#like it makes more sense for the government to be having surveillance with the landline | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kinetic-elaboration · 6 years

Text

September 19: 3% (as of 2x07)

I had this sudden bout of need to write done some thoughts on the 3% after watching 2x07 last night and--they felt deeper in my head but anyway here they are.

Basically some attempts to figure out the exact contours of the Offshore/Inland relationship.

What we know about the Offshore/Inland relationship:

The central idea of the Offshore is that everyone earns their way in; no one is born into that society. A consequence of this rule is that the Offshore is entirely reliant on the Inland for at least one resource: its population. From the point of the view of the Offfshore, then, the children of the Inland are a potential resource, to be protected and nurtured at least to a degree, and the adults of the Inland are the 'unworthy,' who deserve not just their squalor, but the Offshore's contempt. Their main use--their only canonically confirmed use--is to produce more children. Otherwise, they are derided, and the Offshore has no (obvious) reason to care for them in the way it might care for their children up to the age of 20.

The Offshore residents do sometimes return to the Inland, but only for specific purposes--to serve as soldiers or doctors for particular events. They do not routinely visit or hold regular 9-5 jobs on the Inland. The separation is supposed to be as complete as practically possible.

What we know about the universe:

It's the future, clearly. There have been huge strides in technology, but in recognizable directions from current tech: we see sensitive communication devices, high tech computers, high speed submarine travel, and of course the simple sterilization techniques. So we can guess that this universe once looked like our present day, but that its technological capabilities have greatly expanded with time. We also know that not only have those advances been hoarded by the Offshore, but apparently all tech, even that from our current era, has been stripped from the Inland. They not only lack fancy communication devices in the form of rings and headsets, they lack cell or landline phones, computers, televisions, radios. They have toasters, according to Elisa, and perhaps some other appliances, but little else. It is also notable that there used to be at least 2000's level tech in the Inland: there are old computer screens stacked in the background of one scene, and tech-savvy people like Fernando can salvage parts for a makeshift walkie-talkie.

We also know that animals like lions and zebras have become extinct, as Rafael mentions in 2x07. In fact, except for fish, it's not clear which animals still exist.

We know that just as there used to be technological wealth in the Inland, there was more general wealth as well. The abandoned bank where Michele met the Old Man is architecturally quite beautiful. It's also...abandoned, as are the orphanage, and various other houses and buildings in the Inland.

We know that the Process has been going on for about 100 years and juuuust enough about the Founding 'Couple' to assure me that (either in the last season 2 eps I haven't watched or in future seasons) we'll find out more about them, and, hopefully, the state of the world at the time they founded the Offshore.

The History of the Inland/Offshore

Is the destitution of the Inland and/or its technology gap with the Offshore artificially created along with the Offshore and the Process, or is it the result of some other natural event? The extinction of the animals makes me think that there was already environmental damage being done, either long-term or in one fell swoop, following some sort of disaster. And, we know from the way the actual, real world works that some people are always going to hoard resources, that disasters can occur and poverty can increase while some people remain remarkably rich. So my assumption is that the Founding Couple just exacerbated that gap, hoarding the last of the wealth (in terms of money but also technology, natural resources) in one place, and leaving the Inland to spiral down into an ever worse state of poverty and destitution.

But I'm interested in the timeline: had this society suffered through a disaster, perhaps an environmental disaster tied to a mass extinction, before the Process began? Were the Founders interested only in increased fairness, or did they also have a certain sense of human survival in mind? I'm picturing a scenario in which a resource crunch makes it impossible to share what remains with everyone, prompting the creation of a special paradise where those resources can be enjoyed by some, at least, and from there the creation of the Process, which determines which people are 'worthy' of enjoying those resources. Some characters seem to assume that there are enough resources for everyone, if only the Offshore would stop hoarding--but we don't know that to be true. If there truly is not enough for everyone, not only does 'merit' seem like the most fair way to determine who 'wins' the best of those resources, but it also seems the best way to improve humankind's situation as a whole: the smartest and the hardiest and the most creative get access to the most technology, etc., allowing them the best chance to make discoveries and advances that could solve long-lasting resource-deficiency problems. (Basically the same argument that underpins the existence of selective schools and universities; the smartest people 'deserve' the most help in becoming even smarter, the most support in growing and learning.)

Similarly, I'm curious as to how all of this society's tech ended up concentrated in the Offshore? Was there a mass disabling of the Inland's technology? Suddenly your computers/phones/tvs/radios stop working? That would be an extremely effective way to subjugate a large population.

The relationship between the Inland and Offshore

I have a lot of questions about this aspect of the universe but it basically all comes down to: what is the extent of the Offshore's control over the Inland?

At the very least, the Offshore needs the residents of the Inland to continue having children, to replenish the population of the Offshore. This is more complicated than it sounds: the Offshore needs the right number of people, it needs the right sort of people--healthy, smart, educated, and loyal to the concept of the Offshore/Inland divide and the Process itself. It also needs those children to survive the first twenty years of their life, which means it needs to ensure some level of basic safety on the Inland.

Like any minority elite ruling over a majority population that vastly outnumbers it, the Offshore also needs to keep the Inland powerless, for its own survival: to quash revolts, and to ensure complacency wherever possible.

Keeping all of this in mind, what would the Offshore do to meet these goals?

Precisely what it's shown to be doing, first of all.

Surveillance: We see this more in S1, but the Inland is littered with cameras. Aside from the registrations/ear pieces, the cameras are the only tech around, and it appears that there's fairly little respite to be had from them. Not none, obviously: the Cause members have found plenty of places to meet in S2. Still, my impression of the Inland is very much a surveillance state.

Sewing mistrust between neighbors: at least when necessary, as when Marcela makes a call for information on Cause members linked to Ezequiel's death. She's able to dangle a carrot (help in the Process) rather than threaten a stick, but it comes out the same. People will jump to turn on each other.

Military presence/Violence or the threat of violence: This is a little murky, because, aside from the build-up to the Process, when we know there are Division soldiers in the street, it's not clear how often or how extensively the Inland is patrolled by Offshore agents. However, Marcella does have contacts in 'the militia,' and is possibly even their official or unofficial leader; people like Gerson police the Inland for the Offshore, in an admittedly less...uniformed way, and to their own gain.

Registration: Being counted and officially registered is not dissimilar to being surveilled. The keeping of data on everyone (or nearly everyone, or everyone in theory) is a way of exerting control over a large population. It implies that you can always be found, that you can never escape. This is also the practical structure that underpins the Process itself, as Fernando explains, the organizational structure of their whole society relies on this human data.

Control over communication: It's quite obvious that the tech gap between the two societies isn't accidental; it's too complete, and the presence of dead or outmoded technology in the Inland shows it was not always a wasteland in this way. But in the present, the Inland people have no phones, no email--possibly no mail--no TV or radio news created for and by themselves. They have only the devices in their ears, through which they can hear the Offshore, but the Offshore cannot hear them.

Religion: A fervently believed narrative, imbued with the reverence assigned to religious faith, keeps the majority of the Inlanders from revolting. They accept their poverty as being their own fault, if they failed the Process; believe in a bright future for their children, if the children are under 20; and celebrate the success of the Offshore residents, as their due--and anyone who disagrees with these tenets is amoral, disgusting, a traitor to the ideals of the Founding Couple. (I imagine there is other cultural and quasi-religious propaganda going on too, for example the pre-Process procession, a sort of gift or treat for the people of the Inland, which also reinforces their belief in the power structure that aids the Offshore at their expense.)

Total control of the government: There is a Council, and it appears to make decisions for both the Offshore and Inland--but no Inlanders serve on it, of course. I doubt they have any sort of voting rights either.

Brain Drain: taking the top 3% of each year's children from the Inland not only plays into the "reward" narrative that underlies the whole system, it also ensures that the smartest and most creative people leave the Inland and give their allegiance to the Offshore instead. If you conceive of the relationship between the two as a 'war,' or adversarial in any way (as Marcella at least seems to), then it makes sense to want to poach all the best 'warriors' from the other side. (I don't know if this is a conscious thought on the part of Offshore authorities, but S2 does show how dangerous a 3%-er or two can be if left to rot on the Inland.)

Continuing extreme inequality: I'm not sure what other methods the Offshore uses to ensure that the two areas remain sharply diverged in terms of wealth distribution and resources, or even if, at this point, they have to do anything at all to keep up the status quo, but they do gain political power from this discrepancy in quality of life, especially when combined with the existence of the Process as a possible bridge from one life to the other. The Inlanders won't revolt against the Offshore if they hope to someday join it. And if they are rejected, they can hope that their children will advance, a nearly as powerful incentive. This system will self-perpetuate, but only as long as the Inland is a hellscape and the Offshore is a paradise. If there were a reason to hold allegiance to the Inland, people would take it.

Squashing of dissent: And of course, when pockets of organized dissent do form, like the Cause, the Offshore can gather all of these tools together to defeat them: use surveillance to find them, torture and violence to eliminate their members, and their control over the majority populace to reign in their influence.

(An aside, but, considering this list, it's pretty clear that Fernando's ideas to disrupt the Process are better than Ezequiel's bomb idea. The Offshore has formidable weapons, including propaganda weapons, and probably wouldn't have the hardest time recovering even from the death of a generation of Process applicants. They could spin it into a positive for them, probably incredibly easily by--correctly--blaming the Cause, and then broadcast their narrative to the whole of the Inland. Fernando is striking at their tools of control: those communication networks, their monopoly on information, the registration system that makes the Process possible, etc.)

Overall, we know quite a bit about how the Offshore keeps the Inland from starting a revolution, though fairly little about how it nurtures its primary Inland resource, the children.

What else might the Inland be doing, which we haven't yet seen?

Population control: I doubt we'll actually see this, since the Offshore seems intent on encouraging the Inlanders to have as many kids as possible, but if there is a resource crunch in any way in this universe, or if they ever anticipate one on the Offshore, they'd need to exert some control over the total population's numbers. The Offshore always stays in proportion to the Inland, taking 3% of its population every year, which makes sense if they wish to keep a balance that is apparently working. But that means that a population explosion on the Inland would create a population explosion on the Offshore, and perhaps cause a rationing in their resource among themselves.

Use of the Inland population for labor:

It is incredibly unclear to me what people actually spend their days doing, on either the Offshore or the Inland. I suppose the Offshore people could spend a lot of time in leisure activities--except we don't see any of that, what leisure might mean on the Offshore, and at least some of them DO have jobs: we know that some work for the Process, or serve in the military, or on the Council, or as doctors. Even more strangely, we don't know what people on the Inland do when they're not preparing for the Process. We know Silas is a doctor and Fernando's father a preacher. Money does seem to exist. But what other jobs do people have, or could they have? And how do they become qualified for those jobs? Is it all apprenticeships and informal learning, or are there schools? (I'd guess the first but it wouldn't be a retcon to include a school in a future season.) How do people earn money? What do they use that money for--just food and other essentials? Are there are stores? Is housing free and assigned or do people rent?

Looking at this from the Offshore's point of view, I would say that the people of the Inland should definitely not be idle. A large, idle population living in squalor is a potential boiling pot of rebellion.

I also think that the Offshore would want to prioritize leisure for its citizens as much as possible. The jobs they definitely have not outsourced both cannot be outsourced and are prestigious anyway. But there are always jobs that have to be done and no one wants to do. For example--the manufacture of their tech?

Putting all this together, I'd guess that the Offshore assigns work to the people of the Inland as much as possible and is probably in as much control as possible over the issuance and flow of money--probably in a way that appears to be hands off (they seem to have no money themselves) but nevertheless is near complete in practice.

Control of Inland bodies: I'm a little vague on this (see outstanding question 2), but I noticed that the upcoming Process participants not only have their registrations checked and their photos updated, they also get vaccines. And we already know that 'vaccine' doesn't always mean 'vaccine' in this universe. I'm wondering if the Offshore is doing something to the 20 year olds, and if they also have the habit of taking over Inland residents' medical care in other ways. I'm not even suggesting something nefarious. I'm thinking more along the lines of maybe literal vaccines, antibodies, vitamins, strengthening agents, or other sci-fi innovations, to keep their child population healthy--in other words, to protect the most important Inland resource, the crop from which they'll cull their future members.

Outstanding questions:

The Offshore and Inland children's education: The Offshore would definitely want the Inland children educated, because if they are not educated, they can never be good Offshore citizens. Even more specifically, the Offshore values particular skills and traits. It's not just looking for the general 'best,' but has an idea what 'best' means. So it would probably want a hand in molding the children. (Canonically, it looks they actually rely on failed Process participants to train up-and-coming Process participants, as Fernando does, but it seems...like a risk to put all your faith in failures, imo.) But how does it do so? Outside of running schools, which would require much more day to day involvement of Offshore people in Inland life, I'm not sure how they ensure they get a proper crop of new Process participants each year.

The Offshore and Inland children's health: We know that the Inland has doctors, and that their medicine isn't as good as on the Offshore. And I doubt the Offshore cares much about what happens to adults--provided enough of them are healthy enough to have healthy children and, perhaps, to work. But how do they keep the children safe and healthy? The Process is physically grueling in places. It is not for the weak or the half-starved. How do they draw the line between making the Inland a terrible place to live, a place from which all children would be desperate to escape, and also ensuring not only the most basic health and safety, but a general environment in which children could thrive enough to grow into 'the 3%'? (I doubt we'll get an answer for this, and perhaps we're supposed to assume that the very best of the best will rise to the top no matter what: if a child is naturally sickly, he doesn't 'deserve' the Offshore anyway, for example, or if a child would be smart with the proper training but isn't naturally smart on her own, she's not quite 3% material. Characters like Fernando and Joanna bear out this theory some: he is physically disabled and she came from the lowest of even the Inland low, no family at all, and they still both passed the Process, essentially. I'm not entirely sure I buy this, though... The crowd that gathered at the beginning of 1x01 didn't exactly look like they were malnourished as a whole, so at least some needs must be being met.)

I feel like I had some other thoughts but these are already excessive! So I'm done for now.

#the year 2018 #2018: fandom thoughts

1 note · View note

newstfionline · 6 years

Text

When Trump Phones Friends, the Chinese and the Russians Listen and Learn

By Matthew Rosenberg and Maggie Haberman, NY Times, Oct. 24, 2018

WASHINGTON--When President Trump calls old friends on one of his iPhones to gossip, gripe or solicit their latest take on how he is doing, American intelligence reports indicate that Chinese spies are often listening--and putting to use invaluable insights into how to best work the president and affect administration policy, current and former American officials said.

Mr. Trump’s aides have repeatedly warned him that his cellphone calls are not secure, and they have told him that Russian spies are routinely eavesdropping on the calls, as well. But aides say the voluble president, who has been pressured into using his secure White House landline more often these days, has still refused to give up his iPhones. White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them.

Mr. Trump’s use of his iPhones was detailed by several current and former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so they could discuss classified intelligence and sensitive security arrangements. The officials said they were doing so not to undermine Mr. Trump, but out of frustration with what they considered the president’s casual approach to electronic security.

American spy agencies, the officials said, had learned that China and Russia were eavesdropping on the president’s cellphone calls from human sources inside foreign governments and intercepting communications between foreign officials.

The officials said they have also determined that China is seeking to use what it is learning from the calls--how Mr. Trump thinks, what arguments tend to sway him and to whom he is inclined to listen--to keep a trade war with the United States from escalating further. In what amounts to a marriage of lobbying and espionage, the Chinese have pieced together a list of the people with whom Mr. Trump regularly speaks in hopes of using them to influence the president, the officials said.

Among those on the list are Stephen A. Schwarzman, the Blackstone Group chief executive who has endowed a master’s program at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Steve Wynn, the former Las Vegas casino magnate who used to own a lucrative property in Macau.

The Chinese have identified friends of both men and others among the president’s regulars, and are now relying on Chinese businessmen and others with ties to Beijing to feed arguments to the friends of the Trump friends. The strategy is that those people will pass on what they are hearing, and that Beijing’s views will eventually be delivered to the president by trusted voices, the officials said. They added that the Trump friends were most likely unaware of any Chinese effort.

L. Lin Wood, a lawyer for Mr. Wynn, said his client was retired and had no comment. A spokeswoman for Blackstone, Christine Anderson, declined to comment on Chinese efforts to influence Mr. Schwarzman, but said that he “has been happy to serve as an intermediary on certain critical matters between the two countries at the request of both heads of state.”

China’s effort is a 21st-century version of what officials there have been doing for many decades, which is trying to influence American leaders by cultivating an informal network of prominent businesspeople and academics who can be sold on ideas and policy prescriptions and then carry them to the White House. The difference now is that China, through its eavesdropping on Mr. Trump’s calls, has a far clearer idea of who carries the most influence with the president, and what arguments tend to work.

The Chinese and the Russians “would look for any little thing--how easily was he talked out of something, what was the argument that was used,” said John Sipher, a 28-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency who served in Moscow in the 1990s and later ran the agency’s Russia program.

Trump friends like Mr. Schwarzman, who figured prominently in the first meeting between President Xi Jinping of China and Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida resort, already hold pro-China and pro-trade views, and thus are ideal targets in the eyes of the Chinese, the officials said. Targeting the friends of Mr. Schwarzman and Mr. Wynn can reinforce the views of the two, the officials said. The friends are also most likely to be more accessible.

One official said the Chinese were pushing for the friends to persuade Mr. Trump to sit down with Mr. Xi as often as possible. The Chinese, the official said, correctly perceive that Mr. Trump places tremendous value on personal relationships, and that one-on-one meetings yield breakthroughs far more often than regular contacts between Chinese and American officials.

Whether the friends can stop Mr. Trump from pursuing a trade war with China is another question.

Officials said the president has two official iPhones that have been altered by the National Security Agency to limit their abilities--and vulnerabilities--and a third personal phone that is no different from hundreds of millions of iPhones in use around the world. Mr. Trump keeps the personal phone, White House officials said, because unlike his other two phones, he can store his contacts in it.

Apple declined to comment on the president’s iPhones. None of them are completely secure and are vulnerable to hackers who could remotely break into the phones themselves.

But the calls made from the phones are intercepted as they travel through the cell towers, cables and switches that make up national and international cellphone networks. Calls made from any cellphone--iPhone, Android, an old-school Samsung flip phone--are vulnerable.

Intercepting calls is a relatively easy skill for governments. American intelligence agencies consider it an essential tool of spycraft, and they routinely try to tap the phones of important foreign leaders. In a diplomatic blowup during the Obama administration, documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency, showed that the American government had tapped the phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

Foreign governments are well aware of the risk, and so leaders like Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin avoid using cellphones when possible.

President Barack Obama was careful with cellphones, too. He used an iPhone in his second term, but it could not make calls and could receive email only from a special address that was given to a select group of staff members and intimates. It had no camera or microphone, and it could not be used to download apps at will. Texting was forbidden because there was no way to collect and store the messages, as required by the Presidential Records Act.

“It is a great phone, state of the art, but it doesn’t take pictures, you can’t text. The phone doesn’t work, you know, you can’t play your music on it,” Mr. Obama said on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” in June 2016. “So basically, it’s like--does your 3-year-old have one of those play phones?”

When Mr. Obama needed a cellphone, the officials said, he used one of those of his aides.

Mr. Trump typically relies on his cellphones when he does not want a call going through the White House switchboard and logged for senior aides to see, his aides said. Many of those Mr. Trump speaks with most often on one of his cellphones, such as hosts at Fox News, share the president’s political views, or simply enable his sense of grievance about any number of subjects.

Administration officials said Mr. Trump’s longtime paranoia about surveillance--well before coming to the White House he believed that his phone conversations were often being recorded--gave them some comfort that he was not disclosing classified information on the calls. They said they had further confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities.

#Trump's phone #electronic surveillance

0 notes

bountyofbeads · 6 years

Text

When Trump Phones Friends, the Chinese Listen and Learn https://nyti.ms/2JfsQbL

By Matthew Rosenberg and Maggie Haberman

Oct. 24, 2018

WASHINGTON — When President Trump calls old friends on one of his iPhones to gossip, gripe or solicit their latest take on how he is doing, American intelligence reports indicate that Chinese spies are often listening — and putting to use invaluable insights into how to best work the president and affect administration policy, current and former American officials said.

The officials said they have also determined that China is seeking to use what it is learning from the calls — how Mr. Trump thinks, what arguments tend to sway him and to whom he is inclined to listen — to keep a trade war with the United States from escalating further. In what amounts to a marriage of lobbying and espionage, the Chinese have pieced together a list of the people with whom Mr. Trump regularly speaks in hopes of using them to influence the president, the officials said.

L. Lin Wood, a lawyer for Mr. Wynn, said his client was retired and had no comment. A spokeswoman for Blackstone, Christine Anderson, declined to comment on Chinese efforts to influence Mr. Schwarzman but said that he “has been happy to serve as an intermediary on certain critical matters between the two countries at the request of both heads of state.”

Russia is not believed to be running as sophisticated an influence effort as China because of Mr. Trump’s apparent affinity for President Vladimir V. Putin, a former official said.

The Chinese and the Russians “would look for any little thing — how easily was he talked out of something, what was the argument that was used,” said John Sipher, a 28-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency who served in Moscow in the 1990s and later ran the agency’s Russia program.

Whether the friends can stop Mr. Trump from pursuing a trade war with China is another question.

Officials said the president has two official iPhones that have been altered by the National Security Agency to limit their capabilities — and vulnerabilities — and a third personal phone that is no different from hundreds of millions of iPhones in use around the world. Mr. Trump keeps the personal phone, White House officials said, because unlike his other two phones, he can store his contacts in it.

Apple declined to comment on the president’s iPhones. None of them are completely secure and are vulnerable to hackers who could remotely break into the phones themselves.

But the calls made from the phones are intercepted as they travel through the cell towers, cables and switches that make up national and international cellphone networks. Calls made from any cellphone — iPhone, Android, an old-school Samsung flip phone — are vulnerable.

The issue of secure communications is fraught for Mr. Trump. As a presidential candidate, he regularly attacked his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, during the 2016 campaign for her use of an unsecured email server while she was secretary state, and he basked in chants of “lock her up” at his rallies.

Foreign governments are well aware of the risk, and so leaders like Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin avoid using cellphones when possible.

President Barack Obama was careful with cellphones, too. He used an iPhone in his second term, but it could not make calls and could receive email only from a special address that was given to a select group of staff members and intimates. It had no camera or microphone and could not be used to download apps at will. Texting was forbidden because there was no way to collect and store the messages, as required by the Presidential Records Act.

“It is a great phone, state of the art, but it doesn’t take pictures, you can’t text. The phone doesn’t work, you know, you can’t play your music on it,” Mr. Obama said on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” in June 2016. “So basically, it’s like — does your 3-year-old have one of those play phones?”

When Mr. Obama needed a cellphone, the officials said, he used one of those of his aides.

Mr. Trump has insisted on more capable devices, although he did agree during the transition to give up his Android phone (the Google operating system is considered more vulnerable than Apple’s). And since becoming president, Mr. Trump has agreed to a slightly cumbersome arrangement of having two official phones: one for Twitter and other apps, and one for calls.

Foreign governments are well aware of the risk, and so leaders like Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin avoid using cellphones when possible.

President Barack Obama was careful with cellphones, too. He used an iPhone in his second term, but it could not make calls and could receive email only from a special address that was given to a select group of staff members and intimates. It had no camera or microphone and could not be used to download apps at will. Texting was forbidden because there was no way to collect and store the messages, as required by the Presidential Records Act.

“It is a great phone, state of the art, but it doesn’t take pictures, you can’t text. The phone doesn’t work, you know, you can’t play your music on it,” Mr. Obama said on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” in June 2016. “So basically, it’s like — does your 3-year-old have one of those play phones?”

When Mr. Obama needed a cellphone, the officials said, he used one of those of his aides.

Mr. Trump typically relies on his mobile phones when he does not want a call going through the White House switchboard and logged for senior aides to see, his aides said. Many of those Mr. Trump speaks with most often on one of his cellphones, such as hosts at Fox News, share the president’s political views, or simply enable his sense of grievance about any number of subjects.

Administration officials said Mr. Trump’s longtime paranoia about surveillance — well before coming to the White House he believed his phone conversations were often being recorded — gave them some comfort that he was not disclosing classified information on the calls. They said they had further confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities.

In an interview this week with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Trump quipped about his phones being insecure. When asked what American officials in Turkey had learned about the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, he replied, “I actually said don’t give it to me on the phone. I don’t want it on the phone. As good as these phones are supposed to be.”

But Mr. Trump is also famously indiscreet. In a May 2017 meeting in the Oval Office with Russian officials, he shared highly sensitive intelligence passed to the United States by Israel. He also told the Russians that James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, was “a real nut job” and that firing him had relieved “great pressure.”

Still, Mr. Trump’s lack of tech savvy has alleviated some other security concerns. He does not use email, so the risk of a phishing attack like those used by Russian intelligence to gain access to Democratic Party emails is close to nil. The same goes for texts, which are disabled on his official phones.

His Twitter phone can connect to the internet only over a Wi-Fi connection, and he rarely, if ever, has access to unsecured wireless networks, officials said. But the security of the device ultimately depends on the user, and protecting the president’s phones has sometimes proved difficult.

Last year, Mr. Trump’s cellphone was left behind in a golf cart at his club in Bedminster, N.J., causing a scramble to locate it, according to two people familiar with what took place.

Mr. Trump is supposed to swap out his two official phones every 30 days for new ones but rarely does, bristling at the inconvenience. White House staff members are supposed to set up the new phones exactly like the old ones, but the new iPhones cannot be restored from backups of his old phones, because doing so would transfer over any malware.

New phone or old, though, the Chinese and the Russians are listening, and learning.

0 notes

megadarkbouquettidalwavethings · 6 years

Text

Clap On Your Bose, Baby, ’Cause It’s Noisy as Heck Out There

“Everything is loud for games,” said Jean-Luc Cohen-Sinclair, an assistant professor of electronic production and design at the Berklee College of Music and New York University who has worked on games’ sound designs. “They’re designed to have ‘transient-rich’ sounds that have a ‘snappy attack’ — a quick, percussive buildup of energy, like someone snapping their fingers, as opposed to a fading note on a violin.”

Why can you so often overhear other people’s games? Prof. Cohen-Sinclair said that designers accentuate the midrange sound frequency, which translates best to earbuds and small speakers, and to which humans are most sensitive. Because mobile games often compete with external noise, they also contain louder sounds that often carry beyond the player’s earbuds.

Constant earbud and headphone use and high-decibel public venues have led to hearing loss (the World Health Organization estimates that over one billion teenagers and young adults are at risk), forcing listeners to crank up the volume even more. And, of course, there is the occasional altruist who eschews earbuds altogether and generously allows others to share in the melodious sounds of his game, music or video.

We tend to think of visual stimuli as the dominant forces of distraction in modern culture, but sounds too make bids on our attention in the raucous marketplace of noise. Moreover, we have been conditioned physiologically to respond to these auditory cues with dopamine spikes, especially when the alert is for the reward-based feedback of social media validation. It’s hard to be nonreactive to the sound of an incoming text or new Twitter follower.

Something similar was certainly at play with the ringing landline of yesteryear, but phone calls come at a far slower pace, take more time and rarely involve the caller (let alone hundreds of them) affirming how much they “like” you.

Digital brands have developed imprinting strategies that pander to our shorter sonic attention spans. Television and film networks and production companies have always had audio signatures so long as there have been so-called talkies; think of the fanfare accompanying the iconic 20th Century Fox logo, the growling lion of MGM, the three-tone chime of NBC.

Contrast those with the popular networks of the cable and streaming age. HBO has long begun its shows with a television zapping onto a static field that resolves into an ethereal hum. Netflix has a four-second double timpani strike followed by a wash of strings. Amazon Originals offerings start with a whooshing, revolving sound and conclude with a series of vibrant chimes. The new 21st Century Fox logo forgoes the orchestral arrangement and ends in a series of R2D2-like bleeps.

Continue reading the main story

Whereas the old guard privileged pleasing musicality or organic sounds and tried to create distinctive signatures that somehow represented their brand, the new wave seems primarily concerned with securing the viewer’s attention immediately, at a minimum of time, through jarring, synthesized noises that are ultimately interchangeable with those of other companies.

“It’s a ruthlessly corporate way of trying to coerce the attention of the viewer,” said Paul Grimstad, a writer and composer in New York who has scored a number of films. “The scale of attention asked of the viewer for a Netflix episode is comparably smaller than the grand cinematic experience the 20th Century Fox orchestral fanfare sets you up for.”

Many digital sound effects, such as the camera shutter, can be classified as “skeuomorphs,” or imitation objects that unnecessarily use ornamental design features of the originals (such as fake stitching on pleather seats). Their ubiquity suggests a postmodern aural backdrop in which the artificial is increasingly replacing the real. For people who grew up hearing only the real sounds, the new distinctions are likely clearer.

“Someone who’s 80 and someone who’s 12 are going to have different responses to a sound,” said Will Mason, a visiting professor of music theory at Oberlin. But the 12-year-old isn’t necessarily at a disadvantage, he said: “We want to privilege the real sounds over the synthesized ones, and we want to think a shift to a landscape characterized by these ‘artificial sounds’ is a dystopian element. But I wonder why it is that we want to call it dystopian. There seems to be some knee-jerk, intuitive way in which that’s the default stance and in which the real is preferable.”

One reason, aside from our longstanding skepticism over synthetic imitations, may be the preponderance of malevolent or duplicitous artificial intelligence voices in science fiction, from HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey” to Samantha in the 2013 film “Her.” Most of us now have our own HALs and Samanthas in the form of Siri and other virtual phone assistants, which, though rudimentary at this point, should eventually approach the fluency of their fictional forebears. Their speech-simulation abilities, along with their mobility, are helping acculturate us to a future in which public spaces are flooded with digitized and recorded voices on top of all the dings and chimes to which we have grown accustomed.

For years the only automated announcement familiar to New York City subway riders was “Stand clear of the closing doors, please,” but now there is a suite of them to replace previously garbled live messages. The new ones include the well-known imperative urging passengers to be on the lookout for packages left on the train — a common-sense post-9/11 safety announcement, to be sure, but also one that suggests our growing comfort with a surveillance state in which people regard one another with suspicion yet tolerate unseen but heard government and corporate oversight.

As we blithely send our personal data to companies on a whoosh and a bleep, we think less and less about hearing so many other disembodied and artificial noises in the background. We may not love Big Brother, but seem to be O.K. with his cacophonous little siblings.

Continue reading the main story

TEDDY WAYNE

The post Clap On Your Bose, Baby, ’Cause It’s Noisy as Heck Out There appeared first on dailygate.

0 notes