domestic spying

"hey wiretap, can i get a recipe for pancakes?"

this meme is hilarious because it’s so absurdly true.

and this one because it’s perhaps so tragic.

but the truly scary bits wind up looking a bit more like this:

the US intelligence community basically tried to take over the internet. and it very nearly succeeded.

there’s a ton more detail HERE with many of your favorite characters like nina “scary poppins” jankowicz and alethea group, the FBI and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm.

“These existing or former IC employees, contractors, or intermediaries weren’t satisfied with simply controlling Twitter. They also wanted to use PayPal, Amazon Web Services, and GoDaddy in a totalizing effort to de-platform, de-monetize, and excommunicate from the Internet entirely those individuals that the IC et al. deems to be a threat.”

using althea as a cutout, they got hired by twitter, ran an assessment and provided a highly critical report that twitter was reactive and needed to go on offense in spotting and fighting mis and disinformation and that it needed to get more more engaged, assertive, and most of all proactive in informational shaping and making sure that only the good opinions made their way to the public eye.

many have long championed this as a “military and security need” and they went for it with gusto. this is the censorship industrial complex in full flight.

“The company was always on the defense when it came to misinformation, whether from “QAnon” or “coronavirus misinformation,” it claims. As a result, “historically marginalized groups” are vulnerable.”

the IC are draped all over the social media and online world professing “stop the steal” and “election security” and “stop covid misinformation” and we all saw how that went. true stories about problems with drugs and ridiculous pandemic policies were stifled, laptops were hidden and some elections were deemed more deniable than others. many speakers got deplatformed, some even decatformed. whole sites (like parler) were defenestrated from internet and web hosting alike.

there seems to be this widespread sense that this is all somehow aberrant and out of line. i’m really not so sure. i think a lot of this was just “out in the light” and more a function of turning on the lamp and suddenly seeing all the cockroaches that had been there for ages.

there is also a seemingly inapt sense that somehow the law protects us from this. it does not. increasingly, it now seems calculated to enable and even lionize it. we all saw how FISA got railroaded right back in over any and all opposition. these agencies are too powerful to oppose and they excel at myth making, perhaps especially myths around “of course we cannot spy on you, now stand a little closer to alexa, we can’t quite hear you.”

accusation is cheap and “own words and policies” are always better sources of definitive data, so let’s peruse the army inspector general schools intelligence oversight guide, shall we?

please note the date. interesting coincidence.

oversight was created because of how out of control things got in the 60’s and 70’s. they tell the (quite sanitized) history themselves.

but where it really gets meaty is right afterwards:

1. Does the intelligence component have the assigned mission or function?

2. Does the information fall within one of the categories listed in DoDM 5240.01, DoD Directive 5148.13, or AR 381-10?

3. Is the least intrusive method used?

i won’t drag you through all the details, but suffice to say that even absurdly flimsy performative and speculative pretext of “foreign connection” even of multiple hops is sufficient to land the eye of mordor firmly (and legally) upon you and “receiving data,” which of course is not “collection,” gets awfully easy when you just ask a few private players to play errand boy for you and essentially everything is being data mined by private actors already anyhow.

this practice is used with the utmost selectivity. if they don’t want you, no one saw nuffink. but if they do want you, they’re gonna get you. every time,

this is not the tagline of anyplace about to remain the land of the free or the home of the brave.

this is why “russian election interference” is always au courant but somehow “china” is never on the radar.

it’s why narcotics from central and south america (but again, oddly not china) are always pretext.

terrorists, tax evaders, anyone with foreign assets or business partners can get swept up (though not if they are from “our team” in which case they can sell secrets and influence and get a total pass).

this whole process has evolved into something far, far worse than the 60’s saw (with perhaps 1-2 notable exceptions.)

the american dog is getting wagged by a tail that was supposed to inform and defend it and it’s getting desperately overt. this pendulum is WAY too far and it’s time to end FISA, wind about 90% of the IC down, and simply remove the capability.

there is just no way you can leave this lying around and not invite the most egregious and calculated of abuse. these sorts of bureaucracies and agencies always and everywhere evolve to become their own chief constituencies. they become fiefdoms of unaccountable power arrayed against we the people.

and the “safe dose” is much, much lower than many suspect.

i’m not even altogether sure there is one anymore.

just remember: it takes shockingly little to pull lots and lots of data from the internet. short of unplugging and going to live in an ice cave, there is essentially no practical way to insulate your life from this in the modern age. every picture is a treasure trove, every uber ride, online purchase, and cell phone tracking ping that knows you were “last here 24 days ago and stayed for 2 hours and 4 minutes from 8.22 to 10.26 PM.”

this is a hobbyist who people send pictures to and say “find me.”

have a watch.

then imagine what entire buildings full of servers and massive cubicle farms of autists who LOVE doing this all day every day and have some stunningly special and iffy tools could know about you if they decided to.

then maybe ask yourself how you feel about a government that runs such things or, perhaps worse, is run by them.