On Being and Nothingness …
To protect one's online privacy, the Government of the United States advises the following:
If you believe you might have revealed sensitive information about your organization, report it to the appropriate people within the organization, including network administrators. They can be alert for any suspicious or unusual activity.
If you believe your financial accounts may be compromised, contact your financial institution immediately and close any accounts that may have been compromised. Watch for any unexplainable charges to your account.
Report your situation to local police, and file a report with the Federal Trade Commission.
They further advise, among other things:
Minimize Access to Your Information
Lock or log-off your computer when you are away from it.
To be really secure, disconnect your computer from the Internet when you aren't using it.
Evaluate your security settings.
Look for a privacy policy statement or seal that indicates the site abides by privacy standards.
Look for signals that you are using a secure web page.
and a reminder:
The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act requires commercial websites to obtain parental consent before collecting, using, or disclosing personal information from children under 13. For more information, contact the FTC about Children's Privacy.
Well, I've taken their advice, finally to heart, only to learn officially, the governments of the world are, in respect to the above, the absolutely most capable and active invaders of one's privacy in the known universe, in particular the security organs of the United Stazi of America (coined by an artist in Berlin, of all places, so I'm told). If I had a nickel for every sentence I could write for every item of information each person has given to the great data banks of the world, surely I would make the top rung of the Forbe's list, and put you to sleep.
As I write, my word processing program is following me around, checking my spelling, grammar and punctuation with every letter I place on the electronic page. As far as I am aware, there is no key stroke logger reading or recording them, or publishing, before I publish.
The unauthorized, or lack of directly authorized data collection by business and government is of course everywhere except perhaps in some dark cave in the middle of wilderness. I suppose Edward Snowden inspired me to take a deeper look at the electronic record.
I have a program called Ghostery. It told me, when accessing the U.S. Government's advice on privacy, a company called Iperceptions.com has tracked every click I made while there. Webtrends.com was also tracking me, and Google.com's analytics too.
At Nbcnews.com, I read an article about online privacy fears by Bob Sullivan. Ghostery told me, in addition to the U.S. Government looking over my shoulder, the following organizations were also right there beside me: Addthis.com, Chartbeat.com, Doubleclick.net, Betrad.com, Facebook.net, Google.com, Krxd.net, Linkedin.com, Adobe (via msnbc.msn.com), Pubmatic.com, and Scorecardresearch.com. Ghostery, blocked them all, and provided excellent information about each one.
At Cbsnews.com, I read an article by Dave Johnson on how to hide my online activities from the U.S. Government's NSA. No fewer than 17 other organizations have taken note of my visit to Mr. Johnson's missive.
I used the search engines IXQUICK.com and DuckDuckGo.com to help me research this piece. These two search engines left me alone completely while Google et al lost a few bytes of revenue producing data.
Privacy however, begins and ends at the point of connection between your machine, your face, your voice, your iris and DNA, your automobile, and millions of electronic boxes full of the data holding your bank accounts, driver's license renewals, the U.S. Government's Trusted Traveler Program, airline boarding pass, girl met on Omegle.com, (who now Skypes regularly as a very special and singular data set), the vital records of Riga, Latvia from 1866-1937, U.S. census records, one's house and a picture of the back yard via Google Maps, street corner and department store cameras; a list which is literally nearly endless until, with death, do you and all of that part.
Once upon a time, one might spend hours in a library roaming the shelves quietly and privately. Now we roam with a herd of on-lookers, and with special tools. I can now upload my favorite picture of Marc Faber into a search box on Google, and voilà, they will find, via their face recognition software, as of today, 173 instances of the famed doomer, boomer, and gloomer. I then wondered what might happen if I uploaded one of Anthony Weiner's groin pictures. On the other hand, an uploaded foto of a cluster of bananas yielded a few pictures of daisies and merigolds, but no bananas. Google asked me to add a "descriptive word" to my search; its algo clearly wants to learn something about bananas from me, but thankfully nothing about Anthony Weiner (Born September 4, 1964).
In case you are wondering where you may have been in the last year, if you are lucky, and live in one of the updated cities of the world, and in particular, the United States, police patrol cars are now equipped with license plate scanning machines. It is reported, by those who inquired, 100's of instances of their presence on local streets were recorded in the city's police data base, with exact time and exact location. The police track the plates; the cell phone companies track the cell phones; the shippers track the radio frequency tags; thieves track the same chip embedded in the new passports and credit cards; the cameras match faces to names, and the drones circle over head waiting to be told "it" is now a "target."
I would suggest none, or as close to none as none might be defined, of any of these new found friends of ours were given a single permission to record literally 10's of millions of data points, harvested from a single individual's internet presence over the course of a single year. Were I to submit an FOIA request to the government, and could receive every single data point related to me, I would expect the copying charges to exceed some unknown number past 1 million USD. (Perhaps they will be kind enough to load it on a disc, and save me the money.)
One could take some steps to get rid of a few of the unseen friends, starting with Ghosterly above. Another program named Click & Clean, once installed is amazingly revealing, and very very easy to use. In merely a few hours of preparing for this missive, my computer amassed 27 megabytes of stored data in my browser cache, 100's of Cookies tracking my every move, and a history of every place visited. When logging into a web site, such as Facebook, or your online bank account, Mark Zuckerberg (Born May 14, 1984) and Bank of America immediately discover everyone else's cookies and all of the other data listed just now, until you log out, and obliterate the cookie.
I no longer use my ISP's engine to find the web site I'm seeking by word, as in Acting-Man.com or New.Gloomboomdoom.com. DNS servers match the words we know with the actual address, a numbered sequence, sending us to the right place. I now direct my computer and my router to seek the DNS servers operated by OPENDNS.com, a free service. Now, my traffic cop is a neutral disinterested assistant collecting no data, or so I am willing to believe. Were I using a wi-fi connection, the ultimate snooper, I would take further steps to guard against this typically "free" but typically quite dangerous service.
I pay for a virtual private network operated by HMA.Com (Hide My Ass). I log into the server of choice, and eureka, my visits to any web site appear to be from the location server, be it in Phoenix, Arizona or Gosport, Hampshire, England. The proof positive is typically a change in unwanted advertising, like the difference between a Mercedes commercial in New York and the other commercial playing in Lombardy, Italy. I do verify the status of my online presence by running a test at DNSleaktest.com. After downloading their free software, my ISP disappeared completely and reliably. Locked inside the presumed safety/privacy of HMA's encrypted network, I set my web browser to "incognito," call friends using encrypted chat software, code up my emails, and still, I can't think of a way to keep Netflix from logging every movie I have watched or have selected on my Netflix wish list, or the government. Sigh, I guess I'll have to forego them, and go back to the theatre, wearing a disguise and paying with cash.
In addition to these measures, as a friend advised me, I have three running virus programs. Each catches what the others do not; they stop me from entering dangerous alleys and side streets and/or protect me when I do; when in doubt, they make my programs ask permission before they head out to the internet, I presume, to do good things on my behalf.
However, in spite of clicking off my internet connection one evening, I awoke the next day to find that Microsoft had updated my operating system, magically, without an internet connection. In fact, it did so entirely on its own and without permission. It quietly reconnected my computer to the internet and exposed my entire life to the outside world without so much as a hello, do you mind? Next time I see Steven Anthony Ballmer (Born March 24, 1956), I will have a few words ready to direct his way. When in doubt, unplug the machine and your life literally.
Why then is it, I ask, so hard to prove that bad bankers are bad, that SAC Capital is an insider's trading paradise, that John Corzine (Born January 1, 1947) and his company ill appropriated 100's of millions of its customer's money, that billions of tax payer dollars disappeared into thin air during the Iraq and Afghanistan boondoggles, or that congressmen are trading on the inside while business trades them on the outside for a right vote, not just here, but every single place in the world operating with such a system as ours, the ultimate micro software platform?
Either way, there is no one left to ask these questions concerning the heretofore described, stunning invasion of individual and mass privacy. The U.S. Government's advisory needs an update; there is, simply put, no one to call. There is no place to register a complaint. What in return do we receive for all of this, is my final question? No longer can one, quietly, privately, or discreetly hang around a French café to ponder unanswerable questions like these. And most certainly, one cannot light up a Gauloise or two, while doing so. EU rules.
One truth, history has shown; every keeper of the data is himself a potential victim; every enemy or victim of the state has the potential to become a keeper of the data: Edward Snowden.
Some civil liberty fun by Mark Fiore
This article was originally published in Dr. Marc Faber's Monthly Market Commentary (without the Fiore cartoon) and is reprinted with permission.