Doug Roth and the Blissters, the Allentown Parkway, 1985.
Doug Roth, aka D Smash of the Lehigh Valley rock n roll band, The Blissters, died this week.
Roth, who was 50, was the Lehigh Valley’s pre-eminent electric guitarist. As a member of the Blissters, his local popularity and career in that band spanned decades. Put another way, Dougie Smash was the very definition of rock and roll.
A brief history of the Blissters was published at DD blog years ago here.
The YouTube film is from a free Summer Sunday festival on the Allentown Parkway in 1985. I was living on Cumberland Street at the time, a hundred or so yards away, and walked to it with my ex-wife.
It was one of the type of late summer outdoor rock affairs notorious for large numbers of partying young men and women, often with their shirts off, more remarkable because it was purely a local affair of significant size and enthusiasm.
The first clip features Roth performing Nazareth’s “Woke Up This Morning.”
The second clip, below, has an engaging poor man’s D. A. Pennebaker feel. The cameraman shows you just what it was like on the Allentown green that joyful warm afternoon.
It’s a good way to be remembered in eternity. RIP, Doug Roth (1962-2013).
“In my opinion, it’s the greatest transfer of wealth in history,” said general Keith Alexander, he of the National Security Agency, on cyberattacks launched at our great country. — SITREP
See the greatest transfer of wealth in history? Blue is what Americans earn. Red is profits in non-financial corporate America.
I should give a shout-out to Larry Mishel’s note showing that the share of corporate-sector income going to profits has soared to levels not seen in more than 40 years …
There doesn’t seem to be much trickle-down going on.
The difficulty of deterring such [Iranian] attacks was also the focus of a White House meeting this month with Mr. Obama and business leaders, including the chief executives Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase; Brian T. Moynihan of Bank of America; Rex W. Tillerson of Exxon Mobil; Randall L. Stephenson of AT&T and others.
Mr. Obama’s goal was to erode the business community’s intense opposition to federal legislation that would give the government oversight of how companies protect “critical infrastructure,??? like banking systems and energy and cellphone networks. That opposition killed a bill last year, prompting Mr. Obama to sign an executive order promoting increased information-sharing with businesses.
“But I think we heard a new tone at this latest meeting,??? an Obama aide said later. “Six months of unrelenting attacks have changed some views.???
Keep in mind that Obama administration and the US Cult of Cyberwar have been fingering Iran in attacks that make US banking websites run slow for months. (Secondarily, for a virus that crashed hard drives belonging to Saudi oil company, Aramco.)
The recent history, free of propaganda, is that the Obama administration, defense contractors and leaders of the cyberwar lobby in the intelligence agencies took out a vigorous public relations campaign to get cyber-information sharing legislation passed last year.
This has been followed by a rising second and identical spin effort to identify cyberattacks on the United States as a catastrophic threat, one capable of more harm to the nation than natural disasters, and more costly than 9/11, and possibly the subsequent wars.
All this has played out methodically over the last couple of months. And all of it has been touched on at DD blog.
It’s a continuing effort to get bad legislation passed, law that would immunize corporate America from any legal retaliation that might result from malfeasance revealed in information sharing. Secondarily, it is to beat the drum regularly for more spending in cyber-defense. None of this is of any social value. The US of A will not now or soon fall to cyber-attackers. It is a ludicrous scenario to entertain.
[The] US is in a lousy position to make arguments, or even recommendations, on proper conduct in cyberspace. This is because it is an untrustworthy international partner, one which will not be held to standards of conduct it publicly demands from others. (The majority in American power find this of no consequence under the rationale that as the preeminent and transcendent world power, the United States can always act any way it wants and that hypocrisy or an establishment of untrustworthiness does not apply.)
Ours is a country that routinely uses feeble actors in cyberspace — like Iran — as bogeymen in public statements on the dangers of cyberwar without including in the narrative the fact that we provoked them …
This means anything to 99 percent of Americans. Nor should it. Pasadena, or the town where you live, will not cease to function in your lifetime because of cyberwar.
Mega US bank websites that run slow because they’re being hit by denial-of-service attacks are of no consequence in the astronomically bigger picture of the American economy.
The US government and the national security megaplex, which includes large private computer security players and arms manufacturers with expanding, grasping wings devoted to the same business, relentlessly peddle the script that cyber-attacks on the US financial system could bring the country to its knees.
Americans have experienced the opposite. The average family now earns seven percent less than it did at the start of the Great Recession, an economic downturn brought on by this country’s financial system.
This is not because of cyberwar, near cyberwar, Chinese cyber-espionage, or Iranian attacks on banking websites and corporate America.
The President cannot get the minimum wage raised. He cannot do anything to reverse the austerity policies the Republican Party, from its minority position, has imposed on the country. He cannot or will not enact any measures as chief executive that might begin to make economic life in the country better for the majority of its citizens.
So what is he doing? Partially busying himself meeting with Wall Street’s master bankers and ginning up news on the daggers of cyberwar, attributed to China, Iran and North Korea, aimed at America’s heart.
It is maddening and pathetic.
One of the named sources for the Times’ piece is James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, one of the major “think tanks,” the function of which is to furnish national enemies lists, affirmations that named enemies are up to no good, and what, in the way of war, ought to be done about them at once.
The Duchy of Grand Fenwick, aka the Republic of CyberBunker, was said to have attacked SpamHaus and the Internet this week. And most people missed it except for the New York Times and Ars Technica.
I’ve repeated it countless times. Ten years ago the mainstream press just unilaterally quit doing its job on security matters. Serious journalism and critical thinking, as opposed to propagandizing and stenography, simply blew away and was never replaced.
It’s a theme I’ve carped on for years, going all the way back to anti-virus king John McAfee’s manipulations on the Michelangelo virus in 1992.
This is the danger of the “dark age of journalism”, as it has been called. The training of the old Reuters reporter is replaced by one of political and corporate collusion. The separation between newsrooms and public relations agencies growing ever thinner as reporters rush to fill space at all costs, regardless of truth.
Even after she’d written the piece in the New York Times, tech reporter Nicole Perlroth tweeted how she was still getting targeted by corporate PRs to cover the “story”: “Hi Nicole, News is just breaking on the biggest cyber-attack in history. Are you planning on covering?”
The collapse of journalism combined with complex, fast-changing technology offers a wealth of opportunity for propagandists. In the soil of ignorance, fear can easily be sown. So it is with cyberwarfare.
The writer, Heather Brooke, probably didn’t have the space to get deep into the rise of web shoeshine news publishing, the fact that sensation, exaggeration and corporate tech fictions and trivialities are about all they exist for.
In charge at CyberBunker is Sven Olaf Kamphuis, who styles himself the ‘Minister of Telecommunications and Foreign Affairs’ of the ‘Republic CyberBunker’ …
Within its 15ft reinforced concrete walls are 175,000 cubic feet of office space, airlocks, a 750KW diesel generator, fuel reserves and a 2,500-gallon freshwater tank.
Its inhabitants can allegedly survive for ten years without assistance from the outside world.
CyberBunker’s website claims: ‘Dutch authorities and the police have made several attempts to enter the bunker by force. None of these attempts were successful.’
The Google Bus means so many things. It means that the minions of the non-petroleum company most bent on world domination can live in San Francisco but work in Silicon Valley without going through a hair-raising commute by car – I overheard someone note recently that the buses shortened her daily commute to 3.5 hours from 4.5. It means that unlike gigantic employers in other times and places, the corporations of Silicon Valley aren’t much interested in improving public transport, and in fact the many corporations providing private transport are undermining the financial basis for the commuter train. It means that San Francisco, capital of the west from the Gold Rush to some point in the 20th century when Los Angeles overshadowed it, is now a bedroom community for the tech capital of the world at the other end of the peninsula.
There are advantages to being an edge, as California long was, but Silicon Valley has made us the centre. Five of the six most-visited websites in the world are here, in ranked order: Facebook, Google, YouTube (which Google owns), Yahoo! and Wikipedia …
Note, not a word on any of the digital wonders actually transforming life in the area, except by accumulation of wealth. Our tech overlords are not developing the next indoor plumbing or even the polio vaccine.
After 20 years on the net it is a culture I have come to viscerally dislike.
The article makes a good read after news of Yahoo paying 17 million to a teenager for the Summly app. His is a business that employs ten people, for a product that makes news available on smartphones.
Yahoo’s news arm is already terrible, as are those of many web portals.
Compacting crap so it shows nicely as an abstract in even less space on a smartphone screen does not advance anyone although 17 million may have been what the US “market” would pay for it.
Smartphones are not transformative and you can test this by going to where the underclass lives. In Pasadena, where they live, where I live, the effective storefront businesses are Target, cheap eateries and smartphone suppliers. The poor all have smartphones on budget plans. They cannot afford desktop computing or the additional broadband access and their only point of contact with the net on a big screen is institutionally, school or work. Their lives are not transformed by having Android-equipped mobile devices with unlimited music and data. Poverty is not ameliorated by any powers granted through mass possession of mobile phones that take pictures or the ability to socially network.
So what exactly is so great about the culture that pays 17-mil to the dweeb who made Summly? Or any other of the hundreds of valley firms covered daily by TechCrunch?
They make apps — ephemeral stuff — that fit the growing divide, conveniences for the very wealthy, minor diversions for those who have nothing, people who have given up land line telephony.
The alleged innate genius of Stanford dweebs and the tech valley’s trillion dollar value is not now changing our world for the better. They do not address the big problems of the time any more than a shale oil mining boom in the Dakotas does.
It’s easy to go on and on with big examples, not all in the Silicon Valley, but of the culture.
Malaria has not yielded to Bill Gates or Silicon Valley venture capitalists bankrolling synthetic biology firms.
Also Consider Elon Musk, who made his fortune with PayPal, now ubiquitous.
What if you have nothing or the US economy pays so poorly that your line of labor is either nonexistent or not viable without foodstamps and the earned income tax credit? Then of what use is PayPal? There is still a Western Union send-cash station at both supermarkets near me.
Now Musk is haled for new businesses, making an electric car of indeterminate quality for the very top slice of US auto-drivers. And SpaceX, a business that of course will rely on taxpayer-funded contracts for NASA resupply.
Is near space being exploited to the benefit for a majority of Americans? Well, it was.
The infrastructure for global telecommunications and navigation were paid for by the US taxpayer but Elon Musk and SpaceX add nothing to this, they just exploit it for the very top, relatively minor vestigial interests. The US military which has a very big and clandestine space program, also funded by the taxpayer, doesn’t give a fig about SpaceX. It doesn’t need it.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon may have used his vast wealth from digital Wal-martization and sweat-shopping to recover pieces of the Saturn V boosters but all that was paid for by the US middle class and made by Wernher von Braun and his colleagues decades ago.
What does Jeff Bezos bring to it? It’s obvious part of the idea is as a publicity stunt, a tech billionaire’s personal spectacle and vanity thing.
[The] US is in a lousy position to make arguments, or even recommendations, on proper conduct in cyberspace. This is because it is an untrustworthy international partner, one which will not be held to standards of conduct it publicly demands from others. (The majority in American power find this of no consequence under the rationale that as the preeminent and transcendent world power, the United States can always act any way it wants and that hypocrisy or an establishment of untrustworthiness does not apply.)
Ours is a country that routinely uses feeble actors in cyberspace — like Iran — as bogeymen in public statements on the dangers of cyberwar without including in the narrative the fact that we provoked them …
From an article in the Reg, on the “NATO manual on cyberwar,” one that argues that acts of force in cyberspace are [likely] illegal (primary author “Michael Schmitt, professor of international law at the US Naval War College in Rhode Island):”
Schmitt said the legal experts who drew up the manual agreed that Stuxnet was an act of force but were divided on whether the malware constituted an armed attack. And even if it was an armed attack it might still be justified as self defense in the form of striking back at the aggressor in the face of imminent attack, as a paragraph on page 58 of the manual explains:
“In light of the damage they caused to Iranian centrifuges, some members of the international group of experts were of the view that the attack had reached the armed attack threshold (unless justifiable on the basis of anticipatory self defence) [our emphasis].”
In other words, Stuxnet was not illegal because it was by the United States (and/for Israel), the preeminent world military and economic power, against Iran — because they’re bad, small, don’t like us and have a nuclear program.
Such legalisms in any manual thus rendered meaningless because the precedent is to claim the US is the special nation among all, always able to determine itself to be striking from a position of self-defense.
Taken to one logical conclusion, it renders all US participation in the establishment of international codes of conduct as easily abrogated as changing underwear, using the order and procedure established as the result of 9/11.
If there’s a Congressional hearing on cyberwar always view it as a scripted exercise, one in which the “experts” are carefully chosen to throw a scare into laymen.
Such was the case with House meetings on the matter last week.
Computer attacks on South Korea underscore the growing threat of cyber warfare that starts with the flip of a switch, computer security experts told federal lawmakers Wednesday.
North Korea is a “wild card??? when it comes to computer attacks because the country has the desire to launch attacks and a growing capability, said Frank J. Cilluffo, co-director of the Cyber Center for National and Economic Security at George Washington University.
Although North Korea is certainly a suspect behind attacks that shut down some South Korean banks and TV stations, President Obama and South Korean officials have not officially indicated that North Korea, China or any other nation is responsible.
Hacking by China and Russia is “brazen, wholesale and significant,??? and Iran poses a growing threat, Cilluffo said.
“Both our national security and our nation’s economic security are at risk,??? Cilluffo told the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies. “It’s literally as easy as flipping a switch to attack.???
Note the use of the “flip the switch” meme twice, the idea that the US can be turned off, or at least parts of it, like a light bulb, from afar.
Iran’s cyberwar capabilities keep Texas Republican Michael McCaul “up at night,” the story adds. Iran, claims the politician, is “testing us,” seeing just how far it can go before we respond.
It’s outright lying by omission, a feature common to cyberwar discussions.
Iran has been the target of a US cyber-sabotage and espionage operations aimed at its nuclear program, one in which malware specifically written for the purpose has been put into its networks.
As I’ve written previously, the US is in a lousy position to make arguments, or even recommendations, on proper conduct in cyberspace. This is because it is an untrustworthy international partner, one which will not be held to standards of conduct it publicly demands from others. (The majority in American power find this of no consequence under the rationale that as the preeminent and transcendent world power, the United States can always act any way it wants and that hypocrisy or an establishment of untrustworthiness does not apply.)
Ours is a country that routinely uses feeble actors in cyberspace — like Iran — as bogeymen in public statements on the dangers of cyberwar without including in the narrative the fact that we provoked them.
Summarizing, I put it this way (it’s necessary to repeat stuff as part of any public information service):
However, in cyberspace the US government, in developing and unleashing malware on its enemies in the Middle East, has made a world environment where vulnerabilities are commodities and capabilities, information not to be shared because of applications in cyber-weaponry …
Paradoxically, the US government has contributed to the creation of a global Internet security environment where information is not to be shared because there is value in [hoarding and secrecy]. Critical vulnerabilities have great worth in cyber-weapons development. This has created a gray market in which the vulnerabilities, information of zero social value, are sold at good profit.
As with [any] discussions [going forward on] cyberwar and the creation of cyber-weapons, the American government, by its actions, has cut the ground from under its feet on being in position to take the high [position], right from the start. . .
Congressional hearings call panels usually top-heavy with “experts” who are merely there to mine and spread fear.
Frank Cilluffo, for example, goes way back to the time when the propagandizing fell under the phrase “electronic Pearl Harbor.”
December 15, 1999: “Future War in Cyberspace” was the title of a special broadcast on the Voice of America US government radio station. Disclosure: Crypt News made an appearance in it.
“At least twice this year, [the Pentagon’s] Dr. John Hamre has said the United States was in the middle of a cyber war — and the pace of attacks on US Military computers has increased since then,” read the announcer
John Hamre said: “We are in a day to day, virtual cold war. In that sense that we have people trying to disrupt the Department of Defense’s computers on a daily basis. So far, we are staying ahead of the problem. But just barely.”
Frank Cilluffo, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank said the danger of cyberterror “is real and constant.”
“The myth persists that the United States hasn’t been invaded since 1812. I’d like to inform you otherwise. And that is the fact that invasion through cyberspace is now a daily occurrence,” Cilluffo said for Voice of America.
” . . . George Smith is skeptical that offensive military operations will work very well in cyberspace.”
“For years, Mr. Smith has been writing a newsletter on computer break-ins . . . He says Pentagon officials are overstating the danger from computer hackers and intruders.”
“Nevertheless, [Smith] expects the United States and many other nations to try to create ‘cyber-attack’ forces: ‘I think it is likely that people will try, I think it is unlikely they will have any impact.'”
“Mr. Smith says armies in Bosnia and the Gulf War faced computer problems, including viruses. He says they coped with them in much the same way they coped with flat tires on vehicles, or worn out parts on aircraft.
“[Smith] said] the idea that small groups of people, armed only with keyboards, could seriously hurt a powerful military force belongs in Hollywood — not the battlefield.”
Take time to review the entire archive. It’s the only one like it on the Internet, the only record of US (and western) cant on the then emerging subjects of cyberterrorism and cyberwar. You’ll see how the arguments have remained fantastic, self-serving and delivered for maximum scare.
There was one dissident in a House hearing entitled Cyber Attacks: An Unprecedented Threat to U.S. National Security, convened by the House subcommittee Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats, Martin Libicki of the RAND Corporation.
Reporter Andrew Conte of the Albany newspaper mentions him not at all although, mysteriously, he is included in the photograph accompanying the piece cited above.
This is standard behavior in US press stories on alleged, emerging or immediate threats. Critics, even the mildest, are edited completely out of the discussion in favor of direst claims. This is the way it has been for the past decade. Occasionally someone who goes against the assembled received wisdom of calamity is brought in. But the overall trend has been to stamp out anything like that.
In the House hearing, Libicki essentially testified that government ought to be careful with the fear-mongering talk of cyberwar.
Earlier this week Martin Libicki, a senior management scientist at the RAND Corporation, warned the House Homeland Security Committee to be wary of the line between realistic projections regarding cybersecurity and fear-mongering.
“The more emphasis on the pain from a cyberattack, the greater the temptation to others to induce such pain — either to put fear into this country or goad it into a reaction that rebounds to their benefit,??? he said. “Conversely, fostering the impression that a great country can bear the pain of cyberattacks, keep calm and carry on reduces such temptation.???
Libicki argued, very briefly (he was the last to testify), for the House hearing on the “unprecedented threat” — that if a “cyber-9/11” were to occur, because it is a cyberattack the US doesn’t have to rush off and do something rash. The inference, here, being baldly obvious. It was a worthwhile issue to take up, he said.
In doing so he cited the cost of the actual 9/11 attacks, in excess of 250 billion dollars, and a further trillion in the Iraq war.
In a cyberattack is is possible to “take the time to think things through,” Libicki told the committee. “Even though a computer is taken out, another may be close at hand…”
We should not back ourselves into a corner where we always have to respond, he continued.
“In some cases the narrative must allow the attacker to back down gracefully.”
“What are the norms of conduct?” he asked.
Substantively, in creating a public impression that cyberattacks have the most extreme consequences, an expectation has been created in which the country may be compelled to respond out of proportion to the actual impact. (The House page is here. However, the reader will find that the links to the text copies of the testimony are, conveniently, 404s. The video record is more difficult sledding.)
The fear-mongers of cyberwar have now latched onto the stratagem of using monetary figures to describe the losses to Chinese espionage. Currently, their story is that such espionage has cost the United States more than the 9/11 attacks.
This left the committee in a quandary. California Republican member, Dana Rohrabacher, who took the opportunity to give a little speech [1] on the perfidy of Chinese “elites,” was discomfited by it at the end.
Rohrabacher seemed unable to completely endorse the idea that Chinese cyberwar against the United States was more damaging to the country than 9/11.
However, Greg Autry, Senior Economist for the Coalition for a Prosperous America, used the committee to launch a full frontal attack on China. (The organization has a footprint of virtually zero in the news media. And its organizational website “about” page sheds no particular light on who funds or is behind it.)
Excerpted (all errors in transcription, mine):
“[China sees] us as weak and foolish, to be controlled …
“[We] need to make sure the internet is not debased by hoodlums or nations who do not appreciate the rule of law. The Chinese government cannot think of enough things to do from the money they are earning
from the economic warfare they have been executing against the United States …
“[Their] cyberattacks against the United States are in the same financial class as the 9/11 attacks. They are costing clearly billions
and, I believe, hundreds of billions of dollars … This results in loss of life of Americans as well …
I believe that if the [Chinese military cyberwar building, PLA Unit 61398] was a segment of the Iranian Republican Guard located in Tehran, that building would be a smoldering pile of rubble before I could testify…”
Near the end of the hearing RAND’s Libicki had this to say about the financial figures.
Digested:
“I think we need a better understanding of the impact of Chinese economically-motivated espionage on the US economy. We hear a lot of numbers being thrown around. We don’t really know how they’re derived or how consistent they are with how economics works.
We are fairly confidant that terabytes of data go from the United States to China …”
“I would suggest it’s an important issue. If it’s a trillion dollar issue, we treat it one way. If it’s a billion dollar issue, we treat it another.”
Excerpts of Dana Rohrabacher’s brief speech, given to the Chinese people from the floor of the House subcommittee meeting on Cyber Attacks: An Unprecedented Threat to U.S. National Security:
“If the Chinese people are listening and to the Chinese intelligence personnel:
“What differs from what governments did in the past [with espionage]
and what is being done now … is that they are using the intelligence apparatus to enrich themselves … They are using the cyber-intelligence to enrich themselves, they have a personal motivation …
“The people of China are being cheated in that the apparatus has been set up to protect them is being used to enrich the elite and at the
same time put China into a hostile relationship with the United States … On top of that, the elite in China are using this, not to protect China,
not to make it more prosperous, but to repress their own people …
“The elite in China, their vanity and desire for more wealth and power has led China down a wrong path. I would urge those people in China …
the people of good will, to push the elite who are putting us on a path of conflict, out.”
Tom Tomorrow making the now obvious point that being wrong about everything means nothing. In fact, is good for the career if you’re in the top bracket.
