ancianita
ancianita's JournalWhy Trump's Henchmen Might Be Laughing Over Ukraine Intel -- Zuckerberg And His Ukraine Accounts
While the Russian "Internet Research Agency" has received most of the attention for filling the internet with bullshit and bile, the problem is routinely disclosed to be far larger than that ... And while Facebook spends a lot of time insisting they're taking radical steps to police the problem in the wake of genocide in Myanmar, it remains fairly clear they still don't have a handle on the problem.
... another disinformation operation uncovered this week involves a Ukrainian-run "I Love America" Facebook group with more than a million members. In concert with other similar pages like "God bless Donald and Melania Trump and God bless America," the effort lures boomers in with cute kittens and patriotic memes before getting to the real meat and potatoes of the effort:
Many of the posts are just repurposed versions previously pushed by the IRA in a bid to try and stoke existing racial and political tensions in the United States:
... while the usual suspects will likely try to downplay this as "just a few harmless memes," [calling it laughable] the outfit's engagement surpasses many of the biggest, actual news organizations on Facebook, meaning there's still an awful lot of folks having their patriotism and military respect exploited and their heads filled with fluff and nonsense so some Ukrainian nitwits can make a buck:
this effort is far larger than the IRA-linked Facebook groups highlighted in the Mueller report, none of which had more than 390,000 members. The report doesn't think this effort is covert or sophisticated enough to be a government-backed effort (in large part because the Ukrainian backers aren't trying to hide who they are), and is likely just some "entrepreneurs" using pro-Trump propaganda and kittens to make money. Facebook, for its part, doesn't think this rises to the level of "coordinated inauthentic behavior" because the Ukranians aren't hiding their identity (read: it's profitable to Facebook)...
While it may not be part of a foreign-government backed campaign, the end result is the same. Facebook users are being exploited and having their heads filled with rocks for profit. And (at least until this story gets some traction), Facebook's cool with it.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190923/08031243041/another-day-another-major-disinformation-effort-facebook-thinks-is-ok.shtml?fbclid=IwAR0ZOokRpO7Ih8CLRJ51syst4GiQaf2_ck_EBiAAZ1hhFm7-TYiL4cfmm4g
Zuckerberg: First Amendment rights for Ukraine!
Now We Know the Double Standard of Communications Security Exists.
More bad news details have come out on why Obama massive expelled Russians in 2012.
The election wasn't the only big thing.
1.
American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI surveillance teams ... devised other ways to monitor U.S. intelligence communications, including hacking into computers not connected to the internet. Senior FBI and CIA officials briefed congressional leaders ...
These compromises ... gave Russian spies in American cities including Washington, New York and San Francisco key insights into the location of undercover FBI surveillance teams, and likely the actual substance of FBI communications ... provided the Russians opportunities to potentially shake off FBI surveillance and communicate with sensitive human sources, check on remote recording devices and even gather intelligence on their FBI pursuers ...
2.
That effort compromised the encrypted radio systems used by the FBI’s mobile surveillance teams, which track the movements of Russian spies on American soil ...
Around the same time, Russian spies also compromised the FBI teams’ backup communications systems — cellphones outfitted with “push-to-talk” walkie-talkie capabilities ...
The Russian operation went beyond tracking the communications devices used by FBI surveillance teams, ... Working out of secret “listening posts” housed in Russian diplomatic and other government-controlled facilities, the Russians were able to intercept, record and eventually crack the codes to FBI radio communications.
3.
The FBI, under both James Comey and Christopher Wray, have spent years trashing the idea that encrypted communications was important and repeatedly asking the tech industry to insert deliberate vulnerabilities in order to allow US officials to have easier access to encrypted communications.
The pushback on this, over and over, is that any such system for "lawful access" will inevitably lead to much greater risk of others being able to hack in as well.
4.
Of course, it's possible that the folks dealing with the Russians cracking FBI encrypted comms are separate from the people freaking out about consumer use of encryption, but the leadership (i.e., Comey and Wray) certainly had to understand both sides of this. ... Or does it mean that they thought "hey, if we had our comms exposed, so should everyone else?" Or do they just not care?
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190916/17421043003/youd-think-fbi-would-be-more-sensitive-to-protecting-encrypted-communications-now-that-we-know-russians-cracked-fbis-comms.shtml
According to TechDirt, the FBI has been swiss cheese, and so are we. Every back door, portal, or vulnerability that needs "patching" -- not to mention the NSA's warehouse chipping of comm devices -- means Americans' privacy is irrelevant to the FBI's mission of protecting and defending the US Constitution.
Data siphons by individual, state and corporate hackers is our situation. Remember the caution: "If it's free, You're The Product."
The double standard isn't set just by our government but by our corporations.
The Big Boys get security (of their data and global intel).
The rest of us, as "we the product," get no privacy and no security.
When MF45 called Cuomo "Fredo," at the UN Climate Summit, he asserted the lay of the land of fossil fuel mafia capitalism.
"It's not personal, just business," is what a nation of men, not of laws, looks like -- mammon's corporate campus.
Greta -- The Solution Right In Front Of Us
Elizabeth Warren In Iowa Calls For Impeachment
Acronym of the day: VSL
Value of Statistical Life. The value of the cost/benefit of human risk regulation. Human life as dollars in corporatist/government/economic sectors.
A TIME article from 2005:
That's the international standard most private and government-run health insurance plans worldwide use to determine whether to cover a new medical procedure. More simply, insurance companies calculate that to make a treatment worth its cost, it must guarantee one year of "quality life" for $50,000 or less. New research, however, would argue that that figure is far too low.
Stanford economists have demonstrated that the average value of a year of quality human life is actually closer to about $129,000.
To get to that number, Stefanos Zenios ... at Stanford Graduate School of Business used kidney dialysis as a benchmark. Every year dialysis saves the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who would otherwise die of renal failure while waiting for an organ transplant. It is ... the one procedure that Medicare has covered unconditionally since 1972 despite rapid and sometimes expensive innovations in its administration.
To tally the cost-effectiveness of such innovations Zenios and his colleagues ran a computer analysis of more than half a million patients who underwent dialysis, adding up costs and comparing that data to treatment outcomes.
Considering both inflation and new technologies in dialysis, they arrived at $129,000 as a more appropriate threshold for deciding coverage. "That means that if Medicare paid an additional $129,000 to treat a group of patients ... Based on patient surveys, one "quality of life" year is defined as about two years of life on dialysis....
I'm clueless how humans got here; yet VSL is also used in other countries, in every level of government and economic sectors.
Anyone who knows about this knows way more than I. I've been clueless. VSL ran us long before I fussed and fretted over market values usurping Western Enlightenment/moral values, or their buying up bleeding edge culture/innovators.
Now, the idea "It's not personal, just business" isn't just mafia talk; it changes the frame of our dissolutions of the social contract, the citizen-government relationship.
How many of the rich and powerful see us humans as VSL product is hard to say. But I do see majority public opinion polls since Bush II do not result in legislation the public wants (Princeton/Northwestern study 2014); also,
privatization,
government service gutting,
taxpayer shakedowns,
climate crisis denial,
planet B investment,
life extension tech,
AI,
military grade weaponry,
opioids sold to
undereducated,
overmedicated and
over distracted
junk food eating poor people;
believer wars
On its face, VSL is unconstitutional; no dollar value of life was ever expressed or implied by the U.S. Constitution. No legal organization has yet challenged this capitalist/corporate measure of "life, liberty and property," which is one of the reasons why Americans have now become Big Data product.
Warren, Harris, Sanders are onto what Harvard, OECD, and the rich and powerful think about sentimental, thinking, loving humans.
If VSL world doesn't move humans to subvert the monetizing of humans as capital, I don't know what will. VSL deciders don't know or care that they and we humans will either go downward in unconscious ego, or go upward together.
I'm going for kleenex, pondering the direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life
http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1808049,00.html
http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/Viscusi_517.pdf
Greta Thunberg: "Those Answers Don't Exist Anymore. Because You Did Not Act In Time."
Excerpts from her 2019 Speech to UK's Parliament
And they are right. Because how could we? How do you "solve" the greatest crisis that humanity has ever faced? How do you "solve" a war? How do you "solve" going to the moon for the first time? How do you "solve" inventing new inventions?
The climate crisis is both the easiest and the hardest issue we have ever faced. The easiest because we know what we must do. We must stop the emissions of greenhouse gases. The hardest because our current economics are still totally dependent on fossil fuels, and thereby destroying ecosystems in order to create everlasting economic growth.
And we say, "No one knows for sure. But we have to stop burning fossil fuels and restore nature and many other things that we many not have quite figured out yet."
Then you say, "That's not an answer!"
So we say, "We have to start treating the crisis like a crisis, and act even if we don't have all the solutions."
"That's still not an answer," you say.
Then we start talking about circular economy and rewilding nature and the need for a just transition. Then you don't understand what we are talking about.
But you do not listen to that. Because those answers are not for solving a crisis that most of you don't even fully understand. Or don't want to understand.
You don't listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before. Like now. And those answers don't exist anymore. Because you did not act in time.
Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.
We children are not sacrificing our education and our childhood for you to tell us what you consider is politically possible in the society that you have created. We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us and tell us that you really admire what we do.
We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.
The Future, Telling Us To Listen and Act Now
"... I'm sure that the moment we start behaving as if we were in an emergency, we can avoid climate and ecological catastrophe. Humans are very adaptable; we can fix this. But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We must start today. We have no more excuses.
We children are not sacrificing our education and our childhood for you to tell us what you consider is politically possible in the society that you have created. We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us and tell us that you really admire what we do.
We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back."
Never Normal Again.
Even if, miraculously, humans immediately ceased emitting carbon, we'd still be due for some additional warming from us the stuff we've put into the air already. And of course with global emissions still increasing, we're very far from zeroing out on carbon and therefore very far from stalling climate change. The devastation we are now seeing all around us is a beyond-best-case scenario for the future of warming and all the climate disasters it will bring.
The effects will grow and build as the planet continues to warm: from 1 degree to 1.5 degrees to almost certainly 2 degrees and beyond. The last few years of climate disasters may look like about as much as the planet can take. In fact, we are only just entering our brave new world, one that collapses below us as soon as we set foot for it.
From The Uninhabitable Earth. Wallace-Wells, a columnist and deputy editor of New York Magazine, wrote this best seller in response to what he saw as abstract coverage of climate change.
"I started seeing a lot of really alarming papers in 2016, the severity of which weren't being reflected in conventional writing and storytelling about climate." He predicts that alarming change could be coming as soon as the end of this century including an estimated $551 trillion in global damages ...
Worldwide Climate Strikes -- Focus On India
We Are In An Enforcement Crisis -- Do Something
This government is all about loyalties to the rule of men over oaths to the rule of law. The Second Branch is working around and outside norms and law.
Law will not enforce itself. Secrecy at the highest levels through classification, data sweeps, stalling, legal parsings, actionless rumors and simple inaction, keep everyone in the dark. A lot of promises can be kept in the dark. Secrecy invalidates rule of law.
The current "acting" cabinet is led by one man daily enforcing his rule through presidential "privilege." This "privilege" privileges the autocracy of secrets over the democracy of information.
Congress's only power is through the courts; yet, what powers do courts have.
Who do Congress and the courts send out to enforce their rulings on subpoenas, or just their rulings. Who forcibly collects the fines, enters secured buildings to make the arrests, and where are the scofflaws detained.
The People's House and SCOTUS are stymied by law enforcement controlled by only one branch. The president's. The chief "security" officer of the land. The FBI won't act independently. The DNI won't act independently.
That's the current state of impotence in two branches of this government. Two and a half.
There is no power of the Law without real world physical enforcement of it.
My position: it's the enforcement, stupid. Do something.
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Gender: Do not displayHometown: New England, The South, Midwest
Home country: USA
Current location: Sarasota
Member since: Sat Mar 5, 2011, 12:32 PM
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