11.05.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 6:06 pm by George Smith
Good work, Keith Alexander and national computer security contractors. (Readers should repost and re-mail this pic, it’s great stuff. Pariah is exactly the word to describe a growing and indelible image.)
Reuters:
Revelations about the scale of U.S. spying on the Internet have badly damaged the country’s negotiating power in international talks on cyberspace regulation and law enforcement, analysts and industry leaders said at a conference on Tuesday.
Disclosures by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the vast scale of the intelligence agency’s data collection also are undermining U.S. efforts to maintain the Internet as an entity loosely governed by a mix of national, private and nonprofit forces.
“We’re losing leverage internationally” to China, Russia and other countries that want to give more authority to the United Nations and governments, Hoover Institution professor Abe Sofaer …
Remember how the national security Wurlitzer was cranked up to ten on Chinese cyber-spying and cybersabotage?
Digital Pearl Harbor, not a case of if, but when?
From June:
If you’ve been following along it’s no secret the US government and the national security industry have been waging an increasingly concerted campaign to increase cyber-defense spending. The linchpin of the strategy is the relentless argument that Chinese hackers, under the guidance of its government and military, are into all American corporate business, military networks and the nation’s infrastructure. Because of this catastrophe looms …
Well, there is a loud call for mounting a big defensive and offensive military cyberwar capability, claiming that the cybersecurity threat facing the nation is equivalent to, or even more serious and complex than, things like mounting strategy against the German U-boat campaign in WW2 and the achievement of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War …
I’d link to all the stuff I’ve written about but … you can pick your favorites or greatest hates. Put ’em in the comments, if you like.
“The U.S. always reserves the right to overdo things. That’s the legacy of the last 10 years,??? [George Smith] said. “And to the world at large, it’s viewed as a nation that sees every potential problem as a nail to be hit with the hammer of the military and/or security contractors.???
So could Smith think of any possible cyberattack that would warrant military response? Blacking out the entire Eastern Seaboard? Opening the floodgates on the Hoover Dam?
“I’m not really in the business of making predictions, particularly here. Too many variables, and the intelligence on such matters is always fuzzy,??? Smith replied. “I’m going with a conservative ‘no.’???
From US Exceptionalism
It’s the NSA’s world, we only live in it
When you let the people in the biggest cyberwar machine in history have whatever they want the only thing left is to turn it on everyone. If the power and resources are there to do it, it is done. Because they can.
Which is what has happened. There’s little to add except that through Edward Snowden’s documents and their delivery via the Washington Post and the Guardian, one sees the world Alexander has created. It’s one that cements the global perception that people in the US computer security industry (government and private sector allies) are an untrustworthy lot, predatory and needing close oversight.
The Edward Snowden affair demolishes US cyberwar hype
The piffle of cyberwar
Touching off cyberwar.
Digital 9/11 gall.
The greatest transfer of wealth in history
Our cyberdefense shoe-shine boys
Expose the US virus war machine
The Bogometer is blinking red.
Cyberwar rent-seeking
Aspen Security Rent-Seeking Forum
Useless tool of cyberwar journalism
Cyberwar shoeshine drill
It goes back years.
A great working example of what happens when US journalism almost entirely gives up questioning its sources and leaders on national security matters.
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Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, Extremism at 12:01 pm by George Smith
The probability that any predicted national security catastrophe, or doomsday scenario, will occur is inversely proportional to its appearance in entertainments, movies, television dramas and series, novels, non-fiction books, magazines and news.
Or, put another way, the probability that something bad will happen, as described or predicted by experts or any government, intelligence or quasi-corporate/government assessment agency, asymptotically approaches zero as it attains widespread use in popular entertainments. (And that’s usually very early in the development cycle.)
Originally, here.
The all-encompassing blackout causing the country to lapse into barbarism and chaos is a national meme, albeit one that is only a grail for a very particular demographic: Paranoid right-wing WhiteManistan. (Include the Tea Party.)
Here’s another segment that encapsulates the odious nature of it: The well-prepared white father figure in Army man clothes defending his perimeter from someone crummy-looking who comes looking for help.
National Geogrpahic television caters strongly to it.
Starting with Doomsday Preppers, the network has regularly pandered to the audience that believes the country is about to meet an end, usually revolving around the sudden loss of all electricity. It supports a significant industry, one that peddles supplies, bug-out bunker building materials and home combat training on how to shoot or maim interlopers coming for your stuff after the collapse.
Has anyone seen this? I missed it and don’t get cable. (It does appear to have been posted to YouTube.)
I invite comments. Leave a review or an opinion below.
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11.04.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 4:38 pm by George Smith
Would Germany grant Edward Snowden asylum? My hunch is, in the end, they’ll still be afraid of antagonizing the US security megaplex.
But there are cards on the table for it now.
The Spiegel has the best article on the matter.
There’s continuing satisfaction that nationally and globally, way more people know who Edward Snowden is than NSA director, Keith Alexander.
That should tell you much on which side of history the matter is on. Put another way, nobody’s going to ever make a movie about the NSA director but they’re probably already entertaining pitches for a Snowden adaptation in Hollywood.
(Just about anyone can make the observation that America’s top generals no more make gripping historical characters than CEO’s of Wall Street financial institutions. You know, as icons: Patton, MacArthur, Eisenhower, maybe Omar Bradley, and that’s about it. The reasons for this are fairly obvious. They fought for something globally important. Today’s top soldiers can’t really make that argument in any way that doesn’t involve some tortured reasoning and a host of caveats.)
Keith Alexander is the past and while there is literally no practical way to roll back the national security megaplex, time will render his reputation to a footnote or asterisk.
Alexander will retire to the private sector and on signing become instantly very wealthy working as a chief for the cyberdefense arm of one of the big weapons manufacturers.
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10.31.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 8:46 am by George Smith
A variation on the non-denial denial popularized in All the President’s Men, the NSA’s Keith Alexander using “inaccurate” or “factually incorrect” to describe the reporting on Edward Snowden’s agency documents on US cyberspying:
CNN [and] Le Monde contain inaccurate and misleading information regarding U.S. foreign intelligence activities.” — CNN
Many of the media reports on NSA surveillance have been inaccurate, Alexander said. “People do not understand what’s going on,” he said. — Computerworld
The American people are getting left with inaccurate reflection of the NSA’s programs. — FAIR
Many of the media reports on NSA surveillance have been inaccurate, Alexander said. — PCWorld
[The public has] been misled by incorrect media reports about the nature of NSA activities. — The Guardian
[Alexander] flatly denied a slightly garbled account of The Post story as “factually inaccurate” … — CNBC
Although Americans are worried about the NSA listening in on phone calls or reading their emails, this perception is inaccurate, Alexander said. — Law360
[Newspapers] have complicated matters through exaggerated or inaccurate reporting. — OfficialWire
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10.30.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 11:41 am by George Smith
It is announced the NSA has broken into the data centers of Yahoo and Google.
“In an NSA presentation slide on ‘Google Cloud Exploitation’ … a sketch shows where the ‘Public Internet’ meets the internal ‘Google Cloud’ where their data resides. In hand-printed letters, the drawing notes that encryption is ‘added and removed here!’ The artist adds a smiley face, a cheeky celebration of victory over Google security.
“Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing.” — The Washington Post, today
Remember all that digital Pearl Harbor stuff? How the greatest economic theft of all time was being conducted by Chinese cyberspies?
How it would be a good idea to rewrite law to allow corporate comsec hackers to strike back on the Internet?
No?
NSA director Keith Alexander, best American general, ever.
“Now 61, Alexander has said he plans to retire in 2014; when he does step down he will leave behind an enduring legacy—a position of far-reaching authority …” reads a piece at Wired earlier this year.
“We jokingly referred to him as Emperor Alexander, because whatever Keith wants, Keith gets.”
When you let the people in the biggest cyberwar machine in history have whatever they want the only thing left is to turn it on everyone.
Which is what has happened. There’s little to add except that Alexander has virtually single-handedly created the perception that people in the US computer security industry (those that work with the government, which is a lot) are untrustworthy, predatory and needing of close oversight.
“You don’t trust your own secret service???? –John Watson “Naturally not. They all spy on people for money.??? — Mycroft Holmes from A Scandal in Belgravia, Sherlock
Black humor. Yesterday, from the sharing economy, a consulting query — the third this year, the same as the first two — in which someone wanted to discuss the risk to electric power generation from foreign cyberattack.
Declined.
Having never consulted on Maven, only declined because the few projects are from the same person who cuts-and-pastes their requests, I’m rated 3.3 on a scale of 5. (Who knows?! It could be a robot.)
As an online bazaar/aggregation point for human intelligence work, almost every bit as great as Mechanical Turk.
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10.28.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 10:03 am by George Smith
Young hackers to rescue corporate America from cybersabotage!
In five minutes PBS delivers every cliche written in the last quarter century about the genius and talent of young hackers and how they’ll change the world.
We must allow offensive corporate computer security so good guy young hackers can hack attack the bad guys back. This is the prescription of the a NSA man, Stewart Baker, doing public outreach for his old agency, perhaps to distract from the news that his boss and our gov were bugging Angela Merkel and everybody else. As p.r. for the greatness of hacking, computer security and young computer-savvy minds, it’s the pits. And as journalism at a time when its revealed that the National Security Agency has been into everybody worldwide, it’s major fail.
But the message is it’s time to allow our hacker trainee army off the leash to pwn enemies as only they can!
Having been raised in modern networked America and knowing of no world but the digital, their genes are mutated and more DNA packed, their minds quicker, their digital senses honed to sharpness we cannot hope to rival. We are the past, they are the future, so onward and forward, hopefully not downward.
NSA! NSA! NSA! NSA!
Excerpt:
STEWART BAKER (ex-NSA, now through revolving door into private sector security): They can steal your designs. They can steal your– knowhow. They can steal your customer list and your internal analysis of what the biggest problems are in your product. This is pretty scary.
RICK KARR: The bad guys are mostly working from China and former Soviet states. They’re well-trained … Security experts worry that they could cripple the banking system … or shut down parts of the electric grid. Baker says … American businesses need a new mindset if they’re going to defend themselves.
STEWART BAKER: I’m a big believer that– the best defense is an offense. And– if we’re going to have an offense– we’ve got to have people who are really talented drawn to that field.
RICK KARR: People like these college undergraduates, who just might be able to save America’s corporations and governments from the bad-guy hackers: They’re students at Carnegie Mellon University …
But who’s going to save everyone from you?
Read the entire interview and note the journalist asking the NSA lawyer, wouldn’t allowing corporate hackers to conduct offensive operations in cyberspace be illegal?
Replies Stewart Baker, “Unfortunately, it is.”
Best idea and journalism subject ever: Young hackers being trained in attack response for the sake of corporate America.
Provoking nausea is the new black.
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10.09.13
Posted in Cyberterrorism, Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 12:20 pm by George Smith
A WhiteManistan Republican, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, tried to badmouth the website implementation of Obamacare on MSNBC.
“Rep. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who opposes Obamacare, was particularly vocal on MSNBC about the issues he saw with the new system,” reads Politifact today. “He said lawmakers now realize some of the downfalls of the system, including technical concerns.”
Cotton: “They realize that the websites aren’t ready, that there’s no privacy protections, that there’s likely to be data breaches.”
Politifact got in touch with yours truly and I had a significant hand in explaining that no such claims could be made.
On-line data protection on with secure sites is a complicated business. Further, Obamacare access is not even centralized through one site, which Cotton addressed, healthcare.gov.
Depending on where you live you can be directed offsite to another secure page that is maintained by a state (as with California), not the US government. In other words, the Obamacare system has many partners and portals. It is distributed across the nation.
Politifact didn’t use this quote, they opted for another about secure practices, but it summarizes the matter:
“There is a complexity to the matter that in no way lends itself to a blanket assertion about risk delivered by a politician.”
Unsurprisingly, someone like Cotton would literally have no idea. Politifact dubbed his statements false.
The Politifact piece.
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10.04.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 1:55 pm by George Smith
The latest from Edward Snowden is an inadvertant comedy routine with the NSA as the funny-men. If the GOP hadn’t thrown a monkey wrench into the US government, triggered the layoffs of 800,000 and the economic loss of 300 million a day, his leaked documents would still be hot shit. Now, not so much.
Three thousand were laid off at Lockheed today, casualties of government shut down. Perhaps some were in the cyberwar unit. Probably not, though.
Anyway, from CNET:
The National Security Agency has been trying to crack the online anonymity provided by Tor, a US-funded Internet tool designed to keep Net activity private and said to be widely used by dissidents in oppressive countries, as well as by terrorists. That’s according to the latest secret intelligence documents drawn from the cache leaked by Edward Snowden and published by the UK’s Guardian newspaper.
The NSA hasn’t been able to crack Tor outright, but through various means it’s been able to “de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users,” says an internal NSA document quoted by the Guardian.
This graphic is the best, a slide with an evil terrorist in a mask with an assault gun slung over his shoulder, accessing the Tor network!
It’s not even up to the snuff of the worst comic book.
At left, very naughty person.
But to the root of the matter, the obsession that terrorists are everywhere (now childishly called “bad people” and “very naughty people,” rendering the impression that the national security nerds working for the NSA are just as you think they might be — weird and stunted) and that, gosh, they’re using the Tor network.
Back track about two years.
GlobalSecurity.Org installed a paywall and found, when comparing user logs before and after, that a great deal of their regular users — or traffic — was going right through it.
I was asked to have a look.
There are paywalls, cheap and expensive, and the cheap and medium-priced ones are really easy to get through. And the top line, the best exemplified by the New York Times, harder to trivially circumvent. (Although it’s not really impossible to see what you want on the NY Times, even when you’re over the limit, without much trickery. Google the story, someone will have linked to it, go there and enter — the Times doesn’t count in traffic from a referral against your score.)
Anyway, one easy way to get through the GlobalSecurity paywall was to use a proxy anonymizer. The Tor network was perfect for it.
Paradoxically, Tor was developed by the Department of Defense. And the majority of GlobalSecurity.Org’s traffic, or regular users, are people who work for DoD, the intelligence agencies, or defense contractors.
A lot of them were apparently using Tor.
Ha-ha. Wow! Revealed, the NSA trying to unravel and attack the efficiency of Tor to find … Americans, “very naughty people,” in the employ of the national security megaplex.
Ha-ha-ho-ho-hee-hee! A real rib-tickler: “[Said] to be widely used by dissidents in oppressive countries, as well as by terrorists.”
Watch out! Sneaky enemies everywhere! Terrorism! Go NSA hacker dudes, go! Protect the nation from cyberwar!
Repeat the mantra: China, asymmetric, cyberspying, al Qaeda, hacking, very naughty people, Keith Alexander, power grid, intellectual property theft, greatest transfer of wealth in history! ORLY!
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09.25.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 11:10 am by George Smith
I had National Security Agency director Keith Alexander pegged as one of the finest ministers of witless propaganda in service to the national security Bund after seeing a videotaped appearance of him before a crowd of DC sycophants, one where he delivered the now infamous claim that Chinese cyber-spying was bringing about the biggest transfer of wealth in history.
It was, Alexander implied, America’s economic future going up in smoke.
Most Americans still don’t know his name but now he gets lampooned in comic strips.
Yes, wow, Keith Alexander loves science-fiction movies. He is a nerd, as this great pic from a DefCon conference two years ago shows. (Since le affair de Snowden, he has been disinvited.)
Young hackers, listen to Keith Alexander, a tech chicken-head biter just like you, and please save our futures and the American economy from Chinese cyberwar.
Gag me. Next year, or perhaps a little later, he will be cashing in the chips as head of cyberwar rent-seeking at one of the big arms manufacturers.
And this is still perfect.
Keith Alexander — from the archives.
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09.16.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 1:41 pm by George Smith
From the New York Times, astounding news that a Beltway insider has written a book about catastrophic cyberattack on the electrical grid!
Boy, nobody’s ever done that.
From the New York Times:
WASHINGTON — It’s electrifying.
Iran and Venezuela want to destroy the United States, so they conspire with a rogue Russian spy to launch a cyberattack on the North American power grid, beginning by electrocuting a lineman in North Dakota. Their main obstacle is a small-town sheriff in the state’s badlands, Nate Osborne, a former Marine Corps lieutenant in Afghanistan whose titanium leg ultimately saves the day.
That is more or less the plot of Gridlock, co-written by former Senator Byron L. Dorgan, the latest offering in a peculiar Washington genre.
“That’s my little niche, North Dakota energy thriller,??? said Mr. Dorgan, a Democrat who represented North Dakota in the Senate and House for more than three decades.
But life is increasingly imitating Mr. Dorgan’s potboiler. More than 200 utilities and government agencies across the country, from Consolidated Edison to the Department of Homeland Security to Verizon, are now expected to sign up for the largest emergency drill to test the electricity sector’s preparation for cyberattack. The drill, scheduled for November, will simulate an attack by an adversary that takes down large sections of the power grid and knocks out vast areas of the continent for weeks.
But life has definitely not been imitating Dorgan’s “potboiler.”
The electrical grid has never failed due to cyberattack.
However, there has never been a shortage of fiction, non-fiction, movies and tv shows on catastrophic cyberwar attacks on various pieces of US infrastructure.
In terms of reality, besides being an unimaginative wealthy ex-politician, Dorgan is just another data point for DD’s Law, recently coined, which states:
The probability that any predicted national security catastrophe, or doomsday scenario, will occur is inversely proportional to its appearance in entertainments, movies, television dramas and series, novels, non-fiction books, magazines and news.
Or, put another way, the probability that something bad will happen, as described or predicted by experts or any government, intelligence or quasi-corporate/government assessment agency, asymptotically approaches zero as it attains widespread use in popular entertainments. (And that’s usually very early in the development cycle.)
Dogshite books like Dorgan’s have been a dime-a-dozen over the course of the war on terror years. No one who isn’t paid to do so buys or reads them.
The Times reporter, Matthew L. Wald, is definitely paid to do it.
This is not Dorgan’s first novel. Previously, he wrote “Blowout, in which Iran and Venezuela link up with shady hedge-fund types to destroy a supersecret project that uses microbes to turn North Dakota coal into limitless, low-pollution electricity.”
The mad mullahs of Iran and [now inconveniently dead Hugo Chavez of] Venezuela, aiming daggers at the heart of America, North Dakota!
As evidence of contrived stupidity in plotting, it is something of a chart-topper, having probably taken every bit of fifteen minutes to brainstorm.
(It probably went down like this: “North Dakota! I’ll write it as a global terrorist plot against the state because that’s where I’m from and it will guarantee it’s reviewed in every newspaper and on every local tv news show.”)
Larger still, Byron Dorgan is another perfect example from the Culture of Lickspittle, someone who gets shit simply because of who he is. With no obvious talent, he has an agent and offers for dumbly repetitive white man’s techno-thriller romance fiction no one wants.
“Mr. Dorgan said he started his first book, Take This Job and Ship It, on a cruise with his extended family, using a 24-page guide to writing a book proposal that he found on the Internet,” adds Wald.
New York Times exposure, another type of reward for those at the top in the Culture of Lickspittle, gave Dorgan’s book a momentary ratings bump.
“[Last] Tuesday Gridlock was No. 94,180 on Amazon,” writes Wald. Today it’s at 17,355, with fifteen five and four star reviews, most of them smelling strongly of astro-turf.
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