Here, again, from The Future of Counter-Intelligence, is Jennifer Sims:
The significance of 'big data' and miniaturized, inexpensive collection platforms for counter-intelligence is obvious: adversaries can learn much more about each other by spending much less than they once did.
Here is Craig Mundie, Senior Adviser to the CEO of Microsoft, writing in Foreign Affairs March/April 2014:
“Big data” has rendered obsolete the current approach to protecting privacy and civil liberties.
And finally, here is a thought from John von Neumann, one of the great geniuses of the 20th century and a major contributor to computer science, as well as the Manhattan Project, quantum physics and much more:
What we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left.
6
Hidden By Incredulity
Only puny secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by public incredulity.
–Marshall McLuhan
It would not be advisable for us to include this chapter in this book... at least not from the standpoint of public acceptability. Nonetheless, it is important to this subject, and it's something we don't want to hide from our readers.
We will be brief, but direct.
The Core of The Networks
Please take a look at this image, from the paper we noted in chapter three, The Network of Global Corporate Control:
In the paper, this image is noted, “some major TNCs in the financial sector.” The document further reports this:
We find that, despite its small size, the core holds collectively a large fraction of the total network control. In detail, nearly 4/10 of the control over the economic value of TNCs in the world is held, via a complicated web of ownership relations, by a group of 147 TNCs in the core, which has almost full control over itself. The top holders within the core can thus be thought of as an economic ‘‘super-entity’’ in the global network of corporations. A relevant additional fact at this point is that 3/4 of the core are financial intermediaries.
This brings us to a conclusion we cannot evade:
Financial intermediaries – banks of various descriptions – are clearly the core of the world's networks of power.
Whether or not money itself retains its place of top importance in the world (and we indicated in chapter two that it will not), the powers behind money are positioned to remain in power.
The Money Monopoly
We will not cover the details in this book, but it is true that the greatest power of the 20th century was that related to the creation of currency. The world's central banks (and the US Federal Reserve especially) created currency out of nothing at all. Furthermore, through processes hidden by complexity, they skimmed from every dollar as it was being created... twice.
This is not hyperbole, and we had difficulty believing it ourselves, until we read a booklet published by the Federal Reserve itself, entitled Modern Money Mechanics.
This subject is surrounded by people taking the facts too far and even by open anti-Semites, but still the facts exist, written in the hand of the money monopolists themselves. For the most part, however, people turn away from the subject mumbling things like, “That can't be true.”
And yet, stripped of hysteria, racial hatreds and other assorted distractions, this is true: The modern money system provided its operators with an astonishing position, from which they could skim the wealth of the world.
We Can't Simply Dismiss Quigley
Carroll Quigley (whom we quoted earlier) was an esteemed professor at Georgetown University, where he taught for 35 years. Among many others, Bill Clinton claimed him as an important influence. Thus Quigley's reputation as a serious historian and truth teller have to be considered very solid. So, what follows cannot, in our opinions, be dismissed.
In his book, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), Quigley explains that he was given access to the records of a publicly-unknown network operating at that time. He writes:
I know of the operation of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records.
The shape and purpose of this network is described as follows:
The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations… Each central bank sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence co-operative politicians by subsequent rewards in the business world.
Three things must be said about this:
Quigley most likely did not see all the records of this network, but probably only those of one part of it. Nonetheless, it is highly likely that he told the truth about what he saw.
What Quigley wrote, while most likely true in the 1960s, and may or may not remain true today.
World events seem to support Quigley's assertions.
The Crisis and The Options
Again without going through tedious details, we think it fair to say that the financial system of the early 21st century stands on fairly thin ice. World debt is massive; more than can realistically be repaid. On top of that ever-more debt seems to be the order of the day.
If and when debts vanish, however, a strongly deflationary situation will follow, which would require liquidations, like people losing their houses. Since this is politically very dangerous, it is being avoided.
Still, at some point, the strategy of “forever more debt” stands to fail. And judging by the new push to ban cash, it would seem that the networks fear such a moment may come soon.
Aside from the lunacy of cash suddenly becoming a threat, after millennia of daily use, there are good reasons why this tack is being taken. The first is simply because it's the only way to impose negative interest rates on the general populace. If people were allowed to hold cash, they could escape such a policy[24].
A combination of no cash and negative interest rates would allow banks and states to reduce debts efficiently and quietly, without a systemic collapse. Bank accounts would shrink day by day, automatically. Your $1000 in January, for example, would shrink to $950 by December. The difference would go to the banks and to the government. In addition to paying off the debt of the banks, this would also finance government, limitlessly and automatically. And, of course, it would force people to spend everything they got, as soon as they got it.
The other option to the financial networks is a full collapse, followed by the institution of a new system. We will not take space to cover that here, but you can find that possibility illustrated in the novel, The Breaking Dawn.
The Point
The point we wish to make in this chapter is simply that the major banks – and the people and groups that stand behind them – have stood at the center of the 20th century's money power, and now stand at the center of the 21st century's networked power.
This much is known, and bears reporting.
7
Descartes' Demon
If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto a vacant human face—forever.
– Julian Assange, When Google Met Wikileaks
René Descartes is the philosopher who is famous for writing cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” But to get to this famous conclusion, Descartes had to use a mental experiment featuring an “evil demon.” As it happens, D
escartes' imaginary demon is a nearly ideal model of the new type of intelligence that is now rising.
Up till Descartes' time, through the first half of the 17th century, most philosophy (and hence most thinking) was top-down in its approach: The philosopher used principles to determine the conclusion, then tended to fit facts in, beneath that conclusion. Descartes was convinced that this model was wrong, and that he needed to learn how to become absolutely certain, based upon real evidence. He made his case so well, in fact (along with Francis Bacon and others), that his new bottom-up model – starting with small, verifiable facts and building only with what has been verified – has remained the foundation of scientific progress ever since.
René Descartes was born in 1596, in central France. After a fairly quiet childhood, he graduated from law school and was licensed to practice in 1616. But by that time, young Descartes had become disgusted with the foundations of knowledge as they had been delivered to him in the schools of France. He then abandoned conventional life, walked away from his career (and his family's investment in it!), and went wandering around Europe, hoping to learn as he went. Here's how he described the event, in his Discourse On The Method:
I entirely abandoned the study of letters [books]. Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth traveling, visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the situations which fortune offered me, and at all times reflecting upon whatever came my way so as to derive some profit from it.
His many experiences came to a head five years later, in November of 1621, when Descartes, finding refuge (and warmth) in a large, room-like oven, had a series of profound dreams or visions. When he walked out the next morning, he had formulated analytical geometry, along with the basics of the philosophy that would make him famous.
Descartes' book Meditations on First Philosophy (finally published in 1641) contains his arguments on knowing with certainty. To achieve certainty, he ruthlessly deconstructs all beliefs that cannot be shown to be absolutely certain, and then tries to establish what can be known for sure.
To do this, Descartes imagines being manipulated by a powerful demon, who could give him a complete, perfect and false illusion of the world, deceiving all of his senses and convincing him that even logic and mathematics were false. With all inputs from the physical world being wiped away (made invalid by the demon), Descartes arrives at bedrock and finds proof that he, himself, truly exists:
I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I, too, do not exist? No. If I convinced myself of something (or thought anything at all), then I certainly existed.
This is the thought that he expressed briefly as “I think, therefore I am.” In modern English, we'd say, “If I can think, I must certainly exist.”
But while an imaginary demon helped Descartes prove with certainty that he existed, the modern version of his demon is neither helpful or imaginary. Technological versions of Descartes' demon have already been built. Not only that, but many such demons are under construction right now. And they are not only powerful, but they are intelligent and substantially independent of human control.
These demons are Big Data systems: huge groupings of computers, tied to mass surveillance. They see, they learn, and they do their masters' bidding.
So, Google, to use a prime example, is more than an advertising company, it's a demon-master. Google sells the use of its demons, for the purpose of manipulating people. And while the strength of their demons is not yet to the level of Descartes' demon, it gets closer by the day, and for people who remain inside Google's sphere of influence, it is becoming fairly strong. The same goes for Facebook, with many others following behind.
What gives Google and Facebook their strength is the same thing that empowered Descartes' demon: the power to deceive, and to deceive intelligently. Google's method of deception is custom environments: As we noted earlier, what you see on a Google search page (or on a YouTube page, or a Facebook page) is not what your neighbor would see, given the same search criteria. What each of you sees is customized, based upon what Google knows about you and, perhaps, what their clients have to sell on that particular day. You see a customized environment... customized for you personally. And the more experience Google has with you, the more it learns what will or will not effect you.
This has, as any observer of Google's ads knows, been happening and intensifying for quite some time. And so we are moving into a situation where many people will not be living in the real world, but in a world built specifically for them... a world carefully designed to make use of them. This is already significantly true for people who are addicted to iGadgets.
If we see what the demon wants us to see, and if the demon learns which stimuli we do and don't respond to, and which supplemental stimuli contribute to our decisions (the opinions of friends, our mood that day, which TV shows we watched that morning, and so on), the demon can make us do what the demon-master wants us to do.
After all, if I know what motivates you, and if I have the ability to change your environment based upon that knowledge, I can induce you to act in ways that I prefer... and this is precisely what these systems are designed to do. The very scary thing is that computers do this much more effectively and much more cheaply than humans ever could.
Currently, no one is further along this line of development than the US intelligence complex and their “Defense Industrial Base” partners. But while the first demons bear the “Made in USA” stamp, the intelligence agencies and corporations of of most other countries are already building their own, as are even some religious and private groups. All of these are becoming lesser demon-masters, each with its own demon in training.
The Star Trek Dystopia
Perhaps you can remember old episodes of Star Trek, where a civilization became controlled by computers, and no one could remember how things really worked. (There were several of them.) This process, of abandoning the scientific method and replacing it with Big Data's slow omniscience, is precisely how such a thing would happen.
People generally deal with information either by rational analysis or by emotional/intuitive judgment, or by using the two in combination.
When using rational thinking we use information feedback: we think or remember, plug that into the process, get feedback from memory and arrive at a conclusion. And that conclusion also becomes useable information.
When engaging in intuitive or emotional thinking, we get a conclusion, and nothing more. And because that conclusion is formed in ways we can't examine, it's not really useable for further calculations.
Processing information consciously is self-reflective. But when we process information emotionally or intuitively, the heuristic – the mechanism that generates a short-cut answer – is hidden from view[25].
Rational thinking allows us to systematize conclusions. If we find verifiable facts – if we clearly identify causality or find a method – we end up with facts and principles that can be used elsewhere. This is a slow process, but can be used in many areas with extreme reliability. It's the tool that brought us from riding horses to riding space ships.
With emotional thinking, we don't see the process, but we still use our emotional judgments and apply them as if they were a systematic result.
The rational method is slow and limited, but it gives us assurance; its results can be reused with confidence.
Big Data, using the intuitive process, is a shortcut that replaces theory building. Science, after some years under the reign of Big Data, will become statistics, and almost nothing else. People will lose track, whether quickly or slowly, completely or partially, of why.
And that is how a civilization would fall into the Star Trek dystopia. It really isn't as far-fetched as we'd like it to be.
Real Real
ity & Altered Reality
As the various incarnations of Descartes' demon spread and compete (and they will compete, in classic Darwinian fashion[26]), the stronger will be able to lord it over the weaker. In other words, one will have an information advantage and the other will be at an information disadvantage.
In practical terms, that means that a stronger demon can make even the operators of a weaker demon see what he wants them to see. So, in a “Descartes' Demon future,” if you are at an informational disadvantage, your mind won't function according to reality for the most part, but according to an altered reality that is custom-built for you. In other words, you will be subject to unseen, persistent, scientific manipulation, based upon deep and ever-improving psychological profiles.
The purpose of this altered reality will be to guide you to the will of the more powerful demon-master. Those who leave themselves subject to Descartes' demons (as they are now subject to Google, Facebook, etc.) become unwitting slaves to the people who control their altered view of reality.
What we are headed toward is a combination of information gathering, automated environments, machine learning and genetic algorithms. Google has understood this for some time, as have others. Much of the intelligence complex does as well. They just don't talk about it, because talking about it would lessen their information advantage.
As these demons compete with one another, winning strategies will be instantly replicated, maximized and multiplied. Wins will become larger and losses greater.
If you are a winner, your system can create environments that adapt to the user and, in fact, become perfect for the user. (“Perfect” according to your wishes, of course.) You create the illusion of a paradise for the viewer, but in a way that is first profitable to you. This can all be done automatically, with almost no human involvement required. That is what Big Data does.
The New Age of Intelligence Page 6
