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Is MeWe a Profiling/Psyops Project?
MeWe was supposed to put an end to social media dictators who punish free speech, presume to be sole judge of what is need of censorship, practice political mind control, and market your life for fun and profit. But is that what it is really about?
by H. Michael Sweeney proparanoid.wordpress.com Facebook proparanoid.net
Dateline, Oct 30, 2020, from an cluttered garage collapsing into a growing Marxist sink hole. copyright © 2020, all rights reserved. Permission to repost hereby granted provided entire post with all links in tact, including this notice and byline, are included. Quote freely, links requested. Please comment any such repost or quote link to original posting. Fair Use Law in play.
Whut?
Basic observations of MeWe for most users have been previously accepted as normal and ideal… but should be reviewed to provide context, and in fairness. At a point when other Social Media (SM) was shown at best to be a propaganda and censorship tool of the Far Left, and it became clear that millions of conservatives were looking for alternatives, MEWE came to the rescue with impeccable timing. Unlike any other SM, it features a direct MeWe management/operations dialog channel to users, a very responsive contact help feature where problems and questions can be addressed rather quickly. I have found this feature extremely valuable many times, with all due praise.
Of most importance, unlike prior SM, it did not censor, but provided user tools to limit unwanted content, putting you in control, instead of some ‘community standard from Hell’; it did not collect and market your preferences and interests to advertising sources; and it seemed devoid of automated bots and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) trolls. Seemed. Yes, they did have ‘community standards,’ but YOU had to be the one to complain, instead of a staff of snoops reviewing A.I. sniffers for keywords, phrases, names, or verboten URL inclusions. FYI, Facebook deems my propranoid.net URL verboten, despite the fact that everything there is backed up with authoritative sources, or is stated as either a suspected/possible, a claim by someone else, or a personally believed but unproven matter as of yet.
It is important that the reader understand that I am a retired privacy/security consultant and author of 8 books on that and related topics, such as abuse of power and Political Control Technology (PCT). I have specialized in helping stalking victims, some 12,000 over several decades time. One common denominator of such victim experiences is cyber stalking by trolls and others in ways intended to make their life as difficult as possible, generally reducing them to a social, financial, and political zero. This would often include professional hacking and other forms of cyber warfare/invasions of online privacy, to include the use of automated SM bots and A.I. trolls. While I have credentials some might find useful in discussing Web security and technology matters, I do not claim to be that person, today, since retirement; the field advances quickly, leaving inactive professionals behind.
Therefore, for the purpose, I define a troll as a ‘user’ (often a pack of many fake user IDs operated by a single entity) who goes out of their way to be obnoxious, start arguments with inflammatory statements, becomes childishly emotional instead of engaging in reasoned dialog, resorts to name calling and a combination of other of the 25 Rules of Disinformation. I wrote those rules, and they have been used in various college courses on psychology, journalism, and political science. Yes, anyone can use one without evil in mind, but any calculated use the Rules repeatedly, is intending to obscure or confound truth. It is primarily used by to negate the person/group attempting to present a truth deemed unacceptable to a given agenda supported by the user of the rules.
When multiple rules are in play, from multiple SM user IDs, it almost always indicates a professional disinfo or ‘wag the dog’ artist at work, and can even mean a psyops effort is under way. That can also mean the use of a bot or A.I. In the broader view of todays Marxist MainStream Media (MSM), it works the same way with talking heads pushing false narratives… they become the trolls.
When psyops is additionally in play, as when someone is targeted by government for speaking an unwanted truth too loudly, it also usually means that surveillance and psychological profiles have been employed against the target. By such means, they know what will mentally manipulate them into a desired emotional knee-jerk response. Without knowing about these rules, a target will very likely so respond, and can then be ridiculed/shamed for it, resulting in retreat from the debate, and success for the disinfo effort. The most common online purpose of this level of disinfo, is in cover up operations, such as seen in the Flight 800 shoot-down coverup, where FBI, the DOD, FAA, and ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) all participated in a well organized disinfo effort against online truth seekers, to the point of sending FBI agents to intimidate us in person. Many didn’t cave, and we instead reached for a lawyer.
Those efforts included use of online Web bots as targeting tools, as well, which both helped to build the psychological profile, and to apply it effectively. Today, A.I. becomes the ultimate bot.
Bots of any sort, A.I., or no, must necessarily be active within the coded framework of the SM server’s software, if to be effective against multiple targets in near real-time usefulness. This is either by covert insertion (hacking methods or site security compromise), or by the intent of the SM provider, directly (as would likely be found true of Facebook, for instance, which has partnered with Agency (Central Intelligence Agency) in various ways.
The power of today’s A.I. is that it can truly seem to be a living person, instead of some computational algorithms in play. It can be set up to scan the entire SM user base to search all posts for select criteria which define targets in need of targeting, and then execute that function. An A.I. bot can simultaneously begin construction of an automated psychological profile for best effect, all without human interaction. Because it can report back to its owner, it might result in additional profiling steps in the real World, perhaps to include a full surveillance net 24/7. While likely true only for the most important of target truth-sayers, heaven help us all when they connect them to drones and other real-World systems, a’la Skynet: the purpose of the Internet of Things (5G) and Smartmeters from your power company.
If Agency psyops teams are sent, it will usually take up to six months to insure they have a very complete profile, down to sexual practices and preferences, financial standing, and all aspects of one’s personality and belief systems. To be sure, it isn’t so common a matter that the reader should start looking over their shoulder, because if can cost as much as $250K a month to undertake… but looking over your shoulder once in awhile, anyway, is always good advice. When used, it can mean intentional events being staged in the target’s life to observe their response, anything from something as simple as cutting you off on the highway and observing your driving skills, to something as complex as a traumatic event staged against a family member, such as a bullying event or assault. In recent times, the use of A.I. systems has likely reduced that ‘manual profile’ time frame significantly. When drones, et. al, are incorporated, the costs will be next to nothing, and no one will be safe from it.
Whut the Hell, MeWe?
Again, I say MeWe seemed free of such worries, in the beginning. Not my current finding.
First clue: A private MeWe Group I established for stalking victims was itself assaulted with sexual content from a non member. Stalking victims are generally of the same mindset, emotionally, as rape victims, if not actually a victim of rape by their stalker(s). I had to ask MeWe how a Group requiring a Membership acceptance process could be targeted by a non member through the Group Chat feature. Blocking the ‘user’ involved (a stranger unknown to me) did not work. This was the first time that MeWe absolutely refused to respond to a help/bug issue. Multiple inquiries went unanswered, and forced closure of the Group.
Second clue: like all social media which must remain accessible to the public at large, it was clear some liberals were among the general MeWe population, as it should be. I welcome them, if they are willing to engage in reasoned dialog and not behave like trolls and childish snowflakes. As long as MeWe isn’t ‘part of their argument,’ its all good. If they might not so behave, the Block tool affords an easy fix, making for an even playing field… because they could block me, too, if so moved. Then came something entirely different: a team of such trolls which could not be blocked. See them here in the image:
This was the second time a block failed, and it took place almost immediately upon the heels of the first. The ‘blocked’ user still showed in my contact list, and the unwanted Troll harassment continued. A repeat Block attempt did remove the user from my contact list, but did not end the assault (details next). Once more, multiple efforts at engaging MeWe went completely unanswered, beyond the autoresponder saying someone would contact me. Meanwhile, through this period, other help/complaint inquiries were answered quite normally and to satisfaction. It wasn’t due COVID manpower shortages, or any other excuse. Also true: other MeWe Members agreed with me that George and friends were trolls; it isn’t just my take.
Third clue: the nature of the continued harassment by ‘George and friends’ is perhaps the most important clue of an A.I. bot troll in play at MeWe. I log into MeWe perhaps 5-10 or more times a day. Despite being blocked, the post consistently appears with a new anti-Trump comment at the top of my notifications every time I do so, time stamped somewhere randomly between the most recent legitimate notification in the list, and the time of log-in. The only time it might not be at top is if I was too quick in checking for some reason, but it would be there the next time I checked.
This is a statistical impossibility for anything but a code embedded within MeWe’s system. Random samples shown in a partial screenshot from a folder full of examples:
Fourth clue: the notifications are for the same original MeWe post thread which resulted in the attempt to block ‘George’ in the first place, now approaching a year ago, in time. The notification is of new comments made to the original post. It is again highly improbable that ANYONE, much less 21 such anyones, would be electing to consistently, repeatedly through a day, every day, continue dialog on a post that old. While this would not be a trait of human trolls or of any other form of bot, it would be no problem for A.I.
Fifth clue: the only exception to an update so appearing, is if there have been so few posts since the prior log in, that the last update is still visible in the first few posts in the notification list. That is to say, it was already visible in the limited viewing area of the pull-down list. Again, that is something only an in-system Bot could determine.
Sixth clue: while in dialog with MeWe Help staff on an unrelated function glitch, and finding the staff helpful and concerned, I raised once more the ‘George’ issue. That ended all communications on both topics. And, that is when I decided to write this exposition… and to prepare to leave MeWe.
Seventh clue: somewhat synchronous with that cessation, a whole new batch of trolls suddenly appeared to comment on a variety of things I was commenting upon, even things apolitical (religious, news bits, you name it). I remind you of my definition of a Web troll, per the intro. They again came in packs or teams, and employed the exact same methods as did ‘George.’ I’m not putting up with it. I left Facebook because of it (and the other matters), and I will soon enough abandon MeWe, and suggest others might wish to evaluate their patronage, and certainly, to be alert and to evaluate any trolls they encounter against the above findings.
Because there is one more thing any MeWe user reading this should ask about it all…
Whut for would MeWe employ A.I. bots?
Call this a conspiracy theorist’s conjecture, if you wish. However, this theorist has been proven right again and again, and has put terrorists, bad Cops, criminals of all manner, and illegal CIA fronts out of action. My research has resulted in correctly forecasting (via what I call the Unified Conspiracy Theory) the downing of the WTC by false-flag terrorism and the resulting series of Middle East ‘oil wars,’ as well as a terror plot against Portland Oregon, which I thwarted (Gas Station Tasking). The WTC threats were warned of in an online posting I made in the fall of 1999, nearly two years ahead of the event, as detailed in several of my books. It also forecast with warning to Secret Service of an assassination attempt against a Presidential Candidate and his family, which took place a few weeks later and forced him (Ross Perot) out of the running the very night he won the votes to get on the ticket.
Given the mass exodus of conservatives to MeWe, and other alternatives as well, it would seem to be very useful to the Deep State to get all of us non liberals together into a fishbowl for psychological reviews. Once under water, it would help them identify ‘dangerous’ threats to leftist agenda and to target us for ‘destruction’ using the latest methods of psyops targeting. They would know who believes what, who agrees with who, and thereby, who might need special targeting consideration. At least some of those bubbles MeWe users see floating to the top of the MeWe tank disguised as fresh posts and comments, are likely signs they are now growing A.I. sponsored gills… which once dependent upon, could become an off switch.
Holding your breath hoping not to be targeted, might just result in your drowning in a pool of very fouled Marxist swamp water. But that’s just me, and my opinion. Glub. And oh, then there is also this:
A.I. is frequently unstable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable, at times. Glub, glub, g-glup…
And, just so you know: I’m not going to leave MeWe until Valentines Day, or later. If my account vanishes before that, you can check here for any report of censorship for having sought to expose the problem as I see it. ALL COMMENTS WELCOME, including MeWe staff — anonymously, if desired.
FascistBook: The Growing Case for Government Targeting via Social Media
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 August 15, 2011fascistbook
Part I, The Social Media Beast and its Masters
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Image via Wikipedia: One way to visualize FaceBook. Did I mention it was complicated?
I write this as an activist, investigative writer with seven books generally on abuse of power, privacy, and security matters, and a consultant to targeted persons. So I get an awful lot of feedback from countless persons on the issue this article regards. Namely, that social networks are nothing more than government tools for spying on and targeting the politically incorrect among us. I fear there is truth in the supposition.
I’m on Twitter and FaceBook, and switched almost exclusively to FaceBook as I can get more reach there more quickly than on Twitter. Tweets tend to be more frivolous and for whatever reason, are less likely to share. In the space of time it took me to get 25 Followers on Twitter, I had over 500 on FaceBook, and the quality of exchange was much higher. Kudos to FaceBook on that score, at least — though I think that may be premature given how things are of late, as will be reviewed in Part II of this blog.
To be fair, understand that I do not write this as an expert on FaceBook or social media in general. In point of fact, I struggle with many aspects of what older hands might consider child’s play. It is a complex topic and even more complex software. What I am considered expert on is my personal experience and the that includes shared experiences with thousands of other users and clients, and the general topics relating to the problem as represented in my books, consulting, and other activities. So I can put experiences into context, and I think I can relate them with logical analysis. Only where a given item of concern may be questionable with respect to deciding it represents a mere technical glitch or misunderstanding of procedure, vs. a deliberate spy or harassment tactic, should my lack of FaceBook experience be much of an issue. ANYONE, may feel free to correct or educate me on any errant matter expressed. (Note: in nearly a year since this post first went up, no such corrections have been offered. Yay!) I will do my best to flag areas where there is a difference between supposition or conjecture, and evident realities, as well as points in between.
I will additionally suggest one might get more out of this article if they also review my blog, 33 Axioms of Fascism.
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The Intelligence Community and Social Media
It is well known, or should be, that virtually all of the Social Networks have gained funding and, in many cases, direct negotiated working partnerships with government agencies. Of principal concern are those which involve the military or intelligence community, and their greater apparat, which would include think tanks, research firms, PR firms, financial institutions, Institutes and Foundations, Round Table Groups, and other entities which tend o do their bidding (or be their bosses) or support them in key ways. Collectively, this mish-mash forms what generally represents a spy ring network in functionality. Even Law Enforcement Agencies at the local level are now players. That is a pretty broad-based group, and should be explored more carefully…
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Examples might be:
Think Tanks:
The Rand Corporation, a CIA/DOD think tank which has developed several new information gathering systems for its clients. This includes ExpertLens, a new system “to aid complex decision making, adapting online and social media technologies” and which incorporates the Delphi method, Nominal Group Technique, and CrowdSourcing to collect information and forecast against solutions. These are very savvy ‘products’ which can be customized for a wide variety of needs and uses, and incorporated into pre existing informational collection and analysis systems. Are they a potential threat to privacy in social media? You bet.
Public Relation Firms:
Hill & Knowlton is CIA’s PR firm of choice, who conspired to fraudulently get Americans behind the idea to kick Iraq out of Kuwait. They used outright lies before Congress and in media campaigns about bayoneted babies to steal incubators. Same thing happened, by the way, in WWI, when the munitions industry went out of its way to buy a handful of newspapers responsible for the bulk of public opinion, and insure they told us Germans were cutting the breasts off of Belgian women. Its in the Congressional Record (prior link). Wasn’t true, of course, but it heated up the debate and did contribute significantly to the war mood. HK publicly admits to using social media to shape opinions, which translates as disinformation given that their publicly posted policy on such use in no way reflects the kind of blatant dishonesty which they have repeatedly exhibited.
Research Firms:
DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency is actually a corporate-like research entity reporting to the Department of Defense and, secondarily, contracting with major corporations. They are very interested in “solicitating innoative research proposals in the area of social media.” Many analysts see this as a move to track social media for ‘propaganda,’ which from their perspective would be any politically incorrect agenda “so that they can be countered before they can gain traction,” which would, of course, require direct intervention in some way, such as will be discussed in Part II of this blog. This will dovetail nicely with other items in this list, ‘coincidentally.’
Financial Firms:
In-Q-Tel is a CIA venture capital firm that invests in start ups it thinks can serve Agency needs. They originally wanted to be named In-Q-It, but someone (blush) registered those names (.com, .org, .net) before they thought to do it, and rather than pay me (given the animosity between us at the time) a few hundred dollars for the names, elected to instead spend thousands to change the company name. They have since invested heavily in all manner of Internet spying ventures, and continue to seek new avenues. They have not touched ‘closed networks’ such as FaceBook, as yet, at least not directly. However, they have invested in the makers of software used by FaceBook, Google, Yahoo, and others to develop and operate their social media, giving way to speculation that back-door access is quite likely a problem worth considering.
Foundations:
The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), as I expose in my book set Fatal Rebirth, is a kind of Foundation which has no peers when it comes to treasonous villainy. September 11 attacks, the resulting Gulf Oil Wars, Homeland Security, the entire election and War Cabinet of the Bush White House, as well as their policies, were all laid out well in advance (1997), and all came to pass almost exactly as planned, and on schedule. They are not finished either. Their membership roster included a rogues gallery of war profiteers, Bush dynasty cronies and family, and villains like Richard Perle.
Questions: How is it that the invasion date of Afghanistan was known prior to September 11? How is it that Colin Powell and DOD Generals were trolling other nations in support of a war against Afghanistan before September 11? Without September 11, what justification for a war did they expect would materialize? Talk about prior knowledge. Amen, Truthers!
I use them as example here, because one of their PNAC friends, Arianna Huffington, wrote an op-ed article in Lebanon’s Daily Star entitled ‘Social media will help fuel change in the Middle East,’ essentially giving the ‘idea’ to the youth of Islamic nations as the article spread virally, that they could use their phones and computers to organize against their government(s). This was some several months before it actually happened in Libya exactly as she wrote it. Huffington, by the way, is described as having very profitable business ties to the Israeli arms industry and has been female companion to Mortimer Zuckerman, a pro-Israel media magnate. So what’s a nice Jewish girl like her doing writing for Islamic media about social networks for revolutionaries? Clearly, this is a form of manipulation of social media users for political gain… a form of social media control being used as Political Control Technology.
Round Table Groups:
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is one of the Round Table Groups better known in the U.S., as they are based in New York. Unabashed globalists with an agenda for a One-World Government, they infect every element of the corporate world as well as every institution of government. Mere Congressmen cower in their presence and hang on their every word, most of them being members who, as if talking about a fellow Wizard at Hogwarts, fawn over and point out membership in their speeches as if a medallion for Exceptional Wizardry.
It is not. It is a signpost of treasonous shame. They seek to destroy national sovereignty. Their best known members are, perhaps, Rockefeller, Bush, Clinton, Carter, Brzezinski, and Kissinger. The CFR lay the foundation for September 11 in Brzezinski’s book, The Grand Chessboard, in which he said the U.S. must remain dominant in the World, and that to do that, we need to control the oil production of the Middle East and Soviet fields bordering with the Middle East. It stated that unless there was some catalyst event to justify a war in the the region, there was sadly no way to achieve that. So PNAC set about to insure it happened just that way. Good old American Capitalism at its best.
With respect to Social Media, CFR has published another work which essentially says what we all know, that it is a great tool for civilians to organize and can become a tool for political change of governments, to include their downfall. It goes on to say, that properly managed, it can become a tool to translate unrest toward rapid and undesirable (their perspective) changes to a more evenly paced and acceptable (their perspective) change. They stress the importance of gaining such a tool. So you can bet that somewhere, people are making it so. In fact, pretty much everyone listed.
Law Enforcement:
Lately, the New York Police Department has established their own Social Media Unit to infect social media with the presence of Cops looking for clues. Well, that might be OK if looking for a specific clue from a specific suspect in an ongoing investigation, but NOT if it is general snooping to create intelligence files on citizens — as has been common practice in almost every major city well before Internet even existed. Portland and San Francisco PDs, and 18 other Police agencies were involved in trading such files on 20,000 non criminals who had never been subject of investigations, as well as those who had, with B’nai B’rith/Anti Defamation League, South African spies, and CIA. So we know it happens. In fact, my dossier was involved, obtained through FOIA. A lawsuit against ADL by San Francisco was dropped amid huge pressure common to anyone who says bad things about any Jewish organization. Well, that didn’t include me, then, but it does, now: Bad ADL.
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Too Many Masters, Too Few Slaves
Model of a social network. While not the intended representation, one might imagine you and your friends in the left group, and the government snoops in the right group. Are you that second guy on the left?
In each of the above examples, I simply used the first group or firm, etc., that popped into my head (deliberately skipping over some of the more obvious choices, because I already know the answer, for them), and then Googled to see if they had any truck to do with social media which borders on manipulation or spying. In every single case, it was found to be true. From this we might deduce, then, it is likely that EVERY such agency in each category has already or will soon effect a similar intention or action which can be pinned to its lapel. The problem is, that means literally many hundreds of groups who seek to control and subvert social media networks to their own internal and often insidious needs. The bulk of these I would not trust with my life, much less my Nation’s security, and certainly not my privacy, much less counting on them to obey the law.
But there are only so many such social networks, and only a few of them are large enough to merit attention. The larger they are, I suspect, the more valuable a target they become. The largest of these is FaceBook. So it is perhaps no surprise that charges of spying and digital assault on the politically incorrect should be more common to FaceBook users than any other such media forum. Both because there are so many users (more than 700,000,000, or about 1 out of every five computer users World-wide), and because there are so many wanna’ be system infiltrators who rank them the number one choice for manipulation.
I don’t think that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO/President and creator of FaceBook is dumb, but I think he would be stupid to do the things he has done already to cooperate with these kinds of manipulating bastards, unless the scope of the problem as just described, was not known at the time. You can bet he and his brethren competitors were fed a line of crap which started with ‘National Security,’ and ended with ‘personal assurances,’ and you can bet that 90% of that was bull. I can’t imagine anyone willing to give endless back doors and unchecked control of their cash cow to a bunch of people who, in the final analysis, would probably be shot if there were a revolution right now, and their side lost. But once such a bed has been made… as with a deal with the Mafia or the Tong… you can’t go back and undo it. So whatever state FaceBook and its competitors are really in in terms of bedding with evil partners, they, and we, are stuck with it… at least until that revolution takes place.
As I see it, and as is true for all social networks…
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There are three basic paths for abuse to take root
1. Those already inherent in the design or added to it intentionally by the creator/owner of the network which enable their own form of ‘control’ over their client’s experiences, and which could be used in punitive or immoral ways if desired. That does not mean they do so intentionally, but it creates temptation. They would, we presume, be very difficult to discover and almost impossible to prove, but there are clues which might suggest their presence and use. Saying something bad about the media and, in almost every instance, suffering a punitive response, would imply such to be the case.
2. Those added by agreement or as concession to investors or partners. These are undoubtedly on purpose and very likely to be employed to the detriment of end users, where present. These would generally need to be extremely covert in nature and almost impossible to detect. The exception might be harassment or targeting methodologies, but a clever programmer can make these look like glitches. Well, I don’t know of any activist on FaceBook without their glitches.
3. Those obtained by back door access, hacks, etc. You can bet these are in constant wholesale use, where present. Absolutely covert and highly illegal in nature, there will not be any opportunity allowed for discovery, which means that they are not used for harassment. They are snooping solutions, only. Thus short of an announcement of discovery, the end user will never know of its existence, which is also true of the operator of the social media. For this reason, I fear In-Q-Tel’s strategy more than, say, DARPA’s. I fear DARPA’s more than I fear Hill and Knowlton.
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This ends Part I.
Part II, will look at some specific facts, issues and actual experiences reported about FaceBook in media and by users. The issues described in the three paths, above, will be considered and applied where possible in an attempt to evaluate. We need a sense of reality, not conjecture, when it comes to charges of spying and targeting, lest the decisions we make be more dangerous by false assumptions.
Related articles
- Three very insightful articles about transparency on the Internet (empressoftheglobaluniverse.wordpress.com)
- FaceBook wants your Unborn Child (manveetsingh.wordpress.com)
- America’s Fascist Revolution and The Internet as a Counter-revolutionary Force (rogueoperator.wordpress.com)
- Pentagon looks to social media as new battlefield (destructionist.wordpress.com)
proparanoid 
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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Posted in Abuse of Power, Conspiracy, Political Commentary, Targeted Individuals, Uncategorized, Writing
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Tags: FaceBook, Internet Marketing, Privacy, Security, Social media, Twitter