02.28.13
Posted in Cyberterrorism at 4:12 pm by George Smith
Pete Hoekstra was a Republican congressman for eighteen years. In that time he accomplished nothing. He did achieve a reputation as fool, wrong about everything, until 2010 when he left his political career in the House.
Hoekstra ran for governor of Michigan in 2010 and lost. He ran for Senator in 2012 and lost. The latter run was notable only for a racist ad he bought for the Super Bowl.
In 2006, Hoekstra was also briefly in the news, and on DD blog radar, for flaunting a peculiar map, pictured above, that tried to make the case al Qaeda was everywhere in the United States.
Osama bin Laden, insisted Hoekstra in a ludicrous speech on the matter, was much like Max DePree, a business leader virtually no one has heard of, an American entrepreneur who allegedly really knew how to get things done and a mentor of Hoekstra’s.
From DD blog:
In a rambling, sometimes unintentionally nutty speech, Hoekstra warmed to his subject: how al Qaeda must have read from the work of his mentor, Max DePree, CEO/Chairman of Herman Miller Corp.(a manufacturer of office furniture), who wrote the books “Leadership Jazz” and “Leadership is an Art.”
Al Qaeda was nimble, entrepreneurial and agile. It ran its business of terror along the advice of DePree and had good bosses who empowered their employees …
In 2010, near the end of his House career, Hoekstra was again a minor figure in the news for accepting the Islamo-o-phobe “Team B” report which insisted shariah law was slowly taking over the US justice system.
Summing up, Pete Hoekstra is a bigot and a fool, someone without even the sense to be trusted to do the right thing with a rake and a pumpkin-colored leaf bag in the fall. Now he is warehoused as “a senior adviser in Dickstein Shapiro’s Public Policy & Law Practice,” according to a biographical line.
Which, one supposes, makes him perfect for burnishing his reputation as a minor public nuisance, abetted by the editorial staff of Politico, with the recent opinion piece entitled, “The looming certainty of a cyber Pearl Harbor.”
Poor, even as shoeshine’s low standards. There are many now much better at it than Hoekstra, who presumably didn’t write the thing, anyway.
It reads:
America must not wait for a cyber Pearl Harbor to take action. It is time to recognize how serious the problem is …
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02.27.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, Made in China, Predator State at 5:00 pm by George Smith
When I put that question in striking bold yesterday I got to thinking about what has happened in the last fifteen to twenty years. The time period encompasses my writing and work on various matters having to do with security ranging from the old origins of malware to chemical and biological weapons.
That started, depending on where I choose to pick an event, either in the administration of the first Bush, or a little later, with the presidency of Bill Clinton. Long enough to have something to say in terms of perspective, I think.
A number of things are very clear and profoundly disappointing.
The US has always been burdened by an excessively large analytic structure in national security, one in which the primary function is very much not analytic. It’s purpose is to arrive at justification for whatever leadership wishes to do.
That in itself is a major problem and it is at the very roots of the phenomenon that I call shoeshine.
Shoeshine is the work of a managerial and interpretive class of American labor, generally upper middle class, one that is employed to come up with stuff, rationalizations, justifications, all for the convenience to those at the very top in American national and business leadership. Shoeshine has virtually no social value except as employment. It keeps people in work and they can, of course, buy stuff in the economy.
But, fundamentally, shoeshine is a government in collaboration with the private sector employment jobs program that produces nothing of any material value for the vast majority of Americans.
For example, assertions that China is spying away American wealth in cyberspace are signally not important for any Americans except those generating them and the people paying for it to be disseminated. They have no meaning. There are no statistics, except the numbers of news stories and memorandums produced. But there is a big structure that has been employed to embed this information in American culture.
And it has not just been with China.
It goes on to encompass the bogus rhetoric that constantly speaks of the American financial system being threatened by devastating cyberattack, of the electricity being turned off nationwide, of calamities brought on by alleged digital assaults that require one to believe they can rival the destructive power of natural disasters.
Add to it the now impossible to reverse received wisdom that people in the sandy wastes of some poor country you barely know can easily make weapons of mass destruction. Or whatever reasons are given this week for piling up more dead with drone strikes. There really is no end to it.
And there is immorality to this because, at its heart, it’s the human machinery of rationalizing destruction.
However, when I started this there was a class of middle and upper middle class managerial and interpretive workers, smaller, which pushed back.
It was a class that inhabited philanthropic non-profit agencies devoted to such things as the furtherance of public understanding on national security issues, interpretation of treaties and global compliance and arms control.
With eight years of the Bush administration and another four with Barack Obama in charge, that’s all virtually swept away. Agencies I used to call when I was a newspaper reporter for independent from the national line information either became stunted versions of their former selves are ceased operations altogether.
Readers will have also noticed that, in the last decade, the United States isn’t even remotely interested in arms control, unless for the convenience of beating up on Iran and North Korea, and launching a clandestine war against the former.
Arms control was actually perverted into an excuse for invading Iraq.
The US is for arms proliferation big time, the best, as long as we’re doing the selling.
The world wide web, blogs, Wikileaks, whatever you want to name, didn’t fill the vacuum. Almost everyone just quit. They had to. All the money, what small amounts there were, went away. The only money spent for analysis of national security issues now is all on the other side. And its function is simply to pay people to come up with enemies lists and memos to be publicized on who is attacking us and who we are to be frightened of.
Over this period I had acquaintances who also did the progressive critical side of the coin. They wrote blogs or ran websites, worked for little agencies trying to do their part.
As the national security megaplex ballooned they either faded away or went to work for it. If they went to work for it, they went silent, never to speak again. Worried about careers, some even pulled down their old works.
And I was not being at all facetious when I mentioned earlier in the week that the state of rational discussion on cyberwar had been so degraded by this long process of attrition that it is mostly reduced to 140-character Twitter tweets.
The best people can come up with is a short (not too long so as to bore the audience) indignant squawk on social media.
So
WTF is wrong with these people?
Recently, authors Barbara and John Ehrenreich wrote something for Alternet called The Real Story Behind the Crash and Burn of America’s Managerial Class.
Wrote the Ehrenreichs:
It was the occupational role of managers and engineers (the professional managerial class), along with many other professionals, to manage, regulate, and control the life of the working class. They designed the division of labor and the machines that controlled workers’ minute-by-minute existence on the factory floor, manipulated their desire for commodities and their opinions, socialized their children, and even mediated their relationship with their own bodies.
At the same time though, the role of the PMC as “rationalizers??? of society often placed them in direct conflict with the capitalist class. Like the workers, the PMC were themselves employees and subordinate to the owners, but since what was truly “rational??? in the productive process was not always identical to what was most immediately profitable, the PMC often sought autonomy and freedom from their own bosses.
This class grew rapidly from the 1930s to about the mid-Seventies when the “capitalist class” reasserted control and began to cut it back with waves of layoffs tied to de-industrialization.
Technological advances and, most recently, the Internet, have continued to hack at it.
What’s left is now also employed, keeping jobs as long as possible, in cannibalization, boiling down other sections of the economy, finding ways other people can be cast off.
“Then, in just the last dozen years, the PMC began to suffer the fate of the industrial class in the 1980s: replacement by cheap foreign labor,” they continue.
That part of the managerial interpretive class that cannot yet be replaced is in American financial services and the national security megaplex. For the defense infrastructure, it’s been a relatively safe harbor of jobs for those whose work is to furnish information conveniences and processes for the very top of the pyramid.
It is not a mystery why their work has not even the slightest connection to the lives of great numbers of other Americans.
WTF is wrong with these people is that counter-reality and satisfying the political needs of their uppers is what they must do to earn a good living in view of the increasingly throttled prospects offered by this country.
And so they have been transformed into the bleak concrete of a predatory process and structure. In this structure it is imperative they not understand anything which conflicts with the purpose of the job and that they not give a shit about that. Or, if they do, to at least stuff it.
People who work at the Pasadena office of the California Department of Motor Vehicles provide more value daily than the shoeshine workers in national security. Whether you like standing in line waiting your turn or not, the public sector employees get things done that are necessary so that you can drive a car in California. And that’s important to everyday people.
One of the easiest ways to evaluate how this structure’s frankly idiotic, paranoid and self-serving fantasies have broken off with reality is also their presence in (or contamination of) entertainment.
You can compare their weird and estranged myths to the parallel proliferation of zombie and vampire movies, tv shows, books and comics.
Cyberwar is as present during the week in scripts for television and movies, maybe more so if not as successfully, as zombies. So is apocalyptic chemical and biological warfare. Add electromagnetic pulse armageddon.
All of these, propagandized into American culture by the managerial corps of national security shoeshiners to such an extent they’ve become silly popular primetime diversions, crap that has virtually nothing to do with day-to-day life over the last two decades.
Occasionally, some break with the pack.
Why You Shouldn’t Believe Cyber-war Hype, published at CIO magazine, a couple days ago.
Why your host knows what he’s talking about. Read the ‘about’ page.
Two decades is a long time. I think I’ve earned my stars.
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02.26.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 3:57 pm by George Smith
Opening graph, from Slate’s national security journalist, Fred Kaplan, on cyberwar:
The New York Times’ front-page report this week that the Chinese army is hacking into America’s most sensitive computer networks from a 12-story building outside Shanghai might finally convince skeptics that the threat of “cyber warfare??? isn’t the fevered fantasy of Richard Clarke, the producers of “Die Hard 4,??? or the generals at the ever-growing U.S. Cyber Command. Alas, it’s real.
But what is the threat? Few of those in the know believe that some fine day, out of the blue, China will zap the programs that run our power grids, gas lines, waterworks or banking systems, sending our economy — and much else — into a tailspin. Even if the Chinese could pull off such a feat with one keystroke, it’s hard to imagine what they’d accomplish, especially since their fortunes are wrapped up with our own.
Alas, cyberwar shoeshine is real. No, strike that. Not something I’d write. Too easy.
How does someone who never showed much interest in cybersecurity in the last fifteen years go on this way?
It’s a question that applies generally since the topic is at the stage where people who never traditionally cared about it, or even knew much about basic cybersecurity, the nature of the threats, and networked computing, now believe they’re ready to be theorists on it.
Kaplan cites a book by Richard Clarke, 2010’s “Cyber War,” in which he “likened the current era to the decade after the first atomic bombs, when American, then Soviet, scientists built these weapons of enormous destructiveness — but before politicians or strategists devised ways of thinking about them rationally: how to control them, deter their use or limit their damage if a war couldn’t be deterred.”
This was one of the reasons Clarke’s book was brushed off.
“Likening” cyberwar weapons, like viruses, with things like Operation Crossroads or Castle Bravo was not to be taken seriously. (Click the links. Better to follow Drunk Richard Clarke on Twitter.)
For Kaplan’s column, the virus mentioned is Shamoon, implied Iranian retaliation against us and our proxies for Stuxnet.
Shamoon crashed and corrupted information on Saudi oil company computers, information — if they weren’t totally incompetent, that was backed up multiple times somewhere else.
Kaplan mentions Barack Obama’s recent executive order, one that lobbied for increased information sharing back and forth between the cyber-intelligence agencies and corporate America.
The history with regards to information sharing is fifteen years old.
It started with the Clinton administration where it was vigorously pursued by Clarke and assistant secretary of defense John Hamre. They argued for an exception to be added to the Freedom of Information Act, one to encourage corporate America to be forthright about its computer security intrusions, secure in the knowledge its secrets were safe from competitors and journalists armed with FOIA.
They got what they wanted. And it didn’t make a substantial difference. Subsequently, every year — between then and now — someone has always argued for ever more information sharing. Corporate America is not transparent. A frictionless system of information passage with it cannot be created.
Paradoxically, the US government has contributed to the creation of a global Internet security environment where information is not to be shared because there is value in that. Critical vulnerabilities have great worth in cyber-weapons development. This has created a gray market in which the vulnerabilities, information of zero social value, are sold at good profit.
As with discussions about cyberwar and the creation of cyber-weapons, the American government, by its actions, has cut the ground from under its feet on being in position to take the high ground, right from the start.
From 2007, on the old DD blog, a post that runs through some history on cyberwar proclamations, particularly with regards to China:
“Unnamed Pentagon figures continue to get big ink for their thesis that Chinese military cyber assault is a threat of trouser-moistening magnitude,” reported Lewis Page skeptically at the Reg today.
“Last week’s media bandwagon, initiated after Financial Times hacks in Washington obligingly got things rolling, is now thundering along unstoppably as foaming tech-dunce scribes pile aboard.
“On Friday it was [The Times of London’s] turn to play ventriloquist’s dummy.
” ‘Chinese military hackers have prepared a detailed plan to disable America’s aircraft battle carrier fleet with a devastating cyber attack, according to a Pentagon report obtained by The Times,’ ” says the Thunderer.”
If you read through to the end, public proclamations on cyberwar, often as what China could do to America — steal wealth, blow things up, turn things off — goes all the way back to 1999.
A lot of very bad stuff has happened in this country since then. Most of it rained down on the average citizen.
But cyberwar as perpetrated by the Chinese, something that would be worse than Sandy, that could turn off the power on the East Coast?
WTF is wrong with these people?
As with most of the professional pundit and journalist class, the talkers on cyberwar have been wrong about virtually everything. But there’s never been a penalty for being wrong because the members of the group all think alike and protect themselves.
It’s not that cyberwarriors from nations, including China, aren’t into American networks. They are and always have been.
How can you protect any network from undoing given that it takes only clueless employees, contract workers or officials to click on attachments carrying malware in e-mail messages made to look legitimate?
However, what does it all mean? Why do they do it? Is it because they’re really so deluded they believe they’ve put together a master plan to turn off the United States?
Believe me, if it could be done, hackers — who have never been known as shrinking violets — would have pushed that switch years ago.
Or is it because of a combination of factors? Because the networks are vulnerable, they can do it, and they so they do. Or because there’s a mindless, but human belief, that if you vacuum up enough information you gain an insurmountable edge over potential foes?
Is it even possible to process all the material gathered in such ways, to take much more than quickly vanishing advantage from even pieces of it?
No one knows. There’s no way to measure such things.
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Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 2:08 pm by George Smith
They’re supposed to be for our cyberwarriors, too, which has been a good joke for the past couple months.
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02.23.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 2:41 pm by George Smith
In the last fifteen years the US government, military and intelligence agencies have established a solid reputation as regular liars about everything. Particularly when it comes to national security.
Everyone knows this. Everyone also knows the mainstream news has abandoned caring about it.
So every week, something intelligence insulting is repeated again, delivered on menaces, or a single menace, that is threatening the republic, or worse, stealing wealth.
This week it was triggered by a report issued by Mandiant, a computer security firm interested in drumming up business, publicity and currying favor with the US government.
Mandiant’s report told about the Shanghai group, a Chinese military run espionage operation against everything in the United States, all from one building.
It is not news that the Chinese have an extensive espionage campaign conducted through cyberspace and in the real world, against this country. It does and it’s really annoying.
In fact, it is probably safe to say the building in Shanghai is, by far, not the only place involved in it.
But this report was delivered conveniently to capitalize on the Obama administration’s executive initiatives, all virtually pointless, to increase the nation’s defenses against alleged catastrophic cyberattacks on the infrastructure.
And various ex-military men, now lobbyists for big security firms, have been trotted out.
They conveniently say their bits, the traditional scripted theater of fear-mongering on the Chinese menace and cyberwar.
Special mention goes to Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA, now a big can of cyberwar shoeshine for the Chertoff Group where he’s cashing in his chips.
This is how it has worked for the last decade or so. You do your time at the top of the national security heap, pursuing the process of war.
No one cares if you’re good or bad, you’re never replaced, just boosted up and the vast majority of Americans never know or can remember your name. You’re never exposed to the costs of war and the enemy can’t get at you, the lowers suffer that. But for being part of the army of colorless but very important men of national intelligence service, you proceed to the private sector where you are rewarded even more handsomely as totem pole and lobbyist for more predatory defense spending in your specialty.
Hayden’s comments for a story on the cyber-victimization of US corporations by Chinese intelligence for NBC have been so pompous and self-serving they bring on gales of laughter.
So I preserved them in a ROFLBOT cartoon.
Excerpted:
Though the United States limits its espionage to national security interests, intelligence officials said, China has launched a well-organized campaign to steal American corporate secrets via the Internet.
“I know states steal secrets. Our states steal secrets. And we’re actually pretty good at it. But we self-limit. We steal things that are valuable and useful for your security, for your liberty and for your safety,??? Hayden said.
“This is stealing American wealth. It’s stealing American jobs. It’s stealing American competitive advantage,??? General Michael Hayden, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, said in an interview with NBC News.
This has become the common nonsense from the shoeshine corps of cyberwar. The Chinese are stealing our wealth, it is the greatest theft of the future in history.
There is never any figure attached to it because no such figures can be estimated.
On the other hand, one gets all kinds of figures on the loss of American wealth in the economic charts presented weekly by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman on his blog at the New York Times.
Of course, the data on these losses did not result from cyberespionage on everything in the US by the Chinese military.
It was the result of the global economic calamity brought on by the Wall Street financial district, a job of our own devise.
And this illustrates the disconnect between the Michael Haydens and the rest of us. None of this means anything to them except as careerism, a way of increasing self-worth, pure and simple.
The Haydens of government have no connection with the country beyond the DC/northern Virginia national security megaplex. If they actually believe the weird and ludicrous things they say, it’s only because they’ve spent their careers working in an environment where they’ve never been exposed to potentially damaging criticism and superciliousness.
So whatever Michael Hayden was stealing in the name of liberty and safety (say that again, feel the sneer forming on your lips) for us, it didn’t trickle down to the rest of America. And it never will.
Furthermore, while he was head of the CIA Hayden was at the center of the drone war and while he has been tepidly critical of the president’s current pursuit of it once he was out of power, he has spoken out of both sides of his mouth on the subject. Hayden blows whichever way the wind does, apparently.
From the Beeb in 2011:
Gen Michael Hayden believed the results [of the drone program] had been spectacular.
“A significant fraction of al-Qaeda senior leadership in the tribal region has been ‘taken off the battlefield’,” he said.
“That used to mean ‘killed or captured’. In the last couple of years it simply means killed. We just aren’t doing any capturing.”
Ironically the CIA’s drone programme was greatly accelerated under President Obama who has authorised more than 160 Predator missions – four times as many as his predecessor, President George W Bush, targeting not just al-Qaeda but Taliban leaders also hiding in the border areas.
The programme has been highly contentious and controversial.
Gen Hayden denied the attacks were state-authorised assassinations. He said the US was at war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and was simply acting in self-defence.
When I pointed out that legally the war was in Afghanistan not Pakistan, he said that was not how the American administration looked at it.
This raises the ridiculous question sometimes posed in sarcastic 140-character tweets on Twitter: “Why don’t we launch a drone strike or a cruise missile on the Chinese hacker building in Shanghai?”
The answer’s obvious. They’re not destitute nobodies in the sandy wastes of the most desperate places of the world. They’d fight back.
(As a side note, this is the degenerate state of debate on cyberwar. Ten years ago you could occasionally find critical voices saying something on it for news agencies. Now that’s all gone, the only thing left being to do it on Twitter with a hashtag or two.)
Besides, corporate America depends on China — to disappear the wealth of Americans who used to work for Apple and … and … and, you know.
The shoeshine of cyberwar — from the archives.
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02.16.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 12:10 pm by George Smith
The cyberwar shoeshine crowd takes holidays. But when not on holiday it fabricates and dissembles almost non-stop, often in the most absurd ways.
From the well-known publication, on every newsstand you know, Infosecurity magazine:
A national survey of Americans shows that a majority fear that cyber warfare is imminent and that the country will attack or be attacked in the next decade. In addition, Americans believe both the government and private sector networks are ill-prepared for a surge in cyber conflict.
A poll by Tenable Network Security, which works with the US Department of Defense and military and government clients globally, found that the increasingly strong rhetoric about a “cyber Pearl Harbor??? and cyber attacks being the modern-day equivalent of nuclear weapons is apparently having an effect on the nation’s psyche.
Modern day equivalent of nuclear weapons.
Now you know why I find a lot of people who work in the national computer security machine contemptible.
Anyway, a poll conducted by a cyberwar defense firm, Tenable, whose business is contracts on the taxpayer dime, just happens to find that a majority of Americans believe cyberwar is imminent. I bet you’d have a hard time making that one stick in a random sampling at any burger joint in Pasadena.
This is how it works. Guys who worked at the National Security Agency, whose leader is famous for claims that cyberwar is causing the greatest transfer of wealth in history, disappearing the future of all Americans, leave and go into business selling the same warped story.
All in the effort to grease expanding budgets on cyberwar defense from which they will personally profit.
The shoeshine boys of cyberwar have done this kind of thing for a decade and a half, at least. I just didn’t have an insulting enough name for them previously.
Here’s some very obscure but ridiculous shoeshine from a fellow named James Adams, who fronted a cyberwar defense company back in 1999:
[iDefense went bankrupt and ceased operation a few years ago. Its CEO’s bizarre proclamations, however, deserve preservation.]
James Adams was highly quotable on what would happen in cyberwar. No one in the mainstream press cast even the slightest fishy eye at his claims, most of which were laughably absurd.
Here then, is a small sampling of James Adams …
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.” From Techweek, 1999.
“iDefense is way ahead of the competition.” From Washington Technology, “the business newspaper for government systems integrators,” November 1999.
“Which brings us to the final rung on the escalatory ladder: the virtual equivalent of nuclear deployment. I offer as illustration Eligible Receiver.” From a speech, “The Future of War, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, June 2000.
‘Nuff said.
The shoeshine boys of cyberwar — from the archives.
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02.13.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 4:58 pm by George Smith
The President can’t even get the minimum wage up to what it should be if it had been adjusted for inflation. But this is what our cyberwar shoeshine boys were saying today:
One threat is that another nation could perpetrate a Stuxnet-style attack on the US. Stuxnet, the powerful cyberweapon unleashed on Iran’s nuclear fuel centrifuge facility at Natanz, is reported to have destroyed at least 1,000 of the machines and set the program back as many as two years. Such weapons, targeted at civilian systems, could likely wreak havoc on the US power grid. — the website that used to the newspaper called the Christian Science Monitor
The [executive order] won’t scare potential cyber enemies, says Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS institute, a cybersecurity educational organization.
“I expect all of those attack communities that might have been worried [about the order] are breathing a sigh of relief and shaking their heads in wonder that the United States government leaders could be so completely in the thrall of corporate interests that they would leave their military and financial future in harm’s way,??? he says.
“We are in a cyber war. Most Americans don’t know it … and at this point, we’re losing,” said House Rep.[ Mike Rogers, R-Mich., on the Intelligence Committee.]
The United States military/intelligence structure attacked the Iranian nuclear program with malicious software, most notably the Stuxnet virus.
The argument made by the cyberwar shoeshine corps has morphed that reality into a threat against the United States power grid.
What if a Stuxnet was loosed on us?
It takes a lot of hypocrisy and mental gymnastics to be so self-serving.
Officials within the US government and an assortment of cyberwar flacks have since gone public with their belief that Iran is behind the cyberattacks that made some big banking websites run unevenly, sometimes. But probably not when you were there.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 10:47 am by George Smith
The President took a few moments in last night’s State of the Union to address infrastructure and cybersecurity. It was the usual shoeshine, assertions that something terrible will happen if steps aren’t taken, allegations of a looming menace that means nothing when stacked up against major economic issues.
The mythology of cyberattacks turning off the power, poisoning the water, and — most laughably — attacking the financial system (ie, Wall Street) have been piled so deeply over such a long time, a substantial number of people now believe them.
However, there’s reality-based analysis. And so there is this from Homeland Security Today:
President Barack Obama on Tuesday signed the long-awaited executive order designed to enhance the security posture of the nation’s critical cyber infrastructure. Obama made the announcement during the State of the Union address.
“America must also face the rapidly growing threat from cyber-attacks,” Obama stated. “We know hackers steal people’s identities and infiltrate private email. We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets. Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, and our air traffic control systems. We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy.”
The new executive order, however, does not have the force of law. And some analysts see it simply as the latest attempt by the administration to increase pressure on Congress to pass meaningful cybersecurity legislation.
“The administration has been building up to issuing an executive order on this for months,” said George Smith, a senior fellow at Globalsecurity.org. “And, no, it won’t have any impact on infrastructure cybersecurity. None of the Obama administration’s executive orders, in anything for that matter, have any teeth or any practical consequence. They’re essentially blandishments and suggestions that are ignored or meant for window dressing. It’s an attempt to shape the debate and push legislation.”
And that’s exactly how Obama left the issue in his State of the Union speech.
Pabulum.
The country would be better served by the President helping to reduce the power of the minority culture of gun nuts with real steps in new law and control. At the end, that was easily the most powerful part of his speech.
On Ted Nugent at SOTU, from Slate:
Nugent was shepherded over to a standing MSNBC camera. Two police officers looked on, confused by the mobile media herd.
“Who’s that???? asked one cop.
“It’s Ted Nugent,??? said the other cop. “He’s a rock star, he talks about guns.???
“Really? Never heard of him.???
From Mediaite:
[The] cable news networks have, so far, maintained a near-blockade on Nugent clips, and according to Bill Press, wasn’t featured in any of the crowd shots from the speech. The only exceptions, so far, have been CNN and MSNBC, who each aired Nugent snippets during the 5 am hour Wednesday morning, one of which, naturally, contained the word “fecal.???
It wasn’t as if Nugent didn’t make himself available, either. Politico (Oh no! They couldn’t resist either!!) reported that Nugent held court with reporters, telling them that Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI), who was paralyzed in a shooting accident, had “Shit for brains??? because he was critical of Nugent’s attendance at the address. He also denied threatening President Obama.
NBC News’ Luke Russert later asked Nugent if he thought that was “an appropriate thing to say about a sitting member of Congress who’s in a wheelchair????
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02.09.13
Posted in Cyberterrorism at 3:02 pm by George Smith
Al Qaeda’s propaganda arm recently announced the release of a “encryption plugin” for use by its jihadis.
When you’re finally to that, fifteen years after the encryption debates, you can see how far behind and failing the terrorist organization is.
The encryption plug-in is potentially linked to an alleged al Qaeda “resurgence,” one the vast majority of Americans will have missed. Whenever they draw attention to themselves, or — at least — their loosely affiliated groups do, they are destroyed, after mercilessly brief accidental success. (See Mali, where the “al Qaeda affiliate” war was a menace only to the locals until the French foreign legion ran them out of Timbuktu recently.)
Putting things in perspective, the al Qaeda that existed post-9/11 for a few years is smashed. History moves on. No one gets a second act although fringe groups persist.
Al Qaeda, when it was much stronger, was always a laughingstock in cyberspace, its websites easily penetrated and overrun. It was seeded with spies, from national counter-terrorism agencies to amateurs.
It couldn’t even handle the roll out of its comic book designed to terrify Americans, Inspire.
Inspire’s first issue, as .pdf, was purloined by British intelligence, broken into and its content replaced with unreadable encrypted rubbish. Then it was re-uploaded onto al Qaeda servers were it spoiled the debut of the publication, becoming an object of ridicule.
I was interviewed for Homeland Security Today on the encryption matter.
Excerpted:
The Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF), the underground propaganda arm of Al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist organizations, on Feb. 6 released a new encryption plugin for use on a wide variety of instant messaging platforms, raising concerns that al Qaeda may be close to achieving one of the key steps in a potential resurgence — secure communications.
The new encryption tool, Asrar Al Dardashah, was first reported by the Middle East Media Research Institute’s (MEMRI) Jihad and Terrorism Studies Project (JTTM). A complete English translation of the announcement was provided to Homeland Security Today.
With the release of the Asrar Al Dardashah plugin, GIMF promised “secure correspondence” based on the Pidgin chat client, which supports multiple chat platforms, including Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk and Jabber/XMPP.
“The Asrar Al Dardashah plugin supports most of the languages in the world through the use of Unicode encoding, including Arabic, English, Urdu, Pashto, Bengali and Indonesian,” stated the announcement, which was posted on several top online Jihadist forums and GIMF’s official website …
George Smith, a senior fellow at Globalsecurity.org, said the loosely organized Al Qaeda network and its affiliates have a lot of work to do on internal security before the addition of encryption will make a difference.
“The use of encryption software in something as loosely organized as the Al Qaeda and general jihadi networks would only benefit them substantially if they could clean out all the infiltrators, informants and guarantee that everyone was on the same page and used it properly,” said Smith. “That’s an order they most likely will never be able to fill.”
Encryption can’t revive a lousy organization whose time has come and gone.
Readers may notice the presence of someone from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Thomas M. Sanderson, who provides what one expects from such an organization. Keep in mind, all the old national security think tanks aren’t such things at all. They’re places staffed by people paid to dispense whatever shoeshine the state-of-perpetual-war and enemies everywhere hermetic bubble calls for.
They’ve been that way for a long time, warehouses (or Keynesian jobs programs) for the overflow of national security industry drones.
So you get a claim which is contrary to reality.
“Sanderson, who recently worked on an Al Qaeda futures study for the US Special Operations Command, said the ability to engage in encrypted communications ‘is one of the key factors in a potential Al Qaeda resurgence.’ ” it reads.
ORLY?
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02.06.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 1:39 pm by George Smith
Readers will have noticed much of national security has taken an extended holiday. Cyberwar took off for a long time because the people who love to talk about it and make all the claims planted in the news, the upper tier, were enjoying Xmas and a few extra weeks sipping champagne in their chalets.
Al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction have taken a permanent holiday. It is difficult to take seriously discussions on the ease of making biological weapons, or the Internet ricin recipe being dangerous when American white gun crazies have shot up more people in the last 12 months than jihadis in the US post-p/11.
All this is because much of the old national security threat matrix is shoeshine — talk to guarantee full employment in that jobs sector.
The real problems of the US are a political party that has turned neo-fascist, predatory American multi-national big business, inequality, an economy that doesn’t work for way too many citizens, and the continual real threat posed by a runaway gun lobby that exists only to stimulate the business of small arms manufacturing.
All the rest, shoeshine.
Today, from an interview at Mashable, at least one old hand who feels uncomfortable about it:
Talks of cyberwar and a cyber Pearl Harbor seem to be a regular fixture of news reports in the last few months, with prominent U.S. administration officials like Janet Napolitano or Leon Panetta regularly touting the threat of a cyber attack on the United States. But not everybody is buying it. For one, Howard Schmidt, the former chief cybersecurity advisor to President Barack Obama, is skeptical.
“I don’t share the viewpoint that we’re on the brink of disaster every time a new worm comes out or a new DDoS (distributed denial of service) comes out,” he told Mashable. In fact, he even disagrees with the terminology that’s being used. “I don’t like using the word cyberwar, and I don’t like using the word cyber 9/11, cyber Pearl Harbor and all these other things,” he said …
Schmidt said he’s not discounting the threat, in fact, he is well aware of the potential disruption that cyber attacks could cause. For him, the worst case scenario is an attack that takes out power, something that could have cascading and potentially very damaging effects. It’s exactly for this reason that he also warns that using cyberweapons or malware against another nations should be a measure of last resort.
“You can use fire in a conflict if you’re not going to burn. If you’re going to burn, you better not care about what’s going to burn,” he said. “And in cyberspace you think about how vulnerable we are in the United States and generally in the developed countries, that could have a worse effect than what we’re trying to solve to begin with.”
Of course, Mashable itself is shoeshine. It exists only because of the need for grease — and a class of publicity workers for the upper tier in US tech society, providing comment and news on material always implied to be revolutionary but of virtually zero value when thinking about the problems that have blighted the economic prospects and health of hundreds of millions in the United States.
Electronic Pearl Harbor talk is now almost twenty years old. Over fifteen years ago I flatly stated that “electronic Pearl Harbor — not likely.” The people who are writing about it now were in rubber pants when the foundations of the meme were put in place.
Howard Schmidt is an old-timer. He’s been around long enough to see that cyberwar has never made the United States skip a beat while plenty of other things from the real world have.
“[Operation] Red October is rumored to be either a Russian or a Chinese operation,” reads Mashable.
Six months from now it will be something else. Just as it’s been for the past fifteen years.
On the beat that means nothing, reporting on US cyberwar combat policy from a nation that empowers its cyberwarriors to do whatever is thought to be needed:
A secret legal review on the use of America’s growing arsenal of cyberweapons has concluded that President Obama has the broad power to order a pre-emptive strike if the United States detects credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad, according to officials involved in the review.
That decision is among several reached in recent months as the administration moves, in the next few weeks, to approve the nation’s first rules for how the military can defend, or retaliate, against a major cyberattack. New policies will also govern how the intelligence agencies can carry out searches of faraway computer networks for signs of potential attacks on the United States and, if the president approves, attack adversaries by injecting them with destructive code — even if there is no declared war.
“While many potential targets are military, a country’s power grids, financial systems and communications networks can also be crippled,” reads the Times.
The financial system was crippled, by its own corrupt work and bad faith financial speculation in 2007.
What happened? The economy tottered, the world was thrown into a depression and the US government stepped in to keep the banks from failing.
Cyberwar could do that? That’s shoeshine hard at work.
A different kind of shoeshine: Cade Metz at Wired and the continued effort to make computer engineers at Facebook into something they’re not. Or, in a manner of speaking, to make lemonade out of high quality urine.
“Meet the Data Brains Behind the Rise of Facebook” reads the title and you get a picture of said brains arrayed, all guys, all smiles, trying to look as hip as can be, like a new rat pack or a famous all boy pop group.
Wired and the Facebook programmers want you to believe the worldwide data handling that goes into coordinating the nuisance ads inserted into your news feed along with all the likes and posts, is something remarkable.
Nope fellows, they’re not the new Manhattan Project in 1,000 words. They’re not even the global effort that makes the new flu vaccine every year, just guys who communicate the jargon of software platforms, big data and server clusters.
“[Someone] even graced the Facebook data team with its own theme song,” reads Wired.
Boy Howdy!
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