What’s happening to today’s world?
Isn’t it enough that we’re being forced to live in endless lockdowns? That we’re being deprived of free speech by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, who has a monopoly over social media? That we’re losing our life savings to the Feds, who are endlessly printing money, leading to super hyperinflation? That nearly half of the globe is witnessing climate changes, floods, and fires, which will soon lead to human catastrophes beyond imagination? And that entire nations, such as Lebanon, Cuba, and South Africa are on the verge of total starvation and complete poverty?
All this, and now we have to put up with a new trend, one that has become a disconcerting, everyday routine — Governments around the world are spying on us!
Apparently, this government hacking has become a permanent feature of the 21st century’s rotten global order. Governments are using it to advance their interests and weaken their enemies. By that, I mean us, the people, the undeclared enemies of the state.
Today we live in a world in which we’re constantly punished by our governments — we’re impoverished, malnourished, scanned, tested, monitored, silenced, injected with god knows what, imprisoned in our homes, separated from our loved ones, oppressed, violated, incarcerated, slaughtered like cheap… and the list goes on and on.
and now this! Digital hacking, by powerful, easy to outsource, and difficult to trace software that has turned anyone and everyone with a computer or a smartphone into a vulnerable victim of cheap government spying.
Who could have imagined that, in this 21st decadent century, oppressive regimes all around the world, even in what used to be democratic, free-world countries, would become so merciless, so immoral, so ruthless!
Today, cyberwarfare has become the 21st century equivalent of 20th-century espionage. Only, it’s much, much worse!
It’s a never-ending cat-and-mouse game played by small states as well as giant powers, and the only losers in it are ordinary citizens like us.
for a year and a half now, we’ve been punished with stay-home orders, silenced by tech nerds, turned billionaires like Mike Zuckerberg and his faceless Facebook, controlled by Google’s ruthless, cruel and nasty algorithms, enslaved by Amazon’s chief and newly-turned astronaut Jeff Bezos’s domination of more than 60% of online retailing, and financially-ruined by SpaceX’s Elon Musk’s manipulation of digital currency and other money markets.
And now, our own governments are spying on us!
Back in the 20th century, government espionage was carried out by intelligence agencies. At least, at the time, we knew who the enemy was. But in today’s world, hacking is carried out by private mercenaries, and foreign governments like Israel, Iran, Russia, and now China, who are muddying the digital waters and leaving virtually everyone exposed.
Hacking is a new kind of warfare. It is far worse than the ongoing bioterrorism and biological warfare weapons, such as Covid and now Delta.
In 2021, Governments are using foreign hackers, much like they used spies in the 1900s… only cheaper!
This new kind of war resembles and is often an extension of, 20th-century espionage. But unlike spying, hacking carries gains and losses for all sides. It operates in a “gray zone” that is neither war nor peace.
Experts recently told students during a cybersecurity class at a school in New York City that snooping is going to be the new normal in the coming era of cyber conflict. And the problem is that governments are shifting more of their hacking to private firms and outright criminals.
Moscow, for example, hired freelance hackers abroad, including a 20-year-old Canadian, to infiltrate American government accounts.
The hacker-for-hire shadow industry has exploded in recent years. Security researchers have identified highly skilled groups targeting governments, legal and financial firms, real estate developers, Middle Eastern energy companies, and the World Health Organization.
Most are thought to be hired through dark web platforms that offer anonymity for both parties. Though their labors seem to benefit certain governments or corporations, identifying their employer is often impossible, reducing the risk of retaliation.
Globalization and advances in consumer technology have opened a near-bottomless pool of hackers-for-hire. Many are thought to be young people in economically troubled countries, where legitimate work is scarce, especially during the pandemic. Off-the-shelf hacking software and expanding broadband allow almost anyone to put out a shingle.
Some operate openly.
An Indian firm offered to help clients snoop on business rivals and partners. At the center of this week’s allegations of worldwide hacks on journalists and dissidents, the Pegasus software is sold by NSO Group, an Israeli company.
The new normal is small but constant hacks. Chinese-sponsored criminals have raided dozens of companies over the years, according to The New York Times. Paranoid officials, in other countries, use third-party software to snoop on journalists, and rival politicians.
Cumulatively, these often undetected, and easy to deny hacks, suggest a coming era of omnipresent digital theft, influence peddling, and snooping.
This week, a top official in the Roman Catholic Church’s American hierarchy resigned after a news site said that it had data from his cellphone that appeared to show the administrator using the L.G.B.T.Q. dating app Grindr and regularly going to gay bars. Journalists had access to data on the movements and digital trails of his mobile phone for parts of three years and were able to retrace where he went.
It’s not up to me to judge a priest who broke his promises, but this isn’t about one man. This is about a system that allows real-time data on citizens’ movements. This is about unregulated data harvesting.
What’s even scarier is that this data is in the hands of companies that we deal with daily, like Facebook and Google, and also with information-for-hire middlemen that we never directly interact with.
According to the Times, The US Internal Revenue Service has bought commercially available location data from people’s mobile phones to hunt for financial criminals. U.S. defense contractors and military agencies have also obtained location data from apps that people use for prayer.
Most people all around the world now realize that our phones are tracking our movements.
And that no one is too pedestrian to be targeted.
Watch it on YouTube https://youtu.be/buaa3ZXor-8
