This is a worrisome facet of how the United States is entering the age of cyberconflict. President Barack Obama has signed off on a new doctrine, but it remains classified. There’s a new national intelligence estimate of cyber-espionage and its economic costs, but it remains under wraps.
From the New York Times:
It is imperative that nations come together to develop rules of engagement for cyberwar. These rules should:
• Protect a certain amount of critical infrastructure from attack;
• Declare botnets and irregular cyberforces as unlawful combatants;
• Prohibit countries from transmitting cyber-attacks through another country’s networks without permission; and
• Require countries to assist in the investigation of cyber-attacks.
Jody R. Westby is the chief executive of Global Cyber Risk, a security consulting firm, and is the chairwoman of the American Bar Association’s Privacy and Computer Crime Committee. She is a co-author of “The Quest for Cyber Peace.”
The quest for cyber-peace. Global Cyber Risk, a collection all white
upper class career lawyers, some of whom have written legal papers and books on cybercrime nobody not paid to pay attention to would.
Specialties: global business development and risk management, shoeshine.
During a recent off-the-record meeting, a senior government official warned that cyber attacks on United States in 2013 will be worse than they were in 2012, a year during which they reached a peak. (Participants were free to use what they were told, but not to disclose the names or venue).
Representatives of private corporations in the audience were told that there is not one whose computers have not been hacked. The official appealed to self interest (“you spend scores of millions on brand ‘D’ and someone else brings it to the market at a fraction of the cost, after stealing the fruits of your studies???), communitarian concerns (“don’t let your computers be used as a basis for attacking others???), and patriotism (“our systems are only one-third secure???). He pointed out that beyond stealing trade and defense secrets, computer hackers destroyed the data of the computers of Saudi Aramco, and warned that they could easily bring down our infrastructure, from the electrical grid to banking.
Public figures and commentators are so routinely odious in modern American life that everyone learns to filter it out. It’s a defense mechanism for life in the plutocracy. However, occasionally you run across something so supremely stupid and hateful passed off as wisdom it makes your eyes water.
Task begins to rant about a government bailout of the sugar cane and sugar beets industry. Task immediately reveals he’s so ignorant on the subject of food ingredients that “sugar,” in this case, means everything sweet and fattening in the US diet. Which isn’t the case at although I’m not going to get into it.
However, what the pundits really want to get into is a rant about poor people and how fat they are.
The Daily Ticker video is here. Advance to about 2:30 to get to the part where Task and his companion go over the top in their scorn for the poor:
Task: Poor people are fat. For the first time in human history. It’s ridiculous.
It goes on for a bit like that, about how stupid it is for the government to keep sugar prices low because that makes it too easy for poor people to buy a lot of candy. They roll pictures of Hershey bars.
His partner, Lauren Lyster, then suggests by not bailing out the cane industry, we could have an “obesity tax.”
The whole bit is stunning in its ignorance and casual malice.
Now, I don’t have much of a sweet tooth and don’t eat much candy, ever. But in the baking ingredients aisle I find that the price of granulated sugar, either from cane or beets, for use in my tea, just about right.
And while I do not bake I know people who do. Baking cakes, and so on, is a way to make wholesome food — and I consider baked goods part of a decent diet, and that nothing would be served by having to pay more for sugar and seeing to it that less people are employed in the cane and sugar beets industry.
It would also have never occurred to me that it was a handout to poor people who are allegedly too fat in America because all they eat is candy and sweet junk. And that they should not have that because it is bad.
As I said above, it’s eye-watering in its mean spirit and idiotic quality, passed off as righteous anger over government interference in the market. But, unfortunately, I think it’s fair to say you wouldn’t have to go very far to find fellow citizens who believe it to be informed and right.
Poor people are the fattest, only in America, for the first time in history. We should stop making sugar cheap for them with taxpayer money and then they would have to eat apples or look more like those starving in Africa or beggars on the streets of Bangladesh. Or something.
He was just beaten soundly in an election. So he comes back with a budget plan just like the old rejected one, only a bit more cruel. Then he makes a Freudian slip, caught be everyone: “We’re not going to give up on destroying health care…”
Best Paul Ryan song, ever. Republican Jesus, the public crucified him and he rose from the dead four months later.
The White House on Monday accused China of hacking U.S. companies on an “unprecedented scale” and demanded that the attacks stop, in the administration’s most pointed public criticism yet.
National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon called on the Chinese government to recognize the urgency of this issue, investigate and stop the alleged hacking, and be part of a process to create international rules of the road for appropriate activities in cyberspace.
“Increasingly, U.S. businesses are speaking out about their serious concerns about sophisticated, targeted theft of confidential business information and proprietary technologies through cyber intrusions emanating from China on an unprecedented scale,” Mr. Donilon told the Asia Society in New York. “The international community cannot afford to tolerate such activity from any country,” he said.
One almost pities the current administration.
The Republican Party refuses to recognize the result of the November election with the result being the president cannot govern, except when it comes to these types of petty exercises in reprimanding the alleged great menaces to corporate America. And the President cannot make such a frank statement without creating an international incident.
For a corporate America that threw all its support behind the Republican Party last year.
Honestly, it’s hard to imagine how our cyberwar and national security shoeshine boys sleep at night, inhabiting, as they do, a world that is all moral hazard. Well, they probably either were, or became, sociopaths a long time ago.
“With the Dow Jones industrial average flirting with a record high, the split between American workers and the companies that employ them is widening …” reported the New York Times a week ago.
“The U.S. corporate sector is in a lot better health than the overall economy. And until we get a full recovery in the labor market, this will persist.
“The result has been a golden age for corporate profits, especially among multinational giants that are also benefiting from faster growth in emerging economies like China and India.”
Oh, the Chinese are hacking Apple and everybody else, too! It’s really working!
A bit over a week ago the mainstream newsmedia covered the release of a new report issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center, one documenting an explosive rise in domestic extremist groups. One of the initiators is the presidency of Barack Obama and the persistent belief — now going on five years — that he is going to take away the guns.
The number of anti-government, far-right extremist groups has soared to record levels since 2008 and they are becoming increasingly militant, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
It says the number of groups in the “Patriot” movement stood at 1,360 in 2012, up from 149 in 2008 when Barack Obama was first elected president, an increase of 813%. The report said the rise was driven by opposition to Obama and the “sputtering rage” over federal attempts at gun control …
“We are seeing a real and rising threat of domestic terrorism as the number of far-right anti-government groups continues to grow at an astounding pace,” said Mark Potok, SPLC senior fellow and author of the report. “It is critically important that the country take this threat seriously. The potential for deadly violence is real, and clearly rising.”
Potok said that the demographic factors driving the rise in such groups began before Obama became president – the census bureau predicts that whites will become a minority group in the US by 2043 – but have been fuelled by the changes in America he represents. The growth in extremism has been helped by the “successful exploitation over illegal immigration” and by anger over the gun control debate, he said.
Law enforcement officials have uncovered numerous terrorism conspiracies born in the militia subculture, including plots to spread poisonous ricin powder, to attack federal installations, and to murder federal judges and other government officials …
While I didn’t comment on it at the time, the report, entitled Challengers from the Sideline: Understanding America’s Violent Far Right, analyzed right wing domestic terrorism for contributing factors. The strongest correlator was the number of seats held in the House of Representatives by Republicans.
Simply, right wing violence escalates when their are more GOP Reps. The report reasoned this might be because those perpetrating right wing violence feel supported ideologically by Republicans in that body.
The other possibility, of course, is that the rhetoric emitted by the Republican Party in control of the House creates an environment in which some people feel empowered, or moved, to violence against the government.
The other contributing factor was legislation, specifically that having to do with gun control. The Brady Bill, or Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, signed into law in 1993 during the Clinton administrations, caused a spurt in militia growth and related right wing violence in that period. Two years later Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in the most lethal act of right wing domestic terrorism in this country’s history.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok told news reporters he “expected extremism to rise, as anger over gun control had become a ‘grassroots rebellion.’. He said that 20 states are considering laws that would aim to nullify federal gun control measures and 500 sheriffs mainly in western US, who say they will not enforce any such measures.”
The ricin plot, which I covered here as the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang, involved four old men who discussed plans to bomb federal buildings and disperse the poison, was a non-starter but rife with the type of language emitted by the insurrectionist right.
Two of the men pleaded guilty. Two remain to be tried on making a weapon of mass destruction. A bucket of castor beans in a shed was recovered by the US government as evidence, along with one of the old internet ricin recipes, uploaded into cyberspace now well over 20 years ago by a bored teenager.
Disclosure: I was consulted on the nature of the recipe because I’m the person who wrote most authoritatively on the subject during the war on terror years. This is when the newsmedia routinely spread the canard that ricin was easy to make simply by downloading instruction from the Internet, a stupid belief that persists to this day.
The recipe doesn’t make ricin. It makes degreased castor powder from castor seeds which contains some ricin, some or all of which may be degraded depending on the instructions actually followed.
No people have died as a result of attacks using ricin in the entire war on terror. And while al Qaeda has periodically evinced interest in using ricin, it has never done so. In fact, more white right-wing Americans have been arrested and jailed on wanting-to-make-ricin beefs than any other nationality. More specifically, it’s almost exclusively a WhiteManistan thing, where it originated a long time ago.
The Georgia case also illustrates the FBI does have a dragnet out for right wing terror plots, one that makes use of informants recruited to infiltrate potential domestic terror cells.
In slightly related news, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity issued a report about a week ago and almost nobody paid a lick of attention.
This is notable for the fact that the Center was regularly in the news with reports and predictions that catastrophic bioterrorism was imminent and easy to carry out during the salad days of the war on terror.
This was because the UPMC Center for Biosecurity was the house that Tara O’Toole built. When O’Toole left to take a position in the Department of Homeland Security, all the zing and mojo went with her.
As you’ve guessed, or knew, the UPMC Center for Biosecurity existed only to dispense shoeshine on the threat of bioterrorism.
Its most recent report, entitled When Good Food Goes Bad, was covered only by Food Safety News.
From Food Safety News:
From its headquarters on Baltimore harbor, the 15-year-old Center for Biosecurity of UPMC looks out on the historic Coast Guard Cutter Taney, the last ship afloat to have immediately fought back when Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941.
The way the Taney instantly turned its guns on the enemy is just the sort of reaction the U.S. needs to mount whenever and wherever there is an outbreak of foodborne illness, according to the Center’s new report “When good food goes bad??? …
The Biosecurity Center’s interest in foodborne illness outbreaks apparently stems from the 2010 “credible threat??? by Al-Qaeda terrorists to poison salad bars and buffets at hotels and restaurants over a single weekend, using ricin and cyanide. “U.S. officials cautioned that even in small amounts of these chemicals in food could cause serious harm,??? says the report.
That plot was not executed, but highlighted the problem. “Initially, it will be very difficult to distinguish deliberate contamination of the food supply from a naturally occurring outbreak,??? it says.
The Center for Biosecurity researchers who probably have never actually seen any real documents from terror cases on food plots using ricin (and cyanide) have only one citation for this in their report, a brief piece issued by CBS News back in 2010.
“Manuals and videos on jihadist websites explain how to easy it is to make both poisons,” informed CBS.
Perhaps they have also missed the facts that al Qaeda has been smashed and that, I’ll repeat, more white American men have been convicted for fiddling with castor beans than any other nationality.
And that no ricin plots in America have ever gone forward. In any case, the report is classic shoeshine work, stuff of no value to most Americans unless they’re in the homeland security business.
Most recently, the al Qaeda comic book Inspire, now at issue number ten, recommended jihadists start causing “road accidents” and setting fire to cars.
“We all agree the Kuffar chose the wrong path,” it reads. “Now it’s time for their vehicles to also leave the right path. Demolition Derby Style.
“The best timing for a ‘Causing Road Accident’ operation is during night hours, especially on Sunday night. Most of the Kuffar will be either drinking or showing off their driving talents to their friends. In addition to the poor visibility due to the scarcity of light (hmmm, hasn’t ever been to LA at night, obviously). Thus it is hard for your ambush tools to be noticed.”
Ingenious. What could they work out next? Perhaps urinating in ice machines at hotels and motels?
Last year, Inspire recommended setting forest fires. And six months earlier, running people over with a pickup truck armed with a snow plow.
They all worked well.
Anyway, the Center for Biosecurity report recommended the US government strengthen food surveillance.
“Fewer food safety inspections and an increased risk to consumers will result from the lack of a new 2013 budget from Congress and the upcoming across-the-board spending cuts, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said …” reads a recent news piece, also at CBS.
It should be noted that, so far, the sequester is happening but al Qaeda is not.
“[Hamburg] said most of the effects wouldn’t be felt for a while, and the agency won’t have to furlough workers … Still, she said, ‘We’re going to be struggling with how to really grapple with the cuts of sequestration … clearly we will be able to provide less of the oversight functions and we won’t be able to broaden our reach to new facilities either, so inevitably that increases risk.’ ”
New category, Shoeshine. The growing parts of the American economy are devoted to it, armies of upper middle class lickspittles employed as process workers and analysts in it. It had to happen.
From the wire, news that two of the biggest arms manufacturers in then world, Lockheed and Raytheon, are in the running to furnish a private army of cybersoldiers to the government.
Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are vying with telecommunications companies to defend banks and power grids from computer attacks, in a program that gives them access to classified U.S. government data on cyber threats.
President Barack Obama’s Feb. 12 cybersecurity executive order authorized the Department of Homeland Security to let new companies get the government intelligence. Obama and U.S. officials have said sharing classified threat data with companies is essential to help prevent cyber-attacks that could cause deaths oreconomic disruption …
Under the program, the companies are provided — free of charge — computer threat “signatures,??? such as timestamps and coding used in attacks, which have been obtained by the National Security Agency and other agencies. The companies can use this intelligence to strengthen cybersecurity services they sell to businesses that maintain critical infrastructure.
“The demand is there. I think the priority is there, and the threat is serious,??? Steve Hawkins, vice president of information and security solutions for Raytheon, said in an interview.
Cybersecurity Market
Defense contractors like Raytheon view cybersecurity as a growing business as Pentagon spending stalls or declines on more traditional military programs …
To defend against economic disruption. Savor that one.
The President can’t even get the minimum wage raised but there are always initiatives to give more to arms manufacturers, or all of our cyberdefenders, to stop alleged economic disruption.
It’s clear evidence, stuff only stupid people can ignore, that the US has a government and corporate national security complex that forces people into moral crisis.
It’s simple. If you work for this while the rest of the country continues to be hung out to dry, you’re part of the machinery of theft, not the opposite. Got it?
Yes, great idea of benefit to everyday Americans. Give information from the NSA, bought by taxpayers, to arms manufacturers who will sell it for profit to customers. It’s called corporate capture and it’s everywhere in the 2013 US, the model perfected when the government gave free money to too big to fail banks who then turned it around to lend to others at much higher rates of interest.
Well done, parasites! It’s good to be evil!
Believe me, a daily dose of contempt for cybersecurity shoeshiners is not nearly enough.
The drop in the unemployment rate is also not as good news as it may initially seem. The Labor Department reported that 130,000 people left the labor force in the month so they are no longer counted as unemployed. The percentage of the adult population that is employed—the employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) – was unchanged at 58.6 percent. This is just 0.4 percentage points above the low hit in the summer of 2011 and is unchanged over the last year.
While the unemployment rate has fallen back by 2.3 percentage points from its peak, reversing more than 40 percent of its increase, the EPOP is still down by 4.5 percentage points from its pre-recession level. The drop in unemployment is much more the result of people giving up the search for employment and leaving the labor force than workers finding new jobs …
The other big hit to the economy will be from the sequester, which will pull roughly $80 billion in federal spending out of the economy … While the economy is not likely to fall into a recession and send the unemployment rate soaring, the economy is not growing fast enough to meet the need for jobs from a growing labor force. As a result unemployment will be going in the wrong direction for the rest of the year.
Feel free to explain in comments why our cyberwarriors shouldn’t be included in the cutbacks.
Dean Baker explains to newsmen that the only reason the unemployment rate is down is because many Americans have given up. The upper one percent and corporate America have so throttled the economy for their sole benefit labor force participation is dropping.
The U.S. unemployment rate is down, but that is because many Americans have given up looking for a job.
Dean Baker, an economist with the Center for Economic Policy Research in Washington, said Friday that the decline in U.S. labor force participation in this recent data release was “striking.???
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported unemployment fell to 7.7% from 7.9%, but the drop was at least partially attributable to a decline in labor force participation, Baker says. The employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) was unchanged at 58.6 percent, exactly the same as the rate in February of 2012 and just 0.4 percentage points above the low hit in the summer of 2011. This compares with an EPOP of 63.0 percent in 2007, pre-crisis.
This is our world, the one president and the two parties made. The United States has a president who is powerless because the Republican Party has figured out — in the parlance of bdsm sexuality — how to dom from the bottom.
The GOP refuses to recognize the president was re-elected and, therefore, he cannot govern. And the government will shed more employment as a result.
The statistics are striking and merciless. They should result in more social unrest eventually. However the controlling powers and media were effective in convincing many that social unrest as a result of economic calamity is un-American.
The labor force participation percentage is just one more reason to despise our cyber-shoeshine men and the incessant talk about China stealing wealth.
The Internet is now a battlefield. China is not only militarizing cyberspace — it is also deploying its cyberwarriors against the United States and other countries to conduct corporate espionage, hack think tanks, and engage in retaliatory harassment of news organizations.
From China: Wondering what you’d comment on the [NYT/Mandiant] report.
One author [link below] says the Mandiant report on PLA is unconvincing and the timing of the report is too convenient.
Me: Yes, it’s convenient and self-serving. It was timed to maximize the current attempt to conflate espionage, which is real but longstanding, with cyberwar. [Mandiant’s] not the only company to do it. And it’s not surprising given the fact … the sequester budget knife may wind up cutting contractor cybersecurity and cyberintelligence business with the Pentagon.
The attached piece said everything I would have.
Chinese reply: To be realistic, both China and US have strong interest in cyber espionage or cyber war. But I think the US enjoys an absolute technology advantage, given the fact of the US being the center of technological innovation.
China, despite all its problems, is a sensible player in international relations. It’s impossible to imagine they are that reckless as to have an army unit working in the Shanghai building attack institutions in Washington.
Whatever, China has a concerted espionage espionage campaign, longstanding, against the US.
What’s the value? There’s the crux of it, which I wrote about a week ago.
Everyone has been propagandized on the miracles and potentials of cyberwar for so long it’s unsurprising that others want to be into our things, daily, and vice versa.
But this case, even by the low standards of shoeshine, was egregious.
Cyberwar, defined and declared by a handful of mostly private sector shoeshiners, people you’ve never heard of, our analysts and business people who depend on it. All in a few paragraphs. Have a cup of coffee and a pack of butterscotch krimpets while you read through.
“In the past month, several companies — Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and news outlets — have disclosed that their networks were hacked,” wrote the Times in the introduction. “Many of these cybersecurity breaches in the United States appear to be instigated by the Chinese military.”
China attacked Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and Apple! That’s terrible!
If they stole Apple’s shit and started making it in China! Oh, wait. Bad choice. They’ll have all the inside poop on Microsoft’s new Outlook e-mail service, the thing everyone hates. Then they’ll take all Facebook’s accumulated shopping data on you so they can make a FB, or infiltrate it, fill up your feed with ads and not show your posts to your friends unless you pay up.
Well, then they’ll poison the water and cause a blackout. And don’t forget all the wealth stolen, all our many futures down the drain.
And you wonder why I hold cybersecurity experts and stories in such contempt. It’s a crime people are actually paid for it and after fifteen to twenty years, the spite is well-earned.
It’s a shame almost everyone who disagreed abandoned ship. Or maybe they had sense, I can’t decide.
The piece forwarded above, in an English language version of a Chinese News agency, Seven reasons why claims of PLA hacking fail the test.
