The Complete Idiots Guide to The

Upcoming Cyberspace
Apocalypse: Class struggle,
Digital Surveillance, Edward
Snowden and Hillary Clinton
by Simon Gros, mariborchan.si
1. November 2016
Class struggle online has in the past two years crystalized itself exactly on the
problem of surveillance: Edward Snowden among others has demonstrated to the
world that EVERYTHING digitally transferred online by ANYONE (including landline
telephony which is today already digitalized everywhere, so even if you use a 20
year old phone it doesn't help you) is stored in huge computer server farms by (of
course by far not only) the United States Government, which collects data and
spies upon everyone in entire world (at least in the countries where their
products are not prohibited), and today this means that over a billion (that's 9
zeroes) of people's private, personal, intimate, business information is being
indefinitely stored without their knowledge or permission. For those who don't
know, Edward Snowden is for his revelations considered a national traitor in the
US, and the only reason why he isn't dead yet is because of his international
status and the support of the press.
Almost every phone and computer produced in the past few years (no matter
how cheap or expensive) has both hidden implanted backdoor hardware chips
inside the mass produced processors/motherboards (which a regular user can't
possibly circumvent, so for example even installing even the most secure
operating system, the best antivirus and firewall or connecting though a Virtual
Private Network (VPN) doesn't help you anymore). And even the operating
system your phone/computer runs has secret backdoors and transmits data
without your permission or knowledge to the companies which produced it. Even
your internet/phone service provider is doing exactly the same. And all of them
collaborate with your local government, they provide information to governments
in exchange for the passing of corruptive legislation which financially favour their
businesses.
So let's say you send one message to someone online or on a phone: it is in all
probability being intercepted by the operating system, by the phone/internet
service provider, the government and even the phone/computer company you
bought the device from. Even buying a disposable SIM card with cash
anonymously doesn't save you, because once you call a friend and that person
mentions your name in the conversation or saves your name on his phone, your
identity can already be established, a commercial ID attached, crosschecked with
various audio and text algorithms for any previous pattern similarities in various
shared online databases, and bam, you are identified and your communication is
already compromised. And this is done to EVERYONE, not just those suspected of
illegal activity. It is ideologically politically justified by security measures that are

being imposed under the pretext of war on terror or crime prevention, but in
reality is applied to everyone only serves to maintain existing power relations and
interests of Capital.
Even if you turn off every switch and uncheck every option that you don't consent
to any data being sent anywhere, it still secretly leaks from your device. And also,
turning off your phone and taking out the battery doesn't save you, as these kind
of microchips often have their own small separate internal batteries (since they
don't need much electricity to run) and your info is thus available to be freely
(commercially, politically or otherwise) manipulated with and exploited, or used
against you (and all of your contacts) by either governments, or what is far
worse, the beforementioned (who are among the top 10) richest corporations on
the world, by those who own the telecommunications network, those who
produced you phone or computer, the operating system and any additional
software you may have bought. And don't be fooled, changing the corporation
you depend on for digital services doesn't help you, as they make very good
business in trading massive collections of their costumers data between
themselves, officially for the benevolent purposes of advertising, but in reality,
although officially in competition between themselves, the elite corporations
work together and exchange and sell the info between themselves in a mutually
beneficial way.
This directly influences international politics (we remember the affair where the
US government was illegally spying on the highest ranking political
representatives of their own ALLIED countries, for example the president of
France. If we put on top of that the recent Hillary Clinton e-mail leaking
controversy, this means that cyberspace security has become a central topic of
global political debate and legislation, which will make things even a lot worse
very
soon.
What is emerging because of this is a huge class division inside cyberspace,
which the underlying ideological premise being: if you're relatively poor and can't
afford absurdly expensive corporate hardware and security software, and don't
have in-depth technical knowledge, you are instead forced to freely give out all
of your information to the most powerful groups of people in the world (Google.
Facebook, Microsoft, etc. are among the top10 richest global companies) not only
all of your personal information, but even the personal information of everyone
you're in contact with, if you even want to use those companys services, which
you are forced to do anyway in order to be able to normally function in todays
(post)modern society at all. And don't be deceived, they store everything,
because the technology is advanced enough that this has today become
technically relatively easy to do for those that have enough funds, since
extremely advanced technology is being produced at very low costs (for the
companies at least).
With the advent of Augmented Reality, the currently emerging new trend in
technology, things get even worse. Not only that the manipulation and control
are now even more complete and total, since cyberspace and the spontaneous
everyday perception of reality get inextricably merged. Now manipulation and
control becomes even more terrifying, as even the people who walk on the street
might thing they are acting completely free, but dont not even realize the data
transmitted to them and the directions given to them might be manipulated or

falsified in real-time by some anonymous employee of a corporation through the

internet.
And all of this collection of data is completely passive, stored, and hidden, unlike
in the past, where corporate and government spying required actual people to
collect your information. Every button press, every finger swipe, every mouse
click, every voice sound is and can be saved for long, long years. Even if youre
never doing anything wrong or illegal, what you write in a message today, can
used against you in the future, when some employee decides to open your
database folder that has been piling up over the years, thus making power
relations even more absolute.
The only possible proposed solution is said to be encryption, but even that has to
be set up extremely carefully and precisely, and it has to be used on both ends:
by the sender of the message, and its receiver. And if the device used for
encrypted communication has been compromised before encryption is installed
on either end, it doesnt help at all. And services and software that provide
genuine security and encryption are either corporate (and thus extremely
expensive, available only to the selected few), or are extremely unpopular for the
use in the general public, and can even be counterproductive: just by using it, if
its detected, you can be automatically put unto a blacklist of suspects, which
means that if you use encrypted software you might be put even under active
efforts of surveillance just becaused you installed the software in the first place.