Smart meters

and blocking

“IEEE Spectrum magazine has discussed the issue of smart meters, noting that the data generated by these meters can provide a detailed timeline of activities occurring inside a metered location and could lead to knowledge about specific equipment usage.” ~ Anno Domini 2011

When billions of dollars are being spent, you ought to ask yourself why. But, look, you’re busy. I understand. Moreover, there are trillions being spent, and that’s a thousand billion for each trillion, right, so you have mouths to feed, bills to pay, and maybe you were awaiting further reports from the DOGE team about gooferment inefficiency. So it might have escaped your attention that the evil wastrels and bureau rats at the vile department of energy spent $6.4 billion on “smart grid grants” to push smart meter technology.

About $3.4 billion of this violence to your privacy was allocated in AD 2009 in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act signed by Obomber. The “Bipartisan Infrastructure Law” BIL bill threw another $3 billion at the grid and at smart meter tech under the strangulation metaphor acronym of Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP). On top of all that, over $8 billion was spent by the electrical power utilities who are not even slightly regulated nor ever limited by the so-called “public utility commissions” that rubber stamp every request for rate increases and more monopoly power for the power utilities. Now, you might think, well, but Jim wouldn’t be complaining about private expenditures, would he? Yeah, they aren’t really private, though, are they, since the evil state and local terrorists masquerading as “government” but lacking all consent don’t give you a choice about how your electricity is provided. As well, and you can look it up the way I did, all eight billion dollars was tax deductible including under accelerated depreciation. So the evil villains in monopoly power have done a number on you economically. Again. Still.

But it gets worse. You see, smart meter technology is patented. So you can go find the patents. Should I wait here until you get back? No? No, I should continue? Okay, well, then let’s move right along to the really good news.

Devices in your home from incandescent bulbs to microwave ovens to television systems to personal computers to hair dryers all produce an assortment of signals that go in through the connexion to your wall outlet. Signals, I pretend to hear you inquire, with something of disbelief in your voice? Yes. Signals, noise, a power cycle much more complex than the 60 cycles per second of ordinary household power, harmonics, and other information goes back into your house’s power grid, up to the distribution panel, and on through to the power line outside. What sits between your home’s distribution panel and the power line?

In the old days it was an ordinary power meter that did one thing, and did it pretty well. It produced a measurement of the amount of power you use every month. A man from the power company would come around, disrupt your livestock if you kept a dog in the yard with the power meter, and read that number. It was a pretty accurate measurement, too. Some of those devices had a little spinning wheel that would move fast enough that if there were power use in the house you would be able to tell just by looking at the meter.

Energy stars

The argument for the privacy invasive control grid in this particular instance is power savings, green energy, the ideology that the world will be destroyed by carbon dioxide exhaled by naughty humans, or by methane farted by naughty cows, or by sulphur dioxide emitted by various power generation systems. Therefore we should all be required to obey byzantine regulations of excruciating complexity, give up luxuries like heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, and return to a subsistence agriculture existence as peasants. The aristocrats who think of themselves as “peers” of usurpers who falsely claim to be kings (there is no king but Jesus Christ) have always hated you, personally, hated your very guts, and wanted you dead, your children raped and enslaved, and your body displayed in a gibbet. To get there they want to destroy your right to privacy in your home.

So of course the appliance manufacturers eagerly line up to have their devices measured. Any device with an “energy star” or other gooferment regulatory approval signifier or certification will have gone through detailed testing. They will have provided a high level of refined data about exactly what comes back through the power cord from their device into the power lines in your home. Obviously that will also be run past ordinary distribution panels so the invaders of your privacy will know how it looks in aggregate at the smart meter on the wall outside your home.

That meter will send the data to the power company, generally by radio frequency signals, along with current power usage from your home. The power company will sell all that data to advertisers, to big foundations and environmentalist outfits, and to a wide variety of foreign and domestic agencies. All this data will profit the power company immensely. They will make more money selling the data about you than they make selling the power to you. And they will share none of that money with you, not in lower power rates, not in refunds, not in royalties, because they are scumbags and because the legislators who pretend to regulate them hate you with an even greater visceral hatred than hereditary aristocrats and because none of them want you to ever have any fun.

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Now, I do know it is unfashionable to read books, let alone quote from them. So I won’t really be surprised if the language quoted in italics just above is completely unfamiliar. It is, however, the “fourth” amendment to the United States constitution and it says that your home is not to be searched without a warrant, and that such a warrant shall issue upon probable cause, supported by someone taking an oath or making an affirmation (in one of the few constitutional references to Scripture, wherein Jesus tells us to swear not but make our yay a yay and our nay a nay) with particular description about the place to be searched and what contraband items or criminal persons are hidden there. You ought to be aware that the utility power companies don’t want you to have any privacy.

They want to enter your home any time they wish, and through the smart meter on the outside of your home, they do so to an extreme degree. People in various jurisdictions have received letters warning them that a 100 watt incandescent bulb or a plasma screen television is in use in the home, and that these have been banned by the privacy invasive sneering authoritarians in the legislature or in some state or feral gooferment agency. So it is a bit more than just a theoretical concern. In fact, you are not allowed to have any privacy because the authoritarians hate you.

Mind you, spying on your electric power usage through the smart meter is only one of the many ways in which you are spied upon. Since 1916 every phone call has been subject to listening in, every telegram has been duplicated, and every letter has been opened without any warrants and without any limits. You will find that there are people in various agencies who deny these things have been happening, but you really ought to do some careful research. There are devices that let an envelope be scanned in a fraction of a second that, gosh, yes, captures the written address and optically character reads that address to allow for a bar code to be automatically imprinted on the envelope to speed it on its way. Those same devices use very powerful light in various spectra to read every word through the envelope and keep a record of what was written, from whom, and to whom, on each date.

None of the information gathering is authorised by the constitution, but you ought by now to have some clarity that the constitution is effectively a dead letter. It is more noteworthy in how it is violated than in how it is upheld. The people who wrote the “project for a new American century” declaration made it clear that they just do things, they don’t care about legality. And while they are being investigated and prosecuted for doing some things, they are already doing many others. By the way, most often? Yeah, they aren’t investigated or prosecuted.

Who has Pam Bondi actually arrested? Feel free to post a list in the comments, and we can have a chat there.

Blocking

Now it is possible to disaggregate the data from all your household electric appliances, and your high capacity air conditioner, so that the smart meter data can be used to identify not only what is in your home, but when it is being used. In much the same way Target has been caught matching certain shopping behaviours to pregnancy and sending baby welcome coupons to teenage moms because they want to get the most out of their invasions of privacy.

However, you aren’t required to send any data from your appliances to the smart meter. What if there were a device between your electric power distribution panel (the thing with the circuit breakers - it used to have fuses but that’s old school) and the electric utility “smart” meter? What if that device sent in additional information, other noise, other harmonics, noise cancellation signals at appropriate power levels, and other power usage cycle information, not to in any way reduce or much increase your power usage information going to the meter (because the power company would be self-righteous in their indignation if you confused that aspect of their power metering) but just to disguise the items in your home. After all, since you aren’t being paid by them for the data, they don’t really have any reason to expect you to provide that data to them. Your utility contract, to the extent that you didn’t just have a set of terms in your first utility bill, or something on their web site to signify what they think you have agreed to, doesn’t say you’ll let them monitor your use of every hair dryer in your house.

Well, it turns out that not only is such a device real, but it has also been patented. So we might discuss that a little later on in the context of data security and communications privacy.

Other privacy topics

Yes, there is a lot going on in cyber security. As I mentioned recently, the industry is not just one mess, but about 26 messes. An enormous number of vendors offer a large number of services and devices and it is complex and difficult to understand, as is tradition. Thus, I have been working with a number of friends to put together a teaching and education service.

We’re calling it Secure Perimeter Institute. We have a business plan. We have the de rigeur one-page summary and we have a two-pager as well. Working on the financial model. Building up the team. We have registered a domain name and a web site will be built. When? Soon.

Naomi Brockwell released an interesting video on her YouTube channel about Home Brew which is a command line interface alternative to the Apple app store. It turns out that yes it is possible, but not especially obvious, to skip for now the identification of your home computer or laptop with the Apple ID that tracks all your use of every Apple device, app, and makes a mockery of any attempt on your part to have communications privacy or data secure from the vast maw of Apple’s appetite for knowledge about you. Yes, I do think they believe you are their slave, and that the apple with a bite out of it represents their Garden of Eden metaphor for imposing evil upon you. Yes, I do think you can find out all about their contracts with non-consensual and therefore non-governmental feral agencies, foreign and domestic, if you look for a bit. So Home Brew is an alternative way of getting apps for your computers that happen to be Apple branded, and Naomi has the details. Yes, I do think you are grown up enough to go find her channel. Look for NBTV.media if you are having difficulty.

In still other “‘tis new to thee” aspects of our brave new world that has such people in it, this week I learned that the Mozilla Foundation receives 85% of its revenue from Google. So they are owned and operated by Google. Which does explain why Firefox defaults to awful Google for search and also why the new tab screen shows “thought-provoking” stories from hoax stream media and “stories” about products and services from evil vile disgusting businesses that are owned and operated by demon worshippers. Nasty.

Well, I thought, let’s see who might be in charge over there. Turns out they got rid of their recent chief executive officer a little while after her pay was disclosed at $6.9 million. That was for 2023. Nobody wants to say how many hundreds of millions they pay their executives now, but I’m guessing the interim ceo has not taken a pay cut to save the foundation money. Meanwhile they pretend to be about privacy and they pretend to be about open source technologies and they pretend to be doing things the right way. I’m starting to ponder whether there are better choices than Firefox and Thunderbird.

For browsing, I have consistently heard good things about Lynx which is an open source browser that used to be included with Linux operating system installs. I would be delighted to hear in the comments from you about your alternative browser experiences. For search, I have had good experiences with Yandex.

If you know of any prospective donors for Secure Perimeter Institute please let me know. We are able at this time to accept funds through CashApp and a Patreon is being developed. We do accept crypto and we do not publish addresses because that is a huge security goof, but you can get a one-time-use address from me in direct messaging.

If you or anyone you know would like more information about Secure Perimeter Institute, feel free to let me know in the comments or by direct message. And yes we do pay for referrals for customers, so if you know of a possible customer, and they sign up, you could earn a commission. Yay.

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That’s all I’ve got for today. Come back next time when I have something new. Or old.