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L. Neil Smith's THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE Number 203, December 16, 2002 HAPPY BILL OF RIGHTS DAY!
Garbage In, Garbage Out
Exclusive to TLE A number of things are operating to our advantage in our fight against the would-be slaveholders of the 21st century -- particularly the ones holed up in Washington, D.C. As I've written previously, the primary weapon being used by our enemies is the "American KGB" (the correct Russian translation of "Homeland Security"). One of the weapons wielded by the American KGB is the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, which the KGB envisions to be the "permanent record" with which your grade-school principle threatened you. I've previously pointed out that the only moral response to the FedGov's demands to create a police state in this fashion is non- compliance. We are also helped by the proliferation of spam (unsolicited junk e-mail) which acts as chaff in our enemies' radar. There are also a number of things that the average individual can do to thwart the system: - Firstly, there is absolutely no doubt that the hacker/cracker crowd is going to consider TIA a formal challenge. It will be under CONSTANT attack from every distant corner of the globe. Support such efforts: sponsor PayPal or E-Gold accounts for hackers, help them in their work, support them any way you can. They will end up being some of the biggest heroes in our War for Freedom. - Support the new technologies that will appear designed specifically to counter-act tracking on the Internet and to feed bogus data to TIA. Let's imagine you went to www.xxx.com. Under the American KGB, this fact would be tracked and noted in TIA. The next time the KGB wants to sting one of your neighbors (a la Randy Weaver), they might threaten to expose the fact that you like porn to your children unless you complied with their demands. There are ways to spoof such information, and hackers will make these programs available. Your destination might be altered to look as though you'd been perusing nothing but http://www.tia.gov/how_to_be_a_good_little_automaton_droid.html. As such spoofing programs become available, install and use them. Offer the creators of such software all the moral and financial support that you can. - Since everyone -- KGB members included -- will be tracked from cradle to grave, hackers will no doubt seek to make public interesting information about bureaucrats. Perhaps it will become public knowledge that (as a purely hypothetical example) President Shrub likes to post to alt.sex.schoolgirl.bukkake under the alias "subslut-12". Use and support the technologies that make such information public. - Use PGP encryption on EVERYTHING. Your e-mail, your data files, everything. Remember, any night the KGB could bash down your door and take your computers. You don't want them to find anything remotely incriminating. PGP and a 2048-bit (or higher) key are the answer. In addition to purely electronic measures, there are more concrete tactics that one can adopt. Given the fact that TIA seeks to monitor every single financial transaction by every individual in the country from cradle to grave, it is not reactionary to contemplate the following: - Revert to buying things with cash. I know it will be an enormous pain in the behind. Unfortunately, the choice is between having your transaction tracked simply by following the electronic trail or not having it tracked with cash. - Operate as much as possible in the black or gray market. By this, I mean pay your plumber in cash, accept cash so as to avoid making a record of the transaction, and so forth. The goal is to move as much of the economy off of that which is being officially tracked and inspire non-compliance with the system. - Ultimately they're going to cook up a way to track cash. It will probably occur to them that everyone should have a Federally-issued driver's license/debit card/biometric ID in place of any other kind of currency. Moving to forms of barter could be a useful step. See if your plumber will accept silver or gold coins (just rounds, not numastic coins). And not American Eagle rounds, either -- just generic .999 fine silver and gold minted privately. If not that, what about long distance cards, gift certificates from local merchants, or other portable items with value? - One might even consider giving up banking entirely. Certainly it's a pain in the behind of gargantuan proportions and an economic loss to boot. But where your financial data resides with a bank, it will eventually reside with the KGB. Finally, there are areas of physical security that are worthy of consideration: - Think about setting up a "dead man switch" on your computer, so that failure to correctly respond after a specified time period will cause a low-level hard drive format. If the American KGB seizes your equipment and tortures your PGP passphrase out of you, better that the computer self-destructs. - If you're a reloader, think seriously about putting together and marketing an ACTUAL self-destruct mechanism, something that can be easily tripped to cause selected items to be destroyed. Goodness knows what art, literature, and property will become illegal under the American KGB. You might find that having your supply of illicit cigarettes turn into a pile of carbon would be a good thing. Even with a low-level format of your hard drive, it can be possible to recover data from it. ISC2 (the consortium backing my Certified Information Systems Security Professional certification) recommends physical destruction of hard disk followed by immersion of the platters in acid. The basic point is: non-electronic transactions can't be tracked. Your plumber likes cash and operates on the gray market RIGHT NOW because a cash transaction means he doesn't have to report the income to the IRS. If he could get all his payments in cash, he'd be thrilled. Adopt his attitude. The American FedGov is ultimately going to collapse. It will do so via one of two ways: massive economic depression caused by government tampering in the free market, or massive non-compliance in the system itself. The most important thing you can do is: THINK FREE. If you wake up in the morning and say, "Today, I'm free. I will do whatever I like so long as I do not initiate force against another human being," it's ASTOUNDING how your horizons broaden. You realize that you actually have a CHOICE about whether or not to cooperate with the American KGB. Free individuals have choices. Slaves don't. Free individuals, 280,000,000 strong, are capable of coming up with ways around every single draconian attempt to enslave us that the American KGB can devise.
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