We’re all renting space in Ted Nugent’s Land when it comes to guns. Most reasonable people probably gave up all hope of any change after Sandy Hook and 20 dead children brought about explosions in gun and ammunition sales. And even the the most trivial legislation to restrict deadly weapon ownership went down.
To be sure, Ted Nugent and people like him are a minority. Nugent is venomous, plainly psychotic during his waking hours and with views, on everything, not just gun ownership, deeply unpopular to a majority.
But his ilk: the gun nuts, the NRA, the extremists and small arms manufacturers are united and effective. They kill all debate immediately and cause all politicians to cringe and crumble before them. As a result, we are reduced to renting space in Ted Nugent Land. It only falls to us to endure it while the rest of the civilized world thinks “You’ve made yourselves into a collective of irredeemable assholes,” shrugs and moves on.
Regardless of the President’s disappointment and fury yesterday, or the calls to political action filling up your in-box, the only course of action after Sandy Hook failed to achieve anything was to give up. Slaughter is the norm.
In late August, just after the last public gun massacre (I think), the LA Times ran a story on why the US is the exceptional nation when it comes to gun slaughter.
It boils down to social and psychological studies of the character of the country. Americans are delusional about what they can expect for themselves, what they believe to be important and what “success” means. Briefly, they believe in fictions like the American dream, that they can have it all, and that fame and money are always within their reach. When most of it never pans out, it produces mental stressors that have to be lived with on a daily basis. Those with mental problems can crack.
Easy access to guns, the instantaneous nature of the American telecommunications infrastructure and the certainty that launching an armed assault on the public somewhere always leads to global (in)fame guarantees it.
America’s “gun culture” … is deeply rooted in the idea that broad gun-ownership is a bulwark against the emergence of tyranny. And those roots continue to lie close to the surface, he wrote: A national survey conducted in 2013 found that 65% of Americans believe that the purpose of their right to bear arms remains “to make sure that people are able to protect themselves from tyranny.”
Tyranny, a word that American usage has wrung all meaning from, now only signalling that the most appalling acts of bloodshed are acceptable and that everything else must come to a full stop.
How do you escape the tyranny of Ted Nugent Land? And will you wish you could shoot the first person you read or hear mentioning the word “heal” today (do it quickly because the next shooting is coming fast) or tomorrow? Rhetorical questions, obviously.
When and where: Hulu, free, marked as a documentary on police militarization, dated 2007. Apparently, first distributed in 2000-2001, where it went straight to video. Possibly updated much later.
Summary: A snapshot, anywhere from eight to almost fifteen years old, one useful in illustrating how much worse things are now and that, yes, this country is a police state.
A bunch of things to know:
1. Stan Goff, a staff sergeant expert in urban warfare trained Los Angeles Police and others in civilian suppression tactics, the worst of which is euphemistically called Dynamic Entry. Dynamic Entry was developed for use in killing people in house-to-house fighting, at night, in a war zone. Now it’s the common tactic in no-knock police raids. If there is something in someone’s hand when a raid is conducted, they are to be immediately neutralized. This means being shot. Twice. Goff tells the audience, years ago — remember, that this means a lot of problems when used on civilians. No kidding. There is a segment, now dreadfully familiar, in which an African-American was riddled by gun-fire in such a raid, while he was in the process of calling 911 because he heard the SWAT team outside.
2. MRAPs have gotten a lot bigger and more ubiquitous. In Urban Warrior they’re about half the size you see now.
3. Posse comitatus was essentially dead, the public just didn’t realize it, when Urban Warrior was shot.
4. Non-lethal and less-than-lethal weapons have strict envelopes for usage. For example, many are not to be used on children, the disabled, the mentally ill or the elderly. Chemicals are not to be used in barrages. People are not to be shot in the eyes, head, face or other soft parts. All that has been out the window for ten to fifteen years. Non-lethal weapons are used to start fires, asphyxiate, knock people unconscious through concussion, or blind them.
5. Steve Aftergood, someone we all know, is in it, giving him a listing at IMDb. At the end, a short discussion about 9/11 is tacked on. How the military can be used at home after terrorism is becoming “fluid,” he says. Now, we might say, it is a swirling toilet in which we, but especially African Americans and the poor, can be flushed down the hole by paramilitary action that comes in the dead of night.
6. The Battle in Seattle, or the protests against the World Trade Organization, which had already gone very poorly, was escalated by authorities and police because the President, Bill Clinton, was coming to town and the city center needed clearing.
7. If the people who made Urban Warrior had had the time to add a segment on what the future might hold if Americans continued to choose illusions of security over civil liberties and fairness, videotape from the riots and police responses in Ferguson and Baltimore would have fit perfectly.
8. Then as now, the brunt of police paramilitary operations has been born by the African-American population, the poor and the easily stigmatized.
That alleged slow down on police militarization has certainly gone well.
The only thing that will save you — the you being the old white paranoid people in the studio audience — will be an old flivver, a water filter, and the electric generator whatsis he taps on. Plus, one the power fails and society breaks down, all the criminal drug addicts will raid your retirement homes for your medications and pills. Really!
All these people are delusional Christian right wing extremists, a big part of the Republican Party.
Ted Cruz, Republican Presidential hopeful (from USA Today— no link) :
If this deal goes through, we know to an absolute certainty people will die. Americans will die, Israelis will die, Europeans will die. If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, the single greatest risk is they would put it on a ship anywhere in the Atlantic and they would set off what’s called an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse. It would take down the electrical grid on the entire Eastern seaboard, and kill tens of millions of Americans.
And it will be done with an electromagnetic pulse attack as a consequence of same-sex marriage and abortions.
“What is going on with America?!” rails Jim Bakker. Yes, him.
It’s an idea, a wish for an apocalyptic trial of purification, that’s been bubbling up from the base of the Republican Party and extreme right for years.
Ninety percent will die in the aftermath. And they’ll have had it coming because — gay, abortion, unbelievers, non-Christian — and all that.
Get prepping. Keep your horses. Find an old flivver. (From RightWingWatch.)
Eventually, all of the potential GOP candidates will have to speak of their position on electromagnetic pulse attack, whether they secretly believe in it or not.
So they are rubes for private sector rip-offs and boondoggles perpetrated by American arms manufacturing giants.
It’s been easy to observe in the semi-regular cant/hype issued over “directed-energy weapons,” or ray guns, always said to be “game-changers” for the future.
“Directed energy brings the dawn of an entirely new era in defense,” Lieutenant General William Etter, Commander, Continental U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command Region, told a conference hosted by Booz Allen Hamilton and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment.
The military has been working on such weapons for decades, but says many technology challenges have finally been addressed.
Of course, this is not correct. The military application of lasers has been stunted by power requirements and almost total lack of effectiveness in what my be called — the real world.
I’ll get to this in a minute.
Continuing from the Reuters piece:
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told the conference the Navy was encouraged by testing of a laser deployed on the USS Ponce in the Gulf, which can destroy small boats and unmanned aerial vehicles, and can also be used as a telescope.
Mabus said the Navy was extending deployment of the laser on the Ponce, and using lessons learned to help produce a 100-150 kilowatt laser prototype for testing at sea in 2018 or sooner.
If you watch the video you’ll see the nonsensical pitch by the BAE Systems salesman.
The Navy’s main problem are the power handling, generation and storage requirements as well as the hazard.
The rail gun is theoretically to be fitted to the Navy’s largest ships, one example being the Zumwalt destroyer, a program that was halted at three ships.
The rail gun, if published news is correct, requires at least half the power-generating capacity of such a ship when it’s under way. In addition, no one likes to talk about the ship-board hazard posed by the charging and discharge of such large power systems during repeating fire.
Conservatively, it will kill people. On board. And then break down.
Theoretically, charging capacitors as large as a house. Oy.
“Pentagon funding for directed energy programs would remain steady at about $300 million a year for now,” reads Reuters.
By contrast, the NRA generates around $300 million/year from its membership. So maybe the military really isn’t that serious about the programs, after all.
But, said Secretary of the Navy Mabus, who will want a job in high management at a US manufacturer of these things when he leaves his position: “[He] said Iran and other countries were already using lasers to target ships and commercial airliners, and the U.S. military needed to accelerate often cumbersome acquisition processes to ensure that it stayed ahead of potential foes.”
Also, the rolling micro-wave non-lethal weapon that doesn’t work except on those willing to be shot by it, men trapped in a room, or a crowd hemmed in by police, usually know as the ADS or The Sheriff, might be useful:
Major General Jerry Harris, vice commander of Air Combat Command, said the Air Force had developed a high-power microwave weapon that could disperse crowds without killing people by rapidly raising body temperature, and the system could be put to use immediately on drones or other aircraft.
The Sheriff was deployed to Afghanistan and was brought back without firing a shot because, essentially, it doesn’t adapt well when people can shoot back. Plus, public relations problems related to the potential for atrocities, torture, ruined careers, things like that.
Truth be told, every potential Republican Party candidate will have to join the cult. The dangerous GOP base of white American revenge-seekers, paranoids and nihilists demands it. (Some already have. Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush and, I think, Donald Trump immediately spring to mind.)
So, in the National Journal, Cruz buys another ticket for an insane right wing train that’s been riding the rails for virtually the last fifteen years, perhaps longer: Iran will hit the United States with an electromagnetic pulse and millions of people will die.
It’s not just Israel that could be in danger if Iran violates the terms of a nuclear agreement with the United States, 2016 presidential contender Ted Cruz says.
Cruz told reporters Tuesday on Capitol Hill that the “worst-case scenario is that Iran actually uses a nuclear weapon.” Israel could be a target, but Cruz says the United States itself is also at risk.
“If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, one of the most dangerous things it could do with it is load that weapon onto a ship anywhere in the Atlantic, fire the warhead straight into the air, into the atmosphere. If you get high enough and detonate that warhead, it would set off an electromagnetic pulse, what is called an EMP,” Cruz said. “That EMP could shut down the entire electrical grid on the Eastern seaboard, could take down our stock market, our financial systems, but even more importantly could take down food delivery, water delivery, heat, air conditioning, transportation. The projections are that one nuclear warhead in the atmosphere over the Eastern seaboard could result in tens of millions of Americans dying.
Actually, Cruz is a little off on his figures for apocalyptic electromagnetic pulse death. The Cult’s accepted value is usually that 90 percent of all Americans would be dead within a year of the attack.
Ironically, the evidence is overwhelming that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is highly beneficial. CO2 makes crops grow better with less water. A touch of global warming, all that we can possibly expect, is also beneficial, especially compared to global cooling …
The scientific credibility of the global warming has fallen to near absolute zero in the face of the 18-year failure of the Earth to warm. The science behind global warming may have collapsed, but the beneficiaries of government subsidies – scientists and crony capitalist developers of renewable power – are still promoting the theory that is their golden egg-laying goose. Scientific societies, supposed seekers of scientific truth, have fallen so far in promoting global warming as to make the greediest industrial unions look principled and honest by comparison.
[But] a real danger to our national survival that threatens the destruction of the electric grid is ignored. That threat is an EMP or electromagnetic pulse. An EMP can be created naturally when a solar storm on the sun ejects a cloud of particles that strike the Earth. An EMP can also be created artificially by exploding a nuclear bomb above the atmosphere at an altitude between 30 and 500 miles …
A single nuclear bomb, exploded 400 miles above Kansas, could wipe out much of the electronic and electrical infrastructure of the USA. Automobiles, trucks, and railroad engines might be so electronically damaged as to no longer operate. In any case, fuel would be difficult to obtain due to lack of electricity and due to destruction of the electronic control (SCADA systems) of refineries and pipelines. Electricity could be absent for months or years. The novel One Second After is a fictional account of what happens in a small town when an EMP strikes.
“It’s an effort to show the public that we are different, and that we’re trying to change the public perception of what militia groups and survival groups and prepper groups are,??? Luntz said.
Some of the people at the Talkeetna gathering make no secret of their negative feelings about the current administration on social media. Facebook posts include anti-taxation and Benghazi links, along with a photo of ranks of Chinese United Nations forces, captioned “Bring it.???
“We could wake up one day and have an electromagnetic pulse detonation over our state and lose all power and communications and the next thing we know is we got aircraft overhead,??? he said. “That’s a stretch. But it is a possibility.???
“One [session] scheduled for Sunday provided tips on defending against armored personnel carriers,” it reads.
While there aren’t many in this particular group, 20 – 25 by the newspaper reading, many, it says, are ex-military men.
There are the usual nice pictures of white guys in full combat gear, running across a field, weapons raised, while staging a commando assault or, perhaps, a counter-attack against invaders.
Continual warfare in the Middle East, a nuclear Iran, electromagnetic-pulse weapons, emerging pathogens, and terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction variously threaten the United States, some with catastrophe on a scale we have not experienced since the Civil War. Nevertheless, these are phenomena that bloom and fade, and that, with redirection and augmentation of resources we possess, we are equipped to face, given the wit and will to do so.
But then the unthinkable happens and a terrorist detonates a smart bomb. You awake to no lights, coffee, computer or refrigeration. Your car will not start and your phone will not call.
This would go on for months.
Today, everything has computer chips and digital makeup that can be destroyed with “smart??? bombs or non-nuclear electromagnetic pulses (NNEMP).
A NNEMP is a device that causes an electronic pulse that can wipe out all digital-based smart technology when activated near a critical digital or electrical device. It can fit in a suitcase or be deployed by a remotely operated drone.
So unthinkable it’s written or talked about in major media a few times each week.
An even more deadly scenario would be an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. An EMP instantly wipes out all electronics. This means that cars won’t start because of the electronic ignition system; radios, television sets, computers, phones and other communications equipment would be dead; and the rest of the nation’s electrical grid would be down. Imagine that. America would be sent back to the Dark Age, quite literally. All it would take is three to four nuclear detonations in the atmosphere over America.
If you thought the zombie apocalypse was bad, then you should think again. A TV show called “Jericho??? chronicled a devastating nuclear attack on the U.S. and an EMP. This is a possibility if we allow Iran to develop nuclear capabilities.
So why then is our government allowing such a deal to be made?
America needs to wake up before our way of life is gone. An Iran with nuclear capabilities is a threat to the United States and needs to be dealt with before everything we love is destroyed.
If Obama seriously thinks climate change is a more urgent threat to national security than the Islamic State, al Qaida, al Nusra, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, al Shabaab, the Houtis, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Putin in Ukraine or the escalating China-Japan confrontation in the South China Sea, his judgment is so profoundly haywire that Congress should consider invoking the 25th Amendment (that’s the one dealing with presidential disability) and replace him with Joe Biden.
There is a very compelling national security argument for the deployment of solar and wind energy systems and for a much more decentralized electricity production and distribution system without ever uttering the words “climate change.???
Big, centralized power plants and regional scale grids are sitting ducks for enemy attack by terrorism, conventional sabotage, cyber sabotage and attacks with electromagnetic pulse weapons. The last affect whole regions of the country and frog march tens of millions of Americans back into the good old days.
“Climate change is the worst problem facing the world today. We have no more important issue in the world than this issue, period,??? Nevada senior Sen. Harry Reid once said on the floor of the Senate.
At one of Reid’s clean energy confabs, Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton opined on climate change, “This is the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face as a nation and a world.
[But what] if the power grid melted down? The water would stop flowing. Fuel pumps at the corner gas station would not work. Banks would close. Communications would be interrupted. No refrigeration.
If the power remained off for months, it is estimated as much as 90 percent of the population of the U.S. might die from starvation, disease and social tumult.
There are a number of things that could actually cause such a scenario — terrorism, solar flare or an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) caused by the detonation of a relatively small nuclear bomb in the atmosphere.
There’s more. But I think these constitute enough inspirational thinking from the heartlands of freedom for today, no?
The character of America’s Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse is rock solid kook-ism from the far right. It’s mainstream, an industry as well as a grifter’s paradise. There is good money to be made provisioning it: Advice pamphlets, rotten fiction and non-fiction books, emergency tools, concrete, cinder blocks, fuel, barriers of all types, entrenching shovels that double as bludgeons, dried and canned foods optimized for long-term storage, hundreds of YouTube prepper video channels monetized with Google ads, isolated real estate high in the country away from all those other people, special survival schools, guns, guns, more guns and ammo.
Grifter prepper industry junk bag.
Something you need for the end of civilization? They have it. Just click “Add to cart.”
And a couple weeks ago Chicago magazine set one of its reporters to cover a few of the city’s well-off locals willing to be interviewed on their prepping.
The reporter, Rod O’Connor, did leave one thing out in his interviews. Conspicuous by its omission, the politics of his subjects. You see, there are no libtards, gay people, or non-Christians in the bug out bunkers. And scarcely any non-whites.
Because it’s those other people in the cities who will be unprepared when the pulse occurs, American civilization topples and the rule of law comes to an end. It will be necessary to defend the family, possessions and land from them when they boil out of the urban rat-holes in desperation.
By definition: Preppers are a profoundly anti-democratic group, self-absorbed, peculiar and paranoid on fantasies fed to them through right-wing news and end-times self-published literature. The latter, a kind of romance fiction delivered as stories of social trial and purification encompassing world catastrophe, armed struggle and tragedy. But in the end, the good people, the white heterosexual people with values, faith and salt-of-the-earth savvy, still hanging on to the tattered belief in a real America, survive. Evil does not.
Which is why they really don’t like talking to anyone outside their circle, a fact so noted by the magazine’s reporter.
Soon the conversation progressed from blizzards to the quintessential prepper novel One Second After (detailing the aftermath of an electromagnetic pulse attack; Newt Gingrich, America’s favorite conspiracy theorist, wrote the foreword), which she had recently read. Eleni, who has braces and hipster glasses, asked her parents how prepared they were for a serious disaster such as an EMP.
In addition, one is bugged about fiat money.
“All of a sudden, you have hyperinflation, and you’ll need a wagon of cash for a loaf of bread,” one of the preppers says.
Consistent with the beliefs and world view of most of the paranoids in WhiteManistan, every bad thing that happens is turned around to be about what could happen to them.
When, in point of fact, it’s about stuff that has happened to the other people, you know, them, the people without money, or in foreign countries, in poverty.
With every new epidemic or terrorist attack in the headlines, a new batch of preppers is born, says David Scott, whose Northbrook company, LifeSecure, sells everything from crush-resistant earthquake survival kits to fireproof masks designed for fleeing a bombed-out building. “We think of it like sediment,??? he says of the movement that he, of course, has a stake in stoking. “Another headline comes and another layer forms.???
Sediment. Let’s examine the “sediment.”
“Scott started his business in 2005, a few months before Hurricane Katrina, and believes the storm’s aftermath was a wake-up call for thousands of Americans,” the magazine continues.
This “taught” preppers “you could go hungry, thirsty, and even die in the U.S. before the government could save you.”
The people who went hungry and thirsty, or who died or lost everything in New Orleans as a result of Katrina were overwhelmingly African-American and poor, the very opposite of the prepper demographic.
“It was last fall’s Ebola outbreak, in fact, that made [a prepper named Bob Valenti] suddenly feel he was ill-equipped to protect his family if a pandemic disease were to spiral out of control,” reads the feature.
More “sediment.”
Let’s repeat. Who were the people who died in the Ebola outbreak?
Human beings, specifically black people, in the poor West African nations of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.
And the first person to die in America, in Texas, of Ebola was?
Let’s leave it to the readers to mull over.
The prepper story points out that Bob Valenti, its first subject, has two homes — one in a wealthy suburb of Chicago, another in the countryside, for escaping to.
“I ask [another prepper named Campbell] if he fears the kind of lawlessness seen in post-Katrina New Orleans or the riots in Ferguson, Missouri,” it continues.
And when you read this, in a story about well-to-do white people possessed by a shared delusion, once again you know you’re in the presence of seriously turned-around bullshit, a world belief totally detached from actual social reality.
“Ammo is a great barter tool … It’s the ultimate commodity item,” the Downers Grove prepper named Bob Valenti tells the reporter.
“God forbid a small nuclear device or an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) bomb in Los Angeles (goes off), that’s where a lot of us are going to survive — up there,” he said. “You want to get out of the cities. There’s going to be mass looting, rioting — just like in Baltimore — only on a bigger scale because people are going to be hungry after a couple of weeks and the markets are out of food — and there’s no water. Now, we have water up there, we have game up there — we have deer, we have bear.”
That’s why scientists who conducted a study of the risks to the nation’s power grid are traveling the country to warn states not to wait on the federal government.
“What differentiates this other blackout type scenarios is the mechanisms can cause long term permanent damage to many assets,??? said John Kappenman, an investigator with the Electromagnetic Pulse Commission.
State Rep. Joann Ginal, the sponsor of a bill aimed at protecting Colorado’s power grid, said, “It’s very import in regards to homeland security, security of our citizens in Colorado, and just day-to-day living.???
There is no Electromagnetic Pulse Commission. It’s been defunct for over a decade.
The bill was a request for the state’s Public Utilities Commission to study electromagnetic pulse, find where vulnerabilities are, and determine how to fund mitigation.
The study would be entirely funded with donations; nevertheless, the bill failed Wednesday afternoon. A dozen other states have passed, or are considering, similar legislation.
The American fringe is regularly mainstream. It’s one of many very noticeable national character flaws, not a virtue, since the fringe, when referred to here, is all the property of the political right.
Viral, ugh, attention has been given to a handful of America’s estimated three million “Doomsday Preppers” through publicity granted to photographer Henry Hargreaves’ display of what they’ll be eating in the bug-out shack or bunker.
[Hargreaves] confesses that he expected the series to be more dramatic than the final results he captured, and admits that the preppers might be on to something.
‘Initially I expected this to be a rather sensational series but as I spoke to some of the subjects I actually was surprised by the brilliance in their approach.
‘They have been able to stand back and see the whole food system from afar and realize in any kind of disaster the food distribution chain is the first thing to break and they don’t want to be left vulnerable, if and when it does.’
Brilliance.
A word that’s hard to use in description of a photo showing the need for insulin shots after the country is destroyed by “tornadoes.” ONe of Hargreaves’ subjects is a diabetic.
Once in a diabetic coma, or the foot gangrenous due to complications in the extremities, it’s an unforgiving world.
In brief interviews Hargreaves has told viewers of the basic sense of the preppers and the humanizing aspects of the photos.
They’re not all kooks. That’s the message. Is a bowl of crickets and mealworms humanizing?
The lead picture in the Mail’s story, not the one linked in this post, is the Armageddon Supper of Wayne Martin of Texas.
Part of his repast — two cans of gourmet cat food. Why?
When the others from the cities, or just plain bad people try to steal your stuff, they’ll presumably leave your cat food behind.
I’ve fed my cats the stuff advertised as gourmet over the past decades. It still looked like regular cat mush grub to me. However, they always went for it with great relish.
But that reasoning takes us right to the heart of the prepper, formerly “survivalist,” psychology.
It’s predominantly white, Christian and fascist authoritarian, armed to the teeth and convinced the downfall of American civilization will be brought on by a handful of catastrophes, most prominently an attack by electromagnetic pulse.
For the Mail’s pictures, Hargreaves’ coterie oddly has this gone missing. And that’s conspicuous by omission.
If you’re a regular reader, or even an occasional viewer of reality television on preppers, you also know the group looks at the potential end of civilization as a ritual of purification.
The virtuous will survive. Those not so will be cleansed from the country in the end times struggle.
When the unprepared, the non-white, atheist, Democratic, lazy parasites and takers come boiling into the countryside, they’ll be met with armed force.
It takes about five minutes on Google to find prepper pages on the matter, even complicated discussion rationalizing how the Bible, or Jesus, sanctions the deadly force of the gun.
And like any activity linked to politics and the character of the right, it has become an industry, one furnishing everything from keepsakes to any hardware, ammo, or fortification preparations needed.
Parcels of land off-the-grid, hard to find, high in the mountains, possibly near good lakes, away from the contaminating hordes.
Whether or not the power outage in Washington was caused by an attack of some sort, homeland security expert Peter Vincent Pry tells Newsmax TV that it shows there is vulnerability.
The power outage was the result of an explosion at a power plant in Maryland, which affected the electricity at the White House, the Capitol, local museums, train stations, and suburbs as well as the University of Maryland …
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the Department of Homeland Security hasn’t linked the outage “to terrorism or anything like that.”
Pry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, told J.D. Hayworth and Miranda Khan on “America’s Forum” on Wednesday that “even though the official explanation is that this was a mechanical failure — this small explosion — I’m not sure I trust that,” adding that “the electric power industry has a long history of concealing actual attacks on our electric grid.”
The revelation of secret technology that buries spyware into computer hard drives could be a blow to espionage efforts by the U.S. National Security Agency, intelligence analysts say.
Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow-based security software manufacturer, recently reported it found computers in 30 nations infected with spying programs …
A former NSA employee told Reuters that Kaspersky’s analysis was correct and that people still in the spy agency valued these espionage programs as highly as Stuxnet.
“Is anybody safe anymore???? That was the reaction to the report by Bill Supernor, the chief technology officer for KoolSpan, a U.S. company providing secure voice and text systems for mobile phones.
KoolSpan sells more products overseas than in the U.S. “Customers already suspicious of U.S. products will now be even more concerned that firms have been compromised,??? Supernor said. “If this is the U.S. doing this to our adversaries we are seriously shooting ourselves in the foot,??? he said …
George Smith, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, said the report represented “a black eye for the U.S. government because it undermines trust on the global networks.”
“It makes it hard to argue for proper rules of conduct in cyber space because there are now no boundaries,??? Smith said.
Actually, I wasn’t emphatic enough. It’s made it impossible to argue for proper rules of conduct.
Twenty years ago I wrote The Virus Creation Labs. Much of the book was about the nature and ways of the anti-virus industry.
The anti-virus researchers had a code: no virus-writers! Writing malicious code was verboten, immoral. And they were pretty loud and forthright about it.
The question is now is who’s been asked to overlook American-made malware, particularly of this nature, if they run across it? Anyone? American anti-virus and computer security firms?
It puts such US companies in a bind. Even if they haven’t cooperated, how can you be sure?
Computer security conventions are big business. Of course, the US malware industrial complex must send many of its employees to them. Incognito.
But anti-virus researchers were and probably still are pretty smart guys. And they used to be keenly interested in who the virus writers were. Certainly they know their material is read by them. And they know they’ve seen them at conventions, perhaps even been chatted up by one or two.
The next shoe to drop, then, is the identification of one or more of our American malware and virus-writers, and the place they work out of. Much like what was done to the Chinese government hacking operation in Shanghai.
It is hard to say when or if it will come. Things like reality and what constitute reasonable consequences don’t apply to national security matters in the US.
Kaspersky should keep up the good work.
More later, maybe.
Read the entire VOA News piece. There’s a quote from someone at the Heritage Foundation, to the effect that Kaspersky’s anti-virus and malware analysis is part of a campaign to “deligitimize the NSA.”
