08.15.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 11:45 am by George Smith
While I’m very sympathetic to fellow citizens who think they can innovate jerry-bilt gadgets and miscellaneous consumer goods to fight the US surveillance state, Kickstarter campaigns won’t do it. The US government pays contractors 3,4, and five orders of magnitude more than you’ll ever raise in crowd-sourcing.
From the WaPost, a flavor of tech invention fad news built on the impression that Americans are now shocked, just shocked, over the Snowden affair and just how much of the technology of the war on terror is being directed at them:
“Developed as Adam Harvey’s master’s thesis at New York University, CV Dazzle, named after a type of ship camo used during World War II, is face paint designed to make features undetectable by computer vision algorithms … From there he moved into a line of ‘anti-drone’ garments made of a metallized fabric that traps body heat … Harvey rushed to begin an online Kickstarter fundraising campaign [for a metallized anti-track-your-smartphone case] ahead of schedule. The Kickstarter campaign went active Aug. 2 with a goal of $35,000 … Halfway through the campaign, they have raised more than $44,000.”
It’s too late.
Have to be the deliveryman of bad news: It’s not fixable in my lifetime. The technology of American global security has been turned on the civilian populace because that’s where the money is now.
You didn’t think forever chasing around the feebs in Al Qaeda was going to create enough of a lasting profit margin, did you?
Two months ago 3D-manufactured plastic guns were going to change everything, too. And then there was last week’s spying hardware gadget pest from Malice Afterthought.
America’s so awash in big thinkers and innovating talent, one just can’t understand why there would be 48 million on food stamps and a national growth rate of barely over 1 percent.
Just wait until the HyperLoop goes into action. It’ll be better than flying cars and your evening meal in a pill the size of one dose of Viagra.
In real news, the US is a corporate fascist state where you’re freedom is to shop. Increasingly, that means only the topmost and its allowed servant army.
So here I present th best Let ‘Em Eat Cake in the New America copy this week, easy on “Bespoke” jewelry at the NYT:
“But when she acquired a 10-carat Burmese sapphire earlier this year on a buying trip to Asia, she knew just the client who would want to commission her to transform the rare stone into something unique. It was a woman in her 40s living in TriBeCa who already owned many of Ms. St. Clair’s signature pendants, and had a generous husband who wanted to buy her a gift to mark their 20th wedding anniversary … After several weeks of discussion with the couple, which involved sending multiple sketches and three-dimensional molds, Ms. St. Clair created a ring for a fee, she said, of approximately $350,000.”
Three dimensional molds. Being able to drop $350,000 on a custom-designed bauble renders irrelevant displeasure over the surveillance state.
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08.06.13
Posted in War On Terror at 12:32 am by George Smith
The same anonymous perps in the national security megaplex keep trying to convince everyone al Qaeda withstood the hiding it took from the US over the last decade. No one gets a second chance in the history of major conflict. But this weekend we got the old buzzword “chatter” again. Now it’s the revival of al Qaeda’s alleged ability to make bombs of anything — in this case, clothes.
Be skeptical. The US has much bigger problems than terrorism.
This is just shameful:
There are growing concerns that an al Qaeda affiliate could use a new generation of liquid explosive, currently undetectable, in a potential attack, according to two senior U.S. government officials briefed on the terror threat that has prompted the closing of nearly two dozen U.S. embassies.
Though the Transportation Security Administration has long been concerned about liquid explosives being used in potential devices — as it was during the failed Christmas Day bombing in 2009 — the new tactic allows terrorists to dip ordinary clothing into the liquid to make the clothes themselves into explosives once dry.
“It’s ingenious,” one of the officials said.
What’s ingenious is how easy it is for anonymous sources to plant the most ridiculous claims without any substantial explanation except their say-so.
Yes, now they’re going to make bombs out of shirts and trousers by dipping them in a magical cocktail of chemicals. The reason for this kind of horseshit passed off as intelligence is that people will say anything for job security.
File this as even worse than the underwear bomb, which only burned its wearer. And the mythology of the bombs sewn into body cavities, aka “the Joker bomb,” which somehow doesn’t painfully and totally debilitate or immediately poison the carrier.
If you read the article, al Qaeda seems to have been hurt not at all. Pushing the boundaries of nature and science from the sandy wastes of Yemen, we’re surprised they haven’t yet managed to build a stealthy nuclear-tipped ballistic missile program.
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Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 9:19 am by George Smith
Plate 4, Irhabi007. Seven years ago, now jailed aspiring al Qaeda chemical and biological terrorist Younis Tsouli, aka Irhabi007, password-protected this .pdf jihadist translation of Maxwell Hutchkinson’s The Poisoner’s Handbook by combining the initials of the Islamic Media Center and part of his handle to make “IMC007.” Tsouli believed himself to be a secret agent.
Full size.
Plate 5, Chemical Terrorism — Easy to Do!The same summer, a U.S. Army expert on chemical attack, James A. Genovese, was using this as a slide in a presentation on the alleged capabilities of terrorists.
Al Qaeda never launched a chemical or biological attack in the United States.
A word about the series, Fine Art from the War on Terror. In pictures taken from the archives of DD blog, it attempts to show the attitudes, beliefs and thinking from a time when the bad news on what terrorists could allegedly do came daily.
There are probably no similar examples on the web. Share with your friends.
Real life: Careless overuse of pesticide chemical bug bombs in NYC cause catastrophic fire at beauty salon.
OFAWOT
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Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 2:35 pm by George Smith
Plate 1, The Botox Shoe of Death, un-reduced scan of the original from the summer, seven years ago. Made by your host at height of war on terror. The Washington Post newspaper ran a story on how al Qaeda was planning to strike with biological weapons, including botulism, citing one then newly discovered enemy web memo on the matter. They did not inform readers of the fine print which imagined putting botox on the shoes, a gaily laughable proposition.
Actual size — really big.
Plate 2, The
Mubtakkar of Death. About the same time as the al Qaeda Botox Shoe of Death Plan, journalist Ron Suskind revealed an al Qaeda plot in TIME, the Mubtakkar of Death, which was allegedly a cyanide bomb for use on the NY subway. But Ayman Zawahiri spared NYC, it was said.
I had to analyze whether the Mubtakkar was real. There was no evidence that it was although an al Qaeda drawing of a theoretical poison gas bomb that was not like the described Mubtakkar was found in the hands of DHS and distributed around the country as something to look out for. As GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow I was asked to go on NPR to discuss the alleged weapon. The segment was cancelled because I would not tell the host a scary story.
While there is a famous distasteful video of al Qaeda putting a puppy to death with poison gas, there is no public record of the terror organization ever deploying a cyanide bomb although an apocryphal tale, known only to a few, says an attempt was made at one in Afghanistan and that it did not work.
Actual size — really big.
Scan with an aged paper, almost like papyrus, look. Both prints suitable for framing or silk-screening onto T-shirts as educational slices of real American history.
Proof that truth is stranger than fiction. Suitable for any modern iteration of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
OFAWOT
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06.18.13
Posted in Cyberterrorism, War On Terror at 3:29 pm by George Smith
THe NSA’s Keith Alexander has pointed to the case of Najibullah Zazi, a foiled improvised bomber (peroxide explosives, specifically) who was seized by the FBI in 2009, as evidence its PRISM surveillance program is critical for the safety of Americans. In the case, Zazi quickly reached a plea agreement with the government and was assumed to be cooperating with authorities. Many details in the plot against the NYC subway remain cloudy.
Nevertheless, it was big news at the time. Peroxide bombs were supposedly easy to make, great anxiety over them arising from failed shoe bomber Richard Reid and the infamous “liquid bombs” plot that got so many carry-on containers banned from flying in 2006.
The idea from the latter was that it was easy to mix a bomb in an airplane toilet.
The Guardian investigated the case and came more strongly down on the side of an assertion that the clue that led to Zazi had been found in a British counter-terror operation called Pathway.
Writes the Guardian:
In the case of Zazi, an Afghan American who planned to attack the New York subway, the breakthrough appears to have come from Operation Pathway, a British investigation into a suspected terrorism cell in the north-west of England in 2009. That investigation discovered that one of the members of the cell had been in contact with an al-Qaida associate in Pakistan via the email address sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com.
British newspaper reports at the time of Zazi’s arrest said that UK intelligence passed on the email address to the US. The same email address … was cited in Zazi’s 2011 trial as a crucial piece of evidence. Zazi, the court heard, wrote to sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com asking in coded language for the precise quantities to use to make up a bomb.
Eric Jurgenson, an FBI agent involved in investigating Zazi once the link to the Pakistani email address was made, told the court: “My office was in receipt – I was notified, I should say. My office was in receipt of several email messages, email communications. Those email communications, several of them resolved to an individual living in Colorado.”
Zazi, living in Aurora with his father, made attempts to purchase an inordinate amount of hydrogen peroxide at beauty parlor supply stores in a plan to concentrate the oxidizer, a necessary step in making a peroxide bomb. Later he holed up at a hotel in Aurora where he attempted to concentrate the material by heating on a stove. An FBI detention memorandum from 2009, here, traces his actions — he was under surveillance — and delivers an analysis of their meaning.
It mentions Zazi was observed and his communications with a confidant monitored by the FBI, exchanges in which he continued to ask for better instructions on making peroxide bombs. None of the notes indicate he was successful. Indeed, he may not have solved the problem of making bombs when he set out for New York City. There he had intended to visit a swimming pool supply store to buy hydrocloric acid, another ingredient used to catalyze the production of the final explosive peroxide-derived compound.
Zazi was subsequently arrested.
Another complaint, this against an FBI informant who was charged with making false statements in a terror investigation, shows that Border Patrol and Customs had been aware of Najibullah Zazi when he traveled to Pakistan, ostensibly for terrorism training in August of 2008, returning to NYC in January of 2009.
The complaint against Ahmad Afzali, lodged at Cryptome, is here. In it Najibullah Zazi is represented as “Individual A.”
Taken together, most of this points to the old-fashioned assembly of clues, along with a bit of good fortune, in the tip-off to the Zazi plot. There’s no conclusive indication that NSA findings were the Holy Grail on the case.
Coincidentally, old DD blog wrote a great deal about Zazi’s apprehension because of the hysterical statements that tended to accompany the discovery of peroxide bomb plots. In the US, there have been none successful during the war on terror.
From September 2009:
Yesterday, DD commented that whenever would-be peroxide bombing terrorists are in the news, web hits go up. Way up. (This because of an old post that attracted people doing Google search on peroxide bombs entitled, Peroxide Bombs — Easy to Make.)
Everyone (well not everyone …) is looking for ‘how to make a peroxide bomb. Naturally, after reading about it in the news.
However, in retrospect, DD blog had an unusual spike of searches on how to make peroxide bombs from at least mid-August until yesterday. Some of it was attributed to continued news coverage and fallout from the Airplane Liquid Bomber Plot convictions in early September.
So I decided to drill down a bit and Colorado jumped out and bit me. DD blog almost never has any readers from Colorado. California, New York, northern Virginia, Texas, Pennsylvania and the UK are where most of the regulars phone in from.
Using screen snaps of Google Analytics returns, unusual search results line up from Aurora. Why is Aurora interesting?
Because, according to the US government — Najibullah Zazi and the Beauty Parlor Supply Store Bomb Gang were there shopping around for ingredients.
For example, from today’s Los Angeles Times:
“During July and August 2009 Zazi and others … purchased unusually large quantities of hydrogen peroxide from beauty supply stores in the Denver area … Zazi [made purchases] from a supply store in Aurora … In July, August and September 2009 [individuals associated with Zazi made purchases] from three different beauty supply stores around Aurora.”
Colorado logons for peroxide bombs, many in the last few days. (September/Fall 2009) Big circle is Denver. Aurora sticks out on drill down.
The significant number of logons for information on peroxide bombs occurs prior to the permanent detention of Zazi.
Zazi and unknown collaborators were in Aurora from September 6 – 10, at which point he flew to Queens on the 10th, and was back in Denver by the 12th. Are one, two or three hits here from Zazi and/or accomplices surveying the net? Maybe, maybe not. The information does not resolve it.
Continued from the old DD blog post:
At SITREP yesterday, I commented that the government’s indictment of Zazi showed the frequently seen al Qaeda poor man’s approach — to ineptly surf the Internet for bomb-making recipes, hoping something will fall into one’s lap that makes it as easy as baking a cake.
Despite a lot of media coverage on peroxide bombing being easy in 2006, this is not really the case. If it was, peroxide bombs would have been exploding quite frequently over the past few years.
Nevertheless, it led to a survey using Google Analytics and data-mining on DD blog statistics for search on peroxide bomb instructions, linked to times and countries of origin.
That piece, entitled Trends in Terror Prep Net Surfing from 2009, at GlobalSecurity.Org is here.
The original coverage of Najibullah Zazi was overwhelmingly focused on the peroxide bomb angle. This was because peroxide bomb-making, despite its total lack of success in the US, had become one of the hobby horses of US counter-terrorism and the media, starting in 2006. The script was that peroxide bombs were simple and could be brewed up on the spot.
History has shown this to be untrue, certainly in this country. Peroxide bombs can be made but they’re no easier to make than any other kind of improvised explosive. Instructions can be printed on the net, or in an issue of al Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, and still they do not spring up like daisies.
It requires an experienced bomb-maker, someone who knows the art and has done it many times, to make peroxide bomb-making, or any other kind of bomb-making, successful.
Zazi traveled to Pakistan for training, of some type, it is assumed. Was the training effective? Evidence in the FBI complaints against him does not paint the picture of an accomplished bomb-maker but rather someone who, up to the last minute, was still seeking advice on it.
Zazi was one of the clear first examples of a growing problem in al Qaeda — its inability, under US attack, to put dangerous and extremely competent agents into the field. As the war on terror continued it became more obvious. Quality of the personnel means a lot and al Qaeda men, increasingly, did not have it.
The American public has a short attention span. When Keith Alexander went before Congress and mentioned the Zazi bomb plot against the NYC subway hardly anyone would have been expected to remember the details.
On the other hand, it also hurt his testimony. Alexander is not a generalist expert on the war on terror. Up until last week he was a specialist who runs cyberwar and cyber-spying operations at the NSA for the Obama administration. He has been most famously in the press for saying Chinese cyber-espionage is causing “the greatest transfer of wealth in history,” congressional testimony on expanding American cyberwar operations and being the first NSA director to go to the DefCon hacker convention to hobnob and pat young people on the back.
So any testimony about the NSA’s alleged contribution to uncovering the Zazi plot, back in 2008-2009, was never going to be compelling or persuasive.
It is just an argument from authority. And do you believe such an argument? The Edward Snowden affair is all about not believing arguments from authority.
Najibullah Zazi — from the archives.
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06.05.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 8:46 am by George Smith
In orange vests, they hang around big airport runways as alleged pro bono anti-terrorism squads, making sure the bad guys don’t show up with MANPADS.
CNN:
It’s unlikely you’ll ever meet any of these para-police officers, wearing their bright orange vests and ID tags. But if you’re one of the millions of travelers who fly into Chicago every year, you might want to thank them — because they’re helping the FBI, Transportation Security Administration and other authorities protect you from terrorists.
Another in the occasional media favorite: exaggerating the hobbies/roles of middle-aged white guys in service to the nation. The silver-lining: They’re not home much to embarrass their kids.
Someone tell them the war on terror’s kinda over.
Modern day equivalent of the middle-aged white guys who always wanted to use their metal detectors on the grounds of the community swimming pool after hours.
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