*See new updates at end of post!*
Yesterday in the tech world, Apple's Steve Jobs announced a new service called "iCloud," which lets Apple product owners store documents and music on the Internet instead of on their own computer hard drives or mobile phones.
iCloud expands on the trend of cloud computing, which refers to the idea that computer users are storing more of their information "in the cloud" of the Internet rather than on their own storage drives.
For those who may not be familiar the newest introduction to the world of computing is this recently proposed idea of storing your personal data on a server that another party like Amazon, Google or Apple hosts. The idea in it's most sinister incarnation was first introduced by the likes of Amazon, Google and IBM acting as frontmen for obvious intelligence interests. Who else would benefit from inducing suckers people to store their most private of data on a total stranger's servers with zero knowledge of who has access? Cloud computing data storage is only the beginning, as companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple begin advancing steps to expand this technology to applications and even operating systems residing solely on the 'cloud'. User's home computers will be regulated to simple units that must access the cloud server to utilise virtualised systems. Instead of personal computers users will access the cloud for all their computing needs. They've even done up one better as money-mad thieving bastards. Instead of you just purchasing an operating system or applications for a pay and done deal, the cloud will introduce a monthly leasing fee. Sort of like rent-to-own scams where one "rents" furniture or computers from a company and pays upwards of three times the original price for the item(s) in leasing fees.
Eventually when this evil takes root and it will, as idiocratised people are trained to accept it, personal computing will be relegated as an antiquated notion used by "terrorists" with information to hide. Ponder this for a moment, what will you do when you've been using the cloud as your virtual system, and then suddenly you've been put on a digital 'no-fly' list and banned access to your data and computing access. All because your name just happened to turn up inadvertently on a federal watch-list. Or even worse, the iCloud is hacked and all your private information has been compromised and stolen? Still think the cloud is a safe environment for your data? Just ask Sony Playstation users who shared their data on Sony's servers how well that worked out recently.
I've stated it before and I'll say it until it hits home as hard as a fascist takeover, every device that is marketed to the consumer as a "can't live without" ultramega-god-toy is a intelligence-backed Trojan horse. Behind every new technology lies intelligence intercepts that track, trace, document, and pull every piece of valued information they can access. They will catalogue your voiceprints, fingerprints (yes they are actually patenting that technology to read it off the easily fingerprinted iPhone glass), contacts and personal associations, email, voice-mail, personal pictures as well as video. Facial recognition software married up to GPS tracking will ensure that they have the right bloke at the right location. In the new world of remote military violence GPS location and the correct target are all essential for what they quaintly dub pre-emptive assassination. And here you thought that drones were exclusively to be used in foreign wars to kill brown people sitting on resources or in strategic locales. Think I'm fuckin' about? Just chattering up wind to have a laugh about all this? Then you better well short-course your studies on military intel tactics and current events. Your future and eventual survival depends solidly upon it.
The Total Information Awareness programme was never dismantled as you were led to believe, just as COINTELPRO, the Phoenix Project and even MKULTRA were never decommissioned, they went underground and the names were changed in their current incarnations. They all run a regular as clockwork behind the scenes achieving and pursuing the objectives that they were created for. We are at the cusp of the establishment of the Total Information Awareness programme in its totality. Instead of going through central agencies, some of the civilian espionage (SIGINT, COMINT) has been contracted out to private concerns such as Google, Apple, IBM, Microsoft just to name a few. With Israeli intelligence setting up strategic interception points to siphon off economic, military, personal and private high value data. When you have compromising information at your disposal it is the simplest of matters to engineer all sorts of blackmail, false flags, covert drug, human and arms trafficking, and pinpoint your allies and opposition.
According to Counterpunch magazine Google in particular was sought out by U.S. intelligence services for their data (mining) collection expertise. Why not they contracted a consultant named Stephen Arnold of the defence and intelligence firm Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. At a audio recorded conference for current and former intelligence officials in Washington, D.C., in January 2006, he stated that relationship between the U.S. intelligence community and Google had become so close that at least three officers from “an unnamed intelligence agency” had been posted at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Kevin Bankston an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), reported that that the Fourth Amendment’s protections against search and seizure do not apply. The caveats are buried deep in the text that users usually skip over, and click “I agree,” to install a new application. But the consequences are huge, says Bankston. “When private data is held by a third party like Google, the Supreme Court has ruled that you ‘assume the risk’ of disclosure of that data.” When you store e-mail at Gmail – or, similarly, in the cloud at Yahoo or Hotmail – “you lose your constitutional protections immediately.”
Google’s links with the intelligence agency may stretch back to 2004. In 1999, the CIA founded an IT venture capital firm called In-Q-Tel to research and invest in new digital technologies focused on intelligence gathering. An In-Q-Tel funded company, Keyhole, Inc., developed the satellite mapping technology that would be acquired in 2004 to become Google Earth. In-Q-Tel’s former director of technology assessment, Rob Painter, joined Google as a senior manager of Google Federal, his focus the “evangelizing and implementing [of ] Google Enterprise solutions for a host of users across the Intelligence and Defense Communities”. Former CNet blogger Christopher Soghoian revealed that Google applications launch without telling users that the processing and data storage is conducted on remote servers, as long as an Internet connection is maintained — easy enough, given the ubiquity of wireless broadband. Even with no connection, software such as Google’s Gears enable “offline” access to the cloud, running applications and storing data on a PC (again, no cost, no fuss) until a connection is re-established and the new data can be uploaded to Google. Thus the naive user transmits information to a third-party unwittingly – a modus operandi close to the definition of covert surveillance.
Google also works with some of the top players in the surveillance industry, notably Lockheed Martin and SRA International. Former CIA officer Robert Steele says that the CIA’s Office of Research and Development had, at one point, provided funding for Google. According to its literature, ORD has a charter to push beyond the state of the art, developing and applying technologies and equipment more advanced than anything commercially available, including communications, sensors, semi-conductors,high-speed computing, artificial intelligence, image recognition and database management. Steele says that Google’s liaison at the ORD is Dr. Rick Steinheiser, a counterterrorism data-mining expert and a long-time CIA analyst. Further, Anthony Kimery, a veteran intelligence reporter at Homeland Security Today, issued a report alleging a “secret relationship” between Google and U.S. intelligence. Google was “co-operating with U.S. intelligence agencies to provide national and homeland security-related user information from its vast databases,” with the intelligence agencies “working to ‘leverage Google’s [user] data monitoring’ capability as part of an effort to glean from this data information of ‘national security intelligence interest’ in the war on terror.” In other words, Google’s databases – or, some targeted portion – may have been dumped straight into the maw of U.S. intelligence agencies.
The hard brick truth, is that they consider us all potential threats to be categorised and dealt with in the short term and the long term. They are fucking well right too, for we mean to fight them and secure a proper life for ourselves, community and world. We mean to wrench our freedom from their filthy, bloody claws. for this generation and the next and have those who plotted our enslavement and destruction dealt with all due judicious permanence. Read that how you see bloody see fit. Challenge the onslaught and refuse to be a slave shitting away your life on death row. Ask yourself this one question before you retire for the night. Did your mother birth a slave to live and die to serve bankers? Your valuable life sacrificed in toil to serve human garbage wrapped in flesh. To make them obscenely rich whilst being simultaneously drained as dry as a vampire's victim. To be exploited mercilessly, summarily discarded when your usefulness expires and summarily replaced with another cog. Is this the future you envision for yourself and your progeny? Take bold steps to secure your privacy, your vanishing freedoms, and a proper standard of living fit for human beings right NOW!
Evil Bastards Update!
Apple has filed a patent on technology that would prevent iPhone users from filming live events such as concerts. The company plans to build into their systems a component that senses via infra-red whether the user is holding up their iPhone to film a concert or perhaps... another event altogether like a false flag, violent police incident or other emergency. You see that parts not up too the user anymore, Apple has decided that for you and you can read here:
http://undeletedevidence.blogspot.com/2010/12/grass-devices-iphone-or-spyphone.html that clearly they only have your best intentions at heart.
Apple filed its patent application with U.S. authorities 18 months ago, but details only became available this month. It is not clear if Apple intends to develop the concept into a working system, and if so, whether it will be implemented within the company’s devices. The latest version of iPhone is expected in September. I terms of preventing the filming of concerts, this move has Apple proactively fellating entertainment industry interests. In the hopes of obtaining favourable terms with RIIA (the Recording Industry Association of America) and record labels, when negotiating deals to sell content though its iTunes online store.
So in summation, FUCK APPLE and all the likes of them as well!! If you must have a smart phone find a company that respects you and your privacy, or forgo it altogether and use a pay-as-you-go mobile. Devices like the iPhone and iPad are just glittering toys to show off to other people any way, just another useless status device that screams gullible consumer. Be smart and use a telecom company that doesn't pander to NSA demands or slavishly cater to media entertainment cabals. Never forget it's you who have the power, and can force change by simply refusing to go to concerts and refusing to buy and use their spy technology. Using their toys that serve their interests counter to your own, makes you an accomplice to your own enslavement.
15, June 2012 Update!
Still believe Apple is harmless and just developing "cool" gadgets for your tech-savvy lifestyle? Well, take time to read this little news item:
Google and Apple using planes with military cameras to film you sunbathing in your back yard. Apple's newest iOS 6 for their iPhones, iPads and soon laptops as Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, will have integrated facial-recognition features, voice-print and command technologies, geo-location and tracking just for your pleasure and convenience. After all they wouldn't use this for evil, they're a cute, hip and cuddly corporation with direct NSA participation.
It's much worse than what is being marketed as friendly, helpful, state-of-the-art technology. This new marriage of ultra-invasive spy-surveillance, geo-location and digitised cartography is being integrated with the drones they plan on deploying en-masse over US skies very soon. In Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, intelligence assets and operatives from MI6, Mossad and the CIA plant chips in alleged terrorist's homes, cars, or secretly on their person. The deadly tactical drones then hone in on the chip's transmitter signal and let loose their fire-power on the target and anyone standing near. It will be much the same domestically, except the targeting chip with be your iPhone, and eventually all smartphones, tablets and soon laptops that embed this technology in the device's operating system. Don't forget, in the US, they've gone the extra step of preparation, by naming a character by the name of John Brennan as an actual 'Assassination Czar'. Under this wildly illegal new plan, Brennan’s staff compiles a potential target list and is to run the names of assassination candidates past agencies such as the State Department at weekly White House meetings. We're being set-up for the big, fat kill, and you thought that only happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they were being cultivated and field-tested for later use in the domestic home countries.
8, September 2012 Update!
RT News - Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, from any public gathering or venue they deem “sensitive”, and “protected from externalities.”
In other words, these powers will have control over what can and cannot be documented on wireless devices during any public event.
And while the company says the affected sites are to be mostly cinemas, theaters, concert grounds and similar locations, Apple Inc. also says
“covert police or government operations may require complete ‘blackout’ conditions.”
Those policies would be activated by GPS, and WiFi or mobile base-stations, which would ring-fence (“geofence”) around a building or a “sensitive area” to prevent phone cameras from taking pictures or recording video.
Seriously, Blackberry, Android and other new technologies waved about as the next "must have devices" are all being equipped with NSA mandated backdoors for covert surveillance and tracking. However Apple has stepped up aggressively in not only complying with these illegal government demands, but also innovating the technology to do so. Clearly anyone even entertaining the notion of assisting their efforts by rewarding them with purchases of their devices, needs their heads examined. For shiny-object worshippers have willingly stepped into the trap that will not only end any notions of privacy, but also contribute in the creation of a fascist police state. Oh well... Enjoy your free-range enslavement and electro-Stasi in 4G, and be sure to stop by the vat by the door for a tangy bit of Apple flavoured Flavor-Aid.
Sources:
• Counterpunch April 1-15, 2010 - The Cloud Panopticon
• Google, Cloud Computing and the Surveillance-Industrial Complex by Christopher Ketcham and Travis Kelly
• No shooting at protest? Police may block mobile devices via Apple
