Google Mail Uses Esoteric Knowledge to Create Your Avatar

Things move ever swiftly on the Internet, that bold new paradigm, in order to maintain valuation and return maximum value to the shareholders. In the never ending efforts to achieve these worthwhile goals and with all the advanced and esoteric technology being used, it is reasonable to expect that mere users may be confused by what they see and foolishly and incorrectly believe that they are witnessing bugs and mistakes. It is incumbent on all of us to keep up and be aware of these misperceptions and help the future-challenged user to understand that the system is without flaw. 

For example, in the process of receiving and processing email with Google Mail, I was unaware that it helpfully creates a visual avatar of all the people who send me mail and does so flawlessly and automatically without needing to review its results with the mere sender of the email. It is not permitted for the user to be aware of the clever, neural network based, deeper learning informed, higher-level consciousness algorithms that Gmail uses to implement this miraculous new feature because we are uninitiated in the Mysteries.  Still some of us have speculated that Gmail might look out on social media, or perhaps remember attachments that the sender has used in the past.

I suspect it does nothing so simple. I think it is probable that Google is using the esoteric knowledge associated with the ancient Hermetian Mysteries themselves. Many have tried to use these Mysteries for practical purposes in the modern world, but I believe that only Google has had the resources and intellect to actually accomplish this difficult task.

Are Consecrated Masters using Esoteric Knowledge to create your Gmail avatar?

Alas, my sister in law did not realize the perfection of these esoteric algorithms and so when I made a comment about the nice picture of the dog that Google had used for her avatar, she tried to rip my head off.

I think it is important to remind the users that they are indeed "mere users" and that they should not attempt to understand the ways of the Illuminated Masters.  They should accept that their life is an open book, not just to the FBI but to the world at large and anything they use or say on the Internet may be repurposed for their own good.  Google Mail may choose all or none of these ephemera to represent you to your friends, to your family, to your clients, in fact, to anyone. You have no control over it, nor should you.

You should have faith that the Illuminated Masters working in secret shrines will use these Mysteries to create your new image and that the result will be as perfect as the spheres with which the celestial bodies orbit our planet.

Where did this come from?  No one knows but my sister-in-law was not amused.

Foolish mortal! Give up that illusion of control, abandon yourself to your fate and accept that the Adepts of the Mysteries have your best interests at heart.  

NSA, Surveillance, Secrets 5: Motivations, Congressional Approvals and Legal Remedies

[Revised 6/22/2013]

As we learn more about what is going on here, I have to feel that that there are some surprises, but nothing too exciting.  The UK and the USA is using massive metadata collections to do social network analysis and find people.   Many people are surprised by this, I am not.   I am surprised however by some of the vagueness in the approval process.     Whether what Snowden actually released will turn out to be a clear and present danger is unknown at this time.  

Here are some references to articles about how the NSA uses the metadata, a brief discussion of how congress and the judiciary approvals in the process and my own personal opinion that the foreign policy and intelligence uses of this kind of data are so important that we will never get them to stop.  The best we can do, I think, is to control what other uses the data is put to.   This is a somewhat cynical opinion on my part.

I am disappointed to read that the NSA can turn over material that they inadvertently quote end quote stumble upon to the domestic agencies.   I can not see why that would be a good idea; it would not be used directly in court as that surveillance was done without an explicit warrant, (if I understand the law correctly and I probably don't), but I suppose that information in that surveillance could be useful for other parts of an investigation which could be used in court.   The point is that since such surveillance is done under a blanket "warrantless" procedure on metadata, it seems like a very bad idea to use that information for any domestic criminal matter.  It seems to me like you are just asking to get people mad at you over their constitutional rights.

0. So far the best article I have read on the issues here is this one:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/17/evil_in_a_haystack_nsa_metadata?page=0,0

1. The NSA could not care less about your pornography.

You should have concluded from the previous discussion of where the NSA came from that the NSA has bigger fish to fry. They dont read your email and then hand it over to the FBI. Now, on the other hand, the FBI may very well read your email so you should start encrypting it. I don't trust the FBI as far as I can throw them.

2. Approvals

Congressional approval of this cluster of conflicting intelligence agency actions is a work in progress and a subject of debate and acrimony.    The various agencies are under the control (nominally at least) of the executive branch.  The executive branch is supposed to inform Congress of any operation in progress in a timely fashion.   But what is timely and what happens if you have 24 hours to stop someone from doing something bad?   So there are a variety of compromises in place and I will inaccurately try to characterize them here:   (a) Not all of congress needs to be informed, just the select committees on intelligence of the house and the senate.    Between them, that is still quite a few people, about 40, and it is very difficult to keep secrets when 40 people know something.  Nevertheless, that is the basic procedure.  (b) A fallback from that is to brief what is known as the "Gang of Eight".  The Gang of Eight consists of the House and Senate Majority & Minority Leaders, and the ranking bi-partisan members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, for a total of 8 people, a much more manageable number.    (c) For many activities, particularly where surveillance is involved, a special court has been set up involving especially cleared justices to review whether a proposed surveillance can go ahead.   For this purpose, basically a special court/judge has to be on call 7/24.    There is considerable debate about whether this is a real process or whether these courts generally rubber stamp the requests.   This last item is under a body of law that has changed over the last 30 years known as FISA or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act  of 1978.

What you want to do if you want to understand this is to read about FISA and how it is has changed and what the controversies are.

But in the case of the current matter, when Pres. Obama says that "Congress and the Judiciary were informed" he is probably referring to the briefing of either the Gang of 8 or the full intelligence committees (I am not sure which) and the special court set up by FISA.

I promise you that this is all complicated and you will spend time understanding how it is supposed to work, and then how it is alleged that it does work, or, depending on who you talk to, does not work.

https://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/
http://www.cfr.org/intelligence/crs-reauthorization-fisa-amendments-act/p30877

3. Future Direction

You will never be able to get the intelligence community to give up looking for the next Zimmerman Telegram.   But it might be possible to make the fruits of surveillance less useful to the state apparatus. The simplest way is to make information gained by surveillance inadmissable as evidence in criminal or civil court.  Furthermore, it would be useful to make the release of surveillance material for purposes other than national security a criminal act.   If they are just sneaking around for national security purposes, then there is no need for them to be able to use the data for anything else, like violations of the criminal code.   Furthermore it should be possible to sue for damages for the non-national security uses of their research.  These changes in law, which may or may not be possible, would certainly reduce the harm that came from surveillance, a surveillance which I should say is probably inevitable.

The jury is out about whether these recent events are net positive or net negative. 99% that has been revealed is the least bit of a surprise to me. (Note, ok there were some surprises when I read more details about FISA and how that works.)  Maybe it will activate people to outlaw even this kind of surveillance, and that might be good.

We will see.

Not Even Quatermass Can Avoid the Youtube Copyright Checker!

From time to time, I put some video excerpt up on Youtube usually as supporting evidence in favor or against some point in some discussion I am having with someone. So for example, whenever someone calls me crazy, which really irritates me, I want to point him to the scene from Jon deBont's masterpiece, Speed (1994), in which Keanu Reeves calls Dennis Hopper crazy and Dennis replies "No, Jack.", he says, "Poor people are crazy. I'm eccentric".

So I use these different scenes to illustrate ideas, or technique, and of course I rarely if ever own the copyright.   I think that I am allowed to do this but it depends on one's interpretation of the FCC Fair Use Guidelines, which are not black and white but are subject to interpretation. I think I am ok in this use for the following reasons:

(a) I am not making money with these excerpts, nor am I trying to make money,

(b) I am not causing the legitimate owner to lose money, nor am I trying to do so,

(c) Only a small part of the original material is being used, e.g. an excerpt not the complete piece,

(d) The purpose of using the material is education or analysis

I actually hope I am helping the real owner get more money, not less, from his film, by exposing people to a teaser from their work.   Thats what I hope.

[I will insert link to good fair use guide when I find one]

But that is not how Youtube sees it, and sometime after I post the excerpt, Youtube detects it and sends me a nasty note of varying severity. I am fascinated by how they detect these pieces among the hundreds of millions of scenes that they are managing, roughly 120,000,000 of them, and about 200,000 new ones a day.

Of course Youtube does not discuss the process they use. But here are a few things that are observed and inferred and submitted here for your consideration:

1. Sometimes its fast, sometimes its slow.

Sometimes I post a clip and before I know it I have an email from Youtube telling me that it is part of someone else's copyrighted material. From that we conclude that Yourtube pays particular attention to newly loaded videos. But sometimes it ignores a video for months and then discovers it. Why is this? It could be because new material is being added to their checking process all the time, and maybe this particular piece is part of something newly added. Or it could be because some pieces are on a "check often" list, and some are on a "check occassionally" list, or it could just be random. Usually however, if it does not discover and complain about a piece within 1-12 hours, then it probably won't complain for at least a few weeks if not longer.

2. Reversing the video does not seem to help.

It is believed among some people that reversing the video (e.g. flipping it horizotally) defeats the checking algorithm. My experience says that this is not true, but admittedly I only tried once, and I reversed the entire piece. Maybe you have to flip various sections of a piece to confuse it, or something.

3. Some believe that the audio is the key.

Some believe that they are really checking the audio, not the video per se. As audio is harder to mess with and still get the meaning across, whereas there are many things one can do to distort the video. I dont know, it seems plausible to me that checking the audio would be part of their bag of techniques.

4. Some pieces they hate much more than others.

Once upon a time, an afterschool special was shown on NBC that had a very funny conspiracy theory about GE (which owned NBC) controlling the news in this country. The piece ("Mediaopoly") was animated, tongue-in-cheek, humorous. It suggested in a non-serious manner that there was a relationship between the news that NBC and the other networks printed/aired and other corporate issues such as nuclear power plants, the B1 bomber, and possibly even the JFK assassination. NBC went through the roof, the piece was never shown again, and they have been suppressing this piece in all media ever since to this day. I have a very bad copy of this piece which was downloaded with great difficulty from the Internet many years ago. I can not get it up on Youtube for longer than about 1/2 second before it is banned in all forms and all countries and a nasty note is in my inbox telling me that if I try that stunt again they will permanently disconnect my Youtube account.

Why you would almost think that there was a conspiracy not to allow this piece to be seen, wouldn't you? Why you could almost believe that they were afraid of something.

5. But mostly they just want to sell advertising.

But there has been a new policy recently on all excerpts except "Mediapoly" which I am delighted with. They send you a note that says that your piece may be copyrighted by someone else, but don't worry, thats ok. Its just that when someone views it, they may also see some ad that is appropriate given that someone else wants to get some benefit from this. I think this is great, I get to show the piece, they get to make some money, everybody is happy.

Not even Dr. Quatermass is safe from Youtube. I had the following excerpt up on my site for months when just yesterday they told me that it was owned by a 3rd party but that I should not worry: the video can stay up and my viewers may see some ads from time to time.   I love this solution.

Here Quatermass and his lovely assistant are reviewing the ancient records involving mysterious and possibly devilish activities at Hobbes Lane.

Dr. Quatermass and his lovely assistant.  We all suspect that they are having an affair.

The excerpt is from "Five Million Years To Earth" (1967) which is a remake of the famous BBC "Quatermass and the Pit" from 1958, starring the esteemed Dr. Quatermass. This is from the remake, the original from BBC, which you can find on Youtube at last, is remarkable and may even be some sort of live television event.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwvnCVzNpOQ

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062168/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051305/