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.