Okay…, finally got through that. (Too much going on in the house today, so I had to listen in pieces. And I checked out at the whiskey tasting portion.)
What a great podcast! I’d never heard of these guys. Or “Twit.tv” for that matter.
For the couple years when I was trying to get in on the podcast scene myself, I was really finding my speaking brain amping up and becoming quite agile as a direct result. Whereas over the last year where I’ve done very little in front of a camera, I can feel that same part of my mind sliding away. It’s somewhat alarming. Listening to these guys throws that feeling into sharp relief. -All of which is to say…, they’re really good at it! Very easy listening. I’m going to tune in regularly.
As per the subject matter…
Very little of that stuff regarding privacy or information harvesting surprises me. -Though, some of the numbers do! Billions of dollars in revenue through app sniffing? That’s a lot of clams!
Of course, I tend to not require much in the way of confirmation when it comes to my suspicions about Big Tech and Government. I’ve long been content to operate under the assumption that Microsoft and Apple and Google and everybody else are thoroughly corrupt and that their technology is monitoring everything and everyone through every available sensor, and I conduct my affairs accordingly.
-Why some people choose to give the benefit of doubt and offer plausible skepticism to those criminals is beyond me! Sadly, a lot of those same people tend to have also gotten all their boosters and subscribe to all manner of silly ideas, so the likelihood of their being around to keep me aggravated is diminishing by the day. (Choosing to believe in lies is rapidly becoming an unsustainable survival burden.)
The podcast crew pointed out that humans are really great and really awful at the same time. Human nature and Power leads to corruption, and it pays to assume the worst.
-As it happens, I’m currently re-reading through my old collection of real world spy books. Two of which stand out; “The Secret Team” (by Fletcher Proutey) -covering the birth and development of the American government secret agencies (mainly the CIA) from the 1940’s through to the 1980’s, and “The Lost Hegemon - Whom the Gods Would Destroy” (F. William Engdahl) which covers the CIA and their antics from the 1970’s through to 2010-ish…
The upshot being…, you must not only always assume that surveillance and social engineering are happening, and that they are being used in malign ways, but that it is being handled with epic levels of both mastery and incompetence at the same time.
-Mastery in the granular engineering level. (Those phones sure are clever and hard to make and program, but boy do we ever do that well!) and Epic Incompetence in the “Why, Wherefore and WTF?” department. Nobody is acting in a responsible manner, nobody is properly in charge, and if they are, their minds are full of stupid, short-sighted ideas which can be counted on to crash all the ships into all the icebergs. Everything is Bay of Pigs, all the time.
To explain that reference to those of you who haven’t been immersed in obscure history books for the last month…, each component of the CIA’s secretly planned U.S. invasion of Cuba of which the President had no idea was even happening until after the fact, (true!), -from the months of troop training and weapons readiness and flight plans, etc., all of that was put together by the best of the best experts, but the final coordination was such a complete clusterduck with no oversight and no objective other than mindless forward momentum, that thousands of brave men died pointlessly on a beach because of a series of comically stupid reasons and absent leaders who didn’t stop at any point to wonder, “What exactly are we doing and why are we doing it, and who exactly is in charge of all this?” It was a headless beast galloping at full speed ahead to… where?
I see the same kind of madness going on today in the information/consumer tech sphere.
There’s no brilliant evil overlord with a sinister plan. It’s just a lot of sinister small time management goons who can’t coordinate, and a bunch of exceptionally talented techs bent over their work desks obsessively crafting their individual little grommits and levers which make the whole thing possible.
The moral of the story being: Don’t trust that somebody “Up There” is in control, plug all the holes you can, and plan your life around the expectation of critical systems exploitation at every level, and that nasty people who want to hurt and steal from you exist in key positions and are having a grand old time right now.
Oh yeah…
We’d be giving a naive level of doubt benefit to think that the most important chips in our devices are not compromised on the hardware level for the job of surveillance. The only glimmer of relief from that is the people doing that listening aren’t selling your info to advertisers. (They don’t need to make money from adverts. Their money comes from poppy sales.)
