We know that the lockdowns with the Covid flu went far in enriching the coffers of the tech cartel at an (even more) accelerated rate than usual (World’s Richest People Smashed Wealth Records This Week). At some point, it’s no longer about money: it’s about what that largesse can bring and in case you missed it, NSA Chief Who Oversaw Sweeping Domestic Phone Surveillance Joins Amazon Board As Director. “This is the very NSA chief (Keith B. Alexander) who was the face of the agency’s mass sweeping up of Americans’ communications exposed by Edward Snowden’s leaks. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit earlier this month ruled the invasive NSA program was “illegal” and that US officials lied about it… For those keeping score, not only does Amazon own the The Washington Post and oversees the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise, it now has on its powerful board of directors the most visible figure from the NSA who illegally spied on Americans for the better part of a decade.” ZeroHedge reported, and it’s a must-read, and note to self: “Crucially his tenure as Director of the National Security Agency went for nearly a decade, from August 2005 to March 2014. From there he founded a cybersecurity technology company in 2014, of which he’s still leads as Co-CEO and president, called IronNet Cybersecurity, Inc.”

The hire came “Just days after Amazon published a scathing letter (in the Washington Post, which, like Amazon, is also owned by Jeff Bezos) slamming President Trump for not allowing the American multinational tech company to get the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, which instead was awarded to Microsoft.”

Never mind that Amazon Web Services is now authorized to host the US Department of Defense’s most sensitive data, including top secret Pentagon and NSA information (as of 2017) and also has “a monopoly on many services on the internet,” as Esha (@eshaLegal) noted, and “Even without an ex-spy chief with a less-than-stellar reputation in terms of privacy protection on its board, Amazon has faced growing pushback over its intrusive high-tech devices. Its virtual assistant Alexa was caught red-handed passively recording intimate conversations of unsuspecting family members, while its new fitness tracker ‘Halo’ promises to scan users’ bodies and track emotions in their voice,” RT reported,

No matter that the uberlords were all hauled before Congress in late July for anti-trust activities, nothing deters them and heads up, as you’re sheltering at home: “Google Street View offers up a window to the world in all its bizarre, intimate, and often raw glory. That window just so happens to peek into your home, as well,” warned Mashable (How to blur your house on Google Street View (and why you should)). “Google has never exactly been a steward of anyones’ privacy. In 2010, the company admitted that its Street View vehicles — the ones endlessly circling neighborhoods around the world — had secretly been collecting information from unencrypted WiFi networks they drove past for years.”

We don’t suspect that that has changed: only their methods have been altered. We know that they’re ‘listening’ on every Google product you use, whether or not you are you sending sensitive company information over an encrypted network as you’re sheltering at home and keeping the world safe.

Equally worrisome is the tech sector’s control of the media, not only with Bezos’s ownership of the WaPost, but Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs’s, control of The Atlantic, which has been knowingly publishing false, agenda-skewed stories (Did The Atlantic Publish a Made-Up Story About a Police Shooting?), Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff’s purchase of Time magazine and Microsoft founder Bill Gates’s own investments in various media outlets. As Global Research (Press in His Pocket: Bill Gates Buys Media to Control the Messaging) reported, “A Columbia Journalism Review expose reveals that, to control global journalism, Bill Gates has steered over $250 million to the BBC, NPR, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, the New York Times, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, Center for Investigative Reporting, Pulitzer Center, National Press Foundation, International Center for Journalists, and a host of other groups. To conceal his influence, Gates also funneled unknown sums via subgrants for contracts to other press outlets…Gates also funds an army of independent fact checkers including the Poynter Institute and Gannett —which use their fact-checking platforms to “silence detractors” and to “debunk” as “false conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” charges that Gates has championed and invested in biometric chips, vaccine identification systems, satellite surveillance, and COVID vaccines and note to self: UN Forced to Admit Gates-funded Vaccine is Causing Polio Outbreak in Africa.

Nothing like owning both sides of the coin: having the ability to not only listen in on the conversation, but to control it as well. To potentially make matters even worse, AI reportage is coming.  In fact, A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human? It’s a must read as well. The AI’s assurances in the piece are echoes of Silicon Valley’s assurances that they’re there to connect people and make the world a happier, more informed place rather than creating the greatest surveillance and control mechanism in the history of the planet.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Unless you own the press, of course.

Onward and forward.