Big Brother isn't NSA and the US Government, it's Google and Facebook

When I first heard of George Orwell’s 1984 it sounded so science fiction and beyond my capacity to grasp as a potential reality that I dismissed it. I can’t even remember if I read it. I knew very little of the sinister world at large, and in my world the internet didn’t exist. I could conceive of societal over-management in a distant sort of way but I imagined that if a Big Brother kind of scenario ever came into play it would be recognizably science fiction. And it would, of course, be about a corrupt government. 

I was wrong about it all, and it seems I’m not alone. The world has gone beserk with the exposure of NSA privacy invasion, masses of people quoting George Orwell, predicting gloom and doom. Our independence is over; Big Brother Government controls your every move.  

There’s something perfectly Hollywood about it all. Cloak and dagger shadowy organizations, spies, international relations, diplomatic nightmares, global chases from the US to China to Russia to Havanna.

But the real Big Brother – or a fraternity of them – has been operating in our lives and homes for ages. They did what all exploiters do. Groomed us. Here, you can have this for free. We’re doing it because we love you. That how can we help you? transmogrified over time from into how can we exploit you and earn billions of bucks? We all found out about it and had a hissy fit. But we didn’t stop using those products. 

There’s nothing science fiction about it. Nothing out of the ordinary. Not anymore. Only because we’ve become slowly inured to how much of ourselves we give away, and now we're kind of hooked on the idea that unless everybody knows everything about us we’re alone and isolated. 

We still hold onto the concept of the value of privacy. But the reality of what preserving your privacy involves in today’s tech world - being cut off from some potential friend somewhere - scares us. We give ourselves away every second of the day because we somehow believe it’s the only way we can get more and more connected. There was a time when the idea of having having your privacy invaded made you feel naked. Now living in a cocoon where your privacy is utterly protected makes you feel exposed.

I read a great article on BuzzFeed/CNN, "10 ways you give up data without knowing it". It’s a kind of shortened Orwellian type of expose on privacy. I followed one of the links to a pretty detailed inventory of info about how advertisers on Facebook can manipulate their friends, friends of their friends, college students, different age groups, nationalities, genders, occupations, interests, you name it.  

It’s done in the form of Q & A and is of course selling Facebook advertising. Very seductive. If you’ve got something to sell that is. It's a bit of a shock if you're on the receiving end. Nowhere on the page could I see a question like do people supply this information willingly and knowingly? 

We still hold onto the Big Brother idea that it’s the government we have to worry about; that it will control us in a recognisably sinister and science-fiction kind of way. So when Edward Snowden exposes NSA surveillance information everybody throws up their hands in a riot of protest. We know what this is! But the mundane reality of it is that the NSA doesn’t analyse all the info in detail, they simply mine it for specific alerts. They sure don’t use it to manipulate citizens. And the point of it isn’t mass control, but to try and control terrorism. They don’t want to know every intimate detail about us; they want to know whether we know any terrorists or not. 

I guess we focus on the NSA as public enemy number one because the average Joe doesn’t think its work is useful. That’s because they’ve never had to personally pay for their security. The US – and its allies – have usually chosen the military option and most of the casualties have been suffered by the enemy.  

Now the US has a leader who seems hell-bent on peace and not war, but still remains realistically alert to security risks. The only problem with the choice he's put before US citizens is that the more peaceful solution requires them to pay something. For their own security benefits. Personally, given the choice between some innocent child getting its limbs blown off while I sleep peacefully at home, and having the NSA collect my data to see if I'm cavorting with terrorists, it's a no brainer. It’s hard for me to understand why everybody doesn’t clamour to make that same choice.

In real terms this NSA surveillance isn’t much of a payment, not if one is realistic about it. But in a world where media influence has blurred the lines between truth and lies, where politicians and giant corporations are expert fear-mongers, where we get our information from movies and TV series, realism isn’t a strong point. 

Meanwhile the real Big Brother fraternity continue to really control us more and more every day. They have the key to our lives and they can let anybody in to prowl around any time they like. Whether we know about it or not, whether we want it or not. Contrary to the NSA they do want to know intimate details about us; they target each of us very specifically. 

We know it's real, what Facebook and Google do. Why don't we rise up in global protest? Because they’re useful to us. When we advertise, do we care anymore what people have had to give up so we can get to them? Not really. So in fact, we welcome the Big Brother Frat with open arms. And while we’re waving our fists at a red herring that attracts us because of the drama, the real enemy is sucking the will-power out of us through a giant umbilical cord inserted into our Achilles heel.

If you want to opt out of being ad-targeted by Google, click here. To opt out of Facebook targeted ads close your account. Click here for their reasons why they need to continue with targeted advertising and can’t give you the option to opt out. It’s all about how much they love you and how can we help you? They focus on all the things they don’t do and deftly avoid the central question, which is Can I stop my personal and intimate information and that of my friends, my family, my children, being used by Facebook?

 

Because the unspoken answer is unapologetically and categorically No. 

The Sad Truth about Edward Snowden - Nobody Really Wants Him

Edward Snowden continues to elude capture as a story unveils that has all the makings of a fascinating political thriller/personal drama. A lot of his support comes from people who believe he’s a hero and that he sacrificed himself for a worthy cause. Others, myself included, are a little more sceptical, mostly because of the countries he turned to for asylum. To proclaim yourself an activist for human rights – in this case privacy and freedom of speech – and then ask help from countries whose governments are notorious for violating those rights doesn’t make sense.

Snowden must be very naïve if he believes these countries would want to harbour an activist who has shown himself willing to break laws and expose and betray his own country. And he's downright deluded if he thinks they care more about human rights than about international relationships. They’ve already proved that they don’t. They’ll use him if they can and spit him out if they can’t.

Who is Edward Snowden, anyway? What’s his background? There’s not much information to be found about him. I guess he values his privacy. He doesn’t mind exposing a government but he doesn’t want anybody to expose him. He’s possibly also a little paranoid. NBC News reported that he covers himself and his laptop with a red hood when entering his passwords. I can’t say whether that information is true or not.

According to The Guardian, he comes from a middle class family. He was born in 1983 in Wilmington, N.C., his father is a former Coast Guard Officer and his mother is the chief deputy clerk for administration and information technology at Baltimore federal court. He has one sister, an attorney, who is older than him. He didn’t complete high school, but he’s mum on why. He studied at a community college and got a general equivalency degree. The Guardian learned that a student with his name and date of birth took classes at the Anne Arundel Community College from 1999 to 2001 and in 2004 and 2005.

In 2004 he was recruited into the Army Reserves special forces for a 14 week training course which he didn’t complete. Nor did he get any awards. Snowden told The Guardian he broke both his legs in an accident and that’s why he was discharged. 

He then worked as a security guard with the NSA, from where he moved onto doing IT for the CIA. He worked there from 2007-2009, when he left to work for private contractors. He had been working for Booz Allen for about 3 months when he let the cat out the bag. He had been making about $200 000 a year. By self admission he has been a spy almost all his life. Which doesn’t quite fit with the facts. It’s very Hollywood, though. 

Snowden told the Guardian that he was diagnosed with epilepsy last year and used that as his excuse to take leave from Booz Allen. He didn’t tell his girlfriend or his family where he was going or what he was going to do. Nor did he apparently stop to think about how his actions might impact on them. I guess big noble causes require people to be sacrificed, whether they want it or not.

What I wonder is, why did he leave school? No kid does that unless there’s provocation. And the accident with 2 broken legs? What happened there? Snowden did say that he wanted to go to Iraq to protect the Iraqi people but got disillusioned when he realized the special services were more about killing Arabs. 

Which is very understandable and commendable. But what did that do to him, I wonder? As for his home life, how successful was his older sister and what was his relationship with her and with his parents? And I’d be very interested to know when he first started communicating with Julian Assange, or at the least how much he was influenced by that man’s PR. I have the sense that, like poor Bradley Manning, who had lousy self esteem and was lonely and easy prey, Snowden is now just so much fodder for Assange and his personal quest to stay in the spotlight no matter what the cost to anybody.

Edward Snowden - How Much Does He Really Care About Citizen's Rights?

There are more than one ways to skin a cat. Oprah Winfrey once said she always wanted to be a star. Naturally she was drawn to Hollywood but she didn’t like what stars had to do to achieve fame. Nobody does, but some suck it up, believing they don’t have another option. Not Oprah. She chose another route and got nicely rewarded for that bit of lateral thinking.

What about Edward Snowden? Did he reveal US surveillance secrets for a noble cause? Was he a traitor to or a martyr for his country? He has denied that he’s either and insisted he’s just an ordinary guy wanting to protect ordinary Americans from their Big Brother nasty spying government.

Regardless of whether he’s succeeded in doing that or not and whether or not he actually believes his own motives to be pure, he’s created a diplomatic nightmare for the US, China and Russia and possibly even Eduador. More importantly, the choices he’s made since the revelation show him as not being so fundamentally noble after all.

In protecting Americans from having their privacy violated, Snowden chose to seek asylum first in a country with horrific human rights and gargantuan freedom of speech violations. Granted Hong Kong has autonomy but it answers to the Chinese government, which Snowden has got to have known, given the work he did. 

China didn’t want him and he’s been neatly shuffled out of Hong Kong. Under the pretext of the arrest warrant not being properly filled out, which allegedly left the Hong Kong authorities no option but to let him go. The US and Hong Kong are huffing and puffing at each other, but the reality is, they’ve neatly averted a situation that would impede the trade relationship they’re both trying to build. Ironically, they both cyber-spy on each other and they both know they do. It’s unlikely China would want somebody like Snowden in the country.

From China, it was onto Russia. Another country whose human rights record is atrocious and where freedom of speech is severely curtailed. A country whose leader supports Bashar Al-Assad. Nice work, Snowden.

They apparently don’t want him either. Putin has been accused of taking pleasure in sticking his middle finger up at the US for even allowing Snowden into the country without a passport, but he’s just stuck in a transit lounge at the airport. That’s a pretty clear message from Putin. I doubt he has feelings of affection for Snowden who has put him in a right spot. Obviously he doesn’t want to wave that finger too close to the US nose, otherwise he would have granted Snowden asylum. But officially ganging up against him would discredit him with his voters.

He chose a pretty wise diplomatic option. A kind of halfway measure that lets him off the hook in both directions. He’s no fool, Putin. So it’s on to Ecuador for Snowden.

Which has defamations provisions in its criminal code that allow the government to persecute its critics. In 2011 journalist Emilio Palacio wrote an opinion piece in El Universo in which he accused Ecuadorean President Correa of being a dishonest dictator. Correa sued Palacio and three of the newspaper’s board members, brothers Carlos Eduardo Pérez Barriga, César Enrique Pérez Barriga, and Carlos Nicolás Pérez Barriga. They were jailed with 3 year sentences and ordered to pay $40 million in fines altogether.

In an interview with The Guardian, where Snowden talked about his motives, he said "I don't want to live in a society that does these sorts of things..." Really? China, Russia and Ecuador don't do these sort of things?  

Predictably, Jullian Assange and his lawyers and friends were behind getting Snowden out of Hong Kong and attempting to get him asylum in Ecuador. Whether it’ll work or not is debatable. Assange is still holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he’s been for almost a year. He’s obviously not that bothered about freedom of speech in Ecuador either. 

You can’t tell much about a person from what they say. You can’t even always tell who they are from what they do, especially in the beginning, when the ramifications of their behaviour haven’t kicked in. But you can tell a lot from the company they keep. That Assange and Snowden happily accept help from countries with atrocious human rights and freedom of speech violations  makes a mockery of the cloak of nobility they wear as whistle-blowers hell-bent on protecting everybody’s freedom.

Cyber Criminals Caught and a Young Boy Gets His Mother out of Jail

Sometimes it doesn’t seem as if the human race has much to recommend it. From a certain perspective, it's a dirty, anarchistic world. Countries are trillions in debt but they manage to borrow more money. Politicians lie and cheat the people they're supposed to be representing. Bankers destroy economies and get rewarded for it. Individuals' lives are ruined when they can't make a couple of payments on their mortgage or credit cards. 

A pregnant woman in India gets wrongfully convicted of murder and stuck in jail for 19 years because she couldn't put together the $180 bail money. Hundreds of thousands of people languish in prison for years - some for most of their lives - without being charged. 

Another woman commits a federal crime, is prosecuted and found guilty but escapes prison, gets a new identity, lives a decent life for dozens of years until she's caught but she gets off with a good lawyer. Yet another woman commits a lesser crime but can't afford a clever lawyer and her life is over. It's possible that race has something to do with it, because although on the surface it's coincidence that the one who gets to live the rest of her life as a free woman is white and the other one is black, it's no coincidence that most of the wealth, resources and opportunity have historically been available to whites and not to blacks in that country.

People are tried, condemned and executed on insufficient grounds unless you count the grounds of some DA or police department needing to bump up stats. Corporations that produce arms control politicians who create wars out of nothing and get away with it. 

Upstanding members of a community and various business men who wear suits and who everybody respects get to screw around with a woman's fledgling business, sexually harass her, contribute to the destruction of that business and get away scot free while she picks herself out of the gutter, stumbles and falls, stumbles and falls. This time it's not about race because they're all white. Might be about gender, though. Partly it's about people who don't give a damn but mostly it's just about what they know they can do and what she doesn't know she's allowed to do.

It's not hard to get totally bitter and twisted about the way things are. Yet in the face of such overwhelming evidence that the human race has nothing recommend it, some of us - maybe even most of us - still believe that good conquers evil; that everybody has something within them that nobody can touch or assail. That the darkest hours actually contain the light.

That it's possible to climb out of the gutter even when you don't know how and things look hopeless for you. It's possible to retrieve your life no matter how much anybody's screwed you around, no matter how much the odds seem - and are - stacked against you. 

We believe it's possible to turn your life around when it seems too late, that help is always at hand in reality; that we just have to learn how to see it. Because no matter how bad things look and are in the world people are fighting back. And conquering. Bankers are investigated eventually as are banks for illegal home repossessions. In a world that’s tailor made for the worst kind of criminals, when profits from child pornography and crime to the tune of $6 billion are laundered through shadowy cyber organizations they actually get caught. 

Corrupt systems and rulers fall apart. When you have lousy entitlement and self esteem you can get help and rebuild until you're very clear about what people can and can't do in your presence and to you. 

And in a country with so much poverty it's blinding to the soul, a young boy, Vijai Kumari, who was born in prison and spent his life being shunted around juvenile homes because his mother is unjustly and unnecessarily in prison, grows up straight somehow. Somehow learns a skill and gets a job. Miraculously saves and saves until he has the money to pay for a lawyer to get his mother released. And he succeeds.