06.19.13
Great Googley Moogley!
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Ellsberg on Snowden
This, in my mail, from Daniel Ellsberg on another petition making the rounds, an ACLU-sponsored plea to undo NSA spying:
There has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material …
The technical capabilities are in place. With the flip of the switch or another major attack, we may find ourselves in a dangerous situation in which average citizens, along with Congresspersons, journalists and their sources, even judges, are watched around the clock and are afraid to dissent. The core fixtures of our democracy—the right to protest, the right to live freely in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness without government intrusion—could be weakened beyond repair.
I remain afraid of this reality, but we cannot hesitate to address it. I believe we now have the information and inspiration we need to stand up before it’s too late to turn back …
I remain both pessimistic and skeptical. It’s already too late for many things.
Do Internet petitions work? Do you think the national security megaplex will be wilted by tens of thousands of people using their smartphones to digitally sign an on-line petition?
Go ahead, stab that app with your righteous digit of anger! Take that, nosy surveillance state!
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What he said
Consider the changing identity of the most valuable company in America. For a long time, it was GM, then Exxon, then IBM. These were companies with huge visible production activities …
But now it’s Apple, which has hardly any employees and does hardly any manufacturing. The company tries, through fairly desperate PR efforts, to claim that it is indirectly responsible for lots of US jobs, but never mind. The reality is that the company is basically built around technology, design, and a brand identity.
There was an old Dilbert in which the pointy-haired boss explained that the company had discovered that despite its slogan, people weren’t its most important asset — money was, and people only came in at #8 or something. Actually, in Apple’s case market position is its most important asset.
There are a couple of obvious implications from this change in the nature of corporate success. One is that profits are no longer anything remotely resembling a “natural??? aspect of the economy; they’re very much an artifact of antitrust policy or the lack thereof, intellectual property policy, etc. Another is that a lot of what we consider output is “produced??? at low or zero marginal cost.
Smartphones and mobile computing haven’t been transformative for the American populace, at least from what I can see at Baja Ranch everyday. Everyone has an iPhone with apps for every social networking site and more processing power than many older PCs. But they still can’t earn enough to get out of the WIC, SNAP and EBT programs.
Every day it becomes easier to detest Apple and the rest of America’s “tech” industry.
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At GlobalSecurity.Org
Formally:
Did the NSA foil the Zazi peroxide bomb plot?
For those who can’t deal with my rock ‘n’ roll nickname (from ’85).
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06.18.13
Touching off cyberwar
For about a year I’ve been saying the US has touched off cyberwar on the Internet. When it deployed Stuxnet into the Iranian nuclear program and continued to write and deploy malware for that purpose it ignited a clandestine battle.
Stuxnet could not be restricted or contained, as has always been the case with computer viruses. And that secret war has spread and resulted in retaliations.
It set up a growing black market for the hoarding and misuse of security vulnerability information by national cyberwar programs. And it triggered a digital arms and acquisition race among nations with the resources to dig deeply into the mechanics of cyberwar.
The US demonstrated it had an active and busy offensive cyberwar program and that it was expanding its size and capabilities. This has gradually come out in thinly veiled government and military position papers, security contractor news and hiring trends and in speeches delivered by US military men.
In effect, the US has made cyberwar a growing national security business, one that is global, one that a lot of big arms manufacturing and defense service corporations want in on. And there’s no putting the stops to it now. It will continue to roll, gaining momentum as more and more money is spent. More simply, there’s a lot of moolah to be had in screwing with people and other countries through digital arms. Organized crime has proven very little can be truly made secure and now professionally staffed and trained corporate military and intelligence agencies have great incentive to increase their action and leverage.
America has efficiently put itself in a terrible position to complain about the bad doings of others. We have always reserved the right to overdo stuff and this has backfired. Again. It’s a national trait.
Cynically, this may have been impossible to avoid. Having looked in on matters of national security for two decades, the corporate arms and government/military interests, purely on a profit-seeking basis, grew way too large and powerful for it to be otherwise. Lacking any oversight or serious attempt to rein things in, and there were none, the umbilically connected national security powers, mega-businesses and policy-makers were always going to go ahead with lobbying for and building a structure that was for cyberwar.
However, by ingenuously continuing to deliver the script that other bad actors, China, Iran, North Korea, etc., were behind much of the alleged badness on world networks, we set the stage for ruining our reputation.
These countries were at it, probing American business, infrastructure and military sites, putting in place mechanisms and practicing techniques that would allow them to strike in America at later notice. The mainstream media was complicit in delivering this baleful warning without daring to look in the mirror or inspect the other side of the coin.
And up until the Snowden affair, all you could read was the government and national security industry line, that digital Pearl Harbor was coming to the United States, courtesy of many bad guys aimed at … the financial system, the power, the water and on and on.
There was literally no end to it.
This was easily recognized at GlobalSecurity.Org and the other one or two respectable mainstream outlets I normally correspond with.
NSA director Keith Alexander, in the same speech last year where he claimed Chinese cyber-spying was bringing out the “greatest transfer of wealth in history,” added he was trying to ready the nation so that he would not have to go to Congress and explain things the day after a catastrophe.
Well, today General Alexander was in front of Congress, again after last week, for explaining things. But it wasn’t because this country had been subjected to “electronic Pearl Harbor.”
It needs repeating: The reveals by Edward Snowden have derailed Alexander’s (and the government’s) complicated script on digital doom and the accompanying mythology, delivering fundaments and information easier to grasp. The news is not as nebulous, the narrative more compelling.
As the owner of the most powerful military in world history, the US has been consequently also engaged in building the largest cyberwar machine.
From Schneier, at CNN (no link):
Today, the United States is conducting offensive cyberwar actions around the world.
More than passively eavesdropping, we’re penetrating and damaging foreign networks for both espionage and to ready them for attack. We’re creating custom-designed Internet weapons, pre-targeted and ready to be “fired” against some piece of another country’s electronic infrastructure on a moment’s notice.
This is much worse than what we’re accusing China of doing to us. We’re pursuing policies that are both expensive and destabilizing and aren’t making the Internet any safer.
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Kansas secession & the Cold Second Civil War
Back in April I posted that Kansas had essentially seceded:
The latest extremist tactic in legislatures of red states is to practice nullifications, tactics to supersede settled federal law. It’s white Confederacy strategy without firing on Ft. Sumter.
This issue of Rolling Stone goes into it in some detail.
From deep inna heart of WhiteManistan, the description of a place you’ll never visit:
It’s been nearly 10 years since Thomas Frank wrote about the conservative takeover of his home state in What’s the Matter With Kansas? Back then, Kansas still had a Democratic governor in Kathleen Sebelius. But after last fall’s civil war, Kansas has emerged a more intense shade of red than even Frank imagined. The state legislature is the most conservative in the United States, and now there is absolutely nothing stopping the Brownback revolution – one which happens to be entirely at odds with any notion of the GOP adapting to the broader social and demographic changes in the country. If anything, these purists argue, Republicans lost in 2012 because the party wasn’t conservative enough.
No one can say that about Sam Brownback, who is rumored to be mulling his own presidential run in 2016 – and using Kansas as a sort of laboratory, in which ideas cooked up by Koch-funded libertarian think tanks can be released like viruses on live subjects. At a national level, the GOP remains stuck in a reactive position, pursuing executive branch “scandals” and blocking Obama’s policies with no real power to effect changes of their own, and so states like Kansas have become very important to the future of the party’s far-right wing. Consider it a test, a case study – proof, finally, that an unfettered hybrid of Randian free-market dogma and theocratic intolerance can create, in the bitter words of outgoing Senate President Steve Morris, one of the ousted moderates, an “ultraconservative utopia.”
The RS piece charts the evolution of it up to and including Sam Brownback’s tenure as governor. The end result is a state that will eliminate taxation for the sake of Koch industries and destroy its educational system. Other matters include declaring an embryo feel pain at 21 days and adjusting state abortion law accordingly while simultaneously creating an environment which encourages violence toward people who work in an abortion clinic. (There is only one in the entire state, George Tiller’s, who you will recall was assassinated.)
In addition, the Kansas legislature has passed an unconstitutional gun law that maintains arms manufactured and sold within the state are not subject to federal laws. It’s a nullification act and a sovereign citizen type of extremism. Indeed, Brownback even uses the word sovereign in a letter warning Attorney General Eric Holder not to mess with Kansas.
All this only underlines the Republican Party’s problem with young people, Rolling Stone’s core audience. Those who read the article would view Kansas as full of bad — old, angry white guys fulminating against the US government and everyone else not exactly like them.
Yet they still lack the nerve to seize a federal facility or jail those passing through from those places in the country they view as un-American.
“[Brownback’s Kansas budget bill] was designed, frankly, to take care of Koch Industries,” one conservative but not crazy politician tells the magazine. “I could see that it took money from very poor people and benefitted me, personally, too significantly. And I’m not poor.”
They subsequently ran him out of office.
Rolling Stone calls Kansas a “rogue state.” A better description is “pariah state.” And the United States has a number of them, all engaged in what people see but awkwardly refuse to acknowledge as a Cold Civil War.
What’s the answer? What was the answer to apartheid South Africa? Putting the squeeze on economically and socially.
What does Kansas export? Aircraft engines, wheat and meat, primarily. But it’s a puny exporter compared to a state like California. Kansas exports grossed 12 billion in 2012, California — 162 billion.
Canada is Kansas’ primary buyer, taking 22 percent of the trade.
Encouraging a major trading partner not to do business with a state with discriminatory law and a government inimical to social welfare and science would be a start. Kansas is a poor state and its current trajectory will make it more so. Even a small number of percentage points shaved off business would hurt under such conditions.
Certainly not easy but conceptually easy to grasp.
“Pariah state” might not even be strong enough.
Sample this, also excerpted from the Rolling Stone piece:
In the current legislative session, the House and Senate voted to rescind a 25-year-old ban on quarantining people with AIDS, and Rep. Steve Brunk of Wichita introduced a bill that would require cities that put fluoride in their water to inform customers that fluoridation lowers the I.Q. of children. The latter claim, of course, is patently false, but somehow fluoride has become a source of paranoia out in the chemtrail/Alex Jones corner of the wackosphere. A group with anti-abortion ties called Wichitans Opposed to Fluoridation actually managed to pass a ballot initiative last fall that would remove fluoride from Wichita’s drinking water.
People ought to be protected from government predation. In this case, the benighted people of Kansas are the ones who need protection — from their state.
Naturally, there is no way a law that enables the quarantining of people with HIV is constitutional or enforceable in the 2013 US.
Nevertheless, its passage illustrates what the red state GOP crazies grasp instinctively once they are in control: They can pass bad or predatory law no civilized society would tolerate faster than it can be brought before the courts to be struck down.
A new term is needed for it, in addition to nullification. How about vexatious legislating?
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Zero oversight
This is what we have. And Xerocrypt blog encapsulates it in a way anyone can understand. It’s the abrogation of interest in checks and balances, or the taking of any responsibility in maintaining them.
Given the number of employees at the NSA with far more integrity, ethics and intelligence than our politicians, and there’s at least 100,000 people in the United States with Top Secret clearance, it was simply unrealistic to expect this level of surveillance against the American people could be kept a secret indefinitely, just as it’s unrealistic to expect them to safeguard the US without some means of intercepting communications. From what I’ve seen trawling the blogs, the INFOSEC community appears to be in general agreement with the actions of Edward Snowden. A surveillance state, like the one we’ve been drifting towards for the last decade, ultimately does more to undermine a nation’s security and facilitate organised crime. Last week’s events provided just one example of why.
Much of this was our own fault, in not taking an interest in all the privacy-invading laws that were being passed over the years, in handing over so much of our personal information to the major Internet giants when common sense told us it was being turned over to God knows who, in brushing away legitimate worries with the tired and long disproven ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ statement.
Read all of it.
06.17.13
The leaker mindset
Something I wrote for Federal Computer Week awhile back, on the leaking mindset, those like Edward Snowden, not like those on the government contract who spread chumpbait.
Back in the early 1990s, I edited an electronic newsletter that dealt with the culture of amateur virus writers — hackers who wrote mobile malware. Julian Assange was a subscriber. This is only to illustrate Assange’s bona fides as someone from the original world computer underground, a place where one of the driving philosophies was to reveal the secrets of institutional power.
Once confined to what was considered a computer geek fringe, that ideology is now entrenched. It’s no longer an outsider mindset, and it hasn’t been for a long time. Now it’s inside, with its originators entering middle age. And younger adherents of the philosophy are coming along all the time.
They’re everywhere — employed by government, the military and corporate America. And because we have come to the point that the United States is considered by some to be a bad global actor — whether you share that point of view or not — the government is faced with a problem it cannot solve. Its exposure is thought by many to be deserved.
In this new reality, as in nature, a vacuum is abhorred. The mainstream media no longer fulfills the role of speaking truth to power. It opened the door for Assange and WikiLeaks …
“But the good news [for the federal government and its contractors] is that, although you can’t eliminate the Bradley Mannings, they won’t be common,” I wrote.
And they are not. In fact, I’ve been surprised — even dismayed — at how so many of Edward Snowden’s colleagues remain silent in view of what they must see as things Americans ought to know about.
In 2013 America, money — a good job — does buy a lot of silence. Ours is not a culture of bold iconoclasts ready to make life-changing sacrifices. This makes Edward Snowden legitimately remarkable.
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06.15.13
Why the Cult of EMP Crazy is dead
When Republican Roscoe Bartlett was booted out of the House permanently during the last election, it marked the official death of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy. That’s because the head of the electromagnetic pulse cause in the House went solely into the hands of the leader of EMP caucus, Trent Franks of Arizona.
Trent Franks, in the video below, demonstrates that he barely even qualifies as a human being with the power of thought.
Yes, he’s one of the GOP’s large number of “legitimate rape” wackos.
The only good thing in this character defect from the heart of WhiteManistan is that it completely alienates the part of the country that isn’t despicable as well as insane.
And with the likes of Trent Franks in charge, the Cult of EMP Crazy is never going anywhere.
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06.14.13
Cyberwar Shoeshine Drill
Quantum Dawn 2 is coming to Wall Street.
No, it’s not a video game or a bad zombie movie; it’s a simulated cyber attack to prepare banks, brokerages and exchanges for what has become an ever-bigger risk to their earnings and operations.
Organized by the trade group SIFMA, Quantum Dawn 2 will take place on June 28 – a summer Friday that, with any luck, will be a relatively quiet day in the real markets.The drill involves not just big Wall Street firms like Citigroup and Bank of America, but the Department of Homeland Security, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to SIFMA officials.
The drill, run by an ex-Marine who went to work for Goldman Sachs, aims to simulate attacks on the “equity markets.”
Failure of which, everyone knows, would bring the US to a screeching halt.
Naturally, it’s also a way to raise money on a service of no social good to anyone except the people collecting the price of the tickets.
“About 40 firms will participate in the operation, having paid fees of $1,000, $5,000 or $10,000 depending on the size of their revenue … Each firm must send three executives: one from business continuity, one from information security, another from operations whose job is to keep trading, settlement and clearance running during market crises,” informs Reuters.
“A firm called Cyber Strategies, which works with the Department of Homeland Security on cyber threats, will receive the fees for overseeing the exercise.”
Here you have it, folks. The ultimate in cyberwar shoeshine, the servant class of the one percent, in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security, for an inside circle jerk that asks you to swallow the idea that the most important thing now is protecting “equity markets” on Wall Street. From the hordes of cyber-enemies who have figured out all that’s needed to kneecap America is to cause “unusual slowness, in trading, or [have] viruses trying to invade the systems.”
“The [market players] will also have to call one another to figure out what’s going on.”
On the other side of the coin, the majority of Americans would still like protection from Wall Street.
“I don’t like you. Fat. Wealthy. Think you understand pain.” — Rorschach, Watchmen.
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