08.21.14
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 2:48 pm by George Smith
This, from a comment rescue, on the American way of establishing order.
For as long as the blog has been around, as long as you have, for the last 20 years the national security strategy has been about only one thing: Using overwhelming technology in weaponry and money to beat the poverty stricken, around the globe, into place.
The Department of Defense and our military theorists came up for a laughable justification, a buzz term, really, to describe it 20 or so years back.
The asymmetric threat. The asymmetric threat is a nation, or a trans-national group, a handful of “bad guys,” or even a single person who could theoretically come up with a way to take down the country, or at least create great disasters, by attacking the national security structure at any number of imaging, easily smashed, weak points.
The asymmetric threat was one where its operators knew they couldn’t rival the US military in direct spending or equipment, nobody can. So something needed to be invented to explain how those much poorer, read everyone else in the world we’re after, could strike at the security of everyone in this country.
So with that explanation done with, let’s call it what it is: Bombing Paupers. And everything comes out of that from the development of weird torturing non-lethal weapons to opening the development of mine resistant ambush protected vehicles to the western global private sector for the accumulation of a mix armored force bigger than any other nation’s which is then passed off, in part, to the interior. It’s Keith Alexander’s National Security Agency explaining, without even a hint of self-consciousness or shame, about its technological skill in intercepting the telephone calls of piss poor Somali pirates, in the name of protecting us.
You’ll have noticed another common feature. Bombing Paupers is only used on people who aren’t white. The last time the American military actually did carry out an action against a white-skinned group was way back in the Clinton administration, in the bombing campaign against Serbia.
Which is why you won’t see any direct confrontation with Russia over the Ukraine. The national security megaplex won’t bomb the property of a country armed with thermonuclear weapons, one with a military that could cause some pain in retaliation.
That’s the way it has worked in all the time I’ve been here. You could write a book on it.
Take a look at the MRAP program. Thousands were orders, from multiple vendors. It was free money for gargantuan vehicles with names like the Navstar MaxxPro, the BAE Caiman and the Cougar. (Look them up at images.google.com and add the word “police.” You see the amazing result.)
The Pentagon brought many of them home at great expense. It doesn’t want to leave any to the Afghan military, making the excuse they wouldn’t be able to operate and maintain them. The real reason is the Pentagon expects Afghanistan to disintegrate and doesn’t want them in the hands of various warlords and the Taliban. Maybe Pakistan could be persuaded to buy a few, but that’s not certain.
What has been proved certain is that a plan to lease them for free to American police departments of any size, as long as those police departments picked up the tab for maintenance and upkeep, works.
The MRAP, depending on what was bought, cost anywhere between $350 – 650,000 dollars, taxpayer money. That was money that were never spent on any kind of economic stimulus or building of opportunity in this country. And now it’s a really bad deal because police department use more taxpayers to keep them going, for no apparent social benefit.
There’s a clear villain here. It’s whatever group, or individual, that came up with the plan for it. And was rewarded with success.
Some people come to their senses eventually. From Saginaw County, Michigan, I read this week:
I made the decision about a month ago to decommission that [MRAP] vehicle,??? [the sheriff of Saginaw County] said, noting he did it based on financial concerns due to unforeseen maintenance costs.
While the military was to provide any needed parts, Federspiel said he still had to pay for a specialized mechanic to install the parts, along with insurance and fuel for the vehicle.
When Saginaw County Commissioners asked him to look for cost-saving measures before setting the budget in July, the MRAP was the first thing to go …
Go out to the link. The rationale on how to support the vehicle, as it has been explained by other police departments, was to use money from drug forfeiture cases.
But with something like MRAP vehicles and a bad economy, that money just isn’t enough.
The ACLU, throughout the crisis in Ferguson, pointed out that military tactics used in drug cases have fallen predominantly on the black and brown poor, despite the fact that my tribe uses drugs at equivalent rates of incidence.
You can’t get blood from stones. One doubts taking the valuables of the poor swept up in drug busts in an area and boiling it down to cash furnishes even close to enough to maintain vehicles that originally cost from something over a quarter million to 650,000 dollars a piece.
Bombing Paupers, if not lethally, is a domestic strategy to curb unrest.
The Department of Homeland Security did not make block grants of over a million dollars to communities during the war on terror under the rationale that an economically successful region with opportunity is one that is safer and more secure.
What if it had? Rhetorical. A silly suggestion. Socialism, no rewarding of takers and leeches!
More later.
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08.16.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 12:09 pm by George Smith
From the NYT, yesterday (no link):
All these programs began or were expanded in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, when the authorities in Washington declared that local police departments were on the front lines of a global war on terrorism. Terrorism is exceedingly rare, however, and the equipment and money far outpaced the threat.
“You couldn’t say that back then with as much certainty as you can say that now, though,??? said Frank J. Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University. After Sept. 11, few people asked whether the police would use the equipment against protesters, Mr. Cilluffo said. “By and large, I don’t recall an outcry of any sort historically along these lines.???
For years, much of the equipment has gone unnoticed. But as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have drawn down, police departments have been receiving 30-ton, mine-resistant trucks from the military.
An MRAP in Salinas, CA. Note armored machine gun cupola, an absolute must on America’s streets.
From the Daily Mail, last year
A California police department has received a 37,000 armored truck that was once used in military training exercises.
The Salinas Police Department took ownership of the hulking tank-like vehicle on December 17 and parked it in front of the town’s Rotunda for public viewing.
The $650,000 truck has caused quite a stir in the town, with many residents questioning why a military armored vehicle would be needed in civilian situations.
“In a press release, Police chief Kelly McMillin said the department was in desperate need of a replacement for the 1986 Ford money carrier officers used as a rescue vehicle,” it continues.
Look at this picture, and all the pictures of MRAP armored fighting vehicles in small town America, here at Google, and you begin to see the nature of the problem. Everyone likes showing off their panzer.
Look closer at the collections of armored fighting vehicle photos and where they are archived. You’ll also notice a character trait: People get hard over the pictures of heavy military gear.
While the stocking of American police departments with MRAP AFVs is now big news (it’s also worth noting one was not in Ferguson), there has never been any well-publicized outcry in the mainstream on the matter.
Anything for fighting the bad guys and keeping us safe from terrorism. Search and destroy.
On the small town of Dundee, MI, population 4000:
Participating in the exercise was the Dundee Police Department’s armored vehicle called MRAP, or Mines Resistance Ambush Protected. Operated by Chief David Uhl and Sgt. David Kottke, the vehicle became part of Dundee’s force about nine months ago.
The 22-ton former military vehicle, which has a value of about $850,000, came to the department at no cost. Chief Uhl said it provides security for police officers in dangerous situations and is available to any police agency in Monroe County.
“It was an opportunity of a lifetime to get a vehicle like this for Monroe County,??? the chief said.
And this link shows a rough collection of counties which were given MRAP AFVs by the Dept. of Defense, situations where it was thought they would better serve a collection of small towns.
While viewing, always keep in mind that no terrorist groups actually had armored fighting forces. Until Iraq, where we have now bombed an MRAP seized from the American-trained Iraqi military by ISIS:
U.S. warplanes on combat patrols over northern Iraq increasingly are hitting U.S.-made armored vehicles captured by Islamic militants from the fleeing Iraqi army.
In the latest airstrikes Thursday, the U.S. Central Command said that a mix of fighters and armed drones destroyed one of the heavily-armored Mine Resistant-Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles that were a mainstay of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The MRAP was targeted after the warplanes destroyed two other armored vehicles northeast of the Kurdish capital of Irbil that were being used by fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant to fire on positions held by the Kurdish peshmerga forces, the Central Command said in a statement.
The MRAP had a use. Now it doesn’t. It would be fair to describe the Dept. of Defense’s giveaways of them in the continental US as a program that’s a potentially menacing nuisance, but more commonly of little or no social benefit to anyone.
It would be an interesting exercise to find out who, at DoD, thought that providing these things to small and medium-sized town police forces was a capital idea. Did they write a white paper on it?
There should be no optimism, despite all the current press, that there will be changes.
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08.14.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 6:19 pm by George Smith
Racism and over-militarized police forces have combined in Ferguson to produce another uniquely American disaster. The result: A domestic unrest that could easily be duplicated in other cities around the country.
A black American civilian community, justifiably outraged and angry over the killing of one of its own by police was set upon by a thug military-style pacification operation that escalated into a social calamity, literally a crisis of democracy, over a populace’s right to assemble and protest.
In this blog I’ve occasionally touched upon the militarization of America’s police. The war on terror accelerated it, with the Dept. of Homeland Security giveaways of free money (called grants) combining with the Pentagon’s 1033 program to recycle military gear into local police forces so even the smallest town police forces could have access to heavy armaments and armored fighting vehicles.
Locally, I wrote about it in 2012 when the South Pasadena police force got a used Peacekeeper, made by arms manufacturer, Textron, from the Burbank police force which was upgrading to a Lenco BearCat, courtesy of DHS. In the war on terror years, the latter vehicle has been the buy of choice for police departments receiving DHS money. The taxpayer has been very very good to Lenco.
From the blog:
Wha? Even local shires with no significant history of violent crime or threat try to get into the act. The Los Angeles Times informs today that South Pasadena, generally known for its population of swells, tree-lined streets and swank/genteel bungalow homes has acquired an urban combat vehicle for one dollar, sold off by Burbank, which is trading up on homeland security bucks …
[The LA Times]: “Last week the city took delivery of a vehicle known as a Peacekeeper, paying Burbank $1 for the privilege. Burbank originally received the Peacekeeper as surplus from the U.S. Air Force …”The Peacekeeper saw no action during its Burbank years …
“Burbank decided to sell the armored vehicle after it obtained a new BearCat SWAT vehicle in February 2009 through a $275,000 Homeland Security Department grant.”
South Pasadena’s AFV.
Pasadena, like Burbank, has a Lenco BearCat. And, if you live in a city or even if not, you can probably find an armored fighting vehicle in a local police force near you merely by searching Google images. One feature of the militarization of American policing is the wealth of pictures showing it. In modern America, everyone loves to show off their new AFVs.
The net national affect has been intimidation. Intimidation inevitably leads to fear, anger and resistance, sometimes violent. It is a relationship, a vicious cycle, the country, from the top to the bottom, has never learned from.
From Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, military intimidation, overwhelming force and pacification always failed. And in Ferguson (or potentially other cities) it again blew up in our faces. Everyone in local government, from St. Louis, to the governor, made the wrong decisions, repeatedly, and greatly afflicted the black people of Ferguson.
And now it’s another, in a long and repeating history, of national disgraces.
Articles noting this have been published for some time. But like everything else, they have never changed the trajectory of events. More armaments are always better. It’s a dangerous world, “the bad guys” are everywhere, including people you believe to be normal citizens. And the most convenient way to deal with them is to use an armored force, courtesy of US military or DHS giving.
From the Detroit News in 2011:
Warren, Southfield and Washtenaw County each received an armored vehicle after Lt. Darcy Leutzinger, commander of the Warren Police Department’s special response team, got approval for a $1.6 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security to buy the vehicles.
Each four-wheel-drive vehicle holds up to 25 people and protects its occupants from artillery and gas attacks, Leutzinger said. All three are used frequently in Macomb, Oakland and Washtenaw counties, for situations such as hostage standoffs and drug house raids, he said.
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A police armored personnel carrier in Ann Arbor.
From NBC News, a couple years ago:
America’s most in-demand police vehicle is a 10-officer 16,000-pound armored tank that takes bullets like Superman and drives 80 mph. The federal government buys dozens each year for local police departments. Do America’s local police need tanks?
Every day, America produces a fresh batch of barricaded gunmen, some of whom want to lure police into a shootout. Roughly 50 police officers are killed every year, most in shootings, and many during arrests or ambushes.
Which is where the Lenco BearCat G3 rolls in.
Other criminal justice experts have questioned whether police need minitanks, saying they’re often used for mundane tasks such as serving warrants, and create a sense of police as military soldiers rather than neighbors. They also contend that BearCats and other SWAT machinery do little to prevent violent crimes, which have fallen steadily for a decade.
“It’s all an illusion,” said Jim Fisher, a former professor of criminal justice at Edinboro University and author of a book on SWAT teams. “The fact your police department just bought an armored vehicle does not make you safer. It’s going to make you poorer, because your taxes will go up to pay for training and maintenance.” In light of today’s budget-strapped environments, we, too, wonder whether the federal government should be paying for small counties and towns to have tanks to use against their citizens.
Ferguson has made everyone rush to publish pieces on police militarization, framed by the awful pictures from Missouri.
Has it gone too far? Obviously. But the New York Times, for instance, must assemble a panel of six experts to argue the “Yeses” and “Nos” in a couple paragraphs for its blogs.
“Should law enforcement agencies receive surplus military property for everyday policing in cities and neighborhoods?” asks the newspaper.
The person with the most sense is from the ACLU, Kara Dansky, who has written an extensive report on the matter.
She notes another obvious feature of what has transpired:
We also found — perhaps not surprisingly, given the appalling way in which the war on drugs has targeted communities of color — that people of color were more likely than whites to be impacted by paramilitary raids. More often than not, these violent raids are conducted to serve warrants in search of drugs, disproportionately affecting people of color, despite the fact that whites and people of color use drugs at roughly the same rates.
Near the end of the selection, a former policeman, Eugene O’Donnell, makes a truly appalling suggestion, one as a result of the belief that more military technology in the hands of the police actually cuts risk:
The one truly indispensable military technology the police should hurry into service is reliable nonlethal weaponry – like the Pentagon’s so-called pain ray.
This picture, one of the US military’s “pain rays,” known as the Active Denial System, says everything you need to know.
Yes, this would be just the thing to deploy into American cities to let the community know its safety comes first.
For this blog and other places I used to write about the pain ray, originally called “The Sheriff.”
It took over a decade to develop and was a magnet for a large assortment of ninny tech journalists and cheerleaders who would, in turn, write breathless comment on its greatness after being shot by it in a US military staged dog-and-pony show.
The ADS was deployed to Afghanistan and never used. Some intelligent military leaders recognized it would have been a relations nightmare, playing into the hands of the Taliban.
It’s use would do nothing but horrify and incense the population that was its target. It’s a good example of expensive, impractical technology for torturing, remember, non-lethally.
One can only imagine how much worse it would make things.
What is the answer to increasing militarization? In this country, there isn’t one.
We learn nothing. The country is virtually incapable of change. Sure, today there is the promised Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, something to “end the free transfers of certain aggressive military equipment to local law enforcement …”
In a month, it will be gone.
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08.02.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 11:48 am by George Smith
In twenty years of writing about computer and national security issues, I’ve never anyone from the top of the US military quite as grasping as former NSA director, Keith Alexander.
He’s redefined retiring from service at a whole new level.
And I know of no military men, or directors of any intelligence agency, to claim they’re going to be filing patents for security inventions after leaving their public sector jobs.
Yet here we go:
[Alexander, in an interview Monday, said he has developed] a new technology, based on a patented and “unique” approach to detecting malicious hackers and cyber-intruders that the retired Army general said he has invented, along with his business partners at IronNet Cybersecurity Inc., the company he co-founded after leaving the government and retiring from military service in March. But the technology is also directly informed by the years of experience Alexander has had tracking hackers, and the insights he gained from classified operations as the director of the NSA, which give him a rare competitive advantage over the many firms competing for a share of the cybersecurity market …
Alexander said he’ll file at least nine patents, and possibly more, for a system to detect so-called advanced persistent threats, or hackers who clandestinely burrow into a computer network in order to steal secrets or damage the network itself. It was those kinds of hackers who Alexander, when he was running the NSA, said were responsible for “the greatest transfer of wealth in American history” because they were routinely stealing trade secrets and competitive information from U.S. companies and giving it to their competitors, often in China.
Keith Alexander wants you to believe, along with all the other simpletons and sycophants in the natsec journalism business, that he’s so insightful, so inventive, that at night — or in off hours from the NSA, he came up with unique computer security concepts and inventions that he will now sell or lease to the private sector.
After years of building the biggest cyberwar machine in the world on the taxpayer dime, without any apparent oversight at all. And, of course, all while undermining the basic security of the internet, launching clandestine malware attacks on nations in the Middle East, hoarding computer security vulnerabilities and greasing a global clandestine market for the buying and selling of them.
In 1994, for Issues in Science & Technology, in a very old piece entitled Electronic Pearl Harbor, Not Likely, I wrote:
Another reason to be skeptical of the warnings about information warfare is that those who are most alarmed are often the people who will benefit from government spending to combat the threat. A primary author of a January 1997 Defense Science Board report on information warfare, which recommended an immediate $580-million investment in private sector R&D for hardware and software to implement computer security, was Duane Andrews, executive vice president of SAIC, a computer security vendor and supplier of information warfare consulting services.
Assessments of the threats to the nation’s computer security should not be furnished by the same firms and vendors who supply hardware, software, and consulting services to counter the “threat” to the government and the military. Instead, a true independent group should be set up to provide such assessments and evaluate the claims of computer security software and hardware vendors selling to the government and corporate America. The group must not be staffed by those who have financial ties to computer security firms. The staff must be compensated adequately so that it is not cherry-picked by the computer security industry.
In twenty years, Keith Alexander is now on top of a situation that is just the opposite.
He spent his career lecturing and warning of devastating cyberattacks on American infrastructure. Most notably, he insisted again and again that Chinese hackers were stealing so much from corporate America in the way of information and private intellectual property, it constituted the greatest transfer of wealth in history.
If you’ve been on food stamps, the unemployment line, or been otherwise damaged by the Great Recession, you may have missed it.
This is the picture: Grasping Keith Alexander spends his career publicly warning that America’s financial system was imperiled by cybewar, all while building the world’s biggest cyberwar apparatus. And now that he has retired he intends to sell his soon-to-be-patented computer security innovations to corporate America so that they can be shielded from the attacks he spent years telling them are coming and which have already allegedly stolen much of its intellectual wealth. (Which is presumably why they’re all doing legal foreign merger tricks to avoid the payment of tax owed the US govenrment. Which was protecting them, or trying to, in cyberspace.)
Although the Issues in Science and Technology article is a very accurate slice of history from two decades ago, much in Electronic Pearl Harbor, Not Likely is pretty dated, quaintly naive even, and no longer relevant to the computer security discussion. Virus hoaxes are no longer around. Malware production exploded. Computer virus production became professionalized and they’re now used as clandestine weapons of war.
I wrote that it would be hard to do such things. And it has been hard.
It takes government agencies like the NSA to develop things like Stuxnet. And the phenomenon took years to arrive but nevertheless, it has arrived.
But electronic Pearl Harbor never happened. Even though many still warn about it, first among them being Keith Alexander when he was director of the National Security Agency.
And the part about conflicts of interest and casting a skeptical eye upon those who do threat assessment and then seek to immediately gain financially from the impact of such assessments has not changed.
It’s become much worse and Keith Alexander is now the very best example of it.
Keep in mind, this is all part of the expansion of internet spying and its secret infrastructure, he supervised and which was exposed by Edward Snowden. And Alexander’s work has not made the internet more trustworthy.
Quite the contrary, Alexander is seen as primarily responsible for damaging the global reputation of the United States when it comes to acceptable conduct in cyberspace.
Alexander, justifiably, is and should be a pariah. And we dig our global pariahs in 2014. It’s a national character trait. So we should own up to it because we deserve the guy and his grasping.
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04.23.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 12:39 pm by George Smith
At GlobalSecurity.Org, rearranged and with all the push-buttons for “sharing” so others in the national security megaplex might know of a decent book:
Readers of this blog know the topic of cyberwar reasonably well. The national mythology on it has been deadening and invariant for virtually two decades. Festung America has always been threatened with devastation from cyberspace.
Clever hackers, then terrorists, then armies of cybersoldiers based in all countries wishing ill of the US have been claimed to have the power to stop the electricity, to destroy the US economy by striking Wall Street, to poison water and create horrific accidents through the remote manipulation of industrial control systems.
Today authors Bill Blunden and Violet Cheung have produced something of a first on the subject, a comprehensive book on it that isn’t like all previous works on the matter. The genre of cyberwar books can be explained in less than half a dozen words: Fictions passed off as non-fiction. Blunden and Cheung’s new book, Behold a Pale Farce (TrineDay, trade paperback), strength is reality. That makes it rather unique in the field.
All of it, tweezed for minor improvements, here.
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04.21.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 4:32 pm by George Smith
Authors Bill Blunden and Violet Cheung have produced something of a first, a comprehensive book on cyberwar that isn’t like the rest. Behold a Pale Farce’s (TrineDay, trade paperback) strength is reality, a feature that makes it entirely unique in its field.
Readers of this blog know the topic of cyberwar reasonably well. The national mythology on it has been deadening and invariant for virtually two decades. Festung America has always been threatened with devastation from cyberspace.
Clever hackers, then terrorists, then armies of cybersoldiers based in all the countries wishing ill of the US have been claimed to have the power to stop the electricity, to destroy the US economy by striking Wall Street, to poison water and create horrific accidents through the remote manipulation of industrial control systems.
Illustrative as fas back as 1998, this excerpt (which I had something to do with) from Steven Aftergood’s Secrecy Bulletin at the Federation of American Scientists:
[George Smith, author of the Crypt Newsletter] has written a useful corrective entitled “An Electronic Pearl Harbor? Not Likely” which appeared in the National Academy of Sciences journal Issues in Science and Technology (Fall 1998) …
Some of the best-informed observers are quick to acknowledge that Smith’s critique is on target.
“I certainly agree that the notion of an electronic Pearl Harbor specifically, and more generally of information warfare, has been hyped to the point of nausea,” said the vice president of one intelligence contractor that has multi- billion dollar annual revenues from its work in information technology. “This is but the latest of many fads in ‘the Community’,” he told S&GB, “and like most of its predecessors, [it] has just enough substance to require that serious attention be paid, but not nearly as much substance as the Cassandras of the Community would have us believe.”
About fifteen years and “digital Pearl Harbor,” “digital 9/11,” whatever the name for it was trending, never happened. Even though it has been declared, as this book chronicles, a number of times.
But in the same period the Cassandras won almost total victory. The mainstream news collapsed as an agency capable of even mildly critical examinations of the subject. The only people with any say, the only people published where large numbers of eyeballs would see them, were those who hyped always coming Cyber-Armageddon.
As a consequence, books on the broad subject of cyberwar have been, universally, crap. And the reason is simple: Publishers would not stomach critical examinations.
Blunden writes about this as it impacted the publication of Behold a Pale Farce:
While I’ve read about many of the filtering mechanisms of the propaganda model and witnessed its operation from afar, I never thought that I’d encounter them directly. This changed in late 2011 when out of the blue, I received an e-mail from a senior editor at a well-known technical publisher … Having viewed my slides on cyberwar from SFSU’s National Cybersecurity Awareness Event the editor wanted to know if I was interested in authoring a book on the topic. Shortly after … I signed a contract and feverishly began the process of putting material together.
Four or five months later the editor ominously summoned your author and co-author to his office for a meeting. He announced that both he and the founder of the publishing house were very concerned about the tone of the book. The editor complained at length about the potential hazards of push back, particularly with regard to the coverage of former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell. I was sending a message that would directly challenge the narrative being spread by powerful interests … He also protested rather loudly that there were some things he couldn’t sell.
This is true. How do I know?
Full disclosure: Blunden and Cheung used me as a reference to their publisher. And I was subsequently contacted by them for my opinion on the potential for it.
I told the publisher exactly what I’ve said many times previously. To reiterate, cyberwar books have, generally but fairly speaking, all been rubbish, exercises in threat inflation and hyperbole for the sake of titillation, reputation and the pushing of the accepted national security narrative. Another way of putting it: They’re p.r. servanting for the benefit of those on the receiving end of always increasing spending on cyberwar offense, cyberspying and aggressive militarized surveillance of the internet.
At one point I was informed via company e-mail about how one publisher wished to send an early copy of the book off to an employee of Science Applications International Corporation.
This was laughable, no way to do a book of any kind.
Science Applications (or SAIC, for short) is a very large and very secretive Pentagon contractor. Everywhere you find the US military or American spying agencies, you find SAIC.
However, one thing SAIC is not known for is book writing and editing. In fact, suggesting SAIC as an arbiter of a book such as Pale Farce was a smoke signal that a publisher wished it buried in a deep hole.
Now let’s return again to 2010 and the character, Mike McConnell, former Director of National Intelligence and VP at Booz Allen Hamilton.
Why do I call him a character? Because that’s what he was and is, a kind of slippery fellow who was central to shaping public and policy-maker views on cyberwar. I’ll get to him a bit more further in.
Between 2009 and 2010 I tabulated the names of people and company hyping cyberwar in the mainstream press as well as the number of times they appeared.
Here’s the table:
1. Alan Paller, SANS — 84
2. McAfee — 80
3. James Lewis, CSIS — 47
4. Booz Allen Hamilton — 38
5. Symantec — 31
6. Mike McConnell, Booz Allen — 25
7. Paul Kurtz, Good Harbor — 11
8. Richard Clarke, Good Harbor 4
In terms of security vendor businesses, the list condenses to a small number of players controlling the debate all through 2009: SANS, McAfee, and Booz Allen Hamilton, the latter which jumps to number three on the list with 63 hits in major stories if you add McConnell’s total.
In 2010, McConnell was not only on 60 Minutes selling the nation’s near catastrophic vulnerability to cyberwar, but also in the opinion pages of The Washington Post.
Here’s McConnell’s now infamous lead-in paragraph:
The United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing. It’s that simple. As the most wired nation on Earth, we offer the most targets of significance, yet our cyber-defenses are woefully lacking.
By June of that year McConnell, along with Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard, had been invited to a well-publicized debate over whether or not the threat of cyberwar had been exaggerated. Marc Rotenberg and Bruce Schneier were on the opposite, or affirmative side, that it was.
The debate was an (ahem) farce. McConnell and Zittrain were declared the winners by a substantial margin of audience vote. The threat of cyberwar was not exaggerated. It was a triumph for obeisance to argument from authority.
Here’s a bit from the transcript, a part in which Schneier mentions
McConnell’s Post piece (he’s being a bit sarcastic):
So we’re here today to debate the motion that the threat of cyberwar is grossly exaggerated. And … in preparing, read a book full of articles and have some choice quotes. Mike McConnell said in an op-ed in the Washington Post in February of this year that the United States is fighting a cyberwar today and we’re losing. So, cyberwar is going on right now in our country.
The McConnell quote was accurate and the audience laughed.
But here’s Mike McConnell, cyberwar exaggerator but very important person in the national security megaplex, a few minutes later:
When Bruce spoke at the beginning he said, “Mike McConnell said the US is fighting a cyberwar today, and we are losing.” That’s not in fact exactly what I said. Wat I said is if we were in a cyberwar, we would lose. And I was making that statement somewhat metaphorically.
McConnell’s lead paragraph in the Post, published just a few months earlier, again as a matter of fact was not a metaphor. It was quite succinct.
But you can’t win a debate where one of the parties simply denies an accurate quote and gets audience points by insisting he said quite some other thing.
And that was state of the narrative in cyberwar. The press died on the subject. Michael McConnell’s threat exaggeration was what always carried the day.
What’s changed? What makes Blunden and Cheung’s Behold a Pale Farce the right book at just the right time?
Edward Snowden came along. Paradoxically, Snowden was employed by Mike McConnell and Booz Allen as a contractor for the National Security Agency during the big expansion of the American cyberwar machine that took place during the years of cyberwar hype.
Since Snowden, Mike McConnell has gone silent.
Behold a Pale Farce is a book not just of computer security vulnerabilities, misdeeds and astonishing exploits, but one also of the strategic national security industry environment in which they transpired.
It is a study in the US government’s and arms contractors’ employment of propaganda on the alleged threat of cyberwar until there was no longer a debate on the subject. The press became willing stenographers to power. And the power resided in the agencies and private sector businesses that built the American cybermilitary and cyberspying infrastructure, what Blunden and Cheung call “the Deep State.” The result: Total escape from oversight. Until Edward Snowden. Sort of.
Last week, two Pulitzers were handed out, one to the Washington Post and one to The Guardian, in the United Kingdom, for journalism deemed to be a great public service, a consequence of the Snowden papers liberated from the National Security Agency.
I say the Snowden affair and the steady release of NSA documents brought real change. But only “sort of” for Americans domestically.
Internationally, Snowden’s materials utterly demolished the US national security propaganda campaign on China’s much publicized cyber-stealing of the America’s economic future.
A week or so ago, for the New York Times, an Obama administration official, anonymously, was compelled to admit we no longer had any moral standing to argue from the high ground about it.
Michael McConnell is gone from newspapers. At some point he was probably made to squirm while answering now classified questions about his firm’s hiring and screening process for Edward Snowden.
Internationally, the electronic Pearl Harbor meme has been made absurd. You can’t scream someone is planning to cyber- sneak attack the country when you’re caught sneaking into everyone else’s networks for spying (this was always obvious, of course, we’re going to spy, everyone else does it!) and the writing and dissemination of software boobytraps.
Domestically, it’s been another story. Despite disturbed noises in Congress and from the White House, there’s been no change. There has been only theater, purely for public consumption.
Up until his retirement you could still find National Security Agency director Keith Alexander publicly dissembling and complaining that something needed to be done about Edward Snowden. Didn’t you know, as 60 Minutes told us, that the NSA was saving us from the Somali pirates with people who could solve Rubik’s cube puzzles in under a minute?
The authors of Pale Farce frame the span of manipulations well, using Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s 1988 analysis, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media as a guidepost. Orwell, on the perversion of language, comes in for a few mentions, too.
The authors point out, correctly, there’s nothing new in what’s happened. The power of money, political access and propaganda were used as they always have been, to subvert reasoned control and democratic values.
What’s one of the more alarming results? The sad realization that the US has helped create and accelerate a cyber-arms race, a lucrative global and national market where our arms manufacturers are now happily engaged in producing software to destroy the privacy and civil liberties of ordinary citizens.
In addition, Farce provides a nicely detailed and richly footnoted chronology of most of the globally and nationally significant computer security failures and scandals of the past decade. These are woven into broad tapestries, discussions on global computer crime and the constant and inherent vulnerability and error — via people, software and hardware — in the networked world.
Summing up, if you’re interested in a book on cyberwar, Blunden and Cheung’s is the one to read. And it is perfectly timed.
Unlike the rest of our so-called “books” on cyberwar (take this best-selling example), Behold a Pale Farce: Cyberwar, Threat Inflation & the Malware Industrial Complex, won’t badly date if another Edward Snowden comes along. It is a true chronicle, a slice, of our technological history.
There’s also one last reason to get it. Another full disclosure [1]: I’m in it. Some of my best lines, too.
[1]. Example:
“Nobody in the great mass that is not the 1 percent or in the service of the same cares about attacks on the American financial system. They do, on the other hand, wish our financial system would stop attacking them.” — GS, page 224
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02.24.14
Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Ricin Kooks, WhiteManistan at 5:22 pm by George Smith
From last week:
Well over a quarter of a century ago I was always able to find Hutckinson’s recipe for abrin [and ricin] at the end of a telephone line. With the squeal of a US Robotics modem you would find it archived, along with lots of other alleged means to easy mayhem and malice, on bulletin board systems run off PCs in the bedrooms of young men.
With regards to the poison and other informations from the computer underground, what it was called back then, not much has changed.
Keep it in mind, it will have some relevance later.
In the last few years anti-terror training has moved from drills centered around Muslims to those involving domestic terrorists.
One such drill was briefly mentioned in the news last year, from Ohio:
A dead science teacher, weapons of mass destruction, first responders in hazmat suits and the Ohio Army National Guard all near the Municipal Stadium in Portsmouth, Thursday. There’s no cause for alarm — this is just a drill!
The mock disaster training exercise is being done with Scioto County first responders and the Ohio Army National Guard 52nd Civil Support Unit.
“It’s the reality of the world we live in,” says Portsmouth Police Chief Bill Raisin. “Don’t forget there is such a thing as domestic terrorism. This helps us all be prepared.”
The make-believe scenario is timely. Two school employees who are disgruntled over the government’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, plot to use chemical, biological and radiological agents against members of the local community.
On hair-trigger over being potentially painted as domestic terrorists, gun rights supporters used the Freedom of Information Act to pry loose training documents on the incident.
They are here.
The papers show a theoretical plot in which a disgruntled janitor in the Portsmouth School District cooks up some sulfur mustard and ricin, dispersing the former in a plot which caused minor burns. Ricin was put into the school lunches of children, sending many to the hospital with “flu-like” symptoms.
The scenario shows the janitor inspired by William Pierce, a famous American neo-Nazi known as the author of “The Turner Diaries,” America’s foremost example of race hate and government overthrow fiction. Pierce died a number of years ago but his book was a bestseller within the neo-Nazi violent right underground. Timothy McVeigh was one infamous domestic terrorist influenced by it.
The ricin recipe was also reproduced in the documents. It is illustrated as originating from the “Second” Temple of the Screaming Electron 2 website.
I could not find it on TOTSE2, so it is possible that for the drill, something was put together that looked like the chat board.
The original Temple of the Screaming Electron, although it no longer seems to exist, is archived in more than one place on the web and the mirror includes its old ricin recipe. The ricin recipe was a procedure bowdler-ized from far right kook Kurt Saxon’s Weaponeer and The Poor Man’s James Bond where it was attributed to someone named Punk Rock Girl.
Or maybe it is there at TOTSE2 and my search-fu was not strong enough. Or perhaps it was taken down.
On the Temple of the Screaming Electron, by me at the Register, in 2007:
During the [anti-terror] sweep which netted the alleged ricin cell, one young man was arrested with a copy of the ricin recipe downloaded from the Temple of the Screaming Electron, which is where Google will take you if you punch in “how to make ricin” and then click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” tab. He was subsequently released.
The person apprehended turned out to be a researcher with the wrong kind of name.
Over a quarter of a century ago, The Temple of the Screaming Electron was a bulletin board system hosted on a PC at the end of a telephone line. It archived computer virus source code, hacking files and, of course, things like the ricin recipe from self-published pamphlets authored by the violent right, then called anarchy files.
It was later migrated to the world wide web where it lasted, I’m guessing, for about a decade.
In the anti-terror exercise in Portsmouth, Ohio, the perpetrator was
drawn as someone striking back in retaliation against perceived effort to change or eliminate the 2nd Amendment.
However, in terms of motivation, how poisoning young children with ricin at lunchtime would symbolically be seen as having something logical to do with 2nd Amendment rights escapes me. If recent history is a guide, domestic terrorists have planned to attack government workers and installations.
Continuing, domestic right-wingers were recently been convicted in a ricin plot.
One such group was puckishly referred to as the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang in 2011.
Two members of that group were recently convicted by a jury in 90 minutes for conspiring to attack the government with ricin. Two others had previously taken guilty pleas on weapons offenses.
And a few days ago the FBI arrested three more men who were allegedly conspiring to attack the government with pipe bombs.
They were observed and engaged by the FBI and two confidential informants while on Facebook:
Three Georgia men tried to buy pipe bombs and other explosives and discussed attacking power grids, water treatment plants and other infrastructure in a plot to incite other militias to fight the federal government, authorities said.
Brian Edward Cannon, 36, and Cory Robert Williamson, 28, appeared in federal court Friday in Rome and were denied bond. Terry Eugene Peace, 45, is due for his first court appearance Monday. A criminal complaint charges them with conspiring to receive and possess firearms, specifically pipe bombs and thermite grenades. Thermite grenades are military-grade weapons typically used to destroy vehicles, weapons systems and other equipment …
Between Jan. 23 and Feb. 15, the three men participated in online chat discussions about carrying out an operation against the government in February, according to a written statement from an FBI agent. The online chats were monitored by the FBI.
‘‘Peace encouraged members of the militia to review guerrilla warfare tactics, small unit tactics, accumulate supplies and prepare family,’’ the agent’s statement says.
In a recorded phone call on Feb. 8, an FBI source told Peace he had a contact who could provide the materials the men sought. Peace said during the conversation, ‘‘… if he can hook us up with say 12 pipe bombs that will be sweet,’’ according to the agent’s statement.
A second FBI source told agents he had a conversation with Cannon on Feb. 8 during which Cannon said the group planned to ‘‘start the fight’’ with the government by sabotaging power grids, transfer stations and water treatment facilities to create mass hysteria, the agent’s statement says. That would push the government to declare martial law, which would push other militias to join the fight.
The FBI arranged for one of the informants to supply the men with a dozen dummy thermite bombs, at which point they were arrested.
As mentioned last week, it’s quite clear Homeland Security and the FBI monitor networks for this kind of thing.
And the right is a bit perturbed about the Oho anti-terrorism drill.
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02.17.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, WhiteManistan at 9:55 am by George Smith
From the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy:
Iran’s surprising decision to move warships off the Atlantic coast poses a potential catastrophic threat to America from a nuclear or electromagnetic pulse attack, according to an expert who foresaw Iran’s move …
Peter Pry said the ships are probably conducting a test for a future visit from an Iranian freighter that would launch the attack.
“I think the Iranian Navy patrols off our coasts may be intended to lull us into complacency, to get the U.S. Navy accustomed to an Iranian naval presence in our hemisphere, so eventually they could contribute to ‘Zero Hour’ and the great day when the Mullahs decide to drop the nuclear hammer on America,??? said Pry, who staffed a former congressional EMP commission.
From last week, here:
Or perhaps they will be sending this [cargo ship] and it will have a Scud in it with an atomic warhead and next week I won’t be able to post to the blog because electromagnetic pulse will have wiped out US civilization.
Preppers, rejoice, more material for another couple hundred book’s worth of white survivalist romance genre fiction on the end of America.
Hurry, there may still be time to join Peter Pry and the Noah Project by securing your own bug-out retreat in the high mountains of WhiteManistan Appalachia, just like Roscoe Bartlett, before the pulse and the shit hits the fan, bringing an end to American civilization as we know it.
Ready for anything, even the Iranian Navy.
Dead in Congress, prepper psychosis is taken to the Tea Party legislatures in Red States
From Arizona:
Legislation approved Wednesday by the Senate Public Safety Committee would require the state Division of Emergency Management to come up with recommendations about what kinds of things Arizonans should buy now and store in the garage, basement or storage room just in case some enemy detonates a nuclear or other bomb that wipes out power and communications in the state …
SB 1476 is being pushed by Sen. David Farnsworth, R-Mesa, amid concerns about an electromagnetic pulse that can be caused by certain types of explosion …
`Hopefully this will start the discussion and the awareness that we as a government cannot feed all these people,’ Farnsworth said. “As responsible citizens, we need to do our part to make our own private preparations.’
Every man for himself when under nuclear attack. The government can’t and won’t help. Hoard. Build your bunker. Purchase more ammo. Because you know the liberals will come out of the cities looking for your stuff.
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02.04.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 4:27 pm by George Smith
Ol’ EMP Crazy, now stocking 50 pound bags of corn from Sam’s Club and expanding his refuge in Appalachia in advance of the imminent end of America.
In 2012, notorious electromagnetic pulse kook Roscoe Bartlett was run out of the House, losing election to a Democratic candidate in a redrawn district. So, naturally, the first thing one thinks of at a famous web publication — Politico: Hey, let’s do a profile on what happened to Roscoe!
I’m not gonna rewrite everything I had to say at the time Bartlett bit the dust and the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy suffered a blow from which it has yet to recover.
Instead, I quote from the archives:
As long as I can remember Bartlett has been in congress, warning about how an enemy — North Korea, or terrorists, and now the special foe — Iran, will destroy American civilization with an electromagnetic pulse caused by a nuclear weapon detonated over the United States.
The Cult of EMP Crazy, aka as the missile defense/bomb Iran lobby, would have been nothing without Bartlett. Year after year after year Bartlett pounded the issue from the House, as often as possible, even causing the formation of a commission, now years past, to study the threat. [It concluded] the nation could be trivially returned to the age of horse and buggy. (Or as I used to like to put it, the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.)
As a consequence, Bartlett is the inspiration for now hundreds of vanity-published books from the survivalist crew, all distributed on Amazon, all exactly the same – about the end of western civilization by EMP …
Despite all the lobbying, Bartlett was never able to put into action any legislation to deal with electromagnetic pulse doom. But the lobby itself is loud, vociferous and incessant, writing books, articles and opinion pieces, casting movies and commercials, even spanning the Atlantic Ocean to plague the Brits.
Bartlett, for his part, has an obscure career waiting in the prepper/survivalist movement, where everyone is convinced America is about to end, anyway …
Since Roscoe Bartlett has been at his cause for so long, one might legitimately ask what is the man’s legacy?
Striking fear into people who are not particularly perceptive is one of his signal achievements … Bartlett’s unstinting work aimed at describing the total end of US civilization in an instant is particularly resonant within the Christian right …
Roscoe Bartlett, [and this can be said with absolute certainty], has been around longer than PEZ candy, parking meters and penicillin.
The Politico story is here, and excerpting only a little:
Every couple of weeks, the survivalist octogenarian shaves off his white beard, dons a suit and heads to the capital, where he serves as a senior consultant for a cybersecurity company called Lineage Technologies.
Bartlett, a small-government, Tea Party-style Republican, had spent two decades as the U.S. representative for Maryland’s 6th congressional district.
Bartlett’s warnings of catastrophic electromagnetic pulse attacks and solar flares fell on deaf ears and earned him a reputation as a crank …
In speech after late-night speech on the House floor, Bartlett hectored the nearly empty chamber: If the United States doesn’t do something to protect the grid, and soon, a terrorist or an act of nature will put an end to life as we know it.
Bartlett loved to conjure doomsday visions …
Since it was a feature in Politico, it immediately generated copycat coverage in other places, including — surprisingly, the LA Times.
I’ll not repeat from it save to say it includes about everything from the now twenty year-old script/meme. The reporter, one of the Times’ newer employees, was probably in grade school when it started.
Readers know electromagnetic pulse doom now falls firmly within the boundaries of DD’s Law:
The probability that any predicted national security catastrophe, or doomsday scenario, will occur is the inverse of its appearance in entertainments.
Thus, in the case of Roscoe Bartlett’s vision, zero.
There’s a crappy television series, Revolution, on it. Many movies have been made with electromagnetic pulse doom as a central feature of plotting. And do savor the hundreds of vanity-published novels on it, all published through Amazon, establishing a weird genre of adventure and romance fiction for the paranoid prepper far-right in WhiteManistan. (If you click the link to Amazon in the old post, you’ll see the number of books nobody without a mental problem of some kind reads has greatly increased.)
The generic script: The US will collapse soon, through an unspecified series of disasters which include (but are not limited to) total electrical grid failure, rampant bioterrorist-spread disease, and the death of money. Only those in the country, on farms with their own fruit trees, vegetable crops, chainsaws for cutting firewood, elevated water supply, and Bible-reading skills will survive.
Having been familiar with it for so long, I’ve observed there’s a joy in the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy. It’s a creepy enthusiasm for the end of US civilization so the true believers can retreat to their bunkers and bug-out hideaways, well-stocked with guns, ammo and military surplus camo-wear, awaiting the arrival of the starving and diseased scum from the cities who they can have the pleasure of ordering off their property. And then shooting, if not promptly obeyed.
It’s the same joy one senses in the believers in Rapture. Those saved by Jesus in the final score-keeping rejoice in knowing the non-believers will then be subjected to an infinity of misery.
In any case, there are never any Democrats allowed in the bunker when the end comes. It will be a great ritual of purification.
With Bartlett gone to Croatan, or more accurately, a private compound and artificial lake in West Virginia, the mantle of official Congressional electromagnetic pulse crazy fell to the certified idiot from Arizona who goes by the name of Trent Franks.
At which point long-time Cult members knew they had a serious problem.
So they took the electromagnetic pulse doom story on the road to Tea Party meetings in red states, where it is now offered with an entire menu of favorite right-wing hates: The need to end entitlements, the need for legislation to counter “voter fraud,” the need to install anti-shariah legislation at the state level, the need to expose the takeover of the US State Department by the Muslim Brotherhood in the guise of Hilary Clinton aide, Huma Abedin; the treachery of Benghazi…
In response to Politico’s Bartlett profile, Glenn Beck’s Blaze joined in.
Dealing with Iran instead of immediately proceeding with plans to go to war is a Neville Chamberlain moment:
Buck Sexton interviewed on his radio show Saturday former CIA director Amb. R. James Woolsey, now the chair of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Woosley gave a damning critique of the Obama administration’s handling of the Iranian nuclear agreement.
Woolsey, CIA director from 1993 to 1995, told Sexton that Obama’s dealings with the Iranian government have been “roughly equivalent to Neville Chamberlain’s at Munich in the 1930s.???
When Sexton asked Woolsey about Iran’s potential to have a nuclear weapon ready to deploy that the U.S. couldn’t stop, the ambassador said one could be ready in “six months to a year.??? But he added that the Iranians don’t need something sophisticated in order to trigger an electromagnetic pulse, which would be “devastating.???
On that note, Woolsey told Sexton that an EMP poses a security threat in the U.S. as well.
Complete with an old picture of Hitler at Munich.
Takeaway: Like so many things in the socially-crippled US, the paranoid and steeped-in-authoritarianism mythology of electromagnetic pulse doom was turned into a highly-professionalized and tenacious industry, built on the exploitation of a thick seam of WhiteManistan kook-ism and its love of end-times stories in which the virtuous are saved and the sinners destroyed. It’s a profitable business. Just take a look at Roscoe Bartlett’s spread in Appalachia.
Roscoe Bartlett — from the archives.
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02.01.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 1:35 pm by George Smith
Why people should pay no attention at all when someone from a famous American think tank is offering wisdom:
Instead of focusing on what we need to learn, we’ve instead fed on hype that fuels fears but doesn’t solve problems. For instance, Americans have repeatedly been told by government leaders and media pundits that cyber attacks are like weapons of mass destruction and that we are in a sort of Cold War of cyberspace …
But the fiction of a “cyber Pearl Harbor” gets far more attention than the real, and arguably far greater, impact of the massive campaign of intellectual property theft emanating from China.
“P.W. Singer is director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brookings Institution,” reads the LA Times opinion page. It mentions his book on cyberwar.
Cyber Pearl Harbor, electronic Pearl Harbor, digital Pearl Harbor. The meme is now 20 years old. P. W. Singer was 20 when it started cranking up.
I was there at the beginning, covered it for two decades. And have the archive on newspaper clippings on the matter when it was still hot and fresh nonsense.
Anyway, from the same newspaper, in 2012:
Speaking to a group of U.S. business leaders last week, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta issued a dire warning that foreign hackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and that their online attacks on transportation systems, banks and other vital facilities are escalating. The worst-case scenario, he said, is a “cyber Pearl Harbor” perpetrated by state-sponsored hackers or terrorists that “would cause physical destruction and loss of life, paralyze and shock the nation and create a profound new sense of vulnerability.”
Vice magazine, doing some publicity for a paper on how the future American military might will overwhelm the usual paupers and piss ants with a sky full of 3D-printed drones:
Ben FitzGerald, [a Senior Fellow at the D.C. defense think-tank Center for a New American Security], who grew up in the Australian city of Orange, cuts an unorthodox image for a man who spends his days advising some of the highest ranking officers in the U.S. military. When he and his beard aren’t leading Pentagon war games, in which he trains officers to disable future enemy naval fleets by using hypothetical weapons such as giant microwave pulse emitters, he says he likes to visit contemporary art galleries in D.C. with his wife.
The electromagnetic pulse gun, the microwave pulse emitter. Another over 20-year old gem of which I used to like to say, the weapons that are always coming but never quite arriving. Between Wired and Aviation Week magazine, they used to be here about once a month back at the beginning.
And Ben FitzGerald looks like he was a little over ten when it all started.
His paper on 3D-printed drones, for potentially terrifying the usual list of enemies vastly poorer than the US Department of Defense, is co-authored by someone from the giant arms-manufacturer, Northrop Grumman.
This alone would be hilarious enough to reduce a rational person to tetany.
Anyway, now the microwave pulse emitters are in movies, tv and books every week, which brings us back to DD’s Law:
The probability that any predicted national security catastrophe, or doomsday scenario, will occur is inversely proportional to its appearance in entertainments, movies, television dramas and series, novels, non-fiction books, magazines and news.
Or, put another way, the probability that something bad will happen, as described or predicted by experts or any government, intelligence or quasi-corporate/government assessment agency, asymptotically approaches zero as it attains widespread use in popular entertainments. (And that’s usually very early in the development cycle.)
Therefore, you can bet your sweet bippy there’s never going to be an electronic Pearl Harbor, or an electromagnetic pulse attack, or a national blackout caused by Chinese hackers, or people dieing from a ricin mailing even though it’s so easy to make. And al Qaeda does not come back from being hided for more than a decade. No one gets a second chance.
Summed up: Too many bad movies, too much bad television, too much fear-making as edutainment, passed off as serious news, advised by bad people slumming from the national security industry, their purpose primarily maximization of employment. Everything touched by it, tainted by an intrinsic badness. And it is definitely not supported by the real world but must be maintained by a uniquely American machinery of manipulations, lies and purposeful technology-mediated confusion.
The Brookings Institution is now most famous for being the think tank that produced the scholars who made their fame on a book and public rationalizations for the Iraq War. Now notorious quacks, once passed off as the finest of intellectuals.
Publishing this kind of material is a career track. It is servanting for
the national security megaplex and arms manufacturing.
Trivia:
Australian military budget: 24 billion dollars.
US defense budget: 500 – 650 billion dollars.
The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse — from the archives.
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