Tag Archives: Paranoia

Weird security

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Bruce Shneier’s blog discusses how to secure your laptop at international borders. Ignoring the fact that the Shneier methods are impressively ingenious – although, surely, in the sledgehammer-nut category – the truly amazing thing is that any government thinks “security” is served by searching laptops at airports.

I don’t mean “searched to make sure that they aren’t hiding bombs or weapons”. That would be a completely reasonable kind of search.

No, I mean searched, in the sense of “searching the hard drive.” This is absurd, in purely practical terms – ignoring the civil liberties questions – on so many levels. (I planned to list the practical difficulties of the idea, but they should be obvious to anyone who’s ever trawled their own hard disks for hours, in a quest for a two years old cv.)

The gaping elephant-in-the-room sized flaw in the whole procedure is the INTERNET. Any given piece-of-dangerous-information can be sitting comfortably on a computer in end-country x, hours before a courier-with-the-laptop has driven to an international airport in origin-country y. So, why the laptop searches?

The horror….

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fstdt is reliably hilarious. It’s like the old movie Being John Malkowitz – except that in the fstdt case, its a portal into the minds of people who are so barking mad that you wonder if there really are no mental health professionals in the USA.

As a side effect of indulging in giggling your way through a few quotes and following the links to the Rapture forums, the will to live can get vaporised.

It can make you despair for the whole human race. I start to wonder about the statistics. How many of these people are there per head of the global population? *shudder* Plus, you start adding in Islamic fundamentalists and Catholic fundamentalists, these numbers are looking pretty scary.

Well, don’t come out from behind the sofa yet. That’s just the religiously-inspired maniacs. There are plenty more non-religious lunatics where they came from.

Yes, I know about intersecting sets. I try to console myself with the thought that maybe all the conservapediacs and fundies and conspiracy nuts are the same people and that there’s only a limited pool* of them. (Wishful thinking. I think it’s called “denial” on Oprah.)

I came across one point at which the sets intersect in the rapture-ready thread entitled “Ever thought why we’re REALLY going to digital?” I saw the topic heading and tried to predict what the REAL reason for digital transmission would turn out to be. (I see you’re ahead of me here.) To usher in the end times, of course. I bet Jesus’s tv and radio sets were analog. It says so in the Bible, so it must be true.

But I was half-wrong. Although digital transmission is indeed Satan’s way to help bring about the end of the world, the main worry is that it lets the government listen in to all your conversations. (Spare a compassionate thought for the minor government employee paid to listen to the home lives of our own dear fundies, day in and day out. Death would be a blessed relief.) Through the speakers, which act as microphones….

Two words: Big Brother.
I’m not sure if this is true or not, but I heard if you plug a microphone into your speaker socket, you’ll hear sound coming out of it?
What do you all think about this? Is it true? It wouldn’t surprise me, but my question is “why”? I or my family never talk about anything interesting anyway. How do they keep track of millions of people? (from jaiu on rr)

Yeah, my friend tried it out and heard a strange static sound coming from the receiving end.
Also, get a loud speaker, plug it into the microphone socket, now speak into it, and it might record.
Why else would they be doing this?(from jaiu on rr)

Electrical devices do the electrical feedback things that they’ve always done – whether digital or not – and, just because a speaker can (sort of) act as a microphone, it must be part of a plan by some magically powerful “them” to eavesdrop on her family. …. Well, of course it must. What other conclusion could you draw?

The rest of the thread contains a mixture of apparently sane people trying to explain a few basic facts (about electrical devices and the difference between digital and analog) and more people for whom this little bit of rationality is so far over their heads that the saner commenters might as well have been speaking in Basque. Some examples of the latter:

I’m pretty sure that their plan is to watch us through our tv and maybe even tell us what to do. With an RFID chip installed in our bodies required to buy and sell they can just turn it off. The ultimate form of slavery and control.
I think going digital is somehow related to end time events.
All this has me worried, I think I am going to talk all my T.V.’s to the trash.
I know nothing about technology, but I definately believe everything that’s happening now is end time related (lifted from various comments)

OK, this stuff is just ignorant, rather than evil, unlike the “Palestinian babies are better off dead” and “Obama is a secret muslim Antichrist” comments that turn up all around the rest of the site, like the leaking dog turds that always appear on a field of snow.

But it’s not just a few simple-minded RR posters who are promoting digital-analog fear. It seems to be a fascinating component of a really paranoid worldview, so perfectly illustrated by The Truth and Light Ministeries site that I assume the site must be a parody.

(And yes, that’s how they spell it. The US-version spellchecker here is redlining it, so it can’t even be correct for US spelling. The odd word subliminally suggests a tv mini-series to me.)

This site claims that there are 2 reasons for the switch to digital: Reason 1 is that digital images can easily be faked. (Yes, everything used to be true before digital)

Undisclosed sources, experts on reverse technology have informed that any television set manufacture after 1995 has the capability not only to receive a broadcast signal, but to also send one. That’s correct, any television manufactured after 1995 already has a built in feature to send a broadcast signal from your living room of live images of what’s happening in your home.

Yeah, right. So, we are getting a video recorder that’s capable of broadcasting free with our tvs? We must be getting well and truly ripped off when we pay for camcorders, then, because they cost more than tvs and they don’t even let us watch tv at the same time. (My heart goes out again to any low-grade government functionaries forced to spend a working day looking at footage of people staring at “How Fat is your Celebrity Ice-dancer”, pausing occasionally to get a drink and to argue about shopping.)

I follow the “logic” of this argument. Apparently, fibre optics makes it possible, that’s why “they” want us to go digital. It turns out that the New World Order is to blame. Blimey, that New World Order gets everywhere and it’s apparently omniscient and omnipotent. (Maybe it’s god.)

Either the writer has no sense of irony, or else this Truth and Light Ministeries really is a spoof site – maybe a tribute site to the Illuminatus Trilogy – which is subtly undercutting its content with this final bible quote.

And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie

I am pretty impressed by the comedic potential of the link they have to Google video “The Prophecy Club. ” There’s one of a “scientist” explaining about Technology and the Mark of the Beast. (He’s a “scientist” so it must all be true.) However, despite the exciting title, the video redefined the phrase “excruciatingly dull” so I haven’t put a link.

This one (Exposing the Illuminati from Within) sounded even better for a chortle, given the presenter’s impressive list of demonic credentials, but the actual video disappointed by being too boring even for me to watch.

Exposing the Illuminati from Within. Part 2. Bill Schnoebelen was a Satanic and Voodoo High Priest, 2nd degree Church of Satan, New Age guru, occultist, channeler, 90th degree Mason, Knight Templar, and a member of the Illuminati. Bill shows how the conspiracy works and how it uses the Lodge and the highest echelons of power and technology to form a new world government.

Given that every single one of these paranoids is using computers and the Internet to spread their views, I would really hate to have to tell them a single basic truth about computers. You know, that little thing about them being digital.

* The best insult I’ve heard for weeks is “He got into the gene pool when the lifeguard wasn’t looking” So many opportunities to apply it, so little time.

Ministry of Peace

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Sorry if you were lulled into a false sense of living in Wallace and Grommit world. Welcome back to Oceania .

Under the title “Big Brother is watching us all” a BBC correspondent, Humphrey Hawkesley, decribes the next generation of surveillance being developed in Maryland University. “Gait DNA” is what they call the unique pattern of personal movements that will allow computers to track people walking through a crowd.

DARPA seemed to be developing a Babelfish style programme. Plus:

“And this idea about a total surveillance society,” I asked. “Is that science fiction?”
“No, that’s not science fiction. We’re developing an unmanned airplane – a UAV – which may be able to stay up five years with cameras on it, constantly being cued to look here and there. This is done today to a limited amount in Baghdad. But it’s the way to go.

“Wow, it’s so safe, there, in Baghdad. It’s obviously working well then. Can we have it here please?”

Unlikely as those sentences may seem to be to issue from the lips of a sentient being, it looks as if the developers of these boon technologies think that we want them.

Interestingly, we, the public, don’t seem to mind. Opinion polls, both in the US and Britain, say that about 75% of us want more, not less, surveillance. Some American cities like New York and Chicago are thinking of taking a lead from Britain where our movements are monitored round the clock by four million CCTV cameras.

Or how about these see through walls things they are developing? The Hawaian National Guard will be testing radio monitors that can read your heart rate through walls next year, in Iraq.

“… it will also show whether someone inside a house is looking to harm you, because if they are, their heart rate will be raised. And 10 years from now, the technology will be much smarter. We’ll scan a person with one of these things and tell what they’re actually thinking.”
He glanced at me quizzically, noticing my apprehension.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “It sounds very Star Trekkish, but that’s what’s ahead.”

(The idea that a raised heart rate implies a will to murder would probably cause some surprise in a Baghdad gym, if any remain. That would certainly be one way to create a nation of inert people. Imagine taking your chances of going on a crosstrainer if there may be a surveillance bot in the street that notes your heart rate is outside the calm range)

Of course, the meaning of (the BBC man’s ) “apprehension” is “fear”, not “incredulity”. There is little doubt that these things are possible. Whether they are desirable is another matter.

Can it really be possible that most people want more of it?

I value peace and security as much as anyone. I would feel my long-term security was very much improved by a greater willingness to discuss issues and solve them.

I don’t feel my physical safety is improved by blanket surveillance. Anyone serious about circumventing this shit does so. The rest of us just seem to accept it passively.

It’s not inevitable. These are political and social choices. Are we really so pathetic that in the so-called liberal democracies we have absolutely NO control over what our societies are becoming?

[tags]Science, Technology, Society, Culture, Fear, 1984, Oceania, Paranoia, Surveillance, Democracy, Rant, Security, Government, Star Trek, UAV, BBC, Bablefish[/tags]