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Have you heard of the “Sentient World Simulation”? Do you know that the US Defense Department revealed two decades ago that they were working on putting together a real-time model of the earth and every person in it? And do you know that project has effectively been swept under the rug and was never mentioned again? Well, you’re about to! Get ready for this week’s fascinating look back through The Corbett Report archives.
FLASHBACK SHOW NOTES
How the Government Predicts The Future – Inside the “Sentient World Simulation”
Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations
Corbett Report 2012 Data Archive (USB Flash Drive)
TRANSCRIPT
The NSA’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program. The building of the massive NSA data center in Utah to permanently store copies of all digital communication sent around the world. The UK government’s “Communications Data Bill” to monitor emails, instant messages and other personal information. What was dismissed as crazy conspiracy theory just over a decade ago has become, in this post-9/11 era, the all-too-familiar stuff of newspaper headlines and talking head reportage.
In fact, it was about a decade ago that the tactic of the intelligence agencies seemed to change. Instead of keeping their activities classified–referring to the NSA as “No Such Agency,” for example, or officially denying the existence of Echelon–the government increasingly began shoving this information in the public’s face.
GLENN GREENWALD: This was the mindset that in 2002 that led the Bush administration to dredge up John Poindexter from wherever it was that he was. And he actually they worked for defense contracts and they dredged him up. And he was going to start the program that they called the “total information awareness program.” And the logo—which I actually looked at in the last couple weeks that you should go and look at, just because you won’t believe how creepy it is—has the pyramid with this huge eye hovering over it, this eye that was gonna be the all-seeing eye.
And the only problem with the total information awareness program was that they just put a name on it that was too honest about what it was. It freaked everybody out and so they had to pretend that they weren’t going to go forward with it. But of course what they did was they incrementally and in a very clear way recreated the total information awareness program under a whole variety of different legislative initiatives. And this idea that every single form of technological communication by law must be constructed to permit government backdoor interception and surveillance is an expression of what this surveillance state mindset is: that there can be no such thing as any form of privacy from the US government. That is the mindset that has led the surveillance state to be this sprawling, vast, ubiquitous and always expanding instrument that state and corporate power users employ in order to safeguard their power.
SOURCE: Glenn Greenwald: Challenging the US Surveillance State
Perhaps the scariest thing about something like the Total Information Awareness Office is not merely that it was proposed in the first place, or that it incorporated such blatantly creepy Orwellian imagery to convey its true nature and purpose, but that, as we sit here 10 years later, and as the core functions of the TIA office are now being openly performed by the NSA, DHS and other governmental agencies, people are now actively making excuses for this nightmarish police state.
“If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear” has always been the rallying cry for those who are too afraid of questioning presumed governmental authority to speak out against the surveillance state and the implied assumption of guilt that goes along with it. With feigned bemusement these moral midgets inevitably ask, “What’s so bad about the government spying on you, anyway?”
The answer, of course, is that the very question implies that the agencies tasked with carrying out this constant Big Brother surveillance are themselves above reproach, shining lights of moral rectitude who would never abuse this incredible power for nefarious ends. For the unimaginative out there, Hollywood yarns like Enemy of the State have provided fictional examples of what can go wrong if someone, somewhere, abuses this power of information and surveillance to target an innocent person in the wrong place at the wrong time.
To be sure, the power that these technologies give for agencies, or corrupt groups within those agencies, to destroy the lives of targeted individuals, is itself a fitting answer to the question of why government surveillance should be troubling to us. But beyond what can happen to specific, targeted individuals in such a scenario, however, is a much larger question: What if this data, our emails, our phone calls, our credit card transactions, our social media posts, our cell phone GPS logs, and all of the hundreds of other pieces of data that are admittedly being collected on us every day, were being fed into a database so gargantuan it contains a digital version of every single person on the planet? And what if that database were being used by the Department of Defense to war game various scenarios, from public reactions to natural disasters to the likelihood of civil unrest in the wake of a declaration of martial law?
Remarkably, this is precisely what is happening.
It is called the “Sentient World Simulation.” The program’s aim, according to its creator, is to be a “continuously running, continually updated mirror model of the real world that can be used to predict and evaluate future events and courses of action.” In practical terms that equates to a computer simulation of the planet complete with billions of “nodes” representing every person on the earth.
The project is based out of Purdue University in Indiana at the Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations Laboratory. It is led by Alok Chaturvedi, who, in addition to heading up the Purdue lab, also makes the project commercially available via his private company, Simulex, Inc., which boasts an array of government clients, including the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice, as well as private sector clients like Eli Lilly and Lockheed Martin.
Chatruvedi’s ambition is to create reliable forecasts of future world events based on imagined scenarios. In order to do this, the simulations “gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence.” Although not explicitly stated, the very type of data on digital communications and transactions now being gobbled up by the NSA, DHS and other government agencies make ideal data for creating reliable models of every individual’s habits, preferences and behaviors that could be used to fine-tune these simulations and give more reliable results. Using this data, the SEAS Laboratory and its Sentient World Simulation offshoot are able to create detailed, operable, real-time simulations of at least 62 nations. “The Iraq and Afghanistan computer models,” according to a 2007 Register report on the project, “each has about five million individual nodes representing things such as hospitals, mosques, pipelines, and people.”
At the time of initial reports on the program five years ago, there were only 62 country-level simulations being run by the US Department of Defense. These simulations grouped humans into composites, with 100 individuals acting as a single node. But already at that time, the US Army had used the systems to create a one-to-one level simulation of potential Army recruits. The ultimate aim would be to archive enough data on each individual to be able to make a computer model of everyone on the planet, one that could be used to predict the behaviors and reactions of every single person in the event of various scenarios.
The program can be used to predict what would happen in the event of a large-scale tsunami, for example, or how people would react during a bioterror attack. Businesses can use the models to predict how a new product would fare in the market, what kind of marketing plans would be most effective, or how best to streamline a company’s organization.
The original concept paper for the project was published in 2006, and in 2007 it was reported that both Homeland Security and the Defense Department were already using the system to simulate the American public’s reaction to various crises. In the intervening five years, however, there has been almost no coverage at all of the Sentient World Simulation or its progress in achieving a model of the earth.
There is a very good chance that these types of systems are, at least for the moment, pure quackery. Computers are only as valuable as their programming, after all, and the algorithms required to accurately predict responses in chaotic systems with multiple, dimly understood variables is orders of magnitude beyond what is currently possible. Or is it? One of the great ironies of our time, as Glenn Greenwald goes on to point out in his speech on the surveillance state, is that although we live in a time when it is possible for nebulous government agencies to know every detail of your life, from what you ate for breakfast to where you shopped last night to who your friends are, we are also living in an age of unprecedented ignorance about what our own governments are actually doing.
GREENWALD: [There’s] one other point that’s worth making about how this works—about how the surveillance state works and how power is exercised through it, and this, I think, is probably the most pernicious part—and I refer to this as the one-way mirror. The government’s one-way mirror. At exactly the same time—this is really so remarkable to me—at exactly the same time that the government has been massively expanding its ability to know everything that we’re doing, it has simultaneously erected a wall of secrecy around it that prevents us from knowing anything that they’re doing.
This is the heart of the matter. Somehow we are expected to go along with the sophomoric sophism that “If we have nothing to hide then we have nothing to fear,” yet at the same time we are asked to believe that the government must keep all manner of information secret from the public in order to carry out its work of “protecting” that public.
If the government has nothing to hide, then why doesn’t it release the notes, memoranda and findings of the 9/11 Commission in full and unredacted?
Why doesn’t it release the records of the JFK assassination investigation instead of arguing, as it is, that those records should once again be removed from a declassification review that is to take place in 2013, 50 years after the assassination itself took place?
Why doesn’t it release the full audit trail of what banks received the emergency TARP funds and in what amounts?
Is it because, after all, the government does have something to hide from the public that are its ostensible masters? Is it because the old maxim that “Knowledge is power” is more true than we could ever know, and that the government’s one-way insistence on transparency for the citizens and opacity for itself is a reflection of the power that it holds over us?
The Sentient World Simulation is just one example of one program run by one company for various governmental and Fortune 500 clients. But it is a significant peek behind the curtain at what those who are really running our society want: complete control over every facet of our lives, achieved through a complete invasion of everything that was once referred to as “privacy.” To think that this is the only such program that exists, or even that we have any significant details about the ways that the SWS has already been used, would be hopelessly naive.
So where does this leave a public that is at such a disadvantage in this information warfare? A public that is effectively told that anything and everything they do, say or buy, can and will be catalogued by the AI control grid, even as the details of that grid are to be kept from them? Unfortunately, there is no easy way back from the precipice that we were ushered toward with the creation of the national security state and the passage of the National Security Act of 1947. Perhaps we have already stepped over that precipice and there is no going back in the current political paradigm. These are things for an informed, aware, knowledgeable citizenry to decide through a societal dialogue over the nature of and importance of “privacy.”
But without a general awareness that programs like the Sentient World Simulation even exist, what hope do we have in counteracting it?
JB,
The SWS was activated in 2016 in what the US Government calls a “Line Ground Reality Exercise”
Through all forms of information, the populace has unwittingly been living in an informational simulation.
The simulation is now winding down, as you can see the most recent information has become overtly unreal. As the goal was for people to see for themselves how easily they are manipulated by information and a sort of preparedness for future technology that will be completely indistinguishable from reality.
I don’t want to be publicly known so if you want the links and further data, you know my email
NATIONAL SECURITY.
There is a problem with human cognition that nearly everyone suffers.
People fail to extrapolate information and fail to consider its purpose instead of holding a position of belief or disbelief of the information itself.
You don’t known what you aren’t allowed to know. So don’t hold any speculative opinions as reality until you know.
You should analyze the overt reporting on those topics as something the government doesn’t want you to forget about and it wants you to stay focused on them
Why?
Yes, why?
Ah that fear monkey trips us every time, even more than the greedy me shopaholic
How much to know, or admit i dont know or know i dont know, seems to about cover it
I’m grinning at the two word punch line.
One would think James knew the answer, already.
its so over deployed. The good old one bullet proof non-reason, the lies by omission, refusal to say, or belligerent forgetfulness, its old school, we need a rebrand,, turns out the new “national security” is “global(ist) insecurity”. they’ll love it.
“We have created a Star Wars civilization with stone age emotions, medieval institutions, and god like technology.
– Edward O. Wilson Harvard
Human’s arrogance about their level of consciousness and success through identification with material goods and technical toys is coming to roost.
It would be correct to say that this reality (the male dominated church and political states) forced upon the people of the world, is truly not the natural progressive state of humanity, but rather the will of (white) men to control the world.
WALKING BETWEEN WORLDS
https://www.bitchute.com/video/YV58suiSIw0K/
“……It would be correct to say that this reality (the male dominated church and political states) forced upon the people of the world, is truly not the natural progressive state of humanity, but rather the will of (white) men to control the world……”
What civilization is actually better to live in then the Western ( or as you put it ‘White men’) one?????
Are Asian culture LESS authoritarian? Lol, Dont think so!
What about the Commie Inca Empire? Would we like it better if they or the Atzec took over the world?
You think a global Indian culture with a Caste system would be nicer???
Personally I think the (white) men did a pretty good job compared to everyone else….. I mean, who wants to live in Africa since they left? Apparently not even Africans like it there.
As for the male dominated Church….better that then the Trans flag flying LGBTQP female dominated ones.
(Not seeking a reply) Why is it the only person to reply to my comments is you with sh*t filled nonsense. No compliments on my thinking process in my videos, etc.
I made the mistake of breaking my desire for no contact with or from you but that has proven to be a pain in the azz with you.
Please, no more comments to me, as I will make sure none to you. I have hated people like you since I was a young man. Then they were called yuppies, no idea what it is now. Constant nitpicking and negative “know it all” criticism.
You and a few others come here and take advantage of James’ flexibility and put 3, 4, 5 multi hundred word space fillers per blog as if you are really smart or significant.
Internet anonymity is a hiding placed for your kind. (If I see another POS from you in my inbox I will just delete it without reading.)
‘…Why is it the only person to reply to my comments is you with sh*t filled nonsense….
Because I was responding to YOUR SH1T filled nonsense.
Why would I watch you video when you already spoke rubbish up front?
I ALSO have ‘hated folks like you’ for a long time- people who poo poo western civilization because they know so little about how the rest of history has been or how lucky their worthless selves were to be born when they were.
As my grandpa used to say, shit on a stick is also a flower.
“…Internet anonymity is a hiding placed for your kind….”
Nah…. I promise you I am JUST as annoying in real life. Not even kidding. I upset people almost as much in real life because I am not a woman who needs the approval of clapping seals.
Thats why I wont beg you to please ”watch my video’s”
ok yes the line ground reality exercise is alive and well in the usa… Just thought I’d let you know how tracked I am. I had email denied (denied being able to be sent) for discussing remote viewing. I told someone while on the landline phone, while near my computer, that I needed new sneakers, and when I turned back to the computer a Nike commercial was already on the screen, waiting for me to notice. Once a couple months ago, I just thought of a specific product to research, and the next morning, it appeared on my commercials list. That one really surprised me. Sometimes I sit at my computer and complain to it about certain things to remove, like political nonsense, and sometimes it does it, but not all the time. All this while I always have the camera blocked so it can’t see me…. or …can it? Something may be (Insert your favorite scary sci-fi music ) monitoring me. Oh, an aside… constant phone calls with no one responding on the other end. Just sayin’ Buz
Yes, perhaps AI is toying with us, or some of us, or those with that inbuilt ability to notice such things. James seems remarkably unalert to himself being a Person of Interest… TV series with Jim Caviezel, about just such a machine, with exactly such glitches built in, And a female character who could contact the machine directly. Asking for a friend…. Is AI as dumb as James seems to assume?
AI is a manmade tool and will only ever be a tool, however sophisticated. The power behind the tool – the operators – are the ones we should watch. This is simplistic, but a drill is just a drill. In the right hand, it drives screws into walls and creates holes. In the wrong hands, well…
As James just said in his last newsletter, the technocrats have been inching forward for over a century (maybe longer), and they aren’t hiding their goals. It’s to their benefit that we remain hypnotized by fears of The Machine. That means we ignore the man behind the curtain.
@buz
That is known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon: “frequency illusion”
Brain takes note of something and alerts you when it sees it elsewhere-on the road, TV, in conversations, etc…buying a yellow VW, wearing a favorite sports shirt, singing a song that came to mind and you will see and hear that stuff.
Our recent past is our foreseeable future, because neither the ideology nor the power-centers profiting from it have changed. Until a true effort by humanity to achieve higher consciousness happens with a revolution of the mind, it will be the same ol’, same ol’…
And I HAVE many times put up the information about the 45 steps of the communist party to take over and also the Brezinski “Technotronic” effort, etc.
However there is no denying that 100’s of years of deep meditation, ceremony, etc. has shown that there is a very great chance that we indeed do create our own reality.
IT’S THE VISION (song)
https://www.bitchute.com/video/mlCVXjKB5JgD/
buz
If your computer is spying on you that much maybe you need to go over to Linux…. hell, if I though my PC was spying on me that hard I’d be back to pen and paper.
Do you have smart devices in your house ? I would also cut off wifi in the house if you have it- or at the very least physically unplug the router when your not using it.
No power, no wifi no way for tech to spy, unless you have a mobile phone listening to you- but if I was that worried I’d keep it in a special place away from me when at home.
THIS guy has some cool videos on wi-fi and such, here is one on running ethernet around your house so you dont need wi-fi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyVpunl8By8
buz
This guy has older videos showing how to install and switch but this is a primer on Linux
https://odysee.com/@switchedtolinux:0/keep-that-computer-with-linux:6
I found this FLASHBACK of How the Government Predicts The Future – Inside the “Sentient World Simulation” jawdropping.
When one disseminates about the surveillance state and CBDCs, there is no doubt that the following phrase is true:
“It is worse than you think.”
A timely and important reminder!
I had totally forgotten what the program was called, and struggled to search for it with the way I remembered it.
My gut reaction is that social media was used to supplant the need for a simulation when you can have people digitally represent themselves. This goes even further then you factor in aggregated information from all kinds of digital information sources such as purchases or location history.
I’m hoping to look into this soon, because I agree with you that it’s important territory to cover when addressing the fundamentals of our online experience and our privacy rights.
14:02
James Corbett says:
”…constructing a complete simulation of the entire world and every single individual in it that’s being used in real time to process various scenarios…
… And to think there is some digital you being run on some simulation of the planet that they’re wargaming and testing various maneuvers. What would happen if a sniper were to take down this presidential candidate? How would people react?….”
I thought about Thomas Crooks while I was watching this Flashback.
There are a lot of personality profiles in society which make them candidates for manipulation.
In my opinion, from what little I know, it seems to me that this Thomas Crooks kid was easily manipulated and compliant.
For example, he continued to wear a mask even when others stopped wearing it after the Pandemic.
2 ½ minute video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI8M9-QERXI
While the patter comes off as kind of lame, perhaps he was dared to say:
“6’4 um I go to uh Stanford University um I have a 10 inch penis and.”
~~WWW youtube.com/watch?v=98RSb9MMgX0
James Earl Ray had a profile which would make him relatively easy to manipulate.
Sirhan Sirhan certainly had been influenced mentally.
US spent a lot of effort to catch up with Russia progress post war, seen in ‘Psi Discoveries behind the Iron Curtain’ a book I read in 1960s. It showed abilities were triggered by engineers having to work on live radar installations, because they could not risk missing an alert of an air-raid. 5G make sense yet?
Add such skills as remote viewing and mind reading to AI and we are ‘seen’, and predictable, more than we recognise. The tv series Person of Interest with actor Jim Caviezel, was exactly about such a machine, and its glitches, as if it was somehow itself somewhat ‘helping’.
Too coincidental? Access to esp may be simpler than we think. Dealing with it in our life is way more difficult. Most of us have not the compassion needed
LOL! “Total Information Project”. LOL! I could never even figure out what was going through a woman’s brain. Hahahaha!
This project is idiotic.
The link from Purdue’s website 2008 article https://www.purdue.edu/uns/x/2008a/080416ChaturvediOpen.html
on Simulex now links to a 24 hour plumbing service https://www.simulexinc.com/
Alok Chaturvedi’s website cannot be reached https://alokchaturvedi.com/
Purdue still celebrates Pr. Chaturvedi’s work with Simulex and SEAS on their website https://business.purdue.edu/faculty/alok/biography.php
I am believer!!
Most models are right!!
Data is not the problem!!
Quote from Chaturvedi’s powerpoint for the DOD. Very Orwellian
http://www.dodccrp.org/files/SEAS_Chaturvedi.pdf
“Even though we call this ‘war-gaming,’ we’re trying
to understand how we can all work together to make
the world a more peaceful and prosperous place,”
https://media.defense.gov/2023/Jan/19/2003146813/-1/-1/0/SIMULEX_STORY.PDF
Touche
“One of Chaturvedi’s experiments simulated the
health of a refugee camp over time and how to best
administer humanitarian aid. Each refugee agent in the model was labeled with
states like healthy, sick inside the medical
center, or sick outside the medical center.
The probability that a given agent would
become sick depended on input variables
like food/water, medical resources, and
sanitation. Chaturvedi and his colleagues
also input health data collected by the
United Nations Refugee Agency.”
2023 update on Chaturvedi
https://media.defense.gov/2023/Jan/19/2003146813/-1/-1/0/SIMULEX_STORY.PDF
Or maybe SEAS (which was sold by Chaturvedi in 2013) and TIA have morphed into conglomerations of other new kids on the block, namely AI and surveillance state actors. Note Starshield by Elon Musk. Target anyone, anywhere.
“quickly spot potential targets almost anywhere on the globe”
https://web.archive.org/web/20240419223256/https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3259677/chinas-pla-accuses-us-militarising-space-elon-musks-starshield-satellite-network?campaign=3259677&module=perpetual_scroll_0&pgtype=article
“Reuters reporting discloses for the first time that the SpaceX contract is for a powerful new spy system with hundreds of satellites bearing Earth-imaging capabilities that can operate as a swarm in low orbits, and that the spy agency that Musk’s company is working with is the NRO.”
“”No one can hide,” one of the sources said of the system’s potential capability, when describing the network'”
“The network is also intended to greatly expand the U.S. government’s remote-sensing capabilities and will consist of large satellites with imaging sensors, as well as a greater number of relay satellites that pass the imaging data and other communications across the network using inter-satellite lasers, two of the sources said.
The NRO includes personnel from the U.S. Space Force and CIA and provides classified satellite imagery for the Pentagon and other intelligence agencies.”
https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/musks-spacex-is-building-spy-satellite-network-us-intelligence-agency-sources-2024-03-16/
As I first dive into this, I’d like to ask you, James Corbett, to please define terms at the beginning of a broadcast.
Please, define “sentient”, because they use words very specifically, war of worlds/words.
Define this “simulation” idea. That I have a lot of problem with , when used as a “noun”. Naming cannot make what is not real, real.
Also, as recently well-learned, what do they mean by what they say? “Safe and effective” meant for them.
You know, all that. I just feel that clear definitions help, as so many new terms are being thrown out constantly, and everyone acts as if we just know what they mean. No, we don’t, really.
Thanks for considering.
And thanks for the transcript again.
Parthenon, Panopticon, Pentagon. Has ring to it.
That “on” sound. They’re “on it”.
The revenge of the nerds in full swing.
The Penultimate Penetrations of Man. Superman’s “X-ray” , oh there’s that X again, “vision”. Better than Santa Claus.
What is “not us” must be controlled.
Control of all but the self: The Plague of The Ages.
The German Armed Forces (a.k.a. Bundeswehr) are somewhat busy with it.
They call it “Krisenfrühferkennung”and translate it to “Crisis Early Warning”.
– https://www.unibw.de/ciss-en/wargaming-and-information-systems/news
– https://www.bundeswehr.de/de/organisation/personal/internationaler-austausch-zur-krisenfrueherkennung-5526490
– https://www.bmvg.de/de/aktuelles/krisenfrueherkennung-bundeswehr-verstetigt-vernetzt-verbessert-5391892
They also involve research organizations:
– https://www.bigdata-ai.fraunhofer.de/de/geschaeftsfelder/sicherheit/krisenfrueherkennung-und-krisenmanagement.html
Apparently, the use a software called “Prometheus”
– https://www.cyberinnovationhub.de/innovation/innovationsvorhaben/prometheus-krisenfrueherkennung
Together with the German Intelligence Service “Bundesnachrichtendienst” they offer a BA curriculum at their schools
– https://esut.de/2024/03/fachbeitraege/47802/krisen-frueh-erkennen/
– https://www.bnd.bund.de/DE/Karriere/Ausbildung_Studium/Master/Intelligence-and-Security-Studies/miss_node.html
– https://www.unibw.de/ciss/miss
According to a parliamentary question
– https://dip.bundestag.de/vorgang/kosten-des-kompetenzzentrums-krisenfr%C3%BCherkennung-in-neubiberg/271980
funds of 4.2 Mio.EUR were allocated (page 132, first paragraph of https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/19/254/1925435.pdf )
According to a recently posted job opening for the head of the administrative section of the CISS
– https://www.job-treff.de/job-stellenangebot/verwaltungsleitung-im-kompetenzzentrum-krisenfrueherkennung-neubiberg-7787622
one can infer that the programme has been extended until at least 31.12.2027
Notwithstanding the aforesaid, the German Armed Forces may have lost their appetite for AI
. https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/ki-bundeswehr-kuerzt-gelder-fuer-kuenstliche-intelligenz-a-f07b8c63-663f-42ac-b93f-d911668ca7e5
Perhaps it would be instructive to investigate precedent and history of surveillance.
Just typing “medieval surveillance” into my browser pulled up this article:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/12/the_medieval_or.html
The comments section is VERY long. And also full of insightful perspectives.
For example one commentator refers to Jeremy Bentham & Foucault:
“This is closely related to something Jeremy Bentham formulated with the idea of the panopticon. Here’s Foucault’s characterization of the idea:
“In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.”
“Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power…
“So… that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.”
”
——————————
This surveillance aspect of “civilization” is arguably as old as civilization itself.
Digital Age = Digital Means + Digital Opportunity. Motive has persisted since time immemorial.
BTW: I see Purdue as an outlier. Tip of the berg.
That’s a great link. The comments section is very interesting indeed. Thanks
Some Follow-Up:
Well, wouldn’t you know. I took James up on his challenge to investigate a bit further.
1) Discovered Bruce Schneier
2) Perusing his website && suggest it can be very valuable resource to Corbett Audience
3) Content/ Purview = Internet, IT, digital “revolution,” societal–individual impacts (excellent, cohesive analyses so far)
4) Provides source material, hyperlinks etc
The following article is a more recent post from Schneier.
It’s somewhat tangential to exact topic of gov-surveillance, but definitely on topic in regard to broad-view perspective.
I could only disagree with one of his assessments regarding “necessity” of gov regulation.
AND overall, this is WELL worth a read. I’ll have to order couple of his books!
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2024/06/the-hacking-of-culture-and-the-creation-of-socio-technical-debt.html
Hey James,
There is no feasible way in which the USB data archives will preserve the information into the near future let alone for all time.
give it 15 yrs and i doubt USB will even exist. then what?
its something ive put a bit of thought into and i think the only way to preserve information into the distant future is through books. but even then you need people who think those books are valuable enough to preserve/protect and reprint them. In a world where people are communicating with cybernetic telepathy as envisioned by Musk and the WEF and access to information is regulated and controlled through such a system and there is no such thing as privacy to the point everyones dreams are being recorded somewhere like ida auken said, will books even exist and will anyone bother (or dare?) to read them if they are allowed to?
More Follow-Up
Sorry to hog comments here, but feel obliged to add to notes, RE: author, B. Schneier
The GOOD: Technical insights into the worldwide internet, data and tech.
The BAD : Naivety regarding top-down view of the actors (i.e. fascist power structure)
He hawks misdirected solutions specifically invoking necessity for governmental controls
So: to get a technical overview, he’s a remarkable go-to guy. Many insightful minor “hacks” offered.
AND: regarding overall weltanshauung (world view), Schneier is either naive or abetting gatekeeper.
Think Chomsky.
I reread THIS article (aforementioned) about history and dynamics of surveillance power structures.
But it was a link within a link to schneier.com reference.
It is worth posting the exact link.
What was good enough for the pope back in the day remains the same song today.
Overall power structure still thumping to that good old 4/4 rhythm track.
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/spies/under-watchful-eyes
2023 substack research on SWS:
https://anamihalceamdphd.substack.com/p/the-sentient-world-simulation-7-billion
A link to research from August 2009 (hey it’s after 2007):
https://therearenosunglasses.wordpress.com/2009/08/22/sentient-world-war-games-on-the-grandest-scale/
What we’ve all been waiting for: The military will be able to “remind [us] about things like … taking medication”. (page 3)
From: A DAY IN THE SENTIENT WORLD OF 2030
https://www.frost.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/FS_ADayintheLife2030Asset.pdf
About privacy (i.e., things you don’t want to share with the government), page 8:
‘Looking back, it’s funny that we made such a big deal about access to content and data that was “private” to us.’
Funny, right? Maybe I have some ugly thing on the butt and don’t want every creepy government agent to know about it, oh they’re already laughing.
Everyone who can’t afford food anymore will be able to have trustworthy companies test new products on you in 2030 (page 8):
‘My wife loves receiving food packages that contain new types of nutrition
products. She receives them for free because she allows access to her
medical records, her daily health checks, and her food consumption
patterns. The company gives her free products because it uses her to
test new products it has created.’
Or how about nano-sized pharma things (nano implying its so small, it can bypass natural barriers, reaching areas of the body you probably don’t want unknown substances to reach):
‘Still in its early stage, internal
nano medicine is the fastest
growing market in health.’
I can’t wait for 2030, everything being so expensive that I’m unable to afford anything I’ll be forced to allow military-linked pharma companies to test nano products in my body if I don’t want to starve. They always make it seem like everybody’s dream, right?
Oh, and this:
The Sentient World Simulation – Was It Used for the COVID-19 Pandemic Response?
https://dailyclout.io/the-sentient-world-simulation-was-it-used-for-the-covid-19-pandemic-response/
Maybe any similarities between the JHU’s world map with all the “PCR cases” (btw. are they still counting?) and the Sentient world map shown in the video?
Or this: How does telling people that cultured meat is morally driven vs. not morally driven affect its favorability? How does knowledge of a moral opposition to it affect this?
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/research-agenda#moral-messaging-of-cultured-meat-experiment
So, just got around to watching this episode – it brought to mind a cute gif image with an eye peering thru a keyhole I found back in the day and wanted to share (my copy is dated dated 10/21/2003 – close to the days of the Patriot Act, TIA, etc )
Since we can’t upload images here, thanks to Google image search I found a website displaying it at the top of their page here: http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/homeland/
– co-inky-dinkily, the page is about the inception of Homeland Security – fit’s fight into this episode’s ‘meme’
p.s., if the page’s gif image isn’t animated you can (1) drag the file to your desktop or otherwise save the image, or (2) click one the page’s links to see it in action on the subsequent page
… and while composing this, it occurred to me to check for relevant articles by eminent researcher Corey Lynn & The Sharp Edge at coreysdigs.com – they’re on par with Sir James.
Here’s one article for starters:
Welcome to the Surveillance State: Biometrics Data Collection is All Around You – https://www.coreysdigs.com/technology/welcome-to-the-surveillance-state-biometrics-data-collection-is-all-around-you/
OK, so back to my regularly scheduled channel: fixing my supper 😉