The Patriots

by Allen Williams

Recently, I was in the market for some new R-12 hoses to refurbish an older AC gauge set when I happened on an advertisement from Amazon featuring all three replacement hoses for about $17+ bucks.  It seemed like a good deal except for the long delay in shipping the goods but I wasn’t in any hurry so I thought I’d sign up.

Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that Amazon.com doesn’t allow ‘guest purchases’ as does EBAY, its ‘members only’ at Amazon and your order is conditional upon membership acceptance.  I received the following confirmation memo Jan 16, sent to me at our sites email address.

This was the typical automated response however, the next day I received a follow-up email which I expected to be an actual ship date but instead my ‘account’ was frozen!

Subject: Re: Your Amazon.com order cannot be shipped

On 1/16/  12:24 PM, address-verification@amazon.com wrote:

There was a problem processing your order. You will not be able to access your account or place orders with us until we confirm your information.

You can help us resolve this issue by replying to this message with the billing name, address, and phone number registered to your card. Please reply from the email address registered to your Amazon.com account.

If needed, update your information with the card issuer.

For your security, we restrict access to your billing details to a team of account specialists. Our Customer Service team cannot access these details or provide you with more information on this issue. They can only verify that we sent this request.

We ask that you not open new accounts as any order you place may be delayed.

Amazon.com

This makes no sense unless the real purpose of being an Amazon member is to open all of your transactions to government phishers. All the personal 'verification' needed was to PING the card in amount of $1.00 to confirm its validity otherwise the card would be rejected outright. What Amazon is really saying here is that we don't trust you to be who you claim to be without outside confirmation. That's not membership, it's abuse.

On Jan 17^th, I called the company and spoke to a representative who was to ‘look into the problem.’  I told them what had happened and the lady I spoke with indicated that I had to respond with the email address that I opened the account with.  Well, duh.. I DID that and they acknowledged it by responding to the ORIGINAL email address that I opened the account with!!.  (Actually, I responded with both my email addresses and still received the same mind numbing response.)

So, now we know what they’re saying here is NOT the real issue.  Note that I DIDN’T GIVE permission by FAX or in my telephone conversation with the AMAZON rep to verify anything with my card issuer for ANY REASON.  They simply took it upon themselves to contact the bank anyway.  That’s uncalled for as Amazon already had the information and acknowledged it with their reply but here’s their moronic response.

Hello,

We encountered an issue with your account, and have removed your access to this account because 
the card issuer has refused to confirm your name and billing address for your Visa ending in 56. 
You will not be able to access your account or place orders with us until we verify your information.

To resolve this issue, please allow the card issuer to grant our request, or send the information 
below to our secure fax line:

-- A copy of your statement for the payment card used, including the billing address

-- The last two digits of the payment card

-- Your name, phone number, and email address  

You can find our fax number on the Amazon.com Help page:

https://www.amazon.com/help/addressverification

We will convert your fax to a secure electronic image. To protect your information, 
we restrict access to your billing details to a team of account specialists.

Our Customer Service team can confirm that we sent this email, but they cannot view 
your fax or share more information about this issue.

You can expect a response from us within 24 hours of sending your fax.

If you would like us to confirm your information with the card issuer, reply to this email 
after you have arranged for them to grant our request.

In the meantime, please do not open new accounts because any new order that you place may be 
delayed. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. 

Amazon.com

Yes, secure like YAHOO and FACEBOOK which had millions of their ‘secure’ customer records 
hacked. And might they also be passing my business information along to the NSA or FBI as
BEST BUY technical people are currently doing for the FBI?  

The customer rep never addressed my reply or indicated why my bank had to confirm my identity.
A few days later I got another email asking why I discontinued my account. Interestingly enough, 
Amazon’s BEZOS owns the Washington Post and since I have been a written critic of that 
intellectual rag, the Amazon episode begins to make a bit more sense.  

And of course, we all know the ‘journalistic integrity’ of WAPO as in After the WaPost’s Latest Shot, It’s Time to Call ‘Fake News’ By Its Real Name ‘Weaponized Journalism’ My observation to the WAPO editor on instructions from Jeff Bezos for their news coverage is that company policy (written or otherwise) dictates news coverage just as it would with any other firm subsidiary.  Don’t think for a moment that WAPO isn’t looking out for the Amazon billionaire’s interests.

Amazon’s request for my credit card statement is clearly ‘over the top’ and BS pure and simple.  
If you can't believe I who I say I am; we can not have any meaningful business relationship.  I've 
purchased many things online from EBAY and other suppliers and have never experienced such a request.

There is another possibility, the company is advertising the sale of an item they don't have and won't 
have available unless a sufficient number of people express interest before they order from their
China supplier. In that case you might want a verifiable customer base to motivate the Chinese.

If you’re an Amazon customer get prepared for more invasive scrutiny of your account information, and if you’re not, don’t JOIN!.

by Cillian Zeal

A Wednesday piece by The New York Times which details the FBI’s investigation into Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign may have revealed more than intended, at least if a Wall Street Journal reporter who has covered the surveillance previously is correct. 

The Journal’s Kimberley Strassel has written about the investigation in the past. In a piece last week, she posited that the FBI may have used a mole in the Trump campaign, particularly given the Department of Justice’s reluctance to turn over information about the informant to congressional investigators.

The Times piece revealed more details about the Trump campaign surveillance operation — called “Crossfire Hurricane” in reference to the Rolling Stones song “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” — and just how extensive it was. While the tenor of the article, which was written by Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman and Nicholas Fandos, is overwhelmingly favorable to the FBI and dismisses any claims that the surveillance was politically motivated ,(“I never saw anything that resembled a witch hunt or suggested that the bureau’s approach to the investigation was politically driven,” one DOJ official is quoted as saying) there were a few things buried deep in there that specifically caught Strassel’s attention.

In a tweetstorm Wednesday evening, Strassel noted key problems in The Times’ narrative, particularly when the story appeared and significant facts that they glossed over. 

Strassel first argued that the article was a calculated leak of sorts in an effort to get out ahead of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes and the information that he’s gathering and releasing regarding the FBI’s sources on the Trump investigation. 

1. So a few important points on that new NYT "Hurricane Crossfire" piece. A story that, BTW, all of us following this knew had to be coming. This is DOJ/FBI leakers' attempt to get in front of the facts Nunes is forcing out, to make it not sound so bad. Don't buy it. It's bad.

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) May 17, 2018

However, she says it proves what Trump was claiming all along: namely, that his campaign was being spied upon. 

Biggest takeaway: Govt "sources" admit that, indeed, the Obama DOJ and FBI spied on the Trump campaign. Spied. (Tho NYT kindly calls spy an "informant.") NYT slips in confirmation far down in story, and makes it out like it isn't a big deal. It is a very big deal.

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) May 17, 2018

The story briefly mentions that “one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos, current and former officials said. That has become a politically contentious point, with Mr. Trump’s allies questioning whether the FBI was spying on the Trump campaign or trying to entrap campaign officials.”  However, if that informant met several times with two low-level Trump campaign officials, one wonders just what his role — if any — in the Trump campaign might have been. It seems somewhat unlikely that a random individual outside the campaign would have had the opportunity to meet with both George Papadopoulos and Carter Page without some suspicion being aroused if the informant didn’t have extremely close ties to the campaign.

3. In self-serving desire to get a sympathetic story about its actions, DOJ/FBI leakers are willing to provide yet more details about that "top secret" source (namely, that spying was aimed at Page/Papadopoulos)–making all more likely/certain source will be outed. That's on them

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) May 17, 2018 

4. DOJ/FBI (and its leakers) have shredded what little credibility they have in claiming they cannot comply with subpoena. They are willing to provide details to friendly media, but not Congress? Willing to risk very source they claim to need to protect?
— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) May 17, 2018 

Strassel then noted the fact that if the FBI is willing to leak information that makes them look good to media sources, they shouldn’t have any problem complying with the subpoena that the House Intelligence Committee issued.  She also pointed out that the FBI had claimed the dossier had little to no influence on the investigation.

5. Back in Dec., NYT assured us it was the Papadopoulos-Downer convo that inspired FBI to launch official counterintelligence operation on July 31, 2016. Which was convenient, since it diminished the role of the dossier. However . . .

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) May 17, 2018  

6. Now NYT tells us FBI didn't debrief downer until August 2nd. And Nunes says no "official intelligence" from allies was delivered to FBI about that convo prior to July 31. So how did FBI get Downer details? (Political actors?) And what really did inspire the CI investigation?

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) May 17, 2018  

7. As for whether to believe line that FBI operated soberly/carefully/judiciously in 2016, a main source for this judgment is, um . . .uh . . . Sally Yates. Who was in middle of it all. A bit like asking Putin to reassure that Russia didn't meddle in our election.

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) May 17, 2018

Sally Yates, for those of you with short memories, was the deputy attorney general under former President Barack Obama.  Strassel closed with a shot at the DOJ and James Comey.

8. On that, if u r wondering who narrated this story, note paragraphs that assure everybody that hardly anybody in DOJ knew about probe. Oh, and Comey also was given few details. Nobody knew nothin'! (Cuz when u require whole story saying u behaved, it means u know you didn't.)

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) May 17, 2018

This is arguably the biggest story in quite some time. We already knew that intelligence had been weaponized by Obama-era apparatchiks to get a FISA court to agree to surveillance and that the Trump dossier had been prepared using money from the Clinton campaign. However, we’re beginning to realize it went deeper than that — and it could have included a mole in the Trump campaign itself.  If it did, we need to know. No more of this drip-drip-drip of information specifically designed as a limited hangout.

It’s time that the American people are appraised, once and for all, just how far the Obama administration went in using the apparatus of the federal government to infiltrate the campaign of their political adversary.

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by Staff

Small airborne drones modeled after birds, mosquitos and other insect types are in the planning stage, a new age of surveillance devices that can hide in plain sight for crowd control, tracking criminal suspects and surveilling political protests.  As early as 2008 military engineers were already experimenting with the design of insect size drones which can fly and spy on enemies without human risk. 

The military wants smarter UAVs capable of navigating interior spaces autonomously, i.e. without GPS or remote control.  There is strong interest in developing small drones capable of spying virtually anywhere.  "The picture shown in the story is not a real robot mosquito drone, but simply one such proposed ‘prototype’ that may become reality in future, and perhaps they will also be able to take photographs and DNA samples of people. But as of now, these are only speculations, and not facts in practical."

Is this a mosquito? No. It's a proposed insect spy drone for urban areas, already in production, funded by the US Government. It is planned for remote controll and  equipped with a camera and a microphone. It can land on you, and it may have the potential to take a DNA sample or leave RFID tracking nanotechnology on your skin. It can fly through an open window, or it can attach to your clothing until you take it in your home. Given their propensity to request macro-sized drones for surveillance, one is left with little doubt that police and military may look into these gadgets next.  (And to think we were worried about West Nile virus!)
 
And now you know why our government has requested the law be changed to allow drone surveillance in the United States.

The National Defense Authrization Act (NDAA) permits the President to authorize the killing of a citizen anywhere in the world.  There is little oversight or laws governing the use of drones, how much less protection would there be for drones you can't readily see?. The ithreat to individual liberty is significant if such devices ever enter into mass production.

If histtory is any indication,, the term 'enemies' will ultimately be defined to include unwarranted surveiilance of all who resist the totatlitarian reach of the state.

by Allen Williams

A few weeks ago, I decided to have a look at one of the web visitor data recording companies out there to see what kind of information they could collect.. Motherboard reports that a Princeton study revealed that over 400 companies (so far) record your every keystroke and them transmit it to a third party website.  

Typical companies providing this service are FullStory, SessionCam, SmartLook, UserReplay, etc.  I opted to try SmartLook simply because the ’geniuses’ at Webnode provided a convenient widget to insert their tracking code.

It just isn’t enough today that American Intelligence agencies are spying on everyone with their Prism software, but they are partnering with major business and social media like the CIA’s 600 million contract with Amazon .com  for cloud access.  We already know that Facebook and until recently Twitter provide information to the CIA.  The bad news here is that all purchases through Amazon are retained on their cloud servers and the CIA will have access.  You can be certain that any cloud service that your application communicates with will be available to the intelligence services as well as a host of unknown third parties because the data is NOT encrypted.

It’s far better to get the ‘mark’ to provide personalized data on him or herself to the tracking recorder thinking that he’s browsing anonymously or at least ignored  but “…many of these companies have dashboards where clients can playback the recordings they collect.   Yandex, Hotjar, and Smartlook’s dashboards run non-encrypted HTTP pages, rather than much more secure, encrypted HTTPS pages.”  The biggest liability is that once the data is removed from your site all control is lost, virtually anyone could have access to this data and you’d never know.

I was curious to find out just what could be collected by SmartLook.  However, I was surprised to find that the actual service is quite haphazard.  Either SmartLook is developing their recording software ‘on the fly’ as the saying goes or you really don’t get much on the ‘free’ side.  But upgrading the service means you’re paying to have your readers spied on.

Fortunately, the SmartLook collected data is not totally accurate or reliable.  Primarily because the staff is not well organized, knowledgeable or well versed in English.  After adding their code to The Patriot’s header and getting nothing, I contacted SmartLook support where a woman named Sofie informed me by email that  “In one case Only in webnode premium you can add code directly to the HTML header of the whole website.  In webnode free, you need to install the code in all pages you wish to track.”   Anyone, who is remotely conscious or understands the language, knows that free websites don’t have custom registered URLs as we do, ergo, we are a premium user!   So this individual is likely responding with canned phrases from the company’s data forum without any understanding of what was conveyed because they can’t communicate beyond an elementary level in English.

In another case, two different users known to me personally, one residing in Kansas and the other in Ohio accessed our site but showed the same IP address in the data collection set.  Upon questioning one of the support staff as to how this could happen, I was told that “The only explanation is that it was the same person and the two different names appeared because you have wrong code settings.”  The company’s help link indicates that if you want to track a particular user, you have to type their email address directly into the tracking code and they give an example case. The SmarLook tracking code is ‘paste-in’ and Webnode provides the widget access so unless you can’t type an address within the two apostrophe markers, you can’t have wrong code settings unless either SmartLook or Webnode made them.  

Individual email identification is no better as I have seen a whole day of data collection of 6 or more people with the same email but different IP addresses. Guess the user has multiple identities so he or she switches every couple of hours throughout the day.  The responses I’ve received from their support staff are disingenuous and you can’t really trust their assessments.

After some dickering back and forth with their support personnel to get things working the way SmartLook advertised,  I indeed found that I could watch a visitor enter our site and view virtually everything he or she clicked on.  This kind of information can and will be abused down the road and It's already happening as "The CBS report suggests in no uncertain terms that the personal information pertaining to millions of Americans collected by one of the World’s largest ad agencies is sold to the CIA." 

Smartlook claimed their software only retained three days worth of data but that’s because I wasn’t paying them to collect it.  Data was collected from approximately Nov 3^rd to Nov 24^th obviously more than 3 days. There was no data collected beyond Nov 24th, 2017 by their system even though I still had their code installed on the site for several more days.  At first, I thought it was yet another glitch but when nothing more was recorded, I removed the code.  On Nov. 27^th, all archived data subsequently disappeared from the SmartLook control panel or at least was interred somewhere where I couldn’t access it.  You can be reasonably certain that it’s still archived there even if I no longer have access to it.

UPDATE  12/12/17 Why Have you Stopped Using SmartLook?

A) Smartlook doesn't record my website properly
B) I don’t have time to watch the recordings / I find no added value in Smartlook
C) I just removed Smartlook temporarily - plan to use it again
D) I am missing feature X (please fill in)
E) Neither of those, let me tell you why...

I will be glad for any feedback, even if it's negative.

Best regards,

Vladimir Sandera
cofounder, optimist
Smartlook

I received this correspondence from one of the SmartLook co-founders in early December after removing their code from our header.  Why was this an issue? Could it be that they wanted me to leave the code installed to keep recording visitor data whether or not I chose to use it?

Update 1/24/2018

 “We're excited to tell you we're migrating all our data to more powerful cloud service (AWS)! Your account included. The process is time-intensive, but we're working hard to complete the migration by the end of next week.

While the long-term benefits will be great, we wanted to let you know you might experience a few bumps and minor interruptions along the way. (Might.)

The good news:

• AWS provides us with more safety, stability, and speed
• Your data will be better serviced and stored securely
• Smartlook features will run faster
• This migration is a lot of work, and we appreciate your patience during the next few days while we finish up”

Your Smartlook Team

Long term benefits for whom? This move simply presents more opportunities for data to be accessed by more persons unknown as it’s unlikely that Smarlook’s new AWS storage is any more secure than Yahoo who experienced a major hack. 

I recommend readers give serious consideration to a good AD blocker:  “If you want to block session replay scripts, popular ad-blocking tool AdBlock Plus will now protect you against all of the ones documented in the Princeton study.”