Well, here’s confirmation of something we’ve all been suspecting for a while:
Our government is preparing to monitor every word Americans say on the internet—the speech of journalists, politicians, religious organizations, advocacy groups, and even private citizens. Should those conversations conflict with the government’s viewpoint about what is in the best interests of our country and her citizens, that speech will be silenced.
Research by The Federalist reveals our tax dollars are funding the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) technology that will allow the government to easily discover “problematic” speech and track Americans reading or partaking in such conversations.
Then, in partnership with Big Tech, Big Business, and media outlets, the government will ensure the speech is censored, under the guise of combatting “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
Originally used as a marketing tool for businesses to track discussions about their brands and products and to track competitors, the DOD and other federal agencies are now paying for-profit public relations and communications firms to convert their technology into tools for the government to monitor speech on the internet.
The areas of the internet the companies monitor differ somewhat, and each business offers its own unique AI and ML proprietary technology, but the underlying approach and goals remain identical: The technology under development will “mine” large portions of the internet and identify conversations deemed indicative of an emerging harmful narrative, to allow the government to track those “threats” and adopt countermeasures before the messages go viral.
One would hope, of course, that this gross breach of the First Amendment would not pass judicial muster, but in true fascist form, the State has simply farmed its bastardy out to the private sector, thus creating a Clinton-like “technicality” that creates plausible deniability.
I also have no faith — none — that the Supreme Court will act in the Constitution’s best interests. (Okay, maybe a couple of the conservative justices may throw a hissy fit, but let’s just say that I wouldn’t put money on a full court decision because the Communist bloc will never vote against the socialist government, and the chief justice is a craven little fart who seems to caste his vote according to the New York fucking Times editorial opinion.)
The two choices one faces in confronting this looming catastrophe are therefore:
- Try to go “underground” (e.g. using the Soviet-era samizdat method) and hope that one can go undetected by the feral ferrets, or
- Stand astride the barricades, shouting “FUCK YOU!” at the top of your voice, at every opportunity.
The first choice is probably doomed to failure, if The Federalist is to be believed, because these bastards have already the tools to do what they want to do. Remember, the power of samizdat lay on the fact that it used actual paper — hidden printing presses and such — to spread the counter-State “disinformation”. Consider that your Epson or Brother printer already records everything you print and can therefore point a finger right at you, if you are judged to have written doubleplusungood crimethink, and the paper option disappears pretty quickly.
Longtime Readers will know that I’m far more likely to take the second choice, simply because that’s the path I’ve always chosen. Yes, it’s most likely a stupid, futile gesture just like the Delta frat’s destruction of the Animal House town parade; but always remember that in such a situation the Niedermayer character — the State — won’t be the only one carrying live ammunition.
And as I’ve said several times in the past that when it comes to dying I’d prefer to die in my wife’s arms; but spitting and cursing at the State from the barricades surrounded by expended brass doesn’t hold much terror, either.
I’m speaking figuratively, of course, in the latter scenario — but unfortunately for the State apparatchiks, I took an oath when I became a U.S. citizen, and I take that oath really seriously. My allegiance is not to the State — in whatever flavor it comes — but to the ideals and promises contained in the Constitution.
And I don’t need the fucking lawyers on the Supreme Court to interpret them for me.
Your local desktop Brother Printer or even a networked laser printer records everything you print in the sense that it has to keep refilling the print buffer as it prints stuff out, but the but subsequent pages overwrite that area of memory. Small desktop Printers do not have enough to remember more than a few pages at a time. Big corporate printers using print servers have more memory but the same limitations. You might be able to recover last weeks printing but probably not.
GT3Ted is correct, but consider this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
Yes, but if you are stupid enough to use a printer that resides in an area that takes it’s security seriously enough to install than level of encoding on it’s corporate or government print servers then you deserve to get caught.
Using you work computer to setup your next Disney Trip, shop for the latest “must have”, update your social media, or surf for porn will get you fired quicker than almost anything else. That kind of stuff IS recorded on a network and easily tied back to your corporate computer and since all thats being saved is a long string of network addresses and locations it does not take a lot of space on the firewall storage drives. I can go back months and tell you every website you visited. when and for how long without being anywhere near your computer or cubicle.
But , of course, you won’t actually be able to visit any of those sites anyway because the firewall won’t let you and just for trying it will send you an email warning you that you don’t have the authority needed.
There is no such thing as privacy on the Corporate network.
You have to buy a pretty serious corporate level printer to get onboard permanent memory. The normal desktop printer uses RAM just like in your computer: it goes away when the power cycles and gets re-used when you print something new. The coloured dots identifier system is only found on *colour* printers (and I’m not sure that it is not only on colour *laser* printers. I assume that it might be possibly to identify a page as having been printed on a particular printer through examination of the output, but that is easily countered by printing the page, and copying that page on a different machine. Also a low resolution would help obfuscate things.
And if you are serious, use an old, old printer as a throw-away. I can buy a working 25 year old HP-6P printer around here (Ontario) for $25.00, a new cartridge for about the same. My present daily printer is about 22 years old!
I’m with you, Kim, and God bless you for taking oaths seriously. I swore mine, not once, not twice, but three times. Once for my Reserve AF officer commission, once for my Regular commission, and again when I resigned that for a Reserve commission again. I take it seriously, as you do, and Congresscritters who are ALSO former military like *spit* John McStain, REALLY crank my gears when they ignore it.
The older one gets, one naturally becomes more comfortable with their mortality (well, normal people, anyway). The intersection of my coming to terms with my mortality and the depredations of the Stasi state seems to be rushing upon me at breakneck speed.
Ditto.
Ditto!
they sure love 1984 as a playbook.
JQ
There IS a third possibility. The (D)elusionals love 1984 as a manual. Maybe Unintended Consequences could also be a manual.
Time to add printers to the list of things lost in tragic boating accidents.
So, fake printer ids will become a black market thing now. Yay.
Yet the Eff Bee Eye can’t find evidence of misbehavior on Hunter’s laptop in three years with both hands and a flashlight.
Or all those TS e-mails on Hillary’s server…
Borrowing and updating an idea from George Carlin, perhaps we can overwhelm the system by opening and closing every e-mail, web page comment with a “Fuck Biden”.
I think that once you’re on the list they’ll keep you on it. additional emails with Fuck Biden on it won’t do much. maybe “time to grease some commies” would have the desired affect. No officer, I mean grease them like a pan. cover them all over in grease or vaseline so they’re nice and shiny.
JQ
I still know my way around a mimeograph machine. Just need one of those, stencils, ink, and oh yeah, a typewriter (Underwood 5 if you please)… I was a minor god at our church in Guston, KY, since defunct, when I let it be known I could use these for the newsletter… Spit out tons of lesson plans at the Armor School at Ft Knox before retiring.
In my day, a good quill driver was worth his weight in gold.
IIRC, most of the Samizdat were typed on actual typewriters with a stack of carbon papers. Those guys must have had a _lot_ of time, but typewriters weren’t tightly controlled in the USSR like Xerox and Mimeograph machines.
Typewriters also produced a unique signature due to non-uniformity in the strikers, and the FBI has proven the authorship of death threats and ransom notes by identifying the typewriter used to type them. But they already had a suspect and a short list of typewriters he might have used. It takes time to compare two pieces of paper under the microscope to see if they came from the same typewriter. For a sufficiently important case, the FBI or Secret Service might pull together enough agents to check a sample against all the typewriters in an office or library, but I doubt the entire presumably-loyal Russian population would have been sufficient to check thousands of Samizdat against all the typewriters in the USSR.
I also guess that it’s only the top one or two pages in a stack of carbons that are usable for a forensic comparison of typewritten texts. With each layer, the text is fainter and blurrier, and the microscopic details don’t print through many layers of paper. Make sure they can’t trace the paper to you and burn the top 3 pages with their carbon papers, and I doubt you’ll ever be identified by matching typewriters.
However, you also have to be wary of the typewriter ribbon. You had to secure a relatively new ribbon when typing a classified document – but more typing solved this problem. The common type of ribbon was inked fabric, and when the cartridge reached the end, it just reversed the direction and used the ribbon again. Soon there were a dozen impressions on top of each other, and no one can untangle that.
OTOH, the highest quality typewriters of the 1970’s did not use inked fabric ribbons. (I assume Samizdat authors never had such expensive typewriters, nor would they want them, but they were sometimes found in a well-equipped American military office.) Instead, the ribbon was plastic tape with a layer of carbon on the paper side. A stroke of the key would cut out a letter from the carbon and stick it to the paper. The typing was crisp and utterly black, but the ribbon was one time use and you could read the text right off the used ribbon. So when typing anything classified, that kind of ribbon went into the classified safe between uses, and into the classified burn bag when used up – and two people had to sign for it each time.