Police State

With multi-partisan support, EU setting up air passenger database.

DARPA is unusually honest.

"he government agency that brought us the Internet has now developed a powerful new search engine that is shedding light on the contents of the so-called deep Web. DARPA began work on the Memex Deep Web Search Engine a year ago, and this week unveiled its tools to Scientific American and 60 Minutes. "Memex, which is being developed by 17 different contractor teams, aims to build a better map of Internet content and uncover patterns in online data that could help law enforcement officers and others. While early trials have focused on mapping the movements of human traffickers, the technology could one day be applied to investigative efforts such as counterterrorism, missing persons, disease response, and disaster relief.""

Moving on.

Education

Government wants to teach sex-ed to ten-year-olds. What could go wrong?

Under the guise of advancing the STEM education fraud, DARPA is testing next-gen war software on high school students. This highlights another link between government schools and the military.

"the DARPA-funded educational video games developed at the CGS have a purpose beyond the pretense of teaching elementary school children STEM skills.
Instead, the games developed at CGS have had the primary purpose of using grade-school children as test subjects to develop and improve “adaptive learning” training technology for the military.
It's one node in a network of programs originally created with the intent to build better counterinsurgency simulations for American warfighters operating in countries occupied by US forces. In short, DARPA is militarizing academia."

I would say further militarizing.

"In a small lunch room, Cooper and I discuss CGS’s most famous video game,  Foldit, a protein-folding puzzler that crowdsourced research previously only done by experts, making “citizen researchers” out of every player. One puzzle in the game involved a mystery surrounding the cause of the AIDS virus in rhesus monkeys that had stymied scientists for 15 years. Foldit players solved the mystery in ten days."

This is awesome.

"The  CGS website cites DARPA right on its main page, as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and several corporate sponsors. But my curiosity was piqued by a 2011 document from the University of Washington declaring CGS's founding with $15 million dollars—the total of a cool $3 million from the Gates Foundation, and $12 million from DARPA."

This is creepy.

"Captain Russell Shilling has since left DARPA; program managers with the Pentagon's blue-sky research arm typically only stay on between four and six years. In June 2014,  President Obama appointed Shilling as the Executive Director for STEM Initiatives at the Department of Education. "

A stronger connection.

"Once perfected in this manner, Shilling goes on, the technology behind adaptive tutoring could be applied to other fields of training more directly fit for military use. There would be no shortage of test subjects either, because, as the newsletter notes, DARPA has access to the children of military personnel around the world through the  Department of Defense Education Activity, a civilian wing of the Pentagon through which this software can be tested. "

Has access to is a vague term.

"As for why DARPA was even pursuing STEM educational video games for elementary school kids, Ragsdale gave a somewhat surprisingly offhand confirmation of what I had found in the budgets and other documents. “The real inspiration for the program was not STEM,” he said. “We wanted to develop new methods that are game-based to accelerate learning and have something that adapts.""
"It’s not the children’s educational games being developed at the Center For Games Science that is interesting to the military—it's the intelligent tutoring technology. The kids are just unwittingly testing it out for them. "

Other applications.

"In fact, DARPA, originally as part of a separate program than ENGAGE but now also handled by Ragsdale, sought proposals to crowdsource the testing and debugging of software, so that it could be done inexpensively by nonexperts.  The Center for Game Science submitted the best pitch, winning the contract and funding for a project called  Crowd-Sourced Formal Verification.
In the end, the CGS solution was to create video games with visuals representing the underlying mathematics, so that as you played you tested the software for defects.  Verigames, a process for detecting software flaws, was born.
Verigames looks like another portal for kids games, and it doesn’t explain on the site what sort of software you are testing. But as DARPA's original  Crowd-Sourced Formal Verification Proposer’s Day Announcement makes clear, as you play these games you are taking part in debugging military weapons systems software. "

That's creepy too.

Here's the school lunches government serves.

Thankfully homeschooling is skyrocketing, but it needs to be more.

War

DARPA developing chips to implant false memories.

Remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime take over Iraqi city and US equipment.

339 killed, 91 wounded in Iraq.

Over 500 killed in Iraq.

Kurds resist ISIS in Kirkuk. They're better than the US-trained Iraqi government forces.

War

Drones should have been hack resistant from the beginning.

150 killed, 127 wounded in Iraq.

War

Scientists create pizza for military that will last three years.

Assassination used to be considered a sketchy thing, so presidents demanded plausible deniability. Obama openly assassinates people including Americans.

DARPA plans to train 4,000 cadets to be cyber-warriors.

Number of troops using food stamps increases. Huh?

Police State

NSA collects gamers' chat and employs undercover agents in online games and Xbox Live. I'm sure lots of terrorists plot attacks in World of Warcraft. They're just paying people tax money to play games. Snowden strikes again.

NSA's corporate partners have joined an alliance against NSA.

"Eight firms, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Yahoo, have formed an alliance called Reform Government Surveillance group."

They have to carry out this marketing ploy because NSA is killing their businesses, and I'm sure they would love not to have to spy on behalf of NSA, but the government is the boss, so these companies do what they're told. To show how phony this is, they published it in the New York Times.

Tech giants spar over drones with Google CEO proclaiming the government should ban Amazon's drones. What a farce.

Germany's DHL testing drones for delivery of urgent packages to remote locations. So much for my claims of farce. This isn't the wave of the future. It's the present.

More on NSA and FBI hacking of computers to control cameras and microphones.

Every aspect of American life is a police matter.

Government wants to hold people responsible for the actions of others.

DARPA plans to launch spy satellite that will dwarf all other satellites.

Group of authors claim surveillance is theft.

Police State

Microsoft using Xbox One Kinect to profile gamers and groups for better ads. Gamers will love this. So will the NSA.

Detroit's dispatch system failed.

Nicaragua joins Venezuela in offering NSA leaker Snowden asylum. The question is whether or not he can get there.

It's nice to see the press, even if it's just a local newspaper, report on the outrageous police state we suffer under.

Claim that Michael Hastings's car might have been cyber-hijacked to kill him. That's a new one. Here's why.

"But now details are emerging that he was on the verge of breaking an important new story about the CIA, and believed he was being investigated by the FBI."

Hastings is the reporter who wrote the Rolling Stone's article that got then-Afghan war commander General McChrystal fired. I'm already on the used car bandwagon because I don't want my car to spy on me or be shut down by anybody, but maybe they can also cyber-hijack and wreck cars now. DARPA says they can.