In terms of features, Signal checked the boxes for the required minimum feature set of a secure messenger:

• Good security with end-to-end encryption

• Easy onboarding, installation and operation. Clean UI and reliable.

• Works across all major platforms seamlessly (Android, iOS, WIN/MAC/LINUX)

• Low latency for text chatting and reliable calling

• Device verification (to notify others if your device was compromised)

• Support for individual and group accounts.

• The service is free (for Signal, completely free).

There were a few downsides to Signal:

• A valid phone number was required (yes, you could use a burner, but….) Phone numbers are used for tracking and form the unique_ID for many data collection systems using phone numbers and IMEI (the unique ID for the handset used by carriers). A person who worked for a state security agency once told us “if a secure messenger uses a phone number, it’s compromised”. Most phones are attached to a govt issued ID and with voice print ID they know its you on any device in 15 seconds. Telegram uses a phone number, too. You have been warned.

• Your phone number and other information was visible to other users. (this major weakness was recently remedied on Signal)

• Servers were centralized and accessed over the open internet. It’s hard to know exactly what is monitored upstream/downstream from the Signal servers in AWS, Google and Microsoft facilities who are known to work with the CIA and other spying agencies. While the data is encrypted, metadata can be every bit as valuable as the data itself and these vendors have access to the metadata, if not the encrypted messages.

• Third party companies provided notification services (text messages, etc.) and potentially can leak data. This is known from the world of VPN’s, where M247, which has been tied to GCHQ, is an infrastructure service provider for up to 65% of VPN’s.

• Platform notifications included plain text snips of messages, which could be intercepted, if the user allowed it.

• The signaling plane (the messages back and forth to enable calling) is on the open internet, allowing snoops to know who you are calling, even if the call is encrypted.

• It turns out that startup funding for Signal was from a US Government tied entity. Some people won’t like that. Here’s an interesting article: Signal Facing Collapse After CIA Cuts Funding

• When something is free to the user, the money to pay for the service must come from somewhere. Who are the donors? Signal costs a lot of money to operate. Who gave it the funds to operate?

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There are three main problems with the network and business architecture of secure messengers like Signal, Telegram, etc.

• Free is a business model only if data is resold, it won’t work for privacy. (or the service goes out of business). These messengers are all free to the user, therefore someone is paying to run the service and by definition they are not private.

• Users rely on central storage of their data (the most convenient approach). privateLINE p2p will enable users to store their own data locally, with centralized signaling and back up storage, if the user opts to do it. This is the future.

• There is no expectation of privacy on a public network. In the future we expect a separation between public and private networks. You will still use your regular phone and network as an “alibi”. Anything important will need to be conducted on a private network.

For these reasons and others we decided we had to build a new network, away from the internet and under the user’s direct control as much as possible. You should consider using privateLINE as a back up in case something happens to Signal.

[NOTE: we have been developing a new platform for secure and private communications that is air-gapped from the internet using private network technology. If you are interested in testing it (FREE for early accounts), go to this page to get Early Access LINK We use it ourselves for all our comms away from Big Tech spying. Once you are in PL Comms, connect with “chris”]

Why Would We Stop Using Signal?

We had a security breach of some root keys for a legacy chat server we were running and it got attacked and destroyed. It was too hard to restore after the attack and was abandoned. We tracked down the data leak to Signal, as the engineers had used Signal to send these keys between themselves. However, you can never be 100% sure and after the fact it’s impossible to prove with certainty that was the cause….but it made us wonder. That was a few years ago and we decided to stop putting anything sensitive on Signal and to build an alternative we could use for our projects. What about Telegram, What’s App and the rest of them? We’ve heard of similar issues and some are worse than Signal because they are not end-to-end encrypted — messages are converted to plain text once they hit the server, then re-encrypted when sent out — another data collection bonanza for the person running the servers. Let’s dig a bit deeper into Signal, how it was started and some publicly available information that made us ask some questions.

In the early days of instant messaging, encryption was light and security was lighter. The trade off is always security vs. convenience and design was optimized for maximum usability (convenience) and growth hacking. For this reason, privacy apps have always been a specialty niche and necessary service. Signal did a good job, but their model is too expensive to run and has too much centralization. privateLINE is taking a different approach that charges users for the services we provide (so our first obligation is to protect the user’s privacy). We will push as much of the data and bandwidth to the edge of the network (the users provide much of the hardware and bandwidth), which costs the users nothing they haven’t already spent and allows us to provide a sustainable service at an affordable price. We’ll avoid third party and Big Tech services.

Signal has a Financial Crisis

Investigative journalist Kit Klarenberg wrote in Signal facing collapse after CIA cuts funding:

On November 16th, Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal, published a detailed breakdown of the popular encrypted messaging app’s running costs for the very first time. The unprecedented disclosure’s motivation was simple - the platform is rapidly running out of money, and in dire need of donations to stay afloat. Unmentioned by Whittaker, this budget shortfall results in large part due to the US intelligence community, which lavishly financed Signal’s creation and maintenance over several years, severing its support for the app.

Signal is burning a lot of money on their infrastructure (from the Signal blog post of 16 November, 2023):

Storage: $1.3 million dollars per year.
Servers: $2.9 million dollars per year.
Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year.
Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million dollars per year.
Additional Services: $700,000 dollars per year.

Current Infrastructure Costs (as of November 2023): Approximately $14 million dollars per year.

It is unusual for a non-profit tech project to have so many highly paid people:

This is a lot of work, and we do it with a small and mighty team. In total, around 50 full-time employees currently work on Signal, a number that is shockingly small by industry standards.

To sustain our ongoing development efforts, about half of Signal’s overall operating budget goes towards recruiting, compensating, and retaining the people who build and care for Signal. When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.

$19m / 50 = $380,000 per year per employee!!! That’s like a well funded AI company or high level contractors working for a security agency, not a non-profit. People at privateLINE and most startup tech companies could only dream of being paid like that, though to be fair, Signal employees and contractors will never get any stock compensation.

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The infrastructure was not designed to minimize the cost of operations, it was designed for another purpose, data collection by third parties:

“Signal spends tens of millions of dollars every year. We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.”

Another red flag is the requirement to validate your account with a phone. Most phones require a government issued ID, which could match up your data with your phone number.

We use third-party services to send a registration code via SMS or voice call in order to verify that the person in possession of a given phone number actually intended to sign up for a Signal account. This is a critical step in helping to prevent spam accounts from signing up for the service and rendering it completely unusable—a non-trivial problem for any popular messaging app.

The cost of these registration services for verifying phone numbers when people first install Signal, or when they re-register on a new device, currently averages around $6 million dollars per year.

$6m!!! Who does the phone company share that data with and what is their privacy policy? Telcos are like an arm of the local governments.

“the registration fees that cover the delivery of verification codes during the sign-up process to help verify phone numbers and prevent spam accounts”

[NOTE: we have been developing a new platform for secure and private communications that is air-gapped from the internet. If you are interested in testing it (FREE for early accounts), go to this page to get Early Access LINK We use it ourselves for all our comms away from Big Tech spying. Once you are in PL Comms, connect with “chris”]

Calling is routed through their servers, they are not p2p from person to person directly. This means all calls can be monitored and copied going in and out. Encryption for calling is weaker (because it’s real time), you need to keep this in mind. Metadata can be surmised over time mathematically if you watch a data stream long enough.

To take one example, Signal always routes end-to-end encrypted calls from people who aren’t in your contacts through a relay server that obscures IP address information.

There are more efficient approaches we will use with privateLINE that have the user help with paying for infrastructure costs and using their own hardware and bandwidth — the added benefit is the data is in their hands — we will run a network and provide services, but the user will always be able to DIY and keep complete control. The network will be created using software and terrestrial, cellular and satellite connections to a core secure enclave.

Signal has been widely promoted as secure:

Elon Musk also promotes Signal:

When you see this kind of promotion or in the other extreme disinformation about a service to defame it, it screams of an operation. Spies have lifetime contracts and many of them work for several agencies/countries.

Where can data leak?

A service might be 100% secure and protect your data, but what about the infrastructure providers? What kind of privacy policy do they maintain? Can they monitor your meta-data and resell it to a data broker or agency? What is their privacy policy? Everything is tied to your phone number, you should assume your metadata could be exposed to third party services, even if you are securely encrypted. In many cases, the metadata is just as valuable as the messages inside. There is no expectation of privacy on a public network and Signal and other messengers run over a public network.

From Signal’s blog:

We use third-party services to send a registration code via SMS or voice call in order to verify that the person in possession of a given phone number actually intended to sign up for a Signal account. This is a critical step in helping to prevent spam accounts from signing up for the service and rendering it completely unusable—a non-trivial problem for any popular messaging app.

There is a better way to handle this and that’s to use invitations sent by users. You can only connect to someone who invites you. There is zero spam and no need to validate email or phones, since you send your invitation to the email or phone number you personally know. Accounts inside the enclave can be numbered and anonymous.

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Signal uses Big Tech infrastructure:

Millions of people use Signal every day, and it takes a lot of bandwidth to provide a fast and reliable service. Signal spends around $2.8 million dollars per year on bandwidth to support sending messages and files (such as photos, videos, voice notes, documents, etc.) and to enable voice and video calls.

Because everything in Signal is end-to-end encrypted, we can rent server infrastructure from a variety of providers like Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, and others while ensuring that your messages and calls remain private and secure. We can’t access them, and neither can the companies that provide any of the infrastructure we rent.

This sounds like the VPN providers, who “don’t keep logs”, but their service providers who are owned by the spies don’t have any restriction from tracking data.

Privacy Policy

From Signal’s Privacy Policy:

Information we may share

Third Parties. We work with third parties to provide some of our Services. For example, our Third-Party Providers send a verification code to your phone number when you register for our Services. These providers are bound by their Privacy Policies to safeguard that information.

Those third parties are not disclosed, nor are the privacy policy and terms of service of those third parties mentioned anywhere in the Terms or Privacy Policy.

The last update on the Signal Privacy Policy was in 2018!!! Many things have changed in privacy laws in the past six years….this is not even legal in many jurisdictions.

Effective as of May 25, 2018

Updated May 25, 2018

Conclusion

Signal provides pretty good privacy. It’s easy to use. But there are funding problems on the horizon and some red flags that gave us pause. And it’s exposed to the public internet. To the point that we think you should consider an alternative secure communications network or two. The switching cost is of course moving your contacts over to the new system.

[NOTE: we have been developing a new platform for secure and private communications that is air-gapped from the internet. If you are interested in testing it (FREE for early accounts), go to this page to get Early Access LINK We use it ourselves for all our comms away from Big Tech spying. Once you are in PL Comms, connect with “chris”]

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The main thing is you need something that has never touched the internet or public phone networks and that you store in a Faraday bag and powered off when not in use. Even so-called “black phones” use the regular phone system and they sit around on desktops, in pockets, cars, etc. and present an attack surface 24/7.

The best solution we found to date is a DIY “Batphone”. You can buy the phone used or reconditioned from eBay or Amazon. Most any Google Pixel models (4, 6, 7, 8, etc) will work, but we prefer the 6a for cost and other factors. You can use the free version of privateLINE (limit of one device and split tunnel Shield), but if you upgrade to premium ($99 per year) - you will get up to 5 devices and Total Shield (full tunnel), which keeps your Batphone completely off the internet. The advantage of this kind of device is that once you wipe the stock Android firmware from the phone, it will largely be “de-Googled” and like a brand new phone. This device will also support privateLINE’s forthcoming private cell network (powered by ATT).

This phone will be used only for the most important calls, so you will never connect it directly to the internet (it will be firewalled and only run privateLINE-approved apps). Apps include all of the privateLINE apps and other forthcoming apps.

If you would like to upgrade your security, please visit privateline.io and sign up for an account.

This is how you do it in a nutshell:

1. Get an UNLOCKED reconditioned Google Pixel phone for your area (e.g. US, EU, India, etc). We like the 6a because it is the best value and is supported for a number of years going forward. There are newer and better phones, but this one does the job at the lowest cost, currently about $200 +/- on Amazon. We’re also testing Pixel 7 and other models.

2. You will be installing the secure GrapheneOS, which wipes out stock Android firmware. I used a current MacBook Pro, but Windows machines also work. You should follow the GrapheneOS installation instructions or watch the below video:

This is a great explainer video. Be sure you have a very good condition cable, as a bad cable will waste a lot of your time. Be sure to carefully follow the directions in the video.

3. Once GrapheneOS is installed, you will need to configure your new phone. Be sure to never charge it from a device like a laptop or computer, only use a dedicated wall charger and never connect to the internet directly via any USB cable, unless you are already in Total Shield (full tunnel) mode.

4. Make a USB stick with all the apps you will need on your Batphone. I recommend putting these privateLINE apps on the USB: PL Comms, PL Auth, and PL Meet. Brave browser is also a good choice, though GrapheneOS comes with Vanadium browser, which is also pretty good. Get the privateLINE apps from the privateline.io web site (so that you don’t leave any footprints at the Play store), and the Brave browser from brave.com. Use a different machine that is connected to the internet to download. Once apps are on the USB stick, eject it from the computer you used to download and mount it on your Batphone. Go to Files from the top deck of your Batphone by swiping up in the middle of the screen and choosing the Files icon. Click on the “hamburger” in the upper left and then at the bottom of the list choose your USB drive. If you have a problem finding the USB stick, check permissions (Settings—> Security—> USB). USB peripheral should be set to Allow New USB Peripherals. USB-C port should be set to ON. Go to FILES, then choose the hamburger in the upper left. You should see the memory stick connect in the Files app on the phone (note: low-end USB sticks may not connect, and you should use a new one that hasn’t been used with many devices). If you don’t see a USB device, try removing and plugging in the USB device again.

   BE SURE TO CHANGE THE SETTINGS BACK TO BLOCK USB DEVICES ONCE YOU FINISH COPYING SOFTWARE TO THE PHONE, to maintain security for your device if you will never use the USB port for anything but charging. NOTE: you can also use a USB-C to ethernet cable to connect to the internet if you are concerned with RF. Turn off Wifi, turn on the PL Connect app in Total Shield mode, then plug in your Batphone to the ethernet. We have tested this and it works.

5. NEVER use biometric security. People are losing fingers to crooks who want access, and courts have ruled the police can forcibly use your finger to open your phone. Biometrics are a terrible idea for security.

6. Be sure to always keep your phone POWERED OFF when not in use for security. You want to keep hackers away from the device, so be sure to keep it in a Faraday bag like this inexpensive one from Amazon, you can get two of them for about $14:

We like this USB stick, because it has both USB-C and USB2/3 in one tiny stick.

The 32G version runs about $13. We’ve had some issues with adapters in the past and this works reliably.

Good luck with your new Batphone!

Here are some instructions on best practices on how to use your new “Batphone” and keep it off the internet.

**************

1. Keep the device powered off when not in use. It’s harder to attack a powered down device. Bluetooth can still function for several hours as a “Find My Device” feature on Android/GrapheneOS devices ( you should keep this feature OFF). This is also true for iPhones in case you were wondering.

2. Keep the device inside the sealed Faraday bag. Most signals won’t be able to reach the device, improving security. NOTE: most common Faraday bags will stop signals down to 800 Mhz. There are other tracking systems that use lower, more penetrative frequencies, like Lojack for one.

3. Use the “Batphone” for important calls only. Every time you connect to something, you run the risk of an attack. Use your regular device with privateLINE and when you want to do an important call tell them “please switch to the Batphone”.

4. Use a different wifi location each time you call. This might not be convenient, but cafes out of your area or open wifi not at your home base are best if you are concerned with keeping “off the grid”. Many wifi access points are monitored, so the fewer connections, the better. Leave your regular phone at home, as it can be used to track you and associate your “Batphone” with you when you connect that device. Keeping your regular phone at home will not set off alarm bells, assume it’s being monitored and treat it accordingly.

5. Create a dedicated privateLINE account for your “Batphone” and a regular privateLINE account for other devices so you won’t mix them up. You can use the same account, but your text chats will appear on your other devices. Only connect with the most important people who care about their personal safety and security, and who also use a Batphone and keep the account name private.

6. Erase text messages after they have been received and viewed by the recipient.

7. Minimize groups. Prefer one-to-one calls if possible.

8. Only connect with others who are using a “Batphone”. In the future we will have tools to help you know the security status of the device you are connecting to. (i.e. Blue for private phone and private cell network, Green for regular phone, etc)

9. Move away from other devices that are not secure, anything with a camera, microphone or wifi/Bluetooth capability when making your Batphone call. Best to close all windows and doors and go out to the garden. Microphones are very sensitive and can pickup conversations up to 10 offices away. Use an ultrasonic microphone jammer like this one from AliExpress near the other devices to overwhelm those mics.

When phones were copper lines and connected to your local Telephone Company, a warrant was required to listen in on conversations. Only criminals were wiretapped — that was what we were told. With the advent of mobile phones and wireless services, a Big Tech layer has been added on top of your phone and internet line — when you click “I agree” to the Terms of Service agreement, you give Big Tech and others permission to collect and use your data. Each app on your phone can have permission to collect your personal data, so long as “You Agree”. No warrant is required if you give permission to share your data, and it can be resold to anyone, including law enforcement.

Your data is being collected everywhere on the internet by thousands of tech companies and application developers, making your private information available to almost anyone who can pay for it.

Multi-billion $ industries are based on your personal and business information. If this data wasn’t valuable, their services would not be free and those companies would be worthless. If you knew all the ways your data was being used, you would not be happy. It turns out you are worth quite a bit of money to someone, or maybe they just want to keep tabs on your whereabouts. With vast, low-Earth orbit satellite fleets covering the Earth, there will be no escape from the surveillance. Here’s a recent story about how the NSA is buying your data from data brokers without a warrant:

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 25 (Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency buys Americans' internet browsing information from commercial brokers without a warrant, the agency's director told Democratic Senator Ron Wyden in a letter made public on Thursday.

Wyden, who released the Dec. 11 letter, called upon U.S. intelligence officials to stop using Americans' personal data without their express knowledge and consent, saying it was unlawful.

There are about 4,000 active data brokers who resell data:

Look carefully. By aggregating data from many sources, a complete picture of almost anyone can be computed. Source: CrackedLabs.org

Let’s think for a minute. If you gave your permission for someone to collect and use your data according to their terms in an app or device….can’t they legally do with your data as they wish? What about information gathered from public places? Like CCTV on the street? What about grabbing unencrypted comms like email from the open internet? (Note: your email is relayed using plain text after it hits the first relay server, the encryption is only from your software client to your server). There are clear court cases in the USA where there is “No Expectation of Privacy in Public”. This is actually a good thing for society, it keeps things in public open and transparent. But where your data is concerned, you need to maintain internet situational awareness and take care or it could end up in the hands of data brokers.

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Someone is buying your information or access to you based on your real time location, who you communicate with, your emails and proximity to others. Everything you type on or say near your phone can be captured. This data collection might be illegal in some places, but remember, once you give someone your permission to do it, it’s 100% legal. After all, it’s your information and you agreed in the Terms of Service to grant them access to it.

Let’s track the data collection and see where it’s going and what you can do to minimize what is collected.

Some people think “I’ve got nothing to hide and nothing to worry about”. Data collection started with security agencies, who have always tracked people of interest for internal and external threats. This was imitated by advertisers and Big Tech, who were financed and advised by these agencies and now collect information on everyone (not just potential threats). The security agencies now have access to a wildly broader source of data that has been collected by Big Tech with permission from…YOU. Now, China, using technology provided by Big Tech, leads the way with a comprehensive social credit system based on the gathering and use of this personal data. A social credit score entirely influences how you are able to interact with society - from transportation to banking, for starters. In China, CCP Party functionaries are rewarded and good people are punished. Also, there is substantial industrial espionage and business interference happening you need to be aware of. I’ll show you one solution we have been developing to create your own Safe Space away from the internet and the intrusion of Big Tech — we call it privateLINE.

privateLINE is a private network that functions like the internet, but away from the internet. We create an encrypted tunnel from your computer to a secure enclave and give you communications applications that only work in the private enclave. You can find out more about it at privateline.io CLICK HERE. We are beginning the ALPHA service and you can click through to the website, then click on any of the “Get…” or “Try…” buttons to sign up to be on the waitlist to try it out.

Data is only valuable when it can be turned into “actionable information”. There are laws about government data collection, but if you enter into a private agreement with Big Tech via CLICK TO ACCEPT, you might have agreed to let them exploit your data extensively. Many of these info gathering techniques originated with security services, but now corporations are in on the act and because you agreed to everything, it is 100% legal. After all, you accepted their terms in exchange for watching a video or using some software. They are after your IP address wherever it appears, your location, as well as any associated phone numbers and email addresses, not to mention whatever subject you are talking about. This happens because the companies that purchase your data will then be able to market products and services to you.

Did you know your conversations are recorded, processed and scored with AI in real time and added to your file? Out in the field at The Ranch, I had a conversation with one of our contractors about a concrete pad. My Android phone was in my pocket and 20 minutes after going inside, I started getting Google Ads for “concrete pads”. Extremely spooky. Everything you say in front of the microphones is being recorded and potentially sold or worse.

The solution is to move away from the internet and keep a private side to your life. You can still maintain a public presence while keeping certain things private. Check out privateLINE for one solution to this problem.

Everything is highly automated with AI and data is collected from:

Networks - Phone carriers and ISP’s have your location, frequency, meta data and frequency with whom you are talking to, which websites you visit and your IP (internet address), phone, email and other data you willingly provided them when you agreed to use their services. Your data also travels over the open internet for things like email, website visits and many other things. These networks not only cooperate with state security agencies (they have to, they are not given a choice — there is really no escape from state security when using public wires or spectrum), but your data is also “brokered” and resold by private companies you willingly gave your data to when you accepted their “Terms of Service”.

We are all subject to having our data accessed by leaks over the internet. For example when you send an email, while it is encrypted on the first hop, your message is sent via plain text for the next dozen mail server relays. Hurricane Electric is a CCP controlled company, it has ~19% of the public internet IP prefixes, so they have control over those IPs. Anything going through a router controlled by companies like this should be assumed to be “phoning home your data” to Beijing. The CCP is doing the same thing every state security service does everywhere, including our NSA and CIA.

The notorious Room 641A at ATT. The NSA “legally” tapped into all internet communications going through the main ATT switch in San Francisco. The internet is a PUBLIC space and in the USA, there is no expectation of privacy in pubic. Rooms like this are installed at most data centers and telcos in the USA, as well as in other countries. This is why you need a Private Network. Photo credit: Wikipedia.

Hardware - Everything runs on hardware and software. Backdoors have been built into nearly every commonly available hardware CPU. Extra goodies also get installed in your hardware on the way from Amazon to your front porch, if you are targeted in any way. Intel, AMD and ARM processors all have an “administrative area”, accessible by wifi and 3G cellular right on the CPU, in addition to whatever network connection you thought you turned off. This is very difficult to avoid, unless you use 15 year old hardware or a custom chip that can be fully audited and secured. This hardware vulnerability can be found on phones, routers, appliances, doorbells, security and traffic cameras, etc.

Operating Systems - All the major OS have issues. Windows, Mac and even Linux have zero day exploits (unreported flaws that can be hacked) and back doors. A new OS or even one that is cleaned up would be a major undertaking.

Applications - Tik Tok is the most obvious offender, but many free applications also track and sell data. When you click “Agree” to let them use your mic, they could be recording you everywhere and sending back data. Mics are very sensitive, they can hear your conversation up to ten offices away. Many applications included with mobile devices do this out of the box. We tested a new phone from China and it was sending 100MB of data per day from 20 different apps we had not even used! Beware!

NOTE: You can sign up to be among the first to test our new privateLINE.io service HERE. This service keeps your communications off the internet in your own private enclave without data collection or tracking.

Internet of Things - Appliances, TV’s, cars and anything with electricity can have hidden trackers and microphones. Data is returned via IoT cell networks, which are completely separated from the internet. China was caught grabbing this data in the USA and nothing was done about it. You have to assume the NSA was making a copy for themselves and their “partners”.

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Here are some of the most obvious ways your information is collected.

1. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). Proving you are not a robot is one thing, but every time that cute grid pops up, your IP address goes right to Google’s Data Centers. Let’s say you are using a certain web site, or app, as soon as the CAPTCHA screen loads — your IP address will be appended to your record at Google. CAPTCHA is so ubiquitous it’s become a meme:

2. Facebook - Facebook is a spying machine that was originally known as Lifelog (created by the CIA), before becoming Facebook. You are tracked through both your “private messages” and what you post on the Facebook site, they also track your visits on other sites with their tools on other sites, such as commenting, buttons and other syndicated features.

Facebook spying is so widespread humorous memes have been created about it.

3. Google - Probably the greatest spy machine ever devised, it tracks you nearly everywhere on the internet, and it also tracks your phone’s location, microphone, camera, photos (with GPS embedded), videos. The microphone routinely listens as long as the phone is turned on and even while it’s sitting unused in your pocket. As mentioned above, I had a conversation with a contractor and twenty minutes later I was getting ads for “concrete pads” (I had only mentioned it to him), never in any email. Google controls 84% of internet search, and much of the web site authentication and tracking. Analytics is used on most sites and all your web site visit data is grabbed there.

Single sign on has been the holy grail for Big Tech. They know every app and web site you have joined and how often you visit when you click on their icon “for convenience”. There is often a price for one click convenience.

4. Zoom video conferencing - Assume everything on Zoom goes back to China and they collect all calls, chats and contacts you are communicating with. Even though they claim to have “cleaned up” these reported problems, it shows a lack of care and you should avoid this app. Don’t take my word for it, this has been very well documented:

Zoom Gets More Popular Despite Worries About Links to China

Zoom Traffic Through China: Company Apologizes, Announces You Can Control Data Routing

STOP using ZOOM or risk being WATCHED by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)

5. Your car - Mozilla and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) did a study of data collected by cars, here is what they found: “Mozilla breaks down four main reasons why it finds car privacy (or lack thereof) so concerning. They are;

   1. They collect too much personal data (all of them)

   2. Most (84%) share or sell your data

   3. Most (92%) give drivers little to no control over their personal data

   4. We couldn’t confirm whether any of them meet our Minimum Security Standards

      Perhaps the most concerning aspect of the study is that each car brand Mozilla tested failed miserably in the privacy test. The foundation finds that cars are collecting more data than necessary for driving, and cars are in a unique position to collect a lot of data about you, since they take you almost everywhere. 

      "They can collect personal information from how you interact with your car, the connected services you use in your car, the car’s app (which provides a gateway to information on your phone), and can gather even more information about you from third party sources like Sirius XM or Google Maps. It’s a mess," the study says. Additionally, over half (56%) of car brands tested will share your data with government agencies or law enforcement from a simple request -- not a formal one. 84% of those tested will share your data, and 76% can sell it.

      It goes beyond just the data from your car and how you drive; how often you speed, the number of “near misses” you had including “hard braking”, etc. That info will be fed to your insurance company and affect your rates. That oil change or any maintenance you just got, the shop records the mileage and that gets sold to the data brokers.

      The takeaway here is that, if you drive a modern car with smart capabilities such as trackers, sensors, camera, and preinstalled apps, it's probably tracking you.” What can you do about it? Drive an older model car. The data collection is built deep into the electronics and it will be difficult to untangle things.

6. Household “Smart” Devices - Your doorbell camera and household devices (Roomba, Alexa, etc) are sure handy, but most are data vacuums, in addition to whatever dirt they clean off your floor. Anything with a camera or microphone can be turned on at any time to listen or watch what’s going on around it. The Ring cameras are quite popular, but who has access to them?

   In some cases, yes. Ring says that it will still cooperate with law enforcement when a search warrant is present, and Ring still has the right to share user data without consent. Ring said in an interview with The Verge that police can request footage in “emergencies” without obtaining a search warrant—making when and how law enforcement obtain footage arguably less transparent than before. I guess it depends on what kind of emergency the police are having….

   Those robo vacuums make nice maps of the inside of your home, in addition to keeping things tidy.

   High-end models of Roomba, iRobot’s robotic vacuum, collect data as they clean, identifying the locations of your walls and furniture. This helps them avoid crashing into your couch, but it also creates a map of your home that iRobot could share with Amazon, Apple or Google.

   And when it comes to Alexa, it’s always listening (if only for the word “Alexa”). The UK Sun reported the surprising sounds that triggered Alexa:

   A SUN investigation today reveals Amazon staff can listen to Alexa recordings of British couples rowing, discussing private family matters — and having sex. The sounds of lovemaking are among noises that can trigger Alexa-activated Echo speakers, which make recordings as users speak to them.

7. Your phone - This is the big one. People carry their phones everywhere. Your phone has a number of ways it can be used to spy on you with the microphone, camera, gps location, and other sensors. This data can reveal many things about you. It used to be you could remove the battery from your phone if you wanted privacy, but that is no longer an option. Batteries are locked inside phones to save on manufacturing costs. The best way to gain privacy is to put the phone out of earshot, which is not easy since phone microphones are very sensitive. A friend was told by someone in a security agency “phone mics can hear everything ten offices away”. We need to be careful. Apps are also spying on you using the sensors and anything else you give them permission to do.

   Most people don't know that by installing a phone app you agree to terms beyond what you may think you agreed to. One example is thinking you're just allowing an app to access your photos. "They don't realize that also included in the things they agreed to are their browsing history, their search history, things they purchased, financial information, health and fitness data," she said.

   A few years ago, another study was done on how much data was being collected:

   New research conducted at Carnegie Mellon University asked 23 users of Android’s version 4.3 to use their smartphone, and tracked requests for location data from each device with specially designed software. The study revealed that many popular Android apps tracked their user nearly 6,200 times per participant over two weeks – that’s every three minutes. The study found that apps asked for more data than was needed. The participants received daily messages telling them how many times their personal information lists had been shared, and some privacy nudges were particularly alarming. For example, over just a few days your location could have been shared 5,398 times with Groupon, Facebook, and more. One participant reacted to these nudges by saying that he felt like he was being followed by his own phone. The amount of location information shared can be quite alarming.

   That there is a mountain of data on you collected every day should not be surprising, and once it goes to a data broker, it will be sold to anyone with money.

NOTE: You can sign up to be among the first to test our new privateLINE.io service HERE. This service keeps your communications off the internet in your own private enclave without data collection or tracking.

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The safest way to communicate is to go out in the woods far away from all electronics and whisper in someone’s ear. No one can hear you and you know the message was received.

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That might be safe, but it isn’t practical for those not in close proximity to the other person — after all, if someone was down the hall, you could just walk over and say hello. For the rest of us, communications technology is quite handy and immediate when we are at a distance. The safest way for us to communicate is over a private network, away from the internet.

A private network isolates you from the internet and its many threats while prevent censorship of your valuable communications and helping protect your financial transactions.

Your typical VPN and “secure messenger” over the internet - they aren’t everything they are promoted to be as you will see. What can you do about this? We’ve been working hard on developing a tech solution we call Private Line.

Is Encryption Secure?

Sure it’s secure…if you are trying to keep out the local high school hacker and maybe low level criminal gangs. Use logic. If encryption was so secure that “they” could not get into it, would “they” let you have it? No. Encryption needs to be strong enough to keep certain threats out but allow certain security agencies to have full transparency of everything. Otherwise encryption could be used like a weapon (against people like WEF Prof. Schwab and his friends). Here is how they think:

“In this new world, we must accept transparency, and I’ll even say total transparency. Everything is going to be transparent, and you have to get used to it, you have to behave accordingly. It becomes, how should I put it, integrated into your personality, but if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be afraid.”

How are bank systems like the SWIFT Network secured? I ran into someone who had worked for SWIFT, traveling the world installing network and security software at banks who were joining their network. She told me that she had two handlers; one from NSA, the other from the CIA. Each spy watched over her and the other spy to be sure no one was putting anything malicious into the system. After all, spies and bankers trust no one, especially not spies nor bankers. They were using special bank grade cryptography, which has far greater security than the public is permitted to use. This also shows the level of cooperation between banking and spying, something discovered early on by the Rothschilds.

Commercial services must exist in the “Bank” level or below. Operate a “weapon” level service and you will be out of business. “Military Grade” means the military and others can get in — the data is fully transparent to certain groups but not to anyone else. Big Tech lives in the Open Source world, where software is engineered to solve problems while collecting your data at the same time.

The Myth of VPN’s

What about VPN’s? They are not as private as you think. When I tell people this, you can see the sadness in their eyes…they truly believed they actually had privacy. Sorry for that.

A friend who consults on these matters had done research on VPN’s and he shared some information with me (paraphrased from his email to protect his confidence):

Research using tools like DNSlytics, Netlas, and others suggest
that more than 65 percent of VPN operators use the M247 infrastructure
for end points from VPNs. Customers include several famous internet brand names we will not mention here, NOTE: if you carefully examine the egress points of your VPN, you should be able to see if they use M247.

The M247 operates primarily out of Bucharest, Romania. A map
of the firm's "servers" and "points of presence" is available at LINK and HERE.

In October 2016, Metronet acquired M247, for about US$52 million LINK. People running Metronet came from UK telcos. It is important to note that UK based telcos and ISPs allegedly cooperate fully with the UK National Crime Agency and GCHQ (UK’s version of NSA).

NOTE: Once the USA, UK, Israel, Japan, Australia, Canada and New Zealand have something, they all have access to it. It’s no longer FIVE EYES, it’s now SEVEN EYES.

At Unseen we built a hardware based VPN. Within a year of release, these were banned in China and Russia — I guess that means they worked. One of our customers told us our hardware VPN was the only VPN he couldn’t detect and he had tested 60 VPNs. Everyone else used standard OpenVPN and other software tools that left clear signatures in the data, which is how they were detected. There’s a very good chance we might bring something similar to this to our network.

Regular VPN’s dump you out on the Internet in other places and countries. You are still facing the same spying and threats of the internet when using a VPN because you are again on the open internet. Only when you connect directly to a server itself are you secure.

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Secure Messengers

Signal users went into a tizzy when the CEO of Signal started begging for money because the main source of funding for them was a branch of the US government and it was drying up. The US government doesn’t spend money unless it achieves their goals and I believe these were related to giving secure comms to certain overseas groups who were opposed to their local governments. It’s also a handy honeypot for domestic security, as well. Their annual budget for personnel was about $19m for about 50 staff LINK, in addition to hosting and storage costs. That’s about $380,000 per employee. We should all wish to work at Signal, LOL. There are a number of eye-openers on that blog post from Signal.

Here’s a video you need to watch, if you use We Chat, Signal or Telegram. It’s a person speaking to the Scottish parliament and most who see this have a sudden epiphany, like finding out Santa isn’t real:

The shock was apparent from everyone I sent this video to admitting that the government (and implying all of them) have access to these messages.

I don’t need to say another word about secure messengers, since this is right from the horse’s mouth. Apparently, end to end encryption and everything else about these messengers was a joke.

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Hardware, Software and Networks

Hardware is nearly all corrupted in several places. The most obvious is the CPU — all major CPU’s have an administrative section which has God mode powers along with wifi and 3G access built in, separate from the wifi, cellular or ethernet access. Originally installed in x86 processors, this is now a “feature” of all current CPU’s, though it might not be called Management Engine.

Here’s an article that discusses the “Management Engine” back door:

The EFF described Intel ME as a “largely undocumented master controller for your CPU: it works with system firmware during boot and has direct access to system memory, the screen, keyboard and network.”

Back in June 2016, hardware hacker Damien Zammit warned, “Recent Intel x86 processors implement a secret, powerful control mechanism that runs on a separate chip that no one is allowed to audit or examine. When these are eventually compromised, they’ll expose all affected systems to nearly unkillable, undetectable rootkit attacks.”

Translation: someone with access to this God mode basically owns your computer and can see and hear everything happening on it. All major CPU’s have this “feature”. ARM, inside your phone, AMD and of course Intel Inside. Intel processors have had hidden wifi and 3G connections for many years.

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Here are some general rules of thumb about Big Tech spying:

-Assume your phone is always listening. Google spies on everything you say. I’ve personally experience talking with my Android phone in my pocket about pouring a concrete pad and 20 minutes later got ads for concrete pads when I went back inside. All Big Tech does this. Taking your battery out used to be an easy way to stop this when you needed more privacy, but batteries are no longer removable. That was handy for Big Tech, wasn’t it?

-Most devices with electricity could be used for eavesdropping and they connect via cellular IoT bands. IoT is the last unregulated area of the internet and it has billions of devices connected to it. This includesTV’s (which have both cameras and microphones), ovens, washing machines, stereos, etc.. Eavesdropping can be done remotely or through apps on your device. In the case of TV’s the easiest fix is to put a piece of tape over the camera. The microphones used in these devices are dirt cheap, so they will be put everywhere. A friend with a relative at a Chinese security agency told me they can hear ten offices away through a phone microphone. It’s not only your devices spying on you, it’s everything else around you.

-Avoid electronics made by Chinese firms. Here is one case of a clothes iron that had a wifi hacking device inside that sends spam and malware to your network LINK.

-Disable anything with Google. Apple is a little better, but since Steve died, many things he would have forbidden have no doubt been compromised.

The internet is a collection of private networks connected to each other. Everything works well, as long as everyone cooperates. In unstable times, however, things start to break down and it’s time to “lock the gate”.

Policies of each network affect what you can do on the network and this is becoming a problem with de-platforming and censorship. Additionally, the openness of the networks allow security agencies, Big Tech and hackers to collect data and censor data easily. One way to do this is to hack an existing router, or in the case of security agencies, to install a router in line at the data center. We saw this at Xoom.com in 1997, with a special NSA room at our ISP that was collecting all email and web site visits. No one is the wiser while everything is vacuumed up — and of course the ISP is paid well for this service. No one knows where all that data goes, as it’s shared among different agencies who no doubt trade it with others and even sell it for profit.

The Internet is Becoming Adversarial

The internet has become adversarial and most of the threats you need to worry about are on the public internet. What is not well known is we are entering the next phase of the information war which involves the direct censorship and the altering of information. If you can’t get a message through in the first place, whatever level of security you have on that message is worthless. What is needed is a private network for Anti-censorship and the network is the key to getting your message through.

Routers carry your information and because they are exposed to the public internet, they are a major potential problem, as this screen grab shows. In 2014, Edward Snowden talked about router hacking and toolkits that allow access to Quality of Service (QoS) settings inside the router and many other functions. Just hack in and lower the QoS and you can block access to a web site, like this screenshot demonstrates:

This is an MTR chart, it shows the path of packets of information from your computer to the server you are trying to reach. In this case, two routers at Hurricane Electric in California, which is alleged to be affiliated with the CCP, dropped 75% and 89% of the packets, making communications impossible. This kind of attack destroyed Unseen — customers could not reach our server and they requested refunds. You should expect to see missing email, phone calls and blockages to become more frequent.

Big Tech Spying is Ubiquitous

A friend who is a contractor for Google told me Google does not allow their vendors to use Gmail and other public facing services when communicating with Google. LOL! I guess the spying is so bad they won’t even use the services themselves.

Data is collected from the entire internet by Big Tech. No one has any idea what it is exactly used for or who it is shared with. Here are some examples of data collection you might not be aware of:

• CAPTCHA - those cute grids that have become popular memes, they collect your IP address every time you solve them.

CAPTCHAS are ubiquitous to the point they are now used for jokes.

• fonts - collecting your IP from every web page the fonts are on.

• DNS (Google and Cloudflare)- collecting your IP and sites you visit

• Open source software - has had trackers installed. Where are the code reviewers?

Private Networks Will Play a Key Role in Your Personal and Business CyberSecurity

Here is the big picture:

Existing devices such as cellular phones, laptops and desktop computers can access Private Line’s enclave for services such as private chat, calling and file sharing, as well as other applications like crypto wallets, financial applications, marketplaces and forums. All are sequestered inside the firewall and are not accessible to the public internet. Away from threats of the internet and Big Tech.

If things become bad on the Internet, we will build our own private Internet for our clients, colleagues, friends and family. A place for members only, with our own terms of service, privacy policies and without censorship. We call it Private Line and we hope you will come along for this exciting journey!

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“Where have the messages gone?” That’s going to be the real question after everyone realizes everything they said in those “private” comm applications have been collected.

So much for privacy and security. No need for any code reviews….it’s now out there for anyone to see for themselves. If they “have it”, by definition whatever the code was is worthless, regardless what any “security expert” tells you. If that’s true in the UK, it’s true in USA and everywhere else in the world. You have been notified!

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“The Scottish Government has not handed over any WhatsApp messages to the UK Covid Inquiry. It comes after indiscreet UK Government communications sent on the app during the pandemic were made public. The Inquiry heard that key decision makers did use WhatsApp but that very few messages appear to have been retained. Lawyers raised questions about why messages were deleted.”

Good thing there are people working on a real solution to privacy, using private networks. I’ll have more about this in the near future.

Remember, if a phone number is required to use something, that is a UNIQUE_ID for your personal record. Most public encryption isn’t as good as you have been told.

Without real privacy, there is no civil society. Your private writings are your private property. When privacy is gone, lots of people gain access to your private things….they are no longer your property at that point. In fact, this is about private property.

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As for free traffic from search engines, social media and other Big Tech properties, you cannot rely on the people who fundamentally oppose what you stand for to help promote your things. Many times they want to destroy you and they won’t tell you, it’ll just happen. If you are being cancelled, you should listen to this article, it might seriously help you build your idea, business or web site.

Two weeks after President Trump won the 2016 election, one of our companies was permanently banned by Google’s Ad Sense, where we had been running for five years, for basically allowing some of our users to post positive stories about a political candidate. Google kept the $3000 they owed us and “returned it to the advertisers” on a technicality. After burning up 5m+ of our ad impressions. They did this to 200 other sites at the same time. Big Tech is like a rattlesnake. Never trust it and do not turn your back on it.

There are many techniques that don’t need Big Tech to grow traffic, but have been forgotten because people today all rely on the Big Guys for traffic since it’s “easy”. Of course, if you can get some free promotion from Big Tech…take it! I’m not saying don’t SEO…if it can help, you do it. However, you’ll also need to be mindful of “dirty tricks” that can be used to destroy your traffic.

So far, these web traffic building techniques have been used to:

• Build a top 20 traffic web directory site that was acquired by Lycos (built for less than $300k in 1995 when web tools were non-existent, everything scratch built).

• Build the #13 site on the internet at the time, the original Xoom.com which IPO’d, starting with nothing and using less than $10m (which was mostly spent on hardware). Compared to $100m for most IPO’s of that era.

• Double the sales of Wine.com in one year with virtually no advertising spend.

• Build Before It’s News from zero to 8m unique visits per month with zero marketing spend.

• Get the Unseen private and secure communications system based in Iceland to breakeven with over 10,000 paying customers before it was destroyed by the Deep State (dirty tricks).

Others have had similar success with these methods, but you must focus on becoming a destination, not a colony. Control your destiny. When people wake up in the morning or when they are looking for what you have, they should go directly to your web site, not to a search engine who is loyal only to the highest bidder and won’t care if you go out of business when they send your user to your competitor’s site. Facebook encouraged businesses to send all their clients to Facebook because it was easy for the small business to reach their customers on Facebook. Once everyone had a Facebook account, they pulled the rug and now Facebook charges you to reach the very customers you handed to them. Outrageous!!!! Snakes!!!

Here are some of the rules I’ve found that helped me to build a destination internet site or business:

1. FREE is a very good price.

Giving things away for free drives a lot of traffic. Everyone does this and it’s obvious. But it’s still one of the most powerful marketing tools ever invented and new examples come up all the time. Never underestimate FREE.

(The late Tom Peterson who owned appliance stores in Portland Oregon used to say this in late night TV ads. This saying outlasted the man and his business, it’s pure genius!)

The Tom Peterson wrist watch was given away for free when you bought an appliance from Tom and it’s now a collectible. Kurt Cobain, lead singer for Nirvana, wore one. What can you give people that is incredibly valuable to your users, but costs you almost nothing? That is a WIN-WIN.

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2. You can do it all yourself

-but-

You can do it faster, bigger and better if others come to help.

What sounds better; a one-man-band or a symphony orchestra? If you can get your users/viewers to help, it can be amazing and many will want to help for free. If you can pay a little, you’ll get even more help. Don’t be an island, be an army.

3. Be a destination, not a colony

Never become a big tech colony. Ever. If you rely on Big Tech, it’s only a matter of time before there is a “rug pull” and you are left high and dry, or they start charging you a lot of money. Treasure your independence and your users/customers will also treasure you. Always maintain a direct relationship with your audience/customers to the extent you can.

This video, “The Saint of Second Chances” will show you the power of fandom and a bit of how innovative marketing techniques were successfully used in professional baseball — it’s a touching personal story as well. I recommend it and think you will enjoy it.

4. Test, then invest

Never waste money. Wasting money is a sin. Someone traded their virtue for the money you are spending, use it wisely and show some respect — you might wish you had the money you wasted in the future. Take good care of your customers and users, they are your family.

5. Two days are a trend

Never, ever waste time. Make decisions based on hard data and make these decisions as soon as you have the information. Wasting time is a bigger sin than wasting money. You can always make more money, but you can never make more time. If something is not working, stop spending time and money on it immediately. If something works, figure out why and do more of that.

6. Focus your mind (a clean and clear mind)

Make your core message clear, make it attractive, repeat the message and get your customers and users to repeat it often, as well. With a clear goal and a Unique Selling Proposition that you can say in five words or less, everyone will pull the wagon in the same direction.

7. If it isn’t measured, it isn’t managed

Capture data everywhere you can. Tools are now so commonplace and free or cheap there is no excuse for doing it. Pay attention to these numbers, focusing on the KPI drivers for your business. Watch hourly and daily. Set alarms for things like broken pages/web sites. Watch your site like a hawk and listen carefully to customers.

The Traffic Motor Concept

This is a concept our team first developed at Point Communications and it channeled the inner Engineer inside me — we created it even before the term KPI (key performance indicators) came about. It’s an incredibly simple and very powerful concept which combines marginal analysis (daily percent growth) with exponential compounding . It gives you a tool to analyze on the back of an envelope how you are doing every day and it can help you achieve constant improvement. It’s so simple, everyone on your team will know your numbers and goals. The whole team will look for problems and solutions.

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When you first start a gasoline engine, every cylinder needs to fire properly at the right time. To start, it gets a boost from the starter motor, spinning from nothing and then it’s a little bumpy when it first starts until it reaches running speed….just like your web site or business. There’s a flywheel, a circular weight attached to the driveshaft on the engine, that helps maintain momentum and smooths out the motion. The Traffic Motor I’m talking about is similar in that once it functions well, your website or business will “maintain speed” on it’s own. Then you can concentrate on making it go faster by better tuning, adding new features or adding more inputs (fuel).

Exponential Compounding is the Secret

The first thing you must understand is the power of compounding. Web site traffic grows exponentially, it compounds and grows on itself. You could say it’s biological. Measure your Key Performance Indicators (web visits, pages, sales, etc) on a daily basis. If your site is lively and growing, there are things you can do to grow things consistently and speed things up. A tiny difference in daily improvement adds up fast over a year. Everything is “on the margin”, that is where the improvement is monitored. Is the screen green (up) or red (down) and how much. You must watch the daily total numbers growth RATES to know what is happening. This is the discipline you must instill in your team in everything you do. EVERY DAY MATTERS!!

To give an example, if you can grow your web traffic by 1% a day, in one year you will have grown 24X!!

Lets’ say you can only do 0.5% growth per day. After one year you will still have grown 5.5X!!

2% daily growth for a year is almost 1500X!!!

Here’s a chart of daily growth of 2.0% (blue), 1.5% (red), 1.0% (yellow), 0.75%, 0.5% and 0.25% after a year. A measly 1% can add up to a big number!

The first thing you notice is the huge difference once you can go over 1.0% daily growth — this should be your goal “I want to grow at least 1% every day”. This is very difficult for you to consistently achieve, but even if you can only do it for small percentage of the days in a year, it’ll still make a big difference as you can see from the graph. When you are starting out, you will have some 5% and 10% growth days, as you get key links from partners, or maybe a search engine kicked in and it’s possible you get some “blackbirds” too, so don’t lose faith if you have some bad and negative growth days. Pick yourself up and dust off, then get back to it. The next important thing is if you can move out to the right on the curve, say by spending on some promotion or adding a new traffic recirculation feature, you can move your base down the curve saving a lot of time. Money can save time…if you have it.

This system starts with daily improvement and measurement, feeding back results immediately so you don’t waste any time and maximize your growth, it moves you to a higher curve and further down the curve (to a higher level) as well. Keep in mind you will encounter seasonality and even weekly variation. Compare like days (e.g. Mondays to Mondays) and always compare to the previous day and month ago as well. Weekends typically have 50% of the traffic of a week day. Mondays are slower than Tuesdays and of course if some big disaster hits, that’s going to have an effect, as well. Keep your own spreadsheet so you can track day by day and do “what if” projection models for new recirculation or promotion ideas.

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The best way I have found to visualize your site/business is the control volume concept and it works well when applied to the daily compounding model. It’s easy to track everything coming in and going out:

1. Draw a box around your website or business (like I did for the traffic motor, which we will build inside your website or business)

2. Add arrows for traffic coming in, a different arrow for each source, including things you pay for. You are going to carefully track traffic, user data and money on a daily basis. This is like high tech “barrel accounting”. Before double entry bookkeeping was created by the Venetians, this is how accounting was done and it works. All cash was thrown into the barrel and all expenses also came out of the barrel. Did the pile in the barrel go up or down (profit or loss)?

3. Add arrows out for traffic leaving and the money you collect from ads, sales or donations. Same as #2 above, but going out.

4. Don’t forget the key is Traffic Recirculation: email and other notifications to return people to your site (this is KEY) and suggested pages to visit next. The goal is to get as many page views from a visit as possible and to return visitor directly to your site….without paying the Big Tech vampires anymore than you must.

Let’s go through these one at a time:

Traffic IN. What are your traffic sources? There are many free sources of traffic, the best are referring links from other web sites. If you have something of interest to another site, you could propose a link exchange with the other site. We did this for several years until the ad model made web traffic a revenue generator. Here’s a list of traffic sources (a good tool like analytics can monitor performance…you will need to come up with the actual traffic ideas):

• Direct - people typing in the URL in the browser or using a bookmark. A good and easy to spell and say name goes a long way.

• Link exchange - be sure the exchange is fair and similarly trafficked or you could drain traffic from your site.

• Membership list - daily emails bring loyal viewers back to your site. Most of the largest web properties like Facebook were built using email notifications. If you are not forming a direct email relationship with your users and relying on social media notifications you could get into trouble. Your membership email list is a key part of what you need to promote your site.

• Content syndication with link back. Do not give all content away like this, probably no more than 20% will preserve your site’s integrity.

• There are probably 20 or more other places you can pick up traffic that are beyond the scope of this article. Many very talented people are out there and they know more than I do about this, so do a bit of research.

Cash IN - This is the place to watch as it is money leaving your pocket.

Traffic OUT - You want this as low as possible, but all visits must come to an end. Carefully watch analytics for leaks of traffic. Dead pages, 404’s, etc. that get people to bail.

Cash OUT (Revenue) - You’ll get to this part after you have traffic. Focus on the traffic first, conversion to sale (goods, services or subscriptions) and advertising sales once your traffic motor is established. Make sure everything actually works and when you see the money hit the bank, that’s a good first step. You will want to constantly check and watch the revenue. I used to watch it hourly at Xoom.com and go running down the hall to find an engineer to fix things if they broke. Broken things cost money.

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Looking back in hindsight at this blog post from almost ten years ago, it is now obvious to me that encryption is being used as a psyop to convince people they are “safe and secure” when they use approved software/technology. In reality, the public is only allowed to use technology that can be tracked, monitored and turned off at will by someone. This goes for your computers, cars, appliances and phones. The “Internet of Things” and soon “The Internet of People” will have all of these “features”.

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**************

We’ve met some VERY interesting people in our journey with Unseen.is.  We’ve connected with active hackers, cryptographers, former contractors (not Edward Snowden, but people like him in some regards), technologists at the largest companies, etc.  People are all fascinated by what we’re trying to do — it’s really a work in progress, but it gets better every day.  The goal of course is to give people some real security for their valuable communications.

When we tell people “if it’s publicly available, it’s already cracked”, quite a few people don’t believe us.  That’s OK, you just haven’t had a chance to listen in on the conversations we’ve had with people in a position to know what’s really happening.  There is theory and then there’s reality.  We look at the results.

One person we’ve spoken to told us there were four kinds of encryption;

1.  Toy encryption.  This is stuff used by school kids and is so easy to break, it’s like a joke.  Sadly, some of this kind of very weak stuff is still in use where stronger crypto should be used.

2. Pretty Good Encryption.  This is allowed to be exported around the world and it’s all broken by the major security services who have distributed tools to other countries and probably by some of the largest criminal gangs, too.  It includes the standard encryption most people know about, i.e. RSA, AES, SSL, etc.

3.  Bank Grade Encryption.  These are less publicly known or less crippled algorithms used by the largest corporations and banks that need real security.  Export is strictly forbidden from the US, though local laws vary in different countries.  Not easy to find.

4. Weapon.  This is the highest grade and the security agencies consider this to be a weapon on par with atomic weapons and those kinds of secrets.  We’ve known a couple of people who were told to stop working in cryptography.  They either join the “team” or shut down. There is no private business in weapons grade cryptography.

Who said this? The CTO of a modestly large cell carrier. After he asked if we “had a bodyguard”.

Are “weapons” like this illegal?  Actually, isn’t that admitting that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword? How could something that’s purely defensive, like encryption, be used offensively like some kind of weapon? Isn’t that changing the definition to control the discussion and twist the meaning? That’s the sort of thing they used to do in the former Soviet Union under communism, turn the truth on its head purely for political gain and more power over people. We don’t see how encryption could ever be a “weapon”, it’s really just an envelope other people can’t open. So in that regard it’s more of a shield that can be used to protect your personal, owned by you information.

In the U.S., the first amendment lets you have freedom of speech and it doesn’t say how you have to speak.  People there are also allowed to own real weapons — quite a few people own and carry guns in the U.S.  We were told that you might win in court there, as none of these things are against the law in most places (from what our lawyers tell us) and they are all definitely legal in Iceland.  However, there is a point where things go “beyond the legal system” and extra-legal violence becomes reality.   Night time visitors carrying flashlights in the dark and that sort of thing.

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This is a question I hear a lot. The creation of Bitcoin is surrounded in mystery, so people imagine a lot of things. Money has always been used as a weapon, so security agencies get involved to help protect this most valuable state asset. Only the people who made Bitcoin know exactly who made Bitcoin for certain, but I'm going to share my assessment with you and you can come to your own conclusions.

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The original Bitcoin white paper and initial blog posts were written by Satoshi Nakamoto. Everyone agrees with that. The name is obviously fake, it's a pseudonym for a group of people who created Bitcoin and didn't want their names to be known. People have searched for Satoshi and he's a ghost.

Some of you may have heard of the 1996 NSA paper "HOW TO MAKE A MINT: THE CRYPTOGRAPHY OF ANONYMOUS ELECTRONIC CASH" which outlines the potential requirements of digital currencies. A Zerohedge post has more detail on this paper, as well as their reasoning why they believe the NSA built Bitcoin.

I'm going to explore another approach that hasn't been discussed much, the legal and regulatory angle. The question that has been in the back of my mind for several years is "why hasn't Bitcoin been shut down yet?" I've spoken with many bankers and they all told me "we think bitcoin doesn't follow the KYC and AML regulations all banks have to follow". Legally, anyone who handles money as a business is required to keep record of suspicious transactions, report all cash transactions over $10,000 and if you are an issuer of digital currencies, you need to register at a minimum with FinCEN and possibly obtain licenses with states as well. (This, by the way, is the reason banks won’t touch Bitcoin, they have no idea what kinds of shady business it has been involved in. ) Yet Bitcoin didn't do any of this -- with Bitcoin, you can send millions of dollars in a click with no ID. There is no company, no legal contract with terms of service to use it, there is nothing, just some software that's maintained by a community. It wasn't deemed to be money, a commodity or security (yet). The IRS settled on property, they needed a way to tax it.

When Bitcoin began, the coins had zero value and they have always been self-issued by the software. The network is anonymous and distributed and the people who originally created it were nameless cryptography hackers. No one dared to put their real name on the project because if it became valuable one day, they knew what was at stake. They knew what the US Treasury did to the founder of e-gold, an early digital currency who tried to operate legally.

When regulators looked at the laws and regulations they have to work with, Bitcoin was like water. There was nothing to grab onto, nobody to take to court, no centralized service to shutter and because of the cryptographic security, no way to directly confiscate the coins. Getting a new law passed by congress takes a long time and that won't happen until the dust settles. In the meantime, crypto grows by leaps and bounds.

The key to Bitcoin is the way the coins self-issue, to someone who can remain anonymous, based on a random guess of a hash (known as mining). This solved the double spending problem with digital currencies, but more importantly, it's LEGALLY COMPLIANT!!! The miner who solves the puzzle in a race against other miners is rewarded by the software automatically. No person or entity makes this decision, it's automatically decided by the software. Download the software, do some work and get coins. It’s a lottery. Run the software more and get more “tickets” and a greater chance to win.

That is no accident and very subtle. There are easier and much cheaper ways to secure a digital currency via consensus and other means, and you can give coins away using a variety of ways. However, being completely decentralized with anonymous mining and automatic random software issuance means there is no issuer and nothing to regulate. If there was a central issuer sending out coins once they have some value they will certainly fall under a variety of laws and the issuer would need to have money transmission licenses or a bank license. The two available loopholes to coin developers who don't want to spend tens of millions on compliance are to either give all the coins away while the value is zero or have the coins self-issue via mining, lottery or other means.

There is one final aspect. Nothing in modern society can get over a certain size, say $1 billion in total value or revenue per year, without someone's approval. I'm not talking about legal approval, and I'm not going to say any more about this subject. Bitcoin was clearly used by this group as an experiment and they are now prepared to roll out the real Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

Because of the cryptographic and legal sophistication, the people who have the capability to pull this off -- nearly all cryptographers are heavily recruited for agency work, many by multiple countries -- plus the tacit "approval" to get things up to almost $400+B in market cap (as of Oct 3, 2022) -- that tells me it's people associated with a security agency who originally built Bitcoin. I'm not saying 100% NSA because there were a lot of talented hands in the creation of Bitcoin. Most importantly, that means there are still a lot of good people at security agencies!

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We’ve met some VERY interesting people in our journey with Unseen.is.  We’ve connected with active hackers, cryptographers, former security agency contractors (not Edward Snowden, but people like him in some regards), technologists at the largest companies, etc.  People are all fascinated by what we’re trying to do with secure communications at Unseen.is — it’s really a work in progress, but it gets better every day.  The goal of course is to give people some real security for their valuable communications.

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When we tell people “if it’s publicly available, it’s already cracked”, quite a few people don’t believe us.  That’s OK, you just haven’t had a chance to listen in on the conversations we’ve had with people in a position to know what’s really happening.  There is theory and then there’s reality.  We look at the results.

One person we’ve spoken to told us there were four kinds of encryption;

1.  Toy encryption.  This is stuff used by school kids and is so easy to break — an example would be the Caesar cypher, where you add a number to a letter to change its position, e.g. A +3 = D and so one with other letters. Just reverse the process to decode, e.g. D -3 = A. Good for fun only.

2. Publicly Available Encryption.  This is allowed to be exported around the world and it’s all broken by the major security services who have distributed tools to other countries and probably by some of the largest criminal gangs have stolen these tools as well.  This includes the standard encryption most people know about that is in every day use, i.e. RSA, AES, SSL, etc.

3.  Bank Grade Encryption.  These are less publicly known algorithms or upgraded Publicly Available Encryption and they are used by the largest corporations and banks that need real security.  Export is strictly forbidden from the US, though local laws vary in different countries.  You won’t find this, it’s kept under lock and key with agency “minders” sent along to make sure everything stays under lock and key.

4. Weapon.  This is the highest grade and the security agencies consider this to be a weapon on par with atomic weapons and those kinds of secrets.  We’ve known a couple of people who were told to stop working in cryptography.  They either join the “team” or shut down.

Are “weapons” like this illegal?  Actually, isn’t that admitting that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword? How could something that’s purely defensive, like encryption, be used offensively like some kind of weapon? Isn’t that changing the definition to control the discussion and twist the meaning? That’s the sort of thing they used to do in the former Soviet Union under communism, turn the truth on its head purely for political gain and to gain more power over people. We don’t see how encryption could ever be a “weapon”, it’s really just an envelope other people can’t open. So in that regard it’s more of a shield that can be used to protect your personal, owned by you information.

Keep in mind, agencies have many ways to break into your computer. They have zero day exploits (security bugs they know about but the world hasn’t yet discovered), holes in applications, operating systems and even built in back doors in most hardware (Intel, AMD, ARM, etc) using 3G IoT communications, wifi, etc. Water leaks in wherever there is a hole to get through. Take a waterproof item and plunge it in water…it’s guaranteed you will find the leak!

In the U.S., the first amendment lets you have freedom of speech and it doesn’t say how you have to speak.  People there are also allowed to own real weapons, quite a few people own and carry guns in the U.S.  We were told that you might win in court there, as none of these things are against the law in most places (from what our lawyers tell us) and they are all definitely legal in Iceland. These sorts of things never see the light of day in a public court — secret courts exist everywhere in the world, even in Iceland (see an Icelander’s shocked face!).  However, there is a point where things go “beyond the legal system” and extra-legal violence becomes reality.   Night time visitors carrying flashlights in the dark, the black SUV “truck roll” and that sort of thing. Be careful!

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Randomness is the basis of many aspects of cryptography.  It’s used as a key part of nearly all encryption algorithms to generate keys and many cryptographers will tell you privately that they don’t know if that’s where the major weakness is for cryptography, but they have their suspicions.  If that’s true, the lack of true “randomness” could be a major weakness in encryption.

Looking at our world, everything around us seems chaotic, random and jumbled.  But is it?  Car horns honk, static noise on the radio, people walking on the street, all of these things look random. However, science has discovered the existence of other dimensions that exist in micro-cosmic spaces which is why you can’t see them.  Scientists can’t see them either, but they have proven this mathematically.  If there’s math that demonstrates the existence of these hidden dimensions, couldn’t math also be used to “see” things in these higher or lower dimensions?  If you can navigate through a number field in another dimension that isn’t random looking, won’t that help you find your way out of the maze? It would be like going up in a hot air balloon to look down at the maze to very clearly see the correct path out.

That’s one principle of discovering the true nature of randomness, finding a mathematical relationship between the things that appear random and converting them into a much simpler formula that shows the true, underlying order to these things.  With the correct formula, you could see through the randomness and use that knowledge to “predict” with some precision or even certainty a set of results that would remove some or all of the randomness from the equation.  Even narrowing down the possible solutions can make encryption a lot easier to break using today’s desktop computers, not to mention quantum computers.

Viewing things from a higher level, things that appear random and chaotic are actually very clear and well ordered.  Buddhism teaches this aspect of wisdom, from Sakyamuni through many enlightened people today, they’ll say things like “everything is very well ordered” and “nothing happens without reason”.   They are able to look into these other dimensions and when they do so without any intention, the truth of the universe is very clearly seen. Religions have posited this for millennia. “God has a plan”, meaning everything is very carefully arranged by God.

These observations by calm and rational minds point out something very important;  if nothing is truly random, where can you look to see the order?  People with abilities to “see” into other dimensions point out a way to break through “randomness” and to see the order.  You can learn more about that in this book, link: Zhuan Falun.  High level math and super and quantum computers can explore this area today and break through the “randomness”, which makes it possible to substantially lower the number of possible solutions to a cypher.  Not everyone working at Unseen.is (note: Unseen.is is defunct, but the technology will live on in other forms) is a cryptography expert, though we have a few who are expert in this domain.  However, most of the people at Unseen.is do meditate, so we understand this principle from another angle.

If high powered computing power available to various security agencies can “look into” or simulate other dimensions to see through “randomness”, breaking encryption is a much simpler task.  Then the issue becomes one of obfuscation, hiding things in plain sight.  ”I didn’t see it, but it was right in front of me” comes to mind.

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