Slowly over time we as a race get more dependent on the technology around us. To the point where if a major disaster were to occur, the number one factor that would be responsible for killing people is the inability to survive without technology. This isn’t to say that there isn’t people who would still be able to survive and even do survive without the technology that we have all come to be reliant on however, the amount of them is considerably smaller than that of the latter. Now everything is filtered through the world of electronics. Records, certificates, medical data, anything you need to in order to know anything about anyone can be found if you’re a good enough hacker. Or more importantly, if you have access to the records. Those who do have access to the records are virtually in control of everything due to the fact that they have access to all of the information in the world making it so they can control anyone with any sort of ‘dirt’.
Take a look at google for example. Google, one of the largest search engines in the world has connections to almost all of the information in the world if it is on the internet in some form or fashion. Now imagine you’re the CEO of Google and someone messes up your subway sandwich. For some reason you are vindictive and decide that you want to get revenge on that sandwich artist. You have access to any and all information considering that person and have every possible way to ruin them at the edge of your fingertips. All you have to do is request in the information from your server banks, and then make an anonymous tip to the local or national authorities. Scary right? Of course, why would a CEO do something like that, most of them are quite nice people and would never dream of doing something like that. However, if a black hat hacker were to somehow find his way into those data server banks, he would have the kind of information that could bring down and topple whole governments, or even information to force small time people to do whatever it is he wanted said person to do.
Speaking of black hat hackers though, there is one worse area of information brokering that allows anyone to get the information they need on anyone. It goes by many names, The Dark Web, The Deep Web. Now essentially those two names refer to two different things. There is ‘The Deep Web’ which is the part of the World Wide Web that is hidden from search engines, (such as things that are encrypted.) and then there is ‘The Dark Web’. ‘The Dark Web’ is the part of the internet that you usually see in criminal shows and movies, the part of the web where criminals gather together to share information, hack, sell drugs and illegal videos (not like pirated movies if you catch my drift). The only real way to access ‘The Dark Web’ is with special browsers and is technically considered illegal in most of the world. Therefor making it so that if you want to access it (like most curious people want to do) you also need to get some kind of program to hide or mask your IP (usually something like a VPN (virtual private network) which is something that masks your IP with that of another IP in a different location (like if you live in London you can use a VPN to say your IP is coming from Washington DC)).
With all of these different ways to get information on anyone, you would think that more measures would be taken to protect the security of people. So why don’t they? What if you invented the ultimate data bank that held information on everyone? Would you just want to make it extremely hard to break into thus making it so the leak of information would be highly suspicious? Or would you rather make a system that was only well protected, so that information being stolen wasn’t common but only uncommon. After all, if you did that, then no one would think much of certain information being stolen. They would automatically assume that it was some kind of terrorist or hacker. Not the person you possibly invented the system in the first place. With that kind of logic, suddenly having a large scale data base that seems to get hacked more and more often as time goes on seems to become more of a hindrance than a benefit, which is at least without stronger security. However again, if you have stronger security than any hack would be more watch, researched, investigated, and dealt with. Making it so that those who had access to all of the information in the first place would be able to less likely get away with the misuse of such information.
Now again I’m not trying to point fingers or anything or say that a conspiracy is going on or something like that. After all, to say something like that would be to raise a red flag and to invite some kind of accident to happen…. Ooooops… The only thing that can be done is the war over information which is already heavily underway between those who currently control the flow and storage of information. Constant battles hidden in the darkness and shadows of the world where the common populace would not see it and rise up to pick a side. After all, information is power. Absolute information is absolute power, and as well all know very well, absolute power absolutely corrupts. Those who are in power are often hard pressed to give up the power once they have tasted how sweet it is to be in a position of power. Well either way, just be careful what kind of information you put out there on your technology because everything gets saved and everything can be found. So if you wrong someone in some way, even if no one finds a way to prove you guilty, that information is still there and someone may or may not find it someday. Be safe my fellow role-players
(June '17) Prompt #1 - "Conspiracy"
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Originally Posted by Stormwolf
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