Making sense of the world through data
The focus of this blog is #data #bigdata #dataanalytics #privacy #digitalmarketing #AI #artificialintelligence #ML #GIS #datavisualization and many other aspects, fields and applications of data
Yes, backdoors everywhere, obviously! But the good news is that it does not matter!
If the NSA wants to access your data, then there is probably very little you can do. But in most cases, they don't. You are just not important enough. For everybody else (outside the NSA), basic encryption software will keep you safe. For a company, your security is exactly proportional to the price you invest in security.
For individuals, one of the best software ever, is the discontinued Truecrypt. It was discontinued for "safety concerns". Obviously a lie. To this day, no one has ever found anything wrong with Truecrypt. It was just extremely safe... difficult to crack and free! All your important data and HD should be encrypted using this software or a similar one.
For the rest, remember: The Internet is public. And you can therefore expect nothing online to remain private.
Edward Snowden's whistleblowing campaign exposed the National Security Agency in 2013 for having "backdoors"
into commercial technology products. The US spy agency worked with some
Silicon Valley tech firms to develop covert methods of bypassing the
standard authentication or encryption process of a network device so it
could scan internet traffic without a warrant.
Snowden revealed the NSA's special sauce in how it conducted domestic
and foreign backdoor operations to collect vital intelligence, resulted
in the agency reforming its spying process, and had to formulate new
rules to limit future breaches and how it conducts spy operations, three
former intelligence officials told Reuters.
However, a recent inquiry into the new guidelines by Senator Ron
Wyden, a top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, yielded
absolutely nothing as the spy agency dodged questions.
"Secret encryption back doors are a threat to national security and
the safety of our families – it's only a matter of time before foreign
hackers or criminals exploit them in ways that undermine American
national security," Wyden told Reuters.
"The government shouldn't have any role in planting secret back doors in encryption technology used by Americans," he continued:
The agency refused to comment on its updated policies on current
backdoor processes. NSA officials did say they were in the rebuilding
trust phase with the private sector.
"At NSA, it's common practice to constantly assess processes to
identify and determine best practices," said Anne Neuberger, who heads
NSA's year-old Cybersecurity Directorate. "We don't share specific
processes and procedures."
Three former senior intelligence agency officials told Reuters that
before a backdoor operation is conducted, the agency must "weigh the
potential fallout and arrange for some kind of warning if the back door
gets discovered and manipulated by adversaries."
Critics of the agency's spy tools say backdoors create targets for
adversaries and undermine US technology trust among buyers across the
world. According to Juniper, in 2015, a foreign adversary used the NSA's
backdoor in its equipment. The NSA told Wyden's aides in 2018 the
Juniper incident was a "lesson learned."
Reuters cites one of the clearest examples of the NSA working with private tech firms to build backdoors:
"... NSA's approach involved an encryption-system component known
as Dual Elliptic Curve, or Dual EC. The intelligence agency worked with
the Commerce Department to get the technology accepted as a global
standard, but cryptographers later showed that the NSA could exploit
Dual EC to access encrypted data."
What this all suggests is that Snowden's revelations of NSA's spy
tools really didn't change the agency's practices over the last seven
years. Backdoors are still being used as the surveillance state marches on.
The Murphy law: "What can go wrong, will!" is more than it seems. Or rather, it is not just "that". It is about planning around obstacles to prevail in difficult circumstances. Here's the full story of this essential law of nature.
This secret research project explains a lot about 2020
In early 1948, a group of US Air Force
officers was working on a secret research project in the California
desert code named MX981.
The purpose of MX981 was to test how extreme gravitational forces from fast-moving fighter jets would impact the human body.
Aviation was still pretty new; in fact,
the US Air Force had only been created about six months prior, and the
Defense Department wanted to find out just how much physical punishment a
fighter pilot would be able to handle.
Most people have never been in a fighter
jet. But I can promise you from personal experience, the gravitational
force can feel absolutely crushing to the body, even causing a pilot to
pass out.
At the time, it was widely believed that
the maximum limit on the human body was “18 G’s”, i.e. 18 times the
force of gravity. And MX981 was tasked with finding out for sure.
So the researchers built a rail-mounted,
rocket-propelled sled; the idea was to get the sled moving up to 200
miles per hour, then slam the brakes so hard that the sled would come to
a halt in less than a second in order to simulate extreme flight (and
crash) conditions.
They nicknamed their little contraption the “Gee Whiz”. And in early 1948 they started human trials.
The guinea pig was one of the
researchers– a maverick scientist named John Paul Stapp. Stapp was able
to subject himself to an astounding 35Gs, far past the theoretical
limit.
And at that point another researcher, Captain Ed Murphy, was sent out to take an independent reading of the experiment.
It turns out that Murphy’s crew
installed their sensors incorrectly, leading to erroneous readings… not
to mention all the other mechanical failures that kept taking place.
The research team was breaking new
ground; nothing they were doing had been tried before. The equipment
they designed was custom-built, and things broke all the time.
Murphy was reportedly irritated about
the constant failures, and at some point complained that ‘if there’s any
way they can do it wrong, they will.’
Years later this observation morphed into what’s known as Murphy’s Law, often stated as “whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.”
In that context, Murphy’s Law may be the
perfect summary of 2020. Riots and social unrest, political folly,
Covid, brutal lockdowns, spiraling debts and deficits, etc.
Countless businesses have been closed,
many forever. Even more are unemployed. And many countries are imposing
fresh lockdowns after realizing that all of their measures and
protections thus far haven’t done a damn bit of good because the virus
is spiking once again.
At this rate it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect an extraterrestrial invasion before the year is out.
One of the more irritating aspects of this situation is the lack of consistency. Everything changes so quickly.
Covid rules, for example, change
constantly. Here in Puerto Rico where I live, the governor issues a new
decree every week or two; the most recent included a total shutdown of the island’s 911 emergency call centers, though gyms were allowed to increase capacity from 25% to . . . 30%!
Travel rules change even more rapidly;
our Sovereign Woman, Viktorija, has been traveling around Europe for the
past few months, and her flights have been canceled more times than a
Confederate monument.
Businesses are in a world of hurt. They’re one breath away from being shut down by the government.
And if they’re not shut down because of
Covid, they’re at risk of being burned to the ground by peaceful
protesters, or put out of business by the Twitter mob for not being woke
enough.
Financial markets are no better off;
many stock markets around the world are trading at dangerously high
valuations, propped up solely by rumors and conjecture about more free
money from the government.
It’s as if the health of the economy
doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people are unemployed, or
businesses closed down, doesn’t matter.
Over the past few months, markets have
transformed into casinos, where investors are merely gamblers placing
bets on whether politicians can agree on how much debt to pile onto
future generations.
And speaking of politicians, there’s a
whole tribe of card-carrying Marxists now, surging ahead in their
respective polls and clamoring to take over their assemblies.
They’re threatening everything from higher taxes to confiscation of entire industries.
And it’s all happened so quickly. Murphy’s Law.
But as the story goes, there’s actually another interpretation of Murphy’s Law.
In 1948, after finally figuring out the
proper results of their experiment, the MX981 research team held a press
conference, and a reporter asked, “How is it that no one was severely
injured during your tests”
John Stapp, the maverick who strapped
himself into Gee Whiz, replied, “We do all of our work in consideration
of Murphy’s Law. . .”
So you see, in Stapp’s view, the idea was to identify risks… figure out the things that could go wrong… and PLAN around them.
Murphy’s Law is often viewed through the lens of pessimism– everything’s bad, everything’s going to fail.
But Stapp’s view was totally different;
it was grounded in optimism and rationality– we can achieve success by
avoiding mistakes… by actually spending time thinking about what could
go wrong and where the potential for loss and failure might be.
This is the very essence of a Plan B.
It requires foresight and flexibility. Things will change, and a good plan needs to be adaptable to what might go wrong.
But most of all, it requires the will to
actually just sit down and do it. There is no substitute for execution.
After all, your Plan B isn’t going to design itself.
We live in dangerous times! Over the last few years the markets were first to go with QE and interventionist Central Banks. Now it's democracy itself going down the drain. And there is seemingly nothing we can do. It is as if the forces controlling our societies were unstoppable. And maybe they are.
But in this mayhem, one trend is especially concerning: Polarization of opinions.
Not only is there no room left for nuances among the deplatforming of unorthodox ideas but "friends" will hush you into silence by repeating the absurd social memes to which they are bombarded daily by news outlets which have become little more than propaganda machines.
To keep your sanity in this mess, hearing other like-minded people voicing their concern can be reassuring. Yes, the world around you is going mad but there is no need to follow it down this road to madness.
Here's Tom Courser going after the liberal crowds. With other arguments, we could likewise destroy conservative beliefs. What's important is to keep a sense of balance. As they used to teach at Universities during the Middle Ages when these places were real centers of learning in a sea of ignorance: Thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis.
My wife has become increasingly nervous when political topics arise in conversations with our friends over dinner or drinks. She’s afraid I’ll disrupt a pleasant occasion by expressing views that are anathema to our liberal, Democratic friends.
Like what? you might ask.
Well, there are several, but the most inflammatory one is my denial
that Russia meddled in the 2016 Presidential election in a consequential
way, much less with the intention of electing Trump.
"What?" you say. Every MSNBC-watching, New York Times WaPo-reading Democrat knows that
the Russians hacked the DNC emails and passed them on to WikiLeaks to
hurt the Clinton campaign. And how about all those social media posts?
The second I express myself, I am invariably accused of parroting Fox
News or even of endorsing Trump. But I despise Trump and have never
watched Fox news live for more than a minute or two. (Occasionally, I
watch an interview with a left-leaning heretic like myself, who cannot
get airtime on the "legacy media.")
How did this happen? How did I come to reject beliefs my liberal friends hold sacred?
Well, to paraphrase an old commercial, I came by my heretical views
the old-fashioned way: I earned them. I looked beyond the MSM to
independent sources of news and commentary, reading widely and
open-mindedly and thinking critically. Some of these sources publish
reporting, others opinion; many are left-leaning; most oppose American
foreign policy. I weighed them against one another, and the MSM, to
assess their reliability.
In short, I investigated American journalism – and found corporate
media woefully misleading. I would say I found it unprofessional but, as
a friend reminded me, the job of corporate journalism is to
maximize profit; doing so is not conducive, to say the least, to
challenging the dominant power structure and its ideology.
While still teaching (at Hofstra University), I would pick up a free copy of the New York Times on
campus and read it over the course of the day. I would listen to NPR
while commuting. I considered myself well informed. I was quite trustful
of these sources on most topics. My views did not diverge sharply from
those of my liberal friends.
But after my retirement in 2011, I began to look deeper. I’m not sure why; I did not set out to shift my politics to the left. One factor was my interest in Syria,
where my father had taught at Aleppo College during the 1930s. In 2009,
just before violence broke out there, I followed in his footsteps,
traveling to Aleppo with my family. When the protests against the
notoriously brutal and repressive Assad began, I was very sympathetic.
Like the Western media, I favored the "moderate rebels."
But eventually, by reading alternative media, I came around to the
view that there were not enough moderate rebels to bring about a change
of regime. (The notion of a viable moderate opposition was the product
of a Western PR campaign.)
Eventually, I learned that the U.S was arming militant Islamists (as
with the Mujahaddin earlier in Afghanistan, helping bring the Taliban to
power) and eventually sending in troops in violation of international
law. (They are still there.) The result was a terrible civil war. I
reluctantly came to believe that the least bad short-term outcome for
the Syrian people was for the Assad regime to prevail, with Russia’s
help. That is what has happened. Removing Assad would have done
to Syria what removing Saddam did to Iraq: worsened the havoc and
suffering in the nation and the surrounding region.
But what about Assad’s gassing of his own people, you say, which was
investigated by the purportedly neutral OPCW (the UN-sponsored
Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Warfare) and widely reported
in the Western media? Sorry, but whistleblowers among the actual
inspectors eventually came forward to reveal that their firsthand findings had
been distorted to fit the desired verdict. (Remember Iraq and its WMD?)
But of course, the whistleblowers testimony was largely ignored by the
very media that blamed the atrocity on Assad and fawned over Trump’s
retaliatory attack. (The next day, Fareed Zakaria declared on CNN that
"Donald Trump became president of the United States last night.")
Looked at critically, this narrative made no sense.
Why would Assad, who was winning the war, risk antagonizing the world
(and his people)? Why would he cross a redline drawn by the US, risking
retaliation? He wouldn’t, and he didn’t. Almost certainly, these gas
attacks were false flag attacks by the rebels to trigger American
attacks against Syria (which they did). I have learned to ask the basic
question, Cui bono? (who benefits) when reading the news. The answer is
often not the party being blamed by the MSM.
As with Syria, so with Venezuela and Bolivia, with Russia and
Ukraine: if you can put aside the dominant narrative promulgated by the
MSM, you can find dedicated, dogged investigative journalists who
challenge and debunk it. Unfortunately, the debunking
necessarily lags well behind the false story. And in our short news
cycle, it gets lost. Moreover, skeptical journalism gets published only
in small, independent outlets. The MSM generally does not retract its
stories. If it does, it does so in a whisper, someplace where the
retractions will not get noticed. If you look for them, you can find
them, but you have to know to look.
The most authoritative debunkers of the Russiagate/Ukrainegate narrative have been, interestingly, a group that calls itself Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Its work appears regularly at Consortiumnews.com, which was founded by
Robert Parry, who broke the Iran-Contra story. The VIPs are retired
intelligence officers who resent the cooking of intelligence for
political ends. (Their first post was published on the day that Colin
Powell testilied [sic] to the UN Security Council and the MSM
stenographers published his lies; since then, they have an excellent
track record.) Their retirement frees them to voice their views without
permission or repercussions. The VIPs, one of whom, Ray McGovern,
briefed Presidents during the Cold War, can hardly be accused of being
soft on Russia.
They have shown that the so-called "hack" of the DNC emails was
almost certainly a leak. Forensic examination of the megadata by William
Binney, former NSA Director, indicates that the data could not have
been stolen over the internet; so much information could not have been
transferred as quickly as claimed. In any case, recently declassified documents reveal
that Shawn Henry, the president of CrowdStrike Services, the company
tasked by the DNC with examining the server (which the DNC refused to
release to the FBI) admitted under oath that there was no evidence of
email having been "exfiltrated," as had been reported in the corporate
media and universally believed by liberals.
One irony of this, of course, is that the emails published by
WikiLeaks, whose authenticity no one has challenged, were proof of the
rigging of the Democratic primary by the DNC: i.e., election meddling. Given
the damaging content, it seems far more likely that this was a leak by a
disgruntled insider, but the blame of course is put on Russia.
As for the supposedly election-meddling social media activity. It was
not directed by the Kremlin; it began before Trump was nominated and
continued well past the election. The actual ads were mostly puerile,
unsophisticated (and not in fluent English); many favored Clinton; some
were not even about politics. It was mostly clickbait. The bottom line
is that the financial investment was infinitesimal compared to those of
the two candidates. This can’t have had any discernible effect on the
outcome, much less a decisive one. (This is leaving aside the glaring
hypocrisy of Americans complaining about meddling in our elections, when the US is the world champ in that endeavor.)
But the Russiagate narrative has served, as it was intended, to deflect attention from the failures of the Clinton campaign –
and more generally from the Democratic party’s embrace of neoliberalism
at home, betraying the working class, and imperialism abroad.
Regrettably, too, it masks far more serious obstacles to fair elections:
the Electoral College, voter-suppression, gerrymandering, Citizens
United, and so on – i.e., the factors presumably in American control.
Its promotion by the MSM has fostered widespread paranoia about
Russia. Thanks to the DNC and the MSM, neo-McCarthyism is epidemic among
Democrats, who see Russians (I almost said Commies) under every bed.
As the late Stephen F. Cohen insisted (not in MSM, which blackballed him), this is a dangerous delusion; it significantly increases the possibility of a hot (nuclear) war.
Perhaps most alarming, in the MSM Russiagate eclipses the truly
existential threat of the climate emergency. The MSM fiddles while the
world burns.
Most of my friends are academics, artists or other intellectuals. It
makes me sad – and crazy – that these people, who are smart and
sophisticated – not "low information" voters – fall for this stuff,
which is counterfactual faith-based journalism.
I could go on to list other MSM truths that I regard as "fake news."
But there’s little point. It’s not that I expect my friends to believe
me rather than the New York Times. What I’d like is for them to be willing to consider alternative interpretations of events and to explore non-corporate media.
Why? Well, consider the view of Noam Chomsky, who (with Edward S.
Herman) long ago exposed how the MSM "manufacture" consent; he considers
Russiagate a huge gift to Trump, which could hand him the election. Or
consider what William Casey, director of the CIA, said when asked by
incoming President Ronald Reagan to describe his agency’s mission, "We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public knows is false."
Part of the mission of the intelligence agencies has been to infiltrate
American media and gaslight the public. But, as I suggested above, this
does not prevent honest analysts from reaching their own conclusions.
I try not to blame my friends for being misguided by the MSM. After
all, only a few years ago, when I read only what my friends read, I
believed as they do. It’s not that I’m smarter, or more (or less)
liberal than they; it’s just that I’ve made the effort to peek outside
my info silo, the liberal echo chamber.
I try not to be too disputatious in conversations with friends. I
don’t want to alienate them. Life is lonely enough during the pandemic
without becoming persona non grata, never invited back.
On the other hand, why should I silence myself? Why should I nod
sagely as friends spout what I regard as nonsense? Well, there’s no
percentage in it. Sadly, conversation alone doesn’t convince or convert.
Politics has become polarized and tribalized to a frightening degree;
evidence and argument don’t seem to matter. People believe what they want to
believe. The light bulb has to want to change. Or at least, to be open
to changing. And, to be fair, it takes time and effort to explore
alternative media.
But I want my friends to know that while we may all oppose Trump, we
are hardly on the same page. In such circumstances, old friends should
be able to agree to disagree. But how can my friends and I agree to
disagree if they don’t know that we disagree?
So I will continue to speak out. Silence feels like collusion in delusion. And the stakes are high.
I watched an extremely troubling movie the other night on the
recommendation of my friend Rich. It was on Netflix but is also
available on YouTube and is called The Social Dilemma.
We wonder why partisan rancor and political division are at
an unprecedented level in our country. This film suggests a likely
answer.
We spend a lot of time on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, and others, but not nearly as much time as they spend on
us. It seems that these platforms are populated and are indeed
driven by algorithms that are individually calibrated to give each user
what the platform decides that person wants to see, demonstrated
by his pushing the "LIKE" buttons. Liberals get items with a liberal
slant. Conservatives receive stories and items that match their
previous likes. Those individuals who exhibit a liking of conspiracies
get more of the same, as well as ads designed to sell black helicopters.
In other words, every time we "LIKE" an item on Facebook, our
individual settings are fine-tuned. Our news feeds, as well as our
comments, are monitored and used to even more precisely shape what we
see on our screens. No two individuals get the same variety of items on their Facebook pages or on any other platform.
More and more when considering the opinions of people I know, I ask myself, How can they think that way? How can they believe that? They
are, in fact, being programmed to feel that way by their interactions
with their social media. And unfortunately, I am receiving the same
treatment, with different modalities resulting in a different mindset.
Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, taught us that
if you tell a lie enough times, it will be accepted as the truth. It
is obviously also true that different spins on facts and stories can be
individually tailored to each individual's demonstrated tastes. Paul
Simon penned the lyric "A man hears what he wants to hear and
disregards the rest." We watch and listen to news feeds that tell us
what we want to hear. We never tune in to the others.
I'm not suggesting that Facebook, et al. possess Goebbels's evil
intent. I do suggest that they, in their driven purpose of monetizing
our likes and dislikes, have inadvertently helped to drive a wedge in
our population that quite possibly could lead to civil war.
I recall a social experiment from a few years back. In one, people
looked at a picture of a woman in a dress. Half the people looking at
the picture saw a blue dress, and half saw silver.
Two individuals standing side by side and seeing the opposite of each
other in this experiment often questioned the sanity or truthfulness of
the other. In this instance, there was nothing designed to cause the
differing results. It would seem that in some ways, we are hardwired to
interpret certain things differently. But when you add the tactic of
designing individual inputs to reinforce a belief system in the way the
social platform algorithms perform, the often seen results are ironclad
sets of conflicting beliefs that become woven into our population. It is undeniably dividing our house, and we know what Lincoln told us about that.
What is the answer to these troubling circumstances? I wish I knew. But I find it quite telling that many of the executives of the large social platforms stated in the movie that they did not allow their children any time on the very platforms that they are selling to the rest of us. That is certainly food for thought.
At this stage, it is extremely unlikely that most governments in the West will backtrack and adopt more sensible policies. If lockdowns do not work, it is simply because we are doing too little. This is how societies work. This is also how they fail. How could this time be different?
In a stunning rebuke of the "science" and the "doctors" and
leftist politicians and career bureaucrats in the US and across much of
The West, The Epoch Times' Evan Pentchoukov reports
that The World Health Organization’s special envoy on COVID-19 has
urged world leaders to stop using lockdowns as the primary control
method against the spread of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus,
commonly known as the novel coronavirus.
“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” David Nabarro told The Spectator in an interview aired on Oct. 8.
“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
Nabarro pointed to the collateral damage that lockdowns are having worldwide, especially among poorer populations.
“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry, for example in
the Caribbean or in the Pacific, because people aren’t taking their
holidays. Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world
because their markets have got dented. Look what’s happening to
poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world
poverty by next year. Seems that we may well have at least a doubling of
child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school and their parents, in poor families, are not able to afford it,” Nabarro said.
“This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe actually,” he
added. “And so we really do appeal to all world leaders: Stop using
lockdown as your primary control method, develop better systems for
doing it, work together and learn from each other, but remember - lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer."
A number of medical or public health scientists and medical practitioners have signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which states that “current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.”
We are entering dangerous territory. A.I. represents a risk in itself in the long term as many scientists have already warned us, but in the wrong hands the menace is real and far more immediate.
We have seen with Covid-19 how health could be weaponized with dramatic consequences on freedom almost everywhere around the world.
Now imagine a false positive security risk, and the target is not a virus but you!
Minority report meet the Fugitive. You are the hero. But because this is not Hollywood the outcome is grim. Welcome to the future.
The real risk beyond AI is to link database left and right and start deducting correlations beyond the scope of our understanding. But where exactly should we stop for the sake of security in a world fraught with danger, when a majority ask for results by any means?
The article focus on self fulfilling prophecies and as such on the current obsession with race in the US. But the real issue is broader as in the end we are all at risk. From a machine point of view, being human is being defective!
After a flurry of police brutality cases this year and protests
swarming the U.S. streets, thousands of mathematicians have joined
scientists and engineers in calling for boycotting artificial intelligence from being used by law enforcement.
Over 2,000 mathematicians have signed a letter
calling to boycott all collaboration with police and telling their
colleagues to do the same in a future publication of the American
Mathematical Society, Shadowproofreported.
The call to action for the mathematicians was the police killings of
George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and many more just this year.
“At some point, we all reach a breaking point, where what
is right in front of our eyes becomes more obvious,” says Jayadev
Athreya, a participant in the boycott and Associate Professor of
Mathematics at the University of Washington. “Fundamentally, it’s a
matter of justice.”
The mathematicians wrote an open letter, collecting thousands of
signatures for a widespread boycott of police using algorithms for
policing. Every mathematician within the group’s network pledges to
refuse any and all collaboration with law enforcement.
The group is organizing a wide base of mathematicians in the hopes of
cutting off police from using such technologies. The letter’s authors
cite “deep concerns over the use of machine learning, AI, and facial
recognition technologies to justify and perpetuate oppression.”
Predictive policing is one key area where some mathematicians and
scientists have enabled the racist algorithms, which tell cops to treat
specific areas as “hotspots” for potential crime. Activists and
organizations have long criticized the bias in these practices.
Algorithms trained on data produced by racist policing will reproduce
that prejudice to “predict” where crime will be committed and who is
potentially a criminal.
“The data does not speak for itself, it’s not neutral,”
explains Brendan McQuade, author of Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence
Fusion and Mass Supervision. Police data is “dirty data,” because it
does not represent crime, but policing and arrests.
“So what are its predictions going to find? That police should deploy
their resources in the same place police have traditionally deployed
their resources.”
Several, if not all, U.S. states and major cities are thought to use
some type of predictive policing or pre-crime software with known users
including — Chicago, Atlanta, Tacoma, New York, and LA, though not
without protesting its use. As Activist Post previously reported,
many of these states are using Palantir software for their predictive
crime algorithms and have been exposed for doing so, like Florida, whose
police terrorized and monitored residents of Pasco County.
These police organizations across the U.S. have been using what is
known as “heat lists” or pre-crime databases for years. What is a “heat
list,” you may ask?
Well, “heat lists” are basically databases compiled by algorithms of people that police suspect may commit a crime. Yes, you read that right — a person who might commit a crime. How these lists are generated and what factors determine an individual “may commit a crime” is unknown.
Activists and journalists sued the Chicago Police Department in 2017 for failing to disclose how these programs operate, as Activist Postreported.
Chicago wasn’t the only major police department exposed using
predictive crime algorithms. The Los Angeles Police Department was also
caught one year later in 2018 by activists from the Stop LA Spying
Coalition, as Activist Postreported.
This heat list idea in local law enforcement actually originated in Miami then was rolled out in Chicago in 2013. However, Activist Post may
have missed other cities that gained less media attention; and as this
writer will discuss shortly, the idea comes from a federal database.
Fortunately for us, as Nicholas West noted, the pushback has already started in several cities, and a few police departments have dropped their programs after becoming aware of the inaccuracies. In 2018, for example, New Orleans suspended its 6-year running pre-crime program after its secret predictive policing software was exposed.
The scariest part of all this is that the New Orleans and LA
police departments were actually both linked to Palantir Technologies,
which directly works with the CIA and is suspected of being the current
fork of PROMIS Main Core software. PROMIS pre-dates all of these local
police heat lists, with algorithms that put suspected “domestic
terrorists” into their own round-up lists and highly scrutinized tracked
purchases, created at
first by Oliver North for President Ronald Reagan and Vice President
George H.W. Bush under FEMA’s Readiness Exercise — 1984 (REX-1984.)
The use of Palantir’s pre-crime algorithm software posits that other
police departments may be utilizing the same software for their own
pre-crime programs. Palantir is also the same company working with the
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency on its own lists to
catch illegal immigrants, as Activist Post and investigative journalist Barrett Brown originally reported.
You may remember Palantir from journalist Barrett Brown, Anonymous’ hack of HBGary, or accusations that
the company provided the technology that enables NSA’s mass
surveillance PRISM which is the successor to PROMIS. Palantir’s software
in many ways is similar to the Prosecutor’s Management Information
System (PROMIS) stolen software Main Core and may be the next evolution
in that code, which allegedly predated PRISM. In 2008, Salon.com published details
about a top-secret government database that might have been at the
heart of the Bush administration’s domestic spying operations. The
database known as “Main Core” reportedly collected and stored vast
amounts of personal and financial data about millions of Americans in
the event of an emergency like Martial Law.
PROMIS was forked into many reported use-cases for the U.S.
government, including an intelligence application onboard nuclear
submarines of the United States and Great Britain, and the use by both
the U.S. government and certain allied governments for inventory
tracking of nuclear materials and long-range ballistic missiles. But the
most bizarre and frightening use was to keep track of dissident
Americans under Main Core.
The Main Core database isn’t just a rumor or conspiracy theory; PROMIS software was used by
Iran-Contra fall guy then-National Security Council, Lt. Col. Oliver
North to create the dissidents list for Rex-84 that would later evolve
to Main Core. North used PROMIS software in 1982 in the Department of
Justice, and at the White House, to compile a list of American
dissidents to invoke if the government ever needed to do so under Ronald
Reagan’s Continuity of Government (COG) program as a liaison to FEMA.
In 1993, Wired described North’s use of PROMIS in compiling the Main Core database:
Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn
up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example,
or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS,
Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy’s blacklist look
downright crude.
This Main Core database of individuals was given to a handful of
individuals, meaning most government officials had no knowledge of the
program ever existing. The database was passed off from administration
to administration through National Security channels, according to
sources.
Palantir was founded with early investment from the CIA and heavily
used by the military, and Palantir is a subcontracting company in its
own right. The company has even been featured in the Senate’s grilling
of Facebook, when Washington State Senator Maria Cantwell asked CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “Do you know who Palantir is?” due to Peter Thiel sitting on Facebook’s board.
Palantir’s Gotham software allows Fusion
Center police to track citizens beyond social media and online web
accounts with people record searches, vehicle record searches, a
Histogram tool, a Map tool, and an Object Explorer tool.
According to DHS, “Fusion centers operate as state and major urban
area focal points for the receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing of
threat-related information between federal; state, local, tribal,
territorial (SLTT); and private sector partners” like Palantir. Further,
Fusion Centers are locally owned and operated, arms of the “intelligence community,” i.e. the 17 intelligence agencies coordinated by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). However, sometimes the buildings are staffed by trained NSA personnel like what happened in Mexico City, according to a 2010 Defense Department (DOD) memorandum.
Tarik Aougab, an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Haverford
College, one of the many mathematicians who saw recent protests against
police as a an opportunity to take action against these practices said.
“If there is already disproportionately large amounts of time and energy
being spent criminalizing Black and brown people,” Aougab continues,
“the predictions the algorithm puts forth are just going to reflect
that. It’s a way to perpetuate that over-criminalization.”
The mathematicians question if predictive policing is just a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“There’s a big question here: is predictive policing really getting
ahead of events, or is it just a self-fulfilling prophecy?” McQuade
explains that “crime statistics” are more accurately referred to as
“arrest statistics.” They measure police behavior, which is not directly
correlated with crime and violence. These arrests justify and
perpetuate more arrests.
Athreya explains the boycotters will accomplish their goals by collaborating with criminal justice organizations.
We want to work through issues of how various algorithms
are used in the criminal justice system, for things from facial
recognition to DNA matching algorithms, where community groups and
mathematicians can have a say.
In fact, one study
conducted by the AI Institute last year investigated predictive
policing systems and determined “in numerous jurisdictions, these
systems are built on data produced during documented periods of flawed,
racially-biased, and sometimes unlawful practices and policies.”
Another subsequent 2019 audit on predictive A.I. use in Los Angeles found a serious lack of oversight or procedures around
the tools, rendering them utterly useless. Researchers have also
noticed police tend to pursue their own “hotspots” rather than follow
the technology making the tech become an enabler to police labeling and
categorizing individuals without reason, Science Magreported.
This is only the beginning of the fight, and it’s going to be a
drawn-out battle to prevent the use of this technology, not just here in
the U.S. but worldwide as well. There’s no telling how long these
projects have been active, and trusting the police to honestly tell us
is like trusting the wolf guarding the henhouse. However, with
mathematicians as well as scientists and engineers on our side we have a
fighting chance.
We are getting closer and closer to proving what was obvious from the very beginning: Covid-19 is a Bio-weapon developed at the P4 laboratory in Wuhan.
For the sake of transparency and science, this article needs to be distributed as widely as possible.
COVID-19 Is 'Unrestricted Bioweapon'
Li-Meng Yan, A Chinese virologist (MD, PhD) who worked in a WHO
reference lab and fled her position at the University of Hong Kong, has
published a second co-authored report,
alleging that SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, was not only
created in a Wuhan lab, it's an "unrestricted bioweapon" which was
intentionally released.
"We used biological evidence and in-depth analyses to show that SARS-CoV-2 must be a laboratory product, which was created by using a template virus (ZC45/ZXC21) owned by military research laboratories under the control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government," reads the paper.
SARS-CoV2 is a product of laboratory modification, which can be created in approximately six months using a template virus owned by a laboratory of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). The fact that data fabrications were used to cover up the true origin of SARS-CoV 2 further implicates that the laboratory modification here is beyond simple gain-of-function research.
The
scale and the coordinated nature of this scientific fraud signifies the
degree of corruption in the fields of academic research and public
health. As a result of such corruption, damages have been made both
tot he reputation of the scientific community and to the well-being of
the global community.
The report also claims that the RaTG13 virus which
Wuhan "Batwoman" Dr. Zhengli Shi and colleagues say they obtained in bat
feces in 2013 (and which is 96% identical to SARS-CoV-2), is fraudulent and also man made.
Since its publication, the RaTG13 virus has served as the founding evidence for the theory that SARS-CoV-2 must have a natural origin.
However, no live virus or an intact genome of RaTG13 have ever been
isolated or recovered. Therefore, the only proof for the “existence” of
RaTG13 in nature is its genomic sequence published on GenBank.
The report goes on to say that the RaTG13 genome could easily be fabricated,
and that "an entry on GenBank, which in this case is equivalent to the
existence of an assembled viral genomic sequence and its associated
sequencing reads, is not a definitive proof that this viral genome is
correct or real," and that the process for sequencing DNA itself "leaves
room for potential fraud."
If one intends to fabricate an RNA viral genome on GenBank,
he or she could do so by following these steps: create its genomic
sequence on a computer, have segments of the genome synthesized based on
the sequence, amplify each DNA segment through PCR, and then send the
PCR products (may also be mixed with genetic material derived from the
alleged host of the virus to mimic an authentic sequencing sample) for
sequencing.The resulted raw sequencing reads would be used,
together with the created genomic sequence, for establishing an entry on
GenBank. Once accomplished, this entry would be accepted as
the evidence for the natural existence of the corresponding virus.
Clearly, a viral genomic sequence and its GenBank entry can be
fabricated if well-planned.
RaTG13 has 'multiple abnormal features,' according
to the report. For starters, it's claimed that it was a fecal sample -
yet just 1.7% of the raw sequencing reads are bacterial, when fecal swab
samples are typically 70-90% bacterial. Second, the genomic sequence for RaTG13 contains segments of non-bat origin, including fox, flying fox, squirrels and other animals.
What's more, China destroyed all evidence of RaTG13.
"No independent verification of the RaTG13 sequence seems possible
because, according to Dr. Zhengli Shi,the raw sample has been exhausted
and no live virus was ever isolated or recovered. Notably, this
information was known to a core circle of virologists early on and
apparently accepted by them."
Meanwhile, another coronavirus which shares a '100%
nucleotide sequence identity with RaTG13' - RaBtCoV/4991 - on a 'short,
440-bp RNA-dependent RNA polymerase gene segment.'
RaBtCoV/4991 was allegedly discovered by Shi and colleagues in 2012 and published in 2016, and colleagues have been asking if it's the same virus as RaTG13.
Given the 100% identity on this short gene segment between
RaBtCoV/4991 and RaTG13,the field has demanded clarification of
whether or not these two names refer to the same virus. However,Dr. Shi
did not respond to the requestor address this question for months. The
answer finally came from Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance
and long-term collaborator of Shi, who claimed that RaBtCoV/4991 was RaTG1327.
Three suspicious facts
First, it makes no sense that 'Batwoman' Shi and her team wouldn't have conducted whole genome sequencing of RaBtCoV/4991 before 2020, as
it was suspected in the deaths of miners who suffered from severe
pneumonia after clearing out bat droppings in a Chinese mineshaft.
Given the Shi group’s consistent interests in studying SARS-like bat
coronaviruses and the fact that RaBtCoV/4991 is a SARS-like coronavirus
with a possible connection to the deaths of the miners, it is
highly unlikely that the Shi group would be content with sequencing only
a 440-bp segment of RdRpand not pursue the sequencing of the
receptor-binding motif (RBM)-encoding region of the spike gene.
In fact, sequencing of the spike gene is routinely attempted by the Shi
group once the presence of a SARS-like bat coronavirus is confirmed by
the sequencing of the 440-bp RdRpsegment25,32, although the success of
such efforts is often hindered by the poor quality of the sample.
"Clearly, the perceivable motivation of the Shi group to study this RaBtCoV/4991 virus and the fact that no genome sequencing of it was done for a period of seven years (2013-2020) are hard to reconcile and explain."
Meanwhile, genomic sequencing of RaTG13 was conducted in 2018.
Second, why did Shidelay publication on RaTG13 until 2020 when it's got a Spike protein that can bind with human ACE2 receptors?
...if the genomic sequence of RaTG13 had been available since 2018, it
is unlikely that this virus, which has a possible connection to miners’
deaths in 2012 and has an alarming SARS-like RBM, would be shelfed for
two years without publication. Consistent with this analysis, a
recent study indeed proved that the RBD of RaTG13(produced via gene
synthesis based on its published sequence) was capable of binding hACE2
Third, there has been no follow-up work on RaTG13 by Shi's group.
Upon obtaining the genomic sequence of a SARS-like bat coronavirus,
the Shi group routinely investigate whether or not the virus is capable
of infecting human cells. This pattern of research activities has been
shown repeatedly. However, such a pattern is not seen here
despite that RaTG13 has an interesting RBM and is allegedly the closest
match evolutionarily to SARS-CoV-2
Direct genetic evidence proving RaTG13 is fraudulent
Yan's group closely examined the sequences of specific spike proteins for relevant viruses - specifically comparing mutations, and found that the spike genes of SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 do not contain evidence of natural evolution when compared to other coronaviruses which naturally evolved.
A logical interpretation of this observation is that SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 could not relate to each other through natural evolution and at least one must be artificial.If one is a product of natural evolution, then the other one must be not. It is also possible that neither of them exists naturally. If RaTG13 is a real virus that truly exists in nature, then SARS-CoV-2 must be artificial.
More:
It is highly likely that the sequence of the RaTG13 genome
was fabricated by lightly modifying the SARS-CoV-2 sequence to achieve
an overall 96.2% sequence identity. During this process, much
editing must have been done for the RBM region of the S1/spike because
the encoded RBM determines the interaction with ACE2 and therefore would
be heavily scrutinized by others.
The paper concludes: All fabricated coronaviruses share a 100% amino acid sequence identity on the E protein with ZC45 and ZXC21
Evidence herein clearly indicates that the novel coronaviruses recently published by the CCP-controlled laboratories are all fraudulent and do not exist in nature. One final proof of this conclusion is the fact that all of these viruses share a 100% amino acid sequence identity on the E protein with bat coronaviruses ZC45 and ZXC21,
which, as revealed in our earlier report1, should be the
template/backbone used for the creation of SARS-CoV-2. Despite its
conserved function in the viral replication cycle, the E protein is
tolerant and permissive of amino acid mutations. It is therefore
impossible for the amino acid sequence of the E protein to remain
unchanged when the virus has allegedly crossed species barrier multiple
times (between different bat species, from bats to pangolins, and from pangolins to humans). The 100% identity observed here, therefore, further proves that the sequences of these recently published novel coronaviruses have been fabricated.
Unrestricted bioweapon?
Yan notes that while it's not easy for the public to accept that SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon due to its relatively low lethality, it indeed meets the criteria of a bioweapon.
In 2005, Dr. Yang specified the criteria for a pathogen to qualify as a bioweapon:
It is significantly virulent and can cause large scale casualty.
It is highly contagious and transmits easily,
often through respiratory routes in the form of aerosols. The most
dangerous scenario would be that it allows human-to-human transmission.
It is relatively resistant to environmental changes, can sustain transportation, and is capable of supporting targeted release.
All of the above have been met bySARS-CoV-2: it has taken
hundreds of thousands lives, led to numerous hospitalizations, and left
many with sequela and various complications; it spreads easily by contact, droplets, and aerosols via respiratory routes and is capable of transmitting from human to human, the latter of which was initially covered up by the CCP government and the WHO and was first revealed by Dr. Li-Meng Yan on January 19th, 2020 on Lude Press; it is temperature-insensitive (unlike seasonal flu) and remains viable for a long period of time on many surfaces and at 4°C (e.g. the ice/water mixture).
What's more, COVID-19 spreads asymptomatically, which "renders the control of SARS-CoV-2 extremely challenging."
"In addition, the transmissibility, morbidity, and mortality of
SARS-CoV-2 also resulted in panic in the global community, disruption of
social orders, and decimation of the world’s economy. The range and destructive power of SARS-CoV-2 are both unprecedented."
"Clearly,SARS-CoV-2 not only meets but also surpasses the standards
of a traditional bioweapon. Therefore, it should be defined as an
Unrestricted Bioweapon."
