The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy — this time from the side of our arms manufacturers — finally think they have an electronic bomb.
And they’ve bragged about making and changing history in a p.r. video with only, ahem, one thousand some views as of yesterday.
Boeing can’t show you the Counter-electronics High-powered Advanced Missile Project, or CHAMP, in their dog and pony show video with the Air Force Research Laboratory. But they can show you old computers blinking in a narrow view (‘the monitors shown in the video at Boeing’s announcement of the tests only shut down for a few seconds’ reads one piece of Plaster Caster press).
And lottsa animated footage of an animated missile flying over a city.
So the astute viewer, not a stenographer journalist unfamiliar with the long history of these things, will be prepared to ask questions like:
What’s the range when the target PC is interrupted for a few seconds?
What’s the size of the weapon?
What tactical advantage is gained by making the lights and PC monitors in select buildings blink while an unopposed missile is flying overhead?
If it is envisioned as “invaluable against enemy infrastructure like radar and missile launch sites” how is it superior to an ordinary anti-radiation homing or direct attack weapon with longer range?
And if it as short range as exhibited how can it be used as effectively in air defense suppression?
Questions, questions! Why must you ask so many questions? Can you not see, Dick, how Air Force, Boeing and Raytheon boffins have shaken the pillars of science with their work in secret military labs? Surely this will get them to a Nobel ceremony.
Tell it to the Plaster Caster tech press and the guy at Aviation Week. He’s been telling everybody the electronic rays are here for years.
Anyway, that’s where all the easily overawed ass-kissers of military electrical engineers are.
When you make the world a better place rather than make something for trivially annoying people who can’t effectively fight back to charge off on the taxpayer, send me an e-mail.
Invariably, what now happens is that something will be sold to the military that’s an expensive dud, or nearly so. Like the Sheriff, aka the infamous pain ray, brought to you by many of the very same people.
Savor that “made history and stands to change the world” bullshit in the CHAMP commercial. Then look at what some really famous Nobel laureates did once here.
Whoever wins the upcoming presidential election, by halfway through the new term the Commander-in-Chief could be wielding a new weapon straight out of science fiction: laser cannons …
Earlier this year [Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder’s] office had said the Navy was four years away from mounting the laser weapons, but [Monday he said] that recent tests had been “very successful” and the Navy has figured out physics issues that plagued early concepts.
“We’re well past physics,” he said. “We’re just going through the integration efforts… Hopefully that tells you we’re well mature, and we’re ready to put these on naval ships.”
Well past the physics. One of the hallmarks of bad science: Extraordinary claims not backed up by any particularly compelling evidence other than publicity statement.
File under Military Tech Plaster Casters and stenography.
Good news and bad news, lads. Laser cannons allegedly
almost here, but denial of science of global warming. Does this
country have its shit wired, or what?!
This morning I was on the phone for an interview with Voice of America on Leon Panetta’s digital 9/11 warning at a “National Security Dinner” for business executives in NYC.
The mainstream news blotter on my PC had followed the usual script, dutifully repeating all the warnings about an infrastructure vulnerable to — potential Iranian cyberattack!
Ten years ago it was mostly always China that was named. And China is still a very favorite country to mention in Cult of Cyberwar news.
But as I’ve pointed out before, it takes a lot of gall to paint Iran as plotting to launch cyberattacks — the Shamoon virus being the star of this show, since it infected Saudi Arabian Aramco installations — when you’re the party who started the cyberwar.
While the US government has not acknowledged it, it’s no longer a secret that it has been quietly hard at work attacking Iranian infrastructure, and the networks of other Middle Eastern nations deemed unfriendly, with malware.
And it would come as no surprise if it had touched off a cyber-arms race and a retaliating clandestine war.
So since we’ve been poking Iran with pointed sticks in cyberspace for awhile, we’re really not in any position to summon outrage over malware on Saudi Arabian oil terminal networks.
We had to go and shit the bed so now we must live with it.
Look — it’s simple. Have good back-ups. Root, hog or die.
It’s worth adding, that the implication that Americans will wake up one morning and find the country, or portions of it, a smoking dysfunctional ruin due to Iranian cyberattack is about as disingenuous as can be imagined.
However, this type of rhetorical/political maneuvering is not new and Panetta’s speech is one in a historical continuum of warnings about digital Pearl Harbor that go back well over fifteen years. In fact, many American cyberwarriors, and computer security workers, were in rubber pants when they were first cranked up. We furnish the enemy of convenience, according to the time and conditions. The rest of the stuff about what they can do, embellished with the seasoning of computer malware incidents chosen from current news, follows automatically.
Here in the U.S., attacks on large financial institutions during the last two months have delayed or disrupted services on customer Web sites. Secretary Panetta said the scale and speed of those attacks was “unprecedented??? …
While recent attacks concern defense officials, the worry is that there could be even more destructive scenarios. “We know that foreign cyber actors are probing America’s critical infrastructure networks,??? said Secretary Panetta. Those hackers are trying to access computer control systems that operate chemical, electricity and water plants as well as those that guide transportation systems, he said. “We know of specific instances where intruders have successfully gained access to these control systems,??? he said.
Secretary Panetta said the Department of Defense is finalizing the most comprehensive change to the rules of engagement in cyberspace in seven years. “The new rules will make clear that the Department has a responsibility not only to defend DoD’s networks, but also to be prepared to defend the nation and our national interests against an attack in or through cyberspace,??? he said.
What’s not explained here is that networked computers have been everywhere for a good long time. And that trouble-makers and malware invariably always get into them, sooner or later. Well over a decade ago, malware was found on a space shuttle computer, for instance.
And to catalog it all might fill the Library of Congress.
As for the attack-the-water meme, no a requirement of every story on the issue, DD blog has dealt with it decisively, many times. Most recently, here.
And, the “unprecedented” attacks on US giant banks, which made their web pages run slow or inconvenienced some doing on-line banking, a digital Pearl Harbor that somehow failed to bring the nation low, here.
Due to the continued abuse of public news on the issue by US national security men, the now constant use of fearful scenarios and predictions, the public is primed to react badly to even the most trivial incidents. People believe the country could be ruined through cyberspace because they have been told so many times by the Leon Panettas.
One understands fully why the Leon Panettas of our nation do this. They must. Since 9/11, everything must be described in terms of how it could be a potential American civilization-destroying catastrophe, or you are not doing proper due diligence. Many others would say there’s quite a bit of rote CYA-ism to it.
Trouble via the Internet daily will always be with us. It’s a risk that must be managed and, to a large extent, is — with great labor and struggle. But it has not been served by unleashing a state-sponsored malware attack on foes and then hypocritically complaining when someone has aimed a clumsy attack in kind back at you or an “ally.”
“All told, the Shamoon virus was probably the most destructive attack that the private sector has seen to date,??? said Leon Panetta, as conveyed by the Wall Street Journal.
But Iranian computers, or those in other countries caught in the splatter campaign by the Stuxnet program and its brethren somehow have gone missing in this calculation. Because they’re the bad guys and deserve it, right?
In the world of global network security, what you see depends on where you’re standing.
“The Shamoon virus attacked 30,000 Saudi ARAMCO workstations and replaced crucial system files with an image of a burning U.S. flag … That virus added false information that overwrote all of the real data on those machines,” reads the Journal.
Amid a chart packed with erotica and romance, novelist Ray Gorham cracked our Self-Published Bestsellers List this week with a $1.99 thriller [77 Days in September] about an electromagnetic pulse attack (EMP) on the United States.
On a Friday afternoon before Labor Day, Americans are getting ready for the holiday weekend, completely unaware of a long-planned terrorist plot about to be launched against the country. Kyle Tait is settling in for his flight home to Montana when a single nuclear bomb is detonated 300 miles above the heart of America. The blast, an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP), destroys every electrical device in the country, and results in the crippling of the power grid, the shutting down of modern communications, and bringing to a halt most forms of transportation.
Kyle narrowly escapes when his airplane crashes on take-off, only to find himself stranded 2,000 miles from home in a country that has been forced, from a technological standpoint, back to the 19th Century …
People who don’t know anything about science, including journalists, often labor under the assumption that the US military is whiz-bang at it.
Not so. Most of the great achievements in American science do not, and did not, come from the US military. The Manhattan Project, for example, while conducted by the military in World War II, was the product of the finest minds in high-energy physics, chemistry and other related fields.
Today, a doofus editor at an NBC News blog called “Futuretech,” allowed someone to go forward with a story on how the US Navy wants to make jet fuel from sea water.
It takes one small torpedo to send this story to the bottom.
The only way to make fuel from water is by electrolysis, which yields burnable hydrogen gas. And the reason our fuel problems are not over is because splitting it is not trivial, energy wise.
Which is a very good thing for the planet since good ol’ H20 is the solvent in which the chemistry of all life on Earth occurs. (I kinda like that sentence.)
But leave it to stupid journalists to mess this up with incomprehension for an equally benighted audience.
The U.S. Navy may need to look no further than the water around its ships to produce jet fuel, according to a program underway at its research laboratory …
The technology involves extracting carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas from seawater and then using catalysts to convert them into a class of jet fuel called J-5 that meets Navy safety specifications.
The journalist, John Roach, never really gets around to explaining the bit about cracking water, instead relying on some double-talk from the Navy boffins pushing their quack schemes:
This can all be done for between $3 to $6 per gallon, according to a feasibility study published in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy.
“This cost includes capital costs, operation and maintenance, and electrical generation cost for synthesizing the fuel,??? Heather Willauer, the study’s lead author at the Naval Research Laboratory, told NBC News in an email …
The team elaborates in the paper that the “though the energy balance is unfavorable, electricity cannot and never will be able to fuel jet turbines.???
The electricity to produce the fuel would come from either ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) technology or onboard nuclear power technologies.
Took a giant step toward solving the world’s energy problems in one e-mail, a press release, some vague jargon (OTEC) and an article in an obscure journal, did ya?
There might be an Ig Nobel Prize in it.
From Barry Commoner’s obit at the Times, today:
Along with eminent figures of the postwar years like the chemist Linus Pauling and the anthropologist Margaret Mead, he was concerned that the integrity of American science had been compromised — first by the government’s emphasis on supporting physics at the expense of other fields during the development of nuclear weapons, and second by the growing privatization of research, in which pure science took a back seat to projects that held short-range promise of marketable technologies.
Basic science helps one understand why the Navy’s fuel from seawater project is a waste of time. And is intelligence-insulting.
If they could personally touch off a war with Iran before the election, they would.
From the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, and the anti-shariah law/get Huma Abedin crew, this — timed for Netanyahu’s “red line” speech at the UN.
It’s useful to see how the Cult is doing its best to start another war in the Middle East.
Times are hard for the Cult of EMP Crazy. It’s old Congressional main man, Republican Roscoe Bartlett, may lose his House re-election bid in November.
Bartlett, whose career cause has been one warning about electromagnetic pulse doom after another and getting ignored or having his legislation on it wiped off bills by other more powerful pols in his own party, stepped in it earlier this month at a town meeting in his district.
“I’m for student loans. I want kids to have an education,??? Bartlett responded. But he explained that he had read through the Constitution carefully and could find no evidence “that the federal government should be involved in education.??? Then Bartlett expanded on that point (at the 3:35 mark in the clip above, which was passed along by a Democrat).
“Not that it’s not a good idea to give students loans; it certainly is a good idea to give them loans,??? Bartlett said. “But if you can ignore the Constitution to do something good today, tomorrow you will be ignoring the Constitution to do something bad. You could. There are more people in our, in America today of German ancestry than any other [inaudible]. The Holocaust that occurred in Germany — how in the heck could that happen? And when you start down the wrong road, it can be a very slippery slope.???
Loosely comparing the granting of student loans to American German citizens, Hitler and the terror that led to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany probably lost him a few votes. If anyone was paying attention.
Someone should probably purchase Bartlett an old used copy of William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
It is a thick book but Roscoe Bartlett will have time to read it when he continues prepping for the coming collapse after the election. The book makes it hard to square the alleged problem of more school loans with, say, the burning of the Reichstag, the murder and imprisonment of thousands of the Nazi Party’s enemies, and the bestial reduction of German Jews to non-citizen “objects” while the Fuhrer was taking dictatorial power in the final days of Weimar Germany.
The Washington Post may have unintentionally written Bartlett’s political obituary, in August, here.
The article was a laundry list of right-wing survivalist/electromagnetic pulse doom crazy: “The idea that the end of the world is near, and that people will be judged, is a key tenet of [Roscoe Bartlett’s] Adventist beliefs.”
American human right researchers on both coasts — at Stanford out here, and NYU, have published a collaborative study on the drone campaigns in Pakistan. And it isn’t pretty. For practical purpose, drones are conducting a campaign of terror despite official blandishments to the contrary.
The drone campaign is also free of democratic control.
Far more civilians have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas than U.S. counter-terrorism officials have acknowledged, a new study by human rights researchers at Stanford University and New York University contends.
The report, “Living Under Drones,” also concludes that the classified CIA program has not made America any safer and instead has turned the Pakistani public against U.S. policy in the volatile region.
Notably, this story was not written by the newspaper’s drone flack, W. J. Hennigan, who over the space of the last couple years has been something of a p.r. office for the armed drone industry.
[US drone strike policies] cause considerable and under-accounted-for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury. Drones hover twenty-four hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning. Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities. Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves. These fears have affected behavior. The US practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims. Some community members shy away from gathering in groups, including important tribal dispute-resolution bodies, out of fear that they may attract the attention of drone operators. Some parents choose to keep their children home, and children injured or traumatized by strikes have dropped out of school. Waziris told our researchers that the strikes have undermined cultural and religious practices related to burial, and made family members afraid to attend funerals. In addition, families who lost loved ones or their homes in drone strikes now struggle to support themselves.
The Living Under Drones researchers recommend the US government institute a new set of procedure, all of which will presumably be found quite unpalatable by the Obama administration.
They include: “[ensuring] independent investigations into drone strike deaths.” conducting “robust investigations and, where appropriate, prosecutions [while establishing] compensation programs for civilians harmed by US strikes,” and fulfilling “its international humanitarian and human rights law obligations with respect to the use of force, including by not using lethal force against individuals who are not members of armed groups …”
Journalists, it advises, “should cease the common practice of referring simply to ‘militant’ deaths, without further explanation. All reporting of government accounts of ‘militant’ deaths should include acknowledgment that the US government counts all adult males killed by strikes as ‘militants’ …”
Naturally, there has been a loud cry against the incessant escalating use of drones abroad. In a slew of cartoons, editorials and even some news pieces, the drone campaign has been heavily criticized.
All without effect, demonstrating how the drone program has gone completely beyond democratic control. Indeed, the use of drones to kill people in the poorest and most desperate places of the world has not even been a momentary topic for discussion in the current presidential race.
Osama bin Laden is dead and al Qaeda has been rendered virtually non-operational, except for moments of opportunity in places wracked by civil war and total societal breakdown.
Yet, eleven years after 9/11, the eye barely blinks when news stories come across the wire on the thrumming of General Atomics’ Reaper drones in the air above the blighted areas of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. And the subsequent technological vengeance brought down on those in the targeted areas.
The new fad is mini-series TV for the web. A couple months ago Yahoo rolled out “Electric City,” an animated science-fiction drama starring its bank roller, Tom Hanks as the central figure. I watched two episodes, as thrilling as watching mud dry.
Today Yahoo started “Cybergeddon,” a very poor woman’s “24,” underwritten by Symantec.
You know what it’s all about. Push software button remote terrorism, with all the scenarios and myths the salesmen and fear-mongers have delivered over the last ten years.
Since the episodes are only 10 minutes long, there’s a lot of push-buttoning to be shoehorned into each segment.
The premier, uniquely entitled “Push of a Button,” has its central character, a young lady of the FBI who has just nabbed her first cyber-terrorist in Prague, dumping her boyfriend special agent because she prizes her career track more.
The cyberterrorist is sent to prison in the Ukraine where his term is cut short because he has a smartphone which he pushes a button on to deposit a quarter of a million dollars in the accounts of his guards.
A deal’s a deal — so instead of beating him to death and keeping the cash — the jailers let him out.
Upon which he pushes another button on his smartphone to launch an attack on the, wait for it, water systems of southern California. A virus, said to be like Stuxnet, you know — the one we wrote to attack Iran, has been activated in Los Angeles.
It’s a laughable subterfuge, regularly peddled by cybersecurity salesmen.
Water in Los Angeles county is not centrally controlled or even in one spot. It’s all over, in the little sub-communities and tracts, in the valleys and the foothills, and the smaller to medium-sized cities of the Los Angeles metropolitan complex.
It’s distributed, there’s no way to centrally attack it, or to even attack one piece that would immediately threaten to endanger millions of people. Sadly for terrorists, if not scriptwriters or cybersecurity salesmen, water is durable in the US.
For example, my brain tells me, and it’s usually pretty good at these things, that it would be virtually impossible to affect water in Los Angeles County short of destroying the Owens Valley, the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the Colorado River and the Colorado River Aqueduct. It would take an almost irreversible blackout in California to hinder the flow of water into LA County.
What, could hackers or cyber-soldiers blow up Pasadena Water & Power or make the complex unusable and all the water unpotable?
Contrary to what may be popular belief, huge vats of poison are not stored right with water so that a “the push of a button” can contaminate it. Too much chlorine, or adding a little too much alum, would have only negligible effects.
Southern California would ignore you, “Push of a Button” cyberterrorist.
The traffic on the freeway through Pasadena would start jamming around three, as usual. The sun would blast the concrete on the el Molino bridge as I walk over it, maybe to Bobby’s for a soda and a taco.
And that’s all I have to say about this piece of pandering crap. I jumped on the grenade.
Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy chieftain endorses Todd Akin:
Former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich broke with national party leaders and endorsed Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, saying other Republicans must “in good conscience??? do the same.
“If Todd and the people of Missouri prove it’s a close race, what’s the moral case for not backing the Republican nominee???? Gingrich said.
The moral case? That’s an easy one: You shouldn’t vote for dicks.
Newt Gingrich never does anything without getting paid. One wonders the amount of ransom he required for this?
Too rich to pass up, the press release passed off as a story, from Google News, written by “a former corporate director of public affairs for General Dynamics Corp.”
Anyway, the headline reads:
‘Revolution,’ new TV show, focuses on absence of electricity; could it be from electromagnetic pulse attack … Scenario not unimaginable if terrorists can get hands on nuclear weapons
We haven’t heard much lately about the potential effects of an electromagnetic pulse attack on our country but we’re going to hear about it soon. “Revolution,” a TV show premiering next month, will explore the question: What would happen to our society if we lost all of our electricity?
Imagine an environment in which nothing electrical works … That’s the premise of “Revolution.” Think that’s far-fetched? Think again. It is possible and we’re not prepared to deal with such an environment.
Revolution is said to be the work of Eric Kripke. He’s famous for Supernatural. But now it would be good to beat him over the head with a plank.
Electromagnetic pulse destruction, right there with vampires and zombies in scarcity. Both of which were present, off and on, in Supernatural. EMP, it’s such an ambitious stretch.
Now, don’t you really want to hit him with something? I know you do. Admit it. That would be the right thing. And just.
“The National [sic] Heritage Foundation says an EMP attack constitutes one of the greatest threats to national security,” continues the spiel. “Unfortunately few Americans have ever heard of it.”
I guess they’ll let anyone in. So what’s with all the regular crap about big corporate America not being able to find employees with the right “skills” and “intelligence”?
