Johanna Faust, a mixed race Jew, prefers to publish pseudonymously. She is committed: first, to preventing war, ecological disaster, and nuclear apocalypse; last to not only fighting for personal privacy & the freedom of information, but, by representing herself as a soldier in that fight, to exhorting others to do the same. She is a poet, always. All these efforts find representation here: "ah, Mephistophelis" is so named after the last line of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, whose heretical success flouted the censor for a time.

Scary New Ways Big Brother Has Been Watching
- And Recording -
You


In fact, they have been recognizing you by mere snippet of voiceprint for some time now, and they are gearing up not only to record everything to search it later, but to search through what they have already been recording.  Go back and mine the data with new questions. Patterns mined from persons of interest are then used to find other persons of interest.  Pattern recognition includes slang and other linguistic codes learned from intercepted conversations.  These patterns are not limited to keywords; they interpret content.  They include time and place as well as inflection.  They do not have to be in English.  A live human being is not required for pattern recognition.  Did I mention voiceprint?  And don't get me started on GPS -- now that we see that your smartphone is smart enough to secretly record your coordinates continually for later retrieval by whomever has the backdoor key...



Remember: by the time wehear about a surveillance technology, or see it in action, it is already obsolete.  It has already been upgraded.  It would be an error to consider such planned leakages of information to be the measure of the strength of the Panopticon.

With that in mind please note that this dense, scary presentation, which ccc.de diety Andy Müller-Maguhn subtitled "The Big Brother Services Industry and their tools,"
was given given on December 30th, 2009.




click for popup player (hopefully!)



From Andy's Introduction:








But hey, I warned you... last March.. (see  Your Private Life Will Suddenly Explode: Narus's 'Hone'). 



Be seeing you.

Netanyahu, '07: 'I'll Join Olmert if Israel Stops Not Attacking Iran'


 July 20, 2007, the day before the anniversary of the Second Lebanon War.  If we are to trust the Israeli WikiLeaks collection (much virtue in 'if'*), the US State Department recieved word, in a  "confidential" (that is, not even "secret") telegram from  Marc J. Sievers, political counselor at the US Embassy, Tel Aviv, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was willing to join with Ehud Olmert, head of the Kadima party in 2007 --  that is, if Israel would finally attack Iran. Two days beforehand, Amir Peretz, Defense Minister and the head of Labor, resigned. The telegram discussed the establishment of a national unity government, in which the Likud Party would join Kadima, with Olmert as prime minister. 

This was not the first time Netanyahu expressed willingness to make such a deal, either:
One of Netanyahu's advisers, whose name was not revealed in the message, spoke with American officials on the matter. "The adviser commented that the possibility of a national unity government, bruited in the press, is a possibility, but only if Olmert initiated such a move in order to galvanize Israel for action against Iran. He said that in such a scenario, Netanyahu would probably accept an offer of the Foreign Ministry," wrote Sievers.

This was the second time Netanyahu expressed willingness to support the prime minister if he initiated an attack against Iran. In the summer of 2005, Netanyahu resigned as finance minister in Ariel Sharon's cabinet over the Gaza disengagement plan. In December that year, Sharon left the Likud and founded Kadima. At the time, Netanyahu told Sharon he would "support him if he acted against Iran before the elections," reported Aluf Benn in Haaretz two years ago.



* "Your 'if' is the only peacemaker; much virtue in 'if" - Shakespeare, As You Like It, V, iv.







Be seeing you.