Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Sentient World Simulation (SWS)

Technocracy V: The Technocrats Tap in (2)

“What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common – optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance?”
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– Tom Stoppard, author, playwright
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                                      Image credit: gizmag.com | infrakshun   https://infrakshun.wordpress.com/tag/sentient-world-simulation-sws/
In 2003, under the Bush Administration, the Total Information Awareness program was introduced in order to provide “large, distributed repositories” including “biometric signatures of humans” and “human network analysis and behavior modeling” provided by DARPA. It was a reiteration of what ECHELON and MAIN CORE had been doing for years. Congress defunded the program in the same year, prohibiting any such activities to target Americans.
The Total Information Awareness Office run by convicted Iran-Contra felon John Poindexter and featured a logo on its website resembling the popular occult mythology of the Illuminati. It was so blatant that some visitors thought it was a bad attempt at political satire. It wasn’t. It did however, beg the question as to why such a revealing caricature and its objectives was allowed the go ahead? Moreover, why was it derailed so quickly when other draconian legislation – including the highly controversial PATRIOT act – sailed through without any problems?
The reason for this was to provide a distraction so that yet another surveillance hub could be built away from the spotlight.
A 2012 article by online tech magazine Wired reports on Intel journalist James Bamford’s sources who claim that once again, NSA has been continuing its surveillance operations with a new spy data centre based in Utah: “… capable of breaking almost any encryption, reading any email and recording any phone call anywhere in the world, even if it’s not made over the Internet.” Where have we heard that before? This hub is just one of a number of networked sites based around a similar network 0f “ultra-sensitive satellites … with the unique ability to sniff electronic communications from a massive distance.” [1]Bamford’s sources say that the NSA is routinely violating the US constitution by dumping all of America’s communications data into the system for analysis. Perhaps most importantly, and which goes to the heart of the premise of this book is the opinion of another covert source to which Bamford made contact who claimed that: “… the NSA is on the verge of a massive coup, putting the U.S. inches away from ‘a turnkey totalitarian state.’” [2]
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The Total Information Awareness logo as compared to the Great Seal found on the US dollar bill, a freemasonic emblem. A purposeful distraction?
Another heavy-weight whistleblower, William Binney, decided to grab the gauntlet and go against his superiors to warn of an Orwellian Superstate which is “ready” and “set up” so that one has to just “turn the key” and this would be an immediate reality. [3] A specialist in traffic analysis, Binney worked for the NSA for 37 years and knows its capabilities and technical now-how inside out. He joined Electronic Frontier Foundation’s case against the National Security Agency (Jewel v. NSA) filed in July 2, 2012, and their illegal domestic surveillance programs which, according to Binney, “are consistent, as a mathematical matter, with seizing both the routing information and the contents of all electronic communications” inside the U.S. He has stated that over 20 trillion files have been created since the September 11th attacks.[4]Amid significant civil liberty concerns, NSA head and commander of US Cyber Command department General Keith Alexander is still seeking to redesign the internet’s infrastructure so that the NSA may: “… know instantly when overseas hackers might be attacking public or private infrastructure and computer networks.” A trial of 17 US defence companies is already underway.
Tom Simonite from Technology Review tells us:
“Under the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) Cyber Pilot, Lockheed Martin and other companies set up their computer security systems to automatically alert the agency when the alarm is tripped. They automatically pass a summary of what was detected and the IP address associated with the event to the NSA over the Internet. ‘All you need to pass is the fact of a signature and IP address in real time, and we can take it from there,’ said Alexander.” [5]
Yet, there is more to MAIN CORE than high-level data collection and future detention. First, we need to keep in mind that targeting the thinking population is not just an Orwellian fantasy but an objective reality. The NSA and Homeland Security is collecting massive amounts of data on the US and European populations for another purpose which may well have something to do with “Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation” or (SEAS). From their celebratory website we read: “What happens when you take gaming technology, inject it with the latest discoveries in management, economics, and psychology, and apply it to business, political, and social situations? The answer is Simulex’s Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation (SEAS), the result of ten years of research conducted at Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management, in association with the United States Department of Defence and several Fortune 500 companies.” [6]
Looking at Simulex Inc. client base it is fairly easy to guess. As the bold heading that greets us on the client page attests, SEAS has a top heavy bias for the telecommunications industry. It assists the United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) to “model the volatile regions of the world” while also providing their services to United States Department of Homeland Security in preparing “… for bio-terrorist attacks, and by Fortune 500 companies for strategic planning.”[7]Other clients include: United States Department of Defence, United States Department of Justice, United States Army Recruiting Command and Crane Naval Surface Warfare Centre. Their private sector clients are global pharmaceutical corporation Eli Lilly and our old weapons friend Lockheed Martin who got rid of whistleblower Margaret Newsham for blabbing to the press about unwarranted surveillance.
Is it coincidence Lockheed turns up here?
Other Fortune 500 companies are apparently clients but we are not given a list. However, it would be right up the social engineering alley of the Rockefeller Foundation and Monsanto Corp.
(Photo: Mönch / STN)
Which brings us to another 2005 whistleblower Russell D. Tice, a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Air Force, Office of Naval Intelligence, Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and NSA Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) officer. His statements in an interview to online journal Think Progress Security.org claimed that the surveillance discovered so far was “… only the tip of the iceberg,” and there was “… an angle that you haven’t heard about yet…” [8]In another interview with the online culture journal Reason just prior to a congressional hearing on the NSA wiretapping scandal (which went nowhere) Tice infers that the wire-tapping was not the main issue and that he needed: “… to tell Congress that no one knows yet, which is only tertiarily connected to what you know about now … In my case, there’s no way the programs I want to talk to Congress about should be public ever, unless maybe in 200 years they want to declassify them. You should never learn about it; no one at the Times should ever learn about these things.”[9]
So, surveillance was only scratching the surface. What then, are we to make of this military-corporate complex outsourcing in conjunction with MAIN CORE? What would you do if you wanted to predict how each of us may act in the future, most especially if your main objective was to control population in the face of a real or imagined threat against the Establishment power-base?
What is it that we “should never learn about?”
Could that be that each and every one of us who has expressed a level of awareness that thinks out of the box has an electronic kindle file packed full of interesting data? Moreover, this data is part of complex synergy of multi-layered simulations that uses a form of mass “pre-crime” software with a supercomputing power undreamt of.
>Blogger and commentator Kevin Flaherty from cryptogon.com makes it clear in the following analysis:
We must assume that They are using the full spectrum of surveillance information to try to PREDICT HOW EACH OF US IS LIKELY TO BEHAVE ON A DAY TO DAY BASIS. Where we go. Which routes we take. What we buy. Etc. All of these things can be broken down into a kind of moving average that wiggles around between an upper band and a lower band, kind of like a standard deviation from a mean. Stay within the bands, and the Magic 8 Ball probably won’t bother to flag your profile for closer analysis by some genius at the Terrorist Screening Center.
Obviously, most of us aren’t worth the attention of a human analyst, and They know it. Most of the sheep just go with the herd. They do what they’re told, shop at Wal-Mart, pay their taxes, go to church, the end. More educated sheep read Business Week or the New York Times, etc. Within a fairly wide range of activities, it’s no more complicated, for the vast majority of the people out there, than the way pool balls behave as they bounce around the table and each other.
This is a key point, so I’m going to emphasize it: These systems would excel at finding the artifacts, the outliers, the people who haven’t internalized the programming, but continue to act ‘normal.’ [10] [Emphasis mine]
Journalist and author Walter Bowart who wrote the seminal classic Operation Mind Control (1978) the NSA of the 1960s had computer systems decades in advance of public and governmental agencies of the time. And let’s not forget the capabilities of “Quantum Light Harvesting” which offers a revolutionary way to advance computational power to undreamt of levels and in a short space of time. That being so, what systems do we imagine the NSA playing with now in 2015?
Having explored the notions of depopulation or “managed genocide” and psychological operations in this series, Flaherty makes an interesting observation on the nature of this total surveillance and so called resource-grabbing. He draws our attention to a recent and on-going SEAS project in partnership with the US Department of Defence (DOD) called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS). According to the concept paper for the project, a parallel Planet Earth is being developed: “… with billions of individual ‘nodes’ to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR… It will be a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information.” Apparently, the simulation: “… provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP),” so that military leaders can “develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners”.
SWS also:
“… replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.
SEAS can display regional results for public opinion polls, distribution of retail outlets in urban areas, and the level of unorganization of local economies, which may point to potential areas of civil unrest. Yank a country’s water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next.
“The idea is to generate alternative futures with outcomes based on interactions between multiple sides,” said Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, co-author of the SWS concept paper. [11]
However, the Pentagon still isn’t content. Hundreds of additional spies are being sent overseas as part of a new espionage network that is set to rival the CIA in size according to the Washington Post. The report informs us that the a transformation of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) is underway having been “dominated for the past decade by the demands of two wars” and which will now be a “spy service focused on emerging threats and more closely aligned with the CIA and elite military commando units.” With “collectors” numbering as many as 1,600 all over the world this is no small project. In fact, as we have explored, it seems to be part of an expansive operation to merge military and intelligence agencies into a more centralised system of espionage and domestic surveillance. As the Post mentions: “… the Pentagon’s plan to create what it calls the Defense Clandestine Service (DCS) reflects the military’s latest and largest foray into secret intelligence work. The DIA overhaul — combined with the growth of the CIA since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — will create a spy network of unprecedented size.” [12]
illustrationPhoto from Simulex, Inc. advert
On top of all this, in 2012, former CIA intelligence analyst turned Whistleblower Edward J. Snowden leaked more than 50,00 classified documents to the Wikileaks organisation and journalist Glenn Greenwald revealing in black and white just how pervasive and all-encompassing the surveillance capabilities of America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ truly is. For some, the jury is still out on Snowden’s motives, primarily due to the fact that much of this information had been known for many years by independent journalists and alternative media who had been trying to get the attention of the mainstream media, but to no avail. So, it was a little fishy that Snowden was all over every possible media outlet in a very short space of time as though he had single-handedly dismantled the apparatus himself. Yet, he is the first CIA agent to do so. Is he a patsy, a conscious agent or a hero?
Whether the NSA is using him to test the demographic water of mass perception is unclear. For one thing, it allows the public to ease their way into deeper issues surrounding the whole arena of US policy from drone attacks to terrorism. The latter reason has been trotted out to justify all kinds of unconstitutional measures and many are waking up to this fact. After all, so-called “terrorists” are acutely aware that they are always monitored. What Snowden has done is to show how surveillance is targeting innocent people, not the terrorists. The NSA, in all probability, may be extremely peeved that their methods have been revealed. Whether this is a CIA-NSA turf war suggested by some commentators remains to be seen. As the CIA grapples with increasing revelations about its torture and rendition programs and the NSA continues to try and stem the flow of leaked cables on its surveillance capabilities, the leviathan of soft totalitarianism still lumbers forward.
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© infrakshun
By 2013, while the magnitude of surveillance of all and everyone was being digested it is true to say that there may be much more to be drawn out of the NSA shadows. On November 28th,the BBC’s Hardtalk programme, Glenn Greenwald stated that there are still thousands of leaked cables to go through and make public. As it stands, the leaks have not made the slightest difference to its illegality as some commentators have been saying for quite some time. Far from being chastened, the NSA has romped ahead by creating a secret body of law which gives the agency carte blanche in accessing data on Americans justified by the war on terror and the threat of cyber-terrorism and underground nuclear proliferation.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) has eleven members whose job it was to approve illegal wire-tapping orders and which have  now been expanded to allow the NSA to do as it pleases while doffing its hat to feeble attempts to regulate intelligence surveillance. In a Guardian piece by Spencer Ackerman on August 16, 2013, it was reported that thousands of annual violations of its own restrictions continue to mount as reported by two US senators who sit on the US intelligence committee. As Rice, they stated that these were, also: “the tip of the iceberg.”
The bottom line is that everyone is presumed guilty rather than innocent simply due to the vast amount of data building on every citizen. The NSA can effectively trap you into suspected wrongdoing. As we have seen, the ubiquitous rise of entrapment operations may reflect something much deeper. Just because you have led a law-abiding life, it is no protection against mass spying programs seeping into every corner of our lives care of SMART technology. Indeed, the very definition of “law abiding” is changing; contoured towards government policy rather than what is ethically and morally sound. Whistleblower William Binney has warned for several years that the government is storing literally everything and creating a highly sophisticated, searchable database to be used for anything it wants. Snowden says much the same thing in an interview on June 12, 2013:
Because even if you’re not doing anything wrong you’re being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude … to where it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody – even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer. [13]
On July 6, 2013, Eric Lichtblau writng for the New York Times commented on officials’ statements that: “… the court’s still-secret decisions go far beyond any single surveillance order.” Indeed, though European countries such as France and Spain have been found spying on their own citizens, even handing over data to the NSA it is the United States that has led the charge against the global population’s privacy. This in turn, has led the Surveillance State seeping into every avenue of American life. Even the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has routinely been snooping in order to extract largely unconstitutional taxation claims. It believes that it can continue to operate quite happily without using a warrant to read people’s emails and text messages. Just like the search engine Google Inc. (whom we will turn to presently) the Fourth Amendment and every person’s right to basic privacy is deemed irrelevant to the IRS and it’s highly dubious definitions of taxations laws. In summary, they have their ears and eyes tapped into every conceivable communication source while making up their own laws to maintain this illegal surveillance  well into the future. If you listened to the BBC you would think that it is Glenn Greenwald who should be on trial for daring to suggest that intelligence chiefs “routinely lie.”
But the shadow government and the NSA isn’t content – it needs more and more. Research into weaponisation, military capabilities and surveillance has now encompassed much of society. Corporations, multinational security firms and private contractors who act as “digital blackwaters” are all in the NSA bag. Outsourcing is key in terms of diluting accountability whilst encouraging innovation. In just a few examples from many, military-intel company Raytheon has “… secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.” The company admitted that it was a joint research & development project shared with the US government sincce 2010 in order “… to help build a national security system capable of analysing ‘trillions of entities’ from cyberspace.
WilliamBinney-EdwardSnowdenWhistleblowers William Binney (left) and Edward J. Snowden (right)
The security of biometric data is a bad joke since the sale of private data is open to lucrative profits. In 2013, Richard Kerbaj and Jon Ungoed-Thomas reported in the May 13th, edition of The Sunday Times that data of 27m mobile phone users had been: “… offered for sale to the Metropolitan police, private companies and other bodies, enabling them to track users’ movements.” The company involved in the potential sale is: “Ipsos Mori, one of Britain’s biggest research firms, … claimed in meetings that every movement by users can be tracked to within 100 metres.” According to the newspaper, the company: “shelved any deal after being contacted by The Sunday Times.” The report continued: “Documents to promote the data reveal that it includes ‘gender, age, postcode, websites visited, time of day text is sent [and] location of customer when call is made’. They state that people’s mobile phone use and location can be tracked in real time with records of movements, calls, texts, also available for the previous six months.” [14]
To carry out these  games in order to “protect us” the NSA has resorted to impersonating Google in order to obtain its information and swell its billions of files.  Named in the business as a “man in the middle attack” it involves a hacker technique of “… using a fake security certificate to pose as a legitimate Web service, bypass browser security settings, and then intercept data that an unsuspecting person is sending to that service.” Once passwords have been collected users can then log in to genuine banking websites thereby acting as intermediary or “middle man” and re-routing requests to their bank and returning the information to the customer while gathering highly personal data from both participants without either having the slightest clue what has happened. (It also applies to email servers). This time it is not a lone hacker but the NSA and GCHQ, where massive amounts of information is being channelled back to their central hubs. [15]
The idea that informational roadmap of cyberspace has been compromised by Intel PSYOPS and NSA surveillance has become more of a probability that a possibility. It is foolish to believe that anything we do online is secure or private. Not only is the NSA breaking most forms of encryption on the internet but is likely replacing intercepting downloads of open-source encryption software and silently replacing these with their own versions. The NSA is re-calibrating the internet towards its own perception of reality.
Illegality is justified with the favourite canard that it is all to protect us from terrorism. It was confirmed just how manufactured the threat truly is when online journal allgov.net reported in October 2013 that NSA Director Keith Alexander admitted before a congressional committee that he lied when he claimed the agency’s wire-tapping program had thwarted 54 terrorist “plots or events.”  In June of 2013, while the Obama administration was busy denouncing the whistleblowing of Edward Snowden and locking away Bradley Manning for 35 years, the NSA was lying through its teeth once again. Only 13 of the 54 cases were connected to the United States and just one or two suspected plots were: “… identified as a result of bulk phone record collection.” This was nothing new. The head was merely following the “terrorist-under-your-bed” justification for all manner of constitutional abuses practiced by the government and military-intelligence apparatus.
Lying is an inherent part of the deal. Apart from using data and surveillance as a means to implement propaganda, cyber-warfare and the harassment of those deemed “enemies,” mass surveillance is key to Obama’s assassination programs still carried out without oversight. In combination with the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) the NSA and CIA effectively make a private army outside any democratic accountability. Special operations units utilising drones and US soldiers are deployed all around the globe, from Somalia to Yemen, Afghanistan to Iraq. The coordination and logistical support is given by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) who essentially decides who might be a suitable target and the means by which he or she will be murdered.
According to Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) the true purpose of the NCTC is the:
“massive, secretive data collection and mining of trillions of points of data about most people in the United States” …. In particular, the NCTC operates a gigantic data-mining operation, in which all sorts of information about innocent Americans is systematically monitored, stored, and analyzed. This includes “records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records” – “literally anything the government collects would be fair game”. In other words, the NCTC – now vested with the power to determine the proper “disposition” of terrorist suspects – is the same agency that is at the center of the ubiquitous, unaccountable surveillance state aimed at American citizens.
Worse still, as the ACLU’s legislative counsel Chris Calabrese documented back in July in a must-read analysis, Obama officials very recently abolished safeguards on how this information can be used. Whereas the agency, during the Bush years, was barred from storing non-terrorist-related information about innocent Americans for more than 180 days – a limit which “meant that NCTC was dissuaded from collecting large databases filled with information on innocent Americans” – it is now free to do so. Obama officials eliminated this constraint by authorizing the NCTC “to collect and ‘continually assess’ information on innocent Americans for up to five years”. [16]
As the NSA and Homeland Security can now, on a whim, label any American a potential terrorist, the most obvious question to ask is how long will it be before American citizens are assassinated on their own soil? (Assuming it hasn’t happened already).
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Obama’s Drones ready to assassinate from a distance without trial or jury. Based on the woeful intelligence of the last decade chances are you are likely to be an innocent civilian.
Perhaps no better example illustrates how the NSA should be the last people we trust is from the recent confirmation that the agency wishes to defend none other than Wall Street. Rather than wire-tapping genuine criminals infesting the world of cartel economics, this bastion of financial terrorism is deemed worthy of protection.
Salon, journalist Natasha Lennard details how the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a statement in early 2013 noting: “It is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters, and terrorist financing. We collect this information for many important reasons: for one, it could provide the United States and our allies early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy. It also could provide insight into other countries’ economic policy or behavior which could affect global markets.” [17]
The NSA could no doubt collect vast amounts of information on the continuing “irregularities” and corporate crimes still devouring any chance of a healthy economy. As journalist Michael Degerald mentioned regarding the admission: “If any part of American society or business had shown itself to be corrupt to the core, and thus in need of surveillance, it’s Wall Street.” [18]


Notes
[1] ‘The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)’ By James Bamford, Wired, March 15, 2012.
[2] Ibid.
[3] RT report July 2012.
[4] ‘Sworn Declaration of Whistleblower William Binney on NSA Domestic Surveillance Capabilities’ July 16 2012. Public Intelligence.net, http://www.publicintelligence.net.
[5] ‘NSA Boss Wants More Control Over the ‘Net’by Tom Simonite, technologyreview.com, July 27, 2012.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] ‘NSA Whistleblower To Expose More Unlawful Activity: ‘People…Are Going To Be Shocked’’ By Faiz Shakir, Thnik Progress Security, wwwthinkprorgess.org May 12, 2006.
[9]‘Inside the Puzzle Palace’ – A Reason interview with NSA whistleblower Russell Tice, by Julian Sanchez, http://www.reason.org, January 13, 2006.
[10] ‘Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation’ By Kevin Flaherty, http://www.cryptogon.com, June 30th, 2007.
[11] ‘Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale – Sim Strife’ By Mark Baard, The Register, 23rd June 2007.
[12] ‘DIA sending hundreds more spies overseas’ By Greg Millar, The Washington Post, December 2.
[13] See: ‘Full Interview with Edward Snowden’at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdPbvKeRgpk
[14] ‘Secrets of 27m mobile phones offered to police’ by Richard Kerbaj and Jon Ungoed-Thomas Sunday Times, 12 May 2013.
[15] ‘NSA Disguised itself as Google’ by Edward Moyer CNET.com, September 2013.
[16] “The President’s Private Army”: NSA-CIA Spying is Central to Carrying Out the Obama Administration’s Assassination Program. By Washington’s Blog / Global Research, September 29, 2013.
[17] ‘Statement by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper on Allegations of Economic Espionage’
Sunday, September 08, 2013.
[18] ‘Why doesn’t NSA spy on Wall Street?’by Michael Degerald Salon.com Sep 11, 2013.

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