Pink slime and Beef Products, Inc. are on the ropes. So politicians who aren’t very popular have been recruited to burnish the image.
Public relations men gather, offering advice they know won’t work.
It’s black comedy watching the calamity unfold. And a bit reassuring, knowing this is going down to defeat unless the company can find a way to get it back into hamburger on the sly.
Excerpted:
Top elected officials in key beef-producing states Thursday toured the sole remaining plant in the country where “lean, finely textured beef” — otherwise known as “pink slime” — is manufactured. They were there to show support for the much-maligned filler and the jobs they say its production creates …
Meat industry supporters including Govs. Terry Branstad of Iowa and Rick Perry of Texas planned to tour the plant Thursday and sample the product.
“It’s the perception problem. They have this moniker now and they can’t seem to get the slime off of them,” said Marcia Horowitz, senior executive vice president at Rubenstein & Associates. Ideally, a new name would be both “accurate and non-scary,” she said, although she would shy away from using the word “beef” …
Both Horowitz and Johansson speculated that the beef industry might make a play for consumers’ heartstrings.
“Focus on jobs,” Horowitz said. The Associated Press reported that some 650 Beef Products employees found themselves out of work when the company shut down its other facilities. Since meat containing the filler is cheaper, Horowitz said a focus on affordability could also be a good strategy.
“Nostalgia is popular right now,” Johansson said. “Get back to the nostalgia of beef and how American it is.”
Nostalgia, pink slime, and “how American it is”? Certainly, it is totally American. In a very current give-us-money-for-this-crap-because-we-say-so predatory way.
Here are some possible hooks for re-invigorating the brand:
Please buy it or we’ll fire Joe the Ammonia Gas Technician.
Pink slime is yet more mess proving that those who manufacture odious things in America cannot be made to see them that way, even when their corporate noses are rubbed in it by mass opprobrium.
Music for the unpleasant themes of our time. No Norman Vincent Peale-isms, love songs, homilies or uplifting messages. Get your hate on because it’s good for you, a sane response to the condition of living in the USA.
“Apple’s reasons for hoarding so much of its money also raise questions … Apple executives said this week that they had lobbied Washington for tax concessions that would relieve them of much of their tax liability if they repatriated the cash. That smacks of corporate welfare and hardly induces sympathy for a company that is minting money, particularly at a time of such big fiscal deficits.
“More broadly, Apple has come to exemplify the conspicuous wealth – both corporate and personal – that is coursing through Silicon Valley.
“The social obligation this creates has so far been ignored … Apple and its peers stand apart in their financial resources yet with their extended global supply chains, they have multiplied jobs abroad rather than at home. Silicon Valley’s success has largely failed to reverberate to the wider benefit of the society that created it …
“[Apple’s] wealth throws into sharp relief the conditions endured by workers at its Chinese suppliers.” —from the Financial Times
Americans seem to want to read about national decline. The more dire the prediction, the more heated the prose, the more colourful the book title, the better. Conservative commentator Mark Steyn’s jeremiad After America: Get Ready for Armageddon made it to number four on the New York Times’s bestseller list. Peter D Kiernan’s Becoming China’s Bitch briefly topped the Amazon chart …
The book’s title [Becoming China’s Bitch: And Nine More Catastrophes We Must Avoid Right Now] might lead the reader to expect a provocative tract on US-Chinese relations. In fact, this is just one of a huge number of topics that the writer yokes together under the general theme of impending catastrophes that threaten America. In a losing battle to structure his thoughts, Kiernan makes a great many lists. He starts with “five factors that freeze us???, preventing America from dealing with its problems. These are the media, lobbyists, think-tanks, religion in America and its political parties – which seems pretty comprehensive. He then moves on to 10 “impending catastrophes??? that he would like to see dealt with, only the first of which concerns America’s relationship with China. This he describes, obscurely, as “a co-dependency which is decoupling???.
Kiernan’s writing is dazzlingly bad …
Travelling around the world as a reporter and columnist, I have found that an erosion of US economic and political power, and a shift towards China, is already palpable … Europe’s leaders are appealing to Beijing, rather than Washington, for emergency financial assistance. In Africa, a continent is being transformed by Chinese investment. Even in the Americas, Chinese influence is growing: Brazil now does more trade with China than with the US.
The most common reason cited by voters of all political stripes for the rising cost was oil company greed.
Overall, 36 percent of respondents said “oil companies that want to make too much profit” deserve the most blame for higher energy prices. Twenty-eight percent of Republicans said so, as did 44 percent of Democrats and 32 percent of independents.
Twenty-six percent of all respondents said a range of factors was equally to blame, including oil companies, politicians, foreign countries that dominate oil reserves and environmentalists who want to limit oil exploration.
From The Daily Ticker today:
“There is no justification for the current gas prices. This is all about speculation by the people who are speculating on the price of oil and gas,” [says an ex-Senator]. “We could shutdown excess speculation in commodity markets. This government should do that.”
[Then he peddles his book.]
Former Senator Dorgan, a long-time clean energy advocate, joined The Daily Ticker’s Aaron Task to discuss U.S. energy policy (or lack thereof), which is the subject of his new fictionalized thriller, Blowout. It is the first in a two-book series, which the senator calls an “eco-thriller.”
The premise: “What if we were right on the edge of discovering a new source of energy that costs very very little, who would try to stop it and why and how,” he explains.
In “Blowout,” Dorgan writes of a team of scientists who are testing microbes that “eat their way” through coal, leaving dirty waste and methane behind. If successful, coal could be mined and produced without the polluting the atmosphere, which leads to climate change.
[“A Congressional Research Service report] observes that oil companies do not obey market economics and that the ‘oil market … is difficult to fit into the model of free market adjustments.'” — DD blog.
There was an album including all these tunes. But I didn’t have enough money to put it on CD. iTunes, and all it’s second tier imitators, require tithing — more accurately, micro-bribes.
Paying Apple anything to dispense rock n’ roll is anathema. And I’m hardly the only person who thinks so.
There was no real practical option but to give the last record away free, too. Because Steve Jobs and Apple destroyed the album market at a fundamental level, redirecting the profit stream of popular music from recording giants to Cupertino nerds through their technologies of iKit mediated theft creative destruction. Jobs was not innovative in this. He did not create the digital music file format. Jobs’ gift to consumers was a mass storage device for a higgledy-piggledy collection of tunes as a consumer bauble pretty enough for people to covet above everything else. Vulture capitalism and algorithm-greased cutting of throats in the recording industry came built-in with the iPod.
As a bonus, they helped take out the pleasure of going to record stores and few ten thousand businessmen and employees who made, on average, modest livings.
For Smithsonian magazine, Richard Clarke makes what the magazine’s reporter thinks an audacious statement.
Now keep in mind the 1 percent and their shoe-shiners have never looked at the China trade deficit from the aisles of Target or Wal-Mart.
For some reason Clarke believes American companies giving everything over to China is astonishing stuff, a development people are not concerned enough about. They need to be told.
So you’ve a snapshot of our culture of lickspittle in action. Tough old mutton everyone’s chewed through many times repackaged as new fresh veal cutlets.
The vision Clarke has is of a modern technological nightmare, casting the United States as Dr. Frankenstein, whose scientific genius has created millions of potential monsters all over the world. But Clarke is even more concerned about “official??? hackers such as those believed to be employed by China.
“I’m about to say something that people think is an exaggeration, but I think the evidence is pretty strong,??? he tells me. “Every major company in the United States has already been penetrated by China??? …
“My greatest fear,??? Clarke says, “is that, rather than having a cyber-Pearl Harbor event, we will instead have this death of a thousand cuts. Where we lose our competitiveness by having all of our research and development stolen by the Chinese. And we never really see the single event that makes us do something about it. That it’s always just below our pain threshold. That company after company in the United States spends millions, hundreds of millions, in some cases billions of dollars on R&D and that information goes free to China….After a while you can’t compete.???
It’s not below your pain threshold if you’re among the 99 percent.
Wait, there’s more, the US military could be embarrassed militarily.
“Say there was another confrontation, such as the one in 1996 when President Clinton rushed two carrier battle fleets to the Taiwan Strait to warn China against an invasion of Taiwan,” reads the magazine. “Clarke, who says there have been war games on precisely such a revived confrontation, now believes that we might be forced to give up playing such a role for fear that our carrier group defenses could be blinded and paralyzed by Chinese cyberintervention.”
“Clarke now wants to warn us, urgently, that we are being failed again, being left defenseless against a cyberattack that could bring down our nation’s entire electronic infrastructure, including the power grid, banking and telecommunications, and even our military command system,” reads the script.
Get the pies. Imagine Richard Clarke on the stage.
There’s a reason to not read Wired. And it’s the slight feeling of nausea that is acquired from intelligence-insulting news of tech geek start-up companies with no business plan or application except selling dubious services to the Silicon Valley demographic of shoe-shiners for the 1 percent.
However, one can’t always avoid Wired-ism. The “scoops” are ported to other news services, where they cater to those who delight in the indomitable genius of American innovation.
[A] startup called Tacocopter has exceeded all expectations by coming up with a plan that would completely eliminate the middleman from food delivery. How does Tacocopter propose to deliver food? With an unmanned drone helicopter, of course.
According to Wired, Tacocopter is a Silicon Valley startup that came up with the business plan to deliver tacos via unmanned drone helicopters. The idea behind Tacocopter is simple in theory — using an application on a smartphone, a customer would order and pay online. A GPS location would also be transmitted and the drone helicopter would then be sent out with the food to deliver the tacos to the consumer at that location …
Tacocopter’s website launched in July 2011, but the site has only recently garnered attention, receiving more than 14,000 Facebook likes and almost 4,000 retweets. So what’s preventing you from getting on your phone right now and ordering tacos from a quadricopter? The system isn’t a reality yet.
Unfortunately, there are several obstacles preventing Tacocopter from taking off, according to Star Simpson, the MIT graduate who originally came up with the idea …
This bit magically combines the technology of trivial iPhone applications for personal gratification and annoying little robotic flying machines.
Don’t forget to vote again. As part of my best practices pledge, I promise to never make anything for my own benefit that would de-job minimum wage food service workers and deliverymen.
The Human Terrain System “is a U.S. Army program to conduct social and cultural studies in support of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan,” writes Steve Aftergood. “The Bulletin provides theoretical and practical accounts from HTS personnel in the field.”
For instance, one of the accounts from the new bulletin contains an interesting if unintentionally hilarious account of some US information operations in Iraq:
With adolescents growing up in the recent decade, the word “sick” refers to something that is “crazy, cool, insane.” To people living in the US 10 to 30 years ago, the word “sick” had a different definition — “afflicted with ill health or disease, ailing” or “mentally, morally or emotionally deranged, corrupt, or unsound: a sick mind.” Now consider the development of an IO campaign to discredit a group of insurgents: “Those people are sick.” The American who lived in the US 10 to 30 years ago would understand this to mean that the group is mentally deranged or morally corrupt. However, an American adolescent today would interpret this to mean that the group is really cool and hip. Rather than being an abstract issue, this problem actually negatively impacted US IO in Iraq on numerous occasions. In the summer of 2010 an IO campaign was pursued to portray several individuals and insurgent groups as criminals. Unfortunately, the Arabic language used presented these people in more of a “Robin Hood” fashion and may have assisted in recruitment.
In other words, if you speak in the language of a duffer or military stodge, it may not communicate quite what one thinks to a younger generation in a different country.
In another section of the bulletin HTS researchers present numerous colored maps of Afghanistan.
Maps can be quite helpful in understanding where you are. And sometimes not so much, depending on circumstances.
For these maps, a red area denoted where locals were very unlikely to report IEDs to authorities. A yellow are was explained to mean the locals were “somewhat unlikely” to report IEDs to authorities.
But what if one is on the boundary between a red and a yellow or moving from one to the other? Which level of “unlikely” should be assumed?
And how much ‘likely” is in the “likely” in green areas where the color is said to signify the locals are “likely” to report IEDs?
One can see the conundrums that might arise in the determination and weighing of a variety of “likely” stories, so to speak.
It worked so well I went to Cairo last week to see the New Digital World’s Fair of Democracy and Freedom expo. Indeed, I have been posting on my Facebook page all this week from the bank of the Nile. I just didn’t geo-tag it on my wall.
Friedman also noticed that the most explosive group of citizens were young men who used Facebook as a means of rallying protestors. Friedman compared these Egyptians to a tiger just let out of its cage, dangerous and unpredictable. They were ready for a change and did not care if the rest of the world was ready. Friedman used this example to warn students about the hazards of posting information for the world to see. Once the citizens pressed “enter??? on their Facebook pages, the protest was forever immortalized in the cyber world. Nothing could be changed, and the world would soon see the effects of their electronic planning.
The young Egyptians who drove the revolution are desperate for the educational tools and freedom to succeed in the modern world. Our response should have been to shift our aid money from military equipment to building science-and-technology high schools and community colleges across Egypt.
Yet, instead, a year later, we’re in the crazy situation of paying $5 million in bail to an Egyptian junta to get U.S. democracy workers out of jail there, while likely certifying that this junta is liberalizing and merits another $1.3 billion in arms aid. We’re going to give $1.3 billion more in guns to a country whose only predators are illiteracy and poverty.
Build science and technology high schools and community colleges? What they really need is more Facebook and Google guy pixie dust, right?
“Wael Ghonim attended the International Monetary Fund (IMF) meeting in 2011, stating that ‘I feel like Joe the Plumber,’ referring to the conservative activist who became a shorthand for populist outrage during the 2008 U.S. presidential election,” reads his Wiki page.
“In April 2011 Ghonim announce he was taking a ‘long term sabbatical’ from Google in order to start a ‘technology focused NGO to help fight poverty & foster education in Egypt … In May 2011 Ghonim said that he has signed a ‘Revolution 2.0’ book deal …”
From the archives of the old Crypt Newsletter, a collection of excerpts from the nation’s newspapers on Eligible Receiver, in 1999, collecting pieces spanning about three years. Eligible Receiver was an exercise, ostensibly done to test what could be done to hack the country’s infrastructure. It was actually only a set of simulations and musings. And it’s real purpose was to have a something upon which to build an alarming narrative on vulnerability to take the country’s news organs.
From the Crypt Newsletter (JOSEPH K) Guide To Tech Terminology:
Eligible Receiver: A Pentagon ghost story repeated ad nauseam to journalists and the easily frightened in which ludicrous or totally unsubstantiated claims about menaces from cyberspace are passed off as astonishing deeds of techno-legerdemain performed by cybersoldiers working within a highly classified wargame.
Usage: Author James Adams claimed in Techweek magazine that Pentagon hackers employed in Eligible Receiver “did more than the massed might of Saddam Hussein’s armies, than the Nazis in the Second World War.”
Since its first appearance in 1997, Eligible Receiver, like the phrase “electronic Pearl Harbor,” has become a good watermark for identification of uncritical, unsophisticated journalism addressing the potential for cyberterrorism to lay low the nation.
Although never substantiated with solid proof by Pentagon leadership, Eligible Receiver has become an article of faith in the mainstream newsmedia and still appears quite regularly since its genesis almost three years ago as prima facie evidence of what hackers could do to plunge the empire into chaos.
Characteristics of invocations of Eligible Receiver can include any or all of the following: there were 20, or 25, or 35, or 50 hackers; the hackers were from or hired by: [the Pentagon, the NSA, the Joint Staff], the national power grid was taken down, the 911 service was taken down, troop movements were disrupted, the hackers were more powerful than Nazi armies in World War II, laptops were bought, laptops were stolen, software was bought off-the-shelf, software was obtained from the Net, unspecified secret computer systems were compromised and/or unspecified public computer systems were compromised.
Here then, a selection of examples of Eligible Receiver in the news:
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On October 9, 1999, the Los Angeles Times published a story on the Pentagon’s Moonlight Maze hysteria entitled: “In Theory, Reality, US Open to Cyber-Attack — An NSA test exposed vulnerability of critical computer systems to hackers; Outside assault proved it.”
In paragraph seventeen, buried near the end of the Los Angeles Times piece, Drogin writes: “Indeed, the evidence suggests a certain amount of hype and hysteria have overshadowed the reality of cyberspace.”
It was an inadvertently telling choice of words, for in just the story’s second paragraph — one of the piece’s impact points — Drogin fell prey to the same phenomenon.
Drogin invoked the Pentagon ghost story of Eligible Receiver — the secret DoD wargame conducted two years ago which proponents of “electronic Pearl Harbor” insist demonstrated the nation could be flattened by cyberattack.
Drogin wrote: “The [Eligible Receiver] hackers broke into networks that direct 911 emergency systems.”
It was a clear and rather extravagant error.
Appearing in June of 1998 to testify before Congress, Ellie Padgett, deputy chief of the National Security Agency’s office of defensive information warfare spoke of how Eligible Receiver addressed the alleged vulnerability of the 911 phone system.
In a simulated exercise, Padgett said, “we scripted (an) Internet message (that) would be sent out to everybody saying there was a problem with the 911 system, understanding that human nature would result in people calling the 911 system to see if there was a problem.”
The working idea in this part of Eligible Receiver revolved around the hypothesis that many people viewing the message on the Internet in a newsgroup might panic and phone their local 911 trunk, causing a jam-up on the line.
“It can probably be done, this sort of an attack, by a handful of folks working together . . .” Padgett said.
This is an extremely far cry from Drogin’s assertion that the 911 system was broken into by alleged Eligible Receiver hackers. In fact, it has nothing at all to do with breaking into a 911 computer system, whatever that might be.
However, it is consistent, thematically, with the flavor of the mythology propagated on Eligible Receiver …
In fact, during an interview with Crypt Newsletter in the summer of 1998 concerning Eligible Receiver, a Pentagon spokeswoman for the affair asserted “no actual switching systems” were broken into at any time during Eligible Receiver. She went on to say that Eligible Receiver had only simulated these attacks on NSA computer networks set up to emulate potential domestic national systems.
Nevertheless, Drogin also wrote in paragraph two of the Times piece: “In less than three months, the [Eligible Receiver hackers] secretly penetrated computers that control electrical grids in Los Angeles, Washington, and other major cities.”
The lead claims in the Los Angeles Times article are the framing points for a larger discussion on how Moonlight Maze has publicly proved what the Eligible Receiver exercise secretly demonstrated two years ago, which constitutes another rather extensive leap in linking the facts that are known about both.
Drogin quoted from counter-terrorist “czar” Richard Clarke:
“An enemy could systematically disrupt banking, transportation, utilities, finance, government functions and defense.”
The Clarke quotes are functionally identical to the same statements made for Signal magazine in August of this year when it was suggested that the Freedom of Information Act could be “modified” as part of a plan to help protect us from cyberattack. They add nothing to the actual body of knowledge on Moonlight Maze.
For the complete Clarke-uttered propaganda published in August see the “electronic Pearl Harbor” archive.
“It’s cheaper and easier than building a nuclear weapon,” said Clarke for the LA Times.
Buried in Drogin’s piece was comment by John Gilligan who “directs information technology and information systems at the [Department of Energy.]”
Gilligan, while talking about hacker attacks, “[also argued] that the danger is usually overstated,” according to the Times.
“To get access to the electricity grid computers, to start to shut some of the grid, you have to really work at it . . . To do a Pearl Harbor, you need a lot of inside information.”
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The September 19, 1999, issue of New Scientist magazine invoked the mythos as an example of what “cyberwar” could do in an article entitled: “To the virtual barricades.”
“[Electronic Pearl Harbor” can be done — as was demonstrated two years ago when the US Department of Defense conducted a ‘war game’ to test its defences against cyber attacks. In an operation dubbed Eligible Receiver, fifty hackers tried to infiltrate DoD systems using only the simplest of hacking tools.
“Their task was to simulate an attack from North Korea. Despite the best efforts of the DoD, intelligence and security agencies, and the private sector . . . the hackers reduced a virtual electricity grid to 50 per cent effectiveness in just seven days.”
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On June 26, 1999, the Christian Science Monitor featured a story entitled: “The hidden dangers of information warfare.”
The Monitor’s reporter cited the Pentagon’s secret exercise, Eligible Receiver, in the standard manner.
“. . . Operation Eligible Receiver demonstrated the potential vulnerability of the U.S. government’s information systems. The National Security Agency hired 35 hackers to launch simulated attacks on the national information structure. The hackers obtained ‘root access’ – the highest level of control – in 36 of the government’s 40,000 networks.
“If the exercise had been real, the attackers would have been able to create power outages across Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, and New York. They could have disrupted the Department of Defense’s communication systems (taking out most of the Pacific Command) and gained access to computer systems aboard U.S. Navy vessels.
“It was a disturbing exercise. So much so, that several top White House officials have spoken of the possibility of an ‘electronic Pearl Harbor’ attack on the U.S. mainland. Added to these vulnerabilities is the fact that most Americans have no sense of how information warfare will affect them.”
Further along, the Monitor called upon James Adams, appearing here as CEO of IDefense — a firm that advertises its skill in preventing potential “Eligible Receivers,” to provide the pro forma warnings.
“It is a very serious problem,” said Adams for the Monitor.
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From the April 1999 issue of “Government Executive,” a reporter writes on the danger of cyberterror to the national networks:
“The liability posed by such dependence became clear when the Pentagon conducted an exercise known as Eligible Receiver in 1997. Using off-the-shelf technology and software downloaded from hacker Web sites, a team of about 20 employees from the National Security Agency hacked into unclassified Pentagon computer systems. The surprise exercise, designed to expose weaknesses in computer security, succeeded beyond the planners’ wildest expectations. Among other things, the exercise showed how hackers might disrupt troop deployments.
“It was startling,” [Deputy Defense Secretary] John Hamre said. ‘We didn’t really let them take down the power system in the country, but we made them prove that they knew how to do it.'”
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From an April 22, 1999, issue of “Inside the Army:”
“Two years after Eligible Receiver, a joint exercise conducted by DOD in which virtual ‘terrorists’ used stolen hardware from a government facility to gain control over secret computer systems without being detected, the military finds itself ‘in full-scale conflict,’ [Deputy Secretary of Defense] John Hamre said. Important lessons learned over this period include ‘that cyperspace ain’t for geeks, it’s for warriors,’ he said.”
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From a March 22, 1999 report by Associated Press writer Laura Myers entitled “Study Finds Hacker Threat a Real Danger.” Reporter Myers appears to be only vaguely familiar with the Pentagon claim and gets a figure wrong.
This is hardly a liability for the mythos. Even Pentagon proponents of “Eligible Receiver” can’t seem to agree on the number of people involved.
Myers nevertheless passes on the growing legend as proof of national danger:
“In 1997, a national security team of about 20 people, in a cyberwar game [Eligible Receiver] lasting three months, gained access to unclassified Pentagon computers, giving the team the ability to disrupt troops movements.”
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From an interview on cyberterrorism conducted with Senator John Kyl by the United States Information Agency (USIA), published in November 1998:
Kyl: Well, [cyberterrorism is] surprisingly easy. It’s hard to quantify that in words, but there have been some exercises run recently. One that’s been in the media, called Eligible Receiver, demonstrated in real terms how vulnerable the transportation grid, the electricity grid, and others are to an attack by, literally, hackers — people using conventional equipment, no “spook” stuff in other words.
————-
From the Fall 1998 issue of the University of Southern California’s “Networker” magazine:
“Operating under the code-name Eligible Receiver, 35 people working for the National Security Agency targeted unclassified computer systems across the country. Employing only hacking tools downloaded from the Net and standard-issue computers, the team reportedly accessed the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii – in charge of 100,000 troops – among other targets.
“‘We didn’t really let them take down the power system in the country, but we made them prove that they knew how to do it,’ Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre told the press.
“Before Eligible Receiver, what you had was a bunch of driven geeks and a few admirals and generals dotted around who said that ‘this is really important stuff’ and a bunch of traditionalists who were saying ‘yeah, right. It’s all just rubbish, really,’ says Adams. ‘Well, Eligible Receiver gave everyone a very nasty shock because it showed that the whole system could be devastated,’ he adds.”
Editor’s note: James Adams wrote a book called “The Next World War,” published in 1998, that based most of its premises that computers would fight all future wars on Pentagon claims like “Eligible Receiver.” The book was pilloried for passing on myths and April Fool’s jokes, such as the Gulf War virus hoax, as fact. [Adams also founded a computer security company called iDefense. Many years ago it declared bankruptcy and faded away.]
“[Eligible Receiver] resonated at the Department of Defense, which has 2.1 million computers, 100,000 local area networks, and more than 100 long-distance networks. Eligible Receiver was ‘a very telling example for all of the senior leadership here,’ says Susan Hansen, a [Pentagon flack] for Secretary of Defense William Cohen.
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From a USIA interview (published in November 1998) with reporter James Adams, here advertised as the CEO of “Infrastructure Defense,” a firm started to help protect from potential Eligible Receivers:
“The ‘hackers’ taking part in the exercise — called Eligible Receiver — were, in fact, U.S.government employees. They were given no advance intelligence. They bought their laptops from a local computer store.
“The hackers successfully demonstrated that they could with ease break into the power grids of all the major U.S. cities — from Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington, D.C., to New York — that were linked to the U.S. capability to deploy forces. At the same time they were able to break into the -911- emergency telephone system and could comfortably have taken both of those networks down . . .”
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From a September 2, 1998, Jane’s Defense Weekly piece on information warfare and the Department of Defense:
“In one Joint Chiefs of Staff simulation, known as Eligible Receiver, US officials posing as terrorists were able to shut down key command and control systems at US Pacific Command headquarters.”
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In an August 2, 1998 story by Cox Newspapers’ by Andrew Glass entitled: “Target America: Computer Warfare,” the Pentagon grail is credited with turning off all operations of the DoD’s Pacific Ocean/Asian command as well as the 911 system.
Sun Tzu — an ancient and quite dead Chinese military philosopher — is credited with the germ of the idea, too, somehow.
“Last June, the National Security Agency staged a ‘red team’ exercise, code-named Eligible Receiver, in which agents pretending to be North Koreans infiltrated the command-and-control facilities of the U.S. Pacific Command in Honolulu — demonstrating their ability to neutralize most U.S. armed forces from Okinawa to San Diego for many hours without firing a shot.
“Attaining 100 victories in 100 battles is not the pinnacle of excellence,” [Sun Tzu] wrote in ‘The Art of War,’ the earliest known treatise on military science. ‘Subjugating the enemy’s army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence.'”
And, further on:
“Appearing last June before the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on technology, terrorism and government information, Ellie Padgett, deputy chief of the NSA’s office of defensive information warfare, told of one aspect of the worrisome success in Eligible Receiver.
In a phase of the exercise that simulated attacks, she said, ‘we scripted (an) Internet message (that) would be sent out to everybody saying there was a problem with the 911 system, understanding that human nature would result in people calling the 911 system to see if there was a problem’ — thus causing the overloaded phone system to crash.”
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In a speech in Aspen, Colorado, in late July 1998, the Pentagon’s John Hamre said of Eligible Receiver: “A year ago, concerned for this, the department undertook the first systematic exercise to determine the nation’s vulnerability and the department’s vulnerability to cyber war. And it was startling, frankly. We got about 30, 35 folks who became the attackers, the red team . . . We didn’t really let them take down the power system in the country, but we made them prove that they knew how to do it.”
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From a June 1998 Congressional Governmental Affairs Committee meeting chaired by Congressman and former actor Fred Thompson who played a naval commander in the movie adaptation of Tom Clancy’s “The Hunt for Red October”:
“Lt. General Minihan, the Director of the National Security Agency, will identify in greater detail the nation’s vulnerability as revealed in a recent war game known as Eligible Receiver. The Committee also will explore whether the [Y2K] problem will increase America’s vulnerability to attack. As we approach the 21st century, will terrorists and rogue nations test their information warfare weapons without fear of being caught and insert data smart bombs into the nation’s computers for use at a later date?”
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From a May 24, 1998 story in the Washington Post written by Bradley Graham:
“Many details of the exercise, dubbed Eligible Receiver, remain closely held. But according to official sources, a group of 35 NSA specialists simulated a series of rolling power outages and 911 emergency phone overloads in Washington and a handful of other cities. They showed that large-scale blackouts could be caused by targeting computerized sensing and control devices known as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems, which have become common substitutes for human monitors in operating electrical, oil, gas, transportation and water treatment systems.”
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From an April 23, 1998 press conference led by Kenneth Bacon, the Pentagon’s head flack:
“And that was one of the, as I said, one of the signal achievements of the exercise the Joint Staff ran, ELIGIBLE RECEIVER, to improve the awareness of people within the Department of what the computer security issue is.”
I’m astonished by the level of mediocrity in ideas and words it takes to touch off a controversy in some part of the military. It sure doesn’t take much to put the feeble minds on edge.
You read about Marine Gary Stein and expect fire-breathing. The reality is a dullard who can’t write and a Facebook page filled up by a crowd cheering a milchtoast’s taunting of the presidency.
Richard Dawkins. Sound of air going out of tires, people muttering angrily in the audience.
Now, if someone wanted to show balls, and balls are what it takes to be an airborne man, this is the rock concert headliner you’d have at Fort Bragg. To show balance, to demonstrate tolerance and equal regard for all. In honor and celebration of now being able to say you’re gay in the army! To infuriate Jerry Boykin.
Rock the Trans Special Operations Command.
I love it! And a great rip on the old Wilson — Phillips hit, “Hold On.” And, unlike the rest of the flat tires in the recent stories on allegedly trying to make statements, it rocks.
Latest mainstream news controversy, the flip side of the Gary Stein coin, a soldier who got his rock concert for atheists approved at Fort Bragg after a long battle for equal representation.
After a sometimes painful 18 months of gestation, Sgt. Justin Griffith of Fort Bragg, N.C., exclaims, “My baby is about to be born!” His baby is Rock Beyond Belief, apparently the first major atheist event on a U.S. military base.
Griffith, 29, who has served five years in the Army, including two deployments to Iraq, has been wrestling with the overwhelmingly Christian establishment in the Army since September 2010 to get to this point.
The March 31 event is Griffith’s answer to Rock the Fort — a day-long evangelical Christian concert and festival held at Fort Bragg on Sept. 25, 2010, put on by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, with the support and blessing of the military brass. It was the fourth in a series of events sponsored by the group on various U.S. bases dating to 2009.
Among the headliners for the all-day atheist festival on the base are scientist Richard Dawkins, the rock band Aiden and singer/songwriter Roy Zimmerman.
I can consult my rock critic pals like Chuck Eddy and Metal Mike Saunders about the bill. We’d have a really good laugh at the idea.
Richard Dawkins and rock. Not in this universe. Dawkins is big with tech nerds. It’s his audience.
The XVIII Airborne Corps and the US Army Special Operations Command? And Richard Dawkins? You’ll have to pay ’em to go, and maybe even then they’d just run off with the money for some decent beer. That’s what I’d do.
Fort Bragg, not exactly the place you’d find wimpish tech geek fans of Richard Dawkins, despite the post’s tongue-in-cheek title.
Rock the Fort, the Billy Graham Ministries organized festival, doesn’t have quite as bad a bill as Rock Beyond Belief.
But it’s still total crap.
The headliner is Hawk Nelson, a Canadian band accurately described as as second or third tier sissy boy rock.
There are a lot of sweater vest and polo shirt twinky rock bands in North America. The Jonas Brothers and Disney TV guaranteed it. Hawk Nelson aren’t even close to being the best, if that’s the word to use.
The video — well, the little cheer-leading girls are nice.
Real big in the US Army’s airborne corps. Fer sure.
By the way, you can still vote for something a lot better than this dross. Unlike all the above, we do rock. Plus we’re mean and old coots, despising activist atheists and proselytizing evangelicals equally.
