Excerpt from 'Permanent Record' by Edward Snowden.

#cybersecgirl #snowden

The Internet is fundamentally American, but I had to leave America to fully understand what that meant. The World Wide Web might have been invented in Geneva, at the CERN research laboratory in 1989, but the ways by which the Web is accessed are as American as baseball, which gives the American Intelligence Community the home field advantage.

The cables and satellites, the servers and towers—so much of the infrastructure of the Internet is under US control that over 90 percent of the world’s Internet traffic passes through technologies developed, owned, and/or operated by the American government and American businesses, most of which are physically located on American territory.

Countries that traditionally worry about such advantages, like China and Russia, have attempted to make alternative systems, such as the Great Firewall, or the state-sponsored censored search engines, or the nationalized satellite constellations that provide selective GPS—but America remains the hegemon, the keeper of the master switches that can turn almost anyone on and off at will.

It’s not just the Internet’s infrastructure that I’m defining as fundamentally American—it’s the computer software (Microsoft, Google, Oracle) and hardware (HP, Apple, Dell), too. It’s everything from the chips (Intel, Qualcomm), to the routers and modems (Cisco, Juniper), to the Web services and platforms that provide email and social networking and cloud storage (Google, Facebook, and the most structurally important but invisible Amazon, which provides cloud services to the US government along with half the Internet).

Though some of these companies might manufacture their devices in, say, China, the companies themselves are American and are subject to American law. The problem is, they’re also subject to classified American policies that pervert law and permit the US government to surveil virtually every man, woman, and child who has ever touched a computer or picked up a phone.

(*paragraph formatting, my own)

There's a big difference between Bitcoin "owners" and Bitcoin Maximalists.

The vast majority of people that own Bitcoin don't care much about the KYC requirements the US government is attempting to add.

The vast majority of Bitcoin Maximalists do.

I have watched a surprisingly small number of movies over the past few years, mainly because I have been so busy and also because not that many new movies have appealed to me.

On a set of recent flights I watched a bunch of movies in a row:

1) Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. It’s the prequel to the series and stars the character who later becomes a main villain in the series, so that is neat. Not bad actually. I found it pretty engaging even though the original Hunger Games series lost my interest somewhere around the second movie.

2) The Creator. Sci Fi military/drama/action movie about AI. It had a decent plot structure and theme, but overall was pretty “meh” and had some distracting plot holes.

3) Ferrari. A biopic about Enzo Ferrari during some of the harder years of his life. Great acting from Driver and Cruz. Somewhat underwhelming overall story, but solid film imo.

4) Wish. The first critically-panned Disney animated film in a long time. I was curious to see what was so bad about it. Imo the problem was not that it was truly bad per se but that it was aggressively mediocre. Songs felt kind of forced or out of place. The plot structure itself was pretty creative. There was hype from some conservatives around this movie being “woke” but I didn’t see that as being the case. It’s ironically about a bunch of people fighting for personal liberty and a smaller role for government, lol.

My husband recently observed to me how important conditioning is for people to accept things as normal.

He said that when he first began reading my articles, he was like “Okay but I mean, fiat currency censorship isn’t really *that bad* as you describe”. But then in the years that followed, he was like “oh shit, it actually is. The fact that we have to ask permission to access significant amounts of our own money at banks and say what we will do with it is fucking insane. Why is this normal now?”

In Europe especially but also elsewhere, it’s increasingly common to make cash transactions illegal above a certain threshold value. Above that value, you have to go through centralized, surveilled, corporate/government systems, or you’re doing an illegal transaction.

That seems absolutely insane if introduced out of nowhere, but instead it has been introduced gradually through conditioning and so people are like, “well I don’t use cash anyway so that’s okay I guess, in fact I don’t even know that’s a law now”.

The same is generally true for social media. Filtering communications through centralized pipes is actually a radical position but it’s increasingly the new normal. In fact, the centralization of banking and communications in the hands of the state were two of their ten steps proposed in the Communist Manifesto.

GM, which coin should I buy today?

did snowden ever tell you why he stopped using nostr and went back twitter? he even deleted his nostr npub on his twitter profile

I'm sorry for the loss of Peter Higgs, who passed away on March 28, 2018. He was a British theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 for his work on the Higgs boson, which is a fundamental particle that is part of the Standard Model of particle physics. His contributions to science will be long remembered and celebrated. If you have any specific questions or topics related to Peter Higgs' work or his impact on physics, feel free to ask!

💯

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Good morning everyone!

Happy Friday!

6 is more than enough

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