Garīgā izaugsme: High and Low of Rhetoric & Verbiage

“You Will Know Them by Their Fruits” (Matthew 7:15-20)

Ultimately, the most important thing for each representative of public authority delegated by the people is to ensure a full-fledged quality of life and enhance the well-being of the citizens of the country.

To successfully achieve this goal, heads of countries, politicians and officials of all ranks must match their status in terms of their competence and moral qualities.

If the current results of public administration are unsatisfactory, every reasonable & capable person tends to analyse the situation, looks for the reasons for negations, and tries to evaluate them as objectively as possible and to identify the mistakes made. On that basis, the person does everything necessary to eliminate the blunders found by correcting his or her actions, revising his or her attitude and behavioural motives, and improving the methods of work and the means used. If necessary, also insisting on a change of governance.

Nevertheless, such purposeful, goal-directed and natural actions in many countries are still attempted to be restricted by those in power:

√ with the help of the media controlled by the regime, always and everywhere glorifying any activity of the heads of the state, incessantly extolling every decision made by them;

√ by imposing the explanations ordered by the power elite or decisions adopted by politicians, narratives of versions of events and their interpretations;

√ by seeking and finding supposedly objective, but, in fact, fictitious excuses or insignificant reasons for the failure to fulfil the promises given to the people;

√ by motivating citizens to unconditionally obey the policies pursued by the authorities through agitation & propaganda or repressive regulations;

√ by limiting the availability of information and subjecting it to censorship;

√ by preventing an objective analysis of what is happening against the background of the monopolisation of truth;

√ by drastically restricting the choice of voters;

√ by manipulating the minds of people using various means;

√ by ignoring the legal demands of citizens;

√ by steering public activities into the desired direction, while sidelining socially conscious members of society who are irreconcilable with the pursued policy and declaring them to be extremists or foreign agents.

All this is being promoted and stimulated, while public opinion is being influenced and the stereotyped perception of people is being formed and strengthened due to the massively distributed practice of using:

► incorrect statements,

► dubious analogies,

► inadequate interpretations of a specific situation,

► fictional, biased versions and lies.

This is done in an eloquent way that is easily perceived by people (in the form of demagoguery, populism, folklore, sarcasm, irony, satire, absurdity or demonisation):

▼ primitivising the explanations of what is happening,

▼ levelling out the circumstances,

▼ banalising arguments,

▼ ignoring the interactions of various factors and their interrelation,

▼ engaging in statement of the state of affairs, ranting, contemplation of situations or their formal description.

Thus, in fact, parasitising on people’s trust, their emotional perception and the tradition not to question the information published in the media & broadcast on TV, as well as on their habit of not looking for alternative sources of information...: Read more: https://www.amazon.com/HOW-GET-RID-SHACKLES-TOTALITARIANISM-ebook/dp/B0C9543B4L/ref=sr_1_1?crid=19WW1TG75ZU79&keywords=HOW+TO+GET+RID+OF+THE+SHACKLES+OF+TOTALITARIANISM&qid=1687700500&s=books&sprefix=how+to+get+rid+of+the+shackles+of+totalitarianism%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C181&sr=1-1

'The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future' (Public Affairs, 29.

06. 2021)

by Geoffrey Cain

A riveting investigation into how a restive region of China became the site of a nightmare Orwellian social experiment—the definitive police state—and the global technology giants that made it possible

Blocked from facts and truth, under constant surveillance, surrounded by a hostile alien police force: Xinjiang’s Uyghur population has become cursed, oppressed, outcast. Most citizens cannot discern between enemy and friend. Social trust has been destroyed systematically. Friends betray each other, bosses snitch on employees, teachers expose their students, and children turn on their parents. Everyone is dependent on a government that nonetheless treats them with suspicion and contempt. Welcome to the Perfect Police State.
Using the haunting story of one young woman’s attempt to escape the vicious technological dystopia, his own reporting from Xinjiang, and extensive firsthand testimony from exiles, Geoffrey Cain reveals the extraordinary intrusiveness and power of the tech surveillance giants and the chilling implications for all our futures.

Аndrey Soldatov, Irina Borogan

THE RED WEB: THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN RUSSIA’S DIGITAL DICTATORS AND THE NEW ONLINE REVOLUTIONARIES

http://www.counter-point.org/the-red-web-the-struggle-between-russias-digital-dictators-and-the-new-online-revolutionaries/

Geneva: Evolving Censorship Evasion

Join us and learn about our fight against internet censorship around the world.

Automating Evasion

Researchers and censoring regimes have long engaged in a cat-and-mouse game, leading to increasingly sophisticated Internet-scale censorship techniques and methods to evade them. In this work, we take a drastic departure from the previously manual evade/detect cycle by developing techniques to automate the discovery of censorship evasion strategies.

Our Approach

We developed Geneva (Genetic Evasion), a novel experimental genetic algorithm that evolves packet-manipulation-based censorship evasion strategies against nation-state level censors. Geneva re-derived virtually all previously published evasion strategies, and has discovered new ways of circumventing censorship in China, India, Iran, and Kazakhstan.

How it works

Geneva runs exclusively on one side of the connection: it does not require a proxy, bridge, or assistance from outside the censoring regime. It defeats censorship by modifying network traffic on the fly (by injecting traffic, modifying packets, etc) in such a way that censoring middleboxes are unable to interfere with forbidden connections, but without otherwise affecting the flow. Since Geneva works at the network layer, it can be used with any application; with Geneva running in the background, any web browser can become a censorship evasion tool. Geneva cannot be used to circumvent blocking of IP addresses.

Geneva composes four basic packet-level actions (drop, duplicate, fragment, tamper) together to represent censorship evasion strategies. By running directly against real censors, Geneva’s genetic algorithm evolves strategies that evade the censor.

Real World Deployments

Geneva has been deployed against real-world censors in China, India, Iran, and Kazahkstan. It has discovered dozens of strategies to defeat censorship, and found previously unknown bugs in censors.

Note that Geneva is a research prototype, and does not offer anonymization, encryption, or other protection from censors. Understand the risks in your country before trying to run Geneva.

All of these strategies and Geneva’s strategy engine and are open source: check them out on our Github page.

Learn more about how we designed and built Geneva here.

Who We Are

This project is done by students in Breakerspace, a lab at the University of Maryland dedicated to scaling-up undergraduate research in computer and network security.

This work is supported by the Open Technology Fund and the National Science Foundation.

Contact Us

Interested in working with us, learning more, getting Geneva running in your country, or incorporating some of Geneva’s strategies into your tool?

The easiest way to reach us is by email.

Dave: dml (at) cs.umd.edu (PGP key here)
Kevin: kbock (at) terpmail.umd.edu (PGP key here)

https://geneva.cs.umd.edu/

Google’s Earth: how the tech giant is helping the state spy on us

By Yasha Levine Thu 20 Dec 2018 06.00

The internet surrounds us. It mediates modern life, like a giant, unseen blob that engulfs the modern world. There is no escape, and, as Larry Page and Sergey Brin so astutely understood when they launched Google in 1998, everything that people do online leaves a trail of data. If saved and used correctly, these traces make up a goldmine of information full of insights into people on a personal level as well as a valuable read on larger cultural, economic and political trends.

Google was the first internet company to fully leverage this insight and build a business on the data that people leave behind. But it wasn’t alone for long. It happened just about everywhere, from the smallest app to the most sprawling platform.

Uber, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Tinder, Apple, Lyft, Foursquare, Airbnb, Spotify, Instagram, Twitter, Angry Birds – if you zoom out and look at the bigger picture, you can see that, taken together, these companies have turned our computers and phones into bugs that are plugged in to a vast corporate-owned surveillance net-work. Where we go, what we do, what we talk about, who we talk to, and who we see – everything is recorded and, at some point, leveraged for value. Google, Apple and Facebook know when a woman visits an abortion clinic, even if she tells no one else: the GPS coordinates on the phone don’t lie. One-night stands and extramarital affairs are a cinch to figure out: two smartphones that never met before suddenly cross paths in a bar and then make their way to an apartment across town, stay together overnight, and part in the morning.

They know us intimately, even the things that we hide from those closest to us. In our modern internet ecosystem, this kind of private surveillance is the norm. It is as unnoticed and unremarkable as the air we breathe. But even in this advanced, data-hungry environment, in terms of sheer scope and ubiquity, Google reigns supreme.

As the internet expanded, Google grew along with it. No matter what service it deployed or what market it entered, surveillance and prediction were cooked into the business. The amount of data flowing through Google’s systems is staggering. By the end of 2016, Google’s Android was installed on 82% of all new smartphones sold around the world, and by mid-2017 there were more than 2 billion Android users globally.

Google also handles billions of searches and YouTube plays daily, and has a billion active Gmail users, meaning it had access to most of the world’s emails. Some analysts estimate that 25% of all internet traffic in North America goes through Google’s servers. The company isn’t just connected to the internet, it is the internet.

Google has pioneered a whole new type of business transaction. Instead of paying for its services with money, people pay with their data. And the services it offers to consumers are just the lures, used to grab people’s data and dominate their attention – attention that is contracted out to advertisers. Google has used data to grow its empire. By early 2018, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, had85,050 employees, working out of more than 70 offices in 50 countries. The company had a market capitalisation of $727bn at the end of 2017, making it the second most valuable public company in the world, beaten only by Apple, another Silicon Valley giant. Its profits for the first quarter of 2018 were $9.4bn.

Meanwhile, other internet companies depend on Google for survival. Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Lyft and Uber have all built multi-billion-dollar businesses on top of Google’s ubiquitous mobile operating system. As the gatekeeper, Google benefits from their success as well. The more people who use their mobile devices, the more data it gets on them.

What does Google know? What can it guess? Well, it seems just about everything. “One of the things that eventually happens … is that we don’t need you to type at all,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, said in a moment of candour in 2010. “Because we know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about.” He later added: “One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.”

It is a scary thought, considering that Google is no longer a cute startup but a powerful global corporation with its own political agenda and a mission to maximise profits for shareholders. Imagine if Philip Morris, Goldman Sachs or a military contractor like Lockheed Martin had this kind of access.

Not long after Brin and Page incorporated Google, they began to see their mission in bigger terms. They weren’t just building a search engine or a targeted advertising business. They were organising the world’s information to make it accessible and useful for everyone. It was a vision that also encompassed the Pentagon.

Even as Google grew to dominate the consumer internet, a second side of the company emerged, one that rarely got much notice: Google the government contractor. As it turns out, the same platforms and services that Google deploys to monitor people’s lives and grab their data could be put to use running huge swaths of the US government, including the military, spy agencies, police departments and schools. The key to this transformation was a small startup now known as Google Earth.

In 2003, a San Francisco company called Keyhole Incorporated was on the ropes. With a name recalling the CIA’s secret 1960s “Keyhole” spy satellite programme, the company had been launched two years earlier as a spinoff from a videogame outfit. Its CEO, John Hanke, told journalists that the inspiration for his company came from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a cult science-fiction novel in which the hero taps into a programme created by the “Central Intelligence Corporation” called Planet Earth, a virtual reality construct designed, as the book describes, to “keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns – all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff”.

Keyhole had its roots in videogame technology, but deployed it in the real world, creating a programme that stitched satellite images and aerial photographs into seamless 3D computer models of the Earth that could be explored as if they were in a virtual reality game world. It was a groundbreaking product that allowed anyone with an internet connection to virtually fly over anywhere in the world. The only problem was Keyhole’s timing: it was a bit off. It launched just as the dotcom bubble blew up in Silicon Valley’s face. Funding dried up, and Keyhole found itself struggling to survive. Luckily, the company was saved just in time by the very entity that inspired it: the CIA.

In 1999, at the peak of the dot-com boom, the CIA had launched In-Q-Tel, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund whose mission was to invest in start-ups that aligned with the agency’s intelligence needs. Keyhole seemed a perfect fit.

The CIA poured an unknown amount of money into Keyhole. The investment was finalised in early 2003, and it was made in partnership with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a major intelligence organisation with 14,500 employees and a $5bn budget, whose job was to deliver satellite-based intelligence to the CIA and the Pentagon. Known as the NGA, the spy agency’s motto was: “Know the Earth … Show the Way … Understand the World.”

The CIA and NGA were not just investors; they were also clients, and they involved themselves in customising Keyhole’s virtual map product to meet their own needs. Months after In-Q-Tel’s investment, Keyhole software was already integrated into operational service and deployed to support US troops during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the shock-and-awe campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Intelligence officials were impressed with the “videogame-like” simplicity of its virtual maps. They also appreciated the ability to layer visual information over other intelligence. The possibilities were limited only by what contextual data could be fed and grafted on to a map: troop movements, weapons caches, real-time weather and ocean conditions, intercepted emails and phone call intel, and mobile phone locations.

Keyhole gave intelligence analysts, field commanders, air force pilots and others the kind of capabilities we take for granted today when we use digital mapping services on our computers and smartphones to look up restaurants, cafes, museums, traffic or subway routes.

Military commanders weren’t the only ones who liked Keyhole. So did Sergey Brin. He liked it so much that he insisted on personally demoing the app for Google executives. According to an account published in Wired, he barged in on a company meeting, punched in the address of every person present, and used the programme to virtually fly over their homes.

In 2004, the same year Google went public, Brin and Page bought the company outright, CIA investors and all. They then absorbed the company into Google’s growing internet applications platform. Keyhole was reborn as Google Earth.

The purchase of Keyhole was a milestone for Google, marking the moment the company stopped being a purely consumer-facing internet company and began integrating with the US government. When Google bought Keyhole, it also acquired an In-Q-Tel executive named Rob Painter, who came with deep connections to the world of intelligence and military contracting, including US Special Operations, the CIA and major defence firms, among them Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. At Google, Painter was planted in a new dedicated sales and lobbying division called Google Federal, located in Reston, Virginia, a short drive from the CIA’s headquarters in Langley. His job was to help Google grab a slice of the lucrative military-intelligence contracting market. Or, as Painter described in contractor-bureaucratese, “evangelising and implementing Google Enterprise solutions for a host of users across the intelligence and defence communities”.

Google had closed a few previous deals with intelligence agencies. In 2003, it scored a $2.1m (£1.7m) contract to outfit the National Security Agency (NSA) with a customised search solution that could scan and recognise millions of documents in 24 languages, including on-call tech support in case anything went wrong. In 2004, Google landed a search contract with the CIA. The value of the deal isn’t known, but the agency did ask Google’s permission to customise the CIA’s internal Google search page by placing the CIA’s seal in one of the Google logo’s Os. “I told our sales rep to give them the OK if they promised not to tell anyone. I didn’t want it spooking privacy advocates,” wrote Douglas Edwards, Google’s first director of marketing and brand management, in his 2011 book I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. Deals such as these picked up pace and increased in scope after Google’s acquisition of Keyhole.

In 2006, Google Federal went on a hiring spree, snapping up managers and salespeople from the army, air force, CIA, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. It beefed up its lobbying muscle and assembled a team of Democratic and Republican operatives.

Even as it expanded into a transnational multi-billion-dollar corporation, Google had managed to retain its geekily innocent “don’t be evil” image. So while Google’s PR team did its best to keep the company wrapped in a false aura of altruism, company executives pursued an aggressive strategy to become the Lockheed Martin of the internet age. “We’re functionally more than tripling the team each year,” Painter said in 2008. It was true. With insiders plying their trade, Google’s expansion into the world of military and intelligence contracting took off.

In 2007, it partnered with Lockheed Martin to design a visual intelligence system for the NGA that displayed US military bases in Iraq and marked out Sunni and Shia neighbourhoods in Baghdad – important information for a region that had experienced a bloody sectarian insurgency and ethnic cleansing campaign between the two groups. In 2008, Google won a contract to run the servers and search technology that powered the CIA’s Intellipedia, an intelligence database modelled after Wikipedia that was collaboratively edited by the NSA, CIA, FBI and other federal agencies. Not long after that, Google contracted with the US army to equip 50,000 soldiers with a customised suite of mobile Google services.

In 2010, as a sign of just how deeply Google had integrated with US intelligence agencies, it won an exclusive, no-bid $27m contract to provide the NGA with “geospatial visualisation services”, effectively making the company the “eyes” of America’s defence and intelligence apparatus. Competitors criticised the NGA for not opening the contract to the customary bidding process, but the agency defended its decision, saying it had no choice: it had spent years working with Google on secret and top-secret programmes to build Google Earth technology according to its needs, and could not go with any other company.

Google has been tight-lipped about the details and scope of its contracting business. It does not list this revenue in a separate column in quarterly earnings reports to investors, nor does it provide the sum to reporters. But an analysis of the federal contracting data-base maintained by the US government, combined with information gleaned from Freedom of Information Act requests and published reports on the company’s military work, reveals that Google has been doing brisk business selling Google Search, Google Earth and Google Enterprise (now known as G Suite) products to just about every major military and intelligence agency, including the state department. Sometimes Google sells directly to the government, but it also works with established contractors like Lockheed Martin and Saic (Science Applications International Corporation), a California-based intelligence mega-contractor which has so many former NSA employees working for it that it is known in the business as “NSA West”.

Google’s entry into this market makes sense. By the time Google Federal went online in 2006, the Pentagon was spending the bulk of its budget on private contractors. That year, of the $60bn US intelligence budget, 70%, or $42bn, went to corporations. That means that, although the government pays the bill, the actual work is done by Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Bechtel, Booz Allen Hamilton and other powerful contractors. And this isn’t just in the defence sector. By 2017, the federal government was spending $90bn a year on information technology. It’s a huge market – one in which Google seeks to maintain a strong presence. And its success has been all but guaranteed. Its products are the best in the business.

Here’s a sign of how vital Google has become to the US government: in 2010, following a disastrous intrusion into its system by what the company believes was a group of Chinese government hackers, Google entered into a secretive agreement with the NSA. “According to officials who were privy to the details of Google’s arrangements with the NSA, the company agreed to provide information about traffic on its networks in exchange for intelligence from the NSA about what it knew of foreign hackers,” wrote defence reporter Shane Harris in @War, a history of warfare. “It was a quid pro quo, information for information. And from the NSA’s perspective, information in exchange for protection.”

This made perfect sense. Google servers supplied critical services to the Pentagon, the CIA and the state department, just to name a few. It was part of the military family and essential to American society. It needed to be protected, too.

Google didn’t just work with intelligence and military agencies, but also sought to penetrate every level of society, including civilian federal agencies, cities, states, local police departments, emergency responders, hospitals, public schools and all sorts of companies and nonprofits. In 2011, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that researches weather and the environment, switched over to Google. In 2014, the city of Boston deployed Google to run the information infrastructure for its 76,000 employees – from police officers to teachers – and even migrated its old emails to the Google cloud. The Forest Service and the Federal Highway Administration use Google Earth and Gmail.

In 2016, New York City tapped Google to install and run free wifi stations across the city. California, Nevada and Iowa, meanwhile, depend on Google for cloud computing platforms that predict and catch welfare fraud. Meanwhile, Google mediates the education of more than half of America’s public school students.

“What we really do is allow you to aggregate, collaborate and enable,” explained Scott Ciabattari, a Google Federal sales rep, during a 2013 government contracting conference in Wyoming. He was pitching to a room full of civil servants, telling them that Google was all about getting them – intelligence analysts, commanders, government managers and police officers – access to the right information at the right time. He ran through a few examples: tracking flu outbreaks, monitoring floods and wildfires, safely serving criminal warrants, integrating surveillance cameras and face recognition systems, and even helping police officers respond to school shootings.

“We are getting this request more and more: ‘Can you help us publish all the floorplans for our school district? If there is a shooting disaster, God forbid, we want to know where things are.’ Having that ability on a smartphone, being able to see that information quickly at the right time saves lives,” he said. A few months after this presentation, Ciabattari met with officials from Oakland, California to discuss how Google could help the city build its police surveillance centre.

This mixing of military, police, government, public education, business and consumer-facing systems – all funnelled through Google – continues to raise alarms. Lawyers fret over whether Gmail violates attorney-client privilege. Parents wonder what Google does with the information it collects on their kids at school. What does Google do with the data that flows through its systems? Is all of it fed into Google’s big corporate surveillance pot? What are Google’s limits and restrictions? Are there any? In response to these questions, Google offers only vague and conflicting answers.

Of course, this concern isn’t restricted to Google. Under the hood of most other internet companies we use every day are vast systems of private surveillance that, in one way or another, work with and empower the state. On a higher level, there is no real difference between Google’s relationship with the US government and that of these other companies. It is just a matter of degree. The sheer breadth and scope of Google’s technology make it a perfect stand-in for the rest of the commercial internet ecosystem.

Indeed, Google’s size and ambition make it more than a simple contractor. It is frequently an equal partner that works side by side with government agencies, using its resources and commercial dominance to bring companies with heavy military funding to market. In 2008, a private spy satellite called GeoEye-1 was launched in partnership with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; Google’s logo was on the launch rocket and the company secured exclusive use of the satellite’s data for use in its online mapping. Google also bought Boston Dynamics, a robotics company that made experimental robotic pack mules for the military, only to sell it off after the Pentagon determined it would not be putting these robots into active use. It has invested $100m in CrowdStrike, a major military and intelligence cyber defence contractor that, among other things, led the investigation into the alleged 2016 Russian government hacks of the Democratic National Committee. And it also runs Jigsaw, a hybrid think tank/technology incubatoraimed at leveraging internet technology to solve thorny foreign policy problems – everything from terrorism to censorship and cyberwarfare.

Founded in 2010 by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, a 29-year-old state department whizz-kid who served under both George W Bush and Barack Obama, Jigsaw has launched multiple projects with foreign policy and national security implications. It ran polling for the US government to help war-torn Somalia draft a new constitution, developed tools to track global arms sales, and worked with a startup funded by the state department to help people in Iran and China route around internet censorship.

It also built a platform to combat online terrorist recruitment and radicalisation, which worked by identifying Google users interested in Islamic extremist topics and diverting them to state department webpages and videos developed to dissuade people from taking that path. Google calls this the “redirect method”, a part of Cohen’s larger idea of using internet platforms to wage “digital counterinsurgency”. And, in 2012, as the civil war in Syria intensified and American support for rebel forces there increased, Jigsaw brainstormed ways it could help push Bashar al-Assad from power. Among them: a tool that visually maps high-level defections from Assad’s government, which Cohen wanted to beam into Syria as propaganda to give “confidence to the opposition”.

Jigsaw seemed to blur the line between public and corporate diplomacy, and at least one former state department official accused it of fomenting regime change in the Middle East. “Google is getting [White House] and state department support and air cover. In reality, they are doing things the CIA cannot do,” wrote Fred Burton, an executive at global intelligence platform Stratfor and a former intelligence agent at the security branch of the state department.

But Google rejected the claims of its critics. “We’re not engaged in regime change,” Eric Schmidt told Wired. “We don’t do that stuff. But if it turns out that empowering citizens with smartphones and information causes changes in their country … you know, that’s probably a good thing, don’t you think?”

Jigsaw’s work with the state department has raised eyebrows, but its function is a mere taste of the future if Google gets its way. As the company makes new deals with the NSA and continues its merger with the US security apparatus, its founders see it playing an even greater role in global society.

Why Silicon Valley can’t fix itself

“The societal goal is our primary goal. We’ve always tried to say that with Google. Some of the most fundamental questions people are not thinking about … how do we organise people, how do we motivate people? It’s a really interesting problem – how do we organise our democracies?” Larry Page ruminated during a rare interview in 2014 with the Financial Times. He looked a hundred years into the future and saw Google at the centre of progress. “We could probably solve a lot of the issues we have as humans.”

This is an edited extract from Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet by Yasha Levine, which will be published by Icon on 3 January, and is available to preorder at guardianbookshop.com

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/20/

Andrew Yang proposes that your digital data be considered personal property

BY MICHAEL GROTHAUS

2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang may not be at the top of the race when it comes to polling (Politico currently has him ranked as the 7th most-popular Democratic contender), but his policies, including support for universal basic income, have made him popular among a subset of young, liberal-leaning, tech-savvy voters. Yang’s latest proposal, too, is sure to strike a chord with them.

The presidential candidate published his latest policy proposal today: to treat data as a property right. Announcing the proposal on his website, Yang lamented how our data is collected, used, and abused by companies, often with little awareness or consent from us. “This needs to stop,” Yang says. “Data generated by each individual needs to be owned by them, with certain rights conveyed that will allow them to know how it’s used and protect it.”

The rights Yang is proposing:

The right to be informed as to what data will be collected, and how it will be used
The right to opt out of data collection or sharing
The right to be told if a website has data on you, and what that data is
The right to be forgotten; to have all data related to you deleted upon request
The right to be informed if ownership of your data changes hands
The right to be informed of any data breaches including your information in a timely manner
The right to download all data in a standardized format to port to another platform

The fourth point is notable because it seems to suggest Yang wants the same “right to be forgotten” laws that Europe currently offers. That’s something tech giants like Google have litigated vigorously. And you can be sure that many tech giants would lobby just as vigorously against some of his other “data as property” proposals.

Still, it’s refreshing to see a candidate so clearly outline his digital data policies. Whether that will help push him higher in the polls remains to be seen.

Our data is ours - or it should be. At this point our data is more valuable than oil. If anyone benefits from our data it should be us. I would make data a property right that each of us shares. https://www.yang2020.com/policies/data-property-right/ …

Artificial Intelligence: Bright Future or Dark Cloud?

Published on January 11, 2019

Rajat Taneja Executive Vice President, Technology at Visa

The potential of deep learning and AI is almost limitless, certainly well beyond the scope of our current imagination. Complex machines imbued with the characteristics of human intelligence (e.g., the ability to sense the world through sight, sound, and touch; to reason and plan; to communicate in natural language, and to move and manipulate objects), will influence society in untold ways. The discipline however polarizes opinions, with evangelists on one side and doomsayers on the other.

This dilemma is not at all new or limited to the field of computing—consider the ethical debates sparked by breakthroughs in gene editing, stem cell research, or genetically modified foods. Like many technologists of my generation, I am a rational optimist by nature. I believe AI can be harnessed in ways that dramatically improve our lives, and that its potential to do good far outweighs its potential to do harm.

However, we can’t presume that progress will automatically translate to benefits for humankind as a whole. We have an obligation as technologists to think through the implications of our design choices before we put software into production.

I last wrote about artificial intelligence three years ago—before Alexa took up residence on our countertops and Google’s AlphaGo beat the world’s best “Go” video player. I wanted to revisit the subject because I believe we are at a critical inflection point in the evolution of AI.

The Convergence at the Heart of Advances in AI

Driving the growth and importance of AI are the improvements in computing hardware, access to greater amounts of more valuable data, as well as breakthroughs in the underlying software, tools and algorithms that can analyze and make sense of the data. Most of the activity we do today using connected devices is powered by this intersection. Internet searches, online recommendations for movies we want to stream, to gifts we want to buy are driven by advances in machine learning.

In order to compete with the richest, deepest intelligence, like a human being, AI needs fast memory and fast transfers inside of that hardware subsystem. In my days at EA, we were obsessed with making the action in your game look real and authentic on your computer screen. Some of the hardware and software architectures catalyzing AI actually came from advances made in gaming—GPUs and fast memory buses and high-speed memory management.

Machine Learning in Payments

AI and machine learning bring boundless opportunities to payments and commerce. With behavioral biometrics, authentication will become more seamless and secure; with natural language processing, automated sales associates can make shopping online a richer more personalized experience; with computer vision, users will be able to snap pictures to search online, making all visual content instantly shoppable.

In the five years I’ve been at Visa, AI and machine learning have become increasingly embedded in our products and infrastructure. We’ve been using machine learning for years to predict and prevent fraud. With neural networks and gradient boosting algorithms, we were able to identify several billion dollars in fraud last year alone.

AI has also given us formidable new tools for securing and maintaining the Visa network. Our cybersecurity team uses neural networks to categorize and search petabytes of data every day, giving us actionable insights to protect our network from malware, zero-day attacks and insider threats.

Meanwhile our operations team is using machine learning models to predict disruptions in our hardware and software systems, giving our engineers the insights they need to fix bugs in the network before they impact our ability to process payments.

This is just the beginning. We have a team of data scientists in our research group exploring new applications of machine learning for the payment industry and beyond—from recommendation systems to new models for risk and fraud management.

AI: Molding in our (Best) Image?

The breakthroughs in AI that we are harnessing at Visa are manifesting themselves across disparate industries, including energy, consumer electronics, gaming and medicine. So, the questions have evolved from “will AI reach its potential?” or “will it transform our lives?” to “how will we manage that transformation?” and “will AI ultimately help or hurt humankind?”

There is a fierce debate on campuses and in boardrooms about the life-altering effects of AI. Elon Musk has warned of a “fleet of artificial intelligence-enhanced robots capable of destroying mankind”, while Larry Page of Google and Alphabet foresees advancements in human progress.

I believe there is merit in both arguments, and the good news is that we have time to shape AI in a positive direction. In human terms, we are in the toddler stage in the development of AI--a period of rapid neurogenesis. A child’s early years are shaped by external stimuli like pictures, music, language, and of course, human interaction. The result of this neurogenesis will determine a person’s intelligence, compassion, thoughtfulness and, importantly, capacity for empathy.

Similarly, for AI to evolve in a positive direction, we need to involve the humanities, law, ethics as well as engineering. We need diversity of thought amongst the people working on these solutions. I know others share this view. Deep Mind’s founder Demis Hassabis insisted that Google establish a joint ethics board when it acquired the company in 2014.

As a father of young children, I realize how futile it is to predict what they will be like when they grow up. Similarly, none of us can predict what AI will become 10, 20, 50 years into the future. However, today, we have a responsibility, as parents and technologists, to raise our children to be productive, compassionate and, perhaps most importantly, empathetic members of society.

I am excited to learn your perspective on how we can chart an empathetic course for artificial learning in all its manifestations.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/artificial-intelligence-bright-future-dark-cloud-rajat-taneja/

'The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future' (Public Affairs, 29 июня 2021)

by Geoffrey Cain

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55277916-the-perfect-police-state

Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication

Oren Jay Sofer

How to speak and listen more effectively--to communicate mindfully and improve all relationships--based on the author's unique synthesis of mindfulness practice combined with the principles of nonviolent communication.
Communication is hard. Here's a proven method that makes it not only considerably easier, but also much more effective for people on both sides of the conversation. Oren Sofer's method for effective communication is a unique combination of mindfulness with the modality called nonviolent communication (NVC), a method popular since the 1960s that is based on the belief that all human beings have the capacity for compassion and resort to violence or behavior that harms others only when they don't recognize more effective strategies for meeting needs. NVC provides those peaceful strategies. Oren's unique method for fostering peaceful--and effective--communication has three "steps" or components: (1) presence: bringing mindful awareness to the interaction, (2) intention: clarifying and setting a goal for the interaction, and (3) attention: learning to really hear and understand in a way that enables you to navigate the difficulties, express yourself clearly, and listen like it really matters--which it most certainly does. The steps are accompanied by many practical exercises, and in the course of this three-part training, readers will learn how to apply these skills to personal and social relationships with romantic partners, friends, colleagues, and family.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39380381-say-what-you-mean

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power

Professor Shoshana Zuboff

An important book about technology and capitalism - and what our response should be when these two giants collide.

'Many adjectives could be used to describe Shoshana Zuboff’s latest book: groundbreaking, magisterial, alarming, alarmist, preposterous. One will do: unmissable.' - Financial Times

'From the very first page I was consumed with an overwhelming imperative: everyone needs to read this book.' -Naomi Klein

Society is at a turning point. The heady optimism that accompanied the advent of the Internet has gone, replaced with a deep unease as technology, capitalism and an unequal society combine to create the perfect storm. Tech companies are gathering our information online and selling it to the highest bidder, whether government or retailer. In this world of surveillance capitalism, profit depends not only on predicting but modifying our online behaviour. How will this fusion of capitalism and the digital shape the values that define our future?

Shoshana Zuboff shows that at this critical juncture we have a choice, the power to decide what kind of world we want to live in. We can choose whether to allow the power of technology to enrich the few and impoverish the many, or harness it for the wider distribution of capitalism's social and economic benefits. What we decide over the next decade will shape the rest of the twenty-first century.

Exploring the social, political, business and technological meaning of the changes taking place in our time, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism tackles the threat of an unprecedented power free from democratic oversight, and shows how we can protect ourselves and our communities. This is a deeply reasoned examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization. The stark issue at hand is whether we will be masters of the digital, or its slaves.

https://viryialopemensoefczhome.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism.pdf

Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime―from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door by Brian Krebs

There is a Threat Lurking Online with the Power to Destroy Your Finances, Steal Your Personal Data, and Endanger Your Life.

In Spam Nation, investigative journalist and cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs unmasks the criminal masterminds driving some of the biggest spam and hacker operations targeting Americans and their bank accounts. Tracing the rise, fall, and alarming resurrection of the digital mafia behind the two largest spam pharmacies—and countless viruses, phishing, and spyware attacks—he delivers the first definitive narrative of the global spam problem and its threat to consumers everywhere.

Blending cutting-edge research, investigative reporting, and firsthand interviews, this terrifying true story reveals how we unwittingly invite these digital thieves into our lives every day. From unassuming computer programmers right next door to digital mobsters like "Cosma"—who unleashed a massive malware attack that has stolen thousands of Americans' logins and passwords—Krebs uncovers the shocking lengths to which these people will go to profit from our data and our wallets.

Not only are hundreds of thousands of Americans exposing themselves to fraud and dangerously toxic products from rogue online pharmacies, but even those who never open junk messages are at risk. As Krebs notes, spammers can—and do—hack into accounts through these emails, harvest personal information like usernames and passwords, and sell them on the digital black market. The fallout from this global epidemic doesn't just cost consumers and companies billions, it costs lives too.Fast-paced and utterly gripping, Spam Nation ultimately proposes concrete solutions for protecting ourselves online and stemming this tidal wave of cybercrime—before it's too late."Krebs's talent for exposing the weaknesses in online security has earned him respect in the IT business and loathing among cybercriminals.… His track record of scoops…has helped him become the rare blogger who supports himself on the strength of his reputation for hard-nosed reporting." —Bloomberg Businessweek

https://universalflowuniversity.com/Books/Computer%20Programming/Security%20and%20Cyber%20Warfare/Spam%20Nation_%20The%20Inside%20Story%20of%20Organized%20Cybercrime-From%20Global%20Epidemic%20to%20Your%20Front%20Door.pdf

Google’s Earth: how the tech giant is helping the state spy on us

By Yasha Levine Thu 20 Dec 2018 06.00

Why Silicon Valley can’t fix itself

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/20/

Do Morals Matter?: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump

by Joseph S. Nye Jr.

Americans constantly make moral statements about presidents and foreign policy. Unfortunately, many of these judgments are poorly thought through. A president is either praised for the moral clarity of his statements or judged solely on the results of their actions. Woodrow Wilson showed, however, that good intentions without adequate means can lead to ethically bad consequences. Richard Nixon, on the other hand, is credited with ending the Vietnam War, but he sacrificed 21,000 American lives and countless others for only a brief "decent interval."

In Do Morals Matter?, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., one of the world's leading scholars of international relations, provides a concise yet penetrating analysis of the role of ethics in US foreign policy during the American era after 1945. Nye works through each presidency from Truman to Trump and scores their foreign policy on three ethical dimensions of their intentions, the means they used, and the consequences of their decisions. Alongside this, he also evaluates their leadership qualities, elaborating on which approaches work and which ones do not. Regardless of a president's policy preference, Nye shows that each one was not constrained by the structure of the system and actually had choices. He further notes the important ethical consequences of non-actions, such as Truman's willingness to accept stalemate in Korea rather than use nuclear weapons.

Since we so often apply moral reasoning to foreign policy, Nye suggests how to do it better. Most importantly, presidents need to factor in both the political context and the availability of resources when deciding how to implement an ethical policy--especially in a future international system that presents not only great power competition from China and Russia, but transnational threats as borders become porous to everything from drugs to infectious diseases to terrorism to cyber criminals and climate change. : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44244970-do-morals-matter

The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning

By Dan P. McAdams

The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump provides a coherent and nuanced psychological portrait of Donald Trump, drawing upon biographical events in the subject's life and contemporary scientific research and theory in personality, developmental, and social psychology.

Dan P. McAdams, renowned psychologist who pioneered the study of lives, examines the central personality traits, personal values and motives, and the interpersonal and cultural factors that together have shaped Trump's psychological makeup, with an emphasis on the strangeness of the case--that is, how Trump again and again defies psychological expectations regarding what it means to be a human being. The book's central thesis is that Donald Trump is the episodic man. The chapters, structured as stand-alone essays each riffing on a single psychological theme, build on each other to present a portrait of a person who compulsively lives in the moment, without an internal story to integrate his life in time. With an emphasis on scientific personality research, rather than political rhetoric, McAdams shows that Trump's utter lack of an inner life story is truly exceptional. This book is a remarkable case study which should be of as much interest to psychologists as it is to readers trying to reckon with the often confounding behavior and temperament of the 45th President of the United States. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51458681-the-strange-case-of-donald-j-trump

The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists

Forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee explains the outgoing president’s pathological appeal and how to wean people from it

By Tanya Lewis on January 11, 2021

Supporters listen as President Trump speaks during a “Save America Rally” near the White House on January 6—not long before a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol Building. Credit: Shawn Thew Getty Images

The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building last week, incited by President Donald Trump, serves as the grimmest moment in one of the darkest chapters in the nation’s history. Yet the rioters’ actions—and Trump’s own role in, and response to, them—come as little surprise to many, particularly those who have been studying the president’s mental fitness and the psychology of his most ardent followers since he took office.

One such person is Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and president of the World Mental Health Coalition.* Lee led a group of psychiatrists, psychologists and other specialists who questioned Trump’s mental fitness for office in a book that she edited called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. In doing so, Lee and her colleagues strongly rejected the American Psychiatric Association’s modification of a 1970s-era guideline, known as the Goldwater rule, that discouraged psychiatrists from giving a professional opinion about public figures who they have not examined in person. “Whenever the Goldwater rule is mentioned, we should refer back to the Declaration of Geneva, which mandates that physicians speak up against destructive governments,” Lee says. “This declaration was created in response to the experience of Nazism.”

Lee recently wrote Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul, a psychological assessment of the president against the backdrop of his supporters and the country as a whole. These insights are now taking on renewed importance as a growing number of current and former leaders call for Trump to be impeached. On January 9 Lee and her colleagues at the World Mental Health Coalition put out a statement calling for Trump’s immediate removal from office.

Scientific American asked Lee to comment on the psychology behind Trump’s destructive behavior, what drives some of his followers—and how to free people from his grip when this damaging presidency ends.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

What attracts people to Trump? What is their animus or driving force?

The reasons are multiple and varied, but in my recent public-service book, Profile of a Nation, I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence—while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a “lock and key” relationship.

“Shared psychosis”—which is also called “folie à millions” [“madness for millions”] when occurring at the national level or “induced delusions”—refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person’s symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence—even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.

Why does Trump himself seem to gravitate toward violence and destruction?

Destructiveness is a core characteristic of mental pathology, whether directed toward the self or others. First, I wish to clarify that those with mental illness are, as a group, no more dangerous than those without mental illness. When mental pathology is accompanied by criminal-mindedness, however, the combination can make individuals far more dangerous than either alone.

In my textbook on violence, I emphasize the symbolic nature of violence and how it is a life impulse gone awry. Briefly, if one cannot have love, one resorts to respect. And when respect is unavailable, one resorts to fear. Trump is now living through an intolerable loss of respect: rejection by a nation in his election defeat. Violence helps compensate for feelings of powerlessness, inadequacy and lack of real productivity.

Expert on the psychology of Donald Trump and his supporters says their behavior can be explained by a “narcissistic symbiosis” and “shared psychosis.” Tayfun Coskun Getty Images

Do you think Trump is truly exhibiting delusional or psychotic behavior? Or is he simply behaving like an autocrat making a bald-faced attempt to hold onto his power?

I believe it is both. He is certainly of an autocratic disposition because his extreme narcissism does not allow for equality with other human beings, as democracy requires. Psychiatrists generally assess delusions through personal examination, but there is other evidence of their likelihood. First, delusions are more infectious than strategic lies, and so we see, from their sheer spread, that Trump likely truly believes them. Second, his emotional fragility, manifested in extreme intolerance of realities that do not fit his wishful view of the world, predispose him to psychotic spirals. Third, his public record includes numerous hours of interviews and interactions with other people—such as the hour-long one with the Georgia secretary of state—that very nearly confirm delusion, as my colleague and I discovered in a systematic analysis.

Where does the hatred some of his supporters display come from? And what can we do to promote healing?

In Profile of a Nation, I outline the many causes that create his followership. But there is important psychological injury that arises from relative—not absolute—socioeconomic deprivation. Yes, there is great injury, anger and redirectable energy for hatred, which Trump harnessed and stoked for his manipulation and use. The emotional bonds he has created facilitate shared psychosis at a massive scale. It is a natural consequence of the conditions we have set up. For healing, I usually recommend three steps: (1) Removal of the offending agent (the influential person with severe symptoms). (2) Dismantling systems of thought control—common in advertising but now also heavily adopted by politics. And (3) fixing the socioeconomic conditions that give rise to poor collective mental health in the first place.

What do you predict he will do after his presidency?

I again emphasize in Profile of a Nation that we should consider the president, his followers and the nation as an ecology, not in isolation. Hence, what he does after this presidency depends a great deal on us. This is the reason I frantically wrote the book over the summer: we require active intervention to stop him from achieving any number of destructive outcomes for the nation, including the establishment of a shadow presidency. He will have no limit, which is why I have actively advocated for removal and accountability, including prosecution. We need to remember that he is more a follower than a leader, and we need to place constraints from the outside when he cannot place them from within.

What do you think will happen to his supporters?

If we handle the situation appropriately, there will be a lot of disillusionment and trauma. And this is all right—they are healthy reactions to an abnormal situation. We must provide emotional support for healing, and this includes societal support, such as sources of belonging and dignity. Cult members and victims of abuse are often emotionally bonded to the relationship, unable to see the harm that is being done to them. After a while, the magnitude of the deception conspires with their own psychological protections against pain and disappointment. This causes them to avoid seeing the truth. And the situation with Trump supporters is very similar. The danger is that another pathological figure will come around and entice them with a false “solution” that is really a harnessing of this resistance.

How can we avert future insurrection attempts or acts of violence?

Violence is the end product of a long process, so prevention is key. Structural violence, or inequality, is the most potent stimulant of behavioral violence. And reducing inequality in all forms—economic, racial and gender—will help toward preventing violence. For prevention to be effective, knowledge and in-depth understanding cannot be overlooked—so we can anticipate what is coming, much like the pandemic. The silencing of mental health professionals during the Trump era, mainly through a politically driven distortion of an ethical guideline, was catastrophic, in my view, in the nation’s failure to understand, predict and prevent the dangers of this presidency.

Do you have any advice for people who do not support Trump but have supporters of him or “mini-Trumps” in their lives?

This is often very difficult because the relationship between Trump and his supporters is an abusive one, as an author of the 2017 book I edited, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, presciently pointed out. When the mind is hijacked for the benefit of the abuser, it becomes no longer a matter of presenting facts or appealing to logic. Removing Trump from power and influence will be healing in itself. But, I advise, first, not to confront [his supporters’] beliefs, for it will only rouse resistance. Second, persuasion should not be the goal but change of the circumstance that led to their faulty beliefs. Third, one should maintain one’s own bearing and mental health, because people who harbor delusional narratives tend to bulldoze over reality in their attempt to deny that their own narrative is false. As for mini-Trumps, it is important, above all, to set firm boundaries, to limit contact or even to leave the relationship, if possible. Because I specialize in treating violent individuals, I always believe there is something that can be done to treat them, but they seldom present for treatment unless forced.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-shared-psychosis-of-donald-trump-and-his-loyalists/

Misinformation Really Does Spread like a Virus

There is clear evidence that some fake news stories do spread like a simple contagion, infecting users immediately. Meanwhile, other stories behave more like a complex contagion, where people require repeated exposure to misleading sources of information before they become “infected”…: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/misinformation-really-does-spread-like-a-virus-epidemiology-shows/#

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