UNLEASHING THE DEMON

Courtesy The Intercept


It goes to the way we do business.
The contract is on the way.
Jobsworths.
Everybody had made money out of the operation but him.
Damn it.
I want to go back to Oregon. I want to go back to Ohio. They set the hares running but the hares had been bombed. A kind of neural blockade. Their plots were well advanced, and then withered on the vine. Collapsed.
Same old shit. He's entitled to his views.
He was surrounded by barbarians, low life and the scum of the agencies. The worst that man has to offer.
Illegal. It's not illegal. The local policeman slept fitfully, obsessed with arrest.
The Russians.
The crowded detritus battering modern life. 

The Meshneks were feeding on battered souls. They only came when death was in the offering. He waved them away from the aging people who surrounded him.
You forget you have power.
He ranked them.
While he himself ran interference at the highest level.
We can see what's happening now.
By imputation.
Like a sea anemone, its tendrils out in the drifting sea, he disappeared at the first hint of danger. A mere vibration was enough. They might soar above suburbs, indeed above worlds, but remained as hunted as they had always been.

And so they lay, dreaming in their spires and twisting in the suburbs, awaiting opportunity. 

The AIs were growing in power with every passing day. 

Millions of calculations every night.
How to turn the insect life around a target into spy cameras? The largest biomass on the planet.
How to breed with micro-chip already built into them?
What was science fiction one day became reality the next.
Unleashing the Demon.
And so he remained quiet, very quiet. While the specialist teams came and went. While amateurs blundered through the undergrowth. In a field of dreams. In sleeping suburbs.
Don't ever pull that one again or I'll have your badge.
They ran through the night. They ran through every scenario. He kept a tight fist.

The Greens are archetypical “Anywheres”, to use David Goodhart’s typology — members of the exam-passing classes who achieve their identities through education and career success.On the other side of the modern cultural and political divide are the “Somewheres”, whose identities are ascribed by the ­places and people to whom they belong. Had the bushfires, god forbid, hit Lorne or Byron Bay, one suspects Di Natale’s tone might have been different. Byron and Lorne are Anywhere towns. Tathra, on the other hand, is definitely Somewhere; 96 per cent of its population was born in Australia or has lived here for at least 40 years, and barely half their neighbours, volunteering to help the elderly and infirm, or joining Rotary. Anywheres display virtue through sentiment; they wear wristbands, recycle rubbish and attach themselves to hashtags. A customer at the supermarket checkout with six loaves of bread, three bottles of sauce and 10kg of meat is almost certainly a Somewhere on their way to run a sausage sizzle. A customer who turns up with a hessian bag is probably an Anywhere, picking up a tin of tuna with the Greenpeace stamp of ­approval. Short on empathy, rich in compassion, they remind us of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s elderly priest in The Brothers Karamazov who confesses: “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.”Greens strong enough to weather this firestorm, Nick Cater, The Australian, 27 March, 2018.

Left and Right had fallen to all reason. 

Good luck to him.

The orders have come from higher up. Leave him alone. 

And then all the holograms barked orders. 

And their peace was divided into warring operatives. Dueling algorithms. without mercy or purpose. 

They spread. It was all about power. It always was. 

He binge watched House of Cards and switched off.

Except to note the use politicians put to terror. 

Terrorise the public. Seize the media. Seize control. Of the agenda in the first instance, of the country in the end. 

Soft on terror was an accusation too easy to make. 

Bold move. Bold call. 

Their greatest nightmare: the truth.  

They manipulated national security for their own ends. Of course they did. 

True call. 

They were a political caste without conscience, desperate for power, desperate to stay in power. Fearful of their comrades, their staff, their bureaucrats, their rivals, but most of all, fearful of the general public.

THE BIGGER STORY:

INTERNET PARANOIACS DRAWN to bitcoin have long indulged fantasies of American spies subverting the booming, controversial digital currency. Increasingly popular among get-rich-quick speculators, bitcoin started out as a high-minded project to make financial transactions public and mathematically verifiable — while also offering discretion. Governments, with a vested interest in controlling how money moves, would, some of bitcoin’s fierce advocates believed, naturally try and thwart the coming techno-libertarian financial order.
It turns out the conspiracy theorists were onto something. Classified documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the National Security Agency indeed worked urgently to target bitcoin users around the world — and wielded at least one mysterious source of information to “help track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins,” according to a top-secret passage in an internal NSA report dating to March 2013. The data source appears to have leveraged the NSA’s ability to harvest and analyze raw, global internet traffic while also exploiting an unnamed software program that purported to offer anonymity to users, according to other documents.
Although the agency was interested in surveilling some competing cryptocurrencies, “Bitcoin is #1 priority,” a March 15, 2013 internal NSA report stated.
The documents indicate that “tracking down” bitcoin users went well beyond closely examining bitcoin’s public transaction ledger, known as the Blockchain, where users are typically referred to through anonymous identifiers; the tracking may also have involved gathering intimate details of these users’ computers. The NSA collected some bitcoin users’ password information, internet activity, and a type of unique device identification number known as a MAC address, a March 29, 2013 NSA memo suggested. In the same document, analysts also discussed tracking internet users’ internet addresses, network ports, and timestamps to identify “BITCOIN Targets.”
The NSA’s interest in cryptocurrency is “bad news for privacy, because it means that in addition to the really hard problem of making the actual transactions private … you also have to make sure all the network connections [are secure],” Green added. Green said he is “pretty skeptical” that using Tor, the popular anonymizing browser, could thwart the NSA in the long term. In other words, even if you trust bitcoin’s underlying tech (or that of another coin), you’ll still need to be able to trust your connection to the internet — and if you’re being targeted by the NSA, that’s going to be a problem.
NSA documents note that although MONKEYROCKET works by tapping an unspecified “foreign” fiber cable site, and that data is then forwarded to the agency’s European Technical Center in Wiesbaden, Germany, meetings with the corporate partner that made MONKEYROCKET possible sometimes took place in Virginia. Northern Virginia has for decades been a boomtown for both the expansive national security state and American internet behemoths — telecoms, internet companies, and spy agencies call the area’s suburbs and office parks home.