Some news from the other end of the spectrum.
Occupy Wall Street activists buy $15m of Americans' personal debt | World news | theguardian.com
Synopsis of the link. A group that identifies with Occupy Wall Street spent $400K to erase $15M worth of medical debt for 2 reasons. 1.) Prevent hospital bills from causing some people to file bankruptcy. 2.) Bring awareness to the fact that you can negotiate with debt collectors.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stevencassidy13
I think that our only hope at this point are digital vigilantes, anonymous, this is coming down to cyber warfare, and the collective technical prowess of the common folk is surly more powerful.
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If your only hope is in digital vigilantes then I think you are going to be disappointed. The amount of power that the government has amassed for cyber warfare is insane. Vigilantes will fight but I don't think they can win.
The US government is currently recording nearly 100% of the internet, including parts that should be private such as email and phone calls.
They also have access countless surveillance cameras such as parking lot cameras, traffic cameras, police cameras and satellite cameras. They have software that can identify objects in videos such as cars, clothes, colors, etc, facial and stride recognition, and the ability to search all of those videos at once for natural language searches like "white man with long hair driving a red sedan south on Thursday".
The US government illegally added backdoors to most encryption meaning they can read most secrets even when you think you have done everything to protect them.
The first number below is the size of the entire Internet
The second number is the size of all data storage in the entire world - personal computers, phones, ipods, internet etc.
The third number is how much information the NSA is capable of storing.
5000000000000000000 bytes.
2700000000000000000000 bytes
5000000000000000000000 bytes
The only way I can interrupt those numbers is that the NSA plans to record and store everything forever with no intention of ever deleting anything.
The government has already illegally initiated cyber warfare with other countries, organizations, individuals and citizens.
Net neutrality is set to quietly become law soon. When net neutrality was first introduced there was a big stink all across the internet. Big companies like Google and Facebook even replaced their homepages to fight it. A year or two later and most people don't even remember what it is and the law will probably quietly be passed. They know how to patiently wait for fatigue and the next big consumer product to distract us. They know how to manipulate us through traditional non-digital means to get us to not fight back.
Drone pilots have admitted to killing people, waiting for people to come to the aid of the person they just remotely killed, then killing those people too, then going to the funeral of those people to kill the grieving. All from a remote controlled plane. No matter who the target is, that is terror. The majority of Americans are against it. Yet public opinion and ethics matter not.
News stories such as Snowden leaking info about the NSA spying on Americans and stealing/storing nearly all internet data become media sensations for a couple weeks. Then a new story comes out, something like our leaders have the negotiation abilities of a class of first graders, and we forget all about it and move on without questioning if anything should change, much less if it can, and how.
Nearly all media and news sources are owned by 6 companies. Clear agendas are pushed through them without any effort to even cover it up because they know even if we spot manipulation we don't care enough to do anything about it.
Groups like annon can fight, but they are out matched and can not win on their own. To win we have to reverse the growth of gov's cyber warfare program. It is too big to fight and if it continues it's path an Orwellian big brother future is the only possible outcome. That much concentrated power has no other reason for existing.
One of the worst parts about US starting cyber warfare is eventually all countries will start it, it is hard to track, hard to assign accountability and since we led the way we can't tell others to knock it off without being huge hypocrites. Luckily we don't have any problems with being hypocrites.
Back to hope and the future. My opinion. There has been several historic inventions that gave voice to new groups that never had a voice before. Writing, printing press, democracy, radio, tv, internet, etc. Each invention shook things up and redistributed power but eventually the power was able to reestablish itself and maintain control and power. I think in the next 10 years we will see how the voice of the internet shakes things up. Corps, gov and existing power are struggling to maintain their control. We are in a race to see if they can lock it down or if we can break it. IMO in the year 2025 freedom and equality will either be drastically better or drastically worse. If we haven't reduced the power of our cyber warfare gov by then, then we will have lost for good. But I do think we still have a chance right now.
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