This legal case against the FCC offers us an unparalleled chance of stopping 5G in its tracks.

The Irregulators, a team of senior telecom experts, are exposing in court the illegal accounting scheme to replace wired networks with wireless and make us pay for it!

This key legal strategy against the FCC needs our support!

PLEASE DONATE at this link to help continue their fight on our behalf.  It can help prevent the roll out of 5G. They need to be back in court July 22!

For more information, visit https://irregulators.net/

The Background

1.  Verizon, AT&T and other companies have illegally been using the construction budgets of the copper wireline-based (landlines) state telecommunications utilities to build out their wireless networks.
2. Local phone customers have been charged inflated rates that have paid to help telecom companies build their networks – so that rate payers have been unknowingly subsidizing wireless services at the detriment of wired networks.  Landlines offer better sound quality and more reliability in emergencies such as fires and storms and are essential service for elders.  Landlines do not have the health and cyber risks of wireless communications.
   
3. If these “cross subsidies” were removed – or repaid – then 5G would not be profitable.
4. This shell game has given wireless companies enormous profits and has shown artificial losses for wired services. This has allowed telecoms to classify wired networks as unprofitable, to justify eliminating the superior copper-wired service and to force us into entirely wireless service!
5. The telecoms have already charged rate payers (at thousands of dollars/line over two decades), to develop a fiber optic service, but didn’t deliver it to us as promised. Now they are attempting to charge us again for it but only giving us wireless service.
6. Almost all these inaccurate and misleading financial practices were enabled by the FCC accounting rules.
7. Exposing these “cross subsidies” and requiring the FCC to demand that telecom carriers fix them to accurately reflect the actual costs associated with each respective technology, could be a game changer.
8. To add insult to injury, the companies have dumped billions per state of their ‘corporate operations expenses’ that should never have been charged. This is the executive pay, lobbyists, lawyers, golf tournaments and the corporate jets — and worse, these are the lawyers, lobbyists that are working to force 5G on us– we’re paying them extra to harm us!

The Irregulators: An independent consortium of highly regarded senior telecom experts, analysts, forensic auditors, and lawyers was formed to make the public aware of these manipulative accounting practices and take the FCC to task for allowing them at our expense. The group’s goal is to stop the practice of these subsidies and make wireless companies pay for the true cost of wireless, including the WIRED fiber optic networks which they rely on and have already been charging customers for, for two decades.

On June 3rd, 2019, the IRREGULATORS had a major victory when the FCC had the opportunity to but did not challenge their right to take this case and present it in the DC court, starting July 22nd, 2019. With this huge “win” behind them, now the group urgently needs financial support to take the case to trial and hold the FCC accountable for oversight of the telecom industry in an unbiased manner and secure our rights as rate payers.

PLEASE DONATE at this link to help continue their fight on our behalf.  It may help to prevent, or at least, slow the roll out of 5G. For more information, visit https://irregulators.net/

FREE SUMMER READING:  Click here for a free PDF of “The Book of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal & Free the Net”, the 3rd in a trilogy that started in 1998. The second book (and author) was featured on Emmy nominated Bill Moyer’s  PBS special, “The Net at Risk”, in 2006 the first national broadcast program on Net Neutrality. The author and book were also featured in Pulitzer Prize winner, David Cay Johnston’s “The Fine Print”, in 2012.

July 8, 2019 — By Mary Beth Brangan

Action Alert!

On July 9, the Marin County Board of Supervisors plans to consider an urgency ordinance and new policy regarding the installation of fifth-generation cellular wireless technology, commonly called 5G, in locations throughout unincorporated Marin within the public roads.

The Board has set a 1:30 p.m. session in the Marin County Civic Center Board chamber, Suite 330, in San Rafael. Residents will be able to attend, watch the webcast live or archived, or tune in on Channel 27 for Comcast and AT&T U-Verse subscribers. Read more

The draft has some strengths, but needs much work.  Here are comments made by EON suggesting changes and additions.

• Suggestions for Ordinance

From: Mary Beth Brangan, Ecological Options Network, EON

Re: Draft Ordinance for “Small Cell” Installation  Many thanks to the sub-committee for this draft ordinance. I appreciate your work to protect your authority as elected officials and your citizens from the FCC overreach.  

Section 704 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, that prohibits environmental (and claimed health effects, too) from being used to prevent the placement of any RF antenna is unjust and should be repealed.

You are aware of the amassed peer-reviewed science showing adverse health and environmental impacts from RF/EMF.  

I say this because, in a just system, to accommodate willingly the demand by the wireless industry to densify the RF/MMW antennae and therefore the RF/EMF exposure (classified as a 2B carcinogen) would be considered willful endangerment of the public. This assault on our right to health is an outrage.

 Here are a few recommendations for your consideration:

Another Terrible Proposal from the FCC:

Using the OTARD rule for 5G Wireless Radiation

EON’s Comments to the FCC Proposed Rule 19-71 regarding the proposal to use the OTARD (over-the-air reception devices) license (intended for ham radio, satellite dishes, etc.) to put 5G infrastructure on private property to avoid any legal oversight.

EON strongly opposes the proposed amendments to the OTARD rule. It should not be changed to allow wireless companies to put their 5G antennas on private homes in an attempt to avoid legal oversight.

Threats to security, safety and privacy already abound from exponentially increasing use of wireless technologies. What legal remedy would be available to a neighbor adversely affected by a 5G antenna on a nearby property? What legal protections would a property owner have against property devaluation? What responsibility does the FCC have to inform a prospective property owner considering placing a 5G antenna on their property about potential liability for harming neighbors? What responsibility does a property owner have to inform neighbors about the presence of a 5G antenna on their property?

Court rules Berkeley may require warnings
that cell phone use risks radiation exposure  

San Francisco Chronicle, 7-2- 2019

Congratulations and immense thanks to all who worked tirelessly for this national precedent-setting ruling, including Prof. Lawrence Lessig, Ellie Marks, Joel Moscowitz, Lloyd Morgan, the Berkeley City Council and many others!

From Environmental Health Trust: “A landmark Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the City of Berkeley’s cell phone right to know ordinance rejecting industries argument that the ordinance violates the first amendment. This ordinance requires retailers to inform consumers that cell phones emit radiation and that “if you carry or use your phone in a pants or shirt pocket or tucked into a bra when the phone is ON and connected to a wireless network, you may exceed the federal guidelines for exposure to RF radiation.” Read more

Exposing the FCC’s illegal scheme to replace wired networks

with wireless and make us pay for it!

The Irregulators Legal Case against the FCC offers us an unparalleled chance of stopping 5G in its tracks.

They need your support!

The Background

1.  Verizon, AT&T and other companies have been using the construction budgets of the copper wireline- based state telecommunications utilities to build out their wireless networks.
2. Local phone customers have been charged inflated rates that have paid to help telecom companies build their networks – so that rate payers have been unknowingly subsidizing wireless services at the detriment of wired networks.
3. If these “cross subsidies” were removed – or repaid – then 5G would not be profitable.
4. This shell game has given wireless companies enormous profits and has shown artificial losses for wired services. This has allowed telecoms to classify wired networks as unprofitable, to justify eliminating the superior copper-wired service and to force us into entirely wireless service.
5. The telecoms have already charged rate payers (at thousands of dollars/line over two decades), to develop a fiber optic service, but didn’t deliver it to us as promised. Now they are attempting to charge us again for it but only giving us wireless service.
6. Almost all these inaccurate and misleading financial practices were enabled by the FCC accounting rules.
7. Exposing these “cross subsidies” and requiring the FCC to demand that telecom carriers fix them to accurately reflect the actual costs associated with each respective technology, could be a game changer.
8. To add insult to injury, the companies have dumped billions per state of their ‘corporate operations expenses’ that should never have been charged. This is the executive pay, lobbyists, lawyers, golf tournaments and the corporate jets — and worse, these are the lawyers, lobbyists that are working to force 5G on us– we’re paying them extra to harm us!

The Irregulators: An independent consortium of highly regarded senior telecom experts, analysts, forensic auditors, and lawyers was formed to make the public aware of these manipulative accounting practices and take the FCC to task for allowing them at our expense. The group’s goal is to stop the practice of these subsidies and make wireless companies pay for the true cost of wireless, including the WIRED fiber optic networks which they rely on and have already been charging customers for, for two decades. On June 3rd, 2019, the IRREGULATORS had a major victory when the FCC had the opportunity to but did not challenge their right to take this case and present it in the DC court, starting July 22nd, 2019. With this huge “win” behind them, now the group urgently needs financial support to take the case to trial and hold the FCC accountable for oversight of the telecom industry in an unbiased manner and secure our rights as rate payers.

PLEASE DONATE at this link to help continue their fight on our behalf.  It may help to prevent, or at least, slow the roll out of 5G. For more information, visit https://irregulators.net/

FREE SUMMER READING:  Click here for a free PDF of “The Book of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal & Free the Net”, the 3rd in a trilogy that started in 1998. The second book (and author) was featured on Emmy nominated Bill Moyer’s  PBS special, “The Net at Risk”, in 2006 the first national broadcast program on Net Neutrality. The author and book were also featured in Pulitzer Prize winner, David Cay Johnston’s “The Fine Print”, in 2012.

Could A New Cell Tower Hurt You Financially? CBS13 Investigates

Stop the Telecom Rip-Off –

Take Back the Fiber Optic Cable Infrastructure We’ve Already Paid For!

Breaking as we post:

Controlling 5G: A Course in Obstacles – “Every person deserves to be informed about what’s happening“

Head of NOAA says 5G deployment could set weather forecasts back 40 years. The wireless industry denies it. – Government agencies are at an impasse on how to proceed.

‘5G ties uncovered’: RT America’s Rick Sanchez on what’s behind NY Times hit piece

5G likely to mess with weather forecasts, but FCC auctions spectrum anyway – FCC auctions 24GHz spectrum despite likely interference with weather satellites.

Utilities Warn FCC About Impact of 6 GHz Wi-Fi Effort – Say sharing proposal is untested and threatens mission critical communications

Trump’s FCC Chair Accused of Betraying Public Interest Mandate by Backing T-Mobile/Sprint Mega-Merger   ‘He “seems to take smug pleasure in being a blatant telecom shill.”‘

FCC Sued in Breaking Telecom Accounting Scandal (see below)

Reports and Videos on the Growing Public Resistance to 5G:

Keep Our Children Safe! 5G Crisis Day of Action May 15

Report by Vicki Sievers, Event Co-ordinator for the May 15 5G Crisis Day of Action in  San Rafael, CA

AMERICANS FOR RESPONSIBLE TECHNOLOGY initiated a National Day of Action to focus attention on the health crisis threatening the well-being of our children, ourselves and the environment.

5G-small-cell technology gravely alarms scientists, physicians, privacy / surveillance experts and ordinary citizens.

Dr. Martin Pall, PhD: “5G is vastly more dangerous than what we already have . . . all the industry claims about safety are completely and utterly wrong.”

Dr. Ronald Kostoff, PhD: “. . . a major contributing factor to the onset of myriad serious diseases . . .”

Dr. Ronald Powell, PhD: “It would irradiate everyone, including those most vulnerable to harm from radio-frequency radiation: pregnant women, unborn children, young children, teenagers, men of reproductive age, the elderly, the disabled and the chronically ill.”

Despite the rain, San Rafael’s Downtown Plaza Rally focused on keeping our children safe from 5G harm was attended by several dozen people from Marin, S.F., and as far away as Lake County.

Participants carried signs, called to passersby, listened to five compelling speakers (bios attached), gathered copies of informational brochures, cards and articles, and shared concerns and actions with others. Some won copies of the films Generation Zapped and Take Back Your Power, or The Non-Tinfoil Guide To EMFs and The Wireless Elephant in the Room, two of many informative books published in the last several years about the dangers of wireless radiation.

Marin IJ reporter Adrian Rodriguez attended the entire event, and his story appeared the next day (p.3). https://www.marinij.com/2019/05/15/marin-activists-rally-against-5g/  Rodriguez has covered several telecommunications-related meetings in central Marin this past year.  While he reports proceedings competently, for “journalistic balance” he chooses to quote industry (and captured entities such as the CDC) without quoting any expert voices from the volumes of science demonstrating evidence of 2G-3G-4G harm or expert warnings about 5G.

Several readers educated about non-ionizing radiofrequency radiation (RF) have written to Rodriguez or the IJ editor about this particular story. These communiques have been pointed and thoughtfully crafted, but perhaps the most attention-getting I’ve seen is one from Ellie Marks, Director of the California Brain Tumor Association and one of our rally speakers. Download PDF

See also: We need to know more on health effects of 5G

Bonnie McMurray, left, and Christine Tulis, both of San Anselmo, rally against the implementation of 5G cellular networks during a protest on Fourth Street in San Rafael Tuesday. They were among more than three dozen people who turned out to listen to anti-5g speakers and display signs at San Rafael City Plaza. (Alan Dep/Marin Independent Journal)

What about nationwide action on May 15? UC Berkeley’s Dr. Joel Moskowitz lists rallies across the nation on his website, and will continue to update. Note the preponderance of California activity!

5G Day of Action Explained: Because we are facing a 5G crisis, Americans For Responsible Technology is planning a nationwide Day of Action on May 15th, calling on wireless companies (Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile) and their sub-contractors (Crown Castle, ExteNet Systems and other antenna installers) to suspend the deployment of small cell wireless antennas in residential neighborhoods until such time as chronic, low level exposure to 5G radio-frequency (RF) microwave radiation can be proven completely safe. While there are many troubling aspects to the wireless radiation problem, this event concentrates on the impact of chronic radiation exposure on children.

Children are uniquely vulnerable to environmental exposures, particularly those that can affect the developing brain and increase the risk of cancer.

. Americans For Responsible Technology mission: “We are committed to promoting new technologies that protect the health, safety, security, privacy and property values of our fellow Americans.” See full statement and more here: https://www.americansforresponsibletech.org/ San Rafael rally organized by affiliate organization EMF Safety Network and local residents. FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT 5G: http://emfsafetynetwork.org/ https://whatis5g.info/ https://ehtrust.org/key-issues/cell-phoneswireless/5g-networks-iot-scientific-overview-human-health-risks/

Groups and locations nationwide can be found here:  https://5gcrisis.com/

5 G The Doctors Speak Out

Video by Ginger Souders-Mason

May 15, 2019 a rally to stop 5G technology was held in San Rafael, CA. Three Marin physicians came forward to present reasons this technology should never be deployed.

A Researcher Speaks Out

The March 25th Tucson, AZ Town Hall Meeting featured electromagnetic researcher Magda Havas, PhD. Here is her presentation and some questions from the audience.

A Call to Action on the 5G Crisis

Rally Address by Mary Beth Brangan, Ecological Options Network, EON

In order to most effectively change the situation for us and our children as described by our Doctor speakers, we need to look at the context within which all these health challenges are happening.

Transnational capital managers have decided that the next push for the global economy will be through the wonders of dense microwave and millimeter wave technology.  They see dollar signs multiplying wildly at all the potential applications – driverless cars, the Internet of Things, distance surgery, augmented reality and virtual reality.  We, on the other hand, see the potential disruption of the bio-electrical basis of all forms of life.

With the planned 20,000 5G satellites from space, all the planet will be covered by man-made radiation.  There will be no place in the atmosphere surrounding the Earth and on the Earth, to escape it.

In addition, NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ,   NASA and the Navy, have complained that predicting the weather will be negatively impacted by the 5G frequencies being auctioned off by the FCC. Their concerns have been rejected.  The rain today illustrates the importance of that point – because we KNEW it was coming, we could prepare for it. The use of the disputed 5G frequencies for communications, would mask the ones currently used for forecasting water vapor, rainfall, ice or clouds, effectively removing important information in the weather models so we’d be less able to proactively prepare for weather.  With extreme weather events, a loss of prediction accuracy can mean more lives lost.

A few days ago, the New York Times followed by the Wall Street Journal published a rabid attack on those of us who are concerned about the health and safety threats from 5G, accusing Russia of convincing us of the dangers through their TV show Russia Today or RT.  For economic warfare, they claim, Putin is the one who is stoking our fears of 5G! If you think 5g is a bad idea, you’re a Russian shill.

The reality is that the science showing damaging effects of wireless radiofrequency radiation is becoming even stronger and many more people know about it.  To dismiss those scientists who have concerns about this matter as a minority group, as the New York Times does, does a grave disservice to science and to our children.

The truth is that the NYT is in a joint venture with Verizon for what they are calling a 5G Journalism Lab that was announced in January of this year.  Verizon and other telecoms also regularly pay the NYT for full-page color ads.  The article slandering those concerned about 5G didn’t acknowledge any of that blatant conflict of interest, or that of its board of directors or that the major shareholder of the NYT, Carlos Slim, made his multi billions through telecommunications.  Be on the alert for other articles like this spreading disinformation and lies.

Then there’s the telecoms denial about the health effects, though they’ve been in possession of thousands of studies showing serious harm since the 1970’s and before.  Historically, science in this field in the U.S. has been dominated by funding from the military and the telecom sector. Therefore, the established “Safety guidelines” primarily take into account the needs of the military and telecom industry, and their representatives sit on the various committees that establish what is and what is not accepted science. This is despite the fact that the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer decided in 2011 that EMF is “possibly carcinogenic” to humans.  Many independent scientists now believe that classification should be changed to probably carcinogenic or definitely carcinogenic.

The big telecoms also are fleecing us customers financially.  Beginning in the 1990’s they’ve been allowed to raise rates to specifically provide us with the faster, more energy efficient, more healthy, more secure, more fire resistant fiber optic cable directly into the business, home and school.

Telephone ratepayers have paid what forensic accountants estimate as $2,700.00 per line for this build out.  However, as you know, they have not provided that superior shielded cable option, and are now in the process of forcing us all to be exposed to wireless radiation continuously, in our homes, businesses, schools, day care centers, health care facilities, etc. They also intend to eliminate the important copper wire. We would have no control over our own home environment and would be constantly barraged by wireless radiation.

Graphic – Angel Garcia/Bloomberg News

Public Resistance Grows

But there’s growing pushback – both here in the U.S. and globally.

There’s a groundswell of opposition, including halting the 5G rollout in Sydney, Australia.  The Minister of Health in Brussels rejected 5G, stating she refused to treat her citizens as guinea pigs.   Strong protests and calls for a moratorium against 5G are happening in Switzerland, Germany, Florence and parts of Rome, as well as in Canada and beyond.

Today, here in the U.S. there are at least thirty demonstrations in fourteen states highlighting the crisis of 5G, organized by Americans for Responsible Technology.

There are multiple bills working to protect the public in Massachusetts, and many efforts underway in other states and counties.

Our California Representative Anna Eshoo’s bill, HR 530 would void the FCC’s draconian new rules.  Her bill has 46 co-sponsors but needs Republican support.

Please call Republican congressional reps in other areas and states and ask them to co-sponsor this important legislation that protects the authority of states, cities and counties to make land use decisions and manage the public right of way.

Six of the largest ten Cities in the U.S., along with multiple Counties, Mayors, Tribes and the NRDC have all filed lawsuits challenging the FCC overreach.  They are making their way through the courts in San Francisco but probably will take some time to resolve.

Finally, a group of retired regulators, lawyers, forensic accountants and telecom analysts have also filed a lawsuit that challenges the accounting scandal that allowed telecoms to charge us all $2,700 per line for a relatively healthy fiber optic system and then didn’t deliver it.

This suit by the wonderfully named, Irregulators, needs your support.  Please see the handouts that tell you how to help them help us fight against the FCC and telecom overreach.

We must come together to fight this!  There are many ways to help.  Get involved – get the information and spread the word.

Community Leaders Speak Out

Video by Ginger Souders-Mason

On May 15, 2019 a rally was held on the Plaza in San Rafael, CA organized by community leaders opposed to the rush to roll out 5G technology without first having safety studies. Two of those leaders came to the Community Media Center to further voice their concerns.

A Researcher Speaks Out

The March 25th Tucson, AZ Town Hall Meeting featured electromagnetic researcher Magda Havas, PhD. Here is her presentation and some questions from the audience.

FCC Sued in Breaking Telecom Accounting Scandal

A crucial lawsuit is being filed by a group called the Irregulators against the telecom-captured Federal Communications Commission, the FCC.

The crux of the suit is this: Telecoms have charged rate-payers across the country hundreds of billions of dollars to build what was called, nearly two decades ago, an ‘Information Super Highway’ based on a fiber-optic network.

Not only have the telecoms not delivered the already-paid-for fiber optic network to the inside of the premises, which they now owe the public, but they are currently planning to rip out the existing copper wire based landline networks, thus forcing customers into wireless service as their only choice. Copper wire sound quality is better than wireless, it’s less hackable, is energy efficient and often operates during emergencies and disasters when cell coverage fails.

As you know, wireless radiation is an extreme health and environmental threat, has inferior sound quality, is vulnerable to hacking, is an energy hog and is much less reliable in our increasingly prevalent natural disasters caused by climate change such as storms and fires.

But since it is cheaper for the telecoms to operate with higher profit margins, wireless is being forced upon all of us, though we’ve all paid already for the much superior fiber optic cable and should retain our trustworthy copper wires.

The forensic accounting done by this amazing group of principled current and retired regulators, lawyers and telecom expert analysts proves that all of us have already paid an estimated $2,700.00 extra per line for this missing fiber optic service!  (In our case, because we pay for business lines, that means that we’ve already paid $5,400 for fiber optic to the router that we still haven’t got.)  Plus our bills here in California have gone up astronomically as a result of this shady accounting.

The Irregulators already have won in NJ and NY courts and got $350- 500 million dollar settlements that force Verizon to install fiber optic cable and maintain copper wires in under served areas.  A positive court ruling could extend that type of settlement throughout the country.  They need to raise $50,000 asap to continue the case in the Washington, DC Circuit Court.

To recoup what we’ve posted before: Telecoms are currently pushing the build-out of a wireless ‘5G’ network.  This means hundreds of thousands of  wireless ‘small’ cell powerful microwave and millimeter wave antennas, placed along streets near homes, schools, playgrounds, apartments, businesses etc.  Telecoms want to place them every 500 ft. or so, depending on the terrain.

Though these 4G/5G microwave antennae must use fiber optic cable to transmit the signal to the antennae, the plan is to make the final delivery to the inside of the premises by wirelessly blasting microwaves and millimeter waves into homes and businesses from only  feet away.  We’d be bathed in chaotic signals from various frequencies using different technologies blasted at us from a short distance 24/7.  Ultimately, beam-forming technologies, combined with facial recognition, will assure everyone is always surveilled.

As we’ve explained in prior posts, in their rush for new markets from the densification of radiation from these harmful antennas, the bullying telecoms and the FCC are trying to force preemption of states, tribes, counties and cities legal rights to protect their residents’ health, safety and economy against this onslaught.

Together with the lawsuits already filed by the cities, counties, tribes, and NRDC challenging these preemption rules, the Irregulators legal challenge has the potential to decisively push back against the overreach by the telecoms and the FCC.  The Irregulators suit could also prevent the disastrous attempt to remove all copper wire service as well.

from the article below: “…we believe that this proceeding, combined with what we have uncovered, could be used to help cities and states take back the infrastructure that they paid for..”

EON is the Fiscal Sponsor for this extremely important project.

This suit – when seen in conjunction with the litigation currently undertaken by cities across the country challenging the attempted usurpation of their authority – constitutes a much-needed public interest pushback against telecom and FCC overreach.

The Irregulators are fighting for the interests of us all. Please help them help us fight the FCC power grab!

Thank you

Mary Beth Brangan   Jim Heddle

Co-Directors of EON

If you want your contribution to be tax deductible, you must

send a check to EON, memoed for the Irregulators, P.O. Box 1047, Bolinas, CA  94924

(only for donations over $100)

• DONATE: http://irregulators.org/donate 

DOCS & DETAILS: http://irregulators.org/irregulatorsvsfcc/

The IRREGULATORS TAKE A BLOW TORCH TO THE FCC’S ACCOUNTING FREEZE

by Bruce Kushnick – a plaintiff

The IRREGULATORS are going to court on May 20th, 2019 to appeal a recent FCC decision that tries to bury one of the largest accounting scandals in American history. It is critical that the FCC be required to admit to the issues and then deal with the ramifications.

The FCC has allowed the telecoms to engage in accounting shenanigans and this impacts every current FCC proceeding, pricing at the state level for basic service and ultimately all communications services in America. It determines who gets high speed broadband, has led in part to the Digital Divide, controls what price we pay, and has been a major driver for the lack of serious competition for local transmission facilities and services.

We found a ‘structural flaw’ in every FCC decision. Appealing this case provides a way to attack virtually every current and past FCC proceeding that has given the store away to the telecoms, from Net Neutrality to copper retirement and 5G.

This case could also open up many state decisions, especially those created with the help of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which has created model legislation – written by AT&T and Verizon, then handed to their politician members to push through. We note that the FCC’s 5G regulations are based on an ALEC bill.

The FCC’s cost accounting rules were “frozen” to mimic the year 2000. The rules now assign the majority of all expenses to “intrastate” and basically force state commissions to raise basic rates, even though a huge portion of these expenses are related to activity that has little or nothing to do with basic residential landline service.

The FCC has purposefully refused to audit or investigate how their rules impacted basic local rates, or drove federal decisions in other cases. They have never even admitted the harm to consumers and competition.

The IRREGULATORS filed in this bizarre proceeding and exposed the whole charade. But the FCC once again refused to acknowledge the problem and extended the ‘freeze’ for 6 more years in December, 2018.

We have standing to take this appeal and the expertise in the legal, regulatory, and financial analysis areas. Our approach and data could make this case stick and if it does it will blow up the FCC’s entire collection of decisions and current proceedings using the structural flaw.

At the same time, we believe that this proceeding, combined with what we have uncovered, could be used to help cities and states take back the infrastructure that they paid for, including solving the Digital Divide and a new path for bringing back competition.

http://irregulators.org/who-we-are/ The IRREGULATORS is an independent, expert Telecom Team comprised of senior telecom experts, analysts, forensic auditors, and lawyers who are former senior staffers from the FCC, state advocate and Attorneys General Office experts and lawyers, as well as former telco consultants. Members of the group have been working together, in different configurations, since 1999.

Be sure to include this important information in all May 15 events for the national day action against 5G! (use pdf below for handouts)

Download one page pdf handout on Irregulators lawsuit

 

TAKE ACTION AND ACTIONS TAKEN

From WhatIs5G.info

PLEASE SHARE THIS POST WIDELY

 

THIS PREEMPTION BILL IN MARYLAND IS MOVING FAST AND IS SCHEDULED TO BE HEARD THURSDAY.  Emails, phone calls, comments, etc. are welcome from all…even those also living outside of Maryland.
Those within driving distance, please try to attend the hearing in Annapolis this Thursday. We need to fill the House – standing room only! Bring family, friends, colleagues, children, babies, animals….(Well…perhaps not animals!) But let’s fill the room to over-flowing! 
https://whatis5g.info/infrastructure/2019/02/urgent-call-to-action-bad-preemption-bill-in-md-just-introduced/?fbclid=IwAR3zrk9O0cYIQ7XAWtlDcEB14oQ9mvtyGNFAo27ShTb-K4fUR7BohsoNyYY

Three good resources for communities facing 4g/5g infiltration…(That’s all of us!!) 

1. Sample ordinance from Americans for Responsible Technology. This ordinance is in full compliance with the September FCC order but still manages to be somewhat protective of the public. 
https://www.telecompowergrab.org/tool-kit.html (Scroll down on page for the Sample Ordinance)

2. Environmental Health Trust has put together a number of relatively protective ordinances from around the country. The link also includes some recommendations to communities. 
https://ehtrust.org/usa-city-ordinances-to-limit-and-control-wireless-facilities-small-cells-in-rights-of-ways/?fbclid=IwAR1qM08HXNAFT-FlFSFeYu5mP_1mCOOFDKQtYd7nj1T3aQaFZ6__TKDyb2U

3. Summary of the major issues surrounding the deployment of 4g/5g “small cells”. May be used for crafting comments, testimony, letters to city council members, elected reps, or just to learn more. 
https://whatis5g.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Summary-of-5g-issues-for-activists.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3YlNxCZKn-wbmjNmFSOJkFs5P6F0BS80i30k2YurWnmDEOjZrD-ehH3es
Public safety WILL prevail over corporate greed!!

 

And please consider encouraging your elected reps to support or cosponsor HR 530! 

 
Congresswomen Eshoo and Speier Introduce HR 530 to Block FCC Cell Tower Preemption  Jan. 22nd, 2019 | Physicians for Safe Technology 
 “In a courageous move to preserve local government control, Federal bill HR 530 was introduced January 14, 2019 in the House of Representatives by California Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, to invalidate the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) September 26, 2018 ruling to accelerate the deployment of 5G small cells throughout the U.S.  Congresswoman Jackie Speier has co-sponsored the bill.  Representative Eshoo stated the FCC had ‘failed to listen to reasonable input from communities across the country, cowered to industry interests, and failed to put the public interests first.’” In a January 15, 2019 press statement Eshoo added,  ‘Having served in local government for a decade on the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, I understand and respect the important role that state and local governments play in protecting the welfare of their residents,’”
https://mdsafetech.org/2019/01/22/congresswomen-eshoo-and-speier-introduce-hr-530-to-block-fcc-cell-tower-preemption

Here is a link to a letter template from the National League of Cities which you can download and modify. 
https://www.nlc.org/sites/default/files/users/user121/HR%20530%20Letter.docx

Local governments push back on FCC for 5G towers  Feb. 11th, 2019 | Patrick Dwire | Press Banner

Actions some cities are taking. 

Last week the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors adopted a resolution of support for House Resolution 530, introduced by Eshoo, D-Atherton, aimed at overturning Federal Communications Commission regulations that curtail the local control of permitting new cell towers and wireless transmitters.”

Image: Big Brother Monitoring. Master Tux, Creative Commons.

The Panopticon Perplex – Big Other, 5G and the Telecom ‘Coup from Above’

Waking up Watched and Behaviorally Modified in Surveillance Society

By James Heddle – EON
[ Earlier versions of this article were posted on Reader Supported News and Columbus Free Press ]

Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
Every single day
Every word you say
I’ll be watching
  The Police

Digital Domination

Back in the 1780’s British social theorist Jeremy Bentham and his entrepreneur brother came up with a design for what they thought would be the perfect prison. 

It consisted of a multi-storied outer ring of brightly lit prison cells, each with a floor-to-ceiling window facing a central tower covered with opaque glass. 

The Bentham bros figured that if the inmates believed they were being surveilled twenty-four-seven, they would behave themselves – whether or not there were actually any guards in the tower.  Effortless social control.  Jeremy called it a panopticon.

Benthams’ design was never implemented architecturally in Britain, but a corrupt dictatorship in Cuba in the 1920’s built the Presidio Modelo, a close approximation now long abandoned.

In his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, French philosopher Michel Foucault used the concept as a metaphor for what he called ‘disciplinary societies’ in which the citizen is the target of ‘asymmetrical surveillance’ – “He is seen, but does not see; he is an object of information, never a subject of communication,” Foucault wrote.

Now two recent books are alerting us to the fact that we are on the brink of becoming inmates actually living in what amounts to a digitally enabled planetary panopticon.

Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, by investigative journalist Yasha Levine, shows the seamless connections between the military and corporate development of the internet – including so-called encryption applications.

Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Harvard Business School emerita professor Shoshana Zuboff, shows in depth how the internet and its data mining and monetization offshoots have morphed into an unprecedented system of societal behavioral modification for corporate profit. 

Taken together these books are a wake-up call that we must quickly develop new concepts, understandings and modes of analysis and resistance if we are to avoid being digitally enslaved, yet so unaware of our enslavement that we are, as Professor Zuboff puts it, “singing in our chains.”

Two Stems from the Same Root – the Military and Commercial Internet

Levine’s book takes us through his process of discovery that the origins of what we now know as the ‘world wide web’ lie in the U.S. military’s quest for effective counterinsurgency methods in the Viet Nam war.   The Internet, he shows, was born from the desire for domination and population control and has never really lost that essential character.

He debunks the popular twin internet creation myths that its origins lie (1) in the military’s quest for a non-decapitatable command structure to survive a nuclear war and (2) the liberatory fantasies of the likes of Stewart Brand and “radical young computer engineers and playful hackers” of the San Francisco Bay Area’s “acid-drenched counterculture.”

The latter was a idealistic, seductive and naive vision, embraced by many at the time (including my young self) and expressed by the subsiquently suicidal poet Richard Brautigan:

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

The reality was far darker than we knew.

“Since the start of the personal computer and Internet revolution,” Levine writes, “we’ve been told again and again that we are in the grips of a liberating technology, a tool that decentralizes power, topples entrenched bureaucracies, and brings more democracy and equality to the world. Personal computers and information networks were supposed to be the new frontier of freedom – a techno-utopia where authoritarian and repressive structures lost their power, and where the creation of a better world was still possible. And all that we, global citizens, had to do for this new and better world to flower and bloom was to get out of the way and let Internet companies innovate and the market work its magic. This narrative has been planted deep into our culture’s collective subconscious and holds a powerful sway over the way we view the Internet today.”

“But,” on the basis of his extensive research he says, “spend time looking at the nitty-gritty business details of the Internet and the story gets darker, less optimistic.  If the Internet is truly such a revolutionary break from the past, why are companies like Google in bed with the cops and spies?”

From ARPA to DARPA to Tor’s ‘Back Doors’

A key revelation of Levine’s book is that the US military not only fathered the Internet, but that it also sired the encryption system, beloved of privacy advocates, known as Tor.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency was created in the Viet Nam era and quickly applied technology to American wartime aims.  By the late 60’s it launched ARPANET.  By the 1990’s ARPA and morphed into DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and ARPANET had evolved into the Internet. 

“Everything was being hooked up to the Internet,” writes Levine, “banks, phones, power plants, universities, military bases, corporations, and foreign governments, both hostile and friendly.” But an open Internet, with every communication traceable to its source is not a safe place for spies operating under deep cover to communicate.  So a DARPA team of mathematicians and geeks came up with a solution they called ‘the onion router’ or Tor.

The Navy set up a parallel system of servers that sat on top of the Internet.  Covert traffic got redirected into this parallel network and bounced around from one Tor shell node to another so that when it finally surfaced in the Internet nobody could tell where it had come from.

But developers realized that if the system was used only by military and intelligence agencies, people would soon come to suspect any anonymized messages were “coming from the CIA.” 

“To truly hide spies and soldiers,” Levine explains, “Tor needed to distance itself from its Pentagon roots and include as many different users as possible. Activists, students, corporate researchers, soccer moms, journalists, drug dealers, hackers, child pornographers, agents of foreign intelligence services, terrorists.  Tor was like a public square – the bigger and more diverse the group assembled there, the better the spies could hide in the crowd.”

So in 2004, Roger Dingledine, one of the system’s key developers spun the onion routing project – still funded by DARPA – into a nonprofit corporation called the Tor Project.

Soon the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a Silicon Valley privacy advocacy group claiming to be against government surveillance programs gave the Tor Project nearly a quarter of a million dollars in bridging funding until it found other sponsors.  The EFF even hosted the Tor website so that users would be reassured by a message from EFF: “Your traffic is safer when you use Tor.”

The EFF has a strange history for a privacy advocacy outfit.  “In 1994,” Levine reports, “EFF worked with the FBI to pass the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which required all telecommunications companies to build their equipment so that it could be wiretapped by the FBI.”

But EFF cover made Tor into an effective Trojan Horse operation trusted even by the likes of such arch surveillance resistors as Glen Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden. 

What better way for the surveillance state to spy on its citizens than to supply them with a system they believe to by surveillance-proof and clears the way for surveillance capitalism?

Understanding the Unprecedented

Professor Zuboff ‘s Surveillance Capitalism offers several sobering definitions of surveillance capitalism.  One of them is, “An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above; an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.” 

In a highly readable, felicitously phrased, brilliantly argued and engaging 525 pages (not counting notes and sources), she traces the evolution of what can only be described as a diabolical system of incipient corporate domination.

Because this system is unprecedented in human history, we have no analytical concepts or descriptive terms for its components.  What we cannot name, we cannot understand or resist.  Faced with the unprecedented, Zuboff explains, we tend to respond in ways that may have worked in the past, but are inadequate and inappropriate to the new situation. 

‘Surveillance capitalism,’ is a term first coined by John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney.   “Surveillance capitalism,” she explains, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.  Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence,’ and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later.  Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of market place for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets.  Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations for many companies are eager to lay bets on our future behavior.“

The competitive pressures of this new market have driven prediction product developers to discover that “the most predictive behavioral data come from intervening in the state of play in order to nudge, coax, tune and herd behavior toward profitable outcomes.”  The aim of the game is now to “not only know our behavior, but to shape our behavior at scale.”  This is a new phase of capitalism in which the ‘means of production’ become subordinate to new ‘means of behavioral modification.’

This has given birth to a new species of power that Zuboff calls instrumentalism.  Instead of automating production, it aims to automate us.

“Instrumentarian power,” she says, “knows and shapes human behavior toward others’ ends.  Instead of armaments and armies, it works its will through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of ‘smart’ networked devices, things and spaces.”

The vision is to create a synthetic, electronically mediated environment  which is a kind of grotesquely distorted mirror image of the natural ecology in which ‘everything is connected to everything else.’  It envisions an Internet of Things (IOT) in which your refrigerator, your car, your sex toys, your ‘wearable’ heart monitor and your GPS-enabled running shoes and more will all be united into a meta-entity, linked to everyone else’s in what Zuboff terms the Big Other.

Compliance or Defiance…That is the question.

As Zuboff’s work shows, this instrumentarian system of power already surrounds us to an alarming degree, like the proverbial frog in the soon to be boiling water. 

When Google, quickly followed by others, first ventured into these unmapped cyber domains, they were like an invasive species with no predators, pioneers in an unregulated Wild West.  Now that we know what they’re up to, is it too late to hop out of the pot and turn off the heat? 

Zuboff doesn’t think so.  She refuses to buy the corporate myth of technological inevitability. She invites us to ‘be the friction’ which will slow and eventually block this slide into digital domination.

“I say it is not OK to have our best instincts for connection, empathy, and information exploited by a draconian quid pro quo that holds these goods hostage to the pervasive strip search of our lives.  It is not OK for every move, emotion, utterance and desire to be catalogued, manipulated and then used to herd us through the future tense for the sake of someone else’s profit.”

It is a question, she says, “of who decides who decides.”  Democracy itself is what’s at stake.

“If democracy is to be replenished in the coming decades,” she concludes, “it is up to us to rekindle the sense of outrage and loss over what is being taken from us….Let there be a digital future, but let it be a human future first.”

Interviewed on Democracy Now, Zuboff laid out how she thinks we can get there. “We have work to do. But this is work that can be done. Our elected officials can be educated. If they don’t want to get educated, we can elect different people. This is stuff that we can fix. I do believe that.”

She went on to explain, “You know, even into the 20th century, we still had courts, judges who were making decisions that completely sided with the industrialists, whom we have now renamed as “robber barons.” In time, all of these actions are reinterpreted as history shakes out, and democracy finally finds its way through to the light. And that’s what I believe—that’s the process that we’re in now. This thing is 20 years old. We’re at the beginning, not the end. We name it, we tame it. That’s the work now, to reignite our democracy, wake it up for this work of the 21st century.”

The Internet; ’The Blob that Engulfs the World’  vs. “We Name It, We Tame It.”

Yes, there is push-back, and more informed resistance is vitally needed before its too late.  Google employees forced the cancellation of a Pentagon contract to develop artificial intelligence (AI) for lethal purposes.  Public opposition just blocked a planned Amazon headquarters in New York. The UK and New Zealand have both labeled Facebook a ‘digital gangster.’  “Facebook is an out-of-control train wreck that is destroying democracy and must be brought under control,” begins a recent Guardian article. “Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalized ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major social media platforms we use every day,” declared British MP Damian Collins.

In the short time since Part 1 of this article was posted (no credit claimed) Zuboff’s empowering message has begun to reach ever a widening audience through two in depth interviews on Democracy Now, a review by Sam Biddle and 90-minute conversation with Naomi Klein on The Intercept and other outlets.

The ‘naming’ part of Dr. Zuboff’s agenda seems to be going well, but a number of factors and actors suggest that the ‘taming’ part may be easier said than done, requiring a mass informed national and, in fact, global movement.

One of the mind-twisting ironies showing the enormity of the challenge is a recent 3-part investigative series by Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal reporting on the Zuboff-Klein conversation event’s sponsor.  They document that The Intercept’s founder and owner, reclusive, SecondLife-addicted, Dalai Lama devotee,  e-bay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, presides over a global network of ‘politically strategic NGOs and media outlets’ – stretching from Zimbabwe, the Philippines and Syria to Ukraine – that advocate for privacy, transparency and journalistic freedom, while simultaneously interfacing with the U.S. surveillance state, supporting ‘regime change’ plots around the world, and supporting the recent rebranding of Neo-con conman Bill Kristol. 

Say the authors, “Behind the image he has cultivated of himself as a ‘progressive philanthropreneur,’ Omidyar has wielded his media empire to advance the Washington consensus in strategic hotspots around the globe.” 

Whom can you trust?

Yasha Levine, the author of Surveillance Valley: The Military History of the Internet – reviewed in Part ! – told Rubinstein & Blumenthal:

“This kind of multi-level approach … is very much inline with Omidyar’s vision for how to use technology to manage society — and make money in the process.  Central to most of his investments is the use of user profiling and behavioral tracking to manage and run all areas of modern life: journalism, transportation, banking and finance, and government administration. To him it’s not just about running a single service, but integrating things together to give technocrats, business executives and government officials a God’s-eye view of the world — to manage and control society more efficiently.”

As Levine spells it out in his book,

“Today the Internet surrounds us. It mediates modern life. We read books on the Internet: bank, shop and play games on the internet. We talk on the phone, attend college, find jobs, flirt, work, listen to music, view movies and make dentist appointments, and get psychological counseling on the Internet. Air conditioners, phones, watches, pet food dispensers, baby monitors, cars, refrigerators, televisions, light bulbs – they all connect to the internet, too. The world’ poorest places may lack plumbing and electricity, but they, sure enough, have access to the Internet.  The Internet is like a giant, unseen blob that engulfs the modern world.”

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt but it bluntly; “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about… Your digital identity will live forever… because there’s no delete button.”

Naomi Klein, in the conversation with Shoshana Zuboff cited above, suggests that surveillance capitalism and its enabling infrastructures and institutions can be seen as the final phase of the Enclosure Movement, begun in Britain two centuries ago.  A series of ‘Enclosure Acts’ passed by a Parliament controlled by land owners, declared that the forests and fields that had historically been the shared ‘commons’ of the peasantry for farming, grazing, wood-gathering and raw materials, would now be ‘enclosed,’ or privatized for elite profit.  Peasants, farmers, artisans, craftspeople were forcibly driven off their ancestral lands. Their villages burned, their livelihoods destroyed, they were driven into the cities to work in the ’satanic mills’ of newly rising industrial capitalism. It was efficient population control for the profit of the few. Dispossession without representation.  Fast forward to the present ‘Capitalocine,’ when the ‘enclosure’ of the entire planet by profit-seeking, elite forces is at hand.

Zuboff points in her book to the “immense power of a company such as Facebook that routinely manipulates user behavior at scale, using means that are indecipherable and therefor incontestable.” (Just click that ‘agree’ box and become a data slave.) It is, she says, an ‘economics of action beyond the reach of established law and social norms.”  She warns, “They know everything about us. We know nothing about them.” That, in a nutshell, is the essential anti-democratic power asymmetry we face.

“The Behavioral Futures Market” – Commodification of Mass Behavior

The ability of data-gathering to not only track and predict mass behavior, but also modify it to suit commercial profit-making purposes, has created what Zuboff calls ’the behavioral futures market’ – trade in mass behavior outcomes using ‘prediction products.’  If you could modify the weather, investing in ‘weather futures’ would be risk-free.  If you can drive the public’s behavior, investment in ‘behavioral futures’ likewise becomes a sure bet. And if you can drive commercial outcomes, why not use the same methods to drive political outcomes, too.  Enter Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct British outfit now being investigated for its role in the Brexit and U.S. elections, and its growing field of competitors.

The U.S. 2016 election marked the shift from mass digital behavioral modification for commercial purposes to digital behavior-mod for political purposes – from dispossession of our private data to disenfranchisement of informed democratic choice.

Now comes 5G – the Evil Eye in the Sky – being imposed by a federal agency charged with protecting the public interest.

The Telecom ‘Coup from Above’ – The ‘Final Phase of Enclosure?’

The current Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is the very model of a ‘captured regulatory agency.’  

Presently headed by former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai, the FCC has been aggressively issuing rules and rulings that blatantly advance the interests of the telecom industry at the expense of public safety and democratic choice by attempting to pre-empt local, county and state decision-making authority. Ending net neutrality, promoting the Internet of Things (IoT) and the mass build-out of 5G wireless system is at the top of its ’surveillance-industrial-complex’ agenda.

On February 11, 2019 , President Trump signed an Executive Order supporting the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the technology that makes surveillance capitalism possible.

A February 12, 2019 article on Health Impact News was headlined “20,000 Satellites for 5G to be Launched Sending Focused Beams of Intense Microwave Radiation Over Entire Earth.” It reported that the companies with the biggest plans to deploy 5G satellites in the coming months are:

• SpaceX: 12,000 satellites
• OneWeb: 4,560 satellites
• Boeing: 2,956 satellites
• Spire Global: 972 satellites

This is in addition to a global telecom industry push to deploy ground-based, so-called ’small cell’ 5G transmitters every few yards in communities and neighborhoods in the U.S. and around the world, making the surveillance capitalism infrastructure even more powerful and ubiquitous. As the ground-based infrastructure build-out becomes more visible to more people, awareness of its risks to democracy and public health is growing nationally and internationally, and so is public push-back.

Katherine Kheel, editor of WhatIs5g.info, puts the issues clearly,

Our data is fodder for artificial intelligence. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is completely dependent on data. The more granular the data, the more capable the AI. 

Our data is most easily harvested with wireless connections as we can be tracked 24/7 – wherever we go and whatever we do. 

Wireless networks (smart phones and such) stalk us enabling 24/7 tracking us and harvesting our data. (Data is even collected while people are asleep!!) IoT vehicles and “driverless cars” will gather yet more data wirelessly. 

Wired networks such as fiber-to-the-home are stationary so not nearly as desirable to industry as wireless. With wired Internet and Telecommunications technology, industry and government miss out on much of our day. 

4g/5g “small cells” are needed to feed AI more data. 

In fact, THE AGGRESSIVE PUSH FOR 4G/5G TOWERS – THE SO-CALLED “RACE TO 5G” – IS DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY A DESIRE TO CAPTURE AS MUCH OF OUR DATA AS CONCEIVABLY POSSIBLE FOR AI AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES SUCH AS TARGETED MARKETING, GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE, LAW ENFORCEMENT, ETC.

With Trump now calling for “continued American leadership in AI” and claiming we need AI for “maintaining the economic and national security of the United States”, this recent Executive Order is bad news for us all, and will likely be used to support the FCC, Congress, States and industry’s preemption program.

And ‘privacy’ is only part of the issue. As a recent Senate hearing and relentless grilling of telecom executives by U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CN) makes clear, the biological effects of 5g have never been proven safe. Yet the global roll-out continues without bio-impact testing; a global biological experiment on un-informed, mis-informed and non-consenting subjects.

Proven Bio-Effects of WiFi
According to Arthur Firstenberg, author of The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life, “The telecommunications industry has suppressed damaging evidence about its technology since at least 1927.” 

By 1971, US Naval Officer Zori Glazer, working for the Office of Naval Research, was able to assemble an extensive bibliography of over 100 known biological impacts from exposure to RF radiation in over 16 different categories.

Current independent, peer reviewed scientific research leaves no doubt that the impact of EMR on all biological systems – including humans, wildlife, insects and vegetation – need to be taken seriously before its too late.

Blanketing the planet in 24/7 microwave radiation will mean no human or other lifeforms will be able to escape its biological effects. There will be no place to hide, no refuge from the electro-magnetic storm.

Yet the alternative – a global backbone of fiber-optic cable, combined with vastly reduced, only essential mobile WiFi – is cheaper, safer and more secure.  Any guesses as to why this option is it not being more widely pursued?

Amazon’s Core Business is Surveillance
The recent brouhaha surrounding the National Enquirer’s attempt to blackmail Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has further exposed the extent to which the surveillance business model permeates firms at the top of U.S. companies. 

Writes the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, “the company that has made Bezos the planet’s richest human being, is a critical partner for the U.S. Government in building an ever-more invasive, militarized and sprawling surveillance state. Indeed, one of the largest components of Amazon’s business, and thus one of the most important sources of Bezos’ vast wealth and power, is working with the Pentagon and the NSA to empower the U.S. Government with more potent and more sophisticated weapons, including surveillance weapons.”

Globalized Surveillance Capitalism

The U.S. may deserve both credit and blame for creating surveillance capitalisms backbone, but US entities of the cyber-security-industrial complex no longer dominate the field. Every nation and their public-private start-up sectors that can are rushing to compete.  A major incubator of this boom is Israel and its intelligence service Mossad, especially Unit 8200.  

As a 2016 Forbes article Inside Israel’s Secret Startup Machine reports, Unit 8200 has a highly efficient way of identifying and developing teenagers who demonstrate the required set of aptitudes. One alumnus of the system reports, “Unit 8200 can take the top 1% of the 1% of the country.” 

Forbes estimates that “the unit has, at any given time, 5,000 people assigned to it, all mandated to deploy the latest technology, often in life-or-death situations, with surprisingly little guidance.”

Teams of teenage recruits are rigorously trained, then assigned tough tasks, told to ’think out of the box,’ and given the freedom to work with little supervision. After a few years, those staffers are replaced with young newcomers and move on to become entrepreneurs, launching startups in the private sector.

Says one Unit 8200 alumnus, “Just from my generation, there are more than 100 guys from the unit that I personally knew who built startups and sold them for a lot of money.”  According to Forbes, “more than 1,000 companies have been founded by 8200 alumni, from Waze to Check Point to Mirabilis, the parent company of ICQ. Tech giants like to gobble up 8200 firms like hors d’oeuvres. In the last three years alone, Microsoft MSFT +1.23% bought Adallom, a data privacy firm, for a reported $320 million; Facebook FB -0.88% bought mobile analytics company Onavo for some $150 million; and PayPal grabbed CyActive, which predicts hacks, for an estimated $60 million.

Some Unit 8200 veterans also founded the ‘Private Mossads,’ so-called ‘influence management’ outfits like Black Cube, Psy-Group and their lesser-known relatives.  They focus on using social media, fake news websites and artificial on-line cyber-personae or ‘avatars,’ to shape public perception and mass behavior, a service for which there is growing global demand.  As one company motto puts it, “Perception is reality.”  

It’s a Wild West-like lawless international environment. The explosion of this domain has outrun public awareness, much less oversight, understanding and regulation.  As one startup founder observes, “I’m coming from the side of the influencer, who really understands how we can make use of online platforms. There needs to be more regulation, and it’s up to our legislators, in each and every country. What have U.S. legislators done since they learned, more than two years ago, about the potential of these new capabilities? They have the power to move the needle from A to B. Nothing substantial has been done, as far as I know.”

Says another startup founder, “This is the challenge of our time. Everything is fake. It’s unbelievable.”  Adds another,  “In order to understand where we are, we have to understand where we started. What started as a noble cause ended up as fake news. What you have today is a flooded market, with people that will, basically, do anything.”

Its no secret that the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) expends major efforts to influence U.S. politics. With Israel being a key hub of the global ‘influence industry,’ and a major source of highly-trained ‘influencers,’ how unlikely is it that some of their companies, along with operatives from other countries  – and competing factions within the U.S. – will be providing their services in the upcoming 2020 election?

New analysis by the pro-democracy tech firm Guardians.ai finds that, “we can conclusively state that a large group of suspicious accounts that were active in one of the largest influence operations of the 2018 cycle is now engaged in sustained and ongoing activity for the 2020 cycle.”

From fiction to fact – The logo of Peter Thiel’s surveillance company Palantir

From Surveillance Capitalism to Surveillance Philanthropy –
Planetir and the World Food Program  

Palantir is a company co-founded by Republican billionaire and Trump supporter Peter Thiel with start-up funds supplied by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital division.  Its software has helped the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) identify and deport immigrants.

Tolkin fans will remember ‘palantir’ as the evil orb used by the dark lord Sauron to surveille, manipulate and dominate Middle Earth.  Nothing like putting your agenda right out there, hidden in plain sight.

The U.K.’s signals intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) – a key hub in the ‘Five Eyes’ multi-nation surveillance network in which the United States, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada all participate – enthused about Palantir as “having been funded not only by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital branch, but furthermore created ‘through [an] iterative collaboration between Palantir computer scientists and analysts from various intelligence agencies over the course of nearly three years.’

Recently the California-based software firm and the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) announced a five-year $45 million partnership.   According to the news outlet IRIN, a humanitarian data analyst commented, “WFP is jumping headlong into something they don’t understand, without thinking through the consequences, and the U.N. has put no frameworks in place to regulate it.”

Privacy International commented, “The recipients of WFP aid are already in extremely vulnerable situations; they should not be put at additional risk of harm or exploitation.” One Privacy International researcher called the deal “breathtaking, and terrifying.”

A system that not only tracks and predicts, but also modifies and steers individual and mass behavior for private profit as well as elite social and political control constitutes an intolerable technocratic tyranny at odds with human rights and even survival.

In what it calls “an experiment to test its cyberdefence capabilities,” Russia has announced plans to disconnect from the World Wide Web. 

Putin has reportedly called the internet a “CIA project”.  From the foregoing, it seems he is at least partly right.