6/16/20 TECH TYRANNY – DATA IS THE NEW OIL
MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS
Yesterday, it was reported that there were phone data outages all over the country.
A large number of T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T and Verizon customers across the country said they were experiencing outages with their cell service. Customers from across the U.S. were reporting problems with their service, with a large number of reports coming from major cities including Tampa, Miami, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles.
Users flooded T-Mobile’s Twitter account to report issues with their service. Hundreds of comments said customers could not place or receive calls.
T-Mobile’s President of Technology, Neville Ray, addressed the outage on Twitter, writing, “Our engineers are working to resolve a voice and data issue that has been affecting customers around the country. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and hope to have this fixed shortly.”
Sprint, which recently merged with T-Mobile, also appeared to be impacted, according to customers on Downdetector.com. US Cellular appeared to be impacted as well.
With technology we can always expect setbacks, however, when outages happen people feel vulnerable.
In fact there was an outage in the Washington DC area last week and it started a bit of pandemonium. As a matter of fact #DCblackout was trending in the U.S. The hashtag, which appeared in hundreds of thousands of tweets, was accompanied by reports of explosions, missing protesters, and silencers attached to police rifles.
What followed was a brief period of online mayhem: Had the police really jammed cell towers? What was the alleged outage meant to obscure? Journalists on the scene quickly tweeted that they had not experienced any outages, and over the course of the day, the rumor was thoroughly debunked. The blackout, it turned out, was misinformation of the highest order. It was also a distraction from the realities of protesting on the ground, where police used violent tactics against protesters throughout the night, including pepper spray, rubber bullets, and tear gas.
The assumption of a blackout, though, presupposes that it’s possible for the police (or the federal government) to shut down communication networks entirely—an act with grave implications for free speech and the right to assembly, as well as for the safety of protesters and passersby. And although it didn’t take day, the hoax raised questions of whether it’s possible for law enforcement agencies to create a blackout, both technically and legally and whether it’s likely.
It is ironic that week before the hoax, the reality took place as if someone leaked the information too early and that someone somehow made a mistake.
Shutting down cell phones and data access is of course censorship but it is also dangerous as we need data to function as a society.
This form of censorship has happened in the U.S. at least once. In 2011, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, or BART, shut down cellphone service in underground stations in downtown San Francisco, after hearing of plans to protest the shooting of a man by BART police.
BART’s goal was to prevent protesters from coordinating, but it was shortsighted, leaving the agency at the center of a national free speech controversy. The Federal Communications Commission got involved, and BART’s actions were condemned by rights organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The FCC investigated BART, but the commission decided not to make a declaratory ruling on the incident. It came down to a technicality: BART had physically shut down the service by turning off equipment in the underground system, rather than jamming the signal.
No similar incidents have been confirmed since, but during the 2016 Standing Rock protests, Wired reported that tribal leaders believed police were jamming cellphones. The problem with proving these claims is that it’s difficult to tell whether something nefarious is happening or there’s just a bad signal. Only bodies like the FCC, which didn’t investigate the claims, really have the ability to verify that jamming has occurred.
Americans tend to think of deliberate service stoppages as dangerous tactics employed by oppressive regimes abroad.
The question is, if punishing citizens by creating outages happens in other countries and if it is used for surveillance and tracking of people, would it not be at all out of the question that underhanded measured are being executed during the COVID-19 pandemic and the civil uprising in big cities across the United States?
The answer is no.
A Chinese city’s plan to use a smartphone app to track its citizens’ health status regularly has caused fears that the government could use the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to tighten its Big-Brother state surveillance.
Hangzhou, a major city in eastern China, has proposed to use a permanent, point-based mobile program to monitor its residents’ lifestyle, such as how much they exercise, drink or sleep.
Local officials say that the software, which would draw and share citizens’ sensitive information from their medical records, could help authorities keep tabs on the health condition of the city’s 10 million people.
Now, you can say but that is China, a communist state – they do this all the time.
However data that we are told needs to be collected for the public good will certainly be of issue in the coming months – from the census and contact tracing to who you are voting for the data will be valuable to those who wish to hijack our constitutional republic and open it up to a world body.
The United Nations Human Rights Council met after a long recess to discuss data collection on COVID-19 spread and how to recognize that there is a problem with racism and police brutality in the United States.
African groups urged the council to organize an urgent debate on current violations of human rights that are based on racism, systemic racism, and police brutality against persons of African descent and violence against peaceful demonstrations to call for an end to be put to these injustices.
As we predicted, the United Nations would find themselves as the world body to be called in if American showed themselves to be ungovernable. Their Smart cities network of course is a data based operation where artificial intelligence and data mining will be used by an International world police force in order to enforce world law.
This is not a conspiracy theory – this is happening now.
Data in the 21st Century is like Oil in the 18th Century: an immensely, untapped valuable asset. Like oil, for those who see Data’s fundamental value and learn to extract and use it there will be huge rewards.
We’re in a digital economy where data is more valuable than ever. It’s the key to the smooth functionality of everything from the government to local companies. Without it, progress would halt.
However, we now have interested parties that appear to be more aggressive in assuring that the new global plantation that they are proposing will come complete with massive A.I. surveillance and data gathering.
Last year, a government commission called for the U.S. to adopt an AI-driven mass surveillance system far beyond that used in any other country in order to ensure American hegemony in artificial intelligence. Now, many of the “obstacles” they had cited as preventing its implementation are rapidly being removed under the guise of combating the coronavirus crisis.
About the same time, a U.S. government body dedicated to examining how artificial intelligence can “address the national security and defense needs of the United States” discussed in detail the “structural” changes that the American economy and society must undergo in order to ensure a technological advantage over China. It was suggested that the U.S. follow China’s lead and even surpass them in many aspects related to AI-driven technologies, particularly their use of mass surveillance. This perspective clearly clashes with the public rhetoric of prominent U.S. government officials and politicians on China, who have labeled the Chinese government’s technology investments and export of its surveillance systems and other technologies as a major “threat” to Americans’ “way of life.”
In addition, many of the steps for the implementation of such a program in the U.S., as laid out in this newly available document, are currently being promoted and implemented as part of the government’s response to the current COVID-19 crisis.
This is likely due to the fact that many members of this same body have considerable overlap with the taskforces and advisors currently guiding the government’s plans to “re-open the economy” and efforts to use technology to respond to the current crisis.
A recent document obtained by the Freedom of information act and the Electronic Information center, was produced by a little-known U.S. government organization called the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. It was created by the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and its official purpose is “to consider the methods and means necessary to advance the development of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and associated technologies to comprehensively address the national security and defense needs of the United States.”
The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence is a key part of the government’s response to what is often referred to as the coming “fourth industrial revolution,” which has been described as “a revolution characterized by discontinuous technological development in areas like artificial intelligence, big data, 5G, nanotechnology and biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things, and quantum computing.”
However, their main focus is ensuring that “the United States … maintain a technological advantage in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other associated technologies related to national security and defense.” The vice-chair of The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, Robert Work – former Deputy Secretary of Defense and senior fellow at the hawkish Center for a New American Security described the commission’s purpose as determining “how the U.S. national security apparatus should approach artificial intelligence, including a focus on how the government can work with industry to compete with China’s ‘civil-military fusion’ concept.”
Military-civil fusion is exactly what its name suggests – an attempt to deliberately erase the line between the military and civilian sectors.
Imagine that you’re a scientist, a researcher, or an engineer. Your job is to dream up new innovations, technologies, and solutions to some of our world’s most pressing problems. Perhaps you’re researching new artificial intelligence technologies, or pursuing advancements in quantum computing. You’ve been hard at work for months, maybe even for years. Then, suddenly you succeed. Your great idea. A new technology that could change the future and make a real difference for society.
But what if your great idea doesn’t end up where you thought it would? Instead, it ends up in the hands of a foreign military, or in the hands of the United Nations to establish the new Big brother system of smart cities network?
Your ambitions are replaced by the ambitions of the global superstate.
You work for the party – you work for the world order.
There is such a race now to implement new data infrastructure, that we will be seeing the leap frogging of similar tech that the Chinese to oppress and control their people.
The United States wants to eliminate what are called legacy systems that are impeding its ability to prevent China from “leapfrogging” ahead in AI and then dominating it for the foreseeable future, it is also important to examine what will replace these “legacy systems” in the U.S.
Some examples of “legacy systems” include a financial system that still utilizes cash and card payments, individual car ownership and even receiving medical attention from a human doctor. It states that, while these “legacy systems” in the US are “good enough,” too many “good enough” systems “hinder the adoption of new things,” specifically AI-driven systems.
It is interesting to note that the cashless system is being proposed where even credit card systems are up for elimination.
The proposal asserts, in contrast to these “legacy systems” that the best and most advanced system is moving entirely to smartphone-based digital wallets.
Another “legacy system” will be overhauled is car ownership, as it promotes autonomous, or self-driving vehicles and further asserts that there is a need for “a centralized ride-sharing network,” which it says “is needed to coordinate cars to achieve near 100% utilization rates.”
However, it warns against ride-sharing networks that “need a human operator paired with each vehicle” and also asserts that “fleet ownership makes more sense” than individual car ownership. It also specifically calls for these fleets to not only be composed of self-driving cars, but electric cars.
In addition to their vision for a future financial system and future self-driving transport system, The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence has a similarly dystopian vision for surveillance. The document calls mass surveillance “one of the ‘first-and-best customers’ for AI” and “a killer application for deep learning.” It also states that “having streets carpeted with cameras is good infrastructure.”
They wish to advance their panopticon and the new normal or the new order will be run on data that will flow like oil.
This is what makes us vulnerable – not only because it exposes us as our private information is no longer private but it makes us vulnerable as a major cyber-attack could renders us helpless.
We all know the risks of cyberattacks and with the infrastructure in place now most of what we have according to the technocrats is impenetrable from attack.
An entire generation of AI unicorn” companies are “collecting the bulk of their early revenue from government security contracts” Like it or not the use of AI is being used facilitating policing activities. For instance, “police are making convictions based on phone calls monitored with iFlyTek’s voice-recognition technology” and police departments are using AI facial recognition tech to assist in everything from catching traffic law violators to resolving murder cases.
Again the documents provided by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence also touch on the area of healthcare, calling for the implementation of a system that seems to be becoming reality thanks to the current coronavirus crisis.
Their new model of surveillance will be based on the Chinese Model.
In discussing the use of AI in healthcare (almost a year before the current crisis began), it states that “China could lead the world in this sector” and “this could lead to them exporting their tech and setting international norms.” One reason for this is also that China has “far too few doctors for the population” and calls having enough doctors for in-person visits a “legacy system.” It also cited U.S. regulatory measures such as “HIPPA compliance and FDA approval” as obstacles that don’t constrain Chinese authorities.
More troubling, it argues that “the potential impact of government supplied data is even more significant in biology and healthcare,” and says it is likely that “the Chinese government will require every single citizen to have their DNA sequenced and stored in government databases, something nearly impossible to imagine in places as privacy conscious as the U.S. and Europe.” It continues by saying that “the Chinese apparatus is well-equipped to take advantage” and calls these civilian DNA databases a “logical next step” for the New Order.
I know that at the moment a war has been declared on law enforcement – and with it comes the opportunity for those who wish to suggest that the United Nations should come in and replace the legacy system of policing with a new and improved panopticon run by Robo Cop.
We know that in the United States the Department of National Security has no problem with making this country a panopticon where surveillance cameras and various satellites will be used to keep the country under the watchful eye of law enforcement.
Now with the help of the people that detest the police system we have now, the solution in the works seems more palatable for the fascists who wish to control everything.
The American people have historically refused to be placed under a governmental microscope. Now it appears that complacency has allowed the security apparatus of government to implement highly advanced surveillance systems all over the country; in fact, they are all over the world.
You want the legacy system of police operations replaced? It won’t be a problem with what is now being proposed.
The reason is simple – it is all about state control and soon it will be evident that the state wants more of that control to monitor everything from your whereabouts to your political affiliation.
You don’t think that Contact Tracers won’t have any influence on choice while people are terrified of COVID-19?
Contact Tracers are based on public sector workers in the area of public health. Many Contact tracing Jobs are provided by NGO’s. Many NGO’s are provided and funded by political groups.
Among the first NGO’s to receive grants to carry out Contact Tracing work is Partners In Health. This group, funded by the Clinton Foundation, worked in Rwanda and Haiti.
Chelsea Clinton sits on the governing board, and other prominent backers and allies include Rahm Emanuel, Jeffery Epstein, and Bill Gates.
Because Contact Tracers can enter the homes and because some voting polls may also be closed, we may see how Contact Tracers can ‘assist’ voters in their homes with their mail-in ballots.
They may even ask families how they feel politically about certain issues, including vaccines, and other topics of political concern.
It is not that they will – but of course they can. This data can be collected and used to understand what is happening and how people choose their candidates.
This is why it is vital for politicians to weaponize the second wave of COVID-19 — it is done to watch how voting and attitudes about government are changing.
Disinformation can be toxic in an election, damaging to an accurate census count, and potentially deadly in a viral pandemic. In each case, the government must provide accurate and clear information – 2020 is the year of the election, the census and a pandemic.
Are we to think that these factors will not be taken advantage of?
Just look at how the governorships by state have abused the authority they have in establishing the rules when there is a state of emergency.
The governors declare states of emergency. In addition, they claim other powers as well which have not been challenged yet in federal courts. As we can see they can shutdown and manipulate whatever they wish to hang on to their control grabs.
When it comes to data, they are swimming in it and with it can control everything.
