[Author]Amazon Fire TV monitors and records your conversations

by Mike Adams

Natural News
[/Author]
Amazon.com is building the CIA’s new $600 million data center, reports the Financial Times. At the same time Amazon.com is building this massive cloud computing infrastructure for the CIA, the company is also shipping millions of Fire TV set-top devices to customers who are placing them in their private homes.

I have one myself, and it’s a terrific piece of hardware for delivering prime video content. In fact, in terms of its usability and specs, it’s far superior to Roku or Netflix-capable devices. Fire TV is, hands down, the best set-top video delivery device on the market today.

But there’s something about it that always struck me as odd: it has no power button. There’s no power button on the remote, and there’s no power button on the box. It turns out there’s no way to power the device off except for unplugging it.

This is highly unusual and apparently done by design. “It is not necessary to turn off Amazon Fire TV when you are finished using it,” says the Amazon.com website. “Your Amazon Fire TV is designed to go into sleep mode after 30 minutes, while continuing to automatically receive important software updates.”

Note carefully that this does not say your Fire TV device WILL go into sleep mode after 30 minutes; only that it is “designed” to go into sleep mode after 30 minutes. As lawyers well know, this is a huge difference.

Fire TV devices linked to your identity

So far, you might not be convinced this is anything to write home about, but there’s much more to this story. What we know so far is that Amazon.com is building the CIA’s new cloud computing data center, and we also know the company’s Fire TV devices have no way to be turned off and are being placed in the living rooms of private homes.

What starts to make this really interesting is when you realize these devices are linked to your identity before they’re shipped to you.

Ever notice that when you power on your Fire TV device, it already knows who you are? Your entire library of video purchases on Amazon.com is already available, and those purchases are of course linked to your credit card, which is linked to your social security number, which is linked to your identity.

In other words, Amazon.com knows the identity of the owner of every Fire TV box currently sitting in living rooms across America. This mean it can connect everything that happens around that box (including audio monitoring) to your personal identity.

Fire TV devices listen to your voice and upload audio to Amazon servers

Here’s the next piece of this puzzle that may give you pause: There is a built-in microphone on the Fire TV remote.

When you click the search button, your voice is recorded and uploaded to Amazon.com servers where it is analyzed by Amazon cloud computing applications — the same kind of thing Amazon is building for the CIA — in order to return search matches to your local TV screen.

Now, I fully realize that most Americans are too gullible and naive to believe their audio recordings get uploaded to Amazon.com servers, so I’m going to quote CNET.com here which published an article earlier this year entitled: “How to delete your Fire TV voice recordings – Amazon stores your recordings on its servers to improve accuracy of voice searches. Here’s how you can delete that data.”

As this article openly states, “To improve the service and the voice results, however, Amazon records and stores the voice samples associated with your account to its servers.”

It goes on to warn readers that “there is no way to opt-out of Amazon’s voice storage.”

And there you have it: the Fire TV device was engineered from the start to record your voice, upload it to Amazon’s servers — now being expanded to the CIA — and link those voice recordings to your identity.

Nothing written in this article so far should be debatable in the least: it’s all fact, openly admitted by the company itself. Then again, the average Netizen is so clueless about reality that you’ll probably see people denying the fact that Fire TV set-top boxes have microphones and the ability to upload voice recordings to Amazon.com. Some will call that a “conspiracy theory” even though it’s part of the published specification of the device.

But there’s even more to this story that does legitimately qualify as a debatable topic. Let’s explore…

The perfect spy devices for monitoring private

conversations in your home

How hard would it be for Fire TV devices to monitor and upload your conversations 24/7?

Think about it: Fire TV devices already have the hardware, software and bandwidth to record audio and upload it to Amazon.com. That’s part of the spec and functionality of the system. The devices have no power off button to discourage people from turning them off.

The devices are already linked to your personal identity via your credit card on file with Amazon, and this is the same company that’s now building a massive storage and data center for the CIA, which for some reason now needs massive data storage capacity and the ability to process that data using buildings full of servers.

An article published by MHP Books reveals that Amazon may already be working with the NSA to provide surveillance data on U.S. citizens.

Another article entitled, “Snowden slams Amazon for leaking customer data to the NSA” reveals how former NSA contractor Edward Snowden harshly criticized Amazon.com for allowing intelligence agencies to read everything you browse on Amazon.com, including book titles, movies and more. This is happening due to Amazon.com’s failure to implement proper encryption protocols, Snowden explains.

Corporations spying on their own customers is a conspiracy FACT

You can fully expect that many people who are still living in the pre-Snowden era will immediately decry this article as a “conspiracy theory.” But doing so only paints a dunce label on their foreheads, because thanks to Snowden, we already know as a matter of record that nearly all the large data companies routinely spy on their own customers and hand over that data to the NSA. Welcome to 1984, three decades later.

Perhaps in 2004, the idea that all your phone calls, emails, credit card transactions, banking activities, web surfing habits and social media posts were monitored by the NSA could be considered kooky and weird. But today, ten years later, all this (and more) is known to be historical fact.

If you don’t believe me, listen to the words of former high-level NSA architect William Binney who now warns that “the ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control,” according to a headline in The Guardian.

In fact, the mantra “Unplug” might be the perfect word for the greatest wisdom of our time. If you don’t want to be spied on, unplug from the grid: don’t shop at Amazon.com, don’t run search queries on Google, don’t use email, don’t use credit cards and don’t install spy devices in your own living room.

By simply unplugging these devices, you deny them the stream of electrons they need to spy on you. That’s their Achilles Heel: they all need electricity, and YOU control the electricity.

Personally, I love using Fire TV, but I now unplug it when I’m not watching something. This not only protects my privacy from Amazon snoops, it also seems to make the device function a lot better by rebooting it each time.

If you have a Fire TV device, unplug it when you’re not using it. You’ll save a small amount of electricity, but more importantly you might also save your privacy from the prying eyes at Amazon, the NSA and the CIA, all of which are aggressively expanding their monitoring and surveillance of Americans.

[Author]by April Dembosky

KQED California Report/New America Media
[/Author]
SAN FRANCISCO–Bob Martínez has been in the hospital so many times, the surgical staff treats him like a regular at a coffee shop.

“They all know me!” he says. “If I go in there today, they’d say, ‘How’re ya doing Mr. Martínez?’”

Martínez is 81, a long-retired life insurance salesman. In the last few years, he’s had more than a dozen surgeries on his right leg, including a foot amputation, a casualty of severe diabetes. His heart disease has warranted almost a half-dozen heart procedures. After one of his recent operations, he said he’d had enough.

“I’m so sick and tired of being in hospitals,” he says shaking his head. “I don’t want to go back no more. I said, God, no more. No more.”

That’s when hospital staff told him about a program through Sutter Health that would send people to take care of him at home, the Advanced Illness Management program (AIM) designed for people like Martínez with multiple chronic illnesses.

Keeping Patients Out of Hospitals

It’s not hospice. That’s for people doctors say have six months or less to live. This program is for the pre-hospice population, people estimated to be in the last 18 months of life. The AIM program assigns a team of doctors, nurses and social workers to help patients transition home after hospital stays, manage medication, and carefully coordinate care, at home and over the phone, to help keep patients out of the hospital.

Martínez’ nurse Aileen Capuyan and social worker Ally Chu come to his home in Oakland once a week.

“Are you coughing? Do you have any shortness of breath,” Capuyan asks as she listens to Martínez’ lungs?

He sits in the brown leather armchair in his living room while she takes his temperature and checks his blood pressure. Meanwhile, Chu is in the kitchen talking with Martínez’s son Jimmy, who takes care of him. Jimmy is making tamales. Then Capuyan and Chu switch, so each can spend time with both men.

Most of the visit is spent talking: about the pain in Martínez’ leg, how his dominoes game is going at the senior center, and about more sensitive things, like what happens when his health gets worse – what kind of care he wants at the end-of-life and what care he doesn’t want.

“I don’t want to be resuscitated,” Martínez says. “When my time comes –- let it go.”

The founders of the AIM program hope that these ongoing visits build the kind of trust where patients can fully explore these questions. Chief program executive Betsy Gornet says this avoids rushed decisions that don’t capture a person’s real values.

“Spending 15 minutes in a doctor’s office or in an ICU in a crisis isn’t necessarily the way to do advanced care planning,” she says. “We do know that a dialogue over time does help foster the right kind of information.”

She says that means patients get the kind of care they want, and get help before their conditions reach a crisis level.

“We’ve been able to track very consistently, a 30 percent reduction in emergency room visits by these patients, 70 to 80 percent reduction in ICU days, 50 percent reduction in hospitalizations,” she says.

That in turn has saved money.

“We’ve seen the total cost of care go down anywhere from $3,600 to $5,000 dollar per patient over the course of 90 days,” she says.

“The Death of Death Panels”

This is the kind of talk that has sparked fiery debates in Washington. Back in 2009, the idea of doctors even talking to their patients about their end-of-life wishes spurred fears of “death panels” rationing care.

But today, the tone is shifting, according to health policy lobbyist Andrew MacPherson.

“We’re seeing a death of the death panels,” he says. “We’re in a totally new place today.”

He says lawmakers are having real bipartisan discussions about overhauling the American way of death, especially now that more and more politicians are shepherding their own parents through the end-of-life.

“It’s personal stories,” MacPherson says. “People’s personal stories about their mother, about their father are really what bring folks to table to say look, we need to have a health care system that is responsive to patients’ values and preferences and wishes when they’re really seriously ill.”

He says officials in Washington are keeping an eye on the Sutter program as a model that might be replicated across the country. The Medicare program, which pays for health care for people over 65, gave the AIM program a $13 million grant from a fund created under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). In return, they want to see the program generate savings for Medicare of at least $29 million.

“The big question is whether or not it will pan out,” says Suzanne Delbanco, executive director of the nonprofit group Catalyst for Payment Reform.

The Medicare grants are one way the government is trying to move away from paying for health care on a fee-for-service basis, which Delbanco says incentivizes doctors to order more tests and procedures to drive up their revenues. Instead, interest is growing to develop more holistic payment models –- things like “care management fees,” “bundled payments” and “shared savings” –- that reward doctors based on the overall care they provide and outcomes where their patients ultimately get better.

“It’s almost as if we’re going from an a la carte menu to a pre-fixe meal where you pay a set amount for all your courses,” Delbano says.

Two Big Unknowns

But there are two big unknowns.

First, it’s not clear if these new models of care really will cost less in the long run. “We don’t know for sure whether or not financially it will end up being beneficial in an effort to curtail our health care costs,” Delbanco says.

Second, Sutter has to find a way to operate the AIM program that works for its own bottom line. When Sutter saves money for Medicare, by reducing hospitalizations and ER visits, it takes a financial hit on its own revenues. Many of the new services it provides to achieve those savings –- the telephone coordination, some home care, and some social work services –- are not reimbursed under Medicare’s current payment system.

Sutter declined to reveal operation costs or budget figures for the AIM program, though the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reports it costs about $900 monthly, for each patient, on average.

AIM chief executive Betsy Gornet says the program does operate at a loss in some regions and has stayed afloat so far through foundation grants and investments from Sutter. But its goal this year, as part of the government grant, is to become self-sustaining, and to propose a new payment model for Medicare that balances savings for the government and still keeps its own program in business.

“We want to get the right care to the right patient at the right time,” Gornet says. “That will help save everybody’s resources.”

Gornet says the ultimate goal is to keep patients like Bob Martínez as comfortable and vibrant as possible until he reaches the end of his life.

Martínez says he’s been thinking about death a lot lately, especially since his wife, Josie, died two years ago — at home, with her husband at her side.

“God’s got a plan for everybody, different plans” Martínez says. “Some die at home. Some die in a hospital. I want to be home like she was. If it comes to that. But anyway, I’ll take it anyway. I just want to be with her now.”

Martínez died in May. He was at home, in his living room, surrounded by family.

April Dembosky produced this report for KQED’s “California Report” with support from the MetLife Foundation Journalists in Aging Fellowships, a program of New America Media (NAM) and the Gerontological Society of America. Visit KQED’s website to hear her radio report.

For more on end-of-life care, also see NAM’s special “Palliative and Hospice Care” website, sponsored by the California Health Care Foundation.