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darkcalling [comrade/them,she/her]
Limited hang-out that’s been increasing by degrees. They’ll do anything but confirm Hersh was right within the next year or so because they want to bash him and discourage others. Then like 10 years from now it’ll come out he got the basic facts of the story completely correct with maybe a minor nitpick or two and it’ll come out in a predictably meaningless and swept under the carpet way in the form of some natsec ghoul in the Executive or military casually mentioning the truth about it at like a think tank forum or summit and all the big newspapers ignoring it or ignoring that it’s an important revelation and vindicates Hersh.
Smallpox vaccine provides protection for other viruses in the same family. In fact the original smallpox inoculation programs started when scientists noticed that milk maids who tended to get cow-pox from cows pretty much never died from smallpox and had much milder cases of it than other people.
Baby-brains who can only see anything ever though the lens of WW2 and Hitler. (Probably because that thinking is pounded into your head in the imperial core because it was the one war the west has done in ever where they were accidentally on the right side and not just brutalizing, occupying, and installing dictators against the popular will.)
They see Putin as being aggressive for no reason, as being expansionistic because muh recreating Soviet Union or muh Hitler complex or whatever. This all stems from the rotten thinking, the ignorant, propagandized, false understanding of why this war started and spirals out of control from there.
Conveniently pushes against privacy, for spying, against encryption. Pushes mouth-watering (for surveillance) program of taking photos of hotel rooms and uploading them tagged with location, supposedly for the purposes of identifying locations of trafficking victims (won’t help much IMO as traffickers just get smart, take photos one week, move to another hotel the next and then start advertising) which has the appeal to intelligence of being able to 4chan style easily ID where someone is in any picture taken in a hotel room (down to the floor and maybe side of the hotel) with a simple comparison search. Might not seem like much but spies do use hotels, leakers use hotels, hostile press uses hotels, activists they don’t like use hotels and though many require credit cards these days allowing easy IDing through that, there are still many that take cash with a deposit.
Doesn’t at all fight number one root enabler of sexual exploitation of women and girls: liberal capitalism. Hmmm, hmm.
Me: Oh really? Well you can’t convict someone of a crime and be upset about them committing that crime (and seek punishment for it) if they admitted to it openly and that’s why you’re charging them with it in a court of law. Oh wait you can. It strengthens your case when the accused literally confesses to the crime that other evidence also points to them committing.
I’m still strongly considering this might be an engineered limited hang-out. The fact the Ukrainian casualty numbers were so low (and then edited after the release) is suspicious. Indicates either they themselves internally believe the numbers and pass them around (or that the real numbers are more classified still and for some reason lying to intelligence analysts is considered a good idea though considering this guy is just military the CIA may maintain lying to the military is necessary and good to have their support and only CIA may have real numbers and/or disclaimers that say “Ukrainian numbers are bullshit”) OR that this whole thing was cobbled together with a mixture of lies and truths and deliberately released. Perhaps both to mislead the Russians and perhaps as bait for more intel agency funding for spying on gaming communities and spying in general, greater surveillance powers to do that to “prevent” this kind of thing kind of like how FBI engineers and grooms terrorists then stops them and holds that out as evidence of why they need funding. Something along those lines. The whole thing just kind of smells too rosy, because if the Ukrainian numbers were higher and more realistic and they claimed it was a real leak, westerners of the more curious variety might begin to question how things are going over there. Whereas this looks bad but doesn’t undermine the core narrative that at least the Ukrainians are doing well and we should continue funding them and using them as a proxy in a war against Russia.
This guy could be a patsy under such a situation. Could have been goaded into it, provided the engineered materials, etc.
So they’re doing this to punish companies that sell these capabilities to enemy states and neutral third party states because they dislike having to compete with them, they dislike not having a monopoly on it. And I think going forward they may target these companies in several ways as they do not want Russia or China or India or Brazil or Venezuela or even when it comes down to it Greece to be able to just purchase this stuff off the shelf from a neutral third party.
Their ideal world is one where they, the eyes alliance group has internal stuff and they sell it to you but only if you’re in their good graces. Another mechanism of control. Meanwhile they pretend to be noble and sob about these horrible human rights abusing private companies for selling these capabilities and call you a human rights violating regime if you use it. Meanwhile if you use their spyware you’re clearly a human rights respecting nation.
I think you think this is going to take more resources than it in fact does. I doubt the US will have as complete or perfect and implementation as China but it will be enough.
I mean China did this. China did this >15 years ago with 15 year old technology. Technologically. The US has the ability to not only do that but to force companies to figure out ways to best do it at the threat of fines and certainly to threaten people into compliance with the threat of jail-time. The US still controls the western financial system and can inflict punishment if not an end to private entities they wish to bring low for not obeying their edicts. And they have experience. Sanctions are a perfected, preferred weapon of the US and they have hundreds of people who specialize in targeting companies and individuals as well as nations to bring about their surrender and acquiescence to US terms. You’ve not really addressed the legal regime issues at all. Just offered technical half-solutions and sewn doubt.
You seem like the kind of person who if called in in the 2000s and told we want to stop proliferation of child sexual abuse imagery online would have started ranting how impossible the net is to control and yet many efforts later pedophiles (who aren’t among the protected capitalist elite anyways) are more hunted than ever, such material is forced to hide ever deeper away from normal people, etc. Another example. Uh in the 2000s the Bush admin decided to target extreme pornography, among other things bestiality porn. They went to the payment processors, the banks, etc and they had them agree they wouldn’t allow anyone who allowed anyone who produced or hosted such content to do business or use their systems. To give you an idea of how pervasive it was, I know someone who as a child in the mid 2000s stumbled on such pornography (the animal stuff) without meaning to or looking for porn at all.
By your quote’s logic and by extension your thinking, this shouldn’t be, the censorship should have been routed around. (Now let’s be clear here, this censorship is good but judging by how pervasive it was, clearly a lot of people would rather it not succeed and yet it has). Don’t try and hide behind oh but that’s different, no it’s not. If anything it’s harder to get rid of because that type of stuff stuff that anyone can host anywhere. We’re just talking about shutting down one little social media company and access to maybe a few dozen if that foreign news services (to start at least). Orders of magnitude easier.
I say that as a network engineer
You think that gives you credibility but it doesn’t. Maybe you can try and intimidate non-technical people not in industry but not me. You haven’t addressed my points just tried to pull this authority argument and hand-waved it as infeasible. Also, I’ve known too many network engineers to think them the final say on what can and cannot be done. Let’s just say I know for a fact a lot of them would have laughed in the late 2000s if you suggested the idea of the NSA scraping all foreign bound web-traffic for metadata, infeasible, not practical, not scaleable they would have claimed. Yet room 641A was at that point an operating reality. And they have built that datacenter in the southwest for not only doing that but storing it long-term. Again many would laugh and call that infeasible. Not the US government.
You’re clearly deep in some idealistic thinking here so we’re at odds and you’re probably right it’s pointless to continue this as we’re approaching the world wearing different glasses, using different frameworks. However I do want to just leave this reply because I see in you a past me. Someone spouting idealism, ancient proverbs from idealistic weirdos who are living in a world that by their own admissions is a twisted nightmare version of what they’d hoped would come to pass with their technology, with their “freedom of the net”. It’s been falsified. It continues to be falsified. Social networks in particular, things like discord destroying irc + forums have allowed the centralization and corporatization of the internet. Cloud computing, CDNs, not even owning your own infrastructure has decimated this idea of the net as this multi-colored thing of a million threads from a million people and companies with tens of thousands of ‘independent’ networks. The free net was murdered in the cradle by US government control of important parts of it from the beginning and it was buried by the Patriot act and now it’s been paved over by this centralization.