so it was effectively the US gov who grounded Snowden in Moscow
- yes he got an offer to cooperate with FSB, but he refused (ask Sarah Harrison she was there at the Moscow airport)

Dead scientists, philosophers and whistleblowers can not serve society.

Socrates: “His persistent questioning of authorities and public figures is probably intended not to humiliate them, but instead to bring to light truth which might elucidate a view of the good life”

“You are mistaken my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death.”

“He has only one thing to consider in performing any action — that is, whether he is acting right or wrongly, like a good man or a bad one.”[1]

src: https://web.archive.org/web/20201108120534/https://philosophy.lander.edu/ethics/socrates.html