Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Hi, NSA! How are you, today?

Rex Proctor – action figure come to life – is rolling on the floor, laughing so much tears are beginning to form. Two events have occurred this week, either one of which would have caused him to smile at their occurrence, but the sum of their parts have resulted in near-hysteria. He cannot believe how easy it is to dupe the public.

The Tory party of Great Britain has been 'hiding' on-line records of speeches.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/11/tories-attempt-delete-all-pre-2010-speeches-internet

This is a cynical move to ensure that it is difficult to present evidence of promises made that are counter to what they are actually doing now. Rex supposes that the codeword title for this procedure is The Winston Smith Protocol. Still, he is convinced that it will only receive minor attention in the media and, even then, only for a day. They will get away with it, because they can.

Secondly, Google and Microsoft have announced that they are restricting links from a hundred thousand terms associated with child abuse.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/18/uk-us-dark-web-online-child-abuse-internet

On the face of it, a noble endeavour – until you bother to think beyond the scope of the announcement. It is argued that it will stop inadvertent viewing of illegal pictures, yet if you are mistakenly typing in 'naked-child-sex', the odds are remote that you are trying to complete your doctoral thesis on Nabokov. Rex is convinced this change of heart – they originally said this would be impossible to do – is more to do with deflecting questions on their possible involvement with the NSA and GCHQ than it is to do with reducing availability of illegal pornography. And anyway, if you can think of more than a hundred terms associated with child abuse images, let alone one hundred thousand, you are probably already finding ways to circumvent discovery.

Since the majority of the world was convinced the 21st century began on the 1st January 2000, instead of a year later, Rex thinks this sort of public perception manipulation is considered child's play.    

 

Try not to do the stupid things stupid people do.         

No comments: