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elizabeth nickson's avatar

No higher compliment

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Meaghie Champion's avatar

"They knew new trucks would have software in them with a kill switch. They made the connections that we are all under digital surveillance all the time, that our media is controlled to our exact interests and manipulated to give us dopamine hits all day long long before we became aware. They knew that each one of us can have the equivalent of a Stasi team on us at all times via AI and the software in our devices. That a 100% digital financial grid means a digital concentration camp. "

Back in 1998, I was working with a group of crazy Cypherpunks who located a DataHaven on the Principality of Sealand in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Southern England. The plan was to create a CO-location of the data haven, on our Indian reserve. Thanks to this project I was also hanging out with cypherpunks in San Francisco and San Jose in 1999-2000 and I was told, being an activist, that a time would come, if I ever made a dent in my activism... that I had better be prepared for every single word I had ever emailed, or phone conversation, every email, every "private chat" - was being hoovered up and collected, and could be made very public knowledge. I was told to treat all my on-line correspondence as if I would be just fine if it was published to an audience of millions. That there was this program called CARNIVORE and ECHELON that was collecting and surveiling everybody. Since these people were net-gods... (people who ran the backbone of the Internet) I took them seriously. These cypherpunks used to meet weekly (I attended a few such meetings) and one of the things they did was swap loyalty cards from the local grocery stores. They did this to mess up the data being collected by the grocery stores. The cyperpunk world was filled with people who had a very clear understanding of the ability of the internet to be used as a tool to surveil people... It made me very very hesitant to communicate online with anybody I didn't know very very well. I still have that reluctance. Anyways... until the Snowden revelations, I never discussed this with anybody but my husband and kids. When the Snowden story broke, I really thought people would understand the extent to which we are already living in a totalitarian global governing system and how little power we have remaining, in our current condition. But instead of that happening, people went back to sleep and nobody seems to care if they are being spied upon,or their data is being sold to the highest bidding advertiser.... Nobody seems to care. It is absolutely demoralizing. My whole life, I have always felt more like an American than a Canadian... This trucker convoy is the first thing that has given me hope in a long long time. That it is possible to stand up to this.... That there are LOADS of people who are opposed to all this.

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