Video download link | md5sum 4ce4cb514b690bd092e2ddc319c04e80 For-Profit Spying Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: When dealing with industrial and political espionage through the likes of GAFAM (Gulag, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft; or "MAGMA" if you call Facebook "Meta") and various telecom companies, Internet-centric tentacles (Twitter, Netflix, Clownflare etc.) or other US conglomerates (e.g. HP, Oracle, ICBM and Intel) you'd be led to believe that they're purely private ventures, even if or when they lose a a lot money and are occasionally assisted by their borrowings-drunk government (or subsidies from taxpayers); there's sufficiently strong evidence and public information (OSINT) showing that just like "Big Oil" receives subsidies (despite making obscene profits) and "Big Banks" being bailed out (an incentive to rob the public and pass risk to the public) the data-hoarding or information-stealing above-the-law firms are more like militarily strategic Pentagon spin-offs and this will be the subject of this year's slow-paced series

THIS SITE has written about privacy for many years (a lot more so a decade ago when the subject was vastly "hotter", both before and after the Edward Snowden-led NSA leaks).

Journalism has been gradually (and rapidly) dying over the years and we occasionally hear from people spurned by the media, not because what they say is false but because corporate media giants don't wish to entertain the subject or deem it "unimportant" (to affluent media owners, not to the public).

"The series will certainly be slow because of the need to verify claims."This year we're planning to compensate somewhat for this information vacuum. Yesterday we published the last part in a long series (about 23 hours of video) about the media's failure to cover patent affairs, with focus on the collapse of the EPO and, by extension, the Rule of Law in central Europe. In the coming few weeks we'll bring down from the shelves several stories we've been sitting on for a while. They concern American companies and even some "Open Source" projects with links to the National Security Agency (NSA). Wall Street and the government pump/pour money into them, jingoistic with slogans like "nothing is beyond our reach". At what cost?

The series will certainly be slow because of the need to verify claims. Producing leaked documents is risky not just to sources but also to us (for reasons explained in the video above), so a degree of trust needs to be established. The evidence isn't hearsay/word of mouth (strictly verbal) as people inside "the system" saw it firsthand.

"The evidence isn't hearsay/word of mouth (strictly verbal) as people inside "the system" saw it firsthand."To get 'warmed up' a bit, we're going to share just one example that we have, alluding to election meddling activities. People from the inside can attest to that "and just to clarify about my connections to the NSA, I worked for New Knowledge previously [...] about 8 months," one such person told us. "That's where I met the guy that said that elastic search was all NSA. They tried to influence elections and caught..."

There are other examples of this kind.

"I was fired for questioning the ethics of the project," the person said. Other people have experienced similar things and in the future we might name some companies and "persons of interest".

The unfortunate thing is, even small and allegedly "secure" or "private" communication tools are being targeted. To give an example from half a year ago:

In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit investment firm started by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), recently poured more than $1.6 million into encrypted messaging platform Wickr, according to public disclosure records reviewed by Motherboard.

The $1.6 million was transferred before Amazon purchased the company, but highlights Wickr's continuing position as an end-to-end encrypted messaging app for government agencies. Beyond the In-Q-Tel investment, Wickr also has a specific product approved by the Department of Defense, and as Motherboard reported last month, a new $900,000 contract with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Jack Poulson, executive director of Tech Inquiry, first flagged the money transfer to Motherboard. As he pointed out, one of In-Q-Tel's Form 990s, which describes compensation paid to outside contractors, mentions a payment to a company called "W I." That company's address—1459 18th Street, San Francisco—is identical to that of Wickr Inc., according to other public corporate records.

Wickr is "small time" compared to what the CIA does with GAFAM/MAGMA. We'll get to that later this year. ⬆