Freedom isn't Free

With closing proximity, we are now staring directly at the blueprint behind the 2016 presidential election. In 2008 Barack Obama was elected the first African American president of the United States. It is no secret that in 2012 during the Obama re-election campaign, the integration of digital computing had its acknowledgements front and center. In a polling and data analysis program code word Orca. I won’t speculate or go into details about the 44th president’s digital media outreach campaign. All I can offer is that it mobilized voter data and gave the campaign a viewpoint to speak of where campaign targets would most likely be receptive. This is essentially an advertising mechanism that has been in the “Works,” for years. Amongst expert level colleagues and even novice beginners, data mining has been the treasure trove of politicians for quite some time. If you ever done any fund raising online, you more than likely have embraced how important it has become to capture the “Data,” of your donors. Things like First and Last name, Address and contact information. This makes it easy to keep your campaign organized in the form of thank you notices, as well as reusable lists for the future. So, my experience in all things digital has had me paying very close attention to elections. Everything from Nate Silver’s 538 which is the successful number of electorate votes to become president to small mom & pop polling sites that give the viewer insight into the inner working of the voter demographic. It’s like guessing odds at a horse race. It’s somewhat mundane in activity until election day, but the more historical data is used the easier it becomes to project outcomes. For instance, we’ve all probably saw, heard of or simply observed a reporter telling us which states Barack Obama carried in the 2008 and 2012 election. We have kind of taken it for granted that the West Coast will go “Blue,” and the Mid-West “Conservative.” We have all seen the maps with the large swath of color being “Red,” and the more highly populated or “Urban,” areas filled in blue. We’ve come to understand these things that demographically the United States, for the most part is a progressive country where we enjoy freedoms and liberties most of the rest of the world can only dream of. We understand “Pop,” culture in all its forms. We remember the revelation of MTV and Music Videos. We grew up on the “King,” of pop and “Top Forty,” hit lists of popular songs. Even Casey Kasem had a lucrative success late in his career with a “Top Twenty,” countdown. Numbers are everywhere and its almost ironic for a country filled with people who claim to have little to no knowledge about “Math,” to be dealing with numbers so much. Let me switch gears here and jump to the modern and recent revelation that the evidence is mounting that the election campaign of the 45th president engaged in some very unethical and even perhaps criminal activity. Now I say it all with the caveat that we are waiting for evidence and a final report on this activity, but all indications amount to, “Go Straight to Jail and do not collect two hundred dollars,” just like in the game of Monopoly. It’s interesting that I thought of the game Monopoly when describing the Donald J. Trump election campaign because in the game the person with the most properties win. Mr’ Trump himself claims to be a very successful “Business Man,“ that has a history of inviting the media to lay accolades upon his business empire and reality deals. For the most part, I know about him for “The Apprentice,” where he plays mostly himself and the object of the game is to win the favor of “The Donald.” His administration practice up to this point has been more or less a version of the last activity mentioned where people are pining and urging for favoritism from the president of the United States. We haven’t been the most united in the past couple of years and I have a few philosophical anecdotes about it which I will get to later, but first we must consider how we arrived at this point. The reason I started with describing the presidential campaign of Barack Obama is because to me the motives are linked. Campaigns are largely about money. Obama broke every campaign record with regards to financing in two successful campaigns and was awarded with two consecutive presidential terms. As much as any skeptic would like to point to any mention of president Obama’s success and say, “Oh, look there. Obama was the author of the digital campaign that started it all,” but there has never been any allegation or successful prosecution of an iota or speck of truth to any wrong doing. Now here is the pivotal moment and critical judgment impasse to consider in the 2016 presidential election. Barack Obama was never on the ticket, but certainly his policies after eight years of having lead the country out of a financial disaster and creating the first universal health care system in America were. Was Obama polling with approval during his preparation to leave office? I think we can honestly say he was, but you have to remember this was a man that was met with the leadership of congress saying they would do everything in their power to make him a one-term president. And so, they did. They tried anyway by blocking all but the legislation I mentioned that would be used as his legacy defining principle adjectives in a two-term presidential bid. The opposition had become known as the blockade and “Filibuster,” group. Like I said, “Obama was never on the ticket,” but his secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was. We should remember that Hillary was his opponent in the 2012 election before Barack defeated John McCaine. So, if Trump is the trigger for racism, where has it been all this time. I mean I remember that we had solved the problem of racism with the first African American president. Didn’t we? I clearly recall congress mentioning that we could shut down affirmative action programs and do away with social programs and stop trying to level a playing field that was no longer leaning in one direction or the other. I might lose you here, but in order to compress all the racially tinged subjects I’m going to make them all in one 140 character attempt like The Donald would in a Tweet: SC, Confederate Monuments, People on Both Sides, Immigrant Caravan, Hope Hicks, Emanuel Methodist Episcopal Church, L.A. Clippers, Roger Stone, NO DAPL, Florida, CNN, MAGA, the Wall and Amber Guyger. See, I didn’t even hit all the greatest hits. I just stated the ones that came to mind and have been in the news lately. I’m not going to attempt to draw a line from the beginning of the Union to 45th president. I think history will speak for itself here. What we must understand though is there is a motivation to disrupt America’s political system and one more than only one country has an interest in it. Trump’s own words – “Russia, maybe it was China,…” as he so eloquently put it. The point is somebody is going to gain if America loses. Now what is it that we’re going to lose? That is the million dollar question. That is the pig in the poke so to speak. With the rise of the modern day internet what I believe might be the most valued commodity known to man might be truth. Yes, I said it. Good old honesty. The internet is known to be a vast landscape of dark places where mostly we find conspiracy theories. Ever since the invention of the internet by Al Gore we’ve seen one conspiracy laden theory upon the other and we even have conspiracy about conspiracy like Global Warming is a “Hoax,” made up by China to destroy the American economy. My question is “If Global Warning is a hoax, made up by China. Wouldn’t they actually lose money? Providing that most everything is made in China. It’s a simple question, but there isn’t any room on the internet for common sense, so cat videos it is. That is an inside joke, but if you stay on the internet long enough, you’ll eventually get it. Like I said, "analysis is breaking something into smaller parts," in order to understand it. That would make the point that if China were to gain from our obsession with the environment, what other country would benefit from discourse in America? Saudi Arabia, you say? Russia, you say? Now the definition of Analysis is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. I’m going to work backwards from this point to make things easier to understand. What have we learned since DJT became president? We could say racism is alive and well in America. With the idea of global dominance as a tangible goal, the Russian Government could possibly make their return to scene pre-cold war standards. In this we have the historical evidence as a motivator. Also, the finnicky ideological perspective of nationalism could possibly take hold in an already sharp political discourse if sowed right. This is my description of smoking gun. You may or not know that in any investigation one must have the evidence that a crime was committed which most rely on the death of democracy, as the scene of the crime, but without a motivation the dots held together by string theory begin to disappear. So, let us revisit where I left off describing analytics and the internet as a vehicle for a get-away route. The internet is like I previously mentioned a dark place where hooligans & hoodlums can hide in plain sight. Anonymity is the disguise of the would be perpetrators. All they would need is a cover to hide their antics. Speaking of cover, no one finds it odd that during the first two years of the Trump presidency the hactivist group that goes by the thread name Anonymous has all, but almost entirely disappeared? What we have is anonymity showing up in the form of corporations and research groups waiting to cash in on some variable that was otherwise unforeseen. What they needed was a cover that would hide their activities. As I mentioned before the Obama campaign did the footwork with years prior leveraging of vast data gathering and bringing the power of digital computing into the mainstream underneath the branding of major internet research agencies was the government’s ability to undermine its own restriction in the form of privacy laws. The patriot act took care of this where secret courts could justify secret search warrants in the name of national security. FISA or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance was used to spy on our enemies. The act has been around since 1978, but it’s true potential was realized until April 2013 when a security contractor by the name of Edward Snowden laid hands on a treasure trove of internal and top-secret data. No matter if you believe his actions were of treason or freedom protection, the secrets that got out after that were of enormous consequence. Before that we had Bradley Edward Manning or Daniel, as he was known which was convicted or court marshalled under the Espionage Act of that same year. Both instances concluded with the on-site release of Wiki-Leaks producing the documents in question and the following backlash. Now fast forward to 2016 where a hacker name Guccifer 2.0 has possession of stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee that resulted in the information security firm Crowd Strike being hired to review the severs and giving the findings to the U.S. Intelligence Committee. By now, you must admit that the U.S. appears to be in a full-on proxy war with an unknown foreign agent that seems to be pretty advanced in cyber security warfare. Are we looking at the Russian Federation or do we need to be thinking in terms of Iran or Iraq? If you remember the Middle East went through a turbulent time known as the Arab Spring. A series of pro-democracy uprisings that involved Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Bahrain. These nations generally began demonstrating in the spring of 2011, which led to the name. Most of the coordination and cooperation was done through the internet. The society of Muslim brothers or the Muslim Brotherhood found themselves as a political driver that over threw the government and established a democratic election of Mohamed Morsi, after the Mubarak rule. Also, the effect of these uprisings consequentially also led to the mass migration of political refugees from within regimes toward democratic countries which brings us up to Brexit or Britain leaving the European Union. On March 29, 2017 the referendum was invoked that originally was originated from the left in 1970, but was now taken over by the Far Right to leave the European Community or EC in favor of closing Great Britain’s borders. Submitting the results to Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel and on the following day European Council President Tusk, stated that the UK could remain in the European Single Market (ESM) only if the UK accepted its four freedoms of movement: for goods, capital, services, and labor. By then the UK’s immigration had slowed to 100,000 per year which was down from 230,000 the previous year. The point is immigration was the subject used to demonstrate voting power in the United Kingdom. Even though immigration fell far short of intimidating numbers. All this has to do with numbers and if you recall I started by referring to math and from there I went through all of the historical events until I came to the cyber security part of discussion. I recently read a phrase this morning that described facts as pesky little things that are hard to get around and this admittance I do not disagree. I think the problem is that it’s akin to getting lost in the forest for the trees. One wrong step in the wrong direction isn’t too bad, but unless we admit and reply to some major mistakes we are indeed on the wrong path. I think most of the American voters know and understand it by the results of the last election, but how do we reach the 30 – 35 percent of voters who will absolutely never admit that they’ve been taken for a ride? Remember, I mentioned nationalism as a motivator. I also mentioned disrupting American politics. I gave you the following timeline and the key actors of each incident. What I don’t know is the mind & heart of my fellow citizens. What I don’t understand is that if we have outside agitators manipulating policy in America, how do we bring the people into the camp without insulting their mentality? It’s an effort by an large driven by fear. Fear of the unknown and fear of each other. I remember how in the eighties and nineties that although we were far from singing Kumbaya together, we at least agreed about many big things in America. One of those things that we all agreed on besides the obvious is who we’re our opponents and competition. I don’t know if you are a history buff, but I can be assured that you don’t believe Rome was built in a day. This all started with fudged math according to Housing Loans and escalated from there into a full blown financial crisis. For whatever reason, the powers that be had an opportunity to intervene and set the record straight about data that was being used for financial gain. Every step of the way, they failed to provide reconciliation for those treasure troves of data that either went missing or turned up in the wrong hands. Now I don’t have to be Economist to tell you there was definitely motivation & opportunity there. If we want to turn things around for ourselves, the first thing to admit is this isn’t “Rocket Science.” Sure, algorithms and the calculus to predict their behavior are guarded trade secrets, but on a normal scale if the balance of power falls into the wrong hands, we have the capability to correct it. One of those capabilities is to do a minute by minute, hour by hour account of who did what when. Computer Log can provide the information. I believe that investigation has been forthcoming for at least 22-23 months. No matter if the record is reviewed or the forthcoming prosecutions take shape in the public spectrum or the private and that is a very hard pill to swallow considering its tax payer money used for this. As I was saying, the reconciliation needs to be brought to light in a venue that promotes openness and fairness rather than espionage & treason. We have a right to know if a foreign power interfered in a democratic election and how they did it. We have the right to know just how mine and your own tax dollars are being spent to get to the bottom of it. Furthermore, we are justified in the right to demand accountability from our sacred institutions like the F.B.I. or the C.I.A. or whatever covert operation intelligence agency exists. Secret doesn’t mean deceit. Secret implies that our best apparatus will protect our best interest until there is a solution. Every Monday or Friday, we can expect a twitter rampage by the person who is supposed to be using his power to help and lend his service to us. I’m not feeling the “Vibe,” there. I’m not a hater, but I am a voter, a tax payer and a decent human being. I don’t consider it inconvenient to expect a higher standard. In my profession there are consequences to using shoddy ethics to accommodate a few and leaving many in need. Get real Folks, the human element of this entire thing is relevant to what people believe & practice today. There are patriots among us. There are people who commit to an entire career of service. One Game Show host is going to ruin all of that. What I’d like to see is someone from within these corporations to send out a real Technology Information Officer to explain themselves. We do it all the time. What makes the government or anyone else different?