Schneier on Security

No One / Ex Cathedra • June 19, 2019 9:47 PM

“Authoritarian states like China and Saudi Arabia are using this newfound capacity as a tool of social control. Here in the United States, we’re using it to show ads.”

 Enough of this nonsense. Saudi Arabia became a surveillance state after 9-11 because of its association with the United States and its deep instability.  AQ was, and still is, real. AQ's level of seriousness about what they hold true is absolutely off the scale. Anyone who has closely followed the news about the Kingdom knows the story. The equipment, the know-how, the whole shebang, is red, white, and blue--emphasis on red.

 Let's cut the tripe and get to the point. The United States--meaning the government and the big companies--do not just show ads with "this newfound capacity" to remove privacy from human beings. The companies do not want people to make rational decisions--I am thinking of what Noam Chomsky has said--they want to know what people do, where they are, who they associate with, everything, and then apply as much sophisticated analysis onto this data as possible, and then push ads to control what people want.  Showing people ads and controlling them are the same thing. They are creating a specific type of human being with a wired or wireless connection into its brain box--to be monitored, or to be monetized.

 The government of the United States, that Hydra whose imposing heads suffer from limited cranial capacity and a habit of fighting each other, aimed for global information dominance: strip away the encryption and suck up as much data as possible in every way possible from every person possible, to include American citizens, real time--  but then they got caught. The big American companies do something analogous.  In fact, it is a safe bet that our friends in Maryland are in bed with Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc., <b>globally</b>. It surely looks as if it is all part of the same operation, and quite likely it is.

 Without 9-11 much of this would not have happened. The <i><b>global</b></i> war on terror (we are going to remove terror from the earth, even from the dictionary) has rebounded.  The chickens have come home to roost, and the United States is quickly on the path to becoming unrecognizable from its relatively free and integrated form of 10 September, 2001--and the sad, sad fact is that this was one of the <b>stated goals</b> of the tall guy with the long beard who envisioned the attack. If we were to go to D.C. and could talk to anyone we wished about what has happened and about the real meaning of terrorism, we would not find a soul who has cogent answers, especially about how to end it, but surveillance is now a growth industry in America that is here to stay.

 The truth is unpalatable, so attention is moved towards China, which is declared an internally-directed surveillance state, even though it is not that at all.  Why isn't it?  Because it does not have to be, and their real goals are all about business, manufacturing, and China's bright future--in fact, a new era. Xinjiang is then brought up as a kind of straw man fallacy. Pouring in mountains of cash to make life better there and modernize the place is the main thing that is really going on in Xinjiang. People are much, much more free in China than many suppose, and their lives are improving rapidly.  They have protests, there is social mobilization, but most people do not have a reason to be upset or angry. What one encounters is the well-grounded optimism that comes from success and hard work. China controls its borders, they don't let people in who don't go through a process--it's rational. And the armed police don't go around shooting people as the police do in America.  In short, the violence and distrust that the U.S. exported are now coming back in waves, and the easiest response is to pretend that none of it--no Afghanistan, no dismemberment of Iraq, no Yemen, no Mali, no Shinwar Massacre, no secret prisons, no torture, no vulnerability by design in cryptographic primitives for people who have an expectation of privacy, no violation of the U.S. Constitution, no spying on the entire population of the United States in one way or another-- has happened while saying others are evil (the real reason being that they do not roll over and support U.S. domination--China--to include information dominance) and we hold our tongues for the people we like (who are weak and don't mind our dominance), no matter how appalling they are (Saudi Arabia).

Surveillance is violence: it hurts people in subtle ways. If the U.S. does not come clean and go back to supporting the U.S. Constitution, the country will be like Darwin’s finches: changing bit by bit until it becomes a different thing.

No One / Ex Cathedra • June 20, 2019 12:56 AM

That essay contains a link that is pure gold.

It is about the history of advertising for smoking.