09.15.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 2:14 pm by George Smith
Private-sectored, and off-shored to foreign workers, the advancing innovation of global networked services, case GEO Listening, hired by Glendale School District to snoop on students on social media.
Most relevant, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
“This is the government essentially hiring a contractor to stalk the social media of the kids,” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends privacy, free speech and consumer rights.
“When the government — and public schools are part of the government — engages in any kind of line-crossing and to actually go and gather information about people away from school, that crosses a line,” Tien said …
“People say that’s not private: It’s public on Facebook. I say that’s just semantics. The question is what is the school doing? It’s not stumbling into students — like a teacher running across a student on the street. This is the school sending someone to watch them,” Tien said.
Sending someone to watch them, also in their off time.
“To do the work, [GEO Listening] employs no more than 10 full-time staffers — as well as ‘a larger portion’ of contract workers across the globe who labor a maximum of four hours a day because ‘the content they read is so dark and heavy,'” the company’s CEO told CNN.
One is sure that in the sharing economy, the larger portion of contract workers is due to the fact they’re so much cheaper to use than full-time Americans. Digital snitching, like everything else you can do via remote, cheaper with offshore labor and no payroll taxes, benefits, minimum wage, or anything.
The high end American spying companies choose to fill National Security Agency contracts, you see. National secrets need protecting. Kid’s stuff, well, not so much, apparently.
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08.30.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 9:24 am by George Smith
More junk war journalism: The most powerful nation in history is planning to toss a cruise missile volley into one of the world’s most miserable places but an alleged “Syrian” hacker attack has been plaguing the New York Times. Fuckin’ ay!
Syria’s cyberattack: First wave of a bigger war?
CNN — Server Not Found — Those three ominous words — especially for an organization in the highly competitive news business — were seen on computer screens nationwide as customers tried to access The New York Times website this week. The newspaper’s site was crippled for more than 20 hours. A notorious group of hackers called the Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility. Beyond the crippling of one high-profile newspaper website, the incident has people asking broader questions about U.S. cybersecurity: How vulnerable are U.S. websites to attack? Who are our potential cyberenemies? Is there more to come? The answers aren’t comforting: Computer and homeland security experts now warn of a broader cyberwar if the U.S. launches military strikes on Syria.
Heavens, they’ll strike back with cyberwar — “asymmetric warfare.”
Asymmetric warfare, one of the great defense industry weasel phrases of our times, invented by the Department of Defense to describe what kind of attacks all countries and groups that spend less money on their military forces than the US are said to be up to. The perceptive will grasp this defines every other country and group in the world. Combined.
All the Davids, always plotting and thinking of ways to strike the Goliath with their slingshots.
The US has the biggest cyberwar machine in the world, along with the most powerful military, period.
And two certified idiots — journalists at CNN — are today writing about the national threat said to be illustrated by a petty hack of the newspaper of record.
It’s worth adding there’s little to no evidence the “Syrian Electronic Army” is even Syrian.
Yeah, boy howdy!
We’re about to smash them with 200 cruise missiles but think of the horror of cyberattacks on us!?
Mein Gott! Has all honor been lost!
Anyway, I had no trouble reading the NYT on-line this week. Musta been the 20 hours when I was in a coma.
Actually, not everyone saw error messages or suffered problems, mileage varied. But cyberwar, people, look out!
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08.21.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 10:43 am by George Smith
Bradley Manning gets 35 years. Next up, Julian Assange, unless he wants to stay in the embassy of Ecuador in London for the rest of his life. If Manning can be put away for life, so can Julian Assange and, inevitably, Edward Snowden.
In the big story few Americans will recall who turned Manning in but today he figures large again in summaries of the case.
The fellow was Adrian Lamo, a feckless convicted hacker and apparent pathological liar, once a low-level but constant publicity hound at Wired and other on-line magazines. One way of looking at it is to observe Manning couldn’t have had worse luck when he sought out Lamo on-line and chose to speak with him. Many would have told him, outright, run away.
But Manning is an historical figure.
Lamo is not. Rather, he’s an always present human carbuncle, someone whose publicity and achievement as an informant turning Manning’s chats and e-mail over to the FBI and Wired (also not spotless in the affair), exists only due to the frailty of the person who confided in him.
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08.19.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 8:03 am by George Smith
Glenn Greenwald is an accomplished journalist. His release of the materials provided by Edward Snowden is historic.
But he’s not great at everything.
It was unwise to publicize that people you were working with (a family member) — separated globally — were also handling the Snowden materials.
It was obvious, even to the man, they would all become objects of global tracking and observation by the US government and its proxies. And that there might be opportunities taken to look for and seize encrypted files on thumb drives and a lap top.
Which now has been done, if only to provide confirmatory evidence of what Snowden has made available and to procure ancillary files which may hold indications of plans for it.
Greenwald’s an investigative journalist, one with a big ego. It’s not surprising that some aren’t particularly skillful at the spying trade.
On the other hand, shaking down the partner, David Miranda, through the authority of British intelligence service toadies, certainly does nothing to convince the world you’re not the new Evil Empire.
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08.16.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 10:51 am by George Smith
Embiggen, as they say.
Lawmakers and privacy advocates called Friday for reforms and greater transparency in operations of the National Security Agency in response to reports that the highly secretive agency repeatedly violated privacy rules over the years.
The reaction came after The Washington Post reported the violations in Friday’s editions, citing an internal audit and other top-secret documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. —WaPost
Ninety days ago Keith Alexander was using all the publicity tools of the mainstream press to spread the assertion that Chinese cyber-hacking was stealing the country’s future.
The Edward Snowden affair ended that, making him a poor man’s Bob McNamara after the release of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.
But it’s radically different today and the times they aren’t a changin’.
The very cool satirical art of PARIAH!
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08.15.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 3:11 pm by George Smith
After more than 20 years of writing on specialized matters in national security, I’ve come up with a theorem that works on all things American.
The megastructure that now makes the national security a commodity has completely warped the thinking of Americans, from the top to the bottom.
So much so that it’s evident and can be described in a fairly simple rule, one that describes much of the war on terror and the American business of threat-seeking.
And here it is:
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.)
Therefore, you can bet your sweet bippy there’s never going to be an electronic Pearl Harbor, or an electromagnetic pulse attack, or a national blackout caused by Chinese hackers, or people dieing from a ricin mailing even though it’s so easy to make. And al Qaeda does not come back from being hided for more than a decade. No one gets a second chance.
Summed up: Too many bad movies, too much bad television, too much fear-making as edutainment, passed off as serious news, advised by bad people slumming from the national security industry, their purpose primarily maximization of employment. Everything touched by it, tainted by an intrinsic badness. And it is definitely not supported by the real world but must be maintained by a uniquely American machinery of manipulations, lies and purposeful technology-mediated confusion.
And thanks to Frank’s Pine View Farm where I’ve been working it out in commentary.
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08.12.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, Shoeshine at 12:16 pm by George Smith
Excerpts from a talk by Pulitzer-winner Chris Hedges at Chautauqua:
Through a “bombardment of cultural lies and manipulations,??? it has erased every progressive movement from the face of the country.
The system has also created a “psychosis of permanent war,??? Hedges said.
To maintain control over the population, Hedges argued, the U.S. government has done what all empires have done: brought harsh forms of control from the outside to the inside.
“A night raid by a militarized police force in Oakland — command helicopters, searchlights, command vehicles, police in black, Kevlar vests … automatic weapons — looks no different from a night raid in Fallujah [Iraq],??? he said.
Becoming a part of a social movement is the only way to respond to these issues, he said. There is no time to play the game of politics.
And, there is this…
Originally.
None of the points are new. I’ve made them here in comment, music and art for the past decade. The serious security threats are not external.
Most now seem to innately grasp this with the exceptions of complete morons. And the villains in the matter, who know exactly how things stand.
Al Qaeda whoopie cushions get little traction outside of the mainstream press these days. There’s a reason for it. There’s a silent disbelief and cognitive disconnect.
And Keith Alexander of the National Security Agency has gone from someone parading around with a story about how the US was being pillaged by Chinese cyberespionage to just another apparatchik in a uniform whose job it is to defend the assertions of government and make claims about the foiling of terror plots, claims no one supports who isn’t paid to.
Think about it, again. Two months ago you couldn’t get away from the news about Chinese cyber-spying allegedly stealing the intellectual treasure, military secrets and future of America.
Uploaded August 2011. Two years old now.
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08.06.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 3:00 pm by George Smith
NSA director Keith Alexander has made the big time, caricatured in the latest Tom Tomorrow comic.
The paradox is that he’s unnamed. Even though many Americans may now be aware of the Snowden affair and NSA spying on everything, everywhere, they still largely have no idea who Alexander is.
And that’s slightly amusing but not in any really good way.
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07.29.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, Shoeshine at 12:55 pm by George Smith
A couple select quotes from national security megaplex 1-percenters at the Aspen Security Forum:
NSA director Keith Alexander: “Make no mistake about it: These are great people who we’re slamming and tarnishing and it’s wrong. They’re the heroes, not this other and these leakers!???
“The bad guys…hide amongst us to kill our people. Our job is to stop them without impacting your civil liberties and privacy and these programs are set up to do that … The reason we use secrecy is not to hide it from the American people, but to hide it from the people who walk among you and are trying to kill you …”
Mike Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCC) and lawyer for Palantir, tech spying software contractor for the NSA: “Just seeing us here …that inspires confidence, because we’re not a bunch of ogres.???
When you’re protesting you’re “not a bunch of ogres,” it’s a tacit admission of self-consciousness over moral standing in the national security megaplex.
Army general and NSA director Keith Alexander is a special case. As someone who publicly tries to pass off the fiction that Chinese cyber-espionage is the “greatest transfer of wealth in history” at a time of great personal hardship for millions of Americans he is easy to portray as socially tone deaf on a grand scale, someone at the top of the national security pyramid pursuing and building things which are only of importance to the mandarins, corporate and government.
Alexander cannot even capitalize on the normal faux reverence Americans show for all things military. Despite the chest of decorations, he is colorless even in a corps of military men characterized by their appearance as government technocrats serving time until their tickets are punched in the private sector.
And he’s going to rightly have the “greatest transfer of wealth in history” quote hung on him until he’s retired.
As a refresher, from just this morning on the salient problems facing this country in 2013:
46.2 million people in poverty
“Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.”
“Marriage rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones.”
From the census: “[People] ages 35-45 had a 17 percent risk of encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to 23 percent during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of poverty jumped from 11.8 percent to 17.7 percent.”
Comparative statistics, Keith Alexander’s salary: somewhere between 230,000 and 290,000/year.
Amount spent on the military and homeland security during the war on terror: $8 trillion.
The annual Aspen Security Forum, make no mistake, is for the privileged in American society, those who work as the peddlers and crafters of the national security megaplex. It has more in common with a summer festival for wealth in Monaco than anything the American citizenry might experience.
And therein lies a central dilemma in any attempt to restore prosperity, genuine security and fairness in the country. They’re a big part of the problem.
The A-list at the Aspen Security Rent-Seeker Forum — from Cryptome.
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