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Dear Reader
I never could get into Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. I tried and I did find some nice passages in it but the idea of scheming to get friends and working to influence people felt entirely unnatural to me. Kind of dishonest too.
Today I think I’m following that same pattern. Truth in my opinion is more important than trying to gin up popularity. So I’m going to tell the truth about some very popular services that really are threats to life and liberty. If some people don’t like that… then so be it.
When I’m done Doug French explains yet another way that the supposed peace officers of North America have been corrupted—in this case by being given a “legal” right to steal. That’s not hyperbole by the way. Check it out.
Let’s get to it.
Welcome to the Machine
I’ve been flying around to conferences and warning folks about electronic surveillance for years. At first people were generally willing to believe me (I presented them with evidence after all) but more than a few thought I was probably exaggerating. Then came Edward Snowden and a few more people believed that the threat was real. But Snowden’s revelations were only part of the story and not really the most important part.
The electronic surveillance machine is far larger than Snowden’s slides portrayed including not just government abuses but massive commercial abuses. And the structure of this vile machine is being completed now.
But before I go through the details I’d like you to remember if you can a song called Wlcome to the Machine” by Pink Floyd. Here are two sections of the lyrics that encapsulate the essence of the new surveillance machine:
Welcome my son
Welcome to the machine
Where have you been
It’s all right; we know where you’ve been…
Welcome my son
Welcome to the machine
What did you dream
It’s all right; we told you what to dream
I’m not a huge Pink Floyd fan but they sure nailed this one. There are two primary functions of this machine: full-life surveillance (“We know where you’ve been”) and persistent deep manipulation (“We told you what to dream”).
I’m here to tell you that this has already been built and that most Westerners are sitting right in the middle of it.
Yes I know this is something many people don’t want to hear. Far too many are like the ones who complained to the prophet Isaiah telling him “Speak unto us smooth things.” But some things are not smooth… and they’re true anyway.
Why MUST Sell You
—and all the other big free services—are selling your minds thoughts and lives just like a butcher sells meat. And please understand: They have no choice. Not if they want to keep their quarterly numbers positive.
Think about this: users pay the company nothing as in not a single penny. So if you’re a user you are not its customer. Someone pays ; those revenues come from somewhere but they don’t come from you.
So if you’re not the company and you’re not the customer what are you
Yep that’s right—you’re the product. and their ilk are selling you to their customers.
And please understand that the free model gives these companies no choice at all. Their users won’t pay and they have to make money somehow.
“That’s okay; a few ads won’t kill me.”
’s gross revenue is running at over $1 billion per month. ’s is approaching $4 billion per month. Do you really think they get all that money by selling lame ads for backpacks and skis These companies are selling you in far more sophisticated ways than that.
’s boss back in 2009 bragged that “We know where you’ll be ” and you can be very very sure that they’ve been selling such information for the past five years. You can further be sure that they’re a lot better at it now.
Did you know that —three years ago—ran an experiment on 689000 of its users to see if it could alter their moods by altering the headlines they saw And did you know that the experiment was a success
So three years ago found out that it could alter people’s moods making them happier or sadder as it wished. And found something else: those users would transfer those moods to their friends in a cascade effect.
Do you really think hasn’t done anything with that information in the meanwhile Do you really think hasn’t
Making things worse both of these outfits are in bed with the feds. ’s infamous experiment was partly financed by the US Army and is deeply intermingled with the US State Department (as well as other agencies). If you’re curious about this read Julian Assange’s new book on the subject.
You Want Proof
Think about being in ’s position. Auctioning off little ads would never bring in billions per month; you’d have to find better ways of supercharging your ad revenue. So what would you do
First you’d tell your advertisers you could get ads to people the moment they expressed the first interest in their product. That’s a good idea but that moment came was monetized and went more than 10 years ago. You need new ideas to juice your quarterlies.
So what do you do
The answer is easy: You learn how to implant desires in your users. And if you want to do it well you do it in ways that are specific to each individual. After all what works to manipulate me may be completely ineffective for you.
That’s where we are now. And when I say that these companies fulfill Pink Floyd’s lyric of “We told you what to dream” I don’t mean that they tried to make everyone dream the same thing; I mean that they got your friend to dream things that will squeeze money out of her life… and that they’ll make you dream different things things designed to squeeze money out of your life.
Here's how to prove this: Take your laptop to a friend’s house. Both of you log in to YouTube or or . You’ll both see different screens. And that means that you’re already getting customized environments.
So if you were or why would you give people customized environments Shall we really pretend that and the others are doing this as a public service
Of course not; the purpose of everything they do is to generate more revenue. In other words they’re manipulating you for their profit. That’s the only way they can make money from you.
I’ll leave you to decide where this is likely to go.
If you want to do something about it here’s Cryptohippie’s Guide to Online Privacy. The guide is free; the service is not.
A Free-Man’s Take is written by adventure capitalist author and freedom advocate Paul Rosenberg. You can get much more from Paul in his unique monthly newsletter Free-Man’s Perspective.
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Police Piracy
Christmas came early to a Midwest sheriff’s department. While back in Abilene Kansas to see family I read a story reported by an old high school friend titled “Dickinson County Sheriff Office could benefit from forfeiture.”
Interstate Highway 70 starts in Baltimore Maryland and ends near Cove Fort Utah. It transects the upper half of Kansas. Plenty of tourists and trucks travel the route including Andris Cukurs of Glendale California who was pulled over for “a routine traffic stop” in November. It turned out the 68-year-old Cukurs had a little bit of pot and a lot of cash.
I don’t know which direction Cukurs was going but keep in mind that marijuana is legal in Colorado less than 300 miles from where he was stopped. However it was the currency in today’s “policing for profit” age that was breaking the law. Cukurs had $314800 in cash with him and now the Dickinson County Sheriff’s Department is licking its chops figuring Cukurs and his cash were naughty and they being the law and all are nice.
“Typically in a forfeiture it is used for drug enforcement purposes” County Administrator Brad Homman told Salina Journal reporter Tim Horan. “Money used to buy drugs undercover. Or it could be vehicles for the task force computers anything.”
Readers who carry lots of cash should take note. Civil forfeiture laws give law enforcement agencies the incentive to take millions. Civil forfeiture turns the bedrock principle that Americans are innocent until proven guilty on its head. As the Institute for Justice (IJ) points out in its report Policing for Profit “Unlike criminal asset forfeiture with civilforfeiture a property owner need not be found guilty of a crime—or even charged—to permanently lose her cash car home or other property. ”
In law enforcement’s eyes cash is always up to no good and has no purpose other than drug trafficking. Like pirates on the high seas in some states those who are supposed to be protecting and serving are trolling for cash to fund their budgets instead.
The US Department of Justice created its Asset Forfeiture Fund in 1985. A year later the fund—which holds the proceeds from seized property and is available to be divvied out to law enforcement agencies—brought in $93.7 million. In 2008 the amount had ballooned to $1.6 billion. In 2013 it reached $6.3 billion.
The percentage of civil forfeiture proceeds that are disbursed to law enforcement varies from zero to 100% with more than half the states giving everything to the police. Kansas falls in the 100% category as does Texas wherethe average law enforcement agency obtained 14% percent of its budget in 2007 from forfeitures.
The IJ report Forfeiting Justice: How Texas Police and Prosecutors Cash In on Seized Property finds:
[F]rom 2001 to 2007 Texas agencies took in at least $280 million in forfeiture funds and annual proceeds tripled over those seven years. In 2007 the top 10 forfeiture money-earning agencies in Texas took in proceeds equal to more than one-third of their budgets. From 2001 to 2007 about 74 percent of forfeiture funds were spent on equipment while nearly a quarter went to salaries and overtime pay.
The authors of Policing for Profit write:
Criminologists economists and legal scholars who have studied forfeiture behavior have found evidence indicating that police departments are taking advantage of lenient forfeiture statutes to “pad their budgets.”
Nick Sibilla wrote in Forbes this year about forfeiture and pointed out that in the city of Tenaha Texas where police seized about $3 million from hundreds of drivers.
The New Yorker ran a story about Jennifer Boatright a waitress in Houston who drove through Tenaha with her boyfriend two young sons and all of their savings in cash with the intention of buying a used car in her home town of Linden.
The couple was stopped by the Tenaha police who claimed the waitress and her boyfriend fit the profile as drug couriers. They were coming from Houston “a known point for distribution of illegal narcotics” and the two kids were likely decoys. The couple met with the county DA who told the couple they would go to jail and their children handed over to foster care or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha and get back on the road.
New Jersey insurance adjuster George Reby drove through Tennessee with $22000 in cash bagged up in his back seat. He’d been negotiating for a car on eBay and wanted to be ready if he could make a deal.
Officer Larry Bates of the Monterey Tennessee police department stopped Reby for speeding and seized the $22000. “The safest place to put your money if it’s legitimate is in a bank account” the officer explained. “I would put it in a bank account. It draws interest and it’s safer.”
Reby was stunned that the cop could legally take his property for no apparent reason. “I never had any clue that they thought they could take my money legally” Reby said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Indeed Officer Bates didn’t arrest him. It was Reby’s cash that was suspicious and the department wanted it for its coffers. “No it’s not illegal to carry cash” Bates said when interviewed by a reporter from a local news channel. “Again it’s what the cash is being used for to facilitate or what it is being utilized for.”
The reporter pointed out to Officer Bates that he had no proof the cash was illicit. Bates countered “And he couldn’t prove it was legitimate.” In Tennessee if the out-of-staters don’t hire attorneys and return for a hearing about their matter they forfeit their property. However many aren’t given notice of the hearings.
Only because the local TV station reported the story did Mr. Reby get his money back. The Monterey Police Department issued him a check and no apology after four months. To get his $22000 back he had to show up in person waive his Constitutional rights and sign an agreement not to sue the department.
It’s not always cash that law enforcement goes after. The FBI wanted Russell Caswell’s Tewksbury Massachusetts motel and the land it is built on. Barnini Chakraborty wrote on Fox News:
[T]hey suspected it was a hotbed for drug-dealing and prostitution. The agents who were working with state and local authorities told a disbelieving Caswell they had the right to take the property valued at as much as $1.5 million through a legal process known as civil forfeiture.
Caswell had the guts and means to take on the government and he won. The judge called the government’s evidence a “gross exaggeration.” Most people don’t have the means to fight and the cash and property fills law enforcement coffers.
For another example in Ball Harbour Florida a town of only 2500 residents the police raked in more than $5 million in 2011 through its participation with the Justice Department’s asset forfeiture sharing program.
These stories and statistics must provide a jolt to people who instinctively believe the actions of government and its criminal justice system are sacrosanct. However economist Robert Murphy explains this looting though civil forfeitures is “a perfect vindication of the [Murray] Rothbardian point that in a very real sense government is a gang of thieves writ large.”
So just what was Andris Cukurs doing to warrant the routine stop-turned-government-robbery in Kansas He failed to maintain a lane and worse yet he was driving a Chevy while his tag was registered to a Ford.
The 68-year-old was arrested for possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia and distributing a controlled substance. More important he’s been indicted for attempted money laundering.
To call this “policing for profit” implies a service is being exchanged for money. Civil forfeiture is just plain theft under the guise of law enforcement. It’s “police piracy.”
Friday Funnies
I’ve long thought that for pure comic ability Robin Williams was the best I've ever seen. I thought he was absolutely brilliant as a serious actor as well. I found it a great loss that he was such a troubled soul.
I did however have a problem with Williams’ comedy. Having spent a good deal of my life on construction sites and in gyms I’m sick of vulgar humor so that turned me off from much of his work. Still his brilliance is undeniable.
Here are two less-vulgar clips I found. Enjoy.
Robin explaining the origins of golf:
Robin’s first radio broadcast in Good Morning Vietnam:
That’s It for This Week
Just a quick note before I sign off: for portfolio-balancing purposes principals editors and funds they manage may need to sell shares of (ATY.V). There’s no change in the recommendation for this stock but our rules mandate that we notify subscribers so that they can sell if desired before staff may do so.
Have a great weekend and please act to protect yourself from whatever threats you perceive. Make a decision andbe the first one to move. Don’t sit still waiting for permission.
Paul Rosenberg
Editor A Free-Man’s Take