Random Scary Internet Conspiracy Theories (15 items)

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  (#12) The Great Firewall of China

  China’s Golden Shield Project is an ongoing effort to track, watch, and log everything China’s billion citizens do on the Internet – when it’s not simply blocking them from going where they want. The “Great Firewall of China” prohibits users from doing anything that might “harm national security; disclose state secrets; or injure the interests of the state or society, […] create, replicate, retrieve, or transmit information that incites resistance to the PRC Constitution, laws, or administrative regulations; promote the overthrow of the government or socialist system; undermines national unification; distort the truth, spread rumors, or destroy social order; or provide sexually suggestive material or encourage gambling, violence, or murder.”

  Needless to say, this can be interpreted to be just about anything, leading to an odious amount of censorship.
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  (#4) Remote Car Hacking

  With “the Internet of things” becoming more and more of a reality, it’s not a nightmare scenario for hackers to be able to insert code into the brakes, engine, or locks of an Internet-enabled car and take control of it. According to former White House counter-terrorism head Richard Clarke, “There is reason to believe that intelligence agencies for major powers - including the United States - know how to remotely seize control of a car.”

  Whether this has ever actually happened is debatable – some conspiracy theorists believe journalist Michael Hastings was “taken out” in one such attack, though evidence doesn’t support it. But clearly there is at least a theoretical, if not an easily achieved, way to use the Internet to take control of a car and make it do things its rightful owner doesn't want it to do.
  
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  (#8) Text That Deletes Itself

  British author Luke Harding was well into writing The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man, when something bizarre happened to his work: it began to erase itself before his very eyes. In an editorial in The Guardian, Harding wrote,

  “The paragraph I had just written began to self-delete. The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish. When I tried to close my OpenOffice file the keyboard began flashing and bleeping.

  "Over the next few weeks these incidents of remote deletion happened several times. There was no fixed pattern but it tended to occur when I wrote disparagingly of the NSA.”

  Skeptics pointed out a number of holes in Harding’s story, and pointed out that he probably just got his delete key stuck. Or maybe that's what the NSA wants you to think.
  
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  (#11) Telematics

  Employers have long had the ability to monitor every keystroke their employees make on work computers. But the fairly new data science of telematics takes that monitoring one step further. It allows your boss to calculate and develop metrics for every single thing you do at work, developing algorithms for service oriented positions that can determine how much you work, what you make, and even if you keep your job.

  Telematics monitors, logs, and tracks how long it takes to edit a document, serve a customer, whether you upsell, if you have to ring something up twice, or even how many steps you take in an office. All of this data is stored, and can easily be hacked into – when it’s not being used to determine your workplace destiny.
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  (#13) China Is Taking Over the Internet

  Conspiracy theorists lit up with news in March 2014 that President Obama was going to be handing control of the Internet over to hostile regimes in Russia and China. The crux of the complaint was that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which is the non-profit that controls Internet domain names and assignments, was going to become an independent corporation, free of US oversight, when its contract with the US government expired in late 2015.

  While Obama opponents and one-world-government types saw it as an unacceptable breach of US sovereignty, others pointed out that America does not, in fact, run the Internet.
  
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  (#5) MonsterMind

  Buried in the disclosures made by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was information about an experimental cyber defense system that could autonomously neutralize and retaliate against foreign cyber attacks against the US. Nicknamed MonsterMind, it’s supposedly the project that caused Snowden to make his initial disclosures, as he was disturbed by the idea of a self-regulating system that has no oversight and can fight back against anything that it deems a threat. Theoretically, it could be turned against ordinary citizens, or decide it doesn’t want to do what it’s supposed to do and rain nuclear missiles on all of us. Or something.

  Proponents of the idea believe that a “cyber missile defense system” is exactly what we should be investing in, stopping hack attacks before they happen, rather than playing catch-up and cleaning up the damage.
  

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