[Babylon Bee] WASHINGTON, D.C.‐After Attorney General Barr suggested that the FBI and other agencies spied on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, former FBI director James Comey fired back.
"We did not spy," he told reporters as he stretched for his morning yoga class. "We just observed and reported secretly without the subject's knowledge or consent."
"See, I've never considered that spying," he added as he formed the "downward dog" pose. "That's just kind of secret watching. It's definitely not the same thing. When you spy, you watch someone without their knowledge. When you secret-watch, you just kind of secretly watch them."
"If we redefined spying to include all secret watching, we would have to include all the watching of American citizens on a daily basis as spying, and that probably wouldn't be good for our public image."
He then asked reporters if they would take a picture of him looking p ensively up at the trees.
#3
It's not spying, because spying is something you do to foreign powers and they're too much gutless cowards to do that. That's how Russia has been able to do donuts in our back yard in Venezuela for the last twenty years. (Figuratively speaking).
[The Federalist] Advanced technology isn’t just getting out of control, it’s being used as a means of control‐big time. That’s the key message of Shoshana Zuboff’s new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, where the Harvard professor emerita and business analyst argues that Big Tech is determined to fully commodify, control, and co-opt human experiences to provide raw behavioral data that sustains its massive profits and power.
Put simply, Zuboff contends that surveillance capitalism is the constant tracking, analysis, and attempted modification of human behavior for the profit of tech giants who trade in what she terms "behavioral futures markets," places where knowing what people are very likely to do tomorrow or next year is of enormous value to those trying to sell a product or service.
Surveillance capitalism renders human behavior by tracking, measuring, and analyzing from your smartphone to your smart home‐from browsing the internet to private messages or emails with a colleague. This relatively new, dominant force intrudes through cookies and privacy permissions that in most cases must be accepted for a service to work properly or at all, including, for example, many smart home security systems.
Zuboff distinguishes surveillance capitalism at the outset from information capitalism. Whereas information capitalism makes money from information you provide, surveillance capitalism disguises itself in intimidating terms of service agreements and actually nudges your behavior so that you do what it wants in various ways, perpetuating a feedback loop of predatory control and emotional espionage enabled through advanced machine learning and algorithmic programming.
#1
I'll go a step further: it's a misnomer to call this capitalism per se. The companies aren't in this for the money anymore. They _get_ money from the Central Banks for providing Social Control Services.
#2
Thing, one of my thoughts as well. "Surveillance capitalism" is more of a thing of the Deep State or Statism and an obsession for complete control. I think of this obsession as a leftist thing along the lines of the old USSR or Stasi-controlled East Germny. Maybe fascism better describes this form of government and economy.
#4
Orwell described televisions in 1984 that were cameras as well as televisions so Big Brother could watch you in your home. How do we know that isn't being done today? I mean, just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not doing it.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/14/2019 14:21 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Software can be written to make hardware do anything. Anything. A couple of years ago a school loaned school owned laptops to students. What the students didn't realize was the laptops were recording video and audio of the students in their homes and sending that media back to a school server.
Posted by: Neville Dark Lord of the Wee Folk7365 ||
04/14/2019 20:39 Comments ||
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[DW] The rumors that Libyan General Khalifa Haftar ...Self-proclaimed Field Marshal, served in the Libyan army under Muammar Qadaffy, and took part in the coup that brought Qadaffy to power in 1969. He became a prisoner of war in Chad in 1987. While held prisoner, he and his fellow officers formed a group hoping to overthrow Qadaffy. He was released around 1990 in a deal with the United States government and spent nearly two decades in the United States, gaining US citizenship. In 1993, while living in the United States, he was convicted in absentia of crimes against the Jamahiriya and sentenced to death. Haftar held a senior position in the anti-Qadaffy forces in the 2011 Libyan Civil War. In 2014 he was commander of the Libyan Army when the General National Congress (GNC) refused to give up power in accordance with its term of office. Haftar launched a campaign against the GNC and its Islamic fundamentalist allies. His campaign allowed elections to take place to replace the GNC, but then developed into a civil war. Guess you can't win them all... has Kremlin support are as consistent as his advance on the country's capital. In Syria, Russia has flexed its military muscles ‐ but it isn't showing its cards on Libya yet.
Russia seems to be trying to avoid taking a clear side in the escalating conflict.
Continued on Page 49
[Breitbart] Elaine Parker of Job Creators Network writes in The Hill that the American economy ‐ as measured by job creation, unemployment, and wage growth ‐ is one of the strongest in decades:
Last Friday marked the monthly ritual of Jobs Day ‐ or the release of new economic data that is gathered and packaged by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unsurprisingly, the figures provide yet further proof the economy remains on solid footing.
More specifically, the Labor Department numbers reveal that job creation continues to be robust ‐ reporting that 196,000 jobs were added in March ‐ unemployment remains near rock bottom levels at 3.8 percent and wage growth expanded millions of American wallets yet again.
These developments only add to the symphony of other positive economic indicators. In fact, it’s evident Americans are objectively experiencing one of the strongest economies in decades.
[Free Beacon] Rep. Rashida "Rancida"
Tlaib (D., Mich.) accused Democratic leadership Saturday of having "silenced" Muslim lawmakers and only using them for "photos" on Saturday.
In a tweet Saturday morning, Tlaib, who is Muslim, went on the offensive against her party's congressional leadership. She claimed they had failed to properly defend Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), another Muslim, from "attacks."
"They put us in photos when they want to show our party is diverse," she said. "However, when we ask to be at the table, or speak up about issues that impact who we are, what we fight for & why we ran in the first place, we are ignored."
Tlaib made her remarks in a retweet about Omar, which condemned "[t]he attacks on [Omar]" by Republicans and the "subsequent lack of support from Democratic leadership.
Omar came under fire for calling the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 as "something" done by "some people" in a speech to the Council on American Islamic Relations.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R., Tex.) called Omar's comments "unbelievable."
After some back and forth between the two, the issue drew comments from President Donald Trump and others. Initially, however, no Democrats offered comment on the remarks.
[Rudaw] Several times in recent months the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) has said it will shift its focus from the fight against Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... (ISIS) to the liberation of Ottoman Turkish-occupied Afrin in Syria’s northwest.
On March 28, SDF commander Ferhat Abdil Sahin, more commonly known by his nom de guerre Mazlum Kobane, announced the group is "preparing and making arrangements in order to liberate Afrin".
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: trailing wife ||
04/14/2019 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11131 views]
Top|| File under: Sublime Porte
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] The Lebanese ruling establishment’s actions during Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza’s recent trip to Leb have once again proven its disregard for the crumbling economy. President Michel Aoun ...president of Leb, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hizbullah ...Party of God, a Leb militia inspired, founded, funded and directed by Iran. Hizbullah refers to itself as The Resistance and purports to defend Leb against Israel, with whom it has started and lost one disastrous war to date, though it did claim victory... ... seems to be on a campaign to invite US sanctions on the country. Over the last few years, he has acquired a knack for stepping in the path of danger while praying for the best.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
04/14/2019 00:00 ||
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Link ||
[11132 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Iran Proxies
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Babylon Bee] WASHINGTON, D.C.‐After Attorney General Barr suggested that the FBI and other agencies spied on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, former FBI director James Comey fired back.
[The Federalist] Advanced technology isn’t just getting out of control, it’s being used as a means of control‐big time. That’s the key message of Shoshana Zuboff’s new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, where the Harvard professor emerita and business analyst argues that Big Tech is determined to fully commodify, control, and co-opt human experiences to provide raw behavioral data that sustains its massive profits and power.
...Self-proclaimed Field Marshal, served in the Libyan army under Muammar Qadaffy, and took part in the coup that brought Qadaffy to power in 1969. He became a prisoner of war in Chad in 1987. While held prisoner, he and his fellow officers formed a group hoping to overthrow Qadaffy. He was released around 1990 in a deal with the United States government and spent nearly two decades in the United States, gaining US citizenship. In 1993, while living in the United States, he was convicted in absentia of crimes against the Jamahiriya and sentenced to death. Haftar held a senior position in the anti-Qadaffy forces in the 2011 Libyan Civil War. In 2014 he was commander of the Libyan Army when the General National Congress (GNC) refused to give up power in accordance with its term of office. Haftar launched a campaign against the GNC and its Islamic fundamentalist allies. His campaign allowed elections to take place to replace the GNC, but then developed into a civil war. Guess you can't win them all...
[Free Beacon] Rep. Rashida 
Michel Aoun
