1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

> https://twitter.com/IAMTOMMACDONALD/status/1632469821110771713
> Wake the fuck up!

Ministries of Digital Control, CBDC's, AI based preemption and
psychological programming propaganda... being launched worldwide.
Revolt and smashing of their global anti-human computing machines
becoming seen as increasingly more likely.


The US Funding An Experiment In Digital Control In Ukraine

https://www.theorganicprepper.com/us-diia-ukraine/

https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-invites-weapons-test-russia-forces-defense-minister-1726243
https://www.intellinews.com/zelenskiy-launches-his-e-government-concept-country-in-a-smartphone-161751/
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraines-digital-revolution-is-gaining-momentum/
https://www.axios.com/2023/01/18/ukraine-app-diia-other-countries-usaid
https://perceptivx.com/security-concerns-and-legal-ambiguities-threaten-the-future-of-ukraines-state-in-a-smartphone/
https://www.computerscience.org/online-voting/
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/08/1110577439/zelenskyy-has-consolidated-ukraines-tv-outlets-and-dissolved-rival-political-par
https://www.usaid.gov/news-information/speeches/dec-1-2022-deputy-administrator-coleman-bmz-panel-role-digital-public
https://www.usaid.gov/news-information/press-releases/jan-18-2023-us-supported-e-government-app-accelerated-digital-transformation-ukraine-now-ukraine-working-scale-solution-more-countries
https://www.axios.com/2023/01/18/ukraine-app-diia-other-countries-usaid
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samantha-Power
https://amzn.to/3yyVqPY
https://amzn.to/3Fm0jQf
https://www.usaid.gov/news-information/speeches/jan-19-2023-administrator-samantha-power-world-economic-forum-panel-defending-transparency
https://emerging-europe.com/news/in-the-midst-of-war-ukraine-is-exporting-its-know-how-in-govtech/
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/winners-pandemic-economy-big-tech-lockdown-essentials-soar/story?id=72495436
https://inequality.org/great-divide/updates-billionaire-pandemic/
https://news.yahoo.com/trillion-dollar-opportunity-rebuilding-ukraine-105841823.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/28/zelenskyy-blackrock-ceo-fink-agree-to-coordinate-ukraine-investment.html
https://amzn.to/3lfkCbh
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4258
https://findbiometrics.com/new-us-digital-identity-act-expected-pass-paving-way-next-gen-id-70702/
https://www.theorganicprepper.com/cbdcs/
https://www.realclearwire.com/articles/2023/03/06/geofence_warrants_threaten_every_phone_users_privacy_885359.html
https://www.theorganicprepper.com/conspiracy-theories-gaslighting/

Fighting between Russia and Ukraine has been going on for a little
over a year now, ending the lives of hundreds of thousands of young
men and displacing millions.  Ukraine’s Defense Minister, Oleksii
Reznikov, invited Western arms manufacturers to test their newest
weapons against Russians in 2022. And indeed, all kinds of weaponry
have been flowing into Ukraine.  It is truly a testing ground.

So, this begs the question, is anything else getting tested there?
The Ukrainian government seems pretty willing to use its own citizens
as guinea pigs, and the American government seems pretty willing to
foot the bill.  Are American tax dollars going to any other
interesting projects?

Here’s what the US is funding in Ukraine.

Yes, actually.  Volodymyr Zelensky became president of Ukraine in May
2019, and almost immediately he introduced his idea of a “country in a
smartphone.”

In early September 2019, Ukraine launched its Ministry of Digital
Transformation, headed by a World Economic Forum participant, Mykhailo
Fedorov  According to Federov, the goal of this new government
department was to streamline government services, making it easier to
apply for driver’s licenses, passports, and so on.  Ukraine has long
held the reputation as Europe’s most corrupt country, and young
politicians like Federov want to take advantage of new technology to
make changes.

So, in early February 2020, the Ukrainian government launched its Diia
app for smartphones.  Developed by volunteers from EPAM Systems, Diia
has been touted as a way to streamline government services.  By 2021
it had allowed Ukraine to become the first European nation to accord
digital passports and one of the first to issue digital drivers’
licenses.  Federov reported in 2021 that about one-fourth of the
Ukrainian population was using it, and it was gaining in popularity.
As of January 2023, about half the adult Ukrainian population was
using it.

There is a positive side to streamlining government services.  Diia
has allowed Ukrainians to easily start new businesses, making all the
required government paperwork easily available.  I can see this being
helpful for young entrepreneurs.
However, negative consequences became readily apparent, too.

Within a year of its launch, millions of Ukrainians found that their
personal data, such as driver’s licenses, social media information,
and banking information, were being traded online.  There’s always
been the risk of losing your wallet and your driver’s license, but
with everything online, the risks of fraud and identity theft increase
astronomically.

Early on in his presidency, Zelensky talked about streamlining the
voting process via the app.  Aside from the fact that experts have
never agreed about the safety of online voting, by July 2022, Zelensky
had banned political opposition parties and shut down media companies
with alternative views. Having one central app that controls
everyone’s important documents makes it far easier for any ruling
party to maintain its power.

Controlling elections is only the beginning.  Diia launched in
February 2020, and by March 2020, Diia was helping the Ukrainian
government enforce its lockdown policies, as discussed in the recent
report by Redacted.

The Redacted report shows portions of various WEF summits and at 2:06
has a clip of a WEF paper saying, “This digital identity determines
what products, services, and information we can access—or conversely,
what is closed off to us.”  Diia (and other digital identity products)
have been marketed as a convenience, but don’t be fooled.  Developers
of this technology have seen their potential as a control mechanism
from the beginning.

The Redacted report also shows clips of Federov speaking at the 2021
WEF summit, and at 5:40 he openly admits that the pandemic allowed the
Ukrainian government to speed up Ukraine’s digital transformation.
“The pandemic has accelerated our progress,” says Federov.  “People
are really now demanding digital online services.  People have no
choice but to trust technology.”

The Redacted report traces Diia’s transformation from a convenient
service to a military tool.  At 6:39, they discuss an interview in
Wired with Anton Melnyk, an adviser in Ukraine’s Ministry for Digital
Transformation.  In March 2022, Dr. Melnyk stated, “We have
restructured the Ministry of Digital Transformation into a clear
military organization.”
Wartime features in an app

Shortly after the Russian invasion, Diia added all kinds of new
wartime features.  Ukrainians can report Russian troop movements
through Diia’s chatbot, eVorog (eEnemy).  Ukrainians can receive
government payments even if they’re displaced.  But Diia doesn’t stop
there.

Diia encourages citizens to snitch on their neighbors.  The wartime
features allow any citizen to anonymously accuse any other citizen of
being a Russian collaborator.  Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union
demonstrated how wrong this can go.  Ukrainians hate Stalin, and
rightfully so.  But using cutting-edge technology to encourage the
exact same kind of community-destroying snitching is a page right out
of his playbook.  Between the snitching and its one official,
government-approved news station, Diia is rapidly becoming Stalin in a
smartphone.
Here’s why Americans should care.

In case you’re wondering why we should care about the ins and outs of
Ukrainian bureaucracy, there are two big reasons worth paying
attention to this.  The first is that Americans have been paying for
much of the technical development.  The second is that the “government
in a smartphone” concept is rapidly spreading around the world.

USAID has been supporting Ukraine’s digital transformation since 2016.
The volunteers that developed Diia were Ukrainians working with EPAM
Systems, a software engineering company based in Pennsylvania.  And
EPAM Systems may be a private company, but USAID isn’t. It’s
taxpayer-funded.

After the Russian invasion, USAID donated another $8.5 million to
Ukraine to help develop Diia’s wartime features.  USAID director
Samantha Power spoke at the World Economic Forum in 2023, touting
Diia’s success.  She and Federov both talked about the huge successes
and discussed sharing Diia’s model with other countries.
Incidentally, Samantha Power is married to Cass Sunstein, the author
of Nudge and a number of other books that some might consider
pro-social-manipulation.

Power has stated that USAID intends to look for leaders in developing
nations that have been running on anti-corruption platforms and
sharing Diia-like technology with them to help modernize their
countries.  She specifically cited Zambia, the Dominican Republic, and
Ecuador. In January, Estonia announced that they would begin trial
runs of their mRiik app, modeled after Ukraine’s Diia.

And, of course, all of this sounds very loving and charitable.
However, it’s impossible to ignore the financial incentives.
The digital shift in America

The U.S. got a giant shove online when lockdowns were enforced in 2020
and 2021.  The U.S.’s “digital transformation,” even though it was
only partial, still made already-wealthy tech companies even
wealthier. Even though billionaire wealth can fluctuate pretty
dramatically, by the end of 2022, American billionaires were still 50%
richer than pre-pandemic.

Lovers of free-market economics will point out that increased
technological ability is a rising wave that lifts everyone.  That can
be true, but ask yourself, are most people you know 50% richer than
before the pandemic?  Probably not.  Our lives have been getting
pushed online over the past few years.  Some people profited, but the
quality of life of the average citizen decreased.

Combine the shift to a digital world with the reconstruction after
wartime destruction, and you see huge opportunities for profit.  It’s
estimated that rebuilding Ukraine, so far, will cost over $1 trillion.
Zelensky and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink have already come to an
agreement about managing the rebuilding of Ukraine.  USAID may be
charitable, but BlackRock isn’t.  Ukraine is in the process of being
destroyed and being rebuilt.  This is going to be hugely profitable
for certain people, and Big Tech seems to be intent on getting their
slice of the pie.

This kind of thing isn’t new.  Brigadier General Smedley Butler,
combat veteran and Medal of Honor recipient, wrote War Is a Racket
back in the 1930s.  The book is full of examples of industries
generating huge wartime profits in conflicts a hundred years ago.  War
profiteering isn’t new. It isn’t a conspiracy. It’s human nature.

There’s no reason not to think that the same powerful Big Tech figures
will not continue to push the expansion of their businesses by pushing
life around the world online, with or without violent conflict.
Will we all be pushed into government-by-smartphone?

Maybe some emerging markets will be helped by Diia-like apps.  But
what about countries that already had reasonably safe and secure
government services?  Will functional governments be pushed onto a
smartphone?

It’s likely, though not imminent.  The Improving Digital Identity Act
of 2021 is in Congress right now. There are a few versions of it under
review. The Senate version actually states that the government cannot
require digital identity for any kind of transaction.

Americans are still, on average, relatively concerned about privacy
and the concentration of power.  The many concerns surrounding
Centralized Bank Digital Currencies apply to digital identification,
as well.  The OP ran an article last month discussing the total loss
of anonymity that will occur when CBDCs become implemented.

And there are other, less discussed applications.  Look at geofencing.
A federal district judge just issued a first-ever “geofencing” warrant
for anyone in the vicinity of the Capitol on January 6.  This gave
police the authority to search the cell phone data of every American
whose coordinates happened to be in the area, regardless of whether or
not they had anything to do with the shenanigans at the Capitol.

Imagine if they could pull your driver’s license or freeze your bank
account, too.  Right now, that’s not possible. With all of your
important documents linked to something like Diia, it could be.
Here’s how it could unfold.

I don’t think we will all be forced onto something like Diia in the
space of a year, but I think we’re at the beginning of a certain chain
of events.  Digital IDs begin to be offered as a convenience, they
become popular, they begin to be preferred by businesses and
governments, and we eventually lose the option of physical IDs.  And,
of course, some kind of crisis (climate change, another pandemic, a
hot war) could speed this up more quickly, as happened in Ukraine.

The tools to implement a CBDC linked to a digital identity are already
out there.  Look at China’s social credit system.  It’s technically
possible for us, too. It sounds crazy, but conspiracy theorists have
been proven correct so consistently lately I don’t think skepticism
regarding these new, profitable technologies is unreasonable.
How to retain our privacy

We need to remember that life’s about more than convenience.  It’s
about the freedom to try new things, some of which will fail
spectacularly and some of which will lead to resounding successes.
That combination of failure and success is what leads to the deeper
insights that make most of us into interesting people.  If we continue
to trade privacy for convenience, we may find we don’t have much
freedom left, either.

If we want to retain some measure of privacy and control over our own
lives, if we want to avoid the techno-prison currently being
constructed for us, if Americans don’t want our own “Stalin in a
smartphone,” we need to avoid feeding the digital beast.  Yes, it’s
hard, and no, it’s not going to be realistic for 99.9% of us to live
completely offline.  But we can keep our friendships and purchases
offline as much as possible.  We can drag our feet when it comes to
getting the newest smart gadgets.  Perhaps most importantly, those of
us with teenagers and young adults can spend time explaining our
privacy concerns to the younger generation, so they try to live life
offline, as well.

The digital prison is being constructed, but it’s by no means done
yet.  Grand plans like “government in a smartphone” always fall apart
at some point.  The problems with Diia are obvious to anyone paying
attention.  If enough of us can postpone moving everything online,
hopefully, this impetus will collapse on its own.