If you have nothing to hide, why do you care about government surveillence?

abandonconflict said:

I trust you can supply a source to this nonsense, preferably one not funded by the same people who fund the TeaBaggers.

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The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

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Mythbusters banned from talking about RFID
Mythbusters wanted to make an episode about how trackable and hackable RFID chips were. Sounds amazing?

Everyone would’ve learned more about the technology that’s invisibly invading our lines. But, nope. Credit Card companies banned ‘em.

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Are We on the Verge of Total Self-Destruction?
For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves. That’s been true since 1945. It’s now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction, maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence. How to Destroy a Planet Without Really Trying
The question is: What are people doing about it? None of this is a secret. It’s all perfectly open. In fact, you have to make an effort not to see it.

June 4, 2012 by Noam Chomsky

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The pharmaceutical industry has compromised the Western medical establishment and hooked America on drugs.

“The reason for the increase in prescription drug use is that the entire Western medical complex is run by pharmaceutical companies,” said a Stanford University professor of medicine who preferred to remain anonymous“The medical training you get in Western medical schools is largely about learning which drugs to treat which diseases.” She added: “You would think that recent studies, such as the one that said antidepressants are no more helpful than a placebo, would have an effect. But they haven’t."

Other university psychiatrists and medical doctors I contacted for this article either wouldn’t talk on the record or didn’t want to be interviewed, confirming an atmosphere Healy describes as “McCarthyist.” “There is a climate of fear,” he said during our interview. “You find that they are very nervous about saying anything about drug treatments or adverse effects of drugs at all. Doctors keep patients on lots of drugs, even if they are uncomfortable with it. And if you ask them why they’re doing so, the answer you’ll get is: ‘Well, this is the standard of care, and if I don’t take care of it this way, I’m going to be in awful trouble.’”

This standard of care is why Rxisk is directed at patients, not doctors, whose financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry are well documented. Rxisk allows users to enter into its search engine the name of a prescription drug and to see the side effects that have been reported to the FDA’s MedWatch website since 2004 as well as from Rxisk’s international data base, for more than 35,000 drug names from 103 countries, totaling 4.5 million adverse drug event reports.

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An investigation by Wired Magazine in 2009, for example, revealed that the CIA’s investment arm, In-Q-Tel, was funding a software firm that specialized in scraping mounds of data posted to blogs, forums, and social network websites like Twitter. The software firm, called Visible Technologies, was said to crawl, or archive, over half a million websites per day, and produce customized reporting based on real-time keyword searches. At the time of the report, Visible chief executive officer Dan Vetras called the CIA an “end customer” for its product.

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abandonconflict said:

I'm more astonished that the CIA has an "investment arm" than anything. The mafia apparently went legit.


http://rt.com/usa/cia-data-mining-loophole-599/

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echelon1k1 said:

did you have a gun this time so they didn't make you watch?

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bwest said:

So, how is it that most of our progress was made without the internet? Yes the internet has the capability to pool the knowledge we have learned so far, but there is way to much misinformation to make it really practical yet.

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[h=1]Stratfor hacker Jeremy Hammond sentenced to ten years in jail[/h]November 15, 2013
Internet activist Jeremy Hammond who pleaded guilty to hacking servers of the private intelligence company Statfor and leaking its information to anti-secrecy site, WikiLeaks, was sentenced to ten years in jail on Friday, November 15. The release of internal emails belonging to Strategic Forecasting Inc. or Stratfor, has become one of the most successful operations ever conducted by the hacktivist group, Anonymous, which Hammond admitted to being part of. A trove of emails attributed to Stratfor executives suggested that the private company, which employs many former officials from the CIA and other government agencies, kept close ties with the security apparatus.

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abandonconflict said:

I wonder what corporate nationhood will do for the private intelligence apparatus. Orwell turns in his grave.

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abandonconflict said:

Key word, NEW.

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