‘Big brother’ alreadyspying on everyone

THE EDITOR: The deep global state and its disinformation strategists, the global mainstream media, would have the world believe that Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is somehow illegally prying into people’s data and using information in a way that is inimical to the interest of Americans and others in the global community.

Is it that these people think that Facebook has turned into something of a two-edged sword? I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole affair has been staged and is nothing but deliberately contrived anti-Donald Trump propaganda.

Ironically, this youthful  Harvard graduate did not start his social media platform on his own. He got help from the very people who head State agencies that now want us to believe the platform he created is undesirable.

All telecom and internet providers in the US have been mandated by federal law to hardwire in “backdoor” access for all US intelligence agencies to spy on citizens’ electronic communications in real time. At its very inception, Google has had an ongoing relationship with the National Security Agency. Microsoft engineered a backdoor to its Windows OS platform to facilitate US intelligence agencies.

The same people who today are giving the impression that they are badgering Zuckerberg are in bed with the very people who advanced him US$12 million as seed money to begin his Facebook project.

The “powers that shouldn’t be” already have access to everyone’s data. That is no secret. Global intelligence agencies have access to all internet communications in real time, and they store zettabytes of data just in case they need access at some time in the future. The US government shares this big data with friendly governments and vice versa.

So, let us be clear that “big brother” is already spying on everyone everywhere – both locally and abroad. Those with access to all this data can manipulate and engineer social responses; they easily control and manipulate the flow of information. What they do not want are alternate narratives or contrary opinions to reach the rank and file of the wider global population.

Hence, governments the world over have set in train a series of draconian laws that limit access to and restrict the sharing of information, especially its retrieval from networked computers.

Our proposed Cybercrime Bill intends to stifle the local embryonic germ seeds of investigative journalism by imposing harsh and draconian penalties on anyone who – even innocently – happens to transmit “sensitive” information that those in power would prefer to remain hidden.

Lawmakers are using a Hegelian dialectic via Facebook users’ data, Cambridge Analytica, purported Russian hackers and Trump’s election to the White House to justify their planned imposition of “regulation” and even censorship over social media sites like Facebook. Suddenly, “privacy” issues for citizens have piqued their interest.

At the bottom of all of this “noise” is nothing but the deep state’s wish to set and control its unchallenged social and political agenda. Only a chosen few must decide the extent to which ordinary folk must be informed. After all, knowledge is power – power that can derail the best and darkest of plans.

STEVE SMITH via e-mail