All the information you relay is true as far as I am personally aware.

Ever since the Tampa Bay Superbowl, the Trapwire has been out in public view under one name or another. If you do not know what Trapwire is, the main feature I refer to is the integration of all millions of camera sources.

When you buy a webcam for own security, you help secure the nation if you live in a Trapwire area. Your webcam has been backdoored and the exploit is on the shelf at NSA.

The "Sketchy Shit", in my opinion, is this. They know everybody's dirty laundry. That time you bit that chick when she was hitting you; they know. All those hundreds of MP3s you pirated and made available? Those drugs you took? The whores? They know. And they can use this to put you in jail or put you to work.

Meanwhile, the economy is in a structural collapse. Robots are replacing people faster than new jobs are being created. So, the USG is snapping up petit "criminals" using their intelligence net. Most of the criminals are then pressed into service labor as clandestine law enforcement. I shit you not.

[deleted]

Except they are the politicians. I guess there is some sort of detente. Or perhaps the scenario you describe is the status quo.

Italics win.

Even if I were to agree with you, (I dont, much of our intelligence capabilities has been sub contracted out), politicians are owned by business.

So many whores...

Thanks for the comment! All good stuff. But one thing, if a robot can take your job, it should. I believe we should attempt to move towards the singularity with any step we are capable of taking. I know it sucks with jobs and overpopulation, but in the name of progress I think sacrifices must be made.

I don't disagree with your sentiment about Luddite thinking.

But the problem isn't that the robots are succeeding. The problem is that there are no real jobs for Americans anymore, but the people can't eat cake and the USG knows that. Because people no longer hold actual jobs, the USG needs some ways to inject cash into the economy. So they make people into informants and operatives. Then they pay these people in freshly printed hundreds. They send them to various retail stores to buy things at no cost to them. This is simply a way of injecting money into an economy where there are not enough legitimate ways for people to earn money.

Without the false economy this creates, we would be hit a lot harder by so much of our skilled labor base sitting at home idle. As things stand, our labor base itself is being hit hard, but the overall economy appears to be running smoothly.

Addendum: there are a lot of other problems which led America to this. In my opinion, one of the gravest mistakes of our modern time was bringing so many former Soviets here in the late 80's. Our government even picked their brains for "skills of government," as if our defeated Evil Empire rival would have some of those that we should want.

Since that time, when our nation was already troubled post-Kennedy and fresh out of Vietnam, the US has become some kind of weird replica of the Soviet empire, complete with various KGB bureaus. One of them has "Homeland" in its name. What the fuck? Is that department supposed to protect the Sioux Indians, or what? "Homeland?"

We need to essential regress as a culture. If we want to have robots do menial work, or the huge construction, fine, then we should focus on the natural and sustainable. We have a problem with the agriculture in this country. I'm not saying everyone go out and pick berries instead of surf the net, I am saying that we have a lot of land, and a lot of starving people. Why aren't we planting food for everyone.

Have you ever farmed? Is hard work. My PS3 is easier on my back.

But you are correct that it would be great if we all farmed.

TBH, this summer we moved 500 miles inland to farm country so we could farm and write books. We're planting clean food for us to subsist on.

I don't think we need to regress. This is how the Transparent Society (David Brin) is beginning, with birth pains. It will grow into a fine young new society, I hope.

I've farmed, I've cleaned up sheep shit, THAT is the nastiest smell next to fish fertilizer. I've worked my ass off outside every summer, and I have no regrets. People have lost their touch with food. The more processed it becomes, the less healthy we become.

So true, after catching and processing 30 salmon I respect my food with a reverence often associated with a deity. Soon I will be tanning a caribou hide while I eat the fresh Rocky Mountain oyster... Aka the nuts because ya gotta use every last piece

I respect the Native Tribes on a professional level. I'm a chef, so I had some formula training with taking apart pretty much anything with legs, and some with out. And as a chef, I know to use every bit. The lining of the stomach and intestines for casings of sausage. Roasting the bones and using them for stock. I wonder how Moose stock would taste.

"just like when Julian Assange was supposedly a wanted man- and was appearing on television programs all over the place, yet somehow the police and FBI "couldn't find him" this man is in fact not who you think he is- he is in fact a controlled opposition "hero""- ThePaulstalService - he said it best I think.

Correct me if I'm wrong, I thought he found safe havens in embassies and such that protected him from the American laws the gov was trying to stretch into Europe?

He is there now, I believe he talking about prior to this. Its just like Snowden, bullshit they couldnt disappear him before he got to Hong Kong.

He didn't release anything before arriving at Hong Kong.

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Although China is a trading ally I'm not sure how they would feel about a bunch of US government agents running around their cities.

[deleted]

I suppose. But, while I do try to remain subjective I just really want to believe Snowden is on our side. If not, then what? How much bullshit is really going on if one of the only beacons for personal freedoms is just a psy-op?

Turtles, all the way down.

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Snowden hasn't released anything previously unknown. Even the code names as you say, were previously known.

This is from 2009.

It's a giant facade.

All this is true.

Not convincing at all. So, the MSM is controlled, duh, what's new? That doesn't mean the name Assange, Snoden, Manning are never going to appear in the MSM, why not, they are not exactly celebrated as heros. Snoden was free to walk around in the airport, and be seen? GEEZ, like the Russians would build an airport without a back area where people are taken whenever they are detained! Even US airports constantly detain people and take them through closed door into back areas. Those back areas are huge. Most people don't stay there for long, but why not, a person could be held back there indefinitely if they wanted to. This Paulstel thing is BS.

Final edit: There is no way to live off the grid anymore because of (edit 2) and their software that is able to accurately pick up whats going on in the live feed of the cameras. It's not Google Maps-type shit. It's a live feed.

Yep.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8PgHO2YHU0

This is horrifying.

Ho Li Fuk

So.. is it safe in underground tunnels then? Or should we just go to Mars at this point?

I'm hoping to earn my tinfoil hat with this post. So how about this: HAARP was originally described by the military as a means of seeing through cloud cover and into underground facilities, so now that all living things have a constant internal saturation with aluminum and barium from decades of atmospheric aersol spraying we all light up like christmas trees on the HAARP imaging system through clouds, buildings, bunkers, etc, just like when they inject you with contrast for medical imaging.

I mean, if that's your thing...

They already have 2 drones there, they beat us to the punch

They have cameras in the sky that capture every 2 feet in a pixel. Also, we don't want to know what "EP-3" is capable of.

No.

ARGUS-IS, for example, can cover 15 square miles. The United States is 3,794,000 square miles.

There are not 250,000 of these in the air at all times covering all parts of the U.S.

If you want to scare people, at least use believable "tips."

This is the technology that has been released to the public.

Nobody knows what technology they have that the general public doesn't know about.

It doesn't cover 4,000,000 sq mi.

I don't know if you've seen their budget, but...

It's not a budget question. First of all, there's no point in covering every square inch of the United States. There are far more interesting places. Next, there is no evidence to suggest that the technology exists in any practical sense. But most importantly, to suggest that it's impossible to live "off the grid" solely because every 2 sq ft of the US is rendered as a pixel real-time is completely stupid.

Not sure why you're trying to argue with me about it. I'm simply relaying the information given to me by someone who has been in the military for quite some time. Consider the evidence, not your personal bias on the concepts.

Because you or your supposed friend are full of shit.

Read the disclaimer near the top of the post.

I'm not angry. I just call out bullshit when I see it.

And I realize it sounds crazy. Again, just relaying stuff.

Why would you relay things that can't be corroborated or verified in any way? Internet points? Thrills?

It's silly to make such ridiculous assertions with nothing but hearsay backing you up.

But then, this is /r/conspiracy, isn't it.

Oh, and when someone challenges your hearsay you tell them to "take their meds" and accuse them of being angry. Brilliant tactic, worthy of /r/conspiracy.

Re: Disclaimer

So no one is allowed to claim it's true but no one is allowed to claim it's bullshit either? We are left with an innuendo contest. The winner will be he who coins the most ominous nod of ascent while retaining culpable deniability.

MuonDragon, nice try surveillance drone operator. We're not buying your cointelpro.

So we are going to need EMP's huh...?

Edit: may I suggest you don't include the sex of the individual next time. Use ' They ' and keep it vague

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H91Fs1ui7ls/ShrYLP03yZI/AAAAAAAAACo/46sYoMF1TMQ/s320/V-for-Vendetta_39.jpg

What about that guy on the airplane June 19 or so? He worked for NRO and claimed his wife did too

Come on. Are they really that far already?

There are electronic eyes and ears everywhere that are not connected to a brain. You need people to watch the monitors and listen to your calls, unless your "friend" also told you we have a working AI like in Person of Interest. You need people to carry out the oppression, unless your "friend" confirms "they" have turned all the cops, military, civil servants, and court officials in the country into fully-controlled androids.

Calm down.

They already have turned many a cop, grunt, bureaucrat, and official into a fully controllable android. It's called authority. It's an illusion carefully crafted by the ubiquitous authoritarian education system.

All this data is accumulated in vast databases accessible by an alarmingly large segment of the authoritarian complex comprised of military, police, bureaucrats etc.,

You don't need artificial intelligence to make this information dangerous.

Don't panic. You're right about that. Panic is another indicator of instability, and if you panic, they'll target YOU.

Authority only goes so far, and I don't buy the positively looney sci-fi mind-control stuff some folks around here peddle, but yeah your last point gets most of it.

The government has had all the tools to crawl up all our orifices for decades now, if they had a reason to. It's easier now, but the actual problem to be solved (if there is a problem. Honestly I think most laws, especially local laws, and the mechanisms for changing them, work pretty well - this is all theory) remains. If you do want to overthrow the tyrant crying about tyranny is not how it's done. It's sad and pathetic and wasting your, the putative revolutionary's, time.

I'm not sure if the irony of recommending the serious study Che and Castro, ETA, or even AQI and the Taliban would be lost on this crowd.

PS: it is worth mentioning that our military studies them very closely indeed

Honestly I think most laws, especially local laws, and the mechanisms for changing them, work pretty well.

I'm gonna have to disagree with you. Most laws don't work. I might bring up the old saying of "laws are made to be broken." Laws are largely preventative or punitive in nature and increasingly over this last century they have become both.

Even on a local level, laws are usually, unintentionally or not, directed against the common welfare in the interest of "public safety". Citizens have been manipulated into shifting the burden of their safety from a private responsibilty to a public one. With the shift in responsibilty comes a corresponding shift in authority, empowering the fictional "state" (in reality, it's agents) at the expense of the citizen.

Living under the reign of a republic that touts both the highest domestic incarceration rate globally as well as arguably the most internationally active military, I cannot agree that our legal system does anything but ruin lives.

In response to your recommendation of studying militant revolutionaries- ...

It's about as pointless as sitting here and whining. With the impossibilities of clandestine telecommunications operations, and the ubiquity of federal anti-terrorism entrapment programs, I deduce it's near impossible to form a covert paramilitary organization in today's America.

That's just my take though.

All right then. The government (or whoever, the bankers, the Masons) grips the globe firmly in its blood-stained gauntlet. And by what we've found out from Snowden, Manning, Anonymous, wikileaks and all the other whistleblowers: they had this control before we knew they had it, more or less.

What are the options then? To try, try to use our democratic processes, or completely tune-out and find our freedom between our ears, or be crushed by The Machine. You have something better? I really want to know.

The second option: freedom is endogenous.

Personally, I'm learning sustainability and using my nepotic resources to the advantage of my friends, family and self. Moving away from population centers to physically seperate myself from the lambs in case of a slaughter; maintaining my body and mind as best I can in a world ripe with pollution; educating myself in defensive strategy in fear of the day they bring the fight to my doorstep; and generally just watching and waiting.

Have you seen comet Ison? Wtf that thing has got twin moons?!?

I'm with you (except for the moving away from population centers thing, I like being surprised every so often when I walk down the street [even most of the bad surprises that I walk away from become good memories]).

And weird, but I'm hoping to go to an observatory (Pine Mountain) hopefully this weekend. Just saw the Milky Way with my own eyes for the first time ever not too long ago. Vacation, whee!

Sounds awesome. Yeah, there's no guarantee population centers are the least safe place to be, it could very well turn out to be the safest place! I'm mostly moving to the country based on personal preference. I like it. Also, you can see the Milky Way every clear night!

Do you know anything about Trapwire? Because it sounds like you don't.

Psh, Trapwire? I got ECHELON on vinyl. /hipster

Data-mining gives potential targets, people still need to set parameters, and follow up.

PS: Seriously, unless you tell me Skynet (the one from the movies) is real computers are not magic.

Just to Clarify: You're basically saying that Trapwire and like-programs are useless without the manpower.

Trapwire can catch the keywords that you're attempting to organize but the operation still needs a physical person to infiltrate and bring cookies.(Or am I just way off?)

Yeah, basically. They can't program themselves, maintain their physical space, and yeah, give themselves a "purpose"

Also most of the "inputs" for these data-mining operations are just stupid cameras (infrared LEDs, spraypaint, bad weather, plus all the problems the central unit has).

And what I think of as the "vs. computer" problem. When you play a videogame with emergent properties (unpredictable outcomes from the same inputs) that has the option to play against the computer it's very easy to beat the computer after you learn how the person who programed it was thinking (even if you can't use your imputs as fast as the computer can). Games like chess or Jeopardy! are also very complex, but have less of those emergent properties, which is why it's sometimes pretty hard for the very best players to beat the very best computers.

I think FiveSenses is getting at the computers are getting better at emergent stuff, which is concerning, but also sorta inevitable.

PS: emergent videogames: fighters, FPS, RTS, football, basketball. and of course the game of life (not LIFE(TM))

You forget that even the greatest Jeopardy! champions of all time playing together against the now long-obsolete IBM Watson got absolutely crushed by it, even with zero access to the internet... If that is what companies and engineers are doing with machine learning for fun, in extra time, imagine what the generations of machines we don't even know about yet as the public are doing for non-fun, profitable things.

Look into NSAs new Vesuvius computer system. Encryption of basically any kind is useless, and probably will be for the foreseeable future with it's capabilities.

I didn't forget. Watson didn't have internets but it did have over 4 tb of general information (that's 400 Wikipedias of text [399, give or take, counting all of wikipedia to date]) in RAM. And don't think that Watson was a lark; a team put it together. And btw, if you forget all the rest of this, remember it was people, a lot of very smart and talented people, working a long time, to put him (him, lol) together - for a very specific purpose.

Watson beat Ken and Brad not on "being smarter" but on the buzzer, on never getting mentally fatigued or psyched-out or whatever, and on being smart enough. It's important to note that the signal to tell the contestants that it's ok to buzz (turned on by a judge after Alex finishes reading the clue) is a wreath of christmas lights around the game board. Watson, having no eyes, actually got the same signal, electrically, several micro(?) seconds earlier than the human rods and cones did.

Of course the real genius of the system is Watson's other software, presumably in the other 12 TB of its RAM, that could suss out the "clue" portion of the answers comparable with a pretty smart human.

That is the emergent part I was talking about. Watching those episodes I could tell Watson missed a few really easy questions because Watson couldn't understand the context of human speech as well as any average, fluent American citizen, sans encyclopedias and critical thinking skills. I've often wondered if it could do better in another language(?)

But kinda moot at this point. Watson was a well-designed platform for some fantastic programming. That's all. Try having this conversation with Watson two (or 18) point oh and see how far you get.

And re any tippy-top asymmetric encryption scheme vs. a quantum computer:

1. if you were trying to save the human race from the rise of the machines (or anything equally important) you would have practical use for electronic one-time pads, still theoretically uncrackable (ie. completely random)

2. more useful: quantum computers will give us new ways to efficiently encrypt stuff to keep them from quantum computers. That is a simple intuitive leap that the computer itself could never arrive at (maybe?). Will the government keep quantum computers away from us plebs like machine guns or F-16s? That remains to be seen.

PS: to answer my last question: no. It will still take a lot of people to program them bitches.

Singularity, extinction. Incoming.

I know computers are not magic, but please do not underestimate what has already been built. If you already know about even the ancient Texas Memory Systems' entire product line, then, forgive me. Otherwise, do realize that a sufficiently advanced technology will appear to you as if magic. If you haven't seen the technology of today that appears to you as magic then count yourself as lacking, not having.

I can see the dangers with those systems, really, but I just mean they aren't perfect. False positives, environmental issues (the huge one for me is cooling [energy] that requires a huge physical plant with a considerable workforce), and my favorite: computers still don't have any desire or ambition to suppress the vote or invade a country. They're still tools (powerful tools that can facilitate powerful evils [like nukes, or a locked door]), but our enemies, if we have enemies, are still people.

But hey, I'm completely open to whatever top secret thing we'll find out about in five years.

Still... people.

Most of what I know about that system stems from the false positives it produces, in fact.

But, yes, the way people employ these huge tools, which go way beyond Echelon, is the key to whether you and I live or die.

I can't wait until we kick Syria's ass! :D

All this is true.

Not convincing at all. So, the MSM is controlled, duh, what's new? That doesn't mean the name Assange, Snoden, Manning are never going to appear in the MSM, why not, they are not exactly celebrated as heros. Snoden was free to walk around in the airport, and be seen? GEEZ, like the Russians would build an airport without a back area where people are taken whenever they are detained! Even US airports constantly detain people and take them through closed door into back areas. Those back areas are huge. Most people don't stay there for long, but why not, a person could be held back there indefinitely if they wanted to. This Paulstel thing is BS.

Correct me if I'm wrong, I thought he found safe havens in embassies and such that protected him from the American laws the gov was trying to stretch into Europe?

Thanks for the comment! All good stuff. But one thing, if a robot can take your job, it should. I believe we should attempt to move towards the singularity with any step we are capable of taking. I know it sucks with jobs and overpopulation, but in the name of progress I think sacrifices must be made.

This is the technology that has been released to the public.

Nobody knows what technology they have that the general public doesn't know about.

Because you or your supposed friend are full of shit.

MuonDragon, nice try surveillance drone operator. We're not buying your cointelpro.

So many whores...