Raymond Lavas and the Puzzle Palace Book...

"The Man Who Mastered Gravity" was published in March, 2023. Use this space to share your thoughts, comments, praise and/or cries of outrage.
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Henry_Yang
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Raymond Lavas and the Puzzle Palace Book...

Post by Henry_Yang »

So I was studying the history of Dagobert's Revenge Magazine and it was noted that Tracy Twyman started it as a smoke signal device in order to get herself noticed and then outright fully initiated into underground occult orders. She knew that publishing it everywhere would get her the attention needed to be seen by such people and hoped some would reach out to her directly. It worked when Nicholas DeVere (of the Dragon Order) contacted her, and then again when Boyd Rice (of the Satanic Church) did the same.

So this reminded me a lot of Robert Temple. When he published his book, "The Sirius Mystery", a 33rd Degree Freemason wrote to him telling him that he wanted him to join Masonry, and that if he decided to do so, he personally would rig the system to get him to fly through the levels, all the way to the top, where he could sit in with the counsel of elders as a newly minted 33rd Degree Freemason in only a few months time. The man who made this spectacular offer to him died before Dr. Temple made up his mind about going along with the plan. No other Mason (33rd Degree or otherwise) reached out again. It was only this one that felt that Dr. Temple was truly onto something in his work.

That was the kind of experience that Tracy Twyman had sought, but she nor Dr. Temple ever got to become 33rd Degree Freemasons at all. But anyway, these stories drove me to revisit Dr. Temple's work. What did that deceased Freemason see in it? And what was the connection to Masonry at all?

The answer was in Twyman's work. After Dr. Temple published, the Typhonian Order sprang forth. Freemasonry, involving the study of Solomon's Temple and Mithras, naturally had an interest in whatever drove this new order.

When Mithras became Yaldabaoth and created our world, he is seen holding seven stars in his left hand. These are the constellation stars of Artemis and her seven hunter goddess followers. The eighth star and the eighth follower of Artemis dropped out of the sky when she became mortal by marrying a man. She became known as Typhon. Artemis became known as Set.

Some connection between Mithras and Typhon exists but unfortunately Tracy Twyman died before she made it that far in her own investigations. She found evidence in the British Museum that the Templars worshipped these kinds of deities in a form of Ophite Gnosticism.

But what matters for this thread here is that Dr. Temple said this in his lecture:

"The Sirius Mystery Revisited" by Robert Temple at 1:30:42
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j12Ea8Rvn3o
Benard cells can do something called developing long-range order. This happens with very simple things called Benard cells on the surface of a fluid in a pan that's heated by thermal convection. You have a perfectly featureless surface of the fluid and and suddenly it forms these strange cells. And analysis by chemists shows that long-range order appears within these cells that which is ten million times the order that existed before the cell formed. And you seem to be able to get faster-than-light contact within cells, which you can't get outside cells. And it is not impossible, although this is my speculation only, that the Sirius system, being part of a cell with our solar system, have a much more intimate connection then we imagine.
Interesting that plasma physics become relevant here. Despite starting out with studies into the occult. Will this actually help shed light on the Riconosciuto-Lavas technologies? I don't know but let's start with that book that Raymond said to check out.........

Quote from Trickfox:
The above "intelligent Noise" article is a Science Fiction Magazine article so important to the security of the world that the article itself is quoted in an important book called "the Puzzle Palace".(click link below)
http://www.amazon.com/Puzzle-Palace-Ame ... B000BPG27Y
Go ahead and do a search function in the Amazon window click on "search in this book" and put the word ANALOG in the search box.
Item (2) is on page 448 of the book. There is more about this that links me directly with the incident described in the book, see this link: http://www.etoan.com/phasorphone-secret.html
Well I have this book now checked out from the library. Page 448 is a part of the index. I am searching all the terms in the index and not coming up with anything. What is the "incident" that Raymond Lavas was involved in? Where is it described in the book?

Page 448 lists the terms alphabetically in the end of the Cs and the beginning of the Ds. I see CRYPTO AG listed on this page. On page 453 I see the INVENTION SECREY ACT. And at the beginning of that same page I see the INSTITUTE FOR DEFENSE ANALYSIS (IDA)...

Perhaps what Raymond meant are the terms listed on pages 443 and 444. On page 443, ANALOG is written. And directly afterward on page 444, ANALOG OPTICAL COMPUTING TECHNOLOGY is written. These point to pages 356 and 102, respectively.

Page 102 is about the Cray supercomputers. However, on page 356, I see the reference to Nicolai and the Analog Magazine. This must be it!

So this is what Raymond Lavas wanted us all to see.....

PAGE 102 QUOTE

In the spring of 1976 the first CRAY-1 rolled out of the firm's production plant in Chippewa Falls, Minnesota, and, apparently, directly into the basement of the Puzzle Palace. A second was quietly delivered to NSA's think tank, the Communications Research Division of the Institute for Defense Analysis at Princeton University.

With a random access semiconductor memory capable of transferring up to 320 million words per second, or the equivalent of about twenty-five hundred 300-page books, NSA could not have been disappointed. And when it was hooked up to the computer's specialized input-output subsystem, the machine could accommodate up to forty-eight disk storage units, which could hold a total of almost 30 billion words, each no further away than eighty millionths of a second.

On top of this, NSA in 1983 plans to put into operation secretly an enormous worldwide computer network code-named Platform, which will tie together fifty-two separate computer systems used throughout the world. Focal point, or "host environment," for the massive network will be NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. Among those included in Platform will be the British SIGINT organization, GCHQ.

But even with the power of the CRAY-1, the Puzzle Palace is still searching for more speed, more power, and more memory capacity with such concepts such as digital applications of Josephson Junction technology, optical logic elements, magnetic bubbles, and laser recording. Currently, the NSA is conducting advanced research into analog optical computing technology as well as both light-sound interaction devices and charge-transfer devices for achieving more than one quadrillion (or 1,000,000,000,000,000) multiplications per second.
Sound to anyone here like maybe this is where J Eric Roskos, and the INSLAW-PROMIS affair, have started to come into effect?

Now onto page 356, which is the important one that Raymond was talking about.... I will quote the story here as it starts on page 354 and runs to page 357.......

Six months earlier a foursome of inventors in Seattle, working in their spare time in the back of a garage, managed to develop a new kind of voice scrambler. Led by thirty-five-year-old Carl Nicolai, a job-shopper, or technical "Kelly girl", the group called its new invention the Phasorphone and submitted a patent application in October 1977. In April 1978, Nicolai finally received a response from the Patent Office. But when he opened the letter, he was stunned. Instead of a patent, his hands held a strange form with the words SECRET ORDER in large bold letters across the top.

Nicolai had suddenly been assaulted with one of the oldest weapons in the nation's national security arsenal: the Invention Secrecy Act. Passed in 1917 as a wartime measure to prevent the publication of inventions that might "be detrimental to the public safety or defense or might assist the enemy or endanger the successful prosecution of the war," the measure ended with the conclusion of World War I. The act was resurrected in 1940 and was later extended until the end of the Second World War. Then, like the phoenix, it once again rose from the ashes with the passage of the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951, which mandated that secrecy orders be kept for periods of no more than one year unless renewed. There was a catch, however. The act also said that a secrecy order "in effect, or issued, during a national emergency declared by the President shall remain in effect for the duration of the national emergency and six months thereafter." Because no one ever bothered to declare an end to President Truman's 1951 emergency, the emergency remained in effect until September 1978.

Nicolai's secrecy order told him little except that he faced two years in jail and a $10,000 fine for disclosing any aspect of his device "in any way to any person not cognizant of the invention prior to the date of the order." Nowhere on the order did it say why it was issued or who ordered the action.

Unknown to the Seattle inventor, the patent application for his backyard scrambler had traveled through one of the government's least-known bureaucratic labyrinths - one littered with such security classifications as SUPER SECRECY and BLUE SLIP. Once submitted to the Patent and Trademark Office, it, like all other applications, was sent to a unit called the Special Laws Administrative Group, better known as the Secret Group. Here, several dozen specially cleared examiners separate the applications into chemical, electrical, or mechanical inventions and then, using guide lists provided by the various defense agencies, determine whether any contain national security information. Those they suspect are passed on to the Pentagon's Armed Services Patent Advisory Board (ASPAB), a sort of clearinghouse for secrecy orders, which then requests an opinion from the appropriate agency and coordinates the decision to invoke secrecy.

When Nicolai's Phasorphone reached the ASPAB, there was disagreement. The middle-level official at NSA responsible for such decisions wanted the secrecy order issued (although others within the Agency disagreed), and he was supported by the Air Force and Navy representatives. But the Army saw no reason for such a move, so the decision was kicked up to NSA's Director Inman for a final decision. He gave the go-ahead to the order.

Nicolai had thus become, in the slang of the ASPAB, a "John Doe." Of the three hundred or so secrecy orders issued each year, all but a very few are either on inventions the government has originated itself and already classified, or on inventions somehow connected with the government. A John Doe is one of the few outside this circle. In this instance, John Doe was hopping mad.

The object of Nicolai's patent application and the NSA's anxiety was a voice privacy system that relied more, apparently, on the science of transmission security than cryptography. As opposed to cryptography, which merely renders the contents of a message unintelligible to those without the key, transmission security conceals the very existence of the message itself. The seed for the Phasorphone was planted in 1960 in an article on communications security by Alfred Pfanstiehl for Analog magazine. Pfanstiehl suggested that instead of the traditional method of transmission, where signals are sent between transmitter and receiver over a single frequency, a system of pseudo-random wave forms be used. Under such a system a code could be devised using pseudorandom alterations of the frequency spectrum exactly synchronized between transmitter and receiver. The system held promise for an area particularly vulnerable to eavesdropping: CB and marine band radio. But it could also be modified for telephone.

What was so worrisome to the NSA, it seems, was the movement by the private sector into yet another once-exclusive domain. For years the agency had been putting strong emphasis on the marriage of cryptography and transmission security for hidden communications with submarines and clandestine agents in hostile foreign countries.* Such techniques included frequency-hopping, where messages are bounced from frequency to frequency at more than a thousand times a second; burst communications, where a message is supercompressed into a brief "squirt"; and spread spectrum techniques, where a signal is first diluted to a millionth of its original intensity and then intermingled with background noise.

To add insult to injury, Nicolai was planning to market his Phasorphone at a price most buyers could easily afford, about $100, thus increasing the interest in the technology.

That the NSA was suddenly attempting to flex its muscles in the patent area could be seen in the fact that the very day that Nicolai's secrecy order was issued, another inventor was opening a secrecy order on yet another invention.

[*FOOTNOTE: In 1973, TRW began designing a satellite system for use by the CIA in communicating with agents in "denied areas." Code-named Pyramider, the system employed frequency-hopping. This provided the agent with large "safe areas" in cities, where the signals could be hidden among random urban radio transmissions. The system was also capable of reducing aircraft interception in remote areas to a radius of twenty nautical miles. (See Robert Lindsey, The Falcon and the Snowman [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979], page 218.)]

Dr. George I. Davida, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Wisconsin, had submitted a patent application for a "stream" cipher device, incorporating advanced mathematical techniques, about the same time Nicolai submitted his Phasorphone application. Now, like his Seattle counterpart, Davida had also become a John Doe.

Whatever the NSA had hoped to accomplish by its rapid one-two punch was lost in the embarrassing public battle that followed. Soon after Davida received his secrecy order, Werner Baum, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin's Milwaukee campus, sent off a letter to the director of the National Science Foundation, which sponsored Davida's project, denouncing the secrecy order and calling for "minimal due process guarantees." He then told Science magazine that he regarded the order an invasion of his faculty's academic freedom and said that it smacked of McCarthy-era tactics against universities.

After first winning the support of Senator Warren Magnuson, Nicolai also turned to Science and later charged that the order "appears part of a general plan by the NSA to limit the privacy of the American people." He added, "They've been bugging people's telephones for years and now someone comes along with a device that makes this a little harder to do and they oppose this under the guise of national security."

I think a lot of this information was already in those links Raymond attached to his posts and that some of it I recognized word-for-word was already typed up in them. So for me, there was no new information in this story, as Raymond already talked about it before in some other posts, and I think he said also that one of the men in the Seattle foursome was his personal mentor and trainer. Checking his resume, he got a two-year degree in radio and communication technology involving electrodynamics and physics training and went to work for perhaps the CIA afterwards. I don't know which of the four men mentored him, or if the mentoring was even through the company that Raymond worked for, or the school he attended....
natecull
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Re: Raymond Lavas and the Puzzle Palace Book...

Post by natecull »

Ok, so the Phasorphone was a voice scrambler. Yes, that would fall into the NSA's turf, and I do believe that the US military-industrial complex has a habit of just grabbing technologies they like and which could have a military use.

On those 1976 juicy Cray-1 computer specs:
a random access semiconductor memory capable of transferring up to 320 million words per second
Let's say a word was probably 32 bits. That's 1.280 gigabytes per second, or around 10 gigabits. That sounds a lot - until you realise that your basic PC these days has a 10 gigabyt Ethernet cable going to the switch of your office LAN, while this figure is only for the Cray-1's internal RAM, nothing else.

Yes, it was fast in 1976, and that's why the NSA got the first Crays. They needed speed to do codebreaking with, that being their job.

But the other goal of ARPA at the time was to boost the entire US (and world) computing capacity, giving everyone very fast computers (so that the military would have even faster computers), which is why 40 years later we now all have supercomputers that the 1976 NSA would envy, in our pockets. And supersonic drones that can fly and select targets themselves. That part of ARPA's plan worked very well.
On top of this, NSA in 1983 plans to put into operation secretly an enormous worldwide computer network code-named Platform, which will tie together fifty-two separate computer systems used throughout the world. Focal point, or "host environment," for the massive network will be NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. Among those included in Platform will be the British SIGINT organization, GCHQ.
Note that 1983 was when the TCP/IP protocol of the Internet was formally rolled out by ARPANET (the first ARPANET launched in 1969/1970, but they were running a much earlier protocol). There might have been only about 52 major sites (ie, universities, military commands and defense contractors) on ARPANET at that time - I'm not sure, but it sounds about the right order of magnitude. The big Internet boom happened much later, in the early 1990s, when Al Gore and others pushed through legislation to privatize it.

My guess though is that Platform in 1983 was probably not the main ARPANET, but the classified "SIPRNET" (Secret IP Router Network). ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIPRNet ) NSA would have been the logical choice to be the "IT guys" for that network in 1983.
for achieving more than one quadrillion (or 1,000,000,000,000,000) multiplications per second
"Multiplications per second" is a weird metric to quote. I'm guessing maybe they're talking about the "FLOPS" (floating point operations per second) measure, which is what supercomputers are normally rated in. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS ) "One quadrillion" is a petaFLOP, which was a *very* ambitious goal for 1983 - the first teraflop supercomputer (ASCI Red) was 1997, the first petaflop supercomputer in 2008 (Road Runner) - but this would have been a long-term plan, not something they were expecting to get to in a year. And probably from ARPA's "Strategic Computing" subproject, I think, rather than the NSA as such.

Optical chips were an obvious technology to chase in 1983 (optical worked for data cables, but not so much for CPUs) but it turned out we didn't need them; just keeping making silicon masks smaller worked fine. Except for the part where fabs became so expensive that a single vendor in Taiwan became a critical part of the US defense industry supply chain, of course.
Sound to anyone here like maybe this is where J Eric Roskos, and the INSLAW-PROMIS affair, have started to come into effect?
I'm sorry but no, PROMIS wasn't anything to do with raw supercomputing power. That was a completely different ball game, and was already being taken care of by ARPA. Which they achieved. The US-led world computing industry massively failed at making computers *secure* - but they succeeded at (eventually) making them *fast*. And with GPUs and the massive numbers of them in use today, we've now blasted way, way past the petaflop range. All that happened, and was going to happen, without PROMIS.

What PROMIS *was* about was taking a modestly capable database with impeccable "made by / trusted by the US Defense industry" credentials, stiffing the vendor to get full control of the code, selling it to allied countries in the military/governance game, adding backdoors to the code, and sneakily getting secrets from US allies that way. Very much the sort of thing that (post Snowden, we now know) the NSA does. But more of a deeply politically embarrassing social engineering stunt, than a technological one. Just your basic everyday grubby, bordering-on-and-crossing-the-line-into-criminality spy stuff. There had been many grubby schemes before it, and many grubby schemes after it.

I strongly suspect that Amazon AWS - aka "let us run all your servers, we're super cheap and trusted by the US military, we would never let the US military take a peek at your servers! Trust us!" - is the same kind of grubby spy scheme as PROMIS, just very much slicker. It will be an extremely top military secret as to whether or not Jeff Bezos ever does let the US military peek at people's servers, of course.

But PROMIS wasn't an alien supertechnology, and people in the "conspiracy" world with little computer knowledge keep getting confused by that.

Nate
Going on a journey, somewhere far out east
We'll find the time to show you, wonders never cease
Henry_Yang
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Re: Raymond Lavas and the Puzzle Palace Book...

Post by Henry_Yang »

Dear Nate,

You are right that there where many hacks and dirty tricks by intelligence before the PROMIS-INSLAW scandal went down. I first got interested in it back when I believed that it was the first major hack ever. I saw it as the foundation to all the technological mess we are in today. Online school. Hackers stealing accounts with no consequence. Metaverse. Data mining. Data stealing. The technological prison approaching the singularity. AI getting smarter than us. Etc...

But then I realized what you said about the timeline going back further and INSLAW being merely another point on it. I think the software was modified for airplanes at Skunk Works but the real secret to that black technology is in WHY the planes fly, whereas the software was/is only the HOW.
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Re: Raymond Lavas and the Puzzle Palace Book...

Post by Henry_Yang »

PS: I found this paper by Roskos but only the abstract:

Minix security policy model
J.E. Roskos, January 1989
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... licy_model

Abstract

The author describes how the Bell-La Padula model might be applied to the current, unrated Minix operating system. Also discussed are security issues pertaining to inherited accesses and the method used to characterize the Minix file permissions in terms of the more general access matrix model

Might that be related to this?

MINIX: ​Intel's hidden in-chip operating system
Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Nov. 6, 2017
https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-int ... ng-system/


If you learned about operating systems in the late '80s and early '90s, you knew MINIX as Andrew S Tanenbaum's educational Unix-like operating system. It was used to teach operating system principles. Today, it's best known as the OS that inspired Linus Torvalds to create Linux.

MINIX also has access to your passwords. It can also reimage your computer's firmware even if it's powered off. Let me repeat that. If your computer is "off" but still plugged in, MINIX can still potentially change your computer's fundamental settings.

And, for even more fun, it "can implement self-modifying code that can persist across power cycles". So, if an exploit happens here, even if you unplug your server in one last desperate attempt to save it, the attack will still be there waiting for you when you plug it back in.

How? MINIX can do all this because it runs at a fundamentally lower level.
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Re: Raymond Lavas and the Puzzle Palace Book...

Post by natecull »

I think the software was modified for airplanes at Skunk Works
No, that doesn't make any sense at all. PROMIS was a minicomputer database: something a bit like, say, Microsoft Access today. Airplanes run on avionics hardware. You don't run supersonic jet fighters on databases, you need specialist, custom-designed, real-time avionics software. The two domains are utterly different. That would be like someone today saying "I stole the source code to Microsoft Access, now I'm going to use that to write a super-fast Call of Duty for Playstation VR". No. That's not how software works.

MINIX also has access to your passwords. It can also reimage your computer's firmware even if it's powered off. Let me repeat that. If your computer is "off" but still plugged in, MINIX can still potentially change your computer's fundamental settings.
Ok so what you're looking at there is what we call a "system management" chip which, yes, is in all modern PCs. Minix as software isn't really important to that at all; it's just a simple, available OS that they chose to use. They would have used anything else that was available if not Minix.

What happened was that from the 1950s through 1960s, computers were generally big systems that you rented from a large company like IBM (much like Cloud computing today). Then there was a bit of a "rebellion" with first minicomputers like the VAX and PDP (Unix was one of the first minicomputer OSes; it was small and free in its time), and another one with "microcomputers" around 1977 (Apple, Commodore, TRS). Microcomputers tended to be completely owned and controlled by the operator. Hobbyists loved them, and also lots of workers at large corporations bought microcomputers as well. This meant individual teams could do their own computing and didn't have to be dependent on either an outside computing service (like IBM or, today, Amazon) or an internal corporate "IT Division".

(The PROMIS saga fits into this early "minicomputer" moment, where government departments around the world were buying minicomputers and setting up their own "computerization" projects - cutting companies like IBM out of the information loop - and generally weren't connected to the Internet. The story goes that some versions of PROMIS may have been modified to sneakily transmit data by generating radio waves. This is a real (but very difficult to program) technique, which would only work if the site was also under active radio surveillance by expert spies. Snowden in 2014 revealed that the NSA did use this technique in some cases, so that substantiates Michael R's story about making such modifications. Today, though, we have Internet connections everywhere, so such a sneaky technique isn't needed. Just send some packets to the Internet, they're very easy to hide.)

However, the pendulum of social change swings both ways, as it always does. Large corporations don't like losing control of their workers and their machines. There are financial and reputational and insurance penalties if they do. So gradually, computer manufacturers found ways of adding more chips and systems to computers that could control them, somewhat sneakily, but all in the name of "good management". Corporate IT departments loved this and asked for more of it. This really accelerated after around 2000. Companies wanted the ability to restart computers and update them while the power was off. So they added this "system management chip" concept. As the article notes, it's a whole tiny computer that runs a whole OS (Minix in this case, but often it's Java) and it can override all of the memory, network, etc. A big security risk, and it's often very undocumented.

Flash forward to 2024, and modern computers are riddled with lots of these kind of invisible management layers, all of them privacy and security risks. There's multiple competing system management chips, now. There's the TPM (Trusted Platform Module), a whole another chip which stores crypto keys, but which is a little computer that runs its own, mostly secret, operating system. Every hard drive and USB stick, and each plug-in device like screen and camera, is in fact its own whole computer that runs its own operating system. Some devices like this can actually access all your RAM if they are designed to be "evil"; this is another security risk.

That's just the workstation/endpoint. Then we have "The Cloud". Most of our software now runs partly on your computer and partly on huge computers owned by a few corporations (mostly Amazon and Microsoft, but also IBM and Google). These computers are usually what we call "virtual machines" (simulated computers); the "real" computer they are on lives in a warehouse somewhere - perhaps even in another country, very likely in another city/state - and runs its own operating system called the "hypervisor". All of these computers that we, the users, don't physically own and control are security and privacy risks to us. To the companies who run these computers, though, having full control of the "hypervisor" and full access to our data makes them feel secure.

The latest and saddest point in this trend towards corporate control is something called "Data Loss Prevention". DLP is software that runs on the corporate workstation and the corporate Cloud, and scans every single email or message or file that a worker writes or sends, looking for "information that looks like it should be private", and blocks them or notifies their boss if they send it. Corporations use this because they can get in major legal trouble if private customer data "leaks" to the Internet. So in order to enforce well-meaning "data privacy" laws, corporations are doing massive, constant, internal surveillance of all their workers on a level we've never imagined before! And, they're trusting all this "private" data to third party companies like Amazon and Microsoft (because you can be sued for negligence if you host private data yourself and it leaks, but if Microsoft hosts it, it's their legal problem). This is Orwellian "War Is Peace" level of contradiction, but it's currently accepted as Best Practice in the computing industry.

So back 20 years ago, the Internet and personal computers tended to be very wild-west and wide open. But the Internet, and even the physical computers, today are much more surveilled and controlled than they used to be 20 years ago. The move to both "Cloud computing" (which is like the old "timesharing" model of the 1970s before microcomputers) and "Mobile" (which uses locked-down computers that the user often can't install just any software on) has moved us in this direction. I think this change has been driven both by the American military (which was really scared by the 9/11 attacks in 2001, and the rise of encryption, and wanted to eavesdrop on all communications to feel safe) and by American corporations (who also want to control their workers and customers, but mostly for commercial profit and liability reasons). The entire 2000s Web has been driven by advertising, and by surveillance in order to sell ads (and to sell information to the military). This hasn't really even been a secret; Silicon Valley has just followed the large dump trucks full of money which the US military has parked on their lawns.

And then there's the side problem that all this software doing all this surveillance-for-profit is also riddled with accidental errors (and perhaps intentional ones), and the errors can be exploited by hackers. Intelligence agencies of multiple countries pay hackers to find software errors and then often, rather than fixing them, stockpile them as weapons. Edward Snowden in 2014 also revealed that the NSA deliberately weakened encryption by introducing subtle errors into NIST standards. This was a very foolish thing to do, but they still did it. And of course multiple countries have been playing this game, because whoever controls the world's computers, controls the world's information. So it's all been a big, massive, privacy and security and social disaster on multiple levels really.

The latest move in this chess game is the US government moving to ban the Chinese video-chat app TikTok. They're doing this because they know that TikTok, running on Chinese servers, will give the Chinese military access to important information like people's locations - as well as listening to and controlling what information is shared. This is a very reasonable fear. The part that they're not saying out loud is that if a Chinese company has this level of access to user's information - and that this level of access is dangerous to society - then of course American computing companies have access to exactly the same information, with the same dangers. But the US military-industrial complex trusts US computing companies. However, people who *aren't* part of the US military-industrial complex.... perhaps they shouldn't trust those companies quite so much.

Nate
Going on a journey, somewhere far out east
We'll find the time to show you, wonders never cease
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