This recent blog post discussed how since 2010 the FBI has been deploying its super elite surveillance units to the Burning Man Festival. It was written with a sort of, “Look how common surveillance is,” perception. The thought being, if the FBI deploys its classified surveillance units (we don’t even know their budget) to catalog a small group of hippies and stoners getting buzzed in the middle of a desert, they must be everywhere.
It turns out that perception may have been wrong. Since 2010, Burning man has seen a small coterie of very powerful people visit each year, the blackmail and control of whom could prove highly useful. Note that while mobile, their anti- and counter-surveillance defenses would likely be much attenuated. If you are going to get intel, there is no better time than while the target is on a trip, which will inevitably contain holes in their bubble that their security may not be prepared to see and plug on the fly.
If you have never been to Burning Man, your perception is likely this: a white-hot desert filled with 50,000 stoned, half-naked hippies doing sun salutations while techno music thumps through the air.
A few years ago, this assumption would have been mostly correct. But now things are a little different. Over the last two years, Burning Man, which this year runs from Aug. 25 to Sept. 1, has been the annual getaway for a new crop of millionaire and billionaire technology moguls, many of whom are one-upping one another in a secret game of I-can-spend-more-money-than-you-can and, some say, ruining it for everyone else.
Some of the biggest names in technology have been making the pilgrimage to the desert for years, happily blending in unnoticed. These include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Google founders, and Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon. But now a new set of younger rich techies are heading east, including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, employees from Twitter, Zynga and Uber, and a slew of khaki-wearing venture capitalists.
That’s probably partly why they redacted the tech they deployed at the festival from the documents they released. Had they let out all the ultra high-tech toys they bought, it would have only provoked even more interest. It would have been clear that they aren’t there for the hippie pot dealers and the new age crystal-worshippers. They are targeting the power.
I will bet each of those tech titans has video and audio of their entire time there in a file somewhere, much of it from 360 degrees around them. All of their emf emissions were captured for subsequent unraveling, including that encrypted sattelite uplink they think is secure. They know the websites they visited, they read the emails they sent, they heard their phone calls, and they recorded all their conversations – and it is all in the permanent file. Did they buy drugs? Foot surveillance video’d it. Did a married guy pick up a hippie girl for a night of fun behind his wife’s back? That girl was a confidential informant prostitute paid to bang him. She had a 1080p hidden video recorder in her purse positioned on the chair by the bed with a sightline to the bed to record all the festivities. Did another engage in a bit of insider trading? Is one of them a closeted gay? With that level of coverage the sky’s the limit, and anything is possible.
Interestingly an important part of surveillance is infiltration, either by trained sworn agents, or paid informants. Notice those camps hire “Sherpa” servants from the crowds at the festival:
For those with even more money to squander, there are camps that come with “Sherpas,” who are essentially paid help.
Tyler Hanson, who started going to Burning Man in 1995, decided a couple of years ago to try working as a paid Sherpa at one of these luxury camps…
“Your food, your drugs, your costumes are all handled for you, so all you have to do is show up,” Mr. Hanson said. “In the camp where I was working, there were about 30 Sherpas for 12 attendees.”
So many sherpas for so few attendees. How convenient, and luxurious. Mark my words, at least a few of those were either trained officers or paid informants (and not only FBI – Private sector industrial espionage and firms that feed data to Wall Street traders looking for inside intel were probably also there). They would have been tricked out with the latest in hidden body camera gear and audio, and probably a bunch of bugs to plant. Don’t even ask what happens if Elon Musk sets his phone or tablet down and leaves it unattended in his secure area. The goal is total penetration of everything.
If they were caught? Hide, deny, and escape. If they can’t? Ooopps, sorry about that. It was just a training operation, and our trainee went over the line. So sorry. These things happen. Please accept my apologies and give my regards to your drug dealing mistress and your wife.
You can begin to see why our government looks the way it does. This is how our leaders are selected for us, or at least how they select the pool of potential leaders that they let us choose among. Were it not for Donald’s billions, he would never have gotten any press, or anywhere near the Presidency. As it is, I fear for his safety.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. You (and I) have no idea of what is actually out there – and it has the potential to one day be quite dangerous if the wrong people get in charge. My guess is the Alt-right, with all of it’s real-talking, game-educated, charismatic leaders, and an audience of armed, aggressive white males who have a principled opposition to totalitarianism, is near the top of its targeting list. This is about getting the power to dictate to you what you will do, and maybe even who you will betray one day.
Be aware of the threat, and keep your nose clean, if you want to avoid a painful decision one day. Act as if somebody is always watching and recording, and distance yourself from any friends whose lives could be ruined by the machine, because they will be looking for that kind of leverage as well.
If you are a non-American leader in the freedom movement online, I have no idea if this applies to you, though I would think your nation’s security services probably have a file on you. However if you come to the US, don’t underestimate how easily an agency can engineer your coverage such that the majority of people you encounter, from your taxi driver, to your bellhop, to the valet driver who “parks” your rental car (and maybe swaps it out with an identical one better “suited” to monitoring you), to the hotel concierge assigned to you, are actually a part of your coverage, either recruited or sworn. And never underestimate the extent of the technical monitoring installed around you wherever you stay, and wherever you go.
This is a different world.
Apocalypse cometh™
