Imperial Nostalgia

An innovative alternate narrative on the Middle East

Triathlon? Try-poke-along!

A pause in my customary geo-political rant today, just long enough to keep a promise made to friends and family when I set out to make drastic changes in my physical behaviour after retirement.

The first two installments in this saga are available at: Part One and Part Two.

As of August 1, 2011, I can report that I am in the water every day now and have a full body tan for the first time since 1984 in San Diego. And Aldous Huxley wasn't even there.

This progress report can be summed up by saying that I took five months to learn how to crawl (freestyle) properly, something other enthusiasts likely accomplish in mere weeks. I should add that this leisurely pace was wholely deliberate and utterly delicious. I've gone at it obsessed only with relishing every little nuance, not wanting to skip anything. After five months, I've only just this week begun to add continuous breathing.

No kidding!

It is so tempting, and fatal to success to skip Terry Laughlin's admonition to let your belly-button learn and lead the way to air, not your fool head or neck.

So as fate would have it, this past weekend, in my euphoria at discovering that freestyle breathing can indeed be as effortless as dead-man's-float when done properly, that I decided to risk a whole new chapter in my life.

The dreaded backstroke.

Could I possibly roll faceup, with mouth and nose in the air occasionally, watching the clouds slip by like a good terrestrial mammal should?

Aha! So this is the payoff for all those months of patient 'relaxing into gravity'! Stunning. On my very first attempt I felt the water slipping past my skin like silk. Absolutely effortless. I suspect I bettered my own record for both speed and fewest stokes when freestyling for 25 yards, on my very first attempt. "This can't be" says I to myself, until I realized I was talking out loud while still swimming!

Enough! Back to making my belly-button lead the way to air in the crawl... and discovering how hard it is to manage sneaky breaths with a compulsive grin on your face.

So this particular personal narrative ends with both an intent and an assumption.

Friends should assume that my progress will continue ever so gently and steadily until, perhaps by mid-to-late 2012 I'll dare ask Terry to consider me for Mentor accreditation. Not as a business venture. That's why I retired. Just enough to acknowlege the myriad questions from seniors and kids at the lake who, on seeing me wearing goggles during endless hours of two to five-stroke drills, respectively ask either, "what the heck are you doing?" or "what are you looking for?"

Some elders are so wobbly on their feet they don't even get in the water anymore. Some get in, but feel too unsure to do more than just stand and cool off. Others get in and actually float comfortably, but only until they attempt what they think is swimming, which causes them to sink like stone.

There is nothing sweeter in this mentoring experience than the look of bemused astonishment in someone's eyes when, after superman gliding for fifteen minutes with nary a thought in their head but to relax their neck, they suddenly begin skating just as effortlessly, even competing with themselves to see how far they can coast on a single breath.

The rest is nearly self-perpetuating because the whole sensation of immersion swimming at an advanced age is that it's supposed to seem effortless compared to the way we were taught as kids. Each swimmer ambles along at their own pace with relaxed efficient comfort as the only measurement to be trusted.

Take a sunny, warm, quiet weekday with few people around. Ask for help and take an hour just getting into the water if you have to. Stand still and enjoy the weightless feeling. Watch the ducks's doing their hilarious bum-upside-down antics for a while. Gawk at the trees swaying in the breeze.

Enjoy.

Then realize there is not a single stage along the gradual path to this new way of swimming that requires you to abandon one iota of that feeling. I can still ride a bicycle a few minutes at a time. I can even walk a hundred yeards or so.

Not quite a Triathlon. But I'm beginning to relish my daily little Try-poke-along.

Mum is 22 years older than I. She has great trouble standing.

Yesterday she resumed swimming.

Bitcoin and the Ledger Elites

I'm old enough to remember when Bitcoin transaction fees crossed the threshold into being impractical for micro transactions.

We early adopters gratefully pocketed a few pennies from the BCH fork (Bitcoin Cash) and used BCH for a while as the transaction ledger of choice. But that didn't last and we soon resigned ourselves to letting Bitcoin remain the heavyweight pseudo-gold, a deep reserve environment with all the cumbersome characteristics required for a trusted reserve. We hoped, and even predicted something would eventually emerge from the XRP-like community (Ripple) to provide a closed and independent system throughout the global trade-space with a nimble, ultra high speed and practical transactional environment.

We naively supposed that well crafted and trusted gateways would appear on its circumference providing highly liquid unobstructed portals in and out of XRP to both BTC and the fiat (national currencies) Forex network.

Somewhere between 2011 and 2013, however, the intransigent fiat cartel dug in its heels and hired the Warren / Schiff / Rickards / Dimon lobby to do its lying for it. That's when I stopped busting my brain trying to keep up with the David and Goliath skirmishes in that space and retreated to just hodling a little BTC and a little Gold as a mere hobby while the liars pulled each others wires.

Later, after selling even those final trace hodlings, I declared the whole mess in exquisite detail to the Canadian capital gains police and payed full bore taxes on the whole thing. I withdrew. I preferred the peace of mind. It was time to get on with life and retire to gardening and a little hobby-trading using more traditional instruments for interest and pleasure.

Nowadays, so many years later, as I read more and more horrendous tales of financial fibs, and how governments who haven't the guts to levy taxes honestly use debt and inflation instead to water the dollar down, I can't help but wonder . . . are there any young whipersnappers out there to whom my old fogie narratives sound familiar? Can any of you catch me up on what honest crypto wizards have been up to in the meantime?

As for watering down the dollar, do any of you see through the Trudeau/Polièvre/Biden/Trump charades?

It's actually so damn simple.

Banks print money (inflation) and call it Monetary Policy; Governments borrow that money (debt) and call it Fiscal Policy. Meanwhile the gap between haves and have-nots pursues its relentless recurring cycle from Gaza to Mar-a-Lackey and back again.

The Financial Jargon Industry

When resuming more regular postings to this eclectic site a few weeks ago, I mentioned my extended absence had been due to pretty intense contributions to a trading and investement forum.

I'm certainly not about to duplicate it here, but several people have asked where they can find that more specialized financial feed and hence the following links.

The overall thread, now known as The Bigger Lie and the M-33 Trading series, consists of a rather fierce, down-to-earth exposé of the deception and obfuscation in the mainstream, financial Press. What we call the Financial Jargon Industry.

The commercial web platform on which the discussion first arose suspended operations recently, so participants have moved to an independent and more stable venue using Telegram. Those of you who appreciate investigative journalism will recognize Telegram as a solid generic messaging tool, but also as the saving grace that allows people living under autocratic and repressive regimes to communicate with the rest of the world.

Anyone interested in exploring the finance related topics that have fascinated us for the last couple of years are welcome to visit the totally free sites where they now live.

I look forward to meeting you there.

M-33 Video Repository

 

NY Attorney General Letitia James Sues World’s Largest Beef Producer

NY AG Letitia James deserves tremendous credit for intent and a severe scolding for her concurrent sin of omission.

She correctly states that current beef production emits the bulk of New York's environmental methane. Then she concurrently and shamefully omits the fact the ruminants are not responsible for its accumulation. The crime of methane accumulation accrues to New York's soil industry and the vested interests in the pharmaceutics and heavy equipment industries that have corrupted those soil managers.

The methano-phagic organisms that naturally return environmental methane to the soil by default, die in soils with less than 4% carbon. Healthy NY soil contains 7% carbon. Most contemporary NY soil barely maintains 1%. Those essential methano-phagic organisms have been destroyed by three multi-billion dollar predatory and biocidal industries:

• machinery that breaks and inverts soil to a depth greater than 4 inches;

• chemical pesticides that finish killing any soil organisms that survive the ploughing; and

• chemical fertilizers re-administered every year.

I sincerely admire AG James' courage in taking on the powerful beef industry.

I cringe at the cowardice, or perhaps the intellectual laziness, that criminalizes the ruminants rather than the predatory conditions under which they are raised.

That omission is all the more scandalous, nay criminal itself, when those innocent ruminants actually represent the solution to, not the cause of environmental methane accumulation. Ruminants freed from feed lots, returned to pasture under regimes of skilfully managed grazing, both till with their hooves to the ideal depth of four inches and, along with other restored organisms, fertilize and replenish soil to the requisite 7% carbon.

When Ms James re-allocates her quota of legislative and enforcement courage to banning or severely restricting petroleum based heavy equipment tillage, banning or severely restricting big-pharma pesticides, and banning or severely restricting big-pharma fertilizers, she will have graduated from difficult, but still cliché logical fallacy, to the truly heroïc.

 Peter7  M-33  The Bigger Lie

Greetings all.  

It's good to be back.

I've been distracted by my finance related writing, much of which has consisted of volunteer contributions to a discussion group called The Arena.  Unfortunately, the sponsors suspended operations a few weeks ago, leaving hundreds of followers high and dry with no warning or opportunity to backup the data. 

A tough lesson!

At the instigation of those orphaned Arena subscribers (who met me as Peter7), I've opened a thread using Telegram primarily as an index and repository for the instructional videos people had come to appreciate.  

Others pushed for a YouTube channel instead, so I've done that as well, though I personally attend more faithfully to the Telegram group now, because it has already spawned several sub-topics in just its first few weeks.

For those of you who follow my eclectic postings here in Nunaview, I apologize profusely for neglecting it for so long and would like to make up for it both by resuming its currency and also by providing links to the new Telegram  and  YouTube  channels in case you are interested. 

Those series concern M-33, a personal financial trading process, and a broader historical theme titled  The Bigger Lie, which is more along the nonconformist lines you'd expect from me. 😉

I'll leave it at that for now and return here in the coming days to resume the essays that constitute Nunaview proper and renew your good company, something I've missed through the turbulent goings-on of the last few of years.

Best Regards,

pb  

         

Nunaview 2023 - Investment Conference

I have an idea for a global investment conference.

How about we mount a Virtual Zoomsters’ Conference in Connect e-Cloud next time the world's fancy pants billionaires are off flashing their bling in Davos or Zurich?

We could invite Danilo, Daniella and Chris, the smartest investors I know on three continents, with a keynote address by the 2023 Colombian Cigar Queen, all on condition they keep their speeches to under 140 characters.

The breakout sessions would consist of 30 seconds each of absolute silence during which we all sit and stare at each other while desperately trying to keep from bursting out laughing.

Price of admission would be 7 Satoshis sent to a Nul Bucket address that nobody could ever collect, not even E-long-muck, sort of like those trinket trophies we put on one-way deep space probes in case they encounter extra terrestrial life.

The conference would conclude with a rousing standing ovation, with all microphones muted . . . except for the Colombian Cigar Queen’s, who would thus be crowned our honorary Miss Mundo-2023, a sort of thoroughly back tested Implied Volatility score, since by then it would already be 2024.

 What was the old ASCII character version of today's 'rolling-eyes'  emoticon?

Social Trend versus Financial Trade - Forex Shenanigans

Can we tolerate a bit of crypto musing today?

Bitcoin's distributed and decentralised design stands in pretty stark contrast to traditional power structures. 

Consider the gaming industry.

Massively centralized games can slip surreptitious misinformation and propaganda presuppositions to entire populations, or generations, and do it more subliminally than any dozen Trump-deau-ian election conspiracies or Goebbelian propaganda regimes.

Yet (a) central bank interest rate hikes continuing after economic deceleration has already begun, (b) Biden's shooting down a few Chinese drone balloons and (c) Liz Warren's fretting about Chinese components in G5 networks, look a lot like falling for Cold War diversion tactics. Somebody is afraid we plebians might notice the actual war has already morphed from mere Surveillance Economy into fully-meshed Subliminal Influence wars.

Like the old Shakespearean adage, “Methinks he doth protest too much”, Bitcoin protocol’s ability to sidestep hegemony makes the ferocity of attacks by the Jim Jordan - Peter Schiff - Liz Warren - CBDC (central bank digital currency) cabals look an awful lot like fear to me. 

Far from labelling BTC a mere financial Ponzi scheme, their behaviour smacks of a rather desperate attempt to disguise their panic.

Beginning with the earliest days of Phil Zimmerman releasing PGP into the public domain in anticipation of pending US arms trafficking export controls and continuing until Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper, 'crypto' today is actually in the process of exposing, not hiding, the manipulation and corruption at the heart of contemporary government and finance. 

The ‘friction’ in the Bitcoin execution stack lies not within the BTC protocol itself, but rather in global banking’s massive collusion against processing any Crypto/Fiat FX pairs.

So, you tell me. What is the best process that allows us to trade or invest long transparency and short hegemony?

 

Has It Been This Long?

I'm embarrassed. 

First by how long I have ignored this channel.

Secondly by some pretty silly posts going back to March 27 2010.  

Exactly thirteen (13) years ago.

For today, just to let any remaining followers know, I will start afresh over the coming days.

Greetings.

 

 

¿Dónde están los teólogos musulmanes?

El primer mandamiento, bien entendida, no prohíbe las imágenes de lo Divino, se prohíbe pensar que cualquier imagen sea capaz de representar lo divino en el primer lugar!

La carnicería en Charlie Hebdo fue una escaramuza en esta lucha contemporánea hasta la muerte contra la distorsión del Islam fundamentalista sobre el significado de la idolatría.

Que sea a través de un exceso de precaución, la corrección política equivocada, la pereza intelectual, o la cobardía absoluta, teólogos en las tres tradiciones abrahámicas se han convertido en colaboradores silenciosos en el epicentro moral de esta herejía.

Hasta que teòlogos y devotos musulmanes desafían esta profunda distorsión en la definición de la idolatría, la carnicería continuará y provocará una reacción violenta contra el Islam que definirá el resto de este siglo tan vergonzosamente como su homólogo antisemita definió el ùltimo.

Honor en esta guerra se destinará a los que tienen el coraje de exponer esta idolatría en la raíz de la masacre de Charlie Hebdo. Los mártires heroicos de Charlie Hebdo tendran 'Nouveau Résistant' grabado en sus tumbas del siglo 21.

 

Charlie Hebdo - qui sont les vrais lâches

(Il y avait une profonde idolâtrie à l'origine du massacre Charlie Hebdo, mais qui sont les vrais lâches?) 

Le premier commandement, bien compris, ne fait pas référence à des images du Divin. Il nous défend, a priori, de penser que n'importe quelle image puisse représenter le divin! Le carnage à Charlie Hebdo n'a été qu'une seule escarmouche dans une guerre que les terroristes livrent à ce sens fondamental de l'idolâtrie.

Que ce soit par un excès de prudence, de la rectitude politique erronée, une paresse intellectuelle, ou de lâcheté catastrophique, nos théologiens sont devenus collaborateurs dans cette tromperie.

Tant que les leaders religieux de toutes les traditions ne contestent pas cette profonde distorsion dans la définition de l'idolâtrie, le carnage continuera. Incontestée, cette lâcheté catastrophique de la part de nos théologiens risque et encourage une réaction contre l'islam en particulier qui définira le reste de ce siècle aussi honteusement que son homologue antisémite a défini le dernier.

L'honneur dans cette guerre ira à ceux qui ont le courage d'exposer la nouvelle idolâtrie au cœur du terrorisme contemporain.

Dans cinquante ans, les martyrs héroïques de Charlie Hebdo auront la désignation  Nouveau résistant  gravé sur leurs tombes.

 

Muslim Theologians - get off the fence!

The First Commandment, properly understood, does not prohibit images of the Divine, it prohibits thinking any image is even capable of depicting the divine in the first place!

The carnage at Charlie Hebdo was a skirmish in this contemporary fight to the death over fundamentalist Islam's distortion of the meaning of idolatry.

Whether through an excess of caution, misguided political correctness, intellectual laziness, or outright cowardice, theologians in all three Abrahamic traditions have become silent collaborators at the moral epicenter of this heresy.

Until trusted devout Muslims challenge this profound distortion in the definition of idolatry, the carnage will continue and it will provoke a backlash against Islam that will define the remainder of this century as shamefully as its antisemitic counterpart defined the last.

Honour in this war will go to those with the courage to expose this idolatry at the root of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.  The heroic martyrs at Charlie Hebdo should have 'Nouveau Resistant' engraved on their 21^st Century tombs.

Snowden, Cryptography and Cowboy Ethics

A message for impudent bullies hiding behind post-World War II definitions of sovereignty.

No other society on this planet was more fiercely protective of neighborhood privacy than the American frontier.

At a time when distance and isolation bred distinct and even wildly eccentric personalities, if one rancher lost his barn to desiccated prairie fire, every man's uncle from a hundred miles around showed up, unbidden, tools and materials in hand, ready to rebuild that barn within days. An extremely rare crossing of borders. Uninvited.  Preemptive.  Essential to survival.

There was one other exception. Even more rare and even more fierce.

If word got round that one of their number was routinely abusing a mother or sister, there would be some diplomacy in the form of a group sanction or two after church some Sunday morning. But if the abuser persisted in the bullying abuse, then quietly and rather mercilessly, the abuser would be discovered one day lying behind his own barn having been administered the beating of a lifetime.

This wasn't vigilantism. It was just brothers and neighbors protecting the community.

Mr. Obama, Mr Putin, next time you have a hankering to travel to Ryadh or Beijing, tone down the condescending jesuitical apologetics and ramp up a little brotherly love. Let the world know that unconditional respect for sovereignty was an extremely useful step while the community of nations dialed down tribal fears and regional insecurities.

But the neighborhood has indeed gone global.  The family is Human.

Edward Snowden's message to the world is that the winds of human expectation are blowing everywhere, especially when it comes to soil, air, water and a reasonable expectation of privacy.

No territorial ambition involved. No more wussing about garden fences or non-disclosure impunity. Just a quiet little message among brothers.  If one of us has been secretly beating on the innocent or repeatedly poisoning the informational well, we're about to bust every tooth in his cyberface and there ain't a fucking thing he can do about it.

The global frontier.

Obama to Snowden

Nixon went to China.  Reagan pointed fewer nukes at Russia.  Sadat flew to Jerusalem.  Mandela hugged de Klerk.  Bush acknowledged Aids.

Each took a significant political risk in a direction opposite to their previous leanings.  Each spent immense political capital in doing so.

In each case, their most unexpected move became their more lasting legacy.

Now it's Barry's turn.

"You pissed off a lot of people Ed.  Distracted me from my entire second term agenda. But in the process you seem to have handed America a possible way back to History's moral high ground. 'Nuff said? Come on home. Safe passage granted. Let's thrash this out together. All of us."

Bushama

George Bush to Saddam Hussein:

“No territorial ambition involved Saddam.  Just a quiet little message from one bully to another. You're still beating and raping your own sisters.  I'm about to bust every tooth in your face and there ain't a fucking thing you can do about it.”


Barrack Obama to Nouri al-Maliki:

“Relax Mr. Prime Minister.  Just a quiet little message from one constitutional deviant to another. We're both mostly interested in fattening our corrupt sponsors and there is nothing anyone under surveillance can do about it.”


Only the weapons have evolved.

Syria - The hidden assumption

No society on this planet was more fiercely protective of neighborhood privacy that the American frontier rancher. It remains the consummate instance of Cowboy culture. In a place where distance and isolation bred wildly eccentric personalities, live and let-live was the dominant social mantra.

Yet amidst this fierce independence, if one rancher lost his barn to desiccated prairie fire, every man's uncle from a hundred miles around showed up, unbidden, tools and materials in hand, to rebuild that barn within days. It was an extremely rare uninvited crossing of borders, but deemed an essential element of preemptive survival.

There was one other exception. Just as fierce and even more rare.

If word got round among young cowboys that one of their number was routinely abusing a mother, or sister, or defenseless animal, those young men tried a little diplomacy in the form of a group sanction or two, or even three, after church some Sunday morning. But if the abuser persisted in his bullying, then quietly and rather mercilessly, without further warning, perhaps during a festive community gathering, the abuser would suddenly be discovered behind an isolated building having been administered the beating of a lifetime.

This wasn't vigilantism. It was brothers and husbands protecting sisters and wives.

So Barack, next time you have a hankering to travel to Cairo, Stockholm, Beijing, or Bogota, tone down the jesuitical apologetics and ramp up a little brotherly love. Let the world know that unconditional sovereignty was an extremely useful step while the community of nations learned to deal with strangers.  However, since that time, the neighborhood has gone global. 

The neighborhood is Humanity. Earth, air, water and morality flow and blow everywhere.

So try this speech next time Putin plays holier than thou with al Assad.

“No territorial ambition involved Bashir. No more wussing about property lines. Just a quiet little message from one bully to another. You are still beating on your sisters.  So, I'm about to bust every tooth in your face and there ain't a fucking thing you can do about it.”

George Orwell 3.0

The Architecture of Consent

In his iconic novel, '1984', George Orwell warned that powerful special interests would one day use ubiquitous surveillance to manipulate and exploit human behaviour.

He was off by a few years.

Then came George Orwell 2.0.

When the US secret service tried to deprive Barrack Obama of his private citizen's cell phone, they retreated, not because the President overruled them, but because they were themselves astonished to discover that, properly configured, a Blackberry was indeed immune to eavesdropping.

At this stage, long before Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, politically and technically savvy people began putting their private records into encrypted envelopes before entrusting them to any electronic or digital communication service.  

The first counter tremors to this trend appeared when the government of India threatened to expel Blackberry from all of South East Asia precisely because their voice and messenger services were too secure. Blackberry Messenger was a private fortress that even state-sponsored crackers couldn't hack. Ironically, that's when telecommunications managers the world over began insisting that only Blackberries would be allowed inside corporate firewalls. Inexpensive eye candy from Nokia and Samsung were to be left at home.

Then, during the night of May 9, 2011, Microsoft Corporation bought Skype for $8.5 Billion. Cash. The world wondered why. When China subsequently threatened to expel Google and Twitter unless they provided back doors to their customer accounts, we had our answer.

George Orwell 2.03 had arrived and the majority of ordinary citizens suddenly understood that the 'smart' in smart phones referred to what these devices could now reveal about us, not what they could do for us.

In a single historical nanosecond, the veil was rent.

The forces of Orwellianism had blown their cover. They couldn't keep their activities secret much longer. They began to prepare a coup de grace the audacity and subtlety of which would amaze even the most dire adventists of George Orwell 3.0.

The Sanhedrin itself encouraged a wave of crypto-mathematical baptists crying in the righteous wilderness, whom they briefly condemned as Manningian and Snowdenean heretics, all the while secretly welcoming this diversion to camouflage their final thrust.

During the otherwise quiet Autumn of the year 2016 ME, with the world attending to the bread and circus distractions of outgoing President Obama's last minute pardon of Manning and Snowden, a signal advertisement slipped into view, hiding in plain sight.

It was the last mile in the long Orwellian journey.

The immense satellite and sub-oceanic fibre optic networks that link continents and countries were already in place;  national grids linked metropolitan areas; even the few remaining meters linking each house within neighbourhoods had all been upgraded.

All that remained was to start monitoring each individual room within those houses.

Rogers Advertisement:  "Knowing with certainty that your kids are safe when you're not there is what Smart Home Monitoring is all about. Unlike traditional security systems, you know instantly what's happening at home using your smart phone. You can actually see your kids come in the door! Thanks to our dual cable and wireless networks, this is a security system whose reliability you never have to worry about. Get peace of mind knowing your kids are safe."

(Embedded assumption:  Home Monitoring is all about surveillance. Using your smart phone to access your home. Through NSA and PRISM-susceptible networks, you and your kids will now be monitored in house, with your consent, and, talk about audacity, at your expense!)

The brilliance of Homeland Orwellian Preemptive Excision 3.0 is that it assumes Main Street will  'choose' the final implementation of uber-surveillance believing it protects their latchkey-offspring. 

That's George Orwell 3.0.  Universal penetration.  Acquiescence, access and acquisition.  

"And on the seventh day the NSA rested.  And its PRISM control rooms saw to it that we were good."

The audacity of H.O.P.E. indeed!

-  -  -  -  -  -  - 


PS:  If you doubt the intent,  I suggest you review the associated budget numbers.

The Architecture of Consent - PRISM 2

Sitting at supper one evening many years ago in Metz, France, I asked a Canadian military acquaintance how he planned to vote in the upcoming Canadian federal election.

"Same way as last time", he replied rather curtly.

"Yes but how was that?" I ventured.

"For the retention of the secret ballot!" he growled.

I looked up sharply from my supper plate expecting some sign of humour, but found myself peering into the cold, almost belligerent stare of a man who had killed other men and survived attempts on his own.

He had nearly been killed flying Spitfires in Malta in 1942. He had faced the Viet Cong and been shot at again while a member of the Truce Commission in Viet Nam in 1956. Now (1962), he was the senior intelligence officer for the RCAF in Europe as the Berlin wall went up, the Cuban missile crisis was in full swing, and DeGaulle was being threatened with assassination by elements of his own military for pulling out of Algeria.

There were two legitimate monopolies in democratic society at that time: the armory, and the mint. They controlled the use of military weapons and the right to print money. Yet here was a soldier telling me he was willing to lay down his life, willing to die, to keep the keys to the gun locker in civilian hands!

The ultimate difference between democratic and totalitarian regimes.

Today, there is a third battle underway that is every bit as pitched and critical to human freedom as were the arsenal and the mint sixty years ago:  control over citizen identity.

In the first part of this essay on human consent I mentioned a new development currently sweeping through the Identity and Authentication industry, known as 'claims-based-authentication'.

During the early days of the Internet, data engineers assumed that citizen information would have to reside in unimaginably huge, centralized databases. Since then, the very thought of such repositories containing all personal identifiers makes both citizens and enlightened politicians squirm uncomfortably.

We all now realize that government systems are no more qualified or trustworthy than commercial interests to hold all this data.

Happily, visionaries among information technology professionals have taken up this task of re-locating citizen identity and human consent. Rather than assigning the keys to vested-interests in the private or public sectors, they are returning them smack dab back into the hands of each and every individual citizen! 
 

How can this be possible?

Through a kind of massively distributed, blockchain-based, cryptographic and peer-to-peer process called 'claims-based-authentication', a kind of third pillar of democratic governance inextricably rooted in the presumption of foundational anonymity.

The most disturbing aspect of the warrantless powers of surveillance that Dick Cheney and Barack Obama have given Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Security Agency (NSA) is the accompanying fallacy that privacy is only about avoiding embarrassment and hiding sins.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, just making that assertion, in itself, violates natural Law and betrays the United States Constitution.

Do you want a payment receipt at Disneyland in Florida to reveal to a ring of thieves that you are temporarily away from home in Dayton?

Do you want details in your municipal civic registration to hint to political hacks or partisan employers how you voted in the last election?

Should an advertiser be able to bribe a computer clerk at the local hospital to sell them your medical history when you prefer to wait another year before worrying your family about prostate or cervical tests?

These situations have nothing to do with feeling ashamed or hiding personal wrongdoing.  Love others though you might as a good friends, this kind of information is nobody else's business if you prefer to keep it to yourself.  Anyone who advocates risking its disclosure under a 'nothing-to-hide-if-you-have-a-clear-conscience' argument, is advocating twenty-first century civil war!

With luck, the ten year betrayal of civil liberties in both government and finance since 9/11 will be reversed during the next decade through the ever increasing choice of ordinary citizens to use cryptographic and peer-to-peer data management software.

We are on the verge of Identity being re-rooted in human consent and its attendant presumption of initial anonymity.  Both will be embedded at the very core of modern communications technology.

PRISM might soon mean Privacy Restoring Identity Systems and Monitoring.

... part 3 continues next month.

The Architecture of Consent - PRISM 1

I've watched the tweetsters, blabsters and blogsters debate privacy for the last several months.

The invective against government-sponsored intelligence gathering is colourful, but not very helpful. Meanwhile, their opponents see every wish for anonymity as a sign of tax evasion, money laundering, terrorism or pornography.

Both sides cite real or imagined constitutional constraints, wallowing in the kind of law that relies on 'Thou Shalt Not'. Tell someone “Don't think of blue!”, and they must think of blue in order to understand your command.  That's why legislated prohibition often produces the opposite result.

Odd thing though, neither side seems particularly competent in the other kind of law.  You don't go to jail for gaining altitude too quickly. The airplane simply stalls, crashes and you die. The laws of nature and mathematics.

That's why thousands of software engineers and data architects are quietly building new systems that will soon succeed where enforcement has failed, because "that's just the way it works"? They're called 'disruptive technologies', not because they upset the rest of us, but because they might make spies, regulators and most banks seem a little silly and beside the point eventually.

These disruptive technologies all have one fascinating thing in common. They store identity separately from service information. Ta-dah!

Wait a minute. Is that all there is to it?

Yep.   That's it.  Anonymous data.

The database with your name, birth date, address, finger prints and retinal scan won't include your eyeglasses prescription, your bank balance, your blood pressure readings, your parking tickets, your ethnicity, your religion or your shopping preferences. All that stuff will be kept in separate data tables that aren't linked to your identity, except when you authorize it. Or when a qualified judge orders it. Not because it's not allowed, but because that's just the way these databases will be built.

Spies, regulators, banks and business hackers will be thrilled. They won't have to break in to profile service data anymore.  The NSA and Homeland Security will have a ball.  They will be allowed to monitor traffic patterns to their heart's content.

They can track how many Muslims with high blood pressure, a university education and more than two pairs of bi-focals are boarding a flight from Amsterdam to Madrid after requesting a vegetarian meal.

But they won't be able to link that information to individual identities on their own any more.

Not because it won't be allowed, but because that's just the way these systems will be built. That's how they'll work.

Anonymized data bases will free national defenders to engage in much more powerful terrorist profiling than current legislation allows, all without inappropriately invading innocent individual identity. Those data tables just won't contain identity information.

When the profilers detect a threatening pattern in the service stream, they will request corresponding identity information,  only on reasonable grounds, in a process similar to getting a traditional search warrant.

These 'disruptive technologies' will have preemptive anonymity embedded at the very core of their architecture.  They will restore a bunch of democratic and civil protections that earlier information architectures could not.

Curious political operatives won't bother to hack Watergate offices or voter registration systems hoping to find out how you vote.  Neither will a terrorist or thief disguised as a pharmacist, nor a Walmart cashier, nor a bank teller be able to hack payment systems to learn where you live, or how much credit you have, or whether your home is unoccupied while you travel.

Disruptive technologies will embody a whole new architecture of individual privacy and consent at their very core, not because the Walmart clerk isn't allowed to pry into your affairs, but because they simply can't. They won't have access. It won't work that way any more.

Engineers call this astonishing, elegant, even beautiful structure, 'claims-based authentication'. It is almost ready. Several pioneering health care and health records systems are already using it, testing it in the most sensitive data area of all.

Epidemiologists will love the enhanced profiling ability and patients will relish their absolute control over who peeks at their personal records.
  

The only difficulty I foresee is that when claims-based authentication systems come to the world of finance, they might neutralize some of the distorted processes that have unfairly fattened Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. That might indeed upset certain people.

Oh, and by the way?  Bitcoin already appears to be 'claims-based-compliant'.

Next time I'll examine the role anonymity plays in consent and a third essay is in the works to explain how claims-based systems work between you, your doctor, your pharmacy and your bank account.


   continue to part 2 :

Reuters on Bitcoin

Felix Salmon's mainstream article for Reuters on Bitcoin pretends to be more thoughtful than most.

The rhetorical deception is subtle. He doesn't try to fool us with lies. He just leaves out the truth.

He doesn't mention that due to its already indispensable advantages when moving funds internationally, BTC can no longer disappear overnight. Even if an equally independent but improved digital currency emerged and seemed the more likely candidate for a new global standard, the transition would be orderly. People would have ample time to exit one and enter the other, likely with acquiescence and cooperation of both systems. There would be no more cost, probably significantly less, in making that transition than Forex currently charges for any routine currency exchange.

The article is rife with other sins of omission, deliberately under-representing bitcoin's most important elements.

To wit:

It makes no mention of the well pre-planned divisibility of BTC into Satoshi(s), the established term for 0.00000001 BTC that exchanges and retail payment engines will eventually use, not BTC itself. In fact, the term Bitcoin will likely recede lexically or semantically to refer more to its underlying technical architecture, not the unit of currency.

Further, the length of time during which BTC will continue as the vehicle for large inter-currency exchanges and as an inflation-proof form of commodity-as-capital storage will be substantial, even after it cedes primacy to the Satoshi for smaller retail payments. Bitcoin itself will increasingly shoulder the longer term responsibilities of Gold and Silver, but with the added advantages of effortless divisibility and portability.

I do agree the history of commodity and stock bubbles suggests that BTC is likely to ease up, back up, and consolidate at various stages, but the monetarily savvy will patiently continue to participate until and unless an alternative not only appears, but matures.

Until then, the shrill voices of people like Mr. Salmon will try to distract us with their vested interests and frantic need to delay their own vulnerability.

Bitcoin users who started out around $11/BTC, dropped as low as $3-4, then climbed to where things are today, did so by thinking of the dollar as fluctuating, not BTC. That thinking will continue to allow a remarkable degree of calm amid the cries of purported 'bubble' and extremes.