Our Lives and "The Lives of Others"

“Das Leben des Anderen” is a 2006 German drama that describes in painful detail what life was like in the communist East Berlin of 1984, almost six years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, how ordinary and not so ordinary citizens were spied upon by their government, using agents of the infamous Stasi, the German Democratic Republic’s secret police. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3_iLOp6IhM

The movie is not important because it showed how a famous actress was spied upon, her life, trials, and tribulations and the spying minions who answered to the Kommunistische Partei (Communist Party). It is important because it shows the drab and meager daily life of fear, uncertainty, and horror that people in general endured under communist regimes.

Like the actress in the movie, homes were bugged; all telephone conversations were recorded and listened to. All incoming and outgoing mail was opened, read, and copied by small bureaucrats whose job was to report anything out of the ordinary and catalog their daily blogs.

The secret police did not have sophisticated wireless technology to spy on citizens like we have today. They also did not seek nor need warrants to record everything people did or said in their homes, cars, on the phone, social media sites, or by email. They had the oppressive power of government on their side and technology was not advanced to the level that it is today.

There are so many ways now to cheat and steal personal and corporate information online and on the Dark Web that ethical hacking, penetration testing, and cybersecurity expertise have become real job descriptions.

Computer experts, in cooperation with law enforcement agencies, have infiltrated the dark web globally to expose child predators and human trafficking by capturing live podcasts of predators. This is the positive side of online hacking.

It is not just the utility companies scanning our homes via smart meters for presumably just water, electricity, and gas consumption patterns; other companies and individuals invade our privacy via wireless devices, listening and watching everything we do and say, without a judicial warrant; we are being scanned from every direction 24/7.

Companies listen to our phones and bombard us minutes later with ads for products and drugs we discussed privately on the phone or searched online.

Thanks to social media, no informers must be hired to spy on us, we volunteer information daily. The huge databases that our government and private agencies are building on us would be the envy of the Stasi and of any former communist dictator’s spying soldiers and primitive machines. Without advanced technology, the Stasi was quite successful in keeping their population under control.

People under communism were asked to divulge to the Financial Police (that would be the equivalent of the IRS) what they owned, how much money they had hidden in the house, how they purchased certain goods, and why they ate sometimes better food than what was available on the market. Community organizers, not unlike ACORN, patrolled the streets. In exchange for better rations of food or a small monthly stipend, individuals were assigned per block of apartments to record the comings and goings into each apartment.

GPS tracking in our smart phones, cars, boats, appliances, cable TV, cameras, social sites, credit card purchases, streaming, online purchases, flights, and shopping enable faceless individuals to track us and our lives daily, information that is stored in all the AI data centers now mushrooming all over the country. Once all cash is replaced with digital currency, governments will be able to control us, reward, and punish us, from birth to death.

Satellites can take pictures with extreme accuracy. Drones can spy in your bedroom as you sleep. Smart meters relay information to the mother ship about your gas, electricity, water consumption, your appliances, whether you are home, if you are using medical devices, and sports equipment. Appliances can talk to the grocery store and place food orders for you. The utilities companies can turn off your electricity, water, A/C, and gas whether you want it turned off or not.

Content usage is monitored and access blocked or allowed based on politics. Leftist business owners firewall sites that contradict their views. YouTube takes down videos that offend liberals, thus stifling freedom of speech. Academia censors conservative professors by denying them tenure.

Facebook has censored conservative users, writers, and content developers for years. Publishers often turn down good conservative writers. MSM promotes political correctness and liberal views.

No matter where you turn, agents and technology are watching you - they are empowered by non-elected government bureaucrats and corporatists to spy on the “lives of others.”

 

"A Billion Minutes Ago Jesus Was Alive" and Mega Data

The author of Lazarus Man, Chet Nagle, spoke to the Republican Women of Clifton on March 18, 2015 about “The cyber world and you, and how I learned to rob banks – with a computer.”  

The cyber world is a daunting ether space inhabited by bytes, kilobytes , megabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, and zettabytes (ZB). Each measurement is larger than the previous one by increments of 1,000. It is so huge that one zettabyte can hold almost five quadrillion books of 200 pages each.

According to Nagle’s research, the Internet held 1.2 ZB in 2009, 2.8 ZB in 2012, and it is expected to grow to 40 ZB by 2020. Imagine 1.2 ZB as 75 billion fully loaded 16 GB iPads, stacked 339 miles into the sky.

Humans produce now in two days “more information than was created in all of history up until the year 2003.” Nagle said that “if you had bought the computing power found inside an iPhone 5s in 1991, it would have cost you $3.56 million. A TI-83 calculator’s computing power could have taken astronauts to the moon in 1969.”

In the seventies one computer occupied an entire building. Now a major international bank needs just five servers, each the size of an ordinary box.

The data is stored in computers, laptops, iPads, tablets, cell phones, external flash drives, servers in schools, businesses, companies, government, and servers in the “cloud.”

The Mother Ship is the NSA Cloud in Utah where water and electricity are plentiful, enabling its global Cloud to exist. They save not just Meta data, they store EVERYTHING of EVERYBODY around the world, citizens and governments. “If it’s on the Internet and it can be picked up with antennas, it’s there,” said Nagle. Even Hillary’s emails are there, he added, “now try to get them out.”

In addition to personal and banking information, addresses, social security numbers, 70 million medical records are stolen, a veritable cash trove of blackmail. If a database can be hacked, the hacker can engage not just in identity theft but also in identity change.

According to wired.com, an entire town in Romania owes its bustling economy to online hackers. “Râmnicu Vâlcea is a town whose business is cybercrime, and business is booming.” The town of 120,000 is known to the cyber world as Hackerville. http://www.wired.com/2011/01/ff_hackerville_romania/

The situation is so out of control that the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Secret Service held a Cybercrime Seminar in Brasov on October 3, 2012, sponsored by American Express, EBay, Microsoft, Western Union, Trustwave, and MoneyGram International, the larger victims of cyber-criminal activity.

Cybernetics, the study of how humans and machines control and communicate information, has been around since 1948, and it is thought to derive from the Greek word “kybernētēs,” meaning pilot, governor (from kybernan to steer, govern).

The cyber world and its data are under attack from many fronts. There is hacking by those malcontents who want to get even with the perceived wrong-doers. There are criminal hackers who want your identity and want to profit financially from access to your information. There is the possibility of EMP attacks from an enemy force such as a country’s government or from natural disasters such as solar flares. Last but not least are cyberwars, nations being the biggest hackers. A case in point is China, which employs hundreds of thousands of young hackers. They placed malware in the New York Times servers as discovered in 2013. Russia used cyber-attack on Estonia in 2007 and “shut the country down, basically.” They used it in 2008 in Georgia. Ukraine and Russia are currently using cyber-attacks on each other on phones, military vehicles, radios, electronics, GPS systems, anything vulnerable, and anything is vulnerable today.

Malware is software with malicious content designed by young computer intellects. Kaspersky Labs see 325,000 new malware attacks daily. Stuxnet attacked the Iranian nuclear centrifuges, probably developed by U.S./Israel. Lizzard Stressor got into routers, using Wi-Fi to access data. Tyupkin in Eastern Europe inserted malware into ATMs. Dark Hotel inserted malware into business travelers’ cell phones, laptops, and tablets. Last but not least, Nagle mentioned Regin & Flame, U.S. cyber-attack programs.

The 228,700 cyber incidents recorded in 2013 more than doubled when compared with the 100,000 incidents recorded in 2009, said Chet Nagle. Today, Homeland Security reports half a million such incidents a day because the computing power has doubled every year and hackers have become more sophisticated.

The Internet is going to be controlled in this country via the innocuous-sounding net neutrality under the guise of “fairness.” It is already controlled in countries like Cuba, China, and North Korea and we know what that does to freedom of speech, thought, and the ability to write and publish.

Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called net neutrality “Obamcare for the Internet,” because the government will determine “internet pricing, terms of service, and the types of products and services that can be delivered, resulting in fewer choices, fewer opportunities, and higher prices for consumers.” John Boehner (R-Ohio) believes it will “destroy innovation and entrepreneurship.”

http://theweek.com/speedreads/441874/heres-conservative-case-against-net-neutrality