The European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) Stop5G Project was launched in March 2022, and has one year to gather a million signatures from across Europe. If successful, the European Commission and Parliament will be obliged to address the proposals that the EU enact regulations to protect health, nature, the environment and privacy.
Safe Tech International hosted this webinar to help “get the word out” about this critical and potentially life-changing Appeal, and to ensure that the 27 European countries who collaborated on this effort, reach their goal of 1,000,000 signatures by March, 2023.
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!
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.
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.
If these “cross subsidies” were removed – or repaid – then 5G would not be profitable.
This shell game has given wireless companies enormous profits and has shown artificial losses for wired services. This has allowedtelecoms to classify wired networks as unprofitable, to justify eliminating the superior copper-wired service and to force us into entirely wireless service!
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.
Almost all these inaccurate and misleading financial practices were enabled by the FCC accounting rules.
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.
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.
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.
From: Mary Beth Brangan, Ecological Options Network, EON
Re: Draft Ordinance for “Small Cell” InstallationMany 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:
1) First of all, since the FCC order may be overturned in court, we want to remind you about the suggestion from the legal firm, BB&K, who represents many in the case. They recommend that no FCC standards be incorporated into local law per se, in case the FCC order is vacated. So please make anything in the ordinance that would force the county to accommodate the wireless industry’s placing powerful antennae in close proximity to the public, conditional, pending the resolution of the legal challenges.
2) In order to most effectively protect the considerable number of people who have been sickened already by exposure to RF/EMF and whose disability is beyond a mere mobility handicap, such as medical metal, vertigo, cardiac problems and the broader scope of EHS, please add the language:
“The ordinance shall comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.”
This broadens the legal application to include all the handicaps that ADA is intended to include. The ADA covers all disabilities that keep us from engaging in one or more major life activities. The County of San Diego attorneys recommend this language in order not to discriminate among disabilities. There are specific billing codes used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for exposure to RF radiation and other non-ionizing radiation which definitely establish legal recognition of these conditions: https://icd10coded.com/cm/W90/
Billable – 0XXA Exposure to radiofrequency, initial encounter
Billable – W90.0XXD Exposure to radiofrequency, subsequent encounter
Billable – W90.0XXS Exposure to radiofrequency, sequela
This applies to everybody who is covered under Medicare and Medicaid and proves that, despite wireless industry claims, the existence of disability from exposure to RF/EMF is officially recognized.
3) Because the legal challenges brought by the Cities, Mayors, Counties, etc. appear to be very strong against the FCC overreach, the wireless industry and the FCC have a plan B: the industry is proposing to use OTARD to offer licenses to private landowners to have the ‘small cell’ antennae on private property. Of course this would avoid the few legal rights established for the public: being informed about an application, having a public hearing and from setbacks and zoning requirements, etc.
We are very concerned that this will present incredible problems for those residents who may be damaged both from decreased property values (20% reduction or more) if in close proximity as well as from adverse health and environmental effects. What legal remedy would be available to a neighbor adversely affected by an OTARD-listed 5G antenna on a nearby property?
4) Stealth design for antenna facilities is also a concern. People need to be able to protect themselves against unwanted exposure – pregnant women, children, the sick and elderly particularly.
The County should mandate signage to warn that one is within, for instance, 50 ft. of an antenna. This could help pregnant women, who want to act based on the Kaiser Permanente study that showed women most exposed to RF/EMF had three times greater chance of miscarriage. These ‘small cells’ have already been measured to emit very high 4G radiation, even more dangerous because they are so much closer to people.
5) Please prohibit antennas in residential zones. “Least preferred” will be ignored.
6) Studies show that adverse effects increase dramatically within a 1500 ft radius of an antenna.
All sensitive areas should be protected by a 1500 ft. setback: health facilities, parks/recreation areas, eldercare facilities, hospitals, playgrounds/parks — all places where children (and other more vulnerable members of our population) spend many hours to play and sleep.
7) Since the height of the antennae might be on the level of a second or third story window, special provisions must be in place to avoid this. Story poles, street markings, and photos with superimposed proposed antennas should be used to help the public understand exactly where the ‘small cells’ would be installed.
8) Yearly measurement to establish emission levels must be demanded. A 2013 study found a large percentage of cell towers were emitting more radiation than even the FCC has in its guidelines. The FCC said back in 2013 that it didn’t have the manpower to do checks on the hundreds of thousands of antenna under its jurisdiction. Imagine now with the exponential increase in numbers of antenna how unlikely any monitoring of radiation levels is by the FCC. The County must mandate monitoring.
An independent expert chosen by the County should do the radio-frequency monitoring/measurements and
It should be paid for by the applicant.
Unannounced measurements should be done at peak use times to avoid carriers powering down and claiming averaged emissions
9) Please establish a Website so that:
The public can have as much advance notice as possible of applications and
The public can track permit applications and subsequent action. Marin Maps could be used.
The public can have a sign-up for an automatic email alert when an application is submitted.
Public can notice should be provided at the expense of the applicant and the public notification process made clear in the text of the ordinance itself.
10) The public should have the right to appeal any permit approval. A public hearing and community meeting about applications should be included (San Anselmo’s proposed ordinance has this.)
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?
The FCC should not be using taxpayer dollars for the benefit of wireless companies, pushing a new technology that has never been proven safe. In fact, wireless transmission of 2G, 3G and 4G have been shown in peer -reviewed studies to be unsafe. Already there are growing numbers of severely RF injured people who have no where to go to avoid these ubiquitous and increasing frequencies and whose lives are hell from painful reactions they can’t escape. The ADA law should protect them but is infrequently honored.
We know the “5G” installations will be using the prior generations of frequencies as well as millimeter wave technology. We also know that millimeter wave technology has been used as a ‘pain ray’ for crowd control by the military – not a reassuring fact.
The FCC’s wireless radiation exposure guidelines are based on research from the 1980’s, which was biased even then against admitting scientifically established harm and mandated only considering thermal effects, not the non-thermal biological effects documented in copious recent and older studies. And certainly, though there is inadequate study of the health effects from uses of millimeter wave tech, there is high concern from those scientists who have done preliminary studies that show the helical shape of the sweat ducts provide a perfect antenna for penetration of the Millimeter Waves (MW). There is concern that MWs will penetrate into the body much farther than expected.
At this time studies indicate that people are already experiencing adverse reproductive, health and mental effects from the additive effects of increasing exposure to RF/EMF from existing wireless devices and transmissions. Studies show 54% of young people born after 1989 suffer from chronic illness, defined as an illness with no cure within western medicine.
It is totally irresponsible to ignore the FCC’s own initiated but not concluded open dockets on reassessing the current exposure guidelines, particularly for children, the ill and elderly.
Allowing even more close proximity radiation from what the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer currently classifies as a Class 2B carcinogen, will result in massive public opposition and major legal challenges
Many elected public officials across the country are responding to constituents’ concerns and demanding proof of safety before allowing more of this complex, powerful radiation to pervade the environment and public areas. Attempts by the FCC to continue your overreach will result in rising enmity among the public against all wireless companies; why destroy your customer base?
The FCC proceeding mentions the “potential to bring enormous benefits” but there is no FCC analysis of the costs or cost effectiveness. And to truly determine the costs, the FCC will have to factor in major debilitation of the entire population of all living creatures (people, birds, insects, microbes, animals, plants) by intense, man-made radiation that our electrical-biological systems did not evolve within. The profit from wireless technologies is clearly not worth damaging the integrity of biological systems, which are all electrically based on unique frequencies that can be disrupted by the stronger man-made frequencies.
The National Toxicology Program (NTP) under the National Institutes of Health has completed the largest-ever animal study on cell phone radiation and cancer. The relationship between radiofrequency radiation and cancer is clearly established. Dr. John Bucher, Associate Director of the NTP and the lead researcher on this study confirms that the exposure of 1.5 W/Kg is lower than currently allowed for the public, including children, under FCC public safety limits. Testing on rats is standard in predicting human cancers.
The NTP results confirm that cell phone radiation exposure levels within the currently allowed safety limits are the “likely cause” of brain and heart cancers in these animals. Italy’s Ramazinni Institute’s study of rats showed an increase in the incidence of very rare highly malignant tumors—schwannomas of the heart— observed in male rats and reached statistical significance at the highest dose. These are the same types of rare and malignant tumors found to be increased in the US National Toxicology Program (NTP) $25 million animal study of cell phone radiation that used far higher RFR exposure levels. The tumors are also the same histotype as found to be increased in long term cell phone users.
Dr. Anthony Miller, Professor Emeritus with the University of Toronto, and adviser to the International Agency for Research on Cancer says, “Many scientists worldwide now believe that radiofrequency radiation should be elevated to a Class One human carcinogen, on the same list as Cigarettes, X-Rays, and Asbestos.”
Cancer is not the only health effect. Adverse health effects are seen particularly in children whose rates of autism, ADD, depression, anxiety, childhood obesity and asthma are skyrocketing. Kaiser Permanente studies showed clear relationship between in utero exposure to non-ionizing radiation with 3 times greater risk of miscarriage as well as increased risk of childhood obesity and asthma.
There is also a growing body of science showing the interaction between chemical pollution, excess heavy metals in the body and RF/EMF synergize to produce effects greater than each would have individually. See Dr. Ron Kostoff”s
EFFECTS OF TOXIC STIMULI COMBINATIONS ON DETERMINATION OF EXPOSURE LIMITS https://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/59719/EXPOSURE_LIMITS_SAFETY_FINAL(1).pdf
In-Utero Exposure to Magnetic Fields Associated with Increased Risk of Obesity in Childhood
Here are a few studies focused on neurological effects:
Kim, Ju Hwan, et al. “Long-term exposure to 835 MHz RF-EMF induces hyperactivity, autophagy and demyelination in the cortical neurons of mice.” Scientific Reports, vol. 7, no. 41129, 2017. Study found that RF-EMF exposure led to myelin sheath damage and hyperactivity-like behaviour in mice exposed to 835 MHz RF-EMF at a specific absorption rate (SAR) of 4.0 W/kg for 5 hours/day during 12 weeks. Demyelination was induced in cortical neurons following prolonged RF-EMF exposure and suggests a potential cause of neurological or neurobehavioural disorders.
Full Text: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5247706/pdf/srep41129.pdf
___________________
Redmayne M, Johansson O. Could myelin damage from radiofrequency electromagnetic field exposure help explain the functional impairment electrohypersensitivity? A review of the evidence. Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, vol. 17, no. 5, 2014, pp. 247-58.
Review of the evidence for an association between myelin integrity and exposure to low-intensity radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMFs)
“Overall, evidence from in vivo and in vitro and epidemiological studies suggests an association between RF-EMF exposure and either myelin deterioration or a direct impact on neuronal conduction, which may account for many electrohypersensitivity symptoms. The most vulnerable are likely to be those in utero through to at least mid-teen years, as well as ill and elderly individuals.”
Sage, C. and Burgio, E. (2017), Electromagnetic Fields, Pulsed Radiofrequency Radiation, and Epigenetics: How Wireless Technologies May Affect Childhood Development. Child Dev. doi:10.1111/cdev.12824
“New epigenetic studies are profiled in this review to account for some neurodevelopmental and neurobehavioral changes due to exposure to wireless technologies. Symptoms of retarded memory, learning, cognition, attention, and behavioral problems have been reported in numerous studies and are similarly manifested in autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorders, as a result of EMF and RFR exposures where both epigenetic drivers and genetic (DNA) damage are likely contributors. Technology benefits can be realized by adopting wired devices for education to avoid health risk and promote academic achievement.”
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
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.
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.
If these “cross subsidies” were removed – or repaid – then 5G would not be profitable.
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.
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.
Almost all these inaccurate and misleading financial practices were enabled by the FCC accounting rules.
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.
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
The coming 5G networks – what they are and why they might cause problems. Charlie Siler is joined by Vicki Sievers, Marin Outreach Coordinator, EMF Safety Network; Mary Beth Brangan, co-founder, Ecological Options Network; and Rachel Gaunt, executive coach and 5G activist
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)
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
Local governments push back on FCC for 5G towers Feb. 11th, 2019 | Patrick Dwire | Press Banner
Actions some cities are taking.
“Municipal and county governments, and now Congresswomen Anna Eshoo, are fighting back against the telecom industry’s interest in limiting local government’s permitting authority for additional cell towers and installation of 5G cell equipment.
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.”
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, MicrosoftMSFT +1.23% bought Adallom, a data privacy firm, for a reported $320 million; FacebookFB -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.
And so was the eventually suicidal poet Richard Brautigan, who may have realized that the AI bots he gushingly imagined ‘watching over us’ are very unlikely to be ‘machines of loving grace.’
“[O]nce we name and understand that this is an economic logic,’’ says Zuboff, ”then it’s our job, as citizens of democratic societies, to use our new understanding to summon the resources of our democratic institutions, to insist that our elected officials now go beyond naming to actually interrupt and outlaw these practices. Do we really want to be living in a society where the dominant form of capitalism is one that makes its money by trading in human futures? Because the consequence of that kind of business logic is on a direct collision course with democracy…’’
With awareness of surveillance capitalism’s ‘economic logic’ comes responsibility to take informed collective action.
Early 20th century philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff put it plainly: “To know and not to act, is not to know.”
