The real cost of the K-shift will be a total abandonment of rules and morality:
In 2013, Hemisphere was revealed by The New York Times and described only within a Powerpoint presentation made by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The Times described it as a “partnership” between AT&T and the U.S. government; the Justice Department said it was an essential, and prudently deployed, counter-narcotics tool…
However, AT&T’s own documentation—reported here by The Daily Beast for the first time—shows Hemisphere was used far beyond the war on drugs to include everything from investigations of homicide to Medicaid fraud…
Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public…
AT&T has a unique power to extract information from its metadata because it retains so much of it. The company owns more than three-quarters of U.S. landline switches, and the second largest share of the nation’s wireless infrastructure and cellphone towers, behind Verizon. AT&T retains its cell tower data going back to July 2008, longer than other providers. Verizon holds records for a year and Sprint for 18 months, according to a 2011 retention schedule obtained by The Daily Beast…
The disclosure of Hemisphere was not the first time AT&T has been caught working with law enforcement above and beyond what the law requires…
Special cooperation with the government to conduct surveillance dates back to at least 2003, when AT&T ordered technician Mark Klein to help the National Security Agency install a bug directly into its main San Francisco internet exchange point, Room 641A. The company invented a programming language to mine its own records for surveillance, and in 2007 came under fire for handing these mined records over to the FBI. That same year Hemisphere was born…
Once AT&T provides a lead through Hemisphere, then investigators use routine police work, like getting a court order for a wiretap or following a suspect around, to provide the same evidence for the purpose of prosecution. This is known as “parallel construction…”
The EFF, American Civil Liberties Union, and Electronic Privacy Information Center have all expressed concern that surveillance using Hemisphere is unconstitutionally invasive, and have sought more information on the program, with little success. The EFF is currently awaiting a judge’s ruling on its Freedom of Information Act suit against the Department of Justice for Hemisphere documentation…
AT&T stores details for every call, text message, Skype chat, or other communication that has passed through its infrastructure, retaining many records dating back to 1987, according to the Times 2013 Hemisphere report. The scope and length of the collection has accumulated trillions of records and is believed to be larger than any phone record database collected by the NSA under the Patriot Act, the Times reported…
The database allows its analysts to detect hidden patterns and connections between call detail records, and make highly accurate inferences about the associations and movements of the people Hemisphere is used to surveil. Its database is particularly useful for tracking a subscriber between multiple discarded phone numbers, as when drug dealers use successive prepaid “burner” phones to evade conventional surveillance…
The Florida attorney general’s Medicaid Fraud Unit received “Hemisphere Project” training in 2013, according to a report on the unit’s data-mining activities. Florida is one of eight states that is allowed to spend federal money on anti-fraud data mining initiatives. Florida Medicaid fraud investigators use such technology to look for suspicious connections between call detail records such as “a provider and a beneficiary with the same phone number or address.”
It is crazy to think you could end up in court, facing a body of evidence that is entirely made up solely to explain away the origins of the case. Meanwhile the real reason you came to be charged was some entirely different hidden system that monitors everyone, and threw up a flag on some minor quirk relating to your data which you would never believe was even being watched.
It was at that moment when the flag popped, that the system proceeded to break all sorts of laws and engage in all sorts of illegalities behind the scene, assembling the real core case, which would then subsequently be converted into a made up series of legal investigative steps that could be entered into the court record.
A feature of the shift toward K may be a blend of the K-strategist’s aggressive pursuit of goals to quiet increasing levels of amygdala angst, with an absence of the fully K-ified strategy’s strict adherence to rules and morals (itself driven by a fullness of amygdala development), as a way of fostering group cohesion and societal stability. What you will have as the shift goes down, is a less stable society, where everyone does whatever they can get away with. I suppose you can see why that is the point where revolution will either happen or not.
This may mean that at the initial K-shift, until amygdalae fully develop, there will be a period of somewhat sociopathic, Might-Makes-Right psychologically-driven behaviors by everyone, LE and civilian alike.
When in Rome…
