Yeah Liz!

When I was at CFP2013, a former NSA officer was talking to me about how the whole Google machine room worked, and how stuff was not encrypted between servers, in a very matter of fact way.  He had not worked at the NSA since 2002-ish I believe, and was one of the architects of the systems that is a precursor to the Prism system.  It sure sounded like he had had a guided tour.

There's this thing called a National Security Letter.  If folks at Google have had to give the NSA a guided tour of their architecture and machine room, they are not able to talk about it.  Ever.  The ACLU took the feds to court over this with Nick Merrill of Calyx Internet and a bunch of librarians back some years ago when it was ACLU v Ashcroft, and at least won the right to challenge the NSL at all.  Google and the other cloud companies have hinted that they want to talk more about the government interference that they can't talk about.

If the government is taking Google's data on you, they are paying for it -- full un-anonymized data.  They don't have to "hack" it.  They can requisition it, and take it under an NSL.  They can pay for it through a front company -- these were standard for the CIA, to the point where a prominent operative for the CIA got his obit in The Economist when he died just for operating front companies for the CIA.  (http://www.economist.com/node/21563687)  This is not conspiracy theory crap, this is just the way the government bureaucracy works.   You can't have stuff on the books that shows payments from certain organizations.

So when Schmidt is publishing op/eds in the WSJ saying they are "shocked I tell you, shocked!" at the violation of user privacy -- a complete turn around from his prior stance on user privacy, frankly, where he's said that if you aren't willing to do something in public you really shouldn't be doing it at all, and the whole nymwars crap and all -- what he's doing is asking the government not to muscle in on his and the other cloud companies' businesses, and raise too much alarm.

The whole house of cards could come down on them rather badly if this gets investigated and it turns out that they've been getting paid to hand over full unanonymized data, even if it were not voluntary.  It could be bad for GOOG and bad for staffing and really a clusterf***.

There are a few control freaks in my government who I'd like to really have a special prosecutor hang out to dry -- but there is a culture of elites in SV who are not any better, and Schmidt and Gundotra are among them, who I would love for people to realize how they are being exploited by these folks and pushed into a culture of passivity masquerading as content engagement -- very much The Matrix.  Art has always been a tool of revolutionaries.

SV are culture-war profiteers.  And hey, I've lived in that world, I know it pretty intimately.

Our real world is going to hell on the ground while we are presented with kittens on the Internet and crap for sale to keep us anesthetized, and the convergence of transmedia into marketing, politics, and entertainment.  

Pretty soon, we'll have the Eloi vote -- all of us liberal intellectuals in our ergonomic chairs with bright collar jobs and good incomes and futile intellectual votes and gated communities -- and the Morlock vote with people manipulated by fear in their conservative or right wing or service jobs, voting for whomever the war on terror tells them to.  The Morlocks are meant to win, shortly, just as they did in Germany or Iran or other places where a cynical leadership saw a disaffected populace detached from the social contract, ready to be organized -- to be honest, usually those people saw a chaos ready to boil over in fear, and justified their actions by feeling they were restoring order, securing borders and strength, and reaffirming their nation's security in the world.

It's all neuromarketing, now, it's long since stopped being about issues.  Issues stopped being the competitive edge -- they're just window dressing.  It's a competitive market, politics, after all.

But omg, not here, please.  I am not ready for Eisenhower's MIC "peaceful insurgent" coup, and that's pretty much what we're looking at. (http://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942244/ikes-warning-of-military-expansion-50-years-later).  

Our nation was constituted so as to never have a military that could rule itself, to preclude a military coup.  But now, with half a percent of the population with top secret clearances, most of them private contractors without meaningful oversight with blackline projects itching for greater budgets, the "beltway" is wagging the dog.  

Follow the money.  The Bush administration moved the focus of warfare dollars from hard goods to cyberwarfare and dropped it in the cloud's lap to wrestle with the Intelligence Community -- moved Bush's director of national intel, Mike McConnell, to head up Booz Allan (that makes him Snowden's boss' boss' boss or somesuch) to supervise the revolving door of the transition -- and here we are.

This is what the Snowden stuff is about -- not privacy issues, much as I'd want it to be (and you know I would!) about civil liberties in that regard, but about waking up my dear sleeping giant to the effective hawkish coup in DC.

And you know, the world is wearing peril sensitive sunglasses -- or they would have seen nearly everything that was in the Snowden leaks years ago since nearly NOTHING in the leaks is really news.  Nearly all of it was in EFF newsletters or Wired or somewhere easily accessible -- hell, USA TODAY ffs! -- going back as far as the Reagan administration in some cases, but mostly since 9/11, and in many cases making headlines since 2007, or as recently as December of last year, or even a month before Snowden bolted.

And unless we can bust that open in some positive way, we have no real democracy to speak of going forward.  So how do we even start to talk about these things?

But it takes adrenaline, not C-SPAN or the geek pages of Wired's Threat Level column or the EFFector newsletter to get people pumped.  And now, people are milling about buzzing, but are they doing anything?  Not clear.  The tech companies are doing something -- but will they do more than the minimum to protect their businesses?  To make it clear that they want to protect their aphids so they can continue to harvest honeydew in peace, without scandal?  No questions arising whether privacy is truly dead, please, we can't afford it?  Don't make our users question as to whether we are safeguarding their privacy or look too closely.  And ffs don't let this go to special hearings -- we do not want dirty laundry aired.  Do you want another freaking crash?

Bad for business.

http://www.shava.org/2013/10/22/a-retrospective-on-nymwars-google-as-the-identity-network-and-the-nsa/

This should be titled "How we know we can no longer trust private cables running between our offices" or "A Business case for using Corning's Bend In-Sensitive Fiber"

+Liz Fong-Jones Maybe ask also whether posting such a fake sign is illegal? :-)

Weasel?

Works ok on my HTC One X running CM 10.1, but the vibrate is way too long.

A great read even though I'm a new player and only skilled with t1 frigates right now 

+Jay Blanc According to http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/index.html Google has no major datacenters in Canada. But why bother with Canada when there are multiple juicy targets in the EU?

+Michael Leuchtenburg suddenly I'm seeing a Venn diagram with "pregnant dog" in the intersection.

File an appeal anyway. Their fault if they can't follow due process.