Article 43
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
You Are Now Remotely Controlled
By Shoshana Zuboff
NY Times
January 24, 2020
The debate on privacy and law at the Federal Trade Commission was unusually heated that day. Tech industry executives argued that they were capable of regulating themselves and that government intervention would be “costly and counterproductive.” Civil libertarians warned that the companies data capabilities posed “an unprecedented threat” to individual freedom. One observed, “We have to decide what human beings are in the electronic age. Are we just going to be chattel for commerce?” A commissioner asked, “Where should we draw the line?” The year was 1997.
The line was never drawn, and the executives got their way. Twenty-three years later the evidence is in. The fruit of that victory was a new economic logic that I call “surveillance capitalism.” Its success depends upon one-way-mirror operations engineered for our ignorance and wrapped in a fog of misdirection, euphemism and mendacity. It rooted and flourished in the new spaces of the internet, once celebrated by surveillance capitalists as THE WORLD’S LARGEST UNGOVERNED SPACE”. But power fills a void, and those once wild spaces are no longer ungoverned. Instead, they are owned and operated by private surveillance capital and governed by its iron laws.
The rise of surveillance capitalism over the last two decades went largely unchallenged. “Digital” was fast, we were told, and stragglers would be left behind. It’s not surprising that so many of us rushed to follow the bustling White Rabbit down his tunnel into a promised digital Wonderland where, like Alice, we fell prey to delusion. In Wonderland, we celebrated the new digital services as free, but now we see that the surveillance capitalists behind those services regard us as the free commodity. We thought that we search Google, but now we understand that Google searches us. We assumed that we use social media to connect, but we learned that connection is how social media uses us. We barely questioned why our new TV or mattress had a privacy policy, but we’ve begun to understand that “privacy policies” are actually surveillance policies.
And like our forebears who named the automobile “horseless carriage” because they could not reckon with its true dimension, we regarded the internet platforms as “bulletin boards” where anyone could pin a note. Congress cemented this delusion in a statute, SECTION 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, absolving those companies of the obligations that adhere to “publishers” or even to “speakers.”
Only repeated crises have taught us that these platforms are not bulletin boards but hyper-velocity global bloodstreams into which anyone may introduce a dangerous virus without a vaccine. This is how Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, could legally REFUSE to remove a faked video of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and later DOUBLE DOWN on this decision, announcing that political advertising would not be subject to fact-checking.
All of these delusions rest on the most treacherous hallucination of them all: the belief that privacy is private. We have imagined that we can choose our degree of privacy with an individual calculation in which a bit of personal information is traded for valued services a reasonable quid pro quo. For example, when Delta Air Lines piloted a biometric data system at the Atlanta airport, the company REPORTED that of nearly 25,000 customers who traveled there each week, 98 percent opted into the process, noting that the facial recognition option is saving an average of two seconds for each customer at boarding, or nine minutes when boarding a wide body aircraft.”
In fact the rapid development of facial recognition systems reveals the public consequences of this supposedly private choice. Surveillance capitalists have demanded the right to take our faces wherever they appear - on a city street or a Facebook page. The Financial Times reported that a Microsoft facial recognition training database of 10 million images plucked from the internet without anyone’s knowledge and supposedly limited to academic research was employed by companies like IBM and state agencies that included the United States and Chinese military. Among these were two Chinese suppliers of equipment to officials in Xinjiang, where members of the Uighur community live in open-air prisons under perpetual surveillance by facial recognition systems.
Privacy is not private, because the effectiveness of THESE and OTHER private or public surveillance and control systems depends upon the pieces of ourselves that we give up - or that are secretly stolen from us.
Our digital century was to have been democracy’s Golden Age. Instead, we enter its third decade marked by a stark new form of social inequality best understood as גepistemic inequality. It recalls a pre-Gutenberg era of extreme asymmetries of knowledge and the power that accrues to such knowledge, as the tech giants seize control of information and learning itself. The delusion of Ӕprivacy as private was crafted to breed and feed this unanticipated social divide. Surveillance capitalists exploit the widening inequity of knowledge for the sake of profits. They manipulate the economy, our society and even our lives with impunity, endangering not just individual privacy but democracy itself. Distracted by our delusions, we failed to notice this bloodless coup from above.
The belief that privacy is private has left us careening toward a future that we did not choose, because it failed to reckon with the profound distinction between a society that insists upon sovereign individual rights and one that lives by the social relations of the one-way mirror. The lesson is that privacy is public - it is a collective good that is and morally inseparable from the values of human autonomy and self-determination upon which privacy depends and without which a democratic society logically is unimaginable.
Still, the winds appear to have finally shifted. A fragile new awareness is dawning as we claw our way back up the rabbit hole toward home. Surveillance capitalists are fast because they seek neither genuine consent nor consensus. They rely on psychic numbing and messages of inevitability to conjure the helplessness, resignation and confusion that paralyze their prey. Democracy is slow, and that’s a good thing. Its pace reflects the tens of millions of conversations that occur in families, among neighbors, co-workers and friends, within communities, cities and states, gradually stirring the sleeping giant of democracy to action.
These conversations are occurring now, and there are many indications that lawmakers are ready to join and to lead. This third decade is likely to decide our fate. Will we make the digital future better, or will it make us worse? Will it be a place that we can call home?
Epistemic inequality is not based on what we can earn but rather on what we can learn. It is defined as unequal access to learning imposed by private commercial mechanisms of information capture, production, analysis and sales. It is best exemplified in the fast-growing abyss between what we know and what is known about us.
Twentieth-century industrial society was organized around the “division of labor,” and it followed that the struggle for economic equality would shape the politics of that time. Our digital century shifts society’s coordinates from a division of labor to a division of learning, and it follows that the struggle over access to knowledge and the power conferred by such knowledge will shape the politics of our time.
The new centrality of epistemic inequality signals a power shift from the ownership of the means of production, which defined the politics of the 20th century, to the ownership of the production of meaning. The challenges of epistemic justice and epistemic rights in this new era are summarized in three essential questions about knowledge, authority and power: Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows?
During the last two decades, the leading surveillance capitalists Google, later followed by Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft - helped to drive this societal transformation while simultaneously ensuring their ascendance to the pinnacle of the epistemic hierarchy. They operated in the shadows to amass huge knowledge monopolies by taking without asking, a maneuver that every child recognizes as theft. Surveillance capitalism begins by unilaterally staking a claim to private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Our lives are rendered as data flows.
Early on, it was discovered that, unknown to users, even data freely given harbors rich predictive signals, a surplus that is more than what is required for service improvement. It isn’t only what you post online, but whether you use exclamation points or the color saturation of your photos; not just where you walk but the stoop of your shoulders; not just the identity of your face but the emotional states conveyed by your “microexpressions;” not just what you like but the pattern of likes across engagements. Soon this behavioral surplus was secretly hunted and captured, claimed as proprietary data.
The data are conveyed through complex supply chains of devices, tracking and monitoring software, and ECOSYSTEMS OF APPS and COMPANIES that specialize in niche data flows captured in secret. For example, TESTING BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL SHOWED that Facebook receives heart rate data from the Instant Heart Rate: HR Monitor, menstrual cycle data from the Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker, and data that reveal interest in real estate properties from Realtor.com - all of it without the users’ knowledge.
These data flows empty into surveillance capitalists; computational factories, called “artificial intelligence,” where they are manufactured into behavioral predictions that are about us, but they are not for us. Instead, they are sold to business customers in a new kind of market that trades exclusively in human futures. Certainty in human affairs is the lifeblood of these markets, where surveillance capitalists compete on the quality of their predictions. This is a new form of trade that birthed some of the richest and most powerful companies in history.
In order to achieve their objectives, the leading surveillance capitalists sought to establish UNRIVALED DOMINANCE over the 99.9 PERCENT of the world’s information now rendered in digital formats that they helped to create. Surveillance capital has built most of the world’s LARGEST COMPUTER NETWORKS, data centers, populations of servers, undersea transmission cables, ADVANCED MICROCHIPS, and frontier machine intelligence, igniting AN ARMS RACE FOR THE 10,000 or so specialists on the planet who know how to coax knowledge from these vast new data continents.
With Google in the lead, the top surveillance capitalists seek to control labor markets in critical expertise, including data science and ANIMAL RESEARCH, elbowing out competitors such as start-ups, universities, high schools, municipalities, established corporations in other industries and less wealthy countries. In 2016, 57 percent of American computer science Ph.D. graduates took jobs in industry, while only 11 percent became tenure-track faculty members. It’s not just an American problem. In Britain, university administrators CONTEMPLATE a “missing generation” of data scientists. A Canadian scientist laments, “the power, the expertise, the data are all concentrated in the hands of a few companies.”
Google created the first insanely lucrative markets to trade in human futures, what we now know as online targeted advertising, based on their predictions of which ads users would click. Between 2000, when the new economic logic was just emerging, and 2004, when the company went public, revenues increased by 3,590 percent. This startling number represents the “surveillance dividend.” It quickly reset the bar for investors, eventually driving start-ups, apps developers and established companies to shift their business models toward surveillance capitalism. The promise of a fast track to outsized revenues from selling human futures drove this migration first to Facebook, then through the tech sector and now throughout the rest of the economy to industries as disparate as insurance, retail, finance, education, health care, real estate, entertainment and every product that begins with the word “smart” or service touted as “personalized.”
Even Ford, the birthplace of the 20th-century mass production economy, is on the trail of the surveillance dividend, proposing to meet the challenge of slumping car sales by reimagining Ford vehicles as a TRANSPORTATION OPERATING SYSTEM. As one analyst put it, Ford “could make a fortune monetizing data. They won’t need engineers, factories or dealers to do it. It’s almost pure profit.”
Surveillance capitalismҔs economic imperatives were refined in the competition to sell certainty. Early on it was clear that machine intelligence must feed on volumes of data, compelling economies of scale in data extraction. Eventually it was understood that volume is necessary but not sufficient. The best algorithms also require varieties of data economies of scope. This realization helped drive the җmobile revolution sending users into the real world armed with cameras, computers, gyroscopes and microphones packed inside their smart new phones. In the competition for scope, surveillance capitalists want your home and what you say and do within its walls. They want your car, your medical conditions, and the shows you stream; your location as well as all the streets and buildings in your path and all the behavior of all the people in your city. They want your voice and what you eat and what you buy; your childrenӔs play time and their schooling; your brain waves and your bloodstream. Nothing is exempt.
Unequal knowledge about us produces unequal power over us, and so epistemic inequality widens to include the distance between what we can do and what can be done to us. Data scientists describe this as the shift from monitoring to actuation, in which a critical mass of knowledge about a machine system enables the remote control of that system. Now people have become targets for remote control, as surveillance capitalists discovered that the most predictive data come from intervening in behavior to tune, herd and modify action in the direction of commercial objectives. This third imperative, economies of action,ғ has become an arena of intense experimentation. We are learning how to writethe music,ԓ one scientist said, and then we let the music make them dance.ԓ
This new power to make them danceԓ does not employ soldiers to threaten terror and murder. It arrives carrying a cappuccino, not a gun. It is a new instrumentarianԓ power that works its will through the medium of ubiquitous digital instrumentation to manipulate subliminal cues, psychologically target communications, impose default choice architectures, trigger social comparison dynamics and levy rewards and punishments all of it aimed at remotely tuning, herding and modifying human behavior in the direction of profitable outcomes and always engineered to preserve usersԗ ignorance.
We saw predictive knowledge morphing into instrumentarian power in Facebooks contagion experiments published in 2012 and 2014, when it planted subliminal cues and manipulated social comparisons on its pages, first to influence users to vote in midterm elections and later to make people feel sadder or happier. Facebook researchers celebrated the success of these experiments noting two key findings: that it was possible to manipulate online cues to influence real world behavior and feelings, and that this could be accomplished while successfully bypassing usersҒ awareness.
In 2016, the Google-incubated augmented reality game, Pokmon Go, tested economies of action on the streets. Game players did not know that they were pawns in the real game of behavior modification for profit, as the rewards and punishments of hunting imaginary creatures were used to herd people to the McDonalds, Starbucks and local pizza joints that were paying the company for ҩғfootfall, in exactly the same way that online advertisers pay for ԓclick through to their websites.
In 2017, a leaked Facebook documentacquired by The Australian exposed the corporationԒs interest in applying psychological insightsӔ from internal Facebook dataӔ to modify user behavior. The targets were 6.4 million young Australians and New Zealanders. By monitoring posts, pictures, interactions and internet activity in real time,Ӕ the executives wrote, Facebook can work out when young people feel ӑstressed, ґdefeated, ґoverwhelmed, ґanxious, ґnervous, ґstupid, ґsilly, ґuseless and a ґfailure.Ҕ This depth of information, they explained, allows Facebook to pinpoint the time frame during which a young person needs a confidence boostӔ and is most vulnerable to a specific configuration of subliminal cues and triggers. The data are then used to match each emotional phase with appropriate ad messaging for the maximum probability of guaranteed sales.
Facebook denied these practices, though a former product manager accused the company of lying through its teeth.Ӕ The fact is that in the absence of corporate transparency and democratic oversight, epistemic inequality rules. They know. They decide who knows. They decide who decides.
The public’s intolerable knowledge disadvantage is deepened by surveillance capitalists’ perfection of mass communications as gaslighting. Two examples are illustrative. On April 30, 2019 Mark Zuckerberg made a dramatic announcement at the company’
s annual developer conference, declaring, “The future is private.” A few weeks later, a Facebook litigator appeared before a federal district judge in California to thwart a user lawsuit over privacy invasion, arguing that the very act of using Facebook negates any reasonable expectation of privacy ԓas a matter of law. In May 2019 Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google, wrote in The Times of his corporationsԒs commitment to the principle that privacy cannot be a luxury good.Ӕ Five months later Google contractors were found offering $5 gift cards to homeless people of color in an Atlanta park in return for a facial scan.
Facebooks denial invites even more scrutiny in light of another leaked company documentappearing in 2018. The confidential report offers rare insight into the heart of FacebookҒs computational factory, where a prediction engineӔ runs on a machine intelligence platform that ingests trillions of data points every day, trains thousands of modelsӔ and then deploys them to the server fleet for live predictions.Ӕ Facebook notes that its prediction serviceӔ produces more than 6 million predictions per second.Ӕ But to what purpose?
In its report, the company makes clear that these extraordinary capabilities are dedicated to meeting its corporate customers ғcore business challenges with procedures that link prediction, microtargeting, intervention and behavior modification. For example, a Facebook service called ԓloyalty prediction is touted for its ability to plumb proprietary behavioral surplus to predict individuals who are ԓat risk of shifting their brand allegiance and alerting advertisers to intervene promptly with targeted messages designed to stabilize loyalty just in time to alter the course of the future.
That year a young man named Christopher Wylie turned whistle-blower on his former employer, a political consultancy known as Cambridge Analytica. ԓWe exploited Facebook to harvest millions of peoples profiles,Ҕ Wylie admitted, and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.Ӕ Mr. Wylie characterized those techniques as information warfare,Ӕ correctly assessing that such shadow wars are built on asymmetries of knowledge and the power it affords. Less clear to the public or lawmakers was that the political firms strategies of secret invasion and conquest employed surveillance capitalismҒs standard operating procedures to which billions of innocent usersӔ are routinely subjected each day. Mr. Wylie described this mirroring process, as he followed a trail that was already cut and marked. Cambridge Analyticas real innovation was to pivot the whole undertaking from commercial to political objectives.
In other words, Cambridge Analytica was the parasite, and surveillance capitalism was the host. Thanks to its epistemic dominance, surveillance capitalism provided the behavioral data that exposed the targets for assault. Its methods of behavioral microtargeting and behavioral modification became the weapons. And it was surveillance capitalism’s lack of accountability for content on its platform afforded by Section 230 that provided the opportunity for the stealth attacks designed to trigger the inner demons of unsuspecting citizens.
Its not just that epistemic inequality leaves us utterly vulnerable to the attacks of actors like Cambridge Analytica. The larger and more disturbing point is that surveillance capitalism has turned epistemic inequality into a defining condition of our societies, normalizing information warfare as a chronic feature of our daily reality prosecuted by the very corporations upon which we depend for effective social participation. They have the knowledge, the machines, the science and the scientists, the secrets and the lies. All privacy now rests with them, leaving us with few means of defense from these marauding data invaders. Without law, we scramble to hide in our own lives, while our children debate encryption strategies around the dinner table and students wear masks to public protests as protection from facial recognition systems built with our family photos.
In the absence of new declarations of epistemic rights and legislation, surveillance capitalism threatens to remake society as it unmakes democracy. From below, it undermines human agency, usurping privacy, diminishing autonomy and depriving individuals of the right to combat. From above, epistemic inequality and injustice are fundamentally incompatible with the aspirations of a democratic people.
We know that surveillance capitalists work in the shadows, but what they do there and the knowledge they accrue are unknown to us. They have the means to know everything about us, but we can know little about them. Their knowledge of us is not for us. Instead, our futures are sold for othersҒ profits. Since that Federal Trade Commission meeting in 1997, the line was never drawn, and people did become chattel for commerce. Another destructive delusion is that this outcome was inevitable an unavoidable consequence of convenience-enhancing digital technologies. The truth is that surveillance capitalism hijacked the digital medium. There was nothing inevitable about it.
American lawmakers have been reluctant to take on these challenges for many reasons. One is an unwritten policy of דsurveillance exceptionalism forged in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the governmentԒs concerns shifted from online privacy protections to a new zeal for total information awareness.Ӕ In that political environment the fledgling surveillance capabilities emerging from Silicon Valley appeared to hold great promise.
Surveillance capitalists have also defended themselves with lobbying and forms of propaganda intended to undermine and intimidate lawmakers, confounding judgment and freezing action. These have received relatively little scrutiny compared to the damage they do. Consider two examples:
The first is the assertion that democracy threatens prosperity and innovation. Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt explained in 2011, we took the position of “hands off” the internet. You know, “leave us alone.” The government can make regulatory mistakes that can slow this whole thing down, and we see that and we worry about it. This propaganda is recycled from the Gilded Age barons, whom we now call “robbers.” They insisted that there was no need for law when one had the law of survival of the fittest,” the “laws of capital” and the “law of supply and demand.”
Paradoxically, surveillance capital does not appear to drive innovation. A promising new era of economic research shows the critical role that government and democratic governance have played in innovation and suggests a lack of innovation in big tech companies like Google. Surveillance capitalism’s information dominance is not dedicated to the urgent challenges of carbon-free energy, eliminating hunger, curing cancers, ridding the oceans of plastic or flooding the world with well paid, smart, loving teachers and doctors. Instead, we see a frontier operation run by geniuses with vast capital and computational power that is furiously dedicated to the lucrative science and economics of human prediction for profit.
The second form of propaganda is the argument that the success of the leading surveillance capitalist firms reflects the real value they bring to people. But data from the demand side suggest that surveillance capitalism is better understood as a market failure. Instead of a close alignment of supply and demand, people use these services because they have no comparable alternatives and because they are ignorant of surveillance capitalism’s shadow operations and their consequences. Pew Research Center recently reported that 81 percent of Americans believe the potential risks of companies’ data collection outweigh the benefits, suggesting that corporate success depends upon coercion and obfuscation rather than meeting peoples real needs.
In his prizewinning history of regulation, the historian Thomas McCraw delivers a warning. Across the centuries regulators failed when they did not frame strategies appropriate to the particular industries they were regulating. Existing privacy and antitrust laws are vital but neither will be wholly adequate to the new challenges of reversing epistemic inequality.
These contests of the 21st century demand a framework of epistemic rights enshrined in law and subject to democratic governance. Such rights would interrupt data supply chains by safeguarding the boundaries of human experience before they come under assault from the forces of datafication. The choice to turn any aspect of oneӔs life into data must belong to individuals by virtue of their rights in a democratic society. This means, for example, that companies cannot claim the right to your face, or use your face as free raw material for analysis, or own and sell any computational products that derive from your face. The conversation on epistemic rights has already begun, reflected in a pathbreaking report from Amnesty International.
On the demand side, we can outlaw human futures markets and thus eliminate the financial incentives that sustain the surveillance dividend. This is not a radical prospect. For example, societies outlaw markets that trade in human organs, babies and slaves. In each case, we recognize that such markets are both morally repugnant and produce predictably violent consequences. Human futures markets can be shown to produce equally predictable outcomes that challenge human freedom and undermine democracy. Like subprime mortgages and fossil fuel investments, surveillance assets will become the new toxic assets.
In support of a new competitive landscape, lawmakers will need to champion new forms of collective action, just as nearly a century ago legal protections for the rights to organize, to strike and to bargain collectively united lawmakers and workers in curbing the powers of monopoly capitalists. Lawmakers must seek alliances with citizens who are deeply concerned over the unchecked power of the surveillance capitalists and with workers who seek fair wages and reasonable security in defiance of the precarious employment conditions that define the surveillance economy.
Anything made by humans can be unmade by humans. Surveillance capitalism is young, barely 20 years in the making, but democracy is old, rooted in generations of hope and contest.
Surveillance capitalists are rich and powerful, but they are not invulnerable. They have an Achilles heel: fear. They fear lawmakers who do not fear them. They fear citizens who demand a new road forward as they insist on new answers to old questions: Who will know? Who will decide who knows? Who will decide who decides? Who will writethe music, and who will dance?
Shoshana Zuboff (@ShoshanaZuboff) is professor emerita at Harvard Business School and the author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.”
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Sunday, January 12, 2020
Screwed By Charter
I got a home security system managed by (Charter) the local cable company.
For the service I had to buy their ZIGBEE sensors up front, and pay a monthly fee for monitoring.
The system worked well for years.
What I’m just learning now - is the sensors are firmware locked to Charter’s system, and can’t be reused by any other monitoring company.
Charter is GETTING OUT OF THE HOME SECURITY BUSINESS leaving me with over a thousand dollars of perfectly good sensors that will soon be worthless and thrown in the garbage.
---
Spectrum Kills Home Security Business, Refuses Refunds for Owners of Now-Worthless Equipment
By Dell Cameron
Gizmodo
January 9, 2020Spectrum customers who are also users of the company’s home security service are about a month away from being left with a pile of useless equipment that in many cases cost them hundreds of dollars.
On February 5, Spectrum will NO LONGER SUPPORT customers who’ve purchased its Spectrum Home Security equipment. None of the devices the cameras, motion sensors, smart thermostats, and in-home touchscreens - can be paired with other existing services. In a few weeks, itll all be worthless junk.
While some of the devices may continue to function on their own, customers will soon no longer be able to access them using their mobile devices, which is sort of the whole point of owning a smart device.
On Friday, California’s KSBY News INTERVIEWED one Spectrum customer who said that he’d spent around $900 installing cameras and sensors in and around his Cheviot Hills home. That the equipment is soon-to-be worthless isn’t even the worst part. Spectrum is also running off with his money.
The customer reportedly contacted the company about converting the cost of his investment into credit toward his phone or cable bill. The company declined, he said.
Spectrum is owned by Charter Communications, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the U.S. It acquired the home security business in 2016 during its merger with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks.
Charter discontinued the marketing of the home security products shortly after the merger, indicating its plan to exit the business has been in the works for some time. Nevertheless, Spectrum customers were only notified that the service would be ended last month.
A Charter official told Gizmodo on Friday that the company was aiming for a smooth “transition” and claimed only a small percentage of customers would be affected.
Spectrum is hoping to smooth things over with exclusive “offers” from other home security companies, including Ring, which is owned by Amazon. The Ring deal includes a free alarm security kit, but will require Spectrum customers to purchase a year of professional monitoring at a cost of $340.
Rings kit INCLUDES an alarm base station, keypad, three contact sensors, one motion sensor, and one range extender, plus installation at no additional charge. The deal does not include security cameras, but customers will receive 25 percent off any Ring camera or doorbell over $100.
Spectrum is offering a similar deal through Abobe at a cost of $179 per year. The deal INCLUDES one gateway, three mini-door or windowsensors, one motion sensor, a key fob, a keypad, a streaming camera, and a “Secured by Abode” sticker.
The offers notwithstanding, many Spectrum Home Security users will soon find themselves out hundreds of dollars. Spectrum apparently believes it can afford to aggravate these customers, some if not most of whom will have no choice but to continue paying Spectrum for internet service.
Adding insult to injury, Charter and other major internet service providers have enjoyed a massive windfall under the Trump administration thanks to the sweeping 2017 tax breaks passed by the 115th Congress, not to mention the deregulatory efforts of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under Chairman Ajit Pai.
Since 2017, the FCC has worked to roll back numerous consumer protections implemented under the former administration, arguing that a “light-touch” regulatory regime will spur new investments, jobs, and inevitably lower costs for consumers. Those promises, however, have largely failed to materialize.
AT&T, one of the country’s largest ISPs, enjoyed a round of positive press for doling out $1,000 bonuses to employees after receiving a $3 billion tax break, is now engaged in sweeping layoffs and is reportedly forcing American workers to train their own foreign replacements.
The FCC did not respond to a request for comment.
I called the folks at Charter and asked them to unlock the sensors.
The representative may have flat out lied to me. He said they are reusable by any zigbee aware system, and all I need to do is pop out the battery or wait until service is turned off. I called a week later and told the same thing by a different rep.
I also called at least a dozen alarm companies, some local and and few of the big companies like ADT to take over monitoring.
They all say the sensors are unusable by anyone but Charter, and I need to buy a whole new system.
Next I instant messaged the Charter folks over at Twitter.
First they dismissed the issue not unlike the phone reps did, then reminded me how much they love their customers:
Me -> @Ask_Spectrum
I understand you guys are getting out of the home security business. I called a bunch of alarm companies including the big guys like adt and brinks to take over monitoring. They all say they can’t because the sensors are locked to your system. The folks at STOP THE CAP say the same thing.I called your company and the rep tells me that’s not correct, that any company can reuse them. I have over a thousand dollars invested in these sensors.
Whose telling the truth here?
Ask Spectrum
Thank you for contacting us today.
As far as another company accepting our equipment, we have no control over that.
The agent misspoke as it is up to the third party companies whether or not they will utilize our equipment or not. ^JKMe
The question is are the sensors vendor locked, yes or no?Ask Spectrum
We don’t have that information.
It is the choice of the vendor if they want to use them or not. ^JKMe
It’s all over the internet that Charter is discontinuing home security and leaving customers with bricked sensors because they’re firmware locked to your system so they can’t be reused.
I called Charter asking to unlock them. That didn’t work.
So I’m asking you to please unlock them.Ask Spectrum
Unfortunately, you would need new equipment.
We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience. -AZMe
What’s your company’s reason for refusing to unlock them for reuse?Ask Spectrum
Due to security reasons, our devices are non transferrable to other companies.
This previously helped us keep our service as secure as possible. -AZMe
Will you please buy them back?Ask Spectrum
We will not be buying back any purchased equipment.
We apologize for this inconvenience. -AZMe
How about we split the bill 50/50 for the price paid?
Your half can be an account credit?Ask Spectrum
We are not providing credit for any purchased equipment. -AZ
This is another expression of capitalism at its worst.
Only in America can companies be so brazen, arrogant and get away with stuff like this.
A Slashdot poster POINTS OUT:
No idea. I’ve not read their contracts. But it’s a complicated case. Not all things need to be written in a contract. For example if a contract is completely one sided it can be ruled invalid even if both parties sign. Such would be the case if I bought something with the expectation to have it for a reasonable amount of time, only to have it killed within a few months and not get my money back.
Many countries don’t just rely on contracts, but rather codify this in law. E.g. the Sales of Goods Act in Australia would require something to be fit for purpose or require redress. The classic case that this law is based on was someone (don’t ask me to remember the exact details, I did law 20 years ago) who bought carpet for their office only to have it wear through after 6 months of rolling on it with chairs. They were entitled to get the entire carpet replaced. Or Microsoft’s Xbox365 with it’s red ring. There’s a reason they were forced to replace these units in Australia regardless of if they were out of warranty or not as the expectation for fit for purpose was that a console lasts until the following model is released.
In Europe not only do devices come with 2 year warranty but they need to remain functional, and spare parts available from 2 years from purchase or the customer can get a full refund.
These kinds of consumer protection laws are missing in America, but I’m wondering what a good lawyer could argue.
What other buyer beware lessons are learned here?
Charter also has a mobile phone service. You can BUY AN IPHONE FROM THEM, and pay monthly for service.
No thanks. I’m AFRAID they can just as easily pull the same stunt with the phone so it can’t be used by another carrier, if/when they decide to pull out of THAT BUSINESS.
Fool me one shame on me.
Fool me twice shame on you.
And - about the cloud:
Slashdot AGAIN:
There’s a good side to this. We need several high profile stories like this. Best buy killed their cloud service for insignia products last fall and now this.
Maybe a few more repeats and enough people getting burned this way and people will start to understand how stupid it is to buy hardware that relies on somebody’s cloud service that can be shut down at any time.
To add insult to injury - after they’re done screwing customers with this move, THEY MAY:
Dubbed “Spectrum Home Security powered by Ring,” the company would charge a $190 up-front cost for equipment, feature DIY installation and carry a $10 per month monitoring solution fee
AND:
it remains active in other aspects of the smart home. Last November, Charter announced it had adopted OpenSync, an open source framework originating with Plume, that is being used to power a new in-home WiFi management service initially introduced in Austin, Texas. Charter has also teamed with (and invested in) Cujo AI on products that will center on in-home network monitoring and security services
I’m sure they realize that no way, no how - will I sign up for their replacement service.
Or an iPhone.
Or whatever else they decide to market.
What really burns me up after this is Charter’s a monopoly for high speed internet service in my town, so even though I’m dying to take that business elsewhere - I can’t.
Damn.
Help me out and write the Charter big shots
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Saturday, January 04, 2020
The Awakening Part 8
How Long Will It Take For The US To Collapse?
By Brandon Smith
Activist Post
January 2, 2020
There are a multitude of false assumptions out there on what the collapse of a nation or empire looks like. Modern-day Americans have never experienced this type of event, only peripheral crises and crashes. Thanks to Hollywood, many in the public are under the delusion that a collapse is an overnight affair. They think that such a thing is impossible in their lifetimes, and if it did happen, it would happen as it does in the movies they would simply wake up one morning and find the world on fire. Historically speaking, this is not how it works. The collapse of an empire is a process, not an event.
This is not to say that there are not moments of shock and awe; there certainly are. As we witnessed during the Great Depression, or in 2008, the system can only be propped up artificially for so long before the bubble pops. In past instances of central bank intervention, the windowfor manipulation is around ten years between events, give or take a couple of years. For the average person, a decade might seem like a long time. For the banking elites behind the degradation of our society and economy, a decade is a blink of an eye.
In the meantime, danger signals abound as those analysts aware of the situation try to warn the populace of the underlying decay of the system and where it will inevitably lead. Economists like Ludwig Von Mises foresaw the collapse of the German Mark and predicted the Great Depression; almost no one listened until it was too late. Multiple alternative economists predicted the credit crisis and derivatives crash of 2008; and almost no one listened until it was too late. People refused to listen because their normalcy bias took control of their ability to reason and accept the facts in front of them.
There are a number factors that cause mass blindness to economic and social reality. First and foremost, establishment elites deliberately create the illusion of prosperity by rigging economic data to the upside. In almost every case of economic crisis or geopolitical disaster, the public is conditioned to believe they are in the midst of a financial boom or era of peace. They are encouraged to ignore fundamental warning signs in favor of foolish faith in the system. Those people that try to break the apathy and expose the truth are called chicken little and doom mongers.
In the minds of the cheerful lemmings a collapse is something very obvious; they think they would know it when they saw it. It’s like trying to teach a blind person about colors; it’s not impossible, but its very difficult to get all these Helen Kellers to understand that what they perceive is not the whole reality. There’s a vast world hidden from them and they have no concept of how to observe it.
Crash events are like stages in the process of collapse; they create moments of clarity for the blind. However, they are also often engineered to benefit the establishment. Theres a reason why the elites put so much energy into hiding the real data on the state of the economy, and it’s not because they are trying to keep the system from faltering by using sheer public ignorance. Rather, a crash event is a tool, a means to an end. As Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr. warned after the panic of 1920:
Under the Federal Reserve Act, panics are scientifically created; the present panic is the first scientifically created one, worked out as we figure a mathematical problem
Central bankers and their cohorts manipulate economic data and promote the false notion of a boom before almost every major crash because they WANT to ambush the populace. They WANT to create panic, and then use it to their advantage as they rebuild and mutate the system into something unrecognizable only decades ago. Each consecutive crash contributes to the collapse of the whole, until eventually the society we once had is barely a distant memory.
This process can take decades, and the US has been subject to it for quite some time now. Once again in 2019 we are seeing the lie of an economic boom being perpetuated in the mainstream. The public was growing too aware of the danger and had to be subdued. More specifically, conservatives were growing too aware. The sad thing is that the boom propaganda is most prominent today among conservatives, who are desperately trying to ignore the fundamentals in an attempt to defend the Trump Administration.
The same people who were pointing out the economic bubble under Obama are now denying its existence under Trump. Trump himself argued that the markets were a dangerous economic fraud created by the Federal Reserve during his campaign, yet once he was in office he flip-flopped and started taking full credit for the bubble. What is mind boggling to me is that many people, even in the liberty movement, still choose to dismiss this behavior in favor of worshiping Trump as some kind of hero on a white horse.
This only reinforces my theory that the system is due for another major engineered crash event, and that the ongoing collapse of the US is soon to accelerate. Each case of economic calamity in modern history was preceded by peak delusional optimism and peak greed. When the people traditionally most vigilant against crisis suddenly capitulate and claim victory, this is when reality strikes hardest. This is when the establishment triggers yet another controlled demolition.
In order to determine how long an empire will last, one has to take into account the agenda of the elites that control its institutions. As long as they are in key positions of power within the system and as long as they can inject their own puppet politicians, they will have the ability to influence the collapse timeline of that system.
Can they prolong and stave off crisis? Yes, for a short while. However, once the machine of a crash has been set in motion the best they can do is slow down the Titanic; they cannot change its path towards the iceberg. And frankly, at this point why would they? I hear it argued often that the elites are going to “keep the plates spinning” on the economy and that they don’t want to lose their “golden goose” in the US economy. This reveals an naivety among skeptics of the true agenda.
Firstly, the elites have a highly useful political puppet in the form of Donald Trump; he is useful in that he inspires sharp national division, and, he is a self-proclaimed conservative champion and nationalist. If the elites did not trigger a crash under Trump, then this would give the public the impression that conservative ideals and national sovereignty works. This is the opposite of what they want. Why would globalists that want the erasure of nation states and the creation of a centralized socialist Utopia seek to make conservatives and nationalists look good? Well, they wouldn’t.
The only concern of the banks is that they do not take the blame as their engineered collapse of the old world order hits the public with increasingly painful consequences. These consequences are already becoming visible.
The next major crash has begun in the form of plunging fundamentals, and far too many conservatives are placing their heads in the sand for the selfish sake of proving the political left wrong. Declines in US manufacturing, US freight, global exports and imports, mass closures in US retail, as well as all time highs in consumer debt, corporate debt and national debt are being shrugged off and rationalized as nothing more than hiccups in an otherwise booming economy. The Fed’s repo market purchases, barely keeping up with demand from liquidity starved corporations are also not being taken seriously.
Conservatives and analysts are going to have to forget about supporting Trump, a Rothschild owned proxy, and start acknowledging reality once again. The only question now is, will the elites allow the crash to spread further into mainstreet and strike markets before or after the 2020 election?
As noted above, to predict the timing of a collapse in a nation or empire, one has to examine the agendas of the elites that dominate its institutions. We can gain some sense of timing from the public admissions of globalist organizations like the IMF and the UN. Each has announced the year 2030 as a target date for the finalization of globalization, a cashless society and sustainability goals. This means that the elites have around ten years to create a crisis and then solve that crisis with globalism.
Ten years is a narrow window, and if the elites intend for conservatives to take the blame for the next crash, they will have to initiate it soon. They may not have a choice anyway, as the chain of dominoes was already been set in motion by the Fed in 2018 with its liquidity tightening policies.
We can also gauge timing of a collapse to a point by understanding the common tactics the establishment uses to hide what they are doing. Generally, when a collapse is about to accelerate the elites use crisis events as cover to distract the public and produce scapegoats. In my article Globalists Only Need One More Major Event To Finish Sabotaging The Economy, I outlined three potential distractions that could be used in the near term, and if any of these events took place, then people should watch for the collapse to move faster. Two of these events now appear imminent: The first being a war with Iran, and the second being a No Dealђ Brexit.
Finally, we can take into account the globalist need for a scapegoat, and it appears that conservatives and nationalists are their target for blame. This leaves less than one year for a crisis event if Trump is intended to leave the White House in 2020, or less than four years if he is intended to stay in for a second term. Keep in mind that A LOT can happen in a single year, and a second Trump term is certainly not guaranteed yet.
But why create a collapse in the first place? Crash events allow the establishment to consolidate control over hard assets as poverty forces the population to sell what they have to survive. This poverty also creates fear, which makes the public malleable and easier to control. Each new crisis opens doors to political and social changes, changes which end in less freedom and more centralization. Collapse is a succession of crashes leading to a complete erasure of the original society. Its not a Mad Max event, it’s a hidden and insidious cancer that takes over the national body and warps it into a wretched form. The collapse is complete when the nation either breaks apart, or is so damaged for so long that no one can remember what it used to look like.
What we are witnessing today is the beginning of a new crash, and the final phases of a collapse of our way of life. The economic boom narrative among conservatives is a farce designed to trick us into complacency. The bubble that we warned about under the Obama Administration has been popped under the Trump Administration. Nothing has changed in the ten years since the 2008 crash except that the motivation for keeping the crash hidden is quickly disappearing.
Crashes are inevitable, but collapse is only possible when the public remains unprepared. Our civilization and its values are under attack, but they can only be destroyed if we stay apathetic to the threat and refuse to prepare for their defense. We must adopt a philosophy of decentralization. We need localized and self sufficient economies, as well as a return to localized production. Beyond that, we have to prepare for the eventuality of a fight. The fate of the US economy has already been sealed, but the people who are destroying it can still be stopped before they use the collapse to force society into subservience. We have to offer security, we have to offer alternatives to the new world order and we have to remove the globalist threat permanently.
Make no mistake, we are living in the midst of an epoch moment; the outcome of collapse depends on us and our reactions. This is not the task of the next generation, it is a task for our generation. We do not have another couple of decades to take the danger seriously. The plates are not spinning, they have already dropped.
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Friday, January 03, 2020
Bad Moon Rising Part 79 - Iran, What Next?
Tehran Promises ‘Forceful Revenge’ After Trump Orders the Assassination of Top Iranian Commander
Iran’s Supreme Leader warned of “harsh retaliation” after a U.S. airstrike killed Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force.
By David Gilbert
Vice
Jan 3 2020
American citizens have been warned to leave Iraq immediately after Iran vowed vengeance against the U.S. after President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of one of Tehrans top military commanders in a rocket attack at Baghdad International Airport.
The killing of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force and a beloved figure across Iran, marks a significant escalation in the standoff between Tehran and Washington, and on Friday morning Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned that a “harsh retaliation is waiting for the U.S.,” calling Soleimani the “international face of resistance.”
“A forceful revenge awaits the criminals who have his blood and the blood of the other martyrs last night on their hands,” Khamenei added. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said “Soleimani’s work in resisting the U.S. would continue and that the great nation of Iran will take revenge for this heinous crime.”
The Pentagon confirmed it conducted the airstrike and said Soleimani was killed because “he was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.”
Experts now fear that the killing could ignite an already tense relationship between Iran and the U.S., which has deteriorated rapidly since President Donald Trump pulled out of the 2015 nuclear accord.
“From Iran’s perspective, it is hard to imagine a more deliberately provocative act,” Robert Malley, the chief executive of the International Crisis Group, told the New York Times. “And it is hard to imagine that Iran will not retaliate in a highly aggressive manner.”
What happened?
In the early hours of Friday morning, Soleimani arrived at Baghdad International Airport on a flight from Syria, disembarked, and entered one of two cars waiting near the plane.
In the cars were three prominent members of the Iraqi militia, including Abu Mahdi Al Muhandis, an Iraqi militia commander.
As the convoy was pulling out of the airport, close to the cargo area, it was struck by missiles fired by an American MQ-9 Reaper drone-fired missiles.
The airstrike instantly killed all five people in the cars. AP reports that Soleimani’s body was identified by the ring he wore.
Officials were able to pinpoint his location using a combination of top-secret information from informants, electronic intercepts, reconnaissance aircraft, and other surveillance.
The highly-classified mission was triggered by the death of an American contractor during a rocket attack by an Iranian-backed militia just after Christmas, a senior American official told the New York Times.
Who was Soleimani?
By the time of his death, the diminutive 62-year-old had achieved near-mythical status among his enemies, and he was idolized by Iranian hard-liners.
Soleimani began his rise to power following the 1979 Iran revolution, joining the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and conducting guerrilla-style attacks during the bloody Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s a style of warfare that would become the calling card of the Quds Force.
He also forged strong ties with Iraqגs majority-Shiite population during this time, which would help him when he sought to extend Tehrans influence outside of IranҒs borders.
By the late 1990s, he was put in charge of the elite Quds Force, and for the last two decades he has been behind virtually every operation conducted by Iranian intelligence and military forces.
American officials say Soleimani is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. troops during the Iraq War, as he provided advanced bombmaking equipment and training to Iraqi insurgents.
Soleimani orchestrated Irans proxy war across the Middle East, using militias in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon to extend TehranҒs influence.
Wherever you see Iranian activity, you see Qassem Soleimani, whether it is in Syria, whether it is in Iraq, whether it is in Yemen, he is there and it is the Quds Force, the organization which he leads, that I think is the principal threat as we look at this and the principal ones that are stoking this destabilizing activity,Ӕ General Joseph Votel, the then-commander of U.S. Central Command that oversees American military operations in the Middle East, said in 2018.
How is the world reacting?
As Khamenei announced the national mourning period, tens of thousands of Iranians filled the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities after Friday prayers chanting anti-U.S. slogans such as “Death to America.”
A massive crowd dressed in black gathered on the streets of Soleimanis hometown of Kerman to mourn the death of a man considered a national hero in Iran.
As news of an explosion at the Baghdad airport emerged and rumors of Soleimani’s death swirled on social media, Trump cryptically posted a grainy image of the American flag without comment.
The president has yet to publically comment on the assassination, but unsurprisingly, it has divided Congress along party lines.
Democrats have been quick to point out that the decision, which could trigger a full-scale war with Iran, was made without congressional approval.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said “the strike was carried out without the consultation of Congress” adding that “the attack could put the lives of American service members, diplomats and others further at risk by engaging in provocative and disproportionate actions.”
Republicans, however, were quick to defend Trump. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said “Trump exercised admirable restraint while setting clear red lines & the consequences for crossing them.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo noted that many in the Middle East were celebrating Soleimanis death, posting a widely circulated video of Iraqis dancing in the street after hearing the news.
Former National Security Adviser and Iran hawk John Bolton was effusive in his praise of the assassination.
However, the remaining signatories to the 2015 nuclear pact have called for restraint from both sides.
FranceҒs deputy minister for foreign affairs, Amelie de Montchalin told a French radio station that we are waking up to a more dangerous world. Military escalations are always dangerous.Ӕ
Dominic Raab, the U.K. Foreign Secretary, said that further conflict is in none of our interests [and] we urge all parties to de-escalate.Ӕ
What happens next?
Many experts are warning that the attack on such an important figure in Irans leadership could trigger an all-out war in the region, pointing out that Tehran has already reacted violently to the White House campaign of ғmaximum pressure which includes the withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear pact and imposing crippling economic sanctions on the country.
IranԒs reaction to these measures has been attacking tankers in the Persian Gulf, and striking Saudi oil facilities.
U.S. officials told the New York Times that they are prepared for a wide range of retaliatory actions from Tehran, ranging from cyberattacks to terrorism against U.S. interests and allies.
On Friday morning, the U.S. Embassy in Iraq warned all U.S. citizens to leave the country immediately, leaving on flights if possible, or if not, to go to other countries via land though it didn’t specify which countries.
Keen to prevent a leadership vacuum that might undermine Irans response, Khamenei has wasted no time in appointing a successor to Soleimani, naming his deputy, Brigadier General Esmail Qaani, as the new commander of the Quds Force on Friday morning.
Any military retaliation by Iran against the U.S. would have repercussions not only for Tehran and Washington but for the entire Middle East.
“The Pentagon said it was carried out with the goal of deterring further Iranian attacks but in the short term, there is a very real possibility of retaliatory action by Iran that could reverberate across the region,” Naysan Rafati, a senior Iran analyst with the International Crisis Group, told the Washington Post.
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Retirement Ripoff Sequel 2
‘It’s really over’: Corporate pensions head for extinction as nature of retirement plans changes
By Nathan Bomey
December 10, 2019
USA Today
The practice of companies sending monthly retirement checks to their former workers is headed for extinction, and remaining pension funds are in tough financial shape.
Nearly two-thirds of pension funds are considering dropping guaranteed benefits to new workers within the next five years, according to a human resources consulting firm that studied the matter.
Despite gains in the stock market this year, U.S. pension plans are near their worst financial state in two years, according to the new report by Mercer, which casts a spotlight on the escalating cost of past promises to employees.
Most U.S. companies no longer offer defined-benefit pensions, which typically provided guaranteed monthly payments to workers when they retired. But pension funds that still operate must gain in value to ensure they have enough to meet their obligations.
By late 2019, the average pension fund had 85% of the funds necessary to meet its obligations over time due largely to low interest rates, according to Mercer’s 2020 Defined Benefit Outlook.
The firm also reported that 63% of companies with defined-benefit pensions “are considering termination” of the plan within half a decade. That would mean the pensions would be closed off to future participants.
The report comes as corporate pensions continue to disappear.
General Electric announced in October that it would offer lump-sum pension buyouts to about 100,000 former U.S. employees who have not yet begun receiving their pensions.
The company, which has been facing pressure to bolster its finances, also announced plans to freeze pension benefits for about 20,700 salaried pensioners at current levels.
“In the bigger picture, GE is just going the way that most of the private sector in the United States has gone,” Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, said in a recent interview. “Its really over in the private sector. The question is, just when does the last plan close down?”
The number of pension plans offering defined benefits - which means the payouts are guaranteed plummeted by about 73% from 1986 to 2016, according to the Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration.
That’s due to a mix of reasons, including risk, costs, declining union power and the rise of 401(k)-style defined-contribution plans, which require workers to kick in their own funds for retirement investments, often with a company match.
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Opinion: Recent surveys show sharp decline in retirement wealth for typical household
By Alicia H. Munnell
MarketWatch
January 2, 2020
In preparation for a recent presentation, I asked for data to documentthe increasing dependence on 401(k)s as opposed to traditional defined-benefit plans. One of the figures included total retirement wealth for households in the middle of the wealth distribution for five different cohorts.
I was stunned to see that retirement wealth, measured in 2016 dollars, had declined. That is, the wealth holdings for the late boomers (age 51 to 57) were actually lower than the wealth holdings for the mid boomers (age 57 to 63) at the same age .
Retirement wealth, which comes from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), includes:
1) Social Security;
2) employer-sponsored retirement plans (including defined-benefit plans);
3) non-defined-contribution financial wealth; and
4) housing wealth. Ages 51 to 56 were chosen because that is when the respondents in each new cohort enter the HRS, allowing the st
Even though the HRS is the gold standard for wealth and income data, the decline was so unexpected that I asked my colleague, Anqi Chen, to look at data from the Federal Reserves 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances. While the only data readily available were holdings in defined-contribution plans, the pattern was similar to that found in the HRS. The wealth holdings of the late boomers were below those of both the mid and early boomers, who are age 63 to 69.
This pattern of decline is distressing. It suggests that fewer households in the middle of the wealth distribution have 401(k) assets. Given the decline in Social Security replacement rates, an increasing number of households will be falling short.
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