05/26/2024
The THINKING is over. It's time for DOING.
In 2010, there were 1,271 counterterrorist, homeland security, and intelligence organizations, 1,931 private sector analogues, 10,000 locations of these organizations, and ~854,000 people with top-secret security clearances.
The term “financial freedom” takes on an entirely different meaning when one considers not the amount of money one has, but how controlled one’s financial position is. Financial service providers, including banks and credit card companies, are required to collect Know Your Customer (KYC) & Anti-Money Laundering (AML) information from all of their customers. The government requires people to reveal the location of their cash and gold, does not permit people to leave the territory with certain amounts of precious metals, and innovators of new cryptocurrencies can be physically detained for their inventions. A significant portion of income, savings and other earnings are taken by means such as taxes, regulations, licenses and fees. All of this ensures that meaningful “financial freedom” is not possible within the confines of the system.
Virtually all other aspects of a person’s life are subject to some form of controls or surveillance. The FBI has spied on viewers while issuing gag orders against the internet providers through which the spying occurred, border security can detain any who refuse to unlock their phones, judges can imprison those who do not decrypt their hard drives, the government secretly surveys certain businesses such as gun dealers, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows the NSA to force businesses to provide access to their communications equipment, most major manufacturers of printers encode an identification measure to trace printed materials back to that specific machine, government mail carriers store images of mail received through them, the NSA collects metadata of calls through major cellular carriers, and federal agencies collect information from major social media companies while boasting that their program “XKeyscore” can gather intelligence from online histories, businesses and agencies can identify a person’s online presence via their “browser fingerprint,” every smart device’s microphone can be turned on remotely while the location can be tracked within a meter, Intel computers can be remotely controlled and observed by government, and internet censorship as well as indoctrination protocols and the targeting of at risk audiences has been contracted out to obscure non profits.
Those are the facts so those who wish to think of a way around these challenges…have plenty of thinking to do. In this challenge, there may be more cause for hope than might be expected at first glance.
[for link to the essay and 'The Art of Rebellion' series, message me]
