How Donald Trump’s America Is Being Hacked by White Nationalism

BY JUAN COLE

The opening weeks of the second Trump administration have produced daily headlines that read — no, this is not hyperbole! — like science fiction. The spectacle of a South African tech billionaire and his cronies staging a twenty-first-century cybercoup with the acquiescence of an aging lunatic of a president beggars belief. Elon Musk has given vast powers to young, even teenaged plenipotentiaries like Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, 19, who had earlier been employed by Musk’s brain-chip project Neuralink and has now been made a special adviser to the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology and the Department of Homeland Security. The Trumpian lists of forbidden words and concepts have reminded some observers of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

High Technology and Squalor.

Insights into our present crisis, however, are also offered by science fiction novels that, over the decades, imagined artificial intelligence, brain-Internet interfacing, the decline of the state in the face of tech corporations, and the development of largescale digital systems and ways they might be hacked. Such works coalesced into the cyberpunk school of sci-fi writing in the 1980s and 1990s. Heirs to that tradition like novelist William Gibson may now be seen as the reluctant prophets of — yes! — Elon Musk’s invention of a new Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE for the second Trump era.

Cyberpunk has especially resonated in South Africa, its themes explored by authors like Lauren Beukes, whose 2008 novel Moxyland is set in a futuristic Cape Town that labors “under a tyrannical and vigilant government and media.” As she explained, “I’m always writing from that perspective of growing up under what was a utopia for me and a repressive violent state that destroyed lives and futures for Black people when the racist government wasn’t actively murdering them.” Cyberpunk themes have also deeply shaped video games like Canadian-South African director Neill Blomkamp’s Off the Grid, in which Mega Corporations are pitted against one another in a contest for dominance.

The racist tinge to Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s ongoing hacking of the government should also bring to mind Blomkamp’s 2009 “first contact” movie, District 9, which highlighted the determination of White nationalists to cannibalize the resources of populations who had been marginalized precisely to make them vulnerable enough to be looted. With its simultaneous depiction of high-tech wonders and social squalor and its foregrounding of corporate rather than state power, District 9 also has significant cyberpunk themes.

ELON MUSK, THE CE0 OF THREE PRIVATE CORPORATIONS, HAS GAINED THE ABILITY TO OVERSEE GOVERNMENT FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS

On January 31st, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) noted, leaks from the Treasury Department revealed that high-ranking government employees were mounting resistance to ad hoc DOGE head Elon Musk’s demands that his team of young hackers be given entry to the financial-transaction systems managed by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). That’s the unit that makes virtually all government payments, control of which amounts to control of the government. It soon became clear that DOGE operatives had indeed been given authorization to access BFS platforms. As a result, Elon Musk, the CE0 of three private corporations, has gained the ability to oversee government financial transactions (with no questions asked about how he might use the information obtained to enrich himself or harm competitors).

By mid-February it was clear that one of Musk’s acolytes, 25-year-old Marko Elez, had for some time obtained overwrite privileges at the BFS — power, that is, to override the entire federal budget, if he (and Musk) wished to. Elez briefly felt he had to resign due to past messages on social media boasting of his racism, including his advocacy for “Indian hate.” His cause was nevertheless adopted by Vice President JD Vance (whose wife Usha is, ironically enough, from India). For right-wing movements, whipping up hatred of racialized minorities is crucial to getting into and staying in power, and disciplining Elez would have undermined Vance’s project — in comparison to which his wife’s honor is apparently of little interest to him. You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that Elez was soon reinstated.

Overwrite Privileges.

Musk maintains that he’s reducing government waste by capturing the Treasury Department infrastructure and arbitrarily firing large numbers of government workers. He essentially abolished by fiat the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main government distributor of aid globally, which he bizarrely characterized as a “criminal” organization and the employees of which he called “worms.” He abruptly cut off its field agents in dangerous areas like the Congolese capital Kinshasha from their email access and funds to escape a potentially hazardous situation.

Nor was that agency the only object of his ire. In his view, vast swathes of the government are unnecessary and wasteful. No matter that his own companies have fed from the public trough to the tune of nearly $21 billion dollars since 2008 and his DOGE team has been enormously wasteful and dangerous. For example, they firedhundreds of personnel at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration who oversee the country’s nuclear arsenal. When the Gen Z DOGE ninjas finally thought better of it, they couldn’t immediately rehire the experts since they didn’t have their personal emails and had already abruptly closed their government accounts.

As though intent on causing serial catastrophes for the United States, Trump and his crew then began firing employees of the Federal Aviation Agency without whom air traffic controllers say they cannot do their work. They appear to have done keyword searches for “probationary” employees of the agency whom they let go en masse, unaware that the term has a technical meaning in government. A newly promoted FAA employee with a high level of irreplaceable technical knowledge would still be “probationary” for one month.

And here’s the reality of our governmental moment in the second age of Donald Trump: rather than cutting governmental fat, the president and DOGE are excising sinew and bone, amputating limbs from key public agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After all, every $100 million of funding for NIH-supported research (often at universities) generates some 76 patents. In turn, such breakthroughs can generate as much as $600 million in continuing research and development funds. Cuts to overhead at universities hosting NIH research threaten to bankrupt the country’s network of unparalleled research universities, setting the U.S. farther behind in a race to innovate in which China has already taken the lead. The DOGE cowboys may tell themselves that private industry will take up the slack, but (bluntly put) that’s a libertarian fairy tale.

Cyber Capital.

The tech-bro oligarchy’s rise to power is intimately connected with profound changes in America’s political economy. This country has always had a capitalist system, but it has taken radically different forms over time. Each of those forms has had a strong racial dimension. Today, cyber capital seems in the process of becoming dominant, driven by the Internet and large language models (misnamed “artificial intelligence”). The digital economy now represents 12% of gross domestic product (GDP), more than industry, and from 2017 to 2021 it grew seven times as fast as the rest of the economy. It is also giving a fillip to American trade. In 2022, government data indicated that “while U.S. real GDP grew by 1.9 percent, the U.S. digital economy real value added grew by 6.3 percent driven primarily by growth in software and telecommunication services.”

This development was foreseen by cyberpunk authors like Gibson whose 1984 novel Neuromancer is soon to be an Apple TV serial. His hacker hero, Henry Dorsett Case, takes on the fabulously wealthy Tessier-Ashpool SA, a clan-corporation with its own space station fighting the attempt of an artificial intelligence entity, Wintermute, to become autonomous. An amoral gun-for-hire and adrenaline junkie, Case gradually discovers that he’s actually working for that AI entity, which could be seen as a symbol for oppressed, non-autonomous workers or minorities, and is coerced into helping it. (The Cyberpunk genre often depicts a dystopian world in which the dispossessed, ranging from Haitians to immigrant Mongolians, form defiant subcultures never quite penetrated by White corporate digital power.)

The Ultimate in White Privilege.

It has been argued that digital capitalism is intricately interlinked with whiteness as an ideology, serving to perpetuate a racial hierarchy that evolved over the past four centuries. Such a historical interconnection between whiteness and technology functioned as both a tool and a rationale for European colonial expansion. The technology-driven ability to ransack the rest of the world for its wealth turbocharged Europe and North America in the early modern and modern periods. In some instances, as was true with slavery in the United States, Black workers were simply kidnapped and made to work for no pay. The total value of the enslaved in this country on the eve of the Civil War has been estimated at as much as $3.7 billion, among the country’s biggest capital assets at the time.

Elsewhere, instead of outright slavery, an external system of oppressive colonialism was established to extract value from the colonial world for the metropole. South Africa was a classic example of how a White settler-colonial capitalist class from the Netherlands profited from the utter exploitation of Black labor. Consider it no accident that Elon Musk came from South Africa or that such a system, even after it was ended, gave birth to the “PayPal Mafia” of “libertarian billionaires” that has now taken over the U.S government (though they sold PayPal to Ebay in 2002 and no longer own shares in that company).

Elon Musk grew up with the ultimate in White privilege, for which he is clearly nostalgic. According to his biographer Walter Isaacson, for instance, his Johannesburg-based father Errol “worked on building hotels, shopping centers, and factories,” held political office in South Africa while it was still an Apartheid state, and opposed the very principle of one person, one vote. Black South Africans were excluded from the university Errol Musk attended, had their movements restricted by pass laws, could not shop in White establishments, and had no right to vote.

In 1971, when Elon was born in Pretoria, Black South Africans earned, on average, about a sixth of what the average White worker did. And keep in mind that his father Errol wasn’t even the most hardline supporter of the old regime in his family. He viewed his in-laws, the family of Elon’s mother Maye, as far worse. And indeed, Joshua Haldeman, Elon’s maternal grandfather, a Canadian Nazi, moved to South Africa in 1950 because he liked its Apartheid racial segregation and ruling White nationalism. No wonder that, today, his grandson Elon is a supporter of Germany’s neo-Nazi party the AfD.

Peter Thiel, Musk’s comrade-in-arms among the tech-bro oligarchs, is from a German family that moved to the South African town of Swakopmund, which had a substantial German population — many of them unreformed Nazis who idolized Hitler. In the 1980s, at Stanford University, Thiel allegedly proclaimed that “Apartheid works.” He now serves as the chief ventriloquist for Vice President JD Vance, hence Vance’s recent attacks on any European attempts to curb racist speech.

District 9.

What a resegregated world would look like was imagined as science fiction allegory in Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 film District 9. In it, an alien spaceship, perhaps disabled, parks over Johannesburg in 1981. Its passengers descend and live in a ramshackle slum, District 9. After a while, the government decides to exile them to a settlement outside the city, hiring Multinational United, a private corporation, for the purpose. It begins evicting the aliens, smeared as “prawns,” brutalizing them and even performing experiments on them of the kind once used by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. The smarmy White Afrikaner Wikus van de Merwe starts as the corporation’s point man in executing that forcible relocation but becomes infected with alien DNA and begins transforming into one of them. Hoping to reverse that phenomenon, he aids an alien who adopts the human moniker Christopher Johnson. Johnson attempts to return to the mother ship and pilot it to the home world, having discovered to his horror that his people are being experimented on. The film is prescient in highlighting how contemporary capitalist states increasingly view immigration as a problem rather than an asset, how xenophobia drives violence and displacement, and how the role of private corporations in policing citizenship is on the rise.

The South African mafia and their fellow travelers are conducting a counterrevolution. Developments like the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the United States and the 1994 end of Apartheid rule in South Africa both represented an international wave of reaction against racist politics. Such reforms made it distinctly harder for politicians and businessmen to gain and keep power by stigmatizing people of color and representing them as a “terrorist” threat to Whites. The current cyber-coup in Washington, D.C., by this country’s tech broligarchy is intended in part to remove the stigma from such a politics of hatred and racialism.

It should be underlined that birthplace isn’t destiny. Many South African Whites, Beukes and Blomkamp among them, are committed to democracy and determined to make their multiracial country work. Musk and Thiel have made a choice about how to respond to the racist culture in which they were raised, seeking to use Donald Trump and crew to create a twenty-first-century order based on digital authoritarianism and discrimination. Sadly, we have yet to see any of the libertarian racists now in charge of the U.S. government grow a conscience as Blomkamp’s Wikus did.

Copyright 2025 Juan Cole

First published on TomDispatch.com.

Shared via Creative Commons.

The Grid.

I employ a specific email address linked to our family site at Ruthenians.net used exclusively when sending email blasts out to an admittedly captive audience of family and friends after I’ve posted either a new item of vital importance and sage insight on our Blog or the latest video masterpiece depicting events from our family exploits and worldwide travails.

Nobody ever responds to these messages, so I’m never sure if anyone bothers even to either read the email or view the posts. As a result, keeping this website and my others going is a leap of faith, even for an agnostic octogenarian anarchist like myself.

So if I only use this unique address for family and friends, how come I keep getting spam from “marketeers” who want me to sign up for penile enlargement drugs, cryptocurrency investment strategies, tinnitus cures, Nigerian banking schemes, Ukrainian brides [I do have to admit that having seen them up front and personal, Ukrainian women are drop dead gorgeous], and online “dating”? Dating? They must not be aware that the biological imperative no longer applies to geezers [ even though I am Geezerlicious™]. Seriously, you gotta wonder who is out there watching, what they’re doing with what they see, and more importantly why voices opposing such ubiquitous, unwarranted surveillance have been seemingly drowned out by the trumpeters of false patriotism. Journalist and co-founder of  The Intercept Glenn Greenwald, he of the select group of whistleblowers that includes Laura Poitras who have been tasked to selectively publish former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s cache of secret documents purloined right from under the unsuspecting nose of his former employer, recently gave a TED Talk on this very subject titled “Why Privacy Matters“.

Privacy matters because, in Greenwald’s words “everbody understands that we all have things about us that we want to hide and keep private”.

 

“Over the last 16 months as I’ve debated this issue (of personal privacy) around the world, every single time somebody has said to me ‘I don’t really worry about invasions of privacy because I don’t have anything to hide‘, I always say the same thing to them. I get out a pen, I write down my email address and I say ‘here’s my email address. What I want you to do when you get home is email me the passwords to all of your email accounts. Not just the nice respectable one in your work account, but all of them. Because I just want to be able to troll through whatever it is that you doing online. And read what I want to read. And publish whatever I find interesting. After all, if you’re not a bad person. If you’re not doing anything wrong, you should have nothing to hide.‘ Not a single person has taken me up on that offer.” —- Glenn Greenwald.

 

Some years ago, after I first got an iPhone and was well into a daily routine of deploying it for utility purposes and my own personal enjoyment, I started to refer to it as “The Oracle”, as in the buddhist Nechung Oracle, because it served as a medium between the natural world and the ethereal Worldwide Web and caused an almost trance-like state among its users. One glance around me during my then morning commute on the Metro proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the iPhone was a harbinger of a new theology demanding obeisance to The Grid.

Okay, I was a fan of the Cyberpunk novels of Willam Gibson and Neil Stephenson, so I was predisposed to view the Web as if it were some ethereal self-aware deity, set into motion by forces determined to exert complete control over our daily lives.

At one point I even ventured so far along this deus ex machina tendril of vision as to commit myself to writing a treatment for a movie script based upon Gibson’s Sci-Fi triple-crown award winning novel Neuromancer, which unfortunately was lost when the floppy drive on my Osborne 1 computer crashed rendering unusable the floppy disc it was recorded on. The Grid is a harsh mistress. [BTW, I recently read a post on YouTube that announced – after 40 years of failed attempts to bring the novel to a mass media audience – a 10 episode series based upon Gibson’s Neuromancer is due to be released in January 2027 on Apple TV+].

Zero Day Vulnerable.

So how do we as common innocents – whom are otherwise incapable of wrongdoing, unwilling to engage in any traitorous plots, or unwittingly unaware of this ubiquitous surveillance that is vacuuming up the yottabytes of data that define who we are in the eyes of public agencies like the NSA and DOGE or private companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, X, and Meta, all of whom are riding the new wave of web-surfing A.I. chatbots led by their billionaire bosses whom have climbed aboard Trump’s Christian fascist MAGA bandwagon in search of either The Grid or God – how do we lumpen keep at bay or at least at arm’s length these predatory forces  that prowl the Web and poke into our private lives? What tools and strategies – that when properly configured – can we use to help maintain at least a modicum of privacy?

One strategy is to stay “off The Grid” completely (not to be confused with the mobile food truck movement of the same name that takes over various San Francisco venues each week). Author John Twelve Hawks (a pseudonym) claims to have lived this way, yet has managed to survive and publish four novels. Another author, James Ellroy (a former crony and fellow habitue of Venice, CA – “where the sewer meets the sea” – back in the day) insists that he has never owned a computer, still drafts his visceral noir page-turners in longhand, [although he admits that his latest page-turner The Storm was drafted on an infernal machine!!~], and employs a pair of canines to protect him from groupies and plagiarists.

A more high tech strategy is to keep up with security updates for your devices, not only for the OS you use, but also for the applications you employ, including those utilized to watch video (Flash, HTML5, Quicktime), play music, view documents, send email, or store files and data on The Grid (Dropbox, Evernote). And then there are the devices that are physically connected to the Grid whose firmware must periodically be patched to fix what hackers call “0-day vulnerabilities” that might allow some unscrupulous geek “right now” in real time to actually take over your router and maybe even activate the camera on your computer and take pictures of you in the raw. Doesn’t that put the fear of The Grid in you?

Yes, upgrading to a new OS is always a bit of a leap of faith. There is only one hard and fast rule. Call it Rule Number One. Always back up your hard disk before you update or upgrade anything. I can’t tell you how many frantic phone calls I’ve received from friends and family complaining about complications or lost data. You can check out Apple Support for tips on what to do before upgrading, which involve running several utilities and OS maintenance routines, completing application software updates, and finally — you guessed it — doing a backup.

The Lowdown On The Upgrades.

Right here I need to say two things. One is to sound a geek alert — a “caveat” if you will.  (I first encountered this term in the wild while on a “Mid-watch” – Naval-ese for standing watch at midnight – when a senior watch officer who potentially had his finger on “the button”, burst into the Commcenter with a cable in his fist and demanded to know what “caveat” meant.  No shit.) What follows will border on, for lack of a better term, material to make your eyes glaze over and your brain to freeze – sort of like wolfing down an ice cream sundae. The second is to make apologies to Chrome and Windows users.

While I have considerable experience with several versions Microsoft’s OS es (including DOS), I do not speak Chrome (or Android). Having said that, there are resources beyond the scope of this post that can be accessed for security and upgrade tips for those platforms. For Windows, check out the Microsoft Store for the latest release of its OS and links to security patches, being mindful that there are recent iterations of the Windows OS you can now download for free from Microsoft named Windows 10 (Microsoft skipped a Windows 9 release for some arcane reason). However before you fire up your PC and hit the download button you first might want to read Microsoft’s EULA because you may be exposing yourself to some troubling privacy issues as reported in a post by Mick Meany at AcclaimedNews.com titled “Windows 10 Might Be Free, But Your Privacy Is Priceless”.

Firstly, it will automatically sync with the Microsoft servers and silently pass along and store information about you including; your browser history, favourites and the websites you’re currently viewing. Mobile hotspot passwords and Wi-Fi network names and passwords are also logged. Cortana, the new personal virtual assistant records and shares everything you do – which allows it to function properly.

Micah Lee over at The Intercept, in a new post titled “Recently Bought a New Windows Computer? Microsoft Probably Has Your Encryption Key”, makes the case that migrating to a new Windows 10 device is even scarier.

One of the excellent features of new Windows devices is that disk encryption is built-in and turned on by default, protecting your data in case your device is lost or stolen. But what is less well-known is that, if you are like most users and login to Windows 10 using your Microsoft account, your computer automatically uploaded a copy of your recovery key – which can be used to unlock your encrypted disk – to Microsoft’s servers, probably without your knowledge and without an option to opt-out….As soon as your recovery key leaves your computer, you have no way of knowing its fate. A hacker could have already hacked your Microsoft account and can make a copy of your recovery key before you have time to delete it.

Here’s a couple more items to store in the back of your mind; Microsoft, along with Google and your favorite flavor of Social Media – as Yasha Levine describes in his book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet – are_all_ defense contractors so whatever you post, say, or “Like” gets sucked up and stored on National Security State servers; plus you might want to check out this post on NDTV Gadgets on how to turn off some of the more troublesome features of the new OS.

What follows is an OS/iOS critique for Mac users: what to do, what to use, and where to go for resources. I always upgrade one of my devices to the latest Apple version of the macOS and iOS, but before upgrading I always backup: for iOS to iCloud or a hard disc via iTunes or for macOS using the latest version of Carbon Copy Cloner to completely clone (as in make an exact bootable copy) the hard drive on the machine to be upgraded to an external disc.

iCloud Drive has been upgraded which now allows subscribers to store any kind of file – not just iWork or approved App Store application files to iCloud – much the same as Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft’s SkyDrive services have offered for several years now.

However, unlike these latter-mentioned cloud storage services, files stored on iCloud Drive can be shared on your own devices — but not publicly or overtly with family, friends or project collaborators unless you first invite them to share your storage space by setting up shared albums via iCloud and subsequently inviting them to share your selected media within those “shared albums” via the Photos app. Sounds complicated? Well it can be a “Tech Bro” nightmare to manage. Now at least I can backup my video files to iCloud when I’m on the road. But here’s the catch:  you pay Apple for this so-called shared storage which contains files supposedly “uploaded” to iCloud Drive but which are in reality not physically there.

All of your files, photos, videos, graphics, databases, etc. are physically stored and located on internal or external hard discs attached to your computer – including those you’ve elected to share via iCloud Drive – right?  So where are those shared files stored and more importantly what kind of files are they?  The answer to the first question is “ in your User Library Folder on your internal hard drive under iCloud Drive”.  And the answer to the second is obviously “links to the source media stored on your hard drive”.  So you have the original media taking up disc space on your internal and/or external hard discs plus duplicate copies of the media files you have elected to share via subscription to Apple’s iCloud Drive service backed up to your user library on your internal hard disc as well.  Money for nothing and the clicks for free?

Another criticism of iCloud Drive, besides questioning why it took Apple so long to jump on the cloud storage bandwagon, is that the free storage space of only 5 gigs is pretty stingy especially considering Google and Microsoft are offering twice this capacity for free, although in fairness you can buy additional storage at reasonable prices.

Messages is still pretty much a conundrum, except for SMS but I still have issues getting Messages to sync to my other devices using either macOS’s “Messages” app or iOS’s “iMessage” app. It’s like they operate in two different universes. Even though everything is starting to look the same for both the mobile and desktop environments, appearances are deceiving which tends to confirm (for me) that Apple maybe bi-polar when it comes to internal platform integration. There are third-party messaging environments like Google Hangouts, Skype, and ooVoo that work as well or better.

Then there is Apple’s vaunted Apple Music, an ill-mannered attempt at competing with online music streaming services like Pandora and Spotify. Initially after you sign up for a subscription, you get three months of Apple Music service for free along with free access to Apple’s iCloud-based iTunes Match which ostensibly “matches” media content in your iTunes library and stores it on Apple’s servers so you can access your complete iTunes library from all of your devices. However, what Apple doesn’t tell you is that with iTunes Match, should you desire to change a song’s file format from say an uncompressed AIFF file that you burned from a CD that you own to a “lossless” compressed version like AAC, iTunes Match will also “protect” that new AAC version with DRM copy protection, so that now in effect, only you can listen to that song and you cannot share it with friends or family.

If you had sold the original CD subsequent to burning that song, you’d be out of luck (unless you buy a DRM converter). Plus, should you decide to cancel your subscription to iTunes Match (or Apple Music), all of your converted songs could literally vanish from your hard disk, as James Pinkstone relates in his recent post on Vellum:

”..through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users’ computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted. If Apple Music saw a file it didn’t recognize—which came up often, since I’m a freelance composer and have many music files that I created myself—it would then download it to Apple’s database, delete it from my hard drive, and serve it back to me when I wanted to listen, just like it would with my other music files it had deleted.”

Bottom line here: don’t bother signing up for either Apple Music or iTunes Match unless you want your music potentially stolen. Besides there are persistent rumors that Apple is going to abandon online sales of music completely within the next couple of product cycles. Plus there is Amazon Music, that is if you want to risk the rest of your privacy.

In the wake of a reported attack on the Apple App Store by Chinese hackers in which contraband versions of Xcode, Apple’s developer platform for creating applications, were used to create malware versions of some popular apps including WeChat, Apple has beefed up the security features of its OS to include what it calls System Integrity Protection (SIP) — better known to developers as “rootless” access — whereby Root Users whom previously had unrestricted access to all directories and files are prevented from accessing certain system files and applications. For Admin users too, macOS upgrades have initially curtailed or completely eliminated the functionality of a number of third party apps that historically have been useful for monitoring system functions like disc and network activity, CPU temperature, etc. causing developers to either publish upgrades or discontinue the affected apps. Additionally, Disc Utility features such as software Raid configuration options, the creation of Disc Images, and “Verify” and “Repair” of permissions have been either eliminated or dumbed down; the latter two features having been usurped by SIP which repairs permissions automatically every time the OS is upgraded and locks out any potential changes in the interim. For the majority of users the mantra “better safer than sorrier” would seem to apply, although increased security here as in The Wild more often than not translates to loss of freedom and functionality.

The Snowden Effect.

I use an encryption program for some email accounts called GnuPG which requires both ends to have it installed and operational in order to enable end to end encryption. It’s very geeky and most of the time I have issues with understanding what goes where and when since using it involves the matching up of encryption keys. But you should consider deploying encryption on email accounts that you access via a stand alone email client like the Mail.app or Thunderbird. You can also subscribe to encrypted email services such as the recently crowdfunded Protonmail located in Switzerland or Canada’s Hushmail or Germany’s Tutanota which offer both free and fee-based accounts. I guess we can thank  Edward Snowden for this too, since without him we’d still be completely clueless.

When you use laptops in the wild, since portability is one reason why they’re so popular, security is a key issue. Thanks to Mr. Snowden we now know we’re being monitored. Our phones track where we are. So do our laptops. How?

Each electronic device is manufactured and labeled with a code – a serial number. Additionally, computers, servers, routers, switches, access points and devices that connect us to the web also have embedded in their networking cards what is called a MAC address or Media Access Control address; a unique 12 character alpha numeric code consisting six sets of characters separated by colons that looks something like “30:a8:bc:5n:43:x2”. The key word here is “unique”. Your machine will broadcast this MAC address to every device it hooks up to while you surf the Net, which means that you are being tracked and the information you share while you are being tracked is subject to being vacuumed up and used by whomever wants to without your knowledge or approval. This is a fact. So how to you interdict this incursion into your privacy? You spoof your MAC address. There are UNIX commands and Windows Device Manager tips available online that enable an account administrator to temporarily change a device’s MAC address. I do this every time I log into a public network.

You can also use a CGI proxy web server to generate an IP that only shows the proxy server’s IP effectively masking that of your ISP.  Or you can use the TOR Network (TOR stands for The Onion Router) using its eponymous web browser to connect to the internet over a private network pathway where TOR:

…incrementally builds a circuit of encrypted connections through relays on the network. The circuit is extended one hop at a time, and each relay along the way knows only which relay gave it data and which relay it is giving data to. No individual relay ever knows the complete path that a data packet has taken. The client negotiates a separate set of encryption keys for each hop along the circuit to ensure that each hop can’t trace these connections as they pass through.

However be mindful that the Supreme Court has just quietly approved a rule change that would allow a federal magistrate to issue a search and seizure warrant for any target using anonymity software like Tor to browse the internet. So if you use TOR, you could have your computer legally seized or even hacked and all of your browser history and/or files conceivably exposed to public scrutiny.

A great resource for personal privacy tools you can use when surfing online is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, headquartered right here in The City. Check them out and don’t forget to support their efforts in fighting ubiquitous, unfettered, and illegal government surveillance. Also you can cruise over to The Intercept where Micah Lee has recently posted articles on how to encrypt your hard drive and generate secure passwords using Diceware including a lengthy post on setting up and deploying anonymous encrypted chat accounts using Jabber and TOR for just about every flavor of computer and mobile device. Additionally, Mr. Lee has published some tips on how to generate secure passcodes for your phones and computers.

It Knows Where We Are

Recently, I was in a coffee shop near the Civic Center going through my morning “ablutions” of sipping a cup of Sencha and surfing the web, when I grabbed my iPhone and attempted to log on to the shop’s wifi network which by the way is centrally controlled somewhere in Gilroy via a Meraki security system. I received an error message that stated the network I was attempting to access was invalid. That has never happened before, at least to my knowledge. Checking the title line of the access screen on the iPhone I noted that the network address read “applecellphone.us” instead of the usual network broadcast by the shop which is normally “N65.Network-auth.com”. I shut off the wifi network and brought it back up again. This time I again received the same error message with a network address of “ThinkDifferent.us” instead of the normal one. Realizing that my phone’s wifi radio was being redirected to a third party access point located physically somewhere between my phone and the coffee shop’s Meraki network hub I shut off the phone. The NSA?

Next I fired up my laptop and ran through the procedures for spoofing its MAC address but the process failed, several times in a row. After the fourth try, I was able to spoof it’s MAC address and log on to the shop’s network and launch TOR. Checking the memory usage I noticed a spike well over 3.5 gigs, so I shut off the wifi and shut down the machine. Then I rebooted my machine, ran a memory scrubbing app and attempted to spoof its MAC address again. I could not. I checked the memory usage again and it had spiked to over 4 gigs just to load the OS. Something via the previous network connection had been downloaded to my machine and was taking it over. I immediately shut down, took the next bus home, wiped my hard drive, and proceeded to install the old OS from my backup disk.

Everything appeared to be back to normal (whatever that is) until, after launching a TOR session, I checked out the node routes to my secure email service at Protonmail. My usual practice is to request a new connection if even one of the nodes resolves to an address in the US. Well this time the session started with one: 192.34.63.137. And no matter how many times I requested either a new session or new identity, I was routed to the same node address – part of a pool of addresses managed by one Digital Ocean a “cloud infrastructure provider that provisions virtual servers for software developers” – which to me is evidence of very suspect activity. The same node address every time you create a TOR session? My gut feeling is that Digital Ocean obscures (unknowingly or not) subscribers whom are closet NSA collaborators, so consequently I had to wipe my hard disc again and re-install a clean version of the OS. Therefore comrades, if you use TOR, use proxy servers and beware!!! The national security state thinks that you are a terrorist.

Founder and editor of The Intercept, Jeremy Scahill together with his colleague Margot Williams have published an article on their site entitled “A Secret Surveillance Catalog of Government Gear For Spying on Your Cell Phone” which lists dozens of cellphone surveillance devices like The Stingray used by the military and by intelligence agencies some (or all) of which are now being deployed domestically by both Federal and local law enforcement agencies bringing into question whether or not these devices may have been used in a way that violates the constitutional rights of citizens, including the Fourth Amendment prohibition on illegal search and seizure.

”Many of the devices in the catalogue, including the Stingrays and dirt boxes, are cell-site simulators, which operate by mimicking the towers of major telecom companies like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. When someone’s phone connects to the spoofed network, it transmits a unique identification code and, through the characteristics of its radio signals when they reach the receiver, information about the phone’s location. There are also indications that cell-site simulators may be able to monitor calls and text messages.

Time to both invest in one of those Faraday Bags and follow Ed Snowden’s advice for maintaining personal security when using your mobile devices as posted in a recent interview with Micah Lee for The Intercept. First, encrypt your phone calls and text messages. You can do that through the smartphone app Signal, by Open Whisper Systems. Second, encrypt your hard discs. Thirdly, use a passkey or a password manager like 1password published by Agilebits.com. Fourth, deploy two-factor authentication on your email accounts. Most email clients support two-factor authentication. And fifth, read Micah Lee’s interview with Ed Snowden (link above).

Win For All

I think it is safe to say I’m no Alfred E. Neuman claiming to have no worries about government surveillance. In fact, a while ago I published a tongue-in-cheek manifesto on Facebook, that posited a UBI — a kind of basic guaranteed income stream or Universal Basic Income for everybody much like activists Scott Santens or David DeGraw propose, and offered strategies on how to make this whole NSA mass surveillance scenario a win, win, win, win for all.

“I once made the point that if the NSA is so obsessed with collecting my personal and private data, I could willingly offer it to them for a price, since all my data is copyrighted, say for $500 per item per end user per year. This kind of program could be extended to everyone and become akin to a “Social Security for All” or “The Greenback New Deal”. Then the NSA could freely share it with their Wall Street backers whom they really work for, who could in turn market our data much like they do derivatives, securitized mortgages, rental contracts, or “Bespoke Tranche Opportunities” to interested investors, flash traders, and corporate entities who then could exploit the data the way they’re going to anyway and not be bound by any measly copyright law or governmental regulations.

“In fact why not convert the NSA into a private corporation, remove it as a governmental agency, take it away from the auspices of the military thereby shrinking the Pentagon’s budget, and in the process save the taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars annually? I mean how many terrorists have the NSA actually caught anyway? Fifty? Twenty? Even one? You’d think the neoliberal capitalists behind ALEC would have thought of this privatization scheme already.

“It would be a win for the advocates of privatization and the Free Market by allowing unhindered exploitation of everyone’s data for a profit and since the data has been legally bought and paid for there’d be no debate over privacy concerns plus it would stimulate the economy and maybe prove once and for all that we don’t need the privately-owned and run Federal Reserve to prop up Wall Street with our tax dollars.  Hey maybe we could even turn the Federal Reserve into a banking system that actually services the public. What a thought!

As economist Steve Keen points out in his forthcoming book “Rebuilding Economics From The Top Down“:

“The hapless President Obama, whose degrees were in political science and law, took the advice of prominent mainstream economists—such as Larry Summers, whom he appointed Director of the USA’s National Economic Council, and Timothy Geithner, whom he appointed Secretary of the Treasury—that the way to end the crisis quickly was to pump the banking system full of excess Reserves. This, Obama was assured, would stimulate the economy more rapidly than, for example, putting money directly into the hands of households.

The incredibly brief Covid recession threw into high relief just how wrong this conventional economic advice was. When Covid lockdowns forced people out of work, the government response was to give households immediate financial stimulus—and the recession was over in 2 months, making it the by far shortest recession in US history. The Great Recession lasted one and a half years, making it the longest recession in the post-WWII era..”

“So I say again – who needs a banker-controlled and run Federal Reserve that exists for solely for channeling wealth to the plutocracy? Turning it into a publicly-run central bank would be a win for the public sector because governments could then levy taxes on these new profits and help recoup badly needed funds for the country’s infrastructure, an integrated nationwide energy grid, public housing, the social safety net, an actual national healthcare system, eliminate student debt, and put an end to the causes of real inflation – out-of-control asset values caused by the Federal Reserve to begin with.

“It’s a win for the taxpayer who could wind up paying a smaller share of taxes in support of ineffective militarized govenmental agencies. And a win for me as I could afford to live in the other Venice and hang out on Saint Mark’s Square. A Quadrafecta!”

The moral of this story — always backup, cover your tracks, and never ever surf the Web near the Federal Office Buildings in your city because The Oracle not only knows all, it tells all.

And remember,,,, Capitalism is built to run on the social meme of meritocracy – as Clifton Mark writes in his essay “A Belief In Meritocracy is Not Only False, It’s Bad For You” :

“Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of life—money, power, jobs, university admission—should be distributed according to skill and effort…..The most common metaphor is the ‘even playing field’ upon which players can rise to the position that fits their merit….In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.”

Tell that to avid Meritocrat Vice President J.D. Vance who believes: ““Without a belief in the meritocracy, the entire system would crumble.”  I guess that’s why he and Mr. Trump’s MAGA fascists are bent on dismantling the public government and turning it private – meaning just for them.

Here’s what we say:

Meritocracy ≠ Democracy

© Kazkar Babiy ™ MMXIV.

 

Updated February 8, 2025. Originally posted October 9, 2014.

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