06.09.13
Meta
Still haven’t come up with a replacement for the malfunctioning Akismet spam filter, so comments are still under moderation.
Suggestions compatible with WordPress welcome.
Defector from the Shoeshine Corps of Cyberwar
The source of the intelligence leaks that revealed the National Security Agency’s massive domestic surveillance program last week was identified on Sunday by the Guardian as Edward Snowden, a soft-spoken 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of NSA defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton …
“I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things,” Snowden said. “I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under … I can’t in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”
Snowden said he decided to leave his family, girlfriend and a comfortable, $200,000-a-year salary behind, and flew to Hong Kong on May 20. He said he chose China because “they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent.”
The paradox of the leaker seeking refuge in China and spilling the beans at the very moment the Obama administration was mounting an unsubtle press campaign over the matter of Chinese cyber-espionage is noticeable.
As an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden would have certainly been in the middle of things.
The head of that firm’s cybersecurity contracting arm, Michael McConnell, is and was one of the leading salesmen of cyberwar hype. The firm has a very large interest in expansion of its cybersecurity and cyberwar contracting business to the Department of Defense.
The lengthy and original profile of Snowden, at the Guardian.
Top cyberwar rent-seeker, Michael McConnell and Booz Allen Hamilton.
Michael McConnell and Booz Allen — from the archives.
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06.07.13
US cybersecurity leaks damage credibility … not that it had much
The massive leaks on the Obama administration’s cyber-spying and cyberwar initiatives to the Guardian come at an incredibly damaging time for the President.
In the run-up to this week’s talk with Chinese premier Xi Jinping in California the US government carefully laid the stage with selective news leaking on rampant Chinese cyber-spying. The cyber-spying operation, it was claimed, was aimed at everything, from priceless corporate intellectual property to the Department of Defense’s most expensive weapons systems.
There was the creation of a stealth corporate national security lobbying agency called the Intellectual Property Commission, its aim to recommend how the nation could protect its business stuff and ideas from Chinese predation. Millions of jobs had been lost, it claimed, billions of dollar in profit made gone.
It has all been a carefully wrought publicity operation, a deliberate and studied massage of the media to get out a message, one to shame and embarrass China’s rulers.
That was never going to work.
And this week, someone — in cahoots with the Guardian, has leaked explosive material on the US government’s cyberspying and cyberwar activities. Turns out, it’s not particularly surprising the National Security Agency (NSA) has been into everyone’s stuff domestically, all in the name of the war on terror.
Moreover, it appears this release has been strategically timed to come just at a delicate time for the Obama administration. News would have filled with just more of the same on Chinese cyberespionage.
Now the news is filled with information on NSA snooping.
Truth be told, the US has been in terrible position to lecture people on proper conduct in cyberspace since releasing the Stuxnet virus into Iranian networks in an effort to physically damage its nuclear program.
It set off an escalating cyber-arms race. This, in turn, triggered retaliations against US networks and greased the black market for the hoarding and clandestine sale of security vulnerabilities.
And for what? What has the exceptional nation, the one that can say do what we recommend but we reserve the right to do as we please, achieved?
What has the scooping up of all this private data accomplished?
Terrorism just isn’t that common in the US. The use of the biggest digital vacuuming operation in the world hasn’t accomplished much, looking at the black box from the outside.
For example, technically, the government would seem to have been able to sweep up all the on-line and credit card purchases of castor seeds as they happened or shortly after and, therefore, have had a database with the three latest perps in it.
But the FBI still went the wrong way a couple times, had to seize computers and finds the information within hours after descending on places. James Everett Dutschke, who bought on-line, was only identified after Paul Kevin Curtis’ lawyer fingered him. And it was Shannon Richardson who summoned the FBI to New Boston, not credit card purchases of castor seeds.
Anyway, a couple years back Tim Weiner’s history of the FBI, “Enemies,” mentioned the agency getting access to national e-mail through a program called Stellar Wind. It probably used the NSA as the technical collection means. This is more of the same. Only the names, data-mining software applications and corporate security contractors change.
More broadly, this is another issue where, if the national security megaplex can do something that means more for itself, it will do it.
The American people were never asked if they wanted everything about themselves in cyberspace and on the telephone shoved into a massive database, for the sake of safety during the war on terror. No one you know was consulted or asked for permission. It was just done.
And when you read the shock in some places on the net now, in this country anyway, you’re reading the opinions and feelings of the shoeshine upper middle class types who haven’t been sloughed off the US economy yet. They are so put out.
If you asked the people I see in the supermarket in Pasadena every evening about it (and I’ll be walking out to it in a few minutes), they wouldn’t know what’s being discussed. FISC? PRISM?
What’s NSA stand for?
They haven’t had the time or luxury to know. Their snooped-on smartphones are their connection to cyberspace and there’s not anything in this great mass of people that poses an existential national security threat.
So what does Keith Alexander make per year as the 4-star who’s head of the National Security Agency? He’s famously claimed that Chinese cyber-spying is resulting in the “greatest transfer of wealth in history.”
Who’s wealth, precisely?
It is fair game to discuss his compensation in relationship to these issues because nobody involved in this game is in the bottom three-quarters of the economic scorecard. The people implementing the mechanics of this kind of massive digital spying are all from the top, or employed in the national security servant class.
Alexander’s salary: somewhere between 230,000 and 290,000/year.
I don’t know anyone who makes that kind of money.
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Meta, spam question
Akismet, the spam filtering plug-in used by WordPress, just crashed on the blog side. I noticed it when a number of spam pieces went right through to comments.
The Akismet plug-in reports it cannot reach its servers. But there is no notice of a problem at akismet.com.
If anyone has had this happen to them, I’d appreciate a note.
In the meantime all comments are being held for moderation.
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Bean Pounding: Ricin babe arrested
First ricin beans pinup girl, ever!
From the wire, the FBI sorts it:
A Texas woman has been arrested in connection with the mailing of three letters containing a form of the poison ricin to President Obama, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, federal authorities said.
Shannon Rogers Guess Richardson of New Boston, Texas, originally called the Federal Bureau of Investigation claiming that her husband had sent the letters, officials said. The investigators found that she had sent the letters herself, they said.
Richardson is an actress with minor roles on television shows like The Walking Dead and the Vampire Diaries, and was arrested in Arkansas on charges that will be filed Friday afternoon …
From her Facebook page, did not like husband or the president, apparently.
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Bean Pounding: Told you so, for years
Ricin will never be a good weapon. But because of the war on terror millions of Americans believe just the opposite. And to this day, many counter-terror experts with zero practical knowledge in biochemistry continue to tell anyone who will listen that it is easy to make.
To wit, this disgraceful bit from a recent AP news story:
Security and counterterrorism expert Michael Fagel, who teaches at Northwestern University and is a veteran of ricin investigations, said ricin may be employed because castor beans are so easy to come by.
The plants grow wild along highways and in other spots in the U.S. They are also considered ornamental by some gardeners and are cultivated for medicinal castor oil and other products.
“And you can go on the Internet and find out any one of a gazillion recipes on how to make ricin,??? Fagel said, adding that it takes only a beginner’s knowledge of science to “weaponize??? it.
That’s irresponsible journalism and “wisdom” from the war on terror. And over a decade of it has relevance to why castor bean-pounding and the mailing of toxic letters to the president has become a grotesque but uniquely American micro-fad.
(Although it’s not the only factor, as I’ve pointed out. Can you think of any other Presidents, in your lifetime, who received ricin letters? No, didn’t think so. Why might that be?)
Castor meal, or what results after castor seeds are ground are about five percent protein. A five percent nitrogen content in castor meal comes with the protein and that is why it was used as fertilizer when the US still had a large castor farming and milling business.
Of the protein content in castor seeds, some is ricin. This is easily illustrated using SDS gel electrophoretic analysis of castor powder samples. (Which is just what the national lab in Maryland does when it receives samples recovered in ricin cases.)
Here is what a sample recovered from a ricin case looks like, analytically.
Examples from a ricin domestic terrorism case in the US begin in the lanes to the right of the clear lane. The single band lane to the left is a lab ricin standard. And the arrow denotes ricin component in the crude mixture from castor seeds.
The above shows a crude but complex mixture, of which ricin is only one part. Active ricin exists within it but it is far from pure.
And this is why the recipes on the Internet are irrelevant, except as lures and news items to be gawked at. They don’t do anything practical in the sense of a biochemical purification process.
No pure ricin is ever produced in domestic ricin case. It’s way beyond the capability of those who’ve been caught doing it.
Today, from a small newspaper, the Daily Mining Gazette from Houghton, Michigan:
Sarah Green, chair of the Tech chemistry department, said ricin stops all cell activities of the organism it attacks. However, ricin is effective as a weapon against humans only under certain circumstances …
In order for ricin to be effective as an airborne substance, Green said it would have to be a very fine powder and a huge quantity, perhaps tons, would be needed to make it a weapon of mass destruction.
A person who breathes or ingests ricin powder would get sick, but as long as an infected person received medical attention, that person would probably not die.
“Most people get sick, but they will survive,” she said.
Despite its possible toxicity, Green said only someone with a training in chemistry could make ricin an effective weapon.
“It takes quite a bit of purification,” she said.
People who actually know the protein chemistry business realize that production of “tons” of ricin is a ludicrous proposition.
Decades ago the US military tried to make a weapon out of ricin. It even filed a patent, one which became a contentious matter after 9/11.
But the patent, which I described many years ago here, was developed by those operating in almost complete ignorance of the true nature of ricin. Because of that, the work actually degrades ricin.
And there has never been any compelling evidence that this old US military work on “weaponizing” ricin was effective.
Despite all this, the US mainstream media will never get with the program. It’s too complicated a story. There’s a book in it, but who reads books? Not enough eyeballs for the website page.
The damage wrought is irreversible. The lore on ricin is deeply dug in and we will always have a small number of very suggestible, angry and disturbed people who pound castor beans, a first among western nations.
WhiteManistan: Operating out of spite
It’s been obvious for a long long time WhiteManistan, the Republican Party, and all the Ted Nugent-ized people operate with punishment toward those deemed their lessers always in mind.
Not news, but it’s nice to see Krugman write it:
Medicaid rejectionism will deny health coverage to roughly 3.6 million Americans, with essentially all of the victims living near or below the poverty line. And since past experience shows that Medicaid expansion is associated with significant declines in mortality, this would mean a lot of avoidable deaths: about 19,000 a year, the study estimated.
Just think about this for a minute. It’s one thing when politicians refuse to spend money helping the poor and vulnerable; that’s just business as usual. But here we have a case in which politicians are, in effect, spending large sums, in the form of rejected aid, not to help the poor but to hurt them …
[Republican] spitefulness appears to override all other considerations. And millions of Americans will pay the price.
“What it might do, however, is drive home to lower-income voters — many of them nonwhite — just how little the G.O.P. cares about their well-being, and reinforce the already strong Democratic advantage among Latinos, in particular,” he adds.
Cold Civil War 2, hatred of the black President and the neo-Confederacy roll on.
Sic semper tyrannis!
Is WhiteManistan un-American? From the archives.
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06.06.13
Bean Pounding: A dissident in WhiteManistan
And probably going over as good as a lead balloon.
From the Memphis Flyer, by Randy Haspel, excerpted:
These bizarre [ricin mailing] culprits are merely the dull tip of the spear when it comes to the gun-crazed individuals who live among us. The NRA has morphed from an organization that taught firearm safety and responsible gun ownership into a lobbying group for the armaments industry. Their heartless hysteria after the Newtown child slaughter caused gullible gun owners to panic that their rights were in jeopardy, especially after the NRA participated in spreading the false rumor that there was a government plot to buy up the civilian supply of ammunition after a media-induced run on bullets created a shortage.
Unable to see through Fox News and hate-radio propaganda that closing gun-show loopholes will lead to Black Hawk helicopters over Shreveport, these angry citizens live in fear of their own government and walk around with violent fantasies floating through their fevered minds. If you are told all day by right-wing media that you are at war with your government over your basic freedoms, then sending a toxin-laden letter to the chief executive doesn’t make you a terrorist. In your own mind, it makes you a patriot …
So, when a person who watches Fox News bile all day finally goes insane with paranoia, why should it be surprising when that person decides to take action against their government and its officials.
The entirety of the US mainstream media has also not touched the most obvious but most unpleasant fact in the ricin mailing fad.
President Barack Obama is the first president in US history to get not just one, but three ricin letters. In fact, he’s probably the only person in American history to have ever been mailed three poison letters within less than 60 days.
And he just happens to be the first African American president.
Just a coincidence. Yup.
And now you’ve read the first person to point it out.
First music video with ricin mail in it, ever. That’s worth something. Factual and timely, too.
Tommorrow: Bean-Pounding Blues, the song.
Meanwhile, the only ricin and domestic trouble soap opera, ever, that involved sending a poison letter to the president, continues:
There are still no arrests in the ricin investigation in East Texas, but an attorney for a man whose home has been searched by the FBI is speaking out.
FBI agents first searched the home of Nathan and Shannon Richardson in connection with the mailing of ricin-tainted letters to President Obama, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the Mayor’s gun control group in Washington D.C.
Attorney John Delk says his client Nathan Richardson approached him about getting a divorce a year before the FBI searched the couple’s house.
Richardson’s wife reportedly alerted authorities to suspected ricin in the couple’s New Boston home.
“We have very good reason to believe it was a setup,” said Delk.
One feels a bit sorry for the FBI men who have to sort it. They know the investigation of such trivial pests is a huge waste of time and money, but necessary procedure because of the bed we’ve made for ourselves over the last decade.
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I already know I’m weird, thanks anyway
From a web “health facts” story — left-handed people are so weird.
Left-handed people suffer more fright during the watching of horror movies, readers are informed. And there are more fibers connecting their left and right brain halves, a condition called “asymmetric,” which is said to make one more prone to schizophrenia and attention deficit disorder.
On the other hand, there’s people like me, who are lefties but also largely ambidextrous:
Left-handedness has its advantages, too! The same atypical brain tendencies associated with mental health challenges may also contribute to greater creativity and cognitive skills among some left-handed people.
For example, a study of professional orchestras uncovered a disproportionate number of left-handed musicians.
The GMA review article also notes that lefties are reportedly more likely to excel at music, as well as math and language fluency. Lefties are also reportedly more likely to score over 131 on IQ tests.
Lefties are more prevalent in one-on-one sports, too. Part of my college scholarship money came from wrestling. I wrestled right and left.
I do not play a left-handed guitar. But the dominance of my hands in playing standard guitar is the reverse of that of a right-handed player.
My strong hand is on the fret board. The strong hand of the righty player is in picking.
Does it make a difference? A subtle one, I suspect, having more to do with tonality, composition and choices in material that’s played over a lifetime.
Screw ya, righty. You are so normal.
The biggest transfer of [telephone calls] in history …
Wants you to believe China cyberspying on the US constitutes the greatest transfer of wealth in history.
Famous last words.
Inconveniently, right when the President is ready to meet with the premier of China to discuss cyberespionage, the biggest spy on Americans is shown to be … four-star general Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, pictured above.
From the Guardian:
The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
From the Obama administration, yada-yada:
The White House has sought to justify its surveillance of millions of Americans’ phone records as anger grows over revelations that a secret court order gives the National Security Agency blanket authority to collect call data from a major phone carrier.
Politicians and civil liberties campaigners described the disclosures, revealed by the Guardian on Wednesday, as the most sweeping intrusion into private data they had ever seen by the US government.
But the Obama administration, while declining to comment on the specific order, said the practice was “a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States”.
The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.
Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.
Readers may or may not recall part of the campaign on cyberwar, cybersecurity and cyberespionage has involved visits by Verizon executives, as well as leaders of other US big businesses, for talks exhorting them to support instantaneous information sharing about what’s going on on their networks with the National Security Agency.
I wish I could say I regret that cyber-spying has embarrassingly blown up in the administration’s face, at exactly the worst time.
But I’m not.
Like the Stuxnet virus deployed into Iran, this is another item putting the US hype generated on cyberwar into the cold water of a real world perspective.
There is what the US government and the national security megaplex say others are doing to us. And then there is what they are actually doing to us.
Keith Alexander and the Shoeshine Cult of Cyberwar — from the archives.
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