TBR News March 17, 2016

Mar 16 2016

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C., March 17, 2016: “The Argentine navy just pursued a Chinese fishing boat that was illegally fishing well within protected waters. The boarded the boat, took off the crew and sank it. Now, Beijing is as usual, howling with fury. The Chinese have a bad habit of doing things like this. They sneak into the thinly-populated area of Siberia and steal a great deal of Russian timber. If they got caught, and the Russians are aware of this trespassing and theft, there would be another Greek chorus of howls from Beijing. And when it was discovered that the Chinese had been paying for foreign imports with fake tungsten copies of official US gold bars, heavily gold-plated, they did maintain a dignified silence as tons of the fake gold was returned from Swiss banks. The Chinese got caught when someone pointed out to the SBA that the Chinese were not using the right serial numbers on the bars. The Chinese are also forging American and European rare gold and silver coins and shoving them into the numismatic market by the bushel-basket fulls. And when the Germans find out that the US Treasury sold the 53 billion dollars worth of gold bars the Germans had stored at Fort Knox there will be more problems for the White House to ignore.”  

 

Conversations with the Crow

On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.           After Corson’s death, Trento and his Washington lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever

After Crowley’s death and Trento’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas. No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.

Douglas had been in close contact with Crowley and had long phone conversations with him. He found this so interesting and informative that he taped and later transcribed them.

These conversations have been published in a book: ‘Conversations with the Crow” and this is an excerpt.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Crow-Gregory-Douglas-ebook/dp/B00GHMAQ5E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1450147193&sr=8-1&keywords=conversations+with+the+crow

 

Conversation No. 62

Date: Tuesday, February 4, 1997

Commenced: 8:45 AM CST

Concluded: 9:30 AM CST

GD: Feeling a little better, Robert?

RTC: Much, thank you. By the way, Gregory, I dug up the information on this Landreth person you asked me about. He used to work for CBS News and his father ran our offices in Havana. Edward Landreth. Used Sterling Chemical Company as a front. I wouldn’t trust this one, if I were you.

GD: No, I didn’t like him at first sight. And he got some hack named Willwirth at Time Magazine to promise to put me on the cover of their trashy rag if I cooperated.

RTC: What do they want?

GD: Anything and everything relating to Mueller’s CIA employment. Anything with his new name, that is. I have an old Virginia driver’s license, a pilot’s license, an old CIA ID card and things like that.

RTC: Don’t even show them to them and keep the new name to yourself. The first thing they will do, and the Army as well, will be to get out the burn bags and totally obliterate any trace of him. You see, Mueller came in at such a high level and so early that his name is not known. Once your book came out, there were frantic searches of the files but they ran up against the dismal fact that they could not identify his new personality. Beetle Smith knew it, but he’s dead. Critchfield is foaming at the mouth over all of this, but he doesn’t have the name either. Wonderful. But take my advice and don’t give out the name. They would obliterate any trace of it and then piously deny they knew anything about it. Why not try the Army records in Missouri? List five or six names plus the Mueller pseudonym and get a researcher to get the copies of the files. Don’t use your name because you are on the no-no list now. Then, you can take the real Mueller out and toss the rest.

GD: Robert, how brilliant of you. I did this a year ago but I’m glad to see you’re right up on things.

RTC: Well, I know the name, you know the name, but Tom Kimmel and Bill Corson do not know the name. I assume both of them have asked you?

GD: Of course they have.

RTC: Not surprising. I like Bill but he had gone over to the other side, lock, stock and barrel, so use discretion with him. And you can be polite to Kimmel but shut up around him. Anything either one of them get would go straight to Langley.

GD: And the burning would commence.

RTC: Clouds of smoke would blanket the eastern seaboard, Gregory. Help keep America pollution free and keep your mouth closed. No, that’s not what I meant. Your mouth is not a source of pollution. The smoke from the burning CIA records is what I had in mind. What kind of approaches do they use?

GD: Kindergarten level. ‘We are going to make you famous,’ is the main one followed by such stupidity as ‘you can tell me because I’m your friend.’ With friends like that, who needs any enemies? I wouldn’t let any of them into my house. My grandfather would have had them use the tradesman’s entrance. They don’t do that anymore. One great homogenous melting pot of proletariat idiots, ill-educated twits, liars and chronic violators of deceased prostitutes.

RTC: (Laughter) Such an accurate portrayal, Gregory.

GD: It’s been quite an unwanted education, Robert, listening to all the foolishness coming out of these creeps. But, good humored banter aside, I wanted to discuss the Kennedy thing with you.

RTC: Go ahead.

GD: I have been reading through all the major books on the subject, and here and there I find something interesting. Mostly, only personal opinion without facts. But in looking through my notes, I am positive that your collective motives were based on what you thought was good for the country and the CIA, in opposite order.

RTC: Passing secrets to the enemy is very serious, Gregory.

GD: Yes, but Kennedy sacked your top people and was going to break the agency up. Self-preservation is a powerful motive for action.

RTC: Yes, it is. We had a similar problem with Nixon, as I recall.

GD: You weren’t planning to off him, were you?

RTC: No, but we did get him out of the Oval Office.

GD: I met Nixon once and I rather liked him. You? What about Watergate?

RTC: Watergate was our method of getting him out. It wasn’t as final as the Zipper business but he played right into it.

GD: What did Nixon do to you?

RTC: Now, that’s a long and involved story, Gregory.

GD: Well, since you didn’t have him killed, can you tell me?

RTC: I suppose so. Nixon was no specific threat to us, understand. We worked with him rather well. But he was getting squirrelly the second time around. And the China business was no good. China was our enemy and we had the best relations with Taipei….Taiwan. The very best relations, and very profitable. Nixon threw the entire thing out of balance and then the war in Vietnam was another factor. Very complex.

GD: I have plenty of time.

RTC: It was the drug business in the final analysis.

GD: There have been stories around about that.

RTC: Can’t be proven. We get curious reporters fired for even hinting at that. Anyway, it started in ’44-’45 with Jim’s Italian connections in Naples and Palermo.

GD: Angleton?

RTC: Yes, of course. Jim had lived in Italy as a child and spoke the language fluently. He knew the Mafia people in Sicily and the gangs in Naples, not to mention the Union Corse people in Corsica. I mean it was to get their assistance in intelligence matters. First against the Germans and then against the local Communists. Jim was very effective but I don’t think he realized that by asking for favors, he put himself in the position of having to give favors back again. That’s how they are, you know.

GD: I’ve known one or two. Yes, very much that way. Didn’t he realize he was making a bargain with the Devil?

RTC: No, Jim did not. The Italians he grew up with were not that way. I knew a few of those people through my father. He was involved in politics in Chicago in the old days and that means a guaranteed association with the Mob.

GD: And they called in their markers?

RTC: Oh, yes, they did. And that’s how the drug connections got started. The Italian gangsters helped Angleton when he was there with the OSS and then later, they called their markers in with him. Not much at first but much more later. Opium makes morphine and refined morphine makes heroin. You must know that. Turkey has opium fields and so do a number of places in SEA. Burma, for example. Once you get into that sort of thing, Gregory, you can’t get out again. And we comforted ourselves that the actual movers and shakers were doing the dirty work and, at the same time, assisting us with intelligence matters. Killing off enemies, securing sensitive areas and that sort of thing. Naples and Palermo to begin with and later Corsica. And then in Asia, Burma first. We were big supporters of Chiang and when the Commies forced him out of mainland China, he went to Taiwan and one of his top generals, Li Mi, went south with his military command and got into former French Indochina and then into Burma. He had a large contingent of troops, thousands, and both us and the French supplied him with weapons and he, in turn, set up opium farms and we, but not the French, flew out the raw products to be refined in the Mediterranean. The weapons were often surplus World War Two pieces out of Sea Supply in Florida. As a note for your interest, we shipped tons of former Nazi weapons from Poland to Guatemala when we kicked out Guzman there. You have to understand that the Company was huge and compartmented, so most of the people knew nothing about the drugs. Of course the various DCIs did and Colby, who later was DCI, ran the drug business out of Cambodia.

GD: The Air American thing?

RTC: Among others. We actually used official military aircraft to ship when we couldn’t use our own proprietary people. Angleton had mob connections and they used him far more than he used them, but he did not dare try to back out. It got way out of hand but none of us wanted to bell that cat, believe me. And we finally flew out Li Mi with thirteen millions in gold bars. Flew him to safety in Switzerland.

GD: That stopped the drugs?

RTC: No, it all came under new management. Colby was very efficient.

GD: As a point of interest here, Robert, is that why they snuffed him?

RTC: Partially. He knew too much and no one dared to gig him too hard over the civilian killings he ran in Vietnam. There was always the danger he would break down. He was getting along in years and that’s when we have to watch these boys carefully. A heart attack here, an accidental drowning there. After we drowned Colby, we tore his summer place to bits and then ransacked his Dent Place address. Not to mention getting our friendly bankers to let us go through his safe deposit boxes. After hours, of course.

GD: Of course. You weren’t involved, were you?

RTC: In what? Removing these dangerous people? In some cases. I had nothing directly to do with the drugs. That was mostly Angleton.

GD: He must have gotten rich.

RTC: Not really.

GD: But Nixon….was he in the drug business too?

RTC: No. Nixon was a nut, Gregory. A poor boy elevated on high and couldn’t handle the upper levels. Very smart but got to believe his own power. The second election, a landslide, convinced him that he was invulnerable. He wasn’t and he began to play games with China. By playing nice with them, he outraged Taiwan and we all do much business with those people. Drugs and other things. Never mind all that, because it’s still going on. Anyway, they bitched to us, louder and louder, that Nixon would listen to Mao and dump them. If they got dumped, they would tell all and none of us could stand that, so we decided to get Nixon removed. No point of doing a Kennedy on him, but he had to go. After Spiro got the boot, Jerry Ford took over and we knew we would never have any problem with good old Jerry. Hell, during the Warren Commission, good old Jerry ran to Hoover every night with the latest information, so we knew he was a loyal player.

GD: And now did you do it?

RTC: Get rid of Tricky Dick? He did it to himself. We supplied him with a team of our men after we convinced him that everyone was plotting against him. I told you he was getting strange. I think paranoid is a better word. Anyway, we convinced him that McGovern was getting money from Castro and he sent our people to break into the Democrat offices in the Watergate. To get the proof that didn’t exist. They went there to get caught. They taped open the door and one of our people called local security. You know the rest, I am sure. Nixon did it to himself in the end. We just supplied the push. And Ford did what he was told and everyone was happy again.

GD: No wonder they call the stuff powdered happiness.

RTC: (Laughter) I haven’t heard that but it’s fitting. I remember we were afraid Nixon might call out the military, so we stuck Alex Haig in there to keep him isolated. Haig was a real nut but he did his job very well. And another government change, but this time there were no inconvenient questions about Oswald and Ruby types for the nut fringe to babble about. No, Nixon did it to himself.

GD: It didn’t do the country any good, this drawn-out death agony.

RTC: It would not have been a good idea to shoot him, not after the fuss after Kennedy. And Formosa is happy and we are happy and the drugs are still moving around, making everyone money. Just think what we were able to do with our share of mystery cash. No Congress to badger us about our budgets at all. We got billions from them and more billions in cash from the other stuff, so we were all sitting in the catbird seat. Nixon was one man and he had served his usefulness. Notice he’s had a nice retirement.

GD: And so has Ford.

RTC: Ford was a classic pawn. Washington is full of them, Gregory. And I strongly urge you to keep away from this subject if and when you decide to write about things. The Company is not as keen on killing everyone like it used to be, but I don’t think you want to run up against the Mob.

GD: No, of course not.

RTC: That’s a smart fellow, Gregory. Go after dead CIA people but keep away from the Mob. Got it?

GD: Got it loud and clear.

 

(Concluded at 9:30 AM CST)

 

How the FBI’s assault on security provoked a backlash

Attempts to undermine iPhone encryption backfired spectacularly. Businesses, the intelligence community, and ordinary people have united to say ‘no’

March 16, 2016

by Trevor Timm

The Guardian

The FBI’s underhand attempt to get a judge to order Apple to make iPhones less secure is largely backfiring. The Obama administration is now taking heat from all sides in the debate over whether they can force Apple to open a backdoor in its encryption – despite there being no law that requires it.

The FBI’s primary case against Apple was once considered about as sympathetic for the government as it gets: the original phone in question belonged to one of the deceased San Bernardino terrorists, and was owned by a city which had already given permission to break into it. But thankfully, the public now realizes that this case is about much more than just “one phone” (as the FBI once tried to pretend, before admitting that the case would set a precedent that would allow them to break into thousands of them).

What really is at stake is the future of internet security, and whether the government can force tech companies to become arms of the state.

The outpouring of legal support that Apple received in the San Bernardino case is almost unprecedented, with over 40 separate “friend of the court” briefs filed by a variety of actors, including the major tech companies, law professors, civil liberties groups, Black Lives Matter activists, iPhone security experts and even the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression.

Congress, which normally showers FBI director Jim Comey with praise, greeted him with an unexpected bipartisan grilling when he appeared before the House judiciary committee to discuss the issue earlier this month.

But it’s not just Congress that’s pushing back against the idea that the government should get backdoor access to consumer devices: a New York court has already strongly ruled against the justice department’s argument in a similar case. As the New York Times reported on Monday: “Many in the [Obama] administration have begun to suspect that the FBI and the Justice Department may have made a major strategic error by pushing the case into the public consciousness.”

As Reuters has previously detailed, officials from the commerce department, the state department and the White House’s own office of science and technology have all argued internally that the administration should be embracing encryption, not fighting against it.

But the intelligence community also seems to be on the side of better internet security. Defense secretary Ashton Carter made unusually forceful remarks about the importance of encryption in his recent visit to Silicon Valley and came out against any legislation that would weaken or ban it. “Several key NSA officials” also reportedly disagree with the FBI’s move to force Apple’s hand.

And Richard Clarke, counter-terrorism czar under Clinton and Bush, had a harsh message for the FBI in an NPR interview this week, claiming that the FBI and justice department are alone in this fight, and that virtually all other federal agencies recognize that the benefits encryption provide to cybersecurity far outweigh its potential drawbacks.

Meanwhile, every new poll that has come out has shown good news for Apple, even when the questions are framed in a light that is favorable to the government. The first poll that came out shortly after the dispute with the FBI became public showed that a solid 37% of the people favored Apple. When two polls that came out a few days afterwards – once it became clear that this dispute was much broader than just one phone – more of the public favored Apple than the government. This is a remarkable development, considering the government has framed this around a terrorism case.

Most importantly, far from scaring technology companies into potentially disrupting any plans to move forward on new products that use encryption, the public case may have only spurred them to accelerate their plans to double down on it. Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly told colleagues he has no plans to back down and the company will continue to work towards encrypting everything stored on all Apple devices – including iCloud, where millions of people back up their devices.

In addition, Facebook, Google and Snapchat are all reportedly exploring more ways they can more strongly encrypt the communications of their customers, as reported by the Guardian’s Danny Yadron on Monday. Even Amazon, which planned to remove encryption on its Fire devices, was hit with a strong public backlash when the decision was announced last week. The company has since reversed course, telling customers they will be able to fully encrypt their devices again in the spring.

Make no mistake: the FBI is not going to give up easily in this fight. The justice department has brought at least 12 other cases around the country asking for similar measures, and they are reportedly thinking about going after Facebook’s WhatsApp – which uses end-to-end encryption for texts messages and phone calls – next.

But it is heartening to see that the public has a much better understanding of the consequences to our privacy and security than the FBI bargained for.

 

The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism Governmental control is nothing compared to what Google is up to.

The company is creating a wholly new genus of capitalism, a systemic coherent new logic of accumulation we should call surveillance capitalism. Is there nothing we can do?

March 5, 2016

by Shoshana Zuboff

F.A.Z.

Google as a Fortune Teller

Google surpassed Apple as the world’s most highly valued company in January for the first time since 2010. (Back then each company was worth less than 200 billion. Now each is valued at well over 500 billion.) While Google’s new lead lasted only a few days, the company’s success has implications for everyone who lives within the reach of the Internet. Why? Because Google is ground zero for a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior. This is a new surveillance capitalism that is unimaginable outside the inscrutable high velocity circuits of Google’s digital universe, whose signature feature is the Internet and its successors. While the world is riveted by the showdown between Apple and the FBI, the real truth is that the surveillance capabilities being developed by surveillance capitalists are the envy of every state security agency. What are the secrets of this new capitalism, how do they produce such staggering wealth, and how can we protect ourselves from its invasive power?

“Most Americans realize that there are two groups of people who are monitored regularly as they move about the country. The first group is monitored involuntarily by a court order requiring that a tracking device be attached to their ankle. The second group includes everyone else…”

Some will think that this statement is certainly true. Others will worry that it could become true. Perhaps some think it’s ridiculous. It’s not a quote from a dystopian novel, a Silicon Valley executive, or even an NSA official. These are the words of an auto insurance industry consultant intended as a defense of “automotive telematics” and the astonishingly intrusive surveillance capabilities of the allegedly benign systems that are already in use or under development. It’s an industry that has been notoriously exploitative toward customers and has had obvious cause to be anxious about the implications of self-driving cars for its business model. Now, data about where we are, where we’re going, how we’re feeling, what we’re saying, the details of our driving, and the conditions of our vehicle are turning into beacons of revenue that illuminate a new commercial prospect. According to the industry literature, these data can be used for dynamic real-time driver behavior modification triggering punishments (real-time rate hikes, financial penalties, curfews, engine lock-downs) or rewards (rate discounts, coupons, gold stars to redeem for future benefits).

Bloomberg Business Week notes that these automotive systems will give insurers a chance to boost revenue by selling customer driving data in the same way that Google profits by collecting information on those who use its search engine. The CEO of Allstate Insurance wants to be like Google. He says, “There are lots of people who are monetizing data today. You get on Google, and it seems like it’s free. It’s not free. You’re giving them information; they sell your information. Could we, should we, sell this information we get from people driving around to various people and capture some additional profit source…? It’s a long-term game.”

Who are these “various people” and what is this “long-term game”? The game is no longer about sending you a mail order catalogue or even about targeting online advertising. The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life –your reality—in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit. This is the gateway to a new universe of monetization opportunities: restaurants who want to be your destination. Service vendors who want to fix your brake pads. Shops who will lure you like the fabled Sirens. The “various people” are anyone, and everyone who wants a piece of your behavior for profit. Small wonder, then, that Google recently announced that its maps will not only provide the route you search but will also suggest a destination.

The goal: to change people’s actual behavior at scale

This is just one peephole, in one corner, of one industry, and the peepholes are multiplying like cockroaches. Among the many interviews I’ve conducted over the past three years, the Chief Data Scientist of a much-admired Silicon Valley company that develops applications to improve students’ learning told me, “The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale. When people use our app, we can capture their behaviors, identify good and bad behaviors, and develop ways to reward the good and punish the bad. We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable for us”.

The very idea of a functional, effective, affordable product as a sufficient basis for economic exchange is dying. The sports apparel company Under Armour is reinventing its products as wearable technologies. The CEO wants to be like Google. He says, “If it all sounds eerily like those ads that, because of your browsing history, follow you around the Internet, that’s exactly the point–except Under Armour is tracking real behavior and the data is more specific… making people better athletes makes them need more of our gear.” The examples of this new logic are endless, from smart vodka bottles to Internet-enabled rectal thermometers and quite literally everything in between. A Goldman Sachs report calls it a “gold rush,” a race to “vast amounts of data.”

The assault on behavioral data

We’ve entered virgin territory here. The assault on behavioral data is so sweeping that it can no longer be circumscribed by the concept of privacy and its contests. This is a different kind of challenge now, one that threatens the existential and political canon of the modern liberal order defined by principles of self-determination that have been centuries, even millennia, in the making. I am thinking of matters that include, but are not limited to, the sanctity of the individual and the ideals of social equality; the development of identity, autonomy, and moral reasoning; the integrity of contract, the freedom that accrues to the making and fulfilling of promises; norms and rules of collective agreement; the functions of market democracy; the political integrity of societies; and the future of democratic sovereignty. In the fullness of time, we will look back on the establishment in Europe of the “Right to be Forgotten” and the EU’s more recent invalidation of the Safe Harbor doctrine as early milestones in a gradual reckoning with the true dimensions of this challenge.

There was a time when we laid responsibility for the assault on behavioral data at the door of the state and its security agencies. Later, we also blamed the cunning practices of a handful of banks, data brokers, and Internet companies. Some attribute the assault to an inevitable “age of big data,” as if it were possible to conceive of data born pure and blameless, data suspended in some celestial place where facts sublimate into truth.

Capitalism has been hijacked by surveillance

I’ve come to a different conclusion: The assault we face is driven in large measure by the exceptional appetites of a wholly new genus of capitalism, a systemic coherent new logic of accumulation that I call surveillance capitalism. Capitalism has been hijacked by a lucrative surveillance project that subverts the “normal” evolutionary mechanisms associated with its historical success and corrupts the unity of supply and demand that has for centuries, however imperfectly, tethered capitalism to the genuine needs of its populations and societies, thus enabling the fruitful expansion of market democracy.

Surveillance capitalism is a novel economic mutation bred from the clandestine coupling of the vast powers of the digital with the radical indifference and intrinsic narcissism of the financial capitalism and its neoliberal vision that have dominated commerce for at least three decades, especially in the Anglo economies. It is an unprecedented market form that roots and flourishes in lawless space. It was first discovered and consolidated at Google, then adopted by Facebook, and quickly diffused across the Internet. Cyberspace was its birthplace because, as Google/Alphabet Chairperson Eric Schmidt and his coauthor, Jared Cohen, celebrate on the very first page of their book about the digital age, “the online world is not truly bound by terrestrial laws…it’s the world’s largest ungoverned space.”

While surveillance capitalism taps the invasive powers of the Internet as the source of capital formation and wealth creation, it is now, as I have suggested, poised to transform commercial practice across the real world too. An analogy is the rapid spread of mass production and administration throughout the industrialized world in the early twentieth century, but with one major caveat. Mass production was interdependent with its populations who were its consumers and employees. In contrast, surveillance capitalism preys on dependent populations who are neither its consumers nor its employees and are largely ignorant of its procedures.

Internet access as a fundamental human right

We once fled to the Internet as solace and solution, our needs for effective life thwarted by the distant and increasingly ruthless operations of late twentieth century capitalism. In less than two decades after the Mosaic web browser was released to the public enabling easy access to the World Wide Web, a 2010 BBC poll found that 79% of people in 26 countries considered Internet access to be a fundamental human right. This is the Scylla and Charybdis of our plight. It is nearly impossible to imagine effective social participation ––from employment, to education, to healthcare–– without Internet access and know-how, even as these once flourishing networked spaces fall to a new and even more exploitative capitalist regime. It’s happened quickly and without our understanding or agreement. This is because the regime’s most poignant harms, now and later, have been difficult to grasp or theorize, blurred by extreme velocity and camouflaged by expensive and illegible machine operations, secretive corporate practices, masterful rhetorical misdirection, and purposeful cultural misappropriation.

Taming this new force depends upon careful naming. This symbiosis of naming and taming is vividly illustrated in the recent history of HIV research, and I offer it as analogy. For three decades scientists aimed to create a vaccine that followed the logic of earlier cures, training the immune system to produce neutralizing antibodies, but mounting data revealed unanticipated behaviors of the HIV virus that defy the patterns of other infectious diseases.

HIV research as analogy

The tide began to turn at the International AIDS Conference in 2012, when new strategies were presented that rely on a close understanding of the biology of rare HIV carriers whose blood produces natural antibodies. Research began to shift toward methods that reproduce this self-vaccinating response. A leading researcher announced, “We know the face of the enemy now, and so we have some real clues about how to approach the problem.”

The point for us is that every successful vaccine begins with a close understanding of the enemy disease. We tend to rely on mental models, vocabularies, and tools distilled from past catastrophes. I am thinking of the twentieth century’s totalitarian nightmares or the monopolistic predations of Gilded Age capitalism. But the vaccines we’ve developed to fight those earlier threats are not sufficient or even appropriate for the novel challenges we face. It’s like we’re hurling snowballs at a smooth marble wall only to watch them slide down its façade, leaving nothing but a wet smear: a fine paid here, an operational detour there.

An evolutionary dead-end

I want to say plainly that surveillance capitalism is not the only current modality of information capitalism, nor is it the only possible model for the future. Its fast track to capital accumulation and rapid institutionalization, however, has made it the default model of information capitalism. The questions I pose are these: Will surveillance capitalism become the dominant logic of accumulation in our time or, will it be an evolutionary dead-end –– a toothed bird in capitalism’s longer journey? What will an effective vaccine entail?

A cure depends upon many individual, social, and legal adaptations, but I am convinced that fighting the “enemy disease” cannot begin without a fresh grasp of the novel mechanisms that account for surveillance capitalism’s successful transformation of investment into capital. This has been one focus of my work in a new book, Master or Slave: The Fight for the Soul of Our Information Civilization, which will be published early next year. In the short space of this essay, I’d like to share some of my thoughts on this problem.

Fortune telling and selling

New economic logics and their commercial models are discovered by people in a time and place and then perfected through trial and error. Ford discovered and systematized mass production. General Motors institutionalized mass production as a new phase of capitalist development with the discovery and perfection of large-scale administration and professional management. In our time, Google is to surveillance capitalism what Ford and General Motors were to mass-production and managerial capitalism a century ago: discoverer, inventor, pioneer, role model, lead practitioner, and diffusion hub.

Specifically, Google is the mothership and ideal type of a new economic logic based on fortune telling and selling, an ancient and eternally lucrative craft that has exploited the human confrontation with uncertainty from the beginning of the human story. Paradoxically, the certainty of uncertainty is both an enduring source of anxiety and one of our most fruitful facts. It produced the universal need for social trust and cohesion, systems of social organization, familial bonding, and legitimate authority, the contract as formal recognition of reciprocal rights and obligations, and the theory and practice of what we call “free will.” When we eliminate uncertainty, we forfeit the human replenishment that attaches to the challenge of asserting predictability in the face of an always-unknown future in favor of the blankness of perpetual compliance with someone else’s plan.

Only incidentally related to advertising

Most people credit Google’s success to its advertising model. But the discoveries that led to Google’s rapid rise in revenue and market capitalization are only incidentally related to advertising. Google’s success derives from its ability to predict the future – specifically the future of behavior. Here is what I mean:

From the start, Google had collected data on users’ search-related behavior as a byproduct of query activity. Back then, these data logs were treated as waste, not even safely or methodically stored. Eventually, the young company came to understand that these logs could be used to teach and continuously improve its search engine.

The problem was this: Serving users with amazing search results “used up” all the value that users created when they inadvertently provided behavioral data. It’s a complete and self-contained process in which users are ends-in-themselves. All the value that users create is reinvested in the user experience in the form of improved search. In this cycle, there was nothing left over for Google to turn into capital. As long as the effectiveness of the search engine needed users’ behavioral data about as much as users needed search, charging a fee for service was too risky. Google was cool, but it wasn’t yet capitalism –– just one of many Internet startups that boasted “eyeballs” but no revenue.

Shift in the use of behavioral data

The year 2001 brought the dot.com bust and mounting investor pressures at Google. Back then advertisers selected the search term pages for their displays. Google decided to try and boost ad revenue by applying its already substantial analytical capabilities to the challenge of increasing an ad’s relevance to users –– and thus its value to advertisers. Operationally this meant that Google would finally repurpose its growing cache of behavioral data. Now the data would also be used to match ads with keywords, exploiting subtleties that only its access to behavioral data, combined with its analytical capabilities, could reveal.

It’s now clear that this shift in the use of behavioral data was an historic turning point. Behavioral data that were once discarded or ignored were rediscovered as what I call behavioral surplus. Google’s dramatic success in “matching” ads to pages revealed the transformational value of this behavioral surplus as a means of generating revenue and ultimately turning investment into capital. Behavioral surplus was the game-changing zero-cost asset that could be diverted from service improvement toward a genuine market exchange. Key to this formula, however, is the fact that this new market exchange was not an exchange with users but rather with other companies who understood how to make money from bets on users’ future behavior. In this new context, users were no longer an end-in-themselves. Instead they became a means to profits in a new kind of marketplace in which users are neither buyers nor sellers nor products. Users are the source of free raw material that feeds a new kind of manufacturing process.

While these facts are known, their significance has not been fully appreciated or adequately theorized. What just happened was the discovery of a surprisingly profitable commercial equation –– a series of lawful relationships that were gradually institutionalized in the sui generis economic logic of surveillance capitalism. It’s like a newly sighted planet with its own physics of time and space, its sixty-seven hour days, emerald sky, inverted mountain ranges, and dry water.

A parasitic form of profit

The equation: First, the push for more users and more channels, services, devices, places, and spaces is imperative for access to an ever-expanding range of behavioral surplus. Users are the human nature-al resource that provides this free raw material. Second, the application of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science for continuous algorithmic improvement constitutes an immensely expensive, sophisticated, and exclusive twenty-first century “means of production.” Third, the new manufacturing process converts behavioral surplus into prediction products designed to predict behavior now and soon. Fourth, these prediction products are sold into a new kind of meta-market that trades exclusively in future behavior. The better (more predictive) the product, the lower the risks for buyers, and the greater the volume of sales. Surveillance capitalism’s profits derive primarily, if not entirely, from such markets for future behavior.

While advertisers have been the dominant buyers in the early history of this new kind of marketplace, there is no substantive reason why such markets should be limited to this group. The already visible trend is that any actor with an interest in monetizing probabilistic information about our behavior and/or influencing future behavior can pay to play in a marketplace where the behavioral fortunes of individuals, groups, bodies, and things are told and sold. This is how in our own lifetimes we observe capitalism shifting under our gaze: once profits from products and services, then profits from speculation, and now profits from surveillance. This latest mutation may help explain why the explosion of the digital has failed, so far, to decisively impact economic growth, as so many of its capabilities are diverted into a fundamentally parasitic form of profit.

Unoriginal Sin

The significance of behavioral surplus was quickly camouflaged, both at Google and eventually throughout the Internet industry, with labels like “digital exhaust,” “digital breadcrumbs,” and so on. These euphemisms for behavioral surplus operate as ideological filters, in exactly the same way that the earliest maps of the North American continent labeled whole regions with terms like “heathens,” “infidels,” “idolaters,” “primitives,” “vassals,” or “rebels.” On the strength of those labels, native peoples, their places and claims, were erased from the invaders’ moral and legal equations, legitimating their acts of taking and breaking in the name of Church and Monarchy.

We are the native peoples now whose tacit claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own behavior. They are erased in an astonishing and audacious act of dispossession by surveillance that claims its right to ignore every boundary in its thirst for knowledge of and influence over the most detailed nuances of our behavior. For those who wondered about the logical completion of the global processes of commodification, the answer is that they complete themselves in the dispossession of our intimate quotidian reality, now reborn as behavior to be monitored and modified, bought and sold.

The process that began in cyberspace mirrors the nineteenth century capitalist expansions that preceded the age of imperialism. Back then, as Hannah Arendt described it in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “the so-called laws of capitalism were actually allowed to create realities” as they traveled to less developed regions where law did not follow. “The secret of the new happy fulfillment,” she wrote, “was precisely that economic laws no longer stood in the way of the greed of the owning classes.” There, “money could finally beget money,” without having to go “the long way of investment in production…”

“The original sin of simple robbery”

For Arendt, these foreign adventures of capital clarified an essential mechanism of capitalism. Marx had developed the idea of “primitive accumulation” as a big-bang theory –– Arendt called it “the original sin of simple robbery” –– in which the taking of lands and natural resources was the foundational event that enabled capital accumulation and the rise of the market system. The capitalist expansions of the 1860s and 1870s demonstrated, Arendt wrote, that this sort of original sin had to be repeated over and over, “lest the motor of capital accumulation suddenly die down.”

In his book The New Imperialism, geographer and social theorist David Harvey built on this insight with his notion of “accumulation by dispossession.” “What accumulation by dispossession does,” he writes, “is to release a set of assets…at very low (and in some instances zero) cost. Over accumulated capital can seize hold of such assets and immediately turn them to profitable use…It can also reflect attempts by determined entrepreneurs…to ‘join the system’ and seek the benefits of capital accumulation.”

Breakthrough into “the system”

The process by which behavioral surplus led to the discovery of surveillance capitalism exemplifies this pattern. It is the foundational act of dispossession for a new logic of capitalism built on profits from surveillance that paved the way for Google to become a capitalist enterprise. Indeed, in 2002, Google’s first profitable year, founder Sergey Brin relished his breakthrough into “the system”, as he told Levy,

Honestly, when we were still in the dot-com boom days, I felt like a schmuck. I had an Internet start-     up — so did everybody else. It was unprofitable, like everybody else’s, and how hard is that? But when we became profitable, I felt like we had built a real business.”

Brin was a capitalist all right, but it was a mutation of capitalism unlike anything the world had seen.

Once we understand this equation, it becomes clear that demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand. It’s like asking a giraffe to shorten its neck or a cow to give up chewing. Such demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity’s survival. How can we expect companies whose economic existence depends upon behavioral surplus to cease capturing behavioral data voluntarily?   It’s like asking for suicide.

More behavioral surplus for Google

The imperatives of surveillance capitalism mean that there must always be more behavioral surplus for Google and others to turn into surveillance assets, master as prediction, sell into exclusive markets for future behavior, and transform into capital. At Google and its new holding company called Alphabet, for example, every operation and investment aims to increasing the harvest of behavioral surplus from people, bodies, things, processes, and places in both the virtual and the real world.   This is how a sixty-seven hour day dawns and darkens in an emerald sky. Nothing short of a social revolt that revokes collective agreement to the practices associated with the dispossession of behavior will alter surveillance capitalism’s claim to manifest data destiny.

What is the new vaccine? We need to reimagine how to intervene in the specific mechanisms that produce surveillance profits and in so doing reassert the primacy of the liberal order in the twenty-first century capitalist project. In undertaking this challenge we must be mindful that contesting Google, or any other surveillance capitalist, on the grounds of monopoly is a 20th century solution to a 20th century problem that, while still vitally important, does not necessarily disrupt surveillance capitalism’s commercial equation. We need new interventions that interrupt, outlaw, or regulate 1) the initial capture of behavioral surplus, 2) the use of behavioral surplus as free raw material, 3) excessive and exclusive concentrations of the new means of production, 4) the manufacture of prediction products, 5) the sale of prediction products, 6) the use of prediction products for third-order operations of modification, influence, and control, and 5) the monetization of the results of these operations. This is necessary for society, for people, for the future, and it is also necessary to restore the healthy evolution of capitalism itself.

A coup from above

In the conventional narrative of the privacy threat, institutional secrecy has grown, and individual privacy rights have been eroded. But that framing is misleading, because privacy and secrecy are not opposites but rather moments in a sequence. Secrecy is an effect; privacy is the cause. Exercising one’s right to privacy produces choice, and one can choose to keep something secret or to share it. Privacy rights thus confer decision rights, but these decision rights are merely the lid on the Pandora’s Box of the liberal order. Inside the box, political and economic sovereignty meet and mingle with even deeper and subtler causes: the idea of the individual, the emergence of the self, the felt experience of free will.

Surveillance capitalism does not erode these decision rights –– along with their causes and their effects –– but rather it redistributes them. Instead of many people having some rights, these rights have been concentrated within the surveillance regime, opening up an entirely new dimension of social inequality. The full implications of this development have preoccupied me for many years now, and with each day my sense of danger intensifies. The space of this essay does not allow me to follow these facts to their conclusions, but I offer this thought in summary.

Surveillance capitalism reaches beyond the conventional institutional terrain of the private firm. It accumulates not only surveillance assets and capital, but also rights. This unilateral redistribution of rights sustains a privately administered compliance regime of rewards and punishments that is largely free from detection or sanction. It operates without meaningful mechanisms of consent either in the traditional form of “exit, voice, or loyalty” associated with markets or in the form of democratic oversight expressed in law and regulation.

Profoundly anti-democratic power

In result, surveillance capitalism conjures a profoundly anti-democratic power that qualifies as a coup from above: not a coup d’état, but rather a coup des gens, an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty. It challenges principles and practices of self-determination ––in psychic life and social relations, politics and governance –– for which humanity has suffered long and sacrificed much. For this reason alone, such principles should not be forfeit to the unilateral pursuit of a disfigured capitalism. Worse still would be their forfeit to our own ignorance, learned helplessness, inattention, inconvenience, habituation, or drift. This, I believe, is the ground on which our contests for the future will be fought.

Hannah Arendt once observed that indignation is the natural human response to that which degrades human dignity. Referring to her work on the origins of totalitarianism she wrote, “If I describe these conditions without permitting my indignation to interfere, then I have lifted this particular phenomenon out of its context in human society and have thereby robbed it of part of its nature, deprived it of one of its important inherent qualities.”

So it is for me and perhaps for you: The bare facts of surveillance capitalism necessarily arouse my indignation because they demean human dignity. The future of this narrative will depend upon the indignant scholars and journalists drawn to this frontier project, indignant elected officials and policy makers who understand that their authority originates in the foundational values of democratic communities, and indignant citizens who act in the knowledge that effectiveness without autonomy is not effective, dependency-induced compliance is no social contract, and freedom from uncertainty is no freedom. The process by which behavioral surplus led to the discovery of surveillance capitalism exemplifies this pattern. It is the foundational act of dispossession for a new logic of capitalism built on profits from surveillance that paved the way for Google to become a capitalist enterprise. Indeed, in 2002, Google’s first profitable year, founder Sergey Brin relished his breakthrough into “the system”, as he told Levy,

Honestly, when we were still in the dot-com boom days, I felt like a schmuck. I had an Internet start-     up — so did everybody else. It was unprofitable, like everybody else’s, and how hard is that? But when we became profitable, I felt like we had built a real business.”

Brin was a capitalist all right, but it was a mutation of capitalism unlike anything the world had seen.

Once we understand this equation, it becomes clear that demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand. It’s like asking a giraffe to shorten its neck or a cow to give up chewing. Such demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity’s survival. How can we expect companies whose economic existence depends upon behavioral surplus to cease capturing behavioral data voluntarily?   It’s like asking for suicide.

More behavioral surplus for Google

The imperatives of surveillance capitalism mean that there must always be more behavioral surplus for Google and others to turn into surveillance assets, master as prediction, sell into exclusive markets for future behavior, and transform into capital. At Google and its new holding company called Alphabet, for example, every operation and investment aims to increasing the harvest of behavioral surplus from people, bodies, things, processes, and places in both the virtual and the real world.   This is how a sixty-seven hour day dawns and darkens in an emerald sky. Nothing short of a social revolt that revokes collective agreement to the practices associated with the dispossession of behavior will alter surveillance capitalism’s claim to manifest data destiny.

What is the new vaccine? We need to reimagine how to intervene in the specific mechanisms that produce surveillance profits and in so doing reassert the primacy of the liberal order in the twenty-first century capitalist project. In undertaking this challenge we must be mindful that contesting Google, or any other surveillance capitalist, on the grounds of monopoly is a 20th century solution to a 20th century problem that, while still vitally important, does not necessarily disrupt surveillance capitalism’s commercial equation. We need new interventions that interrupt, outlaw, or regulate 1) the initial capture of behavioral surplus, 2) the use of behavioral surplus as free raw material, 3) excessive and exclusive concentrations of the new means of production, 4) the manufacture of prediction products, 5) the sale of prediction products, 6) the use of prediction products for third-order operations of modification, influence, and control, and 5) the monetization of the results of these operations. This is necessary for society, for people, for the future, and it is also necessary to restore the healthy evolution of capitalism itself.

A coup from above

In the conventional narrative of the privacy threat, institutional secrecy has grown, and individual privacy rights have been eroded. But that framing is misleading, because privacy and secrecy are not opposites but rather moments in a sequence. Secrecy is an effect; privacy is the cause. Exercising one’s right to privacy produces choice, and one can choose to keep something secret or to share it. Privacy rights thus confer decision rights, but these decision rights are merely the lid on the Pandora’s Box of the liberal order. Inside the box, political and economic sovereignty meet and mingle with even deeper and subtler causes: the idea of the individual, the emergence of the self, the felt experience of free will.

Surveillance capitalism does not erode these decision rights –– along with their causes and their effects –– but rather it redistributes them. Instead of many people having some rights, these rights have been concentrated within the surveillance regime, opening up an entirely new dimension of social inequality. The full implications of this development have preoccupied me for many years now, and with each day my sense of danger intensifies. The space of this essay does not allow me to follow these facts to their conclusions, but I offer this thought in summary.

Surveillance capitalism reaches beyond the conventional institutional terrain of the private firm. It accumulates not only surveillance assets and capital, but also rights. This unilateral redistribution of rights sustains a privately administered compliance regime of rewards and punishments that is largely free from detection or sanction. It operates without meaningful mechanisms of consent either in the traditional form of “exit, voice, or loyalty” associated with markets or in the form of democratic oversight expressed in law and regulation.

Profoundly anti-democratic power

In result, surveillance capitalism conjures a profoundly anti-democratic power that qualifies as a coup from above: not a coup d’état, but rather a coup des gens, an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty. It challenges principles and practices of self-determination ––in psychic life and social relations, politics and governance –– for which humanity has suffered long and sacrificed much. For this reason alone, such principles should not be forfeit to the unilateral pursuit of a disfigured capitalism. Worse still would be their forfeit to our own ignorance, learned helplessness, inattention, inconvenience, habituation, or drift. This, I believe, is the ground on which our contests for the future will be fought.

Hannah Arendt once observed that indignation is the natural human response to that which degrades human dignity. Referring to her work on the origins of totalitarianism she wrote, “If I describe these conditions without permitting my indignation to interfere, then I have lifted this particular phenomenon out of its context in human society and have thereby robbed it of part of its nature, deprived it of one of its important inherent qualities.”

So it is for me and perhaps for you: The bare facts of surveillance capitalism necessarily arouse my indignation because they demean human dignity. The future of this narrative will depend upon the indignant scholars and journalists drawn to this frontier project, indignant elected officials and policy makers who understand that their authority originates in the foundational values of democratic communities, and indignant citizens who act in the knowledge that effectiveness without autonomy is not effective, dependency-induced compliance is no social contract, and freedom from uncertainty is no freedom.

 

Stargate and Stuxtnet: A History of Rampant Frau

by Harry von Johnston, PhD

 

Some of you have heard of the “Stuxtnet virus.” This is a secret virus that, to all intents and purposes, has been used to disrupt the Iranian uranium program by destroying their German-built centrifuges. Security experts at Symantec and Kaspersky Lab are in agreement this was a joint American/Israel state-sponsored effort involving intense research and development on a particular model of the PLC and the software used to program it

Work on the Stuxnet virus began in the spring of 2009, with the specific intention of targeting the Siemens controllers, whose design was well known and whose software and firmware controller logic was well known.

Stuxnet has four main components. The first spreads the virus through a print network, another to distribute the virus by loading itself onto USB drives, and the other two are rootkits for giving it administrator-level access to the system and to alter code being written to PLCs., a Programmable Logic Controller, a bank of processor-controlled virtual relays that link control systems to industrial machinery. The PLC has a processor-based central unit that runs an event-driven program to control the switching. This program can be entered manually on the PLC’s keypad, but in the case of Iran’s facility, it’s created using the editor software on a laptop and copied to a USB drive that was later plugged in to the PLC’s central unit.

In order to conceal its actual intent, the worm initially spreads indiscriminately, but in the Iranian case, included a highly specialized malware payload that is designed to target only Siemens Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems that are configured to control and monitor specific industrial processes

Byres Security believes the people behind Stuxnet were trying to achieve something bigger by extensively reworking the PLC’s code. This;, of course, is in line with inside information that that Obama, through Cass Sunstein is attempting to find a way to shut off any part of the Internet that he and his people deem as “overly revealing,” or “harmful to National Security” (here read ‘the government’s wishes’.) Shutting down the Iranian centrifuges was a joint American/Israeli project, via the CIA and its ally, SAIC but planned future attacks are purely domestic and reflect both the enemies of the White House and the CIA.

The entire operation is controlled, firstly by the CIA and through them, a company named SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) which, in turn, has set up another front called the Cipher Exchange Corporation. This is run by a former Indian naval intelligence officer and code specialist, one Raj Mohindir Srivastava. But this entire operation is heavily involved with some former CIA lunacy called “Operation Stargate” which once was termed “Remote Viewing.” This was the child of one Ingo Swann, a mountebank and close friend of the even crazier L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology infamy!

SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), is a American technology applications company headquartered in the United States and who works for a number of U.S. federal, state, and private sector clients. It works extensively with the United States Department of Defense, the United States Department of Homeland Security, and the American domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, as well as other U.S. Government civil agencies and selected commercial markets.From 2001 to 2005, SAIC was the primary contractor for the FBI’s unsuccessful Virtual Case File project. SAIC relocated its corporate headquarters to their existing facilities in Tysons Corner in unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia, near McLean, in September 2009. As part of its outsourcing solution, SAIC has development centers in Noida and Bangalore, India. Scicom Technologies Noida was acquired by SAIC in September 2007.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) transitioned a Remote Viewing Program to SAIC in 1991 and it was renamed Stargate Project. STARGATE was one of a number of “remote viewing programs” conducted under a variety of code names, including SUN STREAK, GRILL FLAME, and CENTER LANE by DIA and INSCOM, and SCANATE by the eccentrics at the CIA. These efforts were initiated to assess foreign programs in the field; contract for basic research into the phenomenon; and to evaluate controlled remote viewing as an intelligence tool.

The program consisted of two separate activities. An operational unit employed remote viewers to train and perform remote viewing intelligence-gathering. The research program was maintained separately from the operational unit.

This effort was initiated in response to CIA concerns about highly unreliable reports of Soviet investigations of ‘psychic phenomena.’ Between 1969 and 1971, US intelligence sources erroneously concluded that the Soviet Union was engaged in “psychotronic” research. By 1970, it was suggested that the Soviets were spending approximately 60 million rubles per year on it, and over 300 million by 1975. The money and personnel devoted to Soviet psychotronics suggested that they had achieved breakthroughs, even though the matter was considered speculative, controversial and “fringy.” Using a declared, but fictional ‘Soviet threat,’ the CIA and other agencies have successfully deluded Congress, and often the White House, into heavily funding project that the agencies consider to be ‘cash cows.’

The initial research program, called SCANATE [scan by coordinate] was funded by CIA beginning in 1970. Remote viewing research began in 1972 at the Stanford Research Institute [SRI] in Menlo Park, CA. This work was conducted by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, once with the NSA and a later-identified Scientologist. The effort initially focused on a few “gifted individuals” such as the very eccentric Ingo Swann, an OT Level VII Scientologist. Many of the SRI “empaths” were from the Church of Scientology. Individuals who appeared to show potential were trained and taught to use talents for “psychic warfare.” The minimum accuracy needed by the clients was said to be 65%, and proponents claim that in the later stages of the training effort, this accuracy level was “often consistently exceeded.”

Ingo Swann born in 1933 in Telluride, Colorado, has been heavily involved with the bizarre Scientology movement from its onset and is best known for his work as a co-creator (according to his frequent collaborators Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff) of what has been called ‘remote viewing,’ specifically the Stargate Project.

Swann has described himself as a “consciousness researcher” who had sometimes experienced “altered states of consciousness.” In other words, Swann actually believed that “special” individuals can leave their body and travel through space!

Swann helped develop the process of remote viewing at the Stanford Research Institute in experiments that caught the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency. He proposed the idea of Coordinate Remote Viewing, a process in which ‘remote viewers’ would see a location given nothing but its geographical coordinates,. This bizarre project, was developed and tested by Puthoff and Targ with CIA funding.. Details and transcripts of the SRI remote viewing experiments themselves were found to be edited and even unobtainable.

A Dr. Silfen and Swann prepared an unofficial report of later out-of-body experiments and circulated it to 500 members of the ASPR, before the ASPR board was aware of it. According to Swann, Dr. Silfen has ‘disappeared’ (or like so many other Scientology stories, never existed) and ‘cannot be located.’ Swann claimed he searched diligently for her and begged help from all his Scientology friends. According to Swann, in April 1972 a move was made at the ASPR in New York to discredit him and throw him out because he was a scientologist

GONDOLA WISH was a 1977 Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) Systems Exploitation Detachment (SED) effort to evaluate potential adversary applications of remote viewing.

Building on GONDOLA WISH, an operational collection project was formalized under Army intelligence as GRILL FLAME in mid-1978. Located in buildings 2560 and 2561 at Fort Meade, MD, GRILL FLAME, (INSCOM “Detachment G”) consisted of soldiers and a few civilians who were believed to possess varying degrees of natural psychic ability. The SRI research program was integrated into GRILL FLAME in early 1979, and hundreds of remote viewing experiments were carried out at SRI through 1986.

In 1983 the program was re-designated the INSCOM CENTER LANE Project (ICLP). Ingo Swann and Harold Puthoff at SRI developed a set of instructions which theoretically allowed anyone to be trained to produce accurate, detailed target data. used this new collection methodology against a wide range of operational and training targets. The existence of this highly classified program was reported by columnist Jack Anderson in April 1984.

In 1984 the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council evaluated the remote viewing program for the Army Research Institute. The results were unfavorable.

When Army funding ended in late 1985, the unit was redesignated SUN STREAK and transferred to DIA’s Scientific and Technical Intelligence Directorate, with the office code DT-S.

Under the auspices of the DIA, the program transitioned to Science Applications International Corporation [SAIC] in 1991 and was renamed STAR GATE. The project, changed from a SAP (Special Access Program) to a LIMDIS (limited dissemination) program, continued with the participation of Edwin May, who presided over 70% of the total contractor budget and 85% of the program’s data collection.

Over a period of more than two decades some $20 million were spent on STAR GATE and related activities, with $11 million budgeted from the mid-1980’s to the early 1990s. Over forty personnel served in the program at various times, including about 23 remote viewers. At its peak during the mid-1980s the program included as many as seven full-time viewers and as many analytical and support personnel. Three psychics were reportedly worked at FT Meade for the CIA from 1990 through July 1995. The psychics were made available to other government agencies which requested their services.

Participants who apparently demonstrated psychic abilities used at least three different techniques various times:

  • Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV) – the original SRI-developed technique in which viewers were asked what they “saw” at specified geographic coordinates
  • Extended Remote Viewing (ERV) – a hybrid relaxation/meditative-based method
  • Written Remote Viewing (WRV) – a hybrid of both channeling and automatic writing was introduced in 1988, though it proved controversial and was regarded by some as much less reliable.

By 1995 the program had conducted several hundred intelligence collection projects involving thousands of remote viewing sessions. Notable successes were said to be “eight martini” results, so-called because the remote viewing data were so mind-boggling that everyone has to go out and drink eight martinis to recover. It is now believed that they drank the martinis before the sessions.

The US ‘STARGATE” program was sustained through the support of Sen. Claiborne Pell, D-R.I., and Rep. Charles Rose, D-N.C., who were convinced of the program’s effectiveness. However, by the early 1990s the program was plagued by uneven and “often bizarre” management, poor unit morale, divisiveness within the organization, poor performance, and few, if any results that could be considered accurate.

The FY 1995 Defense Appropriations bill directed that the program be transferred to CIA, with CIA instructed to conduct a retrospective review of the program. In 1995 the American Institutes for Research (AIR) was contracted by CIA to evaluate the program. Their 29 September 1995 final report was released to the public 28 November 1995. It was highly negative in nature. The final recommendation by AIR was to terminate the STARGATE effort. CIA concluded that there was not a single case in which ESP had provided data used to guide intelligence operations.

In June 2001 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) paid SAIC $122 million to create a Virtual Case File (VCF) software system to speed up the sharing of information among agents. But the FBI abandoned VCF when it failed to function adequately. Robert Mueller, FBI Director, testified to a congressional committee, “When SAIC delivered the first product in December 2003 we immediately identified a number of deficiencies – 17 at the outset. That soon cascaded to 50 or more and ultimately to 400 problems with that software … We were indeed disappointed.”

 

Trump ‘winning’ by preying on worst liberal and conservative instincts

March 16, 2016

by Bill Schneider

Reuters

Trump is trouble. That became clear on Saturday when Donald Trump had to shut down a campaign rally in Chicago after violence broke out.

But it did not seem to do Trump a bit of harm at the polls three days later.

He virtually sewed up the Republican nomination with victories in Florida, Illinois and North Carolina. The obvious conclusion: Many of his supporters are asking for trouble.

A group of conservatives is meeting in Washington this week to plot strategies to deny Trump the nomination if he fails to win a majority on the first ballot at the Republican convention in July. Even if Trump has more delegates than anyone else. If the party tries to take the nomination away from him, a Trump supporter warned, “We’ll burn the place down.”

Trump is a crude populist. That doesn’t say very much because populism is not any one thing.

There’s left-wing populism, which targets wealth and privilege (“country-club conservatives”). That’s Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) with his relentless criticism of Wall Street and “the 1 percent.” There’s right-wing populism, which targets the snobbery and self-importance of the educated elite (“limousine liberals”). That’s Ben Carson with his relentless criticism of political correctness and the contempt of the well-educated for traditional religion.

Trump combines both.

Trump a left-wing populist? His attack on free trade is the same as Sanders’. Despite his wealth, he has no love for Wall Street (“The hedge fund guys are getting away with murder”). Nor they for him. Wall Street believes Trump would be a disaster for markets and the economy. The titans of Wall Street are spending millions of dollars on anti-Trump ads to try to deny him a majority of convention delegates.

Trump a right-wing populist? That would be his attacks on immigrants, minorities and women. Plus his embrace of old-fashioned isolationism where the United States avoids foreign intervention unless U.S. interests are directly threatened. Then we bomb them to smithereens. His strategy for dealing with Islamic State: “We bomb the shit out of ’em.”

Trump’s support cuts right across ideological categories. He does best among non-college-educated white voters, particularly men. That’s yet another element in Trump’s populism: the desire for a strongman. In 1959, the great sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote about “working-class authoritarianism” — the predisposition to intolerant, extreme and undemocratic attitudes among “lower-class persons.”

Trump has expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin. “He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” Trump said on MSNBC. As for Putin’s methods, “I think our country does plenty of killing also.”

Trump’s latest Putinesque move is to deny access to his events to news organizations that have been critical of him: The Des Moines Register, Univision, Fusion, The Huffington Post, National Review, Mother Jones, Buzzfeed and, most recently, Politico. It’s the same message he delivers to protesters at his rallies: “Get ’em out of here!” In his victory speech on Tuesday night, he made sure to call the media “disgusting.”

Many Americans seem to want a strongman for the very reason Trump gave. Because no one in government can get anything done. Washington is mired in gridlock. Trump promises to get things done his way, which he doesn’t bother to explain except to promise that he can “make America great again.” He doesn’t even bother with experts and advisers. (Asked whom he is consulting on foreign policy, Trump answered “My primary consultant is myself.”) He wants to do it his way. Alone.

Why is Trump winning the Republican race? Keep in mind that the United States is the most populist country in the world. Next to the United States, the rest of the world is Saudi Arabia.

That’s because this country was originally settled by runaways from authority — oppressive governments, established churches, closed economies. Distrust of elites is a deep-seated value that runs throughout American history. Ever notice how rich and powerful people — business executives, politicians, bureaucrats – are portrayed in U.S. popular culture? Usually as incompetent, corrupt or worse.

American politics, like the American economy, is highly entrepreneurial. Where there is a market, there will be a product. If there is an unpopular war, there will be an antiwar candidate. If voters are unhappy about high taxes, there will be an anti-tax candidate. If the public is fed up with politics as usual, outsiders will suddenly spring up to carry the anti-politics banner, like Ross Perot in 1992. And now Trump.

Exit polls reveal that the one characteristic that best defines Trump supporters is anger. Asked “Which best describes your feelings about the way the federal government is working?” most voters who say “angry” — rather than “enthusiastic,” “satisfied” or “dissatisfied — are voting for Trump.

What are they angry about? Two things: economic decline and the loss of cultural influence.

Trump does best among voters from the declining sectors of American life. A study by the New York Times. “The Geography of Trumpism” found that Trump does best in places with high percentages of whites with no high school diploma and low numbers of ethnic and religious minorities, “old economy” jobs like agriculture and manufacturing and low labor force participation rates. Appalachia, for example.

They are Americans who have been left out of the economic recovery, whose jobs are threatened by foreign trade, who are declining demographically and whose traditional religious and cultural values are under challenge. They’re an angry resistance movement, and Trump is their resistance leader. Ideology? They hate liberals like President Barack Obama with their snobbish condescension. And they hate conservatives like Mitt Romney with their heedless rapacity.

If the conservative effort to stop Trump fails, there will be only one thing standing between him and the presidency — Hillary Clinton. It may pose an agonizing choice for many voters. Two well-known figures, long in the public eye, both negatively regarded by a majority of Americans. Trump more so than Clinton — which is what gives Democrats hope.

Americans can all look forward to the first debate between Trump and Clinton on Sept. 26 in Dayton, Ohio. Sparks will fly. And the viewership will set records.

 

 

 

 

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