How Back Doors Became the 'Normal' or 'Norm'
Andy has a new article today about freedom fighters. This one focuses on security and below are some excerpts:
As Roy and Rianne at Techrights.org like to say, this is a long post so grab a cup of tea. You're about to explore something complex, disturbing and infuriating.[...]
My 10 year old kid does understand cybersecurity. She gets it, at the most fundamental level. She asks me "daddy will cybersecurity win?". She understands already that we are in a war, for humane technology, for human dignity, for environment, for the right to read, the preservation of music, movies, the arts and all the things she loves. Cybersecurity at it's best is a resistance movement against the technofascists.
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The pushers would have us believe in world where you need a smartphone app to sleep, walk, interact with society, eat or have a dump. But people are clearly going to eat, sleep and take a shit whether technology exists or not. We are all smart enough to understand the superfluous froth of technology in the late capitalist era, and that it will soon die back until we regain a more sensible relation to our tech. We also understand that the data stored and processed by our tech is an extension of our own mind-body. It is part of ourselves and must be protected because it can be hurt. There is no intrinsic reason to hate technology, only those who operate it as a weapon of abuse against us.
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Thanks to efforts others like myself have been making for a decade or more, the education system is finally changing. At last, kids are taught about digital threats from the age of 5. I'm proud to have played a significant role in that as teacher, campaigner and a father. My kid knows that bad people want to steal her data, and she should not use things like Google, Microsoft or Facebook. She sees the damage being done to friends who have phones. She chastises her teachers when they say Google to mean "research" - and I am super proud of her for that.
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Disinterest is not limited to the man in the street. Political leaders and official experts show astonishing lack of focus, issuing contradictory and nonsensical brain-farts with eye-watering flatulence. The UK government, which regularly engages in wishful thinking mocks serious computer scientists in its fervour to place snooping back-doors into civil communications, and rush headlong into "AI" which nobody understands or wants.
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Automated attacks via "AI" are rapidly accelerating the problem. Whereas it once took skilled hackers many days to pull-off an attack, enemies can now execute thousands per second. Nations are in a war to build "AI" data-centres as fast as they can. The purpose of these data-centres is to attack populations at the civic level, at a rate and intensity never seen before in history.
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I am writing this with some personal urgency. European and US American visions of technology are diverging rapidly in their values. This week (September 2026) Vladimir Putin directly threatened British defence companies with attack. Most likely that will involve cyber action, perhaps in a Stuxnet fashion designed to cause physical damage, rather than anything like Salisbury. My friends, neighbours and colleagues are now in the cross-hairs. Screaming at a wall for decades that "This is coming" has had zero effect. I'm exhausted and getting burned out. Our leaders are deaf. Getting people on-board with civic cybersecurity has been like squeezing blood from a stone. There is not merely ignorance and reluctance but an established order opposed to cybersecurity. Lions are led by donkeys.
For years here in the UK I've had funding proposals turned down, conference projects derailed, approaches to ministers and MPs quietly sidelined and dropped, defence proposals rejected. I quit a bush-league university because it was academically and morally derelict. It was impossible in a place run by Microsoft gangsters to set up anything resembling a real cybersecurity programme.
All the while those in power keep parroting the language that "Cybersecurity is important", while doing nothing or actively obstructing progress. They simply move British taxpayer's money to American mega-corporations and defend the vassal status of the UK as dependent on hopelessly insecure US Big Tech.
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Running a system with half the computing capacity and memory does not make a person "half as competitive". Such a view of the world is so immature as to be beneath contempt yet it is the outcome of minds damaged by MBA education programmes. A citizen who has one tenth the computing power per capita of a rival, but who is free and self-reliant is in an substantially stronger position with regard to "quality of technological life" (cyber-security).
"We also allowed a lethal monoculture to fester," he said.