From: "CJ Parker" <sonofgomez@hotmail.com>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 07:32:05 -0700 (PDT)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Prologue 18 - SPACE ALIENS HIDE MY DRUGS!!!
Message-ID: <19980417143132.17239.qmail@hotmail.com>
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Prologue 18 - SPACE ALIENS HIDE MY DRUGS !!!

"Everything is becoming science fiction.
 From the margins of an almost invisible literature
 has sprung the intact reality of  the 20th century."
~ J.G. Ballard ~

Hidden Empire:

Peter Jennings, Canadian Circle of Eunuchs Journalist, recently pointed out, on 'World News Tonight,' that the "rewards" of "labor saving" modern technology seem to be mysteriously "missing."
Jennings pointed out that the normal American working family now has 'two' individuals working a '47-hour week.'

Interestingly, Jennings managed to work into the story an example of the $3 Billion that the US government has laying around to invest in digging vast expanses of underground tunnels, etc., in New Mexico, for the purported purpose of (unsuccessfully) seeking out a suitable place to deposit nuclear waste. (He made no direct reference to Underground Reptilian Nazis.)

In the same evening news program, the CoE initiate aired a report containing a subliminal InfoWar reminder to US citizens as to their true role in the government's scheme of things, with a parody of the primitive primary products of Peristroika-TAXES, TAX PROMOTION and TAX ENFORCEMENT.
It described the implementation of the new (to Russia) income tax system, and showed promotional advertisements on the Pavlovian Broadcasting System (PBS) meant to ingrain in the minds of the citizens the officially correct way to view their new friend, Mr. Tax.
"Depressed? Pay your taxes, and you'll feel better."
"No appetite? Pay your taxes, and you'll feel better."
And, for the benefit of those who still know a poisoned Carrot when they see one, Russian PBS also carries promotional advertisements that blatantly and unashamedly trumpet the dark, underlying theme of Tax Agencies around the world, and which American taxpayers can easily recognize from their own experience:
"THE TAX ENFORCERS HAVE GUNS, AND THEY KNOW HOW TO USE THEM."
(Accompanied by live footage of armed thugs in camouflage subduing and kicking the crap out of scumbag tax resisters.)


Isn't it funny how Life imitates Real Life (tm)?




Maybe It's Under The Bed:

So where, exactly, are the mountains of cash resulting from the much ballyhoo'ed Benefits of Modern Technology (tm)?

In an age where it takes two individuals, working harder and longer than the former solitary 'bread earner,' to struggle (and fail) to maintain the same standard of living and future security that existed at a time when the infrastructures around them were undergoing building and expansion, as opposed to their current fall into decay, where are the "missing" benefits of technology disappearing to?

Question: "Where did the 'money go' that was earned by the workers in the proverbial Company Town (tm)?"
Answer: "Where it *always* goes...into deep pockets of the Empire...in this case, the Company Empire and the pockets of the company owner."

Major Question: "Could it possibly be that the Benefits of Modern Technology are being surreptitiously slipped into the pockets of a Hidden Empire (tm), which serves as an invisible version of a Global Company Town?"
Major Answer: "Those who do not learn from the past, are doomed to repeat it..."


How I Would Build A Hidden Empire:  (by Human Gus-Peter)
  [Disclaimer: I am just a kid with an overactive imagination, but...]

   If I wanted to steal all of the financial benefits of modern technology, I would take advantage of all the things I learned subliminally by ignoring the official version of history that my teachers were promoting while concentrating my conscious attention on making my spitballs stick to the ceiling and impressing the cute girl sitting behind me.

   I would first have my secret agent guys become the bosses of the people who sell Geritol  and make fun of their husband's Cuban accent on TV.  I would have them begin selling The Way Things Are (tm) by controlling the entertainment and news that people got to see.
   People have always resigned themselves to TWTA.  It used to be Kings who held their attention with swords and Priests who held their attention with hellfire, but now it is TV that holds their attention with Pavlovian hypnosis.

   Next, I would have my secret guys begin putting the financial benefits of modern technology into the pockets of those who were a part of my Hidden Empire, since people can't miss what they never have.
   I would make sure that my people controlled the money supply and could let people mostly maintain their standard of living, even while raising their taxes and creating all sorts of BlackHoles for new money to disappear down, such as bloated Defense budgets and social programs where it could be funneled into the pockets of my Hidden Empire.

  When the taxes, regulatory fees, licensing fees, interest charges, users fees, and the mountain of other money sources I was able to make The Way Things Are had grown so large that people started recognizing the resemblance to Company Town, Indentured Slavery, and the like, then I would begin making things so that they would receive fewer services and less benefit for the same amount of work.
   I would do it slowly, so that more people working longer hours for slowly declining services and benefits would gradually and constantly become the new, improved Way Things Are.

   I would make sure that those making the laws and those engaged in business benefited greatly from supporting the aims and maintenance of my Hidden Empire, and suffered greatly if they opposed or resisted it in any way.
   I would use my power to control The Way Things Are to direct anger, resentment and resistance of the people toward the government and corporate symbols schills of my Hidden Empire, and keep them from revolting against The Way Things Are by giving them the illusion of being able to control and change The Way Things Are by voting and making consumer decisions.  I would let them rearrange the pawns on my playing board while keeping The Game (tm) moving at a confusing enough pace so that they would hardly notice that the major pieces on my board always remain the same, no matter how they vote, or what illusory decisions they make in their role as consumers.

  Most importantly, I would cement the hold of my Hidden Empire on their lives by not only controlling the information that was fed to the masses, but also gaining access and controlling all of the information that they fed to my shills, and to each other.
   I would cause them to receive a mark in their right hand, or their forehead, which would identify them when they worked, banked, got a drivers license, bought dog food with their discount card at the supermarket.
   I would put in place an extensive surveillance network that could monitor their movements when they ate at a fast food restaurant, used a long-distance cash card, rented a Ryder truck, parked near a federal building, traveled without a license plate on their vehicle. (And if they ordered a Kentucky Fried Chicken 'snack pak' for their final meal, I would make sure it was delivered with an 'extra leg.'-hee, hee)

  I would make certain that the minions of my Hidden Empire could intercept and monitor all forms of communication on a global basis, and provide me with the information I needed to make, break and manipulate every individual, group, company and government on the face of the earth.  I would call one part of this operation 'Echelon' and another part of it 'Octopuss.'

   Lastly, I would use my power to monitor and control all communications to increase the range and power of my Hidden Empire by keeping a sufficient number of people just comfortable and secure enough to express approval of The Way Things Are (tm) in polls designed to find out how much more I can steal from them for the coffers of my Hidden Empire (tm) without mounting a revolution.
   As long as my shills could use their power to sexually assault women in the highest of government offices, financially ruin corporations to steal their software, murder men, women, children and goat-herders at will, without the average person risking their comfort and security by attempting to make serious changes in The Way Things Are, then I would continue to have my shills slowly eat away all of their rights, freedoms and their liberty in every area of their life, all across the face of the earth, until I succeeded in creating a Global The Way Things Are that would finally become resigned to their subjugation that I would no longer have to hide my Empire, and could openly give it an official name.
   I kind of like "New World Order..."  



Quit Being Silly:
[Note from the Editor: Believe it or not, Human Gus-Peter wrote the above without having read any of the following (and he's just a kid...):]


To: e$@vmeng.com
From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Subject: e$: Tet in Cypherspace

Actually, LBJ would have caused stagflation doing that "we owe it to
ourselves" stuff anyway, but it's a nice pipe dream. Nonetheless, money is
always much more important than "policy". In spite of the most bloodthirsty
actions of the most totalitarian statist -- say, the late Pol Pot -- it's
money that creates law, and not the other way around.

This presidency, more than any other in the history of this nation -- a
nation where political corruption has been celebrated as fine art --
understands this simple fact as a natural course of doing its lucretive
business. And the irony that the most socialist president in American
history is also the most attuned to income has never been lost on the people
he's trying to tax and regulate out of business.

However, Freidrich Hayek has been proven right once again where the Clintons
have been concerned, though it's hard to figure out sometimes if Billary are
outright totalitarians themselves or just Hayak's "useful idiots" in the
now-dead cause of socialism. Fortunately, like any good parasites, Billary
can't kill their host, as this latest "spinglage" on cryptography seems to
show. That need for a market "host" for socialism to suck blood from, in the
end, is what has saved our freedom again.



Subject: fincen propaganda
From: "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net

------- Forwarded Message
From: "Mark A. Smith" <msmith01@flash.net>
> FinCEN: Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
> http://TeamInfinity.com/~ralph/FinCEN.html
> 
> Big Brother Wants to Look Into Your Bank Account (Any Time It Pleases)
> 
> The US government is constructing a system to track all financial
> transactions in real-time - ostensibly to catch drug traffickers,
> terrorists, and financial criminals. Does that leave you with the warm
> fuzzies - or scare you out of your wits?
> By Anthony L. Kimery

> Launched with a low-key champagne reception at the Treasury Department in
> April 1990, FinCEN is the US government's (perhaps the world's) most
> effective financial crime investigation unit. Even Russian President Boris
> Yeltsin asked for its help in locating stolen Communist Party funds. This
> state-of-the-art computer-snooping agency is quietly tucked away under the
> auspices of the Treasury Department. Its mission is to map the digital
> trails of dirty money, be it the laundered profits from drug sales, stolen
> S&L loot, hidden political slush funds, or the financing conduits of
> terrorists. It's the only federal unit devoted solely to the systematic
> collation and cross-analysis of law enforcement, intelligence, and public databases.

> Inside FinCEN's new digs on the second floor of a gleaming high-rise office
> building down the road from the CIA in Vienna, Virginia (otherwise known as
> "Spook City"), the talents of the IRS, FBI, DEA, Secret Service, and other
> traditional federal cops such as customs agents and postal inspectors are
> pooled. According to senior intelligence officers, these investigative units
> can access the resources of the CIA, the National Security Agency (which
> intercepts data on electronic currency movements into and out of the United
> States, some of which make their way into FinCEN's analyses), and the
> Defense Intelligence Agency.

> Bruh and other FinCEN officials openly acknowledge their association with
> the CIA, but they refuse to discuss further any aspect of FinCEN's dealings
> with it or any other intelligence agency. In addition to the CIA,
> intelligence officials have admitted, off the record, that the National
> Security Council and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and
> Research (INR) have also joined FinCEN's impressive intelligence crew. In
> short, FinCEN is a one-of-a-kind cauldron containing all the available
> financial intelligence in the United States.
> 
> "It's the first ever government-wide, multi-source intelligence and
> analytical network brought together under one roof to combat financial
> crimes," said Peter Djinis, director of the Treasury Department's Office of
> Financial Enforcement and one of the few Treasury officials close to FinCEN
> activities.

> As routine as such assignments as this case may be, the chumminess between
> FinCEN and the intelligence community raises serious questions about the
> privacy and security of the financial records of citizens John and Jane Doe,
> considering the intelligence community's historic penchant for illegal
> spying on non-criminals. Given the vast reach and ease with which the
> government can now tap into an individual's or business's financial records
> on a whim, these questions have received far too little scrutiny.

> But FinCEN has a hush-hush US$2.4 million contract with the US Department of
> Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory to develop what Bruh and other
> FinCEN officials de-scribed as a powerful "money flow model." Unlike
> FinCEN's current system, Los Alamos's AI software will look for unexplained,
> atypical money flows. Coupled with a massively parallel computer system, the
> AI/MPP could perform real-time monitoring of the entire US electronic
> banking landscape.

> In the near future, all of these government databases will be interfaced by
> way of AI/ MPP technology. "MPP is critical to FinCEN's ability to analyze
> (banking) data to its full capacity," Bruh insists.
> 
> The pure power of such a "database of databases" terrifies critics. Though
> FinCEN and other authorities discount the potential for abuse, tell that to
> the CIA. Its charter forbids it from engaging in domestic surveillance;
> nonetheless, it spied on Americans for seven consecutive presidential
> administrations (it says it finally ceased its internal spying in the mid-
> 1970s).

> "The risk of the CIA getting its hands on this is serious - we know the kind
> of unscrupulous people who populate the spook world," said a Washington-area
> private investigator who conducts many legitimate financial investigations
> for a CIA-linked firm. "This kind of financial data, when coupled with other
> information like a person's credit history, could be used for blackmail,
> bribery, and extortion," said the investigator, who has a military
> intelligence background.
> 
> Bruce Hemmings is a veteran CIA clandestine-services officer who retired in
> 1989. Prior to the DTS proposal, he told Wired that the CIA routinely digs
> for financial dirt on people from whom the agency wants specific
> information.

> DTS could present an inviting mechanism for quieting unwanted dissent or for
> defanging an unruly congressional leader bent on exposing some questionable
> CIA operation. Although still in its embryonic stage and in spite of the
> looming privacy obstacle it will inevitably confront, FinCEN is seen by many
> in the government as the catalyst for a powerful, all- seeing, all-knowing,
> global, financial-tracking organization. In fact, FinCEN is al-ready working
> closely with INTERPOL, and Bruh's deputy just resigned to head up INTERPOL's
> US office.


Want To See Something REALLY Scary?
[Editors Note: Unfortunately the following is NOT fiction.]

> Seated at a computer terminal inside FinCEN's former command post, a FinCEN
> analyst began the hunt. He started by querying a database of business phone
> numbers. He scored a hit with the number of a local restaurant. Next he
> entered the Currency and Banking Database (CBDB), an IRS database accessed
> through the Currency and Banking Retrieval System. CBDB contains roughly 50
> million Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs), which document all financial
> transactions of more than US$10,000. By law these transactions must be filed
> by banks, S&Ls, credit unions, securities brokers, casinos, and other
> individuals and businesses engaged in the exchange of large sums of money.
> 
> The analyst narrowed his quest by searching for CTRs filed for transactions
> deemed "suspicious." Financial institutions must still file a CTR, or IRS
> Form 4789, if a transaction under US$10,000 is considered suspicious under
> the terms of an extensive federal government list. There was a hit. A series
> of "suspicious" CTRs existed in the restaurant's ZIP code. Punching up
> images of the identified CTRs on his terminal, the FinCEN analyst noted that
> the transactions were made by a person whose first name was John. The CTRs
> were suspicious all right; they were submitted for a series of transactions
> each in the amount of US$9,500, just below the CTR threshold of US$10,000.
> This was hard evidence that John structured the deposits to avoid filinga
> Form 4789, and that is a federal crime.
> 
> Selecting one of the CTRs for "an expanded review," the analyst got John's
> full name, Social Security number, date of birth, home address, driver
> license number, and other vital statistics, including bank account numbers.
> 
> Plunging back into the IRS database, the analyst broadened his search for
> all CTRs filed on behalf of the suspect, including non-suspicious CTRs. Only
> 20 reports deemed suspicious popped up on the screen, but more than 150 CTRs
> [brought to you by:ralph@TeamInfinity.com http://TeamInfinity.com/urls.html]
> were filed in all. A review of the non-suspicious ones revealed that on
> several, John listed his occupation as the owner or manager of the
> restaurant identified by the telephone number on the slip of paper taken
> from the arrested drug dealer. The connection between the name and the phone
> number originally given to FinCEN was secured.
> 
> The FinCEN analyst then tapped commercial and government databases, and
> turned up business information on the restaurant showing that John had
> reported an expected annual revenue for his eatery of substantially less
> than the money he had been depositing, as indicated by the CTRs. Fishing in
> a database of local tax assessment records, the analyst discovered that John
> owned other properties and businesses. With the names of these other
> companies, the analyst went back into the CTR database and found that
> suspicious transaction reports were filed on several of them as well.


"When all you have is a gigantic schlong , everything looks like a citizen."
~ Human Gus-Peter ~