Privacy is paramount in a world where knowledge and data are the only competitive advantages. The warped narrative sold to a consumerist planet by shareholder capitalism is based on the proprietary ownership and the withholding of such information but this exchange is uni-directional and the masses must be as diligent as the autocrats in protecting their own individual liberties.
"As long as the game is not a game of perfect information, the advantage will be with the player who has knowledge and can obtain information" - Lyotard. This is the macro structure of information. The technocrats, on behalf of the elite, protect their knowledge using patents, secrecy, the imposition of sanctions and punishments for groupings who invade the territory of their "rights" as the foot soldiers of the systemic controllers. This privacy also engenders such criminality as insider trading and the establishment of economic systems that shield real knowledge from the masses. This core knowledge is guarded jealously, think military research or nanotechnology, and frequently results in our world being made a more dangerous place as the focus is on performativity, efficiency and productivity rather than the law, safety issues or human rights and freedoms. Taking nanotechnology as a particular example, there is no body which is undertaking basic risk analysis regarding this new scientific area - there is no incentive for any body to do so. The race to profit and competitive advantage is the sole dynamic and, yet, there are many scientists within the discipline who are expressing concern as to the extreme risks posed by nanotechnology.
Although we are denied access to much of the key core data and information, we are able to address this imbalance in two ways. The first mode is to monitor the hidden information using analysis based on co-ordinated lateral thinking (not an issue for this particular post). The second route is through self-protection.
Globalised society under the yoke of shareholder capitalism depends upon incentives and fear. These two narratives spread from the top to the bottom of the highly unequal system. The poor in the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) experience both these frameworks to the same degree as those at the top of the Murdochracy. The incentives are the mind-distorting drug that leads to one human being exploiting another for personal advantage. The fear immediately kicks in once this adam's apple has been plucked from the mythical tree - the fear of loss of assets, the fear of competition, the fear of losing your edge, the fear that somebody out there is willing to use tactics even more antisocial than those employed by yourself. The inevitable race to the bottom of the barrel where excessive profit may be achieved in a non-regulated marketplace is the inevitable (and only) outcome to this particular game. Welcome to capitalism in a 2008 stylee.
Privacy is the core competency required to be able to operate in this psychopathic system and privacy requires addressing on two levels - the societal (the macro) and the individual (the micro). We will take each of these core areas in turn, first lets do the macro...
We should all be grateful for organisations like Privacy International (PI). Their aim is to: "...recognize countries in which privacy protection and respect for privacy is nurtured. This is done in the hope that others can learn from their example. Second we intend to identify countries in which governments and privacy regulators have failed to create a healthy privacy environment". This mission statement might sound meek and mild but it should form the fundamental basis of all of our lives, both private and business/employment. The 2007 International Privacy Ranking may be found at http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-559597 and we paraphrase some of PI's findings in this post. Firstly, not one country ranks at level 4.1-5.0 (the grading which represents a nation which "consistently upholds human rights standards") - this is the most depressing feature of the 47 countries covered in the report. Breaking down the data reveals more monsters lurking in the deep.
Eight countries are graded at the bottom level - "endemic surveillance societies" in the words of the report. That such an antisocial grouping would include China, Russia, Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan and Malaysia is hardly surprising but the other two "free" societies should be of far greater concern in the west. For the green unpleasant land that is England and the land of the free that is the USA are also rated as endemic surveillance societies. That Britain falls below such free societies as South Africa, the Philippines, Brazil and Israel should be remembered the next time a tory MP implies that the Brits are living in a police state. A further interesting point to be gained from the PI report is that the state of privacy decays and deteriorates in countries which "elect" right wing governments - check out the 2007 realities in France, Germany, Canada, Poland, Austria and Sweden, for example.
The fallacious war of terror is only a minor part of this invasion of our privacy as members of the populace, a far greater proportion of the probing into our lives by the US and GB is related to fear and incentives.
The societal leash allows that we might enjoy freedom of speech and rights of assembly but only within a structure which enables the deep state and their colleagues in business to monitor our behaviour closely and invalidly. Below is the analysis of Britain by the PI.
* World leading surveillance schemes
* Lack of accountability and data breach disclosure law
* Commissioner has few powers
* Interception of communications is authorised by politician, evidence not used in court, and oversight is by commissioner who reports only once a year upon reviewing a subset of applications
* Hundreds of thousands of requests from government agencies to telecommunications providers for traffic data
* Data retention scheme took a significant step forward with the quiet changes based on EU law
* Plans are emerging regarding surveillance of communications networks for the protection of copyrighted content
* Despite data breaches, 'joined-up government' initiatives continue
* Identity scheme still planned to be the most invasive in the world, highly centralised and biometrics-driven; plan to issue all foreigners with cards in 2008 are continuing
* E-borders plans include increased data collection on travellers
We trust that this makes our British readers feel far safer - you are living in the most invasive country in the EU...
When we established Dietrological and Football Is Fixed, these issues relating to privacy, and hence our security, were the first ones which we addressed. We set up the business in a highly unusual way - we used a cell-and-web structure across a range of nations. Looking at this in more detail will, hopefully, demonstrate the values of such an approach. Dietrological is a knowledge cell, we are a small grouping of individuals who create value through specific analysis and modelling of the global financial system and its derivatives. We are linked to other cells across the world which have their own particular core competencies - information technology, the Far East betting markets, business model innovation, political, the international financial markets etc. We elected to base these cells in surveillance-lite territories and this decision remains the prime basis of our business and personal security. The territories chosen (in a somewhat randomised order!) are Australia, Romania, Greece, Japan and a Caribbean island. The latter is not covered by the PI report but Greece is the most free country of the 47 assessed by PI and Romania is in 2nd place while all of the others rank several levels above the wonderful "free democracies" of your propaganda. The cell-and-web structure works on a range of privacy and security levels, the structure even allows us to provide rampant disinformation via the creative use of the monitoring tactics within England which serve to enhance the strength of our edifice. Through the use of intranets, pagers, spiders collating information from the First World without the First World being aware that their precious data is being monitored, the encoding of information etc etc, we are able to operate in a semi-open source manner say, for example, with regard to Football Is Fixed, while being basically secure in the core of our competitive advantage and our informational and personal security.
We would advise all readers who are unfortunate enough to live in police states to take their privacy seriously. Any email you send, any website you visit, any online purchase you make, every contract you enter into, all travel that you undertake, every phonecall (landline or mobile) that you make may be monitored by the invasive eyes and arms of the state. It is possible using imagination and a little creative thinking to render much of such intrusion obsolete or useless - confuse those eyes and twist those arms. We are not dealing with an intellectual surveillance here and it is a reasonably simple task to distort the picture which the state is trying to build up. We have mentioned before J.J. Luna's "How To Be Invisible" and, although it focuses particularly on the USA and he holds back on some really valuable tools, it is a great basis from which to extrapolate a safer and more secure existence in our fascistic world.
For the time being, "we" will be allowed to produce "our" blogs and link our realities with other social groups across the planet as such behaviours are believed by the system to be of more value to the state than to the individuals. In the words of the prescient Lyotard: "It may even be said that the system can and must encourage such movement to the extent that it combats its own entropy; the novelty of an unexpected "move" can supply the system with that increased performativity it forever demands and consumes".
The most depressing aspect to Football Is Fixed and similar blogs is that we merely enable the psychopaths to take account of the new realities to morph their system to new structures of inappropriate control and power.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
