Fake Names on Facebook and the Surveillance State
File this one in the ever-burgeoning category of: how insane can legislators get?
Congress is now debating an update to the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Turns out it’s already a misdemeanor to “exceed authorized use” of a computer, but the DOJ wants to make it a felony.
Of course, what does “exceeds authorized use” mean? Well, it means, for instance, an employee sending emails to pals while he’s at the office—because his employer has a rule against that.
In other words, the feds want to back up employers’ rules and turn them into felonies. Splendid.
“Yeah, you remember Jack, don’t you? Used to work here? One day he made an online reservation at the Wynn in Vegas, and now he’s in jail. Life is tough, keep your eyes straight ahead and don’t mess with the boss.”
“And Betty? She ordered three lipsticks on a slow Thursday and she’s now upstate. I hear the shrinks got hold of her. Dosing her with an anti-psychotic. Hope she has three live brain cells to rub together when she gets out.”
Then there’s the Facebook issue. The company, originally bankrolled by a CIA front, has a rule against users setting up accounts with fake names. Does the DOJ want to go after Facebook users who break the rules?
The Surveillance State, aided by Facebook, wants to know who you are at all times. They want you to be your name and no other name.
It’s a technical issue, see? It’s a lot easier to spy on you if you’re Mary Jones all the time when you’re online. As opposed to Mary Jones and Dragon Lady and HiHat and Ben Franklin and The Beast From 40 Fathoms…
The joke is, most people lead lives that are fictional already. The NSA and its allied partners spy on those lives.
Here’s the same thing from another angle. John Smith, citizen, follows the straight and narrow. He, like every other John Smith, is a target of the Surveillance State. He hasn’t committed any crimes. He isn’t a threat. But that doesn’t matter. He’s there. He’s a unit. Therefore, he’s on the radar.
But John Smith is a fiction. He’s a convenient, solid, average, normal persona/role in the stage play called Society cooked up by the Real John Smith, who is hiding. Inside himself. You rarely see him. Once in a blue moon, he pokes his head out and says something off-key. Then he retreats behind his facade.
There are millions and John Smiths, and the NSA is spying on all of them. The fake ones. The fictions.
What if every John Smith invented six or seven new personae?
“Sir, are you pretending to be somebody else?”
“Yes, and the pretending is now more intense. It’s ongoing.”
“But you see, sir, that introduces confusion, when we spy on you.”
“I used to believe I was a John Smith android forever. Wow, was I kidding myself. I used to go to one church service on Sunday. Now I go to three different churches. And I’m also an atheist.”
“Excuse me?”
“I campaigned for Democrats only. Now I campaign for Democrats, Republican, Libertarians, Communists, and Anarchists. Of course I don’t vote for anyone. I’m exploring monarchy as well. I think the divine right of kings could make a comeback.”
“But who do you actually worship?”
“The NSA, of course. And the CIA and DIA, Interpol, MI-5, the old GRU, and the Chinese Secret Service.”
“Sir, we have you on the record talking about eight different wives.”
“Only eight? I must have misplaced a couple.”
Some people will assume I mean they should actually marry a dozen women. Those people are the literalists. They always go for the lowest-common-denominator reading. They think if they have a little fun, do a little acting, a little pretending, it might infect their minds. It might take them over. They’re the John Smiths. They live inside walls of fear.
Reality is one fiction among a limitless number of possible realities.
The basic problem with Reality is that’s it’s only one.
Any baby can teach you that. Play with the kid in just one way, over and over, and he’ll develop an itch he can’t scratch. He’ll cry and go off on you. Play with him a hundred different ways and he’ll gurgle and laugh and wriggle and decide coming into this life was a good idea after all.
Every kid needs an uncle and an aunt and a few cousins and a brother or sister. Parents tend to repeat themselves. Their repertoire wears thin. The kid needs a boost, a change, a different face, a new joke, a shift of rhythm.
People who can make you laugh take you out. They take you out of the one, forever, exhausting IS. Reality is the fiction of one and only one IS.
There are two types of laughs. One blows up reality. The other, which is the android laugh, comes across like tranquilized mule with a hernia.
The NSA is super-serious about the one persona that is supposed to be the super-serious you. That’s what they’re spying on.
The internet thrives on anonymity. This causes a lot of nonsense and crap to surface. That’s the price we pay. But the Surveillance State doesn’t want anonymity. It wants “just the facts.”
It wants to scare people into being their android-selves and nothing more, nothing else. It wants The One Reality. If they can make that happen, they win. Afterward, it really doesn’t matter what people do.
I remember watching the very first episode of the original CSI. At the murder scene, the techs were going over an apartment, collecting evidence, bagging it. Then we were back in the lab. More analysis.
I thought, are they kidding? They believe people want to watch this stuff?
Well, people did. They wanted to watch the lab, the fine-tuning of hair, blood, DNA. The categorization, the tracking, the accessing of the data banks.
The first cousin to Surveillance.
You want to talk about operant conditioning? The whole CSI franchise is one giant psyop. For more than a decade. Getting people used to ubiquitous looking and spying and tracking, on behalf of justice.
That’s what NSA wants to be. That’s how NSA wants the public to view it.
Super-serious-android-NSA spying on super-serious-android-us. In the one and only Reality. That’s the op.
So…step back and calculate our chances if we continue to live in the one and only Reality and try to fight them from that position.
Of course, entering and inventing other realities takes imagination. That’s the catch. It always was.
Ever since the first elite priest class on Earth cooked up some crazy spiritual Ponzi scheme to suck in the rubes, imagination has been the nemesis of the State.
Paraphrasing Grouch Marx: “In the 1930s, you could make a movie in which a woman fell down a flight of stairs, and people would laugh. But eventually it couldn’t be a movie. It had to be a real woman falling down a real flight of stairs.”
People are trained like dogs to appreciate and accept only one IS. The “real” IS. They convince themselves this is a good idea. These people are unconscious allies of the Surveillance State.
What’s that? People are into all sorts of multiple virtual realities? Yes, for a while, but they keep coming back to believing in The One and Only Just-the-Facts Reality. If they actually wanted new realities, they’d be cooking them up themselves, they wouldn’t be dreaming inside somebody else’s.
In light of all of the above, the universe of propaganda becomes more vivid. Its aim is reduction. Reduction of the way we see ourselves. We’re given bound images of human beings as citizens living in a walled fortress, where our every thought and action needs to be boiled down and made transparent, so our leaders can make threat assessments.
This is the fiction we’re being fed. Over and over.
“It’s not asking too much, is it? It’s too hard to seek out and find terrorists. We need to collect everything on everybody, and then with suitable algorithms established, we can select out the dangerous ones.
“In fact, it’s better if we consider everybody dangerous and track and limit their movements. That works.”
Yes, the NSA is looking at you. They’re looking at you as if you’re an android. Well, naturally. They’re androids. Wherever they look, they see androids.
The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon Rappoport was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com