Read moreNot only had the Soviet Union—the chief object of the NSA’s spying, and its raison d’etre—disappeared from the map, but now the agency also realized that the main threat was going to be “super-empowered” individuals—terrorists—who might be talking on cell phones or computers anywhere on earth. Above all, these new bad guys were using private technology, rather than the sort of intra-government communications systems that the NSA used to monitor in the Soviet Union or China.
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In a period of a decade or so, Hayden said, the agency went “from chasing the telecommunications structure of a slow-moving, technologically inferior, resource-poor nation-state—and we could do that pretty well—to chasing a communications structure in which an al-Qaida member can go into a storefront in Istanbul and buy for $100 a communications device that is absolutely cutting-edge.”
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Read moreThat, Iain said, was how he’d envisaged the Culture coming about. Conflicts of interest between classes and other groups there would be, but the sheer availability of information and computing power would arm the majority with facts and arguments that would enable them to prove, as well as enforce, their claims. The consequent advance in consciousness would allow the opportunities offered by automation and abundance to be grasped, first in imagination then in reality, and make opposition to their realisation irrational, futile, and weak.
Read more…the over-arching reason for the clamp-down on dissent, migration, and freedom of expression, and the concurrent emphasis on security in the developed world, constitutes the visible expression of a pre-emptive counter-revolution.
…I believe what we’re seeing is a move towards the global imposition of a police state in the developed world, leveraging the xenophobia that naturally emerges during insecure times, by a ruling elite who are themselves feeling threatened by a spectre. Controls on movement, freedom of association, and speech are all key tools in the classic police state’s arsenal. What’s new about this cycle is that the police state machinery is imposed locally, within national boundaries, but applies everywhere: the economic system it is intended to protect is transnational and unconstrained. Which is why even places that were largely exempt during the cold war are having a common police state agenda quietly imposed. There is to be no refuge, other than destabilized “failed states" where the conditions of life make a police state look utopian in comparison.
This system has emerged organically, from the bottom up, and is not the result of any conspiracy; it’s just individuals and groups moving to protect their shareholdings in the Martian invaders, by creating an environment that is safe for the hive intelligences to operate in.
PBSNewshour tour of Fukushima site.
Not mentioned: rising sea temperatures affecting ability to cool reactors… which have been dumping hot, radioactive water back into sea. Heavy water and heavy weather in a feedback loop, dancing us to death.
Cut to them towing iceberg chunks or melted polar ice to the site for maximum Anthropocene Horror.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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The way that iOS devices stay can stay linked even when they change hands can lead to a lot of weirdness.
A number of months back, I was mugged and my iPhone was stolen. I changed my passwords, dissociated it from my Apple account, and and got a new iPhone. Then, a couple of months later, I started getting another person’s pictures in my photostream. I have no idea why this is happening: the phone should be completely divorced from my account. I never updated iOS on that phone and it did not have photostream on it; my best guess is that when the phone got updated and needed to set up a photostream, it looked for the last account that it had been tied to.
The pictures are voyeuristically amazing. As far as I can tell, my stolen phone is in Yemen now, owned by a young man who takes a lot of selfies with a wad of qat tucked into his cheek. He either helps work on a qat field or just visits one from time to time. He takes a lot of pictures of his family: an older man sleeping on the couch, children in ceremonial garb playing in rubble. But most of the images are screenshots of Facebook. Sometimes these are of messages that are in a language I can’t read, but they are usually of images that his friends have posted. A lot of the pictures are of bales of money, bales of drugs, solid gold machine guns, jeeps and tanks, racist caricatures of Obama, and propagandish pictures of Saddam Hussein. On the other hand, amidst these are plenty of pictures of unicorns, flowers, and cute little kittens lying under rainbows. It’s a bizarre look into a world that is entirely unlike my own.
How I Recovered My Stolen iPad | MetaFilter, via Mike M. (via new-aesthetic)
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Deviant vs Mainstream Globalization in Australia’s irregular maritime arrival problem
Australian PM, Kevin Rudd and co keep framing this in the language of capitalism. They’re ruining the business model of ‘the people smugglers’. That is their solution to *stop the boats*. The People Smugglers, filling busted up boats for a one-way trip to or near enough to, the Australian shore that they can claim asylum, […]
Read more "Deviant vs Mainstream Globalization in Australia’s irregular maritime arrival problem"Serco has welcomed the increase in asylum seekers in its annual report. But it says its future profits in Australia will depend on the ”country conditions” in the Middle East and Asia. … Serco admits its ”very strong organic growth” reflects – at least in part – its capitalisation on its existing contracts, including with the government. In particular, it says, its profits in Australia reflect ”an increase in the amount of work undertaken for the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship [DIAC]”. ”In immigration services in Australia, the level of irregular maritime arrivals has increased in 2012, leading to a growth in the number of people in our care,” its annual report notes. ”The level of our future activity is still likely to fluctuate based on country conditions in the Middle East and Asia, where most people in our care originate, and the prevailing government policy, speed of visa processing and the application of the Australian government’s recent offshore processing legislation.” … University of Sydney economist Bob Walker, who has written extensively on privatisation, said research had shown that privatising or outsourcing services was often as expensive or more expensive than governments running the services themselves. ”Essentially the profits of Serco reflect the loss to the taxpayer of outsourcing services that the public service could perfectly well do themselves.” A Serco spokesman said the increase in the value of the contracts reflected the increase in the amount of work undertaken for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. ”When we commenced the contracts in 2009, we were caring for 800 people,” he said. ”We currently look after more than 8000, and employ more than 3000 people in immigration services.”
http://m.smh.com.au/national/serco-profits-rise-as-detention-contracts-hit-186bn-20130419-2i5ln.html
Read moreThe firm that links these three stories together is Serco. Its range of activities, here and abroad, is truly mind-boggling, taking in no end of things that were once done by the state, but are now outsourced to private companies. Amazingly, its contracts with government are subject to what’s known as “commercial confidentiality” and as a private firm it’s not open to Freedom of Information requests, so looking into the details of what it does is fraught with difficulty.
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Among their scores of roles across the planet, Serco is responsible for air traffic control in the United Arab Emirates, parking-meter services in Chicago, driving tests in Ontario, and an immigration detention centre on Christmas Island, run on behalf of those well-known friends of overseas visitors the Australian government.
In the US, the company has just been awarded a controversial $1.25bn contract by that country’s Department of Health. All told, its operations suggest some real-life version of the fantastical mega-corporations that have long been invented by fiction writers; a more benign version of the Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner, say, or one of those creations from James Bond movies whose name always seems to end with the word “industries”.
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I first heard Serco’s name about eight years ago, when I was just starting to understand the amazing growth of what are now called “public service companies”. Once I started looking, their logos were everywhere, suggesting a shadow state that has since grown ever-bigger. Their names seemed anonymously stylised, in keeping with the sense that they seemed both omnipresent, and barely known: Interserve, Sodexo, Capita, the Compass Group.
Serco is among the biggest of them all. At the last count, its annual pre-tax profits were up 27%, at £302m. In 2012 alone, its British workforce grew by 10,000, to 53,000 people (tellingly, as many as 90% of them are said to be former civil servant employees). In terms of employees, that makes it more than twice as large as the BBC, and around 20% bigger than Philip Green’s Arcadia group. A very significant player, in other words, and one that has come a long way since its foundation 1929, when it was a branch of the American RCA corporation called RCA Services Ltd, involved in the then booming UK cinema industry. It was renamed Serco in 1987, after a management buy-out, and floated on the stock exchange the following year. In the 25 subsequent years, during which the UK has grown ever-fonder of outsourcing and privatisation, Serco has grown at an amazing rate.
The current chief executive of the global Serco Group is 49-year-old Chris Hyman, born in Durban, South Africa. His annual remuneration is around £700,000, plus bonuses; in 2011, the value of his total package rose 18%, to £1.86m (the company’s finance director had to slum it at £948,295).
In 2010, Hyman was given a CBE for services to business and charity; he is also an enthusiastic fan of motor racing and an evangelical Christian. Four years ago, he was asked about his company’s very low profile, and he said this: “We had a dilemma – what do we do with the Serco name. We are proud of it. We thought we needed billboards at airports and places like that, to be seen with Tiger Woods on. But we worked out very quickly that is not what we are meant to do. We are meant to be known by the 5,000 not the five billion. The people who serve the people need to choose who supplies the service. We are delighted when the public knows who we are, but really, we need to be known by the people who make decisions.”
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Work for the British government accounts for 40% of Serco’s revenues; to quote from the Daily Telegraph. “Without Serco, Britain would struggle to go to war”. That gives you some idea of how deeply its work penetrates the state, and how unthinkable any kind of corporate crisis would be.
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“Interestingly, we are looking at this. The National Audit Office is doing work around the development of quasi-monopoly private providers, which is the world we’re moving into. We don’t really understand the size of their empires. We’ve got to start getting hold of this. It’s a new phenomenon.”
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 