FascistBook:
The Growing Case for Government Targeting via Social Media
by H. Michael Sweeney,
copyright © 2011, ProparanoidPress, all rights reserved
permissions to reproduce available on request to pppbooks at comcast (net)
In two parts.
Dateline Portland, OR Sept 8, 2011 (part II)
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Part II, The Scope of the Threat
in Social Media Spy Partnering
fascistbook Read Part I, here
Very detailed map (click for full size) of all the clicks needed to use Facebook, each such click useful in gathering/sorting information collected about you. From restoretherepublic.com
Again I remind you that I write this as an activist, investigative writer with seven books generally on abuse of power, privacy, and security matters, and as a consultant to targeted persons. If I make any errors in the remaining presentation, it is likely on the side of underestimating capabilities rather than overstating. The technology involved is all powerful and all-too easy to manipulate for nefarious purposes, and evolves to new levels of capability faster than can be learned of.
The threat goes far beyond the simple image most people have in mind when you talk about social media privacy issues. The threats are quite real, but should be tempered against cause and effect realities and personal strategies as discussed in the closing section. Actual threat levels vary according to the individual, and to the individual’s concerns as may be fostered by circumstances. The threat can exist and be employed against one individual without their ever sensing consequence, but for another individual, it could result in catastrophic injustice. I remind you that where just one citizen is victimized by tyranny, all remain under its yolk and subject to its whims.
The threats come about naturally enough; the very things which allow social media constructs to function are the very things which pose a threat if abused. In and of themselves, a reasonable company operating with reasonable business sense would not deem to abuse any power inherent, lest their getting caught should damage their credibility and ruin a good thing. Yet it is true that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and thus, in time, even the most honest and well meaning entity can cross the line at some point in time. Yet even so, such threats are relatively minimal given that some logical constraints would yet remain in play. We can hope, anyway.
The real threat is in the context of the thrust of this article; involvement of intelligence community, military, or other government agencies in any access to or sharing of your information. For the purpose of such consideration, it may be helpful to think of them simply as themselves being the folks actually managing the social media in question or, at the very least, having the same functionality as their advertising and promotional partners. That is to say, that anything that is true for a social media network or one of their partners, is true for the government snoops with respect to ability to access and abuse information. Actually, MORE is true, as we shall see.
Unlike the folks who found and operate a social media network, they observe no constraints on abuse because any abuses they undertake remain covert in nature, and thus, the existence of the abuse is not likely to be uncovered, and certainly not likely to be proven. Thus the social media entity has little risk in such partnerships, no fear of damage caused by some scandalous revelation. This fact, alone, makes the threats that much more serious. Because if you give a government an inch, it will take a foot, then a yard, then a mile, and on and on until it does get caught. By then, it is far too late and the greater damage has been done than can be known, than can be undone. I doubt Facebook and the like understand this, or they would see how illogical it is to prostitute themselves to Dracos dominatus (draconian rule).
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Ten Different Threat Areas to be Considered:
The remainder of this article will deal with several separate, yet interlocking areas of concern. Some may share properties and elements of others and yet remain their own form of threat with a unique set of additional, unique concerns. These are:
- Marketing (You are a commodity)
- Beliefs (Real and esoteric)
- Contacts (You are who you know)
- Profiling (Labels and lists)
- Tracking (Web and real World)
- Predictives (Thought Police)
- Reward/Punishment (Carrot and Stick)
- Spying (Dataveillance, physical surveillance)
- Trading (Interagency Networking)
- Targeting (Dirty tricks)
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The Intelligence Community and Social Media
I would normally focus on ‘what to do’ in response to such threats, as is the construct of almost all of my books on privacy and security issues. However, in the case of someone who is choosing to participate in social media, the options are few… outside of the obvious choice of rejecting participation altogether. What few choices may exist beyond that drastic alternative will be mentioned as we go. Generally speaking, my books in The Professional Paranoid series do offer useful advice in many of these categories, but were not written to specifically address social media, which did not yet exist when they were penned.
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1: Marketing
Everyone knows that information on consumers is Gold when it comes to marketing. Almost all Web sites participate in marketing to one degree or another, especially if they themselves have something to hawk. But even ‘non commercial’ sites may participate in one form or another of advertising, or in information gathering and sharing arrangements with one or more Web partners. In the old days, information was pretty much limited to contact information and perhaps the kind of things purchased from those keeping the information. It’s now way out of hand thanks to the digital age. Anything about you is fair game if it allows predictive marketing, which is a fancy term for insuring that the ads you see on the Web are more likely to interest you.
The larger and more powerful the dynamics of the (.com, etc.) and the greater their resulting Web traffic, the more likely it is they will be engaged in some form of partnering with other firms to share information about you. Thus it behoves us to read the privacy statements of the various sites we visit BEFORE we engage with the content at the site. Few of us do, of course. Those of us who do, often wish we hadn’t, because it unmercifully kills countless brain cells trying to translate lawyer-speak to plain English. You can lose a first-born if you don’t do it right.
The following is a collection of some scarier parts of Facebook’s privacy policy and user agreements (each of which consists of many pages). An ellipse (…) or double tilde (~~) means I have snipped non relevant passages. Bold text highlights a potentially problematic issue. Parens contain material added by me:
- For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacyand application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License).
- We receive data about you whenever you interact with Facebook, such as when you look at another person’s profile, send someone a message, search for a friend or a Page, click on an ad, or purchase Facebook Credits.
- When you post things like photos or videos on Facebook, we may receive additional related data (or metadata), such as the time, date, and place you took the photo or video.
- We receive data from the computer, mobile phone or other device you use to access Facebook. This may include your IP address, location, the type of browser you use, or the pages you visit. For example, we may get your GPS location so we can tell you if any of your friends are nearby.
- We receive data whenever you visit a game, application, or website that uses Facebook Platform or visit a site with a Facebook feature (such as a social plugin). This may include the date and time you visit the site; the web address, or URL, you’re on; technical information about the IP address, browser and the operating system you use; and, if you are logged in to Facebook, your User ID.
- Sometimes we get data from our advertising partners, customers and other third parties that helps us (or them) deliver ads, understand online activity, and generally make Facebook better. For example, an advertiser may tell us how you responded to an ad on Facebook or on another site in order to measure the effectiveness of – and improve the quality of – those ads.
- Games, applications and websites can serve ads directly to you if they have your User ID. (Ergo, do not stay logged into Facebook when you surf if you do not wish your User ID logged, which is exactly what points directly to YOU).
- Advertisers (and Facebook) sometimes place cookies on your computer in order to make their ads more effective. Cookies are small pieces of data that we store on your computer, mobile phone or other device… we may use them to know ~~ when you are interacting with our advertising or Platform partners.
- We may also ask advertisers to serve ads to computers, mobile phones or other devices with a cookie placed by Facebook… You can always remove or block cookies (such as by using the settings in your browser), but it may affect your ability to use Facebook.
- Sometimes we allow advertisers to target a category of user, like a “moviegoer” or a “sci-fi fan.” We do this by bundling characteristics that we believe are related to the category. For example, if a person “likes” the “Star Trek” Page and mentions “Star Wars” when they check into a movie theater, we may conclude that this person is likely to be a sci-fi fan.
- We sometimes allow businesses or anyone else to sponsor stories like the ones that show up in your News Feed, subject to the audience set for that story… Your friends will see these stories even if you have opted out of the “Show my social actions in Facebook Ads” setting.
- We use the information we receive about you in connection with the services and features we provide to you and other users like your friends, the advertisers that purchase ads on the site, and the developers that build the games, applications, and websites you use.
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2. Beliefs
Consider that every time you post something… every time you ‘like’ or ‘share’ something… you are making a statement about what you believe, or at least what you believe to be valuable or important. It is not about ‘likes,’ it is about beliefs. Yet Facebook does not have a good way of looking at that aspect of information beyond any marketing related elements which may be present, because it is not quite part of their data construct.
However, the intelligence community DOES have a way of looking at it. Be it real (like a political stance) or esoteric (like spiritual matters), you reveal much about your belief structure in every such action. It can become very useful in spying operations because it helps paint the psychological profile of the individual, which is actually its own threat better described below. But it also can be used to flag their attention.
Everyone has heard about NSA’s ECHELON monitoring system which essentially seeks to monitor 100% of global communications on the lookout for useful intelligence. It is essentially an automated key-word sensitive system that electronically listens into information on the fly looking for a set key word or phrase, or perhaps a target audio sequence or voice pattern. Thus it can scan effortlessly for utterances of words like ‘bomb’ or ‘assassinate’ as well as for sounds associated with specific activities or individuals of interest. On any match, the entire communication is recorded for human examination.
We can debate the legality all we want, but Congress has elected to ignore any violation of Constitutional rights represented by the warrantless intrusions which happen by the hundreds or even hundreds of thousands every hour. Worse, it seems, the system can be politically and corporately aimed, it being discovered that ECHELON was being used for industrial spying on behalf of U.S. corporations who were heavy financial contributors to the Democratic National Committee. As defining clues go, that is huge one, the quintessential essence of a fascist government (see my blog 33 Axioms of Fascism) being to function as a corporate state.
But the point is, a social media being watched by the intelligence community can easily be made to work the same way. In point of fact, it can be done without the permission of the social media, though it is greatly facilitated by such cooperation. Every post, every like, every share… the content is all monitored against keywords and then shuffled off for human review if deemed appropriate. Once flagged, you become a person of interest for possible political spying, or even political targeting. You can find yourself on a list… but will more likely be unaware of it for some time.
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3. Contacts
You are indeed who you know to the intelligence community. I assure you that guilt by association is the number one guideline in the overzealous world of counterintelligence, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism (what FBI, CIA, etc., do to protect against espionage, etc.). Thus if you have among your social media ‘friends’ just one person who is suspected of having involvement with what can be loosely (very loosely) defined as a ‘suspect,’ then you, too, are automatically suspect.
In fact, FBI and CIA, and others, use ‘rings of influence’ as an excuse to spy on hundreds of people where only one actual suspect may exist. A suspect, and anyone the suspect is in contact with (one ring), and anyone the contacts are in turn in contact with (second ring), and anyone they are in contact with (third ring), and so one, for some arbitrarily set limit as to the number of rings… anyone within those rings is also suspect, and fervently spied upon on the presumption of likely guilt.
So abusive has this policy been, that just dialing a wrong phone number can get you involved in a ring, and has in more than one case caused innocent persons to be hauled in for relentless questioning and put under a five-year full surveillance net (the standard minimum ‘investigation’ period for FBI types). Spy agencies LOVE this system because they get to report to Congress that they are investigating on a given quantity (untold tens of thousands) of ‘suspects’ to justify their massive budgets, and to paint the problem as being bigger than it really is in order to justify requests for more abusive power and more exotic spy technology.
Thus the problem spirals out of control based merely on conjecture that person A who knows person B who knows person C who knows someone who MIGHT be a criminal, might therefore also be a criminal. So, if you only have a few very close personal friends on Facebook, you probably won’t be targeted for this reason, but if you have 1,000 more casual followers, I can guarantee you a significant chance exists that at least one of those people is in a ring, somewhere – and therefore, so are you, and all of them, too.
So if this makes you afraid to read anyone’s politically incorrect viewpoints, your fear is justified… and is also proof positive that you are a victim of a fascist police state where such fear is an element of political control. Welcome to the New World Order. But not to worry… they fear you more than you fear them. Keep in mind that lists are meaningless if everyone is on the list. We outnumber them millions to one.
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4. Profiling
We hear a lot about profiling as being a ‘no no’ when Police use it to hassle someone because they have the ‘profile’ deemed to increase the likelihood that a person may have a given criminal involvement. For example, if you are stopped on a North South freeway near the Mexican border and the cop sees a ton of McDonald’s trash in your car, you ‘fit’ the profile to be a drug runner. Thus some family man who regularly stops with the kids for Happy Meals and just happens not to keep his car clean, can be hassled to manipulate him into a search of the car.
The unfortunate thing about profiling, is that it tends to get you identified as (something you are not) based merely on the initial suspicion, and thus you get added to a list just as if guilty, and that tends to lead to all manner of problems down the road. Some lists, therefore, are completely bogus, such as the infamous ‘non existent’ No Fly List, where anyone with the same or similar name will rue the day they bought an airline ticket. Profiling is wrong, as are target lists, but we can see why they might want to use them. The problem is, they don’t ‘use them,’ they abuse them, and thereby abuse everyone so identified.
The intelligence community profiles all the time, and because the victims never know about it, they get away with it. But they also engage in another form of profiling – the psychological profile. On the assumption you do get targeted for human review of your on-line activities, I can assure you that a psychological profile will be part of their information gathering goal. Called Q-Methodology when first developed, computer analysis has advanced to the point that a good psychological profile will enable the predicting of how you would react to any given specific situation. In reverse manner, should they desire a given reaction, then can computer what specific situation would most likely generate it, and then work to create that situation by means of dirty tricks (its own section, below).
In my Professional Paranoid series of ‘how to’ books on protecting privacy and security, I spend a great deal of time on this topic, and how to thwart the psychological profile. Thwarting it is very important if you are truly targeted, because any use of it against you can have devastating results, if that is their intention. And in final summary of the threat, it should perhaps also be mentioned that profiling (the sum total thereof), can also predict your future actions and activities (also a threat detailed below), often useful for setting up or arranging advanced surveillance or other operations against you as you wend your way through life. Very dangerous to the politically incorrect among us (e.g., anyone who thinks for themselves and expresses opinions contrary to main stream sheeple).
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5. Tracking
There are two kinds of tracking which might come to mind. Certainly, social media can track your Web activity, as seen in the first section on Marketing. But the greater threat to the politically incorrect is real-World tracking in real time. Think about it: the latest additions to Facebook have been all about tracking:
You now have the ability to ‘tell your friends’ where you are at any given moment, and what you are doing. OK, but you are also telling Big Brother. The same provision now lets you say who you are with. So now, Big Brother can, if having profiles and data files on you and your friends, along with information about the location, deduce WHY you are there and what you are potentially doing which may be completely other than you have described. Thus if you were putting out false information to conceal some other activity, they will likely figure it out. On the other hand, if you really are doing the benign thing, they will still be suspicious you may be doing some less ‘nice’ thing.
But the problem is far more serious than just what you volunteer, because the investigative agencies partnering with social media can do so much more. If you have linked your cell phone or portable laptop to your social media, they can know EXACTLY where you are at ALL TIMES those items are with you and powered up and connected to a network. Remember, in the first threat, above, we learned that Facebook knows your GPS position in such cases. Further, even if your cell phone is not GPS equipped (the newer it is, the more likely it is to use it, even if not advertised as a ‘feature’), or you are using a wifi connection on a laptop, your location can be ascertained through information inherent in the network’s connection with you. Everyone has heard of cell phone tower triangulation, for instance — which was used to capture O.J. Simpson while he was driving on the highway and using his cell phone.
Again, in my Professional Paranoid series, I offer solutions and advice on how to protect against or reduce this kind of threat.
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6. Predictives
We’ve touched on this in the prior dialogs. But the various aspects discussed can be combined in ways which amplify the abilities beyond those already mentioned. Remember the Total Information Awareness Office, renamed Terrorist Information Awareness Office once it was revealed that it represented wholesale spying by the military on every citizen’s every ‘transaction’? They tried to conceal a lot of sins by renaming things and altering artworks, but the truth got out, anyway, thanks to yours truly, and others.
A transaction meant not just purchases, but any event where trackable information could be acquired by use of RFID chips (Radio Frequency Identification Device) which are to be found on virtually every product sold… thereby meaning that ANYTHING on your person, including your clothes, can be used to identify you by means of an electrical scan. So just passing through a doorway or turnstile could be rendered a transaction by simply placing a covert sensor to read the RFIDs as they pass by. I’ve lectured on this (video).
I bring this up only because TIAO’s chief tool was an escalated version of profiling software employed by CIA. Based on the sum grand total history of your transactions, it can predict future transactions. When and where you will go, and what you will do, and why. By additionally interfacing the sum total of one’s social media activity, and general Web activities, this ability is amplified many times over. And don’t you believe it for a minute that TIAO is after terrorists. WE are the ONLY terrorists the system is designed to monitor. While they might actually be able to net a terrorist eventually by use of this system, that represents less than 1/100th of one percent of the people it will be spying on. It is a tool intended to maintain political control, only.
But more than all this, TIAO’s thrust is also to predict what you are thinking about and planning to do which they might object to seeing come to pass. Terrorist events, sure. But why stop there? If they see you might be likely to organize a local protest when the next international financial summit is scheduled to be held in your home town, don’t be surprised to find unmarked black vans trolling your street and sings that things have been moved in your home. I assure you they are more likely to take action to stop that than to stop some guy from blowing up his underwear in a public venue.
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7. Reward/Punishment
When you join in a social media you can expect that certain actions will be tracked and have certain consequences. You will be rewarded for ‘good actions’ as judged by the firm running it, things which represent using the system in ways which generate useful information about you. So if you post, share, or like something, it is useful and appreciated, and can result in subtle rewards, such as promoting you to others who then may invite you to friend them. Usually, the rewards are so subtle you don’t see them. Punishment, on the other hand, can be quite visible.
There are indeed actions they would prefer you not engage in. Inviting too many strangers to join your social network, for instance. Why is that a no no? Because to track information about you and your activities, as far as the intelligence community is concerned, is far more manageable and meaningful if they know that those people on your friends list are truly your friends. Remember the rings when you consider that. Punishment usually comes in the form of warning messages or even temporary inability to exercise certain options, typically with threats that your continued use of the network is in jeopardy. But as we will see in yet another section (threat 10), it can be far more serious than just that.
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8. Spying/Dataveillance
Well, of course, that’s what this whole article is about, isn’t it? But it is listed as its own threat because when the intelligence community is involved, there are whole new levels of spying which can result when their snooping of your activities is determined to make you a person of interest (your politically incorrectness). Depending on why they take an interest, all manner of escalation is possible. Dataveillance is the soft core spying on a soft target, the relatively easy access through back doors to all your personal computer files everywhere of importance. Banks and commercial accounts, insurance companies, medical records, law enforcement, IRS, etc. All of it can be compromised by cyber warriors to one degree of penetration or another. Then we have the hard core variety:
Your phones, car, home, and workplace could be bugged, with or without a warrant. There are whole new kinds of warrants which have been added to the arsenal in post 9-11 hysteria which essentially makes the word meaningless. There is a FISA (the so-called Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which really means DOMESTIC intelligence) Warrant which is issued by a secret judge in a secret court and allows the government cart blanch surreptitious entry into your home, wholesale spying to include cameras in your bedroom, and accessing and taking whatever they wish from your home without your knowledge… and putting things back, if they wish, perhaps even planting evidence since no one is looking. And there is the new ‘roving warrant’ which allows them to target one person and then another, principally through the rings phenomenon earlier discussed. And there are now whole new classes of warrantless actions which are deemed ‘probable cause’ justifications by Presidential order, completely bypassing Congressional law and constitutional considerations altogether.
If they are going to do any of that, you can also bet they will consider a more traditional full surveillance net, which means surveillance posts nearby to watch your entrances, windows, monitor your conversations, who comes and goes, and record everything. You will be followed, perhaps by car, by foot, and even in the air. That can mean aircraft or even micr0-sized robotic camera ‘toy’ planes that can be small enough to fit in your palm. You probably won’t see them, if used.
Then there is smart dust, which are literally small enough to free float in the air (again, my lecture topic), and which work in ‘swarms’ or ‘hives’ to collect and relay information by laser beam to a central monitoring point. Each little ‘mote’ is designed to do a single specific task, but as a collective, they can provide information as useful as if having someone standing there. This is the kind of technology I lecture on, and I assure you it is far more capable than the sci-fi like description implies. Once more, I do write about all these surveillance concerns in my books, and how to deal with them.
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9. Trading
I’ve already written in part one of this post about interagency trading of spy files, using as example the well-known case involving the Anti Deflamation League, B’nai B’rith (both arms of Mossad with respect to spying operations), CIA, and the Police Criminal Intelligence Divisions of San Francisco, Portland, and four other cities. Tens of thousands of citizens of the United States who were targeted for political spying to include surveillance, financial snooping, and personal matters such as friends, beliefs, etc… much like we’ve been talking about, all along.
Agencies all-too often illegally collect and trade files like this at all levels. Local/State agencies share with other locals, federal agencies with other feds, and with locals, and internationally. What one agency is forbidden by law or charter to do, another might be willing to do in exchange for like favors. Reasons for spying are moot. In point of fact, such spying may uncover wrongdoing and do absolutely nothing about it, even if as serious as murder. Agencies simply want information that may be useful later (perhaps as a blackmail tool), either because a given person might come under scrutiny (remember the rings), or because they may be seen as a useful resource for oblique reasons, such as where they work, or a special skill.
Too, I’ve mentioned in other articles that CIA maintains two fronts pretending to be marketing research firms (and more), one in the U.S., and one in Europe. These firms, Locate Plus, and Metro Risk Management, are part of the 1,001 CIA fronts and infiltrated entities I list in The Professional Paranoid Defensive Field Guide. They boast they have and will sell information (a marketing information arm, and an investigative information arm) to anyone on 98% of U.S. citizens (and also happen to market RFID-based tracking bioimplants by Verachip, aka Digital Angel, or the Mark of the Beast).
Excuse me, but I would raze Langley to the ground for this one sin alone, were I President. But these firms are only symptomatic. Social media has revolutionized this aspect of the problem, allowing any agency integrated into the machinery of a Facebook or the like a superlative access to information it can barter to other agencies or sell to fund their illegal black operations being run ‘off the books.’
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10. Targeting/Dirty Tricks
O.K., so you made for yourself a place on someone’s watch list AND you are ‘hip’ to it. You probably don’t like it, and figure you will let people know about it and complain. So you actually dare to post something ‘offensive’ to the system… and I mean by ‘system,’ either the social media folks (verbally assail their policies) or the government or one of its agencies (verbally assail their activities). In other words, you wax even more politically incorrect. Been there, done that.
And what I can tell you is that it certainly feels like targeting and dirty tricks result. For example, I and many of my activist friends on Facebook have had many situations where a negative post seems to have resulted in some form of punitive response such as described above (7), and below, next. But it can easily go beyond that, especially if at the hands of a spy agency or the military, who have whole armies of cyber warriors at their beck and call, all ready, willing, and able to serve up any mischief deemed useful.
My experience in the hours and days following the posting of part one of FascistBook:
Within hours of the blog post and subsequent Facebook/Twitter posts that it had been posted, every Facebook post, share, or like action suddenly required me to answer the silly little pop ups with the scrambled text ‘security phrases.’ Six times in a row, until I became so frustrated that I logged out and gave up for the evening. Normally, these pop up very randomly and infrequently. A normal user might have it happen once a month.If you are an activist, it seems like several times a week. If you are like me, every single transaction, apparently. And not just any scrambled text. Virtually every one of them was completely unreadable, and required as many as six attempts to figure out what they wanted me to type in.
Within one day, which was the next day I logged in, the matter had escalated. Now I had to re enter my email address and password with each post, like, or share. Again, I logged off. When I came back the second day, things seemed back to normal by comparison. I was still had to log in multiple times and was getting a lot of pup up scrambles to solve, but they were easier and far less frequent events to deal with. Perhaps they backed off because my Facebook posts were mainly about this experience. I don’t know. But additionally, now my posts would not take. There would be a kind of ‘hang fire’ where after I hit return, the window stared at me as if I had done nothing. No error message, and no way to redo. Had to log off and back on, and re enter my post. Three or four times per post.
On day four, my browser suddenly started telling me when it fired up that in order to see this page (my home page) I needed to enter my .api user name and password. Mind you, there is no such thing on my computer or associated with my Web activities. Additionally, a second pop up informs me that my browser is not compatible with a particular function I again have nothing to do with in my computing experience. As I work on this post, my browser will simply crash without warning even in the middle of a period of no activity (no action to trigger it). About every ten minutes, on the mark — at least until I typed in this part, after which, it seems to have ceased. Clearly reason to wonder if some cyber warriors might have been having some fun at my expense.
Add to this the fact that in attempting to add new friends at Facebook, I am warned that ‘I am going to fast’ and my ability to add friends is being curtailed for a week as punishment. Gee, that’s funny, because I’m talking three people, here, and I normally add up to twenty at a time or more without such warnings. And one final thing to note… select of my posts seem to have vanished. But of course, none of this proves anyone at Facebook or in government is doing anything in retaliation. That’s the beauty of their system; you can’t prove anything if you are being targeted. All you can do is bitch about it. Guess I’m being rather bitchy, eh?
Just another fun day on FBIbook, I guess. Please feel free to share your own experiences here using the comments.
But this is nothing. If you really do something to upset these folks, you can count on real-world targeting and dirty tricks. They could start messing with your financial situation, your job, or start altering digital information on you such that you are suddenly a dead beat in arrears on your mortgage and car payments, find your insurance policies cancelled, and that you suddenly have a Police record a mile long and outstanding wants and warrants. You’ve seen it all before in the movie, Enemy of the State. And I must tell you that in the past I have been victim of even more unusual antics, which I fortunately overcame and which was the basis of my first book. It is what made me the politically incorrect person I am today.
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Cause and Effect, Personal Strategies
Where does all this leave YOU. It is a matter of cause and effect, I suppose. If you are just another dumbed down citizen happy with mainstream media and government explanations about major events other people tend to call ‘conspiracies’ and ‘cover ups,’ then you are not generating a ’cause’ for which to worry about any ‘effect’ of government spying. You are, instead, simply another idiot who things that ‘if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear from government spying.’ Excuse me, but if that’s the way you feel then get rid of your shades and blinds and let the government watch your wife changing clothes, because they are engaging in that kind of activity against people they THINK have something to hide. And given how loosely they define things now days, the likelihood of YOU getting on one of their suspect lists grows daily.
But if, on the other hand, you are already politically incorrect, then it is your precise situation which should be analyzed regularly for any signs of spying or targeting. It will be subtle if such evidence exists, because they do not want you to know they are there in the woodwork like so many termites. If you do not know how to spot the signs of being followed, surveilled, or of having your home entered and snooped, being bugged, etc., then you need my books. If you do already know these things, or are simply thinking there is even the slightest clue they are true in your case, then you need to be emailing me for some free consultation: proparanoid at comcast (net).
Regardless of where you fall in the above spectrum of possibilities, even if one of the idiots, you need to have a personal strategy in place about how you use your social media. There are simply some things you should not be posting, liking, or sharing, or saying, unless you also are willing to deal with the consequences, or have a strategy in place to thwart them. That, however, is a far more complex dialog than will fit this space. It is the kind of dialog that involves a lot of variables and which is best addressed on a personal basis… so go ahead and email me if that sounds like you.
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FascistBook, Part II
Sep 11
Posted by Author H. Michael Sweeney
FascistBook:
The Growing Case for Government Targeting via Social Media
by H. Michael Sweeney, copyright © 2011, ProparanoidPress, all rights reserved permissions to reproduce available on request to pppbooks at comcast (net) In two parts. Dateline Portland, OR Sept 8, 2011 (part II)fascistbook
Part II, The Scope of the Threat
in Social Media Spy Partnering
fascistbook Read Part I, here
Very detailed map (click for full size) of all the clicks needed to use Facebook, each such click useful in gathering/sorting information collected about you. From restoretherepublic.com
Again I remind you that I write this as an activist, investigative writer with seven books generally on abuse of power, privacy, and security matters, and as a consultant to targeted persons. If I make any errors in the remaining presentation, it is likely on the side of underestimating capabilities rather than overstating. The technology involved is all powerful and all-too easy to manipulate for nefarious purposes, and evolves to new levels of capability faster than can be learned of.
The threat goes far beyond the simple image most people have in mind when you talk about social media privacy issues. The threats are quite real, but should be tempered against cause and effect realities and personal strategies as discussed in the closing section. Actual threat levels vary according to the individual, and to the individual’s concerns as may be fostered by circumstances. The threat can exist and be employed against one individual without their ever sensing consequence, but for another individual, it could result in catastrophic injustice. I remind you that where just one citizen is victimized by tyranny, all remain under its yolk and subject to its whims.
The threats come about naturally enough; the very things which allow social media constructs to function are the very things which pose a threat if abused. In and of themselves, a reasonable company operating with reasonable business sense would not deem to abuse any power inherent, lest their getting caught should damage their credibility and ruin a good thing. Yet it is true that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and thus, in time, even the most honest and well meaning entity can cross the line at some point in time. Yet even so, such threats are relatively minimal given that some logical constraints would yet remain in play. We can hope, anyway.
The real threat is in the context of the thrust of this article; involvement of intelligence community, military, or other government agencies in any access to or sharing of your information. For the purpose of such consideration, it may be helpful to think of them simply as themselves being the folks actually managing the social media in question or, at the very least, having the same functionality as their advertising and promotional partners. That is to say, that anything that is true for a social media network or one of their partners, is true for the government snoops with respect to ability to access and abuse information. Actually, MORE is true, as we shall see.
Unlike the folks who found and operate a social media network, they observe no constraints on abuse because any abuses they undertake remain covert in nature, and thus, the existence of the abuse is not likely to be uncovered, and certainly not likely to be proven. Thus the social media entity has little risk in such partnerships, no fear of damage caused by some scandalous revelation. This fact, alone, makes the threats that much more serious. Because if you give a government an inch, it will take a foot, then a yard, then a mile, and on and on until it does get caught. By then, it is far too late and the greater damage has been done than can be known, than can be undone. I doubt Facebook and the like understand this, or they would see how illogical it is to prostitute themselves to Dracos dominatus (draconian rule).
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Ten Different Threat Areas to be Considered:
The remainder of this article will deal with several separate, yet interlocking areas of concern. Some may share properties and elements of others and yet remain their own form of threat with a unique set of additional, unique concerns. These are:
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The Intelligence Community and Social Media
I would normally focus on ‘what to do’ in response to such threats, as is the construct of almost all of my books on privacy and security issues. However, in the case of someone who is choosing to participate in social media, the options are few… outside of the obvious choice of rejecting participation altogether. What few choices may exist beyond that drastic alternative will be mentioned as we go. Generally speaking, my books in The Professional Paranoid series do offer useful advice in many of these categories, but were not written to specifically address social media, which did not yet exist when they were penned.
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1: Marketing
Everyone knows that information on consumers is Gold when it comes to marketing. Almost all Web sites participate in marketing to one degree or another, especially if they themselves have something to hawk. But even ‘non commercial’ sites may participate in one form or another of advertising, or in information gathering and sharing arrangements with one or more Web partners. In the old days, information was pretty much limited to contact information and perhaps the kind of things purchased from those keeping the information. It’s now way out of hand thanks to the digital age. Anything about you is fair game if it allows predictive marketing, which is a fancy term for insuring that the ads you see on the Web are more likely to interest you.
The larger and more powerful the dynamics of the (.com, etc.) and the greater their resulting Web traffic, the more likely it is they will be engaged in some form of partnering with other firms to share information about you. Thus it behoves us to read the privacy statements of the various sites we visit BEFORE we engage with the content at the site. Few of us do, of course. Those of us who do, often wish we hadn’t, because it unmercifully kills countless brain cells trying to translate lawyer-speak to plain English. You can lose a first-born if you don’t do it right.
The following is a collection of some scarier parts of Facebook’s privacy policy and user agreements (each of which consists of many pages). An ellipse (…) or double tilde (~~) means I have snipped non relevant passages. Bold text highlights a potentially problematic issue. Parens contain material added by me:
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2. Beliefs
Consider that every time you post something… every time you ‘like’ or ‘share’ something… you are making a statement about what you believe, or at least what you believe to be valuable or important. It is not about ‘likes,’ it is about beliefs. Yet Facebook does not have a good way of looking at that aspect of information beyond any marketing related elements which may be present, because it is not quite part of their data construct.
However, the intelligence community DOES have a way of looking at it. Be it real (like a political stance) or esoteric (like spiritual matters), you reveal much about your belief structure in every such action. It can become very useful in spying operations because it helps paint the psychological profile of the individual, which is actually its own threat better described below. But it also can be used to flag their attention.
Everyone has heard about NSA’s ECHELON monitoring system which essentially seeks to monitor 100% of global communications on the lookout for useful intelligence. It is essentially an automated key-word sensitive system that electronically listens into information on the fly looking for a set key word or phrase, or perhaps a target audio sequence or voice pattern. Thus it can scan effortlessly for utterances of words like ‘bomb’ or ‘assassinate’ as well as for sounds associated with specific activities or individuals of interest. On any match, the entire communication is recorded for human examination.
We can debate the legality all we want, but Congress has elected to ignore any violation of Constitutional rights represented by the warrantless intrusions which happen by the hundreds or even hundreds of thousands every hour. Worse, it seems, the system can be politically and corporately aimed, it being discovered that ECHELON was being used for industrial spying on behalf of U.S. corporations who were heavy financial contributors to the Democratic National Committee. As defining clues go, that is huge one, the quintessential essence of a fascist government (see my blog 33 Axioms of Fascism) being to function as a corporate state.
But the point is, a social media being watched by the intelligence community can easily be made to work the same way. In point of fact, it can be done without the permission of the social media, though it is greatly facilitated by such cooperation. Every post, every like, every share… the content is all monitored against keywords and then shuffled off for human review if deemed appropriate. Once flagged, you become a person of interest for possible political spying, or even political targeting. You can find yourself on a list… but will more likely be unaware of it for some time.
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3. Contacts
You are indeed who you know to the intelligence community. I assure you that guilt by association is the number one guideline in the overzealous world of counterintelligence, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism (what FBI, CIA, etc., do to protect against espionage, etc.). Thus if you have among your social media ‘friends’ just one person who is suspected of having involvement with what can be loosely (very loosely) defined as a ‘suspect,’ then you, too, are automatically suspect.
In fact, FBI and CIA, and others, use ‘rings of influence’ as an excuse to spy on hundreds of people where only one actual suspect may exist. A suspect, and anyone the suspect is in contact with (one ring), and anyone the contacts are in turn in contact with (second ring), and anyone they are in contact with (third ring), and so one, for some arbitrarily set limit as to the number of rings… anyone within those rings is also suspect, and fervently spied upon on the presumption of likely guilt.
So abusive has this policy been, that just dialing a wrong phone number can get you involved in a ring, and has in more than one case caused innocent persons to be hauled in for relentless questioning and put under a five-year full surveillance net (the standard minimum ‘investigation’ period for FBI types). Spy agencies LOVE this system because they get to report to Congress that they are investigating on a given quantity (untold tens of thousands) of ‘suspects’ to justify their massive budgets, and to paint the problem as being bigger than it really is in order to justify requests for more abusive power and more exotic spy technology.
Thus the problem spirals out of control based merely on conjecture that person A who knows person B who knows person C who knows someone who MIGHT be a criminal, might therefore also be a criminal. So, if you only have a few very close personal friends on Facebook, you probably won’t be targeted for this reason, but if you have 1,000 more casual followers, I can guarantee you a significant chance exists that at least one of those people is in a ring, somewhere – and therefore, so are you, and all of them, too.
So if this makes you afraid to read anyone’s politically incorrect viewpoints, your fear is justified… and is also proof positive that you are a victim of a fascist police state where such fear is an element of political control. Welcome to the New World Order. But not to worry… they fear you more than you fear them. Keep in mind that lists are meaningless if everyone is on the list. We outnumber them millions to one.
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We hear a lot about profiling as being a ‘no no’ when Police use it to hassle someone because they have the ‘profile’ deemed to increase the likelihood that a person may have a given criminal involvement. For example, if you are stopped on a North South freeway near the Mexican border and the cop sees a ton of McDonald’s trash in your car, you ‘fit’ the profile to be a drug runner. Thus some family man who regularly stops with the kids for Happy Meals and just happens not to keep his car clean, can be hassled to manipulate him into a search of the car.
The unfortunate thing about profiling, is that it tends to get you identified as (something you are not) based merely on the initial suspicion, and thus you get added to a list just as if guilty, and that tends to lead to all manner of problems down the road. Some lists, therefore, are completely bogus, such as the infamous ‘non existent’ No Fly List, where anyone with the same or similar name will rue the day they bought an airline ticket. Profiling is wrong, as are target lists, but we can see why they might want to use them. The problem is, they don’t ‘use them,’ they abuse them, and thereby abuse everyone so identified.
The intelligence community profiles all the time, and because the victims never know about it, they get away with it. But they also engage in another form of profiling – the psychological profile. On the assumption you do get targeted for human review of your on-line activities, I can assure you that a psychological profile will be part of their information gathering goal. Called Q-Methodology when first developed, computer analysis has advanced to the point that a good psychological profile will enable the predicting of how you would react to any given specific situation. In reverse manner, should they desire a given reaction, then can computer what specific situation would most likely generate it, and then work to create that situation by means of dirty tricks (its own section, below).
In my Professional Paranoid series of ‘how to’ books on protecting privacy and security, I spend a great deal of time on this topic, and how to thwart the psychological profile. Thwarting it is very important if you are truly targeted, because any use of it against you can have devastating results, if that is their intention. And in final summary of the threat, it should perhaps also be mentioned that profiling (the sum total thereof), can also predict your future actions and activities (also a threat detailed below), often useful for setting up or arranging advanced surveillance or other operations against you as you wend your way through life. Very dangerous to the politically incorrect among us (e.g., anyone who thinks for themselves and expresses opinions contrary to main stream sheeple).
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5. Tracking
There are two kinds of tracking which might come to mind. Certainly, social media can track your Web activity, as seen in the first section on Marketing. But the greater threat to the politically incorrect is real-World tracking in real time. Think about it: the latest additions to Facebook have been all about tracking:
You now have the ability to ‘tell your friends’ where you are at any given moment, and what you are doing. OK, but you are also telling Big Brother. The same provision now lets you say who you are with. So now, Big Brother can, if having profiles and data files on you and your friends, along with information about the location, deduce WHY you are there and what you are potentially doing which may be completely other than you have described. Thus if you were putting out false information to conceal some other activity, they will likely figure it out. On the other hand, if you really are doing the benign thing, they will still be suspicious you may be doing some less ‘nice’ thing.
But the problem is far more serious than just what you volunteer, because the investigative agencies partnering with social media can do so much more. If you have linked your cell phone or portable laptop to your social media, they can know EXACTLY where you are at ALL TIMES those items are with you and powered up and connected to a network. Remember, in the first threat, above, we learned that Facebook knows your GPS position in such cases. Further, even if your cell phone is not GPS equipped (the newer it is, the more likely it is to use it, even if not advertised as a ‘feature’), or you are using a wifi connection on a laptop, your location can be ascertained through information inherent in the network’s connection with you. Everyone has heard of cell phone tower triangulation, for instance — which was used to capture O.J. Simpson while he was driving on the highway and using his cell phone.
Again, in my Professional Paranoid series, I offer solutions and advice on how to protect against or reduce this kind of threat.
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6. Predictives
We’ve touched on this in the prior dialogs. But the various aspects discussed can be combined in ways which amplify the abilities beyond those already mentioned. Remember the Total Information Awareness Office, renamed Terrorist Information Awareness Office once it was revealed that it represented wholesale spying by the military on every citizen’s every ‘transaction’? They tried to conceal a lot of sins by renaming things and altering artworks, but the truth got out, anyway, thanks to yours truly, and others.
A transaction meant not just purchases, but any event where trackable information could be acquired by use of RFID chips (Radio Frequency Identification Device) which are to be found on virtually every product sold… thereby meaning that ANYTHING on your person, including your clothes, can be used to identify you by means of an electrical scan. So just passing through a doorway or turnstile could be rendered a transaction by simply placing a covert sensor to read the RFIDs as they pass by. I’ve lectured on this (video).
I bring this up only because TIAO’s chief tool was an escalated version of profiling software employed by CIA. Based on the sum grand total history of your transactions, it can predict future transactions. When and where you will go, and what you will do, and why. By additionally interfacing the sum total of one’s social media activity, and general Web activities, this ability is amplified many times over. And don’t you believe it for a minute that TIAO is after terrorists. WE are the ONLY terrorists the system is designed to monitor. While they might actually be able to net a terrorist eventually by use of this system, that represents less than 1/100th of one percent of the people it will be spying on. It is a tool intended to maintain political control, only.
But more than all this, TIAO’s thrust is also to predict what you are thinking about and planning to do which they might object to seeing come to pass. Terrorist events, sure. But why stop there? If they see you might be likely to organize a local protest when the next international financial summit is scheduled to be held in your home town, don’t be surprised to find unmarked black vans trolling your street and sings that things have been moved in your home. I assure you they are more likely to take action to stop that than to stop some guy from blowing up his underwear in a public venue.
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7. Reward/Punishment
When you join in a social media you can expect that certain actions will be tracked and have certain consequences. You will be rewarded for ‘good actions’ as judged by the firm running it, things which represent using the system in ways which generate useful information about you. So if you post, share, or like something, it is useful and appreciated, and can result in subtle rewards, such as promoting you to others who then may invite you to friend them. Usually, the rewards are so subtle you don’t see them. Punishment, on the other hand, can be quite visible.
There are indeed actions they would prefer you not engage in. Inviting too many strangers to join your social network, for instance. Why is that a no no? Because to track information about you and your activities, as far as the intelligence community is concerned, is far more manageable and meaningful if they know that those people on your friends list are truly your friends. Remember the rings when you consider that. Punishment usually comes in the form of warning messages or even temporary inability to exercise certain options, typically with threats that your continued use of the network is in jeopardy. But as we will see in yet another section (threat 10), it can be far more serious than just that.
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Well, of course, that’s what this whole article is about, isn’t it? But it is listed as its own threat because when the intelligence community is involved, there are whole new levels of spying which can result when their snooping of your activities is determined to make you a person of interest (your politically incorrectness). Depending on why they take an interest, all manner of escalation is possible. Dataveillance is the soft core spying on a soft target, the relatively easy access through back doors to all your personal computer files everywhere of importance. Banks and commercial accounts, insurance companies, medical records, law enforcement, IRS, etc. All of it can be compromised by cyber warriors to one degree of penetration or another. Then we have the hard core variety:
Your phones, car, home, and workplace could be bugged, with or without a warrant. There are whole new kinds of warrants which have been added to the arsenal in post 9-11 hysteria which essentially makes the word meaningless. There is a FISA (the so-called Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which really means DOMESTIC intelligence) Warrant which is issued by a secret judge in a secret court and allows the government cart blanch surreptitious entry into your home, wholesale spying to include cameras in your bedroom, and accessing and taking whatever they wish from your home without your knowledge… and putting things back, if they wish, perhaps even planting evidence since no one is looking. And there is the new ‘roving warrant’ which allows them to target one person and then another, principally through the rings phenomenon earlier discussed. And there are now whole new classes of warrantless actions which are deemed ‘probable cause’ justifications by Presidential order, completely bypassing Congressional law and constitutional considerations altogether.
If they are going to do any of that, you can also bet they will consider a more traditional full surveillance net, which means surveillance posts nearby to watch your entrances, windows, monitor your conversations, who comes and goes, and record everything. You will be followed, perhaps by car, by foot, and even in the air. That can mean aircraft or even micr0-sized robotic camera ‘toy’ planes that can be small enough to fit in your palm. You probably won’t see them, if used.
Then there is smart dust, which are literally small enough to free float in the air (again, my lecture topic), and which work in ‘swarms’ or ‘hives’ to collect and relay information by laser beam to a central monitoring point. Each little ‘mote’ is designed to do a single specific task, but as a collective, they can provide information as useful as if having someone standing there. This is the kind of technology I lecture on, and I assure you it is far more capable than the sci-fi like description implies. Once more, I do write about all these surveillance concerns in my books, and how to deal with them.
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9. Trading
I’ve already written in part one of this post about interagency trading of spy files, using as example the well-known case involving the Anti Deflamation League, B’nai B’rith (both arms of Mossad with respect to spying operations), CIA, and the Police Criminal Intelligence Divisions of San Francisco, Portland, and four other cities. Tens of thousands of citizens of the United States who were targeted for political spying to include surveillance, financial snooping, and personal matters such as friends, beliefs, etc… much like we’ve been talking about, all along.
Agencies all-too often illegally collect and trade files like this at all levels. Local/State agencies share with other locals, federal agencies with other feds, and with locals, and internationally. What one agency is forbidden by law or charter to do, another might be willing to do in exchange for like favors. Reasons for spying are moot. In point of fact, such spying may uncover wrongdoing and do absolutely nothing about it, even if as serious as murder. Agencies simply want information that may be useful later (perhaps as a blackmail tool), either because a given person might come under scrutiny (remember the rings), or because they may be seen as a useful resource for oblique reasons, such as where they work, or a special skill.
Too, I’ve mentioned in other articles that CIA maintains two fronts pretending to be marketing research firms (and more), one in the U.S., and one in Europe. These firms, Locate Plus, and Metro Risk Management, are part of the 1,001 CIA fronts and infiltrated entities I list in The Professional Paranoid Defensive Field Guide. They boast they have and will sell information (a marketing information arm, and an investigative information arm) to anyone on 98% of U.S. citizens (and also happen to market RFID-based tracking bioimplants by Verachip, aka Digital Angel, or the Mark of the Beast).
Excuse me, but I would raze Langley to the ground for this one sin alone, were I President. But these firms are only symptomatic. Social media has revolutionized this aspect of the problem, allowing any agency integrated into the machinery of a Facebook or the like a superlative access to information it can barter to other agencies or sell to fund their illegal black operations being run ‘off the books.’
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10. Targeting/Dirty Tricks
O.K., so you made for yourself a place on someone’s watch list AND you are ‘hip’ to it. You probably don’t like it, and figure you will let people know about it and complain. So you actually dare to post something ‘offensive’ to the system… and I mean by ‘system,’ either the social media folks (verbally assail their policies) or the government or one of its agencies (verbally assail their activities). In other words, you wax even more politically incorrect. Been there, done that.
And what I can tell you is that it certainly feels like targeting and dirty tricks result. For example, I and many of my activist friends on Facebook have had many situations where a negative post seems to have resulted in some form of punitive response such as described above (7), and below, next. But it can easily go beyond that, especially if at the hands of a spy agency or the military, who have whole armies of cyber warriors at their beck and call, all ready, willing, and able to serve up any mischief deemed useful.
My experience in the hours and days following the posting of part one of FascistBook:
Within hours of the blog post and subsequent Facebook/Twitter posts that it had been posted, every Facebook post, share, or like action suddenly required me to answer the silly little pop ups with the scrambled text ‘security phrases.’ Six times in a row, until I became so frustrated that I logged out and gave up for the evening. Normally, these pop up very randomly and infrequently. A normal user might have it happen once a month.If you are an activist, it seems like several times a week. If you are like me, every single transaction, apparently. And not just any scrambled text. Virtually every one of them was completely unreadable, and required as many as six attempts to figure out what they wanted me to type in.
Within one day, which was the next day I logged in, the matter had escalated. Now I had to re enter my email address and password with each post, like, or share. Again, I logged off. When I came back the second day, things seemed back to normal by comparison. I was still had to log in multiple times and was getting a lot of pup up scrambles to solve, but they were easier and far less frequent events to deal with. Perhaps they backed off because my Facebook posts were mainly about this experience. I don’t know. But additionally, now my posts would not take. There would be a kind of ‘hang fire’ where after I hit return, the window stared at me as if I had done nothing. No error message, and no way to redo. Had to log off and back on, and re enter my post. Three or four times per post.
On day four, my browser suddenly started telling me when it fired up that in order to see this page (my home page) I needed to enter my .api user name and password. Mind you, there is no such thing on my computer or associated with my Web activities. Additionally, a second pop up informs me that my browser is not compatible with a particular function I again have nothing to do with in my computing experience. As I work on this post, my browser will simply crash without warning even in the middle of a period of no activity (no action to trigger it). About every ten minutes, on the mark — at least until I typed in this part, after which, it seems to have ceased. Clearly reason to wonder if some cyber warriors might have been having some fun at my expense.
Add to this the fact that in attempting to add new friends at Facebook, I am warned that ‘I am going to fast’ and my ability to add friends is being curtailed for a week as punishment. Gee, that’s funny, because I’m talking three people, here, and I normally add up to twenty at a time or more without such warnings. And one final thing to note… select of my posts seem to have vanished. But of course, none of this proves anyone at Facebook or in government is doing anything in retaliation. That’s the beauty of their system; you can’t prove anything if you are being targeted. All you can do is bitch about it. Guess I’m being rather bitchy, eh?
Just another fun day on FBIbook, I guess. Please feel free to share your own experiences here using the comments.
But this is nothing. If you really do something to upset these folks, you can count on real-world targeting and dirty tricks. They could start messing with your financial situation, your job, or start altering digital information on you such that you are suddenly a dead beat in arrears on your mortgage and car payments, find your insurance policies cancelled, and that you suddenly have a Police record a mile long and outstanding wants and warrants. You’ve seen it all before in the movie, Enemy of the State. And I must tell you that in the past I have been victim of even more unusual antics, which I fortunately overcame and which was the basis of my first book. It is what made me the politically incorrect person I am today.
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Cause and Effect, Personal Strategies
Where does all this leave YOU. It is a matter of cause and effect, I suppose. If you are just another dumbed down citizen happy with mainstream media and government explanations about major events other people tend to call ‘conspiracies’ and ‘cover ups,’ then you are not generating a ’cause’ for which to worry about any ‘effect’ of government spying. You are, instead, simply another idiot who things that ‘if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear from government spying.’ Excuse me, but if that’s the way you feel then get rid of your shades and blinds and let the government watch your wife changing clothes, because they are engaging in that kind of activity against people they THINK have something to hide. And given how loosely they define things now days, the likelihood of YOU getting on one of their suspect lists grows daily.
But if, on the other hand, you are already politically incorrect, then it is your precise situation which should be analyzed regularly for any signs of spying or targeting. It will be subtle if such evidence exists, because they do not want you to know they are there in the woodwork like so many termites. If you do not know how to spot the signs of being followed, surveilled, or of having your home entered and snooped, being bugged, etc., then you need my books. If you do already know these things, or are simply thinking there is even the slightest clue they are true in your case, then you need to be emailing me for some free consultation: proparanoid at comcast (net).
Regardless of where you fall in the above spectrum of possibilities, even if one of the idiots, you need to have a personal strategy in place about how you use your social media. There are simply some things you should not be posting, liking, or sharing, or saying, unless you also are willing to deal with the consequences, or have a strategy in place to thwart them. That, however, is a far more complex dialog than will fit this space. It is the kind of dialog that involves a lot of variables and which is best addressed on a personal basis… so go ahead and email me if that sounds like you.
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Tags: FaceBook, Internet Marketing, Privacy, Security, Social media, Twitter