Paratechnology
PARATECHNOLOGY PART 3: SOCIAL NETWORKING - THE PIED PIPER
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A Newly Released, 2012 Expose of the Super Technology of the Global Elite and the Antichrist New World Order
SOCIAL NETWORKING – THE PIED PIPER (Part 3)
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PARATECHNOLOGY PART 3: SOCIAL NETWORKING - THE PIED PIPER
This report is the property of Rema Marketing and is considered to be strictly for reading only. With receipt of this report, the recipient acknowledges and agrees that written permissions must be secured from the publisher to use or reproduce any part of this report, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles. A publication of Rema Marketing. ©2012, All rights reserved.
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PARATECHNOLOGY PART 3: SOCIAL NETWORKING - THE PIED PIPER
PARATECHNOLOGY PART 3: SOCIAL NETWORKING - THE PIED PIPER This section focuses on a critical component of the coming one world government. Control of all people. “And authority was given him over every tribe, tongue and nation” Revelation 13:7
Until now, 100% full control of every tongue, tribe and nation has always represented the biggest hurdle for the conspirators behind global control. So a plan has been devised to seize full control of the two nerve centres of that affect every single person on this planet. Control of all money and control of all global and local communication. By migrating the world to a totally 100% electronic currency and cashless society and by using an avalanche of social networking sites and the increasing attraction of cell phones to entrap billions of people, the largest and most sophisticated privacy conspiracy of all time is being rolled country by country as the full power of the Mark of the Beast comes into full view.
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PRIVACY AND THE PATRIOT ACT
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NATIONAL SECURITY LETTERS
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INFORMATION CONTROL
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CLOUD COMPUTING
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WEBSITE COOKIE TRACKING
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FACE BOOKS COVEVANT WITH RFID
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FACEBOOK COOPERATION WITH INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES
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FACEBOOKS PRIVACY POLICY CONTROVERSIES
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FACEBOOKS SILENT PARTNERS
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WEBCAM REMOTE CONTROL
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THE GOOGLE WORLD ORDER
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THE GROWING POLICY AGAINST CHRISTIANITY
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CELLPHONE REMOTE DATA ACCESS
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STREET LIGHT SPIES
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PARATECHNOLOGY PART 3: SOCIAL NETWORKING - THE PIED PIPER
PARATECHNOLOGY PART 3: SOCIAL NETWORKING - THE PIED PIPER
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PARATECHNOLOGY PART 3: SOCIAL NETWORKING - THE PIED PIPER
1. PRIVACY AND THE PATRIOT ACT The usual story about privacy is that we have to balance the right to privacy against the right to protect individuals. With the Internet, there's always been a concern about the safety of children that has created some controversy. The question of whether emails are truly private is another controversy that has been around before Patriot Act. The Internet has walked a fine tightrope between individual privacy and anonymity and the need to ensure the safety of those using the Internet. Advertisers, cookies and website registrations have often been a concern for Internet users wishing to remain anonymous.
In the United States, Internet privacy prior to Patriot Act was covered by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA, 1986). This was an amendment of a 1968 bill that covered wiretapping when it came to telephone usage. ECPA covered any communications across wire, occurring orally, or electronically "while those communications are being made, are in transit, and when they are stored on computers." This means that another individual cannot legally read your email, your Facebook messages or your instant messages. Naturally, there are exceptions to this rule in order to ensure the safety of users. Those exempted from the law are: • •
Federal, state and other governmental officials who are authorized to intercept such things Operators and providers of Internet services - only for the purpose of maintaining and providing services
For the governmental officials to intercept emails during the time of ECPA, a certain procedure needed to be followed where evidence was presented to a judge showing probable cause and the need to follow and check up on that particular user. The judge would issue a warrant, if it was deemed necessary, and then interception could only occur for thirty days. Should any information be gathered about an individual PARATECHNOLOGY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2012, All rights reserved
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through his or her communications without this procedure, it was illegal to admit it as evidence in a court case. ECPA also protected the privacy of subscribers to such services, and users were also protected against officials following the "tracks" of an individual online (where he or she would dial in, etc.) without the use of a warrant. CALEA - THE INTERMEDIATE STEP BETWEEN ECPA AND PATRIOT ACT Before the Patriot Act was signed into law, the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA, January 2001) was signed into effect. This law modified ECPA to make it easier for law enforcement agencies and government agencies to complete surveillance (authorized) when necessary. This meant that any provider of internet services and equipment needed to ensure that their programs, applications and equipment would allow such agencies to carry out surveillance procedures on any individual if it was deemed necessary. This means that all of the providers of services must comply with the regulation to create a system whereby any individual on the Internet may be monitored. It also means that any new telecommunications provider would need to provide such a system.
For the individual, awareness of this hole in privacy may not have even been achieved at this point. After all, who would pay attention to regulations that were created for providers? This law paved the way for Patriot Act though. Had telecommunications providers and service providers not been required to comply with this law, the losses of privacy brought about by the introduction of Patriot Act - and the type of monitoring and interceptions allowed by Patriot Act - would not have been possible. CALEA paved the way for a radical loss of privacy on the Internet.
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PARATECHNOLOGY PART 3: SOCIAL NETWORKING - THE PIED PIPER
WHAT CHANGED AFTER THE PATRIOT ACT Once CALEA was in place, requiring systems and equipment that allowed for easy surveillance and interception, was ready for the Patriot Act. On September 11, 2001, tragedy struck in the United States. Two commercial airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center towers. Another was partially retaken by the passengers and crashed in a field, and a fourth crashed into the Pentagon. What unfolded afterwards changed american privacy rights forever. Regardless of how one feels about 9/11, it's important to understand how privacy rights changed - especially how internet privacy changed. Prior to the Patriot Act, one could reasonably assume that email was private. While this too was a largely unfounded notion (forwarding being one reason we cannot consider email to be private), this assumption changed. The federal government made the case that greater protections were necessary to ensure the safety of all citizens. This created quite a stir. The original Patriot Act was passed October 26, 2001. Since then, it has changed the way we look at internet privacy - both personally and in the business world. By understanding the Patriot Act and what it means for internet privacy, you can protect yourself and your co-workers' privacy better. H.R. 3162 is probably one of the most despised pieces of legislation passed in the House of Representatives.1 This 342 page bill has impacted the privacy of American citizens. The bill's official title is: "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism," but we've come to know it as the Patriot Act. The purpose, as one can read from the title, is to help protect American citizens from the threat of terrorism. However, this bill has received much criticism - from many sides of the political spectrum. This is because the bill allows for less privacy for individual citizens. For instance, the bill contains wording allowing the government to perform enhanced surveillance procedures including the authority to "intercept wire, oral, and electronic communications relating to terrorism." What's interesting about the Patriot Act is that it doesn't only justify surveillance in cases of terrorism. It also addresses surveillance on people hacking into systems or committing fraud using a computer something government authorities have the right to intercept. Consider this scenario: Say you've become enraged about something your employer has done. You send an email threatening action - involving a computer - against that employer to a friend. It is very possible that this email may be intercepted - or is it? Now, in order to perform surveillance operations on a citizen traversing the World Wide Web, all the government needed to do to start monitoring and intercepting an individual's email was show reason to believe that the person might be a suspected terrorist. In addition to watching U.S. Citizens, the government now had the right to monitor such communications by international citizens. This means that at any point in time, anyone residing in the world who the U.S. government has deemed to be a potential threat may have his or her email being monitored.
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Also prior to the Patriot Act, there were some methods for protecting computers so that information could not be accessed. The act gives government officials the right to bypass any firewalls or passwords in order to obtain, monitor and intercept information. Subpoenas can be granted asking for such information and warrants can be granted from any judge - not just those who previously had the authority to grant such surveillance rights. WHAT DOES THE FUTURE OF INTERNET PRIVACY LOOK LIKE? Ten years after the Patriot Act was passed, President Obama extended it for another four years. Various agencies continue to call for better methods of monitoring and intercepting information. One of the reasons for this does involve a legitimate concern for individual safety. Like it or not, some forfeiture of privacy and freedom is necessary to be kept safe from the vast array of Internet predators out there. That being said, monitoring the activities of individuals only because those individuals are suspected of crimes is highly questionable in terms of human rights. Unfortunately, with the plethora of social networking websites, the ability for companies to "Google" their potential hires and current employees and base employment decisions on what they find, privacy is largely becoming an illusion. While in the early days of the Internet, one could choose any "handle" he or she liked for using the internet, now more personal identifying information is required. For example, Facebook requires everyone using the service use his or her own real name. Those who do not comply with this requirement are in violation with the TOS contract they sign upon registering for the service. That doesn't mean people don't work around it - but it does mean that those individuals are at risk for having accounts suspended.
It's unlikely that privacy concerns are going to go away. In fact, the Internet is increasingly becoming less private. You may have noticed the disclaimers at the bottom of emails reminding you that your emails are not private and advising you not to share any personal information. If privacy is a concern for you, or if you're worried about being monitored, perhaps the best course of action is to shy away from saying anything that could potentially be deemed incriminating. Whilst the Patriot Act is supposed to take the First Amendment into consideration, civil rights activists are concerned that this is not the case in practice. PARATECHNOLOGY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2012, All rights reserved
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2. NATIONAL SECURITY LETTERS The passage of the Patriot Act in October 2001 is by now an all-too-familiar story. The American people, already suffering from the trauma of 9/11, were pushed into outright panic by the anthrax attacks, a series of anthrax-laced mailings that killed five, injured 17 and shut down congress for the first time in modern history. The Act itself was introduced on a Tuesday and signed into law on Friday, before anyone had read let alone understood the sweeping changes it would introduce to American law. One of those changes were amendments to a little-known and little-used FBI instrument called National Security Letters. National Security Letters allow the FBI and other agencies to issue businesses and institutions requests for private data on citizens, including financial transactions and communications records, regardless of whether or not they are even suspected of any crime, and to hold that data indefinitely. One of the most worrying aspects of the letters are their non-disclosure clause, which not only prohibits recipients from disclosing the contents of the letter, but even the fact that they have received a letter at all. The letters were first introduced as an amendment to the 1978 Right to Financial Privacy Act. Originally requiring issuing agencies to give advance notice of the request and allow the subject an opportunity to challenge it, the instrument was amended in 1986 to allow letters to be issued without advanced notice in cases where the FBI had “specific and articulable facts giving reason to believe that the customer or entity whose records are sought is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power.” At the time, compliance with the letters was voluntary and recipients frequently declined to disclose the information. In the 1980s and 1990s, amendments were passed compelling compliance and allowing the FBI to issue letters even when the subject of the request was not under direct investigation. With the passage of the Patriot Act, however, the scope of the program was expanded aggressively. Under the Act, the FBI was granted the power to issue National Security Letters against US citizens, even if those citizens were not suspected of any criminal activity. For the first time, other agencies were also granted the ability to issue the letters. And, unlike other legal instruments for obtaining information like a warrant or subpoena, the letters require no judicial approval before being issued. Despite the incredible frequency with which the letters were issued after the Patriot Act, with the FBI alone averaging 50,000 letters per year between 2003 and 2006, it was not until 2004 that the program was challenged in the courts, with Judge Victor Marrero of the Southern District of New York finding that the National Security Letters violated both the First and Fourth Amendments. The case revolved around Nicholas Merrill, the owner of an Internet Service Provider who was issued a National Security Letter by the FBI requesting 16 categories of information about certain customers, PARATECHNOLOGY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2012, All rights reserved
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including email addresses, billing information, and a number of other pieces of data that remain classified to this day. Refusing to comply with the letter, Merrill entered a year long legal battle that included the FBI’s dropping of its request for the information, but still insisting that he could not publicly speak about the letters or even identify himself as the recipient. It was not until August 2010 that the FBI partially lifted the gag order, allowing Merrill to be identified for the first time. Shortly thereafter, he appeared on the BoillingFrogsPost podcast with Sibel Edmonds and Peter B. Collins to discuss his ordeal. 2 In 2007, the results of an internal FBI audit of the National Security Letters program was made public. The audit only covered 10% of the bureau’s national security cases, yet still uncovered over 1000 instances where the FBI broke their own regulations, including dozens of cases where they had requested information that they were not legally allowed to ask for. 3 An Inspector General report released that March examined a sample of FBI case files and found that there were more National Security Letters issued than there were in the Bureau’s reporting database. The report concluded that the FBI had likely grossly misled the public about how many such letters had been issued. In response, FBI director Mueller admitted a “pattern of abuse of authority” within the Bureau that cast doubt on the ability of the FBI to guard the public trust. Also in 2007 it was revealed that the FBI had issued letters requesting financial records of American companies on behalf of the Defense Department and even the CIA, in direct contravention of its mandate to conduct investigations and operations exclusively overseas. The Department of Defense letters do not have the same mandatory compliance restrictions as FBI letters, but when they were revealed in an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit it was discovered that the letters were coercive and often did not make it clear that compliance with the requests was voluntary. One of the most heartening things about the National Security Letters is that time and again, companies and institutions that have challenged the letters have succeeded in getting the FBI to back down. In the case of Nicholas Merrill, the Bureau dropped its request and partially lifted the gag order preventing him from speaking about it. In 2006, the FBI dropped a request for information regarding computer usage at a Connecticut library and withdrew a gag order on its recipients after being challenged in court. In 2008, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU succeeded in getting the FBI to withdraw a request it had made for records pertaining to a user of the Internet Archive. Herein lies the hope inherent in so many of these inherently tyrannical abuses of government power: that when forced to defend their position in the light of public scrutiny, the tyrants will readily turn tail and run. But, as Sibel Edmonds goes on to point out in that BoilingFrogsPost interview with Merrill, what does it say about the hundreds of thousands of national security letter recipients who did nothing to challenge this practice? Surely nothing can be a more damning indictment of a society that once thought of itself as a beacon of liberty for the world that fewer than one in fifty thousand are willing to stand up and challenge the presumed authority of an agency, and a process, that is clearly and admittedly out of control. So in this microcosm of the national security letter we can see the macrocosm of the police state control grid as a whole. If it is true that for evil to triumph, good men and women must do nothing, than all it takes to defeat that evil is for the good men and women to simply say no and hold their ground.
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3. INFORMATION CONTROL Controlling information and spying on citizens were hallmarks of totalitarian regimes in the 20th century. Yet today, even moderate democracies are getting in on the action. In the last decade, as communication has shifted from traditional landlines, phone calls, and postal service to cell phones and email, governments around the world have struggled to maintain their ability to hunt down criminals and dissidents. As the world went wireless, intelligence gathering agencies have adapted and upgraded wiretapping skills, and major telecommunications companies have helped them do it. Nokia, Sprint, Ericsson, Facebook, Google – think of a business that helps people talk and exchange information and you’ll think of a company that has helped law enforcement agencies look through private data in search of the bad guys. Not such a big deal, right? I mean, we all want to hunt down the bad guys. Yet it’s becoming clear that not only is the loss of our privacy considered acceptable collateral damage, but giving backdoor access to governments make a business’ data more vulnerable to the bad guys as well.
In many areas of the globe, such as the US, UK and EU, to name a few, governments may monitor a citizen’s communications when they are suspected of a crime. There are legal/judicial hurdles that must be cleared for such observations to be installed but once they are cleared governments are legally allowed to spy. Such wiretapping has been going on since before the phone was invented. Now, however, much of our communication doesn’t pass through telephone wires but through the servers of corporate giants like Google. This proved to be both a hindrance and a large opportunity to information gathering and law enforcement agencies. They didn’t have direct access to those lines of communication, but the new medium allowed for automated detection and recording. By requiring PARATECHNOLOGY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2012, All rights reserved
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companies like Facebook, Google, Sprint, etc. to grant them automated backdoor access to their technologies, government agencies all around the world suddenly had the means to browse through billions of communications. Email subject lines, mobile phone GPS locations, call histories – all this digital information could be scanned, sorted, and stored for future use. For instance, Sprint-Nextel provided US agencies with 8 million requests for cell phone GPS location information in 2008-2009 alone – and that’s just one mobile company.4 In an interview with Russia Today, Julian Assange, head of WikiLeaks stated that other technology companies, such as Facebook, are so accessible to US intelligence agencies that they act as de facto information gathering sources. 5 The EU’s massive Project Indect (Work Package 4) 6, which we’ve discussed before, is going strong. Among other prerogatives, the initiative will require major telecom companies in the European Union member states to assist them in establishing automated data mining for mobiles, email, social networks, etc. To the tune of £10 million (about $C16,973,183), the European Union is backing Project Indect, a five-year spy plan whose principal function would be to secretly monitor almost every aspect of the lives of EU citizens. If you send data to the EU, it’s going to get looked at by a computer, and if it sets off the wrong filter, a human will look at it too. This is just the next step in the wiretapping. In 2008, Nokia sold Iran the wiretapping protocols and equipment they would need to monitor their citizens’ phone calls. A group of Iranian citizens are suing the company for aiding the government in (unlawfully) detaining and persecuting them after the disputed 2009 elections. In 2004-2005, during Greece elections, unknown groups were able to monitor the calls of elected Greek representatives. They did so by illegally hacking into Ericsson’s wiretapping capabilities, capabilities that were required by the Greek government. When Google was the victim of a cyber-attack based out of China more than a year ago, the hackers exploited wiretapping protocols Google built into their systems as dictated by the US government. These last two examples highlight how ongoing compliance with wiretapping laws make telecommunications companies more vulnerable to cyber spying in general. Backdoors that grant access to the FBI or NSA also serve as tempting targets for everyone else. Whether they are exploited for identity theft, or used to coordinate concentrated cyber attacks from other nations, wiretapping access is a proven weak point in telecommunication security. The FBI has been leaning on Google and Facebook in recent years to open themselves up further to online wiretapping (presumably to grant easy access not just to subject lines and metadata but body text as well). The FBI has also been involved in a controversial data mining project by the Homeland Security Department. Documents recently posted on line seek industry input to develop the equivalent of a web alert system. “I think what you are looking at is a Google news feed specifically targeted for law enforcement, focusing on their specific needs,” 7
Frank Ciluffo, who leads George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute, told Fox News.
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“We're on our mobile phones and we're on our various iPhones, BlackBerrys and the like that transmits data that locates individuals.” 7
The 12-page document, called "FBI Social Media Application," provides a detailed picture of the bureau’s specifications. The program must have the ability "to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence ... to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents and emerging threats." Ciluffo, who was also a former adviser in the George W. Bush White House, said tracking social media is the tip of the spear for national security investigations and it raises privacy questions, over whether law enforcement officers are allowed to monitor public social media posts. “If you’re in law enforcement's shoes, and certainly if you've got a counterterrorism organization, I wouldn't see why they should feel that anyone else can monitor but they can't,” he said.8
Ciluffo said technology is running way of ahead, and the government is about to meet the new social network. “We’ve got to figure what is the right balance between privacy and security. And I'm not sure we, as a country, have addressed that question. When you're dealing with known foreign terrorist organizations and sympathizers and known terrorists, to me that's a cut-and-dry kind of case.” 8
According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who reviewed the FBI documents for Fox News, information pulled from sites like Facebook, Twitter and blogs could be cross referenced with other databases to identify potential threats. Mike German, a former FBI agent who runs the National Security section of the civil liberties group, says the data could be used to increase video surveillance in a neighborhood. German argues fundamental issues are not being addressed. - intentionally put out there on the Internet, we still have a right not to have that monitored by the government. The government really doesn't have any interest in tracking someone's Twitter account if they're not doing something wrong or suspected of doing something wrong.”
And German says the information can lead, in some cases, to questioning by federal officers, and getting rid of the “cloud of suspicion” can become virtually impossible. “Part of what we want to protect is the freedom to speak your mind, to criticize government policies without fear that the government will take it the wrong way and start treating you as if you're a threat.”
The FBI told Fox News in a statement that the project was in the research stage, and if it goes ahead, it “will not focus on specific persons or protected groups, but on words that relate to “events” and “crisis” and activities constituting violations of federal criminal law or threats to national security. Examples of these words will include lockdown, bomb, suspicious package, white powder, active shoot, school lock down, etc.” 9
Sweden’s FRA-Law (passed in 2008) gave the government unheard of access to online data passing through its lines. While that law proved to be grossly unpopular with the citizenry of Sweden, it went into effect January 1st, 2009, and remains enforced today. WikiLeaks alleges, and Russia Today reports that cables from the US embassy show that the American government was prodding Sweden into adopting greater access to online communications, ostensibly because 80% of the traffic from Russia to the US passes through there.
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How secure is your online information? Depends on how much attention you’ve garnered. While current wiretapping technologies would make it unlikely for every correspondence you produce to receive even automated attention, there’s little doubt that should you become the suspect of government scrutiny, there are systems in place that allow you to be monitored easily. When a law enforcement or intelligence agency comes a knocking, the backdoor to your data is opened. That’s the reality of modern wiretapping laws.
The situation, however, is complex. Companies like Google and Yahoo struggled with being coerced to help countries like China censor information. They were also legally pressured to comply with wiretapping laws in the US and EU. On the flipside, Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants are setting up camp in Washington DC, spending more money every year on influencing laws that affect their industries. Governments pressure businesses, businesses use their wealth to pressure government officials…it’s a fun little waltz, don’t you think? The only problem is that we seem to be the dance floor, even if all the parties involved claim they’re trying to help the average citizen. Singularity Hub has often speculated that the upcoming generation will have different perceptions about privacy, that youth raised on Facebook updates and Tweets will move much of their lives into the public sphere. Unfortunately the trouble arises when our love of expression is twisted into a tool of oppression. We’re currently wading through a nebulous gray zone where criminals can be convicted by their online activity and governments can pour through billions of online communications looking for criminal activity. Wherever we decide to draw the privacy line, we need to do so willingly and on our own terms. The longer citizens wait to make this a prominent political issue the more government agencies will become entrenched in their current behavior. Living in a democracy is no longer a guarantee that a government won’t act in very totalitarian ways. Maybe it never was.
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4. CLOUD COMPUTING Cloud computing sounds like a very technical term but the concept is simple. Imagine your PC and all of your mobile devices being in sync, all the time. Imagine being able to access all of your personal data at any given moment. Imagine having the ability to organize and mine data from any online source. Imagine being able to share that data, photos, movies, contacts, e-mail, documents, etc. with your friends, family, and coworkers in an instant. This is what personal cloud computing promises to deliver. Whether you realize it or not, you're probably already using cloud-based services. Pretty much everyone with a computer has been. Gmail and Google Docs are two prime examples; we just don't think of those services in those terms. In essence, personal cloud computing means having every piece of data you need for every aspect of your life at your fingertips and ready for use. Data must be mobile, transferable, and instantly accessible. The key to enabling the portable and interactive you is the ability to synch up your data among your devices, as well as access to shared data. Shared data is the data we access online in any number of places, such as social networks, banks, blogs, newsrooms, paid communities, etc. Ultimately, your personal cloud which includes everything from your address book and music collection to your reports and documents for work, will connect to the public cloud and other personal clouds. Everything connects. That means every place on the Internet you interact with, as well as every person you interact with can be connected. This includes your social networks, bank, university, workplace, family and friends.
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In 2011 a spate of articles in the “Wall Street Journal” and the technical press brought up a potential dark side to cloud computing. Namely, the spectre of the Patriot Act allowing the US government access to what is stored in the cloud when the servers are provided by a US company. While the government must show reasonable cause for their request for data, US companies holding the “clouds” would be required to turn the data over. Some European and Asian companies are concerned that this amounts to unlimited access to their data. American companies that provide cloud services are crying foul and saying that the concerns are overblown, that cloud service companies elsewhere are seeking to obtain a market advantage by stressing this possibility. But it’s not just marketing. Some governments, such as that of the Netherlands, have considered banning US cloud service companies from competing for government contracts.
Since one selling point of the cloud is that it enables data to travel freely, this concern is worrisome. It raises the concept of companies requiring their data be maintained within their home country’s borders and under their control, thus negating that advantage. Not only are data restrictions being contemplated by individual companies, but some countries are also considering requiring that the cloud companies install servers within their borders. As recently as July 2010 a coalition of cloud computing experts from companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Sales force urged the US government to conduct a study on the Patriot Act and other countries’ national security laws. The report also recommended updating US digital privacy laws which are described as “antiquated.” It’s not just foreign nations that are considering restricting data and specifying server locations, US federal agencies are inserting similar terms and requirements in their contracts despite the fact that agencies have been instructed to categorize their data and only restrict the most highly sensitive. While it appears that this concern is being used primarily by non-US cloud service providers in seeking a competitive advantage, security of data is an important consideration when thinking of moving to the cloud. This is just one more piece of information to keep in mind when contemplating using the cloud to store sensitive information. It is important to be well informed as to all the possible ramifications of data privacy and ownership.
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5. WEBSITE COOKIE TRACKING Major websites such as MSN.com and Hulu.com have been tracking people's online activities using powerful new methods that are almost impossible for computer users to detect, new research shows. The new techniques, which are legal, reach beyond the traditional "cookie," a small file that websites routinely install on users' computers to help track their activities online. Hulu were installing files known as "supercookies," which are capable of re-creating users' profiles after people deleted regular cookies, according to researchers at Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley. Hulu, was storing tracking coding in files related to Adobe Systems Inc.'s widely used Flash software, which enables many of the videos found online, the researchers said in a report. Hulu is owned by NBC Universal, Walt Disney Co. and News Corp., owner of The Wall Street Journal. Hulu was one of several companies that entered into a $2.4 million class-action settlement last year related to the use of Flash cookies to circumvent users who tried to delete their regular cookies. The Berkeley researchers also found that Hulu's website contained code from Kissmetrics, a company that analyzes website-traffic data. Kissmetrics was inserting supercookies into users' browser caches and into files associated with the latest version of the standard programming language used to build Web pages, known as HTML5. In a blog post after the report was released, Kissmetrics said it would use only regular cookies for future tracking. Websites and advertisers have faced strong criticism for collecting and selling personal data about computer users without their knowledge. Many of the companies found to be using the new techniques say the tracking was inadvertent and they stopped it after being contacted by the researchers. The spread of advanced tracking techniques shows how quickly data-tracking companies are adapting their techniques. When The Wall Street Journal examined tracking tools on major websites last year, most of these more aggressive techniques were not in wide use. But as consumers become savvier about protecting their privacy online, the new techniques appear to be gaining ground. Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate, identified what is known as a "history stealing" tracking service on Flixster.com, a social-networking service for movie fans recently acquired by Time Warner Inc., and on Charter Communications Inc.'s Charter.net. Such tracking peers into people's Web-browsing histories to see if they previously had visited any of more than 1,500 websites, including ones dealing with fertility problems, menopause and credit repair, the researchers said. History stealing has been identified on other sites in recent years, but rarely at that scale. Mr. Mayer determined that the history stealing on those two sites was being done by Epic Media Group, a New York digital-marketing company. Charter and Flixster said they didn't have a direct relationship with Epic, but as is common in online advertising, Epic's tracking service was installed by advertisers. PARATECHNOLOGY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2012, All rights reserved
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Don Mathis, chief executive of Epic, says his company was inadvertently using the technology and no longer uses it. He said the information was used only to verify the accuracy of data that it had bought from other vendors. Both Flixster and Charter say they were unaware of Epic's activities and have since removed all Epic technology from their sites. Charter did the same in 2010 with a different vendor doing history stealing on a smaller scale. Gathering information about Web-browsing history can offer valuable clues about people's interests, concerns or household finances. Someone researching a disease online, for example, might be thought to have the illness, or at least to be worried about it. The potential for privacy legislation in Washington has driven the online-ad industry to establish its own rules, which it says are designed to alert computer users of tracking and offer them ways to limit the use of such data by advertisers. Under the self-imposed guidelines, collecting health and financial data about individuals is permissible as long as the data don't contain financial-account numbers, Social Security numbers, pharmaceutical prescriptions or medical records. But using techniques such as history stealing and supercookies "to negate consumer choices" about privacy violates the guidelines, says Lee Peeler, executive vice president of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, one of several groups enforcing the rules. Until now, the council "has been trying to push companies into the program, not kick them out," Mr. Peeler says. "You can expect to see more formal public enforcement soon." 10 In 2010, the online-ad industry launched a program to label ads that are sent to computer users based on tracking data. The goal is to provide users a place to click in the ad itself that would let them opt out of receiving such targeted ads. (It doesn't turn off tracking altogether.) The program has been slow to catch on, new findings indicate. The industry has estimated that nearly 80% of online display ads are based on tracking data. Mr. Mayer, along with researchers Jovanni Hernandez and Akshay Jagadeesh of Stanford's Computer Science Security Lab, found that only 9% of the ads they examined on the 500 most popular websites, 62 out of 627 ads contained the label. The industry says self-regulation is working. Peter Kosmala, managing director of the Digital Advertising Alliance, says the labeling program has made "tremendous progress." Mr. Mayer discovered that several Microsoft-owned websites, including MSN.com and Microsoft.com, were using supercookies. Supercookies are stored in different places than regular cookies, such as within the Web browser's "cache" of previously visited websites, which is where the Microsoft ones were located. Privacy-conscious users who know how to find and delete regular cookies might have trouble locating supercookies. Mr. Mayer also found supercookies on Microsoft's advertising network, which places ads for other companies across the Internet. As a result, people could have had the supercookie installed on their machines without visiting Microsoft websites directly. Even if they deleted regular cookies, information about their Web-browsing could have been retained by Microsoft.
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Microsoft's Mr. Hintze said that the company removed the code after being contacted by Mr. Mayer, and that Microsoft is still trying to figure out why the code was created. A spokeswoman said the data gathered by the supercookie were used only by Microsoft and weren't shared with outside companies. Facebook was also recently exposed as “inadvertently” tracking your web movements, even after you logged off its site. Australian blogger Nik Cubrilovic, like many alarmed by the upcoming Timeline changes to Facebook that will automatically populate your profile with items from your past or sites you’re viewing, looked into how to disable this feature, which could “accidentally share a page or an event that you did not intend others to see.” Cubrilovic writes another blogger’s advice to combat this problem is to log off Facebook. But that isn’t enough: logging out of Facebook only de-authorizes your browser from the web application, a number of cookies (including your account number) are still sent along to all requests to Facebook.com. Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit. The only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate browser for Facebook interactions. Once this revelation went viral, Facebook announced its cookies were unintentionally tracking sending information to the company and that the problem has been resolved. Facebook claimed the cookies no longer send information while you are logged out of its site. However If you are logged in to Facebook, the cookies will still send the information, and they remain on your computer unless you manually delete them. They send Facebook your IP address, the ‘unique identifier’ address of your PC and information on whether you have visited millions of websites: anything with a Facebook ‘like’ or ‘recommend’ button on it. 11
said a Facebook spokesperson — and admitted that some Facebook cookies send back the address of users’ PCs and sites they had visited, even while logged out.
“We place cookies on the computer of the user,”
However, the site spokesperson said that the ‘potential issue’ had now been ‘fixed’ so that the cookies will no longer broadcast information: “We fixed the cookies so they won’t include unique information in the future when people log out.” 11
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6. FACEBOOKS COVENANT WITH RFID The social networking website Facebook launched February 2004 and rose to the number one social networking spot in competition with Myspace. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Facebook had 138.9 million monthly unique U.S. visitors in May 2011. And, over 50% of Americans have a Facebook Account. The next largest block of accounts are in Western Europe. As of January 2011 there were over 600 million Facebook users.
It doesn’t take much forethought to realize that there are countless privacy pitfalls in a world where a near-endless stream of personal bits is indiscriminately posted, indefinitely stored, and quietly collected and analyzed by marketers, identity thieves, and professional government snoops in America and abroad. The public controversies that have erupted to date - Facebook’s drastic terms of service changes and Google Buzz’s forced sharing of email contacts are only the first snares in a rapidly growing thicket of social networking privacy issues. In an innocuously titled article “Water parks and resorts using RFID to capture precious memories” 12 RFID News reported in July 2011 that a chain of North American indoor water park hotels were using RFID wristbands to allow guests to take photos at kiosks, which are then automatically uploaded to their Facebook profiles. Though this method of taking a family photo while on vacation may seem harmless, the article also adds, “…the wristbands also serve as guests’ room keys and in-house charge accounts”. 12
This is just one example of how Facebook is being used to acclimate the public to the surveillance state, with some people excitedly (and unknowingly) embracing it and others surrendering to it merely for the sake of convenience. Facebook has been partnering with companies to promote RFID technology for years in an attempt to market wristbands that track you, as somehow being the next step in societal evolution instead of an elaborately maintained invisible chain chaining civilization backwards into a new form of slavery. Facebook has altered society’s collective mind. By playing on the desires of people, (mostly teenagers and young adults) to socialize and share themselves with others in a way that is more controlled and feels private (though it is not), social networks have become a powerful force in the changing world, and an endless well from which to gather information on individuals like never before. With Facebook as the current leader of the industry, social networks have so successfully lured people from all over the globe into sharing information about themselves, from the private details of their personal lives to the PARATECHNOLOGY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2012, All rights reserved
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momentary mental chatter between their ears, that a person from only a decade ago if placed here today would shiver when first exposed to the new norms of our more socially open culture. Facebook is a tool used not only by its subscribers to meet new people and monitor the activities of friends, but also by law enforcement when investigating crimes, and by employers to screen potential hires. Companies today view the Facebook profiles of applicants. This fact is already widely known and accepted as “normal”. It is likely that in the near future it will be next to impossible to get a professional job without having a Facebook profile. Thanks to the continuing implosion of the world economy, employers hold a greater advantage over their workforces and are obsessed with analysis, numbers, and categorization more now than ever before. Companies can afford to be as discriminating as they want when selecting new employees. Of course Facebook is only one part of this process. Other technological means are also used, such as computerized “personality” tests (mental submission probability gauges) which ask questions such as “how do you feel about the direction the world is headed in?” that have nothing to do with the jobs themselves. Employers look at Facebook profiles to judge an applicant’s personal habits, friends, and political correctness. Everything else being equal, an employer choosing between two applicants, one with a public Facebook profile that reflects a “model life’, and another who either has their Facebook profile set to private, or who has no a profile at all, will most likely choose the one whose personal life they’ve scouted out and been assured fits into their hiring model rather than the one whose personal life remains a mystery. Whether employers will admit to this bias or not is another question, however an honest, common sense look at human nature and the importance companies already place on an applicant’s Facebook profile and web footprint reveal that it already exists. People have been asked to bring up their Facebook profiles during job interviews. Since money is the means for survival in any modern society, the requirement for one to have a Facebook profile (or whatever future incarnation the leading social tracking database takes) will be initially implemented not through legislation, but through social and economic pressure. Many never question Facebook’s motivation in gathering the information that it commonly asks for and retains. At its core Facebook is a database used to track individuals and groups. It tracks not only the information its members post but according to a Facebook employee who spoke to Rumpus Online Magazine, every click its members make while on the website. This means that forgetting about the information you volunteer for a moment (such as favorite activities, religion, sexual orientation, family members) Facebook knows which links posted by friends you click on, which friends’ profiles you visit, and which pictures you view. This information alone says a lot about a person’s interests, world view, personal associations, and even romantic yearnings…information that could easily be used to create psychological profiles of targeted subjects. Along with that, Facebook games provide useful information about a person by cloaking personality questions inside a gift wrap of fantasy. Facebook also knows who your real friends are. Even if you have a page with 5000 friends, list no personal information on it, and only know a few of your “friends” personally, it will most often include those people as the top friends on your profile and automatically suggest them when you use the search box.
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When Facebook partnered with Coca-Cola in 2010 to provide RFID bracelets for teenagers at the CocaCola Village to scan and post their actions to their Facebook profiles,13 it was celebrated as bringing Facebook into the real world. Given what Facebook is all about, the notion of it invading and transforming the real world is a terrifying nightmare that most Americans don’t yet understand and tragically may not understand until it arrives. If the globalists get their way, cash will eventually be taken out of the equation so that all transactions an individual makes will be digital and thus traceable, and halted if the masters of the control grid desire. A society modeled after the experiment at the Coca-Cola Village, and the water slide park would represent a virtual prison state where secrets are impossible to keep and no action is taken without the scan and approval of an all seeing eye. That people may be able to select their privacy settings and prevent their peers from accessing their information would provide only a hollow comfort. The information would still be there, and be accessible to those given the authority to retrieve it. This means that while individuals may be able to keep secrets from fellow slaves, they won’t be able to keep them from their masters. The surveillance state doesn’t just mean that members of society’s upper tiers will be able to monitor those below them. The purpose of surveillance is to control, and that’s exactly what the kind of RFID technology Facebook is selling intends to do. Futurists gleefully talk about an America in which the policies of the nanny state are enforced by technology that can monitor every movement we make, everything we buy, and everything we put in our bodies. A show that ran on the Discovery Channel a few years back, “2057″ hosted by Michio Kaku,14 laid out for its viewers in docudrama form what the globalist controllers envision for society once their control grid is fully in place. A particular episode titled “The Body” proclaimed that privacy would become a thing of the past, showing a world in which toilets analyzed the urine of those who used them and forwarded that information to their insurance companies (featuring the tale of a man who after a night of drinking cheats the toilet by pouring stored urine in it, later being denied a needed procedure in the hospital after discovery of his deception is made). In this show, insurance representatives sit like supreme beings in the futuristic equivalent of call centers, constantly monitoring individuals through tracking devices in their clothes, sending alerts to them (such as through their mirrors to inform them that they’re not brushing their teeth properly), having the sole power to authorize whether or not an ambulance is dispatched after somebody has an accident. While the show obviously attempted to portray this projected future as being positive, with its lifesaving technology prominently featured, the complete control over individuals and society is also demonstrated. This is a future in which insurance companies and government (along with other industries and government) are working together to decide what behaviors and habits are good and which ones are bad for every person. The individual is then a child forever, subject to the demands of a faceless, bureaucratic father. It’s the same road to hell that other central planning nations have taken before, only with greater technology to enforce it, and a public so thoroughly propagandized that they don’t know what real freedom is and thus don’t know how to challenge their bondage. Facebook is the beginning of that…the distant song in the wind begging the young people of the world to sell their privacy to the control grid. In that way it’s a Pied Piper leading the march of the damned, dancing the world into the shackles of slavery…all to the beat of the New World Order’s drum.
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7. FACEBOOK COOPERATIONS WITH INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES Many U.S. government agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are currently investing heavily in research involving social network analysis. The intelligence community believes that the biggest threat to the U.S. comes from decentralized, leaderless, geographically dispersed groups. These types of threats are most easily countered by finding important nodes in the network, and removing them. To do this requires a detailed map of the network. One common form of surveillance is to create maps of social networks based on data from social networking sites as well as from traffic analysis information from phone call records such as those in the NSA call database, and internet traffic data gathered under the Communication Assistance for Law Enforcement (CALEA). These social network "maps" are then data mined to extract useful information such as personal interests, friendships & affiliations, wants, beliefs, thoughts, and activities. Jason Ethier of Northeastern University, in his study of modern social network analysis, said the following of the Scalable Social Network Analysis Program developed by the Information Awareness Office: “The purpose of the SSNA algorithms program is to extend techniques of social network analysis to assist with distinguishing potential terrorist cells from legitimate groups of people ... In order to be successful SSNA will require information on the social interactions of the majority of people around the globe. Since the Defense Department cannot easily distinguish between peaceful citizens and terrorists, it will be necessary for them to gather data on innocent civilians as well as on potential terrorists.” 14
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has embarked on a program of creating fake Twitter and Facebook profiles for the specific purpose of scanning the networks for 'sensitive' words and tracking people who use them. Simply using a word or phrase from the DHS's 'watch' list could mean that spies from the government read your posts, investigate your account, and attempt to identify you from it, according to an online privacy group. The words which attract attention range from ones seemingly related to diseases or bioweapons such as 'human to animal' and 'outbreak' to other, more obscure words such as 'drill' and 'strain'. The DHS outlined plans to scans blogs, Twitter and Facebook for words such as 'illegal immigrant', 'outbreak', 'drill', 'strain', 'virus', 'recovery', 'deaths', 'collapse', 'human to animal' and 'trojan', according to an 'impact assessment' document filed by the agency. When its search tools net an account using the phrases, they record personal information. It's still not clear how this information is used and who the DHS shares it with. An online privacy group, the Electronic Privacy Information Centre has requested information on the DHS's scans. The privacy group has requested information on the DHS, and contractors it claims are working with the agency to scan social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The group says that the government has used scans of social media before to analyse specific events such as the 2010 BP oil spill but this general 'watching' of social media using fake profiles is new. In a court filing the group stated, “The initiatives were designed to gather information from 'online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards,' to store and analyze the information gathered, and then to 'disseminate relevant and appropriate deidentified information to federal, state, local, and foreign governments and private sector partners” 16
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8. FACEBOOKS PRIVACY POLICY CONTROVERSIES One of the notorious examples of how Facebook is putting users at risk came in April 2011 when Facebook quietly switched on a new functionality called “facial recognition” by default without telling its users first. The technology works by scanning newly uploaded pictures and then identifies faces from previously tagged photos already stored in Zuckerberg’s internet silo. Is Facebook eroding the online privacy of its users by stealth? This has not been the first time where changes have been made which require the user to have to go into their privacy settings to opt out yet the user is unaware that the changes have impacted their privacy settings in the first place. Writers for The Wall Street Journal also revealed that in 2010 that Facebook applications (apps) were transmitting identifying information to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies. The apps used an HTTP referrer which exposed the user’s identity and sometimes their friends. Facebook shouldn’t require its users to constantly check their privacy settings to see what the company has changed since their last visit to the site. The onus should not be on Facebook users having to ‘optout’ of the facial recognition feature, but instead on users having to ‘opt-in’. Facebook has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public, and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads. An overview of the ongoing changes of Facebooks terms of services in regards to your privacy is as follows. Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2005: No personal information that you submit to facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings. Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2006: We understand you may not want everyone in the world to have the information you share on Facebook; that is why we give you control of your information. Our default privacy settings limit the information displayed in your profile to your school, your specified local area, and other reasonable community limitations that we tell you about. Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2007: Profile information you submit to Facebook will be available to users of Facebook who belong to at least one of the networks you allow to access the information through your privacy settings (e.g., school, geography, friends of friends). Your name, school name, and profile picture thumbnail will be available in search results across the Facebook network unless you alter your privacy settings.
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Facebook Privacy Policy circa November 2009: Facebook is designed to make it easy for you to share your information with anyone you want. You decide how much information you feel comfortable sharing on Facebook and you control how it is distributed through your privacy settings. You should review the default privacy settings and change them if necessary to reflect your preferences. You should also consider your settings whenever you share information. Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings. Facebook Privacy Policy circa December 2009: Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can, however, limit the ability of others to find this information through search using your search privacy settings. Facebook Privacy Policy circa April 2010: When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. … The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” … Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection. Facebook’s own Terms of use state, 2011: “For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.” Viewed together, the successive and changing privacy policies tell a clear story. Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it’s slowly but surely helped itself, and its advertising business partners and possibly intelligence agencies to more of its users’ information, while limiting the users’ options to control their own information. When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked pointed questions by interviewers Kara Wisher and Walt Mossberg about Facebook privacy breaches at the 2010 D8 Conference, he started sweating so much he had to take off his sweatshirt which then revealed a strange insignia on the inside.17 The D8 conference is a production of AllThingsD.com, a Web site devoted to news, analysis and opinion on technology, the Internet and media. The site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
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Feeling the heat in the room, literally and figuratively, the "insignia reveal" would have never seen the light of day had not Kara Swisher suggested Zuckerberg remove his infamous hoodie, less he sweat himself silly right before their very eyes. Swisher took one look at the bizarre garment and remarked, "What are you in, some kind of cult?"
The bi-directional arrows in Zuckerbergs insignia indicate that each part generates inbound and outbound sharing; • The labels on the arrows — GRAPH, here represented by the "friend requests" icon, STREAM, represented by the "messages" icon and PLATFORM, represented by the "notifications" icon — represent the three prongs of Facebook's strategy for 2010, as revealed at F8 conference; • The blue ring is the interface or Facebook's wall around user data —
the permeability of which remains a major point of controversy; • The motto on the upper half of the blue ring, "Making the world more open and connected" is, according to Zuckerberg, Facebook's obviously unofficial "Mission Statement." Inside, was a strange symbol. What does it mean? Despite the revelation of the insignia the most bizarre aspect of the interview was the way Zuckerberg was visibly sweating when pressed on the issue of Facebook and its privacy controls. Was this because he was well aware that Facebook has no further regards for user privacy. In the future according to the Facebook CEO, every application would be "social" and, best of all from his point of view, inextricably linked to Facebook's platform. Zuckerberg announced the changes at Facebook's F8 conference in September 2011 as part of a wider overhaul dubbed 'Timeline'. While Timeline will display user's activities from birth to present time, the Ticker, a feature implemented in the recent controversial news feed reorganisation, will be made available for more "lightweight" updates, including friends' social gaming activities. That activity is already being displayed in the Ticker feed of those playing games on Facebook, but will make its way to users' homepages once the Timeline update goes live. Timeline and the Ticker are powered by Open Graph, a protocol that allows Facebook developers to integrate their apps into the social map which powers the sites sprawling connections. "One thing that we've heard over and over again is that people have things that they want to share, but they don't want to annoy their friends by putting boring stuff in their news feeds," Zuckerberg said during his keynote. "Our
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solution was to create a new place that's lighter-weight where you can see lighter-weight stuff; that's how we came up with Ticker." 18
Zuckerberg offered the example of Zynga's Words With Friends, an update appearing in the Ticker alerting the reader that two friends were currently playing the game. Hovering over the update expands it to show a picture of the word that is being used in the game at that moment. A click takes you to the inprogress game in a larger window. games are killing it," said Zuckerberg. "Games have been the most successful apps on Facebook. We think that Open Graph is going to take social games to the next level and make them a lot better, by helping you discover even more games that you want to play - through your friends." 19 "Social
Facebook is currently working with several major social game developers to create games specifically for Open Graph, including Zynga, Electronic Arts, and Digital Chocolate. Facebook is also plowing ahead with the help of new partners, Netflix for video, Hulu for video, and Spotify for music to build a matrix of Internet influence that we haven't seen until now. Disruptive, to be sure, and then some. It's a developing story that bears close watching. However Facebook’s games are not without controversy. In October 2010 the Wall Street Journal revealed that many of the most popular applications, or "apps," on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information, in effect, providing access to people's names and, in some cases, their friends' names, to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies. 20
The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook's strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook's rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users' activities secure.
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The problem has ties to the growing field of companies that build detailed databases on people in order to track them online, a practice the Journal has been examining in its What They Know series. It's unclear how long the breach was in place. A Facebook spokesman said it is taking steps to "dramatically limit" the exposure of users' personal information. "Apps" are pieces of software that let Facebook's 500 million users play games or share common interests with one another. The Journal found that all of the 10 most popular apps on Facebook were transmitting Facebook ID numbers to at least 25 advertising and data firms, several of which build profiles of Internet users by tracking their online activities. Defenders of online tracking argue that this kind of surveillance is benign because it is conducted anonymously. In this case, however, the Journal found that one data gathering firm, RapLeaf Inc., had linked Facebook user ID information obtained from apps to its own database of Internet users. The apps, ranked by research company Inside Network Inc. (based on monthly users), include Zynga Game Network Inc.'s FarmVille, with 59 million users, and Texas HoldEm Poker and FrontierVille. Three of the top 10 apps, including FarmVille, also have been transmitting personal information about a user's friends to outside companies.
Most apps aren't made by Facebook, but by independent software developers. Several apps became unavailable to Facebook users after the Journal informed Facebook that the apps were transmitting personal information; the specific reason for their unavailability remains unclear. The information being transmitted is one of Facebook's basic building blocks: the unique "Facebook ID" number assigned to every user on the site. Since a Facebook user ID is a public part of any Facebook profile, anyone can use an ID number to look up a person's name, using a standard Web browser, even if that person has set all of his or her Facebook information to be private. For other users, the Facebook ID reveals information they have set to share with "everyone," including age, residence, occupation and photos.
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9. FACEBOOKS SILENT PARTNERS When doing any level of critical analysis the first question one has to ask is why was Chris Hughes (Cofounder of Facebook) on the guest list of the Bilderberg meeting of 2011? Is it not plausible that Facebook is being tied in with New World Order agenda considering the history of controversial changes that they were forced to withdraw and change because of public opinion. One way to understand the direction of Facebook is to review its funding partners who contributed to its early development.
Facebook’s first round of venture capital funding ($500,000) came from former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel. As a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, Peter has been involved with some of the most dynamic companies to emerge from Silicon Valley in the past fourteen years. Peter’s first start up was PayPal, which he co-founded in 1998, and led as Chairman and CEO. Peter’s tenure culminated in PayPal’s sale to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. After the eBay acquisition, Peter founded Clarium Capital Management, a global macro hedge fund. Peter also helped launch Palantir Technologies, an analytical software company, and serves as the chairman of that company’s board. He is also author of ‘The Diversity Myth’, and also sits on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC. The second round of funding into Facebook ($12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In Q Tel, a venture capital firm established by the
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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1999. One of the company’s key areas of expertise is in “data mining technologies”.
Breyer also served on the board of research and development firm BBN Technologies, which was one of those companies responsible for the rise of the internet. In October 2004 Dr Anita Jones joined BBN along with Gilman Louie. She had also served on the In Q Tel’s board, and had been director of Defense Research and Engineering for the US Department of Defense. She was also an adviser to the Secretary of Defense and overseeing the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is responsible for high-tech, high-end development. The Information Awareness Office (IAO) is a branch of DARPA whose mission is to gather as much information as possible about everyone in a centralized location for easy perusal by the United States government, including Internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver's licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data. In essence, the goal of the IAO is to be able to recreate a life history of thoughts and movements for any individual on the planet on demand, which the Bush administration deems necessary to counter the threat of terrorism. Critics claim the very existence of the IAO completely disregards the concept of individual privacy and liberties and is far too invasive and prone to abuse. Not surprisingly, the backlash from civil libertarians led to a Congressional investigation into DARPA’s activity and the Information Awareness Office lost its funding. The IAO's Illuminati-esque logo features the all-seeing eye from the Great Seal of the United States replaced with the all-seeing eye of the Information Awareness Office gazing at the Earth, and the Latin motto "scientia est potentia," meaning "knowledge is power". 21 On approximately December 19, 2002, the pyramid logo was removed without comment from the official IAO webpage, presumably in response to widespread criticism of its Masonic/Illuminati overtones. The biographies of senior staffers also disappeared. It would be understandable to view Facebook as the IAO’s new mask considering there are 138 million users as of 2011. Parts of the IAO’s technology round-up included ‘human network analysis and behavior model building engines’, which Facebook’s massive volume of neatly targeted data gathering indeed allows a convenient replacement. Another key player behind the scenes is Visible Technologies. Visible® is the leader in social media monitoring, analytics, engagement and social performance dashboard solutions for the small and medium business and enterprise markets. Visible Intelligence® is a next generation social media platform, designed to deliver big improvements in competitive and brand intelligence, marketing ROI and smarter customer insights through an agile platform that activates brand communities at Internet speed and enterprise scale. PARATECHNOLOGY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2012, All rights reserved
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With offices in Seattle, London and New York, Visible ranks as one of the Inc. 500 fastest-growing private companies. Visible has successful customer and partner relationships with Office Depot, DIRECTV, Microsoft, Xerox, Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Boost Mobile, Vail Resorts, Burson-Marsteller, Razorfish, Group M, Wunderman Network, Tribal DDB Worldwide, WPP, John Lewis, Spring Creek Group and Blanc and Otus. Visible is a privately held company with investment funding from Joe Grano, Ignition Partners, In Q Tel, Investor Growth Capital and WPP Group. By taking user information from their monitoring of social networks Visible creates and provides intelligence analyses for corporate clients. Interestingly again we see again the mention of In Q Tel as an investment fund for this organization. Again to reiterate, In Q Tel is a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999 and their repeated presence in the background for many of these data gathering companies should really be full evidence of the government’s intentions. Publicly, In Q Tel markets itself as an innovative way to leverage the power of the private sector by identifying key emerging technologies and providing companies with the funding to bring those technologies to market. In reality, however, what In Q Tel represents is a dangerous blurring of the lines between the public and private sectors in a way that makes it difficult to tell where the American intelligence community ends and the IT sector begins.
In Q Tel has generated a number of stories since its inception based on what can only be described as the “creepiness” factor of its investments in overtly Orwellian technologies. In 2004, KMWorld published an interview with Greg Pepus, then In Q Tel’s senior director of federal and intelligence community strategy, about some of their investments. Pepus was especially proud of the CIA’s investment in Inxight, a company that offered software for data mining unstructured data sources like blogs and websites with analytical processing. The close working relationship between service providers and government agencies was also seen in late 2005 where it was revealed that the NSA had been engaged in an illegal warrantless wiretapping program since at least the time of the 9/11 attacks, monitoring the private domestic phone calls of American citizens in breach of their fourth amendment rights. In 2006 it was further revealed that AT&T had provided the National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdroppers full access to its customer’s internet traffic, and that the American intelligence community was illegally scooping up reams of internet data wholesale. 22 The data mining equipment installed in the NSA back door, a Narus STA 6400, was developed by a company whose partners were funded by In Q Tel.
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10. WEBCAM REMOTE CONTROL Is it possible for security authorities to hijack the webcams of personal computers for spying? In October 2011, a story emerged that the German authorities had been accused of putting out malware that is designed to spy on German citizens, and has security flaws which could let third parties monitor people's computer usage or even plant false evidence. The Chaos Computer Club (CCC), one of the world's pre-eminent 'white hat' hacker groups had accused German authorities of putting out malware intended to spy on citizens and said that someone had anonymously sent them copy of the malware, which it is calling 'Bundestrojaner light'. The group reverse engineered and analysed the software, and found it could "not only siphon away intimate data but also offers a remote control or backdoor functionality for uploading and executing arbitrary other programs…."Significant design and implementation flaws make all of the functionality available to anyone on the internet," 23 the CCC said
in a statement. The group accused the German authorities of being behind the malware, but did not provide evidence to back this up. Privacy and data protection are taken very seriously in Germany, which previously saw massive surveillance operations by the Nazis. The country was the first to pass data protection laws, and now has some of the strictest privacy safeguards in the world. In 2008, the German constitutional court banned the use of state malware, dubbed 'Bundestrojaner' or 'federal Trojan', to spy on citizens' computer usage, beyond straight internet telephony interception. The government responded by saying it was introducing Quellen-TKÜ lawful interception software, which is only supposed to be used for VoIP wiretapping. However, the CCC seems convinced that the malware it analysed is related to the original malware, and is therefore referring to it as 'Bundestrojaner light'. In the United States the Webcam spy case in the Lower Merion School District near Philadelphia has raised concern as to whether others with Webcams are vulnerable to remote spying. The school district admitted to activating the Webcams 42 times during a 14 month period, claiming that it did so only to track lost or stolen laptops. But for anyone with a Webcam (and Webcams are now built in to many laptops and desktops), the question is whether you are vulnerable to having your Webcam remotely turned on. The answer is yes, though the newest version of the software used by the district to monitor its computers can no longer be used to activate Webcams or even track stolen computers. According to Harriton High School student Phil Hayes, officials at the Lower Merion School District used a program called LANRev to manage and track the Macintosh laptops issued to students. The product was published by Pole Position Software, which was acquired last year by Vancouver based Absolute Software. An Absolute Software spokesman verified that it is also his understanding that the school used LANRev software. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Mike Perbix, a network technician from the district, had recorded a Webcast where he talked about his use of LANRev. In a YouTube video attributed to Perbix, he says, "I've actually had some laptops we thought were stolen which actually were still in a classroom because they were misplaced, and by the time we found out that they were back I had to turn the tracking off and I had a good 20 snapshots of the teacher and the students using the machines in the classroom." 24
In one portion of the Webcast (not in the YouTube video), Perbix says, PARATECHNOLOGY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2012, All rights reserved
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"You can go into curtain mode, so if you're controlling someone's machine and you don't want them to see what you're doing you just click on the curtain mode icon...you can take a snapshot of the screen by clicking on the little camera icon." 24
Both the Computrace and LoJack products can be used to turn on a Webcam and photograph the user in the event of a theft investigation. But unlike the old LANRev, only Absolute engineers can track devices and activate recovery features. Company policy, according to Midgley, prohibits them for doing that until a police report is filed. "For us to begin a theft recovery process, we need a case file from the police," 25 he said. Two of the recovery methods are GPS and Internet Protocol location tracking. Absolute tracks the location of devices every 24 hours, but once a device is reported stolen it increases to once every 15 minutes, according to Midgley. "That allows us to pinpoint the location of the device...we then provide the details over to the local law enforcement, who then go in and recover the device." 25 Midgely said the recovery team is made up of former law enforcement officers and that the company has relationships with well more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies across North America. Midgley said the company doesn't typically use Webcam photography, even if it's available. "The photography doesn't always take a picture of the criminal, and it's not always permissible in a court of law," 25 he said. Often, the person who is photographed using the laptop is not the person who stole it. By the time it's been reported, the laptop has been sold, and the person using it isn't the same person who stole it, "so taking a photograph of them really proves no value. In that case, it's not a photograph of the criminal. It doesn't really help find out the location of the device," 25 he said.
There are, however, other ways to remotely turn on a laptop's Webcam. For one thing, there are many legitimate programs on the market that are used to control "nanny cams," or Webcams used at vacation homes and other remote locations. If someone has physical access to a computer, it would be possible to install this software and turn it on remotely. There are also programs such as GoToMyPC that are designed specifically to allow users to remotely control a machine via the Internet. Once connected, the person has complete remote control over the host computer, including the Webcam, microphone, and other features.
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To be certain that Go ToMyPC can be used for this purpose, one can download a copy to a laptop and access it from a desktop PC via the Internet and then use your desktop PC to activate the camera on the laptop. To be fair, GoToMyPC puts up a notice on the remotely controlled machine indicating that there is a session in progress, but that notice can be immediately taken down from the remote computer. You need physical access to a computer to install GoToMyPC, but it's not uncommon for stalking victims to sometimes be in the same location as the stalker. There are also Trojan horses and other malware programs that can be used to take remote control of a computer. According to Mike Geide, senior security researcher at cloud security company Zscaler, "there are several exploit kits out there that include rootkit functionality that allow (people) to interact with the operating system however they want, and that includes turning on specific services or running applications in the background that would include applications to report Webcams, record audio, or turn on a built-in internal microphone." 26
Geide recently blogged about a Chinese government Web site that had been hacked to post malware to utilize an Internet Explorer 6 vulnerability to plant Backdoor:W32/Hupigon which, according to F-Secure, is "a remote-administration utility which bypasses normal security mechanisms to secretly control a program, computer, or network," and "allows for recording with the user's Webcam." 26
TrendMicro education director David Perry stressed the importance of being aware of vulnerabilities. "It would do a public service, if we could make the public more aware that when you hook something like a Webcam up to your system that making it secure is your responsibility," Perry said. "By default, it's insecure." 25 In October 2008, TGDaily reported on a "game" that could "mislead people into clicking on a link that can then remotely control the user's Webcam and microphone." This YouTube video shows a proof of concept of a simple game that could cause a user to turn on the remote camera for an attacker. While security software can protect you against much of the malware, it can't necessarily protect you against the misuse of legitimate programs designed to remotely enable a Webcam or remotely operate a PC. For that, the user has to be aware of what is running on the machine. While a sophisticated PC or Mac user may be savvy enough to determine if there are remote-control programs running on their systems, there are plenty of people who wouldn't have a clue.
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11. THE GOOGLE WORLD ORDER Google is the most powerful search engine on earth. Today billions of users use Google to search for information in which a former student project now rules the world wide web. In 1997 Larry Page and Sergey Brin develop the so called page rank, a complex mathematical algorithm that ranks websites by their relevance. This ground breaking invention profoundly transformed access to information. Google rapidly became the first choice for internet search, but this was only the beginning.
Today Google earns huge profits by dominating online advertising and is well on its way to becoming the most valuable company on the global markets. New features and products are constantly flying out of the Google production line all for free. The perfect blend of software called Googleware gives the company more computing power than anyone else. Google stores the entire web in a giant database of the most sophisticated servers in the world. For instance, Gmail their email service offers several gigabytes of free storage. However it’s no secret that all emails in Gmail including both sent and received emails are scanned within the Google network. Google is methodically collecting personal data including cookies and account information. From this Google can create incredibly detailed dossiers on everyone of us. In fact Google will soon know far more about who you are and what you do on the Web. The Web giant announced that it plans to follow the activities of users across nearly all of its ubiquitous sites, including YouTube, Gmail and its leading search engine. Google has already been collecting some of this information. But for the first time, it is combining data across its Web sites to stitch together a fuller portrait of users. Consumers won’t be able to opt out of the changes, which have now taken effect. And experts say the policy shift will invite greater scrutiny from federal regulators of the company’s privacy and competitive practices. The move will help Google better tailor its ads to people’s tastes. If someone watches an NBA clip online and lives in Washington, the firm could advertise Washington Wizards tickets in that person’s Gmail account. Consumers could also benefit, the company said. When someone is searching for the word “jaguar,” Google would have a better idea of whether the person was interested in the animal or the car or the firm might suggest e-mailing contacts in New York when it learns you are planning a trip there. But consumer advocates say the new policy might upset people who never expected their information would be shared across so many different Web sites. A user signing up for Gmail, for instance, might never have imagined that the content of his or her messages could affect the experience on seemingly unrelated Web sites such as YouTube. PARATECHNOLOGY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2012, All rights reserved
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“Google’s new privacy announcement is frustrating and a little frightening,” said Common Sense Media chief executive James Steyer. “Even if the company believes that tracking users across all platforms improves their services, consumers should still have the option to opt out, especially the kids and teens who are avid users of YouTube, Gmail and Google Search.” 27
Google can collect information about users when they activate an Android mobile phone, sign into their accounts online or enter search terms. It can also store cookies on people’s computers to see which web sites they visit or use its popular maps program to estimate their location. However, users who have not logged on to Google or one of its other sites, such as YouTube, are not affected by the new policy. The change to its privacy policies come as Google is facing stiff competition for the fickle attention of web surfers. Some analysts said Google’s move is aimed squarely at Apple and Facebook which have been successful in building unified ecosystems of products that capture people’s attention. Google, in contrast, has adopted a more scattered approach, but an executive said in an interview that the company wants to create a much more seamless environment across its various offerings. “If you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services,” Alma
Whitten, Google’s director of privacy for product and engineering, wrote in a blog post. “In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience,” she
said. 28 Google notified its hundreds of millions of users of the change through an e-mail in early March 2012 and a message on its Web sites. It will apply to all of its services except for Google Wallet, the Chrome browser and Google Books. The company said the change would simplify the company’s privacy policy, a move that regulators encouraged. Still, some consumer advocates and lawmakers remained skeptical. “There is no way anyone expected this,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy advocacy group. “There is no way a user can comprehend the implication of Google collecting across platforms for information about your health, political opinions and financial concerns.” 29
Added Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass), co-chair of the Congressional Privacy Caucus: “It is imperative that users will be able to decide whether they want their information shared across the spectrum of Google’s offerings.” 30 Google is also expanding not just on the web. Google is conducting research in the area of molecular biology and genetics. What if Google had a file on you including your entire genetic data. Former CIA clandestine case officer Robert Steele has stated that Google is "in bed with" the CIA, as his contacts within the CIA confirm. “I think that Google has made a very important strategic mistake in dealing with the secret elements of the U.S. government - that is a huge mistake and I’m hoping they’ll work their way out of it and basically cut that relationship off,” said the ex-CIA man. 31
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“Google was a little hypocritical when they were refusing to honor a Department of Justice request for information because they were heavily in bed with the Central Intelligence Agency, the office of research and development,” said Steele. 31
Steele highlighted Google’s blatant censorship policies whereby press releases put out by credible organizations that are critical of Dick Cheney and other administration members don’t make it to Google News even though they are carried by PR Newswire. Many critics of Google have highlighted past examples of censorship on behalf of Google, including their blacklisting of a mainstream news website that was mildly critical of China, and also the deliberate stifling and manipulation of Alex Jones’ Terror Storm film ranking on Google Video. Google was also caught red-handed attempting to bury the Charlie Sheen 9/11 story at the height of its notoriety. Saying Google had become “too big for itself,” Steele opined that Google was “long overdue for a public audit.” “One of the problems with privatized power is that it’s not subject to public audit,” said Steele, arguing that groups should rally to “put Google out of business unless they’re willing to go the open source software route.” 31
Steele’s assertions were confirmed in July 2010 when an announcement was made that the CIA and Google were investing in a company that uses real time web tracking in order to screen the internet and possibly "predict the future." The company called Recorded Future uses data from websites, social networking accounts, and blogs to map the times and locations of specific events, and even charts the tone in which they're discussed. "We're right there as it happens," says CEO Chris Ahlberg. "We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people." 32
Google Ventures announced its investment in Recorded Futures in early 2010, and in July 2010 it was revealed that In Q Tel, a firm working on behalf of the intelligence community, had also gotten on board. Both investments were less than $10 million. Another controversial relationship that Google has is with the National Security Agency (NSA). When Google senior executive Vint Cerf visited Washington in June 2009, one of his stops was the National PARATECHNOLOGY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2012, All rights reserved
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Security Agency at Fort Meade in Maryland. There he discussed cybersecurity with General Keith B. Alexander, chief of US Cyber Command, who oversees the Pentagon's network defense system. Cerf’s visit embodied the ongoing collaboration between Google and NSA, which monitors global communications networks. That relationship is now shrouded in official secrecy because of the NSA's two-fold mission: 1) the “protection of US information systems,” and 2) the “production of foreign signals intelligence information.” Google, like the entire US economy, depends on NSA fulfilling its first cybersecurity mission. So it made sense that Google and NSA worked together in January 2010 when twenty-four US corporations found themselves under a sophisticated cyber attack, apparently from China. The attackers were apparently seeking private data held by the companies. What concerns civil liberties and privacy advocates about the Google NSA relationship is the other half of NSA's mission: “the production of foreign signals intelligence information.” In plain language, NSA intercepts and decodes private communications of people around the world. Despite the use of the official modifier “foreign,” NSA is authorized under certain circumstances to collect intelligence on American citizens on US soil. As a corporate entity, Google must manage a conflict of its interests. “The problem Google faces is that its whole business could be terminated at any time if its network gets infected or hit by a denial of service attack," 33
said James Bamford, author of a number of books about the NSA. “There's a feeling among experts in the area that there is only one repository of experts on the subject and that's NSA." 33
Bamford cited the tension between NSA's domestic surveillance mission and Google's desire to assure users their private data is secure and private. “NSA loves secrecy and loves being able to penetrate communications technologies," he said in an interview. “The question is, could NSA's relationship with Google give it more access to private domestic communications than it already has?" 33
Experts say there's no evidence of that. “Google does what every telecommunications company does," says William Arkin, a defense consultant who co-authored the recent Washington Post series Top Secret America." “They comply with national security letters and other requests for information." 34
National Security Letters, known as NSLs, are an extraordinary search procedure which gives the government the power to compel the disclosure of customer records held by banks, telephone companies, Internet Service Providers, and others. Such communications between Google and NSA are shrouded in official secrecy. So is the Google-NSA relationship on cybersecurity. In July 2010 the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a Washington based non profit organization, sued the NSA for records of its dealings with Google in the wake of the January 2010 cyber PARATECHNOLOGY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2012, All rights reserved
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attack. In response to an EPIC request under the Freedom of Information Act, NSA refused to confirm or deny any relationship with Google. John Verdi, an attorney for EPIC, says it would be “unusual" for NSA to take such a stance if the GoogleNSA relationship was merely a “garden-variety cyber security arrangement." Verdi says EPIC has no information that Google has compromised its security standards in its dealings with NSA. Experts say that official secrecy makes it impossible to know the nature of the Google-NSA relationship, even if it is benign. “It makes sense for NSA to share with Google the signatures of malicious code that it detects. That information would help Google defend itself against attacks," 33
said Gregory Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a non-profit group that advocates industry, not government, take the lead in cyber-security. “What complicates the situation is that those signatures are classified information," Nojeim said in an interview. “Presumably Google has people who have the clearances and can receive that information.” 33
Whether the Google NSA relationship on cybersecurity raises civil liberties issues is unknown. Nojeim says. “From a civil liberties point of view, it is much more important to know about the flow of information from Google to NSA, than NSA to Google,…It is incumbent upon Google to disclose more about its relationship with NSA.” 33
The Google NSA relationship many don’t know actually goes back to August 2003 when the search engine entered into a $2.07 million contract with the agency. According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, NSA paid Google for a search appliance capable of searching 15 million documents in twenty-four languages. The arrangement was apparently congenial to Google.
On September 24, 2010, Google landed its largest government contract ever: a $26.7 million dollar renewable sole-source contract for Google Earth spatial imaging software with the secretive National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). With that decision, the Internet search giant multiplied nine-fold PARATECHNOLOGY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2012, All rights reserved
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the total of $3.02 million in direct purchase orders that it has received from 25 federal government agencies since its founding in 1998. The contract was essentially handed to Google. “Google is the only identified source that can meet the Government's requirement for compatible capability across networks, global access, unlimited processing and software licenses, and access to the Google Earth hosted content through widely-used Open Geospatial Consortium service interfaces," the agency explained. 35
Initially, the agency simply announced Google would get the contract without competition. After Fox News ran a story critical of the deal, the agency extended the deadline and invited proposals from others. The agency also added new language disclosing that the choice of Google was pretty much inevitable because the Pentagon already has a deep, classified investment in Google technology: NGA has made a significant investment in Google Earth technology through the GEOINT Visualization Services (GVS) Program on secret and top secret government networks and throughout the world in support of the National System for Geospatial (NSG) Expeditionary Architecture (NEA). This effort augments the current NSG architecture by expanding the GVS and NEA investments to the unclassified network in support of Department of Defense (DoD) Geospatial Visualization Enterprise Services (GVES) standardization. The NSG, DoD, and Intelligence Community have made additional investments to support client and application deployment and testing that use the existing Google Earth services provided by NGA. All of this makes sense in light of the history of Google Earth, which started out as an independent company called Keyhole that received some of its initial capital from the Central Intelligence Agency. Pentagon contracts currently comprise the bulk of Googles federal government business. What Pentagon offices want most from Google and its vendors, it seems, are more sophisticated and costly versions of Google Earth, the company's popular Internet-based aerial viewing service. Google's free services have proved useful and compatible with existing computing systems. Documents obtained by Consumer Watchdog also show that Google's close ties with the Obama White House have raised concerns about possible special treatment or conflicts of interest at the Department of Homeland Security, the US Patent & Trademark Office, the Federal Communications Commission and NASA. In addition, officials at both DHS and the FCC have raised pointed concerns about weak privacy protections in Google products and whether Google's well- documented difficulties with privacy protection could create big problems for federal agencies that use its services Consumer Watchdog also spent 2011 trying to persuade the public to ask Congress to take action over the Google "Wi-Spy scandal." Google Street View cars spent three years collecting wireless data from millions of private users in 30 countries, information such as passwords, web browsing history and emails. Consumer Watchdog calls it the "largest wire-tapping scandal" the world has ever seen, yet Congress has not held any hearings. John Simpson, director of Consumer Watchdog's Inside Google Project, said, "The details of the biggest privacy breach in history shouldn’t be settled in secret. This makes it clear why Google CEO Eric Schmidt needs to testify under oath before Congress about Wi-Spy." 36
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12. THE GROWING POLICY AGAINST CHRISTIANITY The National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) group has previously sounded the alarm about media outlets such as Facebook, Google and Apple, which they say have written policies that violate the fundamental rules of free expression, particularly concerning religious free speech.
The NRB previously released a report at the National Press Club analyzing the various content policies of social networking websites. What they found was disturbing: new media platforms Facebook, Apple, Comcast, AT&T and Google have adopted policies to censor lawful viewpoints expressing Christian views or controversial ideas on “hot button issues.” Some platforms, such as Apple’s iTunes App Store and Google’s pay per click engine, have already started to use those policies to remove orthodox Christian viewpoints considered “offensive” or too controversial. For instance several years ago if you did a google search on the search term “the illuminati” you would have seen pages and pages of pay per click ads on the right hand side of the page with different organizations bidding to advertise their websites exposing the illuminati (as opposed to the free organic search listings on the left hand side). An ongoing avalanche of changes to Google’s terms of services as well as Bing has now categorized many of these controversial Christian/conspiracy themes as “political hate speech” and now if you do a google search on terms like “the illuminati” or “new world order” you will see on most days no pay per click ads or very few ads for any of these keywords, as Google continues to wield the axe on those that make it through momentarily. The few that do remain do so because they are not seen to be aggressive or are watered down expressions. An example is seen below. The search term “Obama New World Order” yields no pay per click ads on the right hand side yet if you do a search on “buying a car” it yields ongoing listings on the right hand side. Back in 2009 the search term “Obama New World Order” would have shown pages and pages of pay per click ads.
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In a January 2010 interview with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg praised social networking for opening people up to share “more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.” However, Zuckerberg’s social network has removed content deemed “anti-gay,” according to the NRB report. It is unclear whether that censored material contained any religious expression. However, the NRB report warns, “The position of Facebook on the issue of homosexuality and its collaboration with gay right group the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination (GLAAD), coupled with its troublesome written policies, are all strong indicators that its social networking platform poses a high index of risk for anti-Christian discrimination.” 37
Google has also committed a number of free speech violations, the NRB report alleges. The world’s most powerful search engine initially prohibited the English Christian Institute from purchasing space for an advertisement about abortion. It also allegedly blocked a Massachusetts pro-family website because of its conservative Christian content. Google also has also excluded churches and other faith groups from free or discounted use of its web tool Google for nonprofits. Colby May, senior counsel and director for the American Center for Law and Justice, said of new media’s apparent split personality, “Something else is in play.” He and others attending a panel discussion of the report suggested that social networking platforms are under a tremendous amount of pressure from various special interest groups. For example, Google removed pages of a Norwegian anti Church of Scientology site after it was pressured to do so by Church of Scientology lawyers. And when Facebook, citing its outlined responsibility policies, abruptly yanked a fairly innocuous photo of two fully clothed male actors kissing from the blog post of gay rights activist Richard Metzger, it sparked criticism in the gay community, leading Facebook to repost the photo. Facebook issued a formal apology and reposted the picture. The report contrasts this incident with several others where Facebook “has permanently and unapologetically removed sexual content.” The grossest act of anti-Christian censorship, according to the report, is Apple’s removal of the Exodus International and Manhattan Declaration apps. Gay rights protesters demonized Exodus’ app as the “gay cure app,” although the app primarily advertised the date, times and locations of its upcoming events. They rallied more than 107,000 sign petitions asking Apple to remove the app from the iTunes store. Gay activists also successfully petitioned the removal of the Manhattan Declaration. May lamented Apple’s skewed judgment, saying it rejected an app for a document that upholds the sanctity of life and marriage as “offensive,” but maintains an app for the violent videogame Grand Theft Auto. The panelists all expressed the fear that selective censorship may silence not just Christianity, but all religions. May stated that the religious community must demand that companies such as Google and Facebook open their media platforms to more kinds of speech. “When we say ‘open,’ we mean open ... don’t give the heckler veto,” he urged. Roth urged the religious community to educate the public about the importance of free speech. He said those in academia, millennials such as Zuckerman and the early makers of Google who launched their companies while attending college, may not be aware of why censorship, however small, is problematic. NRB Senior Vice President and General Counsel Craig Parshall told The Christian Post it plans to send the report to the offending companies along with an invitation for dialogue and discussion. Parshall and others on the Thursday panel made clear their preference for change through dialogue rather than resorting to legislative or regulatory means. However, if the companies do not respond, Parshall says the NRB reserves the right to begin talks with the FCC.
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13. CELLPHONE REMOTE DATA ACCESS Naturally, the cell phone service provider that you use has access to your cell phone records, but it's subject to privacy laws and is supposed to keep your information safely stored away from the public. Government agencies can access to your cell phone records (including call logs and text records) with a subpoena if you're part of or connected to a criminal investigation or a civil lawsuit. Your cell phone company is required by law to comply with subpoenas that request the records. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National Security Agency (NSA) can subpoena the cell phone company for phone records without a prior warrant as a result of the 2001 Patriot Act in order help prevent acts of terrorism. They can also wiretap, that is, listen and record your cell phone conversations. Moreover, the Patriot Act makes it illegal for the cell phone company that has delivered your records to the FBI or NSA to make it publicly known or even discuss the fact that your phone records have been investigated. Police Searches of Cell Phones: You may have a legitimate expectation of privacy of the information stored in your cell phone, and so a search warrant may be needed before a police officer can look at your phone's data. However, an officer has the authority to search a cell phone when the search is "incident to an arrest." The search is deemed similar to an office that searches a closed container on or near a person that he's arresting. Traditional search warrant exceptions apply to the search of cell phones. Where the accessing of memory is a valid search incident to arrest, the court need not decide whether exigent circumstances also justify the officer's retrieval of the numbers from your cell phone. Police officers are not limited to search only for weapons or instruments of escape on the person being arrested. Rather, they may also, without any additional justification, look for evidence of the arrestee's crime on his person in order to preserve it for use at trial. Illegally Intercepted Communications: Most people would think that public broadcasting of an illegally intercepted cell phone conversation would be illegal. Well, the US Supreme Court has found that the First Amendment allows an illegally intercepted cell phone conversation to be shared with others when the conversation involves matters of significant public interest. The lesson here is to be careful because technology has increased the chances that your cell phone conversations are being recorded and could be made public or used against you. Cell Phone GPS Tracking: Although there are many advantages to cell phone GPS tracking, there are also privacy concerns. As most people carry their cell phone with them at all times, the ability is in place to track the exact movements of all individuals. Cell phone GPS could prove useful in saving lives during emergencies. For these reasons the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires wireless network providers to give the cell phone GPS tracking location information for 911 calls that have been made from cell phones. This is known as E911. The law on E911 is fairly explicit. It allows carriers to provide tracking location information to third parties for E911 emergency calls only, however not under any other circumstances whatsoever without the consent of the cell phone owner. Recent court hearings have disallowed the requests of law enforcement agencies to obtain cell phone GPS tracking information from the cell phone companies for suspects in criminal investigations. Most of us don’t know exactly what software is installed on our phones when we purchase them. All that seems to matter is that it works. But when Android developer Trevor Eckhart found software installed on PARATECHNOLOGY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2012, All rights reserved
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many popular mobile devices that logs every single one of your keystrokes, phone numbers dialled, text messages, encrypted web searches, etc, people started to listen. Eckhart had found a program called Carrier IQ installed rather secretly on smartphones; it’s a program that can track almost anything happening on your mobile phone. Carrier IQ threatened Eckhart, who had posted research and manuals on his website, saying he was in breach of copyright law and could face financial charges. But Eckhart didn’t back down. In fact, Eckhart has released a new video and research showing Carrier IQ at work on a phone. The company’s website says the program is used to give “manufacturer’s unprecedented insight into their customer’s mobile experience.” Carrier IQ said the software is used to gather “information off the handset to understand the mobile-user experience, where phone calls are dropped, where signal quality is poor, why applications crash and battery life” — not logging keystrokes. Now, as Eckhart notes in the video, his demonstration is shown on an HTC phone but he mentions he’s seen such software on other phones like Android, Blackberry, Nokia and more. Eckhart describes the software on his website as a “rootkit“ that is ”enabling someone continued privileged access to our computers“ and is ”hidden in nearly every part of our phones.” “If HTC’s privacy policy doesn’t cover the information collected by Carrier IQ, it’s unclear whose privacy policy does,” Eckhart wrote on his website. “Carrier IQ has a minimal privacy policy, but it says, ‘Our products are designed and configured to work within the privacy policies of our end customers[.]‘ So whose policy covers this data — Carrier IQ, or the phone manufacturer, or the carrier? Nobody knows for sure.” 38
Eckhart writes, “An application should never be this hard to fully remove for security reasons — especially out of contract — when it serves no good purpose for the user, and its use should be opt-in ONLY.” 38
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) came to Eckhart‘s rescue when he was threatened with legal action by Carrier IQ: “I’m mirroring the stuff so other people are able to read this and verify my research,” he said. “I’m just a little guy. I’m not doing anything malicious.” 38
The company is demanding Eckhart retract his “rootkit” characterization of the software, which is employed by most major carriers, Eckhart said. The EFF says Eckhart’s posting of the files is protected by fair use under the Copyright Act for criticism, commentary, news reporting and research, and that all of Carrier IQ’s claims and demands are “baseless.” Marcia Hofmann, an EFF senior staff attorney, said the civil rights group has concluded that “Carrier IQ’s real goal is to suppress Eckhart’s research and prevent others from verifying his findings.” 39
Afterward, Carrier IQ released a message of apology to Eckhart, CNET reported:
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“Our action was misguided and we are deeply sorry for any concern or trouble that our letter may have caused Mr. Eckhart,” the company said in response to the EFF’s letter. “We sincerely appreciate and respect EFF’s work on his behalf, and share their commitment to protecting free speech in a rapidly changing technological world.” 40
It did use this apology as another opportunity to say that the company does not use the software to record keystrokes, provide tracking tools, inspect or report content of communications, or provide realtime data to any customer. There have also been growing phone surveillance within the United Kingdom where phone and email records are to be stored in a new spy plan. Details of every phone call and text message, email traffic and websites visited online are to be stored in a series of vast databases under new Government antiterror plans. Landline and mobile phone companies and broadband providers will be ordered to store the data for a year and make it available to the security services under the scheme. The databases would not record the contents of calls, texts or emails but the numbers or email addresses of who they are sent and received by. For the first time, the security services will have widespread access to information about who has been communicating with each other on social networking sites such as Facebook. Direct messages between subscribers to websites such as Twitter would also be stored, as well as communications between players in online video games. The Home Office is understood to have begun negotiations with internet companies in the last two months over the plan. It is certain to cause controversy over civil liberties but also raise concerns over the security of the records. Access to such information would be highly prized by hackers and could be exploited to send spam email and texts. Details of which websites people visit could also be exploited for commercial gain. The plan has been drawn up on the advice of MI5, the home security service, MI6, which operates abroad, and GCHQ, the Government’s “listening post” responsible for monitoring communications. Rather than the Government holding the information centrally, companies including BT, Sky, Virgin Media, Vodafone and O2 would have to keep the records themselves. Under the scheme the security services would be granted “real time” access to phone and internet records of people they want to put under surveillance, as well as the ability to reconstruct their movements through the information stored in the databases. The system would track “who, when and where” of each message, allowing extremely close surveillance. Mobile phone records of calls and texts show within yards where a call was made or a message was sent, while emails and internet browsing histories can be matched to a computer’s “IP address”, which can be used to locate where it was sent. The scheme is a revised version of a plan drawn up by the Labour government which would have created a central database of all the information. The idea of a central database was later dropped in favour of a scheme requiring communications providers to store the details at the taxpayers’ expense. But the whole idea was cancelled amid severe criticisms of the number of public bodies which could access the data, which as well as the security services, included local councils and quangos, totalling 653 public sector organisations. Labour shelved the project - known as the Intercept Modernisation Programme - in November 2009 after a consultation showed it had little public support. Only one third of respondents backed the plan and half PARATECHNOLOGY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2012, All rights reserved
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said they feared the scheme lacked safeguards and technical rigour to protect highly sensitive information. At the same time the Conservatives criticised Labour’s “reckless” record on privacy. A called Reversing the Rise of the Surveillance State by Dominic Grieve, then shadow home secretary and now Attorney General, published in 2009, said a Tory government would collect fewer personal details which would be held by “specific authorities on a need-to-know basis only”. But the security services have now won a battle to have the scheme revived because of their concern over the ability of terrorists to avoid conventional surveillance through modern technology. They can make use of phone tapping but their ability to monitor email traffic and text messages is limited. They are known to have lobbied Theresa May, the Home Secretary, strongly for the scheme. Their move comes ahead of the London Olympics, which they fear will be a major target for terror attacks, and amid a climate of concern about terrorists’ use of the internet. Sources said ministers are planning to allocate legislative time to the new spy programme, called the Communications Capabilities Development Programme (CCDP), in the Queen’s Speech in May 2012. Privacy campaigners warned the scheme was too open to abuse and could be used for “fishing trips” by spies. Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, a civil liberties campaign organisation, said: “This would be a systematic effort to spy on all of our digital communications. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats started their government with a big pledge to roll back the surveillance state. “No state in history has been able to gather the level of information proposed - it’s a way of collecting everything about who we talk to just in case something turns up.” 41
There were also concerns about the ability of phone and internet companies to keep the information secure. And the huge databases could also be used by internet service providers, particularly to work out which advertising to target at users. Broadband firms including BT came up with a scheme almost three years ago to target advertising, but it did not get off the ground. However, if companies were able to exploit the information they will be compelled to keep for the CCDP, they would be much more capable of delivering advertising to computers and even mobile phones based on users’ past behaviour. Gus Hosein, of Privacy International, said: “This will be ripe for hacking. Every hacker, every malicious threat, every foreign government is going to want access to this. And if communications providers have a government mandate to start collecting this information they will be incredibly tempted to start monitoring this data themselves so they can compete with Google and Facebook.” 42
He added: “The internet companies will be told to store who you are friends with and interact with. While this may appear innocuous it requires the active interception of every single communication you make, and this has never been done in a democratic society.” 42
A Home Office spokesman said: “It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public. We meet regularly with the communications industry to ensure that capability is maintained without interfering with the public’s right to privacy. As set out in the Strategic Defence and Security Review we will legislate as soon as Parliamentary time allows to ensure that the use of communications data is compatible with the Government’s approach to civil liberties.” 41
Andrew Kernahan of the Internet Service Providers’ Association said: “It is important that proposals to update Government’s capabilities to intercept and retain communications data in the new communications environment are proportionate, respect freedom of expression and the privacy of users, and are widely consulted upon in an open and transparent manner.” 41
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14. STREET LIGHT SPIES New street lights that include “Homeland Security” applications including speaker systems, motion sensors and video surveillance are now being rolled out with the aid of US government funding. The Intellistreets system comprises of a wireless digital infrastructure that allows street lights to be controlled remotely by means of a ubiquitous wi-fi link and a miniature computer housed inside each street light, allowing for “security, energy management, data harvesting and digital media,” according to the Illuminating Concepts website. According to the company’s You Tube video of the concept, the primary capabilities of the devices include “energy conservation, homeland security, public safety, traffic control, advertising, video surveillance.” In terms of Homeland Security applications, each of the light poles contains a speaker system that can be used to broadcast emergency alerts, as well as a display that transmits “security levels” (presumably a similar system to the DHS’ much maligned color-coded terror alert designation), in addition to showing instructions by way of its LED video screen. The lights also include proximity sensors that can record both pedestrian and road traffic. The video display and speaker system will also be used to transmit Minority Report-style advertising, as well as Amber Alerts and other “civic announcements”. With the aid of grant money from the federal government, the company is about to launch the first concept installation of the system in the city of Farmington Hills, Michigan. Using street lights as surveillance tools has already been advanced by several European countries. In 2007, leaked documents out of the UK Home Office revealed that British authorities were working on proposals to fit lamp posts with CCTV cameras that would X-ray scan passers-by and “undress them” in order to “trap terror suspects”. Dutch police also announced last year that they are developing a mobile scanner that will “see through people’s clothing and look for concealed weapons”. So called ‘talking surveillance cameras’ that use a speaker system similar to the Intellistreets model are already being used in UK cities like Middlesborough to bark orders and reprimand people for dropping litter and other minor offenses. According to reports, one of the most common phrases used to shame people into obeying instructions is to broadcast the message, “We are watching you.” The transformation of street lights surveillance tools for Homeland Security PARATECHNOLOGY A PRODUCTION OF REMA MARKETING AND WWW.GLOBALREPORT2010.COM ©2012, All rights reserved
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purposes will only serve to heighten concerns that the United States is fast on the way to becoming a high tech police state, with Transport Security Administration (TSA) agents being empowered to oversee that control grid, most recently with the announcement that TSA screeners would be manning highway checkpoints, a further indication that security measures we currently see in airports are rapidly spilling out onto the streets. The ability of the government to use street lights to transmit “emergency alerts” also dovetails with the ongoing efforts to hijack radio and television broadcasts for the same purpose, via FEMA’s Emergency Alert System. The federal government is keen to implement a centralized system of control over all communications, with the recent announcement that all new cell phones will be required to comply with the PLAN program (Personal Localized Alerting Network), which will broadcast emergency alert messages directly to Americans’ cell phones using a special chip embedded in the receiver. The system will be operational by the end of the year in New York and Washington, with the rest of the country set to follow in 2012. The notion of using the street lights as communication tools to broadcast “alerts” directly from the federal government is also consistent with Homeland Security’s program to install Orwellian ‘telescreens’ that play messages by Janet Napolitano and other DHS officials in Wal-Mart stores across the country. The fact that the federal government is funding the implementation of ‘Intellistreets’ comes as no surprise given that the nation’s expanding networks of surveillance cameras are also being paid for with Department of Homeland Security grants.
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FOOTNOTES 1. http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html 2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6xsv4azzpc 4. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Secret+police%3A+can+personal+privacy+survive+the+digital+revolution%3Fa0215304992 5. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1382939/Julian-Assange-blasts-Facebook-appalling-spying-machineinvented.html 6. http://www.indect-project.eu 7. http://www.news.com.au/technology/fbi-to-build-app-to-track-social-media-threats/story-e6frfro0-1226274096073 8. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/02/16/fbi-seeks-developers-for-app-to-track-suspicious-social-mediaposts-sparking/ 9. http://www.naturalnews.com/035051_FBI_social_media_tracking.html 10. http://tommytoy.typepad.com/tommy-toy-pbt-consultin/computer-viruses-and-cyber-attacks/ 11. http://thenewamerican.com/tech-mainmenu-30/computers/9211-facebook-attends-to-further-privacy-issues 12. http://www.rfidnews.org/2011/06/28/water-parks-and-resorts-using-rfid-to-capture-precious-memories 13. http://trends2011.clickhere.com/ 14. http://epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/may03_report.pdf 15. http://science-documentaries.com/?p=598 16. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2079283/Tweeting-word-drill-mean-Twitter-account-readgovernment-spies.html 17. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3hu3iG8B2g 18. http://newnation.sg/2011/09/effortless-sharing-on-facebook-is-killing-taste/ 19. http://www.develop-online.net/news/38715/Mark-Zuckerberg-bids-to-bring-game-virility-back-to-Facebook 20. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304772804575558484075236968.html 21. http://www.bigshinything.com/2006/09/oias-illuminati-identity 22. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy 23. http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20118194-245/hackers-say-german-officials-used-backdoor/ 24. http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/itdojo/lanrev-to-lose-theft-track-feature-following-pa-school-spyingallegations/1559 25. http://news.cnet.com/8301-19518_3-10457737-238.html 26. https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/education/certificate-of-cloud-security-knowledge/ccsk-early-adopters/ 27. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/google-tracks-consumers-across-products-users-cant-optout/2012/01/24/gIQArgJHOQ_story.html 28. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/updating-our-privacy-policies-and-terms.html 29. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399308,00.asp 30. http://www.pcworld.com/article/248715/googles_new_privacy_policy_why_you_should_care.html 31. http://www.threadwatch.org/node/9612 32. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXknYNdrKjw 33. http://insidegoogle.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/GOOGGovfinal012411.pdf 34. http://opengeography.wordpress.com/category/surveillance 35. https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=core&id=482ab868878ecd0bd81d978216718820&_cvi ew=0 36. http://insidegoogle.com/tag/going-to-court/page/2 / 37. http://www.christianpost.com/news/facebook-google-apple-censoring-religious-speech-55736 38. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/30/carrier-iq-trevor-eckhart_n_1120727.html 39. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/11/carrieriq-censor-research-baseless-legal-threat 40. http://www.androidcentral.com/carrier-iq-withdraws-misguided-cease-and-desist-letter-apologizes-securityadvocate-treve 41. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/9090617/Phone-and-email-records-to-be-stored-in-new-spyplan.html 42. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/02/20/government-access-to-internet-data_n_1289047.html
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