On Cyber-Vulnerabilities In Oklahoma
The Uninsured Vehicle Enforcement Diversion (UVED) Program is a statewide initiative aimed at reducing the number of uninsured vehicles on Oklahoma roadways, but is that all it does?
Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash
By framersqool:
‘A uniquely dangerous tool’: How Google's data can help states track abortions
Ten states where ending a pregnancy is now illegal have sent the search giant more than 5,700 demands for location tracking data since 2018 — showing the data's potential usefulness to authorities enforcing abortion bans.
From reading this article I have learned a new term: geofence warrant.
According to its enclosed chart, since 2018, the year the District Attorneys Council's UVED warrantless surveillance program was launched, the State of Oklahoma has sent 100 of these warrants to Google, demanding (apparently, and presumably among other types of data) geolocation data on individuals and organizations which use various types of devices and software provided or managed by Google/Alphabet and its subordinate concerns.
While I am anything but an expert on the topics of cybersecurity or cyber-surveillance, I have recently taken greatly increased interest in acquiring at least a general knowledge of what capabilities and vulnerabilities exist, in the post-Roe-v-Wade, post-"special military operation" world we all now live in.
The preponderance of my research in these areas now leads me to a number of conclusions:
- that the nature and scope of cyberattacks (and vulnerabilities to them) by now reach far, far beyond merely any existing risk to the now-antique modus operandi of shutting down IT systems and then demanding ransom payments in cryptocurrency;
- that the current DC administration and its myriad federal bureaucracies, each thoroughly dominated by the Democratic Party and its stated ideological goals, have since the inauguration of the current President taken a greatly intensified interest both in expanding federal cyber-capabilities and in consolidating those of the States under the watchful eye of various federal agencies, for whatever intended purposes;
- that all the States are by now so deeply invested in their own cyber-mechanisms at every level of their governance, and thereby commensurately vulnerable to every type of cyber-incursion which might confront them, that the imminent investiture of federal grants programs, such as those currently on offer from CISA and other federal agencies, is already a reality that every State is facing;
- that a perfect-storm alignment of the existing history of cyber-incursions, the invasion of Ukraine, the ongoing suspicion of Russian meddling in (at least) the previous two national elections, the handing-down of the Dobbs ruling in the US Supreme Court, the current tenure of a Democratic president who campaigned at least in part on promises of expanding federal cybersecurity capabilities, the ever-widening ideological chasm and attendant mutual hostilities and suspicions between the two major parties in American politics, and the current mad scramble to fill new federal employment positions in the cyber-arena being met with a crippling shortage of applicants to result in a certainty of the lowering of vetting standards faced by any such applicants, has now presented every level of American governance with a complex of new issues to confront which make 2018, the year the DAC/UVED program was launched, so far back in ancient history that the year 2018 may as well be the seventeenth century, in terms of how relevant 2018-level thinking about the cyber-universe is, by now;
- and that an apparently permanent domination of Oklahoma governance and internal politics by the Republican Party has left Oklahoma not only vulnerable to cyber-threats from foreign powers or criminal gangs, but also to a pending comprehensive takeover by the federal government of Oklahoma's cyber-assets on both practical and inevitably political grounds, as well as the ongoing and existing internal threat of rogue-vigilante agents such as Arthur Marsh, who are left to do what they please with at least some portion of Oklahoma's official IT capabilities.
Anyone by now seeking to comprehend the nature of this 2022 landscape must at first accept that cybercrime, cyberattack, cyber-surveillance (on both sides of the rule of law), the re-directing of cyber-capabilities beyond their original intended purposes, and the leaking of IT data by either digital or analog means, are now not only inevitable as threats to the rule of law, but to a rapidly increasing extent interchangeable, as means to the end of subverting the Constitution, in ways which were unimaginable even in 2018 (the year the DAC/UVED program was launched, and the propaganda marketing its counterfeit purposes on dot-org quasi-official government websites was written.)
In short, the UVED program was built on lies to begin with: the murky and unverifiable claims that using state-of-the-art (at least in 2018) networked IoT surveillance devices on Oklahoma's highways would somehow make them safer. Of course, this claim has not by now been vindicated by UVED's performance since that time, since, of course, the claim is absurd on its face and could never be proven.
But now, Oklahoma employs a rogue agent who uses the capabilities of the UVED program for whatever purposes best suit both his short-term whims and his long-term ambitions (of whatever nature), and that rogue agent is not even the head of the program.
Which, taken all together, begs a whole lot of further questions.
It is long past time (as an almost comical understatement) that the State government, and especially its Justice Department, begin demanding answers to them.
And terminate the UVED program immediately.
Before, in view of all the above points made and many more certain to arise in the near future, such a misguided experiment that Oklahoma's governing apparatus has been clearly unqualified to manage from the beginning, result in even more harm being done the citizens of Oklahoma and its government's ongoing capacity to uphold and defend the United States Constitution.
Scuttle the rule of law, and what do we have, then?
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.
While most of the human race has been content to doomscroll the self-regenerating 'covid' craze and other fact-free memetics of this third decade of the Century of Stupid, meanwhile the foremost threat to liberty and the rule of law has only benefited from all this fashionable paranoia: the surveillance state. And this is only a loose and by now anachronistic term to describe what has been in the making since long before another panic-driven consumer craze called 'Y2K': it is now a fact of the human condition that one may expect to be under surveillance anywhere and at any time, and that to an increasing extent one might find oneself waylaid by law enforcement or other official organs, for any reason or for no genuine reason at all.
Fabricating casework out of charged electrons has proven such an overwhelming temptation to the official sector that the ideas of rule of law or professional ethics or the Constitution itself are by now being regarded as cliches, and as already forfeit to this new mass addiction to techno-gimmickry which has proven far more harmful to humanity than any of its benefits could ever measure up against.
And it's only going to get worse, fueled primarily by a mass superstition that says surveillance is everywhere and we can't stop it. I fear that the rule of genuine law has already been the first casualty of this calamitous FOMO stampede into cyber-governance, and the most portentous thing is to what extent nobody seems to have a problem with that.
I know I do, and I know I have no intention of being reduced to the status of merely a potential case by government cyber-vigilantism and its beneficiaries, not without a fight.