Phorm, Privacy, Hiding and The Home Office

So Jackie Smith has now decided she won’t be spending £14,000,000,000.00 on a giant database of emails, web pages, texts, phone calls etc. No, she’ll spend £1,000,000,000.00 instead. Why? Well there’s the rub, “privacy concerns”. Yeah right. All this means is that they are definitely going ahead with it but not admitting it. A similar ploy has been adopted by many bent MPs when claiming for empty houses, hard core porn films, butt plugs - erm, sorry bath plugs, and the kitchen sink. In other words it’s another pack of lies.

Phorm is like one of those duck decoys you see them use in the old Tom and Jerry cartoons, it lures in the hapless and,  it has to be said, stupid ducks who get blasted as soon as they are seen. The dimwitted ducks are swimming towards Phorm quacking away about how terrible it is when all the time the hunter (The Home Office) is hiding behind the reeds ready with a massive database with which to whack them over the head and shut them up for good. Phorm is just a commercial application of what the Security Services in this and most other countries have dreamt of for years: an automated sytem of customer/voter/agitator profiling that allows them to spy on everyone.

Phorm is a clever bit of kit, but it’s probably been running for years on behalf of HMG. As we know HMG and the Home Civil Service is riddled with corruption, idleness and self interest. If there’s money in it and it can be applied to advertising, for politicians campaigning, they’ll push it. This will happen all over the world.

The problem is that too many closeted goose steppers and spankers, of both genders and all ages, are of the view that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about. Such aphorisms have an instant appeal in that there is always a certain logic in their construction. However, note the use of the word “you”. The goose steppers and spankers never think it applies to them. Why would it? Daddy drives a Volvo after all. Politicians are the same, believing they’ll always be in power; civil servants think they’re indispensible - confusing this with unsackable. Of course the idea of a giant database is too much to resist for the greedy politicians and civil servants :their hands are itching to have their palms greased by the dodgy IT brigade that feed them and rip the rest of us off. A billion quid? Add a nought more likely.

The Internet is insidious in its destruction of everything: the music business, soon the movie business, the newspaper industry, soon the publishing industry, TV, millions upon millions of back room staff and now privacy.

T. H. E. Ranter believes that the Internet should be crumpled up into a little tiny ball and flung onto a fire to burn forever. While we’re at it screw up mobile phones and throw them on, and cars, and all forms, and all politicians, and all the cranks, crackpots and the generally disaffected or confused who make as much money complaining about it all as the evil doers who put it all into practice. They all piss in the same pot.

Advertising and marketing is what the Internet was created for. It’s what we all do here, anyone who has a website is like any one who has written anything: we all want to be read. We all submit our sites to search engines, count or visitors, page views and so on. We wax lyrical about increases in traffic and sticakbility. We’re no different to Phorm. Phorm is all of us. And now we can all look into the souls of everyone else. So you see Phorm is a force for good, we’ll all know everything about everyone. Won’t that be nice?

Stopphoulplay.com is such a website, it seeks to persuade the casual visitor that people who campaign against Phorm are nutters with their hands in the till taking back handers from the competition. But the campaigners are doing exactly the same thing: using marketing techniques to peddle their wares, which in this case are opinions. Most people don’t give a monkey’s about any of it, they go about their day to day activities blissfully unaware of it all. They will never be adversely affected by any of it. This is why the Internet is such a force for destruction. Greedy self opinionated folk (I don’t include myself in this: I’m not greedy) spend a good proportion of their waking hours glued to a screen, damaging their eyes and stretching their ulna nerves like elastic bands to guarantee RSI and a bad back. Just to make sure the insidious creep of t’Internet stains everyone.

Burn it I say. And that twat who invented it.

Anyone who believes in anything at all would agree with me.

Tags: cranks, data protection act, home civil service, phorm, politicians, privacy issues, Public Sector Corruption

UK Banks Bust

The UK banking sector is in financial meltdown. This is due to the ridiculous ramping up of house prices by vested interests. But whose?

T.H.E. Ranter believes that it is very simple. Bank staff, investment bankers in particular, or as they would be called in any other walk of life, telesales staff, needed more customers. How to get them though was the question. Well, why not make more customers, they did this by expanding the lending criteria to cover virtually anyone. This way they could lend more of their investors money (our money, the taxpayers money) to these new customers and so make more money for themselves. Why was it allowed? Regulators, politicians, bankers and wankers all piss in the same property investment pot. They all own substantial amounts of real property (land and houses) and wanted to see it go up in value. For example Tony Blair bought a few properties and made a tidy sum from it, the rest of them will have done the same. So the whole scam was thought up by, regulated by, and taken advantage of by crooks and thieves, in other words bankers, regulators and politicians. Of course they all knew what would happen long before the rest of us were told about the “credit crunch”, so could use this inside information to make even more money. In addition, and to make matters worse, the politicians have an interest in maintaining prices, so they are using taxpayers money, in other words all of our money (literally), to prop up a corrupt system so as to protect the corrupt enrichment that they have engineered for themselves. If the market were let rip the whole system would have collapsed and house would be worth the same now as they were in 1984.

We now face the nightmare scenario of a bunch of crooks, who reckon they are socialists, using inside information, our money and the law to nationalise banks so as to cover the whole scam up. Our pensions, goods, and currency plummet in value in the meantime whilst they are able to use this power to control virtually every aspect of our lives. PHORM, databases, CRB records, credit records, databases on children, finger printing children, and all the rest of it. And the main purpose of it is to maintain the corrupt status quo.

The problem is that none of us can do a damn thing about it because most of us don’t even have a vote, the only folk who do live in marginal seats, but they don’t have enough power to do anything meaningful and the only people they can vote for are bent Labour and Tory politicians, unknown Lib Dems, the odd BNP nutter or some crank who is prepared to stump up a thousand quid to get fifty votes.

Err, lend us a quid mate

In the meantime life is made more boring by smoking bans, an end to binge drinking, crack downs on this that and the other, and a dour scotch dude saying we should think ourselves lucky he’s in charge and tough shit about your food, gas, lecky and petrol costing a fortune.

How boring is that?

The boring UK, land of the sober gay.

Tags: Boring UK, Gordon Brown, Political Comment

PHORM, Terrorism, Internet Phones, Censorship et al

John Evans, the latest head of MI5, in an interview with the Times today, asserts that the global economic meltdown and the collapse of capitalism will also lead to a change in the global balance of power. He then extrapolates from this that there will be a resultant increase in terrorism. Of course here in Britain there has been minimal terrorism for years now. This is of course largely down to MI5 and the Police. And a good thing as well. However the alarming aspect of the interview is that he mentions internet telephone calls in the same breath as terrorism. They can’t eavesdrop them is the problem of course, they are private in other words.

What does this all mean for PHORM. Well Phorm is the softener for the massive intrusion into digital communications currently being embarked upon by the Home Office to counter alleged terrorism communication that is dependant upon the Internet. Phorm is of course just a way to get around the pop up blockers and anti-spyware software. It allows ISPs to make some extra cash, targets advertising and tracks surfing habits annonymously (although this is disputed by the geeks who understand the finer aspects of the technology). It requires co-operation from BT to install gadgetry at the exchange to intercept communications and the co-operation of ISPs. Of course MI5 and the Home office don’t have to worry about all that co-operation - BT do as the are told and keep their virtual monopoly. PHORM is the thin end of the wedge to get us all used to being spied on all the time. The real power will be the database they are setting up to store everything we do electronically. Phone calls, texts, emails, surfing, posting, blogging, you name it they’ll have it. And of course Internet Telephone calls will be intercepted and traced.

Of course stopping crackpot terrorists from blowing up Joe Public has to be a good thing. Stopping paedophiles killing kids is a good thing as well. This is why they use this to justify the intrusion into our privacy that all of this technology entails.

PHORM is a smokescreen, a red herring, a diversion from the main issue. It’s a bluff, we’re being finessed, our eye is taken off the ball. We’re all protesting about PHORM when we should be protesting about the massive invasion of privacy that’s already occurred and now being increased.

Of course there are always people who object to any form of advertising. You know the ones, they put stickers on their windows about no junk mail, complain about direct marketing and cold calling, hassle door knockers and salesmen. Cranks and crackpots in other words. We all have to make a living and advertising is a legitimate, albeit on occasion irritating, way of doing so. So PHORM gets a bit of publicity and diverts attention away from the real issue.

PHORM is annoying but BIG PHORM, government PHORM now that’s really worrying. The government might have a point about Internet Telephone calls helping terrorists. But is there really any justification for the loss of our privacy on such an unprecedented scale? And will it achieve anything? Even the Chinese don’t do this. Just us, here in the UK.

But if it will have a marginal affect in dealing with terrorists, and to a lesser extent perverts, why spend ten or fifteen billion quid on installing all of this stuff? That’s the really interesting question. What are they really up to. What are they really seeking to achieve with this technology?

Complete control. We’re like animals in a zoo, being gawped at and spied on 24 hours per day. CCTV, speed cameras, soon chips in our cars, medical records databased, banks nationalised, extended powers of debt collection, virtual abolition of juries, fixing the burden of proof, changes in civil and criminal procedures to favour big government. All of these things are creeping up on us. It’s the sort of infrastructure that could be taken over in a heartbeat in a coup and used to control us all. Hopefully it won’t be. But if you put an egg on the edge of a table then after a while, perhaps a very long while - when it’s good and rotten, it’ll roll off and smash, and what a smell there’ll be then.

PHORM? So what. BIG PHORM, government’s PHORM equivalent - that’s the big issue. It’s potentially dangerous.

MI5 and the Police do a worthwhile and dangerous job protecting us from terrorists, organised crime, perverts and paedophiles; this technology will help them do that. But is the price too high? That’s the real question.

Tags: phorm, Political Comment

Tags: Broadband, phorm

PHORM is political

Of course it always was. Governments will often fund a front that is researching methodologies to control and monitor people. They will use marketing techniques to so. Of course they’ve done this for years in election campaigns and so on. But we can see that PHORM has always been political.

Why?

That Dick Branson fella from Virgin Media is involved. You know the fella who pissed off the mafia and has been hiding on his island ever since, talk about a gilded cage. Still, pompous tell-tale-tits get what they deserve. And gropers. Dick’s made some political comment about the state of our hospitals, a sure fire indicator that he’s got political ambitions, and why shouldn’t he? Politics and “charity” are probably the biggest money spinners in the UK right now, I mean the royal family and celebrities wouldn’t be involved in “charity” work if there wasn’t a pretty penny in it for themselves. Think about it. Do you actually know anyone or even know of anyone who knows of someone who has ever been helped in any meaningful way by a charity? No, didn’t think so. Me neither.

But PHORM is a cage for all of us, and it don’t glister. It’s a dog lead, it’s a rope we have to run along. We won’t be able to escape the gaze. We’re going to be gawped at continually. The information collected will be sold to fellas like that Dick Branson, and other a-holes to make money out of. As it is the government are preparing to sell off all of our personal data to private companies who collect debts. There will be absolutely no privacy for any of us ordinary mortals. Of course the royals, politicians, and rich fellas like that Dick Branson will be okay. But we won’t, will we?

PHORM? It’s not about advertising or pop up advertisements. It’s not anonymous either. It’s a gilded cage for all of us, and it’s going to be owned by traitors like that Dick Branson who sell out their fellow man to make more money. And BT? They’ll be fitting these little boxes to every exchange in the UK. PHORM is run by a yank, so guess what. The US of A will know more about us all than the British government.

Tags: Add new tag, Dick Branson, phorm, surveillance