Yesterday, news broke that Google has been stealth downloading audio listeners onto every computer that runs Chrome, and transmits audio data back to Google. Effectively, this means that Google had taken itself the right to listen to every conversation in every room that runs Chrome somewhere, without any kind of consent from the people eavesdropped on. In official statements, Google shrugged off the practice with what amounts to “we can do that”.
It looked like just another bug report. "When I start Chromium, it downloads something." Followed by strange status information that notably included the lines "Microphone: Yes" and "Audio Capture Allowed: Yes".
Without consent, Google’s code had downloaded a black box of code that – according to itself – had turned on the microphone and was actively listening to your room.
What a way to live. Everyone is waiting for the shoe to drop, or should I say the bomb to drop, all the while attacking any and all of us who oppose jihad. Vicious cowards.
“US Officials Warn of ISIS Attacks on July 4,” By Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu, Jewish Press, June 27th, 2015 (thanks to Claude):
Americans’ fear of the ISIS is turning terror into the major election issue
ISIS prepares for U.S. Independence Day.
American police forces from coast to coast are on alert from federal officials that the Islamic State (ISIS) is planning to terrorize the country during the July 4 Independence Day holiday.
Homeland Security, the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center sent an intelligence bulletin to law enforcement agencies.
No specific plots were spelled out, according to CNN, but there was a general warning because of the holiday and the upcoming visit of Pope Francis.
One of my great pleasures in life is attending conferences on fields I’m intrigued by, but know nothing about. (A second pleasure is writing about these events.) So when my friend Kate Crawford invited me to a daylong “Listening Machine Summit,” I could hardly refuse.
What’s a listening machine? The example of everyone’s lips was Hello Barbie, a version of the impossibly proportioned doll that will listen to your child speak and respond in kind. Here’s how The Washington Post described the doll back in March: “At a recent New York toy fair, a Mattel representative introduced the newest version of Barbie by saying: ‘Welcome to New York, Barbie.’ The doll, named Hello Barbie, responded: ‘I love New York! Don’t you? Tell me, what’s your favorite part about the city? The food, fashion, or the sights?’
Barbie accomplishes this magic by recording your child’s question, uploading it to a speech recognition server, identifying a recognizable keyword (“New York”) and offering an appropriate synthesized response. The company behind Barbie’s newfound voice, ToyTalk, uses your child’s utterance to help tune their speech recognition, likely storing the voice file for future use.
And that’s the trick with listening systems. If you can imagine reasons why you might not want Mattel maintaining a record of things your child says while talking to his or her doll, you should be able to imagine the possible harms that could come from use—abuse or interrogation of other listening systems. (“Siri, this is the police. Give us the last hundred searches Mr. Zuckerman asked you to conduct on Google. Has he ever searched for bomb-making instructions?”)
Crisisactors.org, the website established to represent the collaboration between the Visionbox professional actors studio and FEMA’s Emergency Management Institute has been dormant since August 2014. This is according to information obtained from Internet Archive on June 15, 2015.
On July 29, 2014 a notice retrieved from Internet Archive for crisisactors.org announces:
Maintenance
We apologize for the inconvenience, but Crisis Actors is currently undergoing maintenance.
On August 5, 2014 a moderately revised statement announces:
Sorry! We’re under maintenance. We are making some updates to the site. We’ll be back soon, thanks for your patience [sic].
Less than one month later, on August 26, 2014 a static page is prompted via the url that has remained through June 19, 2015.
404: Not Found. Please double check the address you’ve just entered. If you entered “www.example.com/networkname.com”, try “networkname.com instead.”
It is clear from the continuum of these announcements and their identical features that the most recent notification is an attempt to convince the casual browser that the site never existed, when in fact it appears it is being retained for possible future use.
One may recall that in late 2012 the use of professional actors for a variety of roles in “live shooter drills” was becoming common practice. Indeed, as the Sandy Hook massacre event was dominating the news cycle crisisactors.org even maintained a department of “Crisis Actors News”–hyperlinked headlines of stories on active shooter drills where its stable of actors are presumably engaged.
Memoryholeblog
Online commentator RedSilverJ offers his acute analysis of the June 17,
2015 South Carolina Church massacre. He suggests that it may be a
manufactured event reminiscent of 1960s Cointelpro tactics and targeting
the George Soros-backed “Black Lives Matter” movement with the intent
to prompt continued race-based violence across the US.
Something very interesting happened over at GLP March 24th at 9:28 pm.
Something that did not go unnoticed by GLP posters and many others around the interwebz. On page 7 of a thread titled “Medical Type Says Sandy Hook is Total BS”, a user from “Kazakhstan” posted the following: Re: Medical Type Says Sandy Hook is Total Bullshit [0x1a970000, 0x1ab00000, 0x27570000> [rdpclip.exe, "iostatZd15.1"] you copied a large amount of data onto the clipboard ...Do you want to save this data on the clipboard? User ID: 35850666 Korea User ID: 36689081 Korea User ID: 33951304 Kazak User ID: 36809983 Kazak N.C.S. logo.jpg //SECRET C:\SharePoint012USNCSSAD_Wrkc9inet-N-7339.tx t ********************************** REMINDERS —— NOTES ********************************** Sensitivity Level Action Code Team 5.A/ SITE Location of official Agency folder None NPRC Team Contact Sheila N****** CHECKLIST
Do any of the respondents display the urge to supply information that could be helpful to your mission?
Do the respondents appear hostile to your attempts to steer the discussion?
Have you made a personal chart taking care to note who appear to be the “leaders” versus who appear to be the “followers”?
Have you attempted to gauge the “temperature” of the forum’s users?
In other words, the prevailing social psychology of the forum’s members? Have you been more successful with one or the other XStart methods that were demonstrated in N-7015A.DOC? Have more technical members (Computer Programmers, Administrators, or Moderators) of the forum deduced or accused you of hiding behind a proxy?
Would you gain more trust and/or credibility if you were to use one of the Agency’s allotted “HOME” pools? (most often needed when handling EVTS that are more sensitive to the pop. of a specific locale but also location centered web sites such as FB or Patch) Has your PREDEV “persona” been successful or do you gauge that the users find you to be too obtrusive? Accusations of being “ever present” are.
https://www.facebook.com/Redsilverj
