But do go to the site of the German researcher propagating its central thesis, Ralph Langner.
Langner’s discussion is an interesting one and often compelling.
But “hack of the century” is the type of overused phrase that won’t get you a lot of mileage in circles not inclined to believe absolutely everything published about global malware. Or cyberwar.
Langner knows the technical side and makes a reasonable argument
as to the amount of effort put into the Stuxnet bug. He argues that it was created by a national intelligence/defense program. And the obvious insinuation for this story is Israel, although other countries are not ruled out.
However, the discussion goes a bit to far — understandably, in linking circumstantial news — that Iran’s nuclear program has progressed slower than expected — and Stuxnet.
There is no proof that anything went bang or failed catastrophically in a nuclear reactor or even a a centrifuge cascade. Other equally or more plausible explanations exist for any perceived slow down, if there is one, in an Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Still, if one takes the broad leap and grants that a virtual effect of some kind was achieved, Stuxnet still has had an indiscernible effect to everyone not already in on the story.
Years ago, I said publicly that I thought governments would try to write malware and pursue cyberwar. I had no real idea how long ago until I started digging up some old digital news records.
“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.”
To this I’d only add that the lack of substantial proof of success in offensive malware operations won’t stop anyone in the business of insisting just the opposite.
However, Iran’s nuclear program also won’t be stopped by a piece of malware aimed at controller software in its factories.
And the liabilities of employing something like Stuxnet are now fairly obvious.
The most glaring being that such a thing is immediately seized upon and pulled apart by the worldwide distributed network of computer security researchers. And second, that even granting for a moment that it was designed to be directed at Iran, the intelligence requirements for it to be solely limited to that were still way too great to limit its spread to that country.
Stuxnet, which was first publicly identified several months ago, is aimed solely at industrial equipment made by Siemens that controls oil pipelines, electric utilities, nuclear facilities and other large industrial sites. While it is not clear that Iran was the main target — the infection has also been reported in Indonesia, Pakistan, India and elsewhere — a disproportionate number of computers inside Iran appear to have been struck, according to reports by computer security monitors.
Another ramification is the identification of the ioriginating country. If the country of origin is already an international pariah, then it doesn’t matter if Stuxnet is pinned on such a nation.
As a thought experiment, assume for a minute that Stuxnet is a part of a US program, not Israel’s.
In terms of national security and unilateral action, everyone already thinks the US acts rashly and can be reliably depended upon to behave with little regard for others.
At this point, there’s no longer much of a downside to using something like Stuxnet.
Even if a national program were to execute something so poorly the backfire would sweep over the originating country’s civilian systems. (That’s certainly progress, of sorts.)
It would just be yet another example of some team or some agency thinking, perhaps reasonably, that it’s godly and beyond reach.
And we’ve already had a few of those.
Bruce Ivins and the lack of professional diligence at Fort Detrick, in the world of real things as opposed to virtual, coming to mind.
Stuxnet as a super cyber weapon is a hot, sexy story. The hype behind it is predictable, even logical. Paradoxically, one of the famous journalists usually the first to exaggerate such things — John Markoff of the New York Times — gave it, what was for him, a mild reception.
The most striking aspect of the fast-spreading malicious computer program — which has turned up in industrial programs around the world and which Iran said had appeared in the computers of workers in its nuclear project — may not have been how sophisticated it was, but rather how sloppy its creators were in letting a specifically aimed attack scatter randomly around the globe.
All of the old anti-virus programmers, as far back as the late Eighties and Nineties, would have told anyone the same. In fact, they told stories like it about various computer viruses many times, the only difference being the wherewithal didn’t yet exist to aim them roughly over a global network.
In essence, once a piece of replicating malware is released into the world, no matter how “smart” (that being a relatively elastic term) its creator(s), it’s effectively liable to wind up where least expected, no matter how exactingly programmed.
If we get back to nuclear fuel cycles and national bomb programs for a moment, it should be remembered that uranium can be enriched, and an atom bomb made, entirely without the use of Siemens software and globally networked computers.
Entire libraries of books exist on the matter.
And people who have devoted professional careers to the study of nuclear proliferation can give entire classes on what can go wrong inside a bomb program. Without ever getting to software problems and malware. There are many things in the material world which can effect the progress of a bomb-making program, not the least of which are easily understood hurdles like inexperience, subpar skills and interference with access to essentials and properly engineered machinery.
It is unclear whether the problems that Iran has had enriching uranium are the result of poor centrifuge design, difficulty obtaining components or accelerated Western efforts to sabotage the nuclear program …
For most of this year, Iran has added relatively few centrifuges — the machines that spin uranium at supersonic speed, enriching it — to its main plant at Natanz. Only about half of those installed are operating, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. So far, Iran has produced about 5,730 pounds, enough, with considerable additional enrichment, to produce roughly two weapons.
The public explanation by American officials is that the centrifuges are inefficient and subject to regular breakdowns. And while Iranian officials have talked about installing more advanced models that would be more efficient and reliable, only a few have been installed.
“Either they don’t have the machines, or they have real questions about their technical competence,??? Mr. Samore said.
Some of Iran’s enrichment problems appear to have external origins. Sanctions have made it more difficult for Iran to obtain precision parts and specialty metals.
Any of these explanations are as likely, perhaps even greatly moreso, than Stuxnet.
Ted Nugent’s latest essay in the Washington Times is the third in a series of anti-Muslim rants he’s penned this summer. Bafflingly, some of these are now being reprinted in a Detroit newspaper.
Nugent endorses the Team B report that Muslim extremism, in the guise of Shariah law, is taking over America. Indeed, if so, it is nefariously subtle, since most cannot see it.
In the fact-based world, Nugent’s essay — as does the Team B report — takes on the air of something heard from General Jack Ripper, telling Lionel Mandrake at Burpelson AFB, why he launched the bomb wing at the Soviet Union.
Nugent uses the word “poisoning” twice in his essay. It’s a less elegant construction than Ripper’s dialog, concocted by Terry Southern and Peter George for the script of Dr. Strangelove:
A foreign substance is introduced into the precious bodily fluids, without the knowledge of the individual and certainly without any free choice. That’s the way the commies work…
In Team B’s case (and for Nugent’s essay), the nefarious foreign substance is Shariah law, not fluoride put into ice cream by the commies.
“What if it turns out that some of the people the Obama administration has been embracing are actually promoting the same totalitarian ideology and seditious agenda as al Qaeda, only they’re doing it from White House Iftar dinners?” is the stand-out quote from Team B.
In Dr. Strangelove, Jack Ripper was the plainly nuts character.
The most bone-chilling finding by Team B is that America faces the threat of Islamic Shariah law slowing poisoning our legal system and ultimately destroying it.
He continues:
Shariah should be banned in the United States and those Muslims and imams in America who advocate Shariah should be charged with sedition. Trying to overthrow our constitutional government through peaceful or violent means should never be tolerated.
Shariah will only be allowed to poison our legal system and culture if we allow it.
This from a guy who only shouts and writes about overthrowing the present US government.
Team B is the work of Frank Gaffney. Earlier this week, I wrote about him in connection with a post on the Cult of EMP Crazy, of which he is a charter member.
He represents the core of the Cult — the sole property of the GOP — also sharing double membership with Islam-o-phobes and those who believe the President is a secret Muslim.
You can think of them as a lamentable collection of poor men’s Jack Rippers. They hold political office or seats in insane right-wing think tanks but do not have command of a strategic bomb wing.
Yet.
The only reason they’re not truly dangerous right this instant is because they don’t have majority power.
Hoekstra is famous for being mostly a loud Congressional do-nothing. And an Islam-o-phobe. I wrote about him back in 2006, when he was first venting rubbish on Islam sapping and impurifying the precious bodily fluids of America.
As with the Tea Party, Nugent has adopted ever more extreme positions. These ideas are not new, having always been present in the US politics. However, in gentler times they were easily suppressed and kept to the fringe.
Now they’ve been vetted as acceptable by large sections of the population. They anticipate and welcome an even more harsh and cruel country, one of great social and economic inequality, intolerant of everything except its paranoid white appendix of wealth and power.
Again stymied in the US, the Cult of EMP Crazy has moved some of its lobbying effort to the United Kingdom.
Electromagnetic pulse doom stories don’t damage the US president as much as middle class unemployment. In the US even the EMP Crazy lobby understands this.
And this partly explains why standard EMP crazies like Newt Gingrich and Frank Gaffney are now flogging Islam-o-phobia. Gaffney is taken care of today over at Armchair Generalist in Conservative Group Proposes Holy War.
Gaffney is an EMP kook, a birther — in other words, he’s notorious.
I’ve dealt with him before here. He represents the core of the cult which is the property of GOP kookery, also sharing double membership with Islam-o-phobes.
Here’s Gaffney — quoted from some newspaper over at AG:
“What if it turns out that some of the people the Obama administration has been embracing are actually promoting the same totalitarian ideology and seditious agenda as al Qaeda, only they’re doing it from White House Iftar dinners?” said Mr. Gaffney, referring to the daily meal eaten by Muslims to break their fast during Ramadan.
With the cult stymied in the US, its big generals sent off to push for total war against Islam, one of the lesser EMP crazies — Avi Schnurr — has been up to devilment in Britain.
New UK defence minister Liam Fox has fallen into the clutches of fearmongering armsbiz lobbyists, according to reports.
The Telegraph reports on a behind-closed-doors speech by Dr Fox at an event today organised by Avi Schnurr, a lobbyist known for pushing the idea that various expensive defence technologies should be developed by Western governments to ward off hostile ballistic missiles and Bond-villain* style electromagnetic pulse strikes. Schnurr is a leading light of both the Israel Missile Defence Association and the Electric Infrastructure Security Council, which hosts Dr Fox today.
“As the nature of our technology becomes more complex, so the threat becomes more widespread,??? the defence secretary’s speech reads, according to the Telegraph.
“There are certain lunatic-fringe analysts who consider that an EMP can be generated easily using conventional explosives and simple equipment easily fabricated in a back-alley bombmaking shop, but in fact even the mighty US military has never succeeded in building a useful conventional EMP weapon, either explosives-pumped or of the electrically-powered High Power Microwave (HPM) type.
Despite all this Mr Schnurr and his like have had a certain amount of success in bigging-up the pulse strike threat in the USA, and lately have crossed the pond. One of Schnurr’s earliest converts here was the Right Honourable James Arbuthnot, Tory chairman of the Parliamentary Defence Committee and relentless arms-industry point man inside the government. Arbuthnot is nowadays a board member of Schnurr’s EIS organisation, and is chairing today’s EIS Summit.
It would seem that Dr Fox has now in turn been recruited by Arbuthnot, at least to the extent of being willing to boost the EMP threat in a speech.
In the piece, Page neatly encompasses the entire world view of the cult — leaving out its kook far right GOP constituency, which — for the sake of the story — has less meaning in the UK. Another component missing in the UK is the bright line of apocalypse mania, this in which the Christian far right’s interest in electromagnetic pulse attack is not so much on avoiding it, but anticipating it because it will, according to them, signal the beginning of the final battle, the return of Jesus, and the eternal damnation of everyone else but them.
The flip side of the EMP crazy coin is also delivered. While Iran or North Korea are menacing us with a civilization-ending electromagnetic attack, we are always alleged to be working on non-nuclear electromagnetic bombs and rays. These are the weapons that have been coming for the last two decades — but never quite arriving.
In fact, the mythology is so entrenched in parts of the big media, you can routinely read made-up rubbish like this, recently published by The Economist:
These days, the idea of detonating a nuclear EMP weapon to disable the radar defences of some rogue dictatorship is politically unthinkable. Defence laboratories have therefore turned their attention instead to producing large electromagnetic pulses by conventional explosives and other means.
One such weapon uses a small charge of explosive to ram an armature down the axis of a current-carrying coil, squeezing its magnetic field so violently in the process that it emits a powerful burst of electromagnetic energy over distances of several hundred metres. Another type employs a Marx generator (a machine used for simulating lightning strikes) to dump a large electrical charge stored in a bank of capacitors into a specially shaped antenna.
American defence forces have converted a number of cruise missiles to function as non-nuclear EMP generators. Apparently, cars parked up to 300 metres away have had their alternators, ignition coils and engine controls disabled this way. Such e-weapons are said to have been used in Kosovo, the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan.
Afghanistan. Yeah, we attacked the infrastructure of the Taliban in Marja with electromagnetic pulse rays and bombs. That’s why things are going so good.
“I bought a new toilet! It was made in China. That’s where all the jobs went. Nothin’ could be finer!” — live verse from ‘China Toilet Blooz‘ and I do play the harmonica.
Ahem, the New York Times has run a bit asking the question: Are there any jobs that can’t be outsourced?
Well, yeah, menial cleaning, restaurant work, anything that requires a face-to-face connection. I’m willing to bet that overuse of robots and telepresence will cause the same resistance and disgust the phenomenon does on help and corporate telephone lines.
The best jobs program is trade reform with China. Since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, it has used a potent set of mercantilist and protectionist policies to shift millions of American manufacturing jobs offshore.
America can compete in the international environment if “free trade” is also fair.
America’s unemployed skilled manufacturing workers – both white-and blue-collar – can only trade down …
Regrettably, the current generation of unemployed workers is lost until the White House and Congress find backbones to stand up to Chinese trade policies.
In an aside, if you’re wondering why I’ve shifted increasingly away from security discussions that are purely on weird weapons lobbies and fear-mongering, it’s because the security of the country ultimately lies within. If rot and economic unfairness cleans out the middle class, there is no security.
As it stands, the US is unstable. And it can easily become moreso. An unstable US is not good for the rest of the world.
Irrational leadership leads to war and hardship inflicted on others, not just on ourselves. And if there is anyone who thinks that putting the Republican Party in control in Congress won’t lead to greater national instability, they need to get away from this blog. Nothing for you here.
Moreover, there is neither a shortage of U.S. students who are world-class in their educational performance nor of college graduates with science and engineering degrees. The U.S. can claim the lion’s share of the world’s highest performing (domestic) science students and continues to graduate more than two times the number of scientists and engineers than are hired each year. Meanwhile, we produce an astounding number of very low performing students. Improving education is important but focusing on top tier skills is not a panacea for unemployment or poor economic performance …
Job growth requires a coordinated policy response that includes some protection for U.S. workers as well as stimulating demand for domestic products and services.
I would add to these assessments that there can’t be any changes until American business is harshly penalized for deindustrializing to slave labor work nations. Others have called for a democracy tariff, a price put on imports at the border for those things coming from such ‘beggar-they-neighbor’ living spaces.
I’ve said that the Obama administration’s tax incentives are essentially bribes to American business. Instead of hiring the unemployed directly, the president resorts to trickle-down efforts, hoping that some manner of payoff will juice American business into hiring.
The frontpage of yesterday’s hardcopy (no link) Los Angeles Times had, as its headline: R&D effort may yield scant jobs.
The part worth excerpting, which is pretty obvious:
Over the last two decades, US scientists and engineers have discovered or pioneered the science behind one blockbuster product after another — from flat-panel screens and robotics to the lithium batteries that run next generation power tools and electric cars.
Yet, in almost every case, production, jobs and most of the economic benefits that sprang from those breakthroughs have ended up overseas.
===
And new reports show that during the recession American companies ramped up investment overseas for plants and new hires, as well research and development — even as they cut back domestically.
So what didn’t get outsourced in the Great Recession?
Census jobs. It required face to face work and an enterprising, ad hoc, self-motivating mass workforce. I kinow. I was part of it.
The US government could change things by choosing to hire people directly for national reclamation. There would be the usual business outcry that by putting itself in competition with the private sector for such work, it was being bad in all the usual ways. Anti-competitive, socialist, communist, etc.
But when you have an American business culture that’s already accustomed to just taking the bribe money and using it to hurt the US labor force even more, there would seem to be little downside to actually putting people to work without private sector help.
It did not paint this part of the weapons industry as a boon. Building flying robot assassins employs only 10,000. It’s a relative drop in the bucket for a southern California economy that’s bigger than most world nations.
And while 10,000 do have jobs in it, it’s an industry that generates little worth to the middle class. Other than stimulating the local economy where workers presumably spend much of their pay.
Robot assassins don’t build roads, they don’t improve the infrastructure, they don’t do anything for universal healthcare, they don’t fight disease, they don’t coach high-school wrestling teams, they don’t spread goodwill overseas. And it’s not an industry that is theoretically open to everyone for a good living regionally, like Detroit in its heyday.
The Times article also addressed all the downside associated with the industry. Its political lobbying, the legalized political bribery, the association with scumbags like Randy “Duke” Cunningham.
It wrote about the fact that as technology, the drones pretty much suck. They are not miraculous things.
They’re expensive and not useful against any country that has an air defense. They were a joke over lowly Bosnia, it was said, and no one wanted them prior to 9/11.
Which again only shows the war on terror as a growth opportunity for those parts of the American economy which very little to do with a healthy middle class.
In it, drones are used to bump off poor people — “terrorists” after drinking water — in Mexico, their video footage used as entertainment in reality show American programming.
Just prior to 9/11, the Times writes of a Predator sales pitch:
The Predator could be used to spot wildfires, [the General Atomics salesman] told his latest prospects. It could monitor global warming.
The audience listened politely — then scattered quickly when the demonstration ended. There were no takers.
Despite the constant braying about it, “[The drone business is] still not big enough to single-handedly restore the Southland aerospace industry to its former glory,” concluded the Times.
These are the jobs that are not outsourced. Wow.
Thanks heavens they’re as nasty as everyone thinks
From CNBC, billionaires bum out at esatz Davos over US and Obama administration:
“They saw the United States in a long-term slow growth environment with the near-term risk of recession quite real,??? said Wien, in a commentary to Blackstone clients. “The Obama administration was viewed as hostile to business and that discouraged both hiring and investment. Companies and entrepreneurs were reluctant to add workers because they didn’t know what their healthcare costs or taxes were going to be.???
A massive reduction in the consumer debt load, a workforce without the right skills for the jobs of tomorrow, and too high labor costs relative to other countries “are not problems that are likely to be solved any time soon,??? wrote Wien of the attitude of the people at the lunches, which took place in two groups on successive Fridays last month. “Only a few investors thought the Standard & Poor’s could reach 1200 next year.???
So what are the billionaires buying if this environment continues? Wien said “vacant office building,??? “farmland??? and “Africa??? were some of the ideas thrown out.
“[Pieces of jewelry] meant for little girls, they hung on simple faux silver necklaces and cost as little as $8.00.
And they were potentially deadly, according to consumer advocates. This type of cheap costume jewelry made with the metal cadmium, which can be toxic at high levels, is at the heart of the latest ‘made in China’ scare.
Since January, the Consumer Product Safety Division has targeted more than 200,000 pieces of cheap jewelry from China that were made with cadmium and sold at numerous national retail chains, including Wal-Mart and Claire’s.
The story informs when the US virtually banned toxic lead from Chinese toys in 2008, the factories in the country simply moved to cancer-causing cadmium.
“Because entry into low-end jewelry manufacturing in China is inexpensive, competition is tough and factories do all they can to stay afloat, even if that means using toxic materials,” reads the newspaper. “The US EPA labels cadmium a ‘probable human carcinogen.””
Inevitably, it’s the Dickensian nature of US business practice which must take much of the blame.
The story interviews Chinese manufacturers who could make non-toxic jewelry. But it costs more and the pressure is tremendous for the cheapest goods. To sell in the US — presumably at Wal-Marts.
Again, the image of US de-industrialization, the shipping of jobs making things overseas where American businesses can exert pressure on the manurfacturers for the cheapest goods, playing one against the other, not having to worry about any environmental or labor laws. Until an understaffed US regulatory agency catches up years later.
At which point something else conveniently cheap and bad is found as a substitute.
The Chinese will use quantum teleportation to communicate with their new submarine fleet, using blue lasers!
“China is now at the cutting-edge of military communications, transforming the field of cryptography and spotlighting a growing communications arms race … While the People’s Liberation Army won’t be beaming up objects Star Trek-style anytime soon, the new technology could greatly enhance its command and control capabilities,” it reads.
“The Chinese could even destroy their opponents’ electronic control systems – critical to the operation of ground vehicles and aircraft – by producing damaging current and voltage surges with the help of electromagnetic pulse bombs loaded into the DF-21D [supermissile], reported the Asia Times. “Yet another option would be to fit a missile with a thermobaric fuel-air bomb.”
Every Chinese weapon or threat — from quantum teleportation to supermissiles to the ever present stories on that country’s cyberwarriors — never suffers from any taint of intimation that they might be afflicted with the same fundamental essence of crap associated with that nation’s consumer products.
Everyday Americans have experience with Chinese-made products, even if they regret it. There’s no escape, no way out. US business de-industrialized for the sake of leveraging slave work over expensive American labor and regulation.
So in everything from toilet seats to stub wrenches to socks, all goods are ersatz, inferior and often surprisingly dangerous in interesting ways. But cheap.And — of ultimate importance — not made by Americans. Because that would be bad for the bottom line.
From old DD blog in early 2009:
We’re getting a dose of what security means [these days]: A fallen over economy and mass-firings. In the past eight years, our leaders were good at making us look the other way. See the Islamic terrorists! They want to destroy our way of life!
But underneath our noses a different story unfolded, one of a place that made no sense, a land that worked hard at crushing a Middle Class way of life all by itself.
Let’s employ a bit of a fable to define it: The tale of the broken stub wrench, pictured above.
In southern California, everyone has embedded lawn sprinklers. And sometimes, the sprinkler heads are damaged, like when your neighbor runs over one with his SUV. When that happens, you have to replace the fractured sprinkler. And that job requires that you remove a broken piece of it, called a stub, from the water pipe outlet which serves the sprinkler.
There is a tool for doing this and it is called a stub wrench.
DD did not have a stub wrench when this happened to a sprinkler in his yard last summer. So I went to the hardware store on Colorado Street in Pasadena to buy one. That stub wrench is pictured above. It was made in China.
For a stub wrench to work, it has to be a little like a corkscrew. That is, you have to be able to twist it into the broken plastic stub of the sprinkler head. Burrs on the tip of it dig into the stub, allowing you to untwist the broken piece from the outlet coupling, thus removing it. Then you can screw in a replacement sprinkler.
This stub wrench had no burrs and DD didn’t notice until he got home. No matter how I tried to make it work, no dice.
So DD went back to the hardware store and marveled at an entire shelf of ‘made in China’ stub wrenches, all the same, all guaranteed not to work, all with the name of an American company on them. But they were cheap, only about three dollars a piece.
It was an astounding display, not just because of the broken-before-buying quality of the goods, but also because it was obvious that people who bought them never complained. So these non-working items just stayed in stock and were never removed, a Ponzi pay-and-get-ripped-off scheme on the micro-scale, a metaphor for the entire economy, now collapsed but still sitting on the shelf in its polystyrene shrink wrap — broke.
And whenever I read about whatever wonder weapon the Chinese are said to come up with, I laugh, because it’s invariably delivered by US sources in one of the parts of the economy which doesn’t really care if there is a Middle Class, the national security complex. It’s only important to find a trivial menace to inflate until it’s a suitably sized horror.
Socks, under the American name of Hanes (which also used to be an American-made brand until that company purged its workers, too, in favor of the cheap), which become moth-eaten looking after three trips through the washing machine never figure in these stories.
That China can’t make socks which don’t sprout holes after a few weeks isn’t notable.
How does DD know? I thought it would be a good idea to buy some socks before heading out on the downtown Pasadena census-taking trail this summer. I learned my lesson.
It’s worth repeating an excerpt from an earlier post on Chinese manufacturing and US de-industrialization:
The Pentagon often worries about fighting a regional war with the Chinese military. DD never worries about that. Chinese manufacturing has serious systemic quality control issues. The evidence on the national table is that the country simply can’t produce anything that is robust, up-to-standard or poison free. A lot of the time, this doesn’t matter. For instance, it’s not really of major issue if their blues harps and toilet seats really eat it.
However, their jet airplanes, their ships, their rockets and missiles? Heh-heh. C’mon now, seriously.
This hasn’t been the first gas attack on a school, and it’s unclear what kind of non-persistent industrial chemical was pumped into the schools. But it’s a far cry from the feared terrorist use of chemical warfare agents that most DHS scenarios warn about.
In another way of looking at it, one could draw a good conclusion that the Taliban have absolutely zero capability with poison gas. And this kind of attack is a benchmark in pathetic lows.
While it’s a small item, US forces could benefit from a press campaign in area making the point that it’s the cruelest and lamest of things to spray insecticides at girls. However, treatment of women is abominable there, under any circumstance.
Predictably, Raytheon’s pain ray has generated quite a bit of bad publicity along with the usual brief corporate news pieces in which a local TV station or paper sends a reporter to be a trial gimp.
The reporter invariably giggles and jumps out of the way as Raytheon technicians or jailers look impishly on. See the wonder that’s taken a decade for the US military, in conjunction with an arms developer, to come up with! It’s a revolution.
A device designed to control unruly inmates by blasting them with a beam of intense energy that causes a burning sensation is drawing heat from civil rights groups who fear it could cause serious injury and is “tantamount to torture.”
The mechanism, known as an “Assault Intervention Device,” (or AID) is a stripped-down version of a military gadget that sends highly focused beams of energy at people and makes them feel as though they are burning. The Los Angeles County sheriff’s department plans to install the device by Labor Day, making it the first time in the world the technology has been deployed in such a capacity.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California criticized Sheriff Lee Baca’s decision in a letter sent Thursday, saying that the technology amounts to a ray gun at a county jail. The 4-feet-tall weapon, which looks like a cross between a robot and a satellite radar, will be mounted on the ceiling and can swivel.
It is remotely controlled by an operator in a separate room who lines up targets with a joystick.
The ACLU said the weapon was “tantamount to torture,” noting that early military versions resulted in five airmen suffering lasting burns. It requested a meeting with Baca, who declined the invitation.
What much of the news has missed is that Raytheon has been trying to peddle the pain ray into prisons for years. And it has long had a big influence in the LA Sheriff’s Department, where Sid Heal presided over a long career as the local point man for bringing stupid applications in cutting edge technology, rays and various gadgets, into the force.
The folks who keep planes from crashing into one another over at the FAA were none too pleased to read about that little UAV demo conducted by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department this weekend, with the agency telling Sheriff Lee Baca and company to keep their drone grounded pending the result of an investigation. What’s more, the department could actually face disciplinary action for the SkySeer’s inaugural flight — FAA spokesperson Laura Brown commented that although the agency wasn’t “peeved,” they were “definitely surprised” that authorization had not been requested for the trial. Commander Sid Heal, point man for this program tasked with spying on Angelinos locating criminal suspects …
In 2008, Heal retired but not before indicating to New Yorker magazine that he was interested in a Raytheon consulting offer, based on peddling the pain ray. Here, from earlier this week.
Those who’ve followed the ADS story know that Heal and, by extension — the Sheriff’s Department, have longed for the pain ray for some time.
If you read the AP piece to its conclusion, you see the now standard assertions — built up over the years — that the pain ray can’t possibly hurt anybody. Plus it will only be used by people who are trained to exquisite fineness in its use, never afflicted with the cloudy or bad judgment which is usually part of the human condition.
Sure they’re intelligence-insulting, but it’s the way of the p.r. campaign for the thing.
Many authoritarian Americans are always keen to believe whatever rubbish is presented to them, as long as its couched in magical terms which assure that breakthroughs in technology have made a burning weapon something that doesn’t physically burn. It’s all in your mind. Or your nerve endings. Or the top layer of your skin.
Whatever, who cares, its prisoners we’re talking about and if you’re in jail in the US, you deserve everything bad that comes your way. And this is a good flavor of bad, its chief scientists/engineers at Raytheon — all of them — say so.
The pain ray is a weapon for using in cases where people can’t shoot back or launch any kind of counterattack. It’s critical the target be helpless. Like many reporters sent by news agencies for testing.
The ADS — or AID — is not a survivable piece of gear and it’s why it was peddled to the US military for use against unarmed crowds. The US military brought it back from Afghanistan without firing a shot, for logical reasons.
Winning hearts and minds is not the pain ray’s strong suit.
Paradoxically, when the Active Denial System was first marketed it was called the Sheriff and part of the idea was that it was great because it wouldn’t actually kill people, thus pissing off victims and civilians less.
“Sell the Sheriff to the sheriffs!” was probably on a Raytheon sales memo somewhere.
What makes individuals like Newt Gingrich and other GOP cronies so repellent is their use of fear to enrich themselves. According to them, the future is always filled with many all-powerful external threats. The collapse of the US economy, mass unemployment and the destruction of the Middle Class is of no concern.
In John Dean’s Broken Government book from a few years back (yes, John Dean, of all people), he names one of the central aims of GOP power: “Line your own pockets.”
Gingrich and others are featured prominently.
And today’s post, on a discussion of Gingrich’s new book, To Save America, you get the official DD laundry list of GOP predictions about external threats. And all of the industries involved in protecting from such potential threats are those discussed on this blog.
In Newt Gingrich’s latest book, To Save America, he reflects on the five potentially catastrophic threats to the United States. Gingrich lists the threats as “Terrorists with nuclear weapons, Electromagnetic pulse attack, Cyber warfare, Biological warfare, and the potential gap between Chinese and American capabilities.”
Or any noting of the unpleasant fact that the corporate interests in America seem not to have yet realized when you beggar your US shoppers by firing as many as possible, relentlessly compressing wages and removing all benefits, there is not even enough leftover anymore for anything but essentials. Chinese crap notwithstanding.
Nevertheless, it’s time to drop everything and worry about China’s military, or electromagnetic pulse doom, or the usual ant-like countries allegedly developing magical ways with biological weapons:
Frances Townsend, former Bush and Fox News flunky Homeland Security Advisor, felt that electromagnetic pulse weapons are “a big deal and we are solely unprepared for it. I think Gingrich is right.”
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Currently we can try to prevent this threat, but there is no way to defend against it because society is so interconnected, particularly in the delivery of food, water, and medicine. It appears that this is a threat that falls under the radar, with little time or energy spent on solutions. The death toll would climb in unexpected ways. Clare Lopez, a former CIA official who is currently a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, told of a scary scenario where people would “no longer be able to buy groceries or gasoline.
There is also concern — not that al-Qaeda terrorists will become biologists, but that the biologists of Iran, Syria, and Pakistan will become terrorists. These countries, as well as North Korea, are working on synthetic biological weapons.
Naturally, the only way to counter these threats is the standard mantra: A cooperative alliance between the national security industry and big government is always needed.
This almost sounds acceptable, until you’ve been around long enough to know what it really means. I’ll rely on another quote from Dean’s book, by way of a fellow named Alan Wolfe at the University of Pennsylvania:
[If] government cannot be made to disappear, at least it can be prevented from doing any good. [So one purpose] is to build a political machine in which business and the Republican Party can exchange mutual favors; business will lavish cash on politicians … while politicians will throw the cash back at business (called public policy).
The people who regularly tout this rubbish, and often noted here, are genuinely despicable. But in 2010, despicable is virtue.
One imagines very few sane US military leaders would want to see their careers incinerated upon publicized or leaked news on use of the wonderful pain ray on civilians in Afghanistan.
However, the ADS redeployment to a Los Angeles jail, where it can be used on prisoners who can’t launch a counterattack against it, is an industry thing.
Specifically, Ratheon’s, which has long wanted to peddle a commercial version of the ADS into US prisons and police forces. Where, presumably, it can argue behind closed doors that the American public won’t care if prisoners are burned with it. And so they won’t step up suicide attacks and miscellaneous bombings in retaliation for employing it.
Although the Fox News segments on the thing — renamed the AID (you just have to laugh at the cartoonish evil of it) for Assault Intervention Device — participated in the usual stunt, sending a reporter out to be burned, the bloom is well off the weed.
Even Megyn Kelly had to admit the pain ray was a publicity disaster for the US military. And now only a moron, or someone paid to stand still and get burned, thinks getting shot by the pain ray while Raytheon’s technicians perform the test, is great stuff.
So what’s the connection with the Los Angeles jail?
Probably Sid Heal, although the stories didn’t mention him.
For longer than DD can remember, Sid Heal — who retired from the LA County’s Sheriff Department in 2008, has been trying to pitch the pain ray in Los Angeles.
In January, Heal gave notice that he would retire from the Sheriff’s Dept. on March 31st. At that point, he had received at least sixteen job offers. The offer he finds most interesting involves consulting with Raytheon on the Active Denial System — the pain ray.
Raytheon desperately wants to peddle the pain ray into the US correctional system, a task they’ve been at for at least half a decade.
And while the US can’t use the blighted thing overseas for obvious reasons — the reputation for torturing the unarmed being one, the corporation presumably feels there is no such squeamishness in prisons. Where shooting penned up out-of-sight undesirables means out-of-mind undesirables.
Just picture it: Prison guards — big guys, often obese and/or hyper-muscular from a mixed regimen of weight-lifting and steroids, working in a jail — Pitchess — notorious for its bad conditions, and the pain ray.
I just can’t think of a more humane and reasonable combination, can you?
The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy parasitized the New York Times opinion page today. The courtesy was handed to Lawrence E. Joseph who has been relentlessly peddling books on apocalyptic disaster slated for 2012.
The latest Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy jag is the story of the angry sun.
The sun is waking up from a long period of quiet — which is true — and erupting solar storms and mass ejections may shatter advanced civilization, it goes.
Just like in “The Road,??? the movie nobody went to see (or maybe “The Book of Eli,??? another apocalypse-themed flop).
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You’ll see it everywhere because it panders to entrenched American extremist beliefs in tech superstitions and catastrophism. (Bubbling underneath are messages that white people will lose their piles to ravening hordes unleashed by the fall.) And the entertainment industry and parts of the corporate national security biz can monetize this by peddling titillation and fear, respectively.
And so it goes, the coming sun strike being far worse than Katrina, so give taxpayer money to the private sector so risk can be mitigated. What the various gobble-wallahs of the cult fail to add are that there are many pressing problems confronting the US right now, all as bad as Katrina, but that they are of our own devise, not the sun’s. And that the Cult of EMP Crazy is just another special interest posse raid on the middle class.
Here’s the standard line, repeated as necessary, in the newer Cult opinion pieces:
DESPITE warnings that New Orleans was unprepared for a severe hit by a hurricane, America was blindsided by Hurricane Katrina, a once-in-a-lifetime storm that made landfall five years ago this month. We are similarly unready for another potential natural disaster: solar storms, bursts of gas on the sun’s surface that release tremendous energy pulses.
Let’s imagine for a moment someone with the interests of the middle class at heart, besides Paul Krugman, writing similarly for the New York Times opinion page:
DESPITE warnings that the middle class was being systematically beggared and then destroyed by predatory financial policy and the sending of production to slave-labor countries, America was seemingly blindsided by this once-in-a-lifetime perfect storm of economic catastrophe. We are similarly unready for another even worse disaster: The putting down of the American way of life permanently when China puts the US in the rear view mirror as its economy passes ours in the coming decade.
Just for perspective, you see.
Last week, one of the chieftains of the Cult of EMP Crazy, Roscoe Bartlett in the US House of Representatives, was greatly dismayed when his legislation to protect from EMP doom was penciled out of similar legislation in the Senate.
And so the Cult of EMP Crazy quickly marshaled its forces. In the New York Times, it is warned:
Earlier this year the House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow the White House to require utilities to put grid-protection measures in place, then rip off recoup the costs from customers. Unfortunately, the companion bill in the Senate contains no such provision.
It’s not a lost cause, though; lawmakers can still insert the grid-protection language during conference.
Joseph uses [2012] prophecy as a starting point, but claims that his interest lies in more substantial scientific threats to the planet—including cracks in Earth’s magnetic field, the eruption of supervolcanoes and flareups of sunspot radiation. On the other hand, he also gives credence to planetary alignments and The Bible Code before veering into a rant about how the real problem is Christian fundamentalists who want to manipulate the Middle East into Armageddon. When he sticks to science journalism, Joseph is a lively tour guide, introducing readers to Mayan shamans and Russian scientists with equal aplomb. But when he encourages readers to start praying they survive the coming apocalypse, he comes off as exactly the sort of crackpot he claims to eschew. Still, there’s less kookery than in other 2012 books …
Good to know. So get it now, used copies for $0.77.
