Nothing is sacred to the NSA Stasi and their Norsefire partners across the pond at GCHQ. In yet another of those very embarrassing revelations that have generated perverse fantasies among the guilty of the murder of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden the ravenous security state monster is also conducting data-mining operations on cell phone apps including the extremely popular Angry Birds game series. In a collaborative effort by The Guardian, The New York Times and Pro Publica it was revealed that the Anglo-American surveillance machine has been able to easily and successfully exploit in app advertisements to collect personal private data. Angry Birds, an app that reportedly has been downloaded more than 1.7 billion times globally has been hailed as a “golden nuggets” for the illegal data-mining activities as they seek to “collect it all”. What isn't stated openly in these stories at least as far as I have seen is that the games are very popular among children who are being exploited by these dirty villainous agencies as surely as some garden variety pederast trolling through chat rooms.
Not that the foray into the world of video games is an earth-shattering piece of news, the agency that engages in illegal spying already was outed for infiltrating online games such as World of Warcraft several months ago. Hell, given the level of sophistication and the urge for penetration of every aspect of the personal privacy of millions would it truly be any surprise were the news to break that they even had the capability to use the digital television of millions of law abiding citizens to actually watch them? Where exactly will James Clapper, Michael Hayden, General Keith Alexander and their minions be during this Sunday's Super Bowl broadcast?
The Angry Birds intrusion is yet the latest piece of blatant disregard for the Constitution that Obama’s Stasi ( he defends it, he owns it) has been caught perpetrating with and as such there is the duty to chronicle it as another one of those road signs along the highway to Hell that keep whipping by at lightning speed. The story of course is given the best coverage in The Guardian (sorry NYT but you helped lie us into the Iraq war) given the increasingly deplorable descent of the domestic corporate-state media into into the netherworld it is the ultimate irony that freedom loving Americans must now get their news from abroad. It was just the other day that NBC’s Andrea Mitchell who as former Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan’s wife is an illustration of how the elite intermingle and breed so to produce a more entitled form of life form than possible to be produced from the rabble. During an interview with former Congresswoman Jane Harman over the NSA abuses Mitchell broke away for a NEWSFLASH of great national import that was the breaking story of manufactured celebrity Justin Bieber’s legal plight. You just cannot make stuff like this up as our once educated society continues the long slow crawl into the fever swamps of Idiocracy, a movie that is among the most potent social critiques of the modern era.
The Guardian story, by James Ball entitled “Angry Birds and ‘leaky’ phone apps targeted by NSA and GCHQ for user data” will likely have little to no affect on the complacent, sheeplike citizens of the star-spangled, god-kissed Homeland. Perhaps the would be some degree of restiveness amongst the bewildered herd but with Andrea Mitchell’s cutaway from matters of serious news to the Bieber Alert serving as ‘Exhibit A’ it does not exactly bode well for that informed public that is critical for a functional democracy and free country. So I excerpt the following from the foreign news source that continues to provide excellent coverage of our ongoing national existential crisis:
GCHQ documents use Angry Birds – reportedly downloaded more than 1.7bn times – as a case study for app data collection.
The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of "leaky" smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users' private information across the internet, according to top secret documents.
The data pouring onto communication networks from the new generation of iPhone and Android apps ranges from phone model and screen size to personal details such as age, gender and location. Some apps, the documents state, can share users' most sensitive information such as sexual orientation – and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger.
Many smartphone owners will be unaware of the full extent this information is being shared across the internet, and even the most sophisticated would be unlikely to realise that all of it is available for the spy agencies to collect.
Dozens of classified documents, provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden and reported in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica, detail the NSA and GCHQ efforts to piggyback on this commercial data collection for their own purposes.
This has zilch to do with preventing terrorism and it is unimaginable to one with any degree of functional gray matter that serious jihadists with a huge ax to grind against western decadence would spend much time playing freaking Angry Birds. This goes more to the NSA’s aforementioned fervor to ‘collect it all’ for storage as a part of some vague future need which would be - and this is not exactly venturing out on a limb here - retroacatively building a case for persecution against dissidents, political opposition and civil liberties advocates who challenge the system in the fairly near future.
The collection of the personal data through these apps will of course be thrown under the umbrella of “metadata” when it comes to defending the legality of the collections yet that is fairly dishonest. The great hidden secret of all of this (or Easter Egg in video game parlance) is that the “metadata” only serves as an indexing system and what is also being collected here is the actual content of phone calls, emails etc. despite the ongoing denials of the national security state mouthpieces including Barack Obama himself. That is the key - that all of this data is going into a massive database (perhaps something along the lines of MAIN CORE) for when the day comes to conduct the Last Roundup. Perhaps some of the real stuff that is out there on these programs, the as yet undisclosed serious stuff may contain details on a program exactly like that. It not as if it hasn’t already been thought of (REX 84) and as we continue to careen towards the inevitable collapse of an unsustainable the lists grow daily. Why do you think that the immense NSA complex in Utah was built?
It IS happening here.
(Image: The Guardian)
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