The world is run by self-serving psychopathic tyrants (the dwindling number of those who remain ignorant of this fact can begin their education at the Corbett Report).
Such men have no interest whatsoever in the betterment of mankind or the welfare of the Earth, and so i have often wondered why they would allow the mass proliferation of a tool, the internet, that could be used against them. Were they incapable of predicting the result when the people of the world were given access to their plans and an opportunity to unite in protest? Were they really that stupid?
The answer is, of course they were able to predict the outcome. The internet is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
How the West Was Won: Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the Military Origins of the Internet, Part 1
As the digital revolution was underway in the mid-nineties, research departments at the CIA and NSA were developing programs to predict the usefulness of the world wide web as a tool for capturing what they dubbed “birds of a feather” formations. That's when flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in rhythmical patterns.
They were particularly interested in how these principles would influence the way that people would eventually move together on the burgeoning internet: Would groups and communities move together in the same way as ‘birds of a feather, so that they could be tracked in an organised way? And if their movements could be indexed and recorded, could they be identified later by their digital fingerprints?
To answer these questions, the CIA and NSA established a series of initiatives called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) to directly fund tech entrepreneurs through an inter-university disbursement program. Naming their first unclassified briefing for computer scientists ‘birds of a feather,’ which took place in San Jose in the spring of 1995.
Amongst the first grants provided by the MDDS program to capture the ‘birds of a feather’ theory towards building a massive digital library and indexing system - using the internet as its backbone - were dispersed to two Stanford University PHD’s, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who were making significant headways in the development of web-page ranking technology that would track user movements online.
How the West Was Won: Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the Military Origins of the Internet, Part 2
As David Galula, a French commander who was an expert in counterinsurgency warfare during the Algerian War, emphasised:
“In any situation, whatever the cause, there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral majority, and an active minority against the cause. The technique of power consists in relying on the favourable minority in order to rally the neutral majority and to neutralise or eliminate the hostile minority.”
Overtime, however, the intelligence state lost touch with reality, as the focus of its counterinsurgency programs shifted from foreign to domestic populations, from national security risks to ordinary citizens. Particularly in the wake of 9/11, when the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, began mapping out the Internet.
Thanks to Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, we now know that the NSA were collecting 200 billion pieces of data every month, including the cell phone records, emails, web searches and live chats of more than 200 million ordinary Americans. This was extracted from the world's largest internet companies via a lesser-known, data mining program called Prism.
There’s another name for this, and its total information awareness. The highest attainment of a paranoid state seeking absolute control over its population.
Dustin Broadbery on the subversive origins of the internet
Dustin Broadbery is an investigative journalist and blogger.
He previously chatted to me about the anatomy of a cult. This time, he chatted to me about the subversive origins of the internet, including the central and military intelligence links to Facebook, Siri, and a whole lot more.
It’s all a bit creepy and can make one somewhat paranoid about the promises of online privacy.
CIA Partners With Google, Amazon And IBM - PopularResistance.Org
The military industrial complex is returning to its roots as the CIA turns to big tech to maintain control and rebuild the war economy.
The vaunted “17 intelligence agencies” that comprise the U.S. intel community will be sharing a network of private-sector cloud computing service providers which includes Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) as part of a 15-year contract said to be worth tens of billions of dollars.
Exclusive: Emails reveal close Google relationship with NSA | Al Jazeera America
Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying.
Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency’s vast capability for spying on Americans’ electronic communications prompted a number of tech executives whose firms cooperated with the government to insist they had done so only when compelled by a court of law.
But Al Jazeera has obtained two sets of email communications dating from a year before Snowden became a household name that suggest not all cooperation was under pressure.